March 24 FLORIDA: Police tapes reveal accused killer's 1991 plea for help----'Prison ain't going to help me,' Couey said in confession The man charged with killing 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford confessed in 1991 that he tried to molest a 5-year-old girl, telling police "I need help," according to a tape obtained by CNN. The suspect, 46-year-old John Evander Couey, was charged this week with capital murder, burglary with battery, kidnapping and sexual battery on a child younger than 12. Couey had been arrested 25 times previously in Florida -- the same state as where he allegedy kidnapped and killed Jessica. In the confession recorded 14 years ago, he described what he did to the 5-year-old girl in her back yard. "She was riding across and I went over there, and she offered to go in the back yard to jump on the trampoline. And I said 'OK.' We went back there and she was jumping on there," he said on the tape. "I asked if she wanted to play hide and go seek and she said yes, so we did." Couey acknowledged to police that he exposed himself, that the girl then sat on his lap -- voluntarily, he claimed -- and that he put the girl's hand on him. "Then her mother come out and yelled for her and I took off," Couey said. "I feel that prison ain't going to help me," he said. "I got a 10-year sentence and I done got out in 3 years, and it doesn't really help. I feel that I need help for myself. That's why I'm confessing to my crime that I committed tonight, 'cause I want help for myself so I will never have to be this again. I mean I feel bad about it, really I do. "I feel that if I can get help for myself then I can make a better person out of myself," he said. Couey was given the maximum sentence for attempted molestation -- 5 years -- and was out on parole after 2 years. He told police at the time that his effort to molest a young girl was not a 1-time event. A written report by the officer who took the taped confession said: "Couey admitted that this was not the 1st child he had ever touched, however, this is the 1st time he was caught." The officer continued: "Couey admitted to molesting his wife's daughter, however, she agreed not to report the incident if he left the house and gave her a divorce, which he did. Couey knows he has a problem, however, has never sought medical assistance to help him control his sexual attraction for young children." CNN tried unsuccessfully to locate Couey's former wife for comment. 14 years after Couey's plea for help, police sources said, he entered Lunsford's house the night of February 23, made his way to the girl's room, covered her mouth, ordered her to remain quiet and forced her to leave. Authorities found her body March 19, buried behind the home of Couey's half sister in Homosassa, Florida, north of Tampa. (source: CNN) INDIANA: Man on Texas' Death Row gets 91 years in slaying A Marion County judge on Wednesday sentenced Joshua Maxwell to 91 years in prison for killing a man at a Speedway home. A jury convicted Maxwell on March 9 of murder, criminal confinement, arson and theft in the September 2000 death of Robby L. Bott, 45. Prosecutors say Maxwell, 24, and his girlfriend abducted Bott, forced him to take them shopping, then strangled him. After killing Bott, police say, Maxwell and Tessie McFarland, 25, drove across the country, killing an an off-duty jail officer in Texas before being caught in San Francisco after a shootout with police on Oct. 17, 2000. In 2002, Maxwell was sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of Bexar County Sgt. Rudy Lopes II. Maxwell was brought back to Indianapolis for the Bott case. In case a future appeal spares Maxwell's life, Superior Court Judge Patricia Gifford ordered his Indiana sentence to begin after he completes his Texas sentence. McFarland, also convicted in Texas, is serving a 40-year sentence there. She is set to go on trial May 16 in Indianapolis in connection with Bott's slaying. ************************** Brizzi questions judge's impartiality Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said Wednesday that Judge Grant Hawkins opposes the death penalty, and that's why Brizzi wants another judge to preside over the trial of an accused child killer. "The appearance of a bias will erode the public confidence in a fair and impartial judiciary," Brizzi said. "The only way to fix it is for (Hawkins) to recuse himself and have another judge hear the case." In documents filed Wednesday, Brizzi asked Hawkins to hand the death penalty trial of Jeffrey Voss to a different judge. Voss is accused in the Christmas Eve abduction, rape and murder of 12-year-old Christina Tedder. Brizzi cited Hawkins' past rulings and public statements as proof the judge believes