39. The Wrongful Arson Conviction of Juwan Deering - Part 2

This week we continue our coverage of the Juwan Deering wrongful conviction. Juwan Deering was a Michigan man accused of setting a fatal fire that killed 5 children in Royal Oak Township, Michigan. Deering was convicted based on now-debunked arson investigation myths but that isn't the only reason he was convicted. The prosecutor in the case stands accused of some shocking misconduct and we get into it in this episode. Could it be that political motives pushed a prosecutor violate ethics standards to secure a conviction in a mass murder that had been languishing for 6 years? We'll tell you what he's accused of doing but we can only make guesses at his motives for these alleged actions. 

Special thanks to the University of Michigan Law school for providing the court transcripts for the original Juwan Deering Trial. 

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.

You can support their mission to help fight wrongful convictions here: https://funraise.org/give/National-Registry-of-Exonerations/49d88db1-4a88-433c-a0ab-3a4453535ba8/

Background music by Not Notoriously Coordinated 

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For a complete list of sources used, please see Episode 38. Below are additional sources used this week:

https://catherinebroad.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/March-27-2022-Article.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370505001303#:~:text=Taken%20together%2C%20these%20studies%20show,not%20make%20that%20memory%20reliable.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/oakland-co-prosecutor-uncovers-ethical-violations-in-deadly-arson-case-conviction

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/05/14/prosecutor-townsend-whitmer-kidnap-ethics/5094269001/