[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ALA., ILL.

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 10



ALABAMA:

Double Jeopardy----In Alabama, a judge can override a jury that spares a 
murderer from the death penalty.


On an April night in 1997, when Shonelle Jackson was 18, he went out to a local 
club in Montgomery, Alabama. As he and several friends watched a d.j. perform, 
a young man called Cocomo - a gang member from across town - walked up behind 
him and slapped him in the head, then ran off. The next day, Jackson, who had 
no car, approached a known thief named Antonio Barnes and asked him to steal 
him a ride. Jackson wanted to find Cocomo and "holler at him."

Barnes hot-wired a Buick LeSabre, and, with Jackson driving, they picked up 
Barnes's friends Poochie Williams and Scooter Rudolph. All had been drinking or 
smoking weed, and they were armed: Jackson had a .380-calibre handgun, Barnes 
had a .357, Rudolph had a 9-millimetre, and Williams had a shotgun. Cocomo 
could not be found, but at around 11 p.m. a small-time drug dealer named 
Lefrick Moore rolled past in a red Chevrolet Caprice with a booming and clearly 
expensive stereo system.

Jackson followed the Caprice onto a service road, sped past, and cut it off, 
forcing it to a stop. Guns began firing. Moore sprang from the Caprice; he was 
hit once, in the chest, but he attempted to run away. His friend Gerard 
Burdette, who was in the passenger seat, headed in the opposite direction. "No 
need in you running now, motherfucker!" Jackson allegedly yelled while firing 
his weapon.

Burdette escaped, but Moore collapsed in the street and died. Jackson and 
Rudolph fled in the Buick. Williams and Barnes took the Caprice, ripped out its 
stereo, then ditched the car in a pasture on the edge of town. After Williams 
showed Barnes a .380 that he said he'd found in the Caprice, they stashed their 
weapons in the woods and walked home. The next morning, Barnes and Jackson went 
to strip the vehicle, but they were run off by a farmer who had come to the 
pasture to feed his hogs.

Investigators had little evidence to work with: the spent casing of a single 
Mag Tech .380 bullet, shattered automobile glass, the fatal projectile in 
Moore's heart. But 2 days later Barnes turned himself in, giving a "full 
confession," according to a detective's sworn affidavit, and naming Williams, 
Rudolph, and Jackson as accomplices. The next day, Williams and Rudolph 
surrendered.

The 3 suspects in custody identified Jackson as the sole shooter. The police 
went looking for him at the apartment where his mother, Marilyn, lived with his 
2 sisters, Wanda and LaQuanda. Jackson sometimes stopped by with food or money, 
but mostly he stayed at Trenholm Court, a housing project on the north side of 
town. He had grown up there and had been reluctant to leave after his mother 
was evicted and moved to the west side. ("The west side got Bloods - they wear 
red," Wanda told me. "On the north side, the Crips, they do blue and black. 
Shon affiliated with the blue and socialized with the black.")

Jackson had started "holding" for drug dealers at Trenholm at the age of 12. He 
dropped out of school in the 8th grade, and spent a year in juvenile lockup 
after helping to assault and rob a guy who, he claimed, had beat up a friend's 
sister. He was currently on probation for participating in a break-in at a 
pawnshop. On the street, he went by Wendell - his father's middle name. Tall 
and solid, with round cheeks and a bright smile, he had a deep voice and kept 
his hair cut low; his left forearm bore an amateur tattoo of an "S," which his 
father had inked, years earlier, with a needle and thread.

Marilyn consented to an apartment search. After investigators confiscated a box 
of .380-calibre Mag Tech ammunition from a bedroom closet, she called Jackson 
and urged him to talk to the police. Together they went to the station.

It was just after 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and his mother says that he had 
been smoking marijuana. At first, Jackson denied knowing Barnes, Williams, and 
Rudolph. Then a detective told him that his fingerprints had been found on a 
Dairy Queen cup in the stolen Buick. This was a lie, but it had its intended 
effect: Jackson eventually admitted that he had run Moore off the road. But, he 
added, "I ain't kill no one." His account of the incident is much different: he 
says that gunfire flew from all directions, including from Moore's passenger, 
Burdette, who started shooting after Williams fired the shotgun into the air.

All 4 defendants were charged with capital murder - an intentional killing 
accompanied by another felony. In order to secure the death penalty, the state 
would have to prove that the defendants had intentionally killed Moore while 
robbing him.

Jackson went to trial 1st. He knew his co-defendants in passing, but hung out 
with a different crowd, and insisted that they had turned on him to save 
themselves. (After testifying against Jackson, all 3 pleaded guilty to lesser 
offenses, with the understanding that their lives would be spared.)

The prosecutors' case rested overwhelmingly on the co-defendants' story. 
Investigators could not definitively connect the spent casing to the fatal 
projectile, and the only link that prosecutors could establish between the 
casing and the ammunition confiscated at Marilyn's apartment was the Mag Tech 
brand name. (The ammo box yielded no viable fingerprints; Jackson's mother and 
sisters told me it had long been in the apartment and belonged to Jackson's 
father, who had been in and out of jail for years.) The state's ballistics 
expert eventually testified that the lethal bullet could have been fired from 3 
types of gun present on the night of the crime: a .380, a .357, or a 
9-millimetre. Hours after the shooting, the central eyewitness - Moore's friend 
Burdette - told the police that multiple people had fired guns from the Buick.

The only other principal eyewitness not facing the death penalty was a truck 
driver who worked at a chicken-processing plant across the road from the crime 
scene. After the cars collided, he saw flashes of gunfire on the driver's side 
of the Buick; he heard a boom and several pops. He had observed the quickly 
unfolding action from inside his truck, about 65 yards away, on the other side 
of a chain-link fence. It was late at night, and the street light nearest the 
crime scene was out.

The D.A.'s office, possibly foreseeing the difficulty of proving guilt beyond a 
reasonable doubt, offered Jackson a plea bargain: life in prison without the 
possibility of parole. With the death penalty on the table, he should have 
taken the deal. But Jackson declined.

At the time, the state carried out its death sentences with a century-old 
electric chair, Yellow Mama, so named because it was coated in the paint used 
to mark centerlines on highways. Alabama, which has since switched to lethal 
injection, condemns more people to death, per capita, than any other state. As 
Jackson went to trial, in February, 1998, nearly 200 prisoners were awaiting 
execution.

