About covering the Elkins case
Posted: Sunday, March 11, 2007 5:07 PM by Dateline Editor
Filed Under:
Investigations
by Bob Gilmartin, Dateline producer
While much of our story focuses on the work of Melinda Elkins, who in a word is incredible, two other things struck me about working on this story.
One was meeting Clarence Elkins, the other was the frustration I would experience dealing with the prosecutor's office and the Barberton police department in getting public information released to me.
First Clarence, and first impressions. Clarence appeared to me to be an extremely gentle, polite, kind person -- not the kind of person who would ever commit the violent crimes he was charged with. If he was angry -- and who wouldn't be after spending seven years in jail for a wrongful conviction - -it didn't show. He said he was angry, but he said it without showing any outward signs of emotional rage.
How he has kept his composure and gentility amazes me considering the fact that he was in the Ohio state prison system for so long surrounded by violent inmates. How he could survive that environment without becoming bitter and angry is a mystery to me. I think his answer would be a profound belief in his wife, his innocence, and in religion. His constant companion, he says, was his Bible.
In the end, however, there was something quite sad about this man who lost his freedom for so long, and then once he gets out of jail, his marriage. While the rest of us turned our clocks forward one hour last night, all Clarence wants to do is rewind the clock nine years as if all of this never happened.
His simple desire now is to be with his sons who are all grown up. He missed so much as his young boys became young men. But now he has something to look forward to. One of his sons will be a father soon and Clarence will become a grandfather.
On another note, it will be interesting to see how his civil lawsuit against prosecutors and police turns out, and what revelations might come out in court. Prosecutors and police will be forced to disclose in open court how they reached the decision to charge him, and despite an erosion in the facts of their case, refused to drop charges against him for years keeping him in jail. The prosecutors office said in a statment that even after facts changed in the case that because of the seriousness of the charges, it did not recommend the release of Clarence Elkins until a thorough investigation was completed. Clarence's attorney, Jana Deloach, will be handling the case in federal court.
Melinda Elkins would be the first to tell you how frustrating her experience was with the prosecutor's office and the justice system. I would have to say I had my own frustrations in reporting the story, but obviously nothing quite as serious as hers.
Dateline had filed a public records request to get access to the items in the court record, such as evidence, audio and videotapes and crime scene photos that had been made public during the course of Clarence Elkins' prosecution.
All of these items had been released previously either through a public records request by other media or by court order. Much of the material had also already been reported and shown both in the print and broadcast media. We were not asking for anything that had not already been in the public domain.
The response from the prosecutor's office was that because of the ongoing investigation of the Earl Mann case, "revealing details at this time might also jeopardize our ability to gain a conviction." However, the details we were asking for had already been made public, so now, in effect these public records were now not public. In all my years of reporting, I have never seen public records be made "un-public."
Through our own persistence we were able to get access to many of these records, documents and tapes without the assistance of prosecutors. We think Dateline's viewers are better served by knowing what has already been disclosed in open court and including it in our report.
