Issue 324
February 18, 2005
The following article appeared
in nytimes.com on February 15, 2005:
A
Zealous Prosecutor of Drug Criminals Becomes One Himself
By Ralph
Blumenthal
PAMPA, Tex.,
Feb. 9 - No one prosecuted the war on drugs in the Texas Panhandle more
zealously than Richard James Roach. As the blustery and hot-tempered Republican
district attorney for five counties overrun with methamphetamines, he had eked
out an election victory in 2000 vowing a crackdown and was soon gleefully
reeling off the harsh sentences he had wrung from juries: 36 years, 38 years,
40 years, 60 years, 75 years - even 99 years. "I think it's quite clear
that the good citizens of this district are fed up with drugs," he said.
He had
barely missed riding the issue to victory in an earlier race. "My campaign
is centered around doing something with the dope dealers," he told a local
newspaper in 1996, complaining that "it's kind of hard to fight drugs when
you've got dirty law enforcement."
But of all
the quarry brought down by drugs in the district's 4,600 square miles of
achingly flat oil fields and cattle rangeland northeast of Amarillo, the
biggest by far was the stunned figure clapped into handcuffs by F.B.I. agents
in the Gray County courthouse here one morning last month: the $101,000-a-year
prosecutor himself, Rick Roach.
Even as he
was hounding drug offenders into jail, it turned out, Mr. Roach was sinking
into his own hell of drug addiction, by his own account stealing
methamphetamine and other drugs from police seizures to cope with depression
and sexual impotence. Equally astonishing was that his taste for drugs was
hardly a secret: it had come to light in two election campaigns.
In a chain
of events that Mr. Roach said in an interview "makes absolutely no
sense," he injected himself with methamphetamine in the presence of his
office secretary, who was secretly working with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration and who, he has since
learned, was wired with a hidden recorder.
"I just
sort of, you might say, went nuts; I made irrational and wrong decisions,"
he said in several hours of often rambling narrative, part confessional, part
defensive, after a reporter knocked on his door with a question on almost
everyone's lips in the Panhandle: what could explain his astonishing downfall?
"There's
no excuse," he said. "I've gotten what I deserve."
He was ill,
he said; drug addiction was an illness, "but there's no defense for taking
an illegal substance to treat mental illness."
"Who in
their right mind would inject themselves in front of an employee?" he
said.
Asked if he
was looking to be caught, he replied, "There's some truth to that."
Government
officials said they had also been investigating him for pornography and weapons
possession - two guns were in his briefcase when he was arrested on Jan. 11,
and 35 others were found in his home and office, along with stashes of drugs.
Officials also were looking into his handling of millions of dollars in cash
confiscated from drug traffickers along the Interstate 40 corridor that skirts
the sparsely populated counties of Gray, Wheeler, Roberts, Hemphill and
Lipscomb, where only 33,500 people live, fewer than 8 per square mile.
A Guilty
Plea
Last
Tuesday, in a deal with the United States attorney's office, Mr. Roach pleaded
guilty to possessing a firearm while using illegal drugs, a charge that could
send him to prison for up to 10 years and carry a fine of $250,000 when he is
sentenced in coming months. Three other drug charges were dropped. He also
resigned the office to which he had just
been elected
to a second four-year term.
Some said
that given Mr. Roach's turbulent history - hardly a secret from the voters, who
seemed perversely forgiving - they were less than shocked. "He's a damned
outlaw, he's always been an outlaw; the rules were made for him," said
John Mann, a Pampa lawyer and district attorney from 1993 through 2000 who
feuded with Mr. Roach, his political archrival and eventual successor.
Now Mr.
Roach, 55, is under house arrest, confined to his mother's and stepfather's
home in Canyon, an electronic monitoring bracelet signaling the authorities if
he strays more than 200 feet beyond the door.
"If I'm
ever a prosecutor again, which will never happen," he said, "I would
be much less Rambo-ish and more compassionate in the way I handle an offense,
particularly for users."
Although
some defense lawyers and drug defendants he prosecuted have voiced outrage,
officials said it was unlikely that any of Mr. Roach's cases would be
overturned merely on the basis of his conviction, without specific evidence of
prosecutorial misconduct.
A Rough Road
Mr. Roach's
road to the district attorney's office was hardly smooth. He came from nearby
Plainview, where his father, Lavern, was a rising star in the boxing world,
voted rookie of the year in 1947. On Feb. 22, 1950, his 24th birthday, Lavern
Roach was felled in the 10th round of a fight with Georgie Small at St.
Nicholas Arena in Manhattan and died in the hospital the next day.
"He had
been scheduled to fight Sugar Ray Robinson the next month," said Mr.
