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Vocabulary > Justice > Miscarriages of justice
> UK / USA
The Birmingham Six
14 March 1991
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~jjphoto/six.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1006201.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/14/newsid_2543000/2543613.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1437228,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4151635,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1358577,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,730156,00.html
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/other/1974/faul76.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six
injustice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/19/sean-hodgson-miscarriage-justice-ruling
wrongful imprisonment
wrongful convictions > False Arrests, Convictions and
Imprisonments USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/
false_arrests_convictions_and_imprisonments/index.html
miscarriage of justice
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/opinion/a-grievous-wrong-on-georgias-death-row.html
judicial lynching
USA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/14/troy-davis-death-penalty-lynching
miscarriage of justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/jan/17/conviction-fight-miscarriages-justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/19/ludovic-kennedy-dies-89
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/05/justice-on-trial-introduction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/may/05/miscarriages-of-justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/18/prisoner-hodgson-murder-quashed-miscarriage
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4446369.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/jilldando/story/0,7369,755712,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2485830/Jill-Dando-murder-Miscarriages-of-justice.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/jilldando/story/0,7369,755712,00.html
Sean Hodgson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/29/sean-hodgson-release-prison
miscarriage of justice > Sean Hodgson released
after 27 years March 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5934566.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/19/life-after-miscarriage-justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/19/miscarriage-justice-hodgson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/19/sean-hodgson-miscarriage-justice-ruling
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/innocent-prisoner-set-free-after-27-years-1647547.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5931869.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5932836.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/18/prisoner-hodgson-murder-quashed-miscarriage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/mar/18/sean-hodgson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/dna-teresa-de-simone-hodgson
Stefan Kiszko
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/nov/17/ukcrime.immigrationpolicy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/11/ukcrime.duncancampbell
Long-standing miscarriages of justice in the UK
High-profile judicial mistakes,
from Barry George's conviction for the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando
to the jailing of Judith Ward for the 1973 IRA coach bombing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/18/miscarriages-justice-history
in denial of murder IDOM
miscarriage of justice > Robert Brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,7369,981144,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,7369,911068,00.html
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1265362002
http://www.innocent.org.uk/cases/robertbrown
http://www.mojuk.org.uk/bulletins/rb.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3697544.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/2966946.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/01_january/16/hardtalk_brownrobert.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/08_august/29/bakewell.shtml
get a case review
Criminal Cases Review Commission CCRC
http://www.ccrc.gov.uk/
http://www.cps
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/18/prisoner-hodgson-murder-quashed-miscarriage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,,1453787,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4092782,00.html
victims of miscarried justice
innocent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/innocent-prisoner-set-free-after-27-years-1647547.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4151635,00.html
innocence
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/when-innocence-isnt-enough.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html
The Innocence Project: the court of last resort
January 2010
In the US, the Innocence Project has freed
260 people
imprisoned for crimes they did not commit –
and inspired a new film starring Hilary Swank.
In the UK the work is just beginning,
but the lawyers who only take the most desperate cases
of injustice have a first
victory in their sights...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jan/09/innocence-project-conviction-hilary-swank
failure of justice
fabricate
confessions
wrongly convicted over...
wrongful imprisonment for...
the Norfolk Four USA
1997-2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06norfolk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/us/07norfolk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Norfolk-t.html
the Hoxton One
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mother-fights-to-free-the-hoxton-one-1704141.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/
teenagers-murder-conviction--may-be-miscarriage-of-justice-1704129.html
the Cardiff Three
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1920149,00.html
the Birmingham Six
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/may/22/northernireland.sandralaville
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/aug/23/ukcrime.alexkumi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1358577,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,730156,00.html
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/other/1974/faul76.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/14/newsid_2543000/2543613.stm
the Birmingham Six / the Guildford Four > Ludovic Kennedy,
veteran presenter and campaigner
1919-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/19/ludovic-kennedy-dies-89
the Bridgewater Four
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1264588,00.html
the Guildford Four
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,1409654,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/northernirelandassembly/story/0,9061,1408973,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1330869,00.html
http://www.film.u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/In_Name_Father.html
the Maguire Seven
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,1409654,00.html
free
be set free
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/innocent-prisoner-set-free-after-27-years-1647547.html
walk free from court
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-2127194,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1691796,00.html
freedom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/29/sean-hodgson-release-prison
caution
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-2127194,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-2127168,00.html
ruling > be exonerated /
be cleared
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/texas-man-seeks-inquiry-after-exoneration-in-murder.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/nyregion/exonerated-of-murder-dewey-bozella-makes-a-boxing-debut.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html
exonerated
exoneration
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html
posthumous exonerations
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html
Innocence Project New Orleans
USA IPNO
http://www.ip-no.org/
Justice on Trial
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/05/justice-on-trial-introduction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/justice-on-trial
cast doubt over...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5769769.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6276604.ece
Derek Bentley 1933-1953
At the age of 19,
Derek Bentley was hanged for the murder of PC Sydney Miles,
the policeman who caught him breaking into a warehouse in Croydon, south London.
