During the September 2012 evidentiary hearings ordered by the Missouri Supreme Court, Judge Michael Manners warned death row inmate Reginald Clemons if he pled the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify about his role in the 1991 Chain of Rocks murders that the court would draw a “negative inference.”
Manners kept this word.
Last week, Manners – appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2009 as Special Master to gather new evidence and review the Clemons case – issued his report. He found that Clemons failed to prove his innocence in the 1991 murders of Robin and Julie Kerry, for which he had been convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to death.
The court is considering Clemons’ writ of habeas corpus, a civil complaint that he initiated. Though of course Clemons could not be compelled to testify in the criminal trial against him, and did not, “we are way past that point now,” Manners writes in a report that often contains a colloquial touch.
Despite warnings issued in chambers and from the bench, Clemons proceeded to plead the Fifth Amendment 29 times in the evidentiary hearing, on grounds that his answer might incriminate him. Though Clemons answered a few questions to deny that he murdered the Kerry sisters or directly aided in their murders, he refused to answer a string of questions relating to their rapes and other incidents on the bridge.
Manners also sided with the State of Missouri when it argued that Clemons presented no new evidence at the hearing that would justify a new trial.
A rape kit that was withheld from Clemons by prosecutor Nels Moss, Manners decided, would not have yielded any relevant evidence given the degraded nature of the corpse when it was discovered.
Also, Manners decided that Thomas Cummins’ settlement with the City of St. Louis for police brutality claims similar to those alleged by Clemons was available to Clemons at earlier points in the lengthy adjudication of his various appeals, and thus is not new evidence.
However, Manners ruled that the state did suppress evidence from a parole officer who noted that Clemons had an injury consistent with a police beating after his interrogation. Manners ends his opinion on a dramatic note where he explicitly states reasonable doubt as to whether or not Clemons’ confession to rape was coerced by St. Louis police, as Clemons claims. Had the trial court ruled that the confession was coerced, his confession would not have been entered into evidence and heard by the jury that convicted Clemons and sentenced him to death.
However, Manners decided that it is “dubious” that excluding the confession would have altered the jury’s verdict, given the other evidence against Clemons. Most telling, he shows that co-defendant Daniel Winfrey’s accounts of the crimes matches up on the main points with the account provided by Thomas Cummins, the girls’ cousin who was with them on the bridge. Winfrey, a white boy who was 15 at the time, confessed with his parents present.
“Clemons has claimed at times that Winfrey was trying to save his own hide by testifying against Clemons,” Manners writes. “Save his own hide from what? Why would he cut a deal requiring him to plead guilty to murder and rape, knowing that he was going to serve at least part of a 30-year sentence – 16 years as it turned out – if he had nothing to do with killing the Kerry sisters …?”
Winfrey, who was not eligible for the death penalty because of his age, was released from prison in 2007. Co-defendant Marlin Gray was sentenced to death and executed in 2005. Co-defendant Antonio Richardson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The state and Clemons both now have 30 days to file exceptions to the master’s report. Once exceptions are filed, then the master rules on the exceptions or, if he issues no ruling within 30 days, the exceptions are deemed overruled. Once that part of the process is finished, then it moves to a process of getting docketed in the Supreme Court
