Dec. 14 LOUISIANA: The Road to Redemption----Commentary: A prisoner on death row finds that social change comes in small, painful increments, starting with the self. This essay was written for The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. Seven of my 40 years in Louisiana's prison system were spent on Angola's death row, doing time for murder. In 1965, as a 20-year old punk looking for fast money, I ordered a convenience store clerk to open the cash register. He refused and chased me out of the store. Running toward my car, I fired over my shoulder to frighten him. The last time I saw the clerk, he was sitting on the sidewalk yelling for the police. He bled to death. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty nationwide in the case of Furman v. Georgia. I was re-sentenced to life without parole. Apart from the time on death row, I spent 2 years in one of Angola's maximum-security tiers in lockdown, an unspeakably violent environment. One year was spent working in Angola's fields under slave labor conditions, another in the office as a clerk. 9 were spent as a prison journalist, working on The Angolite, the prison magazine. As a result of my testimony in a bribery case, the rest of my years in the prison system have been spent in protective custody away from Angola. Battles against Louisiana's prison system are hard won. But they show that the system is vulnerable. And small victories can fuel larger ones. Change is a potent force behind bars that inspires desperate acts. In February 1951, 31 inmates slashed their heel tendons to protest their brutal treatment at Angola. Newspapers across the state headlined the story. The public reeled in shock. The heel stringers succeeded in improving conditions for a few years. But old ways died hard. It would take repeated assaults to tame Angola. While I was on the "row," I won the 1st prisoner rights lawsuit in the history of Louisiana in 1971 with the help of a young VISTA attorney from New York. Sinclair v. Henderson dramatically improved conditions on death row. It was the first in a long string of jailhouse lawsuits I have successfully filed against Louisiana's callous prison system. Other prisoners followed my legal assault. In 1973, four black inmates filed suit against Angola alleging discrimination. The suit charged that conditions at the prison were "cruel and unusual punishment." The court found that Angola "would shock the conscience of any right thinking person." "Life," a militant black inmate from New Orleans, was my best friend. He was a crusader against homosexual rape who was not afraid to take on the criminal subculture. No brother, Life said, should take another brother for a woman. A few years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision that released me from death row, the U.S. Justice Department demanded that the prison be integrated. Together Life and I went into the most dangerous dormitories and cellblocks at Angola to argue for integration. It came without violence. But Life was knifed to death for his stand against sexual predators. In 1976, in an effort to quell violence at the prison, the administration unshackled The Angolite, the prison magazine, written by inmates for inmates. The Angolite was little more than a newsletter when it was set free. A hard-nosed reformer, Warden Ross Maggio, appointed me to the staff. My expertise as a jailhouse lawyer won me the spot. Administrators felt that uncensored inmate voices would help decrease the level of violence. The warden's gamble worked. But it had an unintended consequence. The Angolite rose to national prominence. Stories that my co-editor Wilbert Rideau wrote, and others that I wrote, won national awards-the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Special Interest Journalism, the Sidney Hillman Award and the George Polk Award, among others. With the breeze of success in its sails, The Angolite journeyed into uncharted waters for prison journalism. Rideau and I covered stories on sexual violence, prison suicides, inmate killings and a host of other issues. We were a black/white writing team in a southern prison, rife with repressed racism and potential violence. Along with our awards, we became the subjects of stories on television networks, in national magazines and in the foreign press. The Angolite's success lifted me out of a pit of despair in Angola's fields and cellblocks. Rideau and I traveled the state on overnight speaking trips to schools and civic groups. We could pick up the telephone in The Angolite office and arrange for calls to journalists all over the country. We had influence with the administration and the free world. We were the envy of other prisoners. I lost it all in 1986 when I turned down a ranking prison official's offer to sell me a pardon. It was a ticket to freedom I felt that I had earned after 20 years at Angola. I yearned to be free with every breath I took. I was a lifer without benefit of parole. I would never leave Angola unless a governor commuted my sentence. In 1986, the governor's mercy was in short supply as the nation escalated its war on crime. Most lifers in Angola's clutches knew they would die there. In 1982, I had married Jodie Bell, a television reporter I met when she came to the prison to do a series on the death penalty for the CBS affiliate in Baton Rouge. The need to be with her shredded my days. Angola did not allow conjugal visits. I lived and breathed sexual desire Craving to be at home with my wife haunted me. I knew, as she knew, that turning down the opportunity to buy a pardon in 1986 might leave me at Angola forever. When I left death row in 1972, I carried its stigma with me. I came to understand that the free world would always see me as a "convicted murderer." But I could not accept that label. Seeds of decency waited to sprout inside my soul, sowed by Sundays in fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist churches. But I never matured. Parental abuse, neglect and cruelty crippled me as I grew up. Prison was the only place left in which I could save my soul. Change did not come with a