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History > 2014 > USA > Justice > States (I)
Jonathan Ferrell's mother and brother on Monday.
Travis Dove for The New York Times
Second Grand Jury Indicts Officer in Shooting Death
NYT
27.1.2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/us/charlotte-police-officer-indicted-in-shooting.html
The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests
JULY 28, 2014
The New York Times
By JESSE WEGMAN
America’s four-decade war on drugs is responsible for many
casualties, but the criminalization of marijuana has been perhaps the most
destructive part of that war. The toll can be measured in dollars — billions of
which are thrown away each year in the aggressive enforcement of pointless laws.
It can be measured in years — whether wasted behind bars or stolen from a child
who grows up fatherless. And it can be measured in lives — those damaged if not
destroyed by the shockingly harsh consequences that can follow even the most
minor offenses.
In October 2010, Bernard Noble, a 45-year-old trucker and father of seven with
two previous nonviolent offenses, was stopped on a New Orleans street with a
small amount of marijuana in his pocket. His sentence: more than 13 years.
At least he will be released. Jeff Mizanskey, a Missouri man, was arrested in
December 1993, for participating (unknowingly, he said) in the purchase of a
five-pound brick of marijuana. Because he had two prior nonviolent marijuana
convictions, he was sentenced to life without parole.
Outrageously long sentences are only part of the story. The hundreds of
thousands of people who are arrested each year but do not go to jail also
suffer; their arrests stay on their records for years, crippling their prospects
for jobs, loans, housing and benefits. These are disproportionately people of
color, with marijuana criminalization hitting black communities the hardest.
Meanwhile, police departments that presumably have far more important things to
do waste an enormous amount of time and taxpayer money chasing a drug that two
states have already legalized and that a majority of Americans believe should be
legal everywhere.
A Costly, Futile Strategy The absurdity starts on the street, with a cop and a
pair of handcuffs. As the war on drugs escalated through the 1980s and 1990s, so
did the focus on common, low-level offenses — what became known as “broken
windows” policing. In New York City, where the strategy was introduced and
remains popular today, the police made fewer than 800 marijuana arrests in 1991.
In 2010, they made more than 59,000.
Nationwide, the numbers are hardly better. From 2001 to 2010, the police made
more than 8.2 million marijuana arrests; almost nine in 10 were for possession
alone. In 2011, there were more arrests for marijuana possession than for all
violent crimes put together.
The costs of this national obsession, in both money and time, are astonishing.
Each year, enforcing laws on possession costs more than $3.6 billion, according
to the American Civil Liberties Union. It can take a police officer many hours
to arrest and book a suspect. That person will often spend a night or more in
the local jail, and be in court multiple times to resolve the case. The
public-safety payoff for all this effort is meager at best: According to a 2012
Human Rights Watch report that tracked 30,000 New Yorkers with no prior
convictions when they were arrested for marijuana possession, 90 percent had no
subsequent felony convictions. Only 3.1 percent committed a violent offense.
The strategy is also largely futile. After three decades, criminalization has
not affected general usage; about 30 million Americans use marijuana every year.
Meanwhile, police forces across the country are strapped for cash, and the more
resources they devote to enforcing marijuana laws, the less they have to go
after serious, violent crime. According to F.B.I. data, more than half of all
violent crimes nationwide, and four in five property crimes, went unsolved in
2012.
The Racial Disparity The sheer volume of law enforcement resources devoted to
marijuana is bad enough. What makes the situation far worse is racial disparity.
Whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly the same rates; on average, however,
blacks are 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession,
according to a comprehensive 2013 report by the A.C.L.U.
In Iowa, blacks are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested, and in the
worst-offending counties in the country, they are up to 30 times more likely to
be arrested. The war on drugs aims its firepower overwhelmingly at
African-Americans on the street, while white users smoke safely behind closed
doors.
Only about 6 percent of marijuana cases lead to a felony conviction; the rest
are often treated as misdemeanors resulting in fines or probation, if the
charges aren’t dismissed completely. Even so, every arrest ends up on a person’s
record, whether or not it leads to prosecution and conviction. Particularly in
poorer minority neighborhoods, where young men are more likely to be outside and
repeatedly targeted by law enforcement, these arrests accumulate. Before long a
person can have an extensive “criminal history” that consists only of marijuana
misdemeanors and dismissed cases. That criminal history can then influence the
severity of punishment for a future offense, however insignificant.
While the number of people behind bars solely for possessing or selling
marijuana seems relatively small — 20,000 to 30,000 by the most recent
estimates, or roughly 1 percent of America’s 2.4 million inmates — that means
nothing to people, like Jeff Mizanskey, who are serving breathtakingly long
terms because their records contained minor previous offenses. Nor does it mean
anything to the vast majority of these inmates who have no history of violence
(about nine in 10, according to a 2006 study). And as with arrests, the racial
disparity is vast: Blacks are more than 10 times as likely as whites to go to
prison for drug offenses. For those on probation or parole for any offense, a
failed drug test on its own can lead to prison time — which means, again, that
people can be put behind bars for smoking marijuana.
Even if a person never goes to prison, the conviction itself is the tip of the
iceberg. In a majority of states, marijuana convictions — including those
resulting from guilty pleas — can have lifelong consequences for employment,
education, immigration status and family life.
A misdemeanor conviction can lead to, among many other things, the revocation of
a professional license; the suspension of a driver’s license; the inability to
get insurance, a mortgage or other bank loans; the denial of access to public
housing; and the loss of student financial aid.
In some states, a felony conviction can result in a lifetime ban on voting, jury
service, or eligibility for public benefits like food stamps. People can be
fired from their jobs because of a marijuana arrest. Even if a judge eventually
throws the case out, the arrest record is often available online for a year,
free for any employer to look up.
Correcting an Old Inequity As recently as the mid-1970s, politicians and the
public generally agreed that marijuana abuse was handled better by treatment
than by prosecution and incarceration. Jimmy Carter ran for president and won
while supporting decriminalization. But that view lost out as the war on drugs
broadened and intensified, sweeping marijuana along with it.
In recent years, public acceptance of marijuana has grown significantly.
Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia now permit some form of medical
marijuana, and Colorado and Washington fully legalized it for recreational use
in 2012. And yet even as “ganjapreneurs” scramble to take economic advantage,
thousands of people remain behind bars, or burdened by countless collateral
punishments that prevent them from full and active membership in society.
In a March interview, Michelle Alexander, a law professor whose book, “The New
Jim Crow,” articulated the drug war’s deeper costs to black men in particular,
noted the cruel paradox at play in Colorado and Washington. She pointed to “40
years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their
families and futures destroyed,” and said, “Now, white men are planning to get
rich doing precisely the same thing?”
As pioneers in legalization, those two states should set a further example by
providing relief to people convicted of crimes that are no longer crimes,
including overturning convictions. A recent ruling by a Colorado appeals court
overturned two 2011 convictions because of the changed law, and the state’s
Legislature has enacted laws in the last two years to give courts more power to
seal records of drug convictions and to make it easier for defendants to get
jobs and housing after a conviction. These are both important steps into an
uncharted future.
The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests, NYT,
28.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/opinion/
high-time-the-injustice-of-marijuana-arrests.html
Jury Awards $23.6 Billion
in Florida Smoking Case
JULY 19, 2014
The New York Times
By FRANCES ROBLES
MIAMI — A jury in northwestern Florida awarded a staggering $23
billion judgment late Friday against the country’s second-largest tobacco
company for causing the death of a chain smoker who died of lung cancer at the
age of 36.
The company, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, promised a prompt appeal.
Michael Johnson Sr. died in 1996 after smoking for more than 20 years. In 2006,
his widow, Cynthia Robinson, of Pensacola, sued R. J. Reynolds the maker of the
Kool brand cigarettes her husband had smoked, arguing that the company had
deliberately concealed the health hazards its product caused.
The four-week trial ended Wednesday. The jury deliberated for 18 hours over two
days, first awarding $17 million in compensatory damages and then emerging at 10
p.m. Friday with a $23.6 billion punitive judgment.
“When they first read the verdict, I know I heard ‘million,’ and I got so
excited,” Ms. Robinson said in a phone interview Saturday. “Then the attorney
informed me that was a ‘B’ — billion. It was just unbelievable.”
She said Mr. Johnson, a longshoreman and hotel shuttle bus driver to whom she
was married from 1990 until his death six years later, began smoking around age
13. He often lit a fresh cigarette with the butt end of another.
“He really did smoke a lot,” she said.
He had two children, who are now 23 and 29.
“The damages awarded in this case are grossly excessive and impermissible under
state and constitutional law,” J. Jeffery Raborn, vice president and assistant
general counsel for R. J. Reynolds, said Saturday in a statement. “This verdict
goes far beyond the realm of reasonableness and fairness and is completely
inconsistent with the evidence presented. We plan to file post-trial motions
with the trial court promptly and are confident that the court will follow the
law and not allow this runaway verdict to stand.”
Such efforts by the industry are often successful. In October 2002, a Los
Angeles jury awarded $28 billion in punitive damages against Philip Morris USA.
In August 2011, an appeals court reduced the punitive damages to $28 million.
The Florida case was among the thousands of the so-called “Engle progeny” cases
that stemmed from a 2006 court decision ruling that smokers could not file
class-action suits but were free to do so individually.
That decision reversed a $145 billion verdict in a class action awarded in 2000
on behalf of a Miami Beach pediatrician, Howard A. Engle. An appeals court
voided the award, saying it was excessive and the cases of individual smokers
were too disparate to be considered as a class.
The plaintiffs petitioned the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld the
decertification of the class but permitted individuals to sue, which set the
stage for Ms. Robinson’s lawsuit.
Friday’s verdict was the highest granted to an Engle progeny case.
Ms. Robinson was represented by Christopher M. Chestnut, based in Georgia, and
Willie E. Gary and Howard M. Acosta, both based in Florida.
“The jury just got it,” Mr. Chestnut said. “The jury was outraged with the
concealment and the conspiracy to conceal that smoking was not only addictive
but that there were deadly chemicals in cigarettes.”
He said the jury seemed most persuaded by 1994 C-Span footage of tobacco
industry executives claiming smoking did not cause cancer and was not addictive,
and by 60-year-old internal documents showing the company knew otherwise.
Scott P. Schlesinger, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., lawyer who has sued big tobacco
but was not involved in the Robinson case, said a verdict this large is not
typical.
“There have not been multibillion-dollar punishments in the Engle cases for one
reason: We are afraid to ask for them. We are afraid of what will happen in the
appellate process,” he said. “This verdict is important because it goes back to
an ongoing saga that goes back to 1990. People have been filing suit one by one,
and we have been winning about 70 percent of them.”
Correction: July 19, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Willie E. Gary, a
lawyer for Cynthia Robinson. He is based in Florida, not Georgia.
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2014, on page A17 of the
New York edition with the headline: Jury Awards $23.6 Billion in Florida Smoking
Case.
Jury Awards $23.6 Billion in Florida Smoking
Case, NYT, 19.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/business/
jury-awards-23-6-billion-in-florida-smoking-case.html
5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case
Will Settle Suit for $40 Million
JUNE 19, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER
The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and
rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a
settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought
civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment in the sensational
crime.
The agreement, reached between the city’s Law Department and the five
plaintiffs, would bring to an end an extraordinary legal battle over a crime
that came to symbolize a sense of lawlessness in New York, amid reports of
“wilding” youths and a marauding “wolf pack” that set its sights on a
28-year-old investment banker who ran in the park many evenings after work.
The confidential deal, disclosed by a person who is not a party in the lawsuit
but was told about the proposed settlement, must still be approved by the city
comptroller and then by a federal judge.
