[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, PENN.

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 3



USA----book review

Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row

Author: David R. Dow-----ISBN: 0807044199-----Pages: 272


The story of the death row inmates who changed one Texas lawyer's mind
about capital punishment

When David Dow took his first capital case, he supported the death
penalty. He changed his position as the men on death row became real
people to him, and as he came to witness the profound injustices they
endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers;
from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty
system.

It is these concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented
that prove the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it's precisely
this fundamental-and lethal-injustice, Dow argues, that should compel us
to abandon the system altogether.

"An honorably dispassionate and logical broadside against a shameful
practice." -Kirkus Reviews

"Dow reveals the dirty little secret of American death-penalty litigation:
procedure trumps innocence . . . [His book] is insightful and full of the
kinds of revelations that may lead readers to reconsider their stand on
the death penalty." -Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune

"Dow's book leaves all else behind. It is powerful, direct, informative,
and told in compelling human terms. He makes us see that the issue is not
sentiment or retribution or even innocence. It is justice." -Anthony
Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning former columnist for the New York Times

(source: Akron Beacon Journal; David R. Dow is professor of law at the
University of Houston Law Center and an internationally recognized figure
in the fight against the death penalty. He is the founder and director of
the Texas Innocence Network and has represented more than thirty death row
inmates. Regularly quoted in publications like the New York Times and the
Washington Post, Dow lives in Houston, Texas.)






CONNECTICUT:

'I Took Her Dream Away' ---- Tormented by the memory of Groton hotel
killing, Jos Torres says he wants to die for his crime.


It is a "no-contact" visit, and the corrections officer says to look for
the Puerto Rican guy with the tattoos.

But when the door opens at the top of the stairs, 45-year-old Jos Torres
a slightly built man who's pacing  is the only one inside the room, which
has a wall of solid Plexiglas.

As he sits to face a visitor on this Saturday night in mid-November,
Torres talks into a phone that, like the others along the wall, has a
short cord  a measure to prevent prisoners from strangling themselves.

Without fanfare, Torres says he wants the death penalty and, very
specifically, death by electric chair.

"I don't want lethal injection. It's like putting a dog to sleep," he
says, curling both hands into fists to reveal letters tattooed across his
knuckles that spell out his hometown: L-Y-N-N M-A-S-S.

Torres has been accused of strangling to death his 1-time girlfriend
Elizabeth Reynes on June 30 at The Days Inn on Groton's Gold Star Highway,
where they both worked when it was called the Best Way Inn & Suites.
Police found her body stuffed in a locker in a small room there, her hands
and feet tied with wire.

Reynes, 46, was in the United States on a temporary work visa from the
Philippines.

Torres has entered a plea of not guilty in the case, but he has not been
cooperating with New London attorney John F. Cocheo, who, Torres says, was
hired by a friend to represent him. Torres claims he doesn't agree with
his plea. Cocheo did not return calls for comment.

On this Saturday night, during the hour he speaks to a visitor, Torres'
accent is that of a New Yorker, an affect from the handful of years he
lived in Manhattan after his childhood in Lynn, before he came to live and
work in Groton. Inside Garner Correctional Institution  where 527
high-security inmates are housed in what the prison system calls its
mental health facility for adult male offenders with significant mental
health needs"  many people think he's Italian. And, because of his tattoos
and the murder charge, Torres says, most think he's part of a gang.

As if to re-enforce the evidence, he lifts up his arms to show twin spider
web tattoos around his elbows.

Since turning himself in to police the evening of the killing, he says, he
has been despondent. He remains on suicide watch in prison.

In various letters to friends, Reynes' family and the newspaper, he has
repeatedly admitted to the killing:

"I HATE MYSELF FOR WHAT I'VE DONE

HER DREAM WAS TO BECOME AN

AMERICAN I TOOK HER DREAM AWAY

I HATE MYSELF FOR WHAT I'VE DONE"

Torres confesses he doesn't know how to read and write, although teachers
kept passing him up to the next grade until he left school in the 10th
grade. Each word in his letters from prison, he says, was spelled out by a
cellmate, and he wrote them down in pencil and capital letters. His
letters of confession were sent out along with pictures of Jesus and the
Virgin Mary ripped from a magazine.



Last June 30, in the late morning, Torres sat down with Reynes at a table
in the hotel's breakfast room. He poured the cereal. She poured the milk.

Reynes had broken off their nearly two-year relationship a few months
earlier, Torres said, telling him that she wanted to be just friends. She
was married to a man in the Philippines, and Torres said she didn't tell
him about the husband and 2 children she was sending money to until after
they were already sleeping together in the same bed.

"She broke my heart," he said.

