STUPID COPS PART TWO

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/10/an_open_and_shut_case_against.html


Mastho Davis always knew.
He knew that in January 1996 he wandered into a stranger’s apartment in Clay and pounded Christina Gristwood in the head three times with a hammer he found on the counter. He left her brain-damaged and paralyzed on one side.
Seven years later, he tried to confess to Onondaga County jail deputies while he was held on a different assault. Later, he tried to admit in open court that he beat Gristwood, but the judge kept resisting the confession.
Davis was crazed and violent, but he had a conscience. In August 2003, he tried again. He walked into the Syracuse Police Department late one night and again told officers he’d beaten a woman with a hammer in 1996.
It’d be another two years before a judge finally accepted what Davis knew all along.
But for all those years, someone else knew the truth, too.
Christina’s husband, Daniel Gristwood, seethed in prison. A judge, jury and prosecutor had sent him there for the crime, persuaded by a false confession coerced by state police investigators.
“I’ve lost everything in my life – my wife, my children, my job, my freedom, everything,” Daniel Gristwood wrote in a letter from prison. “Why am I being railroaded like this?”