News

Appeal Rejected

11 July 2006

The Court of Appeals, the state's top court, has declined to hear the appeal of John "Jack" Carroll. The order follows a refusal in March by the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court to re-examine the case against the 49-year-old.

Carroll's attorney, E. Stewart Jones, said he now plans to take the case to the federal level.

Times Union article

Defense Appeals to State Supreme Court in Wilhelm case.

08 June 2006

Jerry Frost, Christina Wilhelm's defense attorney, argued for the reversal of the 50-year sentence and a new trial when he appeared before the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court.

Appeal: Politics linked to child drowning case Times Union - 7 Jun 2006
The Wilhelm Appeal Times Union - 8 Jul 2006

Albany Lawyer Blog

28 April 2006

Blog by an Albany lawyer about law, life in Albany NY, etc. Click here to see Warren Redlich's comments on law and other topics of interest from a lawyer's point of view.

Petition for Jon Romano's sentence appeal

02 March 2006

Join Justice Now in this petition to the State Supreme Court to set aside Jon Romano's waiver of his right to appeal his sentence.

Please print these documents to have people sign, then send them in.

One signature or a hundred, they all help!

The petition drive is done, thank you for your all your help!

Court refuses to review DeAngelis' conduct in Carroll case.

Updated: 08 March 2006
02 March 2006

Attorney E. Stewart Jones plans to take matters to the federal courts after the state supreme court refused to review the case for prosecutorial misconduct on the part of District Attorney Patricia DeAngelis.

Read the article by Carl Strock from The Schenectady Gazette

Read the article from The Schenectady Gazette

Read the article from Albany Times Union

Appeal Expected in the Romano Case

Updated: 08 March 2006
08 February 2006

Defense Attorney E. Stuart Jones is filing an appeal of the 20-year sentence Jon Romano received under a plea agreement with the Rensselaer County District Attorney's office. The plea agreement waived rights to appeal, but doesn't restrict the ability to appeal the sentence. Romano had just turned 17 and was under heavy medication in November 2004 when he accepted the plea agreement of 20 years for reckless endangerment and attempted murder. The charges stemmed from his actions in February 2004 when he discharged a shotgun twice in a hallway at Columbia High School. While being tackled from behind, the shotgun discharged a third time and ricochet from the birdshot caused minor injuries to one teacher who was treated and released the same day.

Linked stories:

• Review Romano Plea Bargin editorial (The Schenectady Gazette) 08 Mar 2006
• Justice Demands Cut In Term by Fred LeBrun (Albany Times Union) 19 Feb 2006
  Correction on this story: Jon Romano was 16 at the time of the incident, 17 when he accepted the plea agreement
• Injustice (Albany Times Union) 15 Feb 2006
• Teen gunman wants sentence cut (Albany Times Union)
• Lawyer says teen's sentence is 'excessive' (Troy Record)
• Appeal expected from school shooter (WNYT, channel 13 - NBC)
• Romano's attorney prepares to file appeal (Capital News Nine, channel 9 - Time Warner)

Thoughts and Review of No Crueler Tyrannies: Justice For Just Us or Justice For All?

04 February 2006

Blog site: Upstream – A Mohawk Valley Perspective
Blog user: Dan Weaver (2/4/06) -- blog entry here

Finished reading No Crueler Tyrannies. Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times by Pulitzer Prize Winner, Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal. (You can read an excerpt on-line). I sit here so filled with anger that I don’t know how to get this post rolling, except to say that you ought to read this book. It’s especially important that people in this area read it because there is a chapter on Jack Carroll of Troy, who is now serving time for a sex crime he never committed.

What’s even scarier is that Jack, and everyone else portrayed in this book, were convicted of crimes that never even happened.

In all of these cases, what is compelling is the lack of physical evidence of sexual abuse in each case. One minister was supposed to have had sex with numerous children on the church floor every Sunday during worship service while the whole congregation watched. Yet an intensive examination of the church carpet showed no evidence on sexual activity of any kind.

The book covers the sex abuse cases of the Amirault family who ran the Fells Acre Day School in Malden, Massachusetts; the Kelly Michaels case, the case of Grant Snowden, a top notch cop in South Miami, Florida; the Wenatchee, Washington case in which forty citizens were arrested on sex abuse charges in just the first few months of the investigation (one woman alone was charged with 3,200 counts of child rape--an extremely busy woman to say the least), the case of Dr. Patrick Griffin, and, of course, Jack Carroll of Troy.

