July 15 TEXAS: Murder suspect says he was doing God's work----Cypress man is being held in the June death of flight attendant A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God's work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill. "I believe I'm Elijah, called by God to be a prophet," said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. " ... I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing." Interviewed in the Brazoria County Jail Saturday morning, Mangum said he feels no remorse for killing 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., whom relatives described as a "loving" son who never forgot a holiday and a devoted uncle who had set up college funds for his niece and nephew. He worked at Southwest for 24 years. Mangum, who described himself as "definitely not a homosexual," said God called on him to "carry out a code of retribution" by killing a gay man because "sexual perversion" is the "worst sin." Mangum believed Cummings to be gay. "I planned on sending him to hell," he said. Cummings disappeared June 4. His charred remains were found June 16, buried on a 50-acre ranch near San Antonio owned by Mangum's 90-year-old grandfather. Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne would not comment on the case, citing a gag order issued by a judge Saturday afternoon. The Chronicle was unable to reach Mangum's attorney, Perry Stevens. Mangum who claimed he has studied the Bible for "thousands and thousands and thousands of hours" said God first commanded him to kill during a "visitation," or dream, while he was in prison in 2001. He said his victim must be a man because men "carry the harvest of the sinner." After six months' planning, Mangum said, he went to E.J.'s, a Montrose-area club, where he met Cummings. After they drank a couple of beers, he said, the two went to Cummings' home in Pearland. Mangum said he stabbed Cummings with a "6-inch blade." "It's not that I'm a bad dude," he said, expressing concern that people might view him as "strange." Pausing briefly, he said, "I love God." When police searched Cummings' home, they found traces of blood that someone had tried to clean up, as well as evidence that a struggle had taken place, according to court documents. Mangum became a suspect not long after Cummings disappeared, for reasons officials have declined to disclose. Tim Miller, executive director of Texas Equusearch, which found Cummings' remains, said last month that Mangum had used Cummings' credit cards to buy lighter fluid, a flashlight and hydrogen peroxide while he was en route to dispose of the body outside San Antonio. When credit card records showed that the cards had been used near San Antonio, investigators ran a property-records search that led them to the ranch owned by a Robert Mangum, Miller said. Store video also showed that the person using the cards appeared to be Terry Mangum, investigators have said. Cummings' remains were soon found in a shallow grave. The Facts, the daily newspaper in Brazoria County, has reported that Mangum told investigators he did not kill Cummings. Mangum first said he killed Cummings, during a jailhouse interview Friday with that paper. He is being held on $500,000 bail. *********************** A 1970s mystery may be solved----Advanced DNA testing planned on 3 unidentified victims of local serial killer Corll For more than 30 years the skeletal remains of three teenage boys stored in a cooler at the Harris County morgue have been called No. 11, No. 16 and No. 22. But new technology and analysis may solve the mystery of their identities and give names to the last of at least 26 victims in one of the country's most macabre serial killings. The breakthrough came after forensic anthropologists at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office analyzed the bones and recently submitted samples to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for mitochondrial DNA, or mDNA, testing. The mDNA will be compared to samples in a national database. One also will be compared to a sample from parents who fear their missing son could be one of the boys. Center officials said they don't know when their testing and analysis will be complete. But Arthur Eisenberg, director of the center's DNA Identity Laboratory in Fort Worth, said new technology used to obtain genetic material from very old bones offers the best chance that the boys may be identified. "Hopefully, the mitochondrial DNA will tell us something," said Jennifer Love, a forensic anthropologist who heads the Harris County Medical Examiner's forensic anthropology division. Delayed justice The remains of the three unidentified teenage boys are the oldest stored at the morgue, Love said. They boys were among the victims, who ranged in age from 13 to 20, police believe were sexually assaulted, tortured and slain in a killing spree that began in 1972. Police learned of the grisly slayings on Aug. 8, 1973 when Elmer Wayne Henley, then 16, told authorities he had shot and killed a man at the man's Pasadena home after hours of drinking and glue-sniffing. Officers found the body of Dean Corll, 33, a Houston Lighting & Power technician. Henley told investigators about luring young boys to Corll's apartment, where Corll shackled them to a plywood "torture board" before sexually assaulting and killing them. Henley, who was convicted in connection with six of the deaths and sentenced to concurrent 99-year prison terms, led police to their bodies buried in shallow graves at Corll's southwest Houston boat shed, along a Galveston beach and near Lake Sam Rayburn. An accomplice, David Owen Brooks, then 18, admitted he helped Henley lure victims for Corll. He received a 99-year sentence in one slaying. Investigators used missing persons reports, dental records and items found with the bodies to identify most of them. In 1994, a victim, Mark Scott, was identified through DNA. Mary Scott said that finally knowing what happened to her son and saying a final goodbye at his funeral has not eased her grief. "It still hurts me," she said, "and I think about it every day." Love and her team of forensic anthropologists work on the most difficult identification cases at the medical examiner's office, which receives about 4,000 bodies annually, including some that are unidentified. 