"a two-week trial from which all black and all female prospective jurors were dismissed"
"The long, hard half-life of Lawyer Johnson; The last man sentenced to die here was freed 30 years ago. But his struggle has just begun" by James H. Burnett III | Globe Staff, April 08, 2012
This year marks exactly three decades since Lawyer Johnson was freed from the prison in Walpole after 10 years in prison for a murder he is adamant he did not commit. He was the last person sentenced to die in Massachusetts before the Commonwealth did away with capital punishment in 1974.
That is one thing Massachusetts does have going for it, and let's hope it never changes. I'm kind of pro-life, anti-death here at the MSM Monitor.
Johnson still grapples with his lot, with what to make of it, and from it. The made-for-Hollywood version of his life would cast him as a young man brought low by injustice but arriving in time, and with quiet heroism, at a better place. Reality, however, often doesn’t play by storybook rules....
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The crime was a grim affair. According to court records, on the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1971, 30-year-old James Christian, a former laborer originally from Maine, armed himself with a pistol and drove to 71 Prentiss St. to buy drugs. Police said that when Christian attempted to leave the building, he, Johnson, and a third man, who was never identified, argued and that Johnson shot Christian in the face.
“I told them I wasn’t there and that I hadn’t shot nobody, but they didn’t care because I couldn’t tell them where I was when it happened,’’ Johnson says. “I figured I didn’t need to lie and make up an alibi . . . ’cause I hadn’t done anything.’’
When the two-week trial took place six months later, in June 1972, the prosecution’s case rested largely on then-18-year-old Kenneth Myers, who told police he witnessed the shooting, and on the testimony of police officers who acknowledged taking Myers’s word for what happened.
Myers and Johnson knew each other growing up in Mission Hill housing but not well, according to Johnson. “We knew some of the same people, but we were definitely not friends,’’ Johnson says.
The defense was never made aware that a 10-year-old girl, Dawnielle Montiero, had, with her mother’s help, called police to say she’d witnessed the murder. The girl said the shooter was Myers, whom she knew as a violent neighborhood bully, but police declined to take her statement, saying she was too young to be believed.
During the trial, Myers, who already had a criminal record for drug dealing, admitted that he’d first identified another man - one in prison at the time of the murder - before fingering Johnson.
Asked why Myers would peg him as the shooter, Johnson testified that he had no idea.
“Like a lot of young guys, I wanted to be thought of as tough, ‘bad.’ But the truth is I was very shy and sometimes bullied. And it was pretty common for some of the tough guys in the neighborhood to use me and guys like me as scapegoats,’’ he says. “They knew that most of the time we wouldn’t speak up, because we were scared of them. This was different though. This was murder, and I didn’t do it. I had to speak up, but the prosecutors just dismissed it as two old friends turning on each other.’’
After a two-week trial from which all black and all female prospective jurors were dismissed, Johnson was convicted of first-degree murder on June 1, 1972, and sentenced to die by electrocution.
Johnson maintained his innocence, and a team of attorneys argued his case well enough to get him a retrial in 1974. But under nearly identical circumstances, he was convicted again. Johnson’s defense team was still unaware that Montiero even existed.
His second conviction came at about the time the Legislature was abolishing the death penalty for murder. “I came off of death row,’’ he says, “but I still was in prison, in maximum security for something I didn’t do.’’
Johnson continued his appeals, and, in the fall of 1981, he got a break. Montiero, by then a 20-year-old student at Salem State College, and her mother reached out to Johnson’s attorneys and told them that she’d been haunted for years by what she’d seen.
In a sworn deposition on Feb. 13, 1981, Montiero vividly recalled turning down Prentiss Street in time to see Myers and Christian exit number 71.
“Kenny looked at me. I noticed that he had a gun in his hand. He pointed the gun at me but did not say anything. At this time he was about three or four feet away from me,’’ she testified. “Kenny Myers then turned around and said something to the other man. Then he raised his gun and shot the man in the head.’’
Over objections from prosecutors, Appeals Court Judge Eileen P. Griffin declared Montiero’s testimony to be much more credible than that of Myers - particularly as Myers had, some years after the second trial, admitted to defense investigators that he had lied about Johnson’s role. She ordered the state to either retry or free Johnson.
These are the guys that are supposed to be seeking the truth along with justice, right? I mean, you really can't have one without the other.
Prosecutor Thomas Mundy elected to drop the charges, though he maintained until his death in 1993 that he believed Johnson was guilty....
Yeah, WHO CARES WHAT the WITNESSES and EVIDENCE SHOW, huh?
Yeah, NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE, the FASCISTS, 'er, PROSECUTORS ONLY CARE ABOUT THE WON-LOSS RECORD!!
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Also see:
Tulsa shootings appear to target black men
200 march in Trayvon Martin case protest
MSM Fog in Florida
Globe is just making it worse.
