April 19
ARIZONA:
The American Nightmare----Debbie Milke Recounts Life on Death Row
Debbie Milke, born in Berlin, was placed in solitary confinement Arizona for 22
years after being falsely convicted of conspiring to kill her son. Following
her acquittal, she discusses her experience in prison and a life destroyed by a
miscarriage of justice.
Early in the morning on Feb. 4, Debbie Milke was transferred to the Arizona
State Prison Complex in Perryville near Phoenix. She sat in the backseat of a
police car. As she peered out the window, it would be the last time she would
see homes, trees and plants for the next 22 years.
Security officials removed her from the vehicle in front of the high security
prison. "My hands and feet were shackled and I could only take baby steps,"
Debbie remembers.
Then she describes what can only be called indescribable. "The closer we got to
the building, the louder the women became." Debbie purses her lips and makes
fists with her hands. It's as if she's trying to strike at something in the
air.
"The women banged against their cell doors. They called out Ba-by-kill-ler,
Ba-by-kill-er!"
Debbie lowers her gaze. She has no words to describe how she felt at the time.
"I just kept talking to myself constantly: Stay calm, Debbie. They don't know
any better, and they don't know the truth." The walk to her cell seemed to take
an eternity.
Debbie was placed in cell 265, in solitary confinement. Behind the blue door,
the cell measured 86 square feet and contained a bed, a toilet, a sink and
walls covered with graffiti. The steel door closed behind her with a clank,
leaving her standing there in her cell, prisoner number 083533, dressed in
jeans and a light blue T-shirt, holding a few documents and a toothbrush in her
hands.
"I tried to breathe calmly to prevent myself from panicking. I kept telling
myself: This place isn't your home, Debbie. You'll get out of here one day.
This place isn't the end.
It smelled like cement and dust. The light was dim. The worst thing was the
noise. My cell was above the wing where they kept the suicidal inmates. The
women below me were constantly whimpering, all those years."
Whenever Debbie left her cell, either to take a shower or for yard exercise,
she had to undress.
Debbie, now 51, gets up from her brown armchair. Against her black T-shirt, her
hair looks even whiter and her skin paler. For almost a quarter century, Debbie
hardly ever saw the sun.
She then demonstrates a so-called strip search. She extends her hands, rotates
them, lifts her arms and exposes her armpits. She opens her mouth and sticks
out her tongue. Then she folds down her earlobes. Finally, she turns around and
lifts up her hair, bends over and indicates that she is pulling apart her
buttocks, coughs 3 times and then points to the soles of her feet. By the time
she is finished, her face looks drawn and tired.
Debbie is still wearing an electronic bracelet around her right ankle. It is
Sunday, March 22, 2015, the day before what is probably her most important
court date. On the next day, the State of Arizona will have to officially admit
that it was not Debbie who committed a brutal crime, but rather the state that
committed one against her.
According to the charges at the time of her trial, Debbie allegedly solicited
acquaintances to shoot and kill her four-year-old son Christopher in the
Arizona desert. A jury found her guilty, despite the lack of solid evidence
against Debbie. The testimony of a dubious police officer sealed her fate.
On Jan. 18, 1991, a court sentenced Debbie to death even though she was
innocent. If the State of Arizona had had its way, she would have been executed
on Jan. 29, 1998. Debbie was already being prepared for the execution in
Perryville.
"They call it a 'dry run,' the test run for death. Electric chair or lethal
injection? What happens to my body? Who gets my belongings? As soon as an
execution date has been set, you have to answer a lot of questions. That alone
is enough to scare you to death.
A dry run is a procedure based on regulations. At first, my cell was searched
every evening to make sure I wasn't hiding anything I could have used to kill
myself. And then, suddenly, there was this doctor in a white coat. He tied off
my right arm with a flexible tube and ran his fingers along my elbow. 'What are
you doing, I asked?' 'I'm checking to see how healthy your veins are,' he
replied. It was at that point that I realized they were really serious. And
that's when I fell apart."
Over the years, the Arizona justice system never managed to execute Debbie.
Nevertheless, it robbed her of much of her life. Debbie, born in Berlin, was in
solitary confinement for 22 years. She was treated like a monster, locked up in
the labyrinth of the US justice system, a system in which the more you know
about it, the less you understand.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world. Almost 3,000
people are currently on death row, waiting to be poisoned, gassed or hanged, or
executed in the electric chair or by a firing squad.
Statistics compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center show that 151
people have been released from death row and acquitted since 1973. Debbie's
case shows how easily the innocent can end up in prison and on death row.
It is Monday, March 23, in room 7 of the Superior Court of Maricopa County.
It's a sunny day, with the mountains visible across the desert.
The court clock with its red, illuminated numbers, ticks numbers in front of
Debbie. These are the last few seconds of her case, the last seconds of an
American nightmare.
She is sitting between her attorneys, looking nervous. Debbie is wearing a
blue-and-black blouse and a necklace with a silver heart pendant. The
inscription on the pendant reads: "Hear my soul speak."
