THE TRUTH, AND OUR SEARCH FOR JUSTICE.

First and foremost, please allow me to thank you for taking the time to read this letter and for being one of the extremely rare groups who offer wrongfully convicted people in this country a source of hope in the knowledge that there are people out there who care about us ad may be willing and able to help us find justice someday.

My name is Lincoln Keith. I am 37 years old and have been imprisoned for over half of my life, and since 2 months after my 18th birthday. That’s when I was arrested and charged with capital murder, (murder-for-hire), in  October 1994.

I fought my charges but I was convicted and sentenced to Life In prison in a sham jury trial in Odessa, Texas in November, 1995. One of my court-apponted trial attorneys, Scott Tidwell, was appointed to represent me on direct appeal, raising 4 points of error. I asked that he raise a claim of Innefective Assistances at that point because he and my lead trial attorney had refused to allow me to testify on my own behalf at trial despite my wish to do so, and they failed to present any defense at all during the guilt-innocence phase of my trial. Of course, he refused to raise such a claim as it would have been partially against himself. In the end, direct appeal was unsuccessful and my conviction became final in 1998.

At that time, my family used $10,000 they raised to hire a local attorney, Robert Leahey, to file a state habeas writ on my  behalf and he assured us that he would do so shortly. None of us knew ANYTHING about the law at this point, other than when you’re in legal trouble, you get a lawyer. So we did and we trusted him to act in our best interests and do as he said he would. Yet, as the months went by, he hadn’t contacted me, hadn’t filed anything in my case, and wouldn’t answer my letters when I wrote him to ask about time limists another inmate had told me he believed existed in habeas proceedings. My family had to finally drive to Odessa and just show up at his office, and he then assured them that there were no time limits to worry about and that he would be filing our writ soon. He never did and, by the time I learned of the 1-year AEDPA time limit for filing a fedral habeas writ, it had expired.

We later learned that Leahey was running for election to the district attorney’s position at this time and would not have wanted to risk that by over turning what had been a high-profile murder case in that county. In effect, he abandoned my case and allowed the AEDPA’s time-limit to expire all while lying to me and my family claiming that there were no time limits.

My family then spoke to an attorney from New Mexico, Gary Mitchell, who claimed that he knew ways to “get around ” the expired time limits and convinced them to hire him to take over habeas proceedings for us. They did so and then HE failed to file anything until my uncle finally threatened to sue him. Then, a young lawyer who worked in Mitchell’s office, Timothy Rose, took over and filed a state habeas writ raising 4 claims: the Inneffective Assistance claim I’d wanted raised on direct appeal, denial of my 6th amendment right to confront witnesses against me, the denial of my right to a fair and impartial jury, and denial of due process. The court ordered evidentiary hearings on the inneffective assistance and 6th amendment claims, but 18 months later, they denied relief simply stating that my attorney had based the 6th amendment claim upon a non-retroactive case and not even addressing the other claims. We were then informed by Rose that his boss, Mitchell, had lied to us about being able to get around the expired AEDPA time limit and were left high-and-dry.

Not knowing what else to do, my family hired yet another attorney, Mick Mickelsen, to look into our case. While he was preparing to file a successive writ, we discovered that THE KEY WITNESS AGAINST ME DURING TIRAL, CO-DEFENDENT JASON TRENT, LIED TO MY JURY REGARDING A PLEA AGREEMENT. Both he and the DA claimed that he had received a 99-year sentence in exchange for his testimony. However, long after I’d been convicted in large part due to his testimony and sent to prison, he was actually given only TEN years.

Mickelsen quickly filed a successive state writ based upon this new discovery of prosecutorial misconduct as well as re-raising the 6th amendment claim with the assertion that the court had erred in failing to consider the merits of the claim in the prior writ. The court denied the writ without even hearing it.

