Tyrone Noling:
A Summary Of His Case Of Actual Innocence
The public is cynical about claims of actual innocence. People tend to quickly forget about all the cases where prisoners are freed from prison -- even from death row -- after being proven innocent.
People want to believe that prosecutors are honest and ethical, that defense attorneys are conscientious, that witnesses are truthful, that defendants can't be coerced into confessing to crimes they didn't commit, that judges are vigilant, that juries don't make mistakes, and that if dozens of appellate judges have carefully reviewed a case the guy must be guilty.
People tend to close their eyes and ears, even in the face of outrageous cases of government abuse leading to the wrongful prosecution and conviction of innocent men. People want to believe that the wrongful conviction of an innocent man is a rare event.
But our once blind faith in our criminal justice system is being eroded by what was at first only a trickle of cases of innocent men being exonerated but now has become a virtual torrent of almost daily reports of cases of the wrongfully convicted being freed from prison.
We read stories of those convicted by sloppy police work, coerced false confessions, corrupt overly-ambitious prosecutors, junk science, mistaken eyewitness testimony, false testimony, sleeping defense lawyers, biased judges, and jurors tainted by prejudicial publicity. By now we are all becoming all too familiar with cases of the wrongful conviction of the innocent, even here in Ohio.
Only a few months ago headlines announced the release of Clarence Elkins from Mansfield Correctional Institution. Elkins had been indicted in 1998 for aggravated murder with death penalty specifications for killing of his mother-in-law and for raping his 6-year-old niece at his mother-in-law's Barberton home. He was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison in Summit County. Elkins proclaimed his innocence from the beginning. He was supported throughout by his wife and family. He met stiff resistance from the prosecutor and the courts. They wouldn't accept the recantation of the niece, whose trial testimony was the prosecutor's only evidence against Elkins. Finally, Elkins was able to obtain the DNA of the real perpetrator -- another inmate at Mansfield -- from the other inmate's cigarette butt. That DNA matched the DNA of evidence found on the two victims. Prosecuting Attorney Sheri Bevan still did not want to release Elkins, arguing that since DNA evidence is not what convicted Elkins it should not be used to exonerate him. But after spending more than 7 years in prison, the court released Elkins in December, 2005.
Just recently headlines announced the Court of Claims settlement for $2.5 million of Timothy Howard's wrongful imprisonment lawsuit after Howard proved his innocence after spending 26 years in prison for crimes he didn't commit. In 2003 a Franklin County judge set aside the convictions of Howard and his co-defendant, Gary James. Howard and James were convicted in 1977 in Franklin County Common Pleas Court -- and sentenced to death -- for supposedly murdering a bank guard in a holdup. If these two inmates' death sentences hadn't been nullified by a decision of the United States Supreme Court when that court set aside Ohio's death penalty law in 1978, these two inmates would never have had the opportunity to present their eventually meritorious claims in a postconviction petition.
It appears that, so far, all of the judges who have reviewed the claims of Tyrone Noling have operated on the assumption that our criminal justice system functions pretty well; that our criminal trials -- especially death penalty trials -- present a fairly accurate picture of what happened; and that our system could not possibly malfunction to the extent that the trial and the record of the trial would not come close to bringing out the truth. If only they had looked at this case with just a little of the scrutiny that it deserves.
.... John Gideon
Post Conviction Attorney
You Be the Judge
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