History > 2007 > USA > States > Justice (I)

James Waller was comforted in court Wednesday

by Nina Morrison, Barry C. Scheck and, at right, Jeff Blackburn,

all of the Innocence Project.

Photograph: Mark Graham

for The New York Times

A 12th Dallas Convict Is Exonerated by DNA        NYT        18.1.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/us/18dna.html

In Secret 1996 Tape,

Doomed Woman Pleads With Her Killer

February 28, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES

TOMS RIVER, N.J., Feb. 27 — A cluster of stereo speakers was arrayed in front of a jury box. A switch was flipped. And within moments, the courtroom here filled with the sounds of the futile, decade-old pleas from a doomed woman to the teenager who would soon take her life.

“I can tie you up and put you out there,” said a man’s voice recorded on a microcassette in 1996 and played publicly for the first time in State Superior Court here Tuesday.

“No, because you’ll kill me,” replied Kathleen Stanfield Weinstein, a 45-year-old special education teacher from the Jersey Shore who had just been kidnapped in a carjacking. “You’ve got a gun. How do I know that you’re not going to kill me?”

“Because,” the male voice said, “I’ll promise you.”

The tape, a remarkable 46-minute conversation between Mrs. Weinstein and her killer, was played here at the trial of Michael T. LaSane, 27, who prosecutors say is the voice on the tape.

Mrs. Weinstein was smothered with her coat. Mr. LaSane pleaded guilty in 1997 to killing her, but last year he was allowed to retract his plea and request a trial after it was learned that his former defense lawyer had had an affair with his mother. He is in Ocean County jail on $2 million bail.

Mrs. Weinstein’s death attracted national attention when it was disclosed that she had been able to secretly record some of her final minutes, but her family had never allowed the tape to be made public. A lawyer for Mrs. Weinstein filed a motion to prevent it from being played in open court, but Judge James N. Citta ruled on Tuesday that it should be played, though not copied for the press.

Throughout the taped exchange, Mrs. Weinstein tried to negotiate with her killer, asking him to let her go and promising not to identify him. At times she adopted an assertive teacher’s tone, and other times she simply broke down sobbing.

The conversation was wide-ranging: Mrs. Weinstein read from a psychology textbook she had in the car, discussing the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She urged her killer to find God. She promised that she would use her parents’ hiring agency to get him a job. But the most harrowing moments of the tape came when Mrs. Weinstein discussed her son, Daniel, whom she told the killer was born after she had four miscarriages.

“I’m thinking about my little 6-year-old, and I want to go home to him,” she said between sobs, adding later: “I’ve spent my whole life to have my little boy. Don’t break your mother’s heart. I have a son and I know what it’s like.”

The tape was recorded after Mrs. Weinstein, who lived in Tinton Falls, was carjacked at a shopping center here about 3 p.m. on March 14, 1996. William Heisler, the lead prosecutor on the case, said Mr. LaSane wanted to steal Mrs. Weinstein’s car, a gold 1996 Toyota Camry, as a gift to himself for his birthday, which is March 15.

There is no indication that Mr. LaSane knew Mrs. Weinstein, who taught middle school in Middletown, about 40 miles from the crime scene.

The authorities say that the tape was recorded while the car was parked in a wooded area of Berkeley Township where Mrs. Weinstein’s body was eventually found, bound with duct tape and covered with a blue blanket.

A recording expert, Paul Ginsberg, testified in court on Tuesday that Mrs. Weinstein — perhaps with the microcassette recorder hidden in her purse — was most likely able to record about 23 minutes of her conversation with the killer on one side of the tape, then somehow turn it over to record the rest.

The cassette was found in one of Mrs. Weinstein’s pockets when her body was recovered. The recorder was in her purse. Mr. LaSane was arrested shortly after the authorities found Mrs. Weinstein’s car in the parking lot of the Berkeley Township apartment complex where he lived.

He told investigators at the time that he had bought the vehicle from a friend for $5,000. Upon his guilty plea, Mr. LaSane was sentenced to 30 years to life.

Last summer, an appeals court vacated the plea and granted him the right to a trial, which began earlier this month.

On Tuesday, Mr. LaSane’s lawyer, James S. Friedman, argued that the voice on the tape was not his client’s, challenging the testimony of Lt. Thomas Hayes of Ocean County’s major crimes unit.

Under cross-examination, Lieutenant Hayes conceded he had no expertise in voice recognition or audio technology.

“So you really have nothing to back that up, do you?” Mr. Friedman asked after the tape was played.

“It’s backed up by my sense of hearing,” Lieutenant Hayes replied.

The tape also shows how nimbly Mrs. Weinstein was able to think on her feet, enticing the killer to disclose information — about his childhood in Alaska, his parents’ time in the military, his injured hand — that would later provide investigators with valuable clues.

In court on Tuesday, prosecutors introduced Mr. LaSane’s birth certificate from Fairbanks, Alaska, records indicating his parents served in the Army, and a photograph taken shortly after his arrest showing a brace on Mr. LaSane’s right wrist.

Throughout, Mrs. Weinstein tried to encourage her killer to search for a greater meaning to his life. “Why don’t you make a plan?” she asked at one point. “You’ll have to be committed to your goal. You’ve got to believe in something and a start is to believe in God.”

Moments later, the man on the tape offered, “I’ve always been lucky in my life.”

“I always, I don’t know, I always take chances, always thought the worst is going to happen to me,” the killer said.

“Well, usually that’s what I always worry about,” Mrs. Weinstein agreed. “The worst.”

Later, in one of several moments on the tape in which Mrs. Weinstein appears to be speaking to prospective listeners as well as her killer, she sobbed that she had been “worried about the wrong things my whole life.”

“I always thought that I was so lucky, too,” she continued. “I guess it wasn’t a lucky day. All I know is I’m going to trust in God because that’s the only thing I have right now.”

    In Secret 1996 Tape, Doomed Woman Pleads With Her Killer, NYT, 28.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/nyregion/28tape.html


 

Jeffrey and Dorothy Balancio with photographs of Louis.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

    Legal Fight to Decide Whether to Free Man in ’94 Killing        NYT        28.2.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/nyregion/28stab.html

Legal Fight to Decide Whether to Free Man in ’94 Killing

February 28, 2007
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

One night in February 13 years ago, outside a sports bar in Yonkers, a college student was stabbed to death during a brawl between rival Albanian and Italian gang members, some with mob ties.

The student, Louis Balancio, had stumbled upon the confrontation as he tried to enter the bar and was stabbed 13 times — under the armpit and in his chest and back — one wound so deep it perforated his heart and killed him on the spot.

About two dozen people watched the melee unfold that night in 1994 in front of the Strike Zone bar, which has since closed, but none of them willingly stepped forward to tell what happened.

It was not until in 2000, after the authorities arrested several people and persuaded one of them to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for a plea agreement that a man from Yonkers, Anthony DiSimone, who fled for five years after the killing, was convicted of Mr. Balancio’s killing.

Jeanine F. Pirro, Westchester County’s district attorney at the time, celebrated the conviction of Mr. DiSimone — whose father was a Luchese crime family associate — as the “culmination of a fight for justice.”

But more than 100 pages of recently uncovered statements point to another suspect, yet were never shared with the defense before the trial, and they have unleashed a legal battle in federal court that could result in the freeing of Mr. DiSimone, 40.

“His guilt was never a question,” Mr. Balancio’s mother, Dorothy, said recently from her home in Yonkers, where the walls are dotted with pictures of Louis, who died four days after his 21st birthday. “If there was an error in the process, fine, shame on you, but let us try him again.”

Yesterday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan heard arguments on the case. Mr. DiSimone’s innocence or guilt was not at issue at the hearing. Rather, the question was whether he should be retried for Mr. Balancio’s killing — a move that prosecutors say they intend to seek — or allowed to go free without having to answer for the crime again in court. At the heart of the matter is the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution and the nuances of criminal law in New York State.

Mr. DiSimone was acquitted of intentional murder even though prosecutors argued at the time that he grabbed Mr. Balancio, held him from behind and stabbed him to death. Instead, Mr. DiSimone was convicted of second-degree murder under the principle of “depraved indifference” to human life. If he were to be retried, he would have to face this same charge.

But New York’s highest court ruled in 2004 that defendants cannot be convicted of a reckless murder charge when prosecutors present the killing as deliberate.

In 2005, defense lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition based on the documents casting suspicion on another man, material that had not been introduced before the trial.

A Federal District Court judge, Charles L. Brieant, who ultimately overturned the conviction, also ruled this month that Mr. DiSimone could not be retried because prosecutors did not have evidence to sustain the depraved indifference charge as it was newly defined. At one point during the hearing yesterday, Dennis Jacobs, chief judge of the federal appeals court, said, “It can’t be reckless if you jump on top of somebody and stab him a dozen times.”

The words made Ms. Balancio wince. She was on one of the polished wooden benches in the stately courtroom on Pearl Street, beside her husband, Jeffrey, who was a Yonkers councilman after their son’s death. Mr. DiSimone’s older brother, Damon, sat on the other side of the aisle.

John Bartels Jr., representing Mr. DiSimone, asked the court to uphold Judge Brieant’s decision barring his client’s retrial. Valerie A. Livingston, a prosecutor in the office of the Westchester district attorney, Janet DiFiore, who replaced Ms. Pirro in 2005, argued that the state ought to be able to prosecute Mr. DiSimone for depraved indifference murder under its definition at the time of his trial.

“It is the state’s right to bring this defendant back to trial on depraved indifference, and it should be up to the state to decide what law should prevail,” Ms. Livingston said.

Mr. DiSimone continues to serve his sentence of 25 years to life at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Dutchess County, despite being granted a habeas corpus petition on the ground that his rights to gain access to evidence that might have led to his acquittal were violated.

Several times during the hearing, the judges took note of Mr. DiSimone’s confinement. One of them, Sonia Sotomayor, remarked to Ms. Livingston, “As a matter of law, you have no right to hold him, unless you rearrest him.”

In all, 23 people — some of them members of organized crime and gangs like the Tanglewood Boys, a group of toughs from Yonkers — were convicted in connection with Mr. Balancio’s killing. Mr. DiSimone had ties to both groups, according to prosecutors.

Ms. Pirro said at the time that the case was one of the hardest of her career. “This was a Mafia-related murder where the Mafia attempted desperately to silence witnesses,” she said. “We were told that the Mafia was too strong, but we did not rest.”

In his recent ruling, Judge Brieant wrote that the withholding of evidence in the case was “ to say the least, egregious.” He added that it did not matter if the violation was “willful and intentional or merely unthinking and highly negligent,” but just that “justice is done in the case.”

Ms. Pirro declined to comment on the case yesterday, citing the pending litigation. But in a written statement she gave to The Journal News in White Plains this month, she said, “Louis Balancio’s killer was brought to justice based on the evidence unearthed during an exhaustive, six-year investigation.”

Mr. Balancio’s parents, who waited five years for the arrest of their son’s killer and have endured six years of appeals, say they do not blame Ms. Pirro for the latest challenge and that they are ready to go through another trial, however painful. “Our son was massacred; he was butchered,” Ms. Balancio said. “We can’t let the lunatic who did that to him be back on the streets.”

    Legal Fight to Decide Whether to Free Man in ’94 Killing, NYT, 28.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/nyregion/28stab.html

Chief Judge Plans Center to Ease Divorce Process

February 27, 2007
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY, Feb. 26 — Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye, in her annual address on the judiciary, announced plans to create a new family law center in New York City that is intended to make divorce faster and cheaper for couples who want amicable settlements.

New York, which does not have no-fault divorce, is notorious for judicial delays that turn even the least fraught divorces into expensive, acrimonious affairs. Judge Kaye, who has long championed overhauling state divorce laws, repeated her call for no-fault divorce in her speech on Monday, but that idea has stalled in the Legislature in the past.

The planned Collaborative Family Law Center, which will serve all five boroughs, does not require legislative approval, and it will serve as a pilot project on alternative approaches to divorce when it opens in Manhattan this year.

“Too much money, too much delay, too much agony,” Judge Kaye said in her speech, describing the state’s divorce laws. “We anticipate that spouses who choose this approach will find that the financial and emotional cost of divorce is reduced for everyone involved — surely a step in the right direction,” she added.

Judge Kaye also proposed a takeover of the state probation system by the judicial branch, an idea that immediately met with skepticism from a top Senate Republican. Her proposal was drawn from the recommendations of a special judicial task force on probation, which issued a report on Monday finding that a long history of state funding cuts had left probation the stepchild of the state’s justice system.

The report said state reimbursement of county probation departments had fallen from 47 percent of their budgets two decades ago to about 18 percent today. The chief judge also called for $75 million in new annual financing of the system, phased in over the next three years.

Judge Kaye repeated her call for a broad overhaul of the state’s maze of overlapping trial courts into a two-tiered system of courts similar to those in other states. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has already said he supports Judge Kaye’s proposed overhaul, but it will require amending the state Constitution, a lengthy process that would involve votes of support by the current Legislature and the one elected in 2008, followed by a voter referendum.

Judge Kaye also renewed her perennial call for judicial pay raises, another area where the governor has said he would be supportive. In her speech, she called the raises her top priority.

The new family law center would put the state’s imprimatur on an alternative approach to divorce proceedings that started in Minnesota more than a decade ago and has migrated around the country since then but that experts say is only sporadically used in New York.

“It’s much less contentious,” said Henry S. Berman, who practices collaborative law and is a partner at Berman, Bavero, Frucco & Gouz in White Plains.

“If people come into collaborative law wanting to do the right thing and not wanting the last drop of somebody’s blood, and they’re open about their assets and income, it’s a terrific way to do it,” he said. “The litigators will tell you it doesn’t work when people aren’t honest and open, and that’s true. It takes a certain mindset.”

Under the process, lawyers still represent both sides, but they agree not to continue representing their clients if the negotiations fail and the matter ends up in court. That way, advocates of the process say, the lawyers are deprived of a financial incentive for failing to resolve the matter amicably. The participants also agree not to go to court for a certain period of time while the alternative process is under way.

The sides would still have to negotiate grounds for the divorce, unless they used a so-called conversion divorce, which allows couples who stick to a separation agreement to divorce after a year without finding fault.

“The basic premise behind it is that by providing folks with access to lawyers who are knowledgeable in matrimonial law, who are committed to negotiating on behalf of their clients an amicable settlement without being stuck in the adversarial environment, they are able to limit expenses and foster a more collaborative process,” said Daniel Weitz, a state coordinator for the Office of Court Administration.

Jacqueline W. Silbermann, deputy chief administrative judge for matrimonial matters, said the state’s embrace of the process would mean “we will have court oversight of the collaborative law center, and very importantly, we will be providing lawyers for people who can’t afford lawyers to represent them.”

Some lawyers said the practice had limited appeal because many people in the midst of divorce want to maintain the threat of going to court while negotiating settlements.

“I just see that people here are more apt to want to use lawyers to the full extent possible when they hire them, and that means letting them go to court if necessary,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a Manhattan divorce lawyer who is chairman of the matrimonial committee of the New York City Bar Association. He noted that he was not speaking in his capacity with the bar association.

Though Judge Kaye’s call for no-fault divorce has stalled in the Legislature, Senator John A. DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the two chambers were working on reducing the amount of time it takes to get a conversion divorce, from one year to a few months, a step that would move the state closer to something akin to no-fault divorce.

He was less receptive to the idea of a judicial takeover of the probation system. “I don’t get it,” he said. “It’s an executive branch function. I’m not sure the courts should be overseeing the probation system.”

Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for the governor, said, “We look forward to reading the report and considering its recommendations.”

    Chief Judge Plans Center to Ease Divorce Process, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/nyregion/27divorce.html

California Stem Cell Research Is Upheld by Appeals Court

February 27, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW POLLACK

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 26 — California’s stem cell research program is legal, a state appeals court ruled Monday in a decision that could hasten the day when the state’s $3 billion research effort can get fully under way.

The San Francisco-based court upheld a decision made by a lower court last spring that found that the program did not violate laws concerning state spending, the structure of ballot initiatives or rules regarding conflicts of interest.

The legal challenge had been brought by groups that oppose abortion, research with human embryonic stem cells or taxes.

Because of the uncertainty over the litigation, the state has not been able to issue any of the $3 billion in bonds to pay for research. Earlier this month, however, the program awarded its first research grants — nearly $45 million to California-based universities and research institutes — using money lent by the state government and philanthropists.

Robert N. Klein, chairman of the board overseeing the stem cell program, hailed the court’s decision as “one huge step for California.”

Mr. Klein said the decision was so strong that he thought the California Supreme Court would decline to hear the case if the ruling were to be appealed. If the Supreme Court turned away the case, he said, the state could begin issuing bonds as soon as 120 days from now.

Dana Cody, one of the lawyers representing the opponents of the stem cell program, said: “We probably will appeal but can’t say for certain until we’ve seen the decision.” She conceded that the Supreme Court did not take many cases.

Ms. Cody is executive director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, an anti-abortion group, but in this lawsuit is representing two anti-tax groups, the People’s Advocate and the National Tax Limitation Foundation. The third plaintiff is the California Family Bioethics Council, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, a ministry started by James C. Dobson.

California’s program, approved as Proposition 71 by 59 percent of the state voters in 2004, is expected to last about ten years and be the largest research program in the world directed primarily at human embryonic stem cells. Those cells have the potential to turn into any type of cell in the body and could theoretically be used to treat a host of diseases.

The state program is intended in part to circumvent limited spending on the area by the federal government. The Bush administration, as well as the opponents who sued to stop the California program, objects to the destruction of human embryos needed to create the stem cells.

In its 58-page decision yesterday, a three-judge panel said Proposition 71 “suffers from no constitutional or other legal infirmity.” The judges said that the idea of Proposition 71 was to find therapies “as speedily as possible” but that the litigation had “interfered with implementation for more than two years.”

One of the plaintiffs’ objections was that taxpayer money was being spent without what they said was sufficient state control. But the judges rejected those arguments, saying that most members of the stem cell program’s board were appointed by elected officials and that the program was subject to state audits.

The plaintiffs had also argued that Proposition 71 violated a law requiring ballot initiatives to be about a single subject, in part because it allows for research on topics other than stem cells. The judges wrote that since embryonic stem cell research was in its infancy, the research was “as specific as the circumstances permit” and “reasonably limited to a single subject.”

The opponents also said the program violated rules prohibiting conflicts of interest because the stem cell board contains officials of universities and research institutes that can receive grants. The judges noted that board members are forbidden from voting for a grant to their own institution.

    California Stem Cell Research Is Upheld by Appeals Court, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/us/27stem.html

Appeals Court to Consider Smith Burial

February 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:16 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- The fate of Anna Nicole Smith's body is now in the hands of three appeals court judges who will decide whether to overturn a trial court ruling that meant the model would be buried in the Bahamas.

The Florida 4th District Court of Appeal is considering a petition filed Monday by the centerfold's estranged mother, Virgie Arthur, who challenged the trial court's decision last week that gave control of Smith's body to an attorney for Smith's infant daughter.

The advocate for the child, Richard Milstein, and the attorney for Smith's boyfriend, Howard K. Stern, have until 2 p.m. Tuesday to respond to the challenge. The appeals court will then review all the materials and may seek oral arguments or decide the case based on briefs.

Milstein had said he would bury Smith in the Bahamas beside her 20-year-old son, who died last year. Circuit Judge Larry Seidlin ruled last week that Milstein should get custody of the body after hearing testimony that Smith wanted to be buried in the Bahamas.

Arthur wants Smith buried in her native Texas and claims Seidlin had no authority under Florida law to grant custody of Smith's body to the little girl's guardian.

Arthur is the only ''legally recognized person authorized to make the ultimate decision'' about her daughter's remains, the petition filed Monday said.

Arthur filed an emergency motion Friday asking Seidlin to reconsider his ruling, but he declined on Monday. The judge said he wanted to preserve Smith's dignity by having the funeral occur quickly.

Arthur's lawyer, Roberta G. Mandel, wrote in Monday morning's filing that Seidlin's ruling would also be an inconvenience because the mother ''will have to have a passport and roundtrip airplane tickets and several thousand dollars to even visit or put flowers on (Smith's) grave.''

Mandel said Arthur was willing to take the fight to the state Supreme Court, if necessary.

''This mother is a mother who deserves the right to bury her child,'' Mandel said. ''The trial court treated her as though she was nothing.''

Telephone messages left for Mandel were not returned after the appeals court decision.

Stern attorney Ron Rale said his client was ready. Stern was among those who testified last week that Smith wanted to be buried in the Bahamas.

''We've obviously been preparing just in case,'' Rale said. ''But this is just sad that Virgie is pursuing her appeal.''

Milstein, the court-appointed attorney for Smith's 5-month-old daughter Dannielynn, didn't return phone messages Monday, and neither did the public relations firm representing him.

Seidlin declined to comment.

Smith, 39, died in a Florida hotel Feb. 8, sparking legal disputes in Florida, California and the Bahamas.

In the Bahamas, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Isaacs dealt only with procedural matters at a private hearing Monday to determine Dannielynn's guardianship, said Wayne Munroe, an attorney for Smith's estate there.

Isaacs scheduled the next hearing for March between Arthur and Stern, who is listed as the father on the birth certificate. The judge has barred Stern from taking the girl out of the Bahamas until a custody ruling.

Stern and two other men claim they are Dannielynn's father.

Los Angeles-based photographer Larry Birkhead wants a Fort Lauderdale court to enforce a California judge's orders so he can get DNA samples from Smith's body and the baby. Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, also says he may be the father.

