August 28 NEW YORK: Capital Punishment Research Initiative: MISSION STATEMENT, ACCOMPLISHMENTS, AND FUTURE PLANS The Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) was founded in the late 1990s at the School of Criminal Justice , University at Albany. The CPRI has 3 primary purposes: (1) to build and maintain a national archive for historical documents and data on the death penalty; (2) to plan and conduct basic and policy related research on capital punishment; and (3) to encourage scholarship, conduct graduate and undergraduate training, and disseminate scientifically grounded knowledge about the ultimate penal sanction. In collaboration with the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University at Albany Library, the CPRI has initiated the National Death Penalty Archives (NDPA). This collection of historical materials will be an unrivaled resource for scholars, students, and the public interested in the history of capital punishment in America , and in the legal and political battles engendered by this sanction. In addition to housing the records and documents of leading figures in scholarship, and legal and community organizations concerning capital punishment, the NDPA includes a program of oral history interviews featuring prominent activists and professionals involved in death penalty abolition efforts and related work. The CPRI is building a program of data development and empirical research for the study of death penalty-related issues that have direct relevance to legislative and judicial decision-making. This program includes: (a) the acquisition of databases developed by the nation's leading death penalty researchers on issues including evidence of wrongful executions, the exercise of jury discretion in capital sentencing, and the influence of race on sentencing outcomes; (b) the building of new data resources such as the nationwide acquisition of uniquely informative clemency petitions for death row inmates facing execution, and the development of a research program on the roots of public opinion about the death penalty and alternative punishments; and (c) the initiation of policy relevant research on principal issues of concern to legislators, the judiciary, and the public. The CPRI will continue to serve as a locus for public education, conferences, collaborative research efforts, and advanced graduate training with respect to capital punishment in America . Periodic seminars, scholarly publications, a newsletter, the planned web site, and the National Death Penalty Archives are all components of the CPRI, and avenues by which research findings and related information will be disseminated. Future plans include training internships, attracting scholars on sabbatical, and post-doctoral study. The CPRI is actively seeking ongoing funding commitments that are essential to support the principal activities and staffing needed to help achieve its objectives. Background of the CPRI The CPRI is an outgrowth of the commitment to graduate and undergraduate training and scholarship of James Acker and Charles Lanier at the School of Criminal Justice , University at Albany . Dr. William Bowers of Northeastern University has more recently become a principal contributor to the efforts of the CPRI. At the core of the CPRI's early development are 2 major publishing commitments undertaken by Acker and Lanier: (1) a series of 12 articles in the Criminal Law Bulletin (1993-2000) that review and analyze the nature and contours of death penalty law as it has developed on a state by state basis since the U.S Supreme Court authorized a return to capital punishment in 1976, and (2) (with Professor Robert Bohm of the University of Central Florida) an edited volume entitled America's Experiment With Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press; 1998 & 2003) containing 23 chapters on topics of research and policy relevance authored by the nation's leading experts in these fields. This book is recognized as a foremost source of expertise in these areas, and is used as a text for advanced graduate training on capital punishment. Since its inception in the late 1990s, more than 50 graduate and undergraduate students have been involved with CPRI support activities and research projects. Starting in 1999, four doctoral dissertations focusing on the death penalty have been competed at the School. Five doctoral students currently are in various stages of completion of their dissertation research involving the death penalty. The degree of interest in this topic at the School of Criminal Justice is significant, and helps explain why the CPRI is well poised to engage in extensive study of the ultimate sanction, and to undertake the archival and related projects discussed below. Housed at the Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center, School of Criminal Justice , University at Albany , the CPRI is directed by James R. Acker and Charles S. Lanier, and guided by an Advisory Board comprised of leading death penalty scholars and researchers. Board members include Hugo Adam Bedau, Tufts University (Emeritus); William J. Bowers, Northeastern University; and