History > 2005 > USA > Justice > Prisons

THE LIFER

Randy Arroyo

is serving a life sentence for helping kill Captain Cobo,

a crime committed when he was 17.

He will become eligible for parole in 2037, when he is 57.

He doubts he will ever get out.

Richard Patterson for The New York Times

4.10.2005

Serving Life, With No Chance of Redemption

NYT

Oct. 5, 2005

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/
us/serving-life-with-no-chance-of-redemption.html

Evaluation of Medical Care Provider

in the City's Jails

Is Questioned

December 26, 2005
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

During the five years that a profit-making company, Prison Health Services, has provided medical care in New York City's jails, city health officials have assured the public that they were closely monitoring its work. The centerpiece of that oversight is a quarterly report card that scores the company's performance on all manner of care, a level of scrutiny that the city says is unusually rigorous.

And during those years, while state investigators have faulted Prison Health for a rash of inmate suicides in New York, as well as deaths in jails upstate, city health officials have regularly given the company failing grades in many areas, including critical matters like treating diabetes, mental illnesses and acute medical problems.

Despite the disturbing reports, city officials say that they have seen improvement, and that they have made their standards even tougher.

But a close examination of how the city evaluates Prison Health's work reveals a process that often appears to be slapdash, subjective and lenient. Several experts in health care auditing, as well as doctors and nurses who work in the jails for the city and the company, question whether the report cards provide anything approaching an accurate picture of the medical services that cost New York taxpayers more than $100 million a year.

Officials of the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have repeatedly bent their own rules for measuring the company's performance, forgiving flaws that do not cause significant harm to inmates - and saving the company thousands of dollars in city penalties.

The department bases its report card on a review of inmates' medical charts, but lets Prison Health pull the charts itself - a practice that has allowed company employees to fix errors or omissions before city auditors could see the files, said two Prison Health clinicians and three health department employees involved in the process.

Some question the very basics of the arrangement: the monitoring is done by the same health department unit that awarded Prison Health a new $300 million contract last January - a dual role that some department employees and outside experts see as a potential conflict of interest.

Even the health department concedes that its auditing is better at measuring the company's adherence to technical contract obligations, like keeping proper records, than it is at showing the actual quality of its health care. "We're still struggling with how best to monitor that," said the city's health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.

Now the monitors themselves are being monitored. The state comptroller is auditing how the health department renewed its contract with Prison Health and how it oversees the work, an official in the comptroller's office said this week. "The audit began because the quality of the care has been a source of concern for a number of years," the official said.

The quality of health care in jails and prisons gets little public attention, even though everyone involved acknowledges that the stakes are high, and not just for inmates. The vast jail complex at Rikers Island is New York's crucible of public health, where doctors have a chance to treat some of the city's sickest and most troubled people before they return to the street.

City and company officials contend that Prison Health Services is doing a good job of caring for the more than 100,000 inmates who pass through city jails each year. And when the department rehired Prison Health last January for another three years, over the objections of the city comptroller and other officials, it promised to watch the company's performance more closely.

It beefed up the quarterly report card, setting standards in 39 areas of care; if the company failed to meet any standard 95 percent of the time, it would pay a penalty - usually $2,500 to $5,000 for each failing score. Those penalties could double if the company failed to meet the same standard twice in a row.

The two reports issued since then have given Prison Health a total of 22 failing grades, and penalized the company $107,000. Those reports, health officials say, are part of a comprehensive auditing effort that has six auditors in city jails every day reviewing inmates' medical charts.

"If there's a core value to the health department currently," Dr. Frieden said during a public meeting in October, "it's that we base our decisions on data."

But some of that data is meaningless, because Prison Health employees are able to review it and change it, said four people who work at Rikers - two Prison Health senior clinicians and two auditors who work for the health department's monitoring unit, Correctional Health Services. Those employees were granted anonymity because they said they would be punished for speaking to a reporter.

Every day, the health department gives the company a list of patients' charts it wants to review, a common practice in health care auditing. But sometimes, one auditor said, company doctors and supervisors go through the charts, correcting errors and filling in missing information, before handing them over. The auditor said that in one jail, the only way she could keep a physician's assistant from altering charts was to arrive at work first, at 5:30 a.m.

Some of the changes the company has made - like adding a signature or checking a box that had been overlooked - are minor, the city auditors said, though such omissions could lead to a failing grade. But sometimes, they said, company supervisors have filled in answers to important questions, like whether the inmate has H.I.V. or a mental illness.

"They'll just sit there and check 'no' to everything," without knowing whether the answers are true, said one auditor.

Prison Health officials said they knew of only one instance, in 2003, when an employee altered charts. The employee was disciplined, said Benjamin S. Purser Jr., the company's vice president for ethics and compliance. Health department officials said they were aware of a couple of isolated incidents of tampering.

But one city auditor said that the alterations were common, and that this year, after a mentally ill inmate died in the prison ward at NYU Downtown Hospital, a Prison Health doctor and mental-health workers went through the inmate's medical records, checking for missing information to fill in.

In another incident, in 2003, that auditor said, a Prison Health doctor used correction fluid - a conspicuous violation of basic medical procedure, because chart notes must be crossed out, never erased - to change the date when he reviewed an inmate's abnormal lab test result. The change made it seem as if he had done the review within 24 hours, as required, the auditor said.

The auditor said that complaints to health department supervisors had no effect. "It's so totally frustrating how they bend the rules," she said.

For some Prison Health doctors, the frustration is having to spend so much time on paperwork, which they say reveals little about the quality of care. "There's a long institutional history of fudging stuff," one clinician said. "What's a number?"

Even when all the numbers are in, and the audit is completed, the scores are open to revision. Prison Health is allowed to produce what is known as "loose paper," patient information that was missing from the charts during the audit, but later found. Some auditing experts say that is a generally accepted practice in health care reviews.

But the two city auditors said that Prison Health had sometimes misrepresented its work by turning in documents that it created after the audit. The company denied this.

And even after all that data is assembled and auditors determine the scores, the medical director of Correctional Health Services allows the company to argue in its defense, and sometimes changes the scores if Prison Health makes its case that a particular failing did not harm patients.

At least 19 times since 2001, the medical director has excused enough deficiencies in Prison Health's work that a failing score became a passing one, documents show. For example, inmates are supposed to receive a physical examination within four hours after being admitted to Rikers; but the medical director has repeatedly decided to overlook the timing - the whole point of the standard.

Health department officials said they felt the medical director should be allowed to exercise judgment, distinguishing a serious lapse from a minor one.

But one health department manager familiar with the auditing process said the agency was trying to make Prison Health Services look good, because it chose the company. "If P.H.S. looks bad," he said, "we look bad."

Several experts in health care auditing said that making allowances for company errors, and making subjective judgments, undercut the whole idea of holding the work to precise standards. "I don't mean to sound harsh," said Ron Simeone, who has designed auditing procedures for New York State and the United States Justice Department. "But this is tantamount to acknowledging that they have poor recordkeeping and a flawed measurement system."

Rick Koss, director of health policy research for the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, a nonprofit group that reviews care in hospitals, said medical audits should focus on proper procedure, not on whether lapses cause harm. "If someone with chest pain comes to the emergency room and they don't give him aspirin, he may not die," Mr. Koss said. "But that's basically irrelevant - that's the procedure."

These experts also said that because the city's report card requires only average scores across 10 jails, it fails to pinpoint any problem jails, like the women's jail at Rikers, where many Prison Health employees say the care is often worse than in other jails.

The health department has often boasted about the high bar it sets: that the company must comply with each standard at least 95 percent of the time. But that benchmark is illusory, city officials have acknowledged.

Dr. Arthur N. Gualtieri, the health department deputy who oversees jail health care, said in an interview in October that the required rate was actually 90 percent, because the department allowed a 5 percent "margin of error." Later, department officials amended that, saying that the margin of error varied from standard to standard, depending on how many charts were reviewed, and could be larger.

Still later, Dr. Frieden, the health commissioner, said he found the idea of rigidly insisting that the company reach a certain percentage "a little silly."

"Nobody does it like this," he said at a recent meeting of the Board of Correction, a city watchdog agency. "Doesn't make a lot of sense."

Dr. Frieden said his department still needed to make the scores a better reflection of actual medical care, not just the company's recordkeeping. "They should not just be paperwork," he said. "They should reflect actual quality of care."

Dr. Joe Goldenson, the director of jail health care in San Francisco, who has served as a federal court monitor of jails elsewhere, said the New York scores could produce a false sense of security. "I've seen a number of systems where you could look at the numbers and say, 'Gee, it functions well,' but the care that's being provided isn't good," he said.

Indeed, some serious medical lapses have occurred without the city detecting them, said one Prison Health doctor. In April, he said, nurses performed kidney dialysis on inmates for several weeks without a doctor present, as is required. The health department said it was aware of only one incident, in which a nurse dialyzed a patient with a doctor present but without a current order to do so. The nurse was disciplined, the department said.

But the incident was not mentioned on the report card for that quarter, and Prison Health was not penalized.

    Evaluation of Medical Care Provider in the City's Jails Is Questioned, NYT, 26.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/nyregion/26jails.html

Young Killer Is Ruled Competent;

Lawyers Acknowledge His Ruse

December 20, 2005
The New York Times
By KELLI KENNEDY

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Dec. 19 - A youth convicted in 2001 of stomping a 6-year-old playmate to death was ruled mentally competent on Monday for a hearing to determine whether he is returned to prison, perhaps for life. The ruling followed his lawyers' acknowledgment that he had faked being suicidal.

The 18-year-old defendant, Lionel Tate, arrested on robbery charges in May while on probation in the murder case, sent a judge a letter from jail earlier this month saying he was hearing voices and wanted to kill himself. The letter caused the judge, Joel T. Lazarus of Broward County Circuit Court, to postpone a hearing on whether Mr. Tate had violated probation. Instead, he ordered a competency hearing.

Mr. Tate's lawyers said at that hearing on Monday that his letter had actually been written by another inmate, who, they said, had also advised Mr. Tate about what to say to two court-appointed psychologists who subsequently examined him.

Mr. Tate was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001 for killing his playmate, Tiffany Eunick, when he was 12. He was initially sentenced to life in prison without parole, but an appeals court reversed his conviction in 2003, saying his mental competency should have been evaluated before trial. He avoided retrial by pleading guilty to second-degree murder, in exchange for one year's house arrest and then probation.

He was arrested again in May, however, this time on charges of robbing a pizza deliveryman at gunpoint. That arrest set off the events that led to Monday's hearing.

The prominent Miami trial lawyer Ellis Rubin, newly retained by Mr. Tate's family, said Monday that the defendant had admitted that the letter to the judge was written by an older inmate; Mr. Tate merely signed it.

"It became apparent that Lionel was told what to say in the letter and to the psychologists," Mr. Rubin said.

The two psychologists, who examined Mr. Tate separately, testified at the hearing that he had been manipulative and uncooperative. One of them, Barton Jones, said Mr. Tate had appeared to be "feigning a mental disorder."

The other, Trudy Block-Garfield, said, "I believe he tried to lead me to believe he was incompetent."

Judge Lazarus scheduled a hearing for Feb. 27 to determine whether Mr. Tate robbed the deliveryman, thus violating probation.

Young Killer Is Ruled Competent; Lawyers Acknowledge His Ruse,
NYT, 20.12.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/national/20tate.html

In Minnesota, an Odd Request:

Please Don't Fence the Inmates In

December 19, 2005
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

SHAKOPEE, Minn. - In 40 years here, Dennis Hron has never worried about the women living across the street - not even the murderers, the robbers and the kidnappers among them.

What Mr. Hron and other residents are up in arms about now is a plan to wall them off.

The women live in the Minnesota Correctional Facility, separated from the tidy suburban neighborhood that surrounds it by nothing more than a three-foot hedge, pruned to ground stubble in some spots in winter.

State corrections officials, concerned about the rising number of violent women in prison, want to cordon the facility off with a 12-foot fence. They argue that it is the only prison in the country with a maximum-security wing and no perimeter wall.

But residents and city officials say good fences would be wasted on good neighbors.

"They're better neighbors than neighbors," Mr. Hron said, referring to the 496 inmates in the prison, which in December included 79 killers, 5 kidnappers and 17 burglars. "The prison has been part of the community for a long time; a fence will divide that."

Residents of this suburb southwest of Minneapolis apparently did not consider the prison a blemish on the neighborhood when they bought their homes; over the years, most have come to see it as an asset.

Prisoners ran a day care center for a time and enrolled in high school classes by video link. They still play softball on a diamond just across the street from the local elementary school. The prison rents plots to local gardeners and allows neighbors to bicycle and jog on the grounds, despite the No Trespassing signs. People here still recall watching inmates milk cows and raise chickens when the prison kept a farm.

"They're out there every day walking, and there's no trouble," said Gary Hartmann, who has lived on a quiet street behind the prison for 28 years. "We're not concerned about safety issues. There have been a few walkaways, but nothing too violent. I don't see any reason to have a fence."

The warden, Rick Hillengass, counts seven escapes - or walkaways, as even he calls them - in the past 10 years. A young woman serving time for homicide fled to a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Minneapolis, then came back. (Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Hillengass said, named her Most Dedicated Fan.)

Another made it only to the other side of the street, where she stuck out her thumb and was picked up by an off-duty police officer, who promptly delivered her back to the prison. Others have gotten a few blocks only to encounter the Minnesota River and realize that it is too wide to swim across - and that the only bridge out requires them to walk through downtown Shakopee, where in their prison clothes they would surely be spotted.

Mr. Hron recalled one inmate who changed into some clothes left hanging to dry on someone's back deck. "That's a little scary," he said. "But generally, there hasn't been a problem."

Still, state corrections officials say the neighbors are ignoring a new reality: more women are in prison now, and they are more violent.

While there are still 13 times as many men as there are women in prison, the women's population is growing faster. Nationally, the number of women grew an average of 4.7 percent a year from 1995 to 2004; in Minnesota, the increase was far greater, an average of 10.8 percent a year. The population at Shakopee, the state's only prison for women, has doubled since 1998.

And while nationally men are more likely than women to be in prison for violent crimes, violent offenders accounted for half the growth in female prisoners from 2001 to 2004, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

That is only likely to grow: while the number of men arrested for violent crimes declined 20 percent from 1995 to 2004, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the number of women arrested for such crimes increased by 3 percent.

"We feel good about the fact that we've always had a very good relationship with the community," Mr. Hillengass said. "We're very concerned about trying to keep that. But I think a lot of people in the community think we house only low-level offenders. We don't."

