PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I got goose bumps when I read this account of the Wilbert Jones case. For reasons you will understand after reading the post, I truly wonder whether Louisiana's criminal justice system has changed for the better any way in the past fifty years. Five years and still no decision - on these facts? One aspect of the story clearly caught my attention - where Cohen reports that one of the grounds on which the conviction was overturned and a new trial was ordered decades ago was, "because the prosecutors blatantly interjected race into the case." Now we are so many years later, and Rodricus Crawford is on Louisiana's death row awaiting his appeal - set for September 7 - in a case which has been marred, among many other factors, because notorious prosecutor Dale Cox interjected 'religion' into the case. As set out in a post on this Blog on May 31, 2016: "Catholics lead calls for court to spare life of
death-row inmate; Catholic News Service..."The brief called the conduct
of the prosecutor in the capital case, Dale Cox, “inappropriate and
unconstitutional.” “The prosecutor, as an agent of the state of
Louisiana, should not have misused and misinterpreted passages in the
Bible to support his call to the jury for the execution of Mr Crawford.
The prosecutor’s own private interpretations of the Bible are his own
and he is entitled to his own opinions,” it added. “The problem is that
at critical times the prosecutor, Mr Cox, acting as an official agent of
the State of Louisiana, publicly injected his own private religious
interpretations of the Bible into the trial as the State’s justification
to argue for the execution of Mr Crawford. Mr Cox’s statements are
particularly egregious in a parish that leads the country in executions
per capita and primarily due to the efforts of Mr Cox.” During the
trial, in questioning Crawford’s pastor, Cox asked, “Referring to
children, Christ said to his followers: Woe unto you, any of that would
harm one of these. It would be better … as though you will never born.
You will have a millstone put around your neck and dropped into the sea.
Do you believe in that concept?” After some back-and-forth with the
pastor, who said he believed not only in that passage from the Gospel
but also in mercy, Cox asked him, “So, Pastor, then we should just
ignore that Scripture from Christ?” Cox used the passage once more in
his closing argument. Cox is the acting district attorney for Caddo
Parish, or county, which accounts for nearly half of the Louisiana’s
death sentences in the past five years." By itself this grotesque, excessive, bombastic prosecution rhetoric designed to pluck out a guilty plea warrant a new trial - especially in a case where there is ample pathological opinion that 1-year-old Crawford died of pneumonia - and Rodricus Crawford - said to be the second youngest man ever placed on Louisiana's death row - is to have his life snuffed out for a murder that never occurred, on the basis of a strongly disputed pathologist's report. Or does the weight of science not matter in a Louisiana Courtroom, almost fifty years after Wilbert Jones was sent to prison in a case tainted by the intrusion of race - where he still lingers more than five years after he asked a judge to consider "compelling evidence that might support the claim of innocence" - a claim he has advanced from the outset. Still no ruling from the judge. Five years. That must set some sort of record for perverse judicial delay. Does Louisiana's Attorney General have nothing to say about this?
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
STORY: "The Case of the Do-Nothing Judge" by Andrew Cohen, published by The Marshall Project on August 15, 2016. (Andrew Cohen is commentary editor of the Marshall Project. He oversees the site’s
analysis and commentary section and helps provide daily coverage of
legal events and issues. A recovering attorney, he is the legal analyst
for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, a fellow at the Brennan Center for
Justice, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic);
SUB-HEADING: "Suppose a judge decides not to decide. For five years."
GIST: "For the past 45 years Wilbert Jones has sworn to anyone who would
hear him that he did not kidnap and rape a woman in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, in 1971, crimes for which he is serving a life sentence. But
only in the past five years or so have his attorneys and investigators
been able to find compelling evidence that might support his claim of
innocence. And it has been more than five years, from July 29, 2011
until today, that a Louisiana “commissioner,” acting as a judge, has had
the case and done nothing to either reject or embrace it. How long is a reasonable time for a judge to delay issuing an order
with a man’s liberty on the line? And what leverage does a defendant
like Jones have to push into action an unelected, essentially
unaccountable judicial commissioner,
appointed to handle the case by the chief judge in a Louisiana district?
After all, Jones cannot appeal to a traditional judge an order that has
not yet been issued. And the longer his commissioner fails to act the
less likely Jones will ever get to what his lawyers say is the heart of
the problem. The passage of time always has been a part of the story of this crime
and conviction. The rape occurred on October 2, 1971. The victim
(identified in court proceedings only as A.H.) was a nurse at a local
hospital who was attacked as she parked her car to begin her shift.
After she reported the rape, she was shown three police lineups over a
six-week period (none of which included Jones) and identified no one.