Michael E. Radelet, University of Colorado at Boulder. The board members are donating their extensive work on capital punishment over the past half-century to the National Death Penalty Archive, and plan to solicit similar contributions from other leading figures in death penalty research and scholarship from around the nation. The CPRI has several archival and research projects of national scope underway, and others in the planning stage. The projects presently underway include: (1) the National Death Penalty Archive; (2) the Abolitionist Oral History Project (AOHP); (3) several stages of the Capital Jury Project (CJP1-3); and (4) Clemency Petitions as a Key to Wrongful Executions. These projects all involve collaboration with scholars from other universities. Two additional scholarly research efforts, involving personnel at both the School of Criminal Justice in Albany and other universities, are under development: (5) a Study of the Conditions of Incarceration on State and Federal Death Rows, and (6) research on the Role of Punishment for Surviving Family Members of Murder Victims. These activities are described in greater detail below. Work Currently Underway at CPRI: National Death Penalty Archive : A chief component of the CPRI plan for a national center on capital punishment is to establish and maintain a collection of archival materials to document the history of capital punishment and to preserve resources for historical scholarship. Through collaboration with the University at Albany Library's M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, the CPRI has established the National Death Penalty Archive. The primary task in our effort to build the NDPA is to collect, preserve, and make accessible the records of individuals and organizations working on issues related to capital punishment. We are in the process of building a collection that will serve as a valuable resource for historians, researchers, faculty, students, and interested members of the public. We are especially interested in collecting primary documents, such as letters, reports, unpublished writings, personal papers, organizational records, and related materials that currently reside in the hands of activists, scholars, lawyers, family members, and others whose lives have been touched by the death penalty. The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives is home to print, manuscript, and archival sources on a wide array of historical topics. The Department's temperature and humidity-controlled storage facility provides over 25,000 cubic feet of shelving space. Donated materials are inventoried, cataloged, and safely re-housed by graduate and undergraduate students, who work under the supervision of library personnel. For additional information on the NDPA, as well as a description of specific collections, go to http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/ndpa.htm. Abolitionist Oral History Project (AOHP): This project involves conducting interviews with a wide variety of American activists in an effort to build an oral history of the mid-20th century and post- Furman v. Georgia (1972) movement to end capital punishment in America . The project involves interviewing individuals on topics including: (1) their own work in the abolition movement, the successes and failures of abolitionist work, prospects for abolition in the future; (2) particular aspects of abolitionist work, such as the moratorium movement; and (3) related events, such as attempts to prevent executions in various states. The interviews will be preserved as a collection of indexed audio and videotapes, housed in the National Death Penalty Archives (NDPA). Transcripts that have been read and approved by AOHP subjects, as well as personal papers in some cases, will accompany the actual taped interviews in the library. Such a compilation will be useful to all those seeking information on the abolitionist movement in America , on social movements in general, on individuals involved in the effort to abolish the death penalty, and on the specific events mentioned in the interviews. Preparations for these interviews involve constructing biographical sketches of the abolitionists and their death penalty work. Such reviews necessitate collecting and reading their published works, media articles, and other representations about them. The review and analysis of this material serve as a guide for the interview. It also forms the introductory biographical content for the abolitionist's actual oral history in the library. Participants are provided an opportunity to donate personal items ( e.g ., photographs, letters, unpublished writings, notes of meetings and other related documents, etc.) to accompany their oral history contributions. Capital Jury Project: This is a continuing program of research on the decision-making of capital jurors that was initiated in 1991 by a consortium of university-based researchers with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Project has been administered nationally by Dr. William Bowers, who was then Principal Research Scientist, Northeastern University . The findings of