The prison has been here, in different configurations, since the 1920's, and Shakopee has grown up around it: at 32,000 residents, this is one of the fastest-growing Minneapolis suburbs. The prison sits a few blocks from downtown in an established neighborhood of ranch houses, on a plot dotted by crabapple trees and pines, reminders of the farmland this once was.

The prisoners live in brick "cottages," and the grounds include a greenhouse and a large fitness center. Cameras on the perimeter watch the women on their daily outings. The only fence, however, is the backstop behind the softball diamond, which is across the street from the elementary school, a water tower and a cemetery. (The cemetery and the water tower have fences.)

"It's beautiful; it looks like a college campus," said David Hart, who lives across a bike path on the edge of the prison. "You put up a fence and searchlights, and it changes people's perception of what's there."

But the residents say they are concerned about more than property values. The average inmate gets out in six years, and only 12 are serving life sentences.

"We have to think about assimilating them back into society," said Mr. Hron, a former county commissioner. "Now they come out and play ball, they see us cutting our lawns or coming and going, they see what life is like out there, that people are enjoying it. It gives them a good picture, something to aspire to."

Mayor John Schmitt suggested that the fence might actually inspire more walkaways. "If suddenly you're inside a wall, and you can't see your neighbors," Mayor Schmitt said, "it will give you other thoughts. Your natural inclination is to say, 'I want to get outside those walls.' "

The fence would cost $4 million to $6 million. But at a recent meeting, neighbors told the warden that it would be a waste of taxpayer money; they were unimpressed by the statistics on escapes. "Five million for seven people in 10 years?" Mr. Hart said afterward.

In a nod to the community, state prison officials are suggesting that the fence be made of black metal pickets between carved stone or concrete posts - "the kind of fence you might find in a gated community," Mr. Hillengass said - with another fence 20 feet inside for extra protection. Lights would be positioned downward to avoid "the ball-field effect," he said, and there would be no concertina wire.

"If somebody gets out of this facility and causes some serious harm," the warden said, "we would be sitting here in a position of explaining why we hadn't done something about it - why we didn't have a system that tried to keep people inside. As sensitive as we are to the community, we have a public protection responsibility that goes beyond the neighborhood."

Now, visitors often toss drugs in the bushes for inmates, Mr. Hillengass said. And many of the women have come from violent relationships, reflected in restraining orders they have taken out against their partners. "That's an additional reason: to keep people off as well as people on," he said.

Mayor Schmitt remains unconvinced. On a recent tour, he pointed out that the fence would be almost as high as the unobtrusive, one-story prison buildings there now.

"I think it would look very forbidding, certainly not in keeping with a residential neighborhood," he said. "If they want a 12-foot fence, I would encourage them to move to the country."

    In Minnesota, an Odd Request: Please Don't Fence the Inmates In, NYT, 19.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19fence.html

U.S. Rebuffs Red Cross Request

for Access to Detainees Held in Secret

December 10, 2005
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - The United States said Friday that it would continue to deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to "a very small, limited number" of prisoners who are held in secret around the world, saying they are terrorists being kept incommunicado for reasons of national security and are not guaranteed any rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Adam Ereli, the State Department's deputy spokesman, said the United States would not alter its position after the president of the International Red Cross said in Geneva that his organization was holding discussions to gain access to all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

Mr. Ereli said that the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to certain terrorism suspects seized as "unlawful enemy combatants," but that, in any case, the United States treats most of them as prisoners of war.

"We're going the extra mile here," Mr. Ereli said, by allowing the Red Cross access to Al Qaeda suspects and others held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The Red Cross also has access to prisoners held in Iraq.

Aside from those detainees, about two or three dozen terrorism suspects, including a handful of top Al Qaeda operatives, are said by current and former intelligence officials to be held in secret locations.

On Thursday in Geneva, John Bellinger, the senior legal adviser of the State Department, acknowledged that the International Red Cross does not have access to all detainees held by American forces but declined to discuss the existence of secret detention centers.

The Red Cross has recognized that some of those held by the United States are not prisoners of war, and do not have the full protection of the Geneva Conventions. But it has argued that no prisoners, not even those alleged to be terrorists, should fall into what it calls a "black hole" outside any protection under international humanitarian law. A central purpose of the Red Cross is to visit prisoners and protect their human rights.

On Friday, Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Red Cross, said the situation of those held secretly remained "a major concern" that would continue to be the focus of discussions with the United States. "We continue to be in an intense dialogue with them with the aim of getting access to all people detained in the framework of the so-called war on terror," he said.

Mr. Ereli of the State Department said that "cases that pose unique threats to our security" would be denied visits by the Red Cross, even on a confidential basis.

In a related development, the Defense Department announced Friday that Anne-Marie Lizin, a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 55-nation group, would visit American detention facilities at Guantánamo and may question the commanding officers and other staff members.

"The department strives for transparency in our operations to the extent possible, in light of security and operational requirements and the need to ensure the safety of our forces," a department statement said.

Mr. Ereli said "there's no legal requirement" to provide Red Cross access to Guantánamo. "Nevertheless, and even though we're not required to do so, we do provide access to the vast majority of detainees under our control, and we do accord Geneva protections to them."

The Red Cross has been seeking greater access to detainees for at least two years but has been careful to mute its criticism in order to keep the negotiations more productive, according to committee officials.

In Europe over the last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasized that it is American policy not to subject detainees to "cruel, inhumane or degrading" punishment in any location, no matter whether they are held by military or intelligence authorities.

Ms. Rice also said on her European trip that the United States would not hand any prisoners over to other countries in the process known as rendition without obtaining assurances that they would not be tortured.

    U.S. Rebuffs Red Cross Request for Access to Detainees Held in Secret, NYT, 10.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/politics/10detain.html

After 24 Years in Prison,

Man Has a Reason to Smile

December 8, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

MARIETTA, Ga., Dec. 7 - It is rare to see a prison inmate with a life sentence who cannot stop grinning.

But that was Robert Clark Jr. on Wednesday, the day before his conviction for rape, robbery and kidnapping was expected to be vacated on the strength of a DNA test that showed he was not the rapist.

After 24 years in prison - one of the longest incarcerations served by the 164 people who have been exonerated by DNA testing - Mr. Clark, 45, was buoyant at the prospect of seeing his siblings, children and the five grandchildren he did not have when he was sentenced in 1982.

"I still got a little life in me," he said.

Though wrenching, Mr. Clark's story is not so different from that of others who were wrongfully convicted. What is stunning about it is the fact that the man who the authorities now believe was the real rapist, Floyd Antonio Arnold, was in easy reach of the police at the time.

The DNA test that exonerated Mr. Clark started a chain reaction that revealed not just Mr. Clark's innocence, but a series of law-enforcement bungles. Those missteps allowed Mr. Arnold to commit violent crimes repeatedly and, very nearly, to walk out of prison, where he is serving time for cruelty to children, at the end of January, despite the fact that his DNA matches that found in Mr. Clark's case and two other previously unsolved rapes.

"This is the worst case of tunnel vision that we've seen in the history of the Innocence Project," said Peter J. Neufeld, a co-founder of the project, which has been instrumental in DNA exonerations and which is handling Mr. Clark's case.

At 21, Mr. Clark was living with his mother and 5-year-old son in southwestern Atlanta. He worked as a roofer and had no criminal record, save a juvenile burglary charge. One day an acquaintance, Mr. Arnold, lent him a car. Because the car was not hotwired and Mr. Arnold had the keys, Mr. Clark said, he did not think the car was stolen.

But the car had belonged to Patricia J. Tucker, 29, who had been getting into the driver's seat in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot when she was carjacked, kidnapped, taken to the woods and raped three times. At Mr. Clark's trial, the sole defense witness identified Mr. Arnold in the courtroom and testified she had seen him driving the car before Mr. Clark was arrested with it.

But Ms. Tucker testified that Mr. Clark had been her attacker, even though she had initially described him as 5-foot-7 and Mr. Clark was 6-foot-1. The detective in the case told the jury that he never investigated Mr. Arnold because Mr. Clark had initially lied to officers about where he had gotten the car, then switched his story. The judge sentenced Mr. Clark to life.

When Mr. Clark heard that, he interrupted, saying: "Your Honor, they had Tony here. I can't put him on the stand. He'll tell you I didn't do nothing but drive the car two weeks later. Y'all got him right here."

"Mr. Clark, you have had your trial," the judge admonished. "Just remain silent."

Mr. Arnold went on to commit a string of felonies, including burglary, gun possession and sodomy. In 2001, he was charged with multiple counts of child molesting in a case prosecutors say involved a 13-year-old female relative. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, cruelty to children, for which he is now serving time.

Meanwhile, Mr. Clark wrote birthday cards to his children and letters to anyone he thought might be able to help with his case.

When his mother came to visit, he would lay his head in her lap and sleep. When her kidneys failed, he asked to be locked up in solitary confinement so he could be alone to grieve. She died last year, before he gained his freedom. "She knew I got the court order I needed," Mr. Clark said, smiling again.

Finally, the Innocence Project took his case, and a DNA test was done on the evidence. In November, the results showed that the attacker was not Mr. Clark. The district attorney in Cobb County, Pat Head, ran the DNA profile against the criminal offender database. A match came back: Mr. Arnold.

But there was more, said Ted Staples, the manager of forensic biology for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The printout showed that in 2003, when Mr. Arnold's DNA was first added to the database, it matched that in two other rapes, in Fulton and DeKalb Counties.

No action was taken against Mr. Arnold, who will finish his current sentence on Jan. 31.

Mr. Staples said the police in those jurisdictions were notified at the time by phone and letter. But a spokesman for the Fulton County Police Department said it did not know of the match until last week. It has put a hold on Mr. Arnold so he cannot be released.

In DeKalb, Detective Sgt. K. D. Johnson, of the DeKalb County Police Department's youth and sex crimes unit, acknowledged that the department was notified in 2003, but said that the information had slipped through the cracks. "It had gone through several different detectives who have since been transferred to other departments," Sergeant Johnson said. "We're trying to figure out who had it and when."

For his part, Mr. Clark stands to get some restitution from the state, which has paid $1.5 million to two other exonerated men. But, he said, he is thinking more about his 5-year-old granddaughter, Alexis, than how much he might be owed. "They owe me an apology," he said. "They done messed my life up." And he smiled.

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting for this article.

    After 24 Years in Prison, Man Has a Reason to Smile, NYT, 8.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/national/08convict.html

With Missionary Zeal,

Group Fights to Free Convicted Killer

in Maine Girl's Murder

November 28, 2005
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

PORTLAND, Me. - The Augusta chapter meets at Pat Christopher's house on the third Wednesday of every month. On the last Monday, the Madawaska chapter convenes above the police station. And on the fourth Tuesday are meetings of the Auburn-Lewiston and Freedom-Belfast chapters.

These are not book groups or penny poker games. At these meetings, the topic might be DNA under a murdered girl's thumbnail or the time of death in a coroner's report.

And the attendees have an unusually zealous mission: freeing a man convicted 16 years ago of what many consider to be Maine's most notorious crime.

The crime was the murder of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry, who was kidnapped from a baby-sitting job in Bowdoin in July 1988, taken to the woods, raped with birch sticks, tied up, strangled with a bandanna and stabbed in the throat and head.

The convicted man is Dennis Dechaine (pronounced duh-SHANE), then a 30-year-old farmer and Christmas wreath vendor, seen walking from the woods hours after Sarah disappeared.

Law enforcement officials remain convinced he is the killer - after all, the bandanna, knife and rope matched those he owned, a receipt and a notebook belonging to him were found in the driveway of the home where she was baby-sitting, and, according to detectives and jail guards, Mr. Dechaine confessed.

"There's no evidence of somebody else being involved in this," said Eric Wright, who prosecuted the case.

But Mr. Dechaine's supporters, who say they number at least 1,000 in Maine and more elsewhere, refuse to let things rest. Most of them never knew Mr. Dechaine before his conviction, and many belong to Trial and Error, a group whose sole focus is this case. It claims nine chapters in Maine and smaller ones in Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, California and Hong Kong.

They have circulated petitions, urged legislation and recruited lawyers for Mr. Dechaine, who is serving a life sentence in the state prison in Warren. They have staged Dennis Dechaine Day demonstrations at the Statehouse, marching with his life-size photograph.

With walkathons, bake sales and benefit concerts, they have raised $130,000 for expenses like DNA testing. They even have songs with lyrics like: "Do the right thing at least this one time/Let's free Dennis Dechaine."

And one supporter, James P. Moore, a former agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, wrote a book saying the case against Mr. Dechaine was flawed, and then pressed successfully for the release of police records that Mr. Dechaine's advocates say reveal new evidence.

Supporters of Mr. Dechaine, who says he was in the woods that night doing drugs, say cross-outs in police notes show he did not really confess. They stress that no fingerprints, blood or hairs tied him to the murder, to which Mr. Wright replies, "the absence of forensic evidence doesn't mean that's evidence that somebody didn't do it."

John Richardson, Maine's speaker of the House, said, "I don't think I remember a case that has garnered this much attention." The House voted in May on a resolution introduced by Representative Ross Paradis, a Trial and Error member, that urged a new trial for Mr. Dechaine. The bill failed, 85 to 51.

Last year, after the group generated publicity, Maine's attorney general appointed a panel to investigate prosecutorial and police conduct in the case. Its report is expected soon.

And this fall, a judge was supposed to hear a retrial motion based on DNA, but Mr. Dechaine's lawyers decided they could not meet the strict conditions Maine requires for a new trial. Now, Mr. Paradis is introducing a bill to soften the retrial law.

"The Trial and Error folks have been relentless," said Colin Starger, a lawyer for the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to reversing wrongful convictions. It got involved in the case years ago, partly because of a call from Trial and Error.

Mr. Starger said cases almost never spawned large groups of supporters with no relationship to the defendant, and he said that he sometimes kept his distance.

"They've created controversy, and controversy always has the benefit of keeping an issue alive, but sometimes has the downside of dividing people into camps," he said, "and then there's a camp that is strongly against you."

M. Michaela Murphy, Mr. Dechaine's lead lawyer, recruited by the group in 2003, said, "Trial and Error makes my life hard."

"They have their own agenda, which I often don't agree with," she added. "I think they're naïve in the extreme about the possibilities of publicly advocating for a person like Mr. Dechaine. Someone from the group tried to actually contact the family of Sarah Cherry, and I pretty much had a coronary."

