**********************************************************************************
Please DONATE TO VOD https://www.gofundme.com/donate-to-vod
By VOD Editor Diane Bukowski
September 20, 2026
DETROIT–This is a special appeal from the Voice of Detroit to families and friends of those depicted above, and their attorneys, for assistance during a very difficult time financially. WE NEED YOUR HELP to continue paying multiple expenses, including a quarterly web-hosting charge of $479.00, P.O. Box, internet and utilities bills, and more. VOD and its 15 years of stories will disappear from the web if these are not paid.
Protest against the police murder of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis, 2021
VOD’s coverage of these cases is unique. VOD opposes mass incarceration, a continuation of this nation’s centuries-long wars on Black, Brown, and poor and working people. VOD opposes death-in-prison sentences of life without parole. The U.S. has five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population, and 40 percent of those serving LWOP.
Wayne County has the highest number of wrongful convictions in the United States. It also had the highest numbers of juvenile lifers in the country, prior to U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Miller v. Alabama (2012) and Montgomery v. Louisiana (2o16). Those now being re-sentenced under recent Michigan Supreme Court rulings expanding the designation of juveniles to ages 18, 19, and 20 are still facing obstacles in Wayne County.
During the current period in particular, many Wayne County Third Circuit Court judges and prosecutors refuse to abide by the principle enshrined in state law, MCL 770.1, allowing appeals “where justice has not been done.” Instead, they deny defendants, many of whom have served decades of incarceration, citing a complex maze of court rules that were initiated to undermine defendants’ rights on appeal. Some refuse to hold evidentiary hearings.
It breaks my heart every time we investigate a case involving clear injustice and find rulings by judges and prosecutors citing every petty court rule possible, Many of these cases involve criminal repeat offender cops who have beaten, intimidated, and coerced defendants and witnesses through the past decades.
We get new calls every day from prisoners and their loved ones asking us to publish their stories. Stories on these cases involve weeks and even months of work. VOD is a pro bono newspaper, available without charge to its readers. No one working on the stories is paid.
To read VOD’s stories on the prisoners and exonerees shown above, simply put their names into our search engine, at top right on home page. It will bring up multiple stories.
RELATED ARTICLES:
***********************************************************************************
URGENT. Funds needed for quarterly web hosting charge of $479.00.VOD, a pro bono newspaper, now devotes itself entirely to stories about our PRISON NATION and POLICE STATE.
VOD’s editors and reporters, most of whom live on fixed incomes or are incarcerated, are not paid for their work. In addition to quarterly web hosting charge. other expenses include P.O. box fee of $226.00/yr., costs including utility and internet bills, costs for research including court records and internet fees, office supplies, gas, etc.
Please DONATE TO VOD at:
https://www.gofundme.com/donate-to-vod
***********************************************************************************
