May 19
OKLAHOMA:
Decades on death row drive death penalty fight
Oklahoma is killing a man at midnight, and so as darkness falls, another man on
H Block slips off his prison-issue shoes.
He sits crossed-legged in front of the open toilet in his cell. He grips a shoe
in each hand. He begins.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
As far as Curtis McCarty can remember, it just happens.
Another inmate takes off his shoes, and Curtis does, too, and the drumbeat
spreads up and down the hallway and through the dozens of 2-man cells commonly
known as death row.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The visitors begin to arrive. The grieving family members of the victim who has
been brutally murdered. State officials upholding the laws of the state of
Oklahoma. News reporters bearing witness in their constitutionally protected
role. And the men whose job it is to administer a lethal dose of drugs to a
convicted murderer and then watch as he dies.
As the visitors wait for the clocks to strike midnight, the banging grows
louder and louder until it reverberates all the way through the Oklahoma State
Penitentiary. The pipes shake. The walls and the floors tremble. Louder and
louder until it seems like the building might crumble. Until it seems like the
world might end.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
As he sits cross-legged on the floor of CC Cell, Curtis McCarty doesn't much
care about the tampered evidence and the DNA testing and the FBI investigation
and the committed group of lawyers. He doesn't much care that one day he will
walk free outside these walls, leave the state that mistakenly convicted him
and sentenced him to death, and move to Nebraska.
Innocence, guilt - they don't much matter when you are holding shoes in both
hands, bringing them together up to eye level and then smashing them down on
both sides of your toilet. When your entire world is this drumbeat, this
furious rhythmic protest, and nothing else.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
"For hours," Curtis says. "Until my forearms bled."
***
You cannot hear the banging as Curtis McCarty walks to the Creighton University
podium. He is wearing a black-and-white stocking cap that covers gray hair and
the look of a 50-year-old man sure he'd rather be somewhere else.
And sure enough, his girlfriend, Amy, practically had to grab him by the collar
this morning, drag him from the basement of the house they share in Lincoln,
and drive him to Creighton's Harper Center and this anti-death penalty event.
The day starts as you'd expect: many committed people in a room, convinced of
the just nature of their cause, offering factual and moral evidence to sustain
each other and prove the case. You could close your eyes and jumble the words
around a little, and this could be an anti-abortion event or an anti-war event.
And then Curtis takes the stage. Quietly, he begins to tell a different story.
"We are a nation of laws, a Constitution meant to promote justice and equality
before the law," Curtis says. "I believed that. I believed the judge and the
jury would enforce this law. ... I was wrong."
And this.
"You have to understand that the (police) were frustrated. They were frustrated
with how I was living my life. They were frustrated by the fact they couldn't
bring any solace to the Willis family."
And this.
"I lost my family, my country. I didn't have anything to believe in anymore."
And this.
"Had I been asked at one time, I would have voiced support for capital
punishment."
This story is related to the rest of the event because Curtis opposes the death
penalty as vehemently as anyone.
This story is different because it's his own.
***
He starts by explaining to the Creighton audience, in great and discomforting
detail, how he hurt everyone he ever loved before he lost everything he ever
had.
His parents were salt-of-the-earth, hard-working, well-meaning people who
taught him right from wrong. He chose wrong.
He was a junkie at 15. A high school dropout at 16. Part of a crew that robbed
an Oklahoma City gas station at gunpoint at 17. Lost in drugs and booze,
friends with dealers and thieves, estranged from his mother and father, barely
employed, in and out of the county jail at 18.
"Every time I found myself in the back of a police car, I promised to reform,"
he says. "I kept promising this until I was 22."
He had angered the Oklahoma City police by sitting in the back of their patrol
cars too many times. He had angered homicide detectives by lying to them as
they investigated another crime.
He had become somebody it was hard to feel sorry for, no matter what befell
him.
"You don't walk in front of the bull's-eye and then act surprised when they
shoot you with an arrow," he says.
The third and final time Curtis saw a woman named Pamela Willis came just after
Thanksgiving 1982. She, like Curtis, was into drugs. She hung with bad people,
like Curtis.
They passed each other in the living room at a house party held by a mutual
friend. Curtis remembers asking someone, "Who was that?"
"Just Pam."
Days after that party, on Dec. 10, 1982, a man found Pamela Willis in the
living room of that same Oklahoma City house.
