More than three decades after Catherine Fuller was savagely bludgeoned to death in one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious murders, the legal case appears to be over, with the Supreme Court refusing to grant a new trial. That, though, doesn’t put to rest questions that have been raised over the years about the killing and the possibility that innocent men might have been wrongly convicted.

In a 6-to-2 decision handed down last week, the court determined that while the prosecution withheld information from the defense, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome.

“Too little, too weak, or too distant,” said Justice Stephen Breyer of evidence, suppressed by prosecutors, about another man (later convicted of killing a woman in a manner similar to that in Fuller’s case) being spotted at the crime scene.

Prosecutors, arguing Fuller was the victim of a frenzied group attack on Oct. 1, 1984, by a gang of young people known as the Eighth and H Street Crew, brought charges against 13 people. Of the 10 who went on trial, eight were convicted. Six men remain in prison.

The court’s determination that “it is not reasonably probable that the withheld evidence could have led to a different result at trial” was challenged by Justice Elena Kagan in a powerful dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The undisclosed evidence about a possible alternative perpetrator, Kagan wrote, would have changed the whole tenor of the case. She attacked the notion that the government had, as the court majority suggested, a “slam-dunk” case, noting there was no physical evidence tying any of the defendants to the crime and the “serious credibility deficits” of government eyewitnesses.

It took the jurors in this case more than a week — with dozens of agonized votes — to reach verdicts. So is it reasonable to assume that evidence presenting an alternative theory of the crime with an alternative suspect would not have caused reasonable doubt in one or more jurors? We will never know the answer, and that reinforces the need for reforms that give defense attorneys open access to all evidence collected during the investigation of a crime.

Barring new evidence in the Fuller case (unlikely after all these years), there appears to be no legal recourse for the defendants other than seeking parole, which generally involves an admission of guilt that they have been unwilling to make. The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which led the effort to reopen the case, is studying options.

Editorial by the Washington Post

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