This is an article I just read by Ed Pilkington. vile that his imprisonment was even allowed to happen. Triggers the old debate I had in my head over the Esmond case. Not just simply innocent until proven guilty but a bit more to it than that. Justice is so important, or more that every possible attempt and vigilence is made to ensure it happens. However false justice, injustice, undermines and pollutes any correctly served justice by meaning the justice system is itself the perpetrator of crimes and this must not happen. It must not happen because logically the justice system needs to be seperate, UNABLE to committ crimes otherwise crime and justice becomes a dichotomy/duality in conflict/ dialogue with one another and in flux. They need to be comletely seperate in order for one to impose upon another. Other wise the lines between right and wrong (legally? morally?) are blurred and where can we ever start to know the difference between the two. Better to let someone get away with a crime than to convict an innocent person and in doing so commit another crime. But why? Because two crimes have to be perceived as worse than one. But is it a crime to let someone get away with a crime? It is, but only if that allowance is intentional. And the difference here lies in the knowledge. If someone gets away with a crime, despite the arm of the laws best efforts to discover who comitted it, then noone is intentionally committing a crime beyond the original crime that was committed. But if someone innocent is convicted for the original crime then two crimes have been committed.. 1. the original crime and 2. the crime of convicting an innocent person.
Every morning Damon Thibodeaux wakes up in his temporary digs in
Minneapolis and wonders when his newfound freedom is going to come
crashing down. "You think you're going to wake up and find it was just a
dream," he says.
When he stepped out of Angola jail in Louisiana
several guards were at the gate to wish him well, addressing him for the
first time in 16 years as "Mr Thibodeaux". "No offence," he said, "but I
hope I never see you again."
He walked out as the 300th prisoner
in the US to be freed as a result of DNA testing and one of 18
exonerated from death row. With the help of science he has been proved
innocent of a crime for which the state of Louisiana spent 15 years
trying to kill him.
For those years Thibodeaux was in a cell 1.8
metres by 3 metres for 23 hours a day. His only luxury was a morning
coffee, made using a handkerchief as a filter with coffee bought from
the prison shop; his only consolation was reading reading the Bible; his
only exercise pacing up and down for an hour a day in a the "exercise
yard"– a metal cage slightly larger than his cell.
Like most death rows in the
United States,
the prisoners in Angola are treated as living dead things: they are
going to be executed so why bother rehabilitating them? He watched as
two of his fellow inmates were taken away to the death chamber, trying
unsuccessfully not to dwell on his own impending execution. "It was
like, one day they may be coming for you. At any time, a judge can sign
an order and they can come and take you and kill you."
At the
lowest point, he says he felt such hopelessness that he considered
dropping all his appeals and giving up. He would become a "volunteer" –
one of those prisoners who are assumed positively to want to die but so
often simply lack the will to live. He read the Bible some more, shared
his fears with other prisoners through the bars and found a new
resolution. "I came to terms with the fact that I was going to die for
something I didn't do. Truthfully, we're all going to die anyway; it
made it a lot easier."
With little hope, he pressed on with his
appeals and, almost imperceptibly at first, fortune's wheel began to
turn. A lawyer assigned to his post-conviction appeal became concerned
by his case, and she in turn enlisted the help of the
Innocence Project in New York, a national group devoted to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing.
Also
drawn into the fray were a pair of Minneapolis-based lawyers from the
commercial firm Fredrikson & Byron. In his day job Steven Kaplan
works on mergers and acquisitions, not rape and murder, but he threw
himself at the Thibodeaux case pro bono.
As soon as Kaplan began
reading the legal papers relating to Thibodeaux's death sentence, he was
astonished. He had never worked on a capital case before and, like most
people unversed in the finer details of the death penalty in America,
had assumed that the judicial process must have adhered to the very
highest legal standards. After all, a man's life was at stake.
"When
I read the transcript of the trial for the first time, I thought to
myself that the high school mock trial team that I coached of 15- to
17-year-olds would have run rings around the lawyers in that courtroom,"
said Kaplan. "We put more energy into a $50,000 contract dispute than
went into the defence at the Damon Thibodeaux trial."
The sequence
of events that put Thibodeaux on to death row began on 19 July 1996. He
was 22 and worked as a deckhand on Mississippi river barges.
Two
weeks earlier he had moved back to New Orleans, where his mother and
sister lived, to help out with his sister's wedding. He started hanging
out with the Champagne family, distant relatives, who had a flat in a
neighbouring suburb.
He spent 19 July at the Champagne home with
the father, CJ, mother, Dawn, and 14-year-old daughter, Crystal. At
about 5pm Crystal asked Thibodeaux to go with her to the local
Winn-Dixie supermarket but he was busy mending CJ's watch. She left the
house on her own at 5.15pm.
When she was not back more than an
hour later her mother became alarmed and they began a search, Thibodeaux
joining the effort. They called the police and searched through the
night and through the following day.
It was not until after 6pm on
20 July that Thibodeaux went back to his mother's house and lay down to
rest. He was just falling asleep when police arrived and asked him to
come with them.
That was at 7.32pm. At 7.40pm Crystal's body was
found on the banks of the Mississippi, about five miles from the
Champagnes' home. The news was transmitted to the detectives quizzing
Thibodeaux and instantly a routine missing-person interview became a
homicide interrogation.
It started lightly, then the detectives
began piling on the pressure. They repeatedly told him he was lying,
putting their faces close up to his. When he gave them the names of the
people he had been with over the previous 24 hours as alibis, the
officers said they had talked to the individuals who had denied it.
