In Ada case, new trial or freedom
MUSKOGEE — For decades, two Ada men insisted from prison that they did not kidnap and murder a convenience store clerk in 1984 despite their confessions to police.
They claimed their admissions came from a dream.
Those innocence claims attracted renewed national attention when the true-crime documentary series, “The Innocent Man,” debuted on Netflix last December.
Now, a federal judge has ruled in favor of one inmate, Karl Fontenot, who asked in 2016 that his robbery, kidnapping and murder convictions be vacated.
“Based on the numerous constitutional violations that occurred in this case, it is clear Mr. Fontenot did not receive a fair trial to which he was entitled both under the laws of the state of Oklahoma and the U.S. Constitution,” U.S. District Judge James H. Payne wrote.
The judge ruled Fontenot, now 55, must be permanently released from custody or granted a new trial in 120 days. An appeal is expected that could delay any release or retrial.
The judge made his ruling in a 190- page opinion filed Wednesday in federal court in Muskogee. The judge excoriated police and prosecutors for misconduct and declared newly discovered evidence about Fontenot's alibi and other suspects provides “solid proof” of his “probable innocence.”
Fontenot and Tommy Ward had been sentenced to death at a 1985 murder trial even though the body of the victim, Donna Denice Haraway, had not yet been found. She disappeared from the McAnally's convenience store in Ada on April 28, 1984. She was 24.
After a successful appeal, Fontenot was retried in 1988 and again sentenced to death. Because of a retrial error, he later was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Ward was retried in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison. Ward, now 58, has a challenge to his conviction pending in state court.
The case has been intensely scrutinized for years — starting with the book, “The Dreams of Ada” — because the convictions relied heavily on their confessions. Key details from those recanted confessions turned out to be wrong.
Most significantly, both confessed the clerk was stabbed and Fontenot told police the body had been buried near the Ada power plant. The victim's skull and other remains were found more than a year after her disappearance in a field near Gerty, about 30 miles away. She had been shot in the head.
Ward claimed he only had been recounting a dream to police. Fontenot claimed police coerced a confession from him after telling him what Ward said.
The judge agreed police had coerced a false confession
from Fontenot who was particularly susceptible to suggestion because of his abnormally low intelligence. “No rational juror who was able to set aside the tragedy of Mrs. Haraway's death could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Fontenot should be convicted on his own words,” the judge wrote.
In making those findings, the judge specifically pointed to “uncontroverted evidence of Mr. Fontenot's mental and psychological impairments” and “the material discrepancies between the physical evidence and the story Mr. Fontenot told the police.”
In sharply worded language, the judge found investigators ignored evidence, mishandled the crime scene at the Ada convenience store, allowed evidence to be destroyed, pressured witnesses to change accounts, kept critical information from the defense and incompetently processed the Gerty site after the victim's remains were found.
“The Ada Police Department investigators turned a blind eye to many important pieces of evidence, relying instead on witness statements that fit their theory of the case while disregarding much stronger evidence of alternate suspects,” the judge wrote.
The judge in his opinion specially condemned a prosecutor for knowingly put on false testimony about Fontenot from a jailhouse “snitch,” who had made a deal to have her boyfriend released from jail in exchange for her cooperation. She denied in court that she had any agreement for her testimony.
Among the evidence the judge found was withheld from the defense was a forensic anthropology report indicating that the recovered skeletal remains were of a woman who gave birth.
“There is no evidence that Mrs. Haraway had given birth at any time before her abduction,” the judge wrote. “This previously undisclosed evidence is a startling revelation in this case. If Mrs. Haraway was three months pregnant at the time of her abduction, which the evidence indicated, then it was impossible for Mr. Fontenot to have killed Mrs. Haraway on April 28, 1984.”
The case also has been scrutinized because the same district attorney, Bill Peterson, later wrongly convicted two men of another woman's murder. The two men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence and freed. Novelist John Grisham focused on Williamson in his only nonfiction book, which is the basis for the Netflix series.