The penalty of death should be reserved for the absolutely guilty, the most heinous and irreparable. Yet Alabama and more specifically Birmingham's corrupt machine condemned native son Willie Earl Scott to die by lethal injection for a questionable crime, back then and now, where an act of murder was never close to certain, or proof of any illegality actually having occurred.
Recently Forensics Files investigated so-called DNA evidence in the so-called Latonya Sager murder case—"so-called" because Mr. Scott's DNA would be present since he lived there in the home and did his thing there often and with everyone, according to everyone, while no sign of physical or internal injury was ever detailed or recorded on the body of the deceased, whose own health complications accompanied by parental perils were well documented. Mother Latrice Sager was reported by friends even to often talk of KILLING her own kids, both of whom would end up dying within months of one another. Deaths where two insurance policies were paid out to the mother via the nephew of boyfriend Derek Frazier. SU-SPIC-IOUS.
But staying with the Willie Earl Scott case failures, in its investigation Forensics Files found the DNA sample, in original photos, processing reports and actual collection, to be what's known among the country's foremost DNA analysis examiners and experts as a greatly deteriorated "contact trace smear" not half the size of a single raindrop, which means that not only did the DNA sample, in this case semenal, not come directly from it source (penal being a safe assumption) but it was also degenerated, from either the sly presence of spermicide, which would lend credence to the Dr. Baker theory that the retrieved smear sample likely came from a contraceptive, or from the open elements of first contact, i.e. the den sofa, on which the girl slept — a sofa that so many women friends of Willie Earl Scott claimed to have engaged with him in physical copulation on that the prosecutors apparently thought it a safer strategy to just dispose of outright in order to better their chances for conviction leading up to trial. And what Birmingham wants, it gets. Win at all costs.
A RIGGED GAME
Jefferson County prosecutors, though, went even further in the Willie Earl Scott case, the Birmingham News reported, albeit partially, destroying and withholding evidence then trying Willie Earl Scott before an almost all-white jury, where the only sitting African American confessed first in open court during the selection phase and again in her honor Judge Gloria Bahakel's chambers to being a friend and associate with the stepfather and uncle of the deceased.
A week or so prior the same jury had been subjected to a systematic elimination process by the prosecution that allowed for the disqualification of possible actual peers and comprehending ears while permitting jurors that literally voiced their displeasure for rap music, tattoos, nonconformity, all qualities that then personified Willie Earl Scott in his youth, nicknamed Willie Redd, a tat-face, teenage rock musician and self-proclaimed black Jew who worn his easy distinction like a merit badge.
A 19-year-old inner-city statistic predictably has a tumultuous childhood in late twentieth century Birmingham, Alabama, with no father present. He got into a cycle of trouble beginning at twelve. After being sent to the feared West Jefferson Maximum at age 16 his first time ever in prison and surviving to serve a brief two year stint, Willie Earl Scott returned back to a city and an environment that never actually appreciated his genius, muddled and a little blemished but nevertheless undaunted. In less than two years Willie Earl Scott managed to obtain an apartment in one city and a two-bedroom house in another, and secured through his grandmother and sister the purchase of his dream cars, a Lexus ES400 1997 Edition and a 1986 Soviet-era Beemer Classic, a collector's number, before going on to attempt to chart a course of a career in the cutthroat music industry in New Orleans, and he was succeeding. How is this type of tenacity not something in someone a healthy society cheer and root for? No, while partying out on the town one night, Willie's awakened the next morning by police in the bed of a female suitor (a 17-year-old stripper no less who's robbed him of close to $1k) and who contends rape, and a halfbaked case for capital murder is not long coming.
Maybe somewhere in another life or this one, Willie Earl Scott did a misdeed and deserved to be punished, deserved to go to prison. But a system and society that condemns a man to perish, that doesn't take seriously into account an unclear cause of death and medical qualifiers, or a rape kit that test negative and a victim who today recalls differently than prosecutors, is grievously imbalanced and unjust.
During Willie Earl Scott's 23 years behind bars awaiting execution, both the alleged rape victim Landris Wright and potential Latonya Sager murder suspect Albert Hawkins (they call the guy "Poison KillerB," for Christ's sake) were imprisoned for serious crimes against humanity, the latter for home invasion and murdering an unarmed boy — and both were released in less than a decade. While Willie Earl Scott, confined in darkness, has spent the years doing God's work. I'm sorry but there is simply no justice or sense of fairness in that disparity.
