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US – Free After 25 Years: A Tale Of Murder And Injustice – Michael Morton

April 30 Source : http://www.npr.org

The past few years in Texas have seen a parade of DNA exonerations: more than 40 men so far. The first exonerations were big news, but the type has grown smaller as Texans have watched a dismaying march of exonerees, their wasted years haunting the public conscience.

Yet a case in Williamson County, just north of Austin, is raising the ante. Michael Morton had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife. He was released six months ago — 25 years after being convicted — when DNA testing proved he was not the killer.

Instead of merely seeking financial compensation, Morton is working to fix the system. His lawyers, including The Innocence Project, want to hold the man who put him behind bars accountable. They also want new laws to make sure Morton’s story is never repeated.

The Day Of The Murder

On the morning of Aug. 13, 1986, Morton was getting ready for work as head of the pharmacy department at a nearby Safeway in Austin. He closed the door to his home, blissfully unaware that the next time he saw his wife of seven years she would be in a coffin. Morton had nine hours of his normal life left. The clock ran out after work, when he arrived to pick up his son from day care.

“First time I figured something was up was when I locked eyes with the baby sitter,” he says. “She looked at me real weird, like, ‘What are you doing here? Eric’s not here, why are you here?’ ”

Morton was immediately worried and called home. The man who answered was Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell. The sheriff refused to answer Morton’s questions and told him to come home immediately. Morton drove there in a panic.

“There were a lot of cars in the street. There was a big yellow crime-scene ribbon around our house,” he says. “Neighbors were across the street, clustered on the corner … talking to each other, and of course, when my truck comes racing up, they all kind of key on me.”

Boutwell met Morton outside the front door and, in front of everyone, bluntly told him Christine Morton was dead, murdered in their bedroom. Morton reeled.

“You really don’t know how you’re going to react until it happens to you, and with me, I remember it was as if I was … falling inside myself,” he says.

Morton was stunned, nearly mute, which fueled the sheriff’s suspicions and became a major prosecution touchstone at his trial. The fact that Morton didn’t cry out or weep became evidence that he didn’t love his wife and had killed her.

Boutwell took Morton into the living room, his wife’s body still down the hall. For the next four hours, Morton answered every question the sheriff could think of and never once asked for a lawyer.

“In my mind, I knew that, ‘OK, he’s doing his job. You have to eliminate the suspects, so he’s got to tick off these certain questions and get rid of me as a suspect and get on with this thing,’ ” he says.

The ‘Evidence’

Morton was wrong. Boutwell had already decided that Morton was his No. 1 one suspect. The previous day had been Morton’s birthday, and the family had gone out for a nice dinner. After getting home and putting Eric to bed, Morton was hoping for a “happy ending” with his wife. That’s not what happened, though, and Morton’s feelings were hurt. He wrote her something the next morning before he left for work.

“Chris, I know you didn’t mean to, but you made me feel really unwanted last night. After a good meal, we came home, you binged on the rest of the cookies, then you farted and fell asleep. I’m not mad. I just wanted you to know how I feel without us getting into a fight about sex. Just think how you’d feel if you were left hanging on your birthday. I love you.”

This note, left on the couple’s bathroom mirror, turned out to be Morton’s doom.

Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson used it to weave a sensational tale of unspeakable violence. In Anderson’s version of the crime, Morton used a wooden club to viciously bludgeon his wife’s head because she wouldn’t have sex with him. Then, in triumph over her body, he pleasured himself. The mild-mannered pharmacy manager was transformed into a sexually sick, murderous psychopath.

It was all a prosecutorial fantasy; none of it was true. Yet Anderson pounded his fists into his hands and wept to the jury as he described Morton’s perversity. Compared with this vivid picture of the crime, Morton’s defense didn’t have a lot to offer.

“The defense was that [Morton] didn’t do it, and we don’t know who did it. But whoever did it snuck in and committed a really vicious, vicious murder,” says Bill Anderson, now a criminal law professor at the University of Texas who was Morton’s lawyer in 1986. “And that is very frightening. A jury, by convicting [Morton], makes themselves safe. They’ve solved the case and they can go on about their business.”

What the jury and the defense lawyers didn’t know about was the evidence that had been concealed by Williamson County law enforcement. Only the sheriff’s office and the district attorney knew about it.

