Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle held a news conference last month to announce the arrest of three people who stole the identities of victims from the Surfside condo collapse to go on shopping sprees. Because five of those victims had perished, the state attorney aptly called them “cyber grave robbers.”
The thieves started their dirty work approximately two weeks after the tragedy and were charged within two months. Law enforcement and prosecutors acted swiftly and efficiently to bring justice in the name of the deceased and the victims’ families.
(Florida Department of Law Enforcement)
Thomas Raynard James
But justice doesn’t always come that quickly. Thomas Raynard James has been waiting 31 years.
“Jay,” as he’s called by his family, has been incarcerated since 1990 when he was arrested on drug charges, but the Liberty City native was then surprisingly charged and convicted for a murder in Coconut Grove. He’s been trying to claw his way out of the “mistake” made by police and prosecutors ever since.
The likely wrongful conviction happened on Janet Reno’s watch; James’ decades of incarceration fall on Fernandez Rundle’s watch.
No one beyond his family cared about James’ fate until freelance investigative journalist Tristram Korten, who was writing a story about the case for GQ magazine, came along. In March 2021, he started submitting public records requests for documents in the James case. The state attorney’s office responded in two weeks with 800 pages. Miami-Dade County Police took seven months.
Email correspondence obtained by our sister publication, The Miami Times, indicates the state attorney’s office sent the James case over to the Justice Project, its division that investigates possible wrongful convictions, in early April.
But Fernandez Rundle says her office just got a “good footing” on the case with documents obtained by James’ attorney.
“Remember that this is a 30-year-old murder case. And while we don’t throw those [documents] away, they get archived,” said Fernandez Rundle, explaining that the office has to sift through thousands of documents related to the case. “They get boxed up and they get put away. And we’re not exactly under the most normal times with COVID.”
But at least 800 of those pages were unearthed for Korten seven months ago. And if there are “thousands of documents” in existence related to the case, why weren’t they all provided to him?
Fernandez Rundle also told The Miami Times a Sept. 8 news conference organized by local social justice activists who have coalesced to push for James’ release “wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Oh, but it was.
The news conference was meticulously planned with the involvement of James’ family members and his private lawyer, Natlie Figgers. At 10 a.m. on Sept. 7 Figgers was still requesting edits to the news release about the next day’s event. Around 4 p.m. The Miami Times received jailhouse photos of her client from the family. A few hours later, Figgers suddenly requested via email that the conference be canceled, but local activists did not yield.
“Someone, it appears to me, pressured [the family] not to attend,” said retired Miami-Dade homicide detective Al Singleton, who has taken an interest in the case. “And who has the motive to do that other than the state attorney’s office?”
Singleton is quite right. Prior to the moment somebody got to Figgers, she and James’ family members were overjoyed at the prospect of more media attention, thanks to the support and organization of attorney Melba Pearson and leaders from Florida Rising, Circle of Brotherhood, the Greater Miami Chapter of the ACLU and local NAACP branches.
Figgers, scarcely four years out of law school, is ill equipped for the magnitude of this case and more than likely easily intimidated. What do you do when the county’s state attorney holds all the cards and you’re in over your head? You buckle.
That a man originally arrested for drug trafficking was railroaded into a robbery and murder conviction committed by someone else is bad press for Fernandez Rundle. That Pearson, who ran against her in 2020, is calling out the injustice has to get under Fernandez Rundle’s skin. The state attorney even told The Miami Times that Figgers thought the Sept. 8 news conference was politically motivated, and a statement released on Sept. 9 by Figgers repeated as much. I wonder who put that in her head?
There’s plenty of politics to go around, but when lives are at stake, politics needs to take a back seat.
For case-specific details about Thomas Raynard James, read our Sept. 15 article on MiamiTimesOnline.com, “A 31-year battle to prove innocence,” or the original GQ magazine article by Tristram Korten at GQ.com.
Emily Cardenas is the executive editor of the Biscayne Times. She previously worked as a producer at WTXF in Philadelphia and at WSCV, WFOR and WPLG in Miami.