June 20 WASHINGTON: A day of unthinkable loss Robert Dorcy's wife needed a break. He knew it -- knew that for Charlene, especially, caring for two small children was no small task. So Saturday morning, June 12, he told a chaplain, he corralled his daughters -- Jessica, all smiles at 4 years old, and 2-year-old Brittney, with her round cheeks and heart-shaped lips. He took them to a Vancouver park built in memory of a little girl who drowned in 1996. Dorcy played with them for 2 hours, then spent another hour "camping" with his daughters at home. They donned backpacks and built a makeshift tent inside their tidy 2-story duplex, tucked into a cul-de-sac in the Hazel Dell area, just north of Vancouver. Then their dad left for work, and the unimaginable happened. Charlene Annette Dorcy sits in the Skamania County Jail, accused of 2 counts of aggravated 1st-degree murder. Her daughters are dead. Her bail is set at $1 million. She could face the death penalty if convicted, and she is on a suicide watch. Now 38, Dorcy has struggled since she was 13 years old with mental illness -- paranoid schizophrenia, she told a newspaper reporter in 1997. She had been a client at Columbia River Mental Health Services in Vancouver in the 1990s. A neighbor and friend, Pauline Perez, said she knew Dorcy was mentally ill, as did Keith E. Northam of Brush Prairie, Wash., Dorcy's stepfather from the time she was an infant until she was 13. Dorcy was born in Portland and raised in Parkdale. But when she was 13, Northam and her mother, Charlotte Freet Northam, divorced. The girl, he said, went to live with her biological father. She was in the foster care system from 1978 to 1982. The illness shaped a torturously difficult life and, Dorcy has said, led her to try to kill herself at least 7 times. There were bright spots, though. Robert Arthur Dorcy was one. Robert Dorcy, who grew up in the Seattle area, and Charlene Keeney met through a newspaper personal ad and married in Multnomah County in 1996. "He takes me away," she told Brian Willoughby, "from my world of worry and anxiety." Willoughby, managing editor for a news Web site and magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., interviewed Charlene Dorcy many times in the winter of 1997. At the time, he was a reporter covering social issues for The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver. He wanted, he recalled last week, to write a story explaining the daily struggles and successes of someone living with a mental illness. Charlene Dorcy told him her story. Now, 7 years later, Dorcy's words eerily reverberate. Even then, before the children were born, she told Willoughby that she felt overwhelmed by her illness, by the stigma it carries and by the chaos it cast on her life. "You tell someone you're mentally ill, and they get scared," she told Willoughby. "They think you're a criminal, an ax murderer, going to hurt them, but I wouldn't hurt anyone." Each year in the United States, about 350 children younger than 5 die by homicide at the hands of a parent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. From 1976 to 2000, fathers killed 31 % of all child homicide victims younger than 5, while mothers killed 30 %. The mothers, though, attract most of the publicity. 3 in the past decade have drawn national attention and outcry: In 1994, Susan Smith let her car roll into a South Carolina lake one October night; her two young boys were inside. In 1996, Amy Grossberg gave birth in a Newark, Del., motel room, wrapped her baby in a trash bag and tossed it in a garbage bin. In 2001, Andrea Yates of Houston drowned her 5 children in the bathtub, later telling authorities that voices from God told her to kill them. Many Northwesterners, too, recall Elizabeth Diane Downs, who moved from Arizona to Oregon, and a few months later, in 1983, shot her 3 children, killing 1 of them. When mothers kill their offspring, the acts fly in the face of society's perception of motherhood -- a selfless, nurturing calling. "We cling to images of maternal altruism," said Michelle Oberman, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago and co-author of "Mothers Who Kill Their Children," published in 2001 by New York University Press. "It's almost unimaginable that a mother can harm her child." In the past 30 years, Oberman said, cultural changes have left U.S. mothers far more isolated than they were in earlier decades, or than they are today in other countries. Add to that isolation the usual stresses of parenting, layer on postpartum depression or some other mental disorder such as schizophrenia, she said, and "it's almost a prescription for risk, and then, in some cases, disaster." Robert Dorcy, 45, worked hard to stay financially afloat. He and his wife declared bankruptcy in 2002. But he's worked for 22 years at OECO, a Milwaukie company that makes circuit