Eye-Opener

For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘Blogs You Should Read’ tab, over on the right side of your screen, one of those listed is called ‘Life At The Harris County Criminal Justice Center’. It’s written by former prosecutor Murray Newman.

He left when Lykos took over, but he has been very supportive of the Assistant District Attorneys that stayed behind; I linked to a post of his over the weekend from 2009, where he was talking about how Denise Oncken could have accidentally concealed evidence in the Glen Khalden case.

So this guy’s a prosecutor, with prosecutor friends, and what I would imagine is a fairly common prosecutor’s mindset; the system works, we’re all trying to get justice, people that accuse ADAs of corruption or unfair practices are crazy, etc. I don't often agree with him, but I always enjoy his writing.

Which makes this post kind of mind-boggling. Mr. Newman describes how, in the wake of the Anthony Graves and Michael Morton cases, his worldview has changed. He sees that there really are prosecutors out there who will lie and cheat for a win; he applauds the judge who ruled against the D.A. responsible for Michael Morton’s wrongful conviction.

In it, he describes how he felt when Craig Watkins took over the Dallas DA’s office, and started digging around for wrongful convictions; he was a little offended, and worried that prosecutors there would be punished for small mistakes or procedural oversights. He says,

“Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking they are going to go out and try their best to do the wrong thing, so the idea of a prosecutor who deliberately cheated and designed to do the wrong thing was truly lost on us.

Surely, such a creature did not exist.”

I'm grateful that, as a child, I sincerely believed that all policemen were the good guys, and that the only people in prison were the bad guys. It allowed me to grow up with an image of what the system should be like; the perfect ideal that we can never achieve, but should never stop striving for. When you live your life believing that impossibility has already been achieved, it takes something massive to open your eyes.

It's never fun; a key piece of the framework that holds your worldview suddenly crumbles into dust, leaving you staring through a gaping hole into a harshly unpleasant reality. It takes guts to face up to that, and even more to write about it in such a frank and honest way.

The Michael Morton Act

[The Michael Morton Act], written by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, requires prosecutors to give lawyers representing the accused any evidence that is relevant to the defense’s case. The intent of the bill, Ellis has said, is to ensure that key facts that could affect the trial aren’t hidden.

“This isn’t necessarily a good thing for me, because my time and my experiences are finished and that’s not going to change,” Morton said to reporters after the bill was signed. “But this law passed today, and was signed, this will make it much better for everybody else, so that what happened to me won’t happen to you.”

http://blog.chron.com/texaspolitics/2013/05/michael-morton-act-signed-into-law/

This was a super-human effort by multiple people, achieved after a lot of hard work. I don’t mean to discount the value of the bill itself, or of the truly amazing changing of hearts that allowed it to be signed into law.

But there are already laws, like Brady, that mandate the sharing of exculpatory evidence. There are open-file policies in nearly every DA’s office in the state; it’s widely accepted as the only decent way to run a prosecution; those who are going to hide evidence from the defense are probably not going to be influenced by yet another toothless admonition to ‘play nice.’

By passing this bill the legislature has added a very specific set of rules & regulations over an existing one, but what needs to be addressed is the mindset of the prosecutors.

In 2009, years after Coy’s case, one of his prosecutors violated Brady in another case, in an extremely flagrant manner; by hiding the fact that a child accused a black man of assaulting her, when the man she was trying to convict was white. http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Harris-prosecutor-accused-of-hiding-evidence-1742910.php

Apparently, Oncken felt that this glaring inconsistency was meaningless; the jury didn't need to see how the child's testimony changed.

It may have been a one-time thing, but I doubt it. You’d have to have brass balls to just wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I think I’ll try something new and make an attempt to screw a potentially innocent man out of any chance of a decent trial in a way so blatant that a state district judge will feel the need to call me on it.”

The one who discovered the omission was Lisa Andrews, who by this time was working as a defense lawyer; back in 2002, she was the other prosecutor in Coy vs. Texas. In my opinion it seems like she knew there was likely to be something squirreled away by Oncken because she used to work with her. 

Slapping down a fresh reiteration of why people should behave decently doesn’t inspire confidence that we’ve fixed the problem. It smacks of a parent telling their child, “Don’t steal the cookies.”

And then, “Don’t steal the cookies at Grandma’s house.”

And then, “Don’t steal the cookies at the store.”