Roach, fiddling with his father's prize gold ring. His mother remarried, and
the family moved to Pampa, the Gray County seat, where Rick went to school and
entered the Army, serving in Korea. At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, he
studied accounting and earned a law degree.
But he was
plagued for years by alcoholism and drug addiction, at times openly, his
estranged wife, Cindy, said in a separate interview at the Yellow Rose, a
restaurant they once frequented. She said that made it particularly astonishing
that he would ever have sought, and been elected to, a top law-enforcement
position.
While Mr.
Roach was district attorney, his wife said she repeatedly found narcotics and
drug paraphernalia in their barn and threw them away. Last year she found a tin
of drug crystals in one of his coat pockets, she said.
"I was
furious," she said. "He had promised me."
She said she
dumped the crystals in the toilet and then confronted her husband. "He
said he didn't know what I was talking about," she recounted.
But around
the turn of the year, Mrs. Roach said, her husband had come to her distraught.
"He thought he had almost overdosed," she recalled. "He had shot
something in his arm. He was scared, crying. He never cried. He wanted to come
home. He had thrown everything away. If he couldn't come home, he was going to
die."
Janet Stone,
a bartender at the Pampa Country Club, recalled that on Dec. 30, Mr. Roach was
found lying on the floor in the card room, pale and shaking. He later insisted,
she said, that someone had spiked his wine.
Mr. Roach
disputed the account but said he had indeed come to a decision: "No more
illegal substances." On Jan. 3, he showed up at work determined, he said,
to apologize to the staff, and "say, 'Sorry, I've been out of it,' and
turn over a new leaf."
But that was
the day, the F.B.I. said, he injected himself with methamphetamine in front of
an employee one more time.
Mr. Roach
identified her as his secretary, Rebecca Bailey, and remembered having an
uneasy feeling. "I told Becky I felt like something bad was about to
happen; I know something's not right," he said.
"No,"
he said she had responded, "everything's fine."
Mr. Roach's
first recorded brush with the law, according to a Lubbock police record, was in
1975, when he was arrested on charges of drunken driving and using abusive
racial language. The charges were later dismissed. He was working in the town
of Canadian when he and Cindy met, and they married in 1980. Their relationship
was stormy from the outset, she said. "He drank a lot" and sometimes
smoked marijuana, she said. She
left him in 1987, filing for divorce, only to withdraw the papers because,
she said, by then they had three boys, including twins.
Descent Into
Drugs
In 1988,
while they were living in Breckenridge, between Fort Worth and Abilene, he
showed signs of drug use, Mrs. Roach said. Once, she said, he drove to
Plainview and begged a relative to fly him to Lubbock "because he thought
an ambulance was chasing him." He finally checked himself into a treatment
center, she said.
Mr. Roach
said he had suffered from depression since he was 13 and underwent treatments
with a medicine chest of drugs, some self-prescribed and, recently, ordered
over the Internet. "They were all debilitating on my libido, which created
problems with my wife," he said. Viagra, he said, left him with a
splitting headache. He said that in Breckenridge he had started injecting
methamphetamine, finding eventually that, mixed with the sexual enhancer
Levitra, it had the desired effect.
"I was
going to patent it," he said with a hollow laugh. "I'm definitely a
mixed-up person."
He said the
pornographic images reported on his office computer had popped up unbidden, and
that once he replied to be taken off the list to receive them, the
solicitations multiplied. He said he had not stolen seized drug money or
maintained an arsenal, describing the weapons as heirlooms and collectors'
pieces.
Mr. Roach's
first campaign for district attorney came in 1996. At the time he was the
Roberts County attorney, prosecuting misdemeanor cases at $500 a month. His
opponent, Mr. Mann, won the race by 500 votes and according to Mrs. Roach, the
loss plunged her husband into depression.
It was a
hard fought race, with a zesty local weekly, The Canadian Record, printing
reports of Mr. Roach's drug abuse and legal problems.
Four years
later Mr. Roach beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by
charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered
a new election. He went on to win the general election.
Mr. Mann
said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family,
particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football
coach.
Mrs. Roach
said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or
snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor
blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something.
Mr. Roach
said of his downfall, "It just presented itself."
He said that
in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked
in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed
there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. I happened to be having
a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said.
Soon after,
he said, he found another stash of overlooked drugs. "I just remember how
ecstatic I was when I found it," he recalled. He used that, too.
On Dec. 16,
the F.B.I. said in affidavits for search warrants, one of Mr. Roach's employees
found a syringe floating in the toilet of the office bathroom. Tests showed it
contained residue of methamphetamine.
On. Dec. 20,
Dec. 31 and Jan. 3, the F.B.I. said, he was seen by an unnamed witness
injecting methamphetamine.
