The world is a scary place, and every day there are headlines about heinous acts that have been committed. The police department does a great job at trying to put those responsible behind bars, but sometimes there is not enough evidence to convict, the case turns cold, or worse still, the wrong person is targeted for a crime that they didn’t commit.

With advanced DNA testing in 2017, these wrongful convictions have become less common, but they still happen, and sometimes it can be due to something as simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or an inaccurate eyewitness. There have been many famous wrongful conviction cases over the years, which have inspired generations of activists. Bfut also popular culture, with movies, documentaries, and even songs being made about some of the men accused of crimes for which they are innocent. From a boxer who was at the peak of his career, to an Irishman who was accused of being behind a series of Irish Republican Army bombings, these are just some of the cases which have caught our attention.

Thankfully there are organizations, like The Innocence Project, dedicated to taking on cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted. Below are 15 people who served time behind bars for crimes that they didn’t commit.

15. Juan Catalan

Juan Catalan’s story is one that some may be familiar with some because he was the subject of the Netflix documentary, The Long Shot, directed by Jacob LaMendola.

Catalan was charged with murdering a 16-year-old girl, Martha Puebla. Puebla was gunned down outside her home in Sun Valley, California, because she had testified in a gang murder case. Juan’s brother, Mario Catalan, was a co-defendant in that case, so police assumed Juan had done the hit for revenge. However, Juan denied the charges and claimed that he was at a baseball match. This becomes the subject of the film, which reveals the remarkable way Catalan worked with his defence attorney, Todd Melnick, to prove his innocence using raw footage from TV show, Curb Your Enthusiasm — taken during a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball match on May 12, 2003.

Catalan had been in jail for five and a half months awaiting trial for capital murder when his innocence was revealed.

14. George Allen

George Allen spent 30 years in jail for a forcible violation and murder that he didn’t commit. Allen was sentenced to 95 years in prison after being convicted in 1982 of murdering a court reporter named Mary Bell.

Allen was released on Nov. 14, 2012, and sadly only lived four years as a free man before he died from natural causes in October of 2016. He was aged 60.

According to The Innocence Project, Allen had this to say when he became a free man:
“I have spent 30 years in prison as an innocent man, and those have been difficult years for me and my family, but I never gave up hope. I knew that some day [sic] the truth would come out. … Thank God this nightmare is finally ending.”

13. Steven Avery

Steven Avery is another very well-known name when it comes to wrongful convictions, and he too has been the subject of a Netflix documentary, Making A Murderer. While Avery is still behind bars for allegedly murdering freelance photographer, Teresa Halbach — a crime which has divided people on whether or not he is guilty. Prior to this case, he served almost two decades for a forcible violation that he did not commit.

In 1985, Avery was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman by the name of Penny Ann Beernsten (she identified him as her attacker), and sentenced to 32 years behind bars. He served 18 years of that sentence, before being exonerated based on DNA testing in 2003. Two years later, in 2005, Halbach was murdered, and Avery would make headlines again.

12. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was a boxer who was wrongfully convicted of a triple murder in 1966, at the peak of his boxing career. According to reports, Carter was convicted twice of shooting one woman and two men at Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, New Jersey.

Carter maintained his innocence and served 19 years in jail, before a judge overturned his conviction, which led to his release in 1985. Following his release, Carter moved to Toronto, Canada and became an activist for those who had been wrongfully convicted, and served as the head of the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted.

His case (and his life story) is so fascinating that it was turned into a movie called The Hurricane, in 1999. Bob Dylan also penned the song, “Hurricane” after reportedly visiting the boxer while he was in prison.

11. Dennis Maher

Dennis Maher spent 19 years in prison, before DNA evidence revealed that he had been wrongfully convicted of sexual assault.

On Nov.16, 1983, a woman in Lowell, Massachusetts, was sexually assaulted by an unknown man. The next day a second woman was also attacked by a man who threatened her with a knife. She managed to escape, and informed the police giving them a description of what her attacker looked like, and was wearing. That night, Maher was arrested because his clothing matched that of the attacker, and a knife was found in his vehicle. According to The Innocence Project, he was serving with the United States Army at the time.