102 remains not ID'd Made up of 3 forensic anthropologists and an identification specialist, the team has been analyzing the unidentified remains in 102 cold cases including the 3 boys. The anthropologists specialize in using bones to determine age, gender and stature. They note healed fractures, scars and unique bone characteristics. The team is scouring files of 317 other unidentified bodies dating back to 1957, when the medical examiner's office opened, that have been buried in the county's graveyard. "The office believes in helping families find closure by identifying their missing loved ones," he said. Stephen Gammon, missing person's administrator at the center's DNA lab, said quality and age of DNA samples influence test results, but new technologies and methods have improved the chances of success. Gammon said the lab recently has extracted DNA from bones that are 40 years old, which was once nearly impossible. Advantages of mDNA Traditionally, nuclear DNA is tested for identity, but it degrades and is less definitive in very old samples, said Phillip C. Williamson, assistant director of the center's DNA lab. The mDNA, however, is protected by the mitochondrion, the cell's power plant, and does not degrade as easily as nuclear DNA, Williamson said. It has been used for years to trace the ancestry of many species back hundreds of generations. Love said if the center matches mDNA in the samples, the medical examiner will consider it positive identification. "Hopefully," Love said, "we can solve this mystery." (source for both: Houston Chronicle) MISSOURI: Hoping to die free In 1992, Brian Kinder was sent to death row because a court ruled he should die for the rape and murder of a Crystal City, Mo., woman. 15 years later, Kinder says doctors have recommended that he should die a free man because of an ongoing struggle with throat cancer. In early July, Kinder requested a medical parole. Though Kinder is the first death row inmate prison officials can recall ever making a request for medical parole, if it is granted he will follow in the footsteps of a handful of convicted murderers granted parole for medical reasons. "Now that I'm dying they want to bring me to this," he said, using a mechanical larynx in a sterile visitation room at Potosi Correctional Center. Kinder switched to writing his answers to interview questions. He wrote that the parole request had been prompted by his doctors' evaluation after the surgery that removed his voice box a year ago. Kinder's hands shook as he wrote about a typical day in the prison infirmary. "I can't breathe. I don't want to eat. Hospice workers stop by constantly to visit. They have me on Tylenol," he wrote. If his request for medical parole is granted, he will have no family support. He will be released into the care of a medical facility. Kinder has a brother, but his sibling is unwilling to take responsibility for Kinder because of the financial burden of the medical bills and living expenses that have been paid by the state up to this point. For 17 years, Kinder has maintained his innocence and says his brother supports that claim. "He don't think it's right to send me home so he can watch me die," Kinder wrote. Fred Duchardt Jr., Kinder's attorney, said his client's condition has gotten progressively worse since the surgery. He does not represent Kinder in the parole request and did not know whether doctors considered the illness terminal. The prison denied a Southeast Missourian request to speak to Kinder's doctors. In order to be granted medical parole in Missouri, an inmate must demonstrate he or she has a terminal illness in which death is anticipated within six months, that long-term nursing care is required or that confinement will greatly endanger the inmate's life. The parole board receives about 12 requests for medical parole each month, said Brian Hauswirth, chief public information officer for the Missouri Department of Corrections. Most are turned down. In 2006, 19 medical paroles were granted, according to Hauswirth. 20 medical paroles were granted in 2005, and 18 in 2004. Each year, the parole board conducts hearings on 8,000 to 9,000 requests for all reasons, not just medical. Although they are handed out sparingly, medical paroles are given despite the severity of the crime, Hauswirth said. However, the crime is a consideration taken into account by the board, he said. In October 2005, Harold Burton of Jackson County, Mo., who had been serving life without parole on a first-degree murder conviction, was granted medical parole. Burton died a year later, having served 9 years of his sentence. Danny Hahn of Greene County, Mo., another convicted killer, had been serving a life sentence when he was granted medical parole in 2005. He died less than a month after leaving prison. 2 convicted murderers, Dolores Miller and Shirley Little, are still alive after having been paroled for medical reasons. Miller, of Franklin County, who had been convicted on capital murder charges but sentenced to life without parole, was released on parole in April 2004. Little, of St. Louis County, was convicted of 2 counts of 2nd-degree murder when she was paroled in the summer of 2005. Convicted serial killer Faye Copeland of Kansas City was on death row for a short time, but a judge had reduced her sentence to life in prison by the time she was released to a nursing home in 2002. She died in 2003. Another convicted murderer received medical parole in 2006, but he died before he could be released. Of the 19 inmates who received medical parole last year, nine of them had been found guilty of class C felonies, which carry a sentence of seven years for those not considered persistent and dangerous offenders. Hauswirth pointed out that no convicted rapists have received medical parole before. Frank Moody, who had been convicted on charges of statutory sodomy, was paroled in 2006 and died 1 month after his release. "Basically, the only way you're given medical parole, you're going to be so weak you aren't going to be able to harm anyone," Hauswirth said. Someone who receives medical parole is subject to the same guidelines that govern every inmate released on probation. Parolees must request permission from a parole officer