Overturning a conviction? (The Fugitive)
Sep. 8th, 2023 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doranwen posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
little_detailsMost of you have probably seen The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, among others. I'm trying to write a fic for it, set right after the film ends, and have been struggling to figure out Richard Kimble's legal situation. For anyone who hasn't seen the film, I'll summarize the key points (and spoil you completely, so you might not want to read further if you plan on watching it):
- His wife was murdered
- Police arrested him for it, based on "no forced entry" into their home, a 911 call that sounded like it implicated Richard (his wife was calling out for him, hearing him enter the room, but it sounded like she was trying to say he attacked her), the "one-armed man" he said he fought with, they couldn't find (but it's also doubtful how much they looked), and superficial DNA evidence (his skin under her fingernails because she scratched his neck when he tried to move her)
- Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death penalty
- Escaped and committed small crimes as a fugitive (theft, breaking in to someone's house)
- Unearthed evidence of who the real killer was (an ex-cop who turned out to be hired by Richard's supposed best friend to kill both Richard and his wife, Richard escaped only because he got called into work in an emergency and sent his wife home by herself)
- Unearthed evidence of WHY he was targeted in the first place (discovered fraud in a drug trial his supposed best friend was running)
The evidence uncovered is corroborated by the deputy marshal hunting him, who, by the end of the movie, is trying to keep Richard alive as well as capture him because the ex-cop is trying to kill him on orders, the police want to kill him because they think he shot at one of their own (was the ex-cop trying to get Richard instead, but the reports are unclear at this point). The deputy marshal knows Richard is innocent at this point, and the cops look guilty as sin because the real killer is an ex-cop and they're going to look like they knew he was the killer and covered it up (reality is they were just super incompetent).
All that said and done, I'm trying to figure out what he can actually DO about getting himself freed. A few searches come up with overturning a conviction? This page says appeal or writ. From what I could find (but admittedly this is very fuzzy searching) appeals have a limited time requirement, and assuming nothing was filed right at the trial conviction (his lawyer/attorney was terrible), one has to factor in his escape and however long the manhunt took. (The movie's fuzzy on that too, I'm thinking a few weeks at most but am open to hearing someone else's opinion.) I'm guessing it's too late to appeal. Which leaves a writ, from what that page said?
I'm just having a really hard time taking the general pages I'm finding in search and drilling it down to "this is what they're going to do next". Like, obviously finding a new lawyer is a top priority… Can anyone help who *can* see the pathway for what happens next? My characters know it, I just don't, which makes it hard to write, lol.
- His wife was murdered
- Police arrested him for it, based on "no forced entry" into their home, a 911 call that sounded like it implicated Richard (his wife was calling out for him, hearing him enter the room, but it sounded like she was trying to say he attacked her), the "one-armed man" he said he fought with, they couldn't find (but it's also doubtful how much they looked), and superficial DNA evidence (his skin under her fingernails because she scratched his neck when he tried to move her)
- Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death penalty
- Escaped and committed small crimes as a fugitive (theft, breaking in to someone's house)
- Unearthed evidence of who the real killer was (an ex-cop who turned out to be hired by Richard's supposed best friend to kill both Richard and his wife, Richard escaped only because he got called into work in an emergency and sent his wife home by herself)
- Unearthed evidence of WHY he was targeted in the first place (discovered fraud in a drug trial his supposed best friend was running)
The evidence uncovered is corroborated by the deputy marshal hunting him, who, by the end of the movie, is trying to keep Richard alive as well as capture him because the ex-cop is trying to kill him on orders, the police want to kill him because they think he shot at one of their own (was the ex-cop trying to get Richard instead, but the reports are unclear at this point). The deputy marshal knows Richard is innocent at this point, and the cops look guilty as sin because the real killer is an ex-cop and they're going to look like they knew he was the killer and covered it up (reality is they were just super incompetent).