Birkhead attorney Debra Opri indicated after Monday's hearing that Isaacs had agreed to consider his claim. She said DNA tests were expected, but would not elaborate.

A medical examiner has yet to determine Smith's cause of death. Toxicology results could take up to two more weeks.

Smith married Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994 when he was 89 and she was 26. The reality TV star and Playboy Playmate had been fighting his family over his estimated $500 million fortune since his death in 1995.

Associated Press writers Adrian Sainz in Fort Lauderdale and Ben Fox in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

    Appeals Court to Consider Smith Burial, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Anna-Nicole-Smith.html

Evidence in Inmate’s Hand, Justice in His Sights

February 25, 2007
The New York Times
By ELLEN BARRY

On a September afternoon in 2005, with a prison guard standing beside the operating table and another outside the door, a surgeon cut into the left hand of inmate No. 99A2254.

The doctor was trying to find fragments of a bullet among the tiny veins and ligaments of Napoleon Cardenas’s middle finger. Mr. Cardenas had been warned that removing them could cause nerve damage. Another surgeon had balked at performing the operation, saying it could violate the Hippocratic oath.

But Mr. Cardenas did not care. He was convinced that under the pale scars lay evidence that would topple two convictions in a 1994 jewel heist: his and his younger brother’s. Between them, they had already served 14 years in prison for the crime. Cut off my fingers if you need to, he said.

Mr. Cardenas’s lawyers waited anxiously outside as the surgeon, using forceps, removed two pieces of metal. The results would not, in themselves, convince the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, that the brothers were innocent. But Mr. Brown’s investigator was impressed by Mr. Cardenas’s eagerness to have the operation. That and a growing pile of new evidence were enough to prompt the district attorney’s office to start its own yearlong investigation.

On Jan. 18, Mr. Brown asked a judge to vacate the convictions of Napoleon Cardenas and his brother Carlos in the jewel heist. In a statement, Mr. Brown said his prosecutors were “always prepared to take a hard look at a case — even post-conviction — to make certain that justice has been done.”

Steven Silberblatt, one of half a dozen Legal Aid Society lawyers who worked to overturn the Cardenas brothers’ convictions, put it this way: “Sometimes circumstances provide their own lie-detector test. When someone is willing to lose the use of his hand, you get the feeling they’re probably telling the truth.”

The case began on the evening of July 21, 1994. Police officers all over Queens were looking for four Latino men suspected of snatching three cases of Tahitian black pearls from vendors returning to their hotel in Elmhurst from a gem show in Manhattan. The vendors estimated the jewels’ value at $1.5 million.

As they escaped, the thieves rushed at a man in his driveway, demanding his car. The man was an off-duty police officer, and he managed to shoot his service weapon, a 9-millimeter Glock, before he was knocked unconscious. He told detectives later that he thought he had hit a robber who was grabbing at the barrel of the gun.

Within hours, police detectives converged on the emergency room at St. John’s Queens Hospital, where one of the jewelry vendors and the off-duty police officer were being treated. Napoleon Cardenas, then 24, was there, too, with his brother Carlos, 23. It was hard to miss Napoleon; he was screaming. He was being treated for a gunshot wound.

When he was questioned about his injury that night, Mr. Cardenas answered haltingly, arousing a detective’s suspicion. He had shot himself, he said, in his girlfriend’s living room, while handling a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he had been showing to two visitors. He had no license for the gun.

The detective put Mr. Cardenas in a lineup, but when none of the robbery victims made a positive identification, she released him. A friend cleaned up the blood in his girlfriend’s apartment. The police never searched the site.

It took a few days for Mr. Cardenas to realize he might still be a suspect. He was due to serve a four-month sentence for credit-card fraud. Days before it was to begin, Mr. Cardenas fled to the Dominican Republic — a move that would damage his and his brother’s defense.

“I got scared,” he said recently. He had a seriously injured hand, he said, adding: “I was so skinny. I was watching these movies about what happens to people” in prison.

In his absence, the case against him took on a new life. One of the vendors called a detective days after the crime, saying he could now identify Mr. Cardenas as one of the robbers. The police visited Carlos Cardenas to ask about his brother, and began to suspect that Carlos had been involved. When the jewelry vendors returned to New York from California a year later, the police put Carlos in a lineup. One of the vendors chose someone else. Another chose Carlos.

At Carlos’s trial, one of the jewelry salesmen identified him as one of the robbers. There was no physical evidence linking Carlos to the crime. But the prosecutor noted dryly that Napoleon’s injury had occurred “coincidentally, I guess — just a major coincidence — with the same people, about the same time, about approximately the same area.”

In May 1996, Carlos Cardenas was found guilty of first-degree robbery, second-degree robbery and grand larceny. He was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison.

A year later, Napoleon Cardenas surrendered in Colombia to federal marshals and returned to the United States to serve his sentence for credit-card fraud. When he was released, he faced trial in the jewel theft. In court, the off-duty police officer and one of the jewelry salesmen identified Mr. Cardenas. As in his brother’s case, no physical evidence linked him to the crime, but the prosecutor noted the gunshot wound.

“You don’t have a fingerprint to say ‘I was there,’ but everything else tells you he was there, including the bullet that went through his hand,” the prosecutor told jurors. He compared the wound to dye packets rigged to explode on bank robbers.

Although Mr. Cardenas insisted that he could prove his innocence with ballistics evidence and alibi witnesses, his lawyer, Michael C. Harrison, disagreed, and focused on discrediting the government’s witnesses. In 1999, Napoleon Cardenas was convicted of first-degree robbery and second-degree assault, and sentenced to 15 to 30 years.

In 2002, with his legal remedies nearly exhausted, Mr. Cardenas wrote a stinging letter of introduction to Svetlana Kornfeind, a lawyer newly assigned to his case by the Legal Aid Society: he intended, he wrote, “to prove my claim in the courts as soon as I am given the opportunity. So, I want to ask you to be honest to yourself not to me but to yourself by telling me if you have the time or not to help me.”

Ms. Kornfeind was taken aback. But she scheduled a meeting with him. “We had to investigate the possibility that he was right,” she said.

Mr. Cardenas seemed to specialize in driving lawyers crazy. He wrote to his trial lawyer three times a week offering strategic advice. He placed calls from prison to the police in the 110th Precinct asking for documents; if they asked, he said he was a detective. He deliberately injured himself in prison to have X-rays taken of his hand, so he could be sure that the fragments of metal were still there, he said.

“I knew I had evidence in my hand,” he said. “People would laugh at me. I’d sit there and proclaim I was a political prisoner.”

Once in a while, he got a break. An old friend, Eddie Padilla, visited him as he was awaiting trial on the robbery charges. They were talking about friends from the neighborhood, Mr. Cardenas recalled, when Mr. Padilla brightened. Did Napoleon know he still had part of that bullet?

Mr. Padilla had helped clean up blood in the apartment where Mr. Cardenas, still in shock, had pulled the bullet jacket out of his wound. Mr. Padilla still had the jacket. At parties, he would take it out to show friends.

Ms. Kornfeind began to construct an argument to overturn the conviction, citing the newly discovered evidence and contending that Mr. Harrison, the trial attorney, had failed to investigate Mr. Cardenas’s alibi. Mr. Harrison did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Ms. Kornfeind had the bullet jacket analyzed, and contended that the results bolstered Mr. Cardenas’s story: while the Police Department then issued full-metal, copper-jacketed ammunition, this jacket was aluminum, which peeled back on contact. Full-metal ammunition would have passed through the hand intact. The tissue that dotted the jacket was his, a DNA test showed.

The next challenge was to see whether the fragments in Mr. Cardenas’s hand matched the bullet jacket.

Using a tourniquet, doctors at Bellevue Hospital Center cut off the flow of blood to the hand; a “bloodless field” allows surgeons to more easily locate foreign bodies, nerves and tiny veins, said Dr. David W. Friedman, who supervised the operation. It turned out to be an easy task, since the shards were lodged above the bone, like splinters. They were removed through a tiny incision, wrapped in cotton and put in an evidence tube. The wound required only two stitches.

Ms. Kornfeind remembers “just sailing” across town to a crime laboratory, where the fragments would be analyzed. Traces of aluminum would suggest strongly that Mr. Cardenas had been shot with the hollow-point bullet; copper would back up prosecutors’ claim that he had been shot by a police service weapon.

In the end, the fragments were neither. They were shards of lead. Mr. Cardenas’s lawyers contended that they still supported his innocence, since hollow-point bullets, unlike full-metal bullets, break apart on contact, said Thomas A. Kubic, an instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who consulted on the case for the Legal Aid Society.

From the point of view of the district attorney, the ballistics evidence was inconclusive. At a hearing in 2005, a prosecutor said that the gunshot wound had not been at the center of the case against Mr. Cardenas, who was implicated by four witness identifications, “a series of lies he told hospital personnel on the night of the crime as to how he obtained the wound, and his flight from the country immediately after the crime.” But Mr. Cardenas’s eagerness to undergo surgery had made an impression.

The case wore on for months, while the district attorney’s investigator tracked down informants. One of them convinced the investigator that others were responsible for the jewel theft. In January of this year, both brothers passed polygraph tests. That was the final hurdle.

At the hearing where the brothers were exonerated, their father, Napoleon Cardenas Sr., a 74-year-old carpenter originally from Colombia, thanked Ms. Kornfeind and Denise Fabiano, who represented Carlos.

“These are two beautiful persons,” he said in an interview.

Steven Banks, attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society, said the case showed how errors made early in an investigation get “compounded time and time again.”

“It never ceases to amaze me how random it is that people get caught up in the judicial system and the related bureaucracy and can be swallowed up,” Mr. Banks said.

On the day of the hearing, Ms. Kornfeind had been expecting “an explosion of something at the end,” or at least the sight of her client with his handcuffs off, running into his mother’s arms. But Napoleon Cardenas, now 36, would not be released for two days, while immigration officials cleared a deportation order. His brother Carlos, 35, like Napoleon a legal permanent resident, remains threatened with deportation, even though his conviction has been overturned.

Ms. Kornfeind woke up early the day after the hearing, planning to work on Napoleon Cardenas’s immigration case. She pulled up the Web site for the Eastern Correctional Facility in Ulster County, and typed the familiar identification number, 99A2254. A message flashed: No such person exists.

She typed in his name, and got the same message: No such person exists.

That’s when she realized what had happened. Her client was free.

    Evidence in Inmate’s Hand, Justice in His Sights, NYT, 25.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/nyregion/25hand.html

Wife sentenced for killing husband

Updated 2/24/2007 12:13 AM ET
AP
USA Today

MARTINEZ, Calif. (AP) — A woman who fatally stabbed her millionaire psychotherapist husband, whom she met as a 14-year-old girl in treatment, was sentenced Friday to 16 years to life in prison for murder.

Susan Polk received the maximum sentence after acting as her own lawyer in a trial permeated with theatrics, including discussion of her psychic powers and cross-examination of her own sons. An attorney representing her Friday said she planned to appeal.

The 49-year-old suburban housewife was convicted in June of second-degree murder in the October 2002 killing of Felix Polk, 70, at the couple's home in Orinda, a wealthy town east of San Francisco.

Dressed neatly in a pair of khaki pants and a pink cotton sweater, Polk did not appear surprised by the sentence. Earlier, she told the court she was prepared to go to prison and intended to be productive for however long she was there.

"I won't be able to bake cookies, but maybe I'll write a couple of good stories," she said.

Polk said she killed her husband in self-defense after years of abuse and said authorities fabricated and suppressed evidence in the case.

She testified that she seized a kitchen knife from her husband during an attack near their swimming pool and used it to stab him. But prosecutors said she had no wounds to indicate she was protecting herself and Felix Polk had more than a dozen stab wounds.

Polk said her husband began abusing her while she was his teenage therapy patient, and argued that should be a mitigating factor in her sentencing. Her mother, Helen Bolling, told the court that her daughter deserved compassion "considering she has been in prison since she was 14 years old."

But Judge Laurel Brady said the relationship, although problematic, should not be considered in her sentencing because it was not the issue the jury determined at trial.

Jurors in the case did not find Polk credible and one referred to her as delusional. While testifying, Polk discussed secret government experiments and claimed that her psychic powers enabled her to predict the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on World Trade Center, but said her husband prevented her from alerting authorities.

Under cross-examination from his mother, Adam Polk said she was "bonkers" and "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs," referring to a breakfast cereal catch phrase. Friday, he told his mother that he did not know if he would ever be able to forgive her.

"If he were here today he would want you to find the best head doctor in the business and get help," he said.

Polk's lawyer, Linda Fullerton, said there are strong grounds for appeal. The trial was tainted by Polk's own representation and her tense interactions with Brady, who frequently admonished her from the bench, the attorney said.

Polk will be eligible for parole after about 12 years because she has already served more than three years in jail.

But a prosecutor was skeptical that Polk would ever be released.

"She will have to earn her way out and the chances of that are slim," Paul Sequeira said. "She has no remorse. She is still defiant and I think she will be until she draws her last breath."

    Wife sentenced for killing husband, UT, 24.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-23-therapist-killing_x.htm

Woman not guilty in tot slaying

Updated 2/24/2007 1:47 AM ET
AP
USA Today

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — A 53-year-old woman who claimed she received spiritual messages from geese before allegedly stabbing her toddler granddaughter to death was found not guilty by reason of insanity Friday.

A judge ordered Carol Lynn Pappas committed to the state mental health hospital, where officials will decide "when and if she will ever be released," said Kathleen Walsh, spokeswoman for the district attorney.

She faced life in prison if convicted.

Authorities said Pappas called 911 from her son's home Oct. 29, 2005 and said, "I flipped ... the baby was crying and I couldn't handle it."

When police arrived, they found Pappas holding a phone. Both her hands were stained with blood, and an 8-inch knife was found near the body of 21-month-old Madison Pappas. Madison had been stabbed numerous times.

Authorities said Pappas had told her son she had been receiving spiritual advice from geese flying over his house, where she was living.

Court records showed she had been admitted to hospitals for psychiatric care at least six times in 2005, including six weeks before the slaying.

    Woman not guilty in tot slaying, UT, 24.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-24-toddle-slaying_x.htm

Insanity vs. Malice as Motives of Rampage

February 23, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

When Steven Johnson, an unemployed barber who has AIDS, stormed an East Village bar in 2002 armed with a samurai sword, three pistols and kerosene, by most accounts he was propelled by one thought: He would die in a fusillade of police bullets, and his family would then be able to sell his prophetic words and use the proceeds to start a new life.

Only it did not happen that way. He did not die. He did not kill anyone. His family did not sell his story. And now he is on trial — for a second time — on charges of hate crimes, assault and the attempted murder of a police officer. As for the fame he sought, that seems nonexistent as well: aside from an initial burst of attention, his trial has taken place in an all but empty courtroom.

In the early hours of June 16, 2002, Mr. Johnson took the subway from his housing project in Brooklyn to the East Village, looking for “happy people” and seeking to avenge the oppression of black people like him, according to a statement he later gave to the police.

He shot and wounded three people and sprayed several patrons with kerosene at Bar Veloce on Second Avenue, threatening to set them on fire. He was eventually tackled by two women in the bar, then shot and wounded by the police.

To the prosecution, this is a case of attempted “suicide by cop” by a man with a record of weapons and drug arrests going back two decades. He may have been antisocial, the prosecutor said, but he was not mentally ill; he rationally, calculatingly, set out to harm others and gain fame for himself and fortune for his family.

To the defense, these were the acts of a madman, who is so delusional that he cannot be held legally responsible for what he did.

Prosecutors have given the jury a copy of a long suicide note that Mr. Johnson left behind for his 10-year-old son, telling him, “Trust me, you will be famest and a star just cause of me, and cause I follow Gods word.”

During the closing argument yesterday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the prosecutor, Peter Hinckley, played a tape of Mr. Johnson giving himself a kind of pep talk as he prepared to take his journey to the East Village.

Mr. Johnson could be heard talking in a slow, quiet, hypnotic voice, telling himself that he had God on his side, and urging himself on by saying, “Pull your guns on these crackers, son.” In the background, the incongruous sound of a child’s happy, playful voice was heard as Mr. Johnson carried on his monologue.

Mr. Johnson’s lawyer, Michelle Gelernt, of the Legal Aid Society, told the jury in her closing argument that Mr. Johnson’s words in the suicide note and on the tape were clear evidence that he was delusional.

“Somehow, his taking those white people hostage and burning them alive and having police kill him would cause a revolution,” she said, while anybody in his right mind, she argued, would expect no such thing.

But to Mr. Hinckley, the prosecutor, Mr. Johnson’s words were evidence not of mental illness but of a widespread phenomenon familiar to anyone who watches “American Idol” on television.

Mr. Johnson was simply media-crazed, and determined to get his 15 minutes of fame, the prosecutor said.

“The defendant didn’t have any command hallucinations,” or orders from God telling him to kill white people, Mr. Hinckley said. Rather, “he knew he would create media attention” by shooting up a bar, and he wanted his family to profit from his 15 minutes of “notoriety.”

Mr. Hinckley rattled off a long list of other people he said were similarly obsessed by fame, perhaps criminal in some cases but not insane. The list included Mel Gibson, Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, abortion clinic bombers, Palestinian and Iraqi suicide bombers, members of the Aryan Nations, and any number of amateur singers competing on “American Idol.”

“They are clearly grandiose and have strongly and passionately held beliefs,” he said, but they were not delusional in the clinical sense.

Mr. Hinckley was scheduled to end his closing argument today, before the case goes to a jury for the second time. Mr. Johnson’s first trial ended in a mistrial in November 2004, when the jury deadlocked after two and a half weeks of deliberations.

Yesterday, Ms. Gelernt said Mr. Johnson, who is 39, had told a psychologist that he had a “sixth sense” and that he believed that people were “scheming on him.” She urged the jury to interpret that sixth sense as something spiritual, a connection to God, while the prosecution’s psychiatric expert dismissed the phrase as a synonym for “street sense.”

Ms. Gelernt described part of Mr. Johnson’s past that could have been a chapter from “The Fortress of Solitude,” the acclaimed novel about a black boy and a white boy growing up in Brooklyn who fancy themselves superheroes. She said that Mr. Johnson’s mother had taught him to sew when he was a teenager, and that he sewed costumes of Spider-Man and Superman for himself. It was not clear, she said, whether he actually wore those costumes on the street, but certainly he had fantasized about being a superhero.

She quoted Mr. Johnson, who is black, telling psychologists, “There’s no war in the ghetto, but there’s a war in my mind,” and that he was “throwing rocks of words” as a way of educating people to the oppression of black people by white people.

Mr. Hinckley, however, argued that if Mr. Johnson was trying to get revenge on white people, he would not have been cooperative with the white staff at the hospital and jail where he was held, or with his white defense lawyers.

He said that while Mr. Johnson had a history of what he called “conduct disorders,” like fighting with other children and breaking things in childhood, he had not been hospitalized for psychiatric problems as an adult.

Mr. Johnson’s actions were criminal and antisocial, he said, but not driven by mental illness. They were, he said, “the actions of a sane, manipulative man, fully aware of what he did.”

    Insanity vs. Malice as Motives of Rampage, NYT, 23.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/nyregion/23bar.html

Jury Convicts Actor in Killing of Dancer

February 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

An actor and yoga teacher who had climbed out of a working-class Bronx neighborhood to attend private schools on scholarship was convicted yesterday of killing a young dancer from Ohio in what prosecutors said was a jealous rage.

The actor, Paul Cortez, 26, was convicted of killing Catherine Woods, 21, by slashing her throat, after she had rejected him both as a lover and as the self-styled white knight who would save her from working as a stripper in Manhattan.

After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury in State Supreme Court in Manhattan found Mr. Cortez guilty of second-degree murder, and he faces up to life in prison at sentencing next month. Despite hours of confident testimony that showcased his Zen-like demeanor and theatrical training, Mr. Cortez was unable to convince jurors that he was a gentle soul incapable of killing Ms. Woods.

Although he and Ms. Woods had been lovers for a while, she spurned him after he called her father, the director of the Ohio State University marching band, to tell him that she was leading a secret life as a stripper while waiting for her break as a Broadway dancer.

Mr. Cortez poured his fury, frustration and pain into a series of journal entries, including one in which he seemed to foreshadow the crime by writing of a woman “out in the Midwest, where boys are dirty and girls are princesses,” who “wipes clean the shaft that cuts her throat.”

Prosecutors said that on Nov. 27, 2005, Mr. Cortez slipped into Ms. Woods’s building on East 86th Street in Manhattan between 6 and 7 p.m., after her hometown boyfriend and roommate, David Haughn, had gone out to get his car.

Mr. Haughn returned about 20 minutes later to find Ms. Woods’s body, drenched in blood, her throat slashed twice.

Mr. Cortez was unable to overcome the key piece of evidence against him: a print of his left index finger on Ms. Woods’s bedroom wall in a spray of blood that prosecutors said had spurted from her slashed throat.

Jurors were also presented with cellphone records showing that Mr. Cortez had called Ms. Woods obsessively before her death. He called her 292 times in October, and 13 times in what prosecutors said was the last hour and a half of her life, between 5 and 6:33 p.m.

But after she was dead, he never called her again, even though he testified that he did not learn of her death until 16 hours later.

Mr. Cortez’s mother, Ivette Cortez Drake, broke down in sobs as the forewoman announced the verdict. Mr. Cortez, who often smiled and nodded at his family during the trial, did not look back at them when he was handcuffed and led away after his conviction.

One of his lawyers, Laura Miranda, said the real killer was still on the loose.

“If it wasn’t David Haughn, it had to be somebody planning it, somebody who likes going to sex clubs and is sort of obsessed with strippers,” she said.