cards, transformers and light dimmers for aircraft and satellites. Sometimes, he worked other jobs on the side. Charlene Dorcy, who also had a personal bankruptcy in 1994, had trouble staying employed and had received disability payments. In their cul-de-sac, neighbors noticed that the family settled into a predictable routine. Robert Dorcy -- smiling from behind a mustache and thinning hairline in family pictures -- usually got home from work early in the afternoon and immediately took the girls out to the cul-de-sac, a neighbor said. He played with them and watched over them as they rode their tricycles. Some neighbors described Charlene Dorcy -- 5-foot-5, about 160 pounds, with hazel eyes and cascading dark brown hair -- as reclusive. But when Perez and her husband moved into the neighborhood a year ago, the Dorcys stopped by to introduce themselves. The 2 women became friends. They bonded over God, Perez said, and would pray together when Charlene Dorcy brought her girls over to play. The Dorcys' marriage wasn't always smooth sailing. Ell Loney, a chaplain who assists families in crisis, said Robert Dorcy told him that after Jessica was born, his wife wanted a playmate for her. She threatened her husband with divorce if they didn't have another baby. By all accounts, Charlene Dorcy doted on her daughters and rarely let them out of her sight. Their clothes were clean, their curly hair brushed. The Dorcy duplex and back yard were loaded with toys -- so many that she sometimes gave them away to neighbors. Less than 2 weeks ago, she placed a classified ad to sell toys they'd outgrown. She could be short-tempered. Guadalupe Soto, who has lived in the duplex adjoining the Dorcys' home for nine months, said that Charlene Dorcy had come to her door at least 4 times complaining about noise from Soto's children or the television. Sometimes, Dorcy shook with anger. Next-door neighbor Cristal Cates recalled a conversation so bizarre she reported Dorcy to Washington Child Protective Services a few months ago. Dorcy had complained that the Cateses were fixing their fence during what she said was her quiet time, from 3 to 6 p.m. According to Cates, Dorcy then asked: "How would you feel as a Christian, if I killed my children?" In 1998, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published the results of a study of 60 women who had killed their children. It showed that psychosis was present in every mother who killed her child with a knife, and in 7 of 8 women who killed their children with a gun. Schizophrenia, which affects more than 2 million Americans in a given year, is one of a group of related mental conditions called psychoses. Symptoms, which often first appear in the teenage years, include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking and social withdrawal. The illness has no cure. For some patients, it's chronic and debilitating. Others find that with the help of antipsychotic medication and psychotherapy, they can lead full, productive lives. The diagnosis doesn't necessarily mean that a person with schizophrenia would be an inadequate parent, said Dr. Phillip J. Resnick, a psychiatrist. Schizophrenics might find their parenting skills or judgment impaired only during acute episodes of the illness, he said. The director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Resnick is among the world's leading authorities on maternal filicide. That's the technical term for mothers who kill their children. Resnick was an expert witness in the Andrea Yates case, testifying that she was legally insane when she murdered her children in Texas. Peter Banks, the Skamania County prosecutor, said he will consider "mitigating circumstances" as he determines whether he will seek the death penalty in Charlene Dorcy's case. Typically, mental illness is considered a mitigating factor. Dorcy will undergo a competency evaluation before entering a plea. Clouds hung over the tiny Columbia River Gorge town of Carson on June 12. The air felt chilly. Rain fell in fits and starts. On that day, according to a search warrant affidavit filed Tuesday in Clark County District Court, Charlene Dorcy said she waited until her husband left for work, then entered his room and took his gun. Robert Dorcy had bought the weapon, he told Chaplain Loney, because he feared chaos at the millennium. As many people did, Dorcy had stocked up on water. At the time, he told Loney, he put one bullet in the gun and had his wife slip in another, in case she needed to know how to use it if Y2K turned to mayhem. Soto heard Jessica's and Brittney's voices through their shared duplex wall between 2 and 3 p.m. that Saturday. Sometime afterward, court documents say, Charlene Dorcy loaded her daughters into the family's white 1990 Toyota Corolla with its two child-safety seats. She drove about 90 miles into Washington's woodsy Wind River