Wrongful convictions in Pa., ongoing battle for justice focus of WVIA panel discussion broadcast

Research suggests up to 6% of people incarcerated in Pennsylvania's prisons could be serving time for crimes they did not commit.

For 10 years, Donte Rollins was among them.

Rollins was 18 when he was convicted in connection with a 2006 Philadelphia shooting that left a young child paralyzed, even though he was miles away when the crime happened.

He maintained his innocence during a decade behind bars.

"You don't have no other choice but to keep going," Rollins said of his battle for justice.

"For real, it's like it's either that or just die in jail," he said. "And that wasn't an option for me."

Rollins, who had been sentenced to spend 62.5 to 125 years in prison, was exonerated and released from prison in December 2016.

Tireless family members and lawyers for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project helped make that outcome possible.

Rollins shared his story as part of a panel discussion — "Conversations for the Common Good: The Pennsylvania Innocence Project" — which premieres at 7 p.m. tonight, Thursday, Nov. 12, on WVIA-TV.

The nonprofit group works to exonerate innocent people, prevent wrongful convictions and support formerly incarcerated individuals.

Moderated by WVIA’s Tracey Matisak, the panel discussion includes Rollins and two other men freed after clearing their names, Termaine Hicks and John "Yahya" Moore, as well as Pennsylvania Innocence Project Executive Director Zane Memeger.

Short-form documentary footage incorporated into the broadcast introduces viewers to the group's work and other people who have successfully fought wrongful convictions in Pennsylvania.

'The system gets it wrong'

In the late 2000s, the New York-based national Innocence Project "was getting an overwhelming number of inquiries from Pennsylvania," Nilam Sanghvi, legal director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, recently told WVIA News.

That was the impetus to start the Pennsylvania group, which represents clients who have been convicted in state or federal court here.

Since 2009, the group has welcomed home 40 clients who collectively lost nearly 1,000 years of their lives to wrongful convictions.

But the group has received over 8,000 requests for assistance since it opened.

It has offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and serves people all over Pennsylvania, providing free legal services to innocent people who have been wrongfully convicted.

Determining whether a case is worth taking up requires "a rigorous four-stage review process that takes many years," Sanghvi said.

It's a process Executive Director Memeger has seen from multiple perspectives. In addition to time in private practice, he is a former U.S. Attorney who investigated and tried cases involving organized crime, public corruption, government fraud, violent crime, and narcotics trafficking.

"The system likes finality, and it believes that it's gotten it right," Memeger said during the panel discussion. "And the system works well in certain ways, but in other ways it doesn't work well, and I've seen it from both sides, and the system gets it wrong."

"I think it's important for people to understand that the system can get it wrong," Memeger said. "But more importantly, that prosecutors and judges understand that the system can get it wrong, and that they're not infallible, and they should be willing to take a look at a case that gives pause or serious concern in terms of the factual evidence that was present that led to a conviction."

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'This fight, it wears you down'

Moore, who serves as a paralegal with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, returned home in 2023 after 27 years incarcerated. He spent more than 20 years studying law and litigating his own case.

"It took resilience," Moore said. "This fight, it wears you down."

Moore was sentenced to life without parole for second-degree murder in connection with a 1996 robbery in which two men were shot and one died.

"I had to represent myself, and so putting in petition after petition after petition, and knowing that the law is on your side, you still get these denials," he said. "You go back, and you read the law again. You be like, 'Well, wow, I'm right,' and then you go to other people like, 'This is what it says, right?' And you still get denied."

While he represented himself for many years, Moore was not alone in the fight.

"No one could do it by themselves. I don't care how many times you go in the law library. I don't care how many letters you write. It takes help," he said. "It takes organizations like the Pennsylvania Innocence Project."

Moore also helped peers with their legal battles, and has gone on to share his legal findings through writing, public appearances and other platforms — including the Harvard Law Review — in addition to his work with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

"I always say this: The law is made by human beings. It's practiced, and it's enforced by human beings, and so it's only going to be as fair and as just as we are as human beings," Moore said.

"It was feeling grim. It was feeling so bad, but eventually I got help, and that took people," he said. "It took human beings to help me, so I trust that (as) human beings we will find a way. I trust that. I have to."

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DNA, forensic evidence leads to rape case exoneration

Termaine Hicks served 19 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.

The Innocence Project assisted Hicks, saying its efforts helped prove he was framed by a Philadelphia police officer who had mistakenly shot Hicks while he was attempting to help a woman who was just raped on a dark street.

After years of legal battles, DNA and newly reviewed forensic evidence finally helped free Hicks.

"The Innocence Project came in, and they got behind me," Hicks said.

Memeger said DNA evidence and improved scientific methods have been instrumental in the fight to overturn wrongful convictions.

"DNA is the gold standard, and oftentimes when you obtain DNA evidence, you might be able to match it to the individual who committed the crime, but that science is evolving over time," Memeger said.

"What we've learned is technology that wasn't available back when a conviction occurred has now advanced to a point where additional testing will demonstrate that the individual who was convicted is now an excluded person," he said. "Which allows us to go back into court and argue new evidence, and that they ought to be released from prison for a crime that they did not commit."

So it was with Hicks.

A forensic pathologist enlisted by the project reviewed Hicks' medical records and his clothing, concluding police had actually shot him in the back, not the chest, as an officer testified.

"He examined my clothing, and concluded that the police had lied," Hicks said.

