Charles Jaco recently hosted Nels C. Moss, who prosecuted Reginald Clemons, and Redditt Hudson, a racial justice associate with the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri and activist with the Justice for Reggie campaign.
Clemons was convicted of murder as an accomplice in 1993 and sentenced to death. Recently an execution date of June 17, 2009 was set for him, though an indefinite stay was subsequently granted while a federal court rules on a pending appeal.
This is an abbreviated transcript of the show, with very minor internal edits made for concision and to eliminate repetitions.
Nels C. Moss: The most damning piece of evidence, in my opinion, was how (Clemons) was connected through his cousin, Antonio Richardson, who had stolen a flashlight, which had a specific name on it, “Horn one.” When the police located the owner of that flashlight, he gave the name of “Antonio Richardson,” who had then in turn gave the names of the other individuals, who then were taken into custody and gave statements implicating themselves in a rape and robbery scheme, but each denying that they individually had murdered the young ladies, Julie and Robin Kerry.
Charles Jaco: So basically the testimony against all of these guys, the damning testimony, was they all implicated one another?
Moss: No, primarily it was the cousin of the two young ladies, who survived, Tom Cummins; Daniel Winfrey, who was a co-participant in part of these activities; and their own statements.
Jaco: Redditt, where is the problem here? When we hear “Justice for Reggie Clemons,” does this mean that you guys at the ACLU believe that Reggie Clemons is completely innocent of everything and we are about to execute an innocent man?
Redditt Hudson: Yes, and it is not just people at the ACLU, but it is a community of humane and just people.
The first problem with what he just said is the statements that Reggie Clemons and Marlin Gray gave. They were beaten out of them. I have the transcript of the interview from Internal Affairs describing how his confession was beaten out of (Clemons). He ultimately never did confess to murder. They wanted him to. So instead he confessed to rape, and the reason he did that was so that the beating would stop.
He was never tried on the rape charges, but they were used to attach him to the murder, and that’s what made him eligible for capital punishment. How do we execute someone who was never tried on the charges? Because they were dropped by this man (Moss), because he knew he couldn’t prove them.
Moss: The Internal Affairs division interviewed all of these participants at length, took pictures. I obtained medical records from the jail with reference to this, and while they had some injuries they were minor. Some swelling of the cheek or something. They could have easily, according to the medical records, occurred after police custody. To say that the police would beat them to a certain extent, to obtain rape and robbery statements, and say, “Okay, that’s enough. we wont beat them any further for murder statements,” I think is a little ludicrous.
Hudson: The judge at Reggie’s arraignment thought that his injuries were severe enough to send him to the hospital to be treated for them. Thomas Cummins, who was initially charged with the deaths of the sisters, alleged the same thing and got a six-figure settlement for it. How the hell do we justify his claim being settled for money, and deny the claims of guys who had obvious physical injuries, when Thomas Cummins didn’t have a scratch on him? This case is an egregious example of a corrupted process.
Moss: Tom Cummins was with the police officers for a period of 15 to 20 hours after he came out of the river, after he had seen his two cousins killed by being pushed off the bridge. And while he indicated that (the police) pressured him, the only thing they told me they had was, “Well, if you said I did it then I did it.”
In his taped statement, he specifically described the four individuals involved – height, weight, everything – remembered a couple of their names, he indicated how the crime happened, and that statement of his was corroborated by every other suspect that was interviewed.
And if (Clemons) is totally innocent of this, where was his alibi? Where was some witness to say that he was elsewhere?
Hudson: Because he was on the bridge, it doesn’t make him guilty.
Jaco: The cops at the time indicated that (Clemons’) statements and the other three guys pretty much corroborated each other in terms of exactly what happened.
Hudson: If you read (Clemons’) testimony to an Internal Affairs officer, he was given that testimony to read, they wrote it out for him. No wonder it’s consistent, when you beat guys in separate rooms and tell them what to say.
But back to Cummins’ original statement, saying that the most reliable statement he made was the one that he gave about these guys. The most reliable statement he gave was the one that the police challenged him on. It was reliable because it showed his duplicity.
He says that he jumped off a bridge damn near 10 stories high, struck the water at 80 miles an hour, stayed in that water 30 or 40 minutes, swam upstream past the water treatment plant – where the current is so dangerous that they don’t even attempt rescues – comes out of the river completely dry from the waist up, hair neatly combed in place.
The initial investigator told him, “Son, that’s BS,” and they gave him a polygraph, which came back as deceptive. That was his most reliable statement, and that’s when he broke down and told the truth that “it was me who was responsible.”
But then these defendants became available. In St. Louis, race was introduced into the context of the overall crime. You’ve got rape, you’ve got race, and now you have these innocent guys – one wrongfully executed and one scheduled to die because of the corrupted process.
Jaco: So you’re telling me that this entire thing was because three of the four alleged perps were black and the cousin was white?
Hudson: I’m telling you that those facts and circumstances made themselves available to people who were willing to corrupt this process at the expense of innocent lives – and, more importantly, at the expense of justice for Robin and Julie Kerry. Everyone who is an advocate for Reggie now is deeply empathetic to the Kerry family’s situation. Who wants to see two young girls, who by all accounts were wonderful human beings, suffer this way?
Moss: Wait, you’re willing to say that that Reginald Clemons was beaten and a statement was forced out of him and it’s unreliable, but on the other hand you’re saying that a statement was beaten out of Thomas Cummins but it is reliable.
Hudson: No, let me step on that. Thomas Cummins was never beaten. This is the next step in that equation. His father was present in the next room when he was being questioned, and he had an attorney to respond while he was being questioned. So what I’m telling you is that he was not beaten and that settlement that they gave him is, in fact, for paid false testimony.
Now, let’s talk about forensic facts. What about the fact that the coroner Michael Graham testified that there was no evidence of rape at trial?
Moss: On a body in the water for three weeks?
Hudson: But we could’ve had the clothes, they could’ve tested the clothes. The clothes came up missing. Who had them in the chain of custody last? You!
Moss: They were stripped from the woman. What was left on her was so water-soaked that nothing could be made out.
Hudson: What happened to it?
Moss: It happened to it. Nothing was found on it. Nobody ever asked for it. Nothing was found on it.
Hudson: Nobody asked for it?
Moss: Had the defense asked for it, it was theirs.
In fact, Clemons told The American that even his fatally incompetent defense counsel did request the physical evidence from the cadaver found in the river in a pre-trial motion. Legal advocates for Clemons are currently trying to determine whether Moss has confessed to withholding evidence and whether this is grounds for a retrial.