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

Tears flowed from Byron Halsey Tuesday

after he was exonerated of a murder conviction in Elizabeth, N.J.

Vanessa Potkin, one of his lawyers, offered support.

Pool photo by Mike Derer

DNA in Murders Frees Inmate After 19 Years

NYT        16.5.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/nyregion/16dna.html

NYC Fake Firefighter Convicted

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:08 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- A former fashion writer was convicted Wednesday of sexually abusing a woman for almost 13 hours after posing as a firefighter on Halloween to bluff his way into her Manhattan apartment.

A jury needed less than four hours to convict Peter Braunstein in a case that provided a daily window in the bizarre world of a man whose life seemed to grow ever more unstable after he lost his girlfriend and his job in the magazine business.

Braunstein, 43, was convicted of kidnapping, burglary, sex abuse and robbery charges. He was acquitted of arson.

Braunstein's lawyers did not dispute that he carried out the 2005 attack, but said he was so mentally ill that he was unable to form the intent to be held criminally responsible for the crimes.

    NYC Fake Firefighter Convicted, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fake-Firefighter.html

Mom Acquitted of Kidnapping Daughter

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:19 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A woman accused of fleeing with her daughter to Delaware 14 years ago in one of the nation's longest-running missing child cases was acquitted Wednesday of parental kidnapping.

Mary Jane Byrd left Washington in 1993 with her then 4-year-old child during a bitter custody dispute. She claimed she fled the girl's father, Carl Dodd, after years of abuse.

Dodd, who denies the abuse claim, said he searched for his daughter for years. Mother and daughter, now 18, were found by federal marshals in April 2006 at the home of Byrd's mother in Wilmington, Del.

Byrd, 36, shouted ''Oh, thank you, Jesus'' and collapsed sobbing into the arms of her attorney as the Superior Court jury returned its verdict in her favor. Leaving the courtroom, she wept and hugged her daughter tightly, telling reporters that ''God has delivered me.''

She could have faced a year in prison if convicted of parental kidnapping.

Dodd said the jury was likely swayed by the allegations. ''The jury believed all the lies Mary told,'' he said. ''She still has to answer to the man upstairs about the lies she told.''

The week-and-a-half-long trial exposed a troubled five-year relationship between Dodd and Byrd. They broke up shortly after the girl, Marilyn, was born in 1989 and soon began sparring over custody.

Dodd testified he twice called police to force Byrd to allow him to pick up Marilyn for his court-ordered visits. In 1993, Dodd was granted full custody, then Byrd and the child disappeared.

Byrd told jurors that Dodd once held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her, and said he abused both her and his daughter. She said she feared for her life and moved between motels in Delaware, educating the girl herself to avoid detection and working under a false last name.

Dodd admitted to only one infraction, a 1992 verbal threat he said was made out of ''frustration.'' Other than that, he said Wednesday, ''I did nothing wrong.''

Dodd said he has not had any contact with his daughter since she legally became an adult in April. When they first met last year after Byrd's arrest, Dodd said his daughter was cold and sullen. They did not speak after the verdict, and Marilyn left the courthouse with her mother.

''I feel as though, if she wants to talk, I'll be here,'' Dodd said.

(This version CORRECTS that Byrd and the child disappeared in 1993, not Dodd.)

    Mom Acquitted of Kidnapping Daughter, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mother-Acquitted.html

2 Raped by Minister Are Awarded $11.45 Million

May 19, 2007
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., May 18 — In one of the largest judgments in a child sexual abuse suit against the Roman Catholic Church, a Long Island jury on Friday awarded a total of $11.45 million in damages to a young man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers starting in the late 1990s.

The jury deliberated for seven days before finding that the Diocese of Rockville Centre, the sixth-largest in the United States; a church in East Meadow; and its pastor were negligent by hiring and retaining the man who abused the plaintiffs over a period of three years.

After the verdict, the woman tearfully embraced her mother, then held an impromptu news conference in a hallway at State Supreme Court in Nassau County. Saying that thousands of children have been victimized, she added, “I am their voice.”

The purpose of her suit was to “see the truth come out” and to “prevent the abuse of children everywhere,” she said. “Children cannot protect themselves from sexual predators.”

While awaiting his turn to speak, the other victim collapsed in the arms of a lawyer, and court aides had to revive him with oxygen.

“He was just overcome with emotion,” said one of his lawyers, Paul A. Mones.

Later, in a telephone interview, the young man said, “It was extremely difficult for me to relive the experience through the litigation process.” But he urged other victims to come forward because “these kids are going to need therapy and support — you have no idea.”

Both the woman, 23, and the man, 22, testified during the three-week trial that they suffered anxiety, depression, flashbacks, nightmares and difficulties in their careers and in social and romantic relationships as a result of being raped and sodomized by the youth minister, Matthew Maiello.

The jurors, four men and two women — most of them Catholics themselves — left the courthouse without comment.

A lawyer for the church defendants, Kevin McNiff of the firm Mulholland, Minion & Roe, said they were reviewing the verdict and their options.

A diocese spokesman, Sean Dolan, said it was “too early to say” if it would appeal.

“We humbly accept the decision of the jury,” Mr. Dolan added. “We need to try to understand better in terms of the actual dollar amount what that all means. We want to focus on the lessons we’ve learned over the last few years in creating the safest church environment we can. We’re really saddened by the terrible actions of Matthew Maiello, and I hope the award given by the jury helps the victims.”

The jury’s awards approached the $6 million given to each of two victims in a California case in 1998, according to Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer who specializes in sexual abuse cases but was not involved in the Long Island case.

But the Long Island case was notable for more than the size of the judgments. Public attention in church cases has often focused on accused priests rather than on employees other than clergy members, like Mr. Maiello, now 33, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to raping and sodomizing four minors, including the two who sued. He served two years in prison and now lives in Connecticut.

This lawsuit was also the first abuse case against the Catholic Church in New York State — and one of the few in the nation — to go to a jury verdict. Most such suits against the church are dismissed, often because of the statute of limitations, or are quietly settled out of court.

“You very rarely get a chance to hear from the victims — how these guys operate, how the kids get trapped and how the parents get fooled — almost never,” said Mr. Mones, one of the lawyers. “And almost never do you get to hear a pedophile testify in detail; that’s very rare.” Mr. Maiello was subpoenaed to testify at the civil trial.

Convictions in most criminal cases on child sexual abuse, including Mr. Maiello’s, result from plea bargains.

The jury attributed 70 percent of the blame to Mr. Maiello, who did not contest the suit and has few assets.

But the jury also ruled that the church defendants — the Diocese of Rockville Centre; St. Raphael’s Roman Catholic Church in East Meadow; and its pastor, the Rev. Thomas Haggerty — acted “with reckless disregard for the safety of others in the negligent hiring and retention” of Mr. Maiello.

That finding of recklessness means that the church defendants are responsible to pay the full award if Mr. Maiello does not have the money for his share, said the victims’ lead lawyer, Michael G. Dowd.

The jury awarded $2.5 million to each victim for injuries and suffering to date, as well as $250,000 annually to the woman for the next 12 years, and $115,000 annually to the young man for the next 30 years. Her total would be $5.5 million, and his would be $5.95 million.

The diocese, comprising 1.4 million Catholics in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, is one of the nation’s largest and wealthiest. It was the target of a scathing Suffolk County grand jury report in 2003 that found years of sexual abuse complaints that were ignored and covered up.

Since then the diocese has imposed new safeguards, including background checks on employees and volunteers and preventive education for them and for church members.

The victims testified that Mr. Maiello pressured them into having sex with each other and him, plying them with marijuana and alcohol and videotaping them. The abuses started when, as 15-year-old virgins, they were summoned by him to his basement office. The abuse was repeated for years: in the school, rectory, convent and sanctuary, and later in homes, motels, a car, a truck and a boat, they said.

Mr. Maiello said that “God’s plan” brought them together, they said. He gave them prized roles in musical productions but also threatened harm through Mafia connections if they told their secrets, they said.

Other witnesses said that Father Haggerty hired Mr. Maiello even though he knew about Mr. Maiello’s “boundary” and “touching” issues and that Mr. Maiello’s supervisor at another church had said that he could not give a positive recommendation.

The witnesses also said Father Haggerty had ignored the advice of the parish business manager against the hiring and did not sufficiently heed complaints about Mr. Maiello’s conduct once he was hired.

The church’s lawyer, Brian R. Davey, argued that Mr. Maiello was totally at fault, church officials never knew about his crimes and they should not be blamed when the victims’ families saw nothing amiss.

    2 Raped by Minister Are Awarded $11.45 Million, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/nyregion/19church.html

N.Y. woman charged with rape of 11-year-old student

Fri May 18, 2007
2:45PM EDT
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A middle-aged female primary school aide in New York City was charged on Friday with raping an 11-year-old boy more than seven years ago.

Lois Enden, now 55, has been charged with five counts of second-degree rape and two counts of second-degree sodomy and faces up to seven years in prison if convicted, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said in a statement.

Prosecutors allege Enden approached the victim when he was in the fourth grade and took him into an empty room where she kissed him on the mouth. Enden, who has been employed at the school since 1990, then began to drive the boy home after school on a regular basis.

"It alleged that she had sexual intercourse with him at both of their homes at various times between 1999 and June 2000, when he graduated from fifth grade and left the school," Brown said.

He said the investigation began about a month ago when the victim, now 19, met Enden by chance and then told a friend what he said occurred while he was a student at the school in the New York City borough of Queens. The victim's friend persuaded him to report the incident to police.

"The defendant's alleged conduct is not simply a violation of law but of society's innate code of ethics," Brown said. "Parents should never have to be concerned or worried about their children's well-being when in school."

Enden was due to appear in Queens Criminal Court later on Friday.

    N.Y. woman charged with rape of 11-year-old student, R, 18.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1821919320070518

Wrongly jailed U.S. man gets $5 million

Thu May 17, 2007
11:21AM EDT
Reuters
By Av Harris

HARTFORD, Connecticut (Reuters) - A man jailed for 18 years for a rape he did not commit was paid $5 million in compensation by the state of Connecticut.

James Tillman, now 45, was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to 45 years in prison a year later. He was exonerated in 2006 and released after a DNA test proved his innocence.

"No amount of money we give Mr. Tillman will erase this miscarriage of justice," Connecticut House of Representatives Speaker James Amann, a Democrat, said before lawmakers voted unanimously late on Wednesday to give him $5 million.

"We can, however, contribute to his healing, and help Mr. Tillman move on with his life," Amann said.

The case had racial overtones. The victim, who is white, identified Tillman, who is black, from a police line-up. Police never caught the real rapist.

Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell, a Republican, has publicly apologized to Tillman on behalf of the state but previously offered him a much smaller $500,000 payment. She said she supports the legislature's $5 million figure.

In exchange for the settlement, Tillman agreed not to sue the state and police for other claims, including medical malpractice due to a botched prison surgery that permanently damaged his right leg.

The lump-sum payment will not be taxed by the state but is subject to federal income taxes.

Tillman, who was 26 when convicted, lives with his mother and works as an office assistant. He often speaks to school groups about his plight and expressed gratitude to lawmakers who supported his cause.

His DNA test in 2006 was granted after lawyers from the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal clinic, got involved on his behalf, working with state authorities.

    Wrongly jailed U.S. man gets $5 million, R, 17.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1734378920070517

DNA in Murders Frees Inmate After 19 Years

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By TINA KELLEY

ELIZABETH, N.J., May 15 — A man who served 19 years in prison for the sadistic murders of his companion’s two children walked out of the Union County Courthouse flanked by his family members after a judge vacated his convictions on Tuesday.

Prosecutors contended that DNA evidence in the case would probably change the mind of the jury that convicted the man, Byron Halsey, 46. They also said that the DNA evidence pointed instead to Cliff Hall, a neighbor who testified against Mr. Halsey at his 1988 trial and who is currently in prison for three sexual assaults.

Mr. Halsey, who was handcuffed, sat crying silently during the brief proceeding in Union County Superior Court before Judge Stuart L. Peim.

As he left the courthouse, Mr. Halsey said, “I thank my Lord and savior Jesus for keeping me.”

Asked about his emotional state, he smiled and said, “I don’t want to get in more trouble.” He added, What was done to me was criminal at best.”

Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, the Manhattan legal clinic that revived the case, said: “It’s a miracle that Byron is here with us, because if ever there was a case where there was a risk of executing an innocent man, it was this case. Because the facts of the case were so horrible.”

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty for Mr. Halsey in the 1985 killings. The crimes were particularly chilling — Tina Urquhart, 7, was raped and strangled, and her brother, Tyrone Urquhart, 8, died after four nails were hammered into his skull with a brick. The children’s bodies were found in the basement of a rooming house in Plainfield where Mr. Halsey lived with their mother.

Mr. Halsey, a factory worker, was convicted in 1988 of two counts of felony murder and other charges, and sentenced to two life terms and 20 years. He was not eligible for the death penalty because he was not found guilty of purposeful and knowing murder, a capital offense, one of his lawyers said.

