Jonathan Smith walks free after 21 years of wrongful imprisonment
innocenceproject.org
innocenceproject.org
So they didn't just withhold information, 13 years after they manufactured a witness with some quid pro quo?
I think there was a crime committed here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quid_pro_quo
"The Latin phrase corresponding to the usage of quid pro quo in English is do ut des (Latin for "I give, so that you may give"). Other languages continue to use do ut des for this purpose, while quid pro quo (or its equivalent qui pro quo, as widely used in Italian, French and Spanish) still keeps its original meaning of something being unwillingly mistaken, or erroneously told or understood, instead of something else."
Trying is free, ask your friends tomorrow and share the results here please.
What this article forgets to mention is that Ms Haddaway wore a wire and got Jonathan Smith on tape that he committed the murder in order to get $60000 [1]. Here's part of the dialog for reader's convenience:
"[BH:]Why were you in that field with blood all over ya? And they take, I seen ya goin’up the road that day, you know it? And you had a blue coat on and Ray [Andrews] and you both had huntin’hats on. And then when I come back by there and you were in that cornfield and you said that blood come off a dog, but I think that you held her and David [Faulkner] killed her or one of you three done it.
[JS:]They never found out yet have they?
[BH:]I know, that’s why I want to know ‘fore I die. I seen ya, did I ever tell anybody? You know I ain’t gonna tell on ya, goddamn, you’re my blood. I just wanted to know if you done it. I didn’t really think you did. I think crazy David did
[JS:]It’s a secret. It’s a secret when one person knows[.] It aint [sic] a secret when two people know.
[BH:]Well, the three of you know.
[JS:]Right, there’s only two left.
[BH:]It was you and Ray and David.
[JS:]Ray wasn’t there until after it was over.
[BH:]Where was he?
[JS:]Down the road.
[BH:]Ray was right with you in the goddamn field.
[JS:]Yeah. That was after it was all done with.
...
[BH:] Tell me. I ain’t gonna tell nobody, I just want to know (inaudible).
[JS:]He didn’t do it.
[BH:]You done it.
[JS:]Uh huh.
[BH:]You said you did it before. Why did you kill her? I thought she let you in there when you went fishin’[.]... What, you didn’t know her?
[JS:]I knew she had money.
[BH:]You knew she had money.
[JS:]She had money."
[1] https://www.courts.state.md.us/sites/default/files/unreporte...
https://law.justia.com/cases/maryland/court-of-appeals/2020/...
In its analysis of the palmprint evidence, the circuit
court lost sight of the forest for the trees. The
points of overriding importance are:
(1) Ty Brooks burglarized Ms. Wilford’s house in
break-in that was never reported by Ms. Wilford;
(2) Thomas’s confession that he committed the
burglary and murder is corroborated
by his statement putting Ty Brooks in the
house and identifying the murder weapon as
a butcher knife long before those facts were
publicly known; and (3) ...
Just to make a grand summary for everyone:
* writ of innocence does not mean the court of appeals deems someone innocent. It means it finds that in light of the new evidence a retrial is warranted, and the accused enjoys the benefit of doubt once again (therefore he's "innocent until proven guilty"). It is certainly not an exoneration
* both David Faulkner and Jonathan Smith were granted the writ of innocence
* the prosecutors decided to not pursue David Faulkner anymore (either they think he's innocent, or they think he served enough time, or they think they don't have enough evidence to prove him guilty beyond any reasonable doubt)
* the prosecutors decided to try Jonathan Smith in July [1]. A judge decided to deny him bond until that time and to be under house arrest. The judge was obviously aware of the writ of innocence, and found the weight of evidence sufficient to not grant him bail.
* Finally, Jonathan Smith entered an Alford Plea [2], which is a type of no-contest plea. With this plea, the state let him go free. This type of plea does not imply the defendant is guilty, but does not imply that he's innocent either.
*crucially, the Alford plea does not imply prosecutorial misconduct.
