Sept. 6 TEXAS: Texas Toughest in a Tough America "Have a seat." We often hear these words, but sometimes there could be none more horrible. I was looking at the electric chair at the Prison Museum in Huntsville, Texas. Its nickname was "Old Sparky," on which 361 people sat and never stood up again. Old Sparky retired in 1964 when the U.S. Supreme Court placed a moratorium on the death penalty as a "cruel and unusual punishment," according to the federal constitution, but it was restored as a novelty in the Prison Museum, built in 1989. After the U.S. Supreme Court changed its mind and lifted the moratorium in 1976, Texas replaced the electric chair with lethal injection, arguing that electrocution was "too cruel." The electric chair, though, had itself been introduced for humanitarian reasons in 1923, when inmates on death row were still hanged in public. Public execution, supposed to deter people perpetrating crimes, turned into a circus, which enticed onlookers, who were so excited that they took kids to the scene. The state government accordingly moved the venue to the Huntsville prison, where it introduced the chair. The museum says the person who fabricated the electric chair was also an inmate who once faced the death penalty for murder, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Finally, he was released, owing to his contribution of a new way of executing his fellow prisoners. One question occurred to me: Was he a cruel betrayer or a humanist, helping his fellow prisoners be killed more comfortably? The museum kindly explained how to execute by lethal injection. First, the condemned person is bound to a gurney, and two needles (one is a back-up) are then inserted into usable veins in the inmate's arms. The first is a harmless saline solution that is started immediately. Then, at the warden's signal, a curtain is raised exposing the inmate to witnesses and possibly relatives and friends in an adjoining room. The inmate is given a chance to say last words. According to James Laxer, author of a book titled Discovering America: travels in the land of guns, god, and corporate gurus, when one inmate requested a final cigarette, he was told that this was out of the question, that this was a "smoke-free facility." This country, whose economy was founded on the successful cultivation of the cash crop, tobacco, must have looked extremely hypocritical to this smoker inmate. The inmate is then injected with sodium thiopental -- an anesthetic, which puts the inmate to sleep. Next flows pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the entire muscular system and stops the inmate's breathing. Finally, an injection of potassium chloride stops the heart. Death results from anesthetic overdose and respiratory and cardiac arrest while the condemned person is unconscious. It takes seven minutes and costs $86. Not only was Texas the 1st state to execute an inmate by lethal injection but also it has executed 348 death row inmates by this method an eye-popping number compared to the total number of 981 executed inmates in the nation since 1976. One single state has accounted for 35 % of all executions. Texans are really tough. 13 out of 22 teenagers executed nationwide since 1985 were killed in Texas. The execution of minors, however, was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. This is why Huntsville, the state's venue of execution, is called the "world capital of capital punishment." I was curious as to how its residents felt about living in such a World Capital. Roy Birkhead, whom I met in the Prison Museum, was a retired school principal who described himself as a conservative and strongly supported the death penalty. He said, "Execution should be done somewhere." I asked further, "Even so, people are being killed where you live. How do you feel about it?" "I believe people should be held responsible for what they do." "Do you agree on executing even teenagers?" "17-year olds as well as 50-year olds can pull the trigger." He added that the unemployment rate of Huntsville is exceptionally low, as low as 2 %, thanks to the prison economy. Indeed, 1/4 of the 35,000 residents work for the prison system. Thus it was not that strange to hear strong support for capital punishment from whoever I met in Huntsville. Leaflets recruiting correctional officer candidates piled up on the museum counter. If you are eligible to work in the United States, at least 18 years old with a High School Diploma or GED and no record of conviction of a felony, you can apply, the leaflet says. According to the salary table, full-time correctional officers are paid $1,716 a month the first year, up to $2,589 a month in their 9th year. The museum said that to regulate lawless "Wild West" behavior, tough laws and strict execution were necessary, and that, according to polls, an absolute majority in Texas supports capital punishment. This is understandable, although I still wonder why this most self-professedly Christian country not only keeps capital punishment but even faces no significant opposition to it, while Western Europe and Canada have already abolished it. Somehow people who are opposed to capital punishment are stigmatized as "liberal," and liberals are getting viewed as "immoral." It is a recent development that crime has replaced poverty and racial discrimination as a major tem on the social agenda in the United States, as indicated by the lift of the death penalty moratorium by the Supreme Court in 1976. There is saying in Korea that though you may hate crime, do not hate the person who perpetrates crime. Its rationale is that human beings can make mistakes and should be given a chance to be forgiven and to repent. If executed, there will be no chance left for criminals to repent. The brochure put out by the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce gave an example of a successful repentance. John Wesley Hardin, who claimed to have slain