There will always be people who are attracted to law enforcement because they like having power over helpless people.  Scott Nugent of Winnfield, La. appears to have been that kind of person.

I first learned about this story from Alexandria, La. radio personality Tony Brown, the first person to give serious attention to the noose incident in Jena, Louisiana.  I told Brown to contact Howard Witt, the Chicago Tribune reporter who understands the complicated racial dynamics in small southern towns.  Baron “Scooter” Pikes, the victim of an unauthorized taser attack, is related to Mychal Bell of Jena 6 fame.

As Witt notes, there is a strong suggestion that local officials initially attempted to cover-up the true facts of the case.  If there is any indication that justice isn’t being served, there needs to be an organized response.  Thanks to Howard Witt for bringing outside scrutiny to a tragic story.

chicagotribune.com
TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT
Taser death ignites racial tensions
Not far from Jena, La., suspicions rise of a cover-up mount
By Howard Witt

Tribune correspondent

7:52 PM CDT, July 19, 2008

WINNFIELD, La. – At 1:28 p.m. last Jan. 17, Baron “Scooter” Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old man. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.

What happened in the 39 minutes in between – during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser, while reportedly pleading for mercy -is now spawning fears of a political coverup in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.

Even more ominously, because Pikes was black and the officer who repeatedly Tasered him is white, racial tensions over the case are mounting in a place that’s just 40 miles from Jena, La.—site of the racially explosive prosecution of six black teenagers charged with beating a white youth that last year triggered one of the largest American civil rights demonstrations in decades. And in a bizarre coincidence, Pikes turns out to have been a first cousin of Mychal Bell, the lead defendant in the Jena 6 case.
No novelist could have invented Winnfield, a place so steeped in corruption that they built a local museum to try to sanitize it all.

Here in the birthplace of two of Louisiana’s most colorful and notorious governors – Huey and Earl Long-the police chief committed suicide three years ago after losing a close election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-buying.

Four months later, the district attorney killed himself after allegedly skimming $200,000 from his office budget and extorting payments from criminal defendants to make their cases go away.

The current police chief is a convicted drug offender who got a pardon from Edwin Edwards, the former Louisiana governor who is serving time in federal prison for corruption convictions.

All of that tangled history is now wrapped up in the Pikes case, because Scott Nugent, the officer who Tasered him, is the well-connected son of the former police chief who killed himself-and the protege of the current chief, who hired him onto the force.

“A lot happens in this town, and it just gets swept under the rug,” said Kayshon Collins, Pikes’ stepmother, who has participated in several local protests over the case. “What the police did to Scooter just isn’t right. They would never have Tasered a white kid like that.”

The official police version of what happened to Pikes on that brisk January afternoon reads like a sad but familiar story in Winnfield’s local newspaper.

Nugent spotted Pikes walking along the street and attempted to arrest him on an outstanding warrant for drug possession, according to Police Chief Johnny Ray Carpenter. Pikes took off running, but another officer cornered him outside a nearby grocery store. Pikes resisted arrest and Nugent subdued him with a shock from a Taser.

Then on the way to the police station, Carpenter told the newspaper, Pikes fell ill and told the officers he suffered from asthma and was high on crack cocaine and PCP. The officers called for an ambulance, but Pikes later died at the hospital.

Six months later, the Winnfield police are standing by that story. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State Police are investigating the case, and no charges have been filed against Nugent or two other Winnfield police officers who assisted him in arresting Pikes, although the City Council did decide to fire Nugent from the force in May.

Winn Parish District Atty. Chris Nevils says he expects to present the case to a grand jury after he receives the results of the state police investigation.

Evidence contradicts report
But there is already abundant evidence contradicting the official police version of the incident.

An autopsy determined there were no drugs in Pikes’ system and that he did not have asthma, according to Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner.

Moreover, Pikes did not resist arrest, and he was handcuffed while lying on the ground, according to Nugent’s police report of the incident. It was only after Pikes refused Nugent’s command to stand up that the officer applied the first Taser shock in the middle of his back, Nugent wrote.

Several more Taser shocks followed quickly, Nugent stated, because Pikes kept falling down and refusing to get back up. Grocery shoppers who witnessed the incident later told Pikes’ family that he had pleaded with Nugent: “Please, you all got me. Please don’t Tase me again.”

Williams said police records showed Nugent administered nine Taser shocks to Pikes over a 14-minute period. The last two jolts, delivered as police pulled Pikes from a patrol car at the police station, elicited no reaction because the suspect was unconscious, Williams said.

After consulting about the case with Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist, Williams ruled last month that Pikes’ death was a homicide. On the death certificate, he listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest following nine 50,000-volt electroshock applications from a conductive electrical weapon.”

“God did not just call this young man home,” said Williams, who has served as parish coroner for the past 33 years. “If somebody can tell me anything else that killed this otherwise perfectly healthy young man … I’d like to know it.”

Williams is no stranger to controversy in Winnfield. Back in 2004, his garage was firebombed, and he says he’s been shot at 19 times by people upset with the independence of his investigations. He wears a gun holstered at his waist.

“This case may be the most unnecessary death I have ever had to investigate,” Williams said. “[Pikes] put up no fuss, no fighting, no physical aggression. … He just didn’t respond quickly enough to the officer’s commands.”