"That felt like I was being abandoned, because they were the only people
who could put me in their presence away from the crime scene,"
Thibodeaux said. The police gave him a lie-detector test. When they
returned to the interview room and told him he had failed, he fainted.
Several
hours into the interrogation, they delivered the coup de grace: they
warned him what would happen if he kept on lying. "They described to me
death by lethal injection: organs collapsing, the brain shutting down,
extreme pain. That's what they said would happen to me if I didn't give
them what they wanted."
The detectives who interrogated Thibodeaux
have consistently denied using techniques that put pressure on him. But
having studied the case for years, his current lawyers are convinced he
was subjected to a prolonged questioning that interacted with his
vulnerabilities and broke down his resistance. About 4am on 21 July he
gave the police what he thought they wanted. He had been under
interrogation for nine hours, and had no meaningful sleep for 35 hours.
"I had no sleep, I was hungry, I was tired of it. At that point I didn't
care, I just wanted to stop it."
He began to confess, repeating
details of the crime scene that the detectives had given him. "I'm not
the smartest person on the planet, but I was able to figure out how
Crystal died and how she was found from what they were telling me. I
just put the pieces together and gave them the confession they wanted."
He
told them how he had picked up Crystal in his car and driven her to the
crime scene. They began having sex, then she asked him to stop and he
refused. He raped her, hit her on the face with his bare hand, squeezing
her neck and strangling her with a length of white, grey or black
speaker wire that he procured from his car.
At one point Thibodeaux told his interrogators: "I didn't know that I had done it, but I done it." Case closed.
Within
three hours of his confession, details emerged that refuted key
aspects. Examination of the crime scene determined the cord that had
been wrapped around Crystal's neck was a red electrical conductor wire
that had been hanging on a nearby tree, and not the speaker wire
Thibodeaux had confessed to. Crystal's mother also told investigators
within three hours of the confession that Thibodeaux had been with her
in the their flat when she called the police to report her daughter's
disappearance – undermining any possibility of him getting to and from
the crime scene in time to have murdered Crystal.
Further evidence
came out that punctured his confession. The autopsy found that Crystal
had been hit around the face with a blunt object, not Thibodeaux's bare
hand as he had testified. Contrary to his statement that he had had sex
with her and then raped her, the forensic examiner observed no injuries
consistent with violent rape. More than that, he concluded that Crystal
had had no sexual intercourse of any kind, consensual or otherwise, for
at least 24 hours before she died.
All those discrepancies were
known to the authorities before Thibodeaux was put in the dock for
murder and rape. They also knew that there were other potential suspects
who conceivably merited further investigation.
One individual was
a local man with a conviction for paedophilia. Another was a relative
of Crystal's who lived in a flat two blocks from the crime scene – a
paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of drug abuse and violence
against women.
Being poor, Thibodeaux could not afford his own
lawyer and was assigned a public defence attorney by the courts. His
attorney happened to be a former detective who had retrained as a
lawyer, and this was his first murder case. At the time of the trial he
was, unbeknown to Thibodeaux, applying for a transfer to the same
district attorney's office that was prosecuting his client.
"I was
willing to overlook the fact that he was an ex-detective," Thibodeaux
says now. "But if I had known my lawyer was filing to be transferred to
the DA's office I would have asked to have him removed from my case."
The
trial lasted just three days. Over the course of it the prosecution
tried to explain away the lack of any evidence of sexual intercourse or
rape on Crystal's body by speculating that "semen-destroying maggots"
had been at work.
Thibodeaux's lawyer, for his part, did not even
refer to the confession. "You will read the entire trial transcript and
he never utters the word 'confession', as though if he didn't mention
it, it would go away," Kaplan says.
The jury was out for just 45
minutes before they delivered a guilty verdict. The next day the same
jury sentenced Thibodeaux to death for murder and aggravated rape, even
though no rape – indeed no sexual contact of any sort – had taken place.
It
took Kaplan and the other lawyers just a few days to spot the glaring
problems with the prosecution of Thibodeaux. It took them a further 12
years to free him. With the full co-operation of the current district
attorney for New Orleans, they carried out a fresh round of DNA tests
using world-renowned forensic scientists, such as Dr Henry Lee, who
heads a forensic science school at the University of New Haven, and Dr
Edward Blake, of Forensic Science Associates. They looked again at all
the physical evidence, particularly the clothing of Crystal and
Thibodeaux on the day of her murder. They found there was no evidence of
Thibodeaux's tissue, blood or fluids on Crystal's clothing and none of
hers on his – a significant finding as had Thibodeaux been the murderer
and/or rapist, such evidence would certainly have existed.
In
addition, witnesses were tracked down who gave him a watertight alibi
for all but five minutes of the period between Crystal's disappearance
and the time of her death. And lest there be any remaining doubt, a
forensic expert on maggots – such people do exist – testified that the
theory of "semen-destroying maggots" was balderdash.
Since his
release Thibodeaux has travelled to the other end of the Mississippi to
rebuild his life with the help of his new lawyers in Minneapolis. The
town has a good rehabilitation programme that should provide a cheap
home, renewed education and job training.
His 15 years on death
row opened his eyes, he says. "We tell the world that our system is the
best in the world, and it's not." But he says he still supports
capital punishment in America for the most heinous cases – with the proviso that the conviction is sound.
Not
so Steven Kaplan. He cites academic studies that suggest that 2% to 4%
of death-row inmates are probably innocent. "If that was the rate of
failure of airplanes," he says, "would you fly?"