forty-four men, was known as the "meanest man that ever lived" and once allegedly shot a man for snoring. Hardin was captured in 1877 and sentenced to spend the next quarter of a century in Huntsville. While in prison he studied law and theology. After serving only 15 years of his sentence he was pardoned by the governor, and later opened a law office in El Paso. I was wondering why he had not initially been sentenced to be hanged but the brochure said that, during the 1800's, horse theft was considered a much worse offense than murder in so far as legal sanctions were concerned. Punishments are getting tougher in the nation as well as in Texas. The federal Justice Department announced in June, 2004, that the inmate population grew by 2.9 % to 2.1 million people in 2003. There were 715 inmates for every 100,000 Americans in mid-2003, up from 703 a year earlier, the DOJ report found. The inmates' ratio to the population is a world record, one the United States has held for a long time. According to the British Interior Department, in 2001, the three quarters of 203 countries have fewer than 150 inmates for every 100,000 residents, while the United States stood out with 686 inmates. Korea's figure was 133. Is this a proud record? It depends on who gives the answer. John Ashcroft, then Attorney General, said, "It is no accident that violent crime is at a 30-year low while the prison population is up. Violent and recidivist criminals are getting tough sentences while law-abiding Americans are enjoying unprecedented safety." This is typical conservative logic. To separate between good and bad men is the key to a stable society; crimes are what evil people perpetrate and could be eradicated by isolating or even sending evil people to the other world, a view that defines crime not as a socially structured problem but as a person matter. So that building more penitentiaries for punishment is a priority for conservatives over providing education and career training for inmates to be integrated into society. Looking at other countries that top the incarceration list, I found the peer group was not all that distinguished: Russia (638), Kazakhstan (522), Turkmenistan (489) and Ukraine (406), all former members of the Soviet block. Things those countries share are poverty and human rights violation. The United States was not like that just three decades ago. Its inmate population was only 330,000 in 1972, slightly above 100 inmates for every 100,000 residents, a level the United States had kept since 1925. The inmate population has shot up 7-fold in the last 30 years. What has happened in the United States? Did another civil war break out, and has the government held prisoners of war? Criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck examined the increase of the prison population for the period 1980-96 and concluded that changes in crime itself explained only 12 percent of the prison population rise, whereas changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88 % of the increase. In other words, the classes of crime to be punished by imprisonment have been expanded, and the same crime has been dealt with by harder punishments, resulting in the explosion of the inmate population. Despite the fact that, since the mid-1990s, the crime rate has decreased, the incarceration rate has increased. Mandatory sentencing promoted as "Truth in Sentencing" and the "Three Strikes" laws are two of those policy changes. For example, California's "three strikes" law applies a sentence of 25 years-to-life imprisonment for a third felony following two previous serious or violent felonies. In 2003, a man convicted of stealing $153 worth of videotapes from a department store received a sentence of 50 years to life, as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the California law as constitutional. Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a non-profit organization, in 2003 wrote in his report titled "Comparative International Rates of Incarceration: An Examination of Causes and Trends," "Thus, California taxpayers will spend at least $1 million over the next 50 years to lock up this videotape thief." The reason sentencing has been harsher is not because more people commit crime but because more people have taken stronger self-protective measures for themselves and their property. According to James Lynch, a criminologist, the United States incarcerates more and for longer periods of time in the case of property crime and drug offenses than do similar nations. Burglars in the U.S., for example, served an average of 16.2 months in prison, compared 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England/Wales. The war on drugs President Ronald Reagan declared contributed to producing a lot of convicts and ex-convicts. People imprisoned for drug offenses number a half million, a skyrocketing surge from about 40,000 in 1980. One fourth of the whole inmate population are drug offenders. Even among drug offenders, however, there is a disparity. The Sentencing Project says that for possession with intent to distribute powder cocaine a conviction carries a 5-year sentence for quantities of 500 grams or more. Possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine, however, carries a five-year sentence for only five grams. This is called a 100:1 quantity ration, though the Project says that the two types of cocaine cause similar physical reactions. What is different between them is the race of users and sellers of the drugs. Defendants convicted of crack possession in 1994 were 84.5 % black, 10.3 % white, and 5.2 % Hispanic, whereas defendants convicted of powder possession were 58 % white, 26.7 % black, and 15 % Hispanic. In addition, since the cheaper drug, crack, draws more punishment than powder, the disparity accelerates the racial imbalance in prison. Blacks make up 60 % of the inmate population. According to Justice Department's statistics, the chance that a black baby born today will go to prison is 29 %. There is another statistic that 75 % of blacks living in Washington, DC, have or will have been in prison at some point in their lifetime. Traditionally, blacks have voted for Democrats. Republicans and conservatives don't need to worry about the racial disparity, which is an encouraging phenomenon to them, because current or former felons have lost the right to vote due to various disenfranchisement laws. In Florida, the 827,207 disfranchised could not vote in the presidential election of 2000, the result of which was decided by a margin of 537 votes in that state. The Justice Policy Institute, a non-profit organization, announced in 2004 that the more Republican the states were, the more people were incarcerated and disfranchised. As a result, the prison industry has grown into a 40-billion-dollar-a-year business. Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, says, "The prison system just grows like a weed in the yard." Deteriorating small towns in rural areas are competing against each other to build new prisons, while 13 million Americans have been convicted of felonies and spent time in prison more than the population of Greece. Another rarity I have witnessed is that prison museums are everywhere: Alcatraz, Folsom and San Quentin in California, Rawlings in Wyoming, Canon City in Colorado, etc. Prison is incorporated into mainstream culture as entertainment. The Huntsville Museum recreates a 9 x 6 feet jail cell open to visitors, lending a striped prison shirt for $3. People enjoy becoming instant prisoners, wearing the shirt in the cell. The prison in the museum is not any more a painful place but a small theme park for visitors to experience a novelty. Newly built prisons, before having "real guests," are open to people who are willing to pay an expensive lodging charge for a few days, which is becoming a new opening event in the United States. There is an impenetrable wall between prisoners and non-prisoners, and the latter confirm the fortune of not being the former by experiencing prison for a short period of time. In that regard, Huntsville might presumably be the very best. The Chamber of Commerce provides prison information and a map for a driving tour. The route runs around the Huntsville "Walls" Unit, which is located in a downtown residential area. The red-brick building, erected in 1849, looked like a campus building. As I entered it, however, it revealed its true identity right away, with double iron-grated doors, behind which 1700 inmates were locked, surrounded by walls as tall as 30 feet. Another interesting building was an enormous brick stadium, looking like a failed copy of the Roman Coliseum, just outside the east wall, where the Texas Prison Rodeo, called "The Wildest Show Behind Bars," entertained thousands of spectators from 1931 to 1986. It was, rather, a rare chance for prisoners to watch spectators on every Sunday in October. When the 55-year tradition ended in 1986, primarily due to the deterioration of the old rodeo arena, the chance was gone forever. There was a bus station between 12th Street and J Avenue, where released inmates departed for freedom and a new life. Approximately 100 inmates are released per day, getting on a Greyhound with $50 received from the prison in their pocket. But the new reality they face as ex-inmates is harsh. Ex-convicts cannot have a driver's license in some states. Drug offenders cannot get a job in places like Wal-Mart. Student loans for tuition are not available to ex-convicts. The Legal Action Center, a criminal justice policy group, released a report in 2004 saying that all 50 states have adopted laws to bar former convicts from scores of professions requiring state licenses, including barbering and landscape architecture. Most states allow employers to deny jobs to people who were arrested but never convicted of a crime, not to mention that most states allow employers to deny jobs to anyone with a criminal record, regardless of the individual's work history or personal circumstances or how long ago the crime was committed. According to Harry Holzer, professor at Georgetown University, 60 % of companies surveyed answered that they would probably not or never hire ex-convicts. The world outside the prison is another prison to them. Seventy out of each 100 inmates released bounce back from this "freedom," returning to the real prison. Recidivism may result in permanent imprisonment. The last destination on the Prison Driving Tour is the Peckerwood Hill Cemetery, called "The Captain Joe Byrd Memorial Cemetery," which is the final resting place for over 1,900 prisoners whose remains were unclaimed or unwanted when they died. It was used until the late 19th century and abandoned under dense and wild thickets until Captain Joe Byrd, long-time assistant warden at Walls Unit, uncovered and started to maintain it in 1962. The cemetery was a matrix of several vertical and horizontal rows and columns of white concrete crosses, mostly with no more than prison ID numbers inscribed on them, creating a huge matrix like a code book. Nobody had expected that their identity would be sought after their burial. Maybe that's true. Even their family members didn't want to remember their death and life. It was a perfect separation, whether caused by inmates themselves or society. The Peckerwood Hill Cemetery completed inmates' final journey into anonymity by erasing the last trace of their life. The undecipherable tombstones symbolize permanent disfranchisement. (source: Hong Euntaek, Ohmy News) ************************ Judges push for pay raise while bill sits on governor's desk Gov. Rick Perry had asked legislators to approve a salary increase for judges during the 2005 regular session and added the issue to the agenda during the 2 failed special sessions on school funding. He had said the increase was needed to help prevent judges from