Q & A with Edward Humes

What is Mean Justice about?

The nation’s war on crime has gone terribly wrong in California’s heartland — and the unintended casualty of war is innocence. Mean Justice is a portrait of  a community where fear of criminals and the desire to convict them at any cost have spawned one of the toughest justice systems in the nation, along with something far darker: A shocking number of innocent men and women in the City of Bakersfield and the surrounding County of Kern have been wrongly convicted. And what has happened in this oil-and-farm boom town just two hours north of Los Angeles is now cropping up with alarming frequency elsewhere in the country. This is the great, untold story of the war on crime. It’s not just about bulging prisons and three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws and doing away with parole. There is also an unseen price-tag tied to those retreating crime stats our leaders so proudly tout, and its being paid by the innocent with lost freedom, devastated families, and ruined lives. Mean Justice is their story.

How does Mean Justice tell that story?

The central drama in the book is the story of an ordinary man, a retired high school principal convicted of killing his wife. Although the courts in Bakersfield treated his case as open and shut, Patrick O’Dale Dunn’s conviction exemplifies the prosecutorial and police abuses that can put the innocent behind bars. His trial was marked by tainted witnesses, an error-ridden investigation, and crucial evidence kept hidden by the prosecution that, had it been revealed to jurors, could have destroyed the prosecutor’s case. Not even the absence of  physical evidence linking him to the crime, the lack of a motive for him to kill, nor the impossibility of the scenario painted by the prosecution could save Dunn from a life sentence once the deck was so stacked against him.

Cases like that aren’t common, though, are they?

As extraordinary as it may sound, Pat Dunn’s experience is all too common in Bakersfield: I found ninety-one other men and women in this town wrongly prosecuted in recent years for murders, child abuse and other major felonies for which they belatedly were exonerated. There was the high-school track star and class president whose Olympic aspirations were shattered when he was imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit and a rape that never happened; the diesel mechanic and his wife whose children were coerced by authorities into falsely accusing them of molestation; the two prison guards accused of a murder conspiracy over insurance money that didn’t exist; and the Mexican immigrant who faced the death penalty before the authorities reluctantly checked his fingerprints — and found out he had been telling the truth all along when he claimed the police had confused him with a suspect with a similar name. These wrongly accused have served as many as sixteen years behind bars before being exonerated.

Can we really learn all that much from the unfortunate experiences of one town and one man? Aren’t they aberrations?

 It would be comforting to view Pat Dunn’s experience as unique and Bakersfield as some sort of judicial backwater. But they are not aberrations. This community is just an extreme example of the tide of official misconduct and wrongful convictions I found throughout the nation, and the justice system there is simply delivering what the public has demanded everywhere: prosecutors who lock away accused criminals and keep the streets safe — no questions asked. And in the process, conviction of the innocent has become, literally, an everyday occurrence in America, where tough new laws aimed at cracking down on crime have sharply curtailed the rights and protections of defendants while vastly increasing the power and reach of prosecutors — with no additional accountability beyond their own individual integrity. As Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr has shown us, a prosecutor answers to no one, and his power can humble even a president. What most people don’t understand is that these extraordinary powers are not limited to special prosecutors on Pennsylvania Avenue, but are possessed by every local District Attorney in America. There is no more powerful figure in American life today than the prosecutor.

But aren’t prosecutors at a disadvantage because of all the rights accused criminals enjoy and exploit?

That’s been their position for many years, and it has been a successful lobbying tool for hammering through changes in the law, but it is simply not true. Despite popular concerns about judicial activism, endless appeals and “criminals’ rights, the fact is that prosecutors dominate every facet of the criminal justice system, from investigation to charging to sentencing and appeals. Most crucially — and it is here that many abuses take place — they control the flow of information in every case, deciding without any oversight beyond their own conscience what to reveal to a defendant, judge and jury — and what to keep secret. Most prosecutors perform an invaluable and often thankless job, and they do so with honor, integrity and an appreciation of their awesome power to help or harm. But when vast powers to investigate, search, arrest and imprison virtually anyone are conferred upon officials without any meaningful oversight and with virtually no consequences should they break the rules, there inevitably will be abuses, to the detriment of innocents.

But don’t we need tough laws and strong prosecutors to convict and punish criminals?

