Douglas Warney - False Confession / Officer Misconduct

Warney, Douglas; murder; NRE: false confession, false/misleading forensic evidence, police officer misconduct, misconduct that is not withholding evidence, misconduct in interrogation of exoneree

Suggestibility issues

N4 [96] "In 1997, [Warney] was convicted of murder based upon self-incriminating statements made by [Warney], a mentally retarded man suffering from serious physical and mental disabilities at the time of his interrogation and arrest. Failure by police and prosecutors to further investigate and analyze forensic evidence that was inconsistent with [Warney's] alleged confession. More sophisticated DNA testing was unavailable at the time of trial. During the post-conviction phase, the prosecutors originally opposed and the court denied a defense motion for more advanced DNA testing. It is noteworthy that those very tests (conducted voluntarily by the [DA's] office along with a post-conviction investigation) eventually led to the exoneration."

C10 [484] "Douglas Warney was convicted in 1997 of killing William Beason, a civil rights activist, in large part based of a confession he gave which was 'riddled with errors.' Once more sophisticated DNA testing became available, Warney, in 2004, petitioned the court for access to post-conviction DNA testing. The [DA's] Office opposed the testing, stating 'DNA results now would add nothing to what we already know or what the jury knew at the time of the trial,'* and the court [Harold L. Galloway] denied Warney's motion and rejected claims that someone else could have committed the crimes as 'too speculative.'"**

[* The first part of this statement is false, and the second is meaningless. This was all just bluster to try to protect a (wrongful) conviction.]

[** This, too, is some combination of false and meaningless: How is it ever 'too speculative' to demand that all possible forensic tests be performed in order to establish the true perpetrator of a given crime? The court above was apparently just as anxious to protect this wrongful conviction as the prosecutor.]

"Unbeknownst to [Warney], the [DA's] Office decided to conduct testing on the samples the next year, based on the theory that Warney must have had an accomplice, and thus a potential murderer was still walking the streets..."

[Note that this puts quite a different light on the DA's motivations for conducting DNA testing than was implied by the NYS Task Force on Wrongful Convictions (N4) report cited above, which wrote: 'It is noteworthy that those very tests (conducted voluntarily by the [DA's] Office...) eventually led to exoneration.' Yes, the DA's office 'voluntarily' had these tests conducted. But it did not do so out of an interest in ascertaining whether Warney was wrongfully convicted, but rather, because it believed that another person may have also been involved in this crime. Thus, the Task Force was putting an unwarrantedly positive 'spin' on the DA's motives here.]

L23 [768] "According to police investigators, Warney's confession contained numerous nonpublic facts that seemingly corroborated his guilt...[T]hese included:

- that the victim was wearing a nightshirt; - that the victim was cooking chicken; - that the victim was missing money from his wallet; - that the murder weapon was a knife with an approximately twelve-inch serrated blade; - that the knife had been kept in the kitchen; - that the victim was stabbed multiple times; - that the victim owned a pinky ring and a particular necklace; - that a tissue used as a bandage was covered with blood; and that - there was a pornographic tape in the victim's television.

"The investigator who interrogated Warney emphatically denied feeding Warney crime facts or suggesting answers to him during the unrecorded interrogation.* The prosecutor who successfully convicted Warney argued to the jury that the accuracy of Warney's confession was corroborated by his detailed knowledge of these nonpublic crime facts. Although the state had no other evidence than the confession from the unrecorded interrogation, Warney was convicted...It would be almost a decade before DNA testing established his innocence, and he was fully exonerated."

[* Nickel's interrogation was not recorded either.]

[750:731]; 4th Dept. 11/15/02; affirmed

"The verdict is not against the weight of the evidence...[Warney] confessed to the crime and gave accurate descriptions of many details of the crime scene."

[How does the phrase 'accurate description of many details' square with the characterization that Warney's confession was 'riddled with errors'? (In any event, as shown above, the details he did get right were fed to him by the police.)]

