St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Heather Ratcliffe had a story on the front page of the Post on Saturday in which Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce claims to be clearing up the public record regarding the only piece of forensic evidence to surface in the Reginald Clemons case.
The story is on the front page, but it appeared below the fold on a Saturday, notoriously a quiet day for daily papers. This positioning suggests that Post editors didn’t think they had a major story, and if so, they were right about that. In fact, this story merits notice for what it doesn’t say.
At issue is a letter faxed to Judge Michael Manners, the special master ordered to independently review the case by the Missouri Supreme Court. It concerns Nels C. Moss, who prosecuted Clemons in 1993 as an accomplice in the murders of Robin Kerry and Julie Kerry.
On March 9, 2010, the office of Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster faxed Manners saying that Moss had “informed two assistant attorneys general that he had recently been told of the existence of a rape kit located at the St. Louis Police Department Crime Lab. Mr. Moss stated that he had no prior knowledge of this rape kit, raising the inference that the evidence had not been previously disclosed as part of the state’s case against Mr. Clemons.”
According to Ratcliffe, Joyce says she can prove that in fact Clemons’ lawyers were presented with this evidence during “post-trial motions in 1994” (emphasis added). Ratcliffe fails to point out that Clemons already had been sentenced to death by then – a very inconvenient time to be presented with the only forensic evidence in your capital case.
Ratcliffe and Post editors also fail to make notice of a crucial public record, the pre-trial (as opposed to post-trial) motion to compel discovery, which was hand-delivered to Moss’ office on January 15, 1993 and signed as received by someone in his office.
This document clearly compels Moss to hand over any clothing or objects retrieved from the corpse identified as Julie Kerry, any forensic evidence collected from the corpse and any tests conducted on such evidence.
Failure to hand over this evidence to the defense to prepare for the capital murder trial as ordered is a clear breach of prosecutorial conduct. Ratcliffe weakly says Joyce “cannot be sure from available records and recollections whether the defense got the rape kit test results before Clemons’ trial in 1993.”
When you pair this weak admission with the motion to compel discovery, the headline that should emerge is “Prosecutor isn’t sure crucial forensic evidence was presented to defense as ordered.” This either makes Joyce’s “clarification” a non-story – or an implicit admission that what Clemons has been saying all along is true: that the prosecution withheld evidence crucial to his defense that had been specifically requested through the courts.
The Moss admission
For some reason, the Post also continues to ignore another publicly available document that is germane to this evidence – the interview with Moss broadcast last June on The Charles Jaco Show, just before the case was busted back open.
Redditt Hudson of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri – a former police officer with formidable interrogation skills – got Moss to admit on camera that he once had in his possession clothing and other physical evidence retrieved from the body of Julie Kerry.
Hudson asked Moss why he didn’t provide this evidence to the defense.
Moss told Hudson that if Clemons’ defense had asked for the evidence, “it was theirs.” In fact, they had asked for it specifically through the courts.
Moss also said of the corpse, “What was left on her was so water-soaked that nothing could be made out.” This suggested he had known all along about the lab tests and their results.
‘If I didn’t talk’
Another telling omission in Ratcliffe’s story is Clemons’ allegation of police brutality and coerced confession, which forms the basis of his Writ of Habeas Corpus currently before the Missouri Supreme Court.
On the front page of the paper, Ratcliffe makes reference to “a confession that Clemons later recanted.” Clemons was sentenced to death all the way back in 1993. From the Post story one could take away the impression that he “recanted” his confession to rape after years of strategizing on death row.
In fact, Clemons “recanted” his confession on April 9, 1991 – two days after he offered the confession on April 7, 1991.
Even the gap of two days, as opposed to one, could be explained by the fact that Judge Michael David ordered Clemons to be taken to the hospital when he was brought before the bench following his interrogation. David noticed swelling to the 19-year-old man’s face that was confirmed by medical reports.
Clemons’ swollen face – so evident the judge ordered he receive medical attention for it – is consistent with the beatings Clemons said he sustained from two St. Louis detectives.
Clemons did much more than “later” “recant” his confession. Two days after the confession, having been to the hospital in the interim, he presented himself to the Internal Affairs Division and made a formal complaint of police brutality, coerced confession and having been denied his right to counsel and silence.
His Internal Affairs complaint is a public document. Here are some choice bits:
“They started asking me questions about what happened on the Chain of Rocks Bridge. And I told them that I wanted to talk to my lawyer first. So then detective number one, he got up and he slapped me in the back of my head.”
“He asked, after he slapped me in the back of my head, he asked me did I still want
my lawyer. And he was also telling me that if I didn’t talk he was going to
start bouncing me off the walls and everything.”
“I was told to sit on my hands, I sat on my hands and then detective number
two slammed my head against the wall.”
And: “Detective number two grabbed my head again and slammed my head against
the wall about three times and proceeded to choke me and then he let me go.”
Clemons said after an hour and a half of this the detectives gave up on trying to get him to confess to murder. Clemons also claimed there was a botched recording of an attempted coerced confession, which Clemons said he ruined by saying he wanted to remain silent. This alleged tape also was requested by the defense and never provided.
Clemons said the detectives then switched their agenda to beating a rape confession out of him. When they finally succeeded, he said, it was a scripted confession: “He read it off to me and then told me to read it off to him and then it was set there in front of me, just in case I forgot where I was.”
Clemons was never tried for rape, and he never confessed to murder. However, testimony about the rape – including his confession, which should not have been permitted in court if it were coerced – was used as a “sentence enhancer” in the push to get the death penalty.
The state’s star witness, Thomas Cummins, previously had confessed to killing the Kerry girls. He claimed his confession was beaten out of him by some of the same cops Clemons said beat him, using the same techniques.
Cummins was paid $150,000 by the St. Louis police to settle his police brutality claim after his testimony was used to get Clemons sentenced to death. Clemons claim of police brutality – by some of the same cops, in the same week, using the same techniques – was disregarded, and the allegedly coerced confession resulting from his interrogation was used to convict him and sentence him to death.
These disturbing facts are at the heart of the Writ of Habeas Corpus that has Clemons in the news again, though you would never guess that from reading Ratcliffe in the Post.
There is only one thing in Radcliffe’s story worth pointing out for its presence, rather than its absence. And that is semen that the reporter introduces into the story with no evidence of any kind, purely as her own speculation.
Ratcliffe writes, “Neither Joyce nor police will say exactly what was found in the early 1990s in testing of the material – possibly semen from rape.”
In other words, the people who would know the facts aren’t talking. So where does “possibly semen from rape” come from? From the reporter’s imagination – there is no other source provided. No forensic evidence of rape has been disclosed in this case, so the reporter simply imagines it for us – on the front page of a daily newspaper!
Ratcliffe goes on to reintroduce her speculative, imaginary semen two more times before the story is finished. Remarkably, this technique of imagining evidence and then repeating it as if it exists resembles the rhetorical strategies used in court by Nels Moss to convict Reginald Clemons and get him sentenced to death.