the CJP are based on 3- to 4-hour, in-depth, interviews with persons who have served as jurors in capital trials. Phase I of the Project has completed over 1,200 interviews from jurors in 353 capital trials in 14 states. These interviews chronicled the jurors' experiences and decision-making over the course of the trial, identify when various influences come into play, and reveal the ways in which jurors reach their final sentencing decision. The more than forty articles and seven doctoral dissertations, based on CJP data are listed on the CJP website (http://www.cjp.neu.edu/). The extensive research data including tape-recorded and transcribed interviews with capital jurors have recently been donated to the CPRI by Dr. Bowers, and now reside in the National Death Penalty Archive. CPRI has been directly involved in two follow up stages of the Capital Jury Project; first as one of several data collection sites and now as the central locus of research with an application for funding pending with NSF. The first follow-up stage (CJP2) focuses on the role of jurors' race in capital sentencing. It seeks: (1) to identify race-linked perspectives of crime causation and responsibility that may be associated with different assessments of criminal violence; (2) to examine jurors' processes of identification with perpetrators and victims of criminal violence and to assess their relationship to perspectives of crime causation and responsibility, (3) to understand the role of perceptions of crime causation and responsibility, of personal identification, and of empathy with offenders and victims on the evaluation of aggravation and mitigation evidence, (4) to trace the interpersonal dynamics of decision-making, and account for them in terms of jury composition, processes of identification and empa thy, and attributions of cause and responsibility, and (5) to uncover the interplay of gender with race in punishment decision-making and to test the independence of race and social economic status effects. The new (CJP3) research will be conducted at CPRI starting June 1, 2005. This is a study of jurors' receptivity to mitigation evidence in capital sentencing. It draws upon transcripts of capital trials to determine the extent to which jurors give effect to mitigation evidence and related arguments presented in capital sentencing hearings. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that jurors must consider and give effect to evidence of mitigation in making their life or death punishment decisions, yet the earlier CJP research suggests that many jurors do not remain receptive to evidence and arguments of mitigation in making their life or death punishment decisions. This research is designed: (1) to determine the nature and extent of mitigation evidence and arguments presented to jurors in capital cases (from trial transcripts), (2) to assess the extent to which jurors give effect to such information by recognizing its mitigating nature and considering or relying on it in their decision-making (through interviews with capital jurors), and (3) to gain a more refined understanding of how jurors make the capital sentencing decision both individually and as a group, in light of the aggravating and mitigating evidence presented to them and the impediments they experience in their consideration of mitigation evidence. The use of trial transcripts to establish the nature and extent of the mitigation evidence and arguments to which jurors are exposed will help researchers prepare for and conduct mitigation-grounded interviews with a target sample of six jurors from each of 48 capital trials. These interviews will be designed to assess the role of mitigation evidence in jurors' decision-making through a questioning and probing strategy informed by the nature of the evidence and arguments presented to the jurors as revealed by the trial transcripts in their cases, as well as by questions about individual and interpersonal influences in their decision-making. Clemency Petitions as a Key to Wrongful Executions: Unlike judicial proceedings, claims raised in clemency petitions are free of procedural defaults that can mask error, unfairness, or irrationality in a given death sentence. Petitions thus can reveal what the sentencing authority may not have known because of attorney error, prosecutorial misconduct, newly discovered evidence, or other reasons. Clemency petitions potentially represent the vehicle through which facts are reassembled in the most coherent and complete form, with the benefit of all investigation that was ever conducted in a case. These petitions thus afford a unique vantage point on the fundamental fairness, accuracy, and reliability of death sentences in cases that usually end in the defendant's execution. This project involves the acquisition and analysis of an estimated 600-700 clemency petitions and related materials filed in capital cases across America . The clemency requests provide a window on the processing of capital cases, and a source of uniquely detailed information on the nature of faults previously identified in the administration of the death penalty. Research