Issue 340
June 10, 2005
Innocent.
But Never Free.
by Phil
Primack
Peter Vaughn
was convicted of a supermarket robbery, Donnell Johnson of a child's murder.
They spent years in prison proclaiming their innocence. And then one day it
happened: Their convictions were overturned. They were free to go. One man
pieced his life back together. The other fell apart.
After much
deliberation, the courtly older man finally decides which indoor TV antenna to
buy. Behind the counter, the young sales associate, who had patiently offered
his advice, tallies the total. As the customer's wife writes out a check, a
look of mock amazement crosses the associate's face. "You mean you buy it
and she pays for it?" he asks. "Let me shake your hand." The
couple leave the store, what-a-nice-young-man smiles on their faces as they
head for their car parked in this strip mall in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood.
How would
they react if they knew that the poised and charming salesman, Donnell Johnson,
spent five years behind bars, convicted of murdering a 9-year-old boy on
Halloween in 1994 in a faraway Boston housing project?
Perhaps
their shock would ease when Johnson, now 27, explains that he was released from
prison in 1999 and exonerated of that heinous crime; that prosecutors now agree
with what he had said all along, that he didn't do it. "I only tell close
friends about what happened," says Johnson. But other people read about
him in the press. "They're all surprised I did five years. All they know
is me and the person I am now, not the naive, silly Donnell hanging out with the boys."
Last month,
Johnson received an undergraduate degree with honors in criminal justice from
Mississippi Valley State University in nearby Itta Bena. While in college, he
began working full time for Radio Shack, winning awards and promotions. That
Johnson initially did not want his employer named reflects his lingering fear
about reaction to his history, exonerated or not.
More than a
decade after that fateful Halloween, Donnell Johnson is doing well deep in
Dixie. "He took the initiative to go to college despite the fact that he
went into prison at the age of 16 and came out when he was already beyond the
normal college age," says Stephen Hrones, Johnson's attorney.
"Donnell didn't just bemoan his fate and claim others destroyed his life.
He looked forward."
At about the
same time that Johnson was charming customers in Mississippi, Peter Vaughn was
finishing his three-hour shift preparing food for a mental health facility in
Brockton. For the 43-year-old Vaughn, holding down any job -- even a low-wage,
part-time one -- is a big step. Like Johnson, Vaughn was also released from a
Massachusetts prison after a court reversed his conviction. But unlike Johnson,
who returned to his family and
church, Vaughn had no safety net waiting when the guard at MCI-Norfolk told him
in 1986 that he was to be set free the next day. "I was scared,"
recalls Vaughn. "I didn't even know how I was going to get home."
Vaughn had
completed 41 months of a seven-to-12-year sentence imposed after witnesses
identified him as the "outside man," or lookout, in the 1983 armed
robbery of a Star Market in the Fenway. A jury convicted him even though the
market had been robbed again two months later, and a security camera
photographed an outside man with similar clothing and physical characteristics.
Vaughn had the ultimate alibi for that second robbery: He was locked up at the
Charles Street Jail on an unrelated charge. When the Appeals Court of
Massachusetts reviewed his case in 1986, it found that "the documentary
evidence ... was so compelling that reasonable jurors could not have been
satisfied of [Vaughn's] guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." The court
ordered Vaughn's acquittal and release.
No court,
however, could order his happiness. The time Vaughn served for the crime he did
not commit compounded longtime problems: a troubled family history, drugs, and
his own poor choices. While serving that sentence -- not his first but his
longest -- Vaughn rarely saw his mother or son. His best friend died. "The
underlying issue was my being in prison for something I didn't do - why did it
happen to me?" he says. "Why did it happen to me?"
For Johnson,
exoneration led to a college degree, steady work, and more. For Vaughn, it led
to heartbreak, homelessness, and a long, painful search for normalcy.
They have
become an informal fraternity, this band of exonerated brothers cleared of
crimes as serious as murder and rape. According to the New England Innocence
Project, 23 people in Massachusetts prisons have had their convictions
overturned since 1982, including 17 in Suffolk County. The Commonwealth is at
least helping them. Under a law signed late last year, people who have been
wrongfully convicted of crimes can sue for access to a range of services, up to
$500,000 in compensation for their lost liberty, and their records are expunged
of wrongful charges. About 15 other states also provide compensation, but the
Massachusetts statute goes further by offering educational and human services.
Joseph Savage, chairman of the New England Innocence Project, calls the law
"a huge move in the right direction."
Vaughn plans
to seek compensation under that law. So might Johnson, who sued two Boston
police detectives involved in his case and is appealing a federal judge's
decision last year to dismiss the suit.
Donnell
Johnson says he was a star teenage athlete, especially in football and
baseball. But his cheerful boasting fades into soft bitterness as he looks back
at where things went wrong. "Something I really fight with is that if I'd
never been arrested, could I be in the pros now?" he says. "I didn't
get the opportunity to find out if I was good enough. I never had the
opportunity to blow my knee out. Some people say 'could have' and 'should
have.' For me, they were not options."
Neither, he
says, was staying in Boston after his conviction was reversed. "When I got
out, I was able to see where the street life had got me. With my church and
family, they were always behind me. But the street - the people I thought were
my friends - left me out to dry."