Indiana's death penalty law is unconstitutional. Before winning his seat on the bench, Brizzi said, Hawkins was found to have provided ineffective representation for two defendants in death cases; both men successfully appealed their death sentences. "All that taken as a whole shows an appearance of bias," Brizzi said. In the documents, Brizzi said he wants "a fair trial with a judge that is not biased or prejudiced against the death penalty." Hawkins declined to disclose his personal views on the death penalty, but he noted that juries, not judges, have the final say in Indiana. "Current law does not allow the judge to overrule the decision of the jury," Hawkins said. "Therefore, my personal opinion, which is not known to anyone else, is not a factor. I am bound by the jury's decision and I am bound to follow the law." According to court procedures, Hawkins will preside over a hearing in which Brizzi will offer evidence painting Hawkins as biased. Hawkins must then rule on whether Brizzi successfully proved the case. If Hawkins refuses to remove himself, Brizzi said he will appeal. Voss' attorney, Robert Hill, said Hawkins is fair and impartial. "Any judge on the bench has some background somewhere," Hill said. "It may be just as unfair to have someone who is a former prosecutor sitting on the bench. But that's a fact of life of the political process by which we pick judges." Since donning the robes in 2001, Hawkins has twice overturned death penalty cases. Each time, he's been overruled. In September 2001, Hawkins ruled the state law unconstitutional and threw out the death penalty against Charles E. Barker, who was found guilty in the 1993 murders of Francis and Helen Benefiel in Indianapolis. The Indiana Supreme Court overturned Hawkins in April 2002. In June 2003, Hawkins again found Indiana law unconstitutional, this time dismissing the death penalty against Barker and Chijoike Bomani Ben-Yisrayl, convicted in September 1984 of the murder and rape of Debra Weaver, 21, who was abducted from her Northeastside home. Hawkins ruled that a provision in Indiana law giving judges the power to overturn a jury's verdict didn't jibe with U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Indiana lawmakers have since changed the death penalty statute, making the jury's decision final. Brizzi cited a statement by Hawkins published in The Indiana Lawyer on Oct. 10, 2001, in which Hawkins is quoted as saying "the death penalty has to be done perfectly every time" and that "innocent people are getting it." Hawkins did not recall making the statement but said he could not deny saying it. Brizzi also claimed Hawkins' past as a defense attorney shows the judge's personal distaste for capital punishment. In court records, Brizzi cited 2 cases in which then-attorney Hawkins "admitted facts by affidavit and testimony that acknowledged" he was ineffective in defending 2 accused killers, James Games and Gregory Van Cleave. Games was originally sentenced to death in 1984 for the murder of Thomas Ferree. He won an appeal and is now serving a 110-year sentence, according to Indiana death row records maintained by the Clark County prosecutor's office. Van Cleave was sentenced to death in 1983 in the shotgun shooting death of Robert Falkner. Van Cleave admitted firing the fatal shot but claimed "the gun just went off." Van Cleave also won an appeal and is serving a 60-year prison sentence. Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, a member of the county's three-judge executive committee, said judges make decisions based on the law, not their viewpoints. "As trial judges, we have to make those calls on an ongoing basis before the Supreme Court ever weighs in," she said. "Sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong." "We're imposing a legal interpretation, not a personal moral view," she said. "And that's what we're paid to do." (source for both: Indianapolis Star) CONNECTICUT: Antoinette Bosco's life has been shattered time and again, and still she smiles One son committed suicide in 1991 but his mother writes about finding redemption through her suffering. Another son and his wife were murdered 2 years later but today she writes about forgiveness and lobbies against the death penalty. A 3rd son died when organ transplant surgery failed last year but she writes about the joy of being loved by those who loved her son. And even without the deaths of three children -- an unspeakable tragedy that could kill any mother -- this woman who wept buckets of tears over the years as a single mother raising seven kids writes about how love for others overcomes personal anguish. If any writer has what it takes to write a maudlin book about Lent it's Antoinette Bosco of Brookfield. And