The only one
who could have seen him, Mr. Roach said, was Ms. Bailey, who later went public
as the named complainant in the lawsuit to remove him from office. Ms. Bailey,
at her desk in the district attorney's office, did not dispute it, saying,
"He trusted me." She declined to say more until the sentencing.
Mrs. Roach
voiced no interest in a reconciliation but at one point sounded wistful.
"He told me, 'There are some things you don't know about me,' " she
recalled. "I wasn't patient. I should have shut up and listened."
At his
parents' house, Mr. Roach stepped outside the house for a cigarette. He had
been pronounced addiction-free at a Dallas treatment facility he was sent to
after his arrest, he said, but still needed his nicotine. Smoking is banned in
prison, he reflected bleakly. He should give it up, he said, but added that now
"is not a good time to give up anything."
If he is
sentenced to prison, he said, he does not know where he will end up, but that
no place will be much good.
"Prosecutors
don't do well in the pen," he said.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on latimes.com on February 15, 2005:
The
Freedom to Be Vile
If
University of Colorado professor Ward L. Churchill is lucky, the regents who
are now deciding whether or not to fire him will look only at whether his
tasteless ramblings in an essay about 9/11 fell within his academic rights.
Churchill's freedom to speak his mind is unassailable; many other things about
the guy are suspect.
In an essay
written immediately after the 2001 attacks, Churchill blamed U.S. evildoing,
mostly its policies in Iraq, for bringing on violent revenge. Many thinkers
have espoused similar ideas without incurring nationwide wrath. For that
matter, Jerry Falwell also said the United States had brought on the attacks
through its own evildoing, though he had another "evil" in mind and
later had the good sense to apologize for his insensitivity.
Churchill's
over-the-top phrasing caused a furor when his essay came to light this year,
especially his calling the thousands who died in the World Trade Center
"little Eichmanns" — a reference to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Now
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and others are calling for his job. He already has
stepped down as chairman of the ethnic studies department.
It's
something of a mystery how Churchill got the job in the first place. The
respected Boulder campus filled its top ethnic studies post with a man who has
no doctorate, and whose master's degree is in the unrelated field of
communications.
Many believe
that the university was attracted by his claims of Cherokee heritage, though he
has produced no evidence of that heritage and leading Cherokees deny it.
Churchill is accused by other academics of fabricating some accounts of Native
American history.
Churchill
blamed the media for misrepresenting his 2001 essay, saying he had applied the
Eichmann term only to "technicians" of the economy in the World Trade
Center, not to janitors, children or food service workers. There was no such
misrepresentation; he might have meant to differentiate between the power elite
and other victims, but he never did so in the essay. He also now claims to be a
free-speech advocate, yet he has denied others the same right. Last year, he
tried to physically block a Columbus Day parade, saying such celebrations are
not covered by the 1st Amendment.
Academic
freedom and the value of free-flowing ideas are too important to grant only
occasionally, which is why Churchill's rights must prevail. In the end, those
are the only grounds on which we can defend him.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on latimes.com on February 17, 2005:
Alleged
Racial Incidents Shatter Security of Santa Clarita Valley
Some parents
who moved from Los Angeles for a better family environment say
their
children are now under threat or attack.
By Amanda
Covarrubias
Times Staff
Writer
The hills
surrounding Valencia High School are alive with the sounds of buzz saws,
jackhammers and bulldozers.
Across the
street, a new red-tile-roof subdivision is rising along the banks of San
Francisquito Creek, complete with meandering walkways, landscaped greenbelts
and a "village recreation center." Workers are also putting the
finishing touches on upscale hilltop homes that offer commanding views of the
Santa Clarita Valley.
Families
have long flocked to this master-planned community 35 miles north of downtown
Los Angeles because of the pristine parks and high-performing schools in the
fervent belief it is a good place to raise children.
But some
families who moved to the Santa Clarita Valley to escape the noise, crime and
decay of the city are finding that life is not so comfortable in the manicured
suburbs.
The valley
has been roiled over the last few months by claims from at least half a dozen
African American families that their children have been targets of intolerant,
even racist, behavior from their white peers. They say the white teens have
continually bullied, harassed and attacked their children at school and off
campus for no apparent reason, other than the color of their skin.
The attacks,
they said, occurred when youths were walking home from school, going to the
park or visiting friends. The incidents have shaken the community because the
alleged assailants are not skin-head outsiders but other teenagers who live
among them in the pricey subdivisions.
"I need
to be making college plans for my kids, and instead I'm fighting this
mess," said Valencia resident Robin Williams-Nohara, who says her three
sons have been harassed and beaten by white teenagers. "I can't believe
this is happening in L.A. County in 2005. No way."