Recreation Area, 33 miles northeast of Carson. Pine boughs might have brushed the car windows as she traveled the last mile, a stretch where the road narrows to not much more than a path. She arrived at a dead end, where an abandoned basalt quarry sits at 4,000 feet between Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams. A 50-foot-high rock wall hangs over a small, rocky pit ringed by pines. Rusted shotgun shells and beer cans littered the ground, along with charred logs from an old campfire. There, dressed in red pants, a blue shirt and a sweat shirt, Dorcy spread a blanket on the ground, got her girls situated and gave them snacks. She lay the gun on the blanket. "As the children became restless," the affidavit states, "Dorcy picked up the gun, stood up and shot the 2 girls." She returned to the car, the document says, put the gun and snack bag in the trunk, placed her black purse on the front passenger seat and drove away. In Stevenson, less than 40 miles southwest, she called her sister-in-law in Kent, Wash., from a pay phone. She asked for her prayers. It was 5:12 p.m. At 6 p.m., from a pay phone just outside the Vancouver Police Department's Central Precinct, Charlene Dorcy dialed 9-1-1. When Robert Dorcy got home from work that evening, police were waiting at the tan duplex with the black and white trim and manicured lawn. With Dorcy's permission, they searched his home. Later, at the Clark County Sheriff's Office West Precinct, Loney prayed with him before detectives took Dorcy into an interview room. "Bob," Loney remembered telling him, "we've got to pray for the best, but we've got to prepare ourselves for the worst." As authorities questioned Dorcy, Loney and others at the sheriff's office got the word: In the quarry's northwest corner, Skamania County sheriff's Detective Summer N. Scheyer had found a blanket with 2 children lying bloody and motionless. When she checked, neither had a pulse. Both were cold to the touch. In the trunk of Dorcy's car, searched later, was a Ruger 10/22 -- a rifle that holds 10 bullets. Charlene Dorcy had led police to the scene. It appeared, according to the affidavit, just as she had told authorities it would. Back in Vancouver, as Robert Dorcy's interview wrapped up, Loney did what he often has had to do in his six years as a chaplain. "I've found over the years," he said, "that you don't use spicy words . . . you just say it." He joined Dorcy in the interview room, sat next to him and placed a hand on Dorcy's knee. "I said," Loney recalled, "something like 'Bob, our biggest fears are true. The girls are found, and they are dead.'" (source: The Oregonian FLORIDA: Killer claims DNA test will clear him In 1973, Carol Blevins, just 13 years old, set out alone for the beach one Sunday morning. Hours later, the skinny blond child lay dead atop a garbage pile in Riviera Beach, blindfolded, raped, shot at least 5 times. That same year, Learie "Leo" Alford, then 27, a security guard with no criminal history, would be convicted and sentenced to death for her murder -- becoming one of the 1st scheduled to die under Florida's renewed death penalty. Among the ample circumstantial evidence tying Alford to the crime -- including possession of the murder weapon -- prosecutors keyed on blood and semen stains on Alford's clothes and semen found inside Blevins. They knew the semen inside Blevins belonged to someone with type O blood (like Alford), and the blood on Alford's work shirt belonged to someone with type A blood (like Blevins). Vague blood typing was as good as technology got back then. What would DNA technology say today? Alford is alive and asking for it. But prosecutors are saying no. Alford has asked a judge if he can have DNA tests made of the rape-kit swabs and clothing that have been sitting in an evidence box in the clerk's office for years. His attorney, Richard Lubin, says the DNA testing would exonerate Alford of Blevins' rape and murder. Prosecutors are fighting it because they say it won't clear him of the murder and that there's other evidence pinning him to the crime. Yet inside that evidence box remains a truth: either an old one confirmed or a new one revealed. If DNA tests showed another man's semen inside Blevins, prosecutors would be in a major jam: another rapist having walked free for so many years and a major hole in the conviction they already have. "That would completely unhinge the prosecutor's case against this man," said Peter Neufeld, co-founder of New York's Innocence Project. "And what if the DNA matches some pedophile murderer already in the database? Whatcha going to say then?" The Innocence Project is nationally known for winning scores of exonerations with DNA evidence. If the prosecutors stood up more than 30 years ago and told a jury that Alford raped and murdered Blevins, then the blood and the semen of that crime