Under Development: State and Federal Death Rows: This study is designed to learn about the conditions of confinement confronting death-sentenced prisoners and the impact of such confinement on the prisoners and corrections officers within the institution. It will focus in part on what happens to the many death row prisoners whose sentences are reduced to life imprisonment and who eventually are released into the broader prison population. This research will involve using data culled from official records as well as information collected through surveys. Current plans are to (a) compile and review the regulations governing the death rows around the nation, (b) conduct a survey of death row conditions, (c) construct and administer a survey designed for managers of death rows, and (d) conduct interviews with a sample of death row inmates. The Role of Punishment for Surviving Family Members of Murder Victims: The survivors of murder victims have mixed views about capital punishment, and uniquely formulate those views only after the issue becomes a stark reality in their lives. Little is known about how survivors' psychological orientations and personal values, as well as their relationships with the murder victim, shape their thinking about the appropriate punishment. Nor do we understand the effects of the lengthy delays and frequent case reversals on the wishes for closure that often are attributed to murder victims' family members. Precious little is known about the short- and long-term effects of executions on survivors. The investigation of these and related issues for murder victim's survivors is now being planned at CPRI. Associated Activities: The planned research on surviving family members of murder victims described immediately above is the outgrowth of a conference involving CPRI participants. In September 2003, Skidmore College , the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice, and Justice Solutions co-sponsored a conference called "The Impact of the Death Penalty on Victims' Families." A mixture of victims/survivors, victim advocates, researchers, practitioners, and legal professionals attended this forum. The conference brought together a diverse group of interested persons and stakeholders in an effort to begin to understand this subject. The conference resulted in a related book entitled Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-Based Perspectives on the Death Penalty, edited by James Acker and David Karp (forthcoming 2006). In Progress: CPRI on the Web: The CPRI web site currently is being conceptualized and constructed by volunteers. When completed, it will include a more expansive mission statement and history of the Capital Punishment Research Initiative. It also will detail the extensive collaborations that exist with other scholars and universities from around the nation. The online presence of the CPRI will focus on being a resource for the acquisition and dissemination of reliable and usable scholarly information about the ultimate penal sanction. The CPRI site will provide a unique platform where scholars from around the world can post their research interests and activities, exchange ideas, and develop collaborations. Researchers will be able to detail the nature and scope of their research undertaking, including their contact information, and papers and/or publications resulting from their work. This information will be made readily available in a searchable database. The site also will post annotated bibliographies of extant social science research, law reviews, books, and monographs (including relevant reports from governmental and non-governmental agencies), and all decisions of the United States Supreme Court involving death penalty cases. The web site also will include a wide array of useful links, as well as a calendar of noteworthy events related to capital punishment and the work of the CPRI. Death Penalty Periodical: Each year, upwards of 200 articles and reports are published in a wide variety of scholarly journals, law reviews, monographs, and other publications. A large number of judicial decisions in the various state and federal death penalty jurisdictions are issued each year; numerous books on capital punishment annually are added to the literature as well. Discussion and analysis of the death penalty in America would be facilitated if these resources could be brought into focus in a periodical devoted exclusively to the topic. With such a wide array of venues in which to find publications on the death penalty, scholars would find it useful to have a single source of information that brings these various sources together. Such a venture is in keeping with the CPRI's rationale of making research information readily accessible. Funding initiatives: The CPRI has received several discretionary grants since its inception from the Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation, in New York City - These funds have allowed the CPRI to begin work in a variety of areas. However, additional funding is essential for the CPRI to become a fully established national center for research and scholarship on capital