The Daily Beast is reporting about yet another exonerated man today. Raymond Trowler was released from an Ohio prison on May 5th after serving almost 30 years for a rape he did not commit. The article, written by Mansfield Frazier, includes a lot of the same discussion about the incidence of wrongful conviction that we’ve see elsewhere. However, it also addresses the problems with eye witness testimony, race in America and how those two issues intersect and impact on the criminal justice system. According to one source cited, “…more than 75 percent of the more than 200 people to date who have been cleared by DNA were convicted on wrongful eyewitness testimony,” a statistic that will not surprise those of us working on the defense side.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University, argues that problems such as bad identifications are worse in cases brought against people of color, compounded by the lack of resources available to publicly paid lawyers, who serve more minorities, generally speaking. I haven’t read the book yet but will report back soon.
This article, and the discussion of The New Jim Crow, remind me of a case I read about in the local news last week. That story, about convicted felon Ronny Walker, is a terrible one. In 2003, during the course of a burglary, a man shot and killed Elaine Caldwell in her home. Her 9 year old granddaughter and boyfriend were also in the home and saw the shooting occur. The boyfriend, Raymond Lee, identified Walker from an online mug shot database. Walker was serving a prison sentence on unrelated charges until recently and was only charged upon his release in 2009. He was convicted earlier this month.
A couple of interesting facts about Walker’s case:
Lee was a drug dealer operating out of the home where Caldwell was killed, a fact that the killer knew.
Walker, a who has served many years in the Department of Corrections before, turned down a deal to plea to manslaughter in exchange for 5 years in prison.
A jury was unable to come to a conclusion in the case in an earlier trial in February of this year.
A detective apparently testified that Walker never outright denied killing Caldwell and said the he would never tell on himself, which obviously swayed the jury in this trial.