should be put to the test, Neufeld said. "The worst thing that happens is the DNA confirms he's guilty" Neufeld said. "What's the harm in doing a simple DNA test which can only get to the truth?" As for prosecutors fighting the testing, Lubin calls it "unconscionable." He wrote to the judge: "It is the role of the prosecutor to seek justice, not convictions." Through all of his denied appeals, Alford has maintained his innocence. "Why the state would oppose it is beyond imagination, but it certainly awakens one's worst fears," Lubin and fellow attorney Tama Beth Kudman wrote to Circuit Judge Richard Wennet. A DNA test would prove that Alford has spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, Lubin says. "That's what everyone is afraid of." 'Not for the faint of heart' State Attorney Barry Krischer once worked on the Alford case, arguing against his request for clemency in 1979. Then-Gov. Bob Graham commuted Alford's death sentence to mandatory life in prison after an eyewitness changed his story. While Krischer has declined to comment on the Alford case or the office's overall handling of DNA test requests, prosecutors have asked Wennet to deny Alford's request. A ruling is expected anytime. Prosecutors wrote in court filings that Florida law requires that the DNA test performed be able to exonerate a person of the crime. In Alford's case, it would not, wrote Assistant State Attorney Leigh Lassiter Miller. She notes the other evidence in the case, which includes a fiber found in Alford's underwear that matched fibers from Blevins' bikini bottom and Alford's admission to police that he was in possession of the murder weapon. Lubin's DNA requests are not grounded in the law, Miller wrote. They are just "a tale... full of sound and fury signifying nothing," she wrote, quoting Macbeth. Fury indeed. Lubin: "There is is no legitimate legal or moral reason to deny Mr. Alford the right to test. The proof is in the pudding. There's no pussyfooting around. There's no painting it with a different brush. Test the DNA. Period." As DNA exonerations of convicted people steadily rise -- 114 nationwide, according to the Innocence Project -- prosecutors have begun to join the cause as well, launching internal reviews of cases. The Miami-Dade state attorney's office is one of a few in the nation that has taken the proactive stance. The office launched its "Justice Project" late last year, creating master lists of defendants and evidence to be tested. Still, Miami-Dade prosecutors oppose the majority of requests for the testing because in most instances it would not exonerate someone of the crime. But they also agree to tests in order to be thorough, said the project's chief, Assistant State Attorney Michael Gilfarb. The Miami-Dade office would likely agree to test a rape kit where there's no evidence of the victim having prior sexual activity and only one attacker has been accused, Gilfarb said. Recently, the office had a situation similar to Alford's. A convicted rapist serving life in prison had always insisted on his innocence. Only a fingerprint had tied him to the scene. The prisoner asked that semen found on a towel at the rape scene be tested. Gilfarb agreed to the test but did not agree that the result would be an immediate exoneration if it wasn't the prisoner's DNA. "DNA testing is not for the faint of heart," Gilfarb said. "All the evidence pointed to the defendant. I was still losing sleep about what would happen if it wasn't. But that can't be the barometer. You have to take the leap." In that rape case, the DNA did match the convicted rapist. Attorney Joel Daves, who would later become mayor of West Palm Beach, defended Alford at his 1973 trial along with Edward Rodgers, now a senior circuit judge. Daves said he too wants to see the DNA tested -- if jurors had heard DNA evidence back then and it didn't match up to Alford, they might never have convicted him. "We should just see," Daves said. A model prisoner Leo Alford was the son of a prominent Riviera Beach minister. He was married, an Army sergeant honorably discharged and home from Vietnam. He was a father and a Sunday school teacher and sang in the choir. His father wanted him to join the ministry, but Alford wanted other more worldly things, he told The Palm Beach Post in 1993. Alford declined to be interviewed for this article, as did his family members. Now 58, he's imprisoned at Glades Correctional Institution in Belle Glade, where he's been a model prisoner. His only disciplinary report was in 1977, according to the Department of Corrections. Alford had his dessert taken away for not following an order. He's spent the years working in the prison chapel, counseling inmates, organizing worship groups, planning the inmates' annual Christmas pageant. "God has a way of tricking man into doing His own will," Alford told the Post in 