Errors of Impunity - Notable Cases

Notable Cases

• Dr John Bodkin Adams, was a British general practitioner working in Eastbourne, UK. He was arrested in 1956 for the murders of Edith Alice Morrell and Gertrude Hullett. He was tried in 1957 and found not guilty of the first charge and the second was dropped via a Nolle prosequi, an act which the judge, Mr Justice Devlin, later described "an abuse of process". Police archives, opened in 2003, suggest that evidence was passed to the defence by the DPP in order to allow Adams to avoid the death sentence, then still in force. Home Office pathologist Francis Camps suspected Adams of killing 163 patients in total. Adams was only ever fined for minor offences and struck off the medical register for four years.
• Karla Homolka was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against her lover Paul Bernardo for his murders. She portrayed herself as an abused victim, but later evidence proved she was in fact equally culpable, taking part in the murders, but Canadian authorities were unable to prosecute.
• Ronald Ebens, with his stepson Michael Nitz, viciously beat Vincent Chin in the head with a baseball bat, on June 19, 1982. On March 16, 1983, after a plea bargain was reached the previous month to reduce the charge to third-degree manslaughter (which had no minimum sentence and could be dealt with probation), Judge Charles Kaufman sentenced Ebens and Nitz on to three years probation and $3,720 in fines and court costs for the murder of Vincent Chin. Kaufman cited the defendants' clean prior criminal records and that there was no minimum sentence for a manslaughter plea as he responded, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal." Citing the judge's POW record as one of several reasons to invalidate the lenient sentence in favor of a more stringent punishment, advocacy groups unsuccessfully tried to vacate the original sentence. Kaufman's sentence was upheld as valid and final, due to the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy.

• John Wilson, a Scottish football fan, was filmed during a game attacking Celtic manager Neil Lennon. He admitted the charge in court but was a acquitted of assault by the jury and convicted merely of breaching the peace. According to the Guardian, it was "one of the few occasions in Scottish legal history when an individual is acquitted of a crime that he freely admitted carrying out. A joke rapidly emerged that Muammar Gaddafi had offered to surrender to NATO if he could be guaranteed a trial in Edinburgh."