Exonerated: The Plays Characters

Kerry Max Cook
Kerry Max Cook was sentenced to death for the murder of Linda Jo Edwards, a 21-year-old secretary. The murder occurred on June 10, 1977 in Tyler, Texas. Edwards was a college student who was having an affair with her married professor. Cook was arrested in a club where he worked as a bartender. The club was chiefly known as a “gay bar,” and police theorized that Cook was a “degenerate homosexual” who hated women.
Cook was convicted because: (1) A single fingerprint found on the outside of a sliding glass door of Edward's apartment was identified as Cook's. Cook had once been in Edwards’ apartment, but a “fingerprint expert” testified that it was 12 hours old at the time Edwards’ body was found, placing him in the apartment at the time of the murder. This testimony went unquestioned. (2) A witness testified that she had seen Cook in Edwards’ apartment, presumably around the time of the murder. (3) A jailhouse informant testified that he heard Cook confess to the crime. At trial, the prosecutor branded Cook a "little pervert," telling the jury, "I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't eat [the victim's] body parts." At sentencing, Dr. James Grigson, aka "Dr. Death," testified that a person who committed a crime such as Cook's had an antisocial personality disorder, virtually assuring that he would kill again.
Later all the trial evidence was discredited because: (1) The forensic lab technician admitted that it is impossible to date a fingerprint. He said that prosecutors pressured him to give false testimony. (2) It was learned the eyewitness had originally said she saw Edwards’ professor in her apartment rather than Cook. (3) The jailhouse informant recanted his testimony that he heard Cook confess.
The state's highest court threw out Cook's conviction, ruling that the state's “illicit manipulation of the evidence permeated the entire investigation of the murder" and that prosecutors had "gained a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth." Cook was freed in November 1997, but only after pleading no contest to a time-served sentence. Cook spent nearly 20 years in prison, 13 of them on death row. After his release Cook married and had a son he named Kerry Justice, saying, “After 23 years, Justice has finally arrived.”

Gary Gauger
Morris and Ruth Gauger were murdered on April 8, 1993, at their McHenry County farm, where they operated a motorcycle shop and sold imported rugs in addition to farming. Their son, Gary Gauger, who lived with them, discovered his 74-year-old father's body the next day and called 911 to summon paramedics, who notified sheriff's police. Shortly after deputies arrived, they found the body of 70-year-old Ruth in a trailer from which the rugs were sold.
Gary, 41, was taken into custody and, after an all-night interrogation, made statements that police and prosecutors claimed constituted a confession. He denied that he had confessed, claiming he had made the statements only hypothetically after his interrogators persuaded him it was possible he had committed the double murder during an alcoholic blackout. The statements were not electronically recorded, and deputies made no contemporaneous record of them.
Despite an exhaustive search of the farm, no physical evidence was found linking Gary to the crime. Nonetheless, he was indicted on May 5, 1993, on two counts of murder.
At a hearing on a pretrial motion to suppress the alleged confession, Gary testified that deputies had induced him to speculate about how he might have committed the crime. He said they accomplished this by telling him that he had failed a polygraph examination and that clothes drenched in his parents' blood had been found in his room. In fact, the polygraph had been inconclusive and there were no blood-drenched clothes.
At trial, the jury heard the official version of Gary's allegedly inculpatory statements. According to deputies, Gary told them he committed the crimes by coming upon his parents from behind, pulling their heads back by their hair, and cutting their throats. The only evidence introduced to corroborate the alleged statements was the testimony of a pathologist who performed autopsies on the bodies and a state forensic scientist who examined loose hairs found near Ruth's body.
The pathologist, Dr. Lawrence Blum, testified that the wounds on the victims' bodies were consistent with the possibility that the killer had come upon them from behind and cut their throats, although Blum acknowledged it was equally possible that the Gaugers had been bludgeoned before their throats were cut. The forensic scientist, Lurie Lee, testified that the hairs found near Ruth's body and presumed to be hers had been broken and stretched in a manner that would be consistent with the alleged confession, although Lee acknowledged that the hairs also could have been broken during combing or brushing.
The prosecution also sponsored the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, Raymond Wagner, a twice-convicted felon who was incarcerated with Gary in the McHenry County Jail. Wagner claimed that Gary repeatedly admitted killing his parents.
After the jury found Gary guilty on both counts, he waived a jury for sentencing and was sentenced to death by Judge Henry L. Cowlin on January 11, 1994. Nine months later, after Northwestern University Law Professor Lawrence C. Marshall agreed to take the case on appeal, Cowlin reduced the sentence to life in prison.
On March 8, 1996, the Second District Illinois Appellate Court unanimously reversed and remanded the case for a new trial on the ground that Cowlin erred in failing to grant a motion to suppress Gary's allegedly inculpatory statements. In an unpublished opinion written by Judge S. Louis Rathje, with Judges Robert D. McLaren and Fred A. Geiger concurring, the court held that the statements were the fruit of an arrest made without probable cause and therefore should not have been admitted at the trial. Without the confession.

Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs
When Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs went to prison for murder in 1976, her son was 9. Her daughter, 10 months old, was still nursing.
When she was freed in 1992, her son was married with a child of his own and her daughter was a 16-year-old stranger.
"Getting back family is the hardest part," says Jacobs, now 51, who teaches yoga and lives in Los Angeles. "They live with embarrassment for so long: You say you didn't (commit the murder), but everyone says you did."
Fresh out of prison, Jacobs made her first non-collect telephone call in 16 years to son Eric, and then headed to North Carolina to see him, his wife and their 4-year-old daughter.
"Grandma, were you lost?" the girl asked when they met.
"Yes," Jacobs replied. "I was."
The reunion with her daughter didn't go as smoothly. Jacobs found her at a high school in Maine, but Tina kept her distance.
The wounds began to heal a few months later. Tina accepted her mother's invitation to attend an anti-death-penalty rally in Pittsburgh. The crowd applauded Jacobs, then cheered non-stop when Tina was introduced. Mother and daughter hugged. Eventually, they began living together, got their first drivers' licenses and climbed mountains.
By then, Jacobs and her children had grown accustomed to overcoming obstacles.
In 1976, they were all in the back seat of a green Camaro when Jacobs was arrested with her boyfriend, an ex-con named Jesse Tafero, and his prison pal, Walter Rhodes. They were charged with murdering Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Phillip Black and a visiting Canadian policeman named Donald Irwin a few minutes earlier at an Interstate 95 rest stop.
Rhodes was the only one who tested positive for gunpowder residue. But after he agreed to testify against Jacobs and Tafero, he got a life sentence. They were sentenced to die.
Jacobs spent the next five years in solitary confinement, her vocal cords becoming atrophied because of non-use and denied even her photos of Eric, a son by her first marriage, and Tina, her baby by Tafero. She meditated and practiced yoga. "I figured if people could survive the concentration camps, then surely I could survive this," she says.
In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court commuted Jacobs' sentence to life in prison after her lawyers uncovered a polygraph test suggesting that Rhodes, the prosecution's chief witness, might have lied. The next year, Rhodes recanted, saying he -- not Jacobs or Tafero -- pulled the trigger. (He later changed his story again and again.) The case grew even more wobbly when a jailhouse snitch said she, too, had lied against Jacobs at trial.
Tafero was not so lucky. He remained on death row while his appeals slipped away. In May 1990, he was executed.
By then, a childhood friend of Jacobs, filmmaker Micki Dickoff, had become interested in her case. Using court transcripts, affidavits and old newspaper stories, Dickoff found discrepancies in testimony and put together a color-coded brief for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It was enough to overturn Jacobs' conviction.
Rather than risk an acquittal at retrial, the Broward State Attorney's Office offered a plea to second-degree murder in which Jacobs, then 45, did not have to admit guilt. On Oct. 9, 1992, she was released.
She remembers seeing the sun and the moon as she left the Broward County Courthouse.
"I felt like an alien at first," Jacobs says, adding that in prison at least she had stature. "Outside, I had nothing: no money, no place to go. The world I left no longer existed."
For a time, Jacobs had flashbacks and a recurring dream: "I'm madly dashing up and down the corridors trying to find my cell. I couldn't and I was gonna get in trouble. . . . So I ran to the lobby -- it looked like a hotel lobby -- and I asked the desk to call and say I was really here, but I just couldn't find my cell."
The nightmares have ended. The bad feelings come and go. Whenever things get too bad, Jacobs takes long walks along the beach, runs her fingers through the sand and listens to the ocean. "I let the sea take me away," she says.
She lives with her daughter and the mutt she laughingly calls her "grand-dog-ter," and runs a growing yoga business in Los Angeles. She dabbles in filmmaking with Dickoff and in her spare time writes a memoir of death row and life after. She also keeps in touch with old prison friends -- "a little group from the lost planet."

