DNA test a must in death cases
Courts often deny appeals, but forensics can shed light on truth.
Nineteen men on Florida’s death row have been asking for DNA testing in their cases for years, and Florida courts have said no.
What can the judges be thinking?
Journalists at the Tampa Bay Times pointed out this injustice in an excellent series last week that was illustrated by the persistent case of Tommy Zeigler, a Winter Garden furniture store owner who has been on death row for 42 years.
Zeigler, now 73, has asked six times for DNA testing and been refused five of them, the Times reported. More than 15 years ago, Zeigler was allowed to do limited testing of small squares of the clothes he was wearing when four people — his wife, her parents and a longtime customer — were shot and killed in the store on Christmas Eve 1975.
None of the squares contained blood from anyone but Zeigler, damaging the police narrative that Zeigler bludgeoned his father-inlaw 16 times with a heavy metal crank from a roll-up door while holding him in a headlock. That, of course, would have been rather a messy process. So DNA testing at least threw into question the police version and bolstered Zeigler’s story that he was innocent and longtime customer Charlie Mays, one of the dead, did the shooting.
Regardless of Zeigler, Florida ought to be DNA-testing every case in which new evidence could shed any light on the truth. A law passed by the Legislature declaring that suspects have the right to DNA testing unfortunately also gave judges wide latitude over whether to approve it, which is how Zeigler got turned down so many times.
Judges get to decide in death cases whether the DNA would make a difference in the outcome of
the case. If they think not, they can turn down the request. Good grief. Who cares? That’s just unnecessary drama if the goal is truth rather than conviction. Prosecutors should stop opposing such tests. They end up looking like all they’re trying to do is cover their own fannies in a weak case.
The arguments against DNA testing are lame — the blood samples may have deteriorated, the DNA wouldn’t clinch innocence or guilt anyway and samples that are years old weren’t properly preserved because DNA testing wasn’t available at the time. That’s all specious. If an accredited lab can’t property do the test, it will say so.
Even if a convicted killer wants the test just to delay being put to death, give it to him. It’s a few hundred bucks, and six weeks. Move on.
Florida must do everything possible in the way of
forensic science because of its shoddy record of sentencing innocent people to death. Some 28 men have been exonerated through Nov. 5, the most in any state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Does that make you proud?
Zeigler’s case, however, isn’t the best example on which to base an argument for DNA testing. It’s a convoluted mess of twisted forensics along with contradictory evidence and testimony. DNA probably won’t make any difference in the outcome. Consider that a bullet stopped a clock at 7:24 p.m. at the furniture store, but Zeigler, who was shot in the stomach sometime before police arrived, didn’t call for help until 9:18 p.m.
Meanwhile, there are tales black guys who were supposed to be picking up a TV instead being taken into the woods to fire guns, of witnesses coming and going, of bullet fragments and the bloody fingertip of a rubber surgical glove. That’s not to mention the rumor of a three-legged dog that Zeigler supposedly maimed deliberately. Heaven alone knows what would have emerged if the suspects and victims had texting and phone video capability back then.
Compared to any modern crime scene, the bloody picture inside the store was a hot mess of jumbled forensics, which the detectives at the time used to clumsily piece together how it all happened.
Did they get some of it wrong? Undoubtedly.
But a single witness, not any forensic evidence, is the biggest roadblock to Zeigler’s innocence.
Edward Williams is dead now, like so many others in this story, including the judge, the lead detective and a number of witnesses. The Bahamas native would be 101 if he were living. Interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel’s Roger Roy (full disclosure, this columnist’s ex-husband) a decade after the murders, Williams described how Zeigler tried to kill him that night.
Williams, who worked for the family, said Zeigler
asked him to come to the store to help moved heavy items, then pointed a gun at his chest and pulled the trigger three times when he arrived. It didn’t fire, and Williams fled. Later, detectives theorized that Zeigler forgot to reload it after the first round of killing and may have mixed up which of five guns at the scene actually was still loaded.
Williams later that evening had a friend take him to the Orange County Jail at 33rd Street to make a complaint.
Those who believe Zeigler innocent point out that Williams went home and changed clothes that were bloody, suggesting that he was involved. Roy, who now is a journalist for a national magazine, chuckled at the notion that changing clothes somehow makes Williams culpable when set in the context of Central Florida in 1975, where civil rights arrived way late. No sensible person of color would have shown up at police station with blood on his shoes.
“He’s black and poor but not stupid. He knows what’s gonna happen,” Roy said.
Williams, when he was 67, told Roy during an interview that he figured out why he was able to escape what he thought was certain death at Zeigler’s hands.
“The Lord wouldn’t allow it. He wanted someone to be alive to tell the truth, to see that Zeigler was punished. The Lord spared me,” he said in that 1986 interview.
Roy, who covered the case on and off for nearly 20 years, said he asked Zeigler about Williams’ damning testimony and never got a straight answer. He said Zeigler usually muttered something about how he “just didn’t know why” Williams would make up such a story.
“Edward Williams, despite the back-and-forth about details, was always the key. Maybe he was in on the murders as Zeigler’s accomplice. But no way Williams did it without Zeigler.
“There is no way to square his testimony with Zeigler’s innocence.”