This is a perfect example of the propensity to incarcerate blacks more than any other racial group

In 2007, an Illinois college student named Olutosin Oduwole was arrested after a campus police officer found a note promising “a murderous rampage similar to the [Virginia Tech] shooting” inside Oduwole’s locked car. Even though Oduwole insisted that the note was only a draft of some rap lyrics, he was nevertheless convicted of attempting to make a terrorist threat and sentenced to five years in prison. This March, Oduwole’s conviction was reversed on appeal, but the Illinois attorney general’s office promised to fight the reversal. Yesterday, the Illinois Supreme Court refused to review the appellate court’s decision. Oduwole is a free man.

This is great news for Oduwole—and, indeed, for everyone who cares about free speech. But it’s still worth noting that Oduwole should never have been tried in the first place. As I’ve written before, the “attempt” charge was baffling, given that, by all reasonable standards, Oduwole had not actually attempted to threaten anyone. The note was found face-down inside a locked car, where nobody would have been able to see or become alarmed by it. Police found no other evidence to support their charges.

When the appellate court reversed Oduwole’s conviction this March, it did so with a rare move known as an “outright reversal.” Rather than remanding the case for a new trial—as happens with most reversals—the appellate court essentially nullified the guilty verdict, and acquitted Oduwole of the charges against him. “The legal standard that the appellate court had to apply was whether ‘any rational juror could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,’ ” Oduwole’s attorney, Jeffrey Urdangen, told me in an email. “The Court here found that no rational juror could have convicted under these facts.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/05/31/olutosin_oduwole_unjustly_convicted_college_student_s_long_legal_nightmare.html