#Martin Tankleff

[morbidology]

One main purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent. However, with such a flawed system, this isn’t always the case... On 6 September, 1988, 17-year-old Martin Tankleff awoke to discover the bloody bodies of his parents, Arlene and Seymour. Arlene was laying in the bedroom, almost decapitated. Seymour was discovered in his office with a number of stab wounds. Miraculously, he was clinging to life. 

Tankleff soon became the prime suspect after detectives claimed he didn’t look distraught enough, but Tankleff was still in shock. He was taken in for questioning without an adult present. During the interrogation, detectives told Tankleff that his father had awoke while in hospital and named him as the killer. The truth, however, was that Seymour had died without ever regaining consciousness. 

Tankleff had been brought up to believe that the police were good and honest people, and in a state of panic. shock, and exhaustion, he began to question his own memory and question if he could have killed them and then blacked out. He later recalled: “I kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and they kept saying, ‘We don’t care. Just tell us what we want to hear. We want to know it’s you.' You get to a point where you start doubting yourself … you just want to escape that environment.” Under intense interrogation, Tankleff verbally confessed that he had killed his parents with a barbell and a knife that was discovered in the kitchen. However, he never signed a confession document. After his interrogation, he called family members and told them he had been forced to confess. 

An investigation revealed that the knife that authorities surmised to be the murder weapon had been used to cut a watermelon; what was believed to be blood, turned out to be juice from the watermelon. There was also no blood or DNA discovered on the barbell. Authorities tried to argue that Tanklett was just good at cleaning up. No physical evidence found in the crime scene pointed to Tankleff being the killer but he was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison regardless.

Skip forward to 2004, Tankleff’s family had hired private investigator, Jay Salpeter, who uncovered a parade of witnesses to corroborate Tankleff’s innocence. Tankleff was granted an evidentiary hearing where a number of witnesses identified Jerry Steueman as the killer. 

Steueman, who was once Seymour’s business partner, had owed Seymour an abundance of money. Coincidentally, Steueman had been at the card game hosted by Seymour the night of the brutal murders. It was also uncovered that following the murders, Steueman had changed his appearance and even faked his own death and left town. 

In 2007, all charged against Tankleff were dropped and he was released from prison. In 2014, he was awarded $3.3 million for his wrongful conviction and is currently in the process of setting up a business to help exonerate wrongly convicted inmates. Whoever killed Arlene and Seymour have seemingly escaped justice - at least for now.

[unatestadellidra]

IL CLAMOROSO CASO DI MARTIN TANKLEFF

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"He Freed an Innocent Man From Prison. It Ruined His Life." by Ed Shanahan via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/nyregion/jay-salpeter-martin-tankleff-case.html?partner=IFTTT

[leanpick]

Opinion | It’s Time for Police to Stop Lying to Suspects

Opinion | It’s Time for Police to Stop Lying to Suspects

Consider what happened to 17-year-old Martin Tankleff. In 1988, he woke up early one morning to find his mother laying in her bloodied bed and his father slumped in his bloodied study chair, gurgling air but unconscious. Mr. Tankleff called 911. Although he had no cuts or bruises and no history of violence, he was separated from family members and interrogated. After hours of accusations and…

[arenareviews]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

By MAGGIE ASTOR from NYT N.Y. / Region https://ift.tt/2HdVjgq from Blogger https://ift.tt/2HD32bb

[midewestcoast]

New York man wrongfully convicted of killing his parents is sworn in as lawyer

Martin Tankleff was admitted to the New York State bar Wednesday in the same appellate court where his wrongful conviction in the 1988 killing of his parents was overturned.

source https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/05/us/wrongfully-convicted-new-york-man-bar-admission/index.html

from WordPress https://midewestcoast.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/new-york-man-wrongfully-convicted-of-killing-his-parents-is-sworn-in-as-lawyer/

[duaneodavila]

Why No One Answers The Letters

I vaguely remember getting the letter and reading the opening paragraph. It was from a prisoner whose name sounded somewhat familiar, Martin Tankleff. I remembered it from the newspapers, a kid convicted of killing his parents. Years later, he would be exonerated for the murder, and I would think about how I tossed the letter in the garbage rather than reply.

Criminal defense lawyers get letters from random prisoners all the time. They’re often long letters. They occasionally come with papers or transcripts, sometimes hundreds of pages. They proclaim their innocence and beg for a lawyer to save them. Pro bono, of course.

It takes time to read these letters from unknown prisoners, and after reading the first few, you realize they are largely incomprehensible, replete with gushing words about justice and devoid of any substantive basis for action, other than the prisoner’s denial of guilt. You become inured to the protestations of innocence. They all say so. Few are. Almost none can prove it.

But we also know that “almost none” doesn’t mean none.