Nugent, 21, declined to be interviewed for this story. But his attorney, Phillip Terrell, said that Nugent acted according to his training-an opinion seconded by police spokesman Lt. Charles Curry.

Taser safety guidelines
Yet the official Winnfield Police Department Taser policy appears to prohibit the weapon’s use against a non-violent, handcuffed suspect.

“The Taser shall only be deployed in circumstances where it is deemed reasonably necessary to control a dangerous or violent subject,” the policy states. It also requires that a suspect who has been Tasered should immediately be checked out at a hospital.

What’s more, safety guidelines issued by Taser International Inc., the manufacturer of the device that is now used by more than 12,700 law-enforcement and military agencies worldwide, warn officers to “minimize repeated, continuous, and/or simultaneous exposures.”

Company officials, citing dozens of medical studies, insist Tasers are safe when used properly. But few of those studies examined the effect of multiple Taser applications over a short period of time. The U.S. Department of Justice, in a study released in June, concluded that “the medical risks of repeated or continuous [Taser] exposure are unknown.”

In less than two years on Winnfield’s 20-officer police force, police records show, Nugent ranked as the department’s most aggressive Taser user. Among the recipients were a 15-year-old African-American runaway who was not charged with any crime and Pikes’ father, currently serving a prison sentence for a drug offense, who was Tasered by Nugent last year, according to Kayshon Collins.

hwitt@tribune.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast comments on the results of a recent investigation into the Houston crime lab.  “Forensic labs should be more like referees than team players,” Henson says, “neutral arbiters on which both sides can rely – but that’s not how things operate in the real world.”

According to researcher William Thompson, the errors at the Houston lab almost always favored law enforcement and the prosecution.  “It’s like team spirit. They see the defense counsel as their enemy and tend to be kind of secretive and not want to disclose things outside of the family.”

Here is an important update to this post from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

‘Jena Six’ athlete to play at Columbus’ Shaw High
GHSA grants eligibility to Robert Bailey Jr., who awaits trial for battery charge

By S. THOMAS COLEMAN

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Monday, August 25, 2008

Robert Bailey Jr., one of the “Jena Six,” will be allowed to play for Shaw High in Columbus this season.

The Georgia High School Association approved Bailey’s hardship appeal to be granted eligibility for the 2008-09 school year today at its fall executive committee meeting. Bailey’s appeal was the only one of five requests to be approved.

Bailey is one of six black teenagers from Jena, La., who came to be known as the “Jena Six,” after they originally were charged with attempted murder after allegedly attacking a white student at Jena High School in December of 2006. The charges were eventually reduced to aggravated second-degree battery. Five of the six, including Bailey, are awaiting trial.

The alleged attack was one of several racially charged incidents that occurred in the rural town that year, and the case brought worldwide attention to Jena. An estimated 20,000 protesters marched through Jena last summer in a show of support for Bailey and his co-defendants.

The Raiders are ranked No. 5 in Class AAA in the AJC’s preseason Top 10 poll. They are a combined 71-12 since 2002.

Here is the originbal post:

This message of concern was forwarded to Friends of Justice by Organizing in the Trenches, a Jena-based advocacy group led by Robert Bailey’s mother, Caseptla Bailey, and his half-sister, Catrina wallace.  In Jena, Robert was considered a bad apple; in Georgia Robert is considered a model student.

Hello, my name is Brandon Wood, I am the Defensive Coordinator at Shaw High School in Columbus, Georgia where Robert Bailey Jr now attends high School.  First and foremost let me tell all who read this letter what a privilege it has been to have the opportunity to get to know Robert. Since I have known him he has been the model student athlete. Everything he has done has been done the right way.
 
With that said, it would be an injustice to Robert for the GHSA to declare him ineligble to play football this year. Robert has the oportunity and the ability to sign a major college football scholarship. However, if he is
declared ineligble that will not be the case! What we need is as many friends, family, celebrities, media, etc. as we can have present at his hardship hearing.
I am asking you to please help get this information out to as many people as possible. If anyone needs further information about the event they can call or email me and I will be glad to help in any way possible. My number is 706.575.5400 and my email is bwood@mcsdga.net.
 
We will meet the full 33 members of the State Executive Committee on Monday, August 25, 2008 at the Holiday Inn located in Forsyth Georgia. We have not been informed as of yet what time the meeting will begin but as soon as I get that information I will be sure to let everyone know.
 
Let me thank all of you in advance for your hard work pertaining to this matter. Please remember that Robert needs all of our help in this matter.
Please let me know if I can be of any assistance to you!
 
Brandon Wood
bwood@mcsdga.net
Shaw High School
7579 Raider Way
Columbus, Georgia
706.575.5400
http://shaw.mcsdga.net/

There will be more publicity concerning this important ruling in the next few days, but this AP article will give you the particulars.  The state of Louisiana may decide to re-try Albert Woodfox or he may be a free man in a matter of weeks.  We will keep you posted as developments develop.

La. judge overturns ex-Black Panther’s conviction

By DOUG SIMPSON – 18 hours ago

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – A federal judge on Tuesday overturned the conviction of a former Black Panther in the 1972 stabbing death of a Louisiana prison guard.