Undisclosed Information

For the past eight years, John Raley, of the Houston firm Raley & Bowick, has spent thousands of hours pro bono as Morton’s lawyer. “There were fingerprints on the sliding glass door, and there were fingerprints on the luggage that was piled on Christine Morton’s body,” he says. That’s not all: A neighbor told police that she’d seen a man in a green van casing the Morton home. Repeatedly.

“The neighbors report that they had seen a strange van driving around the neighborhood, stopping around the Morton house. The man in the van would drive around back to the wooded area and walk into the wooded area in back,” Raley says. “The interesting thing is, it’s around that area where the bandanna that contains the DNA was eventually found.”

A bloody bandanna had been found by a deputy behind the Morton home. Incredibly, the sheriff’s office decided to ignore it and left it lying on the ground.

Read full article (pictures, listen the story)  : click here 

Robert Taylor – Wrongfully convicted

On November 3, 2011, CWCY client Robert Taylor was released from prison after almost 19 years in prison, proven innocent by DNA. Robert was 15 years old when he falsely confessed to a crime he knew nothing about.

US – Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice Dept.

april 17, 2012 source : http://www.washingtonpost.com

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

The review was performed by a task force created during an inspector general’s investigation of misconduct at the FBI crime lab in the 1990s. The inquiry took nine years, ending in 2004, records show, but the findings were never made public.

In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone.

But two cases in D.C. Superior Court show the inadequacy of the government’s response.

Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981.

Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes.

But DNA testing this year on the hair and on other old evidence virtually eliminates Tribble as a suspect and completely clears Odom. Both men have completed their sentences and are on lifelong parole. They are now seeking exoneration in the courts in the hopes of getting on with their lives.

read full article : click here

‘I put my daddy on death row – but he’s innocent’: Man who testified against his father is campaigning for his release

april, 8 source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk

A man who testified against his father when he was seven years old is proclaiming his innocence and campaigning for his release – 23 years after he was sentenced to life in prison.

Jerry Michael Burgos, now 29, was called to the witness stand to give evidence against his father in 1989.

Jerry Burgos, who was 29 at the time, was charged with strangling his wife Nilsa – who was seven months pregnant – and setting their Polk Township, Pennsylvania, house on fire in an attempt to cover up the crime.

Campaign: Jerry Michael Burgos, right, and his brother Jason, left, are starting a Facebook group to proclaim the innocence of their father Jerry, centre

Campaign: Jerry Michael Burgos, right, and his brother Jason, left, are starting a Facebook group to proclaim the innocence of their father Jerry, centre

When investigators asked the boy what had happened on that fatal night, he said: ‘My dad took me and my brother out of the house and put us in his truck,’  according to the New York Post.

Burgos had told jurors that thick smoke engulfed their home and that he had managed to save his two sons from the blaze – but not his wife.

But the boy could not remember seeing signs of a fire, which allowed prosecutors to use his testimony to discredit his father’s.

The father-of-two had purchased a $75,000 life insurance policy four months before his wife’s death so prosecutors had reason to believe he had committed the crime.

The couple were also said to be involved with other lovers, which gave jurors another motive for the murder.

In 1989 Burgos was sentenced to the electric chair and found guilty of murder, arson and abuse of a corpse.

But Jerry Michael does not believe his father committed the crime. ‘I never hated my dad. I never felt like he did this,’ he told the New York Post. ‘I was always happy to see him when we went to trial.’

‘I feel like parents are a little bit of us. I really don’t think he did it. I can’t see myself doing it, and I couldn’t see him doing it either,’ he added.

The case that has been plagued by controversies went to retrial in 1993 because Burgos’s lawyer argued that prosecutors improperly used Jerry Michael’s testimony. But the second jury still found Burgos guilty.

Then, in 2004, Burgos’s attorney Philip Lauer won an appeal to test for genetic clues, as the previous trials had relied mainly on circumstantial evidence and had ignored DNA testing.

‘It seems like its standard fare in every case that everything gets tested, but in rural counties that isn’t the case,’ Lauer told the New York Post.

But even though a t-shirt found inside Nilsa’s body bag revealed somebody else’s DNA, it was not enough to overturn the verdict.

Now Jerry Michael and his brother Jason are creating a Facebook page to raise awareness about their father’s case. 

