Page 11 - the NOISE April 2014

When detectives first arrived at his door, Mr. Krone invited them inside, confused and curious. They informed him that they need- ed to question him at the station. He cooper- ated; at the time, he wasn’t even certain what was going on. After being grilled at the sta- tion and forced to give DNA and mouth cast samples, Mr. Krone remained calm, knowing his innocence.
The second time detectives showed up at his door and took him to the station, he was arrested for the sexual assault and mur- der of Ms. Ancona. Though facing murder charges, Mr. Krone was optimistic, declining the chance to hire his own lawyer. What did he have to worry about? He was innocent; a thorough investigation would soon prove that. But his court-appointed lawyer was paid a measly $5,000, and as Mr. Krone de- scribed, that’s precisely the caliber of repre- sentation he received. The state prosecution reportedly paid over $50,000 for Dr. Raw- son’s testimony alone, their beloved “bite mark expert” — ten times what Mr. Krone’s prosecutor was paid to defend him. Before too long, Mr. Krone was found guilty of first- degree murder and sentenced to death.
After two years on death row, Mr. Krone was granted a retrial due to the prosecution’s withholding of evidence. Still, four years af- ter being initially arrested, it was to be more of the same. Mr. Krone recalls that upon hearing the verdict at his second trial, the prosecution “jumped up and high-fived like they’d all just won a ball-game” as his mother and sister screamed — his family that, at the conclusion of everything, would end up pay- ing $300,000 fighting for his innocence.
Currently in the forensic community, bite mark testimony is seen as “junk science.” According to a 2002 study by the American Board of Forensic Odontologists, 63.5% of bite mark investigations resulted in “false positives,” and another 22% resulted in
“false negatives.”
Simply stated, bite mark evidence is
wrong far more often than it’s accurate. Es- sentially, Mr. Krone was condemned twice due to wildly inaccurate “expert” testimony.
Even after Mr. Krone’s exoneration, Mari- copa County Attorney Rick Romley defend- ed his prosecution by saying there was still
“strong circumstantial evidence” of Mr. Kro- ne’s guilt. When faced with conclusive proof to the contrary, Mr. Romley simply stated,
“We will try to do better.”
Mr. Krone even alleges that after Mr. Phil-
lips admitted guilt, Mr. Romley tried to make a deal with the killer to say that Mr. Krone was present with him the night he murdered Ms. Ancona. As Mr. Krone explained, “If you’re a prosecutor in a capital murder case, you better get your conviction ... If they put me on death row, they can put anyone on death row.”
Adding international perspective to the seminar, Daniel Reyes Cosío, who works for Mexico’s Departamento de Protección, briefly explained his organization’s aim of avoiding capital punishment in the United States for Mexican nationals. Their goal does not hinge upon guilt, but rather their views that capital punishment goes against mod- ern standards of human rights.
So far, the department has been unsuc- cessful only once, and only because the in- carcerated man refused to cooperate with them. Relating to the horrors of Mr. Krone’s testimony, Mr. Cosío asked that the audi- ence “imagine being a Mexican national, to not speak the language, to not understand what’s going on.”
Up next was NAU Criminal Justice Profes- sor Robert Schehr, who also serves as Direc- tor of the NAU Arizona Innocence Project, a university-supported project founded in 2002 which investigates claims of innocence from cases prosecuted in the state of Arizona. If the presenters before him came equipped primarily with pathos, Mr. Schehr was there to lay down some cold, hard logos.
Primarily citing a Colombia University study overseen by Professor James S. Lieb- man titled “A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases 1973-1995,” Mr. Schehr me- ticulously argued that our incarceration and capital punishment practices are “structur- ally broken.”
The Colombia study examined 5,760 capi- tal cases between 1973 and 1995, ultimately concluding that American capital cases are commonly and systematically rife with error. In fact, more than two out of every three cap- ital sentences examined during the 23-year study period were deemed to be seriously flawed, containing error which undermined the reliability of the trial’s outcome. The overall rate of prejudicial error was 68%, the most common being due to either incompe- tent defense lawyers or police/prosecutors who suppress evidence.
In conclusion, Mr. Liebman states, “If one measures the ‘success’ of the death penalty system by the amount of capital sentences which result in executions then this 23-year- study shows that the system is not a success, and is not even minimally rational.” Perhaps most troubling to hear was that Arizona was among the states with the worst rate of seri- ous error, at 79%; of those errors, the Arizona Court of Appeals captured only 38%.
Mr. Schehr argued that regardless of one’s own personal opinion, there are certain facts that cannot be argued, facts that at the very least warrant some alarm. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, so much so that in 2009, the ratio was 743 adults incarcerated per 100,000 members of the population. In 2011, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statis- tics, 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated
— about 0.7% of adults in the US resident population.
With over two million incarcerated, even with a 1% error rate — a rate much lower than what the Colombia study actually found — that means there are currently 20,000 people wrongfully imprisoned in the United States. Using that same rate of error, of the 125 Arizona inmates currently sitting on death row, one or more should not be there.
In conclusion, Mr. Schehr stated, “There’s no place for the death penalty in a civilized world. Then again, maybe that’s why we still have it.”
Following Mr. Schehr was his NAU peer Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Director of the Martin- Springer Institute which promotes global engagement through holocaust awareness. Keeping his presentation brief, Dr. Krondor- fer stressed that in the United States, unlike in other countries, the focus of incarceration is not rehabilitation, but punishment. Taking a more moralistic approach to death penalty abolishment than his predecessors, he end- ed by simply stating, “Everyone deserves the right to change.”
For more information, azdeathpenalty.org
| Mark Szopinski is Flagstaff writer and musician. busyb3ingborn@gmail.com
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