fleeing the bench for more lucrative private practices. Yet the bill sits on his desk. With a Sept. 16 deadline to sign the bill looming, some jurists are pleading their cases. Bill Bosworth of Cleburne was among more than 50 judges who wrote Perry, lobbying him to sign the bill into law. "Absent the increase, I do not know that I will be able to continue the sacrifice," Bosworth wrote in an Aug. 15 e-mail. He makes $108,000 a year, about $40,000 less than he could make as a private lawyer. In turn, about 30 Texans urged Perry to veto the bill, according to a review by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Some of those who opposed the increase mentioned that the bill also contained an increase in pensions for legislators. The bill proposes that salaries for district judges increase 23 % to $125,000 as of Dec. 1, with justices on the Court of Criminal Appeals and Texas Supreme Court seeing 33 % increases to $150,000. The action would represent the 1st judicial raises since 1997. Prosecutors and certain county attorneys also would see raises. Also, lawmakers who retire after at least 10 years would see a more than 20 % increase in annual pensions, which would start at about $28,000 and go to more than $100,000 for lawmakers with more than 35 years of experience. Kathy Walt, Perry's spokeswoman, said the pay raise remains under gubernatorial review. She added that Perry, whose public career started in the 1980s as a state House member, has no say over the pre-existing tie between legislators' pensions and judicial pay. (source: The Associated Press) OHIO: Clear-cut Spirko case now has many holes Eyewitnesses placed John Spirko and his best friend at the scene of the crime. Authorities say Spirko admitted he helped to kill rural postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger in August 1982 and knew details only the killer would know. It may seem like an open-and-shut case. But as Spirko's Sept. 20 execution date approaches, the case against him is getting increasingly muddy. On Friday, Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro suggested that the state parole board reopen clemency proceedings after news reports showed Petro's senior deputy misrepresented evidence that the parole board relied upon to recommend 6-3 against leniency for Spirko. Defense attorneys have asked the parole board to scrap its recommendation to Gov. Bob Taft, convene a new clemency hearing and ask the Ohio Supreme Court to delay the execution to give Taft time to decide whether to grant clemency or a reprieve. The board is likely to decide this week whether to rehear the case. At Spirko's Aug. 23 clemency hearing, Tim Prichard, Petro's senior deputy, argued against leniency, calling Spirko "an unrepentant, evil, manipulative man." A career criminal with a prior murder conviction who has been in trouble with the law since he was 10, Spirko, 59, is an odd poster boy for innocence. Yet a lot of influential people are questioning whether the state of Ohio is on the verge of putting an innocent man to death. "I believe that John Spirko may very well have been unjustly convicted," said former FBI Director William S. Sessions in a letter urging that Gov. Bob Taft commute Spirko's death sentence. Sessions is one of four retired federal judges who question Spirko's conviction. The Ohio Supreme Court and the parole board couldn't reach unanimous decisions on the case. A sheriff's investigator testified before the parole board on Spirko's behalf. And editorialists for several Ohio newspapers, including the Dayton Daily News, are sounding alarms about the planned execution. At Spirko's trial, authorities made the case that he and his best friend, Delaney Gibson, robbed the Elgin post office in Van Wert County in the false belief that it was loaded with money, then abducted and killed Mottinger to cover up the crime. Spirko's defense boils down to this: - There's no physical evidence linking him to the abduction and stabbing death of Mottinger, 48. - A witness identified Spirko's friend Gibson as the man she saw outside Mottinger's post office the morning of the kidnapping, and prosecutors used Gibson's presence to implicate Spirko. But another key prosecution witness, former U.S. Postal Inspector Paul Hartman, stated this year that even before Spirko's trial he told a prosecutor he didn't believe Gibson was involved. Gibson was indicted but never tried and the state finally dropped charges in May 2004. - Spirko's conviction was partially due to two jailhouse snitches who testified in exchange for leniency, then recanted claims that Spirko bragged about killing Mottinger. - Between October 1982 and March 1983, Spirko gave 20 falsehood-laden interviews, finally implicating Gibson and himself. He was quoted as saying, "Lay it all on me. I killed her." But Spirko didn't sign any statements, and the defense contends investigators may have put non-public crime details in his mouth. The interviews weren't taped. - Authorities failed to adequately investigate other suspects, the defense says. "Janie" Mottinger, a mother of three who had just met her first baby grandchild, disappeared from the Elgin post office Aug. 9, 1982. 