Dean Gillispie sued Miami Township police and former detective Scott Moore for suppressing evidence and tainting eyewitness identifications in the 1991 rape and kidnapping case against Gillispie.
Gillispie was convicted in 1991 in Montgomery County and released from prison in 2011. The Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati law school, former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro and Dean’s mother, Juana Gillispie, worked to free him and clear his name.
Today, Gillispie is 57, and lives in Fairborn, a suburb of Dayton.
“The horror inflicted on Dean and his family and community is hard to wrap your mind around,” Ohio Innocence Project Director Mark Godsey said. “The way the authorities pushed through a conviction and then fought back and refused to admit a mistake was so disappointing. Nothing can repay Dean for the horror.”
He added: “The jury’s verdict sends a strong message that those in power need to change the way they do things.”
“Justice prevailed in this case, although it took a long, long, long time for that to occur,” said Petro, who co-authored a book with his wife Nancy about wrongful convictions.
David Owens, whose firm Loevy & Loevy represents wrongfully convicted clients and represented Gillispie, said they believe $45 million sets an Ohio record.
It is unclear if Miami Township or Moore will seek to appeal the case or when Gillispie might receive payment.
This month our nation exceeded 25,000 years lost to wrongful convictions. The human suffering associated with the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of 2,795 innocent people is incalculable. Without the research and reporting of the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), we likely would not know of or comprehend the truth or implications of this horrific milestone.
The report, “25,000 Years Lost to Wrongful Convictions” released today quantifies the reality of a justice system making its most egregious error: convicting an innocent person. The NRE defines an exoneree as a “person who was convicted of a crime and later officially declared innocent of that crime, or relieved of all legal consequences of the conviction because evidence of innocence that was not presented at trial required reconsideration of the case.”
The NRE has focused on exonerations since 1989. Here are a few highlights from the report:
• On average, each exoneree spent more than 8 years and 11 months in prison before release. Black exonerees spent 10.4 years in prison on average, whereas white exonerees spent an average of 7.5 years. Averages alone do not immediately reveal, for example, that 183 people spent 25 years or more in prison before they were exonerated of crimes they did not commit.
• Innocent Black defendants served a majority of the prison time, 14,525 of the 25,004 years at the writing of the report.
• Governments have paid more than $2.9 billion in compensation, and yet more than half of the exonerated have received nothing.
As with the NRE’s research on racial identification among the wrongly convicted, the work of reporting and studying every known exoneration in the United States since 1989, has shined light on injustices that can accompany wrongful conviction.
Racial and economic injustice shows up in exoneration research. Ronnie Long, convicted of a 1976 rape he didn’t commit in North Carolina, spent nearly 44 years in prison before his exoneration in 2020. The report notes, as the NRE does in every exoneration, what contributed to his wrongful conviction. In Mr. Long’s case, the contributors were “official misconduct, mistaken eyewitness testimony, perjury, and false forensic evidence.”
The injustice of excessive sentencing is also revealed in exonerations. Lawrence Martin spent nearly 19 years in prison for the non-violent “crime” of possession of a knife with a locking blade. Sentenced under California’s “Three Strikes” law, he got a life sentence for possessing this knife. According to the report, the California Supreme Court “ruled that police and prosecutors were applying an overly broad definition of a locking blade. In effect, Martin had committed no crime at all.” He was exonerated of this non-crime in 2020.
The injustice of not being compensated for the loss of freedom, opportunity, reputation, pursuit of happiness, etc. due to the state’s error or misconduct is also addressed in the report, which references the work of Professor Jeffrey Gutman of the George Washington University Law School. Professor Gutman has conducted a comprehensive study of the compensation received by those in the exoneration registry.
The number of years lost to wrongful convictions is staggering but, in fact, an understatement. The report stresses that this calculation refers to only those exonerations we know about. ”The vast majority of false convictions go uncorrected and therefore are never counted.” The milestone does not include large group exonerations prompted by evidence of systemic official misconduct, nor the time spent in custody before trial.