before leaving the state or changing their address. They are forbidden from owning or possessing weapons, and they are barred from using drugs unless they obtain a prescription. They are still supervised by the court through their probation officer, and they must devise a "release plan" for how that supervision will be arranged. Though nothing in the 21-page statute governing parole excludes an inmate sentenced to death from medical parole eligibility, Hauswirth said that just because Kinder has applied for medical parole doesn't mean he's going to get it. The board is reviewing Kinder's medical information, talking to his doctors and considering the severity of his crime. They also intend to hear from Donielle Williams, the 27-year-old daughter of the victim. Though the chief medical examiner for the parole board will make the ruling on whether Kinder's illness meets the criteria for medical parole, Hauswirth said the board will have "ultimate discretion." "Our top priority is public safety," Hauswirth said. Kinder said he intends to tell the parole he "would like to go home." "I've done my time," Kinder said. (source: Southeast Missourian) ********************* Memory of witnesses is key issue The allegations are similar: Witnesses involved in a decades-old murder case change their story. Police and prosecutorial misconduct is alleged. An innocent man is said to have been executed. Prosecutors in both St. Louis and Texas issued reports in the last few weeks that grappled with those accusations and reached the same conclusion: The right man was put to death. Both the case of Larry Griffin, executed by Missouri in 1995 for the drive-by murder of Quintin Moss in 1980, and Ruben Cantu, put to death in Texas in 1993, center on the same issue: memory and eyewitness testimony. False eyewitness testimony or misidentification were involved in more than 75 % of the 205 cases where DNA testing has led to an exoneration, said Innocence Project spokesman Eric Ferrero. Experts say the memory of an event can be a surprisingly mutable thing, even just hours later. DNA testing proved in 2005 that Anthony D. Woods could not have been responsible for the rape of a 15-year-old St. Louis girl in 1983. She told police she had seen her attacker clearly. She spotted Woods walking by her house hours after the rape and told relatives. She insisted, even after DNA results proved Woods innocent 22 years later, that she had the right man, prosecutors said after Woods was exonerated. Memory is not like a recorder, Washington University psychology professor Mark McDaniel said little research has been done on decades-old memories, but laboratory studies covering months-old memories have shown that memories can change to accommodate new information. Eyewitness testimony can be the most damaging testimony, yet researchers know memory is fallible, he said. "That's an implication here. You have to be very, very careful." He noted that not all memories are faulty and people differ in their ability to recall events. So, how do you ever know if a memory, old or new, is accurate? "That's the million-dollar question," McDaniel said. "You probably don't ever know." Handling witnesses Is key St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said witness testimony must be taken correctly, then corroborated with other witnesses and evidence, as was done in the Griffin case. St. Louis prosecutor Rachel Smith, who worked on the Griffin re-investigation, said witnesses were first asked what they remembered, then asked what they needed to help them remember, such as trial transcripts and depositions. They were also asked whether anyone had done anything to influence their memory or testimony. Scott Birch, a criminal investigator for the Idaho Attorney General's office who has solved several cold cases and is now working on a 1979 murder, said investigators must give witnesses information to refresh their memories when decades have passed since a crime. "Can you remember what you were doing 10, 15 years ago?" he asked. "Their memory is going to come back to them if they review their statements from the original investigation." The technique is admissible in courts across the country. Birch said investigators must ask the proper questions. "You have to be careful not to plant information with witnesses or a suspect who simply regurgitate it back to you," Birch said. "You have to ask open-ended questions." The Bexar County, Texas, District Attorney's office report in the Cantu case accused a private investigator working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund of undermining shooting victim Juan Moreno's memory and replacing it with suggestions that another man was responsible and accusations of police misconduct. Investigator Richard Reyna went to Moreno and said Cantu was innocent, First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said last week, "and he begins to suggest another person to him. That's impermissible as hell." Reyna did not respond to a message seeking comment Friday. In a statement issued after the report was released, Reyna said, "No fair minded person could doubt his (Moreno's) account that police repeatedly pressured him to falsely identify Cantu. I am completely confident that Mr. Moreno told me the truth." The Legal Defense Fund said Moreno had expressed remorse for sending the wrong man to death row before ever talking to Reyna, who has been involved with successful exonerations. Changes in Griffin case In the Griffin case, several witnesses told fund investigators and others that their memories contradicted what the state's star witness, Robert Fitzgerald, said. But prosecutors said those witnesses were now saying something different than they had said after the shooting or at trial. In some cases, prosecutors said, a witness had changed his story multiple times. Prosecutors said fund investigators used highly suggestive interviewing techniques when talking to Michael Ruggeri, the first officer on the scene, and never said in their 2005 report questioning the guilt of Griffin that Ruggeri had undergone operations to remove two brain tumors. Prosecutors said Ruggeri told them that his memory was confused by multiple crime scenes and information he had received since the trial. University