By Steve Mills,
Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong



First of two parts.

In July 1998, the State of Arkansas executed Wilburn Henderson for the
murder and robbery of a furniture-store owner, even though a federal
appeals court once ruled there was "significant doubt" about
Henderson's guilt and powerful evidence that the victim's husband was
the killer.

In June 1987, the State of Louisiana executed Alvin R. Moore Jr. for
murder and rape, even though defense lawyers did virtually nothing to
investigate the prosecution's evidence and the chairman of the state
pardon board believed Moore was innocent.

Last June, the State of Florida executed Bennie Demps for killing a
prison inmate, even though the defense produced evidence that the sole
eyewitness never saw the murder and officials didn't turn over a key
report that could have undercut the prosecution's case.

The cases of these men are bound by a common element—all went to
their death accompanied by doubts about the evidence against them,
while their claims of innocence received scant public attention.

Since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated, 682 people have been
executed in the United States, and most of them left behind little or
no question of their guilt, according to a Tribune analysis. They
admitted their crimes or were convicted with compelling evidence.

But some cases challenge the premise that the criminal justice system
has so many safeguards that no innocent person can possibly be
executed.

At least 120 people went to the execution chamber proclaiming their
innocence, according to the Tribune analysis. In many of these cases,
their guilt was clear. In others, however, troubling questions of
innocence remain.

Some verdicts hinged on the kinds of evidence that have repeatedly
helped convict the innocent, such as jailhouse-informant testimony,
hypnotized witnesses and imprecise forensic tests. Other cases were
tainted by inept defense lawyers. Sometimes, significant evidence
impeaching the credibility of key prosecution witnesses or implicating
alternative suspects did not emerge until after trial.

In at least a half dozen cases, one or more appellate judges voted to
halt an execution while expressing concern that the courts were
sending an innocent person to the death chamber.

The advent of DNA testing, with its ability to discern guilt or
innocence with scientific exactitude, has helped focus scrutiny on the
flaws in the criminal justice system. So have the exonerations, within
the past 30 years, of 90 people once sentenced to death.

Even as the pace of executions has been quickened by changes in the
law designed to reduce appeals, the fear of executing an innocent
defendant has moved to center stage in the debate over the death
penalty. In Illinois, Gov. George Ryan cited that chilling possibility
when he declared a statewide moratorium this year.

The Tribune reviewed all 682 execution cases, trying to isolate those
convicted with dubious evidence. That search turned up dozens of such
cases, four of which became the focus of in-depth investigation.

The three cases profiled in this story illustrate how a person can be
executed even though evidence strongly points to another suspect; how
a prosecution that appears open-and-shut can be anything but; and how
a cast of unreliable witnesses in a netherworld of crime can make the
truth nearly impossible to pin down.

Other executed inmates may have had stronger claims of innocence than
Henderson, Moore and Demps. But these three reflect most of the cases
in which defendants protest their innocence. The media paid little
attention to them, and no evidence is available for DNA testing to
conclusively determine guilt or innocence. Whatever mysteries they
present will likely endure.

The Tribune did not prove any of these defendants innocent. But its
investigation shows how evidence that the jury relied on can unravel
when subjected to a more thorough examination.

In the United States, authorities do little or nothing to learn
whether an innocent person has been executed. In England, which
abolished capital punishment in the 1960s, an investigative agency
formed in 1996 does what officials here refuse to do. The Criminal
Cases Review Commission roots through old cases to determine whether
justice miscarried.

Based on the commission's work, an appeals court in England determined
that a Somali seaman hanged in 1952 was innocent. And two months ago,
in a different case, an appeals court ordered that the body of a man
hanged in 1962 be exhumed for DNA testing.

In Virginia, meanwhile, authorities incinerated DNA evidence in one
case where a person has been executed and are fighting efforts for DNA
testing in another.

'I am an innocent man'

A career criminal with a history of mental illness, Wilburn Henderson
was convicted of the Nov. 26, 1980, murder of Willa Dean O'Neal, who
owned a used-furniture store in Ft. Smith, Ark., with her husband,
Bob. O'Neal was shot, police said, in a robbery that netted $41.