Albert Woodfox, who was held in solitary confinement for over 30 years, is one of three former Panthers known as the “Angola Three.” He and two other black prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola were convicted in the killing of guard Brent Miller on April 17, 1972.

U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a ruling late Tuesday approving a federal magistrate’s June recommendation that Woodfox’s conviction be overturned because one of his former lawyers failed to object to a prosecutor’s testimony about a witness’ credibility. Brady also found that Woodfox’s trial lawyer failed to object to testimony from a witness who had died after the trial.

Woodfox’s decades in solitary confinement attracted worldwide attention from activists who called him a political prisoner.

Nick Trenticosta, the New Orleans-based defense lawyer who handled the appeal, said Woodfox’s immediate future lies in the hands of prosecutors, who could request a new trial. Trenticosta said he hoped Woodfox to be released without another trial.

“The man was convicted on false evidence, and he’s been held in solitary for almost 40 years. Let’s release him,” Trenticosta said.

A message left for prosecutors late Tuesday was not immediately returned.

Trenticosta said Woodfox had probably not yet heard about the ruling.

“I don’t believe he knows,” Trenticosta said. “But I’ll talk to him in the morning and he’ll probably find out about it in the newspaper.”

Woodfox and Herman Wallace were kept in solitary confinement from 1972 until March, when they were moved to a maximum-security dormitory with other prisoners. Woodfox was serving 50 years for armed robbery when the 1972 killing occurred.

Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Woodfox’s.

The third member of the “Angola Three” spent 29 years in isolation before his conviction was overturned in 2001. Robert King, known as Robert King Wilkerson in the 1970s, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was freed.

Patrick Waller wasn’t just convicted of a heinous crime he didn’t commit; prior to sentencing he pled guilty to two other crimes he didn’t do.  He thought it was the only way he could escape a life sentence. 

Click on the video link near the top of this Dallas Morning News article to listen to an innocent man describe the sixteen years he lost to prison.   “I’m no angel,” he says.  True that.  He was a mixed up kid on probation for cocaine possession.  That made him an easy guy to pin a crime on–he fit the thug profile.  So long as they had a good suspect (young, poor, black and on paper), the officers investigating these cases were satisfied. 

Patrick Waller has been exonerated on DNA evidence.  In addition, two of the real perpetrators of the rape and abduction Waller was doing time for have since confessed. 

Nonetheless, one of the victims of the 1992 crime thinks Waller might still be guilty.

Listen to the video clip and you will hear Mr. Waller talk about the other prisoners he has met over the years who cannot prove their innocence due to a lack of DNA evidence.  For every DNA exoneration there are . . .

That’s the trouble, we don’t know how many innocent inmates languish behind bars.  But we are becoming all to familiar with the mechanics of wrongful conviction and the guessing game that create such horrors.

This in-depth article from the Dallas Observer slipped past me when it first appeared in mid-June.  At the time, the NAACP had just decided to de-select Dallas pastor Freddy Haynes as the new president of their illustrious organization.  The article suggests that Haynes’ decision to welcome the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into his pulpit might have had something to do with it.  I suspect it’s true.

Freddy Haynes is the kind of preacher you rarely find in White America.  One minute he will be denouncing racist politicians; the next minute he will ask you to turn to your neighbor and ask, “Are you saved?”

White preachers might do one or the other; never both.  The culture wars have driven a wedge straight down the middle of the white Protestant world; if you are politically and socially progressive you don’t talk about “getting saved”; if you are evangelistic you are almost certainly politically conservative. 

I first met Freddie Haynes just over a year ago when he addressed Call to Renewal’s Pentecost 2007 conference in Washington DC.  A few hours earlier, three members of Friends of Justice had led a workshop on faith-based criminal justice reform and the travails of Jena, Louisiana had been front and center.  When we talked to Rev. Haynes after his sermon he told us he had never heard of Jena but he was interested in hearing more.

The next week, Lydia Bean (our Outreach and Development director) and I had a half-hour conversation with Rev. Haynes and his Minister of Justice about Jena and our criminal justice refrom work.  As the article indicates, Friendship Baptist Church, Haynes’ congregation, eventually sent ten buses to the march on Jena.  I was asked to address an organizing meeting at the church a few weeks before the buses rolled.  My wife Nancy and I were the only white people in a packed room (that happens a lot in our line of work).

Although I have chatted with the Baptist minister on three or four occasions, we have never had anything resembling a real conversation.  The Dallas Observer article provides a whirlwind tour of Haynes’ life history (most of it news to me) and highlights his interest in criminal justice reform.  Dallas DA Craig Watkins is a prominent member of Friendship West and I have always wondered if the congregation made it possible for the maverick prosecutor to launch an all-out (and highly controversial) quest to bring justice to the victims of wrongful conviction.  The article confirms my hunch.

Please give this seven-page exploration of a complicated man your careful attention.  Thanks to preachers like Freddy Haynes the civil rights movement is finally arriving in Dallas, Texas.

The fuzzy line separating truth, lies and guesses shapes the plot of most television dramas and has sustained the mystery genre from the moment Sherlock Holmes picked up his pipe. 

