The News & Observer: He fought to fix wrongs; now he waits

BY RUTH SHEEHAN – Staff Writer

Aside from his family, no one is watching Greg Taylor’s innocence hearing more intently than an elderly man in a conservative gray suit in the front row, middle seat.

Sitting quietly, a trench coat folded neatly near his feet, I. Beverly Lake Jr., former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, is not on one side or the other in the case.

But he has plenty at stake. This is the first real test of Lake’s idea for a truth-finding agency to right the wrongs of the state’s justice system.

Lake launched the Actual Innocence Study Commission in 2002, bringing together the fractious factions of the criminal justice system to confront its flaws, to acknowledge that people are sometimes wrongly convicted, to provide a legal safety net.

“I’m very proud,” he said Tuesday, during a break in the Taylor hearing.

Lake, a respected jurist and a conservative, brought instant credibility to a cause that had been bandied about for years, said Wake County Sen. Dan Blue. “This wasn’t some harebrained do-gooder, but someone with serious questions about our justice system.”

But there were detractors. Many prosecutors opposed the second-guessing and scrutiny. Victims groups were incensed.

“This was a difficult process,” said Bob Orr, a former Supreme Court justice who served on the study commission. “There were so many competing interests.”

Yet the study led to the creation of the Innocence Inquiry Commission in 2006. The eight-member commission reviewed Taylor’s case last year and voted unanimously to send it to a three-judge panel.

The panel, convened in a courtroom at Campbell University, will determine whether Taylor was wrongfully charged and convicted in the 1993 killing of Jacquetta Thomas.

Taylor has spent more than 16 years in prison denying any involvement in the murder.

Contesting the claims of Taylor’s innocence are Colon Willoughby, the Wake County district attorney, and Tom Ford, an assistant district attorney who originally prosecuted the case.

Lake has had his frustrations with Willoughby, who, like Orr, served on the original study commission. He was one of a handful of members who voted against the formation of a permanent Innocence Inquiry Commission.

Lake recalled how, when he brought the dozens of study commission members together in 2002, the defense attorneys sat on one side of the room, and the prosecutors sat on the other.

Lake said he believes Willoughby still finds it hard to approach the innocence proceedings as anything but adversarial.

But for all Lake’s lofty talk that this hearing should be a “coming together to find the truth” it’s clear from both sides that it’s a courtroom battle like any other.

Lake realizes some people think the commission’s work reflects poorly on the state’s criminal justice system. He disagrees.

“I believe this restores the public’s confidence in our system,” he said. “If we find someone has been wrongly convicted, we can’t give them that time back, but we can make it right. That’s a victory.”

When Lake invited Willoughby and the others to become members of the Actual Innocence Study Commission back in 2002, he told them, “America has the greatest justice system in the world. But it is not perfect. It is run by humans.”

Now that study commission’s legacy is playing out in the case of Greg Taylor, in a borrowed courtroom, before a three-judge panel.
Of course, they are only human, too.