Chapter 10 No-Crime Cases
| Jurisdiction | North Carolina |
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
• Understand what is meant by a "no-crime" wrongful conviction.
• Discuss the kinds of cases in which no-crime wrongful convictions occur, including shaken-baby syndrome and child sex abuse cases.
• Understand how police misconduct and faulty forensic field tests can lead to no-crime wrongful convictions.
The prototypical wrongful conviction is one in which a crime is committed, but the wrong person — an innocent person—is erroneously arrested, convicted, and punished for the act. Most of the cases discussed thus far in this book have been such "wrong-person" cases. There is, however, another type of wrongful conviction case: one in which no crime is ever committed, but someone is convicted anyway. That is, an innocent person is convicted and punished for a "crime" that never actually took place.
Such "no-crime" wrongful convictions have a long history. In fact, the first known wrongful conviction in the United States, the case of Stephen and Jesse Boorn (discussed in chapter 1 of this book), was a no-crime case: the brothers were convicted in 1819 of killing their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin, who later turned up very much alive. It might be easy for some to dismiss such a case as an artifact of its time. Surely, one might think, a person could not be convicted today if no crime were actually committed.
While seemingly unbelievable, no-crime wrongful convictions are not particularly rare in the modern criminal justice system. The National Registry of Exonerations defines a "no-crime" case as one in which: "The exoneree was convicted of a crime that did not occur, either because an accident or a suicide was mistaken for a crime, or because the exoneree was accused of a fabricated crime that never happened" (National Registry of Exonerations, n.d.). When the NRE published its first report in 2012, less than 15% of exonerations occurred in no-crime cases (Gross & Shaffer, 2012). As of March 2021, more than one-third of NRE cases (1,022 of 2,755) are categorized as no-crime cases. Remarkably, nearly three out of every four women exonerated since 1989 (73%) were convicted of crimes that never happened (Innocence Project, 2021). This startling proportion of no-crime cases is explained, in part, by the high incidence (roughly 40%) of these exoneration cases that involve women who were convicted of harming children or other loved ones in their care (Innocence Project, 2021), a topic we discuss in more detail later. Many no-crime exoneration cases involved drug-related charges, although these are far from the only cases represented. They run the gamut of crime types including arson, assault, child sex abuse, forgery, fraud, gun crimes, burglary, robbery, murder, and more. The Scottsboro Boys cases, which we discussed in chapter 1, involved false accusations of rape when no such crimes occurred.
The factors that are known to contribute to no-crime wrongful convictions overlap with those discussed throughout this book: forensic errors, false accusations, police and prosecutorial misconduct, poor defense lawyering, and the like (Henry, 2020). However, the prevalence of contributing factors among no-crime cases does differ somewhat from what is found in exonerations more broadly. According to the NRE, perjury or false accusation is the most common factor found across all exonerations (60%), and the same is true of no-crime cases (62%). However, other contributors are found less often in no-crime cases. For instance, official misconduct is present in nearly 55% of all exonerations but only 43% of no-crime exonerations. An even greater disparity is found with false confessions (12% in all exonerations vs. 5% in no-crime cases) and mistaken witness identification (28% vs. 0.3%). This makes some sense. If no crime is committed, we should expect few witnesses generally and hence fewer mistaken eyewitnesses, and one result may be that the police have less leverage to elicit a false confession.
How, then, are innocent people convicted of crimes that never occurred? Perhaps the best way to understand this phenomenon is through illustrative case studies. Below, we describe no-crime cases of several types, highlighting the variety of ways such wrongful convictions can occur.1
Even in the modern justice system, people are occasionally convicted of murder when the alleged victim was, in fact, not killed. However, unlike the Boorn brothers' case already discussed, most no-crime wrongful murder convictions do not involve a victim who miraculously turns up alive. Instead, they tend to involve issues such as miscategorized suicides, shoddy arson investigations, the accidental or naturally caused deaths of children and infants, and rejected claims of self-defense.
