The Whole Truth

The U.S. Supreme Court rarely rebukes individual attorneys. But last year its unanimous, 9-to-0 reversal of the 1956 murder conviction of Cabdriver Lloyd Eldon Miller Jr. carried a blunt reprimand. Miller had been accused of the brutal rape-murder of an eight-year-old girl near Canton, Ill., and the high court was convinced that he did not get a fair trial. It charged Fulton County Prosecutor Blaine Ramsey and his special assistant, Roger Hayes, with deliberately misrepresenting evidence by repeatedly waving a "bloodstained" pair of men's shorts before the jury. "In the context of the revolting crime," said Justice Potter Stewart, the underpants' "gruesomely emotional impact upon the jury was incalculable."

Moved by the court's angry words, the Illinois State Bar Association ordered a full-scale inquiry by its grievance committee. After nine months of probing into the prosecutors' conduct, the committee has rendered a verdict of its own. Its report not only clears Ramsey and Hayes of all wrongdoing, but also concludes that it was really the Supreme Court that "misapprehended the facts."

Confession Recanted. Misapprehended or not, the major facts of the case remain undisputed. Little Janice May was found bloodied and fatally beaten along the railroad tracks outside of Canton in November 1955. Miller was arrested two days later, kept incommunicado for 52 hours and "persuaded" to confess after police told him that one of his pubic hairs was found in the victim's vagina. Miller later recanted the confession, and the hair, which was not his, was never introduced as evidence.

Instead, Prosecutor Ramsey relied on the red-stained underpants found a mile from the scene of the crime. They were smeared with the girl's blood, he told the jury, and discarded by Miller after the assault.

The prosecution never established that the shorts were Miller's, or mentioned that they seemed too small for him. Not until 1963, seven hours before Miller's oft-postponed date with the executioner, did his lawyers win permission from a federal court judge for an analysis of the shorts by a defense chemist. No blood was found on the twelve threads the chemist was given for analysis, and he reported that the red marks were only paint. Prosecutor Ramsey then admitted that he had known all along that there was paint on the pants.

Clear Deception. Portraying the paint-spattered shorts as "heavily stained with blood" seemed to Justice Stewart a clear attempt to deceive the jurors. But the Illinois Bar committee insists that the prosecutors were merely following the expert view of a state chemist. His pretrial analysis, says the committee, indicated that there was blood of the victim's type on the shorts. The fact that the shorts were also paint-stained, the committee insists, was quite immaterial. The defense would still have had to explain away the blood.

If Fulton County gets its way, the defense will still have to do that explaining. The current prosecutor, William Malmgren, is Miller's original defender; though he has disqualified himself, his office still wants another trial. Whether or not Miller, who is now a Chicago busboy, ever returns to court, the Illinois Bar committee seems to be saying that, while a witness is required to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," no such restrictions apply to prosecutors bent on winning a conviction.

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