Williams-Nohara
is African American and works as an infant-care specialist in West Los Angeles.
Her Japanese American husband, Seiji Nohara, is a customer service
representative for United Airlines. They moved to Valencia from Monterey Park
four years ago, hoping the good schools and suburban environment would help
their children excel and go on to college.
Valencia
High officials and city leaders acknowledge that racial problems have occurred
on campus, attributing them to young people having a hard time adjusting to the
area's growing diversity.
Santa
Clarita, a fast-growing city set amid the mountains north of the San Fernando
Valley, remains a predominantly white middle-class to upper-middle-class area.
But it is not as white as it used to be.
The number
of black residents in Santa Clarita, which includes the communities of
Valencia, Saugus, Canyon Country and Newhall, has stayed roughly the same over
the last decade, at about 2% of the population. But the white population has
declined from 73% to 69%. Latinos in the city of 151,000 rose from 15% to 21%
in the same period, according to U.S. Census figures.
The median
family income in Santa Clarita is $73,588, compared with $46,452 in all of Los
Angeles County.
"This
didn't start overnight," said Gloria Mercado-Fortine, a local school board
member who grew up in the area. "The demographics are changing and new
ethnic groups are coming in. There have always been Latinos and African
Americans in the Santa Clarita Valley, but it's expanding. I don't think we, as
a community, have paid enough attention to this and made it a priority. I
believe we could have done a better job in planning for these changes."
Valencia
High expelled two students last semester and suspended five others for their
involvement in racial incidents, said Principal Paul Priesz.
The school
has started a tolerance education program sponsored by the Los Angeles County
Commission on Human Relations and established a forum for students to talk
about racial conflicts and devise solutions.
The Los
Angeles County Sheriff's Department, meanwhile, is dispatching undercover gang
unit deputies to cruise Valencia High's parking lots in search of cars with
white power or Nazi insignias.
"The
number of incidents has escalated a little bit recently, but it's something
we've dealt with," Priesz said. "When you talk with kids and their
parents, you learn a lot of these things are happening in the community — at
stores, fast-food restaurants, on the streets — and then they spill over onto
the campus."
Parents say
they are choosing to speak up now before one of their children is severely
beaten or even shot. About a dozen African American families and their
supporters in the Santa Clarita Valley have formed a group called People
Supporting Diversity to combat racist activity. The parents have met with
federal, state and local representatives over the last month to help officials
investigate the incidents and find the attackers.
The most
recent incident occurred Feb. 5, when Williams-Nohara's 16-year-old son, Akira,
was chased at a neighborhood park by a group of white teenage boys who
threatened to kill him, Williams-Nohara said.
Akira and
his brother Shin, 17, were on their way to drop off a friend when Akira asked
to stop at the park to use the bathroom.
Before Akira
reached the restroom, he saw three cars pull up behind his brother's car. The
youths jumped out, carrying metal poles and yelling, "I'm going to kill
you niggers," Williams-Nohara said.
They began
chasing Akira, who ran into the bushes, she said.
In a panic,
Shin called the home where his mother was attending a parents' meeting with
representatives from the county Human Relations Commission and the U.S. Justice
Department about several previous fights.
Parents and
officials raced to the park, where they met sheriff's deputies. The assailants
weren't caught, and the matter is under investigation, said Sheriff's Capt.
Patti Minutello of the Santa Clarita Valley station.
Williams-Nohara
vented her frustrations in a letter to Cmdr. Sam Jones, who oversees the region
for the Sheriff's Department.
" … We
are tax-paying, homeowning, law-abiding citizens who moved here four years ago
for the quality of life we thought the Santa Clarita Valley could offer
us," Williams-Nohara wrote. "No one could ever convince me that this
valley would be anything but a wonderful place to raise our children. This has
turned into a nightmare. Please help us."
Parents say
similar incidents have occurred during the last two years, including Memorial
Day 2003, when two of Williams-Nohara's sons were attacked as they walked to a
store near their house to buy ice cream. Shin and Akira were confronted by a
group of white teenage boys in white pickup trucks. Akira and Shin were hit
with a chain, and Shin was struck in the head with brass knuckles, which left a
long, deep gash on the left side of his scalp that required nine staples. No
one has been arrested in the incident.
Patricia
Pope-Jordan said her son, Devin, also has been the victim of racist acts,
including an incident that occurred last fall while he was waiting at a bus
stop for a ride to school. Two white teens approached and began pushing him,
she said. They tore his shirt and backpack and stole his hat and CD player,
Pope-Jordan said.
