It's an Accusation So It Must Be True

There is one and only one piece of evidence that it was Danny Brown who raped and murdered Bobbie Russell in December 1981. Her son, Jeffery, six-years old at the time, said it was.

Danny spent 19 years in prison.  Then the DNA came back.  Wasn't him.  It was, the DNA said, Sherman Preston.  That was no surprise since around that time Sherman was implicated in a number of related crimes - always acting alone.  In fact, by the time the DNA came back, he was serving a life sentence for a similar crime just a little bit earlier - a crime for which he was convicted in large part based on DNA.

Danny got out.  The prosecutor dismissed the charges.  Innocence triumphs.  It was a great day.

Except.

An investigator from the prosecutor's office had located Jeffery and went across the country to talk to him.  Now 27, he said now what he'd said then.  It was Danny he saw do that to his mom.  And Julia Bates, the elected prosecutor who'd gone into court to personally announce that she was dismissing the charges against Danny because no jury would find him guilty what with the DNA and all, maintained then and maintains now that Danny Brown in fact killed Bobbie Russell.

Because Jeffery.  Because Jeffery was 6 when it happened.  Because he was 7 when he testified. Because even though his testimony included things that obviously were not so, that were physically impossible (he claimed to see things on the other side of solid walls from where he was) he told the truth about seeing Danny do that to his mom.  Because, as she told Jennifer Feehan in the Toledo Blade five years ago when asked if she thought Danny was guilty

Asked if she thinks Brown killed Ms. Russell, Mrs. Bates said yes.

"I do," she said. "I don't think little kids lie."

I thought then and think now that it was one of the stupidest things anyone has ever said.  Kids in fact lie all the time.  The dog ate my homework.  And of course, they're wrong a lot.  Even when they believe things.  (Again, Jeffery testified to several things that were demonstrably false, physically impossible.)  And that he still believes?  Sure.  That happens too.

The first time I wrote here about Danny's case, I told this true story:

Friday night, June 11, 1965. I was at Shea Stadium. Mets-Dodgers game. Warren Spahn was pitching for the Mets, Don Drysdale for the Dodgers. Dodgers won 2-1. Both Dodgers runs were on homers by Drysdale. The Mets run was on a homer by Spahn. Incredible. Etched in my memory. I'll never forget it. Except, of course, it didn't happen that way.

Oh, I was at the game, and it was one hell of a game. A real pitching duel between Spahn and Drysdale. And Drysdale did win it with a home run in the 8th. But the Dodgers other run was on a homer by John Roseboro in the 5th. The Mets run, also in the 5th, came when Joe Christopher singled in Johnny Lewis. Spahn went 0 for 3. Helluva game, like I said. As Casey used to say, you could look it up. (I did. I'll save you the trouble. Here's the link.) Close enough to my memory so you can see how the story got better over time. Until . . . . Like I said, I'm mistaken. I know I'm wrong about just how the game unfolded. But I remember it as three homers - two by Drysdale and one by Spahn. It's not a lie to say I remember it that way. And if I hadn't looked it up, I wouldn't know I was wrong.

Julie Bates, whatever else, is not stupid.  Yet "I don't think little kids lie."

What she meant, of course, is that she believes them when they accuse.

Which brings me, in my typical elliptical way, to my subject, Richard Beck's compelling but flawed new book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.  

February 1984, KABC-TV News in Los Angeles included this breathless report on the investigation into allegations at the long-established, highly regarded McMartin Preschool:

Authorities now believe that at least sixty children were victimized. . . . [They] had been keeping a grotesque secret of being sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschools's care and of being forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals to scare the kids into being silent.

Wow!  And then it turns out that the same things were happening at day cares and preschools across the country.  But worse.  Kids were being forced to eat body parts of murdered children.  Eyes were plucked out.  Satan worship.  Bodies buried in and around the facilities.

Hell of a story.  And, I should add, pretty much entirely bullshit.

Except everyone bought into it.  Police, prosecutors, juries.  Parents, god knows.  Doctors made up tests from which they could tell, tell for sure, that what was perfectly normal in a child was hard evidence of abuse.  Social workers and psychologists and psychiatrists and cops and parents coerced children into making up more and more outrageous stories.  

