How Many Brian Banks Are There?

Brian Banks celebrating with his mother.

If you never heard of the Brian Banks case, you are probably not alone. Banks was a promising high school football player that was falsely accused of raping acquaintance Wanetta Gibson, who attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School with Banks. Not only did Gibson lie about her rape, she also collected a substantial amount of money in a lawsuit she won against the school district after alleging that the school was an unsafe environment.

Banks was exonerated after following up on an eerie Facebook message sent by Gibson that led to her confessing that she made the story up. Fortunately (or unfortunately) Banks was able to secretly tape the confession and was freed after losing five years of his freedom and any chances of rekindling a once promising career in football. Thanks to the infamous California Innocence Project, Brian Banks was able to reclaim his life though there are likely many others who have not been as fortunate. 

Too often men come up with the short end of the stick when it comes to accusations of rape or cases concerning sexual misconduct. It usually just takes the claims of an accuser to have a man vilified as a sexual deviant, a classification that is extremely hard to recover from. Many vindictive people know that labeling a man as a rapist or woman beater are causes for immediate disdain from the community and has often been the case once such claims are made.  

The progress of DNA research and evidence has led to many innocent people being exonerated but according to the Innocence Project website only a small percentage of the cases have biological evidence that can be tested using DNA and much of that is lost or destroyed after the initial conviction. This means that those who have been wrongly convicted have very little chance of receiving freedom or justice from the same flawed penal system that locked them away to begin with. 

Christopher Scott, president of
House of Renewed Hope. 

Based on the National Registry of Exonerations over 2,000 wrongly convicted citizens have been exonerated over the last couple of decades. Over 75% of those falsely imprisoned were sent there due to eyewitness misidentification and an Ohio State University study estimates that about 10,000 people are wrongly convicted each year. How many others remain behind bars for crimes they didn't commit? 

Christopher Scott, who was wrongly convicted of murder and released after 15 years only when the true killer confessed, continues to help others in similar circumstances that he once faced. He now is the president of House of Renewed Hope, an organization founded to fight for social justice for the wrongly accused and convicted through education, support, and legislative advocacy. Only through legislative efforts to revamp the criminal justice system will we see a better process that prevents the wrong people from spending time in prison for crimes they didn't commit. 

These leads us to question how many other Brian Banks are there?