Innocent or Guilty

[SwanTiger]

This is a story about a death-row inmate that was convicted of a horrific crime commited in the mid-eighties. After doing my own research, out of curiosity, I have come to the opinion that there is a possibility the accused is now innocent.

Point 1
Mr. Alley claims that his convicting confession was made under duress (detailed in the text below). This is highlighted by the fact his confession contradicts the medical evidence, or lack of it. Suggesting that his claim of a forced confession is true.

Point 2
A DNA test (which Mr. Alley has requested) whould spread light on the truth and indicate once and for all whether Mr. Alley is innocent or guilty. So far the governor and the courts (both state and federal) have fucked him around with political crap and avoided it.

Time is almost out
Mr. Alley will be excuted this week in the U.S. on Wednesday at 1am. If you can be bothered reading this and believe there is a possibility for a miscariage of justice here and an innocent man may be executed, please e-mail the governor.

HELP THE POOR BASTARD
Send an e-mail to the Governor: phil.bredesen@state.tn.us



21 years after killing, execution days away
Options running out in inmate's bid to live

By BONNA de la CRUZ
Staff Writer

Twenty-one years ago, Suzanne Collins went for a late-night jog wearing a Marine Corps T-shirt and shorts at a Memphis-area naval air station.

The next morning, the 19-year-old's naked body was found in a nearby park, beaten, strangled and impaled on a stick that was used to rape her.

She had more than 100 cuts, bruises, and other injuries. Authorities believed she tried to fight her attacker.

That same day, investigators' main suspect, Sedley Alley, 29, a heating-and-air worker, confessed and showed them the tree from which he took a 31-inch limb used in his attack.

During Alley's 1987 trial, he said that he was insane and that one of his alternate personalities was in control when he killed the Marine.

A jury sent him to death row, and his execution is scheduled for 1 a.m. Wednesday. One of 103 on Tennessee's death row, he would be the first to be put to death since 2000.

But now, his defense attorneys are saying new evidence — withheld by prosecutors for years — casts doubt on Alley's guilt.

A new estimate of the time when Collins died, discovered in the medical examiner's files two years ago, gives Alley an alibi because he was either in police custody or under police observation by that time, said his attorneys in the federal public defender's office in Nashville.

And there could be another suspect.

Eyewitness descriptions of the attacker more closely matches Collins' boyfriend, who may have had a motive to kill her, his defense team said. Police ignored the boyfriend as a suspect, never noting his height or weight or the type of car he drove, and saying he yielded "no information of any value," according to the defense.

Prosecutors and victims-rights advocates counter that Alley’s last-minute claims are stalling tactics and that his execution is long overdue.

Legal battles intensify

The tug of war between the two sides has sparked a last-minute flurry of litigation that could derail the execution at any time and could go as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the past 72 hours, a federal court in Nashville stayed Alley’s execution — but a panel of judges on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the stay on Friday. His attorneys said they plan to file an appeal on Monday to the full court again asking that the execution be delayed.

The appeal revolves around whether Alley should be able to pursue his claim that the state’s lethal injection protocol causes horrific pain and is unconstitutional.

Alley also is asking a federal appeals court to force the state to turn over evidence — Collins’ underwear, a pair of red underwear believed to be the attacker’s, the stick, and other items at the crime scene — so DNA tests can be run.

At the same time, Alley is pressing his DNA case Monday to the state Probation and Parole Board, which could recommend a reprieve for him.

He wants the governor either to keep him out of the death chamber long enough for the court to decide whether he has a right to the DNA tests or to require the tests be done.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Alley’s execution is scheduled for 1 a.m. Wednesday. He is slated to be put on “death watch” by the prison system today.

If his lawyers fail, Alley would become the second person executed in Tennessee since 1960. Robert Glen Coe, a West Tennessee man convicted of raping and killing an 8-year-old girl, was put to death in 2000.

“I asked him a few years ago if he did it, and he said he did not do it,” said April McIntyre, 30, Alley’s daughter and a project analyst for a bank in Louisville, Ky.