The trial took place in the courtroom of William Gordon, a circuit judge in his 
mid-50s who had been on the bench for 2 decades. Alabama elects its judges, and 
Gordon, a reserved and plainspoken Democrat, had spent most of his career 
running unopposed. He had presided over several noteworthy cases - in 1993, he 
banned the governor from flying the Confederate flag atop the capitol - and his 
colleagues told me that he was considered "brilliant" and "very fair, very 
scholarly."

Testimony began on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Friday morning the trial was 
over. Jackson's 2 court-appointed lawyers - general practitioners who had never 
served as lead counsel in a capital trial - called no expert witnesses and did 
little to exploit weaknesses in the state's case. Burdette, the key eyewitness, 
had disappeared, as had a recording of his interview with the police. 
(Jackson's lawyers, who never spoke to Burdette, presented the jury with only a 
transcript of his statement.) As is common in murder trials, Jackson did not 
testify - his lawyers advised against it. The defense failed to call any 
witnesses who might have attested to the possible motives of Jackson's 
co-defendants in testifying against him. "Basically, nobody got up in his 
defense," Monroe Clark, a letter carrier who served on the jury, told me. "And 
he didn't get up on the stand and defend himself, so we never really knew what 
went down." The jury accepted the co-defendants' narrative and convicted 
Jackson of capital murder.

In a death-penalty trial, a conviction is followed immediately by the 
sentencing phase, in which the prosecution urges execution and the defense 
argues for life in prison without the possibility of parole. The state's 
lawyers argued that Jackson should die, because he had shown that he could not 
"live in an orderly society." Jackson's attorneys called four witnesses; they 
were on and off the stand in minutes. His mother, Marilyn, told the jury, 
"Spare my son's life. I love him. And he is my only son I have, and I need 
him." Jackson's father, Louis Taylor, testified that his son was guilty only of 
hanging out with "the wrong type" of people, adding that perhaps he was to 
blame for his son's problems: "I wasn't around as much as I should have been."

Most states with the death penalty require a unanimous vote of 12 in order to 
impose capital punishment. Alabama requires ten. In this case, the jury 
unanimously rejected the state's request to send Jackson to the electric chair. 
The jurors were reluctant to condemn a teen-ager to death, especially in a case 
with such conflicting evidence. "I had concerns about whether Shonelle Jackson 
was the shooter," a juror named Jan Burkes later said, in a sworn deposition, 
adding, "Other jurors also had concerns about whether Mr. Jackson was 
responsible."

Judge Gordon thanked the jurors and sent them home.

In Alabama, though, a capital case doesn't necessarily end there. The state's 
judges can exercise an unusual power: they can "override" a jury's collective 
judgment and impose the death penalty unilaterally.

In the days after the jury rendered its verdict, Gordon began independent 
deliberations over whether Jackson should live or die. At his request, a state 
probation-and-parole officer prepared a "presentence" investigative report, 
which summarized the case in 8 pages. The report included something that 
prosecutors had been prohibited from presenting at trial: Jackson's juvenile 
record. He had been arrested yearly since the age of 12, first for misdemeanors 
(joyriding on a tractor, trespassing), then for felonies (the assault, the 
pawnshop robbery). The jury had been allowed to factor only the robbery 
conviction into its deliberations, because that case had been handled in adult 
court and wasn't sealed.

In the "Personal/Social History" section, the officer summed up Jackson's life 
in 266 words. ("It appears the only job he has ever had was working with his 
uncle in Millbrook, at Owens' Body.") The section reserved for a psychological 
assessment said, "None." The presentence report didn't mention that when 
Jackson was in juvenile lockup the state had found his I.Q. to be just above 
the threshold for mental retardation. Nor did the report include details about 
Jackson's complicated childhood: Marilyn smoked marijuana while she was 
pregnant with him and used crack in his early youth; she sold the family's food 
stamps, forcing Jackson to provide for his sisters; his parents often had 
physical fights and smoked crack together in the kitchen. Later, Marilyn got 
clean. But her son's mental deficiencies were never addressed. (Wanda told me 
that her mother "wasn't gonna get him tested." As a girl, Marilyn had been 
enrolled in special-education classes, and Wanda believes that her mother 
didn't want people thinking of her children as "slow.")

The officer's report noted that Jackson had already been given chances at 
redemption, including boot camp and probation. It failed to mention that 
Jackson had responded well to the structured environment of juvenile detention: 
Department of Youth Services caseworkers found that he needed to work on his 
"inconsistent behavior" but commended his "favorable response to treatment," 
his "valuable" contributions in anger-management class, and his efforts to earn 
a G.E.D.

As Gordon assessed the report alongside case law and the evidence presented at 
trial, he considered the mitigating and aggravating factors. Proof of mental 
instability, for instance, is a mitigating factor that may spare a defendant 
the death penalty; "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" violence is 1 of 
the 10 aggravators encoded in Alabama law that may do the opposite. Instead of 
merely tallying the factors, jurors, and then the judge, weigh them against one 
another. Jackson's jury had arrived at its unanimous vote to spare his life by 
finding that mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones.

Capital-case judges aren't officially allowed to add aggravating factors to the 
jury's list, but they often do so obliquely, by rebutting claims of mitigating 
evidence with subjective assessments not prescribed by law. For instance, they 
may cite a defendant's apparent lack of remorse. In 1 Alabama capital case, a 
jury found mental retardation to be a mitigating factor - the defendant's I.Q. 
was 65 - but the judge dismissed this by suggesting that people can easily fake 
the condition. In his decision, he recalled reading that "gypsies intentionally 
test low on standard I.Q. tests."

4 months after the jury's verdict, Gordon drafted a sentencing order. He 
suggested that Jackson, in pleading not guilty, had refused to take 
responsibility for his actions. He observed that 3 of Jackson's priors involved 
violent crimes, and that he was on probation - an aggravating factor - at the 
time of Moore's death. Jackson's voluntary statement to police was deemed a 
mitigating factor, as was his "truthfulness" with his mother and the fact that 
he was "no trouble at home." Jackson had a girlfriend and a baby, and there 
were no reports of domestic violence; this was also considered mitigating. 
Gordon diminished the importance of Jackson's youth, a mitigating factor by 
law, partly by commenting on his size: "At the time of the homicide, Jackson 
was 6 feet tall, weighed 175 pounds and was within 35 days of being 19 years 
old," the Judge wrote, calling him "a physically mature adult."

