"Lenell Geter's in Jail" | 60 Minutes Archive

60 Minutes rewind the story of Len El Jeter a man as it turned out wrongly accused of holding up uh a uh Kentucky Fried Chicken uh restaurant and got a life sentence for his quote unquote crime it took about 7 months to complete that story by doing the work that the police didn't do and do the work that even his own defense lawyer didn't do and certainly work that the prosecution didn't do we were able to prove that this guy was innocent and in effect we saved a life lenel Jeter is in jail no question about that the question is what happened what put him there lenel Jeter is a young black engineer one of six graduates of South Carolina State College who were recruited by esystems a major defense contractor in Greenville Texas a small town outside of Dallas when he arrived there in 1982 from rural South Carolina his future seemed secure a clean-cut 24 yearold earning $24,000 a year as an engineer and planning to get married 6 months later he was arrested for the $615 armed robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant convicted and sentenced to life in prison today he is in the Texas State Penitentiary and will not be eligible for parole for 20 years his case has raised question about his guilt or innocence and the fairness of the investigation prosecution trial and the life sentence Did you ever hold up anyone no sir I never hold up anyone did you ever steal anything no sir why you sir I only thing I can say is I I can only assert to the fact that maybe it had to be jealousy because I was in a small town um I had only been there six months and and um I had a good job it's a predom it's predominant White Town what did you do with your time off when you weren't working well I was a member of the library um Club there in Greenville um I was on softball team um I read a whole lot because I Was preparing to um enter school maybe next year the following year 80 8 um to work on my masters I have absolute 100% confidence in the conviction of Lenell Jeter as being the correct person who robbed five people at gunpoint in a Kentucky Fried Chicken store in balk Springs Texas Dallas County Prosecutors Ken Carden and Randy Eisenberg say they are convinced he is guilty they told the jury that Jeter was an outlaw known to the police a hardened criminal Beyond rehabilitation in fact there is not a shred of evidence that Jeter had any police record anywhere are you satisfied he has no police record now I'm satisfied that he has no record of final convictions anywhere in the United States are you satisfied that he has a good reputation no I'm satisfied that he had a good reputation among those people at E Systems but that's what comes from being a Dr jackn Mr Hyde we have people who do Rob for fun and lenel I think is one of them that my friend is a prosecutorial hallucination Ed seagull lenel Jeter's courta appointed attorney there's no kind of quirk in his character that's shown itself to anybody that knows him there's no way they can sustain that those people who knew Jeter his business associates and E Systems do not believe he could have done something like this they insist he is innocent he had never been in trouble before he did not have a police record he would work work late at night uh after work and go home he didn't go crowd around at night or anything else so you know it just wasn't his character to uh do anything like that he was accused of doing here's innocent man who got convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment we've now found out after the fact that the evidence that was offered was false how did it all happen could lenel Jeter have been a successful engineer who went out to Rob fast food restaurants on his lunch hour or coffee breaks or after work it all happened with the the armed robbery of this Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Greenville Texas on August 9th 1982 by a young black male the detective investigating was Lieutenant James fortenbery of the Greenville police by his own admission he was hurting for leads so he had the local paper appeal to anyone who'd seen any strange vehicles in the vicinity of the restaurant to contact him Borton Barry got a call from a white woman who lived across the road from this park in Greenville she said she'd seen a black man Park his car roughly where our car is parked park it there a number of times she became suspicious the car had South Carolina license plates now this park is some distance from the robbery a good 3 and 1/2 miles Forton Barry considered this a major lead he traced the license plate and the car turned out to be owned by lenel Jeter well that's my favorite reading place and and and and place of Med meditating it it is a public park and um I used go there and relax and feeded the Ducks because um it's near the water and it's comfortable but must not be suspicious because I go to a public park and and read that doesn't make any sense bberry not only considered Jeter a suspect in the Kentucky Fried Chicken robbery in Greenville but he called the police in Plano Texas to tell them he might have a suspect for a similar robbery there The Plato police told the police in Garland Texas that Jeter might be a suspect for a robbery there well suddenly Jeter's picture was being circulated as a suspect in robberies all over the Dallas region whatever started the investigation once lenel Jeter's photograph began showing up in lineups he began to be identified two weeks after lenel Jeter's photo began being circulated there was a rash of three armed robberies a Taco Bell a mugging in a drugstore parking lot and another Kentucky Fried Chicken this one in Bal Springs Texas the day after that lenel Jeter was arrested and charged with all three robberies there was some talk of plea bargaining but Jeter refused maintained he was innocent was tried swiftly found guilty and sentenced to life for the Kentucky Fried Chicken robbery at Bal Springs besides five eyewitnesses to that robbery two other eyewitnesses for his other alleged crimes were produced at the trial that drugstore mugging victim Luan herd identified Jeter from a lineup not a