FRONTLINE Bulletin
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/
- This Week: " A Crime of Insanity," Thursday, Oct. 17 at 9:00pm
on PBS
- Live Discussion: Chat with producer David Murdock on Fri. at
11am ET
+ This Week ...
"When you're a trial lawyer, it doesn't matter what side you're
on,
because you go into a zone and you're into the battle. You're
not
thinking about right, you're not thinking about wrong. You're
just
thinking about winning ... about doing anything that you have to
do --
short of lie, cheat and steal. ... And anybody who says that
they don't
do that isn't telling you the truth."
So says former prosecutor Cheryl Coleman. In 1996, she did
everything
she had to do to convict a young man named Ralph Tortorici in an
Albany,
N.Y., courtroom.
In December 1994, Tortorici, then a 26-year-old psychology
student at
SUNY's Albany campus, held a class hostage at gunpoint,
announcing that
a computer chip had been implanted in his brain as part of a
government
medical experiment, and that he wanted to see the president of
the
United States. One student was shot and seriously wounded before
police
were able to subdue Tortorici.
That Tortorici was paranoid schizophrenic, and that not a single
psychiatric expert could be found who would testify that
Tortorici was
legally sane when he committed the crime, did not stop Coleman
from
pressing her case with every tool and tactic of the prosecutor's
trade.
Nor did it stop the jury from convicting Tortorici on 11 counts
of
kidnapping and aggravated assault -- nor the judge from
sentencing him
to the maximum penalty of 20 to 47 years in prison.
In "A Crime of Insanity," this Thursday, Oct. 17 at 9:00pm
(WTTW) on PBS,
FRONTLINE takes a close look at the case of Ralph Tortorici and
at the
adversarial criminal justice system itself, in which attorneys
are
pitted against one another in a winner-take-all contest that too
often
leaves justice out of the equation.
How cases like Tortorici's are handled is almost always
controversial.
What is unusual, and remarkable, is the candor with which Cheryl
Coleman
spoke to FRONTLINE about the strategies used to undermine
insanity
claims, and about her own misgivings.
We hope you'll join us on Thursday night. On our website
following the
broadcast, you can read testimony from Tortorici's trial,
interviews
with his father and brother about his emerging mental illness,
the
basics of how the insanity defense works, and much more. You'll
find it
all at http://www.pbs.org/frontline/
Wen Stephenson
Website Managing Editor
FRONTLINE
This program will be rebroadcast at the following time(s):
Oct. 19 at 3:30am (WTTW)
----------------------------
+ Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com ...
Join producer David Murdock this Friday, Oct. 18, at 11 a.m. ET,
for a
live online discussion about "A Crime of Insanity."
For details, see:
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/02/tv_frontline101802.htm
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