![]() ![]() But the police interrogated him for hours without a lawyer, using a brutal technique that left him powerless. He became their top suspect.Īt 23, Ledford had just lost his one-year-old son and his (then) wife was in critical condition. To the police, this husband and father wasn’t performing a convincing husbandly or fatherly grief. Sometimes he had a temper, sometimes a deep gloom. He was awkward, a mess in social situations. Ledford was never well-liked in the community, and he didn’t get along well with his wife’s family. He has been diagnosed by a University of Virginia Clinical and Forensic Psychologist as being “in the autistic spectrum or a severe nonverbal learning disorder.” When his house was burning down, witnesses reported he didn’t try hard enough to run in. Ledford confessed-and that is difficult to undo. On Tuesday, the Virginia Supreme Court refused to consider the case. And yet, the Virginia Court of Appeals, perhaps misunderstanding the finding, denied Ledford a writ of actual innocence. An evidentiary court accepted this, establishing it as legal truth-a huge victory for Ledford. ![]() Neither the burn patterns nor the timeline matched Ledford’s story. Years later, scientists proved that the scenario described in Ledford’s confession-a lighted candle thrown onto an upholstered living room chair-couldn’t have happened. About 20 minutes later, while he was at the station, 911 calls started coming in about a fire raging in, as it turned out, Ledford’s own home. That night, just after his wife and son had gone to sleep, Michael Ledford left for the fire station where he volunteered. Though he confessed under a lengthy interrogation, Michael Ledford did not set the fire that killed his son and horribly burned his (then) wife on October 10, 1999. ![]() See Catapult’s backlist gems (list includes titles from Counterpoint & Soft Skull) here.On April 25th 2023, the Virginia Supreme Court ignored a life-shattering mistake. Our titles have been praised in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets. Our books are frequently named to the American Booksellers Association Indie Next List, and have been featured as Amazon’s Best Books of the Year, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Belletrist Book Club picks, and as The New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. Our books have been finalists for many other prizes, including the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Goldsmith Prize, the Miles Franklin Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN America Open Book Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Stella Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction. Forster Award in Literature, the Maine Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since the launch in Fall 2015, Catapult’s books and our authors have won numerous major literary awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. Catapult strives to be a successful business model for the future of independent publishing. We nurture emerging writers by helping them better their craft, and support more established writers by evenly sharing revenues from the classes they teach, and by paying to publish their work online. Catapult publishes award-winning fiction and nonfiction of the highest literary caliber, offers writing classes taught by acclaimed emerging and established writers, produces an award-winning daily online magazine of narrative nonfiction and fiction, and hosts an open online platform where writers can showcase their own writing, find resources, and get inspired.
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