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

NY to Probe Handling of 1988 Murder

December 31, 2007
Filed at 11:16 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- State investigators are probing how police and prosecutors handled the killings of a couple whose son served 17 years in prison for it before an appeals court ordered him freed, a newspaper reported Monday.

The Commission on Investigation will examine the police investigation that led to Martin Tankleff's 1990 conviction and how the Suffolk County District Attorney's office dealt with the emergence of new witnesses in 2003 who supported Tankleff's claims of innocence, commission Chairman Alfred Lerner told Newsday.

The commission has been gathering evidence for a year and will issue a report in the next five to six months, he said.

Tankleff, 36, was released Thursday on $1 million bond after a state appeals court said new evidence suggested someone else might have killed Seymour and Arlene Tankleff on Sept. 7, 1988, in their Long Island home.

District Attorney Thomas Spota has not decided whether to retry the case and has not been contacted by the commission, a spokesman said Monday.

Tankleff's supporters have long accused the police of coercive interrogation tactics, and they accused prosecutors of ignoring and suppressing evidence.

The commission has no enforcement powers but can subpoena witnesses and can recommend the appointment of a special prosecutor, something Tankleff's supporters have pressed for.

    NY to Probe Handling of 1988 Murder, NYT, 31.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Double-Murder-Confession.html

Violent Felons Move Forward With Lawsuit Over Their Rights to Parole

December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

Last year, a group of violent felons sued the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, charging that the state was ignoring the law by categorically denying them parole. They figured their chances would improve under his successor, Eliot Spitzer, even though Mr. Spitzer was a tough former prosecutor who supported the death penalty.

In the spring, they were heartened when Mr. Spitzer’s new chairman of the State Parole Board, George B. Alexander, reminded his fellow commissioners that they were obligated to consider the potential for rehabilitation, remorse and recidivism as well as the severity of the original crime.

By fall, lawyers for the plaintiffs and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo were on the verge of a legal settlement that would have granted 1,000 or so inmates new parole hearings.

At the last minute, word of the settlement was leaked to the press, around the same time that the board approved parole for a man who had taken part in a holdup that led to a police officer’s death. Among the critics was Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York City, who said, “Violent felons should not be eligible for parole, and cop killers should stay incarcerated for life.”

With Mr. Spitzer’s political capital depleted and the governor hardly eager to embark on another unpopular crusade, the Division of Parole, which reports to the governor, rejected the settlement in November.

The decision suggested a deep ambivalence within the governor’s office regarding treatment of convicts. Mr. Spitzer created a commission to study disparities in sentencing, while he imposed curbs on temporary release programs from prison. He issued one pardon, erasing a robbery conviction, since called into question, of a Brooklyn man who had been out of prison for 10 years but was threatened with deportation to his native Jamaica because of the case. He did not grant a single request for clemency.

Releasing inmates has proved troublesome to politicians nationally, from Michael S. Dukakis, whose presidential campaign in 1988 was put on the defensive because of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed a rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, whose clemency record was questioned this year.

While preliminary figures suggest that violent felons have been more likely to be paroled under Mr. Spitzer than under Mr. Pataki (the board is still dominated by Pataki appointees, though), a federal judge this month granted the inmates class-action status, and their lawsuit is proceeding.

In 2006, the last year of the Pataki administration, releases were approved for 20 of the 274 inmates who had been convicted of violent crimes and went before the parole board for an initial hearing. This year, through the end of November, 40 of 292 were released. In 2006, of the 978 who had previously been rejected and appeared before the board for a rehearing, 128 were released. This year, of the 957 who appeared, 185 were released.

Robert N. Isseks, a lawyer for the inmates, said: “We’re informed that the release rate is going up. However, as we see more people getting released, there are still a large number of people who have exemplary prison records being denied parole just because of the nature of their crime.”

The Board of Parole consists of 19 members appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. Five of the current 17 members (two spots are vacant) were appointed by Mr. Spitzer.

Typically convening in panels of two or three members, members of the Parole Board consider whether inmates who received indeterminate sentences — 25 years to life, for example — have met the requirements for release after having served their minimum terms. Since the mid-1990s, violent felons have received specific sentences, after which they may be released to the supervision of parole officers.

The lawsuit by the inmates charged that prisoners eligible for parole were denied their constitutional rights during the Pataki administration because of what they said was the board’s unwritten policy of rejecting parole in most of the cases solely because of the severity of the crime. The lawsuit said the board failed to also take into account, as required, the degree of remorse or rehabilitation or the likelihood that the inmate would commit another crime if released.

Although a settlement of the suit seemed near, there was a hairpin turn after the Parole Board approved the release of Shuiab A. Raheem, who was serving 25 years to life for the 1973 holdup and siege of a Brooklyn sporting goods store during which hostages were held, Officer Stephen Gilroy was killed and two others were wounded. Four men were charged, but it was not clear who fired the fatal shot.

The board cited Mr. Raheem’s spotless disciplinary record for eight years, his participation in a program to help young people and the fact that he had earned several college degrees.

Mr. Lynch, of the police union, demanded that statements be taken from the hostages and the officer’s widow, Patricia, who was quoted as saying: “He is still the love of my life.”

In response, the Parole Board delayed Mr. Raheem’s scheduled Jan. 3 release and agreed to reconsider the case.

“We don’t want to take any credit if the thing is defeated,” Joseph Mancini, a spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said of the inmates’ lawsuit. “We just want to make sure it is.”

When the settlement evaporated, Mr. Isseks said: “The timing was pretty obvious. We got word not long after the news articles by e-mail that they don’t want to pursue the settlement and refused to give us a reason.”

“I can’t tell you what was in Spitzer’s mind,” Mr. Isseks said. “I can tell you we had reached a settlement. It was just a matter of putting it in writing.”

Paul Larrabee, a spokesman for the governor, declined to discuss what the tipping point was, but said that “all the terms were not mutually acceptable.”

“The state takes the position that it has the right to reject parole for certain inmates,” Mr. Larrabee said.

John Milgram, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said that the attorney general serves as the governor’s lawyer and that “any decision to settle or not settle would be from the administration.”

Mark E. Johnson, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Parole, said he could not comment on pending litigation.

John M. Caher, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, said only, “We just made the decision not to settle and to take the case to court,” and noted that anyone denied parole was entitled to a new parole hearing in two years.

Still, Mr. Isseks said: “Two years is a long time. These are people’s lives, people who have been held far longer than they should have been. Some of them have been denied a dozen or more times.”

Among the proponents of the aborted settlement was the Osborne Association, which works with current and former inmates and has joined other prisoner advocacy groups in preparing inmates for their parole hearings and in studying recidivism rates for former convicts released after serving lengthy terms.

“The rates are remarkably low,” said Elizabeth Gaynes, Osborne’s executive director.

Praising Mr. Spitzer’s “longstanding commitment to a credible and fair criminal justice system,” Ms. Gaynes said the state “was appropriately inclined toward a settlement that would only have given incarcerated people what they were legally entitled to in the first place” but withdrew from the negotiations after negative editorials and “inaccurate allegations” about the governor’s parole policies.

A state study found that from 1985 to 2002, of 1,105 inmates released from New York State prisons after serving a sentence for murder, 33 were imprisoned again for new crimes and 189 for violating parole.

Ms. Gaynes said the settlement would have “given new parole hearings to everyone serving life sentences who had been denied parole prior to April of this year, when the new Parole Board began following the correct guidelines.”

Among the plaintiffs in the inmates’ lawsuit was Charles E. Friedgood, a wealthy surgeon from Long Island who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1975. Dr. Friedgood, who at 89 was the oldest inmate in the state prison system, was granted parole this month after having been rejected five times.

In 2003, after the Parole Board concluded that his offense represented “a propensity for extreme violence,” a state appeals court ridiculed that reasoning as “so irrational under the circumstances as to border on impropriety.”

    Violent Felons Move Forward With Lawsuit Over Their Rights to Parole, NYT, 30.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/nyregion/30parole.html

Scared Silent

So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate

December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

CAMDEN, N.J. — When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street corner here in June, Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother left to search for justice in a world without witnesses — where the stigma of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation prevents many from testifying about even the worst crimes.

But Ms. Glasco held out some hope, all the same. Determined not to let her son’s killer go unpunished, she urged her daughter and other relatives to work the grapevine in the neighborhood where he was killed, Whitman Park, searching for evidence, and maybe somebody willing to share it.

Discovering nothing, she pressed on.

Ms. Glasco’s extended family put together fliers and started assembling a Web site to publicize a reward. She gathered her life savings and set the figure for information at $5,000. She delayed posting it because Camden detectives asked her to wait, saying they had promising leads in the investigation.

The leads fizzled; a trip to see the mayor produced more promises of effort, but no arrests. The murder of Ms. Glasco’s son, Salahuddin Igwe — shot at 5 a.m. as he walked home from a party — remains unsolved.

Ms. Glasco is disappointed. She is also realistic. If the tables were turned, she admits, and if another mother were at her doorstep asking for information, she is not sure she would help, either.

“Snitching, telling on people, isn’t something that I personally would involve myself with,” she said in an interview last week. “People don’t want to talk to you if they think you’re a snitch. If they were your friends, they’re not your friends anymore. You’re left totally all alone.”

As the most violent neighborhood in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities, the Whitman Park section of Camden is on the front lines of the struggle with witness intimidation. An array of powerful forces converge here to discourage people from cooperating with the investigation of crimes — crimes committed against their own homes, their own neighbors, their own children.

Drugs are sold openly from street corners and abandoned row houses. Gunfire is a neighborhood soundtrack. And the competing gangs that control Whitman Park have made it clear that the price for defying them is death. Within blocks of the street where Ms. Glasco’s son was killed, six people were murdered in less than a year.

Yet many residents of Whitman Park say their reluctance to help investigators is based on more than just fear of gang retaliation. It is also a consequence of their deep distrust of the local police and prosecutors and politicians. Like residents of many other struggling, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods across the country, people here complain that racial profiling, police corruption and the excesses of the war on drugs have made them suspicious of virtually any arm of government.

Atmosphere of Distrust

It was here in Whitman Park, after all, that a once-lauded community police officer was sentenced to prison last year for robbing drug dealers. And it was here that Gov. Christie Whitman was photographed frisking a young black man who had been falsely suspected of carrying drugs, an image that surfaced publicly in 2000 and came to symbolize New Jersey law enforcement’s longstanding practice of racial profiling.

And that is not all. The neighborhood’s grim economic and social realities, which have convinced any number of young people here that drug dealing is the best job available, leaves many law-abiding residents with conflicting loyalties.

There are so many people in the neighborhood with friends or relatives in the drug business that to help police arrest a dealer may jeopardize a family’s financial security.

It adds up, the police say, to an environment where they encounter people who, however much they despise the gangs, are more comfortable coexisting with the Bloods, Crips or Latin Kings than assisting the police.

“There’s a lot of history and a lot of reasons for people to stay quiet that are hard to understand unless you’re from there,” said Capt. Al Handy of the Camden police. “We’ve been trying to work with people and win back the trust. But it’s a long, long process.”

The social stigma against helping the police has become an exasperating obstacle confronting officials as they try to combat increased gang violence in urban communities. According to Deputy Attorney General Hester Agudosi, who supervises New Jersey’s 21 county prosecutor’s offices, the number of witnesses who remain silent because they fear for their safety is probably less than one-tenth the number who refuse to talk because they fear the social repercussions.

One small, glaring symptom of the dilemma is the “Stop Snitchin’” movement, an underground effort, popularized in rap videos and with T-shirts, urging criminals not to testify against other suspects in exchange for more lenient sentences. But the sense of estrangement is far broader, crossing generational lines and testing the consciences of people whose only involvement with crime is as a victim or potential witness.

“A lot of white Americans from suburban communities can’t understand why people wouldn’t talk to law enforcement,” said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who is studying witness intimidation for the National District Attorneys Association. “But in a lot of inner-city communities, there is so much hostility to the police that many people of color can’t fathom why someone would even seriously consider helping them.”

In Whitman Park, a neighborhood of less than half a square mile that is home to 6,000 people, young men in black hooded sweatshirts are a fixture on street corners and front stoops, openly flagging down drivers to offer cocaine. Of the 43 murders that the Camden police have reported this year, seven have occurred there.

The reasons for not talking about those murders — or other crimes — can be varied.

“Let’s say you make a police report and they run your name and find out you have a warrant from five or six years ago you forgot about,” said Verdell Peterson, 52. “In this neighborhood, $250 is a lot of money, and if you don’t have it to pay your bail, you’re going to sit in jail until someone else does.”

‘You Might Get Killed’

But many say that steering clear of the police is a matter of trust, and survival.

Neil Reynolds, 18, said that his upbringing in Whitman Park taught him that “the wrong friends will get you shot and cops will get you shot or locked up.”

“If you talk to the police, you might get killed,” said Mr. Reynolds, who has a record for narcotics sales but says he is now trying to leave the drug business. But even those who aren’t physically harmed, he said, face repercussions. “No one wants anything to do with you, because when they get in trouble, they think you’ll tell on them, too.”

At Community Baptist Church, where funeral services have been held for a half-dozen of Whitman Park’s murder victims in recent years, the Rev. David King said an entire generation of Whitman Park children were being raised to fear the police.

Working from a run-down building with oil poured on unused doorways to prevent narcotics dealers from congregating, Mr. King runs anti-gang and drug rehabilitation programs and urges church members to keep an open mind about the police. But last month, when a police officer who is well known and well liked at the church crashed his car out front, Mr. King said he was dismayed to see neighborhood children cheering.

“All they could see was his uniform,” he said.

Police and prosecutors have tried various strategies to regain the trust of Camden residents in recent years. The Shooting Response Team, which quickly floods the scene of any gun crime with a crew of city, county and state investigators, has been credited with an improved response to gun crimes. Statistics indicate that the department has tripled its success in solving shootings, to 42 percent in 2006 from 14 percent in 2003.

But efforts to strengthen the community policing efforts in the neighborhood and start a neighborhood watch program were set back late last year when the officer assigned to Whitman Park, Cpl. Michael Hearne, was arrested on charges that he and an accomplice had been robbing drug dealers at gunpoint.

Corporal Hearne pleaded guilty and is serving a seven-year prison term.

Even those residents who are willing to trust the police can be dissuaded from reporting drug activity to the authorities because narcotics have become such an integral part of Whitman Park’s economy. Steven Carmichael, a postal carrier who is acting president of the United Neighbors of Whitman Park, said that in many instances people are ambivalent because they want to drive off the drug dealers, but are friends with their parents.

“Do you say something to the parent? But maybe the parents already know and are afraid to put the kid out on the street where he might get shot or killed,” said Mr. Carmichael, whose cousin across town was killed by rival drug dealers last year. “Or maybe the parents are out of work and don’t ask where he gets that money so long as it helps them put food on the table. From the outside it seems black and white, but out here, things get complicated.”

Things certainly got complicated for Mr. Carmichael after his cousin’s death.

“I couldn’t go to the funeral because people know I try to help the police,” he said.

In November, when detectives were stymied in the case of 12-year-old boy killed in a Camden housing project, investigators brought the child’s mother up from Florida to canvass the neighborhood in hopes that a “mother to mother” conversation with people near the scene of the shooting might encourage witnesses to come forward.

The case remains unsolved.

Little Help From the Top

Ms. Glasco had hoped to help her son Salahuddin, known as Sal, avoid the temptations and perils of Camden, and so in 2005 she moved with him to Lindenwold, a suburb. Although his father is in prison and his sister has had brushes with the law, Sal was the child who everyone had hoped might at least escape the city.

One of Sal’s jobs was at the Boys and Girls Club of Cherry Hill, near Whitman Park. He frequently spent the night at his sister’s home, on Thurman Street, and socialized with friends down the block.

One June night he never made it back to his sister’s. Ms. Glasco eventually found herself on the telephone with a detective, who, she recalled, “told me that he was sorry to inform me that my son had been killed.”

From the outset of the investigation, detectives warned the family that witnesses would be difficult to come by. But Ms. Glasco was adamant that she was “not going to let this one go.”

So she went looking for witnesses.

“I wanted to let them know this was about a mother and her son,” she said. “And maybe that would make them do the right thing.”

She and her relatives would shake loose a nickname of a potential suspect, but turn up little else. The police did little better.

A meeting in September with Mayor Gwendolyn A. Faison offered one glimmer of hope when the mayor picked up the telephone a few minutes into the conversation and got the deputy police commissioner on the line. There was little follow-up, however, and Ms. Faison said she wasn’t surprised: Camden’s government has been under state supervision for nearly 20 years because of corruption, so the police do not report to her.

“I can call, and I did,” Mayor Faison said, “but I have no authority over them.”

The Camden police declined to discuss the case, but the Camden County prosecutors say they are satisfied with the detectives’ work and optimistic that they’re moving toward an arrest.

Since her son’s death, Ms. Glasco said, she is often not certain where to focus her anger. She is infuriated with the killer and frustrated with the police. She is anguished by the thought that someone knows who is responsible, but is too scared or cynical to come forward. And she is honest enough to understand why they might not.

Still, she pleads.

“People have to put themselves in my shoes,” she said. “I’m a mother with a dead kid. And the person who did it is out there, smiling, thinking that they got it made.”

    So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate, NYT, 30.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/nyregion/30witness.html?hp

After Half a Lifetime in Prison, an Inmate Is Free for Now

December 28, 2007
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — After being imprisoned nearly half his life for the murders of his parents — crimes he insists he did not commit — Martin H. Tankleff shed his shackles Thursday and celebrated at a victory party with family, friends and other supporters.

At the party, friends gave him a lesson on navigating the outside world by teaching him how to operate a cellphone. Sitting on a couch, he was soon making calls, holding the phone to his right ear while putting a finger in his left to muffle the din of the party.