The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that
a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central
Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger. The story
quickly exploded into the public psyche, fanned by politicians and sensational
news reports that served to inflame racial tensions.
The five black and Hispanic men, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests,
claimed that incriminating statements they had given had been coerced by the
authorities. The statements were ruled admissible, and the men were convicted in
two separate trials in 1990.
In December 2002, an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M.
Morgenthau, found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and
beaten not by the five teenagers but by another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted
rapist and murderer who had confessed to acting alone in the attack. Concluding
that the new evidence could have changed the original verdict, Mr. Morgenthau’s
office joined a defense motion asking that the convictions be vacated.
If approved, the settlement would fulfill a pledge by Mayor Bill de Blasio to
meet a “moral obligation to right this injustice.”
The proposed settlement averages roughly $1 million for each year of
imprisonment for the men. That amount would suggest that the city was poised to
pay one of the men, Kharey Wise, who spent about 13 years in prison, more than
it has in any wrongful conviction case.
The other four men — Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Raymond
Santana Jr. — served about seven years in prison.
The lawsuit had accused the city’s police and prosecutors of false arrest,
malicious prosecution and a racially motivated conspiracy to deprive the men of
their civil rights, allegations which the administration of Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg denied and fought vigorously for more than a decade in federal court.
In contesting the suit, the Bloomberg administration argued that the authorities
had acted in good faith and with cause, and should not be held liable. In 2011,
a senior corporation counsel lawyer said that the charges had been supported by
“abundant probable cause, including confessions that withstood intense scrutiny,
in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials.”
Continue reading the main story
In early 2013, the city’s Law Department echoed those views. “The case is not
about whether the teens were wrongly convicted,” a department spokeswoman said.
“It’s about whether prosecutors and police deliberately engaged in misconduct.”
But in January, lawyers for Mayor de Blasio asked the court to delay the
litigation so that the new corporation counsel, Zachary W. Carter, could “get up
to speed on the facts and the circumstances” of the case. Later, the mayor said
that Mr. Carter was “committed to making sure we get to that settlement quickly,
some complicated issues, but we’re going to work through them very, very
quickly.”
If the proposed settlement is approved by the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, it
would then be submitted for approval to Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal
District Court in Manhattan. In 2007, Judge Batts rejected the city’s motion to
dismiss the suit and allowed most of the claims to proceed.
In such settlements, the city typically does not admit liability or wrongdoing;
and any settlement with the five men would presumably include the legal fees and
costs. Aides to Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Carter and Mr. Stringer all declined to
comment on Thursday when asked about the discussions, as did Jonathan C. Moore,
a lawyer representing four of the men. A lawyer for the fifth man did not return
a message seeking comment.
The proposed deal comes not long after the city said it would settle two
longstanding lawsuits involving the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk
practices. In that litigation as well, Mr. de Blasio reversed the city’s
long-held position, and he agreed to sweeping court-ordered reforms that the
Bloomberg administration had tried to block on appeal.
The mayor made that announcement at a news conference in Brownsville, Brooklyn,
where stop-and-frisk tactics had been widely used. He appeared with Mr. Carter;
the police commissioner, William J. Bratton; and, in a show of unity, lawyers
with groups that had sued the city.
It is not yet known if or how the mayor might announce a settlement of the
Central Park lawsuit, if it is approved.
Over the years, the men have consistently maintained their innocence in the rape
of the jogger, Trisha Meili, who was left with no memory of the attack. (Years
later, Ms. Meili revealed her identity and wrote a book, “I Am the Central Park
Jogger.”) In prison, three of the men — Mr. Richardson, Mr. Salaam and Mr.
Santana — maintained their innocence in the rape at parole hearings, where such
a stance hurt their chances at a reduced term. At the hearings, the men
acknowledged being in the park as part of a group of teenagers, some of whom
committed assaults unrelated to the attack on Ms. Meili, and most expressed
regret for the events, without going into specifics, transcripts show.
Mr. Santana indicated in his hearing that the larger group was out to rob
people. “I took part in with the beatings of that man,” he said of one victim,
adding, “If I could go back in time and not do it again, you know, it would have
been a whole different story.”
The men’s lawyers have long said that their clients committed no crimes in the
park that night.
In recent years, the case remained in the public eye, largely through a
documentary, “The Central Park Five,” made by the filmmakers Ken Burns; his
daughter, Sarah Burns; and her husband, David McMahon.
As recently as last Friday, about 100 people gathered at the Brown Memorial
Baptist Church in Brooklyn to view the film and to hear a talk by one of the
men, Mr. Salaam. He described the stigma of living with the brand of being a
rapist. “It wasn’t a popular thing to be one of us,” he said. The film, he
added, “really gave us our lives back.”
At one point, he addressed the lawsuit. “Mayor de Blasio has said that he will
settle this case for us and there has been some positive motion,” Mr. Salaam
said, adding, “We’ve been waiting for 25 years for justice.”
Jim Dwyer contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
5 Exonerated In Jogger Rape Agree to Settle.
5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case
Will Settle Suit for $40 Million, NYT, 19.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/nyregion/
5-exonerated-in-central-park-jogger-case-are-to-settle-suit-for-40-million.html
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers
Who Preyed on Mexican Immigrants
JUNE 15, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER
It was a sprawling family business, employing drivers,
dispatchers and doormen. There were “steerers” who passed out “chica” cards on
the street to solicit customers. There was even a mechanic who swept vehicles
for tracking devices that might have been surreptitiously placed by federal
agents, prosecutors said.
And, of course, there were the women — smuggled into the United States from
Mexico and forced to work in a network of brothels in and around New York City,
or shuttled to farms in New Jersey, where they had sex with up to 25 migrant
workers a day in sheds in the fields, with men paying about $30 for 15 minutes
of sex, the government said.
The ringleaders, Isaias Flores-Mendez, who is about 42, and his brother,
Bonifacio, 35, both natives of Mexico, are among 16 people who have now pleaded
guilty to charges in connection with the sex-trafficking ring, which was broken
up in April 2013.
Life sentences are not unprecedented in federal sex-trafficking cases; there
have been at least 11 imposed nationally in cases since 2009, according to
research by Alexandra F. Levy, a lawyer with the Human Trafficking Pro Bono
Legal Center, a group that arranges free legal help for victims.
James T. Hayes Jr., the special agent in charge of Homeland Security
investigations in New York, said the life terms imposed in the state and
elsewhere were “a sign of how seriously” judges were taking such cases.
The New York case also highlights how structured such an operation can be; Judge
Forrest, of Federal District Court, called it a “vertically integrated
enterprise,” as she sentenced the younger brother on May 30.
“Your criminal enterprise,” the judge said, “was, for these women, not a chosen
way of life but living in a daily hell.”
A prosecutor, Rebecca Mermelstein, told the judge that the “entire enterprise is
only workable because it is staffed, so to speak, by women who do so under
duress, because the conditions are so horrific that it’s not the kind of thing
that anyone could really choose.”
The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has said
in court papers that the Flores-Mendez ring was part of a larger network of sex
traffickers operating between Tenancingo, Mexico, New York and elsewhere. Women
were typically lured through the promise of romantic relationships and a better
life, and were forced into prostitution after they arrived, the office said. The
judge noted that women who refused to submit were beaten, isolated and starved.
“Because money drives these crimes — as it does so many others — we have pursued
forfeiture of the traffickers’ illegal profits and restitution, seeking some
recovery for the victims,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement. He added that the
victims, mostly poor, without legal status and traumatized and terrorized by the
traffickers, were “some of the most vulnerable and powerless in our society.”
Continue reading the main story
Government filings show that brothels were operated at 350 First Street in
Newburgh, N.Y.; in a second-floor apartment at 613 Seneca Avenue in Queens; on
the second floor of a two-story yellow house at 20 Rose Street in Poughkeepsie;
and in an apartment at 121 Elm Street in Yonkers — the busiest of the brothels,
with two women working weeklong shifts and each seeing about eight to 10
customers a day.
Prosecutors have estimated that more than 400 women were victims of the
trafficking conspiracy, including some who were minors. On one intercepted phone
call, a defendant was heard discussing a “new girl who is only 17,” prosecutors
said.
The government said it had been unable to locate or identify the vast majority
of the victims, and that of the few who were interviewed by the authorities,
most would not cooperate largely out of fear of retaliation. One woman who did
cooperate, cited in court records as Victim 1, entered the United States at age
17 with her baby, after the brothers arranged to have her smuggled across the
border, prosecutors said.
She was flown from California to New York in September 2006, where the younger
Flores-Mendez brother took her to a house on 112th Street in Queens; there she
was forced to sleep with her baby under a kitchen table and charged $200 in
monthly rent and $50 weekly for food, prosecutors said.
Over much of the next year, the government said, the woman was forced to have
sex against her will. In statements she submitted at the brothers’ sentencings,
she said she had been forced to have sex with 15 to 35 men a day, in brothels
and through delivery to “sex buyers.”
“I was forced to prostitute myself in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island
City, Philadelphia and the Bronx,” she wrote.
Isaias Flores-Mendez’s “dehumanization of Victim 1 in the interest of profit was
without bounds,” prosecutors wrote. He forced her to take birth control pills,
and when he mistakenly believed that she was pregnant, “he grabbed me by the
neck, slammed me against the wall, beat me repeatedly, and forced me to swallow
more pills so that I would have an abortion,” the woman wrote.
She finally escaped, but was almost killed when the brothers saw her crossing
the street one day in Queens and accelerated their car toward her, forcing her
to jump out of the way, she added.
Such callousness toward the women seemed to be typical of the operation, court
records suggest. Another defendant, Alejandro Degante-Galeno, who worked as a
driver, was overheard on a court-ordered wiretap telling his son, Sergio, who
was also charged in the case, that one woman “should be punished for wanting to
rest and for not wanting to sexually service more customers.”
When the older brother, Isaias Flores-Mendez, was sentenced on May 14, Judge
Forrest said he had run “a depraved and deplorable sex mill.” The judge noted
that he had apologized briefly to his family in court. “But he owes an apology
to so many more people,” she said. “He is, in my view, remorseless.”
When, two weeks later, the younger brother, Bonifacio, was sentenced, he
apologized profusely to the victims, saying through an interpreter that he had
acted out of greed, for money, and asked for their forgiveness. “I’ve realized
that what I’ve done was the worst thing that you can do to a woman,” he said. “I
feel like the worst man on earth.”
Judge Forrest showed no leniency. “We know there were mornings when you woke up
in your bed surrounded by your family, and a woman who had been trafficked woke
up in a locked, windowless room in a basement, unable to go out unless she was
let out,” the judge said.
The brothers were each ordered to forfeit about $1.7 million and pay $84,000 in
restitution to Victim 1.
Lori L. Cohen, a lawyer with Sanctuary for Families, an agency that worked with
Victim 1 and several other trafficking victims in the case, said the woman was
“extremely grateful” for the life sentences but she remained fearful that her
family in Mexico “could be at risk” because she had reported the abuse.
At each sentencing, one of the prosecutors, Amanda Kramer and Ms. Mermelstein,
read aloud a translation of Victim 1’s statement, in which the woman had
explained why she was not appearing in person.
“I am scared for me, my family, and for my family in Mexico,” the woman wrote.
“I want to forget all of this and just have peace in my life.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2014,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers Who Preyed
on Mexican Immigrants.
