[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1152-1153]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO KIRK NOBEL BLOODSWORTH

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, any one of us can only imagine what it 
would be like to be wrongly arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced 
to death for a crime we did not commit. And whatever we imagined would 
pale by comparison to reality.
  Kirk Nobel Bloodsworth, who I am privileged to call a friend, was the 
victim of such a horrific miscarriage of justice. He served 9 years for 
the rape and murder of a young girl he never met, based on the mistaken 
identification by one of Kirk's neighbors.
  Eyewitness identifications, assumed to be among the best evidence, 
are notoriously unreliable. Case after case demonstrates this. Take the 
massive search currently underway for Christopher Dorner, the former 
Los Angeles police officer suspected in three killings. The police have 
been inundated with numerous false ``sightings.''
  Kirk Bloodsworth is a free man today not because the justice system 
worked. For 9 years it failed miserably, and during that time the real 
killer was free. Rather, he had to prove his innocence thanks to DNA 
evidence, which is not available in most cases. One shudders to think 
of the number of factually innocent people who may be serving long 
sentences for whom exoneration through DNA testing isn't an option.
  A February 5, 2013, article in the New York Times quotes Kirk: ``The 
adversarial system doesn't know who's guilty or who's innocent. The 
millstone doesn't know who's under it.'' That article, entitled ``A 
Death Penalty Fight Comes Home,'' is notable because it describes the 
campaign Kirk is helping to lead to abolish the death penalty in 
Maryland, the State where he was convicted and sent to death row.
  Kirk is an example of someone who was subjected to the basest 
indignities and humiliation, and who then came back to inspire others 
to prevent future unjust convictions. It is the mark of a man of 
extraordinary character and courage, who deserves our praise and 
admiration. I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the article be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013]

                    A Death Penalty Fight Comes Home

                            (By Scott Shane)

       Annapolis, MD--Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, a beefy, crew-cut 
     man whose blue T-shirt read ``Witness to Innocence,'' took 
     the microphone in a church hall here and ran through his 
     story of injustice and redemption one more time. Twenty years 
     ago, he walked out of a Maryland prison, the first inmate in 
     the nation to be sentenced to death and then exonerated by 
     DNA.
       About 60 activists against the death penalty listened with 
     rapt attention, preparing to descend on state legislators to 
     press their case. Maryland appears likely in the next few 
     weeks to join the growing list of states that have abolished 
     capital punishment. Some longtime death penalty opponents say 
     no one in the country has done more to advance that cause 
     than Mr. Bloodsworth. But ending executions in Maryland, the 
     state that once was determined to kill him, would be a 
     personal victory for him.
       Even for proponents of capital punishment, Mr. 
     Bloodsworth's tale is deeply unsettling.

[[Page 1153]]