Now, if I was "sleazyfing" the work of the Innocence Project, what did they do in regards to the work of the prosecutors? Is there any way to read their article without inferring massive prosecutorial misconduct?
[1] https://www.stardem.com/emergency_notice/jonathan-smith-deni...
Folks, ignore him, and just read the appeals court decision. They lay it out pretty clear and isn't hard to understand.
Because what's at stake here is the legitimacy of the government.
The message of this article is : "Innocent man stays behind bars for 20 years. Prosecutors are monsters".
And people buy this wholesale. Just read the other comments in this thread.
When people hear this time and again, and then they enter their echo bubble, the conclusion is that the US government is not any better than Putin's gang of thugs.
Folks: whenever you read about an "innocent" man wrongfully serving 20 years in prison, spend 15 min on Google to see if there's more to the story. We do not live in Putin's Russia.
Right, because you chose to mislead the people in this thread by cherry-picking one heavily disputed fact from many to hinge your argument to make it look like he's still guilty.
When you're no longer an "honest broker" of the facts you no longer deserve anyone's time or effort to debate you on the facts.
There is a family relationship between JS and BH. Even in 1987 (the time of the murder) it appears to be hostile. At the time this snippet was recorded it was 13 years later and BH had manipulated the police into agreeing to drop drug charges against her grandson in exchange for testimony. Oddly this seems like a pattern, because BH also offered to help police with the same evidence in 1994 when a Shawn Haddaway was being charged for 3 offenses -- no explanation for this is given, or the relationship.
[edit: From the other link posted by bb88 (thanks, reading now), Shawn Haddaway was the son of BH]
What other conversations, that were not recorded, occurred between JS and BH prior to this "wiretap"? Had BH been badgering JS for days and the responses JS gave were just "giving her what she wanted" -- if so, it would be classic broken family relationship crap -- I recommended reading some of Deborah Tannen's books.
This snippet also doesn't explain why someone else also admitted to the murder, for which there was physical evidence available, but was suppressed.
What happened is very sad -- a person was murdered. But it is far, far more complicated than what is in this snippet.
Doubly so when they sent the wrong guys to jail. Because now it's three innocent lives that were affected adversely.
Of course, the state reviewed that evidence, and along side it evidence of a confession by a different individual, along with palm prints tying that person to the crime scene, which is included in the same document.
We're literally in a thread about wrongful conviction. Evidence. It matters.
This is HN. Please provide evidence of such a claim.
> The activist lawyers and even SF know that these are real criminals but they don’t care.
This is highly speculative. What possible motivation could they have for this?
- To fill USCIS Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification.
- To provide a valid nursing license.
USCIS Form I-9 is also required by most jobs. So the remaining jobs that are targeted by undocumented people are informal jobs in agriculture, construction, landscaping, food processing, etc.
From the international news I've seen from El Salvador, it is my impression that Mara Salvatrucha/MS-13 gang members are easy to identify since they use MS-13 tatoos.
What they do want is for immigrants to not fear deportation, so they want to make a stand that they'll fight immigration enforcement every step of the way. Hence why they'll get involved with these kinds of lawsuits. Even if ICE purely deported only people who committed crimes other than illegal entry or overstaying a visa; you'd still have plenty of immigrants afraid of all law enforcement. Yes, even the legal ones; nobody wants to have to show their papers on pain of having their life uprooted, even if they have those papers.
I don't know exactly what lawsuits SF is filing, but I'm going to assume the actual legal argumentation is less "let the assassains go free" and more "assassains should serve time in American prisons rather than being deported to Mexico where they'll likely escape and reoffend".
1. Due to their being no real central database, it's hard for physical persons in the US to prove their identity and consequently their citizenship status.
2. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US.
3. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US that have lived here for a long time so the "legality" of their status is muddied. This then makes the whole debate around this more about "what is right" and the emotions involved, instead of what the laws say.
https://jacquelinestevens.org/US-Unlawfully-Detaining.Steven...
