Two Tulsa brothers are speaking out after being wrongly convicted of separate crimes

Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of one of essentially the most heinous acts of domestic terrorism this country has ever seen, continues to be a spot where miscarriages of justice occur too often. Friday’s NBC Dateline special follows the story of Corey Atchison and Malcolm Scott, two Tulsa brothers wrongly convicted of two different murders who were serving life sentences for crimes they imagine they didn’t commit.

Atchison and Scott’s story, part of NBC News’ “Inequality in America” ​​series, takes place at a time when racial tensions within the United States are reaching a boiling point. In addition to condemning the police brutality that resulted within the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, protesters, activists, and abolitionists are saying enough is enough that African Americans are not being given equal opportunities for a just future on this country.

Corey Atchison was 48 years old when he walked out of a Tulsa courtroom in 2019 a free man. He spent 28 years in prison for shooting James Lane during a robbery in 1990. His brother, Malcolm Scott, was released from a Tulsa prison in 2017 with a 20-year-to-life sentence for the shooting death of a 19-year-old black woman named Karen Summers. Together, these two men spent nearly half a century locked up, praying day-after-day for release from the American nightmare.

Although Scott and Atchison’s stories featured prominently in , ABC News and native newspapers, the Dateline special marks the primary time North Tulsa residents are speaking out on national television. Episode titled is an emotional tackle a story centering on two siblings who make a pact to offer the opposite the chance to live outside of a jail cell. But at its core, that is one other example of how the criminal justice system is just not fair to all involved.

So far Equal Justice Initiative, founded by Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama, says greater than 25,000 people have been exonerated since 1989. Most wrongful convictions are attributed to forensic errors, inadequate lawyers, and unreliable eyewitnesses. But they are saying that for black people, the presumption of guilt based simply on the colour of our skin plays an enormous role within the legal process. Unfortunately, for Atchison and Scott, all of these aspects worked against them.

In this Dateline special, we take a look at how their stories were even possible by talking to the lawyers and investigators who worked on the brothers’ cases. Craig Melvin, reporter for this special hour, also interviews former Tulsa District Attorney Tim Harris, who defends his prosecution of Atchison. Lawyers say his attitude means the Oklahoma Innocence Project receives a whole lot of requests annually from men and girls who claim they are innocent.

“The system doesn’t want to admit that it made a mistake,” says a lawyer from Oklahoma Innocence Project talks about cases. And the authorities’ denial of their failure to bring justice to those men is comparable to America continuing to place its foot on the necks of African Americans.

In Tulsa alone, lawyers working to free wrongly convicted men and girls say there are greater than 100 cases that resemble Atchison and Scott. As long because the police arrest you Black teenagers for offenses so simple as jaywalkingthere’ll probably be many more.

Watch the Dateline special tonight at on NBC.