Undoing Wrongful Convictions: Texas Attempts to Make Things Right

For years, I have harbored a silent, but firm, dislike for Texas-style justice. I do not know anyone personally who has been convicted of a crime and sent to prison in Texas, but over the years I have read two different kinds of news reports about the Texas justice system. One kind tells about the enthusiastic and dedicated prosecution and conviction of murderers and other heinous criminals. The underlying theme of these reports is "you do something wrong in Texas, and we will hunt you down and make you pay." The second kind of report tells about someone who gets released from prison after serving years — sometimes decades — for a crime he didn't commit. The underlying theme of these articles is "Texas is too quick to convict, and their prosecutors will do anything to get a conviction." You can interpret the word "anything" as broadly as you wish.

Usually a person's wrongful conviction is overturned because of new DNA evidence. Sometimes it's overturned because the real culprit speaks up. It used to be that the Texas justice system stubbornly refused to give up these wrongly convicted people, even when their innocence was beyond dispute. In one sad case, they executed Cameron Todd Willingham, a man wrongly convicted of arson and murder, long after his innocence was established and while his defenders were still hacking through the red tape to save him.

So, in my mind, Texas has earned, and deserves, its reputation as a "hang 'em high, and justice be damned" state. Every time an innocent man is released, I cheer deep inside and hurl silent curses in the general direction of the Lone Star State.

But my opinion of Texas-style justice has been softened. Sweetened, even. Today, a 58-year-old man, Randolph Arledge, is being set free after serving 30 years of a 99-year sentence for a crime he didn't commit. Arledge became the 118th person in the Texas legal system to have his conviction overturned. When Arledge went to prison, his children were 4 and 7 years old. They believed in his innocence and kept the faith all these years, and they were with him when he was released. Arledge had been convicted because two eyewitnesses had lied. He was released based on DNA studies of critical evidence saved for this many years.

Here comes the really cool part.

Texas cannot restore the 30 years they stole from his life. They cannot restore the 30 years they stole from his children's lives. However, in recent years the state of Texas has passed several laws aimed at: (1) preventing wrongful convictions; (2) making it easier for inmates convicted of a crime to have access to new DNA testing; and (3) paying restitution to those who have been wrongly convicted and then released.

You can't really put a cash value on a wrongful conviction, or on the 30 years the state stole from Arledge and his family. But you can try. And the state of Texas has tried. According to one article, the state "has the nation's most generous law for ex-inmates who have proven their innocence, providing a lump-sum payment of $80,000 for each year someone wrongly spent behind bars, as well as an annuity and other benefits."

Money talks. This is the way Texas says "I'm sorry." While I'm still inclined to lump Texas for their overeager prosecutors and their hanging judges, I am equally inclined to applaud Texas for this truly generous attempt to put things right.

SIDE NOTE:


By the way, much, if not all, of the credit for Arledge's release goes to the hard-working people at the Innocence Project. This posting is about Texas, not about the Innocence Project, but I invite you to visit their website and see what they're about. Even Republicans will find it enlightening.

Other entities around the country working on the problem of wrongful convictions include the Michigan Innocence Clinic. 

ANOTHER SIDE NOTE:

The great English jurist Sir William Blackstone said in 1765: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." In 1785, Benjamin Franklin upped the ante, writing: "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." In modern times, Ben's words have been misquoted and misattributed, but the principle remains the same, and forms the basis for many of the clauses in the Bill of Rights. (Source: "Blackstone's Formulation," Wikipedia.)

Teachers vs. idiots: The teachers finally win one!

This blog obviously has a soft spot for good teachers who have been unjustly treated by their employers. Most stories of this genre do not have happy endings. Here's one that does. Sort of. At least, the good guy wins.

In April 2006, Jeffrey Leardini was teaching sixth grade at Community House Middle School in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg (North Carolina) School District. One of his students, a girl, wasn't doing very well in his class. After she received one poor grade too many from him, she decided to do something about it. So she reported that he had been "inappropriately touching" her - that is, touching her in "sexually suggestive ways." And she got four of her friends to report that he had touched them, too.

This was Leardini's eighth year of teaching. According to everything I've read about the case, he was an "excellent" teacher, who got "glowing reviews". He acknowledged, in response to questions from a reporter in the Charlotte Observer, "that he squeezed shoulders, patted arms and touched students' heads as part of his teaching style."