live lineup but an assembly of six mug shots of black men one of them lenel Jeter but that was the second photo lineup police showed to Luan herd the first one they showed her came from E Systems it showed all six young black Engineers from South Carolina lenel Jeter included his picture was in that lineup and she's saying I've never seen him before then they come back in with another lineup and said have you ever seen any of these men before and and she says yeah I've seen that one and it's lenel Jeter of course she doesn't know whether she's seen him in the robbery or whether she's seen him from and she's recognizing from that spreadsheet that she just saw a few days earlier you were shown two photo lineups yes sir you know and you didn't recognize Jeter in the first one yes sir but you did in the second one yes sir how come how come you didn't recognize him in the first one he wasn't there he wasn't in the photographic lineup the first one you know he was he was in that first lineup which six black Engineers from the E Systems that was that first lineup and he was there but how can you account for that missing him in that first lineup um I don't really believe I did if I were looking at the photographic lineup That Lan heard uh was first shown black and white photographs of six individual I don't know if I could pick lenel Jeter out of it myself I mean it's a very difficult lineup to pick him out of in fact she did pick him out of that lineup and she picked him out of a out of a color photographic lineup U she didn't even know he was in the first lineup and I told her yesterday she said no no he wasn't in that first lineup I said yes he was that was the esystems Personnel photograph the black and white photographs I couldn't pick lenel Jeter out of the black and white photographic lineups either but she had no problem with the color photographic lineup picking him out that's not quite accurate both lineups shown to Luan herd were black and white she had no problem picking him out in the courtroom the only black person in the court was the only black person sitting at Council Table and there was no question as to who uh the defendant is because the prosecution told him they had overwhelming evidence of Jeter's guilt because so much plea bargaining goes on in Criminal Court seagull assumed that Jeter would plead guilty perhaps even thought he was guilty himself but when Jeter absolutely refused to plea bargain seagull began to believe in him but then on a Thursday afternoon seagull was told his case would be first up on Monday he had barely one working day to prepare a defense my investigator uh over the weekend uh went to Greenville Texas and came up with Alibi witnesses that showed lenel Jeter could not possibly have committed this crime on Monday because he was at work on that day uh when I got that information information I got it by a telephone call over the weekend I had absolutely no opportunity to talk to the people in advance um but when I did get that information I I thought that I would go over and talk to the prosecutor about it and talk to uh judge lion about it seagull asked the judge for a delay of a week that he needed time to find witnesses who had placed Len Al Jeter at work at the time of the bald Springs Kentucky Fried Chicken robbery a robbery that happened at 3:20 p.m. right in the middle of Jeter's working day day the judge refused to delay the trial if we had another week obviously we would be able to uh get all the witnesses who saw Lenell Jeter at work on that Monday there was only one defense witness that put lenel Jeter at work at the time that the robbery was committed and he contradicted Lenell Jeter Jeter said that he was at at work but gone for an hour and a half that day and the individual that was his supervisor I believe his name is Charlie hartsford testified that Lenell Jeter wasn't gone from work more than 5 or 10 minutes all day Charlie Hartford told us that when he testified Jeter wasn't gone for more than five or 10 minutes he was not considering Jeter's lunch hour as far as that lunch hour was concerned other workers at E Systems can account for that time he left at noon time he went to the bank Rick and I went down to the bank and they remember him come to the bank and how long he stayed at the bank that was in the morning though he went yeah not not in the afternoon but he did leave but C made a big deal out of that that uh you know did you check with the bank no Jer didn't testify that when he was gone from work for that hour and a half that he went to get a bank loan he said he went to Downtown Greenville and got a voter registration application so you explain why Jeter got on the stand and lied if in fact he went and got a bank loan that day lenel Jeter was not lying he did tell the court he went to the bank page 300 of the trial transcript Jeter is asked did you go into downtown Greenville during the lunch hour answer that's correct question why did you go to town that day at lunch answer I had to go down and register to vote I also stopped by the bank too question what bank answer first Greenville National Bank that was the lunch hour but what about the after afternoon remember that Bal Springs Restaurant was robbed at 3:20 p.m. well at between 1 and 1:30 here at E Systems Charlie Hartford Jeter's supervisor gave Jeter an assignment one that would take two hours to do Hartford got it back completed by 4:30 to have driven to Bal Springs hold up the restaurant and returned to work would have taken Jeter another two hours it would seem impossible for him to have completed his assignment and the hold up in the same afternoon the fact he did this work for me as far as I'm concerned fixes him there the majority of the afternoon but the project that he said he gave him the day of the robbery the their records also show was not given to him the day of the robbery their record showed that it was given to him another day and that he could have had plenty of time to do that before it's just not true I've got the records that's what we looked at that's what we had the security guard come down here and testify Rick MCC another E Systems