Jan. 9
USA:
Death penalty dehumanizes us -- Wrongful executions undermine confidence
in the justice system.
Omar Aldrete's comment "In civilized society, execution necessary" (Dec.
12, Insight) on the death penalty invites some questioning discernment.
He suggests "pragmatic necessities" carry more weight than "the dictates
of our moral conscience." We must ask: Is it not moral conscience that
makes us human? If we opt for "pragmatic necessities" over moral concerns,
do we not dehumanize ourselves? Do we not make our civilization less
civil?
Aldrete refers to the execution of the innocent as collateral damage. But
does the damage stop with the wrongly executed? Each wrong execution
undermines confidence in our justice system. Confidence in the law is like
confidence in paper money. Without confidence, neither law nor paper money
can function.
Aldrete writes the death penalty is necessary "to the general physical and
mental health and well-being of the populace." Where is the evidence? On
the contrary, it is a long-established fact that states without the death
penalty have fewer murders than states that do. Meanwhile, many families
of murder victims are letting it be known that the execution of the
murderer brought them no comfort, no release from pain and anger.
Does Aldrete play loose with the facts? He writes "the rate of crime
deserving of the death penalty is going up exponentially." But FBI crime
statistics show that for years crime in general has continued to go down
and capital crime in particular. He says the rate of executions is going
up. Actually, it is going down, as shown in the article "Missouri slowly
killing off executions" (Dec. 16).
Aldrete refers to the value of deterrence in executing murderers. But
longstanding facts show, nationwide and worldwide, that capital punishment
does not deter capital crime, let alone crime in general.
To keep trying to deter killings by killing the killers is not something
nature dictates, as Aldrete writes. If a mark of insanity is doing the
same thing over and over and expecting different results, is not seeking
deterrence through the death penalty a form of insanity?
We might ask: What is at the heart of Aldrete's arguments for the death
penalty? His references to punishment as dictated by society and society
as a whole being the victim may be clues to a notion that society, as
embodied in the state, has an absolute right to determine who shall live
and die. Does this idea have its roots in democracy or totalitarianism?
(source: Comment, Tom Keene is a retired professor of religious studies at
Our Lady of the Lake University; San Antonio Express-News------[my note:
Tom is also a Board member of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty])
CONNECTICUT:
Archbishop Mansell's Letter
Dear Friends:
I am writing to you to request your public affirmation of the dignity of
each human person.
The Gospel mandates us to respect all human life from conception to
natural death. At the present time there is an ongoing debate about the
appropriateness of the death penalty as a means of punishment for
convicted perpetrators of grave crimes. This debate has intensified in
Connecticut as we face the possibility of our first execution in
forty-five years. Aware of the serious moral implications of the use of
the death penalty as a means of punishment for convicted perpetrators of
grave crimes, the Roman Catholic Bishops of Connecticut consider it
imperative to make our voices heard once again on this important issue.
First, we wish to state that we are deeply concerned for the just and fair
treatment of all parties in this matter: the victims and their families,
and those who have been accused or convicted of grave crimes. Next, we are
motivated by the consistent ethic of life. We wish to make clear that, in
accord with the teaching of Pope John Paul II, respect for human life must
be "profoundly consistent."(Evangelium vitae, #87). Human life is a gift
from God that must be respected from conception to natural death. Thus, we
oppose capital punishment. Our profound respect for human life also
explains why we are so involved in such matters as providing goods and
services to the poor, the elderly and the sick. Specifically in regard to
capital punishment, we note increasing reliance on the death penalty,
which diminishes each of us. The death penalty offers the tragic illusion
that we can defend life only by taking life.
We are guided by what Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical letter on
the value and inviolability of human life (Evangelium vitae). Our Holy
Father states that authority must redress the violation of personal and
social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the
crime. In this way, authority also fulfills the purpose of defending
public order and ensuring peoples safety while offering the offender an
incentive to help change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated. Our
Holy Father states:
The nature and extent of the punishment ought not to go to the extreme of
executing the offender, except in cases of absolute necessity: in other
words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today,
however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the
penal system, such cases are very rare if not practically nonexistent.
(Evangelium vitae, #56).
Recent highly publicized court cases have raised serious doubts concerning
the effectiveness of our criminal justice system in detecting the true
source and nature of crimes that have been committed, and in protecting
the rights and dignity of those who have been accused of them. Moreover,
we are not comfortable with the fact that so many of those in prisons and
on death row are poor, young and minorities. They are less likely than
others to be able to avail themselves of legal talent, as are those with
more resources.
