This week Judge Michael Manners issued a new order concerning the Reginald Clemons case. Though it counts as a minor setback for Clemons and his attorneys, it reflects the unprecedented degree of fresh scrutiny being given to the case of a man who had been scheduled to die.
It also suggests that the trial record on Clemons may soon be enriched by crucial new evidence about police coercion and evidence-tampering.
Manners ruled on a disagreement about what evidence the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department would be required to provide to Clemons’ lawyers to help them build their case.
It is clear from Clemons’ lawyers’ request for documents, as part of the case’s unprecedented new discovery phase, that they want Manners to reconsider what role coercion and evidence-tampering may have played in the St. Louis police’s initial investigation into the murders of Robin Kerry and Julie Kerry on April 4, 1991.
Their discovery request was contested on three points by the Internal Affairs Department of the St. Louis police. The department did not think it should be constrained to surrender:
* records of complaints against the officers who arrested and investigated Clemons from August 28, 1998 through the present,
* all documents about any use of force or coercion by any City cop from Jan. 1, 1986 through Dec. 31, 1996
* all documents about any fabrication of or tampering with evidence by any City cop from Jan. 1, 1986 through Dec. 31, 1996.
Manners notes that the dispute over the first of these points had been worked out between the legal teams in a teleconference call. That request was amended to apply to records of complaints against the officers who handled Clemons pertaining to misconduct committed before August 28, 1998 but not reported or alleged until afterwards.
On the other two points – pertaining to the more sweeping requests in the discovery subpoena – Manners sided with the police department.
Asking for evidence of other, similar complaints unrelated to the matter under review, Manners notes, is at times permissible because it can show a “propensity” for misconduct. But the judge reasons that Clemons’ lawyers are asking for too much when they request all records of coercion or evidence-tampering for all City cops, not just the ones who handled Clemons.
“This is propensity evidence on steroids,” Manners notes.
Coercion and evidence-tampering
Evidence of coercion or evidence-tampering on the part of the police and investigators who handled Clemons could be crucial in commuting his death sentence or even overturning his conviction.
Clemons and his codefendants all alleged that their confessions were coerced by the detectives who interrogated them. The judge who arraigned Clemons after he was interrogated ordered him sent to a hospital, rather than jail, for treatment of the injuries he sustained while in police custody. There is no record of Clemons having any injuries when he was taken into custody.
Clemons never confessed to murder, though after hours of questioning he did confess to rape. He said it was a scripted confession, and in transcripts of his confession Clemons comes across as confused and unconvincing.
Clemons never confessed to murder, and he has never been tried on rape charges. However, his confession to rape – which he says was coerced – was used as a “sentence aggravator” by prosecutor Nels C. Moss when he pushed for the death penalty.
Clemons has long claimed that his case could offer grounds for a landmark ruling on the constitutionality of asking a jury to consider giving a more severe sentence – even the death penalty – based on charges for which the defendant was never prosecuted.
As for evidence-tampering, Moss admitted during a television interview last June that he had in his possession clothing retrieved from a body that had been identified as Julie Kerry. When Redditt Hudson of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri asked Moss why he never surrendered the evidence, Moss said, “Nobody ever asked for it.”
In fact, Clemons’ original defense counsel had asked for this evidence in their original discovery subpoena. The clothing would have hurt the prosecution’s case, because Moss’ star witness, Thomas Cummins, testified under oath that both Kerry girls were naked when they were pushed into the river from the Mississippi River.
Cummins was a cousin of the Kerry girls. His initial account of the events on the bridge were so unconvincing that he was taken into custody that night as a suspect, rather than a witness. For example, Cummins claimed that he was forced to jump from the bridge into the river, but his hair was dry and combed.
Cummins confessed to murder, but later claimed his confession was coerced. His allegation of police brutality was settled on the very day that Clemons was sentenced to death for a reported $150,000.
This new discovery phase also will shed light on Cummins’ settlement for the first time and bring this important information into the trial record. One of the items on Clemons’ lawyers’subpoena to the police department that was not contested asks for “any and all documents pertaining to the Thomas Cummins litigation.”
Hudson has described this settlement as a payment for false testimony, though Cummins has continued to stick by his version of events, as reported in his sister Jeanine Cummins’ 2004 memoir A Rip in Heaven.
This memoir – and the Missouri Supreme Court’s most recent summary of the Clemons case – takes as fact statements made by Thomas Cummins that crime scene investigators dismissed as preposterous. Even Cummins’ own father is described in police documents coaching his son not to claim that he was forced to jump into the river.
A watch also was found on the corpse, which would have called into question Cummins’ testimony that the alleged rapes and murders started with a robbery.
Judge Manners is the Special Master appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court to review the case of Missouri death row inmate Reginald Clemons, who had been scheduled for execution on June 17, 2009, before a federal stay of execution opened the door for the historic turnaround by the Missouri Supreme Court in reopening the case to independent review on August 21, 2009.
As he awaits his hearing on May 10, Clemons remains in contact with The St. Louis American, though his attorneys have asked him to refrain from discussing his case.
From prison, he has been watching events unfold in Haiti, along with the rest of the world, following the January 12 earthquake. Clemons thinks what Haiti needs is an industrial sector that manufactures reinforced steel.
“I was looking at footage of the rubble, and I saw a lot of rebar and concrete but no reinforced steel,” Clemons said. “Some reinforced steel structures would have saved a lot of lives.”