She was naked. She had been raped. Strangled. Someone had stabbed her so
violently that a chunk of her sternum had collapsed the knife like an
accordion.
She was 18 the night she died.
"Like me, she was from a good, middle-class white family, which meant she had
every chance, like I did," Curtis tells the audience. "As badly as things
turned out for me, they turned out so much worse for her."
At the crime scene, police discovered semen, hair, blood, a bloody footprint, a
bloody handprint on the wall and the murder weapon: the knife that had
collapsed like an accordion.
They rounded up any man who had seen Pam Willis in the days before her death -
42 in all.
Curtis was one of those men. He walked voluntarily into an Oklahoma City police
station and gave up hair samples, blood samples, palm prints. He answered
questions without a lawyer present, and left. As his lawyers later discovered,
he was eliminated as a suspect that day.
3 years passed. Curtis kept getting high, getting into trouble, getting
arrested. The hunt for Pam Willis' killer went cold. Pressure mounted on
homicide detectives and on a new, tough-on-crime district attorney, and they
started to re-examine the case.
They heard a rumor: Curtis had told someone he knew who killed Pam Willis.
They brought him in again, but this time they physically and psychologically
abused him, Curtis says. They demanded again and again to know the name of
Pam's killer.
Curtis told them over and over he didn't know. And he hadn't ever told anyone
that he did. Rather, he says, he had simply repeated gossip that Pam's death
was likely tied to her drug connections.
The police didn't believe him, or chose not to, and arrested him on suspicion
of first-degree capital murder.
Curtis couldn't believe it, but he figured his lawyers would point out the
obvious: He had no motive. His prints didn't match those on the murder weapon.
He hadn't killed her, and the jury would believe that.
But Curtis didn't know Joyce Gilchrist.
In 1986, when the case came to trial, Gilchrist was an up-and-coming young
forensic scientist who had so wowed police investigators with her ability to
tie suspects to evidence that they had nicknamed her "Black Magic." The year
before, the Oklahoma City Police Department had named her employee of the year.
She took the stand, and everything changed. Yes, she had found Curtis' hair at
the scene. Yes, the blood and semen were consistent with his. Yes, he had been
there that night. Yes, yes, yes.
"By the end of the trial, the jury wouldn't look at me," Curtis tells the
audience. "They stared down at their feet."
The guilty verdict was quickly followed by a hearing to decide whether Curtis
would be imprisoned for life or put to death.
Only 2 people took the stand on his behalf.
His father. And his mother.
"It is one of the most shameful things that ever happened to me. My mother,
silently weeping and begging them not to kill me."
The verdict: death by lethal injection.
***
The inmates hate a prisoner named Fisher. They surround him in the hallway
after exercise hour. They stab him with sharpened broomsticks. He falls into
his cell, spilling blood all over the floor.
Curtis is given Fisher's cell, locked in before the blood on the floor dries.
He watches out his tiny window as they drag Fisher, ranting and struggling,
from the hospital to solitary confinement after he assaults a nurse. Curtis
hears the screams as the guards beat on the psychotic prisoner.
This is Curtis McCarty's 1st day on death row. It is 1986. He is 22.
At first he counts the days, buoyed by the hope that someone will discover the
trial's errors, and he will be set free.
But as the days turn to months, then years, the men around him are killed, one
after another. Some are sadistic serial killers. Some are getaway drivers of
drug robberies gone bad. Some seem mentally disabled.
Curtis reads his own court files and pores over evidence and testimony that
make no sense to him. He reads the other inmates' case files - they ask him to,
as soon as they realize he knows how to read.
He plays the death row version of chess, the board a piece of cardboard pulled
back and forth across the floor between cells. He plays a guitar until the
guards take it from him.
He joins a prison gang for protection. He feels himself slipping away.
"You can't even punch someone there. That's seen as weak. You have to stab. You
become belligerent, aggressive, crazy. You lose your humanity. Everybody does.
You can't stop it."
Were you ever violent, Curtis?
"Only when I had to be," he whispers.
In January 2001 - Curtis McCarty's 16th year on death row - Oklahoma executes 6
men and 1 woman. 7 times in 1 month, Curtis takes off his shoes and bangs them
against his toilet.
1 of those 7 is Billy Ray Fox, convicted of felony murder and put to death
despite his insistence that he was the getaway driver and didn't kill the 3
victims of a grocery store robbery turned murder.
