Convicting the Innocent: Death Row and America's Broken System of Justice
312
Convicting the Innocent: Death Row and America's Broken System of Justice
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Overview
Every day, innocent men across America are thrown into prison, betrayed by a faulty justice system, and robbed of their lives—either by decades-long sentences or the death penalty itself. Injustice tarnishes our legal process from start to finish. From the racial discrimination and violence used by backwards law enforcement officers, to a prison culture that breeds inmate conflict, there is opportunity for error at every turn.
Award-winning journalist Stanley Cohen chronicles over one hundred of these cases, from the 1973 case of the first ever death row exoneree, David Keaton, to multiple cases as of 2015 that resulted from the corrupt practices of NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella (with nearly seventy Brooklyn cases under review for wrongful conviction). In the wake of these unjust convictions, grassroots organizations, families, and pro bono lawyers have battled this rampant wrongdoing. Cohen reveals how eyewitness error, jailhouse snitch testimony, racism, junk science, prosecutorial misconduct, and incompetent counsel have populated America’s prisons with the innocent.
Readers embark on journeys with men who were arrested, convicted, sentenced to life in prison or death, dragged through the appeals system, and finally set free based on their actual innocence. Although these stories end with vindication, there are those that have ended with unjustified execution. Convicting the Innocent is sure to fuel controversy over a justice system that has delivered the ultimate punishment nearly one thousand times since 1976, though it cannot guarantee accurate convictions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632208132 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Stanley Cohen is a veteran award-winning newspaper and magazine journalist. He has worked as an editor, writer, and reporter for newspapers, magazines, and an international news service for more than fifty years and has also taught writing, journalism, and philosophy at Hunter College. He is the author of ten books, including the acclaimed The Game They Played. He lives in Tomkins Cove, New York.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PART I
Official Misconduct
Those who do the arithmetic attest that eyewitness error accounts for more than half the wrongful convictions in the United States. If the identifications of jailhouse snitches are added to the mix, the total would be nearly two-thirds. But while false eyewitness testimony may be the proximate cause in most cases where the wrong man is sent to the death house, it is rarely sufficient to get a conviction. Corrupt practices, usually prosecutorial misconduct, are present in almost every instance, greasing the rails on which hundreds of innocent people are sent to death's door. Misidentifications are not always the honest mistakes of well-meaning citizens doing their civic duty. They are prompted by police eager for an arrest, orchestrated by prosecutors hungry for a conviction, nourished by judges who owe their seats to a public that has not outgrown its wistful nostalgia for frontier justice.
The corrupt practices of those who run the machinery of justice are not the aberrations of an otherwise sound system. They have been woven into the fabric of a social structure that often appears to presume guilt rather than innocence. The ideal of justice that once favored our best instincts has been turned against itself. The great fear of a politician or prosecutor is not that an innocent man may be convicted but that a guilty one might walk free. Which candidate seeking public office today will be ready to chance the prospect of being called soft on crime?
By most educated estimates, about 10 percent of the inhabitants of death row or inmates serving life sentences are innocent. They were put where they are by a combination of such corrupt practices as: police perjury, which has become so commonplace that defense attorneys often refer to testimony by police as "perjumony;" the false testimony offered by those who themselves are in trouble with the law — sometimes suspects, often already incarcerated — who receive favors in return for their fabrications; prosecutors who withhold evidence that might benefit the defense; incompetent or overworked defense lawyers, some of whom have been known to sleep through their clients' trials while presenting virtually no defense at all; and confessions that have been prompted or coerced from suspects who have little or no understanding of how the law works.
When a defendant is acquitted on the basis of such misconduct, there invariably ensues a public outcry that a guilty man may have been turned loose on a technicality. But in truth there are no technicalities, only laws designed to protect the innocent that have been skirted or twisted by those whose power has corrupted the system badly, albeit not yet absolutely.