The judge, looking into the courtroom, announces that she has received a letter
from the Supreme Court of Arizona instructing her to dismiss the case. It takes
her 26 seconds to utter these all-important instructions -- 26 seconds after 22
years on death row.
Debbie is taken into an adjacent room. Her parole officer goes into the room,
holding a bag and a pair of scissors. He emerges 10 minutes later, having taken
off Debbie's electronic ankle monitor and placed it in a bag.
Photographers and cameramen are waiting outside the court. A guard offers to
protect Debbie from them, pointing to another exit, but she declines.
She uses the same approach she used in all those years in which many believed
she was a child killer, the years in which her fellow inmates berated her
whenever she was led through the corridors with shackles on her feet. "I just
think to myself that there's no one there and I keep going straight ahead," she
says.
Today Debbie lives in Phoenix, in a house owned by a friend from Berlin. He
first read about her case in SPIEGEL in 1998, and he has supported her ever
since.
Two columns support the roof over the front door, next to which is a doorbell
without a nameplate. Debbie's dog Angel, a blonde Labrador crossbreed, barks
when the doorbell rings.
There's fruit on the kitchen counter -- pineapple, blueberries and melon. At
best, the only fruit she got in prison was the occasional apple or orange.
Sitting in the armchair in the middle of her living room, Debbie describes what
it was like to wait for freedom for more than two decades. A life with nothing
to look forward to, thoughts of execution and what might be the last image a
person sees before they die.
She talks about what it feels like to return to a world that has seen so much
change. Debbie speaks calmly as she relates her carefully organized thoughts
and memories.
Her parents met in Berlin, where her father was stationed with the US military.
When he was transferred back to the United States about a year after she was
born, Debbie and her mother Renate came along. But the marriage steadily
deteriorated, and in March 1983 Renate moved back to Germany alone.
Debbie's younger sister Sandy remained with their father, who was now working
as a guard at a prison in Florence, not far from Phoenix. Debbie went to
college in Phoenix, where she shared an apartment with a female friend. "We
were 19, our parents were far away and we were crazy about boys."
On a Friday evening in April 1983, she went to a biker bar, where she met Mark
Milke, a floor installer whose parents were from Hamburg. He was athletic and
well groomed. "I was lovesick," says Debbie. She soon noticed that Mark drank
and smoked pot a lot. "But I thought I could change him," she says.
They were married in December 1984, and Christopher was born the following
October. That was when Mark went to jail for the 1st time, after being
convicted of drunk driving without a driver's license.
One day, Debbie found a bag in the garage. It contained needles, a white powder
and a bent spoon. She angrily confronted Mark, and a short time later she found
him in the bath, looking half-dead, with a needle in his arm.
At some point, Mark shouted at her: Take your kid and get out of here! He
pushed Christopher out the front door, and the little boy wet his pants. Debbie
took the child's hand, ran down the street and hid behind some garbage cans. As
she recounts the story, the little boy said: "Mommy, can you buy me some cowboy
boots? That way I can kick Daddy the next time he's so mean."
Debbie, at her wit's end, could only think of 1 person to turn to for help: Jim
Styers, a neighborhood acquaintance. He was friendly and had a 2-year-old
daughter. She called him from a gas station and Styers told her she could stay
in one of the rooms in his house.
She didn't know very much about him. He was a Vietnam veteran and lived on
welfare -- and was haunted by the ghosts of the women and children he had
killed in Vietnam.
He took care of Christopher while Debbie looked for an apartment. She only felt
uncomfortable around Styers' best friend, Roger Scott, a heavy drinker.
On Dec. 2, 1989, Styers asked Debbie if he could borrow her white Toyota and
drive it to a shopping center. Christopher wanted to come along, so he got up
and put on his new cowboy boots. "See you later, alligator," Debbie said.
"After awhile, crocodile," the 4-year-old boy replied. It was a standard
goodbye ritual. And then they left, the veteran and the child.
"Jim called early in the afternoon. He wanted to know if I had heard anything
from Chris. He said that he had lost the boy. I shouted: Jim, you have to find
him. Jim! He said that he was already talking to a security guard.
My head was full of grim thoughts. I thought of child molesters. I panicked and
called my father. He told me to calm down and call the police. So I called the
police.
Police officers showed up in the next few hours. I hoped that Chris, who knew
our number, would call soon. I was starting to go crazy."
Debbie drove to her father's house in Florence that night. The police officers
had promised to watch the phone. She took a pill and fell into a deep sleep.
When she woke up the sheriff was there. He told her that the Phoenix police
wanted to speak to her.
"He took me to the sick room at the police station in Florence. Then a big, fat
man dressed in civilian clothing came into the room. He sat on a chair and
rolled the chair around the table and towards me, until his face was only a few
centimeters away from mine. I was sitting with my back against the wall. He put
his hands on my knees and said that Christopher was dead, that they had found
his body in the desert, and that I was under arrest. All I could do was shout:
What? What? The man asked me if I wanted the conversation to be recorded. I
said: 'No, I need a lawyer.'