engineer says he saw Jeter twice that day first at a coffee break at A4 to 3 and then about an hour later then I came back around a quarter to 4 because I wanted to find out if he got the loan that's my original intentions were and he told me he did he did get the laan then I went back to my desk as we said the trial came up Suddenly it had already begun when Jeter's attorney called E Systems and asked his co-workers to get to Dallas as quickly as possible to testify on his behalf two people who were not called to testify and did not realize until after the trial that their testimony could have been crucial were Dan Walker and Deborah cotton I talked to him shortly uh right around 1:00 and then again at at 3 right at 3: at 3:00 mhm and the robbery took place at 3:20 absolutely impossible to get from it was to be there he came by used my phone at right around 3:45 somewhere between 3:45 and 4:00 that afternoon no way you could get back from B Springs in 15 minutes there wasn't one person that I talked with that could provide Lenell Jeter with an alibi the day of the robbery the time of the robbery when you say you I talked with Ernie lock I talked with uh U Deborah coton no Deborah cotton was here in the hallway during during the trial she wasn't called as a witness by the defense about Walker Walker I don't I don't know whether Walker was in the hallway or not Dr to Hartford no I talked with another supervisor by the name of U I can't I can't remember his name now Deborah cotton sat in this hallway throughout the trial I never talked to her but she had the opportunity to get on that witness stand just like any other witness and tell what she knew and if she could have provided him an alibi at the time I don't see any reasonable explanation for her not doing exactly that and she didn't you said that Deborah cotton was out here she wasn't out here at all there was a lady from E Systems I was told black that was sitting out in the hallway de Cotton's white well then obvious obviously I'm relying what I'm relying on what Mr seagull told me to meet plac Jeter at his desk at 3:00 was not out here was not spoken to as far as I understand by you you or your investigator in advance of the trial Mr Walker who places L ALG there around 3:45 or 4:00 impossible he could have committed the crime talked to him he used his phone then El Jeter used Walker's phone at his desk between either between 3:45 and 4: you didn't talk to them you didn't send anybody out there to try in any way in a Highly Questionable case with no physical evidence to say maybe we're wrong on this one that's simply not true we sent Arty Christian out there did he talk to De cotton well I don't know who he talked to already went out there he talked to you don't you don't know who your investigator talked to I know that he asked did anyone out there have any indication to show that Lenell Jeter actually had an alibi actually was at work at 3:00 when the robbery went down I believe that that you're investigator spent most of his time with the security people at E Systems I invite you to interview my uh investigator and talk to him about what he did did you talk to Deborah cuton no did you talk to Mr Walker no did you talk to Mr Hartford that day no Mr Harper was at the courthouse at the time I was at e system did you know that Deborah cotton and Dan Walker both plays Len El Jeter in E Systems uh at 3:00 and again at 3:45 and again at 4: CL no I don't I didn't know I wasn't aware of that no why didn't you go up to his floor his Department talk to the people who worked with him I did go where he worked uh the security guard took me through the areas where he worked gave me sort of a tour around when I went out to e system the the individuals that worked or had uh testimony in this case was down here at the courthouse uh when I went out there I was not aware that anyone that had any information you mean you didn't go out there in advance of the trial no what did the prosecutors tell you to look for when they send you out as well the prosecutor didn't actually tell me to look for anything when I was aware of the fact that he had all The Alibi Witnesses coming in you see we have a dilemma you have witnesses that have identified this guy as been at a robbery scene and then you have uh his witnesses that say he was at work so obviously a person cannot be at two places at once so that was a problem I went out to see if it was any validity as to what was happening and what the testimony was to be aren't there some doubts in your mind about this young man the only problem that I would have had to begin with this case was when all of The Alibi witness came down to testify for him what it just turned out that none of them could Alibi him during the time these robers committed except for Deborah cutton and Dan Walker who did not testify in this case and uh apparently we were not aware of the existence when you talk to the to the Brass out there at E Systems what did they tell you about lenel Jeter they they held him up very high and as was as reputation and character and type of work that he did was there any suggestion that there might be a a darker side to him no no they just thought he was an outstanding young man basically if I had any evidence subsequent to the trial to show me that Lenell Jeter was innocent I'd ask for at least an investigation I'd send Arty back out there and we'd find out about it none of the evidence that's come to my attention since the trial before the trial or during the trial shows shows me anything except that Lenell Jeter is guilty of this offense the story will continue after this there was no physical evidence of Jeter's guilt no gun no cash no license plate taken down at the scene of a crime the state's entire case was based on eyewitness testimony eyewitness testimony is subject to a great deal of error and uh that's all they have abs have absolutely no corer they have five it's pretty convincing not really when you when you when you stop and think that each one of the persons who identified the robber Iden described a person that doesn't even look like Jeter they have him from five six to six foot