#he physically assaulted me the night before my grandmothers funeral and i had to show up and face him the next day like nothing happened

[slutdge]

I dont really think ive processed just how badly my dads behavior has effected me this year its really the worst it has ever been and i think im avoiding thinking too hard about it cause i know im a danger to myself if i do lol

[news4dzhozhar]

Update: April 20, 2017: Shortly after this story was published, the Arkansas Supreme Court lifted the order blocking the state from using vecuronium bromide, clearing the way for Ledell Lee to be executed tonight.

The state of Arkansas has not given up its execution plans. But every day they seem to unravel a little more. Tonight, on April 20, officials planned to kill Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee, both of whom insist they are innocent. But late Wednesday afternoon, a circuit court judge imposed a temporary restraining order on the state’s planned use of vecuronium bromide, the second in Arkansas’s highly contested three-drug protocol. The provider of the drug, a pharmaceutical company called the McKesson Corporation, accused officials of misleading the company when it sought out the supply, concealing their intention to use it for executions.

The ruling put all executions on hold. Shortly afterward, a second ruling, by the Arkansas Supreme Court, granted a stay to Johnson, with lawyers for the Innocence Project successfully arguing that Johnson has the right to an evidentiary hearing in order to make the case for DNA testing. Lee, too, has the Innocence Project on his side, as well as lawyers with the ACLU. He, too, has fought for DNA testing, to no avail.

The cases of Johnson and Lee add yet another dimension to a system of capital punishment that has been exposed, again, to be profoundly and frighteningly flawed. Beyond the immediate chaos and legal wrangling sparked by Hutchinson’s planned killing spree, the cases of the eight men he originally set to die have exposed the many ugly sides of the death penalty in Arkansas, from the mental illness that pervades death row, to the failures of the clemency process, to a history of botched executions and experimental killing protocols disguised as science. It was only a matter of time, since the risk of executing an innocent person was sure to come up. “When you’re carrying out mass executions, it’s inevitable that innocent people are going to get caught in that net,” Echols tweeted on Wednesday.

Innocent or not, Lee and Johnson also represent a legacy of reserving the harshest punishments for black men accused of crimes against white women. Both were convicted of raping and murdering young white women in their 20s. Both crimes date back to the early 1990s, and both men were tried twice, in an era when Arkansas defense attorneys were woefully ill-equipped to represent defendants facing the death penalty. In 1990, the Arkansas Gazette surveyed 22 local trial lawyers, finding that “half had no capital-murder experience before they were appointed to cases that eventually put their clients on death row.”

In Lee’s case, the records show shocking failures of his defense attorneys, both at trial and post-conviction, which were compounded by egregious conflicts of interest. His trial judge was having an affair with the prosecutor; the two would later get married. The same judge later expressed his regret at appointing a lawyer to Lee’s state habeas proceeding who showed up to court obviously intoxicated. A state prosecutor raised concerns that the attorney was slurring his words, stumbling in the courtroom, and speaking incoherently, while “introducing the same items of evidence over and over again.” Later, the judge told the lawyer that he was unaware he had only recently been in rehab. “If I had known that, I would not have put you on this case,” he said.

Lee was convicted of murdering and sexually assaulting 26-year-old Debra Reese in 1993. Strangled and beaten to death in her home in Jacksonville, Arkansas, Reese was struck 36 times with a tire thumper, which her husband, a truck driver, had given to her for protection when he was on the road, according to court records. Lee was arrested the same day. The state’s theory, as summarized by the Arkansas Supreme Court, was that Lee had set out to commit a robbery and “searched the victim’s neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime.”

Yet despite ample blood and fingerprints at the scene, virtually no physical evidence was found to match Lee. The case against him relied on eyewitness testimony — now known to be notoriously unreliable — along with two main pieces of forensic evidence. One was an apparent blood spot found on a pair of Converse sneakers Lee was wearing at the time of his arrest. According to the Arkansas Supreme Court, a state serologist “confirmed the presence of blood, but consumed the entire sample, thus removing the opportunity for independent analysis by the defense.” The second piece of evidence was a hair sample thought to come from a black man “and found to be ‘consistent’ with Lee’s based on microscopic examination — a forensic method that has since been discredited,” according to the Innocence Project.

