PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — India Spellman was just 17 years old when she was arrested, and later charged, with a crime advocates say she never committed. In fact, they say she was never even there.
Spellman, who had no prior record, was charged with second-degree murder, robbery and related charges. She has been serving a 30-year sentence in Philadelphia since 2013.
Listen to the details of Spellman’s case in the player below:
Dr. Jill McCorkel, executive director of the Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls — a nonprofit organization working to end the mass incarceration of women in the U.S. — and a professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University, has been working tirelessly to exonerate Spellman.
According to the Philadelphia Justice Project, Spellman was convicted alongside a 14-year-old boy who allegedly told authorities she was involved, even though she was at home with her family at the time of the murder.
“The 14-year-old committed these two crimes back to back on an August afternoon with an older woman, and we’re absolutely certain of his guilt,” McCorkel said. “He had a really distinctive facial tattoo that a number of witnesses commented on, and he went to police and simply said that his co-defendant was India Spellman. Well, India Spellman was home with her grandfather, a retired police officer, and her father that day. She was on her computer, doing stuff on Facebook. She was on a phone call at the time of the shooting. However, police went after her anyway … even though they had those phone records.”
While McCorkel said this should be a simple open-and-shut case, many things went wrong at trial. Most significantly, Spellman’s trial attorney did not call her alibi witnesses.
Spellman will return to court in Philadelphia on Wednesday for an evidentiary hearing, where a judge will hear from all witnesses in the case.
“We’re very hopeful that we will get an exoneration for India,” McCorkel said, “and that in so doing, it’ll open up some interest into some other cases where women have been, in essence, victims of malicious prosecution and police misconduct.”
Spellman’s case is just one of many women wrongfully incarcerated, McCorkel said. Women make up about 10% of exonerees in the U.S., she cited, and notably, officials often determine after their convictions that no crime was committed whatsoever.
“There’s just not a lot of resources that are dedicated to looking at women’s cases,” she continued. “So one of the things that we’re trying to do is provide those resources to women and to raise public awareness about how gender can complicate prosecution, specifically of women and girls.”
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Moreover, McCorkel said it doesn’t serve public safety by having the wrong person in prison.
“The person in India Spellman’s case who murdered an 87-year-old World War II veteran has been on the streets for 12 years, presumably,” she said. “That sort of tendency of the system — not to make sure that they got it right, or worse, getting defensive when it’s been proved that they got it wrong — undermines public safety.
“The exonerations are so important because they are performing a crime-fighting function.”
For more on McCorkel’s work to overturn wrongful convictions in Philadelphia, listen to her conversation with Matt Leon on this episode of KYW Newsradio In Depth. Listen in the audio player below, on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcast by Matt Leon and Tom Rickert. Article written by Rachel Kurland.