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Thread: ToForest Onesha Johnson - Alabama Death Row

  1. #21
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Ted's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Aaron View Post
    Pfft that's nothing - a friend of my dad's is a teacher and had a student named Shithead (pronounced Shi-thead, so not pronounced like the obscenity but spelled that way nevertheless).
    Oh my god I genuinely just thought that name was a meme.
    Violence and death seem to be the only answers that some people understand.

  2. #22
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    I graduated high school with a guy currently facing Murder charges in Alabama named A’Timothy.
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  3. #23
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Alabama Appeals Court rules against high-profile death row prisoner

    Decision comes despite growing support for Toforest Johnson’s innocence

    The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals has ruled against Toforest Johnson on a claim of prosecutorial misconduct, affirming a capital murder conviction questioned by an extraordinary array of leaders from Alabama’s legal community. The court emphasized repeatedly in its ruling released May 6 that the only issue it considered was a narrow one related to the $5000 reward payment the state paid its key witness in the 1998 trial. The reward payment was not disclosed to the defense until 2019.

    The case is now one step closer to returning to Jefferson County Circuit Court, where District Attorney Danny Carr has requested a new trial for Johnson. Carr’s unusual request was based on a number of concerns about Johnson’s conviction, including that the trial prosecutors presented five different theories in five different court proceedings about who committed the crime. Carr spent almost nine months studying the case files, interviewing witnesses, and consulting with the family of Deputy Hardy.

    Carr’s request for a new trial is joined not only by the lead prosecutor who convicted Johnson, but also former Republican Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, Jr., former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, and many others.

    Johnson’s legal team is optimistic despite the appellate court’s decision. “We remain hopeful that Mr. Johnson will receive a new trial in this case. All we are asking for is for the court to do what both the district attorney and the original trial prosecutor have requested, which is to grant us a new trial,” said Ty Alper, one of Johnson’s attorneys.

    In 1998, Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death in Birmingham for the murder of Deputy Sherriff William G. Hardy, a crime he has always maintained he did not commit. At Johnson’s trial, prosecutors presented no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony. They relied solely on testimony from Violet Ellison, a woman who claimed she overheard someone who identified himself as “Toforest” talk about the murder on a t3-way phone call from jail. Ellison had never met Johnson and had never heard his voice. Alibi witnesses placed Johnson across town at the time of the shooting.

    At issue before the appellate court was a narrow legal claim about the State’s payment of $5000 to Ellison in exchange for her testimony against Johnson, which prosecutors did not disclose to Johnson’s defense attorneys until almost 2 decades after the trial. In 2019, the Alabama Attorney General’s office finally told Johnson’s attorneys about the $5,000 payment and turned over a copy of the check that it claimed had been misfiled all these years.

    Friday’s ruling agreed with Jefferson County Circuit Judge Teresa Pulliam that Johnson had not established prosecutors committed misconduct in failing to disclose the witness’s financial motivation to testify. But the court said that for procedural reasons it could not consider District Attorney Carr’s position, or that of the Innocence Project, which also filed a brief in support of Johnson’s claim.

    While the issue of the reward payment was pending in the appellate court, Johnson’s attorneys brought a new appeal in Jefferson County based on District Attorney Carr’s request for a new trial.

    Johnson’s team argued that the court must give “great weight” to Carr’s position in the new claim, in light of his extensive investigation into the case. Carr filed a “friend of the court” brief in Judge Pulliam’s court in June 2020, writing that his “duty to seek justice requires intervention in this case.” Johnson has also been supported by an unprecedented eight “friend of the court” briefs, filed by some of Birmingham’s most prominent law firms, on behalf of former prosecutors, retired judges, faith leaders, defense attorneys, legal scholars, law students from all 5 Alabama schools. Three jurors who voted to convict Johnson have also called for the Jefferson County Circuit Court to throw out Johnson’s conviction.

    Johnson must complete the appeals process on the claim related to the reward payment before Judge Pulliam can consider the new petition.

    (source: Beth Shelburne is an Investigative Reporter for the Campaign for Smart Justice with the ACLU of Alabama. She is a former WBRC Anchor, Reporter and Investigator----WBRC news)
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #24
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Opinion Despite evidence of innocence, officials leave Alabama man on death row

    It has now been nearly 3 years since I first wrote about Toforest Johnson, a 49-year-old man who has sat on Alabama’s death row for 24 years, despite strong evidence that he is innocent. That report persuaded former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley to take a deeper look at the case. He later signed an amicus brief and wrote his own op-ed here at The Post, both calling for Johnson’s conviction to be overturned.