A few weeks
later, Devin was bullied at a friend's Sweet 16 party in nearby Castaic. A
group of white youths who appeared to be in their late teens pulled up to the
house in about 20 trucks and cars, jumped over the back fence and crashed the
party, said Tammy Roberts, who is white and the mother of the girl who was host
of the party.
Many of the
party-crashers appeared drunk, Roberts said, and they began intimidating the
partygoers, including Devin, the only African American in attendance.
"I've
never seen such a disrespectful, ugly group of kids in my life," Roberts
said. "They had no regard for parents or property. The DJ just packed up
and left. They ruined my daughter's party."
Pope-Jordan
said one of the male party-crashers knocked a soda from Devin's hand, pushed
his hat off and threatened to kill him.
Roberts said
she called the Sheriff's Department, but by the time deputies arrived, the
unruly teenagers had left, only to return after the police cruisers had rolled
away.
"If I
had known there was this kind of thing going on here, I never would have moved
here," said Roberts, who moved to Castaic five years ago from Los Angeles.
"This is what I was trying to get away from. It's not what I wanted for my
children."
Parents say
they're concerned that their children are being goaded into fighting back,
which puts them at risk of getting arrested themselves. Caryn Brandon said
that's what happened to her son, Brandon Carrera, 16, who heard that a white
teenager had called another white youth the N-word last fall at Valencia High.
"He hit
the kid," Brandon said of her son. "He did it and he's guilty of
that."
He was
arrested on felony assault and battery charges and spent five days in juvenile
hall before being placed under house arrest, his mother said.
The other
boy, whose forehead was cut in the altercation, was punished for using hate
words on campus, Priesz said.
Mary Louise
Longoria, senior intergroup relations coordinator for the county commission on
Human Relations, said the incidents show that even places such as Santa Clarita
— which often ranks as one of the nation's safest cities in FBI crime reports —
still can harbor hate.
"It's
almost like an invisible disease that goes through a community," Longoria
said. "I've heard from African American parents, Latino parents … even
incidents against Jewish people.
"The
good thing is, because they are educated parents who moved up there for their
children, they're organizing and going to the top. That's the first step."
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on nytimes.com on February 17, 2005:
No
Defense
By Andrew P.
Napolitano
THE
conviction of Lynne F. Stewart for providing material aid to terrorism and for
lying to the government is another perverse victory in the Justice Department's
assault on the Constitution.
Ms. Stewart,
the lawyer who was convicted last week of five felonies, will be disbarred and
faces up to 30 years in jail. She represented Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, not
exactly a sympathetic character. He is the leader of the Islamic Group, a
terrorist organization that plotted the assassination of President Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt and masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
He was
sentenced in 1996 to life in prison. When Ms. Stewart sought to visit her
client in jail, prison officials required her to sign an affirmation that she
would abide by special rules requiring that she communicate with the sheikh
only about legal matters. The rules also forbade her from passing messages to
third parties, like the news media. Yet the jury found that Ms. Stewart
frequently made gibberish comments in English to distract prison officials who
were trying to record the conversation between the sheikh and his interpreter,
and that she "smuggled" messages from her jailed client to his
followers.
But if the
federal government had followed the law, Ms. Stewart would never have been
required to agree to these rules to begin with. Just after 9/11, Attorney
General John Ashcroft gave himself the power to bypass the lawyer-client
privilege, which every court in the United States has upheld, and eavesdrop on
conversations between prisoners and their lawyers if he had reason to believe
they were being used to "further facilitate acts of violence or
terrorism." The regulation became effective immediately.
In the good
old days, only Congress could write federal criminal laws. After 9/11, however, the attorney general
was allowed to do so. Where in the Constitution does it allow that?
Mr.
Ashcroft's rules, with their criminal penalties, violate the Sixth Amendment,
which grants all persons the right to consult with a lawyer in confidence. Ms.
Stewart can't effectively represent her clients - no lawyer can - if the
government listens to and records privileged conversations between lawyers and
their clients. The threat of a government prosecution would loom over their
meetings.
These rules
also violate the First Amendment's right to free speech. Especially in a
controversial case, a defense lawyer is right to advocate for her client in the
press, just as the government uses the press to put forward its case. Unless
there is a court order that bars both sides from speaking to reporters, it
should be up to the lawyer to decide whether to help her client through the
news media.
Ms.
Stewart's constitutional right to speak to the news media about a matter of
public interest is absolute and should prevent the government from prosecuting
her. And since when does announcing someone else's opinion about a cease-fire -
as Ms. Stewart did, saying the sheik no longer supported one that had been
observed in Egypt - amount to
advocating
an act of terrorism?
