Issue 349
October 14, 2005
v Lawyers Go Behind Bars As Guardians of Prisoner Rights by Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times
v Los Angels Files Recount Decades of Priests’ Abuse by John M. Broder, The New York Times
v Man Beaten in New Orleans Pleads Not Guilty by Christine Hauser and Natalie Layzell, The New York Times
v The Rumor Mill by Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post
Lawyers
Go Behind Bars as Guardians of Prisoner Rights
By Maura
Dolan
Times Staff
Writer
SAN
FRANCISCO — They exposed the state's locking up of juvenile offenders for 23
hours at a stretch in cells smeared with blood and feces.
They helped
spark an unprecedented federal court takeover of California's prison healthcare
system after revealing that prisoners were dying because of medical neglect.
They ended
the practice of placing mentally ill prisoners in extreme isolation.
The Prison
Law Office, a nonprofit group of lawyers who labor in the shadow of San Quentin
Prison, has in recent years scored a string of court victories felt in nearly
every corner of California's teeming prisons.
"There
is almost no aspect of California corrections, adult or juvenile, that is not
subject to a court order, and almost all of those are the result of suits
brought by the Prison Law Office," said Barry Krisberg, president of the
National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Although its
lawyers are underpaid by law firm standards and represent wildly unpopular
clients, the group has become a litigation powerhouse so successful that the state
in recent years has chosen to fold rather than fight it.
Why, then,
do the lawyers seem more frustrated than triumphant?
They
complain that the pace of change in California's prisons and youth correctional
facilities is achingly slow, that court orders and negotiated settlements take
years to achieve and mark only the start of reform.
As they
trudge from prison to prison to make sure that promised improvements are in
place, they say they must continually remind themselves of what they have accomplished
during the group's 30 years of legal advocacy.
"People
aren't shot dead anymore; let's start with that one," said Steve Fama, 49,
who has worked at the Prison Law Office for 20 years. "During the late
'80s to mid-'90s, the number of prisoners shot dead in California was
staggeringly disproportionate to the number shot dead in all the other state
prisons combined."
The 10
lawyers, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, work in a cluster of modest offices on
San Francisco Bay. They receive as many as 100 letters a day from inmates
asking for help.
"The
kind of cases the Prison Law Office has litigated involve a guy sticking his
arm through the food slot and a guard breaking his arm, people crawling up the
stairs to parole hearings because there were no provisions for people with
disabilities and inmates on psychotropic drugs dying because their cells
overheated," said Sue Burrell, an attorney for the Youth Law Center, a
public interest law firm.
In a lawsuit
against the California Youth Authority, the Prison Law Office complained:
"Rehabilitation
cannot succeed when the classroom is a cage and wards live in constant fear of
physical and sexual violence from CYA staff and other wards."
In a report
stemming from a lawsuit the office helped bring, a court-appointed monitor
found that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was refusing to
discipline guards for serious misconduct at Pelican Bay, a super-maximum
security prison.
"Some
correctional officers end up acquiring a prisoner's mentality: They form gangs,
align with gangs and spread the code of silence," the monitor, John Hagar,
wrote.
Earlier this
year, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson reported that at least 34 inmates
had died recently because of neglect, incompetence and "even cruelty"
by medical staff. Henderson's action followed a lawsuit by the Prison Law
Office.
On a tour of
medical facilities at San Quentin, the judge observed a dentist who neither
washed his hands nor changed his gloves after placing his hands in patients'
mouths.
"On
average, an inmate in one of California's prisons needlessly dies every six to
seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the … medical delivery
system," Henderson said.
The Prison
Law Office was established when memories of the siege at Attica Correctional
Facility in New York were still fresh. The 1971 uprising, in which 43 were
killed, raised public awareness of brutality and racism in American prisons and
spurred widespread calls for reform.
But the
passage of years diminished the power of Attica, and the impulse for reform
gave way to laws instituting harsher and harsher prison sentences. The inmate
population exploded.
From 1983 to
1995, the number of California inmates rose from 30,000 to 160,000. Despite an unprecedented
prison construction boom, the prisons are at roughly 193% of their design
capacity, frustrating efforts to improve conditions.
Don Specter,
53, director of the Prison Law Office, said sentencing laws need to be revised
to reduce the numbers behind bars. As long as the prisons are overcrowded,
conditions that violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment
will persist, he said.
During the
lawyers' visits to the prisons, the inmates tend to be appreciative.
"A lot
of them realize you're their only hope, the only thing that stands between them
and the guard," Specter said.
The lawyers
have complained that prison rules sometimes make meetings with their clients
difficult.