In conclusion, while conceding that the state has the duty to maintain
public order and the right to punish convicted criminals, we, the Roman
Catholic Bishops of Connecticut, express our considered opposition to the
death penalty in the State of Connecticut. To this end, the public policy
office of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Connecticut, the Connecticut
Catholic Conference, has been collaborating with the Connecticut Coalition
to Abolish the Death Penalty (CNADP). CNADP has developed a petition to
abolish the death penalty in Connecticut, to be presented to our
Connecticut General Assembly during the 2005 legislative session. This
petition has been posted in the entrance of the church for your review. I
am asking you to join me in signing this petition to abolish the death
penalty in Connecticut. The petition will be available at the entrance of
the church before and after all Masses next Sunday. The signed petitions
will be presented to the Connecticut General Assembly.
Thank you for all your service. Through the many good works that you
render in the Archdiocese of Hartford, you continue to enhance human
dignity.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Most Reverend Henry J. Mansell----Archbishop of Hartford
(source: WSFB News)
**********************
You, Me And The Death Penalty
We are often told, "Don't take it personally." This may be good advice
some of the time, but not this time. Not when the whole world is watching.
Not when arrangements are being made to carry out, in the early morning
darkness of Jan. 26, Connecticut's - and New England's - 1st execution
since 1960.
We are all, of course, on God's death row, saints and sinners alike.
Losing a life is personal, especially if it is our own. Taking a life is
personal, especially if we freely choose to do so.
In a democracy, an execution is not a dictator's whim. The hand that
provides the lethal chemical cocktail is, ultimately and collectively, the
hand of every citizen and every public official. So let me speak
personally.
My claim to this space is that I have had a more varied exposure to death
penalty phenomena, for more than 70 years, than perhaps anyone else in the
state - in recent decades as an independent journalist investigating
wrongful conviction cases in Connecticut, Alabama, Virginia, Illinois,
Florida, Massachusetts and other states. I will take you through the
stages of my enlightenment. You can have your own say in some other way.
Should we be resolute about executing not only Michael Ross but, in
fairness, the six other murderers waiting on death row? After all, no one
seriously questions their guilt. Or should we call the whole thing off now
and forever within the next 2 weeks?
Where do I stand on the death penalty? Stalling for time, I could say that
I share the sentiments of Clarence Darrow, the legendary trial lawyer.
Though his oratory saved "trial of the century" thrill killers Leopold and
Loeb from execution in 1924, he was honest enough to say at another time,
"I have never killed a man but I have read many obituaries with great
relish."
Or I could quote Tevye the milkman, the "Fiddler on the Roof" philosopher.
Tevye listens to villagers arguing about whether an animal up for sale is
a horse or a mule. Hearing one man's opinion, he says, "You're right!"
Hearing the other man's opinion, he says, "You're right!" Someone tells
him they both can't be right. Tevye says, "You are also right!"
Like gambling, gun control and abortion, the death penalty is one of those
hot-button issues where everyone is more or less right in their reasons
for being for or against. Who am I to say that the loved ones of a murder
victim are wrong about an eye for an eye? Or that others who see all life
as precious are wrong to urge the salvation of even "the worst of the
worst"?
Hypocrisy must be avoided. As the father of four children and the
grandfather of eight, how would I feel in the shoes of the family members
of 8 girls and young women in Connecticut and New York whose lives Ross
snuffed out in the 1980s?
I recently talked to the mother of April Brunais and the father of Leslie
Shelley. April and Leslie, best friends in Griswold, never reached their
15th birthdays. For their parents, a constant horror over two decades has
been the realization that the killer breathes, eats, speaks, sleeps, wakes
up. Their dead daughters do not.
Yet in my work I have also observed another kind of agony.
I have seen the heartbreak, and sometimes the mental breakdown, of
parents, children, wives, husbands, brothers and sisters of men and women
doomed by our deeply flawed criminal justice system to spend years or
decades behind prison walls for crimes they did not commit. I have met and
befriended at least 2 dozen death-row convicts - beginning with Kirk
Bloodsworth in Maryland, the first prisoner to be saved by DNA - who were
lucky enough to have their innocence proved before it was too late.
My own lifelong mixed feelings about executions, a war between head and
heart, were only barely concealed one early December day when I spent
several hours with Michael Ross.
I was not alone with him, of course. In that New London courtroom, where
the man's mental competence was at issue, there was a judge as well as
lawyers, reporters, spectators, sketch artists, guards and others.
