History > 2006 > USA > State Justice (I)

Charles Cullen

being led from court Thursday after he was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences.

He faces sentencing in Pennsylvania for seven killings there. When called on to speak, he declined.

Pool photograph by Mike Derer        NYT        March 2, 2006

As Victims' Relatives Watch, Nurse Who Killed 29 Gets 11 Life Terms        NYT        3.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/nyregion/03cullen.html

R.I. to revisit felons' voting rights

Updated 5/31/2006 11:39 PM ET
USA Today
By Charisse Jones

Andres Idarraga is a sophomore at Brown University in Providence studying comparative literature and economics. He dreams of putting his Ivy League education to good use and one day casting a ballot. But he will be 58 before he can legally vote in his home state for the first time.

That's because Idarraga, 28, spent about six years in prison for drug and gun possession. Under current Rhode Island law, convicted felons can't vote until they have completed parole and probation, a date 30 years away for Idarraga. So he is speaking out to support a state ballot initiative in November that would allow felons to vote after they leave prison.

Its passage would "send a message that we're willing to embrace you, to afford second chances, instead of every step along the way putting up roadblocks," he says.

Rhode Island is one of several states where lawmakers and advocacy groups are working to change laws that deny many felons the right to vote.

An estimated 5.3 million people cannot vote because of a felony conviction, says Ryan King, policy analyst for the Sentencing Project, a research group that favors changes in prison and sentencing rules. Thirty-six states deny that right to felons while they're on parole, and 31 of them also bar voting by felons on probation.

King and other advocates of changing those rules say the restrictions punish people who have served their time and disproportionately affect the poor and people of color.

"In states where there's 20% to 30% of African-Americans who are prohibited from voting, that's a significant portion of the population not being represented by their state or federal legislators," King says.

Some prohibitions against felons voting are being eased:

•Nebraska lawmakers in March passed legislation automatically restoring voting rights to felons two years after they complete their sentences, including probation and parole. The state previously had a lifetime ban.

•Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack last year signed an executive order automatically restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences, including probation or parole, or received early release.

•Coalitions of former inmates, faith-based organizations and civil rights groups are registering voters and lobbying election officials and lawmakers in Rhode Island, Kentucky and other states.

Support not universal

Some lawmakers believe the restrictions should stay in place.

"I don't believe we need to have a voting bloc that comes out of prison angry at the sheriff's department ... and angry at the prosecutor's office," says Tennessee state Rep. Gerald McCormick, a Chattanooga Republican. "I don't think it's right to have them on the same level as people who've paid their taxes and played by the rules."

McCormick sponsored a bill that would have barred anyone convicted of a felony on or after July 1 from voting. That legislation died while another measure, which makes it simpler for some felons to regain their voting rights, passed this year.

Christopher Uggen, a criminologist and sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, says that "once people start voting, they're quite a bit less likely to commit new crimes." He adds that while programs such as work release carry risk, "I think we can clearly say that there's no threat to public safety by permitting prisoners and felons to vote."

Concerns that some voters were unfairly blocked from voting in Florida during the 2000 presidential election and other close political races since then have helped fuel efforts to overturn laws that bar felons from voting, King says. The laws have led to 1.4 million black men — or 13% — being unable to vote, more than five times the national average, the Sentencing Project says.

"Particularly in the South, these laws were part of the old Jim Crow package," says Monifa Bandele, field director of the Right to Vote Campaign, a national coalition helping felons regain voting rights.

The Rhode Island Family Life Center, which helps former inmates and their families, is one of several groups distributing literature on college campuses and registering people to vote with the goal of getting the state referendum approved.

'Right thing to do'

In Kentucky, state Rep. Jesse Crenshaw says that an appeal by several organizations, including labor groups and the NAACP, prompted him to introduce a bill this year that sought to amend the state constitution and allow felons to vote after serving their time and paying all fines. The bill failed, but he plans to reintroduce it next year.

"I see it as the right thing to do," says Crenshaw, a Democrat from Lexington. "After they've paid their debt, they should ... have the rights everyone else has."

A 2005 survey of New York state's county election boards found that about half did not know that felons had the right to vote while on probation or were asking for documents that were not required, says Catherine Weiss, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

"We don't know how many people were turned away by these two problems," says Weiss, whose center helped conduct the survey. "But there were potentially thousands." In May, New York election officials held a session reiterating the rules, says Lee Daghlian, spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections.

Idarraga admits that voting was not the first thing on his mind when he was released from prison in June 2004. "You have to establish yourself," he says. "Right after that, I knew education and voting and being responsible to the community were extremely pressing issues for myself."

    R.I. to revisit felons' voting rights, UT, 31.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-felons-voting-rights_x.htm

    Related > http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-felons-voting-rights_x.htm#table

Washington-Area Sniper Convicted of 6 More Killings

May 31, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

ROCKVILLE, Md., May 30 — John A. Muhammad, the sniper who terrorized the Washington region in 2002, was found guilty on six counts of first-degree murder Tuesday in a Maryland court.

Deliberating for less than five hours, the jury brought a speedy close to a trial that from the beginning seemed to have more to do with theater than with law.

Mr. Muhammad, who has already been sentenced to death by a Virginia court, faces six consecutive sentences of life without parole for the Maryland verdict. Prosecutors said they wanted to ensure that he would die in prison, in the event he won an appeal of his earlier conviction.

The five-week trial provided little new detail about a killing spree that paralyzed the Washington area for 22 days in October 2002, leaving 10 people dead and 3 wounded. But in acting as his own lawyer, Mr. Muhammad offered the drama of a man with no formal legal training gripping a book of logic in his right hand as he demonstrated an unusual mastery of trial etiquette and oratory.

The trial also featured a dramatic clash of two killers, as Lee Boyd Malvo, Mr. Muhammad's accomplice, testified against Mr. Muhammad, who had taken the wayward teenager under his wing.

"I think he's a coward," Mr. Malvo said of his former mentor, just minutes after saying he had once loved Mr. Muhammad. Mr. Malvo, 21, who has agreed to plead guilty in the Maryland killings, said Mr. Muhammad, 45, pulled the trigger in all but three of the shootings. "You took me in your house, and you made me a monster," Mr. Malvo added, staring coldly at Mr. Muhammad.

Families of the victims watched as Mr. Muhammad was forced to confront the loss of loyalty of his former disciple.

"Son," Mr. Muhammad said at one point to Mr. Malvo while cross-examining him.

Angrily, Mr. Malvo interrupted: "I would prefer you address me by my name."

For Denise Johnson, the widow of Conrad Johnson, who was Mr. Muhammad's last victim, Mr. Malvo's testimony brought some consolation.

"It was a huge relief to see Malvo take the stand and say what he did," Ms. Johnson said after the trial. "And we didn't expect anything less from the verdict."

Scott E. Sundby, a law professor from Washington and Lee University who followed the case closely, said the verdict was also vindication for the jury in the Virginia trial that sentenced Mr. Malvo to life in prison rather than death.

"Mr. Malvo's testimony made it pretty clear that he was very much under Mr. Muhammad's sway at the time of these shootings," Mr. Sundby said.

Mr. Malvo described in riveting detail how Mr. Muhammad, whom many former acquaintances have described as a loving father driven over the edge by the loss of custody of his three children, planned a two-stage killing spree.

First, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo would randomly shoot and kill up to six people a day for a month, Mr. Malvo testified. Then they would bomb schools, school buses and children's hospitals, he said.

In the short term, Mr. Malvo said, their aim was to create havoc to cover for Mr. Muhammad's plans to kidnap his three children. The longer-term goal, Mr. Malvo testified, was to extort law enforcement to stop the killing, after which Mr. Muhammad would take the money and move to Canada with Mr. Malvo and the three children. There, Mr. Malvo said, Mr. Muhammad planned to create a training ground for 140 young homeless men whom he would send out to wreak similar havoc and to "shut things down" in cities across the United States.

For Mr. Muhammad, the trial was an exercise in control.

Referring gently to witnesses as "sir" and "ma'am," and frequently begging for the "court's indulgence," Mr. Muhammad showed a strong feel for courtroom etiquette as he painstakingly tried to snare witnesses in small factual inaccuracies and grilled detectives about mistakes in the collection of his DNA during the investigation.

But over the weeks, Mr. Muhammad seemed to grow tired as his original plans to call more than 100 witnesses were foiled; he missed deadlines to file paperwork, and many who were called refused to show up.

During testimony, the prosecution continually broke his momentum with a barrage of objections, most of them sustained by the judge.

"He was impressive until the fourth act of the play," Mr. Sundby said. "But his entire performance fell apart when it came time to weave together all his questioning into a single coherent argument."

Mr. Muhammad closed with a spirited description of the police and prosecution's elaborate efforts to frame him by fabricating the DNA evidence and planting the data found on his computer linking him to the shootings.

He became most agitated as he said Mr. Malvo had been indoctrinated by the prosecution. "I don't care what you saw," he said, referring to Mr. Malvo's testimony. "Lee is a magnificent human being, and I don't care what they've done to him. My son is innocent. I'm asking you to find us both not guilty."

The judge cut Mr. Muhammad off after nearly three and a half hours.

After a long weekend, the jury returned to begin, and quickly end, their deliberations. As the foreman read the verdict on each count, Mr. Muhammad sat still and glaring, his arms folded across chest. "Your honor, may I speak?" Mr. Muhammad asked after the verdict was read.

"No, sir," the judge replied as Mr. Muhammad was led away by guards.

    Washington-Area Sniper Convicted of 6 More Killings, NYT, 31.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/us/31sniper.html

First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE J. FLYNN

SAN FRANCISCO, May 26 — A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.

In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."

The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California's shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources.

Apple had argued that Web sites publishing reports about Apple were not engaged in legitimate news gathering but rather were misappropriating trade secrets and violating copyrights. But in its ruling on Friday, the panel disagreed.

"Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners' enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law's protection," the ruling states.

If upheld, the ruling could have far-reaching impact in California courts on other writers who publish electronically, including bloggers who regularly publish news and opinion online without the backing of a mainstream news operation.

"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, who argued the case in front of the appeals court last month. "It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function."

Apple declined to comment Friday on the ruling or on a possible appeal.

Apple's close guarding of company secrets, particularly unannounced products, is legendary. Friday's ruling arose from a suit filed in December 2004 against the unknown individuals who Apple said had leaked information about unannounced Apple products to two sites devoted to news of the company, AppleInsider and PowerPage.org.

Both sites published reports in November 2004 describing secret Apple projects, including one known at Apple by the code name Asteroid.

Apple did not sue the sites directly but sought to subpoena their e-mail records. As part of the investigation, Apple subpoenaed the e-mail records of Nfox, the company that provided Internet service to Jason D. O'Grady, the publisher of PowerPage.

About the same time, Apple filed a trade-secret suit against Think Secret, another online news site that the company accused of publishing confidential data about its future products. That case is pending.

Friday's ruling is also significant because it addresses whether private e-mail is protected from subpoenas. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored e-mail from your service," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules, NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/technology/27apple.html

Charge of Negligent Homicide for Boy, 8, in School Bus Death

May 24, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

An 8-year-old boy who climbed into a parked school bus, released the emergency brake and sent 26,000 pounds of steel rolling through Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Monday was charged yesterday with criminally negligent homicide in the death of Amber Sadiq, 8, who was crushed between the bus's right undercarriage and a street pole.

The boy, Tafari James, had been suspended from second grade on Friday for climbing onto another unattended bus, officials said yesterday in Family Court in Downtown Brooklyn.

Investigators said it was unclear whether he released the brake on Monday intentionally. Witnesses saw him board the bus alone, on Nostrand Avenue near Crown Street, around 3:15 p.m. He rode the bus as it gathered speed down a slight incline and jump off as it thudded to a halt after traveling 100 feet, the police said.

At a hearing yesterday, Judge Maureen A. McLeod ordered Tafari detained and tentatively scheduled another hearing for Friday. Officials of the city's Law Department, which handles juvenile cases, said in interviews that they have not decided whether to pursue the charges that had already been filed by the police, and must first investigate the boy's history and the case's circumstances.

"The conduct he engaged in constitutes the basis of a criminal act," said Gail Donoghue, special counsel in the Law Department, adding that "we have to figure out what really happened."

Accompanied by his father, great-aunt and great-grandmother, Tafari entered the court around 4 p.m. He was wearing a red hooded sweatshirt big enough for an adult. He sat in a chair, with his feet dangling, and he was crying. On request, he gave his name and age.

A police detective, Brian M. Gregory, testified that the charges were based on Tafari's statements at a precinct station house.

"He saw a parked bus," Detective Gregory said. "He entered a parked bus. He wanted to drive the bus. The bus started to move. He got scared. He saw a crossing guard jumping up and down. The bus stopped after hitting a pole."

Detective Gregory added, "He was trying to move the wheels with his hands and the pedals with his feet."

Samuel Karliner, a lawyer for Tafari, asked whether his feet could reach the pedals.

The detective said, "I don't believe he can reach the pedals on the floor, no."

At the hearing, Kim Lawton, a court liaison officer for the Probation Department, said Tafari had been suspended from school for climbing onto another parked bus on Friday, providing no other details.

During this school year, Ms. Lawton said, Tafari has been absent 40 times and late 14 times. His school has called the Administration for Children's Services to report inadequate guardianship. He is not allowed on school trips and has been found wandering around Crown Heights unsupervised. Ms. Lawton did not say where Tafari attends school, and Tafari 's lawyer said he did not know. The Department of Education and the Administration for Children's Services declined to discuss his history.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Karliner said that Tafari was not responsible for Amber's death. "It was clearly a tragic accident," he said. "The family of our client is distraught for themselves and the child and for the family of the other child."

Mr. Karliner said Tafari "was playing in a bus and didn't know what would happen. As soon as the bus moved, he became scared and terrified and jumped out. I don't see any way that an 8-year-old can perceive that degree of risk."

Tafari, who lives with his father, was under the supervision of his grandmother, Rosslyn James, on Monday when he boarded the bus. In an interview, Ms. James said Tafari left while she was napping.

Mr. Karliner said Tafari's family took him to the precinct station house after Amber, who was a second grader at Public School 161 on Crown Street, was killed.

Tafari was taken into the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice, said Scott Trent, a department spokesman. All juveniles who are arrested undergo medical screening and admissions procedures in the Bronx. Children age 7 to 9 are separated in an environment similar to a group home, without the security features typical of a jail.

Yesterday morning, probation officers met with Tafari, his father and Amber's parents, said Jack Ryan, a spokesman for the Department of Probation. After the police arrest a child, officers have the authority to adjust the charges, ordering the child to write an apology, perform community service or abide by a curfew, among other measures, but only if the victim agrees.

When no agreement was reached, the case was handed over to the Law Department, which could still decide not to pursue the charges filed by the police.

City medical examiners ruled Amber's death an accident caused by blunt impact injuries. The girl's funeral was scheduled for today in Woodhaven, Queens.

Last May, when a 9-year-old girl stabbed her 11-year-old playmate to death in an apartment in East New York, Brooklyn, the police said that no one could remember charging one so young in a killing.

Across the country in 2002, the last year for which statistics are available from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, juveniles were involved as offenders in roughly 1,300 murders, 8 percent of the total. In those cases, 72 percent of the killers were 16 or 17 years old; only 12 percent were under age 15.

Keith Kalb, a spokesman for the city's Department of Education, said department policy does not require a lock on the emergency doors of school buses. Industry experts said buses are intended to be driven to and from their yards, not parked on city streets.

To avoid stress on transmission systems, many buses must be left in neutral, said Noah H. Kushlefsky, a transportation lawyer with Kreindler & Kreindler in Manhattan.

Depending on the model, many buses are equipped with doors that do not lock, like the rear door of the bus that killed Amber, said Bill Paul, the editor of School Transportation News, an industry magazine based in California.

At the hearing yesterday, Judge McLeod ordered a mental health examination for Tafari, saying that he "has a troubled life right now."

When it was over, Tafari asked a court officer how old the judge was and what her hammer was used for. He said he wanted to go home.

Ann Farmer contributed reporting for this article.

    Charge of Negligent Homicide for Boy, 8, in School Bus Death, NYT, 24.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/nyregion/24bus.html

A Subway Nightmare Will Be the Focus of Yet a Third Trial

May 23, 2006
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

What happened to Kendra Webdale seven years ago was a New Yorker's nightmare: She was pushed in front of a subway train by a mentally ill man who had stopped taking his antipsychotic medication.

Ms. Webdale, a 32-year-old journalist and photographer, was killed instantly. Her assailant, Andrew Goldstein, now 36, was convicted of her murder in March 2000 and was sentenced to up to life in prison.

Now he will be tried again.

Last December, the state's highest court overturned his conviction, saying that Mr. Goldstein's constitutional right to confront witnesses against him at his trial had been violated. Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court declined to review that decision.

A spokeswoman for Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said prosecutors would retry Mr. Goldstein, who remains in custody.

Ms. Webdale's sister, Kim, said through the family's lawyer that the family would attend every day of the new trial, as they had his two previous ones.

"What Kim said, was, it's going to bring up memories, but we're prepared to go through it a third time if necessary," the lawyer, Jay Dankner, said. "The family will be there as they were the first two trials, and await the jury's verdict."

Natalie Rea, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society who represented Mr. Goldstein in his appeal, said she was gratified that the Supreme Court had declined to hear the district attorney's appeal. "Obviously, they agreed with us," that the case did not present any new issues for the highest court, she said.

In the meantime, Mr. Dankner said yesterday, there have been developments in a civil lawsuit filed by Ms. Webdale's family in 2000 against seven hospitals and clinics that cared for Mr. Goldstein before Ms. Webdale's death.

He said he had obtained records detailing Mr. Goldstein's treatment in the weeks before he pushed Ms. Webdale to her death on Jan. 3, 1999, off the N-line platform at 23rd Street. "We see numerous prior assaults," Mr. Dankner said. "He was striking out at nurses and psychiatrists. This guy was a walking time bomb."

In their civil suit, the Webdale family contends that Mr. Goldstein was discharged from North General Hospital in Harlem because the state reimbursement for 21 days of treatment had expired and there was no financial incentive to keep him there. Instead of going to a community-based facility, as he was supposed to, the lawyer said, Mr. Goldstein went back to his apartment, and stopped taking his medication.

"Andrew Goldstein fell between the cracks in this system that we call mental health care in New York State as it existed in 1998 and 1999," Mr. Dankner said.

In the seven years since Ms. Webdale was killed, her mother, Patricia, who lives in Fredonia, in upstate New York, has gone through a transformation. Mrs. Webdale, who has five other children, has become an advocate for the mentally ill, and she lectures across the country on the need for better treatment.

She pushed for what became known as Kendra's Law, passed by the State Legislature in 1999. It allows families of mentally ill people, their roommates and mental health workers to petition the courts to require outpatient treatment for people who otherwise might not take their medication or follow their treatment plans.

In an interview last winter, after Mr. Goldstein's conviction was overturned, Ms. Webdale said that in seeking supervision of the mentally ill, she is trying to prevent others from being victimized as her daughter was.

The jury deadlocked in Mr. Goldstein's first trial, forcing a mistrial.

In his second trial, his lawyer argued that Mr. Goldstein pushed Ms. Webdale onto the tracks while suffering from a transient psychotic episode, perhaps made worse by his failure to take his medication.

The prosecution said Mr. Goldstein knew what he was doing, and had a history of using his mental illness as an excuse for bad behavior.

Last December, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that the psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution should not have been allowed to testify about what other people — including Mr. Goldstein's former landlady — had told her about him, unless those people were available to be cross-examined by the defense.

The state court cited a 2004 Supreme Court decision, Crawford v. Washington, in saying that Mr. Goldstein had a constitutional right to confront such witnesses.

The prosecution's contention that Mr. Goldstein "was sane when he killed Kendra Webdale was a strong one, but we cannot say it was so strong that no rational jury could have rejected it," Judge Robert S. Smith of the Court of Appeals said, writing for the majority.

    A Subway Nightmare Will Be the Focus of Yet a Third Trial, NYT, 23.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/nyregion/23subway.html

The City Bar Puts a Guy From Brooklyn in the Big Chair

May 23, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

The Association of the Bar of the City of New York has often been an exclusive place, but it has come a long way since its founding in 1870. It welcomed its first black member in 1929 and its first woman soon after. More recently, it has had a black president and two female presidents.