Ms. Woods’s parents, Jon and Donna, had been in court every day until the jury began deliberations; then they flew back to Ohio.

In a telephone interview last night, Mr. Woods said: “We are just very relieved that the verdict came out the way it did. This is a no-win proposition for either of the families. We’ve lost a daughter, and now the Cortez family has problems with the son, so this is very hard on everybody.”

He said he hoped that during the course of the trial that people had realized that his daughter was “really a fine person,” who took a job she did not like to pay the bills.

Mr. Cortez’s three-week trial combined two classic New York stories, the ambitious, stagestruck Midwestern girl who moved to town, and the boy struggling to escape the mean streets of the Bronx.

Ms. Woods was a classically trained ballerina from Columbus, Ohio, who packed up her dancing shoes and stuffed rabbit and came to New York at 17, determined to make it as a Broadway dancer.

Mr. Cortez was the child of a young divorced mother on welfare whose teachers recognized his talent, drive and intellect at an early age, getting him scholarships to private schools and Boston University that gave him the opportunity to star in high school and college plays.

They met at a gym on the Upper East Side where Mr. Cortez was working as a personal trainer, and began a love affair two or three months later, Mr. Cortez testified. But problems began when Mr. Cortez learned that she was living with Mr. Haughn, who was described by a prosecutor as a “rube from Ohio,” a high school graduate trained as an auto body repairman.

Mr. Haughn, tall, gangly and laconic, with a blond crewcut, testified that he floundered in New York before finding a job as a doorman, but that he adored Ms. Woods, walking her dog and buying Weight Watchers meals for her, even after she had grown tired of his company.

When Mr. Haughn discovered her bloody body, he was at first so stunned that he told the 911 operator he thought she might have had an accident.

Ms. Woods tried to keep Mr. Haughn and Mr. Cortez from knowing about each other, and Mr. Cortez was crushed when he learned that he had a rival, prosecutors said.

“Catherine turned out to be lying, too,” Mr. Cortez wrote in his diary, which was given to the jury.

“She was sleeping with David and others the entire time she told me how she was true and in love with me.”

The tension between Mr. Cortez and Ms. Woods escalated when he told her father that she was dancing at a Times Square strip club — which was true — and that she was taking drugs and engaging in prostitution — which was not true, according to testimony.

Mr. Woods rushed to New York, where his daughter denied everything, and then broke up with Mr. Cortez, belittling his attempts to cast himself as her savior.

“I saved her from rape,” Mr. Cortez wrote in his diaries. “I tried all I could to make her heal and vanquish the demons that kept her self abusing. She thought I betrayed her when I told her father of her nighttime secret life.

“I wanted her to stop so that she would heal and love me without boundary or pain.”

It was, the prosecutor said, the fourth or fifth in a long line of failed love affairs for Mr. Cortez, reducing him again to the bright misfit from the Bronx, wanting to be loved and to prove his superiority. But it turned out to be one rejection too many.

“Why did this happen?” the prosecutor, Peter Casolaro, told the jury in his closing argument. “Because this misogynist and narcissist couldn’t handle rejection.”

Emily Vasquez contributed reporting.

    Jury Convicts Actor in Killing of Dancer, NYT, 16.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/nyregion/16cortez.html

Couple gets 2 years in 'caged kids' case

Posted 2/15/2007 6:41 PM ET
By Thomas J. Sheeran, Associated Press
USA Today

NORWALK, Ohio — A couple who forced some of their 11 adopted, special-needs children to sleep in wire-and-wood cages were sentenced to two years in prison Thursday, after the parents insisted they were only trying to keep the kids safe.

Two of the children, however, said in statements read in court that they were treated harshly while they lived with Sharen and Michael Gravelle. One wrote that they should be imprisoned "for as long as my siblings had to be in cages."

Sharen Gravelle told the court the children were never confined as punishment but rather to protect them, including a child who wanted to jump out a second-floor window.

"Would you prefer that we let them jump? Either way, we'd be here. The difference is they're still alive," she said in a tearful, 26-minute statement.

Gravelle blamed social services officials for not helping her and her husband, Michael, control the destructive behavior of some of the youngsters.

The children, who suffered from problems such as fetal alcohol syndrome and a disorder that involves eating non-food items, ranged in age from 1 to 14 when authorities removed them in September 2005 from the Gravelles' home in Wakeman, about 60 miles west of Cleveland. They were placed in foster care in fall 2005 and the couple lost custody last March.

Sharen Gravelle kept her head down taking notes while the judge read the sentences. Michael Gravelle sat back in his chair, holding his face in his left hand.

Each could have received up to five years in prison for each of the four felonies they were convicted of in December. They also were convicted of seven misdemeanors.

Michael Gravelle, his face red and his voice rising, told the judge he and his wife "felt we were being led by the Lord" when they decided to bring the first child into their home.

He said problems began when they took in a group of siblings with an array of behavior and emotional problems.

"What do you do with these kids?" Michael Gravelle asked. "I prayed constantly for the answer."

He said the enclosures resulted from the suggestions of a social workers, who recommended strict rules to improve the children's behavior.

"I'm begging you," Michael Gravelle told the judge. "I do not deserve jail."

The two children whose statements were read in court, a girl and a boy, were in the courtroom Thursday. The boy wrote that he was "thankful that part of my life is behind me."

He said of his new foster parents, "Because of them I don't have to steal food. I can use the bathroom whenever I want. Never again will I have to sleep in a box."

The girl's statement said Sharen Gravelle treated the children more harshly than her husband did.

"Mom, you walked around like you were God, then whenever you did go places you were Mother Teresa taking in the poor black kids that no one wanted," she said.

The girl said the Gravelles "are grown adults who know the difference between right and wrong. So I ask that they get as much time in jail for as long as my siblings had to be in cages."

The Gravelles have said they will appeal their convictions. The judge allowed them to remain free on bond pending the appeal.

The couple has said they needed to keep some of the children in enclosed beds with alarms to protect them from their own dangerous behavior and stop them from wandering at night.

Prosecutors said the Gravelles were cruel. Witnesses, including the sheriff and some of the children, said the cages were urine-stained and lacked pillows or mattresses, but a social worker and others who testified for the defense said they never witnessed abuse and that the children's behavior improved because of the bright blue and red cages.

One Gravelle child testified he was forced to live in a bathroom for 81 days, sleeping in a bathtub because of a bed-wetting problem. The Gravelles' attorneys said the boy exaggerated the length of his bathroom stay, and an expert for the defense testified that the technique helped the boy.

    Couple gets 2 years in 'caged kids' case, UT, 15.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-15-caged-sentence_x.htm

An Outsider’s Murder Trial Shakes a Southern Town

February 15, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

ABBEVILLE, S.C., Feb. 14 — It was a dispute over 20 feet of mean-looking land, a deadly squeeze of the trigger three years ago backed by pure conviction and an unwavering motto.

The Bixby family refused to budge for a highway-widening project, out of belief. “Live free or die,” cried Steve Bixby, bespectacled and rigged out in camouflage and guns the day of the shooting, in a challenge to the authorities, witnesses said.

Mr. Bixby, 39, and his father, Arthur, 77, are accused of murder in the fatal shootings of two law enforcement officers who were trying to seize the land on behalf of the State of South Carolina. Both men face the death penalty. Mr. Bixby’s mother, Rita, 74, was indicted as an accessory.

Now, with the opening Wednesday of Mr. Bixby’s trial in the murder of Deputy Sheriff Danny Wilson, 37, and Donnie Ouzts, 63, a state constable, this Old South town with its intense Confederate heritage is reliving the winter’s day in 2003 when the reclusive Bixbys held off the local police for 14 hours, after the shootings of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Ouzts.

The town is doing so gingerly. There were no supporters of the Bixbys on hand Wednesday as a jury sat in judgment over what the authorities say was Mr. Bixby’s deadly act of resistance to authority. He is reviled in Abbeville, and the prosecutor had to pick his jury 160 miles away.

What the authorities said was Mr. Bixby’s armed refusal to give up a small piece of his land for the widening of Highway 72 — “We will protect it to our last breath,” he is reported to have proclaimed — is regarded here as senseless. Guns at the ready, Mr. Bixby was primed and waiting for his face-off with the police, witnesses said.

On the other hand, symbols of resistance to central authority, some of the South’s most hallowed, abound here, lovingly tended in the quaint little town billing itself for passing tourists as the “Birthplace and Deathbed of the Confederacy.”

Up the street from the mellow brick courthouse is the white-columned mansion where Jefferson Davis had his last cabinet meeting; nearby, one of the first rallies demanding secession was held in 1860. The monument to the Confederate dead outside the courthouse proclaims that “the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee were in the right;” the Confederate flag flies high above the highway; and a bookstore off the old brick square sells titles like “The South Was Right” and “Myths of Slavery.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., says the Abbeville area, in the western part of the state, has attracted others like the Bixbys — fanatics about property rights and resistance to authority who find the Confederate heritage nourishing. “We’ve pointed out that that area is one of the hotbeds,” said Mark Potok, a staff director at the center.

Residents deny that there is any connection between the region’s Confederate heritage and a violent property-rights ideology.

“I have no clue why the Bixbys moved here,” said the man running the bookstore, Robert Hayes, who also is the state director for the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group still pushing for Southern independence. “He could have picked any place in South Carolina.”

Indeed, one the first things people here say about the Bixbys is that they were “outsiders,” as Mr. Hayes put it, “not us.” About 10 years ago they moved from New Hampshire, where they were involved with an anti-tax/anti-zoning group, and had had run-ins with a judge.

Why the family chose Abbeville is, people here say, a mystery. “Abbeville is just not like that,” said Cheri Standridge, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.

Amanda Dean, who runs a coffee shop on the square, said the family had the wrong idea about the town. “This is a good, strong family town,” Ms. Dean said. “It’s just such a shame. They could feel like they’re coming to their homeland, and that’s what’s so sad.”

The Bixbys may have warmed to Abbeville, but the feeling was not reciprocated by the genteel town. Steve Bixby, heavy-set and marginally employed in construction and food-concession vending, a sometime karaoke singer at a local bar, remained an outsider, while he and his parents fulminated together in the modest little clapboard house about the horrors of government interference. It is still pock-marked with bullet holes.

Indeed, the culture clash between the Yankee Bixbys and their reluctant Southern hosts was on vivid display in the trial’s opening testimony Wednesday. Several witnesses — plain-talking highway engineers who had encountered the Bixbys in the days before the shootings on Dec. 8, 2003 — testified with shock about the family’s propensity for profanity.

“During all this they continued to cuss,” said Drew McCaffrey of the South Carolina Department of Transportation. “There was a lot of cussing from Steve and Rita,” Mr. McCaffrey said.

“They were cussing an awful lot, him and his mom,” said Mr. McCaffrey’s colleague Dale Williams, who recalled the “No Government Agents” sign in the front yard. Michael Hannah, another department employee, recalled, “They basically started making some threats, and there was cussing.”

The verbal violence — “ranting and raving,” Mr. Williams called it — presaged the physical, the witnesses said. A chilling scene confronted him when he drove by on the morning of the shooting: Steve Bixby, framed by his house, “a pistol in his right hand and a long gun in his left.” The witness added soberly, “I knew at that time the officer was in trouble.” Mr. Wilson was shot in the chest and Mr. Ouzts in the back, at the doorstep.

Both men were well-known and well-liked; a young man, asked if he knew them, bit his lip and ducked his head as he hurried out of the coffee shop on the square. “They want to put it behind them,” said Bill Greene, a retired electrical technician, of the townspeople. “Lot of times, people move into these little towns, they think they can have things their way. But you have to obey the laws.”

    An Outsider’s Murder Trial Shakes a Southern Town, NYT, 15.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/us/15property.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Man Who Stabbed Wife Is Acquitted

February 14, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

A man who stabbed his wife to death after his marriage deteriorated into what he described as a decade-long period of psychological warfare was acquitted of murder yesterday.

After just four hours of deliberations, the jury in State Supreme Court in Manhattan found Ben Odierno, 72, not guilty of second-degree murder, a charge that could have put him in prison for 25 years to life. Jurors said later that they believed that Mr. Odierno might have acted in self-defense and did not mean to kill his wife, Christine, 57, when he stabbed her during an argument in the kitchen of their Upper East Side town house.

As the jury forewoman announced the verdict, Mr. Odierno’s face reddened and his body shook with barely suppressed emotion. In the spectators’ section of the courtroom, one of the couple’s sons, Marcus, 25, grinned broadly, and the other, Stephan, 28, wept with relief.

“I feel like I’m back again, from heaven to hell and back,” Mr. Odierno, wearing a gray suit over a sweater, said as he left the courtroom after the verdict yesterday, free after spending nearly two years in jail. “I can’t wait to get a dish of pasta. I’m starving.”

The five-week-long trial was a psychodrama of Tolstoyan, or perhaps Dostoyevskian, proportions.

Prosecutors argued that Mrs. Odierno was an emotionally, if not physically, abused wife, and that her husband had killed her in a rage after she initiated divorce proceedings.

Mr. Odierno, a landlord, testifying in his own defense, described a marriage of nearly 30 years that was initially blissful but had deteriorated. His wife subjected him and their two sons to escalating episodes of bizarre and unstable behavior, he said, before her death on a Sunday in April 2005 as they argued over a separation agreement she had given him to sign in their home on East 84th Street.

The jurors were split when they first entered the jury room, one juror said yesterday, and many of them went back and forth on the verdict in their own minds throughout the trial.

“I myself did not know which way I was going,” said the juror, Joanne McGrath, until she listened to the judge’s instructions yesterday morning.

In the end, she said, the jurors agreed that both spouses were responsible for the emotional abuse in the marriage and that the prosecution, despite putting on a strong case, had not been able to establish that Mr. Odierno had initiated the stabbing.

“We felt it was both ways,” said Ms. McGrath, dean of admissions at New York University School of Medicine. “We felt that he was abused emotionally also.”

The jurors felt there were conflicting ways to interpret even the death struggle.

The prosecutor, Kerry O’Connell, said Mr. Odierno stabbed his wife with a six-inch kitchen knife, killing her with two wounds to the heart and lungs, and then stabbed himself, perhaps to make it look as though he had been stabbed first.

During the prosecution’s cross-examination of Mr. Odierno, Ms. O’Connell expressed disbelief that he would just stand there and let his wife stab him first. He replied, in words that summed up his defense, “I stood there for 30 years.”

Jack Litman, the defense lawyer, said Mrs. Odierno stabbed her husband first, with a boning knife she had been using to cut salad. He then reacted in self-defense, Mr. Litman said, picking up the second knife in such a state of confusion — what a psychiatrist who testified for the defense called an altered state of consciousness — that he stabbed her while holding the knife upside down, with the sharp side up. The kitchen knife had only her blood on it, and the boning knife had only his blood on it, so the physical evidence supported both versions of the account.

“We weren’t quite sure which one initiated it, but we didn’t feel that the prosecution proved that he did,” Ms. McGrath said.

“We felt the prosecution put up a really, really, really good case,” she continued. “Just not good enough to convict him.”

The jurors, some married and some single, also discussed what they would have done in the same situation, she said, and acknowledged the unpredictability of human nature.

“The whole jury room wasn’t sitting there saying, ‘Oh my God, I would never have done that,’ ” Ms. McGrath said. “You’d say you hope you would never have done that, but you don’t know.”

In what proved to be the defense’s trump card, the Odiernos’ two sons testified on behalf of their father, offering a detailed chronology of what they said was their mother’s painful descent into madness, including bumping into them, and then shouting into the back yard — loud enough for the neighbors to hear — that her sons and her husband were hurting her.

In a twist that was typical of the strife and division that had characterized the family, the dead woman’s older brother, Bill Kramer, was in the courtroom yesterday to support Mr. Odierno.

“She was a lady,” Mr. Kramer said of his sister. “And when push came to shove she would have wanted me to support her boys and her husband,” implying that he believed Mr. Odierno.

“I was her protector before Ben and Ben took my place,” Mr. Kramer said. “I love my sister, and she would have wanted me to be there for her.”

Mrs. Odierno’s two sisters and her mother supported the prosecution. They were not in court when the jury announced its verdict, probably because they expected the deliberations to last longer.

Mr. Litman said after the verdict that he believed that the jury had seen the stabbing as “a spontaneous thing that just happened,” not as an intentional, premeditated act. The big question for the jury was, he said, “who started this chance encounter?”

Cassi Feldman contributed reporting.

    Man Who Stabbed Wife Is Acquitted, NYT, 14.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/nyregion/14landlord.html

Jurors Find More Sympathy for Defendant

February 14, 2007
The New York Times
By CASSI FELDMAN

There was surprise yesterday at Ben Odierno’s murder trial in a Manhattan courtroom when the jury came back with a verdict after only four hours. But in interviews later, several jurors said that while there was some debate, the verdict was inevitable.

The defense, they said, painted a compelling portrait of a family in turmoil — one in which Christine Odierno, the victim, often came across as less sympathetic than her husband, the killer.

“It was very difficult to side with the prosecution when the majority of the character witnesses called were there for the defense,” said one juror, Randy Levine, 29, associate media director at an advertising firm.

One witness, Mrs. Odierno’s elderly mother, did not help the prosecution’s case when she failed to recognize the defendant in the courtroom, Mr. Levine said. “She basically discredited herself,” he said.

Miri Samuel, another juror, agreed and said it seemed that Mrs. Odierno could have been the instigator of the couple’s fights. “Christine Odierno looked like someone who could possibly start the whole thing, and there was nothing to contradict that,” said Ms. Samuel, a sales representative for Estée Lauder.

Several jurors wondered why Mrs. Odierno’s sisters, who were usually present in the courtroom, were not called to testify. “We were presented with this one-sided thing where this woman was the puppet master and he was the puppet,” said Rebecca Welsher, 26, a human resources associate for Bear Stearns. “Christine was the voiceless one.”

Meanwhile, they said, Mr. Odierno came off as kind and grandfatherly.

“He was a simple, decent man who tried to live a simple, happy life,” Ms. Samuel said.

Another juror, Joanne McGrath, assistant dean of admissions at New York University School of Medicine, said Mr. Odierno ultimately saved himself. “Putting him on the stand was a big, big, big factor,” she said, “because he turned out to be a likable guy.”

    Jurors Find More Sympathy for Defendant, NYT, 14.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/nyregion/14jurors.html

Fugitive

February 11, 2007
By JIM DWYER
The New York Times

"Orlando."

In a dim, nearly deserted Everglades farm stand, nothing moved.

Orlando Boquete, hybrid of youth and age — his body springy and athletic at 52, but knitted to a startlingly ancient head — peered at the stalls through thick eyeglasses.

Other than a faint buzz, the shimmer of heat trapped in a tin roof, the word “Orlando” was the only sound.

An impatient companion called to him.

“Orlando. Hey, Orlando.”

Not a flicker, head to toe. For more than a decade, Orlando Boquete lived as a fugitive, his very identity a shackle he slipped out of, again and again. He hid bits of sandpaper in his wallet so that in a pinch, he could abrade his fingerprints. Every bit as revealing as the ridges of his fingers, the ordinary, reflexive responses to his own name — a grunt, a sideways glance, a shifting foot — also vanished under the grind of fugitive life. It was as if someone had suddenly clapped hands in front of his eyes and he did not blink. Standing still, not saying yes or hello or uh-huh became a martial art.

The word “Orlando” floated in the thick, steaming air, then sank without trace into the wizened face.

Technically, he was no longer running from anyone, so this denial was vestigial habit. He could say who he was. He lifted a mango, rolled the fruit in the palm of his hand, half-smiled and turned to greet the man behind the counter. He announced that he was Cuban. Then he asked a question.

“Es Mejicano?”

The fruit man nodded, yes, he was Mexican.

At that, the words erupted from Boquete’s mouth, personal history as volcanic rush.

“These Mexicans in the sugar-cane fields helped me,” he began. “Twenty-one years ago, when I escaped from Glades, I hid with them. Right here, by choo-choo.”

He pointed toward the railroad tracks, but the fruit-stand man did not shift his blank gaze. It was almost possible to see him rewind to the phrase “when I escaped from Glades.”

On the way into the town of Belle Glade, the welcome sign in this capital of sugar cane declares, “Her Soil Is Her Fortune,” but another gravitational force goes unmentioned: Glades Correctional Institution, the state prison one mile down the road. The prison had brought Orlando Boquete to Belle Glade, but it could not keep him there.

He started speaking in gusts of alternating language, Spanish one sentence, English the next phrase, a saga of life in flight — of hiding places in the sugar cane, disguises that tricked the police, gratitude to the Mexicans who helped him.

Fugitivo.

The fruit man did not bother to mask his anxiety. As he listened to Boquete, he slid the mango off the counter, with no sign that he was going to bag the purchases of this garrulous criminal. Boquete realized he should present his bona fides. He turned and pointed to me — here, this white newspaper writer from New York has come to look at the canals where he hid with alligators, the mucky fields where he crawled like a snake.

“I don’t read newspapers,” the fruit man said blankly.

At Boquete’s shoulder, his nephew, José Boquete, spoke into his ear.

“Tío,” he said. And he stage-whispered into his uncle’s ear, “DNA.” Not missing a beat, the older man spoke the word “exonerated” and the abbreviation DNA and finally, three more letters that registered with the fruit man.

“CNN,” Boquete said.

“Ahh,” said the fruit man, who pointed to the television in the fruit stand, reciting the shards of the tale that lodged in his memory. A Cubano broke out of Glades Correctional. He ran for years. Then he was caught. And finally, he was proved innocent. There must be more to the story, but it was enough for the fruit man. He pushed the mango across the counter. On the house. Boquete protested. The fruit man insisted.

