A Troubling Case Highlights Our Flawed System

Today The Guardian published a telling article about Missouri death row inmate Reggie Clemons, whose case illustrates the many things that can and do go wrong in the U.S. death penalty system.

Clemons has been on death row for 19 years for being an accomplice in the 1991 murders in St. Louis of two young white women, Julie and Robin Kerry. Two other black youths were also convicted in the case, including Marlin Gray, who was executed in 2005, and Antonio Richardson, whose death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 2003. A fourth co-defendant, Daniel Winfrey, white, pled guilty to a lesser offense in return for testimony against the three others and was released on parole in 2007. The other person who was critical to their convictions was the victims’ cousin, Thomas Cummins. Cummins initially confessed to the police that he had committed the murders, but later the charges against him were dropped when he pointed the finger at Clemons, Gray and Richardson. Cummins later won $150,000 in a police brutality lawsuit in which he claimed he had been treated roughly during many hours of interrogation.

Clemons alleges that he was also a victim of police brutality during interrogation and claims that is why he initially confessed under pressure to raping one of the victims. He later retracted that confession and at no point confessed to the murders. In addition to there being no physical evidence linking Clemons to the crime, other concerns in this case include extreme prosecutorial misconduct and inadequate defense counsel. In fact, Clemons’ lawyer was later suspended from practicing law and his co-counsel had a full time job in another state when she was representing him. Also, the jury in Clemons’ case was stacked as blacks were disproportionately dismissed during jury selection. In 2002, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Clemons’ death sentence should not stand since six prospective jurors had been improperly excluded. A higher court ended up overturning this ruling.

Reggie Clemons was scheduled to be executed in June 2009 but the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the execution and assigned a judge known as a “Special Master” to investigate the reliability of his conviction and proportionality of his sentence. This hearing is set to begin on September 17.

You can take action by signing this petition from Amnesty International calling on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to stop Reggie Clemons from being executed.

(Photo: Reggie Clemons via The Guardian)

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