(L to r) WC CIU director Valerie Newman, DPD Chief Todd Bettison, WC Pros. Kym Worthy, Cooley Innocence Project Dir. Valerie Brame, Quattrone Center Dir. John Holloway at Sentinel Event Review Press Conference Nov. 18, 2025
“Sentinel” study examined case of Eric Anderson, exonerated, freed in 2019
Exoneree Eric Anderson
Recommendations applicable only to “future cases,” as masses of MDOC’s wrongfully convicted individuals serve LWOP “death in prison” terms
“…. preventing the identified [contributing factors] from occurring in the future cannot be achieved by punishing any of the system’s actors …. Recommendations …. would help put good faith system actors in to positions where they are better able to succeed.”– from full report
“The WCSERT did not seek to punish or find blame with any individual or agency, but to learn from this wrongful conviction and make changes to avoid such errors again, helping the criminal justice system operate fairly and justly for all.” –from full report
Mainstream media apparently failed to read complete 48 pp. report, note complete lack of accountability for police, prosecutors, judges and more, many of them repeat offenders, who have sent thousands to die in prison
Kym Worthy’s 2020 election challenger, Victoria Burton-Harris, who got 40 percent of the vote, published this ad.
(Above) Families, friends and supporters of Wayne County’s wrongfully convicted rallied outside the Frank Murphy Hall of Injustice in downtown Detroit June 4, 2021. The rally and march, which packed the streets around the hall, was organized largely by two prisoners and their families, Darrell Ewing and *Thelonious ‘Shawn’ Searcy.
Searcy was exonerated in 2021, and Ewing’s charges were dismissed in 2024, but WC Pros. Kym Worthy, known nationally as “Queen of Mass Incarceration,” and an “Innocence Denier” continues to appeal the court rulings, using taxpayer dollars to prolong their suffering.
Editorial by Diane Bukowski
November 22, 2025
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DETROIT– “Every 10 years, we do studies but don’t do nothing about them. Millions of dollars spent and where does it go?”
Michael Thompson, founder of the Michael Thompson Clemency Project, asked that question at a Lansing, MI forum April 27, 2023, after spending 25 years on a minor marijuana conviction in the MDOC, and still on a four-year parole.
“You KNOW what the solution is. People who are doing 40, 50 years, that shit hurts, man,” Thompson continued. “If it wasn’t for the Last Prisoner Project, I wouldn’t be out. It is not easy to survive after doing decades behind bars. If anybody has done that amount of time, something has happened to them. I know, because it happened to me. . . you lock a person up and throw away the key—WHEN IS ENOUGH? SOMEBODY TELL ME! AMERICA YOU CAN DO BETTER.”
Now. a Coalition of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, the Detroit Police Department, the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan, the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office (SADO) and the Cooley Innocence Project, coordinated by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice in Pennsylvania, has produced yet another study.
It was presented with great fanfare at a press conference November 18, 2025, but it turned out to be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
VOD has read the full report but is not covering it in detail, other than quotes showing that its results are NOT INTENDED FOR PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS, and that CRIMINAL COPS AND OTHER ACTORS WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
To confirm this, read the full report itself, titled “Wayne County Sentinel Event Review Report Nov 2025 Grant version Eric Anderson” at: http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/Wayne-County-Sentinel-Event-Review-Report-Nov-2025-Grant-version-Eric-Anderson.pdf
As usual, the mainstream media turned out handily at Worthy’s request, then reported erroneously that the Sentinel Review applied to past convictions, when it clearly does not. In similar mode, Worthy scheduled a press conference on rape kits, with nothing new to say Sept. 10, 2024. Supporters of Ricky Rimmer-Bey, now 70 years old, who has spent 50 years in the MDOC, framed by criminal cops Leo Haidys and James Harris in 1976, rallied outside the Prosecutor’s Office, as TV cameras barreled by the rally into the building to cover Kym Worthy’s precious pearls of wisdom.
Rally for Ricky Rimmer-Bey at Detroit’s Criminal InJustice Center September 10, 2024.