6 weeks later, her badly decomposed body was found in a bean field, wrapped in an old theater curtain. Slashes in her clothing revealed she had been stabbed more than a dozen times. John Spirko wasn't on investigators' radar scope until he put himself there in October 1982. Jailed on an unrelated felonious assault charge, Spirko offered to provide information on the Mottinger case in exchange for leniency for himself and his girlfriend, who had tried to slip him some hacksaw blades. In some stories he told the motive was robbery; in others, the killers silenced the postmaster after they tried to pick up a parcel containing drugs. Spirko took authorities to a house in Cygnet where he said the killers raped and murdered Mottinger, but he couldn't describe the floor plan and officials found no evidence at the house. But amid the lies, said Prichard, the deputy attorney general, Spirko shared crime details that hadn't been made public. The curtain had been cut or torn and the top was drawn down over Mottinger's head. The stone had been pried out of her ring. Spirko described her missing purse and had seen internal postal documents among the robbery proceeds. "He had intimate knowledge of the crime and he had no explanation for it," Prichard said. "That's what convict(ed) John Spirko." But Steven Drizin, legal director for the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University law school, said Spirko made "tons of mistakes" in describing the crime, and interviews by Hartman, the postal inspector, were poorly documented. Drizin said Hartman "contaminated" Spirko's statements by asking leading questions. Non-public details were suspiciously inscribed in Hartman's notes in different handwriting or jotted in above the lines, he said. Defense attorney Thomas Hill of Washington, D.C., said Hartman used leading questions to get Spirko to implicate Delaney Gibson. Spirko and Gibson were both convicted killers who met in the 1970s while in prison in Kentucky. Gibson had been released from prison, was a fugitive on a new crime and was doing migrant work in North Carolina, when Mottinger was abducted. In August 1982, Spirko had just been paroled from Kentucky for a 1969 murder and was living with his sister near Toledo. His sister said she was with him when he visited his parole officer the morning of the abduction. The parole officer said he saw Spirko that day, but couldn't say when. Hartman learned about Spirko's friendship with Gibson and, in January 1983, Hartman dropped a reference to Gibson's tiny hometown, Bear Branch, Ky. After that, Spirko started talking about Gibson, finally accusing him of Mottinger's murder. Authorities went back to 2 witnesses who each saw a man outside the post office the morning of the abduction. They showed the witnesses new photo lineups which included pictures of Spirko and a clean-shaven Gibson. Truck driver Mark Lewis was "reasonably sure" he'd seen Spirko in Elgin that morning. Opal Seibert positively identified the Gibson photo. But Hartman learned that Seibert's identification was problematic. Gibson's wife said relatives had visited her and Delaney in North Carolina on Aug. 7 and 8 and she had photos of a bearded Gibson to prove it. The photos, Hartman learned, were developed in North Carolina on Aug. 10. A receipt showed Gibson patronized an auto shop there that weekend. Margie Gibson's work records showed she and Gibson picked tomatoes on Aug. 10. Gibson would have had to shave his beard and drive through the night to Elgin to kidnap Mottinger. Prosecutors didn't turn over the Gibson photos to Spirko's lawyers until 1997. Prichard said the defense in 1984 didn't seek to establish Gibson's alibi, because Gibson's guilt was Spirko's best defense: At trial, Spirko said Gibson was the one who gave him details of the crime. Hill, however, contends prosecutors went to trial with a Gibson/Spirko theory they knew wasn't true. If Seibert hadn't placed Gibson at the scene, the other evidence wouldn't have been sufficient to convict Spirko. But Kent Mottinger, the victim's son, said the real breakdown of the system is that Kentucky didn't execute Spirko for his first murder, that of 73-year-old Myra Ashcroft in 1969. "Mom's blood is on the head of Spirko and those who had released him (from) that Kentucky prison," Mottinger told the parole board. "If after all of this you still don't know that Spirko's execution should be carried out, I have one last suggestion for you. Take him and introduce him to your family." The basics The status: Parole board will decide this week whether to reconsider its recommendation that Gov. Taft shouldn't spare the life of convicted killer John Spirko. The crime: Spirko was convicted of the 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger The controversy: A prosecutor is accused of misrepresenting evidence, and the defense says a faulty eyewitness identification of Spirko's friend was used to implicate him. Also, prosecutors say Spirko knew details only the killer would know, but the defense says many facts had been in newspapers. (source: Dayton Daily News) OKLAHOMA: Ride 'em, Convict!--At the Oklahoma State Penitentiary Rodeo, Inmates Bust Loose The pink billowing sky fades to black over the rodeo arena as the Friday night crowd ambles in, women in slinky halter tops and dark red lipstick, men in cowboy hats and blue jeans, tins of tobacco pressed into their back pockets. Along a back row of concrete benches, LaDonna Meadows, 63, lifts herself from a wheelchair and stands on an artificial leg, her hand over her heart. On white horses, a parade of riders, with sequined crosses stuck to the backs of their red-white-and-blue vests, circles the arena while a singer delivers a honey-smooth rendition of "God Bless America." Meadows peers through binoculars until she spots a figure across the way, standing among a crowd of men on bleachers between a high, chain-link fence and a wall topped with coils of razor wire. "My boy," she says of Danny Liles, 45, wearing a straw cowboy hat and red western-style shirt, and longing for his moments in the lights. Meadows smiles, and she seems to forget, at least for the moment, that she's inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, where guards in watchtowers stand ready with shotguns and death row is just down the road; that her Danny -- competing tonight in the annual prison rodeo -- is serving a life sentence for murder; that the crowd is here to see snarling bulls trample and gore and otherwise send Danny and his fellow convicts flying. "Doesn't he look handsome?" Meadows asks, her gaze still fixed on her son. More than 2,000 years after Caesar, the spirit of ancient Rome