Lawyers this week sought a stay of execution from the Arkansas Supreme Court, arguing that the Converse sneakers and hair fibers should be subject to DNA testing, which has advanced by leaps and bounds since the 1990s. But their argument was rejected. With Lee’s execution appearing imminent on Wednesday, attorneys moved to introduce evidence to the Arkansas Board of Parole that Lee suffers from “brain damage and significant intellectual disability,” which was never properly presented by previous attorneys. Instead, the temporary restraining order over the lethal injection drug is keeping Arkansas from taking his life.  (SEE UPDATE ABOVE)

Until the stay of execution from the Arkansas Supreme Court Wednesday, Stacey Johnson, too, had been unsuccessful in convincing the state to consider his requests for DNA testing, with his pleas of innocence falling on deaf ears among the parole board. In a letter to the board members in late March, his local defense attorney, Jeff Rosenszweig, wrote that Johnson “received a raw deal in his case. I believe him to be innocent. At the very least, there is reasonable doubt as to his guilt.”

Johnson was convicted twice, in 1994 and 1997, of raping and murdering 25-year-old Carol Jean Heath, in DeQueen, Arkansas. Her body was discovered at her home by a friend, Rose Cassady, in the early morning hours of April 2, 1993. Heath was in a pool of blood, naked except for a T-shirt. Her throat had been deeply cut. After calling the police, Cassady realized Heath’s two young children were at the house. According to Cassady, Heath’s 6-year-old daughter, Ashley, said, “A black man broke in last night.”

A police officer interviewed Ashley later that day. She told him that she had been sitting on the couch with her mother when “someone knocked on the door.” It was a “black male,” Ashley allegedly said, describing later how the two fought, while she and her 2-year-old brother, Jonathan, hid in the closet.

Johnson did not live in Arkansas at the time, but had returned to DeQueen to attend his father’s funeral. Although he was accused of sexual assault, no semen or other such evidence was found at the scene. As with Lee, the primary forensic evidence against Johnson was a “negroid hair.” It was tested for DNA, with results that could not exclude Johnson. Attorneys unsuccessfully argued that he had a consensual relationship with Heath. While witnesses conceded that Johnson had been at Heath’s home more than once before the crime, at his 1997 retrial, “three witnesses strenuously stated that Ms. Heath had not had a relationship with a black man,” according to a recent appeal.

At his clemency hearing in late March, Johnson argued that his conviction was rooted in racism, which led the state to overlook other leads. “There was a lot of evidence that could have shown that it wasn’t me, but they ignored it,” he told members of the parole board. “They just looked at me, they found the big black guy and the little white person that was a victim and that was enough that they needed.”

As in Lee’s case, the Innocence Project points to several untested pieces of evidence that could have significant probative value — as well as major scientific advances that could yield more accurate forensic results than possible in the 1990s. While hairs thought to belong to a white person were found at the scene, those were never tested. The evidence is important in addressing an alternate theory of the crime. Johnson’s attorneys unsuccessfully pointed to Heath’s boyfriend at the time, a white man named Branson Ramsey, who had a history of abuse. At Johnson’s 1997 retrial, Ramsey’s ex-wife testified that her husband “would punch me or slap me or kick me or bite me.” Particularly notable was her claim that he bit her “on my breast.” Heath, too, had apparent bite marks on her breasts. Ramsey died in 1998. In response to Johnson’s motion for DNA testing last week, the state dismissed the strategy as “a classic case of ‘blame-the-dead-guy.’”

But putting aside the DNA evidence, perhaps the biggest red flag in the case was the state’s reliance on Heath’s traumatized young daughter, Ashley. Though she was found incompetent to testify at Johnson’s first trial, in 1994, Ashley was deemed ready to take the stand for the retrial in 1997. The 10-year-old delivered testimony that seemed heavily influenced by relatives and prosecutors — a fact that alarmed members of the Arkansas Supreme Court who reviewed the case years later. In a 4-3 ruling leaving the conviction intact, the dissenting judges noted that Johnson’s defense attorneys had been denied access to therapist records that showed “Ashley’s stories were profoundly inconsistent and that she had been under considerable pressure from her family and the prosecutor to convict Stacey Johnson.” Among passages they quoted: “The DA says she’s the only one who can ‘keep him behind bars’”; “Her grandmother told Ashley that she ‘has to keep him behind bars,’ because if he gets out he’ll try to kill Ashley next.”

Ashley Heath is now in her 40s. In 2015, the last time Johnson was up for execution, she told the parole board that she no longer believes the death penalty brings justice. “I am tired of re-living [the crime],” she said. “I am ready to put it behind me and move on with my life.”

On Tuesday, April 18, two days before Lee and Johnson were set to be executed, a black man in Louisiana was officially exonerated. Rodricus Crawford was sent to death row in 2013 by Caddo Parish District Attorney Dale Cox, who later made headlines for saying that declining death sentences around the country were a bad sign. “I think we need to kill more people,” he said. Like Hutchison, who is fond of tweeting Bible verses on Sunday, Cox likes to invoke the Bible. In Crawford’s case, he insisted Jesus himself would have supported the death penalty.

