"The Virginia
attorney general's office said Wednesday that it will no longer oppose
overturning the rape and murder convictions of two former sailors after a
federal judge declared last month that "no sane human being" could find
the men guilty. U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney Jr. said last
month that evidence shows Danial Williams and Joseph Dick did not commit
the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko. He urged the state to
free the men of the "continuing shackles of their convictions." Attorney
General Mark Herring's office said in motions filed Wednesday that in
light of the judge's decision, it will no longer contest their efforts
to be declared innocent by the court. Herring's office is now asking the
court to grant the men's writs of habeas corpus, which would have the
effect of vacating their convictions, said Herring spokesman Michael
Kelly. Prior to Gibney's decision last month, the attorney
general's office had defended the men's convictions and urged the court
at an evidentiary hearing last year to reject their innocence bids.........Williams and Dick are two of the so-called "Norfolk Four," ex-sailors
who have long claimed that police coerced them into falsely confessing.
The four men, who were all stationed at the Navy base in Norfolk,
Virginia, drew national attention when their innocence claims were
backed by dozens of former FBI agents, ex-prosecutors and novelist John
Grisham. In
2009, then-Gov. Tim Kaine freed Williams, Dick and Derek Tice because
of doubts about their guilt but allowed their convictions to remain. The
fourth man, Eric Wilson, had already been released. Tice's
conviction has already been overturned. DNA evidence matched a fifth
man, Omar Ballard, who confessed to committing the crime alone. He is
serving a life sentence. Williams and Dick are no longer in
prison, but face certain restrictions because they're still on parole
and must also register as sex offenders."
http://pilotonline.com/news/nation-world/virginia/virginia-attorney-general-won-t-oppose-overturning-convictions-in-norfolk/article_635dbeee-87e1-59e2-8715-a616af7716a0.html
See Wikipedia entry at the link below; "The Norfolk Four are four men, Derek Tice, Danial Williams,
Joseph J. Dick Jr., and Eric C. Wilson, who were convicted in 1999 for
the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko in
Norfolk, Virginia. Their convictions were the source of controversy, as their convictions were largely based on
confessions which the men maintain were coerced with threats of receiving the
death penalty if they did not plead guilty. Organizations such as the
Innocence Project
protested the convictions as a "miscarriage of justice", while
Moore-Bosko's parents continue to believe that all those convicted were
participants in the crime.
[1][2] Three of the four men, Tice, Williams, and Dick, were sentenced to one or more
life sentences in prison without the possibility of
parole
due to their having either pleaded guilty to or having been convicted
of the murder, while Wilson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 8½
years in prison. Three other men, Geoffrey A. Farris, John E. Danser,
and Richard D. Pauley, Jr., were also initially charged with the crime,
but their charges were later dropped. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, was also convicted of the crime and was
sentenced to 100 years in prison, 59 of which were suspended. He is the
only man whose DNA matches that found at the scene, and his confession
states that he committed the crime by himself, with none of the other
men involved. Forensic evidence is consistent with his story that there
were no other participants.
Investigation: At
the time it was noted that there were no signs of a break-in or a
struggle inside the apartment. As the investigation progressed,
detective Robert Glenn Ford questioned residents of Moore-Bosko's
development and was informed by Tamika Taylor, a friend of
Moore-Bosko's, that another neighbor, Danial Williams, was "obsessed"
with the murdered woman.
[4]
Williams lived in an apartment near Bosko's with his wife and their
roommate Joe Dick. Detective Ford interrogated both Williams and Dick
and obtained confessions from them but their confessions were
inconsistent both with each other and with the evidence.
[5]
In the confessions, Williams claimed that he acted alone while Dick
stated that he and Williams had committed the crime together. Dick also
claimed to have committed the crime between the hours of 9 and 11 p.m,
which clashed with Taylor's claims that she and Michelle had remained
out from noon until 11:30 p.m. as well as naval logs that reportedly
showed that Dick was on duty on the
USS Saipan (LHA-2) at the time of the murder.
[4]
The Chief Petty Officer that Dick reported to commented that he had
taken special interest in Dick due to what he saw as the man's
diminished mental capacity; he believed it to be "virtually impossible
for Dick to sneak off, commit the crime and sneak back on board".
[4]
Both men also claimed to have committed violent attacks or sexual
assaults on the victim which were inconsistent with the physical
evidence, such as Williams claiming to have beaten Michelle with a shoe
and assaulting her to the face three times.
[4] Instead the coroner's report stated that Michelle had died due to being stabbed and strangled,
[6]
upon which point Williams changed his confession to state that he "may
have grabbed Michelle’s neck and that he had used a knife he found in
the bedroom to kill her". Neither Williams nor Dick could provide an
accurate description of the knife.
[4] DNA evidence taken from the scene did not match Williams or Dick,
which led a jailhouse informant to prompt Dick to name a co-conspirator.
Eric Wilson was then named.
[7]
The DNA did not match Wilson either and Dick indicated that a fourth
man, whom he called "George" but whom he identified from photographs as
Derek Tice, was also involved.
