Oct. 7 OKLAHOMA: BOOK REVIEW----Grisham skillfully lays down law in true story of injustice The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town----By John Grisham, Doubleday, 368 pp., $28.95 In his 1st foray into nonfiction, novelist John Grisham (``The Firm," "The Broker") has crafted a legal thriller every bit as suspenseful and fast-paced as his best - selling fiction. Grisham skillfully tells the tragic true story of Ron Williamson, who became a hero in Ada, Okla., when he was drafted by baseball's Oakland Athletics in 1971 as the 41st overall pick. Williamson dreamed of becoming the next Mickey Mantle, but in a pro career that spanned 6 years, he never advanced beyond the minor leagues. In his rookie season, Williamson batted a mediocre .265, then a dismal .147 the next season. Although Williamson's baseball dreams came crashing down, he refused to acknowledge that. He drowned his disappointments in alcohol and began showing early signs of deteriorating mental health. After his beauty-queen wife divorced him, Williamson seemed to unravel. Over six months in 1978, he twice faced rape charges, but was found not guilty. A depressed, alcohol-soaked Williamson moved back to Ada, sleeping on his mother's couch. He became the town drifter, a has-been who haunted local watering holes telling tales of his thwarted baseball dreams. Then, on Dec. 8, 1982, young cocktail waitress Debbie Sue Carter was found raped and murdered in her Ada apartment. Although Ada police had no evidence connecting Williamson to the Carter murder, and despite strong evidence exonerating him and pointing to another Ada man, they made Williamson their prime suspect, along with his drinking buddy Dennis Fritz. The pressure on Ada police was turned up considerably after a 2nd young woman was murdered. In an anxiety-filled atmosphere, Ada police used psychological coercion to force confessions from 2 young men, winning dubious convictions on this 2nd murder. Then in 1986, they arrested Williamson and Fritz for the Carter murder. Grisham describes the evidence presented at Williamson's 1987 murder trial as a combination of junk science and patently unreliable testimony from jailhouse snitches hoping to parley false testimony into plea bargains. A prosecution expert told the jury that Williamson's hair "matched" hair found at the murder scene. Grisham shows exactly why this expert testimony was both highly unreliable and misleading. Evidence possessed by the prosecutors tending to show Williamson's innocence was never revealed to his lawyer, who was literally blind. Williamson's lawyer never even brought up his client's questionable mental competency. Most egregiously, the only witness who testified that Williamson had ever seen Carter was a felon who did so at the "suggestion" of Ada police. This same witness would later be convicted of murdering Carter. Williamson was convicted and sentenced to death. He'd spend the next dozen years on death row, seeking a new trial while his mental condition worsened. A few days before his scheduled 1994 execution, a federal court granted a stay. After reviewing Williamson's trial record and finding it riddled with errors, the federal court ordered a new trial. As the process moved slowly forward, a bombshell struck in 1999. DNA testing was performed and the results proved that Williamson had absolutely no connection to Carter or the murder scene. On April 15, 1999, Ron Williamson was set free. He later sued in federal court for wrongful conviction and received a large financial settlement. Yet Grisham's ending is decidedly not a happy one. Williamson continued to drink and confront serious mental health issues. In his final 5 years, Williamson moved 17 times. He died in 2004 from liver problems. "An Innocent Man" is a page-turning and chilling descent into one innocent man's Kafkaesque nightmare of injustice and madness. (source: Boston Globe) **************************** Required reading The end of innocence----John Grishams nonfiction debut, The Innocent Man, reaches a chilling verdict on the US justice system. Marcel Berlins weighs the evidence THE INNOCENT MAN----by John Grisham, Century, 18.99; 368pp JOHN GRISHAMS first entry into nonfiction after 18 bestselling novels is, on the surface, puzzling. It not unknown for writers of thrillers and crime fiction to turn their forensic knowledge and skills to the solving of real-life crimes and the reversal of miscarriages of justice. Patricia Cornwell spent much time and millions of dollars to try to prove (unconvincingly) that Jack the Ripper was the English painter Walter Sickert. Arthur Conan Doyle espoused the causes of 2 wrongly convicted men Oscar Slater and George Edalji. James Ellroy (author of The Black Dahlia) has written of his personal quest to discover his mothers murderer. In Ultimate Punishment Scott Turow (Presumed Innocent) inveighed against the death penalty. But Grisham has chosen to tell a story that does not involve himself in any way. He is not a detective attempting to find out the truth about the murder for which The Innocent Man of the title was convicted. He is not part of a campaign to draw attention to a gross miscarriage of justice, because that had been officially admitted long before Grisham came on to the scene. He has made no startling new discoveries nor provided any dramatic new insights. Moreover, the murder in question created no great stir or publicity other than in Oklahoma, where