PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 5 - In the summer of 1986, two women who did not know each other were raped in the same housing complex in King of
Prussia, a suburb of Philadelphia.
In May 1987, Bruce Godschalk, 26, who had been working for a landscaper, was convicted of both rapes, largely on the basis of a confession to detectives that he recanted long before his trial. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Mr. Godschalk fought for seven years for DNA testing, with Montgomery County prosecutors battling against him and state judges backing the prosecutors, said Mr. Godschalk's lawyer, Peter Neufeld, of the Innocence Project of the Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Recent tests by two laboratories hired by the prosecution and the defense came up with the same results: both rapes were committed by the same man and that man was not Bruce Godschalk.
Even so, the Montgomery County district attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., whose office convicted Mr. Godschalk, has refused to let Mr. Godschalk out of prison, saying he believes that Mr. Godschalk is guilty and that the DNA testing is flawed. Asked what scientific basis he had for concluding that the testing was flawed, Mr. Castor said in an interview today: "I have no scientific basis. I know because I trust my detective and my tape-recorded confession. Therefore the results must be flawed until someone proves to me otherwise." Mr. Castor said he wanted more time to review the results, and that if he concluded Mr. Godschalk was innocent, he would release him.
The case highlights the difficulty of people in prison in obtaining DNA tests. Last August a federal district judge in Philadelphia, Charles R. Weiner, found that Mr. Godschalk had a constitutional right to post- conviction DNA testing, and ordered Mr. Castor to release the evidence for testing. (Last week, faced with a similar question in a Virginia rape, an appeals court came to the opposite conclusion, overturning a decision by a district judge who had ordered testing for an inmate.)
Mr. Castor then retained the Cellmark Diagnostics Laboratory in Maryland. Mr. Neufeld said Cellmark divided the evidence, retaining half of it to test, and sending half of it to Dr. Edward Blake, a forensics expert retained by the defense.
DNA testing has freed more than 100 wrongfully convicted people in the last decade, with about a fifth of those convictions resulting from false confessions. Mr. Godschalk's only prior arrest record was for possession of four grams of marijuana and driving while impaired, said David Rudovsky, a Philadelphia lawyer who is Mr. Godschalk's co-counsel. His photo was in police files because of the marijuana arrest. Six months after the two rapes, Mr. Godschalk's picture was one of an array of mug shots of possible rapists shown to one of the victims by a police detective, Bruce Saville, from Montgomery County. After studying the photos for more than an hour, the victim identified Mr. Godschalk as her rapist, Mr. Neufeld said. The second victim could not make an identification. After several hours of interrogation by Mr. Saville, Mr. Godschalk made a taped confession. Mr. Saville did not tape the hours leading up to the confession, Mr. Rudovsky said. Mr. Godschalk later said he had given a false confession because the detective had threatened him and provided inside information to make his confession appear more credible, Mr. Rudovsky said. His motion to suppress the confession was denied during the trial, and the confession was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Mr. Rudovsky has asked the trial judge in Mr. Godshalk's case, S. Gerald Corso, to release Mr. Godschalk from prison immediately. Mr. Castor said today that before he would "release a rapist into society, I want to know whether the scientific evidence is accurate or not." Dr. Blake, who is a leading forensics DNA expert, and whose Richmond, Calif., laboratory did the DNA testing for the defense, said that the Rapist had left the same genetic signature in both rapes. That signature, he said, "is expected to occur in no more than a few human beings who have ever lived." It was not Mr. Godschalk's signature, he said. Gary Harmor, a forensics serologist with a well-respected lab in San Francisco, reviewed both the defense and the prosecutor's DNA test reports today at the request of The New York Times. "Both profiles match each other, and can only come from one person in the world," Mr. Harmor said of the tests from the two rapes. "And that person is not Bruce Godshalk." The defense's DNA report was completed on Jan. 16, the prosecution's on Jan.30. Mr. Neufeld asked Pamela Newall, who recently retired as head of the DNA unit of the Center of Forensics Sciences in Ontario, and is also an accrediting inspector for the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, to review the reports today. Ms. Newall said the tests excluded Mr. Godschalk as the rapist. Asked what the chances are of laboratory error, Ms. Newall said:”Nonexistent.” Mark Stolorow, the forensics expert who runs the lab in Germantown, Md., retained by the prosecution, said today that because of client confidentiality he could only talk with a reporter about the test results with the permission of his client, Bruce L. Castor. Mr. Castor said he would not permit Mr. Stolorow to discuss the results. "I will talk for the government," he said.
