State executes inmate by lethal injection

12th December 2002

By Todd Kleffman
Montgomery Advertiser

  
ATMORE -- Alabama used its new method of death Thursday afternoon with the lethal injection execution of Anthony Keith Johnson at Atmore's Holman Correctional Facility.

"His stomach kind of heaved a few times after they gave him the drugs. Otherwise, it was just like he went to sleep," said Garry Mitchell, an Associated Press reporter who watched the execution.

The execution was carried out as scheduled after both the U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Don Siegelman refused to issue a last-minute stay. Many considered Johnson's death sentence questionable because he did not kill anyone and the judge that sentenced him to death overrode a jury's recommendation of life in prison.

"An immense injustice has been done because of a lack of integrity of our leaders in high places,"said Thomas Elder, Johnson's pastor who witnessed Johnson's death on behalf of his family.

Cantrell, who ran a jewelry business from his home, was involved in a gunbattle with three men during an attempted robbery. Cantrell was shot five times. Cantrell fired six shots at the robbers, including one that hit Johnson in the back. Johnson was arrested after he showed up at nearby Decatur General Hospital seeking treatment for the wound.

The two other men involved in the robbery were never charged.

"The thing that is heartbreaking about this is that the people involved in this have not been prosecuted -- even though they know who they are and have known who they are for six or seven years," said Elder, pastor of Oak Ridge-Basham United Methodist Church in Hartselle. Along with members of Johnson's family, Morgan County investigators had asked Siegelman to stay the execution.

Johnson had turned to Christianity while in prison, Haley said.

"He was actively involved with prison ministries and they believed he had a geniune spiritual conversion," Haley said.

Johnson was dressed in a white, standard-issue prison uniform and white tennis shoes when he was strapped into the gurney. He exchanged the sign language hand gesture for "I Love You" toward Elder as the death process was started, said Alicia Smith, a reporter for Huntsville television station ABC-31 who was selected to witness the execution.

Six year-old Adam Walsh of Hollywood, Fla who was murdered in 1981.
Authorities in South Florida say they've finally solved the 1981 killing of the boy-



Ottis Toole

Toole was a suspect in the killing of six-year-old Adam Walsh, whose 1981 disappearance from a Hollywood, Florida mall set off a nationwide manhunt. Toole confessed to killing the boy, but he later recanted and was never charged.

John Walsh, Adam's father, says that the Hollywood Police Department made mistakes that could have proved Toole was the killer. A bloody piece of carpet taken from Toole's car and potentially bearing Adam Walsh's DNA was lost by the police.

Toole was associated with Henry Lee Lucas, who at one point claimed he and Toole had killed as many as 600 people. Lucas later recanted his claim but was convicted in Texas of one murder and has been on Death Row since 1985. Otis Toole, who was serving a 20-term for arson in Florida, died in prison in 1996.

Source

###

Adam Walsh case transformed missing kid searches

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – The abduction happened 27 years ago, at a time when parents routinely left their children playing in the toy store, unattended, and continued shopping.

But when Reve Walsh returned to pick up her 6-year-old son, he wasn't there. Over the mall loudspeaker, the plea came: "Adam Walsh, please come to customer service."

Two weeks later, fishermen discovered the boy's severed head in a canal 120 miles away from the Hollywood mall. His body was never found.

The case led to advances in police searches for missing youngsters and a notable shift in the view parents and children have of the world.

On Tuesday, police closed their investigation. They said a serial killer who died more than a decade ago in prison was responsible for Adam's death. They admitted making crucial errors in the case and apologized to the Walshes.

But Adam's death, and his father's transformation from a hotel developer to an activist, helped put missing children's faces on milk cartons and in mailboxes, started fingerprinting programs and increased security at schools and stores.

It spurred the creation of missing persons units at every large police department. And it prompted legislation to create a national center, database and toll-free line devoted to missing children. It also prompted the television program "America's Most Wanted," hosted by John Walsh, which brought such cases into millions of homes.

"In 1981, when a child disappeared, you couldn't enter information about a child into the FBI database. You could enter information about stolen cars, stolen guns but not stolen children," said Ernie Allen, president of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which was co-founded by John Walsh. "Those things have all changed."

Jim Larson of Orlando witnessed the effects of John Walsh's work. His wife, Carla, was abducted in a grocery store parking lot one afternoon in 1997 and was raped and strangled. He credits "America's Most Wanted" with catching her killer.

"Maybe, eventually, they would have gotten there," Larson said of police. "But it seemed like right after the show aired, calls were coming in and leads were followed and they got him."

The man convicted in the killing, John Huggins, is now on Florida's death row.

Others are more hesitant to dole out credit. John Walsh's efforts, said Mount Holyoke College sociologist and criminologist Richard Moran, have made children and adults exponentially more afraid of the world.

"He ended up really producing a generation of cautious and afraid kids who view all adults and strangers as a threat to them and it made parents extremely paranoid about the safety of their children," Moran said.

Police closed the case without any new evidence or even anyone they could charge with the crime.

"For 27 years, we've been asking who can take a 6-year-old boy and murder and decapitate him. We needed to know. We needed to know," said John Walsh. "The not knowing has been a torture, but that journey's over."

Police said the man long considered the lead suspect, Ottis Toole, was conclusively linked to the murder, but largely with circumstantial evidence.

"Our agency has devoted an inordinate amount of time seeking leads to other potential perpetrators rather than emphasizing Ottis Toole as our primary suspect," said Hollywood Police Chief Chadwick Wagner. "Ottis Toole has continued to be our only real suspect."

The Walshes, on network TV morning shows Wednesday, said they were grateful that Wagner had launched a fresh review of the investigation after taking over the department last year and finally ended the case.

"This helped us close a chapter. No closure, I hate that word. It's about justice. It's not about revenge or vigilantism," John Walsh said on ABC's "Good Morning America.".

Reve Walsh, on NBC's "Today" show, added: "You never get over it. It's like losing a limb. You just live without it and try to get around it."