The case against Henderson was hardly overwhelming. In 1991, the 8th
Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis named five other possible
suspects, chief among them the victim's husband. The court gave
Henderson a new trial, saying the evidence against other suspects
"creates significant doubt about Henderson's guilt." But a second jury
convicted him.

Police had little direct evidence linking Henderson to the murder. At
the first trial, the prosecution said a yellow piece of paper showed
that Henderson had been in the furniture store. The paper, found on
the floor, had two phone numbers that Henderson had been given by a
real estate agent. Henderson conceded the paper was his, but said he
must have dropped it when he was in the store several days before.

Jurors were told that, before the murder, Henderson obtained a gun
from a pawnshop and then pawned it back just after the murder.
Ballistics tests, however, were inconclusive about whether that gun
was used in the slaying.

And jurors heard about a long, rambling statement Henderson gave
police after his arrest, saying another man committed the crime and he
just happened to be in the store at the time.

Henderson later recanted the statement, saying he gave it because he
feared police would harm him. He said he was in another part of the
state when O'Neal was killed, an alibi corroborated by his wife.

Henderson's first conviction was set aside when the appellate court
ruled that his lawyer failed to investigate the other suspects. The
appeals court focused primarily on Bob O'Neal.

O'Neal, according to interviews and court records, was violent and
mentally unstable. In 1985, five years after his wife was killed, he
was committed for almost a year to the Arkansas State Hospital for
treatment of paranoid delusions. He died in 1992 of a heart attack.

O'Neal owned the type of gun—a .22-caliber pistol—that was
used to shoot his wife. He told authorities his gun was stolen after
the murder, so it never was tested.

Immediately after the murder, Willa Dean O'Neal's daughter and a
stepdaughter—children from previous marriages—told police
that they suspected Bob O'Neal.

The daughters said in interviews with the Tribune that O'Neal had
abused their mother and that she had begun to talk about divorcing
him. Willa Dean O'Neal also had filed an alienation of affection suit
against a woman who was having an affair with her husband.

"My first instinct was that it was Bob," stepdaughter Glenda Palmer
said. "He was verbally abusive, mentally abusive—just a mean
man."

According to court records and interviews, Bob O'Neal, on the day
before the murder, asked Willa Dean O'Neal's daughter, Glenda
Fleetwood, where her mother wanted to be buried. And on the morning of
the murder, he asked Fleetwood to break from the family's routine and
work with him on a house teardown instead of at the store with her
mother.

That afternoon Bob O'Neal, Fleetwood and her husband stopped by the
store before they went to salvage materials from a house. Before they
left, O'Neal went back inside briefly. He told Fleetwood and her
husband to wait outside, according to interviews and court records.
After he came back out, they left for the work site.

A few minutes later, O'Neal sent Fleetwood back to get a root beer
from the store. When she returned with a soda and mentioned she had
bought it at another store, he insisted she return to the family
business for electrical tape, according to court records and
interviews.

That was when she discovered her mother's body. Fleetwood summoned
police and, accompanied by an officer, went to tell O'Neal his wife
was dead.

"When I came up with the police, he said, 'Somebody killed her, didn't
they?'" Fleetwood told the Tribune.

That comment still bothers Ron Fields, the former Ft. Smith
prosecuting attorney who twice tried Henderson. "The troubling thing,"
Fields said, "was him having this psychic statement—you know,
knowing she was already dead. O'Neal couldn't ever explain it."

Yet Fields remains certain that Henderson killed Willa Dean O'Neal.

"If the police could have arrested Bob O'Neal, they would have.
Everybody wanted him to be the murderer," said Fields, who called
O'Neal a "brute" and said he was widely disliked in town. "I would
have loved to have convicted O'Neal. And I could have without breaking
a sweat. Problem was, he didn't do it. Henderson did it."

Though other suspects were given lie-detector tests, O'Neal was not,
according to records.