He was found guilty of both of these attacks, as well as another earlier attack in Ayer, Massachusetts. He was charged with two forcible violations and one sexual assault in 1984. Maher had always insisted that he was innocent and on April 3, 2003, with the help of the Innocence Project and DNA evidence, he was released from prison.

10. Gerry Conlon

Gerard “Gerry” Conlon was one of the Guildford Four who was arrested and convicted for being a Provisional IRA bomber, responsible for the Guildford pub bombings in 1974. He and three others (two Irishmen, Paul Hill and Paddy Armstrong, and an Englishwoman Carole Richardson) were sentenced in 1975 for the crime, which claimed the life of five people and injured 65.

Conlon served 15 years behind bars before the convictions were overturned in 1989. But life outside of prison was no picnic. According to Irish Times, Conlon spent “the best part of £120,000 in six weeks” on drugs while he struggled to come to terms with life on the outside.

Conlon’s case is incredibly well-known and served as the inspiration for the 1993 movie, In The Name Of The Father. More recently, Johnny Depp gave a foreword in the late Conlon’s biography — the two reportedly became friends in the ’90s after Conlon visited Los Angeles.

9. Nicholas Yarris

Nicholas Yarris spent 22 years on Pennsylvania’s death row before he was released from prison on Jan. 16, 2004. He was found not-guilty on the basis of DNA testing.

He reportedly spent much of that time in solitary confinement, and was badly beaten by prison guards. He is quoted by the BBC as saying, “I genuinely believe that being on death row for 22 years ultimately saved my life. It was the greatest adventure of my life, and I survived it.”

Yarris’ ordeal started in 1981 when he was pulled over by a police officer for driving in a stolen car. Things reportedly escalated during the arrest, and he was charged with the attempted murder of a police officer. While at trial, he was acquitted of these charges but was convicted of theft for the stolen car.

According to Times Herald, while behind bars, Yarris was reportedly experiencing withdrawals because he was a drug addict. In an attempt to get out of prison, he pretended to have information about who killed Linda May Craig — she was murdered and forcefully violated d in 1981. Police could not verify Yarris’ claims and instead suspected him. In 1982 he was tried, convicted and sentenced for Craig’s forceful violation and murder.

8. Robert Brown

In 1997, Robert Brown was arrested in Manchester, and charged with the murder of Annie Walsh. He was 19-years-old at the time.

Walsh had been beaten to death, and Brown, who lived near where the attack had taken place, was arrested four months later. He signed a confession but claimed that police had beaten him, and tricked him into signing it. He was found guilty by a jury, and sentenced to life in prison until DNA evidence was able to prove his innocence after 25 years.

Walsh claimed that prior to the arrest he was trying to build a life for himself, and had met a girl named Cathy, who he really cared about. However, his conviction and his time in prison destroyed all of his future prospects. The BBC quotes him as saying, “The police took that opportunity away from me to build a new life with my girlfriend, who I cared for and loved. It affected her as well. She died of alcohol poisoning at 35 years of age.”

7. Kennedy Brewer

Kennedy Brewer was charged with an awful crime. The abduction, forcible violation, and murder of his girlfriend, Gloria Jackson’s three-year-old daughter, Christine Jackson. On May 3, 1992, the night that Christine went missing, Brewer had been babysitting her, as well as his two biological children with Gloria.

Police suspected Brewer.

In 1995 his trial began, and on May 24, 1995, he was convicted of capital murder and sexual battery. In 2001, advanced DNA testing excluded Brewer, and according to The Innocence Project, the following year his sentence was vacated and he was moved off of death row into pre-trial detention. However, prosecutors claimed that they wanted to retry Brewer for capital murder, and he spent five more years behind bars. He was finally released on bail in 2007 while a new trial was pending. However, thanks to the work by the organization, Brewer was exonerated on Feb. 15, 2008.

6. Michael Morton

In 1986, Michael Morton’s wife, Christine Morton, was beaten to death at their family home in Texas. According to Texas Tribune, the couple’s 3-year-old son, Eric, had reportedly witnessed the murder and described a man very different to that of his father as the attacker. In addition, her credit card was reportedly used, and a canceled check made out to Christine was cashed with a forged signature after her death. Yet despite all of this, Michael was the prime suspect.

