Facts Behind the Fiction
They say truth is stranger than fiction. In these cases, truth is scarier that fiction.
Just so there's no doubt, any individuals named here should be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And, as we'll see, even then guilt may not be certain.
This month, four men from the Chicago area, dubbed the Englewood Four, were exonerated for the 1994 murder and rape of a sex worker after the State's Attorney's Office announced that it was dismissing the indictments against them. Their convictions were overturned after new DNA evidence implicated another man with a long history of murdering and assaulting sex workers.
Michael Saunders, Harold Richardson, Terrill Swift, and Vincent Thames, who were all between fifteen and eighteen years old at the time of their convictions, and Jerry Fincher, eighteen, were charged with the November 1994 strangulation murder and rape of Nina Glover, a sex worker, in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. In mid-March 1995, after all leads in the case had dried up, police claim that Fincher walked into the precinct to voluntarily provide information about Glover's murder to help gain "some consideration" for a friend of his who was in custody on a drug charge. According to the police, after two days of interrogation, Fincher confessed to the murder, also implicating Saunders, Richardson, Swift, and Thames. Police arrested and interrogated the other four, securing confessions, which were wildly inconsistent with each other. Despite the fact that all five supposedly admitted to having sexual intercourse with the victim, pre-trial DNA testing on semen recovered from the victim matched an unknown male and excluded all five teenagers. Rather than continue with the investigation to identify the source of the semen, however, the state went forward with the prosecution of the five young men.
The judge in Fincher's case ruled that his statement was coerced and therefore inadmissible. Since there was no other evidence linking Fincher to the crime, prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charges against him. Saunders, Richardson, and Swift were all convicted at trial based on the strength of their so-called confessions and were sentenced to at least 30 years in prison. After seeing his three co-defendants lose at trial, Thames pled guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Josh Tepfer of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, commented, "Tragically, today's exonerations follow on the heels of the exonerations of four Dixmoor men and Juan Rivera in Lake County, all of which involved police induced false confessions of teenagers. Let's hope the damage these prosecutions have caused has finally forced the State's Attorney's Office to recognize that it can no longer ignore this problem. Let's also hope that the law enforcement will finally learn that aggressive interrogation tactics used against children too often result in false confessions."
Stuart Chanen, a former prosecutor who now works on exoneration cases at the Valorem Law Group, asked, "How many false confession cases are we going to have to see before the state decides to do something about this epidemic? Not only did these men spend years behind bars for a crime they didn't commit, but while they were locked up, the real perpetrator was out murdering and terrorizing other women."
With files from the Innocence Project.
To just about everyone's shock, dismay, and even anger, Casey Anthony was found not guilty in the death of her daughter. Immediately after the jury delivered their verdict, armchair attorneys began analyzing the case, trying to determine what went wrong.
Did the prosecution stumble? Did they over-reach? Should they have pursued a lesser charge? Should they have pursued the same charge but not sought the death penalty?
Was the defense just too strong? (During the trial, not a few observers referred to Anthony's lead defense lawyer Jos� Baez as Jos� Bozo.)
Did the jury misunderstand their charge? Were they somehow duped by Anthony?
Now, after the dust has begun to settle, some jury members have revealed that they did not in any way believe Casey Anthony was innocent, but they didn't feel the prosecution had presented enough evidence to convict her.
This raises another factor; the type and quality of the evidence presented.
In this day of graphic and tech-filled TV crime shows, some people have come to believe that every case must be settled with conclusive, proof-positive DNA evidence. We've become used to seeing crime scene detectives and forensic pathologists answering any and all questions about a case in precise detail, without hesitancy, in neat forty-two minute segments, one hour if you include commercials.
Perhaps we don't understand that real criminal investigations aren't usually so cut-and-dried and that "beyond a reasonable doubt" doesn't mean "beyond any doubt."
In any case, those who were disappointed by the outcome of the Casey Anthony trial may have to be content with the knowledge that, as one observer put it, "Karma is a bitch."
We're now half-way through the Casey Anthony trial. That is, the prosecution is about to rest its case and, beginning in the next day or so, the defense will begin presenting its case.
The testimony has been fascinating. It's included statements and photographs from forensic experts, and even video recordings of the accused in jail. But equally interesting -- and equally disturbing -- is the reaction of the general public. Most comments from readers on news sites reporting on the case are unanimous in condemning the woman accused of murdering her young daughter. Granted, the prosecution has presented some compelling evidence, including numerous lies from the defendant. But the defense has yet to be heard.
Will opinions change when we hear Casey's side of the story?
This month two news items presented a stunning contrast in the world of crime and punishment.
In Ohio, USA, Johnnie Baston became the first person in the United States to be executed with the single-dose drug pentobarbital.
Most lethal-injection executions are performed using the drug sodium thiopental, but faced with a nationwide shortage the country is looking for alternatives. Pentobarbital has been used in lethal injections before, but only as the first drug of a three-drug cocktail. It has also been used to euthanize animals, but this is the first time it's gone solo in a human execution.
A couple of states over, in Illinois, we find a different take on the preferred method of execution: There now isn't any.
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has signed legislation abolishing capital punishment in the state and commuting the sentence for the 15 men still on death row. This comes just over a decade after one of Quinn's predecessors, Governor George Ryan, placed a temporary halt on executions when 20 death-row inmates were exonerated of the charges against them.
Not everyone is happy with this change in legislation. Some believe that execution should still be on the books for "extreme" cases. But isn't every murder extreme? And isn't is just as possible for mistakes to result in wrongful convictions in "extreme" cases as they are in ... what? ... "normal" crimes? Perhaps the critics would be happier in Ohio.