endures in southeastern Oklahoma, only now the gladiators wear cowboy hats. The prison rodeo at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a tradition since 1940 and among the last of its kind, is that most incongruous kind of American pageantry, a mix of Main Street piousness and patriotism, and unabashed Coliseum-style brutality. For two nights every Labor Day weekend, thousands of spectators make their way to a rodeo arena located behind the prison's white walls for a program that includes professional cowboys wrestling and roping steer and cowgirls barrel racing. But what lures them back each year are the inmates, many of them more outlaw than cowboy, tumbling off bulls and bucking broncos. The evening's main attraction, the one they promote on T-shirts, is something called "Money the Hard Way," in which inmates jump in the ring to try to grab a burlap sack hanging from a horn of a 2,000-pound Brahman bull. If they're trampled or battered, as some have been over the years, so be it: The prize is $100 (put up by a local car dealership) -- 10 times what many convicts earn in a month serving meals and mopping floors. "It's our calling card," says Bill McMahan, 72, for 18 years the rodeo's chairman, as he walks through a rodeo street fair the night before the opening. He sips bourbon and water from a plastic cup and chuckles at the prospect of carnage. "People don't go to NASCAR to see the cars run around the track," he drawls. "They're waiting for a big wreck; same with the rodeo. It's human nature. People want to see what ought not be." Last year, an inmate ruptured his groin riding a bronco; a while back another cracked his skull and racked up at least $150,000 in medical bills, according to deputy warden Kameron Harvanek. But tackling a steer is not a problem, particularly for someone whose rsum includes gang fights and being shot in the shoulder and stabbed in the leg, as is the case with Larry Menafee, 28, known as Jughead to his prison pals. He is serving a 10-year sentence for intimidating a state's witness. "Told her I would drill her front door shut with her and her two kids inside, and burn her house down," he recalls with a throaty cackle. His head is shaved and a blond tuft extends from his chin. A swastika is tattooed across his belly. "I ain't gonna get hurt," he promises. Menafee is on the Over the Hill Gang, the team representing the state penitentiary, among 10 inmate squads with names like Wild Bunch, Outlaws and Convict Cowboys from other facilities around the state. Only prisoners viewed as well-behaved are eligible; those who may regard the rodeo as a chance to attempt an unannounced gallop off into the sunset are rejected. Child molesters and residents of death row need not apply. The Over the Hill Gang's roster includes a car thief, a forger and three convicted murderers. Their unofficial captain is Danny Liles, otherwise known as Eight Ball, because, as he explains, he has always been behind it. Liles is the team's most seasoned cowboy, this being his 11th prison rodeo. "It the one thing that gives me focus," says Liles, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his crooked teeth framed by a light brown goatee. He sits in the 13-by-9-foot cell he shares with another inmate, its sliver of a window filled with a view of a guard tower in the distance. A small framed photograph of last year's rodeo team is on his desk, just to the right of a drawing of Jesus. "To me, it's like I'm not in prison," Liles says of the rodeo. "For two days, I don't mind being here. I feel free." No 'Stupid College' The 90 miles of highway that runs south from Tulsa to the penitentiary in McAlester passes by vast plains dotted with cattle and rolls of hay, ranches and truck dealerships and road stops with names like the Speedy Gonzalez Cafe and Red Neck Corner. During the 1800s, this area was the frontier, inhabited by Indian tribes and outlaws, before an entrepreneur named J.J. McAlester built coal mines that drew large numbers of immigrants looking for work. "McAlester, Home of Cowboys and Italians," reads a billboard at the center of the city, a sign that also advertises the prison rodeo. Just after Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, McAlester's residents were offered a choice of hosting a new state college or a penitentiary," says Steve Adams, a local historian (and a retired corrections officer). "No one wanted a stupid college; no one had an education," Adams says. "You were either an outlaw, you farmed or you dug coal." Today, the city of about 20,000 remains blue-collar, its downtown strip of low-slung brick buildings populated by western-wear shops and bargain furniture stores. The city's largest employers include the U.S. Army Ammunition Plant, a main supplier of bombs for the forces in Iraq, but its heart has long been the penitentiary, a sprawling 31-acre fortress that looks like it was built for a Jimmy Cagney gangster flick. In 1940, nearly a decade after the prison in Huntsville, Tex., began hosting a rodeo that drew crowds of 15,000, Jess Dunn, the warden in McAlester, started his own, hoping to boost inmate morale and raise money for the prison canteen. "Thrills, Spills, Chills" is what the program to McAlester's first rodeo promised, along with inmates in their best prison stripes riding bulls with names like Mussolini and Hitler. A trip to the prison "was like a shot of adrenaline," says Barbara Clemens-Denem, who was 16 when she was among six rodeo queens chosen for the 1949 shows. A few years before that, she says, her family went to the rodeo, and during a tour of the prison the warden offered her the chance to sit in the electric chair. When she declined, her grandmother, Lulah, hopped on. Except for a handful of years when it was canceled because of World War II or an inmate uprising in the 1970s, McAlester's rodeo has endured, along with the one hosted by the state prison in Angola, La., even