COMMENTARY: "Flawed justice,' by Billy Sinclair, published by The Crime Report on July 1, 2022.
(Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The following year Bridgeman released a book of poetry titled “There’s Something I Meant To Tell You,” acclaiming him to be “one of the most prolific poets to have interwoven verse and thought in a work complementing its own sagacity.”
It is, and will remain, a collection of poetry that reflected the soul of a wronged man.
Wiley Bridgeman died in June 2021 at age 66 from complications of COPD. Two-thirds of his life had been stolen by a flawed, corrupt criminal justice system."
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GIST: "The American criminal justice system is flawed, perhaps incurably so.
That is the lasting legacy of the September 1971 Attica Prison Riot and the February 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Riot—the two most violent inmate riots in American penal history.
The inmate grievances that triggered these prison riots still exist today in every maximum security state and federal penal facility. Prison cellblock floors may be mopped and cell bars painted more frequently today, but the systemic racism and human abuse that forced thousands of inmates in both prisons to say “enough is enough” is more prevalent today than it was during the decade between the two riots.
Prison riots mirror the nation’s larger criminal justice system.
And what does that mirror show us today about the American criminal justice landscape?
A pandemic has undermined the orderly process of dealing with criminal offenders for more than two years. Increasing violent crime has turned many communities in larger cities into war zones and smaller cities into fear zones.
Hostile, divisive political ideologies have made meaningful criminal justice reform unattainable.
These social conditions have come together in a confluence of storms that darken the criminal justice horizon.
America, by its very diverse, multicultural nature, has always believed—tragically so— that justice is achieved through punishment. It is in the nation’s DNA that the ruling class “punish” the disadvantaged class, those without a voice to “speak truth to power.”
The Prison Policy Initiative reported this past March that there are roughly 1.9 million people detained in “1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,500 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 immigration detention facilities, and 82 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”
Each of these human confinement facilities are punishment-oriented. They are not designed to correct, rehabilitate, or improve the human condition. Their sole purpose is to isolate and punish those individuals who violate the laws of the ruling class.
It is a system, as the Cato Institute says, that is “rotten to the core.”
In a May 2021 essay for the Brennan Center, Andrew Cohen, a senior editor with The Marshall Project, called this punitive process “the American Punisher’s Brain.”
That is precisely what it is.
Americans, especially evangelicals and political conservatives, see “justice” through the prism of punishment born of revenge—the “get even” mindset. They literally want to see the wrongdoer shed a “pound of flesh” for their wrongs. They see a jury acquittal as “he got away with murder,” while a guilty verdict is seen as “justice has been served.”
Revenge-seeking people cannot comprehend concepts of fairness, impartiality or equality with a neutral brain—all three of which are required to achieve meaningful justice.
Their “punisher’s brain” conceives justice in a primal sense; that is, justice is achieved only through a process of revenge satisfaction, particularly so when it involves people below the ruling class, mostly people of color.
The inevitable result of such a justice scheme?
People of color, the financially disadvantaged, and the socially disenfranchised make up the overwhelming majority of the 1.9 million individuals confined in the roughly 5,000 detention facilities in the U.S.
Last year, The Sentencing Project reported that Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than white Americans. More than half the prison populations in 12 states are Black Americans with Wisconsin having the highest Black incarceration rate in the nation.
The Case of Wiley Bridgeman
That brings us to a Black American named Wiley Bridgeman and the “justice” he received from the White ruling class.
In May 1975, the 20-year-old Bridgeman, his 18-year-old brother and their 17-year-old friend were arrested in Cleveland for the murder of a 59-year-old money order salesman.
The trio were quickly convicted and sentenced to death in August 1975.
There was no physical or forensic evidence to connect the trio of the crime. All three had solid alibis. The police found one witness, a 12-year-old boy they threatened and coerced into falsely identifying the trio as the perpetrators of the crime. That was the only evidence that sent the three men to death row to be executed.
They remained on death row until the Ohio death penalty was declared unconstitutional in 1978. Their death sentences were vacated and they were resentenced to life imprisonment.
In 2002, in his 27th year of confinement, Bridgeman was released on parole only to be returned to prison after his parole was revoked because he had an accidental verbal encounter with the boy-turned-man witness.
