Rodricus Crawford is on death row in Louisiana
On the morning of February 16, 2012, something disastrous happened.
This much we know:
A week after his son turned one, Rodricus Crawford woke up a few minutes before 7 A.M. on the left side of his bed. His son was sleeping on the right side, facing the door. Crawford, who was twenty-three, reached over to wake him up, but the baby didn’t move. He put his ear on his son’s stomach and then began yelling for his mother. “Look at the baby!” he shouted.
An uncle in the house called 911. The grandmother and an aunt took turns administering CPR. Twenty minutes later, the ambulance still had not arrived and the uncle, in a panic, called 911 yet again to tell them to hurry up.
When the ambulance finally arrived, Rodricus, with his son Roderius in his arms, rushed out of the house and put his son into the care of the EMTs. The EMTs refused to allow him into the ambulance. They eventually pulled away, but a few minutes later, police came and arrested Rodricus. The baby had died.
Not one single soul in his family thought Rodricus killed the baby. The police brought the child's mother, who lived a few doors down, in for questioning as well. She didn't believe he killed the baby either.
As it turns out, no motive was ever established for the murder. Several family members communicated that baby Roderius had a cold and an autopsy actually confirmed that the baby had pneumonia. A week before the trial, Crawford's attorney asked the DA to dismiss the case:
He had just received a report from his medical expert, Daniel Spitz, a forensic pathologist from Michigan, who co-authored a pathology textbook that is widely used in medical schools. Spitz found that Roderius’s blood had tested positive for sepsis, and he concluded that he had died of pneumonia. Spitz told me that after reviewing the case he thought that there “wasn’t enough evidence to even put this before a jury.
According to the Mayo Clinic:
Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection. Sepsis occurs when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight the infection trigger inflammatory responses throughout the body. This inflammation can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.
If sepsis progresses to septic shock, blood pressure drops dramatically, which may lead to death.
In addition to all but completely ruling out the impact of sepsis, the local coroner
misstated key scientific facts:
Traylor said that his finding of suffocation was based entirely on the bruises on Roderius’s lips, but he never sampled the tissue to date the injury, a basic test that would have revealed whether the bruises came from the earlier fall in the bathroom, an explanation that he ignored. He misstated medical science, telling the jury that Roderius’s brain had swelled as a result of suffocation. Swelling does not occur in cases of smothering, because the person dies rapidly, and the brain can’t swell if blood has stopped circulating. The brain can swell, though, in cases of pneumonia with sepsis.
Both Rodricus and the child's mother told police the day of the death and in court that the baby, as babies often do, had hurt his lip and head in a fall the day prior and had been given ice for it.
In spite of all of this, Rodricus Crawford was convicted for the murder of his own son and sentenced to death. It's perhaps one of the weakest death penalty cases in the entire nation. It turns out, though, that racist District Attorney Dale Cox, there in Shreveport, Louisiana, is leading the way in openly advocating the death penalty as "revenge."
Rodricus Crawford should've received counseling after the death of his son. The child's death appears much more to be a tragic accident than a cold-hearted murder. Not one person testified that they had ever witnessed any type of child abuse from Rodricus Crawford or anyone in the family. To convict a man and sentence him to death with this evidence is lynching by another name and yet another sign of the New Jim Crow.