WORDS TO HEED: FROM OUR POST ON KEVIN COOPER'S APPLICATION FOR POST-CONVICTION DNA TESTING (CALIFORNIA):
"Blogger/extraordinaire Jeff Gamso's blunt, unequivocal, unforgettable message to the powers that be in California: "JUST TEST THE FUCKING DNA." (Oh yes, Gamso raises, as he does in many of his posts, an important philosophical question: This post is headed: "What is truth, said jesting Pilate.")..."So what's the harm? What, exactly, are they scared of? Don't we want the truth?"
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "As it stands now, inmates who have been in prison the longest have the hardest time getting the courts to allow them to test evidence, even when they are willing to pay for it. “Somebody like Tommy…. effectively has to identify the perpetrator,” Grant said. Changing the rules to allow more testing, he said, “leads us to a place as a society and a culture that increases the credibility of a conviction or helps us discover that the wrong person is in prison.”
Rep. Jamie Grant, the Republican chairman of the House criminal justice subcommitte.
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Last June, Rep. Grant instructed his staff to research how other states handle DNA testing. He’d listened to the Times podcast on a trip up and back to Tallahassee. He believed forensic science reforms were needed in Florida. Grant, 37, was elected almost a decade ago to the Florida House. His father, a well-known politician, served in both the Florida House and Senate for two decades beginning in 1980. Like his father and his brother, he’s a lawyer. He said Zeigler’s case, in particular, “put a face and a case around some of the things that we knew were true when it came to forensic evidence and where there were probably some inequities and some injustices.” Zeigler is one of almost two dozen men sent to death row in the 1970s and 1980s who can’t get advanced DNA testing of evidence even though Florida passed a law in 2001 to create the opportunity. That law set the exoneration standard. Grant said the change to the DNA testing law is a priority of his, and he will likely introduce it as part of a committee bill or a larger criminal justice bill to give it the best shot. His staff has patterned the bill after one in Arizona. Inmates would be required to go through the courts to obtain the testing and there would be some limits. But no inmate would be denied, as Zeigler has been, just because the test alone might not prove innocence."
STORY: "Tommy Zeigler case inspires legislator to change Florida’s DNA law," by Enterprise Reporter Leonoro LaPeter Anton, published by The Tampa Bay Times on January 28, 2020. (Thanks to Dr. Michael Bowers of CSIDDS: Forensics and Law in Focus, for bringing this important story to our attention. HL. He writes..."DAs have spent decades refusing to permit post conviction DNA testing. Some sound like reasonable people. Others make self-serving and incorrect statements to bolster their sound bytes. One such DA denies DNA testing as “not leading to exoneration” as an excuse. Excuse me? Testing victims fingernail and clothing could answer doubts from this 1975 death penalty conviction.")
SUB-HEADING: "Bill would lower threshold for testing, which has limited many death row inmates in their appeals."
PHOTO CAPTION: Squares from the shirt Tommy Zeigler was wearing on the night of the murders have been DNA tested, supporting his version of events. But further tests have been rejected by courts and prosecutors.
PHOTO CAPTION: "A bullet casing lies in front of Zeigler Furniture Store in Winter Garden on Dec 24, 1975. Police quickly zeroed in on Tommy Zeigler as their suspect."
GIST: A state legislator plans to introduce legislation that would give Florida inmates more access to forensic testing. Rep.
