Jan. 11
USA:
The sister of mercy
To the men she tries to save from execution, Helen Prejean is nothing
short of a saint. But when Katherine Butler caught up with America's
best-known nun in New Orleans, she found an impatient crusader who's only
too aware of her human frailties
I am running after a nun. In 80-degree heat, through the backstreets of a
Louisiana suburb. She had warned me to lead the way. "Because when I'm
talking," she'd said, "I don't know where I am." But I have led her
astray. She's not happy, she's galloped off in the opposite direction,
leaving me to give chase, feeling as shamed as I did when the nuns at my
convent school would quiver with rage over some sinful transgression, like
being late for assembly.
Sister Helen Prejean moved beyond the petty restrictions of convent life
years ago. As anyone who saw Susan Sarandon's Oscar-winning portrayal of
this nun in the 1995 film of her book Dead Man Walking knows, she has her
mind on a bigger mission. And being late is not an option.
"It's OK," she forgives me, when I catch up. "I just want to be there for
Manuel."
10 years after the film shocked US audiences, elevating her lonely
campaign into nationwide debate, Sister Helen's new book has just been
published in the US. This, she hopes, will deliver another miracle:
helping to achieve the abolition of the death penalty in America
altogether. A book-promotion tour will take her on the chatshow circuit.
But, for today, her focus is on the unglamorous reality of death-row
justice in a dingy Louisiana courtroom. Manuel Ortiz is a condemned
prisoner to whom she has acted as spiritual adviser for five years. Sister
Helen is convinced that he is innocent of the murder for which he was
convicted. Today he has been granted a hearing that could determine his
fate.
I have arrived at 9.30am, on Sister Helen's instructions, outside
Jefferson Parish courthouse, across the Mississippi from New Orleans. She
wants me to see American justice in action. Sweating para-legals are
heaving towers of box-files into the courthouse, and a long line of mostly
young men in T-shirts and baseball caps are queuing to be screened for
weapons under a large "No Firearms" notice.
I go up to the fourth floor. There's no sign of Sister Helen, but peering
through the open door of Judge Jerome Winsberg's courtroom, I see a man
seated at a table in a bright-orange prison jumpsuit. His legs are
shackled with chains. He looks up expectantly. This is Manuel.
Deliberations are already under way when two women squeeze past the armed
officers at the door. Here are the nuns. Sister Helen is dressed in a dark
pinafore and cream blouse, a silver crucifix around her neck. Sister
Margaret Maggio, who runs her office, follows behind. "You, sir, are a
gentleman," Sister Helen whispers loudly to a man who vacates his seat,
"but I want Manuel to be able to see me", and heads purposefully for the
front row, where she takes a notebook out of her bag.
She needs all the ammunition she can get. This is the deep south, where
prosecutors routinely seek the death penalty in murder cases because it
goes down well with the public. The climate is such that until a story in
the national media about it caused outrage, prosecution attorneys wore
ties in court adorned with motifs of a hangman's noose. Most people here
accept capital punishment, Sister Helen says, "with the air they breathe
and the mosquitoes they swat".
Last night, when I phoned Sister Helen at her New Orleans apartment she
was just off a plane from Texas. She travels ceaselessly. But hearing the
raucous cajun music from the French quarter outside my hotel, she said
brightly: "Sounds like y'all are having some party!". I got the impression
that even at 65 she might have been up for a night on the town. At our
only previous meeting, she was at a dinner in her honour in an expensive
London restaurant. She soaked up attention, drinking champagne and telling
stories late into the night.
Now, in court, she leans forward in her chair, listening intently to every
word. I have no idea if the man in the orange suit is a murderer. But even
to my legally untrained ear the details of his original trial sound
far-fetched; the cast of characters might have come straight out of the
mind of Elmore Leonard or Quentin Tarantino. The chief prosecutor is now
in jail for corruption and bribery. The star witness for the prosecution
(a former member of a Honduran death squad) had a string of convictions
unknown to the jury at the time.
Every month, Sister Helen drives 3 hours to the Louisiana State
Penitentiary. In a booth separated by a plastic screen, she and Manuel
talk about the case, or pray, anything to "give him a little courage" as
Sister Margaret says.