"That prompted the district attorney's office to take a closer look at my case, and they concluded that obviously if they lied about this, then they lied about everything else leading up to it, and that the conviction couldn't stand," he said. "This started the process, and this is how my conviction was ultimately overturned."

Hicks was convicted in 2002 and sentenced in February 2003 to serve 12.5 to 25 years for the November 2001 rape, in which a woman was attacked while walking to work on a Philadelphia street.

According to the Innocence Project, the woman could not identify Hicks as her attacker, and there were no non-police witnesses who could identify the attacker.

Hicks testified that he heard screams, saw two men running from the area, and found the bloodied woman on the ground by a dumpster. He nudged her, but she did not move.

"A woman was being attacked. I did not know her, and I just responded, and I did what I thought anybody would do when they hear a woman screaming," Hicks said.

Hicks said he reached into his pocket for his cell phone to call for help, and that was when police arrived.

"By the time I got to the scene, the police had arrived right behind me, and they took my hand in my pocket as a threatening gesture when I was just wanting to pull my cell phone out," he said. "Before my hand came out of my pocket, they shot me three times in my back."

Hicks said police testified that they shot him in his chest after they told him to get off the victim and put his hands up, with one officer claiming Hicks lunged at him.

"One, I don't have any bullet holes in my chest. They're all in my back," he said. "And two, they said after they shot me that I put this bloody gun back in my pocket before I fell to the ground. There was no blood inside my pocket."

Hicks says the gun, which was registered to a Philadelphia police officer, was planted on him.

Hicks also pointed out that police had viewed surveillance footage from a nearby camera on the day of the attack, but had never given a copy to his legal team.

"You see the victim being accosted by an assailant. You see his clothing. I didn't even match the description. However, that surveillance tape disappeared. Matter of fact, the jury never saw the tape," Hicks said.

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A long road to justice

Hicks appealed unsuccessfully in state and federal courts.

Meanwhile, Hicks was not judged suitable for early release because he asserted his innocence at parole proceedings.

"In PA, you have to admit culpability in order to make parole. I did not accept culpability for a crime that I did not commit," Hicks said.

In 2015, Hicks, whose representation now included attorneys with the Innocence Project, filed a petition for post-conviction DNA testing.

The petition was granted in 2017, and testing was performed on several pieces of evidence: The victim's pants and underwear, body swabs taken after the attack, and Hicks’ sweatpants.

That testing was completed in August 2019.

Hicks was excluded as a contributor to genetic material found on the waistband of the woman's underwear. The testing showed a genetic marker consistent with the woman's husband and also an unknown male contributor.

Testing found Hicks' DNA in a blood stain on the woman's pants, "but his attorneys noted there was no evidence that indicated Mr. Hicks was bleeding before he was shot," the Innocence Project said.

No blood had been found inside Hicks’ jacket pocket, which appeared to contradict an officer's testimony about Hicks pulling a bloody gun from that pocket.

In light of the DNA evidence and forensic evidence about Hicks' bullet wounds, the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) began reexamining the case.

The CIU asked a court to vacate Hicks' conviction. His case was dismissed on Dec. 16, 2020, and Hicks was released the same day.

"You really got to believe in yourself, not so much the system, but believe in yourself. Believe in God, and that one day something different will happen," Hicks said.

Similarly, the CIU would re-examine Rollins' shooting case and call for it to be vacated, but it was a long road to reach that point — and even the prosecutors' request faced a challenge.

In Rollins' case, his mother's early efforts to prove his innocence proved critical, but not at first: Ava Rollins obtained security footage from two stores proving her son was miles away from the shooting he was accused of committing.

But, as the Pennsylvania Innocence Project would later argue, inadequate legal defense failed to fully present Rollins' side at trial — including one of the videos that was critical to his alibi, as well as police radio transmissions about encounters with Rollins that contradicted the prosecution's timeline of events.

The CIU's April 2016 call for vacating Rollins' conviction in light of those arguments was rejected by a local judge. It would take an appeal to the Pennsylvania Superior Court before the charges were dismissed in December 2016.

'Working very hard to right some really serious wrongs'

Memeger and the Pennsylvania Innocence Project remain committed to working toward similar outcomes for those who remain wrongfully behind bars.

He also acknowledges it's an uphill battle shaped by a complex legal landscape.

"My guiding principle has always been do the right thing in justice, and even when I was a federal prosecutor, you could be hard-charging and moving forward with investigations," Memeger said. "But at the end of the day, you need to make the right call and make sure that justice is being served, and people who don't deserve to be punished aren't being punished."

As a federal prosecutor, "we also had the luxury of being able to turn down cases," he said.

That's not true at lower levels of the system.

"State prosecutors are overwhelmed with the number of cases that they need to deal with because most crimes are handled at the state level, not the federal level," Memeger said.

"You also have law enforcement officers who are doing work in their communities and bringing these cases to prosecutors and just trying to get the cases done. And then you've got public defenders trying to represent individuals, and their resources are stretched," he said.

"It's just a recipe for bad things to happen within a system that is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination," Memeger added.

"Taking on this role, having that perspective, allows me to support a team that's working very hard to right some really serious wrongs in terms of overturning wrongful convictions, but at the end of the day, just making sure that justice is served," Memeger said of his job at the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

"It may be delayed, but our goal is to make sure that justice is served and wrongfully convicted people aren't sitting in prison," he said.