The streets
around the Bromley-Heath housing project where he was raised were a powerful
temptation, despite the best efforts of his family and church. As a
13-year-old, Johnson was charged with assault and battery with a knife. At 16,
he was arrested in connection with a gang-related shooting. While charges were
dismissed in both cases, Johnson was squarely on the police radar. So after
witnesses identified the Halloween shooter of Jermaine Goffigan as a tall,
light-skinned African-American man with
freckles and an Afro, Johnson was arrested within 24 hours and charged
with murder.
Johnson
insisted he was innocent. Family members supported his alibi that he was home
watching Monday Night Football. But witnesses identified him, and he was convicted
in 1996, first by a juvenile-court judge and again in a jury trial. He was
sentenced to 18 to 20 years in juvenile and then adult facilities, where he
served until 1999, when members of a Boston gang, seeking to cut a deal in the
face of federal drug charges, told
investigators that Donnell Johnson was, in fact, innocent. (Two other
men, one of whom was said to resemble Johnson, later confessed to the
shooting.)
Stuck in
prison, Johnson stewed while those he thought were his friends, who knew who
really had pulled the trigger, stayed silent. He grew determined to leave the
streets that had tempted but betrayed him, so after his release, he moved in
with his grandfather in Brockton and worked as a cook. In prison, he had earned
enough credits to graduate from East Boston High School. His next goal was
college.
"I
always wanted to go to a historically black college with relatively small
classes that was in someplace opposite from city life," he says, sitting
in a restaurant in the small historic downtown center of Cleveland,
Mississippi. "My first choice was in Virginia. I told the interviewer
there my whole story, but I think that's what made them shy away from me."
A fellow member of Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, which set up a scholarship
fund for Johnson, recommended Mississippi Valley State.
"Getting
out of state worked for me," Johnson says. "If someone is failing,
chances are he's still around negative things. People get stuck in their
environment, that mentality, that life. Growing up in the projects, you think
the only way you can go to college is through sports, not by being smart or by
reading."
In
Mississippi, Johnson dated a classmate, and they had a daughter, Alyvia, who is
now 3. Johnson and Alyvia's mother are no longer together but remain friends.
"I was a freshman and she was a junior," he says. "I was still
discovering myself when I met her. I was 21, but after spending my teenage
years in prison, I didn't really know about real simple stuff that most people
take for granted, like how to even talk to a woman."
He had
missed his high school prom, but Johnson learned lessons even his criminal
justice professors hadn't. "A lot of their theories were off," he
says. "Only a few of my professors knew my history, and one asked me to
speak in her class. It was strange, because a lot of the class members were
graduate students who work in the criminal justice system. Some have a
the-system-never-fails mentality, so what I said was an awakening."
Johnson's
new friends call him "Boston." He calls Curressia Brown, a professor
of business administration, his "Mississippi mentor." "We could
look at the book and speculate, but he had a unique knowledge he could
share," says Brown. "I urged him to use his past not as an excuse but
as a lesson. I told him he has the right to be angry and resentful, but you
don't have the right to just lie there. You have an obligation to get up.
That's what
the second chance is for."
Robin
Johnson, Donnell's mother who now lives in Maryland, says support is the key to
success in that second chance. "When these people get out, they're often
hitting society with no one there to hug them or to greet them or even to
listen to them. There may be big hoopla at the beginning, but when the smoke
clears, what happens then?"
What's
happened to Donnell Johnson is that he has become the first member of his
family to graduate from college. And he wanted a photograph of that May 14
graduation moment to appear alongside this story. "The last time my
picture was in the newspapers in Boston, it was in connection with a
murder," he says. "I want everyone to see me now in a cap and
gown."
Peter Vaughn
looks out proudly from the photograph on the wall of his apartment in the
converted Ellis Brett School in Brockton. He stands with a group of men, all
exonorees, and state Representative Patricia Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who
cosponsored the new state law that assists the wrongfully convicted. How
different he looks - how much healthier and happier - than in the snapshot he
digs up from around 1986, when he was an
agitated and
angry inmate at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security state prison.
So agitated,
in fact, that his brother Sal Ali - who was serving time for bank robbery in a
nearby cell - urged Vaughn to go to the prison infirmary, which committed him
to Bridgewater State Hospital for 30 days. Shortly after returning to Norfolk,
Vaughn learned he would be released.
When his
mother arrived in a cab from Brockton to pick him up, Vaughn took it straight
to Boston's South End. There, he moved in with the mother of his son, Pierre
Vaughn, 7, and tried to work a construction job. But in that familiar life, he
fell back on familiar vices. "We were crammed into this studio
apartment," Vaughn recalls. "I was blindsided by the coke and the
drinking. You don't know when you cross the invisible line and become addicted,
but I went way over it. I lived in total numbness from drugs."
That little
boy would end up on drugs and in trouble himself. And he and his father would
become estranged after Peter called the police on his son. "I didn't want
what happened to me to happen to him," he says. But then, on June 12,
2001, while Vaughn was in protective custody in a Fall River psychiatric
hospital, he got the news about his son. Hours before a trial on drug
trafficking charges, Pierre Vaughn, 22, was found dead in
his cell in
the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, a thermal T-shirt wrapped around his neck
and tied to his cell bars.
Vaughn
discusses this painful past with the same calm with which he blows cigarette
smoke out his apartment window. His mother, Hazel Barros, brings food for her
son and his guests but says little. Just a few years ago, Vaughn was locked up
for threatening her. Today, he realizes that she has been his quiet anchor.