it was committed. Nor did the errors in the justice system that followed. It did not involve anyone famous except, in a small way and only locally, the unlikeable accused. So little impression did the case make that Grisham had never heard of it until, 2 years ago, he read, by chance, an obituary in The New York Times, headline d: "Ronald Williamson, Freed from Death Row, dies at 51." Intrigued, he researched further. So why is The Innocent Man, shorn of the usual trappings of successful books about miscarriages of justices, worth reading? Why do a seedy murder, an unsympathetic accused, no surprises, no glamour, no celebrities, a lack of new evidence and a known conclusion add up to an absorbing book? First, the small, sad tale of Ron Williamson is a huge indictment of the US criminal justice system at every level, from the first investigation of a crime to its frequent conclusion capital punishment. Secondly, Grishams talent for storytelling, which has made him such a popular novelist, allows him to turn the commonplace into the gripping. Ada is a small rural town in the Oklahoma Bible Belt, once an oil centre and now full of factories and small businesses. The murder victim, Debbie Carter, was last seen on her way home after an evening at a bar where she worked as a cocktail waitress. Her body was found in her bedroom the next morning. She had been strangled after a fierce struggle with her assailant. This was in 1982, long before DNA became the polices most important investigative tool. There were fingerprints and a few samples of hair. Williamson was a suspect from the start. Once it was thought that he might become Adas most famous citizen, for a different reason. An exceptionally gifted baseball player, he was noticed by several clubs and had reason to believe that he might one day play in the national leagues. He never quite made it, a combination of an injured arm and a dissolute life ending his ambitions and driving him back to Ada, where he became an embarrassing drunk and woman-chaser. Dirty, rude, prone to strange behaviour, keeping weird hours, still living with his mother in a house near the victim's, and with a minor history of sexual assault, he fitted the police's idea of who the murderer should be. The drawback was that there was no evidence whatsoever against him. The crime remained unsolved for 5 years. In 1987, for reasons still obscure, Williamson, and an acquaintance, equally innocent, were charged with Debbie Carters murder. What emerges from Grishams meticulous account is a combination of lying witnesses, incompetent or corrupt police investigations, bad and lazy defence lawyers, third-rate prosecutors, wrong scientific evidence, sheer bad luck (his highly respected church-going mother, his only alibi, had died) and, it has to be admitted, the accused's own disruptive behaviour in court. He was convicted and sentenced to death. It took 12 years for the injustice to be corrected. Williamson was freed from death row 5 days before the date set for his lethal injection, but it was not until 1999 that he finally left prison, fully exonerated, a beneficiary of DNA science that proved his innocence conclusively. He drank himself to death 5 years later. Grisham was shocked by what his research revealed. He had been "exposed to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about." What happened in The Innocent Man, he now realises, happens all the time, everywhere in the US. In the small towns, the police are often untrained and unchecked. Murders and rapes are still shocking events and people want justice, and quickly. They, citizens and jurors, trust their authorities to behave properly. When they don't, the result is Ron Williamson . . ." Grisham has come rather late to this conclusion. There is little in the Williamson case that will surprise anyone with any knowledge of the workings of the justice system in small-town (or even big city) America. No matter. The Innocent Man is a sincere, readable, lively book that raises important questions. It will not achieve the readership of Grishams novels; but it will have performed a greater service. John Grisham appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival today. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com Grisham Case history THE LIFE---- Born in Arkanas in 1955, Grisham studied at the University of Mississippi School of Law. After graduating he worked for nearly ten years in a small-town general law practice before being elected as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983. A year later he began writing his 1st novel, inspired by a harrowing child rape case that he witnessed. He spent 3 years finishing A Time to Kill, and has written a further 18 novels. After the success of his 2nd, The Firm, he gave up his practice to write full time. He now lives with his wife and 2 children in Mississippi and Virginia. ON BECOMING A LAWYER ---- "My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realised that my father hated the legal profession." ON BECOMING AN AUTHOR ----"Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness." (source: The (UK) Times) USA: Learning to forgive----There are different kinds and different paths for different people The man who killed or wounded 10 Amish girls earlier this week has become the devil incarnate for some observers but an object of forgiveness for those he hurt the most deeply. Mary Altaffer, Associated PressThe funeral procession