Disputed DNA murder case in limbo in Supreme Court

COLUMBIA -- A life sentence given in a York County murder case before the S.C. Supreme Court has attracted the attention of veteran ex-prosecutors and national legal experts, who say it is a classic case of an innocent man being sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

The case of the State vs. Billy Wayne Cope involves a surprise DNA match, a possible false confession and questions about whether police and prosecutors overreached.

“Whatever the Supreme Court decides to do, we will be teaching this case for the rest of my career,” said University of South Carolina Law School legal ethics professor Greg Adams.

Last month, Adams devoted an entire legal ethics class before some 50 second- and third-year law students to the case. Cope, now 48, in 2004 was convicted of murder and criminal sexual conduct in the strangling death of his daughter Amanda, 12.

In February, Cope’s case will be a centerpiece of a two-day national conference at USC on ethical questions surrounding prosecutors in wrongful-conviction cases, Adams said.

For 20 months, the case has been before the S.C. Supreme Court. It has not yet decided whether to grant a hearing for a new trial.

A major issue stems from DNA found in saliva and semen on Amanda’s body. It was a perfect match — but not for Cope.

Instead, the DNA matched that of James Sanders, now 52, an ex-con, sex predator and burglar later charged with breaking into four houses in Cope’s neighborhood and assaulting women just after Amanda was murdered. Police didn’t learn that DNA results linked Sanders — but not Cope — to Amanda until nine months after Cope had been charged.

A new theory

After learning the DNA results, surprised police didn’t drop charges against Cope.

They devised a new theory, accusing Sanders of Amanda’s rape and death, too. Under this theory, Cope had let Sanders into his house and watched or helped Sanders kill and rape Amanda.

However, although each were charged with conspiracy to commit the crime and the crime itself, no evidence existed that Cope — a white man — had ever known Sanders, who is black.

Nonetheless, prosecutors, in large part because of confessions Cope made to Rock Hill police — although Cope recanted before trial — went ahead with the case. In 2004, a York County jury convicted both men in a joint trial of murder, criminal sexual conduct and conspiracy.

Sanders’ DNA on Amanda and the lack of ties between Sanders and Cope were some of the issues that drew the attention of Columbia defense attorneys John Barton and Sherri Lydon.

In earlier careers as prosecutors, Barton and Lydon were known for putting well-known suspects in prison.

In the early 1990s, Barton was a lead prosecutor with U.S. attorney’s Columbia office. He helped put more than a dozen state lawmakers in jail as part of the “Lost Trust” legislative bribery scandals. Lydon worked with him. She went on to become the lead prosecutor with the Statewide Grand Jury in the state attorney general’s office. She led the team that put former Lt. Gov. Earle Morris in prison in a securities fraud scandal.

As former prosecutors, both say, they never would have put Cope on trial.

Two defense lawyers with national reputations on wrongful convictions are handling Cope’s appeals for the defense. Neither would normally would get involved in a South Carolina case, but each said the Cope case should be reversed.

“It’s a miscarriage of justice,” said David Bruck, who works on a Washington and Lee University School of Law project involving Virginia death penalty cases. For more than 25 years, Bruck handled South Carolina death penalty trials and appeals, helping to overturn dozens of death sentences and convictions in the S.C. Supreme Court. He also won six out of six victories in the U.S. Supreme Court in S.C. death penalty cases.

“Red flags are everywhere in the Cope case,” said Steven Drizin, one of a handful of legal experts on false confessions nationwide. He works at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern School of Law in Illinois. Of the several hundred documented cases of false confessions nationwide, prosecutors have argued against DNA results in only two cases, one of which is Cope’s, Drizin said.

‘None whatsoever’

A suspect who gives a false confession is hard for people to understand; complex psychological dynamics are at play, Drizin said.

Most false confessions occur in murder cases in which highly trained homicide detectives use sophisticated interrogation techniques to wear a suspect down, he said. That happened in Cope’s case, he said. Before confessing, defense legal briefs say, Cope denied the killing “hundreds” of times. Once confessing, Cope never mentioned that Sanders or anyone else was involved.

On the other side are respected S.C. prosecutors, including then-16th Judicial Circuit solicitor Tommy Pope. The current solicitor, Kevin Brackett, was Pope’s assistant and the lead prosecutor at Cope’s and Sanders’ trial. Don Zelenka, an assistant deputy state attorney general who is handling the prosecution’s appeal, has more than 30 years experience arguing major criminal appeals before the Supreme Court.

Brackett has no doubts about his case. “None whatsoever,” he said last week.

Brackett acknowledged that getting a murder conviction for Cope when Sanders’ DNA was on Amanda’s body — and when the two men didn’t know each other — has problems.

But, as he argued at trial and in appellate briefs, he says Cope is guilty because of many reasons including:

• Police found no sign of forced entry into the Cope house, which was full of trash. The front door and windows were locked. Cope obviously let Sanders in the house and steered him to Amanda’s bedroom. Cope’s wife was working; his two other younger daughters slept through the killing.

• Even though Cope recanted, he did confess, and the jury believed that version of events.

• Sanders’ previous assaults differed from this one. The prosecution was right to get Judge John Hayes to keep the jury from learning that Sanders had committed four other burglaries and assaults on females in Cope’s neighborhood. After all, the prosecution argued, a “variety of dissimilarities” existed between those case and this one, including the fact that the other females were older than Amanda, ranging in age from 20 to “elderly.” And the other victims weren’t killed.

Public airings

The case has attracted national attention. In July 2010, NBC’s “Dateline” aired a show that raised questions about the prosecution’s case.

In reply, Brackett produced his own website, billywaynecope.com. It includes the entire transcript of the three-week trial.

“The many factual errors, omissions and misrepresentations that were contained in the ‘Dateline’ story left the uninformed, casual viewer with the impression that Mr. Cope had been railroaded by a justice system that was both corrupt and inept,” wrote Brackett on his site. “I aim to correct that impression.”

Defense lawyers say in their brief to the state Supreme Court there is so little evidence of a conspiracy between Cope and Sanders that the S.C. Court of Appeals — in its initial decision on the case in April 2009 — upheld Cope’s and Sander’s murder and sex convictions but threw out the conspiracy conviction. No evidence exists of a conspiracy, that court ruled in its first opinion.

However, once the Court of Appeals realized it couldn’t find Cope guilty of murder without the conspiracy charge linking the two men, it reversed itself in October 2009 and issued a new opinion, reinstating the conspiracy conviction.

Law professor Adams said the case illustrates problems that arise when prosecutors and police zero in on one suspect at a case’s outset, only to have evidence come up that undermines their case.

“A prosecutor has a responsibility to seek justice, not only to convict,” Adams said.

Brackett said, “There are false confessions – I believe that. But this is not one of them.”