New York Times

In Appeal, Scrutiny on Not One but 3 Confessions

MAY 19, 2014
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By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Even Billy Wayne Cope’s supporters say the police had good
reason to think he had committed a depraved murder.

“He’s a strange dude,” John H. Blume, a law professor at Cornell, said of
Mr. Cope, who lived in squalor with his family in Rock Hill, S.C. “His daughter is
found dead. There’s no sign of forced entry.”

And Mr. Cope confessed — three times.

The Supreme Court has recognized that intense questioning by the police
“can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they
never committed.” It will soon decide whether to hear Mr. Cope’s appeal of his
conviction, which certainly seems to present the possibility that he talked himself
into a life sentence for someone else’s crime.

Mr. Cope’s confessions were lurid and sordid and filled with disturbing
details about the rape and murder of his daughter Amanda, who was 12 years old.

But “they weren’t very good confessions, being inconsistent with one another
and inconsistent with some of the known physical evidence,” Professor Blume
wrote on behalf of a group of professors in a brief urging the Supreme Court to
hear Mr. Cope’s case.

One thing was consistent in all of the confessions, though: None of them
mentioned an accomplice.

Nine months later, the results of DNA tests came back. They identified a
different man: James Sanders.

There is no evidence the men knew each other, and they would have made
an unlikely pair. Mr. Cope was, in his lawyers’ words, “a socially isolated 385-
pound white man.” Mr. Sanders was a black career criminal and drug addict just
out of prison.

But prosecutors found a way to explain both Mr. Cope’s confessions and the
new DNA evidence. “The only logical explanation,” one prosecutor told the jury,
“is that Billy Cope served up his daughter for his and James Sanders’s own
perverse pleasures and took her life. They did it together. There is no other
reasonable explanation.”

The two men were tried together. The case against Mr. Sanders was
straightforward. His semen and saliva were found on Amanda’s body.
“Mr. Sanders is guilty,” another prosecutor told the jury. “There is no
question about that. That cannot be seriously disputed, not with a straight face.”

The case against Mr. Cope was more challenging. But Judge John C. Hayes
III eased the prosecution’s burdens by refusing to allow Mr. Cope to submit
evidence on a point that at least some jurors might have thought significant: In
the six weeks after Amanda’s death in November 2001, Mr. Sanders committed
or attempted four more sexual assaults in the neighborhood.

There was never a sign of forced entry. He always acted alone.

Last week, prosecutors filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to deny review
in the case, Cope v. South Carolina, No. 13-8427. Allowing jurors to hear about
the other crimes, the brief said, might tempt them to indulge in the “logical
fallacy” that Mr. Sanders had also acted alone in killing Amanda.
Judge Hayes also excluded testimony from an inmate who said he had
overheard Mr. Sanders say that he had raped and killed a “little girl in Rock
Hill.”

Courts allow such jailhouse testimony all the time when it helps prosecutors.
Here it would have helped a defendant.

It is of course not clear what the jury would have done had it heard the
additional evidence. It is known that without it both defendants were convicted
and sentenced to life without parole.

The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Cope by a 3-to-2 vote.
“We acknowledge there is no direct evidence that the two men agreed to commit
this crime or that they even knew each other,” Justice Kaye G. Hearn wrote for
the majority.

Still, she said, Mr. Sanders’s other crimes, within weeks and in the same
neighborhood, were not similar enough to allow the jury to hear about them.
Justice John W. Kittredge dissented. “The relevance of this evidence is
unmistakable,” he wrote. “Sanders, as a serial rapist, always acted alone.”

The majority also ruled that the inmate’s testimony had been properly
excluded because Mr. Sanders had said nothing about Mr. Cope. But that was
the point, Justice Kittredge said. “This is especially evident,” he wrote, “where
Cope expressly sought to refute the claim of conspiracy with Sanders.”

In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a South Carolina
death row inmate convicted of rape and murder who had not been allowed to
present evidence that someone else had committed the crimes. The court,
quoting from an earlier ruling, said excluding the evidence had violated the
inmate’s right to “a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.”

Judge Hayes was the judge in that case, too. In fairness, the Supreme
Court’s 2006 decision, in Holmes v. South Carolina, came after the Cope trial, in
2004. But it came well before the South Carolina Supreme Court last year
affirmed Mr. Cope’s conviction.

Professor Blume said he hoped the United States Supreme Court would give
Mr. Cope another chance. “The jury should be allowed to hear all of the
evidence,” he said, “before Cope spends the rest of his life in prison.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 20, 2014, on page A15 of the New York edition with the
headline: In Appeal, Scrutiny on Not One but 3 Confessions.