Then he took me to Phoenix in a car. As I stared out into the night, I couldn't
believe what was happening. I thought that he might be taking me home now, but
we drove to the police station in Phoenix instead. There, he put me in
handcuffs and took me to a jail. I don't remember much about the days I spent
there, but a young public defender turned up soon. I asked him: Is it true that
my boy is dead? He looked at me with a stunned look on his face. 'How is it
possible that you don't know?' he asked. 'You confessed to arranging the
murder.'"
Debbie's attorney was a typical, inexperienced public defender. He had never
been involved in a murder case. In fact, he had only worked on a handful of
criminal proceedings. While he sat with her, a grand jury appointed by the
district attorney voted to charge Debbie with murder.
She didn't know what had happened. A detective named Armando Saldate had
questioned Styers and Scott. He was a specialist in interrogation with a
reputation for being able to make people confess. He was the "big, fat man"
Debbie had described.
Saldate took Styers to task, but he remained silent. Scott, on the other hand,
was softer. Saldate asked questions and kept pressing him until he began to
talk. The only problem was that he was telling several different versions of
his story.
Yes, Christopher was dead, Scott said. He also knew where the boy was, he
added. He claimed that Styers had shot the boy and that he himself had only
driven the car. He said Styers couldn't stand the boy, and that there had also
been a life insurance policy on Christopher worth over $5,000.
Scott directed the police officers northward. Along the way, he told a
different story, saying that Styers hadn't intended to kill the boy, but that
Debbie had hired him to do it. He didn't reveal why.
The officers discovered Christopher's body in a dry riverbed north of Happy
Valley Road. Someone had fired 3 bullets into the back of his head.
The same evening after Scott's interrogation, Saldate took a helicopter to
Florence, where Debbie was being kept in the sick room at the station. The
crime came at a convenient time for Saldate, who was eager for a promotion and
wanted to show what he could do.
Saldate first typed his report three days later, six-and-a-half single-spaced
pages, containing the alleged confession of Debbie Milke. He wrote that she had
cried and shouted during the interrogation, but that "no tears were visible,"
that he said he "would not tolerate any lies." According to the report, she
then said, "Look, I just didn't want him to grow up like his father," and, "I
just wanted God to take care of him." Saldate claimed in his report that Debbie
"spoke to her friend Jim about helping her figure out a way for her child Chris
to die." And when Jim and her son left, "She knew that they were going to do it
today." The report also alleges Debbie told her son on the day of his death
that "God was coming down and going to take him and that he was going to be
going to heaven."
The problem with the transcript was that Saldate had not brought a witness to
the interrogation. He also didn't record the sessions, and he threw away his
notes, he later claimed.
Debbie says that he had twisted her words around and invented a lot of things.
It was quite possible that she had said that she didn't want Christopher to
turn out like his father, but was that a reason to ask Jim to kill her child?
That's nonsense, she says. Never.
Jim Styers never testified against Debbie. And Roger Scott never repeated his
accusations. Police found the murder weapon, a pistol, in a closet in Scott's
home.
Debbie spent the remaining time until her trial in the prison's psychiatric
ward, tormented by depression and panic attacks. She could only remember that
Christmas decorations were put up at some point, she says. At most, she spoke
with her attorney and her psychiatrist. He taught her how to breathe when she
was hyperventilating during an anxiety attack.
Debbie's trial began on the morning of Sept. 12, 1990. She was taken in
handcuffs and shackles to a room at the Maricopa County Superior Court.
Photographs taken at the time depict a young, 26-year-old woman with a blank
expression and her blue eyes wide open.
"I felt like I was looking at everything through a curtain. They had given me a
sedative, which made me less aware of my surroundings, although I wasn't afraid
of the trial at all. On the contrary, I was looking forward to it, because I
was sure that everything would finally turn out to be a huge mistake. I was so
incredibly naive."
Judge Cheryl Hendrix, a woman with a stern look on her face, presided over the
trial. She had recognized Saldate's report as a confession and as evidence,
even though Debbie had never signed it and continued to dispute its
contents.Archival images show the police officer wearing a suit and tie, and
facing a microphone. "She decided it would be best for Christopher to die," he
said.
When Debbie thinks about that day, she closes her eyes.
"I had to be quiet. But everything in my head was screaming: Liar, you're a
goddamned liar. He was so overbearing, so unbelievably arrogant. And he was
allowed to describe in detail all the things I had supposedly confessed to him.
But the district attorney drove me into a corner. I felt as if I were in
Russia, not America. I was only allowed to answer questions with yes or no, and
I couldn't explain anything. And yet there were so many things that needed
explanation. The fact that Jim was always good to Christopher, and that I had
no reason to distrust him. That I didn't know that Roger Scott would join them
on that day. That I wasn't the one who had bought that life insurance policy,
but my employer, and that it was a routine thing. Everything seemed so unreal
to me. My soul couldn't bear it anymore."
Debbie's mother Renate didn't come to the trial. She said later that she had
been completely taken aback by her daughter's supposed confession.
Debbie's father Sam and her sister Sandy, however, did testify in the trial.
Her father said that Debbie had always been selfish and should never have been
allowed to become a mother. Her sister claimed that Debbie had abused
Christopher, burning him with a hot baking sheet to discipline him.
