Judge allows Floyd Brown suit against SBI to proceed

According to The News & Observer February 4, 2011 edition, Floyd Brown’s civil suit against the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation will be allowed to proceed. The article by Mandy Locke and Joseph Neff, which strictly followed the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) never once mentioned the name of Brown’s prosecutor, Anson County District Attorney Michael D. Parker. It was Parker who charged the severely retarded African American male, with the intelligence of a seven year-old, with a 1993 murder that was based solely on the existence of a so-called confession from Brown that was taken by verbatim by SBI agent Mark Isley.

There was no eyewitness or forensics evidence tying Brown to the crime… in other words, there was no credible evidence for with which to charge Brown. Therefore, Parker relied on the “verbatim confession” to charge Brown with murder and hold him in a mental institution. It was the objective of the mental health staff to somehow miraculously whip Brown’s severe retardation into a state that would allow him stand trial for the murder with which he was charged. But the mental health team was unable to perform miracles, and Floyd Brown languished in the institution at taxpayer expense for fourteen years until an appeal was held outside of Anson County wherein he was freed.

Brown’s declaration of freedom was based on the fact that the judge heard from a variety of expert mental health witnesses who averred that Floyd Brown’s retardation was so severe that there was no way that the six page verbatim written confession could have been attributed to him. So Brown was finally released to the custody of his family, but not before prosecutor Parker maliciously went out of his way to disrupt assisted living plans that the government social workers had put together for Brown’s release.

Brown’s family sought to bring a civil suit against the prosecutors, but Attorney General Roy Cooper proclaimed that Michael Parker had immunity against such action. This is not the stance he took in the Duke Lacrosse case when he invited civil suits against former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong who had prosecuted the Duke Lacrosse case within acceptable bounds, acted as a true “minister of justice,” and did so without malice.

Parker, with the complicity of media-types, transferred all of the blame for the “doctored” confession on SBI agent Isley. Any person of reasonable mind would no doubt believe that Parker was aware that the alleged “verbatim confession” by Brown was a fabrication, which was more likely than not pressed forward by prosecutor Parker. Michael Parker is an intelligent man, and has likely had much experience in orchestrating unethical schemes to prevail with a favorable verdict, yet steer clear of any liability. Parker was also indoctrinated by the state’s policy of “selective justice based on Class and Color” and was fully aware that stealing years of a man’s life would be of little consequence as long as he/she were poor, disenfranchised, and a person of color.

When Brown’s family brought the suit against the SBI for its role in Floyd’s lengthy detention, the Attorney General’s Office objected, according to the newspaper, by arguing that it didn’t matter whether a SBI agent “elaborated or augmented or even smoothed out the alleged confession.” In other words, when defendants belong to a certain class and color, it is permissible in the eyes of the state’s head prosecutor to charge a defendant with a confession that is bogus… or as the state euphemistically put it “smoothed out.”

Unfortunately the state of North Carolina “smooths out” a lot of evidence and testimony in order to place behind bars many innocent people who are considered by the Powers-That-Be to be disposable. Attorneys representing the Attorney General’s Office do not feel that Floyd Brown, a retarded man who was involuntarily held in a mental hospital for fourteen years based on a bogus “verbatim confession,” is deserving of any compensation from the state. There is no doubt that he deserves compensation… just like Alan Gell deserved compensation… and Greg Taylor deserved compensation. Many others who deserve compensation by the state but are unlikely to receive any are Erick Daniels, Levon Bo Jones, and James Arthur Johnson.

Superior Court Judge Forrest D. Bridges undeniably made the right decision in allowing the civil case against the SBI to proceed. The civil suit against Mike Nifong for his handling of the Duke Lacrosse case is the one that should have been dismissed, as it was prosecuted honorably and in good faith. Not to mention that the three Duke Lacrosse defendants not only received seven million dollars each, but in contrast to Floyd Brown, Gell, Taylor, Johnson, Daniels, and others, never spent one day in jail.

With the SBI now under scrutiny thanks to the ill-advised challenge by Prosecutor Tom Ford and Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby against Greg Taylor’s release, it seems like the scales of justice are tipping, ever so slightly, towards that which is just. 


Be sure to catch the latest installment of Episode V of “The MisAdventures of Super-Duper Cooper” -- Part 6. Just click on to the Link below. Also be sure to view the “Commentary, Insight, and Analysis” which immediately follows the strip. A new feature to the commentary allows viewer feedback by e-mail at its conclusion.

LINK: http://justice4nifong.com/direc/sdcDirec/sdcEpv/sdc127.htm

Note: The e-mail response at the end of the commentary which follows the strip may not be functional at this time.

DAs on board regarding SBI lab shakeup… Hogwash!

According to The News & Observer editorial of August 31, 2010, the state’s district attorneys understand that clouds over the SBI hurt their ability to make cases. What the district attorneys should be concerned about is that the clouds interfere with the administration of justice. As so-called “Ministers of Justice,” prosecutors should have their priority as the goal of justice before that of winning a case. For many, if not most North Carolina prosecutors, that has definitely not been the case. The recent case exposed in an article by N &O investigative reporter J. Andrew Curliss about Derrick Allen is a prime example of a prosecutor, Freda Black, placing a conviction ahead of seeking justice. Ms. Black is also the prosecutor responsible for winning an armed robbery conviction against a 14 year-old Erick Daniels. There was no credible evidence or forensic findings tying the young Daniels boy to the crime… only the robbery witness’s linking the shape of Daniels’s eyebrows in a school yearbook to those of the assailant. He served more than half of a 14 to 20 year sentence before he was finally released on appeal. Tom Ford, Wake prosecutor responsible for unapologetically stealing seventeen years of a man’s life (Greg Taylor) because Taylor did not implicate an innocent man in a murder, is unfortunately representative of many of the prosecutors who have no qualms about unjustly incarcerating innocents who are poor, disenfranchised, and people of color.

Although The News & Observer would have you believe otherwise, it is the prosecutors and not the people in the SBI lab who are driving the show. The lab people are merely backseat passengers in the prosecutor’s vehicle. It is the prosecutors who benefit from winning a conviction, not the lab technicians. Even the SBI agents don’t get the glory of convicting the defendant in a heinous crime. Therefore, when a prosecutor’s case is weak, he/she has the built-in incentive to lean on people in the lab in order to force them to skew, omit, fudge, tweak, or otherwise manipulate lab results in hopes of improving their odds at trial. Not all prosecutors take this devious avenue; just the unscrupulous ones such as Tom Ford, Freda Black, Bill Wolfe, and Michael Parker.

The fact that justice is a secondary or tertiary concern of prosecutors is best illustrated in the Alan Gell case. Prosecutor David Hoke was in possession of 17 eyewitness statements that proved beyond doubt that defendant Alan Gell could not possibly have committed the murder for which he was charged. Hoke withheld this information from the defense counsel, and won a capital conviction against Gell. Now, The News & Observer wants to blame this wrongful conviction on the lead investigator in the case, Dwight Ransome. However, a decade after Gell’s conviction when the existence of these witness statements came to light, and the Attorney General’s Office was aware that there were 17 witness statements that proved Gell could not have committed the murder for which he had languished in jail (half on death row), the Attorney General’s Office went ahead and prosecuted the case in a second trial. Roy Cooper didn’t issue an “innocent promulgation” on Gell’s behalf. He tried to keep an innocent man in jail. However, once the jury got the case, they immediately found Gell not guilty. How does The News & Observer explain that? The Attorney General’s Office used SBI agent Ransome’s work to support their case against Gell at re-trial. Somehow, it is not the prosecutors at fault… it’s Ransome.

Currently, Alan Gell is incarcerated on a convoluted vendetta charge concocted by a Johnston County prosecutor. His unreasonable and lengthy sentence is nothing more than payback for having the audacity to file a complaint for the malicious and blatant injustice he suffered with his death penalty conviction. Although he wrongfully served ten years, he was convicted on technical trifle and is serving a five year sentence. According to my math, even with the ridiculous five year sentence, he had five years credit. He should never have served one day of this most recent vindictive sentence.

What is truly tragic is that the prosecutors with integrity who prosecute in good faith and act as “Ministers of Justice” are the ones that are targeted, mainly by the Powers-That-Be, and the unregulated North Carolina State Bar. Gregory Butler was a prosecutor in Johnston County, who when he became aware that the defense attorney lacked some of the prosecutor’s discovery, immediately notified the defense. This act, publicized in The News & Observer, resulted in a delay in the court proceedings while the defense was granted time to review the information presented. It also prompted the North Carolina State Bar to initiate a complaint against Mr. Butler, which forced him to remove himself from the case, causing a further delay. Fortunately, there was no bounty on Mr. Butler’s head, and F. Lane Williamson and his band on the Bar’s grievance panel, did nothing more than give Mr. Butler a slobbery tongue lashing.

But what happened to Mr. Butler pales in comparison to the persecution administered to the prosecutor of the Duke Lacrosse case, Mike Nifong. This prosecutor, with 27 years experience as a prosecutor, and who was appointed to the Durham district attorney position by Governor Mike Easley, had a stellar reputation as a fair and hard-working prosecutor. Since he first practiced as a prosecutor, Mike Nifong had always maintained an open file discovery policy… that is, he provided the defense attorneys with all of the evidentiary information he had in his file. (This was decades before such policy became mandated in the state.) Most of the ardent defense attorneys who sparred with Nifong in courtroom, gave him high marks when it came to opening his files for them and prosecuting fairly. As it is with individuals who possess both high ethical standards and courage, Mr. Nifong was not swayed by pressure applied by peers and higher-ups. He followed his conscience… which made him too independent… which made him too dangerous. Therefore, he was brought down by the big power machine, with assistance from the biased media. The state, along with the Carpetbagger families of the Duke Lacrosse defendants and their attorneys set out to make an example of him, and make him pay, every day, for the rest of his life.