Now his attorneys are demanding that the crooked prosecutor be summoned.
The state opposes it. The man will take the Fifth Amendment and say
nothing. As the procedural impasse continues, the judge takes a call on
his mobile phone. My heart sinks on the prisoner's behalf. At the recess,
Sister Helen rushes forward to greet the prisoner. "Good to see you
Manuel," she beams, showing him a copy of the new book. He raises his
manacled wrists and looks apologetic. Death-row prisoners are not allowed
to have hardback books.
When Dead Man Walking was being adapted by Tim Robbins for the screen,
Sister Helen's order, the Sisters of St Joseph of Medaille, were worried
that Hollywood studio bosses would add a cheap love interest or cast the
nun as a Whoopi Goldberg type. In many ways such a casting might have been
understandable. I can well imagine her scampering over a wall, or taking
part in a high-speed car chase if she thought it would help her crusade.
It's an image that is reinforced, later, when she tells of how during a
visit to the Vatican she once performed a most un-nun like change from
trousers into a skirt in an ante room even as the Holy Father was
shuffling down the corridor to grant her a private audience.
But, make no mistake, Sister Helen may mix with the great and the good,
but her commitment to her cause should never be underestimated. The first
time she witnessed a man being put to death in the electric chair she had
to stop on the drive home to vomit. After six journeys to the death
chamber, she is resigned to living with the nightmares. "They always come
in the form of I'm being executed. But I can't afford to let it overcome
me because I have to tell the story."
As her latest book, The Death of Innocents, makes clear, she considers all
of the 6 state-sponsored killings she has witnessed to be wrongful, even
that of Robert Lee Willie who tortured a woman in a gravel pit for hours
before murdering her. Written while she was staying at a Cheyenne
reservation in Montana, she returns like a detective to the scenes of the
capital crimes of 2 men she believes were innocent. Her aim is to shock
Americans into seeing that the US criminal justice system is so flawed,
and the death penalty so randomly applied to the weakest, that it is
unconstitutional.
But Sister Helen also takes the reader on the final journey into the death
chamber with the condemned men, supplying the kind of detail that is as
surreal as it is horrifying. The polished floors, the secretary typing up
forms. The guard watching Jerry Springer on television in the corner as
the prisoner and the nun have their conversation and a last bowl of
chocolate ice-cream. Then the diapers and the strap-down teams arrive
before the needles are inserted.
On the way, the book excoriates George Bush and his conservative Catholic
ally on the US Supreme Court, Justice Antonino Scalia. Thirty-eight
American states still operate the death penalty, of which Texas is the
crucible. As governor of Texas, Bush signed more death warrants than any
governor in recent history and systematically denied clemency. His habit
was never to devote more than 30 minutes to a review. Sister Helen regards
his compassionate conservatism as a sham, and thinks people in Britain
should be awake to the dangerous parallels between his "war on crime" and
his "war on terror", both of which rely on violence and retribution.
"Don't underestimate what is beginning to happen in Britain where you have
suspected terrorists," she warns. "British people may say 'we are so
beyond this', but you watch what your courts are doing."
The court breaks for lunch and I join the nuns as they rush out to queue
at a branch of Subway for tuna wraps and Coca-Cola. Sister Helen talks
non-stop the entire way there. Outside on the pavement, it is hot and
noisy, but this nun is as practical as she is spiritual; one moment she is
quoting the prophet Isaiah in her big, resonant voice, the next she's
pushing on the nearest door, which happens to be a bail-bonds office, and
asking for a quiet corner in which to sit.
The receptionist looks puzzled at first, but as soon as her boss
recognises the nun, we are sitting around the kitchen at the back of the
office, eating our sandwiches. Sister Helen, still in full flight about
religion, right-wing politics and how America is barely a functioning
democracy, pauses only to shout thanks to the bail-bonds man with the
unlikely suggestion: "I'll know where to come if I ever need a bail bond".
She tells me how Christianity in America has been hijacked to support a
right-wing ideology which fights crime with retribution instead of
rehabilitation. "We have so much Christianity-lite in this country, and
George Bush is the embodiment of that. People are abysmally ignorant about
the Bible and about the gospel of Jesus because all they hear is this
stuff they get at the pulpit."