"I stared at Sandy the whole time and wondered: What have I done to you to make
you hate me so much? She was always jealous of me. She probably enjoyed getting
even with me. I don't know. But when it came to my father, I thought: Why are
you saying these things? You know me! As a soldier, he probably couldn't
imagine that a police officer would lie.
But the really bad thing was that the judge overruled every objection from my
attorney. She also denied all requests to have me take a lie detector test, as
well as to question my friends and Chris's pediatrician. Shortly before his
death, he had spent four weeks in a hospital because of his thyroid. The doctor
had affirmed that he was touched by how much I had cared for Chris, and that
there were no signs whatsoever of abuse. The judge was also uninterested in the
prison psychiatrist's assessment. No wonder, because he thought I was
innocent."
The trial ended after only a few weeks, on Oct. 12. Eyewitnesses say that a boy
played a 15-minute violin solo in the courtroom, after the judge invited him in
an effort to improve the mood.
The jury of 12 men and woman found Debbie guilty of having instigated Styers
and Scott to murder Christopher. On Jan. 18, 1991, Judge Hendrix handed down
the sentence.
"I still remember how my attorney bent over to me and tried to calm me down:
'They definitely won't sentence you to death, Debbie.' But he told me to remain
calm if I heard the phrase 'life in prison.' He said this would be just a
formality and that he would definitely get me out sooner.
And then the judge read the verdict. All I heard was: death. I felt paralyzed.
There was nothing there, no emotion at all."
It wasn't until 22 years later, in March 2013, that the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals shot down the verdict and Saldate's report: "Without Saldate's
testimony, the prosecution had no case against Debbie, as there was no physical
evidence linking her to the crime and neither of her supposed co-conspirators
-- Styers and Scott -- would testify against her. ... The only evidence linking
Debbie to the murder of her son is the word of Detective Armando Saldate, Jr.
-- a police officer with a long history of misconduct that includes lying under
oath."
The appellate court judges listed many cases prior to Debbie's trial in which
Saldate had lied, used unorthodox methods to obtain confessions, broken the law
and framed suspects. In one case, Saldate obtained a confession from a man who
was in the hospital with a fractured skull and couldn't even remember his own
name.
In another, he interrogated a suspect who was on artificial respiration, was
being given intravenous infusions and repeatedly lost consciousness. Saldate
shook the seriously injured man in order to get him to talk.
The appellate judges were horrified by Saldate's methods and the fact that his
testimony had sent Debbie to death row. "No civilized system of justice should
have to depend on such flimsy evidence, quite possibly tainted by dishonesty or
overzealousness, to decide whether to take someone's life or liberty," chief
judge Alex Kozinski wrote for the court. And then they really let loose: "The
Phoenix Police Department and Saldate's supervisors there should be ashamed of
having given free rein to a lawless cop to misbehave again and again,
undermining the integrity of the system of justice they were sworn to uphold."
The prosecutors were already familiar with Saldate's list of sins in 1990, but
they concealed it from the jury. Otherwise, they would have lost their case
against Debbie.
Debbie was placed in solitary confinement on the night after her death sentence
was pronounced. She remembered that the lack of contact with other people
almost drove her crazy.
3 weeks later, she was transferred to death row in Perryville. Ba-by-kil-ler,
Ba-by-kil-ler.
"I was allowed to spend one hour in the yard three times a week. They would put
me in a cage with about four square meters (40 square feet) of space. I hated
it. I felt like an animal in the zoo. But at least I could look up at the sky,
watch the planes go by and imagine who was sitting in them and flying in them.
I always tried to sense the world outside the walls and fences."
During her 1st year in Perryville, she was ostracized by her fellow inmates.
"Maybe they were afraid of me, because they thought: She must be dangerous,
since she got the death penalty. A few guards also felt similarly about me. I
could sense their tension when they opened my door. First, they would always
talk into their walkie-talkies and say: 'Opening Milke's door.' But over time
they realized that I was completely harmless."
3/4 of a year after her arrival in Perryville, Debbie tried to contact her
mother for the 1st time. She wrote her a 32-page letter, dated Oct. 18, 1991.
She sent it to her grandparents in Berlin, whose address she knew by heart.
She spoke German as a child, but she had forgotten almost everything. She wrote
on the envelope, in poor German, "Grandma and Grandpa, it's not true. For my
mother and Alex! Please Grandma! Please!" Alex was her stepfather.
"A short time earlier, the mother of my ex-husband died. It almost broke my
heart to know that she had gone to her grave believing that I had had someone
kill Chris. I didn't want the same thing to happen to my mother. That's why I
wrote to her to explain what had really happened. Soon afterwards, I received a
letter from her. She kept apologizing, because she had thought that I didn't
want to see her. She also wrote that she would help me. That gave me a lot of
strength."
As an inmate on death row, Debbie was not permitted to work. Nevertheless, she
got up every morning at five, made her bed, switched on her little desk lamp
and wrote.
"I stole every moment of silence. The women below me were still asleep that
early in the morning. The silence allowed me to put my thoughts into words. I
wrote back to my mother, my friends and strangers who had heard about my case.
