Free Floyd Brown, Part I

Introduction

Imagine you have been accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Now imagine that you can’t defend yourself because your IQ makes you the mental equivalent of a five or six-year-old child. You can’t tell time. You can’t spell your own name. But somehow, police say, you gave them a lengthy and detailed confession to the murder of an elderly woman. You are facing the death penalty.

Fast forward fourteen years. You’re still in jail. You haven’t gone to trial. Both of the detectives who accused you have been convicted of federal racketeering charges. All of the physical evidence against you - if there ever was any - has disappeared. It’s not clear that you will ever get your day in court. There is a very good chance you will die in a state mental facility because you are too retarded to stand trial for something you didn’t even do.

On the bright side, the Supreme Court has outlawed the execution of the mentally retarded.

Competency

This is the story of Floyd Brown. Mr. Brown was arrested for the 1993 murder of Katherine Lynch in Anson County. He was sent to Dorothea Dix, the state mental hospital in Raleigh, which has a special area for evaluating whether people are competent to stand trial. Mr. Brown is so severely impaired that the doctors said he wouldn’t be able to understand what was going on in the courtroom, or to help his attorneys defend him. When a person is found incompetent to stand trial, the job of the staff at Dix is to make them competent. This is usually accomplished through education. Inmates/patients attend classes where they learn to identify various people in the courtroom (the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney), what their roles are, and how to describe a defendant’s basic rights. Most schoolchildren could pass this test, but it took Floyd Brown a decade to parrot back enough information to satisfy doctors. When Mr. Brown was finally deemed competent to stand trial, the State got scared and offered him a plea to voluntary manslaughter. Brown would have gotten credit for the time he spent at Dix, and would not have had to concede guilt in accepting the sentence. (This is known as an Alford plea. The defendant says that he is factually innocent of the crime, but that it is nonetheless in his best interests to enter the plea.) The only problem was that Mr. Brown couldn’t understand what that meant. Back to competency school he went.

The Evidence, or Lack Thereof

Floyd Brown’s nightmare began six days after the murder of Katherine Lynch. The police picked him up and took him to Katherine Lynch’s house - with blood still on the floor - and told him to hold a stick. It was the murder weapon. (Unfortunately for the State, the one of the only forensic tests ever conducted in the case shows that the bloody palm print found on the stick does not match Floyd Brown’s hand. The other shows that there was no blood on Mr. Brown’s clothing.) The next day, the police removed Mr. Brown from his day center for people with special needs and took him in for questioning. They had Mr. Brown sign a waiver of his rights - which he could neither read nor understand - and interrogated him without recording the interview. From this interrogation came the only piece of evidence tying Mr. Brown to the murder, his alleged confession.

The statement refers to time of day. Brown cannot tell time. The statement says that Lynch called Brown her favorite cousin, but they were not related and had never met. According to the statement, before the murder Brown and Lynch had been watching television together in her living room. There was no TV in Lynch’s living room. Although Brown cannot tell left from right, detectives claimed he told them he hit Lynch on her right arm. Brown - who did not learn to bathe until he was 15 and still has trouble grooming himself - allegedly knew enough to check Lynch’s heart rate and breathing after the attack. Brown identifies the town where his vocational center was located, but today, after 14 years of training at Dix, he doesn’t even know what state he’s in. The mentally retarded are easily coerced into confessing to things they didn’t do because they are eager to please, but it is virtually impossible for Floyd Brown to have given this statement at all.

The Anson County detective listed in Sheriff’s Department records as lead investigator denies ever having been involved in the case. The deputies who took the statement both pleaded guilty in 1998 to shaking down suspects for money in exchange for not pressing trumped-up criminal charges. State Bureau of Investigation agent David Ramsey refers to these officers as, “The worst I’ve ever seen…they were just as corrupt as they can be. I wouldn’t put anything past them.” An Anson County Sheriff’s deputy who worked on the case said that his colleagues were eager to close the case, so “they probably led Floyd to say what they wanted him to.” No one who has spent time with Mr. Brown, including psychiatrists trained to work with the mentally retarded, believes that he made this statement.

In 2003, after Mr. Brown was found competent to stand trial, his attorneys asked to see Ms. Lynch’s walking stick, the murder weapon. It was gone. Also gone was almost all the physical evidence in the case - Brown’s clothing, wooden planks from the floor of Lynch’s home, palm prints lifted from the scene, fingerprint cards, etc. Sometime in the decade since the murder, the evidence had been lost, misplaced, or destroyed. Upon learning of its absence, the Sheriff did nothing to look for it. Prosecutors tried to blame the loss on UPS, but court records show that the evidence was returned to the Sheriff’s Department from the lab, safe and sound. When asked by a reporter what happened to the murder weapon, one detective involved said, “I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t say it. It’s not your business what happened to that evidence. It’s nobody’s business what happened to that evidence.”

Justice?

To the contrary. Putting aside the apology and compensation owed to Floyd Brown, District Attorney Michael Parker and Sheriff Tommy Allen owe the people of Anson County an explanation. Sheriff Allen won’t comment. Mr. Parker has said, “Lost or missing evidence seriously compromises the State’s ability to achieve true justice, but it does not affect a prosecutor’s desire to protect the public from dangerous people. In these cases, the prosecutor attempts to do substantial justice to avoid a greater injustice.” Apparently the irony is overwhelming to everyone but Parker. Katherine Lynch’s killer is still out there, and Anson County has done nothing to find him. Says Lynch’s neighbor, a pastor, “[Brown] got screwed because they didn’t have no suspect and no physical evidence to nail anyone. All these years later, we’d really like to know who did this to Miss Katherine.”

(Source article here. Video of Mr. Brown talking with a reporter here. Click on “Day 4″ at top left.)