Bentley, who had a mental age of only 11, had not pulled the trigger
but was convicted on the strength of an ambiguous instruction to 'Let him have
it'
shouted to his accomplice, 16-year-old Chris Craig.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/21/vanessathorpe.theobserver1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/19/ludovic-kennedy-dies-89
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jul/12/familyandrelationships.family4
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,634024,0.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/21/vanessathorpe.theobserver1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/28/newsid_3393000/3393807.stm
be pardoned > Derek Bentley
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/28/newsid_3393000/3393807.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/138218.stm
When
Innocence Isn’t Enough
March 2,
2012
The New York Times
By RAYMOND BONNER
EDWARD LEE
ELMORE turned 53 in January. For more than half his life, the soft-spoken
African-American who doesn’t understand the concept of north, south, east and
west, or of summer, fall, winter and spring, was in a South Carolina prison,
most of it on death row.
On Friday, Mr. Elmore walked out of the courthouse in Greenwood, S.C., a free
man, as part of an agreement with the state whereby he denied any involvement in
the crime but pleaded guilty in exchange for his freedom. This was his 11,000th
day in jail.
Mr. Elmore was convicted in 1982 for the sexual assault and murder of an elderly
white widow in Greenwood. His trial lasted only eight days, including two spent
picking the jury. The state concealed evidence that strongly pointed to Mr.
Elmore’s innocence and introduced damning evidence that appears to have been
planted by the police. For three decades lawyers for Mr. Elmore, who were
convinced of his innocence, sought to get him a fair trial.
Headlines and news stories about men being released from death row based on DNA
testing suggest that this happens often. But it doesn’t. Once a person has been
convicted, even on unimaginably shaky grounds, an almost inexorable process —
one that usually ends in execution — is set in motion. On appeal, gone is the
presumption of innocence; the presumption is that the defendant had a fair
trial. Not even overwhelming evidence that the defendant is innocent is
necessarily enough to get a new trial. “Due process does not require that every
conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of
convicting an innocent person,” Justice Byron R. White wrote for the majority in
a 1977 case, Patterson v. New York.
In other words, innocence is not enough.
I came to the Elmore case indirectly during the 2000 presidential campaign. On
“Meet the Press,” George W. Bush, who as governor of Texas had presided over
more executions than anyone in history at the time (Rick Perry has surpassed
him), told Tim Russert that he was confident that every person who had been
executed or placed on death row in Texas under his watch was guilty and had had
a fair trial. This led to a reporting assignment in which a New York Times
colleague, Sara Rimer, and I wrote about capital punishment, starting in Texas
and then ranging from coast to coast.
It was an eye-opening experience. But no case grabbed me like Mr. Elmore’s. The
case stands out because it raises nearly all the issues that shape debate about
capital punishment: race, mental retardation, a jailhouse informant, DNA
testing, bad defense lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct and a strong claim of
innocence.
Few men on death row are without any connection to the crime for which they are
condemned to die. Their conviction might be reversed after an appellate court
finds they were denied due process or didn’t receive a fair trial. Other death
row inmates may not be guilty of murder, because they didn’t pull the trigger
though they were present during the crime. But in the case of Mr. Elmore, I am
convinced beyond a scintilla of a doubt that he had nothing to do with the
Greenwood woman’s death. His conviction resulted primarily from a rush to
judgment — and flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Elmore, who grew up in abject poverty as the 8th of 11 children born to a
tenant farmer’s daughter, was arrested 36 hours after the body of 76-year-old
Dorothy Ely Edwards was found in her bedroom closet. Mr. Elmore had occasionally
washed windows and cleaned gutters at the woman’s house, the last time two weeks
before the murder. Less than 90 days later, his trial began.
During his opening statement, the prosecutor, William Townes Jones III, a
courtroom legend, said that 53 hairs had been gathered from the victim’s bed,
where the sexual assault supposedly took place, and that most were the
defendant’s pubic hairs. It was the only physical evidence that put Mr. Elmore
inside the house at the time of the crime. “That’s what convicted him,” said a
juror.
But contradictions appeared at the outset. When Mr. Jones called an agent from
the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, as a witness, he handed
him a plastic bag marked State Exhibit 58 and asked him if it contained “53
hairs gathered from the bed of the deceased.”
“The total count on the hairs is 49,” answered the agent, Earl Wells, and he
added that there were only 42 in the bag, because he had taken seven out for
examination.
Mr. Elmore’s lawyers made nothing of this discrepancy during their
cross-examination of Mr. Wells, or in their closing argument.
The state’s own inability to agree on how many hairs were found wasn’t the only
suggestion of foul play. State Exhibit 58, the baggie with the hairs, wasn’t
sealed. Which means that the hairs could have been put in by anyone at any time,
and could have included those yanked from Mr. Elmore’s groin at the police
station after he was arrested.
Further, the bed barely featured in the police investigation. Investigators from
SLED took nearly a hundred pictures at the house. They took pictures in the
guest bedroom, where nothing had happened — even the small figurines on the
bureau had not been knocked over — and of the bed in the guest bedroom, which
looked as if it was ready for the next guest. But the investigators took no
photos of the bed where they claimed to have found hairs.
Nor did the investigators take the sheets from the bed. Why not? “There were no
obvious blood or other stains present,” one of the agents, Ira Parnell,
explained during Mr. Elmore’s post-conviction relief hearing in the case. The
hearing, which is much like a civil trial before a judge, is an opportunity for
the defendant’s lawyers to present new evidence and to examine and cross-examine
witnesses. He was categorical: “We did not see any stains of any kind.”
The state argued that while the police might have made some mistakes, none
served to deny Mr. Elmore any of his constitutional rights. The hearing judge
adopted the state’s arguments verbatim and declined to grant Mr. Elmore a new
trial.
