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Burton was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Alexius McNeal, the daughter of his second cousin.  Burton had discovered her dead body, and because of his criminal history, he was a suspect from the start.  However, fingerprints lifted from the scene did not link him to the murder.  Burton had a liver ailment, weighed 120 lbs., and had difficulty getting up a flight of stairs.  The prosecution theorized that he struggled with the 5’9”, 186 lbs. Alexius before murdering her.

While in prison, Burton had a known prison snitch, Obie Jacobs, assigned as his cellmate.  Jacobs had testified at other murder trials.  Burton complained to his lawyer, but his request for a different cellmate was denied.  Two months later, the cellmate was meeting with the police and telling them that Burton confessed to him using police supplied information.  Jacobs told them that Burton confessed that he killed McNeal between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., but the coroner had placed her time of her death between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.  (InjusticeBusters)  [10/05]

Rodwell was convicted in 1981 of the murder of Louis Rose, Jr., a drug dealer and the son of a Burlington police captain. No physical evidence linked Rodwell to the crime. The case against him relied on two witnesses: (1) Frankie Holmes, an immunized witness who drove the victim to the murder scene and drove away after the murder. (2) David Nagel, a prison informant, who had the opportunity to confer with Holmes prior to trial, when the two were incarcerated together. Both witnesses faced multiple life felony convictions on various charges.

At trial, Holmes’ testimony conflicted with earlier statements he had given to investigators and the grand jury. Both witnesses’ testimonies were riddled with discrepancies, inconsistencies, and errors. Nagel was a career informant. He had been charged with 37 armed robberies in the 1970s, a number which grew to 59 by the mid-1980s. He managed to sidestep lengthy sentences by aiding the police with tips and testimony. In prison, Rodwell had to endure taunts by other inmates, taunts that usually ended with the refrain, “Another one that Nagel got.”

The prosecution withheld a police report on a witness who stated another person committed the crime. The prosecutor and the state police told the witness, “If you remember what you saw, you will be charged as an accessory.” (Website)  [2/08]

Michael Dirago was convicted in 1991 of the 1985 murder of his 23-year-old girlfriend, Yvonne Davi.  Davi's body had been found near the Delaware River.  The conviction was secured by John Hall, a career prison informant and star witness who unexpectedly came forward just a few days before Dirago's then scheduled trial in Bucks County, PA.  Hall said Dirago told him about the crime when they were both in the Bucks County Jail.

Hall’s testimony placed the murder on the New Jersey side of the bridge on which, he claimed, the victim had been killed.  Dirago was actually convicted in Burlington County, NJ, but only Hall's testimony places the murder there.  Hall gave a riveting account of the murder on the bridge, and of the victim gurgling as she died.  C. Theodore Fritsch, then the chief deputy DA of Bucks County, wrote that Hall’s “unsolicited cooperation,” had changed the case from one with a “rather slim” chance of conviction to a “strong one from the prosecution standpoint.”  Howard Barman, then deputy attorney general of New Jersey wrote that Hall was “a remarkable person” who, but for an alcohol problem, “would probably be a significant member of society.”  (City Paper) (GNS)  [3/08]

Ernest H. Priovolos was convicted in 1990 of the 1986 murder of his former neighbor and girlfriend, Cheryl Succa.  Succa, 21, was found dead with a broken neck under a stone bridge in the 2400 block of Washington Lane in Huntingdon Valley.  Police originally classified her death as an accident.  They said that in the dark she probably stumbled down the bank of the creek. She may not have seen the large rocks and she hit her head.  However, after a career prison informant named John Hall came forward, police ruled her death a homicide.  Hall is known to have provided testimony in an extraordinary number of cases.  In 1994-95 alone he snitched out defendants in 5 murder cases.

Hall shared a prison cell with Priovolos in Bucks County Prison who was there on a drug related charge.  Hall testified that Priovolos bragged to him in the fall of 1988 that he knocked Succa over the bridge with a karate chop and took her purse after becoming angry that she would not have sex with him. Edward Bauman, another inmate and a reported follower of Hall, corroborated Hall's testimony.  At trial, a prosecution witness caused a mistrial by testifying that Priovolos had sexually assaulted her in 1985.  No charges were ever filed for the alleged assault.  At his second trial, Priovolos was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to 12 to 27 years of imprisonment.  The prosecution had sought the death penalty. (Google) (See also Walter Ogrod (Phila 1988), Michael Dirago (Bucks 1985)) [6/08]

Walter Ogrod was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn.  The murder occurred near her house at 7245 Rutland Street, close to Cottman Avenue.  Four witnesses had seen a man carrying a TV box in which Horn’s body was found.  One of the witnesses, David Schectman, told police he'd interacted with the box carrying man for 11 minutes on St. Vincent St.

