INNOCENT PERSONS WRONGFULLY CONVICTED

Part Three

If you click your mouse  over the underlined words, you will get more information.

Innocent persons who are wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn’t commit have their lives turned  into a shambles.  

Tiffany Li, aged 34, was found not guilty of conspiring with her boyfriend to kill Keith Green, 27, and disposal of of his body in 2016.

Prosecutors had accused Ms. Li of orchestrating the murder because she feared losing custody of her daughters.

Ms Li, a Chinese-born property manager, had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The case drew international attention after Ms. Li. posted $35m) bail, one of the highest amounts on record in the US. After 12 days of deliberation, a jury acquitted Ms Li

In this particular case, the accused were not wrongfully convicted.

Her lawyer, Geoffrey Carr, said Ms. Li's not guilty verdict had "nothing to do" with her wealth allowing her to build a strong defence team.

A mistrial was declared in the case against her boyfriend, Kaveh Bayat, after jurors became deadlocked over murder and conspiracy charges against him.

Mr. Bayat, who denied the charges, was accused of shooting Mr. Green in the mouth after helping Ms. Li lure him into a trap.

District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said he accepted the jury’s decision.

He also said, "We are disappointed with the verdicts, since obviously we believe the evidence supported holding Ms. Li accountable for the crimes,"

Defence lawyer Geoffrey Carr said Ms. Li intended to spend time with her family in China, where they made their fortune in dealing with properties.

 Mr Carr said: "It had nothing to do with money, it had to do with hard work done by diligent lawyers."

Ms. Li and Mr. Green were involved in a legal issue  over the custody of their two children, prosecutors said.

On the 28^th of April 2016 they met at a pancake restaurant near her home in Hillsborough, an area south of San Francisco, considered one of the wealthiest communities in the US.

Mr. Green never returned home from the meeting. His body was found nearly two weeks later which was  about 80 miles (128km) away. He had been shot dead. A week after the discovery, Ms. Li and Mr. Bayat were arrested on suspicion of the murder of Mr. Green.

During the trial, prosecutors said Mr. Green's blood was found in Ms. Li's Mercedes and gunshot residue was discovered in her garage.

But Ms. Li's defence lawyers insisted she had nothing to do with Mr Green's death. They argued that Mr. Green was killed in a botched kidnap plot that Ms. Li had no involvement with.

That explanation raises an interesting question. How did the defence lawyers come to that conclusion? 

If he was shot in the garage, why would the so-called kidnappers then drag the body out of the garage and take the body so far from his home?

I don`t know who killed Mr. Green and I suspect that the jury also didn`t know who killed him and that is why the members of the jury found both accused not guilty.  Had the jury found them guilty on such a flimsy conclusion by the prosecutor, then they would have been wrongfully convicted. 

Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins had been sentenced to life in 1984 for killing a 14-year-old boy a year earlier.

They were freed in Baltimore on Monday after a judge cleared their convictions following a review of their case. The case was reopened this year after Mr. Chestnut sent a letter to Baltimore's Conviction Integrity Unit. He included evidence he had uncovered.

Mr Chestnut, Mr Stewart and Mr Watkins were arrested as teenagers in November 1983 following the death of DeWitt Duckett, who was shot in the neck on his way to class at a Baltimore junior high school and had his Georgetown University jacket stolen.

DeWitt's death received widespread press coverage. It was the first fatal shooting of a student in a Baltimore public school.

“These three men were convicted when they were still children and because of police and prosecutorial misconduct," Baltimore state attorney Marilyn Mosby said after the men were released.

n a statement, her office said "detectives targeted the three boys, who were all 16-year-old black boys by using coaching and coercion of other teenage witnesses to make their case against te three innocent boys.

Prosecutors said during the initial investigation police ignored and withheld reports from multiple witnesses identifying another person as the killer, and that trial witnesses failed to identify the three teenagers in photo line-ups.

During the trial, the so-called l witnesses later recanted their testimony  Ms. Mosby said to the judge.

She also said ."I don't think that today is a victory, it's a tragedy. And we need to own up to our responsibility for it,"

The boys, (later men) spent 36 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit that was brought about by the improper actions of the police.  The other convicted boy died in 2002.

Ms.. Mosby also announced the launch of a new programme that is titled as   Resurrection After Exoneration which is programmed  to provide services to help exonerated people reintegrate into society, including support for education and mental and physical health.