that's exactly what she didn't write. A beaming smile is the last thing you'd expect from a woman who has endured so much heartache, but that's what she offers on this sunny March day -- a smile interrupted only momentarily by a frown when a furnace serviceman tells her he can't figure out why so much oil is being delivered to her house every month. "Would you like me to heat up a pizza?" she says, like a typical Italian grandmother. And it's tempting, not for the sake of food but because, even after a more than two-hour conversation, there is no diminution in the passion that Bosco exudes about life. Bosco has written 14 books, most of them on various aspects of her Christian faith. In her latest book, "Lent: An Uncommon Love Story" (Pauline Press), she advocates abandoning the notion of Lent as a time of seemingly interminable artificial suffering that mercifully ends on Easter. Lent is a time to reconnect with the reality of life, and one of life's harsh realities, she says, is that everybody suffers. Everybody. Rather than choosing the artificial suffering of giving up chocolate or starving yourself, she suggests that people confront the real suffering in their lives -- death, divorce or disappointment, ill health or sickly finances -- and look for the emotional and spiritual growth that can result from it. She remembers one time, as a young mom working two jobs while living on four hours' sleep each night, when she complained bitterly to God about her plight. "I heard a voice say, 'Why do you do it?' And I said 'Because I love my kids.' And that's when I realized what Easter was about and why Jesus did what he did -- because he loved his children." Lent is about choosing to hold on even more tenaciously to love and life rather than giving in to despair, Bosco argues. That leads to the real meaning of Easter -- a day to celebrate victory over suffering, like Jesus' resurrection after his crucifixion, because the suffering has produced an inner transformation. The large silver cross hanging from Bosco's neck, set against her bright red turtleneck, might seem ostentatious if not for what Bosco has endured. But she doesn't pretend that the faith her cross represents has ushered her safely and cleanly out of grief. Lent never really ends for Bosco because she said she still learns through her suffering. "Today I'm content. Tomorrow? I don't know," said Bosco, who said she can't make definitive long-term statements like that. "I live in mortal terror that what's happened to my sons will happen to another one of my kids. I'm content except when I think about my sons. A lot of times I cry a lot because I miss them so," she said. Bosco says she writes partly as a way of healing and partly to share her lessons about healing with others. "I hate to write but I love to have written. You bleed a lot when you write. It's very hard work," said Bosco, who also writes a twice-monthly column for Catholic News Service. She certainly isn't getting rich from writing. "You don't make money writing books," said Bosco, who is most famous for her book "The Pummeled Heart: Finding Peace Through Pain," by far her biggest commercial success, with more than 30,000 copies sold. "I think the royalties from all my books last year, combined, was something like $4,000." Bosco is a voracious reader -- an average of 5 books each week. She loves to sift through the old, battered offerings at library book sales because she said she's found a lot of wisdom in them. And, she adds, "I'd like to think that 60, 70 years from now someone will pick up my books. That's my legacy." In one respect, Bosco is living every writer's dream -- writing books because publishers now come to her. But she must weigh publishers' demands against other responsibilities. She constantly writes letters. Some are sent to the readers of her books who write to her or find her telephone number and call, like the woman who contacted her last year and said "The Pummeled Heart" kept her from committing suicide after her son had taken his life. "That lifted me for months," she said. Other letters go to the inmates she has befriended during visits to practically every prison in Connecticut. Bosco has become intensely interested in prison reform. If you need someone to start a lively party discussion, put Bosco in the middle of it and whisper 2 words in her ear. Your choice: either "prison industry" or "restorative justice." The goal of the prison industry, she said, is not merely to punish wrongdoers but to destroy inmates' lives, whether they live or are executed. The letters are meant to help prisoners feel like human beings for a while, said Bosco, who once was terrified when locked in a prison cell for just a few minutes. "I don't know how