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Montgomery, Ala. — Toforest Johnson, 49, has spent half his life on Alabama’s death row for the homicide of a sheriff’s deputy, a killing he says he did not commit.
Johnson’s attorneys requested the Alabama Supreme Court on Friday to “right a grievous wrong” and grant him a new trial. The submitting is the newest effort in a case that has seen former judges, prosecutors and the native district lawyer take part calls to reexamine the 1998 conviction and death sentence.
Johnson’s attorneys are asking the justices to overview a decrease courtroom determination denying the new trial request. They argued that the conviction rested on the testimony of a single witness who was paid a reward and that her testimony “was at odds with the physical evidence and directly contradicted by the state’s theory of the case in other proceedings.”
“The first thing to know is that he is innocent. … Former prosecutors have said it themselves, that there needs to be more eyes on this case and he deserves a new trial,” Johnson’s daughter, Shanaye Poole, mentioned in a phone interview.
Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the killing of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy, who was shot twice within the head whereas working off-duty safety at a lodge in 1995. The conviction got here after Johnson’s first trial ended with a hung jury. A co-defendant within the case was acquitted.
Poole was simply 5 when her father was sentenced to death. She sat on somebody’s shoulders to look by means of the window on the courtroom door to see her father. “That was the last time I saw my dad in person before his freedom was taken from him,” she mentioned.
Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, former Chief Justice Drayton Nabers Jr. and several other former judges and prosecutors submitted briefs to the circuit courtroom, or wrote editorials, supporting a new trial for Johnson. Danny Carr, the district lawyer within the county the place Johnson was convicted, additionally referred to as for a new trial.
Baxley, who labored many years in the past to have the death penalty reinstated in Alabama, mentioned he’s often skeptical of such innocence claims filed by what he referred to as “do-gooder” attorneys. But he mentioned he was astonished on the case.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was just dumfounded that, in Alabama, a case as weak as that would have gotten to the jury, much less a death sentence,” Baxley mentioned in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 ordered a new listening to to happen on Johnson’s declare of suppressed proof
The key prosecution witness on the 1998 trial testified that, whereas eavesdropping on a cellphone name, she heard a person she believed was Johnson admitting to the crime. She was paid $5,000 in 2001 for her testimony, and Johnson’s attorneys argue that the state withheld proof of financial motivation for the testimony.
A choose denied the new trial request in 2020, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld that call in May, ruling that Johnson’s attorneys had not established that the witness “came forward with information in hope of the reward or that the state ever knew of such a hope before Johnson’s trial.”
The Alabama lawyer basic’s workplace has opposed the request for a new trial. Attorneys for the state argued that the witness testified that she was unaware {that a} reward had been supplied when she contacted legislation enforcement.
The current courtroom proceedings have been narrowly targeted on the difficulty of the reward, however Baxley mentioned the case deserves a fuller look.
“Every breath this guy draws on death row is an indictment to the people of Alabama that I love so much,” Baxley mentioned. “If some proper court will look at it, they are going to come to the same conclusion.”
Nabers wrote in an opinion piece this spring that, “there’s now substantial evidence that Mr. Johnson is innocent.”
Carr wrote in 2020 that he took no place on Johnson’s innocence or guilt however mentioned there are considerations about his trial. He wrote that these embrace a key witness being paid a reward, a truth not talked about at trial, in addition to alibi witnesses who positioned Johnson in one other a part of city on the time of the taking pictures.
“A prosecutor’s duty is not merely to secure convictions, but to seek justice,” the transient acknowledged. “It is the district attorney’s position that in the interest of justice, Mr. Johnson, who has spent more than two decades on death row, be granted a new trial.”
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story by The Texas Tribune Source link
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