A FAMILY OF SELFLESS WARRIORS:
When I began preparing this Post, I had in mind the presence of one 'Selfless Warrior' - the basketball player who shocked the sporting world when she announced in 2019 that she was setting aside her extraordinary basketball career (two Olympic gold medals medals and much more) to work on personal goals, and to help free and exonerate an inmate named Jonathan Irons she believed was innocent. Irons had been convicted in Missouri of robbery and assault as well as burglary, unlawful entry, and illegal use of a weapon, when he was 16-year's old and then sentenced as an adult to 50 years in jail, which would mean no parole until he was 60 years old. However, as I learned more about Maya Moore and her role in the Iron's case, it dawned on me that that this post actually tells the inspirational story of a family of 'Selfless Warriors' bound together by a common mission of reforming criminal justice and by a powerful Christian faith. Let me explain:
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THE EXPLANATION:
As reporter Andrea Y. Henderson writes in the St. Louis American, under the heading 'WNBA star Maya Moore's sacrifice helps a St. Louis man get closer to exoneration, published on March 16, 2020, after a judge quashed his convictions 23 years after they were rendered: "Moore, 30, first learned of Irons’ case in 2003, through her godparents and her great-uncle, who had been working with Irons in a prison ministry. Moore said her godparents were heavily invested in Irons’ life and his case, and wanted to teach her about the criminal justice system and how it treats people of color. The Jefferson City native said she didn’t know anyone who was in prison growing up and she had no idea of any of their struggles. “When I met Jonathan, I was 17, my eyes were open and my mind was blown to the reality of there are people in prison who shouldn't be there,” Moore said. Throughout college and her eight-year career with the Lynx, the four-time WNBA champion stayed abreast of Irons' case, and soon he became like family to her. In January 2019, she announced that she would sit out the basketball season to work on a few personal goals and focus on freeing Irons and establishing his innocence. She did the same thing this season, and will also forfeit her chance to play in this year's Olympic games."
MAYA MOORE'S PURSUIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE:
Columnist Kevin B. Blackstone gives us insight into Maya Moore's motivations in a column published by the Washington Post on March 18, 2020, under the heading, "Maya Moore left the basketball court for criminal justice reform, She's seeing the results." Blackstone shows us how much she was motivated by unchecked police violence in America, saying, in part: "But a few months before Kaepernick dropped to a knee in protest of unchecked police lethality against unarmed black men in 2016, Moore stood upright to call attention to the same. She was starring for the Minnesota Lynx that summer when Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man, was pulled over for a broken taillight while driving in suburban Minneapolis and wound up shot and killed by a St. Anthony, Minn., police officer. Afterward, Moore and several teammates wore black T-shirts with white lettering that read: “Change starts with us" and "Justice & Accountability.” “We got together and decided we were going to raise our voice and be citizens,” Moore recalled. “That was the first time I’d really spoken, used my voice, toward the criminal justice lane, the racial reconciliation lane. That gave me courage to talk about Jonathan. As I looked back, I said: ‘I’m literally in the middle of one of these stories right now. It’s just been a private matter.’ It gave me courage to use my voice and [left me] feeling like I’d been educating myself and had something helpful to say.” She said she had been reading “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” a much-celebrated book on imprisonment and race. And she followed the work of John Perkins, an evangelical civil rights worker who has married Christianity with social justice work in California and Mississippi. “That was when it started,” Moore said of her transition to activist. “Just started educating myself through the help of my friends at Athletes for Impact out in L.A. They helped me … to learn.” What Moore said she was learning was how Irons, someone she met when she was a teenage volunteer in her family’s church prison ministry, could be convicted of something he said he didn’t do and physical evidence didn’t tie him to. “It jarred me to my core,” she said. So she set out to set him free. “Getting to where you are, in your convictions, why you do what you do, is a very long journey,” the 30-year-old Moore said. “The way I’ve interacted with trying to do and be a part of things that help humanity is a long road. I’ve done some things more privately than publicly. Over the last three years, I’ve tried to be more intentional about doing things more publicly because my motivations directly connected to a human being that I knew, that I know.” So Moore made sojourns from Minnesota, her only WNBA home, to Jefferson City. During her hiatus from the league, she made trips from the Atlanta area, where she essentially grew up and now calls home again, to the Missouri town. She started her own organization, Win with Justice, to bring attention to both Irons’s plight and what she believes landed him in prison: prosecutorial malfeasance."