In 1987, Michael was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He insisted that he was innocent. It was reportedly not until 2008 that Michael and his lawyers learned about the check, the credit card and his son’s description of the killer. And in 2011, DNA testing revealed the DNA of another man at the crime scene.

Morton was released in October of 2011, and exonerated in December of the same year. He had spent 25 years in prison.

5. Christopher Abernathy

Christopher Abernathy spent 28 years in prison after being convicted of killing 15-year-old Kristina Hickey in 1984. Hickey had been murdered, and her body was found in the bushes near a busy shopping plaza.

Abernathy was arrested a year later after an acquaintance reportedly told police that Abernathy had confessed to them that he had killed Hickey. He was just 18 years old. He reportedly signed a confession, but claims to have felt coerced into doing so.

He was serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole after being charged. However, in May of 2017, DNA evidence revealed that Hickey had been sexually assaulted by a man who was not Abernathy. He was released in November of 2017, and told The Chicago Tribune that he was looking forward to spending time with his mother, and had enjoyed eating a cheeseburger again after all those years.

4. Angel Gonzalez

In 1994, a case of misidentification resulted in Angel Gonzalez being convicted of forcible violation and abduction. His car reportedly matched the description of the vehicle that had been used in the abduction, and later that night, Gonzalez was pulled over by police, and the victim was brought over to identify the car. She positively identified it and then identified Gonzalez as her attacker — one of two men who had abducted her from her apartment in Illinois.

After his arrest, he was reportedly misled by police into signing a false confession, and this, together with the victim’s identification was the most compelling pieces of evidence in the case. Gonzalez was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He insisted that he was innocent of the crimes he was jailed for.

The Innocence Project got involved and with the help of DNA testing, Gonzalez’s conviction for this crime was vacated in 2015.

3. Bennie Starks

Bennie Starks was sentenced to 100 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit. The crime took place in 1986 and the victim was a 69-year-old Hispanic woman who was beaten, forcefully violated and bitten by an attacker. Police thought that attacker was Starks after a dry-cleaning receipt was found in a coat in the river where the attack had taken place.

Despite the fact that Starks didn’t match the woman’s description of her attacker, and despite having an alibi, as well as an explanation for his clothing being found at the scene (he claimed he was mugged), the case went to trial. Then the victim identified Starks as her attacker.

According to The Innocence Project, Starks was charged with attempted aggravated criminal assault, unlawful restraint, aggravated battery, and two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault. It was a lengthy battle to exonerate him, but in 2006 he was released on bail after the assult conviction was overturned; and in 2013 prosecutors dismissed all other charges.

2. Kirk Bloodsworth

Kirk Bloodsworth was reportedly the first American sentenced to death to be exonerated by DNA testing, after already being convicted. Bloodsworth’s story goes like this: In 1984, he was arrested after an anonymous caller told police that they had seen him with a nine-year-old girl on the day that she was killed. But he did not fit the description that an eyewitness witness had made to the police, nor was he living in the area at the time.

He was convicted of the crime. In 1992, though, the prosecution allowed DNA testing for Bloodsworth’s case and the results ultimately led to his release in 1993. At the time, he had served nine years in prison (two years of which he spent on death row). Since his release, the Baltimore Sun reports life has been traumatic for Bloodsworth, as he tries to regain some sense of normalcy.

1. Dewey Bozella

Dewey Bozella had a hard life. His father was abusive and not only beat Bozella, but also his mother, who died when he was nine years old. He then grew up in group homes. He started stealing, he was smoking marijuana and drinking, but then he found boxing. Bozella was an amateur boxer, with big dreams until a wrongful conviction took everything from him.

In 1983, he was arrested and convicted of killing a 92-year-old woman. But Bozella did something remarkable while behind bars, he used it as a time to study, and he also became a certified paralegal who was dedicated to proving his innocence. He started filing motions and writing to the Innocence Project, The New York Times reports.

Bozella spent 26 years behind bars for a murder that he didn’t commit. But in 2009, he was cleared and freed. In 2011, he even fought and won his first professional boxing fight, at age 52.