Perhaps Mr. Elmore’s only good fortune was that on appeal he had on his side two
determined appellate lawyers, Diana Holt, who had first begun working on the
case as a law school intern, and J. Christopher Jensen, an accomplished New York
litigator who was representing Mr. Elmore pro bono. Two years later, they turned
up new evidence that the state had sought to hide and that pointed to Mr.
Elmore’s innocence.
At Mr. Elmore’s trial, the prosecutor, Mr. Jones, said he had authorized the
arrest after being told that during the autopsy, the doctor had found a
“Negroid” hair on the victim’s abdomen. The doctor sent the hairs and fibers
found on the body to SLED, where the agent, Mr. Wells, examined them under a
microscope, then put the slides in a padded envelope and labeled it “Item T.”
In the 1963 landmark case Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that the
state must turn over all potentially exonerating evidence to the defendant. But
Mr. Jones did not give Item T to Mr. Elmore’s trial lawyers. More shocking
still, Item T disappeared.
When Mr. Elmore’s lawyers began searching for it, state officials repeatedly
said they couldn’t find it. The lawyers persisted and, 16 years after the trial,
found Item T — in Earl Wells’s filing cabinet, where the state attorney
general’s office conceded it had been all along. (Mr. Wells said he found it
while moving offices.)
The retired F.B.I. agent retained to examine the hair said it was not “Negroid,”
but Caucasian. Mr. Elmore’s lawyers had the hair DNA-tested. It wasn’t Mrs.
Edwards’s, which suggested it was from an unknown man, likely the killer. Armed
with this development, Mr. Elmore’s lawyers went back to court. There was a
hearing, a few days before Christmas 2000, in the same courtroom where Mr.
Elmore had been convicted 18 years earlier. It was widely expected that he would
get a new trial.
The judge ruled against him. “One hair is not enough,” he said. Spectators
gasped. But the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed.
Mr. Elmore’s lawyers did not give up. Remarkably, in November, the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals — historically one of the most conservative — ordered a
new trial. In a 163-page opinion, the majority was searing in its criticism of
the SLED agents and the police.
There was “persuasive evidence that the agents were outright dishonest,” and
there was “further evidence of police ineptitude and deceit,” Judge Robert Bruce
King wrote.
Even though he walked out of court on Friday, none can call it justice.
A man has served 30 years for a crime he did not commit, many of those under the
threat of imminent execution. Surely, there are grounds for a Justice Department
investigation into whether his civil rights were violated.
A lawyer and
former New York Times reporter
and the author
of “Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.”
When Innocence Isn’t Enough, NYT, 2.3.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/when-innocence-isnt-enough.html
Exonerated of Murder, Texan Seeks Inquiry on Prosecutor
December
19, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BRANDI GRISSOM
AUSTIN,
Tex. — A Texas man wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife is
scheduled to be officially exonerated on Monday.
That is no longer so unusual in Texas, where 45 inmates have been exonerated in
the last decade based on DNA evidence. What is unprecedented is the move planned
by lawyers for the man, Michael Morton: they are expected to file a request for
a special hearing to determine whether the prosecutor broke state laws or ethics
rules by withholding evidence that could have led to Mr. Morton’s acquittal 25
years ago.
“I haven’t seen anything like this, ever,” said Bennet L. Gershman, an expert on
prosecutorial misconduct at Pace University in New York. “It’s an extraordinary
legal event.”
The prosecutor, Ken Anderson, a noted expert on Texas criminal law, is now a
state district judge. Through a lawyer, he vigorously denied any wrongdoing in
Mr. Morton’s case.
Mr. Morton, who was a manager at an Austin supermarket and had no criminal
history, was charged with the beating death of his wife, Christine, in 1986. He
had contended that the killer must have entered their home after he left for
work early in the morning. But Mr. Anderson convinced the jury that Mr. Morton,
in a rage over his wife’s romantic rebuff the previous night — on Mr. Morton’s
32nd birthday — savagely beat her to death.
Mr. Morton was sentenced to life in prison. Beginning in 2005, he pleaded with
the court to test DNA on a blue bandanna found near his home shortly after the
murder, along with other evidence.
For six years, the Williamson County district attorney, John Bradley, fought the
request for DNA testing, based on advice from Judge Anderson, his predecessor
and friend. In 2010, however, a Texas court ordered the DNA testing, and the
results showed that Mrs. Morton’s blood on the bandanna was mixed with the DNA
of another man: Mark A. Norwood, a felon with a long criminal history who lived
about 12 miles from the Mortons at the time of the murder. By then, Mr. Morton
had spent nearly 25 years in prison.
Mr. Norwood has been arrested and charged in Mrs. Morton’s death and is a
suspect in a similar murder from 1988.
The filing by Mr. Morton’s lawyer, John Raley, and attorneys from the Innocence
Project, a group based in New York that represents prisoners seeking exoneration
through DNA testing, is asking for what is known as a “court of inquiry.” The
lawyers did not share the document with reporters but answered questions about
it.
They will ask the court to determine that there is probable cause to believe
that Mr. Anderson withheld reports that the judge in the 1987 trial had ordered
him to turn over. The judge had demanded the documents to determine whether they
might help Mr. Morton’s case. Finding nothing exculpatory in the small number of
documents he was provided by the prosecutor, the judge ordered the record
sealed.
