In October 2000, Sarah Pender, then twenty-one, was living with her boyfriend, Richard Hull, whom she had met only a few months earlier. They were sharing their two-bedroom house in Indianapolis with another couple, Andrew Cataldi and his girlfriend, Trish Nordman. Hull and Cataldi used and sold cannabis, methamphetamines, and LSD.
One week before Halloween, Hull, whose previous felony convictions for auto theft and residential entry prevented him from buying a gun, asked Pender if she would purchase one for him, saying he wanted to “go out in the country and shoot stuff.” Pender assumed he planned to go hunting. That morning, the couple went to Walmart where she purchased a twelve-gauge shotgun and ammunition.
“We don’t know how many wrongful convictions there are . . . . We actually have no idea how many people are currently serving sentences for crimes they didn’t do.” — Barbara O’Brien
That night, Hull and Cataldi argued, as they often did. Pender went for a walk. While she was gone, Hull fatally shot Cataldi and Nordman. When Pender returned, Hull asked her to help dispose of the bodies. Pender, in a series of emails for this article, says she was never afraid of her boyfriend before but felt at that moment that angering him could be dangerous. She helped him take the bodies to a nearby dumpster, where they were later found.
The following week, both Hull and Pender were arrested and charged with murder. At Pender’s trial, deputy prosecutor Larry Sells introduced a letter, allegedly penned by Pender, admitting to Hull that she had manipulated him into committing the murders.
Another damning piece of evidence was the testimony of Floyd Pennington, who was locked up in the same jail as Pender. The two exchanged letters through one of Pennington’s family members. They talked about books, music, and politics, Pender recalls in a series of phone calls and emails to The Progressive. Pennington sometimes asked about her case, but Pender says she never discussed it.
On the stand, however, Pennington testified that Pender had confessed to him. The jury believed Pennington and found her guilty. At sentencing, Sells called Pender a “female Charles Manson,” insinuating that she had been the mastermind behind the murders. She was sentenced to 110 years in prison.
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Sarah Pender at the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis in 2017.
Hull pled guilty, avoiding trial, and was sentenced to seventy-five years, later increased to ninety years. In 2003, he submitted an affidavit stating that he alone had killed the couple. “Sarah was set up by me . . . so I could get a good plea,” he wrote. (Hull declined to speak to The Progressive, writing only, “I do wish Sarah the best but I have to do what is in my best interest.”)
That wasn’t the only exculpatory evidence that emerged: In September 2019, a man named Steve Logan submitted an affidavit admitting that he had forged the letter that was supposedly sent by Pender, in exchange for Hull’s protection from other men at the jail. (Logan did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Despite these revelations, Pender remains at the Rockville Correctional Facility, Indiana’s largest women’s prison. She is now forty-two, having spent two decades behind bars; if she isn’t pardoned or exonerated, it’s where she will die.
Last December, Ryan Mears, the district attorney of Marion County, Indiana, which includes Indianapolis, announced the formation of a Conviction Integrity Unit, the first of its kind in Indiana. Its purpose is “to prevent, identify, and remedy wrongful convictions by conducting fact-based reviews of past convictions.”
When Pender first heard about the unit, she recalls, “I was convinced that the universe was answering twenty years of prayers.”
Since 1989, nearly 2,800 people in the United States have been exonerated of crimes for which they were once found guilty, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The registry’s editor, Barbara O’Brien, says those numbers reflect an unknown fraction of wrongful convictions. “We don’t know how many wrongful convictions there are,” she tells The Progressive. “We study exonerations because they’re our best proxy for false convictions. We actually have no idea how many people are currently serving sentences for crimes they didn’t do.”
Many wrongful convictions involve confirmation bias, or the tendency to bolster a hypothesis by seeking evidence that proves it while disregarding evidence that calls it into question. One of the most famous examples is the five young men who became known as the Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five).
“It’s time to use all that I have been through, all that I have learned, and apply it to help create change.” –Vanessa Thompson
In 1989, after a white jogger was raped and severely beaten in New York City’s Central Park, police and prosecutors pinned the attack on five Black and Latinx teenagers, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Demonized in the press, they were prosecuted, convicted, and locked up for between six and thirteen years. In 2002, another man, Matias Reyes, confessed to being the sole attacker.
By the time the Central Park Five were exonerated, nearly all had served their full prison sentences. Even after Reyes’s confession and tests that confirmed the DNA found on the jogger did not match any of the teenagers, prosecutor Linda Fairstein continued to insist that the five were part of the attack.
Confirmation bias is not unique to police and prosecutors. All people tend to look for and value evidence that confirms rather than contradicts their beliefs.
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Sarah Pender and her sister in 2020.
