NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: …At the trial, Mr. Williams denied knowing Mr. Norwood. But years later, Mr. Williams’s co-defendant admitted that he had told prosecutors that the reason for the murder was not robbery, as he had testified at trial, but Mr. Norwood’s sexual abuse of Mr. Williams and other underage boys. Using that admission, Mr. Williams challenged his death sentence on the grounds that prosecutors knew he had been sexually abused but had told the trial judge there was no evidence Mr. Norwood had abused anybody.
A state court found that the prosecutors had lied, and vacated Mr. Williams’s sentence. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling. The court’s chief justice at the time, Ronald Castille, wrote a concurring opinion criticizing the lower court’s ruling for “condemning” the prosecutors.
The problem was that Mr. Castille himself led the district attorney’s office when it prosecuted Mr. Williams, and personally authorized seeking the death penalty in that case. When he later ran for a seat on the State Supreme Court, he advertised to voters his tough-on-crime record, and the fact that he had sent 45 people to death row. Nevertheless, he refused to recuse himself from Mr. Williams’s case… (more)
NEWSLANC EDITOR: Come on. This is Pennsylvania, or should we say Pennsytucky! Don’t they realize our government is rated the fifth most corrupt in the country?
