|
Rafay/Burns
| Wilfred Hathway | Kyle
Unger | James Driskell
| Clifford St. Joseph |
John Stoll | Ludrate
Burton | Michael
Williams | Albert Johnson
| Shaka Sankofa:
Executed after conviction based on faulty eye-witness | U.S.
wrongful convictions: recently Exonerated Peter
Rose | John Stoll | Ludrate Burton | Albert
Johnson | Stephen Cowans |
Laurence Adams | Peter
Reilly | Still working on it: | Dennis
Dechaine | Dennis Perry
| Dwayne McKinney |
Marty Tankleff
- Clifford St.
Joseph
-
Testimony
by an escaped inmate helped convict St. Joseph of murder.
BY BERNICE YEUNG, SF Weekly, Oct 29, 2003
John Doe No. 60, a drunk, homeless
man who has never been identified, was murdered in 1985 in San
Francisco. His lower lip was cut, allegedly so that the killer
could drink his blood. His chest and neck were vigorously slashed
with a knife, his genitals slit, a pentagram carved on his chest,
and wax dripped into his right eye. Several days after he died,
his body was found under a truck near the Cleveland Wrecking
Co. in SOMA by a man looking to buy salvaged equipment. When
the medical examiner inspected the mutilated corpse, which had
been wrapped in a coarse blanket, he discovered oval burn marks
on Doe's neck and evidence that his hands had been tied behind
his back with guitar strings.
There was only one witness
to the crime: Maurice Bork, a knife-wielding, guitar-playing
escaped convict from Canada with a long-standing interest in
Satanism. Two years after the murder, while he was serving time
for a kidnap-robbery in which he had scratched a pentagram on
his victim, Bork contacted police to tell them that he knew what
had happened to John Doe No. 60. He then claimed that his former
lover, Clifford St. Joseph, had killed the man in his SOMA apartment,
and that the two of them had disposed of the body.
Because of Maurice Bork, Clifford
St. Joseph became the only suspect -- and the only person ever
charged -- in the satanic murder of John Doe No. 60.
St. Joseph was arrested at
his home in June 1987 and tried soon afterward. The murder trial
was combined in court with a trial for sodomy and false imprisonment,
making the proceedings seem like something out of a twisted horror
movie. After more than 17 hours of deliberations, a jury found
St. Joseph guilty of both the sodomy and false imprisonment charges
and of murder -- though it acquitted him of using a knife to
do it -- and handed down a sentence of 34-years-to-life. Now
62, St. Joseph is incarcerated at Folsom State Prison, 25 miles
east of Sacramento.
St. Joseph has always maintained
his innocence. He says he has no knowledge of any killing, and
he has filed numerous documents -- most of them handwritten and
more than 100 pages long -- with federal and state courts insisting
that he was wrongfully convicted.
St. Joseph's case raised several
red flags for local Innocence Projects, which are now helping
him seek post-conviction DNA testing of evidence still stored
by the police. Such testing might reveal another perpetrator
or help undermine the prosecutor's arguments, but it's unlikely
it will resolve all the questions. As St. Joseph's case shows,
and as we've seen with other prisoners who have strong claims
of innocence, DNA technology is not a magic wand that can resolve
the criminal justice system's flaws; it's not a substitute for
real reform. For St. Joseph, better regulation of the use of
jailhouse informants might have made the difference.
Clifford St. Joseph is an eccentric
man. Tall, with thinning strawberry-blond hair, he walks with
a hesitant shuffle, a product of recent heart surgery. When I
visited him more than a month ago in jail, he struck me as strange
and desperate for attention, but not particularly threatening.
As we talked over vending-machine sandwiches, he was alternately
serious and cheery, frequently flashing a disarming, bug-eyed
grin. He boasted that he's well known in the prison because he
dresses up every year in a Halloween costume made of found materials.
This year he'll be the Hunchback of Folsom Prison.
St. Joseph has always led an
unorthodox life. He was emancipated from his single mother when
he was 14, and sold newspapers in Tenderloin bars to support
himself. A gay, middle-aged waiter at the time of the crime,
he liked to surround himself with younger -- often troubled --
men. Having in the past been convicted of misdemeanor check fraud
and statutory rape (he had sex with a 15-year-old boy when he
was 17), St. Joseph opened up his home to runaways, homeless
people, and various unsavory characters.
