New Site Spotlights Wrongful Convictions

A local criminal justice reformer and a Yale journalism professor have teamed up to call attention to wrongful convictions in New Haven — and the systemic police patterns behind them — in a newly published online anthology of investigative reporting.

Their new website, ​“Holding Me Captive,” compiles journalism from current and former Yale students on eight men who have maintained their innocence since being convicted of violent crimes in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s in New Haven. 

The project emerged from a collaboration between Sarah Stillman, a New Yorker reporter and professor with Yale’s newly-launched Investigative Reporting Lab, and James Jeter, a New Haven native who leads the Full Citizens Coalition and Yale’s Dwight Hall Civic Allyship Institute.

Stillman and Jeter first met one another in 2003, when Jeter was incarcerated at Cheshire Correctional Institution and Stillman, an undergraduate at Yale at the time, volunteered there as a creative writing workshop facilitator. 

A participant in Stillman’s workshop, Jeter wrote poetry about his childhood in New Haven. He lived for a time on Dwight Street between Elm and Edgewood, steps from where Stillman would later live off-campus as a Yale student. Jeter can still vividly remember the Yale Police chasing him off campus as a teenager for smoking weed.

Now, he and Stillman are colleagues hoping to fuel a ​“reckoning,” as Jeter put it, over corrupt law enforcement tactics that led to wrongful conviction after wrongful conviction. 

With funding and support from the Yale Law School, they aim to build a body of work by Stillman’s current and former journalism students to illuminate the connections between individual cases of police and prosecutorial misconduct in New Haven. The project is part of an initiative to train Yale student journalists in public-interest, accountability-driven reporting through the university’s new Investigative Reporting Lab.

Some of the men featured in ​“Holding Me Captive,” like Scott Lewis and Vernon Horn, have already been officially exonerated. 

Others, like Daryl Valentine and J’Veil Outing, are fighting to clear their names after critical eyewitnesses for the state recanted their testimony.

Three of the articles featured on the website were published in the Independent, including an article on Gaylord Salters by this reporter, a former student of Stillman’s. The project spotlights reporting by Ko Lyn Cheang, Will Sutherland, Teigist Taye, Ram Vishwanathan, Sammy Westfall, and Caroline Wray as well.

Jeter, Stillman, and two of Stillman’s former students, Matt Nadel and Keerthana Annamaneni, identified patterns of misconduct across the eight cases, including witness coercion, recanted witness testimony, suppressed evidence, and faulty eyewitness identification.

Of the 31 individuals who have been fully exonerated in Connecticut, 15 were from New Haven. Those statistics don’t include the numerous people who took plea bargains or are otherwise still working to clear their names in the wake of evidence undermining the state’s cases against them.

“Holding Me Captive” currently focuses on people accused of gun violence, but Jeter and Stillman argued that the patterns revealed by those cases are indicative of widespread racism among local law enforcement — fueled by the image of Black men as ​“predators,” the ​“narrative of broken people,” that escalated in response to the rise of crack cocaine, Jeter said. 

Jeter recalled his own teenage experiences with police officers who stopped and searched him on the street without cause, sometimes checking his genitals for drugs. 

According to Jeter, while the website documents misconduct that occurred in decades past, ​“the remnants of it still exist.” He pointed to the 2019 police shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, and the recent paralysis of Randy Cox in police custody.

“We’re scratching the surface with the most extreme cases,” Stillman said of the website. ​“Each individual story reveals a lot of injustice. When you see them as an interconnected web … the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

The pair hopes that anyone connected to a wrongful conviction and or instance of police misconduct to tell will contact Jeter at [email protected].

Jeter wants readers to come away with a sense of the scale of historic misconduct in the New Haven Police Department and State’s Attorney’s office. He wants them to ask themselves, ​“Can this culture be penetrated and shifted?” 

“We need to find out,” he added.