Authorities made a series of errors over the years, losing the bloodstained carpeting in Toole's car — preventing DNA testing — and the car itself.

In 1997, Adam's father, John Walsh, released the book "Tears of Rage," that criticized the police department's work.

"So many mistakes were made," he said. "It was shocking, inexcusable and heartbreaking."

John Walsh has long thought Toole was responsible, saying investigators found a pair of green shorts and a sandal similar to what Adam was wearing when he was abducted.

"I have no doubt," John Walsh said. "I've never had any doubt."

Toole confessed to the killing, but later recanted. He claimed hundreds of murders, but police determined most of the confessions were lies. Toole's niece told John Walsh her uncle gave a deathbed confession to the crime.

Toole died in prison of cirrhosis in 1996 at the age of 49. He was serving five life sentences for murders unrelated to Adam's death.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.


#######

Police name Florida child killer

A serial killer who died in prison in 1996 was guilty of the murder and decapitation of a six-year-old boy 27 years ago, say Florida police.

The naming of Ottis Toole as Adam Walsh's killer brings an end to one of America's best-known unsolved cases.

Police said the discovery was made after a thorough review of records.

The case radically affected police procedures over missing children and inspired the TV show "America's Most Wanted", presented by Adam's father.

Adam went missing from a shop in Hollwood in 1981. His head was recovered from a canal two weeks later but his body was never found.

Toole, a convicted killer and paedophile, had long been suspected of involvement in the murder and had admitted guilt at least twice, but later recanted.

At a news conference, Hollywood Police Chief Chad Wagner said that as Toole was dead, further legal action was not possible and the Walsh family were not seeking it.

"However, in the interest in justice, the Hollywood Police Department is announcing today that it is our determination and conclusion that Ottis Toole was the abductor and murderer of Adam Walsh," said Mr Wagner.

Journey over

John Walsh, Adam's father told the news conference: "For 27 years we've been asking, 'Who could take a six-year-old boy and murder him and decapitate him?'.

"We needed to know and today we know. The not knowing, it's been a torture, but that journey is over."

Mr Walsh had been critical of what was widely seen as a botched police investigation, but he praised the police for finally bringing an end to the case.

"This is not to look back and point fingers, but it is to let it rest," he said.

The murder of Adam, and Mr Walsh's subsequent campaigning, led to a raft of measures being introduced, including hotlines to report cases and images of missing children being printed on milk cartons.

Mr Walsh also presents the long-running true life crime programme America's Most Wanted, launched in 1988, which calls on the public to help identify fugitive suspects.

In 2006, US President George W Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, giving state authorities greater powers to track down and prosecute child sex offenders and to make it harder for abusers to reach children online.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7786896.stm

Published: 2008/12/17 02:23:00 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

www.prisonpotpourri.com

The Caged Life

Is Thomas Silverstein a prisoner of his own deadly past — or the first in a new wave of locked-down lifers?

By Alan Prendergast

published: August 16, 2007

###

He stayed in the Silverstein Suite 23 hours a day. His interactions with staff typically amounted to some tight-lipped turnkey delivering his food through a slot in the cell door. The only change of scenery came when an electronic door slid open, allowing him an hour's solitary exercise in an adjoining recreation cage. Visitors were rarely permitted, and entire years had gone by during which he never left the cell.

But this day was different. Silverstein could think of only a couple of reasons why so many well-padded, well-equipped officers would be at his door, ordering him to strip for a search. Cell shakedown? Time for a game of hockey, with Tommy as the puck? No, that was a captain leading the squad. Something big.

A transfer.

So it came to pass that on July 12, 2005, U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate #14634-116 left his cage in Kansas for one in Colorado. Security for the move was tighter than Borat's Speedo — about what you'd expect for a former Aryan Brotherhood leader convicted of killing four men behind prison walls. (One conviction was later overturned; Silverstein disputes the second slaying but admits the other two.) The object of all this fuss didn't mind the goon squad. He was enjoying the view — and hoping that the move signaled the end to his eight-thousand-plus days of solitary confinement. Maybe, just maybe, his decades of uneventful good behavior had paid off.

"They said for me to keep my nose clean, and maybe one day it'd happen," he recalled recently. "So I foolishly thought this was it. If you saw me in that van, you'd think I was Disneyland-bound, smiling all the way."

But the smile vanished after Silverstein reached his destination: the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, better known as ADX. Located two miles outside of the high-desert town of Florence, ADX is the most secure prison in the country, a hunkered-down maze of locks, alarms and electronic surveillance, designed to house gang leaders, terrorists, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners in profound isolation. Its current guest list is a who's who of enemies of the state, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, shoe bomber Richard Reid, plane bomber Dandenis Muñoz Mosquera, abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and double-agent Robert Hanssen.

When it opened in 1994, ADX was hailed as the solution to security flaws at even the highest levels of the federal prison system. Much of the justification for building the place stemmed from official outrage at the brutal murders of two guards in the control unit of the federal pen in Marion, Illinois, during a single 24-hour period in 1983. The first of those killings was committed by Thomas Silverstein, who was already facing multiple life sentences for previous bloodshed at Marion. The slaying of corrections officer Merle Clutts placed Silverstein under a "no human contact" order that's prevailed ever since, and it gave the Bureau of Prisons the perfect rationale for building its high-tech supermax. Although he never bunked there until 2005, you could call ADX the House that Tommy Built.

What greeted Silverstein two years ago was nothing like Disneyland. His hosts hustled him down long, sterile corridors with gleaming black-and-white checkerboard floors that reminded him of A Clockwork Orange or some other cinematic acid trip. One set of doors, then another and another, until he finally arrived at the ass-end of Z Unit, on a special range with only four cells, each double-doored. His new home was less than half the size of the Silverstein Suite and consisted of a steel slab with a thin mattress, a steel stool and desk, a steel sink-and-toilet combination, a steel shower and a small black-and-white TV.