Looking at the food, Vaughn says, "How much do I owe you, Mom?"
"Your
life."
In 1969,
Barros moved her six sons from California to Falmouth, where she had family.
Vaughn says he was placed in an orphanage at age 8 while his mother looked for
an apartment. "I had older brothers who weren't good examples, and I
pursued what they did," Vaughn says. By the time he was 14, he was into
drugs and car theft. Arrested several times as a juvenile, Vaughn entered a Department
of Youth Services halfway house in Springfield, in a neighborhood he says was
full of drugs. After 18 months, he
moved to Roxbury to live with his mother and brothers. At 17, he became a
father and dropped out of high school. "After the baby was born, we needed
money."
As a young
man, Vaughn worked unskilled jobs and boosted cars to pay for drugs. "It
was easier to make money stealing than by going to work," he says.
"I'm not proud of it." While serving six months in 1983 for breaking
and entering, he was charged with the Fenway robbery. At trial his clearly
agitated state did little to help his case, and fighting and other problems
landed him in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
In 1986,
that conviction was reversed. "Peter was deprived of more than three years
of his life through no fault of his own," says Amanda Metts, a Boston
lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery who represents Vaughn. "He has
borne not only the psychological impact of that wrongful conviction but the
reality of being suddenly released from prison without counseling, a job, or
even so much as an apology."
Two months
after his release, Vaughn moved to Brockton to live with his mother. He met
Isabel Goncalves, and they had a daughter, Bianca, who is now 14. They lived
together for five years as Vaughn intermittently sought drug treatment. But it
didn't stick. He'd fall back into drugs and petty crime. After a 1994 stay in a
detox program, Vaughn came home to find that Goncalves who, he says, didn't even
tolerate smoking -- had finally had
it. "I
walked in, and my bags were packed," he says.
He moved to
a cheap hotel and found work with a temp agency. "I was clean for three
months but relapsed." Police arrested him after seeing him steal a car's
radar detector, but that bust also led to a breakthrough, Vaughn says.
"That was the last day I took drugs." It was November 1, 1994 -- the
same day Donnell Johnson was arrested in the murder of Jermaine Goffigan.
While Vaughn
was serving several months for the theft, another family tragedy hit: A brother
died of AIDS. "I took it pretty hard," Vaughn says.
"I went
to the funeral in handcuffs. I had to try to get over it while in a jail
cell." Another brother later died. (Vaughn doesn't know the cause.)
And his
brother Sal Ali? He is serving a life sentence for another bank robbery.
For much of
the late 1990s, Vaughn was in and out of homeless shelters and halfway houses.
He'd often seek -- or be forced into -- treatment for what he has been told is
schizoaffective disorder. But he'd fall off his medications and the bad
behavior would return, finally striking at his strongest support, his mother.
Believing she had stolen money from him, Vaughn threatened her. He was arrested
and served a 120-day sentence,
after which
he was back on the streets. "Living in the street in the snow and cold,
being turned away from shelters because they were full -- that was the end for
me." Police placed him in protective custody twice, including that time in
a Fall River hospital when he learned of Pierre's death. After that, he began
to stay on his meds and saw his counselor more consistently. He started to
attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics
Anonymous
meetings more regularly. In 2003, he found a subsidized apartment in the old
school.
Dale Revzon
worked closely with Vaughn as his case manager at the Department of Mental
Health's Multi-Service Center in Brockton until her retirement in April. She
says she knew from the time she met him in 1993 that "he absolutely needed
treatment. Mental illness was his problem," but it took the double shock
of a homeless winter and the death of his son for Vaughn to be ready to help
himself. Since 2002, she says, Vaughn has stayed on his meds, kept clean,
maintained his apartment, and been consistently on time for his job at the
Multi-Service Center, or MSC, where he prepares food and helps run the
cafeteria.
"He
works very hard and is well liked and funny," says Revzon. "The best
breakfast going now is at the Brockton MSC. I see it turning around for Peter
on a daily basis. This man has worked extremely hard and is doing what he has
to do in the recovery process. He'll always have to be in that process, for
both drugs and mental illness."
Vaughn has
even become a role model for younger members of his family, says Revzon.
"His family has had such incredible tragedy, so many things have happened.
But they can use Peter to help some of the kids coming up, trying to help them
learn the easier way, rather than the hard way he experienced." Vaughn
also tells his story to teenagers under DYS supervision, as he was once
himself. And he tells it to his daughter.
What if that
false Fenway conviction had never happened? Vaughn is asked. After all, he'd
messed up before that, and he messed up after. He pauses before answering.
"Without that felony on my record, if I hadn't gone through what I went
through serving that time, I might have had a fulltime job. I might have still
had a family. I might not have used so many drugs. I might not have committed
any more crimes. I might have set myself straight, which I was trying to do
before that arrest."
But then,
Vaughn says, "I don't blame anybody for what I did wrong. I blame myself
for doing drugs, but I don't feel sorry for myself. I ask God for guidance
every day. I go to meetings three times a week. And I stay sober. I've come too
far to let myself down."
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on boston.com on June 5, 2005:
Former
Wisconsin DA identified as mastermind of 1979 murder
By Robert
Imrie
LADYSMITH,
Wis. -- Even when he was district attorney, Robert Rogers did not exactly act
like one of the white hats. It was no secret he smoked marijuana. He used to
swagger into court in jeans and a T-shirt, which was a big deal back in the
1970s. To some, he came across as arrogant and vain.