By Feb. 6, 1985, the night he fled prison, Orlando Boquete, 30 years old, had already spent two years behind bars for a sexual assault and burglary he had nothing to do with, the victim of a victim who mistook him for the man who climbed in her window. Ahead of him, as far as the eye could see, were mountains of time: five decades.

He bolted.

Of the 194 people exonerated by DNA tests since 1989, only Orlando Boquete undid society’s mistake by fleeing. And he kept undoing it: over the next decade, he was in police custody again and again, only to vanish in a forest of identities that were false, borrowed and stolen. His prison break was the start of a decadelong journey of near-disaster and daring inches, with no money, no home, no name — but with good looks, charm and a quick mind. Craving family and a bed to call his own, Boquete instead found refuge in an underworld of outlaws. “I did certain things that I had to do,” he said. “To survive. But I never, never harmed anyone.”

He would appear at family gatherings, enchanting the children in stolen moments when he again became, without worry, Orlando Boquete. Then he would quietly slip behind the mask of fugitive life. (A niece, Danay Rodriguez, remembers her parents coming home with a flier that showed her tío Orlando as one of the state’s most wanted men — a mistake, the grown-ups assured her.) He held dozens of jobs, legal and illegal; at times, he worked as legitimately as someone with a fake name could. Other times, he worked por la izquierda, on the left — meaning, he said, under the table.

He had always been good at running. Boquete (pronounced bo-KETT-eh) boarded a shrimp boat in the port of Mariel, Cuba, in 1980, when he was 25, leaving behind one son, two marriages, a career as a diesel mechanic in Havana and a jail record as a Cuban Army deserter — this last credential essential, he believed, to helping him clear bureaucratic hurdles for departing Cuba. He joined 125,000 Cubans, known as Marielitos, who formed an extraordinary exodus that year, when Fidel Castro felt pressure from a poor economy and allowed them to leave.

For two years, Boquete led a life that was pretty much on the level. He worked construction, then in Cafetería La Palma in Miami’s Little Havana and later as clerk in a convenience store on the midnight-to-dawn, no-one-else-will-do-it, armed-robbery shift. By June 1982, Boquete was living with an uncle in a trailer in Key West, hoping for work as a commercial fisherman along the archipelago.

On June 25, with the summer heat at full blast, he had a cousin shave his head of thick black hair, leaving only a mustache. That night, various Boquetes later testified, they sat in the trailer, watching baseball and the World Cup from Spain. Afterward, they strolled to a Tom Thumb convenience store for cigarettes and beer. As they approached, police officers asked them to wait in the parking lot. Another police car pulled up. Inside was a woman who had awoken from a sound sleep in her bed in the Stock Island apartments, a few blocks away, to find a man on top of her. He ejaculated on her bedclothes. He had no hair on his face, she said, and a buzz cut on his head. Another man lurked in the apartment with him, she said, but had not taken part in the assault. They grabbed a few items and left.

From the police car, the victim saw Orlando Boquete and told the officer, “That’s him.” Although he had a prominent mustache, he was the only person in the vicinity with a shaved head. That single glimpse shaped Boquete’s life for decades.

Before trial, the prosecutors offered him a deal: plead guilty and give evidence against the other man who had broken into the apartment, and he would have to serve only one year in jail, followed by two years probation.

On the witness stand, Boquete explained why he had declined. “If my freedom depends on my falsely stating that I’m a culprit or guilty,” he said, “I would rather go to jail. I’m conscious of the fact that if the gentlemen of the jury and the ladies of the jury, if they vote against me, they are going to destroy my life, and I’m not afraid to stand here.”

Besides the alibi provided by his cousins and uncle, the defense seemed to hold one other card. A second man, Pablo Cazola, was arrested for the attack and pleaded guilty. He also signed an affidavit stating that Boquete was not his accomplice. But he refused to testify at trial. At the time, DNA testing — the ultimate proof of identity — had not yet been used in court. So the jury was left to weigh the eyewitness identification of a very confident victim, on the one hand, against the alibi of Boquete and his relatives, all of whom testified he had spent an evening watching television and drinking beer.

It was January 1983, a particularly poor moment for a Marielito accused of a violent crime; there had been many fevered stories about their supposed rampant criminality. Convicted after brief deliberation, Boquete was sentenced to 50 years for the burglary and another five years for attempted sexual battery. The case was over and, so it seemed, was the life Orlando Boquete had sought in America. He was 28 years old.

He moved into the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections with one treasured possession, he told me, passed along by an inmate he met in the county jail: a Spanish-language edition of “Papillon,” the prison memoir that became a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. It is the account of Henri Charrière, who wrote — perhaps accurately, though some scholars are skeptical — of his many escapes from French penal colonies over the years.

“This is a real book,” Boquete told me. “He gives to you power. Esperanza. Hope.”

He set about adapting Charrière’s lessons to his own life, finding principles and tactics that could transfer from penal colonies of the 1930s to a state prison in Florida in the mid-1980s. On one occasion, Charrière was undone by an informant. The lessons, by Boquete’s light: study and silence. “Be patient if you want to escape from somewhere,” Boquete said. “You have to be observant. Don’t run your mouth.”

He studied the terrain. Two fences ran around Glades Correctional. The first was short, easily scalable. Between it and the second was a strip of boundary area, about 10 feet wide, mined with pressure detectors. A footstep would set off alarms. Beyond the boundary was the second fence, about 15 feet, with curls of razor wire running along the ledge. Guards watched from towers, but the pursuit of escapees was left to officers who circled the perimeter in a van, on a road just beyond the outer fence.

A natural, compact athlete, Boquete ran every day, processing the details of prison life. Inmates occasionally were taken by a shotgun squad to work in sugar-cane fields near the prison. On one such excursion, Boquete saw a swampy irrigation canal, about 300 yards beyond the outer wall. It served as a moat, complete with resident snakes and alligators. This gave him pause. “Alligators have territory,” he explained. “If they have babies over there, and you go there, you’re in trouble.”

He made a pinpoint search for useful, secret-worthy inmates and found one man from the town of Belle Glade, who agreed to map the roads and landmarks. He was staked $30 by a Colombian inmate with ties to organized crime.

Charrière wrote in “Papillon” of the ocean waters around Devil’s Island, noting that every seventh wave slapped against the shore with greater strength than the ones that came before or after. Ultimately, he marshaled the power of a seventh wave to get clear of the island. At Glades, Boquete timed the orbit of the van, to see how long he would have from the moment he triggered the ground alarms until his pursuers could get back to him. About a minute, he figured.

In “The Fugitive,” a movie starring Harrison Ford, an innocent man on his way to death row seizes a chance to run for his life. In the unyielding reality of prison, innocent people often do the precise opposite of running. They dig in their heels. Many go before parole boards and refuse to apologize for “their” crimes, unwilling to offer themselves as exemplars of how the penitentiary really is a place of penance. In Pyrrhic glory, these innocent people prolong their incarceration by refusing to fake remorse for things they did not do, while the guilty quickly learn that the carrot of parole awaits those who muster the necessary show of contrition.

Even if Boquete had been willing to profess regret for something he had not done, parole was years away. Still, running would inevitably land him in a purgatory of deception and evasion. Moreover, the law does not permit innocent people to flee prison any more than it permits them to resist arrest. The guards would be armed and ready to shoot.

“I know that can happen,” he reflected years later. “I don’t care. If they kill me, anyway, I’m gone. I finish my sentence. I was ready, physically, mentally, spiritually. I don’t be scared about nothing when I escaped. Only a little scared of alligators.”

The evening of Feb. 6, 1985, was miserable, wet and cold. Perfect. “Nobody likes to jump in the cold water,” Boquete said of the guards. “Nobody wants to stay in the sugar-cane fields in the cold weather. The cold weather makes their job more difficult.”

Just before 8 p.m., as he sorted carrots on an assembly line, he caught the eye of George Wright, a 29-year-old man serving 75 years for robbery. Boquete said they had joined forces while jogging in the yard; Wright, who is back in prison and due to be paroled next month, has a somewhat different version of events but declined, through a relative, to be interviewed.

They slipped outside, unnoticed, and walked past the prison’s construction warehouse. They grabbed a door frame someone had left out for them to use in scaling the two fences, Boquete said, then pulled the frame with them over the first fence. Now they were on the pressure-alarmed land. The 60-second clock started running. They propped the frame against the tall fence, then scrambled up to the barbed wire summit. Boquete, who stands 5-foot-4, went first. He briefly got in the way of the 6-foot-4 Wright, who simply brushed past him.

Once they hit the ground outside, they sprinted to the wide, swampy irrigation canal. They paused, caught their breaths. In the distance, they could hear the dogs. Boquete had steeled himself for this moment, but in his heart, had hoped that perhaps he would not have to get into the water. The advance of the dogs convinced him. They had no choice. They plunged ahead and never saw each other again.

Soon, the baying of the hounds was joined by another sound: the beat of helicopter rotors. Boquete immersed himself, surfacing his nose for a gulp of air, seeing beams of a searchlight sweeping across the fields and water. The dogs barked. He had no religious upbringing but wore a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and he put the cross in his mouth to calm himself.

He later guessed that he had been in the water two hours or so, most of it fully submerged, when he finally pulled himself, shivering, onto the bank of the canal. He crawled on his belly into a field, then dug a shallow burrow with his hands. He dropped into the hollow and covered himself with dirt and grass. He could hear his pursuers shout. He tried to lie still.

Something pinched his face. Then one arm. Thousands of biting ants, resident in his hideout, swarmed over his skin. He shielded his eyes with his hands, and listened as the clatter of the search receded. Finally Boquete climbed out of the canal on the same bank that he went in, the prison side of the moat. His pursuers expanded their search but he had hardly gone any distance. As they moved on, he oriented himself, then half-crawled to an orange grove. He ate five oranges, slumped under a tree, ant-bitten, filthy, exhausted. He was quite happy. This grove was near railroad tracks, a less conspicuous route than the main road. The next stop was a sugar-cane field. There, he dug another hole, and after checking for ants, covered himself and slept.

At daylight, he moved like a snake, belly-crawling short distances, cringing when the cane rustled or popped, then pausing to listen. With a small knife he peeled bits of the cane to eat.

He was running for his life, but barely moving. After his second night in the fields, he saw farm workers nearby and realized he had lingered near the prison long enough. He crossed four more canals, the last so wide that he worried he would not make it to the other side. Finally, he reached the railroad tracks, picked up a stick and, bent like a hobo, followed the rails southwest toward Belle Glade.

By late afternoon, he had emerged from the apron of farmland on the prison outskirts and came to Avenue L. Across the road, big trucks were lined up, leaving for everywhere; the map had shown a depot. In the escape of his imagination, he simply hopped a truck; as a tireless runner in the prison yard, he had not foreseen the toll of a slow-motion sprint. He was spent.

Just east of the tracks was a pay phone. Surely, the authorities would be checking with all the relatives who had visited him. He dialed a cousin in Miami. She was shocked to hear his news; the family knew nothing of his escape. He proposed that she pick him up.

She hesitated.

“No, mi primo, no,” she said. No, my cousin, no.

He would stay clear, he told her; she should not worry, he said. “No se preocupe.”

He hung up.

Just beyond the pay phone, a few Mexican migrants idled in front of shacks. The Belle Glade man had told him he might be able to take refuge with them.

It was two full days since he had escaped from Glades Correctional Institution; he had risked getting maimed on razor wire, shot by guards, mauled by dogs, eaten by alligators, poisoned by snakes. It had taken every ounce of strength in his fleet, 30-year-old body to avoid those fates, and he had covered all of 1.2 miles. He was transformed: the innocent person, wrongly accused, now was an outlaw who could be shot on sight. He didn’t care.

“Oye, hermanos,” Boquete called. “Necesito ayuda.”

Hey brothers, I need help.

The Mexicans looked at the bedraggled specimen. Then one of them spoke, Boquete recalled.

“He says, ‘Why do you need help?’ I said, ‘I need help because I run from immigration.’ ”

A day later, one of them asked the logical question: why was a Cuban running from immigration, since Cubans were never deported?

“I tell them the truth. And they laugh, and said, ‘Oh, that was you.’ Because one of them got stopped the night I escaped. They heard the helicopters.”

He worked in the fields for two months, picked up every morning in a truck. Had anyone been looking for the fugitive in the first few days, it is possible that his swollen face would have been hard to recognize. By springtime, he and the migrants decided to pool their earnings and head for Miami. They bought a car for $800. It was mid-April, about 10 weeks after the breakout. Somewhere, Boquete had acquired an Army uniform. Raw as Boquete’s English was, the Mexicans had none. He would drive.

On the road south, a radiator hose burst. As Boquete patched it, a police car stopped. He spoke a phrase he had used often in the previous two years.

“Yes, officer?” he said.

What was going on, the cop wanted to know. Boquete explained about the radiator hose. “Be careful,” the officer advised.

He was. The Mexicans dropped him in Miami, near Little Havana.

Though Boquete’s escape was brave and harrowing, his flight does not particularly distinguish him. In the 1980s, the Florida prisons virtually leaked prisoners: 972 prisoners broke out the year Boquete ran, 1,234 the next year and 1,640 the year after. Most walked away from work crews. Prisoners also left in file cabinets, garbage trucks, dressed as women. From Glades, six murderers dug a tunnel from a chapel, a spectacular breakout that roused alarm and moved state officials to clamp down. The trick was not just getting out but staying out. After the initial burst of excited hunting around a prison, the pursuit of fugitives can be anemic; the search for Boquete and Wright lasted four hours. Prisoners are less often caught than found, unable to sustain endless caution in their affairs. Somewhere, they trip a bureaucratic circuit — they use or respond to their real name, are arrested for crimes much like those that brought them to prison or are bartered by someone else trying to get out of trouble. George Wright, who escaped with Boquete, avoided the authorities for a year and a half, then was caught in the Pacific Northwest.

Boquete turned himself into a hermit crab, sheltered in identities abandoned or left by the dead, an endless scuttle. A résumé, pieced together from his memories and public records, traces a route of dizzying turns and determination.

He worked in sugar-cane fields and danced in the Orange Bowl when Madonna came to perform “La Isla Bonita.” He hauled food in the Florida Keys as a truck loader and sledgehammered into the wall of a clothing store in Miami as a burglar.

He learned to ride a Jet Ski. He taught nieces and nephews to snorkel. He washed dishes in a New Jersey restaurant and ran errands for players in the underground economy of South Florida. One night, with cash in his pocket, he settled at the bar of a fancy hotel in North Miami and proclaimed that he was a boxing trainer who had just won a big bet on a Hector Camacho fight. He bought rounds of drinks for the house and met a real-estate woman from New York. They jogged together on the beach.

All those years, he walked barefoot along a borderline as thin and treacherous as the blade of a knife, the boundary between tension and exhilaration, where freedom was just one unguarded moment — Hey, Orlando! Oye, Boquete! — from vanishing.

He called himself Antonio and Eddie and Hilberto, dead or missing people whose Social Security numbers kept a pulse for a year or so after their demise. A half-dozen times, Boquete said, he was arrested while a fugitive: some of his benefactors left unfinished court business when they departed, and Boquete inherited their petty troubles: drunk-and-disorderly summonses, driving under the influence. He did a week here, 30 days there, he said. He also got into trouble of his own devising.

Rolling his freshly sanded fingertips into police ink pads, he was not connected by the authorities to the man who owed five decades of time to the state. It was simple enough for him to do the short bits, not that he had much choice. In the early days of a six-month sentence, he simply walked away from a jail work crew, making him a fugitive under two identities.

He agreed to take me back over some of the territory he had covered. We traveled through 300 miles of southern Florida, hunting for traces of the self he had worked to keep invisible.

After his Mexican patrons dropped him off in Miami, he returned to Little Havana, a place he knew well. On one of his first days back, with nothing in his pockets, he followed an acquaintance to a utility room in an apartment complex. Someone was using the space to hoard stolen goods, and they found a boom box with detachable speakers. They sold it in three parts. He found a room in an apartment on Northwest Seventh Avenue and took a job at a grocery store, and anywhere else he could find work with no unanswerable questions asked.

The 1980s were years of staggering opportunity and danger in that part of the world. South Florida was the loading ramp for the illegal-narcotics trade in the United States. The Miami River runs through Little Havana. “Lots of boats,” Boquete said. “Lots of drugs.” Some had been handled by a woman he knew as a child in Cuba. Around 1987, she was caught in a federal drug case and was being held in central Florida. She sent word back to Little Havana that she needed clothing, cigarettes and money. Boquete said he went along for the ride to prison, but others in the car balked at going inside, so he did. “I told the guard that everyone else was afraid to see her, I don’t have ID, but I am her cousin,” Boquete said. “They took the clothes.” He relished the audacity of that visit. From the first moments of his escape, when he doubled back toward the prison, hiding in plain sight had proved both tactically shrewd and psychically satisfying.

One of the people who helped him get by — the man who led Boquete to the boom box on his first day back — went on to prosper in the drug trade. On the condition that he be identified only as Ulises because of his own legal problems, the man spoke with wonder at Boquete’s stamina, the new homes every few weeks. “He was not really involved in our group,” Ulises told me. Still, there were many groups and plenty of mundane, if risky, work.

“This guy, Kiki, asked me to hold a package for this guy who would come to my apartment that night,” Boquete said, recalling one incident. Though he did not open it, he guessed that it was a kilogram of cocaine. That evening he heard a car pull up. From the window, he saw a uniformed police officer. In a panic, Boquete dialed his contact. “I tell him, ‘The police are here!’ ” he said. “He said, ‘That’s right, just give him the package.’ ”

Even innocent moments could turn harrowing. One night, he stayed at a friend’s apartment after a party. In the morning, he washed dishes with the front door open. A figure appeared in the corner of his eye.

“Hey, Boquete!” said the man.

Boquete did not lift his gaze from the suds. The man — a uniformed police officer — stood in the doorway calling his name, and finally, Boquete asked what he wanted. A team of officers was on the scene, apparently tipped off to the presence of a fugitive. In a few minutes, all the Mexicans and Cubans in the building were lined up outside.

“If you’re looking for this Boquete, why don’t you bring a picture of him?” Boquete said he demanded.

Another man grumbled loudly about suing for some indeterminate civil rights violation, Boquete recalled, and the officers eventually withdrew.

The encounter rattled him. To find some peace, he flew to Illinois in 1990 and got work in a Weber grill factory. He called himself Antonio Orlando Moralez, a real Marielito who was killed while Boquete was in prison. (The company, Weber-Stephen, does not have payroll records from that time and could not confirm his employment.) A cousin of Moralez’s, who did not want to be named because of immigration concerns, said of Boquete, “He didn’t do anything wrong, and he needed help, so I gave him my cousin’s Social Security number for him to work under.”

The change relaxed Boquete; he did not feel himself under direct police scrutiny. After a year or so, though, worried about how long the Moralez identity would hold up, he moved again, back to Miami for a while, and then to Arizona. It was 1991; he’d been on the run for six years. He was starting to wear down. He returned to Miami, apathetic about being recaptured.

“I was hanging out on the street,” he said, meaning his living came from activities outside the law. One day, he and two other men broke into a clothing store. As they drove off with the loot, a police car followed. They tried to speed away and heaved stolen clothes out of the car, but were quickly caught. In the back of the car was the sledgehammer they used to enter the store. Boquete gave his name as Eduardo Jeres, and a judge put him on probation.

At 37 years old, he had no checkbook, credit cards or bank accounts; he lived with his money, the cash hidden under the kitchen floor of an apartment on 27th Avenue. He welded bars on the windows and doors.

For all that caution, he had not broken out of one prison just to live in another. He often dropped in on his family, went swimming with the children and doted on Danay Rodriguez, his half-brother’s daughter. “He watched us when our parents went out,” said Rodriguez, now 24, recalling that he would bring her the White Diamonds perfume she loved as a girl. To visit them was a heart splurge. They lived aboveground. He could not.

In the summer of 1992, hungry for a quieter, more domestic life, he sent for a nephew, José Boquete, 12, then living in California, to stay with him in Miami while school was out. “I love him from when he was a baby, when he first came from Cuba,” Boquete said. He had a son back in Cuba, not much older. The family trusted him, Boquete said.

For José, it was a thrilling summer. He made friends in the apartment complex. His uncle indulged him and charmed the neighbors. “I made a best friend right away,” José said. “My uncle had these parties, just barbecues, and people came to hang out. It was the greatest.”

One day in August, young José watched the canaries his uncle kept in a cage flapping their wings in agitation. The birds had detected the approach of Hurricane Andrew, soon to become the second-most-destructive storm in United States history.

“I asked my uncle, ‘What’s happening?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, everything’s O.K.,’ ” José recalled. “He just stayed there on the sofa.”

Behind his barred door, Boquete was content, unwilling to fight a storm. Afterward, with electricity knocked out for days, he rigged a line from a car battery into the apartment and even scavenged contraband ice.

At the summer’s end, José returned to California. His uncle looked for work: the hurricane was a boon to the construction trades, and Boquete found odd jobs at a small company, Fantasy Cabinets, which had contracts with police stations and jails, said Mercy Fleitas, who ran the business with her husband, Serafín.

The Fleitas household knew Boquete as Loquito, the little crazy one, for the high-speed pace he kept at work and play. They did not realize that the wiry man was a fugitive. But Mercy Fleitas had a vivid memory of his anxiety about going into a correctional facility where they were doing work. And nearly 15 years later, hearing about his true identity and exoneration, Fleitas remembered a strong streak of decency.