BACK TO THE 'FAMILY.' We are introduced to the role played by Maya's Godparents, in an article by New York Times Reporter Kurt Streeter, published on June 30, 2019, under the heading "Maya Moore left basketball. A prisoner needed help." Although Maya's mother was single, "a strong network of cousins lived in town," and two pillars of this network were Reggie Williams and his wife, Cherilyn, who became Maya’s godparents, on hand for her baptism at a little church downtown and for her basketball games in elementary school and junior high. "Moore moved with her mother to Atlanta and led her high school team to three state championships," Streeter wrote. "She rapidly grew to 6 feet. Her polished game won comparisons to Michael Jordan’s. Back in Jefferson City her cousins had come to know Irons through a prison ministry. They were impressed by his friendliness, wit and eagerness to learn. “There was something about him,” Reggie Williams said. “Just a peace.” During her senior year, Moore and her cousins vacationed at a lake near Jefferson City. Williams had developed such an interest in Irons’s case that he spent months investigating it. One day at the lake, he spread court files on a table and studied them. “What’s this all about?” Moore asked. “Why are you doing this?” She was shocked by the bare-bones facts. Irons was a poor African-American teenager who had been tried as an adult and convicted by an all-white jury. The crime was violent and involved a gun, but no weapon was found. No blood evidence, no footprints and no fingerprints tied Irons to the crime. His 50-year sentence was handed down at a trial that ended when he was 18 — Moore’s age. “My eyes started opening,” Moore said.
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THE COURTROOM:
The unique 'family' nature of Maya Moore's battle to save Jonathan Irons is reflected in the seating arrangements for the hearing on June 18, 2020, when Judge Green was to give his ruling on the motion to vacate the convictions that had already kept Irons behind bars for 23 years.
As reporter Katie Barnes reported for ESPN on June 18, 2020, in a story headed, 'Inside WNBA legend Maya Moore's extraordinary quest for justice.'... "Moore's family and friends form a crowd outside the hearing room. The group is big enough -- a couple dozen people -- that there is a question about whether the hearing should be moved to the upper chamber. After it's decided that today's proceedings will happen here, in the smaller room, Moore's family follows her inside. Four rows of wooden pews make up the seating area. Two tables for the respective legal teams sit in front of a wooden banister. Moore and her loved ones fill the first two pews that extend across the room and half of the third......A man named Jonathan Irons enters the room, the chains of his silver shackles clanking against the floor with his every step. He's wearing an orange jumpsuit. He looks over at the crowd. "Clothes don't make the man," he says, taking his seat at the head of his legal table, his chair facing the judge's bench. The shackles stay on. "God is a chain-breaker, you hear me?" he says. "God is a chain-breaker." "Yes, he is," comes a response from the crowd. Moore sits next to her mother, Kathryn, in the front pew, 6 feet from Irons, her eyes fixated on the profile of his face. Her godparents, Cheri and Reggie Williams, who have advocated for Irons for the past 15 years, sit behind them and next to Cheri's parents. It was Cheri's father, Hugh Flowers, who first formed a bond in the early 2000s with Irons while volunteering as the choir director at Jefferson City Correctional Center. Irons, who grew up without knowing his birth father, grew so close to Flowers that he came to see him as a father figure. Moore's fourth-grade teacher, Joni Henderson, sits next to the Williams family. Even the judge, Daniel Green, is connected to Moore. He coached her kindergarten soccer team. Irons calls to Jonathan Williams, Cheri's 25-year-old son. Jonathan stands, clasping a large brown envelope -- details of Irons' case, the product of over a decade of investment in Irons by the Williams family. "Ooh!" Irons says, giving Jonathan's suit the once-over. "You lookin' sharp!" The room laughs in collective exhale. Kathryn leans over to Maya and whispers in her ear, giving her shoulder a comforting squeeze. Maya gives her mother a nod before reaching back a pew to clasp Henderson's hand."
