History > 2014 > USA > Justice > States (II)

Theodore P. Wafer, center,

was led away after being found guilty of second-degree murder

in the shotgun killing of 19-year-old Renisha McBride.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Detroit-Area Man Convicted of Murdering Teenager at His Porch

NYT

7.8.2014

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/
us/detroit-area-man-convicted-of-murdering-woman-who-knocked-on-his-door.html 

Pursuing Justice for All

DEC. 21, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

He is prisoner No. 260. He stares into the camera for his mug shot, head cocked, eyes forlorn of hope. It is the kind of picture that haunts.

He is 14. His name is George Stinney Jr. He is a child, someone’s baby.

He is a black boy arrested in the murder of two white girls in the rural town of Alcolu, S.C.

He is tried for the murders just a month after the arrest. An all-white, all-male jury is empaneled. That same afternoon, the trial commences. It lasts only a few hours. The white lawyer assigned to Stinney’s defense cross-examines no witnesses and calls none of his own. The jury deliberates for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty. That same day, the boy is sentenced to death by electrocution.

There are no appeals. There are no requests for a stay. When the day comes for the boy’s execution, less than two months after the trial, guards reportedly had a hard time fitting the small boy into the big chair.

He was just 5 feet 1 inch. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, “He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders.”

Some say the book he sat on wasn’t a phone book but the Bible.

(Note to humanity: When the person in your death machine requires a booster seat, maybe you should reconsider what you are about to do.)

As Jesse Wegman of The Times’s editorial board wrote on the Taking Note blog: “Reports from the execution chamber said he was so small that the jolt of electricity knocked the mask from his face.”

That day, June 16, 1944, Stinney became the youngest person executed in America in the 20th century. This unconscionable cruelty — the execution of children — used to be routine. As The Times pointed out in 2005, in the 1940s juveniles were executed at a pace of “nearly once every two months.”

It’s not clear whether Stinney saw the faces of anyone who loved him when he was marched into that execution chamber and strapped into that chair. His sister, Aime Ruffner, told The Guardian this year that the family was run out of town the day her brother was taken away. She is quoted as saying: “I never went back there. I curse that place. It was the destruction of my family and the killing of my brother.”

Last week, a South Carolina judge threw out the conviction, saying “I can think of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights, which has been proven to me in this case” and finding “by a preponderance of the evidence standard, that a violation of the defendant’s procedural due process rights tainted his prosecution.”

This was a victory of sorts: a 70-years-too-late admission that the justice system failed that black child, and that the failure culminated — in short order — in the taking of his life. Yet something about it feels hollow and discomforting, like the thunder that rolls long after the lightning has cracked the sky and split the tree.

It boldly announces itself in all its noisy nothingness. It was the white flash that did the damage and produced the splinters.

That is all too often what “righting” racial injustice looks like in this country: a hollow pronouncement that follows the damage but doesn’t prevent its recurrence.

The overturning of this particular conviction comes at a most profound time — following the decisions by grand juries not to indict police officers in the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and John Crawford III and preceding the ambush and murder of two police officers in Brooklyn

The decision provides a generational through-line of sorts for questions about judicial fairness in this country, about the speed with which people can be judged a threat or an enemy and have their lives taken.

The heart aches for every life lost.

Why are there so many touchstones of outrage to mark the African-American experience in this country? Why is there so much tension between officers of the law and minority neighborhoods?

We have seen many polls recently examining race relations, policing and bias in the justice system. In general, we as a nation are thinking more about these issues — at least at the moment. That is quite encouraging and is a potential starting point for some needed acknowledgments, as well as some needed changes.

All lives are valuable — those of the public and the police. We can and must condemn the deranged suicidal cop killer (who also shot his former girlfriend) as well as the cops who kill. There is no contradiction there. Humanity is the common thread.

The cries of ancestors mingle with those of activists and those of dead officers. Anguish stretches across generations and across the racial gulf. Equal justice demands its proper place. The taking of life on both sides of the badge must be redressed.
 

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Pursuing Justice for All.

    Pursuing Justice for All, NYT, 21.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/
    charles-blow-pursuing-justice-for-all.html

Ex-Inmate on Connecticut Parole Board

Brings an Insider’s View to Hearings

 

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

WATERBURY, Conn. — There was the usual grab bag of inmates preparing to be heard here, from the career offender with a heroin problem to the plotter of a jewel heist to the glum men with girlfriend trouble.

All were former convicts who had landed back in prison on parole violations, and this was their chance to explain their conduct to the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles.

One by one, they were led to rooms at their prisons to participate via teleconference in hearings that dispensed assembly-line justice. Soon, they were offering reasons for their mistakes that ran from the fantastic (“Yes, I had a knife but only because I was cooking”) to the familiar (“My girlfriend made me do it”).

One cog in the machine was different, though: The two-member panel weighing each inmate’s fate included a man who was himself a former inmate.

The expertise that the former prisoner, Kenneth F. Ireland, brought to the task — intimate knowledge of the state’s criminal justice system — came in a way no one could envy: In 1989, a day after he turned 20, Mr. Ireland was convicted of raping and murdering Barbara Pelkey, a Wallingford factory worker.

The crime occurred when he was 16. He received a 50-year sentence and spent nearly half his life, from the age of 18 until he was 39, in prison. Despite his assertions that he was innocent, friends stopped believing in him, and family drifted away. Then, in 2009, DNA testing performed at the insistence of the Connecticut Innocence Project exonerated him and identified the real culprit.