When Mike Nifong was taken down, Durham lost the best district attorney it will most likely ever see. He was a prosecutor who prosecuted cases in good faith based on sound evidence and good science. He did not lobby lab technicians for reports or results favorable to his case, and as a result, the lab technicians and agents did not feel the need to help effect the outcome of his cases. Mike Nifong’s priority was to see justice fairly administered, and to see equal justice for all. He did not subscribe to the state’s tenet of “selective justice based on Class and Color.” If he did abide by that principle, he certainly would not have prosecuted the Duke Lacrosse defendants… especially when doing so severely compromised his chances of winning the election for Durham district attorney.

The News & Observer editorial did get it right. The state’s district attorneys understand that clouds over the SBI hurt their ability to make cases… and that’s what they’re interested in; making their cases. Unfortunately, unlike Mike Nifong, they are less interested in seeing that equal justice prevails for all.

Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett, Wyatt Earp, Eliot Ness, and Mike Nifong

Recently, The Independent Weekly, a Triangle area arts and entertainment publication, which has an aversion to me, featured an article by a “Casual Observer.” The title of the July 14, 2010 article, “Razing questions: The last day of the Duke lacrosse house” by Adam Sobsey, included the following paragraph:
“The next morning, I was sitting in Parker & Otis with a cup of coffee when two men sat down at an adjacent table. One of them turned on a voice recorder and interviewed the other – about the lacrosse scandal, astonishingly. The interviewee vigorously and lengthily attacked the media coverage of the case and defended Nifong. It was even more astonishing to hear him compare Nifong to a cross between Wyatt Earp and Eliot Ness. The building may have been demolished, but apparently we are still picking through its controversial remains.”

Yep, I was the interviewee. A gentleman was working on a project for his doctorial thesis and we met that day in Durham for the interview about how African Americans responded and reacted to the Duke Lacrosse case. As the casual observer accurately observed, I did place well-deserved criticism about biased and unfair coverage on the mainstream media… which is in lockstep with the Carpetbagger Jihad agenda to destroy former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong and anyone considered to be on the wrong end of the Duke Lacrosse case.

A most conspicuous example of slanted media coverage is the utilization of the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy as evidenced in the recent series in The News & Observer which lays prosecutorial misdeeds on SBI agents and its lab. No where in the entire four part series, spread out over a week, did any of the articles, or related articles mention a prosecutor’s name with a case of injustice. For example, Wake Prosecutor Tom Ford’s name was never mentioned, although he was responsible for putting an innocent man prison for 17 years of a life sentence (Greg Taylor). The name of Prosecutor David Hoke’s name was put in print, even though he convinced a jury to place an innocent man (Alan Gell) on death row. Anson County District Attorney Michael D. Parker wasn’t named in the paper’s series even though he was responsible for an innocent man (Floyd Brown) being incarcerated for fourteen years without a trial. Instead, the newspaper placed blame for these and other flagrant injustices on SBI agents and workers in its forensic lab.

Contrast that coverage to what happened when police investigator Linwood Wilson was charged with “obscenity stalking” as a result of marital discord… the headlines blared, “Nifong’s investigator arrested,” “Nifong’s investigator charged with stalking,” etc. You get the picture. The media, unfortunately, is integrally involved in shaping public opinion, and every chance it gets to link Mr. Nifong to a negative story, it will jump at the chance.

Now, I was pleased with the reference in The Independent Weekly by Mr. Sobsey. And, as I have said for some time, Mr. Nifong has the important and positive characteristics of Wyatt Earp, Eliot Ness, and Thomas Beckett. As a prosecutor, Mr. Nifong believed in law, and he set his career to seeing justice carried out, as devoted to law enforcement as Marshal Wyatt Earp. Like the “Untouchables’” Eliot Ness, Mr. Nifong would not be swayed by coercion, peer pressure, public sentiment, or “suggestions” from higher-ups. Finally, Mr. Nifong exhibited the courage and independence of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett in seeking justice… not bending under the force of the Carpetbagger Cabal. And contrary to the lies put forth in the media from the unregulated North Carolina State Bar adjudicator F. Lane Williamson, and others, Mike Nifong prosecuted the Duke Lacrosse defendants when doing so presented a definite disadvantage to his being elected to his appointed position of Durham district attorney.

What is truly sad is that the people of Durham have been snookered out of having one of North Carolina’s truly great prosecutors serve their county. Mike Nifong exemplified a “Minister of Justice” who put getting it right ahead of winning no matter what the costs. It is the people of Durham who share in this blame because they remained silent and idle, allowing the travesty against Mr. Nifong to take root and flourish. Unfortunately, as is often the case, a man possessing the admirable qualities of Beckett, Earp, and Ness, was considered too much of a risk for the Powers-That-Be who wanted to have free rein to co-opt their version of justice as opposed to enforcing the sacrosanct principle of “equal justice for all.”

N&O columnist joins in scapegoating the SBI

This week, The News & Observer newspaper has been presenting a four-part series about misconduct and malfeasance at the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and its lab. It is nothing more than a blatant attempt to shift all of the blame for exposed prosecutorial misdeeds upon a few “rogue elements” within the SBI. As in keeping within its adherence of following the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy, I believe that the name of a prosecutor has been mentioned possibly once in the two parts that have been published to date in the newspaper. Recently, Barry Saunders, the paper’s columnist with the acerbic keyboard, jumped into the fray by dumping on two SBI agents in particular in his column titled “Meet he SBI’s bad guys.”

Following the same tenor as articles in the four-part series, Mr. Saunders lambastes the investigators, while not laying a single kid-gloved hand on the prosecutors. This is yet another example of the strict compliance which the media has when it comes to the PAPEN Policy. To his credit, Mr. Saunders does mention the name of a prosecutor in his article once, but he fails to tie him to the real injustice visited upon defendant Floyd Brown.

Barry wrote the following about the Brown prosecutor: “…Anson County District Attorney Michael Parker spitefully refused Dix workers’ request to take him to the State Fair. Brown would have loved that.” However, nowhere in the article does he attribute Brown’s fourteen years of incarceration without a trial to D.A. Parker. Readers of the Saunders column are supposed to believe that SBI investigator Mark Isley is responsible for that. As a matter of fact, the column doesn’t begin to touch upon the depth of Parker’s malevolence and misconduct. Michael Parker not only denied Dix workers’ request for Mr. Brown to have an occasional lunch with his sister, but he willfully and maliciously interfered with Brown’s disposition after being released from 14 years in custody. This was achieved by Parker surreptitiously finding out the assisted living facility where social workers had arranged for Brown to be sent, then talking with the owners of said facility. Shortly thereafter, there was an abrupt 180 by the owners of the house, and Floyd Brown was denied admittance.

What is terribly misleading about these articles is that they put the onus of the injustice in these criminal cases on the investigators, and not on the prosecutors where it squarely belongs. Surely, District Attorney Parker knew that the lucid confession by a severely retarded defendant was flawed to the point of being fraudulent. And don’t think for a minute that investigators work in a vacuum. They are frequently in contact with the prosecutors. As the articles in the four-part series allude, investigators often work to please the prosecutors on the case. So even if the evidence that is brought by investigators before the prosecutor is not credible, it is accepted by the prosecutor if it supports his/her version of events. These articles printed thus far point to the SBI agents and investigators as being the driving force behind the prosecution of defendants. The prosecutors’ roles have almost been relegated to that of bystanders. “Protect those prosecutors… except Nifong” should be the media’s motto.

What I find to be most disingenuous about castigating remarks about SBI agent Dwight Ransome, is that the media maintains that the investigator zeroed in on a particular defendant and skewed his findings to support his belief. But what about the prosecutor? It begs the question, who is running the prosecution? You would believe the investigator and not the prosecutor after reading this week’s articles in The News & Observer. And what I find curious in Barry’s column is the total omission of the highly publicized case to which Ransome was related… that of Alan Gell. Of course, the identity of the prosecutor of Mr. Gell, David Hoke, would not be expected to be mentioned (in accordance with PAPEN).

As you may remember, in the Gell case, the prosecution withheld from defense attorneys the existence of 17 eyewitness statements wherein the alleged murder victim of Gell was seen alive, after Alan Gell had been locked up on an unrelated charge… clearly and definitively exculpatory evidence. Although these documents were within David Hoke’s folder (and I believe that Hoke maintains that he overlooked them), SBI agent Ransome is the one the media holds responsible for defendants not having access to the evidence. What is even further outrageous is that the media contends that had Prosecutor Hoke and defense attorneys been aware of these witness statements that the charges would have probably been dropped. What the media fails to mention however, is that even with knowledge of the 17 witness statements, the Attorney General’s Office chose to re-try Alan Gell (which resulted in an immediate verdict of not guilty). Now if SBI investigator Ransome’s work was so tarnished at Gell’s initial trial, why would state prosecutors take it upon themselves to take Mr. Gell to court a second time? This is not addressed by the media.

What the media needs to focus on is the vendetta case against Crystal Mangum, the former Duke Lacrosse victim who is currently facing trumped up charges of arson and injury to personal property. The News & Observer needs to sic its top investigative reporters on the Durham Police Department and prosecutors. It needs to delve into the basic question of who started the fire. It needs to ask what credible evidence is in possession of the prosecution to support its claim that Crystal Mangum vandalized a car the night of February 17, 2010. It needs to question the specific basis for the initial charges of attempted first degree murder and identity theft lodged against Mangum. It needs to look into the inactivity of police to clothes ablaze in a bathtub. It needs to try and make sense of a timeline vaguely proffered by police and prosecution regarding events that took place the night of February 17th.

There is plenty for a couple of good investigative reporters to sink their teeth into regarding this case. Not only that, but such an exploration would provide fodder for another highly sarcastic and entertaining column by The News & Observer’s own Barry Saunders. I can’t wait.

Now, it is important to pay attention to these blogs, as you might be tested about them in the future. To get an indication of your apprehension of the topic of Duke Lacrosse’s big connection to the media, click on the following link to access the latest quiz on the topic. Click Quiz 10 on the directory page.

LINK: http://justice4nifong.com/quiz/quiz.htm

Linwood Wilson…Nifong’s personal investigator?

