Daily Dicta: Wrongly Convicted of Murder, Six Defendants Win Fight for $28M Jury Award
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FILE - In this Jan 26, 2009 file photo, four of the six people known as the Beatrice Six, from left, James Dean, JoAnn Taylor, Thomas Winslow, and Debra Shelden, right, applaud during a reception in Lincoln, Neb. On Wednesday, July 6, 2016, a federal jury has awarded $28.1 million to the Beatrice Six, who were wrongfully convicted in an 1985 rape and slaying in southeast Nebraska. The jury's verdict against Gage County and several of the officials who carried out the investigation.[/caption] More than 30 years ago, 68-year-old Helen Wilson was raped and murdered in the Nebraska town of Beatrice. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit doled out a small measure of justice in a case where it’s been almost entirely lacking—one where the killer went free and six people spent a combined 70 years behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit. The appellate panel upheld a $28 million jury award to so-called “Beatrice Six”—three men and women who were convicted or bullied into pleading guilty based on lies, threats and physical evidence that was intentionally ignored. “[W]e note that there are certain types of law enforcement conduct that ‘do more than offend some fastidious squeamishness or private sentimentalism about combating crime’ and which the Constitution forbids,” wrote Judge Bobby Shepherd for the panel. “We have recognized this case is an example of such conduct.”
But recompense has been extraordinarily hard-fought—as the Eighth Circuit panel noted, it’s taken “three prior opinions by this court, two trials, and now, one jury verdict.” And already, lawyers for the defendants, Gage County, Nebraska and its law enforcement officials,
told the Omaha Herald they plan to petition for en banc review before deciding whether to pursue a Supreme Court appeal.The local government defendants are represented by Wolfe & Snowden; Butler & Galter and Jen Amen Law, and backed by amici from The Nebraska Association of County Officials, the Nebraska Sheriffs Association, the International Municipal Lawyers Association and The Nebraska Intergovernmental Risk Management Association.Given the magnitude of the injustice—really, is there anything worse than being wrongfully imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit?—you might think local officials would agree the Beatrice Six deserve compensation.In New York City, for example, Mayor Bill De Blasio in 2014 defended the city’s $41 million settlement with the “Central Park Five,” who were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger, as a “moral obligation to respond to that injustice.” Likewise, Illinois state police agreed to pay $40 million to five teens wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl.But Gage County, Nebraska has a population of 22,311 and a median household income of $34,908, per census data. The county doesn’t have the money to pay the judgment, which will top $30 million with legal fees and interest, according to the Omaha Herald."This whole situation is just a complete tragedy," Jeff Patterson, one of the lawyers for the six, told Herald reporter Joe Duggan. "It’s a tragedy for the residents of Gage County, it’s a tragedy for the Wilson family and it’s a tragedy for my clients."The Beatrice Six are also represented by Herbert J. Friedman of the Friedman Law Offices; Robert F. Bartle of Bartle & Geier; Douglas J. Stratton of Stratton & Ptak; Maren Lynn Chaloupka of Chaloupka & Holyoke and Matthew Kosmicki. The ACLU Nebraska Foundation filed an amicus brief.As described in the Eighth Circuit decision, the police work in the case was shockingly bad.Initially, investigators were on the right track. They suspected a drifter, Bruce Allen Smith, who was living in Oklahoma. He was in town at the time of the murder and was last seen near Wilson’s apartment building. Beatrice police worked with their counterparts in Oklahoma to obtain biological samples from him. But the Oklahoma City police lab bungled the results—the work was done by technician Joyce Gilchrist, who was later accused of forging evidence in hundreds of cases.Smith was eliminated as a suspect and died in 1992. The case grew cold.Former Beatrice police officer Burt Searcey on his own began working as an unpaid private investigator, determined to solve Wilson’s murder. Four years later, after he was rehired by the department, he arrested the group of six. One thing that’s notable: They’re all white, which removed the overlay of racial bias often seen in comparable cases. But there were some major problems with the evidence. For one thing, none of the accused matched the fingerprints or blood found at the crime scene. (One suspect had the same blood type, but different genetic markers.) None of the men were a match for the semen either.When the six accused were questioned, they gave “knee-jerk, baffling statements … many of which contradicted physical evidence and statements made by fellow arrestees,” the appellate panel noted. Also, the police department’s part-time psychologist previously treated two of suspects in private practice. He “counseled” them after their arrests, and encouraged the use of “unconscious recall” or dreams to remember facts about their supposed participation in the crime.Five of the six suspects pleaded guilty. In exchange for lighter sentences, three of them testified against the one who didn’t, and he was convicted of first-degree murder.In 2009, all six were exonerated after DNA evidence definitively implicated Smith as Wilson’s murderer.Gage County argued without success that the county wasn’t liable for the wrongful convictions, and that the deputies should be entitled to qualified immunity.Instead, the panel found there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find that the investigation would have fizzled without the sheriff’s “continued approval of arrests. Evidence at trial showed he allowed the investigation to continue with full vigor despite knowing the deputies arrested individuals who did not match the physical evidence found at the crime scene … he gave oxygen to the reckless investigation.”
Quote of the Day
“With the attorney general’s ruling, the Trump administration has unilaterally seized and reshaped of one of our nation’s most complex and consequential areas of law, all in pursuit of realizing an anti-immigrant agenda that has been at the center of this regime since the beginning. This is not how the rule of law is maintained and not how a government that values human life operates.” --Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center, on AG Jeff Sessions’ decision to end asylum for victims of domestic abuse and gang violence.
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