Rather than spurn further dealings with the authorities, Mr. Ireland, 45, allowed his name to be suggested for a seat on the parole board this year. “I’ve been on the inside, and I understand the programs, the issues confronting the inmates,” he said.

Nominated in October by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, Mr. Ireland is now serving provisionally, along with four other nominees, until state legislators vote on the appointments next year.

Timothy S. Fisher, dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law, got to know Mr. Ireland through work he does on behalf of the wrongfully convicted. Mr. Fisher championed the idea of adding Mr. Ireland to the board in a letter to Nancy Wyman, the lieutenant governor, in March.

“He has a very cleareyed understanding of the people in prison,” Mr. Fisher said. “How so many of them say ‘I didn’t do it,’ and yet he’s no fool. He’s been around them and he knows there’s injustice, but he also knows that there are people who will try to pull a fast one. I think he will be a more discerning judge of character on this board than almost anyone.”

The hearing here served as Mr. Ireland’s first test, and he spent hours poring over each case file before joining Robert A. Murphy, a retired agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was the panel’s second member. The preparation showed.

“What was going on in your life that made you relapse?” Mr. Ireland pressed John Rivera, a 35-year-old Hartford man who had been dragged back into the system as a result of a failed drug test. “Help me understand.”
Continue reading the main story

Those three words alone suggested how far from rote Mr. Ireland’s input was likely to be.

Similarly, he strained to pinpoint James Edward Reilly’s reason for leaving without authorization the halfway house that he had been placed in, marring an otherwise clean record. The 52-year-old inmate said his departure was prompted by his eviction from an apartment he had been renting and that he had simply “moved my stuff into storage.”

Asked about trips he had subsequently taken to Massachusetts and Florida during his absence, Mr. Reilly was repentant. “I know I should have turned myself in after I put my stuff in storage,” he said. “I know. I’m guilty.”

Mr. Ireland did not let the matter drop there, though.

“You were on parole for four years, and you didn’t seem to have a problem,” Mr. Ireland prodded gently. “What led to this?”

Mr. Reilly recounted “a little argument” he had had with his girlfriend that ended in an arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct, but said he had the situation under control: “She’s not around now and we’re broken up.”

Like Mr. Ireland, at least seven of the 11 inmates making their cases had entered the criminal justice system as teenagers. There was much talk about “poor choices,” starting with the “bad decision” that Michael Gaston, 26, admitted to making when the police found him brandishing a knife. He said the incident had happened because he was making dinner when a commotion started and he rushed into a hallway. “Absent-mindedly, I still had the knife in my hand,” he said.

Alexis deJesus, 28, did not quarrel with the panel’s opinion that carrying heroin for a friend was indeed a “poor choice.”

“You did that as a favor?” Mr. Murphy asked.

“Well, I was already in trouble,” Mr. deJesus demurred. “I knew I was going back to jail.”

Considered administrative affairs, parole revocation hearings are more stripped-down than court hearings, even though the rulings they produce are final. Inmates are advised that they may have a lawyer with them or present evidence, but few do, and some participants were flummoxed by the proceedings.

“There’s no way I can go to court?” asked Kendall Hooks, who was dismayed when the panel ordered him to serve the balance of his sentence for his role in an attempted jewelry store robbery without another chance at an early release. He had violated the terms of his parole by leaving a halfway house without permission and was suspected of mailing a package to an inmate.

No, sorry, he was told.

Though Mr. Ireland showed an interest in each of the inmates’ lives — he took a moment to congratulate Mr. deJesus on the birth of a son, for example — the panel’s decisions did not deviate from the norm.

None of the 11 inmates were released into the community, and most had months of prison time restored to their sentences for the misconduct that led them to be arrested again.

“You want to set up these guys for success,” Mr. Ireland said later. “No one wants them to be in prison.” He acknowledged that it might be hard for the inmates to perceive that after sitting through a day of “deny, deny, deny.”

Addressing the youngest inmate of the day, 23-year-old Geraldo Ruiz, Mr. Ireland took a particularly firm stance.

Mr. Ruiz had been accused of violating the rules at his halfway house by letting his girlfriend stay over — twice in the first week he was there.

“What did you want me to do?” Mr. Ruiz asked indignantly. “Kick her out in the street?” The choice, as he framed it, was “either her getting raped or killed” or jeopardizing his parole.

“I understand you might care for the girl,” Mr. Ireland said. “But you got to look out for yourself.”

The idea of having Mr. Ireland on the board appears to have originated with Vivien Blackford, a member of the Connecticut Sentencing Commission, according to people who supported the appointment.

“Having been in prison, he brings so much to the board because he understands the experience, the perspectives and the reasons that people do what they do,” Ms. Blackford said.

Mr. Ireland quit a steady job as a bookkeeper to accept the appointment, which comes with a salary — though that does not seem to be what motivates him.

He stands to collect millions of dollars once Connecticut lawmakers finish reviewing his case. A state law, enacted when Mr. Ireland was still imprisoned in 2008, entitles the wrongfully convicted to compensation. He served more time in prison and was younger when he was sentenced than the man whose case moved lawmakers to pass the law.

Harsh conditions at the prisons where Mr. Ireland spent those 21 years, including the fortresslike one in Wallens Ridge, Va., will also be hard to ignore. He spent a year in solitary confinement when he was 20, lost part of a finger in an assault and watched an inmate die from burns. He said he still has trouble answering the door for fear of who might be lurking there.