All that said and done, I'm trying to figure out what he can actually DO about getting himself freed. A few searches come up with overturning a conviction? This page says appeal or writ. From what I could find (but admittedly this is very fuzzy searching) appeals have a limited time requirement, and assuming nothing was filed right at the trial conviction (his lawyer/attorney was terrible), one has to factor in his escape and however long the manhunt took. (The movie's fuzzy on that too, I'm thinking a few weeks at most but am open to hearing someone else's opinion.) I'm guessing it's too late to appeal. Which leaves a writ, from what that page said?
I'm just having a really hard time taking the general pages I'm finding in search and drilling it down to "this is what they're going to do next". Like, obviously finding a new lawyer is a top priority… Can anyone help who *can* see the pathway for what happens next? My characters know it, I just don't, which makes it hard to write, lol.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 04:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 04:42 pm (UTC)Also, the deputy marshal corroborating is a BFD, honestly. The regional US Marshal for one of the districts is nominated by the President and has to be Senate-confirmed. But the deputies are the ones who stay there, though administrations. So it's a less-political, more daily work oriented job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marshals_Service is a good starting point.
Shorter version for your question is, I think they'd get him a *better* lawyer, tell said lawyer the Marshals will back up Kimble's report that no, he didn't do it. It was a conspiracy to murder his wife and frame Kimble for it, by the supposed 'friend' and the ex-cop. And then petition to have the conviction overturned. The public attention to this could speed it up (clear his name and let this die down!) or slow it down (again, to let the publicity die down). The Marshals as witnesses would definitely help, as would the fellow professionals who can testify to the evidence found during the movie.
I hope this helps some but as ever, ignore anything that doesn't work for your story.
ETA: I do not know IL law, sorry!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 10:21 pm (UTC)I looked up BFD (because I'd never seen that acronym before) but I'm not sure I have the right handle on the usage - could you explain what you were trying to say by it?
I did gather that the deputy marshal was more of a regular job and all that. I poked around their own site, too, and found the reason they might have been going after Kimble in the first place (because everything I was reading was saying "federal fugitive" but Kimble wasn't convicted on federal law, so there was the "why are they going after him?" question) - their timeline had this:
OCTOBER 6, 1981
FUGITIVE INVESTIGATIVE STRIKE TEAMS (FIST)
Fugitive Investigative Strike Teams (FIST) are initiated to capture violent fugitives wanted by federal and local law enforcement. The first FIST operation begins in Miami, Florida on October 6 and concentrates on drug trafficking and violent offenses.
Arguing that Kimble was considered a violent offender, they might've tracked him down for that. Copeland for sure would've been one they'd have gone after as a violent offender (possbly for drug offenses too, we're not told much about him).
Thanks for that list of tasks! It does help quite a bit. Getting a better lawyer's easy to write and all that. Petitioning - they petition any judge and get it looked at, it sounds like? (It also sounds like a place where if there are strings to pull to get things looked at quickly, that's where strings would get pulled. Sam might not be political in his job but he no doubt knows people…)
I also wonder if the police would be worried Richard could sue them for something. I mean, they were extremely incompetent, not following up on the most basic of things (if Richard could've found the one-armed man with just a little research, they could have too), etc. Would it make sense for like the DA to just meet with Kimble and his much better lawyer and just go "we'll agree not charge you for these minor crimes if you don't sue us"? Public perception, if nothing else, is going to be a killer for them. Sykes being an ex-cop looks BAD.
EDIT: I, too, do not know IL law, lol. But I did run across this article for Chicago, which sounds like more or less what I'm dealing with. Only in this case, I have a feeling prosecutors will be pressured to drop the murder charge on Kimble because they've got a better suspect now - and motive and all that. The whole "she was more rich" thing was so patently false, you can tell Sam doesn't really buy it the moment he hears it. (By the joint interview post-St. Patrick's Day parade, his gut's saying Kimble's innocent so hard that he can't muster any enthusiasm for the interview whatsoever.) The public perception will probably work in Kimble's favor for this.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 03:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-10 04:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 04:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-13 04:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-13 04:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 09:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 04:34 pm (UTC)Getting out of the bus before the train hits it? No, you won't find any jury in the country that will convict on that.
Unlocking his own irons and fleeing from the scene of the crash? Yeah, that one they can bust him on.
