3 April 2009 – Hartford, CT, USA Since the good news that the Connecticut Appellate Court has granted a new trial for Richard Lapointe, there have been a number of supportive statements and editorials supporting a just resolution to the case. Today’s Hartford Courant published an editorial titled, “Justice Demands New Trial For Lapointe in 1987 Slaying:”
The Appellate Court also found the lower court should not have dismissed a claim concerning the failure of Mr. Lapointe’s trial lawyers to use two important pieces of evidence, a pubic hair belonging to an unknown person found on the victim’s sweater, and a pair of gloves of unknown provenance found at the scene; or to attack the reliability of Mr. Lapointe’s confession by exploiting three statements — how he strangled Mr. Martin, where in her apartment the crime took place and what she was wearing — that were at odds with later evidence and expert testimony.
The state has circled the wagons on this case for 17 years, continually resisting the possibility that Mr. Lapointe may have been unfairly convicted. Yes, he confessed, but as research and a number of DNA cases have shown, false confessions are not uncommon. The specter of reasonable doubt haunts this case. The way to resolve it is with a new trial.
The Hartford Courant already had published a piece by Donald S. Connery who serves on the advisory boards for the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School and the National Center for Reason and Justice, pointing out:
Interrogation recording has long been the most obvious of all justice system reforms.
Yet for a dozen years, the resistance to recording legislation (“Don’t tell us how to do our job!”) has been ferocious. Our top cops and prosecutors have used every argument to block this entirely beneficial reform. Convictions of the guilty are made more certain. The innocent are protected. The savings in court costs are immense. And every major study of police experience with recording says it is a law enforcement tool enthusiastically embraced once police try it.
The Journal Inquirer refers to:
…the case of Richard Lapointe, the mentally impaired Manchester man who, on the basis of three ridiculously contradictory, inaccurate, and spoon-fed confessions he signed during a marathon interrogation at the Manchester police station, was convicted by a Superior Court jury of murdering his wife’s grandmother in that town 20 years ago.
Tags: Human rights, incarceration