Even so, my concentration on the serial killer often erased all peripheral
distractions. It is not every day that you get to see a man who can tell
you the exact moment of his death. I sat 15 feet from him, separated only
by an easily vaulted barrier. I speculated whether I might have the
agility to spring at his throat and, conceivably, advance the date of his
demise. During World War II, as a trained-to-kill soldier in the
Philippines, I was not squeamish about what needed to be done to the
enemy.
I did not act on this fantasy even as I acknowledge, as everyone should,
the primitive instincts that lurk below our veneer of civilization. I
stuck to my purpose, which was to take a long, hard look at the man we
mean to execute.
I was surprised by his appearance as he entered the courtroom. The problem
with delaying an execution for so many years is that the monster may no
longer look monstrous. Age, prison food and medication had transformed the
muscular youth of the 1980s into a thin, 45-year-old man with delicate
features. When he displayed his full profile and the sweep of his
ponytail, I scribbled a politically incorrect note: "Looks girlish." To
control his "sexual sadism" we have been castrating him chemically, a fate
some men might regard as worse than death.
Even more disturbing: This Cornell graduate acted like an attorney with
more legal skills than the typical lawyer in a typical capital punishment
case. (A stunning Columbia University study reveals that more than
two-thirds of death penalty sentences are overturned on appeal, largely
because of egregious incompetence of counsel and prosecutorial
misconduct.) His own attorney acknowledged that Ross knows more death
penalty law than he does.
The bizarre nature of pre-execution proceedings that go on all over
America reached full flower here, as the murderer, his lawyer, the
prosecutors and the judge all engaged in a lengthy, gentlemanly discussion
about the finer points of court rulings on capital punishment. It was all
about whether Connecticut should accommodate Ross in his willingness,
after so many appeals, to die in a matter of days. No one was crass enough
to mention rapes, weapons, blood, screams and bodies dumped like trash.
What bothered me most was the realization that Connecticut, just by having
a death penalty, had given Ross (like all candidates for execution) a
wonderful gift after his conviction. Something far nicer than a sentence
to permanent confinement in a noisy, suffocating, walled and razor-wired
institution packed with dangerous convicts and surly guards.
We gave Ross celebrity instead of obscurity. We gave him a safer place in
prison, an automatic appeal and top-drawer public defenders who even now
are fighting to keep him alive. We gave him the power to play on our
emotions, to win headlines, to force the state to spend vast sums during
years of legal wrangling, to argue endlessly about what he deserved. I
stand with Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven": "Deserve's got nothing to do
with it."
Even in the moments before his lethal injection, Ross has the power to
call the whole thing off by changing his mind. If so, brace yourself for
more years of expensive nonsense.
It is so very different from the rough justice of my boyhood. In the late
1920s and 1930s, crime and punishment were our best entertainment. For a
kid growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the many daily papers, with morning and
evening editions and screaming headlines, gave us more gore and excitement
than the fictional mayhem children see today on their computer games.
Even the stately New York Times regularly allotted acres of space to crime
stories. Half the front page and three full pages of the Times of Aug. 23,
1927, were devoted to the electrocutions in Massachusetts of Sacco and
Vanzetti.
They were the anarchists whose trial for murder, conducted at a time of
hysteria about bomb-wielding foreigners, touched off an international
firestorm. States seldom apologize for the wrongdoing of their lawmen. In
this instance, half a century went by, then Gov. Michael Dukakis signed a
proclamation in 1977 "clearing" Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
I was still in my crib when another great case in 1927 gripped the
public's imagination. I pretend no awareness of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray,
the lovers who used a sash weight to kill Snyder's husband after several
failed attempts to take his life. What I do claim is that my education in
death penalty issues began only a few years later when I first saw the
famous New York Daily News sneak photograph of Ruth Snyder sizzling in
Sing Sing's electric chair on Jan. 12, 1928.
My parents had saved their copy of the paper. Tom Howard, a photographer
for the tabloid and one of the assigned witnesses to the execution, had
strapped a miniature camera to his ankle. As the switch was thrown for
Sing Sing's first electrocution of a female, her eyes peering out from a
black hood, Howard raised his pant cuff and pressed a shutter release in
his pocket.
Under the huge headline, "DEAD!", the blurry photograph ran full size on
the front page the next morning. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies
roared from the presses to meet the public demand.
In that time, justice, or at least retribution, was not long delayed.