“You know what about him?” she said. “My husband’s brother had died, and he couldn’t do enough for the kids. He was always bringing them food.”

His life was far from tranquil. Tipped off by a trailer-park neighbor that he was “hot,” Boquete drifted to North Carolina, settling in a rural area before returning again to Florida. At times, Boquete said, he craved to sleep with both eyes closed. To answer to his own name. Instead, over the next four years, he landed in police custody again and again.

In March 1995, acting on a tip about a wanted man, the police came to an apartment where Boquete was staying under the name Hilberto Rodríguez. A gun was found, and he was sentenced to a year. He was assigned to a work crew to clean up around apartments for the elderly across from the Orange Bowl. When he spotted a pay phone in front of the stadium, he could not resist. He called Ulises, the friend who met him when he first returned to Little Havana — now a successful drug dealer — and when Ulises pulled up in a van, Boquete dropped his rake and got in.

He stayed with Ulises and his wife in south Miami. Very early one morning in July 1995, Boquete left for his usual exercise routine in a local park: running and 600 sit-ups, beginning at 6 a.m., before the heat of the day. On the way, he was stopped by a drug-enforcement agent, who asked him if he lived there.

No, he said, “I’m just visiting for a few days from Key West.” The agents searched the house and found two pounds of marijuana. Ulises was away, on a trip to New Orleans with a girlfriend. That left his wife to answer for the pot. Suddenly, Boquete’s status as a fugitive took on a high value. She did not know his real name but knew that he was on the run.

As the officers sorted through his tangle of identities, they decided to process him as Hilberto Rodríguez, the fugitive who had walked away from the Orange Bowl work detail.

“In the police station, the cops say, ‘Let’s go,’ ” Boquete recalled. “I am walking to the door. Then a lady sitting at a computer says: ‘Hold on. Palm Beach has something on him, too.’ ” The Glades prison was in the jurisdiction of Palm Beach County. After 10 1/2 years, his fingerprints were linked to Orlando Boquete.

Sentenced under the Hilberto Rodríguez pseudonym for escaping from the county jail, he was returned to the state prison system as Rodríguez, with “Orlando Bosquete” listed as an alias.

After years of running from his true identity, it would turn out that proving who he really was would not be bad at all for Orlando Boquete. That, however, took another decade.

During the 1990s, many prosecutors in Florida, and elsewhere, fiercely resisted DNA testing for people already in prison. Such tests often poked embarrassing holes in the original investigations. After an innocent man died on death row — the prosecutors opposed testing until the man, Frank Lee Smith, was terminally ill — the State Legislature passed a law that explicitly permitted convicts to seek DNA testing, as long as they asked by Oct. 1, 2003. More than 800 prisoners wrote to the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, which set up the Florida Innocence Initiative to manage the requests. As the deadline approached, Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project sent forms to Boquete and others, so that they could start the process without an attorney.

With help from another inmate fluent in English, Boquete filed the paperwork. One day in the spring of 2006, Morrison called him: the test results proved he was not the man who had attacked the woman in Key West. He flushed his parole rejection papers down the toilet. Boquete now had a lawyer in Key West, Hal Schuhmacher, representing him, along with the Innocence Project’s Morrison and Barry Scheck (with whom I wrote a book about wrongful convictions in 2000).

Last May 23, Boquete was delivered in shackles to the county courthouse in Marathon for a hearing. At his request, Morrison brought him a white jacket and pants, 30 waist, for his appearance. His family gathered in the courtroom. The moment swelled with uncommon forces: liberation, vindication, resurrection, humility. “I could sit here and talk for as much time as anybody wanted to give me,” the state’s attorney, Mark Kohl, told the judge, “but every minute that I spend talking to you is another minute that an innocent man sits in jail on this charge.”

The judge, Richard Payne, made the same point. “No words spoken by this court today . . . would do justice to the penalty that you have been required to pay for offenses that now we know conclusively that you were not guilty of committing,” he said. “You are hereby ordered to be immediately released from the custody of Florida.”

The state had measured the system against the case of Boquete and recognized its failure. Still, that would not be the end. The federal government, through the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also took its measure of Boquete. While he had been legally admitted to the United States in 1980, he had never completed the application to gain permanent status. So instead of being freed at the moment he was declared innocent, Boquete was taken in handcuffs by immigration agents to a federal detention center.

Yes, Boquete was cleared of the 1982 case. But had he proved himself a menace to society while on the run? Faced with a large question, immigration authorities seemed to use a microscope to answer it. The burglary of the clothing store and a gun found where he had been staying were “a concern with regard to his potential danger to the community,” wrote Michael Rozes, the field office director for immigration enforcement in Miami. “An escape for which he was eventually convicted, regardless of the fact that this conviction has since been overturned, shows your client’s propensity toward absconding.”

Prosecutors in two counties, Miami-Dade and Monroe, weighed in to urge that the immigration officials look beyond a rap sheet that, in Boquete’s case, was singularly unilluminating.

“Public employees exist to serve the public,” Mark Kohl wrote. “If you cannot conclusively determine that he is a dangerous person, I urge you to release him at once so as to not compound the mistakes made 23 years ago.”

Finally, immigration officials released Boquete on Aug. 21, only after he signed papers conceding that he could be deported for his crimes as a fugitive.

That night, he ate two croquetas and drank a batido de mamey at a quiet dinner with family members, his immigration lawyer, John Pratt, and another innocent Florida man, Luis Díaz, who served 26 years. He corrected what he said were misspellings of his name in official records as Bosquette or Bosquete. The next morning, he went for a run on the beach at 6 a.m. Through Hal Schuhmacher, he got a job doing landscape work for two real-estate agents in the Florida Keys, Morgan Hill and Paula Nardone, who gave him a place to stay. Once a month, he makes a four-hour trek by bus and train from Marathon to Miami, to report to immigration.

A few weeks after his release, Boquete agreed to go with me on a trip back to the prison town of Belle Glade, along with his nephew José, now a musician living in Miami. In the prison parking lot, he squinted at the new buildings. He pointed out the perimeter road and the high fence. An officer told us to move.

As we drove along Main Street in Belle Glade, he spotted Avenue L. “Turn here, this is where I saw the Mexicans,” he commanded. We got out. Not surprisingly, no one remembered an ant-eaten hobo who suddenly appeared on a winter day 21 years earlier.

Yet here were the simple landmarks of his story. He darted along Avenue L, running from one spot to the next. The railroad tracks that he followed away from the prison. A square patch of ground of faintly different hue than the surrounding area. “This is where the pay phone was,” he shouted. He found the lot where he stayed with the Mexicans, but the migrants and their shacks were gone. In front of a deserted, sun-bleached wooden building, he said, “I think this might have been where the trucks were.”

Charged with memory, he looked back from age 52 on the 30-year-old who crawled out of canal waters and sugar cane to reclaim his life. The places were faded; the decades were mapped in the gullies and ravines that run through his face.

What if he had not gone out for beer on that June night in 1982, at the very moment the police were looking for the man with the buzz cut?

What would have come of his life?

“Oh,” Boquete said. “Oh. That’s a real question. Too many beautiful things to do, I believe. Exactly what would have happened, I don’t know. I believe I’d have gotten married, I’d have a little business, property, boat. I’m not talking only about material things.

“Maybe I pass away already. I believe, if I am still alive, like I am now, I’d be much better. ”

His words, while true, suddenly ring in his ears as impolitic. “I’ve got people around me,” he said, citing lawyers, benefactors, family.

Then he paused. “In reality, I don’t have nothing,” he said. It has been 21 years since he last saw the spot where the railroad tracks met Avenue L — the crossroads of his life, the point where he passed from captivity to, well, what? Did he know actual freedom on the run?

“Sometimes,” he said, instantly. “Sometimes. When I have a party, when I have made money, when I feel good, when I got a nice place. It doesn’t have to be a nice place — my own place. When I’m cold — when the police don’t look for me.

“I feel free many, many times. Why did I escape from prison? Because I want to be free. I want to feel free. I see the police, I don’t be scared.”

We turn back toward the car. Then we see it: a sign on the wall of the abandoned wood building, paint-dimmed, the words still legible. “Glades Logistics, Truck Broker.” All those years before, he might have jumped one of their trucks and gone wherever it took him. Instead, step by step, he made his own road, finally circling back. Orlando Boquete: walking, not running.

Jim Dwyer, a reporter for The Times, is the author, with Kevin Flynn, of ‘102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.”

    Fugitive, NYT, 11.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/magazine/11Boquete.t.html?hp&ex=1171256400&en=e702bc9d8f266ca5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Convicted child molester gets 800 years

Posted 2/10/2007 1:03 AM ET
AP
USA TOday

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The former roommate of one of the nation's most prolific child molesters was sentenced Friday to at least 800 years in prison for sexually abusing three boys.

Fred Everts, 36, was convicted last year of molesting the youngsters, ages 3, 9 and 11. He was sentenced to 800 years to life.

Police discovered the crimes two years ago while investigating Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller, who authorities say may have molested hundreds of youngsters over decades and kept detailed logs on the children.

Schwartzmiller, 65, was sentenced in January to 152 years in prison for abusing two 12-year-old boys. He and Everts had met in prison on earlier molestation charges and eventually moved in together in San Jose.

Steve Fein, who prosecuted both men, said Everts admitted molesting about 40 children, including his 3-month-old biological son. He asked for the maximum sentence of 1,175 years to life.

Everts' sentence was compounded under California's three-strikes law because of two felony convictions in Oregon in 1993 for sodomy and sexual abuse on his young stepson.

In asking for leniency, defense lawyer Steven Woodson asked the judge to disregard the previous two felonies and consider his client's admission to the crimes and cooperation with investigators.

    Convicted child molester gets 800 years, UT, 10.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-10-serial-molester_x.htm

Man pleads guilty to smuggling women for prostitution in brothel ring

Posted 2/10/2007 6:38 PM ET
AP
USA Today

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A man accused of managing brothels in Texas and Oklahoma has pleaded guilty to smuggling women into the country to work as prostitutes.

The Austin and Oklahoma City operations run by Juan Balderas-Orosco, 34, were part of a larger ring that included brothels in 13 cities in Texas and across the nation, including New York City, Las Vegas and Atlanta, according to documents filed with his plea on Friday.

The ringleaders sneaked hundreds of women into the United States, most of them from Latin American countries, and forced them to have sex with as many as 40 men a day, according to the court documents. They moved the women from brothel to brothel and kept the earnings.

"The prostitutes reported they were not free to leave the brothels on their own, and the brothel operators were usually armed with firearms," according to the filing.

Balderas-Orosco, 34, pleaded guilty to federal charges of transportation for prostitution, importation of illegal aliens, importation of illegal aliens and conspiracy to smuggle, transport and harbor illegal aliens. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 30 years.

Balderas' lawyer, Kristin Etter, said case was a symptom of a broken immigration system. With limited opportunities for immigrants to come to the U.S., some "are pushed into this underground economy and forced into these kinds of jobs," she said.

He was captured last year and is the lead defendant in an indictment that charges 12 people with smuggling and prostitution crimes. Seven have pleaded guilty in the case and three defendants are at large.

    Man pleads guilty to smuggling women for prostitution in brothel ring, UT, 10.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-10-immigrant-brothel_x.htm

Astronaut Charged with Attempted Kidnapping

February 6, 2007
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times

A NASA astronaut who drove hundreds of miles to confront a romantic rival, wearing diapers on the journey so that she would not have to stop to use the restroom, appeared in court today facing charges that included attempted kidnapping, and was ordered released on $15,500 bond.

The astronaut, Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, mostly kept her head down during the preliminary appearance in an Orange County, Fla. court, but nodded and said “yes” a few times when the judge explained that she was not to have any contact with the other woman, identified as Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force, according to media reports. Mrs. Nowak, who is a Navy captain working for NASA, was also ordered to wear a tracking device.

The Orlando police allege that Mrs. Nowak drove 950 miles from Houston to Orlando -- wearing adult diapers -- and disguised herself in a dark wig, glasses and trench coat to confront Ms. Shipman in the parking lot of Orlando International Airport, according to a police affidavit. Mrs. Nowak considered her a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut, Bill Oefelein, according to the affidavit.

The Orlando police said that Mrs. Nowak followed Ms. Shipman to a parking lot at the airport, where Ms. Shipman entered her car. Mrs. Nowak approached the car window and tried to open the door. When Ms. Shipman would not open the door, Mrs. Nowak began to cry, the police said. Ms. Shipman cracked the window, and Mrs. Nowak sprayed pepper spray into the vehicle.

She later told police, “that was stupid,” according to the affidavit.

“Nowak felt that she needed to meet with Shipman and discuss the details of their relationship with the male astronaut,” a police statement said.

Mrs. Nowak was arrested on Monday and also charged with attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery.

Her court appearance was broadcast live on television. Stations displayed file photos of the astronaut smiling broadly in an orange space suit, juxtaposed alongside the police mug shot of Mrs. Nowak after her arrest, her brow furrowed and hair splayed in different directions.

In court today, her attorney argued that she was an “excellent candidate for pre-trial release” because she had no criminal record, and that he saw no attempt to kidnap, but rather an “attempt to speak to some one in their vehicle.” He said that Mrs. Nowak had an exemplary record of commitment to her space career and the country, indicating she could be trusted to return to court and to stay away from Ms. Shipman. “One’s good works must count for something,” he said.

The state attorney said that the facts indicated a well-thought-out plan to kidnap and perhaps to injure Ms. Shipman.

A NASA official told the court today that before the incident, Mrs. Nowak, who is married with three children, and Ms. Shipman were strangers.

During a check of the parking lot, an officer followed Mrs. Nowak and watched her throw away a bag containing the wig and a BB gun. They also found a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, rubber gloves, $600 in cash, love letters — all in bags and in her car, the police said.

During the July shuttle mission last year, Mrs. Nowak’s tasks included operating a robotic arm. Commander Oefelein served on a mission by space shuttle Discovery in December.

    Astronaut Charged with Attempted Kidnapping, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/us/06cnd-astronaut.html?hp&ex=1170824400&en=71a9bbaa8c20eb8a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Decline of a Family, Played Out on the Stand

February 6, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

In a drab courtroom in Manhattan Supreme Court, everyone from spectators to warring family members to true-crime novelists is witnessing the unraveling of an upper-middle-class, Upper East Side family, in a story of love, devotion, anger and rejection that is at once unique and hauntingly familiar to any husband and wife who have ever had their differences. In this case, however, it ends in horror and bloodshed.

The central figure, Ben Odierno, the son of a barber who immigrated from Italy, went into real estate at 19, almost straight out of high school, and built a comfortable life that included a town house on East 84th Street, a home in the Catskills and land in St. Kitts. Now he is accused of murdering his wife of nearly 30 years in a fit of rage.

On a Sunday in April 2005, the police found Mr. Odierno lying in a pool of blood with his wife, Christine, in the kitchen of their town house, her body shredded by knife wounds, scratches and slashes from head to toe, her right thumb hanging by a thread, the prosecutor said.

“When she married the defendant many, many years ago, she pledged — as most couples do — and so did he, to love and to honor him, to cherish him until they were parted by death,” the prosecutor, Kerry O’Connell, told the jury in her opening statement nearly a month ago. “And at the time she walked down the aisle and took those vows, she never dreamed that her death would be at his hand.”

Mr. Odierno says that his wife stabbed him first, and his lawyer, Jack T. Litman, has turned the trial into a primal struggle, portraying Mr. Odierno, 72, as the adoring husband of a wife who was 13 years younger, and who began browbeating and sexually rejecting him before her death at 57. With the help of the couple’s two sons, Marcus, 25, and Stephan, 28, Mr. Litman has described the marriage as one that deteriorated into psychological warfare.

The defense has described Mrs. Odierno as having undergone some kind of midlife crisis in 1996 or 1997, as she neared age 50. Her husband testified that she had cosmetic surgery for a bunion and for spider veins, and that she kicked him out of her bed permanently. He said he had to sleep with their younger son, Marcus, in the twin bed vacated by Stephan when he went to college and moved five blocks away.

She became increasingly unstable and angry, the father and sons testified. She would lock herself in the bathroom for hours, they said. Mr. Odierno testified that she once pulled out all the electric plugs and unscrewed every light bulb in the chandelier so that when he arrived home, he found the house in utter darkness. She went from dressing the boys like “dolls” when they were young, Mr. Odierno said, to ignoring them.

“I never see you give a hug to the boys,” he said he remembered telling her. “Why don’t you hug or kiss them?”

In 2003, she blamed her husband for her broken wrist, a neighbor testified. But Stephan and his father testified that she had broken it while jumping off a loose stone wall near their country house, an account reflected in what Mrs. Odierno told emergency room personnel at the time, according to hospital notes read in court.

In the three or four months before her death, they said, she would hold her salad knife to her throat and ask if they were going to slit it, and would bump into them and accuse them of bumping into her.

“You’re hurting me,” Mr. Odierno quoted his wife as saying. “You’re making me black and blue.”

Mr. Odierno became so defeated by all this psychological warfare, defense witnesses testified, that he lost 50 pounds in the months before the stabbing and underwent psychiatric care, taking several prescription tranquilizers.

Three days before the stabbing, he visited a divorce lawyer, Stanford G. Lotwin, to ask for advice about a separation agreement his wife had given him. “He looked like a whipped dog,” Mr. Lotwin testified, adding that they made another appointment for the following week.

Through prosecution witnesses and in her cross-examination, Ms. O’Connell has presented Christine Odierno as a woman who was emotionally, “if not physically,” abused by her husband, and whose spoiled sons sided with him because their mother was harder on them. Behavior that might seem irrational to outsiders, the prosecutor has suggested, was actually a symptom of Mrs. Odierno’s subjugation to her husband, and her fear that he might hurt or even kill her.

Ms. O’Connell has brought out in court that Marcus was expelled from the Browning School, a private all-boys high school on the East Side, and that he had been accused of putting swastikas on lockers there. She questioned Marcus about whether he smoked marijuana, and he said he had not for a long time.

He admitted living off his father, but said it was hard to find a job without a high school diploma. When Ms. O’Connell asked whether he had thought of joining the military, Marcus, who had a military-style haircut on the witness stand, said that he was in the process of enlisting.

The prosecutor asked Mr. Odierno about his wife’s suspicions that he had been cheating on her with two other women and that he had children with one of them. Pressed about whether he had had a romantic relationship with a woman named Charlotte, who ran a bed-and-breakfast near their country home, Mr. Odierno denied having had a sexual relationship but said, “Well, listen, I was starving for affection — starving — and this person took the time to talk to me.”

Even the death scene is racked by ambiguity. Prosecution witnesses say that Mr. Odierno had his legs draped over his wife when the police found them; the defense introduced testimony that he had been holding her.

To Stephan Odierno, who returned from dinner out to find the bloody scene, it looked as if his parents were embracing.

“My mom was on top of him,” Stephan testified yesterday, his face reddening. “She had her arms wrapped around him, and he had his arms wrapped around her.”

The prosecution says Mr. Odierno was stabbing himself in the stomach with his wife’s daggerlike salad knife — not the six-inch butcher knife with a broken tip that he used to stab her — perhaps to pave the way for his claim of self-defense.

The defense says that his wife stabbed him first, that he is suffering from traumatic amnesia about what happened next, and that he lacked the intellect and decision-making ability to think ahead, let alone to plan a legal strategy.

At times, the drama of the Odierno marriage has been echoed by the drama in the courtroom. The defense has accused Mrs. Odierno’s sister, who sits in the courtroom nearly every day taking notes, of mouthing obscenities at Mr. Odierno for the jury to see.

Ms. O’Connell, an experienced, aggressive prosecutor, and Mr. Litman, known for defending unpopular clients, have argued so often in front of the jurors that the judge, Gregory Carro, has yelled at them — especially at Mr. Litman — to stop.

In the 1980s, Mr. Litman defended Robert Chambers, then 21, who was known as the preppy killer, in the strangulation death of Jennifer Levin, 18, in Central Park. Mr. Litman argued that Ms. Levin’s death had been an accident that occurred as a result of rough sex. After the jury deadlocked, Mr. Chambers pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

In the 1970s, Mr. Litman defended Richard Herrin, accused of fatally bludgeoning his ex-girlfriend, a fellow Yale student named Bonnie Garland, with a hammer. Mr. Litman argued that Mr. Herrin, a scholarship student, snapped because he had been distressed that Miss Garland wanted to see other men. Mr. Herrin was convicted of manslaughter.

In Mr. Litman’s latest case, Mr. Odierno is pleading self-defense.

“You stood there for three stabs, didn’t you?” Ms. O’Connell demanded incredulously as she echoed his testimony that his wife had stabbed him first.

Mr. Odierno hardly hesitated before replying, “I stood there for 30 years.”

    The Decline of a Family, Played Out on the Stand, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/nyregion/06odierno.html

Murder Trial Hears Account of Marital War’s Last Fight

January 31, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

An Upper East Side man testified at his murder trial yesterday, describing what he saw as his wife’s decade-long mental breakdown and admitting that he grabbed a knife and stabbed her in the kitchen of their home.

But the man, Ben Odierno, said it was his wife who stabbed him first, several times in the stomach, as they argued over his refusal to sign a separation agreement that would have given their country home in the Catskills to her, rather than to their two sons.

“She took the knife, she attacked me, and she was stabbing me, several times in my belly,” Mr. Odierno testified, standing up, at his lawyer’s request, and miming being stabbed below the navel.

“I reacted,” Mr. Odierno said.

