Sixteen years after a troubling investigation and trial resulted in a sentence of death for Reginald Clemons, the Missouri Supreme Court, acting in response to a writ of habeas corpus filed by STB, has invoked a rarely-used procedure to appoint a special master to independently assess the proportionality of Reggie's sentence and take evidence never before considered by any single court. The proceedings before the special master will include an 8-month discovery and briefing period, culminating in a hearing on May 10, 2010 in St. Louis. The special master will then make findings of fact and conclusions of law, which the Missouri Supreme Court will ultimately either accept or deny.
This development represents a surprising and important turn of events in Reggie's case. Since 1995, STB has represented Reggie on his appeal from a 1993 first-degree murder conviction that was riddled with injustices. Reggie was denied effective assistance of counsel at every stage of the prosecution by incompetent lawyers. One of the lawyers abandoned the case and the other failed to interview a single witness prior to trial, did not read the police reports, and was so ill-prepared that he asked Reggie’s mother, who had no legal training whatsoever, to prepare written questions for him to ask witnesses. Reggie's case also suffered from misconduct by a prosecutor who has been criticized throughout his career by both federal and state courts for unethical and unprofessional conduct and who was found guilty of criminal contempt by the trial judge in this case. Reggie's conviction, which was based on a theory of accomplice liability, was obtained through the weak testimony of two highly questionable witnesses (one initially confessed to the murders and the other pled guilty and received a reduced sentence for testifying), and the introduction of a statement Reggie made to police officers after having been beaten for five hours (a statement that implicated him in crimes preceding the murders, but not the murders themselves). Adding to the injustice, the co-defendant whom the State itself contended was the one responsible for the victims' deaths was sentenced to life in prison, while Reggie, whom the State conceded neither planned nor committed the murders, sits on death row. These problems and others later led one of the jurors from Reggie’s trial to swear under oath that she would not have voted to impose the death penalty if she had been fully apprised of the facts.
The hearing before the special master will allow Reggie to raise many of these important issues, several of which have never been considered by any court because they were not adequately preserved by Reggie's trial counsel. Reggie had been scheduled to be executed on June 17, 2009.
The STB team includes Josh Levine, Gabriel Torres, Kimberly Hamm, Allyson Rothberg, Rebecca Mermelstein, Donald Conklin, Thomas Ling, Meredith Duffy and paralegals Stephanie Crosskey and Ashley Lohr.