A man from Michigan has been convicted of murder following a fire in a building and has only recently won.
Until he spoke after Forbes' incarceration, he said the building owner paid him to set the building on fire
Photography:
EP / Archive
After 38 years in jail for murder, Walter Forbes was recently released on full probation.
The turning point came after the main witness in the case withdrew from the testimony against him.
That ended with the help of the University of Michigan's free legal aid department, a mask of mistakes made by the U.S. legal system.
According to the CNN publication, in 1982 Forbes was a student who got into a fight at a well in a town near Michigan.
One of the participants in the brawl, Dennis Hall, arrived the next day and shot Forbes four times.
Shortly afterwards, Dennis Hall perished in a fire in his home.
His fiancée and their joint daughter survived.
During the fire investigation, all blue gasoline and other combustibles were found in the arena on the first floor of the building.
Forbes testified that he learned of Hall's death when he listened to the radio in the morning, and even then he feared that they would try to put the blame on him.
But three months later, 19-year-old Ennis Canbero testified that she saw Forbes and two men carrying red gasoline tanks near the building during the fire and pouring their contents around it.
The color of the red jerrycans she recounted was inconsistent with the color of the blue jerkin found in the investigation of the circumstances of the fire.
Also, contrary to her testimony, the combustibles were located inside the building and not around it.
In addition, one of the defendants successfully underwent a polygraph examination and the charge against him was denied.
Another suspect is also acquitted.
Only Forbes was convicted and sent to life in prison.
Another failure of the lawsuit that was exposed is that two months before the fire, a source revealed to police that the building's owner, David Jones, had purchased fire insurance.
The information was not defined as qualifying evidence and the jury was not exposed to it at all.
Against this background, the jury convicted Forbes of murder and he was sent to life imprisonment.
In the 1990s, an investigation revealed that Jones had committed a similar scam in another incident, in which he was involved in a fire in nearby Livingston County.
Beyond that, right after Forbes' incarceration, he went so far as to claim that the building owner paid him $ 1,000 to set it on fire in 1982.
It should be noted that while the building was worth $ 32,000, the owner received $ 50,000 from the insurance company.
Following the publications, Forbes contacted the University of Michigan's Free Defense Department.
A young lawyer named Sayed was stunned by the findings: "Convicted a person based on the most unreliable testimony, when there was actually a possible story parallel to the cause of the fire," he was quoted as saying.
The defense team was looking for key community Anis Canberra.
They found her suffering from a respiratory disease and living with friends.
When the new defense team came to the congregation, she repeated all the things she had said.
"Everything was a lie, two people came to me and threatened to kill my children if I did not testify against Forbes," she told the defense team.
CNN itself also addressed the witness, who hesitated to speak, but said: "I was very young and it was difficult. I was a girl then."
With the new findings and the withdrawal from the testimony, the defense team approached the prosecution and the court demanding an immediate acquittal of Forbes.
Despite opposition to the lawsuit, a district court judge was unimpressed and ordered Forbes' immediate release.
"We felt great joy," said members of the University of Michigan legal team, "It was not something complicated with DNA evidence. It was just an investigation of evidence on the spot. We are sad that justice was only issued after 38 years."
Forbes himself, who was released on November 30, hopes to continue working on a project to help inmates.
It should be noted that the owner of the building who was in fact the main suspect in the fire, has since died.