Gould v. Commissioner of Correction and the Conundrum of Being Legally Guilty but Actually Innocent in the Criminal Justice System
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 262 |
86 CBJ 262. GOULD V. COMMISSIONER OF CORRECTION AND THE CONUNDRUM OF BEING LEGALLY GUILTY BUT ACTUALLY INNOCENT IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Volume 86, No. 3, Pg. 262
September 2012
George Gould and Ronald Taylor were convicted of robbing and killing Eugenio Vega at his grocery store in New Haven on July 4, 1993. The case against these men was wholly based on the uncorroborated testimony of Doreen Stiles, a self-described "dopesick" prostitute.(fn1) In essence, Stiles testified that from her vantage point in an adjoining alleyway she saw Gould and Taylor enter the store, overheard an argument about money, heard a single gunshot, and then saw Gould and Taylor leave the premises.(fn2)Crediting that testimony, a jury convicted Gould and Taylor of felony murder, robbery and conspiracy; each was sentenced to eighty years imprisonment.
Sixteen years later, in reviewing these convictions, Superior Court Judge Stanley Fuger noted that "[t]here was no fingerprint evidence, there was no murder weapon recovered, there were no 'fruits of the crime' recovered and there was no DNA evidence at the crime scene that in any way linked the petitioners [Gould or Taylor] to this crime."(fn3) Stiles' testimony was the only evidence the prosecution had against Gould and Taylor.(fn4) And on that note, Stiles convinced Judge Fuger that her trial testimony was riddled with lies and fabrications. In turn, the court found that Gould and Taylor were actually innocent of the crimes for which they were languishing in prison, vacated their convictions, and ordered their immediate release from custody.(fn5) The State appealed.
In a unanimous decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed, explaining that, in order to merit post-conviction relief on the basis of actual innocence,(fn6) convicted defendants, like Gould and Taylor, must do more than totally eviscerate all evidence of their guilt; they must produce affirmative evidence of their innocence.(fn7) Because the petitioners in Gould proved only that their convictions were entirely based on perjurious testimony, they failed to prove their innocence.(fn8) Such is the conundrum of being legally guilty but actually innocent in the criminal justice system.
Significantly, Gould and Taylor were not sent back to prison because their claims of innocence were unfounded or insubstantial. Indeed, the majority acknowledges "that it may seem unjust to allow a conviction to stand when the evidence on which the conviction rested has been discredited."(fn9) Gould and Taylor were sent back to prison because the applicable standard of review for non-DNA based claims of post-conviction innocence, rooted in age-old notions of finality and repose, is practically impossible to meet. As Gould demonstrates, the level of justification the court requires in a given case-its standard of review-often preordains the outcome of the case.
This Article contends that, in light of growing evidence that innocent people are being convicted in otherwise proce-durally fair trials "in numbers never imagined before the development of DNA tests,"(fn10) post-conviction standards of review in non-DNA cases fail to properly serve the ends of justice. Because the same errors that produced the convictions that DNA evidence exposed-for example, erroneous eyewitness identifications, witness perjury, false confessions and the like-are just as likely to occur in cases that are devoid of evidence amenable to scientific testing, a post-conviction claim of actual innocence should be recognized not only in cases based on newly discovered extrinsic evidence of innocence but also in cases where it can be reliably shown that a material witness provided false evidence at trial.(fn11)
This Article is organized in four parts. Part I focuses on the normative basis for the judiciary's enduring resistance to recognizing post-conviction claims of actual innocence. Part II argues that systemic flaws in the fact-finding process of criminal trials, as highlighted by significant numbers of post-conviction DNA exonerations, support expanding remediation standards for aggrieved prisoners. Part III discusses the developing jurisprudence of innocence, and Part IV proposes that a reliable showing by a post-conviction petitioner that the fact-finding process of his or her trial was corrupted by materially false evidence is itself a sufficient basis for granting a new trial.
