Prosecution Complex

America's Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent

Daniel S. Medwed

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814796252
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

· “A fascinating ethical, legal, and psychological perspective… Gripping accounts… Simply must be read by all.” – Brandon Garrett, Roy L. and Rosamund Woodruff Morgan Professor of Law, University of Virginia

· “Absorbing, sobering, and informative… This is a must read!” – Charles J. Ogletree, Founding and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice

· “Shows us how to fix the problems.” – John Grisham, New York Times best-selling author of The Litigators

· “Challenges us all to work towards changes.” – Scott Renshaw, City Weekly

· “This book should be required reading by all prosecutors and by all law students.” – Maurice Possley, Los Angeles Daily Journal

· “Illuminating.” – Appeal and Habeas blog

· “Enlightening… tackles an issue many tend to shy away from.” – Shelby Scoffield, Desert News

· “A scholarly conversation.” – Boston Review

· “Highly recommended.” – CHOICE

· “Even-handed, clear-headed.” – Rutgers

“Appeals to both academics and anyone interested in gaining knowledge.” – Criminal Justice Review

PART I
Fair Play?

Prosecutorial Behavior Prior to Trial

State of Texas v. James Curtis Giles

Around midnight on August 1, 1982, three African American men armed with guns broke into a North Dallas apartment and terrorized the occupants. After raping Susan Law, a pregnant white woman, the men robbed her husband, David. The assailants then dragged the woman outside to a nearby field where they raped her again. It was a shocking act of brutality that local police officers did not want to go unpunished. Fortunately they had a good lead. The rape victim recognized one of her attackers as an acquaintance named Stanley Bryant who lived in her neighborhood. But the police were unable to interview Bryant before he fled Texas after the attack, and they had almost no information about the other perpetrators. Susan Law could only describe them in general terms, one as tall and lean and the other as short and stocky.¹

The investigation languished for several weeks until law enforcement received a tip that “James Giles” was one of the participants in the North Dallas assault. Following up on that clue, the police discovered that a man named James Curtis Giles had a criminal record and lived thirty miles away. The twenty-eight-year-old Giles was married with a child and earned his living as a construction worker. A month after the incident, the police showed the Laws an array of six photographs of men who matched the description of the perpetrators. Although the husband failed to identify anyone initially from these pictures, the woman pointed out Giles as one of her assailants, the “tall one.”²

The case against Giles went to trial in June 1983 based on the identification by Susan Law. During the victim’s testimony about her traumatic experience, she repeated her identification of Giles. She insisted that when she saw his photograph she was “absolutely positive that it was him.”³ Law never viewed a live lineup in the case. In fact, her first in-person identification of Giles occurred during trial when the defendant was the only African American in the courtroom except for a bailiff.⁴

Giles claimed he was with his wife during the time of the North Dallas incident. His wife corroborated this alibi on the witness stand. The jury nonetheless found Giles guilty of aggravated rape, and the judge sentenced him to thirty years in prison. The foreperson later explained that the jury agonized over the case but put tremendous stock in the identification.⁵

The conviction of James Giles was suspect from the start. Susan Law declared that Giles’s face was inches away from her during the assault, a salient detail that reinforced the strength of her identification. But she never mentioned that her attacker had gold teeth—and Giles had two of them displayed prominently during the summer of 1982. Although police detectives denied committing any misconduct during the photo lineup procedure, a rumor surfaced that the victim had learned the name “James Giles” from a neighbor and that the police directed her to his photo.⁶

Information gathered during a police interrogation of Stanley Bryant in Indiana cast further doubt on Giles’s guilt. In May 1983, two weeks before Giles’s trial, the Dallas police discovered that Bryant had been arrested in Indianapolis for an unrelated crime. Dallas Detective Carol Hovey consulted with the lead prosecutor in the Giles case, Mike O’Connor, and asked police officials in Indianapolis to interrogate Bryant about the events of August 1, 1982. Indianapolis detectives obtained two statements from Bryant in which he confessed to the North Dallas crimes. Bryant attributed the entire incident to a dispute over drugs, and cited two teenagers named “Michael” and “James” as his accomplices. He described his friend Michael as the taller of the two and gave detailed information about him, including his telephone number. Bryant noted that James was a short, muscular teen who ran in the same circles. Indeed, a younger James Giles—James Earl Giles (a.k.a., “Quack”)—was a known criminal associate of Bryant’s who lived across the street from the Laws. Bryant’s wife provided a statement to the police supporting her husband’s account.⁷