as rising costs and liability concerns have closed the show in Huntsville and at penitentiaries in Mississippi and North Dakota. Occasionally, the organizers say, someone raises a question about the propriety of the rodeo, not on behalf of the inmates but for the livestock. When the animal rights group PETA demanded the event's cancellation a couple of years ago, a spokesman for Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry dismissed the concern as "silly" and the show went on. Still, McAlester's show does not draw nearly as large crowds anymore -- more than 65,000 people came for four days of rodeos in the 1960s -- and the organizers keep fiddling to figure out ways to fill the arena's 12,500 seats. Their latest plans include adding female inmates to the mix next year. "People want to see something fresh," says Layne Davison, a coordinator of the rodeo when he's not overseeing the prison's H-unit, otherwise known as death row. Remembering the Alamo Beneath a furnace-hot sun, Leroy Cornell, in a cowboy hat, stood on a patch of grass wiping sweat from his brow. If it weren't for the I-N-M-A-T-E printed across the back of his blue shirt, this 33-year-old convicted murderer could pass for a big-shouldered ranch hand. "This here's cowboy Roy," he proclaimed to his audience, a line of inmates hanging on the other side of a chain-link fence, watching from a concrete prison yard. On the afternoon before the rodeo is to begin, the Over the Hill Gang assembled for practice, one of six they will have had before the real thing. Despite the heat, the workout is a welcome break from the inmates' routine, a chance to escape shoe-box-size cells and mind-numbing chores. "It's something to make you feel alive," Cornell said. "In here, you're just walking, breathing." Kevin "Skippy" Burch rolled up in his blue pickup, pulling a trailer holding a horse and a sun-sleepy steer he called Spot. A correctional officer, Burch is also the prison's rodeo coach, and this day his mission is to teach the men how to wrestle and rope a steer. "Get your arm right here, and fall back," he said, wrapping a forearm around the steer's neck. The inmates furrow their brows as if they're sitting through a chemistry class. "He'll go down with you," Burch promised. Up lumbered Larry Menafee, whose vast experience on the mean streets of Oklahoma City does not include an encounter with a steer. After a few tugs, he and Spot collapsed on the grass. "Kind of cruel," said Menafee, standing up and allowing himself a moment of sympathy for the beast. Then he noticed a splotch of manure on his boot and he spit a string of expletives. The men learned bull riding atop a mechanical version named El Toro, the kind John Travolta rode in "Urban Cowboy," which had been pulled out to their grassy patch. "Work your hips into it; that's it," Liles shouted at an inmate as El Toro undulated beneath him. Liles stripped off his shirt and climbed aboard, extending his right arm in the air for balance as he kept up with the bull, shoulders rolling, head down. He grinned as he dismounted, the sweat glistening on his back where a tattoo of the winged Harley-Davidson emblem stretched from one shoulder blade to the other. Bull riding, he said, is his favorite event, a challenge that requires "not letting the adrenaline and fear master what you do." It is the kind of discipline, he acknowledged, that failed him on that night 23 years ago at the Alamo Plaza Hotel in Oklahoma City, when he and his brother, Mark, were involved in a murder, stuffing the victim's body in a steamer trunk and dumping it in a brickyard near a river. After their arrest, Mark Liles confessed to stabbing the man, saying that Danny unwittingly walked in on a robbery as it was unfolding. "I just don't want my brother to pay for something I did," a detective quoted Mark Liles as saying at the time. Danny refused to testify against his brother, despite pleading from his lawyer, James Rowan, who recalled shouting at him, " 'You idiot, you don't realize you're throwing away your life.' And he would say, 'I'm not saying anything about my brother.'" After their convictions, a judge sentenced Danny to life and Mark to the death penalty. A week before Mark Liles was to be executed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay to consider a future appeal, an order that eventually led to a retrial at which Danny testified that it had been he -- not his brother -- who had committed the murder. A jury convicted Mark of the crime, but his sentence now was life, and now he too resides at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, in a cell up the hill from his brother. While Rowan believes Danny Liles claimed credit for the murder to spare his brother from a lethal injection, Danny refused to talk in detail about the crime, fearful, he said, that any statement could harm Mark. "I was convicted by a jury," he said. "I'm not going to tell you what my brother did. I'm guilty; as guilty as anyone else." At times, he said, he thinks back on that night at the Alamo and wonders what might have been. "You learn that you can steer a situation," he said. All these years later, he's still trying to master the moment, whether it's avoiding fights in the prison yard, or not talking back to the guards, or staying atop a hard-charging bull. They're In It Together A few hours before the rodeo, guards shepherd the Over the Hill Gang to their dressing room, a holding cell in the prison's main rotunda, where they trade their inmate duds for red western shirts. Michael Mackey, 33, a convicted murderer, leans over to button down the collar of Ace Hailey, 39, a car thief. The men admire each other's appearance and laugh. Then they have questions that need answering. If they jump up on the wall ringing the turf to avoid an oncoming bull, Mackey asks, "are we going to get in trouble for trying to escape?" "As soon as the bull goes, get down off the wall," Skippy