Teachers used to be able to do that. Female teachers can still do that. But in this enlightened century, male teachers would be wise not to touch anyone, no matter how innocent or accidental the touch may be. It's a lesson that a few male teachers are still learning the hard way. It's not fair, and it's definitely not justice, but it's reality.

But this isn't a story about who Leardini did touch. It's a story about who he didn't touch.

Leardini was immediately pulled from the classroom. In a meeting with Kay Cunningham, of the district HR office, he was told that the district had a "no-touch" policy, and he was advised that "he had no choice but to resign immediately or be terminated." She assured him, however, that if he resigned, there would not be an investigation and she would note on his record that he had "resigned voluntarily."

For a teacher who has been trying hard to do all the right things, who has been trying to make the classroom a safe and comfortable place where students can concentrate on learning, and whose mind has never even considered this kind of behavior, accusations like this can be devastating. I can imagine that he was so shocked as to be at a complete loss for words. He wouldn't be able to come up with anything in his defense because he had never considered having to defend himself from anything like this. And when Ms. Cunningham was so belligerent and threatening, of course he felt like he had no choice but to resign.

So he did. He resigned. His personnel record, in addition to a copy of the complaints against him, noted that he had "resigned in lieu of dismissal" and that he was "not eligible for rehire" — which was the kiss of death to his teaching career. Nobody would hire him with that kind of black mark on his record.

Then Cunningham faxed an "urgent" case summary to the police, and eventually criminal charges were filed against Leardini. I don't know for sure, but I would guess that that's about the time he decided to hire a real lawyer. Either Leardini got a really good lawyer, or Leardini has a really good brain between his ears. You see, he knew he was innocent. And that counts for a lot. And eventually, he and his lawyers found out a few important things:

• The girls' lies were exposed, and their conspiracy was uncovered.
• The district did not have a "no-touch" policy, at least not before April 2006.
• The district didn't even follow the policies it did have in place.
• He was entitled to a full investigation of the allegations before the district could take any action, but nobody had told him that. Remember, Cunningham had told him he had "no choice" but to resign or be terminated. She lied to him.
• He had been bullied and misled into resigning.
• He had been denied his right to due process.

So in June 2009, he filed a lawsuit against the school district. All he wanted, he said, was to have his name cleared, to have his teaching job back, and to have that "resigned in lieu of dismissal" notation changed to "resigned voluntarily." The school district, like all of the other school districts that have been featured on Zyzmog Galactic HQ, had some idiots on the payroll that thought they could win the lawsuit. So they refused his terms.

So the suit went to trial. In February 2012, nearly six years after he had been falsely accused and wrongfully terminated, a jury awarded him $1.1 million from the school district, and  $52,000 from Cunningham.

The idiots at the district, when they realized their own misbehavior been exposed and that they had lost the trial, went pale and immediately filed an appeal. By the laws of the state of North Carolina, the appeal went automatically to mediation. Eventually the two sides worked out a deal whereby the district would pay Leardini, not $1.1 million, but $680,000. That's still cheap, compared to the cost of an unjustly tarnished reputation and a ruined career.

As part of the settlement, the district had to remove the complaints from Leardini's file and replace them with a copy of the mediated settlement. They had to remove the "resigned in lieu of dismissal" and any other mention of "disciplinary action" or "termination." But these were only symbolic moves. They couldn't replace the six lost years, or his shattered future.

Leardini's lawyer, Luke Largess, says he hopes that the school district has learned a lesson. The words of a  district spokesman, however, reveal that the district hasn't learned a thing. You can read their exact words in the sources listed below.

In the years between 2006 and 2012, Leardini moved as far away from North Carolina as he could get. He's now a manager at a Petco in San Diego, California.

According to news reports, Cunningham no longer works for the district, so good luck collecting on the $52,000 she owes. It doesn't say whether she quit or was fired, or where she is, but she has had six good years to move elsewhere and cover her tracks. For all we know, she's bullying naïve teachers at another school district somewhere in the U.S.

His accusers got away with no punishment at all. Being minors, their names were never revealed, so they haven't had their reputations dragged through the mud like Leardini has. Today, they're probably freshmen at UNC Charlotte, or at Duke University. They should feel right at home at Duke.