We love a good mystery so long as, in the end, there is resolution.  You know the spinster aunt weilded the knife because, in a good mystery story, she breaks down in self righteous rage and admits the whole sordid truth.  She even tells us why she did it and why she’d gladly do it again. 

That happens in real life too, but not very often.  Criminal cases that go to trial are ambiguous by definition.  The alleged villain claims innocence; a prosecutor says he’s guilty as sin.  Witnesses take the stand, documents are entered into the record, closing arguments are presented and the question is handed to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

Don’t let Law and Order fool you, real trials can be excruciatingly dull.  Witnesses rarely break down on the stand and pour out their souls.  Juries are forced to sift through an ungainly assortment of contradictions, evasions and mind-numbing detail.

Most jurors find resolution by siding with the prosecution.  That way they have the satisfaction of taking a rapist, a murderer, an assailant or a drug dealer off the street.  That feels good.  Putting a guy who may be guilty back on the street is bad for the digestion.  If prosecutors really had to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt we would see far more acquitals.

A man from Lubbock, Texas recently died after spending the last fourteen years of his life in prison for a series of rapes he did not commit.  According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Timothy Brian Cole professed his innocence from the outset, refusing an attractive plea agreement because it was contingent on a full confession.  Those curious about Mr. Coles’ ethnicity can find a picture of his family here. 

DNA evidence shows that the actual rapist was a man in prison for another crime of sexual violence at the time Mr. Cole was convicted.  The actual rapist confessed to the crime on several occasions but nobody wanted to listen to him.  They had their man.

The jurors who sent Mr. Cole to prison were guessing.  They guessed wrong.  They guessed wrong because a prosecutor guessed wrong.  They guessed wrong because a victim guessed wrong after being shown a photo array designed to emphasize Mr. Coles’ picture.  Investigators rigged the photo array because they too were guessing Cole was the rapist.

Why all this guessing?

People need closure; we crave resolution.  We hate movies that leave us guessing.  Guessing is only fun when you know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will be revealed in the end. 

Police investigators and prosecutors are no exception to this rule.  They will make the pieces fit even if they have to shave off a corner here and plaster in a gaping crack there.  Once they have their suspect a false concreteness takes hold.  A fuzzy picture snaps into high definition.  To win at trial, a prosecutor has to appear convinced.  The best way to appear convinced is to actually be convinced.

Prosecutors should be the ultimate skeptics.  Too often, they are playing the guessing game along with everyone else.

Most of us aren’t very good at distinguishing the truth from a lie.  Studies have shown that police interrogators are no better than randomly selected college sophomores at distinguishing between honest and dishonest testimony.  The difference is that professional interrogators say they know who is lying and who is telling the truth; the sophomores admit freely admit that they’re guessing.

Prosecutors guess because law enforcement guesses.  The issue is settled when two or more authorities agree.  Once the official story takes shape it rapidly hardens into fact.  That’s why Tomothy Brian Cole died in prison.

Once law enforcement agrees on the orthodoxy story, it is blindly accepted by prosecutors and jurors.  Most people look to the proper authorities for the answers because they have little confidence in their own empirical skills. The desire for resolution is so intense that innocent suspects will often confess to a crime because they can’t maintain an independent version of the facts in the face of intense interrogation.

A healthy dose of skepticism would have saved Brian Cole, Ann Colomb, Alvin Clay and Freddie Brookins Jr from wrongful conviction.

Our almost religious veneration for authority figures was recently on display in Gerald Missouri when a Tom Coleman style zealot calling himself “Sergeant Bill” came to town claiming to be a federal agent from a “multijurisdictional task force”.   The New York Times story ran this morning under the headline, “Drug arrests were real; the badge was fake.”  Sergeant Bill led local police on a series of no-knock drug raids.  “I don’t need no warrant, I’m a federal officer,” Sergeant Bill would tell suspects as he dragged them out of their beds.

The Times article suggests that most of these unconstitutional atrocities were based on terrorized suspects “naming names” to Sergeant Bill.  Monica Davey, the author of this intriguing piece, scours the midwestern states looking for natural disasters and human interest stories.  For all I know, she could be a trained attorneys.  But her grasp of due process protections seems a bit weak.  These arrests were not real.

Notice how an appeal to federal authority produced instant compliance from a long list of alleged perps, police officers and public officials.  Then a local newspaper editor made a simple phone call and Sergeant Bill’s reign of error was over. 

The lack of independent thinking in Gerald, Missouri is an egregious case of normal.  At every stage of the criminal justice process an uncritical groupthink often substitutes for real evidence.  Uneducated guesses come to the judicial party disguised as unassailable facts. 

You can’t understand how the process works unless you have watched it unfold in real time.  I can imagine how Timothy Brian Coles’ family felt as they watched an innocent man slowly succumb to the guessing game.  

This doesn’t just happen in a few isolated rape cases; it happens whenever the human appetite for resolution trumps independent thought.  The narrative campaigns Friends of Justice undertakes for people like Freddie Brookins Jr., Ann Colomb, Mychal Bell and Alvin Clay reveal the mechanics of wrongful conviction.  When jurors are forced to participate in a guessing game bad things happen to innocent defendants.

