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The Norfolk Four are four men, Derek Tice, Danial Williams, Joseph J. Dick Jr., and Eric C. Wilson, who were convicted in 1999 for the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko in Norfolk, Virginia. Their convictions were the source of controversy, as their convictions were largely based on confessions which the men maintain were coerced with threats of receiving the death penalty if they did not plead guilty. Organizations such as the Innocence Project protested the convictions as a "miscarriage of justice", while Moore-Bosko's parents continue to believe that all those convicted were participants in the crime.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.exonerate.org/2009/norfolk-four/ )〕 Three of the four men, Tice, Williams, and Dick, were sentenced to one or more life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole due to their having either pleaded guilty to or having been convicted of the murder, while Wilson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 8½ years in prison. Three other men, Geoffrey A. Farris, John E. Danser, and Richard D. Pauley, Jr., were also initially charged with the crime, but their charges were later dropped. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, was also convicted of the crime and was sentenced to 100 years in prison, 59 of which were suspended. He is the only man whose DNA matches that found at the scene, and his confession states that he committed the crime by himself, with none of the other men involved. Forensic evidence is consistent with his story that there were no other participants.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/timeline-of-the-case/ )〕 ==Murder and charges== On July 8, 1997 Bill Bosko returned home after a military assignment to find his wife Michelle murdered, having been raped, stabbed, and strangled to death.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://hamptonroads.com/2011/08/charges-dropped-norfolk-four-member-cleared )〕 At the time it was noted that there were no signs of a break-in or a struggle inside the apartment. As the investigation progressed, detective Robert Glenn Ford questioned residents of Moore-Bosko's development and was informed by Tamika Taylor, a friend of Moore-Bosko's, that another neighbor, Danial Williams, was "obsessed" with the murdered woman. Williams lived in an apartment near Bosko's with his wife and their roommate Joe Dick. Detective Ford interrogated both Williams and Dick and obtained confessions from them but their confessions were inconsistent both with each other and with the evidence. In the confessions, Williams claimed that he acted alone while Dick stated that he and Williams had committed the crime together. Dick also claimed to have committed the crime between the hours of 9 and 11 p.m, which clashed with Taylor's claims that she and Michelle had remained out from noon until 11:30 p.m. as well as naval logs that reportedly showed that Dick was on duty on the at the time of the murder.〔 The Chief Petty Officer that Dick reported to commented that he had taken special interest in Dick due to what he saw as the man's diminished mental capacity; he believed it to be "virtually impossible for Dick to sneak off, commit the crime and sneak back on board".〔 Both men also claimed to have committed violent attacks or sexual assaults on the victim which were inconsistent with the physical evidence, such as Williams claiming to have beaten Michelle with a shoe and assaulting her to the face three times.〔 Instead the coroner's report stated that Michelle had died due to being stabbed and strangled,〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/08/24/090824ta_talk_toobin )〕 upon which point Williams changed his confession to state that he "may have grabbed Michelle’s neck and that he had used a knife he found in the bedroom to kill her". Neither Williams nor Dick could provide an accurate description of the knife.〔 DNA evidence taken from the scene did not match Williams or Dick, which led a jailhouse informant to prompt Dick to name a co-conspirator. Eric Wilson was then named.〔 The DNA did not match Wilson either and Dick indicated that a fourth man, whom he called "George" but whom he identified from photographs as Derek Tice, was also involved. Tice confessed and implicated three more men in the crime, and insisted that the group had broken into the apartment, which contradicted earlier evidence that showed that the apartment did not appear to have been broken into. Since the DNA evidence did not match Tice, the police got Dick to name three other men as co conspirators. These men were ultimately never charged because they had ironclad alibis including one who was internet chatting with his girlfriend at the time of the murder and another who records showed had withdrawn money from a cash machine hundreds of miles away within minutes of when the murder had occurred.〔 Critics of the police case also noted that the stab wounds to Moore-Bosko were all of a uniform depth and clustered closely together. This seemed to contradict the prosecution's assertion that multiple men had taken turns stabbing her, but seemed consistent with a scenario where one assailant stabbed her multiple times. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Norfolk Four」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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