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Home Kenny Richey Poor excuse for justice Poor excuse for justice
Wednesday, 09 January 2008
KENNETH Richey is most assuredly not a sympathetic figure, but the kangaroo-court deal that set him free after two decades on death row is an embarrassing reminder that the wheels of the Ohio legal system sometimes grind in cruel, interminable fashion with no guarantee that real justice will prevail.
We make this declaration out of frustration because this newspaper has long maintained a strong editorial position in favor of swift and sure capital punishment in open-and-shut murder cases while opposing those that are unjustly imposed.
Unfortunately, the case of Richey, a small-time Scottish-American hooligan, turned into a travesty of justice before a skeptical world audience. Tried on flimsy evidence in the 1986 fire death of a 2-year-old Putnam County girl, he got an inept legal defense and a faulty trial full of errors and omissions that cast convincing doubt as to whether he committed any crime at all.
Moreover, it took 21 years for the case to run its course, culminating in Richey's release Monday to return to his homeland, free but broke and in ill health at 43 after years behind bars.
Had it not been for the intervention of a federal appeals court, Richey probably would have been executed unjustifiably.
In the end, he was, in effect, blackmailed into securing his freedom by pleading no contest to three face-saving charges so local authorities could claim that he had been held responsible for the death of little Cynthia Collins, the daughter of his sometime-girlfriend.
Gone were capital counts of aggravated murder and arson, lamely replaced by charges that included attempted involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment, on the thin grounds that Richey had failed to look after the child for her mother on the night she died.
Additionally, Richey's lawyer neglected to challenge weak and unreliable testimony that arson caused the fire and the three-judge panel that tried him failed to take account of this crucial omission. Such ineptitude should disqualify those jurists from further service on the bench.
Strong though the thirst for vengeance may be on the part of the victim's family, "failure to baby-sit," as the bogus charge against Richey was termed, is no excuse for unjustly imprisoning a man for 21 years.
Indeed, it was the girl's mother who had the ultimate responsibility to ensure that she was cared for on that fateful night.
Parading Richey into court in chains was the final indignity engineered by Putnam County authorities in an attempt to convince the public that justice was done. But it only served to underscore how an unsympathetic defendant can be chewed up and spit out by a legal system that failed to live up to its promise of fairness.