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Death Penalty Essay
June 9, 2007
TWO CASES OF INNOCENCE
Essay by Billy Wayne Sinclair
E-mail Billy Wayne Sinclair Billy@JohnTFloyd.com
Nearly two hundred innocent persons have been freed from the nation’s prison system over the last two decades through DNA evidence – dozens had been condemned to die and awaiting execution at the time their innocence was discovered.
The nation’s criminal justice system, dangerously infected with an unbridled law-and-order virus, has sent scores of innocent people to prison because of unethical, and criminal, tactics of prosecutors who knowingly fabricated evidence, suppressed favorable evidence, or used perjured testimony to secure these convictions.
Some of these innocent men spent two and three decades behind bars before uncovering evidence that established their innocence. And while there is no absolute, unequivocal evidence to support the claim, it is more than probable that innocent men have been executed in the nation’s death chambers since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. There can be but miniscule doubt that innocent people were executed during the heyday of capital punishment between 1930 and 1960 – especially in those cases where African-American men were convicted of raping white women in the Old South.
I knew two innocent men in the Louisiana prison system – or at least I believed them to be innocent. This belief was not shaped by the “bum rap” stories so prevalent in the prison community but based on my careful examination of trial transcripts and evidence presented at their trials. The two innocent men were both convicted of aggravated rape and were serving life sentence. Their race and socio-economic backgrounds were diverse. One was an African-American ex-cop from New Orleans, and the other was a white roustabout from rural Webster Parish.
The ex-cop was named Romalis Stukes. He was a large, robust man, easily standing 6’3” and weighing 280 pounds. He had always been a large man. Exceptionally intelligent and well-read, Stukes was versed in a wide-range of subjects, particularly in the field of electronics. He had been a good, professional cop with only one minor blemish on his record – a minor incident in which a suspect had been handled too roughly.
In the mid-1980s Stukes was going through a bitter divorce/custody battle with his former wife, a reputed heroin user. The couple had two children in the marriage – a girl aged four and a boy aged ten at the time of the marital split. Stukes had been granted partial custody as well as visitation rights with the children. But as in most divorce cases in Louisiana, the wife had primary custody rights. The children would regularly spend weekends with Stukes who had a neighbor care for them while he worked two jobs – both with security firms.
Stukes’ wife had a 16-year-old “babysitter” who cared for the children. At Stukes’ trial his defense attorney sought to establish that the “sitter” was a drug user who supplied drugs from the streets to Stukes’ wife.
It was this young babysitter who discovered and reported the first indication of the alleged rape. She was drying off Stukes’ young daughter following a bath when the child expressed discomfort as the towel rubbed against her genital area. The sitter questioned both children about whether their “daddy” had sexually abused them. Both children denied any abuse.
The babysitter and Stukes’ wife then got together. They decided to take the children to a local hospital where the attending physician, by law, was compelled to call the New Orleans police. This time the young daughter told the detectives that Stukes had sexually abused her. The son continued to deny any sexual abuse until a subsequent police interview at which time he also said he had been sexually abused by his father.
The only “evidence” presented by the prosecution at trial was the testimony of the young girl. She told the judge that her father penetrated her, had sexual intercourse, and ejaculated some “green stuff” in the process. The prosecution also put the son on the witness stand who, in rebuttal, testified that his father had anal intercourse with him.
This oral child testimony was not supported by any physical evidence. Both children were examined by prosecution doctors and no evidence of sexual abuse was discovered. In Louisiana, however, the lack of physical evidence is immaterial in a rape prosecution. The testimony of the victim alone is sufficient to sustain a conviction.
The young girl’s description of the “rape” defies the doctors’ examination. She said there was penetration by a fully-developed male penis into her undeveloped four-year-old vagina. She said her father then engaged in actual sexual intercourse – a substantial physical activity – before ejaculating some “green stuff.” She did not testify about any pain, blood, bruising or swelling caused by the rape – and the doctors’ examination found none of these physical indications normally associated with child sexual abuse.
The same was true with the 10-year-old boy. One act of anal intercourse stretches the rectum muscles, according to medical reports. The doctors’ examination of the boy found no such evidence of anal intercourse.
Why was there no physical evidence to support the allegations of sexual abuse leveled by Stukes’ children?
While the testimony of any child about sexual abuse is compelling, such testimony is simply not credible when there is a total lack of physical evidence to support it. The kind of rape described by Stukes’ daughter could not have occurred without physical damage to the child that would have been detected by the doctors’ examinations.
I didn’t place much credence in inmate claims of innocence. They more often than not confused “actual innocence” with unconstitutional prosecutorial tactics used to secure conviction. Prosecutorial misconduct does not necessarily translate into actual innocence.
Besides the lack of physical evidence against Stukes, and the highly improbable testimony of his daughter, my belief in the man’s innocence was shaped by my observations of him on a daily basis. There was never the slightest indication that he could, or actually did, rape his own daughter. Sex offenders tend to give themselves away – avid interest in abnormal sex, predilection for pornography, and constant chatter about females in a sexual context. I had many conversations with Stukes, particularly during that period when I provided him with jailhouse lawyer assistance. He never once indicated guilt to me – and after years of practicing jailhouse law, I had developed a knack for detecting guilt.
And then there was Johnny McIntyre – a small town beer-drinking, pot-smoking troublemaker. Like many “good ole country boys,” he married above his social status – and it resulted in a horrible marriage. But the marriage produced a beautiful daughter – a child “Johnny Mac” dearly loved.