His day had begun in a more humbling posture. Hands still cuffed behind his back, Mr. Tankleff entered a hushed Suffolk County courtroom here for a brief bail hearing, where relatives posted a $1 million bond.

Judge Stephen L. Braslow said, “You will be released forthwith.” The dozens of supporters packing the courtroom burst into applause. Sheriff’s deputies escorted Mr. Tankleff to the adjacent jail for discharge. Then he returned to the courthouse, without handcuffs, for a crowded news conference.

Before speaking, the smiling Mr. Tankleff hugged his aunts, uncles and cousins, one by one. All of them wept. He was also surrounded by his lawyers, his private investigator and the organizers of the campaign to free him.

“If my arrest and conviction was a nightmare, this is a dream come true,” Mr. Tankleff said, stepping up to the radio and television microphones and calmly reading a short statement.

Now 36, Mr. Tankleff was 17 when his mother and father, Arlene and Seymour, were fatally bludgeoned and slashed in their waterfront home in Belle Terre on Long Island. He was arrested that same day and convicted in 1990, and had been in prison ever since.

Mr. Tankleff thanked “all my friends and supporters, in Suffolk County and across the nation and literally around the world, for your interest, and for making my fight your fight.”

The crowd included supporters who had never known Mr. Tankleff but had watched his case. “I followed it from Day 1 and just never thought he did it,” said Karen Florian of Farmingville, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Marty Didn’t Do It.”

Mr. Tankleff’s release resulted from a decision issued by the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn last Friday, unanimously overturning his convictions. The court cited extensive new evidence pointing to a band of ex-convicts, acting at the behest of Seymour Tankleff’s estranged business partner, as the killers.

The new evidence would probably have changed the jury’s verdict, so Mr. Tankleff is entitled to a new trial, the court ruled. The appeals court reversed Judge Braslow, who had rejected the new evidence as coming mostly from “a cavalcade of nefarious characters.”

Judge Braslow did not refer to the appeals decision. He gave Mr. Tankleff a standard admonition against getting into trouble: “No further involvement with the law.” And he bade farewell by saying, “Good luck to you, sir.”

The original murder indictments still stand, and the Suffolk prosecutors say they intend to retry Mr. Tankleff. The assistant district attorney in the case, Leonard Lato, said, “It’s basically a do-over.” Any further proceedings will be transferred to a different judge, Robert Doyle.

Cautioning that his fight is not over, Mr. Tankleff said, “Remember that while I am innocent, I am still accused by the Suffolk County district attorney of the murder of my parents.”

He said that if there was a second trial, “I do hope that I can continue to count on everyone’s support as I defend myself again.”

Mr. Tankleff and his supporters have called for the authorities to drop the charges and begin a new investigation of the people they say committed the murders. The private investigator who uncovered most of the new evidence, Jay Salpeter, said, “Up until today we have never won.”

Because of the possible trial, Mr. Tankleff’s lawyers barred him from answering questions from reporters. One lawyer, Bruce A. Barket, said that Mr. Tankleff had been instrumental in the defense, and “we’re going to put him to work on his case.” Another lawyer, Barry J. Pollack, said that first, “we’re going to give him one day off.”

From the courthouse, Mr. Tankleff and his supporters left in a procession of cars for a celebration at the Westbury home of his cousin, Ron Falbee. Traveling along the Long Island Expressway, they whizzed past the exit for Yaphank, site of the police headquarters where Mr. Tankleff was interrogated and charged, based on a disputed confession that he immediately repudiated and never signed. It was, nonetheless, the basis of his convictions.

At the Falbee home, a buffet lunch and drinks were served. One supporter, Kurt Paschke, called the occasion a “Marty Gras.”

Dressed in a white shirt and dark pants instead of a regulation orange jail uniform, Mr. Tankleff mingled amiably in the crowd, thanking everyone again. He was overheard telling a well-wisher that the celebration was “long, long overdue.”

The living room was decorated with a sparkly Christmas tree. Less conspicuously, a table in the upstairs hallway displayed a collection of family photographs. In the front row was a picture of Arlene and Seymour Tankleff.

Before the upbeat party, relatives expressed bitterness and relief at the courthouse news conference. “This whole case has been one disappointment after the other,” Mr. Falbee said. “There’s a lingering anger in there that an innocent man spent years of his life behind bars.”

An aunt, Marianne McClure, said, “I was as upset the day Marty was convicted as I was the day I learned my sister was murdered.”

His travail has been such a burden, she said, that only “now we can mourn my sister properly, because we haven’t been able to for 19 years.”

Leaving the courthouse, a cousin, Lynne Kadan, said, “It’s like the whole family was let out of prison today.”

    After Half a Lifetime in Prison, an Inmate Is Free for Now, NYT, 28.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/nyregion/28tankleff.html

Tankleff Freed After Posting Bail

December 27, 2007
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — After being imprisoned nearly half his life for the murders of his parents, crimes he insists he did not commit, Martin H. Tankleff walked free on Thursday after a bail hearing here.

His hands still cuffed behind his back, Mr. Tankleff entered the Suffolk County courtroom for the brief hearing, at which relatives posted a $1 million bond. He returned to the adjacent county jail to be discharged, then reappeared at the courthouse for a jammed news conference.

First, a smiling Mr. Tankleff embraced his aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom cried. He was surrounded by his lawyers, private investigator and organizers of the campaign to free him.

“If my arrest and conviction was a nightmare, this is a dream come true,” Mr. Tankleff said.

Now 36, Mr. Tankleff was 17 when his mother and father, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, were fatally bludgeoned and slashed in their waterfront home in Bell Terre on Long Island. He was arrested the same day and convicted in 1990, and had been in prison ever since.

He said he wanted to thank “all my friends and supporters, in Suffolk County and across the nation and literally around the world, for your interest and for making my fight your fight."

Mr. Tankleff’s release came after the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Friday unanimously overturned his convictions. The court cited extensive new evidence pointing to a band of ex-convicts — acting at the behest of Seymour Tankleff’s estranged business partner — as the killers. The new evidence probably would have changed the jury’s verdict, the court ruled.

Mr. Tankleff’s original indictment still stands, however, and the local prosecutors say they intend to retry him for the murders. Mr. Tankleff and his supporters had demanded that the charges be dropped, and have called for a new investigation into the people they say committed the murders.
 

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting from New York.

    Tankleff Freed After Posting Bail, NYT, 27.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/nyregion/27cnd-prison.html?hp

Colorado Hearings Re-examine ’87 Murder Case

December 27, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and DAN FROSCH

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — The murder of Peggy Hettrick, 21 years ago this February, was a dark chapter in the history of this tidy college town on the edge of Colorado’s eastern plains.

Ms. Hettrick, a 37-year-old single woman, was last seen leaving a local bar alone and was later found in a frozen field, stabbed in the back and sexually mutilated.

The investigation of the 1987 killing focused on 15-year-old Tim Masters, a collector of survival knives who loved gore-dripped imagery and lived with his father in a trailer near the field.

No physical evidence or murder weapon was ever produced linking Mr. Masters directly to Ms. Hettrick, but on the basis of his drawings, his knives and a psychological profile, he was arrested more than a decade later, convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.

A divided State Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but the dissenting minority said the drawings of mayhem and mutilation were so prejudicial that Mr. Masters had perhaps been convicted “not for what he did but for who he is.”

Now the case has been reopened with hearings that have riveted Fort Collins and the Colorado legal community. Mr. Masters’s new lawyers, in seeking a retrial, have cast suspicion on a Fort Collins eye surgeon, Richard Hammond.

Dr. Hammond, who also lived near the murder scene, killed himself in 1995 after being arrested as a sexual voyeur, but he was never considered a suspect in the Hettrick case. He was also acquainted, according to new court documents, with a prosecutor in Mr. Masters’s case, Terence A. Gilmore, who is now a District Court judge.

Evidence that might have raised suspicions about Dr. Hammond was never given to the defense team in Mr. Masters’s trial, according to documents and testimony in the hearings, including a report from a woman who said she had seen a middle-aged man with a “square jaw,” similar to the description of Dr. Hammond, exposing himself near the field where Ms. Hettrick’s body was found.

Notes from a behavioral scientist from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who disputed the theory that Mr. Masters’s drawings were linked to the crime have also turned up and were also never provided to the defense.

In addition, the jury was never told about a police interview with a plastic surgeon who said he had told an investigator that the way in which Ms. Hettrick was mutilated would have required a high level of surgical skill.

“We’re willing to admit that there are some things that should have been provided the first time around and weren’t,” said Don Quick, the Adams County district attorney, who is serving as a special prosecutor looking into the handling of the case. “We find it troubling.”

Mr. Quick said in an interview that he would decide in January whether the withheld evidence was important enough to have affected the verdict. He could then offer a recommendation to Judge Joseph Weatherby, who is conducting the hearings, and the judge could decide to let the verdict stand, order a new trial or dismiss the case.

Linda Wheeler-Holloway, a former Fort Collins police detective who at one point led the investigation of Ms. Hettrick’s killing, wants to see Mr. Masters freed.

“I’ve been a cop for over 32 years, and I’ve put a lot of people in prison,” Ms. Wheeler-Holloway said. “This is the one and only case where I felt there has been an immense miscarriage of justice. I think Tim is truly innocent.”

Ms. Wheeler-Holloway, now an investigator for a district attorney in Fort Morgan, who is helping Mr. Masters’s defense team, said she started questioning his guilt in 1992. Mr. Masters had enlisted in the Navy, and she had traveled to Philadelphia, where he was stationed, to arrest him.

Instead, after two days of intense interrogation, Ms. Wheeler-Holloway said she came away struck by the consistency of Mr. Masters’s story and his explanation that the graphic drawings were a product of teenage angst and nothing more.

“I began to have concerns that we’d gotten tunnel vision out of the starting gate,” she said.

Another Fort Collins police officer associated with the case, Lt. Jim Broderick, is still working with prosecutors. In an interview outside the courtroom, he said that errors could have been made because so many years had gone by between the crime and Mr. Masters’s arrest in 1998.

“There’s no question that when you’re dealing with a case that old, mistakes get made,” Lieutenant Broderick said.

Much has changed in Fort Collins since 1987. The trailer where Mr. Masters lived no longer exists, nor does the nearby field where Ms. Hettrick’s body was found. A once secluded area, it is now dotted with condominiums and office parks. But the two-story home once occupied by Dr. Hammond and his family still sits on Skysail Lane.

Dr. Hammond’s family moved after his death, and only a handful of people remain in the neighborhood from that time, but several neighbors recalled him as a quiet, friendly man and a respected physician.

In 1995, however, before the Hettrick case had gone to trial, hundreds of videotapes were discovered in Dr. Hammond’s basement, all produced by a hidden camera system in a bathroom that was positioned to capture images of women’s genitalia. The tapes included house-sitters, friends and members of Dr. Hammond’s family. After Dr. Hammond was arrested and released on bail, he committed suicide in a Denver motel.

Now, Mr. Masters’s lawyers are saying that the police and the prosecutors should have considered Dr. Hammond a suspect in Ms. Hettrick’s killing because he had the skill to perform the almost surgical mutilation of her body. They have also suggested that Judge Gilmore’s relationship with Dr. Hammond might have played a role.

Judge Gilmore, who declined to comment for this article, was interviewed about Dr. Hammond in August and said he had known Dr. Hammond only “peripherally,” but he said he had been to Dr. Hammond’s home for dinner.

Asked later if he had any reason to suspect the doctor in the Hettrick case, Judge Gilmore said, “I had absolutely no reason to believe he was involved.”

Referring to Mr. Masters, he added, “There wasn’t anybody else we could try to point a finger at.”

Some people who knew Dr. Hammond are now hard-pressed to see a brutal killer.

“The guy had some quirks, and he did something dopey, but that doesn’t make him a murderer,” said Leo Yudien, who lived next door and was a former patient.

Mr. Quick, the special prosecutor, also said it was too early to say whether justice went wrong.

“There are reasons why the jury convicted Masters and why appellate courts upheld it,” Mr. Quick said. “Nothing is black and white here.”

    Colorado Hearings Re-examine ’87 Murder Case, NYT, 27.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/us/27fortcollins.html

Editorial

State Without Pity

December 27, 2007
The New York Times

It is a shameful distinction, but Texas is the undisputed capital of capital punishment. At a time when the rest of the country is having serious doubts about the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions this year took place in Texas. That gaping disparity provides further evidence that Texas’s governor, Legislature, courts and voters should reassess their addiction to executions.

As Adam Liptak reported in The Times on Wednesday, in the last three years, Texas’s share of the nation’s executions has gone from 32 percent to 62 percent. This year, Texas executed 26 people. No other state executed more than three.

It is not that Texas sentences people to death at a much higher rate than other states. Rather, Texas has proved to be much more willing than others to carry out the sentences it has imposed.

The participants in Texas’s death penalty process, including the governor and the pardon board, are more enthusiastic about moving things along than they are in many states. Texas’s system also contains some special features, like the power of district attorneys to set execution dates. Prosecutors are likely to be more eager than judges to see an execution carried out.

While Texas has been forging ahead with capital punishment, many other states have been moving away from it. New Jersey abolished the death penalty this month, and other states have been considering doing the same thing. Illinois made headlines a few years ago when its governor, troubled about the number of innocent people who had been sent to death row, put in place a moratorium on executions.

These states have had good reasons for their doubts. The traditional objections to the death penalty remain as true as ever. It is barbaric — governments should simply not be in the business of putting people to death. It is imposed in racially discriminatory ways. And it is too subject to error, which cannot be corrected after an execution has taken place.

In recent years, two other developments have undercut the public’s faith in capital punishment.

There has been a tidal wave of DNA exonerations, in which it has been scientifically proved that the wrong people had been sentenced to death. There is also increasing awareness that even methods of execution considered relatively humane impose considerable suffering on the condemned.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in a case about whether the pain caused by lethal injection is so great that it violates the Eighth Amendment injunction against cruel and unusual punishment. Those who study the death penalty say that if current trends continue, eventually almost all of the nation’s executions will occur in Texas. That is not a record any state should want. Some states, such as Illinois and New Jersey, have already had wide-ranging discussions about what role they want the death penalty to play in their criminal justice system. Texas is long overdue for such a debate.

If it is unwilling to abolish the death penalty, which all states should do, Texas should at least take a hard look at a system that still produces so many executions and is so wildly out of step with the rest of the country.

    State Without Pity, NYT, 27.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/opinion/27thu1.html

U.S. Disparity in Executions Grows as Texas Bucks Trend

December 26, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

This year’s death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.

Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of the executions, and that was in a year with 18 executions nationwide.

But enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas has dropped sharply. Of the 42 executions in the last year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people. Many legal experts say the trend will probably continue.

Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death-row inmates, the day is not far off when essentially all executions in the United States will take place in Texas.

“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”

Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston and has accounted for 100 executions since 1976, said the Texas capital justice system was working properly. The pace of executions in Texas, he said, “has to do with how many people are in the pipeline when certain rulings come down.”

The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.

Outside of Texas, even supporters of the death penalty say they detect a change in public attitudes about executions in light of the time and expense of capital litigation, the possibility of wrongful convictions and the remote chance that someone sent to death row will actually be executed.

“Any sane prosecutor who is involved in capital litigation will really be ambivalent about it,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. He said the families of murder victims suffered needless anguish during what could be decades of litigation and multiple retrials.

“We’re seeing fewer executions,” Mr. Marquis added. “We’re seeing fewer people sentenced to death. People really do question capital punishment. The whole idea of exoneration has really penetrated popular culture.”

As a consequence, Mr. Dieter said, “we’re simply not regularly using the death penalty as a country.”

Over the last three years, the number of executions in Texas has been relatively constant, averaging 23 per year, but the state’s share of the number of total executions nationwide has steadily increased as the national totals have dropped, from 32 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2006 to 62 percent in 2007.

The death penalty developments that have dominated the news in recent months are unlikely to have anything like the enduring consequences of Texas’ vigorous commitment to capital punishment.

A Supreme Court case concerns how to assess the constitutionality of lethal injection protocols. While it is possible that states may have to revise the ways they execute people, executions will almost certainly resume soon after the court’s decision, which is expected by June.

Similarly, New Jersey’s abolition of the death penalty last week and Gov. Jon Corzine’s decision to empty death row of its eight prisoners is almost entirely symbolic. New Jersey has not executed anyone since 1963.

And while the total number of executions in 2007 was low, it would have been similar to those in recent years but for the moratorium, if extrapolated to a full year.

There do seem to be slight stirrings suggesting that other states might follow New Jersey. Two state legislative bodies — the House in New Mexico and the Senate in Montana — passed bills to abolish capital punishment, and in Nebraska, the unicameral legislature came within one vote of doing so.

Texas has followed the rest of the country in one respect: the number of death sentences there has dropped sharply.

In the 10 years ending in 2004, Texas condemned an average of 34 prisoners each year — about 15 percent of the national total. In the last three years, as the number of death sentences nationwide dropped significantly, from almost 300 in 1998 to about 110 in 2007, the number in Texas has dropped along with it, to 13 — or 12 percent.

Indeed, according to a 2004 study by three professors of law and statistics at Cornell published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Texas prosecutors and juries were no more apt to seek and impose death sentences than those in the rest of the country.

“Texas’ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,” the authors of the study, Theodore Eisenberg, John H. Blume and Martin T. Wells, wrote. “It should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing convicted murderers to death.”

There is reason to think that the number of death sentences in the state will fall farther, given the introduction of life without the possibility of parole as a sentencing option in capital cases in Texas in 2005. While a substantial majority of the public supports the death penalty, that support drops significantly when life without parole is included as an alternative.

Once an inmate is sent to death row, however, distinctive features of the Texas justice system kick in.

“Execution dates here, uniquely, are set by individual district attorneys,” Professor Dow said. “In no other state would the fact that a district attorney strongly supports the death penalty immediately translate into more executions.”

Texas courts, moreover, speed the process along, said Jordan M. Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas who has represented death-row inmates.