Crawford is now the 158th death row exoneree in the country. He is fortunate that the state dropped the charges in his case. Damien Echols was not so lucky. He was only freed after he agreed to take an Alford plea, in which one can plead guilty while maintaining one’s innocence. “It makes no sense whatsoever,” Echols told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on Monday. “The entire reason that it exists is so that the state can’t be held responsible for what they’ve done to you.” As far as Arkansas is concerned, it has never sent an innocent person to death row. “The state still maintains that they are infallible,” Echols said. “They’ve never made a mistake, they’ve never killed an innocent person.”

Yet one case should still haunt the state. In August 1995, amid loud public outcry, Arkansas executed Barry Lee Fairchild, a black man accused in 1983 of raping and killing 22-year-old Marjorie “Greta” Mason, who worked as a nurse at Little Rock Air Force Base. It was, at the time, “the most publicized and contentious death penalty case in modern Arkansas history,” in the words of local columnist John Brummett, who described how, for once, the parole board was “deeply divided” over whether to recommend clemency for Fairchild. Members ultimately voted 4-2 not to do so, with a seventh member of the board recusing herself because of earlier dealings with the case. Still, she wrote a letter to Gov. Jim Guy Tucker saying there were too many “uncertainties” about Fairchild’s conviction.

The Fairchild case became famous outside Arkansas for embodying the enduring problems with capital punishment. A black man with IQ scores as low as 60, Fairchild had been accused of killing a white woman on highly questionable evidence. In an in-depth article revisiting the case before his 1995 execution, the Washington Post described how “in the absence of forensic evidence, the prosecution case hinged almost completely on Fairchild’s videotaped confession.” That statement, in which he admitted to being an accomplice to the crime, had been obtained by a notorious police sheriff named Tommy Robinson, who had a reputation for abuse, as well as for being openly, flamboyantly racist. “When a state prison refused to help relieve the county jail’s overcrowding, Robinson, to generate publicity, took a group of his prisoners to the state prison and chained them to a fence,” the Post reported. “Robinson once was quoted as joking that he treated his black prisoners well, fed them ‘watermelon and chicken,’ according to the National Journal.” With Robinson in charge, a manhunt ensued for the black man who allegedly killed Mason. In March 1983, several dozen police officers surrounded the house where Fairchild was staying. When he emerged, he was attacked by a German Shepherd belonging to Robinson.

Many of the questions about Fairchild’s guilt emerged after the conviction, with evidence pointing to his brother as the real perpetrator. Over the phone, the original prosecutor, Chris Raff, who is now retired, recalled that “at the time of the conviction, it was not controversial.” Raff did not believe the allegations of Fairchild’s mental disability, saying that the facts and players in the case made it “great fodder for media.” But Jeff Rosenzweig, who expresses great respect for Raff, recalls that law enforcement concealed evidence from Raff himself.

Fairchild faced seven execution dates before he died. Then-Gov. Bill Clinton set no fewer than five. At one point, he came within hours of execution, only for a judge to vacate his sentence, based on the conclusion that he never should have been sentenced to die in the first place. Yet Fairchild would die in the end. His numerous habeas petitions forestalling his execution later inspired political efforts to limit the appellate process for people on death row. By the time Fairchild was finally executed in 1995, Clinton had been elected president. In 1996, he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, dramatically curtailing the habeas rights of people in prison.

The law has been particularly devastating for those claiming innocence while facing execution, including in Arkansas. Speaking to the board of parole at the clemency hearing for Stacey Johnson last month, Rosenzweig tried to explain how AEDPA prevented his client from getting his evidence heard. The “extremely tough standard” it imposed means “only a minuscule percentage of people are able to succeed in federal habeas corpus,” he explained. “That is why we lost.”

With its execution plans increasingly in doubt, the state of Arkansas remains undeterred — and a bit desperate. In a statement Wednesday evening, Hutchinson said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the stay imposed by the Arkansas Supreme Court, adding that he would be reviewing his options with Attorney General Leslie Rutledge. In a less measured response, a few hours later a pro-death penalty state senator posted the cellphone number of the chief justice on Twitter.

Throughout it all, Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson remained in holding cells next to the execution chamber, awaiting the next decision about whether they will live or die. They are still there. In the meantime, Damien Echols continues to speak out, reminding people to stay vigilant. On Thursday, he tweeted: “The only reason a judge or politician would not allow DNA testing to be done in a case is because they want to kill no matter what.”