Claude Jones was convicted of walking into a liquor store in 1989 and killing Allen Hilzendager, the storeowner. The killer is believed to be one of two people who drove there in a car, and Claude Jones was in that car. Forensic analysis of a strand of hair found at the crime scene was said to match Jones’s hair, and so he was placed at the crime scene. On that evidence, he was convicted and executed in December of 2000.

The day before his execution, he filed to George W. Bush, the then-governor of Texas, to stay his execution for DNA testing on the hair. DNA testing was not available at the time of his conviction, but it was available in 2000. Governor Bush was an avowed supported of DNA testing, but the text of Jones’s appeal failed to mention DNA testing, and the stay was denied.

It wasn’t until 2010, ten years after Claude Jones’s death, that the strand of hair was finally obtained for testing. It turned out not to belong to him after all, but rather to the victim Hilzendagar.

While the DNA results do not prove Jones innocent, they do cast doubt on  not only his execution, but his original conviction as well. The strand of hair was the only piece of evidence linking Jones to the crime, and if the DNA results had been available in 1989, he may well have been acquitted.

His son Duane says of the findings, “I hope these results will serve as a wakeup call to everyone that serious problems exist in the criminal justice system that must be fixed if our society is to continue using the death penalty.” We would do well to consider that our capital punishment system is not as secure as we hope.

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.

Ruben Cantu grew up in a rough part of San Antonio. The local police were unreliable and corrupt, and by the age of 15, Cantu was a leader of a gang. He would steal cars and drive them to Mexico. His older brothers had been arrested several times, but he had never yet been convicted.

On November 8th, 1984, Pedro Gomez and Juan Moreno were robbed in a partially-built house. They were construction workers. The house had been robbed before, and so they slept there to guard it. Gomez was killed, and Moreno was shot nine times.

Moreno survived, and was interviewed by police a week later. He stated that his attackers were two Hispanic teenagers one around 14 and the other around 19, a description which fit many people in the area. He was shown some photographs, and did not identify any of them. A month later, based on a rumor circulated by students at his school that Cantu had been the killer, investigators returned to Moreno and showed him five more photographs, including one of Cantu. Moreno still did not identify any of them.

But in March of 1985, Cantu was involved in a barfight with Joe de la Luz, an off-duty officer. Both were armed. Cantu claimed that de la Luz had shown him his pistols and threatened him, while de la Luz claimed he hadn’t provoked Cantu. Whatever the circumstances, Cantu shot de la Luz.

Because of tainted evidence, Cantu could not be prosecuted for that incident, but investigators immediately reopened the Gomez murder. They returned to Moreno and showed him five more men, including Cantu’s photograph, and Moreno again did not identify him. However, Moreno had heard about Cantu’s barfight with de la Luz.

Moreno was shown Cantu’s photograph a third time. At the time a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, he was driven to the police station and questioned. This time, he did identify Cantu. He was the only witness. The other defendant, 15-year-old David Garza, admitted to being at the robbery. Garza never implicated Cantu, despite police pressure and plea bargain offers.

No physical evidence linked Cantu to the shooting, and so he was convicted on Moreno’s testimony alone. He was 17 at the time. After he was convicted, he wrote a letter to the public, saying he had been framed because he shot de la Luz. Cantu never denied shooting de la Luz, and he always maintained his innocence in the Gomez murder.

Cantu was executed in 1993. His last request for a piece of gum was refused. Since then Garza has sworn that Cantu was not present at the murder, and named another person as the killer. Growing up in San Antonio, they had learned to keep secrets, and not rat out anyone, but Garza felt his silence about the actual killer had cost Cantu his life. Moreno, the sole witness, now says he was never shown a picture of the the shooter, who he claims had very curly hair. He says he implicated Cantu because he felt pressured to do so. “That was bad to blame someone that was not there,” he says. “I’m sure it wasn’t him. It was a case where the wrong person was executed.” His wife Anabel reports that whenever she had asked about his scars, Moreno had always told her the wrong man had been convicted.

Bill Ewell, who investigated Cantu, was friends with de la Luz. In 2005, he said he was “confident the right people were prosecuted.” But confidence that one was right is always easy, and the desire to feel correct can overpower astonishing evidence. Is there enough here to be confident?

Ruben Cantu was convicted solely on the testimony of one later-recanted witness and put to death for a crime that happened when he was 17. If one witness’s testimony, extracted after showing the same photograph three times, is enough confidence to sentence a juvenile to death, then maybe our standards are not nearly high enough. And remaining stubbornly “confident” of Ruben Cantu’s guilt doesn’t make the evidence any stronger.