His release comes at a crucial time in the state’s debate over abolishing the death penalty, which has not been carried out since 1963. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for the most serious crimes. A similar bill was introduced in the Assembly last November. There are nine men now on death row in New Jersey.

Mr. Halsey was released on $55,000 bail. In a statement, the Union County prosecutor’s office said he was still facing charges of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of aggravated manslaughter, two counts of felony murder, child abuse and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. He was scheduled to appear in court again on July 9.

The office would not comment on whether or not it intended to pursue those charges in a new trial. But Mr. Scheck said he had not heard anything from prosecutors to indicate that they would not move to dismiss the charges in July.

Mr. Halsey will live in Newark in a supervised setting where he can get job training, Mr. Scheck said. He will be required to wear an electronic ankle monitor for the next 45 days.

“It was a minor miracle that he was not sentenced to death,” Mr. Scheck added. “At the trial, a few of the jurors just didn’t believe in capital punishment.”

Mr. Halsey contacted the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, after exhausting his appeals. Advanced DNA techniques that were not available at the time of the trial showed that the evidence had no link to Mr. Halsey. It did, however, show a match with Mr. Hall, whose DNA samples were already in the state’s database because of his convictions in sex crimes that occurred after the Urquhart children were killed.

The prosecutor’s office said Tuesday night that it was looking into bringing charges against Mr. Hall.

Mr. Scheck noted that in about a quarter of the 201 wrongful convictions that have been overturned with the use of DNA evidence, people had confessed or admitted to crimes they did not commit. Mr. Halsey signed a confession after 30 hours of interrogation, Mr. Scheck said. Mr. Halsey’s lawyers said he had a sixth-grade education and severe learning disabilities.

Dolores Mann, one of his original lawyers, said Mr. Halsey had maintained his innocence from the beginning.

“I’m hoping the case sheds light when the bill goes to the Assembly, so the death penalty will be taken off the books,” she said.

Margaret Urquhart, the victims’ mother, said in a statement: “I knew Byron loved Tyrone and Tina. It didn’t make sense to me that he could have done this. I always had my doubts, but I didn’t know what to do about them. I am thankful that the DNA testing has identified who really did this to my children and that Byron is being released today. I want justice done in this case.”

Another lawyer for Mr. Halsey, Raymond Brown, said his client was looking forward to one thing in particular after being released.

“He said something about taking a bath,” Mr. Brown said. “He hasn’t taken one in 20 years.”

    DNA in Murders Frees Inmate After 19 Years, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/nyregion/16dna.html

170 New Yorkers' Gay Marriages Upheld

May 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BOSTON (AP) -- The marriages of more than 170 gay couples from New York who wed in Massachusetts before last July are valid because New York had not yet explicitly banned same-sex marriages, a Massachusetts judge ruled.

Couples are barred from marrying in Massachusetts if their marriages would be prohibited in their home states. The New York Court of Appeals ruled against same-sex marriages on July 6, 2006.

The Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders had asked for clarification of the status of New York couples who married in Massachusetts before that ruling. Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow gay marriage in May 2004.

Suffolk Superior Court Judge Thomas Connolly ruled last week that those early marriages are legally valid.

Although the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said in March 2006 that gay couples from states with no ''express prohibition'' of same-sex marriage could marry in Massachusetts, it was unclear at that time whether gay marriage was specifically banned in New York and Rhode Island.

Connolly ruled in September that gay couples from Rhode Island have the right to marry in Massachusetts because laws in their state do not expressly prohibit same-sex marriage.

    170 New Yorkers' Gay Marriages Upheld, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gay-Marriage.html

Reporter's Notebook

This Season’s Must-See Criminal Trial

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

“Sex and the City,” meet “Law & Order.”

The trial of Peter Braunstein has it all: kinky sex, celebrity, power and romance, in a Manhattan courtroom setting.

There have been references to cultural icons like Manolo Blahnik shoes, New York City firefighters and Anna Wintour. While a fugitive from the law, Mr. Braunstein wrote a “personal manifesto” that rivaled that of the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, in its obsessive dedication to a cause.

But where Mr. Kaczynski was a murderous mathematician living in the wilderness and seeking revenge on technological society, Mr. Braunstein was a frustrated writer hiding from the police in university libraries and hatching revenge fantasies to protest New York City’s fixation on fashion, status and glamour, and a world to which he had once belonged but which had cast him out.

Mr. Braunstein even taxed the pop-culture trivia knowledge of courtroom spectators last week, when his lawyer read a passage of his manifesto in which he railed that there should be a special circle of hell reserved for Darren Star. Darren who? Bonus points for those who recognized him as the producer of “Sex and the City.”

Mr. Braunstein achieved his own celebrity status on Oct. 31, 2005, when he dressed as a firefighter, used a ruse to get into the Chelsea apartment of a woman he barely knew from work, tied her naked to her bed for what prosecutors say was 13 hours, and groped her.

His trial for kidnapping and sex abuse, unfolding over the last two weeks in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, has become a media feast. The coverage has been at once serious, because of the horror of what Mr. Braunstein is accused of doing, and disproportionate, in a city where 597 murders and 1,500 rapes were recorded last year.

Mr. Braunstein is arguing that he should be acquitted because of mental illness.

The woman’s terror came across in a tape of the 911 call she made the morning after the attack, once Mr. Braunstein had left her apartment and she had untied her bonds with her teeth. But the crime, she acknowledged in her testimony, left deeper psychological than physical scars.

It devastated her sense of trust, she testified. But the swollen eye and chemical burns that she suffered, when Mr. Braunstein drugged her with a chloroform-soaked rag, healed, with the help of cortisone and a dermatologist.

Prosecutors say that in Mr. Braunstein’s twisted mind, the victim was a stand-in for his ex-girlfriend Jane Larkworthy, the beauty editor of W magazine, who had rejected him. Ms. Larkworthy, whose blond good looks and cool demeanor were on display on the witness stand for two days last week, described their sadomasochistic role-playing, including his pretending to knock her out with a chloroform-soaked rag.

The prosecution’s case has evoked a keen appreciation of Mr. Braunstein’s plot devices.

A Police Department criminalist testified that Mr. Braunstein made smoke bombs — which he set up to gain entry to the victim’s apartment — in not just any paper cups, but in a colorful type of Dixie Cups called Krazy Kritters.

Crime scene photographs show the strappy lavender Manolo Blahnik stilettos that he put on the woman while she was drugged. The photos show them arranged on the bed in artful disarray, as if on a stage set.

‘Imagine Nation’

To such ghoulish flourishes, Mr. Braunstein brings intellectual credentials far more developed than those of the ordinary criminal. He co-edited a book, “Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s,” published by Routledge in 2002. He was a media writer for Women’s Wear Daily from 2000 to 2002, when he quit in a huff, as he was about to be fired for being rude to a publicist for Vogue magazine. He nearly completed a Ph.D. in history at New York University. He grew up speaking French in Kew Gardens, Queens, where he went to the Kew-Forest School, a private school.

Both sides have quoted liberally from the defendant’s writing, the prosecution to show that he was motivated by revenge, the defense to show that he was losing his mind.

In his manifesto, he envisioned a Clockwork Orange world devoid of passion and emotion, where anger would be relegated to underground clubs and joy would be a misdemeanor, where he and Aaron Spelling — creator of “Charlie’s Angels” — would go to heaven and Ms. Wintour and Mr. Star would go to hell.

“Another chick with just the right clothes, accessories and beauty products, but not heart,” Mr. Braunstein wrote in his diary, reminiscing about a fashion editor who had criticized him.

He added, “If there ever was a contingent of hubris-drenched compensated sociopaths crying out for retribution, it’s this crowd.”

Prosecutors made much of a passage of his manifesto in which he declared, “I don’t hear voices,” which seems contrary to the defense contention that he was schizophrenic.

The defense countered with a passage in which Mr. Braunstein predicted that he would go to heaven, “along with Joan of Arc,” famous for having visions and hearing voices.

Prosecutors showed the jury a page ripped out of a paperback called “The Want-Ad Killer,” a true-crime book by Ann Rule, found among Mr. Braunstein’s possessions. Parts had been underlined, a prosecutor said portentously, like “All his energy was channeled into his obsession: revenge against women,” and “Harvey was not insane, not in the legal sense, and not in the clinical sense.”

Mr. Braunstein also carried Ms. Larkworthy’s love letters in his backpack while on the run for six weeks through Ohio and Tennessee. His defense lawyer forced Ms. Larkworthy to read the letters aloud in court. Like most love letters, they were embarrassing. Ms. Larkworthy winced as she read them, before the judge took pity and ordered a stop to the recitation.

But Mr. Braunstein listened with all the concentration of a critic, and seemed to enjoy the reading. It was the only time during the trial that he was spotted smiling.

    This Season’s Must-See Criminal Trial, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/nyregion/13braunstein.html

Man Who Admitted Killing Son Set Free

May 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:32 p.m. ET
The New York Times

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- A man who admitted killing his son 17 years ago was sentenced to probation in exchange for saying where the toddler's body was buried -- even though the remains were not found during a lengthy search.

Curtis Williams said he buried the clothed body of 2-year-old Curtis McCoy under 3 feet of dirt on a hilly, brush-filled area beneath an elevated portion of the New Jersey Turnpike in Jersey City. Searchers sifted through soil covering hundreds of square feet last month but failed to find the remains.

The plea deal -- in which a hindering apprehension charge replaced murder counts that carried a life sentence upon conviction -- remained in effect. On Friday, Judge Peter Vazquez sentenced Williams to five years of probation, the maximum allowed, prosecutor Debra Simon said.

Authorities believe Williams was telling the truth about where he buried McCoy's body because he passed a polygraph test.

Simon said the plea deal came about because the case against Williams was weak -- there were only two witnesses, and both may have had ulterior motives to testify against him -- and prosecutors wanted to give McCoy's family closure.

''I didn't have a slam dunk of a case,'' Simon said Saturday. ''If we go to trial for murder and we lose, and we ask him where the baby's body is, he would have laughed. And if we win, what motive would he have to tell us where the baby is?''

Williams, 40, initially was charged with the boy's 1989 murder in January 2006. At the time, he was serving a sentence for fraud for claiming McCoy as a dependent in a loan application. As part of the plea deal, that charge was also dropped.

Williams initially told Newark police that his son had gone missing while they were out shopping.

The boy's mother contacted police in 2004, around the 15th anniversary of her son's disappearance. Jersey City police eventually found evidence implicating Williams, which led to the murder charge.

Williams' lawyer, Jeffrey Jablonski, said the plea deal was the only leverage prosecutors had against Williams to get him to reveal where McCoy's body was buried.

''If Mr. Williams knew where the body was, that was his largest bargaining chip,'' Jablonski said Saturday. ''I know that sounds terribly, terribly harsh, but that's the reality of the situation.''

    Man Who Admitted Killing Son Set Free, NYT, 12.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Child-Death.html

Conviction Is Vacated After 22 Years, but Murder Suspect Is Not Free to Go

May 11, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

Carmine Carini’s cousins were assassins. Prosecutors and Mafia defectors have credited them with numerous killings. One time they were ordered to kill a federal prosecutor but instead they killed his father, an administrative judge who handled parking tickets. They were killed for their blunder.

Their names were Vincent and Eddie Carini, and they were bad guys to hang around with if you wanted to stay out of trouble. Carmine did hang around with them, and did not stay out of trouble. At age 25, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder of a record store owner, a crime some say he did not commit.

That was the year his son was born, 1985. Since then he has never implicated his cousins in the killing, even as he filed eight applications to contest his conviction on procedural grounds. None of these found success — not the effort to fault a defense lawyer for failing to object when a juror was dismissed, not the effort to challenge the verdict sheet, nothing.

But as of yesterday morning Mr. Carini is no longer a convicted murderer, on account of a celebrity lawyer and radio show host, two prolific Mafia cooperating witnesses and a story of tortured conscience that leads right back to Vincent and Eddie Carini.

Before a dozen of Carmine Carini’s relatives and supporters in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Justice Guy J. Mangano Jr. vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial on charges of second-degree murder. Mr. Carini exhaled deeply, and there was a round of applause.

“In between crossing himself,” said his lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, a host of a radio show, “he said he’s ready to come home.”

But first Mr. Carini will have to decide how ready. An assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, offered him the chance to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, a charge that carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years and would allow him to leave prison almost immediately.

“The people still certainly believe in his guilt,” Ms. Nicolazzi said, adding that a plea bargain would require him to acknowledge a role in the killing.

Mr. Carini has maintained he played no role. After the hearing, he returned to the holding pens to consider his lot, a proposition requiring him to cast his memory back to the early 1980s.

Back then, court documents show, Salvatore Mangiavillano, known as Fat Sal, was a car thief and a high school classmate of Eddie Carini. And Frank Smith was a teenage car thief with a specialty: four-door models by General Motors.