“I put my hand on the butcher block. I grabbed a knife and went forward to her. I didn’t mean to kill Christine. It just happened like that. It was fast. I really thought she was going to kill me. I don’t remember anything after that.

“I stabbed her. I know that.”

Mr. Odierno’s contention that he acted in self-defense was the climax of about two and a half hours of testimony yesterday in which he described the progressive breakdown of nearly 30 years of marriage.

Mr. Odierno, a tall, portly man in a gray suit who described himself on the witness stand as “72, going on 73, hopefully,” faces 25 years to life if he is convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his wife on a Sunday in April 2005. Prosecutors say he stabbed his wife, who was 57, in a rage because she wanted to divorce him, and then turned the knife on himself.

The prosecutor, Kerry O’Connell, has suggested that Mr. Odierno secretly abused his wife, noting that once when she had a broken wrist, she told a neighbor that her husband had broken it.

Mr. Odierno testified that his wife broke her wrist when she slipped off a stone wall near their country home.

The defense has been building a case that it was not Mr. Odierno but his wife who was the aggressor.

Mr. Odierno said he met his future wife in 1972, when she rented an apartment in a building he owned at 1520 First Avenue. Beginning in 1996 or 1997, Mr. Odierno said, she became increasingly paranoid and aggressive.

Detail by detail, his account of the breakdown of their marriage was perhaps most striking in its banality.

His wife gradually stopped celebrating Christmas, complaining that the tree was “dirty,” he said.

He said she took their son’s cocker spaniel to the backyard, to relieve himself on Mr. Odierno’s prized fig tree. Soon she was hoarding, “bars and bars of soap, cologne by the carload, picture frames.”

He traced the change to a sort of midlife crisis, when his wife became upset about her appearance. She had surgery for bunions and spider veins and banished him from their bed because she was afraid he would hurt her legs, he said.

She never allowed him to return to her bed, he said, and she rebuffed his advances, even when he brought her flowers.

Although he cooked, she refused to pick up his plate after dinner, complaining, “I’m not your maid.”

“I’m telling you, this was the house of hell,” he said.

A few days before she died, she gave him a proposed separation agreement. He testified that he wanted to sign it, but his sons insisted that he see a lawyer, who advised him not to sign.

At that point, he said, his wife told him that she would mutilate his genitalia if he did not sign the agreement. He called the police, but could not bear to have her arrested, he said. So he withdrew his complaint, he said.

On April 24, 2005, they argued over the country house, he said. He wanted her to promise in writing that when she died, she would leave the house to their sons; she told him he would have to trust her, he said.

Then, he said, “She took the knife, she attacked me. ...”

    Murder Trial Hears Account of Marital War’s Last Fight, NYT, 31.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/nyregion/31murder.html

Friends and co-workers testified that Cynthia Sommer, left, threw wild parties,
got her breasts enlarged and had casual sex with multiple partners in the weeks after her husband's death.

By Denis Poroy, AP

 Calif. woman convicted of poisoning Marine husband        UT        30.1.2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-30-marine-widow_x.htm

Calif. woman convicted of poisoning Marine husband

Updated 1/30/2007 7:37 PM ET
AP
USA Today

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A woman accused of poisoning her Marine husband with arsenic to cash in on his $250,000 life insurance policy was convicted of murder on Tuesday.

Prosecutors argued Cynthia Sommer, 33, wanted a more luxurious lifestyle than she could afford on her 23-year-old husband's $1,700 monthly salary and saw the military life insurance policy as a way to "set herself free."

Sommer's friends and co-workers testified during the trial that she threw wild parties, got her breasts enlarged and had casual sex with multiple partners in the weeks after her husband's collapse.

Todd Sommer was in top condition when he collapsed and died at the couple's home on the Marine Corps' Miramar base in San Diego.

His death was initially ruled a heart attack. Tests of his liver later found levels of arsenic 1,020 times above normal.

With no direct evidence that Sommer was the source of the arsenic detected in her husband's liver, Deputy District Attorney Laura Gunn relied heavily on circumstantial evidence of Sommer's financial debt to show that she had a motive to kill Sgt. Todd Sommer.

Gunn asserted that the defendant was the only person with the motive and access to poison the Marine.

Cynthia Sommer faces life in prison. Her attorney, Robert Udell, told jurors that his client had lost her "knight in shining armor."

She is now engaged to a former Marine she met two months after her husband's death. She was extradited last March to California from her current home in West Palm Beach, Fla.

    Calif. woman convicted of poisoning Marine husband, UT, 30.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-30-marine-widow_x.htm

Big Plan for Small Courts: Seeking Money to Fix Them

January 30, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

ALBANY, Jan. 29 — New York State’s top court officials plan to ask the Legislature for at least $50 million over the next five years to revamp the state’s threadbare system of town and village courts — more than five times the amount they had previously discussed, the state’s chief administrative judge said during legislative testimony on Monday.

“Ten million a year is conservative in terms of upgrading these courts,” Jonathan Lippman, the chief administrative judge, said during testimony before a State Senate panel exploring possible changes to the statewide network of more than 1,250 courts, known as justice courts.

The court officials said in November that they would ask for $10 million this year to improve courtrooms and security, to provide equipment so proceedings can be recorded, and to increase training and financial accountability. But Judge Lippman’s remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee made clear that court officials had concluded that the job would be long and costly.

The town and village courts, run by part-time justices who are poorly trained and minimally supervised, handle two million criminal, domestic-violence, traffic and small civil cases each year. They have changed little since they began 300 years ago, but have recently come under criticism from prosecutors, defense lawyers and citizens. Newspapers in Rochester, Albany, Utica and elsewhere have called for reforms.

Judge Lippman also disclosed for the first time on Monday that his agency, the State Office of Court Administration, would propose legislation to require training for justice-court clerks, who often have responsibility for handling the substantial sums of money that flow through the courts. The state comptroller has said many court clerks have never received even rudimentary financial training. And while the state provides some classes for clerks, they are not mandatory.

An article in The New York Times on Monday told how money has often been lost, stolen or mismanaged in the justice courts, which handle more than $210 million a year in fees and fines. In many of those cases, state officials and local prosecutors concluded that the court clerks had been responsible.

In an interview after Judge Lippman’s testimony, Richard Szarowicz, a former president of the New York State Association of Magistrates Court Clerks, which represents the clerks, said his group had been pressing to make the training mandatory since 1999, but had been told by state officials that it would be too costly.

The hearing was called by Senator John A. DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to explore whether the Legislature should consider changes in the justice courts.

Justices are elected to four-year terms; three-quarters of them are not lawyers. The hearing included proposals by lawyers’ groups to require that all justices have law degrees. Some critics urged that courts be combined into larger courts, or replaced with a system of district courts.

That drew impassioned testimony from some justices who said the system should be improved and better monitored but should remain in place.

They said the courts provide efficient justice that often benefits from the judges’ knowledge of their communities. One justice, Edward G. Van Der Water of Van Buren, N.Y., acknowledged that some justice courts have been hampered by inadequate courtrooms — with “sometimes not even bare essentials” — and poor training.

“We’ve been struggling for a long time,” he said. But he added that any problems stemming from poor financing and monitoring should not be used as an argument to try to abolish the courts.

Some Senate panel members, including the chairman, were openly skeptical of proposals for major change.

“There are bad apples in every single profession,” Senator DeFrancisco said, adding that mistakes by some nonlawyer justices should not be used “to reform a system to the point where the great qualities are being thrown out.”

But Greg D. Lubow, a Tannersville lawyer who is a vice president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the system was beyond repair. He said criminal courts run by justices without law degrees were unconstitutional, and no increase in training would change that.

“Part-time judges,” he said, “give us part-time justice.”

    Big Plan for Small Courts: Seeking Money to Fix Them, NYT, 30.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/nyregion/30courts.html

Money Trail Often Murky in Small-Town Courts

January 29, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

As court clerk in the western New York village of Perry, Ruth Milks was in a prime spot to see the kind of big money that moves through the state’s smallest courts. Her husband was the village justice, and Mrs. Milks — a former justice herself — collected the fines and fees.

She was also in a prime spot to cash in. Mrs. Milks started adding $35 to parking fines, recording the extra charge on the driver’s receipt but not in her court files. By the time state auditors caught up with her in 2003 — only because she had fined one of them — they estimated she had pocketed at least $60,000, which investigators said she spent on gifts and a trip to a casino.

It is no secret that New York’s justice courts — an unwieldy system of 1,250 town and village courts that dates back to Colonial days — have been troubled for a long time. Three-quarters of the justices are not lawyers, and state disciplinary records show that some have jailed defendants illegally and denied people basic legal rights. In recent months, the Legislature and state judicial officials have been scrambling to fix some of the courts’ more obvious failings.

But one of the most intractable problems those officials face is the courts’ miserable record with money, which has been lost, stolen or mishandled in case after case. State investigators have discovered financial records in disarray, missing or simply nonexistent.

It is easy to see why. More than $210 million passes through the justice courts each year in bail, fines and fees. But the part-time justices who are elected to preside in them, many with a high school diploma or less, receive about an hour of initial training in how to safeguard and keep track of the money. They and their clerks, if they have any, often get little supervision or resources, and the justices’ pay can be as low as $2,000 a year.

The towns and villages that pay them are required by law to review the courts’ books, but often fail to take even a cursory look. The officials who run New York’s court system say they have neither the power nor the staff to carefully oversee the justice courts’ finances, and even state disciplinary officials can do little more than punish the occasional justices whose crimes or errors come to light.

Small wonder, then, that some court officials have helped themselves. A clerk in Patchogue, a Long Island village with a busy justice court, was discovered stealing only after a new justice noticed a sharp drop in court revenues. A subsequent state audit in 2005 revealed that the clerk, Deborah Gustam-Williams, had made off with $37,500.

Patchogue’s mayor, Paul V. Pontieri Jr., laid much of the blame on lax oversight at every level. “Give the fox the key to the henhouse,” he said, “and he is going to eat hens.”

Size of Problem Is Unclear

The sums that have been reported lost to fraud or ineptitude have tended to be small, but they loom large in the tiny budgets of the villages and towns. And state officials can only guess at the real extent of the problem, because the courts are so rarely scrutinized and the records are so often a shambles. A simple search of local newspaper accounts for this article showed that at least 23 justices or local court clerks have been charged with theft since 1986. And an examination of little-noticed reports by state auditors and disciplinary officials — who have punished 79 justices for financial misdeeds since 1979 — turned up every type of transgressor, from the mundane to the outlandish. Cases range from the Niagara town justice who billed both the state and the town for his judicial-training expenses, to the justice in the Hudson Valley town of Ancram who fled to Montana when faced with a 144-count indictment for methodically embezzling at least $9,000.

A Saratoga justice stashed court funds in his freezer, his shoes and several other unorthodox places. A justice in the Finger Lakes town of Ovid stowed thousands of dollars in a briefcase at home, while another, in the Catskill town of Shandaken, told investigators he had kept more than $1,000 in the trunk of his car. Then, he said, he gave the car away.

A justice in Gouverneur, near the Canadian border, let state disciplinary officials in on his unusual approach to the bail posted by defendants. “I used the money,” he said. Another justice, in the Southern Tier town of Allegany, told them he saw nothing wrong with using court funds for his own purchases.

And in 2005, auditors from the state comptroller’s office not only turned up a bookkeeping mess in the Southern Tier town of Genesee, but also unearthed undeposited checks that people had written to pay their fines. Some were nine years old.

For many years, those auditors were the state’s best hope for maintaining some level of financial order in the justice courts. The comptroller’s office audited each court every three or four years.

But the office abandoned that sweeping approach in the 1980s, partly in response to staff cuts and new pressures to monitor larger agencies, said Mark P. Pattison, a deputy state comptroller. Now, even as the number and complexity of the courts’ transactions have increased, it conducts only a handful of justice court audits every year — 5 in 2005 and 14 in 2004 — though nearly every one has uncovered evidence of systemwide trouble.

The comptroller’s office connected the dots last May, sounding an alarm that “the pervasiveness of these problems” was so great that the Legislature should make fundamental changes, like combining courts or forbidding many of the smallest courts to handle money at all.

The cry was taken up by the state’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, who issued a report in November saying the losses and thefts “raise difficult questions about the justice courts’ financial integrity.”

She imposed some modest new rules to tighten financial controls, and promised more training and resources for justices and clerks. But her report conceded that state court officials were powerless to do much more because the state divides responsibility for fiscal supervision among the towns, villages and several state agencies, none of which has the power to fully police the courts.

The money flows in constantly, much of it in cash: fines for speeding, fees paid by litigants in civil cases, bail and restitution from defendants. State rules require that courts quickly bank the payments, keep careful records, then forward the money and financial reports monthly to the state comptroller. The state sends some of the money back to the towns and counties, which helps lighten the load on local taxpayers.

It sounds straightforward enough. But it was apparently too much for Kerry R. Lockwood, a legal secretary and a high school graduate who in 1999 was elected justice in Plainfield, a town of 1,000 people near Cooperstown.

Although she handled, on average, fewer than four cases a month, her financial reports to the state were routinely late, some by nearly two years — even after the comptroller’s office told the town board to stop paying her in May 2005 because of the chronic delinquency.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct chased her, and her records, for an additional year and a half. She did not respond to several letters. When a commission investigator made an appointment to view her files, she stood him up, leaving a letter at the court saying she could not find many records. And when the commission called her in to testify as to why she should not be removed from office, she did not show up.

She resigned last year before the commission ordered her removal for fiscal negligence. Ms. Lockwood, like many justices and clerks, did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Even in as small a town as Plainfield, her story was familiar. In 1999, the commission removed another Plainfield town justice who was routinely late with remissions and reports: Joseph W. Kosina, a cattle farmer and high school graduate who fell so far behind in his paperwork that he asked the town’s other justice to file financial reports on his cases. She fell behind, too.

In an interview last week, Mr. Kosina, 73, explained that he was “computer illiterate” and had been trying to juggle two other jobs. “I was raising beef and delivering the newspaper at 6 o’clock in the morning,” he said.

A longtime town councilwoman, Larraine McNulty, said it was nearly impossible to find qualified candidates for the local judgeship, which pays $2,000 a year in Plainfield.

“These judges are in over their heads,” she said.

Those with the luxury of court clerks sometimes turn over all the money matters to them. But the clerks are not much better prepared; though many receive some state training, it is not required. Many receive no guidance or oversight from their justices, and some do not want it.

In 2003, when state auditors told Amy P. Hontz, a justice in Angola, south of Buffalo, that her court’s records were in disarray, with cash stuffed into some files and money missing, she told them quite a story herself: The court clerk, who had resigned, had kept all the records in her basement and limited the judge’s access to them.

In its report last May, the state comptroller’s office said that there were accounting and financial-review problems in all 12 courts it had studied, and that 10 justices did not understand some of their most basic financial responsibilities, like balancing accounts or determining the amount due to the state.

Even conscientious justices can get lost trying to dig out from the mistakes of past judges. When state auditors found flaws in the financial practices of the Arcadia Town Court, east of Rochester, in 2004, the two justices explained that they were carrying on a long tradition.

“Our books were maintained,” they wrote, “as they were by our predecessors and their predecessors before that.”

For many towns and villages, the money generated by the justice courts is an important source of income. So it stands to reason that they would take a keen interest in the courts’ books.

But Judge Kaye’s report in November noted that “many, if not most, localities do not perform full annual audits of justice court finances.”

A few months earlier, the comptroller had revealed that only half of the town and village boards conducted audits, and that many local officials were unaware they were supposed to provide any fiscal oversight at all. He estimated that more than $5.2 million could be missing statewide, from about 430 justice courts, or more than one-third of the system.

Local governments pay a steep price for their lack of vigilance, as some towns have found again and again.

In Palermo, a small town north of Syracuse, local officials called in state auditors in 1998 after their justice, Kimberly Sesso, resigned and the court’s canceled checks could not be found. The auditors concluded that $3,439 was missing, and advised the town board to do everything possible to step up its oversight.

Seven years later the auditors were called back, this time to examine the work of the court clerk, Andrea Busko-Price, who pleaded guilty last May to falsifying court records and stealing at least $1,990. Despite their warning, the auditors concluded, court business had continued as usual.

The town supervisor, Ellen M. Jamerson, apologized and promised to do better. And the two sitting justices admitted that the court clerk had been given complete control over the money. But, they wrote, “in a small township such as Palermo with limited financial and human resources, it is not always feasible to do otherwise.”

A Limited Proposal

In what she has called sweeping changes, Judge Kaye said her office would require towns and villages to audit their courts. But the punishment for not complying is less than sweeping: The list of delinquent local governments will be sent to the state comptroller’s office — which long ago backed away from comprehensive policing of the courts.

To help fill the gap, Judge Kaye has directed the Office of Court Administration, which she heads, to hire 12 new auditors just for the justice courts.

For now, though, the task of policing the justices falls mostly to the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Although it investigates complaints about judges in all of the state’s courts, more than 12 percent of its cases in the last three decades have involved financial mismanagement and theft in the justice courts.

But in legislative testimony last month, the commission’s administrator, Robert H. Tembeckjian, said the lack of regular audits by the comptroller had left his investigators with few leads, and staff cuts over the years had put his agency “close to a breaking point.”

Even when the commission suspects mismanagement or fraud, proving it can be difficult. Some justices have stonewalled, claiming their records are lost or refusing to meet with investigators.

State officials pursued the town justice in Paris, south of Utica, for nine months in 2001, with letters complaining that financial reports and deposits were late. The state persuaded the town board to stop his pay. Still, the justice, John R. Jarosz, did not bother to check his court clerk’s financial records, the commission said, even though he had listed his occupation on a state questionnaire as “accountant.”

Eventually, the commission found that the clerk had falsified her books to cover up for missing money. The clerk was the justice’s wife.

She resigned. He paid back $3,200, and in 2003 the commission found he had failed to supervise her adequately and censured him, the most stringent punishment short of removal.

The Paris supervisor, Joseph F. Jerzak, said town board members were not pleased that the justice kept his job, but the town’s lawyer told them they could do nothing about it.

Six months after his censure, Justice Jarosz was re-elected to another four-year term. The supervisor is a bit stumped. “It certainly doesn’t seem very rational,” Mr. Jerzak said.

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

    Money Trail Often Murky in Small-Town Courts, NYT, 29.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/nyregion/29courts.html?hp&ex=1170133200&en=631db1bfb899d92d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Two Charges Dropped in Wis. Murder Case

January 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:11 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MANITOWOC, Wis. (AP) -- A judge on Monday dismissed sexual assault and kidnapping charges against a murder defendant who investigators said killed a young photographer with the help of his teenage nephew.

Defense attorneys argued the charges be dropped because the nephew's testimony was necessary to support them, and prosecutors missed a Jan. 22 deadline for deciding whether the boy would testify against Steven Avery.

The judge had to make a decision immediately because he had to tell prospective jurors on Monday what charges they would be considering in the case, Avery's lawyer, Dean Strang argued. Potential jurors arrived at the courthouse Monday to fill out questionnaires, and jury selection is to begin Feb. 5.

Four charges remain against Avery, including first-degree intentional homicide. Avery was released from prison in 2003 after serving 18 years for a rape that DNA evidence later proved he didn't commit.

Avery, 44, and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, 17, were accused of sexually assaulting, torturing and killing Teresa Halbach on Oct. 31, 2005, near their family's salvage yard in rural Manitowoc County.

Prosecutors have been negotiating a plea agreement with Dassey and could reach one by the end of the week, said special prosecutor Ken Kratz. Dassey has indicated he would invoke his right not to incriminate himself but would testify against Avery if the judge granted him immunity, he said.

    Two Charges Dropped in Wis. Murder Case, NYT, 29.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Missing-Woman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Ga. Couple Guilty in Law Office Standoff

January 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

STATESBORO, Ga. (AP) -- A husband and wife who held an attorney hostage for more than 24 hours in a standoff that shut down the city's downtown have been sentenced to decades in prison.

A jury found Robbie Eugene Brower and Connie Czako Brower guilty Friday of four counts of kidnapping, two counts of possession of a hoax device, two counts of terrorist threats and possession of a firearm.

Judge F. Gates Peed sentenced Robbie Brower, of Rincon, Ga., to 85 years in prison, and Connie Brower to 65 years.

The couple went into Michael Hostilo's law office in this southeast Georgia college town and took him hostage Jan. 26, 2006. Robbie Brower told the court that Hostilo had misrepresented him and had given him poor advice that resulted in his pleading guilty in a criminal case in 1995.

Hostilo was bound with duct tape and held in the office until the next day, when the couple surrendered. Three female employees were released shortly after the couple took over the office.

''He held the city hostage,'' prosecutor Richard Mallard said of Robbie Brower. ''You can't overlook people doing that.''

Robbie Brower asked the court for lenience for his wife. Connie Brower said she had never done anything like that before, but ''I always stuck by my husband no matter what.''

    Ga. Couple Guilty in Law Office Standoff, NYT, 27.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hostage-Standoff-Sentence.html

A Halting Plea for Mercy, Heavily Edited

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

Ronell Wilson said he was sorry.

To the widows of the two detectives he shot dead, to their children and parents and brothers and sisters, he directed his remorse.

To his own mother watching from the front row of the courtroom, he offered his prayers.

Before a full gallery of police officers and off-duty prosecutors, crusaders against capital punishment and curious onlookers, he cataloged his sorrows.

And to the 12 men and women who will decide whether he is to live or die, he delivered his fate.

“I, Ronell Wilson,” he began, speaking yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, “wrote a statement that I want to read to you, the jury.”