‘I love my mom, but I also lost my dad,’ Jerry Michael said. ‘I really don’t think he did it. I’m 99.9 percent sure that he didn’t do it. There’s no way.’

TEXAS – Hank Skinner – one more innocent on the death row

Filmmaker Werner Herzog’s segment on Hank Skinner, who is on Texas death row and fighting to prove his innocence with more DNA testing.

official website : http://www.hankskinner.org/

Arkansas – Death-row inmate claims state withheld evidence

march 29, source :http://arkansasnews.com

LITTLE ROCK — A man sentenced to die for a 1997 double homicide in Little River County did not receive a fair trial because prosecutors withheld crucial evidence from the defense, an attorney for the man argued today before the state Supreme Court.

An attorney for the state said the outcome of the case would have been the same even if the state had provided the evidence.

The court heard oral arguments but did not immediately issue a ruling in an appeal by Timothy Lamont Howard, 42, who was convicted of two counts of capital murder in the deaths of Brian and Shanon Day. The three were friends and were all involved in using and selling illegal drugs, mainly methamphetamine, according to court filings.

Brian Day’s body was found in a U-Haul trailer in Ogden on Dec. 13, 1997, and his wife’s body was found in the closet of the couple’s home in Ashdown later the same day.

At Howard’s trial in December 1999, jurors heard a forensics expert testify that boots found 2 1/2 miles from the murder scene contained hairs that were a likely match with Howard, and that blood on the boots was a likely match with Brian Day.

Howard’s trial lawyer argued that Howard was in Texarkana when the murders occurred and that the boots had been used to frame Howard.

The state Supreme Court upheld Howard’s conviction in 2002, but federal public defender Scott Braden argued before the high court today that it should order a new trial, or in the alternative send the case back to Little River County Circuit Court for a new evidentiary hearing, because the defense has learned that the state withheld evidence that could have changed the outcome of the trial.

That evidence includes notes showing that errors occurred during the testing of DNA from the boots and that samples may have been contaminated. Braden said the state had those notes but did not provide them to the defense before the trial.

“There is no question here that there is a reasonable probability that the jury would have done something different” if the defense had been able to use those notes to try to impeach the DNA evidence, Braden argued.

Assistant Attorney General Lauren Heil argued that other evidence established that the boots were Howard’s, including testimony by Howard’s ex-wife that the boots looked like his.

Justice Robert Brown asked Heil if she thought that testimony was equivalent to testimony of a DNA match. She said she believed it was, in combination with Howard’s defense that the boots were used to frame him — a defense that she said required conceding that the boots were his.

Braden also argued that the state did not provide the defense with a police report detailing an incident of abuse that Howard suffered as a child. He said the defense could have used the report as evidence of Howard’s violent childhood during the penalty phase of the trial, and the jury could have considered Howard’s past a mitigating factor that weighed against imposing the death penalty.

Heil argued that Howard could have brought up the incident himself at his trial, but he did not.

“The defendant has an obligation to raise things within his own unique knowledge,” she said.

Heil also argued that the defense did not assert its claims in a timely manner, a charge that Braden denied.

The Supreme Court split on Howard’s previous appeal in 2002, ruling 4-3 to uphold his conviction. Only two of the justices who took part in that decision are still on the court: Chief Justice Jim Hannah and Justice Robert Brown, both of whom said then in dissenting opinions they would have overturned the conviction because of problems with the state’s case.

Justice Donald Corbin recused from hearing both appeals. Filling in for him today as a special appointed justice was Little Rock lawyer Ronald Hope.

Name Date Duration
NEW!! CR 00-803 Timothy Lamont Howard v. State of Arkansas, from Little River Circuit Mar 29, 2012 00h 53m Oral Argument

Case Caption:
TIMOTHY LAMONT HOWARD
V
STATE OF ARKANSAS

Timothy Lamont Howard (ACTIVE) Appellant’s counsel:
Dorcy Kyle Corbin – LEAD
Janice Wegener Vaughn – LEAD
Mac John Carder Jr – LEAD
Julie Brain – LEAD
Scott W. Braden – LEAD
Joshua R. Lee – LEAD
Conviction Information:
Convicted of: Capital Murder
Sentence: 000-00-000 (yyy-mm-ddd)
Sentence Type DEATH