For all his nerves, there was no flinching when duty called at the parole hearing. Each time the hearing officer asked the board if they had questions for the men peering up at them from the other end of the video cameras, Mr. Ireland certainly did.
 

Kitty Bennett and Elisa Cho contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2014, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Ex-Inmate Named to Connecticut Parole Board Brings Insider’s View to Hearings.

    Ex-Inmate on Connecticut Parole Board Brings an Insider’s View to Hearings,
    NYT, 20.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/nyregion/
    ex-inmate-on-connecticut-parole-board-brings-an-insiders-view-to-hearings.html

South Carolina Judge

Vacates Conviction of George Stinney

in 1944 Execution

DEC. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Calling it a “great and fundamental injustice,” a South Carolina judge on Wednesday vacated the 1944 murder conviction of 14-year-old George J. Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States in the last century.

Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr. Stinney, who was black, from the time he was taken into custody until his death by electrocution.

The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and his court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend him. His confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”

The order was a rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used only when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.

“I am not aware of any case where someone who was convicted has had the trial conviction and sentence vacated after they’d been executed,” said Miller W. Shealy Jr., a professor at the Charleston School of Law and one of the lawyers who worked on behalf of the Stinney family to have the conviction thrown out.

Ernest A. Finney III, the solicitor who had opposed the request on the state’s behalf — and a son of the first black State Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction — had argued in a two-day hearing in January that the conviction was valid under the legal system in place at the time. He did not return calls for comment.

At the hearing, in Sumter, Mr. Stinney’s two sisters testified, and a videotaped deposition from his brother was played. They spoke of the morning in March 1944 when the two girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, were seen riding bicycles by the pastures in rural Alcolu. The girls’ bodies were found the next morning in a ditch, their skulls crushed. Mr. Stinney was taken into custody within hours, and confessed to the murders that day.

Two white men who had helped search for the girls also testified, and a cellmate of Mr. Stinney’s recounted conversations in which Mr. Stinney said he was innocent and had been made to confess. Less than three months passed between the murder and the execution; the trial and sentencing took less than a day.

Some of the problems of due process highlighted in the ruling were not rare in the Jim Crow South. Still, Mr. Shealy cautioned that this case was exceptional, due in part to Mr. Stinney’s age. Judge Mullen also emphasized that it should not become a standard resort for families grieving over decades-old injustices.

“The extraordinary circumstances discussed herein simply do not apply in most cases,” she wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2014, on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: Judge Vacates Conviction in 1944 Execution.

    South Carolina Judge Vacates Conviction of George Stinney in 1944 Execution,
    NYT, 17.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/us/
    judge-vacates-conviction-in-1944-execution.html

Protests After Grand Jury Declines

to Indict Ferguson Officer

NOV. 24, 2014

By MONICA DAVEY

and JULIE BOSMAN

CLAYTON, Mo. — A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson.

The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world. The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest — and a national debate — fueled by protesters’ outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said that Officer Wilson faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.

Word of the decision set off a new wave of anger among hundreds who gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department. Police officers in riot gear stood in a line as demonstrators chanted and threw signs and other objects toward them as the news spread. “The system failed us again,” one woman said. In downtown Ferguson, the sound of breaking glass could be heard as crowds ran through the streets.

As the night went on, the situation grew more intense and chaotic. Bottles and rocks were thrown at police. At least one police car was burned; buildings, including a Walgreens, were on fire, and looting was reported in several businesses, including a beauty supply store and a liquor store. Gunshots were heard, and law enforcement authorities deployed gas or smoke to control the crowds. Protesters blocked Interstate 44 in St. Louis in the neighborhood where another man was shot by police this fall.

Mr. Brown’s family issued a statement expressing sadness, but calling for peaceful protest and a campaign to require body cameras on police officers nationwide. “We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions,” the statement said. “While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.”

But outside the police station, Lesley McSpadden, Mr. Brown’s mother, voiced frustration with the decision. “They wrong!” she yelled, pointing toward the police officers standing outside of the station. “Y’all know y’all wrong!”

At the White House, President Obama appealed for peaceful protest and “care and restraint” from law enforcement following the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson, even as he said the situation speaks to broader racial challenges in America.

“We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades,” Mr. Obama said in brief remarks in the briefing room, where he made an unusual late-night appearance to respond to the decision. “But what is also true is that there are still problems, and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”

Protests, often well organized and orderly, also occurred in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago, where about 200 mostly young and mostly white protester gathered at police headquarters, despite frigid temperatures and light snow.

In a lengthy news conference, Mr. McCulloch described the series of events, step by step, that had led to the shooting, and the enormous array of evidence and witnesses brought before the grand jury. He described an altercation inside Officer Wilson’s vehicle, after which Officer Wilson had Mr. Brown’s blood on his weapon, shirt and pants, the prosecutor said, as well as swelling and redness on his face.

“Physical evidence does not look away as events unfold,” he said.

Mr. McCulloch also pointed to inconsistent and changing statements from witnesses, including observations about the position of Mr. Brown’s hands. Some witnesses have said he had his hands up as the final shots were fired.

Even before the decision was announced, National Guard troops were dispatched to a police command post; political leaders, including Gov. Jay Nixon, flew in to hold last-minute meetings with community members; schools closed for the week; and businesses and residents, including parents of schoolchildren, braced for what might come next.