Sure there was no evidence.  The dead animals weren't found.  The missing and murdered children don't seem to have been missing or murdered.  The pornographic films (or the studios where they were made) weren't discovered.  The gouged out eyeballs and lopped off body parts don't seem actually to have been gouged or lopped.  But the press dutifully (and enthusiastically) reported as true.  And juries often believed.

Because like Julie Bates, nobody could believe that little kids would lie.  At least not about something really awful being done to them.   And after all, the more you had to threaten them for not telling or reward them for telling, the more obviously true the allegations.

It's that story, built around the McMartin fiasco that started it all, that frames Beck's book.  He's not the first to tell it, but he tells it well.  From the allegations to the investigation to the trials and then the unraveling as it became clear that the absence of evidence really wasn't evidence of guilt.

And as he tells the McMartin Preschool story, so Beck tells of the national hysteria that ensued. Because if the Golem came to LA in the guise of Peggy McMartin, it must be in a Long Island basement masked as the Friedmans and dressed as James Rud at the Valley Green Trailer court in Jordan, Minnesota, and in Niles, Michigan and Malden, Massachusetts and Chicago and. . . .

Good god!  These monsters were everywhere destroying the lives of our children.  And the evidence was, of course, that the children could be browbeaten into saying so.  And that, stunningly, all the real evidence - the films, the ritually slaughtered animals and children, the hidden tunnels, the lopped off limbs - none of it could be found.  How diabolical!  And how much that proved.

For its considerable strengths, We Believe the Children is not without its weakness.  

Trying to find an underlying cause, Beck turns to the woman's movement and the increasing role of women in society.  The religious right and social conservatives glommed onto the idea of evil daycare as a way of punishing women who'd abandon the role of housewife and take an actual job - forcing her children into the day care clutches of committed Satanists.  My god.  He may not be entirely wrong, but it's overly simplistic as most here's-the-cause explanations tend to be.  (As others have noted, Beck's evidence doesn't really support his argument.  Beck points to Gloria Steinem's financial contributions and Ms. magazine's 1993 cover story headline, "BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists. One Woman's Story.")

Nor is Beck's exploration of Freudian (and Freud's own) analysis and the psychiatric and psychological worlds' embrace of multiple personality disorder particularly convincing.  

But the story.  The panic, the ruined lives, the political careers made.  (Janet Reno, Clinton's Attorney General, rode to Washington on the back of Frank Fuster whose wife, Ileana, as part of her plea deal joined the chorus of accusers telling a jury about how Frank, wearing "a white sheet and a strange mask, . . . had sexually assaulted her with a crucifix" and forced her to abuse kids.)

If you think Salem and the witch trials, you're on the right track.  It's a connection Beck makes explicit in his introduction, though he downplays the horror of Salem noting that once the hysteria there ended, there were apologies and reparations.  The victims of the day care hysteria, on the other hand? Well, some have had their convictions overturned.  Others continue to rot in our prisons.  Then again, they killed a bunch of folks up in Salem, and apologies and reparations didn't really do them any good.

Perhaps oddly (or perhaps I'm just wishing that Beck would climb onto one of my own hobby horses), Beck doesn't do much looking at what we haven't learned. 

The Golem, after all, turns out not to have been in the witches of Salem.  They didn't exist.  Nor was the Golem in the preschool teachers and day care workers who didn't do a damn thing to the kids. (Nor, and I'm straying only slightly, was the Golem in the communists and fellow travelers, like President Eisenhower, who Joe McCarthy and his ilk took on in the late 40s and early 50s.)  No, the Golem was the witch hunters, the prosecutors (and cops and parents and media and your next door neighbors).   

And the Golem remains.  This is the lesson implicit in We the Children.  It's the Golem of uncritical belief in the monster under the bed.  The Satanist, cult-predator, child-care workers of the 50s who could only be stopped by locking them up forever - and the damage they caused, my god - are in this year's flavor those who ever considered a sex act outside the missionary position between spouses. And maybe even then.

From the sex offender registries to the hysteria surrounding campus sexual aggression (he looked at me without first obtaining permission) is but a small step.  Believe the children?  We believe the accusers.  Just ask Danny Brown.

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My thanks to Public Affairs Books for providing me a copy of We Believe the Children  for this review.

Little Kids Do Lie

Danny Brown spent some 19 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.  