After breaking a car’s interior lights to obscure the occupants from view, Mr. Smith has testified, he could get $200 from Vincent and Eddie Carini, whom he described as “tough guys and killers.” Mr. Smith, by his own account, graduated to participate in murders with Vincent and Eddie Carini.

On Nov. 18, 1983, a record store owner named Verdi Kaja, who had business dealings with the Carinis, was summoned to a car, driven several blocks, shot three times in the head and dumped in the street.

With the testimony of witnesses who said they had watched Carmine Carini get into the car, he was convicted as the driver and the gunman. Prosecutors said he later visited the victim’s family to warn them against talking to the police.

During Mr. Carini’s time in prison, the Mafia’s fortunes experienced a well-documented waning. Federal prosecutors adopted Mr. Smith and Mr. Mangiavillano as reliable cooperating witnesses in a number of cases.

And in June 2004, United States attorneys wrote to the Homicide Bureau of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, disclosing that both men had heard Vincent Carini, who had long since been killed, confess to the murder of the record shop owner.

The homicide bureau chief, Kenneth M. Taub, passed this information along to Carmine Carini, who began to seek a new trial. At a hearing in February, Justice Mangano entertained the new accounts from the cooperating witnesses.

This put state prosecutors in a fix: To discredit the witnesses could amount to undermining successful federal Mafia prosecutions.

At the hearing, both men recounted hearing Vincent Carini’s confession.

Mr. Mangiavillano described it this way: “I seen him standing outside his mom’s house. His mom’s house, I believe to be on 88th Street and 17th Avenue, across the street from the schoolyard. Anyway, I seen him standing there. I pulled over and I seen that he was sobbing, he was crying. I asked him what was the matter and he told me, ‘My cousin Carmine just got convicted for a murder that I did.’ ”

Prosecutors argued that Carmine Carini has had access to this information for years; defense lawyers countered that factors including the intricacies of Mafia codes of conduct would have prevented him from obtaining any sworn testimony.

At a hearing in April, prosecutors said the new evidence fit a more convincing theory of the crime: Carmine Carini drove the car, while Vincent Carini sat in the back seat and fired the gun. Under the legal doctrine of acting in concert, a jury could accept that version of events and still convict Carmine Carini of murder.

But before that theory can be explored in a new trial, Mr. Carini has a decision to make. Justice Mangano set his bail at $500,000. As he was handcuffed and led away, Mr. Carini blew a quick kiss to his family.

Outside the courtroom, his relations gathered around the lawyer, Mr. Kuby, to ask how they could mortgage their houses for bail.

“I was hoping that he was going to walk out right now,” said Mr. Carini’s 22-year-old son, the one born the year he went to prison, the one he named Vincent, just like his cousin.

    Conviction Is Vacated After 22 Years, but Murder Suspect Is Not Free to Go, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/nyregion/11vacate.html

Vegans Sentenced for Starving Their Baby

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:47 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- A vegan couple were sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for the death of their malnourished 6-week-old baby boy, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.

Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell imposed the mandatory sentences on Jade Sanders, 27, and Lamont Thomas, 31. Their son, Crown Shakur, weighed just 3 1/2 pounds when he died of starvation on April 25, 2004.

The couple were found guilty May 2 of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. A jury deliberated about seven hours before returning the guilty verdicts.

Defense lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically use no animal products. They said Sanders and Thomas did not realize the baby, who was born at home, was in danger until minutes before he died.

But prosecutors said the couple intentionally neglected their child and refused to take him to the doctor even as the baby's body wasted away.

''No matter how many times they want to say, 'We're vegans, we're vegetarians,' that's not the issue in this case,'' said prosecutor Chuck Boring. ''The child died because he was not fed. Period.''

Although the life sentences were automatic, Sanders and Thomas begged for leniency before sentencing. Sanders urged the judge to look past his ''perception'' of the couple.

''I loved my son -- and I did not starve him,'' she said.

When the judge told the defendants they could ask for a new trial, Thomas hung his head low.

''I'm dying every day in there,'' he said, ''and that could take three years.''

    Vegans Sentenced for Starving Their Baby, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Vegans-Baby-Death.html

Man With HIV Gets Life Term for Sex Case

May 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:40 p.m. ET
The New York Times

DALLAS (AP) -- An HIV-positive man who prosecutors say secretly videotaped sexual encounters with 131 young men was sentenced to life in prison for attempting to entice a 15-year-old boy to engage in sex acts.

During his trial, prosecutors alleged Willie Atkins knew of his condition yet endangered dozens of partners by rarely using condoms, and that there was no evidence that he warned anyone that he was HIV-positive.

Atkins was sentenced Friday for attempting to entice a minor for sex, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Because Atkins had two previous felony convictions, for aggravated robbery and firearms possession, he was eligible for the life sentence.

According to authorities, Atkins lured young men to his apartment by offering them jobs to work for his landscaping company, but authorities have had difficulty identifying the men. Jurors at his trial saw clips from 90 hours of sexually explicit videotape.

His defense attorney, Richard Franklin, said Atkins was being unfairly targeted.

''They want to say Willie Atkins gave all these people AIDS, spread HIV all over the place,'' Franklin said. ''They can't be living in some parallel universe where they've never heard of AIDS. It can't be his fault alone, if he has any fault at all.''

The ''dangerous activity'' each side engaged in ''cancels each other out,'' he said.

    Man With HIV Gets Life Term for Sex Case, NYT, 7.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sex-Offender-HIV.html

Mo. Paroles Killer of Abusive Husband

May 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:51 p.m. ET
The New York Times

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A 76-year-old woman left prison Friday after living 25 years behind bars for helping kill her husband, who she said had been abusing her.

Shirley Lute was released to shouts of support and cries of ''We love you, Ms. Lute!'' from inmates at the Chillicothe Correctional Center, said Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Hauswirth.

Lute was initially sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for at least 50 years. She was convicted of aiding her son in killing her husband, Melvin, whom she claims physically tortured and mentally tormented her.

In 2004, then-Gov. Bob Holden commuted her sentence to make her immediately eligible for parole, but the state Board of Probation and Parole refused to release her. Then, earlier this year, the state Supreme Court overturned the board and ordered her released.

The board on Monday granted parole to Lute and another woman who also said she was abused by the husband she killed.

Lute will remain on parole for the rest of her life. Hauswirth said he could not discuss Lute's parole conditions because they are confidential. All parolees must abide by some general requirements, such as not using drugs or possessing weapons.

Her lawyer didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Hauswirth said the other woman granted parole, Lynda Branch, will likely be released next week.

Branch, 54, was convicted of shooting her husband in 1986. She says she grabbed the gun after he threatened to shoot her and her daughter.

Both women's cases were handled by the Missouri Battered Women's Clemency Coalition, which includes professors and students at the state's four law schools.

    Mo. Paroles Killer of Abusive Husband, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Parole-Murders.html

McGreevey, Wife Meet in Divorce Court

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:12 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) -- Former Gov. James E. McGreevey and his estranged wife went to divorce court on Friday in their first public meeting since he resigned and announced he was ''a gay American.''

Judge Karen Cassidy ordered the hearing to consider custody issues and other motions in the contentious divorce case between McGreevey and Dina Matos McGreevey.

''Our fears are it's going to be a media circus,'' McGreevey's attorney Matthew D. Piermatti said of the proceeding.

Matos McGreevey declined to comment to reporters as she arrived at the courthouse. Her lawyer, John N. Post, did not return messages seeking comment.

The former governor also declined to speak with reporters when he arrived at the courthouse alone.

The divorce has drawn intense publicity, much of it brought on by court filings in which they accuse each other of bad parenting and other misdeeds.

Each partner has written a tell-all book about the marriage, which ended in 2004 when McGreevey, then governor of New Jersey, told the world he had had an extramarital affair with a male aide. McGreevey, 49, later claimed his former lover tried to blackmail him, and said he resigned rather than succumb the man's threats. The man, Golan Cipel, denies having had an affair with McGreevey.

The McGreeveys have one child, 5-year-old Jacqueline.

Piermatti said the judge likely will decide temporary custody issues Friday. The curly headed preschooler currently lives with her mother and visits her father every other weekend.

One of the most contentious issues in the divorce is what the child should be exposed to. Her mother made McGreevey and his partner take down a nude photograph in their home, contends that Jacqueline should not be allowed to sleep in her father's bed and says the girl should not be allowed to receive communion in the Episcopal Church because she is being raised a Roman Catholic.

Matos McGreevey's memoir, ''Silent Partner,'' hits bookstores on Tuesday. Her husband put out his own book, ''The Confession,'' last September, saying then that he had carried on his affair with Cipel while his wife was hospitalized after a difficult child birth.

    McGreevey, Wife Meet in Divorce Court, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gay-Governor-Divorce.html

Immigration - Related Cases Clog Courts

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Immigration-related felony cases are swamping federal courts along the Southwest border, forcing judges to handle hundreds more cases than their peers elsewhere.

Judges in the five, mostly rural judicial districts on the border carry the heaviest felony caseloads in the nation. Each judge in New Mexico, which ranked first, handled an average of 397 felony cases last year, compared with the national average of 84.

Federal judges in those five districts -- Southern and Western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California -- handled one-third of all the felonies prosecuted in the nation's 94 federal judicial districts in 2005, according to federal court statistics.

While Congress has increased the number of border patrol officers, the pace of the law enforcement has eclipsed the resources for the court system.

Judges say they are stretched to the limit with cases involving drug trafficking or illegal immigrants who have also committed serious crimes. Judges say they need help.

''The need is really dire. You cannot keep increasing the number of Border Patrol agents but not increasing the number of judges,'' said Chief Judge John M. Roll of the District of Arizona.

A bill by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and co-sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, would add 10 permanent and temporary judges in Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern and Western Texas. This proposal, and others like it, have gone nowhere in the past two years.

''I can't even tell you how much we need that,'' Roll said.

The entire federal court system is affected, from U.S. marshals to magistrate judges. The bottleneck has even derailed enforcement efforts.

During a push to crack down on illegal immigration last fall, Customs and Border Protection floated a plan for New Mexico that would have suspended the practice of sending home hundreds of illegal immigrants caught near the border with Mexico. Instead, these people would be sent to court.

The idea, called ''Operation Streamline,'' was to make it clear that people caught illegally in the U.S. would be prosecuted.

Then New Mexico's federal judges reminded the Border Patrol that they lacked the resources to handle the hundreds of new defendants who would stream into the court system every day.

''We said, 'Do you realize that the second week into this we're going to run out of (jail) space?''' Martha Vazquez, chief judge for the District of New Mexico, recalled telling Border Patrol chief David Aguilar.

''We were obviously alarmed because where would we put our bank robbers? Our rapists? Those who violate probation?'' she said.

Border Patrol eventually dropped the idea. Officials said they could not get all the necessary agencies to agree to it.

It is estimated more than 1 million people sneak across the southwestern U.S. border and illegally enter the country every year. In Arizona, the busiest entry point for illegal immigration, state officials believe almost 4,000 people attempted to enter every day in 2006.

Many lawmakers, advocates and President Bush favor overhauling guest worker programs and rules for businesses that hire illegal immigrants. The intent is to eliminate the incentive for workers to sneak into the country. Bush promoted his latest proposal for new worker visas this month in the border community of Yuma, Ariz.

In recent years, however, Congress has focused on increased enforcement.

The Border Patrol has almost 2,800 more agents than the 9,821 it had in September of 2001. An additional 6,000 National Guard troops have provided logistical support to the Border Patrol since last May.

Congress has made available more than $1.2 billion for reinforcements, including fences, vehicle barriers, cameras and other security equipment.

Homeland Security officials say the increased security is working. In Yuma, Bush said that the number of people apprehended for illegally crossing the southern border into the U.S. has declined by nearly 30 percent this year.

Court officials, however, say they are in crisis mode trying to deal with all the defendants.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, has urged U.S. attorneys and courts to prosecute more illegal immigrants and pushed for more resources for both. But he has discovered that while his colleagues who do not represent a border district are eager to add Border Patrol officers, many do not realize the effect that will have on the court system, his spokesman said.

Even lawmakers from border states say they cannot justify adding judgeships in one district when other districts also need them.

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, says her state needs 12 judges, not just help on the border.

''I'd be happy to support any bill that gives California its fair share,'' Feinstein said in a statement. ''And I will seek to amend any bill that does not.''

Court officials say they have had to be creative just to try the cases they have. Visiting judges help out in some districts. In Arizona, magistrates hold sessions on the weekends and have seen as many as 150 defendants in a day.

In New Mexico, Vazquez, the chief judge, and former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias went on a Spanish-language radio station broadcast in Mexico this winter to warn people about the penalties for illegally entering the country.

Court administrators have trouble keeping employees, such as interpreters, because of the grind. Judges' staffs struggle with burnout. Everyone fights to keep up morale as they hear countless sad stories from migrants who broke the law searching for a better life in the United States.

''It'd be swell to have another judge or two,'' said Judge George Kazen, who is based on the border in Laredo, in the Southern District of Texas. ''It would mean a little more time to spend on civil stuff, and a little more time to reflect. We have to make quick calls and move on.''

