Oct. 4 CALIFORNIA: Star Lawyer Deeply Committed to Deep South For Tom Mesereau, there hasn't been much middle ground lately: It's been either glitz or grits. Mesereau, a big man whose crown of white, shoulder-length hair is about as commonplace in Alabama courts as a powdered wig, is the lead attorney for pop star Michael Jackson. He usually practices in Century City, roughly a million miles from Bessemer's courthouse and the seafood gumbo at the Bright Star restaurant nearby. But here was Mesereau one sweltering afternoon last month, hoping to effect a sudden change of fortune for a 53-year-old body shop owner who was facing a possible death sentence. Charged in a conspiracy to commit murder, Glenis Latham was ushered into the Jefferson County courtroom in his red-and-white striped jail uniform. He had been held without bail for 11 months. Hours later, he was a free man, heading home to a plate of his sister Deshelah's corn bread and black-eyed peas. With help from Mesereau and Birmingham, Ala., defense attorney Charles Salvagio, Latham's murder charge was reduced to criminal conspiracy to possess marijuana - a transformation on the order of a noose being turned into a rubber band. The outcome suited Mesereau just fine. Since 1999 he has handled 6 Alabama and Mississippi death penalty cases at his own expense. All of the clients have been acquitted or convicted on lesser charges. Mesereau, 54, initially volunteered for duty in the Deep South through an American Bar Assn. project. In an interview, he said he was doing what he could to keep defendants from dying at the hands of the state. "I truly believe that many impoverished people don't get proper representation," he said. "As lawyers, we're blessed to have these opportunities." Death penalty opponents say such opportunities abound in Alabama, where convicted killers receive the sentence more often than in 43 other states. "The state has a serious problem with the quality of representation, which often leads to more death sentences," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. Unlike most other states, Alabama provides no money or lawyers for death penalty appeals, he said. Raised in New York, Thomas Mesereau Jr. had no previous connections to the South. Now he rhapsodizes about the food and the manners, chuckling at liberal California friends who issue dire warnings about his safety before each trip. Sometimes he attends services at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, where a 1963 bombing killed four young black girls. Still, Mesereau, a Harvard graduate whose client list has included celebrities such as Mike Tyson and Robert Blake, is an outsider. In one trial, a prosecutor derided him as "a Hollywood fraud." But Mesereau dances away from such jabs like the amateur boxer he used to be. His colleagues say juries have not been put off by his celebrity. "When prosecutors have tried the home-cookin' thing, it's backfired," said Salvagio, Mesereau's partner on several cases. "Tom's just a decent person, and that decency shines through no matter where he's at." Whether Mesereau will sway jurors in the Jackson child molestation case is, of course, unknown. Bessemer is 2,000 miles and a world away from the fans, the camera crews, the commentators, the superheated throngs attending to the self-styled King of Pop's every move. Gutted by the collapse of the U.S. steel industry, the city of 29,000 has a downtown heavy with sagging bungalows, boarded-up windows and abandoned commercial buildings. Despite new revenue from a publicly financed amusement park called Visionland, the city has been mired in hard times, its population shrinking by a third since its heyday. Mesereau has done 3 cases in Bessemer, 2 in Birmingham and 1 in the south Mississippi town of Columbia. A defendant there named Melvin "Mook" Anderson, a former resident of 5 mental institutions, had been charged with fatally shooting a man in a drug deal gone bad. His defense was assigned by the courts to Greg Pierce, a 24-year-old attorney who had only recently started handling felony cases. Eager for help, Pierce called Mesereau but didn't figure anything would come of it. "L.A.? Please!" Pierce scoffed. "I couldn't even get someone out of Hattiesburg!" But Mesereau flew in, with Salvagio and a frequent colleague, Birmingham attorney Wilson Myers. Prosecutors were persuaded to accept a guilty plea in return for a life sentence. "I think they got a little scared of Tom," Pierce said. "They knew he wouldn't be a cakewalk. If I was alone, they would have stomped all over me and Mook would be on death row." Mesereau has brought more than star power to his cases, according to his colleagues. In the trial of Sarah Crawford, charged with killing her 22-month-old daughter, Mesereau had a photo of her ex-boyfriend blown up and propped in a corner of the courtroom. He said that after a couple of days prosecutors objected to it, but by then jurors had been staring from morning till night at the man whom defense attorneys claimed was the real killer. "It was as if he was presiding over the trial," Mesereau recalled with a chuckle. Crawford was acquitted of murder and given a 20-year sentence for manslaughter. In Mesereau's most dramatic Southern case, he helped spring Wesley Quick from death row for 2 murders he did not commit. Going through a mistrial and then a conviction, Quick appealed and was granted a new trial in 2003 - one that showcased