What followed was an apology that had been three years, 10 months and 15 days in the making. Mr. Wilson, 24, stands convicted of capital murder for shooting Detectives James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, each in the back of the head, as they worked undercover to buy a gun on Staten Island in March 2003.

During two weeks of testimony for the penalty phase of the trial, jurors have seen his life rent open for inspection. They have learned of his serious violence in jail, of his petty crimes as a teenager. They have seen his kindergarten grades. They know he sucked his thumb; they know he wet the bed.

Prosecutors have portrayed Mr. Wilson as a dangerous gang member; defense lawyers have cast him as a broken child.

Next week, at the close of a two-part trial that began in November, they will make their final arguments to end or spare Mr. Wilson’s life. No federal jury in New York has ordered an execution for half a century.

As defense lawyers completed their case, they called the revenants of Mr. Wilson’s short history, educators and counselors and more.

“I used to date his cousin Vanessa,” testified one witness, Milton Munroe. He described the pre-adolescent Ronell as “sad.”

Other witnesses told of Mr. Wilson’s failure to obtain a high school equivalency certificate, to find a job or even to complete an application. A defense lawyer, Kelley J. Sharkey, asked some witnesses to tell the jury: “Do you like Mr. Wilson?” They said they did.

And then came his turn to speak. His words were rigorously edited, the product of a robust debate outside the presence of the jury. In an order on Jan. 12, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis gave Mr. Wilson leave to read a brief statement of remorse without swearing to tell the truth, without subjecting himself to cross-examination.

Last week, his lawyers submitted a letter ascribed to Mr. Wilson, seeking to substitute it for the earlier statement. In court filings, this message was characterized as a meditation on the crime, its victims, the circumstances of Mr. Wilson’s childhood and his resolve to live faithfully in prison. His lawyers described it as the work of a conscience stricken by testimony of one victim’s teenage son.

Prosecutors challenged the substitution, arguing that Mr. Wilson should subject himself to their questions if he wished to dispute their arguments. The lawyers argued through at least three drafts of the statement Mr. Wilson would read.

As the hour approached for Mr. Wilson to speak directly to those who will choose his fate, Judge Garaufis ruled on the script line by line.

“I know what it means to be a young kid who never had a father figure,” was disallowed. But jurors had already seen Mr. Wilson’s father, a barely lucid man who said he had concentrated on his recovery from alcoholism to the exclusion of visiting his son in the hospital.

“I have matured greatly and respect others,” was disallowed, but the jurors could measure that from the testimony of his prison guards.

“If I’m spared, I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life,” was disallowed, but the judge had already explained the alternative sentence to the jury.

“When I was growing up, I was thankful for everything anybody would give me,” was disallowed, but his sister had already testified about his neediness.

In an allusion to the process of revision, the penultimate draft contained the phrase “I can’t say much.” That was altered to read: “I am not good with words; I wish I could explain myself better.”

After some last legal arguments, a microphone was placed on a cardboard box, then moved lower. Mr. Wilson entered the room in a gray suit and a purple tie. A small tattoo bridged his right thumb and forefinger. He wore a thin mustache.

A screen for the display of evidence photographs was lifted mechanically, framing his face against an expanse of dun paneling. He took a drink of water. He rocked slightly in his chair. He rose.

“I want you to understand my deepest sorrow towards the victims’ family and friends,” he said.

His head down, his voice low and plodding, he continued: “Because I know how painful it is, I would never wish this for anyone. So I cannot be remorseless.”

He did not look toward the gallery. He did not look up.

“I say it again and again. I am so sorry,” he said. Then he concluded: “I know that the victims’ families may not accept my apology but I pray that God will give them all the comfort and strength that they need to move on from this tragedy. I have the same prayer for my family also.”

After the hearing, the families of the murdered men called his apology insincere.

“He did what he did,” said Rodney Andrews, father of the detective. “You can’t rectify that.”

Michael J. Palladino, the president of the Detectives Endowment Association, characterized the statement as a plea for mercy, not unlike one Mr. Wilson had rejected from one of his victims.

“He begged for his life,” Mr. Palladino said. “I just hope the jury does exactly what he did.”

A cousin of Mr. Wilson’s, Vanessa Warrick, said he had spoken from the heart.

“Ronell’s a sincere person, a loving and kind person, and I just hope the victims’ families received his apology,” she said. “My entire family is sorry for this.”

As he watched the jury depart, Mr. Wilson reached forward and touched the stand of his microphone, ending the connection.

    A Halting Plea for Mercy, Heavily Edited, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/nyregion/25trial.html

Text: Statement of Ronell Wilson in Murder Trial

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
 

Following is the text of the statement Ronell Wilson read in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in the sentencing phase of his murder trial:

I, Ronell Wilson, wrote a statement that I want to read to you, the jury. I want you to understand my deepest sorrow towards the victims’ family and friends. I have seen the pain that I have caused the family and friends of the victims and to my own family and friends. I know that the wives and children and loved ones are also victims.

Because I know how painful it is, I would never wish this for anyone. So I cannot be remorseless and show no sympathy to these men’s families and friends. I am not good with words. I wish I could explain myself more better, but I am truly sorry for the pain I have caused them all. I know that I have caused a great deal of pain to them all and I say it again and again. I am so sorry.

I am sorry that I caused so much pain throughout my life to others, especially my family and the families of the victims. I know that the victim’s families may not accept my apology but I pray that God will give them all the comfort and strength that they need to move on from this tragedy. I have the same prayer for my family also.

Thank you.

    Text: Statement of Ronell Wilson in Murder Trial, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/nyregion/24cnd-text.html

Sorrow and Reflection in Killer’s Housing Project

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By TRYMAINE LEE

Everything feels colder here, on a forbidding patch of brick and glass on Staten Island’s northeast side, just blocks from the harbor. The rest of the island, the vistas of suburban lawns and town houses, could be another planet.

It is rigid, industrial, simple and ugly, with its harsh concrete lines, meshed metal fencing on layers of burnt-orange brick. This is Ronell Wilson’s hometown: the Stapleton Houses, the biggest public housing complex on Staten Island.

Across the harbor in Brooklyn, Mr. Wilson is facing a possible death sentence after being convicted of killing two police officers in March 2003, just a few blocks from these buildings where he lived. Yesterday, he spoke in court and apologized, asking that his life be spared.

It would be an exaggeration to say that everyone at the Stapleton Houses is following the case obsessively, picking apart every televised report, reading every word about the trial in newspapers. But without a doubt, they are paying attention, and from a different angle than people in other neighborhoods — after all, someone from here is on trial for his life.

Their reactions range from sadness as muted as the dark colors of the place, to resignation, to conspiracy theories tinged with anger. This phase of the trial has also led to reflections on life here, because much of the testimony this week focused on Mr. Wilson’s upbringing, on his struggling existence from an early age that his defense lawyers contend played a role at the moment he pulled the trigger.

“I heard he was a good little dude,” said Corey Scott, a barber at the Straight and Nappy barbershop across the street from the projects. “It’s a shame, but no man deserves to die.”

“He was a good friend of my son’s,” said Paul Ivory, the barbershop’s owner. “He was trapped up with the wrong cats. But he was small time.”

Mr. Scott said people who patronize the barbershop have grown tired of talking about Mr. Wilson’s case because “they’re going to kill him, so, there’s nothing else to talk about.”

“People want to blame it on the community,” said Mr. Scott, who said he spent eight years in prison on a gun charge. “It’s not like the community made you do this or that, that’s not right to say. Life is how you make it. The only way life is going to do you bad is if you go out to do bad. That’s life.”

Out in one of the courtyards, a young woman who gave her name as Kiesha echoed many others when she said that Mr. Wilson’s death, should it come to that, hardly seemed like a solution.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” she said. “If you take his life, what is that going to do? Those dead officers aren’t going to end up back here.”

At 2:45 p.m., neighborhood schools let out and children wearing brightly colored jackets and hats fill the courtyards and sidewalks. Janet Robinson, a community matriarch known as the Kwanzaa Lady by many, walked the corridors of several of the buildings on Tuesday with Jalil Crawford, 3, in tow.

Mrs. Robinson, 65, has lived in the Stapleton Houses for more than 20 years and has helped to raise three generations of pregnant teenagers, juvenile delinquents and “community babies.” She said everybody had failed Mr. Wilson and the two officers he killed.

“There is a lot pointing to why Ronell did it, and a whole lot of people are at fault,” she said.

“I feel bad for Ronell,” she added. “I feel bad for his mother, as a woman, as a mother. I feel bad for the community and the fact that what he has done has shed a bad light on all of us in this community.” Mrs. Robinson said that she felt awful for the dead officers, too, and that they were placed in a lethal situation by the Police Department.

“You send two black officers into the black community to buy guns. Then, their backup doesn’t come on time,” she said. “They were put in that position, and they ended up dead.”

Mrs. Robinson lived three doors from Mr. Wilson’s grandmother, where he once lived with his mother and 11 other family members.

While prosecutors paint Mr. Wilson as a coldblooded killer, bully and gang member who depicted his violent lifestyle in rap lyrics, neighbors who knew him said he was just a young man lost.

They said Mr. Wilson’s name never struck fear in the hearts of those familiar with it. They said he was just a “little dude” playing big-boy games, hanging out in the projects like the rest of those hustling to survive in the projects.

Tony Smith, a resident of the Stapleton Houses whose cousin Omar Green was a defendant with Mr. Wilson, stood on a sidewalk bordering the projects with his brother, Fred Tuller, 22. Mr. Tuller said that it was a rough neighborhood to live in, that violence and poverty are seared into who they are and how they see themselves. He saw his first dead body at age 5 or 6. The victim had been shot and left for dead in the stairwell of his building.

“They call this the projects for a reason,” Mr. Tuller said, looking into the hills above the neighborhood, with big houses that almost seem to be leering. “Look at us, in the middle of the projects, down here like lab rats,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.”

    Sorrow and Reflection in Killer’s Housing Project, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/nyregion/25stapleton.html








 

Roy Brown was hugged by relatives after walking out of an upstate courtroom Tuesday.
He served 15 years in prison and was released after DNA tests linked another man to the killing of a social worker.

Kevin Rivoli for The New York Times

  With DNA From Exhumed Body, Man Finally Wins Freedom        NYT        24.1.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/nyregion/24brown.html

 

With DNA From Exhumed Body, Man Finally Wins Freedom

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

AUBURN, N.Y., Jan. 23 — Roy Brown, who spent 15 years in prison on a murder conviction and uncovered evidence while there that linked another man to the crime, was released from prison on Tuesday after DNA tests on the other man’s exhumed body matched saliva on a nightshirt at the crime scene.

After 15 years behind bars, Mr. Brown stepped out of court into a light snowfall and gently pushed his way through a cluster of relatives who vied for his attention. The reception was fine, he said, but he is too sick with liver disease to stand on his feet for long.

“Changes have got to be made, man,” Mr. Brown said later at a lawyer’s office across the street, answering questions in a monotone as he rested awkwardly in a black swivel chair. “They say the wheels of justice move slowly, but you know what? The wheels of justice are flat.”

Mr. Brown, 46, is the eighth person in New York State exonerated through DNA evidence in the past 13 months, more than in any other state during the same period.

The DNA tests that freed him confirmed the results of his own jailhouse investigation, in which he discovered documents that incriminated Barry Bench, a volunteer firefighter, in the murder of Sabina Kulakowski, 49, a social worker who had lived with Mr. Bench’s brother until months before her death. Earlier DNA tests conducted by Mr. Brown’s lawyers linked Mr. Bench’s daughter, Katherine Eckstadt, to the genetic code lifted from the saliva on Ms. Kulakowski’s nightshirt.

Mr. Bench jumped to his death in front of an Amtrak train in 2003, five days after Mr. Brown mailed him a letter accusing him of the crime.

The Cayuga County district attorney, James B. Vargason, ordered Mr. Bench’s body exhumed after a hearing here last month during which Judge Peter E. Corning declined to vacate Mr. Brown’s conviction. Mr. Vargason, who prosecuted the case in 1992, argued that the earlier DNA tests were irrelevant without a paternity test proving that Mr. Bench was Miss Eckstadt’s father.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Vargason joined the defense’s motion to release Mr. Brown, and Judge Mark H. Fandrich, who took over the case upon Judge Corning’s retirement, offered an apology before setting Mr. Brown free.

“I’m sorry it’s taken such a long time for you to come to this day,” Judge Fandrich said. “I’m happy for you and your family. Good luck to you, sir.”

One of Mr. Brown’s lawyers, Nina Morrison, said he has no money, does not know where he is going to live, and suffers from hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver.

He had been released from jail just days before Ms. Kulakowski’s slaying, after serving eight months for threatening another social worker in her office, a man who had ordered Mr. Brown’s daughter removed from his home. He did not know Ms. Kulakowski, who was found bitten, stabbed, beaten and strangled on May 23, 1991, outside the farmhouse where she lived in the town of Aurelius.

Some new information was disclosed in court on Tuesday. Peter J. Neufeld, another of Mr. Brown’s lawyers, said that Peter J. Pinckney, who investigated the murder, had dismissed a firefighter’s suspicions about Mr. Bench’s involvement because he knew Mr. Bench and thought him incapable of killing anyone. Mr. Pinckney was later elected sheriff of Cayuga County but resigned in 2002 after pleading guilty to stealing from a drug investigation fund.

Also revealed on Tuesday was that one of the nation’s leading forensic odontologists, Dr. Lowell Levine, analyzed the bite marks on Ms. Kulakowski’s body before trial and told the district attorney at the time, Paul A. Carbonaro, that the one mark he could interpret “excluded” Mr. Brown, according to copies of Dr. Levine’s handwritten notes. But Mr. Carbonaro never asked Dr. Levine to file an official report, Mr. Brown’s lawyers said Tuesday. Instead, the prosecutors relied on another expert, a local dentist, whose testimony helped convict Mr. Brown.

Even as he supported Mr. Brown’s release, Mr. Vargason said he would not dismiss the indictment against him, and that he needs another month to reinvestigate the case so as to “follow avenues of inquiry that were possibly underdeveloped or even ignored in 1991.” Judge Fandrich will rule on the indictment on March 5.

Meanwhile, Mr. Brown said he will work on “picking up the pieces.” After his release, he went out to eat lasagna with his stepfather and siblings.

As he was about to leave court, Mr. Brown blurted out, “I can’t wait to play Pac-Man.” He looked sorely disappointed when one of his nieces, a perky teenager, told him that the popular 1980s arcade game is now a collector’s item.

    With DNA From Exhumed Body, Man Finally Wins Freedom, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/nyregion/24brown.html

Prosecution Rests in Seeking Death for Killer of Detectives

January 19, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

Retired detectives with red eyes and untucked shirts faced the men’s room wall and wiped their faces with brown paper towels. Back in the courtroom, the convicted man covered his eyes. In the front row, his mother, sister and cousins fell together and sobbed.

The police widow had finished her testimony. Delivered in a halting keen through tears and a deep Haitian lilt, her words gave crescendo to the government’s case to execute Ronell Wilson, 24, for the murder of two undercover detectives on Staten Island in March 2003.

“We no longer celebrate Father’s Day at home,” said the widow, Rose Nemorin, testifying in United States District Court in Brooklyn yesterday. “Instead, we go to the cemetery and I get to watch our children talk and hug a cold wall. It breaks my heart to see my children leaving notes, gifts and hugging a piece of cold wall. The children’s notes read: ‘I love you, Daddy. I miss you. We wish you were here to celebrate Father’s Day with us. We hope you are having a good time in heaven with God.’ ”

When she finished, the jurors walked out for a break. There were wet eyes among them. They have already convicted Mr. Wilson of murder for shooting the detectives, James V. Nemorin, 36, and Rodney J. Andrews, 34, in the back of the head during a covert assignment to buy a gun.

At the close of testimony, prosecutors rested their case for the death penalty. Next week, Mr. Wilson’s family will give an accounting of his loveless boyhood. Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis has ruled that Mr. Wilson will be allowed to read a short statement of remorse without cross-examination.

After hearing testimony on Tuesday from Detective Andrews’s son, who is 16, Mr. Wilson wrote a longer, more detailed statement, his lawyers said in court. Outside the jury’s presence, a defense lawyer, Kelly Sharkey, asked to substitute the new statement, which says, “I am truly sorry for the pain I have caused.”

Prosecutors contested the substitution. Judge Garaufis demurred, worn from the emotion of the day.

“After a good night’s sleep,” he said, “I’ll reflect on what to do.”

The day had been a full one. For the first time since the trial’s start in November, jurors heard Mr. Wilson’s voice. In recorded telephone calls from a federal detention center, he suggested retaliation for an assault on his nephew. Prosecutors offered the recordings as evidence of his ability to order violence from prison.

“Call him and tell him to go see what’s up, yo,” Mr. Wilson says on the recording, “and I ain’t talking about talking about nothing, yo.”

Jurors also heard the voice of Detective Nemorin, who described his undercover work in a clip from a police documentary.

“You’ve got to be nervous,” the detective says. “If you don’t care, you’re going to get hurt. You’ve got to care.”

And jurors heard from those he left behind. First came Sgt. Richard Abbate of the undercover unit, who found his detectives bleeding in the street. He has since retired.

“I’m a supervisor,” Sergeant Abbate said. “It’s my job to bring my team home safely. I did not accomplish my mission that night.”

Marie-Jean Nemorin, sister of the detective, said she had given her baby brother the nickname Little Sweetheart. “We’ll never see him again,” she said.

Then the convicted man’s mother, Cheryl Wilson, rushed from the courtroom. Her son fingered the lining of his suit.

And the widow took the stand. For the benefit of the court stenographer, she spelled the surname that came from her husband. She was 19 when they met.

“My name is Rose Nemorin,” she said. “I am 35 years old. I am the widow of Detective James V. Nemorin. James, my hero, my husband and the father of my three children: Stephan, 11, Rudolphe, 8, and Sarah, 5 years old. Their father and my husband was taken away from us when I was 31 years old and they were only 7, 5 and 18 months.”

Her shoulders were tightly hunched and she held her head sidelong and braced.

“He once told me, ‘Rosie, I am one of the happiest men in the world,’ ” she said. “ ‘I have a beautiful wife whom I love very much, three beautiful children who I love so much and a great job that I love. Rosie, I made success.’ ”

Mrs. Nemorin continued: “I miss seeing his face, his smile and his love. Unfortunately this loving man was taken away from us. For what? He was just trying to make this world a better place for your family, his family and everyone else.”

There were pictures, and she identified those seen on the screen for the jury. In the pictures, Mrs. Nemorin and her husband were young and smiling. He was holding her with both hands, and his nose touched her nose and he was pulling her close. Then they were in wedding clothes and still smiling, and he was holding her hips. Then he was in a T-shirt with their baby on his shoulder.

In the courtroom she was in front of all these people crying. The prosecutor put another picture on the screen, but the machine failed to focus. There was Rose Nemorin up on that screen with her husband pulling her close and the colors bleeding together and the image blurred beyond all recognition.

    Prosecution Rests in Seeking Death for Killer of Detectives, NYT, 19.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/nyregion/19death.html

A 12th Dallas Convict Is Exonerated by DNA

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Jan. 17 — A 50-year-old Dallas man whose conviction of raping a boy in 1982 cost him nearly half his life in prison and on parole won a court ruling Wednesday declaring him innocent. He said he was not angry, “because the Lord has given me so much.”

The parolee, James Waller, was exonerated by DNA testing, the 12th person since 2001 whose conviction in Dallas County has been overturned long after the fact as a result of genetic evidence, lawyers said.

“Nowhere else in the nation have so many individual wrongful convictions been proven in one county in such a short span,” said Barry C. Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that championed Mr. Waller’s case. In fact, Mr. Scheck said, those 12 such instances are more than have occurred anywhere else except the entire states of New York and Illinois since the nation’s first DNA exoneration, in 1989.

In the aftermath of the new evidence, prosecutors had joined defense lawyers in calling for the clearing of Mr. Waller, who spent more than 10 years behind bars before he was paroled in 1993.

“I’m sorry that happened to you, man,” Craig Watkins, the county’s new district attorney, told Mr. Waller on Wednesday, shaking his hand in the Dallas courtroom where a judge later approved a motion to vacate the conviction. That motion now goes to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for formal approval.

Mr. Waller broke down once at the hearing, when describing how his car crashed on the way to a court proceeding in 2001, an accident that killed his pregnant wife, Doris, and the unborn daughter they had wanted to call Grace. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to live no more,’ ” he recalled, mopping his face with a tissue.

One of his lawyers, Nina Morrison, patted him on the back. “He lost 10 years 11 months and 3 days of his liberty literally picking cotton in the fields for no pay,” she told the court. “His perseverance is an inspiration to all of us.”

The judge, John C. Creuzot of Criminal District Court, sought to console Mr. Waller, who stood before him in a tan suit, a white shirt and a tie. “A lot of times we are tested in life, and you certainly had a terrible test,” Judge Creuzot said. “On behalf of any and all public officials at that time, I want to apologize.”

Earlier in the day, the Innocence Project provided synopses of the county’s dozen DNA exonerations. “Nobody knows the reason why we have 12-and-counting here in Dallas, but we’ll find out the answers,” Mr. Scheck said. One Texas lawmaker, State Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, has introduced a bill that would establish a Texas Innocence Commission to study exonerations for ways of eliminating wrongful convictions.

The case against Mr. Waller was largely based on the 12-year-old victim’s identification of him, court papers show.

Around 6 a.m. on Nov. 2, 1982, the boy, identified only as Jay S., was alone in his family’s dark apartment with his 7-year-old brother when he was sodomized by an intruder he described as a black man about 5-foot-8 and weighing 150 pounds, his lower face concealed by a red bandana.