Stripped of most of his small store of personal belongings, Silverstein had little to do besides take stock of his eighty-square-foot digs. The Silverstein Suite was a penthouse at the Plaza compared to this place. There were steel rings on the sides of the bed platform, ready for "four-pointing" difficult inmates. A camera mounted on the ceiling to record his every move. If he stood on the stool and peered out the heavily meshed window, he could get a glimpse of a concrete recreation cage and something like sky. So this was his reward for all those years of following the rules — 24-hour surveillance in his own desolate corner of the Alcatraz of the Rockies. He was no longer simply in the belly of the beast. He was, he would later write, "stuck in its bowels, with no end/exit in sight."

The double doors muffled sound from outside. But over time, Silverstein realized that there was one other prisoner on the range. He shouted greetings. The man shouted back. He asked the man how long he'd been in the unit. Four years, the man said.

Silverstein told the man his name. His neighbor introduced himself: Yousef. Ramzi Yousef. Convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the one that killed six people and injured a thousand. Nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda leader who recently confessed to planning that failed effort to bring down the towers as well as the 9/11 attacks.

His keepers had put Silverstein in the beast's bowels, all right — right next to the one man in the entire federal system more loathed than he was. Still, it was somebody to talk to. Shouting to Yousef was the first conversation with another inmate that Silverstein had managed in almost twenty years.

But talking wasn't allowed. Within days, a new barrier was erected in the corridor outside his cell, preventing any further communication between the two residents of the range. Inmate #14634-116's transfer to ADX was now complete.

Entombed, Terrible Tommy was alone again. Naturally.

In the late 1980s, Pete Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, persuaded Bureau of Prison officials to grant him an unprecedented degree of access to inmates and staff at the Leavenworth penitentiary. Earley was allowed to walk the yard without an escort, to interview inmates without official monitoring, to talk candidly with veteran corrections officers about the dangers and frustrations of their work.

The resulting book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, is one of the most vivid works of prison reportage ever published. Among several unsettling portraits of career criminals and their keepers, the most memorable character is probably one Thomas Silverstein, who was then being housed, a la Hannibal Lecter, in a zoo-like cage in Leavenworth's basement, where the fluorescent lights stayed on around the clock to make it easier to watch him. Wild-haired and bearded — the BOP would not allow him a razor or a comb — Silverstein spent hours talking into Earley's tape recorder, describing his violent past and the petty torments he claimed the guards were putting him through in an effort to drive him insane.

Earley's book made Leavenworth's dungeon monster seem not only rational but quite possibly human. Granting a journalist unfettered access to him was a public relations blunder the BOP has been unwilling to repeat. Silverstein hasn't been allowed to have a face-to-face interview with a reporter for the past fifteen years. When Westword recently asked to visit him, ADX warden Ron Wiley promptly denied the request, citing "continued security concerns." But then, Wiley and his predecessors haven't let any journalist inside ADX to interview any inmate since 2001 because of "continued security concerns" (see related story).

Although he readily agreed to an interview with Westword, Silverstein isn't a huge fan of the press, either. He remains friendly with Earley, but he's learned to be wary of hit-and-run tabloid writers following in his wake, eager to write about "the most dangerous prisoner in America." Most of what the outside world knows about him, if it pays any attention at all, is the fragmentary image presented in The Hot House; he's a captive of his own legend, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber. His letters seethe with contempt for lazy "plagiarists" who have simply appropriated snatches of Earley's account as well as for those who've produced long magazine pieces or cheeseball cable programs about the Aryan Brotherhood that largely rely on the lurid tales of government snitches.

"For some odd reason the media pees when Master snaps his fingers," he wrote recently. "I wouldn't call 'em 'mainstream' any more cuz there isn't anything mainstream about 'em. They're just lackeys for the powers that be."

Silverstein's response to the "injurious lies" spread about him has been to launch his own information campaign at www.tommysilverstein.com. That's right — America's most solitary prisoner, a man who's been inside since before the personal computer was invented and has never been allowed near one, has his own website, maintained by outside supporters who forward messages to him and post his responses.

"He's got a pretty impressive network," says Terry Rearick, a California private investigator who has communicated with Silverstein by letter and phone over several years. After the two lost touch for a time, Rearick got a call from a woman in England on Silverstein's behalf.

The same woman posts regularly on the website, where Silverstein himself duels at length with his detractors. (A similarly heated debate has ignited over the wording of Silverstein's entry on Wikipedia; his defenders and his critics alternately revise the account to suit their competing versions of his crimes.) Some visitors to his site dismiss him as a textbook psychopath. But Silverstein contends that if people understood the grim context in which the killings at Marion took place, the snitch games and psychological warfare and organized violence of prison life, they wouldn't be so quick to demonize him.

It's a strangely disconnected argument — a garbled dialogue between cultures on different planets. Most of the visitors to his website know little about Silverstein's world, just as he knows little about theirs. He's been in prison for the past 32 years, and much of what he's learned about life on the street since he was put in solitary in 1983 has come from reading or watching television. No American prisoner, not even Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, has ever been condemned to such a walled-off existence for such a long period of time. Many of Stroud's years of solitary confinement were spent in relative ease at Leavenworth; he had not only frequent visitors, but also a full-time secretary. Even his seventeen-year stretch in Alcatraz allowed for much more daily communication with others than Silverstein has had.

"I'm amazed that he's not stark, raving mad," says Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, who's corresponded with Silverstein for years and published some of his writing. "He's been in total isolation for almost 25 years. The only people I can think of that have been held in anything remotely like this in modern times are some of the North Korean spies held in South Korea."