In truth,
the federal government prosecuted Lynne Stewart because it wants to intimidate
defense lawyers into either refusing to represent accused terrorists or into
providing less than zealous representation. After she was convicted, Ms.
Stewart said, "You can't lock up the lawyers, you can't tell the lawyers
how to do their jobs."
No doubt the
outcome of this case will have a chilling effect on lawyers who might represent
unpopular clients. Since 9/11 the federal government's message has been clear:
if you defend someone we say is a terrorist, we may declare you to be one of
them, and you will lose everything.
The Stewart
conviction is a travesty. She faces up to 30 years in prison for speaking
gibberish to her client and the truth to the press. It is devastating for
lawyers and for any American who may ever need a lawyer. Souldn't the Justice
Department be defending our constitutional freedoms rather than assaulting
them?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New
Jersey, is an analyst for Fox News and the author of "Constitutional Chaos:
What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws."
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on nytimes.com on February 17, 2005”
A
Folksy Lawyer With a High-Powered Client
By Ken
Belson and Jonathan Glater
The first
four weeks of the trial of Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of
WorldCom, have moved like mud. Witness after witness has testified about a
blizzard of arcane accounting details and their various roles in the $11
billion fraud that sank the telecommunications company in 2002.
Like the
jury, Mr. Ebbers's lawyer, Reid H. Weingarten, has endured the hours of tedious
testimony. With his weathered briefcase, slightly askew necktie and affable
demeanor, Mr. Weingarten has listened intently at times and appeared lost in thought
at others.
But Mr.
Weingarten was anything but casual yesterday when he began cross-examining the
government's star witness, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, Scott D.
Sullivan.
Defending
Mr. Ebbers, who is accused of conspiracy, securities fraud and filing false
reports with regulators, may be Mr. Weingarten's biggest challenge ever. But in
his questioning of Mr. Sullivan - who thus far has been imperturbable - he
showed why he has earned a reputation as one of the country's best defense
lawyers.
From the
outset, he attacked Mr. Sullivan's credibility, forcing him to admit that he
lied to his co-workers, his friends, shareholders, auditors and WorldCom's
board. Mr. Weingarten also added a burst of theatrics to the otherwise plodding
testimony. After Mr. Sullivan conceded that he misled the company's board, Mr.
Weingarten asked him, "So you looked those 12 people in the eye and lied
your head off?"
Judge
Barbara S. Jones jumped in. "O.K., Mr. Weingarten," she said, as if
to wag a finger. The courtroom burst out in laughter.
The episode,
though, was typical of Mr. Weingarten's strategy of acting more like a
basketball coach than a big-time litigator. He bounces on the balls of his
feet, often pointing his glasses for emphasis. And in asking the simplest of
questions, he sounds sincere without being condescending.
"Trial
lawyers are performers, and you start with a certain set of tools and with a
certain personality, and then you hone it," said John Carroll, a partner
at the Clifford Chance law firm in New York, who first met Mr. Weingarten more
than a decade ago. "A lot of guys in court come across as more academic.
Reid talks to people, he comes across in a very
down-to-earth
way."
The strategy
has worked well for Mr. Weingarten, who declined to comment for this article.
Last year, he won an acquittal for Mark A. Belnick, the former general counsel
at Tyco International who was accused of larceny and fraud. He has also
successfully defended Mike Espy, the former secretary of agriculture, and Ron
Carey, the former head of the Teamsters. He now represents Richard L. Causey,
Enron's former chief accounting
officer.
But he has
suffered defeats, too, during his nearly two decades at Steptoe & Johnson
in Washington. One of his more notable losses came in 2003 when a federal jury
convicted Franklin Brown, the former chief counsel of Rite Aid, of conspiracy
and other charges.
Mr.
Weingarten, colleagues say, likes to take on hard cases, and the one against
Mr. Ebbers may be the hardest. Prosecutors have spent years building their case
against Mr. Ebbers and have already won guilty pleas from five former WorldCom
executives for their role in the fraud that led WorldCom to declare bankruptcy,
from which it emerged as MCI last April.
On Sunday,
Verizon Communications agreed to buy MCI for $6.7 billion, a sad if fitting
coda for a company that was once worth nearly $150 billion at market.
Four of
those former WorldCom executives have testified against Mr. Ebbers, including
his close confidant, Mr. Sullivan. Throughout the trial, Mr. Weingarten has not
questioned whether the fraud took place. Rather, he has said it was perpetrated
by Mr. Sullivan and his deputies and that Mr. Ebbers was a big-picture
strategist who left the accounting to subordinates.
His central
strategy has been to attack Mr. Sullivan's truthfulness; Mr. Sullivan is
cooperating with the government in hopes of reducing his own sentence for
participating in the fraud.