they survive. I'd kill myself," she said. With so many people now dependent on the prison system for their livelihood, she said it's increasingly difficult to change minds about how the incarcerated should be treated. Bosco believes in punishment but also advocates restorative justice, by which an inmate admits guilt honestly and then finds some way of making amends. Bosco speaks frequently and has written a book, numerous columns and opinion pieces against the death penalty. She will take her cause to Yale University on April 5 when she joins Sister Helen Prejean, perhaps the nation's best known death penalty foe, at a discussion and lecture. But her opposition is more than politics. She urged a Montana judge not to order the execution of the young man who killed her son because "God is the one who creates life and so God is the only one who should have the right to take it away," she said as she sat on her couch, not from from the corner where her children's photographs look back at her. Bosco said the life of every friend or relative of a murder victim is permanently changed, but executing a murderer won't give back to those survivors what they've lost. Thus the question becomes, "Who am I going to become now if I'm never going to be the person I was?" she said. That's a question, she'll add, that only can be answered during Lent, whenever that may occur in a person's life. (source: Republican-American) CALIFORNIA: Jury-rigging claim scrutinized While fighting on Wednesday to clear itself of charges of habitual jury-rigging, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office may have handed critics ammunition for future attacks on its integrity. Former Alameda County prosecutor John "Jack" Quatman, who has accused his one-time peers of booting Jews and black women from death penalty cases, was attacked by those who worked with him. Quatman endorsed unscrupulous tactics that included threatening to plant drugs on uncooperative witnesses, they told a judge in San Jose. Quatman's honesty and motives - and the morals of the Alameda County District Attorney's Office - were under fire during a second day of hearings before Santa Clara Superior Court Judge Kevin Murphy. The California Supreme Court has directed Murphy to determine whether Quatman's jury-rigging claims are true. Special prosecutor George Williamson from the state attorney general's office called Alameda County District Attorney Thomas Orloff and a parade of defense attorneys and prosecutors to testify Wednesday. Williamson's aim was to portray Quatman as a deceitful egotist clinging to a grudge instead of the truth. During brief testimony before Murphy, Orloff curtly denied ever telling Quatman to keep Jews off a jury. Senior Deputy District Attorney Colton Carmine testified that Quatman told him the way to get reluctant witnesses to cooperate was to threaten to frame them for drug possession. Carmine said Quatman reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a plastic baggy holding what seemed to be a fake rock of crack cocaine. Quatman threw the baggy at Carmine's feet and said "If you don't want to come across, it's that easy," implying the punishment for not testifying would be arrest on drug charges, Carmine said. Carmine said Quatman told hundreds of prosecutors gathered for a statewide conference to keep Jews off death penalty juries because the emotional issues raised by the gassing of Jews during World War II. Carmine said Quatman dumped difficult cases on junior prosecutors and kept ones in which guilty verdicts seemed easier to win. "If it didn't serve his purpose, he wouldn't tell the truth," Carmine concluded about Quatman. Prosecutor Julie Dunger testified that Quatman spoke of letting witnesses see pictures of defendants they were to later identify in court. Quatman reportedly told Dunger that if a witness has made a deal with a prosecutor, they were "bought" and should be made to say whatever is necessary in court whether its true or not. Gary Sowards of the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, however, hammered away at the fact that those now accusing Quatman of sleazy behavior never reported him to superiors or the state bar association. Dunger said she felt she didn't have a superior, because the head of her team was "a notorious alcoholic" whose subordinates compensated for at the office. In a May 2003 declaration used to back a demand for a new trial for Fred Freeman, Quatman contends he was prosecuting the Freeman murder-robbery case in 1987 when Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stanley Golde called him aside and told him to kick Jews off the death penalty jury because Jews balk at the death penalty. Quatman contends keeping Jews and black