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Left Column...
Why would the police lie about a thing like that?
Anyone who still believes in fairy tales might have a hard time explaining away the behavior of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida police and District Attorney's office.
Chiquita Lowe claimed that she saw a man leaving the home of Shandra Whitehead in Fort Lauderdale on the night of April 14, 1985. Shandra had been raped and murdered. She was eight years old. Chiquita Lowe saw the man, she said in court.
The police had a suspect: he was Frank Lee Smith, a man with a criminal record. But they had no evidence linking Smith to the crime. But they had Chiquita Lowe. Chiquita saw Smith leave the house. The entire case-- a capital case-- sat on her testimony. Smith was convicted and sentenced to death. He remained on death row for eleven years, until he died, of cancer, in prison. He remained on death row for eleven years, even though Chiquita Lowe recanted her testimony. He remained on death row for eleven years while the prosecutors refused to do a DNA test to confirm or exclude his guilt.
Eventually, of course, the DNA test was done. Smith was categorically excluded. Not only was Smith exonerated, but another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, was matched to the DNA. Mosley is being held in psychiatric prisons after being found insane when he was brought up on two other murder charges.
Do the police go, "oops"? Do they apologize? And admit that the police can make mistakes? Never!
Chiquita Lowe now says that the police pressured her to identify Smith. You can hear them, can't you? We know the guy did it but we don't exactly have the evidence. Do you want to be responsible for his next victim if he walks? It's your duty to testify as to what we think you saw that night....
She also says the police never showed her a picture of Mosley though the police claim they did, and that she did not recognize him. The police claim she did recognize Smith.
Lowe testified about all this at hearings to reopen the case in 1991 and 1998. The police and prosecutors said she was a liar and completely unreliable. The judge agreed. The judge didn't seem to realize that he had just rejected as "unreliable" the only witness in support of the prosecution's original case, a case so thin and insubstantial that it makes you wonder if there is any system at all to justice in America.
How can a judge, with a straight face, declare that a man's life should be taken based almost entirely on the word of a single "unreliable" witness?
Well, now that the DNA evidence is in, what do the police have to say for themselves? You know what they say? You won't believe it. They say that Smith must have been burglarizing the home at the same time that Mosley was raping and murdering little Shandra Whitehead. That's why, they say, Lowe did see Smith fleeing the house. That's why, they say, detectives really did overhear Smith say something incriminating as they were escorting him to jail. That's why, they say, the police are really never wrong, though sometimes strange things happen... who knows?
The problem is not that the police occasionally make a mistake. The problem is that the police, encouraged by conservative law and order politicians and incompetent judges, have developed the habit of picking a likely suspect-- preferably someone poor and uneducated and with a history of convictions-- and then hanging a case on him.
It's so much easier than investigating the crime and making a case against a real suspect.
Copyright © 2001 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