At the trial, when the coroner testified that he believed Willa Dean
O'Neal was shot in the head as she sat in a chair, Bob O'Neal
whispered to a woman next to him, according to court records. "No,
that's not the way it was," the woman quoted him as saying. "She dove
out of the chair to miss the bullet."

With Henderson on Death Row, O'Neal wrote a letter to the state
insisting Henderson had been wrongfully convicted.

Before the second trial, Fields said he offered Henderson several
deals to plead guilty and avoid the death penalty. One offer would
have allowed Henderson to apply immediately for parole.

But Henderson, insisting on his innocence, wanted to go to trial and
be acquitted, said his lawyer, Gerald Coleman. "He never wavered,"
Coleman said.

The defense tried to point toward O'Neal as the killer at the second
trial. But the prosecution offered a witness whose testimony appeared
to place O'Neal elsewhere at the time of the murder.

The witness, Clarence Wilson, lived a block from the used-furniture
store and had visited Willa Dean O'Neal the day of the killing.

He said that Bob O'Neal had left the store by the time he got there,
and that Willa Dean O'Neal was still alive. That left a brief window
of time when Henderson could have committed the crime—and
mirrored what Wilson told police initially.

At an earlier hearing in federal court, however, Wilson had testified
differently, saying he left the store while Bob O'Neal was still
inside.

To implicate Henderson, the prosecution again used Henderson's
statement, the slip of paper and the information about the gun. He was
again convicted.

Henderson, 56, was executed by injection on July 8, 1998. "I am an
innocent man," he told the warden. "God forgive you for what you do."

Cracks in a solid case

On June 8, 1987, in the hours before his execution, convicted murderer
Alvin R. Moore Jr. sat calmly in his cell in Louisiana's
maximum-security prison in Angola as his spiritual adviser opened a
Bible and read from the Book of John.

With only minutes left before prison guards would arrive to walk Moore
to the death chamber, Rev. Roger Stinson finished and closed the book,
he recalled in an interview. "Now is the time to ask for forgiveness,"
Stinson said.

But as he had done every other time, Moore just shook his head.

"I didn't do it," Stinson recalled Moore saying. "I don't hold
anything against anybody—I just didn't do it. They can kill my
body, but they can't kill my soul."

In leg irons and handcuffs, Moore, 27, was escorted to the electric
chair just after midnight. Electrodes were attached to his left leg
and shaved head. Minutes later he was pronounced dead.

In the eyes of then-Bossier Parish District Atty. Henry Brown, the
case against Moore was solid.

The victim, JoAnn Wilson, 23, was the wife of a former co-worker of
Moore's, and police said she identified Moore as her attacker in a
dying declaration.

Moore was arrested shortly after the 1980 murder with a drop of blood
on his pants. DNA testing was not yet available, but tests showed it
was Type O, the same as the victim's. Moore did not have Type O blood,
the most common of all blood types. The pants can no longer be found,
according to Bossier City police and local officials.

A stereo and a plastic jug containing $18.80 in pennies from Wilson's
home were found in Moore's car. Two of Moore's friends said he
admitted to them that he killed the woman.

But a Tribune examination shows that although the prosecution case had
the patina of certainty, beneath it lies a troubling mix of shifting
accounts and questions that were not raised at trial.

The two friends who implicated Moore at trial recanted and now say he
is innocent.

Also, a witness never interviewed by police told the Tribune that
Moore's car was parked near the Wilson house around dusk, supporting
Moore's claim that he was there before dark. Wilson's call to police
for help came at 9:35 p.m., about 40 minutes after dark.

And the Tribune, through an open-records request, obtained police
files that Moore's appellate attorney said never were given to him or
the trial attorney. One report has the woman's husband saying he saw
his wife alive at home at 9 p.m.

This information differs from the husband's trial testimony and could
have been used by defense attorneys to bolster Moore's account that he
left before the stabbing, which the prosecution said occurred between
9 and 9:30 p.m. Under Louisiana law at the time, prosecutors were not
required to give police reports to defense lawyers unless they
contained information helping the defendant.