In a curious turn, Gordon twice acknowledged that Jackson might not be the 
killer. The passenger in the Caprice, Gerard Burdette, "did not identify anyone 
with a .380 automatic, and he did not specifically enumerate how many people 
fired shots," he wrote. "He said he heard 4 to 5 shots . . . and because he 
said he saw 2 persons with weapons" - someone with a .357 and someone with a 
9-millimetre - "it could be reasonably inferred that the one or both fired."

The Judge went on, "According to Burdette, and the medical examiner's opinion 
of the type of bullet that killed Moore, the person with the .38 or .357 would 
have fired the fatal shot. That person was Barnes, assuming the testimony can 
be reconciled, because the evidence from Barnes and Williams is that Barnes had 
a .357." In a footnote, Gordon wrote that the evidence "suggests that Barnes, 
not Jackson, fired the shot that killed Moore." He further acknowledged that 
the 3 co-defendants "had an interest in casting Jackson as the leader and prime 
culprit." (Williams received a sentence of life imprisonment. Rudolph will be 
eligible for parole in September, 2015, and Barnes in December, 2017. None of 
them responded to my attempts to speak with them.)

Gordon's reasoning plainly contradicted itself. Even so, he determined that the 
aggravating factors outweighed even the ambiguity about who fired the fatal 
shot. Setting aside the jury's unanimous vote, the Judge ordered that Jackson 
be put to death.

The Jacksons learned of Gordon's override from Marilyn's sister, Thelma Owens, 
who had heard it from a co-worker, who had heard it on the radio. They called 
Ben Bruner, the lead defense attorney, who hadn't heard about the ruling; he 
rushed to the county jail, but by the time he arrived his client had already 
been given the news.

A good capital-defense lawyer establishes a close, mutually informative 
relationship with the defendant and his family, but Bruner and the Jacksons had 
no such bond: the 1st time the Jacksons met their lawyer was at the courthouse, 
as the trial began. The family felt blindsided by the death sentence because 
they had never been told that, in Alabama, a judge could override a jury. 
Jackson was vaguely aware of the override provision, but his lawyers had said 
not to worry about it - the state's initial plea offer had suggested to them 
that the death penalty was off the table.

On July 2, 1998, a week after the Judge released his death order, Jackson 
returned to the courtroom for the formal sentencing. The jury box was now 
empty.

"Mr. Jackson have anything to say in this case why sentence of law should not 
be imposed against him?" Gordon asked.

Standing before the court, Jackson choked up. "Your Honor, I'm very sorry for 
what happened," he said. "And what happened I know shouldn't have happened. 
And, Your Honor, it wasn't planned like that at all. . . . Your Honor, I don't 
want to die. Let me live, please, Your Honor. I don???t want to die."

The Judge was not swayed. As Gordon condemned him to death, Jackson struggled 
to absorb what was happening. "My mother and them crying - I started zoning out 
when I seen my folks crying," he told me recently. "I didn't really comprehend. 
But I knew it was something bad."

Judicial override first entered the American legal system in the 1970s, and was 
conceived as a way of guarding against the overuse of the death penalty. In 
1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court struck down the state's 
death-penalty law, because it was "so wantonly and so freakishly imposed." 
Racial disparities were especially at issue and remain so: in some states, 
black defendants are about 4 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to 
death; the odds are even greater when the victim was white. The Furman ruling 
effectively invalidated death-penalty statutes, and executions stopped 
nationwide.

States were allowed to rewrite their death-penalty laws. To satisfy the Supreme 
Court's concerns about arbitrariness, Florida's new version shifted final 
sentencing authority from jurors to judges - the jury's sentence became merely 
an advisory verdict. Florida's judges were not afforded complete discretion, 
though; they had to give a jury's recommendation "great weight" and could 
exercise override only when the justification for a death sentence was "so 
clear and convincing that virtually no reasonable person could differ." 
Satisfied with these and other changes, the Supreme Court, in 1976, found the 
statutes in Florida, Texas, and Georgia constitutional. Today, 32 states 
sanction capital punishment.

Alabama modelled a new death-penalty statute on Florida's and adopted it in 
1981, but without the "great weight" and "clear and convincing" safeguards. 
Alabama required only that a judge "consider" the jury's sentencing verdict. A 
jury's life-without-parole vote - even a unanimous one - was given no statutory 
standing. As Gordon noted in Shonelle Jackson's death order, "Neither the 
Alabama Death Act nor Alabama case authority informs the trial court how it is 
to consider the advisory verdict."

According to a 1994 paper in the Alabama Law Review by Katheryn Russell-Brown, 
a University of Florida law professor, the state's law putatively offered the 
"perfect combination of jury and judge input: the jury represents the 
community's conscience and the judge represents legal balance and wisdom." But, 
in adopting no statutory standards for override, Alabama constructed a legal 
"facade" that "allows the judge to operate without adequate checks and 
balances." Russell-Brown, one of many scholars who have expressed concerns 
about override, wrote that the state's approach would probably "leave capital 
jurors skeptical at best about the value of their time, effort, and energy."

During jury selection in the Jackson case, a man in the candidate pool asked, 
"Suppose the jury votes against the death penalty. Can the court overrule 
that?"

"It can," Judge Gordon replied. "But that should not be a consideration in your 
vote."

"Why do we go through this exercise, then?"

"Because the legislature passed the law, and I'm here to enforce it," Gordon 
said, adding, "It's not a good answer, but it's the best answer I can give 
you."

Currently, Florida and Delaware are the only other states with override, but 
their judges use the provision very sparingly, and when they do it's almost 
always to convert death sentences to life. Nobody in Delaware is on death row 
because of override, and it has been 15 years since a Florida judge has 
exercised override to impose the death penalty. In 31 of the past 32 years, 
Alabama's judges have condemned someone to death through override at least 
once.

Nearly 70 Alabama judges have single-handedly ordered an inmate's execution, 
and collectively they have done so more than a hundred times. 36 of the nearly 
200 convicts on death row are there because of override.

The potential for error in death-penalty cases is known to be so great - 
according to the National Academy of Sciences, 1 in 25 defendants in America 
will likely be wrongly convicted - that capital punishment is declining 
nationwide. Since the late 90s, the number of executions has dropped by about 
1/2. Alabama, meanwhile, has executed 12 men in the past 4 years, 3 of them 
through override. Certain Alabama judges have exercised override repeatedly. 
The late Ferrill McRae, of Mobile County, used the provision 6 times. McRae was 
1 of 9 local circuit judges but "presided over 30 % of the capital cases 
because he assigned a large number to himself," according to a 1995 Boston 
University Law Review paper by Stephen Bright, an Atlanta-based human-rights 
attorney. Another Mobile County judge, Braxton Kittrell, Jr., who had exercised 
override 5 times, was called Max Brax.

