Freedom Archives Search Engine

Search Help

How does this work?: There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar: Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching: You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching: The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches: You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Justice for John

"The case against John Ewing is one of the most complicated stories you will ever encounter. It involves all the elements that result in wrongful convictions:

-mistaken eye-witness identification
-improper police techniques
-fabricated evidence
-destroyed evidence
-withheld evidence

Justice for John is a grassroots group of friends and family that got its start in 1994 with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the evidence to perform DNA testing.

The case involved 5 CSC (criminal sexual conduct) assaults from complainants in 3 counties. Two sheriff departments (Washtenaw & Jackson Counties), as well as the Michigan State Police, were involved in the investigations and the collection of evidence from the 5 cases. Yet, as of this day, not one agency has been able to produce a shred of evidence for DNA testing.

Without this evidence J4J will never be able to prove John's innocence. But the search for these rape kits and lab slides did produce a plethora of other facts that prove that justice was never served in this case."

-Justice for John website

Documents

10 Documents Found
Hiding 1 non-digitized documents (show)