When Hellion, Jr. starts knocking over his classmates for their cookies, the problem is not that we haven’t created a rule that states he is not allowed to steal cookies at school. The problem is that, deep in his heart, he’s a thieving little bastard who doesn’t care how his actions affect others. That’s what has to be changed; the assumption that the government, represented by prosecutors, police officers, and judges,  is entitled to do whatever it needs to do to get the outcome it desires. 

Weekend Reading 69

I was reviewing a post about Denise Oncken's infamous Brady violation on the excellent blog, Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center for Monday's post. I was surprised to realize that I had never scrolled down to read the comments. Well, I finally did last night.

Denise Oncken, for those of you new to the blog, was one of the prosecutors in Coy vs. Texas. The case they're talking about is detailed in the Houston Chronicle, here: Harris County Prosecutor Accused of Hiding Evidence.

A lot of these comments are about Denise Oncken, and her reputation at the DA's office in 2009. Now, I have no way of knowing who these commenters were, and I can't say whether they're true or not, but...Damn, there was a lot of vitriol aimed in her direction. Take a look: Brady & Over-Reliance on Open File.

Also, Young J discusses Coy's case over at http://theprisonpensman.blogspot.com/

Grand Jury-Rigged

I wrote about a grand jury irregularity in my last letter to Mike Anderson, and I want to talk a little more about that today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_States

Assuming I understand this correctly, before you get tried for anything more than a misdemeanor in Texas, you must first be indicted by a grand jury; that’s 23 people, before whom the prosecutor brings all the evidence gathered against a person. That person is not allowed to be present, or to even know that they’re the subject of an investigation (although if you’ve been arrested, you probably do.) Their defense lawyer is not allowed to be there, and there is no requirement that any exculpatory evidence needs to be presented.

A widely accepted aphorism states, “A good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” It’s a commentary on how the process, which is supposed to protect citizens from unnecessary legal action, is stacked heavily in favor of the prosecutor. If they want to see that person hauled into court they can make it happen; guilt or innocence doesn’t really enter into it.

We know that Coy received multiple indictments, and only one was ever brought to trial. But here's the timeline: December 2001: Coy receives two indictments, one for Jill Odom's case and one for Jane Doe's. On March 6th of the following year, he's indicted on two more counts, one of those being the girl who claimed they drove to a hotel and had unprotected sex, miraculously failing to infect him with her STD. 

That's all I can find records of; we know that they brought in multiple women to testify that they had been abused during the punishment phase of the trial, but I'm not finding records. 8 women, that's the number that's constantly being thrown around...but I can find only four indictments. 

Why is this significant? We talked about this a little before; when Pat Lykos took office, the number of ‘no bills’ (indictments refused) skyrocketed. Which means prosecutors where bringing cases they thought they could win, but the grand juries were slapping them down. While the media painted this as Pat Lykos being soft on crime, it’s possible that she simply wasn’t using the grand jury process as a rubber stamp anymore; maybe by choice, or maybe she just didn’t have connections to the good ol’ boy network like Rosenthal did.

This is something I haven't really looked into before, so it's going to take awhile before I can come out with a coherent point about it;I think it merits further research, though. What was the state of the grand jury process during Rosenthal's administration? How many times was Coy indicted, and when were those handed down?

Letter to Mike Anderson 7

I came across this post on BigJolly Politics this week, and it’s been on my mind quite a bit. As always, I encourage you to write your own letter, copy this one, or just send one of those flyers to your right. Let’s let the DA’s office know that our interest in this case continues, and we want to see action on it.

D.A. Mike Anderson

1201 Franklin

Houston, TX

77002

Sir,

I’m writing to you today about the case of Carlos Coy, #908426.

I saw an article written by David Jennings of the blog Big Jolly Politics. In it, he protests SB 834 and brings up what appear to be multiple connections between political figures in Harris County and the members of grand juries.

I do not believe a government can exist without accusations of corruption. It doesn’t take much for the perception take hold, and then the public is left wondering who can be trusted; caught between opposing accusations and murky ethical quandaries, there is little that can be done immediately. 

However, when corruption has been ignored for many years, and we can finally see the devastation it left, it is imperative that we address it. There were serious problems with the criminal justice system under D.A. Chuck Rosenthal, and I hope that you will agree that, no matter how long ago an injustice took place, it is never a bad idea to do what we can to fix it.

