STORY: "Revenge killing: Race and the death penalty in a Louisiana parish," by Rachel Aviv, published by the New Yorker in the July 6, 2015 issue; (Rachel Aviv joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2013. She has written about criminal justice, psychiatry, education, foster care, and homelessness, among other subjects. In 2010, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her writing on mental health was awarded a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship, an Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and an American Psychoanalytic Association Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her writing is collected in “The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010” and “The Best American Science Writing 2012.”)
GIST: "A week after his son turned one, Rodricus Crawford woke up a few minutes before 7 A.M. on the left side of his bed. His son was sleeping on the right side, facing the door. Crawford, who was twenty-three, reached over to wake him up, but the baby didn’t move. He put his ear on his son’s stomach and then began yelling for his mother. “Look at the baby!” he shouted..........When detectives interviewed Lott, she was reticent and leaden. In emotional situations, she was known to retreat by staring at her phone. “Have you ever seen him lose his cool?” they asked her, referring to Crawford. “No, sir,” she said. “Until today.” “What happened today?” “He was just upset,” she said. She told the officers that Roderius “had a little cold,” so she’d stopped by Crawford’s house the day before to drop off a nasal aspirator. While she was there, Crawford had told her about the baby’s fall, and she’d looked at his injuries. “There was a bruise right there,” she said, pointing above her right eye. “And his mouth—he had bust his lip. But he was still happy and everything.” That morning, a forensic pathologist performed an autopsy and determined that the bruises on Roderius’s lips were the marks of smothering. Later, when he reviewed slides of Roderius’s lung tissue, he discovered that the baby also had pneumonia, but he decided that the illness was a coincidence. The detectives interviewed Crawford for the second time that day, and told him that the pathologist had found bruises on the baby’s bottom, indicating that he had suffered from “chronic child abuse.” “Chronic child abuse,” Crawford repeated, as if testing a new phrase. “I don’t know if he’s ever been beaten at his mom’s house, but at my house he’s never been beaten by me,” he said. “He’s a baby. He’s a one-year-old. What could he do to me to make me beat him?” “We see it all the time,” the detective said. “We can’t answer that.” “I told you—he fell. That’s the only thing that ever happened to him. He fell in the bathroom. But me beating him? No!” Then the detective said, “There are certain fluids in your one-year-old son’s lungs that tell us that he was suffocated before he died.” “He was suffocated?” Crawford said. “What do you mean by suffocated? Like somebody held him down?” “The cause of death is asphyxiation with acute suffocation.” “No. When I woke up this morning—I’ll tell you again, sir—when I woke up this morning . . .” His voice began wavering, and he trailed off. “That’s too much,” he said. “Did you wake up on top of your son?” “No, sir. No, sir!” “If that’s what happened, that’s what you need to say. It’s important.” “I know it’s important. I’m telling you I didn’t wake up on my son. I didn’t wake up suffocating him—nothing. That’s some real talk.” The autopsy report was sent to the office of Dale Cox, the first assistant district attorney of Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport. After reading the police reports, he decided to seek the death penalty. Cox told me that in the past forty years he had never prosecuted a man between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six who grew up in a nuclear family. “Not one,” he said. He believes that the “destruction of the nuclear family and a tremendously high illegitimate birth rate” have brought about an “epidemic of child-killings” in the parish. At the time that he learned of Crawford’s case, he was prosecuting another young black man accused of killing his infant. After the man was sentenced to life without parole, rather than death, Cox told a local TV station, “I take it as a failure that I was unable to convince the jury to kill him.”".........The week before Crawford’s trial, in November, 2013, Gold asked Cox to dismiss the case. He had just received a report from his medical expert, Daniel Spitz, a forensic pathologist from Michigan, who co-authored a pathology textbook that is widely used in medical schools. Spitz found that Roderius’s blood had tested positive for sepsis, and he concluded that he had died of pneumonia. Spitz told me that after reviewing the case he thought that there “wasn’t enough evidence to even put this before a jury. You didn’t have anybody who thought this guy committed murder except for one pathologist who decided that it was homicide on what seemed like a whim.” Cox told me that the new medical report “gave me pause.” But after meeting again with the first pathologist, James Traylor, he felt confident about the theory of smothering. In court, Traylor testified as cross-sections of the baby’s bruised bottom were displayed for the jury. Traylor said that the baby’s pneumonia couldn’t have been severe, because family members hadn’t reported a fever or rapid heartbeat. “I’m the guy that did the autopsy,” Traylor told the jury. “There is no one else that can speak for the victim other than myself.” Traylor said that his finding of suffocation was based entirely on the bruises on Roderius’s lips, but he never sampled the tissue to date the injury, a basic test that would have revealed whether the bruises came from the earlier fall in the bathroom, an explanation that he ignored. He misstated medical science, telling the jury that Roderius’s brain had swelled as a result of suffocation. Swelling does not occur in cases of smothering, because the person dies rapidly, and the brain can’t swell if blood has stopped circulating. The brain can swell, though, in cases of pneumonia with sepsis. When Spitz testified, he explained that sepsis in young children can be fatal within a few hours, with early symptoms passing unnoticed. But his testimony was eclipsed by a cross-examination that lasted twice as long as the direct testimony. Cox interrogated him about a mistake he’d made in an autopsy in Michigan, where he had overlooked a bullet wound in a decomposed body. “You are overextended,” Cox told him. “You are overworked.” The judge later wrote of Spitz that “any veracity that he had was destroyed.” Crawford’s mother, Abbie, felt uneasy as soon as the jury, composed of nine white people and three black ones, returned to the courtroom. “All I remember hearing is ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty,’ ” she told me. “Rodricus looked at me, and I looked at him, and I just tried to hold it all in.”........In April, Crawford’s lawyers filed their first appeal with the Louisiana Supreme Court, which almost never overturns a verdict in capital cases. The brief described the “racial and geographic arbitrariness of the death penalty in Louisiana—confined predominantly to African-American men prosecuted in Caddo Parish”—and said that “Crawford’s fate depended far more on where he was prosecuted than his ultimate moral culpability.” The Crawfords are so upbeat about each brief submitted to the court that their lawyers have to discourage them from unrealistic expectations. Crawford says that when he is free he intends to get married and to move away from Mooretown. “Rodricus doesn’t want to be part of the same old world that he was in,” Abbie Crawford said. “He tells me, ‘Keep praying, Mama, because the Father is dealing with us. The Father is getting us ready. I know he’s getting me ready to be a young man.’ ”
The entire article can be found at:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
