Mean Justice
Page 63
Shareef Cousin, sentenced to death at age sixteen in Louisiana, is exonerated of the murder charge against him because prosecutors used improper evidence to win his conviction. Prosecutors subsequently dropped the case against Cousin, whose basketball coach had provided an alibi for the time of the murder.
Twenty-six criminal cases against black and Hispanic motorists, all investigated by the same two New Jersey state troopers, grind to a halt when a state probe produces evidence that the troopers had planted and falsified evidence in a number of the cases.
The Florida Supreme Court issues an unprecedented warning to state prosecutors, calling for a halt to the prosecutorial misconduct it was seeing with “unacceptable frequency” in capital cases. If prosecutors fail to observe ethical and legal restraints in the future, despite repeated admonitions from the high court, new laws might have to be carved out by the court to punish prosecutors in future cases, the state justices warned. In freeing a Tampa man, Walter Ruiz, from a death sentence for a 1995 murder, the high court wrote that his trial was “permeated by egregious and inexcusable prosecutorial misconduct.” The court listed six other cases it was forced to reverse in recent years because of the misbehavior of prosecutors.
New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick calls for a grand jury investigation of his own office after revelations that critical evidence of innocence involving a man scheduled to be executed in two weeks had been hidden by his own deputy prosecutors for years. John Thompson had been convicted in two separate trials, first for armed robbery, then for murder. The armed robbery conviction had been used by prosecutors to win the death penalty in the murder case. Newly disclosed blood evidence—known to prosecutors for fourteen years—points to a different suspect in the armed robbery.
In New York, John Duval is released from prison after twenty-six years for an armed robbery and murder in which a key eyewitness—kept jailed for seven months until he testified against Duval—had originally said he never saw Duval at the crime scene. The police report detailing the witness’s original story was kept hidden from defense, judge and jury.
Two days after John Duval was freed, two men in Oklahoma, Dennis Fritz and Ronald Williamson, are released and exonerated after twelve years for a rape and murder case that had devastated their small town of Ada, Oklahoma, in 1982. The case had gone unsolved for five years before prosecutors used bogus scientific analyses to link the two men—a junior high-school science teacher and a minor-league ball player—to hair samples found at the crime scene and on the body of the twenty-one-year-old murder victim. The men were also convicted with the help of a jailhouse informant, who received leniency in exchange for his testimony against the two men. In a bizarre twist, DNA testing done this year not only exonerated Fritz and Williamson but implicated the prosecution informant as the actual rapist and murderer. The testing was done at the urging of lawyers representing Fritz, who was serving a life sentence. Testing was opposed by prosecutors as a waste of time. Williamson got lucky—his appeals had been exhausted and, at one point, he was five days away from execution. His sister had been called and told to make funeral arrangements.
On April 19, the “Citizen’s Protection Act” becomes law—legislation cosponsored by a conservative Republican congressman concerned about prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions at the federal level. The act, vigorously opposed by the U.S. Justice Department, requires federal prosecutors to follow the local ethical rules in the states in which they practice—just as every other lawyer must. Justice Department officials and their legislative allies—including the powerful Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah—fought the legislation, saying the seemingly commonsense notion that prosecutors, like other lawyers, must adhere to ethical regulations, would hamstring the war on crime. They succeeded in killing many of the bill’s original provisions, but its core requirement on ethics passed as a rider to a budget bill. An unprecedented attempt to reign in prosecutorial misconduct, the law nevertheless had limited impact in that it affects only federal prosecutors. The majority of criminal prosecutions—and prosecutorial misconduct—occurs at the state and local level, where the Citizen Protection Act has no authority.
Allegations of misconduct, improper leaks and abuse of power are raised against Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr during his epic confrontation with President Bill Clinton. The nation’s best-known prosecutor and investigator of high-level wrongdoing, Starr himself comes under investigation for allegedly leaking secret grand jury information to the press, and for secret payments allegedly made to a witness who offered testimony against the president. Starr’s tactics also come under attack in the prosecution of presidential friend Susan McDougal and defense witness Julie Steele, both of whom accused Starr of using his power to attempt to persuade them to lie, then prosecuting them when they refused. (McDougal was subsequently acquitted of criminal contempt, and Steele’s jury could not reach a verdict.) Starr was also criticized when he subpoenaed presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury to question him about his comments to the press about two of Starr’s assistants (the comments concerned past allegations of prosecutorial misconduct lodged against the assistants). Starr asserted that Blumenthal—and anyone else who publicly criticizes the special prosecutor in a fashion Starr considers inaccurate—could be guilty of obstruction of justice, a notion many journalistic and legal observers condemn. Ken Starr, more than any public figure or criminal case has ever done in the past, has made the general public aware of the sweeping power prosecutors possess in contemporary America: how a prosecutor often answers to no authority but his own conscience and sense of duty; how he may remain unbowed even before the President of the United States; and how the grand juries he convenes have become his tools rather than the checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. What is not as abundantly clear to the public is the fact that Starr’s extraordinary powers and absence of accountability are in large part shared by every local, county, state and federal prosecutor in America.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humes, Edward.
Mean justice : a town’s terror, a prosecutor’s power, a betrayal of innocence/
Edward Humes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Criminal justice, Administration of—California—Kern County.
2. Prosecution—California—Kern County. 3. Judicial error—
California—Kern County. 4. Dunn, Patrick O’Dale—Trials, litigation, etc.
5. Trials (Murder)—California—Kern County. I. Title.
KFC1199.K472C724 1999
364.15’23’0979488—dc21
98-43801
CIP
ISBN 978-1-4767-0267-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-1172-0 (eBook)