by Edward Humes
In United States vs. Udechukwu, a new trial is granted to a woman convicted of smuggling heroin at the San Juan, Puerto Rico, airport. Upon her arrest, the woman begged to cooperate with authorities and said she had been forced to smuggle by a sinister drug merchant based in Aruba. Federal investigators confirmed the existence of this Aruban drug trafficker and discovered that he was the target of an investigation himself. Yet this information was never given to Udechukwu’s defense, and when she came to trial and told her story of coercion, the federal prosecutor falsely suggested to jurors that the Aruba drug dealer was a mere concoction created by the defendant to bolster a phony story.
Kirk Bloodworth is released from prison in Maryland after DNA testing proves that he had nothing to do with the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. Tried twice in the case, Bloodworth was initially sentenced to death in 1984, but the conviction was overturned because the prosecution withheld evidence of his possible innocence and the involvement of another suspect. At a second trial, he was convicted again, but sentenced to life. Years later, the DNA test proved his claims of innocence had been true all along. Maryland state bars the introduction of new evidence of innocence after one year, which could have kept Bloodworth in prison, but the prosecutor on his case, aghast at the injustice, joined a petition calling for Bloodworth’s pardon, which he finally received.
Clarence Chance and Benny Powell are freed after seventeen years in prison for a murder they did not commit. Reverend Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, a Princeton, New Jersey-based organization that specializes in revealing unjust convictions, uncovered misconduct by Los Angeles police and prosecutors that had effectively framed Powell and Chance. The city later paid the men $7 million to settle their wrongful-imprisonment lawsuits.
Muneer Deeb is acquitted of murder in Texas. Deeb had been sentenced to death in 1985 for allegedly hiring three hit men to kill his girlfriend, but his conviction was reversed and a new trial granted by the state court of criminal appeals because prosecutors relied upon improper evidence. The chief informant in the case was revealed to have lied repeatedly, and Deeb had been ruled out as a suspect by one police department before the detective on his case transferred to another department and targeted Deeb once again. One alleged accomplice pleaded guilty in exchange for mercy and testified against Deeb, but his testimony was riddled with lies and mistakes. The alleged shooter, David Wayne Spence, convicted on the same evidence originally used against Deeb, was executed in April 1997, even as Deeb was acquitted of hiring him.
In a case with macabre connections to Muneer Deeb’s and David Wayne Spence’s, Sidney Williams is released from a life sentence for the rape and murder in Waco, Texas, of Juanita White, Spence’s mother, because the prosecution and investigator on the case—the same as in Deeb’s and Spence’s—relied upon questionable informant testimony to win convictions. Before her death, White had received a letter from an inmate who had testified against her son; in it, the inmate confessed to perjury and begged for forgiveness. Forty-eight hours after a police memo about the letter was issued, White was murdered—though investigators never checked out a possible connection between the letter and White’s death. At Williams’ trial, fifteen Waco police officers testified for the defense, saying the informants in the case could not be trusted. One of those officers had been threatened with indictment when she tried to get the county grand jury to investigate official conduct in the case. Once he was released, prosecutors declined to attempt a retrial of Williams. His alleged accomplice, Calvin Washington, convicted on exactly the same evidence, remains in prison for life. Andrew Lee Mitchell is released from a 1981 death sentence after it is revealed that the sheriff who arrested him suppressed statements of police officers who saw the murder victim alive two hours after the murder supposedly took place—at a time when Mitchell had an alibi. A key witness also recanted in the case, and even the prosecutor filed an affidavit saying Mitchell had not received a fair trial. He came within two days of being executed.
Kerry Max Cook, sentenced to death for a 1977 mutilation-murder in Tyler, Texas, has his sentence overturned because of systematic government misconduct and the hiding of evidence in his favor. The same Smith County District Attorney’s Office that prosecuted Andrew Mitchell also prosecuted Cook. (Cook was tried and convicted again, but, in 1996, he was granted yet another new trial, again because the appeals courts found “prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset.” Cook was subsequently released on bail while authorities decide whether to try him yet again, after spending twenty of his forty-one years on death row.)
Andrew L. Golden, a high school teacher in Florida, had his 1991 murder conviction and death sentence for allegedly killing his wife reversed by the Florida Supreme Court, which found that prosecutors won their case without ever proving the death was anything other than an accident. (Golden was fully exonerated and released from further charges a year later.)
Mark Bravo, a Los Angeles mental-hospital worker sentenced to eight years for the 1990 rape of a patient, is released after DNA testing proves his innocence. Misconduct had infected this case, ensuring his wrongful conviction: The victim had recanted and accused others in the rape during interviews with police, though this information was kept secret, and the government refused to investigate what was later shown to be Bravo’s ironclad alibi.
The California Court of Appeals overturns the drunken driving conviction of Rafael Garcia Garcia, a San Diego-area car salesman, after finding that both the San Diego County District Attorney and the California Attorney General hid evidence that the prosecution’s accident-reconstruction expert was unreliable. Ninety-one others convicted because of this same expert’s testimony had to be contacted and offered the opportunity to reopen their cases as well, while a deputy attorney general sued his employer, claiming to have been demoted, ridiculed and harassed because he expressed concerns early on about official misconduct in the Garcia case.