There was no physical evidence for the crime I was accused of — only one witness  manufactured by detectives, detectives who wrote a script for the fake witness to perform at trial. And when the prosecutor’s office was approached by several attorneys with credible evidence that this was a common police practice, the prosecutor’s office simply forged ahead. I was convicted and sentenced to 52 to 80 years. They just threw me away, like I was garbage.

This is the sort of argument made in the letters, that it’s a common police practice to manufacture a case based on jailhouse snitches against an innocent person. It’s not that anyone doubts it, but it’s not going to win. No matter how often you say it, how loud you say it, how passionately you say it, the “common practice” doesn’t disprove guilt in this one, individual case.

Once someone is convicted, the burdens shift. He’s no longer presumed innocent, but guilty. It’s no longer the prosecution’s job to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the convicted defendant’s to prove innocence. With the advent of DNA, that’s become possible in some cases. In others, the effort that wasn’t expended before trial may manage to come up with evidence long after the appeals are exhausted. Alibi. Recantation. Physical proof that it was impossible to do. Or a dirty lying cop.

But these are still outliers, and demand substantial effort, time and luck. It’s great that there are organizations out there willing to do it, like the Innocence Project, but they can’t do it for everyone and have to carefully pick their cases, choose where to allocate their scarce resourced. Individual lawyers don’t necessarily have that opportunity. Once in a while, a lawyer, for whatever reason, will decide to take on a lost cause and end up winning it. More often, we spend a few hundred hours only to end up nowhere, with no chance of changing an outcome no matter how strongly we feel it was wrong.

Perhaps this is why after writing over 7,500 letters to lawyers, law schools, innocence projects, television producers, magazines and newspapers, celebrities and public figures — and despite having provided secret prosecutor memorandums acknowledging the practice of detectives creating fake witnesses and brokering illegal deals and favors, as well as proof of prosecutorial complicity — there has been no outcry. Perhaps this is why I did not receive every benefit of the doubt, why I did not receive a thorough investigation when accused of a crime, or an opportunity to be heard in court and in public the way rich and powerful people are.

More than 7500 is a lot of letters. It’s expensive to send out that many letters. And much as you might question the bitterness, it’s entirely understandable why a person who is innocent would be bitter. And yet, it wasn’t that the recipients of those letters, the “lawyers, law schools, innocence projects, television producers, magazines and newspapers, celebrities and public figures” were callous or uncaring, but that there are too many letters, too many people proclaiming innocence when there is nothing we can do.

Lacino Hamilton wrote the Truthout post, as well as the 7500 letters, to no avail. I have no reason to doubt that he’s innocent. He’s served 24 years of his sentence, and he’s still at Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan. Regardless of what happens, he’s not “garbage,” but that doesn’t mean the law can provide him with any relief.

Why No One Answers The Letters republished via Simple Justice

[petloverus-blog]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

What is happening Friday is the last session of a class he has been teaching at Georgetown University with a lifelong friend, Marc Howard, who decided to go to law school because he wanted to help overturn Mr. Tankleff’s conviction. Mr. Tankleff himself recently passed the bar exam and expects to be admitted to the bar this year.

In the class, called “Making an Exoneree,” students have…

[vandbnews]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

[blogjeremygoldstein]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million https://ift.tt/2F2Ezqo

[triciansmithdesign]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

http://dlvr.it/QQ9fXl

[ricet-photographie77-blog]

Tweeted

"Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million" by MAGGIE ASTOR via NYT The New York Times https://t.co/uabMQNiXEh

— Rhys Taylor (@rhystaylor77) April 20, 2018

[javierpenadea]

"Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million" by MAGGIE ASTOR via NYT N.Y. / Region https://ift.tt/2HdVjgq

[xoner8ed]

#Repost @innocenceproject (@get_repost) ・・・ Martin Tankleff spent 17 years wrongfully incarcerated. At one point during his incarceration, his prison was hit with a norovirus outbreak, and there was nowhere to hid from it.⁠ ⁠ "There is no way to 'social distance' in prison. There is no way to avoid contact with people — your next-door neighbor is inches away from you and is separated only by steel or concrete," he says.⁠ ⁠ The coronavirus is far deadlier than the norovirus, and has already infected hundreds of incarcerated people across the U.S.⁠ ⁠ Read about Martin's experience and why he is worried about those who are still behind bars at the link in bio.⁠ ⁠ 📷: @sameerak_ for the Innocence Project⁠ ⁠ #COVID_19 #Coronavirus #Prison #Jail #Exonerated #Exoneree #Justice (at Innocence Project) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-crFTED_Rt/?igshid=ovtn9o6lhaqj

[izayoi1242]

Martin Tankleff, Wrongly Imprisoned for 17 Years, to Get $10 Million

By MAGGIE ASTOR Mr. Tankleff, who was wrongly convicted of murdering his parents when he was 17, has reached a settlement with Suffolk County, N.Y. Published: April 20, 2018 at 09:00AM from NYT N.Y. / Region https://ift.tt/2HdVjgq via IFTTT