Yet the no-contact conditions imposed on Silverstein are becoming less unique by the day. There are now 31 supermax prisons in the country, with more under construction, including Colorado's own 948-bed sequel to the current state supermax, known as Colorado State Penitentiary II. They are costly on several levels — the operational expense per cell can be double that of a less-secure prison, and the rate of mental illness in solitary confinement far exceeds that of the general prison population — but lockdown prisons are all the rage with a vengeful public. Increasingly, they are being used not for short-term punishment (disciplinary segregation) but for long-term confinement of hard-to-manage inmates (administrative segregation), whose privileges keep shrinking. Colorado, for example, no longer allows journalists to interview its supermax inmates except by mail.

"The phenomenon is disturbingly common," says David Fathi, a staff attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project. "If it's disciplinary confinement, it's finite — when you're done, you're done. But with administrative segregation, there's a real lack of transparency about what a prisoner can do to earn his way out."

In the federal system, the past decade has seen the rise of "special administrative measures," or SAMs, which are imposed on terrorists or other inmates whose communications with the outside world "could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons." There are now at least two dozen SAMs cases in federal prisons, including Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui, whose access to mail, phone calls, media interviews or other visits are extremely limited or banned outright. At present the restrictions must be approved by the U.S. Attorney General, but the Bush administration is considering changes that would allow wardens at ADX or other high-security prisons to designate inmates as terror threats and thus ban them from all media contact — even if they haven't been convicted on terrorism charges yet, Fathi notes.

Silverstein isn't a SAMs case. He still has his website and his mail (although he claims it's frequently withheld or "messed with" in other ways). But he may be the prototype of what the government has in mind for other infamous prisoners — to bury them in strata of supermax security to the point of oblivion.

Responding in letters to questions about the psychological impact of his isolation, Silverstein struggles to find the right words. "Trying to explain it is like trying to explain what an endless toothache feels like," he writes. "I wish I could paint what it's like."

In an article a few years ago, he called solitary confinement "a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you're trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight."

In a Darwinian world, predators have to adapt or die, just like their prey. Tommy Silverstein arrived in the federal prison system at a critical phase of its evolution, when the number of inmate assaults on other inmates and staff was rising sharply and officials were looking at the idea of control units as a way to neutralize the growing threat posed by prison gangs. Silverstein quickly became a symbol of the problem — and the inadequacy of the proposed solution. It's not a stretch to say that the Marion control unit helped to make him what he became, just as the mayhem that erupted there helped to reshape the American prison system.

Before he reached the nether regions of the BOP, Silverstein's criminal career had been thoroughly unremarkable. Born in 1952 in California, he'd grown up in a middle-class neighborhood in Long Beach, but he was bullied by other kids who thought he was Jewish. (According to The Hot House, Silverstein's biological father was a man named Thomas Conway, whom his mother divorced when Tommy was four years old; she later married a man named Silverstein.) As a teenager, he ripped off houses for money to buy drugs; his sister, Sydney McMurray, says he was battling a heroin addiction and problems with his volatile, controlling mother.

"We were taught never to throw the first punch, but never to walk away from a fight," McMurray recalls. "My brother started getting into trouble because he was running away from a violent environment at home. Then he got into drugs, and he became a brother I never knew."

At nineteen, Silverstein landed in San Quentin for armed robbery. Paroled, he was soon arrested again for series of robberies — pulled with Conway and another relative — that yielded less than $1,400. This time, he went into the federal system on a fifteen-year jolt. He was 23 years old, and his life on the streets was already over.

At Leavenworth Silverstein became closely associated with Aryan Brotherhood members who allegedly controlled the heroin trade inside the prison — close enough that when convict Danny Atwell was found stabbed to death, supposedly because he'd refused to be a mule for the heroin business, Silverstein and two other AB members were charged with the murder. In 1980, he was convicted at trial on the basis of shifting testimony from other inmates and sentenced to life in prison. A federal appeals court later ruled that much of the testimony should never have been allowed and threw out the conviction. But by that time, Silverstein was in the Marion penitentiary and facing more murder charges.

Marion opened in 1963, the same year that Alcatraz closed. It was intended to be not just a replacement for the Rock but an improvement, with a more open design and modern rehabilitation programs. Yet by the late 1970s, it had the most restrictive segregation unit in the BOP; not coincidentally, it was also the most violent prison in America, a dumping ground for gang leaders and crazies. Between 1979 and 1983, the prison logged 81 inmate assaults on other inmates and 44 on staff; 13 prisoners were killed. BOP reports issued in 1979 and 1981 proposed turning the entire facility into a "closed-unit operation."

Confined to a one-man cell in the control unit 23 hours a day, Silverstein says he spent much of his time learning how to draw and paint. "I could hardly read, write or draw when I first fell," he explains. "But most of us lifers are down for so long and have so much time to kill that we actually fool around and discover our niche in life, often in ways we never even dreamt possible on the streets. We not only find our niche, we excel."

Prison officials worried that Silverstein was finding his niche in other areas, too. Long-simmering disputes between white and black gangs had a way of coming to a boil in the control unit. In 1981, D.C. Blacks member Robert Chappelle was found dead in his cell. He'd apparently been sleeping with his head close to the bars and had been strangled with a wire slipped around his neck, plied by someone exercising on the tier. Silverstein and another convicted killer, Clayton Fountain, received life sentences for the crime; inmates who testified for the prosecution claimed the two had boasted of it.

Silverstein has always denied killing Chappelle. (Another inmate later claimed to have done the deed, but investigators found his confession at odds with the facts.) Yet even if he hadn't been convicted in court, the suspicion that he was responsible was sufficient to trigger more violence. Shortly after the slaying, the BOP saw fit to transfer one of Chappelle's closest friends, D.C. Blacks leader Raymond "Cadillac" Smith, to the Marion control unit from another prison. Within days, Smith had tried to stab Silverstein and shoot him with a zip gun. Silverstein and Fountain responded by cutting their way out of an exercise cage with a piece of hacksaw blade and paying a visit to Smith while he was in the shower. Smith was stabbed 67 times, in what Silverstein still describes as an act of convict self-defense.

"Everyone knew what was going on and no one did anything to keep us apart," he told Earley. "The guards wanted one of us to kill the other."