But it was
not until this spring -- more than 20 years after Rogers's death -- that it
became clear his outlaw image while district attorney was more than a pose.
Investigators
say the district attorney masterminded a 1979 murder that had mystified this
town for years, recruiting his three brothers as the hit men. Two of those
brothers have been jailed on murder charges.
According to
investigators, the victim, Roger Pfeil, a 27-year-old college student, was
angry at Rogers for having Pfeil's dogs shot for running loose. Rogers was
afraid Pfeil would come after him, so he struck first, investigators said.
Pfeil was killed in his driveway with a blast to the head from a sawed-off shotgun.
Rogers
remained as Rusk County's top law enforcement officer for several months
afterward before leaving town under a cloud of suspicion in Pfeil's slaying.
But the investigation went nowhere until a grand jury was convened and one of
Rogers's brothers came forward to say he watched as Pfeil was shot. That
brother will not face charges.
''I don't
think people are shocked that Bob Rogers was involved in it," current
District Attorney Kathleen Pakes said. ''What people can't believe is the two
people that did this are just right here in the community."
Rogers's own
life ended in violence in 1984 at age 38. He shot himself to death on his boat
in Marin County, Calif., after killing a man who was romantically involved with
his estranged wife.
Dan Gudis,
mayor of this city of about 4,000 people 125 miles east of Minneapolis, said
the arrests provide some answers people had sought for years. ''They are
surprised and excited to know they will finally know what really did
happen," he said.
Around
Ladysmith, Rogers was known as a renaissance man who loved to hunt, golf, ski,
and do carpentry and electrical work. He held a law degree from Stanford
University. During the 1970s, he worked for now-Governor Jim Doyle, then Dane
County's district attorney, as an assistant district attorney. Doyle fired
Rogers over an incident in which Rogers distracted a theater ticket-taker while
two of his brothers removed a custom-made
window from
a van nearby.
''I remember
a lot of people being fairly pleased that he was no longer working in the
office," Doyle said.
But he also
said of Rogers: ''I think most people who dealt with him would say he was
incredible, a very, very smart person, very high energy."
Rogers filed
in 1978 to run for district attorney but withdrew a month later, saying he did
not have time for the job. His name remained on the ballot as the only
candidate, and he got 2,805 votes.
In court, he
had an air of confidence, said Ladysmith Police Chief Dean Meyer. Some
considered Rogers arrogant. ''He was a guy who walked into the courtroom in
blue jeans, clogs, T-shirt, and sports coat," Meyer said.
''You would
rarely see him prepare for a case. He would walk in the door, boom, boom, boom.
He rarely missed a beat in court."
It was no
secret Rogers smoked marijuana, Meyer said, and he once testified at hearings
that he favored reducing the penalty for using pot.
In 1979,
soon after sheriff's deputies shot Pfeil's dogs, Pfeil stormed into the
sheriff's department and started punching officers, made threats, and spit on
Rogers. A day before Pfeil was killed, Rogers told one of the officers he had
received an anonymous phone call warning Pfeil was going to kill him.
Prosecutors
say Rogers persuaded his brothers to kill Pfeil first. According to
investigators and court records, John Rogers, 52, a one-time factory worker,
pulled the trigger. Mike Rogers, 50, who owns a painting business in
California, told authorities he and brother Dale, a 46-year-old carpenter, hid
nearby.
All three
have cooperated with investigators, revealing where the weapon was buried,
police said.
John
Rogers's attorney, Steven Gibbs, said both brothers confessed and hope to
resolve the case without a trial.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on washingtonpost.com on June 5, 2005:
Judges
Are Seeking Cover on The Bench
Safety Is
Top Concern After Recent Attacks
By David
Finkel
DANVILLE,
Ky. -- An unprotected head, an exposed neck and the top few inches of a
judicial robe: That's all that can be seen of Judge Bruce Petrie as he bunkered
down on his bullet-resistant judge's bench, panic button within reach, armed
bailiffs nearby, taking on the first case of the day.
Two sisters
had gotten in a fight, first with words, then with punches.
"Do you
believe this is a fair and accurate representation of the injuries you
sustained?" Petrie asked one of the sisters as he studied a photograph of
some bruises.
It was an
utterly routine question -- except this is the year that being a judge has been
anything but ordinary. The number of reported threats against judges has been
increasing. So have verbal and physical attacks against judges and other court
officials, in courthouses and elsewhere. A judge in Atlanta was gunned down in
his courtroom. In Florida, the state court judge in the Terri Schiavo
right-to-die case had to be put under protective guard. In Chicago, the husband
and mother of a federal judge were gunned down by a man who had broken into the
judge's home to kill her.
"The
madness in the shadows of modern life," is how that judge, Joan H. Lefkow,
described these times in a recent congressional hearing about judicial safety.
Six months
ago, Petrie's little courtroom in the center of this pretty town, on the top
floor of a courthouse with a gazebo in its lawn, was as it always had been.
"You would have walked in, taken the elevator to the third floor and
walked into the courtroom and not seen any law enforcement until the bailiff
came in and said, 'All rise,' " Petrie said.
Then came
the arrest of a man who is now charged with Petrie's attempted murder, the day
the shadows extended into Kentucky. According to authorities, the man was on
his way to a hearing in Petrie's courtroom with an accordion file stuffed with
papers, and that the papers had been hollowed out to conceal two clips of
ammunition and a gun.
