Earl Berryman and Michael Bunch -- New Jersey, 1985

True Stories of Injustice...

Earl Berryman and Michael Bunch -- New Jersey, 1985

Although their appeal was denied by a New Jersey state appellate court last year, Earl Berryman and Michael Bunch recently filed federal habeas petitions to challenge their 1985 rape and kidnapping convictions. They are both presently serving 50-year sentences for crimes they did not commit.

They were convicted because of the victim’s uncorroborated identification testimony. She initially identified Bunch and Berryman from a mug book labeled “B,” which contained photographs of all individuals with names beginning with that letter. The victim had earlier reviewed the “A” book and was told by police that, unless she could identify the suspects quickly, she would have to look through mug books for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, each containing more than 150 pictures.

In the petitions filed by their attorneys, NACDL members Jean Barrett and Paul Casteleiro, Bunch and Berryman base their claim primarily upon the ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Of the many incidents detailed in their petitions, perhaps the most egregious and inexcusable error was committed by Bunch’s trial lawyer. At both the first trial and retrial, he opened the door for the prosecution to introduce severely prejudicial evidence of Bunch’s extensive criminal arrest record. He further invited the prosecution to reveal that, at the time of the rape and kidnapping investigation, Bunch was also a suspect in an unrelated robbery homicide case.

Through his cross-examination of the police investigator, Bunch’s attorney tried to establish that the police themselves doubted the complainant’s story. The investigator responded to the rape victim’s initial complaint by merely mailing postcards to Bunch and Berryman, asking them to come in for a station interview. However, Bunch’s lawyer erred when he inquired extensively into the chief investigator’s reasons for taking a limited response. This allowed the prosecution on redirect to bring out the fact that the police wanted Bunch to stay out on the streets to give their informants time to make a stronger case against him for the robbery homicide. Bunch’s first trial ended in a mistrial due to juror misconduct, but his lawyer incompetently committed the same exact error on retrial.

Trial counsel’s incompetence was very likely a decisive factor in Bunch and Berryman’s case because their convictions were based exclusively on the victim’s weak identification testimony. For example, the record shows that she gave vastly different physical descriptions of her attackers on three separate occasions, all of which varied substantially from Bunch and Berryman’s actual physical features. The victim also contradicted herself at both trials by denying that she had initially given the police various physical descriptions of her assailants.

Paul Casteleiro, Bunch’s present lawyer, who previously helped CM win the release of three other innocent men, had hoped that the court would act quickly on the petitions some time early in 1995. However, this will come too late for Bunch, who was stricken with AIDS and died in October.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
1025 Connecticut Ave. NW, Ste. 901, Washington DC 20036
www.criminaljustice.org / www.nacdl.org
(202) 872-8600 / FAX(202) 872-8690 / assist@nacdl.com