A man who has spent 28 years in prison based on a dream—and it wasn’t his own. That’s right. In 1989, Clarence Moses-EL, who is African-American, was sentenced to 48 years in prison after a woman said she dreamed he was the man who raped and beat her in the dark. The victim said she was raped in her apartment after a night out drinking at a party. She was beaten so badly during the attack that she suffered broken facial bones and lost the use of one eye. Initially, the victim named three men she had been drinking with as her possible attackers—none of them was Clarence Moses-EL. But police never investigated any of those men, because, a day and a half later, the victim said she had a dream that Moses-EL was the one who had raped her.
Since day one, Clarence Moses-EL has maintained his innocence. In 1995, he won a court order to analyze evidence that could have proved his innocence. He persuaded his fellow prisoners to chip in a thousand dollars to pay for DNA testing. Denver police packaged the evidence, which included the victim’s rape kit, her clothes and bed sheets in a box, and marked it, “DO NOT DESTROY.” But then, the police threw the box in a dumpster.
The story doesn’t end there. One of three people the victim initially listed as a possible attacker was a man named L.C. Jackson. In 2012, Jackson sent Clarence Moses-EL a letter in prison that read in part, quote, “Let’s start by bringing what was done in the dark into the light.” In court this past summer, Jackson confessed to the attack, admitting that he had what he claimed was consensual sex with the victim and beat her that night in her apartment. Jackson’s then live-in girlfriend corroborated his testimony, saying he left their house during the time of the attack, and blood evidence pointed to someone with Jackson’s blood type, not Moses-EL’s. Yet Clarence Moses-EL has remained in prison, and Denver District Attorney Mitchell Morrissey has fought for years to uphold his conviction.
During the 28 years Moses-EL has fought for his freedom, a number of his family members have passed away, including his mother, who died in 2013. He has 12 grandchildren whom he has never met, because he doesn’t want them to see him behind bars.
On Monday, Clarence Moses-EL finally won a major victory, when a judge lifted his conviction. He could be freed as early as this next Tuesday, when a bond hearing has been set. The District Attorney’s Office has not yet said if they will attempt to retry him for the crime.
Susan Greene talking:
I used to work at The Denver Post, Amy, and we worked for a year on a series called “Trashing the Truth,” which was about the loss and destruction of DNA evidence. It was a national series of stories about what happens when these tiny parcels of biological evidence go lost or missing. And Clarence’s case was the story we started the week-long series with, because it was so flagrant, with the—so much DNA evidence being right there, Clarence having raised the money in prison to test it. And the police, despite the fact that it was in a box marked “DO NOT DESTROY” and he had two court orders to have it tested, threw it in a dumpster. So, that’s how I got to know Clarence about nine or 10 years ago.
Nobody ultimately was held responsible. There was a slight investigation, and it was deemed that there was a lack of communication between the DA’s Office and the police department, that the DA’s Office didn’t notify the police department that there were two court orders to test the DNA. Now, how that explains how someone could physically take a box marked “DO NOT DESTROY” in magic marker and throw it in the dumpster, I don’t know.
Gail Johnson talking:
what decades of experience now in this country with exonerations and wrongful convictions research has shown is that eyewitness misidentifications are a major cause of wrongful convictions. And that’s what happened in this case.
It’s a dream. It’s an eyewitness in the sense that she’s the only person who’s identified him, because she now claims, and claimed at trial, that he was her attacker. But there are lots of reasons to doubt the reliability of that. We’re not saying this was malicious on her part, but certainly she was heavily intoxicated, so much so that she had passed out before the attack and vomited. She had been drinking malt liquor that night with L.C. Jackson and others. She also had very poor eyesight. It was dark when she was attacked. And the attacker beat her about the face, which was quite traumatic.
