Well, election season is on us, and the good folks of Ohio may well be the people to decide for the entire country whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is President. I'm not going to dedicate time here tonight to argue whether the Electoral College is still the best plan. Instead, I will spend a few minutes talking about when politics affect legal decisions.
Last month I was deeply involved in a murder trial. If you read some of my posts, you know that it ended in a hung jury, 10-2 in favor of acquittal. As of yet no decision has been made as to whether or not the defendant in this case will be re-tried. He is out on a much smaller bond, but his future is still in limbo. Will he have to defend himself again? Should he even have to?
This case has always been political in nature. The victim was the Superintendent of schools in a smallish town, that had seen its share of racial division and corruption. He was an outsider that had been brought in to "clean up" the town, and also implement Brown vs Board of Education, which was long overdue. He had his run-ins with the School Board, and they wanted him gone. He ended up dead less than 24 hrs before a controversial meeting was to take place,
The defendant, a 17 year old high school student at the time, had no connection to the victim, the Board, or even the community. His family had recently relocated there. Neither he, nor his parents, were part of these controversies. Yet, due to some circumstantial evidence that placed him near the scene of the crime at approximately the same time as the murder, he became a person of interest. He was investigated, and dropped as a suspect, twenty years ago.
The problem is that now there is a D.A. that is aggressively trying to clean up cold-cases. The defendant was asked to give a DNA sample, which he did. The State got an arrest warrant on the strength of a "DNA match." This so-called match not only proved later to not be a match, it tended to show that the defendant could NOT have been the killer.
Nevertheless, the D.A. pursued this case with a fervor. She fought to make sure the defendant's bail was unattainable ($1M), and insisted in taking this matter to trial even when the lab that suggested there could be a match came back with a report saying there was not one.
Why would someone do this? Well, it may just be a coincidence, but the D.A.'s name has made a lot of headlines with her high-profile prosecution of this and other cases. Oh, and she is up for re-election in a couple weeks.
Since the hung-jury, she has kept silent about the case, and has let the Assistant D.A. who was the lead here take all the criticism. As for whether or not the Defendant would be re-tried? No word. No one is expecting anything until after the election. If her challenger wins, everyone expects the case will be dropped. If she wins, she may re-try it? Who knows?
The sad thing is that the victim's family is no closer to justice than they were twenty years ago. The defendant--a real person, with a wife, with hopes for a family, with hopes for regaining his life--sits and waits. This is not justice, and justice should never have to be put on hold due to someone's political aspirations.
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