1994
The Justice Department reports that twenty of its prosecutors around the nation resigned in the 1993–94 fiscal year while they were under investigation for misconduct. During that same period, allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in the department rise 78 percent compared to the previous fiscal year. (The U.S. Justice Department is the only prosecutorial agency out of thousands in the country that tracks and publicly reports on allegations of misconduct by its lawyers.)
Edward Honaker is released after serving ten years in prison for a Nelson County, Virginia, rape he could not have committed. Evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in the case included the fact, kept secret by prosecutors, that two key witnesses had been induced hypnotically to recall details of the events in question, which greatly reduced their credibility; the hiding of the fact that the victim’s initial description of her attacker did not match Honaker, but changed once she was shown a picture of him; and the fact that prosecutors never told their forensic expert that Honaker had a vasectomy years before the rape, which meant he could not have left the sperm found in an examination of the victim. Another prosecution expert claimed a hair found on the victim was unlikely to match anyone other than Honaker—patently false testimony, as no test exists that can positively match a hair to an individual. When DNA tests, unavailable at the time of the rape, were finally performed, Honaker was completely exonerated, because the sperm sample matched neither Honaker nor the victim’s two sex partners, which meant that it had to have come from another, unidentified rapist. Honaker still could not win his freedom, however: Tough state laws in Virginia allow only twenty-one days from the time of conviction for the introduction of new evidence, a deadline long since lapsed. Evidence of prosecutorial misconduct did not come to light for years, but Virginia law makes no allowances for a delay in the presentation of new evidence of innocence, even when it is the fault of government neglect or malfeasance that it was not available sooner. Honaker had to petition the governor and beg for a pardon, his only chance to escape wrongf
ul imprisonment, and his plea was finally heeded when prosecutors joined the request and admitted to convicting the wrong man. The case demonstrates that prosecutors, not judges, are often the final arbiters of justice under current laws, and that, in many cases, only their personal integrity and willingness to admit embarrassing conduct can save innocent men and women from false imprisonment.
Ronnie Bullock, convicted of the 1983 rape of a nine-year-old girl on the basis of a composite sketch produced with the help of the victim, is released after eleven years in prison. DNA testing, unavailable at the time of his trial, revealed that he could not have committed the crime, as he tried all along to convince unsympathetic police and prosecutors. The testing could have been accomplished years earlier, but the authorities had misplaced the key piece of evidence. The prosecution later admitted to imprisoning the wrong man.
Gary Ramona wins a $475,000 lawsuit against his daughter’s therapist after presenting evidence that his daughter’s “recovered memory” of molestation was false and the result of suggestive and improper counseling techniques.
John Spencer is released from a fifty-years-to-life sentence when state police in New York admit to planting his fingerprints at the scene of a double murder. (Three state-police troopers were later convicted of falsifying fingerprints in a scandal that affected more than one hundred cases.)
Gilbert Alejandro, convicted of rape in 1990 in Uvalde County, Texas, is freed because his conviction rested on false testimony from a forensics expert, Fred Zain, later prosecuted for perjury and obstruction of justice. (The same expert’s false evidence brought one hundred thirty other criminal cases into question.) Charges were dropped and Alejandro was awarded a $250,000 settlement; Zain was acquitted.
Joseph Burrows is released from death row in Illinois after five years when the two main witnesses against him recant, one saying police coerced him into accusing Burrows and the other confessing to the murder himself. There was never any physical evidence linking Burrows to the crime. Yet the district attorney appealed the trial court’s decision to free Burrows, trying to keep him on death row despite the crumbling of the prosecution’s case. The state appeals courts have upheld the decision freeing Burrows.
In United States vs. Robinson, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver reverses a drug conviction because a prosecutor, who had interviewed a key witness, told the defense that the witness could not say who retrieved the drugs at issue in the case. In fact, the witness had provided identifying information that clearly did not fit the defendant. Had that witness’s information been given to the jury, the appeals court determined, the defendant could easily have been acquitted.
Adolph Munson is freed from an Oklahoma death sentence after nine years because prosecutors withheld evidence that supported his claims of innocence. The prosecution’s case was further undermined when the prosecution forensic expert who testified against Munson, Ralph Erdman, was subsequently convicted of seven felonies for misrepresenting facts in other cases. (Munson was acquitted in 1995 when retried for murder, though he remained in prison on other charges.)
Ricardo Aldape Guerra, sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of a Houston police officer, is freed after fourteen years on death row when a federal judge finds that Guerra was the victim of an outrageous misconduct. The judge calls police “merchants of chaos” bent on revenge and on threatening witnesses into lying. The court also accused prosecutors of manipulating evidence to falsely convict Aldape, when all the physical evidence pointed to another man killed in a shootout with police. Rather than retry Aldape, the authorities ultimately dropped the case. The judge wrote, “But for the conduct of the police officers and the prosecutors, either [Aldape] would not have been charged with this offense or the trial would have resulted in an acquittal.” Prosecutorial misconduct cited by the judge included threatening and intimidating witnesses, most of whom were children, and hiding evidence of Aldape’s innocence while lying in closing arguments about evidence of his guilt. The court asserted that the prosecutors’ “misconduct was designed to obtain a conviction and another ‘notch in their guns’ despite the overwhelming evidence that [another man] was the killer.”
