The Constitution of the United States provides, in Amendment Five: “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
On April 12th, 2001, a woman’s body was found in the trunk of a car registered to Carol Hebert. The first detective on the scene did not know who the woman was. He did not know if she was married. Nevertheless he immediately ordered the arrest of the husband of Carol Hebert.
In December of 2001, a Denver District Court ruling held the arrest to be illegal because it lacked probable cause. But the detective’s classic rush to judgment had set the stage for the entire ensuing proceeding against Hal Hebert.
Denver police immediately released incriminating but completely false statements about Mr. Hebert. They focused their investigation entirely on him and intentionally ignored other available clues and information that would have led to a different suspect.
Police perjured at Mr. Hebert’s arraignment and later at his trial. They suborned perjury from other witnesses through coercion and intimidation. They fabricated evidence, and connived with prosecutors to purposefully misrepresent forensic evidence from the Denver Police Lab. Prosecutors introduced inflammatory evidence about guns owned by Mr. Hebert even though they knew the firearms could not have been the murder weapon. Evidence was known to prosecutors of two perpetrators of the crime but never shared with the defense. Police and prosecutors together coached false statements of a man who provided the key perjured testimony on which the prosecution’s entire case theory rested: that six weeks prior to his wife’s death, Mr. Hebert had “purchased and planned with a .22 pistol” (which was never produced). Mr. Hebert was found guilty on June 28, 2003.
A few weeks later the key witness murdered a victim under similar circumstances to what had befallen Carol Hebert. Suburban (Arapahoe County) law officials discovered the witness had been a practicing serial murderer for some years. He had killed at least five people in Denver under the noses of the same Denver police who had coached him to testify falsely at Mr. Hebert’s trial. The key witness was charged (by the same prosecutor who had used him as her star witness at Mr. Hebert’s trial) with 52 major felonies including numerous murders, burglaries, robberies and kidnappings. The witness accepted an offer from the prosecutor which allowed him to avoid a trial and a possible death penalty. He quietly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to multiple life terms
Neither the judge nor the police nor the Denver District Attorney ever made an effort to notify Mr. Hebert or his defense team of the revelation of their key witness’ actual shocking criminality. The witness, in prison and safe from further prosecution, has bragged and laughed to his fellow inmates that he is actually responsible for many more crimes, including the murder of Carol Hebert.
By their actions and tactics throughout this investigation and trial (and after), the prosecutors from the Denver District Attorney’s Office methodically and purposely deprived Hal Hebert of an accused person’s most precious right: Due Process.
Due Process is a simple concept that is succinctly defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as a “fair hearing.” Mr. Hebert has struggled since his 2003 trial to attain a fair hearing but has been rebuffed by a series of court holdings that have never attempted to evaluate the facts and merits but have instead denied his pleadings on narrow procedural grounds. The controlling precedent that must be adhered to, but courts have ignored, is provided in the fountainhead of American Law: “The Constitution is the supreme Law of the land,” Judge Willett, 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Mr. Hebert welcomes the support of American citizens, who love the Constitution, for his effort to avail himself of the protections it embodies against outrageous misuse of a Governmental Agency’s power and dominion over an individual.
Mr. Hebert seeks a fair trial.