PUBLISHER'S NOTE: (1): What do police informants have to do with forensic science? (I'm glad you asked). Investigative Colloff give us a clue when she writes - at the link below - "I’ve wanted to write about jailhouse informants for a long time because they often appear in troubled cases in which the other evidence is weak." That's my experience as will as a criminal lawyer and an observer of criminal justice. Given the reality that jurors - thanks to the CSI effect - are becoming more and more insistent on the need for there to be forensic evidence, it is becoming more and more common for police to rely on shady tactics such as use of police snitches, staging lineups, coercing, inducing, or creating false confessions out of thin air, procuring false eyewitness testimony or concealing exculpatory evidence.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: (2): A phenomenal account by reporter Samantha Melamed that had me thinking about actor Al Pacino and the movie 'Injustice for all' - the Catch-22 of America's criminal justice system - with one caveat to keep in mind: These were not actors. The horrible, unfair, unequal, corrupt treatment meted out to these two men in Pennsylvania's parody of a criminal justice system happened in real life. This definitely was not a movie. As Dr. Michael Bowers put it on his outspoken site CSI DDS 'Forensics and Law in focus': "Another chapter about rigged prosecutions ending in a death sentence. The blame lies with DAs and the police. A new DA led to this new review."
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: (3):
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Robert Dunham, a former federal defender in Pennsylvania who runs the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said false testimony by jailhouse informants is common — especially in death-row cases. A Northwestern University study found that 46% of death-row exonerations involved such informants. “Everything that goes wrong in the criminal system goes wrong worse in capital cases,” Dunham said. “Generally speaking, the more high-profile a case is, the more prone it is to government misconduct. There is greater public pressure and greater political pressure to solve the case and to convict somebody. There is greater political gain to a prosecutor who has ambitions beyond his office.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Williams’ conviction was vacated in 2013, after the key witness, James White, recanted — and said a prosecutor met with him repeatedly before the trial, coerced his testimony, and fed him fabricated information. But by then, White’s credibility was in shreds, and the DA’s Office refused to back down. Then, in February 2019, the CIU (Conviction Integrity Unit) turned over its file to defense lawyers, revealing 22 boxes containing 42,000 pages of documents. An analysis of the file by the CIU and the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represented Williams in state court, comprises a catalog of deep problems in Pennsylvania’s legal system, lawyers say: concealed evidence, undisclosed deals in exchange for testimony, corrupt relationships with informants, and a direly inadequate system of appointing and funding defense counsel that doomed both men to decades in prison. “We believe there are indeed Brady violations,” said CIU chief Patricia Cummings, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to share with defendants potentially exculpatory evidence. “We find that to be incredibly troubling.”
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GIST: "The 1989 murders were violent and callous acts: three New York drug dealers lured to a housing project to buy guns, robbed of $26,400, loaded into a van and shot execution-style, their bodies left in different locations in North Philadelphia. Thanks to the testimony of a man serving life sentences for six murders, two Germantown men — Christopher Williams and Theophalis Wilson — were convicted of the gruesome crimes. Williams, 29 at the time of the killings, received three death sentences. Wilson, who was 17, was sentenced to life without parole. After maintaining his innocence for close to three decades, Williams was exonerated in December — the 11th person cleared by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) since Larry Krasner took office in 2018. And based on the discovery of “a plethora of significant, material, exculpatory evidence,” the DA argued in court filings that Wilson also should be cleared. That he hasn’t highlights what advocates say is a glaring flaw in the system: While Williams, sentenced to death, eventually was appointed skilled legal counsel, Wilson, as a lifer, had no one to argue his case. “If Chris had not gotten the death penalty, I don’t think anybody would know about these cases,” said Jennifer Merrigan, a lawyer with Phillips Black, which took on Wilson’s case pro bono in 2019, along with Greenberg Traurig attorneys Brian Feeney and Kelly Dobbs Bunting. “It was only because he had really great lawyers who thoroughly litigated the case and had the money to involve experts … and then to continue that fight.. Williams’ conviction was vacated in 2013, after the key witness, James White, recanted — and said a prosecutor met with him repeatedly before the trial, coerced his testimony, and fed him fabricated information. But by then, White’s credibility was in shreds, and the DA’s Office refused to back down. Then, in February 2019, the CIU turned over its file to defense lawyers, revealing 22 boxes containing 42,000 pages of documents. An analysis of the file by the CIU and the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represented Williams in state court, comprises a catalog of deep problems in Pennsylvania’s legal system, lawyers say: concealed evidence, undisclosed deals in exchange for testimony, corrupt relationships with informants, and a direly inadequate system of appointing and funding defense counsel that doomed both men to decades in prison. “We believe there are indeed Brady violations,” said CIU chief Patricia Cummings, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to share with defendants potentially exculpatory evidence. “We find that to be incredibly troubling.”