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers Who
Preyed on Mexican Immigrants,
NYT, 15.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/nyregion/
life-sentences-for-two-sex-traffickers-who-preyed-on-mexican-immigrants.html
3 Are Exonerated of Murder
in Cases Tied to a Discredited Detective
MAY 5, 2014
The New York Times
By FRANCES ROBLES
and STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office will ask a judge to
vacate the murder convictions of three half-brothers whose trials relied on
questionable evidence produced by a now discredited homicide detective, several
lawyers close to the cases said.
The defendants, Alvena Jennette, Robert Hill and Darryl Austin, will become the
first people connected with the detective, Louis Scarcella, to be exonerated
since the district attorney’s office last year began reviewing 57 trial
convictions obtained through the work of Mr. Scarcella.
Mr. Scarcella, whose investigative work was blamed last year for a wrongful
conviction that kept a man in prison for 23 years, was accused of fabricating
confessions, coercing witnesses and failing to turn in exculpatory evidence. The
most damning pattern in the detective’s cases — uncovered last year by The New
York Times — was the use of Teresa Gomez, a crack addict who was a witness in
six separate murder cases.
Ms. Gomez, who is deceased, often got crucial details wrong and contradicted
other witnesses. One case she testified in was dismissed because she failed to
show up for her cross-examination. Another man accepted a guilty plea, and then
wrote despondent letters to the judge saying that Ms. Gomez, whom he described
as a person who would sell a close relative for crack, had railroaded him.
The decision by the district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, to vacate the
convictions came in advance of any defense motions on the defendants’ behalf.
If the prosecutors’ request is granted, only one man, Mr. Hill, will actually
gain his freedom. Mr. Jennette, 50, was released on parole in 2007; Mr. Austin
died in prison 14 years ago at age 37.
“The last time I saw my brother was at sentencing; the next time I seen him was
in a casket,” Mr. Jennette said on Monday after learning that his conviction
would be vacated. “This is the thing that really, really troubles me: He could
not be here to share this. He was always optimistic that we would get out some
day and that a wrong would be righted.”
Mr. Austin will be cleared posthumously, and his mother will stand in for him in
court on Tuesday before Justice Neil J. Firetog of State Supreme Court in
Brooklyn, said Pierre Sussman, a Bronx civil rights lawyer who represents the
brothers.
Mr. Hill has been in state prison since 1988. He is 53, has multiple sclerosis
and was weeks away from parole.
“This is a bittersweet result for a family devastated by the criminal justice
system,” Mr. Sussman said. “While Mr. Hill is gaining his freedom and his
brother Alvena recovering his good name, their brother Darryl died alone in a
jail cell. And all three brothers had to live through their respective decades
in prison knowing that their mother was suffering for them on the outside.”
He credited Mr. Thompson for moving swiftly and “allowing the healing to begin.”
Mr. Scarcella, who is retired, has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Alan
Abramson, did not respond to a request for comment.
The murder of Ronnie Durant in 1985 had gone unsolved for two years until it was
assigned to Mr. Scarcella. He quickly produced a new witness, Ms. Gomez, who
said she saw Mr. Jennette and Mr. Austin rob and kill a man.
But prosecutors later found that her testimony did not line up with the physical
evidence: She had described a Wild West shootout, yet there was no gun in the
victim’s possession or evidence that any other gun had been used.
In March, prosecutors in Brooklyn disclosed that the first detective on the case
had interviewed two people who said the two brothers were present when the
killing took place, but did not take part in it. That information was never
shared with the defense at the time of the 1988 trial, or any of the nine times
Mr. Jennette took the case to court over two decades.
“How was it possible that this woman testified in this many murder cases without
nobody saying nothing?” said Mr. Jennette, who served 21 years for the 1985
murder.
The district attorney’s new Conviction Review Unit found no evidence that Ms.
Gomez was given cash in return for her testimony. There was no clear reason she
gave the problematic testimony, a person familiar with the prosecutor’s
investigation said.
At the trial of Mr. Hill in 1988, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw him kill a
man on a street corner in January 1987. She said Mr. Hill, a drug dealer known
as Bobby Love, shot the man and stuffed him in a taxi with the help of three
friends.
Mr. Hill admits that he found the man, Donald Manboardes, shot in the basement
of his grandmother’s house, where friends often gathered to use drugs. Afraid to
have the police find a body in his grandmother’s house, he and his friends
dragged the man up the stairs, put him in a cab and asked the driver to take him
to Kings County Hospital, Mr. Hill said.
But Mr. Hill’s friends were never called to testify at trial. In interviews last
year, the three witnesses backed Mr. Hill’s account of the killing.
Mr. Thompson took office in January after defeating Charles J. Hynes, who had
been district attorney for 24 years and who had fought off the brothers’
appeals. These exonerations would bring the number of men cleared by Mr.
Thompson to six.
Mr. Thompson, who ran a campaign that promised to clean up the district
attorney’s office, came in inheriting a list of 57 Scarcella cases and about two
dozen non-Scarcella cases of potential wrongful conviction that needed to be
reviewed. The unit has since added about 10 more old cases to its official
review, bringing its caseload to 90.
Mr. Thompson put weight behind the Conviction Review Unit by assigning 10
lawyers plus a handful of investigators and support staff. Ronald S. Sullivan, a
Harvard Law School professor, was named its chief last month.
A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline
3 Men Are Exonerated of Murder in Cases Tied
to a Discredited Brooklyn Detective.
3 Are
Exonerated of Murder in Cases Tied to a Discredited Detective,
NYT, 5.5.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/
nyregion/prosecutor-to-seek-voiding-of-3-murder-convictions-linked-
to-brooklyn-detective.html
Echoes of the Superpredator
APRIL 13, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Remember “superpredators”? Nearly 20 years ago, they prowled
into the American consciousness — a menacing new breed of children, born of
crack-addled mothers and absent fathers, and programmed solely for murder and
mayhem.
The superpredator “is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape,
maim, without giving it a second thought,” said John DiIulio Jr., the Princeton
political scientist who coined the term in 1995.
News reports — usually featuring images of glowering black teenagers — warned of
the coming wave of violence that would flood the country. Respected
criminologists bought into and amplified the hysteria. Most destructively,
almost every state passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles as
adults, by increasing the number of crimes or reducing the age that triggered
adult prosecution — and in some cases eliminating the minimum age altogether.
Of course, the superpredator predictions were completely unfounded, as Mr.
DiIulio himself later admitted. “Thank God we were wrong,” he said in 2001, from
his comfortable post in the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives. Juvenile crime, like all crime, was in fact declining
throughout the 1990s.
Two decades later, it’s easy to look back in judgment, but it would be a mistake
to think the nation has fully moved beyond that mind-set. Many states continue
to punish juveniles as harshly as they can, even though the Supreme Court has
held in a series of landmark rulings since 2005 that young people are
“constitutionally different” from adults.
In a 2012 case, Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that juveniles may not
receive a mandatory sentence of life without parole, because it prevents judges
from considering the “hallmark features” of youth — including “immaturity,
impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences.” Recognizing that
younger offenders have a greater capacity for change, the court required that
judges give them “individualized” sentencing decisions and, except in extremely
rare cases, a “meaningful opportunity” for release “based on demonstrated
maturity and rehabilitation.”
Some states have taken the court’s rulings, and its reasoning, to heart. Since
the ruling in Miller, five states have abolished juvenile life without parole in
all cases. In March, West Virginia lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill that
provides parole review for any juvenile who serves at least 15 years in adult
prisons. Similar legislation is pending in Connecticut and Hawaii.
But other states keep fighting to prevent their juvenile offenders from ever
having the chance to see the light of day. Michigan now gives judges the
“choice” of imposing a minimum sentence of 25 to 60 years instead of life
without parole. Courts in other states have refused to apply the Supreme Court’s
ruling retroactively, stranding many of the more than 2,000 inmates who were
sentenced before the Miller decision.
The issue is not, as supporters of mandatory sentencing would have it, about
going easy on criminals. No one is ordering judges to release inmates who are
not rehabilitated, or who pose a threat to society. Rather, it is about giving
legal meaning to the neurological, psychological and emotional vulnerabilities
of young people. Those who make mistakes — even terrible ones — should not be
sentenced to die in prison.
The myth of the superpredator helped spawn a generation of misguided laws that
treated young people as adults, despite evidence that doing so actually
increases recidivism. Most of these laws remain in effect. The Supreme Court has
rightly begun to dismantle their constitutional foundations, but some states are
determined to act as if it were always 1995.
A version of this editorial appears in print on April 14, 2014,
on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
Echoes of the Superpredator.
Echoes of the Superpredator, NYT,
13.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/echoes-of-the-superpredator.html
The Paramedic Murderer
of Narrowsburg, N.Y.
APRIL 10, 2014
The New York Times
Magazine
By NINA BURLEIGH
In the hills around Narrowsburg, N.Y., where second-home
owners tend gardens and the Lenape once roamed, people don’t forget a mysterious
death. They still talk about the bar owner who shot his waitress in the chest
late one night and served just six months in jail after saying it was an
accident. Then there was the story about the man who arrived home one night only
to notice that his wife, who had been in the back seat, was no longer in the
car. Her body was found on the side of a road along the route he’d taken.
Charges were never filed.
We own a house near Narrowsburg, but I never knew anybody who died mysteriously,
until one day a couple of weeks before Christmas 2008, when I saw a picture of a
burning house on the front page of our town paper with the headline “Local Woman
Dies in Fire.” The woman was Catherine Novak, a cheery neighbor I’d known since
2004. For a year, we each had a kindergartner in the local school and a toddler
at home. We had been lured to the area, about two hours from New York, by real
estate bargains in a beautiful but isolated and depressed community. We soon
learned, though, that we had traded urban problems for country ones. Heating oil
was expensive, septic tanks leaked and cars needed constant maintenance. In
September, the summer residents returned to the city and the restaurants closed.
By January, we lived for the salt truck and the social diversion of drives to
Walmart and the McDonald’s PlayPlace. I was hoping to high-tail it back to
Manhattan as soon as I could, but Catherine was committed to making a life
there.
I rarely saw her husband, Paul. He worked in Queens as a
paramedic and slept in the city three or four nights a week. Occasionally he
showed up at school events wearing a uniform with the caduceus and F.D.N.Y.
patches on the shoulders. The Iraq war was entering its second year, and an
American flag flapped from their porch. In those post-9/11, wartime days, it was
possible to assume he might be some kind of hero.
The last time I saw Catherine was late in the summer of 2008. We had moved back
to Manhattan and went up to the country only on weekends. I was packing the car
when she and her daughter, who was 9, pulled up in the late-afternoon sunlight.
I hadn’t seen her for several years. “I’ve been looking for you,” she called as
she climbed our front steps. “I need a job. My husband’s having an affair.” She
said it with a light laugh. We talked a bit, but I was in a hurry to get back to
the city. I left, promising to pass her résumé to corporate H.R. I never heard
from her again.
The morning Catherine died, Dec. 13, 2008, was unusually cold, with temperatures
dipping into the 20s, a biting wind chill and flurries of snow. Before dawn, a
neighbor rose to make coffee and saw the Novaks’ house across the road engulfed
in flames. More-distant neighbors noticed the light and initially thought the
sun was rising. By the time fire trucks arrived, the red-and-white house had
collapsed. Later that day, investigators used a backhoe to excavate frozen ash,
and in the gray light of early afternoon, reached the basement floor, where
Catherine was on her back, arms outstretched, charred in situ like a figure from
Pompeii. She was 41. The body of the family dog, Aladdin, was nearby, locked in
a kennel.
People in Narrowsburg were suspicious for the usual reasons: Her husband had
left her for a younger woman. They were fighting about money. She never kept the
dog in the kennel when she was home. And that night, her two children were more
than 100 miles away at their father’s apartment on Long Island.
