by BJW Nashe
The Amanda Knox case is a media sensation. Meanwhile here in the U.S. we have had a heyday with wrongful convictions during the past several decades. Just this month, two Brooklyn men — Antonio Yarbough and Sharrif Wilson — were released after spending more than two decades in prison for a triple murder they didn’t commit. Their story barely registered as a blip on the news radar screen.
The Italians clearly have not mastered the dark art of wrongful conviction. They have made a mess of the Meredith Kercher murder trial in Perugia. The highly publicized prosecution of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito was botched from the start. And now a rotten scandal situation is made even worse with a long, drawn-out process of appeals and re-trials that seems to infuriate just about everyone who is paying attention.
This is no way to succeed when it comes to the delicate matter of wrongful conviction. What’s going on in Perugia and Florence right now is amateur hour. If the Italians are serious about sending innocent people to jail for lengthy prison sentences, they need to study the work of true professionals. Take a close look at how we have handled these cases in America. We convict the wrong people all the time. And we rarely suffer the indignity and shame surrounding the Knox and Sollecito cases. We have innocent citizens sitting in prison for decades before they have any chance of being exonerated and released. Many of them never get out.
Amanda Knox’s prosecutors are going about this all wrong. Let’s briefly recap the ongoing debacle there.
In the aftermath of Meredith Kercher’s murder, prosecutor Giuliani Mignini seized on Kercher’s roommate Amanda Knox and Knox’s boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito as the primary suspects. In the absence of a clear motive or solid evidence, Knox and Sollecito were convicted based on slander and innuendo (“sex games” and “strange behavior”), in addition to a false confession obtained from Knox under duress, plus some faulty DNA evidence. Anyone with basic critical thinking skills who has studied the case knows the guilty verdict was bogus. Still, the pair spent four years in prison, before their conviction was finally overturned on appeal.
Knox and Sollecito were released. She was able to return home to Seattle, while Sollecito remained in Italy. Meanwhile, the wheels of injustice kept grinding on ever so slowly. In January 2014, a second trial concluded, finding Knox and Sollecito guilty again. This will bring about yet another appeal. Is this the final jeopardy round? When will this circus come to an end? If Knox’s conviction is ultimately upheld, the U.S. State Department will be faced with a controversial extradition request, which will most likely lead to further embarrassment for the Italians when the U.S. flat-out denies the request, ties it up in endless red tape, or simply ignores it altogether.
We handle wrongful convictions very differently in America. For one thing, we don’t target bright young college students visiting from foreign countries. We also
Sharrif Wison
tend to avoid prosecuting rich people because they have so much cash at their disposal. Money and resources are the equivalent of kryptonite for just about any wrongful conviction — guaranteed to bring nothing but shame and ruin. Prosecuting educated, white, middle class persons who might be innocent is also risky. This attracts too much attention from the press. People might start actually investigating the facts. The glare of the media spotlight is best avoided, so the faulty prosecution can proceed quickly and quietly, like a skilled prowler in the dark. Finally, once we’ve identified a suitable suspect, we don’t get bogged down in lengthy re-trials. Once we convict someone, the verdict sticks like crazy glue. The sentence is handed down, the steel door of justice slams shut, and there is no more monkey business. Retrials? Following a guilty verdict? Good luck with that. All convicted criminals have the right to an appeal, yet this rarely makes much difference. It is excruciatingly difficult to get a guilty verdict overturned in America. Do the Italian authorities take some sort of perverse pleasure in swaying back-and-forth from guilty to innocent, and then back to guilty again? Is the experience similar to attending an overblown opera?
Wrongful convictions in America are primarily obtained from the lower rung of the economic ladder. In the U.S., someone like Amanda Knox is not likely to be prosecuted for murder on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Here, people wrongfully convicted of crimes tend to be poor, disenfranchised individuals, often members of minority groups. They don’t have adequate resources to mount a successful defense, and their plight rarely receives significant, meaningful coverage in the corporate American media, for whom they are persona non grata. They do not publish bestselling memoirs, as Amanda Knox has done. They do not emerge as international figures or spokespersons for truth and justice. CNN does not show up to film a special documentary about their unfair treatment.
Even if these poor, unfortunate souls are somehow exonerated of their crimes — usually long after they were sent to prison — most Americans won’t be paying much attention to them. They will not become celebrities. Their stories will not be made told in films or books. They won’t get thousands of “likes” on Facebook. Few people will follow them on Twitter or Instagram. They probably won’t even own a computer.
Which brings us to Antonio Yarbough and Sharrif Wilson, who were teenagers when they were convicted of the 1992 murders of Yarbough’s mother, younger sister, and a cousin.
Yarbough was the one who initially discovered the bloodied corpses of his loved ones and called the police. The cops asked him to come down to the station to help them figure out who the killer might be. Yarbough explained what happened next:
“Before you know it, I had this photograph shoved in my face, and I was being threatened and slapped around, and they wanted me to sign a false confession. And I wouldn’t.”
Sharrif Wilson was also brought in for questioning. During an intense interrogation, Wilson caved in under pressure, and gave a false confession that also implicated Yarbough in the killings.
“I was scared, afraid; I was lied to, manipulated into believing that I was going to go home, if I do tell … what they said happened,” Wilson said.
Wilson and Yarbough were convicted for the three murders and sent to prison, where they would remain for the next 21 years. It wasn’t until 2005 that Wilson admitted to anyone who would take him seriously that he had falsely confessed and implicated Yarbough in the crimes. Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson began reviewing the case five years later. In 2013, DNA testing concluded that trace evidence found under Yarbough’s mother’s fingernails were connected to another murder in 1999, which the duo could not have committed because they were incarcerated.
Both Wilson and Yarbough were released from prison earlier this month to very little fanfare.
According to the New York Times, District Attorney Thompson finds himself “grappling with a metastasizing wrongful conviction scandal in which dozens of imprisoned men have asked for freedom, their convictions linked to mistakes and misconduct by police and prosecutors in the violent, drug-plagued 1980s and 1990s.”
We would be mistaken to assume that wrongful convictions based on false confessions is a rare occurrence, or limited strictly to New York. Since its inception in 1992, the Innocence Project has been working hard to demonstrate the whole nation’s mastery of the dark art of wrongful conviction.
During the past 20 years, the Innocence Project has helped to obtain the release of more than 300 wrongfully convicted people, including 18 who spent time on death row. The Project’s review of these cases found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions. Other factors included invalidated forensic evidence, government misconduct, faulty information from informants, bad lawyering, and false confessions. The latter are particularly relevant for cases involving juveniles. The Project found that 44% of juveniles provided a false confession, compared to 13% of adults. The Wilson and Yarbough case was no fluke.
Compared to the fun and games in Italy, the U.S. has been leading the way when it comes to “succeeding” at wrongful convictions. We have had hundreds of Amanda Knox-style cases, which most of us have never heard of. Fortunately, the work of the Innocence Project and other likeminded activists might be signaling an end to this dubious form of “success.”