The group has since tried to tone things down, ousting the member who went to Sarah's grandparents' house and visited one of her sisters at the restaurant where she worked. These days, members are selling cookbooks and urging Maine movie theaters to show a new film about exonerated inmates as a way to build support for Mr. Dechaine.

The Rev. Robert Dorr, the Cherry family's pastor and spokesman, said the Dechaine supporters' persistence "boils down to abuse" and said the family could not "come to terms with their grieving when these people are always in their face."

It started after Mr. Dechaine's conviction in 1989, when Carol Waltman, who knew him in Madawaska, in French-Canadian northern Maine, founded Trial and Error. Ms. Waltman, who had had medical problems, said "God kept me alive for a reason, to help Dennis."

When he sought a new trial in 1992, one of several unsuccessful legal moves, Trial and Error bused in 90 supporters in "slime green" T-shirts who gave Mr. Dechaine a standing ovation in the courtroom, Ms. Waltman said.

Later, with money Trial and Error raised at a dance, Mr. Dechaine's lawyer had Sarah's fingernails tested for DNA, something Mr. Dechaine had requested before his trial but had been denied. Blood under a thumbnail contained DNA of another man, still unidentified. The state confirmed those results last year.

Mr. Wright, the prosecutor, said the DNA was irrelevant in this case and could have come from anywhere, including contamination.

The Dechaine cause gained supporters after Mr. Moore's 2002 book, "Human Sacrifice." Mr. Moore said he attended an early Trial and Error meeting to defend law enforcement against allegations by people he assumed were "a bunch of nuts," but was instead inspired to investigate.

His 450-page book, whose royalties go to Trial and Error, asserts, among other things, that the police failed to look at other suspects and that at the time of Sarah's death, Mr. Dechaine was being interviewed by the police in her disappearance.

The book attracted people like Bill Bunting, 60, a cattle farmer and writer of maritime books, who has visited Mr. Dechaine "well over 100 times," and says "the only organization I ever belonged to before this was 4H."

It also drew Nancy Farrin, 43, a state microbiologist and mother of two, who said that after visiting Mr. Dechaine, "I felt like this guy is either the supreme con artist of the century" or innocent.

Other supporters include Dale Preston, who strangled his wife after finding her with another man, and met Mr. Dechaine in prison.

And there is Morrison Bonpasse, whose other causes include the Lucy Stone League, which promotes the rights of women to keep their maiden names, and the Single Global Currency Association. He was the one who visited the Cherry family, he says to "encourage them to understand that their goals are similar to our goals: We want the killer of Sarah Cherry to be found and punished."

Mr. Bonpasse said he was continuing to work for Mr. Dechaine's release.

Trial and Error's members are so passionate that their voluminous Web site even draws connections between the Dechaine case and "The Shawshank Redemption," a Stephen King short story and movie about Andy Dufresne, wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder.

Among the similarities the Web site cites: that Mr. Dufresne was 31 and Mr. Dechaine was 30, that Mr. Dufresne said he was drunk at the time of the murder and Mr. Dechaine said he was on drugs, and that "both lived in Maine."

In an interview from prison, Mr. Dechaine, 48, said: "Half the group believes that any press is good press, the other half believes that the less press the better. I guess I vacillate, to be honest with you."

    With Missionary Zeal, Group Fights to Free Convicted Killer in Maine Girl's Murder, NYT, 28.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/national/28murder.html

Freed by DNA,

Now Charged in New Crime

November 23, 2005
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

MADISON, Wis., Nov. 17 - As three men sat nervously on a stage, preparing to recount their nightmarish journeys through a justice system that had sent them away for crimes they had not committed, the moderator had a plea for the crowd in an auditorium here.

Let us not talk about Steven Avery, another man now sitting in a county jail charged with killing a young woman. Not tonight. Not again.

"This event is not about that," the moderator, Lawrence C. Marshall, a law professor who has spent years trying to free wrongfully convicted prisoners, urged. "Tonight we are here to talk about the much bigger issue."

For days, however, the case of Steven Avery, who was once this state's living symbol of how a system could unfairly send someone away, has left all who championed his cause facing the uncomfortable consequences of their success. Around the country, lawyers in the informal network of some 30 organizations that have sprung up in the past dozen years to exonerate the falsely convicted said they were closely watching Mr. Avery's case to see what its broader fallout might be.

Two years ago, Mr. Avery emerged from prison after lawyers from one of those organizations, the Wisconsin Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School, proved that Mr. Avery had spent 18 years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit.

In Mr. Avery's home county, Manitowoc, where he was convicted in 1985, his release prompted apologies, even from the sexual assault victim, and a welcoming home for Mr. Avery. Elsewhere, the case became Wisconsin's most noted exoneration, leading to an "Avery task force," which drew up a package of law enforcement changes known as the Avery Bill, adopted by state lawmakers just weeks ago.

Mr. Avery, meanwhile, became a spokesman for how a system could harm an innocent man, being asked to appear on panels about wrongful conviction, to testify before the State Legislature and to be toured around the Capitol by at least one lawmaker who described him as a hero.

But last week, back in rural Manitowoc County, back at his family's auto salvage yard, back at the trailer he had moved home to, Mr. Avery, 43, was accused once more. This time, he was charged in the death of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old photographer who vanished on Oct. 31 after being assigned to take pictures for Auto Trader magazine at Avery's Auto Salvage.

After her family searched for Ms. Halbach for days, investigators said they found bones and teeth in the salvage yard, along with her car. In the car, they found blood from Mr. Avery and Ms. Halbach, they said. They also found her car key in the bedroom of his trailer, they said, and, using the very technology that led to Mr. Avery's release two years earlier, they said they identified Mr. Avery's DNA on the key.

"This case has blown us away," Stephen M. Glynn, a Milwaukee lawyer who has represented Mr. Avery in a $36 million civil lawsuit against the former prosecutor and former sheriff in the original sexual assault case, said of the new charges against Mr. Avery. "I haven't taken that hard a punch in a long, long time."

"This lets down so many people," Mr. Glynn went on. "This case became something that could have had an enormously positive effect on the criminal justice system in this state, but now that's up in the air."

Around the nation, DNA testing has led to the exonerations of 163 people since 1989, including Mr. Avery, said Maddy deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project in New York, where Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld were pioneers in the movement. Only one of those exonerated is known to have been convicted of a serious crime since being freed, Ms. deLone said.

Like leaders in similar groups, Ms. deLone said she had recently heard about Mr. Avery's case and had talked to colleagues about it. "While this is a horrible, horrible crime," she said, "we really don't think that it will have an effect on these efforts or on our responsibilities to vindicate innocent people."

At the Wisconsin Innocence Project, leaders said the new accusations against Mr. Avery should not now be linked to his earlier wrongful arrest and release. Keith Findley, co-founder of the Wisconsin group, which describes Mr. Avery's case in its brochure, said the group's intent was not just to release the innocent but to find truth, and properly punish those truly responsible for crimes.

"This is a very emotional time and a very emotional event," Mr. Findley said. "But this should not affect what we do."

Still, for advocates accustomed to being praised as fighting on behalf of the falsely accused, the backlash here has been unavoidable. On talk radio and on Internet Web logs, critics have said that without the Wisconsin Innocence Project's efforts, one young woman might still be alive. Some said Mr. Avery's criminal record revealed telling signs of violence - with convictions, for example, for burglary and cruelty to animals - long before his 1985 sexual assault conviction.

At the trial, the strongest evidence against Mr. Avery came from the victim. She identified Mr. Avery as the man who had attacked her as she jogged on a beach. She had seen his face just 8 to 10 inches from her own, she said, and had noted his height, his broad hands with stubby fingers, his hair. The first thing that had raced through her mind in the attack, she told the jury, was that she needed to "get a look at this guy."

Years after the jury found Mr. Avery guilty, his lawyers pressed to have new DNA testing done on pubic hair found on the victim after the attack. The tests revealed not only that the hair did not belong to Mr. Avery, but found that it matched another man, who had lived in the area and who had since been sent to prison for a sexual assault. The case was held up as a perfect example of how eyewitness testimony, even the best intentioned, could simply be wrong.

Even before the sexual assault conviction, Fred Hazlewood, the judge, now retired, who presided over Mr. Avery's case, said Mr. Avery's criminal record showed that he "had a real potential" for violence. "But he served his time," Judge Hazlewood said, "and you can't convict someone for what he might do."

Family members said last week that they were certain Mr. Avery was not guilty of the new charges of first-degree intentional homicide and mutilating a corpse. The authorities were wrong before, Mr. Avery's father, Al, said, and they are wrong again. The evidence, Al Avery said, was planted.

When Steven Avery finally got out of prison, his father said, he had lost his wife and family and found himself living in a tiny ice shanty once meant for winter fishing. Just surviving after so many years in prison was hard enough, Al Avery said.

"Now it's starting all over again," Mr. Avery's father said as he looked around the salvage yard that law officers had searched for days.

Mr. Avery's mother, Dolores, said she could see the way people were looking at her, again, in the grocery store and on the streets here near Lake Michigan.

"He's innocent," Ms. Avery said. "I know it in my heart."

Soon, she said, she plans to call the Wisconsin Innocence Project, the lawyers who helped her son once before.

"There are 36 million reasons why they should be doing this to him," Mr. Avery's brother, Chuck, said, referring to the award his brother was seeking in his lawsuit.

The future of that suit now appears in question. Depositions have been postponed. Mr. Glynn said that he still believed that his client had a strong case, but he acknowledged that the case had grown complicated. What will potential jurors think now?

The arrest has changed other plans, too. Lawmakers who had pushed to have the state pay Mr. Avery more than $420,000 for his wrongful arrest have grown quiet. And the bill of changes - to the way the police draw up eyewitness identification procedures, conduct interrogations and hold onto DNA evidence - is no longer called the Avery Bill.

"The legislation is very important and very sound for our justice system as a whole," said Representative Mark Gundrum, a Republican who helped organize what was then called the "Avery task force."

"But this does detract a little bit," Mr. Gundrum said. "Obviously, we're not talking about Steven Avery anymore, not highlighting his conviction."

And plans for a "grand, glorious" signing ceremony for what is now simply called the "criminal justice reforms" package, he said, seem remote.

    Freed by DNA, Now Charged in New Crime, NYT, 23.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/national/23exonerate.html

Blake found liable in wife's slaying

Fri Nov 18, 2005 7:48 PM ET
The New York Times
By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Robert Blake, acquitted eight months ago of murdering his wife, was found liable on Friday for her slaying in a wrongful death civil suit brought by her children and was ordered to pay $30 million in damages.

The actor appeared pale and stunned as the verdict was read, ending an 11-week civil trial in which Blake testified in open court for the first time about the 2001 shooting death of his spouse, Bonny Lee Bakley.

Blake's courtroom appearance worked against him, and a majority of the nine men and three women on the Los Angeles Superior Court jury in Burbank rejected his contention that Bakley was a victim of her own checkered background.

A number of jurors said later they discounted the efforts of Blake's lawyers to highlight Bakley's past as a career swindler who ran a lonely hearts scam and spent time in jail.

"It is not right to take someone else's life regardless of what kind of person they were," juror David Lopez said.

The civil court panel split 9-3 on the $30 million award and 10-2 in favor of finding that the former star of the TV detective show "Baretta" intentionally caused Bakley's death.

By a 9-3 jury vote, Blake's co-defendant in the case, his former bodyguard and handyman Earle Caldwell, was cleared of a separate charge that he conspired with the actor to kill his wife.

After the verdict, Blake and his lawyers quickly left the courthouse. They made no comment to the media.

The $30 million judgment, if upheld, could financially ruin the 72-year-old actor. During pretrial talks aimed at reaching an out-of-court settlement, he had said the most he could pay was $250,000.

JURY 'HATED' BLAKE ON STAND

"I have every reason to believe that Robert Blake will make good on the judgment that he was ordered to pay," said Eric Dubin, attorney for Bakley's estate and her four children.

He said interviews with jurors after the verdict revealed that Blake's testimony during the trial damaged his case. "They hated him on the stand. He was just out of control," Dubin said. Jury foreman Bob Horn later added, "We believe Mr. Blake was probably his worst enemy on the stand."

Blake insisted under oath that he loved Bakley, never harmed her and was planning a life with her so they could raise their daughter, Rose, now 5. He also described Bakley as someone who "could charm the eyes out of a rattlesnake."

Bakley was shot to death in Blake's car a short time after the two dined together at a restaurant on March 4, 2001.

Blake told police said he had gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a handgun he mistakenly left behind and returned to the car to find Bakley slumped over, bleeding to death.

In March of this year, a jury acquitted Blake of charges he committed the murder after trying to solicit others to kill his wife. Caldwell was initially charged as a conspirator in the criminal case before a judge dismissed the charge.

The outcome of the Blake trials was reminiscent of mixed verdicts returned in the case of former football star O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted of criminal charges he murdered his ex-wife and her friend but later found liable for their deaths in a civil suit and ordered to pay $33.5 million.

At his murder trial, prosecutors said the actor killed his wife to gain custody of his daughter from a woman he despised and considered a bad influence.

Prosecutors and lawyers for Bakley's estate argued that Blake was furious at Bakley when she became pregnant in 1999 and pressured her to have an abortion. They said he tried kidnapping the baby, then married Bakley in November 2000 to get her to drop child abduction charges against him.

Blake found liable in wife's slaying, R, 18.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-19T004800Z_01_BAU876452_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-BLAKE.xml

Deupree's running shoes are falling apart and caked with dust.

Phil Sears for The New York Times        6.11.2005

Prisoner Has Name and Marathon Number (49997)        NYT        6.11.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/sports/sportsspecial/06marathon.html?pagewanted=1

Prison officials say Deupree, 69,

has conned New York City Marathon officials to gain entry to the race

Phil Sears for The New York Times        6.11.2005

Prisoner Has Name and Marathon Number (49997)        NYT        6.11.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/sports/sportsspecial/06marathon.html?pagewanted=1

Prisoner Has Name

and Marathon Number (49997)

November 6, 2005
The New York Times
By JERE LONGMAN

MALONE, Fla., Nov. 2 - In a recent letter to the director of the New York City Marathon, Jim Deupree asked to run the 26.2-mile race on Sunday. His would be an unlikely entry. He is incarcerated at a state prison here among the cotton and peanut farms of the Florida Panhandle, midway through a 30-year sentence for armed robbery.

"I am a fairly decent 69-year-old long-distance runner and commercial printing salesman from Indiana presently 'retired' here in Florida," Deupree wrote with dark humor.

