"The last defendant in the Central Park jogger case remaining in jail will spend Christmas as a free man after a judge on Monday resentenced him to a lesser term on a drug conviction. Raymond Santana had served his sentence for the 1989 park attack when he was arrested on a drug charge in 1998. Because he was a prior felon, he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years to seven years in prison."

More on the tossing of the verdicts in the Central Park Jogger case:

"Michael Warren and Roger Wareham, lawyers for three of the men, spoke of justice denied for so long, justice granted yesterday, and demands of reparations. Civil suits would come, they said. They contend that the confessions were coerced by the police."

"We must first obtain justice on behalf of these young men, on behalf of their families who have been put through a terrible ordeal," Mr. Warren said. "Their youth was stolen from them, was snatched away from them, they were not able to enjoy the fruits of a childhood simply because they existed behind the cold prison bars for crimes they did not commit."

Where are the five unjustly convicted youths today?

"McCray is married, has three children and works in a factory; Richardson is a night watchman and goes to school; Salaam goes to school for computer science; Wise is looking for work; Santana is in prison for an unrelated crime."

The Judge did not mention false confessions or police interrogation procedures in his 21 page ruling. Rather, he wrote:

"It is virtually self-evident that the newly discovered evidence, specifically the confession of a self-admitted murderer and serial rapist, corroborated by physical evidence including scientific testing establishing that he was the sole source of DNA evidence ... would create the probability that had such evidence been received at trial, the verdict would have been more favorable to the defendants."

The courtroom was packed with supporters of the men who as teenagers had served seven to twelve years in prison for the crime. The five men did not appear in court, as they wanted to avoide the media.

Governor George Ryan of Illinois has pardoned three wrongfully convicted inmates.

Rolando Cruz, a symbol of Illinois's deeply flawed death penalty system was one of those pardoned.

"Ryan made the announcement as he spoke before the University of Illinois College of Law on the state's death penalty system. Ryan has been considering commuting the death sentences of about 140 men currently on death row."

"I wish them well; they've been through hell," Ryan said as the crowd gave him a lengthy ovation."

"Two of the men pardoned, Cruz and Gary Gauger, had been on death row. They and the third man pardoned, Steven Linscott, had already been released after their convictions were thrown out. The pardons clear the men's names and allow them to seek compensation for their wrongful convictions from the Illinois Court of Claims."

Thank you, Governor Ryan. May your successor show as much courage and conviction as you have these past two years.

Eric Zorn has some excellent commentary on the issue in today's Chicago Tribune, including these comments about why the Governor should grant blanket pardons to all on death row:

"If you grant selective commutation, you will be saying, in effect, that a careful governor can go back over old cases and neatly separate those convicts who deserve the death penalty from those who don't. If you believe that, go ahead. But you'll be retroactively invalidating the moratorium and the work of your commission and will be saying instead that the death penalty system was never "broken" as you've maintained, it just needed one extra layer of review....Reducing a sentence to life-without-parole is a compromise with human frailty, not an act of mercy. No prisoner so sentenced has ever beend."

"A judge dismissed the convictions Thursday of all five men who served years in prison for the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park, a crime that exposed the city's racial tensions and made national headlines."

"The courtroom, filled with the family and friends of the defendants, burst into cheers and applause as state Justice Charles Tejada announced his ruling."

The police are angry. We're thrilled.

They gathered in Chicago Sunday. On Monday, "30 former death row prisoners took part in a 37-mile relay walk from a state correctional center near Joliet to downtown Chicago, the latest in two days of activities designed to call attention to flaws in the state's capital punishment system."
About 30 former inmates, each marching a separate leg of the trip with sympathizers, carried a letter that was later delivered to Gov. George Ryan, who is considering clemency petitions of more than 140 death row inmates. The letter urges Ryan to commute all death sentences to life in prison without."

"Seven former death row inmates from Illinois also marched, as well as ex-prisoners from other states including Florida, Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico."

In Why Innocent People Confess , Michael Kinsley explores a connection between plea bargaining and false confessions.

"The emphasis on capital crimes is misleading in a couple of ways, though. Crimes such as murder and rape are amenable to reversal by DNA testing, but there is no reason to assume that wrongful convictions are more common in DNA-friendly crimes than in others. In fact, there is good reason to assume the opposite."

