 TWO FACES OF INNOCENCE
On September 30, 1959, Steven Truscott was convicted of the first degree murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper. The presiding judge at his trial sentenced Truscott to "be hanged by the neck until you are dead."
Steven Truscott was all of 14 years old. The Government of Canada, acting under the authority of Her Majesty the Queen, was perfectly prepared to hang a fourteen year old boy.
There was also the small matter of Truscott's innocence. Steven Truscott was not merely legally "not guilty," he was factually innocent. Innocent in thought, word and deed. Worse still, most Canadians have known this for longer than I've been alive. The only people in the country who argued otherwise was the federal government.
Even though it was later decided that executing a fourteen year old would be unnecessarily barbaric and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, he was still branded a murderer. Despite his being paroled at the earliest opportunity in 1968 - in large part due to a belief in his actual innocence - Steven Truscott has had to live with the brand of being the killer of little Lynne Harper for 48 years. Even though he escaped the hangman's rope, Steven Truscott lost his life in 1958.
Yesterday morning the Ontario Court of Appeal gave it back. For the first time nearly half a century - almost forty years after most Canadians reached the same conclusion - Steven Murray Truscott is an innocent man in the eyes of the law.
Defiant to the end before the law, the people and basic common sense, the Crown was handed its final defeat in the matter of Regina v. Steven Murray Truscott.
In a decision released today, the court unanimously holds that the conviction of Mr. Truscott was a miscarriage of justice and must be quashed. The court further holds that the appropriate remedy in this case is to enter an acquittal. The court thus orders that Mr. Truscott should stand acquitted of the murder of Lynne Harper. The Court of Appeal wouldn't even give the Crown the minimum it sought, a new trial. Instead, Truscott was acquitted outright. A nightmare that begun twelve years before I was even born finally ended yesterday.
Forty-eight years ago, Mr. Truscott's life was ruined by bad science, incompetent police, ambitious prosecutors who relied on the perjured testimony of at least one witness, and an excitable, misinformed public. Steven Truscott resurfaced a decade ago to begin the battle to win his life back. Yesterday he won.
 The Truscott case is infamous in Canada, but virtually unknown everywhere else. Because of the change of the media's scope and reach, Richard Jewell's life was ruined instantly and in ways that were unimaginable during the orignial Truscott trial.
Mr. Jewell was working as a security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when he noticed a bag unattended where it wasn't supposed to be. He, acting by himself, cleared the area as best he could (which I can tell you from personal experience is no easy task) before a bomb exploded, killing one and injuring 111 others. Were it not for Richard Jewell's presence of mind and professionalism, there is very little doubt that there would have been a far greater number of fatalities.
Richard Jewell was a hero that night, and he was crucified for his trouble.
In the beginning, Jewell was celebrated world-wide as a hero. As I remember it, that last for all of a day, maybe two. Then a string of dimwitted and lazy FBI officials - extending directly into the office of the director, Louis Freeh - latched on to Mr. Jewell's professional ambitions (he wanted to be a police officer) and decided that he was the bomber.
Instead of doing anything crazy, like arrest him and charge him with the bombing, the FBI named Richard Jewell a "person of interest" and began leaking unfounded smears to the media, who reported them with glee. It was a truly horrid thing to watch and conditioned me to instinctively take the side of anyone named a "person of interest," because that phrase tells me that law enforcement and journalists are going to destroy that person for no reason at all.
I've never seen anything like what happened to Mr. Jewell. He was lionized one minute and demonized the next. It literally flipped in a day. Incompetence in the FBI and greed in the media was all it took to ruin a man's life. The fact that the FBI never had the evidence to lay charges and the media never bothered to ask why never seemed to enter into the case. Richard Jewell and his mother were prisoners in the own home - surrounded by unmarked FBI cars and network satellite trucks for over eighty-eight days.
Despite the fact that the bombing was later conclusively attributed to a right-wing psychopath named Eric Rudolph, who later went on to bomb a gay nightclub and an abortion clinc, it took the state of Georgia over ten years to thank Richard Jewell for what he did that night in Centennial Park - save an unknowable number of lives.
If nothing else, he got that. A craven, lazy and stupid law enforcement establishment, cheered on by the jackals at NBC and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution joyfully went about the task of destroying Richard Jewell for no reason at all. Everybody else - including myself - sat back and broke out the popcorn.
It took ten years, but Governor Sonny Perdue finally said thank you to Richard Jewell. 13 months later - yesterday - Richard Jewell died. He was 44 years old. No one in the media or the FBI ever really apologized to Mr. Jewell, but at least he died knowing that the people of Georgia appreciated him for what he did in the early morning hours of July 27, 1996.
Steven Truscott and Richard Jewell. Those names are but two reasons to never trust cops, courts or reporters to bring justice. Yes, both finally - in one case, a half-century late - received justice, but they recieved it in spite of the legal and media establishments, not because of them. The legal and media establishments were more than ready to throw both men into the abyss for no other reason than expediency.
When I think of Steven Truscott and Richard Jewell, I inevitably think about the death penalty. Truscott was sentenced to hang as a fourteen year old and it took almost fifty years to establish his innocence. I have no doubt whatsoever that Jewell would have been sentenced to lethal injection had things played out differently.
Because of language in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows the Crown to appeal jury acquittals, I am unable to support the death penalty in Canada under any circumstances. With the maladjusted misfits in the Bush administration - people champoined by Alberto Gonzales and who have almost never been right about anything in the last six years - wanting to expedite executions, I feel my support for capital punishment in the United States waning as well.
I fail to see how anyone who fancies themselves a believer in small, limited government and federalism can possibly support that government's ability to execute citizen's more easily. I fail to see how the two can be logically reconciled. Taking the life of another under judicial edict is the most solemn duty a government can undertake. Increasingly, officeholders refuse to recognize that in the face of opinion polling.
Lately I've given a great deal of thought to Justice Harry Blackmun's lone dissent in Callins v. Collins.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question--does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die?--cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, see, e. g., Arave v. Creech, ___ U. S. ___ (1993), relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, see, e. g., Johnson v. Texas, ___ U. S. ___ (1993), and vital judicial review to be blocked, see, e. g., Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S. ___ (1991). The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution. I'm not there yet. But I'm getting closer every year.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Gallows Pole By: Led Zeppelin From: Led Zeppelin III
PermalinkLabels: I Fought The Law, Journalists Are Swine, The Serious Side of skippy
|
