In 1977 Emma Crapser, ninety-two, was murdered in her Poughkeepsie, New York, home on her return from a bingo game. Six years later, based almost entirely on the testimony of two criminals who repeatedly changed their stories, Dewey Bozella, twenty-four, was convicted of the murder.26 No physical evidence implicated him. In fact, the fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, was recovered from the scene. Wise was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood.
Bozella finally won the right to a new trial in 1990. Prosecutors offered to free him in exchange for an admission that he had committed the crime. The forced confession would have let them off the hook for prosecuting an innocent man. Bozella turned down the deal, but his bad luck held and a jury convicted him again. As years piled on top of each other, he held to his principles. Whenever he came up for parole, he refused to express remorse for the crime he swore he didn’t commit, killing his chance for release.
Determined not to surrender to self-pity and hopelessness, Bozella, while serving time in Sing Sing, earned a bachelor’s from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary. The Innocence Project persuaded a law firm to work pro bono on an appeal. As his new lawyers delved into the case, they found a retired police lieutenant who’d saved one file from all the cases he’d worked on throughout his career. It was Bozella’s. He believed that someone would eventually look into the case again, and he wanted to be ready. The file included all the pieces of evidence favorable to Bozella that, contrary to the rules of the court, had been withheld from his lawyers. Eventually, a court freed him on October 28, 2009. He was fifty-two and had spent half his life in prison.
Bozella, the light heavyweight champion of Sing Sing, made headlines when he fulfilled his long-held dream to be a prizefighter. He won a cruiserweight contest in October 2011 in Los Angeles. HBO reviewed the facts of his conviction and exoneration for viewers and showed highlights from his bittersweet victory.27 Bozella promptly retired. He received no financial compensation for his lost twenty-six years.
In 1977 eyewitnesses in Council Bluffs, Iowa, identified a white suspect in the fatal shooting of a night watchman at an auto dealership. The suspect consented to a lie-detector test, which he failed. But his case was dropped without explanation. Instead the prosecutors, David Richter and Joseph Hrvol, prosecuted two black out-of-towners, Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee, plunging them into a Kafkaesque maze. Harrington and McGhee weren’t offered the lie-detector test.28
Richter, the county attorney, had been appointed to his post and was up for election. He and Hrvol paid a sixteen-year-old car thief $5,000 to testify against the black suspects. The teen kept changing his story about who he saw, what he saw, and even whether the weapon used in the murder was a shotgun or a pistol. Years later, when the case against Harrington and McGhee unraveled, it was in light of “new” evidence—evidence that the prosecutors had suppressed year after year as they went on with their lives. Ultimately, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the teenaged witness had been coached by prosecutors and was a “liar and perjurer.”29
Iowa law prevented Harrington and McGhee, who’d served twenty-five years in prison, from seeking compensation from the county or state, so they sued the prosecuting attorneys. In 2010 the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Richter and Hrvol mounted a startling defense. Basically ignoring the facts of the murder itself, they contended there is “no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed.” Before justices had a chance to rule, the two sides reached a settlement, making the case moot. But in previous rulings the Roberts court had already granted prosecutors blanket civil immunity. (It would be interesting to see whether immunity would still hold if prosecutors buried a corpse in someone’s yard and then prosecuted the resident for murder.) Earlier, ruling against framed ex-convict John Thompson of Louisiana, the five-justice majority asserted that if prosecutors aren’t shielded from lawsuits, they’ll be targets for a wave of nuisance briefs filed against them by jailhouse lawyers.30 This supposition almost makes sense until you run into a case like Harrington and McGhee’s. Richter and Hrvol continued practicing law after the settlement (although no longer as prosecutors).31
In April 2011 the Roberts court overturned a $14 million civil judgment in favor of John Thompson, who at age twenty-two was set up for armed robbery and murder convictions by prosecutors in the office of New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick Sr., father of the singer and actor.32 First, prosecutors manipulated evidence to obtain a guilty verdict against Thompson for an armed robbery. Then, they used that conviction to obtain a death sentence when they subsequently prosecuted him for a murder he didn’t commit. Thompson served eighteen years in prison, fourteen of them on death row, before an investigator hired by an appellate team of pro bono lawyers found a long-forgotten report sent to the prosecutors on the blood type of the armed robber. It was type B. Thompson was O. Prosecutors had hidden the report. Thompson’s lawyers proved that at least four prosecutors knew about the test and its results.33 In fact, the pro bono team eventually discovered ten separate pieces of evidence that prosecutors had hidden.34 For example, more than one witness reported seeing a gunman six feet tall with close-cropped hair running away from the murder scene. Thompson was five feet eight with a bushy Afro.35
Thompson, now director of the New Orleans–based Resurrection After Exoneration, a support group for exonerated inmates, has painstakingly reconstructed the strategy prosecutors employed to railroad him. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, he wrote that after his arrest in January 1985 they
took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been arrested as a suspect in the murder. A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was the murder weapon.
My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like someone who had recently tried to rob his children. Suddenly I was accused of that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’ identification.
After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder trial. So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the gun from Kevin Freeman. And now that I officially had a history of violent crime because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death penalty.
Locked up in Louisiana’s infamous Angola Prison, “I was put in a dead man’s cell. His things were still there; he had been executed only a few days before.”36
Eventually, Thompson wrote, he got “lucky” because the lawyers working on his appeal went to extraordinary lengths. The firm hired an investigator, who discovered the secret blood test. After Thompson’s convictions were overturned and he sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office, jurors in a civil trial awarded him $1 million for every year he spent on death row, but the Roberts court, voting 5-4, made sure he never received it. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, concluded that the case was only a “single incident” and didn’t prove a pattern of similar violations.37 Yet Thomas’s version of events conflicted with known facts. He disregarded a raft of similar outrages in New Orleans that also consisted of prosecutors concealing key evidence from defense lawyers. One of the prosecutors had worked on six cases that resulted in death sentences. In five of them, courts reversed the convictions for prosecutorial misconduct.38