Doubts over murder conviction of Kevin Keith fuel demands for reconsideration of
death penalty in Ohio
An unlikely coalition of death penalty backers and opponents, including conservative
politicians and former judges, is attempting to prevent the execution of an Ohio man
they say was wrongly convicted of murdering a young child and two women.
Suggestions that police fabricated evidence against Kevin Keith, 46, has led the
group to urge Ohio's governor to spare him should his parole board hearing fail.
The case is also fuelling demands for a rethink of the death penalty in Ohio, which
carries out the second highest number of executions in the US.
The group is urging the Ohio governor, Ted Strickland, to spare the life of Keith,
who is scheduled to plead for a pardon or a new trial.
If the board rejects the appeal, Strickland will have to decide whether Keith will
be executed by lethal injection in September after 16 years on death row.
The case is fuelling demands for a rethink of the death penalty in Ohio, which
carries out the second highest number of executions in the US after Texas.
More than 30 former prosecutors and judges are pressing Strickland to free Keith or
order a new trial.
Among them is Jim Petro, a former Ohio attorney general and Republican who supports
the death penalty. "I am gravely concerned that the state of Ohio may be on the
verge of executing an innocent person," he said in a letter to the governor.
Herbert Brown, a former justice in Ohio's supreme court, also wrote to Strickland.
"There is a mass of exculpatory evidence, suppressed evidence, faulty eyewitness
identification and forensic reports that support legitimate claims of innocence," he
said.
Keith was convicted of breaking into a flat and spraying it with bullets. Police
found four-year-old Machae Chatman dead alongside her mother and aunt. Two other
children survived, as did Richard Warren, who provided the eyewitness testimony that
convicted Keith.
At the trial, Keith was accused of murdering the Chatmans because one of their
relatives was an informant who had identified him as a drug dealer.
Keith said he had a watertight alibi – four people said he had been at his aunt's
house, 12 miles from the crime scene. But the jury convicted him.
Critics have suggested police fabricated a crucial piece of evidence. Keith's trial
was told a nurse who treated Warren said he had identified his attacker as someone
called Kevin.
After the trial, however, no nurse could be found with the name given by the police
officer who made the claim, and the nurse who treated Warren said she had never had
any such conversation.
Keith is optimistic that he will be saved from execution. "I don't want to die, but
I don't want life without parole either," he told Ohio's Columbus Dispatch
newspaper.
"I want out. I'm innocent. I want a life, but I'm afraid to let myself think about
what that might be like ,because it will hurt that much more if it doesn't happen."
miscarriage of justice primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a
crime they did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other
direction—"errors of impunity", and to civil case. Most criminal justice systems
have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful conviction, but this is often
difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is
not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been
executed or died in jail. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with
wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed
trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause
to eliminate death penalties to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years,
DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.
Scandinavian languages have a word, the Norwegian variant of which is justismord,
which literally translates as "justice murder." The term exists in several languages
and was originally used for cases where the accused was convicted, executed, and
later cleared after death. With capital punishment decreasing, the expression has
acquired an extended meaning, namely any conviction for a crime not committed by the
convicted. The retention of the term "murder" represents both universal abhorrence
against wrongful convictions and awareness of how destructive wrongful convictions
are.
Also, the term travesty of justice is sometimes used for a gross, deliberate
miscarriage of justice. The usage of the term in a specific case is, however,
inherently biased due to different opinions about the case. Show trials (not in the
sense of high publicity, but in the sense of lack of regard to the actual legal
procedure and fairness), due to their character, often lead to such travesties.
The concept of miscarriage of justice has important implications for standard of
review, in that an appellate court will often only exercise its discretion to
correct plain error when a miscarriage of justice (or "manifest injustice") would
otherwise occur.[1]
[Causes of miscarriages of justice include:
Plea bargains that offer incentives for the innocent to plead guilty
Confirmation bias on the part of investigators
Withholding or destruction of evidence by police or prosecution
fabrication of evidence or outright perjury by police (see testilying), or
prosecution witnesses (e.g. Dr Charles Smith)
Biased editing of evidence
Prejudice towards the class of people to which the defendant belongs
Poor identification by witnesses and/or victims
Overestimation/underestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony
Contaminated evidence
Faulty forensic tests
false confessions due to police pressure or psychological weakness
Misdirection of a jury by a judge during trial
perjured evidence by the real guilty party or their accomplices (frameup)
Perjured evidence by supposed victim or their accomplices
Conspiracy between court of appeal judges and prosecutors to uphold conviction of
innocentRisk of miscarriages of justice is one of the main arguments against the
death penalty. Where condemned persons are executed promptly after conviction, the
most significant effect of a miscarriage of justice is irreversible.