Examiners determined that the dog died of smoke inhalation, but an autopsy found
that the level of carbon monoxide in Catherine’s lungs was too low to kill her.
They concluded that she died after debris from the fire crushed her chest. The
lead fire investigator considered Catherine’s death suspicious but couldn’t
prove that the fire wasn’t accidental. Ten days after the fire, Paul Novak
passed a lie-detector test, and a few months later he collected about $800,000
in insurance money and left his job.
The case was closed. Anyone in town who thought Catherine might have been the
victim of a crime straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel filed away their
suspicions with the waitress and the dead wife by the side of the road.
What Narrowsburg didn’t know about the Novaks, Queens did. Catherine was raised
in Glendale, a neighborhood of low apartment buildings and one- and two-family,
aluminum-sided homes behind chain-link fences. The fourth and youngest child,
she and her family moved from apartment to apartment while her struggling
parents scraped together money for parochial school. She put herself through
Marymount Manhattan College doing accounting and other odd jobs and became a
semiprofessional volunteer, a woman people could count on to help clean the
schoolyard, decorate the church hall and run the blood drive.
When she was 19, she joined the Ridgewood Volunteer Ambulance Corps, first
becoming a dispatcher and then earning her certification as an E.M.T. She rode
the ambulance a few times, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift stretchers, and
eventually she became a Certified First Responder instead. She married an E.M.T.
named Michael Ansbach, and they built a life around the adrenaline-fueled
emergency world. But if Catherine enjoyed the drama of paramedic life, she was
no thrill junkie. At home she was the responsible partner who balanced the books
and checked the fire alarms monthly. When the marriage ended in divorce after
four years, she started dating businessmen.
Then in the summer of 1996, Catherine went to an ambulance-corps barbecue and
met a tall, dark-bearded paramedic named Paul Attila Novak, the first and only
son of an Austrian mother and a Hungarian father who each immigrated to Queens
during the Cold War. Novak’s mother told me Paul was “tender, like his father”
and that he was drawn to emergency-medic work after volunteering to drive the
elderly to treatment. But many people found him cool and unemotional.
Catherine’s best friend, Margaret Hershman, didn’t like Novak from the start.
“He was big-time antisocial, and he gave me the creeps,” she said. Catherine,
though, “really loved him,” she said. “He was big. He was strong. And she was
dedicated. And she made a lot of excuses for him.”
A career paramedic, Novak had been working for Jamaica Hospital Medical Center,
in Queens, for about five years and was one of the hospital’s more seasoned
ambulance drivers. He could steer a speeding truck under the sinuous elevated J
train and racked up numerous certified saves — awards for successful
resuscitations. His partners told me that he was known as the guy who could “get
things done,” thanks to his connections to hospital administrators, but that
meant that if you angered him, you might have your file pulled by the higher-ups
and inspected for infractions. To his colleagues, he was a solid medic with a
reputation for fearlessness. He collected and reconfigured motorcycles to make
them faster. He once brought in a video of himself speeding through the upstate
woods at 160 m.p.h.
Novak didn’t strike his colleagues as unusual, but that may have been because
what passed for “normal” behavior among paramedics at Jamaica was already
slightly askew. It was something about the combination of life-or-death
situations coupled with long periods of boredom. According to Jordan Press, a
former paramedic and sometime ambulance partner of Novak’s, sex in ambulances
and prescription-drug abuse were common between calls. He described how he once
took so much Percocet that he found himself on a call unable to remember how he
got there. “It’s a strange business to be in,” he said. “It’s this invisible
world that nobody knows about. You have all these people who get involved in
bizarre situations all the time. When you are in it, you have no idea. But
everybody who leaves, they say, ‘What the [expletive] was that?’ ”
Press said Novak often idled the ambulance near Wi-Fi hot spots so he could
download triple-X images. “Paul had a porn fascination like something I have
never seen before. He has some type of void in him that he was trying to fill
with objects and porn. Objects and porn. He could never be satiated. It was
automatic, like I automatically hit Google news.”
He rarely talked to women and had only one serious girlfriend, from high school,
who was an E.M.T. They were briefly engaged but broke up, and she married
someone else. A few years later, she committed suicide. Paul, hearing the
emergency call on the scanner and recognizing the address, responded and, in the
lingo, pronounced her at the scene.
The pairing of Paul Novak and Catherine Lane never made much sense to the other
paramedics. She was frugal and had an accountant’s sense of responsibility about
balanced books. He was always broke, blowing his income on electronics and
motorcycles. On Valentine’s Day 1997, they married. A year later, Novak filed
for bankruptcy. According to some people close to Catherine, she never had any
problems with debt before, but in 2003, she filed for bankruptcy too.
By then they were living in Narrowsburg, in Sullivan County, with their
3-year-old daughter, Natalee, in the inexpensive home they had bought. He would
sleep in Queens a few times a week, and she would stay in the country and raise
their children.
“She always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” her mother, Christina Daws, says.
“She really wanted to have a house so that her children could say, ‘That’s where
I grew up.’ ”
In Narrowsburg, Paul and Catherine were not like the many New Yorkers buying up
and renovating cheap farmhouses or congregating around one another’s ponds on
summer weekends with wine from the new shops on Main Street. Their house needed
work, but very little got done because money was tight. After their son,
Nicholas, was born in 2003, Catherine’s family visited for the christening,
celebrating amid the reek of overflowing septic in the yard. Catherine “put a
brave face on it,” her mother said.
Catherine plunged into local civic life. She volunteered at the school, served
on its board and acted as a deacon at the Lutheran church. A lifelong Girl
Scout, she led Natalee’s troop. But the cracks in her marriage were starting to
widen. When Novak talked to the police after the fire, the investigator wrote,
“Novak indicated that his relationship between him and Catherine struggled when
he was placed not only behind the needs of the children but also with her
volunteer work with the Lutheran Church and the Girl Scouts.”
In the fall of 2007, a fresh face appeared at the Jamaica ambulance garage:
Michelle LaFrance, a voluptuous 25-year-old, was completing the paramedic
certification program at Stony Brook University with a stint on an ambulance.
Born and raised on Long Island, the daughter of an Avis car-rental executive,
she’d been volunteering on ambulances since she was a teenager. But she was also
troubled. LaFrance attempted suicide at 15, and by 20 she had a cascade of
ailments that included cardiac arrhythmia, fibromyalgia and
premenstrual-distress disorder. She was on a variety of medications, including
painkillers and antidepressants.
Continue reading the main story
LaFrance was assigned to “ride the bus” with Novak and Press. After a one-night
stand with Press, she began an affair with Novak, their romance stoked, in part,
by the adrenaline of emergencies. She later testified that after she intubated a
patient for the first time, she texted Novak: “Hey I got my first intubation!”
Then, she told the court, “we met for drinks so I could celebrate; that was the
first time I kissed him.”
On Jan. 16, 2008, a date LaFrance remembered because she insisted Novak backdate
his separation agreement to it, they slept together. In March, Paul told
Catherine he had never loved her. A few weeks later, LaFrance phoned the
Narrowsburg house in the middle of the night, asking for him, and Catherine
finally knew the truth.
Novak moved into an apartment with LaFrance in Glen Cove, on Long Island, and
Catherine filed for divorce. He agreed to pay $1,700 a month in child support
and take the children every other weekend. But the separation was far from
amicable. To LaFrance, Novak seethed that Catherine was a “fat, ugly troll” and
a terrible mother. They started fighting on the phone about money and the
children. Novak threatened to file for custody.
To her Narrowsburg friends, Catherine was the picture of motherly devotion. She
took two part-time jobs, at the school and a local church camp, telling people
she wanted to save money for the children’s college educations. She had Natalee
and Nicholas perform home fire drills and videotaped them, clips of which the
prosecutors showed at the trial. Before she let the kids visit Long Island, she
vetted LaFrance by taking her out to a local diner and asking her to help shop
for Nicholas’s birthday cake.
A newly single mother on a quiet country road, Catherine never talked about
fear. But two weeks after Novak moved out, she paid a neighbor’s husband to
change all the locks.
After Catherine’s death, Novak used the insurance money to buy a house in Palm
Coast, Fla., with an in-ground saltwater pool, and moved there with his children
and LaFrance. They didn’t marry, although he bought her an engagement ring.
Instead, they fought. One afternoon in April 2012, more than three years after
Catherine’s death, LaFrance, who had moved out of Novak’s house, called the New
York State Police and said she wanted to talk about Catherine’s case.
Investigators flew to Florida and interviewed LaFrance for more than six hours.
Five months later, after building their case, authorities arrested Novak and
charged him with murder and arson.
Almost every weekday last August and September, Paul Novak, dressed in a dark
suit, walked in chains from the Sullivan County jailhouse to the courthouse, the
two buildings attached by razor wire and a chain-link fence. Three zaftig
blondes sat behind him in court — his mother, his sister and his new girlfriend,
Kathleen DelGrosso, a software designer he met on Match.com, who moved in with
him in 2011, a year before he was arrested. Catherine’s mother, brother and a
revolving cast of her relatives sat on the other side of the aisle. Reporters
showed up every day, putting the story on the front page of area newspapers, and
“Dateline NBC” producers wandered in and out. Around Narrowsburg, the headlines
stunned neighbors and friends, the gruesome details of Catherine’s death leaving
them in tears or cursing Novak under their breath.
A pair of Sullivan County prosecutors — the current officeholder and his
predecessor wearing a hearing aid as well as a sling from recent shoulder
surgery — told the jury that Novak’s motive was greed. LaFrance, the star
witness, now certified as an E.M.T. in Florida, had immunity from prosecution.
She testified for five days, alternately cocky, teary or obsequious. She
couldn’t remember exactly when Novak disclosed his plan, she said, but she went
along with it, hoping “to make life easier.” They visited Catherine the week
before the fire, under the pretense of picking up a motorcycle. Novak sneaked
downstairs and unlocked the basement door to prepare for the following week.
“He was gonna do this and save the children,” she testified. “I don’t remember
exactly the conversation. He had me convinced that Catherine was the bad guy and
he was the good parent and his kids were abused and his kids were miserable and
we need to save the kids.”
“Did he tell you anything about what he needed to do about Catherine before Dec.
12?” the district attorney asked her.
“That he needed to kill her.”
“Did you do anything to stop it?”
“No, I did not,” she said, weeping.
In the weeks after the fire, when the state police interviewed some Jamaica
Hospital paramedics about Novak, none expressed any suspicions, one investigator
told me. Perhaps they were fearful; perhaps they wanted to protect him. But once
the trial was underway, several had to testify. They described how Novak never
made a secret of hating his wife and had been talking about ways to dispose of
bodies and commit the perfect crime.
The parade of burly Queens ambulance drivers gave the small courthouse audience
a glimpse into an urban subculture so inured to death and violence that they
were oblivious to the casual callousness and misogyny of their own testimony.
Press — who was subpoenaed but never called to testify — told me, “I still find
myself thinking, Well, she’s dead, what’s the big deal?” He then has to remind
himself that Novak killed her. “You see so many dead bodies,” he said. “She was
just another dead body. And I know that’s how Novak saw it.” Novak complained so
much about Catherine that Press jokingly suggested that he “send her to Somalia
on a church mission, she’d never come back,” he said. “He comes back to me the
next day and says, ‘I looked it up about Somalia, and it wouldn’t work.’ And I
said, ‘Are you [expletive] kidding me?’ ”
One paramedic, Ed Palmer, testified that he overheard Novak telling Catherine on
the phone, “You may be the mother of my children, but I can still kill you.” At
the time, Palmer left the room, he said, to give his buddy “some privacy.”
