Mean Justice (83 page)

A veteran gang prosecutor in San Diego is fired for acting unethically in handling confidential informants in a murder case and a conspiracy case, both of which had been reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Jemal Kasim had been convicted of hiring two men to injure a rival gang member, but was freed after it was learned that the prosecutor had secretly worked for leniency on behalf of a key witness while telling jurors that he planned to prosecute. A judge holding hearings on the matter concluded that the prosecutor had not been truthful on the witness stand about his actions in the case, and even the prosecutor’s own boss accused him of withholding evidence from the defense. Another man, Jerauld Harrell, convicted of stabbing a rival gang member to death, was granted a new trial when it was revealed that, during a closed hearing with the judge on the case, the prosecutor proposed that witnesses deny under oath that one of them was an informant. A subsequent San Diego County Grand Jury report criticized the entire gang-prosecution unit for mishandling
informants and thereby jeopardizing a host of criminal cases and convictions.

After nearly fourteen years in Alabama state prison, two brothers, Dale and Ronnie Mahan, are released and granted new trials after DNA tests show they had been wrongfully convicted of a 1983 rape and kidnapping. The prosecution’s main witness—the rape victim—had lied about the source of semen found on her clothing after the rape. It belonged to a boyfriend she had never mentioned because she was married to another man at the time. The boyfriend, who defense attorneys now believe was the rapist, was subsequently killed in an unrelated confrontation with police in Mississippi. Despite the DNA tests and the victim’s lies, prosecutors in Alabama announced that they intended to prosecute the Mahan brothers again in an attempt to return them to prison.

In Philadelphia, where nearly three hundred felony convictions were overturned because of police corruption, a new revelation threatens to overturn even more cases: a training video for young district attorneys, instructing them how to lie and how to keep minorities off juries. The tape was made by a prosecutor running for the post of district attorney. “You don’t want those people on your jury,” prosecutor Jack McMahon says on the video, describing his belief that young blacks are less likely to convict criminals. “The only way you’re going to do your best is to get jurors that are unfair and more likely to convict than anybody else in that room.” (McMahon lost the election.)

Because of misconduct by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, former Black Panther Party leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt is released after spending twenty-five years in prison for a wrongful murder conviction. Prosecutors had concealed the fact that the key witness in the case was a government informant who was given money and allowed to carry guns even though he was a convicted felon. Prosecutors then let their witness lie about his role as an informant while testifying against Pratt. Other evidence surfaced, through the testimony of a retired FBI agent, that the FBI knew Pratt was in another
city at the time of the murder, but kept silent because they were “at war” with the Black Panthers. The Los Angeles County District Attorney decided not to retry Pratt.

Texas Governor George W. Bush refuses to grant a pardon to Kevin James Byrd of Houston, who spent twelve years in prison for a rape that DNA testing later proved he could not have committed. Bush, who aspires to the presidency and relishes his tough-on-crime reputation, rejected the unanimous recommendation of the state board of pardons, as well as pleas from the judge who presided over Byrd’s case and the prosecutors who convicted him, all of whom now say that Byrd is innocent. The victim in the case, who was raped while eight months pregnant, had originally told police that her assailant was white, but though Byrd is black, he was still convicted. Texas law does not allow new evidence to overturn convictions after more than thirty days, leaving a governor’s pardon as Byrd’s only way out. (Bush eventually relented and pardoned Byrd.)

The practice of police officers perjuring themselves in order to secure wrongful convictions in criminal cases—“testilying”—becomes so rampant in Boston that the chief judge for the Superior Court of Suffolk County creates a reporting system to refer all such cases for prosecution as they arise. The judge’s move came after an embarrassing series of stories appeared in the
Boston Globe
that demonstrated the sometimes impossible testimony by police officers used to win convictions, often with prosecutors’ acquiescence or active participation, along with the burying of evidence that could prove innocence. Even when caught testilying, officers were not disciplined or prosecuted in the past; one was even promoted. One man who spent six years in prison for attempting to murder a police officer, Christopher Harding, receives a new trial after his case is publicized in the
Globe
series; the judge hearing the case finds the Boston police “perpetrated a fraud on the court” by concealing the whereabouts of a police officer who could have exonerated Harding.

