Motion Filed on Behalf on Mentally Disabled Man on Death Row
"Some trials uncover the truth. Some conceal it."
So begins the application filed by MacArthur Justice Center Attorney and Assistant Director Joseph Margulies on behalf of Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., a mentally retarded man on death row.
In 2006, a jury convicted Alfonso Rodriguez and sentenced him to die. At trial, he was depicted as little better than an animal. The prosecution said he abducted Dru Sjodin, raped her, drove her to a remote field in Crookston, Minnesota, slashed her throat, and left her to die. But we now know this carefully scripted tale conceals much and reveals little.
The application filed by Margulies and his colleagues with the federal public defender in Minnesota describes the difference between what was and what could have been, had Mr. Rodriguez received the trial envisioned by the Constitution. To begin with, much of the forensic evidence was bogus. The centerpiece of the government's case was the testimony of Michael McGee, the Ramsey County (St. Paul, MN) Medical Examiner, who said Sjodin had been raped and that she died from two slash wounds to her neck.
Both parts of this testimony are false. To put it bluntly, no crime lab in the country would have endorsed Dr. McGee's testimony about the supposed rape. And as for his testimony about the knife wounds, four independent pathologists have examined the evidence in this case. All of them agree that McGee is just plain wrong. The dramatic testimony offered by Dr. McGee was untrue.
If the trial concealed much of what we now know to be true about the crime, it obscured even more about Mr. Rodriguez. We now know he was not simply "slow." He was not simply "cognitively impaired." He was not just the child who everyone picked on because he couldn't keep up. Not just the little boy who failed so many grades that he was 18 years old in the ninth grade; who boasts that he has read hundreds of books — the pitiful boast of a simple man with a child's brain. Alfonso Rodriguez is mentally retarded. And were there no more to learn about him than the fact that he is retarded, that would be enough. Because the law accepts what no civilized society should question: we do not kill the mentally retarded.
The same vulnerable little boy who fell gradually farther and farther behind his mates is the one who was preyed upon. He was the one who was taunted. He was the one who was sexually abused. Because he is retarded, he was a target. And because he is retarded, he cannot understand the deep shame and intense humiliation he feels. He only knows that sometimes, when he sees a person who triggers a memory of shame and rekindles the sense of humiliation, he can be thrown against his will into another time and place. He becomes overwhelmed. Fear gives way to panic. This panic-stricken and retarded man is the one who encountered Ms. Sjodin. What followed was a terrible tragedy, but not a capital crime.
Recent media coverage about the case can be found at the The Washington Post and MPR News.
