Wrongful Conviction of Martin Tankleff
On the morning of September 7th, 1988, a seventeen-year-old boy called 911 from a house on the Long Island Sound and said his parents had been attacked. Within hours, before Martin began to process what had happened to his parents, he was sitting in a police interrogation room, being told, over and over, that he was the one who did it.
This is the story of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff. And it's the story of their son, Martin Tankleff, who lost both of them to a single act of violence in his own home. Then, in a set of horrifying circumstances, he lost the next eighteen years of his own life to a system that decided, almost immediately, that grief and guilt looked the same on a teenager's face. Instead of being known as Martin, he was known as inmate number 90T3844 for nearly two decades.
Photo Credits: Prisons and Justice Initiative, Murderpedia, Getty Images
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