The professional reviews on amazon.com give Rabinowitz high praise for the book. Some of the amateurs are not so kind, although overall they gave the book 3.5 stars out of 5. The biggest complaint was the slimness of the book and the slenderness of the evidence presented by Rabinowitz.

But these reviewers are approaching the book in the wrong way. Rabinowitz’s book is meant to be a primer on false accusation, not an exhaustive treatise. Each case deserves a book of its own; some need more than one book to tell the story. Rabinowitz is trying to show us the witch hunt like atmosphere of these trials, which peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, but which has not completely died out.

It would have been impossible in such a book for Rabinowitz to have gone into the detail that all readers might want. But here is what makes Rabinowitz’s work important. In it she brings us face to face with well over one hundred people who were falsely accused of sex abuse in a variety of cases in different parts of the country. In each case, even though there was no evidence, prosecutors and social workers followed a similar plan to deny justice to the accused. In most cases the accused were found guilty, but in the end, except for Jack Carroll and Gerald Amirault, they all had their sentences overturned. And there is still a lot of hope for Jack.

Trials of large numbers of people for crimes that they did not commit are not new to America--this mass hysteria, beginning with the Salem Witch Trials, pokes its ugly head up with every new generation of Americans, seemingly oblivious of history.

We are not done with the sex abuse hysteria, but we are already into a new hysteria. As one amazon.com reviewer said, “The post-9/11 environment is ripe for similar cases - this time targeting those who are perceived to be soft on homeland security. Books like Rabinowitz's, however imperfect, serve as cautionary tales of our paranoid propensity to believe the worst about each other.”

The sad thing is that while people were being prosecuted for sex crimes that never happened, real sex crimes were taking place, and going undetected because the police, social workers, prosecuting attorneys and Child Protective workers were using all of their resources to prosecute innocent people.

I have been promising to write on this topic for a long time. Now that I have begun, I will be posting frequently on it because I have a lot I to say. I have waited a long time to say what I want to say. It took me awhile to find the right forum and this blog seems to be it.

If you are one of those people who are skeptical about false accusations and innocent people going to prison, I hope you will keep an open mind and continue to read these posts. I was like you once. I wanted to castrate everyone accused of sex crimes before they even had a trial. (Even now I believe that sex offenders who murder should receive the death penalty). Then one day Child Protective Services of Montgomery County showed up at my door and investigated me for alleged neglect. (Neglect differs from abuse and is a nebulous allegation which includes emotional neglect, truancy and a host of other things which I will discuss in a future post).

I was a law abiding, hard working, well respected citizen who thought this could never happen to me, but it did.

It can happen to you too.
posted by Dan Weaver at 1:47 PM | 1 comments links to this post

DeAngelis to Appeal McGrath's Ruling in Hunter Case

04 February 2006

A prepared statement from DA Patricia DeAngelis states that she is seeking to appeal the ruling in the Hunter case. Hunter's attorney blasts the Rensselaer County District Attorney's office.

Article from The Troy Record

Article from The Albany Times Union

Defense: Wilhelm not responsible

30 January 2006

Article in the Bennington Banner, Defense: Wilhelm not responsible

Another article on this topic from the Times Union

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH...

27 January 2006

The Albany Times Union joins Justice Now in calling for the resignation of Rensselaer County DA Patricia DeAngelis. Times Union

In today’s editorial, the Times Union allows that DeAngelis was not the one responsible for withholding evidence in the Burton Hunter case. However, according to the Record, DeAngelis did the pre-trial work in the case, only handing the case over to another ADA ten days before the trial began.

The time has come for justice to be restored in Rensselaer County. District Attorney Patricia DeAngelis must step down.

Rensselaer County District Attorney’s Office in trouble again.

24 January 2006

The courts have overturned yet another conviction. This time, Patricia DeAngelis’s office has been admonished for “violating professional responsibility.” For more on this breaking story visit: WTEN news and the Albany Times Union.

Justice Now will continue to follow this story.

Rensselaer County District Attorney Patricia DeAngelis admits her office withheld evidence in a 2002 sex abuse case

04 January 2006

In November 2002, Burton Hunter Jr was convicted by a Rensselaer County jury of sodomizing a 17-year-old girl in 2001. He is serving 25 years in Great Meadow Correctional Facility.

After County Court Judge Patrick McGrath agreed this fall to hear an appeal by Hunter's attorney, Cheryl Coleman, DeAngelis conceded in writing that her office had withheld potentially exculpatory eviden! ce from the defense during the time of the trial.