"Murder and rape convictions, especially those with a prospect of capital punishment, generally follow a full-dress trial with all its elaborate rights and protections for the defendant. A false confession under these circumstances is highly unusual and highly suggestive that something improper went on at the police station."

Kinsley says that "for every one criminal conviction that comes after a trial, 19 other cases are settled by plea bargain.... If you're the suspect, sometimes this means agreeing with the prosecutor that you will confess to jaywalking when you're really guilty of armed robbery. Sometimes, though, it means confessing to armed robbery when you're not guilty of anything at all."

Kinsley explains the history of plea bargaining:

"As our official system of justice became larded with more and more protections for the accused, actually going through the process of catching, prosecuting and convicting a criminal the official way became impossibly burdensome. So the government offered the accused a deal: You get a lighter sentence if you save us the trouble of a trial. Or, to put it in a more sinister way: You get a heavier sentence if you insist on asserting your constitutional rights to a trial, to confront your accusers, to privacy from searches without probable cause, to avoid incriminating yourself, etc."

Kinsley compares plea bargaining to an insurance policy: "Plea bargaining is a way of trading the risk of 20 years to life for the certainty of five to seven. But by creating this choice, and ratcheting up the odds to make it nearly irresistible, American justice virtually guarantees that innocent people are being punished."

Kinsley concludes with a look at the Central Park Jogger case and says that unofficial offers of lighter sentences convinced the five youths to confess to the rape which they didn't commit. The catch-22 was that when they went before the board, they got extra time for not confessing to the crime which they didn't commit.

"Constitutional protections like the right against self-incrimination don't apply to hearings, either. You don't have to confess, but extra years of prison are the price if you don't."

Update: The bottom line on plea bargains:

"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed"

From Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" , also recorded by Don Henley on his Actual Miles album.

Remember Abdallah Higazy? He was the Egyptian student who was falsely accused of possessing an aviation radio in a hotel room overlooking the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. We wrote about Higazy here and here.

Yesterday, Hagazy filed a $20 million lawsuit against an FBI polygraph examiner charging that the FBI agent coerced him into making a false confession by threatening to have the U.S. government contact the Egyptian security services and make his family's life in Egypt a "living hell."

"Higazy, initially detained as a material witness in the terror investigation on Dec. 17, 2001, spent 31 days in solitary confinement. He was freed only after a security guard at the Millennium Hilton Hotel admitted he had lied when he told FBI agents he had found the radio in a locked safe in Higazy's hotel room on the 51st floor. "

"The lie was uncovered when another guest who had been evacuated from the hotel on Sept. 11, an airline pilot, returned to claim his possessions and demanded his radio back. "

Higazy is seeking $10 million in compensatory damages, $10 million in punitive damages, and a public apology.

The News & Observer has produced an outstanding 4 part series, "Time of Death," about a wrongful conviction. The introduction states:

Allen Ray Jenkins was murdered in Bertie County in April 1995. Three years later, a petty drug dealer, Alan Gell, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to die. He is now on Death Row at Central Prison.

There is a problem. A wealth of evidence indicates that Gell was in jail when Jenkins was killed. Some of the evidence was suppressed by police and prosecutors. Some was simply not pursued by defense lawyers who put on a hurried and haphazard case.

Like most people on Death Row, Gell insists he is innocent. Gell, however, may well be telling the truth. This is his story.

On Monday, a Bertie County Superior Court judge threw out his conviction and ordered a new trial after finding that the state had failed to turn over evidence of his innocence to the defense.

Newsday is on a roll. The Long Island paper has had these four articles in the past two days on the plight of the indigent defendant and the wrongfully convicted. Please take the time to read them all.

