Darryl Howard hugs his attorney, Barry Scheck, after being exonerated. Photo: Sameer Abdel-Khalek via the Innocence Project
“Thank God this wasn’t a capital case,” Barry Scheck said as his client, Darryl Howard, walked free after 21 years wrongfully imprisoned for a double murder he did not commit. Howard’s exoneration in a Durham courtroom this week was yet another reminder of why we cannot trust our justice system to decide life and death.
During this week’s hearing, it came out that the state had evidence pointing to another killer even before Howard was convicted. Then-District Attorney Mike Nifong chose to ignore it.
Years later, when DNA found on one of the victims was shown to match another man, another Durham district attorney, Tracey Cline, told police there was no need to investigate whether that man had been the true killer and Howard was innocent.
Howard’s case would be hard to believe if we hadn’t already seen so many like it before. Several innocent men sentenced to death in North Carolina uncovered similar misconduct in their cases.
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown: Police failed to test fingerprints found at the crime scene that did not match McCollum or Brown. The two teens were sentenced to death with no physical evidence linking them to the crime, while clues pointing to another culprit — a serial rapist and murderer who lived next door to the crime scene — were ignored.
Levon “Bo” Jones: Prosecutors concealed the fact that they were paying their star witness, a woman who provided the only evidence linking Jones to the crime. She later recanted her testimony, after Jones spent 13 years on death row because of her lies.
Glen Edward Chapman: Police hid facts pointing to his innocence, including eyewitnesses who identified another suspect and an autopsy showing one of Chapman’s two supposed victims had not even been murdered.
Alan Gell: Police failed to disclose interviews with more than a dozen witnesses who saw the victim alive long after the date when Gell had an opportunity to commit the crime. The state used as its star witnesses two girls who had been caught on tape making up a plan to falsely accuse Gell.
No, Howard’s case wasn’t capital. But that doesn’t mean the next wrongful prosecution won’t be.
The post In life and death, N.C. courtroom corruption threatens the innocent appeared first on NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.