And I also made notes about things I wanted to ask my attorney during his next
visit."
At 10 o'clock, she set aside the letters she had finished writing. Then she
turned on the TV and watched "The Young and the Restless," a soap opera in
which two families struggle for power and recognition. They became ersatz
families for Debbie.
Debbie would read after lunch, when most of the other inmates napped. She read
self-help books about the power of the imagination, Tolstoy's "War and Peace"
and "Man's Search for Meaning," by the Jewish psychologist Viktor Frankl, who
describes how he survived life in a concentration camp. Her mother and friends
were allowed to send her books.
"I wanted to understand what enables people to persevere, because I was often
amazed that I didn't go crazy. I wanted to know where this strength comes from.
At some point, I realized that we don't know what we can actually endure until
the moment when we have to do it."
In 1994, Debbie took a paralegal course from a correspondence school. For $30 a
month, she received study materials by mail. The money was deducted from her
prison account, which consisted of money deposited by her mother and friends.
"I wanted to gain a better understanding of what the lawyers were talking
about, because I had only one objective: to get out. I wanted to find out who
had killed Chris. And I wanted to expose Saldate, because I realized that I
couldn't have been the only one he had done that to."
To drown out the noise during the day, Debbie would sit on her bed and spend
hours solving crossword puzzles and Sudokus. Or she would listen to music:
meditation music, Metallica and Madonna. She used to do squats and sit-ups to
her music.
At 6:30 every evening, the window in her cell door opened and a tray was pushed
through. Her mail would be placed next to her dinner. It was the highlight of
the day.
"Then I watched TV again. To find out what was in style at the time, I would
occasionally switch on the Home Shopping channel. But I also watched a lot of
documentaries about other countries. About circumcision rituals in Africa or
about poverty in India. I remember this one report about an Indian family. They
lived in a tiny, two-room apartment. They had nothing, and their four children
couldn't get enough to eat. That's when I looked around and thought to myself:
It isn't really all that bad here. I have a roof over my head and a bed, and I
get food to eat. From then on, I treated my cell as a room.
Aside from my daily routines, that too became a survival strategy for me: To
see the good in all the bad things and accept my situation."
Debbie went to bed at 8 p.m. every night. In the summer, when temperatures
climb to over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in Phoenix, she
usually slept on the floor.
Afraid that her clothing would be stolen, Debbie washed it herself, including
towels. She would make face peelings with headache tablets from the prison shop
and cut her hair with nail clippers.
"But what I missed most of all was a real toothbrush."
Debbie pulls out 2 prison toothbrushes, which are about the size of cigarettes.
"They were finished after you'd brushed your teeth twice, but they only gave
you a new one once a week. We were also not allowed to use dental floss,
because it was supposedly dangerous, although we were allowed to use shoelaces.
As a result, my mouth was full of bacteria after all those years, and my teeth
started to come loose."
She reaches into her mouth and pulls out a pair of braces. Her real teeth
haven't straightened out completely yet.
Debbie derived strength from the conviction that she would be released one day.
But then, shortly after Christmas 1997, she received a letter. It contained her
execution date: Jan. 29, 1998.
"All of our appeals in Arizona had failed, and we hadn't received confirmation
that our appeal at the federal level had been received yet. As a result, I felt
that this execution date was a formality. But then it dragged on and on. And I
had to go through that dry run. I called my lawyer and asked him when we could
expect the confirmation from the federal court. He assured me that everything
was going according to plan. And, in fact, the execution date was cancelled the
next day. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that he really wasn't paying much
attention to my case anymore.
Then I sat down and wrote to my mother, asking her to contact Mike Kimerer. I
had read about him in the Arizona Republic, the local paper, which I received
every evening. He had already won some of the most challenging cases. I needed
him."
Mike Kimerer is sitting at a long mahogany table in his law firm. He has alert
eyes and is a powerful man, even at 74. Kimerer has an outstanding reputation
as a criminal defender in the United States. He helped win the Miranda case in
1966, involving kidnapper and rapist Ernesto Miranda. Since then, police
officers have been required to read anyone they arrest their so-called Miranda
Rights: the right to remain silent and the right to have an attorney present.
Debbie's case, says Kimerer, will have an equally strong impact on the American
justice system.
Sitting next to him at the table is Lori Voepel, a member of Debbie's legal
team. She was still in law school when Debbie was sentenced. "At the time, we
all thought she was a monster. So did I. But now that I'm familiar with the
files, I know what a horrible abuse of justice we're dealing with here," she
says.
Voepel is an appeals specialist. She takes two pieces of paper and draws curved
lines on the paper to represent the path through the labyrinth in which Debbie
was trapped. Voepel draws lines from the original court in Phoenix to the
appeals court in the State of Arizona, then to the Arizona Supreme Court, then
back to the original court and back to the Supreme Court again. Then she draws
a parallel line with her pen, to indicate that the case is now being heard in a
federal court. Voepel needs a 2nd piece of paper to continue drawing the line,
this time to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, familiar to hardly anyone
outside the United States, even though this appeals court is one of the
country's highest courts.
