On the night of May 22nd, 2005, a young man named Salvador Martinez was pushed to the ground in an alleyway near Dudley Grange Park in Camden, New Jersey.

A few witnesses claimed to have seen two assailants rifling through his pockets before one of them

fatally shot Salvador. And police took a statement from one of the witnesses named Carol Lofland,

who would eventually name 24-year-old Lance Alford.

Carol Lofland, when she first got asked about the situation, he said, yeah, I did see the guy

in his face, but he's not from around the area. I'm from around the area. And then she got locked up for her own personal charges. You know what I mean? They go see her again. And somehow I got my name down in the picture. I'm like, how to get my name on the picture? I don't know. And perhaps a more salient question is not how, but whom.

The person leading this investigation for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office was Sergeant

Martin Devlin, who we've seen in multiple wrongful conviction cases, practicing a similar pattern.

Single photo identifications shown to alleged witnesses with something to gain.

The three eyewitnesses who did testify against Lance at the trial were shown a single

photo of Lance rather than a photo array. And when you're shown a single photo, that's a very

suggestive form of identification. The police are telling you this is who we think committed

the crime. By the time Lance was taken to trial, Carol Loughlin's story had changed to something that was provably false. Her statement about how she seen a guy get shot while he was standing up. Don't even match up with this forensic evidence in the case. And they still let this lady check to fly out on me. Come on, man. Y'all playing games. You're playing all my life. You know what I mean? I'm Lance Lamar for... I'm innocent of the crimes. I was locked up July 6, 2005. And I've never got out ever since. From Lava for Good podcast, this is Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling.

Today, Lance Alford.

Camden, New Jersey is a small city just over the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where

an industrial boom in the late 19th century was followed by a bust in the mid to late 20th century,

when companies left town for cheaper labor, leaving the economy and quality of life to crumble.

I was born in Camden, 1980, and my mother, she was on the home, working two jobs,

trying to provide for her three kids. She finally decided to try to move out of Canada into Cherry Hill in 1986, 87.

Cherry Hill is an affluent, mostly white suburb, a recipient of what was known as white flight during the great migration of the Jim Crow era,

when many African Americans ventured north for potentially kinder communities as opposed to the south,

only to see large swaths of white folks head to the suburbs from the cities, bringing their tax base and school funding with them.

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