He was executed in Arkansas after 12 years of abolition of the death penalty. It recently turned out that, as he had always stated, Ledell Lee was indeed innocent. The DNA certified it. But the trial story is unbelievable: a drunk lawyer, a magistrate from the prosecutor’s office who marries the judge who sentenced him, because of a hair at the crime scene. They said it was similar to hers. How was it established? By eye
JACKSONVILLE – They killed him with a lethal injection in 2017. Ledell Lee had always sworn he was innocent, over the many years he was put on death row. And to the trials. And at the time of arrest. He asked for the DNA test in every way, when the Innocence Project organization, which deals with judicial errors, believed that the genetic examination could clear him after taking less than two weeks to study the case, realizing how scandalous it was. But the Supreme Court refused: too late. Arkansas hadn’t sent people to the gallows for 12 years and was in a hurry to show how good it was at punishing the guilty.
The house of the crime
Today it turns out that the state, after a long wait, also killed the wrong person: the DNA found on the baseball bat that killed the victim in 1993, the 26-year-old Debra Reese, finally analyzed, belongs to another person, still unknown. There were also fingerprints at the crime scene: none belonged to the black man murdered by American justice. Now Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, without feeling any sense of shame, judges “inconclusive” and goes so far as to say that “the jury found him guilty based on the information he had.”
The victim
One thing that triggered the Innocence Project reaction: “While the results obtained twenty-nine years ago after the collection of evidence proved incomplete and partial, it is noteworthy that there are now new DNA profiles that were not available during the trial or the post-conviction proceedings in Mr. Lee’s case. ‘ But what was the evidence that “nailed” poor Lee?
THE CRIME
Debra was his neighbor. Separated, she worked in a boutique and raised a seven-year-old son alone. She was slaughtered with a baseball bat. To bring the accused to the scene of the crime were some witnesses, who swore to have seen him enter and leave the house of the victim. They found a hair. They deemed it his based on a glance under the microscope. That was enough. There were five fingerprints, never identified and never made available to the defense. It will be said: how did the lawyer not protest and not defend him in the right way? The answer is incredible: he was an alcoholic. He was so drunk in a hearing that they asked him to take a test at the end of how he had mumbled in the courtroom, asking nonsense arguments and questions. Lee was poor, raised without a father and with three brothers, and suffered from a certified brain problem. Basically it was only against the United States and in particular against the prosecutor Holly Lodge Meyer, the magistrate who also followed the next four counts of which the victim was indicted (including two sexual assaults), some of which were not prosecuted. when his death sentence had already been declared: “Cold and calculating,” said Meyer, “and without remorse.” Of course.
Attorney Meyer
In fact, it was impossible for him to defend himself. But that’s not enough. It also emerged that a magistrate from the Prosecutor’s Office was the judge’s mistress, whom he later married: a fact which, evidently, could make the magistrate not exactly an impartial person. But even this was not enough to invalidate the trial: they said that Lee had not been able to prove that the two had a romantic relationship even when his fate was decided. As if he, disabled, poor and with a drunk lawyer, could ascertain this, however, from behind bars. He didn’t know either, of course. Others later discovered it. Thus, any subsequent appeal, when the organizations took an interest in his case, proved to be belated and useless. Every oath of innocence is a lie. Any attempt to deny the crime, a lack of remorse. Remorse that his state assassins do not have in Arkansas even today that the DNA has established that it was someone else who killed Debra Reese. Sometimes, witnesses matter more than science. It happens when an innocent person ends up in death, and in this case: they don’t even apologize.
From Cronaca Vera
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