I cannot make any specific allegations of wrongdoing in Coy’s case; I do not have the training and expertise needed to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, but I feel very strongly that during that time period little attention was paid to the rights of those accused. Likewise, I feel that what information we do have about Coy’s case indicates that something went wrong; it defies common sense to think that a man could be sentenced to 45 years in prison on the malleable testimony of a child that couldn't testify definitively whether she had been assaulted, or merely had a bad dream. 

According to the Innocence project, the wrongfully incarcerated serve an average of 13 years before winning their freedom; next year will be the 13^th anniversary of Rosenthal’s election, and I hope very much that those abused that notorious administration will begin to see justice.

Please, sir, look into Carlos Coy’s case. Give us justice sooner, rather than later.

Me, my address, etc etc etc.

Weekend Reading 68

This weekend, I have an update from James Dehuelves:

Cant Stop the Hustle 2 is coming! We have a lot of great songs for it, but still need help putting some on. Here at Calico Records we had a vision to bring fan music and the stories they had about how SPM has helped in their lives, and motivated them to keep pushing and going even when people told them they couldn't. 

Can't Stop the Hustle is a movement for SPM to shine light on his case and to bring his story out to fans that know about him, and even to people that don’t know about him. Can't Stop the Hustle goes by this slogan: “we are his voice and we are getting stronger then ever.” I got to talk to Pain from Dope House Records and it went good. Hopefully we will be able to use some of SPM’s song on the Can't Stop the Hustle, The Movie that we’re also working on and on the part two.

The movie will be about how we got this movement going, how hard it was to get going, and also round how SPM had a major part to motivate  in an indie label to come to be.  All I ask is if you have any tracks or even support, email me at j.dehuelves@yahoo.com   or on Facebook THAONEICE@facebook.com    

Support the movement; we are his voice. Thanks.

 p.s. We also have a track that ft SPM with Crown Royal, I’ll have a sample up in a week of what we have together.

And an extremely cool video of two fan's reaction to the release of The Son of Norma snippets:

And this unspeakably amazing music video set to the single, Angels:

Larry Sims

I was going through my files and found an old story about Larry Sims, a man who was released after serving 24 years in prison for rape. Prosecutors improperly withheld evidence from his defense;

2011:

“Recently discovered DNA evidence seems to indicate that the woman who said Sims raped her lied about the case when she claimed she did not have sex earlier with Sims’ cousin Gerald Harding. DNA found on her sanitary napkin was a match to that man.

Decades ago, the cousin testified at Sims’ trial that he and the woman had consensual sex.

With the woman’s testimony now in doubt, a judge decided Wednesday to free Sims.”

He received his freedom, an apology from a judge, and prosecutors dismissed the charges against him. He died last year, still waiting for the state to fully exonerate him.

This whole situation is fucking tragic; he was freed because the prosecutors hid physical evidence from his defense, but it appears that charges were dropped because the DNA proved that his accuser had lied, not because it was enough to prove that he hadn’t committed the rape. In Texas, just because the state can’t prove you committed a crime doesn’t mean you have enough to prove your innocence; but I digress.

In a few of his letters, Carlos Coy has talked about how the testimony against him changed; things like Mary Doe’s apparent inability to commit to a memory that didn’t support the State’s case. The prosecutors saw how the evidence they were using twisted and turned, based on variations in the child’s story; did they have any responsibility to inform the jury that the testimony presented was malleable, and changed from one day to the next?

Larry Sims’ case was overturned after 24 years, when prosecutorial misconduct and a lying plaintiff were exposed. However tragic the ending, it gives me hope that we’ll eventually see the same light shine over Coy vs Texas.

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/22/until-death-texas-inmate-tried-to-clear-name/

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/headlines/20110127-man-paroled-in-dallas-after-dna-test-casts-doubt-on-rape-conviction.ece

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/headlines/20110126-dallas-man-imprisoned-decades-for-rape-likely-to-go-free-after-dna-evidence-casts-doubt-on-guilt.ece

http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/06/19/4044571/larry-sims-freed-by-dna-deserves.html

http://www.cca.courts.state.tx.us/OPINIONS/PDFOPINIONINFO2.ASP?OPINIONID=21777

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/19/even-in-death-family-still-fights-for-exoneree/