Mean Justice (78 page)

The conviction of Thomas R. Merrill for a double murder committed during a coin-shop robbery in Orange County, California, is thrown out because a prosecutor hid a witness statement that exonerated Merrill.

1992

Kerry Kotler is freed after eleven years in prison for rape, burglary and robbery in Suffolk County, New York. Long before his release, Kotler had proved that he was the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, police perjury, and concealment of evidence (the victim in the case originally failed to identify Kotler as the rapist). But this was deemed harmless error, and Kotler lost all his appeals. In 1990, however, DNA testing showed conclusively that Kotler could not have committed the crime. The Suffolk County District Attorney continued to fight the case for two more years before Kotler finally was declared innocent and released.

Sabrina Butler walks off death row after her 1990 conviction for murdering her nine-month-old child is overturned. The Mississippi Supreme Court finds that prosecutors insisted the young mother had killed her baby when the evidence suggested that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was actually the cause.

High school principal Jay Smith, sentenced to death for three killings in Upper Merion, Pennsylvania, is released by the state supreme court because of egregious prosecutorial misconduct and the withholding of evidence that would have helped Smith’s defense. The case was the subject of a television miniseries and a book.

Citing prosecutorial misconduct, a federal appeals court in San Diego throws out the convictions of four Mexicans and three Bolivians who supposedly ran a massive cocaine importation ring called the “Corporation.” Federal prosecutors hid from the defense a memo that detailed their chief witness’s many lies, his lack of credibility and the false allegations he had made in the past. Federal authorities also kept secret the fact that this informant was given free run of government offices, telephones, undercover sports cars, undercover houses and other perks in exchange for testimony favorable to the prosecution. By keeping this information secret, prosecutors were able to suggest to the jury their witness was a trustworthy fellow with no incentive to lie.

In the case of the “Prime Time Rapist” in Tucson, Arizona, in which an innocent man was wrongfully arrested, kept incommunicado, relentlessly interrogated by police, then publicly named even as investigators realized they had the wrong man, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decides that the normal immunity from liability that protects law-enforcement officials does not apply. The court decides that Michael Cooper, falsely accused of being the culprit, should be allowed to sue officials for their misconduct, as the violations of his constitutional rights were simply too premeditated, systematic and egregious. Tucson had been beset by a serial rapist from 1984 to 1986, one who struck in the early evening by brazenly striding into the homes of his victims as they watched television—thus, “Prime Time Rapist.” Police and sheriff’s officials created an arrest plan that they put into motion when Cooper was picked up after his fingerprints were mistakenly matched to one of the rape scenes. According to the plan, they ignored Cooper’s pleas to see a lawyer, refused to allow him to remain silent, and pushed him to confess for hours on end. In essence, the plan called for violating every one of his constitutional rights, lying to him about evidence and witnesses, and subjecting him to as much stress and pressure as possible, so he would “crack.” Later, when the fingerprint error was discovered, Cooper was released, but it took two months for the police to publicly clear him. (The real rapist eventually was caught.) The appeals court was so outraged by the conduct of officials in Tucson that they began their opinion with the following statement: “It is an abiding truth that nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard for the charter of its own existence.”

Jay Kerr, a former Disney movie actor, is freed from his drug-conspiracy conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct, after an appeals court concludes that a federal prosecutor in Montana improperly vouched for the reliability of an informant in the case.

Federico M. Macias is freed from his death sentence in Texas after coming within two days of execution. An appeals court found
that Macias had received a grossly incompetent, government-paid defense attorney who did virtually nothing in the case, while the prosecution ignored substantial evidence of Macias’s innocence in order to secure his conviction. Once the conviction was overturned, the grand jury refused to indict him a second time—normally a rubber-stamp process for the prosecution—because there literally was no legitimate evidence of his guilt.

In
United States vs. Yizar,
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta overturns an arson conviction because the prosecutor failed to reveal that an accomplice in the case said the defendant was innocent.

In the case of
Jacobs vs. Singletary,
a convicted murderer receives a new trial from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit when it is learned prosecutors kept secret a key witness’s original statement that he did not know who fired the fatal shot—exactly the opposite of his testimony at trial.

A series of major federal drug convictions in New York City are reversed because prosecutors concealed the highly pertinent fact that the group of drug agents involved in the cases had developed a pattern of committing perjury and were themselves under criminal investigation.

In
Walker vs. City of New York,
a convicted murderer won his freedom after two decades when it was finally proven that prosecutors had pursued the defendant’s conviction and continued imprisonment even though they were aware of his probable innocence, and lied and concealed evidence in the process. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, in freeing the man, criticized the entire chain of command at the local district attorney’s office, finding the agency had failed to train trial attorneys “in such basic norms of human conduct as the duty not to lie or persecute the innocent.”

Coal miner Roger Keith Coleman is executed in Virginia despite substantial new evidence of innocence in the murder of
a young woman. His appeal failed not because the new evidence was lacking, but because his lawyers were three days late in filing it. Coleman produced uncontroverted evidence that police and prosecutors had favorable information and witnesses while concealing the existence of another suspect. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, however, calling Virginia’s decision to deny Coleman a new hearing because of the three-day filing delay a matter of “states’ rights.”

Sonia Jacobs is freed from death row in Florida, where she had been sentenced for the 1976 murders of two policemen at a highway rest stop. Prosecutors kept secret the fact that their star witness in the case—an alleged accomplice in the crime—had failed a lie-detector test. After being granted a new trial, Jacobs pleaded no contest in exchange for a sentence of time served. Her codefendant, Jesse Tafero, did not fare so well: his execution had already been carried out in 1990, before evidence of prosecutorial misconduct surfaced.