Then, three months after the crime, police arrested a 16-year-old named
Emmett Hills for another rape and Hills, looking to ingratiate himself
with prosecutors, told officials that Jones was his “partner” in the
rape of A.H. The victim then viewed another police lineup and identified
Jones, who had been arrested based on Hill’s incriminating statement. We now know how inaccurate eyewitness identification can be,
especially under the procedures in use decades ago. The record of the
case shows that A.H. was nowhere near certain that Jones was her rapist
when she identified him. She was so uncertain, in fact, that she called
the police hours after she first made the identification to let them
know there was a “small possibility” that Jones was not her rapist
because his “voice was different” and “because he looked a little bit
taller the night of the rape.” Jones is 5’3.” A.H. had described her
rapist as 5’8” or 5’7”. She also had described a gap between his teeth. The Louisiana State Police crime lab found DNA evidence on A.H.’s
dress, slip, and pantyhouse but did not test this evidence — indeed,
could not test that evidence the way we can test it today. But even
today we cannot test any of that evidence because it is gone, missing
from the clerk’s office without any explanation, even though the
envelope that contained it is still there. Louisiana has never explained
what happened to that evidence even though it might have either
exonerated or definitively incriminated Jones. Jones never confessed to the crime and there was no physical evidence
linking him to it. He was tried in 1973 and quickly convicted based
solely on A.H’s identification and Hills’ statements. That conviction
was just as quickly
overturned
because the prosecutors blatantly interjected race into the case (Jones
is black and so was the victim in the case — she testified that she
told her assailant so before he attacked her but that he did not believe
her because she was light-skinned). So Jones was tried again, in 1974,
and again quickly found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. What neither of Jones’ juries knew, what neither were told by police
or prosecutors, was that 27 days after the kidnapping and rape of A.H.
another man, Arnold Ray O’Connor, evidently raped and kidnapped a woman
from the parking lot of another hospital in Baton Rouge, one just a few
miles from the hospital where A.H. had been attacked. O’Connor height
and physical appearance matched the description A.H. had given the
police in her case far more closely than Jones did — right down to the
gap between the teeth. O’Connor’s modus operandi even mirrored the
victim’s account of her ordeal. O’Connor was in custody by the time Jones was re-tried in 1974 yet no
police officer evidently thought to see if O’Connor’s fingerprints
matched those taken from A.H.’s car. Nor did police or prosecutors share
with Jones’ attorneys during either trial what officials knew about
O’Connor, the rape he allegedly had committed, or its similarities to
the crime for which Jones was charged and then convicted. It’s hard to
describe a more obvious violation of
Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors and police to turn over to a defendant “exculpatory” information in their possession. In fact, there is evidence in the record of the case that shows that
police and prosecutors in the Jones case went even further. Not only did
they fail to share what they knew with Jones’ attorneys, these
officials went to extraordinary lengths to hide O’Connor himself within
the justice system to ensure his existence would not be discovered by
Jones’s lawyer. For example, instead of charging O’Connor with rape in
that case where there was overwhelming evidence of his guilt,
prosecutors instead tried him only on an armed robbery charge, leaving
even the trial judge befuddled. This information about how local authorities protected O’Connor at
Jones’ expense came to light only in the past few years thanks to the
dogged work of a defense investigator with the Innocence Project New
Orleans, William Aquino, who spent two years digging through old files
and records to discover the extent of the apparent misconduct. A.H. is dead now. O’Connor is still alive today, living locally, but
evidently not talking (to defense attorneys, anyway. They tell me they
asked local officials to investigate O’Connor’s potential role in this
case but were denied). And no one in Baton Rouge — not present-day
police or prosecutors nor their predecessors who handled the case in the
early 1970s — has stepped forward to publicly explain why so much
effort was made to protect one alleged rapist (O’Connor) at the expense
of a man (Jones) whose victim only half-heartedly identified him. Nor
has anyone in East Baton Rouge come forward to take responsibility for
the chaotic state of the case files and evidence that could have
exonerated (or incriminated) Jones today......... For their part, parish lawyers representing the state have not
bothered to respond to Jones’ new claims on their merits. Nor evidently
have they shown any interest in investigating O’Connor himself even
though they have been asked to do so by Jones’ attorneys. In a five-page
“answer” filed in May 2015, the last significant document filed in the
case, they argue instead that Jones’ claims cannot be heard because they
are untimely — untimely when filed in 2010 and untimely today — because
state courts already have heard “multiple, successive” requests for
relief by Jones and his attorneys through the years. It’s true. Jones
has filed many new motions and briefs, every one of which has been
rejected by the Louisiana courts over the decades. But even motions that
judges consider “untimely” are supposed to be resolved in a “timely”
fashion by judges. Jones may be guilty and O’Connor innocent for all anyone knows. But
even prosecutors in their last filing made a point of acknowledging that
East Baton Rouge Judicial Commissioner Quintilis Lawrence has not
issued a ruling since this issue was first brought before him. Jones’
lawyers have not yet made an issue of the delay itself — have not said
that Commissioner Lawrence himself is depriving Jones of his legal
rights by refusing to rule on his case. But the decision, whenever it
comes, will be the first step in a process that could wend its way back
up the Louisiana court system over the next few years. So long as
O’Connor is alive he’s a potential witness to help solve a mystery that
is almost half a century old. Once he dies Jones will be doomed, whether
he’s guilty of rape or not."
The entire post can be found at
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/08/15/the-case-of-the-do-nothing-judge?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=opening-statement&utm_term=newsletter-20160816-564#.3D3cD8kqT
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I am monitoring this case. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments.
The
Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty
incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the
harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into
pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology
system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent
stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please
send any comments or information on other cases and issues of
interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