of Michigan law school professor Samuel R. Gross, who led the fund's Griffin investigation, denied that improper techniques had been used. (source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch) GEORGIA: Family, friends of Davis gather for vigil Rain failed to dampen a gathering for a prayer vigil Saturday in support of Troy Anthony Davis at Sacred Heart Church. Davis, a death row inmate from Savannah who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, made an audio appearance at the vigil through the telephone. His message was relayed to the estimated 100 family members and supporters who participated in the vigil. "Thank you for your love and your prayers," he told Aleta Toure, who relayed the words to those gathered in the church pulpit. "We are going to get through all of this. "It really touches my heart that so many people have come together on my behalf. Through God's grace, this is happening. We will be together to celebrate real soon." Toure, a member of the Interracial Interfaith Community and a community activist, helped organize the vigil. Many of those gathered said they were deeply concerned about the looming execution date because evidence demonstrating that Davis might be innocent has yet to be reviewed by the courts. At one point during the phone call, they raised their voices in cheer, chanting over and over again, "Free Troy Davis!" Apparently overwhelmed with emotion, Davis momentarily stopped speaking. Then he got back on the phone and relayed another message to all young men in Savannah, telling them to make a stand, even if that meant standing alone. "But when you stand together," he said, "nothing can bring us apart." Speaker Michael Porter said it is a very sobering thought to imagine that someone very near and dear to your heart - your mother, father, sister or brother - is scheduled for execution. Porter said he hoped the state will have the maturity to put aside what he called its blood-thirsty desire for revenge, not only to give Davis another chance for a fair trial, but also so that "we do not teach the message to society that we believe in killing." "What gives anyone the power to put an expiration date on the life of a human being?" asked Masjid Jihad, another speaker at the vigil. "What happened to the officer is a tragedy. It is also a tragedy and a crime to sentence someone to death unjustly." Toure said she wanted it to be known that the community can come together and make a difference by signing a petition to win a new trial for Davis. She said anyone can go online to www.troyanthonydavis.org [1] or www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis [2] to sign the petition. (source: Savannah Morning News) **************************** Some say their lies framed convicted killer If Troy Anthony Davis is executed Tuesday, Tonya Johnson will be in mourning. Not just because she has known Davis since they played together as children. But because she will have to accept that she played a role in his death. "It will be hard to live with myself after what I [have] done," she says. "It will be very hard." Hard because Johnson believes Davis is an innocent man. Harder still because she says she did not tell the whole truth to police when they questioned her about the events that took place on a summer night in 1989. Fear ate at her soul then, she says. She never spoke openly about the murder of Savannah police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail. Not with her friends, not with her family. Only years later did she tell a cousin, who nudged her to "do the right thing" and step forward. 7 of 9 key witnesses who implicated Davis in MacPhail's murder have recanted their testimony since the 1991 trial. Others, like Johnson, later made sworn statements that shifted the blame away from Davis. Some say they lied initially or withheld vital information. They were young then, as fearful of the police as they were of neighborhood thugs. Some were in trouble with the law and say they acted out of self-preservation. Johnson is still scared of retaliation from the man she thinks really killed MacPhail. But over time, she felt the risks were worth taking, especially after her cousin promised to protect her. "I couldn't hold it in anymore," she says, sitting on a small brick wall along a former Burger King parking lot where MacPhail was killed. The restaurant moved to another location, but a homeless shelter and Greyhound bus station are still there. So is the motel across the street, now The Thunderbird Inn, where a witness said Davis had a "little smirky smile" and a gun in his hand. The passing of months and years reshaped lives and chipped away at what was allegedly untold. Some witnesses say Davis' fate weighed heavily on their consciences. "This is real. The death warrant has been signed. An innocent man is going to die," says April Hester Hutchinson, Johnson's friend who was with her the night of the murder. Many of the witnesses claim that detectives were intent on pinning Davis with the crime and intimidated them into giving incriminating statements. Back in 1989, Savannah's police force was not a welcome sight in African-American communities. "They weren't nice," Johnson says. "You did all you could to avoid them." But by the time the witnesses spoke up,it was too late for Davis, who has always maintained his innocence. Because of a 1996 federal law that aims to accelerate death penalty appeals, courts have ruled that new evidence cannot be considered in a capital case if it should have been presented during the appeals process. Davis was convicted of shooting MacPhail, an off-duty officer who was responding to a fight at the Burger King. Police did not find a murder weapon. Nor was there any DNA evidence. The prosecution relied on the testimony of eyewitnesses. Davis is scheduled to die Tuesday unless the state Board of Pardons and Paroles decides to commute his sentence. A clemency hearing is set for Monday. Though never heard in court, the witness recantations fuel hope for Davis' defense and an army of anti-death-penalty forces, including Amnesty International, which decry the state for putting to death a possibly innocent man. But witness recantations are not always well-received in the justice system. Are witnesses