Dallas prosecutors withheld Stanley Bryant’s statements implicating “Michael” and “James” from the defense, even though the government is required to disclose such evidence as a matter of federal constitutional law. In 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland that, before trial, prosecutors must turn over all evidence that is favorable to the defense and material to guilt or punishment.⁸ It does not matter whether the evidence is in the hands of the assigned prosecutor; information possessed by the police is imputed to the prosecution for Brady purposes.⁹ Stanley Bryant’s statements—as well as those of his spouse—were undeniably favorable to the defense and would have led the defense team to Quack Giles’s doorstep. Dallas prosecutors knew about the Bryant statements before trial, as demonstrated by their exchanges with Detective Hovey and, through her, the Indianapolis police. Almost as worrisome as the failure to disclose the Bryant statements, prosecutors neglected to investigate the possibility that this other James Giles was one of the culprits. Bryant later pled guilty to the North Dallas crimes in return for a twenty-year sentence.¹⁰

James Curtis Giles, meanwhile, persisted in claiming his innocence from behind bars. Stanley Bryant viewed a photograph of him in 1985 and vowed that the man convicted of aggravated rape did not participate in the North Dallas crimes. Yet two writs of habeas corpus filed by Giles went nowhere in the 1980s.¹¹

Things began to look up for Giles in 1989, when he met a man named Marvin Moore while they were incarcerated in the same prison. Moore knew a lot about the events in North Dallas. On the night of the crime, the police found Moore during a canvass of the surrounding area. The police hauled Moore down to the precinct where he was cleared by Susan and David Law (who knew him). Shaken by the experience, Moore went back to his apartment complex and visited the home of his friend Bernard Giles. During that visit he learned that Bernard’s younger brother, Quack, had committed the crimes along with two others.¹²

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office conducted a cursory reinvestigation of the case in the early 1990s in response to Moore’s claims but backed off after Susan Law maintained her identification and a primitive DNA test of biological evidence collected in a “rape kit” as part of the medical treatment of the victim yielded inconclusive results. Giles served ten years of his sentence before obtaining parole in 1993. In addition to living under the shadow of parole after his release, the state required Giles to register as a sex offender, a condition that subjected him to ridicule in the small Texas town where he settled.¹³

Eager to clear his name, Giles convinced the Innocence Project in New York City to take his case. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, investigates and litigates post-conviction claims of innocence by inmates whose cases contain biological evidence suitable for DNA testing.¹⁴ The Innocence Project has freed more than one hundred innocent prisoners.¹⁵ It has also inspired the creation of numerous other groups dedicated to this work, including the Second Look Program that I helped establish at Brooklyn Law School in 2001 to handle innocence claims by New York state inmates whose cases lacked DNA evidence.¹⁶

In the Giles case, the Innocence Project set its sights on subjecting the biological evidence retrieved from the North Dallas crime scene to new types of DNA testing. Sophisticated DNA testing of the material from the rape kit in 2003 identified the profiles of two males, neither of which matched that of James Curtis Giles. A string of even more advanced DNA tests pinpointed the biological profiles as belonging to Stanley Bryant and a man named Michael Anthony Brown, who had died in 1985 awaiting prosecution for a different gang rape.¹⁷

These discoveries gave James Curtis Giles renewed hope because of the strong connection Brown and Bryant had to James Earl “Quack” Giles. Quack Giles had died in prison in 2000 while serving a sentence for unrelated crimes in Dallas. To substantiate the link between Brown, Bryant, and Quack Giles, representatives of the Innocence Project approached Michael Brown’s sister. She signed an affidavit verifying that Quack Giles and her brother were good friends in the early 1980s, that their families lived in the same apartment complex in North Dallas, and that the two teenagers hung around with another neighbor named “Stan” during the summer of 1982. She also identified Quack Giles from a yearbook photo. Upon viewing a picture of James Curtis Giles, she indicated she had never seen him before.¹⁸