At the time, there was no federal death penalty for inmate homicides — and not much the system could do to Silverstein, who was already serving multiple life sentences in the worst unit of the worst prison the BOP had to offer. But some staffers, concerned about Silverstein's outsized rep among white inmates, apparently did their best to keep him in check. In the months that followed Cadillac's death, Silverstein began to regard Officer Merle Clutts, a bull-headed regular of the control unit, as his chief tormentor.

Silverstein has given different explanations about what Clutts did to deserve such attention. Clutts trashed his cell during shakedowns and withheld mail; he smudged his artwork and taunted him; he even tried to set him up for attack by other inmates, Silverstein has suggested. Silverstein claims he told Earley "the whole story," but only pieces made it into The Hot House. Earley won't comment, saying he no longer discusses Silverstein with other reporters because of past misunderstandings.

The BOP has denied that Clutts harassed Silverstein. Whatever the source of the feud might have been, there's no question that Silverstein became fixated on Clutts. One study by Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian suggests that prisoners in control units sometimes experience "the emergence of primitive, aggressive fantasies of revenge, torture, and mutilation" of the guards who watch over them.

Silverstein thought about Clutts, and he thought about the difficulties involved in getting to his enemy when he was allowed out of his cell only one hour a day, shackled, escorted by three guards.

Locked down for life, he had a mountain of time to consider the problem.

One day in solitary is pretty much like another. Prisoners have different strategies for filling up their days, but there are always more days to come.

In his cell at Florence, 54-year-old Tom Silverstein usually rises before dawn, catches up on letters and reads, waiting for the grand event that is the delivery of his breakfast. He goes to rec for an hour, comes back to the grand event that is lunch, showers and cleans his cell. Time for some channel-flipping on the small black-and-white TV, in search of something fresh amid the religious chatter and educational programs he's watched over and over. More reading, some yoga. Then dinner, more TV - he's a sucker for Survivor, Big Brother and other "reality-type shows" — and so to bed.

When he was in the Silverstein Suite at Leavenworth, Silverstein had access to paintbrushes, pens and other art supplies. At ADX, he's only permitted pastels, colored pencils and "cheap-ass paper," he reports; consequently, he hasn't drawn a lick since he's been there. He says that every few weeks, he's moved from the cell with the heavily meshed window to one with no window at all, then back again a few weeks later. There are rare, glorious interruptions in the routine — a visit with sister Sydney last May, an occasional lawyer checking in. Visitors sit in a booth outside the cell and talk to him on a phone; he sits shackled on the other side of a glass partition and talks back. But these dazzling bursts of conversation quickly fade into a muddle. Did the last lawyers come before or after his sister? Silverstein isn't sure.

"It's all a blur, a dream state of mind," he writes. "Like my memories. When I venture back to my yesterdays, it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction."

Yet there is one memory, one day that stands out from all the rest — the day that started it all. Twenty-four years later, Silverstein is still in the position of analyzing, defending and regretting the act that has defined his fate. But nothing can explain away the act itself, a murder that was meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed.

Marion wasn't designed to be a supermax. Control unit prisoners had to be shackled and escorted to the shower every day, and the guards permitted them to have brief conversations with other inmates in cells along the way. On October 22, 1983, Silverstein was on his way back from his shower when another inmate in a rec cage called over one of his three escorts — Merle Clutts. Now flanked by only two guards, Silverstein paused at the cell of one of his buddies, Randy Gometz, and struck up a conversation.

Before the guards knew what was happening, Gometz had reached through the bars, uncuffed Silverstein with a hidden key — and supplied him with a shank. Silverstein broke away from the guards and headed toward Clutts, now isolated at the far end of the tier. "This is between me and Clutts!" he shouted.

He stabbed the officer forty times before the dying Clutts could make it off the tier. Hours later, Silverstein's friend Clayton Fountain pulled the same handcuff trick and attacked three more guards in the control unit, fatally wounding Robert L. Hoffman Sr.

Two federal officers slaughtered in one day, on what was supposed to be the most secure unit in the entire BOP, sent the system into shock. The bureau's response was to forge ahead with the long-considered plan to turn all of Marion into a control unit while whisking Silverstein and Fountain into even more restricted quarters. (Fountain died in 2004 at the age of 48).

For years prison activists attempted to challenge the Marion lockdown in court, charging that the prison staff set about beating other prisoners and subjecting them to "forced rectal searches" as payback for the deaths of Clutts and Hoffman. In 1988, a federal judge ruled that the inmate accounts of staff brutality were simply not credible.

By that point, Silverstein and the bureau were already on the road that would lead to ADX — a place where communication among inmates, and physical contact between inmates and staff, could be strictly controlled and all but eliminated.

If the guard killings in Marion happened at any federal prison today, the perpetrators would almost certainly face the death penalty. Silverstein has suggested more than once that death would have been a more merciful option in his case.

"Even though we may not execute people by the masses, as they do in other countries, our government leaders bury people alive for life in cement tombs," he writes. "It's actually more human to execute someone than it is to torture them, year, after year, after year."

Silverstein's last taste of some kind of freedom came in the fall of 1987. Rioting Cuban prisoners broke into his special cell in the Atlanta federal penitentiary and set him loose. For one surreal week, he was able to roam the yard while the riot leaders dickered with federal negotiators over the release of more than a hundred prison staffers who'd been taken hostage.

Then the Cubans jumped him, shackled him and turned him over to the feds. Surrendering Silverstein had been high on the BOP's list of demands for resolving the situation, right up there with releasing all hostages unharmed.

Contrary to the bureau's expectations, Silverstein didn't butcher any guards during his precious days of liberty. He didn't harm anyone. He suggests the episode shows that he's not the killing machine the BOP says he is, and that he could exist in a less restrictive prison without resorting to violence.

The bureau isn't convinced. He killed Clutts.