Mesereau's zeal for antagonistic witnesses. In Quick's earlier trials, a government witness was on the stand for less than an hour, Salvagio said. Mesereau, though, took all day to question him, believing the man had threatened to kill Quick's family if Quick failed to take the murder rap. "Tom's a great cross-examiner," Salvagio said. "He asked questions like: 'Isn't it true you're into satanic rituals? Isn't it true you've looked around for people to kill?'" When a prosecutor objected that the questions were irrelevant, Mesereau pointed to the witness, declaring, "The relevance, your honor, is that this man is the killer!" Quick's mother, Renaldi Vines, still gets chills recalling that moment. The witness "leaned back in his chair, kind of puffed his chest out, got a big smile on his face, and nodded his head in agreement," she said. "And the jury saw it." But victory was bittersweet: The witness was not prosecuted. Quick, then 26, was acquitted of murder but sentenced to 76 years for 3 home burglaries. He is appealing that sentence. Some of the victories chalked up by Mesereau and his local partners have triggered outrage. Many Alabama residents were angered when Crawford, the mother accused of fatally beating her toddler to death with a candy-filled soda bottle, escaped death in "Big Yellow Mama," the state's brightly painted electric chair. And when a Birmingham jury acquitted Terry Wayne Bonner, a homeless mentally ill black man, of killing a young white woman, Mesereau's local co-counsel received death threats. Mesereau had summoned an expert on eyewitness identification to challenge a former Miss Alabama who said she saw the nighttime shooting from an apartment window eight floors up. The 21-year-old dead woman's father, William Temples, is still upset. "I found it surprising he'd come all the way from California to represent a homeless man, a drug addict, a man who was on the streets despite having a wife and three or four children, a man who, I have no doubt, murdered my daughter," said Temples, an insurance agent in Mobile. "I don't know what he was trying to achieve, other than being a big-name lawyer." Last month in Bessemer, attorneys on both sides of the Latham case knew exactly what they wanted to achieve. It had already been a tumultuous day in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Mac Parsons. A jury had come back with 2 murder convictions against Charles Tinker, a drug dealer described by prosecutors as "the godfather" of Bessemer's underworld. Latham, who worked on Tinker's cars, had refused to testify against him, frustrating prosecutors who had hoped he would talk when they charged him. Latham, prosecutors claimed, was part of a conspiracy because his shop allegedly was the place where Tinker and others plotted the killings of 2 rivals. Prosecutors later said their case against Latham, who had no criminal record, had fallen apart because of witness intimidation. Mesereau scoffed, saying the mild-mannered Latham had intimidated no one. In court, Latham stood before Parsons, flanked by Salvagio and Mesereau. A crew from the TV show "Celebrity Justice" had cameras rolling. In the hallway earlier, Mesereau had obliged a woman who asked for his autograph on a news story about the case. Agreeing to a deal hammered out by the attorneys after a week of negotiation, the judge gave Latham a boilerplate explanation of his right to a trial on the marijuana charge. Quietly, Latham declined, preferring to plead guilty and take a sentence of time already served. A former state senator with a wry sense of humor, Parsons accepted thanks from attorneys on both sides. As the cameras focused on Mesereau, Parsons addressed the defendant. "It shows what you can do by hiring a good, sharp lawyer - from Birmingham, Alabama," the judge said, nodding toward Salvagio. The courtroom erupted in laughter. Mesereau beamed. 2 days later, he and the judge attended church together. (source: Los Angeles Times) USA: On the Eve of Supreme Court Hearing, Cornell Professor Says It's Time to Stop Executing Minors Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr., 607-255-3290 or 607-351-2610 (cell), [email protected] On Oct. 13, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in Roper vs. Simmons, a case that will determine the future of the juvenile death penalty in America. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Cornell University professor of history, human development and gender studies, with expertise on the history of American childhood, says the court must -- once and for all -- halt the practice of executing minors. "America cannot legitimately hold itself up as a beacon of human rights around the world as long as we continue to execute people for crimes committed as juveniles," she says. Brumberg, the author of Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer (Penguin Books, September 2004), argues that "kids who kill are not a new phenomenon. While it was appropriate to conflate children with adults a century ago, today it is not." Brumberg also maintains that adolescents should not be held to the same standard of legal culpability as adults. "A growing body of scientific evidence -- gathered in the last 15 years -- shows that juveniles, much like the mentally retarded, lack the mental capacity to make informed decisions," she says. Kansas Charley is a historical and psycho-social review of the case of Charley Miller, born in 1874 and orphaned