Mr. Nixon, who had declared a state of emergency and called up the Missouri National Guard last week, called for peace and calm in a news conference Monday several hours before the decision was announced. “Our shared hope and expectation is that regardless of the decision, people on all sides show tolerance, mutual respect and restraint,” he said.

Yet many here questioned why the authorities would announce the decision in the evening, rather than waiting for daylight hours. Furious, sometimes violent, demonstrations and tense clashes with the police took place late into the night for several weeks in August, and some law enforcement officers had urged a daytime announcement. Over a period of weeks, many leaders here had suggested that a Sunday morning announcement would be best, but the grand jury, which had been meeting on the case since Aug. 20, finished its work on Monday. Asked about the timing, Mr. Nixon said it had been the choice of Mr. McCulloch.

Many of the elaborate plans for how the grand jury’s decision would be released — including 48-hour notice for the police after the decision — appeared to have been scrapped. The family of Mr. Brown, 18, who was killed by Officer Wilson on Aug. 9, was notified by prosecutors in the afternoon, after some reports had already appeared on television and online. A lawyer for the family expressed frustration that they had not been told sooner.

Since August, Officer Wilson has stayed close to St. Louis, reading news articles and following television coverage of the case, those close to him said. He has made no public statements or appearances. In a secret ceremony in October, he married his fiancée, Barbara Spradling, also a Ferguson police officer, court records show. Officer Wilson remains on paid administrative leave from the police department, but local officials said they expected that he would resign in the coming days, regardless of the grand jury’s decision.

Mr. Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., handed out turkeys to needy families over the weekend, and has filmed a public service announcement urging calm once the grand jury decision is announced. The parents have been pushing for what supporters have called the Michael Brown Law, which would require officers to wear body cameras.

As the news of the decision spread, school officials were deciding whether to open schools on Tuesday. At least one district canceled after-school and evening activities, and at least four school districts announced they would not hold classes on Tuesday.

All around, there were signs of businesses closing at the prospect of trouble. At least two area malls, including the St. Louis Galleria and the Plaza Frontenac, closed early on Monday evening. In Clayton, a police memorial was covered, some mailboxes were locked shut and a bakery was closed Monday near the St. Louis County justice center, where the Ferguson grand jury has been meeting.

Another investigation, a federal civil rights inquiry into the case, continues, though federal officials have said that the evidence so far does not support such a case against Officer Wilson. A second federal investigation is examining whether the Ferguson police have engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations.

Officer Wilson took the unusual step of testifying before the grand jury, appearing for more than four hours on an afternoon in September to defend his actions, and he said he was convinced that his life was in danger.

In the days of protest that followed, Mr. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, took the unusual step directed his staff to present “absolutely everything” — rather than a witness or two — to the grand jury. He was under considerable pressure in the case, facing widespread calls to recuse himself and be replaced by a special prosecutor after opponents cited what they called flawed investigations in the past involving police officers.
 

Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Campbell Robertson, Mitch Smith, Manny Fernandez and Alan Blinder from Ferguson, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on November 25, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Grand Jury Declines to Indict Police Officer in Ferguson Killing.

    Protests After Grand Jury Declines to Indict Ferguson Officer,
    NYT, 24.11.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/
    ferguson-darren-wilson-shooting-michael-brown-grand-jury.html

Eric Holder’s Legacy

 

SEPT. 25, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

By any measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been one of the most consequential in United States history. His decision to resign, which he announced on Thursday, was long anticipated; he has said he will stay on through his successor’s confirmation. It is hard to imagine that anyone who could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr. Holder’s.

As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr. Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of the most contested issues of our time. But his record is marred by the role the Justice Department played in matters of secrecy and national security under his leadership.

 

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE In 2011, Mr. Holder announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal law as between a man and a woman. The law was unconstitutional, he said. It was a critical moment that foreshadowed both President Obama’s own “evolution” on same-sex marriage the following year and the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling invalidating an important part of the law. Since the court’s decision, nearly two dozen federal courts have struck down state bans on same-sex marriage throughout the country, and the Supreme Court has been asked again to rule on whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage — a question it dodged in 2013.

 

VOTING RIGHTS Mr. Holder successfully fought discriminatory voting restrictions around the country before the 2012 elections. When the Supreme Court gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, he was quick to find new ways to challenge discriminatory laws. Shortly after the ruling, the Justice Department joined lawsuits challenging new restrictions like strict voter-ID requirements and cutbacks to voting hours in North Carolina and Texas. In both states, Republican-controlled legislatures imposed rules that most heavily burden poorer and minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

“The history of this nation has always been to try to expand the franchise,” Mr. Holder told The New Yorker in February. “We’ve always found ways in which we’ve made the voting process more inclusive. What these folks are intending to do, or certainly the impact of what they’re going to do, is to turn their backs on that history.”

 

CRIMINAL JUSTICE From early in the Obama administration’s first term, Mr. Holder made broad criminal-justice reform a central goal of his tenure. “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” he said in a landmark speech last year. He often spoke about the issue in starkly moral terms, no more so than when discussing race. The disproportionately harsh treatment of blacks throughout the criminal justice system, he said, “isn’t just unacceptable; it is shameful.”

Among other things, Mr. Holder strongly supported a 2010 law that eliminated the difference in sentences for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. Last year, he ordered federal prosecutors to be more lenient toward low-level drug offenders, and he supported legislation that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for many drug crimes. He has investigated police departments for excessive force — including in Ferguson, Mo. — and fought for more financing for indigent defense services.

