Feb. 11, 2016

“Significant criminal justice reforms (are needed) to minimize the chances of wrongful prosecution in the future.

“Some might dismiss such goals as a liberal utopian ideal, but criminal justice reform is being embraced nationwide by tea party conservatives. Why? Because few things exemplify the overreach of an all-too-powerful government (better) than one that yanks away an individual’s freedom without legal justification….

“Conservatives in the heavily Republican Texas legislature have embraced some of the most far-reaching criminal justice reforms in the country….”

– From “Shame and joy behind 149 exonerations” in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Feb. 7 editorial)

And how is North Carolina’s own heavily Republican legislature taking up the cause of criminal justice reform? With the piously labeled Restoring Proper Justice Act, (text cache), which both conceals information on the drugs used for capital punishment and repeals a law requiring a physician be present.  Sponsoring Rep. Leo Daughtry railed against “roadblocks in front of the death penalty (that) have stopped us from using the punishment” for the past decade.

Had Daughtry had his way, death row inmates Henry McCollum and Leon Brown would long since have been executed – instead of exonerated and then pardoned by the same governor who blithely signed the Restoring Proper Justice Act into law.

Jan. 31, 2012

Expert vouching.

That odd little legalism is the crucial issue in Junior Chandler’s latest – and perhaps last – shot at justice. Durham attorney Mark Montgomery has just filed an appeal on Junior’s behalf in the N.C. Supreme Court.

In Junior’s 1987 trial in Buncombe County, the prosecution ran out no fewer than six expert witnesses, including three pediatricians.

Each expert testified that Junior’s alleged victims had in fact been sexually abused “as they described” – but none could cite definitive physical evidence on which they based their validation.

In the years since, higher courts have seen the reversible error of those ways. Expert vouching is now inadmissible in the absence of physical evidence “diagnostic of” – not just “consistent with” – sexual abuse.

The case against Junior was weak and weird on all fronts. No credible eyewitnesses or physical evidence. No storyline that made a lick of sense. (Although prosecutor Bill Hart must have liked the kidnapping-and-boat-ride scenario – he called on it again four years later in the Little Rascals trial.)

Only four children testified against Junior, accounting for less than 2 percent of the 1,407-page trial transcript. Some claimed to have been abused by… Pinocchio. And jurors never heard from those children on Junior’s bus who denied seeing abuse.

Just how important was expert vouching in imposing Junior’s two consecutive life sentences?

On all charges supported by expert vouching the jury found him guilty. On all charges not supported by expert vouching it found him not guilty.

Sept. 11, 2016

“I honestly don’t understand not only how the Attorney General’s Office felt it was necessary to fight us through a full week of hearing in this case, but how they could stand up at the end of that hearing and say they thought Johnny should stay in prison.

“That is not a minister of justice. A minister of justice should be objective enough to evaluate the evidence in a fair way and there was no way anybody could look at the evidence that came out in that hearing and say Johnny Small should be in prison.”

– Chris Mumma of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, quoted in “Johnny Small free after murder charge dismissed” in the Wilmington Star-News (Sept. 8)

I would’ve expected, before my apprenticeship on the exoneration watch, that district attorneys would be less willing to having their fingers pried loose from wrongful convictions than their allies in the attorney general’s office. It’s the DAs, after all, who have to ‘splain their misfeasance to the voting public.

But this often seems not to be the case, as exemplified by Assistant AG Jess Mekeel’s misplaced concern for “the stability and reliability of our justice system.”

How much of this institutional resistance to exoneration owes to a tradition of prosecutorial blood-brotherhood? And how much springs directly (if not via email) from Attorney General Roy Cooper?

If Cooper took heed of Mumma’s thoughtful plea for “more cooperation between prosecutors and defense attorneys in their efforts to achieve justice,” evidence of it has yet to surface.

Sept. 16, 2013

“The prosecution-minded are careful to say that they do not believe everything a child says. For example, they do not believe 3-year-old Virginia’s statement that ‘Karen was cooked in a microwave.’

“But they do believe her when she says, ‘I helped my teacher put a playhandle in Karen’s heinie’ – even though one 3-year-old sodomizing another with a ‘playhandle’ an inch or 2 wide and not causing bleeding from a torn rectum is as unbelievable as cooking a child in a microwave.

“Accepting half a child’s statement and rejecting the other (death by microwave) is capricious: The truth is not a smorgasbord from which we can choose the facts we fancy and leave behind those we do not.”

– From “Magical Child Molestation Trials: Edenton’s Children Accuse” by Margaret Leong (1993)