July 27 MISSISSIPPI: District attorney wants the death penalty in auto dealer's death In Brandon, District Attorney David Clark said he will seek the death penalty for at least one of the suspects accused of gunning down a Florence used-car dealer. Harry McGuffee, 56, was shot 4 times in the head on July 8 inside his office at Five Star Auto Sales on U.S. 49 in Rankin County. Investigators are still determining who pulled the trigger, Clark said. Jermaine Rodgers, 21, and DeAndra Dampier, 16, claimed in a preliminary hearing on Monday that they did not pull the trigger. Each blames the other man for the murder, authorities said. 2 vehicles stolen from the lot were recovered at the Rodgers' apartment in Magee, Florence Police Lt. Andy Barrett said. "This was a heinous crime," Clark said. "We felt the death penalty is the only thing that is fair under the circumstances." Attorneys for the suspects maintained their clients' innocence. "A lot of investigation needs to take place in this case," said Ken McNeese, who is representing Dampier. "There's a lot more to be revealed." Rodgers and Dampier were being held in the Rankin County Jail without bond awaiting grand jury action. Clark said he will definitely seek the death penalty against Rodgers. He said he is waiting for evidence to return from the state crime lab before deciding whether to seek the death penalty for Dampier, who is being charged as an adult. Rodgers' wife, Clarissa Rodgers, 21, and Dampier's ex-girlfriend, Tamesha McClendon, 19, are charged with accessory after the fact. They have posted $20,000 bonds. (source: Associated Press) NEW YORK----book review BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'MIRACLE AT SING SING' ----Though a Man's Up the River, He Needn't Be Up the Creek MIRACLE AT SING SING How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners By Ralph Blumenthal----Illustrated. 303 pages. St. Martin's Press. $25.95. Prison wardens necessarily live at a remove from society. They provide few examples to counter the villains Hollywood has offered over the years, from the brutal work camp captain in "Cool Hand Luke" to the venal warden- bureaucrat in "The Shawshank Redemption." But if wardens have failed to erase the stigma of their profession, it wasn't for lack of trying by Lewis E. Lawes, the man who ran Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y., from 1919 to 1941. In a series of popular books and magazine articles, and in his own radio show, Lawes tried to show that not all wardens are either sadists or on the take. He even tried to persuade Hollywood to make a movie about him. Lawes's biopic was never made, a sore spot for him later in life. But this warden, who died in 1947, would no doubt be happy to know that a biography of him now sits on the shelf. In "Miracle at Sing Sing," Ralph Blumenthal captures the warden's determination to make his prison come alive to the outside world. As Mr. Blumenthal, a reporter for The New York Times, shows, Lawes didn't crave attention entirely for its own sake. He also had a crusade to wage: against the death penalty, against harsh and inflexible sentencing practices, and against the assumption that his prisoners were irredeemable. "It is so easy for busy people to think of prisons as simply jails where men are locked up," Lawes wrote near the end of his career. "Prisons are really communities populated by human beings." It was a point he spent his life proving. As Mr. Blumenthal explains, Lawes seized on opportunities like Sing Sing's baseball team to bring families and visitors into the prison. He built grandstands accommodating up to 3,000 spectators and masterminded a game between the Sing Sing Orioles and the 1929 Yankees. The inspired matchup didn't disappoint. Onlookers got to see Babe Ruth hit a 600-foot monster of a home run high over the heads of the guards who stood atop the prison's walls. More important, from Lawes's perspective, they got to see the inmates behaving themselves. Lawes was predictably skewered for coddling criminals. "What? No caddies?" newspaper cartoonists asked when visitors reported that the Sing Sing convicts had built a small golf green. (Older inmates needed to exercise too, after all.) According to Mr. Blumenthal, Lawes didn't care. He figured that any attention was good attention and started a clipping service at Sing Sing to keep track of his press coverage. Lawes's views about how to treat prisoners were of a piece with early-20th- century progressivism, which blamed poverty and industrialization for crime. His job gave him a singular credibility that helped reel in speaking engagements. When he told audiences that the death penalty was useless, he could also describe what it was like to officiate at an execution, which he would do more than 300 times by the end of his tenure. Lawes liked to surprise listeners with his insider's wisdom. "Men who took human life and served time are the best behaved and the best trusted in Sing Sing," he told a women's civic group at the Hotel Astor in Times Square in 1923. He had numbers to back up his claim: of the 180 Sing Sing murderers who had been paroled, only 3 had returned to prison. Aspects of Lawes's approach had a father-knows-best quality. He was the 1st warden to read all his prisoners' mail. But if Lawes was a paternalist, he was willing to test his belief in "his boys" on himself and his family. An inmate barber who'd been convicted of slitting a man's throat shaved the warden every morning. Other prisoners enlisted as house servants diapered his daughters and chauffeured Kathryn, his wife. Mr. Blumenthal writes that when she died in the couple's 19th year of residence at the prison, "the boys asked - demanded - to be allowed to say good-bye to the sainted mother of Sing Sing who liked to say she had 3 girls and 2,000 boys." Lawes agreed to open the gates so the men could walk in the funeral procession. He felt sure that no one would mar the occasion by trying to escape. He was right. Mr. Blumenthal doesn't err by portraying Sing Sing as a benevolent overnight camp. Lawes's image, however, emerges unscathed. Mr. Blumenthal describes the warden, after an execution, surrounded in the prison's mattress shop by a circle of angry men, one of whom screamed at him, "You killer!" Lawes apparently got out of the tight spot by putting up his fists and challenging the screamer to a one-on-one fight. In 1941 3 inmates escaped, and a police officer was killed during the getaway. Lawes's humanitarian ways were quickly blamed. The incident prompted his retirement, but a report by the state prison commissioner eventually absolved him of mismanagement. What is Lawes's legacy? Today there are former wardens who have similarly dedicated themselves to progressive causes: Don Cabana campaigns against the death penalty based on his experience overseeing executions at a prison in Alabama; Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin, pushes education and rehabilitation as the new director of the California Department of Corrections. But if Lawes was their forerunner, the connection is not one that Mr. Blumenthal makes. "Miracle at Sing Sing" is history as storytelling rather than argument, evoking Lawes and his era without explaining why they matter to the present. Still, the book illustrates for current readers what Lawes sought to teach his contemporaries: how to run a prison while holding fast to one's humanity. (source: Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Legal Affairs magazine and a Soros justice fellow; New York Times)
