Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict

Chapter 7: Criminalizing Mental Illness: Does It Matter?

176 Chapter 7 Criminalizing Mental Illness Does It Matter? I truly regret that this had to happen, . . . [e]verybody trying to do the right thing and going through all the right steps and coming out with the wrong result. I think a simple I’m sorry would never be enough. —District Attorney Frank J. Clark* On February 6, 1987, a jury found Anthony Capozzi, a schizophrenic, guilty of raping two women in 1983 and 1984. The trial judge sentenced him to eleven to thirty- five years in prison. On April 2, 2007, Judge Shirley Troutman threw out the rape convictions after DNA evidence linked the crimes to another man. Capozzi spent twenty years in Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison, for crimes he did not commit. During his incarceration, the New York State Parole Board denied him parole five times since he became eligible in 1997, because his refusal to admit the crimes made it impossible to complete a mandatory sex offender program. A story in the New York Times on March 29, 2007, reported that *Erie County district attorney’s after a court hearing in Buffalo, New York in which Judge Shirley Troutman threw out Anthony Copozzi’s two 1987 rape convictions (“After 22 years in prison, man exonerated ,” CNN.com, April 3, 2007) Criminalizing Mental Illness 177 Capozzi’s lawyer,Thomas D’Agostino, said upon learning of the DNA evidence, “Anthony has never, ever wavered. . . . He has known what it would mean to say, ‘I did it.’ If he said that, he would have gotten out.And he wouldn’t do it.” Originally suspected in six attacks that took place in or near Delaware Park in Buffalo in 1983 and 1984, he faced trial for three rapes but juries only convicted him of two. His family always maintained his innocence. They argued that his mental illness made him incapable of planning the attacks in which the rapist threatened victims with a gun, took them to a secluded area, and ordered them to remain on the ground for ten to twenty minutes after the rape. The victims identified Capozzi in two police lineups. At the time of his trial, Capozzi had a three-inch vertical scar above his left eye.The victims who testi- fied did not mention the scar and estimated the weight of their attacker at 150 pounds,at least 50 pounds less than what Capozzi weighed at the time. Capozzi’s lawyer stated that there was no physical evidence linking Capozzi to the rapes. But the identification by the victims was the basis for the convictions. An arrest of a suspect for another series of rapes and murders led to Capozzi’s exoneration. Police arrested Altemio Sanchez after DNA evidence identified him as a rapist and serial killer known as the Bike Path Rapist. After that arrest, investigators began to question Capozzi’s conviction because of the similarity between the rapes.At the time of Capozzi’s trial, science had not developed the kind of DNA analysis that could demonstrate conclusively that Capozzi did not commit the crimes. However, beginning in the mid-1990s, the district attorney issued several subpoenas to the Erie County Medical Center for slides that contained genetic material from the rapes because DNA analysis could now establish Capozzi’s guilt or innocence. Each time, the hospital reported that it did not have the slides. After the arrest of Sanchez, the district attorney once again issued a subpoena to the hospital.This time a pathologist at the hospital found slides 178 C r i m e , P u n i s h m e n t, a n d M e n ta l I l l n e s s containing genetic material from hundreds of rapes between 1973 and 2002, including those rapes attributed to Capozzi. DNA analysis of the slides matched Sanchez and not Capozzi. Shortly after, the district attorney joined with Capozzi’s defense counsel in asking for Capozzi’s exoneration and release from prison. After his release, he returned to Buffalo to reunite with his family. Social Control and the Social Meaning of Mental Illness While the mentally ill are not the only persons wrongly convicted of crimes, research indicates that they are more vulnerable to such convictions (Radelet et al. 2001; Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer 2001). Our belief that the mentally ill are dangerous creates a presumption of guilt in our...