Murder or Suicide? The Case of Cesar Munoz
Magdaliz Rosario was killed by a gunshot wound to the head on September 8, 1997. She was in the bedroom of the Chicago, Illinois, apartment she shared with her common-law husband, Cesar Munoz, and another man named John Flores. Earlier that day, Flores had gone with Rosario to the security company where he worked so she could apply for a job, and she was hired on the spot. Munoz reported that he was annoyed with Rosario because she had left him to care for their children, so he drove with them to the business where she was interviewing. When they returned home, Munoz said they put two of the children to bed, and Rosario prepared a bath for the third. Then, Munoz said, Rosario went into their bedroom and locked the door, and he heard a gunshot. He tried opening the door lock with a nail and when he was unable to do so, he broke the door down. After Munoz screamed for help, Munoz's father entered the room while Munoz was dragging Rosario across the apartment to the stairs. Munoz said he had tossed the gun out of an open window and into a trash can, where police found the weapon under more than a foot of garbage. Munoz had two spots of blood on his shirt where he had seemingly cradled Rosario, and there was no other blood evidence to place him near her at the time of the shooting (Associated Press, 2013). Flores reported to the police that he and Rosario were having an affair. Munoz, he said, was jealous, and Rosario was unhappy with her relationship.
Munoz was charged with first-degree murder. After his first trial ended in a mistrial, he was tried a second time in November 2000. Several witnesses testified against Munoz. Flores testified regarding his affair with Rosario and said she did not seem suicidal. The detectives testified to Munoz's statements, said that the gun was found buried in the trash can, rather than on top as would be expected, and that the bedroom door had not been locked as Munoz reported. A ballistics expert linked the fatal bullet to the gun, and a crime lab analyst found gun powder residue on Rosario's left hand, although testing on Munoz was inconclusive. Finally, a pathologist testified that the wound was from close contact, but was indicative of a homicide rather than a suicide.
For the defense, Munoz's brother testified that he heard Munoz scream for help and shout, "She shot herself!" He ran upstairs, saw Rosario on the floor and Munoz standing nearby, and then ran back down to call 911. Munoz's cousin also rushed to the apartment after hearing the screams and said he was told that Rosario shot herself. Munoz also testified on his own behalf. He said that after they returned home, Rosario went to the bedroom and was sobbing. She then prepared the bath for their third child, went to the bedroom, and slammed the door. He could not get in, but peeked through a crack and saw Rosario get the pistol out of the dresser. Munoz said he then heard the gunshot and broke the door down. He also admitted that he had reported to detectives that he struggled with Rosario over the gun, but said that was untrue. The defense also wanted to introduce testimony from a friend of Rosario's who reported that she had been suicidal a week before she died, and from a pathologist who would follow up with a report that the death was a suicide, but the friend's testimony was barred by the judge and the pathologist did not testify.
Munoz was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison. His conviction was reversed in 2004, but he was again convicted at his third trial. At that trial, a detective testified that he believed Munoz's story was a lie, and the prosecution further presented evidence that Munoz's jealousy about Rosario's affair was his motivation for killing her.
The conviction was again overturned in 2010 and for his fourth trial, Munoz decided on a bench trial — to have his case decided by a judge, rather than a jury. The defense introduced several new key pieces of evidence. First, a locksmith had examined photographs of the door and reported that it had been locked and it looked like it was scratched with a nail, as Munoz said. A child psychologist testified about Rosario's abandonment by her mother and the related depression she experienced. Finally, the defense introduced testimony about the gun powder residue on her left hand, which suggested that, although Rosario was right-handed, she had held the gun in her left hand and pulled the trigger with her right thumb.
On June 12, 2013 —16 years after Rosario's death — Munoz was acquitted by Judge Rosemary Higgins. Although Munoz's innocence may not be as crystal clear as some of the other individuals we have discussed, his acquittal at retrial means that he was formally exonerated. At the very least, there is a clear lack of tangible evidence that Rosario's death was a homicide, let alone that it was committed by Munoz.
Death by Arson: The Case of Han Tak Lee
When a cabin fire broke out at a camp in Halifax, Pennsylvania, on July 29, 1989, 20-year-old Ji Yun Lee was killed. Arson investigators reported that the fire was set...
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