1993. At his trial, Alford used an alibi defense -- that he could not have killed Blevins between 10 and 11 a.m. that day because he was off with someone else. That someone else was a man named Ronald Gardner. At the trial, Gardner testified the 2 had unsuccessfully attempted to have sex in a freight yard nearby. In Gardner's account, though, times did not match. Gardner said he was back home by 10 a.m., watching a Sunday church program. Other alibi witnesses did match the times. Prosecutor Charles Brown theorized that Alford, enraged by the failed encounter with Gardner, acted out on Blevins as she walked by Alford's security guard post. Blevins, who attended John F. Kennedy Junior High School, was found in a remote wooded area on a trash pile a few hours later. Testing still possible Despite the 30-year age of the evidence taken from her that day, it's still possible to test for DNA, according to Orchid Cellmark, the Maryland-based company where Lubin proposes to have the evidence examined. It would cost thousands of dollars to test it, which Alford and Lubin will pay themselves. Lubin represents Alford pro bono. He last worked on the case in 1979, representing Alford at the clemency proceedings. After so many years, the idea to try for testing came to Lubin last year, as a state-imposed deadline loomed for making DNA requests. Lubin rails at the idea that prosecutors would refuse to test the same evidence they used years ago to put someone away. "Every single person exonerated by DNA was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury convinced it was overwhelming," Lubin said. "By a jury that was wrong." Now it's left to Judge Wennet to decide what truth will be. (source: Palm Beach Post) ILLINOIS: Sluggish justice -- Cook County's torpid legal system has led to jail overcrowding - and worse When police arrested Anthony Copeland of Calumet Park, Bill Clinton was campaigning for his second term, Chicago was reeling still from the previous summer's fatal heat wave, and "The Macarena" dance craze was sweeping the nation. It was May 7, 1996. Copeland was 25 years old. Since then, the accused gangland killer hasn't set foot outside the Cook County Jail's concrete walls. Copeland - accused of shooting a man as he bent over to tie his shoes - has been jailed for 8 years. Neither judge nor jury has decided the question of Copeland's guilt. And he is not alone. In the Cook County Jail, more than 600 people are locked up awaiting trial or sentencing. "We have 33 people that have be in there (at least) five years," said Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, who oversees the jail. "That's unacceptable to me, it's totally unacceptable, it's ridiculous. ... That tells you something is wrong with the system." Cook County courts have always had a problem dealing with massive caseloads and have always been slower then neighboring counties as a result. But the problem appears to be getting worse. The average length of stay for a Cook County jail inmate in 2003 was a record high 216 days. In the 1990s, it was about 90 days, Sheahan said. In New York City, an inmate stays in jail an average of 45 days, and in Los Angeles, 35 days, according to a report released in May by the John Howard Association. The group was appointed by the federal court to monitor Cook County jail conditions as part of a 1974 civil rights lawsuit on behalf of inmates. "There are thousands of cases ... where average length of stay is a year," said Charles Fasano, who monitors the jail for the association. "These are huge numbers of guys." Defense attorneys are accustomed to cases that take years, said Andrea Lyon, president of the Illinois Association of Defense Lawyers and director of the Center for Justice in Capital Cases at DePaul University. That's particularly so for cases in which the defendant could be sentenced to death. "It used to be that a capital case would go to trial in a year or a year and a half," said Lyon, who managed the Cook County Public Defender's murder task force until 1991. "That was considered long, but everyone understood that there was a lot more involved. ... you have to defend everything your client ever did in his life. "Now I hear cases where (attorneys) are unsurprised when it takes 3 or 4 years to go to trial, which is astounding to most people." Cook County courts swamped Prosecutors say all delays are generally caused by the defense, because prosecutors are required by law to go to trial quickly. The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees everyone "the right to a speedy and public trial." By Illinois law, a defendant has a right to a trial within 120 days of his arrest, if he asks for it. Defense attorneys counter that prosecutors are slow to turn over evidence and often ask a judge for time to conduct DNA testing or respond to defense motions. "The 120-day rule is