[DanaC]

The appeals process relies on a lot of things, including the introduction of 'new evidence'. Without that new evidence, the old evidence is rarely revisited by those with the power to act.


The crime:

Two weeks earlier he had moved back to New Orleans, where his mother and sister lived, to help out with his sister's wedding. He started hanging out with the Champagne family, distant relatives, who had a flat in a neighbouring suburb.

He spent 19 July at the Champagne home with the father, CJ, mother, Dawn, and 14-year-old daughter, Crystal. At about 5pm Crystal asked Thibodeaux to go with her to the local Winn-Dixie supermarket but he was busy mending CJ's watch. She left the house on her own at 5.15pm.

When she was not back more than an hour later her mother became alarmed and they began a search, Thibodeaux joining the effort. They called the police and searched through the night and through the following day.

It was not until after 6pm on 20 July that Thibodeaux went back to his mother's house and lay down to rest. He was just falling asleep when police arrived and asked him to come with them.

That was at 7.32pm. At 7.40pm Crystal's body was found on the banks of the Mississippi, about five miles from the Champagnes' home. The news was transmitted to the detectives quizzing Thibodeaux and instantly a routine missing-person interview became a homicide interrogation.

The interrogation:

It started lightly, then the detectives began piling on the pressure. They repeatedly told him he was lying, putting their faces close up to his. When he gave them the names of the people he had been with over the previous 24 hours as alibis, the officers said they had talked to the individuals who had denied it. "That felt like I was being abandoned, because they were the only people who could put me in their presence away from the crime scene," Thibodeaux said. The police gave him a lie-detector test. When they returned to the interview room and told him he had failed, he fainted.

Several hours into the interrogation, they delivered the coup de grace: they warned him what would happen if he kept on lying. "They described to me death by lethal injection: organs collapsing, the brain shutting down, extreme pain. That's what they said would happen to me if I didn't give them what they wanted."

The detectives who interrogated Thibodeaux have consistently denied using techniques that put pressure on him. But having studied the case for years, his current lawyers are convinced he was subjected to a prolonged questioning that interacted with his vulnerabilities and broke down his resistance. About 4am on 21 July he gave the police what he thought they wanted. He had been under interrogation for nine hours, and had no meaningful sleep for 35 hours. "I had no sleep, I was hungry, I was tired of it. At that point I didn't care, I just wanted to stop it."

He began to confess, repeating details of the crime scene that the detectives had given him. "I'm not the smartest person on the planet, but I was able to figure out how Crystal died and how she was found from what they were telling me. I just put the pieces together and gave them the confession they wanted."

He told them how he had picked up Crystal in his car and driven her to the crime scene. They began having sex, then she asked him to stop and he refused. He raped her, hit her on the face with his bare hand, squeezing her neck and strangling her with a length of white, grey or black speaker wire that he procured from his car.

At one point Thibodeaux told his interrogators: "I didn't know that I had done it, but I done it." Case closed.

Now, pushing someone that seems to be guilty into confessing their guilt is only narrowly separated from pushing someone to admit guilt regardless of the facts. A cop who truly thinks theyhave their man...I can see the temptation.

But when details emerge that cast doubt on the confession, there are two ways to respond. One is to act on that doubt, and the other is to bury it.

Within three hours of his confession, details emerged that refuted key aspects. Examination of the crime scene determined the cord that had been wrapped around Crystal's neck was a red electrical conductor wire that had been hanging on a nearby tree, and not the speaker wire Thibodeaux had confessed to. Crystal's mother also told investigators within three hours of the confession that Thibodeaux had been with her in the their flat when she called the police to report her daughter's disappearance – undermining any possibility of him getting to and from the crime scene in time to have murdered Crystal.

Further evidence came out that punctured his confession. The autopsy found that Crystal had been hit around the face with a blunt object, not Thibodeaux's bare hand as he had testified. Contrary to his statement that he had had sex with her and then raped her, the forensic examiner observed no injuries consistent with violent rape. More than that, he concluded that Crystal had had no sexual intercourse of any kind, consensual or otherwise, for at least 24 hours before she died.

Here's the clincher, as to why I do not trust any justice system to be bombproof:

All those discrepancies were known to the authorities before Thibodeaux was put in the dock for murder and rape. They also knew that there were other potential suspects who conceivably merited further investigation.

One individual was a local man with a conviction for paedophilia. Another was a relative of Crystal's who lived in a flat two blocks from the crime scene – a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of drug abuse and violence against women.

All this was known, but they went ahead anyway. And thatbrings us back to the idea that justice in America is a function of charity.

Being poor, Thibodeaux could not afford his own lawyer and was assigned a public defence attorney by the courts. His attorney happened to be a former detective who had retrained as a lawyer, and this was his first murder case. At the time of the trial he was, unbeknown to Thibodeaux, applying for a transfer to the same district attorney's office that was prosecuting his client.

"I was willing to overlook the fact that he was an ex-detective," Thibodeaux says now. "But if I had known my lawyer was filing to be transferred to the DA's office I would have asked to have him removed from my case."

The trial lasted just three days. Over the course of it the prosecution tried to explain away the lack of any evidence of sexual intercourse or rape on Crystal's body by speculating that "semen-destroying maggots" had been at work.

Thibodeaux's lawyer, for his part, did not even refer to the confession. "You will read the entire trial transcript and he never utters the word 'confession', as though if he didn't mention it, it would go away," Kaplan says.

If you cannot afford the right lawyer, you do not get the right justice. And what is the impact of a poor defence?

The jury was out for just 45 minutes before they delivered a guilty verdict. The next day the same jury sentenced Thibodeaux to death for murder and aggravated rape, even though no rape – indeed no sexual contact of any sort – had taken place.

That quickly a man is sentenced to die for a crime he patently did not commit.

The rest of the article is worth reading. The mechanics of the 12 years appeal process, and the various bodies and individuals that made it happen in the end.

But there was one more interesting bit that really caught me. Right at the end it tells us that:

his 15 years on death row opened his eyes, he says. "We tell the world that our system is the best in the world, and it's not." But he says he still supports capital punishment in America for the most heinous cases – with the proviso that the conviction is sound

That last line is a killer. I hear it so often from people who agree with capital punishment. It surprises me to hear it from someone who has first hand experience of just how unsound a conviction can be. Because, his conviction, as with so many others are considered 'sound' at the time. Who's ever to confidently say today's sound will not be tomorrow's unsound?

His lawyer does not agree, and I will leave the last word to him:

Not so Steven Kaplan. He cites academic studies that suggest that 2% to 4% of death-row inmates are probably innocent. "If that was the rate of failure of airplanes," he says, "would you fly?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...-man-death-row