March 10
FLORIDA:
Prosecutors planning to seek death penalty
Prosecutors have filed court papers saying they will seek the death
penalty for the man accused of killing a Lake County deputy sheriff and
wounding 2 others.
State Attorney Brad King filed a notice March 2 in Lake County Circuit
Court stating that he intends to pursue the death sentence if Jason
Wheeler is convicted of 1st-degree murder of a law-enforcement officer,
for which the maximum penalty is death.
Wheeler, 29, is accused of killing Deputy Wayne Koester and wounding
Deputies Bill Crotty and Tom McKane in a Feb. 9 ambush at his home near
Paisley.
Deputies captured Wheeler later that day. Wheeler, who was wounded and is
paralyzed from the waist down, is under 24-hour police guard at a
rehabilitation facility in Leesburg.
Wheeler also is charged with 2 counts of attempted murder of an officer
and 2 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm of an officer. Those
charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
(source: Orlando Sentinel)
********************
State: McCord picked murder over a divorce
The state outlined its case against Max McCord during opening arguments on
Wednesday. The Weston father is accused of murdering his schoolteacher
wife.
Inside a tense Broward courtroom Thursday, 2 contradictory portraits
emerged of Weston father and accused murderer Max McCord.
As Assistant State Attorney Brian Cavanagh sees it, the 39-year-old was a
sex addict and a desperate spendthrift who killed his wife, Marie Noguera,
to cash in on her $350,000 life insurance policy and end a loveless
marriage.
But defense attorney Jeanne Baker suggested McCord, while stretched
financially, was far from a desperate man. She suggested shoddy police
work and a rush to judgment has left Noguera's real killer at large.
On Aug. 2, 2001, 31-year-old high school Spanish teacher Noguera was found
strangled in an upstairs study in a house in a gated neighborhood.
Prosecutors have filed notice that they will seek the death penalty if he
is convicted.
During his 3-hour opening statement, Cavanagh borrowed a quote from
Shakespeare's Hamlet: "For murder though it have no tongue, will speak."
At times red-faced and in a booming voice, Cavanagh railed at the
defendant.
"Max McCord chose her death over divorce," he said with clenched fists.
"There wasn't some phantom intruder!"
The prosecutor reminded jurors more than once that McCord visited
prostitutes, "spending large sums of the family's money, deeper and deeper
into financial oblivion."
Baker, for her part, suggested that McCord's interest in prostitutes was
not indicative of major marital strife.
"It was part of their life," she said, adding that the practice is more
accepted in his native Denmark than here in the United States. "They were
not a couple falling apart."
Baker said the state's case was based on a whole lot of "he said, she
said" and "uncorroborated claims."
She, too, evoked a quote from Shakespeare, this time from Macbeth: "full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The state's case will likely hinge on how well prosecutors chip away at
McCord's alibi. On the night of her death, McCord told police the family
had dinner at home then drove together to the mall around 8 p.m. He said
Noguera returned to her car because she had forgotten her purse. When she
didn't return, McCord said he took a cab home, found her body and called
police.
Cavanagh suggests that physical evidence will show that Noguera was
already dead when McCord and their 3-year-old daughter left the gated
compound for the mall.
The state says security tapes from the complex showed him leaving the
complex at 8:18 p.m. with an empty passenger seat, but Baker countered
that the camera's timer was off and that the image captured was impossible
to decipher.
The trial is expected to last about eight weeks. Testimony is set to begin
today at 9:30 a.m. in Broward Circuit Judge Peter M. Weinstein's chambers.
(source: Miami Herald)
CALIFORNIA:
Mexicans on death row may ask for new hearings after Bush decision
More than 2 dozen Mexican nationals on San Quentin's death row are
expected to seek new hearings after President Bush said courts nationwide
must review claims that the prisoners' rights were violated by not being
allowed to contact their consulate after arrest.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer would not say how his office
would handle the cases of the 26 Mexicans on death row.
"We have not taken a position on that issue," Nathan Barankin, a Lockyer
spokesman, said Wednesday.
