Righting a Wrong

One September night in 1973, police in rural Canaan, Conn. (pop. 1,100), were summoned to the home of Barbara Gibbons. A hard-drinking woman of 51 who had never married, she had been stabbed to death, and officers promptly arrested the slight, trembling youth who said he had found the body. He was Peter Reilly, Barbara's teenage son.

The boy, who had never known his father, was inarticulate, malleable and anxious to please authority. After 25 nearly sleepless hours of questioning and polygraph testing, he almost obligingly agreed with his police interrogators and "confessed" that he had killed his mother. Though he later recanted, a jury believed the prosecution and convicted him of manslaughter. But almost no one who knew the quiet, timid youth felt that he was guilty. Friends and neighbors organized a defense committee. Writer Joan Barthel, who lived near by, became convinced of his innocence, told his story in New Times magazine and eventually wrote a book about the case. Money and help came from others with homes in Connecticut, including Novelist William Styron, Director Mike Nichols and Playwright Arthur Miller, who argued that Reilly's confession was simply "not believable."

Last week, three years after the killing, a court finally agreed: the charges against Reilly, now 21, were dismissed, following an admission by the prosecution that important evidence of his innocence had been withheld at his trial.

Reilly's defenders had long contended that he left a church meeting at about 9:40 on the murder night, began calling friends at 9:50 after finding his mother's body, and was waiting outside his house when police arrived at 10:02. No trace of blood was found on Reilly, and this time table would scarcely have allowed him to commit the savage crime--his mother had been extensively mutilated.

After the conviction, Miller and the boy's other local backers brought in a new lawyer and an investigator who worked to nail down the time sequence more firmly. They got assistance from a CBS executive who pinpointed exactly when a particular movie scene had been broadcast--ten seconds past 9:50--because one neighbor had been watching the scene when Peter called.

In March, after the results of the new investigation were introduced at a hearing, the judge threw out the conviction. A new trial was planned, but last summer the original prosecutor died of a heart attack. His replacement was going through the files when he came upon a startling piece of evidence: a Canaan fireman and his wife had seen Reilly driving in downtown Canaan at 9:40 p.m. and they had told police about it. Though that substantially backed Reilly's story, the defense was never informed of the statement.

Emotional Commitment. Why had the crucial testimony been withheld? Reilly's lawyer, T.F. Gilroy Daly, had an explanation: "Peter was an easy guy to pick on. He was all alone in the world at that time." Others felt that in a small community where serious crimes are rare, local officials had made a hasty, emotional commitment to Reilly's guilt that they soon found impossible to shake off.

At the very least, the Reilly case raised suggestions of official misconduct, and Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso ordered two investigations--one into the original prosecution, another into who really killed Barbara Gibbons. Says Miller: "We just happened to [free Reilly] by dint of much work and labor. This pretty well calls justice into question."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.