The emotional fights, clothes thrown from the trailer into the yard, and a pestering mother-in-law finally brought an end to the “redneck marriage,” as McIntyre called it.
The mother-in-law was determined that McIntyre would not have a relationship with her “granddaughter.” She instructed her daughter to keep the child away from McIntyre. His repeated telephone calls, threats, and drunken appearances at the mother-in-law’s residence created perpetual conflict between the estranged couple.
Finally, one night after hours of heavy drinking McIntyre drove to the mother-in-law’s residence. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun, he demanded to know where his daughter was. The mother-in-law was belligerent but after McIntyre hit her husband upside the head with the barrel of the shotgun, she realized he was deadly serious this time.
McIntyre kidnapped the couple from their residence in Shreveport and drove them to his trailer residence in rural Webster Parish. He began to interrogate the couple about the whereabouts of his daughter.
According to the mother-in-law’s trial testimony, McIntyre then tied up the father-in-law up before taking her into the bedroom where he made her lie on the bed. She said he put the shotgun in a corner before getting in the bed with her.
Here is where the story got utterly bizarre.
The mother-in-law testified she was in her menstrual cycle and had a tampon in use for that reason. She told the jury that McIntyre performed oral sex on her for forty-five minutes before vaginally raping her with the tampon intact.
The mother-in-law was examined by her own physician on the same night of the alleged rape. The physician told the jury that the victim had not been unusually upset and that his examination of her had not revealed any bruising, swelling, redness, or abrasions. There was no physical evidence to support the kind of sexual assault described by the mother-in-law.
The post-rape examinations found spermatozoa in the mother-in-law’s vaginal canal. It was determined that the spermatozoa had been deposited at least twelve hours prior to the time she had allegedly been raped by McIntyre.
The post-rape examinations also discovered a male pubic hair that did not belong to McIntyre.
The physical evidence clearly established that the victim had had recent sexual intercourse but not with McIntyre.
The Louisiana rule of evidence that the crime of rape can be established solely through the victim’s testimony creates miscarriages of justice as in the McIntyre and Stukes cases. The rapes in both these cases could not have occurred as the victims testified under oath without the perpetrator leaving some evidence of the physical assault.
Why did the prosecution in both these cases elect to take them to trial without any physical evidence?
The answer is simple. “Sex” sells, as the Madison Avenue adage says. Criminal convictions for sex offenses are easily obtained in Louisiana – and, more to the point, these convictions are more politically profitable than other criminal convictions. So there is an inherent political tendency to prosecute these cases quicker than in other cases.
That’s precisely why “mistakes,” the conviction of innocents, are more often made in sex offense cases – and why prosecutors are loathe admitting to such mistakes even when DNA clearly establishes innocence. An increasingly troubling aspect about DNA evidence is that prosecutors love to use it when it supports a criminal conviction but detest it when it is used to establish the innocence of the wrongfully convicted.
For example, states and the Federal government are now compiling mandatory DNA databases. By the end of 2002, the FBI reported that nearly seven thousand DNA samples had been matched to unsolved crimes. Virginia alone had matched DNA evidence to 74 crimes, including 12 rapes and 9 murders committed by juveniles. These successes made prosecutors giddy with professional satisfaction.
But prosecutors have a much different attitude when DNA evidence reveals that an innocent person has been convicted. A Missouri Assistant Attorney General is on record before the Missouri Supreme Court, arguing that even DNA evidence indisputably cleared a condemned inmate of murder, the state should still be permitted to execute him if no constitutional errors were committed obtaining the conviction of him. The Attorney General said the criminal justice system’s interest in “finality of conviction” is more important than an innocent man being put to death.
What happened to that time-honored judicial principle that “it is better that one hundred guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be convicted”?
The philosophy of Missouri Attorney General’s office has replaced this precious principle. These kinds of attorney generals (and they are legion) are the ones responsible for legislation that now prevents inmates like Romalis Stukes and Johnny McIntyre from having their claims of innocence heard by the courts. Claims of actual innocence are now routinely ignored by the court with judicially-imposed “procedural bars” – rules that prohibit a court from entertaining a claim because the state inmates did not follow all the rules of evidence or procedure.
Stukes and McIntyre will die in the Louisiana prison system. Their deaths will go unnoticed, unreported – recorded only in prison medical records that will ultimately be destroyed.
How many more of them are there?
W.E.B. DuBois once wrote that “there is a desperate need of nationwide organizations to oppose this racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and Black.”
In 1950 an Englishman named Timothy Evans was hanged for the murder of his child. He initially confessed to killing his wife but retracted the confession. The bodies of his wife and child were not found. John Christie, a neighbor of the Evans’, was the key witness for the prosecution. But four years after Evans was hanged, Christie confessed to murdering seven women, including Evans’ wife and child. The bodies of his victims were found walled up in his home. Christie was also hanged. It took Queen Elizabeth more than a decade to pardon Evans posthumously, citing his innocence in the 1965 pardon.
The United States has faced compelling – some would say overwhelming – evidence that innocent persons have been executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. But irrefutable evidence – like those bodies found walled up in Christie’s house – has not been revealed to establish the “actual innocence” of an executed person.
When that occurs, and it most assuredly will, the United States may be willing to abolish the death penalty.
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