WRAL and other mainstream media outlets continue to spin the news reports like yarn by stating that former Duke Lacrosse case investigator Linwood Wilson is Mike Nifong’s investigator. A recent WRAL online article about Linwood Wilson has the following headline: “Guns, computers seized from home of former Nifong investigator.” It doesn’t read: “… of former Duke Lacrosse investigator.” It doesn’t read: … of former state investigator.” The fact is that Mr. Wilson is not Mr. Nifong’s personal investigator, and the media is red-handedly caught purposely trying to tie Mike Nifong into the recent domestic troubles facing Linwood Wilson.

A sampling of other WRAL online headlines about Linwood Wilson, who is currently under a cloud of negative publicity and possible criminal charges, include the following:
“Former Nifong investigator gets higher bond after case revisited;” “State handling domestic case involving former Nifong aide;” and “Nifong’s former investigator in domestic dispute.”

However, Linwood Wilson’s presently alleged problems being tied to the former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong is nothing new. A WRAL headline in 2007 read: “Nifong’s top investigator toppled.” And an article in 2008, which was also about Mr. Wilson, read: “Nifong’s investigator in Duke case wants lawsuit dropped.”

Such headline is disingenuous to say the least, and without doubt, selective. When the state and media recently lowered the boom against the initial head investigator of the case against Alan Gell, Dwight Ransome, the media referred to him as “SBI investigator.” The mainstream media never mentioned or referred to Mr. Ransome as “(David) Hoke’s investigator.” In fact, in most all media articles about Alan Gell’s unjust prosecution, Prosecutor David Hoke’s name was never mentioned. This, of course, is in strict compliance with the media’s PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy.

However, it is unheard of for media to attribute investigators as being possessions of the prosecutor(s) of cases being investigated. Only in the Duke Lacrosse case can one expect the unusual, the unexpected, the unprecedented, and the unjust treatment by the state and the media.

Like Mike Nifong, Crystal Mangum, Brian Meehan, myself, and others who are considered to be supporters of Mike Nifong and/or on the wrong end of the Duke Lacrosse case, Linwood Wilson, as a Duke Lacrosse prosecution investigator, is a high valued target in the Carpetbagger Jihad agenda. Because of that, it is unwise for one to place faith in what is spoon-fed about him to the public by the media. The media has been very effective in vilifying Mike Nifong, and supporting the state’s trumped up charges against Crystal Mangum, the victim in the Duke Lacrosse case.

When it comes to injustice, Duke LAX case doesn’t even merit mention

In yesterday’s issue of the News & Observer, an article by staff writer Mandy Locke titled “Former Dix inmate sues SBI agents” tries to dredge up sympathy for the Duke Lacrosse defendants by making a comparison with the injustice Floyd Brown sustained. In what is essentially media blasphemy, she stretches to make a connection between the situations faced by Floyd Brown and the three Duke Lacrosse defendants. Floyd Brown is a mentally retarded man who was held for fourteen years without a trial by Anson County District Attorney Michael D. Parker. Per its customary PAPEN Policy (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong), the prosecutor’s name is never mentioned in the article. Mr. Brown was finally released from custody when a judge from outside of Anson County ruled that he was being held unlawfully. There was no “credible evidence” or any evidence linking Brown to a murder for which he was charged, but never tried. Brown’s fourteen years of confinement were made harder by Parker’s refusal of the staff’s request to allow Brown to have lunch with family, or a day trip to the fair. And after Brown was released, with arrangements made by state social workers for his placement in an assisted living facility, a vindictive Parker went out of his way to disrupt Brown’s disposition. Further arrangements for housing for Brown were made secretly to prevent the D.A. from continuing to maliciously interfere with housing plans. In addition, the charge against Brown by D.A. Parker was based solely on a written confession attributed to Brown that experts claimed he was too retarded to have made.

Contrast Floyd Brown’s situation with the three Duke Lacrosse defendants who did not spend one day in jail, received $7 million each in an out-of-court settlement with Duke University, enjoyed the benefit of being proclaimed “innocent” by Attorney General Roy Cooper during his April 11, 2007 “Innocent Promulgation,” were coddled by the biased media, and are suing the cash-strapped city of Durham for an additional $10 million each… in the words of their attorney “so nothing like this ever happens to anyone else.” Yet, they are claiming that they were denied due process. How? This claim is obviously a bluff, and the Carpetbagger families of the Duke Lacrosse defendants and their greedy attorneys were expecting the city to roll over just like Duke University. They have no intention of carrying out this lawsuit because they have no case.

The media should be ashamed to even mention the Duke Lacrosse case when it comes to injustice, especially with innocents such as Alan Gell who was falsely convicted of capital murder by Prosecutor David Hoke, and Darryl Hunt in Winston-Salem. These men mentioned in the article, along with others such as Erick Daniels, Gregory Taylor, and James Arthur Johnson are some of the true victims of North Carolina’s justice system, and they have all served excessively long unjust incarceration on convictions made without credible evidence.

One of the most recent victims of injustice is Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case. Durham Prosecutor Angela Garcia-Lamarca is trying to do her best to get a plea deal with Ms. Mangum, now that she is under electronic house arrest and not in an oppressive jail cell. Initially the prosecutor tried to have Ms. Mangum plead guilty to the arson charge and serve a two year jail sentence… as though that was a really great offer. The problem is that the prosecutors have no case against Ms. Mangum, and they know that they would be thoroughly embarrassed if they took their case to court. No credible evidence… nothing. The Mangum prosecution’s position is similar to that of Prosecutor Bill Wolfe’s in the James Arthur Johnson case, in which, to the relief of the prosecution, Johnson accepted an Alford plea on a flimsy charge to avoid the possibility of being returned to jail. The Mangum prosecution’s retaliatory motivation is similar to that of Alan Gell who currently in prison for charges brought as a vendetta against him after he filed lawsuits and complaints for his earlier false murder conviction. Prosecutor Garcia-Lamarca, Judges Claude Allen and Paul Ridgeway, and the Durham Police and Fire departments, along with the media, are all focused on punishing Crystal Mangum for her role in the Duke Lacrosse case. The charges for which she was arrested on February 17, 2010 were merely a means of imposing an indefinite sentence on Ms. Mangum without her being convicted of a crime.

Some media outlets have attempted to mitigate the suffering of Ms. Mangum by falsely reporting, shortly after her arrest, that she was under house arrest on a $250,000 bail. NBC-17 and Newsweek magazine both made the false claims although Ms. Mangum actually spent approximately 90 days at the Durham Detention Center, and is currently under house arrest after the posting of bond. Almost without exception, however, the media goes out of its way to give the Duke Lacrosse players (who attended the beer-guzzling stripper party with under-aged drinking and racial epithets) a positive and sympathetic look. But there is no way that Duke Lacrosse defendants comes close to enduring the hardship and suffering of Floyd Brown, Alan Gell, Crystal Mangum, and others.

However, what I don’t understand is why Floyd Brown’s attorneys are going after the investigators. Surely the SBI agents and sheriff’s deputies acted no more deliberately and in bad faith than lead prosecutor Michael Parker. It was Prosecutor Parker who was responsible for Floyd Brown being unlawfully held fourteen years, not the investigators. Maybe Brown’s attorneys are extending a professional courtesy to Prosecutor Parker by not filing a law suit against him. But, then, the North Carolina State Bar did not even feel motivated enough by the injustice against Brown to initiate its own complaint against Michael Parker. Whereas in the Duke Lacrosse case, the State Bar was quick to lob an ethics complaint against the Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong in order to force him off the case as the prosecutor.

Bottom line is that Floyd Brown deserves compensation for the atrocious injustices he suffered at the hands of Anson County Prosecutor Michael Parker… the defendants in the Duke Lacrosse case, on the other hand, do not even deserve mention.

Making a big deal out of a little fire: the Mangum arson timeline

The following information has been obtained from fire records, police reports, and other documents that are accessible by the public. Data from these papers are used to set up an accurate account of what transpired during the night of February 17, 2010, and early morning of February 18, 2010 at the Durham apartment that was rented by the Duke Lacrosse accuser Crystal Mangum.

February 17, 2010 – evening. Crystal Mangum is at the apartment she rents with her three children. She has a dispute with her ex-boyfriend who has been staying for a short time at her apartment intermittently. Crystal’s nine year-old daughter becomes concerned about her mother’s welfare during this dispute, and places a call to 911 seeking help for her mother.

Durham Police officer H. P. Thompson arrives at the house in which the dispute is taking place, late at night on the 17th, no time of arrival is listed on the reports.

February 17, 2010 – 11:53 pm. Ms. Mangum is placed under arrest by Officer Thompson, according to the arrest report.

February 18, 2010 – 12:08:56 am. 15 minutes after Ms. Mangum’s arrest, an alarm to the Durham Fire Department is placed by the Durham Police reporting a “structure fire with a subject trapped” at the address of Crystal Mangum.

February 18, 2010 – 12:15: 10 am. 6 minutes, 14 seconds after receiving the call, Fire Engine 3 arrives on the scene. When they arrive, they find the bathroom door closed, and upon opening it notice that a fire was visible in the bathtub. With a 1 ¾ inch hose-line extending through the front door, the firemen spray water on the fire in the bathtub.

February 18, 2010 – 12:18:00 am. 2 minutes, 50 seconds after arriving on the scene, the firemen extinguish the fire in the bathtub. Although there is no indication from the fire reports or police reports that the walls, floor, or ceiling of the bathroom sustained any fire damage, the firemen pull the ceiling of the bathroom to check for extension of the fire… and find that there is none.

Engine 3 then advises command that an investigator is needed for this incident.

February 18, 2010 – 1:40:31 am. 1 hour, 22 minutes, 31 seconds after extinguishing the fire, the last unit leaves the scene.

What is not clear in any of the reports is why the police officers, upon finding the clothing on fire in the bathtub did not simply turn on the faucet or shower head and douse the fire? Instead, it seems, the police decided to close the bathroom door in hopes of slowing the spread of the fire from the bathtub to other parts of the structure. There was no mention of any fire damage to the walls, floors, or ceilings in the bathroom or anywhere else within the apartment. It seems that had the fire been extinguished by the police when they first became aware of it, any smoke damage would have been significantly minimized. The time that had elapsed from when Ms. Mangum was arrested by police until the fire was extinguished by the fire department was 25 minutes.