Calls To Improve Pay For Court-Appointed Lawyers
Newsday

Moving to Stop Wrongful Convictions
Newsday

Compensation is Hard to Come By
Newsday

Getting it Right
Newsday

The Washington Post has a welcome editorial today, Lessons for Virginia Justice on why Virginia should change its current rule that except for cases with biological evidence, challenges to convictions in criminal cases must be raised within 21 days:

"As uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge, certainty in criminal cases is a mirage. People confess falsely. Even where there seems to be no doubt, there is doubt. The total picture created by evidence is a constantly shifting mosaic. So the system must be open to new evidence whenever it appears -- as New York's system was here. In New York, the rules allowed prosecutors to do the right thing, even more than a decade after the conviction. In Virginia, by contrast, newly discovered evidence is -- with a narrow exception for biological material -- never admissible more than 21 days after a conviction. The Virginia Supreme Court is now considering a change in this rule. It is long overdue. Allowing the evidentiary mosaic to freeze at any particular moment only guarantees that injustices become irremediable."

Very little has been written this week about the death of former West Virginia chemist and expert witness Fred Zain whose perjured testimony was responsible for putting hundreds in jail and even on death row. When Experts Lie tells his story well and links to the official investigative report on his despicable actions.

Finally indicted, his trial was postponed indefinitely due to his having been diagnosed with cancer. He died last week at the age of 52.

He got to spend his final days at liberty. His victims, wrongfully accused defendants, spent years in jail because of his fraud upon the courts.

Goodbye, Mr. Zain.

Update: We found this December 4th obituary in Newsday (Associated Press). We don't have a live link to it, but it is also available on Lexis ($).

"OBITUARIES / Fred Zain, 52, Discredited W.Va. Police Chemist

Charleston, W.Va. - Fred Zain, a former West Virginia State Police chemist whose discredited work resulted in the payment of millions of dollars to wrongfully convicted defendants, has died at age 52.

Zain, head of the state police chemistry lab from 1986-89, died Monday at his home in Ormond Beach, Fla., his lawyer, Tom Smith of Charleston, said yesterday. Zain was suffering from colon cancer.

Prosecutors said Zain lied on the witness stand and faked test results, and thus accepted his fees and salary under false pretenses.

Last year, a West Virginia jury was unable to reach a verdict on four counts of obtaining money under false pretenses. Three of the charges dealt with expert witness payments Zain received after he left the state in 1989. He was to have been retried in July, but the trial was delayed indefinitely because of his cancer.

Besides the expense of investigating and prosecuting Zain, and retrying cases related to him, West Virginia has paid at least $6.5 million to settle lawsuits by wrongfully convicted defendants.

No one knows precisely how many convictions resulted from Zain's testimony, or how many people are still imprisoned in West Virginia, Texas and other states where he served as a consultant.

A West Virginia State Police investigation identified as many as 182 cases that might have been affected by Zain's work.

In a 1997 interview in Texas, Zain said he had been made a "scapegoat" by political forces in West Virginia and Texas.

Zain worked as a state police chemist from 1979 until 1989, when he took a similar job in Bexar County, Texas. His work in West Virginia was discredited in 1993 by the state Supreme Court, which said Zain may have lied or fabricated evidence in dozens of rape and murder cases.

His work in Texas also was under fire and led to the payment of at least $850,000 to two men. In 1997, Zain avoided a perjury trial in Texas because the statute of limitations had expired.

Zain was fired by Bexar County after his work in West Virginia was discredited. He later moved to Florida where he worked for a state-run environmental laboratory."

The West Virginia Supreme Court report on Fred Zain's misconduct is here. We got to know one of Mr. Zain's victims, William Harris, several years ago--he was able to get a fair award (about one million dollars) from the state, but how do you repay someone who is yanked from their promising life at 17 and forced to spend 7 years (on a 20 year sentence) in one of the worst adult prisons in the country after being wrongfully convicted of rape based upon a lying chemist's testimony?

William's story is one of the 28 told in the Government publication, Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science, available here.

A detective in William's case was later convicted of perjury. DNA testing proved William was not the donor of the semen involved in the rape. Zain lied and told the jury that the genetic markers in the semen left by the assailant matched those of Harris and only 5.9 percent of the population.

The Week in Review section of the Sunday New York Times today takes on the issue of Why Confess to What You Didn't Do?. The subject of false confessions and the need to videotape all interrogations has been highlighted the past several months by the reopening of the Central Park Jogger convictions. If you are coming late into the story, here is the Times link to full coverage of the case. Included are the several excellent articles by investigative journalist and author Jim Dwyer.