Two months ago, a half dozen federal officials traveled to Bunkie, Louisiana to meet with law enforcement and two local citizen organizations.  One meeting emphasized “problem youth” and sagging pants; the second focused on warrantless searches, racial profiling, and of evidence of evidence planting.  

US Attorney Donald Washington told a meeting of the Coalition for Justice that the “sagging pants” people had no complaints about local law enforcement.  Bunkie Police Chief Mary Fanara was claiming that the malcontents were just a bunch of drug dealers and their family members who thought they should be free to peddle their poison in her town.

Who was Mr. Washington supposed to believe?

Then, a day before another scheduled meeting of the Coalition for Justice, 100 police officers from a variety of federal and state agencies swept into Bunkie in the early morning hours, arresting twenty suspected drug dealers.

Score one for the sagging pants people.

Just in case anyone was counting, a middle-aged white couple was arrested along with the usual (black) suspects. 

If any illegal substances were seized during the raid local authorities didn’t publicize the fact.

The Bunkie raid was reminiscent of the infamous Tulia drug sting.  Only half the number of suspects were arrested, twice as many law enforcement personnel were involved, and (unlike Tulia) the federal government (FBI, federal marshalls) were involved.  But the employment of a multijurisdictional task force is standard operating procedure in the war on drugs.

Several parents of defendants spoke at the well-attended meeting of the Coalition for Justice in Bunkie last night; their experiences with law enforcement varied considerably.  Some officers were respectful and professional, producing search warrants and answering questions in a patient and courteous manner.  Other families were not so fortunate.

Several parents reported that law enforcement refused to produce search warrants on the pretext that they weren’t required to.  Some officers, according to reports, refused to identify themselves by name or badge number.

One mother reported that her thirteen year-old daughter had been dragged from her bed and thrown on the floor with a gun pointed at her head.  The officers conducting that raid got the wrong house.  No apologies were offered when the mistake came to light.

Some defendants were allowed to dress; others were hauled off in their boxers with their teeth and hair unbrushed.

Several speakers told the affected families that this is a time for patience.  If the Bunkie Police Department really had conducted a year-long investigation (as newspaper reports claim), and if they have solid evidence to back up their charges, we will respond accordingly.  If, however, no real evidence is produced and everything devolves into the all-too-common swearing match between an undercover cop and a defendant, that will be another matter altogether.

There can be no doubt that Monday’s raid was timed to make the point that the Bunkie Police Department is serious about the drug war and has the full support of state and federal officials.

Friends of Justice was represented at the meeting by Executive Director Alan Bean, Outreach Director Lydia Bean and Dwight Pope and Vanessa Hernandez, our valiant summer interns.  This afternoon we will be visiting with Ann Colomb in Church Point before heading on to Jena to visit with Jena 6 families.

Bunkie has been a slow-simmering story since Friends of Justice was first contacted by local resident Denise Atkins in February of 2007.  After interviewing dozens of concerned people it was clear that an adversarial relationship had developed between the Bunkie Police Department and the poor sector of the African American community.  I talked to four former members of the Bunkie Police Deparment who told me it had not always been thus. 

Two participants in the Tuesday night meeting were former Bunkie residents currently working in law enforcement in Dallas and Los Angeles.  While admitting that every law enforcement agency has its share of problems, the officers in our midst assured us that warrantless searches are not standard procedure in their jurisdictions. 

Another speaker told the group that we have not gathered to express out anger with the Bunkie Police Department.  Anger, he said, is not effective; organizing is.  Law enforcement has a proper and honorable role and we need to honor that; but when police officers behave as if the protections and rights of citizenship do not extend to all members of the community we have a problem. 

And so we wait.  How things will shake out in Bunkie, Louisiana is anyone’s guess.  Repeated efforts to file official complaints with the FBI have thus far proven unsuccessful.  The Alexandria office has made it clear that they will not be investigating in Bunkie.  When complaints are addressed to other FBI offices in Louisiana, complainants are directed to Alexandria. 

Liza Grote of the Louisiana ACLU has written a pointed letter to US Attorney Donald Washington addressing these concerns.  One thing is certain, tensions will continue to simmer in this little town until the right questions are addressed by the appropriate people.  This is an issue of democratice accountability.  Are we a nation that provides liberty and justice for all, or are we not?

 

The wheels of justice are finally grinding for Albert Woodfox.  The information in this article was culled from a brief conference call sponsored by the attorneys representing the Angola 3, so the details are a bit sketchy.  More coverage is sure to follow and we will keep you updated.

The tragic case of the Angola 3 demonstrates how hard it is for the criminal justice system to admit failure.  The Angola 3 were wrongfully convicted of murder after the State of Louisiana sponsored the perjured (and purchased) testimony of a multiple rapist.  The fact issues surrounding this case are horrendous, but progress was minimal until a broad coalition of attorneys and activists organized around the issue.  Tory Pegram, a Friends of Justice board member who was instrumental in bringing the Jena story to the world, is serving as a communications conduit for this group and, as always, is doing a wonderful job.

It is likely that the judge’s recommendation (see below) will be followed and that Mr. Woodfox will eventually be freed.  Since the fact issues surrounding the Herman Wallace case are very similar, the state will have a hard time holding Wallace if Woodfox has been exonerated.  The dominos are falling in Louisiana. 

