“Joseph Sledge’s timing could not have been worse. While serving a four-year sentence for stealing t-shirts in 1976, the 36-year-old man from Georgia escaped from a prison work farm in eastern North Carolina. That same day, Josephine Davis and her daughter Ailene were brutally murdered in their farmhouse in nearby Bladen County. Sledge immediately became the prime suspect and was charged with their murders upon his re-capture” (Matt Ford, “Guilty, Then Proven Innocent,” The Atlantic, 2/9/2015).
Two inmates where Sledge was being held after his capture told police that Sledge had told them that he had killed a couple of white women.
Open and shut case, right?
No.
Bloody fingerprints found at the scene were not Sledge’s. Several hairs could not identify anyone. The bloody shoeprints didn’t match Sledge’s shoes.
And those inmates?
We’ll get back to them.
Two years later Sledge was convicted of double murder and sent to prison. He insisted that he was not guilty. After 25 years his request for DNA testing was granted.
For the next nine years, they couldn’t find the hairs.
Finally, in 2012 they found them.
The DNA testing excluded Sledge as a suspect.
Six months later one of the two informants—the only one still living—testified that he had lied by repeating information he’d heard from police and prison staff, in return for a $3000 reward and the dropping of some charges he was facing.
More than 18 months later, Sledge was declared innocent and freed. He was 70 years old, and he had spent more than half of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Five years later, he died.
There are more details, if you have the stomach for them.
The injustices in this story are numerous and pervasive. It’s common for us to assume motives, but I try to resist doing that, because only God knows the heart. But even if we assume everyone involved had the best of intentions—except, of course, those informants—there’s still plenty to criticize. The basis for the original conviction was of course weak. I’ve written of my time on a jury, where half the members would not vote to convict—even though they thought the defendant was guilty—because the entire case was based on the statements of a single witness. A truism in the law is that it’s better to let a guilty person go free than to convict an innocent one.
Further, the archiving of the physical evidence was at best inept. They couldn’t find the hairs for nine years?! That’s just really hard to believe.
And another 18 months to release the man after it was indisputable that he was innocent.
Even at their best—and this is not one of those times—our justice systems are imperfect and frustrating and, well, unjust.
And we hate that, or at least we should.
As creatures from God’s hand and in his image, we want justice to be done. We want evils to be corrected, miscreants to be fairly punished. And we especially want the really evil people—the Hitlers and the Pol Pots and the Idi Amins and the Ted Bundys and the Wayne Gacys and the Jeffrey Epsteins of this world—to face what they’ve got coming. We want their evil to end.
We want peace. We want safety. We want justice.
And if there’s just one person who’s behind all this evil, who’s responsible for all of it, and intentionally so—
We want to see him crushed, violently and painfully and permanently.
Well.
The Bible talks about that, and in fact its larger story moves to its climax by recounting the final justice given to the Evil One.
We’ll talk about that next time.
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
