A man spent 24 years in prison based on the testimony of a witness, a witness who recanted her testimony only 2 months after the trial. Despite that, no one seemed to do anything or try to overturn the conviction. The man in prison did not even know that the witness had recanted. In 1995, Dontae Sharpe was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. Sharpe's initial conviction was based on statements made by Charlene Johnson, a teenager recently released from a voluntary stay at a psychiatric ward who told police in April 1994 that she saw Sharpe and another man shoot Radcliffe in a drug deal dispute. Sharpe was arrested despite having two witnesses who said he was with them having dinner when the shooting happened. Soon after the trial, Johnson recanted and said she wasn't there at the time of the shooting. "Within 2-months after trial, the 15-year-old state's alleged eye-witness came forward to recant - later testifying she felt pressured to lie at trial and received rewards from police beforehand." Dontae Sharpe | NAACP North Carolina (naacpnc.org) Johnson said she made the claims up based on what investigators told her. The National Registry of Exonerations reported that Sharpe was a small-time drug dealer and police had been trying to arrest him for some time before Radcliffe's shooting. In addition to that, the former medical examiner who had testified at the trial has now come forward giving their expert opinion that Johnson's testimony about the shooting was "medically and scientifically impossible". The medical examiner had only learned of witness's testimony after the trial. Radcliffe had been shot in the arm, and Johnson’s description of a face-to-face confrontation didn't line up with the trajectory of the bullet through the body. Fortunately, at least, in 2019 a judge finally exonerated Sharpe. He had served 24 years in prison. In 2021 he was issued an official pardon by the North Carolina governor. At the trial, Charlene Johnson, who was 15, gave testimony that she had seen Sharpe shoot Radcliffe in a face-to-face altercation over a drug deal. Johnson would later say that her testimony was made up and had been based on what she saw on television and what investigators told her. Johnson had initially refused to come to the trial and testify. In response, police took her into custody and brought her to court. Johnson admitted at trial that she had received $500 for "coming forward". Sharpe said he had been sustained throughout the decades by his faith in God, his lawyers, the pastors who supported him and his mother, who gave him the strength to resist pressure from prosecutors to accept plea deals that could have resulted in his release from prison.
Need a new law, 1 million tax free dollars for every year someone spends in prison when they are exonerated...AND mandatory prison time for prosecutors and others who suppress evidence and/or suborn perjury to obtain a conviction.
Witnesses need to be thoroughly vetted. That is easy for the prosecution, since the State has deep pockets. It is near impossible for public defenders who lack both the funds and resources, and also near impossible for those of modest means who can afford an attorney or are not eligible for a public defender. Someone might ask, well, if the prosecution investigates a witness, wouldn't those docs have to be turned over to the defense? Um, well, that might tread on attorney work-product privilege.