The Houston Chronicle investigation can be found here.

In 1983, Wanda Lopez, a gas station clerk, was stabbed and killed. Police quickly arrested Carlos de Luna a few blocks away, hiding under a truck with no shirt and no shoes.

He was charged for the gas station robbery and the murder. Two witnesses testified. Aguirre had seen the killer right before he entered the station, and had gone inside to warn Lopez. Baker had arrived at the station right after the slaying, and had watched the killer run away. Both identified Carlos de Luna as the killer. At the time, he had been in and out of prison and involved in several violent crimes, including injuring a police officer.

De Luna maintained that he was innocent, claiming that an acquaintance, Carlos Hernandez, was the real killer. He claimed he had hidden from the police because he was on parole and was not permitted to drink, and also because no one would believe him. Prosecutors said there was no such person. One prosecutor said Carlos Hernandez was a “phantom”. De Luna was convicted and executed in 1989.

In fact, Carlos Hernandez was a real person, and the other prosecutor knew this. In 1999, ten years after de Luna was executed, Hernandez died. His family members began to speak out, implicating him as the actual killer. They said he’d bragged that de Luna had been blamed in his stead.

Further investigation found that Baker, the eyewitness, told police the killer had a mustache and wore a graey flannel shirt. Hernandez had a mustache, and de Luna did not. De Luna had been arrested without a shirt. His shirt was later found, and it was white. Baker later said that he’d identified de Luna because police had said he was hiding under a truck. Lopez had been stabbed, and the store was blood-spattered, but no blood was found on de Luna’s person or his clothes.

Furthermore, his previous crimes had all been committed without a weapon. Hernandez had a violent criminal history as well, both before and after the Lopez murder, and his crimes were committed using knives.

De Luna never confessed to the crime, not to Carroll Pickett, the priest who administered last rites, not to anyone. Both prosecutors still believe the right person was convicted. Schiwetz, the lead prosecutor in the case, states that it was because de Luna’s testimony was inconsistent. He says he believes de Luna murdered Lopez without getting blood on his shirt, and then washed the blood off his shoes in wet grass. I don’t think that’s plausible.

Certainly it would feel better to believe de Luna was guilty. But believing it doesn’t make it true. Nor does feeling better about his guilt make him guilty.

For more information, here are the three parts of the Chicago Tribune investigation.

A class of extraordinarily tragic stories is the tales of individuals convicted of crimes they did not commit. Our newspapers are filled with stories of people freed after years, sometimes decades in prison, freed after DNA evidence overturns their conviction. We are happy for them that they are cleared, and we cry for them, wondering how they can put their lives back together after so many years (often their younger years) were wrongly taken from them.

On rare occasions, the people in question have died in prison. On even worse occasions, the people in question have been executed by the government. That, most feel, is unconscionable. That’s the ultimate outrage, isn’t it? To mistakenly take everything from someone, and then, to want to give someone’s life back and be helpless to do so.

Happily, here in the U.S., there’s never (in recorded legal history) been a case of a person executed who was later exonerated. We point to this spotless statistic and carry on with our consciences unburdened, trusting in a rigorous system to prevent such unthinkable errors.

BUT!

Believing something doesn’t make it true, nor does remaining ignorant make it false.

How justified is our faith in our legal system? How reasonable is it to think that such an injustice has never been committed in this country?

This week, I will present a handful of the most questionable cases in U.S. history. I urge the world to think about them. And if the people involved really were innocent, then that is what happened. Remaining ignorant doesn’t make them guilty.

I need to shower. Holy project to infinity. I even did my laundry and everything, and I just haven’t put it all away yet. I really need to shower. The dead skin cells are starting to pile up, and I think they’re starting to slough off. It’s weirding me out.

I need to acquire food. I think I forgot to eat dinner. Or rather, I forgot that I hadn’t'd dinner. I actually thought about going to dinner, decided I wasn’t hungry, and then forgot about the whole thing.

In the next 13 hours, I need to shower and sleep and re-learn Java. In the next 15 hours, I need to’ve done all that, and then finished a code test in Java besides. I’m more familiar with C, but I simply refuse. Allocating memory for strings! I refuse. Yipes! I also need to meet with my professor. Thank you, world, for reminding me.

