Death Watch
December 2004, Page 47

Another DNA Exoneration, Another Death Row Inmate Freed
By Colin Garrett

This past August, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, prosecutors finally dropped all charges against Ryan Matthews, making him the 115th death row inmate to be exonerated and the 14th freed by DNA evidence. Matthews was barely 17 when arrested, and tested with an IQ of 71.

In April 1997 in Bridge City, Louisiana, grocery store owner Tommy Vanhoose was working in his back office when a masked man put a gun to his head and demanded money. When Vanhoose refused, the robber shot him and then fled the store, jumped through the passenger window of a waiting car, and discarded a ski mask, flannel shirt, and gloves as the car sped off.

The evidence against Matthews was never very strong. Eyewitnesses said the suspect was 5’5” or 5’6”, but Matthews is 6’0”. One witness sitting in her car outside saw the suspect as he fled, firing shots in her direction. She tentatively picked Matthews as the triggerman in a photo line-up, and by the time of trial was sure of her identification. The driver of another car saw the suspect in his rearview mirror, while being shot at, and while trying to block the escape of the get away car, and identified Matthews in a show-up hours later. His passenger was unable to make an ID. A defense expert testified at trial that DNA testing of tissue samples taken from around the mouth area of the ski mask excluded Matthews.

To bolster this weak evidence, the prosecution relied on the confession of co-arrestee Travis Hayes. Hayes, also borderline mentally retarded, initially told the police he was nowhere near Bridge City at the time of the shooting, but after 6 hours of interrogation without counsel or his parents present, told the detectives he had driven with Matthews to the grocery, watched him go in, and 15 minutes later heard shots and saw Matthews to come running out. Hayes’ statement differed in many details from other witnesses’ testimony. Richard Ofshe, a false-confession expert, reviewed the case and filed an appeal declaration stating there was cause for serious doubt about the reliability of the confession. Hayes later recanted his statement.

Ryan Matthews’ attorneys on appeal, Billy Sothern and Clive Stafford Smith of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, pushed for retesting of the DNA evidence, which not only again excluded Matthews, but this time pointed to Rondell Love. Love is serving 20 years for killing Chandra Conley, admitting to slashing her throat a half mile from where Vanhoose had been shot 6 months earlier. DNA tests of the gloves discarded by Vanhoose’s killer also identified Love, and Love was heard bragging in prison about having killed Vanhoose. The court ordered a new trial in March 2003, and Ryan Matthews was finally freed in August 2004.


More Wiggins Ammunition
You can’t present a good mitigation case without proper investigation, and you can’t do proper investigation without a mitigation specialist. Courts around the country are reversing death sentences, following the Supreme Court’s holding in Wiggins v. Smith (2003) 539 U.S. 510, that in analyzing a claim of ineffectiveness of counsel, a trial attorney’s decision not to present certain mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of a capital trial cannot be considered a strategic decision if it was based on inadequate investigation.

In Pennsylvania v. Malloy, 2004 WL 1946291, 2004 Pa. Lexis 2047 (Pa. 2004), trial counsel failed to investigate significant childhood trauma. Although Malloy’s attorney argued in mitigation that Malloy was 20 years old at the time of the murder and acted at the substantial direction of another, he did little or no mitigation investigation, and as a result presented no testimonial mitigation evidence. Post-conviction proceedings revealed that Malloy’s step-father, mother and her boyfriend had physically abused him as a child, that his drug-addicted mother had abandoned him, and that the New York Bureau of Child Welfare institutionalized him at age twelve because his grandmother couldn’t control him. “Counsel’s duty encompasses pursuit of all statutory mitigators of which he is aware or reasonably should be aware, unless there is some objective, reasonable ground not to pursue the circumstance (such as when it might open the door to harmful evidence). . . . Although counsel cannot be ineffective for failing to investigate evidence which he had no reason to know existed, counsel still has an obligation to conduct a reasonable investigation to uncover such information.” And, of course, a mitigation specialist is the only team member specially trained to get this kind of information, and often the only one capable of uncovering it. n


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