The wheels of justice…
…grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.
Another story of a person falsely convicted of murder on flimsy evidence (in this case, testimony about a confession) that should never have been considered credible.
What an awful story.
Here are some more details on how it was that Susan Mellen was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole, and the efforts it took to free her.
One observation of mine: if a person is convicted, especially of a serious crime like murder, on the story of someone who says that person had confessed to them, and on almost nothing else, then that witness’s credibility is of the utmost importance. And yet in Mellen’s case, prosecutors appeared to have ignored the fact that the informant was a well-known serial liar.
Hate to say it, but for many prosecutors it is about winning.
Sole duty of defense attorney to attack credibility.
Back the truck up. For a person to be falsely convicted of murder is always a tragedy and the foundational principle behind our judicial system’s premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
That said, was the evidence flimsy? A drug addict and serial liar’s testimony is certainly problematic but what gave it credibility with the jury was that the witness knew “details of the killing that had not been made public”.
Since later, some gang members admitted to the killing (timing is unmentioned) and testified that Mellen was NOT there, that leads to only one explanation for the witness, one ‘June Patti’ knowing those details; she was there at the killing, either during it or immediately thereafter.
I thought the legal principle was that a witness who willfully lies on one matter is not credible on any matter.
Cornhead, I’ve had the same concern about prosecutors for some time. I’ve long felt our judicial system was set askew from the beginning. Finding out the truth is not the foundational rational, but instead there is an adversarial platform. In the realm of defense, such as in the OJ case, where his lawyers are wearing $2000 suits and possess a formidable reputation comes into play big time. This is quite distinct from the English system where everyone is in robes and wigs trying to ascertain exactly what happened.
Also, broader than the context of this post, after I got a bogus traffic ticket, and my car was towed when my son was pulled over on a traffic ticket (and it cost me $500, and a day off work to get my car though I could have gone 3 blocks from my house to get my car at the time) I determined that our “criminal justice” system here in Los Angeles operates as a guild. From the multi-million dollars in revenue towing service affiliated with the city, to the bondsman, to the social worker, to the prosecutor to the judge…built in customers. Not like us in construction, that have to operate a business, producing a product for a satisfied customer in order to stay in business. Big and broken here in L.A.
Ray,
My impression is that the defense attorney did not question the witness’s veracity by alluding to her reputation as a liar. But even if he did, jury members had to ask themselves; how could she know details unrevealed by the police if she hadn’t been told them by the defendant? Presumably there was no evidence that she had been at the scene of the crime and the later gang members confession evidently hadn’t yet occurred.
SharonW,
I think it’s a bit more complex than that. The founding fathers were under no illusions as to human nature and realized that the norm in any trial is for both sides to try to ‘win’. The adversarial nature of our system is predicated upon the premise that if each side tries its best with the defense having the advantage of the prosecution having to prove guilt, that the avoidance of finding the innocent guilty will be minimized to the greatest extent possible. Better that some guilty go free than that an innocent be convicted. Of course, it’s impossible to eliminate it 100% of the time.
The English system takes just the opposite view, better that the innocent occasionally are convicted, than that the guilty escape justice. The premise being that generally only the guilty have enough evidence against them as to make charges likely. The holes in that logic are of course obvious. I would also dispute that the English system is any more interested in the actual truth than is ours.
Arguably, the same system differentiated by whether the innocent wrongfully convicted or the guilty escaping justice is the more distressing.
Corruption will ever find its way until human nature changes.
My late Uncle, the DA, had to fire more than a few over active underlings for pushing flaky cases.
The way it REALLY is supposed to work:
The DA ‘pre-tries’ the case. His assistants present ‘squibs’ of their cases — the crux upon which the prosecution turns — and the DA blesses the effort — or nixxes it.
This review process is designed to prevent flaky cases — and to firm up such cases that have merit.
My Uncle constantly killed cases advanced by newbies. They’d watched too many TV shows.
%%%
He also put a categorical prohibition on retail marijuana prosecutions… going back forty-years ago… a total waste of time and resources. The juries simply would not convict.
This went so far as to getting the local police forces to ignore (retail) cannabis during busts.
He viewed cannabis busts as a huge wedge towards police corruption. By de-criminalizing it — the word got out — the docket was kept clean for significant crimes.
Previously, the docket was absolutely clogged with nickel and dime busts. Since promotion within the police departments largely turned on bust records, for a time you had every cop hustling for these ‘easy ones’ while ignoring what was important. (It had gotten to the point that a serious fraction of the force was back in the station filing out (MJ bust) reports — unable to respond to emergency calls.)
