Courthouse Protest Targets Wrongful Convictions
by Laura Glesby, New Haven Independent, Nov. 16, 2022
During Darcus Henry’s 13 and a half years in prison, he would spend every possible minute at the law library with a group of nearly 15 other men who all maintained their innocence. Together, they’d meet for the permitted hour every Tuesday and Thursday to read about court precedents, research their own cases, and exchange stories of pressured witnesses and suppressed evidence.
On Wednesday, nearly a decade after he walked free, Henry stood in the wind outside the state court-house at 235 Church St. to help lead a protest against wrongful convictions like his.
All the while, he thought of Maurice Blackwell, Cory Turner, and the others still researching in the prison library, hoping to prove their innocence.
Henry joined a group of other Black men in New Haven who have asserted and in many cases proven that their convictions were unjust outside the downtown courthouse on Wednesday.
“I’m here to lend my voice,” he said. He also lent his story — of being one of four suspects charged in a December 1996 murder at the Farnam Courts housing complex, of being sentenced to 100 years in prison, and of being freed alongside his three friends in 2013.
Together with family members of people still incarcerated for crimes they say they never committed, Henry and other attendees on Wednesday amassed a group of 20 people.
The group gathered to call for accountability for the cops and prosecutors who falsified or suppressed evidence, and for state prosecutors to reexamine cases that have not yet been overturned.
A spokesperson for the state judicial branch declined to comment for this article. A representative from the state’s attorney’s office did not return a request for comment by the publication time of this article.
The protest was organized by Gaylord Salters, who spent 20 years in prison for a shooting he maintains he never committed. Salters got out of prison this summer due to a shortened sentence after the sole witness against him recanted. Local civil rights attorney Alex Taubes, who has represented many clients with similar stories, also organized the rally.
[The article can be read in its entirety at newhavenindependent.org/article/freed_new_haveners_protest_wrongful_convictions]