Exoneration by DNA Evidence After 30 Years of Imprisonment 

After thirty years of imprisonment, three men serving life sentences have been exonerated by a judge after DNA evidence cleared them of rape and murder charges. For one man, this exoneration came too late; Larry Ruffin died in prison eight years ago, after spending his life from age nineteen imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.

In early May of 1979, a man broke into the home of Eva Gail Patterson, then raped her and cut her throat in the presence of her 4-year-old son. Young Larry Ruffin was picked up for the crime within a few days, and gave several statements, contradictory on many points, but all essentially confessing to the rape and murder of Ms. Patterson. He then recanted, indicating that he had been physically coerced by law enforcement officials into confessing, and maintained his innocence. Before Mr. Ruffin’s trial was set to begin, the police interviewed another man named Bobby Ray Dixon, who had been with Mr. Ruffin in a halfway house at the same time, and implicated Mr. Dixon in the rape and murder as well. Mr. Dixon, a nearly illiterate man who suffered from seizures after being kicked in the head by a horse as a child, pled guilty to the murder. He also apparently said that Phillip Bivens was with them as well, although no records exist of that first interview where the allegations were supposedly made. Mr. Bivens was then arrested and all three men ultimately given life sentences. Mr. Bivens was told he could be facing the death penalty unless he pled guilty to the charges, even though he had never met the other defendants or the victim before. Fearing for his life, he agreed to plea guilty. Looking back, the now 59-year-old Phillip Bivens reflects that "I feel like I should have been stronger than that."

In prison, Mr. Dixon’s seizures were so frequent that the guards gave him a baseball batting helmet to protect his head when he fell. He developed lung cancer last year, which has since spread to his brain. Mr. Bivens, although a free man, has spent the greater part of his life behind bars and has no home, but is looking into housing for exonerated prisoners in New Orleans.

When a case is not prosecuted properly or when defendants do not have adequate representation, the number of victims of the crime invariably increase. While what happened to Ms. Patterson was a horrific tragedy, the imprisonment of three innocent men expanded the radius of the heartbreak, as more families had to endure the untimely loss of their loved ones. For the two surviving men, life after thirty years of imprisonment will no doubt prove to be a difficult struggle with limited resources available to them.

The DNA evidence which exonerated the three wrongfully imprisoned men implicated a man named Andrew Harris, who had lived just up the road from the victim. He was convicted of another rape outside of Hattiesburg in 1982 (which arguably could have been prevented had the investigation of the first crime been carried out correctly) and is currently serving a life sentence. One can only speculate regarding the high level of coercion used against these three men by law enforcement, in order to force three separate individuals to confess to crimes they did not commit and knew nothing about. This case in particular illustrates how the overwhelming power of government must often be closely guarded against for citizens to remain free from coercion and imprisonment.

To read more about this case and the work of members of the Innocence Project who fought for the release of these men, go to:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Phillip_Bivens.php

For additional information and a press release regarding this case, please refer to the web address below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17exonerate.html

From the desk of Lane Cryar