State Of Arkansas (ACTIVE) Appellee’s counsel:
Attorney General – LEAD

Trial Court: Little River
Little River Circuit
Trial Court Number: CR-97-105
Trial Judge: Charles A. Yeargan

——- EVENT LISTING ——–
03/29/2012 Case Submitted – Orally Argued

03/29/2012 Supreme Court Votesheet Issued

03/29/2012 Supreme Court Oral Argument Issued for
REGULAR DOCKET scheduled for 03/29/12 at A.M. – ORAL Argument.
2/27/12 – Scott Braden and Josh Lee confirmed
2/27/12 – Lauren Heil confirmed

No. 02-6564 Status: DECIDED
Title: Timothy Lamont Howard, Petitioner
v.
Arkansas
Docketed: Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Arkansas
September 26, 2002 (CR00-803)
~~Date~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sep 25 2002 Petition for writ of certiorari and motion for leave to proceed in
forma pauperis filed. (Response due October 26, 2002)
Oct 28 2002 Brief of respondent Arkansas in opposition filed.
Nov 7 2002 DISTRIBUTED for Conference of November 27, 2002
Dec 2 2002 Petition DENIED.
********************************************************
~~Name~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~Address~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~Phone~~~
Attorneys for Petitioner:
Jeffrey M. Rosenzweig 300 Spring Street 5013725247
Suite 310
Little Rock, AR 72201
Party name: Timothy L. Howard
Attorneys for Respondent:
Lauren E. Heil AG’s Ofc., 200 Tower Building 5016821309
323 Center Street
Little Rock, AR 72201
Party name: Arkansas

Why is Alabama opposing DNA testing?

March 28, 2012  source :http://socialistworker.org

why is Alabama opposing DNA testing?

Rebekah Skelton reports on a case where an Alabama man’s life is at stake.

March 28, 2012

Alabama death row prisoner Thomas ArthurAlabama death row prisoner Thomas Arthur

THOMAS ARTHUR has been on Alabama’s death row for 30 years. He was convicted of killing Troy Wicker in 1982, but has always maintained his innocence. Recently, a federal appeals court stayed Arthur’s March 29 execution date over an issue about lethal injection, though that stay could be lifted at any time.

The real question, however, remains this: Will Thomas Arthur be executed in Alabama without being allowed to have DNA testing that could prove his innocence?

There is a piece of evidence, an “Afro wig” worn by Wicker’s killer as a disguise, that could be tested for Arthur’s DNA. The wig has already been tested once for DNA, after another Alabama prisoner, Bobby Ray Gilbert, confessed to Wicker’s murder in 2008. However, the testing was inconclusive–there wasn’t a match for Gilbert or Arthur.

Ultimately, the original judge decided that Gilbert’s confession wasn’t credible, and despite a lack of other physical evidence tying Arthur to the crime, she recommended that the Alabama Supreme Court deny Arthur’s appeal, which it did.

Now, Arthur’s defense team is asking for a more advanced DNA test, called a mini-STR DNA analysis, on the wig, but Alabama’s attorney general is fighting the request–arguing that this test wouldn’t be any more accurate than the previous one. On top of that, there is no law guaranteeing Arthur the right to further DNA testing.

“I am outraged that there is physical evidence that, if DNA-tested, would prove my father’s guilt or innocence conclusively. This testing could be done prior to his execution and would be paid for by the law firm handling his case,” said Arthur’s daughter Sherrie Stone. “If we are to continue executions in this country, laws must be put in place in which DNA testing must be allowed at all stages of the process. There is a chance we are executing innocent people. I know because my father is one of those people.”

If the lawyers have offered to pay for the testing, what could possibly be the problem? If the test shows that Arthur’s innocent, the state of Alabama can rest easy knowing they didn’t condemn an innocent man to death. And if it show’s he’s guilty, it would only affirm what the state has already convicted him of, at no cost to them.

However, as Andrew Cohen pointed out in a February article in The Atlantic, the general consensus among prosecutors and judges is to value “finality” in cases, rather than “accuracy.” Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, outlined this position in a 2000 “Frontline” interview, saying, “We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent. We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IT SHOULD be clear to anyone with a conscience that if there’s even a small chance that someone might be innocent after being convicted, the court should do everything in its power to ensure they have the right person–especially when someone’s life is at stake.

