FairPlay

Explicit Content Warning | 18 + | For Mature Audience

September 8 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Isn't it the responsibility of the prosecutors, the judges and the police officers to seek the truth, to seek justice? Or are they in it just to seek convictions?

Many argue that now in America, you are first presumed guilty rather than innocent, and after getting wrongfully convicted, you can spend the rest of your remaining life, fighting for your freedom.

They call it, The Prison Industrial Complex, a state of the art human algorithm of banking on other peoples misery. It’s an industry that needs to be fed, so they say, so it can feed them. But what they don't understand is they are only feeding a false narrative that will eventually come to bite them as it comes to a collapse because it’s fundamental foundation is based on injustice.

You can call it, The Justice Industrial Complex, in the guise of pretending to be just, where everyone is mostly after making some money while some are after freedom and justice.

Take a Deep Dive in to the case of Leonard Coleman, he’s serving a life sentence at the St Clair Correctional facility in Alabama. For the past decade, he’s been trying to fight what he calls, his unjust conviction of the murder of Kimberly Mixon who was found dead in December 2010 with a gunshot wound to her eye. Kimberly is also the mother of Leonard’s son, Xayvion who was 4 when his mother died, and they allege it all happened in front of him.

But what you or I say or think is the truth doesn't really stand in front of the facts, the ground realities, and no matter how much you would hate it or how hard you try to accept it, or not, the truth does not have your or my versions, nor does it need any of our permissions, the truth is simply just the truth.

In the case of Leonard Coleman, the biggest element that is missing is the whole truth. It’s a story riddled with holes that would make you want to gasp for air. If you have the patience to go through a conversation of over 2 hours, which I highly doubt that you would do, not because you would rather want to watch or listen to the latest flick on your chosen streaming platform to kill time, but because you don't want to know what is actually going on in your own country, in your own backyard. And if you don't know it, and if it comes to you too, then you won’t know what to do and would fall victim to this joke being played upon us. Leonard Coleman has been fighting back attacks all his life and he even fought another case from inside the prison and actually won and was acquitted. Can he do it once again?

This is the

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At the Wrong Place. At the Wrong Time.

Explicit Content Warning | 18 + | For Mature Audience

August 19 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News

Trinity Matthisen has spent the last two decades of his life inside a prison. Right now he is somewhere in Michigan, behind bars, in a small, very uncomfortable cage, for something, he says, he did not do, for a crime, evidence may prove, he did not commit.

Can you imagine what I just said, does it sound so repetitive that it has become acceptable to hear this? Have we become accustomed to this, so used to it by now, is it something normal? We have been desensitized to the fact that we love to incarcerate people who probably are innocent of the crime for which they have been punished for, and punitively, unjustly, wrongly, wickedly punished and for what? Prison as Rehabilitation, Matthisen says, is a lie.

Trinity Milford Matthisen, originally from Colorado, is at Chippewa Correctional Facility in Kincheloe, Michigan doing time for convictions of assault with intent to murder, felon in possession of a firearm and three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He was sentenced as a third habitual offender to 40 to 70 years imprisonment for his assault conviction, 57 months to 120 years imprisonment for his felon in possession of a firearm conviction, and two years’ imprisonment for each felony-firearm conviction. The felony-firearm sentences run concurrently to each other, but consecutively to his other sentences. That sounds terrifying, in many ways, and especially when you hear the word felon, but you need to hold the judgements until you know both sides of the story and especially coming from someone who is actually living that kind of a reality. Matthisen is in for “at least 40 to 70 years”. In his own simple words, they have destroyed his life and he was railroaded by a few friends, the prosecutors and lies from false witness testimony.

But Trinity Matthisen is not giving up that easily, he argues that the obliteration of his rights, just because he had a prior record, is evident in his court records and you don't need much to find out how he was denied his basic constitutional rights even before his trial began and during it. He says, to get to that conclusion, all you have to do is go through his entire case files, and probe the police reports that are not publicly available, along with more than 30 eyewitness accounts that are missing or have been lost or hidden. He is also stunned at the jaw dropping denial of his FOIA requests. Trinity argues that evidence is being kept away from him, evidence that can potentially exonerate him and that he has enough material to push for a retrial of his case, as long as an attorney has the courage to seek the truth, without prejudice.

But what is there to hide? And how much truth is there in the https://anchor.fm/justicenews/support

FairPlay EP 8 | John Ortiz Kehoe | Justice for an Accuser a Defendant and a Missing Girl - 

Explicit Content Warning | 18 + | For Mature Audience Only.

August 14 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | Justice News.Net

What do you do when out of three the people you have, the only one who can tell you exactly what happened, is dead?

How much truth can you find in the remaining two people, one of whom is an accuser and the other one, a defendant.