Terrible Tommy says he's changed. He claims to have gone 21 years without a disciplinary writeup. Other long-term solitaries go berserk, smearing their cells with feces and "gassing" their captors with shit-piss cocktails. Not him.

"The BOP shrinks chalk it up as me being so isolated I haven't anyone to fight with," he writes, "but they're totally oblivious to all the petty BS that I could go off on if I chose to. I can toss a turd and cup of piss with the best of 'em if I desired. What are they going to do, lock me up?

"But I just have more self-control now, after 25 years of yoga, meditation, studying Buddhism and taking some anger-management courses. All that goes unacknowledged."

McMurray says her brother has learned a great deal about patience and suffering over the years. "He's more like the brother I knew on the outside years ago," she says. "I have spoken with the guards who deal with him every day, and they don't have a bad thing to say about him. It's the ones in administration who are trying to make it as difficult as they can for him.

"But my brother has a spirit that is unbreakable. In Leavenworth, at least he could draw. It's been more of a challenge for him in this situation, but he hasn't let it break his spirit."

The bureau doesn't care about his spiritual progress. He killed Clutts.

Silverstein has told reporters that he wants to apologize to the families of the men he killed, "even though it was in self-defense." He has recanted some oft-quoted lines from his interviews with Earley about "smiling at the thought of killing Clutts" and feeling the hatred grow every time he was denied a phone call or a visit. He says he regrets the grief he's caused and no longer seethes with hatred.

The bureau is unmoved by his repentance. He killed Clutts.

Silverstein has been cut off from the operations of the Aryan Brotherhood for decades. His story is still told among the faithful, in an effort to keep his memory alive among the younger members, but he disputes that the group is a white supremacist organization. His own paintings include an ethnically diverse array of portraits. "I think it's worth noting that Tommy is no longer a racist, if he ever was," says Prison Legal News editor Wright.

The bureau could give fuck-all. He killed Clutts.

Twice a year, prison officials hold a brief hearing to review Silverstein's placement in administrative segregation. For many years, the hearings were held in the corridor outside the Silverstein Suite in Leavenworth. Silverstein stopped attending because the result was always the same: no change. At ADX, he's taken to filing grievances, claiming that the move has left him more isolated, with fewer privileges than ever before.

"I am being punished for good conduct under ploy of security reasons," he wrote last year in a formal appeal of his situation. "The goal of these units is clearly to disable prisoners through spiritual, psychological and/or physical breakdown."

In his response, Warden Wiley pointed out that Silverstein is provided with food and medical care, "daily contact with staff members" and access to television, radio and reading materials.

"It's ridiculous to call a nameless guard that shoves a food tray through the hole in the door...a source of meaningful 'human contact,'" Silverstein fired back. "I request placement in general population."

He took his appeal to the regional office, then to headquarters, where it was swiftly denied. "You are serving three consecutive life terms plus 45 years for bank robbery and murder, including the murder of Bureau of Prisons staff," an administrator noted. "You are a member of a disruptive group and an escape risk. Your heinous criminal and institutional behavior warrant a highly individualized and restrictive environment."

Wiley declines to comment on Silverstein's treatment at his prison. Last spring, a group from Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour certain areas of ADX. The group wasn't let in Z-Unit, where Silverstein lives, or anywhere near A-Unit — the "hole," where most disciplinary cases are housed. But they saw enough to realize that the staffers who bring meals "do not converse regularly, if at all, with the inmates." Despite claims that clinical psychologists checked on prisoners every other week, "several inmates said they had not spoken to a psychologist in many months," and such conversations tended to be brief.

The group also reported that many ADX prisoners are trapped in a catch-22 predicament — they've been sent there directly after sentencing but have never been provided any opportunity to "progress" to a less restrictive setting because of the nature of their crime. Every placement review finds that the "reason for placement at ADX has not been sufficiently mitigated."

"No matter how well they behave in prison, they cannot undo the past crimes that landed them in prison, generally, and then ADX, specifically," Human Rights Watch director Jamie Fellner wrote to BOP director Harley Lapin.

Some crimes, it seems, are beyond redemption.

Silverstein got a copy of the do-gooders' report and immediately fired off a letter to the group, suggesting that they come see him in Z-Unit if they want the real story about the government's "failed and draconian penal system."

No one from the group has come to see him yet. Silverstein waits for them in his box within a box. He knows that the bureau just wants to bury him and that he turned the key himself. But he also knows he didn't build that box all on his own.

His earliest possible date of release is eighty-eight years away. He has nothing but time.

http://www.westword.com/2007-08-16/news/the-caged-life/

###

Thomas Silverstein..

ADX-Florence, CO..

Prison Legal News..


www.prisonpotpourri.com

Priest's Murder Video Online Prompts Probe

Inmates Do Not Have Internet Access

Day in court brings fresh wave of pain

Eight years ago, Willie Crain abducted and killed 7-year-old Amanda Brown. He appeared in court again Friday, but the sight brought no closure for Amanda's father.

By COLLEEN JENKINS, Times Staff Writer

Published September 9, 2006

[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]

Roy Brown and his wife, Sylvia, embrace outside the Hillsborough County Courthouse Annex after sitting through a hearing for Willie Crain.

	Amanda Brown
	Willie Crane

TAMPA - Roy Brown wanted Willie Seth Crain Jr. to die for killing his 7-year-old daughter Amanda in 1998. But he also wanted an answer.

Ten, maybe 15, times Brown tried to write the letter. Only anger and insults spilled from his pen.

Then, days ago, Brown got word that the death row inmate would return to court Friday. Brown couldn't sleep. He had to write.

Mr. Crain, he began, choosing his words carefully with the help of a retired sheriff's deputy friend.

Our innocent little girl placed her trust in you as a friend, and as a result of that trust, lost her life. ... Every day not knowing where she is, not having laid her to rest, it is torture for all of us, especially my family. If that is your goal, then it is working.

On Sept. 11, 1998, Roy Brown's ex-wife awoke to find Amanda missing from her Seffner home. Crain, who had spent the night hours after meeting the mother and daughter, was gone too.