He was introduced to Maurice
Bork through his friend Chris Granger. St. Joseph says that as
a favor to Granger, he let Bork stay with him and got him a job
using a fake ID. Soon, Bork and St. Joseph became lovers. A few
weeks later, John Doe No. 60 was killed.
Though St. Joseph is clearly
guilty of bad judgment, it is not at all clear that he is guilty
of murder.
The legal case against St.
Joseph is rife with problems. Bork, who had been given partial
immunity against being prosecuted for helping to dispose of the
body and clean up Doe's blood, was a key witness in St. Joseph's
monthlong trial. A cast of iconoclasts, ex-cons, and drug addicts
was also called to the stand to offer confusing, conflicting,
and sometimes outlandish testimony. The only evidence linking
the murder to the St. Joseph apartment was a blood drop found
near the bedroom and a bloodstain on a blanket, but this fact
became obscured because the prosecution used an imprecise procedure
called luminol testing to suggest that large quantities of blood
had been splashed on the carpets and floor.
And then the prosecution brought
in a jailhouse informant to bolster its case.
William McCray, who shared
a cell with St. Joseph as he was awaiting trial, testified that
St. Joseph talked frequently about Satanism. McCray, whose honesty
a jail chaplain described as "verging on bad," also
detailed the alleged satanic ritual that had killed Doe.
During cross-examination, McCray
admitted that St. Joseph's legal documents had been stored in
a box under his mattress in the cell. He said he'd "probably"
touched them, but he insisted he'd never read them. McCray also
maintained that he wasn't being rewarded for testifying, yet
he was released on his own recognizance after giving a statement
about St. Joseph to Detective Napoleon Hendrix (working with
then-Detective and now former Police Chief Earl Sanders). (McCray
said he was released because he had received threats from other
inmates.)
Though groups like the Innocence
Project Network have argued for more scrutiny of jailhouse informants
through pretrial hearings, the California District Attorneys
Association says it believes such proceedings are unnecessary.
Closer inspection of both Bork's and McCray's testimony could,
however, have changed the course of St. Joseph's trial.
In addition to the questionable
testimony of jailhouse informants, St. Joseph faced other obstacles
at trial. Among the most damaging, the Doe murder case was tried
along with a separate incident that allegedly took place at St.
Joseph's apartment about five days after the murder.
Prosecutors attest that St.
Joseph and an acquaintance, Edward Spela, drove to Polk Street
and picked up Ricky Hunter, a homeless male prostitute. They
claim that for the next few days, Spela, Bork, and St. Joseph
drugged and raped Hunter, forced him to engage in sex acts with
a dog, and kept him chained, naked, to a radiator.
Police arrested Spela, Bork,
Hunter, and St. Joseph's roommate for disturbing the peace. Hunter
later pressed charges against St. Joseph for sodomy and false
imprisonment, though St. Joseph was at work during the arrests
and denies playing any part in the incident.
Before trial, St. Joseph's
attorney, Harriet Ross, tried to sever the murder from the Hunter
episode. The prosecution, however, claimed that Hunter was to
have been the next victim in a satanic killing gone awry, and
the court ruled that the two cases should be combined.
Ross tried to attack Spela's
credibility by showing that he was not mentally stable, explaining
that Spela told ridiculous and fantastic stories (he told an
investigator for the public defender that he had had sex with
Liberace and Elton John and that someone had recruited him to
assassinate Ronald Reagan). The judge would not allow Ross to
pursue this line of questioning because it didn't come from a
professional psychologist, and berated her before the jury for
attempting to raise the issue.
Trying two dramatic, violent
incidents at the same time was the nail in the coffin for St.
Joseph, Ross says. "The joinder of the rape and murder was
the damning action. It was incredibly prejudicial," Ross
told me recently. "I will never believe otherwise. Each
one tried alone -- there was a good case for an acquittal or
a lesser charge. But together, they were so glaringly horrible
that the jury had to be emotionally reacting to the facts."
