Two weeks ago, I read a story in The New York Times about two men who were released from prison because DNA evidence proved they were completely innocent of murdering and raping an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina in 1983. Both men — Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46 — spent at least part of their 31 years in prison on Death Row.
McCollum and Brown, who are both mentally disabled, were convicted based on a confession that they said was forced and quickly retracted. The jury convicted them despite the lack of any physical evidence. The prosecutor, Joe Freeman Britt, persisted in arguing they were guilty although Roscoe Artis confessed to murdering and raping another girl after the 11-year girl was murdered and lived one block away from where the 11-year-old girl’s body was found.
Thirty years later, DNA at the crime scene was finally tested. It belonged to Artis, but Britt, who is now retired and was profiled by “60 Minutes” as the USA’s “Deadliest DA” because of his success in getting people sentenced to death, still insists McCollum and Brown are guilty. He called the prosecutor who asked a judge to release the two innocent men a “pussy.” Hey, tough guy, if you prosecuted the right person the second girl might still be alive. YOU are the one who is soft on real criminals.
The case of McCollum and Brown made me very curious about how many people on Death Row were exonerated of crimes they were convicted of. Here is what I found:
* McCollum and Brown were the 145th and 146th Americans on Death Row to be released from jail since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Here is the list. On the average, the 146 convicts were in jail for almost 11 years before they were exonerated.
* Amnesty International’s report on the USA lists the following as “factors leading to wrongful convictions” — inadequate legal representation, police and prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony, mistaken eyewitness testimony, racial prejudice, jailhouse "snitch" testimony, suppression and/or misinterpretation of mitigating evidence, and community/political pressure to solve a case.
* Twenty of the 146 Death Row prisoners were found to be innocent because of DNA tests. All 20 have been released since 1993. This could mean that several innocent people were executed between 1973 and 1993 before DNA testing was available. It should also be noted that many states and jurisdictions have refused to conduct DNA testing even after scientists verified that it was accurate.
* Altogether, 317 Americans convicted of crimes have been exonerated based on DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project. This list includes people who were convicted of murder but were never on Death Row as well as people convicted of non-capital crimes. The 317 convicts were in prison for an average of 13.6 years. The actual perpetrator was identified in about half the DNA tests. Many were free for many years.
I was in favor of the death penalty for many years because I believed that it deterred a small number of people from murdering other people and the penalty was worthwhile even if it only prevented the murder of one person.
Then, I learned about the Rolando Cruz case. Cruz was convicted in 1985 of murdering, raping and kidnapping a 10-year-old girl in 1983 near Chicago based on police testimony that he confessed although there was no confession on the police tape of the interrogation and Cruz denied he confessed.
In 1984 and 1985, Brian Dugan murdered, raped and kidnapped a 7-year-old girl; murdered and raped a woman, raped another girl, and raped another woman in neighboring communities. The details in the murders of the two girls were almost identical, but the Cruz case prosecutor and police officers refused to listen to the Dugan case officials — even after Dugan confessed he killed the 10-year-old girl.
Cruz, it turned out, was a poor gang member who was angling for a large reward and voluntarily went to the police with fabricated information on the crime. If the police didn’t decide to frame him, a girl and a woman might still be alive and another girl and a woman might not have been raped.
Cruz came within an hour or so of being executed more than once, but he was released from jail after a 1995 DNA test proved that Dugan was the murderer. Seven law enforcement officials were indicted for framing Cruz, but they were acquitted by a jury that partied with the officials that evening.
I lived in the Chicago area when Cruz was exonerated and I was horrified by the police’s misconduct. By 2000, 13 Death Row convicts in Illinois had been released from prison because they were innocent. There were more exonerations than executions in Illinois.
I would bet my life that many innocent people have been executed. Texas, which has historically resisted requests for DNA tests and retrials based on new evidence, has executed 516 people since 1976 to Illinois’ 12. Texas has executed more people than the No. 2 through No. 7 states combined, but it has only exonerated one person based on DNA evidence.
Do you trust Texas? I don’t. In fact, 69 percent of Texans believe that their state has executed innocent people — and most of them support the death penalty anyway.
The American justice system is, to be very polite, extremely flawed. No one should be executed as long as the justice system can’t be trusted to punish the right people.
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