Edward Lee Elmore Freed after Thirty Years:
Cornell Death Penalty Project Director and Students Worked on Former Death-Row Inmate’s Case
On March 3, 2012, Edward Lee Elmore walked out of prison after thirty-one years behind bars, twenty-nine of which he spent on death row. His ordeal began in 1982, when he was convicted for the sexual assault and murder of Dorothy Edwards in Greenwood, South Carolina. During the lengthy appeal process that ensued, “the state’s case began to unravel,” says John H. Blume, Professor of Law, and director of Clinical, Advocacy, and Skills Programs as well as the Cornell Death Penalty Project. Blume argued Elmore’s third direct appeal in 1987 and has been involved in the case ever since, along with Diana Holt and Chris Jensen.
“The primary attack was on the reliability of the physical evidence,” he says. Once Elmore’s legal team was able to enlist disinterested qualified forensic experts, it encountered increasingly strong indications that damning evidence had been fabricated or over-interpreted by authorities. In one instance, an evidence bag marked “Item T” went missing for years; when it resurfaced, it was found to contain a pubic hair belonging to a man other than Elmore. Despite such revelations, in 2000 a South Carolina judge again ruled against Elmore saying “one hair was not enough.”
In 1993, Blume joined the Cornell Law faculty and, in conjunction with Cornell Professors Sheri Lynn Johnson and Stephen Garvey, formed the Cornell Death Penalty Project to foster empirical scholarship on the death penalty, offer students an opportunity to work on death penalty cases, and provide information and assistance for death penalty lawyers. Students in the Project’s capital clinics became involved in Elmore’s case, performing research, conducting interviews, and drafting claims periodically over the next decades of litigation.
In 2010,