Free the Innocent

Marty Tankleff was sent to prison at 19 for killing his parents-a crime he didn't commit. His childhood friend Marc Howard dedicated his life to fighting for his liberty. Now they work together to help others

- LIZZIE HYMAN 

It was the first day of his senior year of high school, Sept. 7, 1988, when Marc Howard heard whispers in the halls that one of his friends, Marty Tankleff, was in trouble-not with the principal, but with the law. Brushing off the rumors as implausible, Howard was driving with an instructor through the streets of the Long Island suburb of Belle Terre, N.Y., during his third-period driver's education class when he spotted police cars parked outside the Tankleff house. He knew instantly that something had gone terribly wrong. "The drive back to school was very quiet," he recalls.

Not long afterward Marty was arrested and charged with the fatal stabbings of his parents, Seymour, 62, and Arlene Tankleff, 53, at the family's home earlier that day. After more than a year of awaiting trial, Marty was convicted of his parents' double murder in 1990 and sentenced to 50 years, a case based on a false confession he gave to police after hours of grueling interrogation in which police lied to him, telling him his father said he'd done it. Marty insisted he was innocent, never signed a confession and said he had been tricked into a false admission of guilt. For 17 years in prison he maintained that innocence and Howard believed it. Howard dedicated his life to studying law and fought to prove Marty’s innocence, helping free him in 2007. “He sacrificed a portion of himself to save me,” says Tankleff, 52, who was exonerated by a New York court after a yearslong legal campaign led, in part, by Howard, 52, now a government and law professor at Georgetown University. “I owe him everything.”