Ashcroft Cites Jurist’s Dissent in Calling Him ‘Pro-Criminal’

It was a sickening rampage.

James R. Johnson killed three law enforcement officials and a sheriff’s wife in a series of ambushes near his rural Missouri home on Dec. 8, 1991.

He confessed.

But he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity--claiming he had been in the grip of an uncontrollable flashback to his Vietnam combat days, a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder.

His jurors didn’t buy it. They sentenced Johnson to die.

On appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the death sentence. Only Judge Ronnie L. White dissented.

John Ashcroft has cited that vote again and again as proof enough that White is “pro-criminal,” not fit for promotion to the federal judiciary. For his part, White has not commented publicly on the case. But his written opinion explains his reasoning.

White argued that the defense lawyer had made a blunder so egregious that it unfairly wrecked Johnson’s case.

The lawyer had announced, with great flourish, in his opening statement that Johnson so suffered from the delusion he was in Vietnam that he had set up a perimeter of tin cans around his garage and had flattened his own tires to prevent the enemy from using the vehicle against him. The prosecution quickly punctured that theory, revealing that in fact the police, not Johnson, had set up the cans and popped the tires as part of their stakeout after the killings.

All seven Supreme Court justices agreed that the defense lawyer indeed had made a major mistake in not investigating the evidence more thoroughly before making his opening statement. The majority, however, held that the error was not fatal to Johnson’s case, because the lawyer had other opportunities to present evidence of post-traumatic stress.

White disagreed. “I find it is reasonably likely that a jury that had not seen the defense destroy its own credibility on this issue” might have been more receptive to the insanity defense, he wrote. If the defense had not been so incompetent, he concluded, there would have been “a reasonable likelihood” of a different verdict.