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The Guardians.
The above is the title of the latest John Grisham novel. The story is based on the below. I get my books on audible, and they provide good entertainment while playing.
Centurion Ministries, Inc. is a secular, non-profit organization located in Princeton, New Jersey, whose primary mission is to free and vindicate from prison those who are completely innocent of the crimes for which they have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for life or death.[1]
Centurion Ministries was founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey as a result of his investigation on behalf of a prisoner, Jorge De Los Santos.
McCloskey learned of De Los Santos in 1980 while a seminary student at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. McCloskey used his own funds to investigate De Los Santos' claim of innocence. He located the chief witness against De Los Santos, who recanted his false trial testimony. McCloskey then hired Paul Casteleiro, a Hoboken lawyer, to write the writ to bring De Los Santos' case back into court. A U.S. District Court judge overturned the conviction and in 1983 De Los Santos was freed.
Centurion is the first organization to investigate cases of wrongful convictions in the US and Canada. In 1987, California businesswoman, Kate Germond, joined McCloskey and together they built an organization that has secured the release of 63 (as of 15 October, 2019) wrongly convicted men and women from all across the United States and Canada.[2]
McCloskey retired in May 2015 and Germond is now the Executive Director of Centurion. Centurion continues to seek exoneration of wrongly convicted people through a thorough field investigation.
Selected cases[edit]
Jorge De Los Santos[edit]
Newark, NJ. Convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 murder of a Newark, NJ used-car salesman, Jorge De Los Santos spent almost nine years in prison before being freed in July, 1983, by former US District Court Judge Frederick B. Lacey. The judge said testimony from a jailhouse witness that convicted De Los Santos "reeked of perjury" and that the prosecutor knew it. Centurion's investigation yielded the new evidence that freed De Los Santos."[3]
Kerry Max Cook[edit]
Tyler, TX. "In November, 1997, Kerry Max Cook was freed after spending nearly 20 years on death row for a murder in which he had no involvement. This was the crowning moment of a grueling seven-year effort by Centurion Ministries on Cook's behalf. Texas' highest court threw out the conviction and ruled that the state's "illicit manipulation of the evidence permeated the entire investigation of the murder", and that the state "gained a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth""[3] [4]
David Milgaard[edit]
Saskatoon, Canada. An order of the Canadian Supreme Court freed David Milgaard on April 16, 1992 after 23 years of imprisonment. Centurion's two-year investigation of the rape/murder case established the identity of the real killer. The Supreme Court recognized that "the continued conviction of Milgaard amounts to a miscarriage of justice" Then, a 1997 DNA testing of physical evidence confirmed Milgaard's innocence and resulted in the arrest of the actual killer.[3]
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt[edit]
Los Angeles, CA. In the late 1960s, Geronimo Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party. In 1972, Pratt was convicted of a 1968 murder on a Santa Monica, CA, tennis court. After 27 years of imprisonment and many denials of habeas corpus petitions, Pratt was granted a new trial and then freed in June 1997 by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey. After conducting an extensive evidentiary hearing, Judge Dickey ruled that the state's primary witness was in fact an FBI, LAPD, and LADA informant, who had significantly lied against Pratt at trial. This culminated a four-year effort by Centurion on Pratt's behalf."[3]
Darryl Burton[edit]
St. Louis, Mo. Based primarily on the alleged eyewitness account by a criminal informant for the St. Louis Police, Darryl Burton spent 24 years confined in Missouri prisons for the 1984 fatal shooting of Donald Bell at an Amoco gas station. The cashier at the gas station at the time of the shooting testified at a 2007 post conviction hearing that she had told the police they had the wrong man. She stated that shooter was light complected while Burton is very dark skinned.[3] [4]
Freeing Burton in August 2008, the Cole County judge found that the cashier's certainty that Mr. Burton was not the killer to be "clear, credible, and powerful." The judge also ruled that the informant's extensive criminal history was kept from the defense; had the jury known of it, it would have provided "persuasive evidence of the defendant's innocence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_Ministries
Grisham awed by work of Centurion Ministries to free wrongly convicted inmates
PRINCETON BOROUGH — Author John Grisham first heard about Princeton’s Centurion Ministries in 2005 when he was visiting attorney Mark Barrett in his Oklahoma office. They were talking about Barrett’s late client, Ron Williamson, a wrongfully convicted death row inmate whose trial and 1999 exoneration became the basis for Grisham’s nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man.”
