July 24 TEXAS: Death row survivor now takes no chances With enough cash to make bail and a careful eye on the speed limit, Ernest Ray Willis embarked last week on a road trip into his past. As the former inmate drove deep into the state that once wrongly convicted him of murder, he followed the hard lesson he learned during nearly 2 decades on death row. Take no chances in Texas. "I'm cautious," he said. "Because I know if I came through one of these towns and something happened, I'd be the first one they're looking at." Whatever the risk, by journey's end, Willis hoped to bury his past as inmate No. 000881 and resurrect his relationships with a son and brother. Pulling away from his home in lush Mississippi, Willis pointed his pickup toward this dry Pecos County crossroads, his personal gateway in and out of purgatory. Jurors here convicted the former roughneck of setting a 1986 house fire that killed 2 women. And, after years of appeals exposed flawed evidence, prosecutors here retreated from the accusations. 9 months after winning his freedom, Willis was back at the scene of his conviction, asking the state to wipe out all official records of the case. Setback Arriving in freshly pressed jeans, a crisp Western shirt and ostrich-skin boots, Willis looked lean and prosperous when he opened the courthouse door Friday morning. The courtroom was quiet. His hearing was scheduled to begin in an hour. Minutes before it started, a casually dressed man approached and greeted him warmly. It was Ori T. White, the former district attorney who inherited Willis' case from his predecessor and eventually decided the inmate was innocent. The 2 men had never met. White apologized for the state's mistake. Willis reached out and, with a tremor in his voice, said, "It's so good to shake your hand, man." White's successor, Laurie K. English, was less welcoming. The new district attorney for the 112th Judicial District opposed Willis' request to erase his record. The hearing quickly stalled, however. A Dallas forensic laboratory, one of the agencies still holding records from Willis' case, had not received the required notice. A letter mailed to the lab had come back marked undeliverable. As a result, the proceeding was postponed about 60 days. The first goal of Willis' trip would have to wait. "They threw us another curve," he explained hours later as he sat in the Odessa living room of his older brother Alton and sister-in-law Bernice Willis. With family Seven years had elapsed since the brothers had last seen each other, when Willis still was an inmate fighting his conviction. Neither Alton nor Bernice Willis had met Verilyn, the Mississippi woman Ernest courted and married while on death row, so he passed around the photo he carries in his wallet. Snapped by a guard, it shows the couple grinning side by side, separated only by the Plexiglas in the prison visiting room. As the hours passed, the reminiscing meandered from hunting trips to working in the oil fields to early driving lessons, leaving little room for talk of the future. Eventually, Willis plans to find work. He might start a business with the money he is receiving from the state fund that pays wrongly convicted inmates about $25,000 for every year they languished in prison. When the final check arrives next year, the state will have given Willis a total of $429,166. The money has clearly eased his re-entry, but no one was calling it lavish pay for more than 17 years of confinement in a solitary cell three paces long. "I wouldn't trade this country for any other country or live in any other country," Alton Willis said, "but I think there's a lot of laws that need adjustment." After the brothers talked past midnight, Ernest Willis went the next morning to join his son, Shawn, for breakfast. It was their second meeting of the trip. After a quick embrace, they sat down in a rear booth at Whataburger. Now 36, Shawn Willis had been about 17 when his father was charged with capital murder. Distance and despair had eroded their relationship so that, by the end of Willis' incarceration, they had stopped corresponding, leaving anger and guilt to fill the silence. "It was just easier for me to live my life, try to keep it out of sight, out of mind because the more I thought about it, the more it hindered everything I tried to do," Shawn Willis said. "Just thinking about it, knowing he wasn't there, he wasn't going to be there - it was just tough to deal with. I got tired of being depressed all the time." Shawn Willis broke the silence, writing a letter shortly before his father's release. They had seen each other a couple times since then, but this trip provided their first leisurely visit. They had played nine holes of golf a couple days earlier, but a few hours of fun hardly compensated for all the time lost. And then it was over. About 40 minutes into breakfast, Ernest Willis looked at his watch and calculated the roughly 860 miles ahead of him. "I'm going to have to take off because I'm going to be 2 o'clock in the morning getting there," he said. Leaving the past The shortest route back to Mississippi traveled north of Iraan, the tiny town in Pecos County where Willis' long legal odyssey began. There, 2 versions of the June 11, 1986, fire that killed the sleeping Gail Allison and Elizabeth Bellue still compete with each other in the local lore. The original account embellishes on details alleged at Willis' trial, adding that the women were bludgeoned before they were burned. The newer, but now official, narrative points the accusing finger toward faulty electrical wiring or perhaps stray cigarette embers. "I heard it was an accident," said J.H. Kent Jr. The site no longer shows any scars of the tragedy. Fenced off by new cedar stays, the lot now hold's Kent's house, a beige mobile home with red shutters. Chimes dangle in the desert breeze near a sign by the front door that reads "God Bless This Home." Only once, Kent said, has the property produced any disturbing reminders of the blaze. Several years ago, while digging a water line, his shovel hit a layer of charred earth. A foot of caliche now covers that scorched soil. The next time he returns to West Texas, Willis would like his history here similarly buried. (source: San Antonio Express-News) INDIANA: Mental illness defense to be probed in 2 killings In Crown Point, a public defender appointed to defend a woman accused of bludgeoning her 2 young sons to death said