Michigan resident Rose Larner was killed, or overdosed on cocaine or murdered somewhere between the late afternoon and evening of a December day in 1993 and all this occurred between three friends. Bill Brown, Rose’s childhood friend, accused another friend John Ortiz Kehoe of the murder, three years after it allegedly occurred. Bill’s account given to the prosecutors was the only eyewitness testimony used to convict John Ortiz Kehoe and it sent him to life behind bars without any possibility of parole. But a new hearing on John’s case raises many questions about what really occurred on that day in December of 1993.

Since the past 25 years while incarcerated John has maintained his innocence, and according to him, it was Bill Brown who was the last person left with Rose because John left the two together and went to Mcdonalds to get some food and upon his return found a highly nervous Bill Brown and the dead body of Rose in the bathroom.

Too much has been said about this case in the past two decades. I accidentally stumbled upon John’s case while listening to the FreeMe Podcast hosted by Thomas Herold. In the case of John Ortiz Kehoe not a single witness was presented from his side. The more you read some of the actual case files the more bizarre the case looks, not because of what the actual accusations were, nor by what the prosecutors were trying to do and not by what was being reported by the media, it looked bizarre because it has so many holes in it that it is now impossible for it to hold any water.

This could probably come out as one of the most erroneously reported cases in the history of journalism in the United States of America, and if and when that occurs, it can help address the allegations being made in this case that big media took spoon fed information from the prosecutor's office and ran with it without even taking an independent look at the facts and then made a business out of that lie for decades. More digging may even show, how some of the media companies, thinkin

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FairPlay EP 7 | Luke Wirkkala, Acquitted

The Right To Defend Myself

July 22, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

You have got to seriously pause for a few seconds and put yourself in this situation, after I ask you this question...

What do you do in a moment when you are under assault?...

Should you give in.

Should you run?

Or Should you fight…

There’s not much time left for other questions here.

But what if the attack is also a sexual assault

A man to another man... Someone in your home...

Would that make you think twice about what to do next?

Are you thinking that this is something that cannot happen to you?

If you do, then you live in a dreamworld, like most of us do.

But if you think that you can also be a victim, under assault by a person who was known to have a record and history of aggressive assaults, but you didn’t know about it, then you are not alone.

Luke Wirkkala was also asking himself the same questions, when he was under a sexual assault by someone he had trusted and had invited him to his home after a day of super bowl drinking, but after Luke passed out on his couch, he was awoken at 2 am while David Ryder was assaulting him. It was a moment of reckoning, thus activating the instinct to defend himself.

Luke was wrongfully convicted of murder in 2013 and after a long, exhausting and cruel battle, he was acquitted of that murder in 2021.

In this episode of FairPlay Luke Wirkkala takes you through a weird reality that can turn anybody’s dream into a nightmare and then witness the power of principles, persistence and faith.

Read more at The JBlog on Justice News.Net

Peace.

FairPlay EP 6 | Lydell Grant Is Exonerated

How to convict an innocent man in America, but not get away with it, this time.

June 10, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Justice for Lydell has finally been achieved but not without a hard fight. In our previous episode of FairPlay we spoke to Mike Ware the defense attorney for Lydell Grant and we discussed Lydell's extraordinary case of wrongful imprisonment and its following consequences. In this week's episode we speak to Lydell Grant himself as he unloads some facts about his case and lays bare the injustices within the U.S. criminal justice system that can completely decimate an innocent man's life forever.

God is in control, says Lydell, and the truth is always enough to stand on its own. And that he is not looking for apologies, though he deserves it, from all parties involved that wrongfully convicted and incarcerated him for life, only if they could, because he got exonerated within a decade. According to Grant, there was a higher power watching over him. "It was God", says Lydell Grant, "Who took him out of the clutches of an unjust criminal justice system".

The question is, how can you proceed to charge an innocent man in a court of law for a crime he did not commit and when there is no evidence proving that he committed that crime? Shouldn't this be outlawed. What happened to the "innocent until proven guilty" part? Currently Grant is working on his music career and he also plans to launch his own non profit organization that will seek to exonerate other individuals who are innocent but incarcerated and still left behind, but not for long. The times have changed, so the system must change as well, says Lydell.

Lydell wants a law enacted that can hold those prosecutors and investigators and judges accountable who act maliciously against a defendant. Grant talked about something he says he never mentioned before, how he had to fight major conflicts of interests in his case and how he endured his decade long nightmare in prison where the odds were already stacked up against him from the beginning. He says the truth is not bi

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June 1, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Lydell Grant spent more than 9 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, but being free now, safe in the comfort of his home in Houston Texas, didn't come without a fight. It took him a decade to break free from the chains of a Cruel Prison-System where he was unjustly incarcerated for almost a decade.

On this journey Lydell didn't fight alone. His attorney Mike Ware was there to pull some hard punches, and some of them, landed right on their opponents faces and bled and broke a few noses and bones.

Mike Ware is a seasoned criminal defense Lawyer based out of Fort Worth in Texas. Mike is also an adjunct professor at the Texas A&M School of Law and is the Executive Director of the Innocence Project of Texas. You can read more about his work on Mike Ware Law.