When the DNA came back to Sherman Preston, it wasn't really much of a surprise.  Back when Bobbie Russell was killed, Preston was a one-man crime wave, raping and killing.  In fact, when the DNA was finally tested, Preston was doing a life sentence for a similar murder - convicted years after the fact on a DNA match.  Anyhow, after the DNA, and after Danny passed a polygraph (because the magic box, so unreliable that its results aren't ordinarily admissible in court, trumps real science) Julie Bates, the Lucas County prosecutor agreed to cut Danny loose. 

The only witness to Bobbie Russell's murder, assuming he actually saw it, was her then-six year-old son Jeffery.  Jeffery said Danny did it.  Jeffery also said he saw things that would have been physically impossible for him to see.  But when an investigator went to tell Jeffery about the DNA, the young man (he was 25 or 26 by then) again said that Danny did it.  So Julie Bates figured that it was so.  After all, she said, mouthing one of the stupidest things anyone has ever said,

"I don't think little kids lie."

And though she agreed to cutting Danny loose and dismissing the charges against him (without prejudice so she could refile them when the DNA morphed into Danny's or something), she maintains that he killed Bobbie Russell.  Because kids don't lie.

Actually, I don't think Jeffery did lie.  I think he was mistaken.  And now he has a false memory.  It happens.  Way too much.

But little kids?  That thing about them not lying?  As I said, one of the stupidest things anyone has ever said.  Little kids lie all the time.  

Chaneye Kelly was 8 when she lied.

Her father, she said "stuck his pee-pee into my pee-pee."  

When she was 9, and on the witness stand, she lied again, this time with clinical precision (and clinical terminology).

The prosecutor Karen DiValentino started with a few benign questions but quickly got to the point: “Do you know why you’re here today?”
“Yes,” Chaneya said. “Abuse.”
“By who?”
“My father.”
“Do you know where that happened?”
“In the bathroom …”
“When you were laying on the floor, what, if anything, did your father do?”
“He, um, stuck his penis in my vagina.”
“And were you laying on your stomach or your back when that happened?”
“Back.”
“And did he do anything else to you?”
“He took his finger.”
“And where did he put his finger?”
“In my vagina.”

On that testimony, and on his witness-stand puffing of his military record (he claimed to be a Vietnam vet, which he wasn't, and to have a purple heart, which he didn't), the jury took just 4 hours to convict Daryl Kelly.  The judge called him a "pathological liar" and sent him up the river for 20-40 years.

It's been about 14 years now that Daryl Kelly's been in prison.  About 13 since Chaneya acknowledged her lies.  

She lied because her mother (the aptly named Charade), a drug addict supporting her habit through prostitution, threatened to beat her with a belt unless she did.  She lied because the prosecutor promised to buy her a bicycle if she'd implicate her father.  She lied because she was a kid.  And kids lie.

Eventually a panel of prosecutors was convened to consider Chaneya's recantation and Daryl's protestations of innocence.  They interviewed Chaneya.  It didn't go well.

[S]he got the feeling they were more interested in protecting her father’s conviction than in listening to her. “There was a point in time in there that I just blew up,” she says. “I got really upset. I was just like: I’m tired of this. I just want you guys to listen to me … I’m telling you that nothing happened. Why is it so hard for you guys to understand that? Absolutely nothing happened.”

They decided, those prosecutors did, that prosecutors don't lock up innocent people.  Daryl Kelly denied he was guilty.  Since it couldn't be true, they concluded that he was a pathological liar. And guilty.

The cops, of course, were free to lie.  

Detective Mancinelli grilled Daryl. “Mr. Kelly, if you didn’t do anything wrong, how did your finger­prints get on her thighs and buttocks?”
He scrambled for an explanation. “Maybe while I was sleeping,” he said, “my wife took my hands and put them there?”
“How did your semen get inside your daughter’s mouth?”
Daryl tried to make sense of what he was hearing, offering a couple of explanations before saying, “Maybe while I was sleeping my wife had sex with me and then took the semen and put it on her?”

Which is, of course, bullshit. That never happens except in Scott Turow novels. Certainly it didn't happen in this case. Kelly's explanations were implausible because he was trying to account for things that didn't happen. Mancinelli was making them up. But since the explanations were implausible, since Kelly didn't just admit the things that hadn't happened, he was lying.  And only bad guys lie.  Oh, and cops.  Cops are free to lie.  They're the good guys. 