Override execution orders have been carried out 10 times so far. Among those 
put to death was Robert Lee Tarver, Jr., a black man accused of shooting a 
white convenience-store owner, Hugh Kite, in 1984. Tarver was convicted largely 
on the testimony of his co-defendant, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges and 
received a sentence of 25 years. Tarver appealed the judge's override on the 
grounds of racial bias and incompetent counsel - his lawyer had never tried a 
murder case and was a friend of the victim. The appeal failed despite an 
affidavit from the prosecutor admitting that he had illegally struck qualified 
black people from the jury (a longtime problem in Alabama). In April, 2000, 
Tarver went to the electric chair, maintaining his innocence until the end. In 
"Race to Execution," a PBS documentary about the case, a relative of Tarver's 
said of the Kite family, "I'm sure they grieved for their loved one. But I 
would want to make doggone sure you got the right man."

The State of Alabama has not always had the right man. In 1987, Walter 
McMillian, a black pulpwood worker, was accused of killing Ronda Morrison, a 
white 18-year-old dry-cleaning clerk, in Monroeville. The judge, Robert E. Lee 
Key, Jr., had McMillian await trial on death row, as if a death sentence were a 
foregone conclusion, and relocated the trial from a county that was 40 % black 
to an overwhelmingly white one. The trial lasted a day and a half. 12 defense 
witnesses swore that McMillian was at home on the day of the crime, hosting a 
fish fry. There was no physical evidence. Nevertheless, the jury found 
McMillian guilty based on the testimony of t3 state's witnesses, 2 of whom 
reported seeing McMillian's truck at the dry cleaner's around the time that 
Morrison was strangled and shot. The jury recommended life in prison. In 
overriding this decision, Judge Key remarked that McMillian deserved to be 
executed for the "brutal killing of a young lady in the first full flower of 
adulthood." The Judge's confidence was misplaced - McMillian was exonerated 
after his appellate lawyers discovered that prosecutors had withheld evidence 
and that the state's star witnesses had lied. By the time McMillian was set 
free, in 1993, he had spent 6 years on death row.

More than 20 override decisions have involved white defendants, but in some of 
these cases, too, the judge's reasoning has had a racial subtext. In 2000, a 
judge ordering the death of a white defendant noted that if he hadn't 
overridden the jury he'd have "sentenced three black people to death and no 
white people." The comment has been interpreted as an attempt to cover up 
racial disparities in the death penalty. Race is "a real consideration here," 
Douglas Johnstone, a retired Alabama Supreme Court justice, told me. Some 
judges, he said, "want to make sure they put enough white people to death to 
hang on to the prerogative" of override.

The U.S. Supreme Court has considered the constitutionality of override several 
times. In Spaziano v. Florida, a 1984 case that upheld the provision, Justice 
Harry Blackmun declared that the Supreme Court was not about to establish "any 
one right way for a state to set up its capital sentencing scheme." (10 years 
later, Blackmun announced his opposition to the death penalty, calling it 
"fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake.")

In 1995, the Court addressed how heavily an Alabama judge should weigh a jury's 
sentencing verdict. The override case in question involved Louise Harris, a 
woman with a lifelong history of trauma and abuse, who had hired someone to 
kill her husband. In an 8 - 1 decision, the Court declined to require Alabama 
to adopt Florida's "great weight" standard. Such a ruling would constitute 
"micromanagement," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote. In capital cases, she 
declared, the Court "trusts the judge" to level the correct punishment. (The 
opinion validated the viewpoint of override proponents, who have argued that 
judges possess experience, expertise, and a dispassionate approach that jurors 
may lack.) The lone dissenter was Justice John Paul Stevens. Override, he 
observed, allowed a prosecutor "who loses before the jury" to get "a 2nd, fresh 
opportunity to secure a death sentence," in some cases by presenting "the judge 
with exactly the same evidence and arguments that the jury rejected." He wrote, 
"A scheme that we assumed would 'provide capital defendants with more, rather 
than less, judicial protection' has perversely developed into a procedure" in 
which a "defendant's life is twice put in jeopardy."

Death-row inmates have challenged override through the 5th Amendment (double 
jeopardy), the 6th (right to a jury), the 8th (cruel and unusual punishment), 
and the 14th (equal protection). All such efforts have failed. In Ring v. 
Arizona, a 2002 case involving the killing of an armored-car guard, the Court 
held that only a jury can decide if there are aggravating circumstances that 
warrant the death penalty. By stripping judges of the power to add aggravating 
factors, Ring seemed to open a new path to challenging overrides, since they 
largely happen when a judge recalculates a jury's evaluation of mitigating and 
aggravating circumstances. But since then the Supreme Court has not addressed 
the issue directly, other than to declare that Ring was not retroactive.

Last November, the Court had an opportunity to revisit Alabama's override 
provision, through the appeal of a death-row inmate named Mario Woodward. In 
2006, he shot and killed a Montgomery police officer during a traffic stop. 
Woodward had previously served 6 years in prison for killing his girlfriend. In 
the case involving the police officer, the jury voted 8 - 4 for life 
imprisonment, in part because Woodward's childhood was marked by abuse. Judge 
Truman Hobbs, Jr., overrode the recommendation, citing access to information 
during the sentencing phase that the jury had not heard.

Woodward mounted an appeal, but the Court declined to hear the case. Justices 
rarely issue opinions when rejecting a petition for writ of certiorari, but 
this time Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer did. Sotomayor, pointing out that 
the prevalence of override in Alabama may be due to politics, wrote that giving 
unilateral death-sentence power to judges who are seated through partisan 
elections "casts a cloud of illegitimacy over the criminal justice system." 
Noting that the Court had not examined Alabama's death scheme in 18 years, she 
argued that it was time for "a fresh look."

After Shonelle Jackson learned that he would be executed, he filed jailhouse 
motions asking for a new trial and new counsel. The lawyer appointed to the 
case was Bryan Stevenson, the founder and director of the Equal Justice 
Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Montgomery that represents indigent 
defendants facing the death penalty. E.J.I. has won dozens of retrials, 
death-sentence reversals, and exonerations, including Walter McMillian's. In 
that case, Stevenson uncovered the prosecutor's pressure tactics simply by 
listening to the flip side of a police interrogation tape.