[8]
Tice confessed and implicated three more men in the crime, and insisted
that the group had broken into the apartment, which contradicted
earlier evidence that showed that the apartment did not appear to have
been broken into. Since the DNA evidence did not match Tice, the police
got Dick to name three other men as co-conspirators. These men were
ultimately never charged because they had ironclad alibis including one
who was internet chatting with his girlfriend at the time of the murder
and another who records showed had withdrawn money from a cash machine
hundreds of miles away within minutes of when the murder had occurred.
[4] Critics of the police case also noted that the stab wounds to
Moore-Bosko were all of a uniform depth and clustered closely together.
This seemed to contradict the prosecution's assertion that multiple men
had taken turns stabbing her, but seemed consistent with a scenario
where one assailant stabbed her multiple times.
Trial: Williams,
Wilson, and Tice were each brought to trial in 1999, with Williams
pleading guilty to rape and capital murder in the hopes of getting a
life sentence in exchange for a stipulation of facts.
[7]
Lawyers for the three men mentioned that none of their DNA matched that
found at Michelle's apartment, to which prosecutors stated that the
lack of DNA evidence couldn't disprove that the defendants weren't at
the scene.
[9]
Williams was found guilty of rape and sentenced to eight and a half
years, while Dick received life without parole and Tice received two
consecutive life sentences.
[10]On
Jan. 15, 1998, Omar Ballard pleaded guilty to the rape of a
fourteen-year-old girl. In February of the same year, he sent a letter
to a female acquaintance threatening her and indicating that he had
murdered Michelle Moore Bosko.
[11]
It was later discovered that Ballard was an associate of Michelle Moore
Bosko. Tamika Taylor, who had introduced Ballard to the Boskos and knew
about his history of violence towards women, had told the police that
they should investigate him as a possible suspect.
[11]
Ballard was later investigated for the crime and arrested after it was
discovered that his DNA matched that found at the crime scene.
[11]
Ballard confessed to the crime, giving a description that aligned with
the physical evidence. Despite police pressure to implicate Williams,
Tice, Dick, and Wilson, Ballard insisted that he had committed the crime
alone, saying that "those four who opened their mouths were stupid".
[11]
The police incorporated Ballard into their theory of the crime, but
insisted that Ballard refused to name his accomplices for fear of being
labeled a "snitch" and that the other men, who had been willing to
implicate others in the crime, were afraid of Ballard and thus refused
to implicate him.
Retrials and aftermath: Williams appealed his verdict but was denied in 2000.
[7] Tice's conviction was reversed in 2002 by the
Virginia Court of Appeals because Judge Poston had not allowed Tice's attorney to question Ballard about his written confession.
[7]
During the retrial, Poston refused to allow the confession or
statements in as evidence because they were not "properly
authenticated", but the judge did allow Tice's attorney to read the
confession letter aloud.
[7] Despite the retrial, Tice was again sentenced to life in prison.
[7]
In 2005 attorneys for Dick, Williams and Tice petitioned for
clemency from Virginia governor
Mark Warner. Warner did not rule on the petition, and it was considered by subsequent Virginia governor
Tim Kaine. The claims of innocence were backed by several FBI agents as well as eleven of the jurors who initially convicted them.
[12][13] Tice's conviction was overturned on November 27, 2006 by a
circuit court on constitutional grounds, but the conviction was reinstated by the
Virginia Supreme Court.
[14]
Tice filed a petition for habeas corpus with a United States District
Court, and on September 14, 2009, U.S. District Court Judge
Richard L. Williams
vacated Tice's murder and rape convictions, on the ground that Tice had
been denied his constitutional right to effective counsel. On November
19, 2009, Judge Williams ruled that prosecutors can retry Tice. On April
20, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
affirmed Judge Williams' rulings vacating Tice's convictions.
[15] Tice was later freed in 2011 after the
U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Tice's confession should have been thrown out of court.
[16]
On August 6, 2009, Kaine granted a conditional pardon to Dick, Tice,
and Williams, releasing them from prison while not erasing their
convictions.
[17] Part of the conditional release states that the three men are required to register as sex offenders and felons.
[18] Wilson was released in 2005, but must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. In March 2010, he asked the
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for a writ of
habeas corpus
challenging his conviction. The court refused to hear Wilson's case,
saying that since he was not in prison, on probation, on parole or on
supervised release, he was not in custody and therefore could not
petition for habeas. A panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit also refused to hear the case.
[19] Former detective Glenn Ford was later indicted on May 2010 on an
unrelated extortion charges of accepting payments from criminal suspects
in return for favorable treatment,
[20] with him being found guilty of two of the four counts against him.
[21][22] This prompted attorneys for the Norfolk Four to call for full exoneration of their clients and in 2013 the
Yale Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic filed a petition for the Supreme Court to clear Wilson's record of his crimes.
[23][24] Virginia Attorney General
Ken Cuccinelli did not file a response, but the Supreme Court ordered him to file a brief by April 25, 2013.
[25] On June 24, 2013, Wilson's petition was denied. The case is Wilson v. Flaherty, No. 12-986
."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Four
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.
