Greg Taylor's claim that he was railroaded into prison, wrongfully convicted of murder, turned out to be ... true! So three Superior Court judges concluded after a hearing that broke new ground for North Carolina's justice system.
Taylor, set free after 17 years, is joyful at his exoneration. The rest of us can take satisfaction in knowing that this state now has a method capable of identifying cases where the courts, in punishing the innocent, have failed.
After weighing testimony from the same principal characters whose accounts led to a guilty verdict at Taylor's trial, the evidence that he did not kill Jacquetta Thomas in 1991 was "clear and convincing," the judges declared. That validated the judgment of the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission, which made Taylor's case the first it has referred for a judicial hearing.
The jury that went on to convict Taylor, then a crack addict, had to sift the accounts of druggies and other inhabitants of Raleigh's seamy underworld. It also heard some testimony about hard physical evidence, offered up by an agent of the state. It's easy to see how, amidst the confusing swirl of witnesses and their accusations and denials, the assertion that blood had been found on Taylor's SUV might have tilted the scales against him.
Uncertain findings
But it turned out that the blood evidence was nowhere as clear-cut as SBI agent Duane Deaver suggested after the crime. That signals a shocking breach of fairness at the heart of Taylor's prosecution and, more broadly, casts a shadow of suspicion on the SBI's treatment of crucial lab evidence.
It must become a priority of Attorney General Roy Cooper to get to the bottom of how blood evidence was reported, or misreported. There has to be a full accounting of how this evidence was used and who was affected.
It's already known that in one other case, Deaver apparently didn't play straight with the evidence he was responsible for gathering. In the case of death row inmate George Goode, convicted in the 1992 slayings of a Johnston County couple, evidence of blood on the defendant's boots was cited by Deaver at trial.
Goode's death sentence was vacated last year, with federal district judge Malcolm Howard finding that Deaver "presented misleading evidence about the testing done on petitioner's boots being conclusive for the presence of blood." Deaver had conducted a preliminary test, but not the follow-up test necessary to prove blood was on the boots.
Bloody tales
With respect to Taylor, Deaver conducted the second-stage test, which was inconclusive. But he didn't acknowledge that fact in his report to prosecutors, who went ahead with the claim that the SBI had located blood on Taylor's vehicle. In other words, what the jury heard about the blood was not scientifically sound. The substance might have been blood, but that had not been proved.
Last week, Deaver contended the results of the second test hadn't been disclosed because the sample was so small that the test wasn't definitive.
But he also said the decision as to which results to report and how the findings should be worded had been made by his SBI superiors. SBI Director Robin Pendergraft responded in a statement on Wednesday: "The SBI did not then and does not now have a policy to withhold any evidence or testing result."
Attention, Roy Cooper: Pendergraft's assurances are welcome, but this must be sorted out. Deaver's allegation points to a deliberate effort by SBI management to downplay evidence favorable to defendants. If there was a policy or practice leading to the suppression of lab results that might raise doubts in jurors' minds, you must root it out and make sure those responsible are punished.