By the boy’s account, he heard the voice of his attacker that night at a 7-Eleven near his home, and turned to see Mr. Waller, who was then 25 and lived with his family in the same apartment complex as the victim, the only black family there. Although there were discrepancies in the boy’s account — Mr. Waller is almost 6-foot-4 and was heavy — and although Mr. Waller presented witnesses saying he was home at the time, he was convicted in 46 minutes and sentenced to 30 years. He won parole in 1993 but had to register as a sex offender.

He had begun petitioning for retesting of the state’s rape evidence in 1989, and redoubled his efforts in 2001 after Texas passed a law granting post-conviction access to DNA testing. Results of hair testing appeared to rule out Mr. Waller as the attacker, but the Court of Criminal Appeals found it inconclusive.

Still, “the Lord kept pushing me because I wanted my name back,” Mr. Waller said Wednesday.

Last month the Innocence Project, through use of a previously unavailable technology called Y-STR DNA, found that genetic material recovered from the victim conclusively excluded Mr. Waller and the victim and could have come only from someone else.

Mr. Waller has started a lawn care business, but remains on parole pending the formal action of the appeals court and must shy from all contact with children. “It has been a long struggle for me,” he said. “They look at you like you’re an animal.”

Mr. Watkins, Dallas County’s first African-American district attorney, took office two weeks ago in a Democratic sweep. “I can say I’m sorry all day,” he told Mr. Waller in court. “I know that doesn’t mean much to you, but I can guarantee to you in the future when I’m the district attorney we will insist that we will not send anyone who’s innocent to prison.”

“The sad thing,” he said, “is the person who actually did this crime is still out there on the streets.”

Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting from Dallas.

    A 12th Dallas Convict Is Exonerated by DNA, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/us/18dna.html

Death 31 Years After Shooting Leads to a Murder Indictment

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and CASSI FELDMAN

Jose Rivera and Juan Cortes were drinking and gambling on a street corner in the South Bronx late in the steamy afternoon of Aug. 2, 1974. But alcohol, heat and a game of craps turned out to be a dangerous combination, and the men soon fell into an argument about a roll of the dice.

Mr. Rivera, then 22 years old, became so enraged that he pulled out a pistol and shot Mr. Cortes in the neck, the authorities have said. Mr. Cortes was rushed to a hospital and survived, but the bullet left him paralyzed.

Thirty-one years later, on Dec. 29, 2005, he died.

Yesterday, the Bronx district attorney’s office announced that it planned to file murder charges against Mr. Rivera, even though he has already served prison time for the attack.

Mr. Rivera is scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow in State Supreme Court in the Bronx on a charge of second-degree murder, said Steven Reed, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.

Mr. Reed said prosecutors decided to pursue the murder charge after the medical examiner’s office determined that Mr. Cortes’s death at age 65 had been caused by the 1974 shooting.

Mr. Cortes’s death is known in official parlance as a “reclassified homicide,” one resulting from an injury incurred in a previous year, sometimes in a previous decade. The number of such deaths reached a record high in 2006, with 38 cases reclassified. In 2004, there were 32. The Police Department said a typical year had about 12 such cases.

Several of the recently reclassified homicide cases have been linked to gunshot and stabbing wounds from the 1970s, including six during 2006 alone, according to the police.

The bullet that hit Mr. Cortes in the neck left him bedridden in a second-floor apartment in Morrisania, and in need of around-the-clock care.

“He’d always feel cold and complained, even in the summer, he was cold,” said Santos Toro, the superintendent of the apartment building where Mr. Cortes lived for about five years before his death.

Decades after the shooting, Mr. Cortes’s legs and fingers remained so badly swollen, said Mr. Toro’s wife, Ana Toro, that one of his home health care attendants became physically ill when she saw his limbs.

“Sometimes he used to say he wanted to die,” Ms. Toro said. “He was in pain. I used to talk to him about God.”

She said Mr. Cortes told her he had been shot when he was a young man, but never discussed the details.

Mr. Rivera served at least two years in prison on an assault charge related to the crime; the exact length of his sentence is unclear because documents from that long ago are hard to locate or are incomplete, the authorities said. Mr. Rivera is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for a burglary conviction in Buffalo, where he had moved.

The Bronx district attorney’s office spent a year seeking witnesses to the shooting and examining its legal options before it decided to reclassify the crime as a murder, Mr. Reed said. He declined to say whether any witnesses had been found.

Cara Buckley and Emily Vasquez contributed reporting.

    Death 31 Years After Shooting Leads to a Murder Indictment, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/nyregion/18reclass.html

The Suspect in 3 Murders and 8 Rapes Blended In

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID STABA

BUFFALO, Jan. 17 — The man sitting at table 35, a booth in the back of the restaurant, made the same impression on Rebecca Klauk last Saturday that he had left on countless other people who encountered him over the years: respectable but wholly unremarkable. He just blended in.

Short and bald, he wore a sensible plaid shirt and had good posture, Ms. Klauk noticed. At one point, he started rearranging the tableware in front of him — somewhat compulsively, she thought. But Ms. Klauk, the manager of the restaurant, a Latin American spot called Solé, was trying not to stare.

Three undercover detectives were at the bar watching the man, Altemio Sanchez, who the authorities suspect is the so-called Bike Park Rapist, responsible for three murders and at least eight rapes in the Buffalo area since 1981. One of the detectives showed Ms. Klauk his badge and instructed her not to touch anything on the table Mr. Sanchez shared with a woman who matched the description of his wife, Kathleen.

But the empty plates could not just sit there, so a busboy cleared them, leaving Mr. Sanchez’s water glass and two others as the couple departed Solé about 6:15 p.m. And they left a good tip.

For decades, Mr. Sanchez had led an outwardly ordinary life, raising children he bragged about, playing golf and working steadily as a machinist at a factory on the outskirts of town. But officials say Mr. Sanchez, 48, was also the reason Ms. Klauk’s father and other parents in this area had for years warned their daughters not to walk forested paths alone.

Prosecutors are expected to bring charges to a grand jury on Thursday in the 1990 rape and strangulation of Linda Yalem, a sophomore at the State University at Buffalo, who was jogging on a bike path just off campus. In 1996, Mr. Sanchez was among the 1,548 people who entered the Linda Yalem Memorial Run, an annual 3.1-mile race that the police regularly videotaped for clues.

He has already been arraigned on murder charges in the slaying of Majane Mazur, a 32-year-old prostitute found strangled in a field near some railroad tracks in 1992, and prosecutors contend that he also killed Joan Diver, a nurse and a mother of four, on Sept. 29, the 16th anniversary of Ms. Yalem’s death. DNA samples taken from Ms. Diver’s car match Mr. Sanchez’s DNA, the authorities said, but prosecutors are not expected to present that case to the grand jury immediately.

In addition, the authorities say Mr. Sanchez raped at least eight other women between 1981 and 1994. DNA evidence links him to five of those attacks, they say.

Mr. Sanchez’s lawyer, Andrew C. LoTempio, has said he is not guilty of any of the allegations, and suggested he would seek a change of venue out of concern his client could not get a fair trial in Erie County.

“There is no history of violence in his house,” Mr. LoTempio said. “If this guy fits the profile, then so does everybody’s uncle.”

To his neighbors in suburban Cheektowaga, a five-minute drive from Solé, the restaurant where he left his DNA on a glass after that fateful dinner on Saturday, Mr. Sanchez was friendly and thoughtful, offering his generator after a storm, or help installing heated gutters. He worked at the same job for 23 years, and seemed obsessive only about his gardening. As ordinary as they come.

The Bike Path Rapist often attacked in the morning, as his victims jogged or strolled outdoors. He often prepared a spot in advance to commit the crime, perhaps leaving a roll of duct tape there, to tape eyes shut. He attacked women from behind, strangling them with electrical wire or drapery cord, leaving two long marks on their necks.

There are only glimpses of the moments where these two characters, the outward Mr. Sanchez and the killer sketched by the police, might have intersected, like the two times Mr. Sanchez was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, in 1999 and 1991. Twice more, he eluded capture by detectives on his trail: in 1990, the police questioned Mr. Sanchez and took his fingerprints after a co-worker reported him lurking on a bike path, and in 1981, officers interviewed his uncle after a rape victim thought she spotted her attacker in the uncle’s car at a shopping mall. (The uncle failed to tell the police his nephew had borrowed the car until this month.)

“I still have this little hope in my heart that this all was his evil twin,” said Joyce Heath, a neighbor and friend of Mr. Sanchez.

Altemio Sanchez was born on Jan. 19, 1958, in San Sebastian, in Puerto Rico’s northwest corner, according to his aunt, Margarita Torres. His mother, Lucy, had four children, two boys and two girls, and when Mr. Sanchez was 2, the family moved to the United States mainland. Mr. Sanchez did not know his father, his lawyer said, and grew up for a time with his mother, who died several years ago, and an elderly stepfather. He lived in Florida and around Buffalo.

“He was a nice kid, a serious kid,” said Ms. Torres. “A quiet kid.”

Mr. Sanchez was 23 at the time of what prosecutors contend was his first attack, the 1981 rape, a crime they have not charged him with in part because the statute of limitations long since expired. Two years later, Mr. Sanchez started a job he held until his arrest on Monday, at a brass factory north of downtown Buffalo. Mr. Sanchez mostly worked the off-shifts: 3:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., or midnight to 7:30 a.m., most recently as a machine operator, moving the sheets of copper alloy that the plant produces.

“I was not aware of any performance issues in the time he worked here,” said Jack B. Alonge, the factory’s director of human resources. “Everyone here was shocked.”

His lawyer said that Mr. Sanchez met his wife, who now works for a marketing company, at Buffalo State College. The year his wife graduated, 1991, Mr. Sanchez was arrested after trying to solicit an undercover police officer in a prostitution sting.

“Are you looking for some action?” Mr. Sanchez, who was driving a white 1988 Pontiac, asked the officer, according to court records. He offered her $25 for intercourse, using a coarser word, and ended up paying a $75 fine instead.

By then, the Sanchezes and their two young sons had moved to the two-story Cape Cod on Allendale Street in Cheektowaga, a house he lovingly cared for, impressing his neighbors. The children went to good schools; Mr. Sanchez coached their basketball team.

Everyone brought a dish to the Sanchez summer garden parties, a mix of the couples’ work friends and neighbors, said Nadine Donohue, who has lived on the street for 28 years with her husband, Jerry. “The scary part is, he’s the nicest person you’d ever want to meet,” Jerry Donohue said. “This is what’s so upsetting. He never made any sexual remarks about a woman, never swore. You’d go to his parties and have a beer or two with him.”

By the time Mr. Sanchez sat down at Solé on Saturday about 5 p.m., the police had been watching him for days, said the Erie County sheriff, Timothy B. Howard.

The surveillance started because of a lucky confluence of events. At almost the same time that investigators determined that DNA from the Bike Path Rapist most likely belonged to a Hispanic man, an F.B.I. profiler said the suspect probably solicited prostitutes. Another investigator, reviewing old cases, happened upon Mr. Sanchez’s uncle and the episode with the car.

All of which led the police to knock on the Sanchezes’ door last week, on the pretense of recovering an unlicensed gun in hopes of obtaining a sample of his DNA. Mr. Sanchez had lost his gun license because of his prostitution arrest, but never turned in the weapon; the police took the .22-caliber pistol from his closet last week, but were unable to retrieve DNA. So they kept trailing him.

After Mr. Sanchez left Solé, the detectives moved quickly — so quickly, in fact, that Ms. Klauk, who left the restaurant for a few minutes, did not see them gather the glasses and other utensils before following Mr. Sanchez to a bookstore and taking his coffee cup from there as evidence.

The DNA results came back Sunday night, and Mr. Sanchez was arrested the next morning as he drove home from work.

Ms. Yalem, 22, was from California, and was found in thick brush off the Ellicott Creek bicycle path. Ms. Diver, trained as a nurse, frequently traveled back to Utah, where her family has a cabin in the woods. A family picking wildflowers stumbled upon Ms. Mazur, who was originally from South Carolina. Christine Mazur was 5 when her crack-addicted mother was killed. Now 19, she lives in South Carolina and is studying to be a teacher.

“He can’t ruin anybody else’s life now,” Ms. Mazur said of Mr. Sanchez’s arrest. “I never had anybody here for my prom, or my first date, or any of the other things your mother should be there for.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

    The Suspect in 3 Murders and 8 Rapes Blended In, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/nyregion/18bike.html

Defense Portrays Harrowing Childhood as Reason to Spare Killer of 2 Detectives

January 17, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

Ronell Wilson had a miserable childhood. There were roaches everywhere. He took beatings, sucked his thumb long past infancy and failed his driver’s license exam six times.

Detective Rodney J. Andrews was a doting father. He told his boys to be leaders. He helped with their homework, taught them chess and took them to theme parks.

“He was the best dad I could ask for,” said Detective Andrews’s elder son, Christian, 16, testifying yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, where a jury must decide whether Mr. Wilson should die by lethal injection for killing Detective Andrews and his partner, James V. Nemorin.

The same jurors have already convicted Mr. Wilson, 24, of murder for shooting the detectives in the back of the head during an undercover assignment on Staten Island in March 2003.

With his head high, his back straight, his voice deepened by adolescence, Christian went on, “He always did stuff for me and Justin.”

In this second phase of the trial, prosecutors seek to add Mr. Wilson’s name to a roster of 46 federal death row inmates, by the count of the Death Penalty Information Center. Just three have been executed since 1963, including Timothy McVeigh in 2001.

Mr. Wilson’s lawyers said they plan to offer his own sorry history to spare him that fate. The trial is expected to last about two weeks, with the mundane and intimate details of biography as evidence.

“Let us begin, ladies and gentlemen,” a defense lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, said in court yesterday, “our sad work together.”

Prosecutors began their case as some twisted childhood reunion. Up to the witness stand came a police officer who had arrested Mr. Wilson for throwing a bottle at a police van at age 11, a young man Mr. Wilson had confronted in a street fight and another Mr. Wilson had bullied at age 13.

“He took my book bag,” said the bullying victim, Jack Marczewski, now a 23-year-old computer technician. “He opened it up and started going through it.”

An assistant United States attorney, Morris J. Fodeman, said in his opening statement that the case for execution would depict patterns of violence and misanthropy escalating from such juvenile delinquency. The judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, wore the dress robes he reserves for solemn occasions.

Mr. Wilson, who maintained a cast of stolid indifference through the first phase of his trial, now seemed a shrunken man, slumped and listless. A screen for the display of evidence photographs lay on the table before him, unwatched.

But his lawyers seemed newly invigorated. After the prosecutor concluded his quiet, studied opening argument, Mr. Dinnerstein made an impassioned plea for mercy.

“It’s about life and death; that’s what we’re going to be talking about,” he said, his voice strained and breaking. “Whether that boy, that person, that man lives or dies.”

He recounted a timeline of lovelessness and neglect, a boy born Earl Ronell Wilson at the start of the crack epidemic to an absent father and an addicted mother. He spoke of an infested apartment in Coney Island, interventions by child welfare workers, cramped quarters, meningitis, cruel nicknames and threats of suicide.

“A suicidal 6-year-old,” Mr. Dinnerstein said.

He asked for mercy, in the form of natural death in a maximum security prison.

“More death,” Mr. Dinnerstein said, “gives honor only to revenge.”

Then prosecutors began recounting the lives of the slain men, starting with Detective Andrews. After three and a half years of legal machinations, his relatives took the witness stand to describe his life, their loss.

“Who was Rodney Andrews to you?” asked a prosecutor, Colleen Kavanagh.

After a long pause, the woman on the witness stand, MaryAnn Andrews, answered, “Rodney was my best friend, the love of my life, my first love, my husband, the father to my two boys.”

Through testimony and family photographs, the jurors watched baby Rodney asleep in a puffy chair beside a cousin, young Rodney all duded up for Mother’s Day in his outlandish Sunday best, teenage Rodney sweeping MaryAnn into his arms for a smooch. They heard of his service in the Navy, a fall overboard that broke his wrists, his struggle to recover and his rebirth as a police officer.

That cousin asleep in the puffy chair, Derek Williams, now 39 and a senior analyst for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, recounted bygone days acting out scenes from “Adam-12” and other television police shows.

A sister-in-law, Rosemary Lubrano, spoke of the void left by Detective Andrews’s death.

“I believe in my heart,” Ms. Lubrano said, “that Rodney is looking down from heaven, and he is watching over us, and he will protect us.”

When Christian walked into the courtroom for his turn at the witness stand, he took a long look at his father’s convicted killer, then turned to receive a prosecutor’s questions. In response, he quantified episodes of homework assistance and other fatherly duties.

“I miss him being there for me and my brother,” Christian said in a strong, confident voice. “Giving me a little advice, and joking around with me.”

As he walked from the courtroom, Christian did not give a second look to Mr. Wilson, slumped there in his chair with an index finger to one temple and a thumb to the other, one fatherless young man hiding his eyes from the gaze of another.

    Defense Portrays Harrowing Childhood as Reason to Spare Killer of 2 Detectives, NYT, 17.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/nyregion/17death.html

Man charged in Phoenix serial case

Posted 1/16/2007 9:31 PM ET
AP
USA Today

PHOENIX (AP) — A man suspected of being the area's serial "Baseline Killer" has been indicted on charges including nine counts of first-degree murder, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

The 74 charges against Mark Goudeau, which also include 15 counts of sexual assault and 11 counts of kidnapping, stem from crimes committed between August 2005 and June 2006 throughout the Phoenix area.

"The reign of terror has ended. The quest for justice has just begun," prosecutor Andrew Thomas said.

Defense lawyer Corwin Townsend said Goudeau will plead not guilty to the new charges. He has already pleaded not guilty to two sexual assaults that authorities also attributed to the Baseline Killer.

"We haven't changed our position at all," he said. "The fact that they threw out more charges does not change our belief that they have the wrong guy."

Townsend said he will add to Goudeau's defense team to handle the new charges, some of which could potentially lead to the death penalty under a conviction.

Police announced last month that the man they believed to be the Baseline Killer was in custody and recommended that Goudeau be charged with murder and other crimes.

Goudeau, an ex-convict, has been in jail since September, when he was arrested in the two sexual assaults. At the time, police stopped short of pronouncing Goudeau the Baseline Killer while they built a case against him.

But last month, police said that investigators had collected forensic evidence — including DNA and ballistics — and other evidence implicating Goudeau in the killings.

"We feel very confident about these charges, very good about where we are with the evidence," Thomas said Tuesday.

Goudeau's defense team has hired its own forensics expert to analyze evidence that led to the sexual assault charges. According to their expert's independent review, Townsend said it doesn't appear that Goudeau can be definitively linked to the suspected sexual assaults of two women in September 2005.

"I feel fairly confident there will not be any type of DNA match," Townsend said.

Goudeau is still scheduled to face the sexual assault charges in a trial to start Monday. But Townsend said the trial likely will be postponed until March.

The Baseline Killer case originally included eight killings. A ninth was publicly revealed in December. Most of the victims, all but one of them women, were killed going about their daily activities, such as leaving work, washing a car or waiting at a bus stop.

Police have said the killer usually struck at night and wore disguises, including a wig of dreadlocks and a fisherman's hat. The name Baseline Killer came from the Phoenix street where some of the earliest crimes were committed.

About half of the Baseline Killer attacks occurred within three miles of the Phoenix home Goudeau shared with his wife. One woman was killed just around the corner.

Goudeau had previously served 13 1/2 years in prison for three aggravated assaults, armed robbery and kidnapping before being paroled in 2004. He once blamed his history of violence on a weakness for crack cocaine.

The Baseline Killer was one of two serial killer cases that spread fear across the Phoenix area in recent months.

In August, police arrested two roommates in what was dubbed the Serial Shooter case. The two men are accused of driving around the city and its suburbs at night, firing at people randomly from a car. Seven people were killed.

The defendants are awaiting trial.

    Man charged in Phoenix serial case, UT, 16.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-16-baseline-killer_x.htm

Man Sentenced to 26 Years for Reporter’s Murder

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By SARAH ABRUZZESE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 — One of the two men convicted of murdering a retired reporter for The New York Times was sentenced today to 26 years in prison.

Michael C. Hamlin, who was 24 when he was arrested, had faced up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery late last year. He was tried for his part in the death of the reporter, David E. Rosenbaum, 63. Mr. Rosenbaum, who had recently retired, was beaten and robbed near his home in Northwest Washington nearly a year ago.

Mr. Hamlin testified at trial that he stole Mr. Rosenbaum’s wallet but that his cousin, Percey Jordan, Jr., who was 42 when he was arrested, struck the victim over the head with a pipe. Mr. Rosenbaum died two days later.

Mr. Jordan is scheduled to be sentenced before the same judge as his cousin, Judge Erik P. Christian, in District of Columbia Superior Court later this month. He faces at least 30 years in prison and a maximum of life without the possibility of parole.

The two men were arrested after surveillance cameras photographed them using Mr. Rosenbaum’s credit cards.

The Rosenbaum family has filed a $20 million suit against the District of Columbia and Howard University Hospital, contending that he would be alive but for their negligence. Mr. Rosenbaum was at first presumed to be intoxicated and was not treated immediately.

“This is a really sad day,” said Marcus D. Rosenbaum, the victim’s brother. “This whole thing is just really sad.”

    Man Sentenced to 26 Years for Reporter’s Murder, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/us/03cnd-rosenbaum.html?hp&ex=1167886800&en=daf19c073cc6694e&ei=5094&partner=homepage