1998

After nearly a decade on death row, Shawn Hill of Los Angeles is freed from his conviction and death sentence, because of the
gross misconduct of Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Rosalie Morton, a seventy-four-year-old career prosecutor with a storied history punctuated with repeated allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. The California Supreme Court took the unusual step of naming Morton in its published opinion, accused her of conducting a “pervasive campaign to mislead the jury” during Hill’s trial in a 1986 drug-robbery-and-murder case and of perpetrating “a mountain of deceit” in order to win. “Morton’s actions, at times childish and unprofessional and at other times outrageous and unethical, betrayed her trust as a public prosecutor,” the court wrote. “Her methods were deceptive and reprehensible.” Morton was said to have misstated and mischaracterized evidence, told the jury information that was not in evidence, misstated the law and told “outright falsehoods.” The court found that Morton’s misconduct helped win Hill’s conviction despite the testimony by two of three eyewitnesses who said Hill had not committed the murder. Morton had been cited for misconduct in three other criminal cases in the seventies and eighties, and a federal magistrate in 1989 had recommended she be disbarred for unethical conduct, though a judge rejected the recommendation. In addition, a 1977 opinion cited her for twenty transgressions during a robbery trial, including threatening to kick the defense lawyer in the ankle and hit him in the face. That conviction was upheld, however, and Morton was reported to have bragged about her performance in the case. Despite this history, Morton was not removed from prosecuting cases for her office until after the Hill decision was made public.

In the same week that it frees Shawn Hill, the California Supreme Court—known as a conservative body that upholds almost every capital conviction—reverses another death sentence, this time ordering a new trial for John Brown, convicted of killing a policeman in Garden Grove, California, in 1980, again because of prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecution failed to disclose a lab report that would have lent support to Brown’s defense of diminished capacity. The supreme court ordered Brown to be retried or to have his conviction reduced to the non-capital offense of second-degree murder.

In the small town of Linden, Alabama (population 2,500), Goodloe Sutton, the editor of the
Democrat Reporter
newspaper, withstands death threats, advertising losses, subscription cancellations and other repercussions when he documents extortion, petty theft, drug trafficking, framing of innocents and other misconduct by the most powerful politician in the county, Sheriff Roger Davis. The case demonstrates the difficulty in reining in misconduct by law-enforcement officials. Sutton had complained for years to Alabama authorities, who ignored both his stories and the blatant corruption displayed by Davis’s department, which enjoyed the support of powerful politicians throughout the state. Finally, federal authorities stepped in and prosecuted the sheriff and two of his men, including the county’s chief drug-enforcement officer. Davis received a twenty-seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to extortion.

Five New York City police officers are indicted under federal civil rights statutes in a case that sparked national outrage—the alleged torture and sexual assault in a police station of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, who was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub where a brawl had taken place. Louima was never charged with any offense. However, he required four operations to repair his ruptured bladder and colon from when the policemen sodomized him with a nightstick. A supervisor was indicted for allegedly lying under oath about the incident.

A study of the quality of government-appointed defense attorneys reveals that minimum-wage employees at McDonald’s often make more money per hour of work than some states pay defense attorneys for the poor in murder cases. According to a study by the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, the maximum indigent-defense fee in Virginia, for example, is $265 for investigating, litigating and defending a felony charge that carries a punishment of twenty years or less; the fee rises to a maximum of $575 if the potential sentence exceeds twenty years. (By comparison, a top-flight criminal-defense attorney hired privately would earn more than that in one hour of trial in a murder case.) According to the study, an Alabama lawyer who spends five hundred hours preparing for a death-penalty
trial will make $4 an hour. The study is replete with case histories of underpaid lawyers who slept through key portions of trials, appeared in court drunk or unprepared, or displayed complete ignorance of the law—and resulting convictions that were allowed to stand.

