July 25 FLORIDA: My pen pal's a killer on death row Tracey and Clark are good friends. They share jokes in good times and console each other in bad times. They exchange cards and presents on birthdays and at Christmas. But the pair have never met and are highly unlikely ever to get together. For Von Clark Davis is awaiting execution on death row in the USA. One of his only contacts to the outside world is Tracey Kesterton, a 41-year-old divorcee and graphic designer from Ward End. But why would a bright, successful woman want to write to a convicted killer thousands of miles away? "I always wanted to do it," said Tracey. "I don't know why but I suppose there was something that bothered me about death row. "I agree with the death penalty providing you know you've got the right person, but the problem with America is that it doesn't seem that safe." Tracey began writing to Clark nine years ago after she split from her husband of 10 years. "My husband was a scenes of crime officer with the police, so he was never going to agree with me writing to a death row prisoner," said Tracey. "But once we got divorced I was a free woman and decided to pursue what I wanted to do." Tracey treasures the companionship she shares with 42-year-old Clark, who was sentenced to death for the aggravated murder of Suzette Butler, his then girlfriend, in 1984 after a bar brawl in Ohio. He even sent Tracey, who worked at the NEC until multiple sclerosis forced her to give up her job, a jewellery box made out of matchsticks, crafted in his tiny cell. "He can be really funny and charming in his letters, despite his situation," said Tracey, who lives in Cotterills Lane. "He calls me "fatty" despite the fact I'm only 8 stone and has a real sense of humour. "He told me once how he accidentally helped other prisoners escape after he used a shovel to move snow from the exercise yard and pushed it into a 15ft heap next to the wall. "2 other prisoners came along and climbed up the snow before jumping over the wall." Yet despite getting close to Clark, Tracey rarely thinks about meeting her unlikely friend. "It's not really an issue," she said. "Our letters are like conversations anyway. "While I was at work, I would write letters at my desk and then have to hide them when the boss came round. "Nowadays I will be sat in the garden and write to him how I've just seen a squirrel and things like that." Clark describes his fortnightly letters to Tracey as his lifeline. "Our letters become my escape from this miserable environment," he writes. "In my pen pal, I have got the very best matey I have ever had and I wouldn't trade Tracey Kesterton for a million pounds or all the tea in China. "There's no way I would have been able to tolerate this situation without the years of continuous contact with her." Tracey, of course, has to come to terms with the inevitable. "We don't talk about his execution. You have to find something else to write about," she said. (source: Andy Shipley, Evening Mail (UK)) (in) WASHINGTON, DC) Birmingham News, Chicago Tribune, "Deadline" Documentary to Receive DPIC Journalism Awards The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) will honor journalists from The Birmingham News and The Chicago Tribune, and directors from Big Mouth Productions during its 9th Annual Thurgood Marshall Journalism Awards at the National Press Club on Monday, July 25. The awards recognize those journalists who have made an exceptional contribution to the understanding of problems associated with capital punishment. This year's ceremony will feature the first-ever Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award for Excellence in the Posthumous Exploration of Innocence. The honor will go to Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley for their article about the capital conviction of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas last year. Willingham had been convicted and sentenced to death for the arson murder of his 3 daughters, but had maintained his innocence since his arrest. An investigation of the state's case against Willingham revealed that his conviction was based primarily on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances. The Award for Excellence in Print Journalism will be awarded to Carla Crowder, a reporter with The Birmingham News. Crowder will receive the honor for her achievements in giving voice to both sides of the death penalty debate in Alabama. Crowder's articles have profiled the individual life histories of the executed, the economic and personal struggles faced by those who have been exonerated from death row, and the stories of those who continue to await their executions. In 2004, Crowder wrote about the life of David Hocker, who was executed in Alabama late last year. Hocker was convicted of capital murder after a 1-day trial, sentenced to death after his attorney presented no mitigation evidence, and was executed with no post-conviction review. In her series on Hocker, Crowder did what no attorney or social worker had ever done before: tell Kevin Hocker's life story. Directors Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson of the New York-based Big Mouth Productions