|
By B John Burns
January 8, 2010
This week brought one of the final chapters in the saga of Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee. We all know the story. Two days after his 19th birthday, Mr. Harrington was sentenced, along with Mr. McGhee, to life in prison without parole for a 1977 murder of a retired police officer, committed at a time when Mr. Harrington was captain of his high school football team in Omaha, and being recruited for a possible athletic scholarship to Yale.
Nearly all of Mr. Harrington’s avenues for relief had run dry (like I say, you know this story), but Mr. Harrington’s family never gave up on him. When they protested his innocence to Anne Danaher in the parking lot of the Iowa State Penitentiary, where she was the prison barber, she listened. She invested her own money and her own time into digging up police reports and other records relating to the 1977 prosecution. From them, Ms. Danaher was able to ascertain that the defendants’ attorneys were not provided with highly exculpatory evidence that pointed directly towards another suspect, and that would have laid waste to the credibility of the state’s star witness against them.
Ms. Danaher brought this information to Waterloo attorney Mary Kennedy who initiated a very late action for postconviction relief. In 2003, when all reasonable hope had dissipated that Mr. Harrington or Mr. McGhee would ever leave the Iowa prison system with a pulse, the Iowa Supreme Court stepped up and did the right thing. After twenty five years in prison.
You know the story. We talked about it at all of our 2003 seminars. The Harrington story took up forty minutes of my hour-long caselaw updates that year. It took the whole hour when Anne Danaher, the prison barber, showed up at the Iowa Trial Lawyers Association seminar in Iowa City (I believe) to tell the story from her perspective. That was a good day. (Actually, Ms. Danaher told me that Terry Harrington heard I was talking about his case in my updates, and planned to come see it himself, but ultimately couldn’t make the trip).
Since then, the question has been what remedy our system owes to Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee. There are measurable hurdles of immunity in the paths of defendants who wish to recover damages from the government for convictions wrongly obtained. Prosecutors have absolute immunity from suit when exercising their prosecutorial functions. Law enforcement officers have limited immunity. Does the absolute immunity extend to prosecutors who hide exculpatory evidence, and allow potentially innocent defendants to go to prison for a quarter century?
I have to say, I haven’t followed the civil case closely enough to know the exact nature of the issues being litigated, but we know the case was argued before the United States Supreme Court early this term.
And we know that, earlier this week, the parties terminated the Supreme Court proceeding and reached a settlement agreement. Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee will split $12 million in damages.
That seems like a lot of money. It IS a lot of money. If it’s handled well, neither Mr. Harrington nor Mr. McGhee (or any of their issue, as the lawyers say) will ever have to worry about money again. Mrs. Burns and I could live pretty comfortably on $12 million, provided the relatives didn’t find out we had it.
But the question that keeps surfacing in comments I’ve heard about the settlement is a good one. Is it worth it? Does $12 million compensate two men for the loss of their youth, and the loss of what arguably would be their best years? Does $12 million compensate them for the nastiness of twenty five years in prison?
Can any of us imagine, I thought to myself as I was writing this, what it would be like to be trapped for twenty five years in a prison, with no reasonable hope of release, watching all the best years of your life fall behind you?
Then I looked up on the wall in front of me, at my Certificate of Admission to the Iowa Bar. It’s dated January 25, 1985.
So ask me in 19 days.
 |