The Death Row 10 Illinois
They became known as The Death Row 10. Their renown was not of long duration nor did it spread very far, but it earned them at least a footnote in the nation's grim struggle with its penal system. They were all prisoners on Illinois' death row who were alleged to have been beaten and tortured by former Chicago Police Commissioner Jon Burge and his detectives. Although they were not charged at the time, Burge and the detectives were forced into taking early retirement in 1993. Five years later, the ten men joined together inside prison and asked the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP), a national organization that worked at the grassroots level for the abolition of capital punishment, to help them organize.
The CEDP took their cases, and along with volunteer help from other groups including attorneys and students from the Bluhm Legal Clinic of the Northwestern University Law School, four of the men were exonerated. On January 10, 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange, and Stanley Howard on the grounds that they had been physically coerced into confessing to crimes they did not commit. The following day, convinced that the four represented a system that had become totally corrupted, the governor commuted the sentences of all of the remaining 167 prisoners on Illinois' death row. On March, 9, 2011, he signed legislation ending capital punishment in the state of Illinois.
Ryan's action, audacious by any political standard, prompted a new debate regarding the application of capital punishment. Although only four of the ten were exonerated, the case of the Death Row 10 gave impetus to the abolition movement.
Aaron Patterson Illinois
Back in the old neighborhood no one wanted to mess with Aaron Patterson. He was as tough as they came and his reputation as leader of Chicago's Apache Rangers street gang further embellished his tough-guy image. It was that image, no doubt, that contributed to his spending more than fifteen years of his young life on death row for a crime he did not commit.
The crime was the murder of an elderly couple, Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez, who were found stabbed to death in their home on the south side of Chicago in 1986. Patterson was arrested on the basis of a tip provided by a woman named Marva Hall who was the cousin of another suspect. Hall told the police Patterson had admitted to her that he had committed the murders. He was arrested eleven days after the victims' bodies were found. Four hours later he signed a confession. Indicted by a grand jury, he was eligible for the death penalty because there were multiple murders and the crime had taken place during the commission of a burglary, another felony.
Before the trial began, Patterson filed a motion to suppress his confession on the grounds that it had been coerced after four hours of police interrogation during which he had been severely tortured. The motion was denied in Cook County Circuit Court. Patterson's allegation of police abuse was made, in its own crude fashion, at the time of his interrogation. Left alone for about an hour after he promised to confess, Patterson had used a paper clip to etch a message into a metal bench. The message read: "Aaron 4/30 [the date of the interrogation] I lie about murders. Police threaten me with violence. Slapped and suffocated me with plastic. No lawyer or dad. No phone. Signed false statement to murders."
At trial, Patterson testified that he had been intermittently beaten and smothered with a plastic typewriter cover before agreeing to confess. After the brief respite during which he etched his note, Patterson said an officer brought Assistant State's Attorney Kip Owen into the room. Patterson asked if he could speak to Owen alone and the officer left. He told Owen that he had been tortured and asked for an attorney. Owen then left and summoned the officer to return. Patterson testified that the officer threatened him with further torture until he agreed to sign the confession drafted by Assistant State's Attorney Peter Troy. The officer, who was not named in court, was later identified as Jon Burge, at the time a lieutenant and later commander of the police unit. The three men involved in extracting the confession — Burge, Owen, and Troy — were not directly involved in the torture.
The jury wasted little time in returning a verdict of guilty. They also found no mitigating circumstances to prevent the imposition of the death penalty. An appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court brought no relief. It paid little heed to Patterson's charge of physical coercion. Yet, aside from Hall's dubious identification, there was no other evidence on which he could have been convicted, let alone sentenced to death — no forensic evidence, no murder weapon, no physical evidence of any kind. Further, his charge of torture by Burge and his crew could not have been seen as entirely baseless. Substantial evidence had accrued from as far back as the 1970s that they had used torture to extract confessions from scores of prisoners. Just five years before denying Patterson's appeal, the Supreme Court had ordered a new trial for Andrew Wilson, who had confessed to the murder of two Chicago police officers. Wilson said he had been physically coerced into confessing. He maintained that he had been cuffed to a hot radiator and that "electrical shocks had been administered to his gums, lips, and genitals." A doctor who examined him found "multiple bruises, swellings, and abrasions" and several "linear blisters."