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office revived its investigation of the case in December 2006 after analyzing the evidence compiled by the Innocence Project. The prosecutors’ efforts soon identified fingerprints left on a telephone at the crime scene as those of Brown. Prosecutors then dispatched an investigator to interview David Law. When shown two separate photo lineups—one containing a picture of James Curtis Giles, the other featuring one of Quack Giles—he selected Quack Giles as the perpetrator. Susan Law also viewed a series of photographs. This time she identified neither James Curtis Giles nor Quack Giles as her attacker and acknowledged that she was not certain the man she helped convict was guilty.¹⁹

The final piece of the puzzle, Susan Law’s recognition of her possible mistake, fit snugly with the rest of the evidence vindicating James Curtis Giles. The prosecution could no longer deny the compelling nature of his innocence claim and joined the Innocence Project in arguing that his conviction ought to be overturned. A Dallas judge granted the motion in April 2007. Two months later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals officially exonerated Giles of any role in the horrific 1982 crimes.²⁰

To their credit, Dallas prosecutors took affirmative measures to right a grievous wrong. They even released documents in 2003 showing that their predecessors had withheld Bryant’s statements fingering “Michael” and “James” in the crime.²¹ In 2007 new chief prosecutor Craig Watkins made investigating wrongful convictions a top priority in his administration and apologized to Giles personally for his office’s missteps. Shortly after Giles’s release, Watkins established a unit to review post-conviction claims of innocence.²²

But in James Curtis Giles’s mind, these belated attempts to act as ministers of justice were too little too late. They could not cleanse the stain of misconduct that had caused him nearly a quarter-century of torment. Disclosing Bryant’s statements to defense counsel in 1983 would have drastically altered the trajectory of Giles’s life. As Giles later remarked, the “DA shouldn’t be practicing law [anywhere] in this country. They should be held accountable.”²³ It appears that those prosecutors emerged from the Giles fiasco with their careers intact. The lead prosecutor, Mike O’Connor, is now a personal injury litigator in Bryan, Texas. When asked about the case in 2007, he claimed to barely remember it: “It wasn’t anything unusual, it was just one of the cases we tried every month and year.”²⁴

The James Curtis Giles case is a grim example of how prosecutors’ decisions to suppress exculpatory evidence before trial can lead to the conviction of an innocent defendant. Giles’s exoneration was one of no fewer than six that occurred in Dallas County from 2007 to 2009 because of past nondisclosure of exculpatory evidence.²⁵ Alas, misconduct of this nature is not the only way prosecutors harm the innocent through pretrial decision making. The next three chapters examine a variety of prosecutorial choices before trial that may contribute to wrongful convictions, focusing on decisions about (1) charging crimes, (2) disclosing evidence, and (3) plea bargaining.²⁶

1
Charging Ahead

Prosecutors enjoy vast discretion to determine which criminal charges, if any, should be filed after the police arrest a suspect. Take the following example. Assume that a man drinks a large quantity of alcohol one night, drives on a busy street, and kills a pedestrian on a sidewalk. In addition to being charged with driving while intoxicated (DWI), the perpetrator could face a litany of homicide-related crimes. This event might be viewed as criminally negligent homicide because a “reasonable person” would not have driven drunk in this manner. Alternatively, this conduct could be construed as manslaughter—a reckless homicide in which the drunk driver consciously disregarded the substantial and unjustifiable risk that an innocent citizen might be killed. But that is not the end of the possibilities. The driver might be charged with outright murder for exhibiting “depraved indifference to human life,” a form of extreme recklessness characterized as murder, not manslaughter, given the abhorrence of the conduct. The differences in the definiti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. Fair Play? Prosecutorial Behavior Prior to Trial
• PART II. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? Reasons to Doubt Prosecutorial Conduct during Trial
• PART III. The Fallacy of Finality: Prosecutors and Post-Conviction Claims of Innocence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author