CHILD ABUSE!
VOD continues to cover dozens of other Michigan lifers’ cases, most recently that of David McKinney, serving LWOP for the 2004 murder/robbery of Black Inkster gun shop owner Clyde Alexander.
The conviction was based primarily on a 14-year-old child’s false testimony, now recanted, obtained under threat by repeat offender Inkster cop Anthony DelGreco and others. They also elicited a false confession from McKinney, obtained illegally as they denied him access to his attorney and delayed arraignment on the charge for months as they concocted the case.
David McKinney, mother Cheryl McKinney
Despite a scathing report by Private Investigator Vicki Yost, a former Inkster police chief, sent to Wayne Co. CIU director Valerie Newman, denouncing McKinney’s conviction, the CIU has refused him exoneration.
Anthony DelGreco now works at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, according to his LinkedIn account, as a “Medicolegal Death Investigator.” He brags that he retired as a homicide detective after 27 years, reaching the rank of of Lieutenant despite his record of literal CHILD ABUSE and other false convictions.
Former IPD Det. Anthony DelGreco
Is he one of the “good faith system actors” the Wayne County Prosecutor and Inkster Police are refusing to hold accountable? There are hundreds more cops, prosecutors, judges and other actors who have committed unpardonable crimes against those they wrongfully consigned to death in prison. In a just world, they would suffer the same fate.
This is not the first rodeo for the State Appellate Defenders’ Office (SADO) in covering up false convictions on behalf of Kym Worthy. After the Detroit Police Crime Lab was closed in 2008, due to a plethora of forensic evidence errors, Worthy and SADO worked together to review the cases of prisoners adversely affected by the errors. Despite grant funding to both the WCPO and SADO from the City of Detroit and other entities, Worthy claimed they only had enough resources to investigate convictions from 2003 to 2008, and SADO consented to those restrictions.
DPTF FAMILIES, FRIENDS RALLY 2011
The Detroit People’s Task Force to Free the Wrongfully Convicted, made up of prisoners who had been incarcerated largely during the 1990’s and their families, waged a militant campaign beginning in 2009 for an independent review of cases by a national forensics center not involved with either local police or prosecutors. The Detroit City Council voted in support, but it never happened, a travesty beyond words.
Mark McCloud, president of the National Lifers of America Chippewa Valley Chapter #1026, has identified hundreds of MDOC prisoners, including those below, who were convicted due to misconduct by the same cops and prosecutors involved in the cases of exonerated individuals. VOD continues to cover dozens of other cases. The Sentinel study includes no plans to review these cases, or others by repeat offenders in law enforcement, in spite of the Brady/Giglio U.S. Supreme Court rulings and their progeny which hold such offenders accountable in all cases.
Some MDOC prisoners framed by repeat offender cops and prosecutors.
The establishment media and the Democratic Party campaign machine, which have uncritically supported Kym Worthy since she became prosecutor in 2004, need to wake up to the suffering imposed by mass incarceration in Wayne County, which has the second highest number of wrongful convictions in the U.S. The U.S. itself has only 4 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its incarcerated population,
RAY GRAY, freed at 69.
These are our brothers and sisters, children, mothers and fathers, family and friends, who live out their lives on Michigan’s Secret Death Row. How can we continue to condone their suffering at the hands of the Mass Incarceration Machine?
Raymond Gray, who spent 50 years in the MDOC for a crime he did not commit (he was not even there), but was forced by Kym Worthy and Valerie Newman to plead guilty to second-degree murder to get out and go home to his ailing wife, eloquently depicted that suffering below.
By Ray Gray, one of hundreds of paintings done during 50 years in prison.
RELATED STORIES (only a sample out of 14 years of VOD’s publication):
ROGER CARLOS RAY WINS EVIDENTIARY HEARING ON 3RD TRY; EXONEREE LAVONE HILL CALLS FOR RAY’S RELEASE
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“David McKinney is arrested on November 20, 2004,” Yost recounts. “Per the Investigator’s Report, Police Report and Walker Hearing testimony of Detective Anthony Delgreco, McKinney was arrested on an outstanding narcotic charge.
