The System’s Contradictions

Nothing about the story the prosecution presented ever added up. The internal contradictions were visible to anyone paying attention.

If Ronald had been forced at gunpoint to participate in the killings, coerced, a reluctant instrument of someone else’s violence, then why would his supposed coercer have allowed him to fire random, harmless shots? What is the logic of threatening someone into killing, then allowing them to waste bullets on nothing? The scenario requires both that Ronald was under Clarance’s total control and that Clarance was, at the same time, indifferent to whether that control produced anything useful. It makes no sense.

And if Ronald was a reluctant, manipulated participant who deserved mercy, the prosecution’s implicit argument when they made the deal with him, then why did he receive three life sentences, including one without the possibility of parole for the murder of a child? The prosecution wanted it both ways. They used Ronald’s testimony to convict Clarance while sentencing Ronald as though he were the killer.

He couldn’t be both a coerced bystander and a cold-blooded murderer. The prosecution never had to reconcile that contradiction. They just moved on.

Then there was the physical evidence, or the complete absence of it. No DNA linked Clarance to the crime scene. Not a trace. When Ronald told investigators that the people involved had worn gloves and thrown them out of the car window afterward, police searched the highway. They found over a hundred pairs of gloves scattered along the roadside, as if a box had exploded somewhere and distributed its contents across miles of pavement. The only pair they claimed was connected to the case happened to be sitting in plain sight. Even those had no DNA on them. No weapons were ever recovered. No .22. No other firearms. Nothing.

This was not random violence. This was personal.