In Washington, Benjamin Harris is freed from his conviction and death sentence for the 1984 murder of Jimmie Turner. Harris maintained all along that he had been framed, but his attorney, in preparing for the capital case, only talked to his client for a mere two hours and interviewed but three of thirty-two witnesses. On appeal, Harris was granted a new trial because of his incompetent defense. (A codefendant, more ably represented, had been acquitted.) Prosecutors chose not to retry him, but, unwilling to give up, instead attempted to have him confined as insane despite previously arguing that he was sane enough to be tried for the murder. A jury heard the matter and ordered his release from a mental hospital.

Robert Hayes, convicted in Florida and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a coworker, is exonerated at a second trial. He had been convicted on the basis of faulty DNA evidence presented by the prosecution, but was granted a new trial by the Florida Supreme Court. Prosecutors continued to press charges even though the victim was found clutching the hairs of her presumed attacker—which came from a white person. Hayes is black.

New York City police burst through the door of the home of Ellis Elliott of the Bronx, dragging him naked from bed into the hallway of his apartment building and then force him to sit there for an hour before finally bringing him women’s clothing to wear to the police station. “You’re nothing but an animal, nigger. You don’t deserve any clothes,” he recalls one officer telling him. The police had a warrant to search for drugs, and though they find none, Elliott is still hauled to jail and locked up overnight. Only then did the police realize that they had gone to the wrong apartment and arrested and humiliated an innocent man by mistake. They sent him home, still in
women’s clothes, where he found his apartment, minus a front door, filled with police officers watching television and helping themselves to the contents of his refrigerator. Another team of NYPD officers that same day did the same thing in a search for drugs at the apartment of Shaunsia Patterson, who was eight months pregnant and at home with her two young children and teenaged sister when police broke the door down. Once again, they had targeted the wrong apartment in the wrong building. The officers screamed obscenities and abuse at the pregnant woman, who was so terrified by the invading wave that she wet herself. Furniture was destroyed, flooring removed, the refrigerator was broken and Patterson was kept handcuffed in her soiled clothes for several hours.
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert, who documented both incidents in successive newspaper columns, wrote, “It is difficult to overstate the terror that is provoked by these inherently dangerous commando-like raids on the premises of innocent people. It is the sort of thing you would expect from a totalitarian state, not the municipal government of a city like New York.” The city has yet to offer an apology or compensation in either case.

The FBI reaches a $1 million settlement with whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst, who claimed to have been harassed and mistreated for revealing misconduct and shoddy work at the once-vaunted FBI crime laboratory. Under the terms of the settlement, Whitehurst will be given FBI reports and will set up a review panel to examine potential government misconduct in thousands of criminal cases in which the lab’s work and analyses were critical tools for prosecutors. The cases range from mundane drug convictions to murders to the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.

Forty-four law-enforcement officers from five police agencies in and around Cleveland, Ohio, are charged with taking money to protect cocaine traffickers, hiring themselves out as security guards for criminals, trafficking in drugs themselves, covering up crimes, framing others for their own criminal acts, and other acts of corruption. Dozens of criminal cases handled by
the officers were immediately called into question, raising fears of innocents wrongly convicted. The Cleveland case represents the latest in a series of police-corruption cases from around the nation, in which 509 officers in forty-seven cities have been convicted in federal courts in the past three years.

Murder charges are dropped for good against Earl Rhoney, convicted of a burglary-murder based solely on bloodhound evidence and an experimental “scent-machine,” which was supposed to have extracted the killer’s scent from the murder victim’s clothing. The Orange County, California, judge who overturned Rhoney’s conviction—and then left office to become district attorney—found that the bias of the bloodhound’s handler more than likely led the dog to choose Rhoney, and subsequent rulings have called into question the reliability of the scent machine. Nineteen at the time of his arrest and conviction, Rhoney spent two years imprisoned before being released.