courant.com/news/opinion/hc-connery-lapointe-murder-appe.artmay02,0,2618455.story
By DONALD S. CONNERY
May 2, 2010
Monday in Rockville's Superior Court, Richard Lapointe will
have his last chance to show the world that Connecticut's lawmen
made a tragic mistake two decades ago.
Charged in 1989 for the murder of his wife's 88-year-old
grandmother two years earlier, and convicted in 1992, the
hard-working family man lost everything: his freedom, his
livelihood, his marriage and all contact with his only child.
Now, finally, at a habeas hearing seeking a new trial, he aims
to prove his innocence.
Lapointe, 64, is incapable of being much more than an
uncomprehending observer of the proceedings. Even the Manchester
police who long ago gained his three muddled confessions during
a nine-hour interrogation ("I killed her ... but I don't
remember being there") knew all along that he was mentally
disabled.
Having endured five operations for Dandy-Walker Syndrome, "water
on the brain," his intelligence may be limited, but I expect he
will enjoy being reunited, if only at a distance across the
courtroom, with The Friends of Richard Lapointe. This citizens
group has fought for his freedom with astonishing persistence
despite endless setbacks.
Such attention to a case that might have lapsed into obscurity
was bolstered by The Courant's law-trained reporter, Tom Condon,
when he investigated the murder of Bernice Martin for an article
published on Feb. 21, 1993. His conclusion: Lapointe is almost
surely innocent.
Years later, when neither publicity nor appeals to the state's
highest courts won the day, Lapointe's seemingly hopeless case
was taken on by the Princeton-based Centurion Ministries. The
organization, funded by public donations and using crack
investigators, has freed a parade of imprisoned innocents over a
quarter-century. Centurion attorneys will present the required
new evidence of Lapointe's innocence at the Rockville hearing.
Hopes for Lapointe's freedom were buoyed in early April when two
other men, George Gould and Ronald Taylor, were released after
nearly 17 years behind bars for a New Haven homicide they did
not commit. Their exonerations were the fourth and fifth in
Connecticut in five years. A ruling vacating Richard Lapointe's
conviction would make him the state's sixth exonerated prisoner
in a short time span. If freeing the innocent is to be
established as an annual event in this state, isn't it time to
ask: Have we been doing something wrong?
We can count on our state's attorneys to do everything in their
power to keep Lapointe behind bars for life. Yet they and all
other law enforcement people cannot possibly be unaware of the
DNA revolution that has shaken our justice system.
That revolution, coinciding with Lapointe's nearly 21 years in
jail, has done far more than free some 250 innocents (the tip of
the iceberg) while identifying, in many instances, the true
criminals. It opened our eyes to the magnitude of wrongful
convictions, numbering in the tens of thousands annually, and to
the reasons why they occur: faulty eyewitness testimony, junk
science, unreliable jailhouse snitches, bad lawyers, lying cops,
overzealous prosecutors and, of course, false confessions.
In light of all the new knowledge, does it never occur to our
state's attorneys to go back to square one in cases like
Lapointe's, be appalled by the absence of evidence of guilt, and
move vigorously to correct an injustice, however embarrassing it
may be?
They ought to take their cue from the forthrightness of retired
Manchester police captain Joseph Brooks. His detectives lured
Lapointe to headquarters on false pretenses on July 4, 1989, and
got him to agree that he must be guilty. Brooks believed then,
as did virtually everyone else in the law, that no one confesses
to a crime he didn't commit unless deranged or physically
tortured.
Even so, Brooks questioned the quality of the confessions and
the absence of confirming evidence. Instead of arresting
Lapointe that night, he let him go home. He would proceed only
on an arrest warrant signed by a prosecutor and a judge. They
did not share his misgivings, or order an expanded
investigation, so Lapointe's fate was sealed.
"Richard's conviction has always troubled me," Brooks told me
recently. "I knew him around town as a simple, harmless
dishwasher. The whole thing made no sense. In the last few years
I have studied the old files and every case document I could
find. My inescapable conclusion is that Richard Lapointe had
nothing to do with the murder of Bernice Martin."
•Donald S. Connery of Kent has written about the criminal
justice system for nearly 30 years, focusing largely on false
and coerced confessions, is on the advisory boards of the Center
on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School and the
National Center for Reason and Justice, based in Boston.
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