In every nation the justice system strives to be perfect. However, it is vulnerable to deliberate abuse, accidental bungling, and occasional failures. Thus it could cause unbearable pain and suffering to innocent people. Stories of such anomalies are not rare in the criminal justice system of the United States. It does try to protect the innocent with adequate built-in checks and controls. Nevertheless, some cases of innocent people accused of wrongdoing fall through the cracks, and end up on the wrong side of the law with life-altering implications for those concerned.
George Stinney Jr
It was a spring day in Alcolu, a small lumber mill town in South Carolina. It was during the height of racial tensions in the U.S. The deep south was segregated along racial lines under the Jim Crow system. Blacks were seen as subpar to whites, and vigilante justice was prevalent.
That fateful day in March 1944, George Stinney, 14, and his brother Johnnie were home in Alcolu doing what normal youngsters do. Suddenly the police arrived and took both of them to the precinct. They were questioned and charged with the murder of two young white girls from the same town. Later Johnnie was released and the police interrogated George, and according to the police, they got a confession from him.
George was charged and the authorities put him through a speedy trial. There was little or no evidence (other than the so-called confession), and no witnesses were presented during the trial. The trial lasted about two hours, and the jury deliberated for about 10 minutes. The jury found him guilty of murder. On April 24, 1944, George Stinney Jr was sentenced to die by electrocution. There was no appeal and he was executed on June 16 the same year. An innocent young life was extinguished by the racially biased actions of a few authorities and a flawed system.
Later it was found that the authorities had omitted many of the normal processes and conventions of the criminal justice system. They showed haste to put the blame on the defendant.
Based on new details and faulting the negligence shown by the authorities and the abhorrent violation of constitutional rights, the family in 2013 petitioned for a new trial. On December 17, 2014, George’s conviction was posthumously cleared. It took 70 years to get the conviction overturned.
The wrong Giles
James Curtis Giles lived in Texas for most of his life. One night in 1982, the police barged into his bedroom, arrested and charged Giles with aggravated rape and robbery. James Curtis Giles was till then a relatively unknown person, with no prior convictions or a criminal record. He was a quiet person, and lived a life minding his own business. From that moment, his life took a turn for the worse.
A few days earlier, three men had broken into a neighbour's house, gang-raped a pregnant woman and robbed her husband and another occupant. Soon afterwards, the police apprehended a suspect, Stanley Bryant, who in turn provided the names and descriptions of his accomplices. They were two teenagers, Michael and James Earl Giles, who lived close to the victims’ house. Armed with that information, the police looked for Giles and arrested James Curtis Giles. But he was not a teen, nor did he live anywhere close to the crime spot.
James Curtis Giles was relentlessly proclaimed his innocence. But the authorities did not bother to investigate further since the victim herself had picked out James Curtis Giles from a police line-up.
They proceeded with the case. James Curtis Giles was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 1993, after 10 years in jail, he was released on probation and registered as a sex offender.
In spite of overwhelming evidence pointing away from James Curtis Giles, the police and the prosecution failed to provide such information to the defence, until a group of lawyers from the Innocent Project realised James’s situation and started to look into his case. What they found were alarming gaps and negligence by the police and the prosecutors. When the police had received information from Stanley Bryant, without much investigation they went and picked up the wrong Giles, instead of James Earl (Quack) Giles who was a teen and lived close by. The police and the prosecutors had the confession from Stanley Bryant, they knew James Giles was the wrong Giles, but this information was not available to the court.
A DNA test conducted in 2003 cleared James Curtis Giles of the crimes, and further DNA tests positively identified others as the perpetrators; also, fingerprints at the scene pointed to other individuaals. Finally, on June 21, 2007, the court granted James Curtis Giles his freedom from wrongful conviction, exonerated him, and set him free.
The case of Troy Davis
On August 19, 1989, a police officer was shot and killed as he was trying to rescue a homeless man from the midst of an altercation. Mark MacPhail was that Savannah, Georgia police officer. A few days later, Troy Davis was arrested based on a certain Sylvester Cole’s words. Cole had claimed he was present when the incident occurred.
Troy Davis’s trial started about two years later in 1991: he had been charged with murder. There was no murder weapon or any other physical evidence, but there were nine eyewitnesses including Sylvester Cole. They testified against Troy Davis. However, Troy Davis insisted on his innocence and told the jury that Cole was the one who beat up the homeless man. Davis also said he had left the scene before the shooting.