Wiley Bridgeman, via Witness to Innocence
In 2011, according to the death row exonerees’ organization Witness to Innocence, the Cleveland Scenemagazine conducted an exhaustive investigation into Bridgeman’s case.
That investigation uncovered substantial misconduct in the way the police coerced testimony from the 12-year-old alleged witness.
The magazine’s investigation also led to the witness recanting his testimony against Bridgeman, his brother, and their friend.
The witness recantation and the police misconduct was enough to secure the interest of Ohio Innocence Project attorneys Brian Howe and Mark Godsey. Their ensuing collaborative investigation led to a reversal of Bridgeman’s conviction in November 2014.
Bridgeman was then released from prison after serving 39 years, three months and nine days.
Cleveland prosecutors conceded Bridgeman’s actual innocence and wrongful imprisonment. The City of Cleveland in 2016 awarded him $2.4 million in damages for his wrongful imprisonment.
The following year Bridgeman released a book of poetry titled “There’s Something I Meant To Tell You,” acclaiming him to be “one of the most prolific poets to have interwoven verse and thought in a work complementing its own sagacity.”
It is, and will remain, a collection of poetry that reflected the soul of a wronged man.
Wiley Bridgeman died in June 2021 at age 66 from complications of COPD. Two-thirds of his life had been stolen by a flawed, corrupt criminal justice system.
The National Registry of Exonerations (“NRE”) reports that as of June 2022, there have been 3,171 exonerations in this country since 1989—more than half of which involved convictions obtained through either prosecutorial or police misconduct. Nearly two-thirds of those convictions were obtained against people of color.
Legislatures can enact laws designed to bring about criminal justice reforms but they cannot legislate the revenge gene out of the system that implements those reforms.
For example, most parole decisions are determined by race, either of the offender or victim, and/or the local politics associated with given cases. Fairness, impartiality and equality do not exist in the discretionary parole process or in any other process in the justice system that allows discretion to avoid accountability.
There are tens of thousands of innocent Wiley Bridgemans in American penal facilities and hundreds of thousands more who have been and are continuing to be victims of injustice.
Billy Sinclair
Many will die anonymous deaths in these revenge designed institutions while others will survive only to live the rest of their lives damaged by a flawed justice system.
Justice cannot be perfect. But it can be fair absent revenge."
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://thecrimereport.org/2022/07/01/flawed-justice/
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The two robbers fled with the briefcase containing about $425 and got into a green car parked down the street and escaped.
Within a week, police obtained a statement from 12-year-old Eddie Vernon, who identified the gunman as 18-year-old Ricky Jackson. Vernon told police that 17-year-old Ronnie Bridgeman, and Bridgeman’s 20-year-old brother, Wiley, who drove the getaway car, were with Jackson.
Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers—none of whom had a criminal record—were arrested on May 25, 1975. They were charged with aggravated murder, aggravated attempted murder and aggravated robbery.
All three were tried separately in Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas in August 1975. No physical or forensic evidence linked any of them to the crime.
The prosecution’s case rested almost solely on the testimony of Vernon, who had turned 13 by the time he testified.
Vernon’s testimony was inconsistent. He initially told police that he was on the bus coming home from school when he saw the two men attack Franks as he got out of his car and walked to the store. Vernon testified at the trials, however, that he had already gotten off the bus when he saw the attack and that the attack occurred as Franks emerged from the store. Ann Robinson testified that she was shot in the neck by a bullet that pierced the store’s front door. She was unable to identify the robbers.
A 16-year-old neighborhood girl testified for the defense that she walked into the store just before the attack and saw two men outside the store. She said that neither of the two men were Jackson nor the Bridgeman brothers. Several of Vernon’s classmates testified that he was on the bus with them when they heard the gunshots and that none of them were able to see the robbers.
Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were convicted in August 1975. Ronnie Bridgeman was convicted in September 1975. All three denied they were involved in the crime. All presented witnesses who said they were elsewhere at the time it occurred—although they lived close enough to the store that they walked there after the shooting and were part of the crowd of about 100 people that had gathered.
All three were sentenced to death—just months after their arrest. Those sentences were later commuted to life in prison.
