A New Lawsuit Seeks to Prove Ledell Lee Was Innocent When Arkansas Executed Him.

[Cattledog]

Lee on right.

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Three years ago, Justice Neil Gorsuch cast his first vote as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Arkansas to execute Ledell Lee for the 1993 murder of Debra Reese. In a 5–4 ruling, the court approved of the state’s decision to go through with a planned marathon of eight executions before a drug in their lethal injection cocktail was due to expire. There were serious flaws in the case against Lee, who unwaveringly professed his innocence. Family members offered an alibi for him during the approximate time of the murder. His first appellate attorney appeared drunk in court and never introduced evidence that Lee was intellectually disabled. In the days before Lee’s execution, Arkansas courts refused to allow a DNA analysis that could exonerate him. The decision by Gorsuch and the other conservatives to dismiss all this in the rush to use the lethal drugs was terribly controversial at the time. Lee was executed just before midnight on April 20, 2017.

That decision could soon look much worse. On Thursday, a group of lawyers, including from the Innocence Project and the ACLU, filed a lawsuit in Arkansas on behalf of Ledell Lee’s sister, Patricia Young, seeking testing of DNA and fingerprint evidence from the crime scene that the Supreme Court determined three years ago need not be evaluated. The five testable sets of fingerprints found at the scene do not match Lee’s, but can be tested against a database of 70 million people in minutes at no cost to the city of Jacksonville, Arkansas, one of the defendants in the case.

Full article at:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/ledell-lee-execution-dna-evidence-arkansas.html?fbclid=IwAR0G6wUNBAHBb17EOIJPP8XEO3p7x4MNzeEXSbA4hUxRDJzXBTwgVwwo2GU

[Mike 03]

1. Extremely disturbing. From another article about this case:

The difficulties with the case against Lee began almost immediately. He was picked up nowhere near the crime scene and was not in possession of any possessions that could be linked to the break-in at Reese’s home.

The only evidence against him was inconclusive at best. There were two eyewitnesses, but they gave conflicting reports of the suspect’s identification.

The crime scene was shocking, with blood splattered over the walls and floor. Yet when Lee was arrested on the same day detectives could find no blood on his clothes or body including under his fingernails and nothing was found in a forensic search of his house.

Given the paucity of evidence, it is not surprising that it took two trials to find Lee guilty and sentence him to death. The first trial collapsed after the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

The ACLU and Innocence Project took up Lee’s case very late in the day having been asked to get involved shortly before his scheduled execution date. What they discovered when they opened the case records astounded even these experienced death penalty lawyers.

Very quickly they established there were major problems with the prosecution case against Lee. One area that especially concerned them was the inadequacy of Lee’s legal representation, both during the second trial in which defense attorneys inexplicably failed to call alibi witnesses that could have placed Lee elsewhere at the time of the murder, and in terms of the help he received at the appeal stage of his case.

At one post-conviction hearing, a lawyer working for the state of Arkansas approached the judge and raised concerns about Lee’s attorney, Craig Lambert. “Your honor, I don’t do this lightly, but I’m going to ask that the court require him to submit to a drug test,” the counsel said. “He’s just not with us … His speech is slurred.”

The Guardian: 'The new evidence raises deeply troubling questions': did Arkansas kill an innocent man?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/23/arkansas-death-penalty-ledell-lee-execution

[Karadeniz]

2. Appalling. I hope he is vindicated and his family feels some small sense of justice.