In addition to including five noteworthy cases, the report concludes by noting the continuing trend of the establishment of conviction integrity units (CIUs), often in prosecutors’ offices, that are tasked with reviewing and reinvestigating case with credible claims of innocence. There are now 85 CIUs, mostly in large cities but also now statewide in six states.
The report notes that since the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, “our criminal justice system has been the focus of intense — and well-deserved — scrutiny,” concluding that reducing wrongful convictions, correcting the state’s past wrongs, and recognizing the state’s responsibilities to the wrongfully convicted both financially and in other support, are important components of reform efforts.
Prosecutorial and police misconduct – we’ve been preaching about those things on this site for a long time now, and there doesn’t appear to be an end in site – at least not yet.
David Leonhardt of the New York Times just wrote a very illuminating article on this subject, and I append it for you here:
February 16, 2021
Good morning. We look at two men who spent decades behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit.
Curtis Flowers’s day typically began around 4:30 a.m., when a prison guard slid a breakfast tray into his cell. The tray often included a biscuit, potatoes, oatmeal or grits — “a bunch of starch,” as Flowers said to me recently, with a quiet laugh.
Sometime after 8 a.m., the guards led him from his cell to a small outdoor pen where he was permitted to exercise, look up at the sky and talk to other death-row inmates in nearby pens. The pen was large enough for him to take three steps in one direction and two steps in another. “Walking in circles, you get dizzy real quick,” Flowers said.
After an hour in the pen — sometimes less — he returned to his cell for the rest of the day. There, he read books, wrote letters, watched television and talked with the guards or fellow prisoners through the bars.
Flowers lived like this for more than 20 years, on death row in Mississippi — despite there being no good evidence that he committed the crime, a 1996 quadruple murder in a furniture store, for which he was convicted.
He was a victim of prosecutor misconduct. A local district attorney, Doug Evans, convicted Flowers on weak evidence that later fell apart: To this day, no witness or physical evidence even puts Flowers at the scene of the crime. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 2019, citing Evans’s blocking of Black jurors. Last year, the state of Mississippi dropped all charges.
When I spoke to Flowers by Zoom recently, I was awed by his grace. He has spent nearly half his life behind bars, and in 2018 was denied a request to attend his mother’s funeral, but he conveys a calm cheerfulness. “Just doing little things to make me happy,” he said, like bass fishing.
Curtis FlowersDavid Doobinin
Still, there was one subject that sparked passion in him: the consequences — or lack thereof — for Evans, as well as for some of his friends still locked up in Parchman Farm prison. Flowers told me that while he believed many people at Parchman were guilty, others are there because of Evans’s misconduct. “It’s terrible,” Flowers said.
Yet Evans remains the top prosecutor for seven Mississippi counties. He “has faced no adverse consequences for his handling of the case,” as Parker Yesko — a member of the “In the Dark” podcast team that exposed the holes in the case — has written.
What would change look like?
In recent years, a movement known as criminal justice reform has sprung up, supported by both conservatives and progressives. Its biggest goal is reducing the number of Americans behind bars — which is currently above two million, giving the U.S. the world’s highest incarceration rate. Another goal is to introduce more accountability for prosecutors and detectives found to have committed misconduct, creating incentives to avoid unjust convictions.
“Prosecutors can misbehave with impunity, facing virtually no consequences even when a judge says they have committed substantive misconduct,” Shaila Dewan, a Times reporter covering criminal justice, told me.
My colleague Jan Ransom has published a gripping account of another case of potential misconduct. It takes place in the Bronx and involves Huwe Burton, whose mother was stabbed to death in 1989, when he was 16. Three detectives coaxed a false confession out of him, using a mix of threats and lies, and he spent almost 20 years in prison. A judge has since exonerated him.