will receive the Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for their documentary "Deadline." This film, which was featured last year by Dateline NBC, gave viewers a first-hand look at the emotional events surrounding former Illinois Governor George Ryan's historic decision to pardon 4 men and offer clemency to the remaining 167 people on the state's death row due to his concerns about the fairness and accuracy of Illinois's death penalty. Though he had been a tough-on-crime death penalty supporter for nearly 1 decades, Ryan's opinion about capital punishment was shaken when he watched a group of journalism students discover evidence that exonerated a man from death row just before his scheduled execution. In the film, Chevigny and Johnson give viewers an insider's look at Ryan's courageous actions and America's death penalty debate. New York Assemblyman Joseph Lentol will deliver the keynote address at the awards luncheon. Earlier this year, Lentol, who is Chair of the Assembly's Committee on Codes, played a pivotal role in the committee's historic vote not to reinstate capital punishment in New York. A former death penalty proponent, Lentol's position on the issue began to evolve after the state's statute was declared unconstitutional in 2004 and the Assembly held a series of public hearings to determine the best course of action regarding the future of capital punishment in New York. The Thurgood Marshall Journalism Awards are named in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice who believed that people would see the death penalty in a new light once they understood how it works in practice. "The question with which we must deal," Justice Marshall wrote, "is not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in light of all information presently available." The distinguished judges for this year's Awards were Loren Ghiglione, Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and Virginia Sloan, Executive Director of The Constitution Project. Entries for next year's awards must be published or produced in 2005 and should be submitted to the Death Penalty Information Center by January 31, 2006. (source: Death Penalty Information Center) IDAHO: Idaho's death row grows as appeals linger In Boise, a very Wednesday during the lunch hour for the past 8 years, a handful of people stand on a busy street corner next to the Idaho Capitol, holding signs calling for an end to the state's death penalty. "I think there's a change happening," said 36-year-old Mia Crosthwaite of Boise, a "What Would Jesus Do?" medallion swinging from her necklace. "We usually get 4 or 5 thumbs up now and a lot fewer alternate fingers opposing us." The reception might be different 400 miles north in Coeur d'Alene, where sex offender Joseph Duncan III is in jail awaiting trial, charged with 6 counts of murder and kidnapping -- all punishable by death. He's accused of tying up and killing Brenda Groene, her son Slade and her boyfriend Mark McKenzie so he could take 8-year-old Shasta Groene and her 9-year-old brother Dylan -- who was later found dead -- to sexually assault. "I was up in Kootenai County last week, and if the billboards about this defendant I saw are any indication of what a majority of people think, they want this to be a death-penalty case," said LaMont Anderson, the top death-penalty prosecutor for the Idaho attorney general's office. "Idaho is one of the most pro-death-penalty sentencing states in the country." But actually inflicting the ultimate punishment on the condemned in Idaho is a different story. Since 1957, Idaho has only executed one person -- double-murderer Keith Wells, who dropped all his appeals and demanded to die by lethal injection in 1994. There are 16 men and 1 woman currently on Idaho's death row. They've been there an average of 12.8 years, with tenures ranging from 23 years for Lacey Sivak, sentenced to death for the 1981 shooting and stabbing of a Garden City gas station attendant, to seven months for Azad Abdullah, sentenced to death in November for murdering his wife and burning their Boise home. Anderson, who won't venture a guess when any of the ongoing death row appeals may be exhausted, blames the scarcity of executions on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears death sentence appeals from 9 Western states. "There is absolutely no question that any prosecutor who practices in the 9th Circuit is going to have a harder job than prosecutors in any other circuit in seeing a death penalty through to execution," said Anderson. "There are certain judges in the 9th circuit that have never affirmed a death penalty case." If Kootenai County Prosecutor Bill Douglas seeks and wins a death penalty conviction against Duncan, death row defense attorney Bill Mauk of Boise says the evolving state of capital punishment law means there's no guarantee the sentence will ever be carried out. "We no longer as a society have any confidence in the certainty of a prosecution that necessarily results in the death penalty," said Mauk, who represented Idaho death row inmate Donald Paradis. Paradis was sentenced to death in 1980 for strangling Kimberly Palmer in northern Idaho but