If those she accuses of "manipulating God" are to be found running the
government and filling the ranks of America's Christian right, then she is
one of the few outspoken voices on the Christian left. She rejects the
label, but in her version of Christianity, everyone has an inviolable
human dignity. "When you are walking with someone to their death, even
when they have done terrible crimes, and they are saying 'sister, please
hold on to my life', there is no dignity in this. It is cruel and
unnecessary. It involves torture. They are defenceless, and then we kill
them."
It is difficult for liberal Europeans to understand the scale of her task
in changing attitudes in the red states of America. Conservative websites
are filled with references to "frying" convicts and accusing "prissy"
campaigners like Sister Helen of "glorifying" murderers. Her answer is
uncompromising. "What did Jesus say? 'The least of these.' People
considered monsters, throwaways. They deserve full human dignity and the
compassion of Christ."
It is on the way back from the bail-bonds office that we lose the way and
have to break into a run. Somehow we are back in our seats when a mystery
witness takes the stand, an answer perhaps to the nun's prayers. The woman
testifies that her husband, the chief witness in the original trial,
confessed on his death bed to the murders. It feels like made-for-TV court
drama, but there are gasps from the public gallery.
Manuel looks around and searches for Sister Helen's face. She smiles and
gives him a thumbs-up. "Poor Manuel," Sister Helen whispers to me, "he
knows that this day could decide whether he lives or dies."
She knows that even explosive testimony doesn't always buy you your life
back once the door to America's machinery of death has closed behind you.
As I leave her, Sister Helen is speeding off back to New Orleans to meet
Sean Penn and Jude Law. They, and Kate Winslet, are in town shooting a new
movie. For Sister Helen, the hope must be that life does not imitate art
too closely. Sean Penn played the prisoner in the orange suit in Dead Man
Walking. And he died strapped to the black padded gurney, his arms
outstretched in the shape of a cross.
'The Death of Innocents' by Sister Helen Prejean is published by Random
House. Available from Amazon for 12.22
(source: The Independent (UK)
FLORIDA:
State looks to improve jury pool operations
Apparently, it takes more than $15 a day and free showings of Ace Ventura
and Grumpy Old Men to persuade people to show up for jury duty in Palm
Beach County.
The county summoned more than 132,000 residents for jury duty last year
and wound up with only 42,000 who were eligible, capable and available to
serve. That's a little over 30 %, meaning the court has to summon 1,000
people to get 300 for a venire, or a qualified pool of jurors.
It's close to the statewide average, and compared with Miami-Dade County's
12 % to 13 %, it's not bad. But compared with the Broward County rate, and
the national average, of about 40 %, it could be better.
Jury management is caught between a bulging court system and a
budget-slashing legislature. The state Supreme Court has appointed a
22-member "work group" to try to repair and improve the system, so more
people show up to do their civic duty and the courts use them more
efficiently.
The group's main tasks are to decide whether state standards for jury
panels, which are widely ignored, should be changed, and to recommend how
to deal with jurors who don't show up and those who ask for postponements.
The court has appointed other groups to study reforms such as doing away
with peremptory challenges and allowing jurors to take notes, question
witnesses and discuss testimony during trials.
Justice Fred Lewis will conduct a public hearing Jan. 19 in Miami to hear
from judges, lawyers, court officials and others who want to have a say.
The hearing will be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
In 2003, the Florida Legislature cut the $4.5 million budget for paying
jurors and witnesses by $600,000. Panic ran through the courts when
then-Chief Justice Harry Anstead sent a memo to all 20 circuit courts
saying the state was in danger of running out of money to pay jurors and
witnesses before the end of the fiscal year.
No jurors - no jury trials. When not enough people are available to fill
juries, trials get postponed or, if they're already started, a mistrial
has to be declared. Anstead urged court officials to try to follow state
guidelines and call an average of only about 18 people for each potential
six-person jury. For death penalty cases, the standards say no more than
50 prospective jurors and no more than 30 for other 12-person juries.
A review by the Office of State Courts Administrator in May reported that
only two counties, Escambia and Highlands, were abiding by the state
standards and that officials in every circuit felt at least some of the
limits needed to be raised.
