More on the Ballard case and its impact

March 2, 2006 on 11:47 am | In State legal news | |

Errors at trial

Overturning Florida’s wrongful convictions

Daytona Beach News Journal editorial
Tuesday, February 28, 2006

After years of controversy, Florida lawmakers finally seem to understand the importance of DNA testing in previously closed criminal cases. To date, 25 people have walked free — 22 of them from death row — because DNA tests proved their innocence.

The evidence is so compelling that the Legislature has extended the deadline for DNA testing twice, and could abolish it during next month’s session. They’re moving in the right direction, putting justice over politics.

But not every case has DNA. And some of those convictions are troubling. Such was the case with John Robert Ballard, a 37-year-old convicted of two murders and sentenced to death in 1999.

Ballard’s conviction rested mostly on a few hairs and a fingerprint found in a Collier County apartment shared by Jennifer Jones, and Willy Ray Patin, Jr. The evidence established that Ballard was in the apartment — but that was no surprise, since Ballard was friends with the couple and often in their home. Testimony showed that another man had shot at Jones’ and Patin’s apartment the week before the couple was murdered. But instead of pursuing that man, prosecutors persuaded a jury to convict Ballard.

Telling him he’d forfeited his right to live, Circuit Judge Lauren Miller sentenced Ballard to death. Still, he maintained his innocence.

Nearly six years later, the Florida Supreme Court has ordered Ballard to be freed. The evidence against him was too slim, proving only that he was in the apartment at some time, the court said.

Ballard wasn’t the only one to suffer because of the state’s decision to prosecute him. News of Ballard’s pending freedom hit the victims’ families hard. They trusted the state to find the right man, and they say they’re struggling with the notion ! that the high court threw out his conviction.
Courts can’t calcula te the cost of an error this massive. But they can learn from cases like Ballard’s. Florida’s criminal trial system is adversarial — one lawyer pitted against another — but in too many cases, indigent defendants rely on overburdened, underfunded public defenders. These lawyers are often highly skilled, but have nowhere near the resources they need to adequately investigate cases and prepare defenses.

Florida leads the nation in overturned convictions, which could be read two ways — either the state’s trial system is lax, or the appellate system is exceptionally good at catching trial-court errors. Ballard’s case doesn’t shed light either way, but other cases travel between courts for years before innocence is proven.

Justice demands that Florida’s leaders take a harder look at those overturned convictions. They’ll find patterns: cases based at least in part on questionable jailhouse snitches; others relying on faulty eyewitness identification; prosecutors ! who go too far in their quest for a conviction.

Other states are looking for ways to minimize wrongful convictions by controlling these common avenues to error. Florida owes it to John Robert Ballard and every other citizen to make the criminal justice system as accurate and fair as possible.