If the inmates ask state courts for new hearings, "We'll address them one
by one," Barankin added.
However, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott appeared poised to stand by
the convictions in his state, noting after Bush's decree Tuesday that
neither the president nor an international court could override state
court authority.
The president's announcement came in response to a ruling last March by
the International Court of Justice, a U.N. tribunal also known as the
World Court, which stated the U.S. had violated the rights of 51 Mexicans
on death rows in 8 states.
The World Court said local authorities failed to notify the Mexican
Consulate promptly after their arrests, and did not advise them of their
right to seek assistance from the consulate, as is required by the Vienna
Convention.
Barankin noted that the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments March
28 in the case of a condemned murderer from Texas who is relying on the
World Court directive to try to get his conviction overturned.
The Supreme Court's decision, expected by the end of June, may determine
California's response to similar claims, Barankin said.
Meanwhile, a lawyer working out of the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco
has already begun interviewing the condemned Mexican prisoners in
California, said Stefanie Faucher, of Death Penalty Focus, an anti-capital
punishment organization.
(source: Associated Press)
MISSISSIPPI:
Miss. court denies post conviction request in death row case
The Mississippi Supreme Court has denied a request from Richard Gerald
Jordan to be allowed to argue for a new trial on 30 issues. Jordan was
seeking a post-conviction appeal, in which inmates claim to have found new
evidence they believe would justify a new trial.
Jordan's is the longest-running case on Mississippi's death row.
Jordan, 58, was convicted of kidnapping and killing Edwina Marta in
Harrison County Jan. 13, 1976. He was accused of collecting a $25,000
ransom from Marta's husband, then taking the woman to a wooded area in
north Harrison County and shooting her in the back of the head.
Over the past 28 years, Jordan has been sentenced to death 3 times, only
to have the sentences overturned in federal or state courts.
On Dec. 2, 1991, Jordan agreed to a sentence of life without parole to
avoid the death penalty. Within 3 years, Jordan had changed his mind and
asked for a new sentence of life that did not bar parole. His motion was
denied by a judge in 1995.
Jordan appealed to the Supreme Court, saying he had agreed to the sentence
but it was invalid under state law.
The Supreme Court in 1997 agreed, ruling life without parole as a
sentencing option did not exist until July 1, 1994. The justices said the
only sentences available to Jordan were death or life imprisonment with
parole. The justices ordered a new sentencing hearing.
In 1998, a Harrison County jury sentenced Jordan to death. In 2001, the
Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the death sentence.
Presiding Justice Bill Waller Jr., writing Thursday for the court, said
Jordan presented no new evidence on which he might win a new trial.
Waller said the evidence showed Jordan received a fair trial and a fair
sentencing hearing.
(source: Associated Press)
ARKANSAS:
TO DO WITH REALITY: An Interview with Burk Sauls and Brett Savory by Nikki
Tranter, PopMatters Books Editor
Despite the fact that no evidence of a satanic ritual was found in Robin
Hood Hills or in the way the children were killed, the police promoted
their stories of devil worshippers. The local media obliged. Once this
fantasy was the basis of a criminal investigation, it was no longer
necessary for the West Memphis police to bother with things like forensic
science, crime-scene reconstruction, or any of the techniques used by
responsible investigators. They no longer had to think about criminal
behavior or physical evidence. They had chosen their path, and it had
nothing to do with reality. -- Burk Sauls, "California to West in Ten
Years"
If Burk Sauls sounds pissed off, it's because he is. 10 years after
learning about the murder of 3 young boys at Robin Hood Hills via Joe
Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's HBO film Paradise Lost, Sauls has
experienced too much frustration at the actions of the West Memphis,
Arkansas, police and their botched investigation. So much so that he
wasn't all that committed to contributing to M. W. (Mike) Anderson and
Brett Savory's new collection, The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in
Support of the West Memphis Three. It wasn't that he doubted Anderson and
Savory; it's just that as cofounder of the Free the West Memphis Three and
a longtime activist on behalf of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie
Misskelley, who he believes were wrongly convicted of murder, he simply
didn't need the potential grief.