Another partner, Don Medley, testified that he was standing around the garage
one day when Novak said that fire was the best way to get rid of a body. Willy
Gonzalez, a veteran paramedic, one of the few with more experience than Novak,
told me that he was riding in an ambulance with Novak one night as he was going
through his computer. “Suddenly he has this brainstorm: ‘You know how to commit
the perfect crime?’ ” Gonzalez said. “And I’m looking at him, at first taken
aback, and I say, ‘No, how?’ ‘Fire! Get rid of the evidence!’ I was like, ‘O.K.’
”
At the time, Novak’s colleagues testified, they thought his talk was just part
of the black humor that got them through the shift. “At the garage, everyone
talks about death and bodies all the time,” Palmer told jurors. Some of them
later came to think, though, that Novak had been vetting them, looking for
someone to help with his plan.
Eventually he did find his accomplice, a 6-foot-9 giant named Scott Sherwood,
whose lifelong battle with bipolar disorder and daily intake of large doses of
psychiatric medications — Adderall, Celexa, Seroquel, Trazodone — were no secret
among his friends at Jamaica Hospital. He was emotional and fell apart easily
when he was on call, especially if the case involved a child. “He would be
crying and everything,” Press said about Sherwood. “I would be like: ‘Come on,
dude, you know we gotta get through this night. There’s another one around the
corner.’ ”
Sherwood, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in a deal that could
result in a shorter sentence in exchange for his testimony against Novak, told
jurors that he empathized with Novak’s plight, because he had experienced an
ugly divorce himself. He was barely staying afloat paying alimony and child
support for a son he was not allowed to see. When Novak said he needed to “do
something” about Catherine so he wouldn’t “end up like me,” Sherwood testified,
he agreed to help.
On the night of Dec. 12, the prosecutors and their witnesses told the jury,
Novak and LaFrance were in their home in Glen Cove with the children. LaFrance
gave Natalee and Nicholas each a Benadryl strip before bed to make sure they
slept through the night. Then Sherwood arrived, and the three went upstairs,
where Novak had a variety of chemicals, a glass bowl and lots of ice. The plan
was to make chloroform, which they would use on Catherine, then light the house
on fire and make her death look like an accident.
“And now there’s three Jamaica paramedics standing around making chloroform,”
LaFrance told the jury. “And everybody’s O.K. with it.”
Sherwood then drove Novak upstate, stopping at a Walmart, where Novak bought a
beanie cap, some duct tape and a pair of suede gloves. Novak directed Sherwood
to park behind a barn about a mile from Catherine’s house. Novak left, and
Sherwood sat in the car and waited. An hour later, Novak reappeared from the
woods, peeled off a pair of scrubs, got back in the car and said, “It’s done.”
They drove off as a glow illuminated the rolling hills.
“It’s done,” Novak repeated when he arrived home, according to LaFrance. A week
later, he finally told her the details. He lured Catherine to the basement by
setting off a fire alarm, then applied the home-brewed chloroform, but it didn’t
work. So he strangled her. “He told me they were rolling around on the floor,
and she was begging for her life, saying, ‘Think of the kids!’ ” LaFrance
testified. “And the only thing he said the whole time was, ‘I’m doing this for
the kids.’ ”
After his confession, LaFrance said, their relationship soured. She drank to
forget what happened. One night, she got so drunk that she stripped and walked
into a neighbor’s house. The police were called, and it took six of them to
handcuff her to a tree. She woke up in the hospital the next morning, unable to
remember the previous night.
“It was supposed to be this paradise,” she told the jurors about their life in
Florida. “We saved the kids, we are going to be living happily ever after. And
it was a disaster.”
In 2011, she moved into a condo in a nearby town and started having nightmares
about Novak. “I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, I felt the bed move and I
knew it was Paul coming in to kill me. I was waiting and waiting, and he wasn’t
there.”
She began dating a local sheriff’s deputy in the spring of 2012. She told him
about the crime, and he urged her to call the New York police.
At the trial, Novak was represented by a New York criminal defense attorney
named Gary Greenwald. As he paced back and forth in front of the jury, he laid
out the defense’s theory: LaFrance, wanting Novak and his children to herself,
killed Catherine, with the help of Sherwood, whom she seduced. The only hope he
had of convincing a jury of this theory was to discredit LaFrance. She denied
that she slept with Sherwood, but Greenwald repeatedly reminded jurors that she
had affairs with a number of married men and returned often to a comment she
made to the police about having had sex with “half of Mattituck,” the Long
Island community where she once lived. Greenwald spent days going line by line
through her and Sherwood’s lengthy medical and psychological records. The tactic
drew out the proceedings, turning the trial into one of the longest in Sullivan
County’s history. A majority of the jurors had no more than high-school
diplomas; most were absent from much-needed jobs. Two were excused as the
proceedings went a month over schedule.
On the last day of Novak’s defense, Greenwald called to the stand what he
described as a “killer witness”: Paul’s daughter, Natalee, then a month shy of
14. After Novak’s arrest, the Florida Department of Children and Families put
Natalee and Nicholas in the custody of Novak’s mother and new girlfriend to keep
them in the same home and schools, a decision Catherine’s family didn’t
challenge, because they were worried about further disrupting the children’s
lives. Chewing her lip on the witness stand, Natalee told the jurors that her
mom and dad loved each other and that the last time she saw her mom alive, she
was hugging her dad goodbye. She wept as she spoke.
But the jury had already heard the testimony of LaFrance and Novak’s colleagues
describing how much he had hated Catherine. They had also seen a picture of
Sherwood’s license plate as he sped through a toll on the George Washington
Bridge at 6:39 a.m. on Dec. 13. There was also the prosecution’s own killer
witness: Elise Hanlon of the New York Fire Department. On the 12th anniversary
of the Sept. 11 attacks, after the judge held a moment of silence to remember
New York’s lost first responders, Hanlon took the witness chair. A stout,
unflappable blonde, she testified that she was a lieutenant and paramedic based
in Queens. She started dating Sherwood around 2004, and they married in
September 2012, two weeks before he was arrested.
Hanlon knew her boyfriend drove Novak to Narrowsburg on the night of Dec. 12,
2008. About two weeks after the fire, she testified, she confronted Novak, and
he admitted that he killed Catherine. Hanlon never called the police. “I didn’t
want my boyfriend to be arrested,” she testified.
On Sept. 27, 2013, a jury of eight men and four women found Novak guilty on all
charges, including first- and second-degree murder, arson, burglary, grand
larceny and insurance fraud. He took the news impassively, as expressionless as
he was when LaFrance described how he made the chloroform and when his daughter
cried on the stand. He was later sentenced to life without parole.
Leaving the courtroom for the last time, some jurors looked shellshocked. “You
have three bipolar, sex-crazed adrenaline junkies” — Novak, LaFrance and
Sherwood — “coming from the madness of the paramedic world known as Jamaica
Hospital,” one juror said to reporters. “It’s like this nest. It’s like — I
don’t even know how to begin to describe it.”
Toward the end of the trial, I returned to the scene of the crime. Queen Anne’s
lace and goldenrod bobbed in the shallow depression that marked where the house
had stood. A shagbark hickory and a dying pine shaded the tiny red-and-white
garage, painted to match the house. For four years, neighbors and friends were
unable to pass the rusty mailbox and overgrown concrete driveway on County Road
25 without a feeling of unease. Now people around town were starting to talk of
closure. Catherine’s death was no longer one of those terrible mysteries we
wondered about and tried to put out of our minds. “I don’t know if there can be
closure when someone is torn out of so many people’s lives,” said the Rev.
Phyllis Haynes of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, where Catherine was a
member. “But what has happened is that all of us can breathe a little easier
without that niggling little poke in our hearts and minds that there wasn’t
something quite right about her death.”
Nina Burleigh is an investigative journalist.
Her most recent book is “The Fatal Gift of Beauty:
The Trials of Amanda Knox.”
Editor: Ilena Silverman
A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2014,
on page MM32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline:
Murder in a Small Town.
The Paramedic Murderer of Narrowsburg,
N.Y., NYT, 10.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/magazine/
the-paramedic-murderer-of-narrowsburg-ny.html
Man Wrongfully Convicted
in 1989 Brooklyn Murder Is Set Free
APRIL 8, 2014
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
A timeworn phone bill from a Quality Inn in Orlando, Fla.,
turned out to be one of the most valuable pieces of paper Jonathan Fleming owns.
Mr. Fleming, 51, who was serving the 25th year of a sentence of 25 years to life
after being found guilty of a 1989 murder in Brooklyn, was released on Tuesday
after new evidence was uncovered in his case. The evidence included a receipt
that established he was in Florida less than five hours before the killing.
He stood quietly, his hands clasped behind his back, as his lawyers detailed new
evidence that they and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office discovered. “Had
it been available at the trial, the likely outcome of the trial would have been
different,” an assistant district attorney, Mark Hale, told the judge, Matthew
J. D’Emic, as he explained that his office supported Mr. Fleming’s release.
It was only when the judge said that the motion was granted and the indictment
dismissed that Mr. Fleming’s composure wavered, his shoulders shaking and his
eyes tearing up as he hugged his lawyers. Cries of “Thank you, God,” “Our
prayers have been answered now” and “You’re a free man” came from his friends
and family in the courtroom.
Mr. Fleming’s is one of dozens of wrongful-conviction cases that the new
Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, inherited when he took office
this year. The office is also combing through 50 cases that a detective, Louis
Scarcella, who has been accused of using illegal tactics to frame suspects, was
involved in; Mr. Scarcella was not part of Mr. Fleming’s case.
Mr. Thompson’s predecessor, Charles J. Hynes, created the Conviction Integrity
Unit to look into questionable cases after criticism over wrongful convictions.
Mr. Thompson, who campaigned in part on reforming the district attorney’s
office, has so far gained the release of two prisoners who were serving time for
murder after new evidence was obtained, and prisoners’ advocates are pushing him
to move quickly on other cases. The office on Monday appointed Ronald S.
Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor, to lead the unit, now called the
Conviction Review Unit, and added three outside lawyers to help evaluate cases.
Mr. Fleming was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of Darryl
Alston, a rival drug dealer, on Aug. 15, 1989, at the Williamsburg Houses.
His alibi was simple: He was in Orlando at the time of the shooting, on a family
trip to Walt Disney World.
During the trial, Mr. Fleming’s lawyers gave evidence showing that he was in
Orlando around the time of the murder — plane tickets and video footage and
vacation photos from family members. But prosecutors argued he could have
returned to Brooklyn and shot Mr. Alston, producing a list with 53 possible
flights he could have taken, according to a document prepared by Mr. Fleming’s
lawyers, Taylor Koss and Anthony Mayol. And they cast doubt on the testimony
from Mr. Fleming’s family members about his whereabouts.
A woman who said she was an eyewitness, Jacqueline Belardo, identified Mr.
Fleming as the killer. Though she recanted what she said before sentencing,
saying she had identified Mr. Fleming in exchange for a dismissal of grand
larceny charges against her, the prosecution contended that Ms. Belardo was
lying, according to the document.
In June 2013, the Conviction Integrity Unit began examining Mr. Fleming’s
conviction after investigators and lawyers for Mr. Fleming brought it the new
witness statements. In November, the unit turned over to the defense police logs
that it had come across during its look at the case. The logs showed that Ms.
Belardo, the purported eyewitness, had been brought in after being found in a
stolen van and charged with grand larceny; after several hours of questioning,
she pointed to Mr. Fleming as the killer, according to the defense document. A
little over an hour later, her charges were voided and she was released. Ms.