Billy is Curtis' cellmate. His best friend.
By 2001, "I had completely come apart," Curtis tells the audience.
He decides to end his legal appeals, decides to forget the mistakes and
untruths that gnaw at him whenever he reads his case file. He decides to die
for a murder he didn't commit.
And then mail arrives from his mother. There is no note inside the envelope,
just a newspaper story she had clipped out.
"Gilchrist under investigation for wrongdoing," the headline says.
***
At the lectern, Curtis' voice is getting louder. His voice begins to bounce off
the auditorium walls. The room is completely, utterly silent. We can hear the
banging now.
During Joyce Gilchrist's watch, inconclusive blood and DNA tests had somehow
become positive tests. Evidence that might have exonerated murder and rape
suspects disappeared.
"60 Minutes" and other national news heavy hitters did investigations showing
that her success in court might be tied to something besides magic, black or
otherwise. Other forensic chemists turned against her. She was sued, booted out
of professional organizations, fired. Hundreds of cases she had worked on now
flap in the legal breeze.
The FBI investigated eight cases of misconduct, which led to the release of
three prisoners. One man who had spent 15 years in prison for a rape that DNA
testing proved he didn't commit. Another man who spent 17 years on death row
for a murder that a DNA test called into question.
And Curtis McCarty, whose own DNA test, when he got 1 after nearly 2 decades,
showed that his didn't match the DNA found at the crime scene.
He is released in 2007 after serving more than 21 years in prison, almost all
of it on death row.
He is 44 years old.
He moves back in with his parents. He takes care of his mother, who is dying of
a lung disease. He plays Barbies with his niece, who is 3, and teaches her to
say "I'm going to be a nuclear physicist when I grow up."
But he is not joyous. He is aimless. Depressed. Furious.
"My attorneys were worried about me because I was basically a recluse," he
tells the audience. "They decided to give me something to do."
So they send him to Nebraska.
He passes the statue of Honest Abe, enters the State Capitol and walks into the
rotunda. He is there in Lincoln to testify before the Legislature as it
considers a bill to abolish the death penalty, and he does. But something else
happens.
He turns, shakes the hand of the 1st person he is introduced to - and she
becomes his girlfriend.
She is Amy Miller, the legal director of the Nebraska chapter of the American
Civil Liberties Union.
Curtis says he admires her because she fights for people no one else will fight
for, and because she is friendly with people who don't agree with her politics.
He tries to treat her kindly and cheer her up when she's down. She makes sure
he gets to all his speaking engagements: Curtis doesn't have a car, and his
short-term memory is shot.
He has a lot of appointments these days: He speaks at small-town Nebraska high
schools. Auditoriums in Lincoln and Omaha. Events in Alaska and New York City.
Japan. Rome. Paris.
Not long ago, he spoke to a committee of the United Nations.
Before every speech he is terrified, sure that he will sound silly, sure that
professors and diplomats and activists don't want to hear from a man like him.
And if the speech at Creighton is any indication, when he is done the
professors and diplomats and activists jump out of their seats and give him a
standing ovation, because he has wowed them. And maybe because clapping is the
only thing they can think to do.
Curtis McCarty, 1 of 142 men and women who have been exonerated while on death
row, shakes hands and talks to well-wishers and returns to the house he and Amy
share in Lincoln.
Most of those exonerated are, like Curtis, a product of the modern era. Many
are spared by DNA testing.
When Curtis is by himself, he wonders: How many people on Oklahoma's death row
died before a DNA test could prove their innocence?
How many Americans just like him has the death penalty killed?
He wonders this, and it drives him.
He says he will continue to accept all invitations in the 32 states that still
allow the death penalty. (Iowa abolished capital punishment 48 years ago.)
He will continue to speak in Nebraska. Last week, the most successful effort at
repealing the death penalty in decades narrowly failed because of a filibuster
in the Nebraska Legislature. The bill will carry over to the 2014 session.
Curtis will continue to do what he does, and the whole time he will hear the
sound. It is crystal clear, and it is in surround sound, and it is turned all
the way up inside his head.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
For Curtis McCarty, the banging is the story. For Curtis McCarty, the banging
won't ever go away.
************
Death penalty: for and against
3 arguments for
Closure: In some cases the family members of victims say capital punishment
helps end a horrible chapter in their lives - a chapter that began when their
loved one was killed by the person later put to death for the murder.