He proposed to run, not through New York's five boroughs with 37,000 other entrants, but in the razor-wire isolation of the prison yard of the Jackson Correctional Institute. He would circle a dirt track, one that measures about two and a quarter laps to the mile, until he completed the marathon in about 60 laps. He said he had trained 50 miles a week and hoped to complete the race in four hours.

His aim, Deupree said, would be to raise money for cancer research in memory of George Sheehan, the running guru and author who died of prostate cancer in 1993. Sheehan had written encouraging notes and sent him running shoes, Deupree said.

He had run about 200 of these proxy races of various distances over the past 10 years, Deupree wrote in September to Mary Wittenberg, director of the New York City Marathon and chief executive of the New York Road Runners, the club that organizes the race.

The club eagerly granted Deupree a race number, 49997, and asked that he report his finishing time. "Keep on running!" Robert L. Laufer, a lawyer for the Road Runners, wrote.

Florida prison officials have taken a more skeptical view of Deupree's running over the past decade, saying that organizers of distance runs around the country are too credulous in allowing him virtual entry into their races.

Prison officials acknowledged that Deupree did run on the prison track. But they questioned whether he was completing races and seeking to raise money for cancer research or whether he was merely seeking publicity in hopes of receiving a commuted sentence.

Deupree, who has been in and out of prison since the 1970's for crimes he said were related to a dependence on alcohol, is sentenced as a habitual offender in Florida. He is scheduled for release in 2019, at the age of 83.

With 1,300 inmates to supervise at the Jackson Correctional Institute, prison officials said they did not have time to sit with a stopwatch and lap counter to verify the running habits of any one inmate. Any racing would have to be done on the honor system.

"He runs on a regular basis," Jerry Kelly, director of recreation for the prison, said of Deupree. But, he added, "I truly don't know what his capabilities are."

Carl Davis, an assistant warden in charge of security, said he thought Deupree did run races inside the prison yard. But Buddy Kent, an assistant warden in charge of prison programs, said he thought Deupree was "conning people" in an attempt to get them to send him money or running shoes or to provide him with publicity.

Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, said prison officials had no evidence that Deupree ran marathons.

"The bottom line is, we think he's conning people, these race officials, and he's done it for years," Buchanan said. "We strongly recommend they not send him a race number or register him, because he's not doing it."

If that is true, Deupree's entry in New York would be an embarrassment for Wittenberg, who is in her first year as race director, and would surely irritate some of the tens of thousands of legitimate runners who failed to gain admittance into the marathon through a lottery system.

[On Friday, Wittenberg said she allowed Deupree into the race because she had been told he had committed a robbery at a young age and because she felt that running a marathon could be redemptive.

"It says to me this guy's serious, trying to make the best of his situation, and we should support that," she said in a telephone interview.

Told of the skepticism of Florida prison officials, Wittenberg said, "My jaw is open," adding, "That would be a travesty, taking advantage of a situation if he's in fact not doing what he says he's doing."

Later, she said of Deupree, "If this gives him something to focus on and gets him out running as long as possible, I think there's some value in that."]

There has been some independent verification of Deupree's history as a prison runner. In May 1980, The Runner magazine detailed his trouble in Indiana with alcohol, burglary, bad checks and a stolen company car, and how running allowed Deupree to shed both 50 pounds and, temporarily each day, the confines and tensions of life behind bars.

After training 100 miles a week, Deupree ran 259 miles from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City upon his release in October 1979 to his home in Shelbyville, Ind., over 12 days. Hal Higdon, author of the article, accompanied Deupree on two of the days, running more than 20 miles each stretch, and writing that "the eight-minute pace he assumed was relaxed and efficient."

The story ended on a despairing note. A month later, Higdon wrote, Deupree began drinking again and was arrested after a car dealership said he had not returned a loaned automobile on time. Deupree said in an interview that the arrest cost him a chance to run the New York City Marathon in 1980.

On the issue of charitable causes, the American Cancer Society said that Deupree had contacted its national headquarters in Atlanta several years ago. But, a spokesman said, there were no records indicating that donations had been made on behalf of Deupree or Sheehan.

Bernard F. Daley, a criminal defense lawyer in Tallahassee, Fla., who has corresponded with Deupree, said the prison system had a history of discouraging such charitable activities.

"I think he's sincere in trying to utilize his time for something good," Daley said of Deupree. "Whether it has resulted in anything, I don't know."

Four months shy of his 70th birthday, at 5 feet 9 inches and 170 pounds, Deupree appears fit with trim gray hair, a ruddy face and bifocals strapped in place by dental floss. His running shoes are falling apart and caked with dust. He lost his only benefactor when his brother died last year, he said, leaving him unable to afford new running shoes for $73.70 at the prison canteen.

If he does complete a marathon in four hours Sunday, it would be a remarkable achievement. Last year, only nine men in his age group, 65 to 69, finished the New York City Marathon in four hours or less.

When he began running in prison 26 years ago, Deupree said, he was a "fat butterball" who weighed 250 pounds. Essentially, he said, he has replaced one addiction with another, favoring exercise now over alcohol, which cost him two marriages and his freedom and left him estranged from two sons.

His latest incarceration, for robbery with a deadly weapon, came for a crime committed on Jan. 12, 1990. He said he walked into a bank in Clearwater, Fla., after a drinking binge and handed a teller a note that said: "I've got a gun. I want $2,000 or I'll hurt you."

"An insane alcoholic thing" is how Deupree refers to his crime.

By contrast, he said, running provides a natural high and "an escape from where I'm at, from the tensions of being in prison." But prison officials were attempting to sabotage his running-for-charity project, Deupree said. The authorities preferred stories about overcrowding and inmate riots so that money for new prisons would be readily available, he said.

"It's the lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key principle," he said.

Warden Russell Smith of the Jackson Correctional Institute disputed this. Given the adverse publicity many prisons receive, any positive news would be embraced, he said.

"He's led me to believe he's raised several hundred thousand dollars for the American Cancer Society," Smith said of Deupree. Not so, Deupree said, adding that he knew for certain only $400 in charitable donations had been made on his behalf. If he had more publicity, he could raise more money, he said.

Round and round, prison officials spar with Deupree. By his own count, he has been written up 61 times for rules violations related to running. The latest disciplinary report came when a race number was sent to Deupree from New York, prison officials said. He is not allowed to receive race numbers or money, T-shirts and running shoes donated to him, the authorities said. Anything that would single him out from other inmates is considered contraband.

Earlier this year, the New Balance shoe company agreed to send 80 pairs of running shoes to Deupree and the prison, but delivery was halted because it was a rules violation, said Kent, an assistant warden. New Balance, however, said it declined Deupree's request because it did not meet the company's guidelines for charitable donations.

Les Smith, a lawyer from Portland, Ore., who is event director of the Portland Marathon, said Deupree notified him that he had completed last month's race by proxy in 3 hours 58 minutes 11 seconds. He regularly provides Deupree with a race number, Smith said, noting it was not important to him that Deupree complete the race and raise money for charity. The simple act of running was sufficient, Smith said.

"It's good for mental health," Smith said. "Something to be encouraged."

Here in the rural Florida Panhandle, though, prison officials remain unconvinced about Deupree's intentions to complete a proxy run of the New York City Marathon.

"He has a couple of medical conditions and he's 69 years old," Kent said. "My best guess is, he won't run no 26 miles 385 yards."

Yes, he will, Deupree insisted. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he said, he planned to run for two and a half hours on the prison track Sunday morning, return to his cell for a mandatory inmate count, then return to the track for one and a half hours. Another inmate has agreed to lend him a pair of size 8½ shoes if his own give out, Deupree said. He plans to write his race number on his shirt, near his prison number, or scribble it on his arm.

How far will he run? Most likely, only he will know.

    Prisoner Has Name and Marathon Number (49997), NYT, 6.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/sports/sportsspecial/06marathon.html?pagewanted=1

In City Jails, a Question of Force

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Even in the rough society of the cellblock, where batons and pepper spray rule, a guard is not supposed to punch a prisoner in the face. A face blow - a head strike, in the cold parlance of corrections - should be a last resort.

Shawn Davis was on the receiving end of a head strike when he was an inmate in a Rikers Island jail, and he lost the sight in one eye. Eric Richards, another inmate, had his eardrum broken. Charles Paige's cheekbone was fractured.

"The very first blow was to my face," Mr. Paige said, recalling his scuffle with Rikers Island officers while, he said, his hands were cuffed behind his back.

Head strikes should be rare in jails: they subdue by causing painful and sometimes permanent injury to inmates, and can leave guards hurt as well. But in New York City, hundreds of inmates have suffered head injuries in recent years after clashes with correction officers, according to a lawsuit in United States District Court in Manhattan based on information culled from official reports.

The reports reveal that inmates' heads were punched, hit with batons and kicked in a roster of pain that is costly in human and medical terms and adds friction to an already tense environment. Officers, too, suffered, with broken fingers, fractured wrists and sprained arms.

The suit, by the Legal Aid Society and two law firms, opens a window on the corridors of the city's jails and the hierarchy of violence that guards are instructed to use to control them - a scale that begins with verbal cajoling, ascends to pepper spray and body blows and blocks, and reaches head strikes only when a guard is fighting to save himself. That scale sounds grim but is increasingly accepted practice in prisons across the country and has proven effective in New York jails where it was observed.

The suit recognizes that prison guards must sometimes resort to force. But it charges that the city's officers routinely use head blows instead of starting with less harmful methods. City guards have not been adequately trained, the suit claims, to follow the sequence of escalating force tactics, even though it is clearly spelled out in city correction policy.

"Force is not a foreign concept in a prison, it's part of everyday life," said Jonathan Chasan, a Legal Aid lawyer. But he said, "They should be able to restrain without this level of injuries."

After four years of legal jousting, the two sides are now in intensive settlement talks. Judge Denny Chin has set a trial date for Nov. 28 but apparently hopes to work out an agreement before then.

City officials declined repeated requests for comment on the allegations, saying they do not discuss continuing litigation. In motion after motion, however, the city has battled the suit in court. The city points out that recorded incidents in which guards used force in its jails have decreased significantly, dropping by 33 percent from 2000 to 2004, and are infrequent considering the size of the system, which in all admits about 100,000 new inmates a year.

"Excessive force is not a systemic problem and is antithetical" to its correction practices, the city contends.

The lawsuit looks closely at incidents in which guards used force against inmates in six jails on Rikers Island from Jan. 1, 2000, to Aug. 1, 2003. Of a total of 2,596 incidents, 703 incidents produced head injuries to 738 inmates.

Steve J. Martin, a lawyer and corrections consultant who is a witness for the plaintiffs, sifted through 745 reports of the most serious incidents, which included versions from guards and inmates as well as medical reports. He found 70 cases of inmates with facial fractures or broken teeth, and 113 cases of inmates with facial cuts requiring stitches - results he called "an astounding and frightening litany of injurious force."

Mr. Martin said his research revealed a "routine use of hard impact strikes to the head" in city jails. In one month, April 2003, in three Rikers Island jails he scrutinized, there were 42 serious incidents in which guards used force, with head strikes recorded in 13.

In a more recent sample cited in the suit from six jails, which includes reports from four months in the year before November 2004, guards used head strikes in at least 46 of 218 recorded incidents where they applied force.

Mr. Martin also provided head strike information from other prison systems he has studied, appointed by either a court or a correction agency. Examining reports of guards' use of force in five jails in and around Fort Lauderdale, Fla., during 18 weeks in 2004, for example, among 200 incidents, Mr. Martin found fewer than 8 head strikes. In the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, in 54 incidents during eight months in 2004, only 2 head strikes were reported. In a sample from Clyde N. Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., a rural prison, of 105 force incidents there were none in which an officer reported a head strike, although 10 inmate head injuries were recorded.

A number of the inmates bringing the Rikers Island lawsuit are repeat offenders with volatile temperaments or chilling criminal records - the sort of inmate whom correction officers find hardest to keep in line.

Shawn Davis, 38, is a schizophrenic. He explained, in an interview in state prison in Beacon, N.Y., where he is serving five years for sexual assault, that he visits the clinic once a month for an injection, since he can have fits and seizures if he misses it. After he returned to Rikers Island from a court date on May 28, 2002, an officer barred him from going to the clinic.

"She cursed at me using smart language," Mr. Davis said. "It got me so hyper. I very anxious to have my medications."

He decided to do "something that said I wanted attention," he said: "I picked up a plastic chair and threw it" over the heads of officers in the cellblock control booth.

He was restrained and his hands were cuffed behind his back, Mr. Davis said. But, he said, while riot squad officers dragged him down a hallway, one guard punched him in the face. One guard gave him a parting kick in the temple, Mr. Davis said.

"Both eyes just shut down," he said. "Ruptured globe" was the finding of two surgeons at Bellevue Hospital Center, who operated the next day to try to save his left eye. Doctors later concluded it would never see again.

According to a summary of the correction officers' accounts of the episode, one officer said he had defended himself from a punch by Mr. Davis by punching the inmate back three times in the face. The officer had "a superficial scratch to the left eyebrow and right side of the face." The summary was written by Vincent M. Nathan, a lecturer in criminal justice at the University of Toledo, Ohio, who is also a witness for the inmates in the suit. The city did not provide any material from correction officers.

Another inmate, Eric Richards, 28, could not even remember, in a deposition he gave last year, all his criminal convictions, starting with the one for his first car theft when he was 16. Mr. Richards was in a Queens courthouse holding cell on Jan. 29, 2002, when he objected to a strip search. Mr. Richards claimed that one angry guard had knocked him over with a punch in the face while another had jumped on him and pushed a finger under Mr. Richards's eyelid.

"I'm screaming, 'Get your hands out of my eyes!' " Mr. Richards said. Another officer slammed his head into cell bars, he said.

According to Mr. Nathan's summary of the correction officers' accounts, they said Mr. Richards had started the fight by pushing past one officer and punching another. Two officers acknowledged having punched Mr. Richards in the face. Three officers reported injuries, including one with a sprained ankle.

Medical reports showed that the perforated eardrum had left Mr. Richards deaf in his right ear, and he is also partly blind in one eye.

Martin F. Horn, the correction commissioner, at first agreed to an interview, then declined on the advice of lawyers for the city. But a copy of the city's correction policy, revised by Mr. Horn last year, shows that New York has embraced the idea of a scale of force with many incremental steps before head strikes.

Officers are instructed to try to dominate a balking inmate with "control holds" and "take-down technique." They should not go for head blows "unless unavoidable," and must especially avoid hitting inmates in the head with batons. Guards are required to record any head strikes, which are also called head shots, in a special log book.