really a sham," Sheahan said. "I think that there are times when all of us have to work harder." Fasano said studies of the court system by outside consultants have shown both prosecutors and defense attorneys ask for delays and neither side fights hard for quick trials. "It's sort of like, 'We're working together every day, I better agree with you so you'll agree with me.' It's professional courtesy, and the clock stops," Fasano said. "Constitutional protections are Swiss cheese." One clearly contributing factor is the sheer number of cases in Cook County. Often referred to as the largest unified court system in the nation, Cook County's system includes the city of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Other major metro areas, like New York, are split into multiple court jurisdictions. Cook County felony judges handed down more than 37,000 decisions in 2003, said Judge Paul Biebel, chief judge of the criminal courts. "My judges in this building (each) disposed of an average of 900 cases per year," Biebel said. "We're not getting more room, so the reality of the situation is we're doing with what we have." A judge can try only one case at a time, Biebel said. Most of those enduring lengthy waits for trial face serious crimes and cannot afford their own attorneys, either. That makes them the responsibility of the Public Defender of Cook County, an office notoriously overworked and understaffed. Even attorneys in the office's homicide task force, which handles the most serious cases, work 20 cases each on average, said Xavier Velasco, chief operations officer for the public defender's office. Each of the 36 attorneys on that task force handles an average of 6 or 7 death penalty cases, Velasco said. "While we're interested in efficiency, our role is to make sure that our clients' rights are protected," Velasco said. "That is our mandate." After 13 people were released from death row in Illinois because they were found not guilty or because their cases were deeply flawed, death penalty cases grew more complicated thanks to greater scrutiny on the legal system. And many of the reforms have proved time-consuming. "There are 200 to 500 hours of preparation needed out of court for every capital case," said Lyon, who spent 15 years with the public defender's office. "But it's someone's life. You can't tell someone, 'It's 5 o'clock and I'm leaving.'" In capital cases, and increasingly in all felony cases, prosecutors and defense attorneys are seeking DNA testing of evidence. The popularity of such testing has outstripped the capacity of the Illinois State Police crime lab and other private crime labs, Velasco said. The state police lab can return high-priority "heater" cases, in which there is a known suspect, within days, said State Police Lt. Lincoln Hampton. Other cases are tacked onto a backlog that has recently shrunk from 1,100 cases to 775 cases. "In January, it would take about three months to get answers (from the lab)," Hampton said. "But it can vary widely. ... Crime scene investigators are getting much more aware of DNA testing, so before where they'd send in 2 or 3 samples, now they send in 20. "They don't want to miss a clue if it might solve a case." Sheahan suggested some defendants want their cases to drag, especially those who know they're guilty. "They know they'd rather be here in Cook County than in some state prison, so they'll stall," Sheahan said. "They're closer to home, they're here with some of their friends, their visitors don't have to travel as far." Rampant overcrowding in jail Besides the emotional toll on the accused, the victims and their families, long trial delays inflict consequences on the judicial system. The most obvious effect is on the jail, which has been overcrowded "every single day ... since January of 1988," according to the John Howard report. About 1,000 inmates sleep on the floor of the day activity room every night, Sheahan said. Cells designed for 2 people routinely hold 3. "Length of stay and number of admissions are the 2 main variables for overcrowding," Fasano said. "Admissions is not going up. It's like a restaurant. The question isn't how many tables you have, it's how often you turn them over." Sheahan has started release programs that allow some non-violent inmates to live outside the complex. He won the right last November to send inmates appealing their cases back to state prison until they're needed in the courtroom. Still, the average daily population of the jail - 10,664 in 2003 - has doubled in 15 years. "If you crowd them in, a lot of them have short fuses," Sheahan said. "They get upset with each other, even looking at TV, they could get to a fight over a TV show. "Even an average family, a good family, if you put them in a room all day and tell them to stay there, they'd get on each other's nerves. And in many cases, these are