Wrongly-executed people nevertheless occasionally receive posthumous pardons—which
essentially void the conviction—or have their convictions quashed. Many death
penalty states hold condemned persons for ten or more years before execution, so
that any new evidence that might acquit them (or, at least, provide reasonable
doubt) will have had time to surface.
Even when a wrongly-convicted person is not executed, years in prison can have a
substantial, irreversible effect on the person and their family. The risk of
miscarriage of justice is therefore also an argument against long sentences, like
life sentence, and cruel sentence conditions.
Relief Urgently Needed for Innocent Man on Ohio's Death Row
Targeting: Ohio Parole Board and Governor Ted Strickland
Started by: Supporters of Kevin Keith
The State of Ohio is poised to execute Kevin Keith on September 15, 2010, in spite
of overwhelming evidence supporting what Mr. Keith has maintained from the time of
his arrest – he is actually innocent, wrongfully convicted of a crime based on
faulty eyewitness identification. The Ohio Innocence Project, the National Innocence
Network, and a group of leading eyewitness and memory experts all support relief for
Mr. Keith. Help urge the Ohio Parole Board and Governor Ted Strickland to grant
clemency to Kevin Keith by adding your name to this letter.
Report close You must be signed in to report content.
Petition Text
Clemency For Kevin Keith
Hello,
The State of Ohio is poised to execute Kevin Keith on September 15, 2010, in spite
of overwhelming evidence supporting what Mr. Keith has maintained from the time of
his arrest – he is actually innocent, wrongfully convicted of a crime based on
faulty eyewitness identification.
Mr. Keith has an alibi for the time of the crime supported by four witnesses.
The Ohio Innocence Project, the National Innocence Network, and a group of leading
eyewitness and memory experts all support relief for Mr. Keith.
I urgently appeal to the Ohio Parole Board and Governor Ted Strickland to grant
clemency to Kevin Keith to prevent the State of Ohio from doing the intolerable:
putting a man to death for a crime he did not commit.
The primary evidence against Mr. Keith was the erroneous eyewitness identification
of one of the surviving victims of the crime, who identified Mr. Keith in spite of
initially telling at least four witnesses that he was unable to identify the
perpetrator. This identification of Mr. Keith relied on the very procedures
recognized to be unreliable and inaccurate by Governor Strickland and the Ohio
Legislature when the State passed into law in April new requirements for eyewitness
identification procedures.
New evidence recently uncovered by counsel for Mr. Keith further discredits the
identification. Thirteen years after he was convicted, Mr. Keith discovered that one
of the State’s supposed “witnesses” – who was critical to corroborating the
legitimacy of the eyewitness identification – does not actually exist.
Additional new evidence also implicates an alternative suspect who told a police
informant that he was paid to carry out the crime for which Mr. Keith stands to be
executed.
No court has ever had the entirety of new evidence before it.
More information on the case can be found at: www.kevinkeith.org.
Mr. Keith has steadfastly maintained his innocence from the time of his arrest and
throughout his 16 years on death row. The State of Ohio now risks putting to death
an innocent man with no jury ever hearing the entirety of evidence of innocence.
I appeal to the Ohio Parole Board and Governor Strickland to grant clemency to Kevin
Keith.
[Your name]
Signatures
Tweets
Raymond Grenier (Woonsocket, RI)
Signed letter
about 4 hours ago
Echo G. (Ashland, OH)
Signed letter
about 5 hours ago
Tina Neylon (Cork, Ireland)
Signed letter
about 8 hours ago
Michael Richardson (Hawthorne, CA)
Signed letter
about 12 hours ago
Robert Humphrey (Brookings, OR)
Signed letter
about 15 hours ago
Martina Rocha (Houston, TX)
Signed letter
about 17 hours ago
Patricia M Johnson (Columbus, OH)
Signed letter
about 23 hours ago
James Neagley (Leesburg, NJ)
Signed letter
Aug 14
Phoebe Murphy (norwich, United Kingdom)
Signed letter
Aug 14
Candice Barnett (Santa Monica, CA)
Signed letter
Aug 13
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@ACCADP: Stop OH execution of #KevinKeith convicted on a eyewitness that DOESN'T
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Take Action @change: Relief Urgently Needed for INNOCENT Man on Ohio's Death Row
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