Please remember:Peter Shellem, Investigative Reporter Who Wrote of Wrongful Convictions, Dies at 49

[Are_grits_groceries]

Peter Shellem, whose relentless digging into dusty court records, erroneous crime-lab reports and coerced confessions during his 23 years as a reporter for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., led to the release of five wrongly convicted prisoners, died Oct. 24 at his home in Gardners, Pa. He was 49.

In one case, a man who was a teenager when he was convicted of killing a neighbor was released after 28 years in prison. In another, DNA evidence that Mr. Shellem recovered from a professor’s refrigerator in Leipzig, Germany, exonerated a retarded man of rape and murder.

Mr. Shellem committed suicide, his son Philip said, but the Cumberland County coroner, Michael Norris, would not confirm the cause of death.

Although Mr. Shellem’s investigative work was not widely known outside of central Pennsylvania, Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, called him “a rare, one-man journalism innocence project.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01shellem.html?ref=obituaries

RIP Peter Shellem :patriot:

I hope you now have respite from whatever demons chased you.