In 1994, the St. Louis
Circuit Attorney’s Office committed gross prosecutorial misconduct in order to convict Lamar Johnson of murder.
They knowingly presented perjured testimony, fabricated facts to negate
Johnson’s strongly corroborated alibi, and buried the fact that a prime witness
against him was a paid jailhouse informant. Twenty-five years later, that same
Circuit Attorney’s Office, now led by Kim Gardner, is doing everything it can
to get Johnson a new trial so the truth can vindicate him. But the Missouri
establishment is fighting her tooth and nail, all while Johnson languishes in prison for a crime he
almost certainly didn’t commit.
The only reason Johnson has a fighting shot at
liberty today is that Gardner, like a handful of recently elected,
reform-minded prosecutors, created a Conviction Integrity Unit to review
questionable cases like his. Gardner’s CIU produced a 70-page report cataloging
the misconduct in Johnson’s case and used it to move for a new trial. It should
have been a no-brainer, but a Missouri judge rejected the request — not based
on the evidence itself, but because Johnson had technically missed the deadline
for filing a new trial motion.
The trial court got it wrong, and today the
ACLU, ACLU of Missouri, and the Innocence Project filed an amicus brief
explaining why. It’s simple — Missouri courts, like all state and federal
courts — have the inherent authority to prevent miscarriages of justice like
this. Specifically, no potentially innocent man should be held behind bars and
refused a retrial because of a technicality, without so much as a hearing to
test the evidence and expose the state’s wrongdoing. The trial court could have
actively avoided this black letter law in denying the motion.
Given the clarity of the legal question here, we
have to ask ourselves why the Missouri courts — as well as the state Attorney
General, who opposed the new trial motion and would represent the state in
further proceedings — are bending over backward to avoid learning the truth.
After all, the justice system in Missouri has always supported a prosecutor’s
discretion to follow the evidence where it leads, just as Gardner and her CIU
have done here. Is the difference that Gardner dared to use that discretion to
vindicate a man, rather than keep him locked up? Is it that Johnson is Black?
Is it that Gardner is a young, Black, female elected prosecutor who has upset
St. Louis’ good old boys club, including investigating the notorious St. Louis police? Or is it that punishment and racism are so deeply ingrained
in our criminal justice system that any indication that we get it wrong from
time to time — even if getting it wrong means stealing a man’s life — must be
fought to the hilt, lest the entire house of cards comes crashing down?
These are all fair questions to ask because
Lamar Johnson’s story is hardly unique, nor is the institutional pushback
against Kim Gardner’s attempts at reform. Nationwide, a new wave of prosecutors
who dare to challenge mass incarceration have been met with resistance at every
turn, even when deploying the same discretion that previous prosecutors have
enjoyed.
In Boston, District Attorney
Rachael Rollins dropped criminal charges against protestors exercising their
First Amendment rights and was forced to defend that discretionary decision in
Massachusetts’ highest court (she won). In
Philadelphia, the federal U.S. attorney is waging a public war against local DA Larry Krasner instead of working hand in hand with him
to administer justice. In Baltimore, Governor Larry Hogan is attempting to steal cases from State Attorney Marilyn Mosby to show how tough on crime
he is. And in Chicago, the local police union has publicly expressed “distrust”
in State Attorney Kim Foxx, who was elected in part because she correctly distrusted the police’s own cover-up of the Laquan McDonald murder.
Unsurprisingly, these prosecutors also share
another thing in common — they’ve all instituted Conviction Integrity Units to
help ensure that wrongful convictions become a thing of the past.
To be clear, none of these prosecutors is
perfect, nor is prosecutorial discretion an unmitigated good. When prosecutors
do what is right, they deserve support, just as they deserve critique when they
are wrong. Unfettered discretion helped get us into the mass incarceration mess
in the first place. Even reform-minded prosecutors can better restrain their
discretion across a variety of issues, including not appealing tainted
convictions and not coercing plea bargains from vulnerable defendants, even
though they can.
But when prosecutors recognize the damage their
predecessors have done — including the horrific harm of a wrongful conviction —
deploying discretion to right that wrong is the height of justice and should be
celebrated, not demonized. Accordingly, we hope the Missouri appeals court will
deploy its discretion to right the wrongs done by the district court in Lamar
Johnson’s case, and give him the new trial he so obviously deserves.