    Immigration - Related Cases Clog Courts, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Crowded-Courts.html

Ill. Priest Pleads Guilty to Sex Abuse

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

JOLIET, Ill. (AP) -- A Catholic priest previously convicted of child molestation has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two teenage brothers in the 1990s.

Louis Rogge, 76, of Joliet pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Under a deal with prosecutors, he will likely serve 30 days in jail and four years of probation. He had faced a sentence of three to seven years in prison.

The Will County State's Attorney's office accused Rogge of abusing the first boy in 1996, when he was 15, and the second in 1999, when he also was 15.

Rogge was a longtime family friend and spiritual adviser for the boys, prosecutors said.

In 1974, Rogge pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation in Athens, Ga., and was sentenced to six years probation, officials said.

Rogge, a priest with the Carmelite Order, was removed from public ministry in 2002 when the church learned about his decades-old sexual molestation conviction, officials said.

A Will County judge accepted Rogge's guilty plea and ordered a sex-offender evaluation.

Prosecutors said Rogge has had a heart attack and requires ongoing care.

''It's an appropriate disposition in the case,'' said Charles Pelkie, spokesman for State's Atty. James Glasgow. ''He's in his 70s, and we consulted with the family members on this.''

Rogge's sentencing is set for July 26.

    Ill. Priest Pleads Guilty to Sex Abuse, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Priest-Abuse.html

Ohio Judge Frees Man After Bible Quiz

April 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CINCINNATI (AP) -- A man arrested on Wednesday for allegedly trying to use a stolen credit card at a drugstore got a break from a judge after passing a sort of Bible quiz.

When Eric Hine appeared in court this morning, his attorney described him as a church-goer, hoping the judge would set a low bond.

Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge John Burlew was skeptical and asked Hine to recite the 23rd Psalm.

He did: all six verses. Some in the courtroom applauded.

Burlew was satisfied and released Hine on a $10,0000 appearance bond, meaning he'll have to pay that amount if he doesn't show up for his next court date.

    Ohio Judge Frees Man After Bible Quiz, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Defendant-Bible-Passage.html

Wis. Teen Convicted of Rape and Murder

April 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MANITOWOC, Wis. (AP) -- A jury convicted a 17-year-old boy Wednesday of raping a photographer and helping his uncle, whose previous brushes with the law brought attention to the case, kill her and burn her body.

Brendan Dassey was convicted of homicide, sexual assault and mutilation of a corpse in the death of Teresa Halbach, 25, on Halloween 2005.

His uncle, Steven Avery, 44, was convicted last month of her murder and is awaiting sentencing June 1. He previously served 18 years in prison for rape before being exonerated by DNA evidence and freed in 2003.

Dassey faces sentencing Aug. 6. Both he and Avery face mandatory life terms on the homicide charge.

Mike Halbach, Teresa's brother, said his family was relieved the two cases were over.

''Hopefully Teresa can now enjoy her time in heaven instead of worrying about us,'' he said. ''We're sending both of them to prison.''

During the nine-day trial, Manitowoc County Circuit Judge Jerome Fox allowed prosecutors to show the jury a three-hour videotaped statement in which Dassey detailed how Halbach was raped and killed. The teen later recanted the confession.

Unlike his uncle, who never took the witness stand at either trial, Dassey testified in his own defense, saying he had lied when he told of going to Avery's home, seeing Halbach shackled nude in a bed, raping her and helping Avery kill her and burn the body.

He said he made up the story but may have taken some details from a book he read.

''I don't know,'' he answered repeatedly when asked why he would say such things.

The prosecution argued that evidence such as leg irons and handcuffs in Avery's bedroom and two bullets -- one with Halbach's DNA on it -- matched what the teen had told investigators.

Avery's trial drew widespread attention because he had served 18 years in prison for a 1985 rape before DNA evidence showed he didn't commit that crime. Released in 2003, he claimed he was framed for the Halbach murder by the same sheriff's department he was suing for the wrongful conviction.

Halbach disappeared after going to the Avery family's auto salvage yard to photograph a minivan Avery's sister was selling through Auto Trader Magazine. Her cousins later found her vehicle in the lot, partially concealed by branches, pieces of wood and car parts.

Investigators found charred fragments of her bones in a pit behind Avery's garage and in a barrel, along with her camera and cell phone.

In closing arguments, special prosecutor Tom Fallon said Dassey accepted his uncle's invitation to rape Halbach because he wanted to know what sex was like. He helped kill her and burn her body to dispose of the evidence of the crimes, he said.

But defense attorneys argued there was little that tied Dassey to Halbach's death, other than what they claim was a false confession.

''What we don't see up until this point and have not heard is anything scientific that matches Brendan Dassey, that places Brendan Dassey at Steven Avery's at the date and time of the killing. No DNA. No fingerprints,'' defense lawyer Mark Fremgen said.

Associated Press writer Emily Fredrix contributed to this report.

    Wis. Teen Convicted of Rape and Murder, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Missing-Woman.html

Alternates Chosen for Spector Case

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- More than four years after a beautiful actress was shot to death at Phil Spector's hilltop mansion, a jury must decide whether the music producer murdered her.

Opening statements in Spector's trial were scheduled for Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the gender makeup of the jury sparked a last-minute legal dispute when prosecutors claimed the defense was systematically removing women through challenges. A judge disagreed and an alternate panel of four men and two women was chosen.

The regular jury, sworn in last week, has nine men and three women.

Spector, 67, a legendary music producer whose ''Wall of Sound'' recording technique transformed the sounds of rock and roll in the 1960s, lives in a rambling castle-like mansion in suburban Alhambra. It was there that he took Lana Clarkson on Feb. 3, 2003. She wound up dead in the foyer with a gunshot through her mouth.

Clarkson, 40, best known for her role in the Roger Corman 1980s cult classic ''Barbarian Queen,'' had gone home with Spector from her job as a nightclub hostess. He met her hours before she died.

A chauffeur who drove the pair to Spector's mansion has told of hearing a gunshot and seeing Spector emerge from the house holding a gun and declaring, ''I think I killed somebody.'' Spector later said he believed the shooting was an ''accidental suicide'' by Clarkson.

It took about eight months of investigation before authorities charged Spector with murder. They are proceeding on a theory of ''implied malice,'' alleging he did not intend to kill Clarkson but caused her death by reckless behavior and taking an extreme risk.

If convicted of second-degree murder, he could face 15 years to life in prison.

    Alternates Chosen for Spector Case, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Phil-Spector.html

Man Not Guilty in 'Dungeon' Rapes

April 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:59 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) -- A jury has found a convicted sex offender accused of raping two teen girls in an underground bunker not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill.

Kenneth Glenn Hinson wiped his eyes and mouth and appeared to cry after the jury read its verdict, which followed about four hours of deliberations over two days.

If convicted, Hinson had faced a mandatory life sentence without parole under the state's two-strikes law because he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 1991.

This is a breaking news update. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) -- A jury has found a convicted sex offender accused of raping two teen girls in an underground bunker not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill.

    Man Not Guilty in 'Dungeon' Rapes, NYT, 23.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Underground-Dungeon.html

Man Accused in 'Dungeon' Case Testifies

April 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) -- A convicted sex offender accused of raping two teens in a dungeon-like space behind his home testified Saturday that he had sex with both of his accusers hours before the alleged crimes took place.

Kenneth Glenn Hinson said one of the 17-year-old girls then asked him for money.

The girls have testified that Hinson, 48, took them from a bedroom while they slept in March 2006. Prosecutors allege he bound them with duct tape, raped them and left them to die in a small room hidden beneath a tool shed.

Hinson's attorney has said the girls lied and the sex was consensual.

Hinson testified that the girls asked him to purchase a sexual device about a week before the alleged crimes and, after he did, one of them demonstrated to him how it worked.

He described in detail his trip to a sex shop with one of his accusers. When Hinson's attorney, Rick Hoefer, asked him to look inside a brown paper evidence bag containing the device, Hinson told the court, ''It's the one I paid for or it's an identical twin.''

Hinson said he went to bed shortly after his sexual encounter with the girls and expected them to help him paint apartments the next morning.

When he saw police cars arrive at his property, Hinson said he assumed they were looking for the marijuana stashed in the basement of his shop for a trip to New York later that day. Hinson said he panicked and disappeared in the nearby woods. He was arrested after a four-day manhunt.

The girls' names are being withheld because The Associated Press does not generally identify alleged victims of sex crimes.

Earlier, state DNA expert Ken Bogan testified that the chances that DNA evidence found on one of the teenager's T-shirt is from anyone other than Hinson is ''approximately one in 710 quadrillion.''

''How many zeros is that?'' prosecutor Jennifer Evans asked.

''Fifteen,'' Bogan answered.

The state rested its case after Bogan's testimony Saturday, the fifth day of Hinson's trial on charges of criminal sexual assault, kidnapping and assault and battery with intent to kill.

If Hinson is convicted, he faces up to life in prison without parole.

Hinson was convicted in 1991 for the rape of a 12-year-old girl. Two review committees recommended that Hinson be committed to a state program for sexually violent predators after serving a nine-year prison sentence, warning he could commit a future sex crime. But a judge rejected the plan and set Hinson free.

    Man Accused in 'Dungeon' Case Testifies, NYT, 22.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Underground-Dungeon.html

Tenn. Preacher's Wife Convicted

April 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:55 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SELMER, Tenn. (AP) -- A preacher's wife who claimed her husband abused her was convicted of voluntary manslaughter Thursday for killing him with a shotgun she said fired accidentally as she aimed at him. Mary Winkler showed no emotion as the verdict was read.

Prosecutors had sought a first-degree murder conviction, but the jury settled on the lesser charge after deliberating for eight hours. She faces three to six years in prison but would be eligible for parole after serving about a third of the sentence.

If Winkler, 33, had been convicted of first- or second-degree murder, she would have gone to prison for at least 12 years and maybe for the rest of her life. Her lawyers said Mary Winkler's testimony was decisive.

''They had to hear it from Mary; there was no other source,'' defense attorney Steve Farese said.

Winkler told jurors in powerful testimony Wednesday that her husband, Matthew, abused her physically and sexually, but she said she did not pull the trigger and the shotgun went off accidentally as she pointed it at him.

The prosecution said it was ludicrous to suggest the shooting was an accident. Assistant District Attorney General Walt Freeland said bank managers were closing in on a check-kiting scheme that Mary Winkler wanted to conceal from her husband.

Matthew Winkler, a 31-year-old preacher at the Fourth Street Church of Christ, was found in the church parsonage shot in his back in March 2006. One day later, his wife was arrested on the Alabama coast, driving the family minivan with their three young daughters.

Prosecution witnesses described Matthew Winkler as a good husband and father, and the couple's 9-year-old daughter testified she never saw her father mistreat her mother. Mary Winkler also said under cross-examination that her husband did nothing for which he deserved to die.

''At the end of the day, we're left with the memory of Matthew Winkler,'' said defense attorney Leslie Ballin. ''And even though there have been a lot of negative things said about him in this trial, there were some good things, too, and you heard that from Mary.''

Matthew Winkler's father, who is also a preacher, thanked the jury and thanked God for being ''our rock and our shield'' during the trial.

''We're very grateful for the privilege and honor that was ours to be the parents of Matthew Brian Winkler,'' Dan Winkler said. ''And we treasure the memory of the love that he had for his family, for his Lord, for his church, for us his parents.''

The prosecution released a statement that said, ''We want the Winkler family to know that our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to them for the loss of their son, brother and father, Matthew Winkler.''

The couple's three daughters -- ages 2, 7 and 9 -- are in the custody of his parents, but the defense attorneys said Mary Winkler hopes the verdict will allow her to be reunited with her daughters in the future. She will be sentenced May 18, but is free on bond until then.

Dan and Diane Winkler have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Mary Winkler.

Voluntary manslaughter suggests the crime was committed in an irrational state and premeditation is not necessary for a conviction.

A psychologist testified Mary Winkler could not have formed the intent to commit a crime because of her compromised mental condition. Dr. Lynne Zager said she suffered from mild depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which started at age 13 when her sister died and got worse because her husband abused her.

The jury of 12 included a woman who said she had been a victim of domestic abuse. They have been sequestered at a motel during the trial, which began April 9.

    Tenn. Preacher's Wife Convicted, NYT, 20.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Minister-Slain.html

Jury Gives S.D. Woman Life in Prison

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- A jury on Wednesday spared the life of a woman who killed an acquaintance and hacked up her body with a chainsaw, sentencing her to life in prison without parole.

Daphne Wright, 43, smiled after the verdict was read. Wright was convicted last week of kidnapping and murdering Darlene VanderGiesen, 42, in February 2006.

VanderGiesen's mother, Dee, told Wright that God had helped the family forgive her.

''We pray for you every day asking that God may touch your heart, that you may come to know his love and that you repent of your sins and seek God's forgiveness,'' she said.