But tonight, the association will truly venture into new territory: it will swear in as its 64th president a lawyer whose practice is outside Manhattan — Brooklyn, to be precise. A criminal defense lawyer from the legal salt mine known as Court Street, to be more precise.

In an organization whose leaders have almost invariably come from the mahogany-paneled power corridors of Manhattan's white-shoe firms, the coronation of Barry M. Kamins, a bookish 62-year-old whose most imposing piece of office furniture is a slightly ratty couch, marks a new era.

"The city bar is very concerned about diversity in the profession," Mr. Kamins, a partner at the emphatically black-shoe firm of Flamhaft Levy Kamins Hirsch & Rendeiro, said last week. "I think my nomination goes a long way to showing that they don't just talk diversity, they demonstrate it."

He reflected for a moment. "Although it's been 136 years, it has to start at some point."

To be sure, Mr. Kamins is no upstart. He worked his way through the ranks, heading the city bar's judiciary committee, then its executive committee, then becoming a vice president. The head of the committee that nominated Mr. Kamins, Evan A. Davis, a former president himself, said the group did not feel that it was taking a risk on Mr. Kamins.

"We were just following our tradition of taking someone who already has the extraordinary confidence of the bar and the judiciary and picking him to be our president," he said.

But even Mr. Davis acknowledged, "It's definitely a big first."

With the title — which Mr. Kamins takes over from Bettina B. Plevan of the mammoth firm Proskauer Rose — comes the responsibility of leading the country's second-largest and second-oldest local bar association, with 22,000 members and a sumptuous headquarters on West 44th Street (in Manhattan).

In addition to providing the city's lawyers with countless educational and networking opportunities, the association does extensive pro bono work, runs a legal referral service that handles 100,000 calls a year and issues position papers on legal topics.

Mr. Kamins, the author of the standard treatise on New York search and seizure laws, said he hoped that during his two-year tenure the association would take a position on government wiretapping. He declined to state his own views on the subject but volunteered, "I think there's got to be an appropriate balance between civil liberties and national security."

Mr. Kamins said he also hoped to sharpen the city bar's focus on lawyers' ethics, a subject he has learned well over years of defending lawyers accused of misconduct. His clients included Victor I. Barron, a state Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn whose bribery conviction made it even harder for members of Brooklyn's legal community to garner respect.

(Mr. Kamins himself served on the committee that screened the Brooklyn Democratic Party's judicial candidates, although he resigned in protest in 2003. "I wasn't happy with the process," he said.)

After graduating from Rutgers Law School in 1969, Mr. Kamins worked in the Brooklyn district attorney's office. In 1973, he crossed the street to become a Court Street lawyer, a term once so identified with ambulance-chasing sleaze that a Brooklyn Law School professor who referred to one of his colleagues as a Court Street lawyer was sued for slander.

" 'Court Street lawyer' has gotten a bad rap," Mr. Kamins said as he sat in his 33rd-floor office in a firm he shares with four other lawyers. "Court Street lawyers are just like any other — there are great ones, and mediocre ones, and not-so-great ones."

Although Mr. Kamins did not seem daunted by the pedigrees of some of his recent predecessors — they include a former appellate judge, a former counsel to the governor, and a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell — he did confess to being impressed by their offices.

"They're like palaces," he said. "You almost feel like you're afraid to write at the desk. You don't want to damage the furniture." At Mr. Kamins's office, that work has already been done. He sits at the battle-scarred desk his mother bought him for finishing law school and looks past stained blinds out spotted windows at the skyline of Lower Manhattan.

He mused a bit more about what he hoped to accomplish at the bar association. "You can't change the culture, but you can try to make the place more inclusive," he said. "I might ban the term 'outer borough.' "

    The City Bar Puts a Guy From Brooklyn in the Big Chair, NYT, 23.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/nyregion/23bar.html

Lawyers Elsewhere Take Note as a New York Man Is Freed by DNA Tests

May 17, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER and DAVID STABA

Freed after serving 10 years for a murder he confessed to but did not commit, Douglas A. Warney rolled out of a courthouse in Rochester yesterday morning in his wheelchair, celebrating the DNA tests that led the authorities to another suspect and condemning the tortuous legal process that had kept him behind bars.

"I'm angry that I was put in a position that I could have been executed for a crime that I didn't commit," said Mr. Warney, 44, who initially was charged with first-degree murder, which carried a possible death sentence.

Mr. Warney's release — after bitter fights over the validity of his confession, his right to DNA testing and an abrupt reversal by the Monroe County district attorney — struck a powerful note nearly 800 miles away at a prison in Nashville.

There, another man who had confessed to murder, Sedley Alley, was granted a two week stay of execution by Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee so he could return to court to make new arguments for DNA testing that prosecutors have opposed and courts have not permitted.

Mr. Alley was scheduled to be executed at 1 a.m. today, but the state Board of Probation and Parole voted 4 to 3 to recommend that Governor Bredesen delay the execution to permit new tests. In presenting their plea to the board, Mr. Alley's lawyers said that the case of Mr. Warney in New York offered instructive parallels.

"The Warney case is so eerily similar to ours that it's scary," said Kelley J. Henry, an assistant federal defender in Nashville who is one of Mr. Alley's lawyers.

In both cases, the men were said by prosecutors to have made convincing admissions of guilt, offering details that only the killers would have known. Defense lawyers said that the confessions also contained striking inconsistencies with important facts. In neither case were DNA tests conducted, and the prosecutions rested almost entirely on the disputed confessions.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Alley admitted to killing and raping a 19-year-old marine, Suzanne Collins, in 1985. Evidence collected from and near her body has never been tested, and prosecutors say that Mr. Alley, who entered an insanity defense at his trial in 1987, first claimed he was innocent in 2004.

The state has opposed DNA tests, saying he forfeited any right to them by waiting so long to ask. Mr. Alley and his lawyers have been unable to persuade state or federal courts that he is entitled to them.

Governor Bredesen, whose wife, Andrea Conte, is a founder of a crime victims' group that supports the execution, said that he believed Mr. Alley was guilty and that he was acting "reluctantly" in delaying the execution.

In upstate New York, Mr. Warney was released shortly after noon yesterday, accompanied by members of his family and his lawyers. Based entirely on a two-page statement that he signed after being questioned by police, Mr. Warney was arrested and charged with stabbing William Beason to death on New Year's Day, 1996.

Soon after he was taken into custody, investigators learned that blood found at the crime scene had come from someone other than the victim or Mr. Warney. Defense lawyers said that it was the blood of the killer, and excluded Mr. Warney; prosecutors said that while he might have had an accomplice, he knew secret details of the crime. He was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years.

When Mr. Warney sought DNA testing two years ago, prosecutors opposed it, persuading a judge that the tests would not prove anything the jury did not already know.

Despite winning that argument, the prosecutors then conducted the testing, without telling Mr. Warney's lawyers. The results linked the blood to a man serving time in prison for a series of violent attacks with knives, including one murder. One of the man's fingerprints also was found in the victim's home.

That man, Eldred Johnson Jr., was interviewed in prison last week and told investigators that he had acted alone in killing Mr. Beason and that he did not know Mr. Warney, said the Monroe County district attorney, Michael C. Green.

Asked yesterday why he had refused to permit the DNA tests when Mr. Warney sought them, Mr. Green said, "I felt they legally weren't entitled to the relief they were seeking."

In February 2005, Mr. Green's office lost a case involving similar DNA issues in the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. A few days after that decision, Mr. Green wrote a letter that began the process of testing the DNA in Mr. Warney's case.

Mr. Green said that ruling "had nothing whatsoever to do" with his decision to order the DNA testing. He did it, he said, because after rereading files from the Warney case he realized that blood at the scene might have come from someone who took part in the murder but was still at large.

"I called everyone together and said we have to go into this with a blank slate," Mr. Green said. "If it leads to evidence that shows Warney was properly convicted, great. If it shows us that he didn't do it, so be it."

One of Mr. Warney's lawyers, Peter J. Neufeld of the Innocence Project in New York, said that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate how Mr. Warney learned nonpublic facts about a crime that he was not involved in, arguing that the police must have fed details to Mr. Warney.

Mr. Green said Mr. Warney could have gotten information from newspaper articles, from visits to the victim's home, and from the detectives. "He could have gleaned information from the questions the police asked him," Mr. Green said. "We'll never know."

The interrogation of Mr. Warney was not recorded, a measure urged by some legal scholars as a way to resolve questions about the reliability of a confession. Mr. Green was ambivalent. "I don't have any real objection to taping," he said. "The one concern is that, is taping going to inhibit people from talking to the police?"

Jim Dwyer is one of the authors of a book, "Actual Innocence" (Doubleday, 2000), with Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld. Mr. Neufeld is one of the lawyers representing Douglas A. Warney, and Mr. Scheck is representing Sedley Alley. Mr. Dwyer reported from New York for this article and David Staba from Rochester.

    Lawyers Elsewhere Take Note as a New York Man Is Freed by DNA Tests, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/nyregion/17dna.html

Priest Found Guilty of Nun's 1980 Murder

May 12, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG

CLEVELAND, May 11 — A priest was found guilty on Thursday of murdering a nun 26 years ago in what another priest testified was a ritual intended to defile the nun.

The defendant, the Rev. Gerald Robinson, 68, showed no emotion as the jury verdict was read in Lucas County Common Pleas Court in Toledo. Judge Thomas J. Osowik sentenced him to 15 years to life in prison.

Father Robinson's lawyer said he would appeal the verdict, which the jury handed up after seven hours of deliberations.

The body of the nun, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, 71, was found on April 5, 1980, in the chapel at Mercy Hospital in Toledo. She had been preparing the Eucharist for Easter services. Her killer laid an altar cloth across her body before stabbing her 31 times. Nine stab wounds to the chest were in the shape of an upside-down cross.

The killing was committed by someone with deep understanding of church symbols and rituals, the Rev. Jeffrey Grob of Chicago, an expert on the occult, testified. Sister Pahl had a smear of blood across the forehead, Father Grob said, a mockery of the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church.

"All these things were done to have her die in the most humiliating, degrading way possible for a nun," said Dean Mandros, chief of the criminal division in the Lucas County prosecutor's office.

Prosecutors said Father Robinson had been angry about Sister Pahl's domineering personality and her complaints about how he had conducted a Good Friday service the night before the killing. Father Robinson, who presided over Sister Pahl's funeral Mass, was the primary suspect from the beginning, the authorities said.

As the priest was being questioned by detectives two weeks after the killing, Mr. Mandros said, Deputy Police Chief Ray Vetter interrupted the interview and allowed a monsignor to escort Father Robinson out of Police Headquarters.

"That upset the detectives to no end," Mr. Mandros said.

Deputy Chief Vetter also requested that detectives give him their reports on the case, Mr. Mandros said. Some of those reports were never seen again. Within a month, the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Mr. Vetter, who retired in 1986, testified this week that he was a practicing Catholic but had not been involved with the investigation.

The investigation was reopened in 2003 after a woman from Toledo approached the Toledo Diocese with accusations that a number of priests, including Father Robinson, had molested her as a child in a series of rituals, Mr. Mandros said. The accusations were sent to the prosecutor's cold case unit.

Using new forensic techniques, the authorities discovered imprints on the altar cloth that closely matched a letter opener belonging to Father Robinson that had an emblem of the United States Capitol on the side, Mr. Mandros said. They also found three witnesses who said they saw the priest near the chapel around the time of the killing.

Victims of sexual abuse accuse the diocese of a long-running effort to shield priests from prosecution.

"I'm relieved by the verdict today," said Claudia Vercelotti, who was molested by a Toledo priest as a child and is now a member of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "But the murder happened 26 years ago. You can't talk about this case without talking about the Catholic Church's cover-up."

Father Robinson maintained his innocence throughout the trial. With a number of the original witnesses dead and many original documents missing, his lawyer, Alan Konop, argued that prosecutors did not have a case. "The initial police investigation was very poor, and there was so much conflicting testimony," Mr. Konop said.

When Father Robinson was arrested in April 2004, he told the police on a videotape that was shown at the trial that he had been shocked to find the nun dead and shocked again when the other hospital chaplain accused him of murder.

    Priest Found Guilty of Nun's 1980 Murder, NYT, 12.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12priest.html

Dean of Hollywood Lawyers Faces Legal Woes

May 1, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- When A-list stars have legal troubles or need to negotiate seven-figure movie deals, they often turn to powerhouse attorney Bert Fields.

The 77-year-old legal legend has built a reputation as one of the most feared litigators in Hollywood while working for Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and other celebrities.

Now, it's Fields who may need help.

In recent months, prosecutors have been investigating his involvement with private investigator Anthony Pellicano, the suspected kingpin of a wiretapping ring accused in a federal indictment of threats and blackmail while digging up dirt to help clients in legal disputes.

Prosecutors believe actor Sylvester Stallone was among the celebrities wiretapped by Pellicano.

Fields began working with Pellicano in the early 1990s and has acknowledged being a subject of the ongoing investigation. He denies knowing about any questionable tactics by the private detective and is now waiting for prosecutors to decide whether to charge him.

Fields declined a request from The Associated Press for an interview.

''We have acknowledged in the past that Mr. Fields and the firm engaged Mr. Pellicano on a number of matters,'' said attorney Brian Sun, who represents the law firm where Fields works.

''We maintain that neither the firm nor any of its attorneys were involved in any illegal activity,'' he said.

To charge Fields, prosecutors would likely need taped conversations between the two men or testimony by Pellicano against Fields.

Pellicano, 62, has insisted he will not cooperate with authorities. Prosecutors have said they seized recordings of conversations between Pellicano and clients but have not named them or revealed the content.

''The government has a couple of hoops to jump through to prove wrongdoing,'' said Heidi Rummel, a former federal prosecutor and professor at the University of Southern California.

''They have to show that Pellicano got his information illegally and that Fields knew he got it illegally,'' she said.

Fourteen people have been charged so far in the case.

Among the most notable, ''Die Hard'' director John McTiernan pleaded guilty in April to making false statements to an FBI agent, and former Hollywood Records president Robert Pfeifer admitted hiring Pellicano to wiretap the phone of his former girlfriend as part of a legal dispute.

Pellicano and Fields have worked together for a number of celebrities.

In 1993, they helped defend singer Michael Jackson against molestation allegations involving a 13-year-old boy. Pellicano tried to discredit the boy's father by claiming he was trying to extort money from the pop star.

Both parted ways with Jackson before the entertainer reached a reported $25 million settlement with the boy's family.

Fields also hired Pellicano to investigate a lawsuit filed in 1999 against then-talent manager Brad Grey by comedian Garry Shandling, who accused Grey of taking excessive commissions from his HBO series, ''The Larry Sanders Show.'' Grey now heads Paramount Pictures.

The federal indictment accuses Pellicano of paying a Los Angeles police officer to run Shandling's name through government databases.

Grey, who has been interviewed by FBI agents, has said he had no knowledge of any illegal activity by Pellicano. The legal dispute with Shandling was settled out of court.

Fields also represented talent manager Kenneth Starr in a lawsuit filed by Stallone in February 2002. The action star claimed he was advised by Starr to keep his investment in Planet Hollywood restaurants even though Starr told others the chain was headed for bankruptcy. The suit was eventually settled.

Fields built his reputation as a civil litigator and says he's never lost a trial in which he was lead counsel.

Cruise recruited Fields to file a lawsuit against a publication that claimed to have a videotape showing the actor engaged in a homosexual act. The publication eventually printed a retraction. Fields also beat back a plagiarism claim against director Steven Spielberg involving his 1997 slave story ''Amistad.''

In a 1989 interview with American Film magazine, Fields issued a warning to his legal opponents.

''When somebody does something to one of my clients, I tend to become very angry and turn it into what I call a 'holy war,''' Fields said.

His intensity doesn't ease outside the courtroom. He has written a book questioning the identity of William Shakespeare and another about the life of Richard III.

His two novels, written under the pen name D. Kincaid, feature a high-profile Los Angeles lawyer named Harry Cain.

Fields created another character -- private investigator Skip Corrigan -- before meeting Pellicano.

In one passage of ''The Lawyer's Tale,'' the private eye tells Cain that a man they're investigating calls a suspected prostitute several times a day.

''Don't ask me how I know,'' Corrigan says. ''You don't wanna know.''

    Dean of Hollywood Lawyers Faces Legal Woes, NYT, 1.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Hollywood-Wiretaps.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Jury Awards $1.7M to Woman Spanked on Job

April 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:26 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- A jury awarded $1.7 million Friday to a woman who was spanked in front of her colleagues in what her employer called a camaraderie-building exercise.

The jury of six men and six women found that Janet Orlando, 53, was subjected to sexual harassment and sexual battery when she was paddled on the rear end two years ago at Alarm One Inc., a home security company in Fresno. The jury said Orlando did not suffer from sexual assault, as she had alleged.

Jurors awarded Orlando $10,000 for economic loss, $40,000 for future medical costs and $450,000 for emotional distress, pain and suffering. They awarded her an additional $1.2 million in punitive damages.

Orlando's attorney, Nicholas ''Butch'' Wagner, did not immediately return calls for comment.

K. Poncho Baker, an attorney for Alarm One, said it was excessive.

''I think the jury was so upset at Alarm One that they went overboard,'' Baker said. ''Not to say that what Alarm One did was right, but this allows her to manipulate the system.''

Orlando quit in 2004, less than a year after she was hired, saying she was humiliated during the company's camaraderie-building exercises.

Sales teams were encouraged to compete, and the losers were made fun of, forced to eat baby food, required to wear diapers and spanked with a rival company's yard signs, according to court documents.

Lawyers for the company said Orlando and others took part in the exercises willingly. The company has since abandoned the practice.

During the trial, company attorneys revealed that Orlando had sued a previous employer, also claiming that she had been sexually harassed.

    Jury Awards $1.7M to Woman Spanked on Job, NYT, 29.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Spanking-Trial.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Expert: Priest's DNA not present on evidence in nun's slaying

Updated 4/26/2006 1:27 PM ET
USA Today

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Blood on an altar cloth covering a nun's body and DNA traces on her underwear did not come from the priest charged with her killing 26 years ago, a DNA expert testified Wednesday.

The DNA found on Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was likely from a man, but tests did not link the sample to the Rev. Gerald Robinson, said Cassandra Agosti, a forensic analyst with the state's crime lab.

Prosecutors said the trace of DNA was so small that tests showing it came from a man might have been wrong, or the sample could have been left by investigators on the scene or in the coroner's office.

Robinson, 68, was the hospital chaplain when Sister Pahl was found stabbed to death on the day before Easter, 1980. She was found in the chapel where both worked, but authorities have not disclosed a motive in her killing.

Investigators said Sister Pahl was not sexually assaulted, but her body was posed to look as though she had been.

Testimony Tuesday had focused on a silver, sword-shaped letter opener that was found in Robinson's room.

Detective Terry Cousino testified that he had never seen a letter opener like it, and said its shape was consistent with punctures in the altar cloth. He said mirror-image blood stains indicated the cloth had been folded in half over the nun's body.

Agosti testified Wednesday that the letter opener had on it a substance that may have been blood, but she said she could not prove it was blood.

"It could be a lot of things?" asked defense attorney John Thebes. Agosti answered yes.

Prosecutors pointed out that Agosti did not test the entire cloth when she determined blood stains that were examined did not come from Robinson.

But she agreed with Thebes that the tests show "he's not on it (the cloth)."

A blood stain analyst for the prosecution explained how stains on the altar cloth could have been made by the letter opener.

Paulette Sutton, a medical examiner specializing in blood stain evidence, showed jurors several stains on the nearly 10-foot-long altar cloth. She said a pattern in the stains matched ridges on the handle of the letter opener.

Sutton conceded it was possible another object could have created the patterns, but said that the letter opener could not be ruled out. "I'm not going to get an absolute answer," she said.

Prosecutors on Tuesday had showed the jury an enlarged photo of the letter opener inserted into the puncture wound in the 71-year-old Roman Catholic nun's jaw.

"The fit was so snug," said Julie Saul, director of the forensic anthropology lab in the Lucas County coroner's office. "It just seemed to lock into place."

Robinson was a suspect early on because he was near the chapel at the time of the death. It wasn't until after his arrest two years ago and the exhumation of the nun's body that investigators discovered the puncture wound in the jaw.

Robinson, free on bail, could get life in prison if convicted of murder.