But when it comes to police and prosecutors, confirmation bias is combined with an incentive to solve cases and secure convictions. They may not set out to convict the wrong person, but confirmation bias might lead them to put forward unreliable evidence, including witnesses whose testimony may be incentivized.
Sixty percent of exonerations involve false accusations or perjury, the National Registry has found. While the Supreme Court in Brady vs. Maryland directed prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence, including deals in exchange for testimony, to the defense, this does not always occur.
Once convicted, defendants face an uphill battle trying to prove their innocence. As O’Brien notes, the current criminal justice system is “not good at revisiting errors.” The appeals process focuses on errors in how the law was applied, not factual errors.
Since 1989, the state of Indiana has exonerated thirty-eight people, twenty-four of whom had been wrongfully convicted based on false accusations or perjury. During that period, neighboring states have exonerated far more: 356 in Illinois, 134 in Michigan, and eighty-seven in Ohio. All three states have conviction integrity units, which precipitated some of these exonerations. Others resulted from the efforts of innocence projects or legal challenges filed by the wrongfully convicted person.
The first conviction integrity unit opened in 2002 in Santa Clara County, California. The following year, it exonerated Quedellis Ricardo Walker, who had served twelve years of a twenty-six-to-life sentence after being wrongfully convicted of murder in 1991. The Santa Clara unit has since investigated and exonerated five other men.
As of April 2021, there are eighty-two conviction integrity units across the country. Together, they have resulted in 488 exonerations since 1989, of nearly 2,800 exonerations from all efforts nationwide. Conviction integrity units differ from innocence organizations, which operate independently from the prosecutors’ offices, though the two frequently work together.
Marion County’s Conviction Integrity Unit is one of eight created this year. The first in Indiana, it could be the start of increasing the state’s low exoneration rate. Neighboring state Michigan created a Wayne County conviction integrity unit in 2018. Investigations into wrongful convictions typically take months, and sometimes years, to complete, but Wayne County’s unit has already resulted in twenty-six exonerations, a rate that experts call “unheard of” in such a short time. Wayne County’s success prompted Michigan’s state attorney general to announce the formation of a statewide unit.
It’s too soon to tell whether the Marion County Conviction Integrity Unit will achieve that same rate. For now, the prosecutor’s office tells The Progressive that it anticipates reviewing fifteen to twenty cases each year. Currently staffed by two attorneys and a paralegal, it began accepting applications in April and by the end of that month had already received fifty. The office declined to comment on whether it might investigate specific cases, but did confirm that it will review and investigate convictions based on incentivized testimonies and forged evidence.
At the time of her arrest, Alexa Whedon was deep in the throes of a crack addiction.
“I couldn’t even prove my own innocence thanks to the lost time in the abyss of [my] mind on drugs,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. Of one thing she is certain—she had never met, let alone helped kill, sixteen-year-old Shanna Sheese, whose body was found in a vacant Indianapolis lot in October 1998.
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Sarah (standing, third from left) with the founding team of Constructing Our Future, including Vanessa Thompson (front far left).
The following February, Whedon was trudging through the snow to buy a pack of cigarettes. A car pulled up and the driver offered her a ride. Whedon agreed and hopped in. The driver, she says in a telephone interview, was an undercover police officer, who arrested her for prostitution.
While in custody, Whedon recalls that a detective interrogated her about Sheese’s murder, spreading several photos of the dead teen across the table. She insisted she knew nothing about it.
Whedon was held on prostitution charges at the Marion County Jail in a large room with bunk beds stacked side by side and where conversations could easily be overheard—and interrupted.
One day, Whedon was talking to another woman when a third woman, Lisa Baker, abruptly accused her of admitting to Sheese’s murder. Baker contacted the case detective and told him of the alleged confession. Whedon was then charged with murder, along with two other defendents: Vanessa Thompson, a woman with whom Whedon had smoked crack, and Thompson’s sometime boyfriend and dealer, Malcolm Wilson.
During Whedon’s trial, Baker and two other women from the jail testified that Whedon admitted to participating in the killing. Their testimonies of what Whedon admitted to varied, with Baker saying she confessed to watching her co-defendants beat Sheese, while according to another woman’s account, she helped hold the teenager down.
The three co-defendants were tried separately. Whedon was convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty-five years in prison. She appealed, arguing that the women’s testimonies had not been truthful. She attempted to bring in Rob Warden, then-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, as an expert on incentivized witness, or snitch, testimony. The court excluded his testimony and upheld her sentence.
Twenty-three years later, Whedon maintains her innocence. She never even met Sheese, she said, and met the two people who were to become her co-defendants only in November 1998, weeks after Sheese’s body had been found.
Whedon’s co-defendent, Vanessa Thompson, was also arrested in February 1999 on prostitution charges. When she arrived at the Marion County Jail, she was surprised to see Whedon, with whom she had smoked crack on the streets. Neither knew that they would soon be facing murder charges—or decades in prison.
