Today's New York Times reports, "30 Years Later, Freedom in a Case With Tragedy for All Involved." It's written by Campbell Robertson. It's a tale of false confessions and the threat of the death penalty as a law enforcement tool.
A little after 10 o’clock on Thursday morning, it was all up to Phillip Bivens. Just like that. The judge adjourned the hearing and Mr. Bivens, standing in a red jumpsuit in the corner of the courtroom, could all of a sudden do anything he wanted. After 30 years in prison, he was not sure what that was.
“Take it easy, I guess,” he said. “Try to ease my mind.”
Mr. Bivens, 59, and Bobby Ray Dixon, 53, two men who were serving life sentences, were exonerated by a judge on Thursday morning, their guilty pleas to the charge of murder erased. The judge said it was likely that another man, Larry Ruffin, would soon be cleared for the same murder.
There was no special hurry in his case. Mr. Ruffin died in prison eight years ago.
The expected ruling would be one of only a handful of posthumous exonerations nationwide, and taken with Thursday’s events, a rare triple exoneration.
Nonetheless, said Emily Maw, the director of the Innocence Project of New Orleans, the law center that pressed for the men’s release, the case has been nothing but a series of tragedies.
On a warm night in early May 1979, a man broke into the home of Eva Gail Patterson, raped her and cut her throat in front of her 4-year-old son. Ms. Patterson, whose 2-year-old was sleeping in the next room and whose husband was working offshore on an oil platform, stumbled to her neighbor’s carport, where she collapsed and died. The 4-year-old, Luke, told the police that a single man, “a bad boy,” had killed his mother.
The Jackson Clarion Ledger carries the editorial, "Justice: Remedy flaws when possible."
Mississippi has seen multiple examples this week of the imperfection of justice in the state's judicial system.
Citizens have read the sad story of the late Larry Donnell Ruffin, who died in a Mississippi prison in 2002 after serving 23 years behind bars for the rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman. But DNA testing posthumously cleared Ruffin of the charges along with Bobby Ray Dixon and Phillip Bivens.
Dixon serve 32 years in prison for the crime. He is free on medical release, but suffering from cancer. Dixon and Bivens, who got a life sentence in the case, formally won their freedom Thursday after a hearing in Forrest County. Ruffin, Dixon and Bivens were falsely convicted of the 1979 murder and rape of Eva Gail Patterson of Hattiesburg.
Testing of DNA evidence from the crime scene was linked to Andrew Harris, who is already serving a life sentence in Parchman for another Forrest County rape committed two years after Patterson's assault and murder.
Ruffin is the second person in the nation posthumously cleared of a murder conviction by DNA evidence. Nationwide, DNA testing has cleared 258 prisoners, exonerating 63 prisoners who made false confessions and 19 who made false guilty pleas.
And:
Justice in Mississippi is imperfect. When those imperfections are revealed, they must be remedied.
Otherwise, there is no justice.
The Clarion Ledger has the news report, "Convictions overturned: Imprisoned men free at last; Third Miss. inmate cleared posthumously based on DNA testing," by Jerry Mitchell.
The first official posthumous exoneration was that of Tim Cole in Texas.
Comments