This past summer, we commemorated that day 50 years ago when hundreds of thousands of people packed the grounds near the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. On that same day, New York City learned in horror that two young women had been slashed and murdered in their Upper Manhattan apartment, in a case that ought to remind us of how far we have left to go in protecting another important civil right: the due-process right not to be jailed based on a false confession.
Janice Wylie had planned on attending the March on Washington but stayed home instead that day. After she and roommate Emily Hoffert were found dead, the case quickly grabbed local and national attention as the “Career Girl Murders.” Months later, the New York Police Department arrested a 19-year-old black man named George Whitmore based on his detailed “confession,” later proved false. The case against Whitmore unraveled, and another man, Richard Robles, sits in jail for the Wylie-Hoffert murders today.
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