Documentary Crime Oscar-winning documentary that documents a murder trial in which a 15-year-old African-American is wrongfully accused of a 2000 murder in Jacksonville, Florida. However, during the trial he testified that he had been brutalized into his confession, and he was acquitted. Butler subsequently confessed to the crime, and the case went to trial. Like Butler, he is 15 when he's picked up by police after a woman from Georgia is shot at a nearby hotel. Four years after he was acquitted in the slaying of a Georgia tourist, Brenton Butler took the witness stand Tuesday and described being beaten by a police . Explains that a. b. butler was in prison for 16 years for a crime he didn't commit. However, this exception is applicable only when the declarant is unavailable as a witness. Brent Butler is on Facebook. In an interview with The Fix , the 25-year-old Australian actor was asked what he . Brenton is a very friendly and talented barber. Andy Joiner and 20 days each for detectives Duane Darnell and Jim Williams. The Butler case opened up discussion about the video taping of police interrogations. Another man, Gable McDonald, had made a series of oral confessions to the crime several hours after it was committed. According to their attorney, the family decided to settle for various reasons, including concerns about how long the case would drag on and the difficulty in proving the case under federal civil rights law.[9]. In this confession, he said that he was hungry and had no money, so he decided to approach Mr. and Mrs. Stephens to ask them if they had any spare change. The apparent reason for the unavailability requirement is that the hearsay statement is needed all the more if the declarant is not there to testify. [8] Finally, on April 29, 2002, the Butler family accepted a $775,000 settlement from the city. However, the Patriot Act did in an opposite way about looking people of what they had done before they were sentenced. Brenton just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. "My first thought was, you know, maybe the world is turning a corner. On a Sunday morning in 2000, Brenton Butler went from being a fifteen-year old high school student to a suspected criminal being held in a ten by ten room. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. however, her husband was the sole witness and survivor. Philyaw, Walton and Moniz:3 Black women from Jacksonville debut acclaimed books, become friends. Curtis intended to raise a reasonable doubt by presenting evidence that Butler was the one who committed the crime, and Butler's confession was to be an important link in that defense. The prosecutor must have believed then that Butler's confession was reliable. In May 2000, two tourists from Georgia were outside the Ramada Inn. We conclude that the trial court erred in excluding evidence that another person had confessed to the crime.
See 90.804(2), Fla. Stat. At that time, he entered an unconditional plea of guilty to sale of cocaine, and his sentence was deferred. The confession is corroborated by the fact that Mr. Stephens positively identified Butler as the assailant. All rights reserved. A French film crew made a documentary on the case, "Murder on a Sunday Morning,"which went on to win the Oscar for best documentary in 2001. Mrs. Stephens did not move fast enough, so he pulled out a chrome revolver that he had found several days earlier. En la serie 'Seven Seconds', la muerte de un joven afroamericano de 15 aos en Jersey City suscita un encubrimiento policial y una bsqueda desesperada de la verdad. Both stories speak to the presence of racism in the American criminal justice system. Brenton Butler Case Bibliography Associated Press. The state originally claimed that a juvenile named Brenton Butler had committed the crimes. 1038. King is the other young man who is accused of taking part of the crime. When 15-year-old black cyclist Brenton Butler dies in a hit-and-run accident -- with a white police officer behind the wheel of the vehicle -- Jersey City explodes with racial tension. Butler's family sued the city of Jacksonville over the ordeal, alleging racial profiling and inadequate training, and the parties settled on a $775,000 payout. View Essay - Murder On a Sunday Morning from SOCIAL SCI CLU 3M at Milton District High School. A police technician discovered that there was a latent fingerprint of value on a plastic telephone card contained in the purse. The claim of bias which the defense sought to develop was admissible to afford a basis for an inference of undue pressure because of [the juvenile's] vulnerable status as a probationer, as well as of [the juvenile's] possible concern that he might be a suspect in the investigation. Davis, 415 U.S. at 317-318, 94 S.Ct. The jury found the defendant Curtis guilty of first-degree murder and armed robbery. This. During the investigation of a shooting death outside a motel in 2000, police arrested 15-year-old Brenton Butler and charged him with the murder. No one was injured, but a dog died in a house fire Wednesday afternoon in Sugar Hill. Then the police should learn how and when to draw the line, when they are tested to their limits., Also, Patriot Act gave the FBI to increase entitled to spy on people which strip human rights. Next The Brenton Butler Case Join Facebook to connect with Brenton Butler and others you may know. The jurors heard a great deal of evidence relating to Butler's guilt or innocence. A subsequent grand jury investigation criticized the police handling of the investigation but found no criminal wrongdoing. These requirements appear to be irreconcilable. She had eight test readers, four of them Black, read the book before publishing, to offer opinions and advice. Although they are running on different party ballots, the candidates for the Hall County School Board Post 1 seat have the same ultimate goal to support teachers. Brenton is the son of a middle-aged, middle-class black couple: his mother Latrice (King) works at a private school full of snotty white kids; his father Isaiah