[2] Centurion Ministries was founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey as a result of his investigation on behalf of a prisoner, Jorge De Los Santos.
McCloskey then hired Paul Casteleiro, a Hoboken lawyer, to write the writ to bring De Los Santos' case back into court.
In 1987, California businesswoman, Kate Germond, joined McCloskey and together they built an organization that has secured the release of 63 (as of 15 October, 2019) wrongly convicted men and women from all across the United States and Canada.
After 27 years of imprisonment and many denials of habeas corpus petitions, Pratt was granted a new trial and freed in June, 1997 by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey.
After conducting an extensive evidentiary hearing, Judge Dickey ruled that the state's primary witness was an FBI, LAPD, and Los Angeles County District Attorney informant who lied at trial.
Based primarily on the account of a criminal informant for the St. Louis Police, Darryl Burton spent 24 years confined in Missouri prisons for the 1984 fatal shooting of Donald Bell at an Amoco gas station.
The judge also ruled that the informant's extensive criminal history was material and kept from the defense and would have provided "persuasive evidence of the defendant's innocence" had the jury known.