Ex-offenders set free to fail? A guest column by Jed Horne

Times-Picayune, Saturday, June 19, 2010

The warrant issued for the arrest of Curtis Kyles, in connection with the murder of a young woman earlier this month, has inspired I-told-you-so reactions from two very different camps. On the one hand are people who cite the warrant as proof that Kyles was a murderer all along. Others argue that he may have been turned into one by the twisting experience of his many years on Death Row and the lack of rehabilitative services once he was released.

Kyles famously was tried five times for the murder of Delores Dye, killed as she wheeled a shopping cart across a sun-drenched Schwegmann's parking lot in 1984. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Kyles' conviction and death sentence after determining that New Orleans cops and prosecutors withheld evidence. That evidence strongly implicated an associate of Kyles in the Dye murder, a police informant who was both a drug addict and a confessed (but never prosecuted) murderer.

Unlike a lot of high-profile exonerations in recent years, the Kyles case lacked DNA evidence that could offer definitive proof of what's called "actual innocence." Instead, the case pivoted on the principle of "reasonable doubt" and the unreasonable -- and patently illegal -- lengths to which prosecutors had gone to deny juries information that might feed those doubts. "Desire Street," my book about the case, irked some readers by dwelling on Kyles' criminality and refusing to portray him as a choirboy. The prosecutorial misconduct was undeniable; the Supreme Court cited chapter and verse. But I allowed that, in trying to frame Kyles, prosecutors might have been targeting exactly the right guy.

Of course that persistent ambiguity does not make Kyles guilty of the Dye murder any more than the recent warrant establishes his guilt in the murder of Crystal St. Pierre.
What was certain about the Dye murder was that incompetent and illegal tactics by prosecutors not only blew the case, they cost Mrs. Dye's survivors a chance at emotional closure. Equally certain is that Kyles was put back on the street with breathtakingly little thought given to the possibility that he was, if not a danger to society, very likely a danger to himself.

Louisiana has pushed aside South Africa to claim the planet's highest rate of incarceration. We've gotten real good at putting young men in prison. And prison has gotten real good at turning them into hardened criminals or outright psychopaths.

Clearly we need to get just as good at engineering their productive return to society after sentences are served -- or vacated. That means pre-release rehabilitation, and it means much more thorough follow-up.

California is only the first state to have driven itself into the poor house by essentially giving the prison industry unrestricted access to state revenues. Eventually, Louisiana is going to need to get smart, too. Investments in programs that give the formerly incarcerated a shot at a productive return to society are not a question of coddling criminals. They are a way to protect ourselves from them. And they are a helluva lot cheaper than jailing every two-bit dope dealer in the mistaken notion that we have "gotten tough on crime."

The good news is that post-incarceration services are taking root here. Non-government programs for the most part, they assist with housing, job training and the psychological counseling that can steer ex-prisoners away from the enticements of crime. One of the best, Resurrection after Exoneration, is run by a man with a very clear sense of the reality on both sides of Angola's gate. John Thompson served 18 years on death row for a conviction eventually overturned by revelations that included long-suppressed blood evidence.

Cases are rarely that clear-cut, which is why in "Desire Street" I chose to focus on the more amorphous matter of reasonable doubt. But the virtues of rehabilitation for former prisoners, Thompson's mission today, are unambiguous. We would be wise to learn from him, and also from Curtis Kyles.

A former Times-Picayune city editor, Jed Horne's book about the Kyles case was followed by "Breach of Faith, Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City." His e-mail address is jedhorne@gmail.com.