"That's A Terrible Thing To Do To Somebody"

The most disappointing episodes of Law & Order are when the defendant breaks down on the stand under relentless hounding from the assistant district attorney, and admits they committed murder. Of course. They denied their involvement. They pled Not Guilty. They fought the charges with every fiber of their being, and when the time comes to defend themselves on the stand, Jack McCoy wears them down, and they cough it up. Happens all the time.

Even more ridiculous were the scenes from Perry Mason, when the ace defense attorney - in the process of defending his client from murder charges, where the law only requires the creation of reasonable doubt - would go the extra mile and get someone not even charged with the crime to admit their guilt on the stand.

But none of these legal eagles have anything on the Gage County, Nebraska sheriff's department and county prosecutor.

In Gage County, they go beyond getting defendants to admit their guilt. They go flying by getting witnesses not charged with the crime to admit their guilt. No, in Gage County, they can convince people to plead guilty to murders they didn't know they committed. That is a higher level indeed.

In 1985, a 68-year old woman named Helen Wilson was raped and murdered in Beatrice, a quiet town of 13,000 in the southeastern corner of Nebraska. The FBI determined at the the time that the crime had been committed by a single assailant. Four years later, the case remained "unsolved" until a woman, Ada Taylor, came forward. She claimed that she and three other men had committed this horrific crime. Taylor who - according to court documents - was known "to be of low intelligence, with emotional problems" later added the name of James LeRoy Dean to the list. Mr. Dean, according to his attorney, is also of "low to borderline" intellectual functioning, and also is described as having emotional issues.

When the police came to talk to Dean, he said he knew absolutely nothing about the crime. This is something, of course, that is said by both the innocent and the not so innocent.

But Taylor claimed that Dean's motive for the crime was robbery. The crime scene investigation unit, however, found over $1,000 in the apartment in a place that would have taken very little effort to find.

The police asked Mr. Dean for a blood sample, which he - consistent a claim of innocence - readily supplied. The lab results showed that Mr. Dean's blood did not match the blood found at the scene of the crime.

Mr. Dean also agreed to take a polygraph test. This proved to be his undoing. Not because of how he scored, but because of who scored it. The test was administered by a deputy county sheriff who, quite remarkably, also had a Ph.D. in psychology.

Here's a life tip for the reader: If you find an psychologist who is working as a deputy county sheriff, he's probably a crappy psychologist. A good psychologist would be working as a psychologist, charging the country hundreds of dollars per hour for his services, not pulling third shift tracking down DUIs on Route 77.

This deputy county sheriff/psychologist told Mr. Dean that the polygraph results "revealed, at a subconscious level, his involvement in Wilson's homicide." The test, this deputy sheriff explained, also revealed that Dean was "repressing his memories of the murder."

To sum up, according to Dr. Deputy, the test showed that Dean was lying about the crime, even though Dean didn't realize that he was lying about the crime. That's some polygraph. Call the APA.

The police repeatedly showed Dean videos of the crime scene and convinced him that he been there. And in exchange for testifying against the other suspects, the prosecutor told him that they would give him a good deal, that they wouldn't charge him with first degree murder. They told him they would take the death penalty off the table.

So, he testified. He pled guilty to aiding and abetting second degree murder of a crime he couldn't recall being a part of. He spent 5 years in prison. HIs "accomplices" - based in no small part on his testimony - spent upwards of 18 years in prison for the murder of Helen Wilson.

Dean, of course, was innocent, a fact that was proven with the help of the Innocence Project. So, tragically, were all of the others. The guilty party had been a man named Bruce Allen Smith, identified through DNA tests, according to recent tests conducted by the Nebraska Attorney Generals office.

Smith had been an original suspect in the crime. And when you see the evidence - gee - you could understand why. On the night in question, he had been drinking in a bar in Beatrice. He went to a nearby party where he was thrown out after he threatened that he was going to "rape someone." As he was being thrown out, he vowed that he would "get even." He was dropped off in the middle of the night near Wilson's apartment. The next day a witness saw Smith with blood on him. And the police found a wallet at the scene that Smith was suspected of stealing.

Unfortunately, an incompetent lab technician had eliminated Smith as a suspect. So, naturally, the police went with the "repressed-memories/threaten-them-with-the-death-penalty" angle. it turns out that Dean wasn't the only one the psychologist used this theory on:

(Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy attorney Jerry) Soucie criticized the prosecution's use of a psychologist who told the accused that they had committed crimes so heinous they had blocked what they had done from their memories. One of the women sentenced in conjunction with the case, Debra Shelden, still believes she was somehow involved, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points otherwise, Soucie said.

"That's a terrible thing to do to somebody," Soucie said.

What a travesty of justice.