For Ledell Lee, fighting verdict to the end futile

Arkansas Court Frees Life of Two Convicted People As Innocent | USA Breaking News

More than two decades after he was found guilty in the slaying of a Jacksonville woman, Ledell Lee died by lethal injection Thursday night amid his protestations of innocence and last-ditch efforts for court-ordered DNA tests.

Lee, who also was serving prison time after two rape convictions, was sent to death row primarily on eyewitness testimony, a shoe imprint and the serial number of a $100 bill he was accused of lifting from 26-year-old Debra Reese. Police arrested Lee on Feb. 9, 1993, within hours of finding Reese bludgeoned and strangled in her Jacksonville home.

After the arrest, investigators drew Lee"s blood and linked his DNA to four unsolved cases -- three sexual assaults and one homicide -- in the central Arkansas city.

The second homicide charge and one of the rape cases were ultimately dropped, but Lee faced all five criminal cases -- simultaneously but separately -- before three different Pulaski County judges. Two public defenders represented him, and in the Reese case, they quickly requested a mental examination, court records show.

"I can"t see any daylight in fighting these charges," Lee told a state psychiatrist nearly one year to the day after Reese"s death. "I"m frustrated, irritated, troubled, all at the same time."

Twenty-three years later, the state executed Lee. His team of attorneys -- including from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Innocence Project -- in court filings sought to highlight problems with Lee"s previous legal counsel, his present-day competency and the lack of forensic evidence brought in the Reese trial.

Lee did not get a reprieve.

Lee"s younger brother, Howard Young, called it a "travesty" that courts declined Lee"s request for additional DNA testing.

Aside from his murder conviction, juries convicted Lee in the 1991 rape of a Jacksonville woman and the 1990 rape of a Jacksonville teenager. His s***n was found on the woman"s jeans and the teenager"s body, medical experts testified at the trials. He was convicted on one rape charge before the murder trial, but all three rape cases were disclosed during the sentencing part of the Reese-case trial.

Holly Lodge Meyer, the lead prosecutor on all five Lee cases, profiled him then as a "hunter" whose prey were the women of the Sunnydale neighborhood in Jacksonville.

"I think what makes Ledell Lee particularly deserving -- and no other penalty but the death penalty would be proportional to the crimes that he has committed -- would be this pattern of being a serial rapist and a killer," Meyer said in a telephone interview.

Born in Blytheville, Lee grew up mostly fatherless and in poverty, Young said. Lee and his three brothers shared one of their home"s three bedrooms and their clothes -- even frequently exchanging the same pair of pants on the same day, young said.

lee held a series of jobs working with fiberglass and boat construction, including at one factory in Sherwood, he told the psychiatrist. At the time of Reese"s murder, in early 1993, he had a 2-year-old daughter, according to the report.

A jury convicted Lee of striking Reese three dozen times with a tire thumper -- a tool similar to a baseball bat designed to be whacked against tires to gauge their inflation -- after invading her Jacksonville home.

Reese was a newlywed with a 7-year-old child from a previous marriage. A housewife who formerly worked at a baby boutique store and at a cleaner"s office, she visited her parents" home daily, according to her father, Stephen Williams.

Often, Reese and her mom spent their days together watching television or shopping before Reese went to get her son from school.

"They were best friends," Williams said.

Reese talked to her mom by phone minutes before her death, telling her she would be over soon. She said she was spooked after a man she didn"t know knocked on her door and asked to borrow tools to fix his car, Williams said.

Later, a shoe print, matching a pair of 10 Converse sneakers Lee owned, was found in the bedroom where she was killed. So was a hair strand, but it was not forensically linked to Lee. The state Crime Laboratory confirmed that Lee"s sneakers contained drops of human blood, but the sample was not large enough to test for a match with Reese"s DNA at the time, said Meyer, the prosecutor.

Lee"s recent bid was to have DNA tests conducted on the hair and the shoes.

The serial number of a $100 bill recovered from a Rent-A-Center in Jacksonville was within one digit of a $100 bill in Williams" possession, according to court testimony. Williams said he had given $300 to his daughter from a larger sum in sequential bills he received from a credit union after cashing a vacation check.

Company records showed Lee paid a debt on the day of Reese"s killing, according to testimony, though Young said prosecutors couldn"t prove definitively that his brother used the bill in question.

Reese"s neighbor testified that he tailed Lee on the day of Reese"s murder after becoming suspicious when he barged into Reese"s home and left while repeatedly looking over his shoulder. The neighbor, Andy Gomez, also testified that he lost sight of Lee for a few minutes while following him but that he was certain that Lee was the guy he saw leave Reese"s home.

A second neighbor of Reese"s testified that Lee knocked on his door and asked for tools. The neighbor loaned Lee tools, which were never recovered, according to Meyer, who posited that Lee knocked on doors to scout whether women were home alone.

Reese"s parents told her son that she had been killed on the same day it happened. The 7-year-old was deeply unsettled and could not be persuaded to stop playing a Nintendo video game even late into the night, Williams recalled. For several weeks, Williams slept with his grandson on a mattress on the floor.

"I"ll give you two words for "cruel and unusual,"" Williams said, referring to terms used by inmates to describe the manner of their planned execution. "Ledell Lee."

A Section on 04/21/2017

At a glance

THE INMATE

Ledell Lee

Age: 51

From: Jacksonville.

Sentenced: Oct. 16, 1995, in Pulaski County.