Although the policy might sound like bureaucratic rigmarole for a guard facing a raging inmate, corrections experts said prisons around the nation have adopted similar procedures after finding them effective in lowering violence.

"If properly presented and reinforced with training, they do work," said William C. Collins, a lawyer who is an editor of The Correctional Law Reporter, a newsletter. "They allow an agency to give their staff a sense of what is appropriate under some circumstances, and what isn't." Blows to the head, he added, "pretty much aren't on the list."

Several corrections experts said they were troubled by the head strike and injury rates in New York City. "If use-of-force policies are appropriate and followed, you're not going to see a lot of injuries," said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas professor of corrections policy and a leader of a task force for the American Bar Association that is revising national standards for the use of force in prisons.

The suit, in which Legal Aid is working with lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, seeks better training for guards in self-defense and take-down methods, and calls for working video cameras in the jails.

Measures similar to those demanded in the suit were put into effect, after hard-fought earlier litigation, in the Central Punitive Segregation Unit on Rikers Island, the isolation cells for inmates who make trouble in jail. They resulted in a "significant diminishing" of inmate injuries in confrontations with guards, according to the final court order in the case, in 2002.

City officials seem more focused on the fact that overall violence is diminishing than on continuing head injuries. In a deposition last year, Commissioner Horn was asked if he was familiar with the department's system for "reporting head shots."

"Is that a drink?" the commissioner replied.

    In City Jails, a Question of Force, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/nyregion/30rikers.html

Prisoner Says Abuse of His Islamic Books

Preceded Beating in '01

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Long before charges of Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay were news, Charles Paige, one of the inmates in a lawsuit against New York City over practices in its jails, clashed with guards on Rikers Island after, he said, they mishandled his Islamic books.

Mr. Paige, 46, was in the city jail in December 2001 awaiting transfer to state prison on a drug charge. Long a devout Muslim, Mr. Paige had been praying five times a day and going daily to Islamic study classes in the jail.

On Dec. 4, guards ordered a general search in the cellblock. No stranger to incarceration, Mr. Paige knew no talking was permitted during the search. But the officer who came to search his cell, he said, stepped on his prayer rug. "I informed her she was standing on my rug," Mr. Paige, a slight man who weighs less than 130 pounds, recounted in an interview. He said the officer ordered him to be silent.

A ward captain told the officer to step off the rug, Mr. Paige said. She did, but she began rummaging through his things, and he protested again. Other officers took him out of his cell for an hour until the search was over. When he returned, he said, "My cell was tossed."

Two books of the Hadith, which has instructional stories from the life of the prophet Muhammad, were under water in the toilet.

"I felt violated," Mr. Paige said. He marched out of his cell and started banging on the window of the guard booth. Officers used pepper spray on him, he said, then dragged him, handcuffed and gasping from the spray, to a hallway. One officer punched him in the face while another held him from behind, Mr. Paige said.

"I was yelling 'Allah akbar,' which means 'God is great,' because I was thinking I was going to die because of my breathing," Mr. Paige said. X-rays taken later at Bellevue Hospital Center revealed a facial fracture below his right eye.

The correction officers said Mr. Paige had started the melee by punching an officer in the jaw, according to a summary of their accounts. One officer "defended himself by throwing several punches to the body and facial area of the subject." That officer reported a sprained right hand, while another guard had a broken thumb.

Mr. Paige was later convicted in jail of striking an officer and sentenced to 120 days in punitive segregation.

    Prisoner Says Abuse of His Islamic Books Preceded Beating in '01, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/nyregion/30side.html?ex=1141362000&en=47dacd11df6658c2&ei=5070

Number of Women in Prisons Is on Rise

October 24, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (AP) - Women made up 7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons last year and accounted for nearly one in four arrests, the government reported Sunday.

The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared with 2003, more than double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of inmates in those facilities.

The total number of people incarcerated grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787.

That figure includes federal and state prisoners, as well as 713,990 inmates held in local jails, 15,757 in United States territorial prisons, 9,788 in immigration and customs facilities, 2,177 in military facilities, 1,826 in Indian jails and 102,338 in juvenile facilities.

The country's state and federal prison population, 1,421,911, which excludes state and federal prisoners in local jails, grew 2.6 percent in 2004, compared with an average growth of 3.4 percent a year since 1995.

    Number of Women in Prisons Is on Rise, NYT, 24.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/national/24prison.html

US prison population

continued to grow in 2004

Sun Oct 23, 2005
10:22 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. prison population, already the largest in the world, grew by 1.9 percent in 2004, leaving federal jails at 40 percent over capacity, according to Justice Department figures released on Sunday.

Inmates in federal, state, local and other prisons totaled nearly 2.3 million at the end of last year, the government said. The 1.9 percent increase was lower than the average annual growth rate of 3.2 percent during the last decade.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, there are more people behind bars in the United States than in any other country.

China had the second-largest prison population with 1.5 million prisoners, according to statistics updated in April and cited by King's College. The total U.S. population is about 296 million, while China's is 1.3 billion.

The Justice Department said the U.S. incarceration rate hit 486 sentenced inmates per 100,000 last year, up 18 percent from 411 a decade ago.

The five states with the highest incarceration rates last year were all in the South, led by Louisiana with 816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. The five states with the lowest rates were all in the North, with Maine experiencing 148 sentenced inmates per 100,000 state residents in 2004, according to the Justice Department figures.

The U.S. prison population continued to grow last year even though reports of violent crime during 2004 were at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a government report released in September.

    US prison population continued to grow in 2004, R, 23.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-10-24T022241Z_01_KRA373907_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-PRISONS.xml

Serving Life,

With No Chance of Redemption

October 5, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

LIVINGSTON, Tex. - Minutes after the United States Supreme Court threw out the juvenile death penalty in March, word reached death row here, setting off a pandemonium of banging, yelling and whoops of joy among many of the 28 men whose lives were spared by the decision.

But the news devastated Randy Arroyo, who had faced execution for helping kidnap and kill an Air Force officer while stealing his car for parts.

Mr. Arroyo realized he had just become a lifer, and that was the last thing he wanted. Lifers, he said, exist in a world without hope. "I wish I still had that death sentence," he said. "I believe my chances have gone down the drain. No one will ever look at my case."

Mr. Arroyo has a point. People on death row are provided with free lawyers to pursue their cases in federal court long after their convictions have been affirmed; lifers are not. The pro bono lawyers who work so aggressively to exonerate or spare the lives of death row inmates are not interested in the cases of people merely serving life terms. And appeals courts scrutinize death penalty cases much more closely than others.

Mr. Arroyo will become eligible for parole in 2037, when he is 57. But he doubts he will ever get out.

"This is hopeless," he said.

Scores of lifers, in interviews at 10 prisons in six states, echoed Mr. Arroyo's despondency. They have, they said, nothing to look forward to and no way to redeem themselves.

More than one in four lifers will never even see a parole board. The boards that the remaining lifers encounter have often been refashioned to include representatives of crime victims and elected officials not receptive to pleas for lenience.

And the nation's governors, concerned about the possibility of repeated offenses by paroled criminals and the public outcry that often follows, have all but stopped commuting life sentences.

In at least 22 states, lifers have virtually no way out. Fourteen states reported that they released fewer than 10 in 2001, the latest year for which national data is available, and the other eight states said fewer than two dozen each.

The number of lifers thus continues to swell in prisons across the nation, even as the number of new life sentences has dropped in recent years along with the crime rate.

According to a New York Times survey, the number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, to 132,000. Historical data on juvenile offenders is incomplete. But among the 18 states that can provide data from 1993, the juvenile lifer population rose 74 percent in the next decade.

Prosecutors and representatives of crime victims applaud the trend. The prisoners, they say, are paying the minimum fit punishment for their terrible crimes.

But even supporters of the death penalty wonder about this state of affairs.

"Life without parole is a very strange sentence when you think about it," said Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School. "The punishment seems either too much or too little. If a sadistic or extraordinarily cold, callous killer deserves to die, then why not kill him? But if we are going to keep the killer alive when we could otherwise execute him, why strip him of all hope?"

Burl Cain, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, which houses thousands of lifers, said older prisoners who have served many years should be able to make their cases to a parole or pardon board that has an open mind. Because all life sentences in Louisiana are without the possibility of parole, only a governor's pardon can bring about a release.

The prospect of a meaningful hearing would, Mr. Cain said, provide lifers with a taste of hope.

"Prison should be a place for predators and not dying old men," Mr. Cain said. "Some people should die in prison, but everyone should get a hearing."

Television and Boredom

In interviews, lifers said they tried to resign themselves to spending down their days entirely behind bars. But the prison programs that once kept them busy in an effort at training and rehabilitation have largely been dismantled, replaced by television and boredom.

The lot of the lifer may be said to be cruel or pampered, depending on one's perspective. "It's a bleak imprisonment," said W. Scott Thornsley, a former corrections official in Pennsylvania. "When you take away someone's hope, you take away a lot."

It was not always that way, said Steven Benjamin, a 56-year-old Michigan lifer.

"The whole perception of incarceration changed in the 1970's," said Mr. Benjamin, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for participating in a robbery in 1973 in which an accomplice killed a man. "They're dismantling all meaningful programs. We just write people off without a second thought."

As the years pass and the lifers grow old, they sometimes tend to dying prisoners and then die themselves. Some are buried in cemeteries on prison grounds by other lifers, who will then go on to repeat the cycle.

"They're never going to leave here," said Mr. Cain, the warden at Angola, of inmates he looks after. "They're going to die here."

Some defendants view the prospect of life in prison as so bleak and the possibility of exoneration for lifers as so remote that they are willing to roll the dice with death.

In Alabama, six men convicted of capital crimes have asked their juries for death rather than life sentences, said Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.

The idea seems to have its roots in the experience of Walter McMillian, who was convicted of capital murder by an Alabama jury in 1988. The jury recommended that he be sentenced to life without parole, but Judge Robert E. Lee Key Jr. overrode that recommendation and sentenced Mr. McMillian to death by electrocution.

Because of that death sentence, lawyers opposed to capital punishment took up Mr. McMillian's case. Through their efforts, Mr. McMillian was exonerated five years later after prosecutors conceded that they had relied on perjured testimony. "Had there not been that decision to override," said Mr. Stevenson, one of Mr. McMillian's lawyers, "he would be in prison today."

Other Alabama defendants have learned a lesson from Mr. McMillian.

"We have a lot of death penalty cases where, perversely, the client at the penalty phase asks to be sentenced to death," Mr. Stevenson said.

Judges and other legal experts say that risky decision could be a wise one for defendants who are innocent or who were convicted under flawed procedures. "Capital cases get an automatic royal treatment, whereas noncapital cases are fairly routine," said Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge in California.

David R. Dow, one of Mr. Arroyo's lawyers and the director of the Texas Innocence Network, said groups like his did not have the resources to represent lifers.

"If we got Arroyo's case as a non-death-penalty case," Mr. Dow said, "we would have terminated it in the very early stages of investigation."

Mr. Arroyo, who is 25 but still has something of the pimply, squirmy adolescent about him, said he already detected a certain quiet descending on his case.

"You don't hear too many religious groups or foreign governments or nonprofit organizations fighting for lifers," he said.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed a bill in June adding life without parole as an option for juries to consider in capital cases. Opponents of the death penalty have embraced and promoted this alternative, pointing to studies that show that support for the death penalty dropped drastically among jurors and the public when life without parole, or LWOP, was an alternative.

"Life without parole has been absolutely crucial to whatever progress has been made against the death penalty," said James Liebman, a law professor at Columbia. "The drop in death sentences" - from 320 in 1996 to 125 last year - "would not have happened without LWOP."

But some questioned the strategy.

"I have a problem with death penalty abolitionists," said Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News and a former lifer, released in Washington State in 2003 after serving 17 years for killing a man in a robbery attempt. "They're positing life without parole as an option, but it's a death sentence by incarceration. You're trading a slow form of death for a faster one."

Mr. Arroyo shares that view.

"I'd roll the dice with death and stay on death row," he said. "Really, death has never been my fear. What do people believe? That being alive in prison is a good life? This is slavery."

Murder Follows a Kidnapping

Mr. Arroyo was convicted in 1998 for his role in the killing of Jose Cobo, 39, an Air Force captain and the chief of maintenance training at the Inter-American Air Forces Academy in Lackland, Tex. Mr. Arroyo, then 17, and an accomplice, Vincent Gutierrez, 18, wanted to steal Captain Cobo's red Mazda RX-7 for parts.

Captain Cobo tried to escape but became tangled in his seat belt. Mr. Gutierrez shot him twice in the back and shoved the dying man onto the shoulder of Interstate 410 during rush hour on a rainy Tuesday morning.

Although Mr. Arroyo did not pull the trigger, he was convicted of felony murder, or participation in a serious crime that led to a killing. He contends that he had no reason to think Mr. Gutierrez would kill Captain Cobo and therefore cannot be guilty of felony murder. "I don't mind taking responsibility for my actions, for my part in this crime," he said. "But don't act like I'm a murderer or violent or that this was premeditated."

That argument misunderstands the felony murder law, legal experts said. Mr. Arroyo's decision to participate in the carjacking is, they say, more than enough to support his murder conviction.

Captain Cobo left behind a 17-year-old daughter, Reena.

"I miss him so much it hurts when I think about it," she said of her father in a victim impact statement presented at trial. "I know he is in heaven with my grandmother and God is taking care of him. I want to see the murderers punished not necessarily by death. I feel sorry that they wasted theirs and my father's life."

Ms. Cobo declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Arroyo said he was not eager to leave death row, and not just because of dwindling interest in his case.

"All I know is death row," he said. "This is my life. This is where I grew up."

His lawyer sees reasons for him to be concerned about moving off death row.

"He's going to become someone's plaything in the general population," Mr. Dow said. "He's a small guy, and the first time someone tries to kill him they'll probably succeed."

That kind of violence is not the way most lifers die. At Angola, for instance, two prisoners were killed by fellow inmates in the five years ended in 2004. One committed suicide, and two were executed. The other 150 or so died in the usual ways.

The prison operates a hospice to tend to dying prisoners, and it has opened a second cemetery, Point Lookout Two, to accommodate the dead.

On a warm afternoon earlier this year, men in wheelchairs moved slowly around the main open area of the prison hospice. Others lounged in bed.

