In the case of Reginald Clemons, the State of Missouri has a rare opportunity to correct a series of egregious mistakes made by St. Louis police and prosecutors and inept defense counsel. Clemons was not unique, as a poor black man interrogated for the rape and murder of white women, in being subjected to police brutality and coercion. He was not unique, once charged for these crimes, in being targeted by prosecutorial misconduct. And the weakness of his defense counsel also was not unique. The combination has been nearly lethal for Clemons, because once convicted of murder and sentenced to death (he has never been tried for rape), his appeals process has been severely limited by his defense counsel’s failure to raise the objections that should have provided a strong basis for appeal.
The Missouri Supreme Court acted bravely in the name of justice in 2009 when it opened the Clemons case to a new evidence phase by appointing a Special Master with subpoena power. Many of us avidly anticipate Clemons’ new day in court when Judge Michael Manners holds a hearing this fall to review the case record in light of new evidence.
It is extremely discouraging, as we anticipate new evidence judged by new ideas, to see very old inaccuracies about this case broadcast by the Post-Dispatch in the voice of its veteran columnist Bill McClellan. In a column last week, McClellan claimed that Clemons and his co-defendants “all confessed.” It is sloppy when discussing a capital case to cite a confession without specifying a crime, but since Clemons was sentenced to death for the murder of Robin and Julie Kerry, McClellan clearly implies that Clemons confessed to murder. This is not true.
On April 7, 1991, St. Louis police recorded Clemons confessing to the rape of one of the Kerry sisters. He did not confess to murder. The judge who saw Clemons after his interrogation ordered him sent to the hospital for treatment (the police recorded no injuries to Clemons before the interrogation). When Clemons was released from the hospital, immediately on April 9, 1991 – with the assistance of the counsel he was unconstitutionally denied during his initial interrogation – St. Louis police recorded a very different statement. Clemons described how St. Louis detectives beat him when he asked to see a lawyer and then tried to beat him into confessing to murder. Clemons said he finally gave in and confessed to rape to stop the beating and because he knew DNA evidence would exonerate him.
McClellan’s column has the wrongheaded refrain that various claims made in Clemons’ defense are not “an argument for innocence.” While McClellan’s memory of the case is so poor he can’t even remember what Clemons did or did not confess to, his structural sense of criminal justice is even worse. The accused need not make an argument for their innocence. Innocence of the accused is assumed; it is guilt that must be proven.
In arguing guilt, St. Louis prosecutors relied on coerced, scripted confessions and perjured witnesses. Key witnesses for the prosecution must have perjured themselves, since prosecutor Nels Moss separated the prosecutions of the three defendants who stool trial and the same witnesses provided conflicting eyewitness testimony at different trials. As for the DNA evidence that Clemons knew would exonerate him, the prosecution only produced it in 2010 during the Special Master’s new evidentiary phase. Moss defied a motion filed by Clemons’ defense counsel to provide the physical evidence collected from the one corpse rescued from the Mississippi River. Whatever DNA evidence has been retrieved, the corpse would have posed one major problem for the prosecution in 1991: the corpse had some clothing, whereas the coerced and scripted confessions had the Kerry girls being pushed off the Chain of Rocks Bridge.
McClellan’s memory also is deficient about the role of Thomas Cummins, the cousin of the Kerry sisters who first confessed to their murder (after being coerced by the same police department using the same techniques described by Clemons). McClellan muses that “maybe” the cops didn’t believe Cummins when he first professed innocence because of another case in another state. In fact, police didn’t believe Cummins because his hair was dry and parted and his clothes mostly clean and dry only moments after he claimed to have been thrown off a bridge into the middle of the Mississippi River. The jury might have fallen for Cummins’ story, and McClellan did, but the cops McClellan loves so much didn’t.
Thomas Cummins received a $150,000 settlement from the St. Louis police on the day Reginald Clemons was sentenced to death. A white man is beaten into confessing to murder and walks away with a check; a black man is beaten into confessing to rape and is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. These are the shameful facts about the Clemons case that McClellan seems to have forgotten. Fortunately, the Missouri Supreme Court remembered and Judge Michael Manners knows. Let justice be done at last.