    Expert: Priest's DNA not present on evidence in nun's slaying, UT, 26.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-26-priest_x.htm

Maryland boy, 12, charged in double homicide

Updated 4/24/2006 11:48 PM ET
USA Today

DISTRICT HEIGHTS, Md. — A 12-year-old boy was charged in a Maryland juvenile court Monday with beating and stabbing his mother and younger brother to death.

The boy, whose name is being withheld by officials because of his age, faces two counts of first-degree murder, said Ramon Korionoff, spokesman for the state's attorney in Prince George's County. Maryland doesn't allow children younger than 14 to be charged as adults. The boy is being held in a juvenile facility.

When police arrived at the District Heights apartment complex just outside Washington on Sunday morning, they found the bodies of Katrina Powe, 31, and Mystery Hillian, 9, said Cpl. Clinton Copeland of the Prince George's County Police Department.

"He's the only suspect," Copeland said. "We're still trying to determine a motive."

If the boy is convicted of the crimes, he could be sentenced to a juvenile facility, but under state law, he would be released by age 21. That's the law in many states.

Murders by young children are rare, said Howard Snyder of the non-profit National Center for Juvenile Justice.

In 2004, the most recent year for which FBI figures are available, there were eight arrests of children ages 10 to 12 on murder charges by police departments representing 71% of the country, Snyder said. Some departments don't report statistics to the FBI. Overall that year, there were an estimated 1,100 arrests of juveniles 17 and younger on murder charges.

That number was down significantly from 1993, when arrests of juveniles on murder charges nationwide peaked at an estimated 3,800, Snyder said.

"There's a lot less gun crime," he said. "Murders by juveniles of family members didn't change. What went down was murders of acquaintances."

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says handgun use by youths dropped as the criminal trade in crack cocaine declined.

Teens had been drafted into street sales in the 1980s, he said, but as demand for crack faded in the 1990s, there were fewer teens carrying guns.

    Maryland boy, 12, charged in double homicide, UT, 24.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-24-boycharged_x.htm

Judge Rules Suits Challenging Stem Cell Agency Have No Merit

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21 (AP) — A state judge ruled on Friday that California's $3 billion stem cell research institute was a legitimate state agency and that two lawsuits challenging its constitutionality had no merit.

The decision came a month after a four-day trial in which lawyers with connections to anti-abortion groups claimed the stem cell institute violated California law because it was not a true state agency and its managers had several conflicts of interest.

But Judge Bonnie Lewman Sabraw of Alameda County Superior Court handed the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine an unambiguous victory, writing that the lawsuits failed to show that the voter-approved law that created the agency in 2004 "is clearly, positively and unmistakably unconstitutional."

The ruling becomes official in 10 days unless the lawyers representing the losing side put forth new and significantly different arguments.

Proposition 71 was placed on the California ballot in November 2004 to counter President Bush's stem cell research policy, which greatly restricts the amount of federal financing that can be used for the work, which is opposed by many conservatives.

The measure was approved by 59 percent of the state's voters, and it will finance about $300 million annually in stem cell research that the federal government will not.

"It's unfortunate that the plaintiffs, after losing at the polls, went to court to frustrate the voters' will," the state attorney general, Bill Lockyer, said. "The sooner this legal fight is over, the sooner California can move to where the people want it — in the forefront of stem cell research."

David L. Llewellyn Jr., a lawyer for one of the groups suing the stem cell institute, said he would probably petition the California Supreme Court to take the case directly, bypassing the appellate courts.

"There are several curiosities in the verdict," said Mr. Llewellyn, who represents the California Family Bioethics Council.

Mr. Llewellyn had argued that because Proposition 71 authorized financing for both stem cell work and other kinds of medical research, it violated state laws against proposing two subjects on a single ballot measure

The stem cell agency's finances will remain in limbo even after Friday's ruling.

The litigation prevented the Institute for Regenerative Medicine from selling securities to traditional Wall Street bond buyers to raise any of the $3 billion it is authorized to borrow. That will not change until the expected appeals of the verdict are exhausted, probably next year.

Still, the agency managed to finance its first research grants this month after six philanthropic organizations lent it a combined $14 million, to be paid back once bond market financing is available.

The grants, totaling $12.1 million, went to 16 universities and nonprofit research centers to set up basic stem cell research training programs.

    Judge Rules Suits Challenging Stem Cell Agency Have No Merit, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/business/22cell.html

Merck Loses Vioxx Suit in Texas

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON

A state court jury in South Texas dealt Merck another setback yesterday afternoon, awarding $32 million in damages to the family of Leonel Garza, a 71-year-old retiree who died of a heart attack in 2001 after briefly taking the painkiller Vioxx.

Texas laws that cap punitive damages will automatically reduce the award to $7.75 million. Still, the verdict is a major disappointment for Merck, because Mr. Garza had a long history of heart disease, including a previous heart attack, and took Vioxx for less than a month before he died.

Merck has now lost three of the five lawsuits to reach juries, and each of the losses has involved multimillion-dollar awards for the plaintiffs.

The verdict, by a vote of 10 to 2, was announced at 2:30 p.m. local time in state court in Rio Grande City, a South Texas town of 13,000 near the Mexican border. Jurors deliberated for about eight hours over two days.

The case began in January, but the trial proceeded intermittently, with jurors hearing only four days of testimony every month, because the judge overseeing the suit is responsible for cases in several counties.

"We're really pleased," said Joe Escobedo, the lead lawyer for the Garza family. "We thought that Mr. Garza's case was a very, very strong case."

Lawyers for Merck denounced the verdict and said they expected it would be overturned on appeal. Juries in South Texas have a history of returning large verdicts for local plaintiffs against companies with headquarters out of state, said Richard L. Josephson of the firm of Baker Botts, who was the lead lawyer for Merck's defense team in the case.

Making the case even more difficult for Merck, Mr. Garza's family was well known in Starr County, where he had lived and where the lawsuit was heard, Mr. Josephson said.

"This is a one of a kind; this is an aberration," he said. "If I had tried this case in Houston, where I live, I think we would have won it 19 out of 20 times."

Mr. Josephson said that Judge Alex W. Gabert, who oversaw the suit, should have dismissed the case before it reached a jury because lawyers for Mr. Garza's family had no scientific evidence that Vioxx had caused Mr. Garza's heart attack.

"There really isn't any good science to indicate that Vioxx can cause a heart attack in less than 30 days," Mr. Josephson said. "It shouldn't have been submitted to the jury."

In addition to his heart attack in 1981, Mr. Garza underwent a quadruple bypass in 1985, and was a smoker who was also overweight and had high blood pressure.

Mr. Garza's family claimed that he had taken Vioxx for 25 days before his heart attack, although medical records confirmed only 7 days of use.

Mr. Escobedo said that Vioxx was especially dangerous to Mr. Garza because of his other risk factors and that he should never have been prescribed the drug.

"Mr. Garza was the last person in the world that should have been taking Vioxx," said Mr. Escobedo, who told the jury that Merck had known since 2000 that the drug posed heart risks but continued selling it for four years.

The verdict highlights the risks that Merck faces as the number of lawsuits over Vioxx continues to grow.

Shares of Merck fell about 1 percent after the verdict was announced yesterday, and closed down 26 cents, at $34.74.

About 20 million Americans took Vioxx from 1999 to 2004, when Merck withdrew the drug after a clinical trial showed that it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes compared with a placebo. Earlier clinical trials had also shown that Vioxx appeared to be much riskier to the heart than naproxen, an older painkiller.

In its earnings report this week, Merck disclosed that it faced 11,500 product-liability lawsuits over Vioxx, with 23,300 separate plaintiffs, as well as 190 class-action lawsuits. Merck has set aside almost $1 billion to defend itself from the lawsuits, but the company has not yet given any estimate of what it believes its total liability in the cases will be.

In each of the three cases Merck has lost, juries have awarded verdicts of more than $10 million, and have ordered Merck to pay punitive damages, which are supposed to be awarded only in cases of egregious corporate conduct.

Merck has said that it plans to defend Vioxx lawsuits case by case, and a month ago that strategy appeared to be working. After losing a $253.5 million verdict in the first case to reach trial, Merck won the next two.

But recently the tide has seemed to turn abruptly against the company, as its lawyers struggle to explain a raft of documents that show its scientists were concerned about Vioxx's heart risks several years before Merck stopped selling the drug in 2004.

Merck lost a Vioxx suit this month in New Jersey, where the jury awarded a 77-year-old heart attack survivor and his wife $13.5 million in damages. That man had taken Vioxx for four years.

Kenneth L. Frazier, Merck's general counsel, said in a conference call after the verdict yesterday that he was pleased with the performance of Merck's defense lawyers. Merck never expected to win every case at trial and believes it has strong ground for appeal, he said.

"The realities of the world are that jury cases have uncertain outcomes," he said.

    Merck Loses Vioxx Suit in Texas, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/business/22vioxx.html?hp&ex=1145764800&en=30fa46a34bd084a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In the Money, and in Court

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON

The next wave of drug lawsuits is coming.

As Merck reels from 11,500 suits over Vioxx, its arthritis drug, the rest of the industry is girding for challenges over another half a dozen widely used medications that plaintiffs' lawyers say have hidden and severe side effects or were improperly marketed.

Unlike Vioxx, which Merck stopped selling in 2004, the other drugs remain on the market.

The drugs now under attack include Seroquel, an antipsychotic medicine from AstraZeneca; Ortho-Evra, a birth-control patch from Johnson & Johnson; Prempro, a hormone therapy for women from Wyeth; and Fosamax, an osteoporosis medicine made by Merck. The drugs have combined annual sales of almost $7 billion and are used by millions of patients.

The first Prempro case is expected to reach trial this summer, and Johnson & Johnson has already begun to settle some Ortho-Evra cases, according to lawyers involved in the lawsuits.

In each case, plaintiffs' lawyers are trying, at least rhetorically, to link their suits to the Vioxx litigation, asserting that the drugs have serious side effects that their makers did not disclose. In two of the four Vioxx suits to reach trial, plaintiffs have won large verdicts.

The companies say they have done nothing wrong, and lawyers who defend drug companies say that the rise in pharmaceutical suits is a reflection of changes in the plaintiffs' bar, not a reflection of the dangers of the drugs.

"This is really like cattle moving around a pasture, grazing on the greenest part of the grass," said Peter Bicks, a defense lawyer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. "The greenest part of the pasture now appears to be, in the post-Vioxx era, drugs."

The suits are keeping the pharmaceutical industry on the defensive at a time when drug makers are trying to rebuild their image amid public anger over prescription drug prices and the fact that some companies did not disclose negative information from clinical trials during the 1990's.

Lawsuits over prescription drugs carry perhaps the highest stakes of all product liability litigation, lawyers on each side say. Plaintiffs' lawyers may spend years and millions of dollars to prepare for a single trial, but a victory can come with a verdict of $10 million or more.

To gain leverage against the companies, trial lawyers aim to build "inventories" of hundreds or thousands of plaintiffs that they can settle simultaneously for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Last year, Eli Lilly agreed to spend $700 million to settle 8,000 lawsuits over Zyprexa, a drug for schizophrenia that causes severe weight gain in many patients. Wyeth has spent $15 billion since 1998 to resolve lawsuits over its fen-phen diet-drug combination, which can cause severe heart problems and is no longer sold. And Wall Street analysts estimate that Merck may eventually have to pay $10 billion to $50 billion to end the litigation over Vioxx, which has been linked to heart attacks and strokes.

While Fosamax, Seroquel, Ortho-Evra and Prempro are still being sold, clinical trials or reports to the Food and Drug Administration have linked them to serious side effects. Fosamax has been associated with severe jaw decay; Seroquel with weight gain, which raises the risk of diabetes; Ortho-Evra with blood clots, which can cause strokes; and Prempro with an increased risk of breast cancer.

In each case, plaintiffs' lawyers say, drug makers hid early indications of the side effects and improperly marketed their medicines.

"These companies just do it again and again and again," said Paul J. Pennock, a partner who leads litigation against drug makers for Weitz & Luxenberg, one of the largest plaintiffs' law firms. "They try to create much larger markets for these drugs than is warranted, particularly given what they know about the risks."

But lawyers for drug makers say that prescription medicines are as safe now as they have ever been and that the rash of suits reflects an emboldened and enriched plaintiffs' bar.

For a decade, large plaintiffs' law firms have profited from suing corporate America over asbestos-related diseases, but asbestos suits are slowly drying up, leaving plaintiffs' lawyers searching for new targets, defense lawyers say. In addition, plaintiffs' firms have grown flush with cash from settlements of asbestos and tobacco lawsuits and now have the resources to finance cases that can take years and millions of dollars of upfront investment.

To build caseloads, plaintiffs' firms aggressively advertise for clients. Smaller firms then refer potential plaintiffs to a handful of large firms like Weitz & Luxenberg that can afford to invest in complex cases. In return, the smaller firms receive a share of the proceeds from any settlements or verdicts.

"It's an industry, an amazing industry," said Barbara R. Binis, a lawyer at Reed Smith who has successfully defended Wyeth in several diet-drug lawsuits. "They all talk to each other, and they all play off what each other is doing."

Drug suits may also have been spurred by changes in federal laws intended to discourage class-action litigation, said Benjamin Zipursky, a law professor at Fordham University. Unlike traditional consumer class-action cases, in which thousands or millions of plaintiffs with relatively small claims are combined into a single case, drug lawsuits are usually not combined into a single mass trial. Instead, each lawsuit is tried individually, although a single judge oversees the process of document production and witness depositions for all the cases.

"Class-action reform has a tendency to make class actions less desirable, and the class-action device is not what's being used in these cases — these are multiple individual cases," Mr. Zipursky said.

But plaintiffs' lawyers say they do not take on drug cases lightly, despite the prospect of lotterylike rewards, because pharmaceutical suits are very difficult to win.

With billions of dollars in annual profits, drug makers have essentially unlimited resources for their defense, and the cases often turn on complicated scientific evidence that can be hard to explain to juries. As they prepare cases for trial, lawyers must spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours interviewing witnesses and sorting through company documents. In the last few years, suits over Serzone, an antidepressant, and Rezulin, a diabetes drug, have largely fizzled.

"These are tough cases," said Christopher Seeger of Seeger Weiss. Mr. Seeger was among the lead lawyers in the Zyprexa settlement but has lost the only Vioxx case he has tried. "I don't really hear a lot of plaintiffs' firms sitting around, saying, 'Here's the next big moneymaker,' because these are monsters, these cases."

None of the next wave of suits will be as big as Vioxx, lawyers for both sides say. In the Ortho-Evra, Prempro and Fosamax cases, the potential pool of plaintiffs is relatively small, numbering thousands of patients instead of tens of thousands. In the Seroquel cases, plaintiffs will probably not win huge damages even if they do win their suits, because they are mentally ill and mostly unemployed, limiting the economic damages they can be awarded. Damage awards for economic loss are closely tied to income. .

But the cases may offer some advantage for plaintiffs compared with Vioxx suits, said Tim M. O'Brien, a partner with Levin Papantonio. In both the Ortho-Evra and Fosamax cases, plaintiffs have a "signature disease," a condition that is closely linked to use of the drug but is otherwise very rare. The use of contraceptive patches has been linked to blood clots, which are unusual in women of childbearing age, while the jaw decay associated with Fosamax is also very rare. In contrast, the heart attacks that plaintiffs' lawyers assert were caused by Vioxx have many other causes.

"Those cases that are retained are going to be easier to prove than the Vioxx cases," Mr. O'Brien said.

The Prempro cases may be the longest shots, because Prempro use has been linked with a relatively slight increase in breast cancer risk. But Tobi Millrood, of Schiffrin & Barroway, which represents about 1,000 of the 6,000 Premarin cases nationally, said he believed that he could convince juries of the link between individual cancer cases and Premarin use.

"Many of the women I represent don't have any of the risk factors that can be associated with breast cancer," Mr. Millrood said.

Further, the litigation can prove damaging for drug makers even when they are not financially ruinous. As part of the lawsuits, drug makers must turn over their internal e-mail and documents to plaintiffs' lawyers. While the documents are often transferred under seal, they can be leaked or become public during trials.

The Vioxx case has badly damaged Merck's once pristine reputation by bringing to light e-mail that contained derogatory comments made about the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 by Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who at the time was Merck's chief scientist.

    In the Money, and in Court, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/business/22plaintiffs.html

Crackdown on Workers Brings Dismay and Anxiety

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, April 21 — Alirio Lares, a waiter in South Beach here, had been hopeful lately that Congress would grant some form of amnesty to illegal immigrants like him. But after federal officials began a crackdown this week on employers of illegal immigrants, Mr. Lares's optimism faltered.

"Where I work, they don't check papers," Mr. Lares, 43, who moved from Venezuela 12 years ago, said on Friday. "But of course I am afraid because I am working illegally and I know they can fire me anytime."

In its first days, the crackdown resulted in the detention of more than 1,100 illegal immigrants in 26 states and the arrest of seven managers and former managers of a pallet supply company, bringing praise from groups favoring stricter enforcement of immigration laws but prompting dread and resentment among immigrant workers and some employers.

Alexandra Perez, a mother of three who cleans houses and blow-dries hair in Weston, Fla., said she thought the authorities were trying to intimidate the many immigrants who had closely followed the political debate over their status and watched or joined recent rallies pressing for legal status and citizenship.

"What happened yesterday, I think, is a tactic that they are using to scare us so we don't keep on pushing to get rights," said Ms. Perez, 38, who came from Venezuela 10 years ago. She was referring to an announcement on Thursday by Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, that the stepped-up enforcement would continue.

Some employers also criticized Mr. Chertoff's plan, under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement will increase the number of worksite enforcement agents and efforts to root out businesses that submit fake Social Security numbers for workers.

"If we didn't have them, we'd really be in a bind," Roy Pace, a mechanical contractor in Austin, Tex., said of immigrant workers.

Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for the immigration enforcement agency, said that the crackdown was aimed at employers who "egregiously and specifically violate the law," and that the agency believed most employers "do want to follow the law and be in compliance."

In Plant City, Fla., where thousands of immigrants tend citrus groves and berry fields, Melissa Gonzalez, who helped found the group Immigrants United for Freedom, praised Mr. Chertoff for singling out those who hire illegal workers.

"They're the higher power," Ms. Gonzalez said. "They're the ones that have slaves working for them. They should be the ones to be in trouble. A lot of them treat their workers badly, pay them badly and only take advantage of these people."

Billy L. Heller Jr., chief executive of Pacific Tomato Growers in Palmetto, Fla., said companies were not equipped to verify their workers' status, a task he said belonged to the government, not employers.

"Does this mean I have to have people spend the whole day on a government Internet site double-checking numbers?" said Mr. Heller, whose company grows produce in Florida, California, Georgia, Virginia and Mexico. "We are not document police, and we can't discriminate. If folks present what looks to be reasonably legitimate, then we have to act as if it is."

Mr. Heller and others said the crackdown would make them lobby harder for a guest worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to work temporarily in the United States and possibly apply for asylum. Some advocates for immigrants said they suspected that, in fact, Mr. Chertoff's announcement was meant to increase pressure on Congress to approve a guest worker program while also placating conservative voters who prefer stricter enforcement.

"This is political cover for the guys who want to keep the conservative right happy but also want to keep business happy," said Greg Schell, a lawyer for the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Lake Worth, Fla.

Several illegal immigrants said they should be left alone by the authorities because they paid taxes.

"I have proof that I have contributed to this country by paying my taxes," said Sabina Noriega, 38, who came here from Mexico 16 years ago and works on a farm in Homestead, south of Miami. "I don't plan to run from this. Why would I run if I'm not doing anything wrong? They are jumping the gun, but I think it's because something good is soon to come."

Diana Posadas, who arrived from Guatemala on a tourist visa 13 years ago and works in a Homestead pizzeria, said the crackdown made her frustrated and sad but also hopeful that change — possibly including amnesty for some immigrants — was near.

"What I think is that they know that something good is going to happen," Ms. Posadas said, "and they are trying to kick as many people out now to minimize the number of people they would favor in the end."

Lydia Gonzalez Welch, an executive board member with the League of United Latin American Citizens in Dallas, said she, too, questioned the timing of the announcement.

"Here it is on the forefront of a movement when the community is being empowered to stand up for themselves," Ms. Welch said, "and all of the sudden the fear of God is put into them."

Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami, predicted that the crackdown would drive illegal immigrants "further underground where they are invisible and untraceable." Ms. Little said her office had received far more calls lately from immigrants afraid of taking their children to school, seeking medical treatment and attending church.