Snyder and her lover (who took her place in the hot seat minutes later)
were dispatched within 11 months of their arrests. The last public
execution in America, a Kentucky hanging in 1936 that drew a crowd of
20,000, followed the crime by only two months. Lynchings in the South and
Midwest took only hours or days and were locally considered almost legal.
Scarcely anyone was keeping statistics on executions in the 1930s. Only
now can we look back and know that those were both the glory times of the
death penalty, claimed to be a deterrent to criminal violence, and
America's busiest crime years until the 1960s. In a country with half of
today's population, annual executions hit a high of 199 in 1935. Things
went downhill after that, to double digits after 1951, sinking to just 21
in 1963.
In 1968, not one person was officially put to death for the first time in
U.S. history. 2 decades later, a revival was well underway, leading to 98
executions in 1999. Then the number dipped again to just 59 in 2004.
Texas, as usual, was tops with 23. The Northeastern states scored zero.
Most of what we know about executions in America since Colonial times is
due to the peculiar obsession of M. Watt Espy, a lean and gracious
Southerner who has spent most of his adult life assembling invaluable bits
of death penalty information for his one-man Capital Punishment Research
Project. By the time I caught up with him in the 1990s, his index cards
offered details on 14,000 executions since 1608.
My wife and I called on Espy during one of my many trips to Alabama on
behalf of Michael Pardue of Mobile, a 17-year-old forced to falsely
confess to three murders in 1973. I had long since given up the pretense
that I could maintain a detached journalist stance when confronted by the
sight of innocent people drowning in legal cesspools.
All of Pardue's convictions had been overthrown, but the state refused to
cancel his life-without-parole sentence because of the "three strikes"
law. He had briefly escaped three times from prisons where he did not
belong in the first place. Finally, a prosecutor and a judge in a dusty
rural courthouse agreed to let him go one day in 2001, but only if his
wife, his lawyer and the rest of us agreed not to embarrass them by
alerting the media. Imagine the joy of seeing this middle-aged man set
free after 10,000 days and nights unjustly caged.
We found Espy in a creaky old house in the sleepy town of Headland way
down in Alabama's southeast corner. As the nation's foremost historian of
executions, he was still mired in the pre-computer era of typewriters,
loose leaf binders, file cabinets and data gleaned from yellowed
newspapers, brittle true-life crime magazines, police mug shots and other
seemingly useless material.
The sleuth of executions proved to be a fountain of lore about dead men
walking - and sometimes joking or reciting verse. ("Hang me high/And
stretch me wide/So the world can see/How free I died.") Espy knew all
about the sorry history of the Southern states alone accounting for as
many executions as the rest of the nation combined.
We discussed various Alabama wrong-man cases that miraculously had escaped
Holman Prison's "Yellow Mama" electric chair. He spoke of Walter
McMillian, an exonerated black man who had been put on death row even
before trial. I told how Mike Pardue in 1973 had been seduced into taking
blame for murders he didn't do because his defense attorney, recently a
prosecutor, said it was his best way of avoiding execution. This was a
cruel ruse; the boy could not have been put to death.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, had called a halt to
executions everywhere in the land. They could be resumed (and were in
1977) as soon as the death machinery was readjusted to make it less of a
crapshoot. Only "a capriciously selected random handful" of the most
violent criminals get sentenced to death, wrote Justice Potter Stewart,
under state laws that are "cruel and unusual in the way being struck by
lightning is cruel and unusual."
Such concerns about the arbitrariness of executions, like awareness of
mistaken convictions, were far from the minds of most people in the years
leading up to World War II. Even so, there were enough do-gooders to work
up a formidable, if generally futile, abolition movement. At the head of
the pack was the League to Abolish Capital Punishment, oddly led by Lewis
Lawes, famous as the Sing Sing warden whose institution enjoyed New York's
monopoly on electrocutions.
Critics called Warden Lawes a hypocrite for saying he averted his eyes in
the death chamber every time the lethal jolts were applied. I remember him
in radio interviews eloquently decrying the whole business. His elevated
argument about why the death penalty should be abandoned was echoed
decades later when Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke of his faith in "the
evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing
society."
The reformers back then feasted on a series of controversial cases. As
historian Stuart Banner tells us in "The Death Penalty," the execution of
Gerald Chapman in Connecticut in 1926 created quite an uproar. "Chapman,
convicted of killing a police officer, was widely believed to be
innocent." His death produced a flurry of editorials and letters to the
editor on both sides of the issue, all serving as a prelude to the much
noisier national arguments about the death sentences imposed on the
"Scottsboro boys" in Alabama and the circus atmosphere of the Bruno
Hauptmann trial in 1936.