The files Barrett had collected for Williamson’s case included a few boxes marked Centurion Ministries, and Grisham asked Barrett about them.
“He said, ‘Those guys only take the toughest cases,’” Grisham said Tuesday night at a benefit at Nassau Presbyterian Church for Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that has freed 44 innocent people either on death row or serving life in prison.
“Most people do not believe that innocent people go to prison,” said Grisham, the headline speaker for the fund-raising event. “Almost every wrongful conviction could have been prevented,” he said.
Grisham and actor Brian Dennehy provided the celebrity draw for the fund-raiser. But the loudest cheers of the night were reserved for Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, and the 11 wrongly convicted “exonerees” who attended the event.
McCloskey stepped on stage to the raucous applause and hoots of his hometown fans. He has lived in Princeton since he became a 37-year-old student at the Princeton Theological seminary in 1980. For his fieldwork, he was the student chaplain at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where one inmate, Jorge De Los Santos, insisted he was innocent.
“I believed in his innocence,” McCloskey said in an interview the day before the fund-raiser. “I didn’t know, but I believed.”
So McCloskey took a year off school to investigate, working from the room he lived in rent-free in a mansion at 72 Library Place in exchange for running errands for the elderly woman who owned the house.
Three years later, De Los Santos was freed. The room at 72 Library Place became Centurion's main office for the first seven years of the organization.
Overturning wrongful convictions has become a more popular cause since the rise of DNA testing in the 1990s.
https://www.nj.com/mercer/2010/04/grisham_awed_by_work_of_centur.html
Centurion Ministries, Inc. is a secular, non-profit organization located in Princeton, New Jersey, whose primary mission is to free and vindicate from prison those who are completely innocent of the crimes for which they have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for life or death.[1]
Centurion Ministries was founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey as a result of his investigation on behalf of a prisoner, Jorge De Los Santos.
McCloskey learned of De Los Santos in 1980 while a seminary student at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. McCloskey used his own funds to investigate De Los Santos' claim of innocence. He located the chief witness against De Los Santos, who recanted his false trial testimony. McCloskey then hired Paul Casteleiro, a Hoboken lawyer, to write the writ to bring De Los Santos' case back into court. A U.S. District Court judge overturned the conviction and in 1983 De Los Santos was freed.
Centurion is the first organization to investigate cases of wrongful convictions in the US and Canada. In 1987, California businesswoman, Kate Germond, joined McCloskey and together they built an organization that has secured the release of 63 (as of 15 October, 2019) wrongly convicted men and women from all across the United States and Canada.[2]
McCloskey retired in May 2015 and Germond is now the Executive Director of Centurion. Centurion continues to seek exoneration of wrongly convicted people through a thorough field investigation.