Jamie Grant, the Republican chairman of the House criminal justice
subcommittee, said he was moved, in part, by the case of Tommy Zeigler. The
74-year-old Zeigler, convicted of killing his wife, in-laws and another
man at his family’s Winter Garden furniture store on Christmas Eve
1975, has now been denied DNA testing six times. His story was featured
in a series and podcast by the Tampa Bay Times called Blood and Truth. Grant said the law would allow DNA testing in cases where it might only provide evidence of innocence. Currently, inmates are rejected by courts and prosecutors if the DNA testing wouldn’t clearly exonerate. Grant,
whose House district includes parts of northern Hillsborough and
Pinellas counties, said it’s fairer to have a lower threshold. To
prevent prisoners from overusing it, Grant would require the inmate’s
DNA be deposited into a newly created state database to be checked for
other crimes. State Attorney Aramis Ayala turned down Zeigler’s latest request for
DNA testing last year, saying she didn’t think the forensic analysis
would exonerate him. Ayala overruled her conviction integrity unit,
which urged her last spring to agree to the testing, saying it was
Florida’s “moral obligation.” As it stands now, inmates
who have been in prison the longest have the hardest time getting the
courts to allow them to test evidence, even when they are willing to pay
for it. “Somebody like Tommy…. effectively has to identify the perpetrator,” Grant said. Changing
the rules to allow more testing, he said, “leads us to a place as a
society and a culture that increases the credibility of a conviction or
helps us discover that the wrong person is in prison.”
***
When
police arrived at Zeigler’s furniture store on that Christmas Eve, he
fell into the arms of an officer. He said he’d been shot in a gunfight
with a customer and others who tried to rob him.
But
police focused almost immediately on Zeigler, thanks largely to a man
who said Zeigler had tried to shoot him earlier that night at the store.
The lead detective pointed to a $500,000 insurance policy Zeigler
purchased on his wife’s life months before. Defense lawyers claimed that the accuser lied, and they said Zeigler didn’t need the money. The
case went to trial five months after the crime, even though defense
attorneys hadn’t finished interviewing the state’s witnesses. They were
denied more time. The jury was split, at first, but later found Zeigler guilty. It said he should get life in prison. The judge sentenced him, instead, to death.
• • •
Forty
four years and dozens of appeals later, the case is still a swarm of
competing facts. New revelations continue to raise doubts in the state’s
case. In 2001, a little more than a decade after DNA was
first used to convict someone, Zeigler’s lawyers won a limited DNA test
of the shirt he wore the night of the murders. It did not turn up the
blood of his father-in-law, who was shot at close range and savagely
beaten with a metal crank. Experts say Zeigler’s shirt should be covered
in backspatter. Police
reports unearthed in recent years also revealed that two other
businesses faced break-ins or attempted break-ins on the night of the
murders. But Zeigler’s New York attorneys, who have
worked to free him for three decades, have been unable to get the
evidence tested using modern DNA techniques. For almost
two decades, former Orange-Osceola State Attorney Jeff Ashton fought
attempts to test the fingernails of Zeigler’s father-in-law, the blood
discovered on Eunice Zeigler’s blouse beneath her coat or the rest of
the clothes Tommy Zeigler wore that night. The evidence is stored in a
climate-controlled locker in Orlando. Then, in 2016, Ayala beat Ashton. Ayala,
a death penalty opponent, started a conviction integrity unit and urged
those with questions about their convictions to submit applications.
Zeigler’s lawyers had already submitted a 47-page memorandum with 404
pages of exhibits in April 2018. They met with the unit in March 2019. Then they waited.
• • •
The Times asked
Ayala, through her spokeswoman, for comment at least eight times in
2019. But she refused all requests for an interview. So the Times submitted
a records request to the Ninth Judicial Circuit last September, seeking
emails and documents related to Zeigler’s review. The
documents arrived a month later and outlined the disagreement within
Ayala’s office over Zeigler’s case. The conviction integrity unit, led
by Monique Haughton Worrell, had recommended in March 2019 that Ayala
support Zeigler’s DNA testing application. But
months later, Worrell left for a new job and Amanda Simpaio Bova
replaced her as the unit’s director. Documents show Bova and others in
Ayala’s office questioned the recommendation in Zeigler’s case. They did
not feel it would lead to an exoneration. But no one notified Zeigler’s lawyers of a decision. They read the news in the Times.
In late October, Zeigler’s lawyers sent Ayala a letter, asking for an explanation.