Dee VanderGiesen told Wright's mother, Carolyn Tucker: ''We both have lost our daughters. One to death and the other to prison time for as long as she lives. May God's grace be shown to you at this time of pain in your life.''

Prosecutors said that Wright was jealous of the friendship VanderGiesen had with Wright's former lover and that it turned to rage that drove Wright to kidnap VanderGiesen, kill her, burn the body and cut it apart with a chain saw.

VanderGiesen's remains were found in a Sioux Falls landfill and a Minnesota ditch.

In closing arguments earlier in the day, prosecutor Dave Nelson said Wright, who like VanderGiesen is deaf, deserved to die by lethal injection because the mutilation was the act of a depraved mind. But he said he respected the jury's verdict.

''I think they reached this decision independently of any of the diversions of race, of deafness or anything else. I think they decided this case on the evidence,'' he said.

Wright's public defender, Jeff Larson, argued that she burned and cut the body as an afterthought and that the slaying was an isolated act motivated by jealousy.

Nelson told jurors their verdict would be just if they treated both women equally. VanderGiesen was white and heterosexual; Wright is a black lesbian.

After about eight hours of deliberation, jurors found that Wright had the depravity of mind, but they decided that she should not be executed for it.

The jury forewoman read the verdict, not the judge. It means Wright will spend the rest of her life at the women's prison in Pierre or the penitentiary in Sioux Falls.

It was South Dakota's first capital punishment case with a female defendant.

    Jury Gives S.D. Woman Life in Prison, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Dismemberment-Trial.html

6 Indicted in Juvenile Offender's Death

April 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:21 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WESTMINSTER, Md. (AP) -- Six former staff members at a school for juvenile offenders waited 41 minutes before calling 911 about an unresponsive 17-year-old student who died, prosecutors said in announcing an indictment against the workers.

''They thought he was faking,'' State's Attorney Jerry F. Barnes said Tuesday.

Isaiah Simmons died Jan. 23 while being restrained by staff at Bowling Brook Preparatory School.

Medical examiners ruled Simmons' death a homicide, and the FBI has opened a civil rights investigation. The school has closed, and Simmons' death prompted the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services to reform its crisis intervention policies.

The grand jury declined to indict the six employees on the more serious charge of involuntary manslaughter. Steven Heisler, an attorney for Simmons' family, said they disagreed with that decision.

''There's no question that there was reckless endangerment,'' Heisler said. ''However, when reckless behavior results in a death, that is manslaughter.''

Charged with reckless endangerment in the indictment returned this week are Michael P. Corradi of Middletown, Pa.; Dennis Harding of Baltimore; Brian G. Kanavy of Mechanicsburg; Jason W. Robinson of Westminster; Shadi Sabbagh of Keymar; and Mark R. Sainato of Keymar.

Messages left with Corradi, Kanavy and Robinson were not immediately returned. Sainato's number was disconnected, and Harding and Sabbagh had unlisted numbers.

Barnes did not release names for any attorneys representing the men.

If convicted of the misdemeanor charge, each could face a maximum of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Brian Hayden, an administrator with nonprofit Bowling Brook, said the school hopes to reopen and fully supports its former employees.

''Hopefully, the truth will bear out through the criminal proceedings and these gentlemen will be found innocent of all charges,'' he said in a news release.

Bowling Brook was under contract with the state of Maryland to educate boys in trouble with the law. Youths at the residential school, including some from Pennsylvania, were relocated to other schools after it closed.

The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services placed Simmons at the school following a 2006 conviction for robbery with a deadly weapon.

Among the changes since his death, staff at state-owned and private juvenile facilities have been advised that youths should only be restrained if there is an immediate risk of harm, that restraints should last a maximum of 30 minutes, in 15-minute intervals, and that they must be videotaped. Simmons was restrained over a period of several hours.

Medical staff also will have to be consulted in the event of a restraint that lasts 15 minutes, Donald DeVore, Maryland's secretary of juvenile services, said Tuesday.

''These are things that, based on my experience, if they had been in place at the time that Isaiah died, might have saved his life,'' DeVore said.

DeVore also said that he would not allow staff to use compliance techniques that caused pain.

''There are methods for juveniles that are safe methods of dealing with kids that don't cause pain,'' he said.

The department also ordered inspections of all juvenile facilities. DeVore said he expects to receive reports from those inspections by next week.

------

On the Net:

Bowling Brook Preparatory School: http://www.bowlingbrookprep.org

State's Attorney: http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/stateatt/index.html 

    6 Indicted in Juvenile Offender's Death, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Juvenile-School-Death.html

Wife: I Don't Recall Shooting My Husband

April 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:52 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SELMER, Tenn. (AP) -- A preacher's wife accused of murdering her husband testified Wednesday that she doesn't remember picking up the shotgun or pointing it at her husband, but she said she did not pull the trigger. She heard a ''boom'' as the shotgun fired, she said.

''Something went off,'' Mary Winkler said, crying on the witness stand.

Prosecutor Walt Freeland asked her if she understood what a trigger did, or which end of a shotgun was dangerous.

''You know that pulling a trigger is what makes it go boom?'' Freeland asked.

''Yes, sir,'' Winkler replied.

She also said under cross-examination that her husband, Matthew, had done ''nothing'' for which he deserved to die.

Mary Winkler said she just wanted to talk to him when she went into their bedroom at the church parsonage, but she was terrified. He was physically and sexually abusive, she said.

That day, she just wanted to stop him from being so mean, she said.

After the gun fired, she ran from the house, she said. ''I thought Matthew would be mad at me, and I didn't know what he would do to me.''

Later, she returned to their bedroom and found him on his back, dead. A forensic pathologist testified that Matthew Winkler had been shot in the back.

Mary Winkler said that despite the abuse, she still loved her husband. She said she was ashamed about the abuse and didn't tell anyone.

''I didn't want anybody to know about Matthew,'' she said.

Her depiction of her marriage contrasts radically with the description by the prosecution, whose witnesses described Matthew Winkler as a good father and husband.

Matthew Winkler, 31, was found fatally shot in the parsonage where the family lived in March 2006. A day later, his wife was arrested on the Alabama coast 340 miles away, driving the family minivan with her three young daughters inside.

Earlier Wednesday, Mary Winkler testified her husband punched and kicked her, forced her to have sex she considered unnatural and refused to grant her a divorce.

The defense showed the jury a pair of white platform-heel shoes and a wig she said her husband wanted her to wear during sex.

Mary Winkler, 33, talked quietly, her eyes downcast as she described their sex life. She said her husband wanted her to look at pornography before sex, and photos she identified as coming from her husband's computer were entered as evidence.

She testified that he once kicked her in the face, and hit her, pushed her down and hit her with a belt. Shortly after they were married, ''he just got me down and told me that I was his wife and we were family now, and he just screamed and hollered,'' she testified.

''I just wanted out,'' she said.

If convicted of first-degree murder, she could be sentenced to up to 60 years in prison. But a psychologist testified she could not have formed the intent to commit a crime because of her compromised mental condition.

Dr. Lynn Zager testified that Mary Winkler suffered from mild depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which started at age 13 when her sister died and was worsened by her husband's abuse. The disorder made it more likely that Mary Winkler would have ''dissociative episodes'' in which she lost track of her ability to think and feel, Zager said.

The defense has said Mary Winkler intended to hold her husband at gunpoint only to force him to talk about the incident involving their 1-year-old daughter, Breanna, and that the shooting was accidental. She testified that her husband had put his hand over Breanna's nose and mouth to make the baby stop crying.

Several witnesses for the prosecution said they never saw any sign that Matthew Winkler was abusive. The couple's 9-year-old daughter, Patricia, testified that she had a good father and she never saw him mistreat her mother.

Last week, prosecutors played an audiotape in which Mary Winkler acknowledged shooting her husband, telling investigators her ''ugly came out.'' She told authorities that her husband criticized her constantly and that she got tired of it and just ''snapped.''

    Wife: I Don't Recall Shooting My Husband, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Minister-Slain.html

Doctor Says Preacher's Wife Claims Abuse

April 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SELMER, Tenn. (AP) -- A preacher's wife accused of murdering her husband told a psychologist that he often threatened her with a shotgun and forced her to have sex, the psychologist testified Tuesday.

Dr. Lynne Zager said Mary Winkler also told her that, on the day of the fatal shooting, her husband tried to stop their 1-year-old daughter from crying by placing his hands over the baby's nose and mouth.

Prosecution witnesses have described Matthew Winkler, a 31-year-old preacher at the Fourth Street Church of Christ in this west Tennessee town, as a good father and husband.

But the defense says he terrorized his family and criticized his wife's every move.

Matthew Winkler was found fatally shot in the parsonage where the family lived in March 2006. A day later, Mary Winkler was arrested on the Alabama coast 340 miles away, driving in the family minivan with her three young daughters.

The psychologist said Mary Winkler suffered from mild depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which started at age 13 when her sister died and got worse because her husband abused her. She could not have formed the intent to commit a crime because of her compromised mental condition, Zager said.

Mary Winkler, 33, could be sentenced to up to 60 years in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.

Her attorney, Leslie Ballin, said the defense would wrap up its case Wednesday, and that Mary Winkler was going to decide overnight if she would testify.

The defense has said Mary Winkler intended to hold her husband at gunpoint only to force him to talk about the incident involving their 1-year-old daughter Breanna. The defense said the shooting was accidental.

Several witnesses for the prosecution said they never saw any sign that Matthew Winkler was abusing his wife. The couple's 9-year-old daughter, Patricia, testified Monday that she had a good father and she never saw him mistreat her mother.

But Mary Winkler told the psychologist that her husband criticized her for putting on weight and regularly pinched and shoved her, Zager said. ''The summer when she was out of jail was the first time she could wear shorts because of all the bruising,'' Zager said.

Last week, prosecutors played an audiotape in which Mary Winkler acknowledged shooting her husband, telling investigators her ''ugly came out.'' She told authorities that her husband criticized her constantly and that she got tired of it and just ''snapped.''

Tabatha Freeman, Mary Winkler's younger sister, said Tuesday she noticed changes in her sister after she got married in 1996. She said Matthew Winkler controlled everything his wife did, preventing her from making any decisions and isolating her from her family.

''A very bubbly, outgoing sister became very subdued,'' Freeman said.

One defense witness testified he saw Mary Winkler with a black eye in 2003, when Matthew Winkler was youth minister at a church in McMinnville, about 65 miles southeast of Nashville.

Rudolph Otto Thomsen III, who let Mary Winkler live with his family in McMinnville while she was free on bond, said Mary explained that she was playing with her girls and one of them accidentally hit her in the eye.

That didn't strike Thomsen as suspicious, and the defense offered no proof that Matthew Winkler gave his wife a black eye. But Thomsen said Mary Winkler's behavior often changed around her husband.

''It was like you'd thrown a switch. Her head went down, her hands went together,'' Thomsen said.

The church secretary in McMinnville, Lori Boyd, testified that Matthew Winkler seemed nice at first but became demanding and cruel, treating other church staff members as ''people lower than him.''

    Doctor Says Preacher's Wife Claims Abuse, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Minister-Slain.html

Slain Preacher's Daughter Testifies

April 17, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:33 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SELMER, Tenn. (AP) -- Prosecutors rested their case against a preacher's wife accused of murdering her husband with the heartbreaking testimony of the couple's 9-year-old daughter.

Patricia Winkler took the stand Monday in a crowded courtroom. When the prosecutor asked the girl to state her name and birthdate, she looked over at her mother, Mary Winkler, and began sobbing.

But a few minutes later, Patricia kept her composure as she recalled how she heard a ''big boom'' come from her parents' room on the morning that her father was shot.

''It seemed like somebody fell on the ground,'' Patricia told the jury. ''I went to mama and daddy's room to see what had happened. I saw daddy laying on the floor face down.''

After four days of testimony from the prosecution, the defense was expected to begin calling witnesses Tuesday morning. Defense attorney Leslie Ballin has hinted Mary Winkler could take the stand.

Matthew Winkler, a 31-year-old preacher at the Fourth Street Church of Christ in this west Tennessee town, was found dead in the parsonage where the family lived in March 2006. A day later, Mary Winkler was arrested on the Alabama coast 340 miles away, driving in the family minivan with Patricia and her two younger sisters.

Prosecution witnesses have described Matthew as a good father and husband. But Mary Winkler's attorneys have said he was a dictator at home who terrorized his family and criticized his wife's every move.

Patricia testified he was a good father and she never saw him mistreat her mother. Later, under questioning from a defense attorney, the girl burst into tears after trying to explain why -- after one visit -- she stopped seeing her mother following Mary Winkler's release from jail.

''Because I didn't want to see her,'' Patricia said. After a long pause she added, ''Well, I mean, I still love her,'' and started crying again, burying her face in her hands. Mary Winkler and several members of the jury also wept.

Defense attorney Steve Farese went to the witness stand to comfort Patricia and didn't ask any more questions.

Last week, prosecutors played an audiotape in which Mary Winkler acknowledges shooting her husband, telling investigators her ''ugly came out.'' But Mary Winkler also told an Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent on the tape that her husband had threatened her.