Daryl Kelly sits in his cell.  He's pretty much lost touch with his kids.  They're young adults now. They've moved away.  They have lives of their own.  They don't much come to visit.

Recently he was transferred to Fishkill, a medium-security prison, and when he got to his new bunk, he didn’t put up any photos of his family. “Prison is not my home,” he says.
Instead, he keeps his pictures of his children hidden inside a photo album. Every now and then, when he wants to feel less lonely, he’ll sit down on his bed and study snapshots from all the years he missed: the kids posing in front of their church, Chaneya in her gown at high-school graduation. When he gets to the last page, he slips the album into a plastic bag to protect it from dust, places it back inside his locker, and closes the door.

* * * * *

There are lessons in all this.

• Don't talk to the cops.  It's really true.  What you say will be used against you.  The police say they just want to clear things up.  They clear things up by arresting people.  Don't help them.
• Don't tell stretchers on the witness stand.  They'll come back to bite you.  Cops can get away with testilying.  When ordinary folks do it, it's perjury.  
• Don't believe what they taught you in civics.  The people who run the system don't believe that it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be convicted.  In fact, they think it's better for 10 innocent people to go to prison than for one guilty person to go free.It won't all work out in the end.  

That's all trivia.  You knew that if you'd paid attention.  The harder lesson, the more serious one, is that the system doesn't give a shit.  Nobody cares about Daryl Kelly.  At least, nobody with the clout to do anything.  Those projects set up to investigate and free the innocent?  They ignore him or blow him off. The government?  It is to laugh.  The prosecutors whose job is to do justice (whatever the fuck that means)?  We've seen what they did.

Up against everything is that kids don't lie when they accuse.  Jeffery Russell told the truth.  He was telling the truth when he spoke of things that he saw through solid walls and he told the truth about Danny Brown.  And we know it was true (OK, we don't, but Julie Bates does) because "little kids don't lie" when they accuse.  Chaneya Kelly told the truth when she accused her father.  Because little kids don't lie.  When they accuse.  She lied when she said that what she'd said before was a lie.  We know she lied then because before she'd accused and little kids don't lie.  When they accuse.

Daryl Kelly might have a shot at parole sometime if he'll just fess up and lie and admit that he raped his daughter.  Which he didn't do.  But since speaking the truth makes him a pathological liar, it just stands to reason that lying makes him truthful.

Joseph Heller, of course, wrote of a particular fucked-up system.

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”

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I got the story of Chayneya Kelly and her father from an article by Jennifer Gonnerman in New York Magazine.  The quotes are from Gonnerman's article.  You should go and read the whole thing.  

Because Innocence Isn't Enough

I've got to assume that it's coincidence that I read Gideon's eloquent and agonized take on the presumption of guilt from yesterday pretty much back to back with this morning's article by Jennifer Feehan in the Toledo Blade on Danny Brown.

First, the short version of Gideon's post. (You should read the whole thing.)

The presumption of innocence, a bedrock principle of criminal justice systems the world over for generations, is really not that ambiguous or in doubt. . . .

It’s a catchy phrase: “innocent until proven guilty”. It nicely ties in the other core principles: the burden of proof is on the State; the defendant has a Constitutional right not to testify; each and every element must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. . . .

It’s all a lie. A big, bold-faced, wool over your eyes lie.

The presumption of innocence is dead, at least in practice. The real presumption, if you must, is that of guilt. Despite the Constitutional and historical directives to the contrary, the defendant “enjoys” a presumption of guilt from the moment of the institution of criminal proceedings.

Every criminal defense lawyer knows he's right. Although most won't admit it publicly, everyone in the system knows he's right.

Once a person's charged (really, once the person is a serious suspect), the person is presumed guilty. You need to start with that to understand. But then you need another piece. Because even when we win, the person is presumed guilty.* The taint remains.

It doesn't matter how we win (or it it's "we" or what's generally thought of as a win). The presumption of guilt remains.

• Charges never brought.
• Charges dismissed by the prosecutor.
• Found not guilty at trial.
• Conviction vacated.
• Exonerated by DNA.
• Something else.

Doesn't matter. In the words of Marvelous Mark Slackmeyer, speaking of Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell, "GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!"

One could jump in pretty much anywhere for an example.