In February, he called for the repeal of “profoundly outdated” felon disenfranchisement laws, which, in some states, prevent as many as one in five African-Americans from voting. And, in April, he directed prosecutors to seek out thousands of prisoners to be considered for early release from overlong drug sentences.

•

While much of Mr. Holder’s legacy rightly will be defined by the improvements he made in areas of civil rights and criminal justice reform, it will also be defined by deeply harmful actions — and failures to act — involving issues of national importance.

Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department approved the targeted killing of civilians, including Americans, without judicial review, and the Obama administration fought for years to keep the justifications for such efforts secret. In the zeal to stop leaks of government information, Mr. Holder brought more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than during all previous presidencies combined. In tracking the sources of leaks, prosecutors seized phone and email records of journalists who were doing their jobs.

Even as the Justice Department devoted so much misguided energy to preventing leaks, it neglected to prosecute some of the most glaring cases of wrongdoing. Driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to “look forward,” Mr. Holder used claims of government secrecy and immunity to toss out lawsuits seeking accountability for torture and other criminal abuses committed in the war on terror.

On the financial front, he did not prosecute a single prominent banker or firm in connection with the subprime mortgage crisis that nearly destroyed the economy. These are not accomplishments to be proud of.

Of course, Mr. Holder has always served at the pleasure of the president, who has his own policy priorities and political survival to consider. At his best, Mr. Holder stepped up and said things that Mr. Obama could not or would not say. And in wielding the muscle of his office, in a job of exasperating complications and irreconcilable conflicts, Mr. Holder has worked to increase justice for many of America’s most dispossessed or forgotten citizens.

A version of this editorial appears in print on September 26, 2014, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Eric Holder’s Legacy.

    Eric Holder’s Legacy, NYT, 25.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/opinion/eric-holders-legacy.html

DNA Evidence Clears Two Men

in 1983 Murder

SEPT. 2, 2014

The New York Times

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

and ERIK ECKHOLM

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential harm from false, coerced confessions and of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a Superior Court judge in Robeson County, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and Mr. McCollum’s death sentence and ordering their release. The courtroom erupted into a standing ovation.

“We waited all these long years for this,” said James McCollum, the father of the man released from death row. “Thank you, Jesus,” he repeated.

The exoneration ends decades of legal and political battles over a case that became notorious in North Carolina and received nationwide discussion, vividly reflecting the country’s fractured views of the death penalty.

The two young defendants were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, the 6-foot-6, Bible-quoting district attorney who was later profiled by “60 Minutes” as the country’s “deadliest D.A.” because he sought the death penalty so often.

For death penalty supporters, the horrifying facts of the girl’s rape and murder only emphasized the justice of applying the ultimate penalty. As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party put Mr. McCollum’s booking photograph on campaign fliers that accused a Democratic candidate of being soft on crime, according to The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.

In 1994, when the United States Supreme Court turned down a request to review the case, Justice Antonin Scalia described Mr. McCollum’s crime as so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection. But Justice Harry A. Blackmun, in a dissent, noted that Mr. McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old and that “this factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in this case is unconstitutional.”

The exoneration based on DNA evidence was another example of the way tainted convictions have unraveled in recent years because of new technology and legal defense efforts like those of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit legal group in North Carolina that took up the case.

In the courtroom here on Tuesday, the current district attorney, Johnson Britt (no relation to the original prosecutor), citing his obligation to “seek justice,” not simply gain convictions, said he would not try to prosecute the men again because the state “does not have a case.”

Mr. McCollum was 19 and Mr. Brown was 15 when they were picked up by the police in Red Springs, a town of fewer than 4,000 people in the southern part of the state, on the night of Sept. 28, 1983. The officers were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie, 11, who had been raped and suffocated with her underwear crammed down her throat, her body left in a soybean field.

No physical evidence tied Mr. McCollum or Mr. Brown, both African-American, as was the victim, to the crime. But a local teenager cast suspicion on Mr. McCollum, who with his half brother had recently moved from New Jersey and was considered an outsider.

After five hours of questioning with no lawyer present and with his mother weeping in the hallway, not allowed to see him, Mr. McCollum told a story of how he and three other youths attacked and killed the girl.

“I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and threatening me,” Mr. McCollum said in a recent videotaped interview with The News & Observer. “I just made up a story and gave it to them so they would let me go home.”

After he signed a statement written in longhand by investigators, he asked, “Can I go home now?” according to an account by his defense lawyers.

Before the night was done, Mr. Brown, after being told that his half brother had confessed and facing similar threats that he could be executed if he did not cooperate, also signed a confession. Both men subsequently recanted at trial, saying their confessions had been coerced. The other two men mentioned in Mr. McCollum’s confession were never prosecuted.

Both defendants initially received death sentences for murder. After new trials were ordered by the State Supreme Court, Mr. McCollum was again sentenced to death, while Mr. Brown was convicted only of rape, and his sentence was reduced to life. (In later years, the Supreme Court barred the death penalty for minors and the execution of the mentally disabled.)

Lawyers from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, working with private law firms, began pressing for DNA testing of the physical evidence in the case, which included a cigarette butt found near sticks used in the murder.

Recent DNA testing by an independent state agency, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, of evidence gathered in the initial investigation found a match for the DNA on the cigarette butt — not to either of the imprisoned men, but to Roscoe Artis, who lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found and who had a history of convictions for sexual assault.