“It’s not coincidental that the debate over lethal injections had traction in other jurisdictions but not in Texas,” Professor Steiker said. “The courts in Texas have generally not been very solicitous of constitutional claims.”

Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rebuked the state and the federal courts that hear appeals in Texas capital cases, often in exasperated language suggesting that those courts are actively evading Supreme Court rulings.

The last execution before the Supreme Court imposed a de facto moratorium happened in Texas, and in emblematic fashion. The presiding judge on the state’s highest court for criminal matters, Judge Sharon Keller, closed the courthouse at its regular time of 5 p.m. and turned back an attempt to file appeal papers a few minutes later, according to a complaint in a wrongful-death suit filed in federal court last month.

The inmate, Michael Richard, was executed that evening.

Judge Keller, in a motion to dismiss the case filed this month, acknowledged that she alone had the authority to keep the court’s clerk’s office open but said that Mr. Richard’s lawyers could have tried to file their papers directly with another judge on the court.

    U.S. Disparity in Executions Grows as Texas Bucks Trend, NYT, 26.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/26death.html?hp

Report: Holdout NY Juror Regrets Verdict

December 26, 2007
Filed at 10:40 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (AP) -- A second juror who convicted a black man of shooting a white teenager in a racially charged encounter now says she felt pressured by fellow jurors to change her vote to guilty.

Juror Donna Marshak told the New York Post she was so distraught when the verdict was read that she turned her face away so she did not have to look at John White as he was convicted of manslaughter in the Aug. 9, 2006, shooting.

The verdict came after 12 hours of deliberations Saturday, the fourth day in which the jury considered defense arguments that White feared a ''lynch mob'' had set upon him when a group of angry white teenagers gathered outside his home in Miller Place, a predominantly white community on Long Island.

The Post had previously reported that another juror, Francois Larche, decided to change his vote to guilty after Suffolk County Judge Barbara Kahn told jurors they would have to return Sunday if they did not reach a verdict.

Marshak, a 63-year-old white retiree, said the decision by Larche, who also is white, to change his vote left her as the lone holdout, the Post reported Wednesday. She said she did not believe she could change the minds of any other jurors.

''I haven't felt right since the trial ended,'' she said. ''I definitely have some regrets about not sticking to it.''

Marshak said she was heartsick afterward.

''I was driving home and I just had to stop. I started crying,'' she told the newspaper.

Jury forewoman Maureen Steigerwald told Newsday during the weekend that she thought the jury did a ''very careful, conscientious deliberate job.''

White, 54, was convicted in the shooting of 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro Jr. He remains free on bail until sentencing, when he could face a prison term of five to 15 years. White has said he will appeal.

    Report: Holdout NY Juror Regrets Verdict, NYT, 26.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Driveway-Shooting.html

Calif. Court: Malls Can't Bar Protesters

December 25, 2007
Filed at 7:39 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The California Supreme Court has ruled that shopping malls can't stop protesters from urging the boycott of stores while on mall property.

In a 4-3 decision Monday, the justices ruled that the Fashion Valley mall in San Diego violated California's free speech laws when it kicked out demonstrators in 1998.

Members of a workers' union at the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper were forced out of the mall for distributing leaflets urging the boycott of the Robinsons-May store.

The union was involved in a dispute with company management and wanted to hurt Robinsons-May's business because it advertised in the newspaper.

The high court ruled that California's free speech laws protect such demonstrations.

    Calif. Court: Malls Can't Bar Protesters, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mall-Protests.html

Juror in Long Island Killing Says He Was Pressured Into a Guilty Verdict

December 25, 2007
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON and NATE SCHWEBER

At 8 p.m. on Saturday, a jury deciding the racially charged manslaughter case of a black man who shot a white teenager last year was still “hopelessly deadlocked,” to use the term the jurors used earlier in a note to the judge.

It was the 11th hour of the fourth day of jury deliberations, and a pack of news crews was waiting, as were lawyers, anxious relatives of the defendant and the victim and a racially divided gallery that had sat on separate sides of a courtroom in the Suffolk County courthouse for a month.

A mistrial seemed imminent. But Judge Barbara Kahn, who had given the jury the case on Wednesday, kept them deliberating late Friday night. Then, when they could not reach a unanimous verdict, she called them in on Saturday, asking them to give their home phone numbers to court officials and indicating that they would have to come in again Sunday if they did not reach a decision, and then on Monday, Christmas Eve.

In fact, most of the jury — 10 members — had already concluded by then that the man, John H. White, 54, was guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting of Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17.

Daniel was shot point-blank in the face on August 9, 2006, after he and several friends arrived at Mr. White’s house and began using racial epithets in challenging Mr. White’s son, Aaron, then 19, to fight.

But there were two holdouts on the jury. And to one of them, François Larché, 46, of West Islip, Mr. White’s account of the night’s events — that the shooting was an accident and that he was protecting his family and home against a “lynch mob” of angry teenagers — resonated.

In an interview at his home, Mr. Larché said he still thought there was reasonable doubt about Mr. White’s guilt. On Saturday night, when the jury was polled, he refused to vote guilty, he said. He said that he and a female juror, whom he declined to name, had endured pressure and mistreatment from the other jurors because they remained “diametrically opposed” to them.

But by the end of the night on Saturday, he said, the pressure and the rigorous deliberating schedule finally caused them to buckle. At 8:30, he said, he spoke with the other holdout.

“I said: ‘That’s it, I’m done. I don’t know what you want to do, but that’s it for me,’” Mr. Larché recalled. “Everyone stayed real quiet when that happened. They were probably whispering to themselves, ‘Hallelujah.’”

Within a few minutes, the jury of six white women, five white men and one black man walked into the courtroom and told Mr. White that he had been found guilty.

There was no immediate comment from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, but a lawyer for Mr. White, Frederick K. Brewington, said Monday that the setting of such a rigorous schedule for the jury “turned up the pressure for a verdict” and “was like dynamite to throw into an already explosive case.”

The manslaughter charge that Mr. White was convicted of carries a maximum sentence of 5 to 15 years. Mr. Brewington said he was appealing the decision and would request that Mr. White, who is free on $100,000 bail until his Feb. 21 sentencing, remain out of prison until the appeal.

Mr. Larché, who is white and immigrated from South Africa in 1982 partly because of his hatred of apartheid, said that he was badgered by the other jury members for holding out.

“They were making attacks on me,” and with that dynamic, he added, “You’re not going to be able to work.”

On Friday, the jury sent Judge Kahn a note stating that certain jurors were not properly following her instructions and needed to be reminded of legal aspects of the charges. Mr. Larché said that other jurors “told me I was misinterpreting the law.” But, he said, he firmly believed there was reasonable doubt that Mr. White was guilty.

“The doubt is definitely there,” he said. “You have the right to use deadly force if you believe your person or property is threatened. Does he have justification for that? I think he does.”

If other jurors had paid closer attention to the charges, he said, “They might have made a different decision.”

In an interview at his home yesterday, Juror No. 12, Richard Burke, called the deliberations “very emotional” but he said that there was no pressuring of the jurors. “Nobody pressured nobody,” Mr. Burke said. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and it was a process. Some people just see things a little different, and when the verdict happened, it happened. It was just an act of God, and that was that.”

For his part, Mr. Larché denounced the performance of his fellow jurors. “I don’t think there was any process followed where all the jurors objectively looked at the evidence and testimony and put all the pieces together,” he said, adding that he finally gave in to the pressure. “I wish that the people of the State of New York gave this man another trial in another county,” he said. “I don’t think Suffolk County will ever be fair to Mr. White.”

    Juror in Long Island Killing Says He Was Pressured Into a Guilty Verdict, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/nyregion/25jury.html

Scared Silent

In Witness Killing, Prosecutors Point to a Lawyer

December 21, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

NEWARK — For prosecutors in New Jersey, much about the 2004 murder of Deshawn McCray was all too familiar: Yet another key witness in a major drug case had been shot dead before he could testify in court.

But there was one aspect of the killing that especially alarmed and infuriated prosecutors. They believed that a defense lawyer — a former prosecutor — had played a role in facilitating the murder.

The United States attorney has said that that lawyer, Paul Bergrin, relayed Mr. McCray’s identity to friends of one of his clients, a gang member who was facing life in prison on drug charges. The prosecutors said he had even met with members of his client’s gang in person to make clear what was at stake.

“No Kemo, no case,” Mr. Bergrin told the gang members, using Mr. McCray’s nickname, according to testimony in federal court this year.

Three months later, Mr. McCray was shot in the head by one of the gang members on a Newark street.

“Paul Bergrin was a pivotal part of the conspiracy to kill Kemo McCray,” an assistant United States attorney, Joseph Minish, said in court. “Without him, it would not have taken place.”

Prosecutors will not speak publicly now about Mr. Bergrin. They have never charged him in connection with the killing or in any other case in which witnesses might have been intimidated or harmed. They have indicated that problems with safeguarding key evidence — including a wiretapped conversation involving Mr. Bergrin — have left them unable to pursue a prosecution.

But for law enforcement officials in New Jersey who have struggled to combat the widespread problem of witness intimidation, the claims about Mr. Bergrin amount to a particularly disturbing twist on a growing threat.

Mr. Bergrin, in an interview, denied any involvement in knowingly endangering a witness. He said that he had never met with gang members, and that anyone who claimed that he conspired to harm a witness was lying.

“I had nothing to do with the homicide of any witnesses whatsoever,” said Mr. Bergrin, who continues to practice criminal defense law in New Jersey. “I would never partake in any kind of action related to that kind of conduct.”

Law enforcement officials in New Jersey, though, have long been concerned about cases involving Mr. Bergrin’s clients, many of them gang members.

In one case, murder charges against Mr. Bergrin’s client were dropped after a prosecution witnesses was killed. In another murder case and a shooting case, charges were reduced after witnesses were intimidated and recanted their previous statements. And in 2005, a witness against one of Mr. Bergrin’s clients in a murder case changed his story after the defendant’s relatives gave him $1,050 in Mr. Bergrin’s office — and later pleaded guilty to making the payment.

Mr. Bergrin was not present in the office at the time, and he said he had no knowledge of any such payment. “There was never any allegation that I was involved,” he said.

The only legal or professional scrutiny Mr. Bergrin is currently known to face, in fact, is in New York City, where prosecutors have charged him with running New York Confidential, a brothel that charged $1,000 an hour.

The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, has accused Mr. Bergrin of taking over the business from a former client and using it to offer sexual favors to unnamed New Jersey law enforcement officers and jail guards — people who were in a position to keep him informed about what inmates might be planning to cooperate against his clients.

Mr. Bergrin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Gerald Shargel, called the charges “nonsense.”

The possible role of defense lawyers in the intimidation of witnesses has angered prosecutors in New Jersey for years, and has recently attracted the interest of state legislators.

For their part, prosecutors say they have grown weary of a familiar sequence of events: Shortly after they provide defense lawyers with copies of a witness’s statement, as they are required by law to do, the threats, warnings and outright attacks begin.

In gang cases prosecuted in cities including Trenton, Newark and Camden, it is not unusual for a witness’s statement to be photocopied within days of being turned over to the defendant’s lawyer, and then be posted on telephone poles or circulated throughout the neighborhood.

State officials are hoping to offer witnesses greater protection, state officials are pushing for laws to restrict the information released to lawyers for certain criminal defendants.

A bill now being considered by the State Legislature and supported by the state attorney general would require that prosecutors handling gang cases turn over only a witness’s name, and make it a felony for defense lawyers to provide their clients with addresses or other identifying information.

“The defendants have a right to know the evidence against them,” said Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, a sponsor of the bill. “But witnesses have a right not to be harassed.”

But even supporters of that measure concede that it will be of limited value because many gang crimes occur in neighborhoods or drug organizations so tightknit that all it takes to locate a witness is a name — or a nickname.

Mr. Bergrin, 52, built a reputation as something of a legal maverick as he moved from prosecutor to defense lawyer.

After a decorated career in the Army infantry, he was a prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office in New Jersey and the Essex County prosecutor’s office, preparing his cases with a ferocity that impressed his colleagues and intimidated his opponents. Mr. Bergrin — the son of a Brooklyn police officer and a graduate of law school at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — bragged that as a prosecutor he won convictions on every homicide case he handled.

He entered private practice sometime before 1990, and since then, Mr. Bergrin’s client list has allowed him to move through divergent worlds. He has represented celebrities like Queen Latifah; soldiers accused of murdering Iraqi detainees; Angelo Prisco, a Genovese crime family boss; and a former Mrs. New Jersey, who was accused of passing $70,000 in bad checks.

And he has won acquittals in more than a dozen murder trials, a track record that has made his name familiar along Newark’s streets and cellblocks.

Mr. Bergrin’s dealings with those clients has provoked criticism from prosecutors and police officials who say he has become far too close to the accused drug dealers and gangsters he represents.

Mr. Bergrin defends his work.

“When you represent thousands of individuals, have had hundreds of homicides and violent crimes, you can’t be held responsible for every time a witness gets talked to or intimidated or threatened,” he said.

In Mr. McCray’s case, the events leading to his slaying began in November 2003, prosecutors have said, when Mr. Bergrin met with a client named William Baskerville, who had just been arrested on charges of selling more than 50 grams of cocaine.

The prosecutors’ charges about Mr. Bergrin emerged at Mr. Baskerville’s trial. Mr. Bergrin had been removed as his lawyer, but he was a central character in the story prosecutors told in court.

Court records and telephone logs show that shortly after visiting Mr. Baskerville in jail, Mr. Bergrin called Hakeem Curry — Mr. Baskerville’s cousin and Newark’s most powerful heroin distributor — and told him the identity of the prosecution’s star witness.

“I got a chance to speak to William, and he said the informant is a guy by the name of K-Mo,” Mr. Bergrin told Mr. Curry, according to a transcript of the conversation, which was taped.

Later that week, according to prosecutors, Mr. Bergrin met with Mr. Curry and two other relatives of Mr. Baskerville’s to discuss the case. One of the gang members who prosecutors said was present at the meeting was Anthony Young.

Mr. Young testified that Mr. Bergrin had warned everyone at the meeting that if Mr. McCray were to take the stand, Mr. Baskerville would almost certainly be convicted of charges that would bring a mandatory life sentence. Based on Mr. Bergrin’s statement, Mr. Young testified, Mr. Curry’s organization paid him $15,000 to kill Mr. McCray because “he has to be pushed, he has to be handled, we have to knock him off.”

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Baskerville bragged to fellow inmates that he had sent word to have his witness killed, they testified. On March 3, 2004, as Mr. McCray and his stepfather were walking back from a Newark convenience store, Mr. Young ambushed them.

Three bullets struck Mr. McCray in the head. Mr. Young, who confessed and cooperated in Mr. Baskerville’s prosecution, was sentenced to life and avoided a possible death sentence. At Mr. Baskerville’s trial, the prosecutor, in his summation, said of Mr. Bergrin, “Don’t think, ‘How could a lawyer do this?’ I hope you’re not thinking that. He was in on it, ladies and gentlemen. There is no doubt about it.”

Mr. Bergrin said that he was bewildered by the United States attorney’s assertion that he had sought to have Mr. McCray killed. He said he had spoken to Mr. Curry about the case only at the request of his client’s mother, who had informed him that Mr. Curry was her son’s cousin.

“I was just relaying the strengths and the weaknesses of the case with my client’s relative because of his close relationship,” Mr. Bergrin said.

But federal officials have described Mr. Bergrin in open court as the “house counsel” of Mr. Curry’s drug organization, which they said was responsible for more than 80 percent of the heroin distributed in Newark. Dealers who worked for Mr. Curry have testified that Mr. Bergrin was equal part lawyer and friend whose main duty was to monitor all the cases to be certain that no one cooperated with prosecutors.

The United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher Christie Jr., has not brought charges against Mr. Bergrin, partly because an assistant prosecutor did not properly safeguard the tapes of wiretapped conversation involving him, meaning that they may not be admissible as evidence in court.

“Any suggestion that I tried to prevent people from cooperating or had other motives is absolutely false,” Mr. Bergrin said. “I work incredibly hard on all of my cases and am available at all hours of the night to represent my clients.”

    In Witness Killing, Prosecutors Point to a Lawyer, NYT, 21.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/nyregion/21witness.html?hp

Lawyer Sentenced in Church Porn Case

December 17, 2007
Filed at 1:19 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) -- A former attorney for a prominent church was sentenced Monday to six months of home confinement for destroying the ex-music director's laptop computer containing child pornography.

Philip Russell pleaded guilty in September to misprision of a felony, which means he had knowledge of a felony but didn't report it. He had faced up to 14 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

Prosecutors did not recommend a sentence but U.S. District Judge Alan H. Nevas sentenced Russell to home confinement, a $25,000 fine and community service instead of prison time.

Russell's attorneys called it an impulsive act in an otherwise law-abiding career.

''I'm very relieved and very happy this case is behind me,'' Russell said outside court.

Russell acknowledged he destroyed the computer but said he did not expect an investigation involving Robert Tate, who oversaw choir programs, including those involving children.

Tate was convicted in January of possessing child pornography. He has not yet been sentenced.

Former President George H.W. Bush attended the church while growing up and funeral services for his parents were held there.

    Lawyer Sentenced in Church Porn Case, NYT, 17.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Attorney-Indicted.html

N.Y. Couple Convicted in Slavery Case

December 17, 2007
Filed at 12:15 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) -- A jury on Monday convicted a millionaire couple of enslaving two Indonesian women they brought to their mansion to work as housekeepers.

Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, and his wife, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45, were each convicted of all charges in a 12-count federal indictment that included forced labor, conspiracy, involuntary servitude, and harboring aliens.

Prosecutors said the women were subjected to repeated psychological and physical abuse and were forced to work 18 hours or more a day.