In
questioning Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Weingarten repeatedly emphasized one of the
biggest potential flaws in the government's case: at all the meetings where Mr.
Sullivan said he told Mr. Ebbers about the accounting fraud, they were the only
two present. Mr. Sullivan said on the stand yesterday that "those
conversations were always Bernie and I."
No written
or taped record of those meetings have been shown at the trial, a fact that
could well be crucial to the defense. "The true hallmark of a master at
this is somebody who masters all the figures out where to focus the
attention," said James M. Cole, a former colleague in the Justice
Department and a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave. "He is discerning
enough to know what matters."
Mr.
Weingarten, lawyers say, is adept at using his folksy manner to play to the
jury. In closing arguments during Mr. Belnick's trial, he summarized the
prosecutors' charge that Mr. Belnick helped cover up a payment to a Tyco board
member. But rather than revisiting the testimony of Frank Walsh, the Tyco
director who received the payment, Mr. Weingarten instead showed that he
empathized with a weary jury. "I mean, I am Walshed out," he said.
"You heard about that yesterday." The jury acquitted Mr. Belnick.
Mr. Weingarten has a hands-on approach
to his cases and relies less than
most well-known lawyers on his
subordinates, according to colleagues who
say his strengths are his opening and
closing statements.
An hour before opening statements in the
Ebbers trial, Mr. Weingarten sat
alone in a
corner of the cafeteria at the federal courthouse in New York. Clutching a
bottle of juice with his eyes half closed, he appeared to be quietly rehearsing
his lines. By the time he rose before the jury, he was telling them a story
they appeared to comprehend, not merely reciting the arcane accounting details
or convoluted legal arguments.
He deftly
compared the prosecution's case to a docudrama where, if facts do not fit the
case, "you just leave them out."
Mr.
Weingarten's easygoing style harks back to the years when he was, in his words,
"a child of the 60's." Born in Newark in 1950, the son of a grocer,
he was an avid basketball player and attended Cornell University, where he
studied philosophy and labor relations. He took a year off from college to
travel, for a trip down the Amazon and another across the Sahara.
He first
entered the courtroom three decades ago after answering an ad for a job in the
district attorney's office in Dauphin County, in eastern Pennsylvania, while he
was finishing his last year at Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pa.
His boss at
the time, Roy Zimmerman, promised him that if he stayed for two years, he would
turn him into a trial lawyer.
Mr.
Weingarten left that office in 1977 to take a job with the Justice Department's
new Public Integrity Section. During the following decade, Mr. Weingarten
helped convict several politicians who ran afoul of the law, including the
former South Carolina congressman John W. Jenrette.
He also
played a role in the Iran-Contra investigations.
It was at
the Justice Department that Mr. Weingarten also met his best friend, Eric H.
Holder, who went on to become deputy attorney general in 1997. Their friendship
led to speculation that Mr. Weingarten had an unfair advantage defending
clients being pursued by the government, accusations that Mr. Weingarten has
dismissed.
Mr.
Weingarten and Mr. Holder, who now works at Covington & Burling in
Washington, helped form the See Forever Foundation, an organization that established
a charter school in Washington focused on helping disadvantaged children. Mr.
Weingarten has also coached the basketball team at the school and taught
Western philosophy there.
"He's a
firm believer that we need to create systems that create fair
opportunities," said David Domenici, the foundation's executive director.
In his
philosophy class, Mr. Weingarten "did everything to make the class
relevant to kids growing up in the city. He posed questions and the dilemmas in
them."
The question
facing jurors is whether Mr. Weingarten can convince them that Mr. Ebbers, the
man who presided over WorldCom's startling rise, was somehow unaware of its
downfall.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on CNN.com on February 17, 2005:
Defrocked
priest guilty of molesting boy who later shot him
by The
Associated Press
BALTIMORE,
Maryland (AP) -- A defrocked priest was found guilty Thursday of molesting a
former altar boy who shot and wounded him on a city street a decade later.
Jurors found
that Maurice Blackwell, 58, who did not testify, molested Dontee Stokes, 29,
when Blackwell was pastor of St. Edward, a Roman Catholic church in West
Baltimore.
The jury
convicted Blackwell of three of four counts, finding he abused Stokes in 1990,
1991 and 1992 but acquitting him of a charge relating to an alleged incident in
1989, when Stokes was 13.
Sentencing
was scheduled for April 15. He could face up to 45 years in prison.
After the
verdict, Stokes said he felt vindicated.
"Mr.
Blackwell was at no point on trial. It was all about me," he said.
"The world can see that I'm not a perfect person, but I stand here right
and he stands wrong."
Stokes had
served home detention on a gun charge related to the shooting.
