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.

Compilations of unjust verdicts go back at least as far as 1932, the publication date of Yale University law professor Edwin M. Borchard's Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice. Journalist Edward D. Radin became Borchard's heir in 1964 with his book, The Innocents, and Ohio journalist Martin Yant assumed the mantle in 1991 with Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted.

But the book that more than any other set the stage for the contemporary debate appeared in 1992. In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases, by social scientists Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E. Putnam, discusses more than 400 cases. Other scholars have challenged some of their examples, but no critic of the trio has persuasively refuted the Radelet team's contention that erroneous convictions are all too frequent even in capital cases.

The Monroe case centers on issues that are not unique by themselves but may be unique when grouped together. Taylor became fascinated by one special conjunction. As he phrases it,

I wondered how it was possible for an intelligent, educated, independent woman to confess to being in a room when her lover killed himself if in fact she was nowhere near the house. People can and do vividly remember events that never took place, just as they can and do block from their minds memories of actual events. If Beverly Monroe was not guilty, her case involved both syndromes—she had been persuaded to produce a false memory because she had been convinced she had a repressed memory.

Most authors who look into alleged wrongful convictions come out strongly for guilt or innocence. Not Taylor. It is difficult to tell whether he believes Monroe to be a murderer or a victim of injustice. In a note to potential reviewers in the pre-publication copy of the manuscript, editor Jonathan Karp notes that "readers within Random House are evenly split on the question of Beverly Monroe's guilt. This is a testament to the balance of John Taylor's reporting and the rich complexity of the characters involved in the case."

Even if Monroe is guilty, she did not receive a fair trial. The jury did not know enough of the facts to make an informed judgment. Police and prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence, thus violating numerous U.S. Supreme Court and lower court rulings. Powhatan County prosecutor Jack Lewis and his colleague Warren Von Schuch, on loan from Chesterfield County, probably sincerely believed in Monroe's guilt. But sincerity is no excuse for withholding important evidence from the defense. Part of that evidence involved an undisclosed leniency deal for a jailhouse snitch. The use of jailhouse snitches is always a red flag, because so many of them lie in exchange for reduced criminal charges or lesser prison sentences.

As Taylor's book ends, Monroe has lost every appeal to date, but yet another appeal is still alive. Students of alleged wrongful convictions learn to read appellate opinions skeptically. The judges might be learned and well-intentioned, but too often they allow themselves to be bound by traditions and legal precedents that can let finality trump truth. In the Monroe case, appellate judges refused to consider new evidence because a defense lawyer had failed to make a certain objection at trial; in another instance, they invoked a draconian Virginia law banning the introduction of potentially exculpatory material beyond 21 days of conviction. Trouble is, such material often does not become known to the convicted defendant until years later.

Monroe's prosecutors continue to maintain that the accumulation of evidence suggests her guilt. Some readers will agree; others, as the Random House editor's note suggests, will draw the opposite conclusion. But this much we know for sure: Every alleged wrongful conviction takes thousands of hours and lots of money to sort out. If new evidence should surface, it is often impossible to find a lawyer to present it, a court to hear it, a prosecutor to admit a mistake. As a result, another conclusion is almost surely just as certain: Some wrongful convictions are never righted.

Steve Weinberg is an investigative journalist who lives in Columbia, Missouri. He is working with a team of researchers from the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., on a multi-year study of the conduct of prosecutors nationwide.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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