glorious, religious awakening. It came in painful increments, from education and the self-awareness that education fosters. As I looked in the mirror every day, I began to see a killer. The familiar contours of my flesh covered an animal's bones. I had to accept responsibility for an undeserved death. But I could not accept a label that placed me beyond the pale of human salvation. I am not the only prisoner who has ever chosen that road. But each and every one who takes it knows that it tempts a shank in the gut. The rehabilitated inmate steps away from social acceptance and stands in apposition to the natural order in his prison environment. He becomes a target of inmate scorn-"riding the religious pony" or "sucking up to the man" to get out of prison. Scorn easily escalates into violence. I walked a fine line for 2 years before I was moved from a Big Yard dormitory, where I lived with some of the most dangerous prisoners in Angola, to a safer dormitory. The offer to sell a pardon confirmed rumors that I had been hearing for months in 1986 about corruption in Governor Edwin Edwards' third administration. (The four-time governor of Louisiana is now doing 10 years in a federal penitentiary for selling state licenses to build casinos.) In the late 1980s, his pardon board chairman sold pardons for a golf cart, cash, gold jewelry, and sex with inmates' wives. He and the prison official who offered to help me buy a pardon were convicted of public bribery. The offer of an illegal pardon ignited a firestorm in my brain. I had spent years changing myself. Now, I could reap the full reward only if I dismantled the moral framework I had struggled to erect. I could only be released if I committed the crime of bribery. Whispers from my criminal past urged me to do it. The hard, practical side of my nature agreed. But I could not. I was a prisoner of the moral man I had become. The striving to see more than a "convicted murderer" in the mirror drove me to reject the offer. Neither could I betray my wife. My rehabilitation was the foundation of our marriage. She is a Catholic who believes in forgiveness and redemption. Her moral heritage - instilled by the nuns who taught her in parochial schools - put her on a plane I revered. "My child," the nuns would say, "Virtue is its own reward." I could not involve my wife in an illegal act that would destroy her faith in me and make her liable for a criminal charge. Jodie had the price of a pardon-$15,000 in a bank account in Texas. She wrestled with her own demons in rejecting the offer. She was a woman in her forties married to a lifer. She ached to have me at home and knew how unlikely it was. Buying a pardon might be the only way we would ever be together. Had she decided to pay the bribe without telling me, I might not have known until I was set free or we were charged with public bribery. But she would not betray me. Instead, she contacted the FBI for me. Jodie understood my struggle for self-respect. Cooperation with the federal government doomed me to a life in protective custody-one of the most restrictive environments in prison. Otherwise, I would be killed as the "snitch" who slammed the door on freedom. Inmates who bought pardons were released. Governor Edwards claimed he knew nothing of the scheme. In 1992, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer commuted my life sentence to 90 years, making me eligible for parole. On Sunday, June 8, 2003, my wife and I celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary in the cellblock lobby with a cup of coffee that I was allowed to bring to the table where we visit. I have nearly a decade left to serve in prison. I have been denied parole 8 times since 1992. I will not be discharged until 2011, after I have served half of a 90-year sentence. My wife will be 72 years old when I finally go home, and I will be 66. God knows how much life will be left to us. But I will leave prison knowing that I am more than a "convicted murderer." I did not fail my wife or myself. Striving for change saved my soul and left its marks on a prison system without one. >From The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb www.theimpossible.org. (source: Mother Jones - Billy Wayne Sinclair is the author of A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story (Arcade Books, 2002), a book he wrote with his wife, Jodie.) NEW JERSEY: Bill would put death penalty on hold With the nation engaged in debate over this week's execution of a California inmate, New Jersey is inching closer to becoming the 3rd state to declare a moratorium on its death penalty. The state Senate is scheduled to vote on the suspension tomorrow, and a key Assembly leader hopes the lower house will quickly follow suit. The move would cap a years-long effort by death penalty foes, who contend capital punishment is imperfect and life in prison without parole is a viable alternative. The Senate vote comes 2 days after Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the 51-year-old founder of the Crips gang, was executed at San Quentin Prison - even as he continued to profess his innocence - for the murders of 4 people in 2 1979 holdups. "We know so much more today than we did when the death penalty was reinstated (in New Jersey) in 1982, including about how often the system makes mistakes," said Celeste Fitzgerald, director of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. New Jersey hasn't executed anyone since 1963, even though the death penalty was reinstated. The state has 10 men on death row. The bill the Senate will consider would create a death penalty study commission to scrutinize the state's death penalty law, particularly whether it is applied fairly, its costs, whether it is a deterrent to crime and if it should be abolished. The commission would complete its work by Nov. 15, 2006. In the meantime, a moratorium would be imposed on all state executions until at least 60 days after the commission finishes its work. In November, the New Jersey Policy Perspective group said the state has spent $253 million in the last 23 years on a death penalty that hasn't been