Hunter's trial occurred in the same period as some other high profile sex cases handled by DeAngelis, including several in which convictions have been overturned by the Courts for prosecutorial misconduct. Also prosecuted by DeAngelis during this period was the case of Jack Carroll, whose Coram Nobis was submitted to the Third Department Appellate Court on December 19, 2005.

As is customary when Rensselaer County's notorious DA DeAngelis is found to have violated the rules of law and ethics of her profession, she refused comment on the Hunter case.

Read More: http://timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=436040

Justice Prevails Over Politics in Rensselaer County

09 November 2005

Election night douses DeAngelis' bid for county judgeship! Read the following articles from the Times Union.
"A message in defeat of DeAngelis" by Fred LeBrun (Wednesday, November 9, 2005)
"It's Judge Jacon - Rensselaer County voters make the right call in a critical election." - Times Union Editorial (Wednesday, November 9, 2005)

Albany Attorney issues scathing indictment of an arrest and trial by the Albany DA's Office

Appearing on our Justice Now TV program, Albany attorney John Kelleher describes the horrendous ordeal of 17-year-old Jesse Poleto. The Albany youth was arrested by State Police in November 2004 and charged with stealing underwear from the lady next door. However despite evidence that included a signed confession and videotape that prosecutors claim depicted Poleto committing the crime, it took jurors less than one hour to reach a "not guilty” verdict.

Using the skills of a forensic photographer and a dramatic courtroom presentation, Kelleher showed how the youth pictured on the videotape was not the defendant but was in fact another youth. Kelleher says despite overwhelming evidence that his client was not the underwear burglar the DA persisted in conducting the trial for almost a week. Said one juror after the verdict was read, "This is a prosecution that never should have happened." Kelleher blames both the State Police and the DA for putting his client through this traumatic experience.

Interview with the head of the Albany Capital Defender Office

Ernie Tetrault, Justice Now Moderator sat down recently with Mark Harris, head of the Albany Capital Defender Office.

Harris says a concern of his for many years has been that many prosecutors in this state believe they are above the law, and in one sense they are right. The Committee on Professional Standards (COPS) which governs the ethical behavior of attorneys fails to discipline prosecutors who have had convictions thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct . He says conduct of a level to cause the reversal of a criminal conviction has been judged unethical by the Appellate Division. He says this is certainly something the Committee on Professional Standards should be looking at and doing something about it. But so far they are doing nothing.

Justice Now will attempt in the to get the Committee to do its duty. Hopefully they will look at the string of reversals in the Rensselaer County District Attorney’s Office and decide to take action.

Click here For information on the show's schedule.

Leave to Appeal, E. Stewart Jones takes on the case of Jack Carroll pro bono

08 March 2005

Attorney E. Stewart Jones has agreed to take on the case of Jack Carroll, pro bono...

And his first order of business is to file a Leave to Appeal on Carroll’s 440 motion with the NYS Appellate Court-Third Department.

ones became familiar with Carroll’s case through retired WRGB news anchor and reporter, Ernie Tetrault, who after extensive review of the court record, is convinced that Carroll was railroaded to prison. At Tetrault’s request, Jones reviewed court documents from the case and notified Carroll’s wife that he would take the case on, free of charge. In an interview with Schenectady Daily Gazette columnist Carl Strock, who also believes Carroll was railroaded, Jones said, “I am offended by the conviction. The proof was not there. He should not have been convicted." Jones went on to say, “…the errors made were of constitutional dimension.” He categorized Jack Carroll’s convictions as “outrageous.”

News of this development was a tremendous relief to Carroll and his family, who have spent nearly $250,000 to free Jack and clear his name. With no money left, the family was uncertain how they would obtain legal counsel to continue the fight for Jack’s freedom.

Jones’ first order of business is to file a Leave to Appeal on Carroll’s 440 motion with the NYS Appellate Court-Third Department. If his application is granted, Jones will argue that both of Carroll’s convictions were tainted by flagrant prosecutorial misconduct on the part of Rensselaer County DA Patricia DeAngelis, who has had 3 convictions overturned for prosecutorial misconduct in recent months. If the Leave to Appeal is denied, Jones will then take the case to federal court.

“I am so thankful,” Carroll said upon hearing the news. “I couldn’t be in better hands. I am so hopeful that this nightmare will finally end for me and my family.”

News of Injustice...

Appellate Court reverses two more convictions of Rensselaer County District Attorney, Patricia DeAngelis, and in its decisions, again criticizes the conduct of the prosecutor. Read those and another 2004 appellate court decision here:

Read more about the tactics used by DA DeAngelis in the Jack Carroll case, here.