Plain Old Justice

Framed by Police, and Himself

By John Peccavi

    On November 30, 1976, Columbus, Georgia police began investigating the rape and murder of Katharina Wright.  What followed typifies some of the worst abuses of the criminal justice system, abuses which caused an innocent man to spend 43 years in prison, 25 of them on death row.

    The crime took place in the apartment which Wright and her husband, a soldier at Fort Benning, had rented just two weeks earlier.  The Georgia Innocence Project reports that, a day after the murder, "a young white man from a prominent family was discovered fondling the victim's body in the funeral home."  Police contacted the man, "who then confessed to murdering the young woman, providing facts about the case that only the true perpetrator could have known."

    However, a grand jury did not indict and the police had no other suspect for months.  Then, two men arrested on other charges told police they had information.  They claimed Johnny Lee Gates had shot Wright and then thrown the gun into the creek.

    Police found a gun in the water and arrested Gates.  By the time police learned that this gun was not the murder weapon, Gates had already signed a confession.

    Gates had only a sixth grade education, had mental disabilities, and could not read.  The police did not read the incriminating document to him, but he signed it.  Police took Gates to the crime scene and videotaped him confessing again.

    How could this be?  As DNA evidence later established, Gates did not commit the crimes.  Yet he confessed to them.  Twice.

    Research has shown that coercive interrogation techniques can make many people confess to crimes they did not commit.  People with mental disabilities are particularly vulnerable.  In future posts, we will look at untrue confessions more closely.

    Police built their case against Gates with other dubious evidence.  They had not found Gates' fingerprints at the murder scene months earlier, but after they took Gates back to the apartment, a technician returned to the scene and found one.

    Right after the murder, one of Wright's neighbors told police that a black man had knocked on his apartment door about two hours before the crime.  The neighbor described the man as being between 5'9" and 5'10" in height and weighing about 170.

    After Gates' arrest two months later, the witness identified him in a lineup, even though Gates is only 5'5" and weighs just 130 pounds.

    At trial, Gates' lawyer did not call any witnesses.  The jury never heard about the earlier confession by the white man who was observed fondling Wright's body.  The jury also never heard that police had found a large smear of Type B blood at the crime scene, even though both Gates and the victim had Type O blood.            

    The all-white jury found Gates guilty and the court sentenced him to death.

    That all-white jury was no accident.  Years later, a court ordered the prosecutors to reveal their jury-selection notes from Gates' case and from other cases in which the prosecutors had sought the death penalty.  The notes reveal a deliberate plan to keep people of color off the jury.  The plan always worked except for one time. In that trial, unrelated to the Gates case, the prosecutors ran out of peremptory challenges, resulting in a black juror being selected.

    In 1986, the U. S. Supreme Court held that the execution of a mentally incompetent person was cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, and that someone facing execution had the right to a hearing to determine his mental state.  In 2003, after such a hearing, a judge reduced Gates' sentence to life in prison. 

    Still, he remained behind bars with little hope of release.  Prosecutors maintained that the evidence in his case had been destroyed.

    But in 2015, interns working for the Georgia Innocence Project discovered the neckties and bathrobe belt which the killer used to bind the victim had not been destroyed.   Analysis using a new scientific technique showed that the DNA on these items did not match Gates' DNA.

    Attorneys from the Georgia Innocence Project and the Southern Center for Human Rights took this new evidence to court.  In January 2019, the court ordered a new trial.

    Prosecutors then appealed.  And lost.  The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed his right to a new trial.

    Prosecutors then offered Gates a deal: He could plead guilty to manslaughter and be released for time already served.

    Gates entered an "Alford plea," which allowed him to maintain his innocence while admitting that the government had enough evidence to convict him.

    On May 15, 2020, Gates walked out of prison, free at last.

    At one time, I would have considered this case a fluke, an outlier not typical of our criminal justice system.  But when I started looking closely at the cases I discerned, over and over, the same shameful pattern repeating itself.

    I see a whole group of people treated not as human beings but like a herd.

    Liberty and justice for all?  That's what we teach our kids to say.  If we mean it, we should stop just talking about it and make it happen.

 

Banner photograph of barbed wire by Joshua Woroniecki (Upsplash).  Photographs of Johnny Lee Gates from the Georgia Innocence Project.

 

UPDATE 

Framing a Black Man for a White Man's Crime

     Whatever happened to that white man who was caught fondling the victim's body in the funeral home?  The man who confessed the killing her, but the grand jury refused to indict?

    History, focused on Johnny Lee Gates, seems to have forgotten about the true killer.

    Is this the only time a black man has taken the fall for a crime committed by a white man?  Does it only happen in the American south?

    Consider this disturbing story about a gruesome multiple murder in Chino Hills, California.  When a neighbor came to pick up his 11-year-old son from a sleepover at the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen, he discovered the boy had been stabbed to death.  So had the Ryens and their 10-year-old daughter. The Ryen's 8-year-old son had also been slashed and left for dead, but survived.

    The survivor said that several white men had committed the crime. But sheriff's deputies arrested a black man, Kevin Cooper, who had escaped from a minimum security prison and then hid in an empty house near the murder scene.

    After Cooper's arrest, the sheriff's office received information pointing towards another suspect, a white man named Lee ------------, who had served time for another, unrelated murder, but released from prison before the Ryens' death.  Lee's girlfriend told authorities that on the night of the Ryen murders, Lee had come home wearing bloody coveralls and driving a station wagon that resembled the Ryens' car.

    According to reporter Nicholas Kristof, the girlfriend turned the bloody overalls over to the sheriff's office but the blood on them was never tested.  By this time, the deputies already had arrested Cooper.  Detectives, like other human beings, can fall prey to a kind of confirmation bias, thinking:  My mind is already made up, don't confuse me with the facts.

    Or maybe the deputies were doing something more sinister.  And criminal.  Reporter Kristof describes evidence suggesting that the deputies removed a tube of blood taken from Cooper after his arrest and poured some of it on a T-shirt found at the crime scene. 

    Technicians had added a chemical preservative, EDTA, to the blood taken from Cooper.    The blood stains on the T-shirt showed an elevated level of EDTA and, before the last round of testing, technicians found that the vial holding Cooper's sample was nearly empty.

    Kristof cites other evidence suggesting that the San Bernadino County sheriff's department had "gone rogue."  The sheriff himself later was convicted of stealing guns from the department's evidence room and a deputy admitted to Kristof stealing evidence from the evidence room.  Both, however, deny framing Cooper.

    Kristof concludes:  "This is not a case just of police and prosecutorial misconduct.  The entire system failed, decade after decade."