'An innocent man is on death row. Alabama officials seem OK with that,' writes columnist Kyle Whitmire. Read the full story here ➡️
I’m a competitive person. I hate getting beaten to a story. So I took little pleasure three years ago when the Washington Post’s Radley Balko unearthedright in my backyard — a death penalty case in which the defendant, a man named Toforest Johnson, couldn’t have committed the crime.
Both had alibi witnesses putting them in another part of town at the time of the murder. But police had a teenager, Yolanda Chambers, who identified Ford as the shooter — but only after she first had named three other men as the shooter.And this is the bonkers thing about this prosecution: They didn’t argue that Johnson and Ford had committed the murder together. Rather, they charged and tried them apart from each other.
Ellison’s daughter had been dating a man who was in jail. In a scheme to get out of jailhouse phone charges, the daughter would use three-way calling to connect her boyfriend and others with people on the outside they wanted to call, thus allowing them to pay for one call instead of several. And Ford himself, who died last year, might have been the most important witness of all. Ahead of their trials, prosecutors offered Ford immunity if he would finger Johnson as the killer. Ford refused, saying he wouldn’t lie, even if it would set him free. Instead, he stood trial and won an acquittal.As bizarre as Johnson’s case is, it’s not a unique or unusual failure of the system. There have been others.
And what should scare the hell out of everybody is that Alabama’s most senior public officials seem OK with that.Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall knows all of this.Marshall tomorrow could pull the plug on the state’s case against Johnson, which is now before the Court of Criminal Appeals.They seem set on killing an innocent man, because doing anything less might make someone think they’re soft on crime.
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