     In 1984, he was a former Marine with no criminal record who 
     had followed his father's profession as a waterman on the 
     Eastern Shore of Maryland. A woman glimpsed on television a 
     police sketch of the suspect in the rape and murder of a 9-
     year-old girl outside Baltimore. She thought it looked like 
     her neighbor Kirk, and she called the police.
       From there, with the police and prosecutors under intense 
     pressure to solve the crime, it was a short route to trial, 
     conviction and a death sentence for a man whose Dickensian 
     name, after all, seemed to imply guilt.
       ``I was accused of the most brutal murder in Maryland 
     history,'' Mr. Bloodsworth, now 52, told the church audience. 
     ``It took the jury two and a half hours to send me to the gas 
     chamber.''
       Only after nine years in the state's most decrepit and 
     violent prisons did Mr. Bloodsworth, through his own 
     perseverance and some aggressive lawyering, manage to get the 
     still-novel DNA test that finally proved his innocence in 
     1993.
       Even then, prosecutors publicly expressed doubt about his 
     innocence. ``Nobody knew what DNA was then--it was sort of 
     shaman science, a `get out of jail free' card,'' he said in 
     an interview. It took another decade--and, again, Mr. 
     Bloodsworth's own dogged efforts--before officials ran the 
     DNA from the murder scene through a database and identified 
     the real killer, who is now serving a life sentence. He bore 
     little resemblance to the description that the police had 
     compiled from eyewitnesses.
       Mr. Bloodsworth said he kept pursuing the test to clear 
     himself once and for all, but also to find the killer of the 
     girl, Dawn Hamilton, who was found in the woods stripped of 
     clothing from the waist down, her head crushed with a piece 
     of concrete. ``This was a ghastly, horrific thing,'' he said.
       Even after his release, Mr. Bloodsworth could never quite 
     escape the false charges that had threatened him with 
     execution. He tried to return, he said, to ``a normal life,'' 
     but he was haunted by what he had learned about the justice 
     system.
       ``If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody,'' 
     he said. He threw himself into work against capital 
     punishment and for justice reform, first as a volunteer 
     speaker and later as a professional advocate. Last month he 
     began work as the advocacy director for Witness to Innocence, 
     a Philadelphia-based coalition of exonerated death row 
     inmates who push to end capital punishment.
       The movement to end the death penalty has garnered more 
     support from politicians and the public as it has shifted 
     from moral condemnation of capital punishment to a more 
     practical argument: that mistakes by witnesses and the police 
     inevitably mean that innocent people will be executed. While 
     DNA gets the limelight, of 142 prisoners sentenced to death 
     and then exonerated in the last 40 years, just 18 were freed 
     over DNA evidence, according to the Death Penalty Information 
     Center in Washington.
       Use of the death penalty has been steadily declining, and 
     17 states no longer have it on the books, with 5 of them 
     abolishing it since 2007, said Richard C. Dieter, the 
     center's executive director. Executions dropped to 43 last 
     year from 98 in 1999.
       ``These innocence cases are the biggest single factor, 
     because it has spread doubt throughout the system,'' Mr. 
     Dieter said.
       Mr. Bloodsworth, a tireless public speaker who has visited 
     state after state to lobby for repeal, handing out a 2004 
     book on his case, called ``Bloodsworth,'' has used his own 
     experience to promote those doubts. ``I think no single 
     individual has changed as many minds as Kirk,'' said Jane 
     Henderson, the director of Maryland Citizens Against State 
     Executions, a lobbying group. ``He's articulate, patient, and 
     he's got a huge heart.''
       His homespun eloquence has unmistakable appeal, but his own 
     tale is his most powerful argument. Prosecutors and jurors 
     ignored glaring problems with witnesses--two were boys who 
     did not pick Mr. Bloodsworth out of a lineup--and dismissed 
     five alibi witnesses who testified that he was home at the 
     time of the murder.
       ``The adversarial system doesn't know who's guilty or who's 
     innocent,'' Mr. Bloodsworth said. ``The millstone does not 
     know who's under it.''
       At the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, he could stretch 
     out his arms and touch the sides of his cell. He stuffed 
     paper in his ears at night to keep the cockroaches out. His 
     skull was cracked by another inmate who swung a sock stuffed 
     with batteries. He was still locked up when his mother died.
       After his release, he was pardoned and was paid $300,000 in 
     compensation by the state. But even as he worked for death 
     penalty abolition in other states, he became a regular 
     visitor to Annapolis, pressing legislators to learn from his 
     case. ``I'm a walking reminder for them,'' he said.
       Delegate Barbara A. Frush, a Maryland legislator for 19 
     years, said a visit from Mr. Bloodsworth two years ago 
     changed her mind about capital punishment, which she had long 
     favored. ``I sat across the desk from him and looked in his 
     eyes and listened to his story,'' she said. ``It sent shivers 
     down my spine. I thought, I can't take the chance that I 
     might send an innocent man to death.''
       This week, for the first time, he had a private visit with 
     the longtime president of the State Senate, Thomas V. Mike 
     Miller Jr., who has decided to allow a floor vote on the 
     repeal bill. Mr. Bloodsworth left the meeting more optimistic 
     than ever.
       From time to time, he has heard from the people who sent 
     him to prison. A juror got in touch to apologize. One of the 
     two lead homicide detectives sought him out; ``it seemed like 
     he wanted absolution,'' Mr. Bloodsworth said. One of the 
     prosecutors, S. Ann Brobst, who had called him ``a monster'' 
     at trial, insisted on driving to the Eastern Shore to give 
     him in person the news of the DNA hit on the actual murderer.
       At the church hall, he turned from his own story to the 
     prospects for action in Maryland.
       ``What do you smell?'' he bellowed.
       ``Victory!'' the advocates yelled back.
       ``It's time to close the case,'' Mr. Bloodsworth declared, 
     raising his arms in anticipation.

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