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Vanessa Thompson
Thompson, too, says she never met Shanna Sheese but, like Whedon, was questioned in jail about her murder. Afterward, Thompson called Wilson from the jail. “That’s when he told me that he in fact knew her and that he used to sell her drugs,” she tells The Progressive in a phone interview.
According to her appeals brief, Thompson began to believe Wilson might have been involved and gave the detective three statements, but insisted that she did not kill anyone. Other women in the jail claimed otherwise, telling police that they heard Thompson admit to the murders. Some had previously testified at Whedon’s trial and did so again against Thompson.
Thompson was convicted and sentenced to fifty-five years. In a separate trial, Wilson was convicted and sentenced to sixty-five years.
Under Indiana’s previous sentencing guidelines, Thompson needed to serve just 50 percent of her sentence. (In 2014, the law was changed; now convicted people must serve 75 percent of their sentence.) Her sentence was cut by another four years for completing three programs and earning two associates degrees, moving her release date to September 2022.
While in prison, Thompson also came up with the proposal that became Constructing Our Future, an initiative drawn on the Habitat for Humanity model, in which formerly incarcerated women transform the derelict buildings blighting Indianapolis into housing for themselves.
Thompson signs all of her letters “Until justice,” but the time between receiving an application and completing an investigation means that she will likely still be waiting for justice after her September 2022 release. Nonetheless, Thompson hopes that the Conviction Integrity Unit will free other people wrongfully imprisoned. “My life was taken based on rumors and gossip,” she reflected.
Thompson recognizes that her life, at that time, was a mess. But now, she says, “it’s time to use all that I have been through, all that I have learned, and apply it to help create change.”
Not only does she want to clear her name, she wants to be sure others aren’t imprisoned solely on jailhouse rumors and gossip. “If my case can set policy to prevent others from going through the same thing,” she says, “I’m going to do everything I can to prevent that from happening.”
Many prosecutors are resistant to acknowledging a potential mistake, even when confronted with proof. But in 2013, Pender’s former prosecutor, Larry Sells, publicly stated that he didn’t believe she received a fair trial.
In an interview for this article, Sells says he learned in 2009 about a “snitch list” of people whom Pennington had offered to testify against in exchange for a reduced charge and a shorter prison sentence. Had he known about the list, Sells says, he would have turned it over to the defense and might not have called Pennington to testify. He still holds fast to his belief that Pender is guilty but notes, “Whether she’s guilty or not, she deserved a fair trial.”
Pennington, however, emphatically denies having lied. From prison, where he is now serving a (separate) thirty-year sentence for rape, he tells The Progressive that Sells knew about his snitch list all along and insists that Pender admitted to masterminding the murders.
By the time Sells made his announcement, Pender had spent years in solitary confinement after escaping, in 2008, with the assistance of a prison guard. She lived and worked under an assumed name in Chicago for four months before a neighbor recognized her from the television show America’s Most Wanted and turned her in. Upon her return to prison, Pender spent the next five years in solitary confinement, where she was locked in a seven-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-two hours a day. She was allowed to rejoin the general prison population in 2014.
Five years later, in 2019, Pender’s hopes were once again raised when her sister located Steve Logan, who signed an affidavit attesting to forging the letter to Hull. With all legal avenues exhausted, she and her family began a clemency campaign, hoping that Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb would commute—or shorten—her sentence and allow her to go home.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, shuttering government offices and locking down prisons. Pender’s clemency hearing was postponed; no new date has been set.
Last December, Pender, living in a large room with fourteen other women, tested positive for COVID-19, two days after Mears’s announcement of the creation of the new unit. So did six of her roommates. All were locked into their cell for two weeks with their COVID-19-negative roommates. Five months later, Pender still has not regained her full sense of smell and sometimes struggles with brain fog.
The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office tells The Progressive that it plans to visit the state’s prisons to provide presentations about the unit to those who are currently incarcerated. The office will also send copies of its application to prison law libraries to copy and distribute.
Until then, however, many women at Rockville Correctional Facility remain in the dark about the Conviction Integrity Unit. In mid-April, when The Progressive asked if she had submitted a petition request form, Whedon responded, “I never even knew this [unit] existed until you mentioned it,” she wrote. Wanting to submit her petition immediately, she asked for the address and details of what she needed to send.
For both Pender and Whedon, the creation of this unit brings hope, something that is in short supply in prison. But, Pender added, “hope is dangerous because when it’s ripped away, it’s gut wrenching.” Noting that her 110-year sentence is, in effect, a death sentence, she mused, “I’m glad to have hope again, but I’m very cautiously optimistic because I know it’s a double-edged sword.”