Certainly. And we have them — punishments have never been tougher, prisons have never been more full and prosecutors have never been more successful. The problem is that prosecutors are by law required to do justice, not to simply win convictions and fill cell blocks. With the awesome power of the state behind them, prosecutors must meet a higher standard of conduct that other lawyers. But in recent years, many prosecutors have come to see themselves more as advocates for crime victims whose sole job is to win in court by any means. In researching Mean Justice, I found case after case in which prosecutors kept evidence of innocence secret, from alibis to eyewitnesses to outright confessions by others — all in the name of winning their cases. Sometimes the misconduct takes the form of  knowingly relying on erroneous, improper or false evidence. And even when the errors and misconduct finally are detected after conviction, it is the prosecutors, not the defense attorneys, who exploit legal technicalities and procedural delays to prolong unjust imprisonments on appeal. Contrary to popular wisdom, which perceives appeals as a means for convicts to thwart justice, the Byzantine world of appellate briefs and writs overwhelmingly favors prosecutors at every turn, routinely tolerating official misconduct while ignoring compelling evidence of innocence.

Can you give some examples of this?

I found 616 cases of wrongful convictions involving official misconduct in recent years around the nation, and that number is just a representative sample — no one knows how extensive the problem is because no one keeps track of such cases. Indeed, the system is set up to make such tracking all but impossible. But some examples that come to mind in Bakersfield are the Kniffen, Tomlin and Pitts cases. It took sixteen years in prison for Scott and Brenda Kniffen to be exonerated after being imprisoned for molesting their two sons, even though it had been known for years that the scientific evidence used to convict them was bogus, that their children (like dozens of others in Bakersfield) had been coerced and even terrorized by investigators and prosecutors into falsely accusing their parents; and that reports, tape recordings and other crucial pieces of evidence had been kept from the defense. Charles Tomlin, convicted of murder despite an alibi and the fact that the only witness against him recanted, was finally freed after sixteen years in prison because of illegal evidence introduced by the prosecution. In the Pitts case, seven men and women were sentenced to hundreds of years in prison for supposedly taking part in a massive child sex and pornography ring. After five years of prison, all were freed because of prosecutorial misconduct so massive that the appeals court opinion in the case needed several hundred pages to list representative examples of official wrongdoing — the single worst case of prosecutorial misconduct in the history of California, if not the nation.

Can you describe similar cases from other parts of the country?

The appendix of MEAN JUSTICE is called “The Toll of Misconduct” — it provides a year by year listing of hundreds of wrongful convictions from every state and major city in the country since 1990. Many of the injustices remained uncorrected for years until some outsider forced the system to recognize its errors. In Chicago, for example, it took four journalism students on a class assignment to uncover the massive official misconduct that put four men in prison — two on death row — for eighteen years for a double murder and rape they did not commit. Thanks to the students’ dogged work in raising doubts about the witness tampering and suborning of perjury by police and prosecutors, DNA tests were made, and the four men were completely exonerated in 1996. (Incidentally, more than fifty other men have been freed from wrongful convictions in recent years because of  DNA tests made after questions were raised about prosecutorial or police misconduct.) In San Francisco, meanwhile, federal prosecutors anxious to nail down an international drug conspiracy accepted as their star witness a man who had been tortured into testifying by authorities in China. This in itself was misconduct, but it got worse: When the witness attempted to recant, saying he had made false accusations just to stop the torture, the U.S. prosecutors threatened this man with deportation and certain death unless he stuck to his original story — then failed to tell the judge, jury and defense about any of this . To this day, the Justice Department has neither admitted its errors in the case nor disciplined the offending prosecutors. Meanwhile, in Boston, the practice of police officers perjuring themselves in order to bolster prosecutors’ cases — “testi-lying,” it’s called — has become so rampant that the presiding judge in Suffolk County created a reporting system to refer such cases for immediate prosecution. The move to punish police lying on the witness stand came only after an embarrassing series of stories in the Boston Globe showed how police and prosecutors routinely tolerated official perjury for years in order to win convictions.

Why does such misconduct occur? Is it due to some sort of corruption?

Deliberate corruption would provide an easy explanation for the problem of police and prosecutorial misconduct, but instances of law-enforcement officials accepting bribes or other forms of personal or political profit in exchange for framing the innocent are most rare, and those that have been found have been dealt with severely and effectively. A much more subtle process seems to be at work in most cases, one that is not so easily dealt with. Most seem to involve well-meaning officials who believed — and, in many cases, still believe, despite harsh criticism from trial judges and appeals courts — that they were doing what needed to be done to put the guilty away, and that complaints about misconduct amount to little more than carping about technicalities. This far more insidious, well-intentioned zeal for protecting the public and punishing malefactors even if it means breaking the rules is very hard to detect and confront. The officials responsible for the misconduct usually enjoy widespread community support — they win most of their cases, after all — and any criticism is inevitably met with thundering law-and-order rhetoric, complaints about liberal judges and biased journalists, and calls for changes in laws that protect the accused, as if detection of misconduct, rather than the misconduct itself, was the problem.

Can you illustrate this phenomenon?