Bruce Turner is freed from his 1991 conviction and ten-year prison sentence for assault and battery because a Middlesex County, Massachusetts, prosecutor threatened two defense witnesses who would have attested to Turner’s innocence, preventing them from testifying and depriving Turner of a defense.
In Will County, Illinois, felony misconduct charges against Wilmington Police Chief Frank Lyons and his police officer son are dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct—the use of improper evidence in obtaining a grand jury indictment. Charles Bretz, the prosecutor responsible—the top prosecutor in his county—was forced to resign when it was revealed that he maintained a private law practice that may have conflicted with his public prosecutorial duties. Several murder convictions were called into question when it was later revealed that Bretz maintained a hidden relationship with the trial judge on the case. The same judge and prosecutor also were accused in a federal civil rights suit of misusing the court system to deprive a father of his parental rights.
1995
Jesse DeWayne Jacobs is executed in Texas for the murder of a suburban Houston woman in an abandoned house. Even though a prosecutor said Jacobs did not commit the crime, it was not enough to induce the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution. Prosecutors originally had won the death sentence by convincing a jury that Jacobs pulled the trigger in the crime, though he claimed his sister had done it. Later, at the trial of the sister, the same prosecutor who convicted Jacobs announced that the sister had indeed pulled the trigger, and that Jacobs had no idea what his sister planned to do at the time she committed the crime. She received a ten-year prison sentence. In a six-to-three vote, the U.S. Supreme Court said it was perfectly permissible for the same prosecutor to argue mutually exclusive theories in separate trials and to proceed with the execution of Jacobs. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, saying that one of the prosecution’s versions of the case had to be a lie, raising “a serious question of prosecutorial misconduct.” Stevens further wrote, “In my opinion, it would be fundamentally unfair to execute a person on the basis of a factual determination that the state has formally disavowed.”
A police corruption scandal in Philadelphia’s Thirty-ninth Police District explodes with allegations of innocent men and women framed, evidence planted and witnesses coerced on a massive scale. More than 1,000 criminal convictions have to be reviewed; at least 116 are overturned. Another 150 pending charges are dismissed. Six officers are eventually prosecuted and imprisoned, with many more fired, demoted or transferred.
Rolando Cruz of DuPage County, Illinois, twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, is exonerated amid evidence of massive police and prosecutorial misconduct, phony confessions, withheld evidence, lying witnesses and a refusal to accept the confession of a convicted child rapist and killer who admitted to the Nicarico murder (and whose semen was found at the crime scene). Granted a third trial, Cruz was acquitted by a judge who harshly criticized the authorities in the case. Ultimately, three DuPage County prosecutors (one of whom had gone on to become a judge) and four former sheriff’s deputies were indicted for allegedly concealing evidence that could have exonerated Cruz and for allegedly cooking up other evidence in their quest for a conviction in the high-pressure and sensational case.
Alejandro Hernandez of DuPage County, Illinois, having been sentenced to death, retried and resentenced to eighty years in prison for the murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, is exonerated along with Rolando Cruz, again because of official misconduct. The man who confessed to the crime and whose DNA has been linked to the victim’s body has never been charged.
Lloyd Schlup, a Missouri convict, was freed from his 1985 death sentence for a murder inside prison. The government had kept hidden a videotape and statements from t
wenty other witnesses, which all indicated that Schlup was in another part of the prison when the murder occurred. An appeals judge found that no reasonable juror in possession of these facts would have convicted Schlup. After the evidence of his innocence surfaced, Missouri state prosecutors still fought to have Schlup executed, invoking a 1996 law that limits prisoners to a single federal appeal and one writ of habeas corpus. This law enables prosecutors to exploit a legal technicality empowering them to disregard even irrefutable proof of innocence and to proceed with executions. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, granted Schlup a hearing despite the new law, declining to apply it retroactively to Schlup’s case, and the new evidence led to his overturned conviction. Had he been convicted in 1996, however, Schlup would have had no recourse and could have been legally executed despite his innocence.
In a landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses the murder conviction and death sentence of Curtis Kyles because Louisiana prosecutors hid several pieces of critical evidence that would have helped the defense, including information about a paid informant in the case who implicated himself in the murder—evidence that the high court felt could well have altered the verdict had jurors heard about it. The Court told prosecutors that when there is any doubt about whether information is helpful to a defendant, it must be disclosed. “This is as it should be,” the Court wrote. “Such disclosure will serve to justify trust in the prosecutor as the representative of a sovereignty whose interest in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. And it will tend to preserve the criminal trial, as distinct from the prosecutor’s private deliberations, as the chosen form for ascertaining the truth about criminal accusations.” (Later, with all the evidence fully aired in the fatal carjacking case, two retrials of Kyles led to hung juries, with a majority of jurors voting for acquittal. Charges eventually were dropped and Kyles went free.)