This latest "trial of the century" touched off a media tsunami. In 1932,
five years after Charles Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic, someone
kidnapped and killed his baby son. Hauptmann, a German immigrant, looked
guilty (people said) and offered a dubious alibi for possessing some of
the ransom money. Unconcerned about any presumption of innocence, the
Daily News announced his arrest in 1934 in headlines two inches high:
"LINDBERGH KIDNAPER JAILED."
Hauptmann's inevitable conviction and execution were thrilling events for
everyone in my neighborhood. The great drama of justice in action was
marred, however, by Hauptmann's insistence on his innocence. He refused to
yield even when New Jersey's governor promised life imprisonment in
exchange for a confession. With Anna Hauptmann's full support, he would
not yield, even when a newspaper promised to give his destitute wife and
son $90,000.
I was sure of Hauptmann's guilt, of course. I trusted the law. I was
raised on Dick Tracy, radio's Gangbusters and the exploits of J. Edgar
Hoover, Melvin Purvis and the other G-men. The nation cheered as the good
guys went after John Dillinger, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Ma Parker,
Bonnie and Clyde and the other famous criminals. Few were bothered by the
FBI's execution of Dillinger as he stepped out of a movie theater in
Chicago.
World War II put a stop to my fascination with such matters. I had other
priorities, like staying alive. Even so, I was aware that there was such a
thing as military justice. Most of the millions in uniform behaved
themselves well enough. Firing squads made an example of at least some of
the murderers and rapists.
Years after the war, I read about a secret cemetery in France, in
Fer-en-Tardenois, where 95 of the most unlawful soldiers were buried. The
dead included Eddie Slovik, who was a petty thief in Detroit before being
drafted. His corpse eventually was brought home as his loved ones wondered
about the U.S. Supreme Court's slogan, "Equal Justice Under the Law."
Out of 21,049 American military personnel convicted of desertion during
World War II, he was the only one executed. Needing a deterrent because of
all the troops going absent without leave during the Battle of the Bulge,
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the order. The story was told in 1974 in a
television movie, "The Execution of Private Slovik," starring Martin
Sheen. By then, even our armed forces had become reluctant about applying
the death penalty. No military execution has occurred since 1961.
Before finding my way to Connecticut in 1968, after a decade overseas as a
Cold War foreign correspondent, 2 death penalty controversies in the 1950s
and '60s had a major impact on me.
The 1st was the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Never
before or since has there been such a worldwide condemnation of the
American choice of capital punishment. President Truman and his successor,
Eisenhower, both refused to intervene and had to cope with millions of
letters and telegrams flooding the White House.
My wife and I were more than onlookers in that time of hysteria about Reds
under every bed. Some of our left-leaning professors at Harvard had come
under fire for supposed anti-Americanism. I later reported Sen. Joe
McCarthy's rampage of false accusations for United Press. But in the
Rosenberg matter, the mounting evidence of a genuine case of
Moscow-directed wartime espionage, stealing our nuclear bomb secrets,
became impossible to dismiss.
The execution date was stayed four times as the U.S. Supreme Court met to
consider clemency, on one occasion bringing the justices back from
vacation. Ten thousand people gathered in Manhattan's Union Square in a
final cry for mercy as Sing Sing's electric chair did its work on June 19,
1953. Today, with Soviet files open to inspection, we can be fairly sure
that Ethel had far less to do with passing on secrets to our wartime ally
than Julius, and should have been spared death, if there had to be a death
penalty in the 1st place.
As for the 2nd memorable controversy, it was underway when we moved to
London in 1962 after my Cuban Missile Crisis reporting for Time, Life and
NBC got me booted out of Moscow. Margaret Thatcher was our member of
Parliament. The Bobbies kept the peace without carrying guns. Our
neighbors on Hampstead Heath were well aware of their country's ancient
tradition of executions (ax or gallows preferred), including deaths long
ago for such "Bloody Code" offenses as shoplifting, stealing letters and
being in the company of gypsies for a month.
Any number of reforms to civilize capital punishment had been adopted
since the last public decapitation in 1820 and the last public hanging in
1868. Yet this was not good enough. There was a rising demand to be rid of
the death penalty.
