Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has joined two other former prosecutors in filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of William Kuenzel, an Alabama death row inmate sentenced to death in 1988. New evidence emerged in 2010 raising doubts about his guilt. According to Morgenthau's brief, two witnesses who testified against Kuenzel gave entirely different accounts that did not identify him when they first met with authorities. One of the witnesses admitted being involved in the murder. Morgenthau, who retired from the D.A.'s office in 2009 at the age of 90, asked Gil Garcetti, former Los Angeles District Attorney, and E. Michael McCann, former District Attorney of Milwaukee, to join him in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case. The three men each served over 30 years as prosecutor, and oversaw a total of more than 7 million cases. Morgenthau said he always opposed the death penalty and felt he had to act in Kuenzel's case because it reminded him of the Central Park Jogger case, in which he helped reverse the convictions of five teenagers originally convicted of rape and attempted murder. Of the death penalty, which was in place in New York from 1995 to 2007, he said, “[W]e reduced murder by 90 percent and never once sought it.”
George F. Will, conservative commentator of the Washington Post, recently drew a lesson about the death penalty from the documentary The Central Park Five, which airs on PBS on Tuesday, April 16. Will wrote, “[T]his recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes.” The Central Park Five tells the story of five juvenile defendants (four African Americans and one Hispanic) who were convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park, New York, despite the absence of DNA evidence linking them to the crime. Four of the five gave confessions, which they later said were the result of police intimidation. All were sentenced to prison. In 2002, after a recommendation from the Manhattan District Attoreny, their convictions were vacated.