In August, however, a different judge ordered the record unsealed, and Mr.
Morton’s lawyers discovered that Mr. Anderson had provided only a fraction of
the available evidence. Missing from the file was the transcript of a telephone
conversation between a sheriff’s deputy and Mr. Morton’s mother-in-law in which
she reported that her 3-year-old grandson had seen a “monster” — who was not his
father — attack and kill his mother.
Also missing were police reports from Mr. Morton’s neighbors, who said they had
seen a man in a green van repeatedly park near their home and walk into the
woods behind their house. And there were even reports, also never turned over,
that Mrs. Morton’s credit card had been used and a check with her forged
signature cashed after her death.
In October, Judge Sid Harle of Bexar County District Court freed Mr. Morton
based on the DNA evidence and authorized an unusual process allowing his defense
lawyers to investigate the prosecutor’s conduct in the original trial. The
lawyers questioned the lead sheriff’s investigator, an assistant district
attorney who worked with Mr. Anderson and the former prosecutor himself.
In their accounts, the witnesses said Mr. Anderson had firmly controlled every
detail of the prosecution. In his own two-day deposition, however, Judge
Anderson said he recalled few details of the case and asserted that he had done
nothing wrong. He said that he had interpreted the judge’s order to disclose the
reports as a narrow demand for the initial documents from the investigation and
that he felt “sick” over Mr. Morton’s wrongful imprisonment.
If the court of inquiry ends with a finding that Mr. Anderson committed serious
acts of misconduct by concealing material evidence, it could lead to
disciplinary action by the state bar association and possibly even a criminal
prosecution.
Experts, however, are skeptical that Judge Anderson could face serious
punishment or disbarment, even if the court were to decide that he had committed
malfeasance. Susan R. Klein, a professor at the University of Texas Law School
who specializes in criminal issues and prosecutorial ethics, said that such
actions would be “incredibly unusual,” particularly after the Supreme Court’s
decision this year dismissing a $14 million civil jury award against a Louisiana
prosecutor, Harry Connick Sr., for his failure to turn over evidence that
ultimately led to an exoneration.
While withholding material evidence intentionally can get a lawyer disbarred,
Ms. Klein said, “It’s extremely unlikely.” In the court filing, Mr. Morton’s
lawyers argue that the amount of time that has passed since the trial may not be
a bar to criminal prosecution if Mr. Anderson is found to have violated a court
order; they argue that there may be no statute of limitations for contempt of
court under state law.
Mark Dietz, a lawyer for Judge Anderson, said that he had asked for, but had not
received, the report that Mr. Morton’s lawyers plan to file on Monday. He said
he worried that the report would inaccurately reflect what happened in 1987. Mr.
Dietz questioned whether Judge Harle had jurisdiction to order a court of
inquiry, and in a letter to Barry C. Scheck, the co-founder of the Innocence
Project, wrote that while his client welcomed “positive discussion about
criminal justice reforms,” “false and defamatory statements regarding Mr.
Anderson’s conduct as a prosecutor in the Morton case have no proper place in
that discussion.”
In an interview, Mr. Scheck said he hoped the court of inquiry proceeding would
result in changes in law and policy that could promote greater fairness in
criminal cases. Previous high-profile exonerations, he said, have led to new
laws that improved access to DNA testing after conviction and provided generous
compensation to those who were wrongfully convicted.
“This is one of those catalytic, iconic cases that leads to reform,” he said.
John Schwartz
reported from New York, and Brandi Grissom from Austin. Ms. Grissom writes for
The Texas Tribune, which produces a twice-weekly local section in the Texas
editions of The New York Times.
Exonerated of Murder, Texan Seeks Inquiry on Prosecutor, NYT, 19.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/texas-man-seeks-inquiry-after-exoneration-in-murder.html
Exonerated of Murder, a Boxer Makes a Debut at 52
October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
PHILADELPHIA — The television crew had him up at dawn doing the Rocky
fandango, dashing up the 72 stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
dancing around in triumph like another over-the-hill, underdog pugilist who had
made it big.
Cliché or not, it is hard not to imagine the familiar trumpet score along with
the thwock, thwock, thwock of fists on punching bags as Dewey Bozella trains for
one of the least likely boxing matches in history.
After 26 years in New York State prisons, and two years after he was exonerated
of murder, Mr. Bozella will make his professional boxing debut on Saturday in
Los Angeles, at age 52, on the undercard of the light-heavyweight champion
Bernard Hopkins. (A mere 46 himself, Mr. Hopkins became the oldest fighter to
win a major world championship this May.)
Mr. Bozella’s other fight, in which he is seeking compensation for the half of
his life he spent behind bars, may be even more daunting than chasing victory in
the ring. But for now, Mr. Bozella is focused on what he says will be his one
and only professional bout.
“I want to go out there and give 100 percent and then move on with my life,” he
said. “This is not a career move. It’s a personal move and a way to let people
know to never give up on their dreams. My favorite quote is ‘Don’t let fear
determine who you are and never let where you come from determine where you’re
going.’ That’s what this is about.”
The product of a violent broken family and a hard life on the streets, Mr.
Bozella was a troubled 18-year-old in 1977 when Emma Crapser, 92, was murdered
in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home after returning from playing bingo. Six years
later, based almost entirely on the testimony of two criminals who repeatedly
changed their stories, he was convicted of the murder.
