Marion Coakley - Misleading Forensic Evidence
Coakley, Marion; sexual assault; NRE: false/misleading forensic evidence, withheld exculpatory evidence, prosecutor misconduct, police officer misconduct, misconduct that is not withholding evidence
Suggestibility issues
N4 [93] "In 1985, [Coakley] was convicted of rape in the first degree based, in part, upon testimony of forensic blood expert. Failure by defense counsel and prosecution to conduct additional serological testing, which would have confirmed exculpatory opinion of forensic expert. [94] Court's refusal to grant the defense an adjournment in order to conduct further testing which would have confirmed exculpatory opinion of forensic expert. Forensic expert's lack of knowledge about the state of serological evidence which may have caused unwarranted certainty regarding his opinion."
B30 [81] "On October 13, 1983, Olga Delgado and Gabriel Vargas spent the night at the Bronx Park Motel in New York City. In the early morning hours a stranger broke into their room asking for money. The robber locked Mr. Vargas in a closet and raped Ms. Delgado. Still unsatisfied, the stranger demanded more money, and Ms. Delgado proposed driving him to her home where she promised cash could be found. The stranger took the bait and drove Ms. Delgado to her apartment complex. When he saw the silhouette of someone else, Ms. Delgado's brother-in-law, Jose Rios, at the apartment door, the rapist fled, abandoning the car near the Bronx Motel.
"The police were called. The car was discovered and dusted for prints. Ms. Delgado, Mr. Vargas and Mr. Rios each independently described the perpetrator as a black male with a dark complexion, about 26-28 years old, 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighing about 150-160 pounds, with a moustache, a 'beard' or 'stubble' of chin hair and a short 'afro' haircut. Later that night, while Ms. Delgado was taken to Jacobi Hospital where a rape kit was prepared, Mr. Rios and Mr. Vargas were taken to the photo room of the police precinct to look through photo trays. They were told to go directly to one of the officers with any photograph either of them recognized and not to show it to each other. Nonetheless, when Rios saw Marion Coakley's photograph, he took it over to Vargas and said, 'This is the man.' Vargas agreed. When Ms. Delgado arrived at the station house from the hospital, she was shown a photo-array from which she, too, selected Mr. Coakley. The record does not reflect what the police may have said to any of the witnesses, nor what either of the witnesses may have said to Ms. Delgado as she viewed the various photographs.
"Marion Coakley was arrested two days later and positively identified in a lineup by Mr. Vargas, Mr. Rios, and Ms. Delgado. Mr. Coakley is black, but not dark-complexioned. He does not have a Jamaican accent [apparently, the actual rapist did, a fact which the author neglected to mention above], and on the day of [82] his arrest did not have an Afro, long or short.He is mildly retarded...The police had a copy of his photograph because Mr. Coakley had been arrested previously.
"From the day of his arrest, Marion Coakley protested his innocence. He maintained always that he had been at a bible study meeting at the time of the crime, and he immdiately produced eight alibi witnesses. All eight witnesses were interviewed by the prosecutor's office within days of the arrest. Significantly, Marion Coakley also demanded, took, and passed a polygraph test. At trial, the jury was forced to resolve a difficult dilemma -- eyewitnesses against alibi witnesses. The jury convicted him. Mr. Coakley was sentenced to prison for an indeterminate term of from five to fifteen years.
"For many wrongfully convicted persons the story ends at sentencing. Marion Coakley was lucky. Twenty-five months later, post-conviction counsel turned up enough 'newly discovered' evidence to convince the court to set aside the conviction and the Office of the [DA] of Bronx County to dismiss the indictment in the interests of justice.
"[T]he eyewitnesses' testimony...[83] seems particularly unreliable since each of the witnesses had a limited opportunity to observe the perpetrator. From the moment he broke into the motel room, the stranger instructed his victims, at gunpoint, not to look at him. During much of the incident, Ms. Delgado was forced to wear a bath-size towel over her face and head. Moreover, the only light in the motel room emanated from the video image on the television screen. Consequently, up until the time that the stranger and Ms. Delgado got into her car, Ms. Delgado only saw the stranger's face 'a couple of times.'
"While driving in the car, Ms. Delgado remembered looking at the man's face in the reflection of the rear-view mirror, as he adjusted it, and being scared when his eye caught hers. From that point on, throughout the entire drive to her apartment, Ms. Delgado was too frightened to look at the stranger again.
"Mr. Rios, who was the first to identify Mr. Coakley's photograph from the police trays, only glimpsed the stranger from behind the doorway of Ms. Vargas's apartment. Mr. Vargas was locked in a closet for a good part of the incident.