"It was
just another case to me," Petrie said of the case he was to hear that day.
It was a case about a restraining order, just like the case this day involving
the two sisters, which is why, after asking a routine question of a woman who
has been glaring at her sister, Petrie is watching carefully as she swivels her
head toward him.
"Do
what ?" she said, seething.
Petrie, 39,
is a judge in Family Court, also known by those who work in it as Hate Court,
and Demonic Relations. The court for divorces and domestic violence cases, it
is a funneling point for such rawness and heartbreak that when Petrie became a
judge, he used part of his acceptance speech to acknowledge the tenderness of
those he would be judging, saying with sympathy, "There is a lot of
sadness that comes through our courts."
Now,
thousands of cases later, he would add anger, a litany of it as the morning
goes on:
"Nobody
makes me angry and gets away with it."
"He
does have a temper."
"I was
gonna fistfight him."
"I was
done dirty."
Case after
case -- 729 times last year alone -- Petrie is the one to make a decision that
inevitably leaves someone upset. And although that has always been part of being
a judge, the increase in hostile responses is changing the very nature of
American courtrooms. Once universally accessible, the modern courthouse now
features not just the Kevlar-reinforced benches and panic buttons, but camera
monitors, walk-through magnetometers, X-ray scanners and, just in case all of
those measures fail, "safe" rooms and detailed evacuation plans.
There are
guides to making courthouses safer ("Are spectator seats solidly built and
fastened to the floor?" asks one checklist. "Are public restrooms
routinely searched?"), and there are measures to make judges feel safer,
including a recent $12 million congressional appropriation for federal judges
to install alarm systems in their homes.
"Obviously,
had the Lefkow family had such a system at home, this horror could have been
avoided," Joan Lefkow told the Senate Judiciary Committee when she
testified in May. "We judges are grateful beyond words to this committee
and the Congress for authorizing this appropriation so quickly after this latest
tragedy."
In Danville,
though, and in versions of Danville in every state, many courtrooms remain as
open and accessible -- and unprotected -- as ever. Kentucky is not the richest
of states, and Boyle County, where Danville is located and where the
unemployment rate is 6.6 percent, is not the richest of counties.
It is
instead a place with a courthouse built in 1862 that has county offices as well
as court facilities inside, and multiple unguarded entrances. In that entrance?
That's the sheriff, LeeRoy Hardin, who said, "Well if they'd give me a
plate of money, we could solve the problem, but that ain't gonna happen."
In that
entrance? That's the county executive, Tony Wilder, who said that he's
reluctant to turn the courthouse into "a fortress" because the voters
of Boyle County prefer "that small-town atmosphere when they come to the
courthouse" -- even though one of those voters once mailed him his
picture, cut from the newspaper, with a bullet hole in his forehead.
Six months
after Petrie was targeted, there are still no magnetometers at the entrances,
no scanners, no security cameras and no equivalent of the U.S. Marshals, only a
sign inside the main entrance that says, "The possession of concealed
weapons, even with proper permit, prohibited on this property."
"Literally,
you could walk into this courthouse with a MAC-10 under your coat, and no one
would know it until you pulled it out," said Circuit Court Judge Darren
Peckler, whose courtroom and chambers are on the second floor.
Like Petrie,
Peckler has a panic button within reach. "But the sheriff's office is only
open till 4," he said, "so if you panic, panic before 4
o'clock."
"That's
exactly right," Sheriff Hardin said.
Peckler has
an application on his desk for a concealed weapons permit that would allow him
to bring a gun into the courthouse, which he is wondering whether to submit.
"I'm
not opposed to guns. I own guns. But there's something about carrying a gun
into churches and courtrooms," he said. "I don't want to give into that
mentality. But I guess I'd be a fool not to consider it."
Thirty-five
miles north of Danville, in the chambers of U.S. District Court Chief Judge
Joseph Hood in Lexington, there's no such hesitation.
"It's
with me whenever I move," Hood said after reaching into his briefcase and
pulling out a semiautomatic pistol that he is holding in the air. "There
are people out there wrapped not too tight. Their bubble is off-center, if you
know what I mean."
He added,
"These Glocks are good pieces of equipment."
Over in
Frankfort, in his office on the second floor of the state Capitol, Kentucky
Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Lambert said he also has considered getting
a gun. "Have I done it? No. But I have thought about it," he said.
"I can anticipate a situation in which I might be faced with a threat and
might need a weapon."
As chief
justice, Lambert is also chief executive of the Kentucky court system,
overseeing 267 judges, 3,400 employees and courthouses in 120 counties. He said
that most of those courthouses have "excellent" security, but he also
said, "We're seeing behavior today in court that absolutely would have
been unheard of a generation ago. People talk back. Yell back. There's a
greater degree of anger.
"I
think Family Court is probably the very worst," he added. "Because
people are crying to their core."
Back in
Danville, the crying core of a 57-year-old man named Ronnie Gay Cornett was
revealed in a note he wrote that authorities say was intended to be his eulogy,
to be read aloud after he killed himself, his ex-wife, her attorney and Petrie,
who had been the judge in his divorce. "Thank you all for coming," is
how the handwritten note began. "I would hope everyone would remember me
for any other reason than the actions that brought us here. The simple fact is
everyone regardless of how strong an individual they are has a breaking
point!!!"
