Yet Another Case Demonstrates The Injustice of the Death Penalty
After 21 Years, DNA Testing Sets Man Free in Rape Case
In yet another case where the state (in this case the state of Connecticut) convicted a person and then held on to exculpatory evidence in a warehouse, waiting for some smart lawyer to call for DNA testing (instead of doing the DNA testing as a matter of justice), until the wrongfully convicted person served 21 years in prison. It seems to me, in the interest of justice and the sanctity of our court systems, that the state ought to order DNA testing in all cases where a person was convicted and samples of body substances exist. But that is not the way our courts have ruled. In fact, in some cases, the courts have ruled that convicted felons are not entitled to DNA testing of existing samples, even if the DNA technology was not available at the time of the conviction... even if there is potential of exculpatory evidence coming from the DNA process. In fact, there have been a few cases where the courts have refused to allow another trial or the admission of DNA test results to vacate a conviction.
This is why we should all oppose the death penalty. While 21 years in prison is very difficult to undo, it can at least be undone to some extent. However, a convicted person sentenced to death cannot be undone once the sentence has been carried out. I oppose the death penalty on the basis of logic and Christian principles.
But after the samples were discovered by his lawyers last year, Mr. Fappiano finally had the evidence he had sought for half of his life. Yesterday, a State Supreme Court judge vacated his conviction for the 1983 rape of a Brooklyn woman, after the tests showed he had not committed the crime for which he spent more than two decades in prison.
Several hours after the judge’s ruling, Mr. Fappiano shuffled out a steel door into the hallway of a Brooklyn courthouse, clutching a brown paper bag of personal items in one hand along with every relative within arm’s length with the other.
“I just kept waiting,” said Mr. Fappiano, 44, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his gray sweat pants as his mother, a brother and several cousins looked on. “I’m just happy that it’s over.”
His family and lawyers were less forgiving, their elation warring with anger and frustration as they mulled the long path that Mr. Fappiano traveled between conviction and redemption, with 21 years of it in prison.
“The only thing I feel is that my son was kidnapped,” said Rose Fappiano, his 69-year-old mother. “I couldn’t believe this day had come.”
Mr. Fappiano was represented by lawyers from the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing. He was the fourth person in the last year in New York State to be exonerated by testing arranged by the project’s lawyers, who yesterday called for a full-scale reform of the city’s procedures for storing evidence.
“It is no small miracle that Scott is here today,” said Nina Morrison, his Innocence Project lawyer. “Had Scott’s case depended on the evidence storage and collection inventory procedures of the New York City Police Department, he would still be in prison today.”
In a statement, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said that the department had requested proposals for a more advanced evidence tracking system to replace the current one. “The advanced system will be used, in part, to improve retrieval of old evidence, which has sometimes proven difficult considering the extraordinary volume and the lack of an automated system in the 1980’s and 1990’s,” he said.
In a separate statement, the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, called Mr. Fappiano’s imprisonment a “tragedy.” Mr. Hynes also said that while Mr. Fappiano was convicted long before his tenure as district attorney, his office “conducted extensive investigations into this case and moved immediately to have him released” once the new DNA tests were performed.
The Brooklyn woman, who was not named in court documents, was raped several times in different rooms of her and her husband’s house in December 1983. Her husband, a police officer, had been tied up by the rapist in the couple’s bedroom with a telephone cord. The rapist had broken into the house and carried a gun, court documents said.
The woman identified Mr. Fappiano as her rapist while flipping through police photographs of men who matched the general description of her assailant, and later picked him out of a lineup, though he was five inches shorter than the man she said had attacked her and had shorter hair.
But the woman’s husband did not identify Mr. Fappiano out of the lineup. Though investigators retrieved nearly a dozen pieces of physical evidence of the crime -- including cigarettes the rapist had smoked, vaginal swabs from a rape kit and semen stains on a towel and on a pair of sweat pants the victim put on after the attack-- blood tests failed to link any of it to Mr. Fappiano.
continued...