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HOW REGGIE WILLIAMS - MAYA MOORE"S GODPARENT FOUND A DOCUMENT CONCEALED FROM THE DEFENCE THAT HELPED SAVED THE DAY:
As ESPN Reporter Katie Barnes continued: "Back in Jefferson City on that sunny October day, Judge Daniel Green calls Irons' case from the bench. It's been 10 months since Irons' legal team filed the petition that led to this hearing and over a decade since Reggie Williams, Moore's godfather, discovered a piece of evidence that Irons' team plans to present today. The catalyst was Moore, who had met Irons through Reggie and Cheri in the summer before her freshman year at UConn. According to The New York Times, Moore had seen Reggie reviewing Irons' legal documents during a family vacation in her senior year of high school, became interested in the case and visited Irons in prison for the first time during that summer of 2007. "Until Maya Moore got involved, [Irons] just really didn't have the resources to either hire counsel or hire investigators," says Irons' attorney Kent Gipson. "It's big to sacrifice a year of your career in your prime to do that." Back in August, after months of motions and extensions and exhibit filings and updates, Green, the judge, had set this date to hear arguments in the case. Today, Irons' legal team begins by calling Reggie Williams to the stand. Williams' testimony focuses on the longevity of his relationship with Irons and his intimate knowledge of the path Irons has taken through the legal system following his conviction. Williams, who has worked for State Farm for 33 years in both underwriting and claims investigation, says Irons gave him power of attorney in 2005, after he had shown a keen interest in the case, and Williams spent years poring over the materials contained in the three boxes of evidence given to him. In 2007, he took these materials to a University of Missouri law professor, who referred Williams to one of his students for help. They then filed a records request, which led them to the O'Fallon Police Department to review additional files. Williams, who declined to comment for this story, testified that once they were allowed inside the police department, Williams asked to see police reports. He was handed a blue folder stuffed with documents. He paged through them and discovered something that caught his eye. "It was a latent fingerprint report that I had not seen before," he says today on the stand. Irons' team then calls Irons' original defense attorney, Christine Sullivan. The report, Irons' lawyers argue, raises questions about the conduct of the prosecution in Irons' original trial. The document is not the same report that was given to Irons' defense attorney in 1998. At the time of Irons' 1998 trial, the fingerprint report indicated that the two fingerprints found on the storm door leading out of Stotler's home belonged to Stotler. But this report, which Williams found two years into his investigation, indicates that only one of those prints was Stotler's. The other, this report reveals, doesn't belong to Irons. "Explain the significance of the fingerprint evidence to your defense," says Jessica Hathaway, one of Irons' attorneys. "That someone else was in or out of that house that left the print on an outer door," Sullivan says. "Not Jonathan, not the homeowner, someone else." A choked sob comes from the corner of the room. Tears stream down Irons' cheeks as he gasps for air. This is the argument upon which Irons' appeal hinges. Moore presses her lips together and grips the railing in front of her. Her knuckles tighten and the tension ripples up her forearm. Green calls for a recess. The room empties. Moore stands in the hallway surrounded by her family. Irons is off to the side, flanked by corrections officers. They aren't allowed to speak to each other "I'm heartbroken that we can't console him as part of our family," Moore says. "One of the results of someone suffering injustice is that pain." Twenty-one years after his conviction, Irons has finally received another day in court, but he will have to wait weeks, maybe months, to find out if Green believes him."