Stevenson is the nation's most prominent opponent of override. Much of what is 
known about override originated with studies conducted by E.J.I. Stevenson, a 
Delaware native, moved to Montgomery 3 decades ago, not long after graduating 
from Harvard Law School. In 1995, he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant for 
his defense work. Every autumn, he commutes weekly to New York to teach at 
N.Y.U.; his students discover that in Alabama's capital-justice system 
virtually all defendants are black and poor, and virtually all administrators - 
including all nineteen appellate judges - are white. Stevenson, a lanky 
54-year-old who keeps his hair shaved like a Buddhist monk's, is one of the few 
African-American lawyers a criminal defendant in Alabama might meet.

Stevenson considers override to be the most pressing death-penalty issue. In 
his new book, "Just Mercy," he argues that "judge overrides are an incredibly 
potent political tool." One morning this spring, he told me, "Override 
introduces such arbitrariness into a death-penalty system that's already flawed 
by the arbitrariness of poverty and race and power and politics." We were at 
E.J.I.'s headquarters, which is in a brick building on a rejuvenated block of 
downtown Montgomery, between a tapas bar and the Hank Williams Museum. Slaves 
once disembarked at the end of the street, on a broad bend in the Alabama 
River, to be marched into town and auctioned off at the public fountain.

Proponents of override argue that the provision insures that "the worst of the 
worst" will receive proper justice. But too often, Stevenson said, judges are 
"imposing the death penalty because the death penalty is good for your brand." 
He went on, "If you're a prosecutor or judge who has to run for re-election, 
and you have to worry about your identity in the community - frankly, nothing 
says 'tough on crime' like the death penalty."

Every 6 years, Alabama elects circuit judges (who hear capital cases) and 
members of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court. 
Judicial overrides tend to spike in and around election years. According to a 
2011 study by E.J.I., 30 % of the state's death sentences in 2008, an election 
year, were imposed through override, compared with 7 % the previous year.

Most overrides are upheld. Douglas Johnstone, the retired Alabama Supreme Court 
justice, told me that judges on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals tend to 
"know, or think, that reversing a criminal case is a way to throw away votes." 
He said, "Affirming a verdict is a way to stay down in the foxhole and not get 
your head shot off."

Shonelle Jackson was sentenced to death in the summer of 1998, an election 
year. Bruner, his lead attorney, told me he assumed that Judge Gordon exercised 
override because "he was planning to run for something else." In fact, Gordon 
decided to retire.

An ex-prosecutor named Tracy McCooey ran for his seat. That fall, as 
judicial-campaign ads appeared throughout Alabama, a TV spot for McCooey aired 
in Montgomery County, featuring her former boss, the longtime district attorney 
Ellen Brooks. The D.A., standing in a courtroom, before an American flag, told 
viewers, "Tracy McCooey and I tried hundreds of cases in courtrooms like this. 
Tracy won't need to be taught."

In a 1996 address to the American Bar Association, Justice Stevens said that a 
prospective judge's "campaign promise to 'be tough on crime' or to 'enforce the 
death penalty' is evidence of bias that should disqualify a candidate from 
sitting in criminal cases." But in Alabama pledging to be tough on crime is how 
judges get elected. Every election season for decades, television ads have 
shown aspiring judges posing with a hunting rifle or saying things like "I've 
looked killers in the eye and sentenced them to death."

Alabama doesn't cap campaign contributions, and its judicial-election spending 
leads the nation's. According to a report by the nonprofit Justice at Stake and 
the Brennan Center for Justice, at N.Y.U., appellate-court candidates alone 
collected 206 million dollars in campaign contributions between 2000 and 2009, 
more than double the amount raised in the previous decade. The study found that 
special-interest groups and political parties contribute through an "arcane 
maze" of pacs, making influence hard to trace.

Some transactions are less difficult to track, as I learned by reviewing the 
campaign-finance records of more than 100 judges. The state allows lawyers to 
contribute money to the campaigns of judges who may preside over their cases, 
and they do so routinely. Randy McNeill, the prosecutor who asked Judge Gordon 
to sentence Shonelle Jackson to death, had contributed to Gordon's campaign 
fund. McNeill, a deputy district attorney who some thought would make a good 
D.A., donated the money in April, 1991, with his wife, Margaret, who had 
clerked for Gordon. The McNeills gave 50 dollars, because Gordon, who was 
running unopposed, had personally capped contributions at that amount. McNeill 
told me that he supported Gordon politically because he was a mentor and "the 
most honorable man I've about ever known."

The judges themselves often make donations to candidates who may be in a 
position to uphold their decisions: between 1993 and 2012, nearly 40 judges who 
had practiced override donated money to candidates for the Alabama Court of 
Criminal Appeals, the Alabama Supreme Court, and attorney general. In 1993 and 
1994, 2 years for which records are available, Judge Gordon contributed a total 
of 350 dollars to 2 Alabama Supreme Court candidates. In 1999, he retired and 
became a private judge; he is sometimes appointed by the state to hear cases. 
Since then, he has contributed more than 2000 dollars to candidates for the 
Alabama Supreme Court, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, and attorney 
general. He donated to the re-election efforts of Ellen Brooks, the Montgomery 
County D.A., and gave 200 dollars to McCooey, the judge who succeeded him. 
McCooey, who was re-elected several times and recently retired, told me that 
she returned any contributions she received while running unopposed, including 
Gordon's. "Perception is everything," she said. "The perception when you're 
getting money is not good."

The Alabama State Bar Association does not consider campaign contributions by 
judges and lawyers to be unethical. But Stevenson, of E.J.I., told me, "It 
clearly undermines the impartiality of the courts. A donor's interest in 
supporting you is exactly what is implied: favorable treatment, more 
considerations, some accountability." Justice O'Connor, since her retirement, 
has made similar warnings about an elected judiciary: in a speech last year, 
she said that electing judges fosters a public image of courtrooms governed by 
"politicians in robes."

Every year since 2000, Hank Sanders, a Democratic state senator from Selma, has 
introduced legislation calling for death-penalty reforms and for the abolition 
of override in Alabama. In his view, the state's capital system heavily skews 
the odds in the prosecution's favor: the attorney general's office has an 
entire litigation unit devoted to making the death penalty stick, but there is 
no statewide criminal-defense system. A poor defendant receives a 
court-appointed or contracted attorney who needs to have only 5 years' 
experience in criminal-defense law; the American Bar Association recommends 
that a capital defense team consist of at least 2 "high quality" attorneys 
supported by investigators, as well as experts in such areas as mental health, 
forensics, and substance abuse. Stephen Bright, the Atlanta attorney, has said 
that it's "unconscionable that a defendant facing serious criminal charges can 
get stuck with a tax or real-estate lawyer." (Defendants may also get stuck 
with an unscrupulous attorney: a review of Alabama State Bar Association 
disciplinary records shows that 1/5 of the lawyers whose clients have received 
the death penalty have been reprimanded, suspended, or disbarred.)