White was 19 in December 1989 when he was arrested for killing Michael
Haynesworth, a 30-year-old who had dated White’s 13-year-old girlfriend —
tying up and beating Haynesworth before shooting him and dumping his
body in Fairmount Park. He faced the death penalty. He agreed to plead guilty to escape execution — with the understanding,
he would later claim, that prosecutors would assist him in obtaining a
commutation after 15 years. “That was the prosecutor’s word,” White
wrote in a 2016 court filing, maintaining his innocence and arguing the
DA should be required to make good on the deal.] In all, he admitted to six murders, including the execution of a
60-year-old taxi driver named William Graham; the fatal shooting of
19-year-old Cheltenham man, Marron Genrette; and the killing of the
three New York men, Otis Reynolds, Kevin Anderson, and Gavin Anderson.
White implicated at least five other men in the various crimes. White accused Williams of masterminding all of the murders, along with
other brutal acts — including two murders of which Williams would be
acquitted, and other violent crimes that could not be substantiated. But in the prosecution for the Germantown triple murder, the DA’s Office rigged the trial, lawyers on both sides now allege. The files opened in February contained eyewitness accounts and 911
calls that contradict White’s account of the killings, as well as police
activity sheets that identify compelling alternative suspects. And they
reveal contradictory statements by White that further undermine his
credibility, according to court filings. They also contain materials that lawyers say corroborate White’s claims
that he repeatedly met with prosecutors to discuss his testimony and
was even provided photographs so he could identify the three victims of
the triple murder, whom he had never met. One handwritten note in the
file reads: “Get Morgue Photos of Jamaicans [to] show to White to
alleviate I.D. problem.” In an interview, the former prosecutor in the case, David Desiderio,
now a defense lawyer, said he had no reason to doubt White’s testimony
at trial. He disputed assertions of prosecutorial misconduct and
questioned Krasner’s motives in revisiting the case. “It’s garbage. It was something the district attorney made up," he
said. "That man never once indicated to me that what he was saying was
false. If the DA wants to believe that, then there’s something else
going on with the District Attorney’s Office. A jury believed this man. I
don’t know how they can invade the province of the jury.” Also unearthed in the file were documents revealing that another key
witness, David Lee, was a long-standing police informant who already had
avoided charges in two previous murders. That history was not revealed
by prosecutors at trial — nor was it raised as a conflict by Wilson’s
defense lawyer, Jack McMahon, a former prosecutor who had handled a 1990
murder case in which Lee was listed as a witness, defense lawyers say. McMahon said he remembers Wilson’s case, but not Lee. “I never heard that name in my life,” he said. Williams’ conviction was vacated in 2013, and a new trial was ordered.
But even after that, the District Attorney’s Office fought to keep the
case file confidential. Then-Assistant District Attorney Bridget Kirn
argued in court that there were no relevant materials to turn over.
(Attempts to reach Kirn for this article were not successful. Robert Dunham, a former federal defender in Pennsylvania who runs the
Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said false testimony by
jailhouse informants is common — especially in death-row cases. A
Northwestern University study found that 46% of death-row exonerations involved such informants. “Everything that goes wrong in the criminal system goes wrong worse in
capital cases,” Dunham said. “Generally speaking, the more high-profile a
case is, the more prone it is to government misconduct. There is
greater public pressure and greater political pressure to solve the case
and to convict somebody. There is greater political gain to a
prosecutor who has ambitions beyond his office.”
