Turning a blind eye to obtain justice
Sometimes, legal system works in mysterious ways
NEW HAVEN, CONN. • On Tuesday, Leroy Harris appeared in court and pleaded guilty to kidnapping and robbery. The plea was a legal fiction and everybody knew it. He knew it. The prosecutors knew it. The judge, too.
Nearly 30 years ago, Harris was convicted of raping a woman in this Connecticut city — a verdict he has been trying to reverse ever since. Earlier this year, after decades of fighting his appeals, the Connecticut state’s attorney’s office finally conceded that the evidence against him might be tainted. The prosecutors agreed to let him go — if he took a deal.
At the heart of the deal was something called an Alford plea, an odd legal paradox that required Harris to formally plead guilty to a set of lesser crimes, but not admit that he had actually committed them. After he played his role in this courtroom drama, the judge reduced his sentence to the years that he had served. Harris was freed Tuesday.
But the prosecutors also walked away with what they wanted. At least on paper, they were able to preserve their conviction.
In recent years, plea bargains of all sorts have dominated the U.S. criminaljustice system: They now account for almost 95 per cent of the final dispositions in felony cases across the nation. Even the Supreme Court has acknowledged their pre-eminence, writing in 2012 that “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”
Alford pleas, however, are exceptionally rare, composing only six per cent of all the guilty pleas in state and federal courts, according to a study published in 2009. They allow defendants to maintain their innocence even as they bow to the reality that they would likely be convicted at a trial.
But then there are defendants like Harris, who entered his plea decades after his conviction and only, as he put it, “under duress.” Across the country, different prosecutorial agencies take different positions when facing cases that might be marred by a wrongful conviction.
In Harris’ case, the prosecutor who tried the matter had not disclosed exculpatory evidence. Scientific testing also showed that DNA on the victim’s clothes could not have come from him. The victim failed at first to pick out Harris in a photograph array.
Legal experts say that even if defendants who enter guilty pleas are eventually released, they are often subject to collateral effects that could include losing government benefits or the legal right to vote. The strategy of hinging a release on entering a plea also allows a prosecutor’s office to keep a guilty finding on its records and thus avoid being sued.
“There are only two reasons to offer a plea after a conviction has occurred,” said John Hollway, an associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who has written about wrongful convictions. “If you don’t believe in your case, but you also don’t dismiss it, what are you really doing? You’re either trying to preserve your stats or protecting yourself against civil liability.”
Kevin Kane, the chief state’s attorney of Connecticut, disagreed. He insisted that his prosecutors look at troubled cases on an individual basis and sometimes do decide to dismiss the matter
DOES EVERYBODY WALK AWAY COMFORTABLE AND HAPPY? NO. IT’S A BALANCE.
fully. That didn’t happen in Harris’ case, he said, because evidence existed that convinced the office it might have withstood an appeal.
“In this case, we worked out a compromise, and I think it was a fair one,” Kane said. “Does everybody walk away comfortable and happy? No. It’s a balance.”
From the moment he was charged with rape and robbery in 1989, Harris, 57, has insisted on his innocence. Even after his conviction — for which he was sentenced to 80 years in prison — he fought five appeals.
His lawyers said that about eight months ago they started making headway in negotiations with Patrick Griffin, the state’s attorney in New Haven, who gradually acknowledged there were problems in the case.
That set up a choice, Potkin said: Harris could take the Alford plea and be free to share Thanksgiving with his family. Or he could keep on fighting, perhaps for many years, as courts in Connecticut considered his appeal. In the end, he took the deal.
“They were going to drag it out for years,” Harris said Wednesday, “but 50 per cent of something is better than 100 per cent of nothing.”