Boston, 1979. A taxi driver named Jeffrey Boyajian was sh0t in a housing project car park. Fred Clay was sixteen, in state care, and had been taken from his mother as a child. The case against him was two things. First, a witness who had seen men from a distance in poor light and could not identify anyone — until a police hypnotist put him under and he produced a description. Hypnotically refreshed testimony is now widely excluded by courts as unreliable, because what it reliably produces is confident memory, not accurate memory. In 1979 it went to the jury. Second, an identification from a photo array in which Clay's picture stood out from the others. No physical evidence. No confession. He was tried as an adult at sixteen and sentenced to life. At that time Massachusetts could do that to a child. Thirty-eight years. In 2017 the Suffolk County District Attorney's office joined his lawyers in asking for the conviction to be vacated, and a judge did. He walked out in August 2017, aged 53. The charges were dropped entirely. In 2022 Massachusetts paid him compensation. Now the thing about his release that tells you what thirty-eight years actually does. He had been taken into care as a boy and then imprisoned at sixteen. He had never rented a flat. Never held a bank card. Never had a mobile phone, a job interview, a driving licence, or a day as an adult outside an institution. He came out at fifty-three and had to be taught how to live in a world that had been invented while he was inside. He has said that the hardest thing was not anger. It was ordinary tasks. A man was hypnotised. A boy lost his entire adult life. He lost his youth, his freedom, and nearly four decades he could never recover. No compensation could give them back. We have documented more stories like his to confront the stories history cannot afford to forget. 📖Get yours: savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…

He stepped outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills to put money in a parking meter. Six hours later Charles Belk was still in a cell, barefoot, having been handcuffed on the pavement in front of a crowd in his own neighbourhood. He is a film producer. He had done nothing. 22nd August 2014, during the Emmy weekend. Belk, 51, had been at a business dinner. He walked out to feed the meter. Police surrounded him, handcuffed him, took his shoes, and sat him on the kerb in front of the restaurant while people filmed on their phones. A bank had been robbed nearby. The description police were working from was a tall, bald Black man. Belk is tall and bald. That was the match. That was the entirety of the match. He was held for about six hours on suspicion of robbery before surveillance footage was reviewed and he was released without charge. His car was impounded. He had to post bail to get out, and it took days to get that back. He wrote about it afterwards, and the paragraph people quote is the one where he lists what he was doing: a business dinner, a parking meter, a pair of shoes taken off him on a public street. Here is the part worth your attention. Charles Belk produced films. He had a degree in engineering and an MBA. He was in a wealthy part of Los Angeles in a suit on a Friday night. None of that is a defence against a description that says tall, bald, Black, because that description is not a description. It is a category, and there were about a hundred thousand men in that county who fit it. Six hours, barefoot, for a parking meter.