Two systems of representation:
Two systems of representation:
In 1993, Wilson and Williams were moved into the state prison system — Wilson to general population, Williams to death row. Williams would spend 25 years in solitary confinement,
leaving his cell only for showers, hour-long trips to the exercise
cage, or visits to the law library. Each time he left his cell or
returned, he was strip-searched and shackled. Still, one advantage he had as a death-sentenced prisoner was an
enhanced right to counsel. Eventually, he was appointed a lawyer from
the Federal Community Defender Office, which has overturned more than 100 death sentences in Pennsylvania. After Williams already had spent two decades on death row, the
defenders convinced a judge that his trial lawyer had been ineffective
for failing to bring in scientific experts who would have contradicted
White’s account that the three men were shot and then pushed out of a
moving van onto the sidewalk. That was impossible, experts testified in
2013, since none of the victims had any injuries beyond the fatal
gunshot wounds. Each time Williams’ case inched forward, Wilson used a typewriter to
pick out a claim piggybacking on his codefendant’s arguments. But six years after Williams’ conviction was overturned, Wilson still has not had an evidentiary hearing. “It’s emblematic of how unfair our system is, and how it’s stacked
against defendants without resources,” said Merrigan, Wilson’s attorney.
His case finally returned to court — and sparked the CIU’s review of
both cases — only because he was entitled to resentencing under a U.S.
Supreme Court decision that automatic life sentences for juveniles are
illegal. Marc Bookman, of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, said
it’s just a small part of how Pennsylvania — the only state that provides no general funding for indigent defense — has created a system ripe for wrongful convictions.
One study of Philadelphia murder cases
from 1994 to 2005, published by RAND, underscored the deficiencies of
court-appointed lawyers, who at the time were paid just $2,000 for
pretrial preparation — work that could take weeks or months. It found
that cases assigned to public defenders resulted in a 19% lower murder
conviction rate, a 62% lower chance of a life sentence, and a 24%
shorter average sentence length. “As long as we refuse to properly fund effective lawyers in our most
serious cases, be they life without parole or death, we’re going to have
the kind of injustice these cases represent,” Bookman said. “We tend to
think all these cases are in the past and it would never happen now,
but we’ve done nothing at all to make changes from then to now. The
system we have today is the exact system we had 30 years ago.”
After Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn Bronson accepted the
DA’s request to withdraw charges against Williams in the triple murder,
he was ushered into a holding cell in the courthouse basement and put on
a bus back to state prison. That’s because Williams is still serving a life sentence for one more
murder: that of Michael Haynesworth. Again, the sole eyewitness was
James White, supported by David Lee, who testified he’d supplied the
weapons. White’s 13-year-old girlfriend, initially charged as an adult,
also testified, saying she had lured Haynesworth to the crime scene, but
did not witness what happened next. Notes in the file the DA’s Office shared in February could shed light
on that case, too. According to court filings, they revealed
inconsistent statements by White about how that murder was committed and
who the perpetrators were. Cummings, of the CIU, said her office has not taken that case up for
review, but that she’d take a look at any conviction that hinged on
White’s testimony. Another man, Troy Coulston, was tried together with
Williams and is also serving a life sentence for that murder. Outside Bronson’s courtroom on Dec. 23, Williams’ extended family,
including three of his children, and his fiancée, Dawn Jonson, waited
for the court proceeding that would bring the family patriarch one step
closer to home. “It’s been so long,” said Greg Banks, who was 11 when the police came,
guns drawn, to arrest his father. “But we see progress. It’s hope.
Before, I had no faith at all. Now that you see change, it gives you
belief. It’ll be a slow process, but it’s moving.” It’s hard for them to process why Williams’ conviction in the Haynesworth case remains intact. “It was just one witness who told all these lies. He’s involved in all
of it,” said Jonson, the mother of Williams’ youngest son, Chris
Hartwell, who was 6 months old when his father was arrested. Sherrie Bradley was 14 when her father was arrested. She said she knew
him as a hardworking family man who, since he was finally moved off
death row, has embraced working in carpentry, exercising skills he’d
been forced to neglect for decades. “What they said about him was just totally impossible to me,” she said. “When a person is innocent, it will show.""