Mr. Moses-EL filed a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence—namely, that L.C. Jackson was now admitting his involvement in these events. The Denver District Attorney’s Office did not go out and talk to Mr. Jackson about those statements for 18 months after those admissions became public. So, the system was slow to respond. But ultimately, as Amy explained, we now have a major breakthrough in the case. Mr. Jackson has testified in court, under oath, before a Denver district judge, about his involvement. He has admitted, under oath, that he went to the victim’s home at the time of the attack, that he had sexual intercourse with her, that he physically assaulted her.
the Denver District Attorney’s Office has been fighting Mr. Moses-EL’s attempts to vindicate his innocence at every turn, including fighting our access to some documents that—from Mr. Jackson’s sex assault case. And I think one of the important things for your listeners to understand today is that this Denver District Attorney’s Office prosecuted Mr. Jackson years later on what’s known on as a cold hit DNA case for the brutal sexual assault of a woman and her nine-year-old daughter in their home that occurred about a mile, mile and a half from the events underlying Mr. Moses-EL’s case. There are some striking similarities between the manner in which those assaults were committed and, again, the assault in the 1987 case for which Mr. Moses-EL has been incarcerated for 28 years. So when you put together Mr. Jackson’s history, criminal history, as well as his admissions, as well as—we presented evidence that—from his girlfriend at the time of the assault, who said he left the house right after—about 20 minutes after the victim—she lived two doors down—and that he was gone for an hour or two, and then he returned to her presence, and then, about 20 minutes later, they learned about the assaults that had happened. So, he was gone at the exact moment of the assaults.
Susan Greene talking:
The reaction by other media really has been to ignore this case for years. I wrote about it at The Denver Post; when I left The Denver Post, I continued writing about it. I’m now with The Colorado Independent. But when I left, The Denver Post and all other media have ignored this case. Nobody went to the hearing. Nobody’s done any investigative work on it at all. And I think that’s largely because there has been so much misinformation put out by the DA’s Office. This is a DA who, in this case, has simply made stuff up, ad hominem. And we have a media market here that just doesn’t have the kind of investigative journalism resources to dig in. And not only that, we have a media here that is cowed by the powers that be here so much that Mitch Morrissey will dish out facts about this—not facts about this case, misinformation about this case, and the media will buy it. And so, this is not just a problem in the DA system, it’s a problem systemwide. And it’s why journalism is so important.
back in 2012, three years ago, L.C. Jackson wrote this letter to Clarence Moses-EL in prison, and it read, “I really don’t know what to say to you. But let’s start by bringing what was done in the dark into the light. I have a lot on my heart. I don’t know who[‘s] working on this. But have them come up and see me. It’s time. I’ll be waiting.”
What happened is, Clarence, from prison, who really has been just kind of silently in prison, for the most part, for 28 years, tried to get a new hearing. And it took, I think, about three years for that process to move forward. You would think—and the DA was made aware of that letter fairly early on, so you would think, because a DA’s responsibility is to seek the truth and to fact find and to make sure, if there’s new evidence, it’s looked at. But that’s actually not the case. The DA ignored this new evidence. Not only did it ignore the new evidence, that office, but it kept maintaining, incorrectly, as Mitch Morrissey has done for at least 10 years now, that the victim never named L.C. Jackson in her outcry. And that’s incorrect. He has testified to that in the Legislature, he has said that in press releases, he’s said that in videos. And again, this goes back to the media. People buy it. What the documents show, the police reports show and the court records show is, in fact, the victim several times named L.C. Jackson in her outcry. She never named Clarence Moses-EL in her outcry.
What it also—what nobody else has really talked about is that the lead detective in the case in the Denver Police Department said before he died, he always had reservations about this case. And the reason he had reservations is because the victim, before she was attacked—and she was brutally attacked, Amy—had had a fight with Moses-EL’s wife and had said publicly, “I’m going to get back at you.” And so, this detective had concerns that it was a personal vendetta that made—that prompted the victim to have this so-called dream, that is, as Gail said, the only evidence on which Clarence was convicted.
Clarence Moses-EL is in a prison called Territorial in Colorado. He has lived for many, many years in the Bent County Correctional Facility, which is hours away from Denver. He was transferred yesterday, on his way to Denver, to bond out, but didn’t make it here because, I guess, he needed to transfer from prisons. It’s like a terrible, never-ending bus ride. So he’s in Territorial, and hopefully he’s on his way to Denver today, hopefully, if the DA doesn’t continue fighting it, to bond out.
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Gail Johnson
defense attorney for Clarence Moses-EL.
Susan Greene
editor of The Colorado Independent. She is a longtime reporter and columnist, formerly with The Denver Post.
— source democracynow.org