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gath4w-3DpIiMlWbenW2RmQXWJwAD9187GN04

Ex-Black Panthers want freedom after decision

By JANET MCCONNAUGHEY – 12 hours ago

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Two former Black Panthers convicted of killing a prison guard in 1972 should be freed after a federal magistrate found a previous attorney made mistakes during a trial, their current lawyers said Wednesday.

Magistrate Judge Christine Nolan wrote that Albert Woodfox’s conviction should be overturned because his former attorney should have objected to testimony from witnesses who had died after his original trial and to letting a prosecutor testify about the chief prosecution witness’s credibility. The attorney’s omission denied Wilcox a fair second trial in 1998, Nolan wrote in a recommendation Tuesday to U.S. District Judge James Brady, who will rule later.

Woodfox, 61, and Herman Wallace, 66, spent 36 years in solitary confinement after being convicted in the stabbing death of guard Brent Miller on April 17, 1972. They said they were targeted because they helped establish a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Woodfox’s.

Attorneys plan to meet soon with prosecutors to discuss both cases, in hopes of settling them without any further review, said Attorney Nicholas Trenticosta, who represents Woodfox and Wallace.

But First Assistant State Attorney General John Sinquefield said he plans to ask U.S. District Judge John Brady to reject Noland’s recommendations. Sinquefield prosecuted Woodfox in 1973 as an assistant district attorney and was called as a witness during his retrial in 1998.

Along with another ex-Black Panther convicted of killing an inmate at the prison, the trio became known as the “Angola Three” because they were held in isolation for about three decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La., about 40 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

The witnesses who died before Woodfox’s second trial included the prosecution’s main witness – an inmate who made a deal in exchange for his testimony – and an expert who talked about blood spatters on clothing that state officials said had been lost, Nolan wrote.

Asked Wednesday about his testimony regarding the witness, Sinquefield said, “I was subpoenaed, and I testified under a subpoena over there and told the truth the best I could remember it.”

The attorney also should have asked for money to hire experts to testify about blood, DNA and fingerprints and other evidence in Woodcox’s defense, the magistrate wrote.

Noland also noted strong evidence of misconduct by prosecutors but said she declined to go into detail because the ineffective counsel alone was grounds to overturn the conviction.

Trenticosta asked the Louisiana Supreme Court on Wednesday to consider Wallace’s case. Although a state court commissioner had recommended overturning his conviction, a district judge refused and a state appeals court rejected Wallace’s arguments last month.

Wallace and Wilcox were kept in solitary confinement from 1972 until March, when they were moved to a maximum-security dormitory. Woodfox was serving 50 years for armed robbery before the 1972 charge.

The third member of the “Angola Three” spent 29 years in isolation before his conviction was overturned in 2001. Robert King, known as Robert King Wilkerson in the 1970s, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was freed.

King said he now lives in Austin, Texas, and supports himself by giving talks about his case and that of Woodfox and Wallace. “I keep the focus on Herman and Albert,” he said.

When they went to Angola, the prison was known as America’s bloodiest. Murders were common and, according to testimony at Woodfox’s 1998 trial, there were widespread problems with rape, Noland wrote.

Asked about the long years in isolation, King said, “It’s like being in hell.”

On the first day of Alvin Clay’s trial in late May, I walked from Little Rock’s Central High School to the federal courthouse.   I wanted to feel the shift from the Old Jim Crow segregration of 1957 to the New Jim Crow regime on display at Mr. Clay’s trial.  As I walked, I remembered sitting in courtrooms in Texas and Louisiana.  I remembered the helpless feeling of watching a wrongful conviction unfold before your eyes and being powerless to stop it.

A week later, with the Clay trial more than half over, I was feeling upbeat. I saw the coming verdict as a coin toss. The government’s case was remarkably weak; but I knew it didn’t have to be strong.

When the closing arguments were over I knew Alvin was going down on all counts. Steven Snyder, the assistant US attorney was afire with indignation, his arguments precisely tailored to the fears and loyalties of his audience. Defense attorney George Hairston was badly off his game.

Perhaps it was the fact that somebody had broken into Mr. Hairston’s hotel room the night before and stolen his closing argument along with the rest of his laptop computer. Perhaps the aging attorney was showing early signs of senility. Whatever the explanation, only a stellar performance would have removed the governments trump cards from the table, and Hairston hadn’t come close.

Friends of Justice intervenes in cases with a high potential for wrongful conviction.  Kareem Abdul Jabbar White was convicted in September of 2000, the last of nine drug defendants tried in the Swisher County courtroom.  We had spent nine months watching one defendant after another convicted on the uncorroborated word of a remarkably corrupt undercover officer named Tom Coleman. Ultimately, Coleman implicated three-quarters of the young black males in Tulia.

A month after Kareem was convicted; the Tulia story was featured in the New York Times. But three years would pass before the defendants were pardoned by Governor Rick Perry and released from prison. Everyone associated with the Friends of Justice became personae non grata. The ordeal was particularly draining for people like Nancy Bean, a school teacher who had to face the angry glares of the respectable folk every work day.