Burch advises. Liles summons the men to the rear, where they kneel for a prayer. "Let us exhort one another and stand by each other," Hailey says. "We are more than what they give us credit for." On the other side of the prison wall, the warden hosts a barbecue, where a band plays bluegrass and country tunes and guests sit at picnic tables and on bales of hay awaiting the arrival of the governor. "This is just fun," Michael Boyer, a white-haired anesthesiologist, says of the rodeo as he munches on a forkful of beans. "Like a crawfish festival or a watermelon festival. Wholesome entertainment, that's all it is." As the sun sets, the crowd drifts down the road to the arena, where they fill half of the 12,500 seats, sipping sodas and eating funnel cakes and chili dogs. The events featuring the professional cowboys inspire a drone of quiet murmuring from the stands, but the inmates are another matter, particularly when they tumble from bucking broncos, barely able to hang on for more than a few steps out of the chute. "I love it," shouts Pete Bonicelli, 45, sitting with his wife and two children after working all day as an electrician at the ammunition plant. He laughs. "You like to see them taking a beating." A few minutes later another inmate falls and leaves the ring on a stretcher. Another will exit the same way before the show is over. The cheers grow when the announcer introduces what he describes as a new event, something called "Mexican Sweat," in which a bull lowers his horns and hurtles into a card table where four inmates sit on plastic chairs, lifting one in the air as two others scatter. The lone inmate who remains seated wins a $200 prize. "Did you enjoy that?" the announcer asks to applause. That is the appetizer for "Money the Hard Way," for which dozens of inmates pour into the ring as the speakers blare, "I fought the law and the law won." They swarm the bull, which stomps, snorts, bucks and otherwise swats them away like flies. "Oh, God," a young woman shouts from her seat, while her neighbors laugh and whoop and whistle, everyone standing, until, somehow, an inmate streaks past and manages to grab the burlap sack off the horn. As the crowd roars, the inmate jumps up and down, hands in the air. >From her perch, in a section where many of the inmates' families sit for a better view of their loved ones, LaDonna Meadows smiles. At least her Danny had sat out that round, not out of choice, as it turned out, but because he is about to compete in the last event of the night. The one he looks forward to all year. Bull riding. "Eight Ball!" Meadows shouts. The chute opens and the bull tosses Liles around like a feather before dumping him on the earth. His wild ride is over just as it begins. Liles stands and trudges back to his seat, as the spectators head for the exits. A squadron of guards pat-search the Over the Hill Gang before they are led back to their changing cell, where they get their reward for a long night in the dirt -- hamburgers and vanilla shakes, which they eat while sitting on the floor, replaying their brush with the cowboy life. "He was going this way and that way, and I'm thinking I got you," Liles says of his bull. "Then it was over." He smiles. "We had fun, that's all that matters." The guards come a few minutes later, and the men trade in their red shirts for their usual blues. They parade back to their cells, the barred doors along their path clanging shut, one after the other. (source: The Washington Post) INDIANA: Let's clarify insanity question----Our position: Legislators need to establish standards for determining mental status of inmates facing the death penalty. As the case of Arthur Baird, who was spared the death penalty last week, illustrated, the issue of sanity makes the question of whether to proceed with a convicted killer's execution extraordinarily complicated. It's an issue Indiana lawmakers need to address. Considerable dispute remains over whether Baird was insane in 1985 when he killed his wife, unborn child and parents. Expert testimony was divided during the trial. Although a jury decided to impose the death sentence, individual jurors have since said they would have opted for life without parole had that option been available. In a ruling on a last-minute effort to halt Baird's execution, the Indiana Supreme Court split over whether Baird was sufficiently competent to be executed. The court also was divided over what U.S. Supreme Court standard, if any, exists for deciding the issue. Justice Theodore Boehm also noted, "The legislature in this state has made clear that it wishes to impose the death penalty in some cases, but unlike almost all other states, Indiana has no specific statutory provision addressing either the standard of insanity or any procedural requirements to guard against execution of the insane." That needs to change. In Florida, when the governor is informed that a condemned prisoner may be insane, a commission of psychiatrists is appointed to assess the inmate's mental condition. Prison wardens in Connecticut can urge the court to order examinations of those on death row. In commuting Baird's death sentence, Gov. Mitch Daniels said he found it "difficult to find reasons not to agree" with those who concluded that Baird was "insane in the ordinary sense of the word." The governor may have to confront at least 2 other executions involving thorny questions about the prisoners' sanity. "Because of its irreversibility, apart from whatever one thinks of its morality, we should err on the side of caution in carrying out an execution," Boehm warns. Establishing sound procedures and standards for assessing the mental status of those facing execution -- divorced from the heat of trial --would be a cautionary step toward helping judges, corrections officials and the governor meet their awesome life-and-death responsibilities in capital murder cases. (source: Editorial, Indianapolis Star)