Only weeks after the murder, in fact, Mr. Artis confessed to the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl in Red Springs. Mr. Artis received a death sentence, later reduced to life, for that crime and remains in prison. Officials never explained why, despite the remarkable similarities in the crimes, they kept their focus on Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown even as the men proclaimed their innocence.

The only witness at the hearing Tuesday was Sharon Stellato of the innocence inquiry commission, who under questioning from defense lawyers described the lack of evidence tying the two men to the crime as well as the DNA findings implicating Mr. Artis. The district attorney said he had no evidence to the contrary.

Joe Freeman Britt, the original prosecutor, told The News & Observer last week that he still believed the men were guilty.

After Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown returned to prison to file the paperwork for their release, which to the frustration of defense lawyers and the men’s relatives was delayed, apparently until Wednesday.

As exoneration appeared likely, Mr. McCollum recently reflected on his fate.

“I have never stopped believing that one day I’d be able to walk out that door,” he said in the videotaped interview with The News & Observer.

“A long time ago, I wanted to find me a good wife, I wanted to raise a family, I wanted to have my own business and everything,” he said. “I never got a chance to realize those dreams.

“Now I believe that God is going to bless me to get back out there.”

Correction: September 2, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the Supreme Court justice who noted that Henry Lee McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old. It was Justice Harry A. Blackmun, not Hugo.

Jonathan M. Katz reported from Lumberton, and Erik Eckholm from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: DNA Evidence Clears Two Men In 1983 Murder.

    DNA Evidence Clears Two Men in 1983 Murder, NYT, 2.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/us/
    2-convicted-in-1983-north-carolina-murder-freed-after-dna-tests.html

Sentencing, by the Numbers

AUG. 10, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By SONJA B. STARR

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — IN a recent letter to the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the growing trend of evidence-based sentencing, in which courts use data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Mr. Holder is swimming against a powerful current. At least 20 states have implemented this practice, including some that require risk scores to be considered in every sentencing decision. Many more are considering it, as is Congress, in pending sentencing-reform bills.

Risk-assessment advocates say it’s a no-brainer: Who could oppose “smarter” sentencing? But Mr. Holder is right to pick this fight. As currently used, the practice is deeply unfair, and almost certainly unconstitutional. It contravenes the principle that punishment should depend on what a defendant did, not on who he is or how much money he has.

The basic problem is that the risk scores are not based on the defendant’s crime. They are primarily or wholly based on prior characteristics: criminal history (a legitimate criterion), but also factors unrelated to conduct. Specifics vary across states, but common factors include unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.

Such factors are usually considered inappropriate for sentencing; if anything, some might be mitigating circumstances. But in the new, profiling-based sentencing regimen, markers of socioeconomic disadvantage increase a defendant’s risk score, and most likely his sentence.

Advocates of punishment profiling argue that it gives sentencing a scientific foundation, allowing better tailoring to crime-prevention goals. Many hope it can reduce incarceration by helping judges identify offenders who can safely be diverted from prison.

While well intentioned, this approach is misguided. The United States inarguably has a mass-incarceration crisis, but it is poor people and minorities who bear its brunt. Punishment profiling will exacerbate these disparities — including racial disparities — because the risk assessments include many race-correlated variables. Profiling sends the toxic message that the state considers certain groups of people dangerous based on their identity. It also confirms the widespread impression that the criminal justice system is rigged against the poor.

It is naïve to assume judges will use the scores only to reduce sentences. Judges, especially elected ones, will face pressure to harshly sentence those labeled “high risk.” And even if risk scores were used only for diversion from prison, it would still be wrong to base them on wealth and demographics, reserving diversion for the relatively privileged.

Evidence-based sentencing also raises serious constitutional concerns. The Supreme Court has consistently held that otherwise-impermissible discrimination cannot be justified by statistical generalizations about groups, even if those generalizations are on average accurate. People have a right to be treated as individuals, and individuals often do not conform to group averages.

For example, in its 1983 decision in Bearden v. Georgia, the court unanimously rejected the state’s contention that a defendant could have his probation revoked because his recent job loss increased his crime risk. The court held that “lumping him together with other poor persons and thereby classifying him as dangerous ... would be little more than punishing a person for his poverty.”

Litigation has been slow in coming, however. The risk-prediction instruments are not very transparent (some are proprietary corporate products), and defendants may not understand the role of poverty and personal characteristics. But challenges could be on the horizon. For example, I recently participated in training the Michigan defense counsel on constitutional objections to evidence-based sentencing, in preparation for the state’s impending implementation.

Of course, judges have always considered future crime risk informally, and it’s worth considering whether actuarial methods can help make those predictions more accurate. The problem isn’t risk assessment per se; it’s basing scores on demographics and socioeconomics. Instead, scores could be based on past and present conduct, and perhaps other factors within the defendant’s control.

Data-driven predictions grounded in legitimate factors might be about as accurate as current profiling schemes. There is no persuasive evidence that the current troubling variables add much predictive value, once criminal conduct is already taken into account. But even if they do improve accuracy, this gain doesn’t justify sacrificing fairness.

Criminal justice policy should be informed by data, but we should never allow the sterile language of science to obscure questions of justice. I doubt many policy makers would publicly defend the claim that people should be imprisoned longer because they are poor, for instance. Such judgments are less transparent when they are embedded in a risk score. But they are no more defensible.
 

Sonja B. Starr is a professor of law at the University
of Michigan.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 11, 2014,
on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Sentencing, by the Numbers.