In yet another case where the state (in this case the state of Connecticut) convicted a person and then held on to exculpatory evidence in a warehouse, waiting for some smart lawyer to call for DNA testing (instead of doing the DNA testing as a matter of justice), until the wrongfully convicted person served 21 years in prison. It seems to me, in the interest of justice and the sanctity of our court systems, that the state ought to order DNA testing in all cases where a person was convicted and samples of body substances exist. But that is not the way our courts have ruled. In fact, in some cases, the courts have ruled that convicted felons are not entitled to DNA testing of existing samples, even if the DNA technology was not available at the time of the conviction... even if there is potential of exculpatory evidence coming from the DNA process. In fact, there have been a few cases where the courts have refused to allow another trial or the admission of DNA test results to vacate a conviction.
This is why we should all oppose the death penalty. While 21 years in prison is very difficult to undo, it can at least be undone to some extent. However, a convicted person sentenced to death cannot be undone once the sentence has been carried out. I oppose the death penalty on the basis of logic and Christian principles.
But after the samples were discovered by his lawyers last year, Mr. Fappiano finally had the evidence he had sought for half of his life. Yesterday, a State Supreme Court judge vacated his conviction for the 1983 rape of a Brooklyn woman, after the tests showed he had not committed the crime for which he spent more than two decades in prison.
Several hours after the judge’s ruling, Mr. Fappiano shuffled out a steel door into the hallway of a Brooklyn courthouse, clutching a brown paper bag of personal items in one hand along with every relative within arm’s length with the other.
“I just kept waiting,” said Mr. Fappiano, 44, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his gray sweat pants as his mother, a brother and several cousins looked on. “I’m just happy that it’s over.”
His family and lawyers were less forgiving, their elation warring with anger and frustration as they mulled the long path that Mr. Fappiano traveled between conviction and redemption, with 21 years of it in prison.
“The only thing I feel is that my son was kidnapped,” said Rose Fappiano, his 69-year-old mother. “I couldn’t believe this day had come.”
Mr. Fappiano was represented by lawyers from the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing. He was the fourth person in the last year in New York State to be exonerated by testing arranged by the project’s lawyers, who yesterday called for a full-scale reform of the city’s procedures for storing evidence.
“It is no small miracle that Scott is here today,” said Nina Morrison, his Innocence Project lawyer. “Had Scott’s case depended on the evidence storage and collection inventory procedures of the New York City Police Department, he would still be in prison today.”
In a statement, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said that the department had requested proposals for a more advanced evidence tracking system to replace the current one. “The advanced system will be used, in part, to improve retrieval of old evidence, which has sometimes proven difficult considering the extraordinary volume and the lack of an automated system in the 1980’s and 1990’s,” he said.
In a separate statement, the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, called Mr. Fappiano’s imprisonment a “tragedy.” Mr. Hynes also said that while Mr. Fappiano was convicted long before his tenure as district attorney, his office “conducted extensive investigations into this case and moved immediately to have him released” once the new DNA tests were performed.
The Brooklyn woman, who was not named in court documents, was raped several times in different rooms of her and her husband’s house in December 1983. Her husband, a police officer, had been tied up by the rapist in the couple’s bedroom with a telephone cord. The rapist had broken into the house and carried a gun, court documents said.
The woman identified Mr. Fappiano as her rapist while flipping through police photographs of men who matched the general description of her assailant, and later picked him out of a lineup, though he was five inches shorter than the man she said had attacked her and had shorter hair.
But the woman’s husband did not identify Mr. Fappiano out of the lineup. Though investigators retrieved nearly a dozen pieces of physical evidence of the crime -- including cigarettes the rapist had smoked, vaginal swabs from a rape kit and semen stains on a towel and on a pair of sweat pants the victim put on after the attack-- blood tests failed to link any of it to Mr. Fappiano.
continued...
posted by Jim Downey at 5:26 AM
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