Contributing reporting for this article were Terry Aguayo and Jennifer Saldarriaga in Miami; Tim Eaton in Austin, Tex.; Laura Griffin in Dallas; Karen Hastings in Alamo, Tex.; Barbara Novovich in Marathon, Tex.; and Andrea Zarate in Homestead, Fla.

    Crackdown on Workers Brings Dismay and Anxiety, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22workers.html

Prosecutor ties nun's cuts, priest's blade

Updated 4/21/2006 9:52 PM ET
USA Today

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Stab wounds in the chest of a nun killed 26 years ago match exactly with the diamond-shaped blade of a letter opener found in the room of a priest accused in the slaying, a prosecutor said Friday.

The tip fits exactly with a small hole in the jaw of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, who was strangled and stabbed a day before Easter in 1980, prosecutor Dean Mandros said in opening statements of the priest's trial.

The Rev. Gerald Robinson, 68, is accused of strangling and stabbing Pahl, 71, on the day before Easter in 1980 in the chapel at the hospital where they worked together. The priest presided at her funeral Mass four days later.

Defense attorney Alan Konop said inconsistencies in statements made by witnesses over the past two decades will leave doubt in the minds of the jurors about who committed the crime.

"Pieces of the prosecutor's puzzle do not fit," he said.

Jurors on Friday walked through the hospital chapel and the sacristy, where the priest's robes are kept and where the nun's body was found. They also saw Robinson's old room.

Pahl was stabbed 31 times, including nine times in the shape of an upside down cross, Mandros said. Prosecutors said they will not try to prove a motive in the killing.

Investigators reopened the murder case in December 2003 after the prosecutor's office received a letter about a woman's claims that she was molested by priests for years as a child. Among the names she mentioned was Robinson. Police were unable to substantiate her allegations of sexual abuse.

Robinson was a suspect early on because he was near the chapel at the time of the killing. He was arrested in 2004 after investigators found that bloodstains on an altar cloth matched those from the letter opener.

Robinson, who is free on bail, could get life in prison if convicted of murder.

    Prosecutor ties nun's cuts, priest's blade, UT, 21.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-21-priest-nun-slaying_x.htm

Calif. judge backs $3 billion stem-cell effort

Fri Apr 21, 2006 10:51 PM ET
Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California judge on Friday opened the way for the state to begin funding $3 billion of stem-cell research, ruling the controversial voter-approved California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is constitutional.

But opponents can still appeal the decision.

California has been at the center of the stem-cell debate since voters in 2004 approved using state funds for research. The debate pits groups that morally oppose using fertilized human eggs for study against others who see stem cells as key to curing many diseases such as Alzheimer's and diabetes.

Alameda County Judge Bonnie Sabraw held that the institute, approved by state voters in November 2004, is a legitimate state agency that can issue debt.

"This will enable the stem cell agency to carry out critically important research in the most exciting area of biomedical research," Dr. Phillip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine said in a statement.

Opponents had challenged the constitutionality of the institute, effectively freezing its efforts to issue up to $300 million in debt annually.

"We have a victory across the board on every issue presented," Robert Klein, the institute's chairman, said on a conference call.

The suit was filed in April 2005 by a group of defendants that now includes the California Family Bioethics Council, a project of the California Family Council which opposes abortion and gay marriage, and the National Tax Limitation Foundation.

President Bush in August 2001 restricted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to existing batches of the cells, which are taken from days-old embryos and are able to be turned into all types of human tissues.

Academic researchers and biotechnology companies have complained that a lack of U.S. funding for stem cells has stymied research in the field.

Given the limitations on federal money for embryonic stem cell research, several states have moved to enact their own funding in an effort to attract fast-growing biotech businesses.

California, the most populous U.S. state, has attracted many biotechnology companies since the 2004 vote approving state funding, but companies have been frustrated while the issue was tied up in court.

"This should enable us to recruit the kind of personnel from around the world who are highly qualified yet are unable to work with stem cells in their home facilities," Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanford's institute for stem cell biology, said in a statement.

The stem-cell institute earlier this month issued $12.1 million to researchers, marking its first grants, backed by bond anticipation notes while its debt authority faced the court challenge.

The institute may issue up to $200 million in bond anticipation notes until the legal challenge to it is resolved, Klein said, noting that opponents will have a month to appeal Sabraw's decision after it becomes official at some point in the next ten days.

Sabraw in her ruling noted that the groups challenging the institute failed to show that the measure establishing it was "clearly, positively and unmistakably unconstitutional."

Bonds issued by the institute are valid, the judge added.

California voters approved the institute's formation by passing a November 2004 ballot measure. It allows the institute to sell up to $3 billion in state debt to fund stem-cell research that many scientists believe will lead to breakthroughs for treating various illnesses and ailments.

    Calif. judge backs $3 billion stem-cell effort, R, 21.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-22T025146Z_01_N21302787_RTRUKOC_0_US-STEMCELLS-CALIFORNIA.xml

Arizona's Strict Approach to Insanity Defenses Gets a Hearing Before the Supreme Court

April 20, 2006
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, April 19 — Eric M. Clark was 17 years old and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he shot and killed a Flagstaff, Ariz., police officer six years ago. Found incompetent to stand trial, he spent the next three years in a mental hospital.

After he received treatment and was deemed competent to stand trial, his insanity defense failed in the face of a combination of statutes and judicial decisions that make Arizona one of the most unreceptive states in the country to a criminal defendant's evidence of mental illness.

The question for the Supreme Court in an argument on Wednesday was whether the state's approach meets the basic test of fairness, or due process of law.

The court has never ruled that the Constitution requires a state to allow an explicit insanity defense, and four states — Kansas, Utah, Idaho and Montana — have in fact abolished such a defense.

But in those states, a defendant is permitted to present evidence of diminished mental capacity to negate the prosecution's assertion that he acted with criminal intent, an element that it is the state's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Arizona, by contrast, such evidence is barred from the trial. A defendant who relies on an insanity defense may request a verdict of "guilty except insane," which requires the defendant to demonstrate insanity under a statutory definition that is narrower than that in all but a handful of states.

Most states use either a two-part definition of insanity known as the M'Naghten rule, which stems from an English legal decision in 1843, or a modern and broader variant of the rule. The M'Naghten rule permits a defendant to show that because of a mental illness, he either did not know "the nature and quality" of the criminal act, or did not know that "he was doing what was wrong."

When the Arizona Legislature established the "guilty except insane" verdict in 1993, it eliminated the first prong of the M'Naghten definition, meaning that a defendant could not be found insane unless he could demonstrate that at the time of the crime, he did not know his conduct was wrong.

The result was that Mr. Clark, the teenager in Flagstaff, was barred from arguing that his delusions caused him to believe that he was shooting a space alien rather than a police officer. That prohibition, his lawyer, David I. Goldberg, told the court on Wednesday, meant that Mr. Clark did not receive a fair trial.

The case, Clark v. Arizona, No. 05-5966, is an appeal from the Arizona Court of Appeals, which affirmed Mr. Clark's conviction and life sentence for the crime of intentionally killing a police officer.

Mr. Goldberg offered the justices an analogy: "A person thinks he is squeezing a lemon, but it turns out to be his sister. He knows that killing his sister is wrong, but not that squeezing a lemon is wrong."

In focusing only on knowledge of right and wrong, Mr. Goldberg said, the Arizona law was constitutionally deficient in not permitting Mr. Clark to present a full defense. "A person could know in the abstract that killing is wrong, but not know that they were killing a person," he said.

Much of the debate during the argument centered on whether Arizona's narrowed definition of insanity made a practical difference. The state's lawyer, Randall M. Howe, chief counsel in the Arizona attorney general's office, asserted that nearly all those defendants who could have claimed that they did not understand the nature of their actions, the part of the definition that Arizona has eliminated, could also demonstrate that they did not know their acts were wrong.

"I won't pretend that under some theoretical, hypothetical scenario, that might not occur," Mr. Howe said, "but it is very difficult to imagine."

In any event, he said, "the state has discretion to define insanity as it sees fit."

Several justices appeared troubled, Justice John Paul Stevens among them. Could a defendant who "thought he had a mission in life to kill Martians," he asked, be convicted of murder for killing a person whom he thought was a Martian?

Mr. Howe replied, "If he truly believed he was shooting an alien, he would certainly have a very strong case for insanity." But he said that on the evidence found by the trial judge in this case, which was heard without a jury, Mr. Clark knew he was killing a police officer and, in fact, had planned the crime in advance.

The justices also had questions about Arizona's refusal to permit evidence of diminished capacity in rebuttal to the state's evidence of criminal intent. Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Clark's lawyer, said the refusal was unconstitutional "because it allows the state's evidence to go uncontested."

The state argued at the trial that Mr. Clark intentionally lured the police by driving around a residential neighborhood late at night with loud music blaring from his car. Mr. Goldberg said that under Arizona's rule, he was not permitted to argue that the purpose of the loud music was to drown out the voices that his client was hearing as the result of his illness.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked Mr. Howe, the state's lawyer, why the state could bar evidence of mental illness when it could not bar other types of evidence, like a defendant's inability to understand English, that might also be relevant to the question of intent. "What is it about mental capacity that allows you to exclude that type of evidence?" the chief justice asked.

Mr. Howe replied that the impact of mental illness on a defendant's ability to formulate the intent to commit a crime was "just too complex a question to ask a jury or judge to decide."

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement also argued on Arizona's behalf. While federal law applies to both parts of the insanity definition, Mr. Clement said in his brief, "the United States has an interest in ensuring that Congress retains authority to revise the standard."

    Arizona's Strict Approach to Insanity Defenses Gets a Hearing Before the Supreme Court, NYT, 20.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/washington/20scotus.html

Oklahoma man charged with 1st-degree murder

Updated 4/17/2006 7:46 PM ET
USA Today

PURCELL, Okla. (AP) — A grocery store stocker was arraigned Monday on first-degree murder charges for the killing of a 10-year-old girl in what authorities said was an elaborate plan to eat human flesh.

Kevin Ray Underwood appeared before McClain County Judge Gary Barger, who entered a not guilty plea for Underwood.

Underwood, led into court with his hands and feet shackled, spoke softly as he told the judge he needed a public defender.

The defense requested a gag order, complaining that officials made "inflammatory, prejudicial and conclusory statements" to the media that had helped fuel widespread interest in the case.

Prosecutor Tim Kuykendall said he probably would not oppose the request. A hearing on the gag motion will be held Tuesday, the judge said.

After the arraignment, Kuykendall said he would seek the death penalty.

"In my 24 years as a prosecutor this ranks as one of the most heinous and atrocious cases I've ever been involved with," he said.

During the arraignment, a man in the hall outside the courtroom yelled, "Let's string him up. Let's string him up, baby killer, and hang him." Police led the man away.

Underwood, 26, was arrested Friday and held without bail after drawing suspicion at a checkpoint set up near the apartment complex where he and Jamie Rose Bolin were neighbors.

Authorities said he led investigators to his apartment, where they found the girl's body in a large Rubbermaid tub sealed with duct tape in his bedroom closet.

Authorities believe Underwood lured the 10-year-old into his apartment, beat her on the head with a wooden cutting board and suffocated her with his hands and duct tape.

Police Chief David Tompkins said investigators believe Underwood sexually assaulted the little girl after he killed her and planned to eat the corpse.

Meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers found in his apartment were intended for the little girl, Kuykendall said.

According to a police affidavit, Underwood confessed that he killed the girl, telling FBI agents: "Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up."

Police said that while there were deep saw marks on the girl's neck, she had not been dismembered.

In a brief, tearful telephone interview with The Associated Press, Underwood's mother was in disbelief and horror over the accusations.

"This is something that I don't know where it came from," said Connie Underwood. "He was always a wonderful boy.

"I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible."

Underwood's parents have visited him in jail, with the conversation ending in tears, Tompkins said.

"It seemed to help the family out a lot and help Kevin out a lot," Tompkins said. "Kevin realizes he has done wrong."

    Oklahoma man charged with 1st-degree murder, UT, 17.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-17-okla-case_x.htm

Jailed Child's Family Getting $221, 000

April 14, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:52 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ESPANOLA, N.M. (AP) -- The family of a third-grader who was handcuffed and jailed after misbehaving at school will receive $221,000 from the city and its insurer to settle a lawsuit.

Jerry Trujillo, then 8, was sent the school counselor's office after he hit another child with a basketball in August 2004, his mother said. The juvenile citation for disorderly conduct said Jerry then ''got out of control and refused to go back to class.''

After police were summoned, Jerry was booked into the city jail, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and placed in a holding cell while adult inmates in a nearby cell taunted him, according to the lawsuit. He was released to his parents a half hour later.

The family's attorney, Sheri Raphaelson, said her clients were relieved Jerry would not have to testify. A jury already had been chosen to hear the federal civil rights lawsuit, but both sides filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.

The family will receive $85,000 initially, and the remainder of the settlement is to be paid over several years for Jerry's education and college fund. He now attends a private school.

The lawsuit named the police chief, school officials and others. The school district settled last October for $6,000 without admitting liability.

    Jailed Child's Family Getting $221, 000, NYT, 14.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Third-Grader-Jailed.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Illinois Man Gets Life for Kids' Drownings

April 12, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:36 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (AP) -- A man convicted of killing his former girlfriend's three children by letting them drown as their car rolled into a lake was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison.

Maurice LaGrone Jr. was convicted Tuesday after prosecutors argued that he and the children's mother planned the deaths at Clinton Lake on Sept. 2, 2003, with the children inside.

Defense attorneys had argued that LaGrone, 30, made bad decisions, such as parking too close to the water on a boat ramp, but did not intentionally drown the children.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty. The jury on Wednesday, however, determined that he shouldn't be eligible for execution.

LaGrone was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of 6-year-old Christopher Hamm, 3-year-old Austin Brown and 23-month-old Kyleigh Hamm.

The children's mother, Amanda Hamm, 30, faces identical charges at a later trial.

Defense attorney Jeff Justice said he was shocked at the verdict.

''We will stand strong tomorrow and next week, and hopefully I will be able to make sure Maurice leaves this courthouse with his life,'' he said.

The children's three fathers emerged from the courtroom with tears in their eyes. Craig Brown, Austin's father, said after the verdict that he could accept a sentence of life in prison.

''I guess I'd just be happy if he just stays locked up for the rest of his life and can't get out to harm any other children,'' he said.

    Illinois Man Gets Life for Kids' Drownings, NYT, 12.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Lake-Drownings.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Jury Awards $9 Million in Vioxx Trial

April 11, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) -- A jury awarded $9 million in punitive damages on Tuesday to a man who blamed his heart attack on Vioxx, finding that manufacturer Merck & Co. failed to warn about the risks of its arthritis drug and misrepresented the risks to physicians.

The damages are in addition to $4.5 million already awarded to John McDarby, 77, of Park Ridge, who suffered a heart attack after four years on Vioxx, a painkiller taken by 20 million Americans before being pulled off the market.

In its only other loss in a Vioxx case, Merck was ordered last August to pay $253 million to the widow of a man who died after taking the drug for a short time. That amount will be reduced because the law in Texas, where the case was heard, limits punitive damages.

The drug company said it would appeal.

Tuesday's decision capped a five-week trial that combined two cases: that of McDarby, a retired insurance agent who took the drug for four years, and Thomas Cona, 60, of Cherry Hill.

Cona said he took the drug for 22 months before his 2003 heart attack, but he couldn't prove it. His prescription records showed only enough for about seven months' use, and the six-woman, two-man jury rejected his claim that Vioxx was to blame.

In both, the jury said Merck misrepresented the risks of Vioxx and concealed them from prescribing physicians.

The trial -- the sixth over Merck's once-popular painkiller -- was the first involving people alleging use of 18 months or more. That's important because the study that prompted Merck to voluntarily withdraw the drug found that its risks doubled after 18 months' use.

The jury could have awarded McDarby $22.5 million in punitive damages, or up to five times the amount of the compensatory damages he had been awarded. Punitive damages are designed to punish companies for misbehavior.

The verdict was the first time since New Jersey passed a product liability act in 1995 that a drug company was ordered to pay punitive damages.

''Merck's actions were proper and did not, in any way, call for this award as defined by New Jersey law,'' said Chuck Harrell, spokesman for Merck's legal team.

''The evidence was clear that we provided the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with the information about Vioxx that we were required to provide. And under New Jersey law, that means punitive damages should not have been awarded,'' Harrell said.

Merck shares fell 16 cents to $34.26 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange after initially rising 1.5 percent in the immediate wake of the verdict announcement.

The initial rise indicated Wall Street was relieved that the jury didn't award the maximum $22.5 million, health care analyst Steve Brozak of WBB Securities LLC said.

''It would have basically sent a message that this was egregious behavior'' by Merck if the jury had imposed the maximum, Brozak said. He said uncertainty over what the jury would do has been a drag on Merck shares.

Merck faces about 9,650 Vioxx cases in state and federal courts, and has vowed to try them one at a time.

    Jury Awards $9 Million in Vioxx Trial, NYT? 11.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Vioxx-Trial.html?hp&ex=1144814400&en=7ce0008a4c0fe931&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Official Resists Extradition on Charge Involving Internet and Sex

April 6, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, April 5 — The Department of Homeland Security's deputy press secretary appeared in a Maryland state court on Wednesday and refused extradition to Florida, where he faces charges of using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.

The press official, Brian J. Doyle, was arrested Tuesday night in his home in Silver Spring, Md., after nearly a month of computer contact with a Polk County detective who was posing as a teenager. Mr. Doyle now faces 23 counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. Under Florida law, each count is a third-degree felony that carries a five-year prison term.

Mr. Doyle's lawyer, Barry Helfand, said his client would remain in the Montgomery County Detention Center, where he is being held on a fugitive warrant, until a hearing set for May 4. Mr. Helfand said he needed time to discuss the case with Mr. Doyle and would "most likely" return to ask the court to release Mr. Doyle to allow him to turn himself in to the authorities in Florida, where he would be formally charged. Mr. Doyle, 55, who has no prior criminal record, according to the Maryland law enforcement authorities, joined the department last year after working several years for the Transportation Security Administration. From 1975 to 2001, he worked on the Washington news desk for Time magazine.

As Mr. Doyle was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday, Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who is chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the committee would investigate the Homeland Security Department's hiring and security clearance policies.

Mr. Doyle's arrest "raises serious concerns about the department's hiring policies and, more important, its security clearance practices," Mr. King said in a statement.

"I am concerned," he continued, "that D.H.S.'s security clearance procedures and controls on misuse of electronic equipment do not meet the standards of other national security agencies."

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, called the charges "very serious allegations" and promised the administration's full cooperation with investigators.

Mr. Doyle came to the attention of the Florida authorities on March 12, when the Polk County detective, posing as a teenage girl online, was contacted by him on the computer, according to an account provided by the sheriff's office.

Mr. Doyle told the detective online that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security and, in later contacts, provided the numbers of his office telephone and his government-issued cellphone, the sheriff's office said.

Over time, the authorities said, Mr. Doyle sent the detective "hard-core pornographic movie clips" and used the chatroom service of AOL and his telephones "to have explicit sexual conversations." The sheriff's office said some of the exchanges "are too extraordinary and graphic for public release."

    Official Resists Extradition on Charge Involving Internet and Sex, NYT, 6.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/washington/06doyle.html

Jury awards $4.5 million in Vioxx verdict against Merck

Wed Apr 5, 2006 8:54 PM ET
Reuters
By Jon Hurdle

ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (Reuters) - A jury on Wednesday found Merck & Co. failed to warn Vioxx users of the drug's heart risks and ordered it to pay a 77-year-old plaintiff at least $4.5 million in a decision that raises questions about the company's future defense of thousands of lawsuits filed over the medicine.

The jury determined that the company knew or should have known that its pain drug increased the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events, but didn't adequately warn users or their doctors.

In a split decision after about 14 hours of deliberation, the jury said Vioxx had been a substantial contributing cause of a heart attack suffered by 77-year-old plaintiff John McDarby but determined that the drug was not a significant cause of a heart attack suffered by a second plaintiff, Thomas Cona.

Both men blamed the drug for their attacks.

Merck was also found to have misrepresented and concealed the heart risks of Vioxx when marketing the drug to doctors. However, the jury found that Merck did not commit consumer fraud in its efforts to sell the drug. Jurors awarded $4.5 million in compensatory damages to McDarby but nothing to Cona.