REFERENCED BOOK
The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis
Three Editors: M. W. Anderson and Brett Savory Arsenal Pulp Press October
2004, 202 pages, $19.95
"I got an e-mail from Brett Savory asking me if I would be interested in
contributing something to their book," Sauls told PopMatters. "I remember
thinking -- as I always do when I hear about ideas like this -- that it
probably would never actually happen. I kept putting off writing
something, partly because it's hard to come up with something like that,
and partly because I honestly didn't think it would ever get printed. It's
always very difficult when someone asks me to write something about the
case or to speak about it. It's almost impossible to summarize this case
without going off on hundreds of tangents and pointing out all the various
ways that the police and the trial failed."
Steering away from the usual case rundown (something he's written and
rewritten many times for the WM3.org Web site), Sauls's "California to
West Memphis in Ten Years" instead explores the history of his involvement
in the case, attempting to answer the one question he's been asked more
times than "What happened?", that is, "Why do you care?" Unlike so many
West Memphis Three supporters (including many of the book's contributors),
his investment has nothing to do with his childhood or a personal penchant
for wearing black and listening to death metal. For Sauls, it was simply
learning of an injustice and working to right it. He writes about his
continued struggle to see the convicted men freed as if it's something
anybody would do.
In fact, Sauls's organizational efforts and his assistance with
fundraisers like the Cruel and Unusual art show hosted by Winona Ryder
last year in Los Angeles, helped inspire the Last Pentacle project, which
includes writing by top horror authors Bentley Little, Peter Straub and
Poppy Z. Brite, with illustrations by Clive Barker. "So many filmmakers,
visual artists, and rock stars had all come together to combat this
injustice," Savory told PopMatters "Yet no fiction writers. I felt it was
a hole that should be filled, since dark fiction played a certain part in
the West Memphis Three's conviction." Selecting informed contributors --
something that initially concerned the editor -- turned out to be a
relatively simple process. "Mike and I each drew up a sort of dream list
of writers we would like to ask, then determined ways of contacting them."
He said he and Anderson were astonished to get such favorable responses
from almost every writer contacted, especially since they weren't even
sure if the authors were aware of the case. "More well-known writers knew
about the case than I had thought," he said. "I figured Mike and I were
going to have a long slog ahead of us trying to convince these people to
go and read up on the case, but most of them already knew about it."
As someone who has spent so much time fighting for the cause, Sauls was an
obvious choice to contribute. Because of his years of work directly with
the convicted men, his piece is one of the book's most confrontational.
"California to West Memphis in Ten Years" is honest to the point of
distressing, but Sauls's bluntness ("Three children were killed and left
in ditch. They were stripped and tied with their own shoelaces. Someone
did it.") is not about shocking the reader so much as openly and plainly
presenting facts:
The local police were so convinced that the murders were just too horrible
to have been committed by anything less than a supernatural force in the
form of a satanic cult under order from Satan himself. They enlisted the
help of self-proclaimed experts in the occult who inflated these tales
until they convinced themselves and many in the community that devil
worship was the only possible motive for the murders. Due to inexperience
and overzealousness, the West Memphis police destroyed what might have
been valuable physical evidence. They were left to struggle with the
shambles of their own investigative bungling, and were forced to resort to
wild stories of satanic cults and human sacrifices.
Burk Sauls
Emotionally charged yet without ranting or finger-pointing, this approach
sets the tone for much of the book. Sauls's distress is mirrored by many
contributors, making for an overall gloomy tone. "Sadly, this case pulls
up a lot of dark emotions in people," he said.
But the book's darkest pieces are often it's best, especially those
concerned with the psychology of fear and exploring the introverted
adolescent mind. Paul Tremblay's "All Sliding to One Side", for example,
about a father's concern his young daughter will have to someday confront
the world's evil, and Michael Marano's "The Changeling", in which a kind
of personification of fear, anger, and frustration narrate the tale of a
suicidal boy are among the collection's more moving fictional pieces.