There was no physical evidence implicating Mr. Bozella. Instead, there was the
fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a
nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood. Mr.
Bozella was retried in 1990, and was offered a deal that would let him go free
in exchange for an admission that he committed the crime. He refused. A jury
convicted him again.
At Sing Sing, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s
from the New York Theological Seminary. And he boxed in the prison’s “Death
House,” once the scene of electrocutions, then a boxing ring, where he became
Sing Sing’s light-heavyweight champion. At parole hearings, he repeatedly
refused to express remorse for the crime he did not commit. He would get out one
way, he said, either in a box or as an exonerated man. The box seemed more
likely.
In the end, he was saved by a miracle. The Innocence Project, a legal clinic
dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, believing in his case but unable
to pursue it absent DNA evidence, referred it to the law firm WilmerHale.
Lawyers there eventually found the Poughkeepsie police lieutenant who had
investigated the case. He had retired, and Mr. Bozella’s was the only file he
had saved. It included numerous pieces of evidence favorable to Mr. Bozella that
had not been turned over to his lawyers. On Oct. 28, 2009, he walked out of the
courthouse in Poughkeepsie finally a free man.
He struggled to find work, eventually counseling former convicts while teaching
boxing at a Newburgh, N.Y., gym until ESPN became interested in his story. In
July, at its annual ESPY Awards, he was given its Arthur Ashe Courage Award,
whose past recipients have included Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman and Nelson
Mandela. The offer to box professionally came as a result of that appearance.
But when he took the rigorous California State Athletic Commission test on Aug.
24 to get licensed to box in the state, he failed. After Labor Day, he began
working out in Philadelphia with the trainers for Mr. Hopkins. They were
skeptical.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to kill this old guy,’ ” said Danny Davis, one of Mr.
Hopkins’s trainers. “There’s no way this guy can make it through my training.”
But Mr. Bozella got tougher, leaner and more nimble, dropping 10 pounds in
little more than a week. He sparred with, and took serious lumps from, a
world-class fighter: Lajuan Simon, a middleweight title contender. Mr. Bozella
took the test again on Sept. 29. This time he passed.
Officials said Mr. Bozella was believed to be the oldest fighter ever licensed
to box in California. Fighters that age are extremely rare but hardly unknown.
“The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists,” by Bert Randolph Sugar and Teddy Atlas, has
a section on “Boxing’s Greatest Methuselahs” that includes Mr. Hopkins; Jem
Mace, the legendary 19th-century English boxer who fought at 59; and Saoul
Mamby, a former junior welterweight titleholder who fought in 2008 at the age of
60, making him the oldest fighter ever to appear in an officially sanctioned
bout.
Mr. Bozella, a cruiserweight — between light-heavyweights and heavyweights —
will not be fighting for a championship; he is taking on Larry Hopkins, 30, of
Houston, who is 0-3 as a professional (and is not related to Bernard Hopkins).
His purse in the pay-per-view bout will be in the very low four figures.
But even if hype and marketing are as much a part of boxing as quick feet and
sharp jabs, Mr. Bozella said the bout was anything but a stunt.
“You’ve seen the workout I went through, the pain, blood and bruises I’m
getting,” he said after four rounds sparring with Mr. Simon last week. “No one’s
giving me nothing for free. I can go out there and get knocked out, or I can
knock the other guy out. It’s that simple.”
Mr. Bozella hopes to open his own gym as a way to mentor youngsters, but beyond
its Hollywood touches, his feel-good story turns cloudier. The day after he
passed the boxing test, a federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Dutchess
County and the City of Poughkeepsie over the evidence that was not turned over
to his lawyers.
The decision was primarily based on a controversial Supreme Court ruling in the
case of Connick v. Thompson. By a 5-to-4 margin, the court, in a decision
written by Justice Clarence Thomas in March, threw out a $14 million jury award
to a former death row inmate freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.
The decision stated that only a pattern of misconduct in properly turning over
evidence could warrant financial compensation, no matter how egregious the
misconduct against a single defendant.
“I’m not going to disrespect the courts,” Mr. Bozella said. “I’d just like the
justice system to be fair. Same thing with boxing. If the judges are fair, then
the real winner wins. Just be fair. That’s it.”
Exonerated of Murder, a
Boxer Makes a Debut at 52, NYT, 10.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/nyregion/exonerated-of-murder-dewey-bozella-makes-a-boxing-debut.html
A Grievous Wrong
September 20, 2011
The New York Times
Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the
1989 killing of a police officer in Savannah, Ga. The Georgia pardon and parole
board’s refusal to grant him clemency is appalling in light of developments
after his conviction: reports about police misconduct, the recantation of
testimony by a string of eyewitnesses and reports from other witnesses that
another person had confessed to the crime.
This case has attracted worldwide attention, but it is, in essence, no different
from other capital cases. Across the country, the legal process for the death
penalty has shown itself to be discriminatory, unjust and incapable of being
fixed. Just last week, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Duane
Buck, an African-American, hours before he was to die in Texas because a
psychologist testified during his sentencing that Mr. Buck’s race increased the
chances of future dangerousness. Case after case adds to the many reasons why
the death penalty must be abolished.