Sources:
NBC News
Charlotte Observer
WBTV
Triangle News14
And here's a Washington Post article from 2000 about a similar incident. The school mishandled it at first, but they quickly set about to make things right.

Update:
Here's an article that appeared in Charlotte Magazine, written in December 2006. At that time, things were looking pretty bleak for Leardini. This is an extremely well-written article about the incident, and it's still relevant today.

On Judgment

A very wise man once said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." He knew the all-too-human tendency for us to judge each other, to pigeonhole people, to fit them into a box full of labels and preconceived notions, and to rank them above us or below us on the "worthiness to live" scale.

It's like the old joke about what two men think of each other when they first meet. In that split second before they smile and extend their hands to greet each other, in that very instant, they're thinking to themselves, "Yeah, I can take him."

(I don't even want to joke about what women think of each other when they first meet.)

The wise man followed his admonition with this observation: "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

To illustrate this principle, allow me to paraphrase George Carlin. Carlin says that there are two kinds of drivers on the road: morons and jerks. A moron is anybody who drives slower than you. A jerk is anybody who drives faster than you.

The interesting thing about the morons and the jerks, according to the paraphrased Carlin, is this: in the eyes of all the morons, you're a jerk. And in the eyes of all the jerks, you're a moron.

Therefore, we ought to take the wise man's counsel to heart and not judge anybody, right? There are a couple of problems with that. First, humans are rational beings, and we are constantly weighing and evaluating everything around us. Second, we have to make judgments simply to survive in this world. For example, we teach our children to choose their friends wisely. We choose our own friends wisely (or not so wisely). We decide whether it's better to get drunk with friends or to stay dry and sober. We elect our political leaders. We decide which charities will receive our contributions.

Finally, and most critically, we are sometimes required by law or by fellowship to sit in judgment of our fellow humans. This is something that can never be taken lightly, because when we sit in judgment of others, we also sit in judgment of ourselves. When we hear a recitation of the faults and indiscretions of another, it causes us, rather than recoiling in disgust or revulsion, to examine ourselves for our own tendencies towards those same faults and indiscretions. In the end, no matter whether we condemn or pardon those we are required to judge, we sit condemned by our own consciences for our weaknesses.

And when judgment is rendered and sentence is passed, we murmur the ageless proverb, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Those who are anxious or willing (or hasty) to call down the judgment of God, or Lady Justice on the heads of their fellow beings, to holler "Off with their heads!", must be ready and willing to accept their own portion of that judgment in payment for their own indiscretions. If they are not, then they stand doubly condemned: by their errors and their hypocrisy.

 I don't believe in karma per se as a religious or spiritual principle, but as a fundamental law of nature, I do believe that there really is something to it. What Christians call the Law of the Harvest ("whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap") comes close to it. The judgments that we render have a funny way of being reflected back on us, sometimes immediately and sometimes years down the road. Those of us who believe in a God who judges us according to our works and/or the desires of our hearts, who hope that He will treat us mercifully in our weaknesses and our errors, had better be willing to extend that same hand of mercy to our fellow travelers in their moments of error or weakness.

I'm not saying that laws are irrelevant and that there's no such thing as crime. Nor am I suggesting that we should roll over and let thieves pick us clean. Some principles of right and wrong are absolute. For example, cold-blooded murder for its own sake has been a universal crime for millenia. Wrongs must be righted. Villains and monsters must be uncovered and removed from society. We must shield our children from abuse and depravity until they are strong enough to handle it on their own. The influence of justice, like the influence of gravity, can be temporarily avoided but will always prevail in the end.

But as human beings, put here on this rock we call Earth to test ourselves and prepare (we hope) for something better, we will come a lot closer to that "something better" when we endeavor to lift each other up more than we pull each other down. I think we all get a little closer to perfection when, rather than fall upon our fellows with the swift sword of justice, we defer that justice (when permissible) to Him whose right it is to judge, and instead extend to them the arms of mercy and fellowship.

Most of those who surround us are trying just as hard as we are to be successful, not just on the physical or material plane, but on the spiritual plane as well (however you want to define "spiritual", and whatever word you want to substitute for it). We gain a lot by showing the same love and mercy to our fellow travelers that we hope will be shown to us, when we need it most.