21 Wrongful Years – and Nearly 20 More -UPDATED

This story seemed like a good one to post along with the information below on Schwarzenegger’s attempt to end California’s 15 month death penalty moratorium.

It takes place in Oklahoma, not California and has to do with a prosecutor bent on conviction, damn the facts, together with a police lab analyst who would lie, destroy evidence and falsify test results to give the prosecutor whatever he needed to win at trial.

This win-at-all-costs prosecutor kept Curtis Edward McCarty locked up for 21 years, 16 of them on death row. McCarty is the 201 person to be cleared in the US through DNA evidence. He was finally released just after noon this past Friday.

Robert H. Macy, was the Oklahoma County District Attorney who prosecuted McCarty in both of his trials. Over his career, Macy has sent 73 people to death row – more than any other prosecutor in the nation – and 20 of them have been executed. Macy has said publicly that he believes executing an innocent person is a sacrifice worth making in order to keep the death penalty in the United States.

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UPDATE: Yesterday, one more man, Byron Halsey, was released after nearly two decades in prison for the rape and murder of two New Jersey children (The jury declined to give him the death penalty, although prosecutors pushed for it.). Now DNA shows it was likely the neighbor, a sex offender, who committed the crimes. Mr. Halsey, a man with a 6th grade education and severe learning disabilities, signed a confession after 30 hours of interrogation. (Here’s the NY Times article.)

What is it exactly that we gain from the death penalty? Somebody tell me please again because I keep forgetting.

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Here are some snips from the Innocence Project’s press release on the McCarty case:

In 1986, McCarty was convicted of a 1982 murder in Oklahoma City and sentenced to die. Citing misconduct by the prosecutor and a police lab analyst, the Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction, and McCarty was retried in 1989. He was again convicted and sentenced to death. In 1995, the appeals court upheld his conviction but threw out his death sentence; in 1996, he was sentenced to death again. In 2005, the Court of Criminal Appeals again overturned his conviction, citing the continued pattern of government misconduct – and new DNA tests showing that semen recovered from the victim did not come from McCarty…..

…Macy’s conduct in prosecuting McCarty was singled out in the Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that overturned McCarty’s first conviction; that ruling noted that the case was “replete with error” and referred to Macy’s conduct as “improper” and “unprofessional.

“Every piece of evidence in this case, including evidence that was used improperly to secure convictions, now shows Curtis McCarty’s innocence,” said Colin Starger, the Innocence Project Staff Attorney on the case

His misconduct was compounded when he relied on Joyce Gilchrist, a police lab analyst who falsified test results and hid or destroyed evidence in order to help secure McCarty’s convictions…

Gilchrist initially said hairs from the crime scene definitely did not match McCarty, then changed her records and testimony to say they definitely matched him (years later, Gilchrist either hid or destroyed those hairs when they were sought for DNA testing). The prosecution also claimed that semen on the victim’s body came from McCarty, while DNA testing now shows that it did not.

“For anyone who believes the death penalty is being carried out appropriately in this country, and anyone who believes that prosecutors and government witnesses can always be relied on to pursue the truth, this case is a wake-up call,” said Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of the Innocence Project.

Yep, that’s kinda how I saw it.