Kansas man sues over wrongful conviction, 15 years in prison

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Kansas man sues over wrongful conviction, 15 years in prison

Bill Draper, Associated Press
Updated 4:56 pm, Tuesday, May 10, 2016

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Kansas man who spent 15 years in prison for a rape and murder to which his brother confessed several times, including in suicide notes, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday alleging he was framed by investigators, prosecutors and his brother's attorney.

Floyd Bledsoe, 39, was convicted of raping and killing 14-year-old Camille Arfmann, who disappeared from Bledsoe's Oskaloosa, Kansas, home on Nov. 5, 1999. He was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he steadfastly denied committing.

"Floyd has had to live with the effects of being branded a murder, a rapist, a pedophile, being ripped from his family, being taken from his two young sons and placed into a world of violence," his attorney, Russell Ainsworth, said during news conference Tuesday.

The lawsuit alleges that prosecutors pursued the case even though Bledsoe's brother, Tom, confessed to multiple people — including Jefferson County sheriff's deputies — that he was responsible for the girl's death. None of those confessions is mentioned in the 37-page case report, nor is there an explanation for why authorities released Tom Bledsoe from custody and arrested Floyd Bledsoe for Camille's death, Ainsworth said.


Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Kansas-man-sues-over-wrongful-conviction-15-7435162.php

[rpannier]

1. Ought to send the prosecutor to jail

and anyone else involved in the cover up
Maybe that would be a lesson to them to not frame people

[happyslug]

2. When I read something like this, I assume Drug Informant.

Last edited Tue May 10, 2016, 10:31 PM - Edit history (1)

The Police will bend over backwards to protect a Drug Informant. Most times when a drug informant does a crime and is caught, the charges are dropped OR he gets the minimal sentence. In this case, the rape and murder of a 14 year old, whoever did it was going to jail for a LONG time. Someone did not want it to be their drug informant so they looked for who else to pin the crime on, the actual evidence be damned. Prosecutors and Police know Juries want to convict, so all they have to do is have a passable case and the defendant will be convicted (an exception to this rule are all African American Juries, they just do NOT trust the Police, so you actually have to have evidence independent of the police testimony, but even African American Juries tend to want to convict).

A little more details on the case (and I can NOT find anything about anyone being a drug Informant, it appears the Sheriff and the Prosecutor took a dislike to Floyd and a liking to Tom and that decided the case for them (one of the two did the crime):

http://cjonline.com/news/2016-01-07/floyd-bledsoe-tom-bledsoe-camille-arfmann-oskaloosa-murder-exoneration1#

Benton and the other jurors were driven by a desire to see someone punished for the senseless and heinous murder of Camille, he said.

“The jury decided that the evidence wasn’t overwhelming but we all decided to convict him because he was the only one we could make accountable for this poor girl’s murder,” Benton said.

“We knew someone in that family – one of those two boys or their father – killed that poor girl. This was our best chance to lock one of them up,” he added. “We all paid attention at trial but we wanted somebody to pay