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On a February night ten years ago, 60-year-old Roger de la Burde never woke up from a nap on his sofa in the living room of his estate along Virginia's James River. De la Burde, a tobacco company scientist with eccentric tastes and a questionable story that he had been a Polish count, held a gun in his cold, stiff hand. When his longtime companion, Beverly Monroe, found his body the next morning, she concluded he had committed suicide. So did the police and the medical examiner—at first.
How and why the authorities came to suspect a woman past 50 with an advanced college degree, a responsible job, three loving children, a sweet nature, and no criminal record of violence drives journalist John Taylor's book. Of course, not all murderers fit the typical profile, but Monroe was a particularly anomalous candidate. Ignorant of the case for years, Taylor saw a New York Times article about her appeal, became fascinated with the details, realized the events had received almost no coverage outside the Richmond media, contacted one of Monroe's daughters who is a lawyer, received documents from the appeal, and found himself vowing to write a book.
Ten years ago, despite what seemed the initial implausibility of the accusation, few people would have given any credence to the possibility that Monroe is innocent. She had motive, means, and opportunity to kill de la Burde. Although she originally denied that she was present at the estate when de la Burde died, after intense interrogation conducted repeatedly over a period of months by a driven police investigator, Monroe confessed that she had been in the living room when the gun went off, though she continued to deny that she had murdered her companion. Case closed, right?
Wrong. In the past ten years, more and more people have begun to acknowledge the problem of wrongful convictions. They account for only a tiny percentage of all criminal cases, to be sure, but the raw numbers are nonetheless staggering. On January 31, 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty, citing the state's "shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row." Ryan's decision was spurred by the findings of Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess, the Center of Wrongful Convictions, and an investigative trio at The Chicago Tribune (Maurice Possley, Steve Mills. and Ken Armstrong) to expose case after case of justice gone awry: innocent individuals going to prison because of police, prosecutors, medical examiners, laboratory technicians and other actors in the criminal justice system bending or breaking the rules.
In many other locales as well, dna evidence—not available at the time of the trial—has led to the release of individuals convicted of murder, rape, and other crimes, many of who had been in prison for a decade or more. In some jurisdictions, a single forensic scientist falsifying or otherwise mishandling evidence—Fred Zain in West Virginia seems to be the uncontested leader here, but Joyce Gilchrist in Oklahoma might be in competition with him—has been responsible for multiple miscarriages of justice.
Stories such as these have begun to change public perception. No longer can concerns over the trustworthiness of guilty verdicts be dismissed as the ravings of knee-jerk liberal coddlers of criminals. Indeed, the wrongful-conviction issue ought to become part of the law-and-order platform. After all, when the wrong person is sent to prison, the actual perpetrator is still at liberty to murder, rape, or rob again. Meanwhile, the supporters of the wrongfully convicted lose faith in the criminal justice system, causing a ripple effect that can contaminate the jury pool. If the ordinary citizens who are summoned for jury duty distrust the system, prosecutors will find it increasingly difficult to win convictions of the guilty. Nobody wins in that atmosphere.
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