After Kimerer and Voepel took over the case from Debbie's previous attorney,
they visited her in prison. "She was in a dangerous situation," says Voepel.
"They had driven her into a corner, like an animal. We brought her back on
track, but the most important thing was that she participated. Some death row
inmates simply give up at some point and let themselves go over a cliff. Not
Debbie."
In a 2001 letter, Debbie told her mother about what she called the "men in
black". They searched Debbie's cell every three months, dressed entirely in
black, wearing combat boots and facemasks with eye slits. "I really live in a
hell, and no one really has any idea what that's like," Debbie wrote.
"It was because of them that I didn't have a photo of Chris in my cell. I was
afraid that one of them would tear it up. And that he'd say: Oops, that was an
accident.
But there were nice guards, too. I think some of them felt that I was innocent.
It usually materialized when they asked me about my website, which my mother
had set up for me. 'Debbie, I heard you have a website.' Then I'd take a long
look at them and ask: So what did you do on my website? And then they'd smile
at me or give me a wink. The nice ones also allowed me to roll my sock into a
double layer for protection before they put on the leg irons. They had such
sharp edges that pressed into your skin."
Debbie points to one of her ankles, which is surrounded by scars, as if she had
been bitten by a dog.
"I call them my battle scars."
Debbie's hair turned gray after 10 years in Perryville. She was only 36 at the
time. But the toughest years were yet to come.
"I had always hoped to have a family again. But nothing was moving. I suffered
from severe depression. Sometimes I would just sit at my little window for
weeks, watching them build a highway on-ramp in the distance, watching the
construction vehicles drive back and forth. I would often try to imagine what
Chris would look like. What would have interested him. Would he have joined the
army?
It took me a long time to accept that I would never be a mother again. In the
end, it was a certain way of looking at things that helped me. At my age, I
thought, many people are already in their second marriage and still aren't
happy. They live their lives in the rat race and they don't have any time to
think about the meaning of life. That time was given to me as a gift. I
actually tried to see my lack of freedom as a gift, as a form of freedom."
Interactions with her fellow inmates also helped her, especially with a woman
named Wendy. She lived in the cell next to Debbie's during her last nine years
in Perryville. Wendy beat her cancer-stricken husband to death with a barstool,
for which she was sentenced to death.
"Our cells shared an evaporative cooler. If we laid down on the floor, we could
have conversations through the air vents. We talked a lot about philosophy.
During the time when I was learning Spanish, I always said to her at around
seven: Okay, I have to go to Mexico now. That was when I always watched a
telenovela."
Toward the end of her incarceration, Debbie was allowed to have visitors for 4
hours every Monday. It was usually an elderly couple that came to visit,
friends of her mother. Or her mother would visit, when she was in Phoenix.
"Those were brief hours of happiness. I always asked her to tell me about what
it was like outside, totally ordinary things. Unfortunately, I was never
allowed to hug her. There was always a pane of glass between us. And it always
broke my heart to see her go. But then I would tell myself: It's okay, Debbie.
You can't get out, but one day you will. I almost derived strength from that
sadness. I knew I would never have Chris back. But if I persevered, at least I
would be able to embrace my mother again one day. It became all the more
important to me when she got so sick."
Meanwhile, Kimerer and Voepel were fighting their way through the courts, a
process Kimerer calls "an uphill battle." They fought for 12 years, until March
14, 2013, when the federal appeals court overturned all previous verdicts in
the Milke case, in a rebuke to the entire justice system.
The number of executions and new death sentences increased in the 1980s and
90s, the period in which Debbie was sentenced. Conservatives dominated the
courts at the time, says Kimerer. "Now the pendulum is swinging back the other
way," he says, "and Debbie's case is part of the reason." With its ruling on
Debbie Milke, the Ninth Circuit Court is forcing America's prosecutors to
present all evidence that could exonerate a defendant. Its decisions often set
a precedent nationwide. "The court switched on the light," says Voepel.
"After the Ninth Circuit Court's ruling in March, it was clear that I would be
released. I said to Mike and Lori, my attorneys: Get me out of her. Please.
Now. I don't care how. They can put me under house arrest, and I can wear an
ankle bracelet, but I have to get out of here.
My mother had cancer. I knew she was going to die soon. And I wanted to hug her
one last time. To do that, I had to waive my right to a speedy trial, and I
knew it. But I didn't care."
But it still took much too long until I was released. One morning in September,
I received a visit in prison from Ronda, who worked on my defense team. I
didn't know what she wanted -- at least until she showed me my release papers
in the visitors' room. I was incredibly excited, and I thought I was dreaming.
We had fought for so long."
Debbie was released on Sept. 6, 2013, on $250,000 bail and under strict
conditions. She was carrying a paper bag filled with books and letters. A guard
said: "Here you go. Good luck," and then there she was, standing outside.
"It all felt surreal. Mike and Lori were there. They took videos of me with
their phones. I wasn't afraid, but it was overwhelming. Everything was so
gigantic, the trees, the houses. We drove into the cities, and I looked at the
cars outside the window. It was loud, and there were people everywhere, many
homeless. Everything seemed so strange. Mike had a little screen in his car,
and I had no idea what it was for. And he could talk to anyone on the phone
without holding the phone up to his ear. How did that work?