The grievous errors in the Davis case were numerous, and many arose out of
eyewitness identification. The Savannah police contaminated the memories of four
witnesses by re-enacting the crime with them present so that their individual
perceptions were turned into a group one. The police showed some of the
witnesses Mr. Davis’s photograph even before the lineup. His lineup picture was
set apart by a different background. The lineup was also administered by a
police officer involved in the investigation, increasing the potential for
influencing the witnesses.
In the decades since the Davis trial, science-based research has shown how
unreliable and easily manipulated witness identification can be. Studies of the
hundreds of felony cases overturned because of DNA evidence have found that
misidentifications accounted for between 75 percent and 85 percent of the
wrongful convictions. The Davis case offers egregious examples of this kind of
error.
Under proper practices, no one should know who the suspect is, including the
officer administering a lineup. Each witness should view the lineup separately,
and the witnesses should not confer about the crime. A new study has found that
even presenting photos sequentially (one by one) to witnesses reduced
misidentifications — from 18 percent to 12 percent of the time — compared with
lineups where photos were presented all at once, as in this case.
Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial. Six said the
police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis. The man who first
told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical
evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics
evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the
motive for his conviction.
More than 630,000 letters pleading for a stay of execution were delivered to the
Georgia board last week. Those asking for clemency included President Jimmy
Carter, 51 members of Congress and death penalty supporters, such as William
Sessions, a former F.B.I. director. The board’s failure to commute Mr. Davis’s
death sentence to life without parole was a tragic miscarriage of justice.
A Grievous Wrong, NYT,
20.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/opinion/a-grievous-wrong-on-georgias-death-row.html
The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t
April 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN THOMPSON
New Orleans
I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve
been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors
surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never
punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won
against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they
were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included
proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.
Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else
today.
I was arrested in January 1985 in New Orleans. I remember the police coming to
my grandmother’s house — we all knew it was the cops because of how hard they
banged on the door before kicking it in. My grandmother and my mom were there,
along with my little brother and sister, my two sons — John Jr., 4, and Dedric,
6 — my girlfriend and me. The officers had guns drawn and were yelling. I guess
they thought they were coming for a murderer. All the children were scared and
crying. I was 22.
They took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man
I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been
arrested as a suspect in the murder. A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring
and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was
the murder weapon.
My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like
someone who had recently tried to rob his children. Suddenly I was accused of
that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there
was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’
identification.
After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder
trial. So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the
gun from Kevin Freeman. And now that I officially had a history of violent crime
because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death
penalty.
I remember the judge telling the courtroom the number of volts of electricity
they would put into my body. If the first attempt didn’t kill me, he said,
they’d put more volts in.
On Sept. 1, 1987, I arrived on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary —
the infamous Angola prison. I was put in a dead man’s cell. His things were
still there; he had been executed only a few days before. That past summer they
had executed eight men at Angola. I received my first execution date right
before I arrived. I would end up knowing 12 men who were executed there.
Over the years, I was given six execution dates, but all of them were delayed
until finally my appeals were exhausted. The seventh — and last — date was set
for May 20, 1999. My lawyers had been with me for 11 years by then; they flew in
from Philadelphia to give me the news. They didn’t want me to hear it from the
prison officials. They said it would take a miracle to avoid this execution. I
told them it was fine — I was innocent, but it was time to give up.
But then I remembered something about May 20. I had just finished reading a
letter from my younger son about how he wanted to go on his senior class trip.
I’d been thinking about how I could find a way to pay for it by selling my
typewriter and radio. “Oh, no, hold on,” I said, “that’s the day before John Jr.
is graduating from high school.” I begged them to get it delayed; I knew it
would hurt him.
To make things worse, the next day, when John Jr. was at school, his teacher
read the whole class an article from the newspaper about my execution. She
didn’t know I was John Jr.’s dad; she was just trying to teach them a lesson
about making bad choices. So he learned that his father was going to be killed
from his teacher, reading the newspaper aloud. I panicked. I needed to talk to
him, reassure him.
Amazingly, I got a miracle. The same day that my lawyers visited, an
investigator they had hired to look through the evidence one last time found, on
some forgotten microfiche, a report sent to the prosecutors on the blood type of
the perpetrator of the armed robbery. It didn’t match mine; the report, hidden
for 15 years, had never been turned over to my lawyers. The investigator later
found the names of witnesses and police reports from the murder case that hadn’t
been turned over either.
As a result, the armed robbery conviction was thrown out in 1999, and I was
taken off death row. Then, in 2002, my murder conviction was thrown out. At a
retrial the following year, the jury took only 35 minutes to acquit me.
The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish
district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of
evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.
Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first
surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury
investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he
called it off.
In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they
did to me. The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been
assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them,
“We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.” The jury
awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row —
which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict
is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.
I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid
evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed
are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no
criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no
one can be sued.
Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men
one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their
convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were
sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I
was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more
than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom
have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those
cases to see how many others might be innocent.
If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood
evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.
A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me.
John Thompson is the director of Resurrection After Exoneration,
a support group for exonerated inmates.
The Prosecution Rests,
but I Can’t, NYT, 9.4.2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10thompson.html
30 Years Later, Freedom in a Case With Tragedy for All
Involved
September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
HATTIESBURG, Miss. — A little after 10 o’clock on Thursday morning, it was
all up to Phillip Bivens. Just like that. The judge adjourned the hearing and
Mr. Bivens, standing in a red jumpsuit in the corner of the courtroom, could all
of a sudden do anything he wanted. After 30 years in prison, he was not sure
what that was.