If you read part one of this series you will remember that I wrote  that I was the person  who brought into Canada compensation to wrongfully convicted innocent persons. One man who spent 24 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit was awarded ten million dollars.

What follows is a lengthy story of a man having been accused of a murder when in fact he was absolutely innocent of the murder.

American prisons have a higher proportion of its citizens incarcerated in them more than anywhere else in the world and the State of Louisiana has more prisoners than anywhere else in the United States. And most of that State’s prisons have more blacks in them than whites.

This is the story of one of the black prisoners. His name is Robert Jones, who was jailed in the 1990s for killing a young British female tourist in New Orleans. It was a crime another man had already been convicted of killing the tourist but Jones  was prosecuted for the murder anyway even though he was totally innocent.

British holidaymakers Julie Stott and her boyfriend Peter Ellis were on a trip to the US that was meant to be one they remembered for the rest of their lives.

It was a celebration of the couple's engagement, though they had decided not to announce the news until they returned to the UK.

On Tuesday 14^th of  April 1992, having already visited Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon, the couple planned a night out in New Orleans. Julie chose a restaurant and later they went to see a Latin jazz band at the Cafe Brazil.

At about 11:30 pm the couple were strolling back to their hotel through the city's historic French Quarter, laughing and fooling around with a balloon they had found on the street. But suddenly, as they passed an old French convent, a man leaped out from the shadows, and pointed a gun at them.

He shouted at them to lie down, but the couple froze in panic staring at the gun. The next moment the man started shooting at the couple.

He fired two shots at Peter. One grazed the front of his shirt as he dived behind a parked car.

Then the gunman turned to Julie, who was still standing startled in the middle of the road. She began to turn to run but as she did two shots rang out. She slumped to the ground.

The attacker turned, jumped into a car and sped off in the wrong way down the one-way street.

Peter rushed to his fiancee's side, trying to revive her. There was no response. He saw blood gushing from her arm and tried to stem the flow with his shirt. As he cradled her. He shouted for someone to call for an ambulance.

Unfortunately the second bullet had hit her in the head,just behind her ear . She was dying of her wounds.

 “When I got here, only Julie's clothes were left in the road. She had been taken away by the emergency medics,” said James Stewart, the murder detective called to investigate the killing.

FBI agent Stewart based in Florida said that it was quickly apparent that Julie Stott's death was the result of a botched robbery. The entire confrontation, he estimated, took less than 30 seconds.

While the details Peter Ellis gave were crucial, his description of the gunman was sketchy, so focused had he been on the gun.

Stewart did have leads such as the bullets used by the gunman and witness descriptions of the attacker's car. But he also knew the pressure would be on to find the murderer quickly.

That was because at the time of that particular shooting, there were crime sprees in other American cities, like Miami, where tourists were also targeted by robbers carrying handguns.

What Stewart had not bargained for was the hunger for the story in the British media, which got involved in a way that dramatically altered the course of the case and the life of Robert Jones.

Stewart quickly learned some other important facts about the night of the murder.Just minutes before the shooting of Julie Stott, and just a short distance away in New Orleans's French Quarter, another couple had been robbed at gunpoint. And two hours after Julie was killed, another street robbery took place. Again the attacker was armed.

Crucially, in both cases, descriptions of the gun and a burgundy car with a white roof used by the attacker matched those given by witnesses after the killing of Julie Stott, and also by the victims of a sadistic robbery and rape a week earlier. It was clear that Julie Stott's killer had embarked on a violent one-man crime spree and had already carried out at least four attacks in the city.

Meanwhile, the UK media had begun crying out for this man to be brought to justice. Within days the Sun newspaper had offered a $10,000 reward for the arrest of the killer. That news spread quickly in New Orleans and suddenly calls to the police flooded in. Any time you throw around a lot of money like that, you're going to get all kinds of people calling in and all kinds of leads.

Most of the tips were discarded, but then one came in that investigators thought they should explore further.

“The caller identified some guys. He said they had all been in a bar talking about the murder and giving details that made him think they had been involved,” says Stewart, who was by this stage getting desperate for a breakthrough.

One of those named by the caller was Robert Jones, a 19-year-old from a run-down neighbourhood who had already been in some scrapes with the law. He had been suspected of selling drugs, and though he had never been convicted of any crime, police had his picture on file.