Selected cases[edit]
Jorge De Los Santos[edit]
Newark, NJ. Convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 murder of a Newark, NJ used-car salesman, Jorge De Los Santos spent almost nine years in prison before being freed in July, 1983, by former US District Court Judge Frederick B. Lacey. The judge said testimony from a jailhouse witness that convicted De Los Santos "reeked of perjury" and that the prosecutor knew it. Centurion's investigation yielded the new evidence that freed De Los Santos."[3]
Kerry Max Cook[edit]
Tyler, TX. "In November, 1997, Kerry Max Cook was freed after spending nearly 20 years on death row for a murder in which he had no involvement. This was the crowning moment of a grueling seven-year effort by Centurion Ministries on Cook's behalf. Texas' highest court threw out the conviction and ruled that the state's "illicit manipulation of the evidence permeated the entire investigation of the murder", and that the state "gained a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth""[3] [4]
David Milgaard[edit]
Saskatoon, Canada. An order of the Canadian Supreme Court freed David Milgaard on April 16, 1992 after 23 years of imprisonment. Centurion's two-year investigation of the rape/murder case established the identity of the real killer. The Supreme Court recognized that "the continued conviction of Milgaard amounts to a miscarriage of justice" Then, a 1997 DNA testing of physical evidence confirmed Milgaard's innocence and resulted in the arrest of the actual killer.[3]
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt[edit]
Los Angeles, CA. In the late 1960s, Geronimo Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party. In 1972, Pratt was convicted of a 1968 murder on a Santa Monica, CA, tennis court. After 27 years of imprisonment and many denials of habeas corpus petitions, Pratt was granted a new trial and then freed in June 1997 by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey. After conducting an extensive evidentiary hearing, Judge Dickey ruled that the state's primary witness was in fact an FBI, LAPD, and LADA informant, who had significantly lied against Pratt at trial. This culminated a four-year effort by Centurion on Pratt's behalf."[3]
Darryl Burton[edit]
St. Louis, Mo. Based primarily on the alleged eyewitness account by a criminal informant for the St. Louis Police, Darryl Burton spent 24 years confined in Missouri prisons for the 1984 fatal shooting of Donald Bell at an Amoco gas station. The cashier at the gas station at the time of the shooting testified at a 2007 post conviction hearing that she had told the police they had the wrong man. She stated that shooter was light complected while Burton is very dark skinned.[3] [4]
Freeing Burton in August 2008, the Cole County judge found that the cashier's certainty that Mr. Burton was not the killer to be "clear, credible, and powerful." The judge also ruled that the informant's extensive criminal history was kept from the defense; had the jury known of it, it would have provided "persuasive evidence of the defendant's innocence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_Ministries
Grisham awed by work of Centurion Ministries to free wrongly convicted inmates
PRINCETON BOROUGH — Author John Grisham first heard about Princeton’s Centurion Ministries in 2005 when he was visiting attorney Mark Barrett in his Oklahoma office. They were talking about Barrett’s late client, Ron Williamson, a wrongfully convicted death row inmate whose trial and 1999 exoneration became the basis for Grisham’s nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man.”
The files Barrett had collected for Williamson’s case included a few boxes marked Centurion Ministries, and Grisham asked Barrett about them.
“He said, ‘Those guys only take the toughest cases,’” Grisham said Tuesday night at a benefit at Nassau Presbyterian Church for Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that has freed 44 innocent people either on death row or serving life in prison.
“Most people do not believe that innocent people go to prison,” said Grisham, the headline speaker for the fund-raising event. “Almost every wrongful conviction could have been prevented,” he said.
Grisham and actor Brian Dennehy provided the celebrity draw for the fund-raiser. But the loudest cheers of the night were reserved for Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, and the 11 wrongly convicted “exonerees” who attended the event.
McCloskey stepped on stage to the raucous applause and hoots of his hometown fans. He has lived in Princeton since he became a 37-year-old student at the Princeton Theological seminary in 1980. For his fieldwork, he was the student chaplain at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where one inmate, Jorge De Los Santos, insisted he was innocent.
“I believed in his innocence,” McCloskey said in an interview the day before the fund-raiser. “I didn’t know, but I believed.”
So McCloskey took a year off school to investigate, working from the room he lived in rent-free in a mansion at 72 Library Place in exchange for running errands for the elderly woman who owned the house.
Three years later, De Los Santos was freed. The room at 72 Library Place became Centurion's main office for the first seven years of the organization.
Overturning wrongful convictions has become a more popular cause since the rise of DNA testing in the 1990s.
https://www.nj.com/mercer/2010/04/grisham_awed_by_work_of_centur.html