The eulogy
was just one piece of paper that authorities say Cornett left with a friend.
There also were burial instructions, ("Pall bearers no suits"),
financial instructions ("I don't reckon I owe anyone else other than what
Petrie ordered but argue since we're both dead that goes away"), and an
admonition to "Read the 31st psalm" -- a psalm, Petrie said as he sat
in his office with a Bible one day recently, "about David being persecuted
and his enemies are all around him."
Petrie is an
elder in his Presbyterian church. He is also a husband, a father of two young
children and lead singer in a classic rock band that practices in the backroom
of a cellular phone store, which is where he was when he first heard of the
threat against his life.
"Where
are you?" he remembered a state police detective saying in a phone call.
It was late at night, the hours when Petrie is called several times a week for
an emergency protective order.
Petrie
explained he was practicing with his band.
"No, I
mean where are you? Right now?" the detective interrupted and told Petrie
about the eulogy, the instructions and the threat, and that the police didn't
know where Ronnie Cornett was.
Cornett, who
has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder, has yet to go on
trial. Because of that, Petrie doesn't want to talk specifically about the
case. Instead he defers to authorities, who say they learned about the threat
from a tip from a friend of Cornett's, and to a court file. In it is Petrie's
divorce ruling, in which Cornett's wife got the Cadillac, the boat, the
jewelry, the artwork and the house, and Cornett got the farm, the truck, the
knives, the gun safe and the guns.
It also
includes the results of a search warrant executed on a "gray hard
Samsonite briefcase with the initials R.C. with a combination lock with three
numbers to open (326)," inside of which police say they found $10,000 and
13 Imodium A-D caplets.
And the
results of another search warrant, this one on a 2003 Chevy Tahoe, in which
they found the accordion file, the hollowed-out packet of papers, a Colt .45,
two seven-round magazines filled with bullets, and a 15th bullet in the Colt
.45's chamber.
What's not
in the court file is any sense of the eight hours between the detective's phone
call and Cornett's arrest. "I remember feeling sick to my stomach, feeling
like I was going to throw up," said Petrie's wife, Lesli. Petrie said he
was up all night, in his den, lights down and drapes drawn, waiting for the
next call from police.
At 5:30 a.m.
it came: Stay away from work, they told him, and keep the children home from
school.
Then came
another call just before 7 a.m. saying that Cornett had been taken into
custody, and soon after that, after talking things over with his wife and
waking his children, Petrie decided to go to the courthouse. He walked in the
unguarded entrance. He made his way to the unguarded third floor. He went into
his unguarded courtroom, gaveled another session of Hate Court into order and
methodically began working his way through the day's docket -- just as he is
doing this day, six months later.
In the
intervening months, there have been some changes. One involves an alarm system
at Petrie's home; another involves an unmarked parking space at the courthouse;
another involves deputies with handheld metal detectors who now wand anyone
going into the courtroom. Petrie said he is also considering the answer he got
from the state police when he asked them what he could do for protection, and
they answered, "Buy a gun."
What hasn't
changed: the cases themselves, which remain as sad and angry as ever.
"I just
don't want me and her to get into it anymore," one of the sisters is now
saying quietly, head bowed, no longer glaring, and that's how that case ends,
not with a restraining order but with two sisters walking out into the hallway.
Onto the
next case: a woman who said her husband twisted her arm, threw her to the
ground and threw a remote control at her head.
Voices rise.
Bailiffs, tense, watch. Petrie puts his head in his hands, even more of him
disappearing from sight. Two days from now he will be taking a class to get his
concealed weapons permit, but for now he's a judge not with a gun, but a
question.
"And
then what happened?" he asked.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on latimes.com on June 5, 2005:
Halt
to Murder Case Probed
The LAPD's
watchdog is investigating whether an internal affairs sergeant was improperly
ordered to end examination of a questionable conviction.
By Scott
Glover and Matt Lait
The Los
Angeles Police Department's civilian watchdog has launched an investigation to
determine whether an internal affairs sergeant was improperly ordered last year
to shut down his probe of a questionable 1985 murder conviction.
The sergeant
uncovered new evidence that contradicted the prosecution's case against Bruce
Lisker, 39, now serving a life sentence for murdering his 66-year-old mother in
the foyer of the family's ranch-style Sherman Oaks home on March 10, 1983.
The
sergeant, Jim Gavin, also expressed concern that the LAPD detective who
investigated the murder may have prematurely dismissed a second suspect and
possibly lied to prevent Lisker's release on parole. But before Gavin could
complete his work, he said he was ordered by his superiors to stop
investigating.
Inspector
General Andre Birotte Jr., who reports to the Police Commission, confirmed last
week that LAPD officials had asked him to investigate the case because
allegations of wrongdoing involved officers from internal affairs and the
department wanted to avoid any perception of a "conflict of
interest."
Additionally,
Michael Cherkasky, appointed by a federal judge to monitor the LAPD, said in an
interview that he also was reviewing the department's handling of the case.
LAPD Chief
William J. Bratton, who has been briefed by senior police officials on the
Lisker matter, declined to comment.
The
high-level interest in Lisker's case comes after a Los Angeles Times
investigation last month detailed new evidence and findings that contradicted a
prosecutor's claim that a teenage Lisker beat and stabbed his mother, Dorka
Lisker, after she caught him rifling through her purse for drug money.