Sara Norman,
37, another lawyer in the office, recalled her irritation when guards at a
youth correctional center in Stockton forced her to wear a bulky green
stab-proof vest during a tour.
Talking to
wards through their food slots, Norman said, she apologized for the vest.
"That is not the way I want to be interacting with them," she said.
Alison
Hardy, 44, also an office lawyer, said she vigorously objected when guards at
the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo insisted that she could meet
with prisoners only if they were shackled. The guards prevailed.
Yet a prison
guard once locked Norman into a plexiglass cell with an unshackled convicted
murderer on death row.
After the
interview concluded, Norman called out to the guards to let her out. No one
heard her. Eventually, she resorted to "banging and banging and banging on
the door."
The inmate
was "perfectly nice," and they laughed about the incident, she said.
Her point was that prison rules are "utterly arbitrary."
The lawyers
said they generally have good relations with prison staff, although their
litigation record has caused some resentment.
When the
state loses a case, it must pay the Prison Law Office reasonable attorney fees,
which is how the office pays for itself.
Lance
Corcoran, executive vice president of the prison guards' union, complained that
taxpayers are bearing the expense.
He said the
Prison Law Office has "incredible power" and faulted the Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation for doing "a very poor job of
defending" itself.
Jerold A.
Prod, an administrative law judge and former chief counsel for the state
corrections department, described the Prison Law Office as "probably a cut
above the average public interest legal organization." He also observed
that the lawyers could be "blinded by their cause."
He recalled
a time when the group wanted work opportunities to be equal for male and female
inmates, even though the men vastly outnumbered the women behind bars and the
female inmates, he said, mostly wanted to go to beauty school.
"The fastest
way to start a riot at the California Institution for Women at that time was to
shut down the cosmetology clinic," Prod said.
The Prison
Law Office has benefited from significant free help from some of the state's
top private law firms.
"They pick
their shots," said Richard B. Ulmer Jr., a partner at Latham & Watkins
who has worked with the office.
The group
knows its way around Sacramento. Specter, often described as unassuming, is
reputed to be a fierce negotiator.
"He
comes across as a very gentle, quiet person, but man, get out of the way,"
said Burrell, of the Youth Law Center.
Bruce
Slavin, general counsel for the corrections department who has dealt with the
Prison Law Office for 20 years, said relations with their lawyers have become
"less confrontational" and "less adversarial" over the
years.
"If the
Prison Law Office brings a complaint to me, they are usually going to be
accurate in identifying the problem," Slavin said. "Their solution
may not be the same as our solution."
Specter said
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "has a commitment to prison reform that no
other governor has had" but still has failed to make any significant
reforms.
"The
governor gets creamed by the victims' rights activists and the prison guards
and starts to sound more and more like [former Gov.] Pete Wilson," Specter
said.
Even when
the governor has signed onto a reform, months may pass before the prisons adopt
it, the lawyers said.
Fama, the
group's 20-year veteran, recalled his frustration during a recent visit to
monitor implementation of reforms at a Southern California prison. He
discovered that a logbook intended to ensure that emergency medical supplies
were in place had been provided only the day before his visit. The prison was
supposed to have had the book months earlier.
Fama said
his aggravation eventually gave way to hope. Although progress was slow, his
visit had made a difference.
* * * * *
Los
Angeles Files Recount Decades of Priests' Abuse
By JOHN M.
BRODER
LOS ANGELES,
Oct. 11 - The confidential personnel files of 126 clergymen in the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct with children
provide a numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church's shame, revealing case
after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its
parishioners.
In some
cases, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and his predecessors quietly shuffled the
priests off to counseling and then to new assignments. In others, parents were
offered counseling for their children and were urged to remain silent.
Throughout
the files, cases of child molesting or rape are dealt with by indirection or
euphemism, with references to questions of "moral fitness" or
accusations of "boundary violations." For years, anonymous complaints
of abuse were ignored and priests were given the benefit of every doubt.
The
personnel files - some of which date from the 1930's - were produced as part of
settlement talks with lawyers for 560 accusers in a civil suit here. The church
provided them to The New York Times in advance of their public release in the
next few days. The archdiocese is releasing them in part to make good on a
promise to parishioners to come clean about the church's actions in the
scandal, church officials said. It also hopes that the release will spur
settlement talks, which appear to have stalled in recent months.
Raymond P.
Boucher, the lead lawyer for those suing the church, said the versions of the
files released by the church were cleansed of much of the damaging details of
the accusations and the church's response. Their release was chiefly a public
relations move by the church as both sides prepared for the first cases to go
to trial, Mr. Boucher said.
