Today's News & Observer of Raleigh publishes the editorial, "Time for SBI agent to be disciplined."
Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s four-term attorney general, needs to terminate the employment of SBI agent Mark Isley or justify why he shouldn’t. Isley not only didn’t do his job properly in a 1993 murder case in Wadesboro, but he also put an innocent man in jail for 14 years by essentially writing a phony confession. Isley certainly conveyed the impression that he had taken down the confession of Floyd Brown verbatim. But one expert after another said that Brown, a mentally disabled man with an IQ of about 50, couldn’t possibly have recounted the “murder” with such coherent detail. Then when Brown, who was ordered freed in 2007 by Durham Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson, sued the state, Isley said the “confession” he wrote down was really a summary.
Such behavior by an SBI agent is outrageous and inexcusable. A man who committed no crime – in this case the beating death of a retired teacher – lost 14 years of his life thanks to Isley. This same agent, The News & Observer’s Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke reported Sunday, demonstrated curious professional behavior in the 1990s when he was in Anson County working with a couple of sheriff’s deputies.
It seems Isley heard about those deputies getting payoffs to reduce charges on defendants. Yet Isley, according to information that came to light in Brown’s lawsuit, failed to file any reports for several years, though he says he told somebody about it. Both those deputies went to federal prison.
Links to those stories are below.
"State faces a steep price for injustice," is the Rocky Mount Telegram editorial.
North Carolina has experienced a heavy dose lately of the price of inexcusable errors on the part of the State Bureau of Investigation. Injustice doesn’t sit well – nor is it cheap.
The company that insures the N.C. Attorney General’s office has paid most of the millions of dollars in settlements to two men who were wrongly convicted of crimes based on faulty evidence analyzed and reviewed by the SBI crime lab.
Floyd Brown of Anson County will receive $7.85 million for spending 14 years in Dorothea Dix Hospital’s psychiatric unit. Greg Taylor of Wake County is owed $4.625 million for the 17 years he spent in prison. Both were wrongly convicted of murders they did not commit.
State taxpayers have to meet a deductible in each case. The insurance company will pay the rest. Twelve million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but 31 years taken away from two men’s lives is hardly a bargain.
"SBI settlements: The high cost of injustice," is the Winston-Salem Journal editorial.
North Carolina taxpayers will pay dearly for inexcusable mistakes made by the State Bureau of Investigation over the years. But men who will collect multi-million dollar settlements for those mistakes paid an even higher price: They lost their freedom for years.
Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and his department’s insurers have agreed to pay two men who had been incarcerated due, in part, to misconduct by SBI agents, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.
And:
But there is one more thing Cooper could do: He could indicate the state’s true remorse for these injustices by doing the honorable thing. On behalf of the state, he could finally apologize to these men.
The News & Observer report, noted above, is, "Despite SBI settlement in Brown case, discredited agent is still on the job," by Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke.
The misconduct of State Bureau of Investigation Agent Mark Isley has rung up all sorts of costs: a $7.85 million payout for taxpayers and their insurers; 14 years behind bars for an innocent man with a severe mental disability; and another scar for law enforcement.
Isley, however, still has his job at the SBI, and there’s no indication from Attorney General Roy Cooper that it’s in jeopardy.
Cooper, a four-term Democrat, refused to be interviewed last week about Isley and the Brown case. Isley, head of the bureau’s Medicaid Fraud Section, could not be reached for comment.
Jim Coleman, a Duke University law professor and co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, says wrongdoers in law enforcement are rarely held accountable.
“The misconduct in this case is another black eye for the criminal justice system,” Coleman said. “They simply take the loss and move on as if nothing happened. Until there are consequences, nothing will change.”
"SBI agent Mark Isley slow to report tips on cop conspiracy," is the other News & Observer report, also by Neff and Locke.
For nearly two years, SBI agent Mark Isley failed to file reports involving serious allegations of wrongdoing against his colleagues at the Anson County Sheriff’s Department, according to documents attached to a lawsuit against Isley.
The information turned out to be on target: The two officers ended up in federal prison for soliciting payoffs from accused criminals.
The new details about Isley surfaced in the lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown that was settled last week. The two cases have followed Isley during his 24-year career, but SBI leaders have taken no public action.
Only in 2010, after The News & Observer chronicled Brown’s confinement based on an implausible confession, did the SBI launch an internal investigation. It followed at least five years of documented concerns about Brown’s arrest.
Earlier coverage of the North Carolina exonerations begins at the link.
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