states, with the death penalty on the books. here is what happened in alabama in the case of deforest johnson. first, when the police arrested five men suspected of shooting the off-duty police officer, in 1995, ballistics showed that only one gun was used in the shooting, so they could not have all pulled the trigger. the police decided to let three of the five men they arrested go. but they kept deforest johnson and one other suspect, a man named adragus ford, and charged them both for the same murder. now, that happened despite the fact that both men had alibi witnesses who could testify to the fact that they were at a nightclub on the other side of birmingham when the shooting happened. still, both men were charged, and tried separately. prosecution didn t try to argue that the men committed the crime together, they couldn t decide which of the men did it so they tried two different theories of the case in two separate trials
interviewed or corresponded with on other cases reached out to me, and one thing i found over the course of my career in covering this beat is that the defense attorneys handle a lot of cases, and a lot of people that they represent are guilty, you know, even the system can be unfair, and they tend only to reach out to a journalist when they re really, really mad about a case and when they are really certain that the person is nntd and as i started doing more and more reporting on the case and talking to the attorneys involved, you know, it just became clearer and clearer that this was a real injustice that had gone unaddressed. and what i had tried to outline and what seemed to be wrong about having convicted mr. johnson, it became very narrow this week because the alabama court of appeals ruled against mr. johnson s claim of prosecutorial misconduct because of the money paid to a key witness in the trial. that seems to be one little
one of the reasons we know toforest johnson s name and his story is that in a 2019 washington post column, they wrote an opinion essay titled an ilt lusion of justice maying out in extended detail that sent johnson to death row where he spent half of his life and there is a story about a wrongful conviction, it s about witnesses who were rewarded for lies and threatened for telling the truth, and it is about an overly aggressive law enforcement, and a supine judiciary and almost comically ineffective representation, and how all of these things put a man on death row who everyone agrees is innocent, even the man who prosecuted him doubts his guilt. it is a story of lives ruined along the way and about the murder of a much-liked deputy, that because of all of this, remains unsolved.
0 they ll be no reluctance on our. part at that time, the chairman committee, the chairman the garage was reluctant to issue subpoenas. i doubted, thompson told the associated press. there s no precedent to force that compliance. but, in the months since, revelations have come to life. ce revelations have come to life. because after conducting nearly a thousand witness interviews and obtaining over 100,000 documents, one thing has become clear, efforts to contest joe biden s election victory were not limited to the white house and a kookie task of sham lawyers and conspiracy theorist, elected republican lawmakers were deepl they were integral to the plan to overturn the election of the 2020 election. a mind boggling 147 house republicans, look at them all, objected tobl certifying presidt biden s victory on january 6th, literally hours after their own workplace was ransacked by a violent mob. but for a smaller core of trump die-hards their involvement went far beyond voting. messages f