Is Edward Lee Elmore and His Family Still Alive
Story highlights
- Edward Lee Elmore was sentenced to death for a murder he says he didn't commit
- Lawyers: Law enforcement planted evidence and manipulated facts to convict him
- Federal appeals court blamed "farthermost malfunctions" in the justice system
- To win his freedom, Elmore pleaded guilty to murder while maintaining innocence
Past the time Edward Lee Elmore won his freedom at age 53, he had spent 30 years -- most of them on death row -- imprisoned in South Carolina for a crime he says he did not commit.
Law enforcement planted evidence and prosecutors manipulated facts to bandage Elmore equally the merely suspect in the 1982 murder of 75-year-one-time Dorothy Edwards, his lawyers merits.
Even with seemingly overwhelming evidence in Elmore's favor, it took nearly 2 decades to win his release, in what an appeals courtroom called "one of those exceptional cases of 'extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.' "
His experience raises almost every issue that shapes America's capital punishment contend: Deoxyribonucleic acid testing, mental retardation, a jailhouse snitch, incompetent defense lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct and "a stiff merits of innocence," said author Raymond Bonner, who wrote about the case in "Beefcake of Injustice: A Murder Example Gone Wrong."
In other words, a prime instance of when "innocence is not enough," Bonner said.
Elmore would probably still exist on expiry row if non for Diana Holt, who began investigating his claims of innocence in 1993. When Holt met Elmore, she was surprised that a bedevilled killer on death row could be "so docile and gentle."
Two postal service-conviction review courts rejected Elmore's claims, though one noted that he "may well non exist guilty." But Holt never considered giving upwardly.
"If I throw in the towel, a client dies. If I stop working, they stop animate," Holt said. "Sometimes, I am the first person who ever stuck by them or treated them with respect."
A bloody crime scene
Elmore was arrested in January 1982 for the rape and murder of Edwards, a wealthy widow in Greenwood, S Carolina. Edwards' longtime neighbor and friend, Greenwood Urban center Councilman Jimmy Holloway, told police he let himself into her house after noticing newspapers piling up in her driveway.
Inside the business firm, he discovered her bloody corpse in a bedroom closet and alerted police force. Holloway also identified Elmore, who had cleaned Edwards' windows and gutters the month before, as a possible doubtable.
Inside 48 hours, constabulary arrested Elmore based on a thumbprint found on Edwards' back door. By Apr, a Greenwood County jury had convicted Elmore of murder and sentenced him to death. It would be the first of iii times he would stand trial in the example, followed by years of appeals and mail service-conviction reviews.
When Holt took on the case, she says, she discovered a agonizing chain of events that led to Elmore'southward conviction, starting with law enforcement's willingness to build a case around Holloway'due south timeline. From there, Elmore's lawyers say, prosecutors suppressed claret and fingerprint evidence that could have cast doubt on their example. Instead, Elmore's lawyers claim that prosecutors deliberately introduced falsely incriminating statements from a jailhouse informant and hairs from Elmore that were not institute at the criminal offense scene.
A breakthrough finally came in 2011, when the 4th Excursion U.S. Courtroom of Appeals reversed Elmore's confidence and ordered a new trial, based partly on findings that Elmore's trial lawyers blindly accustomed the prosecution'southward case without bothering to examine the evidence in his start trial and retrial.
"A healthy skepticism of authorization, while mostly appropriate, is an absolute necessity for a lawyer representing a client charged with capital letter murder," a gauge wrote in the bulk opinion. "Elmore's lawyers disregarded their professional person obligation to investigate critical prosecution evidence, thereby engendering 'a breakdown in the adversarial procedure that our organisation counts on to produce just results.' "
'Couldn't believe my eyes'
None of information technology would have come to low-cal if not for Holt. She was in her mid-30s when she joined the case the summer before her third year of police force school. Her journey to police school had been hard-fought, with a history of abusive relationships and a stint as a teen serving time in a Louisiana prison for armed robbery.
At 28, she began taking community college classes and earned the grades to enter Southwest Texas State University. Given her past, Holt was pleasantly surprised when the University of Texas accepted her law school application in 1991.
Her professors nudged her in the management of death sentence litigation when she began to bear witness a knack for the persistent earthworks the job demands. Through internships at the Texas Resource Center, Holt met lawyer John Blume, executive director of the South Carolina Decease Penalization Resource Centre. During an internship there, Blume asked her to help with Elmore's instance by interviewing jurors.
"I started reading the trial testimony and couldn't believe my eyes," Holt said. "All the forensic evidence evaporated under the smallest measure of scrutiny."
She became immersed in the case, "all Elmore, all the fourth dimension," and "classes became more similar an annoying lark," she said. Blume offered her a chore as a staff attorney once she graduated, but she couldn't wait and moved to Due south Carolina before the final spring semester, for "Elmore and John Blume," she said, half-joking.
A few things virtually the instance jumped out at her.
For one, constabulary said they had seized pubic hairs from Edwards' bed and identified them every bit belonging to Elmore.
If that was true, Holt wondered, where were criminal offense scene photos of those hairs on the bed? Why weren't they packaged like other show taken from the scene? Why didn't investigators collect the bedsheets for farther assay? Elmore conceded that hairs introduced into trial evidence belonged to him but claimed that police pulled them from his head and groin surface area after his arrest.
Meanwhile, fibers and hairs collected from Edwards' trunk and marked "item T" on an evidence log were never introduced into testify. For years, the state claimed they were missing, until 1998, when they were establish in the private office of an investigator in the case. Testing revealed a "Caucasian pubic pilus inconsistent with Mrs. Edwards" that Elmore's squad claims could have cast doubt on the state's theory that he was the simply possible killer.
Holloway'southward "farcical" trial testimony also led Holt to question his portrayal by prosecutors as a shocked neighbour and longtime friend. When Holt interviewed Holloway in 1993, within five minutes, she said, he told her, "I am the only one who could kill her and get away with it, the way she trusted me so."
Holloway died in 1994.
And yet, when Elmore walked out of prison house in 2012, he was not fully exonerated.
Elmore agreed to a bargain with prosecutors that allowed him to maintain his innocence while pleading guilty. In exchange for pleading guilty to murder, the state dropped a burglary charge and agreed to a 30-yr sentence with credit for fourth dimension served.
In the 2012 hearing, prosecutor Jerry Peace said that the state even so believed it had a strong example confronting Elmore but that the victim'southward daughter supported the plea as a means of ending the case.
Holt, even so, told the courtroom that his defense squad believed Elmore is "100% innocent" just also sought to end the case. He could have gone to trial, but she has seen other clients wait years for a retrial. She likewise would take preferred an all-out acquittal, but "firsthand freedom stymied ongoing justice," she said.
"That the justice system provided an avenue for an immediate release to freedom for Mr. Elmore that was previously not available to him is more than justice than injustice," she said. "Justice was better served with his freedom."
If you were in Elmore'south shoes, would you plead guilty to a crime you did non commit, in orde r to become out of prison? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/death-row-stories-elmore/index.html
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