Prosecutors often do not want the witness to be vetted. Unfortunately, they are often not there in the interests of justice but are there to win their case. There are numerous ways in which prosecutors are incentivized to win, higher likelihood of career advancement. (The prosecutor's office is more likely to put prosecutors with a long track record of winning on more important cases) And they have more to gain from wrongfully winning than any worry about punishment, because in many types of situations there is very little accountability; it is almost a near certainty that the prosecutor is never going to face any punishment or even reprimand for misconduct. There is actually surprisingly little oversight. Even the judges most of them time pretty much just take the prosecutor at their word, since they don't have the time and energy to actually sort through all the details of every case, having so many cases. And other prosecutors can be fearful of going after another prosecutor, because these are people who have the power to easily put people in prison. It's almost like a little club; they will only go after their own in the very worst cases. They routinely put people in prison so often that they just become numb to it, it becomes like a reflexive action. A lot of the laws that they imprison people for criminalize types of things that are not clearly morally wrong, so that's just yet one more way their career experience blunts their moral inhibitions. (Imagine you have just put 100 people in prison for wearing pink hats, over the last month, because a law says that's illegal and that's your job. After doing that, it's going to be much easier for you to put someone innocent in prison; you're not going to feel so bad about it) Oftentimes prosecutors have reason to believe the accused is guilty, but they just do not have enough actual evidence to win their case. They want to put the person they believe is guilty in prison, so they use unethical tactics. From what I've researched, this is very common among cases of people wrongfully convicted. It may have started with someone wrongfully interpreting ambiguous forensic evidence, and then some police detective, acting out of a hunch that a suspect is probably guilty, plants a little piece of evidence, either to make it easier to put the person in prison, or to be able to obtain another search warrant. Then someone else in the game sees this evidence, believes the accused is guilty, and does something else unethical to try to make sure the accused goes to prison. It snowballs. Each person in the game feels that doing something to frame the suspect is justified because that's the only way they can make sure the suspect, whom they believe is guilty, will go to prison. But each of these individuals may not know about the separate actions of the others. They would not do what they did if they knew what actions the others had done. A lot of people don't believe planting evidence, giving false testimony, or coercing others to give testimony that may likely not be true, is wrong when it is done to make sure a guilty person is convicted. Emotions can take over. Combined with a lack of emotion in other departments. Psychologically, people usually feel uncomfortable thinking in terms of uncertainties. (It's hard to be angry at someone and demand vengeance when in your head you know there's a 1 percent probability they might not have done it, for example) For this reason, many defendants are judged guilty before the trial ever takes place, or before all the evidence is even gathered. Think of it as common human psychological inadequacies. I could write much more but this post is already too long.
The prosecutor is required to turn over all the evidence the have collected to the defense, if it could be at all relevant, but there are many times where prosecutors intentionally do not turn over relevant evidence. They are trying to win. Most of the time the defense will never know. It can take a lot of work to investigate, so defendants without expensive lawyers most often will not uncover this evidence. Sometimes the evidence is uncovered after the trial has taken place, but it is not considered important enough to make a difference. If a judge decides, in his opinion, that the level of evidence was already sufficient for a conviction, then a new trial will usually not be allowed. Jury trials are expensive and time consuming to carry out. A piece of evidence slightly suggesting the witness might not have been reliable is often not seen as important enough to justify a new trial. It's easier for the judge to just assume that the jury would likely have still convicted even if they had known about that evidence. I've seen some other cases where a fairly important piece of new evidence was revealed but the defendant was not able to have a retrial because they had already had a retrial before, over some less important piece of previous new evidence that had surfaced, so now they have run out of second chances. Even in cases where this new evidence would probably mean an over 50 percent chance of being found not guilty, it's most often not enough. At that point they will apply much more stringent standards and it's very unlikely the prisoner will be granted a new retrial. They don't want to have to keep giving prisoners trials over and over again. And usually after an accused person is convicted, and especially after a retrial has already been held, different standards apply. Instead of there needing to be enough evidence to prove they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, now there needs to be enough evidence to prove they are innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. Many (probably most) judges don't even want to bother overturning a conviction if they think the prisoner might be guilty (as in even a 40 or 30 percent chance of being guilty). (New evidence could for example just be being used as an excuse to get the prisoner a new trial. If a prisoner has enough new jury trials, even though the evidence in each trial is exactly the same, they may eventually have a chance of being found not guilty. And it works the other way too. If a prosecutor were able to try the accused over and over again, they would have a higher chance of obtaining a guilty verdict if they were not able to initially do so in the first trial.) This post has already gone on too long, and not every issue brought up in this post applies to the story in the opening post. But the point is, a lot of this comes down to procedure, rather than logic and commonsense, like most people might expect.
Neither party is entitled to everything, since everything encompasses attorney-client privilege and attorney work-product.
Privilege and work-product are not inherently evidence. Perhaps you can explain how a WestLaw search is "evidence." Likewise, I'm not seeing where an internal memo on how to proceed with prosecution is "evidence."