16 N.Y.S.3d 428; Court of Appeals 3/31/11; civil suit

[Warney spent more than nine years in prison for a murder he did not commit. IQ of 68, 8th-grade dropout. DNA and fingerprint match to Eldred Johnson, who stated that he acted alone. Even by trial time, none of the tested blood evidence matched Warney or victim. (Just blood typing available at the time.)]

from Records and Briefs:

[13] [DA Michael C. Green; ADAs Larry Bernstein and Wendy Evans Lehman.]

"William Beason was found stabbed to death in his apartment on January 3, 1996...Douglas Warney, who had full-blown AIDS, was arrested three days later on the basis of a false confession elicited by the Rochester police..."

"Some blood found at the scene -- on a blue towel and tissue found in the bathroom -- was determined not to come from the victim or Mr. Warney, but the testing conducted on it -- which predated DNA technology -- could not identify its source. Forensic analysis of the other evidence -- including blood collected from under the victim's fingernails and a fingerprint found on a videotape box in the victim's room -- was inconclusive."

[53] [Dets. Evelyn Beaudrault, John Gropp ]

[54] "Rather than properly investigating the crime to find the true perpetrator... Beaudrault and Gropp fabricated false inculpatory evidence against an innocent man, by falsifying a typewritten statement that they attributed completely to Mr. Warney, by feeding Mr. Warney non-public details about the crime that only the police and the perpetrator could have known, and by falsely claiming that the non-public details originated with Mr. Warney.

"The...officers lied to the prosecution and defense counsel to conceal the unconstitutional tactics they employed to secure the so-called 'confession,' thereby suppressing the fact that they had falsified statements attributed to Mr. Warney...At the preliminary hearing and trial... Beaudrault and Gropp provided false, perjurious testimony, consistent with their pretrial reports and communications with prosecutors, that Mr. Warney, voluntarily and without being fed facts, gave details of how he committed the crime, including facts that only the perpetrator or the police would know."

"To create corroborative evidence to bolster the so-called 'confession'... Robert Garland, an evidence technician with the RPD [Rochester Police Department], falsely claimed that a partial fingerprint lifted from the murder weapon was inconsistent with the victim's print and consistent with Mr. Warney's print when, in fact, Mr. Warney was excluded or at least could not be included as a possible source of the print. Garland concealed the true, exculpatory nature of the fingerprint evidence from the prosecution and defense counsel and provided false, perjurious testimony at trial concerning the fingerprint evidence."

"In addition...Stephen Edgett, another RPD evidence technician, determined that at least one print from a videotape box found at the scene of the murder belonged to an unidentified source -- meaning that it belonged to neither the victim nor Mr. Warney. Yet, neither Edgett nor the other...officers conducted any investigation to determine the source of the fingerprint."

"It is now known that the source of the fingerprint is the real perpetrator, Eldred Johnson, an individual who had a history of committing violent acts and slaying innocent people. In fact, just two weeks prior to the Beason murder, Johnson murdered his landlord's wife and almost killed his landlord by repeatedly stabbing them. While Beason was not arrested for those crimes until over two years later, he had been arrested and convicted for numerous crimes in the State of New York, including violent felonies, prior to the Beason murder. Thus, Johnson's fingerprints were in the statewide fingerprint database and accessible to the...officers for comparison with the unidentified print at the time of Mr. Warney's wrongful arrest. Because the...officers failed to investigate this obvious lead, Johnson remained free and subsequently attempted to kill two other individuals by slashing their throats. Had the...officers run the unidentified print through the statewide database, they would have identified and located Johnson to prevent him from brutalizing other innocent people."

"The unconstitutional and tortious acts of the...officers were not isolated incidents. Rather, these acts were consistent with the custom, policy, and practice of the Rochester Police Department to condone, encourage, and/or facilitate the use of coercive tactics against witnesses and suspects, the fabrication of evidence, the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence, the failure to properly investigate serious crimes, and the failure to adequately train and supervise officers in critical law enforcement responsibilities."

[Offcrs. Sandra Adams and Thomas Jones also involved in case.]