by the age of 6. He moved from foster home to foster home, suffered both mental and physical abuse, and then finally went off on his own to tramp penniless across the country. In September 1890, at the age of 15, while stowing away on a Union Pacific freight train, he met two financially solvent boys -- Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh -- who had been tramping for adventure. Miller shot them both in the head and robbed them while they were sleeping. The murder made national news. Miller successfully fled the murder scene and investigators had few clues, but he was so overwrought with guilt that he turned himself in and confessed to the crime. After a national debate about his fate and numerous court appeals, Miller was hanged in 1892 in Cheyenne, Wyo. -- at the age of 17. The case before the Supreme Court, Roper vs. Simmons, has some elements that are similar to Charley Miller's. Christopher Simmons, like Miller, was repeatedly beaten and abused as a child, and his crime was horrific. At age 17 he was charged with the murder of Shirley Crook, whose body was found in the Meramec River in Missouri on Sept. 9, 1993. Crook had been bound with cable, straps and duct tape and tossed alive into the river, where she drowned. The lower Missouri courts found Simmons guilty and sentenced him to death. In 2002 the Supreme Court of Missouri denied the death penalty for Simmons, explaining that execution would violate his 8th and 14th Amendment rights. Roper vs. Simmons will test Stanford vs. Kentucky, the 1989 decision that allowed execution of 16- and 17-year-olds. Fifteen years after Stanford vs. Kentucky, the world has changed, explains Brumberg, pointing out that most other countries reject the idea of executing people for crimes they committed as minors. In the Simmons case, 48 nations, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and Canada, have submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, suggesting that executing someone under age 18 violates human rights norms and the minimal standards set by the United Nations. In addition, prestigious and nonpartisan organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the Society for Adolescent Medicine and the American Bar Association, have all taken stands against the juvenile death penalty for both scientific and moral reasons. "The juvenile death penalty violates international standards of decency even among autocratic regimes like Saudia Arabia, Nigeria, Iran and the Congo," she says. In the afterword of Kansas Charley, Brumberg addresses the scientific and medical causes for violent behavior, including the possibility that there may be a biological cause. However, she is quick to say that any biological propensity to violence is probably activated by environmental stressors, such as family dysfunction, poverty and abuse. Beyond the science, Brumberg points to modern death-row statistics as well. Between 1973 and 2002, the United States executed more minors than all the other countries in the world, combined. She says: "In the eyes of the international community, the United States now stands out for its backwardness rather than its humanity. After a century of struggling with this issue, it is time for Americans to outlaw this barbaric practice. History shows that we pick on boys with the least resources and that these cases most often become political footballs." (source: US Newswire) TENNESSEE: High court declines appeal of Tennessee death row inmate The U-S Supreme Court refused today to consider the appeal of a Bedford County man on death row for the execution-style murder of his 3 young sons and his ex-wife's 4-year-old daughter. Daryl Keith Holton was scheduled to be executed in June, but in May the Tennessee Supreme Court delayed the execution until next June. Holton has said he was suffering from severe depression when he lined the children up and shot them with a rifle in November 1997 in Bedford County. Holton told the children and their half-sister that they were going Christmas shopping when he picked them up from their mother. The high court declined the appeal without comment. (source: Associated Press) NORTH CAROLINA: Debate on death penalty escalates Debate on death penalty escalatesPending executions, election, moratorium raise issuesANNA GRIFFINRaleigh BureauThe timing certainly is interesting.After nine months without an execution, North Carolina is scheduled to kill two convicted murderers in October, just in time for Gov. Mike Easley and Attorney General Roy Cooper to reaffirm their commitment to law, order and all sorts of other conservative-for-a-Democrat principles. Barring intervention from the courts or the governor, who can reduce death sentences to life imprisonment, the state will execute Sammy Perkins early Friday and Charles Roache on Oct. 22. The timing has death penalty opponents enraged, and not just because Election Day looms. When the N.C. General Assembly convenes in January, it likely will consider stopping state executions for two years so lawmakers can study potential reforms in the way the state investigates and prosecutes potential death penalty cases. The Senate approved the moratorium in 2003; supporters said they had the votes in the N.C. House this year, but Republican Co-Speaker Richard Morgan refused to bring the bill up for a vote. "Let's just say that this all seems more about saving face and executing people for political gain than