“Take it easy, I guess,” he said. “Try to ease my mind.”
Mr. Bivens, 59, and Bobby Ray Dixon, 53, two men who were serving life
sentences, were exonerated by a judge on Thursday morning, their guilty pleas to
the charge of murder erased. The judge said it was likely that another man,
Larry Ruffin, would soon be cleared for the same murder.
There was no special hurry in his case. Mr. Ruffin died in prison eight years
ago.
The expected ruling would be one of only a handful of posthumous exonerations
nationwide, and taken with Thursday’s events, a rare triple exoneration.
Nonetheless, said Emily Maw, the director of the Innocence Project of New
Orleans, the law center that pressed for the men’s release, the case has been
nothing but a series of tragedies.
On a warm night in early May 1979, a man broke into the home of Eva Gail
Patterson, raped her and cut her throat in front of her 4-year-old son. Ms.
Patterson, whose 2-year-old was sleeping in the next room and whose husband was
working offshore on an oil platform, stumbled to her neighbor’s carport, where
she collapsed and died. The 4-year-old, Luke, told the police that a single man,
“a bad boy,” had killed his mother.
Larry Ruffin, 19 at the time, was picked up a few days later. The night of the
murder he had been on leave from a halfway house, where he was sent after
stealing some beer from a store. Over the next few weeks, he gave several
statements, contradictory on many points but all conforming to the same basic
storyline: He had raped and killed Ms. Patterson, and he had acted alone.
Mr. Ruffin soon recanted, however, saying that he had been physically coerced by
law enforcement officials into confessing, and maintained his innocence. Over a
year later, just before Mr. Ruffin’s trial was set to begin, the police
interviewed Mr. Dixon, who had been with Mr. Ruffin at the halfway house at the
same time. Mr. Dixon told them that Mr. Ruffin had killed Ms. Patterson, but
said that he had been with him that night. Mr. Dixon, who pleaded guilty to
murder, apparently said Mr. Bivens was with them as well, though no records
exist of that first interview.
Mr. Bivens, who had returned to his home in California several months earlier,
was arrested by police officers who showed up at his door one night.
“I’d never been on a airplane before,” he said on a car ride out of Mississippi
after the hearing. “I thought they were going to kill me. I thought they were
going to get me up there and push me out.”
Back in Hattiesburg, he was told he could be facing the death penalty unless he
pleaded guilty. Law enforcement officials showed him pictures of the crime scene
and asked what he remembered, he said. He had never met Mr. Dixon before, he
said, but, fearing for his life, he backed up Mr. Dixon’s account.
“All of these things, it’s hard to push them out of my mind,” he said on the car
ride, staring out the window. “I don’t like to think about it. I feel like I
should have been stronger than that.”
The trial, in the winter of 1980, was based almost exclusively on the three
statements.
On the stand, Mr. Dixon, who described himself as a “hard learner” who could
barely read, began to contradict his own testimony. Finally, he said that he had
not been with the other two that night and that he did not even know what Ms.
Patterson looked like. He said that he had been kicked in the head by a horse as
a child and ever since had suffered seizures.
“I don’t have the right mind,” he said on the witness stand. “My mind comes and
goes, and I don’t like to see nobody took away for nothing they ain’t done.”
Mr. Ruffin was convicted, though a hung jury prevented a death sentence. He was
sentenced to life in prison and died of a heart attack in 2002.
Mr. Dixon, whose seizures were so frequent in prison that guards gave him a
baseball batting helmet, developed lung cancer last year, which has since spread
to his brain.
A couple of years earlier, lawyers for the Innocence Project had received an
application for help from Mr. Dixon through a corrections officer. The lawyers,
pointing to studies that show the frequency of false confessions, requested a
DNA test of the evidence from the rape kit.
In July, the results came back. They implicated a man named Andrew Harris, who
had lived just up the road from Ms. Patterson. In 1982, he was convicted of a
rape outside Hattiesburg and is now serving a life sentence.
Law enforcement officials are now investigating his connection to the Patterson
case.
Mr. Dixon was granted medical parole after the test results came in and has been
out of prison since. Only Mr. Bivens remained.
The courtroom on Thursday was full of people who last came together 30 years
ago. Mr. Ruffin’s family members wore “Free at Last” T-shirts, maintaining that
freedom is a state that can be still achieved by the dead.
Mr. Dixon was there, smiling and leaning on a cane carved by his brother. The
Patterson family, including Luke, now in his 30s, was sitting the front row. The
district attorney, the same man who had been in the post in 1979, represented
the state.
After the hearing, Mr. Dixon was taken by his brother a few dozen miles out of
town to a sun-dappled clearing among pine trees, the site of Mr. Ruffin’s grave.
The Ruffin family prayed, sang hymns and released balloons, and Mr. Dixon broke
into sobs.
Earlier, Mr. Bivens stood across the street from the courthouse, in brand-new
clothes still bearing the creases of the display shelf. He carried his
belongings in a pillowcase: two Bibles, a pair of flip-flops, some shampoo, some
socks. The lawyers took him to lunch and then drove him to New Orleans.
He was planning to stay in housing there that was set up especially for
exonerated prisoners. Maybe, he said, he could find a job gardening. And he was
thinking about looking up his old girlfriend, the one he was about to marry
before the police arrived at his door that night.
It is important to have people around you, he said. They keep you from thinking
about things too much. And they serve as an alibi, just in case.
