NCCAN - National Capital Crime Assistance Network

Larry Smith

Larry Darnell Smith was convicted for murder in 1994 at age 18. February 4, 2021, Judge Shannon Walker dismissed all charges and he was released after spending most of his adult life in prison. He spent almost 27 years in prison, and is now 45 years old. His long time attorney (mostly pro bono), Mary Owens, stuck with him to the very end. NCCAN director, Claudia Whitman, worked with Attorney Owens and with Larry over the last 7 years to uncover new evidence and to move the case forward. Read Detroit Free Press article here.

Our Mandate

Our work consists of providing support to innocent people who have been unjustly imprisoned and their families. We also have fundraising initiatives to raise money for specific projects, such as retaining an attorney for a prisoner who is ready to take their case back into court.

You May Ask, "Aren't all people in prison guilty?"

The answer to this question is no. There are many avenues by which an innocent person can find him/her self in prison for the long term. These include unreliable eyewitness testimony, police corruption, and the misuse of prison informants. Statistics show that as many as 10% of the prison population may be innocent. Since the advent of DNA evidence, there have been 263 DNA exoneration, and the number continues to grow.

A One-Woman Innocence Movement - Claudia Whitman

One of the exonerees cleared this fall by the Wayne County Conviction Integrity Unit - Darrell Siggers - was a client of Claudia Whitman - a one woman innocence movement. Claudia, an artist based in Colorado, had already been a full-time volunteer for Equal Justice USA for many years when, in 2000, she authored a report for them entitled Reasonable Doubts: Is the US Executing Innocent People? The report focused the cases of 16 people who had been executed despite compelling innocence claims. Her report garnered quite a bit of attention, which prompted Jeffrey Deskovic to ask for her help in his case. After three years, she had collected enough information to convince the New York State Defender’s Association to take a new look at his case. Ultimately, with the help of the Innocence Project, Deskovic was exonerated in 2006 of a murder he’d falsely confessed to at the age of 16.

Since Deskovic’s exoneration, Claudia has helped dozens of incarcerated folks directly. “Once your name gets out there, you get letters asking for help almost every day,” she says. Four more of her “clients” – used loosely, since Claudia accepts no compensation – were exonerated in Michigan; two of whom she brought to the attention of the Michigan Innocence Clinic after doing her own work on the case (Desmond Ricks, Marwin McHenry), one of whom she hired a lawyer for (Bernard Young), and one who was handled by the newly formed Conviction Integrity Unit of Wayne County (Darrell Siggers).

Claudia does more than help the innocent in prison. She has also contributed much to the Registry, including helping Maurice and Ken piece together the chronology of the cases she worked on, and pointing us to other cases that are working their way through the innocence pipeline. She is dedicated to righting wrongs and fighting injustices, and is an excellent example of a reality in innocence work: no exoneration happens in a vacuum. It usually takes a village, but sometimes that village only has one resident, and that is Claudia.

Taken from Fall at the Registry, November 2018

Call To Action

Our cause demands attention and consideration, and we hope that we can make a case for your participation and/or donations. Click on the "Donate" button on any page to contribute.

You shop, Amazon gives! An Easy Way to Donate

Join the Amazon Smile program to redirect some of your purchase dollars to the National Capital Crime Assistance Network. You shop on the Amazon Smile site and have all the same goods at exactly the same prices. When you do so, Amazon donates a small percentage of your purchases to NCCAN. These small donations add up! Over the course of a year, you can donate tens to hundreds of dollars!

Here's how, it is very simple: Visit http://smile.amazon.com/ch/61-1455008, and make your purchases. That is all.

Thank you for supporting our cause!

Excerpt from

The Whole Truth

Richard A. Leo On Why Innocent People Confess To Crimes

by Mark Leviton

In 1983 the police in Fauquier County, Virginia, arrested Earl Washington, a twenty-two-year-old, mentally disabled farmhand. He was a suspect in a burglary, but during two days of uestioning, detectives asked him about five other crimes. Washington, who had the IQ of a ten year old, confessed to all of them. Though four of the cases against him were dismissed, he was convicted of the fifth, a brutal rape and murder, and sentenced to death.

Washington spent a total of seventeen years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2000. Five different appellate courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — had upheld his conviction.

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Confessions are seen as the gold standard of evidence in a trial, but cases like Washington’s are more common than people think.

Law professor Richard A. Leo has spent several decades trying to bring attention to the problem of false confessions. The public has not always been supportive of his efforts. The average citizen, he says, presumes suspects are guilty and believes they deserve whatever they get.

Leo’s work has been cited by the Supreme Court, and he’s been involved in many high-profle cases in which people have given false confessions, including the West Memphis Three and the Central Park Five. In 2010 he was featured in a PBS Frontline documentary about the Norfolk Four, who were the subject of Leo’s book, co-written with Tom Wells, "The Wrong Guys."

To understand how the police coerce an innocent suspect into admitting guilt, Leo has examined interrogation techniques, undergoing the appropriate training and sitting in on nearly two hundred interrogations. He says the problem is not necessarily a matter of misconduct by detectives, most of whom are “decent people who follow the rules.” Rather it’s a pattern of errors resulting from misguided methods and a presumption that police have arrested the guilty party.

Born in Italy, Leo grew up in Southern California, where his family moved when he was three. He describes himself as an “accidental lawyer”: while earning his PhD in social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early nineties, he was given the opportunity to earn a doctorate of jurisprudence concurrently almost for free. (He’s proud of having completed both degrees in four years.) He never wanted to practice law in a courtroom, but he’s often been called as an expert witness or hired as a consultant.

Currently the Hamill Family Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of San Francisco, Leo is the author of several books, including "Confessions of Guilt and The Miranda Debate", and he’s won awards from the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Psychological Association. Before coming to the University of San Francisco, he taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of California, Irvine. He has eight-year-old twin daughters and in his spare time plays guitar and is an avid boxing fan.

I met with Leo one rainy afternoon this past winter. He’d just changed offices and apologized for the mess; his shelves overﬂowed with lawbooks. We spoke for two hours, and he often shook his head or laughed uncomfortably at the tragic absurdities of our criminal-justice system.

This article was published by The Sun, July 2017. To read the full article, click here.