Indications continued to grow that torture on the part of Chicago's police department was a common practice. In a civil rights case that followed, a jury found that the City of Chicago has a de facto policy allowing police to physically abuse suspects in cases in which police officers were killed or injured. In 1991, the year before Patterson lost his appeal, the Chicago Police Department's Office of Professional Standards had suspended Burge and two of his assistants following allegations of torture. The month after Patterson lost his appeal, US District Court Judge Milton I. Shadur ordered the release of a secret Chicago Police Department internal report, prepared in1990 by the Office of Professional Standards (OPS) cataloging more than fifty instances of "methodical" and "systematic" torture involving Burge's unit. Specific officers were named in thirty-five of the cases; Burge was personally named in more than half of them. A month later, the Chicago Police Board forced Burge to retire.
At around the same time, Patterson finally caught a break. G. Flint Taylor Jr., an attorney who six years earlier had helped prove that torture had been used in the Wilson case, stepped in and offered to represent Patterson. Marva Hall, whose identification of Patterson was the only evidence other than his confession to implicate him in the crime, had signed an affidavit saying that she had initially fabricated her testimony to protect her cousin. She also said she had tried to recant before testifying but decided against it when Assistant State's Attorney Jack Hynes threatened her with jail if she did.
Taylor filed a petition for post-conviction relief, asking Judge John E. Morrissey for an evidentiary hearing on Patterson's torture allegations growing out of the OPS report. Morrissey denied the petition, saying, "any nexus between Area 2 Chicago Police Department headquarters' alleged systemic torture of people and Aaron Patterson is highly tenuous at best." Taylor appealed, and in 2000 the Illinois Supreme Court concluded that "substantial new evidence supports defendant's claim that his confession was the result of police brutality" and ordered Morrissey to hold the hearing. However, months passed without a hearing being scheduled. At that point, a group of attorneys led by Locke E. Bowman of the Macarthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School entered the case and demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations of torture. In April 2002, Presiding Judge Paul E. Biebel, of the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court, granted the request. In the meantime, Taylor had filed a petition with the Illinois Prisoner Review Board requesting a pardon for Patterson based on innocence. On January 10, 2003, Governor Ryan granted the request, touching off the clearing of Chicago's death row and the abolition of capital punishment in the state of Illinois.
In 2006, Cook County special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle released the results of an independent investigation into the torture allegations against Burge. They found that Burge approved the torture of criminal suspects for two decades using methods such as electric shock, radiator burns, guns to mouth, and bags pulled over the head. In 2010, Burge was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying he had engaged in misconduct even though, according to the judge, there was a "mountain of evidence" indicating he had. Patterson and the three other Death Row 10 inmates who were freed settled their separate law suits against the city, agreeing to share a $19.8 million payout. But it was not all good news for Patterson. By the time the settlement had been reached, he had returned to prison on a federal gun and drug conviction.
Madison Hobley Illinois
At about two in the morning on January 6, 1987, Madison Hobley was awakened by the smoke alarm in his apartment on East 82nd Street in Chicago. When he opened the door he saw a hall full of smoke. He told his wife, Anita, to get their fifteen-month-old son, Philip, and flee the apartment, but they never made it out. Hobley, shoeless and wearing only his underwear, got out safely. He went to his mother's home, about one mile from the scene. His wife and son perished, along with five other residents of the building.