tall some of them have with whisker hair some of them have with a mustache some of them have with long side Burns all of them have with long hair he never looked like that people quite often get small details incorrect in their uh uh pictures of people the pictures they mentally retain but when you come face to face with someone you don't tend to forget them but it's the small details that send a man away for life so don't they have to be very very carefully examined it's the live witnesses that you look at listen to and decide after you hear them on the stand that you believe them that send people to the penitentiary so Jeter was found guilty then came the punishment the sentencing phase of the trial the prosecution asked the jury for life for lenel Jeter and among its Witnesses was Lieutenant Fortenberry he told the court he telephoned the police in South Carolina and a sheriff down there Sheriff Ed Darnell had said he knew Jeter and knew him to be a bad character Sheriff Darnell when Lieutenant Fortenberry called you what did he want to know about Lenell Jeter he was telling me about Jeter and being a suspect in his home robbery and said that uh he just needed some information on him and I told him I said I don't have anything on I don't know him at all did you say to Lieutenant foron Barry that if his name is Jeter and he comes from Denmark South Carolina he must be or was probably an outlaw definitely not no sir no way shap off pH if someone was a a a bad character uh in your county do you think you'd know him I think I would we have less than 19,000 people here and I know most of them the bad character especially it wasn't until after the trial that seagull learned Darnell had denied saying Jeter was a bad character Lieutenant Fortenberry will not be interviewed but after Darnell's denial he did talk to a local station in Dallas I have not purged myself and anything further in regards to that I'll stand on my testimony did anybody call South Carolina to confirm this story that Len El Jeter was a man with a quote bad reputation in South Carolina well lenel Jeter's reputation didn't have anything to do with the facts of the case that we prosecuted him for it had only to do with his punishment and that was one witness out of several that said he had a bad reputation there were two other Witnesses and it turned out that those Witnesses were policemen from another town who'd heard of that bad reputation either directly or indirectly from Lieutenant Fortenberry and there's one more thing that's important to know about the lenel jeters story remember that first Kentucky Fried Chicken robbery here in Greenville the one that first brought lenel Jeter into the mind of Lieutenant Fortenberry because of that phone call he'd received about the out ofate car seen at a local park Carla Wright worked in this restaurant and Lieutenant Fortenberry showed her a photo lineup and were you able to identify anybody in those pictures as the robber no sir later you did see Len Al Jeter correct mhm was that the man who held up the Kentucky Fried Chicken no sir you're sure of that sure Mike Brown also saw the hold up man when he was shown a photo line up by Lieutenant Fortenberry Brown picked out two men who looked something like the holdup man neither one was Jeter how did Lieutenant Fortenberry react he didn't say anything to me it was just the way it was it was uh the kind of feeling you get when you think like you've disappointed somebody uh like you've given them the wrong answer you you now know what Len El Jeter looks like you seen exactly right exactly is that the man who held up the Kentucky Fried Chicken Elaine Moody was a customer that day in the Greenville Kentucky Fried Chicken she too saw the robber but more important she was an employee at E Systems and knew lenel Jeter he is very friendly and he always called me by my name so you were on a first name basis yes so had that been Lenell Jeter in there holding up that that restaurant I think he would have said [Laughter] hello and I don't think he would have continued on the rod if right so so you're absolutely what 100% positive it was not lenel Jeter who held up that restaurant absolutely so all the eyewitnesses of the Greenville holdup cleared him of that robbery and the police did not press charges but it was that robbery that put his name and his face into the criminal justice system and all because his car was seen with outof State plates in this Greenville Park the phone call reporting that car set off a chain of events that ended with a door slammed shut on the life of lenel Jeter I've received no justice no justice at all I haven't received anything close to Justice I consider myself a hostage actually I do consider myself a hostage um in the house of Injustice whether or not Len Al Jeter is innocent there are so many reasonable doubts about his guilt and doubts about the trial and investigation that many feel at the very least he deserves a new trial the NAACP joined the defense in a request for a new trial which was denied by the same judge who tried Jeter originally they filed an appeal and the FBI has investigated to see if Jeter's civil rights have been violated no decision yet on that after Jeter's trial he was given a polygraph test The Examiner said Jeter showed deception but refused to say whether or not he thought Jeter had failed and he refuses to release the test to Jeter's lawyer so that it can be examined by another expert Jeter did pass another test one using drugs and hypnosis and finally the South Carolina legislature and the State Attorney General have asked the Texas Attorney General Jim Maddox to look into the case of lenel Jeter Mr Maddox has problems of his own he's under indictment for commercial bribery meanwhile Len El jeta remains in jail possibly for life he was out of jail released from prison within 4 days of our broadcast very satisfying moment for 60 minutes and certainly for me

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 449,219

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, Lenell Geter, Morley Safer

Id: OapYdbAxcos

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024