for 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol makes its way down Georgetown Road in Georgetown, Pa. Ebersole was killed in Monday's shootings along with several other young girls at an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pa. How does that happen? It's a question many Americans have asked themselves, as images of horse-drawn buggies and their sad-but-peaceful-looking occupants rolled across our TV screens while reporters and commentators struggled to understand the dichotomy of such senseless violence without the predictable rage. After nearly a week of what one Amish bishop called "our 9/11," an author who knows the community told The Associated Press: "They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death," said Gertrude Huntington, a Michigan researcher who has written a book about children in Amish society. "The hurt is very great," Huntington said. "But they don't balance the hurt with hate." Does that response come simply from self-control or community expectation, or is it something deeper in their religious mandate that extends mercy without justice before the deep grieving process has even begun? Fred Luskin, director and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, said in studying forgiveness over time, "I think there has to be some processing of the grief response before one can come to a genuine experience of forgiveness. On some level what you are forgiving is your own outrage," which those who have been through such trauma know can often come much later, after the initial shock has worn off. But that said, "parts of what they are doing are so laudatory and separate from even forgiveness, which is that they are not punishing this person's family," he told the Deseret Morning News. In reaching out to killer Charles Roberts' family and even inviting them to the victims' funerals, the Amish are more in keeping with "what Jesus would do" than most. Chris Hondros, Getty ImagesFlowers, notes and other tokens of sympathy lie on the side of Mine Road in Nickel Mines, Pa., where a gunman killed several children and himself. Yet he wonders about "the inner quality of that forgiveness. I don't know how you can do that without feeling some of the pain and struggling with your own loss and woundedness," though he said that processing such feelings "doesn't have to take as long as most people do. "They are telling us that (their) entire belief system and orientation is to God's word and a sense that (humans) don't assign justice that God does that. It's almost like playing a game of Monopoly," where players acknowledge that "we don't set the rules but God does. And his rules are that things happen to us that we don't understand. Our job is to be kind. They're showing the value and power of that kind of conditioning," while those more concerned about justice or even vengeance "are showing the value and power of our secular conditioning." Luskin said he's not implying that it's right to resent or hold a grudge, "but we assume that as a default. People who have this seamless religious experience have a different response to it." The Amish reaction "would not be what I would teach. In the world I live in, people have to go through some level of grieving and suffering to find the place in themselves that transcends that. "The Amish have a ready mechanism for that in a deep and absolute faith. It seems like a better choice if you are going to have to pick one but it's never the way I go out and teach." In his book, "Forgive for Good," Luskin delineates the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, saying one does not prescribe the other. "You do not have to forget what happened. Forgiveness does not mean you lie down and become a doormat when you are hurt." Rather, it means people find peace despite pain and mistreatment, and take responsibility for how they feel. In forgiving, people learn to take painful events less personally, to make better decisions for the future and to feel better both physically and spiritually. Luskin has conducted 4 different studies that show people who are taught to forgive become "less angry, more hopeful, less depressed, less anxious and less stressed," which led to greater physical well-being. Those who forgive are also "more confident, and they learn to like themselves more." There is no evidence the Amish are extending forgiveness for such reasons, but Luskin doesn't think their expressions of forgiveness come simply out of being in a temporary state of shock, either. "The only thing I would wonder is if it belies some of the discomfort some community members are feeling." Kristina Coop Gordon, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Tennessee, agrees. She's done research on the tendency of religious women to be more forgiving toward their partners in domestic violence cases than secular women. "Those who are religious do have much more of a mandate or feel more pressure to forgive than those who are not. I have data showing those who endorse high levels of religious attendance and consider themselves very religious are more willing to forgive." That conclusion comes out of a simple measure of forgiveness, but when more complex measures are applied, religious women "don't always score higher," she said. "What that suggests is that when they feel the pressure to forgive, they may say they did, but they may not have gone through the process that those who study it think they need