Real-Life Horror Stories

By Donna Ladd Wednesday, October 24, 2007 4:20 p.m. CDT

John Grisham says Haley Barbour should sign a moratorium on executions in Mississippi. "Absolutely. If I had my way, we'd stop all of them," Grisham said.

Innocent people are going to prison due to prosecutorial misconduct, junk science and even politics. Some are on death row. The state has probably executed the innocent already.

"It's a matter of time before we execute the wrong person. It's going to happen one of these days in this country. It's probably already happened," the best-selling author warned.

That was the dark, direct message Monday night at the Jackson Hilton. Grisham was there with fellow best-selling author and attorney Scott Turow to raise money for the Innocence Project, which is helping free innocent people around the country—people like Cedric Willis, who was freed in March 2006 after 12 years in Parchman for a murder that evidence showed all along that he did not commit.

Willis got a standing ovation Monday. "Y'all's money is going to a good cause," Willis told the packed ballroom. … We have a system that is putting innocent people away." He said that 12 years ago, prosecutors had evidence that would have exonerated him, but didn't heed it. He believes it's because "one of those elections was coming up." "I wonder how they feel now," Willis said of the people who sent him away. "I feel great."

But things weren't "great" for Willis who came of age in Parchman, after going when he was 18. He feared for his life every day, as Brian Johnson reported in his award-winning feature about Willis in the JFP last year.

Cedric pled for the audience to care about the innocent people in prison. "I hope nobody else has to wait 12 years," he said.

But, as Turow explained, many people just do not want to believe it's true. He spoke of a letter he got that said that it couldn't be true that innocent people are sitting in prisons and on death row; he also remembered a time when he didn't believe it was possible, either.

Turow talked about the "paradox of capital punishment" and how the "worst of the worst" cases push prosecutors and cops and judges to send up innocent people because they don't want to be wrong and turn murderers and rapists back onto the streets. So, instead of presuming that the defendant is innocence, as our Constitution requires, the overly diligent system often "shifts the burden of proof to the defendant," he said.

That means that innocent people are going to prison and, possibly, to the death chamber, egged on by "tough on crime" politicians and media (like The Clarion-Ledger's ghoulish delight every time the state executes someone).

In recent years, efforts like the Innocence Project are forcing re-examinations of convictions. And real science is helping to clear many inmates. To date, there have been 208 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. Of those, 125 were African American, 58 white, 19 Latino, 1 Asian American and five of unknown race. In 77 of those cases, the true perpetrators have been identified.

The first of those DNA exonerations came in 1989. Thus, we can make one of two assumptions: No innocent person was executed before 1989. Or: One, two or many innocent people were killed by the state before science caught up with the barbaric habit.

Common sense argues for the second. In this state, we know well how unfair our criminal-justice system has always been. But many so-called thinkers reject the idea that any innocent person has ever been executed—or that one ever will be under our current system.

Turow, though, considers such an argument a "canard."

"Once a defendant is dead, there is no legal vehicle to test-proof in a courtroom, so the people like Justice Scalia who like to say there has never been proof that an innocent man has been executed, that's a game. That really is a canard. They know darn well there's no way to prove it in a courtroom."

In his state of Illinois, Turow said, 18 condemned people have been exonerated. "You know when the numbers are like that that somebody who's gone to the death chamber claiming his or her innocence genuinely was."

The question is: Do we care?

"We cannot build or tolerate a criminal-justice system that condemns innocent people," Turow said. "We can't call it that."

The saddest part is that there are likely others sitting in prisons around the country who can't get anyone to pay attention to them. They are innocent, and nobody gives a damn.

That is immoral. Even if you don't believe that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" also applies to state employees executing convicted criminals, as I do, it's hard to argue that it doesn't at least mean, "Thou Shalt Not Kill Innocent Humans."

The Innocence Project is willing and able to fight the good fight on society's behalf. The New Orleans Innocence Project stepped in and saved Cedric Willis, even though they weren't officially working in Mississippi at the time.

"We got loads of letters from Mississippi," Emily Maw said Monday.

Now we have our own Innocence Project in Mississippi—the state that may well need it the most, with our historic bloodlust and collective apathy over how the accused are treated. It's headquartered at Ole Miss, and has virtually no overhead. Nearly every dime goes to helping the innocent, and saving society's soul.

As I sat listening to Willis, and Grisham, and Turow, and Maw, last night, I had a vision of thousands of checks flowing into the Innocence Project office in Oxford—a real-life Welcome Wagon, of sorts. Some of them are for $5, others for $10, others for $100 or more. Maybe there are even some $1 bills that fall out of envelopes up in Rebel country.

Friends, this is the statement we need to make as a people. We must take a moral stand and help free—and, thus, expose to the world—wonderful people filled with potential and love like my friend Cedric Willis. We need to send the message with our dollars that we care about justice—the real kind, not some kind of political salivating that disregards humanity and the need for members of society to take care of, and honor, one another.

When Cedric was in prison, his mama kept praying for justice for her boy. "It's coming, it's coming," she kept promising him. He believed her then, and I believe her now.

Send donations to Mississippi Innocence Project, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS, 38677-1848. Visit their website for more information.

Previous Commentsshow

What's this?

Support our reporting -- Follow the MFP.

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Jackson Free Press