Even if you don’t buy my line about it being immoral for the state to kill its own citizens, recent revelations about the criminal justice system show that defendants are convicted based on inept and shoddy police work to the point where the risk of executing an innocent person is ludicrously high. In fact it may have already happened in Oklahoma.
Time magazine has a powerful, chilling account of the mess that Oklahoma is facing now because of fraud perpetrated by an Oklahoma City Police Department forensic chemist, Joyce Gilchrist. Gilchrist appears to have simply manufactured evidence out of whole cloth.
Essentially what she did was testify that hair and fiber evidence demonstrated that a defendant was indeed at the scene of the crime. The only problem was that a) other forensic experts could not replicate her findings, and b) some of the people she testified against could not have possibly committed the crimes they were charged and convicted with.
For example, Robert Lee Miller was convicted of rape and murder charges based in part on testimony that Gilchrist gave that hair and fibers found at the scene were linked with Miller. After Miller spent 10 years in jail, however, a DNA test demonstrated that Miller was almost certainly not the rapist. Another man linked to the case was charged with the crime and Miller was released from Death Row.
Another man, Jeffrey Pierce, was released from jail after serving 15 years of a 65-year sentence for rape. In that case Pierce had a solid alibi, but Gilchrist’s testimony swayed the jury. Again, a DNA test recently proved Pierce could not have been the rapist and he was released.
Unfortunately, such vindication may not be possible for other defendants potentially railroaded by Gilchrist’s fraudulent testimony. Gilchrist testified in thousands of cases, including 11 in which the death sentence has already been carried out against the defendant.
So far, according to Time, FBI forensics experts have looked at eight cases of Gilchrist’s and found she provided inaccurate testimony in five of the cases (though the article is unclear as to whether the FBI has examined any of the capital cases involved.)
Defenders of capital punishment insist that there are numerous checks and balances in place to prevent these sorts of things from happening, but the bottom line is that zealous police and prosecutors in Oklahoma City were more than willing to blithely look the other way at Gilchrist’s incompetence because she was telling them what they wanted to hear. As a lawyer who filed a complaint against Gilchrist at the beginning of her career told Time, “She couldn’t have got away with this if she weren’t supported by prosecutors, ignored by judges and police who did nothing.”
Are there other Joyce Gilchrist’s working in the system, providing prosecutors with the testimony they need to convicted alleged rapists and murders regardless of whether or not there is any factual basis to their testimony? Maybe. Maybe not. Would you like your life riding on the work of people like Gilchrist?
I wouldn’t. It is long past time to abolish capital punishment for moral reasons and to avoid the sort of tragedies that such a loose cannon could create.
Source:
When The Evidence Lies. Belinda Luscombe, Time, May 21, 2001.