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Philadelphia & the Liebman Study
By Emilie Lounsberry
Death-sentence rate in Phila among highest
PHILADELPHIA - it led the nation's top five cities over a 23-year span, a study found. One of four death-penalty cases was reversed on appeal.
Philadelphia racked up the highest death-sentence rate among the nation's five largest cities during a 23-year period, and one of every four cases was reversed on appeal.
That is one finding of a wide-ranging study on the death penalty in the United States that also concluded that the highest error rates in capital cases from 1973 through 1995 were likely to occur in places where prosecutors aggressively sought execution as punishment for murder.
The review, led by Columbia University law professor James S. Liebman, took nearly seven years and involved an analysis of thousands of capital cases across the nation.
The study showed that Philadelphia topped Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles in the number of death verdicts per 1,000 homicides from 1973 through 1995, with 27 death sentences per 1,000 murders. Philadelphia had a reversal rate of 25 percent, according to the study.
Phoenix, which is now the sixth-largest city but was considerably smaller during much of the study period, outpaced Philadelphia with a death-sentence rate of 41 per 1,000 homicides and a reversal rate of 84 percent.
The city has long been a big contributor to Pennsylvania's death row. With 243 prisoners, the state has the fourth-largest death-row population in the country, behind California, Texas and Florida. About 135 of the Pennsylvania inmates were convicted of Philadelphia murders. In contrast to Philadelphia, the study reported that Delaware County, with a death-sentence rate of 12 death verdicts per 1,000 homicides, had six death verdicts during the study period, and none of them was reversed.
CAMDEN, NJ
Across the Delaware River is another story. The report said that Camden, with 11 death verdicts per 1,000 homicides, had six death verdicts during the study period, and all six were reversed.
Camden's example reflects New Jersey's tradition of caution in death cases. The state has just 16 inmates on death row, and no one has been executed since 1963.
The new report comes at a time when the fairness of the death penalty has reemerged as a topic of debate in America, largely because wider availability of DNA testing has cleared more than 100 prisoners convicted of serious crimes nationwide.
Though polls show that Americans still favor capital punishment, jurors interviewed in death-penalty cases routinely express a desire for decisive evidence and a concern about the possibility of executing an innocent person.
The report has fueled the debate.
Proponents of the death penalty criticized the study, saying that it relied on old data and that Liebman is a death-penalty opponent who has represented defendants in capital cases.
In Philadelphia, District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, who has been in office since 1991, has a reputation for aggressively seeking the death penalty. Ronald Eisenberg, head of the law division in the District Attorney's Office, said the study is replete with "assertions that can't be backed up" with facts. "The facts and figures don't seem to correspond to the broad conclusions the author is hoping will be reported," said Eisenberg, who questioned the accuracy of the numbers used to calculate the city's death-sentence rate and said he believes the rate is lower than the study suggests. He said that only about 1 percent of homicide cases now end with a verdict of death, perhaps five to six cases per year. He said that death verdicts were slightly more common 10 to 15 years ago.
Dudley Sharp, research director for Justice for All, a criminal-justice advocacy group that supports the death penalty, questioned the reliability of the study data and conclusions, calling it an "illusion without a foundation."
The Columbia study is a follow-up to a 2000 report that found that 68 percent of all death verdicts that were fully reviewed from 1973 through 1995 were reversed by courts due to serious error.
The new study found that the more often the death penalty is sought, the more likely it is that there will be errors, which could increase the likelihood that an innocent person would be executed.
The study's look at Philadelphia occurred at a time when most cases were in a much earlier stage of appellate review. Since 1996, 22 Philadelphia cases have been reversed, and numerous death-penalty cases from across the state are now at various points in the appellate courts.
Robert B. Dunham, who handles capital post-conviction appeals for the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said he believes that more and more cases will be reversed as those cases move through appellate courts.
Philadelphia's reversal rate - 25 percent - was significantly lower than all but three of the 15 counties across the nation that had 50 or more death verdicts during those years.
In addition to Phoenix and its 84 percent reversal rate, Tucson, which had the highest death-sentence rate - 64 per 1,000 - had a reversal rate of 71 percent. Las Vegas, with the second-highest death-sentence rate of 55 per 1,000, had a reversal rate of 64 percent, according to the study.
In small counties, the rates were sometimes higher, according to the study, but that was because there were only a small number of homicides.
Liebman said it took nearly seven years to collect and analyze all the data that was gathered in state and federal courts in some 5,000 cases, and he said he does not believe that more data would change the national trends noted in the study - which he said was completed by people on both sides of the death-penalty debate.
"We followed the numbers where they took us," Liebman said.
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
February 6, 2002