seeking justice and fairness," said Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a Carrboro-based group working to abolish capital punishment. The governor isn't involved in setting execution dates; his role is to decide whether to grant last-minute clemency. The attorney general oversees the team of state prosecutors who fight death row inmate appeals and lets the Department of Correction know when those appeals are exhausted. This year has represented an unusual reprieve for the state's inmates, the longest since Easley and Cooper took office in Jan. 2001 . The state's only execution so far this year was on Jan. 9. That gap, and its end, can be explained by more than politics, or at least, more than legislative politics. For much of this year, the state courts were holding off on handling death penalty appeals while the U.S. Supreme Court considered an appeal by an Alabama inmate who challenged the injection execution method. The court said the Alabaman could pursue his case, but opened only a narrow door to such challenges. "The system has been backlogged," said Keith Acree, spokesman for the Department of Correction. Now the backlog is about to clear, and state leaders face a conflict: Scheduling executions at the same time more people are calling for a temporary halt to them. The push for a moratorium in North Carolina echoes a national debate over capital punishment. Recent studies have shown that black people and poor people are more likely to receive a death sentence than affluent whites convicted of similar crimes. Thirty-three death row inmates nationwide have been exonerated since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. More than 124 city and county governments across the country have called for a death penalty moratorium. That list includes more than 31 communities in North Carolina, including Charlotte. The movement to take a break from executions to study the system has gained momentum with a recent spate of cases in which prosecutorial misconduct and mistakes helped convict people who turned out to be innocent. The most embarrassing and prominent case in the Carolinas involved Alan Gell, a Bertie County man whose original death penalty conviction was overturned because prosecutors withheld evidence that could have exonerated him -- after he'd spent 6 years on death row. Cooper, the Democratic attorney general, opted to re-try Gell. A jury found Gell not guilty earlier this year, and since his release from prison he has become an active death penalty opponent, lobbying at the General Assembly and speaking across the state to civic and church groups. Beyond Perkins and Roache, at least four other death row inmates could exhaust their appeals and receive execution dates before the General Assembly returns to work early next year. "I just don't understand how they can go ahead killing people when there's a very real chance the legislature will pass the moratorium next year," Gell said recently. "That just doesn't make any sense to me at all." Easley and Cooper have opposed a moratorium in the past. So have their Republican challengers, gubernatorial candidate Patrick Ballantine and attorney general candidate Joe Knott. Easley, a former district attorney and attorney general whose office originally prosecuted Gell, has said he does not believe North Carolina needs a halt in executions, although he was less direct in a recent interview. "There are so many different mutations of this moratorium idea that it would be hard for me to give an answer that I feel comfortable with right now," he said. "The one thing I do feel strongly about is that those who say they want a death penalty moratorium so they can study the death penalty ought to get to the business of studying it. They've been asking for a moratorium for something like 6 years now, and if they want to show good faith and build support, they need to start studying something." Ballantine says there's no reason to stop executions, yet has earned points with death penalty opponents, most of them Democrats, for saying that he believes the system needs to be studied. Abolitionists are angry with Easley for refusing to meet with them. Easley says there's no reason for him to sit down with anti-death penalty advocates such as Dear and legislators who oppose capital punishment every time another execution rolls around: He knows where they stand, he says, and they know where he stands. Scheduled to Die SAMMY CRYSTAL PERKINS, 51 Sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of 7-year-old Lashenna "Jo Jo" Moore, his girlfriend's granddaughter. Perkins' lawyers say their client deserves clemency -- essentially the altering of his sentence from death to life in prison -- because jurors did not hear complete details of his mental illness. His lawyers also allege juror misconduct, saying at least one juror decided on death before hearing all the evidence. He is scheduled to die at 2 a.m. Friday. CHARLES WESLEY ROACHE, 30 Roache is scheduled to die on Oct. 22 for the 1999 killings of Mitzi Phillips and her 14-year-old daughter, Katie, during a random robbery in which he killed 3 other members of their Haywood County family. During his trial, Roache's lawyer showed evidence of a family history of alcohol abuse and violence. Another man involved in the crimes was convicted of four counts of 1st-degree murder but received life sentences. Roache has opted to forgo appeals. (source: Charlotte Observer)
