“Rocky was a misunderstood, gentle person,” remembered a neighbor. Dutton was too scared to leave the room. In a phone interview in early February, he described a somber atmosphere on the prison’s death row, where a friend of his named Dominique Ray was scheduled to be executed the week we spoke. And if we were emotional, it was valid. She heard Ludie Mae say that her husband was in the other room—a strange comment, given that she wasn’t married. Marzell was an associate of Butch’s who, in his own words, “sold drugs, watched houses, and did basically anything he needed at the time.” He and Rocky knew each other well from around the neighborhood. At the time of Ludie Mae’s death, Rocky was living across the street from her with his wife and children on one side of a converted duplex. The Case for Rocky Myers But that means we are still working toward presenting a clemency request to Governor Robert Bentley. Frantically, attorneys working there filed a petition with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Defender Office for the Middle District of Alabama, asking if defenders assigned to the unit could take up Rocky’s case. He’d planned to go to a club with his in-laws but when he arrived at their house, they’d already left. Ludie Mae offered to dial the number for him. Police arrived at Ludie Mae’s house just minutes after her frantic 911 call, making it plausible that the assailant had stashed the VCR in the nearby alley once he heard sirens approaching the area. But Rocky denied that he’d been at Ludie Mae’s house that night; he claimed he’d found the VCR stashed in the alley that runs between his house and the shot house. And Rocky surely knew that Ludie Mae lived alone — yet on the night of the murder, Dutton said she’d heard her cousin tell her attacker that her husband was in the other room. Rocky Myers, an intellectually disabled man in Alabama, will soon face the execution chamber despite mounting evidence of his innocence. Around the time homicide detectives shifted their focus away from Cool Breeze, Marzell was arrested while driving a stolen car in Decatur. I couldn’t move,” Dutton later told police. Homan Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama (Sharon Steinmann/AP). From early on it was apparent that Rocky had a hard time keeping up with other kids his age, and at 11 he was diagnosed with intellectual disability (termed “mental retardation” at the time). When Hale told him that he was facing the electric chair, he started crying and asked to speak with his mother. How could someone do that without emotion? According to his lawyers, the state may be preparing to kill an innocent man. “I kept waiting for that word that was going to tell me what happened and there was never one. Soon police got another tip that pointed toward his involvement in the murder. Rocky wasn’t the first suspect to come under the spotlight during the investigation. Alabama Is Going to Execute Rocky Myers. Convicted on the basis of scant evidence by a nearly all-white jury in a trial that lasted only a week, Rocky has intellectual disability, scoring at or below the crucial 75-point threshold for a formal diagnosis in four out of five IQ tests. After his conviction Rocky was transferred to Holman Correctional Facility, where Alabama carries out its death sentences. I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. Schwarz later admitted to negligence, signing a declaration that said he “did not tell Mr. Myers I was no longer representing him,” and that he “did not inform Mr. Myers that I would not pursue relief on his behalf in federal court.” The Board of Professional Responsibility of the Supreme Court of Tennessee issued a public censure to him in 2005, saying that he “willfully neglected his representation of his client.”. “I didn’t want to be over here begging for my life and stuff like that,” he said. Rocky Myers is one of 175 people on death row in Alabama. But then Hale asked Rocky if he knew a man named Marzell Ewing. “That’s what it boiled down to.”, Rocky was thus convicted of capital murder, and by a margin of 9-3 the jury provided their agreed-upon recommendation of life without parole to the judge. While fighting for a deadline extension in court, lawyers working on Rocky’s case heard a shocking story from Marzell Ewing, Rocky’s acquaintance who had testified to having seen him trade the VCR in the shot house. Butch’s operation was no secret to law enforcement, with one witness in the case later saying that he had a “well known relationship with the Decatur police.” There were rumors that he’d been given a de facto license to sell drugs in exchange for information and other favors. He Might Be Innocent. If I could read the law in the books and learn and study, I would. Rocky Myers grew up in New Jersey, one of 10 children in what relatives describe as a “hard life.” His father was an alcoholic, and his mother battled depression after having her first child at 14. To Kacey Keeton, a federal defender who picked up Rocky’s appeal in 2007, the case is a checklist for everything that’s wrong with the death penalty in America. But as hard as they tried, Puckett and the others who shared her uncertainty couldn’t get the rest to budge. But then Hale asked Rocky if he knew a man named Marzell Ewing. That same year, Delaware’s Supreme Court banned the practice in that state. