Wrongfully convicted man dies 10 years after prison release

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press
Updated 4:49 pm, Thursday, January 25, 2018



JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man who spent 16 years in prison for crimes he didn't commit has died after an extended illness, a decade after being released.

Levon Brooks died Wednesday at his home in Columbus, Mississippi. He was 58. His widow, Dinah Brooks, said he was diagnosed with colon cancer five years ago.

Brooks was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for the 1990 rape and killing of Courtney Smith, the 3-year-old daughter of his former girlfriend. The conviction was partly based on testimony from Dr. Michael West, a forensic dentist who came under intense criticism for his testimony in criminal cases.

Brooks was released from prison in February 2008 after DNA evidence pointed to another man, who confessed. At an exoneration hearing the next month, the prosecutor apologized to Brooks.




Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Wrongfully-convicted-man-dies-10-years-after-12525893.php

---

District Attorney

[DFW]

1. This happens so often in the USA, it's practically routine

The Texas Innocence Project sprang up precisely because this was occurring so much.

I want a federal law mandating that overzealous prosecutions that deliberately ignore blatant exonerating evidence result in the DA and investigating police officer(s) serve mandatory sentences equivalent to that served by the wrongly convicted, up to and including death. Maybe the presiding judge, too, if deliberate suppressing of exonerating evidence can be shown.

Too harsh? What about for the wrongly convicted? Sixteen years of a peron's life stolen isn't harsh? I'm not talking about mistakes here. I'm talking about deliberate persecution of an innocent in order to score some political or PR points.

It's maybe a little Draconian, but I'll bet it would remove the incentive to deliberately go for a wrongful conviction in one big hurry. There seems to be no such disincentive in our legal system, and way too many innocent Americans are being incarcerated, or even executed because of it.

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” -- Sir William Blackstone (July 10, 1723 – February 14, 1780).

[Aristus]

2. "Everything that happens to you between the time you are arrested until the time you are

interrogated at the station is designed to get you to confess."

Quote from the film "Molly's Game".