• The parents of JonBenet Ramsey?
• Kobe Bryant?
• OJ?
• Ken Lay?
• The latest not guilty in your local paper or on Fox News?

Does Nancy Grace let it go?

None of them is ever fully cleared of the taint of guilt - from the mere presumption. Where there's smoke . . . . Besides, they had slick lawyers or a technicality or lousy prosecutors or witnesses who lied for them or they paid someone off or the jury fucked up. (Who ever reads the retractions in the newspaper, after all?)

And there's Danny Brown.

Back in 1981, Bobbie Russell was brutally raped and murdered. It was a horrible crime, the details of which don't much matter here. Bobbie's son, Jeffery, then 6, saw some of what happened. He testified at trial, believed then, and believes now, that Danny Brown killed his mother. He's wrong. He was wrong then, and he's wrong now.

In 2000, we had the DNA tested. It wasn't Danny's. We asked the judge to grant Danny a new trial. The state wasn't convinced. Anyone can fake DNA, or something. They wanted a polygraph. Danny passed. The state conceded that our motion was meritorious and that Danny's conviction should be vacated. After 19 years in prison, Danny was released, and it was a great day. Then the state dismissed the charges. Why try him again just to get an acquittal. They knew that no jury would convict Danny in the face of two crucial facts: The DNA wasn't his. The DNA was Sherman Preston's.

Did I mention Sherman Preston? Around the time Bobbie Russell was killed back in 1981, there were a lot of brutal killings in Toledo. Sherman Preston was convicted of one of them, a murder similar in many respects to the murder of Bobbie Russell. He's now serving a life sentence. Ironically, although there was other evidence, charges weren't brought against Preston for years - until DNA evidence was tested and made successful prosecution possible.

Once again, the DNA from the Bobbie Russell murder confirms that the killer was Sherman Preston. It wasn't Danny Brown.

But the state won't concede the point. Danny killed her, they say. All day, every day, rain or shine, Danny walks around the county courthouse with a sign proclaiming his innocence, talking to people, arguing the injustice of the system, asking the state to concede the point. But it won't. Jennifer Feehan sets it out.

The sign Brown carries states the facts of his case as he sees them: "13 witnesses. No physical evidence. Lie detector test. DNA. What does it take??"

Mrs. Bates said it certainly takes more. She said she cannot discard the "crucial" testimony provided by the lone witness to the murder - the victim's then-6-year-old son, Jeffrey. The youngster said then and continues to maintain it was Danny Brown who killed his mother. "[Investigator] Tom Ross went out to see him in the last year," Mrs. Bates said. "He's a grown-up now. He has a memory he's never going to forget." Asked if she thinks Brown killed Ms. Russell, Mrs. Bates said yes. "I do," she said. "I don't think little kids lie." Still, Mrs. Bates said, she cannot put her belief before a jury without evidence and testimony that would prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Much of the evidence linking Brown to the crime is circumstantial - he'd had a casual relationship with Ms. Russell, he'd been to her Birmingham Terrace apartment on several occasions, he could have known where she kept the key.

Got that? Here's the evidence against Danny.

• He knew Russell.
• He'd been to her apartment.
• He might have known where she kept a key.

Any idea how many people might qualify as suspects based on that? I just had a plumber at my home this morning. He knows me. He's been to my home. He might know where there's a key. For his sake, nothing bad better ever happen to me.

But, of course, there's also Jeffery. Back in 1982, during the trial, he testified to things he could not, physically, have seen. But he could, probably did, at least briefly, see the killer. He said it was Danny. Apparently he still thinks so. And Julie believes him because, once again,

I don't think little kids lie.

We can start with that. Kids lie all the time. The mythic story about George Washington and the cherry tree ("I cannot tell a lie") is taught to children both as evidence of how Washington was better than everyone else and to make his honestly exemplum on which children ought to model themselves. The story would be nonsense if kids didn't lie. What she really means is that she doesn't believe kids lie when they say that someone else did something bad.

All accusations from children, therefore, are true. Anyone not convicted is simply evidence that the system doesn't work. It's nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. Again, kids lie. But more, like adults, but even more so they're mistaken.

There's a presumption in Ohio evidence law that anyone over the age of 10 is competent to testify. Children under 1o? Nope. When the question of competence is raised, they may only testify if the court determines that the child knows the difference between lying and telling the truth, understands the obligation to tell the truth, and is capable of accurately receiving impressions so as to be able to know what's true from what's false.