I am not a fireman, but I have serious questions as to why an investigator would be needed for this fire. Common sense would dictate that Ms. Mangum must have harbored some ill feelings toward her ex-boyfriend and wanted to release frustrations by setting his clothing on fire (not unlike the scene in the movie “Waiting to Exhale” in which the Angela Bassett character sets her boyfriends clothing on fire… not in a bathtub like Ms. Mangum did, but in her boyfriend’s sports car). It is obvious that by placing the ex-boyfriend’s clothing in a fireproof bathtub, that Ms. Mangum was executing a controlled burn, and had no intention of burning down the house. In lieu of a fireplace, the bathtub is the most logical place to burn someone’s clothing. Furthermore, there was no mention in any of the official reports of an accelerant being used in the fire. It makes no sense that in a fit of anger at her ex-boyfriend, Ms. Mangum would burn her residence that she shared with her three children.

If anyone acted negligently during this event, it would be the police, who instead of immediately extinguishing the fire in the bathtub upon detection, decided to close the bathroom door and call the fire department to put out the fire. Their irresponsible actions put the entire apartment building in jeopardy of being burnt to the ground. The police enabled the smoke damage to the building grow in magnitude, and the extensive smoke damage possibly forced the firemen to pull the ceiling in the bathroom. Why the reluctance on the part of the police to put out the fire? More likely than not it was to magnify the seriousness of the charges that they would lob against Ms. Mangum, the accuser of the Duke Lacrosse defendants. Their misguided motivation for acting against Ms. Mangum was in compliance with the Carpetbagger Jihad movement directed at anyone or anything on the “wrong end” of the Duke Lacrosse case.

With respect to the fire, Crystal Mangum was arrested on a felony first degree arson charge (initially five counts, then later reduced to one count). Ms. Mangum was indicted by a grand jury on the charge of first degree arson under North Carolina statute 14-58. According to that statute, a first degree arson charge is in reference to a building or a structure that is burned while inhabited. It is evident that the structure (building, or apartment) was not burned, nor was there an attempt made to burn the structure by Ms. Mangum. The blatantly false charges are vendetta-driven and make a mockery of the North Carolina justice system, its police officers, prosecutors and courts. It is past time for the Duke Lacrosse case related foolery to cease. Crystal Mangum should be immediately released from custody and the charges against her dismissed. The justice system should not be involved in lengthening her time of incarceration for the purpose of disrupting her employment situation and losing custody of her children. What is really shameful is that our system of justice is not only cruel and draconian in its workings, but that it allows the Carpetbaggers to dictate the degree of callous and inhumane treatment.

In addition to releasing Crystal Mangum, the courts should also immediately release Alan Gell, another victim of vendetta justice. Prosecutor David Hoke withheld exculpatory evidence in winning a capital murder conviction against Gell, an innocent man. After serving ten years of wrongful incarceration, Gell was set free at re-trial, and he filed lawsuits against those individuals and agencies responsible for his conviction. When law enforcement learned that he impregnated his girlfriend just prior to her turning legal age, he was convicted on some convoluted cockamamie charge and sentenced to five years. This, after serving ten years wrongfully incarcerated. Do the math: Gell wrongfully incarcerated ten years minus five year cockamamie sentence equals immediate release from prison with five years credit.

Million dollar bail… a case comparison – Part 6

Christopher Ray McBride, 28, has a troubled past history that includes an eleven month prison sentence in 2003 for breaking and entering, embezzlement, assault, larceny and drug manufacturing. According to the News & Observer article of April 30, 2010, McBride was convicted in 2004 and 2005 of assaulting a female and resisting an officer, and served a probation sentence until April 2006. Most recently, he was scheduled for court this month on firearms possession and drug charges.

The April 30th N & O article titled “Father charged in blinding” states that Mr. McBride was jailed on a child abuse charge after he assaulted his 1 year-old daughter and left her permanently blind. The loss of the child’s sight as due to brain trauma she sustained at the base of her skull. Mr. McBride was not charged with attempted first degree murder, and his bail was initially set at $125,000.

Crystal Mangum, who allegedly scratched her boyfriend, on the other hand, is charged with attempted first degree murder in what her boyfriend described as a “misunderstanding.” Ms. Mangum used no weapons, inflicted no injuries, and yet she was saddled with a million dollar bail, and remains in jail after her arrest on February 18, 2010.

When her prosecutor obtained a grand jury indictment, the felony attempted first degree murder charge was not even considered. Also, the simple assault and battery misdemeanor charge was not acted upon by the grand jury. Neither the misdemeanor charge of communicating threats nor the felony charge of identity theft was entertained by the grand jury. And although many of the charges piled on Ms. Mangum at her arrest were not sought by prosecutors before the grand jury, her bail was reduced to $250,000 with the condition that if she were to raise the bond, she would be released from jail to remain under house arrest. Her bail has since been reduced to $100,000.

As has been stated previously, the selective and unjust treatment Ms. Mangum has endured from the police, prosecutors, and courts, is not unlike the abusive, excessive, and unjust treatment to which former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was subjected. The disparities in their sentences in comparison with others are the proximate result of their roles in the Duke Lacrosse case… Ms. Mangum, the accuser, and Mr. Nifong, the prosecutor.

The vendetta justice that ensnared Ms. Mangum is not unlike that which resulted in Alan Gell being given an extremely harsh five year prison sentence for a charge with circumstances that would have only netted others probation. Gell spent a decade wrongfully incarcerated, initially sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Prosecutor David Hoke withheld exculpatory evidence from Gell’s defense attorney in winning a capital murder conviction. And when Mr. Gell sought the legal retribution to which he was entitled, he incurred the wrath of the North Carolina justice system… and he now sits in prison, a victim of vendetta justice.

Both Crystal Mangum and Alan Gell should be immediately released from confinement. Neither of them is a flight risk or a danger to society. In fact, the charges against them both are drastically inflated and not worthy of incarceration. Their incarcerations, solely to quench the vindictive thirst of the North Carolina justice system and, in the case of Ms. Mangum, the Carpetbagger families of the Duke Lacrosse defendants, are exacting a toll on North Carolina taxpayers who must pay for their prison accommodations. The money used to keep them behind bars is money that could be better spent… for example, to help pay to defend the cash-strapped city of Durham from the civil lawsuits filed by the avaricious Carpetbagger families and their greedy attorneys.

Although their release makes sense on a financial level to taxpayers and North Carolina residents, their immediate release from custody is the right thing to do, it is the ethical thing to do, and it is what justice demands to be done. There is no place in a just justice system for vendettas.

Vendetta justice makes a mockery of the NC courts at taxpayer expense

A 59 year old man went into an online chat room and became the acquaintance of a fourteen year old girl. Later, he traveled from Raleigh to Burlington, North Carolina where he met the young teenager in person. An attentive Burlington police officer noted suspicious activity by a car driven by the man (it had no license plate), and upon pulling it over noted that the 59 year old male driver was accompanied by the 14 year old girl as a passenger. Also in the vehicle were drugs and drug paraphernalia. The man, Bryant Harrison Dennis, was arrested and charged with statutory sex offense, indecent liberties, contributing to delinquency of a minor, possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia… and his bail was set at $10,000.
During a domestic dispute which her boyfriend described as a “misunderstanding,” Crystal Mangum allegedly scratched her boyfriend, and executed a controlled burn of some of her boyfriend’s clothes. As a result, she was charged with attempted first degree murder, assault and battery, five counts of felony arson, three counts of contributing to the delinquency of juvenile, communicating threats, identity theft, injury to personal property, and resisting arrest… bail for her was set at one million dollars.

The two-case comparative illustrated above represents but a small sampling of disparity in treatment afforded to the majority of criminal suspects versus someone on the wrong end of the Duke Lacrosse case. It is the vastness of the difference in treatment between the two which requires the public to suspend logic and sense of fair play that enables the North Carolina justice system to even dare to implement such draconian and excessive charges and outrageously high bail. Strip away the veneer of anti-Nifong public fervor created by the media, and the charges against Ms. Mangum and the million dollar bail are laughable. It is payback… vendetta justice… courtesy of the Carpetbagger Jihadists. What is really ironic is that the Carpetbagger families of the Duke Lacrosse defendants and their attorneys are able to foment anti-Nifong and anti-accuser sentiment among Durhamians and get unyielding support from them while at the same time costing those same Durhamians millions of tax dollars to defend the city of Durham against the carpetbagger lawsuits. The media has been an effective and willing accomplice of the Jihadists in achieving this outcome which boggles the logical mind.

Probably one of the best known examples of vendetta justice nationally is that which Orenthal James Simpson received in Las Vegas, Nevada, after he succumbed to what I believe to be an elaborately executed sting operation. The judge in that case before handing down an extremely harsh sentence against Simpson, told the courtroom and the media that her ruling was not in the least bit influenced by Simpson’s prior criminal court battle in which he was found not guilty. Although the judge gave those assurances with a straight face, anyone and everyone with any knowledge about the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders and the subsequent trial of O. J. Simpson, knew otherwise. And the judge knew they knew, but because the public animus and anger towards Simpson, the judge felt comfortable issuing an unprecedented lengthy prison sentence for him… and the judge may have even felt compelled to do so by the people.

There are many instances of vendetta justice in the Tar Heel state, and they include the following cases: Gregory Taylor (charged and convicted by prosecutor Tom Ford because Taylor would not implicate an innocent black man in a murder… after his exoneration by a three judge panel, the state continues its harassment of him, including the withholding of a pardon by the governor); Floyd Brown (a profoundly retarded man who was charged with murder based solely on a confession which experts state he could not have made… held for fourteen years without a trial, and when finally released Prosecutor Michael D. Parker willfully disrupted and interfered with assisted living arrangements that had been set up by his family and state agencies); Theodore Jerry Williams (who complained about the district attorney’s office, and later while in custody, was brutally beaten up – including a broken arm – and then charged with attacking a correctional guard).