Huwe BurtonElias Williams for The New York Times
Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, is now conducting an inquiry into whether the three detectives’ tactics tainted 31 other homicide cases. The detectives have denied wrongdoing, and Clark has suggested they were following “standard procedure” at the time.
Still, Jan writes, “the inquiry highlights how a new generation of prosecutors in New York and elsewhere is delving deeply into whether deceptive police interrogation tactics might have warped the criminal justice system.” In the Bronx and some other places, prosecutors have formed units to review old cases and tried to bar problematic police officers from testifying.
Prosecutors and police officers have tough jobs and sometimes make honest mistakes, as Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project, which helped free Burton, has noted. But outright misconduct is more frequent than many people realize. It played a role in more than half of the 2,400 exonerations documented nationwide over the last three decades. “For Black men wrongly convicted of murder, the proportion was 78 percent,” Jan writes.
Toward the end of my conversation with Flowers, I asked him what he thought should happen to prosecutors like Evans who have committed misconduct. Flowers replied that they should be subject to the same punishment they have inflicted on others. “It sucks to be behind bars,” he said, “and I don’t think he would want to sit back there.”
We at the Prison Policy Initiative are in the business of making America’s draconian, exploitative, sprawling incarceration system more obvious to everyone. The basic facts of mass incarceration are easy to grasp when laid out in, say, a pie chart. But there are other elements of the criminal legal system that never stop boggling the mind — even for us.
For April Fools’ Day, here are seven facts about incarceration and supervision that are as hard to believe as they are hard on people in the system:
Prisons and jails maintain “welfare funds” that are supposed to benefit incarcerated people, but often use the money to shore up their budgets or spend it on treats for themselves.
When incarcerated people and their loved ones pay for phone calls or commissary goods, it creates revenue for companies, which kick back some of the money to the facilities themselves. This money is funneled into “inmate welfare funds.” But what happens to it then? In our report Shadow Budgets, we revealed that prisons and jails often use the funds not for special purchases on behalf of incarcerated people, but to shore up their own operating budgets — or even to pay for perks for themselves.
In one county — Dauphin County, Pennsylvania — the local paper exposed the jail using its welfare fund for purchases as inappropriate as fitness trackers and gun range memberships for staff.
One-third of state and federal prisons sit within three miles of federal Superfund sites.
Research warns against living, working, or going to school near Superfund sites — the most toxic places in the country — as this proximity is linked to lower life expectancy and a litany of terrible illnesses. But many incarcerated people have no choice. With many prisons located near toxic wastelands, people in prison all too often develop health problems: For instance, in western Pennsylvania, a state prison located on top of a coal waste deposit has led to skin rashes, sores, cysts, gastrointestinal problems, and cancer.
The average yearly income of someone in jail pretrial is less than $20,000.
Nearly half a million people are sitting in a local jail awaiting trial. Their average yearly income hovers just under $20,000, meaning that it’s easy to keep them locked up by imposing cash bail (the median bail amount for people detained on bail who are accused of felonies is $25,000). Women and Black people in jail have even lower incomes on average, making them even more vulnerable to being stuck in pretrial detention, which can very quickly lead to losing one’s job, losing custody of children, forgoing medical appointments, and so on. And pretrial detention doesn’t just throw someone’s life into chaos — it makes it more likely that they will plead guilty just to get out of jail.
Felony convictions may not disqualify someone from being president, but they still block people from jobs like bartending, car sales, and pest control.
19 million people in America have felony records. And occupational licensing requirements, the standards and rules that govern who can work in certain professions, often explicitly exclude anyone with any felony conviction. These rules thus lock millions of people out of jobs like nursing, sales, bartending, and firefighting, no matter the details of their conviction — making it much more likely that formerly incarcerated people will end up in low-paying, itinerant jobs rather than stable employment.
You can’t help but ask: If someone with a felony conviction isn’t barred from becoming president, why should they be barred from all of these positions that have far less power and responsibility?
