Dear Reader, My name is Thomas Louis Washington, prison number #407126 I am currently falsely imprisoned within the Michigan Department Of Corrections. I was sentenced to 42 to 82 years for 1st degree home invasion, assault with intent to murder. I have been wrongly convicted for 13 long years. The Detroit Police Officers who handled the evidence that would have proved my innocence either mishandled it or intentionally destroyed it. At my trial the Officer that handled the evidence failed to show up to my trial when he was called. After 13 years I have discovered that the two officers in question are a part of a Detroit Police Narcotics Unit that have been found to have on more than one occasion falsified affidavits for search warrants, kidnap and robbed criminal suspects at gunpoint and sold the drugs seized to other drug dealers who divided the proceeds amongst the Detroit Police Narcotics Unit. This was all done while they were acting under the "COLOR OF THE LAW" These i...

To know that I regret the things I done wrong in my life shows that I have grown considerably in all the years I've spent in prison. I use to make unintelligent comments such as: "I have no regrets because everything happens for a reason; I can't regret because those things taught me something; or to regret is to deny the existence of my purpose." Wow! Even hearing those stupid ass comments today turns my stomach and put a bad taste in my mouth because they show how ignorant and infantile my thinking actually was back then. For so long I had no clue of the impact my actions had on other people, plus I was so desensitized after experiencing so much hardship in my life that I was oblivious to the feelings of empathy and compassion. I was driven by this insatiable need of defiance whereas I couldn't even care enough to regret my poor choices. I wasn't cognizant in my youth, and my lack of intelligence led to some painful regrets in my life. One of those regrets c...

  A defendant is entitled to a presumption of innocence as to all charged conduct until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and that presumption is supposed to do meaningful constitutional work as long as it applies. At least that's what courts tell the accused and the jury about how it works. We can think of no reason that a jury's finding the defendant not guilty of a charge undoes that guarantee. In fact, the jury's view that the state did not meet its burden of proof should cut the other way. --Bridget M. McCormack, Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court To expect justice to be blind, fair and applicable to all isn't a stretch of the imagination nor an unreasonable expectation when you are a considered a citizen of the United States of America. But in 1992, it was a painful realization to an nineteen year old black kid who stepped inside of the Wayne County Circuit Courtroom on the day of his sentence and found that justice was far from being blind, becaus...

 Dear Governor Whitmer, I’m writing to you today, not as a citizen of Michigan, nor the United States but as a citizen of the world.  The purpose of my letter is to ask you to look at the case of Carlos King, a prisoner of the Michigan  Correctional Department. Carlos has served 30 years of a 50-75 sentence. He was imprisoned at the age of 18 for 2 counts of  armed robbery and one count of felony firearms. The guidelines for sentencing were 3 years minimum  to 8 years maximum. The judge who tried the case took it upon himself to add to the sentence for  crimes that Mr. King was tried for but found innocent of. It has since been recognized that this was an unconstitutional sentencing, and it should be reversed  immediately.  These are the raw facts of this case. However, as you know there are so many stories between the lines  when we look at individuals’ lives. What has happened to Mr. King, and I suspect so many other men,  especially m...