ligonlaw Review of A Wilderness of Error

A Wilderness of Error (2020)

Too much evidence was excluded in the telling of this tale.

[2/10 · 28 September 2020]

For some reason, none of the television portrayals of the MacDonald case mention the disbarment of the prosecutor, Jim Blackburn. Blackburn is quoted extensively in written and photographed interviews. Blackburn was prosecuted and imprisoned, then disbarred by the North Carolina State Bar for fraud in a scheme Blackburn had devised to charge his clients for work that was both unnecessary and undone. Blackburn's crimes and his apology were featured in the North Carolina State Bar newspaper's front page. That his crimes were ones of dishonesty, and that he was kicked out of the North Carolina Bar should bear some weight in evaluating his testimony in these documentaries. He is allowed to discuss his theory of the case and his strategy, but the audience should be informed that he was disbarred, has never been allowed to have a law license, and makes a living giving lectures. Blackburn hid evidence from the defense. Contrary to the requirements for a fair trial, Blackburn did not make all evidence available to the defense for testing. Days before the trial, Blackburn made a treasure trove of evidence available to the defense, but it would have been impossible to test the evidence at the last minute. None of the evidence was labeled. It was housed in a jail cell, and the defense had no idea how it would be used. The defense complained of Blackburn's dishonesty to the deaf ears of Judge Franklin Dupree. Discussion of the dishonesty of the prosecutor is a relevant point in a documentary about a fair trial. FX did not bring it up. Dupree was a prosecutor's judge, appointed by Richard Nixon. He refused to allow relevant evidence from the defense to be heard by the jury. He argued with defense counsel, and he ruled against the defense over and over, giving the impression he didn't like Attorney Bernie Segal, a jewish man who wore his hair long. I was a litigation student in Bernie Segal's class six years after the MacDonald trial. He was convinced of his client's innocence as MacDonald began his long long prison term. The bias of the judge was mentioned but not explored in the documentary. A North Carolina judge once told me that MacDonald should never have been represented in North Carolina by a "hippie jew." The prosecutor hid Helena Stoeckly from the defense and there is evidence that she was threatened by the prosecution if she told the truth about her involvement in the murders. Segal's team searched for their witness during the trial, but could not find her. She was pretty flakey, and she was a drug addict, but she was being held in a Raleigh hotel, The Blue Velvet Inn, until Segal complained to the judge. She was produced, but the prosecutors told her she would be sent to prison if she gave a different account of the crime, according to investigators. Tampering with such a key witness should have been explored by the documentary makers. Several investigators looked at the evidence in the trial and became completely convinced of MacDonald's innocence. They too wrote books, but the books and their conclusions regarding the veracity of the prosecution's case were left out of the documentary. The MacDonald case has been much-studied, and large numbers of people believe that an innocent man is behind bars. The author Joe McGuinness is responsible for several television presentations. His book, a "60-minutes" piece based on his book and a mini-series also based on McGuiness's book presented what appeared to be conclusive evidence, but it was all the same evidence. All of it came from McGuinness. McGuinness committed fraud. He was charged with fraud in the MacDonald case, and he lost to MacDonald. A judgment of nearly $400,000 was paid to MacDonald by McGuinness. McGuinness's reputation as a journalist was irreparably harmed by his book "Fatal Justice." Another book has suggested that he turned on MacDonald and wrote the book finding MacDonald guilty as a result of a calculation that his book would sell better if he found MacDonald guilty. This documentary did not mention the fraud by McGuinness or the judgment he paid. Nor did the documentary mention that the McGuinness theory of the case dominated "Fatal Vision," the "60 Minutes" piece, nor that it was the basis of the mini-series. The crime scene was a shambles. Untrained investigators marched around in the crime scene. More than a dozen people walked through the MacDonald home before it occurred to anyone that there might be a problem with contamination. This was 1970 before shows on TV discussed contamination of evidence. The cops and the MPs moved things around, walked through the place and changed the evidence forever. Nothing was mentioned in the documentary about the state of the crime scene. The final trial was conducted almost a decade later. The trial that occurred at Ft. Bragg in Oct. 1970, tossed the case out. The military judge told the investigators to search for the hippies who were present in MacDonald's house. Nine years later, the MacDonald case was heard in federal court in Raleigh. Nine years after the crimes, the evidence and the scene did not improve, but the government was ready to convict him. For 30 years, MacDonald has been eligible for parole, but he refuses to apply for parole if it means confessing to the crimes. Not mentioned in the documentary. MacDonald identified a lady in a floppy and others. A gang of drug-addicted hippies was present in his home. Stoekley confessed again and again until her death. Her friend, Greg Mitchel, also present in the MacDonald home suffered the remainder of his life with the guilt of his involvement in the MacDonald murders. He confessed several times. Finally, it must be said that the standard for acquittal changes after conviction. Until conviction, a defendant is presumed innocent, and any reasonable doubt can overturn the conviction. Once convicted, the standard becomes absolute innocence. One must produce evidence that the conviction must be overturned because the defendant was never guilty. Here, the court violated MacDonald's right to a fair trial by omitting so much evidence of his innocence and making his defense so much more difficult than it should have been. In a different courtroom or with a different federal judge, the evidence supporting MacDonald would have created a different impression on the jury. By putting his thumb on the scale, Judge Dupree succeeded in convicting a man, who may be innocent, but he did so at the expense of fair trials.