Many of the 2.9 million people on probation have to take regular drug tests — which they often must pay for — even those whose convictions have nothing to do with drugs.
In our report One Size Fits None, we combed through probation rules in 76 jurisdictions and found that 62% of those places require all people on probation to submit to regular drug tests. Not only is drug testing dubiously effective in advancing any public safety goals; the rules mean that even if someone’s conviction had nothing to do with drugs, they have to get tested anyway. Worse, many of these jurisdictions make people on probation pay for their own tests, at a cost of between $15 and $20 per test (often multiple times a week).
Several state prison systems slap financial sanctions on people who attempt suicide or harm themselves.
Not only do most prisons coerce incarcerated people to pay copays to see a doctor; some actually make people pay the prison back for costs incurred through acts of self-harm. Iowa, Georgia, Nevada, and New Mexico’s policies on disciplinary fines state that incarcerated people can be made to reimburse the state if they attempt suicide or hurt themselves in prison, an environment known to aggravate mental illness. In Virginia, corrections staff recently discussed financially penalizing people who self-immolated in protest last year.
Nearly half of all Americans have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated.
FWD.us reports that 113 million adults, or 45% of all adults in America, have had an immediate family member locked up for at least one night. These figures underscore that while having a criminal record — or even having an incarcerated loved one — carries heavy stigma in this country, it is an incredibly common experience. Making the criminal legal system fair and just is not something that impacts a select few; it’s directly relevant to our friends and neighbors.
And 10 things you shouldn’t believe
While these facts about incarceration are hard to believe but unfortunately true, there are also a number of myths floating around about the criminal legal system. Head over to our recent report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025 where we bust 10 common myths about incarceration the far too many people do believe. We cover the exaggerated impact of private prisons, phantom “factories behind fences,” the crime waves that weren’t, and more.
For almost 20 years, from about 2000 until 2019, the federal government offered at least some idea of how many people across the U.S. die in prisons and jails each year, thanks to the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA). But for the past six years, policy changes have left researchers, journalists, and advocates on their own when it comes to learning of deaths in custody.1 Prison and jail mortality data — now irregularly published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) — are now far less detailed, and consistently underreport deaths.2
Fortunately, a passionate team of data-wranglers at UCLA Law — an extension of the invaluable UCLA Law Covid Behind Bars Data Project — has shifted their focus to report on all-cause mortality in state and federal prisons, filling the void left by the DCRA implementation turmoil.
Given the current administration’s values and priorities, it’s reasonable to expect less criminal legal system data transparency from federal agencies over the next few years, not more. At a time when the public is paying increasing attention to what happens behind bars, we highly recommend checking out academic and grassroots resources like the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project (we’ve curated a list of others at the end of this post).
Tracking prison deaths
Led by two of the country’s leading scholars on prison and jail conditions, UCLA Law professors Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman, the Behind Bars Data Project is “the country’s most comprehensive public resource tracking prison deaths nationwide.” Project team members tirelessly submit public records requests, compile and web-scrape publicly-available mortality data, and work with partner organizations to pull together data by state. The website allows users to examine deaths in each state’s prisons, with helpful context like the total prison population and a calculated crude mortality rate for recent years.
This screenshot from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project website shows how users can compare prison death counts and rates across states.
Even with all the hard work of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project team, not all jurisdictions are forthcoming with all aspects of mortality data, such as the name, race, or sex of those who have died, where they died (i.e., inside a cell, a medical unit, or an outside hospital), or the circumstances of their deaths. Helpfully, each state’s Data Reporting Summary indicates what details each state has made available.
The team is also analyzing the mortality data, examining possible drivers and correlates of prison deaths such as restrictive housing (also known as solitary confinement), racial disparities, length of incarceration, and other factors. They anticipate completing more research, blog posts, and peer-reviewed publications in the near future.