She told Tennessee authorities that her husband criticized her for ''the way I walk, what I eat, everything. It was just building up to this point. I was just tired of it. I guess I just got to a point and snapped.''

Brandy Jones, who described Mary Winkler as her best friend, said Monday she never saw any evidence of physical or emotional abuse. She had dinner with the Winklers a month before Matthew was shot, and the couple seemed happy, Jones said.

''She did state she was happier than she had ever been, and that they would never leave west Tennessee,'' Jones testified.

Earlier Monday, a forensic pathologist testified that Matthew Winkler was killed by a shotgun blast in the middle of his back; 77 pellets were removed from his body

The defense has said Mary Winkler, 33, intended to hold her husband at gunpoint only to force him to talk about his personal problems after a situation involving their 1-year-old daughter, Breanna. The defense did not describe the situation.

Defense attorneys have also called the shooting accidental.

The prosecution has said the Winklers were in financial trouble and that bank managers were closing in on a check-kiting scheme that Mary Winkler wanted to conceal from her husband.

    Slain Preacher's Daughter Testifies, NYT, 17.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Minister-Slain.html

Alabama church arsonists get state prison time

Fri Apr 13, 2007 12:17AM EDT
Reuters
By Verna Gates

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - Three young men who torched Alabama churches in a drunken spree last year must spend two years in state prison after completing their federal prison sentences, a judge ruled on Thursday.

Matthew Cloyd, 21, Benjamin Moseley, 20, and Russell DeBusk, 20, pleaded guilty to state charges before Bibb County Circuit Judge Marvin Wiggins.

Under a plea agreement, their 15-year sentences for arson, burglary and animal cruelty, for shooting a cow during the rampage, were reduced to two years as long as they behave.

"They'll be in there long enough to know it was a serious crime," said Bibb County District Attorney Michael Jackson.

The nine church fires in February 2006 started as a drunken prank and turned into a statewide nightmare as people mounted armed vigils to protect their houses of worship.

The incident evoked the days when the Ku Klux Klan and Satanists burned down churches.

Earlier this week, Cloyd and Moseley, who burned all nine churches, were sentenced to eight years in federal prison. DeBusk, who burned five churches, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

Dozens of parishioners crowded the courtroom for Thursday's hearing. Many of their preachers had called for mercy.

The Rev. Jim Parker, pastor of the ruined Ashby Baptist Church, had urged the state to keep the sentences light so the men could get out, start working and pay restitution.

"We prayed for wisdom for the judge, strength for the young men and grace for the families and I believe we saw the prayer answered today," said Parker.

    Alabama church arsonists get state prison time, R, 13.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1235221720070413

Accusers Recant, but Hopes Still Fade in Sing Sing

April 13, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

After five young people identified him in court as the murderer, Fernando Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of killing a 16-year-old youth in Greenwich Village. No other evidence — a gun, a fingerprint or a clear motive — tied him to the crime.

He has been jailed ever since, despite the fact that for 14 years, the same five witnesses have insisted their testimony was false.

The five gave sworn statements in 1993 that Mr. Bermudez was not the killer and that their testimony had been manipulated by the police and prosecutors. They did so at the risk of being charged with perjury, and they have stuck with those accounts even as they have approached middle age, taken on steady jobs and raised families.

Nonetheless, the recantations have had little impact. The same judicial system that once relied on the witnesses now no longer believes them.

“What does it take, with the system that we have, to reinvestigate a wrongful conviction?” said Scott Christianson, a supporter of Mr. Bermudez and a former state criminal justice official. “It’s really beyond me.”

The reason is based in the prevailing wisdom of the American justice system, which views recantations as untrustworthy, acts not of conscience, but of sympathy or bribery or coercion. That view is so deeply ingrained that one judge, rejecting one of Mr. Bermudez’s appeals in 1995, said candidly that five recantations were simply too many to believe.

In recent years, though, the reliability of recantations is being re-evaluated, driven in part by the growing number of cases in which DNA evidence has cleared people who had been locked behind bars for years. In several recent cases, DNA evidence has shown not only that people were innocent, but that witnesses who had recanted really were telling the truth.

“Blanket suspicion of recantations is clearly not warranted,” said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law. “We know now that many of the traditional precepts that have been held by the courts are not warranted, and yet the courts continue to cling to them.”

Mr. Bermudez, 38, a husband and father of three, has no exculpatory DNA evidence in his corner. He is serving a sentence of 23 years to life and has watched appeal after appeal fail.

Yet he has never wavered from the account he first told investigators: He did not know the victim, Raymond Blount, he had no motive to shoot him and he was elsewhere with friends at the time of the murder in August 1991.

Two friends who were with Mr. Bermudez that night have given accounts that support his own. Their versions also have not wavered since the crime.

Mr. Bermudez’s supporters say he was a victim of the crime wave that beset New York in the early 1990s. They say that the police and prosecutors, overwhelmed in the face of a near record number of murders, seized on bad evidence, settled for easy answers, ignored looming contradictions and bullied impressionable young witnesses into testifying against Mr. Bermudez.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office rejects those assertions. It notes that the conviction of Mr. Bermudez has been upheld several times, most recently by a federal court in 2006.

“A federal magistrate found after an extensive hearing,” said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, “that the recantations of the eyewitnesses were incredible, that the conduct of the trial prosecutor with respect to the witnesses was proper and that the defendant’s due process rights had not been violated.”

The same magistrate judge, however, noted missteps in the case, among them allowing the people who identified Mr. Bermudez as the killer to view his mug shot as a group, a prejudicial blunder that in New York is nearly always grounds for ordering a retrial. The police also failed to look for the man whom the main witness had first implicated.

The police investigation was led by a detective who had been involved in an earlier homicide case in which a young man had been mistakenly identified as a killer only to have his conviction overturned. The detective was suspended from the force after being charged in a drunken-driving accident in 2004 in which two women were critically injured.

Mr. Bermudez’s situation has attracted a legion of supporters, including lawyers, law professors, a retired detective and a former federal judge. “The evidence powerfully shows that Bermudez is innocent,” said Bennett L. Gershman, a professor at Pace University Law School.

Mr. Bermudez’s hopes now rest on an appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In an interview at Sing Sing prison, he recalled the faith he once had in the system.

“I believed that it was as simple as telling the truth,” he said, “and the truth prevailing.”

Now, he says, the truth doesn’t matter.

The Crime

Much of what happened to Raymond Blount early on Aug. 4, 1991, is not in dispute. On a dance floor at the Marc Ballroom on Union Square West, Mr. Blount punched another teenager, Efrain Lopez, apparently after he caught the youth looking at him the wrong way.

Angry and embarrassed, Mr. Lopez later testified, he approached a man in the club whom he knew from his neighborhood and told him what had happened. Later, at 3 a.m. outside the club, Mr. Lopez and his friends again encountered Mr. Blount and his friends.

People broke bottles, ready to fight. The man from the neighborhood asked Mr. Lopez to point out the puncher. Mr. Lopez pointed at Mr. Blount. With that, the man jogged up and fired one .25-caliber bullet into Mr. Blount’s abdomen, severing an artery. He died at a hospital later that morning.

The killing was one of 10 in Greenwich Village that year.

“The Police Department was stretched,” said Mr. Christianson, who has written about the case. “The district attorney was stretched.”

Mr. Bermudez’s supporters say lapses in the investigation began within hours. Several of Mr. Blount’s friends were hauled into a windowless Police Department storage room. Photographs of young Latino men with arrest records were placed before them. Among the photographs was one of Mr. Bermudez, a graduate of St. Nicholas of Tolentine High School in the Bronx.

He had been arrested a year earlier on a marijuana possession charge and faced a separate charge that he had tried to sell 165 grams of cocaine to an undercover agent. But he had no history of violence and was living with his parents in an apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan.

The photograph of Mr. Bermudez caught the eye of one witness, Jamie Velazquez. She asked, “Who’s this cutie?” or something to that effect, according to court records. The man looked, she said, like someone she had seen at the club.

She and three other witnesses conferred and agreed he resembled the gunman.

A federal judge later found that the police had violated regulations that bar witnesses from collectively viewing a mug shot. Courts have ruled that such discussions allow witnesses to be improperly influenced by others.

But that morning, the police thought they had a lead on a suspect.

A Key Witness

The next evening, Aug. 5, detectives brought in the teenager who had been punched, Efrain Lopez, for questioning. Mr. Lopez, who had served time in prison for stealing a car, feared being charged in the shooting, he said later, because he had pointed out Mr. Blount for the gunman.

Over the next 27 hours, he was questioned about what had happened, eventually admitting he knew the gunman.

The killer’s name is Lou, he said in a videotaped statement. Wool Lou was his street name, because he sold “wools,” slang for crack cocaine. Wool Lou, Mr. Lopez said, hung out near Mr. Lopez’s grandmother’s building on West 92nd Street, and in a schoolyard nearby.

At trial, Mr. Lopez would testify that he had gone to Public School 84 with Wool Lou, and knew him to be Puerto Rican.

None of these descriptions matched Mr. Bermudez. He is of Dominican descent and lived on 204th Street, six miles from Mr. Lopez’s neighborhood. He had not attended P.S. 84. And he had never been called Wool Lou.

But presented with a photo array of suspects, Mr. Lopez pointed to Mr. Bermudez.

As it turned out, there was a man known as Wool Lou who lived on West 91st Street, in Mr. Lopez’s neighborhood, and had a criminal record, though not for dealing drugs. His name, Luis Muñoz, and his street alias were in the Police Department’s files. Anyone looking at the files may have noticed how closely Mr. Muñoz’s facial features matched those of Mr. Bermudez.

But the police were satisfied they had their man. They never interviewed anyone from Mr. Lopez’s neighborhood, never spoke with any of his friends who knew the man named Wool Lou, or with anyone else from the 92nd Street schoolyard where Mr. Lopez said Wool Lou hung out. For his part, Mr. Muñoz said years later that he did not commit the crime.

The Arrest

On Aug. 6, detectives picked up Mr. Bermudez for questioning. From that moment, his supporters say, they should have wondered whether they had the right man.

Witnesses had said the gunman was light-skinned, thin, Hispanic, 5 feet 11 inches tall and 165 pounds, a description that the defense later argued matched that of the man listed in police files as Wool Lou. Mr. Bermudez was darker, and he stood a muscular 6-foot-1 and weighed 205 pounds.

Nonetheless, he was brought to the Sixth Precinct station for questioning by Detective Daniel Massanova.

Mr. Bermudez told the detective and an assistant district attorney, James G. Rodriguez, that he and three of his buddies had spent the night of the shooting driving around Manhattan looking for girls.

At 2 a.m. they ate at a restaurant a few blocks from the shooting, he acknowledged. But he said they had left the area by 2:30, a half-hour before the shooting, and were back in Inwood by 3 a.m.

Mr. Bermudez was then placed in a police lineup in which he and several “fillers” were told to sit down instead of standing. His supporters say it had the effect of reducing the disparity between his height and that of the gunman described by witnesses.

One witness, Nkosi Boyce, later told a federal magistrate that detectives at the lineup had repeatedly asked him about Mr. Bermudez.

“They said, ‘Is that him?’ ” Mr. Boyce testified. “I said, ‘It’s not him.’ They asked me again, ‘Is that him?’ I said, ‘That’s not him.’ ”

The prosecution did not ask Mr. Boyce to testify at trial.

Mr. Bermudez was represented by Barry Kenyon, a lawyer who hired a retired detective to help him prepare for trial. But they had little time. The district attorney’s office did not turn over its evidence until the last business day before the trial’s start in January 1992.

With only a weekend to study thousands of pages of witness statements, autopsy reports and grainy videotape of Mr. Lopez’s statement, Mr. Kenyon did little to challenge the credibility of the five witnesses. Four of the five, it turned out, had arrest or conviction records. One, Michael Thompson, had a gun possession charge that was dropped by the district attorney just before trial. That fact was never presented to the jury.

The key witness, Mr. Lopez, seemed the most troubled of all, a convicted car thief who said he routinely smoked marijuana. He was aware, he acknowledged later, that he might be charged if he did not cooperate with authorities.

At trial, Mr. Lopez’s role was crucial. On Jan. 28, 1992, he pointed to Mr. Bermudez and identified him as the killer. Four other witnesses did the same.

Still, the prosecutor, Mr. Rodriguez, lacked a clear motive to explain the killing, since Mr. Bermudez did not know anyone involved. Instead, he depicted Mr. Bermudez as a spoiled brat who dealt drugs, slept late, thought highly of himself and, thus, thought nothing of killing someone on a whim. And he suggested that Mr. Bermudez had suddenly begun wearing eyeglasses during the trial to confuse witnesses about his appearance.

It was enough, even without physical evidence. On Feb. 6, 1992, after an 11-day trial, a jury convicted Mr. Bermudez, then 22, of second-degree murder.

The Recantations

Years later, one witness, Mr. Thompson, says he still struggles to explain why he testified against Mr. Bermudez.

