In 1963, Perth serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, confessed to the murder of Anderson when arrested in 1963 and again before he was executed. At his appeal, Trevor Condron, the police officer who had examined John Button's car in 1963 told the appeals court that while the car was damaged, the damage was not consistent with hitting a person and that three weeks before Anderson's death, Button had reported to police another accident. This accident report had been known to police at the original trial but been discounted as irrelevant. The court also heard from Dr Neil Turner, who had treated Anderson. He claimed that her injuries were not consistent with Button's vehicle. The world's leading pedestrian accident expert, American William "Rusty" Haight, was flown to Australia and testified that experiments with a biomedical human-form dummy, a similar Simca to Button's and an EJ Holden similar to the one Cooke claimed he was driving when he hit Anderson, matched exactly Cooke's account and excluded the Simca.^[8][9] In February 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction.^[10][11]

Button now spearheads the Western Australian Innocence Project, which aims to free the wrongfully convicted.^[12]

Both victims survived the attack. Pamela McLeod-Lindsay was adamant that her husband had not attacked her. She said that the attacker had an Australian accent. McLeod-Lindsay's accent was Scottish. McLeod-Lindsay was charged anyway with the attempted murder of his wife and son. The prosecution contended that Pamela McLeod-Lindsay was lying to protect the family's income. McLeod-Lindsay was found guilty.

McLeod-Lindsay was exonerated after a further review by another blood spatter pattern expert determined that the pattern was likely caused by transfer when he cradled his wife rather than by blows.^[14]

Unbeknownst to her parents, documents presented to the Supreme Court of Appeal described her as 22 years old. Her birth certificate indicated her age was 16. Amnesty International and other organizations declared her execution to be a crime against humanity and against children of the world.^[76]

In 1980, Ezra Goldberg, a retired policeman concluded that Baranes was innocent. He gave the information to Judge Haim Cohn, one of the Supreme Court judges who had rejected his appeal. Cohn concluded that his judgement had been wrong, and suggested Baranes ask for a pardon. Baranes refused, claiming that such a request would be an admission of a crime he did not commit. Cohn then asked President Chaim Herzog to grant Baranes a pardon. Baranes was finally released in June 1983 after receiving a presidential pardon. He had served 8+1⁄2 years of his sentence.

Following his release, Baranes continued his struggle to clear his name. Three times his requests for a new trial were denied. In March 2002, Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner finally ruled that Baranes should get a new trial. Four weeks later, Judge Cohn died. His last phone conversation was with Justice Dorner; he called her from his sickbed and thanked her for fixing the injustice "that I did". Baranes was one of the people who carried Cohn's coffin at his funeral. In December 2002, the court acquitted Baranes—without hearing evidence and without deciding whether Baranes committed the crime after the prosecution decided not to have a trial. In 2003, Baranes was awarded NIS1.4 million in compensation. On August 5, 2010, he was awarded a further NIS5,029,000 in compensation. Amos Baranes died in September 2011. A suspect in the murder of Rachel Heller was arrested in 2019.

He was spared further incarceration at this time, due to intervention from the Radical Party which offered him a candidacy to the European Parliament (EP). Tortora won election in two constituencies, despite the country being divided between those who held him guilty and those who held him innocent. He resigned as an EP member in December 1985, renouncing his parliamentary immunity. Tortora was then placed under house arrest until he was completely acquitted and rehabilitated by the Court of Appeal in September 1986. He returned the next year to his work in TV, to a moving comeback in his "Portobello" show, to die in 1988 from cancer and become an icon of battles against injustice and a perpetual reminder of a grave public blunder of the Italian judiciary system.

In 2015, the Supreme Court of Cassation overturned the previous guilty verdicts, definitively ending the case.^{[89][90][91][92]} Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito had not committed the murder and were innocent of those charges.^[91][93] According to Vedova, the decision by the five judges was almost unprecedented. Guede's conviction still stands.^[92]

Amnesty International denounced Francisco Marcial's imprisonment as resulting from a wrongful prosecution. The group declared her a prisoner of conscience, claiming there was no credible evidence against her, and that she had been prosecuted because of her gender, poverty, race, and inability to speak or understand the Spanish language.

In 2009, prosecutors dropped the case against Francisco Marcial and she was released. The two other women convicted of the same charges, Alberta Alcántara and Teresa González, had their convictions reversed by the Mexican Supreme Court in April 2010 and were also released from prison.^[97]

After returning to the U.S., St. Martin's Press published Volz's memoir, Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua.^[111][112]