One of the most shameful examples of vendetta justice is that of Alan Gell. He was sentenced to death, even though the prosecutors had exculpatory evidence (which they withheld from the defense team) proving that he could not possibly have committed the murder for which he was charged. He served ten years before the evidence came to light and he prevailed at a re-trial. Gell incurred the wrath of the state when he filed civil law suits about his unfair and tragic ordeal (however, unlike Mike Nifong, Prosecutor David Hoke was granted immunity as a state employee). Subsequently, when it came to the attention of the Johnston County prosecutor’s office that Gell impregnated his girlfriend just prior to her being of legal age, he was charged, and given a five year sentence. Under usual circumstances probation would be more likely, but nothing as severe as the sentence he received. This sentence was enforced without consideration given to the fact that Alan Gell had already wrongfully served ten years for a murder he did not commit. The convoluted and tortuous reasoning for the charges against Gell and his sentence defy common sense and mathematics. According to my arithmetic, ten years wrongly served minus five years of a bogus sentence equals freedom with five years credit… and it shouldn’t have taken a Joe Cheshire to get Gell a better deal. Alan Gell remains incarcerated today. He should be immediately released.

Almost everyone associated with the wrong end of the Duke Lacrosse case has been a victim of vendetta justice… no one more so than Mike Nifong. He has been so vilified and demonized by the Carpetbagger Jihadist Machine with its media and public relations connections, that he, his supporters, Crystal Mangum, and others connected with the Duke Lacrosse case are treated by the police, prosecutors, and courts with the same disregard for the rule of law and fair play that O. J. Simpson was subjected to during his Las Vegas interaction with the criminal justice system.

The public turned a blind eye as unprecedented injustice upon unprecedented injustice was heaped upon former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong… including disbarment, a jail sentence, and a request for the U.S. Department of Justice to proceed with criminal charges against him for depriving the three Duke lacrosse beer-guzzling, stripper partygoers of their civil rights. The public’s blind eye is a powerful enabler that allows those dispensing criminal justice in the state to veer from or even totally disregard the legal statutes in place to assure impartiality and fairness in the system.

Mike Nifong supporters are likewise being targeted with unjust treatment. At a recent event on the campus of Duke University, a known Nifong supporter and member of the Committee on Justice for Mike Nifong who was wearing a Committee tee shirt, was accused of trespassing on Duke’s private property despite the fact that he was on campus at the institution’s public invitation to attend a three-way interview featuring U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He was not told prior to attending the event that Mike Nifong supporters were not invited, and he was not warned prior to attending that his presence on the campus was not wanted. Instead, upon leaving the event, a security guard honed in him, telling him that he was trespassing. Despite the Nifong supporter’s protestations, the guard escorted him off the property in a manner to ensure the infliction of emotional pain, humiliation, public scorn, and embarrassment… and there was the continuous threat of imminent arrest, as the guard called in backup. It is evident that Duke University has no qualms with suspending civil rights and First Amendment Rights when it comes to Mike Nifong supporters.

But it is the malicious and cruel treatment of Ms. Mangum that truly puts North Carolina to shame when it comes to vendetta justice. The media is responsible for getting the public to forget that Ms. Mangum was the victim at the Duke Lacrosse beer-guzzling stripper party. She was the one who was scheduled by the escort service (under false pretenses by a Duke lacrosse party host) to perform at the bacchanalian festivity. She was the one who was dehumanized and humiliated by the mostly Duke lacrosse team members… one of whom made obscene gestures with a broom. She was the one with whom the partygoers vented anger after she stopped dancing minutes into the performance due to the audience’s lewd and crude behavior. Finally, she was the one upon whom some of the partygoer’s heaped racial epithets, including the n-word. Yet Crystal Mangum is the one who is targeted for vendetta justice by the courts and the state… and the court and justice system, under the Jedi mind-trick spell of the carpetbaggers, are quick to impose it.

The vendetta justice plan for Ms. Mangum is to punish her by keeping her incarcerated for as long a period as possible. So far she has remained imprisoned since February 18, 2010, and even if she was able to post bond, the judge in the case determined that she would be released to house arrest. No such contingency was made for the aforementioned child predator with the $10,000 bail… when he posts bond, he’s free. A mean-spirited and punitive backbone supports the North Carolina justice system, one in which the principles of fairness, compassion, morality, and rehabilitation are defiled.

Finally, vendetta justice comes at a cost to taxpayers in the state. Using the police, prosecutors and courts to exact private party (i.e. Carpetbagger) revenge results in taxpayer dollars going towards unjustified prosecution, diverts police and court resources that could otherwise be focused on legitimate crime, and pays for expenses needed to incarcerate many individuals who are neither a threat to society nor a flight risk. Especially in this period of economic hardship with the state and municipalities scrapping by financially, the concept of vendetta justice should be immediately jettisoned. It is time to, among other things, release those wrongfully incarcerated by vendetta justice (Alan Gell, Crystal Mangum, George Goode, Rayford Burke, etal.). Money used to pay for their incarceration could be much better spent defending the cash-strapped city of Durham from the lawsuits of the avaricious Carpetbaggers and their money-hungry attorneys.

Doing the right thing when a prosecutor errs

Wayne County District Attorney Branny Vickory in his earlier days as a North Carolina prosecutor helped to wrongly convict Dwayne Dail of the 1987 rape of a twelve year old girl. Mr. Dail spent nearly 19 years in prison before DNA evidence performed on a night-gown proved that he could not possibly have been the rapist. The case that Prosecutor Vickory brought against Dail more than two decades ago lacked “credible evidence” (something for which former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong has been soundly criticized for in his handling of the Duke Lacrosse case). Despite Dail’s steadfast insistence of his innocence, he was convicted largely on the testimony of the twelve year old victim. The full extent of the evidence in the Duke Lacrosse case will never be known because it was dismissed by Attorney General Roy Cooper on April 11, 2007… however, like the rape case in 1989, it included testimony by the sexual assault victim. Prosecutor Branny Vickory, though green as an attorney back then, seems to have prosecuted the case in good faith and within the standards accepted by which prosecutors are held.

Mr. Vickory prosecuted the wrong person for the 1987 rape. Did he make some mistakes? I am sure that he would be the first to admit to it, just like Mr. Nifong admitted to making mistakes during the prosecution of the Duke Lacrosse case (although the jury will be out permanently regarding innocence or guilt of the three indicted by the grand jury). Although the injustice of an innocent man (Dail) spending nearly two decades of his young productive life unjustly confined is unfathomable, the prosecutor, Vickory, should not be pilloried. Mike Nifong,who prosecuted the Duke Lacrosse case in good faith and within acceptable standards, likewise should not be held to public scorn just because he prosecuted defendants from families of wealth, power, and privilege. Unfortunately, the gauntlet was thrown down and the Carpetbagger Jihad initiated when the mother of Duke Lacrosse defendant Dave Evans, Rae Evans gave her interview on “60 Minutes.” She stated that Mr. Nifong would “pay every day for the rest of his life,” because, as she so insightfully put it, he “picked on the wrong families to indict.” It is important to also keep in mind that the Duke Lacrosse defendants, as opposed to Mr. Dail, never spent one day in jail, that they received seven million dollars each from Duke University, and that they are currently suing the city of Durham seeking an additional ten mil each.

Although I am not well versed about the Dwayne Dail case and the prosecution’s actions, I am inclined to give the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt, if, as was reported in The News & Observer, Vickory rushed to free Dail once the 2007 DNA tests excluded him as the assailant of the 12 year old victim. No one person, or no one prosecutor is perfect… everyone makes mistakes. To his credit, Branny Vickory admitted his mistake and made an effort to correct it. This is what a good prosecutor does. And as simple as the principle of correcting a mistake seems, it is one that is not undertaken as often as one would think among state prosecutors. In the Alan Gell case (prosecuted by David Hoke), for example, as soon as definitive exculpatory evidence became available proving that Gell could not have committed the murder for which he received the death sentence, the Attorney General’s Office proceeded to re-try Gell, nonetheless.

More recently, another situation where prosecutorial mistakes led to a wrongful 17 year imprisonment of an innocent man is illustrated by the Greg Taylor case. When the Innocence Inquiry Commission unanimously referred Greg Taylor’s murder conviction to a three judge panel for review, the initial 1991 prosecutor Tom Ford, with assistance from Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby, fought tooth and nail to have the innocent man, Greg Taylor, remain incarcerated for the rest of his life. The judicial review of the case brought to light the fact that the State lab withheld information favorable to the defendant, and that Prosecutor Ford misrepresented the lab results in order to win a conviction against the innocent man. Like prosecutors Vickory and Hoke, Ford had no credible evidence to charge or prosecute Greg Taylor in 1993.

Prosecutors, once they realize that they have made a mistake, should admit it and move to correct it… like Vickory and Mike Nifong. When the Duke Lacrosse accuser could not identify to Prosecutor Nifong’s satisfaction that she had been rape, Mr. Nifong immediately moved to drop the rape charges. However, when exculpatory evidence was uncovered pointing to Gell’s innocence, the Attorney General’s Office chose to fight to try and convince the public that it had not made a mistake by convicting an innocent man to death… but the jury, when presented with the exculpatory evidence and given the opportunity to deliberate, quickly reached the obvious verdict, that Gell was innocent. Prosecutor Tom Ford, likewise tried to convince the world that Greg Taylor was guilty before a panel 17 years after the initial trial. Ford was more interested in trying to prove that he had not made a mistake in convicting the wrong man, rather than any consideration that he might be keeping an innocent man behind bars for the rest of his life… he didn’t care.

All prosecutors, at some time or another in their careers, make mistakes… but it is the relatively few good ones, like Branny Vickory and Mike Nifong, who admit to them and then set about to correct them.

