Centurion Ministries

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Centurion Ministries, Inc is a secular, non-profit organization located in Princeton, New Jersey whose primary mission is to free and vindicate from prison those who are completely innocent of the crimes for which they have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for life or death.[1]

History

Centurion Ministries was founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey as a result of his investigation on behalf of an innocent man, Jorge De Los Santos. Jim learned of Mr. De Los Santos in 1980 while a seminary student at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. Jim used his own funds to investigate Mr. De Los Santos claim of innocence, located the chief witness against Mr. De Los Santos who recanted his false trial testimony, hired Paul Casteleiro a Hoboken lawyer to write the writ to bet Mr. De Los Santos' case back into court. A U.S. District Court Judge overturned the conviction and in 1983 Mr. De Los Santos was freed. Centurion is the first organization to investigate cases of wrongful convictions in the US and Canada. In 1987, California businesswoman, Kate Germond, joined Mr. McCloskey and together they built an organization that has secured the release of 53 (as of 12/11/2013) wrongly convicted men and women from all across the United States and Canada.

Mr. McCloskey retired in May 2015 and Ms. Germond is now the Executive Director of Centurion. Centurion continues to seek exoneration of wrongly convicted people through a thorough field investigation.

Process

Centurion Ministries undergoes a formal process to help prove those wrongfully convicted are innocent.[2]

  • Case Research: CM thoroughly studies the entire written record of the case.
  • Field Investigation: CM conducts a field investigation in order to obtain new evidence that can help overturn the case.
  • Trial: CM hires experienced attorneys and expert witnesses to overturn the case in court.

Selected cases

Jorge De Los Santos

[3] Newark, NJ. "Convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 murder of a Newark, NJ used-car salesman, Jorge De Los Santos spent almost 9 years in prison before being freed in July, 1983, by former US District Court Judge Frederick B. Lacey. The judge said testimony from a jailhouse witness that convicted De Los Santos "reeked of perjury" and that the prosecutor knew it. Centurion Ministries' investigation yielded the new evidence that freed De Los Santos."

Kerry Max Cook

[3] [4] Tyler, TX. "In November, 1997, Kerry Max Cook was freed after spending nearly 20 years on death row for a murder in which he had no involvement. This was the crowning moment of a grueling seven-year effort by Centurion Ministries on Cook's behalf. Texas' highest court threw out the conviction and ruled that the state's "illicit manipulation of the evidence permeated the entire investigation of the murder", and that the state "gained a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth""

David Milgaard

[3] Saskatoon, Canada. "An unprecedented order of the Canadian Supreme Court freed David Milgaard on April 16, 1992 after 23 years of false imprisonment. Centurion Ministries' two-year investigation of a 1969 Saskatoon, Canada, rape/murder established the identity of the real killer. The Supreme Court recognized that "the continued conviction of Milgaard amounts to a miscarriage of justice" Then, a 1997 DNA testing of physical evidence confirmed Milgaard's innocence and resulted in the arrest of the actual killer, albeit 28 years after the crime."

Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt

[3] Los Angeles, CA. "In the late 1960's Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party. Soon after the FBI had vowed to "neutralize" him, he was falsely charged and then convicted in 1972 for a 1968 murder on a Santa Monica, CA, tennis court. After 27 years of imprisonment and many denials of habeas petitions, Pratt was granted a new trial and then freed in June 1997 by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey. After conducting an extensive evidentiary hearing, Judge Dickey ruled that the state's primary witness was in fact an FBI, LAPD, and LADA informant, who had significantly lied against Pratt at trial. This culminated a four-year effort by Centurion Ministries on Pratt's behalf."

Darryl Burton

[3] [4] St. Louis, Mo. "Based Primarily on the false eyewitness account by a career criminal informant for the St. Louis Police, Darryl Burton spent 24 years wrongly confined in Missouri prisons for the 1984 fatal shooting of Donald Bell at an Amoco gas station. The African American cashier that was present at the gas station at the time of the shooting testified at a 2007 post conviction hearing that she had told the police they had the wrong man because the shooter was light complected and Mr. Burton is very dark skinned. Freeing Darryl in August 2008, the Cole County judge found this witness' certainty that Mr. Burton was not the killer to be "clear, credible, and powerful." The judge also ruled that the informant's extensive criminal history was kept from the defense; and had the jury known of it, it would have provided "persuasive evidence of the defendant's innocence.""

Executive staff

Kate Germond Executive Director

[5] Kate Germond joined Centurion Ministries in January 1987 after becoming intrigued by an article written in the New York Times in November 1986 about Jim McCloskey's third exoneration. Prior to that she was a businesswoman and community activist in Mendocino, California where she lived with her family for close to 20 years. In addition to performing in-the-field investigations of her own cases, Kate oversees the Case Development Manager. Kate is naturally talented at this type of work, and considers it to be her calling.

Paul Casteleiro, Legal Director

Paul Casteleiro has been involved with the exoneration of many of Centurions clients. Until September 2014 he was a single shop criminal defense lawyer working out of Hoboken NJ. Mr. Casteleiro has had much success with and without Centurion. But it is his work on behalf of the wrongly convicted that is his passion.

W. James Cousins, Attorney

Jim Cousins has worked with Centuiron for 15-years. Most notably on the Richard Lapointe case, a Connecticut case of a mentally challenged man who was convicted of murder. In 2015 the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered a new trial and later that year all charges were dismissed against Mr. Lapointe. Mr. Cousins has also worked on a number of other cases with Centurion.

Alan Maimon

[5] Alan Maimon worked for 12 years as a journalist before joining Centurion ministries in January 2012. While with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he contributed to a series of stories about Kentucky's criminal justice system that was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. As an investigative reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he was the recipient of a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. He is a Philadelphia native and a graduate of Brown University.

Hired in January 2012, Alan is Centurion Ministries' full-time investigator.

James C. McCloskey

[5] Jim McCloskey was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia and is a 1964 graduate of Bucknell University. After three years as a naval officer in Japan & Vietnam, he spent 13 years in business, primarily as an executive for two different international management consulting firms, one in Tokyo and the other, The Hay Group, in Philadelphia. He left the business world for the ministry in 1979. Subsequent to earning a Masters of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, he officially founded Centurion Ministries, Inc. in 1983. However, McCloskey actually began the work of Centurion Ministries in 1980 when he took a one year leave of absence from his seminary studies to investigate the claim of innocence by a Trenton State Prison inmate whom he met while serving as a student chaplain at the prison. Mr. McCloskey's efforts were rewarded with the release and exoneration in 1983 of the inmate, Jorge De Los Santos.

Paul Henderson, Retired

Paul Henderson, a former investigative reporter for the Seattle Times, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for a series of articles that vindicated a man who had been falsely convicted of rape. In 1985, Paul became a private investigator and worked successfully since 1988 on a number of Centurion Ministries cases. In 1996, Paul became a full-time staff investigator for Centurion Ministries. Paul lives in Seattle, Washington.

News

References

  1. ↑ Golin, Sarah. "Working to Save Innocent Souls", "The Washington Post", October 25, 2008, accessed June 29, 2011
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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