punishment, and to further realize its potential as a leading source of research and public education on the death penalty The CPRI is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization. The CPRI actively seeks funds from any source, public or private, agency or individual, governmental or non-governmental, in an effort to secure its place as a fully functioning center within the university setting. Inquiries and suggestions regarding possible funding sources, and/or donations, should be made by contacting us at: Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center School of Criminal Justice , University at Albany 135 Western Avenue, 245 Draper Hall Albany, NY 12222 518-442-5231 (office) 518-442-5212 (fax) (source : School of Criminal Justice 2004) NORTH CAROLINA: DNA match could free convict----Inmate says he took plea bargain in killing he didn't commit In February 1990, someone visited the 2nd-floor apartment of Stacey Stanton, a waitress in Manteo, and stabbed her 16 times in the neck. Leaving her mutilated body on her living room floor, her sweat pants, panties and shoes strewn about, the killer went to the bathroom to clean up. As the killer fled into the street outside Stanton's apartment, a bloody mint-green washcloth was left behind. Today, Clifton Eugene Spencer, who is serving a life sentence for Stanton's murder, hopes that washcloth will help set him free. Spencer says his lawyer, convinced that he would probably be convicted, pressured him into going to prison for a killing he did not commit. Prosecutors have acknowledged that the evidence against Spencer -- all circumstantial -- was weak. And tests on DNA recently extracted from the washcloth show that it came from a man, but not from Spencer. Prosecutors have agreed to have that profile run through a national DNA database of convicted felons, a process that could take months. Spencer hopes it might lead authorities to the true killer. He is one of a handful of convicts in the state to get DNA testing of the evidence in his case; a 2001 law allows them to seek the analysis if none was ever done. Among the others to use the law are Darryl Hunt, who was exonerated in 2003 of rape and murder after 18 years in prison, and death row inmate Rex Dean Penland, who won a new trial last month. Spencer would like a similar outcome. "I feel very hopeful that we're going to get a break in this thing, and things will go my way for a change," Spencer said in a prison interview in Gatesville in northeastern North Carolina. Spencer's lawyer, Christine Mumma, executive director of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, has been going through what evidence remains in the 15-year-old murder case to decide what to test first. It has been slow going because some evidence has been destroyed, despite a court order to the contrary; some was contaminated; and some was too deteriorated to analyze. But the green washcloth gives hope to Mumma and Spencer that they can show that he didn't kill a woman he considered a friend. Elizabeth Stacey Stanton, who was 28 when she died, grew up in Northfield, N.J., a small town near Atlantic City, where she was a high school cheerleader and attended beauty school. She fell in love with Manteo during summer trips as a teenager. Years later, she moved there and joined a crowd that worked days and played hard at night. In the early afternoon of Feb. 3, 1990, a co-worker went to check on Stanton because she hadn't shown up for work at the Duchess of Dare restaurant after an alcohol-fueled evening of quarrels and tears. The killing unnerved the almost 1,000 residents of the resort town, where no one had been murdered since 1976 and where lawyers and fishermen alike knew Stanton from the diner. Manteo police called in reinforcements. Dare County Sheriff's Office investigators and SBI agents soon arrived. By evening, investigators dusted Stanton's apartment for fingerprints. They collected hairs found inside the victim's mouth and clutched in her hands, possibly torn out during a struggle. They photographed that morning's Virginian-Pilot newspaper lying on a living room chair a few feet from the body. They found the washcloth. They did not find a murder weapon, which they thought was a box cutter. They believed Stanton was probably killed in the early morning hours. A brutal attack It was a killing of exceptional brutality. Beyond the stab wounds to the neck, 2 others were made after Stanton was already dead. That led the medical examiner to note in his report that the "infliction of the sharply incised wounds to the breast and the vaginal region while the deceased was dying or already dead strongly suggests a fetishistic activity." Investigators soon questioned Spencer because he was one of the last people to see Stanton alive. Spencer, now 46, was born in Columbia, a Tyrrell County town along U.S. 64 on the way to the beach. After a stint with the Army in Germany, he settled there, married and had a daughter. But run-ins with the law led German authorities to deport him in 1987. Spencer acknowledges that at the time of Stanton's killing he was addicted to cocaine. He was