Based on the
new evidence and findings, uncovered separately by Lisker's defense team, Gavin
and Times reporters, the prosecutor, Phillip Rabichow, now retired, says he has
reasonable doubt about Lisker's guilt.
At least seven
of the 12 jurors who voted unanimously to convict Lisker also now say they
would have favored acquittal, had they known all of the evidence at the time.
Lisker,
imprisoned for the last 22 years, filed a complaint with internal affairs two
years ago against the detective, Andrew Monsue, who arrested him for his
mother's murder.
In the
complaint, Lisker alleged that Monsue had failed to investigate another
suspect, solicited perjured testimony from a jailhouse informant and lied about
finding $150 supposedly stolen from Dorka Lisker's purse. Monsue denies any
wrongdoing.
Assigned by
internal affairs to investigate the complaint, Gavin took previously unexamined
crime scene photographs to an LAPD analyst, who made a startling discovery: A
bloody footprint left in a bathroom that was attributed to Lisker at trial did
not match Lisker's shoes, suggesting that there was another person in the house
at the time of the killing.
During
Gavin's investigation, police also discovered an autopsy photograph of what
appeared to be a footprint on Dorka Lisker's shaved head. The mark was not
recognized as a shoe impression at the time of the trial.
At The
Times' request, the LAPD further analyzed the impression and determined that it
matched the bloody footprint in the bathroom.
Gavin also
expressed concern that Monsue, the detective, may have prematurely dismissed a
second suspect, a friend of Lisker's named John Michael Ryan, who lied about
his whereabouts at the time of the killing, had a history of violence and left
town the day after the murder.
A telephone
call from the Lisker home around the time of the murder was made to
a number
nearly identical to that of Ryan's mother — a call that Rabichow, the
prosecutor, now acknowledges could be used to link Ryan to the crime. Ryan
killed himself in 1996.
In his
complaint to internal affairs, Lisker also questioned Monsue's claim that a
couple who purchased the Lisker home after the murder had informed him that
they had found $150 in the attic above Bruce Lisker's old bedroom. Monsue made
the claim in a letter he wrote to the parole board in which he said that the
discovery of the money "confirmed our initial theory" that Bruce
Lisker had robbed his mother before killing her.
But Gavin
could find no evidence that Monsue had ever documented the development
in writing.
Gavin then contacted the man who Monsue said had reported finding the money.
The homeowner later signed a sworn declaration that he could not remember
finding money in the attic or ever contacting Monsue.
Gavin had
more leads to pursue. But his supervisors had grown impatient and told him that
internal affairs was not in the business of investigating homicides, he said.
"I was
told to shut it down," Gavin said in an interview with The Times. "I
was told I was done."
A short time
later, Lisker was notified in prison by Monsue's immediate supervisor that
there was no merit to his allegation that Monsue lied to the parole board. No
further investigation was warranted, the supervisor said.
When
Lisker's private investigator was told by Gavin that he had been ordered to
conclude his investigation, the investigator sent a letter to Chief Bratton
alleging that Gavin's bosses were engaging in a cover-up. Without telling his
superiors, Gavin also gave the private investigator a copy of the LAPD analysis
of the bloody footprint found in the bathroom.
As a result
of the investigator's letter to Bratton, another internal affairs investigation
was initiated into whether Gavin's supervisors had prematurely shut down his
investigation, and whether Monsue's supervisor had acted properly in dismissing
Lisker's complaint.
Internal
affairs also is investigating Gavin to see whether he violated department
policy by sharing confidential information with Lisker's defense team. Gavin
was transferred out of internal affairs to a training position in Sylmar in
February, pending the outcome of the complaint against him. The LAPD has
declined to comment on the status of that probe.
Birotte, the
LAPD inspector general, declined to say whether his investigation would delve
into Gavin's conduct.
The slaying
of Dorka Lisker was particularly gruesome. She was beaten with a trophy and an
exercise bar and stabbed in the back with two steak knives.
Lisker said
that when he went to his parents' home to borrow a jack so he could fix his
car, he looked through windows at the back of the house and saw his mother
lying on the floor. He said he broke in through a kitchen window to tend to his
mother, then called paramedics.
Monsue
didn't believe Lisker's story and arrested him for the crime that afternoon.
Lisker was
convicted in 1985 and sentenced to 16 years to life. The judge barred Lisker's
lawyer from mentioning Ryan as a possible suspect at trial, ruling that
Lisker's lawyer lacked adequate evidence for presenting such a defense. The
prosecution's case was based in part on the testimony of a jailhouse informant,
who claimed that Lisker confessed to him as the two spoke through a hole in the
wall between their cells in the Los Angeles County jail.
Lisker has
twice confessed to killing his mother over the years — once in an effort to get
a more lenient sentence and later when he first became eligible for parole. He
now says the confessions were desperate attempts to minimize his time behind
bars for a crime he didn't commit. He has maintained his innocence for more
than a decade and says he will never again admit to the killing, even if that
means staying in prison for the rest of his life.
Lisker has a
habeas corpus petition pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The Times,
as part of its seven-month investigation, found a police document that may have
solved one of the enduring mysteries of People vs. Lisker: What happened to the
money Lisker supposedly stole?