More accuracy now: Some pro-death penalty advocates acknowledge flaws in cases
tried during the previous half-century, but say today's DNA testing makes it
less likely the wrong person will be convicted.
Justice served: Death penalty proponents often argue that penalties for taking
a life should include the government's ability to take the convicted murderer's
life, noting that an eye for an eye is a centuries-old tradition embraced by
different civilizations and different religions.
3 arguments against
Wrongfully executed: More than 300 Americans have been exonerated by DNA
testing and released from prison, 1/4 of them after being convicted of murder.
Which raises the question "How many innocent people have been put to death?"
Cost: Anti-death penalty advocates argue that the cost of the death penalty far
outweighs the cost of a life spent in prison. California, for example, spent
$137 million on death penalty cases between 2007 and 2009 and didn't execute a
single prisoner during that time. Florida spends an estimated $24 million on
death row for every one execution it carries out.
Stop the killing: Murder is wrong, and the nation shouldn't participate in a
system sanctioning the killing of murderers, those opposed to the death penalty
often argue.
[sources: Nebraska Legislature, the Innocence Project, Death Penalty
Information Center, Focus on the Death Penalty, University of Alaska]
(source: Omaha World-Herald)
NEBRASKA:
Broken system
In 1975, my mother was murdered by Wesley Peery. She was bound and gagged and
seated on the toilet in the back room of our family coin store; after they had
finished ransacking the coin store, they had left the building. Peery returned
and shot my mother 3 times in the head.
My mother was not the only person that he had murdered. A famous murder case in
1955 that just recently had come to fruition involved Nancy Parker who was
raped and strangled by Peery. However, Parker's husband, Darrel, was badgered
into saying he had been the one who murdered his wife, which he immediately
recanted.
Peery was found guilty of murdering my mother and was sentenced to death. After
all the appeals and open heart surgery he received, he eventually passed away
on death row from natural causes. My mother was not given the same chance at
appeals and surgery to keep her alive so she could undergo more appeals. She
and the rest of my family did not receive closure on what had been an act of
greed and in Peery's case the act of a serial killer.
I believe if we are going to have a death penalty, it should be one that works.
The system that we have now is broken.
Louis Mitzner, Lincoln
(source: Journal World)
CALIFORNIA:
Galvan gets death penalty for murder
State prison inmate Robert Galvan was sentenced to death this week for the
murder of his cellmate in 2010.
Galvan, 37, was found guilty by a jury in March for the 1st-degree murder of
fellow cellmate Robert Johnson, 29, at Corcoran State Prison. Galvan was
serving 4 consecutive life sentences at the time for robbery, kidnapping and
assault with a deadly weapon.
While the murder case was pending in 2012, he also got out of his handcuffs,
assaulted his counsel and stabbed a correctional officer.
In his decision, Judge Peter Spinetta said the murder was vicious and
preplanned. He said there was no motive for killing and that Johnson was
defenseless during the attack. Considering Galvan's long history of criminal
activity, Spinetta said he had no choice but to agree with the jury's verdicts
and give Galvan the death penalty.
"The evidence shows that the danger he poses to others cannot be curbed by
imprisonment, even for life," he said at the Wednesday hearing. "Under the
circumstances, imposition of a death sentence is not only warranted, it is
without viable alternative."
According to the county, a motion was filed to give Galvan life without the
possibility of parole instead of the death penalty, but Spinetta denied it,
again citing his conclusion that imprisonment wouldn't change his behavior.
After the sentencing, Galvan was transported to death row at San Quentin State
Prison, where he will stay until the sentence is carried out. Galvan is the 1st
person to get the death penalty in Kings County since 2010.
(source: Hanford Sentinel)
USA:
Boston bombing judge becomes target over Miranda rights
A Harvard Medical School research assistant who has served as a U.S. judge for
23 years now finds herself at the center of the Boston Marathon bombing case,
and by extension the post-Sept. 11 issue of whether, and when, suspected
terrorists deserve constitutional rights.
Marianne Bowler, who also freelanced for magazines before going to law school,
became a civil litigator for the Justice Department in the late 1970s. She put
her background to use, specializing in personal injury cases, medical
malpractice, swine flu and asbestos litigation, before eventually rising to be
the 2nd-most powerful federal prosecutor in Massachusetts.