was freed from prison in 2001 after the 9th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that he had been denied a fair trial. Richard Deiter, director of the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, says the steady drop in U.S. executions -- 59 last year, down from 65 in 2003 and 98 in 1999 -- reflects an increasing ambivalence toward capital punishment. "It's not that the death penalty is thought to be morally wrong, but it is shown to have problems, risks and costs associated with it," said Dieter. "The more fair and accurate you want to be with the death penalty, the more it will cost and the longer it will take." Some of the decline is attributable to the high-profile wave of death row exonerations that began in the late 1990s when DNA testing was used to prove condemned men were actually innocent. After 18 years on Idaho death row for the 1983 killing of a nine-year-old Nampa boy, Charles Fain was released from prison in 2001 after DNA tests on pubic hairs found on the boy's body showed they did not belong to Fain. Meanwhile, Idaho's death penalty law was changed in 2003 to require juries, not judges, to decide the sentence in capital cases and come to unanimous agreement before sentence can be invoked. In the three capital cases tried under the new law, Idaho juries have condemned two men to death while Jason McDermott received life in prison without the possibility of parole in March when one juror out of 12 determined his shooting of a man in the head and leaving him the desert did not merit a death sentence. "There is tremendous pressure put on a holdout juror in these cases now," said Boise State University Social Sciences and Public Affairs Dean Michael Blankenship, a former police officer who interviewed death penalty jurors for a national study. "In the Coeur d'Alene case, you've got multiple victims killed in a very heinous way and it's going to be very difficult for the defense to get them to look at their client's background as a mitigator." The attention Duncan's case has drawn to state's death penalty statute has been welcomed at the Wednesday afternoon street corner protests by Idahoans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "We want to raise the issue that Idaho is a death penalty state and we need to have more discussion on why this law is wrong," said Henry Krewer, 72, of Boise, who's missed only a handful of the weekly demonstrations since they began during Lent in 1997. "We're going to be here forever until it's changed." (source: Associated Press) CALIFORNIA: Ex-Con Crime Novelist, Edward Bunker, Dies Edward Bunker, the ex-con turned literary icon whose hard-edged crime novels reflected the equally hard edges of a life that included nearly 2 decades as an inmate in some of the country's toughest prisons, has died. He was 71. Bunker, a diabetic, died Tuesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of complications after surgery to improve the circulation in his legs, said a longtime friend, screenwriter Robert Dellinger. A West Hollywood resident, Bunker had spent most of his rebellious and criminal youth in Los Angeles in a succession of foster homes and reform schools. Often homeless and living by his wits on the streets, he was 14 at the time of his first criminal conviction, for burglary, which launched what he later called his "full-scale war on authority." Years later, a prison psychologist described Bunker the habitual criminal as a "pitiful, tormented and tormenting individual." At 17, after stabbing a youth prison guard and later escaping from Los Angeles County Jail, where he was serving a sentence for another crime, Bunker became the youngest inmate at San Quentin. There - and at Folsom and other prisons during 3 terms behind bars that totaled 18 years for robbery, check forgery and other crimes - he learned to write. In 1973, still in prison and having written 5 unpublished novels and scores of unpublished short stories, he made his literary debut with "No Beast So Fierce," a gripping novel about a paroled thief whose attempt to reenter mainstream society fails. James Ellroy, a master of crime fiction, called the book, firmly rooted in Bunker's experiences, "quite simply one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years; perhaps the best novel of the Los Angeles underworld ever written." "No Beast So Fierce" was turned into the 1978 movie "Straight Time," starring Dustin Hoffman. The script was co-written by Bunker, who also played a small part in the film as a criminal who meets Hoffman in a bar and plans a heist for him. After that, Bunker had parallel careers as an actor and writer. He wrote three more uncompromisingly realistic novels of criminality and life behind bars, "The Animal Factory," "Little Boy Blue" and "Dog Eat Dog." He also co-wrote the screenplay for "Runaway Train," a 1985 action drama about 2 escaped convicts played by Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. And he co-wrote the adaptation of his novel for "Animal Factory," Steve Buscemi's 2000 prison drama starring Willem Dafoe and featuring Bunker in a small role. With his soft, raspy voice, a nose broken in innumerable fights and a scar