“If they did DNA testing, it would show that he’s innocent. … If the state is so sure he’s guilty, it seems they would want DNA testing to prove they’re right. Do they have something to hide?” she said.

The state attorney general’s office, which has taken the lead on much of the appeals on the prosecution side, declined to comment on the case.

But in court papers filed last week, state attorneys said Alley had no constitutional right to DNA testing after he was convicted.

They also said there are procedural problems with Alley’s complaint. For instance, federal district courts don’t have authority to make state courts turn over evidence, their court brief said.

State attorneys also noted in court papers that Alley for 20 years never said anything about being innocent.

The Collins family, through a liaison, said they did not want to comment.

But in a short film called “The Other Side of Death Row,” John and Trudy Collins talked about the murder of their daughter, whom they described as someone “who always wanted to do something special.”

John Collins described the killing this way: “Somebody came up from behind her, grabbed her, threw her in his car, took her off-base to a county park nearby, where over time, he battered her against his automobile, stripped her, chewed on her breast and then broke a branch off a tree under which Suzanne was lying and thrust the branch between her legs, up through the entire length of her body, mutilating all her organs.”

The film, put together by a victims’ rights group called You Have the Power and the state Department of Correction, also includes interviews of family members of other victims of Tennessee death row inmates.

Trudy Collins described Alley’s numerous appeals as “frivolous and ridiculous.” The family poured its entire savings into the case, she said.

“A lot of judges and courts have heard all of this nonsense,” Trudy Collins said. “And it goes on and on.”

‘Proof of his innocence’

DNA expert Barry Scheck joined Alley’s defense team last week. He plans to be in Nashville on Monday for the hearing before the parole board, said Kelley Henry, an assistant federal public defender who represents Alley.

Scheck, well known as one of the attorneys in O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, is co-founder of The Innocence Project.

The nonprofit legal clinic has helped free inmates through DNA testing. There have been as many as 176 individuals who have been cleared by DNA evidence, including 14 who were at one time sentenced to death.

Scheck, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, helped exonerate another Tennessee man who had been sentenced to 119 years in prison for a Memphis rape and robbery.

The defendant, Clark McMillan, was freed from prison in 2002 — 22 years after he was convicted — after DNA tests showed he did not rape the victim.

[SwanTiger]

“DNA testing can be done in certain ways that will shed definitive light on somebody’s guilt or innocence,” Scheck said last week.

In Alley’s case, definitive guilt or innocence could be derived by testing seminal fluid detected on Collins’ thighs, the attacker’s underwear that was left at the scene, tissue scrapings under a broken fingernail, and the tree branch, Scheck said.

“If it turns out the seminal fluid, the skin cells from the underwear, the tissue under the fingernail, the blood or tissues from the stick all come back to the same male who is not Sedley Alley, that is powerful proof of his innocence,” Scheck said.

Hair and blood found in Alley’s car, which authorities determined could have come from Collins, could also be tested for DNA, Scheck said.

Governors of other states, including President Bush when he was governor of Texas and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, have stepped in with reprieves to order DNA testing, according to The Justice Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates on behalf of people who might have been wrongly convicted.

The Innocence Project legal clinic would cover the costs of the DNA tests in Collins’ slaying and work with state attorneys to ensure that the best laboratories would be used, Scheck said.

If it comes to it, Alley’s defense team would pursue DNA testing even after Alley is executed, Scheck said.

“Nobody wants a situation where tests that could have been very probative on guilt or innocence were not performed before the execution,” Scheck said.

Alley’s argument for DNA testing has not succeeded so far.

The state court, which denied Alley’s petition for DNA testing two years ago, said that he would not be cleared even if DNA proved a third person had been in contact with the victim that night. A federal judge earlier this year also dismissed the complaint.

Advocates say appeals, such as Alley’s DNA argument, is dragging out the process and prolonging Alley’s life.

“When there is so much evidence in a case, there doesn’t need to be DNA testing,” Rebecca Easley, a victims-rights advocate, said in an e-mail. The men who murdered her sister were on death row for a time.