Belardo still stands by her recantation, according to the document.
The Conviction Integrity Unit also turned over the phone receipt. At 9:27 p.m.
on Aug. 14, 1989, Mr. Fleming had paid a phone bill at the Orlando Quality Inn,
making it unlikely he could have made it back to Brooklyn in time for the 2:15
a.m. shooting on Aug. 15. But the receipt was not a part of trial evidence. Mr.
Koss said at Tuesday’s hearing that Mr. Fleming had asked about the receipt at
the time of the trial and that a detective at the trial was questioned about the
receipt and said he did not recall recovering it. Investigators found the
receipt in the case file last year.
Other new evidence was a report from the Orlando Police Department, which had
looked into Mr. Fleming’s alibi at the New York Police Department’s request. The
Orlando police interviewed Quality Inn staff members who remembered Mr. Fleming;
at the trial, the only witnesses to vouch for Mr. Fleming’s presence in Orlando
were family members.
It was the new documentary evidence that was most compelling in this case, said
Mr. Hale, the assistant district attorney, specifically the receipt and the
Orlando Police Department’s letter. “We, in looking at the evidence, do not
believe we have the present ability to retry the defendant,” nor will the office
be able to retry him in the future, Mr. Hale said.
As part of their investigation, the defense and prosecutors then reinterviewed
witnesses to the murder, and their accounts pointed to a different suspect.
“They’re bringing my baby home,” said Mr. Fleming’s mother, Patricia Fleming,
72. An innocent man “did all this time,” she said. “It was hard on him and it
was hard on me.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2014,
on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:
Man Wrongfully Convicted in 1989 Murder Is Set Free.
Man Wrongfully Convicted in 1989 Brooklyn
Murder Is Set Free,
NYT, 8.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/nyregion/
brooklyn-district-attorney-overturns-conviction-in-1989-murder.html
Man Framed by Detective
Will Get $6.4 Million From New York City
After Serving 23 Years for Murder
FEB. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By FRANCES ROBLES
A man who was framed by a rogue detective and served 23 years
in prison for a murder he did not commit will receive $6.4 million from the City
of New York in a settlement that came before a civil rights lawsuit was even
filed, lawyers involved in the case said on Thursday.
A $150 million claim filed last year by the man, David Ranta, was settled by the
city comptroller’s office without ever involving the city’s legal department —
which the lawyers involved in the negotiations described as a “groundbreaking”
decision that acknowledged the overwhelming evidence the city faced.
The comptroller’s quick acceptance of liability in the high-profile conviction
is also significant because the case is the first of what is expected to be a
series of wrongful conviction claims by men who were sent to prison based on the
flawed investigative work of the detective, Louis Scarcella, who has been
accused of inventing confessions, coercing witnesses and recycling informers.
“While no amount of money could ever compensate David for the 23 years that were
taken away from him, this settlement allows him the stability to continue to put
his life back together,” Mr. Ranta’s lawyer, Pierre Sussman, said. “We are now
focusing our efforts on pursuing an unjust conviction claim with the State of
New York.”
Mr. Sussman added that Mr. Ranta, who, at 58, had a heart
attack the day after he was released last March, “would like everyone to know he
is happy to have a chance at recovering his health, taking care of his heart and
being there for his family and children.”
Mr. Ranta, who declined to comment on Thursday, was convicted of the 1990
killing in Brooklyn of a Hasidic rabbi, Chaskel Werzberger, a Holocaust survivor
who had stepped into his car at dawn just as a jewelry robbery was taking place
across the street. He was shot in the head and his station wagon was used as a
getaway car while the jeweler escaped unharmed.
The rabbi’s death shook the Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg, which was
a major voting bloc for the newly elected district attorney at the time, Charles
J. Hynes.
Mr. Hynes’s office defended the conviction for decades, fighting off appeals and
rejecting evidence that pointed to another killer. But when one eyewitness came
forward decades later to say that a detective had told him to pick the man with
“the big nose” out of a lineup — Mr. Ranta was the only person who fit that
description — the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit conducted a
yearlong investigation and discovered more serious problems.
When investigators approached two other witnesses in the case, they immediately
admitted that they had lied.
The two career criminals who implicated Mr. Ranta in the crime used their
cooperation in the case as a means to obtain get-out-of-jail excursions provided
by Mr. Scarcella, who before retiring had been well regarded for his ability to
solve homicides at a time when Brooklyn was awash in violence. He has repeatedly
denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Ranta had always accused the detective of manufacturing his confession. Mr.
Scarcella said Mr. Ranta confessed while handcuffed to a bench at Central
Booking. Although the allegation about the confession was never proven, the
mounting questions about Mr. Scarcella’s methods made it increasingly suspect.
Prosecutors also discovered that Mr. Scarcella had followed up on an anonymous
telephone call that attributed the killing to a robber named Joseph Astin. Mr.
Scarcella questioned Mr. Astin’s wife and tried to track down a parole officer
to collect recent photographs of him. But he dropped that lead when Mr. Astin
died in a car accident, and then the officer never submitted any paperwork
documenting the time spent investigating him.
Two months after Mr. Ranta was released, he filed a notice that he would sue the
city. Negotiations took place for several months under the previous comptroller,
John C. Liu. But it was Mr. Liu’s successor, Scott M. Stringer, swayed by the
fact that the Brooklyn district attorney’s office had joined in the motion to
free Mr. Ranta from prison, who ultimately agreed to settle the case.
“This settlement is in the best interests of all parties and closes the door on
a truly regrettable episode in our city’s history,” Mr. Stringer said in a
statement. “I am pleased that my office was able to move quickly on this case.”
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department, which would have had responsibility
for defending the city had the case proceeded, declined to comment on the
settlement, which is among the largest the city has ever reached with an
individual.
Mr. Ranta is expected to make a separate wrongful conviction claim against the
state. Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman proposed legislation on Wednesday
that would make it easier for people like Mr. Ranta to make such claims; under
current law, it is difficult for people who made false confessions to be
compensated for wrongful convictions.
The news of the settlement came as Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district
attorney, convened a new three-member panel to review dozens of Mr. Scarcella’s
cases. The panel is to replace the one appointed by Mr. Hynes, which was widely
criticized for including several people close to him, including campaign donors
and the godfather of his children. Dogged by the fact that the majority of the
cases that involved questionable behavior by Mr. Scarcella took place under his
watch, Mr. Hynes was voted out of office in November in a landslide victory for
Mr. Thompson.
According to Mr. Thompson’s office, his review panel will include Bernard W.
Nussbaum, a former White House counsel to President Bill Clinton who was forced
out over his role in an investigation of a failed savings and loan; Gary S.
Villanueva, a defense lawyer and former assistant district attorney in Brooklyn;
and Jennifer G. Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor who is now the executive
director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia
University.
Details of their responsibilities have not been ironed out, but they are
expected to play an advisory role in the dozens of innocence claims that have
arisen in cases investigated by Mr. Scarcella.
After Mr. Ranta’s release, an investigation by The New York Times found that Mr.
Scarcella had used the same witness in several different murder cases and that
at least six confessions had included similar phraseology: “You got it right. I
was there.” Some confessions did not match the evidence.
One inmate, Sundhe Moses, who had been investigated by the detective, hired
lawyers who tracked down a star witness, who said detectives had coached him to
lie. The Parole Board released Mr. Moses in December after he served 16 years
for the murder of a 4-year-old girl.
A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2014
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:
Man Framed by Detective Will Get $6.4 Million From City
After Serving 23 Years for Murder.
Man Framed by Detective Will Get $6.4
Million From New York City
After Serving 23 Years for Murder,
NYT, 20.2.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/nyregion/
man-framed-by-new-york-detective-to-get-6-4-million-without-filing-suit.html
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict
in Florida Killing Over Loud Music
FEB. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — After four days of deliberation, the jury
in the racially tinged trial of Michael Dunn, a Florida man who set off another
firestorm over the state’s self-defense laws when he shot a teenager to death in
a parking lot during a dispute over loud music, said it could not agree on
whether Mr. Dunn had acted to protect himself or was guilty of murder.
The jurors did find Mr. Dunn guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted
murder for getting out of his car and firing several times at the Dodge Durango
sport utility vehicle in which Jordan Davis, 17, was killed. Three other
teenagers, the subjects of the attempted murder charges, were in the car but
were not struck. Mr. Dunn continued to fire at the vehicle even as it pulled
away. On the attempted murder convictions, he could be sentenced to 60 years in
prison.
Judge Russell L. Healey of Duval County declared a mistrial on the count of
first-degree murder, which applied only in the death of Mr. Davis. The jury also
failed to reach agreement on lesser charges that are automatically included in
jury instructions. Those were second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter.
The state attorney for Jacksonville, Angela Corey, said immediately after the
verdict that she planned to retry Mr. Dunn on first-degree murder. Ms. Corey
said she hoped jurors would explain why they could not agree on that charge,
which could help her team in the new trial.
Mr. Davis’s parents, who wept after the verdict, said they were grateful for the
jury’s decision to convict Mr. Dunn of attempted murder and would await his
retrial. “It has been a long, long road, and we’re so very happy to have a
little bit of closure,” said Lucia McBath, Mr. Davis’s mother.
Mr. Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, said that Mr. Dunn was in shock over the
verdict and that his parents were “devastated.”
“There were no winners; everybody lost,” Mr. Strolla said. “It’s hard to call it
a victory.”
Mr. Dunn’s sentencing hearing was expected to occur in March.
The case was steeped in racial overtones. Mr. Dunn, 47, is white, and the
teenagers black. It also drew renewed attention to Florida’s expansive
self-defense laws that allow people who say they feel threatened to use lethal
force to protect themselves. The trial began six months after the verdict in
another high-profile case that focused on race, in which George Zimmerman was
acquitted in the fatal shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin.
The 12 jurors, who had been sequestered since Feb. 6, consisted of four white
men, four white women, two black women, one Hispanic man and one Asian-American
woman. Some black leaders expressed disappointment that there were no black men
on the jury.
The deadlock means that at least one juror had reasonable doubt about the
prosecution’s version of events.
The prosecutors had argued that Mr. Dunn did not shoot Mr. Davis in
self-defense, as he testified. He shot him, they said, because he was enraged
that when he asked the teenagers to turn down the music booming from their
vehicle in a gas station parking lot — Mr. Dunn described it to his fiancée as
“thug music” — Mr. Davis did not do so and then cursed him repeatedly.
Mr. Dunn, who was visiting from out of town, left the scene and did not call 911
or the police after the shooting. Instead, he returned to his hotel, and the
next morning drove two and a half hours to his home in Brevard County. The
prosecutors said his behavior did not jibe with the actions of a man who had
fired in self-defense. They also argued that Mr. Dunn had had enough time to
reflect before shooting, which was why they accused him of premeditated murder.
Coming on the heels of the failure to convict Mr. Zimmerman in July, the verdict
was a blow to Ms. Corey, who was the special prosecutor in the Zimmerman case.
“The verdict won’t sit well with the black community in Jacksonville,” said Ken
Jefferson, a vice president for Operation Save Our Sons, a group that tries to
help young men in Jacksonville, where blacks make up 30 percent of the
population. “There is a feeling of being able to shoot black people and get away
with it,” he said, particularly after the Zimmerman case.
Mr. Strolla said the prosecutors had overcharged Mr. Dunn, reaching for
premeditated murder because they were seeking vindication after their showing in
the Zimmerman trial.
Mr. Dunn, who testified on Tuesday, told jurors that Mr. Davis had pointed a
shotgun at him from the window of the Durango, threatened to kill him and then
tried to get out of the car. It was only then, Mr. Dunn said, that he reached
into his glove box, unholstered his 9-millimeter pistol, put a round in the
chamber, and fired 10 times.