"Unfortunately,
these files do not contain the full story of the participation by the church in
the manipulation and movement of these priests," he said. "The full
files would show how deep and pervasive this problem was and how much the
church put its own interests ahead of those of the children and others who were
molested by the priests. That is a broader and deeper story."
The files
reveal that only recently did the church come to grips with the abusive and
criminal behavior in its ranks and act aggressively to contain it.
The Los
Angeles cases are in many ways typical of the sexual abuse claims that have
stained the church around the country in recent years. The behavior of priests
in Southern California was no worse than that seen elsewhere, and the response
of senior church officials was generally no better. But the sheer scope of the
claims and the potential for a huge payout to victims sets Los Angeles apart
from archdioceses in other major American cities.
Perhaps the
most egregious case here concerns the Rev. Michael Baker, who voluntarily
revealed in 1986 to then-Archbishop Mahony a sexual relationship with two young
boys from 1978 to 1985. Archbishop Mahony did not report the abuse to the
police, but rather sent Father Baker for counseling and prohibited him from
having any close contact with minors, the documents show. But he was soon
assigned to parishes where he found it easy to prey on young boys again.
After
several more unsuccessful efforts at therapy, Father Baker was finally removed
from the priesthood in 2000, but only after it was learned that he had molested
as many as 10 victims over the previous 20 years.
There are
many cases in which the accusations were not made until years after the alleged
incidents and some in which early complaints were not deemed credible. But in
all, the files paint a portrait of an institution in denial about what now
looks like widespread sexual misconduct.
The
Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the nation's largest Roman Catholic diocese,
covering 8,700 square miles and serving nearly five million Catholics. The size
of the priestly abuse problem here rivals that in Boston, where more than 500
members of the clergy were accused of abusing children over the past 60 years
and where the church paid $85 million in 2003 to settle civil claims against
it.
Since then,
the stakes have risen. Late last year, the Diocese of Orange County in
California paid $100 million to settle 85 cases.
Lawyers
involved in negotiations in Los Angeles said that if an overall settlement was
reached between the 560 plaintiffs and the church, the payout would be
significantly higher than in Boston or Orange County, perhaps exceeding $500
million. The cost of litigating each case individually could rise far beyond
that.
Since 1985,
the archdiocese has settled a handful of child molesting cases, paying a total
of $10 million.
The
archdiocese received relatively few complaints of sexual abuse by priests, no
more than a couple dozen a year, until 2002, when the church scandal exploded
with news reports from Boston. Since then, the Los Angeles Archdiocese has
received hundreds of complaints against more than 250 priests and other church
workers, of whom roughly half are now included in settlement talks.
The
documents will be posted within a day or two on the archdiocese Web site (www.la-archdiocese.org)
or on a site kept by the church's lawyers (www.la-clergycases.com), said J.
Michael Hennigan, lead lawyer for the archdiocese. [The documents are currently
posted here.]
Mr. Hennigan
said the priest files, even though they do not contain a lot of detail about
the alleged offenses, would provide the public with a better sense of how the
church's response to such charges has evolved.
"We
wanted to show what happened, when it happened, what we knew and how we dealt
with it," Mr. Hennigan said.
In the case
of the Rev. Kevin Barmasse, parents of a young boy wrote to top officials of
the archdiocese in 1983 to complain that the priest had abused their son at St.
Pancratius Church in Lakewood, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles.
Two weeks
later, the archdiocese sent Father Barmasse to serve as associate pastor at a
parish in the Diocese of Tucson, on the condition that he receive therapy.
Within three
years, according to later reports, he made sexual advances toward several male
high school students. In 1992, he was stripped of his priestly duties.
Mr. Hennigan
said Father Barmasse was one of very few priests that the Los Angeles
Archdiocese allowed to move to another parish and continue ministering to
children after a credible complaint had been received. He said Cardinal
Mahony's inclination to trust in therapy was typical of the church response at
the time.
For years,
the church treated sexual abuse by members of the clergy as a moral failing and
a sin that could be confessed and forgiven. It is only within the last 15 years
or so that church officials recognized that pedophiles are by nature repeat
offenders and cannot be permitted unsupervised contact with children, Mr.
Hennigan said.
He
contrasted the behavior of church officials here to that of officials in
Boston, who repeatedly shuffled sexual predators from parish to parish with no
warning to the public. Such incidents, including the notorious cases of the
former priests John J. Geoghan and Paul R. Shanley, led to the reassignment of
Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston and forced the closings of dozens of parishes
and Catholic schools to pay damage awards.