The night of July 9, 1980, was the third of what would be more than a
week of consecutive 100-degree days in Bossier City, a city of 50,000
in the northwest corner of Louisiana.

Police were sent to JoAnn Wilson's home after she telephoned and said,
"Somebody stabbed me." An officer said that he broke down the door and
that Wilson identified Moore in her dying breaths. After she was taken
to the hospital, her husband, Aron, then 19, drove up.

In an interview, he said the officers asked if he knew someone named
Alvin and he gave them Moore's name.

Moore, who had socialized with the Wilsons, was in custody in less
than four hours. Questioned by police, Moore said he had met JoAnn
Wilson through her husband. Moore said he and Aron Wilson had both
worked in the maintenance department at the Veterans Administration
Hospital in Bossier City and at times drove to work together.

Moore had a criminal record that included misdemeanor convictions for
taking a swing at a store owner in a dispute over shoplifting and for
hitting a janitor at school.

He told police that he and JoAnn Wilson were having an affair and she
gave him money before he left. He identified Arthur Stewart and Dennis
Sloan as being with him at the Wilson house, and both were arrested
the next morning.

In tape-recorded statements to police, the two said they saw Moore
having sex with the woman, but never described it as a rape. Both said
they took the stereo and jar of pennies while Moore was in the
bedroom.

Both told police that they then went outside, that Moore came out 5
minutes later and that as they drove over the Red River back to
Shreveport, Moore told them he had stabbed Wilson to death. Within
days all three were indicted on charges of murder, rape and aggravated
burglary. The state said it would seek the death penalty against
them.

Moore's father, Alvin Sr., a mechanic, hired Shreveport defense lawyer
Stacey Freeman for $10,000—equivalent to Alvin Moore Sr.'s
take-home pay for a year.

Freeman, a flamboyant attorney who died in a car wreck in 1990, had a
reputation for rhetorical flourishes in court and for cutting deals
out of court. He interviewed few witnesses before Moore's trial and
conducted no investigation of the prosecution case except to visit the
crime scene, court records show.

Lawyers who later represented Moore on appeal would criticize Freeman
for failing to question why no blood was found in Moore's car even
though the struggle in the Wilson home left blood spattered on the
wall and floor in the living room and bedroom. Freeman never examined
the car.

The appellate lawyer thought it was remarkable so little blood was
found on Moore's pants and none was found in the car.

Defense lawyer Randall Fish, who was Freeman's assistant at trial,
said they both believed Moore was probably guilty.

"Stacey didn't handle it like a death penalty case should have been,"
Fish said in an interview. "I was somewhat embarrassed at the time. He
had no real strategy."

On the day that jury selection was to begin, District Atty. Brown
announced that Stewart and Sloan had agreed to plead guilty to lesser
charges and testify against Moore. Freeman was taken by surprise.

He had planned for all three men to be tried at once, which would have
prevented the prosecution from using Stewart and Sloan's statements to
police against Moore. Freeman demanded a continuance, but the judge
refused.

Freeman petulantly told the judge: "I'm not going to announce ready
for trial, your honor. I'm not ready. I'm just going to sit here and
let her go."

At trial, Sloan and Stewart both testified that Moore told them, "I
stabbed the bitch nine times." Stewart told the jury that while
standing outside, he heard a woman scream in the house and Moore came
out with a knife in his hand.

Bossier City Police Officer Bill Fields testified that he and fellow
officer Matthew Nycum were the first police to arrive and found Wilson
choking and gasping, bleeding from 13 stab wounds.

"I asked her who stabbed her," Fields testified. "She told me Elvin. I
asked her again to repeat it and she said Elvin. I asked her a third
time and she told me Elvin. I asked her if she knew the subject. She
told me that he used to live down the street and he was black. She
repeated that twice."

Moore, who was black, testified that he had consensual sex that night
with Wilson, who was white. He denied killing her.

