Today’s WP contains a sad and touching profile of Priscilla Lollar.
Priscilla Lollar was the mother of Richard Lollar. Richard Lollar and Jacinth Baker were the two men who were stabbed to death after the Super Bowl in 2000; this is the case in which Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis pled guilty to obstruction of justice.
There are many reasons why wrongful convictions are bad. Obviously, innocent people do time in prison, time that can’t be given back to them. But also, if the wrong person is convicted, that means a murderer is still out in public, free to commit other crimes.
Today’s example of this comes from the NYT, with a followup on the Baithe Diop/Denise Raymond murder cases I mentioned yesterday.
The NYT goes into a little more background on the prosecution’s original theory of the case: Ms. Raymond’s former boyfriend was an alleged drug dealer, who was charged in the case with “conspiracy to commit murder”. The prosecution claimed that he and his drug dealing buddies were afraid Ms. Raymond was going to go to the police about their drug operation. Ms. Raymond was apparently being cultivated because, as a FedEx executive, the drug dealers figured she could help them get drugs through the FedEx system. (The boyfriend was acquitted: “testimony from two key witnesses was discredited by defense evidence”, and he died five years ago.)
The NYT article doesn’t make it clear why the prosecution believed the Diop and Raymond cases were tied together. According to the original NYT article on the reversals in the Diop conviction, the prosecution believed Diop’s killing “was part of an elaborate plot to distract the police from the intended crime: the theft of $50,000 worth of cocaine from a passenger in Mr. Diop’s car.” But it isn’t clear who that passenger was, or how Ms. Raymond’s murder was a part of this plot.
I was able to dig up the original “How To Solve a Murder” article on Google Books, and it doesn’t make things much more clear; if I understand the theory of the crime correctly, the cocaine heist was an inside job, and Ms. Raymond’s boyfriend was supposedly ordered to kill her “as some kind of twisted atonement” for making his bosses in the drug ring angry. In retrospect, the whole case seems to have had holes in it you could drive a cab through.