The Innocence Project said that Danny Davis spent more than 32 years in prison for a crime that DNA evidence now proves he did not commit, marking another case in which coercive interrogation and withheld evidence led to a wrongful conviction. The conviction stemmed from a 1992 murder in Cairo, Illinois, where police “took 17-year-old Isaac Davis and his 20-year-old brother Danny in for questioning” after receiving an “unfounded tip.”
According to the organization, Danny’s decades-old murder conviction was finally vacated in 2024 after a judge reviewed newly-presented evidence of his innocence and ordered his release.
The Innocence Project stated that Davis endured “many hours of psychological and physical abuse,” including threats that his younger brother “was going down for the crime,” and officers telling him, “Your Black ass [is] going to fry.”
As the Innocence Project explained, both brothers ultimately signed false confession statements “fearing for their lives,” implicating themselves and an acquaintance, DeVoe Johnson. The organization noted that Danny later pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, saying in court, “I just want to live. That’s the only reason I’m pleading to it.”
The organization highlighted the contradictory outcome in Johnson’s case, noting that he was acquitted after a bench trial by the same judge who accepted the brothers’ guilty pleas, who now found the confessions “were not credible.”
According to the Innocence Project, attorneys from multiple innocence organizations began investigating the case in 2015, litigating for DNA testing and uncovering evidence withheld from the defense, including “critical witness statements and potential alternate suspects.” DNA testing later identified male DNA under the victim’s fingernails, and the organization said that “Danny, Isaac, and DeVoe were all excluded.”
The Innocence Project wrote that after a 2024 evidentiary hearing, a judge vacated Davis’s conviction and ordered his release. The group said Davis, then 52, “walked out of prison and reunited with his family” after more than three decades behind bars.
In the release, the organization stated that on the ride home, Davis told his legal team he hopes “other wrongly convicted people will see him and know to keep fighting.” According to the Innocence Project, he is represented by Innocence Project Attorney Vanessa Potkin, Illinois Innocence Project attorneys Lauren Kaeseberg and Maria de Arteaga, and Exoneration Project attorneys Lauren Myerscough-Mueller and Karl Leonard.
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