Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Editorial: Pardon the Norfolk 4
There is ample evidence to dispute the questionable confessions of four men convicted of a 1997 rape/murder.
From the RoundTable blog
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Richard Cullen -- former federal prosecutor, former Virginia attorney general, stalwart Republican -- is an unlikely advocate for freeing convicted rapist-murderers from prison. Yet he and former Virginia Attorney General Anthony Troy, a Democrat, joined last week in asking the governor to pardon three sailors serving life sentences for that heinous crime, as well as a fourth convicted of rape only.
Gov. Tim Kaine should pardon them, not as an act of mercy but one of justice.
Three of the so-called Norfolk 4 face life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko in Norfolk. All confessed to the crime. All are seeking clemency. And it seems they deserve it since another man later bragged about committing the rape and murder. His account fits the evidence, his DNA was found at the scene -- and he says he acted alone.
No DNA was found from any of the Norfolk 4.
The lack of DNA evidence is not proof of their innocence. But it is compelling support of it in light of the fact that, from the start, their confessions were suspect. Police had no physical evidence tying them to the scene. The men's accounts of the crime were not consistent with the evidence. Their statements contradicted each other's and sometimes their own. And they all grew from the apparently bad seed of a confession by the first to be charged, Joseph Dick.
Dick's attorneys describe him as psychologically vulnerable to coercion -- of "low normal" intelligence, suggestible, compliant and fearful of authority. After police got his confession, he implicated the rest -- along with three other men who did not confess and whose charges subsequently were dropped.
Dick plea bargained to escape a possible death sentence and testified against the other suspects. One, Eric Wilson, was convicted of rape only, served 812 years in prison and is free, but he too is asking for a pardon. He is registered as a sex offender.
To believe that Dick, Wilson and the other two convicted men, Danial Williams and Derek Tice, are innocent, one must be able to believe that they confessed to a horrific crime that they did not commit.
That should not be hard to imagine for Virginians familiar with the notorious case of Earl Washington, who came within days of being executed for a rape and murder, but was later exonerated.
The false confession is a phenomenon not nearly as rare as it should be. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal group that works to clear wrongly convicted people through DNA testing, says more than a quarter of its first 130 exonerations were of people who had confessed falsely.
Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court reinstated Tice's conviction, overturned by a judge who faulted the defendant's attorney for not seeking to suppress his client's confession. The court ruled narrowly on a point of law, not on the defendant's guilt or innocence. His was the final legal challenge open to any of the Norfolk 4.
Kaine is their only hope now for justice.
