Proponents of the death penalty in Missouri claim that the state has a failsafe system and no record of wrongly executing prisoners. Even those Missourians who believe that execution is a necessary facet of criminal justice must admit the strong possibility that the state erred fatally in prosecuting the case of Larry Griffin – and they should take this case as a cautionary lesson that challenges their views.
This week, the results of an NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund investigation spurred Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce to reopen the investigation of the 1980 murder of Quintin Moss, for which Larry Griffin, a black St. Louis resident, was executed by the State of Missouri in 1995.
The blind spots in the state’s successful prosecution of Griffin brought to light by the NAACP investigation are appalling. Wallace Conners, an eyewitness who was himself shot in the same incident, was never called to testify or even interviewed regarding the murder. He denies that Griffin was the shooter. The only alleged eyewitness who did testify, Robert Fitzgerald, had (in the words of Justice Blackmar of the Missouri Supreme Court) “a seriously flawed background, and his ability to observe and identify the gunman was also subject to question.” Fitzgerald, a white man, was a convicted felon relocated to St. Louis as part of the federal Witness Protection Program. Also, the initial 3-page police report made no mention of a white man present at the scene of the crime.
The Griffin case again demonstrates that African Americans are most often the victims of miscarriages of justice. The word of a white man – a convicted felon, no less – sent a black man to death without proper investigation. “When serious crimes occur in the black community, too often neither the defendants nor the victims – nor the truth – matter to the authorities,” said Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The ghost of Larry Griffin may or may not be exonerated for what now seems to have been a hasty, ill-considered conviction and execution. In the meantime, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation, known as the 2005 Streamlined Procedures Act, which could leave the Larry Griffins of the future even more exposed to miscarriages of justice.
As a Washington Post editorial arguing against passage of the legislation states, “For a great many capital cases, the bill would eliminate federal review entirely. Federal courts would be unable to review almost all capital convictions from states certified by the Justice Department as providing competent counsel to convicts to challenge their convictions under state procedures.” Barry Scheck, a lawyer representing Wallace Conners in the reopened St. Louis murder case, and who joined Congressman Wm. Lacy Clay at the press conference here this week, testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee against the Streamlined Procedures Act.
Scheck told the American this week that there are many cases like Griffin’s in which the evidence for wrongful execution is even more compelling, but that he was too busy arguing on behalf of the living sitting on death row to settle the scores of the dead.
There is one witness unable to testify before the U.S. Senate or the St. Louis circuit attorney. But we can be sure that the ghost of Larry Griffin is screaming that we need to take more, not less, time and care in considering the prosecution of any capital crime.
Talk radio has been hot in St. Louis this week. “The death penalty is under attack” has come out of the mouths of several people who seem reluctant to take the time to weigh the facts of this case and what it says about our criminal justice system. Currently, 52 inmates face execution in Missouri. The case of Larry Griffin should make us wonder if there are any innocents among that number waiting on death row.
Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a former prosecutor as well, once felt confident, just as do many in Missouri, that his state was not wrongfully sentencing prisoners to death. But, as he confronted case after case in which an innocent man was saved from death row, his stance changed. He placed a moratorium on the death penalty until his state’s injustices could be straightened out. The ghost of Larry Griffin asks the State of Missouri whether it should consider the same course of action.