    Sentencing, by the Numbers, NYT, 10.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/opinion/sentencing-by-the-numbers.html

Arrest in New Jersey Boy’s Death

Stirs Memories, but Mysteries Remain

Timothy Wiltsey Case, Cold for Years,
Resurfaces With Charges Against Mother

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA

and NATE SCHWEBER

Michelle Lodzinski’s screams rose above the din of clanging rides and carnival games. It was a spring evening in 1991, and she told anyone who was listening that she had brought her 5-year-old son to the carnival in Sayreville, N.J. Now, he was missing.

Ms. Lodzinski told the police she had looked away for a moment to order a soda, when someone snatched her child.

The carnival was shut down. Helicopters circled overhead late into the night, and hundreds of police and volunteers searched the park for any sign of the child.

Almost immediately, the northern New Jersey case attracted national attention, with little Timothy Wiltsey’s picture — vibrant and smiling — appearing on the side of thousands of milk cartons and on the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium. Don Mattingly posed holding his photo.

Twice, the case was featured on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

From the outset, however, something seemed off about the 23-year-old mother’s story.

No credible witnesses could recall seeing the boy at the carnival. Ms. Lodzinski’s version of events about what had happened that night changed over time. She did not act the way people might expect of a grieving mother, with neighbors in South Amboy describing her alternately as cold and calculating or too perky.

When Timothy’s skeletal remains were found 11 months after he disappeared, the authorities made a point of noting that his mother had not been eliminated as a suspect.

Still, for more than two decades, they were unable to build a case against her.

On Wednesday, though, on what would have been Timothy’s 29th birthday, Ms. Lodzinski was arrested in Florida after being charged with his murder. A resident of Port St. Lucie, she has been living in the state since 2003, working as a paralegal and raising two other sons, 12 and 16.

In a one-page indictment unsealed on Thursday, a grand jury in Middlesex County, N.J., found that Ms. Lodzinski, 47, “did purposely or knowingly kill” Timothy. The indictment does not detail either the cause of death or the evidence the grand jury considered in reaching its conclusion.

The Middlesex County prosecutor, who brought the charges, is working to have her extradited to New Jersey.

Ms. Lodzinski’s relatives did not respond to phone messages on Friday, and she declined to apply to be represented by a public defender during a brief court appearance on Thursday. She has always maintained her innocence.

While many questions about the case remain unanswered, Ms. Lodzinski’s arrest stirred vivid memories for Ronald Butkiewicz, a retired agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who helped lead the search after Timothy vanished.

“This case was the biggest unfinished piece in my career,” Mr. Butkiewicz, 69, said on Friday, noting that when he joined the effort to find the boy, he had already been missing for several months.

A few years earlier, Mr. Butkiewicz had traveled to Seattle to assist in the case of the so-called Green River killer, who murdered dozens of women and dumped their bodies in remote areas near the river. (Gary L. Ridgway was ultimately convicted in that case after confessing in 2003 to killing 48 women over a 16-year period.)

Mr. Butkiewicz said he learned two key things while working on the Green River case: Killers often dump bodies in desolate areas with which they are familiar, and the skull is usually the first thing to be discovered during a search because it looks like nothing else found in the woods.

When Mr. Butkiewicz joined the hunt for Timothy, he learned that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shoe, just like those that the boy was last seen wearing, had been recovered near the Raritan Center, a three-square-mile industrial park in Edison whose commercial buildings were surrounded in those days by wide expanses of woods and marshes.

Mr. Butkiewicz said that while investigating Ms. Lodzinski’s background, he interviewed a woman about the various jobs the mother had held. She mentioned the Raritan Center and that Ms. Lodzinski had worked there as a secretary.

Mr. Butkiewicz said he immediately pulled out a map and asked the woman to point to the office’s location.

Her finger fell almost on the exact spot where the shoe had been found, he said. Soon after Mr. Butkiewicz ordered a search of the area, Timothy’s skull was recovered. The boy’s remains were so badly decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.

Alan A. Rockoff, who was the Middlesex County prosecutor when the boy disappeared, said on Friday that all of the evidence against Ms. Lodzinski at the time was circumstantial. DNA testing, still in its infancy, was no help. He said he was happy that after years of hard work, a jury would now get the chance to hear the case against her.

“It has bothered me for the last 23 years,” Mr. Rockoff said. “This is one of those gnawing cold-cases that we never put in the freezer.”

The arrest did not come as a surprise in the South Amboy neighborhood where Timothy grew up, though residents there said nothing seemed unusual about the single mother raising her son before he disappeared.

Still, the question lingered: Why would she do it?

Stephen Illes was among the hundreds of people who lost sleep searching for the missing child.

“I always hoped the little boy would be found, I thought maybe a family member came and got little Timmy at the carnival,” Mr. Illes said, standing in the yard of the two-story wooden home where he has lived since 1963.

“I still can’t believe she’s guilty,” Mr. Illes, 81, added. “How someone can do that to a child, I can’t even get it in my mind.”

But for most people in the town, sympathy for Ms. Lodzinski hardened long ago into skepticism.

In 1994, in an odd twist, she was arrested and eventually confessed to lying about being kidnapped by federal agents and taken from her home in Colonia, N.J., to Detroit. Her lawyer at the time said she was not even clear in her own mind why she made up the story.

She was arrested again in 1997, accused of stealing a computer from work. Since then, she had seemingly lived a quiet life.

In 2001, on the 10th anniversary of Timothy’s disappearance, a reporter from The Star-Ledger of Newark tracked Ms. Lodzinski down in Minnesota, where she was living. She said she was trying to get on with her life, to move past what had been a very dark period, though she added that it would always be with her.