Soon after the tip came in, a woman who had been robbed, kidnapped and raped in a horrific, prolonged ordeal a week before the murder of Julie Stott, was in the police station for a follow-up interview.

The investigator interviewing her said the police had news of a potential suspect and showed her a series of photographs.

Looking at the first picture, the rape victim said the man was too young. The second she did not recognize at all. The third she put to one side, before looking through the others photos.

Ultimately, she went back to the third picture that, she said, was the man who had attacked her. The third photograph was of Robert Jones.

Traditionally in the UK, lineups are conducted “live”, using the suspect and then several volunteers that are found on the day that resembled the suspect. But live lineups were often cancelled due to logistical problems. In a bid to reduce cancellations and make lineups fairer for suspects by finding more suitable volunteer stand-ins, for the past few decades lineups in a number of countries in Europe, the UK and the US have used photo lineups or video parades.

Accuracy with a witness's willingness to choose a suspect is common. In other words, sequential lineups seem to make people less likely to make a choice at all. But when they do pick a suspect, there is a greater risk of making the wrong choice. Far too many persons have been wrongfully identified as the culprit who committed the crimes and they spent years in prisons for crimes they didn’t commit.   

For some of the lineups, the target face or “guilty suspect” was present and in others, they were absent thereby representing the conditions of an innocent suspect in a criminal investigation. Previous cases conducted showed that witnesses are better at identifying a culprit who is of the same race as them and more likely to misidentify a culprit who is of a different race. This bias is referred to as the “own-race bias”, or “cross-race effect”. r case Caucasian  as well as some photos of black people.

 Mistaken identification can lead to wrongful convictions. Although there are some factors, such as own-race bias, that can’t be controlled by the police but other factors such the backgrounds of photo lineups can be controlled. Ensuring that witnesses choose a suspect because they recognise a suspect’s face, rather than disparities in the way the lineup photos are displayed, could help to reduce the false identification of innocent suspects.

One night in 1984, a stranger broke into Jennifer Thompson-Cannino's apartment and raped her. After the assault, Thompson-Cannino, then a 22-year-old college student, helped police sketch artists create a composite picture of her attacker. Later, in a photo lineup, she identified Ronald Cotton who was  a 22-year-old man who looked strikingly like her sketch and had previous run-ins with the law. Then, she picked Cotton from a live lineup. Cotton was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

A decade later, DNA testing revealed that Cotton was not a match to semen samples from Thompson-Cannino's assailant. But the samples did match the DNA of another convict, Bobby Poole  who, it turned out, had told a fellow inmate he had committed the crime.

During the years since Cotton was exonerated, he and Thompson-Cannino co-authored the 2010 bestselling book "Picking Cotton" about their experience, and have campaigned together to reform eyewitness identification procedures.

Their story has become another classic example of the fragile nature of eyewitness testimony. Beginning in the 1990s, forensic DNA testing has revealed hundreds of cases of wrongful convictions. In fact, eyewitness misidentification has played a role in more than 70 percent of wrongfully convicted individuals, according to the Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people.

Following that flurry of DNA-fueled exonerations, law enforcement agencies started paying closer attention to the science of memory and identification, says Gary Wells, a psychologist at Iowa State University who has studied eyewitness identification since the 1970s. Police departments across the country began making changes to lineup procedures, such as presenting possible suspects one at a time rather than all at once. In 2011, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a landmark decision requiring judges to instruct jurors on the limits of eyewitness identification.  Other states are discussing similar instructions.

I honestly believe there's no area of experimental psychology that has had a bigger effect on the legal system. However, some psychologists say some of those changes may have been premature. What has been described as a success story of psychological research is not looking like it's quite so simple anymore.  If I was a lawyer representing a suspect who was identified in a lineup, I would have him take a lie detector to see if he really was the criminal who committed the crime.  If heor she  passed the test. I would bring that fact to the attention  of the prosecutor. 

What I would really like to see happen is have a witness be given a voice distress detection test while he or she is looking at the people in a lineup. When asked if the person the witness fingers as the culprit, it could be determined if the witness may not be sure that he or she is right when choosing  a person as the real culprit. The witness wouldn’t really know that his or her voice is being determined if she is suffering from stress since he or she isn’t sure of his or her conclusion.