Two days after Horn’s murder and again 11 days later, Schectman identified Raymond Sheehan from photo arrays as the man he saw carrying the box.  However, Schectman also identified another neighborhood man as the box carrier.  Sheehan had been suspected of the 1987 Frankford murder of 10-year-old Heather Coffin and would be convicted of it after DNA testing was done in 2003.  Sheehan denied involvement in the Horn murder and was never charged with it.

In 1992, Walter Ogrod, who had lived across the street from Horn, signed a confession to the murder.  However, by all accounts, Ogrod looked nothing like the man described by witnesses.  Afterward, Ogrod claimed police coerced his confession.  Schectman had described a man who was 5 to 8 inches shorter than Ogrod.  He also knew Ogrod by sight, if not by name, before the murder, and never mentioned him to police.

At trial in 1993, the jury agreed to acquit Ogrod, believing his confession was coerced.  However, just before the verdict was read, one juror stood up and said he did not agree with it.  The judge declared a mistrial.  Horn’s stepfather, who believed Ogrod was guilty, knocked aside a bailiff and managed to punch Ogrod.  The stepfather later said that the judge had told him that had the trial been a non-jury bench trial, the verdict would have been guilty.  One could argue that the judge declared a mistrial because he did not agree with the jury's verdict.  At a minimum he could have forced further jury deliberations at which the objecting juror would likely succumb again to pressure from other jurors.

Two years later, after an appeals court rejected double jeopardy claims barring a retrial, Ogrod crossed paths with John Hall, a notorious jailhouse informant.  Hall was known as “The Monsignor,” because he heard more confessions than a priest.  With Hall’s help, Ogrod was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to death.  In 1997, a Daily News reporter raised serious questions about Hall based purely on the sheer number of cases Hall had been involved in.  However, it had only been proven that Hall had lied in one 1995 case.

In 2003, Hall wrote a series of private letters, never intended for publication, explaining how he got Ogrod convicted.  Hall did not actually testify at Ogrod’s trial as his past informant testimony and criminal convictions undermined his credibility.  Instead he got fellow inmate Jay Wolchansky to testify and told him what to say.  During trial Wolchansky was allowed to testify under the alias Jason Banachowski.

At the time Hall was facing a 25 to 50 year mandatory minimum sentence on various charges.  Instead he got 9 to 18 months after several detectives who had worked with him on the Horn case and other cases showed up to testify for him.  Wolchansky also got consideration for his testimony.  As Hall put it, "Everyone made out."  Except, of course, Ogrod.  On June 7, 2005, Governor Rendell signed Ogrod's death warrant, scheduling his execution for Aug. 2, 2005.  The execution has since been stayed.  (City Paper)  [3/08]

Gary Michael Benn was sentenced to death for the shooting murders of his half-brother, Jack Dethlefsen, and his half-brother's friend, Michael Nelson.  The shootings occurred in Dethlefsen’s house.  At trial Benn did not testify directly, but he made statements to a third party who testified to his version of events.  According to this version, the killings were in self-defense.  Benn’s version was reasonably corroborated by the position of the bodies relative to the guns in the house.  The killings were presumably not premeditated as Benn did not use his own gun, but had left it in his car.  Dethlefsen had a reputation for violence.

The prosecution presented another version of events through the testimony of Roy Patrick, a jailhouse informant, who shared a cell with Benn as he was awaiting trial.  According to Patrick, Benn had perpetrated two insurance scams together with Dethlefsen and Nelson involving the burglary and arson of Benn’s trailer.  Benn allegedly refused to share the proceeds of these scams with Dethlefsen and Nelson, and then killed them because they threatened to disclose the crimes to the police.  Benn did report a burglary on Oct. 12, 1987 and had a fire on Dec. 11, 1987.  There was some dubious evidence presented that these events occurred for insurance fraud purposes, but explanations for this evidence emerged after trial.

In 2002, the Federal Ninth District Court overturned Benn’s conviction because of multiple Brady violations, which were failures by the prosecution to turn over exculpatory evidence.  Patrick’s identity was not disclosed to the defense until the day before trial.  The prosecutor had told the defense that it could not disclose his identity because he was in the witness protection program.  However, Patrick was never in such a program.

The prosecution failed to inform the defense of extensive evidence that would have severely undermined Patrick’s credibility as a witness.  One example: a week before trial, Patrick received $150 from detectives in advance payment for a nonexistent videotape that Patrick said would show Benn committing one of the Green River serial killings.  The Court characterized Patrick as “completely unreliable, a liar for hire, [and] ready to perjure himself for whatever advantage he could squeeze out of the system.”  The prosecution also failed to turn over a fire investigator’s report that conclusively stated that the fire in Benn’s trailer was accidental and could not have resulted from arson.  Benn was scheduled for retrial in Sept. 2003.  (Benn v. Lambert)  [7/07]