The Sabhnanis, who have four children and operate a worldwide perfume business out of their Muttontown home on Long Island's Gold Coast, could face up to 40 years in prison, although attorneys predicted the punishment would be considerably less. He is from India, and she is from Indonesia, but both are naturalized U.S. citizens

One of the couple's daughters, Dakshina, collapsed in the front row as the verdict was read, prompting the judge to clear the courtroom while medical personnel attended to her.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Hoffman said he would appeal. ''Apparently, the jury was taken by the histrionics ...'' of the Indonesian women, he said.

Fellow defense lawyer Stephen Scaring said another of the Sabhnanis' children, daughter Tina, told him: ''We never did anything to anybody, how could this happen to us in America?''

Prosecutors refused to comment until court proceedings were completed.

A representative of the Indonesian consulate in New York declined to comment.

Prosecutors called it a case of ''modern-day slavery.'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lesko said in closing arguments the poorly educated women worked as housekeepers for $100 or $150 a month -- all of which was sent to their relatives back home.

Lesko said the women, known only as Samirah and Enung, were subjected to ''punishment that escalated into a cruel form of torture'' that ended when one of the women fled on Mother's Day.

Allegations of abuse included beatings with brooms and umbrellas, slashings with knives, being made to repeatedly climb stairs and take freezing cold showers as punishment for misdeeds that included sleeping late or stealing food from trash bins because they were poorly fed.

Samirah, the woman who fled the house in May, said she was forced to eat dozens of chili peppers and then was forced to eat her own vomit when she failed to digest the peppers, prosecutors said.

''This did not happen in the 1800s,'' Lesko said. ''This happened in the 21st century.''

Enung testified that Samirah's nude body once was covered in plastic wrapping tape on orders from Varsha Sabhnani, who then instructed Enung to rip it off. ''When I pulled it off, she was screaming,'' the housekeeper said through an interpreter before breaking down in tears on the witness stand.

The Sabhnanis' defense attorneys contended the two women concocted the story of abuse as a way of escaping the house for more lucrative opportunities. They argued the housekeepers practiced witchcraft and may have abused themselves as part of an Indonesian self-mutilation ritual. They also said the couple went on frequent vacations that would have given the two women ample opportunity to flee.

The Sabhnanis spent nearly three months in jail until a judge approved a bail package that required them to post $4.5 million and pay an estimated $10,000 a day for security monitoring while they were kept under house arrest. The bail package remained in effect Monday.

    N.Y. Couple Convicted in Slavery Case, NYT, 17.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Forced-Labor.html?hp

Baseline Killer Suspect Gets 438 Years

December 15, 2007
Filed at 6:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

PHOENIX (AP) -- A man accused of being the Phoenix Baseline Killer was sentenced to 438 years in prison Friday for the sexual assaults of two sisters. Mark Goudeau still faces trial for the slayings of eight women and a man in 2005-2006, and faces a possible death sentence if he is convicted. He has pleaded not guilty.

The 43-year-old former construction worker was sentenced for his September conviction on charges of raping one woman and sexually attacking another as they walked home from a park.

During the two-month trial, both sisters identified Goudeau as their attacker. DNA evidence also linked him to the rape.

Goudeau has maintained his innocence, and told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Andrew Klein that what happened to the two young women was horrible, ''but I had nothing to do with it.''

Klein said before handing down the sentence that Goudeau must have two ''diametrically opposed'' personalities, one calm and respectful in court and the other sociopathic and brutal.

One of the victims told the judge Friday through an interpreter that she still wakes up crying at times: ''I will hope for him to never get out.''

The Associated Press has not identified the woman because she is the victim of sexual assault.

Prosecutors had said earlier that Goudeau faced a maximum of 285 years in prison. But Deputy County Attorney Suzanne Cohen proved a prior violent record in court Friday that made him eligible for the higher sentences.

Goudeau is suspected of being a serial predator known as the ''Baseline Killer,'' named for the south Phoenix street where many of the early attacks took place.

He is the first of three suspected serial killers to go on trial for a rash of random attacks that terrorized the Phoenix area for more than a year. All three were arrested last year.

Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were arrested in the so-called ''Serial Shooter'' case in August 2006 and are expected to go on trial next year. Hausner faces seven murder counts and Dieteman is charged with two. Their trial is expect to begin next year.

    Baseline Killer Suspect Gets 438 Years, NYT, 15.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Serial-Predator.html

Millionaire Sentenced in Wife's Death

December 7, 2007
Filed at 8:42 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- A millionaire was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for hiring someone to kill his estranged wife so he wouldn't have to split the couple's fortune.

Manfred Schockner's wife was stabbed to death in 2004 as police responding to a prowler call stood outside her home. A man later convicted of killing Lynn Schockner said he was offered $5,000 to kill the woman and stage a burglary.

During his sentencing Thursday in Long Beach Superior Court, Schockner, 67, suggested that police could have stopped the attack.

''Had they followed proper procedures, my wife would be alive today,'' Schockner said.

Superior Court Judge Gary Ferrari scolded Schockner and denied the defense's request for a new trial.

''This case is all about you. It's all about your insatiable greed,'' Ferrari said. ''You could have walked away from that marriage a millionaire. You had to have it all, so you had your wife's throat slit, and, just as bad, you made your son an orphan.''

Prosecutors said Schockner didn't want to split at least $3.5 million in community property with his wife.

    Millionaire Sentenced in Wife's Death, NYT, 7.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Murder-for-Hire.html

Battle Lines Drawn as Officer Is Arraigned in Killing

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

It took only about 10 minutes for Officer Rafael Lora of the New York City police to be arraigned yesterday on a charge that he illegally killed an unarmed man while investigating a car accident outside his home this spring.

Dressed in a dark suit and tie, the officer stood and listened as a prosecutor told a judge in State Supreme Court in the Bronx that the fatal shooting had “no justification.” He pleaded not guilty to first-degree manslaughter and quickly left.

But as Officer Lora, 37, walked out of the courtroom, the taunts from those related to Fermin Arzu, 41, the man the officer shot, rang out.

“Look at us! Why don’t you look us in the eye?” one man shouted as Officer Lora left, accompanied by his lawyer and several police officers who came to support him.

The lines were clearly drawn at the arraignment of Officer Lora, a nine-year veteran of the Police Department, who, after being indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday, was arrested yesterday morning, fingerprinted, photographed and formally charged in the fatal shooting of Mr. Arzu, a building porter.

The courtroom was so crowded with Mr. Arzu’s relatives and friends that members of the press were placed in the courtroom’s jury box to free up space. Officers who had come to support Officer Lora stood at the back of the courtroom.

“My client is remorseful for the fact that a life was taken, but he’s not apologetic for that, only because he did nothing wrong,” Stuart London, Officer Lora’s lawyer, said at a news conference on the steps of the Bronx County Courthouse after the arraignment. “My client was caught in an untenable position where he was forced to discharge his weapon.”

Officer Lora, who was freed on $50,000 bond, has been suspended without pay and stripped of his gun and badge, the police said.

The Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said at a press conference later in the day that Officer Lora’s statements about the shooting during his testimony before the grand jury last month lacked credibility.

“Officer Lora’s statements do not jibe with the physical evidence and the statements of other eyewitnesses, and ultimately it is our position that this tragic death of Fermin Arzu, a working man, was unnecessary, unjustified and therefore illegal,” Mr. Johnson said.

The shooting occurred shortly before midnight on May 18 after Mr. Arzu, driving his red minivan on the wrong side of the road, crashed head-on into a parked car on Hewitt Place in the Longwood section.

Officer Lora, who lives nearby, came out of his house to investigate. He was off duty at the time, wearing civilian clothes. He brought his police-issue 9-millimeter Glock handgun and had his badge clipped to the waist of his blue jeans.

Officer Lora told investigators that when he got to the minivan, Mr. Arzu did not respond to his questions or commands and appeared to be drunk. Blood-alcohol tests later showed that Mr. Arzu’s blood alcohol level was above the legal driving limit of 0.08.

Witnesses said they heard the two yelling at each other, but it remains unclear whether Officer Lora opened fire before or after Mr. Arzu’s minivan began to move down the street with the officer partially pinned inside by the open driver’s-side door.

Mr. London said yesterday that Officer Lora began to shoot only after the car began to move and that he was in danger of being dragged under the minivan.

“His own state of mind was that he was going to get run over,” said Mr. London. “Who knows what other damage this vehicle could have done to person or property?”

Officer Lora fired five times, striking Mr. Arzu once. He was able to free himself, and the minivan traveled for about two blocks, striking several other objects, including a brick wall and a pole, before it exploded in flames.

Mr. Arzu died from a bullet wound that entered his back and pierced his heart.

About 40 of Mr. Arzu’s relatives and friends attended the officer’s arraignment and vowed to attend each of his court dates in what prosecutors said would probably be a long legal process, given the number of witnesses and the complex nature of some of the forensic evidence. Officer Lora’s next court appearance is on Jan. 8.

After Officer Lora was heckled by several angry people, Mr. Arzu’s fiancée, Thomasa Sabio, 46, who was carrying a large framed photograph of Mr. Arzu, and several relatives burst into loud sobs that echoed around the halls of the courthouse.

Some members of the group began to chant, “Justice for Arzu!”

“This hurt so much,” Ms. Sabio said, crying, as she clutched the photograph to her chest.

One of Mr. Arzu’s children, Katherine Arzu, 21, said the 25-year maximum sentence for the manslaughter charge that the officer faces was too little.

“He killed my father,” she said. “He left me and my brother alone.”

Ms. Sabio summed up the emotional day by saying, “Today is a bad day for all of us.”

Al Baker contributed reporting.

    Battle Lines Drawn as Officer Is Arraigned in Killing, NYT, 6.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/nyregion/06cop.html

Grand Jury IDs Shooter in Taylor Death

December 5, 2007
Filed at 5:18 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- The 17-year-old suspect in the death of Sean Taylor is scheduled to make his first appearance in court one day after he was accused of firing the shot that killed the Washington Redskins safety.

Eric Rivera is expected to make his first appearance in a Miami-Dade court Wednesday. A grand jury here identified him as the gunman in its indictment issued Tuesday.

The indictment charges Rivera and the others -- Charles Wardlow, 18; Jason Mitchell, 19; and Venjah Hunte, 20 -- with first-degree felony murder and armed burglary. Wardlow, Mitchell and Hunte were ordered held without bail during brief court appearances via a videoconference from Miami-Dade County jail.

The three, who stood silently during the hearing, will remain at the jail under suicide watch after Judge John Thornton Jr.'s ruling.

Rivera was being transported from Fort Myers to Miami-Dade on Tuesday night. One of his attorneys said the grand jury's identification of Rivera as the gunman was expected.

''This does not come as a surprise,'' said Sawyer Smith, who along with his father Wilbur represents Rivera.

The 24-year-old Taylor died Nov. 27, a day after he was shot in the bedroom of his home. Police have said he was a victim of a botched burglary.

''I think he's in disbelief over what occurred,'' Wilbur Smith said. ''His expression to me was that 'I can't believe this kind of thing happened.'''

Asked how he would defend his client, Wilbur Smith said simply: ''Stay tuned.''

Attorneys said the four young men were agitated.

''He's very distraught,'' said Hunte's attorney, Michael Hornung. ''He's scared.''

Hornung offered glimpses of his client's possible involvement. He said Hunte was the only suspect with a valid driver's license and behind the wheel at least part of the time. He said Hunte did not have a gun and did not know his friends' plans.

''Just a bunch of friends that evening said they were going to the East Coast, and he went along,'' Hornung said. ''He had no idea whatsoever what was going on.''

Hunte is cooperating with police, his attorney said, and would tell them everything he knows.

Probable cause affidavits for Mitchell and Rivera said the two confessed to participating in armed burglary. According to the reports, Mitchell and Rivera admitted entering the home and said someone had a gun and shot Taylor, but they didn't identify who. Police and attorneys also have said some of the young men confessed, though they wouldn't elaborate.

Wardlow's attorney, David Brener, did not return a phone message. Wilbur and Sawyer Smith have said there is a fifth suspect, though police would not confirm that.

Richard Sharpstein, Taylor's former attorney, said the athlete's family was grateful for police and prosecutors' work, but that it did little to lessen their loss.

''They're still grieving and no amount of justice could ever replace Sean to them,'' Sharpstein said. ''However, they'll support this prosecution and wish the state attorney best in achieving the most severe punishment to these people.''

    Grand Jury IDs Shooter in Taylor Death, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-FBN-Redskins-Taylor-Slain.html

Man Accused in Machete Attacks Arraigned

December 5, 2007
Filed at 8:23 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A man accused of killing two people and seriously injuring three during a series of machete and gun attacks was arraigned Tuesday, telling the judge he didn't think a lawyer ''was really going to help.''

Christopher Erin Rogers Jr. is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree attempted murder. He faces up to 99 years in jail for each charge.

Rogers is accused of killing his father in Palmer with a machete Sunday and seriously injuring his father's girlfriend, then driving about 40 miles south to Anchorage and shooting three people, killing one and seriously injuring the other two. Police arrested Rogers after a brief car chase through rush-hour traffic Monday.

Rogers, 28, was being held on $1 million bail and was due in court for a pre-indictment hearing Thursday. He told Anchorage District Court Judge Brian Clark he couldn't afford an attorney, and was assigned a public defender.

''I talked to (a lawyer), but I don't think it's really going to help,'' Rogers told the judge.

Rogers is the lone suspect in the deaths of his father, Christopher E. Rogers Sr., and Jason Wenger, 27, a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, police said.

Rogers is also charged with seriously injuring Liz Rumsey, 33, Tamas Deak, 43, and his father's girlfriend, Elann Moren, 55.

Authorities believe Rogers had no prior connection to Wenger, Rumsey or Deak.

    Man Accused in Machete Attacks Arraigned, NYT, 5.12.2007,http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Machete-Killings.html

American Exception

Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers

December 4, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
 

This is the second in an occasional series of articles that will examine commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.

CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.

The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.

Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.

He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.

Mr. Holle, who had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted of first-degree murder. He is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole at the Wakulla Correctional Institution here, 20 miles southwest of Tallahassee.

A prosecutor explained the theory to the jury at Mr. Holle’s trial in Pensacola in 2004. “No car, no crime,” said the prosecutor, David Rimmer. “No car, no consequences. No car, no murder.”

Most scholars trace the doctrine, which is an aspect of the felony murder rule, to English common law, but Parliament abolished it in 1957. The felony murder rule, which has many variations, generally broadens murder liability for participants in violent felonies in two ways. An unintended killing during a felony is considered murder under the rule. So is, as Mr. Holle learned, a killing by an accomplice.

India and other common law countries have followed England in abolishing the doctrine. In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court did away with felony murder liability for accomplices, saying it violated “the principle that punishment must be proportionate to the moral blameworthiness of the offender.”

Countries outside the common law tradition agree. “The view in Europe,” said James Q. Whitman, a professor of comparative law at Yale, “is that we hold people responsible for their own acts and not the acts of others.”

But prosecutors and victims’ rights groups in the United States say that punishing accomplices as though they had been the actual killers is perfectly appropriate.

“The felony murder rule serves important interests,” said Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor in the Holle case, “because it holds all persons responsible for the actions of each other if they are all participating in the same crime.”

Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said “all perpetrators of the underlying felony, not just the one who pulls the trigger” should be held accountable for murder.

“A person who has chosen to commit armed robbery, rape or kidnapping has chosen to do something with a strong possibility of causing the death of an innocent person,” Mr. Scheidegger said. “That choice makes it morally justified to convict the person of murder when that possibility happens.”

About 16 percent of homicides in 2006 occurred during felonies, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Statistics concerning how many of those killings led to the murder prosecutions of accomplices are not available, but legal experts say such prosecutions are relatively common in the more than 30 states that allow them. About 80 people have been sentenced to death in the last three decades for participating in a felony that led to a murder though they did not kill anyone.

Terry Snyder, whose daughter Jessica was the victim in Mr. Holle’s case, said Mr. Holle’s conduct was as blameworthy as that of the man who shattered her skull.

“It never would have happened unless Ryan Holle had lent the car,” Mr. Snyder said. “It was as good as if he was there.”

Prosecutors sometimes also justify the doctrine on the ground that it deters murders. Criminals who know they will face harsh punishment if someone dies in the course of a felony, supporters of the felony murder rule say, may plan their crimes with more care, may leave deadly weapons at home and may decide not to commit the underlying felony at all.

But the evidence of a deterrent effect is thin. An unpublished analysis of F.B.I. crime data from 1970 to 1998 by Anup Malani, a law professor at the University of Chicago, found that the presence of the felony murder rule had a relatively small effect on criminal behavior, reducing the number of deaths during burglaries and car thefts slightly, not affecting deaths during rapes and, perversely, increasing the number of deaths during robberies. That last finding, the study said, “is hard to explain” and “warrants further exploration.”

The felony murder rule’s defenders acknowledge that it can be counterintuitive.

“It may not make any sense to you,” Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor in Mr. Holle’s case, told the jury. “He has to be treated just as if he had done all the things the other four people did.”

Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Charles Miller Jr., the man who actually killed Jessica Snyder, but he was sentenced to life without parole. So were the men who entered the Snyders’ home with him, Donnie Williams and Jermond Thomas. So was William Allen Jr., who drove the car. So was Mr. Holle.

Mr. Holle had no criminal record. He had lent his car to Mr. Allen, a housemate, countless times before.

“All he did was go say, ‘Use the car,’ ” Mr. Allen said of Mr. Holle in a pretrial deposition. “I mean, nobody really knew that girl was going to get killed. It was not in the plans to go kill somebody, you know.”

But Mr. Holle did testify that he had been told it might be necessary to “knock out” Jessica Snyder. Mr. Holle is 25 now, a tall, lean and lively man with a rueful sense of humor, alert brown eyes and an unusually deep voice. In a spare office at the prison here, he said that he had not taken the talk of a burglary seriously.

