THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 4, 1995 TAG: 9507040427
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MANTEO LENGTH: Long : 223 lines
Edgar Barnes has few regrets about leaving his Outer Banks law practice to become a District Court judge. But before being sworn onto the bench last month, the Nags Head attorney said there was one murder case he was not ready to close.
``I'm going to swear to uphold justice. And I will do that for Clifton Spencer,'' Barnes, right, said of a court-appointed client he has defended for more than three years, the last one for free.
``I'm not going to forget about him. I'm going to do as much as I can for him without violating legal ethics.
``I'm not convinced justice has been done in this case.''When Stacey Stanton didn't show up for her waitressing shift one afternoon in 1990, a co-worker walked across the street to Stanton's upstairs apartment.
She found her friend lying on the floor on her back, half-naked, her knife-slashed body smeared with blood.
Police discovered hair clutched in Stanton's hands and stuck to the 28-year-old victim's sliced-open chest.
A March 1990 laboratory report prepared by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation says police examinations of samples taken from Stanton and the crime scene ``did not reveal any Negroid hair.''
But a black man has spent five years in prison for the killing.
Clifton Eugene Spencer always has contended he did not kill the New Jersey native.
He never got a trial, either.
On June 11, 1990, Spencer entered a ``not guilty'' plea in Dare County Superior Court. But on the advice of an NAACP attorney - who admitted he never interviewed any witnesses, spoke to any police officers or even visited the scene of the killing - Spencer changed his plea to ``no contest'' six months later.
He was sentenced to life in prison on Jan. 8, 1991.
``I sincerely and personally believe Clifton Spencer to be innocent and will continue to fight to see that he receives due justice,'' Nags Head lawyer Edgar Barnes wrote District Attorney Frank Parrish early last month, a few weeks before Barnes became a District Court judge.
``I ask you to consider reopening this case,'' wrote Barnes, who was court-appointed to represent Spencer for an appeal in May 1992.
``Or at least let me have access to all the police officers' investigation files in order that I might be satisfied that justice has been served.''
On Friday, Parrish, who was elected district attorney four years after Stanton's death, agreed to ``look into the evidence,'' review internal and police files and, eventually, meet with investigators.
``I'm not saying I will reopen this case,'' the District Attorney said from his Elizabeth City office. ``But I'm very willing to look into it. My only concern - always and for every case - is that justice be done.''
Many residents of this waterfront town still talk about the slaying. But law enforcement officials who were involved call it an open-and-shut case. One of the original investigators says he is certain the right man is behind bars.
A stocky, 6-foot-3 welder with dark skin and wide-set eyes, Spencer sleeps on the bottom bunk in a cinderblock prison dormitory he shares with 35 other inmates. With no air conditioning - and only two small windows that open - nights get so unbearably hot that no one can sleep, Spencer said in a telephone interview Thursday.
``That's when I come close to giving up,'' said the 36-year-old Army veteran, who previously was convicted of drug possession and assault on a female.
``It's 100 degrees or more and no one even remembers I'm here. Now that Edgar is a judge, I won't have any outside help,'' Spencer said. ``I just want someone to look at my whole case. I want a judge or jury to see all the evidence. Ultimately, I'd just like to have a trial.
``I've lost my freedom for something I didn't do.''
Spencer's original attorney, an NAACP lawyer, and Barnes all said their client had never confessed to killing Stanton.
``That's why I wouldn't plead guilty. He said `no contest' was more like admitting I was giving up,'' Spencer said. ``I told them I'd rather die than plead guilty to something I didn't do. That lawyer told my mom I'd be sentenced to die if I took my case to trial. `A black man accused of killing a white woman in a small, Southern town doesn't have much chance,' that NAACP guy said.''
Spencer says he had been friends with Stanton and her boyfriend for more than two years when he saw the couple at a Manteo pub on Feb. 2, 1990.
``Stacey was on the other side of the bar, talking to someone, and her boyfriend was playing pool when I got there,'' said Spencer, who had ridden with a friend from his uncle's house in Tyrrell County to the small waterfront town. ``They had a little fight or confrontation. He had just broken up with Stacey the day before. She got upset and left, alone. I stayed in the pub and played pool with him.''
According to Spencer, he was the only black man in the bar that night and some of the other patrons - including Stanton's white boyfriend - began giving him a hard time over a pool game. So Spencer left, and saw Stanton in the parking lot at her nearby apartment, talking to ``a guy I didn't know. She asked if I'd get her boyfriend to talk to her. So I went back to the pub. But he didn't want to come see Stacey.''
Spencer returned to Stanton's apartment, where she was drinking vodka, he said. ``I told her what he'd said and it kind of hurt her feelings,'' Spencer said. ``I stayed a couple hours, drinking with her. Then Stacey asked me to go look for some crack (cocaine).''
After wandering the streets for about an hour, Spencer said, he returned to Stanton's apartment empty-handed. ``We were in the living room, and we'd been drinking, and we both kind of fell asleep on the floor. She kind of nudged me to wake up. And I got up and left,'' Spencer said. ``I went to my friend Wayne's house and waited outside until he came home. Then, we both went in and crashed on chairs at his place.
``When I got back to Columbia the next day, a sheriff's deputy called me over to his car and asked me to come to the department. I didn't know what he wanted. But when he called the dispatcher, he told her he had the murder suspect.''
The killer stabbed Stanton at least 14 times in the neck, stomach and chest. He slashed her right breast and her vagina. But an autopsy report revealed no evidence of rape or sexual intercourse.
``Sweatpants were being worn at the time of bloodshed,'' State Bureau of Investigations officer P.D. Deaver wrote in his crime lab report.