Frankly, satisfying that test to the satisfaction of a judge (and then maybe an appellate court) in Ohio is frighteningly simple. And hearsay from kids doesn't even require that the test be satisfied. But this is about Jeffery, and I'm not claiming he lied. I'm not saying he wasn't capable of telling true from false or even that he wasn't capable of relating what he saw.

Not incompetent, not dishonest, not lying, not depraved. He was just wrong. He made a mistake. It happens to everyone. (See that person on the street you think is your old high school classmate? Ooops. Gee, I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else.)

Don't believe me? Ask Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton. They've been there, done that. The difference is that Thompson-Cannino acknowledged - first to herself, then to the world, then to Cotton - that she was wrong. Jeffery hasn't taken that first step. Maybe someday. Maybe not. It's a hell of a tough thing to admit, even to yourself, that you made a mistake about who you saw kill your mother. It's tough to admit that you sent an innocent man to prison for 19 years.

And the mistake, the false impression? It burns into your mind. We all believe, all of us, things about our pasts that are not so. Some half formed memory becomes something else and becomes that of which we are certain.

Friday night, June 11, 1965. I was at Shea Stadium. Mets-Dodgers game. Warren Spahn was pitching for the Mets, Don Drysdale for the Dodgers. Dodgers won 2-1. Both Dodgers runs were on homers by Drysdale. The Mets run was on a homer by Spahn. Incredible. Etched in my memory. I'll never forget it. Except, of course, it didn't happen that way.

Oh, I was at the game, and it was one hell of a game. A real pitching duel between Spahn and Drysdale. And Drysdale did win it with a home run in the 8th. But the Dodgers other run was on a homer by John Roseboro in the 5th. The Mets run, also in the 5th, came when Joe Christopher singled in Johnny Lewis. Spahn went 0 for 3. Helluva game, like I said. As Casey used to say, you could look it up. (I did. I'll save you the trouble. Here's the link.) Close enough to my memory so you can see how the story got better over time. Until . . . . Like I said, I'm mistaken. I know I'm wrong about just how the game unfolded. But I remember it as three homers - two by Drysdale and one by Spahn. It's not a lie to say I remember it that way. And if I hadn't looked it up, I wouldn't know I was wrong.

Anyhow, here's the thing. Danny Brown is innocent. The DNA says it wasn't him, it was Sherman Preston. The polygraph says it wasn't him. The eyewitness made a mistake. It's that simple.

But Danny lives with this cloud over his head because he was charged with a murder. The media's covered the case and explained his innocence. The prosecutor dismissed the charges. But the prosecutor believes he's guilty. The prosecutor won't say that they won't bring charges against him again. In fact, they want to. And it's not a small number of the public who believe the prosecutor. Kids don't lie. If he weren't guilty, he wouldn't be a suspect. Innocence isn't enough.

And so there's that cloud over his head. And he can't just get on with his life. And it's, well, we toss about words like "tragedy" a bit too readily. But it's a really awful thing.

There's unfortunately not all that much about Danny's case that's unusual.

Brown has stacks of newspaper clippings about defendants who were wrongfully convicted. He doesn't think people realize the extent of the problem.
"This is a crazy one, 'DNA clears inmate who dies of cancer.' He died in jail for a crime he didn't commit," Brown said, shaking his head. "This is another one. This is what I'm saying, 'DNA collars one man, frees another after 20 years,' and that's my situation, but it's not freeing me."
He frequently brings up the case of the Duke University lacrosse players who were falsely accused of sexually assaulting a stripper in 2006. Not only were the charges dropped against the young men, but the prosecutor was disbarred for misconduct in the case.
When the charges were dropped, one of the accused players, Reade Seligmann, said the experience had opened his eyes "to a world of injustice I never knew existed. If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can't imagine what they'd do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves."
Brown said that's the category into which he falls.

That's not exactly right. Danny wasn't really railroaded. But there he is. Day after day.

Because you know, innocence, even when it's proved, doesn't overcome the taint of the presumption, the continuing presumption, of guilt.

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*I'm not even beginning to address, here, the cases of those where the evidence dissolves but convictions remain in place. Cameron Todd Willingham is the obvious recent example.