Misconduct – an uneven playing field?

The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s penalty for intentionally misleading the defense?

Both prosecutors were ordered to be “publicly censured.” A man’s life was on the line, and all the prosecution’s conduct resulted in was a public reprimand. Compare that to the case of an Oklahoma defense attorney accused of suborning perjury.

After a witness was found to by lying when she said that a drug defendant was with her in Mexico on the day of a 2007 drug deal, attorney Mark Clayborne was accused of knowing the witness was lying and knowing she had altered the date on a video to make it appear that she and the defendant were together in Mexico on the date of the alleged offense.

Clayborne contested the witness’s statement that he told her to lie, saying he did not knowingly permit perjury. However, he was convicted of one count of perjury by subornation and one count of false preparation of exhibits as evidence. He was disbarred and criminally sentenced to six years in prison.

Read more at Huffington Post

The jaw-dropping police/prosecutor scandal in Orange County, Calif.

Laura Fernandez of Yale Law School, who studies prosecutorial misconduct, says it’s amazing that both the sheriff’s office and the DA’s office worked together to cover up the misconduct: “From my perspective,” she says, “what really sets Orange County apart is the massive cover-up by both law enforcement and prosecutors—a cover-up that appears to have risen to the level of perjury and obstruction of justice. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors in Orange County have gone to such lengths to conceal their wide-ranging misconduct that they have effectively turned the criminal justice system on its head: dismissing charges and reducing sentences in extraordinarily serious cases, utterly failing to investigate unsolved crimes and many murders (by informants — in order to prevent that evidence from ever getting to defense lawyers), while simultaneously pushing forward where it would seem to make no sense (except that it conceals more bad acts by the state), as in the case of an innocent 14-year old boy who was wrongfully detained for two years.”

Full Article by Radley Balko, Washington Post Here

Ronnie Long

Ronnie Long was a 19-­year-young-black man when his life was condemned to a broken system overflowing with institutional racism. Justice was an oath, yet only an image hiding in the darkness for many, including Ronnie. After 39 years that image of justice is still hiding, though there is ample opportunity for it to be unleashed.

It all began in 1976 when Ronnie, accompanied by his father, stood before a judge in Cabarrus County, N.C. facing trespassing charges for being in a public park near his home. As the judge dismissed him from those charges, unbeknownst to Ronnie, behind him was a separate judge condemning him to life. That judge was a white woman, a prominent citizen of the county, who had been victimized in her home during a robbery that led to her rape two weeks prior. Chauffeured by detectives to the courtroom, with “reason to believe that maybe this day there might be a man in the courtroom that she could identify..as the man who raped her” she identified Ronnie Long, according to court records.

It took nearly ninety minutes of “constant looking around…. read more here.

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August 2020:

A North Carolina man, sentenced to 80 years in prison for rape and burglary, was released last week after spending 44 years behind bars. A federal appeals court determined that Ronnie Long, who has always maintained his innocence, had been a victim of “extreme and continuous police misconduct.”

Long, 64, was suddenly released late last week after the State of North Carolina admitted it could no longer defend the case, and asked a court to vacate his convictions.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ronnie-long-freed-44-years-prison-wrongful-conviction/

Jodi Arias

Jodi Arias defended herself from repeated attacks by her abusive ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander after she dropped his camera.

The prosecution attempted to prove premeditated murder with a ridiculous circumstantial case based around Jodi using three gas cans (false), and changing her hair color on her trip to visit Travis (also false), among other rubbish cited as evidence of premeditated murder.

In addition the State changed it’s theory over the order of the injuries, in a blatant attempt to pit the testimony of the medical examiner against Jodi’s truthful testimony of what occurred. This culminated in a ridiculous claim that his own autopsy report had a “typographical error”.

The physical evidence shows Alexander was shot first, then he stands at the sink, indicating he did not anticipate further attack, consistent with Jodi’s testimony that she shot him by accident.

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Death penalty retrial commenced  29 September, 2014.
Jury hung in sentencing retrial 5 March, 2015.
Sentenced to natural life, April 13, 2015.

Charles Erikson

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Charles wrongly confessed to a murder, implicating his friend Ryan Ferguson. Ryan has been freed after a coerced witness recanted, it’s ridiculous that Charles remains in prison.

The link to serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards :

“November 1, 2001 Kent Heithholt found murdered in Columbia, Missouri. The next day Edwards blogs about the murder at ZodiacKiller.com, and references the murder of “CJB” ( Cheryl Jo Bates) 35 years earlier.”

Source: Edward Wyane Edwards Timeline

Glenn Fritz

Fabricated/coerced identification in Missouri.

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Nyki Kish

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Nyki Kish was convicted of murder after Ross Hammond was stabbed a street fight. There was no reliable evidence Nyki either stabbed Hammond, that Hammond was stabbed with the knife that Nyki was alleged to have obtained from her friend, or that Nyki ever had possession of that knife.

It’s much more plausible that Hammond was stabbed by another knife, and not the knife which he had in his possession after he was stabbed.

Nyki was wrongly portrayed as a “pan-handler” in the local press, and her conviction was unfair in many ways,

This is a rather incomplete summary of this complex case, see the Website for more details.

Article on the knife

Note: this article is categorised as “Crime committed by others”, given that Hammond was fighting with a knife, it’s entirely possible whoever did stab him ( not Nyki Kish ) was arguably acting in self-defense. Hammond was certainly acting in a very provocative way.