CHAPTER 11 ACTUAL PERPETRATORS: PUBLIC SAFETY AND MONETARY CONSIDERATIONS
| Jurisdiction | North Carolina |
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
• Understand what is meant by "true perpetrators" in the context of wrongful convictions.
• Discuss research documenting the extent of preventable crimes committed by true perpetrators.
• Discuss the individual and societal costs incurred when true perpetrators remain at large while innocent individuals are wrongfully convicted.
• Understand that reforms aimed at improving justice system reliability and thus reducing wrongful convictions should outweigh ideological differences concerning justice system values.
Three-year-old Courtney Smith was abducted from the bed she shared with her two sisters in rural Noxubee County, Mississippi, on the early morning of September 15, 1990. Two days later her body was found in a nearby pond. An autopsy revealed that she had suffered several injuries, including bruises about her head, tears in her vaginal wall and hymen, and abrasions on her wrist. The cause of death was drowning. Five-year-old Ashley Smith, one of Courtney's sisters, identified Levon Brooks, a former boyfriend of her mother, as the man who had taken Courtney from her bed. Brooks was arrested and charged with capital murder. He pled not guilty and was brought to trial in January 1992. Dr. Michael West, a forensic odontologist, testified for the prosecution. Dr. West identified the abrasions on Courtney's wrist as human bite marks and stated that "it could be no one else but Levon Brooks that bit this girl's arm" (quoted in Brooks v. State, 1999, p. 750). Brooks was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
In May 1992 a tragically similar crime occurred in Noxubee County, just three miles from where Courtney Smith had resided. Three-year-old Christine Jackson disappeared from her bedroom sometime before dawn on May 3rd. Kennedy Brewer, the boyfriend of Christine's mother and the father of two of her children, had been babysitting Christine and her two younger siblings during the night. Two days after Christine's disappearance, her body was discovered in a creek behind her house. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. Brewer was charged with the crimes and brought to trial in March 1995. Dr. Michael West testified at the trial that multiple wounds found on Christine's body were human bite marks. He opined that five of the marks "were very good and [he] indicated within a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Brewer put them there" (Brewer v. State, 1998, p. 134). Brewer was convicted and sentenced to death. While affirming his conviction and death sentence, the Mississippi Supreme Court concluded that "[t]he evidence in this case, albeit circumstantial, sufficiently supported the jury's verdict" (Brewer v. State, 1998, p. 134).
Much later, the convictions against both Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer unraveled. Neither had committed the heinous crimes that resulted in Brooks spending 18 years in jail and prison, and Brewer remaining incarcerated for more than 15 years, including several spent on death row. DNA testing conducted in 2001 excluded Brewer as the source of semen recovered from Christine Jackson's body. Although his conviction was vacated, he was held in jail five more years pending a new trial. Attorneys for the Innocence Project pressed to secure Brewer's release. They also noted the similarity between the crimes for which Brewer and Brooks had been convicted. Their investigation linked the DNA evidence in Brewer's case to another man, Justin Albert Johnson (Innocence Project, 2008).
Johnson lived close to the homes of the murdered children in both cases. He had a history of sexually assaulting women and children. Although he had been a suspect in both crimes, and even provided blood and hair samples during one of the investigations, law enforcement authorities did not pursue him or the possible connection between the two sexual assaults and murders. They had focused instead on Brooks and Brewer. The same sheriff's officer had investigated the killings in both cases and the same medical examiner had conducted the autopsies. The same prosecutor had filed charges in both cases. Dr. West had examined the bodies of both children and testified at both trials. Ironically, Johnson reportedly was excluded as a suspect in both cases based on bite-mark comparisons. After the DNA analysis led the police to Johnson, he confessed to murdering both Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson (Dewan, 2008; Forensic Examiner, 2008; Innocence Project, 2008; Neufeld, 2008).
Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were exonerated in 2008 (Mott, 2008). Justin Albert Johnson pled guilty to raping and murdering Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson in 2012. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole (Sisson, 2012). A lawyer from the Innocence Project observed: "If local law enforcement had properly investigated these crimes, they would have stayed focused on Albert Johnson from the beginning. In fact, if Albert Johnson had been apprehended for the first crime, the second one would never have happened—and the three-year-old victim would be approaching her 18th birthday" (Innocence Project, 2008).
Mississippi Innocence (2011). In this documentary film, director Joe York examines the story of the wrongful convictions of Brewer and Brooks as well as their path to exoneration and return to society.
Wrongful convictions produce a tsunami of harms. The harms begin, of course, with the innocent persons who suffer punishment for crimes they did not commit. They almost always entail fractured familial relations and lost friendships. They extend more broadly still, tarnishing systems of justice and how citizens perceive them. Additional insidious harms loom in "wrong person" cases. When an innocent person is erroneously arrested, charged, convicted, and punished, the true offender has escaped prosecution and remains at large, all the while capable of committing more crimes and claiming new victims. As evidence of these grim truths, we need look no farther than the compounded miscarriages of justice in the cases of Levon Brooks, Kennedy Brewer, their families, and the young victims of Justin Albert Johnson's brutal crimes.
The new harms inflicted by the real offender when the wrong person is held responsible for a crime are an often-overlooked consequence of wrongful convictions. They represent "the flipside injustice" of wrongful convictions (Acker, 2012/2013). The most immediate and significant harm occurs in the form of new crime victims; victims whose lives, health, and property would have been spared had the crime's true perpetrator been arrested and prosecuted rather than the innocent person who instead suffered conviction and punishment.
Data maintained by the Innocence Project reveal that the true perpetrators of crimes were identified in 159 of the 325 (49%) DNA-based exonerations reported...
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