Shares of the drugmaker fell 3 percent in after-hours trade.

The trial now moves into the punitive phase in the case of McDarby. Jurors will determine on Thursday whether McDarby is entitled to punitive damages on top of the compensatory damages he was awarded. Punitive damages are capped at five times the amount set for compensatory damages under New Jersey state law.

Former Merck chief executive Raymond Gilmartin will appear at Thursday's hearing to explain the company's actions over Vioxx, said Merck spokesman Kent Jarrell.

Rob Gordon, an attorney for McDarby, predicted there would be more Vioxx cases following the jury's award to McDarby, who had a series of health problems including diabetes and heart disease that his attorneys said were exacerbated by Vioxx.

"I think there is going to be a significant increase in the number of filings against Merck," Gordon told reporters after the verdict.

Merck attorney Chuck Harrell said the company was "disappointed" by the split decision.

He added, "The split ruling at least suggests that we need to look at these cases on an individual basis as we have in the past."

Neither McDarby nor Cona made any comment as they left the court. Mark Lanier, who represented Cona, told reporters after the verdict that the jury "evidently didn't believe that Cona took the drug."

Merck had sought to cast doubt on the length of time that Cona took Vioxx.

If anything is clear in this mixed verdict, according to Steve Brozak, a pharmaceuticals analyst at WBB Securities, it's that Merck is in the middle of a "long and arduous process.

"I think that Merck has to be calculating as we speak as to how long this process can continue, but (the company) can't win on draws.

"They have a mixed verdict here, but literally thousands of cases standing in front of them, and attorneys handling those cases can thrive all day long on these types of verdicts."

In previous trials, Merck was able to argue that there was no evidence of increased heart risk associated with short-term use of the pain medicine. Because Cona, 60, and McDarby were both long-term Vioxx users, this trial has been particularly closely watched for indications of how future cases might play out.

Merck voluntarily pulled the $2.5 billion a year drug from the market in September 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among people who used it for at least 18 months.

Since then, the drugmaker has been hit with nearly 10,000 Vioxx-related lawsuits.

(Additional reporting by Anna Driver in Atlantic City)

    Jury awards $4.5 million in Vioxx verdict against Merck, R, 5.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-04-06T005417Z_01_N05383135_RTRUKOC_0_US-MERCK-VIOXX.xml

Court Ruling May Remove Some of the Drama From Massachusetts Criminal Trials

April 2, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, April 1 — It is the stuff that courtroom dramas are made of: the gotcha moment when a lawyer confronts a witness on the stand with evidence that the witness is lying.

Maybe the lawyer discovered that the witness had been out of town the day he or she supposedly saw the crime or learned that the witness had told different stories.

"I do it in almost every case," said James L. Sultan, who has represented several high-profile defendants in Boston. "That's what we do as criminal defense lawyers."

Now, Massachusetts lawyers are likely to have far fewer of those moments, following a ruling by the state's highest court.

The ruling, which split the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court 4 to 3, said that judges in criminal trials can compel defense lawyers to give the prosecution evidence that they plan to use to cross-examine prosecution witnesses.

That makes Massachusetts one of three states with such a rule, experts said. The others are New Jersey and Minnesota, although courts in some states, including New York, have ordered the defense to produce such information, Mr. Sultan said.

Federal courts and most state courts do not require defense lawyers to tell prosecutors about information that could impeach the credibility of a prosecution witness.

"It's very unusual," said Myrna Raeder, a professor at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles.

Legal experts say the decision is striking because Massachusetts is considered a judicial trend-setter and is perceived as liberal.

"Most people view Massachusetts as being one of those states that has always been very concerned about the rights of criminal defendants," Professor Raeder said.

"That's why this case is interesting, because it seems to go to a different direction," she said. "How in the world are you going to be able to raise reasonable doubt unless you can impeach prosecution witnesses in a manner that they will clearly be surprised as opposed to being able to put together a plausible story?"

But some defense lawyers in New Jersey and Minnesota said mandatory disclosures could lead to more pleas and dismissals before trial. "Trust me, I was taken aback that we had to tender that information to the prosecution," said William M. Ward, chief public defender of the 10th Judicial District of Minnesota, who previously worked in Illinois, where no such requirement existed. "But by having this open-book policy, it helps resolve cases. We've had more dismissals."

Still, some Massachusetts lawyers say the ruling will have a crushing effect on their cases. Peter Krupp, a defense lawyer, said that before the court issued its ruling on March 14, when cross-examining a witness "you could have in your back pocket 27 things that show that X isn't quite X, and Y isn't quite Y, and Z is outright false."

With the new rule, "a lying witness will become a better liar," Mr. Krupp said.

The court's decision, written by Justice John M. Greaney, was based on the concept of reciprocal discovery, which requires both sides to turn over information so that neither side is ambushed at trial. Discovery is common in civil trials, but in criminal trials there are different rules.

Justice Greaney said that Massachusetts, like most states, required prosecutors to give the defense investigation results. He said that even though the government usually had more resources to conduct investigations, the judicial process was fairer if the defense also shared its results.

"Criminal trials," Justice Greaney wrote, "are matters of justice and not sporting events in which the side that has the strongest advocate (employing advantages to which he or she is not entitled) gains the upper hand."

The court's ruling concerned a motion in a murder case in which the defendant, Patrick John Durham, pleaded guilty to manslaughter before trial, so the ruling has no impact on that case.

Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, in one of two dissents, said the ruling would have a broad impact, citing the importance of cross-examination to a defendant's constitutional right to confront an accuser.

"The effectiveness of cross-examination often depends on being able to surprise a witness, particularly an accusing witness, with evidence that contradicts or is inconsistent with his trial testimony," Judge Marshall wrote, adding, "It permits the jury to assess for themselves the reliability of a witness's memory, or whether an accuser is truthful."

Robert P. Mosteller, a law professor at Duke University, said the trend has moved from little discovery to more disclosure from prosecutors, to requiring defense lawyers to reciprocate with some types of evidence.

Many states, for example, now require defense lawyers to tell prosecutors if they are planning an insanity or alibi defense and to share information about expert witnesses.

Politically liberal states often lead these trends, Professor Mosteller said, because they champion open exchanges of information, even if it shrinks defendants' options.

"In many situations the only way discovery is going to expand very much is that it's going to cost the defense something," Professor Mosteller said. "The question is, does it cost too much?"

Prosecutors and defense lawyers in Minnesota and New Jersey say it does not. John C. Eastlack, a defense lawyer in New Jersey, said he would advise the Massachusetts lawyers to "calm down, take a deep breath." Mr. Eastlack said he had tried many cases in federal court, where he does not have to disclose cross-examination evidence and where he receives limited discovery from the government. He said he preferred the two-way information sharing of the New Jersey system.

"Sometimes it can lead to a plea that more comports with justice," he said, instead of a defendant "perhaps getting hammered in a way they shouldn't or being able to walk out the door when they shouldn't because the prosecutor was surprised by something."

Mr. Eastlack and Mr. Ward both said the rule affected their strategies, especially whether to have their investigators interview prosecution witnesses before trial.

Such interviews must be given to prosecutors, so deciding not to interview a witness, and therefore having nothing to give prosecutors, may preserve the element of surprise. But it may also prevent the defense from learning critical information.

Robert M. A. Johnson, the district attorney for Anoka County in Minnesota, said that in 10 percent to 20 percent of cases, "we would get something from the defense counsel which would say your impression on the case is not correct, and sometimes that leads us to dismiss the case."

In Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, the Middlesex district attorney, said she expected a similar effect and dismissed defense lawyers' concerns. "If they really believe that their case turns on being able to surprise a witness, I think their case rests on fairly thin threads to begin with," Ms. Coakley said.

In addition, she said, "if a witness is surprised" with unexpected defense evidence, "what if it's wrong? The defendant gets an unfair advantage."

Mr. Sultan said he was hoping to challenge the decision in the United States Supreme Court, although the court does not usually agree to hear cases if the underlying criminal trial has been resolved, as Mr. Durham's has.

"The way to find out whether a witness is lying is to basically confront that witness," Mr. Sultan said. "Does the witness squirm, does the witness sweat, does the witness not have a ready answer? It's that moment that's at the heart of the trial."

    Court Ruling May Remove Some of the Drama From Massachusetts Criminal Trials, NYT, 2.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/us/02disclose.html

New Orleans officers indicted on videotaped beating

Posted 3/29/2006 12:48 PM Updated 3/29/2006 5:03 PM
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two fired New Orleans police officers and one current officer were indicted Wednesday in the videotaped beating of a retired teacher in the French Quarter last fall. (Related video: More on indictment)

The Oct. 8 beating of Robert Davis, 64, was caught on videotape by an Associated Press Television News crew covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Earlier, the grand jury had heard from Davis, who told reporters as he entered the courthouse that he barely remembers the attack and would not be able to recognize the officers who beat him. But Davis said he thought the three men deserved stiffer charges than the misdemeanor offenses they were originally charged with.

Robert Evangelist, 36, was charged with false imprisonment while armed with a dangerous weapon and second-degree battery; Lance Schilling, 29, was charged with second-degree battery; and Stewart Smith, 50, was charged with simple battery, according to a statement from District Attorney Eddie Jordan.

Evangelist and Schilling were fired after the incident; Smith was suspended but remains with the police force.

False imprisonment, the most serious of the charges, carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Second-degree battery is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $2000 fine, Jordan said. Simple battery is a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a $500 fine.

Davis spent more than an hour testifying about the beating, which left him lying on the street, hands cuffed and blood flowing from his head and face. Afterward, he told reporters that he still has headaches and back problems and even had to interrupt his testimony to take medicine.

"It went all right," he said, adding, "but I can't tell you anything. I've been sworn to secrecy."

The retired elementary school teacher said he was "a private citizen here on business returning to my home. There was no need for what happened."

He said he had returned to the storm-struck city to check on his property and was looking for a place to buy cigarettes in the French Quarter when police grabbed him.

The videotape shows an officer hitting Davis at least four times on the head. Davis twisted and flailed as he was dragged to the ground by four officers. One officer kneed Davis and punched him twice, and Davis is shown face-down on the sidewalk with blood streaming down his arm and into a gutter.

Smith had ordered APTN producer Rich Matthews and the cameraman to stop recording. When Matthews held up his credentials, the officer grabbed him, jabbed him in the stomach and delivered a profanity-laced tirade.

Evangelist and Schilling were charged with battery against Davis, and Smith was charged with battery against a reporter.

The video also shows two FBI agents joining the police in subduing Davis. Their role is being investigated by federal officials.

A federal civil rights investigation also was launched.

"Without this videotape, I'm sure this case would be swept under the rug," said Davis' attorney, Joseph Bruno.

Davis has pleaded not guilty to charges of public intoxication, resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and public intimidation. His lawyer said this week he expects the charges will be dropped.

    New Orleans officers indicted on videotaped beating, UT, 29.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-29-new-orleans-beating_x.htm

Grand Jury Indicts Bouncer in Student's Savage Killing

March 23, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK and KAREEM FAHIM

A grand jury indicted a bouncer at a SoHo nightclub yesterday for first-degree murder in the killing of Imette St. Guillen, the 24-year-old graduate student whose bound and savaged body was found in a Brooklyn lot last month, 17 hours after she disappeared, court and law enforcement officials said.

The bouncer, Darryl Littlejohn, is scheduled for arraignment at 2 p.m. today on charges listed in a sealed indictment, officials said.

While all grand jury proceedings are closed, special rules apply in sealed cases. Prosecutors can present evidence without formally notifying a suspect, said an official who was granted anonymity to discuss grand jury workings.

The case is an unusual fit for sealed procedures, as Mr. Littlejohn is neither able to flee nor plausibly unaware of the grand jury proceedings. He has been held at Rikers Island on a parole violation for two weeks, since shortly after the police first questioned him.

In that time, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced that evidence would be presented to a grand jury, and news coverage of the panel's work has been pervasive.

The strength of the case against Mr. Littlejohn was still unclear yesterday, and the few publicly reported clues remained those revealed by Mr. Kelly — that Mr. Littlejohn is the last person known to have seen Ms. St. Guillen alive, and that his DNA matches DNA found on plastic ties used to bind her.

A first-degree murder charge can be based on any one of various circumstances. If, for example, prosecutors seek to show that Ms. St. Guillen was killed in Brooklyn, they could portray her death as part of a kidnapping. Killing someone in the commission of a felony is one standard for a first-degree murder charge.

Mr. Littlejohn's lawyer, Kevin P. O'Donnell, did not return calls seeking comment yesterday, but in a television interview broadcast on Channel 2 last night, Mr. Littlejohn proclaimed his innocence, saying that he had escorted Ms. St. Guillen from the Falls bar in SoHo because it was closing time. He did not say what happened after that, but said that the police had focused on him because of his past. "I'm a likely suspect because I have a criminal background and I wasn't supposed to be there working," he said, alluding to a curfew and job restrictions for parolees.

The details of Ms. St. Guillen's murder have riveted the city since they first started to trickle out, after detectives, alerted by an anonymous caller, found her body wrapped in a quilt in a desolate corner of Brooklyn on Feb. 25.

After days of puzzling over that discovery, investigators believed they had found their suspect. Mr. Littlejohn, an ex-convict with a history of robberies and drug possession, had been working as a bouncer at the Falls, where Ms. St. Guillen was last seen alive.

As the police held him at Rikers Island for violating his curfew, the search for evidence tying him to the murder intensified.

Scouring at least three crime scenes for clues, the police also looked to a series of kidnappings and rapes as they tried to build the case against Mr. Littlejohn. Investigators searched the Falls repeatedly, as well as Mr. Littlejohn's home in Queens, even tearing up the plumbing. There were setbacks for investigators when the rape and kidnapping victims were unable to identify Mr. Littlejohn in lineups.

Over the course of the very public investigation, portraits emerged of the victim and the man the police said killed her.

Ms. St. Guillen, a Boston native and a graduate student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, came to New York in 2004. At her funeral, friends talked of her intellect and radiance. An A student, Ms. St. Guillen had been studying crime scene investigations this semester, and would have graduated this spring.

Throughout Ms. St. Guillen's life, Mr. Littlejohn shuttled in and out of penal institutions on seven felony convictions.

Raised in two of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, Richmond Hill and South Jamaica, Mr. Littlejohn lives in a small yellow clapboard house owned by his mother. He used aliases like Handsome and Blaze and wore military fatigues, dark U.S. Marshal T-shirts, and bulletproof vests. He sometimes carried a handgun strapped to his hip.

On a snowy December morning in 1994, Mr. Littlejohn, 5-foot-7 and 158 pounds, vaulted over the counter of a Long Island bank, aimed a gun at employees and customers, and made off with $61,759. Convicted on federal and state charges, he was given two 10-year sentences, though he was allowed to serve them concurrently.

In July 2004, he was released from prison. He told his parole officer that he was working days in the office of a mortgage lender, but he was the night sentinel at the door of the Falls, a popular drinking spot where Ms. St. Guillen had gone alone in circumstances that remain murky.

On March 12, in a rare Sunday press conference, Commissioner Kelly formally connected those two lives, saying the police had made a breakthrough in the case and citing the DNA evidence.

Mr. Kelly also confirmed reports that the police had traced Mr. Littlejohn's cellphone activity on the day of the murder, from his home to the spot in Brooklyn where the young woman's body was found.

"Littlejohn is the prime suspect in this case, and his indictment will be sought for the murder of Imette St. Guillen," Mr. Kelly said.

Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for this article.

    Grand Jury Indicts Bouncer in Student's Savage Killing, NYT, 23.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/nyregion/23dead.html

Family of Victim Finds Murder Case Is Overshadowed Again

March 23, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

The story of Romona Moore seems timed to end as it began.

Three years ago, when Ms. Moore disappeared from the streets of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, the police at first declined to open a case, leaving her family to distribute fliers. The police notified the press after her body was found, misspelling her name.

The news media hardly noticed, distracted by the disappearance of Svetlana Aronov, a 44-year-old rare-books dealer from the Upper East Side. In that case, still unresolved, the commander of Manhattan detectives held a news conference with a giant photograph.

Yesterday, a verdict was reached in the trial of one of the two men accused of murdering Ms. Moore, 21, an immigrant from Guyana. It will be unsealed today, after the jury hearing the case against the second man begins deliberations.

As it was announced, news was spreading that a grand jury had indicted the bouncer at a bar in the death of another woman who disappeared from Manhattan, Imette St. Guillen, 24, a graduate student who lived on the Upper West Side.

Throughout the week, across the street from the courthouse where the Moore case was on trial, outside a long hallway marked Grand Jury, reporters and photographers from The Daily News, The New York Post and People magazine have kept a vigil. Television crews have waited outside with satellite trucks.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office has logged calls about the St. Guillen case from CNN, MSNBC, "Good Morning America" and Geraldo Rivera (not his assistant).

By now the urban morality play is well rehearsed: Two people meet brutal ends, one an object of obsession, the other ignored.

"Her disappearance never got the attention," said Romona Moore's mother, Elle Carmichael, "so I guess it'll never get it."

Public attention and the allocation of police resources often coincide, experts say. "It's sort of chicken and egg; the media often helps set the police agenda," said David J. Krajicek, the author of "Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities." "It's almost redundant to say it at this point, but it has to do with social status, wealth and race."

As the trial of the two men accused of killing Ms. Moore has unfolded, the allocation of police resources has been on display. Defense lawyers pointed out lost evidence and searches in which investigators overlooked condoms, condom wrappers, chains, bloody tools and clothes stained with bodily fluids. On the witness stand, Detective John Cantone was forced to admit that he had left several rooms out of a crime scene sketch and marked north as south.

"This was overshadowed by so many things," said Clifford Mann, an uncle of Ms. Moore. The police response, he said, is "only good for one set of people and not the other."

But the discrepancy did not go without notice. Ms. Moore's family marched on a precinct station house, carrying signs that chastised a detective by name. Newspapers published articles contrasting the police responses. The police sought to explain their actions, saying that women Ms. Moore's age often fail to check in with their families and that other circumstances in the Moore and Aronov cases differed.

Three years later, closing arguments in the Moore case were made on Tuesday and yesterday in State Supreme Court. Nearly a dozen of Ms. Moore's relatives watched in the courtroom, but reporters and colleagues of the prosecutor were distracted.

Across the street, the satellite trucks were pulling away from the door by the grand jury room. Jurors in the Moore case were told to return this afternoon, around the time an arraignment is scheduled in the St. Guillen case.

"I don't have any answers for that," Ms. Carmichael said. "All I can say is, I'm proud of the way I brought up my daughter."

    Family of Victim Finds Murder Case Is Overshadowed Again, NYT, 23.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/nyregion/23murder.html

New trial date set for Andrea Yates

Mon Mar 20, 2006 4:16 PM ET
Reuters

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The retrial of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in the family bathtub in June 2001, was postponed for three months on Monday because two defense witnesses were unavailable.

Yates, 41, was scheduled for retrial starting on Monday but District Judge Belinda Hill moved it back until June 22. The defense had sought the delay so that two key psychiatric experts would be able to testify for Yates, who has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.

Yates was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for the drownings, which occurred when she was receiving treatment for severe postpartum depression. The conviction was overturned by a Texas appeals court last year because of false testimony by the prosecution's key witness.

Prosecutors and defense attorney George Parnham have tried, but failed, to reach a plea bargain to avoid a second trial, which Parnham said would hurt Yates' fragile mental health.

Yates also pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at her first trial. She told police and psychiatrists she killed her children, who ranged in age from 7 years to 6 months, because she wanted to save them from the devil.

Her ex-husband, Rusty Yates, who divorced her after she went to jail, got remarried on Saturday at a Houston-area church.

"These are trying times for Andrea - literally and figuratively," Parnham told reporters. "She's tense. She's terrified."

    New trial date set for Andrea Yates, R, 20.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-20T211618Z_01_B45533_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-MOTHER.xml

Ex-nurse who killed 29 patients gets 12th life sentence

Posted 3/10/2006 11:17 AM Updated 3/10/2006 12:33 PM
USA Today

EASTON, Pa. (AP) — A judge in Pennsylvania added a 12th life prison sentence Friday against a former nurse who killed at least 29 patients in two states.

Charles Cullen, who was sentenced last week to 11 consecutive life terms in New Jersey, gave lethal overdoses to seven patients at nursing homes and hospitals in Pennsylvania, and tried to kill three others in one of the worst murder sprees ever discovered in the U.S. health care system.