remorseful for having testified against a man who lived among them? Or why would anyone now believe a person who lied once under oath? Johnson says fear prevented her from telling police the whole truth about what she saw on a balmy summer night 18 years ago. She says she was sitting on the porch of unit No. 1152 at the Yamacraw Village public housing complex with her friends when a man came running from the direction of the Burger King and hid two guns behind the screen door of the abandoned unit next door. He returned a while later and asked Johnson: "Is he dead?" The man was sweating heavily and in a panicked state. "He gave me the impression that he did it." That man, Johnson says, was not Davis but someone else from the neighborhood. The man implicated Davis at his trial and has not recanted. Davis' lawyers have alleged in court motions that the man Johnson saw is the real killer. Neighborhood residents describe the man as a "nasty bully" who fell in and out of trouble as routinely as the Savannah River ebbs and flows. Johnson says he carried guns and drank heavily. Johnson did not point the finger at Davis. But she, like her friend Hutchinson, kept quiet about seeing the other man that night. She felt harassed by him, harassed by the police. "A lot of us were afraid" of the man, she says, standing outside her old home at Yamacraw. "I still am afraid. He threatens a lot of people." Johnson thinks he doesn't know where she lives now but worries he could find out. "It's not hard. Savannah's too small." Jeffrey Sapp says he stepped forward after sleepless nights thinking about the friend he helped send to death row. Police officers repeatedly questioned Sapp at his mother's home in Cloverdale, a black middle-class subdivision where the Davis family also lived. The neighborhood was crawling with police after the MacPhail killing. "They told me they could lock me up for withholding evidence," Sapp says, sitting in the same living room in which he was questioned. "I got tired of it. So I told them Troy confessed to me. None of it was true. "It was almost 20 years ago. It's hard to believe. We were so young then." Sapp derides himself for being a pawn in a dangerous game. He sometimes walks around the corner and stands in front of Davis' house. He thinks: "That's my home-boy Troy on death row for something he didn't do." Sapp looks weighed down by the thought of the pending execution. He drops his head and stares at the carpet. His only consolation is that Davis once told him he knew the police questioned him under duress. Sapp says Davis forgave him after he spoke the truth. That is how he is able to live with himself. (source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution) ***************************** A very modern lynching The quaint, Deep South charm of Columbus, Georgia, conceals a hideous truth - it was a crucible of the Ku Klux Klan's lynch mobs. Now another black man is to be killed in the state, by lethal injection. The man behind his execution? The direct descendents of one of Columbus's first racist killers. On a warm, early summer's morning, the wide streets of Columbus, Georgia, are perfumed by forests of azaleas. They bloom from the handsome, well-cultivated gardens of Victorian villas, standing proud behind lush lawns and elaborate, wrought-iron verandas. On the far shore, beyond the city limits, the smoky blue Alabama hills fade into the distance. It is the picture of Deep South serenity; modern America in the cradle of its past. Columbus is indeed a handsome city. Its middle-class citizens like to declare it "simply one of the best places on Earth". But then they are affluent and white, and many prefer not to dwell on its insidious history: of racism and injustice. Because Columbus, where Coca-Cola was born, is also a crucible of American slavery and one of its hideous by-products, lynch-mob killing. This is the birthplace of the 1st journal to advocate Southern independence in order to preserve slavery. In the Civil War it was a stronghold of Confederate support and the place where, 3 years after losing the war, the white ruling elite marked the beginning of the murderous reign of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia by orchestrating its first documented killing. They assassinated George W Ashburn, one of the South's leading white champions of racial equality. Even today, the city is still divided by a racial fissure marked by the east-west thoroughfare of Macon Road ? white people live to the north; black to the south. On both sides of this great divide lie the unmarked sites of past atrocities - racial murders and lynchings. They include the place where, in 1912, a mob grabbed a terrified 14-year-old black boy from a courtroom after the jury had found him not guilty of murdering a white playmate, Cedron 'Cleo' Land, in a hunting accident. On his knees in front of the angry crowd the black boy pleaded for his life, but it was to no avail. Under the leadership of the boy's father and uncle, a wealthy local farmer called Aaron Land, he was shot up to 50 times. Yet today, nearly a century later, the echoes of those killings ring loudly. The direct descendants of that mob's leaders have played a hand in a grave new injustice: the arrest, trial and handing down of the death sentence on a black man whose guilt has palpably not been proved beyond reasonable doubt; where box files of fresh evidence are consistently ignored; where self-interest appears to be driving the man to his end. In Georgia's forbidding Diagnostic And Classification Prison, 56-year-old Carlton Michael Gary has been on death row since 1986 for the rape and murder of 7 elderly white women in the so-called Stocking Stranglings. His most recent attempt to win a retrial failed 6 weeks ago. I first met Gary in November 1998 in a bare, oppressive death row visitors' room. He made no secret of his previous convictions for robbery and handling stolen goods, but he protested his innocence of the stranglings: "I'm not Prince Valiant," he said, "but I'm not Satan, either." As I investigated his case further, I became certain the trial was a farce, in which evidence was systematically hidden and misrepresented. Of course, Gary is just 1 of dozens of black men on America's death row with questionable