The all-white jury returned its guilty verdict in 40 minutes. During
the penalty phase, Freeman called not a single witness to speak on
Moore's behalf. His presentation was 2 minutes and 15 seconds long,
and he never asked the jury to spare his client's life. Freeman later
said he would have felt "silly" asking the jury to spare Moore.

Stewart and Sloan spent nearly 20 years in prison and now live in
Shreveport, working together at a body shop. Both men, in interviews
with the Tribune, say that they implicated Moore because they believed
the police already had enough evidence to convict him and that they
lied on the stand because they feared execution.

"I didn't want the death penalty," Stewart said. "When I said I heard
a lady scream—that wasn't true. When I said I saw him come out
with a knife—that wasn't true either. I'm not proud of it. I
thought I needed to tell what the police wanted. ... I made up a
story."

At a 1986 clemency hearing for Moore, Stewart and Sloan recanted in
sworn affidavits. They said that the victim was alive when they left
with Moore and that they did not hear Moore say he stabbed her,
according to a newspaper account of the hearing and interviews.

"I saw her in the doorway," Sloan said in a recent interview. "She
looked fine to me."

But Stewart, in an interview with the Tribune, has altered his account
again. Though he maintains he never saw Moore with a knife or heard
the woman scream, he said his statement in the affidavit that he did
not hear Moore say he stabbed the woman was false.

"I did hear him say that," Stewart said. "But I never believed it. I
saw her close the front door. I didn't think anything was wrong."

Stewart said that for the clemency hearing, he would have said
anything to spare Moore's life. "I lied about some things," he said.
"But now, I don't think he did it."

Nycum, now the general manager for a Bossier City car dealer, said in
an interview that he was an auxiliary officer in 1980 when he
accompanied Officer Fields to the Wilson home. He said he never heard
JoAnn Wilson make the statement that Fields claimed she uttered in her
dying breath.

"She was incoherent, spoke in a heavy Southern accent and said what
sounded to me like 'elephant,'" Nycum said. "I never heard her say,
'Alvin did it' or 'Elvin did it.'"

Fields, in an interview, said, "I know what I heard. I don't want to
know anything else."

Former prosecutor Brown, now a state appellate judge, said Moore's
version of events was "ridiculous" and Stewart and Sloan's
recantations were equally unbelievable.

The time line of the evening was not an issue at Moore's trial, but an
analysis of police reports, court transcripts, fire department records
and interviews suggests it could have been if defense attorneys had
the documents later obtained by the Tribune.

There is no official time-stamped record of when JoAnn Wilson's
emergency call came to the Police Department that night, but a
dispatcher said at Moore's trial that he took the call at 9:35 p.m.

After being arrested, Stewart told police that he, Sloan and Moore
arrived "about nightfall" at the Wilson home. Sloan said it was "about
7 or 8:30."

Stewart told the Tribune: "It was daylight, getting to sundown. It
wasn't dark. You could still see. It was still light when we left."

Robert Temple, the Wilsons' landlord, told the Tribune that on the
evening of the murder, he was working in the area and drove by the
Wilson home. "I saw Alvin Moore's car out there," Temple said. "It was
daylight, around dusk."

Records at the U.S. Naval Observatory show that sundown that night was
at 8:25 p.m. The period between the moment when the top of the sun
dips below the horizon and darkness is called "civil twilight," ending
when the sun has gone about 6 degrees below the horizon. Civil
twilight ended and darkness began that night at 8:53 p.m.

Bossier City detective reports said Aron Wilson was not at the home
when police arrived, but drove up after his wife had been taken to the
hospital. He told police he had left home earlier in the evening to
work on the car of Perry Goodwin, who lived about a mile away, the
report said.

The report quoted Wilson as saying he came home at 9 p.m. to get a
tool and his wife was alive. Goodwin told police that Wilson went home
at 9 and returned about 10 minutes later. On the witness stand,
however, Wilson testified he wasn't home at 9 that night.

In an interview at a restaurant near his home in Flint, Mich., Aron
Wilson was shown the police report. "I came home at 7:30 that night,"
he said. "That's wrong."