A perfect example was the Bakersfield Witchhunt in the mid to late 1980s, a panic over organized rings of child molesters and devil worshipers that swept the town, leading to the investigation of hundreds of men and women, the indictment of fifty-four and the removal of dozens of children from their homes and families. The hysteria that gripped Kern County, long a hotbed of conspiracy theories, was unimaginable. Neighbors stopped talking; people avoided touching children for fear they would be accused; police dug up back yards searching for bones and evidence of ritual crimes. Similar investigations and panics later swept the nation, but it all started here: Bakersfield saw the first of these so called “ring” cases. Investigators from Kern County briefed detectives in the far more infamous McMartin Preschool case in Los Angeles, and pioneered many of the abusive techniques that ultimately discredited the McMartin prosecution and many others like it around the nation. Bakersfield’s well-meaning social workers, detectives and prosecutors would interrogate children for hours, forcing them to say they were molested though they denied it and medical evidence supported their denials. Tapes and other evidence documenting this coercion were then minimized or kept secret; jurors were led to believe the allegations were made freely and without prodding. Doctors paid by the prosecution were called in to claim signs of abuse were present when none existed, while parents were denied the right to have their own children examined by independent experts. When medical reports failed to support allegations of molestation, they were kept hidden from defense lawyers. Anyone who questioned the investigation became suspect themselves. Thousand year prison sentences were handed down in these cases, but they have since been shown to be a veritable textbook of how not to investigate crimes against children, and the vast majority of have been overturned. Yet the District Attorney insists that the convictions were valid and that liberal appeals judges have perverted the law to set criminals free — a position popular with constituents, but that is simply not the case.

How does the central character in Mean Justice fit into this picture? Why focus on Pat Dunn?

Pat Dunn’s story is just so incredibly riveting. Here’s an ordinary man, who found his soul mate late in life — both had been married before. Sandy Dunn had millions in the bank from her first marriage; Pat was a retired school principal with a mortgage foreclosure business he ran out of his home. They both were conservative, law-and-order Republicans who were glad their D.A. put away more criminals per capita than any other in the state. They had read the news stories about prisoners claiming they were innocents wronged by the authorities in Bakersfield, but the Dunns didn’t buy it for a second. Pat Dunn thought ­ no, he knew — that it could never happen to him. He still can scarcely believe it, even as he sits in prison for the eighth year of his life sentence.

What was he accused of doing? And what did your investigation uncover?

In the summer of 1992, shortly before their sixth anniversary, Pat reported Sandy missing, saying she disappeared in the night without a trace. Sandy had always liked to walked alone at odd hours; now Pat believed she had begun to show signs of mental confusion, possibly Alzheimer’s disease, and he feared she was lost or had been harmed by someone during a late-night walk. It sounded reasonable to the authorities at first. But Sandy had friends in city government, influential friends, and they had never liked Pat. They and another family friend who gave erroneous information to the police about the Dunns, pushed for his arrest, and detectives soon decided Pat must have killed Sandy. The reached this conclusion even before Sandy’s  body was found buried in the desert sixty miles from home, some ten days after Pat reported her missing. The detectives single-mindedly pursued Pat as their only suspect, though there was no physical evidence suggesting Sandy had died at home or at his hands, and despite the fact that the financial motive they assumed might lead Pat to kill was discredited by friends and financial advisors. Then, after two months of futile investigation, detectives suddenly found a star witness — a heroin-addicted three-time convicted felon who claimed to have witnessed, by chance, Pat dragging his wife’s body out the front door on the night she was said to have vanished. This was the principal evidence against Pat, other than some suggestion that Pat and Sandy fought often and might have been contemplating divorce. It was enough to convict him in Kern County, earning him a sentence of life without possibility of parole.

So what’s wrong with that? Informants are used in cases all the time. Just because the witness was a criminal doesn’t mean he was a liar, does it?

No, but when such witness are used, it is particularly important that juries have all the information needed to assess their credibility. That did not happen in this case. My investigation found that this witness, Jerry Lee Coble, had long been known to the police as a liar and con-man, and that before popping up in the Dunn case, he had begged to be allowed to inform on someone — anyone — that the police might want to nail in order to elude his own prison sentence. He was turned down by the sheriff’s department as untrustworthy — until he offered information against the most spectacular criminal case in Bakersfield at the time, the murder of Sandy Dunn. Only then was Coble accepted with open arms by the same sheriff’s department, and relieved from serving a six-year prison sentence of his own. But the prosecution in the case kept information about these machinations secret and instead presented Coble to jurors as if he were testifying as a civic duty. The police reports documenting his pleas to become an informer were never turned over, and the names of the detectives who knew about it were never given to the defense. Coble’s most recent frauds and crimes were also kept hidden, along with the fact that an open-and-shut case against him was mysteriously dropped by the same DA’s Office prosecuting Dunn (a case that would have derailed him as the star witness if prosecuted). Worse still, Coble’s testimony was riddled with errors — including the fact that he described the murder scene incorrectly, identifying vehicles in the driveway of the Dunn home that could not have been there at the time of the murder, but which were present many weeks later, after the case had been in the papers. And the problem with this star witness is only one of many errors and improprieties in the Dunn case I found.

