On January 15, 1980, a 15-year-old girl reported she had been raped along the railroad tracks in Wilmington, Delaware. Elmer was implicated by a man who was actually a suspect and, most likely, the assailant.Daniels was arrested on January 17, 1980 and charged with first-degree rape. Because of his age, he underwent a court-ordered psychiatric exam. The doctor who interviewed him would state in his report that he had serious reservations about Daniels’s guilt.

The state’s case hinged in part on allegedly powerful forensic evidence connecting Daniels to the crime. Police had collected pubic hair from pants found at Daniels’s house and head hair from the panties of the victim. Michael Malone, an analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that the hair from the pants was consistent with the pubic hair of the victim in “all microscopic characteristics,” and that the head hair found in the victim’s panties was also similiarly consistent with Daniels’s head hair.

"When you get a double, what we call a double match like this, it would increase the probability tremendously," Malone said. It was his opinion that it was extremely unlikely that Daniels wasn’t the source of the hair.

It turns out this type of forensic science is bogus, and the FBI examiner grossly overstated the scientific significance of the hair evidence. In 2013, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Innocence Project, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers began a review of FBI analysts’ testimony and reports on hair comparisons. In 2015, the group said the review had found that analysts, including Malone, had provided erroneous testimony or reports in more than 90 percent of cases it had studied.

Attorney General Matthew Denn filed a motion on November 30, 2018 asking that Daniels’s conviction be dismissed. In its motion, the state noted that Daniels had been in prison for nearly 39 years, more than twice the presumptive sentence if he was convicted of the same crime today. The motion was granted on December 13, 2018, a day after Daniels turned 57.

Isaiah McCoy was exonerated on January 19, 2017, when a judge acquitted him at a retrial. He is the 157th person exonerated from death row in the United States, the first in 2017, and the first in Delaware.

McCoy was convicted and sentenced to death in 2012, but the Delaware Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2015 as a result of prosecutorial misconduct and ordered a new trial. The Court suspended Deputy Attorney General R. David Favata from practice because of his misconduct at McCoy’s trial, which included belittling McCoy for choosing to represent himself, making intimidating comments during a break in proceedings, then lying to the judge about making the comments.

McCoy waived his right to a jury for his retrial, leaving the decision in the hands of Kent County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Young. In acquitting McCoy, Judge Young noted that there was no physical evidence against him and that two alleged accomplices had given contradictory testimony. One of the accomplices received a sentence reduction for testifying against McCoy.

On January 19, 2017, Kent County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Young acquitted McCoy and he was released.

Upon his release, McCoy said, “I just want to say to all those out there going through the same thing I’m going through ‘keep faith, keep fighting. Two years ago, I was on death row. At 25, I was given a death sentence – and I am today alive and well and kicking and a free man.”

In July 2017, McCoy filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking damages for his wrongful conviction. The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2019.

Mark Purnell served 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

In January 2006, a robbery and shooting occurred in downtown Wilmington. The only eyewitness to the shooting did not identify Mr. Purnell as being present at the scene and told police that she saw two people running from the scene at full speed immediately after a single gunshot was fired. One week prior to this incident, Mr. Purnell had undergone knee surgery, and multiple witnesses and doctors confirmed that he could walk only with the assistance of crutches.

Despite the absence of any eyewitness or physical or forensic evidence linking Mr. Purnell to the crime, a jury convicted him of murder, and the Court sentenced Mr. Purnell, then eighteen years old, to a term of no less than forty-five years imprisonment.

Mr. Purnell’s conviction was affirmed on direct appeal and his first motion for post-conviction relief was denied.

A successive motion for post-conviction relief is procedurally barred under the 2014 version of the Delaware Criminal Rules of Procedure, unless the petitioner can present with particularity new evidence that creates a strong inference that he is actually innocent of the charges, and that the new evidence will probably change the result if a new trial were granted. The high Court stated: “In this extraordinary case, we find that Mr. Purnell has made just such a showing.”

In vacating Mr. Purnell’s conviction and sentence, the Supreme Court cited a litany of improper police and prosecutorial conduct that the State had used to secure Mr. Purnell’s conviction, including lying to multiple witnesses, threatening them with the death penalty if they did not implicate Mr. Purnell, and interrogating one cognitively impaired witness for more than eleven hours while he remained handcuffed to a chair in the interrogation room.

The Court also ruled that Mr. Purnell’s defense attorney during his 2008 trial was impermissibly conflicted from representing Mr. Purnell due to counsel’s prior representation of a witness against Purnell in the same case. Defense counsel’s motion to withdraw was denied by the trial judge. As a result of that conflict, defense counsel could not, and did not, present evidence or pursue a theory of defense that pointed toward his former client as the true perpetrator.

The Court ruled that new evidence presented by Mr. Purnell more than a decade after he was convicted creates a strong inference that he is actually innocent of the crime and that evidence would probably change the result if a new trial was granted.

On April 28th, 2022, in response to the defense’s motion to dismiss, the State of Delaware dismissed all charges against Mark.

Mark was represented by Innocence Project Delaware, and our dedicated probono attorneys from Milbank LLP in New York and Rigrodsky Law in Delaware.

Upon his release, Mark told the Delaware News Journal that he was looking forward to being with his family. “I want to be successful and be a positive energy in this world,” he said. “I’ve got to prove right everyone that believed in me.”

Purnell v. State is the first case in which the Delaware Supreme Court has found the actual innocence exception to the bar against successive post-conviction motions to apply.

Jermaine “Marlow” Wright spent more than 20 years on death row before a Delaware court overturned his 1991 conviction.

Wright was sentenced to death in 1992 in the killing of 66-year-old clerk at a liquor store and bar outside Wilmington. At 18, Wright was the youngest person on death row in Delaware’s prison system.

Wright’s case “was wrought with prosecutorial and police misconduct” according to Attorney James Moreno, a member of Wright’s defense team. When new evidence came to light in 2013, Moreno requested a retrial and argued to suppress Wright’s 1992 confession tape, which had been filmed while Wright was under the influence of drugs. It had been the prosecution’s sole evidence. In 2015, Superior Court Judge John Parkins Jr. ruled Wright’s confession inadmissible. Wright’s charges were dismissed, and he walked free for the first time in two decades.

But just 10 months later, in 2016, prosecutors successfully reinstated the confession as evidence, and a new trial was scheduled. While that year saw the repeal of Delaware’s death penalty, concern that a new jury would send him back to prison resulted in a difficult and bittersweet decision for Wright.

Shortly before trial, he agreed to a no-contest plea deal, “a prosecutorial tool often used when a state doesn’t want to admit wrongdoing,” Moreno explains. “A lot of innocent people leave prison this way and are saddled with the disabilities of a felony conviction despite their innocence.”

“After 24 years incarcerated, I would just like to go home,” Wright told the court.

At the time the Supreme Court overturned Wright’s sentence, he was the longest-serving death row inmate in Delaware.