Asked about Goodwin's statement, Wilson said Goodwin also was
mistaken.

After Moore's conviction, the question of his innocence fell to the
side as the case was appealed and upheld by the Louisiana Supreme
Court. When attorneys Rebecca Hudsmith and Wellborn Jack Jr.
volunteered to handle his federal appeal in 1983, they focused on the
issue of inadequate legal representation at trial instead of
challenging his guilt.

"It looked like we had a real good chance of winning on the attorney
competence issue," Jack said. "And if we could get a new trial for
Alvin, then we could turn our attention to the evidence."

That strategy almost saved Moore's life. U.S. District Judge Tom Stagg
in 1984 vacated Moore's death sentence, citing Freeman's poor
lawyering, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. But before that
hearing could be held, the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New
Orleans overruled the lower court decision and reinstated Moore's
death sentence.

It was not until a last-ditch appeal for clemency before the Louisiana
Pardon Board that a question about the prosecution's evidence was
raised when Stewart and Sloan gave their sworn affidavits.

Howard Marsellus, chairman of the pardon board at the hearing, said he
believed Moore was innocent. Marsellus, who later was sent to prison
for taking a bribe to vote for clemency in an unrelated case, said he
thought Moore never had a chance.

"We went back to deliberate," he said. "I said that from the time the
cops arrived on the scene, that boy was dead. I said, 'I'm not voting
to kill that boy.'"

Moore lost his bid for clemency, which would have commuted his
sentence to life in prison, by a 3-2 vote.

Death in a Florida prison

Bennie Demps, 49, was executed last June for the 1976 murder of a
fellow inmate at Florida State Prison. But ask the investigator on the
case just how the murder happened and who was involved, and his answer
is that he doesn't know for sure.

"When you have a killing inside a prison, nobody ever knows what
happened," Wiley Clark, who investigated the stabbing for the Bradford
County state attorney's office, said in an interview. "You're never
going to figure out the real truth."

Like most killings behind the concrete walls and razor wire of a
prison, the murder of Alfred Sturgis involved characters so seedy that
truth and sympathy were equally difficult to find.

When Demps was accused, he, as well as the victim and the key witness,
were all convicted murderers. Years earlier, Demps had been sentenced
to death for a double murder. But he escaped execution when, in 1972,
the U.S. Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional
because it was being carried out in an arbitrary manner. Demps' death
sentence was commuted to life.

Until the day he died, Demps claimed prison officials framed him for
the Sturgis killing because he had escaped that earlier death
sentence.

There was evidence that would have helped Demps, but authorities did
not turn it over to Demps' lawyer. That included a report that did not
surface until 20 years after the murder—one purporting to
describe the dying inmate's identification of his killers. But that
report does not mention Demps at all.

Prosecutors said at trial that before Sturgis bled to death, he named
Demps, James Jackson and Harry Mungin as his assailants. Larry
Hathaway, an inmate serving a 99-year sentence for murder, became a
prosecution witness after he reported seeing Jackson stab Sturgis with
a shank, while Demps held down Sturgis and Mungin acted as lookout.

Clark, a former police officer, said he was loath to trust eyewitness
testimony, and was particularly suspicious of Hathaway, whom prison
medical records described as "extremely manipulative" and having a
"personality disorder."

Before the trial, Hathaway told an attorney for a prisoners rights
group that he did not witness the Sturgis murder. At trial he insisted
he did. Then after the trial, three inmates came forward to say that
Hathaway was nowhere near the scene of the stabbing.

Finally, in 1994, Hathaway told an investigator for Demps' lawyers
that he had lied at trial.

There was no physical evidence linking Demps to the murder, so
prosecutors relied largely on the testimony of Hathaway and two prison
guards, A.V. Rhoden and Hershel Wilson. The guards testified that
Sturgis named Demps as one of his three attackers.

"I told just what Sturgis told me. Nothing else," Rhoden told the
Tribune.

The three inmates were convicted in 1978 and prosecutors sought the
death penalty for all three. The jury recommended death for Demps and
Jackson and life for Mungin.