homeless, sleeping with friends and relatives in Columbia. He worked odd jobs and occasionally as a truck driver for a lumberyard. On the day before the killing -- Friday, Feb. 2 -- Spencer had $30 in his pocket from chopping wood and cleaning a laundromat. About 6 p.m., after an afternoon of beer-drinking, Spencer ran into a friend from Manteo and decided to ride there with him. In Manteo, Spencer wandered into the Green Dolphin, a bar that locals say attracted a rough crowd at the time. Spencer found friends inside: Stanton and her ex-boyfriend, Norman J. "Mike" Brandon Jr., a carpenter whom Spencer knew from the lumberyard. It soon became clear that Spencer had wandered into a quarrelsome love triangle: Stanton, Brandon and Brandon's new girlfriend, Patty Rowe. Stanton had just learned that Brandon had gotten Rowe pregnant even though he and Stanton had slept together a few days earlier. Upset, Stanton left. A little later, Spencer left also and Stanton waved him down outside her apartment across the street, he told police. Stanton, talking loudly and slurring, wanted him to ask Brandon to come talk to her. Spencer reluctantly agreed. Back inside the Green Dolphin, Brandon refused and Spencer returned to Stanton's apartment to tell her. She was disappointed and told Spencer that she wanted to get high. With $35 from Stanton, Spencer went in search of crack cocaine but could not find any. When he got back, Stanton was home alone, so Spencer slept there. He woke up later and then went to the home of a friend, who recalled Spencer's arrival at 4:30 a.m. Inconsistent accounts Investigators soon became suspicious of Spencer. They learned he had attacked a girlfriend in Germany with a pair of scissors. His statements to them about what he did that night were inconsistent. Spencer's description of the situation when he left Stanton's apartment appeared to match what police found the next day: Stanton wasn't wearing sweat pants. She was "sprawled" on the floor. Spencer failed a polygraph test that asked whether he killed Stanton. He admitted washing his hands in the bathroom. Then, on Feb. 8 -- five days after Stanton's body was found -- investigators were convinced that Spencer confessed. According to investigators, Spencer said Stanton got angry when she woke and realized Spencer, and not Brandon, was lying next to her. He told them Stanton "got real loud and started kicking him and screaming," according to an investigator's notes. An investigator asked Spencer whether Stanton then provoked him with a box cutter. In response, Spencer leaned forward in his chair, put his head down and nodded "yes" 2 or 3 times, according to a detective's interview notes. Spencer says police misunderstood. "I got tired of answering them," Spencer said during the prison interview in Gatesville. "I sighed and put my head down. They took that as a yes." Spencer was charged with 1st-degree murder. Prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty. In December of 1990, Romallus O. Murphy, a civil rights lawyer from Greensboro, met with Spencer's parents and sister at a Shoney's restaurant in Raleigh, according to testimony at a 1993 hearing. The family had used their savings, about $6,000, to hire him. Murphy, they later testified, told them that a black man accused of killing a white girl in Dare County didn't stand a chance of a fair trial. They said Murphy urged them to persuade Spencer to accept a deal offered by prosecutors that would spare his life. The no-contest plea On Jan. 7, 1991, the last day Spencer could accept the plea deal, Spencer met with Murphy. Spencer said the lawyer told him again that he had scant chance of being found not guilty. Spencer said Murphy told him that he could plead no contest, which meant he wouldn't be admitting guilt. Spencer agreed to take the plea deal. 2 days later, Spencer pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Spencer says he wanted to spare his family the pain of watching his execution. "I was battling an addiction. I had brought so much pain on so many people," he said. "I didn't want to cause any more pain for my family." At a 1993 hearing and in a recent interview, Murphy denied ever pressuring Spencer or his family and denied saying Spencer, as a black man, wouldn't get a fair trial. Murphy said it was Spencer who suggested a no contest plea. Since his conviction, those involved and aware of his prosecution wondered whether the right man was behind bars. Dare County District Attorney Frank R. Parrish, who did not prosecute Spencer, thinks it would have been "extraordinarily difficult" to get a conviction had the case gone to trial. Parrish wrote that in a 2004 letter to the parole board in support of Spencer's release. Even H.P. Williams Jr., the district attorney who prosecuted Spencer, questions whether Spencer is guilty. "At the time, there were some serious questions about whether it could have been another individual," said Williams, an Elizabeth City lawyer. "I think the compelling evidence against Spencer was his inability to tell the truth during interviews. That doesn't mean he did it. If there is some way to prove he didn't