Cullen didn't attend a brief court hearing in Northampton County where he was sentenced to life without parole for the 1998 death of Ottomar Schramm. A retired Bethlehem Steel worker, Schramm died from an overdose of heart medication at Easton Hospital.

After the hearing, Schramm's daughter, Kristina Toth, said the sentence provided no closure.

"We live in a world touched by someone else's evil and that will never change," Toth said. "I wish someone would make Charles Cullen answer why he picked my dad."

The former nurse is required to attend the sentencing Friday afternoon in Lehigh County, where relatives of patients he killed also will be in attendance.

Cullen escaped the death penalty after agreeing to help prosecutors identify patients to whom he had given lethal drug overdoses. He will serve his sentence in New Jersey.

Relatives of the 22 New Jersey victims confronted Cullen for the first time at his sentencing there last week, calling him a "monster" and "vermin." Cullen, 46, said nothing.

He has claimed that he killed 40 patients over a 16-year nursing career and that he did so out of mercy. Many of his victims were old and very sick.

Cullen was arrested in 2003 after a New Jersey hospital told prosecutors about questionable lab results involving patients under his care.

At the morning sentencing, Judge Stephen Baratta criticized the hospitals, saying their own economic interests motivated them to not warn other hospitals when Cullen switched jobs.

"It's appalling and unconscionable. ... It was just easier to pass Mr. Cullen to another hospital than to deal with their concerns and their suspicions," Baratta said.

Both states since have made laws protecting hospitals and nursing homes from legal action when reporting disciplinary actions taken against employees.

    Ex-nurse who killed 29 patients gets 12th life sentence, UT, 10.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-10-cullen_x.htm

As Victims' Relatives Watch, Nurse Who Killed 29 Gets 11 Life Terms

March 3, 2006
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

SOMERVILLE, N.J., March 2 — Charles Cullen, a lonely, sneaky nurse who pleaded guilty to killing 29 patients and told authorities he may have killed many more, was sentenced on Thursday to 11 consecutive life terms, with no hope for parole for 397 years.

Families of his victims had waited years for this: to stand in court and lash out at the man who ranked as one of the most elusive serial killers in the country and had caused them so much pain. But if they were looking for any hint of a reaction from Mr. Cullen, any sense of remorse or even recognition of what he had put them through, they left disappointed.

As more than 20 people stepped to the microphone, many choking back sobs or vibrating with anger, Mr. Cullen simply stared at the rug.

"Look at me, Charles!" snapped Debra Yetter Medina, granddaughter of one of Mr. Cullen's ailing, elderly victims.

He did not. Instead, he looked bored.

Ms. Medina then read out loud, very loudly, in fact, a dictionary definition of "vermin."

"That's you, a small, objectionable animal," she said. "And guess what? There ain't no doors out of hell, baby."

Prosecutors acknowledged that four centuries of prison time were redundant but they seemed, in asking for so much, to be responding to the three-hour outpouring of grief that filled the courtroom in Somerville, the town where Mr. Cullen committed many of his crimes.

There was pain. There was anger. There was even forgiveness. If any lesson could be drawn from the ordeal, many relatives said, it was that losing a loved one was difficult enough but that having a loved one murdered was inestimably worse.

Many shared stories about getting fired from jobs or doing badly in school or not being able to think straight because of the haunting images in their minds of Mr. Cullen leaning over their sick, helpless relative, a deadly needle in his pocket.

John Shanagher, whose father, John, was killed by Mr. Cullen, said there was an awkwardness that stalks him wherever he goes.

"Conversations stop when we enter rooms," Mr. Shanagher said. "We are no longer the Shanaghers. We are that poor family where that nurse killed their father."

"There is part of me that would like to see you put to death," Mr. Shanagher continued. "A part that would appreciate the irony of you dying by lethal injection."

Mr. Cullen, 46, was a career nurse with an icy bedside manner and a history of mental illness who worked at nine hospitals and one nursing home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over the course of 16 years.

He killed his victims by sneaking into their rooms, usually late at night (he often volunteered for the night shift), and injected them with lethal doses of drugs. His weapon of choice was a powerful heart medication called digoxin. He preyed upon not just the old and the sick but the young and recovering as well.

He left a trail of suspicion behind him, often leaving a hospital right before he was caught.

But in December 2003, after he went on a murder spree at Somerset Medical Center, killing 13 patients in less than a year, he was caught. A few months later, he struck a deal to avoid the death penalty, and in exchange for getting life in prison, he agreed to plead guilty and help authorities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania identify all his victims — a process that is still going on. He estimated he killed 40 patients. He never really said why.

He cooperated, he stopped cooperating, he cooperated again. He threatened to skip his sentencing, and deny his victims' families the satisfaction of confronting him. He insisted on donating a kidney to an ailing friend, telling a judge that after all the lives he took, he now wanted to save one, a request that his public defender, Johnnie Mask, admitted was "a bit ironic."

But last week Mr. Cullen abruptly dropped his resistance and agreed to face the families. The sentencing on Thursday in Somerset County Superior Court was for 22 murders in New Jersey and three attempted murders. Mr. Cullen still has to be sentenced for seven murders in Pennsylvania.

Mary Strenko talked about her son Michael, a 21-year-old star athlete who always seemed to know when his mother was feeling down.

"He'd say, 'I know what you need, Mom. Mom needs a hug.' "

Mr. Cullen killed Michael Strenko in 2003.

"Now, instead of giving him presents," she said, "I get to put flowers on his grave."

She went through a list of all the things she would not be able to do and ended with, "I will never have the opportunity to dance with him at his wedding."

At that, a tear rolled down a sheriff's officer's cheek.

With four officers hovering over him, Mr. Cullen sat at a table in front of the judge. He wore gray slacks and a black sweater, with the square edges of a bulletproof vest sticking up under the sweater. Above him, mounted on the walls, were gold-leaf angels. To his left was a lectern with a microphone. He never even turned to look at it. When asked to speak at the end, he declined.

He was branded all sorts of things. Monster. Vampire. Demon from the lowest depths of hell. Deplorable. Detestable. Demented.

Some people tried to provoke him, calling him a coward and saying his two daughters would always live in shame. But Mr. Cullen did not flinch.

"In case you forgot what my mother looked like," said Richard Stoecker, "Look into my eyes now, Mr. Cullen. You'll see those same eyes."

Another man, whose mother Mr. Cullen tried to kill, took a different tack.

"I want to talk to Mr. Cullen, just for a minute," said David Agoada, in a soft, almost hopeful voice. "You still can do something good in your life. Tell us, how did you do this? How did you kill all these people?"

Mr. Cullen folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes.

    As Victims' Relatives Watch, Nurse Who Killed 29 Gets 11 Life Terms, NYT, 3.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/nyregion/03cullen.html

Youth Who Killed at 12 Will Return to Prison, but Not for Life

March 2, 2006
The New York Times
By TERRY AGUAYO

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., March 1 — A teenager who was sentenced to life in prison five years ago for stomping a younger playmate to death when he was 12 pleaded guilty Wednesday to armed robbery, in a deal that spares him a life sentence for violating probation.

The defendant, Lionel Tate, now 19, appeared before Judge Joel T. Lazarus of Broward County Circuit Court for a hearing stemming from his arrest last spring on charges of robbing a pizza deliveryman while on probation for the murder. Asked by Judge Lazarus if he pleaded guilty to the armed robbery charge, Mr. Tate replied, "Yes, sir."

The judge scheduled sentencing for April 3 and ordered Mr. Tate held without bail. The minimum sentence is 10 years' imprisonment, and the maximum 30. The term will run concurrently with the sentence the judge may impose for violating probation.

Mr. Tate was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001 for killing his 6-year-old playmate, Tiffany Eunick, in July 1999. His trial lawyers in the widely publicized case contended that he had been imitating wrestling moves he had seen on television and that the death was an accident.

He was initially sentenced to life in prison without parole, but an appeals court reversed his conviction in late 2003, saying he should have been mentally evaluated before trial. He was freed in January 2004, and avoided retrial by pleading guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for one year's house arrest and then 10 years' probation.

In September 2004, during his period of house arrest, he was taken into custody when, the police said, they found him away from home at 2 a.m. carrying an eight-inch knife. For that, Judge Lazarus added five years to the probation and warned Mr. Tate that any future violations would not be tolerated.

But last May he was arrested again after robbing the pizza deliveryman in Pembroke Park, another Broward County community.

Assistant State Attorney Chuck Morton said the deal that led to the guilty plea on Wednesday was in Mr. Tate's best interest, allowing him to "avoid spending the rest of his life in jail."

Ellis Rubin, Mr. Tate's lawyer, expressed satisfaction with the plea deal, calling the evidence against his client "overwhelming."

"I feel very good," Mr. Rubin said after the hearing. "This was the only professional and ethical thing to do."

Mr. Tate's mother, Kathleen Grossett-Tate, an officer with the Florida Highway Patrol, said she felt relieved by the plea.

"It's very emotional," Ms. Grossett-Tate said. "I'm very hopeful."

    Youth Who Killed at 12 Will Return to Prison, but Not for Life, NYT, 2.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/02tate.html

Entwistle pleads not guilty in double murder

Thu Feb 16, 2006 6:36 PM ET
Reuters
By Jason Szep

FRAMINGHAM, Mass (Reuters) - A British man accused of fatally shooting his American wife and infant daughter in Massachusetts and then fleeing to England pleaded not guilty on Thursday to two first-degree murder charges.

Handcuffed and shackled at the legs, Neil Entwistle, 27, said nothing as his lawyer entered the pleas in Framingham District Court, about 20 miles west of Boston. The brief hearing came a day after his extradition from England and nearly a month after the slayings of his wife and daughter.

Police accuse Neil Entwistle of shooting his 27-year-old wife, Rachel Souza Entwistle, in the head and then turning the .22 caliber gun on his 9-month-old daughter, Lillian Rose, as they lay together in bed on the morning of January 20.

Rachel's parents, Joseph and Priscilla Matterazzo sat silently in court, holding a bouquet of flowers as they faced their son-in-law for the first time since the slayings.

Entwistle's court-appointed lawyer, Elliot Weinstein, criticized the media for the weeks of publicity surrounding the case as he addressed a bank of TV cameras at a news conference outside the courthouse. He said he did not know if his client would ever receive a fair trial.

"I am certain that anybody watching this telecast or reading the reporting of this arraignment has already formed an opinion with respect to Mr. Entwistle's guilt," he said as three news helicopters hovered overhead.

Entwistle arrived at the court house in a bullet-proof vest and left in prison-issue orange top and loose gray pants. A man in the crowd outside the courtroom yelled "murderer" as he was driven away in a police motorcade.

The double murder in a colonial home in the quiet, affluent Massachusetts suburb of Hopkinton, about 30 miles west of Boston, and Entwistle's disappearance to his native England after the killings have drawn intense media attention.

POLICE AFFIDAVITS

Despite searches of the Entwistle home by family, police and neighbors, the bodies went undiscovered for two days, hidden under a comforter and bed linens in the master bedroom.

Police affidavits unsealed this week showed that in the days before the bodies were found, Entwistle had surfed the Internet for ways to kill people and how to commit suicide.

They also include forensic evidence linking Entwistle to the alleged murder weapon -- a gun owned by Rachel Entwistle's stepfather found with Rachel Entwistle's DNA on the muzzle and Neil Entwistle's on the handgrip.

State prosecutors say they believe Entwistle was despondent after sinking deep in debt and took the gun from his father-in-law's collection in a suburb about 50 miles away and returned it on the day of the murders.

They have said Entwistle, an unemployed computer engineer, may have intended a murder-suicide but instead drove to Boston's Logan airport and flew to London the morning after the killings to stay with family in Worksop, central England.

Entwistle told police in a telephone call from London he had found his family killed after returning from errands around 11 a.m. He said he covered the bodies up and then grabbed a knife from the kitchen to kill himself, "but then put it down because it would hurt too much," the police affidavit said.

He chose not to fight extradition after his February 9 arrest.

"To think that someone we loved and trusted, opened our home to, could do this to our daughter and granddaughter, is beyond belief," a spokesman for Rachel's family, Joe Flaherty, told reporters.

He will be held without bail until the next court date on March 15 with a full trial expected in about a year. If convicted, he could face life in prison without parole.

Rachel, a Massachusetts native, met Entwistle in England as a college student and married him in Massachusetts in 2003.

    Entwistle pleads not guilty in double murder, 16.2.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-02-16T233619Z_01_N16328951_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-ENTWISTLE.xml

Kansas' Top Court Limits Abortion Record Search

February 4, 2006
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN

WICHITA, Kan., Feb. 3 — The Kansas Supreme Court restricted on Friday an unusual and divisive investigation by Attorney General Phill Kline into illegal abortions and child rape, ruling that the names and personal information of 90 women and girls must be removed from the records he is seeking from two abortion clinics.

While granting most of the clinics' requests in a lawsuit seeking to keep the records private, the court did not prevent Mr. Kline from obtaining the records, leaving that decision to a lower court judge.

Before turning over the records, however, that judge must re-evaluate whether Mr. Kline has sound legal reasons for seeking the records, the court ruled, and must eliminate from them information unrelated to possible violations of the state's laws on late-term abortions and reporting of child abuse.

"The type of information sought by the state here could hardly be more sensitive, or the potential harm to patient privacy posed by disclosure more substantial," Justice Carol A. Beier wrote for the court. "If inquisition subpoenas for documents related to abortions are not handled sensitively, the fundamental rights of women who may seek abortions in the future could be substantially impaired or the assertion of those rights prevented."

Both sides said they saw the ruling as a victory, with Mr. Kline saying, "I am pleased that the judge's subpoenas will now be honored and the investigation will proceed."

The court declined the clinics' request to hold Mr. Kline in contempt for making public some sealed records in the case, ruling that his behavior was "troubling" but granting him "the benefit of the doubt."

Representatives of the two clinics — Women's Health Services in Wichita and Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb — said that they knew it would be impossible to halt Mr. Kline's investigation, and that they were confident the redacted files would protect the privacy of their patients and would not expose their doctors to prosecution.

The Supreme Court opinion "does everything we asked the court to do," said Lee Thompson, the Wichita lawyer representing the clinics. Peter Brownlie, chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, called it a victory for "women's medical privacy."

"We've said throughout that the attorney general is free to investigate us, and we stand by that," Mr. Brownlie said. "What the attorney general will find is that we followed the law in Kansas with regard to reporting suspected abuse of minors, and we followed the law with respect to abortions at or around the time of viability."

Mr. Kline, a conservative Republican, secretly began the investigation into the two abortion clinics shortly after taking office in 2003. It was the first of its kind in the country to pursue criminal charges and was part of an effort by Mr. Kline to clamp down on illegal abortions.

The investigation became public when the clinics moved to stop the subpoenas, and shortly afterward, the attorney general in Indiana, also an anti-abortion Republican, took a similar tack, demanding 80 patient files in an investigation of whether Planned Parenthood clinics failed to report illegal sexual activity by girls under 14.

Friday's ruling quotes a member of Mr. Kline's office describing the investigation as "massive in nature," and says that about three-quarters of the 90 requested files concern adults, and two-thirds are from the Wichita clinic, which is known nationwide for performing late-term abortions.

Kansas is one of 31 states to ban or restrict a procedure to end pregnancies after the first trimester that doctors call intact dilation and extraction and critics term partial-birth abortion. After 22 weeks, in cases where the fetus would be viable outside the womb, abortions are allowed here only when "continuation of the pregnancy will cause a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman."

Mr. Kline has said he disagrees with the United States Supreme Court's interpretation that harm to the pregnant woman's mental health justifies such a procedure. But the State Supreme Court affirmed Friday that "the mental health of the pregnant woman remains a consideration necessary to assure the constitutionality of the Kansas criminal abortion statute," a crucial point for the clinics in defending their doctors' decisions to do late-term abortions.

The second focus of Mr. Kline's investigation is the reporting of under-age sexual activity, and Friday's ruling noted that the inquiry also included separate subpoenas concerning live births to women under age 16. The Supreme Court decision was announced as Mr. Kline was testifying in federal court here in a separate suit on the reporting requirements.

In two hours on the witness stand in that case, Mr. Kline often seemed uncomfortable as lawyers questioned him on whether various teenage sexual activities — French kissing while lying on top of one another, fondling of breasts, oral sex — constituted abuse that health care providers must report to state authorities. He declined to respond to such hypotheticals, and said the 2003 opinion he issued that prompted the federal suit was focused on teenage pregnancy, which he said must always be reported because "it is evidence of the injurious act."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, in New York, filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of health care providers and educators who contend that such widespread reporting would have a chilling effect, stopping many teenagers from seeking contraception, counseling and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. "That's possible," Mr. Kline acknowledged on the stand.

Though the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services does not investigate reports of consensual sex among under-age peers, and prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, Mr. Kline said they must be reported nonetheless.

"A child's been raped," he said outside court. "Report it, and we'll figure out the truth."

Bud Norman contributed reporting from Wichita for this article, and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.

    Kansas' Top Court Limits Abortion Record Search, NYT, 4.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/national/04kansas.html

Couple Sentenced to Prison for Wendy's Chili Scheme

January 19, 2006
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 18 - A state court judge sentenced a Las Vegas couple who admitted to planting a severed human finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili to lengthy prison terms Wednesday.

The couple, Anna Ayala and Jaime Placencia, pleaded guilty in September to planting the finger as part of an extortion scheme. Their story received heavy news coverage and briefly threatened a public relations nightmare for the fast food chain.

Ms. Ayala and Mr. Placencia apologized Wednesday in state court in San Jose. Mr. Placencia was sentenced to 12 years and 4 months, said his lawyer, Charles Kramer, and Ms. Ayala was sentenced to 9 years.

The judge, Edward J. Davila, also ordered the couple to pay about $21 million in restitution to Wendy's.

Mr. Kramer, in a telephone interview, said that company officials had indicated they intended to seek about $170,000, to make up for wages lost by the employees at the Wendy's restaurant in San Jose where Ms. Ayala planted the finger on March 22.

"They have indicated they are not even going to pursue restitution provided our clients do not pursue" a movie or book deal about their experience, Mr. Kramer said. "The corporation seems to have recognized that these people do not have $21 million."

Asked what he thought of the severity of the sentence, Mr. Kramer paused, then said, "As fraud cases go, it seems to be some of the folks that took down some of these huge corporations a few years ago and defrauded" investors, employees and retirees out of billions of dollars "are getting less time."

"It certainly sends a clear and loud message," he added. "I don't know what else to say."

At the hearing Wednesday, The Associated Press reported, several Wendy's employees testified, including the man who made the chili.

"I felt so bad for the fear of what people would think of me," The A.P. quoted the chili maker, Hector Pineda, as saying. "We are the ones that have suffered."

David Boyd, the prosecutor on the case, said it was ironic that the publicity Ms. Ayala had courted to cover her claim resulted in a stiffer penalty because the it increased harm to Wendy's business.

"She went on 'Good Morning America' with her attorney to say how horrible it was," Mr. Boyd said. Her statement "actually had substantial impact on Wendy's sales." The authorities suspected a hoax early on. A test by the Santa Clara County coroner's office concluded that the finger "was not consistent with an object that had been cooked in chili at 170 degrees for three hours," as is the Wendy's policy.

And police officers also were never able to verify contentions by Ms. Ayala and two relatives that she vomited after spitting out the detached finger. The officers found no vomit at the scene, the affidavit said.

    Couple Sentenced to Prison for Wendy's Chili Scheme, NYT, 19.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19finger.html

Court denies Kennedy cousin's murder appeal

Fri Jan 13, 2006 12:18 PM ET
Reuters

HARTFORD, Connecticut (Reuters) - Connecticut's highest court has upheld Kennedy relative Michael Skakel's conviction for the 1975 murder of his 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley, court documents showed on Friday.

Skakel, now 45, was convicted in 2002 of bludgeoning Moxley to death with one of his mother's golf clubs and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

He appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court, arguing that the state's five-year statute of limitations had expired when the relative of the Kennedy political family was charged with the murder in 2000.

Dorthy Moxley, Martha's mother, expressed relief at the decision made by the court on Thursday and said she had no doubt Skakel had committed the crime.

Skakel, who was 15 when Martha Moxley was murdered, is a nephew of Sen. Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel. Robert Kennedy, brother of slain U.S. President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968.