So now that this information is known, will Pat Dunn go free?

It is hard to imagine Pat would have been convicted in the first place if everything now known had been disclosed by the authorities as required by law, and had prosecutors not presented erroneous evidence and argument at his trial. He has launched a last-ditch appeal, using information contained in Mean Justice, but only time will tell. It is now before the California Supeme Court.

But won’t he automatically get a new trial?

No, prosecutors often fight very hard to preserve convictions and to downplay any errors or misconduct, and the law and the courts often side with them. The Kern County District Attorney, Ed Jagels, concedes no errors in the Dunn case, or any other, that would warrant overturning a single conviction ­ despite his office's long history of prosecuting the innocent. Most people who are imprisoned in cases marked by government misconduct do not win their freedom.

Why is that?

Because most misconduct is not detected at all — the problems in the Dunn case remained hidden until I uncovered them. The four men falsely convicted in Chicago of murder would still be there were it not for a group of  journalism students who discovered the injustice in the case. And even when misconduct is found, the courts deem most instances “harmless error,” sustaining convictions even when prosecutors break the law. Many states have set tight deadlines for introducing new evidence, some allowing only a thirty-day window after sentencing. After that, presenting evidence of the worst prosecutorial misconduct imaginable would not be enough to overturn a conviction. In examining just such a case, Supreme Court Justice Kennedy recently asked if it would be legal under Texas law to execute a man who offered incontrovertible evidence of  his innocence — a videotape of someone else committing the murder — if that video was presented one day after the thirty-day deadline expired. Texas prosecutors answered yes, and the Supreme Court agreed, upholding such inflexible deadlines as a matter of states rights and prosecutorial prerogative — even if it mean executing the innocent. Texas went on to execute the defendant in question, Leonel Herrera, who did not have such a videotape, but who did present new witnesses, including a former Texas state judge, who implicated someone else in the crime; a confession from another suspect; and a polygraph test exonerating Herrera. But the evidence was presented after the deadline expired; Herrera didn’t even get a hearing on the issues before he was put to death.

Is the problem of wrongful convictions and prosecutorial misconduct getting better or worse? Will there be more Pat Dunns?

It’s impossible to tell for certain, because there are no clear measures of the problem’s extent.  It is safe to say that the justice system is an increasingly fertile place for prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions. Expanded powers for prosecutors without expanded accountability make it so. What few measures of the problem that do exist are not encouraging: The Justice Department, one of the few prosecutorial agencies that does issues reports on misconduct, saw allegations against its prosecutors increase significantly throughout most of the Nineties. More telling, perhaps, are statistics from death rows around the nation, where an increasing number of men and women have been released in recent years after proving their innocence — some sixty-nine since the death penalty was restored in 1973. That means, of the 6,000 or so condemned since 1973, about one out of 80 proved to be innocent, with some coming within days or hours of execution before being spared. At least a third of these cases involved  convictions that were won through government misconduct. Now, no system of justice can guarantee perfection, and one out of 80 may not seem like much of an error factor at first blush, but would we accept a car that exploded only one out of 80 times it was started, or a doctor who killed only one out of 80 patients? Of course not. Yet, recent cases suggest that in the last five years, the rate at which innocents have been found on death row has accelerated.

What remedies have been proposed for this problem?

Federal legislation introduced last year to hold prosecutors accountable for misconduct did not pass. The only other remedy proposed by prosecutors and the courts to address this problem is placing further limits on appeals and accelerating executions — that is, making it harder to find misconduct, rather than curing the misconduct itself. And so the specter of innocents dying on death row is fast becoming a grim, but very realistic, prospect. Indeed, many observers believe it has already happened. The one bright spot is that public outcry is beginning to have an effect, thanks to a series of murder cases overturned, leading to the exoneration of people previously sentenced to death, along with a moratorium on executions in Illinois, where prosecutorial misconduct has been exposed a serious threat to justice. Many states, local prosecuting agencies, and the Justice Department, are setting up innocence programs that will provide DNA testing to some convicted criminals who can raise legitimate questions about their convictions. We could be at a watershed moment in which balance is restored to the justice system, so that it that both protects public safety and the rights of the individual with equal vigilance. For it should never be forgotten that this is as much an issue of public safety as civil rights: Every time an innocent person is imprisoned, a guilty one remains free.

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