Why Prosecutor Tom Ford is among the worst of the worse

On the morning of September 26, 1991, Raleigh police officers come upon the body of Jacquetta Thomas, a 26 year old African American, in a cul de sac at the end of Blount Street. The murder victim, who worked as a prostitute, had been severely beaten and her body partially exposed. Near by, but out of sight, is an SUV belonging to Gregory Flint Taylor, which had been abandoned earlier that morning after it became bogged down off-road in marshy land.

When Greg Taylor returns to the scene to see about extricating his vehicle, he identifies himself to the police at the crime scene as the owner of the vehicle and cooperates with their questioning in the homicide investigation. He does so freely and without legal consultation, and even goes to the police station to submit to further interrogation.

During his interviews, Greg Taylor gives consistent statements to the investigators. He he tells that he did not know the victim Jacquetta Thomas, never met her, and that she never was inside of his SUV. He states that his only passenger that night was Johnny Beck (an African American man), that they were riding around seeking and using drugs, and that while driving off road, his car got stuck in the moist terrain during the wee hours of the morning. He tells detectives that unable to remove it from its quagmire, the two decided to leave the vehicle to walk and try to hitch a ride home. On exiting the cul de sac, they noticed for the first time what appeared to be a body, but did not get close or examine it; planning instead to call authorities later in the morning if it had not been discovered by then.

Within twelve hours of the police’s discovery of Jacquetta Thomas’s body, Greg Taylor is charged with the murder. He is charged without forensic evidence linking him to the victim or vice versa, and without evidence confirming the victim’s presence in his vehicle. The unsubstantiated motive for the murder, according to Wake County Prosecutor Tom Ford is that Jacquetta Thomas, a prostitute, refused to engage in sex with Taylor, which resulted in Taylor becoming so enraged that he severely beat her to death. As was pointed out during the February 2010 hearing before the three judge panel, Gregory Taylor has never had a history or reputation of violence, either before the murder or afterwards during his 17 years of incarceration (during time spent in prison, he was not charged with any violations or misconduct… a rare accomplishment).

Prosecutor Tom Ford, I strongly believe, does not care whether or not the killer of Ms. Thomas is apprehended and faces judgment because he has absolutely no compassion for the victim… an African American and a prostitute. His only priority is closing the case, and not solving the crime. So, he rushes to judgment in charging Greg Taylor with the murder of Jacquetta Thomas without reasonable cause or due diligence. Tom Ford heeds the state’s tenet of “selective justice based on Class and Color” when he charges Taylor, who is white but admitted to drug use and did not come from a family of material wealth and privilege, with the murder of Ms. Thomas.

Now, this is where Tom Ford’s actions become really sinister and despicable. His plan is to entice Greg Taylor, the white owner of the SUV, to falsely implicate his black passenger and fellow drug user Johnny Beck for the murder of Jacquetta Thomas. If Taylor refuses, Ford threatens to convict Taylor and have him spend the rest of his life in jail. By doing so, Ford could accomplish two objectives… close the case on a murder, and take a black man off the Raleigh streets (innocent or not). Ford initially believes that wrapping up this case would be relatively easy, thinking that Taylor would jump at the chance to avoid a conviction for murder and a lifetime in prison by simply implicating a black man for the commission of the crime, even though Taylor knew Beck to be innocent. However, Tom Ford does not count on Greg Taylor being a man of such integrity that it far exceeds what little that Ford, himself, possesses. Gregory Flint Taylor, at the repeated urgings and threats by Prosecutor Ford, refuses to give false testimony implicating Johnny Beck, a man he knew to be innocent.

Because Greg Taylor refuses to perjure himself by giving false testimony at the behest of Prosecutor Ford for the purpose of implicating another innocent man, Tom Ford makes good on his threat to convict Taylor of the murder. Ford achieves this goal by making deals with two other incarcerated individuals (a prostitute and a jailhouse snitch), who are facing long stretches behind bars, and like him, are lacking morals and integrity. They provide false testimony against Taylor in exchange for the promise of a reduction in their sentences. What is particularly egregious about this action is that Taylor’s defense team is not made aware by the prosecution of this backroom deal between Ford and the perjurers. In addition to the false testimony, false forensic blood test results, as well as the falsely misinterpreted actions of a scent hound, are used by Prosecutor Ford to win a conviction against Taylor in 1993 for the murder of Jacquetta Thomas. Greg Taylor is sentenced to life in prison.

Facing a life sentence for a murder he did not commit, Prosecutor Ford continues to offer Greg Taylor incentives for a reduced sentence and a chance at freedom in exchange for the false testimony needed to convict Johnny Beck, the black man against whom Ford was forced to drop charges because Taylor would not provide the false and necessary testimony to needed to convict. Despite the prospect of spending the rest of his life and dying within the dreary confines of a small prison cell, Greg’s ethics and integrity remain strong. Ford is unable to break him.

After sixteen years in prison, the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission takes up Greg Taylor’s case and presents it to the Innocence Inquiry Commission. After a thorough review of the case, the eight member board unanimously recommends that Greg Taylor’s case be brought before the three judge panel to determine whether or not he should be proclaimed innocent and freed, or remain in jail… the burden of this hearing being placed on the defense.
Wake Prosecutor Tom Ford, with full knowledge of the sleazy backroom deals made with the jailhouse snitch and the prostitute, and full knowledge that the SBI lab test results were not confirmatory for the presence of blood on Greg Taylor’s SUV, nonetheless decides to work with Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby to fight and try to keep an innocent man in jail for the remainder of his life. Tom Ford is definitely no “minister of justice.”

In February 2010, the truth, as cogently and orderly presented by Attorneys representing Greg Taylor (Mumma, Klinkosum, and Cheshire), combined with the pathetically convoluted, disjointed, and irrelevant presentation by the state assures a pronouncement of “innocent” by the judicial body at the hearing. Gregory Taylor, at long last, is unfettered by shackles and bars, and tastes freedom for the first time in nearly two decades. Seventeen years of his life are lost because of the actions of a prosecutor who, is angered by Taylor’s refusal to work with him to wrongfully convict an innocent black man in the Thomas murder. This anger is what led Ford to punish Taylor by convicting him of the Thomas murder.

Clearly, actions by Ford in the Greg Taylor case, warrant Tom Ford the dubious distinction of being hailed as among the “worst of the worse prosecutors in the Tar Heel state. Other deserving North Carolina prosecutors include David Hoke, who withheld from the defense attorney of Alan Gell exculpatory testimony of seventeen independent eyewitnesses which absolutely refuted Gell’s guilt in a murder for which he was sentenced to death and served a decade wrongfully behind bars. Wilson County Prosecutor Bill Wolfe deserves mention as one of North Carolina’s worst prosecutors for charging James Arthur Johnson for the murder of Wilson teen Brittany Willis, a crime that Wolfe knew Johnson did not commit… a charge based on the statement of Kenneth Meeks, a black teenager and the true killer of the victim. Meeks made the statement implicating Johnson (who is also African American) in the murder of the Wilson teen after police informed the killer that Johnson snitched on him. When Meeks, more than a year later, recanted his statement and admitted that he made it out of anger, Prosecutor Wolfe had no case against Johnson because there was no forensic evidence tying Johnson to the crime. Therefore, Wolfe shortly thereafter manufactured two eyewitnesses, both related to the Wilson Police Department (one being a retired police officer) to implicate Johnson in the crime. The use of these two false witnesses was quickly jettisoned by the prosecution after Dr. Reverend William Barber, President of the NC NAACP became involved; because with his involvement came closer media scrutiny… scrutiny that the false testimony of Wolfe’s two eyewitnesses could not withstand.

As horrendous as these overt acts of prosecutorial misconduct are, and the terrible injustice for which they are responsible, only one of the prosecutors, David Hoke, was taken before the unregulated North Carolina State Bar’s Disciplinary panel. He was merely given a mild reprimand by the group. However, professionally Hoke did not suffer as he was promoted to the position of Assistant Director of the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts. Rev. Barber filed a complaint of prosecutorial misconduct with the North Carolina State Bar against Bill Wolfe, which the Bar proceeded to ignore. Likewise, the North Carolina State Bar refused to act on my complaint against Tom Ford (for his actions in the Gregory Taylor case) which was filed in August 2009. As things now stand, former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong remains the only prosecutor to be disbarred by the North Carolina State Bar since its inception in 1933.

And why was Mike Nifong disbarred? He was disbarred because, as Rae Evans (mother of Duke Lacrosse defendant Dave Evans) so insightfully put it during an interview on “60 Minutes,” he “picked on the wrong families.” In other words, Mr. Nifong did not automatically stop the investigation and he did not refrain from pressing charges in the alleged sexual assault against the Duke University student-athlete partygoers who came from families of wealth, status, and privilege, as was expected from a Durham district attorney. Instead Mr. Nifong pursued the investigation and prosecution as he would in any other case, without Class or Color entering the equation. To express the displeasure by the state, Mike Nifong was singularly persecuted to an extent never before seen… and it was done in order to set an example for other North Carolina prosecutors who might consider not complying with the unwritten state tenet of “selective justice based on Class and Color. In addition to disbarment, Mr. Nifong was convicted on a trumped up contempt of court charge and sentenced to jail; the U.S. Department of Justice was asked to launch a criminal investigation into Mr. Nifong for depriving the Duke Lacrosse defendants of their civil rights; Mr. Nifong was denied immunity to which he was entitled as a state employee carrying out his duties; the Attorney General’s Office refused to represent him at his hearing before the North Carolina State Bar; the North Carolina State Board of Elections chose to harass Mr. Nifong by singularly auditing his campaign without cause; and he was blatantly bashed by the biased mainstream media.

The unregulated and self-serving North Carolina State Bar was so hard pressed to come up with a complaint carrying enough substance against Mr. Nifong to appear legit that it was forced to amend the complaint initially filed… a rare action indeed and not supported by law. The Bar alleged that Mr. Nifong withheld evidence… which he did not. The Bar alleged that Mr. Nifong lied to the court… which he did not. The Bar alleged that Mr. Nifong made prejudicial and inflammatory statements against the defendants… which he did not (most, if not all, of the statements for which Mr. Nifong was accused of making took place prior to any indictments being handed down). It is the position of the Committee of Justice for Mike Nifong that Mr. Nifong acted within the acceptable standards of the state’s prosecuting attorneys.