“It was Jordan Davis who kept escalating this to the point where I had no choice
but to defend myself,” Mr. Dunn said on the stand. “It was life or death.”
Mr. Davis, a high school senior who had spent the day with three friends on the
day he was killed, Nov. 23, 2012, was hit three times and died in the car. He
would have turned 19 on Sunday.
The prosecutors argued that Mr. Dunn had fabricated his story about the shotgun
to bolster his self-defense claim. The police never found a shotgun, and no
witnesses ever reported seeing one. The teenagers testified that none of them
had a shotgun in the car. That was why no one shot back at Mr. Dunn, the
prosecutors said.
The trial, which lasted six days before deliberations began on Wednesday, was
the latest courtroom test for Florida’s expansive self-defense statutes,
including the so-called Stand Your Ground provision. Under the law, Mr. Dunn
needed only to have been convinced that he saw a shotgun, whether or not one was
present.
Since their son’s death, the Davises have worked to try to change Florida’s
self-defense laws, including the Stand Your Ground provision, which grants wide
latitude to people who believed they face a threat. The prosecutors portrayed
Mr. Dunn as a man who felt threatened right away because he viewed the teenagers
as “gangsters.” Mr. Strolla disputed that notion and said Mr. Dunn has
maintained it was the violent rap subculture, not race, that influenced Mr.
Davis’s behavior.
Legal analysts said the defense had a relatively weak case because only Mr. Dunn
said he had seen a shotgun, and his fiancée’s testimony undermined his
credibility. To back his claim, Mr. Dunn was forced to testify, always a risky
move since it opens a defendant up to cross-examination. “He testified very
straightforward and honest,” Mr. Strolla said.
In what prosecutors called a “wow” trial moment, the fiancée, Rhonda Rouer,
shaking on the witness stand, said that Mr. Dunn had not mentioned to her in the
night and day they spent together before his arrest that any of the teenagers
had a shotgun. Ms. Rouer was inside the gas station convenience store when the
shooting occurred.
But there were weaknesses in the prosecutors’ case.
Mr. Strolla repeatedly told jurors that no shotgun had been found because the
police had failed to thoroughly search for it.
The teenagers, he said, had three minutes to hide the weapon after they drove to
a nearby lot to escape the gunfire.
“They thought this was just another murder in Jacksonville,” Mr. Strolla,
referring to the police, said at a news conference before the verdict.
Mr. Strolla also underscored what he said were inconsistencies in the testimony
of the teenagers and cast doubt on the witness who said he had heard Mr. Dunn
say, “You’re not going to talk to me that way,” before reaching for his pistol.
A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2014,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict in Florida Killing
Over Loud Music.
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict in Florida
Killing Over Loud Music,
NYT, 15.2.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/florida-killing-over-loud-music.html
Mercy in the Justice System
FEB. 9, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The constitutional provision that gives the president
virtually unlimited authority to grant clemency was not an afterthought. The
founders understood very well that there could be miscarriages of justice even
under the rule of law. By allowing the president to commute unjust sentences or
pardon deserving petitioners who had served their time, they sought to ensure
that the workings of the courts could be tempered with mercy.
Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Lincoln, and Truman viewed the clemency
process as a central mission of the office. But the concept of mercy went out of
fashion by the 1980s, when the country embarked on a mandatory sentencing craze
that barred judges from exercising leniency when it was clearly warranted and
placed the justice system almost entirely in the hands of prosecutors. As a
consequence, even first-time offenders were largely viewed as beyond redemption.
These laws drove up the prison population 10-fold and filled the jails with
young, low-level drug offenders who were confined far longer than their offenses
warranted. They also created a large and growing class of felons, who are
trapped permanently at the margins of society by postprison sanctions — laws
that bar them from jobs and housing, strip them of the right to vote and make it
difficult for them to obtain essential documents like driver’s licenses.
The perpetual punishment model of justice has had far-reaching consequences.
Politicians stayed as far away from clemency as they could, fearing that voters
would view them as soft on crime. Meanwhile, at the Justice Department, the
clemency process — which had been a cabinet-level responsibility — fell under
the authority of prosecutors who seemed to view even reasonable lenience as a
threat to the prosecutorial order. The time required to handle clemency
applications went from months to years; the backlog grew; the stream of mercy
that had once flowed began to dry up.
The clemency system, in other words, is in a state of collapse. The Justice
Department admitted as much last month, when the deputy attorney general, James
Cole, asked the criminal defense bar to help the department find suitable
candidates for clemency among the many thousands of people who were casualties
of the mandatory-sentencing era.
Mr. Cole specifically mentioned nonviolent, low-level drug offenders who are
serving “life or near-life” sentences that are considered excessive under
current law. He was clearly referring to people prosecuted under the abjectly
racist 1986 federal law that punished people caught with crack cocaine far more
severely than those caught with the powdered form of the drug.
In 2010, Congress reduced, but did not eliminate, the sentencing disparity, and
thousands of people sentenced under the original law are still living behind
bars. President Obama commuted the sentences of eight of them in December; even
so, his has been one of the least merciful administrations in modern history.
The Justice Department’s sudden interest in the clemency problem is good news,
but asking defense lawyers for help is a haphazard approach. What’s needed is
wholesale reform of the department’s pardon office, which has proved itself
ineffective and incompetent, partly because the current process relies on the
department to evaluate its own work.
One sound idea is to create a clemency review panel outside the Justice
Department, perhaps as a part of the executive office. Mr. Obama could form an
advisory board, or reconfigure the pardon office to include defense lawyers,
sociologists and other experts who would bring a broader perspective to the
issue. The goal would be to give the president unbiased information that would
enable him to exercise fully this important aspect of executive power.
A version of this editorial appears in print
on February 10, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition
with the headline: Mercy in the Justice System.
Mercy in the Justice System, NYT, 9.2.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/opinion/mercy-in-the-justice-system.html
Second Grand Jury Indicts Officer
in
Shooting Death
JAN. 27,
2014
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON
CHARLOTTE,
N.C. — Three times since a police officer fired 10 bullets into her son Jonathan
last September, Georgia Ferrell has made the long journey from the family home
in Tallahassee, Fla. Each time, she sought to understand why her son, a former
Florida A&M football star and a homebody who wanted to take his mother with him
to the junior prom, was gunned down when he was just asking for help.
On Monday, she got closer to her answers. A grand jury indicted Officer Randall
Kerrick, 28, who joined the city’s animal control division in 2010 as a pathway
to his police job, on a charge of voluntary manslaughter. He was the first
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer charged in a fatal shooting in more than 30
years.
Mrs. Ferrell said one thought came into her head when her lawyers told her
Monday afternoon that the Mecklenburg County grand jury had indicted Officer
Kerrick: “God’s will must be done.”
It was the second time a grand jury had heard the case. The first panel, which
convened a week ago, did not indict the officer, but suggested instead that
prosecutors come back with a lesser charge. Community outrage was strong. Roy
Cooper, the attorney general and a likely Democratic candidate for governor,
decided to present the case again, this time with four witnesses instead of two,
and to a full panel of 18 jurors instead of 14.
Although the proceedings are secret, lawyers for the family said there was a
good probability that the jurors saw footage of the shooting taken from a patrol
car that night — something the family has not been allowed to view.
What they saw, according to people who have seen the video, was a 24-year-old
man who was approaching officers with his hands outstretched. In the confusion,
it is difficult to discern whether the bullets or commands from the officers
came first. Either way, according to one lawyer who has seen the video, there
was little time for Mr. Ferrell to respond.
“In some of these cases of excessive force you can say, ‘Yeah, but he shouldn’t
have been there in the first place’ or ‘He was doing something he shouldn’t
have,’ ” said Charles Monnett, a lawyer in Charlotte, who is representing the
family. “There is no ‘but’ in this case. It’s just a tragic case.”
Lawyers for Officer Kerrick, however, said the outrage was misplaced.
“Those outraged have simply not heard all of the facts and hasten to a
position,” his lawyers, Michael J. Greene and George V. Laughrun II, said in a
statement. “The true outrage of this community should be at the attorney
general’s complete disregard of the original findings of our first grand jury.”
Mr. Ferrell, who was working two retail jobs, had recently moved to the
Charlotte area to join his fiancée and save money to go back to school.
Just after 2 a.m. on Sept. 14, Mr. Ferrell was dropping off a work colleague in
Bradfield Farm, a subdivision with tennis courts and a swimming pool 17 miles
east of downtown Charlotte.
On a particularly dark stretch of road, Mr. Ferrell drove down an embankment.
The car was so damaged he had to kick out the rear window to free himself.
Unable to find his cellphone, he stumbled to the first house he found and
knocked, according to the lawsuit and police reports. Inside, a white woman home
alone with her infant daughter panicked and called 911. A black man, she said,
was trying to break in.
Three officers arrived 11 minutes later. Mr. Ferrell had left the house and was
on a street that led to the community pool. Rodney Monroe, chief of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, said Mr. Ferrell charged toward the officers and
refused orders to stop. One officer fired a Taser, which missed its target.
Officer Kerrick then fired 12 shots, 10 of which hit Mr. Ferrell. Autopsy
results included in the lawsuit show the bullets entered his body and traveled
downward, which the family claims to show Mr. Ferrell was already on his knees
or lying on the ground when he was shot. Officers then handcuffed him.
Toxicology reports showed Mr. Ferrell had caffeine, nicotine and an alcohol
level that was well below the legal limit in his system.
The shooting, in which the officer was white and the victim was black, has
raised debate in many circles about the place where race and excessive force
intersect. But the Ferrell family thus far has declined to make the case part of
a broader picture.
“We will wait on all that,” said his younger brother, Willie, who grew up so
close to Mr. Ferrell that he left a prime scholarship at the University of
Mississippi so he could play football with his older brother in Florida.
The family has, however, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, naming the City of
Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, Officer Kerrick and Chief Monroe. Chris Chestnut,
a family lawyer based in Atlanta, hopes the suit will force the department to
provide more information about the shooting, including the police video, and
prompt improvements in a department that has a long history of citizen
complaints about the use of excessive force.
Charlotte officers have killed at least five people in the past 13 months,
according to the suit.
For Willie Ferrell, steady vigilance of the case is a way to keep alive the
spirit of his older brother, who cooked ribs and chocolate cake for his buddies
and inevitably rooted for the underdog, following the hapless Detroit Lions when
they were in the N.F.L.’s cellar. He said the two did nearly everything
together, singing in the church choir and playing football.
Now, showing up in Charlotte for every important turn in a trial that could
begin by the year’s end is his way of honoring him, he said. “It’s easy to
represent somebody who is so good,” he said. “I know he would do the same for
me.”
Correction:
January 27, 2014
An earlier version of this article misidentified the officer
who was
indicted. His name is Randall Kerrick,
not William
Kerrick.
A version of
this article appears in print on January 28, 2014,
on page A11 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Second Grand
Jury Indicts Officer in Shooting Death.
Second Grand Jury Indicts Officer in Shooting Death, NYT, 27.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/us/
charlotte-police-officer-indicted-in-shooting.html
Texas Woman
Is Taken Off Life Support After Order
JAN. 26, 2014
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ$
HOUSTON — A Fort Worth hospital that kept a pregnant,
brain-dead woman on life support for two months, followed a judge’s order on
Sunday and removed her from the machines, ending her family’s legal fight to
have her pronounced dead and to challenge a Texas law that prohibits medical
officials from cutting off life support to a pregnant woman.
