A 163 Year Sentence

Monday October 19, 2015
The Buffalo News.com (/)
Opinion
Louis Eze, Joy Wosu and Emeka Dominic Okongwu spent a total of four decades in prison after being
convicted in 1993 of crimes that never occurred.
State turns its back on three innocents who wrongfully spent years in
prison
Updated: February 11, 2015, 06:01 PM Published: February 12, 2015, 12:01 AM
It may have been a wrongful conviction of a different type, but it can hardly be disputed that the three
people convicted of a horrific crime 22 years ago were, in fact, innocent. Whatever anyone wants to call it
– travesty comes to mind – these people went to prison for a crime they did not commit.
And the travesty continues. The law offers them no way to seek compensation from the state of New York
for what amounts to a legal crime against them.
The accusation could hardly have been more terrible or worthy of law enforcement’s attention: Police
believed that the father of 8-year-old twins had raped his daughters three times during the previous year
– 1991 – after tying them to mattresses or chairs and sealing their mouths with duct tape.
It’s a tangled story that led to the charges, but the bottom line is that the girls, now 30 years old and
working in Buffalo’s health care industry, say it never happened. No crime occurred.
Police and prosecutors believed it did, though – and some still do – but the women said they were
coached and that when they tried to recant, no one believed them. Instead of checking out the
discrepancy, police and prosecutors assumed someone was pressuring them to change their story.
And three innocent people went to jail: The girls’ father, Emeka Dominic Okongwu; a friend of their
father, Louis Eze; and Joy Wosu, an immigrant from Nigeria who had befriended the two men. All told,
they served a combined 40 years in prison before being freed and ultimately exonerated.
Cases of wrongful conviction often center on misidentification by witnesses or false confession by
suspects who may be mentally ill or addicted to drugs, and always under unrelenting pressure by
investigators. This case appears to be something different.
Partly, the convictions arose from poor performance of defense lawyers, another common cause of
wrongful conviction. But it wasn’t the defense that filed charges for a crime that never occurred; it was
police and prosecutors, horrified by reports of an unthinkable crime and guided by now-outdated
policies that encouraged children to go along with what law enforcement was telling them, rather than
treating them as the easily manipulated creatures they are and guiding them toward an accurate report
of what did – or did not – happen.
Approaches have changed in the years since then. In Erie County, for example, interviews are not usually