Ledell Lee was executed in 2017 for the murder of Debra Reese, a crime he always said he did not commit. Last Friday, the Jacksonville, Arkansas mayor and City Council agreed to conduct forensic testing of the DNA and fingerprint evidence in Ledell Lee’s case. This is an important step in getting to the truth in Ledell's case — and this community helped make it happen.
Ledell, a Black man with limited resources, was convicted of murdering a white woman, and was tried by a nearly all-white jury — just one of the 12 jurors was Black. The prosecutor who sought the death sentence for Ledell described him to the jury in dehumanizing terms, saying that he had “hunt[ed]” the victim and stalked her as “prey.”
Studies have found that a victim's race influences the likelihood of the accuser being given the death penalty, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. And innocent black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than innocent white people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
In response to the lawsuit jointly filed with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and law firm Hogan Lovells US LLP on January 23, the city of Jacksonville has agreed to proceed with critical DNA and fingerprint analysis in this case. We look forward to working with them to conduct this new testing as soon as possible to discover the truth.
Started in 1992 as a legal clinic at Cardozo School of Law, the Innocence Project is now an independent nonprofit, affiliated with Cardozo, that exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