The private rooms, for terminal patients, are as pleasant as most hospital rooms, though the doors are sturdier. The inmates have televisions, video games, coffeepots and DVD players. One patient watched "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Robert Downs, a 69-year old career bank robber serving a 198-year term as a habitual felon, died in one of those rooms the day before. In his final days, other inmates tended to him, in four-hour shifts, around the clock. They held his hand and eased his passage. "Our responsibility," said Randolph Matthieu, 53, a hospice volunteer, "is so that he doesn't die there by himself. We wash him and clean him if he messes himself. It's a real humbling experience."

Mr. Matthieu is serving a life sentence for killing a man he met at the C'est La Guerre Lounge in Lafayette, La., in 1983.

At Point Lookout Two the next day, there were six mounds of fresh dirt and one deep hole, ready to receive Mr. Downs. Under the piles of dirt were other inmates who had recently died. They were awaiting simple white crosses like the 120 or so nearby. The crosses bear two pieces of information. One is the dead man's name, of course. Instead of the end points of his life, though, his six-digit prison number is stamped below.

The sun was hot, and the gravediggers paused for a rest after their toil.

"I'm hoping I don't come this way," said Charles Vassel, 66, who is serving a life sentence for killing a clerk while robbing a liquor store in Monroe, La., in 1972. "I want to be buried around my family."

The families of prisoners who die at Angola have 30 hours to claim their bodies, and about half do. The rest are buried at Point Lookout Two.

"It's pretty much the only way you leave," said Timothy Bray, 45, also in for life. Mr. Bray, who helped beat a man to death for falling behind in his debts, tends to the horses that pull the hearse on funeral days, placing white and red rosettes in their manes.

Wary of a Transformed World

Not all older lifers are eager to leave prison. Many have grown used to the free food and medical care. They have no skills, they say, and they worry about living in a world that has been radically transformed by technology in the decades that they have been locked up.

Wardens like Mr. Cain say that lifers are docile, mature and helpful.

"Many of the lifers are not habitual felons," he added. "They committed a murder that was a crime of passion. That inmate is not necessarily hard to manage."

What is needed, he said, is hope, and that is in short supply. "I tell them, 'You never know when you might win the lottery,' " Mr. Cain said. "You never know when you might get a pardon. You never know when they might change the law.'"

Up the road from Point Lookout Two, near the main entrance, is the building that houses the state's death row. Lawyers for the 89 men there are hard at work, trying to overturn their clients' convictions or at least convert their death sentences into life terms. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, eight Louisiana death row inmates have been exonerated in the last three decades. More than 50, prison officials said, have had their sentences commuted to life.

But those hard-won life sentences, when they come, do not always please the prisoners.

"I have to put a lot of these guys on suicide watch when they get off death row," said Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden, "because their chances have gone down to this."

She put her thumb and forefinger together, making a zero.

Janet Roberts contributed reporting for this series. Research was contributed by Jack Styczynski, Linda Amster, Donna Anderson, Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.

    Serving Life, With No Chance of Redemption, NYT, 5.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/national/05lifer.html

Locked Away Forever

After Crimes as Teenagers

October 3, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

OCALA, Fla. - About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they could vote, serve on a jury or gamble in a casino - in short, before they turned 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole.

Juvenile criminals are serving life terms in at least 48 states, according to a survey by The New York Times, and their numbers have increased sharply over the past decade.

Rebecca Falcon is one of them.

Ms. Falcon, now 23, is living out her days at the Lowell Correctional Institution here. But eight years ago, she was a reckless teenager and running with a thuggish crowd when one night she got drunk on bourbon and ruined her life.

Ms. Falcon faults her choice of friends. "I tried cheerleaders, heavy metal people, a little bit of country and, you know, it never felt right," Ms. Falcon said. "I started listening to rap music and wearing my pants baggy. I was like a magnet for the wrong crowd."

In November 1997 she hailed a cab with an 18-year-old friend named Clifton Gilchrist. He had a gun, and within minutes, the cab driver was shot in the head. The driver, Richard Todd Phillips, 25, took several days to die. Each of the teenagers later said the other had done the shooting.

Ms. Falcon's jury found her guilty of murder, though it never did sort out precisely what happened that night, its foreman said. It was enough that she was there.

"It broke my heart," said Steven Sharp, the foreman. "As tough as it is, based on the crime, I think it's appropriate. It's terrible to put a 15-year-old behind bars forever."

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does that. Life without parole, the most severe form of life sentence, is theoretically available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries. But a report to be issued on Oct. 12 by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found juveniles serving such sentences in only three others. Israel has seven, South Africa has four and Tanzania has one.

By contrast, the report counted some 2,200 people in the United States serving life without parole for crimes they committed before turning 18. More than 350 of them were 15 or younger, according to the report.

The Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to ban the juvenile death penalty, which took into account international attitudes about crime and punishment, has convinced prosecutors and activists that the next legal battleground in the United States will be over life in prison for juveniles.

Society has long maintained age distinctions for things like drinking alcohol and signing contracts, and the highest court has ruled that youths under 18 who commit terrible crimes are less blameworthy than adults. Defense lawyers and human rights advocates say that logic should extend to sentences of life without parole.

Prosecutors and representatives of crime victims say that a sentence of natural life is the minimum fit punishment for a heinous crime, adding that some people are too dangerous ever to walk the streets.

In the Supreme Court's decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said teenagers were different, at least for purposes of the ultimate punishment. They are immature and irresponsible. They are more susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure. And teenagers' personalities are unformed. "Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile," Justice Kennedy concluded, is not "evidence of irretrievably depraved character."

Most of those qualities were evident in Ms. Falcon, who had trouble fitting in at her Kansas high school and had been sent by her mother to live with her grandmother in Florida, where she received little supervision. She liked to smoke marijuana, and ran with a series of cliques. "I was looking for identity," she said.

Like many other lifers, Ms. Falcon is in prison for felony murder, meaning she participated in a serious crime that led to a killing but was not proved to have killed anyone.

In their report, the human rights groups estimate that 26 percent of juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole for murder were found guilty of felony murder. A separate Human Rights Watch report on Colorado found that a third of juveniles serving sentences of life without parole there had been convicted of felony murder.

The larger question, advocates for juveniles say, is whether any youths should be locked away forever.

At the argument in the juvenile death penalty case, Justice Antonin Scalia said the reasons offered against execution apply just as forcefully to life without parole. Justice Scalia voted, in dissent, to retain the juvenile death penalty.

"I don't see where there's a logical line," he said at the argument last October.

When it comes to Ms. Falcon, the prosecutor in her case said she does not ever deserve to be free. Indeed, she is lucky to be alive.

The prosecutor, Jim Appleman, is convinced that she shot Mr. Phillips. "If she were a 29-year-old or a 22-year-old," he said, "I have no doubt she would have gotten the death penalty."

Ms. Falcon dressed up, as best one can in prison, to meet two journalists not long ago. There was nothing to be done about the plain blue prison dress, with buttons down the front. But she wore gold earrings, a crucifix on a gold chain and red lipstick. Her dark hair was shoulder length, and her eyes were big and brown.

She said her eight years in prison had changed her.

"A certain amount of time being incarcerated was what I needed," she said. "But the law I fell under is for people who have no hope of being rehabilitated, that are just career criminals and habitually break the law, and there's just no hope for them in society. I'm a completely different case."

"My sentence is unfair," she added. "They put you in, and they forget."

Tagging Along on a Horrific Night

The case of another Florida teenager, Timothy Kane, demonstrates how youths can be sent away for life, even when the evidence shows they were not central figures in a crime.

Then 14, Timothy was at a friend's house, playing video games on Jan. 26, 1992, Super Bowl Sunday, when some older youths hatched a plan to burglarize a neighbor's home. He did not want to stay behind alone, he said, so he tagged along.

There were five of them, and they rode their bikes over, stashing them in the bushes. On the way, they stopped to feed some ducks.

Two of the boys took off at the last moment, but Timothy followed Alvin Morton, 19, and Bobby Garner, 17, into the house. He did not want to be called a scaredy-cat, he said.

"This is," he said in a prison interview, "the decision that shaped my life since."

The youths had expected the house to be empty, but they were wrong. Madeline Weisser, 75, and her son, John Bowers, 55, were home.

While Timothy hid behind a dining room table, according to court records, the other two youths went berserk.

Mr. Morton, whom prosecutors described as a sociopath, shot Mr. Bowers in the back of the neck while he pleaded for his life, killing him. Mr. Morton then tried to shoot Ms. Weisser, but his gun jammed. Using a blunt knife, Mr. Morton stabbed her in the neck, and Mr. Garner stepped on the knife to push it in, almost decapitating her.

"I firmly believe what they were trying to do was take the head as a kind of souvenir," said Robert W. Attridge, who prosecuted the case.

Mr. Morton and Mr. Garner did succeed in cutting off Mr. Bowers's pinkie. They later showed it to friends.

Mr. Morton was sentenced to death. Mr. Garner, a juvenile offender like Mr. Kane, was given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 50 years.

Mr. Kane was also sentenced to life, but he will become eligible for parole after 25 years, when he will be 39. However, he is not optimistic that the parole board will ever let him out. Had he committed his crime after 1995, when Florida changed its law to eliminate the possibility of parole for people sentenced to life, he would not have even that hope.

Florida is now one of the states with the most juveniles serving life. It has 600 juvenile offenders serving life sentences; about 270 of them, including Ms. Falcon, who committed her crime in 1997, are serving life without parole.

Data supplied by the states on juveniles serving life is incomplete. But a detailed analysis of data from another state with a particularly large number of juvenile lifers, Michigan, shows that the mix of the life sentences - those with the possibility of parole and those without - is changing fast.

In Michigan, the percentage of all lifers who are serving sentences without parole rose to 64 percent from 51 percent in the 24 years ended in 2004. But the percentage of juvenile lifers serving such sentences rose to 68 percent from 41 percent in the period. Now two out of three juvenile lifers there have no shot at parole.

The Times's survey and analysis considered juvenile lifers generally, while the human rights report examined juveniles serving life sentences without parole. Both studies defined a juvenile as anyone younger than 18 at the time of the offense or arrest. For some states that could not provide a count based on such ages, the studies counted as a juvenile anyone under the age of 20 at sentencing or admission to prison.

Juvenile lifers are overwhelmingly male and mostly black. Ninety-five percent of those admitted in 2001 were male and 55 percent were black.

Forty-two states and the federal government allow offenders under 18 to be put away forever. Ten states set no minimum age, and 13 set a minimum of 10 to 13. Seven states, including Florida and Michigan, have more than 100 juvenile offenders serving such sentences, the report found. Those sending the largest percentages of their youths to prison for life without parole are Virginia and Louisiana.

Some Dismay Over Sentences

Juvenile lifers are much more likely to be in for murder than are their adult counterparts, suggesting that prosecutors and juries embrace the punishment only for the most serious crime.

While 40 percent of adults sent away for life between 1988 and 2001 committed crimes other than murder, like drug offenses, rape and armed robbery, the Times analysis found, only 16 percent of juvenile lifers were sentenced for anything other than murder.

In those same years, the number of juveniles sentenced to life peaked in 1994, at about 790, or 15 percent of all adults and youths admitted as lifers that year. The number dropped to about 390, or 9 percent, in 2001, the most recent year for which national data is available.

Similarly, the number of juveniles sentenced to life without parole peaked in 1996, at 152. It has dropped sharply since then, to 54 last year. That may reflect a growing discomfort with the punishment and the drop in the crime rate.

It is unclear how many juveniles or adults are serving life sentences under three-strikes and similar habitual-offender laws.

Human rights advocates say that the use of juvenile life without parole, or LWOP, is by one measure rising. "Even with murder rates going down," said Alison Parker, the author of the new report, "the proportion of juvenile murder offenders entering prison with LWOP sentences is going up."

The courts that consider the cases of juvenile offenders look at individuals, not trends. But sometimes, as in Mr. Kane's case, they express dismay over the sentences that are required.

"Tim Kane was 14 years and 3 months old, a junior high student with an I.Q. of 137 and no prior association with the criminal justice system," Judge John R. Blue wrote for the three-judge panel that upheld Mr. Kane's sentence. "Tim did not participate in the killing of the two victims."

These days, Mr. Kane, 27, looks and talks like a marine. He is fit, serious and polite. He held a questioner's gaze and called him sir, and he grew emotional when he talked about what he saw that January night.

"I witnessed two people die," he said. "I regret that every day of my life, being any part of that and seeing that."

He does not dispute that he deserved punishment.

"Did I know right from wrong?" he asked. "I can say, yes, I did know right from wrong."

Still, his sentence is harsh, Mr. Kane said, spent in the prison print shop making 55 cents an hour and playing sports in the evenings.

"You have no hope of getting out," he said. "You have no family. You have no moral support here. This can be hard."

Mr. Attridge, the prosecutor, who is now in private practice, said he felt sorry for Mr. Kane. "But he had options," Mr. Attridge said. "He had a way out. The other boys decided to leave."

In the end, the prosecutor said, "I do think he was more curious than an evil perpetrator."

"Could Tim Kane be your kid, being in the wrong place at the wrong time?" he asked. "I think he could. It takes one night of bad judgment and, man, your life can be ruined."

Different Accounts of a Crime

Visitors to the women's prison here are issued a little transmitter with an alarm button on it when they enter, in case of emergency. But Ms. Falcon is small and slim and not particularly threatening.

She sat and talked, in a flat Midwest tone married to an urban rhythm, on a concrete bench in an outdoor visiting area. It was pleasant in the shade.

Her mother, Karen Kaneer, said in a telephone interview that her daughter's troubles began in Kansas when she started to hang around with black youths.

"It wasn't the good black boys," Ms. Kaneer said. "It was the ones who get in trouble. She started trying marijuana."

Not pleased with where things were heading, Ms. Kaneer agreed to send Rebecca away, to Panama City, Fla., to Rebecca's grandmother. "It was my husband's idea," Ms. Kaneer said ruefully, referring to Ms. Falcon's stepfather. "Her and my husband didn't have the best of relations."

Ms. Falcon received a piece of unwelcome news about an old boyfriend on the evening of Nov. 18, 1997, and she hit her grandparents' liquor cabinet, hard, drinking a big tumbler of whiskey. Later on, when she joined up with her 18-year-old friend, Mr. Gilchrist, she said, she did not suspect that anything unusual was going to happen. She thought they were taking the cab to a party.

"I didn't know there was going to be a robbery at that time," she said. "I mean, Cliff said things like he was going to try out his gun eventually, but as far as right then that night in that situation I didn't know."

Asked if she played any role in the killing, Ms. Falcon said, "No, sir, I did not."