women off capital case juries was standard practice at the district attorney's office. "Quatman is basically trying to have the last laugh," said Golde's son, Ivan, and Oakland attorney in the gallery each day of the hearings. "This is a grudge match against Tom Orloff for one. For two, he is using my father as a pawn to help his and his wife's law practice in Montana." Quatman's wife is a lawyer who handles appellate work in death penalty cases. Quatman and his wife have a small law firm in Whitefish, Mont. Oakland criminal attorney Daniel Horowitz was called to the stand to testify Quatman told him Golde and he were "just sitting around in the chambers bull" and that Quatman was adamant no judge was going to tell him how to pick a jury. Horowitz said it was only later that he read Quatman's sworn declaration and noticed it conflicted with what Quatman told him. Quatman retired from the district attorney's office in 1998 after 25 years as a prosecutor. Golde died that same year and had been a jurist on the bench since 1973. The state supreme court directed Murphy to review Quatman's claims and Williamson was assigned to represent the Alameda County District Attorney's Office in the hearings. Williamson has strived in court to portray Quatman as a bitter man bent on getting revenge on Orloff, who Quatman has long despised and blames for stymying his career. Orloff testified he was 2nd in command to then District Attorney Jack Meehan when Quatman was disciplined for a sexist insult targeting a female peer in the office about 12 years ago. Quatman was reportedly banished to a unit specializing in consumer fraud. Orloff testified that a newspaper requested a copy of the discipline letter from Quatman's personnel file when Quatman later tried to get elected as a judge in Contra Costa County. Orloff said he told Quatman of the request, and that Quatman "asked me to shred" the letter. Orloff said Quatman was irked by his refusal. "When you do something that's not right, it comes back to bite you," Orloff explained, referring to the legendary Watergate scandal as an example of how cover-ups can be more scandalous than whatever is being hidden. "Destroying it would be destroying evidence. It would be dishonest." Orloff kept the letter from the newspaper on legal grounds. Murphy barred Sowards from asking Orloff whether his office made a practice of excluding Jews or black women from juries. Murphy had ruled at the outset of the hearings that they would focus only on charges of jury-rigging in the Freeman case. Williamson is to continue calling witnesses today and the last of the testimony is expected to be presented next week. (source: The Argus) *********************** 2 gang members face death penalty----Jury recommends ultimate punishment for murder spree A jury on Tuesday recommended the death penalty for 2 Baldwin Park gang members convicted of a crime spree that left 4 dead, including one in Ontario. The Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated for just 1 hour during the penalty phase of the trial for Oswaldo Amezcua, 29, and Joseph Flores, 34, said Jane Robison, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney. Amezcua and Flores were found guilty on Monday of killing 4 Baldwin Park men: George Orlando Flores, Luis George Reyes, who was killed in Ontario; John Luis Diaz and Arturo Madrigal. The killings happened during a crime spree in 2000 that ended on July 4 when the 2 were caught on the Santa Monica Pier. While Flores was captured without incident, Amezcua took about 20 tourists hostage and shot 3 police officers before arrest. The officers were injured, but not killed. "These 2 people chose to live by a certain code, and they don't care about the laws. All they care about is being notorious," said Deputy District Attorney Darren Levine. John Luis Diaz was shot and killed while riding a bicycle with his brother on April 11 on Los Angeles Street in Baldwin Park. On May 25, Flores and Amezcua pulled up next to a car on Merced Avenue in Baldwin Park, and killed Arturo Madrigal in the other car. The next slayings occurred June 19 on Ledford Street in Baldwin Park when Flores fired an AK-47 while in a car and Amezcua used a 9mm handgun, Levine said. George Flores was killed and a 2nd person was wounded. The 2 then went to Flores' mother's house in Hemet, Levine said. They had a car problem. When they pulled over to the side of the road in Ontario, he said the 2 killed Luis Reyes, shooting him 19 times. The 2 men were also convicted of about 30 other felonies, including several counts of attempted murder, arson, 2nd-degree robbery and shooting at an inhabited dwelling. They will be sentenced April 20 in Los Angeles Superior Court. (source: Daily Bulletin)