“The statement of 14-year-old Clifford (last name withheld from publication) who received a plea deal for his testimony, gave multiple statements to police and failed a polygraph. When [he] indicates he has information on the Inkster Case his statement to DPD mentions “Nephew” – later identified as Anthony Fields who is tied to selling a gun stolen from the gun shop.
VOD reviewed McKinney’s homicide file, trial transcripts including the Walker Hearing, and other documentation, but noted no evidence that other possible suspects were investigated, either by the Inkster Police Department, the Wayne County Prosecutor, or the ATF.
Willie Wimberly, 16-yr. old victim of 1999 Inkster drive-by shooting that killed one, injured two, testified Oct. 8, 2024 at evidentiary hearing that Mike D was not the shooter, as he told OIC Darian K. Williams and Sgt. Gregory Hill at the time.
Degraffenried wrote further, “[The prosecution] hid this information from the defense and allowed perjured testimony to be introduced to the jury through the state’s main eyewitness Broderick Ward, an eyewitness that the first responding police officer, Jamie Devoll. testified as to not being on the scene at the time of the shooting.”
A pre-trial date is set for Oct. 9, and new trial for Nov. 11 before Judge Green, Rm. 506, Wayne Co. Criminal Justice Center, 5301 Russell, Detroit, MI. 48211.*
DETROIT — It is hard to believe so many Detroiters now disregard the city’s history as a vanguard of the Black liberation movement in the 1960’s and 70’s.
But in recent years, Detroiters have elected Black judges like Christopher Blount, whose father Michael Blount was one of the few Black cops on S.T.R.E.S.S., and other judges who also blatantly ignore the rulings of higher courts on false convictions, as they add to the devastation wrought in the Black community by mass incarceration. 
1971 ROCHESTER STREET MASSACRE of Wayne Co. Sheriffs involving among others: Sgt. JAMES HARRIS of S.T.R.E.S.S.
Ruling by USDC Judge Stephen A. Murphy, Magistrate Elizabeth Stafford is first victory in lawsuit vs. conditions at WHC, filed in 2019
MDOC Director Heidi Washington multiple other officials, represented by MI Atty. General Dana Nessel, promptly appeal to 6th Circuit Court
DETROIT–Six years after they filed a class-action suit regarding horrific conditions including rampant black mold and filthy ventilation systems throughout Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, women there won an outstanding ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Stephen J. Murphy June 24, which adopted the March 12 Report of Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Stafford.
On qualified immunity, he said, “All defendants’ Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claims must satisfy a two-part test with an objective and subjective component. The objective prong asks whether the inmate was incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm. The subjective prong then asks whether officials knew of and disregarded that excessive risk to the inmate’s health or safety.” Here, Plaintiffs satisfy both prongs.”
Meanwhile, Jay Love, host of the podcast, “Turning a Moment into a Movement,” and Trishe Duckworth, head of Survivors Speak, have mounted an emergency campaign for the release and hospitalization of plaintiff Krystal Clark, who doctors say could die if she is not released from prison forthwith. They are asking people to call Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and email MDOC Director Heidi Washington.
Judge Ramsey noted for the record that Tooks’ acceptance of the settlement offer means that he gives up his right to a Miller hearing, any claim that the settlement offer is a result of promises or threats that were not disclosed on the record, and his right to appeal the sentence, except for newly discovered evidence or a change in the law that would retroactively apply to him or a violation of the settlement offer or Michigan statutes.
They continued to national victory after the U.S. Supreme Court declared mandatory juvenile life without parole unconstitutional in Miller/Jackson v. Alabama (2012) and Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), which made Miller retroactive in the face of virulent opposition by many state prosecutors.
They are proof that the battle for the most oppressed, including people of color, youth, and especially those who have been consigned to die in our prisons, continues in Michigan, despite the climate created by our fascist, racist President Donald Trump. 
