Stories you shouldn’t miss:
1. Another Oakland man who was wrongly convicted and sent to prison has been exonerated thanks to the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University, the Trib and Chron report. Johnny Williams, 38, spent fourteen years in prison after being wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl in Oakland in the 1990s. Williams was released in January after serving his full-term behind bars, and wasn’t exonerated in court until last Friday after the Innocence Project proved through DNA testing that he was innocent. Like the other recent case of an Oakland man who was exonerated by the Innocence Project last month, Oakland police and the Alameda County DA’s Office depended solely on a witness identification to obtain Williams’ conviction. As the Express has previously reported, witness IDs have proven to be among the least reliable forms of evidence. The news of Williams’ case also coincided with the revelation that OPD has been sued for putting an innocent man on its Most Wanted list.
