Lucky find frees death row
prisoner
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday January 5,
2002
The Guardian
A
man who spent more than 17 years on death row in Florida for the murder of a
beauty-school proprietor has been freed after a chance discovery in a lawyer's
filing cabinet showed that someone else had repeatedly confessed to the crime.
Juan Roberto Melendez, 50, was convicted in 1984 of the murder of Delbert Baker,
who was shot in the head after locking up for the night at Mr Del's Beauty
School in Auburndale, Florida, on September 13 1983. But a judge has ruled that
the prosecution withheld crucial evidence at the trial which revealed that
another man, Vernon James, had admitted his responsibility for the murder to
lawyers, investigators and acquaintances. "They can give me a billion dollars
and they cannot pay for what they did," Mr Melendez said yesterday after his
release from the Union correctional institution in Rainford, Florida, on
Thursday. Despite nearly 18 years of imprisonment on a conviction based on no
physical evidence, the former migrant worker, born in Brooklyn but raised in
Puerto Rico, told reporters: "If I would get bitter, all I would do is torment
myself ... I tell you, I feel great." His conviction rested on the testimony of
a convicted criminal, David Luna Falcon, who said Mr Melendez had confessed
while the two were taking cocaine. The state supreme court upheld the sentence
on appeal. But in 2000 Mr Melendez's lawyer, Roger Alcott, was appointed a
county judge, and while moving boxes of files in his office he discovered the
transcript of a conversation a month before the trial in which an early suspect,
Vernon James, told investigators that he had killed Baker and Mr Melendez was
not present. At a 1996 hearing connected with the case, a local lawyer, Dwight
Wells, said that James had told him he had been involved in a gay relationship
with Baker and that he killed him after a violent argument. James died two years
after Mr Melendez was convicted. Last month a Florida judge overturned the death
sentence, ruling that the prosecutor had failed to disclose the confession to
the defence at the trial. Judge Barbara Fleischer said the prosecutor had also
misled the jury about Falcon's testimony by arguing that he had "nothing to
gain" from testifying against Mr Melendez. In fact Falcon had agreed with
prosecutors that his own prison time would be reduced if he did so, she said.
Falcon has since died. Mr Melendez's appeal lawyer, Marty McClain, said: "It is
a sad day that the system allowed this to happen. Here a person has spent 17
years and 10 months on death row for a crime he didn't commit." Polk county
prosecutors said they had decided against holding a new trial because one
witness was dead and another had recanted. "That leaves us with nothing to
proceed on," the assistant state attorney, Chip Thullbery, said. But he refused
to apologise. "We still believe he did it, we simply have to recognise that we
can no longer prove that in court," he said. Mr Melendez, the 99th death row
prisoner to be exonerated and freed since 1973, said he had never lost hope. He
had told himself: "I'm innocent. I should not die here." He added: "Without
hope, I would have committed suicide." He had no relatives in Florida, he said,
and planned to return to Puerto Rico to live with his mother. "I'm going to go
home to look after my momma - she's 73 years old, she's all alone," he said. "I
just want to spend time with her."