to go through." She has no data on the Amish community in particular, so Gordon said she has been scratching her head as she considers their expressions of forgiveness. "The only thing I could think of was they are such a different society from the rest of us, and could this possibly be that they could have these feelings?" In the normal population, "I would be very skeptical of it. But they have a very communal approach to the world, it seems, and they're not so individualistic as most of us are. So part of me wonders if they are not better able to do this than the rest of us because they have more of a communal spirit." Because it's such a different society and their faith commitment runs so deep, "I wonder if there is not something operating here that's different from most of our responses. The more I study forgiveness, there are different kinds and different paths for different people." Elaine Emmi, a local Quaker and president of the state's Interfaith Roundtable, said she sees quite a bit of similarity between the Amish and the Quakers in dealing with injustice and forgiveness. She watched a father she knew personally forgive his adopted son for killing their wife and mother. The man worked with the legal system to avoid the death penalty for the killer and to seek healing. "It was an amazing case where you can't bring those back who are gone, but hopefully you can heal the people who are here. It was that sense of 'Let's work through the issue and not just lock him up and throw away the key,' which doesn't provide rehabilitation or allow for change." The concept of "restorative justice" goes to healing beyond retribution. "You have to embrace that person and draw them back into the community ... . We really do feel much like the Amish in restorative justice and creating harmony within a community," she said, acknowledging that healing "just takes a very long time. You have to know that you are going to suffer through bouts of pain." Quakers practice mentally "holding in the light" a person or problem, praying for resolution and healing. She hopes tragedies like the Amish have experienced and their reaction will help bring about questions and discussion. And there seem to be plenty of questions when it comes to forgiveness. A discussion about the topic at the University of Utah a few weeks before the school shooting drew dozens of people eager to understand how to forgive and whether it's really possible. Gordon believes the "proof is in the pudding" with the Amish what the outcome over time will be for that community in terms of mental health and how they feel long-term rather than right now. "That's where you would know if it's genuine rather than forced." Luskin said humans don't have to want vengeance. "I wish we were all that kind of Christian," but with the Amish, "it's the inner experience of some in their community that I just don't know. For some or many people, they can seamlessly do this. I'm not convinced that everyone can, even if they don't want revenge." (source: Deseret News) INDIANA: Indiana inmate admits to killing 5 women and 1 teenage girl Prosecutors in northwest Indiana are closing the books on some old murder-rape cases. They say a mentally retarded man told a judge in Crown Point that he raped and killed 5 women and a teenage girl more than a decade ago. As part of an agreement, Eugene Britt, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to only three murders. Britt will be sentenced to 245 years in prison. Last week, the judge ruled Britt was mentally retarded and could not get the death penalty. He's already serving life in prison plus 100 years for the 1995 slaying of an eight-year-old girl. (source: Associated Press) WISCONSIN: Death penalty would present brutality over wisdom Dear Editor: Channel 3 had a story saying a majority of Wisconsin residents favored a death penalty. Are they aware of the details behind the issue? A majority of the churches and humanist societies in Wisconsin have come out against a death penalty in Wisconsin. 2/3 of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. Shall Wisconsin join the world majority or join ranks with China, Iran and Saudi Arabia (which together with other states in the United States make up for 94 % of the world's executions, according to Amnesty International)? A study by New Jersey on its death penalty has the startling figures of $253 million spent on death penalty convictions since the last reinstatement of the death penalty and of the 60 death penalty convictions, 50 were reversed. Effective money spent? That is what the Department of Corrections is asking for in the next budget. Or $52 million less than what BadgerCare is seeking. Shall Wisconsin become a state that considers killing criminals more important than providing health care for its citizens? How often do you see a rich person on death row? How often blacks versus whites? The last death penalty conviction in Wisconsin was a public hanging in Kenosha, where, according to historical notes, the death was so drawn out that the public was outraged by its brutality. It may become lethal injection now, but it's still brutal. Let's not answer brutality with brutality, let's answer it with wisdom. Susan Hagstrom -- Madison (source: Letter to the Editor, The Capital Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OKLA., USA, IND., WIS.
Rick Halperin Sat, 7 Oct 2006 23:11:18 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)