However, I would think that a good lawyer should be able to 1) use the new evidence from the murder case to get that sentence rescinded, and THEN 2) get any sentence for escaping/fleeing waived as "time served."
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-08 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 09:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 09:14 am (UTC)And from what I can tell, one of the MAJOR things influencing whether or not new evidence will result in a retrial or exoneration or some other legal redress, is "what do the District Attorney and the Police Department think about it." If the DA and PD don't want to admit the conviction might be wrongful, it's probably going to take a loooooooooooong time with constant petitions and letters and external pressure before anything happens. But if one of them takes an interest, things can move forward fairly quickly. Having a respected member of law enforcement publicly declaring a convict is innocent and willing to push for it would make a huge difference.
Also, if you're wondering what resources Kimble might have to help, the movie is from 1993. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992. And their whole job is to get people who were wrongly convicted exonerated. And he might need their help, because in the 1990s it was a lot harder to get convictions overturned than it is now; a whole slew of criminal justice reform laws were passed in states across the nations in the early 2000s to make it easier for people wrongfully convicted to be freed. The 90s was when the "tough on crime/make criminals suffer/lock 'em all up" mentality was at its height in the US.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 02:11 pm (UTC)And I plan on Sam doing everything in his power to get people to admit there was a mistake. Sam is appalled at the whole thing, naturally. So I basically want to get him to find someone in the DA's office, maybe (because CPD are not so willing to drop things right now until they look *really* bad, the media may help here) to admit that it was wrongful…
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 07:35 pm (UTC)They still do a very high percentage of cases where DNA is the conclusive evidence that the person convicted of the crime is innocent, simply because that's the easiest and simplest way to prove innocence. But they've also taken on (and won) cases where the problem is unreliable eyewitnesses, or police misconduct, or prosecutorial misconduct (they've actually gotten at least two former DAs convicted of that and sentenced to jail!), or pseudoscience bullshit "evidence," or other problems.
In 1993, they'd probably start by saying "we don't take that type of case, we only look at cases where DNA evidence can prove innocence" and then take a closer look and go "holy shit, this guy is innocent, well, it's a little outside our core practice, but he needs help we can give, so we'll take the case anyway."
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-10 04:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-10 06:21 am (UTC)Most of the prisoners who contact them are either genuinely guilty or have an ambiguous case where there's nothing really to be done--even if they are innocent, the conviction was not because of junk evidence, or bad eyewitnesses, or corruption in law enforcement. But even the ones where the person is clearly innocent they get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more of those than they actually have the people and time to help with.
They were taking cases from across the US from the very beginning despite being just a law clinic at a law school.
Here's the history: https://history.innocenceproject.org/
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-10 06:29 am (UTC)Lol, sounds like the real question is - how did Richard not hear about and contact them in the first place? (You'd think they'd have been able to find Sykes, at least, even without knowing Nichols was behind everything.) I don't feel like the movie allows for him to have known about them, though maybe it's because he's not gotten *to* the prison yet when he escapes. (And if *Richard* didn't know about them, then that leaves Sam or else the new lawyer Richard gets.)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-11 08:35 pm (UTC)Then after the events of the movie, there's all of a sudden a lot of evidence of innocence, and he's still probably able to afford his own lawyer(s) but some support from the Innocence Project would be helpful and so they start helping with the case.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 03:08 pm (UTC)From my watching of the film, the cops did not *knowingly* pass over Sykes (the ex-cop) as the killer to pin it on Richard instead, they just simply accepted Sykes' alibi (using fifteen coworkers from the drug company where he works as security - those people need to be prosecuted for giving false alibis!) and didn't consider Richard's story as credible. Richard had his attorney supposedly looking for the one-armed man (which I think he did, he just wasn't very competent - probably specialized in an entirely different area of law and Richard didn't know any better to get a better lawyer when he was charged with something of this magnitude), and so the cops went "well, they're not finding the guy, bet he doesn't exist" and went after Richard because "she was more rich" (Richard's wife was from a wealthy family and he was the sole beneficiary of her life insurance policy).