Mickelsen said that my case was a true “miscarriage of justice” and expressed his regrets that he hadn’t  been able to do more to fix it. I went on to file a federal writ pro se, raising an actual innocence claim with the underlying constitutional violations of my rights to effective assistance of counsel at trial, to confrontation of witnesses, to due process, and to a a fair and impartial jury and a separate claim based upon Jason Trent’s lie regarding his plea agreement and the DA’s complicity in that lie. Because that lie had only recently come to light, that claim at least should have been considered timely. Yet, the district court show down my fedral writ as time-barred. Clearly, it didn’t matter how many constitutional rights had been violated in order to gain this wrongful conviction, I was just out of time. The 5th circuit denied my requests for Certificate of Appealabilty and I was also refused ceriorari when I applied to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not long after that, there was a glimmer of hope when the Innocence Project of Texas, who had accepted my case three years earlier, notified my wife that they were ready to begin investigating my case. To my knowledge, no one ever contacted any of the witnesses in my case nor sought out the potential alibi witness I’d told them about, but a few months later, I received a letter from one of their representatives telling me that, although they believe I am innocent and am a “victim of a broken system”, there was nothing further they could do for me.

On the tail end of that disappointment came another gasp of hope when Bill Windsor informed my wife that he wanted to include our case in a documentary he was making about the broken justice system entitled “Lawless America”. He met with my family and interviewed and filmed my uncle Chris Payne. Afterwards, he posted the interview on the Lawless America site along with a comment that mine was the “worst case of injustice” he’d ever come across. This caught the attention of a group calling themselves The Texas Writ Writers Association who contacted my family and said they wanted to help me fight my conviction and requested my legal files. Nothing ever came of this and my wife eventually had to drive to Dallas to retrieve our records. While there, she ran into Mickelsen, the attorney who had filed my successive state writ. He told her that new cases involving Actual Innocence Claims had been ruled on that he believed he could use to get my case back into the courts. He took our files and we felt that we had hope again. However, a few months later, he informed us that he couldn’t help us after all because of the Actual Innocence claim I had previously filed in my pro se federal habeas writ.

We have contacted numerous innocence groups and spoken to different attorneys since, but little else of consequence had been done in my case.

Juanita Green was shot three times in her bed on October 19, 1994. I was convicted of agreeing to murder her for a mere $400. The state claimed that the victim’s then 14- year old granddaughter, Melanie, offered to pay me to shoot Green because she wouldn’t let her date Josh Humphries. There were six kids charged in this crime: Melanie  Green, who was acquitted on the charges of hiring me; 19-year old Josh Humphries, who received a Life sentence; myself; 19-year old Jason Trent, the aforementioned co-defendant who testified at my trial that he’d received 99-years in a plea agreement but only received ten years’ Dale Streckfuss, who received a plea agreement of 8 years, and; Brandi Middaugh, who received a plea agreement of five years.

I was arrested and brought to trial because when Humpries was brought in for questioning regarding the murder, he accused me of having committed the crime. Detectives questioned the 19-year old for hours in what turned out to be a 160-plus page confession. Initially, when they asked him whether I was possibly involved in the crime, he truthfully told them I had nothing to do with it. Then, after bringing up my name numberous times, they pointed out that, of the group of kids he’d been hanging around with, he was the only one who knew the victim. He admitted that fact, then was told that “it didn’t look good for him” and was asked if, since he claimed he wasn’t the killer, he was willing to go to jail for “someone else’s crime”. At that point, detective Snow Robertson suggested a bathroom break. The taping stopped for a full 20 minutes and, once it resumed, Humphrie’s story had completely changed. He was suddenly claiming that I was the shooter in the crime and he was just a bystander. Yet, when they asked him, (whom I’d only met for the first time a few weeks prior and only a couple of times after that), to describe me, he said I was “about 6 feet tall” and “180 pounds” where I was only about 5′ 6″ and maybe 130 pounds, that I was “half-mexican” when, in truth, I am blond-haired blue-eyed, and he claimed  that I was from California which also was far from the fact. He obviously didn’t even know who I was, much less went with me to kill someone as he was suddenly trying to claim.