In early 2003, the Innocence
Project at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office took on
St. Joseph's case, and since then, attorney Paul Myslin has worked
on it like a man obsessed. He has gone back to the alleged scene
of the crime, scrutinized horrific autopsy photographs, read
through the 23-volume transcript, located evidence that was supposedly
destroyed, and searched for witnesses who testified at trial
(many of them are dead, and Maurice Bork remains incarcerated).
In August of this year, Myslin,
along with Susan Rutberg of the Golden Gate University Innocence
Project, filed documents with the San Francisco Superior Court
seeking to represent St. Joseph. They're hopeful that DNA testing
of various items -- a cigarette butt found in Doe's mouth, hair
fibers, oral and anal swabs from the victim, and a segment of
carpet -- will prove that St. Joseph was not the killer.
But the testing might not be
done, because the district attorney could choose to oppose it.
(Elliott Beckelman, the deputy district attorney handling the
case, who still believes St. Joseph is guilty, says he may only
oppose testing on some of the evidence.) Even if testing moves
forward, it may not yield conclusive results.
"Not all cases are like
a rape case, where the DNA can show that it's not the [inmate's]
semen," says attorney Myslin. "It's lucky when you
have a conclusive piece of evidence."
For Clifford St. Joseph, who
has served 16 years of his sentence, DNA testing is one of the
last legal avenues available to him to prove that he is innocent.
But even if testing can show that St. Joseph had no hand in the
Doe murder, it is no replacement for the better investigative
and courtroom procedures that might have kept him out of prison
in the first place.
|
 Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
Truth suppress'd, whether
by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com
If you hold the mouth
of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb
Publisher : Sheila
Steele
Got something
to say about this or any other stories on this site? Go to injusticebustersblog Participate!
- injusticebusters
court advice :
- How to walk yourself through the justice system
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- Why you should dump your preliminary hearing (written July 1998 and still valid)
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- Sermonette:
The
Naked Truth -- (You
will find links to many more sermonettes in the sidebar on this
page
Another target
of Dueck's malice: : Wilf Hathway
Our activism
contributed greatly to the good vibes which happened around the
civil trial.
Index
to the stories on this website
This is not
regularly updated so if you are looking for a particular story
and you have a name or keyword, please use the site search engine(at
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Index to Saskatoon Police stories
This is a pretty good scrapbook
for the 1998-2002 period.
Inquiry into the malicious prosecution of David
Milgaard untanling 36 years of Saskatchewan police and Crown
misconduct: : Opening day 1 | 2
| 3 | 4
| 5 | 6
| 7 |
- Stephen Williams:
Canadian writer subject to Stasi-like treatment by Canadian police
- Terry
Arnold: : Snitch a
suicide?
- RCMP
scenario stings: Brian
Hutchinson starts digging
- Gary
wells: Faulty eye-witness
testimony
- Tulia,
Texas
- Gilmer,
Texas
- Willie
Upshaw
- Wrongfully convicted in Canada
- Foster Parent false accusations
- Martensville
- Don
Smith obscenity trial: an obscene conviction
- James
Lockyer
- Hurricane
Carter
- Johnny Cochran speaks up for
Bill Sampson
- Vopnis
- Abdulai
Mohamed
- Nfld Defamation story:
- Wanda
Young
- Racism
in the Federal Civil Service
The Terrible Story behind the Atif Rafay and
Sebastian Burns convictions
Trial
set for June 15
We
know part of this disclosure is a forged statement and perjured
affidavit from a Winnipeg cop
-
-
-
-
The
Crown is still fighting Fred Poirier -- and they are losing.
Secret Commissions Case from Northern B.C.
-
-
- 2005: In
the United States the proven wrongful convictions just keep coming
at us!
-
- Brandon Morin:
- Convicted in Oregon
- of rapes which did not happen
- This website has good information
about Measure 11 -- Oregon's Mandatory Sentencing requirements
which have been in place since 1994. In this case we see how
the combination of a flawed grand jury system and prosecutors
who seek not justice but convictions is a recipe for wrongful
convictions.
-
Canadians who
have been wrongfully convicted because of improper investigations
combined with zealous Crown
A
round-up of wrongful convictions in Canada
Toronto Police paid out $30M in secretly resolved
claims over last five years
|
