Question to Death Penalty Advocates
How do the cases of Rolando Cruz and Henry McCollum affect your views. Both of them escaped the needle by dumb luck, and in both cases the police and state ignored evidence pointing to the true monsters and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept the truth.
Rolando Cruz: Shortly after the conviction, the actual killer admitted to killing the little girl. Every officer who investigated to rebut his story concluded that the actual killer Brian Dugan was telling the truth. An assistant Attorney general resigned rather than prosecute Cruz. DNA testing was inconclusive. The state still tried to execute Cruz, relenting only when DNA testing excluded Cruz and an officer admitted to lying about key info. DNA testing later proved that Brian Dugan was the murderer of Jeanine Nicarico. Cruz came within three weeks of death and if Dugan hadn't come forward to save his own hide, the public attention that ultimately saved Cruz wouldn't have existed. In short he would have died for Dugan's crime if Dugan hadn't tried to save his own hide.
Henry Lee McCollum: McCollum was arrested for raping and killing Sabrina Buie. He was mentally handicapped, the officers interviewing him had information and could well have fed it too him accidentally, his confessions were written in language far beyond his iq, he was screamed at for hours to confess, there was no physical evidence, and the other men named in the confession aside from his brother all had alibis. Antonin Scalia and the Republican party held him up as a case of why the death penalty was just. Last year, DNA testing implicated a man named Roscoe Artis, who not only committed similar murders (one just a month after Sabrina Buie in the same town) but lived a mere 100 feet from where Sabrina Buie's body was found and who when questioned multiple times accidentally revealed information only the killer would know. In this case the commission that freed McCollum got involved because his brother wrote out a form asking them to investigate the case. They only could operate because there was a moratorium in NC at the time (they can only get involved when the appeals run out and once that happens inmates are executed). If the moratorium hadn't been in place McCollum would have died for Artis's crime. When he was released he was 50, had been in jail for 31 years, watched many people who had been friends get sent to the death chamber, and discovered that the man he had come to love as a father figure was the same man who destroyed his life by committing the crime he was sentenced to die for. To this day the original prosecutor and many of the officers involved have refused to admit their mistake. The guy who convicted McCollum actually convicted Artis of the murder that occurred a month after Sabrina Buie, and later it turns out the police asked fingerprints on a can touched by Sabrina to those of Roscoe Artis. The report was never turned over and the tests were never done, even though not turning over the report was a violation of the law.
Both cases seemed like clear cut cases, and both turned out to be innocent. In Cruz's case, the state fought to resist evidence, and in McCollum the organization that saved him only had the chance because of a moratorium.
So what do you have to say?