Britain was in distress about executing the wrong man for murder years
earlier, while giving a free pass to one of the most industrious serial
killers since Jack the Ripper. In the words of one account of the case, a
feeble-minded man, Timothy Evans, suspected of the 1949 slayings of his
wife and daughter, was taken "to the police station where he was
interrogated until he either confessed, signed a confession or the police
lied about him doing either." He was soon convicted and hanged.
Only later, when bodies began to surface, did it become apparent that a
key witness against Evans, John Christie, had included Evans' wife and
daughter in a string of murders. Christie was executed in 1953. Evans was
granted a posthumous pardon in 1966 while we were in England. In 1998, two
other executed innocents, Derek Bentley and Mahood Matan, were similarly
pardoned posthumously.
What was most scandalous was the refusal of authorities to face up to
their mistakes and institute reforms. An alarmed public demanded, and got,
Britain's complete abolishment of the death penalty, followed by
safeguards to protect the innocent. Today, of course, all of Europe and
virtually all other advanced societies except America are done with
capital punishment.
I had no idea then, before we returned home to look for the perfect small
town in Connecticut, that lawmen of The Constitution State, when similarly
exposed for miscarriages of justice, would be just as reluctant as their
British counterparts to admit error and adopt higher professional
standards.
The Peter Reilly case of 1973-77 changed my life. I had expected to carry
on a career as an international reporter but instead started groping about
in the terra incognita of our justice system. What else could I do? A high
school friend of my children had been forced to falsely confess to slaying
his mother. He now wore the brand of convicted killer. Wading deeply into
what became the most controversial criminal case in Connecticut history, I
eventually wrote a book about the tragedy of it all, "Guilty Until Proven
Innocent."
Arthur Miller could not. Though his role in exposing the injustice and
recruiting legal talent had been critical to the teenager's exoneration,
he was so horrified by the state's willingness to put a blameless person
behind bars that he found it impossible to tell the tale. In an
unforgettable passage in his memoir, "Timebends," he explained his
"absence of creative enthusiasm":
"It is still difficult to describe with any precision, but I think I was
oppressed by a certain brute repetitiveness in the spectacle of the Reilly
prosecution. It was simple enough to understand that the police, once
locked onto Peter, could not relent, lest they endanger their professional
reputations. Quickly the question changed from who murdered Barbara
Gibbons and might still be walking around loose to who was impugning the
state police. But as simple as the explanation was, it offered a vision of
man so appallingly unredeemable as to dry up the pen. Except for the
intervention of private citizens, a young man, physically slight and in
many ways still psychologically a boy, would have been tossed to the
wolves in the state penitentiary and eaten alive," Miller wrote.
What does this have to do with today's debate about capital punishment?
Peter, 18 at the time of his arrest and due to be 50 in March, was
convicted of manslaughter and never in danger of execution. But it is the
Reilly story, and others like it, that challenge any belief we may have
that Connecticut justice is so immaculate that we can make killing our
worst offenders the preferred option.
I will be plain. We have no business executing anyone until we clean up
our act. And not even then.
We have to get over the hubris of thinking that we can go forward with a
clean conscience because we are not Texas, Virginia, Georgia or some other
benighted state with less stringent rules about who gets to die. The
world, not impressed with our fine distinctions, will lump us with the
worst of the worst states.
As Lynne Tuohy reminded us in The Courant Jan. 2, Connecticut came close
to tossing out the death penalty in the mid-1950s. Gov. Abraham Ribicoff
was all for it; so was much of the public and the press. Understandably,
the killing rampage of Joseph Taborsky and Arthur Culombe changed minds
all over the state, including Ribicoff's.
Citizens applauded the lawmen for putting an end to the reign of terror
and winning death sentences for both killers. If the means used to
accomplish those ends were not entirely legal, who would object? Answer:
The U.S. Supreme Court.
Each year, our highest court looks at only a few of the thousands of
appeals from the guilty complaining of unfairness and the innocent hoping
for rescue. The justices took up Culombe's complaint. It was brought by
his attorneys, of course; the man was illiterate and brain-damaged. The
court came down so hard on Connecticut's crime-solving methods that
Culombe, with a life sentence, escaped the fate of Taborsky, who
"volunteered" for the electric chair instead of appealing his conviction.
He became the last person to be executed in Connecticut.
The spotlight was on state police Maj. Sam Rome, "Connecticut's Dick
Tracy," famous for crime busting that relied heavily on his gut instinct
and dirty tricks. His style was to illegally seize evidence, wheedle
confessions in any way possible, and keep attorneys at bay for days, by
shuffling suspects from one police barracks to another. On the witness
stand, Rome denied choking, kicking and beating Culombe. He denied
bringing in the suspect's 5-year-old daughter to play in the interrogation
room during the grilling.