None of State Senator Sanders's proposed reforms have been adopted. Cam Ward, a 
Republican state senator from Alabaster, told me, "This is a deeply red state - 
the death penalty's still very popular." He said, "I'm not a fan of all these 
anti-death-penalty bills, but if you've got a judge who's in a hot election, 
and the jury returns a verdict of life without parole, and the judge overrides 
for the sole purpose of politics - I can see where that could happen." Even 
judges who have exercised override have acknowledged the problem of outside 
pressure. Politics "has to have some impact, especially in high-profile cases," 
Tommy Nail, a circuit judge in Birmingham, once said. "Let's face it, we're 
human beings."

William Gordon, the judge in the Shonelle Jackson case, told me that he did his 
job without politics in mind: "That wasn't the way I worked." McNeill, the 
prosecutor - who has since left the D.A.'s office for private practice - told 
me, with some exasperation, that there "was no agenda" behind his campaign 
support of Gordon. He said, "Now, is there some case where agenda did, or 
could, come into play for some judge? Sure. But you've got that in every aspect 
of the law. We are a system of man. Man is fallible. The last perfect person to 
live on this earth, we nailed Him to a cross."

In May of 2001, the Alabama Supreme Court found that Judge Gordon had exercised 
bad judgment at one point during Jackson's trial. The defense had requested a 
hearing on the admissibility of Jackson???s police statement - the one that was 
elicited by lying to Jackson - and Gordon had refused to allow it. The case was 
remanded to Montgomery County - to what was now Judge McCooey???s court. 
McCooey held the hearing and ruled the statement admissible.

Jackson again appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, whose nine justices 
included Douglas Johnstone. Formerly a Mobile County circuit judge, Johnstone 
had once overridden a jury in a case involving execution-style shootings during 
a robbery. It was the kind of gruesome crime cited by override proponents. Not 
long afterward, Johnstone ran for the Supreme Court. One of his campaign ads 
featured an image of a locked jail cell and footage of him, in robes, grimly 
assuring viewers that he had been "meting out the full measure of justice."

Yet, in February, 2002, when the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Jackson's 
conviction and death sentence, by a vote of 7 - 2, Johnstone was one of the 
dissenters. He wrote, "In assigning no weight nor binding effect to a 
life-imprisonment recommendation by a jury, Alabama law reduces to a sham the 
role of the jury in sentencing and allows baseless, disparate sentencing of 
defendants in capital cases." The other dissenter was Justice Champ Lyons, who 
argued that override was wrong in a "close case like this one, where the 
evidence suggests a possibility that Jackson might not have fired the fatal 
shot." Later that year, Jackson's appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which 
declined to hear the case.

Jackson soon sought a new trial or sentencing hearing through the next tier of 
Alabama's capital appeals process. He filed a Rule 32 petition, which, under 
the Alabama Rules of Criminal Procedure, allows a defendant to return to the 
trial court and raise new issues of concern. In January, 2007, the case came 
back before McCooey.

Before being sworn in as a judge, McCooey prepared for the job by shadowing 
Gordon for a month. She noticed that Gordon wrote "draft after draft" of his 
orders. "He's a very learned judge, extremely smart about the law," she told 
me. "He's a good person. . . . When he writes an opinion, he literally spends 
weeks and weeks researching, reading, writing. He does not take anything 
lightly." In dismissing Jackson's attempt to secure a retrial or a new 
sentence, McCooey explained that her decision was informed by her discomfort 
with "2nd-guessing" Judge Gordon. She told the courtroom, "I'm not going to go 
in back of what Judge Gordon did, because I know what kind of judge he was and 
I know the kind of decisions he makes." In essentially upholding the override, 
McCooey declared, "That man would not have made that decision unless he had 
good grounds to make it."

During the next several years, Jackson's case moved through the appeals system, 
based on claims about juror misconduct, incompetent trial counsel, and 
discovery. In 2009, the eyewitness Gerard Burdette died, in a drug-related 
shooting. Ultimately, all appeals to the state failed. At one point, an appeals 
court argued that the jury's 12 - 0 verdict against the death penalty proved 
the competence of Jackson's lawyers.

In October, 2013, Jackson and his legal team began appealing through the 
federal courts. He petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, which allows a 
defendant to argue that a state judgment violated federal or constitutional 
law. This past May, a federal magistrate recommended denying the petition. The 
case, which is now before a district-court judge, may one day come before the 
Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, in Atlanta. Its chief judge is 
Ed Carnes, whom the National Law Journal once called "the premier death-penalty 
advocate in the country." Carnes, who has tried to restrict death-row inmates' 
access to federal appeals, once ran Alabama's capital litigation unit, and he 
wrote what later became the state's death-penalty law.

If the 11th Circuit rejects Jackson's appeals, he can once again petition the 
U.S. Supreme Court. There is also the possibility of clemency from Alabama's 
governor. (The current governor, Robert J. Bentley, is a Republican who 
strongly supports the death penalty.) If Jackson's sentence is carried out, he 
will be the 1st person to be executed despite a jury's unanimous vote for life.

"I don't like judicial override," Douglas Johnstone told me one afternoon in 
May. "I think it's a bad thing, but it's the law, and since it's the law even a 
judge who doesn't like it may have to use it." He said, "My criterion was that 
if my observation of the jury and my knowledge of the facts of the case 
satisfied me that the jury had failed to do its duty, then I would override."

Johnstone and I were on the splintery dock of his home, on a river south of 
Mobile. Silver-haired and in his early seventies, he had on jeans, sandals, and 
a T-shirt. We walked up to his house - tin roof, open windows, stacks of 
Audubon and The American Scholar - and he brewed 2 mugs of Irish breakfast tea. 
As we sat in Adirondack chairs overlooking the water, he said, "To me, it's 
perfectly absurd that a jury's recommendation of life without parole isn't even 
a factor - the jury is wasting its time."