In a letter from prison, where he is serving a life term, Mr. Gilchrist declined to comment. At his trial, both his lawyer and the prosecutor told the jury that Ms. Falcon was the killer.

The medical evidence suggested that the passenger who sat behind Mr. Phillips killed him. But eyewitnesses differed about whether that was Ms. Falcon or Mr. Gilchrist.

Several witnesses did say that Ms. Falcon had talked about violence before the shooting and bragged about it afterward.

"On numerous occasions she said she wanted to see someone die," Mr. Appleman, the prosecutor, said. Ms. Falcon said the evidence against her was "basically, that I was always talking crazy."

The testimony grew so confused that at one point Mr. Appleman asked for a mistrial, though he later withdrew the request.

Though their verdict form suggested that they concluded that Mr. Gilchrist was the gunman, the jurors remain split about what was proved. "There was no evidence presented to confirm who was the actual shooter," said Mr. Sharp, the jury's foreman.

But Barney Jones, another juror, said he believed Ms. Falcon shot the gun. "She was confused," he said. "She was probably a typical teenager. She was trying to fit in by being a violent person. The people she hung out with listened to gangster rap, and this was a sort of initiation."

Whoever was to blame, Mr. Phillips's death left a terrible void. "Each day we see a cab, the memories of our son and the tragic way he died surfaces," his father and stepmother, Roger and Karen Phillips, wrote at the time of the trial in a letter to Mr. Gilchrist, according to an article in The News-Herald, a newspaper in Panama City.

At the prison here, as Ms. Falcon talked, a photographer started shooting, and she seemed to enjoy the attention, flashing a big smile at odds with the grim surroundings.

It was a break, she explained, from the grinding monotony that is the only life she may ever know. She reads to kill time and to prepare herself in case a Florida governor one day decides to pardon her.

She had just finished a book on parenting.

"If God lets me go and have a kid," she said, "I want to know these things so I can be a good mother."

Janet Roberts contributed reporting for this series. She was assisted by Linda Amster, Jack Styczynski, Donna Anderson, Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.

    Locked Away Forever After Crimes as Teenagers, NYT, 3.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/national/03lifers.html

Years of Regret

Follow a Hasty Guilty Plea Made at 16

October 3, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WALLA WALLA, Wash. - The prosecutor was in the middle of his opening statement, describing in vivid and disturbing detail the murders of Homer and Vada Smithson, who had just celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.

The defendant, Donald Lambert, 16, doodled as he listened. Then, court records show, he passed a note to his lawyer. It said he wanted to plead guilty.

Mr. Lambert entered his plea 13 minutes later, after a brief conversation with his lawyer, Guillermo Romero. The plea required Mr. Lambert to spend the rest of his life in prison. Mr. Lambert said Mr. Romero, who has since been disbarred, offered him no guidance.

"He didn't go into, like I know now, that it was my whole life," Mr. Lambert said in an interview at the Washington State Penitentiary here. "None of my family was in the courtroom. I was on my own."

There is little question of Mr. Lambert's guilt. But there are substantial ones about whether he and other juveniles facing life sentences are competent to make decisions with permanent consequences. Had Mr. Lambert rolled the dice and allowed the trial to proceed, he could have done no worse than what he agreed to in his plea.

In Washington as in other states, minors who sign a contract to buy a stereo or a bicycle are allowed to change their minds. They are, in the words of the State Supreme Court, "incompetent to contract away their rights."

But minors are allowed to enter binding plea agreements that call for life without the possibility of parole.

"He's got a right to plead guilty," said John Knodell, who prosecuted Mr. Lambert. "We trust kids that age to get an abortion."

Mr. Lambert, now 23, is an imposing young man, six feet of blocky muscle under a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He is covered in ugly prison tattoos, created with the motors from cassette decks. The tattoos climb up his neck, onto the back of his big square head and over an eyebrow. They compete for attention with a scar on his forehead. The combined effect is menacing.

At the prison interview here, Mr. Lambert's new lawyers instructed him not to answer questions about the killings.

But according to court records, early in the morning on May 21, 1997, Mr. Lambert, then 15, and Adam Betancourt, 16, burst into the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Smithson, both in their late 80's, in Quincy, Wash.

The youths shot Mr. Smithson many times, in the head, chest, legs and abdomen, and then went outside to reload. Mrs. Smithson made a desperate phone call to her son: "They're killing me!"

"The phone was right by a big kitchen window," recalled Al Smithson, the couple's son. The youths then shot her through the window. "They peppered her big time," Mr. Smithson said.

In 2003, a federal judge in Spokane threw out Mr. Lambert's guilty plea, calling his lawyer's conduct "unprofessional," "egregious" and "a dereliction of duty."

"Mr. Lambert had everything to lose by entering the guilty plea," wrote Judge W. Fremming Nielsen, who was appointed by the first President Bush. The decision to plead guilty to aggravated first-degree murder "was the most important decision of his life, and he was forced to make it without essential information."

There was evidence, Judge Nielsen wrote, suggesting that Mr. Lambert incorrectly thought he was facing the death penalty and that the sentence he pleaded to would allow him to be paroled after 20 years.

Mr. Romero, the defense lawyer, was disbarred last year for conduct unrelated to Mr. Lambert's plea. In an interview, Mr. Romero said his former client pleaded guilty with full knowledge of the consequences. Mr. Romero said he was unsurprised that Mr. Lambert now claims to have been confused.

"I would lie on my mother's grave," Mr. Romero said, "if I thought it would save me from life in prison."

Judge Nielsen, in his 2003 decision, ordered prosecutors to try Mr. Lambert or release him. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, reversed that ruling last year, saying Mr. Lambert had known what he was doing when he pleaded guilty.

Years of Regret Follow a Hasty Guilty Plea Made at 16, NYT, 3.10.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/national/03juvenile.html

 

To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars        NYT        2.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/national/02life.web.html

To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars        NYT        2.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/national/02life.web.html

To More Inmates,

Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

October 2, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

HARRISBURG, Pa. - In the winter woods near Gaines, Pa., on the day before New Year's Eve in 1969, four 15-year-olds were hunting rabbits when Charlotte Goodwin told Jackie Lee Thompson a lie. They had been having sex for about a month, and she said she was pregnant.

That angered Jackie, and he shot Charlotte three times and then drowned her in the icy waters of Pine Creek.

A few months later, Judge Charles G. Webb sentenced him to life in prison. But the judge told him:

"You will always have hope in a thing of this kind. We have found that, in the past, quite frequently, if you behave yourself, there is a good chance that you will learn a trade and you will be paroled after a few years."

Mr. Thompson did behave himself, learned quite a few trades in his 35 years in prison - he is an accomplished carpenter, bricklayer, electrician, plumber, welder and mechanic - and earned a high school diploma and an associate's degree in business.

So exemplary is his prison record that when Mr. Thompson, now 50, asked the state pardons board to release him, the victim's father begged for his release, and a retired prison official offered Mr. Thompson a place to stay and a job.

"We can forgive him," said Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father. "Why can't you?"

The board turned Mr. Thompson down.

Tom Corbett, the state attorney general, cast the decisive vote.

"He shot her with a pump-action shotgun, three times," Mr. Corbett said. "This was a cold-blooded killing."

Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years.

But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure on governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever.

Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.

A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes.

Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent.

The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the nation's enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences.

Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence.

As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime.

About 150 inmates have died there in the last five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number.

A Growing Reliance on Life Terms

American enthusiasm for life sentences reflects an uneasy societal consensus. Such sentences are undeniably tough, pleasing politicians and prosecutors, but they also satisfy opponents of capital punishment.

"If you are punishing a heinous criminal who has committed a violent murder, it is appropriate to use severe sanctions," said Julian H. Wright Jr., a lawyer in North Carolina and the author of a study on life without parole. "It has the advantage of achieving a harsh penalty and keeping a violent offender off the streets. And you don't take a human life in the process. Indeed, if you mess up and do it wrong, you haven't taken someone's life."

But the prison wardens, criminologists and groups that study sentencing say the growing reliance on life terms also raises a host of questions.

Permanent incarceration may be the fitting punishment for murder. Few shed tears for Gary L. Ridgway, the Green River killer, who was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms in Washington State, one for each of the women he admitted to killing.

But some critics of life sentences say they are overused, pointing to people like Jerald Sanders, who is serving a life sentence in Alabama. He was a small-time burglar and had never been convicted of a violent crime. Under the state's habitual offender law, he was sent away after stealing a $60 bicycle.

Fewer than two-thirds of the 70,000 people sentenced to life from 1988 to 2001 are in for murder, the Times analysis found. Other lifers - more than 25,000 of them - were convicted of crimes like rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, extortion, burglary and arson. People convicted of drug trafficking account for 16 percent of all lifers.

Life sentences certainly keep criminals off the streets. But, as decades pass and prisoners grow more mature and less violent, does the cost of keeping them locked up justify what may be a diminishing benefit in public safety? By a conservative estimate, it costs $3 billion a year to house America's lifers. And as prisoners age, their medical care can become very expensive.

At the same time, studies show, most prisoners become markedly less violent as they grow older.

"Committing crime, particularly violent crime, is an activity of the young," said Richard Kern, the director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.

Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group that issued a report on life sentences last year, said that about a fifth of released lifers were arrested again, compared with two-thirds of all released prisoners.

"Many lifers," Mr. Mauer said, "are kept in prison long after they represent a public safety threat."

In much of the rest of the world, sentences of natural life are all but unknown.

"Western Europeans regard 10 or 12 years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to life," said James Q. Whitman, a law professor at Yale and the author of "Harsh Justice," which compares criminal punishment in the United States and Europe.

Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on comparative punishment, said life without parole was a legal impossibility in much of the world.

Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole. And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, "No one stays 20 years in prison."

Some developing and Islamic nations mete out brutal sanctions, including corporal punishment and mutilation. But if the discussion is limited to very long prison sentences, Professor Tonry said, "we are vastly more punitive than anybody else."

The reasons for this gap are hard to pinpoint. Professor Whitman detects an American appetite for harsh retribution. Professor Tonry locates that appetite in a Calvinist tradition.

"It's the same reason we're not a socialist welfare state," he said. "You deserve what you get, both good and bad."

That sort of talk struck M. L. Ebert Jr., a former president of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and the district attorney of Cumberland County, Pa., as a little fancy.

"Is it too much to ask that people don't kill people?" he said. "I can't tell you the devastation it causes families, who never forget. If you kill somebody, life means life without parole."

The Crime and the Victim

"My anger broke loose, and I shot her," Mr. Thompson said recently, recalling for the millionth time the day he killed Charlotte Goodwin. He was afraid, he said, that her pregnancy would get him kicked out of his foster home, his fourth in five years and the first one that he liked.

Mr. Thompson is a slight, almost elfin man, with receding, wispy, unkempt salt-and-pepper hair, a casual mustache, breath that smells of cigarettes and moody brown eyes in a heavily creased face.

He is serving his time at the Rockview Correctional Institution near Bellefonte, just up the road from Pennsylvania State University. It is a soaring and forbidding mass of granite, a piece of Gotham City plunked down in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania.

He used his friend Dennis Ellis's pump-action shotgun, Mr. Thompson said, and he shot Charlotte at close range three times. He tried to explain the repeated shots.

"You have to pump each time," he said. "It is true. Dennis and I, we always had a habit of going out in the woods with a gun and see how fast we could empty a gun. That's where the second and third shots come from."

Charlotte's wounds were not immediately fatal. The youths had the idea, Mr. Thompson said, of putting her in a nearby creek. But she bobbed to the surface. So the three teenagers slid her body under the ice that covered a part of the creek, drowning her.

"You should have seen how stupid we was," Mr. Thompson said. "I wish I could change that."

Mr. Thompson grew up as a slow and confused child, with a slight speech impediment. He had 13 brothers and sisters, "and that's not counting the half ones," he said.

"Three or four of them have died so far," he said. His mother died when he was 10, he added, "I'm told of cancer."

Mr. Thompson recalled his younger self.

"That 15-year-old kid was so scared. He was a special-ed kid. Special-ed kids get teased a lot. I was small. I kept running away. Here was a kid who was always scared to death, picked on, possibly beat up."

"Looking back," he said, "I wish someone would have grabbed hold of me and kicked my butt. I wasn't a bad kid."

He met Charlotte Goodwin at the foster home.

"I didn't get to know her that well," Mr. Thompson said. "At that age, boys are after one thing. A girl can talk all she wants and you ain't listening to her. You're thinking of only one thing."

Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father, remembered a cheerful child.

"She was just happy-go-lucky," Mr. Goodwin said of her. "If there was any kind of music on, she'd move to it."

Jackie confessed to killing Charlotte, and Judge Webb sentenced him to life. At that time, 1970, in Pennsylvania, a life sentence usually meant fewer than 20 years.

Dorothy D. Quimby was the clerk of the Orphans Court of Tioga County at the time and she knew him as "a gentle, good boy who had suffered a lot of hurt."

"I also knew Judge Webb very well," she wrote to the pardons board, "and know that his intentions were not to have Jackie incarcerated for any great length of time."

A few months ago, Mr. Goodwin, 78, traveled 100 miles to speak up for his daughter's killer before the pardons board, which meets in an ornate courtroom of the State Supreme Court here, under a stained-glass cupola and a dozen frescoes attesting to the majesty of the law.

Mr. Goodwin, a retired glass factory worker with a gray goatee and a hearing aid, is a small man with erect posture, alert eyes and quick laugh, but he gets a little overwhelmed by public speaking. He spoke softly and haltingly.

"He was just a scared little kid," Mr. Goodwin said of Jackie. "If he ever gets out, he's got a good education, and I think he'll use it."

Kenneth Chubb, a retired facilities manager at the prison in Camp Hill, told the board that he had a proposal.

"My wife and I would both like to offer, if needed, a place for him to stay," Mr. Chubb said, his voice choking with emotion. "Plus, my son, who has a plumbing business, will offer him a job."

That drew a low whistle of surprise from a former prison official in the audience.

"For a corrections person to embrace an inmate is just incredible," the official, W. Scott Thornsley, said.

A few days before the hearing, Mr. Corbett, the state attorney general, met with Mr. Thompson.

"I walked out of the room thinking and feeling that he was going to say yes," Mr. Thompson later said. "He was not coldhearted. He wasn't drilling me. He gets to the point. He's a decent man."

But in the end, that visit, Mr. Goodwin's pleas and Mr. Chubb's offer were not enough to sway Mr. Corbett, the one dissenting vote on the five-member parole board.

"I am not prepared," Mr. Corbett said, "at this time to vote in the affirmative."

