Doing the time, but not the crime

Alton Logan has been in prison ever since 1982, when he was convicted of the murder of security guard Lloyd Wickliffe in a McDonald’s robbery. Logan has probably never heard of M.I.T economics professor Dan Ariely, but he certainly knows the truth and importance of Dr. Ariely’s research on honesty and dis-honesty.

On March 17, 1982, attorneys W. Jamie Kunz, Dale Coventry and Marc Miller signed a notarized affidavit stating: “I have obtained information through privileged sources that a man named Alton Logan, who was charged with the fatal shooting of Lloyd Wickliffe, is in fact not responsible for that shooting.” They then put that affidavit in a fireproof lockbox and hid it away.

Kunz and Coventry were public defenders representing cop-killer Andrew Wilson. Miller was another public defender appointed to represent Edgar Hope, who had also been charged with Logan in the McDonalds’ murder.

Hope told Miller that he did not know Alton Logan, but that Andrew Wilson was “the guy who guards my back.” Miller then told Kunz, “My understanding is that your client Andrew Wilson is the shooter in the McDonald’s murder.”

Kunz and Coventry met with Wilson in the jail library and asked him if it was true that he had killed Lloyd Wickliffe.

The AP news story reports that, “As they recall, Wilson was even a bit gleeful about the McDonald’s shooting. To Kunz, he seemed like a child who had been caught doing something naughty. ‘I was surprised at how unabashed he was in telling us,’ he says. ‘There was no sense of unease or embarrassment. He smiled and kind of giggled. He hugged himself, and said, ‘Yeah, it was me.’”

Kunz and Coventry checked with law professors, ethics boards and their bar associations trying to find a way that they could divulge the truth that an innocent person, Alton Logan, had been convicted for the crimes which their own client had committed. However, because of the lawyer-client privilege, none of the attorneys could expose the secrets which their clients had told them because doing so would then subject their clients to prosecution for those additional crimes.

Frustrated at their inability to be able to help Alton Logan, the three attorneys signed the affidavit and Coventry got Wilson’s permission to let that truth be known after Wilson’s death.
In January, Andrew Wilson died and Dale Coventry opened up his lockbox and provided the 26 year-old affidavit to authorities.

After Alton Logan was told of the publication of that affidavit, he told a reporter, “I said finally, somebody has come and told the truth. I’ve been saying this for the past 26 years: It wasn’t me.”

Logan is not yet free; he will have to wait for a governor’s pardon or a successful new trial based upon this new evidence.

And that brings us to professor Ariely’s summary of his research on honesty and dishonesty, in which he concluded: “[T]here are four general drivers of dishonesty: (1) lower external costs and relatively higher benefits of deception; (2) lack of social norms, which results in a weak internal reward mechanism; (3) lack of self-awareness, which primes the activation of the internal reward mechanism; and (4) self-deception.”

Each of those items have important policy implications for moms, dads, teachers, and governments, but perhaps the finding that best applies to Andrew Wilson’s choice to let Logan suffer in prison is that “people who violate the rule and are not caught receive a positive reward for the violation.”

Wilson chose to let Logan suffer, not because he feared getting an additional murder conviction for killing a security guard was going to do him any more harm than what he got for killing two policemen, but simply because it gave him a perverse pleasure to have gotten away with it, regardless of the pain his lie caused to others.

Now that he is dead, Wilson has certainly made some findings of his own: God is truth (Titus 1:2); Satan is the father of all lies (John 8:44); and, sadly for him, “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who pours out lies will perish.” (Proverb 19:9)

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesday in the Star-Exponent.