he would investigate reports she was mentally ill. A Lake County magistrate entered a plea of not guilty Friday for Magdalena Lopez, 30, who is charged with 2 counts of murder. Investigators said she beat to death Antonio Lopez, 9, and Erik Lopez, 2, on Tuesday night with a 10-pound weight. A police report said that as officers approached the house in Dyer, about 10 miles southwest of Gary, Lopez walked out with blood stains on her clothes and bare feet and told officers, "I had to kill them -- they're in a much better place now." Her husband, Robert Lopez, and other family members and neighbors say she had been suffering from mental illness in recent months. Lopez said his wife had not been the same since she suffered a miscarriage about 2 years ago. Public defender Casey McCloskey, who was assigned to represent Magdalena Lopez, said he would explore every possible defense, including reports the woman suffered from bipolar disorder. She was being held without bail in the Lake County Jail. Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said the case qualified for the death penalty, but he was awaiting results of a review before determining whether to seek it. If Carter does not seek the death penalty, the woman could face 45 to 65 years in prison if convicted. A funeral for the boys was Saturday at St. Margaret Mary Roman Catholic Church in Hammond. (source: Indianapolis Star) USA: ABA Urges Congress to Strengthen Right to Counsel in Criminal Cases The American Bar Association has urged Congress to strengthen the right to counsel in criminal cases, not make it harder for defendants to assert their rights and claim innocence. The ABA asked Congress to reject a bill that would keep federal courts from reviewing habeas corpus claims, including claims of innocence. If Congress wants to streamline the criminal justice process, the ABA testified, ensuring competent counsel is the best strategy to keep cases moving and ensure justice for all litigants. In testimony submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Eric M. Freedman, a member of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project Steering Committee, urged Congress to reject S. 1088, the "Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005." He said that the "bedrock definition of justice is that the legal system function reliably to punish the guilty and acquit the innocent." To achieve justice expeditiously, Freedman continued, the ABA has recognized that government should provide competent counsel to indigent defendants and that habeas corpus proceedings must focus on relevant substance, not legal technicalities. "(The bill) attacks both of these core principles," said Freedman. Freedman noted that the proposal proposes to dilute states' obligation to provide competent counsel to the indigent by shifting the responsibility for reviewing habeas corpus petitions from the courts to the Attorney General. This policy would "allow states with inadequate systems for the provision of counsel to erect more barriers to reviewing the results of trials that are simply unreliable in ascertaining the truth." Instead, Freedman said, Congress should provide more resources to states to implement the ABA's Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases. Of equal concern, Freedman testified, are provisions of the bill that seek to remove state court decisions from "the scrutiny of their constitutional merits that federal habeas corpus was designed to insure in the first place." The result, Freedman said, would be that evidence of innocence, which often only emerges over time and with the assistance of effective counsel during the course of the criminal justice process, would frequently not be found and would be prevented from reaching court. Freedman concluded that rather than streamlining the process, as the proposal's title suggests, "speed and accuracy both will be impaired by the enactment of a bill that diverts the courts from the merits while inviting numerous challenges to the validity of its provisions." To achieve the goals of expeditious and accurate justice, Congress should instead focus on the provision of competent counsel. Freedman is a nationally recognized expert on the constitution and death penalty issues. (source: Empire Journal) OHIO: Richey's betrothed eagerly awaits convicted man's new day in court----Prosecutor confident in state's case Kenny Richey has been on death row in Mansfield, Ohio, since 1986 for the death of a 2-year-old girl who died in an apartment fire, which prosecutors said he set. It's a rare warm summer in Scotland, where Karen Torley Richey awaits the new trial of her fianc several thousand miles away in Ottawa, Ohio. Kenny Richey, who has been on death row in Ohio since his 1987 conviction for an arson fire in which a 2-year-old Putnam County girl died, is expected to have charges against him presented to a grand jury next month. Richey was born in the Netherlands to a Scottish mother and American father and grew up in Edinburgh. He moved to Putnam County in 1982 when he was 18 to be with his father, who was divorced from his mother. Ms. Torley Richey has imagined a new day in court for Richey ever since she inadvertently took up his cause a decade ago, when she was a divorced, unemployed mother of 4. "Kenny and myself, as well as the family, have always wanted a new trial," Ms. Torley Richey said. "Being simply freed was never enough for Kenny. He wants to be able to prove his innocence in a court. So we are excited about the prospect of being able to have this." An ocean and about 1/3 of the way across the North American continent away, Putnam County Prosecutor Gary Lammers is not as excited as the Richeys are about the pending trial. "The next six months is going to be pretty ugly, I'm afraid," said Mr. Lammers, just back from a family vacation he called too short. A 3-judge panel in Putnam County ruled in 1987 that Richey, who prosecutors said was baby-sitting the 2-year-old girl for her mother, started a fire in the apartment to murder his former girlfriend, Candy Barchet, and her new boyfriend, Mike Nichols. The couple were in the apartment below. A U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Cincinnati overturned Richey's conviction Jan. 25 on the grounds that his constitutional rights were violated because he was inadequately represented by his attorney, William Kluge of Lima, on the arson charge. (source: Toledo Blade)