Source for most: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecu...
More context: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/24/politics/undocumented-immigra...
The statutory language is in 8 USC § 1325[0] and consists in relevant part of:
"Any alien who... obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation... shall... be fined under title 18 or imprisoned... or both"
It's hard to prove and rarely prosecuted of course, but that doesn't change the fact that many of the overstays are guilty.
Obviously, we’re talking about ICE so my comment was meant towards non official border crossings.
Many of the people that OPs friend is complaining about receiving aid from San Francisco "activist lawyers" are from Asia, who obviously didn't enter the country illegally, hence, non-criminals.
Isn't visa overstay illegal? Is it not part of ICE job?
You’re not a criminal if you leave your car parked in a street cleaning zone, you committed a civil infraction.
"Isn't visa overstay illegal?" is not related to "calling everyone who ICE deports “criminals” is factually wrong."
Feel free to jump to pages 7, 8 and 9 of this report. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20190712/109772/HHRG...
That's quite debatable. Our founding fathers believed that, but today's justice and penal systems (and political system that buttresses them) do not reflect that belief.
While I agree with you on that core idea being debatable, I also see a lot more support for it than not. Clearly, my experiences are anecdotal, but they do come from a wide swath of the nation.
One of my tasty pleasures on business travel is to strike up some conversations with people. I have done it with all walks of life from homeless to rando joe and jane bag of doughnuts to people of serious means.
For profit prison is growing unpopular. I think it should. And that profit motive does drive a lot of policy aimed at keeping cells full, often justified in dubious ways.
One point in your favor is our trend toward aggressive punishment. People want to see the big, sexy verdicts and game over sentencing and often equate that to a greater measure of their own safety and security.
There is also very low support for better answers to what people do when they have paid, are out again and unable to build a life for ongoing punishment as an ex con. Fewer than I would prefer to see equate that to a lesser measure of security and safety in their lives.
All that said, I am definitely on the err on the side of guilt, meaning some guilty people are not convicted.
I am also on the side of corrections. The goal should be for people to pay their debt to society for wrong doing, AND while paying it, arrive at some plan, skills, resources to try again where it makes sense.
Not doing those things means releasing people who are extremely likely to fail and our results reflect that reality. Sadly, very large numbers of people respond to those facts with even more aggressive sentences, often openly saying we just do not need those people.
Rough topic, IMHO. There is work to do here. Not sure the will exists to do it.
Usually this means that there's good evidence that the person is actually innocent and the trial was completely botched. There are plenty of rural areas where the court decides that someone "seems" guilty and then suppresses any evidence that doesn't support that.
Society benefits when the guilty are in prison and suffers when they go free. If a person is guilty and the police made a mistake, we should correct the mistake the police made, including by firing people responsible or pressing criminal charges if appropriate, but malpractice by the police should not exonerate a guilty person.
The purpose of that is to disincentivize malpractice. That's why we have the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine for improperly obtained evidence. There's no point in illegally breaking into someone's house to get evidence because that evidence is inadmissable.
The alternative solution is to allow the evidence and prosecute the people who gathered it illegally. The problem there is that there's a clear conflict of interest: they were gathering that evidence for the prosecutor. The same prosecutor who will try to convict them for gathering that evidence. That prosecutor is incentivized to let them walk so they can keep getting illegal evidence. The second issue is that it's not always clear whether it's actually legal to gather some evidence in a particular way. We either have to prosecute negligence the same as malice, which seems unfair, or we leave a gaping loophole where we have to prove malice. All you have to do to get away with is shrug and go "I had no idea that it was illegal for me to just walk into the house if the door was already unlocked, and no, no one can verify the door was unlocked before I got there".
The defendant doesn't have to prove his innocence the DA has to prove his guilt. I hope you never do jury duty.
> New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler was famously quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities that "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted.