convictions. But what kept me coming back to his case was its almost incredible links with the area's deeply rooted racist past. In 1984, Gary's case was assigned to Judge John Land, 63 at the time, who fatally skewed the trial by refusing to grant a cent of public funding to his defence lawyer. Land was the son of farmer Aaron Land. Moreover, Gary's request for a retrial was handed to Judge Clay Land - John Land's great-nephew. His recent judgment came as a complete shock: the new evidence had appeared overwhelming. It means that at some point in the next 2 years, Gary will be strapped to a bed and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs. It is my view that his death will amount to a legally endorsed modern-day lynching. But my view is unnecessary: it is the facts that shout the loudest. The Columbus Stocking Stranglings would have been terrifying anywhere. The killer usually struck at night, picking socially prominent, elderly, white women who lived alone. Before they were strangled, the victims were raped and brutalised. Most had terrible head injuries, one a fractured chest bone. Nevertheless, the racial history of Columbus and the wider South intensified their impact. All but one of the murders happened in the affluent, all-white neighbourhood of Wynnton, and from an early stage the police believed that the killer was black - it was claimed pubic hairs at the crime scenes had "negroid characteristics". Yet despite their supposed leads, the killer continued to rampage with impunity. The strangler claimed his 1st victim - Ferne Jackson, 59, Columbus's director of public health - on September 15, 1977. His 7th, and last, strike was in April 1978, the victim Janet Cofer, a 61-year-old primary school teacher. Throughout that time, the only suspect the police produced was Jerome Livas, an odd-job man with learning difficulties. He was arrested after the first 2 killings. 2 weeks later, and with Livas still in jail, the killer struck again. Bizarrely, the police continued to insist that Livas was their man, because he had told them things that "only the killer could have known". The charges against Livas were dropped after a reporter interviewed him in jail. He confessed to the murders in Columbus - but he also confessed to the murders of several US presidents including John F Kennedy and William McKinley, and the Thirties kidnapping of the aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby. The Columbus police needed a new suspect. Carlton Gary, the son of a construction worker who left when Carlton was still an infant, had been raised in Columbus up to the age of 13, and moved back there around the time of the 1st strangling. A year after the final strangling, he was arrested trying to rob a South Carolina restaurant. The murder-squad detectives compared his fingerprints to those found at the strangling crime scenes. They did not find a match. Then, 5 years later, in March 1984, Sgt Michael Sellers, the detective who "solved" the case, went after Gary again. He told me that his tip-off came from a very unorthodox source - what he described, with complete seriousness, as a "phone call from God". He said he received a message from a man with Alzheimer's Disease, whose conscious mind had no idea of what he was saying. Despite the more than dubious nature of this "source", and despite Gary's character, which bore little resemblance to the standard psychologist's profile of the driven and inadequate serial killer, Sellers managed to get the case moving by again comparing Gary's prints with those from the murders. This time, remarkably, they did match. After a seven-week manhunt, Sellers and his partner Ricky Boren tracked Gary down to a motel where he was in bed with a girlfriend. On the night of May 3, 1984, they interrogated him for 9 hours, by the end of which they had obtained a damning confession. Awkwardly, they made no contemporaneous notes, and neither, apparently, did they tape their conversation. Instead, Sellers testified that he went home afterwards and sat at his kitchen table at 4.30am, producing a full and accurate record from memory of what Gary had said. 2 months later, he showed it to Boren, who recalled more details: together they then produced the undated and unsigned, typed, 12-page document that was handed to the jury at Gary's eventual trial in 1986. No court in Britain, nor in most of America, would have admitted it as evidence, but the judge in Columbus accepted it without demur. It was not the hearing's only strange feature. John Land's pre-trial ruling that Gary's defence should not receive any public funding meant that his lawyer, a Vietnam veteran named Bud Siemon, was unable to do his job. At the same time, the police and prosecution spent millions of dollars as they tried to build their case. When the prosecution presented scientific evidence - much of which has turned out to be very dubious - Siemon had no means of scrutinising it. He worked on the case for 2 years and it almost bankrupted him. Judge Land was a powerful figure, not only in Columbus but across the state - the leader of a secretive network of politicians, lawyers and businessmen known as the Fish House Gang. As a young man, he had been a segregationist state senator and, later, as district attorney, he helped protect the murderer of Dr Thomas H Brewer, a leading black civil-rights activist, accepting the killer's spurious claim that he shot him seven times in self-defence. Years later, in interviews with me, John Land said he regretted his racist past, and realised that his actions in Gary's case were wrong. But his change of heart had come a little late. At the end of Carlton Gary's trial, the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. Under Georgia law, while the prosecution has wide powers to decide what evidence to keep secret when a case goes before a jury, it can later, at the appeals stage, be compelled to hand over almost everything to the defence. In 1992, 6 years after Gary was sent to death row, his appeal lawyer, Jeff Ertel, saw the prosecution's sealed files. There, Ertel found documents that undermined much of what the jury had heard. Gertrude Miller, who survived the strangler's attack, had identified Gary in court. The prosecutor, Bill Smith, told