Despite a
number of well-publicized abuse cases here, Cardinal Mahony has remained the
leader of the archdiocese and the Los Angeles church appears to be on fairly
sound financial footing. Mr. Hennigan said he believed the archdiocese has
sufficient resources and insurance to handle settlements without closing
schools or selling church property.
Lawyers for
the accused priests tried to keep the personnel files secret, saying that their
release violates employee record confidentiality laws and that the information
in them will prejudice the courts and the public against their clients.
The church,
while arguing that some material from the files is protected by priest-penitent
or psychotherapist-patient privilege, said it wanted to release the majority of
the contents as part of a process of expiation. The material has been in the
hands of plaintiffs' lawyers for nearly three years, but courts have ordered it
sealed. The church interprets a court ruling last month as allowing it to
release edited versions of the personnel files. The files do not include
accusers' names.
"What
the church is trying to do is repair the damage that was done and make sure, as
much as is humanly possible, that it doesn't happen again," said Tod
Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese. "This whole sad chapter in the
church's life is an opportunity for purification."
* * * * *
Man
Beaten in New Orleans Pleads Not Guilty
By CHRISTINE
HAUSER and NATALIE LAYZELL
NEW ORLEANS,
Oct. 12 - A man who was videotaped being beaten by two police officers as they
tried to arrest him pleaded not guilty in court here today to charges of being
drunk and resisting arrest.
But a lawyer
for the police officers contended today that the man, Robert Davis, had
stumbled down the street and "fell into a police horse," and he
asserted that the officers did not use excessive force.
Mr. Davis
appeared in Municipal Court this morning to make his plea of not guilty, and he
stood with his hands behind his back as Judge John Shea read out four charges,
of public intoxication, battery, resisting arrest and public intimidation. Mr.
Davis was released on his own recognizance and must appear in court on Jan. 18.
Mr. Davis
was beaten and forced to the ground when the police officers tried to arrest
him on Saturday night in the French Quarter. The beating was videotaped by an
Associated Press Television News crew.
Two officers,
Lance Schilling and Robert Evangelist, have pleaded not guilty to charges of
battery in the beating of Mr. Davis, while a third, Stewart Smith, pleaded not
guilty to a battery charge for roughing up an A.P. producer, Rich Matthews.
Mr. Davis's
lawyer, Joseph M. Bruno, aid his client suffered fractures to his cheek and eye
socket, and scrapes and bruises.
The accused
officers were suspended without pay.
But Frank
DeSalvo, the lawyer for the police officers, said today that the officers had
"acted reasonably" because Mr. Davis pushed and "cursed at
officers" and resisted arrest. Mr. De Salvo, appearing at a news
conference here surrounded by three officers charged in the incident, said,
"we don't concede excessive force."
Referring to
Mr. Davis, Mr. DeSalvo argued, "he brought it on by his actions."
The lawyer
also said that Mr. Davis "clearly was not hit in the face."
All three
officers appeared at the news conference with Mr. De Salvo, but made no
statements.
Strongly
defending the officers' actions, Mr. DeSalvo said "they didn't do anything
wrong."
He asserted
that Mr. Davis "fell into a police horse" after stumbling down the
street. When the officers intervened, he said, the officers, hearing his
"slurred speech," initially "acted for his safety." Mr.
DeSalvo went on to describe what followed as based on Mr. Davis's refusal to
cooperate.
"Clearly
he was not hit in the face," Mr. De Salvo said, telling reporters
"you need to look at that video, look at it slowly."
The lawyer
said Mr. Davis was struck around the neck and shoulders in his continuing
struggle with the officers trying to handcuff him. He still refused to comply
despite being pepper sprayed.
Two F.B.I.
agents who were passing by, Mr. DeSalvo said, saw the commotion and stopped to
assist. One of the F.B.I. agents "took him down" and the injury to
his face happened when he hit the ground, the lawyer added.
Mr. DeSalvo
said that "proper police procedures" were followed and blamed
"politics" for being behind the allegations of brutality.
The lawyer
also said Mr. Smith, was not involved in the arrest incident and described how
the officer bumped into the A.P. producer, who grabbed him and "spun him
around."
Mr. Davis's
hearing this morning was held in the Union Passenger Terminal, a bus and
station converted into a court because of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina.
On Tuesday,
Mr. Bruno, the lawyer for Mr. Davis, had expressed the hope that the city would
drop the charges against his client. He said his client would seek
compensation. Mr. Davis had said in one earlier interview that sometimes he
staggered.
Mr. Bruno
and Mr. Davis, trailed by television cameras on Tuesday, revisited the scene of
the beating near the corner of Bourbon and Conti Streets. Mr. Davis has said he
quit drinking years ago.
