Frontline

An Ordinary Crime (2002x1)

Air date: Jan 10, 2002

It was a robbery gone wrong, and when it was over, a woman had been shot in the head. Fingerprint evidence identified one of the suspects who quickly named two accomplices: a friend and the friend's cousin, a man he knew only as "Terrance." And that's where the problem with this ordinary crime begins. Police apprehended sixteen-year-old Terence Garner and charged him with the crime. Garner insisted he was innocent. The codefendants said they had never met him. Another man with the name "Terrance" surfaced and confessed to the crime, then recanted and was let go. FRONTLINE investigates a bizarre case of injustice where two men with the same name are implicated in the same crime and one-Terence Garner-is sentenced to thirty two to forty three years in prison.