I felt like a stranger in my hometown. I only recognized a few street corners.
It was as if I had been on another planet for a long time. We drove straight to
Lori's office. Then the officer came to put on my ankle bracelet. Wearing it
was one of the conditions I had been given. I was looking forward to it,
because I saw the thing as a part of my freedom. The officer was stunned. He
said I was the first person for whom an ankle bracelet signified freedom.
Then we went to see the friends of my mother who had always helped me so much.
There were balloons in the air, and cake and roses. I have a photo that shows
me smelling a rose. What a scent."
The friend from Berlin took Debbie to his house that evening. She couldn't
stand closed doors and still had no sense of what it was like to be outside, no
sense of relative size, of distances and of space. In her years between prison
walls and bars, the world had become too big for her.
"I couldn't deal with it. It was overwhelming."
She closed all of her blinds. Only after a few days did she carefully open one
of them, the one in front of the kitchen window.
"I lie awake at night and delight in the ticking of the clock in the bedroom,
and in the silence. There was nothing but noise, noise and more noise where I
had come from. I also enjoyed the darkness, because the lights are always on in
prison."
Shortly after Debbie's release, her mother Renate flew to Phoenix. The mother
and daughter hadn't touched each other in 25 years.
"We screamed and cried. It was a strange feeling to hug people and be hugged. I
wasn't familiar with it anymore. But I had told myself: Debbie, whatever's out
there, absorb it and let it happen. Go with the flow."
She flips open the laptop, which she now knows how to use, to show us photos
from her mother's last visit. Photos of her planting cacti in the garden behind
the house, and having to brace herself because the cancer had already weakened
her body. And her mother sleeping with Angel next to her, with one of the dog's
paws resting on her shoulder.
Her mother had to return to Germany in March 2014.
"I still remember the day she left, because she had to go back to chemo. It was
March 16. We both knew it was the last time we would see each other. That's
because I couldn't leave the country. It was one of the terms of my release.
When I closed the door behind her, I broke down."
Renate Janka died in August 2014. On Skype, Debbie saw her mother becoming
weaker and weaker.
"She was sitting on the sofa the last time we had a conversation. She had
wrapped a scarf around her head. Reinhard, her life partner, called out from
the other room: Debbie, you have to be firm with your mother. She doesn't want
to eat. She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. And I said to her: Mom,
it's okay if you don't want to eat.
She was admitted to the hospital a short time later. And one morning, when I
called Reinhard on Sykpe, he started crying. I knew that it was over."
Debbie starts to cry.
"I miss her terribly."
The long years in prison have strained Debbie's psyche and her body. She lost
the sensation in her fingers in Perryville. It was carpal tunnel syndrome, a
condition involving pinched nerves, and she had to have surgery. The doctor
said that it might have been caused by her writing in prison. She wasn't
allowed to use ballpoint pens, just the thin refills, because a ballpoint pen
could be used as a weapon.
Debbie has now sued the State of Arizona for damages. Is she angry about all
the years that stolen from her?
"What good would it do to be angry? Sure, there are so many things I could be
furious about. But what would that change? Nothing. I probably won't live to be
100. I can't waste the rest of my life being angry. It's more difficult for me
to forgive -- my sister and, most of all, Jim and Roger. I do believe that
Roger shot Christopher to death. Just because. The way other people torture
animals. He was a cruel, sick person."
Roger Scott was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1991, and Jim
Styers in 1990. Both men have appealed their verdicts, but have been
unsuccessful so far. They are still on death row in the State of Arizona.
There is no grave that Debbie can visit to mourn her son. Christopher was
cremated, and the urn with his ashes was given to his father.
"I don't know what Mark did with it. I'm not in touch with him. But somehow I
know that he's taking care of it. I know that he put up a cross in the desert
where Chris died. But I'll never go there. I couldn't bear it.
I have to look forward and make plans. I want to take a road trip and visit
friends in Louisiana, Ohio and Virginia. I just want to stand there and say:
Hey, I was just in the neighborhood."
She laughs.
"And I want to apply for a passport, because I want to be in Germany in August.
I still have family there, on my mother's side. I want to live there."
It is now evening. Debbie steps out onto the terrace and looks up at the sky.
She is free. She is no longer in a cage and she no longer wears an ankle
bracelet. There is a light breeze. The sound of two wind chimes can be heard.
Debbie chose them carefully. One is for the voice of her mother and the other
is for the voice of her son.
"I feel close to them when they chime."
(source: Spiegel Online)
USA:
Supreme Court and States Struggle to Make the Death Penalty More Humane----The
high court is taking a close look at a drug that has been tied to botched
executions.
When Dennis McGuire died on an execution table in Ohio last year, he clenched
his fists and writhed as onlookers watched for 26 minutes before he drew his
last breath. McGuire, who had admitted to raping and killing a pregnant woman
in 1989, was visited by a clergy member in the months leading up to his
execution. He was there that day and said McGuire resembled a fish washed
ashore, gasping for breath.
