Peter Reilly (Justice Victim)

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Peter Reilly (* 1956 ) was innocently convicted and imprisoned of a miscarriage of justice in the USA between 1973 and 1978 . This caused a stir in the 1970s when a support group made it public. At the time of the crime, 17 years old, the white young man from Falls Village, Canaan , Connecticut was blamed for the brutal murder of his mother Barbara Gibbons (51) and sentenced to six to 16 years in prison because of an extorted confession. He was acquitted five years later.

The case

Peter Reilly grew up in cramped conditions. He didn't know his father. The mother lived mainly on welfare money, drank and received lovers. She was found in her bed with her throat cut and a bottle in her vagina. Her son Peter's “confession” was preceded by 24 hours without a lawyer and ten hours of interrogation.

Through the tough struggle of a support group it was finally proven “that Peter was five miles from home at the time of his mother's murder. In addition, the witnesses who saw Peter were a police officer and his wife. Your affidavit, which must have been known to the criminal police, was discovered in the prosecutor's files after he died of sudden heart failure. "

Among the prominent supporters that the poorly educated youth found (after his confession was revoked) was the Connecticut-based playwright Arthur Miller , who touched on the case in his memoirs published in 1987.

The phenomenon is not only known from the US judicial system: the police and the public prosecutor's office want to “calm the public down” by quickly calling them a perpetrator and later resist “losing face”. According to Miller, the police tried to save their "honor" even after the exculpatory material was presented. In the end, however, the now retired Police Chief Fussenich was forced to visit Peter and apologize. The liberal governor Ella Grasso had "hesitated a suspiciously long time before intervening against her own officials."

Miller was shocked, among other things, by the "terrifyingly cold and cynical abuse of Freudian psychology" that the police had allowed themselves to during their interrogations. Among other things, she brought up the " Oedipus complex " in order to make Peter more palatable that only he could have murdered his mother.

The case was presented in two books and numerous radio and television reports.

Reilly, meanwhile in his mid-50s, lives today (2011) in Tolland and works as a seller of car accessories in Ellington . In his free time he is a guitarist in a rock band. He remains committed to improving the judiciary. The crime that he was once accused of has not yet been solved.

literature

Film / video

  • Van King; Jonathan Towers; Bill Kurtis: American justice. / A son's confession . Towers Productions, Inc .; Arts and Entertainment Network., New York: A&E Home Video 2002
  • Peter Reilly, Donald Connery, Andrew Schneider: conviction and innocence , Storrs, CT: Custodian of Records, University of Connecticut LCWP UConn Torrington Campus, 2009.
  • A Death in Canaan (1978) (TV) in the Internet Movie Database (English). German "Death in a Small Town" directed by Tony Richardson

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Time curves 1989, page 731
  2. ↑ time curves 1989, page 733
  3. ↑ time curves 1989, page 730
  4. ↑ Donald Connery 2008  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 29, 2011@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.tcextra.com  
  5. ^ Hartford Courant, February 27, 2011 , accessed December 29, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Reilly, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American victim of a miscarriage of law
DATE OF BIRTH 1956