Now 66 and a federal magistrate judge, her career as an attorney and jurist
took on a new headline when, at a bedside court hearing in Boston's Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center last month, she advised bombing suspect Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev of his rights under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Miranda v. Arizona.
On May 30, she is scheduled to preside over the first full court hearing in
Tsarnaev's prosecution, as the government seeks to show a trial is warranted on
the two capital charges he faces. Tsarnaev, 19, is accused of carrying out the
April 15 attack that killed 3 and injured 260 with his brother Tamerlan, 26,
who died after a shootout with police. Bowler also presides over the
prosecution in Boston federal court of three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends
accused of hindering the probe.
Bowler read Tsarnaev his rights to remain silent and seek legal counsel in the
hospital room hearing April 22, three days after he was captured. During those
three days, Tsarnaev, according to law enforcement officials, revealed details
of the attack to investigators who were acting under a so-called public safety
exception that allows pre-Miranda questioning if there is a reasonable belief
there is imminent danger to the public.
While he answered their questions freely during that time, he stopped talking
after Bowler read him his rights, said Republican lawmakers, who seized on this
in the following days, making Bowler the issue with accusations that she chose
to intervene in the investigation.
"I totally disagree with what she did," said Rep. Peter King, a New York
Republican. "From talking to a number of FBI agents, this appears to be
unprecedented for a judge to walk in and in effect stop the interrogation and
provide Miranda rights."
Bowler's action was "highly unusual" and may have harmed the FBI probe, Rep.
Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an
interview last month. "The problem in this case is you have a judge who hastily
intervened" in the public safety exception.
"That cost us dearly in terms of valuable intelligence" about the bombing and
other possible plots, Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who leads the U.S.
House Homeland Security Committee, said last month. "The FBI was cut short in
their interrogation when the magistrate judge decided to Mirandize him."
Tsarnaev may have revealed more information if the judge hadn't stepped in,
McCaul said. As an example, the lawmaker cited Tsarnaev's pre-Miranda
revelation that he and Tamerlan had discussed going to Times Square in New York
to detonate at least seven more explosives.
The problem with the lawmakers' criticisms of Bowler is that they are
misplaced, because she was just doing her job, according to the Justice
Department, the U.S. Attorney's Office and defense lawyers.
Authorities are required to notify courts of an arrest within 48 hours by
supplying an affidavit showing there was probable cause for the detainment.
Once that complaint is signed by a judge, an initial court appearance must be
scheduled without "undue delay," according to court rules.
The Justice Department confirmed that, as required under rules of criminal
procedure, Bowler didn't become involved in the case until April 21 when
prosecutors filed a criminal complaint, which she signed that day.
"The court, that evening, scheduled an initial appearance for Monday, which it
then coordinated with the prosecutors, federal defender, court reporter, U.S.
Marshal Service and the hospital," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the
government. Under those same rules, the judge is required to advise a defendant
of his rights at the initial appearance.
Susan Phalen, a spokeswoman for Rogers, declined to comment on Bowler. Mike
Rosen, a spokesman for McCaul, said the congressman had reversed his position
since his April 26 statement, alleging that the FBI provided inaccurate
information about the reading of Miranda rights to Tsarnaev.
King said the interrogation should have continued for as long as it took to get
details about the planning of the attack, even if it meant the information
couldn't be used against the suspect. There's enough evidence to prosecute
Tsarnaev without that information, he said.
"Whether it was the FBI's fault or the judge's fault, the Miranda should not
have been read," King said.
Jason Pack, an FBI spokesman, declined to comment on lawmakers' statements.
There was nothing unusual about Bowler reading the Miranda warning, said
Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for Boston U.S. Attorney Carmen
Ortiz, who is prosecuting Tsarnaev. "There have been claims that the judge
abruptly entered the hospital room unannounced; that simply was not the case."
Brendan Garvin, Bowler's spokesman, declined to comment on the lawmakers'
statements.
Friends of Bowler said that the sudden politicization of her role runs counter
to her reputation.
"I was very glad to see that she didn't play to the critics, because she ran
that initial appearance in the hospital in the same way it would have been
conducted if it had taken place in a courtroom involving an anonymous
defendant," said Mark Pearlstein, a defense lawyer who has known Bowler since
the late 1980s and had an office next to hers when they were federal
prosecutors. The criticism is "wildly misplaced," he said.
Bowler is evenhanded with both sides of the courtroom aisle, said Pearlstein,
now a criminal defense lawyer who leads the Boston office of the law firm
McDermott Will & Emery.