Thank you for this, it’s pretty eye opening.
A confession should never be the sole evidence of convicting anyone.
I’m not usually given to conspiracy theories, but we already have plenty of evidence that the prosecution lied repeatedly in this case.
Besides, the article definitely presents its side of the story, but the fact it left out a huge detail that the person admitted to committing the crime calls into question the article itself. What other things did it conveniently leave out?
But to answer the question, well how do we know any evidence isn’t manufactured? You know, I agree with your sentiment here.
But I would also say that the prosecution here has been caught lying, red handed, multiple times. For this case and for the evidence presented here, it should be examined and reaxamined.
would a false tape made 21 years ago show signs of falsification detectable with modern technology? I don't know but I would expect yes.
What are the consequences of this for the prosecution?
Notable cunt Annie Dookhan[0] is responsible for putting up to 40,000 innocent people in jail by falsifying DNA records for the Massachusetts state AG. Over 21,000 cases have already been dropped. Her punishment? 3 years.
Most efforts to fix this are denounced as being pro-criminal or anti-cop or some tired variation on the same.
If you know of any good ways to change this system that don't involve violence, I would love to hear them and participate.
The laws already exists, we only need to start applying them consistently to all kinds of criminals.
State actors should be subject to mandatory minimum life sentences for violating the rights of the public.
I propose this as a demonstration by the system that it is willing to respond to violations of the rules by the system. Such violations are inherently more problematic.
Why not?
You are a bad cop, and you expose the government to liability. After a few such liabilities, the government makes it clear to your chief that this will affect his (or her) budget.
Your buddy officers, with their pensions threatened, confront you in the locker room.
Or perhaps your department takes out insurance, and the premiums are high and rising. Buddy officers etc. "I'm sorry Binks, but there's no money for CoL this year with this wrongful conviction thing."
I'm just speculating. If the government insists against visiting the negatives on the culprit law enforcement agency, then it's the citizens who suffer instead. But I think that the costs would eventually exert influence on the problem children.
Smith entered an Alford plea to first-degree felony murder and daytime housebreaking in the case of Wilford’s death. The plea is not an admission of guilt but acknowledges a potential for conviction if the case had gone to trial.
The conditions of his pleading guilty were that his sentence be suspended and he be granted probation. Talbot Circuit Judge Stephen Kehoe accepted the plea and handed Smith five years of supervised probation and a suspended life sentence.
Joseph Michael, special prosecutor in the case, said he reached the agreement with Smith’s attorney Don Salzman over the weekend. Michael said a plea deal had always been a potential outcome in the case but Smith had not previously been willing plead guilty.
The prosecutor said of the agreement Wednesday that while “the only real justice would be for this crime to never have happened,” he stands behind his offer “because this matter needs to be closed.”
Smith “can hide behind an Alford plea,” he said, “but he’s a guilty man and he will always be guilty.”
1. Palm print evidence was suppressed by the prosecution.
2. Another man's confession of guilt (including details that were not publicly known) as well as detailing how the palm print got there pointed to another killer -- which the police did not pursue.
3. Everything else was a sideshow.
In this case the Alford plea is good since the prosecution would have to had retry him, and probably look silly in light of new evidence.
https://revealnews.org/podcast/the-jail-tapes-in-the-dumpste...
> Most people serving life sentences don’t have an investigative reporter show up to volunteer at their prison and spend a year reinvestigating their case. Most don’t have ties to a presidential candidate to make their story more appealing to news editors. George Floyd’s killing probably also played a role. Floyd’s death gripped Minnesota and put a spotlight on systemic racism before the eyes of the world. There are efforts around the country to review old cases like Myon’s. About a dozen states have set up sentencing review units or conviction review units. Minnesota is establishing one, but it’s unlikely all the Myons out there will get anyone to give their old cases a second look.
When the police try to frame you for something you didn't do, you won't have to spend 21 years behind bars.