sweeps blood at a slaughterhouse. Mymain goal is to get some conversations started. If the declarant is available to testify, the confession does not qualify as a declaration against penal interest and it is excluded because it is hearsay. This argument misses the point. I recently discovered the Academy Award winning documentary feature Murder on a Sunday Morning. After they returned, Butler made a written confession, which differed in some details from his oral confession. Nor is the due process problem identified in Chambers resolved merely because Florida recognizes an exception to the hearsay rule for declarations against penal interest. Brenton Leonard Butler) was a murder case in Jacksonville, Florida. He made the confession just a few hours after the murder. [7] Eight months later, the lawsuit was refiled, seeking $8.5million. The woman's traumatized husband identifies him as the killer and, after hours in police custody without a lawyer or notification of his parents, a confused and scared Jason eventually confesses. He told the officers that he had kept the money and that he had placed the purse with the gun inside it on a truck in traffic. Officer Williams said that he asked Mr. Stephens, Are you absolutely sure if this is the individual that you feel shot your wife? Stephens said, Yes, I am. According to Officer Williams, Mr. Stephens then emphasized the point by saying, I'm not going to send an innocent man to jail.. And not interfere with the progress towards coming to a conclusion on the case. The state also called a jail inmate, William Johnson, who testified that Curtis had told him that he was the one who shot Mrs. Stephens. [2] Williams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against his co-defendant at the trial; he was sentenced to ten years in prison. ``It was a long way from being our best example of what our detectives could do. trial jury: 8 men, 4 women, and a few opinions, Dog killed in Wednesday Sugar Hill house fire, Herschel Walker fires up supporters in Cleveland. All rights reserved. They supplied a photograph of Butler with bruises on his face, which they claimed was the result of the interrogation. It took her more than a decade, between working and raising children, to make the story be what it needed to be, and tobring the book to publication. Butler (pictured, left) was apparently cut during a struggle with the girl. Curtis presented evidence that Mr. Stephens had identified Butler, and the state countered that evidence by providing an alibi for Butler. Later in the afternoon, Butler told the officers that he had shot the victim by accident. During this painstaking investigation, police picked up a 15-year-old student (Brenton Butler), who was on his way to submit a job application to a local Blockbuster Video. To dismiss this evidence, we would have to assume that Butler not only falsely confessed to murder, but, by some tragic coincidence, he was also mistakenly identified as the killer by an eyewitness to the murder. Who is Brenton Butler? Mrs. Stephens' purse was recovered from a dumpster, but not as a result of any information provided by Jermel Williams. Fred Burke was arrested by police in March 1931 but was charged with the December 1929 murder of a police officer and sentenced to life in prison for that crime. Acquitted man is witness at retrial. SEVEN SECONDS Review: Episode 8-10. Published: 5/25/2004 6:45:29 PM. Johnson was facing a possible thirty-year sentence on a charge of sale of cocaine, and he had an offer from the state to plead to fifteen years as a habitual offender. Brenton Butler Murder Case. On May 7, 2000, in the parking lot of . Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Although the confession does not meet all of the technical requirements of the declaration against penal interest exception to the hearsay rule, it was admissible in evidence as a matter of constitutional law. Some police officers in "Seen" come off as flawed, fallible, even negligent. By this, the Court did not mean that the statements had been blurted out, but rather that they were made without any compulsion and without any apparent motive to lie. This seemingly racial bias is what connects the story of the real Brenton Butler and the fictional Brenton Butler of Seven Seconds. 186, 501 N.E.2d 207, 221 (1986); see also Jones v. State, 709 So.2d 512, 525 (Fla.1998) (equating a confession made to police with a confession made spontaneously to a friend). Florida allows litigants to impeach their own witnesses, but that does not necessarily resolve the constitutional problem identified in Chambers. Those tapes are now routine and relied on during trial.". Butler was picked up by police in May We have been asked to consider one argument for reversal. Confession Although Brenton Butler was ultimately found not guilty by a jury, the due process which was not afforded to him, the torture from the police and the anguish of spending six months in prison for a crime he had absolutely nothing to do with, all because he was a black male in the vicinity of a cop on the day of a crime is proof positive of the During the investigation of a shooting death outside a motel in 2000, police arrested 15-year-old Brenton Butler and charged him with the murder. Now the state argues that the confession fails to meet the test of Chambers because it is unreliable, but the state is plainly not in a good position to make this argument. He also denied that he was testifying for the state in the hope of receiving a lighter sentence. Jablonski Jablonski was sentenced to 364 days of jail time (how disrespectful to not even round it up to a year). Jax Teen Acquitted Of Murder Arrested In Indiana, Teen Falsely Accused Of Murder Writes Book About Ordeal, Officers' Discipline In Butler Case Overturned, Internal Affairs: Suspend 3 Officers In Butler Case, Falsely Accused Teen Sues For $8.5 Million, Grand Jury To Hold Off On Decision In Butler Case, Shorstein, Glover Apologize To 'Wrongly Accused' Teen. In Czubak v. 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