[57] "On the morning of January 3, 1996, Michael Lee called the police to report that his roommate William Beason was missing. RPD officers reported to the Lee/Beason residence...With the aid of the Fire Department, RPD officers forced open the door to Beason's bedroom suite and found Beason's body on his bed, lying on his back, with numerous stab wounds to his neck and chest. There was a large quantity of blood on and around his body, and the suite appeared to be ransacked, with papers and clothing strewn about. Two pornographic tapes were found on the bedroom floor and one in the VCR."

"RPD evidence technicians processed the crime scene, finding and collecting a bloodstained knife, a bloody towel, and bloody tissue from the bathroom. They also lifted fingerprints from the crime scene, including six prints from one of the videotape boxes found in Beason's bedroom suite and one partial print obtained from the murder weapon."

"Lee last saw Beason on the morning of Sunday, December 31st, right before Lee left on a trip to Toronto. He told police that he returned from Toronto on Tuesday, January 2, 1996 and noticed that Beason's car was in the garage, though Beason should have gone to work that day and he always drove to work. When Lee went into the house, he noticed that Beason was not there and that, among other things, the window in the kitchen was left open and snow from a weekend storm had accumulated by it. Lee made several unsuccessful attempts to reach Beason on his cell phone that day. On the next day, January 3, 1996, Lee called Beason's workplace and was told that Beason was not there. Lee then noticed that a crockpot in the kitchen had been left on with chicken cooking inside. At this point, Lee decided to call the police.

"Based on an autopsy conducted on January 4, 1996, the medical examiner determined that Beason had been stabbed nineteen times in the neck and chest and died as a result of the stab wounds. The wounds were found to be consistent with the bloody knife recovered in Beason's bedroom. The medical examiner also found defensive wounds on Beason's left hand and, as a result, clippings of his fingernail were collected. It became readily apparent to the police that Beason died after a violent struggle and that the perpetrator was cut during the attack and went into the bathroom to clean blood off himself with the tissue and towel recovered by the police. The biological evidence recovered during the autopsy and the blood evidence from the scene were submitted to the Monroe County Public Safety Laboratory for analysis."

"On January 4, 1996, after the news of Beason's murder was widely reported in the press, Mr. Warney called the RPD in reference to the murder. Mr. Warney -- who has an IQ of 68, was in special education until he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and was heavily medicated for full-blown AIDS -- was severely mentally impaired at the time he called the RPD. In fact, just days prior to the Beason murder, Mr. Warney had been hospitalized in a Rochester psychiatric facility for making crank calls to the police."

"Mr. Warney had a passing acquaintance with Mr. Beason prior to his death. Mr. Beason had previously met Mr. Warney and had hired Mr. Warney to clean his house and shovel snow from the driveway in front of his home. The last time Mr. Warney was at Beason's house was to shovel snow in the winter of 1994, and the last time Mr. Warney saw Mr. Beason was at the Monroe Avenue Pub after the Fourth of July fireworks in 1995."

"Prior to January 4, 1996, officers at the RPD knew of Mr. Warney because of his crank calls to the police in December 1995 and also because he had called the police on a prior occasion about drug activity in his apartment building."

"On the evening of January 4, 1996...Officer Sandra Adams, who previously responded to Mr. Warney's complaints about drug activity in the building, went to his apartment in response to Mr. Warney's call to the police."

"Mr. Warney informed Adams that he was concerned that his name was brought up in connection with the murder of a man named William on Chili Avenue. In response, Adams left her card and told Mr. Warney that he would be contacted by an investigator."

[58] "After eventualy speaking with Mr. Warney...Adams preparted a report, which stated that Mr. Warney implicated his cousin Brian Szymkowski in a homicide on Chili Avenue involving a man named William."

"On January 6, 1996, Gropp and Beaudrault arranged a meeting with Mr. Warney. They picked him up at his apartment at approximately 10:45 a.m. and brought him to the police station, where they placed him in a small office."