All this, and yet the juries weren’t convicting the perps.
So the DA’s office pulled the plug.
&&&
There are countless screwballs in the prosecutors offices of this nation.
Without strong oversight — the elected DA — the boys will go totally overboard more often than you might think.
Sounds as if the prosecutors didn’t ignore the witnesse’s rep, they depended on it.
I suppose we might have to ask the question as to whether jurors are morally bound to acquit regardless of the case presented due to the possibility the prosecution has withheld exculpatory evidence and/or suborned perjury.
One murder is a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands, thousands, and millions done by the Regime… well that’s different.
Cornhead.
Here is another look at prosecutors, and how much absolute immunity allows them to get away with their behavior.
Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person–Mother Teresa, or John Lennon–and decide how he or she could be prosecuted:
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time.”7
link
Neo: “And yet in Mellen’s case, prosecutors appeared to have ignored the fact that the informant was a well-known serial liar.”
And that is only half the problem – the other half of the problem for this wrongful imprisonment is that HER defense attorneys ignored that fact too. It was their job to show the jury that and, unless a judge for some reason didn’t allow them to, they failed.
Charles:
I’m not so sure the defense lawyers were allowed to.
I haven’t read much about the actual trial, or the caliber of her defense. I’d be curious, though.
I have a brother who is a lawyer; he made a statement that it is not about truth; it is about who tells the most convincing story.
District attorneys need to remember that they represent ALL the people, including the accused.
See, Brady v. Maryland, #490, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), and Giglio v. United States. 450 U.S. 150 (1972).
At a minimum, district attorneys owe the accused a fair trial.
In my opinion, even in cases where full disclosure of a witness’ lying past has been made to the defense, presenting testimony of a known liar is just plain unfair.
It is beyond unfair when a district attorney presents testimony from a
liarwitness which indicates that witness’ own culpability (here knowing details of the crime not previously released by the police) and letting a jury (or even a judge) convict the accused on such evidence.By the way, there is an article here
http://www.aele.org/law/2009all09/2009-09MLJ101.pdf
titled, “Civil Liability for Police Failure to Disclose Exculpatory Evidence.”
I think the facts were slightly more nuanced than the linked article would lead one to believe. Grandma was a meth-head and a meth dealer, with her husband and other family members, at the location of the murder. The gang members who supposedly killed the victim were friends of Grandma and sometime residents in the two house compound. There were conflicting statements attributing several people, including Grandma, her husband and the gang members in the murder, for several related motives to do with drug dealing mainly. No one talking about the murder was a doctor or lawyer, you know, including the now deceased witness. Since the star witness is now dead, she can’t defend herself, quite convenient, but she is no less tarnished than Grandma and the other cast of slimeballs surrounding the murder, none of whom are very believable.Polygraph tests, BTW, are not admissible in court, because they are inherently unreliable. Oh, and Grandma’s big alibi witness? He only came forward the week of the trial. He was silent for months prior. This is another of the rewriting history “falsely convicted” memes. A jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her. Now, all these years later, based on a cursory internet headline, people want to think that there was some msicarriage of justice without even bothering to research the basic facts.
I’ll add a little more. it’s difficult at this late date to find much ostensible fact presented at the trial, at least not much that isn’t filtered by the defense lawyers working for the Innocence Project, who of course are free to put their own interpretation on things. And they do, seriously so. However, there was a circumstantial case presented against – I think – three defendants, that case aside from the testimony of the now dead witness who claimed Grandma confessed to her. 2 persons were convicted, one was acquitted. The news reports ignore that the gang members who were convicted (and others suspected) of committing the murder were close associates and friends of Grandma, who was a criminal herself. And 17 years after the fact, it always easy to find new witnesses, or witnesses who recant, or people who now remember another witness was a liar, and so forth. But, of course, in an environment where everyone involved was a criminal and/or drug dealer, I think it likely that everyone was also somewhat challenged when assigning veracity. What all of the present day accounts ignore is that a jury of Grandma’s peers heard the evidence, she was represented by counsel who examined the state’s evidence and presented his own, etc. Now of course, he is deemed incompetent, but then, he lost, so by definition these days, he must have been unprepared or drunk, or something. IF, 17 years later, people still remember the late witness as a liar, then how was that not known at the time? And I repeat, the state had other evidence against Grandma, which fact seems to be lost in all the hoopla about this case. A jury didn’t convict a woman of murder based solely on the unsupported word of another woman with a marginal lifestyle, just like a prosecutor didn’t bring such a case to trial or a judge let it go to a jury.
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