He went on, "Why have we become a nation that's just obsessed with punishment? 
The reason is that we've become a fearful nation. The people that were once 
free and brave are so afraid of something bad happening to them. They're 
attracted to politicians who say, 'I will be tough on crime.' And if a 
politician promises to be tough on crime he's got to have something to show for 
it."

Johnstone seemed surprised to hear that Gordon was the trial judge in the 
Jackson case.

"Kiwi did the override?" he said. Gordon picked up the nickname Kiwi in 1959, 
while enrolled at an Alabama military academy. ("You went through a week of 
hazing, and everybody got a nickname," Gordon told me. "They named me for shoe 
polish.")

Johnstone and Gordon serve on a task force charged with rewriting jury 
instructions in plain language. "I had observed over the years that Kiwi is a 
real judge, and a good judge," Johnstone later told me, in an e-mail. "By 'good 
judge,' I mean that he is so smart and so scholarly that he consistently gets 
the facts, the law, and therefore the judgment itself, right."

One night in January, 1982, on the north side of Montgomery, a sanitation 
worker named Paul Edward Murry tried to sell marijuana to 2 plainclothes vice 
detectives. The officers, Tony Burks and Mary McCord, attempted to arrest him, 
and, during a scuffle with Burks, Murry fired a pistol several times. A bullet 
struck McCord in the chest. Murry got hold of Burks's gun and shot him in the 
back.

McCord died, becoming the first female police officer in Alabama to be killed 
in the line of duty. Immediately after the shooting, and again during the 
trial, Murry insisted that he had thought Burks and McCord were robbers.

The case came before Judge Gordon. The jury voted, 11 - 1, to sentence Murry to 
life without parole. Gordon overrode the jury and sentenced Murry to death, 
arguing that the defendant's drug use and dealing, and his tendency to gamble, 
had helped to make him "not a person of good character."

The Alabama Supreme Court overturned the sentence, by a vote of 6 - 3, finding 
that Gordon had failed to tell the jury that the crime could be raised to the 
capital level only if Murry knew that McCord was a cop. The reversal prompted 
about 200 law-enforcement officers from across Alabama to protest outside the 
state capitol.

Gordon imposed the death penalty a 2nd time. An appeals court remanded the case 
because the Judge had written a relatively short and opaque sentencing order. 
Alabama appellate judges had a history of signing off on cursory overrides, but 
in this case the court demanded elaboration: Gordon had to be explicit about 
the aggravating and mitigating factors.

The Judge provided a more detailed account of his reasoning. He listed Murry's 
lack of a significant criminal record as a mitigating factor. He also noted 
that Murry had performed "kind acts" for his family and neighbors, including 
caring for his invalid mother, and that he had adjusted well to prison, where 
he had learned to read and write. The Judge then resentenced Murry to life 
without parole.

Gordon told me that when the Supreme Court rejected his override he had asked 
himself, "What did I miss? Was my judgment bad?" He went on, "You read what 
experienced judges have to say, and their criticisms, and you take those things 
to mind and make a decision."

Now in his 70s, Gordon is white-haired and compact, with the ruddy complexion 
of an outdoorsman. (He hunts deer.) Since leaving the bench, he has worked as a 
private civil judge and a mediator. We met in the corner office that he rents 
in a bank tower in downtown Montgomery. His tidy desk held a glass gavel.

It has been 16 years since he ordered the death of Shonelle Jackson, and he 
told me that he could not fully recall his reasoning. "Whatever I put into that 
sentencing order is what I thought about," he said, adding, "I made the best 
decision I could. Somewhere down the line, if somebody says I was wrong, then 
you can accept that." I asked how much pause the jury's unanimous 
recommendation for life had given him. "I don't know that I could quantify it 
for you," he answered. Why had he factored Jackson's juvenile record into the 
decision when prosecutors had been barred from using it at trial? "As I 
wrestled with this case, I researched, and there was this case from Florida 
that dealt with a juvenile record and sentence," he said. "My recollection is I 
looked at it and thought it was appropriate to rely on." At one point, he said, 
"What you're trying to get at is what happened here," and tapped his head. "And 
I can't answer that."

In a later conversation, the Judge told me that his position on override is to 
"let the jury decide." He said, "If you're going to have the jury system, 
you've got to put all your faith in it."

Then why had he lacked faith in the Jackson jury? And why had he overridden the 
jury despite his explicit acknowledgment that Jackson might not be the killer?

"I'm not going to go beyond what I wrote," he said. "That was a long time ago."

Gordon told me he left the bench, in part, because adjudicating criminal cases 
for 22 years had exhausted him. Jackson's case was "not the worst case I ever 
had," he said. He then mentioned one in which 3 men drove around Montgomery, 
randomly shooting people with an assault rifle, including a woman whose brains 
had been "blown out." The Judge said, "People do some terrible things."

He went on, "People talk about being hard on crime. O.K. - are you willing to 
pay the price? Are you willing to construct the prisons? Staff the prisons? 
Budget for food and medical care? You can't put everybody in the penitentiary. 
You just can't." He looked away, shook his head, and said, "Sometimes you just 
have to put 'em down."

The State of Alabama recently ran out of pentobarbital, one of the drugs used 
in lethal injection. Cam Ward, the state senator from Alabaster, once warned 
that the legislature's failure to grant anonymity to the manufacturers of such 
drugs could result in the return of the electric chair. In September, the state 
tried to resume executions, turning to a new 3-drug lethal cocktail used in 
Florida. Some death-row inmates are challenging the change in federal court.

Yellow Mama remains on standby at Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, 50 
miles northeast of Mobile. Shonelle Jackson is incarcerated there. In a recent 
phone conversation, he said, "You talking about killing me for something you 
ain't even sure that I did? That's crazy."

On May 30th, he turned 36. He's a bit heavier now, with glasses and more 
tattoos. He didn't want to talk about his role in Moore's killing. Instead, he 
spoke of his childhood: "I stole food first, because I hated going to ask the 
next-door neighbors do they have some bread - a boy like that be the 
laughingstock of the school the next day. It went from stealing 1 pack of 
bologna to 2 packs. I used to go from apartment to apartment, trying to steal 
perfume, sell it on the street. Me and my sisters go to Burger King and eat. 
That make you feel good, and special, to be able to do that for your sisters. I 
was 11 and 12, doing that shit. By the time my mother did get clean, it was too 
late."

Phone calls were timed, and Jackson had to keep calling me back. "I feel like 
everybody is born good, but at some point you get corrupted," he said. "The 
solution is not just to kill the problem. But society don't look at it like 
that." A few minutes later, he had to hang up for good.