Torres continued to pursue Reynes, but in late spring, upset over his
failed efforts, he said, he tried to hang himself. It was May 31, his
birthday. After he went to the hospital for treatment, he said, he went to
stay with another ex-girlfriend, who was trying to get him to move on from
Reynes.

According to Torres, that former girlfriend had convinced him to meet
another woman after work on June 30. He had bought flowers for the
occasion and put them in the refrigerator in the breakfast room.

While friends and coworkers have said that Torres was both physically and
mentally abusive to Reynes, he said he never physically harmed her before
June 30. He claims it was she who was jealous. When Reynes saw the flowers
that morning in the breakfast room, he said, she flew into a rage. As he
described it, they began arguing publicly and eventually carried their
dispute into a small closet-sized room behind the conference room, where
Reynes had been staying.

"It was like I was split in two," Torres said, describing the 5 minutes it
took to strangle Reynes. "...One half of me was saying, 'Get out of here.'
"

Torres said he doesn't know what made him bind her hands and feet with
wire after Reynes was dead, or what made him stuff her body in a cabinet,
the same cabinet where he used to hide when he wanted to escape work.

He remembers leaving the room as though nothing had happened. He cashed
his paycheck and drove to the home of his ex-girlfriend's brother. It
wasn't until 5 p.m. that it hit him that he had killed Reynes, he said,
and he called the police to turn himself in.



It is 8 p.m. at Garner, and Torres says that usually at this time he is
taking his meds: one pill for the shakes, one pill to sleep and one pill
for what he calls "the voices."

He describes hearing Reynes' voice in his head. It happens at night, when
there's nothing to do but stare at the walls in his cell. She tells him,
he says, "Please, don't." He often has the same dream about the day of the
murder.

"I just still can't believe I did it," he says.

The prison, says Torres, is broken up into blocks  the gangs congregate in
one block, the "gays" in another. To describe his block, he lifts a finger
to his head, rolls it around, and says he's with the "high-functioning
crazy people." Then he grins  showing off a chipped front tooth.

For 11 days, he says, they had him downstairs in a medical area, because
he had stopped eating, hoping to die. He wasn't on any meds at the time,
he says, but now, with the medication, he's doing better.

In prison, Torres says, he makes 75 cents per day cleaning the showers. He
plans to save enough to buy a television set for his cell.

"I can't even cry," he says. "I want to, but with the medicine I'm on, I
can't even cry."

At the time of this conversation, Torres has only 1 person on his approved
visitor's list at Garner  a reporter. Torres' family is still in
Massachusetts, but he says they don't know where he is.

His letters to his former boss, Rohit Patel, one of the hotel's owners,
have been unreturned, he says. Friends and former coworkers of Reynes'
have said that Torres and Patel were like family.

In an interview last summer, Patel said that he and Torres were close,
that he was close with all his employees. More recently, however, Patel
said in a statement under oath that he only knew Torres as a hard worker,
nothing more.

Torres calls Patel a liar.

Torres is scheduled to appear again in court on Dec. 4.

(source: The Day)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Abu-Jamal case still stirs anger----It's been 25 years since Officer
Daniel Faulkner was slain. He and the man convicted have supporters
meeting this week.


Google "Mumia Abu-Jamal" and you'll get more than 1 million hits for sites
containing his name. For "Police Officer Daniel Faulkner," it's only
22,800.

25 years ago this week, at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets - before
the Internet became a household word - an exchange of gunfire that left
Faulkner dead and Abu-Jamal wounded linked the names of the 2 men
inextricably in the city's history.

The survivor was transformed into a revolutionary folk hero, an
international cause celebre; the dead man became a memory whose cause has
been taken up by supporters determined to ensure that his is more than a
bit part in a death-penalty drama still without a final act.

Both sides - those who are determined Abu-Jamal is innocent and those who
are equally determined that he is not - will gather again in Philadelphia
this week. Abu-Jamal's supporters will be here to protest; Faulkner's
supporters to rally for his widow, Maureen, who never remarried and now
lives in California.

There have been many twists and turns in last 25 years - witnesses
recanted or their accounts were discredited, another man "confessed" to
being the killer, and a federal judge overturned Abu-Jamal's death
penalty, a decision that is still before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Third Circuit.

But one thing has not changed: In the eyes of the law, Abu-Jamal remains
guilty of killing Faulkner Dec. 9, 1981, shooting him in the back and then
once in the head after the officer wounded him with a bullet to the chest.

And somewhere in between the 2 sides in the case are those who feel that
Abu-Jamal did not get a fair trial but believe he did it.

The reasons why the case remains alive and is still being fought on the
Internet (Justice for Police Officer Daniel Faulkner vs. Free Mumia sites)
are varying and complex.

