O What a Tangled Web
BIG LIZARD BLOG
By Dafydd on Crime and Punishment
This is jaw dropping: in an effort to secure commutation of the death sentence against California inmate Michael Morales, his defense team (which includes Kenneth Starr, interestingly) sent to Gov. Schwarzenegger six sworn affidavits from the jurors who decided his case (or his sentence, or both), begging the governator for clemency for Morales.
But according to prosecutors, those six affidavits were literally faked.
The jurors denied they thought Michael Morales deserved clemency because some of the testimony at his trial may have been fabricated, said Nathan Barankin, spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer.
"We showed each person the declaration on their behalf and they all said they didn't say that," Barankin said....
On Friday, the San Joaquin District Attorney's office sent Schwarzenegger a new batch of sworn statements from five of those jurors saying they not only still supported capital punishment for Morales, but had never spoken with the defense investigator who claimed to have secured their signatures.
Kathleen Culhane, the San Francisco private investigator who Starr and Senior said had interviewed the jurors, declined to comment.
None of the five jurors involved in the legal tug-of-war, whose names were blacked out of the competing clemency documents to protect their privacy, could immediately be reached for comment.
(Evidently, one of the six jurors was unable or unwilling to file a new affidavit with the DA's office that he or she had not given the previous one; this could be as uninteresting as the juror being out of state, or as significant as the juror refusing to swear that he or she didn't previously swear. We'll see.)
It's hard to overstate the seriousness of such a charge. If this is true, and if the defense attorneys were aware when they presented them that these affidavits were fakes, then I think there's no question but that they would be swiftly disbarred; that is such an obvious consequence -- and it's so likely to be discovered, since of course the DA is going to contact the jurors, after getting blindsided like that -- that I have a very hard time believing that any of the defense team was aware of the fraud... assuming it was a fraud.
But I have an equally hard time buying the idea that five (out of six) jurors would (a) sign such affidavits for clemency, but then (b) give subsequent sworn affidavits that they had never signed the first affidavits; if they were caught, they must know they could and likely would be prosecuted for perjury or even obstruction of justice. One, maybe; but five? It strains credulity to the snapping point.
And that leaves only one explanation that I find probable. We start and end here:
Kathleen Culhane, the San Francisco private investigator who Starr and Senior said had interviewed the jurors, declined to comment.
Ms. Culhane is going to find herself on the griddle sizzling like ground chuck, confronted by five jurors who all swear they never gave her any such declarations, or indeed ever spoke to her at all. I will follow this case with rapt attention.
By the way, the Antique Media continues its anti-capital-punishment crusade by refusing to print the name of the poor 17 year old girl that Morales raped and murdered in January, 1981; her name is Terri Winchell. I believe it's important to remember the victims of the butchers on Death Row... and here is why. |
