Lamar Johnson is innocent. The man who committed the crime for which Johnson was has pleaded guilty.
After she was elected, the office of St. Louis DA Kim Gardner found and disclosed the evidence of Johnson's innocence that her predecessors had suppressed.
Included in that evidence: Prosecutors paid off the only eyewitness to identify Johnson, and didn't disclose this to the defense.
But when the case came before the MO supreme court last year, 30 elected MO prosecutors filed a remarkable amicus brief.
In it, they argued:
1) St. Louis DA Kim Gardner behaved unethically when she asked a court to give Johnson a new trial.
2) Because he had exhausted his appeals (which he lost because, again, previous DAs suppressed exculpatory evidence), Johnson should remain in prison, regardless of innocence.
45 prosecutors from other states filed their own brief in support of Gardner.
Just to reiterate: 30 elected prosecutors in Missouri publicly stated that it's *unethical* for a DA to ask a court to free an innocent man -- and that an innocent man should remain in prison for procedural reasons.
In the end, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against Johnson and Gardner. So he remains in prison. The ruling explicitly states that Johnson's innocence is irrelevant.
Finally, I'll just note that one of the premises upon which the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed in 1996 is that extensive federal review of state convictions is unnecessary because the states are perfectly capable of preventing wrongful convictions.
UPDATE: The office of Missouri governor Mike Parson just announced 14 pardons and commutations, including the McCloskeys. Lamar Johnson and Kevin Strickland did not receive a pardon or commutation. So both remain in prison, despite that even prosecutors say they’re innocent.
This is exploding on right-wing Twitter as if it’s some new revelation. It isn’t.
The thing is, there’s actually a nugget of truth here. But it doesn’t exonerate Chauvin. Instead, its an indictment of how cops are reflexively cleared for in-custody deaths.
The Minneapolis ME’s office did indeed give prosecutors an improper, preliminary report that appeared to downplay Chauvin’s role in Floyd’s death. (A judge later scolded the DA’s office for this.)
This happens often with in-custody deaths.
They’re also right that public and political pressure may have altered the ME’s early analysis. But that pressure didn’t result in an incorrect manner of death determination. Instead, it turned what looked to be a false, knee jerk exoneration of cops too common in these cases.
After spending 29 years trying to execute him for a crime he didn't commit, Arizona finally freed Barry Jones.
Yet as his family and legal team waited for him at the jail for his release, state officials dumped him at a Greyhound station. They didn't bother telling anyone.
It's just a perfect illustration of the CJ system's utter lack of humanity. To find his family, Jones had to first navigate a city he hadn't seen in decades. His first human interaction as a free man was with a Del Taco employee, who refused to let him use the phone.
Read @LilianaSegura's moving story about Jones' release here:
The specific, somewhat complicated issue here is whether the prisoner can make his case in district court or must take the more circuitous and difficult route of first getting permission from the fed. appeals court.
But the core problem is that AEDPA allows states to defend ...
... convictions won on garbage forensics like bitemark evidence without having to defend the actual merits of those methods. They can just hide behind procedural rules, and AEDPA instructs the federal courts to defer to them.
That said, there are definitely issues worth discussing here.
Why was the ME consulting with prosecutors before completing the autopsy? Why did he give prosecutors opinions that contradicted his trial testimony, and have since been thoroughly refuted by the medical community?
The answer is that many medical examiners treat deaths in police custody differently other regular deaths. They do more tests, more lab work. They look for reasons to let cops off the hook. And they're much more likely determine a manner of death as "inconclusive" ...
The Tennessee legislature responds to the Tyre Nichols murder by . . . overriding police accountability measures passed by voters, stripping civilian review boards of their power, and making it more difficult to investigate abuse and excessive force.
This legislature is an abomination -- a body of reactionary, hypocritical, culture-warring ignoramuses with nothing but contempt for the people they claim to serve.