One piece of evidence against Skakel was testimony from a classmate that he had boasted years after the murder that he would get away with it "because I'm a Kennedy."

Skakel's lawyers had said the case should never have been transferred out of Juvenile Court and that the law at the time of the killing was clear that there was a five-year statute of limitations on any crime punishable by imprisonment.

The State's Attorney countered that transfer from Juvenile Court was reasonable because of Skakel's age at the time of his arrest. They also said state lawmakers never intended the statute of limitations to apply to murder cases.

"The system did not work here," said Michael Sherman, Skakel's trial lawyer. "I have respect for the courts but the bottom line is that an innocent man remains in jail period."

Moxley's body was found on the lawn of her parents' home in the affluent town of Greenwich, Connecticut, next door to the Skakel home. She had been bludgeoned with a golf club that investigators matched to a set belonging to Skakel's late mother.

Skakel still has a petition for a new trial pending in Stamford Superior Court.

    Court denies Kennedy cousin's murder appeal, NYT, 13.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-01-13T171833Z_01_DIT361832_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-SKAKEL.xml

A Fallen Judge Rethinks Crime and Punishment

January 13, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. - His last night behind bars, Roland Amundson was sitting in the prison library when he felt the large shadow of someone standing over him. He looked up to see the inmate others feared the most, a former motorcycle gang leader who had been convicted of killing a man in a bar fight - a murder so violent the court doubled the standard sentence.

The man wanted to talk.

Mr. Amundson had been the appellate judge who upheld that unusually strict sentence. Now, he was just a fellow prisoner, inmate No. 209383. "He asked if I remembered him," Mr. Amundson recalled in an interview in December. "He wanted me to know he didn't hold any hard feelings against me."

The encounter in October, Mr. Amundson said, was one of a dozen times in his three and a half years in prison that he was confronted by inmates whose sentences he had ordered or upheld in 15 years as a judge. Those experiences and Mr. Amundson's other dealings as a convicted felon - at his sentencing, prosecutors turned the words of his rulings against him to justify a longer term - have shaken the world view of a man who, from the bench, thought he knew all there was to know about crime and punishment.

Until 2001, Mr. Amundson, who is 56, was a highly regarded judge who sat on the Minnesota Court of Appeals, the state's second-highest court. Mentioned in legal circles as a likely nominee to the State Supreme Court, he was a popular public speaker, served on charitable boards in Minneapolis, and seemed to know everyone. Colleagues described him as brilliant and charming.

Then he was caught taking $400,000 from a trust fund he oversaw for a woman with the mental capacity of a 3-year-old, money he spent on marble floors and a piano for his house as well as model trains, sculpture and china service for 80, all bought on eBay.

Now, serving the last months of his sentence in a halfway house here, Mr. Amundson is engaged in an uneasy and humbling round of self-reflection, examining the criminal justice system from a rare two-sided perspective while busying himself with a menial vocation: shoveling snow and taking orders to the printer for a sewing machine company he represented long ago as a lawyer.

"Judges can say they have no idea what's going on in prison," Mr. Amundson said from a worn couch in the halfway house. "But if you know what's going on and you are still callous, God help you. If you are part of the system that does the things the system can do, God help you."

Like Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals who pleaded guilty in a harassment case and spent 13 months in federal prison in the early 1990's, Mr. Amundson belongs to a small group of distinguished jurists undone by the laws they had been sworn to uphold, who later came to claim redemption in their undoing.

In Mr. Amundson's case, it is a transformation that some people he hurt find unconvincing. "I don't think he feels like he did anything wrong," said Karen Dove, a guardian for Mr. Amundson's victim.

Prosecutors say they are skeptical that Mr. Amundson has learned much in prison; he has continued, they say, to expect special treatment. At one point, he tried to get into a boot camp program that would have halved his sentence; prosecutors blocked the move, saying it was intended for inmates with drug problems or illiteracy.

More recently, Mr. Amundson raised eyebrows with a Christmas card featuring an unshackled ball and chain. It included quotes from Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn about the redemptive value of prison, as well as a picture of Mr. Amundson with his four young sons - reminding some of his critics of how many lives he has hurt.

"It was another indication that he hasn't seen the light," Ms. Dove said.

But relentlessly cheerful - "Come into my chambers," he greeted a visitor, his arm surveying his small cubicle with a leather chair jammed into the corner at the sewing company in nearby Eden Prairie - Mr. Amundson said he wants to use his experience to promote the importance of rehabilitation in prison.

After a boom in prison populations, there are now a record number of ex-felons getting out of prison each year - about 640,000 a year, up about 40 percent over the last decade - and more than half of them end up back there. Across the country, officials are experimenting with ways to smooth re-entry and prevent recidivism, with drug treatment or job training.

Mr. Amundson could get out 23 months early, in April, because of good behavior. He has surrendered his law license, and with few prospects for the future, says he wants to create homes for men coming out of prison, giving them a place to live and help with other hurdles to successful re-entry.

As a judge, Mr. Amundson says he had not thought about sentencing beyond his court; he has come to see its consequences from fellow inmates.

"I knew the era of rehabilitation was over, but I had no idea we had reduced it to just warehousing, and I don't think most judges do," he said.

Mr. Amundson recalled one man he met in prison who had been convicted of killing his parents after they abused him. At 18, he was sentenced to 18 years.

"At 34, he is completely incapable of living in society," Mr. Amundson said. "He's been raised by corrections officers."

Mr. Amundson, who is openly gay, continues to struggle with the court system in a custody battle with his former partner over their four adopted sons from Russia. He grew bitter about prison restrictions on communicating with the boys. What determines successful re-entry into society, he said, is family support.

"If there is any collection of men who need fathers more than the men in prison, I don't know it," he said. "You're dealing with men who need fathers and yet you're decimating their relationships with their children."

By the time he began adopting children in 1998, Mr. Amundson had been stealing for at least three years. He had set up a trust in the early 1990's for the mentally retarded daughter of a wealthy beer distributor he knew from his days representing the state's beer wholesalers. When the man died, Mr. Amundson became sole trustee.

He recalls putting his hand in his desk drawer and pulling out the first of 85 checks he forged. "It was like somebody else was doing it," he said.

Ms. Dove and another woman who worked for the retarded woman, now in her 30's, became suspicious in 2001 when they asked Mr. Amundson for money for a new roof on the woman's house, and he said the trust was empty. It had been worth more than $600,000 when the father's estate was settled seven years earlier.

In retrospect, Mr. Amundson says he wanted to be caught.

"I was tired of being Rolly Amundson, tired of being at everybody's beck and call, just tired," he said. "This was my vehicle to end it all."

Amy Klobuchar, the Hennepin County attorney, saw it in simpler terms. "I believe he was greedy and wanted to live a lifestyle that he didn't have the money to live," she said in December.

Mr. Amundson resigned as a judge and agreed to plead guilty, but he haggled over sentencing, she said, trying to avoid prison time. He sought to mitigate his sentence in 2002 by arguing that he suffered from bipolar disorder, but prosecutors pointed out that he had written an opinion rejecting psychological factors as mitigating. They sought a sentence 12 months longer than the guidelines recommended; Judge Amundson himself, they noted, had written opinions upholding extended sentences in cases where the victim was particularly vulnerable.

The judge sentenced Mr. Amundson to 69 months, as prosecutors requested, saying he had been drunk on power, and had acted not out of depression but out of a sense of entitlement. Mr. Amundson called in a long line of prominent witnesses - his pastor, a former Miss America, a former ambassador - to argue against a harsh sentence.

For her part, Ms. Klobuchar had what she recalled as "her guardian angels," two black defendants who happened onto the courtroom after they appeared in court on drug charges, and sat in the front row expressing their outrage as Mr. Amundson's friends testified.

"I don't think he should be treated any differently than the people that have walked through his own courtroom," she said.

    A Fallen Judge Rethinks Crime and Punishment, NYT, 13.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/national/13inmate.html?hp

Child killer Yates again pleads not guilty

Mon Jan 9, 2006 1:14 PM ET
Reuters
By Matt Daily

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who drowned her five children, pleaded not guilty to murder by reason of insanity on Monday in a case set to be retried after her 2002 convictions were overturned.

Yates' lawyer, George Parnham, said he would seek bond so his client can be released to a state mental health facility from the downtown jail where she is to be housed during the trial, set for March 20.

"I want her placed in a mental health facility pending the outcome of the case," Parnham told reporters.

Yates, 41, wearing an orange jail-issue jumpsuit, appeared alert during her brief appearance in state court before Judge Belinda Hill. On earlier occasions she had seemed disoriented.

Parnham said anti-psychotic and anti-depression medication had helped Yates' mental state, which he said had at times deteriorated so much that she has been placed on life support three times since her imprisonment.

Talks with prosecutors over a plea deal were ongoing, he said, and although Yates would not plead guilty to murder, other options that would keep her in mental institutions were available.

"Andrea will never be able to take care of herself, in my opinion," he said.

Yates was originally sentenced to life in prison after a jury disregarded her previous insanity plea and found her guilty for drowning three of her children in the bathtub at the family's home in 2001. She has spent much of that sentence at a state prison mental health facility.

Prosecutors charged Yates in connection with only three of the five children's deaths.

In November, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals backed a lower appeals court ruling issued a year ago that overturned jury verdicts against Yates because of errors in the testimony of a prosecution expert witness.

During the original trial, Dr. Park Dietz, the expert witness, told the jury Yates had patterned the killings on an episode from the television show "Law & Order," for which he worked as a consultant. But defense lawyers later discovered the episode never existed.

This time, Yates will not face the death penalty because the original jury had ruled there were mitigating factors in the case.

That could help Yates, Parnham said, because juries that are death-penalty qualified, such as the one in Yates' first trial, have been shown to be less sympathetic to insanity pleas than juries not considering the death penalty.

    Child killer Yates again pleads not guilty, R, 9.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-01-09T181330Z_01_EIC963992_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-YATES.xml

Florida Supreme Court Blocks School Vouchers

January 6, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

In a ruling expected to reverberate through battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program yesterday for students attending failing schools, saying the State Constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public system.

The 5-to-2 ruling orders state officials to end, at the close of this school year, a program that Gov. Jeb Bush has considered one of his chief accomplishments.

Known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program, it uses public money to pay tuition for 730 students who have left failing public schools and enrolled in private schools. But a prominent voucher proponent said yesterday's ruling could also endanger the state's charter school system and a voucher program for disabled students, which together serve nearly 100,000 students.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the federal Constitution does not prohibit vouchers, but it also held last year that states were not obliged to finance religious education as well as secular education. Those actions left it to state courts to decide whether voucher programs were legal, and focused national attention on the battle over vouchers in Florida, which teachers' unions first challenged in 1999.

The Florida ruling cannot be appealed to the United States Supreme Court because no federal issues are involved, lawyers on both sides of the litigation said.

In its ruling, the Florida court cited an article in the State Constitution that says, "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools."

The Opportunity Scholarships Program "violates this language," the court said.

"It diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children," the ruling said. "This diversion not only reduces money available to the free schools, but also funds private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or the public system."

Governor Bush called the ruling "a blow to educational reform."

"It temporarily removes a critical tool for improving Florida's public schools and it also challenges the power of the Florida Legislature to decide as a matter of public policy the best way to improve our educational system," Mr. Bush said.

He said the state would explore all legal options including amending the Florida Constitution.

Voucher proponents across the nation called the ruling a setback, just weeks after Congress enacted the nation's largest federally financed school choice program, which reimburses tuition for more than 350,000 students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, regardless of whether they enroll in public or private schools.

"We ended last year with a major victory and begin this year with a major setback," said Clint Bolick, a lawyer who was a participant in the Florida litigation on behalf of voucher supporters and is president of the Alliance For School Choice, a group based in Arizona.

Since Wisconsin established the nation's first voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990, a handful of other states have followed suit, including Ohio, Colorado and Utah. In 2004, Congress enacted a voucher program for the District of Columbia.

Some of the state programs have come under legal challenge and the verdicts have been mixed. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the Milwaukee program's constitutionality in 1998. The United States Supreme Court upheld the Ohio program in 2002. But in Colorado in 2004, the State Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that the state's newly enacted program would unconstitutionally strip local school boards of their control over education.

Joseph P. Viteritti, a professor at Hunter College who has written widely on voucher programs, called the Florida ruling important because many state constitutions have provisions similar to Florida's, requiring that public education be "uniform."

"It signals a direction that litigation may go in the future, offering a strategy for people who may want to strike voucher programs down," he said.

Chief Justice Barbara J. Pariente, who wrote the court's majority ruling, said that private schools are not "uniform," partly because they are exempt from many requirements imposed on public schools, including standardized tests and teacher credentialing rules.

Mr. Bolick, the voucher proponent, called the Florida ruling especially disheartening because it not only ends the Opportunity Scholarships Program but also offers a legal basis for challenging two other major Florida efforts: the McKay Scholarships, which provide vouchers for more than 14,000 disabled students, and the state's collection of more than 300 charter schools, which educate 82,000 students.

Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the ruling "very encouraging."

"It's clear that the court felt that public monies ought to be used for public schools," Ms. Cortese said. "Certainly for Florida this is the nail in the coffin of a voucher program."

Mr. Bush, a Republican, made the voucher plan a cornerstone of his campaign for governor, and the Legislature approved it weeks after he took office in 1999.

Later the same year, the two national teachers' unions - the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers - along with a coalition of other groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People supported a few Florida parents in filing at least two suits challenging the program.

The parallel antivoucher suits were eventually consolidated.

Lawyers for an array of groups that support school choice, including the Florida Catholic Conference and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, filed briefs in the case defending vouchers.

    Florida Supreme Court Blocks School Vouchers, NYT, 6.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/national/06florida.html

Awaiting Next Word in 17-Year-Old Murder Case

January 3, 2006
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

Martin H. Tankleff was supposed to start his senior year of high school on Sept. 7, 1988. But before dawn, his parents were bludgeoned and stabbed during a rampage in their home on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound.

Within hours he was arrested, based on a confession that was handwritten by a detective, which Mr. Tankleff promptly repudiated and never signed. Still, it sealed his fate. In 1990 a jury convicted him of double murder, and he began serving two consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison. He appealed, in vain, all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

But when he turned 34 in August 2005, Mr. Tankleff voiced renewed hope that "this is my last birthday spent in jail." In a year and a half of sporadic hearings in Suffolk County Court, he has challenged his conviction, against the opposition of prosecutors.

Besides disputing the validity of the confession, his lawyers called 21 witnesses in a presentation of a new body of evidence, including an alternative theory of what happened that September night. Mr. Tankleff's lawyers accused his father's business partner and three former convicts of being the real killers. One admitted in an affidavit to being the getaway driver. Several witnesses said two others privately admitted their involvement, including one who told his son, "Yes, I did it."

The hearings heartened supporters who rallied to Mr. Tankleff's cause and prompted news reports, book projects, a film proposal and features on national and foreign television programs. A Web-based campaign to free him, organized by family members and others, has drawn responses from as far as Indonesia.

Criminal law experts have also focused on the case, citing it as a classic miscarriage of justice. They say it has the earmarks of wrongful conviction, with a false confession, dubious police work and a prosecutor's conflicts of interest.

"I never saw a similar case where a defendant was so obviously innocent," said Herbert A. Posner, a retired State Supreme Court justice who is following the case.

The prosecutors insist there is no merit to Mr. Tankleff's claim of innocence. They dismissed his new evidence, called his witnesses "misfits" and suggested that some had hoped to be paid for their testimony.

"No credible evidence connects anyone other than Martin Tankleff to the murders," said the latest filing from Leonard Lato, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk.

In an interview, Mr. Lato disputed all the Tankleff witnesses: "Some people are flat-out lying. Others may simply be mistaken or confused by the passage of time." He challenged the credibility of those with criminal records, drug abuse or psychiatric problems, as well as their motivation, saying they sought fame or were prompted by jealousy, revenge or other bias.

When the hearings ended last month, the judge, Stephen L. Braslow, said he would rule soon afterward on whether the new evidence is credible and would have changed the jury's mind. If he overturns the convictions, prosecutors could then retry Mr. Tankleff, charge someone else, or drop the case.

Criminal justice experts said the obstacles to reopening a case are daunting.

Steven A. Drizin, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, who studied the Tankleff case, said: "Unfortunately, in almost every wrongful conviction case, even when DNA excludes the suspect, law enforcement officers - whether blinded by tunnel vision, whether they don't want to admit a mistake, whether from fear of civil liability - they remain fixated on preserving a conviction, even in the face of compelling contrary evidence. That's the saddest thing in these cases."

Winning exoneration typically takes a decade and sometimes comes after the defendant dies in prison, said Samuel R. Gross, a University of Michigan law professor and co-author of a landmark study of 340 exonerations. He called them "the tip of an iceberg" of tens of thousands of such cases.

What makes the Tankleff case stand out, experts say, is that it lacks the DNA proof that has helped overturn many other convictions, yet it raises many other issues. Mr. Tankleff's lawyers make these claims: a botched initial investigation produced a false confession, new evidence identifies the real killers, the police detective in the case lied about his ties to one of the killers, the district attorney has connections to the killers, and prosecutors ignored evidence, coerced defense witnesses and shielded the real culprits.

"It's an incredible case," said Prof. Bennett L. Gershman, who lectures about it at Pace Law School. "There are so many angles. I haven't seen anything like it."

William E. Hellerstein said he had handled 300 cases as the Legal Aid Society's appeals chief in New York City, "but I never mounted what Marty has."

An Alternative Theory

The hearings, which began in July 2004, focused on the central mystery: if Martin Tankleff did not kill his parents, Seymour and Arlene, then who did?

At the outset, Mr. Tankleff accused his father's partner in a chain of Strathmore Bagel stores, Jerard Steuerman, who called himself the bagel king of Long Island. The partners had been feuding over the elder Tankleff's demands that he co-own new stores and that Mr. Steuerman repay him $500,000 in loans. The slain couple's siblings and their siblings' children, who were familiar with the business dispute and say the police never interviewed them, say Mr. Steuerman had threatened to kill Seymour Tankleff.

On the night of the attack, Mr. Steuerman was in the Tankleff home in Belle Terre, near Port Jefferson, for a poker game and was the last player to leave. But the police ruled him out as a suspect and quickly charged the Tankleffs' son.

Mr. Tankleff, then 17, said he awoke in the morning to find his mother dead and his father gravely wounded, called 911 and gave his father first aid. When the police doubted his version of events, the youth asked for a lie-detector test, but they refused. (Later he passed two tests, he said.)

The lead detective, K. James McCready of the Suffolk County police, testified that he told Mr. Tankleff during the interrogation that his father - who was in a coma and died a month later - had awoken at the hospital and identified the son as the attacker, that the son's hair was found on his mother's hands and that a test proved that his shower was used that morning, which the police said showed that Mr. Tankleff may have washed off his parents' blood.

All those claims were false, the police later acknowledged, but at the time, Mr. Tankleff said he began to doubt his sanity and wondered if he could have "blacked out" and committed the crimes. He said that Mr. McCready had coaxed him to describe the attack and had written a confession for him, but that he had refused to sign it.

A week later, as his wounded partner lingered in a coma, Mr. Steuerman disappeared, shaved his beard and ended up in California using an alias. Mr. Tankleff accused Mr. Steuerman of having killed his parents and the police later located Mr. Steuerman and brought him back to New York, but the police still did not consider him a suspect.

Ultimately, Mr. Tankleff's confession - even without his signature - trumped all else at the trial. Lawyers who work on wrongful conviction cases said that is to be expected: The average person, and juror, has a hard time accepting that an innocent person would confess.

Even supporters concede that Mr. Tankleff hurt his cause at the trial by coming across as unemotional. Critics said he seemed to fit the image the prosecutor laid out: a spoiled young man with a motive to kill his parents for their money.

"A confession is so powerful that it forces the system to break down," said Professor Drizin, and the defendant "is less likely to get relief on appeal."

Yet false confessions are well documented. "You had cases 75 years ago where someone confessed to killing a missing person, then the supposed victim wanders into a saloon," said Peter J. Neufeld, co-founder of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law's Innocence Project, which has helped to free 170 prisoners.

Today, DNA has disproved confessions, as in the Central Park jogger rape case. Reviewing DNA exonerations nationwide, Professor Gross, of the University of Michigan, found that one-fifth of the defendants had confessed.

