Innocence Project Files for ‘94 Killing Evidence (pg. 1, 2)
This is the most important and tangibly impactful story I’ve ever written, and I fought editors at two newspapers to write it. Ultimately, I was only allowed to tell it through the lens of DNA evidence, rather than through the lens of judicial, police and lawyer misconduct and inadmissible information that provided a motive for an alternative perpetrator. These things that I couldn’t write about resulted in what was very likely a wrongful conviction (a conviction several members of the original jury later said they couldn’t stand behind), that led to Belynda Goff being sentenced to life without parole. (My editor was worried the newspaper would seem like an advocate. Frankly, I felt an advocacy role was warranted.) This story pressured a reluctant district attorney’s office and judge to release evidence and caught the attention of an op-ed writer, who ran with this story in a way that, as a daily reporter, I couldn’t. He kept it in his column nearly every week, while I covered related court filings and hard news.
When I started reporting this, Belynda Goff had been imprisoned for 20 years already. The media coverage at the time of the homicide assumed her guilt. The coverage never mentioned that credible evidence implicated the victim, Stephen Goff, in an arson-for-hire scheme (he was supposedly paid but didn’t complete the “job”), nor did the jury hear this evidence. (Neither did my belated coverage mention the arson-for-hire, per editorial decisions made above my pay-grade. ) Meanwhile, the story died down, Belynda languished in prison, and her children and eventually grandchildren, grew up without her. Due to the fantastic work of her Innocence Project lawyer, Karen Thompson (now with the ACLU of New Jersey), Belynda was freed on a technicality about two years after this story was published. She hasn’t been exonerated, but she is with her family. Had I not pushed this story and taken it from paper to paper, she might not be free. The catalogued DNA evidence was too compromised to exonerate Belynda, so without a huge amount of renewed attention to her case (first catalyzed by this story and then kept in print constantly by Mike Matherson, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette op-ed writer), the injustices surrounding how this case was prosecuted would likely have gone unexamined forever, and Belynda would have died in prison.
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