Prison deaths in context: Using the data to demand transparency and change
A wide swath of academics, journalists, and advocates have been utilizing UCLA’s mortalitydatasets for a few years at this point. (We, for example, wrote extensively about the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging prisons and jails using the team’s data). Data users are urging lawmakers and correctional officials to implement common-sense reforms, like releasing medically vulnerable and/or elderly people from prisons, overhauling bail practices to reduce jail time, and improving access to medical care and basic life-sustaining measures like air conditioning and adequate food in prisons. Meanwhile, some of the mortality data being published by states are heavilyredacted and limited, so some advocates are simply asking for more transparency and stronger reporting systems.
As the Behind Bars Data Project team continues to collect and analyze prison mortality data, they also have plans to look more broadly at measures of the health of people in carceral institutions using creative sources of information on healthcare access, expanding our collective understanding of how incarcerated people contend with illness and death in “death-making institutions.” As we at the Prison Policy Initiative are among those working to shed more light on correctional health issues and the inadequate healthcare in prisons and jails, we are excited for what’s to come from the Behind Bars Data Project.
For further reading, check out some other valuable resources on justice-involved deaths:
The newest iteration of the Prison Policy Initiative’s flagship report explains that the incarcerated population grew by about 2% overall, with significant spikes in the incarceration of immigrants and young people.
March 11, 2025
Easthampton, Mass. — Today, the Prison Policy Initiative released the 2025 edition of its flagship report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. The report offers the most comprehensive view of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., showing what types of facilities they are in and why. It also serves as a primer on the size and scope of the criminal legal system and busts 10 of the most persistent myths about mass incarceration and crime.
For the first time ever, the report highlights important changes and trends in the criminal legal system, including:
The overall incarcerated population has grown by roughly 2% since our last Whole Pie report, according to the most recent data, although the total confined population is still about 13% smaller than its pre-pandemic size;
Recent growth in incarceration is largely driven by a handful of states, with nine states accounting for 77% of all state prison growth over 2022 and 2023. Conversely, 10 states have continued to reduce their prison population since 2021.
Courts sent 11% more young people to incarceration in 2022 than in 2021, the first increase in youth confinement in over two decades.
“This data tells the story of states taking two divergent paths,” said Wendy Sawyer, Research Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. “The first path works to reduce the number of people behind bars, recognizing that every person who is locked up represents the failure of overly-punitive policies. The other path doubles down on the misguided policies that created the nation’s mass incarceration crisis by locking more people up, destroying lives, and making communities less safe.”
The report includes 32 visualizations that shine a light on the hidden realities of the criminal legal system in America, including:
A pie “slice” showing the 655,000 people in local jails on any given day, including over 450,000 people awaiting trial, and over 100,000 people held by jails for other agencies.
A graphic explaining that, contrary to a popular misconception, only 8% of incarcerated people are held in privately-run facilities.
Graphics offering details about lesser-known parts of the criminal legal system, including involuntary commitment, civil commitment, and jails on tribal lands.
On Friday, March 14, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, Prison Policy Initiative will host an Instagram Live discussion about the key takeaways from the report and answer questions from viewers. Those interested in joining this event can use their mobile phone to set a reminder and watch here.
A cookbook author and former restaurateur, Jennifer Chandler has been writing about food and dining for more than 25 years. In her role as the food and restaurant writer for The Daily Memphian, she covers food news, provides readers an inside look into their favorite restaurants and offers suggestions for what to order at eateries across the Memphis area.
Chandler’s stories and recipes have been featured in national publications such as Real Simple, HGTV Magazine and Woman’s World. She’s also appeared on a number of national broadcast cooking segments including Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” and Ducks Unlimited TV. She also hosts a radio show “The Weekly Dish” on Memphis’s NPR station WKNO-FM.
She is the author of four cookbooks: “The Southern Pantry Cookbook,” “Simply Salads,” “Simply Suppers,” and “Simply Grilling.” While she boasts a degree from Le Cordon Bleu, this Memphis native is about making real food accessible for real families.
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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