Regardless, based upon that bogus, coerced, and self-serving “confession” and because one of Humphrie’s friends, Johnny Rowton, told police in response to questioning that i was involved in the murder, I was arrested at my mom’s home on the morning of October 21, 1994, and charged with capital murder.

The “evidence” used against me at trial consisted of the following:

>The 163-page transcript of Josh Humprie’s previously-mentioned confession which was given to the jury in spite of Humnphrie’s refusal to take the stand at my trial;

>Co-defendant Jason Trent’s testimony in which he claimed he was with me when I supposedly shot the victim;

>The hearsay testimony of two of Humphrie’s friends who claimed I told them I’d committed the murder;

>My .22-caliber rifle which one of those two friends, Johnny Rowton, had given the police and claimed it was the murder weapon when they questioned him at Brandi Middaugh’s house, and ;

> The testimony of detective Snow Robertson who claimed that, at the time of my arrest, I “blurted out” a confession that, with all the people who were present, only he heard.

The evidence that points to my Innocence is as follows:

> In Humprie’s confession, not only did he initially tell detectives that I had nothing to do with the crime, but that, once they frightened him into falsely accusing me in an attempt to save himself, he described someone who didn’t resemble me in the slightest. Hence, even IF he did go with someone else to commit the murder, it wasn’t ME.

>Jason Trent, the only alleged eyewitness to testify against me had every reason to testify to anything the DA told him to since he faced life  but, contrary to his testimony at trial, only received TEN YEARS.

> When the FBI tested my .22-caliber riffle against the bullets removed from the victim’s body and fired .22 shell that was retrieved from a dumpster along with the victim’s stolen and discarded belongings, the  bullets could not be matched to my gun and, more importantly, the spent shell casing was ruled to DEFINITELY NOT have been fired from my gun but from some other .22-caliber firearm.

>Facts discovered after my trial support my assertion that I never “blurted out” ANYTHING to Snow Robertson and that he just made that up. One, he was dating the assistance DA who helped try my case and had motive to help her gain a murder conviction. Most tellingly, it was proven that he had a pattern of making unsupported claims of these backseat confessions in evidentially weak cases. Two and a half years after my trial, he made a similar claim in another young man’s trial. Fortunately, that kid’s judge was the same who had presided over my trial and his attorney had represented one of my co-defendants. That attorney pointed out Robertsons pattern and the judge disallowed Robertson’s testimony regarding the alleged “blurted” confession.

>Following my trial, one of the jury members came forward and told my lawyers that another juror, Max Ford, who had claimed during voir dire proceedings not to know anything about or anyone involved in my case, had actually turned out to be a family friend of detective Snow Robertson’s. He kept this fact to himself until other jurors, during deliberations, began discussing acquitting me due to disbelief in Robertson’s testimony. That’s when Ford the other jurors that he had been long-timed friends with Robertson’s father, that he came from a good family, and that he wouldn’t have lied about the “blurted” confession. Then, those doubting jurors voted to convict me.

> I had an alibi witness, Ronald Richardson, who saw me passed out at an apartment across town from the crime scene at the time Humphries and his friends claim I was committing the murder, but my trial attorneys never called him to testify.

>The state claimed that Melanie Green, the victim’s granddaughter, offered me $400 to kill her, but Green was ACQUITTED. How can I, (or anyone else, for that matter), be guilty of murder-for-hire if no one’s guilty of hiring?

I have tried to keep this as succinct as possible as I know you receive many letters every day, but I hope I have given you enough information for you to see and understand just how unjust my conviction is and what a travesty of justice my trial and the ensuing appellate process has been in this case. I and/or my family will, of course, be more than happy to fill in any blanks, answer any questions, and provide documentations to support everything I’ve shared with you as well as anything else you need or want to see.

I hope with all of my heart that you might be able to help me and my family somehow. Either way, I thank you again for your time and for being a source of hope and a point of light in the darkness.

I close with the best wishes to you and yours,

Sincerely,

Lincoln Keith

 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Lincoln-Keith/526170534066436

http://www.change.org/petitions/should-justice-have-an-expiration-date

https://www.facebook.com/lori.helmstetler