“I honestly thought they were going to get food,” he said of the men who used his car, all of whom had attended the nightlong party at Mr. Holle’s house, as had Jessica Snyder.

“When they actually mentioned what was going on, I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Holle added, referring to the plan to steal the Snyders’ safe. “I thought they were just playing around. I was just very naïve. Plus from being drinking that night, I just didn’t understand what was going on.”

Mr. Holle’s trial lawyer, Sharon K. Wilson, said the statements he had given to the police were the key to the case, given the felony murder rule.

“It’s just draconian,” Ms. Wilson said. “The worst thing he was guilty of was partying too much and not being discriminating enough in who he was partying with.”

Mr. Holle’s trial took one day. “It was done, probably, by 5 o’clock,” Mr. Holle said. “That’s with the deliberations and the verdict and the sentence.”

Witnesses described the horror of the crime. Christine Snyder, for instance, recalled finding her daughter, her head bashed in and her teeth knocked out.

“Then what did you do?” the prosecutor asked her.

“I went screaming out of the home saying they blew my baby’s face off,” Ms. Snyder said.

The safe had belonged to Christine Snyder. The police found a pound of marijuana in it, and, after her daughter’s funeral, she was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing it.

Not every state’s version of the felony murder rule is as strict as Florida’s, and a few states, including Hawaii, Kentucky and Michigan, have abolished it entirely.

“The felony-murder rule completely ignores the concept of determination of guilt on the basis of individual misconduct,” the Michigan Supreme Court wrote in 1980.

The vast majority of states retain it in various forms, but courts and officials have taken occasional steps to limit its harshest applications.

In August, for instance, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas commuted the death sentence of Kenneth Foster, the driver of a getaway car in a robbery spree that ended in a murder.

Mr. Holle was the only one of the five men charged with murdering Jessica Snyder who was offered a plea bargain, one that might have led to 10 years in prison.

“I did so because he was not as culpable as the others,” said Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor.

Mr. Holle, who rejected the deal, has spent some time thinking about the felony murder rule.

“The laws that they use to convict people are just — they have to revise them,” he said. “Just because I lent these guys my car, why should I be convicted the same as these people that actually went to the scene of the crime and actually committed the crime?”

Mr. Rimmer sounded ambivalent on this point.

“Whether or not the felony murder rule can result in disproportionate justice is a matter of opinion,” Mr. Rimmer said. “The father of Jessica Snyder does not think so.”

    Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers, NYT, 4.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/us/04felony.html?hp

Not Guilty Plea in Ex - Punk Manager Death

November 28, 2007
Filed at 7:08 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The personal assistant of a wealthy real estate agent and punk rock pioneer pleaded not guilty to murder on Tuesday, while court documents detailed her handwritten confession to her boss' beating death.

The assistant, Natavia Lowery, initially denied knowing anything about the death of Linda Stein, who was a former co-manager of the Ramones; then she blamed a masked man, according to court papers made public Tuesday.

Lowery claimed in a signed statement that her boss blew marijuana smoke in her face, brandished a cane and made derogatory remarks about black people.

''I snatched the cane and hit her repeatedly with it,'' wrote Lowery, who is black.

Outside court, defense attorney Ron Kuby accused police of coercing a false confession by grilling his client in an interrogation room for 12 hours.

''She had to make something up to get out of that room,'' Kuby said.

Stein, 62, was found face down in a pool of blood inside her $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment on Oct. 30. She had been smashed a half-dozen times in the head and neck -- blows that fractured her skull.

Police have said Lowery was shown on a surveillance tape leaving Stein's building shortly after the brief, brutal assault.

Lowery's attorney noted that the purported murder weapon -- previously described as a weighted stick used for yoga exercises -- was never found.

Police spokesman Paul Browne declined to comment.

Kuby also told reporters that Lowery, 26, had recently learned behind bars that she is pregnant with her fiance's child. He said he would make the pregnancy an argument for releasing her on bail at her next court appearance on Dec. 12.

Stein's real estate deals with clients, including Sting and Steven Spielberg, earned her the moniker ''Realtor to the Stars.''

    Not Guilty Plea in Ex - Punk Manager Death, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Ex-Punk-Manager-Slaying.html

Defense in Teenager’s Death Invokes Memories of Lynch Mobs

November 28, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

RIVERHEAD, N.Y., Nov. 27 — The trial of a black man accused of killing a white youth who threatened his son will be as much about race and the echoes of Jim Crow lynch mobs as about the five minutes on a hot August night in 2006 when a white teenager was shot in the face, defense lawyers for the man suggested on Tuesday.

“In the South, black men were hung because they were accused of rape, and ironically, the incident that propelled the events of that night had the same sort of background,” said Paul Gianelli, the lawyer for the defendant, John H. White, 54, a construction foreman. Mr. White, who moved with his family into the predominantly white Long Island hamlet of Miller Place only two years before the killing, faces charges of manslaughter and gun possession in Suffolk County Criminal Court here.

“They were a mob, a lynch mob,” Mr. Gianelli said of the five youths who tracked Mr. White’s son, Aaron, 20, to his home that night.

The lawyer said the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, 17, and the other youths spewed racial epithets at Mr. White and his son that night. Police have said that the youths wanted to beat Aaron White because they believed he had posted a message on an Internet chat room threatening to rape a 15-year-girl they all knew.

Mr. White intended to use the gun only to disperse the group, Mr. Gianelli said, and it went off accidentally when Mr. Cicciaro grabbed for it.

In his opening statement, the assistant district attorney, James Chalifoux, conceded that racial epithets were shouted during the confrontation. He told the jury that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends had been drinking heavily before the shooting, but that the prosecution’s case would focus not on the decisions made by the victim but on those made by Mr. White.

“Some of you may not agree with what Daniel Cicciaro did that night,” he said. “But this trial is about John White’s actions. He did not act the way you would expect of a grown, 53-year-old man.”

Mr. Chalifoux continued: “John White did not lock his doors. He did not call 911. He did not go outside and try to defuse a volatile situation.” Then, he added: “Instead, he armed his 19-year-old son with a loaded shotgun. He armed himself with an illegal .32-caliber handgun. And he confronted these unarmed boys.”

After the shooting, Mr. White lifted his hands and, the prosecutor said, told the first police officer at the scene: “Some kids were trying to assault my son. I did what I had to do. You might as well put the cuffs on me.”

Police initially charged Mr. White with murder. A grand jury reduced that charge to manslaughter in the second degree, the equivalent of reckless homicide. In July, however, Mr. White rejected a plea bargain that would have guaranteed him a maximum sentence of two to six years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea.

If convicted on the manslaughter charge, he faces 5 to 15 years in prison.

In September 2006, Mr. White said in an interview that he had seen the youths not as a “white mob” but as “a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”

During the interview, he described himself, unprompted, as the grandson of an Alabama man whose two brothers were lynched in the 1940s. He also said the .32-caliber revolver he used in the killing was bequeathed to him by his grandfather for protection.

The tall, bespectacled Mr. White sat impassively at the defense table Tuesday, occasionally taking notes.

Behind him, less than 20 feet away, sat Daniel Cicciaro’s father, Daniel, and his mother, Joanne Cicciaro. She clutched her midsection and gently rocked through most of a day of highly charged, gruesomely detailed re-enactments and descriptions of her son’s death: The single gunshot wound in the left cheek, the three inches between shooter and victim, the large pool of blood in the driveway and the victim’s cellphone lying nearby.

Both sides agreed that the dispute that led to the confrontation began at a birthday party. Aaron White was a guest along with all of the youths involved. At some point, a young girl known to all of them complained that his presence made her uncomfortable. Mr. Cicciaro and several others asked him to leave, and he did.

When the girl later told the youths she was uncomfortable because of a threat she believed was posted in an online chat room, Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue the matter. He phoned Aaron White, cursing him, and then found out where he lived and left with his friends to find him.

They arrived in two cars, blocking off the driveway of the Whites’ home.

The first witness on Tuesday, the Whites’ next door neighbor, Anthony Morano, said the first sign of trouble he noticed was the sound of the cars “racing up and down the street,” apparently looking for the Whites’ address.

“Very noisy cars, they sounded like mini-motorcycles,” he said.

Then he heard “very boisterous arguing,” he said, and “a loud pop.”

When he looked out his upstairs window, he said, “I seen something fall to the floor, to the street.”

Earlier, Mr. Morano described Mr. White as a quiet, “Hello, how are you?” kind of neighbor who was meticulous about caring for his lawn and his flower beds.

    Defense in Teenager’s Death Invokes Memories of Lynch Mobs, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/nyregion/28shoot.html

Astor’s Son Appears in Court and Denies Charges

November 28, 2007
The New York Times
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Anthony D. Marshall, 83 years old, the only son of Brooke Astor, leaned forward slightly and gazed down at the table. The only sound in the courtroom yesterday afternoon was the voice of an officer reading a litany of criminal charges against him.

One after another, the charges accused Mr. Marshall of stealing millions of dollars and valuable property from his mother, the philanthropist and socialite, after she was found to have Alzheimer’s disease.

When the last charge was read, Mr. Marshall placed his right hand on his brow, stirred, and murmured two words, “Not guilty.”

The heir to one of New York’s oldest and most legendary fortunes then borrowed a pen from one of his lawyers and signed some papers. They were given to the judge, who said, “The arrest warrant is vacated and the bond is approved” — meaning that Mr. Marshall, though a criminal defendant, still had his freedom.

As he left the courtroom, he briefly comforted his wife, Charlene, patting her back.

The two held hands as they walked slowly down the corridor, trailed by court officers and reporters. Before boarding an elevator, Mr. Marshall began leaning on a brown wooden cane with a gold-colored handle.

The 18-count indictment that was unsealed yesterday accused Mr. Marshall and one of his mother’s former lawyers, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., of numerous crimes over a six-year period, including persuading the frail and ailing Mrs. Astor to change her will so they could enrich themselves. Mr. Morrissey even stands accused of forging Mrs. Astor’s signature on an amendment to the will.

Elizabeth Loewy, an assistant district attorney, told Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr. that Mr. Marshall “abused his position of trust to steal from” his ailing mother. She asked that Mr. Marshall provide a personal recognizance bond in the amount of $100,000 and surrender his passport, which he did.

It was a striking new chapter in a divisive legal battle over Mrs. Astor’s fortune and well-being that started 16 months ago, when Mr. Marshall’s son Philip filed a court petition accusing his father of neglecting her care — a charge that was later found to be unsubstantiated — while trying to gain financially from her wealth. Mrs. Astor died in August at 105.

The Manhattan grand jury found enough evidence of improprieties committed by Mr. Marshall and Mr. Morrissey to hand up the indictment, which carries with it the possibility of significant prison time.

“Marshall and Morrissey took advantage of Mrs. Astor’s diminished mental capacity in a scheme to defraud her and others out of millions of dollars,” District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said at a news conference. “Marshall abused his power of attorney and convinced Mrs. Astor to sell property by falsely telling her that she was running out of money.”

Mr. Morrissey’s lawyer, Michael S. Ross, said that his client was flying back to the United States today and would surrender on Friday.

Mr. Morrissey was charged in the indictment with forgery, criminal possession of a forged instrument, scheme to defraud, and conspiracy. Mr. Marshall, who had been his mother’s salaried financial adviser, is charged with scheme to defraud, grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, falsifying business records and other charges.

One of Mr. Marshall’s lawyers, Kenneth E. Warner, said his client had “faithfully and effectively” managed Mrs. Astor’s affairs for more than 25 years, increasing the value of her investments from $19 million to $82 million.

“Brooke Astor loved Tony, her only child, and whatever he received was in accordance with her wishes,” Mr. Warner said. “Just as the original claims of ‘elder abuse’ were found to have no basis, we’re confident that once all the facts are known, Mr. Marshall will be exonerated.”

Mr. Marshall appeared weary at 8 a.m. yesterday as he arrived on Hogan Place in Lower Manhattan in a black Cadillac sedan, which parked in front of the entrance to the district attorney’s office. Photographers pressed their lenses up to the car window and camera lights flashed as Mr. Marshall sat impassively inside, staring straight ahead.

Wearing a gray pinstriped suit and a dark blue tie, Mr. Marshall stepped onto the sidewalk and slowly walked the 20 paces to the entrance of the office, avoiding two plastic cones and a wooden ramp placed over part of the building’s front steps.

More than a dozen reporters, photographers and television camera operators swarmed around him. A television reporter extended a microphone and asked a question. Mr. Marshall — his wife and a lawyer clutching his elbows — continued walking and made no response.

The three passed through a revolving door and stood briefly in the lobby of the building. Then, holding a green building pass in his hand, Mr. Marshall boarded an elevator.

The indictment alleges that in one instance, Mr. Marshall “stole” more than $50,000 to pay the captain of his yacht. The document also states that Mr. Marshall took money from his mother to pay the salary of a social secretary who worked primarily for his theater production company, which he operated out of his mother’s apartment without her knowledge..

He is also charged with stealing two pieces of art from her apartment — one by Tiepolo and one by John Frederick Lewis. The pieces, each valued at about half a million dollars, were returned as part of a settlement in the case brought by Philip Marshall.

On a broader scale, the indictment says that Mr. Marshall, after consulting with Mr. Morrissey, used Mrs. Astor’s money in August 2005 to pay himself a retroactive salary increase, to $1.4 million from $450,000.

Mr. Morgenthau said that as far back as 2001, Mrs. Astor’s doctors had told Mr. Marshall that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and that “her ability to understand complex issues was limited, and made it clear that his mother’s mental condition would be degenerative.”

But Mr. Morgenthau said that according to the indictment, Mr. Marshall and Mr. Morrissey persuaded Mrs. Astor to change her will in 2004 with two amendments, one of which leaves her son her residuary estate and changes her longstanding plan to ultimately leave that money to charity.

Daniel J. Castleman, the chief of the investigation division of the district attorney’s office, described that amendment as “depriving the charities of $60 million or more.”

Mr. Morgenthau said that his office’s investigation had revealed that Mr. Marshall and Mr. Morrissey had conspired to fire Mrs. Astor’s longtime lawyer and to have Mrs. Astor sign that amendment.

“Morrissey is charged with forging, or participating in the forging of Mrs. Astor’s signature” on the other amendment in question, Mr. Morgenthau said.

The amendment believed to be forged, which was signed in March 2004, directed that Mrs. Astor’s real estate be sold upon her death and that the proceeds be added to her residuary estate. Mr. Castleman said that this would result in higher executor fees for Mr. Marshall and his handpicked co-executors: his wife and Mr. Morrissey.

    Astor’s Son Appears in Court and Denies Charges, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/nyregion/28astor.html?hp

Free and Uneasy

Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside

November 25, 2007
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming.

For months after his release in September 2006, he had been yearning for a chance to dive in, to test his endurance, to feel that familiar sensation of pushing his body through the water, to get to the other side.

On a late-winter afternoon before giving a speech on wrongful convictions, Mr. Deskovic giggled mischievously as he stood at the edge of a hotel pool in Latham, N.Y., an Albany suburb, then leapt in abruptly, hugging his knees to produce a huge splash. In shorts and T-shirt, he sucked in some air and dived under, holding his breath. And holding it. He made his way across the pool in hurried, sideways strokes, and emerged gasping but smiling.

“Yes! Yes! I did it,” Mr. Deskovic yelled, his fists clenched above his head like a victorious boxer. “I still have it in me.”

A grown man with a full bushy beard, celebrating the simple accomplishment of an innocent youth. A tiny yet transcendent moment, one among many such moments of recaptured pleasures and newfound problems since his exoneration and release from prison last autumn.

Having walked out of the Westchester County Courthouse vindicated yet petrified of the unpredictable tomorrows ahead, Mr. Deskovic found that his first year on the outside was more turbulent than triumphant. Still trying to recover what was stolen from him, he is, at 34, a free man who has yet to feel truly free.

At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who, like Mr. Deskovic, were convicted of murder. In gathering information on 137 of them over the past four months — one of the most extensive such efforts to date — The New York Times found that many faced the same challenges Mr. Deskovic has confronted, like making a living, reconnecting with relatives and seeking financial recompense for his lost years.

But given Mr. Deskovic’s age at conviction (he was 17, one of about two dozen of the 206 exonerated inmates imprisoned as teenagers) and length of incarceration (about 35 percent spent more than 15 years behind bars), he has faced particular challenges.

He could be the assertive adult who articulately lobbied at the State Capitol in April to require videotaping of police interrogations. He could also be the overgrown adolescent who stamped his feet and pouted at a Grand Central Terminal kiosk in August when asked if he wanted his smoothie with yogurt or apple juice.

Having spent nearly half his life locked up, accused of brutalizing a high school classmate he hardly knew, Mr. Deskovic was sent into the world last fall lacking some of life’s most fundamental skills and experiences.

He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.

He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.

He said he had never made love.

For six months, Mr. Deskovic got by on $137 a month in disability checks and $150 in food stamps from the federal government, carrying cans of tuna in his backpack. Now earning money through speeches and newspaper columns about wrongful conviction, Mr. Deskovic paid rent for the first time in his life in August, for a cozy attic apartment in Tarrytown that the county subsidizes because of his depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In September, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police, the medical examiner, a prison guard and the governments of two counties, alleging that detectives falsified reports and coerced his confession, and that the prison guard groped and beat him. A separate lawsuit in the Court of Claims is planned seeking payment from the state for the wrongful incarceration.

Since January, he has been enrolled at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, and he expects to earn a bachelor’s degree in behavioral sciences in two months. Since June, he has studied daily for the Law School Admissions Test in hopes of soon going to law school.

At Mercy on a $22,000 scholarship, Mr. Deskovic has read Marx, Freud and Jung but has struggled to navigate the nuances of flirtation and friendship.

“These people are half my age,” he said one morning in a campus cafeteria filled with loud young men in baseball caps and baggy jeans. “They have their own social networks and I’m not part of it. They have direction. They’re going through the normal cycle of things.”