Greenville Medical Examiner L.S. Harris, who conducted the Feb. 4, 1990, autopsy, determined that most of the mutilation occurred after Stanton died. ``The infliction of the sharply incised wounds to the breast and vagina region while the deceased was dying or already dead strongly suggests a fetishistic activity on the part of the assailant,'' Dr. Harris wrote.
Time of death, he estimated, was Feb. 3, 1990, ``probable early morning hours - at home.''
Police found fingerprints from Spencer, Stanton and her boyfriend in the apartment's bathroom sink and smeared around the living room. Of the 13 prints that were identifiable, the State Bureau of Investigations' March 1990 physical evidence report shows, seven were Spencer's, four were Stanton's and two were her boyfriend's.
Police reports and court documents list the boyfriend as a suspect. He provided investigators with an alibi for the early morning hours of Feb. 3, 1990. He was not charged with the crime.
``The police photographs show Caucasian hair all over Stacey's right chest wall,'' Barnes said. ``Clifton Spencer has an alibi between 4 and 5 a.m. that day from his friend, Wayne Morris. He has an alibi from 5 a.m. that morning'' from the people who drove him back to Columbia.
State investigators found a Feb. 3, 1990, Virginian-Pilot newspaper on a chair in the southwest corner of the room in which Stanton was killed. Carriers threw the paper in the driveway at about 6 a.m. every morning. Someone had to have brought the paper upstairs and taken it into Stanton's apartment.
``If the victim brought this paper into the house herself, she was alive around 6 a.m. that morning,'' Barnes wrote. ``If the murderer brought the paper in, he did so before or at the time he murdered her, which would have been after 6 a.m. At this time, my client had an alibi.''
Police and court records show investigators kept no written or taped conversations with Spencer during the week they interrogated him in Dare and Tyrrell counties. Hand-written notes - that have not been available to Barnes or the public - are all that exist to show allegedly incriminating statements that Spencer may have made about his involvement in the crime. A weapon never was recovered.
Records of a lie detector test, which investigators say Spencer failed, also are unavailable.
``We spent months investigating that case. And the SBI has all of the evidence and reports now,'' Dare County Sheriff's Deputy Jasper Williams said Friday from his Manteo office. ``If I had any doubts at all about having the right man, I'd still be pursuing this case.
``As it stands,'' Williams said, ``this case has been closed for four years.''
SBI investigators did not return phone calls at their Greenville office last week.
In October, a private investigator - contacted by Barnes - gave Spencer two additional lie detector tests in prison, asking him whether he took part in Stanton's killing.
``After a careful and detailed analysis of the polygraph charts . . . I have determined that Mr. Spencer is not guilty of causing the death of Stacey Stanton,'' wrote Outer Banks private investigator Asher D. Vandenburg. A state-certified polygraph examiner, Vandeburg performed the tests for free.
Spencer said he thought he was going to a hearing when he and his Greensboro attorney, Romallus O. Murphy, entered Dare County Superior Court on Jan. 8, 1991. Murphy had been expected to argue several pretrial motions, including a change of venue on the ground that his client could not receive a fair trial in Dare County. Instead, the lawyer told his client he should accept a plea bargain - the deal, he said, would expire in a half-hour.
``I'd already told him I didn't do it. I wouldn't plead guilty. But he gave me no hope,'' Spencer said. ``He said `no contest' didn't mean I was admitting guilt. And if I took the plea I could, at least, live. If I went to trial, he said, they'd fry me.
``It was real hard to sign that paper. I was fighting with myself the whole time. I didn't want to die, though,'' said Spencer. ``When I got back to jail, I cried at what I'd done. Now, no one will get to hear the whole case.''
Although then-District Attorney H.P. Williams Jr. had sought a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty against Spencer, Williams said he offered a deal in December 1990 after deciding there was no evidence to prove that the killing was premeditated or deliberate.
``There is no evidence he planned it. And there is evidence he was provoked'' by Stanton, Williams said after the judge sentenced Spencer to life in jail. ``We examined it closely, and I felt a second-degree charge was appropriate.''
On April 24, 1992, Spencer filed a 77-page handwritten petition in Dare County Superior Court contending his lawyer forced him to accept the plea to avoid the death penalty.
``What is known by the defendant and God,'' Spencer wrote, ``is that the assailant is not in the prison system where he belongs.''
Barnes was appointed to handle the appeal. He argued that Murphy's ineffective representation gave Spencer no choice but to accept a plea. He asked the court to schedule a first trial for his client.
On April 22, 1993, Judge Gary Trawick ruled that Spencer must complete his life sentence.
``The plea was entered into voluntarily,'' said the judge. A year later, Barnes appealed the Dare County Superior Court ruling to the State Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel denied that petition on June 3, 1994.
Since then, Barnes has continued to investigate the slaying on his own and write letters on Spencer's behalf. But he has not been able to take the case any further. Since December, Letitia Echols of the state Prisoners Legal Services has been formally representing Spencer.
``There is a possibility that we could file a federal appeal. But we haven't done so yet,'' Echols said last week from her Raleigh office. ``I've held onto this case because I think there's something there.
``I need to interview some witnesses and some of the original investigators. And I plan to come to Dare County soon,'' said the lawyer. ``His Greensboro attorney didn't really even go through the evidence. We're looking into the case now. I think there is something there. I'm just trying to nail it down.
``Even if a federal level appeal is successful, Spencer wouldn't walk,'' Echols said. ``He would just get a trial.''
That, said Spencer, is all he wants. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW WILSON/Staff
Photo
Clifton Spencer
KEYWORDS: MURDER STABBING TRIAL VERDICT by CNB