from a 1953 knife wound that ran from his forehead to his lip, the compact and muscular ex-con was ideal for typecasting as a big-screen thug. Among the most notable of his nearly 2 dozen film roles was that of the criminal Mr. Blue in Quentin Tarantino's 1992 crime drama "Reservoir Dogs." Most recently, he played a convict in the remake of "The Longest Yard." Bunker's last published book is his 2000 memoir, "Education of a Felon," which features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, who praised the author as "an artist with a unique and compelling voice." Bunker's memoir, according to a Times review by Anthony Day, "is a masterful summation of the hard and brutal life of crime and prison from which Edward Bunker chiseled the vigorous prose that marks him as America's foremost chronicler of prison life." "He's the most successful and respected prison writer in America," said Dellinger, who met Bunker in 1973 at the federal prison on Terminal Island, where Dellinger was the inmate founder and teacher of the 1st creative writing class sanctioned by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. At the time, Bunker was being held in an isolation cell while awaiting trial in connection with a Beverly Hills bank robbery. "We've produced a lot of writers in prisons," Dellinger said, "but Bunker wrote with energy and a muscular style that very few people have, and his words just literally jump off the page." On what propelled him to become a writer, Bunker once told an interviewer: "It has always been as if I carry chaos with me the way others carry typhoid. My purpose in writing is to transcend my existence by illuminating it." An only child, Bunker was born in Hollywood in 1933. His mother was a chorus girl in vaudeville and Busby Berkeley musicals, and his alcoholic father was a stagehand and occasional studio grip. After his parents divorced when Bunker was 4, he spent the next half a dozen years in and out of foster homes and military academies, from which he frequently ran away. "I didn't hear about love except in movies when I was a kid," Bunker once told Dellinger. By 12, he was living in the first of a series of juvenile reform schools. While in reform schools, Bunker became a voracious reader; at San Quentin he again found escape "from the misery of my world" in books. About a year after Bunker was sent to San Quentin, fellow inmate Caryl Chessman, the notorious "Red Light Bandit," published his book "Cell 2455, Death Row." "It was a revelation to me," Bunker later said, "that a convict could write a book and have it published." Although he had dropped out of school in 7th grade, Bunker committed himself to becoming a writer. Louise Wallis, the wife of producer Hal Wallis and a prominent benefactor of the McKinley Home for Boys, befriended Bunker. She sent him a portable typewriter, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a subscription to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, whose Book Review he devoured. He also subscribed to Writer's Digest and enrolled in a correspondence course in freshman English from the University of California, selling blood to pay for the postage. Bunker never forgot the first line he wrote as a fledgling writer: "Two teenage boys went to rob a liquor store." "When I met him, he was at war with the world and society, but he was loyal to his friends," Dellinger said. "If you said I need you, he'd never say why. He'd say where or when." Dellinger, who helped Bunker in his transition from prison life to the mainstream, said Bunker "changed his attitude toward society and people after he got out and enjoyed success." Bunker's marriage to Jennifer Steele ended in divorce. He is survived by their son, Brendan. A memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. Sept. 10 at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood. (source: Los Angeles Times) ILLINOIS: Judge lays down own law: No all-white juries----Transcripts reveal controversial stand A judge's comments in recent months that she would refuse to seat an all-white jury have raised eyebrows at Cook County Criminal Court and questions about whether the judge acted inappropriately. "Folks, you all know I have a rule; I don't seat all white jurors," Circuit Judge Evelyn Clay said as a jury was being picked to hear a murder trial last month, according to court transcripts. Chief Criminal Court Judge Paul Biebel Jr. said last week that he had recently been made aware of the remarks Clay made. Clay admitted they were "indelicately stated" and said she regretted being blunt. But it is her view that qualified African-Americans were being left off juries without good reason, she said. "I try to preside over jury trials in a fair and impartial way--that is always my goal," Clay said. "I carry out all my duties and responsibilities with that goal." Clay, who is African-American, made the remarks in chambers before 3 separate trials, according to transcripts reviewed by the Tribune. The 1st time was the April 20 trial of a man for unlawful use of a weapon. After 8 jurors were picked, Clay indicated she was not satisfied with the makeup of the panel. "I'm telling you folks, I