"Almost immediately, Gropp, in the presence of Beaudrault, began employing escalating coercive tactics to force Mr. Warney to make statements or admissions concerning the murder. Gropp began to verbally abuse Mr. Warney and threaten him, both physically and otherwise, in order to force him to admit that he committed the murder.

"In response to Gropp's intensified interrogation tactics, Mr. Warney requested an attorney, but Gropp and Beaudrault rejected Mr. Warney's request, stating that he did not need an attorney because they were simply investigating the crime."

"Neither Gropp, Beaudrault, or anyone else ever informed Mr. Warney of his Miranda rights* at any point during the interrogation."

[* This was also true of Nickel. ]

"Despite denying Mr. Warney's request for an attorney and despite the increasingly threatening atmosphere to which [he] was being subjected, Mr. Warney denied knowing anything about the crime."

"After...constant and repeated threats, Mr. Warney yielded to [their] coercive tactics and provided at least four different versions of events. The first...implicated Szymkowski and conformed to the facts Mr. Warney allegedly reported to Adams two days before. According to the second statement, however...he joined Szymkowski inside Beason's home. In the third...Mr. Warney's story evolved into an admission of greater culpability, as he stated that he and Szymkowski stabbed Beason together. By the fourth and final version of events, reflected in a typewritten statement created by Beaudrault and Gropp, Szymkowski was no longer present during the crime, and Mr. Warney falsely confessed that he acted alone in murdering Beason."

[59] [A second, even more detailed 'statement' was elicited later that same day.]

"The...officers did investigate Szymkowski and determined that he could not have participated in the crime because he was at a secured facility during the time in question and, thus, could not have left."

[60] "In the typewritten 'confession,' Mr. Warney purportedly stated that he stabbed Beason in the downstairs kitchen, but Beason was in fact attacked and killed in his upstairs bedroom...Mr. Warney also allegedly stated that he drove his brother's Chevrolet to Beason's home, yet his brother had not owned a Chevrolet in years and did not even own a car at the time of the murder...The...officers also attributed to Mr. Warney the admission that he cut his finger and bled at the scene of the crime -- an admission that was central to the police theory of the crime since they recovered a bloody tissue and towel in the bathroom, which suggested that the perpetrator used these items to wipe his wounds. But when Mr. Warney's hands were inspected and photographed on January 6, 1996 -- only days after the murder occurred -- he had no cuts or scratches, and when post-arrest blood group and enzyme testing was conducted on the tissue and towel, it excluded him and the victim as the source of the blood."

[62] [ADA Richard Keenan made closing argument.]

"[At trial,] the defense presented evidence from Thomas Rodwell, the County's serologist, who stated that enzyme testing excluded both the victim and Mr. Warney as the source of the blood found on the blue towel left in the [63] bathroom."

from NRE synopsis (by Maurice Possley):

"During 12 hours of police interrogation, Warney gave varying accounts."

"Warney's confession...contained numerous inconsistencies. Szymkowski was in a medical facility at the time of the murder. Warney said he killed Beason in the kitchen, although evidence showed the murder occurred in the bedroom. He said he tossed his bloody clothes in a garbage can, but the can -- which had not been picked up -- had no bloody clothes. Warner was no stranger to police. A few days before Beason's murder, police took Warney to a psychiatric hospital after he made dozens of false calls reporting fires and car accidents and ordering pizzas. He had checked out after one day."

"When prosecutors interviewed him, [Eldred] Johnson admitted that he had acted alone in killing Beason and that he did not know Warney.

"On May 16, 2006, Warney's conviction was vacated and he was released from prison.

"Warney filed a claim with the New York Court of Claims that was settled for $400,000. As part of Warney's civil suit against the city, Ron Smith & Associates reviewed the print on the knife and concluded that Warney could be excluded as its source based on an 'absence of feature correlation.' Smith opined that Garland had tried to 'bolster the fingerprint evidence in the eyes of the jury.'

"In 2011, Warney settled a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Rochester for $3.75 million."

[All emhases added unless otherwise noted.]