Hillsborough sheriff's officials and volunteers eventually found drops of Amanda's blood on the convicted child molester's toilet and underwear. They didn't find Amanda.

The mystery haunted Brown, 55. Seared in his memory was the way Crain had looked at Brown and his current wife after a judge announced the death sentence.

"He grinned at me and Sylvia," Brown recalled this week, "and told me he wasn't going to die."

In recent years, Brown has been a quiet fixture at the scenes of missing children.

Last week, the Amanda Brown Foundation became an official nonprofit organization. Brown wants to give financial and emotional support to families of abducted children and educate parents about sexual predators.

Still, Brown kept bottled inside the words he needed one man to hear.

"I want Amanda," he said.

For so long, he had worried about what might happen if he finished the letter. He knew name-calling and bitterness wouldn't achieve anything. He thought a rambling diatribe would dilute the effect.

"I was told all through the court process just don't look at him, don't talk to him, don't show no emotions or nothing," Brown said. "You're just scared to death that if you say anything ... he'll get an appeal."

Two years ago, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Crain's conviction and death sentence. The appellate process is in its early stages, to Brown's dismay.

"He already outlived my daughter, and there's something wrong with that," Brown said.

But Brown wondered this week if time might be his friend. Maybe Crain was ready to reveal Amanda's whereabouts.

Brown decided he would give Crain, now 60, the letter at the hearing. Wednesday night, through tears, he started yet another draft. He added the last touches the next morning, then gave it to his wife to type on foundation letterhead.

We can only pray to God that he helps us through each day and one day will enter into your life and guide you to do the right thing. Let us know where we can find Amanda. Let us bring her home where she belongs today. Sincerely, Roy Brown, Amanda's father

Feeling "a relief and a half" about having finally written the letter, Brown carried it to court Friday morning - only to learn that he would not be permitted to hand it to Crain.

He could do nothing, except strain to control his anger at the sight of Crain and listen to perfunctory talk about appellate motions and Crain's relationship with his attorneys. Like others in the courtroom, Brown learned Crain has colon cancer.

The hearing ended, and Brown still had the letter. But he had taken the first step toward peace.

This weekend, he'll take another. On their way to Tallahassee for a memorial service honoring Florida's missing children Monday, Brown and his wife will stop at the prison for death row inmates in Starke.

They can't deliver the letter to Crain in person, but they can leave it at his front door.

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at 813 226-3337 or ">cjenkins@sptimes.com.

[Last modified September 9, 2006, 00:31:59]

Source

---

November 20, 1999

National News Briefs; Man Sentenced to Death In Slaying of 7-Year-Old

A convicted child molester was sentenced to death today for killing a 7-year-old girl who disappeared from her mother's bed on Sept. 11, 1998, and has never been found.

The molester, Willie Crain, 53, was convicted in September in the kidnapping and death of the girl, Amanda Brown.

Mr. Crain met Amanda's mother, Kathy Hartman, in 1998. Prosecutors said he had visited Ms. Hartman at her home, given her a tranquilizer and then crawled into bed with her and Amanda. Mr. Crain and Amanda were gone when the mother woke up.

The police said they believed that Mr. Crain, a crab fisherman, had disposed of the girl's body, perhaps in Old Tampa Bay.

An 11-day search did not turn up a body, but bloodstains on Mr. Crain's clothes and toilet were matched to the girl.

Mr. Crain was convicted in the 1980's of child molesting.

#####################

11-19-99

FLORIDA:

A Florida crab fisherman was sentenced on Friday to die for the
murder of a 7-year-old girl whose body was never found.

Willie Crain, 53, was convicted in September of killing Amanda Brown
a year earlier. She disappeared on Sept. 11, 1998, after Crain spent
the night with her and her mother at their Tampa home.

Amanda's mother, Kathy Hartman, testified Crain and Amanda were missing
when she woke up the next morning. Police found traces of Amanda's blood
in Crain's home and on his clothing, identifying the blood through DNA
testing.

Crain denied killing Amanda. He said the girl was asleep in her mother's
bed when he left their house to go fishing. He said the blood could have
came from a loose tooth.

Hillsborough County Circuit Court Judge Barbara Fleischer accepted the
jury's unanimous recommendation that Crain be sentenced to die.

"This court agrees with the jury that death is the sentence that must be
imposed," Fleischer told Crain at a sentencing hearing. She could have
sentenced him to life in prison.

During the penalty phase of the trial, the jury was told that Crain was
convicted of sexually molesting 6 young girls in 1985 and served 6
years of a 20 year sentence.

Police think Crain, who trapped crabs for a living, might have disposed
of Amanda's body in Tampa Bay.

All executions in Florida are currently on hold until the U.S. Supreme
Court rules on whether the state's use of the electric chair violates the
U.S. constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment. State
lawmakers are to meet in January to consider lethal injection as an
alternate means of execution.

(source: Reuters)

##############

The Bell Curve was much in the news around Tampa, specifically the Left Tail of the Curve, which is the home of people like Willie Crain Jr., and his brother Linwood, both recent incarcerates.

Willie is suspected of killing a 7-year-old girl, but a massive search for evidence has turned up little except traces of blood now being DNA'd.

Then, his brother Linwood "Loco" Crain was picked up on bad-check and firearm charges. (Oh, he also killed a woman in 1983 and served 6 years.)

Now, if Willie killed the girl, it will be his first known murder. However, he's done time for raping little girls, and two new accusers just came forward, saying they recognized him from incidents 30 years ago, which would be quite a feat, for to describe the face of either Crain as "grizzled" would be gentle.

Willie's lawyer understands the Bell Curve very well: "I don't think Willie Crain is smart enough to hide a body where nobody could find it."

