EDITORIAL: Still Seeking Justice

Apr 17, 2010

Digging up the truth in the 30-year-old murder case of James Dvorak won’t be easy.

Dvorak was killed at Canova Beach in 1981, and the crime pinned on Satellite Beach resident William Dillon through trumped-up evidence, including use of fraudulent dog handler John Preston and coerced testimony from a jailhouse snitch.

Dillon spent 27 years in prison before DNA tests in 2008 excluded him from key evidence, including a bloody T-shirt, and the state released him.

Despite that travesty of justice — and similar cases such as that of Port St. John resident Wilton Dedge, also wrongfully incarcerated for decades — no state official has ordered a probe into the sham convictions.

That’s why we’re pleased Sheriff Jack Parker reopened the Dvorak investigation last year. His office has now sent the T-shirt and other evidence to a lab for DNA testing.

It may be a long shot, but we hope the tests lead to information that makes it possible to solve the mishandled case. And potentially put the actual killer in prison, which would give the Dvorak family and Dillon some measure of closure.

But other important steps are needed:

Compensation for Dillon.

Because of a teen drug conviction, Dillon is ineligible for compensation through Florida’s Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Act and may not receive any payment from the state for his years of lost freedom and horrors he endured behind bars.

Sen. Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, deserves credit for sponsoring a special claims bill for Dillon in the Legislature, but it hasn’t yet been approved.

Haridopolos should keep pushing to make it happen.

A thorough probe of corrupt practices in the Brevard-Seminole State Attorney’s office during the 1980s.

Mounting evidence from the era when prosecutors relied on Preston shows they were fully aware he was a fraud.

Meanwhile, jailhouse snitch Roger Dale Chapman’s testimony before the Legislature in November that he was told to lie about Dillon by then sheriff’s Detective Thom Fair shows the circle of misconduct may have included law enforcement agents.

Haridopolos is rightly seeking $200,000 in the state budget to create an Innocence Commission to investigate Florida’s shameful history of wrongful convictions and imprisonment.

At least 11 convictions have been reversed in Florida in recent years through new DNA evidence. Many times, state prosecutors denied inmates’ requests for testing for years, suggesting they feared it would expose their illegal actions.

It’s obvious a panel to recommend changes in state law to protect the innocent from future wrongful convictions is needed. But a much tougher criminal probe should accompany it:

One with the power to bring down the hammer of justice on any officials in Brevard or other counties who broke the law to win guilty verdicts that put away innocent men.

Reprinted from the Florida Today

Click here to return to the News Archive