We founded CityBeat in order to, as early 1900s muckraker journalists put it, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Mostly we wanted to make a difference by celebrating “alternatives” in Cincinnati, be they people, causes, ideas, lifestyles or organizations.
Then in 2003 came the ultimate opportunity to make a difference: save a person’s life, specifically an Ohio Death Row inmate scheduled to be executed one month from our publication date.
Writer Leslie Blade told the crazy story of Jerome Campbell’s battle with the State of Ohio over his 1989 murder conviction and his impending execution. After Illinois had released 13 Death Row inmates when DNA testing proved their innocence, many states, including Ohio, offered the new technology to prisoners appealing their death sentences. Campbell was the first Ohio inmate to sign up.
A Hamilton County jury had convicted him of a bloody knifing in a West End apartment. The slim evidence against him consisted of a witness who saw Campbell near the apartment building the night of the murder (Campbell lived nearby); two fellow prisoners who said Campbell confessed to the murder while held with them in the County Justice Center (both were released after they testified against Campbell); and Campbell’s blood-stained sneakers, which prosecutors said resulted from his role in the grisly murder. Campbell claimed that the blood on his shoes was his own, from an earlier fight.
The bloody shoes were still in storage 13 years later, and Campbell asked that the blood be tested with new DNA technology. All other evidence — including fingerprints from the murder scene that didn’t match Campbell’s and bloody footprints that didn’t match his sneakers — had been destroyed by Cincinnati Police after his conviction.
Ohio’s state crime lab issued a report saying there was no blood from the victim on the sneakers — it was all Campbell’s, as he had said. Then the other shoe dropped: Attorney General Jim Petro announced that the shoes weren’t critical evidence after all and Campbell’s sentence would stand. His execution was scheduled for May 14, 2003.
Excerpt:
“ ‘(The state) must have been thoroughly convinced that it was going to come back with victim’s blood on it,’ local defense attorney William Gallagher says. ‘They were looking for a DNA test that would finally, conclusively prove that all these people on Death Row are guilty and shut the rest of them up.’ …
“ ‘I know that my words seem like I have given up, but the facts are in,’ Campbell wrote to Blade from prison. ‘The courts have lied, the cops and the prosecutors have lied. I just ask that you take all the paperwork that I send you and show the public that the only thing the judicial system does is help cover up bad detective work at all cost, and if an innocent man has to die, that’s cool too, because it helps keep up the illusion that the system works.’ ”
Today:
Campbell’s attorneys and family members made one final appeal before the Ohio Adult Parole Board, using the CityBeat story to help explain the lack of physical evidence and prosecutors’ reliance on jailhouse snitches. Stunningly, the parole board recommended that Campbell’s death sentence be commuted; Gov. Bob Taft agreed. It was the first time since Ohio reinstated the death penalty in 1981 that the board had voted for clemency.
Campbell remains in prison today and continues to seek a new trial, but the wheels of justice grind slowly. The Ohio Innocence Project, founded at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law the same year Campbell’s life was spared, is working on his case. Using DNA technology and other tools, they’ve managed to secure the release of 17 wrongly convicted inmates in the past 10 years.
Ohio has executed 48 men since Campbell’s clemency ruling. Certainly, given the botched prosecutions we now know about in so many death penalty cases, some of them deserved better. At least justice was served one time in 2003 with Jerome Campbell, and CityBeat proudly played a role.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2014.