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. This is the stage in the death penalty process where many sentences have been overturned on the basis of poor representation by counsel at trial, procedural errors, the recanting of witness testimonies, or new evidence of misconduct by prosecution, police, or juries. Designed and Developed by, You do realize this is all hogwash as nobody has ever been to the moon, right? Roadrunner claimed he’d implicated Cool Breeze because he was angry over an argument they’d had the night of the murder, and Butch said he’d backed up Roadrunner’s statement because “I just figured that’s what everybody wanted to hear.” They said the story they’d originally told was still mostly true: A man had come to the shot house asking for crack on credit the night of Ludie Mae’s murder, returning later with a VCR to trade. A few weeks later, a local man who’d known Cool Breeze for nearly 30 years came forward to claim it, saying that he’d seen someone else cross the road near Ludie Mae’s house with a VCR tucked under his arm on the night of the murder. The cousin, Ludie Mae Tucker, lived a few blocks west of the city’s shopping district, in a run-down neighborhood that struggled with crime and had been dubbed “crack town” by locals. But I’m not able to do that. The next step was to prepare to file a federal habeas petition. And if we were emotional, it was valid. Robin “Rocky” Myers may be innocent and intellectually disabled. During jury selection, one juror said that if a suspect made it through a grand jury he was “automatically guilty.” And she remembers that another juror kept referring to the VCR as “rabbit tracks” that proved his guilt. “Federal habeas corpus review is a critical stage in a death penalty case, because it allows death row prisoners to bring federal constitutional claims that were heard in state court but were not successful,” said Anna Arceneaux, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. According to Detective Sergeant Dwight Hale, Rocky admitted to using crack but denied knowing anything about the murder and said he’d never met Roadrunner or Butch before. Rocky eventually married and had four children, moving to the west side of Decatur, a small port city just south of the Tennessee border where his wife’s family lived. He offered detectives an affidavit saying that the man he’d seen cross the road was short and stocky, certainly not Cool Breeze, who was nearly six-foot tall. A year later, Rocky received a letter from the state attorney general’s office saying that he’d missed the deadline to file any further habeas corpus petitions and notifying him that Alabama would be moving to set an execution date. We never had to beg for anything to eat. He said he’d found it at his sister’s house, which was just a few blocks up the road from Ludie Mae’s. “It was the state’s place to prove that Rocky Myers was in the home and committed that crime. A federal judge ruled that Marzell’s new statement didn’t override Rocky’s failure to meet the habeas corpus deadline; even with the new evidence, the case was effectively closed. So when Hale said that Marzell had made a statement saying that he’d seen Rocky give a VCR to Butch the night Ludie Mae was killed, Rocky hung his head. Dear Friend, Some time ago you graciously added your name to a petition requesting clemency for Rocky Myers. [2:17] Rabia Chaudry: Hi, and welcome to Undisclosed. Roadrunner also testified that the alley leading to the shot house was a well-known stash spot, saying that he himself had frequently found and hidden stolen goods and drugs there. And Roadrunner testified that Cool Breeze had also been at the shot house on multiple occasions that night, at one point “sweating real hard” and wearing a white sweatshirt with blood on it. “We had affidavits that showed [habeas corpus] language is above college level in terms of reading and understanding, and that Rocky reads at approximately a third or fourth grade level, so that will never make sense to me.”, “A lot of people think that people on death row know the law, they know this-or-that, but I don’t,” said Rocky. Rocky’s trial began two years later. “I just don’t show it because it don’t do any good to other people. 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