On a fall afternoon in 1955, eight-year-old Janice May was found raped and beaten beside the railroad tracks near Canton, Ill. She died an hour later. Subsequently, Canton Cab Driver Lloyd E. Miller Jr., 28, was sentenced to death for the crime. Yet Janice's murder remains unsolved. Last week the Supreme Court unanimously reversed Miller's conviction because the prosecution had used false evidence with an almost incredible disregard for U.S. standards of fair trial.
Gruesome Impact. Cabbie Miller became a suspect when one of his passengers reported that he had confessed to the murder. After he was arrested, Miller was held incommunicado for 52 hours, denied counsel and told that one of his pubic hairs had been found in the child's vagina. The police assured him that he was mentally ill and would be sent to a hospital if he confessed. Soon after Miller signed a police-written confession, he recanted.
The prosecution refused to let Miller's lawyer examine the physical evidence before the trial. And when a police chemist said that the hair found in the child was not Miller's, Fulton County Prosecutor Elaine Ramsey decided not to mention it. He made do with other evidence: a pair of "bloodstained" undershorts, which he said Miller had shucked off after the crime. The shorts were apparently too small for Miller, but a police chemist testified that the blood was type A, the same as the child's, while Miller's was type O. Prosecutor Ramsey brandished the shorts with what Justice Potter Stewart last week called "gruesomely emotional impact upon the jury."
Paint—Not Blood. For seven years, Miller awaited execution. Seven hours before his scheduled death in 1963, a federal judge granted him a habeas corpus hearing at which he was finally allowed to have his own chemist examine the shorts. The stains were paint—not blood. Even more startling, the state conceded that the prosecutor had known the truth during the trial.
That was not the only revelation. At the 1963 hearing, the prosecution lost its star witness, Betty Baldwin, the Canton passenger who had testified that Miller blurted a confession while she was riding in his cab. Now she completely recanted her story. Then there was Miller's landlady: she had refused to aid his lawyers in 1956 after the prosecution told her that she had a constitutional right to silence. Now she testified that Miller was asleep in his room at the time of the crime.
The judge who granted Miller the habeas hearing in 1963 had ordered him released or retried, but the state won a reversal in a U.S. appellate court. Last week the Supreme Court reversed that reversal: Miller must be freed or retried. Said Justice Stewart: "More than 30 years ago, this court held that the 14th Amendment cannot tolerate a state criminal conviction obtained by the knowing use of false evidence. There has been no deviation from that principle. There can be no retreat."