A
month later, they filed their own public records request. The documents
arrived in early December and contained a letter written by Ayala a
month before, on Nov. 5, turning down Zeigler’s application. In
the letter (which the lawyers say they never received directly), Ayala
told them that when she first became state attorney, she looked at
Zeigler’s case and decided that it did not qualify for DNA testing. But
she asked the conviction integrity unit to make certain nothing had been
overlooked. Ayala declined to speak to the Times
again last month, but last week, she agreed to a phone interview. She
said she wanted to clarify her position on Zeigler’s case. Ayala acknowledged the investigation and the trial gave her pause but that wasn’t enough to overcome the case against Zeigler. She
said she asked his attorneys, multiple times, to cite evidence that
would support a claim of innocence. “To this day, I have not seen that.” Ayala
said she supports DNA testing when the analysis would clarify the
truth, but she believes the forensic review in Zeigler’s case would make
it “blurry” and she doesn’t believe in giving him “another stab at the
apple.” Worrell, the former conviction integrity unit
director, said she stood by her decision, but she also supported Ayala.
“We had a fundamental difference in philosophy,” said Worrell, who
taught a criminal defense clinic at the University of Florida for 16
years. Asked if she drew any conclusions about the
Zeigler case from her review, Worrell said: “I think what you want to
know is do I feel in my heart that Tommy Zeigler is innocent and the
answer is I don’t know. ...There’s nothing that speaks to me that says
that he was definitely innocent. But I do believe there’s a doubt as to
whether or not he was guilty and that for me was enough to move
forward.” Randy E. Loboda, a law school intern and former
homicide investigator who retired after 33 years with the Dallas Police
Department, said he spent 250 hours reviewing the Zeigler file while
working with Worrell. He said he believes Zeigler is likely guilty. But
he also wanted to see the fingernail clippings of the victims tested for
DNA. “You
have the fingernails and you don’t process them?” he said in a phone
interview. “From my standpoint, I would not want to execute Tommy
Zeigler if … there is a possibility someone else is involved.” Zeigler’s
attorneys were devastated by Ayala’s decision. “I thought more highly
of her than that,” said Terry Hadley, who defended Zeigler at his
original trial. David Michaeli, one of Zeigler’s New York
attorneys, said he believes the DNA testing could exonerate Zeigler. If
the blood of the victims is not on Zeigler’s shirt, he said, then
Zeigler could not have killed them, and he was a victim of robbery, as
he initially claimed. “Tommy Zeigler has been seeking DNA
testing for 25 years, which is a staggering amount of time,” Michaeli
said. “The court has set the bar impossibly high.”
• • •
Last June, Rep. Grant instructed his staff to research how other states handle DNA testing. He’d listened to the Times podcast on a trip up and back to Tallahassee. He believed forensic science reforms were needed in Florida. Grant,
37, was elected almost a decade ago to the Florida House. His father, a
well-known politician, served in both the Florida House and Senate for
two decades beginning in 1980. Like his father and his brother, he’s a
lawyer. He said Zeigler’s case, in particular, “put a
face and a case around some of the things that we knew were true when it
came to forensic evidence and where there were probably some inequities
and some injustices.” Zeigler
is one of almost two dozen men sent to death row in the 1970s and 1980s
who can’t get advanced DNA testing of evidence even though Florida
passed a law in 2001 to create the opportunity. That law set the
exoneration standard. Grant said the change to the DNA
testing law is a priority of his, and he will likely introduce it as
part of a committee bill or a larger criminal justice bill to give it
the best shot. His staff has patterned the bill after one in Arizona.
Inmates would be required to go through the courts to obtain the testing
and there would be some limits. But no inmate would be denied, as
Zeigler has been, just because the test alone might not prove innocence.
• • •
Zeigler, interviewed on death row recently, said he was not surprised by the latest rejection.
“I
quit being surprised. I quit being angry,” he said. “Anger’s like
cancer. It’ll eat you up. I just accept it and let it roll.” He
said he was disappointed in Ayala. “She could have made so much
difference in that office if she had just thought about what she was
doing.” He said he’d love another day in court. “I don’t want them to say, ‘Go home, Tommy,’ ” he said. “I want 12 men and women of the state of Florida to say: ‘Not guilty.’ ”
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https://www.tampabay.com/news/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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/
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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