"Evidence which might have caused the jury to think more skeptically about the strength of the eyewitnesses' testimony was not revealed to defense counsel. Just four days after the crime, Mr. Vargas and Ms. Delgado hired an attorney to initiate a lawsuit against the Bronx Park Motel. The $10 million suit was filed on January 26, 1984, a year and a half before Mr. Coakley's criminal trial began. When the criminal trial started, discovery in the civil suit was well under way, and Ms. Delgado had been examined by a psychiatrist hired by the civil defendant [the Motel]. The [DA's] Office and the police knew about the civil suit before and during the trial, but nonetheless failed to disclose this to the defense.
"When they they testified against Mr. Coakley, Ms. Delgado and Mr. Vargas knew that the motel management was claiming as a defense to their civil suit that no rape or forced entry ever occurred and that the whole incident was a pretext to sue the motel. Mr. Vargas and Ms. Delgado expressed the concern in a private conversation with the police, prior to their testifying at the criminal trial, that the outcome of the criminal case might affect their civil suit. In short, the pending $10 million civil suit provided Delgado and Vargas with what they perceied to be a huge stake in the outcome of the criminal case. The jury never knew about [84] the interest these victims had in the outcome of the criminal prosecution, nor could it weigh the effect such an interest would have had on the apparent certainty of their identification or their overall credibility as witnesses.
"Moreover, in a psychiatric evaluation conducted pursuant to the civil suit, Delgado revealed that she had been seeing a psychiatrist prior to the rape-robbery and that, as a result of the rape, she had experienced severe emotional trauma and psychological shock. She was confined to her bed for three weeks and to her home for four months. For the two years preceding trial and during the trial itself, Delgado was being medicated due to her psychological problems. Significantly, she revealed to the doctor that whenever she saw other blacks on the street, she thought they looked just like the perpetrator.
"The defense was never informed, and so the jury never learned, that another witness, Edith Thompson, a chambermaid at the Bronx Park Motel, reported seeing a person fitting the description of the perpetrator and failed to select Mr. Coakley's photograph out of an array that was shown to her the night of the crime. Mr. Vargas and Ms. Delgado are light-skinned Hispanics and the perpetrator they described was a dark-skinned black. Edith Thompson, on the other hand, is black.
"Additionally, evidence that pointed to suspects other than Mr. Coakley was not pursued by the police. For example, Olga Delgado testified that she remembered the stranger's adjusting the rearview mirror of the car as he drove her home. When the car was discovered, the police carefully dusted it for prints. A palmprint was lifted from the rearview mirror. The police never compared this print with Mr. Coakley's palm, and elimination prints were never obtained. After Mr. Coakley's conviction, post-conviction counsel compared the palm print to Mr. Coakley as well as the usual drivers of the car, Ms. Delgado and Mr. Vargas. The prints matched none of those people.
"Finally, the jury never heard the most persuasive evidence of Marion Coakley's innocence. When Ms. Delgado was taken to the hospital after the rape, semen was found on her underwear. Since Ms. Delgado denied having sexual intercourse with anyone else that day, only the rapist could have been the person responsible for the presence of sperm. Prior to the trial, the defense secured a court order compelling serological tests to compare blood type groupings from Mr. Coakley with the groupings from the semen stains. Tests were conducted by Dr. Robert Shaler, who was then the Director of Serology at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office. The results of the comparison showed that Mr. Coakley was a Type A secretor and that only Type B was present in the rape kit sample. In a report prepared prior to trial, Dr. Shaler concluded that Mr. Coakley 'could not be the donor of the semen."
"Unfortunately for Mr. Coakley, before the trial was to commence, Dr. Shaler decided that he was no longer completely certain that the tests conclusively excluded Mr. Coakley. Dr. Shaler worried that if Mr. Coakley were a low-level secretor, he might secrete so little blood group substance into his semen as to render it undetectable. In an effort to be cautious, Dr. Shaler informed that court, at a pre-trial hearing, that he wanted to perform additional tests to determine the range of Mr. Coakley's secretion levels. The trial court ruled that no adjustment for additional tests would be granted and precluded all serological evidence.
"Post-conviction, additional serological tests were conducted on multiple semen samples from Mr. Coakley. These tests conclusively showed that Mr. Coakley always secreted sufficient amounts of blood group A so that if he had been the rapist, Type A substance would have been present. Moreover, two studies were published in the year following the trial which demonstrated that the variations in blood group substance secretion levels are relatively small. The additional test coupled with the publication of the new scientific studies led Dr. Shaler to conclude to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Mr. Coakley could not have been the donor of the semen. If the court had granted an adjournment for the additional tests pre-trial, Marion Coakley might well have been acquitted."
rom NRE synopsis (by Hyungjoo Han)
[All emphases added unless otherwise noted.]