The jury found Troy Davis guilty of aggravated assault, obstructing a law enforcement officer and murder, and recommended the death penalty. While the automatic appeal processes were happening, a newspaper in Atlanta started publishing stories, after an in-depth investigation, about the case. It found that seven out of the nine eyewitnesses had recanted their stories. They also acknowledged that their reason to implicate Davis was pressure from the police. Another ten people came forward to point the finger at Sylvester Cole.
The State of Georgia tried three times in 2008 to execute Troy Davis, but last-minute appeals and legal wrangling postponed the inevitable on a temporary basis. Additional appeals to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, the State Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court also failed, and finally, a fourth date was set to execute Davis. People from around the world, three-quarters of a million people, signed a petition supporting clemency for Davis. They included former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation William Sessions, 51 members of Congress, and others from the movie and entertainment industry and Amnesty International. Even one of the original members of the jury, Brenda Forrest, conveyed to the Board of Pardons and Paroles panel that she no longer could trust the original verdict. Another witness, Quiana Glover, testified before the board that she had heard Cole confess about the killing at a party in June 2009.
However, the police officer’s family was adamant and they believed it was Troy Davis, and no one else, who was guilty, and expressed their desire to see Davis executed. The family had no doubt about Davis’s guilt.
Despite the doubts, and lack of direct evidence, and despite the huge public outcry to show leniency, on September 21, 2011, just after 11 p.m. Troy Davis was injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs, and pronounced dead a few minutes later.
A fallen dream
This is the story of young Yoshihiro Hattori who was born in Nagoya, Japan. He was 16 when he came to the U.S. as an exchange student. A young, intelligent, outgoing Yoshihiro moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to fulfill his dream: to study in America. He and his friend, Webb Haymaker, stayed in a working-class neighbourhood near the school.
A few months into their stay, they were on their way to a Halloween party organised for the Japanese exchange students. On October 17, 1983, thinking that it was the right house, Hattori and Haymaker walked to the front door of Mr. and Mrs. Peairs and rang the bell. As they did not receive a response, they walked back to their car.
Seeing the strangers at her doorstep, Mrs. Peairs yelled to her husband, “Rodney, get your gun.” As Yoshihiro and Webb were walking back to their cars, Rodney Peairs grabbed his .44 Magnum and pointing it at Yoshihiro yelled, “freeze.” Not knowing the meaning of the word, Yoshihiro turned around and started pacing towards Mr. Peairs. Rodney Peairs fired his revolver, striking Yoshihiro and mortally wounding him. Rodney Peairs went inside and stayed there until the police came about 40 minutes later. Webb tried to help his friend and called the police from a neighbour's phone. Yoshihiro died moments later.
The local police were hesitant to charge Rodney Peairs, stating that he was within his rights to shoot a trespasser. He was questioned and released. Later, pressed by the State Governor and the Japanese Consul General, the police charged Rodney with manslaughter, a lesser charge compared to first-degree murder.
The trial lasted seven days. The defence strategy was to emphasise the panicky and scary situation the Peairs couple had faced that fateful evening. The 12-member jury deliberated for less than four hours and delivered a unanimous “not guilty” verdict, setting Rodney Peairs free. Homicide is justifiable under Louisiana's 1976 ‘shoot-the-burglar’ law that allows a person to kill an intruder.
The case attracted national and international attention. It exposed the U.S. gun culture to the world. Later, a million Americans and close to two million Japanese signed a petition and presented it to the U.S. government asking for stricter gun laws. In November 1993, President Bill Clinton signed ‘Brady Bill’ into law, and later in December, Ambassador Walter Mondale presented a copy of the Bill to the parents of Yoshihiro Hattori.
In a civil trial, the Peairs were found culpable for the crime. Yoshihiro’s parents were awarded $650,000 in damages and they used that amount to set up two charitable funds in his name.
These are the life stories of four different people from four different places and times. They were innocent victims failed by a not-so-perfect justice system. The results were catastrophic and led to grave outcomes. Unfortunately, there was no culpability on the part of the perpetrators. Their (in)action changed many lives forever.
A thin grey line separates rights and wrongs and sometimes it blurs when entangled in judgment calls and technicalities. These are prime examples of how even well-intended systems with adequate checks and controls can fail. The people who are the gatekeepers of the system are supposed to manage it with educated and sound decisions and with proper corroboration and deliberation. However, sometimes they fail.
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