John Henry Knapp is freed from further prosecution after coming within three days of execution for the 1973 arson death of his baby in Arizona. Shortly after the fatal fire, Knapp confessed to the crime, but then recanted within minutes, saying he was only trying to protect his wife, who had fled the state. He maintained his innocence from then on, but was convicted anyway. At trial, the gas can that started the fire was introduced, and Maricopa County prosecutors presented evidence that the prints on it were smudged and unidentifiable. But the prosecution knew this to be a lie: there were usable prints, none of them Knapp’s. When the state attorney general took over the case on appeal, it learned that the prints on the can belonged to Knapp’s wife, who had been given immunity but was never called to testify. The prosecution had also kept hidden a secret tape recording of Knapp’s phone call to his wife moments after his confession—in which he confided in her he was innocent but had confessed in order to protect her. When Knapp asked her to come home, she responded, “They’ll have to come and get me.” Knapp’s defense would eventually allege that the prosecution ignored and kept secret more than
a hundred witness interviews that would have helped prove his innocence. When he was finally granted a new trial, Knapp agreed to plead no contest to a lesser charge in exchange for his immediate freedom.

1993

A thirty-six-year-old developmentally disabled Navy supply worker and church volunteer named Dale Akiki is freed after spending thirty months in jail on charges of molestation and satanic ritual abuse. After a seven-month trial, Akiki’s jury acquitted him in just a few hours, then harshly criticized the San Diego County District Attorney for filing the case at all. The investigation mirrored many of the discredited molestation-ring cases in Bakersfield and elsewhere, like them featuring extremely suggestive interviews of children, no physical evidence and increasingly wild and disprovable allegations by young children that included the ritual sacrifice of elephants, giraffes and the hanging of children upside down during molestation, all of which supposedly occurred during a series of ninety-minute Sunday-school classes where Akiki was a volunteer baby-sitter. The case was handled by therapists, investigators and prosecutors who had become convinced that San Diego was a hotbed of satanic child abusers, and their questioning of the children reflected that bias, a subsequent county grand-jury investigation concluded. There was no evidence to support that belief beyond simple hysteria, the grand jury reported after consulting with experts from the FBI. The grand-jury report detailed an entire series of such false prosecutions in the San Diego area and chastised the gullibility, bias and hysteria of a local task force—since disbanded—linked to most of the problems. The district attorney in office at the time, who had been reelected more often than any other prosecutor in the state, lost his subsequent bid to serve another term in office.

Margaret Kelly Michaels, in prison since 1988, is freed from her conviction on 115 counts of child abuse stemming from allegations that she had sexually assaulted twenty young students at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New
Jersey, where she worked part-time while saving up for acting school. The twenty-five-year-old woman was accused of forcing the children to have sex with her, lick peanut butter off her genitals, and insert objects into her anus. She was also accused of sodomizing them with knives and forks, and forcing them to eat feces and urine. Moreover, the children spoke of Michaels being able to levitate cars and trees, assaulting them with swords, and amputating little boys’ penises. All of the abuse allegedly took place in the day-care center when other teachers, as well as parents and children, were present in the building. No medical evidence confirmed the abuse. During Michaels’ appeal, forty-five psychologists and child-development experts filed a brief attesting to the fact that the children had been subjected to a veritable brainwashing by police and prosecution, in which adult interrogators convinced children that they knew Michaels had done bad things and that the authorities needed the help of the children to keep her locked up. Kids who gave the “right” answers were rewarded with police badges and other gifts; those who gave the “wrong” answers about abuse at Wee Care were denied food or humiliated. The appeals court that granted Michaels a new trial deplored the prosecution’s interrogation of the children, saying it denied Michaels a fair trial. The following tape-recorded exchange between interrogator and child was typical:

(After the conviction was reversed and she was freed, another year and a half passed before prosecutors in New Jersey finally decided not to retry Michaels, and she was fully exonerated.)

Sixty-five-year-old Columbus, Ohio, businessman Bill Garland, who had been convicted of interstate fraud in federal court, has his conviction overturned on appeal because prosecutors had charged him without fully investigating the case, and in so doing, prosecuted a fraud where the victim said there was no crime (Garland had paid him back) and ignored evidence of his innocence. Prosecutors told the jury that Garland was involved with a gold-trading fraud, though there was no evidence to support this allegation.

Walter “Johnny D” McMillian of Monroeville, Alabama, is freed from his 1986 death sentence and declared innocent. The three main witnesses against him later revealed how they were coerced and pressured by police into incriminating McMillian (a tape of one such session, long kept secret by the police, was inadvertently handed over to one of McMillian’s defense attorneys, corroborating the witnesses’ claims). The pressure to convict McMillian was so great that he was actually held on death row
before
he went to trial. Though he had many alibi witnesses, no criminal record, and there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder of a young employee of a dry-cleaning shop, McMillian did not see his case reopened until
60 Minutes
did a report on his pending execution. Prosecutors eventually admitted to mishandling the case, and McMillian went on to testify before Congress about the plight of an innocent man on death row: “I was wrenched from my family, from my children, from my grandchildren, from my friends, from my work that I loved, and was placed in an isolation cell, the size of a shoe box, with no sunlight, no companionship, and no work for nearly six years. Every minute of every day, I knew I was innocent.”