The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
The Responsibility of Judges Do judges have any responsibility to comment or interrupt or notify the attorneys, or even to strike a venireperson on their own [which is called sua sponte, “of his own accord”] if they spot an irregularity during a jury voir dire? Judge Hawes founded the Deep Springs chapter of CASA. He …
Wilcox’s Lie and Steve’s Latest Appeal Steve filed this new writ on June 2, 2017 to ask for an evidentiary hearing based on the new evidence about Ronelle Wilcox’s potential lies by omission. Esther Walker, the Assistant DA who currently handles habeas corpus appeals for the 555th District Court, in her response to the writ, …
Cleveland Sanford and Wilcox When I interviewed Cleveland Sanford, I asked him what he would have done if he had known about Ronelle Wilcox’s service with CASA. He said, “I wouldn’t leave somebody that was a CASA volunteer on a child case. I mean, I just wouldn’t do it…unless I didn’t have any other options.” …
Ronelle Wilcox and CASA Let’s look at the courtroom floor plan again. When Sanford asked his question about CASA there were seven out of ten potential jurors remaining on the front row. Juror #1 was gone, and so were #3 and #7. Ms. Wilcox had one empty space on her right and another on her …
Ronelle Wilcox and the Voir Dire After lunch, Elmer Ross still had the floor. His first question was answered by Juror #2, Ronelle Wilcox. My focus will be on her for the rest of the voir dire. [By the way, I need to remind you that this exploration of Ms. Wilcox’s role in the voir …
Questions From the Prosecution Hawes turned the proceedings over to the prosecutor, Elmer Ross, who said, “This is the point in the process where we will be talking to you a little bit about your background and about your life experiences to determine whether or not you would be an effective and impartial juror on …
Take a look at this courtroom floor plan image. It’s a seating chart of where the remaining 64 prospective jurors were sitting after their jury cards were shuffled. In the court transcript, they were referred to mostly by number from that point forward. After the break, Hawes explained the results of the shuffling to …
Initial Excuses Judge Hawes’ first action was to examine the venirepersons for qualifications and excuses. After swearing everyone in, he allowed anyone who felt they shouldn’t be there, or needed to be excused, to come up and talk to him about it. The room was packed with ninety-five venirepersons. It was so full, Doug Sanford …
Greatly abbreviated versions of this post and the eight that follow it were used in Aggravated. These posts made up the initial Voir Dire chapter in the book before it was trimmed down to its essential bits. I’ve posted them here in case anyone wanted to see the same material with a great deal more …
To see the following images in context of the full description of the voir dire proceedings that day, follow this link to the first post in a nine-post series, or you can just use the images below if you’re reading along with the text in the print version of Aggravated. This was the arrangement of …