Mr. Davis,
who is black, has said that he does not think the beating and arrest by the
officers, who are white, was motivated by race. Mr. Davis was in New Orleans to
inspect his property in the Upper Ninth Ward.
On Saturday
night, Mr. Davis went to the Bourbon Street area to buy cigarettes. He was
concerned about the curfew, which at the time was 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., and asked a
police officer on horseback about it, Mr. Bruno said. It was just before 8 p.m.
"He
walked down the street, saw a police officer on horseback. He asked him a question
about the curfew," Mr. Bruno said. "Then a second officer approached and,
what Robert described, 'interfered' with his conversation with the officer on
horseback." Mr. Bruno said that Mr. Davis told the second officer he was
being unprofessional. "He walked away, and he was then struck from
behind," Mr. Bruno said.
* * * * *
The
Rumor Mill
By Anne
Applebaum
Did you know
that a monster crocodile was fished out of the New Orleans floodwaters? Had you
realized that sharks were swimming through the submerged streets of the Lower
Ninth Ward? Did you see the photographs of Katrina, the ones showing the
hurricane menacing New Orleans like a Wizard of Oz cartoon twister? In the
weeks after Hurricane Katrina, all of those rumors were present on the Internet
in one form or another. I personally received the crocodile photograph -- an
authentic picture, apparently, taken in Congo some years ago.
Yet although
all of these rumors were in the air -- or in the cyber-air, to be more precise
-- none of them took hold. Few people were worried about monster crocodiles or
sharks. The fake photographs of Katrina looking like the thing that blew
Dorothy out of Kansas somehow never made it onto the evening news. Nevertheless,
many did believe the other rumors: the babies being raped, the rat-gnawed
corpses floating in the streets, the police officers being shot point-blank in
the head, or the snipers firing at helicopters. These reports surfaced not only
in mass e-mails but also on talk shows and in the press around
the world.
And now it seems that they were no more real than the man-eating sharks.
Although investigations by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the New Orleans
police and the National Guard have turned up a few bad incidents, none of the
more grotesque stories of the horrors at the convention center or the Superdome
can be substantiated.
Where did
they come from? For once, it's really not possible to blame "the media,"
although naturally many have. For once, the sociologists -- and there's a whole
flock of them who study rumors -- have something interesting to add. They point
out that the main influence on whether people believe rumors is the reliability
of the sources -- in this case, senior New Orleans officials. Some of the
stories of infant rape came from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. The tales of
armed gangs of thugs outgunning the police in the convention center came from the
New Orleans police chief, Edwin Compass. More important, both told these stories
on television, to Oprah Winfrey -- possibly the most trusted woman in the
nation.
But there
was more. In fact, New Orleans post-Katrina was a textbook example -- or
perhaps I should say the perfect storm -- of the conditions that rumors require
to flourish. A lack of good communications is always a precondition for phony
stories, and the telephones in New Orleans were down. A few true examples of
bad behavior, inevitably embellished in the retelling, always help too -- and according
to the Times Picayune, one of the four bodies (not 200, as rumored) recovered
from the convention center might really have had stab wounds. Gunshots really
were heard. As National Guard soldiers have confirmed, conditions in the convention
center really were crowded and primitive, infants and old people really were
starving and dehydrating in the heat, and help really was shockingly slow.
But in the
end, the fact that so many people believed, as Nagin put it, that the crowds
had degenerated into an "almost animalistic state" must have had
deeper roots. For the rumor sociologists also tell us that the most deeply
believed rumors are always the ones that express some profound public anxiety.
Some think that anxiety had to do with race: As I am not the first to note, few
would have believed that 25,000 white, middle-class suburbanites had reverted
to an "almost animalistic state" within a few days. But then, I'm not
sure that 25,000 black middle-class suburbanites would have inspired such
stories either, and certainly black officials such as Nagin and Compass
wouldn't have repeated them.
What I'm
guessing the Katrina rumors revealed was not precisely racism but a much deeper
fear of the poor, even of poverty itself. What I'm guessing they revealed is
our imaginary picture of what life would be like without the civilizing
elements and the social markings to which we're accustomed: our houses, our
cars, our clothes, our possessions, our reputations, our authority. If all that
was gone, who knows how our next-door neighbors would behave, how we would
behave. Maybe the people across the street would turn out to be thieves. Maybe the people who live across the city, in
the neighborhood we never visit, would turn out to be murderers.
Or maybe not
-- but we don't know, which is why we imagine murder and rape. Perhaps it's not
so odd that the mayor and the police chief immediately assumed the worst about
their own city. Monster crocodiles, in the end, are a lot less threatening than
life without possessions, without status, without law.
* * * * *