Source

Legal State Update

Articles & Documents

PLAY | BACK | NEXT

Aug. 22, 2006, 1:03AM
Trial of boy in his father's death adds to legal battles in the case
Two years after the child, now 12, allegedly shot dad, wrongful-death, custody suits go on

By PEGGY O'HARE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

It's been almost two years since physician Rick Lohstroh was shot to death as he sat in his sport utility vehicle outside his ex-wife's home. Since then, the couple's older son has spent two Christmases and two birthdays in custody while awaiting trial.

In that time, the boy, now 12, has been away from school, his friends, his brother and the grandparents who moved here from out of state in an effort to restore some sense of normalcy to his and his brother's lives.

His turbulent home life, marred by his parents' poisonous divorce, is now just a memory. Instead, he has moved from a juvenile lockup to the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center's psychiatric facility, where he is one of 14 youths under the watch of doctors.

This week, he will face another emotional hurdle when he stands trial in a juvenile court on a murder charge.

Jurors will hear that the boy was only 10 years old when he was accused of shooting his father five times in the back and left arm. The shooting took place outside the Katy home of the boy's mother on Aug. 27, 2004, after the couple's acrimonious breakup and child custody fight.

The boy's mother, Deborah Geisler, has acknowledged in a deposition that the semiautomatic pistol that killed her ex-husband had come from a zippered case kept in her bedroom closet. A 47-year-old nurse at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Geisler has not been charged.

State District Judge Michael Schneider has ordered the trial closed to the public to protect the boy's interests. Having started last week with an unusually large panel of 300 candidates, attorneys were still choosing a jury on Monday. There was no word on whether testimony might begin today.

Nationwide publicity

Rick Lohstroh, a 41-year-old physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, was killed as he picked up his sons for a weeklong visit. Investigators said he was sitting in his Toyota 4-Runner when his older son got into the seat behind him and fired through the back of the driver's seat. The younger boy, then 8, was still in the house.

The tragedy drew nationwide publicity and sparked multiple court cases. The one that's likely to draw the greatest interest, however, is the son's trial, which is expected to last two to six weeks.

The flurry of court battles also includes the fight for custody of the two brothers. There also is a wrongful-death lawsuit claiming negligence by Geisler and her present husband, Matthew Swanson, as well as by several pharmaceutical companies, since the accused son had been taking Prozac and its generic equivalent at the time of the shooting; and there is an unresolved battle over the slain doctor's life insurance proceeds.

Lohstroh and Geisler divorced in May 2003 after more than a decade of marriage, but their animosity continued. At different times during the marriage, both were arrested on family violence charges.

Public records show that Lohstroh pleaded no contest to an assault charge in Galveston County in 1997 and was granted deferred adjudication, a form of probation. Although details were not available Monday, he reportedly dropped the charge against Geisler.

After their marriage collapsed, Geisler reported to police in Webster, and later Friendswood, that her older son, then 8, told her his father had molested him. Officers investigated, but the district attorneys' offices in Harris and Galveston counties refused to accept charges.

Those who knew Lohstroh say he was devastated by the allegations, but didn't let them hurt his relationship with his sons. Neighbors on the Friendswood cul-de-sac where he lived said after his death that they never believed the accusations.

Child Protective Services never took the children away from Lohstroh, and the parents eventually were granted joint custody. The boys remained in Friendswood schools while shuttling between their father's home and their mother's new home in Katy.

After the shooting, a Galveston County judge awarded temporary custody of both boys to Lohstroh's mother and stepfather, Joanne and Richard Greene, who moved to Friendswood from Columbia, S.C., to fight for them.

In court papers filed last month, one of their attorneys said the Greenes' legal fees total more than $79,000 and they have "exhausted their life savings."

Wrongful-death lawsuit

The Greenes filed a wrongful-death lawsuit last year, accusing Geisler and Swanson of failing to keep the pistol out of the boys' reach, properly supervise them and teach them handgun safety. The case is set for trial in December.

In that complaint, the Greenes also sued the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Co. and Mallinckrodt Inc., alleging that the older boy's use of the antidepressant fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac, created a state of "agitation, depersonalization, hostility and mania leading to violence. ... "

The couple said the companies failed to adequately warn that the drug was "not safe" for a 10-year-old and did not give proper notice of its possible risks. Court records show the older boy began taking the drug under his mother's supervision a little more than two weeks before the shooting.

Geisler said in a deposition that she gave her son the medication exactly as his doctor had prescribed and that she believed it would help him.

"She followed the physician's instructions on what to do with the Prozac and completely denies that she failed to fulfill any parental responsibility," said Geisler and Swanson's attorney, Roger Oppenheim.

Life insurance dispute

Asked to describe something that made him scared or uncomfortable, he wrote, "When I was eight my DAD died ... I was scared! My mom told my brother to shot [sic] my DAD but my grandparents came to help me," according to papers filed last month by James V. Pianelli, an attorney for the Greenes in the insurance fight.

Oppenheim said Geisler had nothing to do with the shooting.

Geisler could not be reached for comment, and the Greenes could not comment, according to one of their attorneys, because of gag orders in the criminal case and the custody battle. The Lake Jackson attorney representing Geisler in the custody fight, Sheelah Wooten, did not return calls seeking comment.

In the dispute over the slain doctor's life insurance proceeds, his brother, William J. "Bill" Greene, argues in a lawsuit that he was the primary beneficiary but had received only half of the $1.4 million. Geisler originally was named as beneficiary of the remaining half, but could not collect because of the divorce.

The grandparents — who were not named as beneficiaries — filed a counterclaim saying Bill Greene, their son, had made no effort to care for the boys and deserves none of the money.

peggy.ohare@chron.com

WHERE HE'D GO

The TYC would retain jurisdiction until he turns 21, however, so he also could remain in a TYC facility until that age and then go to adult prison.

Even if he receives a lengthy sentence, he might serve only three years before becoming eligible for parole, according to juvenile law. A child who has no disciplinary problems in juvenile lockup and completes any specialized treatment ordered by the courts within the first three years has a better chance of going home.

Source

Cody Posy

'Fighting Injustice'