don't know what you all intend to do, but I have no intention of seating an all-white jury," Clay said, according to transcripts. Ronald Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University, called the judge's comments extraordinary. "I've never heard of a judge making such a statement, and I think it was ill-advised to do so publicly," he said. "It injects an unfortunate racial element into the matter, and quite frankly it raises very serious questions about whether [the judge] is discriminating against whites." But Allen said he is willing to give the judge the benefit of the doubt. "It may be that she thought what she was observing was [lawyers] trying to discriminate against blacks," he said, "and what she was saying is, `I'm not going to permit that.'" In a 1986 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Batson vs. Kentucky that it was a violation of the constitution to keep blacks off juries solely because of their race. The court found that the public's confidence in the fairness of the system would be damaged. It is reasonable to expect that almost any random selection of 12 people from Cook County would contain at least one minority, experts said, and while it may be a noble goal in seating a jury, there is no requirement that every jury must include members of a certain race. Lawyers pointed to cases such as Holland vs. Illinois, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that there is no requirement that jurors have to mirror the makeup of the larger population. Both sides in a criminal case are allowed an equal number of "peremptory challenges" that they may use to exclude any prospective juror as a matter of strategy, but not because of their race or gender, experts said. State statutes outline who is eligible for jury service and how jurors are to be randomly selected from a pool of citizens drawn from the residents of the county. Allen said judges have leeway to steer a jury's makeup by allowing or not allowing lawyers to drop prospective jurors "for cause." Reasons for excluding someone for cause might include their stating that they cannot be fair to one side or the other, or because they have been convicted of a crime. "A judge who suspects someone is stacking a jury one way or the other [racially] can more heavily scrutinize challenges for cause and peremptory challenges," Allen said. Some lawyers who work at the Criminal Courts Building said they see no problem with a judge taking a stand for diversity on juries. "I see her now as a leader in forward thinking," lawyer Sam Adam Jr. said. "And not because it's better for black defendants to have black juries, because the truth of the matter is some of the worst juries for black defendants are black--they are tired of seeing the stuff that goes on in the neighborhood. But this is the year 2005, and if the Constitution means anything, it means a person should have certain unalienable rights--including the right to a trial by jury of his peers. That means that a person should have at least one member of a jury from his racial, ethnic or national background to consider guilt or innocence." Sources with knowledge of the situation said the Clay matter has come to the attention of the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, which considers allegations of judicial misconduct. But Kathy Twine, the board's executive director, said she could neither confirm nor deny that an inquiry is under way because of confidentiality restrictions. She did say, however, that the board has not filed a formal complaint with the Illinois Courts Commission. In addition to the April 20 trial, transcripts show Clay made similar comments a few days later after 9 jurors were seated to hear a 1st-degree murder trial. "How many African-Americans you all have?" the judge asked, according to a transcript. "I should have all given you my rules. I don't seat an all-white jury." On June 17, with another murder trial about to begin, court transcripts show Clay argued over the issue with Assistant State's Atty. Thomas Driscoll. Driscoll moved to strike a prospective juror for cause. The man's race was not explicitly clear in the transcript, but the move drew the same reaction from Clay. Driscoll pointed out that there were Hispanics and one Asian on the panel and told Clay he did not agree with her rule as a general policy because it presumed prejudice. "It does, it does when you seat an all-white jury," the judge answered. "It looks inherently on its face like a jury that's not of [the] defendant's peers." According to the transcripts, Driscoll responded that in his view that is why jurors are questioned about their qualifications. "And the only thing I'm saying to you is you need to try to get-- find qualified African-Americans as well," the judge said. Driscoll eventually accepted a black woman as the 12th juror. The remarks are the second time recently that Clay, elected to the Circuit Court in 1996, has been the subject of controversy. In January, Clay had a prospective juror--a pregnant woman-- handcuffed and held in contempt of court after she indicated the woman could not be fair to a defendant in a gun case. (source: Chicago Tribune)