When you think your phones are tapped, and you know someone just disabled the brakes on your car, time moves slowly.

I spent the four months after Mr. White’s conviction pouring over Joe “Booty Wooty” Moore’s trial transcript.  None of the lawyers involved in the legal fight had considered filing a writ of habeas corpus on Joe’s behalf, so we decided to write one ourselves.  I soon realized that I was studying the mechanics of wrongful conviction.

Moore had been convicted in December of 1999 and sentenced to 90 years (another defendant received multiple 99-year sentences).

Joe Moore

Joe Moore had been convicted on drug charges a decade earlier and, with his knees bad and his diabetes worse, he lived in fear of returning to prison. On two separate occasions, Tom Coleman had attempted to lure Joe into selling drugs. Both times, the hulking hog farmer ran the skinny cop off his property.

Joe’s jury didn’t know about Coleman’s checkered past. And Joe’s court-appointed attorney provided what must be the most counterproductive defense in the annals of jurisprudence. Still, I kept wondering how the uncorroborated testimony of a stranger could overcome the presumption of innocence?

Alvin Clay’s trial inspires similar questions.

The convictions of Joe Moore and Alvin Clay trials followed the same narrative arc: A low-status black defendant, one documentable “prior bad act”, a fiery close from the prosecution, a placid performance from the defense attorney, a lying witness, and an all-white jury.

Actually, there was a single African American on Joe Moore’s jury, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. She knew Joe just well enough to question the government’s case, but her doubts were no match for the certainty shining in the eyes of eleven white jurors. These people didn’t think Joe was guilty; they knew it. The man had been a bootlegger, a notorious gambler and a womanizer back in the day; so he had to be guilty of this one too.

None of the early members of Friends of Justice had much prior experience with the law. We were preachers, slaughter house managers, wheat farmers, school teachers and juke-joint proprietors. When we heard that forty-six drug kingpins were peddling poison to school children in tiny Tulia, Texas, we didn’t believe it.

I can never forget the headline in the local paper: “City streets cleared of garbage”. A few days after reading these words I shared my concern with the Sunday school class at the Baptist Church. I was particularly bothered by the repeated use of the term “scumbag” in reference to defendants the newspaper editor didn’t know personally. “I had always believed that defendants are to be considered innocent until proven guilty,” I said.

A red-faced man told me that the defendants were guilty, all forty-six of them. Moreover, they were all going to jail. A few months later, this man served as chairman for a jury that sentenced a young first-offender to forty-five years for selling drugs to Tom Coleman.

When the Sunday school class ended, a local businessman took me aside. “It’s these black athletes,” he confided. “They score a few touchdowns and they think they’re gods. They think they can smoke their dope and mess around with our girls, and, well, something had to be done.”

All of the original Friends of Justice expected to get out of the criminal justice reform business the moment our fight in Tulia was over. Most of us did. But the phone calls didn’t stop. At first the anguished voices on the other end of the phone came from Tulia; then from surrounding counties.

Never Again Rally, 2001

Simply by publishing a factual narrative of these cases in independent newspapers we found we repeatedly embarrassed the state into doing the right thing. Before the drug sting defendants got some justice, Friends of Justice had overturned three smaller cases in the Texas panhandle.

Then the calls started arriving from further afield. Ann Colomb, a housewife from Church Point, Louisiana, told us that the federal government was using convicted drug dealers to accuse her family of running a multi-million dollar drug ring out of their modest FHA bungalo.

I could imagine a small town sheriff and a dim-witted gypsy cop cooking up a bogus drug bust in the Texas panhandle; it never expected to see the federal government following suit. There is no parole in the federal system, inmates were facing multi-decade sentences, and they could win time cuts of five years or more by providing “substantial assistance” to the US attorney’s office.

It was obvious from the outset that astute inmates were hosting perjury parties behind bars. The government had to provide defense counsel with summaries of each contact they have with inmates. By placing these reports in chronological order, I could see the Colomb family name spreading from inmate to inmate and from prison to prison.  Letters started arriving at the US Attorney’s office offering information about “the Culone’s” or “the Colognes”. 

Ann hadn’t taken the Colomb name until she remarried her current husband, and none of her sons went by the name.  Common sense suggested that the letter writers were willing to implicate total strangers if that’s what it took to lop half a decade of their sentences.  One inmate eventually admitted that he paid over $2000 to a cellmate for identifying information on Ann Colomb and her sons.l

After interviewing almost every important person in the Colomb’s social world I knew the government’s vast cocaine enterprise was a complete fantasy.

Ann Colomb

I still believe that most federal prosecutors wouldn’t have gone after the Colomb family on such shoddy evidence; but if a rogue prosecutor decides to prosecute, there is little recourse.  There are few limits to prosecutorial discretion.

Innocence projects are springing up across America in the wake of a horrifying string of exonerations. Are wrongful convictions confined to the relatively small number of cases involving DNA evidence, or is the problem just as serious in narcotics and conspiracy cases?

DNA evidence had no bearing on the Joe Moore case, it didn’t help Ann Colomb and, when I first arrived in Jena, Louisiana, I knew it wasn’t going to help Mychal Bell either.