Lydell Grant was arrested for the 2010 murder of Aaron Scheerhoorn outside a nightclub in Houston’s Montrose district. Six eyewitnesses, looking at a photo lineup, identified Grant as the killer. And in the words of Michael Hall, a reporter at TexasMonthly.com, Grant swore he was innocent. “We have six eyewitnesses that can positively identify you as the killer,” Grant remembers a detective telling him. “I don’t care if you have six hundred witnesses,” he said. “I didn’t kill him.” Six eyewitnesses testified against Grant at trial and he was convicted in 2012.

According to the Harris County District Attorney's Office, Lydell Grant was wrongfully accused in the 2010 stabbing death of Aaron Scheerhoorn outside a Montrose bar in downtown Houston. Jermarico Carter, turned out to be the real killer, with DNA evidence, and who confessed to the murder almost a decade later. Lydell was out on bail in 2019 and then in 2021 Texas board of appeals declared Grant innocent and finally exonerated.

Mike touched on many critical issues related to the bitter realities of the U.S. justice system. From the role of a spoon-fed medi

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FairPlay Ep4 | Exonerated with Valentino Dixon

It Took 27 Years For Him To Get Justice

May 17, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

Joining me on this episode of FairPlay is someone who persistently fought for justice for his own life and his freedom and for the truth and he got it but it took him about 27 years to get there, and his name is Valentino Dixon. And he spoke with us out of Buffalo NewYork.

On June 12, 1992, the jury convicted Dixon of second-degree murder of Torriano Jackson, attempted murder, assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 38 1/3 years to life in prison.

Fast forward to 26 plus years to September 19, 2018, Lamarr Scott, the actual shooter, who admitted to this crime many times before, pled guilty to manslaughter in return for a sentence that would run with the 25 to 50 year sentence he was already serving for another killing.

That same day, Dixon’s convictions for second-degree murder of Torriano Jackson, attempted murder, and assault were vacated and the prosecution dismissed the charges. The conviction for criminal possession of a weapon remained intact because the TEC-9 that Scott said he used in the shooting belonged to Dixon. Dixon was then released from prison more than 27 years after his arrest in 1991.

Valentino's case is best described in the words of Max Adler at The Golf Digest.

"The case is complicated, but on the surface it involves shoddy police work, zero physical evidence linking Dixon, conflicting testimony of unreliable witnesses, the videotaped confession to the crime by another man, a public defender who didn’t call a witness at trial, and perjury charges against those who said Dixon didn’t do it. All together, a fairly clear instance of local officials hastily railroading a young black man with a prior criminal record into jail. Dixon’s past wasn’t spotless, he had sold some cocaine, but that didn’t make him a murderer."

A lot of the unjust and cruel treatment that Valentino has suffered throughout his 27 year long nightmare can easily be understood by going through the work of Phil Fairbanks at The Buffalo News and by Maurice Possley senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations. For now he awaits the result of a pending law suit against his accusers. His nightmare, partly continues, he says in the interview, the city ran out of money.

But do you think someone who's been exonerated, proved out to be right and innocent of the crimes they said he committed, do you think that person can ever lead a normal life? Do you think they have destroyed that person’s life?

What's next for Valentino Dixon?

Find out on FairPlay at https://anchor.fm/justicenews/support

FairPlay Episode 3 | Exonerations with Barbara O’Brien

The cost of incarcerating the innocent

May 9, 2021 | Imran Siddiqui | JusticeNews.Net

The mission of The National Registry of Exonerations is to provide comprehensive information on exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in order to prevent future false convictions by learning from past errors.

But have we done just that?

Joining me on this episode of FairPlay and to speak about The Registry is Barbara O'Brien. Barbara is a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, where she teaches classes in criminal law and procedure. She is currently the Editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, which “collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States from 1989 to the present.” The Registry provides a virtual home for exoneration stories and also an accessible, searchable statistical database about the cases.

Barbara spoke about how the Registry started and evolved and has contributed to positively impacting many lives across America.

She differentiated between DNA evidence, jailhouse informants, false testimony, and witness tampering. She talked about prosecutorial misconduct, unfair judgements, bail bonds, the prison industry and how can we, if possible, and if ever be able to predict false convictions.

I asked her, why is it so easy to incarcerate someone wrongly in America, but so difficult to get the same individual honorably released?.

We also talked about the role of race in a fair and impartial jury selection and in the final outcome of most cases and punishments. I asked Barbara if the Registry has been successful in making police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges more sensitive to the problem of wrongful convictions and more willing to reconsider the guilt of defendants who have already been convicted when new evidence of innocence comes to light.

One of my suggestions to her was to implore the concept of developing an "Innocence List", to at least start collecting basic data on those individuals who are claiming to be innocent with clear evidence.

The question remains, have we learned enough to prevent future false convictions, have we learned enough of anything from our past errors?.

Find out on FairPlay.show