John F. Cowley, the district attorney in Tioga County, where the killing took place, agreed that Mr. Thompson should never be free.

"At the end of the day, in Pennsylvania life means life," Mr. Cowley said. "I come down on the side - not firmly - but I come down on the side that there should be no pardon. It's a tough case. The only reason is the age at the time of the crime. Everything else is way beyond ugly."

In lawsuits around the country, lifers are complaining that the rules were changed after sentencing. In some cases, they have the support of the judges who sentenced them.

A survey of 95 current and retired judges by the Michigan state bar released in 2002 found that, on average, the judges had expected prisoners sentenced to life with the possibility of parole to become eligible for parole in 12 years and to be released in 16 years. In July, a Michigan appeals court echoed that, saying that many lawyers there used to assume that a life sentence meant 12 to 20 years.

"This belief seems to have been somewhat supported by parole data," the court said in rejecting a claim from a prisoner who claimed that recent changes in the parole system had worked to his disadvantage. "For example, between 1941 and 1974, 416 parole-eligible lifers were paroled, averaging 12 per year."

In the last 24 years, by contrast, a New York Times analysis found that while the number of lifers shot up, the number of lifers who were paroled declined to about seven per year - even using the most liberal of definitions.

In 2002, for instance, a Michigan judge tried to reopen the case of John Alexander, whom he had sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for a seemingly unprovoked street shooting in 1981.

The judge, Michael F. Sapala, said he had not anticipated the extent to which the parole board "wouldn't simply change policies but, in fact, would ignore the law" in denying parole to Mr. Alexander. "If I wanted to make sure he stayed in prison for the rest of his life, I would have imposed" a sentence "like 80 to 150 years," the judge said.

An appeals court ruled that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over the case.

Executive Clemency Wanes

In Louisiana, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, has a large number of lifers, "it was common knowledge that life imprisonment generally means 10 years and 6 months" in the 1970's, the state's Supreme Court said in 1982.

Since 1979, all life sentences there have come without the possibility of parole, and the governor rarely intervenes.

"The use of executive clemency has withered, as it has all over the country, especially with lifers," said Burk Foster, a recently retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The federal appeals court in California is considering whether the parole board there may deny parole to lifers based on the nature of the original crime, which, prisoners say, is a form of double jeopardy. The plaintiff in the case, Carl Merton Irons II, shot and stabbed a housemate, John Nicholson, in 1984 after hearing that Mr. Nicholson was stealing from their landlord. Mr. Irons was sentenced to 17 years to life for second-degree murder.

The parole board refused for a fifth time to release him in 2001, saying that the killing was "especially cruel and callous."

The prosecutor who sent Mr. Irons away spoke up for him at a hearing the next year, to no avail. "If life would have it that Carl Irons was my next-door neighbor or I heard he was going to move next door to me," the prosecutor, Stephen M. Wagstaffe said, "my view to you would be that I'm going to have a good neighbor."

Mr. Irons filed a lawsuit challenging the board's decision. A federal district judge agreed, ordering him paroled. The federal appeals court is expected to rule soon.

The state has 30,000 lifers, of whom 27,000 will eventually become eligible for parole. As a practical matter, parole for lifers is a two-step process: the parole board must recommend it, and the governor must approve it. Neither step is easy. In a 28-month period ending in 2001, according to the California Supreme Court, the board considered 4,800 cases and granted parole in 48. Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, reversed 47 of the decisions.

Governor Davis had run on a tough-on-crime platform. In five years as governor, he paroled five lifers, all murderers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who succeeded Mr. Davis in late 2003, has been more receptive to parole. He has paroled 103 lifers, 89 of them murderers.

"Even though he is letting out more than Davis, it is still just a trickle," said Don Spector, executive director of the Prison Law Office, a legal group concerned with inmate rights and prison reform. "The victims' rights groups are used to seeing nothing, so to them, it seems like there's been a flood of releases."

Reginald McFadden is the reason lifers no longer get pardons in Pennsylvania.

Mr. McFadden had served 24 years of a life sentence for suffocating Sonia Rosenbaum, 60, during a burglary of her home when a divided Board of Pardons voted to release him in 1992. After Gov. Robert P. Casey signed the commutation papers two years later, Mr. McFadden moved to New York, where he promptly killed two people and kidnapped and raped a third. He is now serving another life sentence there.

Lt. Gov. Mark Singel had voted to release Mr. McFadden. When news of the New York murders broke, Mr. Singel was running for governor and was well ahead in the polls. The commutation became a campaign issue, and Mr. Singel was defeated by Tom Ridge, who did not commute a single lifer's sentence in his six years in office.

Ernest D. Preate Jr., the state attorney general at the time, was the sole dissenting vote in Mr. McFadden's case.

Then, it took only a majority vote of the board to recommend clemency. Mr. Preate worked to change that, and in 1997 Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote in cases involving the death penalty and life sentences. The amendment also changed the composition of the board, substituting, for instance, a crime victim for a lawyer.

Mr. Thornsley, a former corrections official who now teaches at Mansfield University, said the amendment made a sensible change. "It took a unanimous vote to convict somebody," he said. "It should take a unanimous vote to send a case to the governor. If you're going to have a sentence, it should be served out in its entirety."

The McFadden experience in Pennsylvania is a representative one, said Michael Heise, a law professor at Cornell.

"Around World War II, governors were giving away clemency like candy," Dr. Heise said. "Ever since Governor Dukakis and Willie Horton and President Clinton and Marc Rich, executive officers have been far, far more reticent to exercise their power. The politics are pretty clear: they don't want to get burned."

As recently as 30 years ago, pardons for lifers were common in Pennsylvania. In eight years in the 1970's, for instance, Gov. Milton Shapp granted clemency to 251 lifers. Since 1995, even as the number of lifers has more than doubled, three governors combined have commuted a single life sentence.

These days, Mr. Preate is on the other side of the issue, working to overturn the amendment that he himself set in motion. He said his change of heart came after he spent a year in prison on a mail fraud conviction in the mid-90's. Meeting older lifers convinced him that the current system could be unduly punitive, he said.

"That got me involved in the fight against the amendment I helped create and supported," he said.

Mr. Preate now supports legislation that would allow a parole board to consider the cases of lifers who have served 25 years and are at least 50. "I never foresaw the politicization of this process," he said, "and the fear that has crept into the process."

Mr. Thompson entered prison in an era when its goal was rehabilitation, even for people serving nominal life terms. These days, he works as a prison carpenter, earning 42 cents an hour building cabinets and fixing things up around the prison, which houses about 1,800 inmates, more than 180 of whom are lifers.

"It helps pay the cable and gets you a little bit of commissary," he said. "It might be strange to say, but coming to jail helped me. I got an education. Would I have got that out there? I probably would have quit like my brothers and most of my sisters. Would I have an associate's degree? Would I have job training?"

He has a cell to himself, with a television and a guitar. He plays "the old rock, the classics" and said he was partial to Bob Dylan. He has started playing sports.

"Softball season started up again and the young boys talked me in to playing again, and I'm pretty good," he said several months ago. He plays second base.

A lifer entering the system today would have few of Mr. Thompson's advantages. Programs have been cut back, and those that still exist are often reserved for prisoners serving short sentences.

Mr. Thompson sounded resigned when he talked about being turned down by the pardons board.

"A lot of guys in here really thought I was going to make it, staff and inmates, to give a little hope to the lifers," he said wearily. "I didn't cry this time. I committed a crime. Even though I think I've been punished enough, I'm to the point where I'm worried about my people, my supporters, because it really does take a toll on them."

The Data on Lifers
Janet Roberts of The Times's computer-assisted reporting unit contributed reporting for this series. She was assisted by Jack Styczynski, Donna Anderson, Linda Amster, Jack Begg, Alain Delaqueriere, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.

    To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars, NYT, 2.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/national/02life.web.html

Face value

The prophet of prison

Sep 1st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Is John Ferguson the saviour of America's prison system

or its destroyer?
 

JOHN FERGUSON has done time in prison. He well remembers the days he spent guarding inmates and mopping floors at a women's jail in New Mexico. Four years ago, he swapped his office for the prison floor to take part in a television series that sent corporate executives to work on the front-lines of their companies. The experience was educational: “Your feet got tired because you're walking around on concrete all the time,” he says, with his slight Tennessee twang. “I learned that it's a business that could be very mundane but you can't ever relax—you've got some folks that are spending every working hour trying to figure out how to do mischief”.

As head of America's largest private prison operator, the Nashville-based Corrections Corp of America (CCA), Mr Ferguson is responsible for 63,000 inmates in 19 states and Washington, DC—and his potential market is growing all the time. Inmate numbers in America rose by 25% between 1996 and 2004. America now has 726 prison inmates for every 100,000 people, compared with 142 in England, 91 in France and 58 in Japan. With public prisons notoriously overstretched, private prisons have been quietly picking up the slack since the Reagan years.

It is a business prone to nasty surprises. CCA, which had confidently built prisons during the 1990s boom years, was saddled with debt and empty beds after stabbings and escapes at one of its Ohio prisons caused a slump in business. Mr Ferguson took the reins in 2000 and salvaged the firm, but there have still been plenty of bumps. In the past year CCA has weathered riots in Oklahoma (one death) and Kentucky as well as a hostage-taking in Florida—to say nothing of lawsuits following a riot in Colorado in July 2004. “Inmates are litigious,” laments Mr Ferguson.

All these problems also afflict state-run prisons. But they are a particular threat to CCA, because many people still find the very idea of a privately run prison faintly immoral. Critics complain that a private company will inevitably treat prisoners simply as inventory. But Mr Ferguson responds that prisons—like any other public service—can be improved by competition and flexibility. For states with a sudden capacity problem, CCA can supply “just-in-time” beds. The company can also build prisons faster than the government—15 months for CCA compared with up to five years for states and eight for the federal government.

The private sector can offer other innovations. After his spell on the front-line in New Mexico, Mr Ferguson came away appalled by the number of hours prison guards spend documenting their movements in a logbook; he is trying to switch to an electronic system. But his real trump card is cost. CCA and its competitors can almost always undercut the state—Florida even obliges the private sector to operate 7% more cheaply than the public sector. The savings owe much to lower staffing costs, and economies of scale. “The public sector has a tendency not to eliminate positions when they're not needed,” says Mr Ferguson, who spent four years as Tennessee's finance commissioner.

Only a handful of CCA facilities has unions, which gives the company a cost advantage since the public-sector prisons tend to have powerful unions. Critics of private prisons say that the CCA method poses a security risk, since workers with fewer benefits and lower pay will be less vigilant. But Mr Ferguson has a ready retort: “If that is the case, Southwest Airlines would be having a crash every month,” he says, pointing out that his prisons are all regulated and inspected by the government.

If Mr Ferguson can see off his critics, there is plenty of scope for growth. Although CCA's latest quarterly earnings showed no advance from the same period last year—the result of a regrettable shortage of inmates at some facilities—Mr Ferguson expects big new contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The bureau is already CCA's largest customer, and its projections put it about 30,000 beds short by 2010, according to CCA. Many of the detainees sent to private prisons are illegal immigrants; indeed, a surge in criminal aliens needing beds helped save CCA five years ago. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another federal bureau, could bring more business if Congress funds the intelligence-reform bill passed last in late 2004.

Mr Ferguson rules out going abroad for new business—one of his first acts upon taking charge five years ago was to ditch CCA's international ventures. A much more promising source of potential business is state governments. Private prisons have footholds in about three-quarters of the 50 states. They are strongest in the South and west—but northern states are beginning to open up as well. Vermont, for example, last year asked CCA to house 700 of its inmates, mostly in a Kentucky facility.

Golden opportunities

The big prize would be California. So far the Golden State has mostly run its own prisons. But the badly overcrowded public system has huge problems—a federal judge recently mandated reforms to the provision of health care for Californian inmates, after denouncing instances of “outright depravity”. Private operators are closely watching Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's prison policies and union-busting activities. CCA has no contracts yet in California, although in July the GEO Group, CCA's largest rival, was contracted to operate a 200-bed minimum-security facility in California.

Privatisation of existing prisons gives plenty of scope for CCA to expand, without any further increase in the United States' already exceptional level of incarceration. Mr Ferguson fends off suggestions that he longs for a further surge in prisoner numbers, or lobbies for more lock-em-up laws. “It's kind of like saying a heart surgeon's out advocating to reduce anti-smoking programs so they'll have more hearts to work on—we just don't do that.” In any case, the trend towards locking up felons for ever longer periods is already firmly established.

The prophet of prison, Economist, 1.9.2005, http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4342571

U.S. Prison Population,

World's Highest, Up Again

Sun Apr 24, 2005 04:36 PM ET
Reuters
By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. penal system, the world's largest, maintained its steady growth in 2004, the Department of Justice reported on Sunday.

The latest official half-yearly figures found the nation's prison and jail population at 2,131,180 in the middle of last year, an increase of 2.3 percent over 2003.

The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000, for France 91 and for Japan 58.

The figures issued by the department's statistical unit showed that 12.6 percent of black males in their late twenties were behind bars. The comparable rate for Hispanic males was 3.6 percent and for whites 1.7 percent.

"Unless we promote alternatives to prison, the nation will continue to lead the world in imprisonment," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a think-tank that studies prison issues.

According to the Justice Department, violent crime in the United States fell by over 33 percent from 1994 to 2003 and property crimes fell by 23 percent.

Yet the prison population has continued to climb, increasing an annual average of 3.5 percent since 1995, partly due to high recidivism. Within three years of their release, two of every three prisoners are back behind bars.

Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to "get tough on crime" policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug and property offenders to long mandatory sentences.

"We have to be concerned about an overloaded system which sentences many offenders quickly and is not dong a good job of sorting out people who should be incarcerated from people for whom other responses would produce better, less expensive results," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington think-tank.

The rise in the prison population varies by state. Since 1998, 12 states experienced stable or declining incarceration rates but crime rates in those states declined at the same rate as in the other 38.

Texas, with 704 per 100,000 people in state prisons, incarcerates almost seven times as many as Maine, at 149 per 100,000.

It costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year. The United States spends about $57 billion annually on its prison and jail system.

Women remain the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, increasing by 2.9 percent over the year to over 103,000. In 1980, the United States imprisoned 12,000 women.

In addition, the United States jails around 283,000 people with serious mental illnesses and almost 92,000 foreigners.

U.S. Prison Population, World's Highest, Up Again,
R, Sun Apr 24, 2005 04:36 PM ET,
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=VPEKPOURKDSMICRBAE0CFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=8274699