And because of them, there is a clash of perceptions about race, justice
and truth.

One thing that is clear is that Abu-Jamal was not a typical defendant. As
a teenager, he joined the Black Panther Party. He then became a radio
reporter of some renown whose African American colleagues elected him head
of the National Association of Black Journalists local chapter. But his
radio work fell off as he drifted toward the radical group MOVE.

His trial also was far from ordinary, with Abu-Jamal being regularly
ejected for disrupting the court, often in pressing his demand that he be
represented by MOVE founder John Africa before the mostly white jury.

Add to that the climate of suspicion at the time that the Philadelphia
police were racist and a brusque judge who became known for imposing death
sentences, and the ingredients were in place for a highly charged trial.

Finally, it was Abu-Jamal's death sentence that jelled international
support for him from left-leaning groups. He has been made an honorary
citizen of Paris and a street has been named after him in a Paris suburb.

In Philadelphia, however, support for Abu-Jamal is not that evident,
except among a few, including members of MOVE and those for whom
opposition to the death penalty is a driving force.

And since he was taken off death row 5 years ago, even international
attention has diminished.

For Maureen Faulkner, who has been steadfast in countering the arguments
made by Abu-Jamal's supporters, that also has had an effect.

"It's given me a normal life for a couple years," she said.

Joseph McGill, who prosecuted the case, said he believes most of those who
still support Abu-Jamal are part of what he called an "uninformed
movement."

"The further you get away from Philadelphia, the less light that's shown
on it," he said. "The way they talk themselves out of considering the
facts is to say the facts are not true."

But his supporters argue the facts were fixed.

In court papers filed on Oct. 23, Abu-Jamal's lawyers assert that in 2000
a court stenographer claimed that the original trial judge, Albert Sabo,
was overheard saying he was "going to help 'em fry the n-." Sabo, whose
courtroom actions and death sentences have been repeatedly questioned by
appeals courts, died in 2002.

Kemah Washington - whose late father and Episcopal activist, the Rev. Paul
Washington, called for a new trial for Abu-Jamal - said the passing of
time and the unchanging demands of life had made it "hard for people to
focus" on the case.

That, he said, did not mean that Abu-Jamal did not deserve another trial.

"Nobody can say he had a fair trial," said Washington, who has read the
trial transcript and believes Abu-Jamal is innocent.

The bare outline of the shooting goes like this:

At 3:45 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, Faulkner, 25, pulled over a green Volkswagen
driven by Abu-Jamal's brother William Cook in the 1200 block of Locust for
reasons still unknown.

A scuffle broke out. Abu-Jamal, 27, who was driving a cab at the time,
witnessed it from a parking lot on the corner and ran across the street.

Gunfire erupted, and when it was over, Faulkner had been shot in the back
and once in the face. Abu-Jamal was wounded in the chest, his licensed
.38-caliber handgun with five spent rounds at his feet.

Witnesses identified Abu-Jamal as the gunman at trial. The defense
attempted to make the case that another gunman shot Faulkner and fled.

McGill, now in private practice, thinks Abu-Jamal "got caught up in the
role he was playing" of a black revolutionary.

"He was much more involved in creating a role and creating an audience for
the trial at times then focusing on what would be best for him," the
former prosecutor said. "His whole focus was anti - anti-system,
anti-government, anti-judicial system."

McGill said he thinks Abu-Jamal could have been convicted of a lesser
homicide charge if he had waged a true defense.

That concerted defense did not come until 1995, when Abu-Jamal got a
post-conviction relief hearing with the same judge presiding.

But Abu-Jamal again lost and he later fired his attorneys, including noted
civil-rights lawyer Leonard Weinglass, who declined to comment for this
story.

In 2001, U.S. District Court Judge William Yohn Jr. revived the case by
overturning Abu-Jamal's death sentence, but disappointing both sides.

While he did not order a new trial, the judge directed that either
Abu-Jamal be sentenced to life or that prosecutors hold another
death-penalty hearing within 180 days.

District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham's decision to appeal stopped the
180-day clock and the case remains before the federal appeals court, which
has deferred action while Abu-Jamal's lawyer pursues other appeals in
state courts.

On Friday, Maureen Faulkner will host a luncheon honoring Abraham at the
Union League with proceeds to go to a fund established in Daniel
Faulkner's name that awards scholarships to the children of Philadelphia
murder victims. On Saturday, Faulkner's family and friends will attend a
Mass in his memory in Philadelphia.

Also on Saturday, buses are scheduled to bring protesters from New York
for a march in support of Abu-Jamal from City Hall to the American Friends
Service Committee building at 15th and Cherry Streets.

(source: Philadelphia Inquirer)