Mr. Deskovic’s life after exoneration has been punctuated by milestones like getting a driver’s license (and a $3,000 Pontiac Grand Am with a bumper sticker proclaiming, “Failure is not an option”), and new adventures, like playing table tennis at a Greenwich Village bar with people he had met online.

There have been confounding trips to the supermarket and painful reunions with his mother, hard-won victories over his fear of speaking in public and profound disillusionment over his own inability to accept his past.

And there was a bittersweet return to the courthouse in White Plains in May for the sentencing of the man found by DNA evidence to have committed the crime. There, the victim’s mother offered Mr. Deskovic an apology: “How I would like to turn back time and return to you what was cruelly taken away.”

Of course, she can’t. No one can.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Deskovic said one morning in his dorm room, “I feel that the only difference from here to prison is that I don’t have bars on my windows.” He was kneeling on his bed and staring at the neat lawn outside. “I’m free, but I’m trapped, and no matter how much I run, I’ll never make up for the lost time.”

Scarred Life, Severed Family

Carrying a box of religious and self-help books, a garbage bag full of legal documents and a few worn-out sweaters, Mr. Deskovic went from prison to Cobleskill, a speck of a town in central New York where his mother, Linda McGarr, settled after his conviction. He calls Cobleskill “the boondocks,” adding an expletive whenever he is angry at his mother, which is often.

While he was locked up, Ms. McGarr was Mr. Deskovic’s connection to the outside world (he has never known his father). He wrote letters and sent them to her to type. She, in turn, sent money for cans of oysters at the prison commissary. When he needed to badger a lawyer, she was his voice. But the relationship withered through the bars. Ms. McGarr, 60, said she tired of the lonely 150-mile drives to visit him. Mr. Deskovic said he resented her lack of urgency in tackling his legal appeals.

Two days after his release, Mr. Deskovic exploded: “How come you didn’t do more to help me?”

“I know you went through hell in there,” Ms. McGarr responded, “but I paid dearly, too.”

The next morning, Mr. Deskovic stuffed his possessions in plastic bags and boarded a train to Peekskill, the scene of the crime that scarred his life.

On Nov. 15, 1989, Angela Correa — a sophomore at Peekskill High, like Mr. Deskovic — slipped a “New Kids on the Block” tape into a portable cassette player and took her camera to a park near her home, snapping a picture of a dove perched on the roof as she left. Two days later, someone spotted her naked body in the woods.

The police retrieved hair and semen samples, which did not match Mr. Deskovic’s DNA; prosecutors argued that they were from earlier consensual sex. Mr. Deskovic, however, fit the description provided by a criminal profiler for the police, and raised investigators’ suspicions when he cried copiously at Ms. Correa’s funeral, though they were not close friends. (In a recent interview, Mr. Deskovic explained that he was always picked on in school and Angela was one of few students who were nice to him, once helping him with algebra.)

After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.

“I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there,” he recalled recently. “I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me.”

More than a quarter of all prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence had falsely confessed or made incriminating statements, according to the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that secured Mr. Deskovic’s release. Like many of those men, he had maintained his innocence since shortly after the confession, proclaiming at his sentencing hearing: “I didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe you’re innocent,” the judge conceded before sentencing him to 15 years to life. “But the jury has spoken.”

Back in Peekskill after his release, frosty raindrops pelting his skin, Mr. Deskovic ambled past the police station on Nelson Avenue where he was held after his arrest and up Brown Street toward Crossroads, the apartment complex where he grew up.

“I used to play kickball here, and when it snowed, I’d get a piece of cardboard and sled down this hill over there,” he said, staring at a slope between a tall brick building and a playground. “I used to have a life.”

“Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are people on other planets and that all of a sudden you’re dropped there, with no idea how these people live their lives, how their society works,” he blurted. “I’m this alien. I’m the man pretending he knows what the hell is going on around him when, in fact, he’s clueless.”

Growing up, Mr. Deskovic and his younger half-brother, Christopher McGarr, spent hours shooting hoops at Depew Park, swimming in a local pool or watching wrestling on television, then mimicking the moves of Hulk Hogan and Mr. T on the living-room carpet.

“I didn’t have no father growing up, so I looked up to my brother,” explained Mr. McGarr, now 30. “But when he went to prison, a part of me died.”

On the school bus, other children called his brother a rapist, a killer. So he stopped taking the bus. Eventually, he stopped going to school. Soon he followed Mr. Deskovic into the criminal justice system, racking up more than 20 arrests and several stays in jail for drugs, theft, assault and trespassing.

By the time of Mr. Deskovic’s release, the brothers had not seen each other for 12 years. They waited another six months, until Mr. Deskovic was speaking at Siena College, near Albany, where Mr. McGarr lives.

“I don’t see him,” Mr. Deskovic said as he entered the lecture hall.

“He’s right there,” his mother replied, pointing to a man on a couch.

Mr. Deskovic hesitated, pursing his lips to stop them quivering, then trudged over to his brother, who spread his arms. They hugged a long time — Mr. Deskovic in a suit and striped tie, Mr. McGarr in loose clothes and gold chains — as their mother snapped pictures and an uncle rolled video.

“It’s been so long,” Mr. McGarr said, rubbing his fists against Mr. Deskovic’s back.

But the brothers saw each other only once more, for a tense evening of bowling and pizza in April. Mr. Deskovic’s meetings with his mother have devolved into sporadic phone calls that invariably end in screams and tears.

“Too much time has passed; we have no connection,” Mr. Deskovic said. “My relatives don’t know who I am.”

Seeking Friends

In his canvas book bag, Mr. Deskovic carries a copy of a newspaper article about his exoneration, in case anyone questions why a convicted killer is walking the streets. The newspaper picture of him and his lawyers also adorns Mr. Deskovic’s new Web site and MySpace page, which until recently included a plea: “Is anyone up to showing a man who has been away for 16 years how to have a good time?”

In his loneliest moments, when he scans the few personal contacts on his cellphone and realizes he has no one with whom to share his angst, Mr. Deskovic misses the predictability of prison life, where decisions were made for him.

At Elmira, guards woke Mr. Deskovic at 5:30 a.m. and escorted him to the kitchen, where he helped prepare breakfast for 1,800 inmates. He stood outside his cell for each of four daily counts; after the last, at 10:30 p.m., what the guards call the “quiet bell” signaled bedtime.

“If I was looking for entertainment, I’d stand by the chess players in the yard until someone challenged me” for a match, Mr. Deskovic recalled. For kinship and protection, Mr. Deskovic — a former altar boy who converted to Islam during his first year in prison — sought out fellow Muslim inmates. “If it weren’t for my religion,” he said, “I would have taken my own life in prison, or I would have lost my mind.”

On the outside, life’s pace is his to establish. During the week, there are classes, college work, psychotherapy sessions, meetings with a social worker and with the lawyers handling his compensation suit, plus practicing table tennis. Most weekends, he sits alone in his apartment, scouring the Internet for phone numbers of colleges, churches and other institutions that might be interested in hiring him for a speech.

He also trawls the Web for companionship, joining a hodgepodge of groups: “Westchester/So CT Social and Active Group,” “Straight Edge NYC” and a table tennis club.

One June evening, Mr. Deskovic took the train to the Fat Cat, a cavernous basement bar in Greenwich Village, to meet the table tennis players. As a duo played Sinatra on piano and trumpet, Mr. Deskovic ordered a ginger beer and stood across the table from a 37-year-old stockbroker who runs the group.

Score: 13-10.

“I got the momentum, baby,” Mr. Deskovic said, bobbing side to side.

14-10. 15-10.

“I got the serve now!”

18-12.

“I’m going to win! I’m going to win!”

Speaking With Motivation

On a brisk March morning, Mr. Deskovic arrived at the Mercy College cafeteria ahead of the breakfast rush, wearing a suit and carrying three ties on a hanger. He approached a woman wiping counters and whispered in her ear. She grabbed the silver tie with white diamonds and knotted it around his neck.

“I’m an adult and I don’t know how to fix my ties,” Mr. Deskovic said.

He wolfed down a plate of pancakes, then called Darren Wilkins, a concert promoter he met in December and hired to manage his career as a speaker.

Weeks before, Mr. Wilkins took Mr. Deskovic shopping in Harlem, where he bought three four-button suits. For inspiration, they have listened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. For technique, they have watched videos by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

Together, they drafted a lecture describing the mistakes that led to Mr. Deskovic’s wrongful conviction and outlining changes to prevent others from meeting the same fate.

That March day, before speaking to the League of Women Voters at an elegant home in Bronxville, he and Mr. Wilkins, a Christian, held hands, bowed their heads and prayed.

“Public speaking is a way for me to find some meaning to what happened to me,” explained Mr. Deskovic, who has not applied for traditional jobs since his release, but has traveled across New York and four other states for speeches, including one in Texas in September.

In Bronxville, Mr. Deskovic rested his hands on a plant stand in lieu of a lectern. His voice was flat and soft. He seemed to deliberately lock eyes with each of the 16 women sipping coffee.

“If anything I’ve said here today has moved you in any way, I’d like you to join me in a movement against wrongful convictions and to get the death penalty out of New York State,” he said. “Can you make a phone call? Can you join a demonstration?”

Between speeches, Mr. Deskovic counts on donations of food, clothes and cash from people who have heard his story in the news, as well as members of local mosques and the Westchester charity New Beginnings.

He rarely eats out, but for the occasional $4 kebab. Mostly, he survives on Cheerios, tuna, canned corn and shrimp-flavored noodle soup.

On July 27, Mr. Deskovic got the keys to a one-bedroom attic apartment, in a yellow house with green shutters in Tarrytown. The living room window overlooks the Hudson River, a view much like the one he had during a short stint at nearby Sing Sing.

He trimmed his beard that day, shedding perhaps the last visible reminder of the man prison had made him.

A month later, a dean at Mercy College, Shelley Alkin, who had helped arrange Mr. Deskovic’s scholarship after his release from prison, took him shopping at Pathmark to teach him about cleaning products, what types of food he ought to be eating and how much he should expect to pay.

“And I have a plan for when I go shopping on my own,” Mr. Deskovic said proudly. “I’m saving up the empty containers so I can bring them with me and buy the same things all over again.”

    Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside, NYT, 25.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25jeffrey.html?hp

Free and Uneasy

A Long Road Back After Exoneration, and Justice Is Slow to Make Amends

November 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JANET ROBERTS and ELIZABETH STANTON

Christopher Ochoa graduated from law school five years out of prison and started his own practice in Madison, Wis. He has a girlfriend and is looking to buy a house.

Michael Anthony Williams, who entered prison as a 16-year-old boy and left more than two years ago as a 40-year-old man, has lived in a homeless shelter and had a series of jobs, none lasting more than six months.

Gene Bibbins worked a series of temporary factory jobs, got engaged, but fell into drug addiction. Four and a half years after walking out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he landed in jail in East Baton Rouge, accused of cocaine possession and battery.

The stories are not unusual for men who have spent many years in prison. What makes these three men different is that there are serious questions about whether they should have been in prison in the first place.

The men are among the more than 200 prisoners exonerated since 1989 by DNA evidence — almost all of whom had been incarcerated for murder or rape. Their varied experiences are typical of what The New York Times found in one of the most extensive looks to date at what happens to those exonerated inmates after they leave prison.

The Times worked from a list of DNA-exonerated prisoners kept by the Innocence Project — widely regarded as the most thorough record of DNA exonerations. The Times then gathered extensive information on 137 of those whose convictions had been overturned, interviewing 115.

The findings show that most of them have struggled to keep jobs, pay for health care, rebuild family ties and shed the psychological effects of years of questionable or wrongful imprisonment.

Typically, testing of blood or semen from the crime scene revealed DNA pointing to another perpetrator. The authorities in some of the cases have continued to insist they convicted the right men, and have even fought efforts by some of them to sue for money.

About one-third of them, like Mr. Ochoa, found ways to get a stable footing in the world. But about one-sixth of them, like Mr. Bibbins, found themselves back in prison or suffering from drug or alcohol addiction.

About half, like Mr. Williams, had experiences somewhere between those extremes, drifting from job to job and leaning on their family, lawyers or friends for housing and other support.

And in many cases the justice system has been slow to make amends.

The Times researched the compensation claims of all 206 people known by the Innocence Project to have been exonerated through DNA evidence as of August 2007. At least 79 — nearly 40 percent — got no money for their years in prison. Half of those have federal lawsuits or state claims pending. More than half of those who did receive compensation waited two years or longer after exoneration for the first payment.

Few of those who were interviewed received any government services after their release. Indeed, despite being imprisoned for an average of 12 years, they typically left prison with less help — prerelease counseling, job training, substance-abuse treatment, housing assistance and other services — than some states offer to paroled prisoners.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Vincent Moto, exonerated in 1996 of a rape conviction after serving almost nine years in Pennsylvania. “They have programs for drug dealers who get out of prison. They have programs for people who really do commit crimes. People get out and go in halfway houses and have all kinds of support. There are housing programs for them, job placement for them. But for the innocent, they have nothing.”

The Times’s findings are limited to those exonerated inmates the newspaper reached and do not represent the experiences of exonerated prisoners everywhere. (More on the research and a full list of contributing reporters are at nytimes.com/nyregion.)

Most of the 137 exonerated inmates researched by The Times entered prison in their teens or 20s, and they stayed there while some of their peers on the outside settled on careers, married, started families, bought homes and began saving for retirement. They emerged many years behind, and it has been difficult to catch up.

To be sure, many in the group were already at a disadvantage when they entered prison. More than half had not finished high school. Only half could recall holding a job for more than a year. Some admitted to abusing drugs or alcohol or running with the wrong crowd.

But dozens of them had been leading lives of stability and accomplishment. More than 50 had held a job for more than two years in fields as varied as nursing, mail delivery, welding, fishing, sales and the military. Five had college degrees, and 20 others had completed some college or trade school.

Still, many of those were as unlucky as the most modestly educated when it came to finding work after their release. Most found that authorities were slow to wipe the convictions from their records, if they did so at all. Even newspaper articles about their exonerations seemed somehow to have had a negative effect in the public’s mind.

“Any time that anyone has been in prison, even if you are exonerated, there is still a stigma about you, and you are walking around with a scarlet letter,” said Ken Wyniemko, who spent more than nine years behind bars in Michigan after a rape conviction.

Before his conviction, he managed a bowling alley. After his release in 2003, he spent two fruitless years job hunting, and he estimates he applied for at least 100 jobs. Today, he lives off money he received in a legal settlement with Clinton Township in Macomb County, Mich.

Many of the jobs the newly released found proved short-lived, often lasting no more than a year. A few ex-prisoners like Kevin Green, who went from bingo caller to utility crew supervisor, changed jobs to advance their careers, but most drifted from job to job with little gain in status or salary.

Ryan Matthews, with a fiancée and 2-year-old to support, lost a series of jobs after he was exonerated from Louisiana’s death row. He lost a shipyard job after his employer saw a news report about his exoneration on television.

Short of suing, few received substantial compensation from the government.

Given the hodgepodge of state compensation laws, an exonerated prisoner’s chances of receiving any significant sum depend on the state where he was convicted and whether he can find a lawyer willing to litigate a difficult case. One man who served three years in California sued and won $7.9 million. Another, who had served 16 ½ years in Texas, filed a compensation claim and received $27,850.

President Bush and Congress moved in 2004 to improve the compensation the wrongly convicted received, adopting legislation that increased payments for people exonerated of federal crimes to $50,000 per year of imprisonment, and $100,000 per year in death penalty cases. The legislation included a clause encouraging states to follow suit, at least for wrongly convicted prisoners who had been on death row.

Lawyers and others involved with helping the exonerated have seized on that recommendation in pushing for improved compensation laws nationwide. But their efforts have gained little.

Only one state — Vermont — has adopted a compensation law since the bill passed. Twenty-one other states and the District of Columbia already had procedures for compensating the exonerated; half cap awards below $50,000 per year of incarceration.

Of the 124 prisoners exonerated through DNA and known to have received compensation, 55 got at least $50,000 for each year in prison. And most of them sued in federal court, claiming their civil rights had been violated by overzealous police officers, crime lab specialists or prosecutors. Lawyers say such cases are very difficult to win.

Twenty-five were convicted in states that provide no compensation and have collected nothing. Among them is Mr. Moto, who said he struggled this summer to raise his 10-year-old daughter on $623 a month in disability payments.

“You give no compensation to none of those guys who were wrongfully incarcerated and proved their innocence?” he said in an interview. “How can you say we believe in justice?”

    A Long Road Back After Exoneration, and Justice Is Slow to Make Amends, NYT, 25.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25dna.html?hp

Polygamist Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

November 21, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN DOUGHERTY

ST. GEORGE, Utah, Nov. 20 — The polygamous leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years to life in prison for forcing a 14-year-old girl to “spiritually” marry her 19-year-old cousin and commanding the naïve bride to submit to sexual relations against her will.

The defendant, Warren S. Jeffs, 51, was convicted by a jury in September of two counts of acting as an accomplice to a rape. Judge James L. Shumate of the Fifth District Court imposed two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole has the authority to parole Mr. Jeffs at any time, but a spokesman, Jack Ford, said it would be unlikely to do so before his first hearing in three to four years.

Mr. Jeffs remained seated, his face expressionless, as Judge Shumate announced the sentence. He declined the judge’s offer to address the court, and his defense lawyer, Walter Budgen, said Mr. Jeffs did not want to say anything publicly because he still faced criminal charges for arranging under-age marriages in Arizona. In Utah, Mr. Jeffs faces federal charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

Mr. Jeffs was convicted after a trial that included testimony by the victim, Elissa Wall, who is now 21, married and no longer a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon sect with an estimated 10,000 members. Ms. Wall testified that she told Mr. Jeffs she did not want to marry her cousin Allen G. Steed and later begged Mr. Jeffs to be released from the union because of unwanted sexual contact.