do it, I support that. I have some questions as to whether he is guilty or not." Spencer's fingerprints were the only physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. Testing showed the hairs found in Stanton's hands and mouth did not come from Spencer. Wayne Morris, a friend with whom Spencer stayed after leaving Stanton's apartment, testified that there was no blood on Spencer's clothes. Investigators likewise found no blood on Spencer's clothes or in Morris' living room, where Spencer slept. Spencer left Stanton's apartment and arrived at Morris' home at 4:30 a.m., according to Spencer and Morris. That day's issue of The Virginian-Pilot, found inside the house only feet from Stanton's body, was not usually delivered until after 6 a.m., according to one of Spencer's earlier lawyers who investigated the matter. Mumma says that means either Stanton brought the paper inside that morning or the killer did. Either way, Mumma says, it places the time of death after Spencer left her apartment. Spencer had an alibi for all but an hour and a half that morning after the paper was delivered. Police found no traces of blood on Spencer's clothes or in the car of the friend who drove him back to Columbia later. A different suspect And, according to court records, there was another suspect: Mike Brandon. Brandon had physically abused women, according to a witness at one of Spencer's appeal hearings. Brandon's fingerprints were found in the apartment, according to the SBI lab report. And emotions ran high that night; two women who had been at the Green Dolphin testified that they heard Rowe, the pregnant girlfriend, threaten to kill Stanton if she didn't leave Brandon alone. Neither Brandon nor Rowe responded to letters and messages seeking comment. Both live in North Carolina, but they apparently are no longer together. Earlier this month, during a phone call to the home where Brandon lives in Chocowinity, a Beaufort County town, a woman told a reporter, "Obviously, he doesn't want to talk to you." On the night of the murder, Brandon and Rowe left the Green Dolphin together and slept at the home of Joni Newman, according to Newman, another member of the Green Dolphin crowd. Investigators later testified in court that their suspicion turned away from Brandon because he had an alibi -- and Newman was one of those alibi witnesses. Newman, now 44 and living in Raleigh, said in a recent interview that she cannot provide an alibi for Brandon that morning. Newman said she woke at 3 a.m. to hear Brandon and Rowe arguing. Newman went back to bed and didn't wake again until 7:30 a.m., when Brandon called from the Duchess of Dare. "I cannot say he didn't leave my house at 3:30 a.m.," she said. "I don't know. I went back to bed." Newman said that later that morning, when she and Brandon drove past Stanton's apartment, Brandon mentioned that he had taken Stanton's newspaper to her door earlier. Since then, Brandon has twice been charged and once convicted of breaking into the Dare County courthouse and trying to gain access to the vault where evidence from criminal cases is held. Once, he used a power saw. Resolving all doubt Last year, Mumma, Spencer's lawyer, persuaded Parrish, the Dare district attorney, to agree to DNA testing. Parrish said he felt ethically obligated to consent because such technology is now available and there was another "viable suspect" at the time of the investigation. "I thought it was appropriate to resolve every doubt," Parrish said. This spring, police gathered DNA samples from Brandon and Rowe. So far, Mumma said, testing has neither conclusively helped Spencer nor implicated Brandon. Most hairs found in the victim's mouth and on her hands belonged either to an animal or to Stanton or were too deteriorated for testing, Mumma said. One hair fragment from the victim's left hand didn't match anyone involved -- not Stanton, Spencer, Brandon or Rowe, she said. And Brandon's DNA didn't match the male profile found on the washcloth, Mumma said. The green washcloth was the last piece of evidence in Spencer's case that could be tested for DNA, she said. Spencer's hope to prove his innocence is riding right now on whether a match can be found in the national DNA database. (source: News & Observer) ALABAMA: Foley man convicted of capital murder A Foley man has been convicted of capital murder in the bludgeoning death of his 77-year-old neighbor and attempted murder in an assault on the victim's wife. A Baldwin County jury on Friday convicted Timothy Wade Saunders, 26, of two counts of capital murder in the slaying of Melvin "Curly" Clemons. The two counts stem from charges of burglary and robbery. Prosecutors had alleged that Saunders was high on crack cocaine July 9, 2004, when he beat Clemons over the head with a crowbar in the couple's backyard. Saunders also was found guilty of attempted murder in an attack on Agnes Clemons, 73. She used a shotgun to fend off the attack. "It'll be a long time before I'll ever be over being afraid," Clemons said after the verdict. Saunders could be sentenced Monday to death or life in prison without parole. (source: Mobile Register)
