Falsely Jailed (for 30 Years) Man Dies 1 Month Out of Prison

[sabra]

Source: CBS News

Bobby Ray Dixon Spent 30 Years Behind Bars, Falsely Accused of Murder, Only To Have Cancer Kill Him One Week After Release

(CBS/AP) A Mississippi man who spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit has died less than a month after his name was cleared in the case, the Associated Press reports.

Bobby Ray Dixon died Sunday from cancer. He was 53. Jerry Dixon says he's glad his brother lived long enough to see himself cleared by DNA evidence in the 1979 rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman.

In September, a circuit judge set aside the guilty pleas of Bobby Ray Dixon and another man in the slaying of Eva Gail Patterson after the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a petition on their behalf. The judge is expected to rule later on a posthumous petition for a third man, Larry Ruffin, who died in prison in 2002.

Dixon had been released from prison in August on a medical release given inmates who have a terminal illness, reports The Clarion-Ledger. He had been receiving chemotherapy for advanced lung cancer and a brain tumor.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/09/national/main7037768.shtml?tag=stack

[FiveGoodMen]

1. But the jury got their ya-ya's out, so it's all okay, right?

Wouldn't have been any fun at all to acknowledge reasonable doubt...

No chance to punish anyone that way.

[Matt_in_STL]

6. Jury?

I am not sure about your courtrooms but I don't recall juries having anything to do with a guilty plea. I can tell you aren't a fan of juries but in this case the blame should be placed elsewhere.

[FiveGoodMen]

10. Ah, missed that part.

In this case ...

"In interviews, Dixon said that not only did he have no idea what the victim looked like, but that police had beaten and coerced him into confessing to the crime."

... a true mainstay of society's ills gets the blame.


When it's NOT some crap like this, it's usually that an overzealous prosecutor riles up the jury regarding the horrible nature of the crime and then essentially says: "You wanna help? You wanna make the victim feel better? Nail THIS guy. That's it. No other choice -- sit there and do nothing like you just don't care OR nail THIS guy!"

And the jury too often obliges.

[Jackpine Radical]

12. Did he plead guilty?

It says he confessed, but often people confess to things they didn't do and later try to retract their confessions. You may notice that a number of these DNA exonerations have involved innocent men who confessed. The police have specialized methods, such as the Reid Technique (and its various modifications), for eliciting confessions.

[joeybee12]

2. PHUCK!!!!!

At least he had some peace knowing he was cleared, but still...PHUCKKK!!!!!!!!!!

[virgogal]

3. Awful. Kind of like the guy portrayed in "Conviction"

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jgraz]

5. No.

[BlueJazz]

7. Amen to that.

[Earth_First]

8. What does (any) god have to do with scientific dna evidence?

:shrug:

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[FiveGoodMen]

11. I think the point was that any decent god wouldn't let someone down this badly.

And I agree.

Any decent god wouldn't.

[sally cat]

14. God made him confess.

[FiveGoodMen]

16. It IS just the sort of thing the creepy bastard would do!

[Xipe Totec]

18. You know, here's what I don't get about you.

Bartleby: You know, here's what I don't get about you. You know for a fact that there is a God. You've been in His presence. He's spoken to you personally. Yet I just heard you claim to be an atheist.

Loki: I just like to fuck with the clergy, man. I just love it, I love to keep those guys on their toes.

-Dogma

[FiveGoodMen]

19. That was a good movie.

Lots of interesting ideas including one that's only in the deleted scenes about how hell began as simple banishment and only ended up being so awful because of its residents.

Of course, Kevin Smith and I differ on the existence of any of that stuff.

[Angry Dragon]

15. All kinds of gods out there

[mudplanet]

13. This is Hattiesburg all over. The first black man to attend college

at the local university died "of pneumonia" in the Hattiesburg jail. Once a local resident bragged to me how, after some local resident was murdered, the Hattiesburg cops picked up a vagrant they suspected of the deed and murdered him. This woman was gleeful about it. The graduate library at the university is named after a racist prick who was a leader in the "White Citizens Council," the socially acceptable arm of the KKK that was funded by the state legislature. It was operated as sort of the Mississippi CIA, with full time paid informants and investigators. When I went to the university there we tried to organize an campus chapter of the ACLU and the administration made it known that the faculty member who agreed to be the adviser (student organizations required a faculty adviser) would be fired and sure enough, when a philosophy professor agreed to become adviser they fired him. He wrote a book about it called Exit 13.

Left out of the story is that the real rapists are free and probably sit in the front row at church in Hattiesburg every Sunday.

[nalnn]

20. ACLU on campus

No idea when you attended, but when I was there in '91, there was a chapter of the ACLU. Looking in the campus phone directory right now, there is a campus ACLU representative listed.

[mudplanet]

21. 1970s to 1980s. They had to wait for McCain to die before they could

actually enter the civilized world. The campus is the only place I've ever been where the dedication to raygun philosophy was so strong that they had a change machine in the post office that charged you a nickel to give change.

[rainlillie]

17. Did anyone read John Grisham new book Confession?

During an interview John talked about a case where a man was wrongly accused, convicted and spent time in prison and died shorty after his release.