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On the morning of the murders he was at a sheriff's office, filling in paperwork, with his name on a form and his face in front of deputies. Ricky Kidd was applying for a gun permit. He still got life without parole. Kansas City, Missouri, February 1996. Two men were shot dead. Ricky Kidd was arrested and charged. His alibi was not a friend, or a girlfriend, or somebody who owed him. His alibi was a law enforcement agency, because that morning he had been at the Jackson County sheriff's office applying for a permit to buy a handgun, and then at a child's birthday party. There was paperwork. There were people. He was convicted anyway and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. What came out over the following years: witnesses who identified him later recanted; other men were implicated by evidence that was available at the time; and material that should have gone to his defence did not. He spent his time inside learning law and working on his own case, and he became known for helping other prisoners with theirs. In August 2019 a judge granted him a writ of habeas corpus and he walked out after twenty-three years.** Prosecutors did not retry him. He has since founded an organisation working on wrongful convictions, and he speaks publicly about it. A man went to a government office, in daylight, and gave his name to a sheriff's deputy on a form. That is about as documented as an alibi can get. If you were designing the most verifiable possible account of your own whereabouts, you could not do much better. It did not work. And everybody reading this who has ever thought *well, I would be fine, because I could just prove where I was* — Ricky Kidd could prove where he was. He lost twenty-three years anyway. Discover the cases that expose the devastating cost of injustice—and the lives left waiting for answers. Get our book savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…

He was twenty-one and he had an alibi. He had been on the phone. There were records. His lawyer met him for the first time on the day of the trial and did not use any of it. Yutico Briley got SIXTY YEARS. New Orleans, Louisiana, 2012. An armed robbery. Yutico Briley, twenty-one, was arrested nearby and identified. He had been at a motel. He had phone records. He had an alibi that could be checked by anybody willing to spend an afternoon on it. His trial lasted a matter of hours. He was represented by a lawyer who, on the record, had not meaningfully investigated the case and did not present the alibi. He was sentenced to sixty years without parole for a robbery in which nobody was hurt. He wrote letters from prison for years. Nothing moved. What eventually moved it was a journalist. Emily Bazelon, writing for the New York Times Magazine, looked into the case after he reached out, and what she found was that the alibi had been verifiable the whole time. The Orleans Parish District Attorney's office reviewed it and agreed the conviction could not stand. In March 2021 Yutico Briley walked out after **nine years.** Nine years is not the longest sentence on this page today. That is exactly why it is here. Leonard Mack got forty-seven years on the paper. Ricky Jackson got thirty-nine in a cell. You read those and the number does the work for you. Yutico Briley was twenty-one and lost his twenties. He went in before Instagram was a habit and came out at thirty. And the reason he got out is not that the system corrected itself. It is that a reporter at a magazine happened to read his letter. How many letters are there? How many others are still waiting for someone to listen? Join us in uncovering the injustices too often ignored, and help bring these stories into the light. Get our Ebook savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…