F. Lane Williamson, the chair of the Bar’s grievance panel, used his divine powers of mind reading to reach the conclusion that Mike Nifong prosecuted the Duke Lacrosse case solely for political gain (to retain his post as Durham district attorney). A rigged poll by SurveyUSA conducted for WTVD – ABC 11 News helped fertilize the idea that the May 2, 2006 primary for Durham district attorney was close and that wooing black voters would assure Nifong of victory. In actuality nothing could be further from the truth, as black voter registration was low, and black voter turnout was even lower. Using common sense and logic, the best route to a victory would have been for Mr. Nifong not to have brought charges against the Duke lacrosse player or to dismissed them. Instead, his pursuit of the prosecution turned a landslide May 2006 primary victory into a narrow one, and enabled another campaigner (who ran on a platform of solely beating Nifong and promising to give up his position to enable an appointment to the Durham D.A. position by Governor Mike Easley) to garner a whopping 39% of the fall election vote. The only person to use the Duke Lacrosse case for his/her own political gain was Attorney General Roy Cooper, whose main television campaign ad begain with a screen showing in big letters: “The Duke Lacrosse Decision.”

It should be noted that Mr. Nifong acted as a “minister of justice” as evidenced by the fact that he dropped the rape charges against the Duke Lacrosse defendants after the alleged victim could not give assurances in later testimony, to his satisfaction, that a rape had taken place. Mr. Nifong’s actions in this respect are in stark contrast to those of Tom Ford, who continues to press for Greg Taylor to remain in jail for the rest of his life in spite of the fact that his contention that blood evidence used to convict Taylor was false, as was the interpretation of actions by a scent hound in the initial trial. Also, the Attorney General’s Office continued to fight for Alan Gell to remain locked up after it came to light that 17 eyewitness statements that proved Gell could not possibly have committed the crime for which he was sentenced to death.

Wake County Prosecutor Tom Ford is no minister of justice, but as a prosecutor he most definitely is among the worst of the worse. Yet, the state does not go after him professionally or personally. The biased mainstream media follows the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy and shields his identity from the public whenever possible when discussing the Taylor case. Even Greg Taylor’s attorney, Joseph B. Cheshire V, has not a disparaging word to say about Tom Ford, the prosecutor responsible for his client losing 17 productive years of his life due to Ford’s malicious vendetta. Yet, Cheshire, the most powerful attorney in North Carolina, is quick to chastise and criticize Mr. Nifong for his actions in the Duke Lacrosse case (well within standards practiced by other prosecutors), even though Cheshire’s client (one of the Duke Lacrosse defendants) does not spend one day in jail, and receives a $7 million out-of-court settlement with Duke University.

What I find most disheartening, however, is the response, or lack thereof, by the leadership of the African American communities in Durham and throughout the state of North Carolina. To my knowledge, Dr. Reverend William Barber (president of the NC NAACP) and other leaders have not been critical of Prosecutor Tom Ford and his actions in the Gregory Taylor case. To my knowledge, leaders of the black communities have also been silent about the barbaric treatment of Mike Nifong by the state and the media for his handling of the Duke Lacrosse case in which he adhered to the principle of “equal justice for all.” And now that fallout from the Carpetbagger Jihad against Mike Nifong etal. has engulfed Crystal Mangum (charged with attempted first degree murder for allegedly scratching her boyfriend and held in jail on a million dollar bond), the black leadership continues to follow its course of timidity, and remains silent about this injustice. This is disgraceful.

Don’t believe the hype fostered by the Carpetbagger Jihad Juggernaut and dutifully disseminated by the biased mainstream media that Mike Nifong is the worst prosector in North Carolina history and the only one deserving of disbarment. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Mr. Nifong’s nearly thirty years of service to the state has been exemplary and exemplified by the principle of “equal justice for all.” The truly worst of the worst designation, without doubt, goes to Wake County Prosecutor Tom Ford, although compelling arguments could be made for prosecutors Bill Wolfe (in the James Arthur Johnson case) and David Hoke (the Alan Gell case.)

Thank goodness D.A. Willoughby ignored my pleas

After the unanimous September 2009 decision of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission to recommend the case of Gregory F. Taylor be taken before a three judge panel for adjudication, Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby had the perfect opportunity to work to free the man who had spent 17 years wrongly incarcerated for a murder which the state failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Instead, he chose to fight the release of Taylor by first requesting a lengthy delay in the hearing. The judge refused to acquiesce and the February 2010 date of the hearing remained firm.

Because Greg Taylor had already lost 17 years of his life behind bars, I felt that each day was especially precious, and I wrote two letters to the Wake district attorney imploring him to work to have Mr. Taylor released as soon as possible and forego the scheduled hearing before the three judge panel. D.A. Willoughby never responded to my correspondence and refused to do so. Instead, with the assistance of Tom Ford – the prosecutor responsible for Taylor’s initial conviction in 1993, Willoughby proceeded to argue before the three judge panel to have Greg Taylor remain imprisoned for the rest of his life.

There was never a question in my mind about the outcome of the three judge panel’s decision, as Tom Ford’s “rush to judgment without credible evidence” case in 1993 was fraught with problems: no forensic evidence linking the victim to Taylor or Taylor to the victim; prosecutor testimony of two witnesses who fingered Taylor in exchange for the promise of a reduced sentence; blood evidence on Taylor’s vehicle which the State SBI lab knew was not of human origin; and the motive for the murder did not hold water. The state’s case against Greg Taylor was so weak that I believe that first year Campbell University law students representing Taylor would have prevailed before the panel of jurists… despite the burden of proof being shifted to the defense.

Now, had Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby followed my advice and taken the initiative to release Mr. Taylor prior to the February hearing, then the testimony from prosecution witness Duane Deaver about SBI lab’s uneven reporting practices in 1993 might never have come to light. According to Mr. Deaver, protocol in place at that time prevented him from putting in his report the results of confirmatory tests which favored Taylor’s innocence and countered the presumptive test which tended to be damaging to Taylor. This revelation is of immense importance because other convictions won while this biased and flawed lab policy was in place could now possibly earn a second look. So even though Greg Taylor’s liberty was delayed for several weeks, in the big picture his sacrifice will enable many wrongly incarcerated innocents to have another shot at freedom.

I do not expect the state to welcome review of the cases and work hard to identify the wrongly accused. This was made apparent when North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper first stated that an internal review would be conducted. He later succumbed to the intense prodding by defense attorney Joseph Cheshire V to permit an external review of the cases. As Joseph Cheshire stated… to paraphrase, the people do not trust the state to conduct a fair and objective audit of its own past practices. Nor should they.

This hearing is not the first time that prosecutorial egos and the desire to protect the misconduct of a prosecutor overtook common sense. Not long ago the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office decided to retry Alan Gell despite the presence of irrefutable exculpatory evidence of his innocence. This trial was undertaken for the purpose of mitigating David Hoke’s obvious misconduct in the initial Gell trial in which he won a death penalty conviction. However, with the exculpatory evidence in play at the re-trial, the jury was quick to find Alan Gell not guilty. In a more recent case, Forsyth County prosecutor Belinda Foster was forced by D.A. Tom Keith to file an “accessory after the fact” charge against James Arthur Johnson while she dropped charges of murder, rape, kidnapping and armed robbery. Special prosecutor W. David McFadyen then stepped in to prosecute the case, which resulted in an Alford plea by Johnson to a charge of misprision of felony (not reporting knowledge of a crime to authorities). Now, although James Arthur Johnson did report to the Wilson Police three days after his knowledge of the crime (which resulted in the case being solved), he evidently did not report it quick enough.

So, thanks to the hubris and desire of Willoughby to shield Tom Ford from criticism of his prosecution of the innocent Greg Taylor, he did not take my advice and instead proceeded with fighting against the release of a man wrongfully convicted. And, as a result, other innocents may hopefully find another avenue by which they can obtain a justice that has been denied.

News & Observer’s familiar dance with the Attorney General’s Office

In an editorial by the News & Observer staff in the March 3, 2010 editorial page titled, “Testing the crime lab,” the newspaper and the Attorney General’s Office waltz around the issues of injustice for appearances sake. Not long ago the newspaper’s editorial chastised a state prosecutor for holding a man, Floyd Brown, for fourteen years without a trial. A judge later dismissed murder charges in this case in which a confession was cooked up by the prosecution. Problem is that the severely retarded defendant could not have possibly made the confession attributed to him. There was no physical evidence linking Mr. Brown to the crime, but he was poor, disenfranchised, and an African American. Nobody cared. However, the newspaper’s editorial pretended to be concerned by challenging the Attorney General’s Office to look into how the man could be held for 14 years without being taken to trial. Over the years, the Attorney General’s Office has not looked into the matter. The News & Observer has not pressed for a response.

With the exposure of the biased State forensic lab testing procedures which helped convict Gregory Taylor of a crime which he did not commit, the News & Observer is now calling for the Attorney General’s Office to investigate other cases in which convictions might have been won through faulty state lab procedures. Pitifully, the News & Observer is trying to reassure its readers that Attorney General Roy Cooper is conscientiously leading the charge in trying to uncover tainted convictions. As the paper puts it, “Fortunately, Attorney General Roy Cooper is facing up to the problem.” As in the Floyd Brown case, the newspaper pretends to be concerned about injustice created by the State’s lab procedures, and the A.G. is pretending to objectively review cases in search of convictions attained with faulty lab results.

The truth of the matter is that the prosecutors knew that the State’s lab was biased against the defendants long ago. Prosecutor Tom Ford and Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby were aware that the lab results used to help convict Gregory Taylor were flawed when they recently fought to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his life, despite a case that hinged completely on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch and prostitute who received promises of reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony. The backroom deals that Tom Ford hatched with the “witnesses” were withheld from Taylor’s original incompetent attorneys.

