Legal Commentary

Playing the Blame Game to Excuse Wrongful Conviction

By TChris

Claude McCollum was convicted of raping and murdering a woman in Lansing, Michigan. After about three years behind bars, prosecutors (to their credit) admitted that "new evidence" cast doubt on McCollum's guilt, and facilitated his release from prison.

Now "new evidence" establishes that the prosecution probably, and the police certainly, had reason before McCollum's trial to question his guilt. As the result of McCollum's lawsuit, police and prosecutors are pointing fingers at each other while claiming their own conduct was blameless.

A police detective told prosecutors more than two months before trial that surveillance tapes showed Claude McCollum could not have killed Carolyn Kronenberg, newly filed court documents claim. That claim by Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. James Young contradicts statements by prosecutors that they didn't learn of the evidence until McCollum's 2006 trial.

Young says he told Ingham County Assistant Prosecutor Eric Matwiejczyk in November 2005 that he thought McCollum was innocent, based on video recordings showing McCollum to be elsewhere when the murder was committed. According to Young, Matwiejczyk "responded that an LCC mathematics professor had discredited how the detective calculated times that McCollum was seen on a surveillance video in a different building than where the murder happened." The unidentified math professor has yet to surface, and Matwiejczyk's claim that he gave Young's report to the defense right before Young testified is contradicted by defense lawyers, who presumably would have used it to shred the prosecution's case had they known of it.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 22, 2008 (boomark / email).