"In a civil case, 18 works," said William Roby, chief judge of the 19th
Judicial Circuit, which covers the Treasure Coast. "But when you've got a
medical malpractice case where everybody in town knows the doctors, that's
a problem."
High-profile criminal cases and weeks-long civil cases involving multiple
litigants make even bigger splashes in jury pools. Some run through
hundreds of candidates before prosecutors and defense attorneys can agree
on a panel of 6 or 12, plus alternates.
Roby said he is abiding by the standards and assumes other judges in
Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties are, too. But he
said he has come close to having mistrials and has had to ask lawyers to
agree to having no alternates for juries.
In the 15th Judicial Circuit - Palm Beach County - prospective jury panels
are limited to 160, but people rejected for 1 jury may be sent back into
the pool and considered for other trials. While they wait to be called,
Kimberly Collins and the jury management staff try to keep them
entertained with books, magazines and movies.
Chief Judge Edward Fine represents the circuit on the jury panel work
group, along with West Palm Beach trial attorney Theodore Babbitt.
"My main interest on this committee is to see that we have enough money to
pay all jurors, and that we don't have to curtail trials near the end of
the fiscal year," Fine said. "If we can come up with more efficient
methods, that will be great."
Jurors are entitled to $15 a day for the first three days they serve, if
they aren't being paid by their employers while on jury duty. After 3
days, all jurors are entitled to $30 a day, even if their employers pay
them.
After Anstead's memo, Fine said Palm Beach County jurors might have to
accept IOUs for their service and wait for payment until the start of the
next fiscal year, but it didn't come to that.
Babbitt responded to the memo with a letter saying he realized courts were
in crisis but that limiting jury panels created "wholesale disruption" of
civil trials.
"The reality of life is that to seat a six-person panel with 2 alternates
on a 3-week case takes a lot more than 160 challenges," Babbitt wrote.
A judge can't expect jurors who are self employed or who aren't getting
their full salaries to keep their attention on a case when they are under
financial hardship, he said.
"What this means is that it will be virtually impossible to seat a jury
for any case longer than a week anywhere in the state," Babbitt wrote.
"That will put an end to all settlement negotiations and make sure that
Florida... is in no better shape regarding how long it takes to get a
serious case to a jury than New York or Chicago."
Babbitt said some judges use the jury panel limitations as an excuse for
not trying larger cases, which clog up dockets and delay other trials. He
said the work group needs to talk about changing procedures, such as
picking jurors a few days or a week before a trial, which would create
more pressure for settlement.
"95 % of cases get settled," he said, "but not before the Friday before
the trial's due to start."
In 1998, Florida changed its source for jurors from voter registration
lists to driver licenses, which most circuits say requires them to summon
more people to get enough for a jury pool. Critics complain that the
larger list wastes more money and time because it captures larger numbers
of people who aren't eligible, capable or interested in jury service:
non-citizens, non-English speakers, felons and people with charges pending
against them.
But Fine said he sees the change as a positive, not a negative, because it
involves a broader range of people. Babbitt agreed.
"I think it's one of the smartest things we ever did," he said. "I
remember talking to a hairdresser who said she never registered to vote
because she didn't want to serve on a jury. I think that's horrible."
Fine said Palm Beach County's 30 % show-up rate isn't bad, considering
that the notices are sent by regular mail to a population that is mobile
and partly seasonal.
"I can improve my figures, as they do in some counties," he said, "by
making all the college kids come during Christmas vacation, so you have a
higher show-up rate, but knowing full well that we're not going to have
any juries during that time."
State law says people who don't show up for jury duty without valid
excuses can be held in contempt of court and fined up to $100.
"I haven't done that," Judge Fine said. "I probably could do that, but I
haven't. I could spend money tracking people down and seeing who actually
got the notice by sending out certified mail. It's a matter of cost
efficiency."
On the Treasure Coast, a call to jury duty had better not be ignored.
Judge Roby said he has issued up to a dozen contempt warnings to no-shows.
"I give them one chance by mail to show why they didn't show up in
response to a validly issued subpoena," Roby said. "And if they don't show
up, I get the sheriff to bring them in."
(source: Palm Beach Post)