Blackwell
declined to comment. Defense attorney Kenneth Ravenell said he felt jurors
reached their decision on evidence they should not have heard, referring to
detectives' references to "other victims," which the judge ordered
stricken from the record.
"It's
impossible for people to wipe clear what they've already heard," Ravenell
said. He said he planned to seek a retrial and if that failed, to appeal that
decision.
On
Wednesday, the jurors deliberated five hours without reaching a verdict,
sending a note to the judge saying they were unable to agree and asking how to
proceed.
Judge Stuart
Berger read them standardized instructions Thursday morning on the importance
of a unanimous verdict. They then deliberated about a half-hour more before
reaching their verdicts.
In closing arguments Wednesday, the
prosecution called Stokes a vulnerable victim who was preyed upon by a trusted
father figure. But Ravenell portrayed Stokes as a disturbed young man who made
up the allegations to deal with a sexual identity crisis.
"There
was absolutely no credibility to anything Dontee Stokes has told you,"
Ravenell said.
Stokes
admitted in court that he has had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and
reality at times, but firmly maintained he was sexually abused by Blackwell.
Dontee
Stokes: "I'm not a perfect person."
Prosecutor
Jo Anne Stanton called the allegations that Stokes was concealing homosexual
tendencies a "smoke screen."
Stokes had
made accusations against Blackwell in 1993, but Blackwell denied the
allegations and no other alleged victims came forward at the time. Blackwell
received psychological treatment and returned to his parish, although he was
barred from working with children and young adults.
In May 2002,
in the midst of the national scandal involving Catholic priests, Stokes shot
Blackwell three times. In the aftermath, Baltimore prosecutors reviewed Stokes'
old allegations and charged Blackwell with abuse.
Stokes, who
testified he had an "out-of-body experience" at the time of the
shooting, was acquitted of attempted murder in December 2002 but was convicted
on gun charges. He served 18 months on home detention.
Blackwell
was stripped of his church authority after acknowledging he had a sexual
relationship with a teenage boy in the early 1970s.
The Vatican
defrocked him in October.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on boston.com on February 16, 2005:
Shanley
gets 12 to 15 years
Defrocked
priest's accuser hailed as hero
By Joanna
Weiss, Globe Staff
CAMBRIDGE --
Defrocked priest Paul R. Shanley was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison
yesterday before a roomful of alleged clergy sexual abuse victims, who declared
the conclusion to his criminal trial a step toward collective justice.
When
Shanley, a central figure in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston's clergy sexual
abuse scandal, was led away in leg shackles and handcuffs, a brief burst of
applause was heard in the Middlesex Superior courtroom. Shanley's accuser, a
27-year-old firefighter, was greeted with hugs, handshakes, and gratitude.
The victim
is a hero, said Arthur Austin, 56, who says he was raped by Shanley as a young
man. ''What it came down to at last" was the man ''taking on the dragon of
Paul Shanley's 40-year reign of terror," Austin said. ''So just by
default, he was doing it for the rest of us."
The
courtroom was fuller than it was during Shanley's two-week trial, largely with
alleged victims like Austin, who could not press charges because of the statute
of limitations.
The
sentencing was the final chapter in a trial fraught with symbolism and high
expectations: a means of catharsis for Shanley's alleged victims, a witch hunt
to his supporters.
In a
statement read by prosecutor Lynn Rooney, the victim pleaded with the judge for
a hefty sentence and suggested that he was asking on behalf of many others.
''That
pervert has victimized many, many people," the victim wrote.
''Don't deny
them their justice, too."
For Shanley,
the man had a pointed wish: ''I want him to die in prison.
Whether it's
of natural causes or otherwise. However he dies, I hope it's slow and
painful!"
The man's
wife and father also spoke, accusing Shanley of destroying his victim's faith.
The accuser's wife, 23, said her husband refuses to step inside a church for a
wedding, funeral, or christening. She called Shanley ''a coward who hid behind
God."
''No matter
how many private pleas you make to God for forgiveness, he will see through
you," she said. ''You are sick to your core."
The Globe
does not identify sexual abuse victims without their consent.
Shanley, 74,
a former ''street priest" known for his ministry to troubled youth, was
convicted last week of two counts of child rape and two counts of indecent
assault and battery against a child. The charges stemmed from the early 1980s,
when he was a parish priest at St. Jean's Church in Newton, where his victim
was a Sunday school student. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in
prison.
Shanley's
defense lawyer, Frank Mondano, said yesterday that a fair trial was impossible
because of the sexual abuse scandal. Mondano sought a lesser sentence in a
county house of correction, arguing that Shanley had health problems, no criminal
record, and no likelihood of being a security risk.