30 Years Later, Freedom
in a Case With Tragedy for All Involved, NYT, 16.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html
Op-Ed Columnist
Innocent but Dead
September 1, 2009
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man
who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed
his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that
there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in
Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.
In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.
Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have
spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was
innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.
It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been put
to death would come to light. It was far from inevitable that this case would be
the one. “I was extremely skeptical in the beginning,” said the New Yorker
reporter, David Grann, who began investigating the case last December.
The fire broke out on the morning of Dec. 23, 1991. Willingham was awakened by
the cries of his 2-year-old daughter, Amber. Also in the house were his year-old
twin girls, Karmon and Kameron. The family was poor, and Willingham’s wife,
Stacy, had gone out to pick up a Christmas present for the children from the
Salvation Army.
Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and
flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows
of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at
the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to
get into the room.
There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a
horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined
house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern) that
they interpreted as evidence of arson.
They noticed deep charring at the base of some of the walls and patterns of soot
that made them suspicious. They noticed what they felt were ominous fracture
patterns in pieces of broken window glass. They had no motive, but they were
convinced the fire had been set. And if it had been set, who else but Willingham
would have set it?
With no real motive in sight, the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, was
quoted as saying, “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart
throwing.”
Willingham was arrested and charged with capital murder.
When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to
change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and
hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children
saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an
effort to get to the girls.
And you could almost have guaranteed that a jailhouse snitch would emerge. They
almost always do. This time his name was Johnny Webb, a jumpy individual with a
lengthy arrest record who would later admit to being “mentally impaired” and on
medication, and who had started taking illegal drugs at the age of 9.
The jury took barely an hour to return a guilty verdict, and Willingham was
sentenced to death.
He remained on death row for 12 years, but it was only in the weeks leading up
to his execution that convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to
emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at
Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in
the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of
arson.
The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on
Feb. 17, 2004.
Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who
was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to
investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.
The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor
through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for
determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that
the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against
Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He
said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened
it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”
Grann told me on Monday that when he recently informed the jailhouse snitch,
Johnny Webb, that new scientific evidence would show that the fire wasn’t arson
and that an innocent man had been killed, Webb seemed taken aback. “Nothing can
save me now,” he said.
Innocent but Dead, NYT,
1.9.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/opinion/01herbert.html
Jill Dando murder: Miscarriages of justice
Barry George is not the first person to be wrongly convicted of murder and
then have their conviction quashed.
Last Updated: 6:27PM BST 01 Aug 2008
The Daily Telegraph
By Caroline Gammell
Stephen Downing spent 27 years in prison for the murder of Wendy Sewell, a
typist who was killed in a churchyard in Bakewell, Derbyshire, in 1973.
His conviction in the so-called "Bakewell Tart" case was hailed as one of
Britain's worst miscarriages of justice when he was freed in January 2002.
Mr Downing received an initial £250,000 payment on release from prison and
further £500,000 in 2006 because he was not told he was under arrest or that he
had the right to a solicitor.
He was 17 with a mental age of 11 when he was convicted of beating 32-year-old
Mrs Sewell to death with a pick-axe handle at a cemetery in Bakewell.
He was arrested and interviewed for about eight hours before admitting the
attack. Later he retracted his confession but was convicted the following year.
Stefan Kiszko was convicted of killing 11-year-old Lesley Molseed in 1976 and
served 16 years before being released in 1992.
The tax clerk, from Rochdale in Greater Manchester, was found guilty of
abducting the girl and then stabbing her on a moor in West Yorkshire.
Mr Kiszko, who was described as "odd and vulnerable", spent nearly two decades
in prison before the Court of Appeal acknowledged that his impotence meant he
could not possibly have killed her.
He died of a heart attack aged 44 just a year after being released.
His mother Charlotte died four months later and because he had no other
relatives, the Government did not have to pay him compensation of more than
£500,000.
Ronald Castree was finally convicted in November 2007, having committed the
crime as a 21-year-old.
Timothy Evans, 25, was hanged on March 9, 1950, for the murder of his wife and
daughter.
Deemed to be of low intelligence, the Welsh van driver with an IQ of 70
apparently "confessed" to killing his wife Beryl and their 14-month-old daughter
Geraldine in 1949.
Three years after his execution, former neighbour John Christie confessed to
strangling eight victims - including Mrs Evans and Geraldine.
Mr Evans received a post-humous official royal pardon in 1966, but his case
helped bring about the abolishment of capital punishment.
His family fought for compensation right up until 2004, arguing that the royal
pardon was "inadequate remedy".
Unemployed Colin Stagg was tried for the murder of 23-year-old Rachel Nickell,
who was killed while walking with her two-year-old son on Wimbledon Common in
1992.
He was charged with murder and spent a year in prison, but the judge presiding
over the case threw out the charges against him because they were based on a
honey trap operation.
Trial judge Mr Justice Ognall described it as "wholly reprehensible'' and
"deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" and threw the evidence out.
Mr Stagg is still trying to claim more than £1 million compensation from the
Metropolitan Police but the case is on hold while the police investigation
continues.
Robert Napper, 41, has been charged with Miss Nickell's murder and appeared in
court last November.
Jill Dando murder:
Miscarriages of justice, DTel, 1.8.2008,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2485830/Jill-Dando-murder-Miscarriages-of-justice.html
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