not good people." Besides the general overcrowding, the inmates held longest create special security problems. Often, they're the most violent people in the jail, and they get bolder the longer they're there. Gang members in jail can communicate with their gang on the outside easier than they can from state prison, Sheahan said. Other gang members cycle through on a regular basis, allowing the relay of messages and orders. "When they get that way, they think it's their home; they don't follow rules and regulations; they think it's their gang turf," Sheahan said. "There isn't anything they haven't tried to do or think about. "They have all the time in the world." In the courtroom, prosecutors face problems with long-delayed cases because witnesses die, move, lose interest, or forget what they know, said Cook County state's attorney spokesman John Gorman. "Witnesses in many of these gang cases go back to the neighborhood, and they get intimidated by the gangs," Gorman said. "And occasionally they will recant." Solution far from reality With no agreement about the cause of the problem, there is little agreement about solutions. Both Fasano and Sheahan think the county should study the issue. Fasano called for an independent report, similar to one the county paid for in 1990. "Many of the lawyers and judges say there are legitimate reasons for (delays in) this case and this case and this case ... and there probably are," Fasano said. "But then you have to look at it on the macro level and say, 'Here's what you have, boys.'" Sheahan suggested a permanent case-management review committee could be created to look into any case taking more than 2 years. "What I envision is you get a former judge, or a former public attorney, and a former prosecutor and a defense counsel. They could look it over and see if there are any red flags," Sheahan said. Sheahan said judges and attorneys have opposed the plan, and county board members aren't sure they want to pay for it. But Sheahan said such a review group would cost little. "If there's an exception, look at it, but how can we ever defend eight years? Five years?" Sheahan said. Biebel said the chief judge's office is reviewing cases more than 2 years old, but it is too early to know what will be found. Legalize drugs? Lyon has a radical solution that she admits will not get much popular backing from lawmakers. She said the nation should consider legalizing drugs. "A lot of our judicial resources ... are tied up dealing with low-end user cases," Lyon said. "We'd be better if we took (drug addicts) out of the system and put them right into treatment, which works 50 % of the time, as opposed to jail, which works 10 % of the time for drug addicts." Biebel - who said he would not endorse a change in drug laws - noted drugs are everywhere in the felony courts. "Approximately 70 % of our cases involve drugs directly or indirectly," Biebel said. "50 % of murders are gang-related ... and that involves drugs, because in Chicago, the gangs control the drug trade." At least 3 of the 9 longest-held inmates at Cook County jail are awaiting trial for gang-related crimes. Any changes in law will come too late to affect their cases. Anthony Copeland, now 32, is due in court July 9. On that day, it will have been 2,985 days since his arrest. (source: Daily Southtown) CALIFORNIA: Judging jury's 'life or death?' efforts not easy Frustrating. Disturbing. Upsetting. Those incompetent jurors. When a man confesses to killing someone and asks for the death penalty, the way Seti Scanlan did after killing Alice Martel, it's a no-brainer. Right? 2 children are without their mother and their father is a widower because the 26-year-old Scanlan fatally shot Martel in the abdomen as she tried to close her office door during a Burlingame bank robbery in 2002. It capped a string of 10 armed robberies in which Scanlan also shot a store clerk and a police officer. But the jury can't give Scanlan death? There is something achingly unfinished for the Martel family because the tragedy of Alice Martel's death ended in a mistrial. So what if Scanlan had an abusive and violent father? What gives? No, I have never sat on a jury. I've always sat in observance. Jurors are smart. Jurors are nincompoops. Before they're called to duty, they're like our next-door neighbors. Once they're jurors and have to render a verdict, suddenly they become something else. They're not like us -- more like the jerk who thoughtlessly cut us off on the freeway this morning. In the jury box Whether we sit listening to testimony day after day or we never set foot in the courtroom, everyone has an opinion. To wit: Any of us would do a better job than those few bleeding-hearts on the jury. But would we really? As a journalist, I've sat through more closing arguments than I can recall. I've whispered observations to colleagues