This is the fourth installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Eric Anderson’s first plan for college was derailed by a nine-year prison sentence.
During the time he spent serving a wrongful conviction, he might have earned multiple degrees, had he not been misidentified as the suspect in a Detroit armed robbery.
“At the time, I was going to Wayne County Community College, two weeks from finals,” Anderson recalls, “and in the fall I was going to transfer to Michigan State. So all of this was on my mind.”
Having been the subject of a collaborative case review spearheaded by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Anderson was recently reconnected to academia. A Nov. 17 media announcement, during which Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy pledged to increase efforts to reduce wrongful convictions like Anderson’s, discussed Quattrone Center recommendations designed to benefit law enforcement, prosecutors, and the conviction integrity unit that helped free him.
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“The recommendations are good because, clearly, I fall in line,” says Anderson. “My case is used as a measuring stick to identify these issues.”
In an incident unrelated to his case, Anderson was shot in the foot at a downtown-area diner about 10 miles from where the robbery occurred, proving his whereabouts. Although Anderson was captured on surveillance at the Coney Island where he was wounded, he was accused by one of the robbery victims who pulled Anderson’s image from a social media page.
“They chose to work this case in a way to disprove my alibi,” Anderson says of investigators.
But failures occurred beyond the investigation, according to Quattrone’s report, known as the Sentinel Event Review — including pre-trial when a judge asked Anderson if he was “stupid” for rejecting a plea deal offered by prosecutors.
John Hollway, senior advisor to the Quattrone Center, told media who attended the Sentinel Event Review press conference that its review wasn’t “about blame.”
“It is about building a safer, more transparent and more reliable justice system,” he said.
Anderson recalls falling through judicial cracks at “every level.”
“Like Swiss cheese,” he adds, “through all these holes with no support.”
The early work of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office CIU led to Anderson’s freedom in 2019, a year after it accepted his case for reinvestigation. He was among the first 10 exonerees, but Anderson says his exoneration and other initial CIU victories might have contributed to one of its ongoing challenges: “After I was released, of course you have innocent people submitting requests to try to regain their freedom, but I’m sure you have guilty people trying to get their reviews, too, which leads to backlogs. The backlogs create a waiting list and that stalls people who deserve their freedom from getting it.”
Along with a place in the National Registry of Exonerations, created by the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic, which aided in Anderson’s exoneration, he has found himself reconnected to college. Anderson regularly visits law schools, but as a guest speaker now, not as the student he’d been when his education and life were disrupted. Anderson also serves as a training consultant to public defenders in Michigan and to law enforcement in Illinois.
Despite the work of the Quattrone Center, CIU and other advocates for improved law enforcement and prosecutorial methods, he remains haunted by the notion that prison can result from a simple witness error or lie.
“One of the biggest problems with wrongful convictions is misidentification, right?” he asks.
“You’ll remember things that never existed,” Anderson adds, “because it fits the narrative at a certain point.”
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This article appears in Dec. 10-23, 2025.