John Collins, in the film, said, “Suzanne’s case has been in the judicial system for more years than her age when she was killed.”

Shifting time, changing story

A wood-paneled station wagon Alley was driving caught police officers’ attention the night of July 11, 1985.

He had been drinking at home that evening and was out for another six-pack, according to his confession as recounted in court documents.

Depressed, lonely and unhappy, Alley missed Kentucky, where his parents and two children from a previous marriage lived.

His mind wandered to thoughts of suicide, killing himself by driving his car into a wall. About 10 minutes after midnight, military police interrupted those thoughts and pulled Alley over.

His station wagon matched the description of a car seen at the Millington naval air station where joggers had heard a woman scream. The naval station was where Collins, a lance corporal, was in avionics training and where Alley’s wife worked.

Alley told them he had been fighting with his wife and was driving around. Police talked to his wife, then let him go after 1 a.m. They checked up on him close to 1:30 a.m., noting he was on his porch talking to his wife.

From there, two stories evolved.

In his taped confession to military police, Alley said he struck Collins with his car and decided to take her to the hospital. When she wouldn’t calm down, he hit her several times, threw her to the ground and stuck a screwdriver in her head.

He was scared, and he was drunk. But he never had sex with her, he said.

He decided to make it look like she was raped, he said, so he pulled off her clothes, dragged her near a tree, then broke off a tree limb, which he used to rape her. During Alley’s 1987 trial, he said one of his alternate personalities was in control, known as “Power” or “Death.”

Adding to the prosecution’s case, three witnesses identified Alley’s car by sight and sound as the one involved in Collins’ abduction.

Blood found inside the car matched Collins’ blood type and hair also found in the car could have been hers, prosecutors said.

But Alley, who had previously never been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, has a different story to tell now. His original confession is not reliable, his defense attorneys and daughter said.

“I asked him why he made up the confession, and he replied that ‘A detective held a gun up to my head’ and threatened to shoot him in the face so his mother would be forced to attend a closed-casket funeral,” McIntyre said.

The confession was either partially or entirely false, according to criminologist Richard A. Leo, who was hired by the defense team.

It included two errors: Alley said he hit the victim with his car and stabbed her in the side of the head with a screwdriver. During trial, the medical examiner testified that she was not hit by a car nor was she stabbed with a screwdriver.

“These errors are significant because they defy rational explanation if Mr. Alley did in fact murder the victim,” Leo said in written testimony. Leo is an associate professor of criminology, law and society and associate professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

Defense: Case doesn’t add up

The first clue for defense attorneys came two years ago when an investigator for the defense team discovered a document in the Shelby County medical examiner’s files that showed Collins’ time of death as being between 1:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.,” said Henry, the public defender representing Alley.

That flew in the face of prosecutors’ arguments that Alley abducted and killed Collins before he was stopped by police.

Other parts of the case did not add up either, Henry said.

One witness told police the attacker was 5-foot-8 with a medium-build and had short, dark brown hair and a dark complexion. Alley is 6-foot-4 and was slender, with medium to long reddish-brown hair, medium complexion with a mustache and beard, according to court documents.

The tire tracks and shoe prints at the crime scene were not from Alley’s car or his shoes. And hairs and fingerprints found on items near the body were not Alley’s, his attorneys said.

Those pieces of evidence point to someone else, perhaps one of Collins’ boyfriends, Alley’s attorneys said in court papers.

Her Memphis boyfriend drove a similar wood-paneled station wagon, matched the description of the abductor and admitted he saw Collins the night she was killed.

Plus, Alley’s attorneys said, that boyfriend had a motive to kill: Collins was leaving town to be with another man, her fiance, in California. She was scheduled to graduate from avionics school the day she was killed.

An investigator for the defense team interviewed the two men and both said they thought they were in exclusive relationships with Collins.

For Collins’ family, the second-guessing and what-ifs have gone on long enough. They are ready for Alley to pay the ultimate price — but even then, there won’t be closure.

“There never will be closure,” John Collins said in the film. “What you get is a modicum of peace. You get a feeling that somebody cares. The state of Tennessee cared enough about our daughter that it carried out an execution on her killer. But no closure until the day we die.”