"I would not regard her as being reflexively liberal or conservative,"
Pearlstein said in a phone interview. "She's taken a baseball umpire's view of
calling them as she sees them."
Tsarnaev is recovering from wounds sustained during the police manhunt
following the bombing. U.S. authorities are also probing the activities of
others, including Tamerlan's widow, and investigators have traveled to Russia
and elsewhere in pursuit of leads on the genesis of the attack.
Lawmakers briefed by federal law enforcement officials have said the Tsarnaev
brothers, ethnic Chechens who came to the United States with their parents as
refugees from Russia's Caucasus region, were motivated by radical Islam they
learned mostly over the internet.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now held at a federal prison medical center west of Boston,
is charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and
may face the death penalty if convicted. He told investigators the original
plan was to target the city's July 4 celebration and that the brothers attacked
last month's race after building their bombs - pressure cookers filled with
explosives - faster than expected, according to an official briefed on the
matter.
Bowler may be replaced by a U.S. district judge if a grand jury indicts
Tsarnaev. For now, she is the arbiter of the Obama administration's effort to
bring the alleged bomber to justice in a case where prosecutors have yet to say
whether they will seek the death penalty.
The day after Tsarnaev's May 30 hearing, Bowler is scheduled to preside over
the next court appearance of his friend, Robel Phillipos, 19. He is accused of
lying to investigators about how he and 2 other friends at the University of
Massachusetts-Dartmouth reacted when they realized Tsarnaev might have been
involved in the attack.
Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, has already sought to put distance between himself
and the other 2 men, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, saying he - unlike
them - isn't accused of destroying evidence. Phillipos was released on bail and
is under "strict house arrest," as ordered by Bowler.
Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov, both 19, are from Kazakhstan. They are accused of
disposing of a backpack containing fireworks wrappings they found in Tsarnaev's
dorm room April 18, after the FBI released pictures of the Tsarnaev brothers.
Both in the U.S. on student visas, Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov waived a probable
cause hearing that Bowler had scheduled for this week because their lawyers
wanted more time to see government evidence.
Bowler, whose list of citations on her resume includes as many medical journals
as legal publications, was a pre-med student in Regis College in Weston, Mass.,
where she graduated in 1967. She focused on biochemistry while at Harvard,
according to a biography supplied by the court, and as a writer on medical
subjects before obtaining a law degree from Suffolk University in Boston.
Born in Boston, she became a judge there in 1990, after serving in various
roles as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston beginning in 1978, according to a
biography on the federal court's website. As a government lawyer, she was part
of a New England "strike force" against organized crime in 1979.
Bowler has a reputation for avoiding ideology and public pressure in
high-profile cases, defense lawyers and former colleagues said.
She is known for a formal approach to interacting with litigants, said Michael
Kendall, a formal federal prosecutor in Boston who has known Bowler since the
early 1980s.
"I can't think of a person who would be less interested in injecting any
predisposed views into a case than her," Kendall, who now leads the
white-collar defense group at McDermott Will & Emery in Boston, said in a phone
interview. "Whatever ideological viewpoint she has never comes into the
courtroom."
Before ascending to the bench, Bowler was a trial lawyer for the civil division
of the U.S. Attorney's Office - a role that required her to defend the U.S. in
litigation.
Richard Egan, a retired FBI agent, said that when he was sued by a political
activist in the 1980s, Bowler was given the job of defending him.
"I could not have had better representation if I had hired the most expensive
law firm on Wall Street," Egan said in a phone interview. "She's practical,
understands personalities, understands the process and doesn't overstep it."
An hour after Tsarnaev's bedside hearing last month, Bowler was back in her
courtroom, presiding over an unrelated criminal case involving the illegal
possession of drugs and firearms.
At that hearing, she displayed her propensity for formality in her courtroom.
While Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn MacKinlay questioned his primary witness,
an officer from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, MacKinlay sat
down briefly to review his notes, and then asked another question.
Bowler immediately asked him if he intended to continue questioning his
witnesses from a seated position. MacKinlay said it wasn't his intention and
hopped to his feet before continuing.
"Courts are the last bastion of procedure and form in this country - she
protects that civility and formality," Robert Peabody, a former state and
federal prosecutor in Boston who now practices at Collora in Boston, said in a
phone interview.
(source: Concord Monitor)
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