Look at the facts in the Gregory Taylor case. D.A. Willoughby and Prosecutor Ford have knowledge that the blood evidence used to convict Taylor was not reliable, yet they fought against justice for Mr. Taylor. Willoughby, because he knew that he had no case, initially tried to indefinitely delay the hearing before the three judge panel which resulted from the Innocence Inquiry Commission. Is this the action of a true minister of justice? The Attorney General’s Office, in the meantime, was silent. However that is not surprising when one reflects on the Alan Gell case in which Prosecutor David Hoke withheld crucial exculpatory evidence from the defense in winning a capital murder conviction. When a new trial was ordered by a judge, the Attorney General’s Office chose to fight to keep Gell incarcerated. The jury, when armed with knowledge of the exculpatory evidence that proved that Gell could not have committed the murder, immediately found him not guilty.

The difference between Hoke, Ford and former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong is that when new evidence or testimony was presented to Mr. Nifong, he was a true minister of justice and acted accordingly. For example, when he heard that the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case could not say with absolute certainty that she had been raped, he immediately dismissed those charges. Tom Ford and David Hoke were unyielding in their positions despite the overwhelming logic against them. And whereas the media, in accordance with the carpetbagger jihad against Mike Nifong, has unfairly and wrongfully defined Mr. Nifong, it has gone out of its way to adhere to the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy. Tom Ford’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the March 3, 2010 editorial.

What is most telling is what the editorial attributes Attorney General Roy Cooper as saying… which is that “the review (of the cases for flawed State lab reports resulting in convictions) will be conducted internally at the outset, but that an independent look might be warranted.” What is that supposed to mean? Basically, it means that the process will not have transparency and that the so-called review is undertaken for nothing more the sake of appearances. Everyone’s pretending, including the media.

Nifong’s past convictions under scrutiny?

Another wcbstv.com online article, this one titled: “Ousted DA Nifong’s Past Convictions May Appeal,” is totally misleading and prejudicial. It is yet another arrow from the quiver of a biased media agenda to destroy former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong by misleading the malleable media consumer with outrageous lies and innuendos. Another headline patent made for pulling the wool over the eyes… another Jedi mind-trick. This ridiculous headline infers that Mike Nifong’s actions in handling the Duke Lacrosse case were not only far outside the bounds of acceptable prosecutorial practice, but that his past convictions were won using unacceptable practices. What’s worse is that it states that those who were convicted by Mike Nifong in the past are entitled to an appeal. How absurd. Again the media insults the intelligence of those who no better, while misleading those who don’t.

Steve Cron, a defense lawyer from Santa Monica, California, stated: "But his behavior in this case was so outrageous and so beyond what's required of an ethical prosecutor that everyone's going to start going back and looking." Please give me a break. Mr. Nifong acted well within accepted standards of prosecutors within the state. Mr. Cron did not mention what Mr. Nifong did that was so “outrageous.” Mr. Nifong did not withhold evidence from the defense attorneys, like prosecutor David Hoke did in winning a wrongful conviction against Alan Gell, or like prosecutor Tom Ford did in winning a wrongful conviction against Greg Taylor, or like Jim Hardin did in winning a conviction against Michael Peterson and depriving him of a fair trial. Furthermore, Mr. Nifong did not lie to the court, as the court would want everyone to believe. The court purposely misinterpreted Mr. Nifong’s statements in order to levy the cockamamie charge against him… then, used it as a basis for a contempt of court charge and a 24 jail sentence. This chain of events is totally mind boggling. Statements Mr. Nifong made to the press, which defense attorneys labeled as so prejudicial and inflammatory, were made prior to indictments being handed down. They were mild, and made for the purpose of encouraging party-goers to break from the “athletic no-snitch rule” and give truthful honest statements about what transpired during the party.

The headline is, in fact, cruel in giving false hope to those convicted under prosecutor Nifong, and it encourages those convicted by Nifong to entertain the possibility of seeking an appeal. Worst of all, the headline suggests that others convicted by Mr. Nifong were victimized by his inherent prosecutorial misconduct. The article presents nothing to substantiate its reckless, illogical, and biased headline.

If one wants to investigate past cases, then I would strongly recommend looking into convictions won by Wake prosecutor Tom Ford. His conviction of an innocent man, Gregory Taylor, should be overturned by the three judge panel at its hearing which begins on February 9, 2010. The vendetta prosecution by Ford was made against Mr. Taylor because Taylor refused to wrongfully implicate another innocent man (Johnny Beck) in a murder. Ford offered Taylor a reduced sentence if only he would implicate Beck, an African American male. When Taylor refused, he was sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit. And Ford won a conviction against Greg Taylor on the testimony of two witnesses… a prostitute and a jailhouse snitch. Both had received deals, similar to the one Ford offered Taylor… testimony Ford wanted them to give in exchange for a reduction in their sentences. It was an offer which they could not refuse, because they did not have the moral values of Greg Taylor. And, it was an offer that Prosecutor Tom Ford withheld from Greg Taylor’s defense team, in violation of ethical rules.

Rather than do the right thing and get the conviction overturned, Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby is fighting to keep an innocent man in jail in order to protect his prosecutor, Tom Ford, from complaints of prosecutorial misconduct.

From the prosecution of Gregory Taylor in 1993, Tom Ford displayed a propensity of winning convictions by making deals in exchange for testimony to suit his agenda. This type of conduct by a prosecutor is frightening, and leads one to question the testimony used by Ford to convict others in the seventeen years since. If past cases should be examined for prosecutorial misconduct in hopes of establishing grounds for appeals, then Wake Prosecutor Tom Ford is the ideal prosecutor with which to begin investigating. They should scrutinize whether backroom deals were made with witnesses in exchange for a favor from Ford, and whether the knowledge of such deals was withheld from the defense team.

Don’t expect the media to advocate such a position, however, because it operates under the PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) policy. The media wants to stir the public and those convicted under Nifong into a frenzy against a prosecutor (Nifong) who acted well within acceptable standards, yet tiptoe around the minefield of misdeeds of the truly unethical prosecutors and shield their wrongdoings from the public. This is indeed a pathetic situation.

Media’s PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) Policy is strictly adhered to

In the News & Observer, January 16, 2010 article titled “Judge won’t delay Taylor case,” staff writer Mandy Locke strictly followed the media’s PAPEN (Protect All Prosecutors Except Nifong) policy by omitting Wake County Prosecutor Tom Ford’s name from the article. Prosecutor Ford is responsible for convicting Gregory Flint Taylor for a 1993 murder that he did not commit. Mr. Taylor received a life sentence because he would not implicate another innocent man (Johnny Beck, an African American) for the crime. Even despite tantalizing offers in exchange for his testimony, Mr. Taylor refused to lie at Tom Ford’s demand, and has, as a consequence, spent sixteen years wrongly incarcerated. Tom Ford convicted Taylor solely on testimony from a jailhouse snitch and a prostitute, both of whom were offered reduced sentences in exchange for their cooperation. What is even more egregious is the fact that Prosecutor Ford withheld these backroom deals with the two false witnesses from the Taylor defense attorneys. Despite the above, Tom Ford’s name is never even mentioned in the entire article. Not once! But that is the way it is when the PAPEN policy is in place.

Now, Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby has pleaded for a delay in the Gregory Taylor case before the three judge panel which is scheduled for Tuesday, February 9, 2010. The newspaper article did not state the length of time D.A. Willoughby sought to delay the hearing. Fact of the matter is that even with a delay of an additional sixteen years from now, Willoughby would still not be ready to go before a panel of three judges. And it won’t be because he didn’t have the time to prepare, it’ll be because he doesn’t have a case. He never did, and neither did the original prosecutor Ford, who Willoughby is trying to protect. Willoughby would rather waste taxpayer resources and time and the court’s time with this charade against Gregory Taylor in order to protect the wheelin’ and dealin’ prosecutor Tom Ford than to dismiss the murder charge and allow an innocent man to go free… an innocent and honorable man who has wrongly spent sixteen potentially productive years lost behind bars.

One thing should be clear, however, and that is that Gregory Flint Taylor will be free. There is no doubt about that. Now that there is some oversight on some shaky convictions, in the form of an Innocence Inquiry Commission, prosecutors will be less likely to continually hold innocent people unjustly… all to the dismay of D.A. Willoughby. As a prosecutor, Colon Willoughby is supposed to be a “minister of justice,” seeking truth over a conviction. The fact that he voted against the recommendation of the creation of the Innocence Inquiry Commission shows Willoughby’s lack of commitment to putting truth before conviction. It is the same position taken by Attorney General Roy Cooper who retried Alan Gell in the murder case initially prosecuted by David Hoke. Cooper wasted taxpayer money by re-trying a man in which exculpatory evidence proved that he could not possibly have committed the murder for which he was sentenced to death (evidence withheld by prosecutor Hoke from Gell’s defense included information that Gell was incarcerated on an auto-theft charge during the time that the murder was committed). The jury immediately acquitted Gell at his retrial, when this exculpatory evidence was presented.

“We’re at a disadvantage. We don’t know much of anything,” Willoughby is quoted as stating with regards to not knowing the identity of witnesses Taylor’s attorneys will likely call at the February 9th hearing. The bottom line is, that if Tom Ford’s initial prosecution had merit, then Willoughby would be prepared to take on anything that Taylor’s attorneys could toss at them. The problem for Willoughby is that Ford’s case against Taylor in 1993 was merit-less. That is their disadvantage, and it is one that cannot be overcome by time or anything Willoughby does. The three judge panel will find Gregory Taylor not guilty.

And when the media covers that event on February 9th, they will talk about how Gregory F. Taylor was wrongfully incarcerated for sixteen years, the details about the hearing, and give a background history about the murder which led to this tragedy of sixteen lost years. But, in strict compliance with the PAPEN policy, the media will not mention the name of Tom Ford, the prosecutor responsible for this tremendous injustice. However, do not be surprised to see Mike Nifong’s name, through some convoluted and tortuous manner, linked to the ghastly tragedy that befell Greg Taylor… from which the mindless and misled among the media consumers will naturally attribute Mr. Taylor’s misfortune to that evil and sinister Mr. Nifong.