The System Fails

What has stayed with Clarance the longest, through everything, is not the individual acts of misconduct or betrayal. It is the comprehensiveness of the failure. The way every mechanism that should have caught the error instead confirmed it. The way every door that should have opened instead closed.

Owasso had not seen a murder in ten years when this happened. The local investigators were inexperienced with capital cases. They brought in help from Tulsa, but Tulsa help brought Tulsa corruption. The federal defenders assigned to Clarance’s post-conviction case found procedural bars everywhere they turned, while forty-two other people were walking out of prison because of the same detective whose role in this case has never been examined.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals described the remaining evidence, after Henderson, with the bullets he alone found, was removed from the picture, as “overwhelming.” No one asked them to name it. No one required them to explain how two impeached witnesses whose stories changed every time they told them constituted overwhelming evidence against a man whose connection to the crime was circumstantial.

Since 2012, multiple investigators have looked at this case. They have all reached the same conclusion: Ronald Thompson should never have been permitted to testify against Clarance. He was mentally unstable. He was, by his own admission, blacking out on multiple substances the night of the murders. His account changed so many times that no consistent version of events could be extracted from the aggregate. And yet that testimony was the foundation, the load-bearing wall, of a death penalty conviction.

No one did.