Though the gruesome incident made headlines, it was hardly a surprise for some.
"I predicted that it would cause a long and agonizing death," anesthesiologist
David Waisel told TakePart. Waisel appeared as an expert witness on behalf of
McGuire before his execution - 1 of several lethal injection cases he has
testified in - and told the court the death would be drawn out.
The execution had not gone as planned. After Ohio corrections officials ran out
of pentobarbital and the pharmaceutical manufacturer refused to keep selling it
for use in lethal injections, the state decided to execute McGuire with a
previously untested combination of the sedative midazolam and the painkiller
hydromorphone. While midazolam works as a muscle relaxant and sedative to
render inmates unconscious before other injections are administered, it has no
painkilling properties, Waisel explained.
On April 29, midazolam's use in lethal injections will take center stage in
arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. The drug gained notoriety last year
after botched executions in Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma. At issue is
whether the drug can be used as part of a 3-drug cocktail without violating the
constitutional rights of inmates. Attorneys for the state of Oklahoma will
argue in favor of the drug's role in executions. Defense lawyers representing
death row inmate Richard Glossip and others will argue that botched executions
like that of Clayton Lockett demonstrate that midazolam's sedative properties
can't be trusted.
Many Americans may wonder why the highest court in the land is closely
considering the last living moments of convicted criminals, some of whom had
little mercy for their victims. The principle of a humane execution feels like
an oxymoron, but anti-death penalty advocates and the attorneys in Glossip's
case argue it's the legal responsibility of the state to ensure these deaths
are not so painful as to be considered cruel and unusual under the Eighth
Amendment of the Constitution.
Like McGuire's, Lockett's execution was a drawn-out process marked by visible
pain. After midazolam was successfully injected, Lockett appeared unconscious.
But when the next two drugs were injected incorrectly, the pain was so extreme
that Lockett was roused from his sedated state, according to Megan McCracken, a
staff attorney with the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California,
Berkeley, who focuses on lethal injections. Onlookers watched as doctors tried
16 times to inject the final 2 drugs - vecuronium to paralyze him, and
potassium chloride to stop his heart. Lockett writhed and gasped as the
executioner fumbled and accidentally inserted a needle into an artery in his
groin rather than a vein. He died 43 minutes after the midazolam was injected.
[Lockett's] case represents more than maladministration and human error. It
shows us the risks with midazolam are real," said McCracken. "This is certainly
the right time for the court to take a very careful look at this issue,
particularly given these bungled executions."
While McGuire's case involved just 2 drugs, rather than the 3-drug cocktail at
issue in Glossip v. Gross before the Supreme Court, his drawn-out death is
illustrative of what can go wrong if midazolam fails to fully anesthetize an
inmate.
"The concern is that midazolam provides no pain control," Waisel told TakePart.
"Potassium chloride burns a great deal, but it's hidden from us because the
inmates is chemically paralyzed and unable to move their muscles. They may look
very serene despite what could be a considerable amount of pain."
So even in a case unlike Lockett's, if the paralytic drug works, there is no
way to know how much pain an inmate is experiencing should the midazolam not
take effect. An inmate could effectively wake up as midazolam's efficacy fades
but appear pain-free because he is paralyzed.
On Wednesday, 12 states led by Alabama filed a friend-of-the-court brief in
favor of Oklahoma's arguments supporting the use of midazolam. The states are
waiting for the green light to use various pharmaceutical combinations
involving midazolam, in many cases the same combination that killed Lockett.
"It is outrageous for them to argue that lethal injection has too high a risk
of pain to be a constitutional method of execution," wrote Alabama Attorney
General Luther Strange. "It is better than they deserve."
Some states have already prepared backup plans in case lethal injection drugs
become unavailable or are ruled unconstitutional. As if anticipating the
possibility that the court won't rule in favor of the state, Oklahoma Gov. Mary
Fallin on Friday signed a bill to legalize the use of nitrogen gas in place of
lethal injections. In this version of the death penalty, a nitrogen gas mask
would be placed on the inmate's face to replace the supply of oxygen,
effectively suffocating him to death. The legislator who cowrote the nitrogen
gas bill touted it as a quick and painless option - a "a fool-proof way for a
humane execution." Utah resurrected the firing squad as a legal execution
method in March.
Whether or not the court rules midazolam cannot be used in executions, the
legislative success of these alternatives shows the United States isn't ready
to let go of the death penalty yet. The latest numbers from Pew Research
Center, released this week, show that 56 % of Americans support the death
penalty for those convicted of murder. While that number marks the majority,
Pew reports that support for the death penalty is the lowest it has been in 40
years. In 2011, 61 % of Americans supported the death penalty, down from 78 %
in 1996. The majority of that decline has occurred among Democrats.
In spite of these other options, it is telling that the court chose to grant
the Glossip petition in Oklahoma and hear arguments in this case at all.
Numerous other petitions for death row inmates - raising issues such as jury
selection, racial bias, and ineffective counsel - are often dismissed, such as
that of Missouri inmate Andre Cole, who was executed on Tuesday.
(source: takepart.com)
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