I first noticed something was amiss shortly after midnight, when I started typing, and only nasty things came out. Haskell doesn’t make any sense. Wraiths are stupid. Meditation sucks. The word “let” is ungainly. I hate Haskell. why won’t they make any Now Panic and Freak Out posters with the crown upside-down???

On and on it went, and eventually I noticed something was out-of-the-ordinary, and I sat down for a reset.

Resetting is a strange sort of ritual for me. I build a playlist of about a half-hour (for that’s about how long I have before I start falling asleep), and then I turn the lights out, close my eyes, sit very still, and listen to it. It’s loosely meditative. I try not to think about anything. I think the idea is that some register in my brain somewhere has gotten a bad value stuck in it, and so I dump in all this sound and flood out my RAM. In the end, hopefully the bad feelings are all purged, and I can try again.

There are some sounds that are worth a thousand words to me, or even a thousand frames of a recompiled memory. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I once walked into Professor’s office and saw a large painting on his counter. I asked what thousand words it was trying to say, and whether it had been painted by a computer? He answered that no, it was simply painted by a human. He didn’t think it was trying to say anything. He thought I was looking too hard. He went on to say that he didn’t know if it was upside-down. Perhaps the artist had signed it, and by a signature, perhaps he might determine if it really was upside-down. He found the signature; the painting was indeed upside-down. That was an interesting little episode.

But a few seconds of song are enough to build a full emotion, hopeful or enthused or poignant recollection. I hadn’t realized that Collide would remind me so strongly of summer 2005, which was when I first started listening to it. Three weeks out of a summer that I’d all but forgotten, and I certainly couldn’t tell what songs I listened to while I was there! But the songs can still tell me. I could see the layout of the computer lab, the bright room with black computers and an aisle down the middle, and the particular flavor of the companionship of those particular people. I hadn’t realized I still remembered what being around those people felt like.

Half an hour later, I returned to the Internets, all ready to continue on with the Haskell assignment, when suddenly. . . .

It’s hard to tell when one gets gradually crankier over many hours, but it was so immediately clear right then. I looked at the chapter, and I immediately felt angry. It was very strange. I like programming, and although it is often tedious and frustrating, it doesn’t usually make me angry. I didn’t understand where the feeling was coming from. I noticed I was confused. I was particularly grateful to’ve had my half-hour of music, so that I could at least try to feel more reasonably about it. But all the rest of that night, I had to try hard not to be cross with Haskell. It occurred to me that I might hate that class.

Red Bull is especially effective after a while of not having any, and a 20-ounce can especially so. All those times I tried to implement rollover, and what it actually took was a can of Red Bull and a problem set! Around noon today, I submitted that problem set, and shortly after had a short phone conversation with Mr. Two Sigma. Not a phone interview, just a short conversation where he explained to me how the code test will work, and then told me about Two Sigma. It sounded like a happy place. Mr. Two Sigma was very friendly. I was a veritable monster. I asked whatever I felt like, rather than reasonable things. “Does Two Sigma contribute to the country’s GDP? Does it create wealth, or simply reshuffle it?” Mr. Two Sigma responded that people there sympathized with the Wall Street Occupants.

I spent the rest of the day stumbling around being non-punctual about things. Late to class, left early from class, late to carillon anyways, left early from ACM practice, late to handbell lesson. . . .

Handbells are gorgeous little critters! The larger ones are about the size of a person’s head and heavy enough that they are hard to shake. When I gave one a hefty swig, it echoed: DOOONNNNNNGGGGGG! I tried to quiet it, and I could feel the thing vibrating, big solid resonant frequencies rolling around within it. The smaller ones looked like little Terraria fairies. Ms. Ellen gave us a lesson. Each of us had three or so bells, and whenever those notes came up, we were to ring those bells. I was A, B-flat, and B. Most of the pieces we played were in F-major, so the B bell didn’t come up very much. Each time it did, it caught me completely by surprise. I felt like naming them, but then I’dn’t be able to remember them all.

Now I’m here again. The night after rollover, all I want to do is sleep, but it’s another problem set night, and I have until noon to learn enough about my senior project topic to write a proposal about it. And also figure out what a proposal is, that might be important too.

The list of things to be done is still vastly longer than it should be, and I do want to mail out more postcards and knit some more, but that problem set was a big one. Having that done feels like I’m not completely off track.

Dearest Internets,

I must apologize for my behavior these past few days. I’ve been in a sort of a slump, where the Internets seem endlessly fascinating, and ambition is in short supply. I have let the queue of things-to-be-done pile up, and rather than dealing with it, I pushed it to the back of my mind for one more website, five more minutes, another hour, and another few days.