used, money that it said could have been better spent in other areas. And earlier this month, Sister Helen Prejean of "Dead Man Walking" fame, visited the State House with Fitzgerald's group and lobbied lawmakers to eliminate the death penalty permanently. The moratorium bill has taken a long road. It passed both houses in 2003, only to be vetoed by then-Gov. James E. McGreevey. But Kelley Heck, spokesman for state Senate president and acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, said Codey would sign the bill set to be voted on tomorrow. "In that sense, he will sign a moratorium," Heck said. For it to reach Codey, the Assembly would have to approve the measure by the Legislature's Jan. 10 reorganization or the bill would expire. Assembly Majority Leader Joseph J. Roberts Jr., D-Camden, said yesterday he couldn't be "presumptuous" and talk for Assembly Speaker Albio Sires, D-West New York, but said the Assembly could take action. "There's growing support for the life-without-parole alternative," said Roberts, who will become Assembly speaker Jan. 10. Roberts said a study commission and moratorium was a 1st step toward that option. "I would be hopeful if it passes the Senate on Thursday that we'll deal with it on Jan. 9," Roberts said. That would allow Codey to sign the bill into law before he leaves office as acting governor. But if the Assembly doesn't act by Jan. 9, Roberts said he isn't too concerned. No execution is imminent. While it is not an official moratorium, the state, under a February 2004 appeals court ruling, cannot carry out the death penalty until it revises procedures on how the penalty would be imposed. Gov.-elect Jon Corzine is a death penalty opponent. And the Legislature will continue to be controlled by Democrats after it reorganizes. "I don't see the lame duck (session) as time imperative," Roberts said. "I'm not persuaded by people who want to wrap up every issue just because we're near the end of the term." He said a death penalty moratorium, along with other issues, easily can be reconsidered by the new Legislature after Jan. 10. Fitzgerald said death penalty foes remain hopeful. "It's not surprising that the Senate has decided to examine this issue more closely, and common sense supports halting executions while the study is being carried out," she said. "The evidence has demonstrated time and time again that the system is broken and should be replaced with life without parole, which has proven to be fairer, stronger and more certain punishment." Maryland and Illinois have instituted death penalty moratoriums to study the issue. Since 1973, 107 people have been released from death row thanks to strong evidence of their innocence, according to the American Bar Association. But the moratorium proposal won't have complete support. Assemblyman Michael P. Carroll, R-Morris Township, recently said he would oppose a death penalty repeal. "There are still some offenses where the guilt is clear and there is no other alternative for society to express its disgust and outrage other than this manner," Carroll said. NOTE: Contact State House bureau chief Tom Hester Jr. at [email protected] or at (609) 777-4464. (source: The Trenton Times) ALABAMA: Former Moore supporter reveals chilling prophesy The woman who filed suit to reinstate Roy Moore as Alabama's Supreme Court chief justice now fears his election as governor. Whether Christian talk show host Kelly McGinley had a falling out with the right wing of the Republican Party or saw a vision of the future, she's saying some chilling things. >From Mobile, Ms. McGinley said Mr. Moore and his followers want to establish a theocracy, or a government by a person or persons who claims to rule with divine authority. She said they "wish to bring a government based on Old Testament law, which would administer the death penalty for offenses ranging from homosexuality to talking back to your parents." She says his election could trigger a major showdown between state and federal governments that could lead to violence. She links the Republican Party, the Council for National Policy, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Masons in a web of conspiracy to impose Biblical law. "It is too extreme for the likes of me," she said. But it may be a case of her being too extreme for Republicans, also. In 2004, the party blocked her from running for the state school board because of her on-air support for the Constitution Party, even though Mr. Moore appeared with the party's presidential candidate last year. Whether she's got it right or is wrong about Mr. Moores supporters, the country's radical-right element wants to fundamentally change the nations government. The Moore wing of the Republican Party is a roiling mass of fearful people who haven't made the transition to the teachings in the New Testament. As proof of that, Mr. Moore built his candidacy entirely on defying the constitutional ban on mixing church and state. (source: Editorial, Decatur Daily) ************ Authorities doubt Jeremy Jones killed hairdresser Authorities now say they doubt that suspected serial killer Jeremy Jones killed a Forsyth County hairdresser whose remains were found behind a church in neighborhing Dawson County. Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John Bankhead tells an Atlanta radio station (W-S-B) that it does NOT appear that Jones had any involvement in Patrice Endres' disappearance or death. He says investigators from the G-B-I and both counties are going back over files to see if they can develop additional leads. Jones told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that he lied to investigators about the hairdresser's disapperance to get better food and extra telephone and visitation privileges. Investigators were back at the church yesterday looking for more evidence. Endres' remains were found December 6th in the area behind the church. Jones was sentenced to death December 1st in Mobile for the murder of a Turnerville woman. He also is charged in the deaths of a 16-year-old Georgia girl and a 45-year-old New Orleans woman. (source: Associated Press)