(source: The New Yorker (Nov. 17) )






ILLINOIS:

Did the Innocence Project frame an innocent man?


The Innocence Project has made a large impact on the debate over the death 
penalty, in part by re-investigating cases that sent defendants to Death Row 
and getting their convictions reversed. That is how Anthony Porter found 
himself freed from prison after being convicted of a double homicide in Chicago 
after several eyewitnesses identified him as the gunman. The Innocence Project 
found a man who confessed to the murders, and Alstory Simom was convicted and 
ended up doing 15 years.

Why only 15 years? The Cook County Attorney's office moved to have Simon's 
conviction set aside after discovering the tactics used by the Innocence 
Project of Northwestern University to get the confession:

The investigation by the Innocence Project, [Cook County State's Attorney Anita 
Alvarez] said, "involved a series of alarming tactics that were not only 
coercive and absolutely unacceptable by law enforcement standards, they were 
potentially in violation of Mr. Simon's constitutionally protected rights."

Alvarez isn't kidding. The Journal-Sentinel's Jim Stingl, who was initially 
skeptical of Simon's story, describes how Simon got conned into the confession 
- with help from an attorney who supposedly represented Simon's interests:

[Northwestern journalism professor David] Protess and 2 of his journalism 
students came to Simon's home in the 200 block of E. Wright St. in Milwaukee 
and told him they were working on a book about unsolved murders. According to 
Simon, Protess told him, "We know you did it."

Then Simon received a visit from Ciolino and another man. They had guns and 
badges and claimed to be Chicago police officers. They said they knew he had 
killed Green and Hillard, so he better confess if he hoped to avoid the death 
penalty.

They showed him a video of his ex-wife, Inez Jackson, implicating him for the 
crime - a claim she recanted on her death bed in 2005 - and another video of a 
supposed witness to the crime who turned out to be an actor.

They coached Simon through a videotaped confession, promising him a light 
sentence and money from book and movie deals on the case. Simon, admittedly on 
a 3-day crack cocaine bender, struggled to understand what was going on.

Perhaps worst of all, they hooked up Simon with a free lawyer to represent him, 
Jack Rimland, without telling him that Rimland was a friend of Ciolino and 
Protess and in on their plan to free Porter.

Simon has now been freed. So too has Porter, who got the case dismissed in 1999 
and walked off of death row, thanks to the Innocence Project. In part because 
of the Porter dismissal, then-Gov. George Ryan froze all executions, and the 
state legislature eventually repealed the death penalty in Illinois. And the 
families of the 2 victims of that 1982 double homicide have received no justice 
at all for their loss.

Protess got suspended from Northwestern after his tactics began coming to 
light, retired not long afterward, and isn't talking about Simon. Paul Ciolino, 
the lead investigator for IP in this case, told Stingl that Simon had also 
confessed to a Milwaukee TV reporter. Stingl doesn't say what happened to 
Rimland, whose license to practice law should be investigated after this 
episode.

Someone needs to answer for what happened with Simon, and someone needs to 
answer for interfering with justice for the families of the victims. The 
Innocence Project has spent decades in advocacy against the death penalty and 
ends-justifying-the-means approaches in prosecution, and it would be very 
bitter irony indeed if the Northwestern University branch adopted the same 
tactics and ruined the life of an innocent man in order to push their own 
agenda.

Update: Where were the media on this case, anyway? In April, Dan Curry at 
American Thinker predicted that Simon would get exonerated, and said the clues 
on his railroading had been apparent for years:

The 1st public clue came in 2005, when Porter incredibly lost his $24 million 
civil lawsuit to recover damages for his "wrongful" prosecution, conviction and 
incarceration. In the extremely favorable venue of Cook County Circuit Court in 
Chicago, after months of favorable press coverage, Porter nonetheless lost 
because the defense lawyers were able to show that Porter probably committed 
the murders. It came to light that Northwestern's alleged witness reversal was 
overstated and that handfuls of people saw Porter in the vicinity of the crime, 
several saw him holding a gun, and two saw him fire the fatal shots. Those 
facts were ignored in the media frenzy at the time of Porter's release.

As Simon's lawyers dug into the case, a more sinister side of the story 
emerged. In a carefully detailed letter to the Cook County State's Attorney's 
office asking for a rehearing of the case, Simon's lawyers are claiming that 
Protess and private investigator Ciolino illegally coerced the confession from 
Simon, using a series of questionable tactics and promising him a short 
"self-defense" sentence and eventual riches from book and movie deals. The 
alleged confession was also tainted by Ciolino supplying Simon a lawyer 
friendly to him and Protess. Incredibly, the lawyer pled his client despite the 
strong evidence against Porter, and, in the midst of pending proceedings, gave 
an award to Ciolino and Protess for uncovering "evidence" against his clients. 
(Protess and Ciolino deny they did anything improper in the Porter case).

Buttressing the notion that Simon's confession was phony were recantations from 
the two witnesses Northwestern dug up against Simon. Both said they were 
promised money or favors for their fake testimony, according to Simon's court 
filings. In addition, Simon told several people at the time of his confession 
that it was coerced and not true.

No evidence remains that Simon committed the murders. Nobody saw him at the 
crime scene near the time of the murders. No physical evidence exists. All that 
remains is his "confession." Meanwhile, eight solid witnesses finger Porter at 
the scene of the crime at the time of the murder. 2 saw him do the shooting. In 
addition, a top prosecutor in the Cook County office has signed an affidavit 
attesting that he was dubious about the Porter exoneration and said so within 
the office at the time. ...

I first noted something fishy about the Porter case in 2006 on a blog and was 
met with stony silence. Several years later, retired Pulitzer Prize winning 
Chicago Tribune reporter William Crawford wrote a detailed analysis of the case 
and pitched it to former colleagues at various media outlets. He was ignored 
and even mocked. But he appears to have been right.

A quirky Chicago cop named Martin Preib has picked up the crusade. Preib, a 
self-described mediocre lawman, happens to be a gifted writer on the side. His 
2nd book, Crooked City, traces his astonishment about the Porter case and 
others, once he dug into the facts. He brilliantly tells the story about the 
fraudulent exoneration via his personal odyssey to uncover the truth and 
through the story of 1 of the original investigators who was outraged that 
Porter was released.

How many other "exonerations" did Innocence Project create out of whole cloth? 
Maybe in the future, we should leave investigations to investigators rather 
than journalism students.

(source: hotair.com)