Connecticut's Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to Rome's methods
both in the Culombe appeal and a similar appeal in the Roy Darwin murder
case a few years later. The U.S. Supreme Court did not. The Culombe and
Darwin confessions were thrown out. Darwin was set free despite strong
indications of guilt.
The deficiencies of police techniques were on full display in the bizarre
mid-1960s case chronicled in Mildred Savage's "A Great Fall." The
mutilated body of a Barkhamsted woman, Dorothy Thompsen, was found in her
home. Deciding that the victim's mentally disturbed mother-in-law did it,
Rome won her confession by bringing in a detective to pose as her attorney
and a policewoman to pretend to be the new fiance of her son, the victim's
husband.
This enterprising activity could have closed the case if a rival
investigator had not stepped in. Lt. Cleveland Fuessenich, a future state
police commissioner, found his own suspect, Harry Solberg, and obtained a
competing confession. Solberg was twice brought to trial. Two times Rome
testified for the defense. The case died on the vine with Solberg free and
the homicide unsolved.
I thought of this affair as the ultimate farce of Connecticut justice
until I involved myself in the more recent Haddam-Killingworth bus arson
case. The torching of $500,000 worth of school buses in 1994 led police to
a teenager named David Saraceno. A 10-hour, high-pressure state police
interrogation forced false admissions that were neither written down at
the time nor recorded.
Saraceno was convicted and imprisoned but later released after a private
investigation discovered that the prosecutor was protecting four other
young men who almost certainly did the crime. The chief state's attorney's
office uncomfortably joined the defense in a motion to overturn Saraceno's
conviction.
This should have freed the youth from further jeopardy. Instead, in 1999,
under threat of extending the legal nightmare that had already cost his
parents $100,000, Saraceno accepted guilt for "hindering prosecution by
falsely confessing."
Under the statute of limitations, the state had allowed the five-year
window for prosecuting the known suspects to close. No one except the
wrong man did jail time for the crime.
The law officer most responsible for compelling Saraceno to declare it was
all his fault is Chief State's Attorney Christopher Morano. Yet I believe
him to be quite good at his job, as are most of our lawmen most of the
time. They protect us bravely. It is only their inability to admit and
correct mistakes in high-profile cases that throws them off the true
course of justice.
I am also quite willing to think well of Leonard Boyle, our new state
police commissioner, after a recent two-hour confidential interview. Boyle
may be Connecticut's best-qualified top cop ever. Given encouragement, he
could bring 21st century thinking to a department still wedded to old
ways, still refusing to record interrogations, still stifling its own
whistleblowers.
Is it any wonder that I do not want to entrust anyone in this state, or
any state, with the power to inflict death when life is an option?
With honorable exceptions, our politicians, police agencies, prosecutors
and judges have been slow to learn the lessons of the DNA revolution that
has rocked the criminal justice system during the last 15 years. The
errors, corruption and racism have always been known, if only because of
movies like "The Wrong Man," "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Hurricane."
It is just that people prefer to believe that wrongful imprisonments are
rare, and only the truly guilty get a ticket to death row.
In fact, the national error rate for mistaken convictions is far higher
than even the experts suspected. With more than 2 million Americans in
prison or jail at any one time, the number accused or convicted for crimes
they did not do is in the tens of thousands. If airlines operated this
way, two to five planes would crash for every hundred taking off.
Thanks to DNA, we are now forced to confront the ugly reality of a system
rampant with faulty eyewitness testimony, false confessions, junk science,
jailhouse snitches, inept lawyers, police perjury, win-at-any-cost
prosecutors and judges too comfortable with the idea that appeals of jury
verdicts are about technicalities, not the possibility of innocence.
Connecticut's Richard Lapointe case ought to be our loudest wake-up call.
I could say the same about the three other ongoing wrong-man cases I know
best in this state. All are based on unconscionable police methods of
squeezing falsehoods from suspects and witnesses: Ryan Thompson for a
Plainfield slaying, Travis Wright for a killing in Stamford and Patrick
Corbin for a rape in Bristol. But Lapointe deserves special attention
because the death penalty came into play in a way that should shame us
all.
The middle-aged dishwasher was arrested in 1989 and convicted in 1992 for
the 1987 slaying of his wife's 88-year-old grandmother, Bernice Martin.