But lately, prosecutors have been fighting harder than ever to keep defendants from having access to post-conviction DNA testing. Hank Skinner has been on Texas death row since 1995. His case has many similarities to Arthur’s, such as DNA evidence the court is denying him the right to have tested and a heavy emphasis on an eyewitness who at one point or another recanted.

“Since these guys are on their electoral deadlines, their finality has nothing to do with accuracy,” said Skinner’s wife Sandrine Ageorges-Skinner. “You can’t rush justice.”

The goal of any justice system has to be to find the truth. As Sandrine said, since no justice system is ever going to be infallible–there have been 289 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S., according to the Innocence Project–prosecutors and judges must be willing to admit that they might have convicted the wrong person.

Post-conviction DNA testing must be granted to prisoners whose guilt is questionable–o matter what the cost, and especially when it could be an innocent person who’s paying the ultimate price.

First published at The New Abolitionist.

CNN interview of the wrong conviction of Alan Northrop !

march, 25, 2012

Woodland, Washington (CNN) — Alan Northrop was playing pool in 1993 when his life changed forever. He was lining up a bank shot when he felt something on his wrist: a handcuff.

Northrop was arrested for the rape and kidnapping of a housekeeper. “I instantly said, ‘No, you’ve got the wrong guy,'” Northrop recalls telling detectives. But detectives believed the victim’s testimony, although she was blindfolded for most of the attack. A jury agreed, sentencing Northrop, a father of three children under age 6, to 23 years in prison.

From behind bars, Northrop tried to prove police had the wrong guy. In 2000, he contacted the Innocence Project Northwest at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle.

For years, prosecutors denied the project’s requests to use more advanced DNA testing on the evidence in Northrop’s case. In 2005, a new state law gave judges the power to order additional testing. But it took five more years for Northrop’s testing to be completed and for a court to consider the results that conclusively showed another man’s DNA was on the victim.

In 2010, Northrop, still sitting in prison, got a letter with news he thought he might never get.

“I was jumping around the day room saying, ‘I’m out of here! I’m out of here!'” Northrop said.

read full interview on CNN

TEXAS – Execution dates set for two death row inmates

march 16, 2012

Execution dates were set for two Bexar County death row inmates, including one who was given a reprieve last month days before his scheduled execution, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Anthony Bartee, 55, was scheduled to die on Feb. 28 but was granted a reprieve to allow for additional forensic testing. Bartee’s attorney, David Dow, sent a letter to the court arguing the new May 2 date should not have been set because the DNA testing has not been completed. He said neither he nor his client was told of a hearing to set a new date, the letter said.

Bartee was convicted in the August 1996 robbery-murder of his friend David Cook.

An execution date of Nov. 14 was set for Ramon Hernandez, 40. Hernandez was convicted in the 2002 rape and murder of Rosa Rosado, 37, according to TDCJ.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Execution-dates-set-for-two-death-row-inmates-3413825.php#ixzz1pUUVRTTA

POSSIBLE INNOCENCE: Alabama Denies DNA Testing for Man Facing Execution

Alabama recently set an execution date for Thomas Arthur (pictured), who was convicted of a murder that took place 30 years ago. Arthur has always maintained his innocence, but has been denied access to DNA evidence that might lead to a different verdict. As Andrew Cohen pointed out in an investigative piece inThe Atlantic, Arthur is scheduled for execution on March 29, despite the confession of Bobby Ray Gilbert to the crime for which Arthur is facing execution.  There was no physical evidence that linked Arthur to the murder, and his sentence was secured almost entirely by the testimony of the victim’s wife, Judy Wicker. At first, Wicker told the authorities that Arthur was not involved in the crime, but when she was convicted for hiring someone to murder her husband, she arranged a deal with the prosecution. In exchange for a recommendation of early release from prison, she changed her original testimony and implicated Arthur. Since then, Gilbert has testified under oath to the murder. Gilbert said he had an affair with Wicker and soon agreed to kill her husband. State courts, however, have ruled that Gilbert’s confession was not credible, and have opposed DNA testing on an item recovered from the crime scene that could identify who was actually involved in the crime.  Arthur’s attorneys have agreed to pay for the DNA testing.

source : death penalty

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