Even though Demps was not the alleged attacker in the stabbing, the
judge gave him death, citing his convictions for the two previous
murders. He gave Jackson and Mungin life in prison. Interviews with
Jackson and Mungin could not be arranged.

Demps' attorneys never received a letter written before the trial by
Bill Beardsley, the prison official who oversaw the murder
investigation. The letter criticized Hathaway for his "fabrication" in
another investigation and could have been used by Demps' lawyers to
question Hathaway's credibility.

Lawyers also were never given a copy of a one-page report from chief
inspector Cecil Sewell that was written the day after Sturgis died and
sent to Secretary of Corrections Louie Wainwright. It said that
"before Sturgis died, he named James Jackson, B/M, #029667, as his
assailant." Demps and Mungin are not named in the report, which
surfaced 20 years after the murder.

In an interview with the Tribune, Wainwright, who retired in 1986
after 24 years as secretary, said the report was meant to apprise him,
in detail, of incidents at the state's prisons. "It should have been
fairly detailed," Wainwright said. "It should have had all three
inmates."

Demps' attorneys also argued on appeal that Hathaway, for his
testimony, received undisclosed benefits that would have provided him
with ample incentive to lie.

To buttress their argument, they cited a letter Beardsley wrote a year
after Demps was sentenced to death. That letter supported "special
parole consideration" for Hathaway, even though he had served only
four years of his 99-year sentence. Beardsley, who described Hathaway
as an informant and critical witness, made another parole request for
Hathaway in 1983, according to his letters.

Now retired, Beardsley said those letters were not tied to a deal for
Hathaway's testimony.

The investigation of the murder of prison inmate Leroy Colbroth, seven
months after the Sturgis killing, also produced information that could
have helped Demps. That, too, was kept from Demps' lawyers.

Colbroth, who was known as "99" because he was serving a 99-year term
for armed robbery, ran gambling, loan-sharking and drug operations in
the prison, according to his prison records. Before he was killed,
investigators had identified him as a leading suspect in two prison
stabbings, one of them fatal, the records show.

During the investigation of Colbroth's murder, several inmates swore
in depositions that Colbroth was killed because he had stabbed
Sturgis. Other inmates later said that they saw Colbroth kill Sturgis
or that he admitted killing him.

Some of those inmates wanted to help Demps, but did not, saying in
sworn affidavits that prison officials either threatened them with
retribution if they testified or offered incentives, such as transfers
or shorter sentences, for refusing.

The two inmates charged with killing Colbroth were acquitted.

Thomas Elwell, who prosecuted Demps and Colbroth's alleged assailants,
declined to be interviewed unless he was paid. He became a judge in
Gainesville but resigned in 1992 amid an investigation into
allegations that he removed price tags from merchandise at a Pic 'n
Save department store and replaced them with lower price tags. He was
not charged.

Since he has been in private practice, he has been suspended four
times by the state bar for violating conflict of interest rules and
for financial irregularities, according to disciplinary records.

Demps' appellate lawyer, Bill Salmon, sought a new trial from the
Florida Supreme Court. But the court refused, saying that although
prosecutors perhaps should have turned over the chief inspector's
report, it did not necessarily clear Demps. "Assailant," the court
said, might have referred only to Jackson, because he was identified
as the inmate who wielded the shank.

On the day Demps was executed, the window to the execution chamber
opened to reveal the condemned man lying on the gurney with a white
sheet draped over his chest and legs. Angrily, he chastised officials
who had cut deeply into his leg to find a vein suitable to carry the
lethal injection.

"They butchered me back there," Demps declared to witnesses. "This is
not an execution, this is murder. I am an innocent man."

Gerald Kogan, who was chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court,
found the case troubling, even though he did not vote to give Demps a
new trial.

"I had grave doubts about Bennie Demps," said Kogan, now retired. The
case "keeps coming back and back and nothing new is raised. But you
can't do anything after a while."

Next:   A fourth case illustrates how the burden of proof shifts on
appeal.