James Joseph Richardson (December 26, 1935 – September 16, 2023)[1][2] was an African-American man who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1968 for the October 1967 mass murder of his seven children.

At a trial in Fort Myers, Florida, the jury found him guilty of murdering the children and sentenced him to death.

As a result of the United States Supreme Court's 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision finding the death penalty unconstitutional, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

[3] The night before, Annie Mae Richardson, James' wife, had prepared a lunch of beans, rice, and grits for the children.

After they returned to school that afternoon, their teachers noticed they were showing strange symptoms, and the principal immediately took them to hospital.

[3] Determining that all of the sick children were from the same family, he promptly went to their apartment building to search for and quarantine any potential poison.

Arcadia Police Chief Richard Barnard and DeSoto County Sheriff Frank Cline were among the next law enforcement officers to examine the apartment.

Frank Shaub, a prosecuting attorney in the area, did respond to reporters and gave them accounts of his investigation of the house.

[3] Cline, Barnard, their staffs, and Shaub all agreed that the bag of parathion had not been there the day before, when the premises had been searched five times.

Minoughan was the first officer to arrive and was told by Bessie Reece, the babysitter, that Charlie Smith, a black resident of Arcadia's Quarters, had discovered the parathion.

The next day Cline and Shaub's local assistant, John Treadwell, III, told reporters that Richardson had "discussed insurance policies for the children the night before their deaths".

[3] The coroner's jury held a hearing on November 2, 1967, at which Judge Hayes said: "We will meet today to instruct Frank Cline to file murder charges against Richardson.

[3] He contacted people who knew Richardson and they told him he had a reputation as a family man and they could not believe he would kill his children.

[3] Robinson filed for a writ of Habeas Corpus after examining the available evidence and finding nothing substantial that could indicate Richardson was guilty.

[3] Judge Justice revoked the bail, ordered Richardson to be jailed again, and asked for a change in venue, to Fort Myers, in the next county.

[3] During the trial, the most sensational development was when Cline claimed that there was evidence that at least three of Richardson's children had been killed in another county and a further three who had become ill but had not died.

[3] Bessie Reece gave evidence that she divided up the meal into seven equal parts once the children came home from school at five minutes to twelve.

[3] A pathologist and a chemist concluded that the children had in fact died from the organic phosphate parathion, which was found in their stomachs and on utensils in the Richardson apartment.

[3] Several law enforcement officers, including Barnard, Cline, and Minoughan, testified that they had searched the shed and had not seen the bag of parathion there on October 25.

Lane began an exhaustive investigation and in 1970 published his findings in the book Arcadia, in which he revealed that the baby sitter, Bessie Reece, was a convicted murderer, and indicated that Richardson and his wife were innocent.

[6] Further, the investigation into the children's deaths had been inadequate: leads were never pursued, critical questions were not answered, and inconsistencies were never resolved.

[5] Remus Griffin, a man who had been dating the secretary of one of State Attorney Frank Schaub's deputies, "Red" Treadwell, met Lane and his wife at a town meeting called "End the Silence: Free James Richardson", and then took one of the three copies of the complete original file on the case and gave it to Lane.

The Governor, Robert Martinez, appointed the State's Attorney from Miami-Dade County, Janet Reno, to be the special prosecutor on the investigation.

A number of months thereafter, on October 25, 1989,[citation needed] a hearing was held in Arcadia, in the same courthouse where Richardson had been convicted more than 21 years earlier.

On April 25, 1989, after looking at all of the evidence presented by both sides and noting the inconsistencies and the injustice that had been done in Arcadia over two decades ago, retired Circuit Judge Clifton Kelly said that Richardson had not received a fair trial, and released him into the custody of his attorneys, Lane and the local counsel.

[9] The settlement by the county went to pay the costs of his local lawyers, while Richardson had been in prison for so long that he became eligible for Social Security.

In 2014, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law House Bill 227, which provides compensation to a wrongfully incarcerated person who was convicted and sentenced prior to December 31, 1979, and who is otherwise exempt from other state provisions for compensation because the case may have been reversed by a special prosecutor's review and nolle prosequi rather than being overturned by a court.