On Friday, a state district judge ordered John Peter Smith Hospital to remove
the woman, Marlise Muñoz, from life-support machines by 5 p.m. on Monday. The
judge ruled that the state law barring doctors from withdrawing “life-sustaining
treatment” to pregnant women did not apply to Ms. Muñoz because she was
brain-dead and therefore legally dead. The hospital had refused to honor the
family’s request to disconnect her, claiming that the law prevented them from
doing so until they could perform a cesarean delivery.
But on Sunday, the hospital decided against appealing the judge’s decision and
announced that it would follow his ruling. The J.P.S. Health Network, which runs
John Peter Smith Hospital as part of the taxpayer-financed county hospital
district, said in a statement that the past several weeks had been difficult for
both the family of Ms. Muñoz and her caregivers, but it defended its handling of
the case.
“J.P.S. Health Network has followed what we believed were the demands of a state
statute,” said a spokeswoman, Jill Labbe. “From the onset, J.P.S. has said its
role was not to make nor contest law but to follow it.”
At roughly the same time, about 11:30 a.m., Ms. Muñoz was disconnected from the
machines as her family gathered at her bedside in the hospital’s I.C.U. Her body
was released to her husband, Erick Muñoz, the family’s lawyers and a relative
said.
Mr. Muñoz, 26, a firefighter in a town near Fort Worth, had found his wife on
the kitchen floor in late November after she suffered an apparent blood clot in
her lungs. He, as well as his wife’s parents, Lynne and Ernest Machado, had
argued that she had died shortly after arriving at the hospital and they said
they were disturbed by the move to keep her on life support.
“The Muñoz and Machado families will now proceed with the somber task of laying
Marlise Muñoz’s body to rest, and grieving over the great loss that has been
suffered,” Mr. Muñoz’s lawyers, Heather L. King and Jessica Hall Janicek, said
in a statement. “May Marlise Muñoz finally rest in peace, and her family find
the strength to complete what has been an unbearably long and arduous journey.”
The hospital did not dispute that Ms. Muñoz was brain-dead, saying in court
papers that she met the clinical criteria two days after she was first brought
to the hospital. But the hospital’s lawyer said the law still applied to her,
insisting it was part of the Texas Legislature’s “commitment to the life and
health of unborn children.” The lawyer, Larry M. Thompson, pointed to a section
of the Texas Penal Code that states a person may commit criminal homicide by
causing the death of a fetus.
The law “must convey legislative intent to protect the unborn child, otherwise
the Legislature would have simply allowed a pregnant patient to decide to let
her life, and the life of her unborn child, end,” wrote Mr. Thompson, with the
Tarrant County district attorney’s office, which represented the hospital.
Ms. Muñoz, 33, was 14 weeks pregnant with her second child when she first
arrived at the hospital, on Nov. 26, and on Sunday had been at the end of her
22nd week of pregnancy. The fetus was not viable, the hospital acknowledged in
court papers. It suffered from hydrocephalus — an abnormal accumulation of fluid
in the cavities of the brain — as well as a possible heart problem, and the
lower extremities were deformed. One of Mr. Muñoz’s lawyers said medical records
indicated some of the doctors treating his wife had recommended taking her off
life support.
Groups that oppose abortion had expressed support for the hospital’s legal
argument. A statement released by the National Black Pro-Life Coalition and
Operation Rescue said that the fetus deserved not to be killed, and that
numerous people had expressed an interest in adopting the child when it was
born, even if it had disabilities.
It was unclear on Sunday who would end up paying the hospital bill. Hospital
officials had said previously that they were focused on caring for Ms. Muñoz,
and that it was inappropriate for them to comment on or estimate the cost of a
patient’s care. “At the appropriate time, the finance department will pursue the
customary avenues to identify payers and reimbursement,” Ms. Labbe said.
A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2014,
on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline:
Texas Woman Is Taken Off Life Support After Order.
Texas Woman Is Taken Off Life Support After
Order, NYT, 26.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/us/
texas-hospital-to-end-life-support-for-pregnant-brain-dead-woman.html
Family of South Carolina Boy
Put to Death
Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later
JAN. 22, 2014
The New York Times
By ALAN BLINDER
SUMTER, S.C. — After South Carolina electrocuted George J.
Stinney Jr. in 1944, his family buried his burned, 14-year-old body in an
unmarked grave in the hopes the anonymity would allow him to rest in peace.
But on two mornings this week, nearly 70 years after the electrocution that
ultimately made Mr. Stinney, a black teenager in the segregated South, the
youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century, lawyers and
spectators crowded into a courtroom with a very different agenda: shedding
enough light on the case to try to clear Mr. Stinney’s name.
“When I looked at the case and what was there and studied it, it was appalling,”
said Miller W. Shealy Jr., one of the lawyers who agreed to help the Stinney
family in its quest for a new trial or a voided verdict. He added that the case
played out in the “old South Carolina,” but said, “It’s still appalling.”
Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule on the requests at the end
of the two-day hearing, and she asked for more written briefs in the coming
weeks.
But in a state where racial matters still simmer — the presence of the
Confederate battle emblem at the State House was the subject of a demonstration
this week — the proceeding was a reminder of a difficult past recent enough that
two of Mr. Stinney’s sisters were in the courtroom.
When a lawyer asked Amie Ruffner, one of the two, what she recalled of her Jim
Crow-era childhood in South Carolina, she replied, “Nothing good.”
A huge part of that painful childhood was the execution of her brother, who was
put to death less than three months after two white girls, ages 7 and 11, were
found dead in Alcolu, the mill town where Mr. Stinney lived, in March 1944. Mr.
Stinney, who, along with his father, joined the group searching for the two
girls, was arrested soon after their bodies were found in a ditch, dead from
blows with a railroad spike.
Investigators said then that Mr. Stinney had admitted to killing the girls after
they asked him for suggestions about where to find maypops, a type of flower in
the area. (His confession, and other records of the case, were lost.)
Mr. Stinney’s hastily scheduled trial lasted just hours, and he was executed
that June.
Although Judge Mullen declared early in this week’s proceedings that she would
not be contemplating Mr. Stinney’s guilt or innocence, the hearing took on the
atmosphere of a trial, if one somewhat mellowed by the lessons of history.
“Back in 1944, we should have known better, but we didn’t,” said Ernest A.
Finney III, solicitor for the Third Circuit Court in Sumter, who was opposing
the request on the state’s behalf. “The fact of the matter is, it happened, and
it occurred because of a legal system of justice that was in place.”
But Mr. Shealy said the state owed Mr. Stinney a different result, even if a
favorable ruling prompted an onslaught of appeals in other aging cases. “The
state really needs to say, ‘This was wrong,’ ” he said.
With another trial a prospect, if only a distant one, Judge Mullen heard legal
arguments that touched on issues like judicial standing, and aggressive
inquiries about the limits of memory, an especially important issue because many
of the records in the case were destroyed.
Witnesses evaluated photographs and a large map, one that was disputed for its
accuracy. Lawyers asked pointed questions during cross-examinations. A
pathologist voiced concerns about the autopsies of the two victims, and a
psychiatrist cast doubt on the validity of a confession Mr. Stinney gave
investigators.
“Does the confession fit the evidence? No,” said Dr. Amanda B. Salas, a child
and adolescent forensic psychiatrist who had studied the case before she began
evaluating it on the Stinney family’s behalf less than a week ago.
Dr. Salas said Mr. Stinney’s admission was “a coerced, compliant, false
confession,” but she cautioned that she had no evidence of misconduct by
investigators. Instead, she attributed the confession to his vulnerability as a
black teenager facing scrutiny by white officials.
Those echoes of the state’s past came into play as each side brought to the
stand witnesses with fierce views about whether Mr. Stinney merits a trial that,
both parties acknowledged, could not bring a boy back.
“I’d like to see them find him innocent,” said another sister of Mr. Stinney’s,
Katherine Robinson, a retired teacher.
But Frankie Bailey Dyches, the niece of one of the victims, said she was unmoved
by such calls.
“I believe that he confessed,” said Ms. Dyches, who was born after the 1944
killings. “He was tried, found guilty by the laws of 1944, which are completely
different now — it can’t be compared — and I think that it needs to be left as
is.”
She also said: “I’ve heard stories here that I believe are false. It doesn’t
change my feelings about what happened.”
Despite the divergent testimony, Mr. Finney, a son of the first black State
Supreme Court chief justice since Reconstruction, said he believed that the
session had been cathartic for people in this region, who have watched the case
become the subject of a theatrical production and a 1991 movie. “I think it’s
been beneficial for the community, and I hope the Stinney family feels like
we’ve done some good,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2014, on page A14 of
the New York edition with the headline: Family of S. Carolina Boy Put to Death
Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later.
Family of South Carolina Boy Put to Death
Seeks Exoneration 70 Years Later,
NYT, 22.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/
family-of-s-carolina-boy-put-to-death-seeks-exoneration-70-years-later.html
When
Children Become Criminals
JAN. 19,
2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York is
one of two states, the other being North Carolina, in which 16-year-olds are
automatically tried as adults. This is the case despite overwhelming evidence
that sending children into adult courts, rather than the juvenile justice
system, needlessly destroys lives and further endangers the public by turning
nonviolent youngsters into hardened criminals.
It is past time for New York to bring itself in line with the rest of the
country. Gov. Andrew Cuomo took the first step in that direction this month when
he announced that he would name a commission and order it to develop a plan by
the end of the year for raising the age for adult criminal prosecution. The
commission does not need to reinvent the wheel. But it will need to recommend
changes in laws and procedures, and in this it can profit from studying
Connecticut, which recently carried out raise-the-age legislation of its own.
The New York law came about in 1962, when the state created the juvenile justice
system under the Family Court Act. At the time, lawmakers were unable to agree
on the age at which offenders should be declared adults; they set it temporarily
at 16, pending further hearings. But as often happens with public policy,
inertia set in and “temporary” became permanent.
The result is that New York channels nearly 40,000 adolescents a year into the
criminal courts — most of them charged with nonviolent crimes like fare-beating
in the subways, marijuana possession and shoplifting. The consequences have been
especially disastrous for black and Latino young people, who are overrepresented
among those arrested and disproportionately at risk of having their lives ruined
by encounters with the criminal justice system.
Much has been learned since the 1960s. Federally financed studies, for instance,
have shown that minors prosecuted as adults commit more violent crimes later on
and are more likely to become career criminals than those sent through juvenile
courts, where they receive counseling and family support. Beyond that,
neurological science has shown that adolescents are less able to assess risks
and make the kinds of mature decisions that would keep them out of trouble.
Connecticut wisely adopted a strategy based on rehabilitation, not lockups,
reducing arrests and saving the state money. It raised the age of adult criminal
prosecution from 16 to 18 in 2007; the change was phased in, taking full effect
in 2012. As preparation, the Legislature created a council of experts from law
enforcement, mental health and other fields to coordinate policy changes. The
courts stopped taking cases involving nonthreatening adolescent misbehavior,
like possession of tobacco. The state invested in counseling and intervention
programs that allow young people to make amends for minor misdeeds without going
to court.
Some good ideas are already in circulation in New York, the result of an earlier
commission study. Some of them have been incorporated into a bill submitted to
the Legislature by New York State’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, calling for a
special court for 16- and 17-year-olds charged with nonviolent crimes. The new
commission may end up supporting a more comprehensive approach in which all but
the most serious offenses by anyone under the age of 18 would be handled in
juvenile court. In any case, New York is way overdue for change.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 20, 2014,
on page A16 of
the New York edition with the headline:
When Children
Become Criminals.
When Children Become Criminals, NYT, 19.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/opinion/when-children-become-criminals.html
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