Mr. Tankleff fit one common profile of a false confessor: an impressionable teenager, said Barry C. Scheck, the Innocence Project's other founder. One study of exonerated defendants showed that 42 percent of those under the age of 18 had given false confessions, but only 13 percent of older defendants had done so.

Another tactical misstep that leads to erroneous arrests, critics say, is when the police prematurely focus on one suspect and ignore other possibilities. "The man with the most to gain from the death of Marty's parents changes identities and flies to California - that should not have been dismissed," Professor Drizin said.

Experts say the Tankleff confession fails the ultimate test: the facts do not fit. The parents were involved in a violent struggle, but the son had no scratches or bruises. And the supposed weapons, a barbell and a knife, had no blood on them.

The use of trickery by the police in interrogations is a legal and common technique, but critics say it invites false admissions. In Suffolk County, the State Investigation Commission found ineptitude, corruption and dubious confessions in a majority of cases in the 1980's.

But the Suffolk prosecutor, Mr. Lato, called false-confession studies an unproven science and insisted that the police statement was Mr. Tankleff's true confession.

Role Reversals

In the upside-down world of the Tankleff case, both sides reversed their traditional roles. The defense accused people of crimes and introduced evidence, and prosecutors dismissed the charges against the newly accused.

The Tankleff lawyers have made a series of allegations since 2003. They contend that the killers are the father's partner, Mr. Steuerman, and three former convicts - Joseph Creedon, Peter Kent and Glenn Harris - acting at his behest.

"Any prosecutor could take what we have now and indict and convict," said Mr. Tankleff's lawyer, Bruce A. Barket. "It's an overwhelming case."

The Tankleff team says it made a breakthrough after a private investigator, Jay Salpeter, tracked down Mr. Harris, who admitted he had driven Mr. Creedon and Mr. Kent to the Tankleff home.

That account was bolstered by Mr. Creedon's son, Joseph Guarascio, who said his father had described the drive, had told of how Mr. Steuerman signaled the killers to enter the Tankleff home and recounted the ensuing attack.

The prosecutor, Mr. Lato, called Mr. Guarascio "arguably the biggest liar at the hearings." Mr. Creedon's lawyer, Anthony LaPinta, speculated that Mr. Guarascio was manipulated by his mother, who had long ago broken up with Mr. Creedon.

But another witness said Mr. Creedon had recruited him in an earlier attempt on the elder Mr. Tankleff's life. Another said the killers had visited him before the attack and had asked him to join them. Four witnesses said Mr. Creedon had told them that he was involved. One quoted Mr. Steuerman as having said he had killed two people.

The defense lawyers say that most of the 21 witnesses whom they produced - including a priest - never knew the Tankleffs or one another and had nothing to gain from testifying. "If this entire picture had been presented to the trial jury, it wouldn't have convicted," said Prof. Eric M. Freedman of Hofstra Law School.

Professor Gershman of Pace said, "There is a mountain of new evidence, certainly enough to grant a new trial."

In court papers and at the hearings, Mr. Lato attacked the witnesses' truthfulness and accuracy. He accused the Tankleff team of coaching witnesses and inducing them with money, which it denies.

Credibility Is Challenged

Defense lawyers have made a central issue of Detective McCready's credibility. Before the Tankleff killings, the State Investigation Commission found that he had committed perjury in a different murder case.

After the Tankleff trial, Detective McCready opened a bar with the husband of Martin Tankleff's half-sister. The only relative who turned against Mr. Tankleff, she pushed for and got a bigger share of the estate while his case was pending.

Detective McCready testified in 1990 that he did not know Mr. Steuerman. But, in the recent hearings, a businessman testified that he had seen the detective visit Mr. Steuerman at a bagel store and quoted the detective as saying Mr. Steuerman was a client of his private construction company.

Another witness, who declined to testify but signed an affidavit, said she had worked at a bagel store for Mr. Steuerman, who had introduced her to Detective McCready as a card-playing friend.

Last month, Joseph Guarascio testified that his father, Mr. Creedon, had admitted to the murders and said he had bribed Detective McCready with $100,000 to avoid arrest. Mr. McCready denied the allegation.

The prosecutor, Mr. Lato, called the accusations an "outrageous" ploy to smear the detective. But Professor Gershman said, "If you can show the lead detective perjured himself in the case, that is grounds for reversal in two seconds."

Was Evidence Ignored?

Mr. Barket, the defense lawyer, accused prosecutors of "a systematic attempt to stop the truth from coming out."

Prosecutors, for instance, never checked Mr. Harris's claim that before he drove the killers to the Tankleff home, they visited the home of another man, William Ram. Mr. Tankleff's investigator located Mr. Ram, who confirmed the story and said that the three men in the car had invited him to join them. Later, he said, he discussed the murders with two of them.

But the defense team claims that the district attorney's office tried to intimidate Mr. Harris, threatening him with prison and opposing immunity in exchange for his testimony, so he did not testify. The defense also said prosecutors had coddled the real killers. After being told that Mr. Harris had accused him of murder, Mr. Kent said, he cried until prosecutors reassured him, saying, "We don't believe you did this."

Mr. Lato dismissed the complaints.

"They're accusing everybody of misconduct, attempting to impugn the integrity of every person who stood in Marty's way," he said. But Professor Gershman said the prosecution's conduct could be grounds for appeal, "This is misuse or abuse of power."

The defense team lobbed harsher charges at the Suffolk district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, accusing him of multiple conflicts of interest. They sought a special prosecutor to replace him, but Judge Braslow refused.

They cited Mr. Spota's role in his previous position as a police union lawyer, when he defended the police in the state inquiry that ultimately found rampant corruption in Suffolk. Among those he defended was Detective McCready, who the inquiry concluded had committed perjury at a previous murder trial. Mr. Spota later defended Mr. McCready, who had since retired, in an assault case; he was acquitted.

The defense lawyers also cited a link between Mr. Spota's former law partner and Mr. Steuerman: the partner had defended Mr. Steuerman and his son in criminal cases, including charges that the son had sold cocaine in a bagel store.

"He just can't represent all sides," Mr. Barket said of Mr. Spota.

To distance himself, Mr. Spota assigned the case to Mr. Lato, who declared "a Chinese wall" between Mr. Spota and the case. But on the day the judge denied Mr. Harris immunity for testimony about being the driver, Mr. Spota was seen talking with Mr. Lato, then entered the courtroom by a private door and sat in the audience.

Mr. Tankleff's supporters say they are also facing a clubby atmosphere of personal and political relationships in Suffolk's courts and law enforcement community. They also said that Judge Braslow, while open about hearing evidence, has perhaps given them grounds for appeal through his rulings, especially his decisions to reject their request for a special prosecutor, immunity for Mr. Harris and subpoenas forcing additional witnesses to appear.

Mr. Lato said he would "not dignify the conspiracy stuff." Judge Braslow and District Attorney Spota declined to comment.

But last fall, in a rare public comment on the case, Mr. Spota offered intriguing opinions. Appearing on News 12 a cable television station, before he was re-elected in November, he called the crime one of "rage and passion" rather than a contract killing. (The Tankleff lawyers say the murders fit both profiles.)

But even as his office fought to uphold Mr. Tankleff's convictions, Mr. Spota sounded ambiguous. "I have never really ever said Marty Tankleff did or did not commit this murder," he said. "If the judge in the Tankleff case says he should get a new trial, then he should get a new trial."

    Awaiting Next Word in 17-Year-Old Murder Case, NYT, 3.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/nyregion/03tankleff.html

In New York, Power of DNA Spurs Call to Abolish Statute of Limitations for Rape

January 2, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

It was his eyes. She was flipping through a newspaper, and suddenly his eyes were staring at her from a police photograph in the crime pages. Even before she read the headline, she felt shock. Then nausea.

"The way he came at me with that knife, I can't forget those eyes," she said, recalling the stranger who climbed through her Manhattan apartment window one night in late 1972 and raped her.

The man's photograph, published last April, brought it all back in an instant for Stefanie Aubry, the victim. It brought back her agonizing decision to submit silently so he would not harm her two young daughters, asleep in the same room. It revived her furious anger - even though the crime happened more than three decades ago.

Ms. Aubry learned from news accounts that the man's name was Fletcher A. Worrell and that he was accused, based on DNA evidence, of a strikingly similar rape in the same area of Manhattan just seven months after her attack. Certain that he was the one who had assaulted her, Ms. Aubry called the Manhattan district attorney.

She was one of six victims of decades-old unsolved rapes who contacted New York prosecutors after Mr. Worrell's police photo was released last spring, describing the marrow-deep chill of recognition they felt when they saw his face.

But the only thing certain at this point is that Mr. Worrell, 59, who has never been a suspect in any of those attacks, can never be prosecuted for them. New York's five-year state statute of limitations for rape has long since run out. The victims will not get a chance to prove their suspicions in court, nor will Mr. Worrell get a chance to prove them wrong.

Prosecutors can only lend an ear to the victims, who say they are living with unhealed wounds, as though the rapes happened weeks ago. "It was one tale of horror after another," said Martha Bashford, the assistant district attorney who fielded the calls. "I take notes and try to make sure it becomes part of the record. But otherwise, there is nothing I can do."

City officials say Mr. Worrell's case provides a stark example of why New York's 40-year-old statute of limitations for sexual assault cases has become obsolete. Since he was arrested last year, Mr. Worrell has been linked by DNA to a decades-long trail of predation. In November, a jury convicted him in the 1973 rape of Kathleen Ham in Chelsea. DNA matches have tied him to at least 21 other rapes in New Jersey and Maryland.

Mr. Worrell's lawyer, Michael F. Rubin, declined to comment on the cases of the six victims who came forward after his client's picture was published, saying Mr. Worrell had not been legally implicated in any of them. But he disputed the idea that DNA testing had made the statute of limitations outdated.

The statute "ensures timely prosecution when memories are still fresh, and the advent of DNA technology hasn't changed that," Mr. Rubin said.

The arrest of Mr. Worrell in Ms. Ham's case was a lucky exception for the prosecutors. A trial for her rape that Mr. Worrell faced in 1974 ended in a hung jury. He jumped bail soon after, so a warrant was issued for his arrest. It was discovered last year in a background check when Mr. Worrell tried to buy a shotgun in Georgia. When prosecutors went to their old files, they found Ms. Ham's underpants stuffed in a folder. Traces of semen on the underwear matched Mr. Worrell's DNA.

The prospects for justice for the six women who believe they also were Mr. Worrell's victims are remote. The assaults happened in the 1970's, two decades before DNA testing became common forensic practice. The law at the time required eyewitness corroboration of a victim's testimony and proof that she had put up "earnest" resistance, making rape cases hard for the police to resolve and discouraging detectives from investing time and resources in them.

The six victims told prosecutors that the police did not collect fingerprints or other evidence from the crime scene, and in most cases did not send them for medical examinations.

"I didn't feel like anybody made a big deal about it," Ms. Aubry said of the police who answered her 911 call. Now 57, Ms. Aubry lives on Staten Island and works as an administrator at a medical center. In November 1972, she says, she was a long-distance telephone operator making $2.91 an hour.

Just as the attacker did in Ms. Ham's rape, the man who attacked Ms. Aubry crept in darkness up a rear fire escape and through an open window. Ms. Aubry lived with her daughters, 2 and 3 years old, on the third floor of a building on East Third Street in Manhattan.

Ms. Aubry recalls that the man brazenly switched on the light before he jumped on her bed clutching her kitchen carving knife, threatening to kill the girls if she screamed. She stayed quiet, and the girls stayed asleep.

She called 911 as soon as he left, and two police officers were there in minutes, asking questions and taking notes. But they never sent her for a medical exam, she said, and she showered immediately, washing away crucial evidence. The next morning she pored over the precinct's books of sexual assault suspects. But the eyes she could not forget were not there.

Retelling the story in her living room recently, Ms. Aubry at first seemed calm. Suddenly she was shuddering, crying, struggling to clear her throat. "It never leaves your mind completely," she said. "There are times, I could be just sitting alone, or in my car driving, it would come back into my head. And the anger comes right back with it."

Joyce Doyle, another woman who called the district attorney after seeing Mr. Worrell's picture, said she was attacked in June 1973 in her apartment on East 31st Street. The intruder came through the living room window, threw a cloth over her head and "was dragging me around by the hair."

He tied her hands with a pillowcase, she recalled. But when he left her alone for a moment she twisted her legs together like a vine. He was not able to force them apart, and he finally fled without raping her.

Although the man had spent 20 minutes rifling through her closets and drawers, Ms. Doyle said the police did not collect fingerprints. If they had, she noted, they could have compared them with Mr. Worrell's prints when he was arrested three weeks later, on June 26, in the rape of Ms. Ham.

Perhaps because Ms. Doyle thwarted the rape, she said she was not as emotionally scarred as some victims. "I was only crazy for two years, instead of 32 years," said Ms. Doyle, now 68 and a retired lawyer. But that did not lessen the impact when she spotted Mr. Worrell's photograph on television during his trial in November.

"I just looked up from my computer," Ms. Doyle said, "and I said, 'My God, it's him.' "

Another woman who called about Mr. Worrell said she had been raped in November 1973 by a man who sneaked into her Upper East Side apartment when she left her door ajar to take out the garbage.

"It kicked me in the stomach" to see Mr. Worrell's picture in the paper, she told Ms. Bashford, the prosecutor. A fourth victim also told Ms. Bashford that she was sure Mr. Worrell was the man who raped her at knifepoint in an East Village apartment later in 1973.

Under New York state law, rape is a B felony, on a par with burglary and grand larceny. The five-year statute can be extended to 10 years if the perpetrator's whereabouts are unknown. Adopted in 1970, the statute is intended to protect defendants against stale prosecution in which evidence is lost and witnesses have faded recollections or are no longer available.

But city officials argue that DNA, offering the possibility of a scientifically precise identification of the criminal many years after the crime, has changed the legal calculus.

"DNA doesn't have any of the human frailties," said John Feinblatt, the justice coordinator for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "It's time for law to catch up to science."

Since reform of New York's rape laws began in the late 1970's, the police have more systematically collected evidence known as a rape kit, including samples of semen and hair taken from different areas of a victim's body. The F.B.I. maintains a national databank of DNA profiles taken from crime scene evidence and from convicted sex offenders.

In New York, bills offered by State Senator Dean G. Skelos, a Republican, to abolish the statute of limitations for rape have been repeatedly adopted by the Senate over the last decade, but have not passed the Assembly. A bill the Bloomberg administration offered last spring to eliminate the statute is awaiting action in the legislative session beginning in January.

"Many criminals got away with it because they simply disappeared," said Assemblyman Mark Weprin, a Queens Democrat who sponsored the city's bill.

The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, has proposed elevating rape to a Class A felony, like murder, kidnapping and arson, which do not have statutes of limitations. He noted that 26 states have abolished such statutes.

"The victim doesn't ever get over it," Mr. Morgenthau said, "so there's no reason why the perpetrator should be home free."

Defense attorneys say that the statute serves to spur timely action by police. It "has been working for decades, ensuring prompt investigation by the police and the prosecuting authorities," said Ray Kelly, a veteran lawyer who is the president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. None of the proposed reforms would be retroactive, so they would offer no relief to victims like Ms. Aubry.

She remains haunted by the image of Mr. Worrell and the thought of the crime. "It stays in my mind," Ms. Aubry said, hunched over on her living-room couch. "It keeps me always on guard. You just have to leave it to God and go on living. You have to keep your eyes open and your doors locked."

    In New York, Power of DNA Spurs Call to Abolish Statute of Limitations for Rape, NYT, 2.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/nyregion/02rape.html

Holiday Clemency Has an Inmate Suddenly Looking Homeward

January 2, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

OTISVILLE, N.Y., Dec. 28 - Darryl Best was not expecting any prison visitors on Christmas Eve, so he was all the more surprised when the warden himself entered the room.

"He tells me, 'Today's my day off, you know,' " the inmate recalled. Then, the warden, Robert J. Ebert, said something he had never said in his 35 years in corrections: "You have been awarded clemency by the governor."

Mr. Best, 49, was the only inmate to be granted clemency in New York in 2005, and the first since 2003.

"I needed a seat then," Mr. Best said in an interview Wednesday at the Otisville Correctional Facility.

Mr. Best was convicted of drug possession in the Bronx in 2001 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, under the tough drug laws adopted when Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor. Gov. George E. Pataki's order of clemency could send him home, to his family's crowded apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in as little as a month.

The clemency is unusual, and not just for its rarity. Mr. Best, a first-time offender, is thankful but far from apologetic, and will leave prison continuing to voice his innocence. He had sought a full pardon from the governor, and his conviction remains under appeal.

The Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, feels strongly enough about the case to have urged against clemency in a Dec. 5 letter to the New York State Division of Parole.

The case, which has been covered on "America's Most Wanted," the Fox television series, has rallied opponents of the Rockefeller sentencing guidelines, which were eased under a bill signed by Governor Pataki last year. It has been a source of controversy not only for the length of the sentence but also for the facts behind the arrest.

On Nov. 3, 2000, Mr. Best was working on the roof on an uncle's home in Williamsbridge, the Bronx, when two undercover officers dressed as Federal Express deliverymen arrived with a package to a Linda Williams at that address. Mr. Best signed for the package, which had a return address of El Paso, Tex., and he was quickly arrested since it contained more than one pound of cocaine. The police had discovered the drugs in a Federal Express office earlier that day.

In a statement after Mr. Best's conviction, the district attorney's office said it was clear that he had been expecting the package and that he had tried to throw it over a fence when he realized that the deliverymen were actually police officers. Mr. Best had told a detective that "he had a lot of kids and needed the money," Mr. Johnson wrote in his letter opposing clemency.

In the interview at Otisville, Mr. Best said that he had no idea there was cocaine in the package and that he had never used illegal drugs. His uncle's neighbors were named Williams, and it was not unusual for their packages to be addressed to his uncle's house because his uncle was retired and usually home, he said. After signing for the package, he noticed the first name Linda, he said, and since he knew no one by that name, he tried to return it.

"I said, 'Hey, listen, this don't belong to me,' but he kept moving," he said. "As soon as I hit the sidewalk, the police cars pulled up." He said that he did not throw the package, and that he thinks now that drug dealers had planned to intercept the package at his uncle's house - a not uncommon practice - but had missed the delivery. "They don't care who signs for it," he said of the police. "You sign for it, you're going to jail. I was in the right place at the wrong time."

A spokesman for the district attorney's office, Steven Reed, declined to respond to Mr. Best's account, saying the conviction spoke for itself.

Mr. Best turned down a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for as little as 18 months, and was convicted by a jury in October 2001. He left behind his wife of 23 years, Wanda Best, their four daughters and her son from a previous marriage. Without their father's oversight, some of the children drifted from school or sports, Mrs. Best said.

"Some of the things that happen in life, you can never get back," said Mrs. Best, now 54. If Mr. Best is released as expected after a hearing in January, it would restore a Christmas tradition in New York. Governor Pataki has awarded 33 clemencies in his 11 years as governor, almost always during the holidays and almost always to drug offenders, in an attempt to soften what he said were overly harsh sentences.

"It's like President Bush giving a turkey clemency," said Randy Credico, director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.

Governor Pataki said in a statement that Mr. Best had "dedicated himself to becoming a contributing member of society and has earned an opportunity for a second chance." While behind bars, Mr. Best did woodwork for a church and worked as a tutor and as a hall attendant. Officials hearing his clemency case reviewed letters and calls from Mr. Best's supporters, among them Russell Simmons, the music executive, and the Kunstler group, where Mr. Best said he had been promised a job upon his release.

Mr. Best had worked for the New York City Police Department until he failed a drug test - because he was taking painkillers for his back, he said - and quit pending a hearing in 1986.

He will return to an apartment in a housing project on Jefferson Street that will be familiar, to a point. His fish died a long time ago because no one knew how to care for them, his wife said. His little dog was replaced by Shayla, part German shepherd and part pit bull. There is a computer in the living room, and DVD's he has probably never heard of. His youngest daughter, 12 when he went to prison, is now a quiet 17-year-old. Another daughter has had a child. A shelf is filled with pictures from graduations that he missed.

"When I think back on all the things I've passed up - 'I'll do it later' - I'm not going to pass up anymore," he said. "I'm going to enjoy life to the best of my abilities."

His wife said she would not let him out of her sight for a long time. "He's not perfect," she said. "But he's perfect for this family."

    Holiday Clemency Has an Inmate Suddenly Looking Homeward, NYT, 2.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/nyregion/02clemency.html