The book's nonfiction pieces have a similar darkness to them. Each brings
to light the pain wrought from so much concentration on such a difficult
situation. Margaret Cho's "Letter", for example, is "a plea [and] a
prayer" that "[God] is finished making an example of them, the West
Memphis Three." Cho almost begs for the salvation of the convicted men.
She describes her friend, Damien Echols, sitting on death row, as a "heavy
metal Nelson Mandela", a man with whom she discusses opera and books and
politics and wishes he could have the same kind of opportunities she's
had:
"I wish hard, eyes shut and head and heart throbbing, at shooting stars,
blowing out birthday candles, every opportunity I have that Damien and
[his wife] Lorri will go wherever they like, see everything, visit people
who love them, yet have never met them, who have sent letters and cards
from far, far away, with invitations to stay as long as they want,
whenever they can, anytime, always, forever welcome.
Sauls is particularly moved by Cho's compassion, grateful to have her "on
our side". "She's one of those writer/performers," he says, "who doesn't
seem to have any piety or celebrity baggage. She writes honestly, she's a
genuinely good person, and she's funny as hell. She's also famous and
therefore has access to many more people's ears than any of us do, so when
she talks or writes, people listen."
Mara Leveritt, Arkansas Times journalist and author of Devil's Knot: The
True Story of the West Memphis Three, wishes the celebrity writers
directly implicated in the case were so compassionate. In her piece, "An
Open Letter to Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz", she all but
admonishes the fame authors for not speaking out in support of Echols,
who, she writes, "is set to be executed, in part, for reading your books."
In the nearly 10 years since Judge [David] Burnett sentenced Echols to
death, many artists have risen to challenge the abuses of self-expression
that were allowed to bear on his trial. Scores of filmmakers, musicians,
actors, visual artists, and writers have protested the prosecutor's
exploitations of art, as have thousands of your readers. But what has been
heard from the 3 great writers whose works actually figured in his trial?
Do the authors really have a duty to speak out? Have these authors ignored
the case or have they simply neglected to mention it publicly? According
to Sauls, this courageous willingness to pose challenging questions is
typical of Leveritt. "She's been this case's most rational voice since it
happened and a big inspiration to many of us who have been rallying around
this situation for so long. Her piece is a stand out for me."
(Incidentally, King did mention the case, albeit indirectly, and his part
in it, in the 1999 BBC documentary, Stephen King: Shining in the Dark: "I
don't think that any kid was ever driven to an act of violence by a
Metallica record, or by a Marilyn Manson CD or by a Stephen King novel,
but I do think these things can act as accelerants. There's a whole
culture of violence in this country and I'd be the last person to deny
that I'm a part of that, but I'm only a child of my culture.")
Though he admits a certain bias, Sauls's favorite piece in the collection
is a group of photographs of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley by Grove
Pashley. "Even though I was standing right there when Grove shot those
photos, I see so much in them that I don't normally see when I'm with
Damien, Jason, and Jessie in person. I think the artistry in those photos
comes from the way they really show the insides of those three guys." He
says the photographs, the first taken of the young men as adults, shocked
people when exhibited at the Cruel and Unusual benefit, in their vivid
demonstration that the three teenagers in the Paradise Lost films were now
fully grown adults. "The impact of those photos had an emotional effect on
everyone who saw them."
Overall, Sauls says he's happy with the book. "I'm thrilled to have been
proven completely wrong about it," he says. "The fact that this book
exists is proof that people are still compelled to do things and
contribute toward finding ways of exposing this case to more people. So
many cases like this one don't get the exposure and are forgotten.
Hopefully the work that the contributors have done will inspire people to
pay more attention to their justice system, their death penalty, and their
own prejudices and emotions and opinions concerning crime and punishment."
Savory agrees. "I've learned," he said, "that some police forces are
willing to throw proper procedure and due process to the wind to relieve
public pressure, finding convenient scapegoats on which to pin monstrous
crimes." At the same time, Savory says his involvement with dedicated West
Memphis Three supporters like Sauls have encouraged him to not to give up
hope: "I've learned, too, that thousands upon thousands of people are
willing to stand up and say something when such a case comes to light."
(source : PopMatters.com)