    At least 14 former judges and prosecutors have also called for Johnson’s conviction to be overturned, including 2 former state supreme court justices, a former president of the Alabama state bar, the current district attorney from the county where Johnson was convicted and, remarkably, even the man who prosecuted Johnson. 3 of the jurors who convicted Johnson have also now said they believe they were wrong. Yet, as of now, Johnson is still on Alabama’s death row.

    Johnson was convicted in 1998 for the 1995 murder of Jefferson County deputy William Hardy. The investigation of Hardy’s murder was a mess. Police and prosecutors meandered from suspect to suspect, pressured and threatened witnesses, and dangled reward money for incriminating testimony.

    In the end, prosecutors focused on Johnson and his friend Ardragus Ford, even though both had alibis. Both men were promised leniency if they’d implicate the other. Both refused, insisting that neither had anything to do with the murder.

    The 2 were arrested because of statements from a teenage girl who was with them on the night of the murder. But that girl continually changed her story, often after threats from police, as their theories about the crime continued to evolve. At Ford’s trial, prosecutors conceded she had lied at least 300 times. Another witness who implicated Ford said the police had threatened to take away her children. Yet another witness, who refused to implicate the men, was locked up in juvenile detention for nearly a year because the police didn’t believe her.

    Johnson and Ford were tried separately, and at each trial prosecutors offered a theory of the crime that directly contradicted what they argued at the other. Only Johnson was convicted. He was sentenced to death.

    The only real evidence against Johnson came from a woman who claimed to overhear a phone conversation in which she said a man identifying himself as Johnson confessed to the crime. But in 2003, Johnson’s attorneys learned that this witness had been paid $5,000 for her testimony. That was never disclosed to the defense, and prosecutors wouldn’t turn over a copy of the check for another 16 years.

    In May of this year, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled against Johnson. Under Alabama law, it isn’t enough that the key witness against Johnson was paid and that this was never disclosed. The burden is on Johnson to prove that the witness testified only because of the reward. The court ruled Johnson had failed to do so.

    There were other problems with Johnson’s trial. His attorney had no death penalty experience and expressed reservations to the trial judge about taking the case. Due to a lack of funds, that attorney could afford only a down-on-his-luck, unlicensed investigator whom Johnson’s current attorneys describe as an “alcoholic, racist, suicidal” man who was homeless at the time and had recently been fired from a previous capital case for incompetence.

    That investigator failed to investigate Johnson’s alibi that he was at a club on the other side of Birmingham at the time of the murder. Johnson’s attorneys have since found 10 eyewitnesses who placed him at the club.

    Despite all of this, and despite the growing list of former Alabama officials speaking out on Johnson’s behalf, there’s a notable lack of urgency among the current state officials — those who have the power to do anything about it.

    Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has yet to show any interest in Johnson’s case. When a local TV station recently asked Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall about Johnson’s case, he replied: “We’ve seen the appeal most recently be upheld by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.” He added, “Much of the narrative that we see those that are advocating on behalf of this defendant were disproven in court.”

    That isn’t true. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals didn’t rule on Johnson’s innocence. It ruled on the narrow question of whether the trial court erred in finding the state’s failure to turn over evidence of the payment to one witness was a violation of Johnson’s constitutional rights. But the public is often ignorant of the details of any complex case. That gives politicians such as Marshall cover to brush aside the very real possibility that the state is preparing to execute an innocent man.

    Both federal and state appeals courts have ruled that once a case progresses as far as Johnson’s, the courts’ obligation is to protect the finality of jury verdicts. Prisoners must show overwhelming evidence of innocence to get relief. Lesser claims, they argue, are better handled by the political process — by appealing to attorneys general to drop charges, or to governors to grant clemency.

    So the courts pass the buck to the politicians, while politicians like Marshall claim that if prisoners like Johnson were really innocent, the courts would have freed them.

    Meanwhile, every month of delay is a month Johnson could have lived outside of prison, reclaiming the time and freedom unjustly taken from him.

    (source: Opinion; Radley Balko, Washington Post)
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #25
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Claiming innocence, Alabama death row inmate seeks new trial

    By KIM CHANDLER
    The Associated Press

    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Toforest Johnson, 49, has spent half his life on Alabama’s death row for the murder of a sheriff's deputy, a killing he says he did not commit.

    Johnson’s attorneys asked the Alabama Supreme Court on Friday to “right a grievous wrong” and grant him a new trial. The filing is the latest effort in a case that has seen former judges, prosecutors and the local district attorney join in calls to reexamine the 1998 conviction and death sentence.

    Johnson’s attorneys are asking the justices to review a lower court decision denying the new trial request. They argued that the conviction rested on the testimony of a single witness who was paid a reward and that her testimony “was at odds with the physical evidence and directly contradicted by the state’s theory of the case in other proceedings.”

    “The first thing to know is that he is innocent ... Former prosecutors have said it themselves, that there needs to be more eyes on this case and he deserves a new trial,” Johnson’s daughter, Shanaye Poole, said in a telephone interview.

    Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the killing of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy. Hardy was shot twice in the head while working off-duty security at a hotel in 1995. The conviction came after Johnson's first trial ended with a hung jury. A co-defendant in the case was acquitted.

    Poole was just 5 when her father was sentenced to death. She sat on someone’s shoulders to peer through the window on the courtroom door to see her father. “That was the last time I saw my Dad in person before his freedom was taken from him,” she said.

    Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, former Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, and several former judges and prosecutors submitted briefs to the circuit court, or wrote editorials, supporting a new trial for Johnson. Danny Carr, the district attorney in the county where Johnson was convicted, also called for a new trial.

    Baxley, who worked decades ago to have the death penalty reinstated in Alabama, said he is usually skeptical of such innocence claims filed by what he called “do-gooder” lawyers. But he said he was astonished at the case.

    “I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was just dumfounded that, in Alabama, a case as weak as that would have gotten to the jury, much less a death sentence,” Baxley said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 ordered a new hearing to take place on Johnson’s claim of suppressed evidence.

    The key prosecution witness at the 1998 trial testified that, while eavesdropping on a phone call, she heard a man she believed was Johnson admitting to the crime. She was paid $5,000 in 2001 for her testimony, and Johnson’s lawyers argue that the state withheld evidence of monetary motivation for the testimony.

    A judge denied the new trial request in 2020, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld that decision in May, ruling that Johnson’s attorneys had not established that the witness “came forward with information in hope of the reward or that the state ever knew of such a hope before Johnson’s trial.”

    The Alabama attorney general’s office has opposed the request for a new trial. Attorneys for the state argued that the witness testified that she was unaware that a reward had been offered when she contacted law enforcement.

    The recent court proceedings have been narrowly focused on the issue of the reward, but Baxley said the case merits a fuller look.

    “Every breath this guy draws on death row is an indictment to the people of Alabama that I love so much,” Baxley said. “If some proper court will look at it, they are going to come to the same conclusion.”

    From Alabama Chief Justice Drayton Nabers Jr., wrote in an opinion piece this spring that, "there’s now substantial evidence that Mr. Johnson is innocent.” Carr wrote in 2020 that he took no position on Johnson’s innocence or guilt but said there are concerns about his trial. He wrote that those include a key witness being paid a reward, a fact not mentioned at trial, as well as alibi witnesses who placed Johnson in another part of town at the time of the shooting.

    “A prosecutor’s duty is not merely to secure convictions, but to seek justice,” the brief stated. “It is the district attorney’s position that in the interest of justice, Mr. Johnson, who has spent more than two decades on death row, be granted a new trial.”

    https://oanow.com/news/national/clai...9a91b1b6f.html
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  6. #26
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Alabama Supreme Court denies new trial for death row inmate

    By The Associated Press

    The Alabama Supreme Court on Friday denied a new trial for a death row inmate in a case that has seen the district attorney, former state attorney general and a former chief justice join calls to reexamine his conviction.

    Justices rejected Toforest Johnson's appeal of a lower court decision denying him a new trial. The request was one part of an ongoing effort to overturn the conviction.

    Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy while Hardy was working off-duty security at a hotel.

    Johnson's lawyers had argued he was due a new trial because the state failed to disclose a key prosecution witness was paid a reward several years after testifying. The Court of Criminal Appeals in May ruled that Johnson’s attorneys had not established that the witness knew about the reward or was motivated by it.

    Johnson's lawyers will appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have a separate new trial petition before a Jefferson County judge based on the district attorney's concerns about the conviction.

    Danny Carr, the current district attorney in the county where Johnson was convicted, in 2020 filed a brief with the court saying Johnson should get a new trial “in the interest of justice." Carr wrote that he took no position on Johnson’s innocence or guilt but said he had multiple concerns about the case.

    He wrote that his concerns about the conviction include the reward issue and that alibi witnesses place Johnson in another part of town at the time of the shooting. Carr said the original lead prosecutor had also expressed concerns about the case.

    The key prosecution witness at the 1998 trial testified that, while eavesdropping on a phone call, she heard a man she believed was Johnson admitting to the crime. She was paid a $5,000 reward in 2001.

    Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, former Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, and several former judges and prosecutors submitted briefs to the circuit court, or wrote editorials, supporting a new trial for Johnson.

    https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/...h-row-95446619
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #27
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Distributed for conference 9/26/23.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/22-7337.html
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  8. #28
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mastro Titta's Avatar
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court DENIED Johnson's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama
    Case Numbers: (CR-05-1805)
    Decision Date: May 6, 2022
    Rehearing Denied: August 26, 2022
    Discretionary Court Decision Date: December 16, 2022

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/...23zor_5368.pdf

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