Reggie Clemons on Missouri death row: a case of reasonable doubt
URGENT – PLEASE TAKE AN INTEREST IN THE REGGIE CLEMONS CASE TO PREVENT ANOTHER UNJUSTIFIED EXECUTION.
Reggie Clemons is a 33 year old African American man sentenced to death in Missouri after an unfair trial by a jury that was biased in favor of execution.
Reggie’s case is filled with many injustices including police brutality, gross prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective trial counsel. Reggie who had no criminal record was 19 years old at the time of his arrest. His interest has been in human rights, mechanics, inventions and he was in the process of starting a small business.
Reggie was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of two young women who drowned after plunging from the Chain of Rocks Bridge into the Mississippi River.
He was among a group of four young men (all teens except one) who encountered the victims and their cousin, Thomas Cummins on the Chain of Rocks Bridge. Even though the prosecutors conceded that Reggie neither pushed the women nor planned the crime, he was convicted on the theory that he was an accomplice. There was no physical evidence linking Reggie to the crime for which he received the death penalty, no fingerprints, no DNA, and no hair or fiber samples.
The police first arrested Thomas Cummins for the crime. Cummins told the police that he had jumped from the bridge into the Mississippi River. But, Cummins had no injuries and his hair was clean, dry and neatly combed. The police and the Coast Guard doubted Cummins’s story. The jump from the bridge to the river was 80 feet, and he would have landed in freezing water. Cummins failed a lie detector test and told police that the two women had fallen from the bridge as a result of an altercation that began after he made a sexual advance on one of them. The police arrested and charged Cummins with the murder of his cousins.
Reggie was beaten by the police and coerced into making a false statement. He was denied an attorney. At Reggie’s arraignment, Judge Michael David noted that Reggie had suffered physical injury while in custody. The prosecutorial misconduct in Reggie’s case was so severe that the prosecutor was held in criminal contempt of court and fined for his conduct.
A Federal Judge vacated Reggie’s death sentence in 2002 and noted that Nels Moss (Prosecutor) actions were abusive and brutish. However, the 8th Circuit Court overturned the Federal Judges ruling. And Reggie was put back on death row and now faces an execution date being set by the state of Missouri.
Marlin Gray, one of the Chain of Rocks codefendants, was executed on October 27, 2005, at 12:07 AM, by the State of Missouri.
For additional information about Reggie’s story and how you can help prevent another unjustified execution, visit his web site at www.justiceforreggie.com or contact Reggie’s mother at,