The idea of getting a pardon, I did see in another fic. Overturning a conviction is better in the sense that it would remove the conviction from his record and so he wouldn't be considered as a felon forever (which might make it hard for him to work as a surgeon again, something I think he would want to do, it's all he has left to him now). But if it's impossible to get, then a pardon would at least keep him off death row… I'll have it brought up in the fic, for sure, but I think I want to have them work to get his conviction overturned, because it'll be better for him in the long run.
Plus publicity ought to work in their favor. One of the final scenes of the film has a whole bunch of news people going "he says it was the one-armed man, now you've got a one-armed man in custody, is that the guy?" and really sort of grilling the cops because they can tell there's a lot more to the story. All it would take is a good lawyer to spin the story right to them and the media would run with it. The publicity here could actually work in his favor.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-09 03:19 pm (UTC)If anyone can be proven to have perjured themselves during the trial, that could be the grounds for asking for the writ/appeal. I know not the appropriate terms for the argument, but it might be in the family of the fruit of a poisoned tree.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-11 07:32 pm (UTC)In terms of what happens to the murder conviction, if there's very obvious evidence that it wasn't him, the conviction can go away. How it happens can depend on a lot of things, but if the prosecutors are on side and admit they fucked up, it can go pretty smoothly. When Adnan Syed's case was vacated earlier this year it was literally just the DA going to a judge and asking them to please vacate the conviction (on very tenuous grounds tbh).
(If you don't have the DA on side it gets a lot more complicated.)
I'll also reiterate that the prosecutors are not obligated to charge anything. They frequently don't charge things that people are clearly guilty of, for all sorts of reasons. In a case like this where there's lots of publicity about a clear miscarriage of justice, unless the DA was really invested in seeing him in jail for some reason, they would probably just decline to charge most/all of the minor crimes. My guess would be that unless some of the other crimes were violent (and I don't think they were?) they might at most charge for the escape, just because they don't want to create a narrative where escaping from prison to prove your own innocence is OK; my guess it there would be a deal where he pleads guilty to some minor charge related to the escape and gets a few months probation in exchange for everything else being dismissed.
However it looks like a lot of the prison escape crimes depend on what your original crime was, so if his conviction was vacated it's possible it could be argued that he can't actually be charged for the escape, since "escaping from prison when you aren't convicted of anything" isn't a crime. (He could still plead for something as part of a deal, though.)
They could also make some kind of immunity deal in exchange for his testimony against the actual bad guys; they might do this pro forma anyway just to give him a legal guarantee that nobody could come back and charge him later. Immunity/cooperation deals often specify that the person can't be convicted for any acts they performed in relation to a specific event or specific crime as long as they continue to cooperate, so he could probably be given a deal like that for any crimes committed in relation to his wife's murder or his escape from her killer.
But if the whole thing is very high-profile, as it would probably be, the simplest outcome might just be that the governor gives him a blanket pardon for any crimes he confesses to having committed after his arrest.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 12:25 am (UTC)And in the film it's clear that Sam has a pretty good relationship with a judge, to get wiretaps easily and whatnot. I can see him using that relationship to be all "hey, take a look at this case". Ironic, considering in the film he's getting wiretaps to find Richard, and now he wants to exonerate him, but that's the fun of this film for you.
The immunity deal sounds like a good idea, yeah.
If the governor gives him a blanket pardon for those crimes, does that mean that any of them would actually get charged and go on his record (even though he's pardoned from any of the consequences of them)?
Thanks, this is very helpful!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-11 11:36 pm (UTC)One thing which might happen, is that the prosecution won't want to risk a case getting overturned (prosecutorial reputation is very much based on how many trials they "win" and overturned cases look especially bad. No this isn't great for the justice system) and may offer (read attempt to pressure the MC into accepting) your main character an Alford or No Contest plea in exchange for waving the sentence. The prosecution would present this as a best case scenario -- no need to drag things out with another trial or the uncertainty of an appeal! but it's actually pretty shitty for the people who agree to it bc regardless of whether you maintained your innocence in the plea process, your record will still say you were convicted
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 12:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-12 01:05 am (UTC)