The Manchester police, interrogating Lapointe for more than 9 hours,
extracted such admissions as, "If the evidence shows I was there and that
I killed her, then I killed her, but I don't remember being there." Yet
there never was any physical evidence linking him to the murder and arson.
The uncorroborated false confession was central to the conviction. The
police and prosecutors were fully aware that Lapointe, with a child's mind
in a man's body, had suffered from a form of hydrocephalus or "water on
the brain" ever since boyhood. They knew of his exceptional vulnerability
to the powerful psychological ploys that are commonly used in
interrogation rooms nationwide. Nonetheless, Connecticut tried hard for
the death penalty.
But for Dr. Charles Duncan, a neurosurgeon from the Yale School of
Medicine, the state might have succeeded. With graphic images of
Lapointe's damaged brain backing up his testimony, he convinced the jurors
not to increase our death row population.
Now in his 15th year behind bars, Lapointe should have been set free a
decade ago by some combination of public outrage and official action after
Tom Condon's cover story in Northeast [Feb. 21, 1993] exposed the full
horror of it all. That classic in investigative journalism led to a
Hartford conference of national experts on the system's errors and a book
I edited, "Convicting the Innocent." Nothing worked. Connecticut justice
was unmoved.
A citizens' group, The Friends of Richard Lapointe, founded by Robert
Perske of Darien, has been untiring in seeking Lapointe's liberty. Perske
is the nation's foremost advocate for mentally retarded citizens caught up
in the justice system. The prospects for Lapointe's eventual salvation are
brighter these days. The case has been taken up by Centurion Ministries of
Princeton, N.J., nationally known for winning freedom for dozens of
innocents who had lost all hope.
Which brings me to Gov. M. Jodi Rell. As she blesses the death penalty and
vows to veto any bill calling off the Ross execution, she may sincerely
believe she is acting in Connecticut's best interest. She is not.
Even if they cannot stop an execution on their own, governors have their
state's biggest bully pulpit to arouse public opinion against it. Or they
can make political hay, as Bill Clinton did during his 1st run for the
presidency, by showing up the day a convict dies.
President Bush, who presided over more executions (152) than any governor
in American history during his reign in Texas, did not give an inch on his
tough-on-crime stance when appeals to save Carla Faye Tucker, the killer
turned born-again Christian, flooded in from all over the world. He did
say a prayer for her.
Another Republican governor, George Ryan, seemed to be just as fond of
executions until the day he learned that half the people Illinois had been
sending to death row were wrongly convicted. He could hardly have escaped
noticing that something was terribly wrong. A series of Chicago Tribune
exposs and investigations conducted by Northwestern University's law and
journalism schools had uncovered a Grand Canyon of miscarriages of
justice.
The rest is history. I was in and out of Chicago a number of times during
that time, serving as an adviser to Northwestern's Center on Wrongful
Convictions. Ryan, a onetime pharmacist, was not much of a governor, but
it was heartening to see him courageously defying his own party, the law
enforcement leadership and conventional political wisdom by doing the
right thing.
He was applauded around the world for declaring a moratorium on
executions. Then, saying there was no way of sorting out the innocent from
the guilty with any swiftness or certainty, he cleared every last convict
off death row. They would just have to do with life-without-parole
sentences. The Illinois legislature came alive with new laws, including
the mandatory recording of interrogations, to reduce mistaken convictions.
Gov. Rell, who enjoys far more popularity than Ryan ever knew, has the
opportunity of a lifetime to make history of her own. She can steer
Connecticut away from the folly of resuming executions. In the tradition
of Ella Grasso, who was magnificent during the Reilly case for stopping
the police cover-up, she could direct her energies toward making this
state's justice system the most advanced and principled in the nation.
Money is available for this noble task: the millions we are wasting and
will keep on wasting by maintaining the death penalty.
Connecticut cannot afford to look ridiculous. The whole world is moving
away from the death penalty as if from the plague. Its complete abolition
in this nation is inevitable. Unless, of course, Abraham Lincoln was wrong
about "the better angels of our nature."
Would Rell lose face by changing her mind, just as Ribicoff changed his,
although in the other direction? I leave it to a bit of verse from the
1960s, urging America to call off the bombings in Vietnam, by Danish
scientist and poet Piet Hein:
The noble art of losing face
May someday save the human race
And turn into eternal merit
What weaker minds would call disgrace.
(source: Donald S. Connery of Kent is writing a history of miscarriages of
justice; Hartford Courant)