“When you’re not educated or you just don’t know, when the cops tell you to do something, you do it,” said Mr. Thompson, 34, a married father who works at a private clinic for the mentally ill. “You figure they got the guy, he must have done it.”

Another witness, Okpa Iyesi, is now an elder at a church in Maryland. In his recantation, he said the prosecutor had lied to him, telling him that ballistics evidence already pointed to Mr. Bermudez as the killer, according to court records.

Ms. Velazquez, the witness, said she told Mr. Rodriguez on the eve of the trial that she did not think Mr. Bermudez was the killer, the court records show.

And Mr. Lopez said he knew all along that Mr. Bermudez was not Wool Lou. But he said the authorities threatened to charge him with murder if he didn’t cooperate. And he said Detective Massanova had made it obvious that he wanted him to pick out the Bermudez photograph.

“He didn’t tell me, ‘Pick him,’ but he was like, pick him,” Mr. Lopez said in an interview.

Detective Massanova, in an interview, denied coaxing Mr. Lopez. He and the prosecutor have denied any improprieties.

Approached by Mr. Bermudez’s first appeals lawyer in 1993, each witness submitted a sworn affidavit retracting the identification of him as Mr. Blount’s killer. But recantations have long been regarded with skepticism. Jury verdicts are meant to offer finality, legal experts say. Recantations undermine that certainty, if all it takes to reopen a case is to get witnesses to revise their testimony.

Some judges have ruled that recantations should be given more weight in cases where the original testimony constituted the only evidence. Few trials, though, have had five witnesses identify someone as a murderer, only to attest later that their testimony had been false. The very number upset Justice John A. K. Bradley, the Bermudez trial judge, who dismissed the first motion for a retrial without a hearing.

“It strains credulity to believe that five unshaken trial witnesses would suddenly claim that they had testified falsely under oath,” he wrote in a 1995 decision. Had Mr. Bermudez presented fewer than five, he said, it would have been more believable.

In 1997, a state appeals court, citing “the inherent unreliability of recantations,” affirmed the conviction.

Appeals Pile Up

At first blush, the Bermudez case seems fertile ground for appeal, with a last-minute delivery of evidence, a conviction that relied on testimony from teenagers with legal problems of their own, and police work that the defense has characterized as slapdash.

But appeals courts tend not to look at mistakes in the aggregate. Rather, they consider whether any one error represents a violation of an appellant’s constitutional rights or a basic miscarriage of justice.

Appeals courts also generally limit their reviews to what happened on the record at trial and avoid delving into evidence that was not presented to a jury. It is a process that favors appellants whose lawyers aggressively raise objections and exploit gaps in evidence at trial, something Mr. Bermudez’s lawyer, Mr. Kenyon, acknowledges he did not do enough of — in part, he said, because the family lacked the money to fully investigate the case.

In 2002, though, a federal magistrate, Kevin Nathaniel Fox, finally agreed to hear testimony from the five recanting witnesses, as well as from the prosecutor, police detectives and Mr. Bermudez’s alibi witnesses.

He concluded that the prosecutor’s summation had included improper remarks, and that the police never should have allowed witnesses to discuss the mug shot as a group, a blunder he called “impermissibly suggestive and conducive to irreparable misidentification.”

But he discounted the recantations as unbelievable. He rejected the account of one witness because, he said, her testimony reflected a more precise recollection of events than she had exhibited at trial. On Judge Fox’s recommendation, a judge in Federal District Court, Loretta A. Preska, turned down Mr. Bermudez’s bid.

Now Mr. Bermudez awaits the judgment on his latest, perhaps final, appeal.

He has a clean disciplinary record and spends evenings reading legal briefs. His wife, whom he met through correspondence, and his children visit him every few weeks. In 15 years his story has not changed.

“I sometimes have to manufacture hope,” he said, “because this is a very depressing, dangerous, evil place.”

Detective Massanova is now battling his own problems. He is on trial on charges related to the off-duty car accident in 2004 that injured the two women. In an interview, he declined to say whether he still thought Mr. Bermudez killed Mr. Blount.

“Bermudez is in jail because a number of people said he was the shooter,” he said. “I can’t use a lie detector test on everybody who comes in.”

    Accusers Recant, but Hopes Still Fade in Sing Sing, NYT, 13.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/nyregion/13appeal.html?hp

All Charges Dropped in Duke Case

April 12, 2007
The New York Times
By DUFF WILSON and DAVID BARSTOW

RALEIGH, N.C., April 11 — North Carolina’s attorney general declared three former Duke University lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper innocent of all charges on Wednesday, ending a prosecution that provoked bitter debate over race, class and the tactics of the Durham County district attorney.

The attorney general, Roy A. Cooper, said the players — Reade W. Seligmann, David F. Evans, and Collin Finnerty — had been wrongly accused by an “unchecked” and “overreaching” district attorney who had ignored contradictory evidence and instead relied on the stripper’s “faulty and unreliable” accusations.

“We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” Mr. Cooper said at a news conference.

“We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred,” he added.

Mr. Cooper said he had considered but ultimately rejected the possibility of bringing criminal charges against the accuser, who continues to insist she was attacked at a team party on March 13, 2006, and asked him to go forward with the case. Mr. Cooper said his investigators had told him that the woman “may actually believe the many different stories that she has been telling.” He said his decision not to charge her with making false accusations was also based on a review of sealed court files, which include records of the woman’s mental health history.

Mr. Cooper reserved his harshest criticism for the Durham County district attorney, Michael B. Nifong, at one point even depicting him as a “rogue prosecutor.”

“In this case, with the weight of the state behind him, the Durham district attorney pushed forward unchecked,” said Mr. Cooper, who took over the case in January. “There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado. And in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Cooper said that for now he would leave any official sanctions to the North Carolina State Bar, which has already taken the extraordinary step of formally accusing Mr. Nifong of numerous ethical violations, including withholding exculpatory evidence and misleading the judge who presided over the case. Mr. Cooper said he would instead seek new legislation to give the North Carolina Supreme Court greater power to remove prosecutors.

“We need to learn from this and keep it from happening again,” he said.

At an emotional news conference of their own on Wednesday, the three former teammates, flanked by defense lawyers and families, spoke of relief and vindication, but also of their lingering anger toward Mr. Nifong and many in the news media for what they described as a rush to believe the worst about them.

“This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” Mr. Seligmann said. “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.

“The Duke lacrosse case has shown that our society has lost sight of the most fundamental principle of our legal system: the presumption of innocence.”

Mr. Seligmann, 21, of Essex Fells, N.J.; Mr. Evans, 24, of Annapolis, Md.; and Mr. Finnerty, 20, of Garden City, N.Y., were initially charged with rape, sexual offense and kidnapping — crimes that could have put them in prison for three decades. The rape charges were dropped in December.

From the start, all three repeatedly proclaimed their innocence. “These allegations are lies,” Mr. Evans insisted on the day of his indictment.

On Wednesday, looking a bit older but every bit as resolved, Mr. Evans looked across a roomful of reporters and said, “We are just as innocent today as we were back then.”

Mr. Nifong could not be reached for comment Wednesday. But his lawyer, David B. Freedman, said Mr. Nifong was “devastated” by the attorney general’s criticisms of his conduct. Mr. Freedman said that while Mr. Nifong had “no problem” with the decision to exonerate the players, he was deeply wounded by Mr. Cooper’s attack on his judgment and performance.

“He’s a person who has dedicated himself to public service for 29 years,” Mr. Freedman said in a telephone interview on Wednesday night. “All he cares about is public service.”

Mr. Nifong has denied violating any ethics rules, although he has acknowledged mishandling some evidence and making intemperate and unjustified remarks about the Duke lacrosse team. In the first weeks of his investigation, for example, Mr. Nifong told reporters he was certain that a rape had occurred and called the lacrosse players “hooligans” who were hiding behind a “wall of silence.”

In fact, three co-captains, including Mr. Evans, had cooperated fully with the police. Other team members canceled interviews on the advice of lawyers. “There was never a blue wall of silence,” Mr. Evans said Wednesday.

If the ethics charges against him are upheld, Mr. Nifong faces a range of possible penalties, including disbarment. A preliminary hearing Friday will decide Mr. Nifong’s motion to dismiss the most serious charges.

Some parents of the players, meanwhile, have suggested that they might sue Mr. Nifong and Durham County. “All options are on the table,” Joseph B. Cheshire, a lawyer for Mr. Evans, said Wednesday when asked about possible legal action against Mr. Nifong.

The accuser could not be reached for comment. Her father, a retired truck driver, said that his family continued to believe her accusations. “I think if it had gone to court, it would be a different story altogether,” he said in an interview at his home on Wednesday night. “The jury would hear both sides of it. But they didn’t want it to go to court. They made that clear last year.”

Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, who weathered heavy criticism throughout the case, particularly from supporters of the three players, issued a statement welcoming the exonerations and praising the players. “They have carried themselves with dignity through an ordeal of deep unfairness,” Mr. Brodhead said.

Even some community leaders who had previously argued that the case should have gone to trial did not object to Mr. Cooper’s decision. The North Carolina chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. released a statement saying it respected and accepted the work of the attorney general’s office. Irving Joyner, a law professor at North Carolina Central University, who had been monitoring the case for the N.A.A.C.P., echoed that theme, saying, “Based on my personal knowledge of him and high respect of him, I accept his conclusions.”

Likewise, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, one of the largest such groups in the nation, released a statement saying it was satisfied with the attorney general’s decision to drop all charges.

With its overtones of race, sex and privilege, the Duke case instantly drew national news media attention. The accuser was a poor, black, local single mother working at an escort service while enrolled at the predominantly black North Carolina Central University in Durham; the Duke students were relatively well-off, white out-of-staters — members of a storied lacrosse team at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. The accuser’s vivid account of racist and misogynistic taunts also fueled a simmering debate about the off-field behavior of elite athletes and the proper role of big-time sports on America’s college campuses.

Yet as the months passed, as the specifics of her accusations kept shifting, and as defense lawyers skillfully highlighted other glaring weaknesses and contradictions in the evidence, the case came to be seen by many as justice run off the rails by political correctness and the political ambitions of Mr. Nifong.

When the accusations arose, Mr. Nifong was in a close political campaign. Appointed acting district attorney in 2005 by Gov. Michael F. Easley, he was seeking election against a better-known opponent. Mr. Nifong, who mentioned the case at some campaign appearances, won the crucial primary election — and most of the black vote — on May 2, weeks after announcing indictments against two of the players.

The players’ supporters have long contended that Mr. Nifong used the Duke case to advance his political prospects.

“In his search for a false conviction, this is a man who appealed to racial and class hatred,” Mr. Cheshire said at Wednesday’s news conference.

Mr. Nifong just as vehemently denied the accusations of political manipulation. But in bringing charges, Mr. Nifong discounted evidence of innocence — including alibi evidence from time-stamped photographs and cellphone records — and relied almost entirely on the woman’s photo identification of the three suspects and on a report by the sexual assault nurse who examined the woman.

The photo lineup procedure was riddled with errors and contradictions and appeared to violate Durham, state and federal guidelines. The police, instructed by Mr. Nifong, showed the woman pictures only of lacrosse team members, with no filler photographs of people who could not possibly be suspects.

The sexual assault nurse’s report of blunt force trauma was undermined by other accounts of her activities as a stripper the weekend before the lacrosse party. There was no other forensic evidence to support her account. And other than the accuser, no one claimed to have witnessed the assault —including a second dancer hired for the evening and the 20 or so men at the party.

Mr. Cooper succinctly summed up the evidence this way: “No D.N.A. confirms the accuser’s story. No other witness confirms her story. Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself.”

One of those contradictions forced Mr. Nifong to drop the rape charges in December. The woman, who had repeatedly said she endured violent penile penetration, suddenly said she could no longer be sure what had penetrated her. This came after it had been revealed that sophisticated DNA tests found no traces from any of the three defendants — or any other Duke lacrosse player — on her body or clothes. DNA from other men, however, was found.

Mr. Nifong at first vowed to proceed with the remaining charges of kidnapping and sexual offense. But in January, facing ethics charges and mounting criticism from editorial pages and bloggers, he asked Mr. Cooper to take over the case. Mr. Cooper said he and his staff spent three months reinvestigating the case, interviewing Mr. Nifong, police investigators, defense lawyers, the accuser and other witnesses.

In the end, Mr. Cooper said, it was not even a close call. Their investigation, he emphasized, “shows clearly” that there was insufficient evidence to bring any charges.

On the Duke campus, some students greeted Mr. Cooper’s decision as a welcome relief from months of turmoil. “The Duke bashing got old really quickly,” said Tucker Page, a junior from Portland, Ore. “To pigeonhole all students as racist and sexist — it felt like the media was personally attacking us.”

After the accusations surfaced, Mr. Brodhead, the university president, canceled the lacrosse season and accepted the coach’s resignation. He also appointed panels to examine the team’s behavior and the university’s handling of the case. He invited Mr. Finnerty and Mr. Seligmann back to school after the rape charges were dropped, but they declined. Mr. Evans had graduated the day before he was charged.