In 2002, Wiley Bridgeman was granted parole. Several weeks later, Wiley was living in a shelter in Cleveland when he had an accidental encounter with Vernon, who was working as a security guard at the shelter. Afterward, Vernon’s supervisor asked him about the encounter and Vernon explained that he had been the witness whose testimony convicted Wiley. The supervisor told Vernon to report the contact to Wiley’s parole officer because the contact was prohibited by the terms of Wiley’s parole. Vernon did so and as a result, Wiley’s parole was revoked and he was sent back to prison after being free for only about three months.
In January 2003, Ronnie Bridgeman was released from prison on parole.
In 2011, Cleveland Scene magazine published a detailed examination of the case and highlighted the numerous inconsistencies in Vernon’s testimony, and the absence of any other evidence linking Jackson and the Bridgeman’s to the crime. The article pointed out that Vernon had been paid $50 by Ann Robinson’s husband to testify at the trial—a fact that Vernon had failed to mention in his testimony.
Kyle Swenson, the reporter who wrote the article, attempted to interview Vernon, but he refused to talk about the case. Swenson reached out to Vernon’s pastor, Arthur Singleton. When Singleton mentioned to Vernon that a reporter wanted to talk to him, Vernon brushed off Singleton, telling him to ignore the reporter.
Months later, Swenson sent his article to Singleton, who asked Vernon about it. Vernon refused to talk about it. In 2013, Singleton paid a visit to Vernon in a hospital where Vernon was being treated for high blood pressure.
Singleton later said in a sworn affidavit that he asked Vernon again about the article. “Edward Vernon told me that he lied to the police when he said he had witnessed the murder in 1975, and he had put three innocent men in prison for murder,” Singleton said in the affidavit. “He told me that he tried to back out of the lie at the time of the line-up, but he was only a child and the police told him it was too late to change his story.”
Singleton said that Vernon broke down and wept. “I could see the weight…being lifted from his shoulders,” Singleton said.
Prompted by the recantation, Brian Howe and Mark Godsey, attorneys with the Ohio Innocence Project, filed a petition for a new trial on behalf of Jackson. Similar petitions were later filed on behalf of Wiley Bridgeman and Ronnie Bridgeman, who had since changed his name to Kwame Ajamu.
The Ohio Innocence Project’s re-investigation of the case uncovered evidence that when Vernon attempted to recant his identification of the three defendants, police intimidated him to testify falsely. The police had never disclosed to the defense attorneys for the three defendants that Vernon attempted to recant his accusation prior to the trials.
Police reports obtained by the Ohio Innocence Project also showed that police considered two other men, Paul Gardenshire and Ishmael Hixon, as suspects in the crime, but their investigation of those two men was terminated when Vernon identified Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers.
The license plate on the green car seen speeding away from the crime was matched to a car belonging to Hixon, whose police record included a robbery and shooting a year earlier. In 1976, a year after the Franks murder, Hixon pled guilty to more than a dozen counts of aggravated robbery.
In November 2014, Judge Richard McMonagle held a hearing on Jackson’s motion for a new trial. Vernon testified that police fed him the details of the crime. “I don’t have any knowledge about what happened at the scene of the crime,” he testified. “Everything was a lie. They were all lies.”'
Vernon told the judge that he was on the bus when he heard two pops that sounded like firecrackers. The bus was close to the store where the crime occurred, but not near enough that he could see anything that took place, Vernon testified. But based on a rumor he heard on the street, Vernon said he went to the scene and told police that Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers committed the crime.
“I’m thinking, ‘I'm doing the right thing,’”' Vernon testified. “I told the officer, ‘I know who did it.’” He testified that he tried to recant, but the detectives took him into a room and told him he was too young to go to jail, but they would arrest his parents for perjury because he was backing out. So, Vernon said, he agreed to testify at the trials.
On November 18, 2014, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty said the state would no longer contest the motion for a new trial. “The state concedes the obvious,” McGinty said.
In December 2014, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office said it would not oppose compensation awards to Jackson, Bridgeman and Ajamu because they believe the men are innocent. In February, 2015, they were declared innocent by a judge. Jackson was preliminarily awarded $1 million in compensation pending a final computation by the Ohio Court of Claims.
In June 2021, Bridgeman died of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease."
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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/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;
