The Freedom Bulletin

The New York Daily News has a good story today about a man named Danny Colon, who spent 20 years in jail for two murders that he did not commit. In June, he was finally freed once and for all, when his conviction was overturned by an appeals court and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (incidentally, the same office that dismissed the attempted rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn) decided not to retry him.

On the day his torturous two-decade legal odyssey ended, the squawking sea gulls of Coney Island sounded like a choir of seaside angels to Danny Colon.

“Not like the gulls at Green Haven, circling for food,” said Colon, who spent 16 years inside that state correctional facility. “It’s different sitting on the beach.”

Read the rest here.

I had never heard of the “West Memphis Three” until Friday, when they were freed from prison. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. were convicted of the 1993 murders of three second-grade Arkansas boys, Christopher Byers, Steven Branch, and Michael Moore. But recently, when new DNA tests were done, they showed that none of the men’s DNA was at the crime scene, and they could not be tied to any murder weapon.

In court on Friday, prosecutors reached a very unusual deal with the West Memphis Three. The defendants entered Alford pleas to the charges that the jury had convicted them on, which means that they officially pled guilty while maintaining that they are actually innocent of the charges. Because many of the witnesses from the trial are dead or their memories fuzzy, prosecutors decided they didn’t have enough evidence to sustain a conviction if the case was tried again. Although the Three are officially considered guilty in the eyes of the law, they decided that entering that plea was in their best interest because in exchange, they were sentenced to time served, which allowed them to walk free. Echols had been sentenced to death, and Baldwin and Misskelley to life in prison.

The father of one of the victims called the newly freed defendants “animals” and said, ”It’s just going to give a key to everybody that’s on death row right now to open up their cells and walk out there with the rest us. All the killers, the rapists, the serial murderers.” But with all due respect, prosecutors did not just randomly decide to free the three men. New developments that took place after their trial show that forensic evidence failed to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and, in fact, makes it seem like they are probably innocent. People should not be imprisoned, let alone sentenced to death, unless they are, to a moral certainty, guilty of the crimes with which they are charged. So based on what I know about this case, Friday’s outcome appears to be the right one.

CNN has a good article about what they are up to now that they are free, and their official support fund has tons of information and links about this crazy case.

John Thompson was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1985. He didn’t testify in his own defense because he worried that a prior armed robbery conviction would hurt his credibility. Shortly before his planned execution, in 1999,  private investigators discovered that prosecutors in the robbery case had withheld evidence that blood at the crime scene did not match him, that a supposed eyewitness description did not resemble him, and that the main informant had received a reward from the victim’s family. He was then retried on the murder charge and quickly acquitted. Then, he sued the district attorney who prosecuted him, Harry Connick, Sr., for failing to train his employees on their duty (established under Brady v. Maryland) to share exculpatory evidence with the defense. He was awarded $15 million for his suffering, one for each year he spent behind bars and one for legal fees.

Last week, the Supreme Court threw out this award. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia both wrote opinions, which Dahlia Lithwick at Salon called among the “meanest ever.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent aloud.

Scalia called the wrongful conviction the work of a “miscreant prosecutor,” not the fault of the D.A.’s office as a whole, in explaining why D.A. Connick shouldn’t be held liable. But Ginsburg wrote that similar Brady violations had occurred several times in the same office, that five prosecutors had been involved in the misconduct, and that they failed to correct it “despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight.”

What makes this case really unjust is that, according to Ms. Lithwick from Slate, “the courts already give prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions as prosecutors.” So neither the D.A. nor individual prosecutors can be held responsible for misconduct that took 14 years from a man’s life and nearly killed him. Clearly, someone did something wrong. Either D.A. Connick failed to properly teach his prosecutors about their Brady obligations, or one or more individual prosecutors chose to violate these obligations. I don’t know enough to make a determination of which was the case here, but one or the other certainly was. It is wrong that neither of the possibly culpable parties can be made to pay restitution to their victim, Mr. Thompson.

• Full opinion (PDF)

In case you missed it, a Texas man, Cornelius Dupree, was officially exonerated on Tuesday in a rape and robbery case for which he had served 30 years in prison. He refused to attend sex offender treatment programs, which would have enabled him to be paroled, because he, well, wasn’t a sex offender.

“A Texas man declared innocent yesterday after 30 years in prison had at least two chances to make parole and be set free — if only he would admit he was a sex offender.

But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

‘Whatever your truth is, you have to stick with it,’ Dupree, 51, said yesterday, minutes after a Dallas judge overturned his conviction.”

Kudos to him for not giving in, and shame on the system that took away 30 years of his life. He will now receive a lifetime annuity, as well as $80,000 for each of those 30 years, as he should.

Read the rest.

In 1987, the body of 37-year-old Peggy Hettrick was found in a field in Fort Collins, Colorado. Investigators, led by Lt. Jim Broderick, suspected a 15-year-old boy named Tim Masters because he lived near the field and created violent artwork and writing which seemed, to some people, to match the injuries to Hettrick’s body. There was not enough evidence to charge Masters, and little happened in the investigation until 1997, when Broderick decided to have Masters’ art and writing analyzed by a forensic psychologist, who supported Broderick’s theory. Masters was then charged with murder and was convicted in 1999, at the age of 27, and sentenced to life in prison, even though there was no physical evidence against him. In 2008, DNA testing excluded his DNA from the crime scene and he was cleared and released from prison.

Now, Broderick has finally been charged with eight counts of perjury for his role in Masters’s wrongful conviction. He allegedly made false statements during the investigation, preliminary hearing, and trial and faces up to 6 years in prison plus a $500,o00 fine for each count.

I think it is about time that those responsible for Masters’s imprisonment be held responsible. He spent nine years in prison, even though the evidence shows that he is most likely completely innocent. Masters’s rights were violated, and whenever someone’s rights are violated, someone is responsible for that violation and ought to be punished. In this case, the people responsible are the law enforcement personnel who tried to pin the crime on Masters despite the lack of evidence against him. The evidence so far suggests that Broderick is chief among those people, and it’s time for Tim Masters to see justice.

If you need another reason not to vote for Martha Coakley for U.S. Senate tomorrow, in addition to her political views and the fact that she called Curt Schilling a Yankees fan, she has also put clearly innocent people in jail on at least two occasions.

According to this article by Ann Coulter, in 2001, when Coakley was Middlesex County District Attorney, Gerald Amirault, who had been convicted of child molestation in 1986 despite there being no evidence to support the charges, was granted clemency by the Massachusetts parole board. Governor Jane Swift was going to go along with their recommendation, but Coakley enthusiastically lobbied Swift to keep Amirault in prison, and she agreed. Because of Coakley, Amirault remained in prison for three more years.

Additionally, in 2003, Harvard grad student Alexander Pring-Wilson was walking down the street when he was attacked by two drug dealers, both with criminal records. In the ensuing struggle, Pring-Wilson fatally stabbed one of his attackers with the utility knife that he always carried. Middlesex D.A. Coakley charged Pring-Wilson with first-degree murder for his act of self-defense. He was held without bail and convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but then was awarded a new trial and eventually pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. Even if you think that Pring-Wilson acted wrongly, which I don’t, it is inappropriate to charge someone with first-degree murder for a non-premeditated death that occurred in the middle of a fight.

So, there you have it – two examples of people unjustly put in prison by Coakley. Contrary to the opinion of the Coakley supporter that I encountered at yesterday’s rally, a D.A.’s job is not to put innocent people in jail.