the jury that she had never picked out anyone before. In fact, she had identified three previous suspects, and when she first spoke to the police, she had said it was so dark she could not say whether the man who raped her was black or white. Other papers suggested Gary's interrogation had been taped, as he had always claimed, and that he had said nothing incriminating. DNA testing was starting to become available, and the first of the now almost 200 people freed from death row as a result had been exonerated. In Gary's case, Ertel learnt, this would not be possible. According to the prosecution, semen samples had been destroyed years earlier on the grounds they constituted a "bio-hazard". Meanwhile, Ertel decided to investigate a photo of Janet Cofer that showed a deep bite wound on her left breast. It might, he thought, be possible to compare the marks in the picture with Gary's teeth. Ertel called an expert in Atlanta, Dr Thomas David. When Ertel arrived at his office, David came straight to the point. "I know about this case," he said. "I'm the guy they showed the bite cast to." Ertel stared at him in amazement. "Bite cast? What bite cast?" David told him that two months after Gary's arrest, prosecutor Smith and others had been to see him with a mould made from the wound on Cofer's breast. He said that the cast had been made by a Columbus dentist, Carlos "Sonny" Galbreath. Ertel phoned him and asked what had happened to it, but Galbreath said the cast had been lost or destroyed. Seven years later, in March 2001, I met Galbreath for coffee in the Columbus Hilton. We had only been talking a few minutes when he dropped his bombshell. "I do know this. The bite cast is still in existence." He went on to say that the cast would reveal the killer had a distinctive, unusual deformity: a wide gap between his top front teeth, one of which was "rotated" out of alignment by about 40 degrees. "I guess that would have been visible every time he opened his mouth," Galbreath said. Gary's teeth were straight and even, as those who had known him at the time of the murders could confirm, including Gene Hewell, a fashion-store owner for whom Gary had modelled. "Believe me," Hewell said, "you don't get too many models with twisted teeth." I had an obvious question: why had he not given it to Ertel years earlier? The dentist laughed. The thing was, he explained, that Doug Pullen, the assistant prosecutor at Gary's trial, was his best buddy. "Doug said, 'You tell him any damn story you like, but on no account can he look at [that] model.'" Finally, in 2005, Thomas Dunnavant, the Columbus coroner, announced that he had found the cast, with identifying label still attached, in the back of a cupboard. Dr David, the dental expert, testified at this year's appeal hearing that there were significant differences between the killer's teeth and Gary's. He was satisfied that Gary was excluded as the man who had bitten Mrs Cofer. Clay Land, the judge conducting the appeal hearing, now had to decide whether to quash Gary's conviction and order a new trial. The bite cast was far from the only piece of fresh evidence that threw doubt on the verdict. For example, although DNA tests were impossible, I had managed to smuggle some of Gary's semen out of death row. Thanks to tests done after the murders, we demonstrated that the biochemical make-up of Gary's semen was completely different to that of the killer. The Stocking Strangler was a "non-secretor", meaning he produced a very low level of the antigen that indicates blood type within semen. Gary is a '="secretor" - his semen contains more than 3,000 times as much of this antigen as the killer's. Gary's lawyers were optimistic. But they had not reckoned on the strength of Columbus's old-boy network. Since Gary's trial, many of the white officials responsible for sending him to death row have prospered. Ricky Boren, the senior detective in the case, has risen to become the city's chief of police. Jim Wetherington, chief at the time, was last year elected mayor. The 2 prosecutors, Bill Smith and Doug Pullen, are now superior court judges. A Columbus academic told me: "If Clay Land gives Gary a new trial, those old guys are going to run him out of town." Land's ruling came on May 31. In his judgment, he accepted that the bite cast should not have been concealed from the trial: it was a breach of Gary's constitutional right to due process. But it was not enough to get him a retrial. It was "possible" that the jury, had it seen the cast, would have reached a different verdict, but not "probable": it was not enough "to undermine confidence in the outcome" of the original trial. Effectively, Judge Land was saying: the bite cast may not match Gary's teeth, but this is no big deal. If Gary reaches the end of his journey in the execution room, as now seems likely, he will be taken, a day or 2 before his scheduled time, to a special unit, H5, "the death house". It contains a single cell and the death chamber itself, where the walls still exude the indelible stench of burning flesh from the days of electrocution. After visits from friends, family and lawyers and - should he want it - a final meal, he will be granted a last wish. Many of the 39 killed in Georgia since the return of the death penalty in 1976 have asked to do what no death row prisoner is permitted to do during their time there - to walk on the grass outside. Then, at 7pm on the appointed day, he will be laid on a gurney with thick straps around each limb, his neck, chest and abdomen. A technician will fit him with intravenous lines. Then the curtains dividing him from the spectators - reporters, relatives and, no doubt, most of Columbus's top legal officials - will part. The warden will ask if he has a final statement, and then the state will kill Carlton Gary by lethal injection. Andrew Hall, QC and chairman of the English Criminal Bar Association, said that the appeal judgement that may lead Gary to this room would have been "inconceivable" in the UK. Where it can be proved that fresh evidence might have induced reasonable doubt in jurors' minds, a conviction must be quashed. The fact that the prosecution decided not to disclose the cast made the position more serious. He added, "The test in Britain is whether the evidence