USA TODAY: A man who spent nearly 30 years on Louisiana’s death row was freed Tuesday after a court vacated his conviction in the murder of a Shreveport businessman.
The attorneys say that new information corroborates what their client claimed all along: “That he was not present at nor involved in the crime for which he had been convicted and sentenced to death.”
According to Ford’s attorneys, his trial was “profoundly compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence at his trial, including information from an informant, a suppressed police report related to the time of the crime and evidence of the murder weapon, which implicated the true perpetrator.” … (more)
EDITOR: Some prosecutors only want to put another notch in their gun. They are ignorant or simply refuse to accept that they are officers of the court and their duty is justice. Think this can only happen elsewhere? We have experienced here in Lancaster a District Attorney, the cat’s paw of the convention center advocates, conducting a year long witch trial against sitting county commissioners His reward? He was elected judge.
We don’t want to be soft on criminals. But the pubic and the criminal system needs to have the humility to understand we have purposefully or inadvertently sent innocent people in prison. It is our jobs to be as conscientious as possible.