A day after Mr. Jeffs’s conviction on Sept. 25, Mr. Steed was charged with one count of rape, and is awaiting trial.

Ms. Wall declined Judge Shumate’s restitution offer of $5,000 for psychological counseling. Facing Mr. Jeffs in the courtroom Tuesday, she said that her restitution would be for the court “to give Warren Jeffs the sentence that he deserves and that perhaps some good will come from all of this.”

The sect’s teachings state that a man must have at least three wives to reach the highest realms of heaven. The sect split more than a century ago from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which disavowed polygamy in 1890 in a political compromise to gain statehood for Utah. The mainstream church excommunicates anyone practicing polygamy.

Two weeks ago, Judge Shumate unsealed jailhouse videotapes, a mental health competency report and other documents describing a crisis of faith last winter by Mr. Jeffs and his deteriorating mental health.

Those records show that after a month of praying and fasting in his cell at the Purgatory Correctional Facility in Hurricane, Utah, Mr. Jeffs relinquished his role as sect leader in conversations with church members and family.

“I am not the prophet. I never was the prophet, and I have been deceived by the powers of evil,” Mr. Jeffs said to a brother in a conversation on Jan. 25 that was videotaped by jail officials. In another conversation, Mr. Jeffs said he had been “immoral” with a sister and a daughter 30 years ago, according to documents.

Three days later, Mr. Jeffs tried to hang himself in jail. In the days after the suicide attempt, he threw himself and slammed his head against a cell wall, according to the mental health competency report prepared last April. After he was treated for depression, Mr. Jeffs’s health improved in February, and defense documents state that he recanted his statements about not being the prophet and that he had been faced with a great spiritual test.

Mr. Jeffs assumed control of the church after the death of his predecessor, his father, Rulon.

Mr. Jeffs ruled with unquestioned authority and excommunicated scores of men who were forced to leave the community and their wives and children. Mr. Jeffs then reassigned the women and children to other men that he considered more spiritually worthy.

    Polygamist Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison, NYT, 21.11.2007,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/us/21jeffs.html

3 Sentenced in Death of NYC Gay Man

November 20, 2007
Filed at 10:57 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Three men convicted of beating a gay man and then chasing him onto a highway where he was struck by a car and killed were sentenced to prison on Tuesday, prosecutors said.

All three had been part of what prosecutors called a hate-inspired robbery scheme.

On Oct. 8, 2006, they found Michael Sandy in an Internet chat room frequented by gay men, lured him out to Brooklyn's remote Plum Beach with a promise of a date and then attacked him. When Sandy tried to escape, he was hit by a car on the Belt Parkway.

Anthony Fortunato, 21, who had told jurors they shouldn't convict him of a hate crime because he's gay was sentenced to seven to 21 years in prison for second-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and attempted petit larceny.

John Fox, 20, was sentenced to seven to 21 years in prison for second-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and attempted robbery as a hate crime.

Ilya Shurov, 21, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in prison for second-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and attempted robbery as a hate crime.

A fourth man, Gary Timmons, had already pleaded guilty to attempted robbery as a hate crime and testified in the case in exchange for a four-year sentence.

Fortunato claimed in court that the attack was not motivated by hate. But prosecutors argued that under state hate crimes law, they didn't have to prove that Sandy's attackers hated gay men -- only that they picked their victim because of his sexual orientation.

    3 Sentenced in Death of NYC Gay Man, NYT, 20.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Parkway-Attack.html

Doctor to Trial in Autistic Boy's Death

November 16, 2007
Filed at 12:15 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. (AP) -- A doctor was ordered on Thursday to stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by incorrectly administering a controversial chemical treatment.

Dr. Roy Kerry, 69, used the wrong drug and administered it incorrectly while trying to use chelation therapy on Abubakar Tariq Nadama, another physician testified for the prosecution at Kerry's preliminary hearing Thursday.

Dr. Mary Carrasco called Kerry's actions ''extremely reckless.''

The boy went into cardiac arrest in Kerry's office on Aug. 23, 2005, immediately after receiving the therapy meant to remove heavy metals from the body.

Chelation is not approved by the federal government for treating autism, though the Food and Drug Administration has approved it for treating lead poisoning. Some people who link autism to a mercury-containing preservative that was once common in childhood vaccines advocate chelation as a remedy.

A district judge on Thursday determined prosecutors had enough evidence to proceed with the case and ordered Kerry to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter.

Kerry's lawyer, Al Lindsay, had argued there was not enough evidence that the doctor had committed a crime.

John Gismondi, the family's attorney, welcomed the district judge's decision. ''It was obviously reckless conduct. He did something no doctor in the world would do,'' Gismondi said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed Abubakar's autopsy in January 2006. The agency said the boy died because the doctor administered a drug that removes calcium from the blood, disodium EDTA, rather than calcium EDTA, which is FDA-approved to treat heavy metal poisoning.

Carrasco also said Kerry administered the drug in one intravenous ''push,'' but should have given the drug over several hours.

The boy's parents, Mawra and Rufai Nadama, had moved from Plymouth, England, to the Pittsburgh area so he could receive the autism treatment. They have filed a wrongful death suit against Kerry. The parents have returned to the United Kingdom and did not attend Thursday's hearing.

Kerry has argued that the boy's autism symptoms improved after the first two treatments. He acknowledged there may have been ''miscommunication'' about which medicine to administer during the third treatment, but said it did not amount to gross negligence.

Kerry also will stand trial on charges of endangering the welfare of a child and reckless endangerment. The doctor has no prior conviction, so is unlikely to face the maximum sentence of decades in prison if convicted.

    Doctor to Trial in Autistic Boy's Death, NYT, 16.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Autistic-Boys-Death.html

Men Accused in Girl's Death Need Lawyers

November 13, 2007
Filed at 12:35 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CASSVILLE, Mo. (AP) -- The stepfather of a slain 9-year-old girl and his friend need public defenders to represent them against rape and murder charges, an attorney said Tuesday.

Public defender Brian Smith spoke on behalf of David Spears, Rowan Ford's stepfather, and Chris Collings at their first court appearance. Neither man entered a plea pending the appointment of their lawyers.

Rowan's body was found earlier this month in a southwestern Missouri cave about 10 miles south of her home in the village of Stella.

Spears, 25, and Collings, 32, were brought into court under heavy guard and wearing wrist and ankle shackles. They are charged with one count each of first-degree murder, forcible rape and statutory rape.

During the hearing, Rowan's mother, Colleen Spears, sat in the front row of the gallery flanked by several friends and family members. Afterward, she walked silently past TV cameras and reporters. A police officer escorting them told reporters not to ask questions.

Barry County prosecutor Johnnie Cox said that he has not decided if he will seek the death penalty.

Both men have admitted taking part in the crime, according to investigators and court filings.

Collings' brother Greg Horton has said that he did not believe his brother was involved. Spears' mother has said that her son told her from jail that he took part, although she was unclear on the details.

(This version corrects the attorney's last name to Smith instead of White.)

    Men Accused in Girl's Death Need Lawyers, NYT, 13.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Missing-Girl.html

Cause Celebres Cross Line Into Heroism

November 11, 2007
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WINSTON, Ga. (AP) -- A crowd gave a hero's welcome to a 20-year-old freed from a 10-year prison sentence imposed on him for having underage sex in a hotel room at a New Year's Eve party.

Genarlow Wilson, like the Jena Six in Louisiana and NFL quarterback Michael Vick, is the latest young black man to draw support from many in the black community who seem willing to look past alleged offenses.

For three years, the West Metro NAACP chapter led the fight to free him from the prison term. ''Free Genarlow'' became a rallying cry across the country as the case turned him into an example of racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

The Georgia Supreme Court agreed, freeing him on Oct. 26 with a 4-3 decision that called his sentence ''cruel and unusual punishment.''

On Saturday night, hundreds rose to their feet and gave Wilson a standing ovation before honoring him with the chapter's first Staying the Course Youth Award.

Nationally syndicated radio host Warren Ballentine, who has used his show to speak out against racial injustices including Wilson's case, called the award ''a wonderful thing.''

Wilson, applauded for refusing to accept a plea bargain and continuing to contest his sentence, appears humbled by his experience. Sheepish and soft-spoken in interviews, he comes across as polite and respectful -- a contrast from the cavalier teen who is shown smiling in a grainy videotape of the hotel room encounter that led to his prison term.

''We're not awarding him for the video,'' said Ballentine, the keynote speaker at Saturday's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fundraiser. ''We're awarding him for fighting ... This young man is a champion.''

Still, the attention is sparking a debate over whether accolades are in order.

''I admire that he stood his ground,'' said Cassandra Dillard, who was in the audience. ''He made a mistake. But I don't know what he has done that warrants an award.''

Even Wilson acknowledged that the accolades are a bit awkward.

Bryant Purvis and Carwin Jones, two of the so-called Jena Six, looked less than modest when they appeared on the red carpet at the BET Awards in Atlanta last month. They are accused of beating a white teen in a case that galvanized thousands of blacks who saw disparate and excessive prosecution in the small central Louisiana town of Jena. Charges weren't filed against three white teens accused of hanging nooses in a tree at the local high school shortly before the attack.

While the Jena Six themselves were not honored and BET distanced itself from the fight, the teens received a standing ovation from the audience when they took the stage to help present the Video of the Year award.

Still, there was a perception that they were acting more like superstars than defendants who may have been treated unfairly -- but are not necessarily innocent.

Some in the black community may be ignoring such wrongs out of frustration, said Jeff Johnson, an activist and former national youth director of the NAACP.

''I don't think that it is an intentional negligence on our part,'' he said. ''It is an optimistic desire to be able to stick it to a justice system that has stuck it to us for so long. But we can't do that at the cost of justifying behavior that we know is unacceptable. What we've got to be able to do is get to the point where we can hold everybody accountable at the same time.''

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference came under fire in August after suggesting it would recognize Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick. Although the organization did not say it would honor Vick -- who is scheduled to be sentenced next month on federal charges related to a dogfighting operation -- it later clarified its position.

''He might've made a mistake, but it's not enough to throw this man away as a human being,'' said SCLC President Charles Steele. ''This is an opportunity to bring about healing.''

Kimberly Alexander, president of the NAACP chapter, said that while Wilson made some mistakes, his case is still a success story. And audience member Dillard said she respected Wilson's perseverance, but wasn't sure she could go beyond supporting him.

''There are so many people who are wrongfully arrested, wrongfully prosecuted, wrongfully incarcerated,'' Dillard said. ''Do we give an award to all of them? Is it that we're so in need of heroes? I don't know.''

    Cause Celebres Cross Line Into Heroism, NYT, 11.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Teen-Sex-Case.html

N.J. to Vote on Abolishing Death Penalty

November 9, 2007
Filed at 3:45 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Lawmakers in New Jersey, which hasn't executed anyone in 44 years, will decide within two months whether to wipe the death penalty off the books, legislative leaders said Friday.

If approved by the Legislature and Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a death penalty opponent, the move would make New Jersey the first state to abolish capital punishment since the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.

''The time has come,'' Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts Jr. said after a breakfast meeting in his office with Sister Helen Prejean, the Roman Catholic nun who wrote ''Dead Man Walking.''

''This is such a special moment,'' said Prejean, whose book about serving as a spiritual adviser to death row inmates was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. ''New Jersey is going to be a beacon on the hill.''

The Assembly will vote Dec. 13 on whether to reduce the state's most severe punishment to life in prison without parole, Roberts said. Jennifer Sciortino, a spokeswoman for Senate President Richard J. Codey, said he expects taking similar action before the legislative session ends Jan. 8, though a vote hasn't been set.

Corzine spokeswoman Lilo Stainton said the governor looks forward to working with the Legislature to abolish the death penalty.

Roberts, a Democrat like Corzine and Codey, called the death penalty ''flawed public policy'' that is costly, discriminatory, immoral and cruel.

''The consequences are irreparable if mistakes are made,'' he said.

A Senate committee approved abolishing the death penalty in May, but the Senate didn't give the bill further consideration. The bill stems from a January report by a special state commission that found the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison and didn't deter murder.

The proposal hasn't sat well with relatives of the victims of those on death row.

Sharon Hazard-Johnson, whose parents were killed in their Pleasantville home in 2001 by Brian Wakefield, said lawmakers should focus on streamlining the state's death penalty law. She challenged them to put the question to voters.

''The majority would say that they are for the death penalty when it fits the crime,'' Hazard-Johnson said.

New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982 but hasn't executed anyone since 1963. The Legislature imposed an execution moratorium in December 2005 when it formed the commission that studied the death penalty.

''The New Jersey death penalty has become a paper deterrent, the epitome of false security,'' Roberts said.

The state has eight men on death row.

Republicans, the state's minority party, vowed to fight the proposal, recalling the May arrests of five men charged with planning to mount a terrorist attack against Fort Dix.

''We live in dangerous times,'' said Sen. Gerald Cardinale. ''While there are problems with the way the death penalty is administered in New Jersey, abolishing it is not the solution.''

    N.J. to Vote on Abolishing Death Penalty, NYT, 9.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Death-Penalty-New-Jersey.html

State’s Oldest Inmate Is Granted His Freedom by Parole Board

November 8, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

A panel of the State Parole Board voted 2 to 1 yesterday to release Charles E. Friedgood, a wealthy Long Island surgeon who was convicted in 1976 of murdering his ailing wife and who is now, at 89, the oldest state prison inmate in New York. He is expected to be freed in mid-December and admitted to a veterans’ hospital.

Reversing a ruling announced on Oct. 10 by a panel of three other parole commissioners, the majority concluded yesterday, “There is reasonable probability that, if released, this inmate will live and remain at liberty without violating the law.”

He was ordered to participate in an anger-management program and mental evaluation and not to contact “the victim’s” family — including his own children and grandchildren — without the permission of a parole officer.

It was the sixth time a board had considered Dr. Friedgood’s release since he served the minimum of his 25-years-to-life sentence in the 1975 murder at the family’s 18-room residence in Great Neck, on Long Island, where he and his wife, Sophie, raised their six children.

One of his daughters, Esther A. Zaretsky, a lawyer, represented him in a second court case that challenged the parole process by arguing that under Gov. George E. Pataki the board routinely refused to release violent felons. Her co-counsel in that case, John F. Queenan of Albany, said yesterday, “We got what we’ve been fighting for.”

The board said yesterday, “While some have formally expressed opposition to this inmate’s release, for various reasons, they are significantly outnumbered by those expressing support for release.” Those included the Nassau County prosecutor who handled the case; various relatives, clergymen and prison employees; and several public officials, including Marty Markowitz, the borough president of Brooklyn, where Dr. Friedgood practiced.

The board said that Dr. Friedgood’s crime “was horrendous and cannot be excused, explained or forgotten” and that it had “a deep and profoundly negative impact upon the victim’s family.” Against that, the board weighed his advanced age; his medical condition; and his positive record in prison, including saving the lives of a guard who was having a heart attack and an inmate who was choking.

Dr. Friedgood has terminal cancer and has undergone numerous operations, including a colostomy. As far back as 2000, it was estimated that his medical bills had already cost the state nearly $300,000.

Sophie Friedgood’s death certificate recorded the cause as a stroke, but the police were suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the certificate himself and quickly sent the body out of state for burial.

Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his 48-year-old wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he was flying to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he fathered two children. He was convicted of second-degree murder.

Late last month, the Oct. 10 rejection was voided after concerns were raised by the counsel for both the State Division of Parole and the Board of Parole. The division disagreed with the board’s conclusion that Dr. Friedgood was likely to break the law again if released, a spokesman said at the time.

Concurring in the decision announced yesterday, Commissioner Thomas P. Grant wrote, referring to Dr. Friedgood: “During your interview, you repeatedly cited your status as a senior citizen. It is important to recognize that your actions deprived your wife of the ability to enjoy such status.” Still, he wrote, “The likelihood of your engaging in criminal activity in the community is virtually nonexistent.”

Yesterday’s decision was by three parole commissioners who were appointed by Governor Pataki and who were not involved in the Oct. 10 decision. One, Chris Ortloff, dissented vigorously and argued that Dr. Friedgood’s release “so deprecates the seriousness of his offenses, the murder of his wife and subsequent grand larceny of hundreds of thousands of dollars from her estate, as to undermine respect for the law.”

Mr. Ortloff said that Dr. Friedgood had used his state medical license to assume responsibility for his wife’s care and to obtain the five injections of Demerol that killed her.

“In colloquial terms, this case, given the inmate’s advanced age and medical prognosis, raises the proverbial question: ‘If any offense deserves the maximum sentence of life in prison, does this one not do so?’”

In an interview in September at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County, Dr. Friedgood said: “You look back, you know, it’s you can’t believe how sometimes things happen that you did that it was completely unnecessary. If you don’t want to be with a woman anymore, you divorce. You know, you don’t have to resort to murder.”

Stephen Scaring, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, said in a September interview that if Dr. Friedgood had remained silent, he never would have been prosecuted. “He believed he could talk his way out of everything,” Mr. Scaring said. “Instead, he talked his way into it.”

This week, more than three decades later, he finally talked his way out.

    State’s Oldest Inmate Is Granted His Freedom by Parole Board, NYT, 8.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/nyregion/08inmate.html

Man Pleads in Nev. Courthouse Shooting

November 5, 2007
Filed at 11:22 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- A man accused of killing his wife and shooting the judge who was handling their bitter divorce reached a plea deal Monday, abruptly ending his trial.

Darren Mack, 46, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and entered an Alford plea to a charge of attempted murder as the defense was to begin calling witnesses.

Mack was on trial for the June 12, 2006, stabbing of his estranged wife, Charla, at Mack's town house in south Reno. Authorities said that after the killing, Mack drove to a downtown parking garage and shot Washoe Family Court Judge Chuck Weller through the third-floor window of the judge's chambers. The judge survived.

Mack admitted in court that he shot Weller, but invoked the Alford plea, in which a defendant acknowledges there is enough evidence for a conviction without admitting guilt.