Could it be that established civil rights organizations are attaching the shopworn categories of the 1950s and 1960s to a social landscape they no longer fit?  What if the civil rights abuses of the 20th century are mutating into exotic strains as a new century unfolds? And what if the pills and potions that vanquished the Old Jim Crow are no longer effective?

The Old Jim Crow regime maintained social distance between white people and black people. The New Jim Crow uses mass incarceration to maintain social distance between the beneficiaries of our Brave New economy and those who have been left behind.

America hasn’t always locked up six to ten times as many of her citizens as other western democracies. The shift from Old Jim Crow segregation to New Jim Crow incarceration began in the early 1980s and continues apace. Our prisons are overflowing with drug addicts, nickel-and-dime drug dealers, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, and the adult children of dysfunctional parents.  Some of these people belong behind bars.  Others can’t cope on the streets, but don’t belong in prison.  Thousands, we believe, are innocent of the charges that placed them behind bars.

Friends of Justice argues that mass incarceration multiplies the social problems it is designed to relieve. In the process, the potential for wrongful conviction has risen dramatically.

Our Common Peace Initiative encourages a shared quest for viable alternatives to mass incarceration. A second program, Operation Blind Justice, uses narrative intervention to expose the mechanics of wrongful conviction.

This explains our interest in the plight of Alvin Clay. The Little Rock attorney outraged the US attorney’s office by exposing an undercover sting operation that made Tulia’s Tom Coleman look like Andy Griffith. All fifty of the people targeted by the Arkansas operation were African American.

By sponsoring the perjured testimony of a corrupt officer, Alvin Clay argued, the federal government had forfeited the national trust.

When a confidential informant told his handlers that thirty-four of the fifty defendants indicted in the wake of Operation Wholesale were innocent, no one believed him.  Roy Lee Russell was charged with perjury and a rookie attorney was assigned to his defense.

When Alvin Clay showed that he was willing to go to the wall for low-status defendants, the FBI was called in to investigate the Little Rock attorney. No evidence of wrongdoing had surfaced, but the government knew that if they looked hard enough they would come up with something.

All they needed was evidence of one bad act and a witness willing to point the finger.

Civil Rights activists have spent the past half century searching for another Rosa Parks story.

The New Jim Crow regime has been kind to Rosa parks and her spiritual heirs. The great divide is no longer between black people and white people; but between those who have adapted to the rules of the new economy and those who either cannot or will not adapt.

A civil rights story illuminating current problems will almost always feature compromised defendants. The futile search for unsullied subjects injects Old Jim Crow assumptions into a New Jim Crow reality.

The judicious use of perjured testimony is the critical cog in the machinery of wrongful conviction. In Tulia, Tom Coleman pointed the finger and the rules of evidence kept Coleman’s crazy quilt past out of the courtroom.  In the Colomb case, the federal government paraded a dozen convicted drug dealers before the jury. With all that smoke there had to be some fire somewhere.  In the Clay trial, the government sponsored the testimony of a pathological liar.  It may be legal, but it’s morally abhorrent.

Getting a witness to point the finger at an innocent defendant is not easy. Even drug addicts and drug dealers will dig in their heels when asked to send an innocent man to prison.

Donny McCuien knew Alvin Clay was innocent; that’s why he was seen weeping in the witness room. Two of the inmates who came to Lafayette prepared to testify that they had purchased drugs from the Colombs blew the whistle on a perjury scam once they met the convicted defendants and realized they didn’t fit the dealer profile.  In Tulia, a compromised informant named Eliga “Man” Kelly refused to lie for the government.

It takes a crude cocktail of threats and promises to shape perjured testimony.

Once witnesses have testified, however, it is almost impossible to get them to recant. Witnesses who admit to perjury will be convicted of perjury. Prosecutors and police officers insist they were acting in good faith and no one prove otherwise?  Proving malicious intent is virtually impossible.

When all the mechanics of wrongful conviction are considered together it is hardly surprising that only 5% of cases make it to a jury? In most cases, this is because defendants are guilty as charged. But innocent people will  frequently take a plea bargain if they don’t think they stand a chance with a jury.

America can’t retreat from its dysfunctional love affair with mass incarceration unless we concede that the war on drugs is unwinnable, that prison is no place for addicts, the mentally ill or the mentally retarded and that our prisons have devolved into crime schools.

Friends of Justice is not satisfied with snatching the occasional brand from the burning. Our narrative interventions highlight egregious examples of business as usual.  Unlike legal professionals, we are free to critique the justice system on moral grounds.

Narrative interventions produce teachable moments. By documenting cases of wrongful conviction as they unfold we demonstrate how that the normal functioning of the criminal justice system regularly produces unjust outcomes.

The real culprit is the system itself.  Machinery is designed to replicate a predictable outcome. When high demand pushes the assembly line to the breaking point all attempts at quality control are abandoned.

In theory, the appeals process culls the bad cases from the criminal justice production line. But so long as the moving parts of the judicial process are working properly, appeals courts express satisfaction with the final result. So long as the losers in this process appear to low-status thugs, no one is concerned.

After three decades of mass incarceration there is a growing hunger for a better way. Friends of Justice wants to get people talking about viable alternatives to a failed status quo.  We invite you to join the conversation.

Alan Bean
Friends of Justice