“I don’t forget the past. Never,” she said. “I think about it all the time. I think about him all the time.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:
Arrest Stirs Memories, but Mysteries Still Remain.

    Arrest in New Jersey Boy’s Death Stirs Memories, but Mysteries Remain,
    NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/nyregion/
    for-decades-questions-lingered-in-case-of-missing-new-jersey-boy.html

Detroit-Area Man

Convicted of Murdering Teenager

at His Porch

 

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By MARY M. CHAPMAN

and JULIE BOSMAN

DETROIT — No one disputed that in the early morning hours of Nov. 2, Renisha McBride, 19, stood on the front porch of a bungalow in suburban Dearborn Heights, Mich. She pounded at the door with her hands, moving to the side of the house and back to the front. Minutes later, the homeowner, a 55-year-old airport maintenance worker named Theodore P. Wafer who had been roused from his sleep, opened the inside front door, fired a single shotgun blast and killed her.

On Thursday, after less than two days of deliberation, a Detroit jury decided that it was murder.

The case has stirred racial tensions in Detroit — Ms. McBride was black, and Mr. Wafer is white — and has drawn comparisons to the case of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in 2012.

But where Mr. Zimmerman successfully invoked self-defense, Mr. Wafer failed.

Mr. Wafer was found guilty of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and a felony weapons charge. He could face life in prison.

In a cramped Detroit courtroom, several family members of Ms. McBride wept when they heard the verdict; others gasped. Mr. Wafer stood and stared straight ahead.

Mr. Wafer, who lived alone, claimed self-defense in the shooting, testifying from the witness stand that he was asleep in his living-room recliner about 4:30 a.m. when he was jolted awake by violent pounding on his doors. He was terrified, he said, and within minutes scrambled for his shotgun stashed in a closet, believing that someone was trying to break into his home in Dearborn Heights, just across the city line from Detroit.

“I was upset,” he told the courtroom on Tuesday, speaking in a soft, even voice. “I had a lot of emotions. I was scared. I had fear. I was panicking.”

His lawyer, Cheryl Carpenter, reminded the jury that Mr. Wafer stayed inside his house during the shooting and was hardly looking for trouble that night. “Is this fun for you?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, “it’s a nightmare.”

Prosecutors countered that Mr. Wafer had taken the law into his own hands, failing to call the police and then shooting the unarmed Ms. McBride without warning. Her family, who watched the courtroom proceedings with grim faces and frequent tears, said that they believed Ms. McBride must have been lost, confused and seeking help after being hurt in a car crash several blocks away.

After the verdict on Thursday, Monica McBride, Renisha McBride’s mother, said that she was astonished and relieved. She had been hurt, she said, by what she saw as attempts by the defense to sully her daughter’s reputation.

“We know who she was,” Ms. McBride said. “She was a regular teenager. She wasn’t violent. Her life mattered.”

Walter Simmons, Renisha McBride’s father, said he did not believe race was a factor in her death. “I think he was mad and was ready for whomever came to his door,” he said of Mr. Wafer.

The jurors declined to speak to reporters after the verdict was announced on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Wafer is to be sentenced on Aug. 25.

During a two-week trial, jurors heard from 27 witnesses, including Mr. Wafer, who described the events on the night Ms. McBride was killed. A friend of Ms. McBride’s testified that earlier in the evening, the two drank vodka and smoked marijuana. Just before 1 a.m., Ms. McBride hit a parked car within the Detroit city limits, left the scene of the accident and rejected help from neighbors, witnesses said. One witness said that Ms. McBride, who appeared disoriented and was bleeding from her injuries, brushed off a neighbor’s plea to wait for an ambulance.

Her whereabouts for the next several hours remain a mystery. But sometime around 4:30 a.m., she approached Mr. Wafer’s home, a small house on a corner lot. He testified that he was asleep in his living room when he heard loud pounding on the front door, then on the side door.

Mr. Wafer, who has no landline phone, said that he frantically searched for his cellphone, but could not find it. As the banging continued, he said, he went to a closet and retrieved his Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, which he had loaded less than two weeks earlier after vandals had paint-balled his vehicle.

On the morning of Nov. 2, Mr. Wafer was so afraid that his house was about to be invaded, he told the courtroom, that he did not even peek through his vertical blinds to see who was outside, concerned that he might “give away” his position within the house.

He opened his front door and, seeing a “figure,” said he fired one shot through the locked screen door, killing Ms. McBride. Mr. Wafer then found his cellphone and called 911. In a conversation only 18 seconds long, he told the dispatcher that he had shot someone on his front porch who was “banging on my door.”

Michigan law allows lethal force only if a person “honestly and reasonably believes” that it is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm. Michigan also has a “castle doctrine,” which states that there is no legal requirement for a person to retreat inside his or her home.

Ron Scott, a community activist who has publicly supported the family, stood outside the courtroom on Thursday and hailed the verdict as a victory for Detroit and its surrounding communities.

“The jury was made up of different races and from many bordering areas,” he said. “This shows we can get beyond separation.”

Mary M. Chapman reported from Detroit,
and Julie Bosman from Chicago.

A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
Man Guilty of Murdering Woman at His Front Door.

    Detroit-Area Man Convicted of Murdering Teenager at His Porch,
    NYT, 7.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/us/
    detroit-area-man-convicted-of-murdering-woman-who-knocked-on-his-door.html