Dahlia Lithwick posts, "Murder Conviction Most Foul: What Justin Wolfe's case in Virginia tells us about death row cases everywhere," at Slate. Here's the beginning of this must-read:
Almost 10 years ago, Justin Wolfe was convicted of murder in the killing of his drug supplier, Daniel Petrole Jr., who was gunned down near his home in Manassas, Va., in 2001. The murder and trial exposed a massive Northern Virginia drug ring, featuring a made-for-TV array of strippers, night-clubbers, and champagne-sippers, with Wolfe—described by the prosecutor as "a Little Al Capone"—at the epicenter.
Except that the entire case seems to have been built around a lie. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Virginia vacated Wolfe's murder conviction and death sentence. And while his decision exposes serious prosecutorial misconduct in Wolfe's case, it also illustrates a deeper problem: a capital punishment system that encourages bad behavior, then magnifies the sin by allowing that behavior to go undetected.
In 2009, Drew Lindsay did an in-depth report on the Wolfe case for Washingtonian magazine titled "An Innocent Man on Death Row?" It's worth reading in its entirety, but the critical bit of information that emerges is that the man who actually shot Wolfe's drug supplier—Owen Barber IV—was the main witness against Wolfe in the murder-for-hire case. Even the prosecutors agreed at the time of conviction that without Barber's testimony, "Wolfe never would have been prosecuted." But Barber recanted his testimony in a 2005 affidavit, swearing that Wolfe had never hired him to kill the Petrole, and that he had lied on the stand after the police threatened him with the death penalty if he didn't implicate Wolfe. Barber told a roommate and a prison cellmate the same things. He recanted once again—returning to his story that Wolfe ordered the killing.
Because Virginia is Virginia, and thus second only to Texas in the number of executions it carries out, the fact that the star witness in a death penalty case recanted his testimony didn't seem to impress the courts all that much. Until this week, that is, when Judge Raymond A. Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Norfolk granted Wolfe's petition for habeas corpus relief because—as he explained—the state had violated Wolfe's due process rights by using Barber's false testimony and withholding information it was obligated to turn over under Brady v. Maryland, information that could be used to impeach the witnesses against him.
Related posts are in the prosecutorial misconduct index. The responsibility of the state to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense was articulated in the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland; more via Oyez.
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