The George Barrett Social Justice Program and the Criminal Justice Program hosted John Huffington and his attorney, Chong Park, for a discussion of Huffington’s wrongful conviction and the decades-long legal fight that secured his freedom.
Huffington’s Case
Huffington recalled that, as a teenager, he had fallen into the wrong circles and been loosely involved in his town’s local drug activities. His case began in 1981, at age 18, after spending an evening with an acquaintance, participating in a drug exchange before heading home. The next day, he learned that two people had been murdered later that night. When the acquaintance falsely told police that Huffington had been present, he was pulled into an interrogation that quickly turned accusatory. “That would be the last time my feet would hit the ground for 32 years, two months, and 22 days,” he said, describing how he was taken into custody without bail, trusting that the system would eventually correct itself.
“I didn’t do it, and I’m going to assume that this criminal justice system is going to figure that out,” he recalled thinking prior to his trial. “They don’t convict innocent people. There weren’t Innocence Projects at all back then, in fact. I’d never really heard of wrongful convictions, and I had a mindset that, if you do the crime, you do the time. But I wasn’t a part of this, so I went into it with that train of thought.”
At trial, a combination of unreliable testimony and flawed forensic evidence led to his conviction and death sentence. Prosecutors relied heavily on the acquaintance’s account, FBI testimony, and discredited forensic methods, including comparative bullet lead analysis. Continuous appeals and retrials eventually exposed these flaws and prosecutorial misconduct.
“One of the key pieces of evidence was two hairs that the FBI Special Agent testified were a 99.9% match to John’s,” said Park, who serves as partner at Ropes & Gray LLP. “So based upon that, the jury convicted John, and he spent 32 years unlawfully incarcerated, 10 on death row.”
A Tenacious Legal Strategy
In those three decades, Huffington and his legal team had to be resourceful as they dealt with relentless challenges, including denied appeals and withheld evidence. They pursued appeals through state courts, the Fourth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Huffington even filed motions directly from prison.
“I spent years in the law library,” he recalled. “I wrote my own 75-page motion on double jeopardy, collateral estoppel, alternatives to petit acquit, restitution—these old doctrines that I had dug into.”
Park and the team from Ropes & Gray LLP targeted the flawed forensic evidence, bringing in experts to challenge the FBI’s comparative bullet lead analysis. A turning point came with the emergence of DNA testing and the discovery of the long-withheld evidence. When Huffington sought DNA testing on the hairs used against him, prosecutors attempted to have the evidence destroyed, an effort the court ultimately denied. It turned out that there were dozens of hairs spread across multiple slides, poorly preserved, and never fully disclosed to the defense. Efforts to obtain additional information through a Freedom of Information Act request also stalled, as the FBI reported that key records could not be located.
Then in 2010, a Washington Post reporter obtained internal Justice Department documents that had never been shared with Huffington’s defense, showing that Michael Malone, the FBI agent on Huffington’s case, had a history of “consistently misrepresenting evidence and testifying outside of his area of expertise,” and that officials had flagged his testimony as unreliable years earlier.
With this new information, Huffington’s team reopened the case under a Maryland law established in Brady v. Maryland that allows convictions to be challenged based on the “totality of evidence.” DNA testing of the contested hair was finally conducted and yielded definitive results: none of the hairs belonged to Huffington. The state’s case collapsed, opening the way for a writ of actual innocence and, ultimately, his release.
“I’d waited 32 years for the truth to come out, and it came out, and it was overwhelming,” Huffington recalled. “When you’re fighting for your truth, at that point, that was all that was important to me. I literally hadn’t thought ahead to, oh, I might actually get to go home. I was just like, finally, my voice is heard. It’s not just me saying I’m innocent; it’s out there.”
Post-Release and Advocacy
Upon release in 2013, while on bail, Huffington quickly found work that gave him purpose, serving as director of workforce development at a local nonprofit focused on reintegration, unemployment, and poverty. He later became a trainer for the Illinois Police Academies, teaching classes on wrongful conviction awareness and avoidance. He began speaking publicly and sharing his story at universities to highlight flaws in the criminal justice system. Huffington said he didn’t want to jeopardize his work trajectory, and he accepted a plea deal in 2017, a decision that he found difficult to reconcile.
“I thought I had a message and a voice, and then I did this deal, and I shut down. I stopped doing the talks because I felt like I sold out,” he explained.
But Huffington and Park remained focused on holding the prosecutor, Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph Cassilly, accountable for his misconduct. The team filed a grievance with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission. After a peer tribunal found the prosecutor guilty and he rejected a verbal reprimand, the case proceeded to the full commission and ultimately to the Maryland Supreme Court. The court disbarred Cassilly in 2021 for intentionally failing to disclose evidence—the fifth time in U.S. history a prosecutor was disbarred for contributing to a wrongful conviction, according to Huffington and Park. The court also reinforced prosecutors’ legal duty to disclose evidence favorable to defendants, strengthening safeguards against future miscarriages of justice.
Huffington was granted a full pardon in 2023 by then-governor Larry Hogan and was awarded $3 million in compensation. Later, Governor Wes Moore issued a public apology. Huffington emphasized that no amount of compensation can truly make up for the 32 years he lost. In 2024, he filed a civil lawsuit seeking $100 million against Harford County and five former officials involved in his case, alleging counts including malicious prosecution, false arrest, and evidence fabrication. The lawsuit is not about personal gain, Huffington said, but it is a means to “wake them up” and expose patterns of misconduct. His civil attorneys have continued to uncover previously hidden evidence, he added, revealing that the full scope of wrongdoing may never come to light.
“Ropes & Gray represented me pro bono for 37 years with 162 attorneys, not counting background support staff and plus ones,” he said. “I’ve never heard of that, and I don’t think you’ll ever see that again—a law firm that invested in one person. I’m really grateful for that.”
He told students, “We need good prosecutors. If we’re not communicating with those offices, this is going to keep happening. We need good people, independent thinkers, and people that are willing to stand their ground, their moral ground, on truth and what is right. Every single person in this room can do that. That’s the takeaway, to always stand on truth, and don’t let that win-loss record affect your judgment. Don’t let that public pressure affect your judgment and the way you do the right thing.”