TX - Tortured into false confession 42 years ago, Robert Coney freed

LovelyPigeon

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Man was tortured until he confessed
Associated Press
Lufkin, Texas — A 76-year-old man who spent nearly every day of the last four decades in prison walked free after a judge found that deputies extracted his confession to a 1962 robbery by crushing his fingers between cell bars.
--->>

State District Judge David Wilson, who dismissed Coney's charges, investigated and found that the sheriff of Angelina County at the time and his deputies used physical force to extract confessions, often crushing prisoners' fingers between jail cell bars.

When Wilson questioned Coney, the prisoner held up two twisted and bent fingers.

"I remember the sheriff well," Coney said --->>


http://www.news-leader.com/today/0821-Manwastort-161162.html

Not bitter, he says; wants to "pick up the pieces" of what life he has left.
 
he sounds like a courageous man. I would be VERY bitter.
 
sickens me to hear this....times were "different" then, and "justice" had no checks and balances. police power was absolute.
 
Half a lifetime in prison, then freedom
By Ralph Blumenthal
New York Times News Service
Published August 22, 2004
DALLAS -- Robert Carroll Coney was in prison when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was in prison when the Beatles came to America, when people walked on the moon, when the war raged in Vietnam, when communism fell, and when the Internet and cell phones were invented.

But earlier this month, after spending almost every day of the past 42 years behind bars, Coney, 76, walked out of the Angelina County Jail in Lufkin, Texas.

A state district judge had found credence in Coney's long-standing claims that he had been beaten into pleading guilty, without a lawyer, to a $2,000 supermarket robbery that landed him a life sentence in 1962. He fled the term, only to be imprisoned many times in other states, escaping often, recaptured often, until he was returned to Texas last year to serve out his original term.

The judge, David Wilson, furthermore found that a long-forgotten court order should have expunged those criminal charges as far back as 1973. --->>

Meanwhile, he said, he was struggling to get used to store prices, such as $1.69 for a loaf of bread, and to having to dial his area code to make a local call.

In the judge's findings and Coney's own accounts, the tale unfolds with echoes of "Les Miserables," with Coney, a combat veteran of World War II and Korea who already had run afoul of the law, cast into the American prison archipelago after being threatened into pleading guilty and ordered to shut up in court by a guard who silenced him with a racist epithet.--->>

All that and much more happened to him, Coney said in court filings and an interview in Dallas, where he has been reunited with his common-law wife of 50 years, Shirley Jackson. She has stood by him, even to the point of once going to jail herself for smuggling hacksaw blades to him for an escape.

"I knew he was a good man, and I loved him," Jackson said.--->>

Coney and Jackson, 65, were to have gotten formally married Friday, but the ceremony was put off until Coney can get something better than a prison ID. --->>


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...,1,2904219.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

If you read this article you'll see that Coney wasn't an entirely innocent man--and his former prosecutor doesn't agree with his release-- but he does seem to be the victim of a bad system.

I hope his remaining years can be happy and trouble-free.
 
:laugh: :laugh: sorry...can't help it...HACKSAW BLADES??? :rolleyes: were they in a cake?? geeze :banghead:
 

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