Location

Defendant(s)

Date of Alleged Crime

Santiago Ventura Morales was convicted of murdering Ramiro Lopez Fidel, a fellow farm worker.  Fidel had been stabbed twice in the chest and left to die in a strawberry field near Sandy.  The conviction was due to the prosecution's use of fabricated evidence, including the use of a fake murder weapon.  Only one witness, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, testified that Morales was the killer. The witness, Epifanio Bautista Lopez, initially testified that he saw nothing, but changed his testimony after he was taken into the district attorney's office during a recess.  Under cross-examination, Lopez said that he was afraid of what might happen to him if he did not testify the way the prosecutor wanted him to testify.

Several days after the trial, four jurors, Patricia Lee, Glorya Oppitz, David Ralls, and Sherien Jaeger, told the defense co-counsel, Lane Borg, that they had changed their minds about their jury votes and asked if they could do anything about it.  They were told that a verdict cannot be thrown out simply because jurors change their minds.  Three of these jurors formed a support group for Morales.  They visited him in jail, sent him money, and wrote letters to the parole board asking for his release.

Morales's defense was hampered because Morales, a Mexican immigrant, did not speak English or Spanish, but spoke Mixtec, an indigenous language.  The judge assigned him a Spanish interpreter.  The interpreter tried to tell the judge that he could not communicate with Morales, but the judge refused to accept the idea that a Mexican defendant could not speak Spanish.  Portland Oregonian newspaper columnist Phil Stanford wrote many columns outlining Morales's innocence.  The Oregon Attorney General opposed Morales's petition for relief on the grounds that his innocence was not a legal basis to overturn his conviction and release him.  Four years after Morales's conviction, his lawyer established that another farm worker, Herminio Luna Hernandez, was the actual killer and Morales was released.  (NY Times)  [5/08]

John Arthur Pender was convicted of the murder of Mrs. Daisy Wehrman and her four-year-old son, Harold.  The murders happened at a rural hamlet known as Schnitzerville, which was five or six miles west of Scappoose, OR.  Suspicion may have been placed on Pender by a neighbor, G. H. Sierkes, who had disputes with Pender and whose wife had reported the murders.  Evidence indicated the Sierkes family had a good idea who the actual culprit was.  The jury at Pender's first trial could not agree on a verdict, but he was convicted at his second trial.  The evidence against him consisted of speculation about how he could have committed the murder.  Pender was initially sentenced to death.

The Sierkes had a son, John G. H. Sierkes, age 20 at the time of the murders, who was a mental defective with homicidal tendencies. He had made attempts to kill his father and different members of his family when he was thwarted or angry.  John Sierkes later confessed to the murders, then repudiated his confession after his family threatened to disown him.  He then reconfessed and there is much evidence to indicate that he did, in fact, commit the murders.  Oregon Governor Olcott pardoned Pender in 1920.  (Why Some Men Kill or Murder Mysteries Revealed) (MOJIPCC) [8/09]

David Lee Simmons was charged with four counts of felony third-degree rape and two counts of felony sodomy for having consensual sex with his girlfriend dating back to Sept. 2005 when he was 17 and she was 14.  Under a plea deal, Simmons pled guilty to two counts of the charges rather than risk many years in prison if convicted by a jury on all counts.  He served 30 days in jail.

However, James Greer, the foreman of the grand jury that was asked to indict Simmons, happened to read a newspaper account of the plea deal.  Since the grand jury specifically declined to indict Simmons, Greer was shocked and he confronted prosecutor Steven Leriche, who in turn contacted Simmons's defense attorney.  The prosecutor may have mistakenly failed to read Simmons's paperwork and thought he was indicted.  However, since the refusal to indict individuals are rare events which receive notice, some observers do not believe it likely the prosecutor made this mistake.  Instead they believe he simply proceeded as though Simmons was indicted.  Simmons's defense attorney failed to catch this error.  In Oct. 2006, Simmons's convictions were vacated.  (Popehat) (FJDB)  [8/09]

Karlyn Eklof was convicted of the murder of James Salmu.  After eight to ten hours of daily interrogation for nine days, Eklof recited on videotape a police invented scenario in which she stabbed Salmu with a plastic knife.  Eklof was prosecuted for Salmu's murder based on this “confession.”  Following Eklof's indictment, Salmu's body was found.  At trial, testimony was presented indicating that Salmu had been stabbed.  The prosecution then presented Eklof's confession, which appeared to agree with the cause of death as she confessed to stabbing Salmu.  The prosecution also presented the testimony of two witnesses who made incriminatory statements against Eklof.

On appeal it was discovered that DA Fred Hugi had engaged in multiple Brady violations involving the withholding of exculpatory evidence.  Salmu's cause of death was bullet wounds and there was no evidence that he had been stabbed.  It was also not revealed that the two witnesses who testified did so in order to avoid prosecution themselves.  One of these witnesses was under indictment for molesting his daughter, and the DA went to extraordinary efforts to conceal this fact.  As of 2007, Eklof is using the Brady violations to appeal her conviction.  Eklof's complete story is written in Improper Submission: Records of a Wrongful Conviction by Erma Armstrong.  (JD35 p3)  [7/07]

(Federal Case)  On March 11, 2004, a number of bombs were detonated on trains in Madrid, Spain, which killed 191 people and injured about 2000 others, including American citizens.  A bag containing detonation caps was found outside a train station through which all the bombed trains had left or had passed through.  On March 17, digital images of fingerprints found on the bag were transmitted to the FBI and run through their AFIS database of fingerprints.  When latent print #17 was run, the database produced 20 possible matches.  FBI Senior Print Examiner Terry Green then manually compared the potential matches and found a 100% match with the fourth ranked print on the AFIS list.  The FBI has long claimed that fingerprint identification is infallible. A top FBI fingerprint official had testified to a “zero error rate.”

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William Branson was convicted of the murder of William Booth.  It was alleged that Branson, 23, was improperly intimate with Mrs. Anna Booth, 32, the victim's wife.  Branson had been seen on numerous occasions some months before the murder talking to Mrs. Booth as she stood on the front porch of her house in Willamina while he was on the sidewalk outside of her yard.  There were several witnesses who claimed they saw Branson and Mrs. Booth going in the direction of the murder location separately (not together) before the time of the murder.

The victim was killed with .38 caliber gun and Branson had borrowed a .38 caliber gun from his uncle for a fishing trip two months before the murder.  Branson said the gun later went missing from his house along with some jewelry.  Witnesses testified the killer wore a black or dark blue jersey with a black hat, while evidence indicated Branson wore a red sweater and no hat on the day of the murder.  The soil near the victim's body showed the killer wore hob-nailed shoes while Branson reportedly wore smooth shoes.

In May 1917, another man, William Riggin, gave a confession to the crime, a confession that was later fully corroborated.  In 1920, Oregon Governor Olcott granted Branson an unconditional pardon.  (Why Some Men Kill or Murder Mysteries Revealed) (MOJIPCC) [8/09]