GIST: "Attorneys for Alabama Death Row inmate Toforest Johnson are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, arguing the key witness was secretly paid a reward for her testimony.
Johnson’s attorneys said in their filing Monday to the nation’s highest court that the $5,000 payment was disclosed two decades later “after years of the official denials that the witness was ever paid. According to State officials, who continue to pursue Johnson’s execution, it had been ‘misfiled’ all those years.”
“The public cannot possibly have confidence in the system if the state of Alabama is permitted to execute Johnson when it paid its key witness $5,000 in secret and both the District Attorney and the trial prosecutor support a new trial.”
Johnson, 50, was convicted of the 1995 shooting of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy. Johnson is currently incarcerated at William C. Holman correctional facility in Atmore.
The U.S. Supreme Court justices have reviewed the case before. In 2017, the court ruled in favor of Johnson, sending the case back to the state.
The appeal wound its way through the state court system for years, with the Alabama Supreme Court declining to review the case in December.
“If there were nothing problematic about the State’s $5,000 payment to (the witness), there would have been no reason for the state to conceal the payment for 18 years,” wrote Johnson’s attorneys in the filing.
“If not for a retired state employee informing Johnson’s counsel in 2018 that the State maintained a confidential reward file, Johnson never would have obtained the documents about the payment.”
According to the Monday petition, the former lead trial prosecutor said the state’s entire case against Johnson was based on that witness. He later testified, according to the filing, “I don’t think the State’s case was very strong, because it depended on the testimony of Violet Ellison in my opinion.”
Ellison told police she heard a man who identified himself as Toforest confess to the shooting. She didn’t know Johnson, and said she overheard the remark when she picked up the phone during a call her daughter made to a friend who was in jail. Her story “contradicted the physical evidence in the case,” said Monday’s filing.
Following his 1998 conviction, Johnson’s lawyers argued that prosecutors suppressed evidence that Ellison knew about the reward money being offered in the case, and that she was hoping to get the cash. That argument was litigated throughout the court system from 2003 until 2018.
In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Johnson’s case and sent the case back to state court. There was a hearing in Jefferson County, where Johnson was convicted, and it wasn’t until 2018 that the copy of the check that was paid to Ellison surfaced.
Johnson’s lawyers weren’t told about the payment, and didn’t conclusively know about it until seeing that check.
That hearing also led to a file that contained a letter from the then-district attorney to the governor, asking for the money. That letter said Ellison gave information on Johnson “pursuant to the public offer of a reward.”
The county circuit court judge ruled in favor of the state, and the case again was appealed to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. That court also ruled that Johnson’s team couldn’t show Ellison knew about the reward money when she talked to police.
Then, in December, the state’s highest court declined to look at the case.
In 2020, Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr voiced concerns about Johnson’s case and asked for a new trial. He wrote in a court filing, “It is the District Attorney’s position that in the interest of justice, Mr. Johnson who has spent more than two decades on Death Row, be granted a new trial.”
The original prosecutor also supports Carr’s motion.
“The requests of the District Attorney and the trial prosecutor are particularly striking given the nature of … claims,” wrote Johnson’s lawyers in the Monday filing. “Johnson has been seeking a new trial… for nearly two decades. One might expect a defensive reaction from the office and the individual accused of violating a capital defendant’s constitutional rights. Yet here, both have requested that Johnson’s conviction be vacated based on a litany of problems…”
Former Alabama Chief Justice Drayton Nabers and former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley are among numerous lawyers, former judges and prosecutors who have voiced support a new trial for Johnson. Other supporters include former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, former magistrate Judge John Carroll, and three former jurors on the case.
Monday’s petition to the court comes after a Sunday night event in Birmingham to raise awareness about the case. According to Johnson’s lawyers, more than 400 people attended the , Greater Birmingham Ministries event.
The state has yet to set an execution date for Johnson."
The entire story can be read at:
INFORMATIVE PODCAST: Listen to California Innocence Project podcast on 'Jailhouse snitches and informants' - a Wrongful Conviction Podcast - featuring Prof. Justin Brooks, at the link below.
EPISODE NOTES: "People are falsely accused of crimes all the time. It’s bad enough when it happens by accident, but it’s even worse when the accuser has something to gain from it. Join us as we explore the role of jailhouse informants and confidential sources in implicating the wrongfully accused with Justin Brooks, Founder and Director of the California Innocence Project, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders, and former Investigator Detective Gregory McKnight."
The Podcast can be accessed at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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