RONALD JOHNSON

For over three decades, Mr. Johnson and three generations of his family have fought tirelessly to prove his innocence. When his attorneys at Phillips Black were finally allowed to review police and prosecution files, it confirmed what his supporters have always known: Mr. Johnson is innocent. At trial, police and prosecutors hid an abundance of evidence completely discrediting the only two witnesses in the case.

CURTIS KINGWOOD

Mr. Kingwood’s wrongful conviction was based on evidence that was fabricated by disgraced Philadelphia Homicide Detective Phillip Nordo. Two eye-witnesses changed their initial descriptions to match Mr. Kingwood and his co-defendant after Detective Nordo promised each of them $20,000 in exchange for their testimony. One of those witnesses cooperated in other cases for Nordo, including testifying as an eye-witness in anotherhomicide trial on the same day that he testified against Mr. Kingwood. Years later Detective Nordo was charged and convicted for sexually assaulting several people during police interrogations. He is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence for sexual assault.

StePHen Lazar

The case against Mr. Lazar was based on three discredited sources of evidence: a suitcase found unweathered in the victim’s backyard three and a half months after the crime, the statements of several individuals with substance addictions and pending criminal cases, all of whom the district court noted had “severe credibility problems,” and a purported confession given after over 30 hours of questioning while Mr. Lazar was in acute withdrawal from methadone. Lazar v. A.G., et al., CV 14-6907, 2023 WL 2382812, at 25 (E.D. Pa. Mar. 6, 2023). Each prong of the case has been thoroughly undermined by newly disclosed evidence.

THEOPHALIS BILAAL WILSON

“No words can express what we have put these people through; what we have put Mr. Wilson through; what we have put his family through; what we have put the victims in this case through, and what we have put our community through”. - Patricia Cummings, Assistant District Attorney

On January 21, 2020 the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, after tireless work by Phillips Black Project, Greenberg Traurig, LLP and the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit, vacated the conviction and ordered immediate release of Theophalis Bilaal Wilson, who served nearly three decades in prison for murders he did not commit as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. In the words of the Conviction Integrity Unity of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office: “Wilson's trial was infected by serious prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, a critical witness who supplied false testimony, and ineffective assistance of counsel. As a result, he was wrongfully convicted of three homicides and sentenced to an unconstitutional mandatory life sentence.” (Commonwealth’s Answer to Petition for Post-Conviction Relief). Background about the case appears below.

JUVENILE JUSTICE

Phillips Black is at the forefront of compiling and analyzing the transformation of juvenile life without parole sentencing (JLWOP) resulting from the seminal Eighth Amendment decisions of Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010), and Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012). Phillips Black is a leading producer of JLWOP legal scholarship examining the rapid changes across the country, identifying the jurisdictions that have already abandoned or are decidedly moving away from this sentence, and explicating the law and actual practices in counties and states that continue to countenance sentencing individuals to die in prison for crimes they committed before reaching age eighteen.

PHILLIPS BLACK JLWOP REPORTS

In recent years, Phillips Black has produced two studies covering this area.

Juvenile Life Without Parole After Miller

No Hope: Re-examining Lifetime Sentences for Juvenile Offenders

The first provides a comprehensive accounting of each U.S. jurisdiction’s response to Miller. It catalogues the judicial and legislative responses in all fifty states, and serves as a resource to practitioners litigating JLWOP cases.

The second, released on September 22, 2015, analyzes JLWOP in practice. Drawing on a data set from each state’s department of corrections, the report establishes that JLWOP arose in the midst of hysteria over the race-based myth of a coming wave of the Superpredator, a pseudo-scientific theory propagated in articles such as My Black Crime Problem, And Ours. Superpredator youth never arrived, but, as we report, the overwhelming majority of JLWOP sentences are premised on that myth and are disproportionately imposed on non-whites.