Delbert Tibbs
Delbert Tibbs was arrested in 1974 and charged with the murder of a white man and the rape of his girlfriend. The crime took place on a Florida highway and, except for the "rape victim", there were no other witnesses. She told police the murder and rape were committed by a black man she described as dark skinned, five-six or seven with a big Afro. Delbert Tibbs is light skinned, six three and wore a small Afro. Delbert, who was hitch-hiking two hundred miles away from the scene was arrested and charged with the crimes.
It was later learned that the murder victim had been recently discharged from the navy and had moved to the trailer park where the young woman was living with her boyfriend, a photographer. The woman became involved with the sailor and they ran off together. When asked during cross-examination, "Isn't it true that you ran away from this guy? The photographer, he pursued you and caught you on the highway and then killed this young man and threatened to kill you if you didn't come back with him?" she broke down and cried. The judge called a recess. When she returned to the stand, cross examination resumed but the lawyer representing Mr. Tibbs, never asked her another question about it.
Delbert Tibbs was sentenced to death. Two years later, the Florida Supreme Court overturned his conviction for lack of evidence.
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Delbert was born in what he describes as Apartheid Mississippi, before the coming of "the King and Mrs. Parks". He moved to Chicago at the age of twelve with his widowed mother. He attended Southeast City college and Chicago Theological Seminary. After dropping out in 1972, Delbert began what he has described as his "Wilderness Experience", walking around the U.S.A.
That experience jumped to another dimension when Delbert was arrested and charged with rape and murder in Florida. Although Delbert vehemently denied the charges, and although the state was never able to produce any evidence against him, he was tried and found guilty by an all white jury (the victims, too were white) and sentenced to death. A mass movement was organized to fight for his life, spearheaded by his friends and family. Rita Warford, Peete Seeger, Terry Callier and Oscar Brown Jr. and the dancer Darlene Blackburn organized a benefit and raised $ and consciousness on Delbert's behalf. His case became a cause celebre. Angela Davis and many other outstanding freedom fighters entered the fray. The Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction but did not order the lower court to cease and desist prosecution. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. After many legal perambulations, until 1982, The state's Attorney in Lee County, Fl. dropped the case as he stated that his witnesses' s credibility would be questionable to a jury.

Robert Earl Hayes
Robert Earl Hayes was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 32-year-old woman who worked with him at a horse racetrack in Broward County, Florida.
The conviction rested in substantial part on the testimony of a witness who claimed to have seen Hayes with the victim and heard her reject his advances shortly before the murder.
In addition, the prosecution presented a DNA analysis purporting to link Hayes to the crime. However, the defense attacked the forensic analysis as sloppy and established that several light-colored hairs had been found in the victim's hands. These could not have come from Hayes, because he was African American.
The Florida Supreme Court ordered a new trial on direct appeal in 1995, holding the allegedly incriminating DNA unreliable.
New DNA testing was conducted with proper controls. It exonerated Hayes, but the prosecution refused to drop the charges. Hayes was acquitted upon retrial in 1997.

David Keaton
In 1971, Keaton was accused and convicted of killing a deputy sheriff during a robbery. Based on new evidence, the Florida State Supreme reversed his conviction in 1973 in the case Keaton v. State (273 So.2d 385 (1973)).
The story "The Stigma is Always There", written by Sydney Freedberg,
1. David Keaton Florida Conviction: 1971, Charges Dismissed: 1973 On the basis of mistaken identification and coerced confessions, Keaton was sentenced to death for murdering an off duty deputy sheriff during a robbery. The State Supreme Court reversed the conviction and granted Keaton a new trial because of newly discovered evidence. The actual killer of the sheriff was later convicted.