The Promise of Justice Initiative, along with the Amir Ali of Washington D.C. Roderick & Solange Macarthur Justice Center, filed a petition for certiorari in the United States Supreme Court raising significant questions about the constitutionality of Corey’s conviction.
Mark Stern, writing in Slate, wrote about Corey’s case in an article entitled “How to Frame a Man for Murder, Prosecutors and Police “don’t think his life matter.” It explains how the Capital Appeals Project represented Corey on direct appeal when he was one of the youngest individuals sentenced to death in America, how his death sentence was reversed based upon a finding that Corey was a person with intellectual disabilities, and why the Promise of Justice Initiative took on representing Corey on his claims.
Writing from the Brennan Center, reporter Andrew Cohen wrote of Corey Williams here:
You likely have not heard of Corey Williams but the story of his dubious murder conviction is another story that lays bare the scope of injustice that pervades Louisiana’s criminal justice system — and Caddo Parish in particular. It is a story that merits national attention not just for the shoddy work of police and prosecutors in the case but for the way state judges so far have refused to use their authority to unwind what surely is an inaccurate and unreliable result.
Williams was barely 16 years old and intellectually disabled when he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for killing a pizza delivery man in Shreveport in January 1998. How do we know he was disabled? A Louisiana court subsequently said so, concluding that Williams lacked “the ability to engage in the world around him (even in a proceeding where the death penalty (for him) is being addressed.” That judge thus reduced Williams’s death sentence to a sentence of life in prison without parole — a fact that makes what happened at Williams’s trial even more stark.
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At trial, prosecutors relied on the confession, and the fact that Williams was present at the scene of the crime with a gun, and derided the defense argument that Williams, a “slow” kid, had been set up by those three other suspects. Even in the absence of physical evidence linking Williams to the victim it must have been an easy choice for jurors. So many wrongful conviction cases start out this way; as easy choices for jurors who haven’t heard the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It was only after Williams was convicted and sentenced to death that defense attorneys learned the truth about what police and prosecutors knew about those other suspects. A series of pre-trial interviews taken by the police revealed the extent to which those three men had been involved in the murder and then had lied about it to save their own skins. The police interviews suggest that the police knew that Williams was mentally disabled and that the older suspects were trying to pin the murder on him. Worse, there is evidence to suggest that the police didn’t make an innocent mistake in concluding that Williams was the triggerman; that they instead shaped the written record to fit their theory based upon that dicey confession.
Under the Supreme Court’s command in Brady v. Maryland, the transcripts of these police interviews should have been disclosed to the defense before Williams’s trial to protect his constitutional right to a fair trial. None of it was. Instead, “summarized witness statements” were produced to the defense by police and prosecutors; summaries that unsurprisingly endorsed the prosecutors’ theory of the case and at the same time precluded Williams’s trial attorneys from meaningfully challenging key testimony. Basic testimony like where the murder weapon ultimately was found, for example.
When a prosecutor violates the law by failing to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense a judge is required to determine whether the evidence would have reasonably created a different result at trial. Tell me: if you were a juror in the Williams case would you have wanted to know what the police and prosecutors knew? That those three other men had implicated themselves in the murder and that Williams likely had not fired the shot that had killed the victim? It’s hard to imagine evidence more likely to change a jurors mind than the evidence that was suppressed in Williams’s case.
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It’s a miracle, really, that Williams’s death sentence was lowered to a life sentence given how feckless are Louisiana’s appellate judges. But that doesn’t mean justice has been done here. I have covered enough of these wrongful conviction cases to have given up reasonable hope that Louisiana’s justice system will ever mete out justice in any sort of consistent or timely way. It will likely take a federal court review, and another decade or so of avoidable litigation, for justice to come at last to Williams. By then he will have served twice as long in prison as he spent before he was arrested for a crime he may not have committed.
How do epic wrongful conviction cases like this come about? They come about this way, with dirty work at trial that gets endorsed by trial judges and then glossed over on appeal by judges less concerned about accuracy than to some hoary notion of a rule of law. Caddo Parish has a new prosecutor. The pending appeal represents an early test for him about what justice will look like going forward there. Because whatever it was that Louisiana gave Corey Williams (and the victim in the case for that matter) it sure doesn’t look like justice.
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The Promise of Justice Initiative is committed to securing justice for Corey, and appreciates the support of Amir Ali and the entire RODERICK & SOLANGE MACARTHUR JUSTICE CENTER.