The trouble with resolutions of abstention from certain websites or Terraria or the ilk is that they are not things I decide once. They are things I must decide over and over again, twenty times each day, whenever the urge arises. Even if I have only a 1/20 chance of making the wrong decision each time, that sends my success rate over a day plummeting to 1/e, or 0.368. Especially at night, it becomes easier and easier to make the wrong decisions, and my hours from midnight to sunrise are often spent in the glow of a Terrarian dawn.

I had hoped to get through this semester without ever missing a single class (not counting actual reasons), and I broke that not one month into school.

For whatever reason, even though I know what I ought to do and what my past and future selves would want me to do, at the present moment, I fail to do it. For days, my present moments failed to do much of anything. I wish I could point to one thing and say, that is the cause; that is what I need to change. The reality is I don’t actually know what causes it and why these slumps come up sometimes. But sometimes, I look around and am horrified to find that this is where things have ended up.

I am sad that this happened and unhappy with myself. I am also grateful that not so much damage has been done. My schoolwork is recoverable; I’ll be caught up again.

I’ll be spending the next few days pulling things from the queue and executing them. I apologize if I’ve missed your email or failed to return your call. Thank you for your patience with me. If all goes well, I should be ready for the first post of Miscarriage of Justice Week on Friday. Things never go entirely according to plan, so I’ll aim for Monday as the starting day.

Peace and happiness,
wobster109

I tried to implement rollover last night, which is what happens when my sleep schedule becomes incompatible with my class schedule. My sleep schedule likes to shift later and later (because staying up another hour is always easier than waking up an hour earlier), until by the end of the weekend, I’m sleeping all the daylight hours and awake all the night. Rollover takes the night and drags it out until the next night, by which point I’m awake a bit longer than normal and ready to sleep at a functional hour again.

So it turns out that works a lot better if I have some dire need to be awake, such as a problem set that takes all night. As it was, I feel asleep around sunrise and missed my classes today. That was terrible.

I’ll try again tonight, and tonight I’ll sit in front of my computer at my desk and drink Red Bull and do work. Holding down a job is going to be rough. Being a Real Person is going to be rough.

Well that was excruciating.

A few days ago, finding myself with no classes on Fridays and deciding that I hadn’t played nearly enough piano lately, I decided Friday would be a good day to play piano all day.

I meant all day. My first idea was to start at midnight and go until midnight. Happily, the practice rooms had little signs on the door saying not to play after midnight, and I was spared that horror.

Eventually, I settled on twelve hours, because it was a nice number with lots of factors, and also because it was a nice fractional part of a day.

Dear Rachel’s first reaction: “Why would you do that?” Me: “To see if I can.” Rachel: “Oh, well if that’s your motive, I guess you have to do that, but if it’s to improve, that’s not optimal.”

Dear Kevin’s first reaction: “Why twelve? That seems sort of arbitrary.” Me: “I started off with 24, but then I cut it down, and twelve was what was left.”

And then, Rachel again: “That’s a long time.” Kevin: “Twelve is a lot of hours.”

In fact, I knew it was a long time. I knew it was about an order of magnitude larger than my attention span. It had to be, because if it wasn’t, then what would that prove? A proverb about cutting off something to spite the something-something floated through my mind.

I had it all planned out. I’d wake up at 8:00, start at 8:30, and break for brunch, DSAC meeting, and dinner. It was all planned out. I gathered that even if I didn’t make twelve, if I made eight or so, I could consider it a success.

I was twenty minutes behind schedule from the very beginning. I’ve never quite learned that waking up ten minutes before I need to be somewhere just doesn’t quite work. I started twenty minutes later than I intended. Since DSAC meeting is a fixed time, I had brunch at the planned time at 12:30, twenty minutes shy of four hours in.

The afternoon dragged on and on. I’d intended to make up the twenty minutes after dinner, but then I found both practice rooms occupied. I never made up those twenty minutes I lost at the very beginning, but stubborning through the rest of it counts as success, I think.

Yesterday, I checked out six great big tomes from the library so as to have enough material to drudge through for twelve hours. I learned a very sweet and very pretty piece that I found in the Faure book, and I’ve picked a nice Nocturne to learn. I think I never want to see a piano again for a few days, or maybe a few weeks.

It’s nice to know I can occasionally do something for a very long time given a sufficiently stupid reason, I guess.