At common law, a jury's verdict was considered the final truth of the case and that "truth" was incontestable. The notion of challenging a jury verdict in a criminal case for any reason was unthinkable. According to legal historian Theodore Plucknett, "[f]or centuries it was an unwritten axiom that a criminal trial could not be reviewed."(fn12) As Chief Justice Marshall explained in Ex Parte Watkins,
A judgment in its nature concludes the subject on which it is rendered, and pronounces the law of the case. . . .It puts an end to inquiry concerning the facts by deciding it. . . .
Erroneous though it may be, a criminal judgment was thus final and not reviewable in early nineteenth-century criminal jurisprudenceAn imprisonment under a judgment cannot be unlawful, unless that judgment be an absolute nullity; and it is not a nullity if the court has general jurisdiction of the subject, although it should be erroneous.(fn13)
well into the twentieth century it was still widely held that courts lacked the inherent power to grant relief to wrongly convicted defendants.(fn14) In some of the more egregious cases, defendants convicted of murdering individuals who were later discovered to be alive, and defendants convicted of committing robberies that never occurred,(fn15) were denied legal remedies. An appeal for executive clemency was (and often still is) the only remedy available to the convict-ed-but-innocent, for the justice system is done with them.
Today, all states provide some process for obtaining post-conviction relief on the basis of newly discovered evidence;(fn16) most circumscribe the time frame in which such claims must be made, and all set extremely high proof requirements that must be met to warrant judicial relief.(fn17) In consequence, the process of proving one's innocence (many times years after trial) through newly discovered evidence is so burdened with procedural restrictions that for all practical purposes no meaningful remedy exists. Ironically, it is much easier for the prosecution to obtain a guilty verdict against someone who is presumed by law to be innocent than it is for a person who is actually innocent to obtain relief after a wrongful conviction-even one based entirely on perjured testimony.
The judiciary's intractable resistance to re-opening judgments in criminal cases is rooted in a policy of finality: the belief that right or wrong cases must come to an end. In the 1963 article Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, Professor Paul Bator argues that finality gives legitimacy to criminal convictions and that without it the criminal law is deprived of much of its deterrent effect.(fn18) The oft-quoted remarks of Justice Harlan in Mackey v. United States punctuate these arguments:
No one, not criminal defendants, not the judicial system, not society as a whole is benefited by a judgment providing a man shall tentatively go to jail today, but tomorrow and every day thereafter his continued incarceration shall be subject to fresh litigation on issues already resolved.(fn19)
However, as Professor Bator acknowledges, this notion of finality "raises acute problems in our society."(fn20) No system of justice can function if its judgments are in a state of perpetual flux. Victims of crimes, as well as the public in general, have legitimate interests in seeing that those individuals who have been convicted of crimes do not elude their just punishment. But all members of society have an equally compelling interest in ensuring that criminal proceedings justly and fairly produce correct outcomes.
Society needs to have factual disputes resolved and finality accorded to those resolutions. However, society at large and the individual in particular have an equal interest in ensuring that only the guilty are convicted and punished. On balance, the relative importance of ensuring the finality of criminal judgments is simply not more important to the continued legitimacy of the criminal justice system than the exoneration of factually innocent individuals.
Fundamentally, the problem with post-conviction standards of review that are virtually impossible to satisfy is that they elevate finality over correctness and process over results. Though no system of justice can guarantee error-free decision making, correct results matter; growing numbers of provably incorrect results call into question the legitimacy of the process.
At one time it may have been possible to take comfort in the belief that fundamental miscarriages of justice either did not occur or occurred so rarely that there was simply no need to be concerned about innocent people being erroneously convicted or wrongly executed. That ship has sailed. DNA science is indisputably proving that wrongful convictions occur with regular and troubling frequency in the criminal justice system.(fn21) Moreover, for each DNA exoneration, there are probably hundreds of wrongly convicted individuals whose cases do not contain biological evidence that could affirmatively prove innocence.(fn22) Thus, if growing numbers of confirmed DNA exonerations are the tip of the proverbial innocence iceberg, as is a...
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