sitting next to me. The jury box, however, is separated from the rest of the courtroom by more than a simple railing. "One thing to remember -- and something people tend to not believe -- is that the juries take their jobs very seriously," said Sonia Chopra, a trial consultant with the National Jury Project in Oakland, "particularly in a capital case." I've only come close to being impaneled once. It was a nasty case in which 2 defendants were accused of beating the daylights out of a fellow resident in a down-at-the-heels residential hotel in San Francisco. But I was rejected. I always wonder how would I have deliberated behind those doors once the closing arguments and the judge's instructions were given. Chopra says I probably would be just like other jurors. In many cases, it's a juror's 1st time. Even fewer have served on a capital case before. And when you've never been in such a role before, understanding your job, as the judge has laid it out, is something honest people take to heart. "They know they have a big decision, and they don't want to make it lightly," Chopra said. Not just retribution The defendant's desire to die is not necessarily the key factor. For some, with life or death hanging in the balance, weighing "aggravating and mitigating circumstances" -- such as Scanlan's childhood -- was key. For one juror, evidence of "an unstable mind" tipped the scales. Like the jury, we as a society are not unanimous when it comes to handing up the death penalty. I don't even know where I stand. Of course I would feel differently if I were David Martel. Or if it were my mother who died in that Burlingame bank. Or my spouse. "Mistrial" here means life in prison without possibility of parole -- not exoneration, not a pass. Life in prison may not provide closure. It is not the same fate that Alice Martel suffered. If we were a different society, we'd let David Martel exact his retribution personally, and directly, on Scanlan. Thank God we're not. Scanlan will never go free. Nor will there be another tragic murder -- like Alice Martel's -- at the hands of Seti Scanlan. So give the jury -- all of its members -- credit for trying to do the right thing (source: Column, L.A. Chung; Mercury News) USA: Juvenile Death Penalty to be Highlighted at Annual Event; Starvin' for Justice 2004; 11th Annual Fast and Vigil at Supreme Court Contact: Abe Bonowitz, 800-973-6548 or 561-371-5204 (mobile - use starting 6/25) or [email protected], for the Abolitionist Action Committee; or David Elliot of National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 202-543-9577 ext. 16 or 202-607-7036 (mobile) or [email protected] WASHINGTON, June 20 /U.S. Newswire/ -- With the trend of US States abolishing the death penalty for juveniles and the upcoming re-argument of the juvenile aspect of the issue before the US Supreme Court, anti-death penalty activists will converge on Washington, D.C., Tuesday, June 29, through Friday, July 2, for 4 days of activities commemorating the historic 1972 and 1976 Supreme Court rulings that suspended the death penalty in the United States and later allowed executions to resume. Several programs during the 4-day event will specifically address the juvenile death penalty. June 29 marks the 32nd anniversary of the Furman v. Georgia decision suspending executions, while July 2 marks the 28th anniversary of the Gregg v. Georgia ruling allowing executions to resume. Since Gregg, 915 people have been executed in the United States, with 3 more executions scheduled to take place June 29 and 30, during the course of the four day protest. This is the eleventh year in a row that the Abolitionist Action Committee has held its annual Fast and Vigil between the dates of these two landmark decisions. Activists, many of whom are fasting the entire four days, are travelling to Washington D.C. from across the United States and beyond. Highlights of this highly visual and interactive annual event include live music by recording artist Steve Earle, and talks by death row survivors, victims family members, and noted activists. ------ ATTENTION REPORTERS, EDITORS AND PRODUCERS: Consider interviews with activists from your specific state or region. A "media availability" will be held at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, June 29, on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Among those known to be available at that time: Florida death row survivor Juan Melendez and leaders from various organizations opposing the death penalty. A public rally, complete with interesting visuals, will begin at noon, and musician Steve Earle will perform at an evening rally on July 1. The Abolitionist Action Committee is an ad-hoc group of individuals committed to highly visible and effective public education for alternatives to the death penalty through nonviolent direct action. (source: US Newswire)