Early the following morning, two detectives, Robert Dwyer and James Lotito, appeared at his mother's apartment. They told Hobley that the fire had been caused by arson and that they wanted to ask him some questions. Perhaps, they suggested, he might be able to help them identify the arsonists. According to police, Hobley was ready to cooperate and went with them to local police headquarters. Hobley later claimed he was given no choice about accompanying the detectives. At that point, their stories diverged markedly and events started to quickly move beyond Hobley's control.
The police said that following brief questioning at the Area 2 station, Hobley voluntarily went downtown with them to central police headquarters where he confessed to setting the fatal fire. Hobley's version of events was far different. After being taken downtown, he said, he was handcuffed to a chair and kicked by Sergeant Patrick Garrity; then Dwyer, Lotito, and Detective Daniel McWeeney placed a plastic typewriter cover over his head and suffocated him until he blacked out. He said he never confessed.
The case against Hobley was, at best, fragile. Most critically, there was no evidence of a confession. Dwyer said he took notes as Hobley admitted his guilt but inadvertently spilled something on the pages and threw them away when the ink ran. At trial, no tangible evidence of a confession, neither written nor recorded, was submitted. The police testified that Hobley told them that on the night of the fire he took a can to a nearby filling station, bought a dollar's worth of gasoline, and emptied the can in the hallway outside his third-floor apartment and down the stairwell. Then he set a match to the gasoline and tossed the can down in the second-floor hallway.
The gasoline can being the only physical evidence linking Hobley to the crime, the prosecutors produced two witnesses who testified that they saw Hobley buying the gasoline. Andre Council, a customer at the station, testified that he was pumping gas when he saw a man make the purchase. About an hour later, he went to the fire scene, about half a mile from the station, where he saw the man who had purchased the gas. The next day, he saw a photo of Hobley on television, recognized him as the same man, and called the police. The station attendant, Kenneth Stewart, testified that a man had bought a gallon of gas at his station, but failed to identify Hobley in a police lineup. Coaxed by police to choose someone, Stewart selected Hobley as the most likely but said he was uncertain.
With no tangible evidence and only a tenuous identification to support their case, the prosecution produced a two-gallon gas can that another detective, John Paladino, said he found at the fire scene. But even that turned out to be problematic. Detective Virgil Mikus, who testified as an arson expert, told the jury that a burn pattern on the floor in front of the Hobley apartment indicated that gasoline had been poured there, but tests had shown no traces of gasoline in the area. He surmised that it must have been washed away by firefighters when they extinguished the blaze. Critically, Hobley's fingerprints were not found on the can, but that bit of information was withheld by the prosecution until some years later.
The jury found Hobley guilty and found no mitigating circumstances that would preclude the death penalty, which the judge imposed. Four years later, in 1994, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the sentence. The following year, Hobley's appellate attorneys — Professor Andrea Lyon, of the DePaul University College of Law, and Kurt H. Feuer — filed a petition for post-conviction relief in the Circuit Court alleging that the authorities had illegally withheld a forensic report stating that Hobley's fingerprints were not found on the gasoline can. The existence of such a report had been denied by police witnesses during the trial. The defense team also charged that other reports, one of which claimed that police had destroyed a second gasoline can found at the scene, had been suppressed. In total, the reports suggested that the can introduced into evidence had been planted there and that the fire had been set by someone other than Hobley. All the same, Circuit Court Judge Dennis J. Porter denied the petition without a hearing. In 1998, however, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed Porter and remanded the case for an evidentiary hearing. The court stated: "At defendant's trial, the defense theory was that another person had started the fire. The negative fingerprint report and the existence of a second gasoline can found at the fire scene certainly would have offered concrete evidentiary support to that defense theory."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Convicting the Innocent"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Stanley Cohen.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Preface: Executing the Innocent,
PART I Official Misconduct,
PART II Eyewitness Error & False Accusation,
PART III False Forensics or Junk Science,
PART IV Snitch Testimony,
PART V False Confession,
PART VI Long-Term Confinement,
Afterword: United States v. Criminal Justice,
Author's Note,
Source Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Related Subjects
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