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THE RULING: RENOWNED CRIMINAL JUSTICE ANALYST MAURICE POSSLEY EXPLAINS WHY JUDGE GREEN VACATED ALL OF THE CONVICTIONS, IN HIS ENTRY ON THE NATIONAL REGISTRY OF EXONERATIONS:
"In March 2020, Circuit Court Judge Daniel R. Green granted the petition and vacated Irons’s convictions. The judge noted that the prosecution had conceded that the fingerprint report had not been disclosed. In fact, evidence showed that the bottom portion of the original report that showed that one fingerprint was unidentified apparently had been covered up when it was copied. The report that was disclosed was the sanitized version. Judge Green said the undisclosed portion of the report would have been “unassailable forensic evidence” to attack the state’s case and support [Irons’s] claim of innocence.”
The judge also noted that Irons’s trial defense attorney had failed to call a witness, Crystal Boeckman, who would have placed Irons at a location that was far enough from Stotler’s home that it was “logistically difficult if not impossible for [Irons] to have committed this crime.” Moreover, the judge faulted Irons’s defense lawyer for failing to establish that the gun presented in evidence “had no connection either to the offense or to [Irons] and probably should not have been admitted into evidence.”
Judge Green also cited the testimony at an evidentiary hearing from Dr. James Lampinen, a University of Arkansas psychology professor who reviewed the eyewitness identification factors in the case. Lampinen said that the photograph of Irons used in the photographic lineup was significantly larger than those of the other five men in the lineup. Lampinen determined that Irons’s head “was twenty-five percent larger than the average of the other photos, making [Irons’s] photo inherently suggestive based upon size alone,” Judge Green said.
Lampinen was critical of the police officers who suggested that Stotler make a “guess” when viewing the lineup. He also said that Stotler’s identification had evolved from virtually no description on the day of the crime to a very specific description of Irons and his clothing. Lampinen testified that the likely explanation was that Stotler’s identification was based on “suggestive outside factors rather than memory.”
Judge Green said he found Lampinen’s testimony “credible and…raises grave doubts regarding the reliability and accuracy of the eyewitness identification by Mr. Stotler.” The judge also said the evidence relating to Hanlen’s undisclosed misconduct as well as the enhancement of Irons’s lineup photograph, when combined with the fingerprint evidence “removes any doubt that the verdict in this case is not worthy of confidence.”
The Missouri Attorney General’s office appealed the ruling. On July 1, 2020, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a final appeal. That same day, the charges were dismissed and Irons was released."
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COMMENTARY: So there you go. I started with one 'Selfless Warrior' and ended up with a whole family of 'Selfless Warriors! Collectively they make the point that it takes a huge amount of work, commitment and support to rectify a miscarriage of justice. It doesn't just happen. There's no doubt in my mind that if Maya Moore had not come along - if her life had not intersected with that of Jonathan Irons - Jonathan would still be in prison possibly for the rest of his life. In a telephone interview, Jay Lennox, a member of Iron's legal team told me, "I can tell you 100% if Maya Moore had not showed up, Jonathan would not be a free man today." Of Maya Moore and her family, Mr. Lennox had this to say: "I think she has a bigger platform for criminal justice reform - and there are, in my opinion, so many people that are wrongfully in prison today - more Black than White. Maya, Reggie Cheri and Jonathan are faith-based, driven by God."...Totally inspirational. Case closed. HL.
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INSIGHTFUL READING MATERIALS:
Andrea Y. Henderson: St. Louis American story:
Katie Barnes reported for ESPN on June 18, 2020, in a story headed, 'Inside WNBA legend Maya Moore's extraordinary quest for justice.'
National Registry of Exonerations entry: (Anthony Irons):
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5766
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CHRONOLOGY:
Key Dates will be found in the National Registry of Exonerations entry at the above link.
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Next Monday: (21 September): TBA during the week here and on 'The Charles Smith Blog' - smith forensic.blogspot.com -
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