that was not disclosed would have been relevant: did it have the potential to influence the trial? "In this case, it would have been fatal to the prosecution." I cannot prove that any of the manifest unfairness of Carlton Gary's trial and appeal has been the product of racism by its participants. I have heard Doug Pullen state his own abhorrence of such attitudes, and I have no doubt that the other white protagonists would do the same. Yet this story has happened in the South, a region where historically racism has been a constant theme. It has also been acted out by descendants of long-standing families with deep-rooted racist backgrounds. This isn't quite the end of the road. Later this year, there will be a hearing in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Georgia, Alabama and Florida, and after that, the US Supreme Court. But getting anywhere at such a level is extremely difficult. Last week, Gary sent me a message via his lawyers. "I always said you were too optimistic. "No judge who is part of Columbus was ever going to stop this legal lynching. "My last hope is that the judges who will consider my case now will not be from there. Maybe they will have open minds." 'Violation: Justice, Race And Serial Murder In The Deep South' by David Rose is published by HarperPress, 16.99 (source: Daily Mail (UK) OKLAHOMA: State Corruption in the Name of 'A Noble Cause' Released on May 31st, Curtis McCarthy was driven in an Oklahoma County van to meet his family and friends. But at 44, he does not know many people outside of prison, having been incarcerated, mainly on death row, since he was 22. He even has an 8-year-old granddaughter he has never hugged. He is the 3rd person released from custody in Oklahoma after the revelations about an overzealous (corrupt) civilian employee in the police forensics lab there in the 1980s and '90s. Joyce Gilchrist, a forensics expert worked with the police for 20 years and was apparently an extremely convincing and engaging prosecution witness. The attractive, articulate woman was teasingly referred to in the prosecutor's office as "Magic" for helping them win convictions. (There was a CBS, "60 Minutes II," story on her in 2001, and CBS News did some follow-ups on it.) She could, for instance, be a bit over-dramatic in her testimony, implying a greater certainty about hair samples matching each other than there really was, or perhaps she could just lie outright, as she apparently did in McCarthy's case. A district judge released McCarthy after deciding that Gilchrist had destroyed evidence. McCarthy's lawyers claim that she had even switched samples to get a match, and the national Innocence Project took up McCarthy's case (New York Times, May, 27, 2007). The Times quoted the district judge: "Frankly all of the evidence that Joyce Gilchrist collected, if she inventoried it, if she stored it, if she analyzed it, I believe is so questionable that it is difficult to determine if it has any evidentiary value." I teach ethics and enjoy analyzing these sorts of cases with my students. One response I initially get is the "bad apple" response: There are some bad people in every profession. But I tell the students that it is not adequate ethical thinking to simply point out the bad apples and say everything will be better after we get the bad ones out of the barrel. Look, rather, at the whole criminal justice culture. If we can change the culture, we will get rid of most of the bad apples -- not the other way around. Jocye Gilchrist was a problem -- surely. But how does someone like her function smoothly (receiving commendations) for twenty years? Doesn't that imply a wider problem than just one bad apple in the police crime lab? Was not something wrong with the prosecutors who were so anxious to get their "magic" Gilchrist on the stand to testify, case after case, year after year? (There were plenty of signs her work was too good to be true.) And here is another clue that there is a wider culture problem: True, she was fired, but she was never prosecuted for a crime. Perhaps "overzealousness" like hers was institutionally tolerated, even though it meant someone like McCarthy would spend years on death row. A book I am re-reading, Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause, tries to look at the barrel and not each apple separately. The author thinks most police and criminal justice misconduct is not rooted in money scams, but in a strange cultural problem: a strong certitude that police work is a "noble cause." It is such a noble cause that one can bend the rules, lie, use any means, to serve it. Look at Joyce Gilchrist in the police lab. No one bribed her to fudge evidence. She would never take a bribe from a criminal. But she apparently could lie to put "bad guys" in jail and help the "good guys." Our side is noble; why fuss about tactics? This noble cause tradition is handed down to new recruits from older officers and other leaders in the criminal justice world decade after decade, building a sort of culture that second-guesses ethics in order to achieve grand purposes. The values of the whole system start changing, even if the written rules do not. The book I'm reading makes an excellent point on institutional acceptance of misconduct. It references a study by the Chicago Tribune, "Break rules, be promoted." (The title reflects the Joyce Gilchrist story well: she was promoted to be head of the lab.) The Tribune examined 381 cases of prosecutor misconduct in homicide cases since 1964. These were serious cases of misconduct that ended with convictions being overturned. For instance, one prosecutor won convictions against 2 Afro-Americans and did not tell the defense about 1 witness who said the perpetrators were white. Another prosecutor knew evidence was planted. But in these 381 cases, not one of the prosecutors was convicted of a crime. And many went on to be district attorneys or judges. For 22 years Curtis McCarthy was a victim of a culture condoning some misconduct, because it serves the "noble cause." (source: Texas Civil Rights Review)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, MO., GA., OKLA.
Rick Halperin Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:07:03 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