[SwanTiger]

What to write? Here is an Example

Dear Governor,


I write to you in regards to the up-comming execution of death-row inmate Sedley Alley and wish to express my concern over the lack of attention paid to now available evidence.

After following the news reports and conducting my own research into the case, I am of the satisfied opionion that Mr. Alley deserves at the very minimum his request for DNA testing.

This would validate the argument of prosecutors or prove a condemed man innocent and prevent his premature death like that of the Victim involved in this case.

I beg of you to consider your options within your capabilities of power to prevent any possibility for a miscariage of justice.

[SwanTiger]

To me this seems like a classic example of hardcore American politics from decades ago still existent in the Justice System. Regardless of who this man is or what he has done in life, mistakes and all, I believe everyone deserves REASONABLE DOUBT where there is evidence to suggest it. Fairness in other words.

Make an effort you lot, it only takes 5 minutes to send an e-mail and it MIGHT make a difference.

EDIT: I have not been brainwashed by some political rights organisation.

[cowpoos]

why would the boyfriend rape his girlfriend?

[SimJen]

Whats the point?
Media could have put a spin on it, who's saying what they wrote is right and all the facts are true and correct.
Its nothing to do with me, I don't know the full details from both his case and the victims so I can't possibly make a judgement and neither should anyone else unless you are a lawyer or actually sat in court during the trial.
Did you have full access to the case files????? I don't think so. So you made a decision based on what you read.
This is the problem with the world today, everyone makes a judgement from what they read or see in the media(and all its forms).

[thatHurt]

why would the boyfriend rape his girlfriend?

It was with a stick. Some fucked up dickedhead boyfriend's have done worse than that. Murder - look close to home first I reckon.

Look, I think the guy at least deserves to have the DNA test done. What could it hurt, apart from the government's case?

[Kendog]

The whole reason I don't believe in the death penalty, hard labour or castration yes, but who gives anyone the right to put someone else to death for something they may not have actually done. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that shite. Anyway, that's just what I think, what would I know.
Mrs KD

[SPman]

Whoever did that deserves to die - preferably in the same way.

But - it had better be the right person and, history shows that it, as often as not, isn't!

Without ALL steps to ascertain correct guilt - which seems to seldom happen, in most legal systems around the world - there should be no death penalty. It often seems to come down to the egos at play on the side of the prosecuters.....

[WINJA]

im all for the death penalty as long as its smoking gun evidence like credible eyewitnesses or video , poor bastard

[mstriumph]

what was done

brutal

there's so much rage there - rage against women in general? or against this woman in particular?



if the case has been going 21 years and the technology is now available to say definately who the killer is or isn't then surely a few more days shouldn't hurt whilst they use it?

[SwanTiger]

Did you have full access to the case files????? I don't think so. So you made a decision based on what you read.
This is the problem with the world today, everyone makes a judgement from what they read or see in the media(and all its forms).

Here is the "story" from the opposing side of the argument:

http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Pending/04/jun04.htm

I have more detailed links from both sides of the argument which clearly shows a bias and an attempt to prove doubt.

I never said that the man was innocent or guilty, but there is plenty of un-resolved evidence that SHOULD (in my opinion) be cleared first. Any attempt to avoid this (which is happening) is a miscariage of justice and implies that ego's responsibile for prosecuting are biased through ignorance or otherwise.

EDIT: I don't care about the death penalty, different cultures different motivations of justice. All I am concerned about is a potentially innocent man been killed while un-resolved evidence remains. Simple in'it?

[The_Dover]

GIVE HIM THE CHAIR

fuckin capsunlock bollocks

[Lou Girardin]

The whole reason I don't believe in the death penalty, hard labour or castration yes,

So if they get it wrong they can just sew 'em back on?

[The_Dover]

So if they get it wrong they can just sew 'em back on?

Hey, if it's good enough for John Wayne Bobbitt to pursue a career in porn it's good enough for me.

Marvellous Modern Medicine.

Now where are my pills............