Police arrested Lee within hours of the 1993 beating death of Debra Reese, 26, in Jacksonville, after he was linked to the crime by eyewitness testimony from a neighbor. He maintains his innocence.

THE VICTIM

Debra Reese

Age: 26

Hometown: Jacksonville

How it happened: Reese was bludgeoned to death and strangled during a home invasion Feb. 9, 1993.

Source: http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/apr/21/for-ledell-lee-fighting-charges-futile-/?news-arkansas

Continue Reading ..

UPDATE Attorneys for Ledell Lee argue they should be allowed to locate, test DNA evidence collected in 1993 as part ...

AFRICANS GET EXECUTED IN ARKANSAS
In a hearing this afternoon before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright, attorneys for death row inmate Ledell Lee argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing. They hope testing can prove that the African-American hair found at the crime scene belongs to someone other than Lee, and that the speck of blood found on Lee"s shoe does not belong to the victim in the case.

UPDATE: Wright denied the petition.

Here it is. Lee was sentenced to death for the Feb. 9, 1993 murder of Debra Reese, 26, who was beaten to death in the bedroom of her home in Jacksonville. Investigators found that she was strangled and struck at least 36 times with a "tire thumper," a club used by truckers to check tire pressure. Her husband, a truck driver, had given her the tire thumper for protection while he was on the road. Lee has maintained he is innocent of the crime.

As reported in the jacksonville"s arkansas leader newspaper, lee was also convicted of raping two other Jacksonville women, and was put on trail in the rape and murder of Christine Lewis, a 22-year-old mother, also from Jacksonville, who was abducted from her home in Nov. 1989 before being raped and strangled. Her body was left in an abandoned house. Lee"s trial in the Lewis case ended in a hung jury.

During the hearing, Lee"s attorney Lee Short made the case that prior counsel in the Reese case failed Lee by not insisting on modern DNA testing of the items prior to now. He said that Lee had reached out to the Innocence Project in 1996, asking for them to take up his case, but was told they didn"t have the staff or funding. Pulaski County Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Johnson, arguing for the state, said that while there have been advancements in DNA testing techniques and technologies, attorneys for Lee had presented no evidence to the court proving those advancements.

Short said that at the time of Lee"s original trial, the science of hair analysis was mostly about comparison. "Basically what happened at the trial is this," Lee said. "I"ve got a hair. I"ve got another hair. I"m going to show you what the differences are." Lee said that with significant scientific advancements since 1993, investigators can now determine much more from hair analysis, especially if the hair involved has a root. Johnson said there"s no way of knowing if the hair has a root. Short claimed there was testimony to the effect that there was a hair root, but couldn"t find the passage while searching the transcript at today"s hearing. As for the speck of blood found on Lee"s Converse tennis shoe which was determined destroyed during testing to prove it was human blood Short said modern techniques could potentially recover a sample and prove it was either Lee"s blood or belonged to someone other than Debra Reese.

Judge Wright noted that there have been many instances where Mr. Lee "s case had come before the courts, but he hadn"t made the argument that the material should be tested with modern technologies and techniques. Wright said that if actual innocence was the basis of a claim by Lee, that could have been raised "earlier than the eve of execution." Short said that Lee has always maintained his innocence in the case, adding that without undertaking modern DNA testing, Lee "was not a good candidate for an actual innocence claim." If the court allows the testing, Short said, he believes the results will make Lee a very good candidate for an innocence claim. Johnson said that the purpose of the hearing is "not to ask "what if?"" adding that Short had "besmirched" the character of previous counsel who represented Lee. Short replied that he would "absolutely" besmirch the character of Lee"s previous counsel.

Short said that his investigations have shown that the evidence in the case is supposed to be in the custody of the Jacksonville Police Department, which is required to preserve the evidence. He asked the court to order the Jacksonville PD to either produce those items for testing or admit that they have been discarded. Short said attorneys for Lee are not asking for a new trial, only that the evidence be made available for testing.

Short said that Lee"s case was based on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony from witnesses he painted as flawed, including one witness who was on Vicodin at the time he claimed he saw Lee leaving Reese"s home, and another who told investigators she was of the Rastafarian religion and smoked marijuana daily. All eyewitnesses in the case, Short said, made "cross-racial identification" of Lee, which has been found to be flawed in other cases. Short also said that even though the crime scene was "extremely b****y," when Lee was arrested three hours after the murder, Lee was only found with a single speck of blood on his shoe. Short said the strongest evidence by the state was a Converse shoe imprint left at the crime scene. If Lee had changed out of his b****y clothes, Short asked, why didn"t he change his shoes too?

Johnson countered that even if modern testing found that the hair discovered at the crime scene belonged to a different African-American man, and that the blood on the shoe belonged to someone other than Debra Reese, neither would prove Lee"s innocence or create an alibi for him the night of the crime. Short argued that if either of those outcomes turned out to be true, it would "substantially advance" Lee"s case for innocence. Short cited the West Memphis 3 case, in which later DNA testing found that none of the DNA evidence discovered at the crime scene matched Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley or Jason Baldwin. Short said that in that case, Johnson could have made the same argument as he did in Lee"s case. The discovery that DNA evidence collected at the crime scene didn"t match any of the West Memphis 3 was instrumental to securing their release.

Judge Wright said he would have a ruling on the issue "by the close of business today."

Source: http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/04/18/attorneys-for-ledell-lee-argue-they-should-be-allowed-to-locate-test-dna-evidence-collected-in-1993-as-part-of-innocence-claim

Continue Reading ..