Today, Mr. Evans is working, while Mr. Finnerty and Mr. Seligmann said they were looking forward to continuing their educations. All three said the searing experience of being falsely accused before their fellow students and an entire nation had drawn them closer to their families. “To hell and back,” is how Mr. Evans described the past year.

Duke officials said the furor had not hurt their admissions or fund-raising efforts. The university had 19,170 applicants this year — including record numbers of African-Americans (2,190), Asians or Asian-Americans (5,173) and Latinos (1,303). The men’s lacrosse team, ranked third in the nation just before the accusations, was recently ranked fourth by Lacrosse Magazine.

Mr. Nifong aside, the most lasting damage may be to the credibility of North Carolina’s criminal justice system. Mr. Cooper, who said he would issue a report next week detailing all the evidentiary weaknesses in the Duke case, said the prosecution had indeed raised broader questions about the state’s criminal justice system.

“This case,” he said, “shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor.”

Duff Wilson reported from Raleigh, N.C., and David Barstow from New York. Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Mosi Secret from Durham, N.C.

    All Charges Dropped in Duke Case, NYT, 12.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/us/12duke.html?hp

Trial to Begin in Killing of Minister in Tennessee

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By THEO EMERY

NASHVILLE, April 8 — Just over a year ago, Wilburn Ashe stood outside his minister’s home in Selmer in southwest Tennessee. He could see the lights inside, but the door was locked and his knocks went unanswered.

Mr. Ashe returned to church for Bible study without the minister, Matthew Winkler. Later, four other church members went to the house and let themselves in with a key. They found Mr. Winkler dead, sprawled in a bedroom with a shotgun wound, and no sign of his wife, Mary, or their three daughters.

The discovery was only the first shock in a killing that thrust Selmer into headlines around the country. After the Alabama police found Mary Winkler and the children hundreds of miles away, she stunned the community again with the admission that she had shot her husband and fled.

On Monday, after a year of speculation, jury selection is to begin in a McNairy County courthouse where Ms. Winkler, 33, will face trial on charges of first-degree murder.

The killing left members of Mr. Winkler’s church, the Fourth Street Church of Christ, searching for answers and, at times, seeking respite from the attention on their town.

Over the last year, some details have emerged from court and news reports. But Mr. Ashe, 71, said the killing remained as much a mystery as it was the night he knocked on the Winklers’ door.

“We know there are three little girls that don’t have a daddy, and for all practical purposes at the present time, they don’t have a mama,” he said. “We know those things, and we know that Mary has said she did it. That’s all I know. And all of it is sad.”

The Winklers arrived in Selmer in 2005. Mr. Winkler, a minister’s son, was energetic and lively, and the congregation grew. Church members said his wife seemed doting and domestic.

The home was apparently not as tranquil as it appeared. Clark Freeman, Ms. Winkler’s father, said in a televised interview in November that he suspected abuse, and that his daughter covered “terrible bruises” with makeup. Mr. Freeman, reached by phone last week, declined to comment.

There may also have been strains over finances. Ms. Winkler’s lawyers have said that the couple were caught up in an overseas swindle. Ms. Winkler had also deposited worthless overseas checks in a local bank, prosecutors said.

When Mr. Winkler’s body was found, friends suspected a break-in and a kidnapping. Then, a day later, the police found the family van in Orange Beach, Ala. According to the police, Ms. Winkler confessed, saying she had “snapped” after arguing with her husband over money.

The killing stirred a frenzy of news coverage as reporters and television crews descended on Selmer.

“You’d have to be almost under a rock not to have known about this, with as much attention as it got last year,” Mayor David Robinson said.

In days after, the closeness of the church members became apparent. Ms. Winkler apologized to the congregation in a note, and some members visited her in jail. Pam Killingsworth went almost every Sunday until Ms. Winkler made bail in August, taking along photos and community updates.

Even Ms. Winkler’s in-laws, Dan and Diane Winkler, appeared forgiving: Dan stood up in his church in Huntingdon to say they loved their daughter-in-law, according to a church newspaper account.

Dan and Diane Winkler — who have custody of the three girls, Patricia, 9; Mary Alice, 7; and Breanna, 2 — have since filed a $2 million wrongful death suit against Ms. Winkler. They did not return calls seeking comment.

After Ms. Winkler posted $750,000 bail, she went to McMinnville, Tenn., about 65 miles southeast of Nashville, to live with friends and work at a dry cleaner. She made headlines again when a television station broadcast photographs of her taken on New Year’s Eve, smoking at a restaurant with a beer in front of her.

Ms. Killingsworth, who taught music to the Winkler children, said that she had tried to put the case behind her, but that it had proved hard to do as the trial drew near.

“It’s just something you don’t get over in a year’s time,” she said. “I don’t even know if you’ll get over it in a lifetime.”

    Trial to Begin in Killing of Minister in Tennessee, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/us/09minister.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Still Guilty After All These Years

April 8, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT TUROW

Chicago

THIS Friday a 33-year-old man named Juan Luna will go on trial here for the murder of seven people in a Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine, Ill., on Jan. 8, 1993. The investigation of the murders, in which the victims’ bloody corpses were discovered in the restaurant freezer, languished for more than a decade until Mr. Luna’s DNA was identified in the saliva found on a chicken bone at the crime scene.

Having spent some time over the years as a criminal defense lawyer, I find this use of DNA evidence somewhat ironic, even a bit perverse. When I was first exposed to the forensic use of DNA, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was seen largely as a tool of the defense, usually resisted by prosecutors who feared manipulation of the underlying science.

Ultimately, hundreds of people around the country were able to demonstrate they had been wrongly convicted, and those successes led prosecutors to realize that the same DNA tests — and experts — could also provide evidence that guilty people had been walking around free for years. The Brown’s Chicken case is but one of hundreds of “cold cases” now being resolved by advances in forensic technology, particularly DNA testing.

Greater accuracy in the truth-finding process is a laudable development. But I worry that the growing capacity of today’s forensics to reach farther and farther into the past seems likely to undermine the law’s time-ingrained notions, embodied in statutes of limitations, about how long people should be liable to criminal prosecution. As the Brown’s Chicken case illustrates, DNA analysts can now examine scant decades-old specimens and produce results of near-certainty in identifying suspects. Nor are the innovations in forensic science limited to the testing of human DNA. Forensic botany can often establish whether plant fragments found on a victim or defendant have a unique origin. Fire-scene investigation has advanced because of new extraction techniques and instrumentation. Fingerprint identification has been revolutionized both by cryogenic processes for lifting latent prints and computer imaging that allows faster and more reliable identification of partial prints. Forensic pathology, ballistics and forensic anthropology have also moved ahead rapidly.

As a result, forensics now sends the criminal law into a region it has formerly entered only with reluctance: the distant past. In almost every American jurisdiction, the statute of limitations prevents prosecution of most felonies after a specified period, five years in the federal courts, three years in my home state, Illinois. The primary exception nearly everywhere is murder, which has always been prosecutable whenever sufficient evidence emerges. When law enforcement began using forensic innovations in the 1990s to investigate “cold cases,” they were applied to the mountain of unsolved murders that had accumulated as homicide rates rose in the 1960s.

But now the frequency with which cold-case crimes committed decades before are now being solved — along with the popular TV shows portraying such triumphs each week — have led to increasing public pressure in many jurisdictions not only to apply new forensic technology to a broadening array of old cases other than murders, but also to erase the time limitations that the criminal justice system has long observed for those offenses.

The reasons for the pressure are obvious. While murders are the gravest offenses we know, they are not the only crimes whose memory continues to haunt the public. The victims of rapes, or serious assaults, or kidnappings are rarely at peace while a perpetrator remains at large. In addition, unsolved crimes that seem to reflect group hatred can continue to divide a community, even years later.

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, now pending in Congress, would appropriate $10 million for investigation of pre-1970 homicides. But it also contemplates collecting evidence of offenses that did not result in death, like church and synagogue bombings and racially motivated abductions. Baltimore, Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., and Fairfax County in Virginia have cold-case squads that look into unsolved sexual assaults and abductions from years past, and in Montgomery County in Maryland, cold-case investigators focus on a variety of violent crimes besides murder, including armed robbery.

As such developments continue, the public will inevitably come to question why we have statutes of limitations at all, particularly since they strike many laypeople as nonsensical. Why should a criminal go free merely because it took a long time to catch him? But as usual with broadly observed legal rules, they contain a measure of wisdom.

The law has always feared the hazards of long-delayed prosecutions. The chief concern impelling limitations — that memories dim over time and that evidence is likely to become lost or dispersed — appears at first blush to be irrelevant in the face of today’s more exacting science. If DNA can prove, within 99.9 percent certainty, that a defendant was the perpetrator of an unsolved rape, why not send him to prison? Yet what if his defense to the charge is consent? Forensic science can often establish identity with near certainty, but it is not a time machine that can transport us backward so that we recapture every nuance of a largely forgotten event.

Erasing statutes of limitations as to crimes that can be newly proved also risks sweeping in offenses that were previously ignored. Revised political judgments and changes in social mores can motivate prosecutions occurring decades later. In a Sunday serial that ran in this newspaper last spring, I wrote about a judge who 40 years later must reconsider his role in a sexual incident that would now be adjudicated as a rape, but which in his youth was regarded as something the drunken female victim “had coming.”

The law is a fluid thing, and there is an inherent unfairness in initiat- ing a prosecution decades later when legal rules and community expectations have changed. If a jury — or the police and prosecutors — now strongly disapprove of conduct to which they would have once turned a blind eye, it’s natural to wonder whether the defendant would have acted the same way in today’s ethical climate.

Statutes of limitations have also traditionally embodied a moral judgment that if a person has lived blamelessly for a significant time, he should not have the anxiety of potential prosecution hanging over him forever. Violent crimes are usually the province of young men, and it is often the case that one of the principal purposes of the criminal justice system — keeping the criminally inclined off the streets — vanishes with time.

An 18-year-old who shoots and paralyzes someone has committed an offense whose consequences never end for the victim, but there is still an element of pathos if punishment is visited decades later on a perpetrator who’s grown to be a much different person and a valued community member.

And if we decide that today’s scientific evidence should allow the statute of limitations to be removed on more serious offenses like rapes, kidnappings and hate crimes, there will be a push to remove the statute for lesser offenses too. It’s an inevitable consequence that in investigating old and serious crimes, evidence of more minor offenses will emerge.

Identifiable DNA will turn up in the saliva underneath the stamp on a threatening letter a murder victim received, or in a smudged and otherwise unreadable fingerprint on currency stolen during a bank robbery in which hostages were taken. Having committed the resources to cold-case investigations, the police and prosecutors will be reluctant to allow those newly provable offenses to go unpunished, especially when, as in examples like these, there is reason to suspect that the offender also committed the more serious crime.

The wide variables — the gravity of the offense, the strength of the new evidence, the difficulty of mounting an effective defense, the degree to which changed expectations drive the new prosecution — call for applying balancing tests in deciding whether a statute of limitations should be exceeded in a given case. But criminal law, generally speaking, is the legal area that most favors clear rules, both to rein in prosecutorial discretion and to give fair notice to everybody — victims, perpetrators and the community at large — about what to expect.

Pushed to choose, most contemporary legislatures inevitably vote to toughen criminal rules, and thus we can expect statutes of limitations to be eliminated or tightened in future years. And with their retreat will go an element of lenience that has always reflected the complex moral judgments that are necessary when crimes fall under the lengthening shadow of time.

Scott Turow is the author, most recently, of the novella “Limitations.”

    Still Guilty After All These Years, NYT, 8.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/opinion/08turow.html

Three Yale students arrested for burning U.S. flag

Wed Apr 4, 2007 4:41PM EDT
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - Three Yale University students, including a Briton and a Greek national, have been charged in a case involving the burning of a U.S. flag outside a Connecticut house, a court official said on Wednesday.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, 19, were arrested on Tuesday and charged in New Haven Superior Court with reckless endangerment, arson, breach of peace, criminal mischief and other offenses.

Police said the three torched a flag hanging from the porch of a house in New Haven near the Ivy League school.

Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek. Both are freshmen. Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, according to police and court documents. Anklesaria and Angelopoulos turned over their passports.

Police gave no indication why they set fire to the flag. The trio acknowledged it was a "dumb thing to do" when questioned by police, the New Haven Register reported.

They appeared in court in leg irons and handcuffs, the newspaper said. Bail was set at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, and $15,000 for Anklesaria, it added.

Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, "Come Back to Afghanistan," about his experiences there, the Yale Daily News reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning was protected under constitutional free-speech guarantees, invalidating laws in 48 states and outraging veterans' groups and others who say that an important national symbol should be protected from defacement.

"It makes me sick to my stomach to think that someone would burn the American flag," Marc Suraci, 37, owner of the two-story house, told the Register, describing himself as "very, very patriotic."

    Three Yale students arrested for burning U.S. flag, R, 4.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0436814620070404