''I do understand right now in my state of mind that shooting at the judiciary is not a proper form of political redress,'' Mack said.

Judge Douglas Herndon set a two-day sentencing hearing, Jan. 17-18, saying he wanted to allow time for statements, and Mack made it clear he wanted to speak.

''There are some very important things to say, and I've remained quiet through this whole thing,'' Mack said.

During the hearing Monday, Mack apologized for shooting Weller, who watched from the first row behind the prosecution.

''This dark night is over, or at least a portion of this dark night is over,'' Weller said afterward.

In exchange for Mack's admissions, prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of life in prison with possible parole after 20 years. The judge is not bound by that agreement.

Mack, whose family owns a well-known pawn shop, also faces two to 20 years on the attempted murder charge. Under Nevada law, his sentence automatically will be doubled because a deadly weapon was involved.

Prosecutor Robert Daskas noted that Mack's agreement waived his right to appeal.

''Our goal going into this case was to see Darren Mack convicted of premeditated murder and of attempted murder,'' Daskas said. ''Whether it was by jury verdict or guilty pleas was insignificant to us.''

David Chesnoff, one of Mack's lawyers, said he was pleased that Mack likely will have a chance to be released on parole.

Charla Mack's mother, Soorya Townley, said she was pleased with the outcome. She called Mack a ''sociopath'' who ''hypnotized himself into believing he's justified and he's the victim.''

Charla Mack filed for divorce in 2005. In court documents, her lawyer said Mack ignored Weller's order to pay her $10,000 a month in temporary alimony.

Weller found him in contempt of court, and Mack filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying, but Charla Mack's lawyer said in court documents that Mack continued his lavish lifestyle, taking frequent vacations with girlfriends.

Testimony in the trial began Oct. 24.

The trial was moved to Las Vegas because of pretrial publicity in Reno, and all Washoe County judges were recused from the case. Washoe County District Attorney Dick Gammick removed himself because of his long acquaintance with Mack.

------

Associated Press writers Sandra Chereb and Scott Sonner contributed to this report from Reno.

    Man Pleads in Nev. Courthouse Shooting, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Courthouse-Shooting.html

Man Admits to Raping Friends' Daughters

November 5, 2007
Filed at 11:43 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CINCINNATI (AP) -- A 50-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to a series of rapes in which he used stun guns and chloroform to knock out the teenage daughters of his friends while they were home alone.

Chien Tai Wu obtained garage door control codes by offering to take care of pets for friends who went on vacation, and later used the codes to enter the homes while a teenager was home alone, prosecutors said.

Some victims did not remember the rape, thinking they had dreamed an attack, prosecutors said. One teenager woke up during an attack and later identified Wu.

''I don't know what got into my head,'' Wu told the judge Monday. ''It was bad judgment.''

Wu pleaded guilty to two charges each of rape and attempted rape, five charges of aggravated burglary and one charge each of felonious assault and illegal use of a minor in nudity oriented material.

In exchange for the plea, three charges of felonious assault and a charge of gross sexual imposition were dismissed. He faces as many as 102 years in prison when he is sentenced in December.

Detectives found thousands of child pornography images on Wu's computer, including videos that showed a man breaking into the homes of teenage girls, knocking them unconscious with chemicals and raping them, prosecutors said.

''I don't know if he got the idea from the films, but he was certainly acting out the material on the films,'' prosecutor Mark Piepmeier said.

The initial charges covered crimes against three victims on five dates over six years, court records said.

Wu confessed after the arrest, according to previous court testimony. He had been set to go to trial in January but changed his mind after a judge refused last week to throw out his statement to police.

    Man Admits to Raping Friends' Daughters, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Chloroform-Rapes.html

Servant Testifies About Alleged Abuse

November 5, 2007
Filed at 1:53 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) -- An Indonesian woman who worked as a servant for a millionaire couple charged with modern-day slavery testified Monday she was forced to walk around naked and eat her own vomit for minor transgressions such as sleeping late.

The 51-year-old woman, identified only as Samirah, said through an interpreter she was also punished for eating from the trash ''because I wasn't given food.''

''I said, `Mrs., just send me home to Indonesia,''' said Samirah, who is barely 5-foot tall and weighs well under 100 pounds.

Samirah's testimony for the prosecution began last week in the trial of Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, and his wife, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45. The couple have pleaded not guilty to all charges in a 12-count federal indictment, including conspiracy, involuntary servitude and other offenses.

They are accused of bringing Samirah and another Indonesian woman to the United States to work as housekeepers but enslaving them instead in their Long Island mansion, sending $100 a month home to their families but subjecting them to repeated psychological and physical abuse.

The Sabhnanis -- who operate a worldwide perfume business out of their home -- were arrested in May after Samirah, wearing tattered clothes, was found in May wandering outside a Long Island doughnut shop, pleading for help after apparently escaping while taking out the trash.

The second housekeeper, Enung, was found hiding in a basement closet after authorities searched the mansion based on Samirah's claims.

Looking agitated on the witness stand Monday, Samirah stood up and waved her hands as she demonstrated how she was slashed with a knife. She also got down on her knees in front of jurors to show how she scrubbed floors three times every day since her arrival at the home in 2002.

Defense attorneys contend the housekeepers practiced witchcraft and may have abused themselves as part of an Indonesian self-mutilation ritual -- an assertion Samirah denied. The couple went on frequent vacations that would have given the two women ample opportunity to flee, their lawyers said.

Samirah said she was forced to walk naked from the servants' room to the kitchen and to eat 100 chili peppers, followed by six spoons of chili powder mixed with salt water for various misdeeds. She said she vomited after eating the peppers and was told to eat the vomit.

If convicted, the Sabhnanis could face 40 years in prison.

    Servant Testifies About Alleged Abuse, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Forced-Labor.html

Md. Court Rejects Sniper's Appeal

November 5, 2007
Filed at 2:03 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) -- Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammad does not deserve a new trial in Maryland, a state appeals court ruled Monday in a sharply worded unanimous decision that compared Muhammad to Jack the Ripper.

The state Court of Special Appeals said Muhammad terrorized the Washington region in a rampage similar to that of the notorious Victorian serial killer who murdered at least five East London prostitutes in 1888.

But the three-judge panel noted one distinction: ''Jack the Ripper has never yet been brought to justice. The Beltway snipers have been.''

Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were convicted last year on six counts of first-degree murder in Montgomery County in the October 2002 shootings that terrorized the area. Ten people were killed and three were wounded in the shootings in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia.

''The sense of dread that hovered over the entire community was immeasurable. The six lives that were taken were but a part of an incalculable toll,'' Judge Charles Moylan wrote in the 152-page opinion.

Muhammad, 46, and Malvo are in prison in Virginia, where Muhammad was sentenced to death and Malvo to life without parole. Malvo -- a teenager at the time of the shootings whom Muhammad manipulated, authorities said -- pleaded guilty to the Maryland charges.

Muhammad claimed he should get a new trial because he was wrongly allowed to represent himself and was wrongly deemed mentally fit to stand trial.

The judges wrote that Muhammad ''freely and intelligently'' waived his right to a lawyer and that the trial judge didn't err in letting him represent himself.

Attorney J. Wyndal Gordon, who served as Muhammad's standby counsel during the trial but did not represent him, called the ruling ''a real travesty of justice.''

Gordon did not participate in the appeal and did not know if Muhammad planned to appeal the decision.

Lawyers for the state did not immediately respond to calls for comment.

    Md. Court Rejects Sniper's Appeal, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sniper-Slayings-Appeal.html

Murder Trial to Start Without Body Found

November 5, 2007
Filed at 7:37 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- On a late summer day, Nina Reiser shopped for groceries, dropped her two children off at her estranged husband's house in a quiet section of the Oakland hills, and vanished.

Prosecutors say there's no great mystery about what happened; they believe they can prove she was killed by her husband, Hans Reiser, even though her body hasn't been found. But the defense has maintained it's not proven Nina Reiser is dead, let alone slain, and she may very well be secretly living in her native Russia.

The challenge facing prosecutors, scheduled to move forward with opening statements Monday, is to build a convincing case out of the DNA and circumstantial evidence, said attorney Ivan Golde, who briefly discussed joining in Reiser's defense but ultimately did not get involved.

''You just start adding up block after block,'' he said. ''At the end of the day, will it be strong enough? You never know how it will play out.''

The case began over the Labor Day weekend last year when Nina Reiser went missing after dropping off her children. Her minivan was found six days later with her purse and groceries still inside.

Investigators say they found small amounts of blood matching Nina's DNA at Hans' home. They also reported finding her blood in his car, which was missing the front passenger seat and had a floorboard soaked with water when police found it.

Seven-year-old Rory Reiser later told police he never saw his mother leave the house. But during a pretrial hearing, the boy testified that he saw his mother drive away. Jurors aren't likely to hear either story since both the boy and his sister are now in Russia with their maternal grandmother, who has begun custody proceedings.

Nina, 31, a trained doctor, and Hans, a 43-year-old software engineer well known in programming circles, had met in Russia and married in 1999. They were separated by 2004 but had never divorced. They were fighting over custody of the children.

During the pretrial hearing, defense attorney William Du Bois suggested that Nina and her family had ties to a Russian spy agency. There was also testimony that Nina had dated a sadomasochist.

    Murder Trial to Start Without Body Found, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Missing-Mother.html

4 Convicted in Student's 1979 Slaying

November 2, 2007
Filed at 12:57 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOLLAND, Mich. (AP) -- A jury convicted four men Thursday of kidnapping a college student from her job nearly 30 years ago, then raping and killing her, in a case that was revived after a documentary film about it.

Janet Chandler, 22, was abducted from the Blue Mill Inn in Holland, where she worked as a desk clerk, and taken to a home where she was gang-raped before being strangled, prosecutors said.

A snowplow driver discovered the body of the Hope College student a day later about 35 miles south of the west Michigan city.

Convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder were James Cleophas ''Bubba'' Nelson, now 60, of Rand, W.Va.; Arthur Carlton Paiva, 55, of Muskegon; Freddie Bas Parker, 50, of Powellton, W.Va.; and Anthony Eugene Robert Williams, 56, of Boscobel, Wis. Sentencing was set for December.

First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.

''The case is about never giving up,'' state Attorney General Mike Cox said in a news release. ''Janet Chandler's tragic death happened long ago, and unfortunately the trail went cold.''

Two other people earlier pleaded guilty to reduced charges of second-degree murder and are serving prison terms: Laurie Ann Swank, 49, of Nescopeck, Pa., who also worked at the hotel and was the victim's supervisor; and Robert Michael Lynch, 67, of Three Oaks.

The male defendants worked as security guards brought in to patrol a labor strike and were staying at the hotel, where some developed intimate relationships with Chandler and Swank, according to testimony.

Interest in the decades-old case was revived after a Hope class produced a documentary film about it that aired in 2004 on public television.

The new evidence breathed new life into the case, Cox said.

''In the end, this incredible team of police and prosecutors has now closed the book on this horrific crime (and) has brought closure for Janet's parents and family,'' he said.

    4 Convicted in Student's 1979 Slaying, NYT, 2.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-1979-Killing.html

NJ Man Convicted of Killing 6 As Teen

November 2, 2007
Filed at 1:03 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) -- A man was convicted Thursday of killing six people, including his aunt and her boyfriend, years ago when he was 16 in one of New Jersey's deadliest killing sprees.

Llewelyn James, now 22, has maintained his innocence, and his lawyer, Jaime Kaigh, told jurors his client falsely confessed.

Authorities said James shot and killed his aunt, her boyfriend and two others in February 2002 in a rural home near his about 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia. The next day, they said, he killed two more people and wounded a man during a shooting that prosecutors said resulted from a drug deal gone wrong.

The jury convicted James of six counts of murder, four counts of felony murder, one count of attempted murder and several weapons charges. He was acquitted of two counts of felony murder.

Each murder conviction carries as many as 30 years to life, but James won't face the death penalty because he was a juvenile at the time of the slayings. He is scheduled to be sentenced in December.

    NJ Man Convicted of Killing 6 As Teen, NYT, 2.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Six-Slain.html

Gang Member Is Convicted Under Terror Law

November 1, 2007
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

In the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, 36 states enacted laws that would guarantee harsher sentences in terrorism cases. Gov. George E. Pataki signed New York’s law within six days of the attack. Like the others, it was aimed at international terrorism organizations like Al Qaeda.

But yesterday, in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, jurors for the first time found a defendant guilty under New York’s statute, and he did not fit the stereotype of a terrorist. The defendant, Edgar Morales, is a 25-year-old recreational soccer player and gang member who fatally shot a 10-year-old girl and wounded a second man outside a christening party in 2002.

Mr. Morales, a baby-faced construction worker, was a member of the St. James Boys, a gang described in the trial as being formed by Mexican immigrants to protect themselves from being assaulted and robbed by other gangs in the west Bronx.

Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney, was criticized by some lawmakers when he used the statute against Mr. Morales two years ago; some said it was not the law’s intended use.

But just as racketeering laws aimed at mobsters have since been used in other crimes, Mr. Johnson said, the terrorism charge fit because Mr. Morales and his gang had terrorized Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the west Bronx for years through violence and intimidation. It also provided for a far more substantial sentence.

The jury deliberated for four days after testimony ended last Thursday, but despite their disagreements on other elements of the case, jurors said yesterday they had concluded very early that Mr. Morales was guilty of terrorism.

“When you fire a gun into a crowd, whether you hit your intended victim or not, you scare people, you make them fearful for their lives, and that’s why, in my opinion, the terrorism charges applied,” said a juror who identified herself only by her first name, Linnea. Like the other jurors, she did not want to be identified because the case involved gang members and a killing.

Another juror said she had been hesitant about using the terrorism statute against Mr. Morales when prosecutors presented evidence, but once Justice Michael A. Gross told them on the trial’s final day that terrorism was defined as an act meant to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” her reluctance dissolved.

Still another member of the jury said, “When we think of terrorism, we think of Sept. 11th, so I was skeptical at first, but when we heard the definition of terrorism — to inflict fear and to dominate — from the get-go we agreed.”

Other states have used their terrorism statutes, which were seen as largely ceremonial when they were introduced because major terrorism cases were likely to be prosecuted by the federal government. Still, the Virginia antiterror law was used in to convict John A. Muhammad, who was convicted of masterminding 16 sniper shootings in the Washington area in 2002 that killed 10 people. He has been sentenced to death.

In a statement after the verdict in the Bronx case was announced, Mr. Johnson reiterated that the terrorism charge had been applied properly.

“These were callous acts that resulted in the life of an innocent child being snuffed out,” he said. “The jury’s finding of terrorism is significant in determining an appropriate punishment.”

The verdict quickly drew criticism from both ends of the political spectrum, as some wondered whether it would lead to a deluge of new prosecutions using the same approach.

Timothy Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization, said the New York law and others like it had no place being used to prosecute gang members.

“Lawmakers were told after Sept. 11th that we needed new laws, and it’s become kind of a bait-and-switch, because lo and behold, they are not being used against Al Qaeda, they’re being used against ordinary street crime,” Mr. Lynch said.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, whose views are often the opposite of the Cato Institute’s, also criticized the terror application in the trial.

“Without commenting on the manslaughter and attempted murder convictions, the pile-on of a terrorism charge is indeed a matter of concern,” she said. “The law was pitched as New York’s way to protect itself against Al Qaeda and the like. No matter what horrific crimes were committed against the Mexican-American community, that’s not terrorism.”

The Bronx jury convicted Mr. Morales of first-degree manslaughter, attempted murder, criminal possession of a weapon and conspiracy, each with the additional element of terrorism, which is likely to increase his prison term significantly when he is sentenced Nov. 14.

The terrorism component increases each crime one level — a B felony becomes an A felony, for instance, raising a potential 15-year sentence to 25 years to life.

Dino Lombardi, Mr. Morales’s lawyer, said he would probably appeal the verdict because he did not think the terrorism charge was appropriate.

Before the trial began, Mr. Lombardi had argued against the application of terrorism charges in a gang murder case, but he softened his stance yesterday.

“We may be looking at a future where this is a justifiable application for these types of gangs that don’t have a money-making motive, as opposed to traditional organized crime operations, but this gang was directed to inflict themselves mainly on rival gangs,” said Mr. Lombardi, drawing a distinction between gang members and other civilians.

The terror legislation was sponsored by Michael A. L. Balboni, then a state senator from Nassau County, who has called its use by Mr. Johnson an “unanticipated application.” Mr. Balboni, who now oversees the state’s Office of Homeland Security, did not return a call seeking comment yesterday.

The shooting occurred on Aug. 18, 2002, when Malenny Mendez, 10, went with friends to a christening party at a church.

Also at the party were Mr. Morales and a group of other members of the St. James Boys, who had come uninvited and with at least one handgun.

After getting into a fight with other partygoers, the St. James Boys decided to seek retribution.

Mr. Morales, who did not testify at the trial, had previously acknowledged handling a gun that evening and being a member of the gang.

The only witness who testified that he saw Mr. Morales shoot the gun was Enrique Sanchez, another member of the St. James Boys, who was among those present that night. In a deal with prosecutors, Mr. Sanchez agreed to testify against Mr. Morales in exchange for the chance to plead guilty to second-degree murder.

Mr. Sanchez said he watched Mr. Morales fire the .38-caliber revolver, killing Malenny with a bullet to the head, and striking Javier Tocchimani, 32, three times, leaving him paralyzed.

Though jurors said they did not believe portions of Mr. Sanchez’s testimony, they blamed Mr. Morales for not leaving once he felt that a shooting would take place.

“He knew about the gang, he knew what it was all about, he saw there was a problem that night, why didn’t he leave?” one juror said. “Why didn’t he drop the gun when it was handed to him?”

    Gang Member Is Convicted Under Terror Law, NYT, 1.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/nyregion/01terror.html?hp