Although
Monsue claimed that it ultimately was found stashed above Lisker's old bedroom,
an evidence inventory filed shortly after Lisker's 1985 conviction showed that
the money may have been in Dorka Lisker's purse all along. On the inventory, an
evidence technician dutifully noted cash as among the contents of the
patent-leather bag: "5 $20.00 bills — 1 ten-dollar bill, 1 five-dollar
bill & 5 one-dollar bills. Total $120.00."
* * * * *
The following
article appeared on nytimes.com on June 7, 2005:
Desert
Graves in Northern Iraq Yield Evidence to Try Hussein
By
CHRISTOPHER DREW and TRESHA MABILE
A chain of
evidence that investigators believe will help convict Saddam Hussein begins at
a windswept grave in the desert near Hatra, in northern Iraq.
The burial
site - a series of deep trenches that held about 2,500 bodies, many of them
women and children - is one of many mass graves that dot the country. But it
was the first excavated by an American investigative team working with a special
Iraqi tribunal to build cases against Mr. Hussein and others in his government.
A senior
Iraqi court official has said the tribunal is planning to start the first trial
of Mr. Hussein by late summer or early fall in a case that focuses on the
killings of nearly 160 men from Dujail, a Shiite village north of Baghdad,
after the former dictator survived an assassination attempt there.
But American
legal advisers say the Hatra grave holds a key to what is likely to
be one of
the broadest charges against Mr. Hussein - that he is responsible for the
killing of as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980's, some in chemical-weapons
attacks. They say those charges could be filed later this year, and Iraqi
officials said last weekend that there could be up to 12 separate cases against
Mr. Hussein and others. Each would require a separate trial, and multiple
convictions could mean multiple death sentences for any defendant.
According to
Gregory W. Kehoe, the American who set up the investigative team, what was
found at Hatra shows how the Hussein leadership made a "business of killing
people" - the scrape marks from the blade of the bulldozer that shoved victims
into the trench, the point-blank shots to the backs of even the babies' heads,
the withered body of a 3- or 4-year-old boy, still clutching a red and white
ball.
Much rests
on the prosecutions of Mr. Hussein and his lieutenants - for Iraqis seeking a
reckoning and for the Bush administration, which hopes the trials and the
Iraqi-American partnership will help vindicate its involvement in Iraq and serve
as a model of justice and democracy in the Arab world.
Yet in the 18
months since Mr. Hussein's capture, questions have been raised from several
quarters about whether the process can produce a fair trial. Not only has Mr.
Hussein challenged the tribunal's legitimacy, mocking an Iraqi judge for
"applying the invaders' laws to try me," but the United Nations and most
European countries have refused to help, partly out of opposition to the death
penalty. Human-rights advocates have questioned whether the tribunal's standards
for finding guilt will be high enough to justly link Mr. Hussein to the
killings.
In their
first extensive interviews, with The New York Times and the Discovery Times
Channel, Mr. Kehoe, the top American adviser to the tribunal from March 2004
until this spring, and several other investigators provided a detailed look at
how the cases are being built.
More than 50
American advisers have been training several hundred Iraqi investigators and
judges, none of whom had experience with human-rights laws or handling such
complex cases. The Americans have provided forensics expertise, while the
Iraqis have fanned out to find witnesses. With American advice, the Iraqis will
decide what charges to bring and will run the trials.
What the
investigators are ultimately trying to do, Mr. Kehoe said, is "connect the
circle" to prove "command responsibility" - that Mr. Hussein
violated human rights by knowing about indiscriminate killings, before or
afterward, and doing nothing to stop or punish those who carried them out.
The way to do
that, said Mr. Kehoe, a former federal prosecutor in Florida who spent five
years investigating Bosnia war crimes, is through basic detective work,
starting with bodies in the ground and tracing the orders up the chain of command.
The tribunal
initially planned to leave Mr. Hussein out of the Dujail case and charge only
five associates, partly to test the new court system. But Gregg Nivala, now the
top American adviser, said yesterday that new evidence found last month had
strengthened the case against him.
Mr. Kehoe
and Mr. Nivala said there was enough evidence - including the testimony of new
witnesses and newly found documents - to charge Mr. Hussein and other top
officials with crimes against humanity for the Kurdish campaign.
Investigators
have also authenticated Iraqi government documents and audiotapes seized by
Kurdish militias in the early 1990's. In a June 1987 document, Ali Hassan
al-Majid, one of Mr. Hussein's cousins and top deputies, commanded Iraqi troops
"to carry out random bombardments using artillery, helicopters, and aircraft
at all times of the day and night in order to kill the largest number of
persons present" in areas linked to Kurdish fighters. On an audiotape, Mr.
Majid, who became known as "Chemical Ali," can be heard shouting, at
a Baath Party meeting about Kurdish villagers: "I will kill them all with
chemical weapons."
Gregory Paw,
who was one of Mr. Kehoe's deputies, said that in a hearing in December, Mr.
Majid, now in American custody, "was gradually acknowledging more and more
of what took place" in Kurdistan. Mr. Paw said Mr. Majid was "looking
for others to cast blame upon."
Mr.
Hussein's lawyers say that he and his former top associates are not guilty, and
that they will counter any charges by attacking the tribunal as a
"kangaroo court." Still, one of the lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said,
"We know his chances are grim and very slim."
Bodies in
the Sand
The trenches lie hidden in a dip in the sand that for centuries had been an oasis during spring rains. The ground was hard, and Mr. Kehoe's forensics team, sweltering in the 110-degree heat, had to dig eig