February 8, 2012

  • MoJW: Leo Jones

    Leo Jones was a suspect in the 1981 murder of Thomas Szafranski, a police officer. Szafranski was killed by a bullet fired into a police cruiser outside Jones's apartment building. Jones and his cousin Hammonds were found in their apartment and taken into custody.

    Jones states that police coerced him into giving a confession. He claims he was forced to play Russian Roulette, and that police pointed a gun to his head and threatened to kill him. He says he was beaten. A lawyer who saw him shortly afterwards said his face had been cut and bruised. Twelve hours after the killing, Jones confessed. He says he confessed because he feared for his life.

    His cousin Bobby Hammonds gave testimony that implicated Jones, saying he had seen Jones leave the building with the rifle and return after hearing shots. Hammonds briefly disavowed his statement at a pretrial hearing, also claiming to have been beaten and threatened by police. He returned to his original testimony at the trial, but eventually signed a sworn statement saying he never saw Jones with the gun.

    One of the officers who arrested Jones, Lynwood Mundy, later left the police department amidst an investigation that he had abused a suspect. Hugh Eason, another investigator, said he'd had to pull Mundy off of Jones, and that Mundy had "hit him pretty good". Cleveland Smith, a police officer who worked with Mundy, said that Mundy frequently bragged about beating Jones. He testified that he had seen once seen Mundy extract a confession by squeezing a suspect's genitals.

    In the following years, over a dozen witnesses (I counted 14 from the Chicago Tribune article) would give testimony implicating another man, Schofield, in the killing. They testified that they had either seen him or heard him confess to it. Among them were two of his girlfriends, one saying he had gotten into her car and told her drive away from the crime scene right after the shooting, and another saying he had told her to give a false alibi for him if police ever asked. In each round of appeals, the courts ruled that the new evidence was insufficient.

    We tend to think that no innocent person could ever be convicted, because it is "innocent until proven guilty". This, however, is a horribly simplified version of what actually happens. Leo Jones is "innocent until proven guilty" until his trial, and the evidence that was available at his trial was his coerced confession, his cousin's coerced testimony, and the guns found in his room. Tests were not able to conclusively link the weapons to the crime, but the confession was convincing enough.

    However, once a person has been convicted, the rules change. Then, that person is presumed guilty, as ruled by the trial. The default setting is now "guilty". Whereas before, it is sufficient to raise reasonable doubt, now you need to prove yourself innocent beyond doubt. You need to present such a case that a jury would immediately acquit you. If, at the end of your appeal, the court says there exists reasonable doubt, then your status remains guilty: you lose. If they are unsure it was you, you lose. In addition, you are not allowed to reuse witnesses that have already been called. You must produce new evidence.

    As more witnesses were uncovered linking the killing to Schofield, they were presented in appeals. Each time an appeal was lost, those witnesses could not be used in later appeals. In a small victory, Jones's lawyers won a court ruling that said the standards for proving innocence were "almost impossible to meet". But because they could not call witnesses that had already been presented, they could only call a few of the many witnesses they had compiled.

    Leo Jones was executed in 1998. He was convicted on his own confession, Hammond's testimony, and inconclusive weapons. Despite twenty witnesses providing evidence that his confession and Hammond's testimony were physically beaten out of them, and that another man was the culprit, he was put to death. In what kind of a world are two coerced testimonies enough to condemn a man to death, while twenty in his defense are not enough to spare his life?

    The Chicago Tribune article can be found here.