THIS AND THAT

Robert Riggan: Colorado/Felony Murder, Life Without Parole

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:23:41 GMT

Robert Riggan was sentenced to life without possibility of parole by a panel of judges in Colorado, USA in April 1999 for felony murder.

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Robert Riggan escapes death against his will..

A panel of 3 judges Friday unanimously rejected the death penalty for
a killer who had begged to die rather than spend his life in prison.

The case was the 1st test of a new law that puts the death penalty
decision in the hands of judges instead of juries. The decision denies
opponents the opportunity to challenge the new death penalty proceedings.

The key factor cited by the judges was the jury's failure to convict
Robert Riggan, 39, on the charge of first-degree murder after
deliberation in the death of 22-year-old Anita Paley.

The jury deadlocked on that charge, but convicted him of 1st-degree
murder while committing or fleeing from felony sexual assault.

"Just as we must have tremendous respect for a jury's verdict of guilt or
non-guilt, we must have respect for the fact that the jury that heard the
evidence in this case was divided and deadlocked on this enormously
critical issue," the judges said in an opinion read by presiding
Jefferson County District Judge Frank Plaut.

Paley, a Capitol Hill prostitute, died of a severe brain injury and her
vagina was slashed with a knife after she went to the mountains with
Riggan May 16, 1997. Riggan sped away in his van after a passing motorist
saw him dragging her body near a cabin above Black Hawk.

"A civilized society should not and cannot take the life of a human
being, even one who commits an especially heinous, cruel and depraved
offense, if a jury could not conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that
the individual in fact administered the fatal injury," the judges said.

Plaut read the 12-page decision of the panel in a packed courtroom Friday
morning as Riggan sat quietly and his defense team clasped their hands
and bowed their heads, tensely awaiting the decision.

District Judges R. Brooke Jackson of Jefferson County and Jack Smith of
Arapahoe County joined in the unanimous decision.

Riggan shook his head after he learned his life had been spared. He made
a rambling 15-minute statement to the judges in which he again proclaimed
his innocence. Riggan contends Paley was suicidal and fatally injured
herself when she jumped from his van.

"I'm relieved," said defense attorney Dennis Hartley. "It was a
thoughtful decision. I didn't expect anything less. It was a correct
decision under the circumstances of this case."

Riggan maintained his innocence and restated his desire to die dkuring a
telephone interview after the hearing. "Life in prison is very rough," he
said. "People don't realize it, but once you're there for a while, people
would rather die."

Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas said he accepted the
decision, but believes Riggan deserved the death penalty.

"I think we did the appropriate thing in this case," he said. "Under
these kinds of circumstances, I would do it again."

The decision rejecting the death penalty means that a Supreme Court
challenge of the state's new law must wait for another case.

Most likely that will come in the Brandy Duvall murder case, in which
Danny Martinez and Francisco Martinez both face death penalty sentencing
hearings in Jefferson County within the next few weeks.

Although prosecutors failed to prove that Riggan committed intentional
felony murder, the judges said, they proved that Riggan committed his
offense in an "especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner."

The judges cited the 3-inch knife wound to Paley's vagina that
resulted in massive blood loss.

"After inflicting the wound, Mr. Riggan attempted to hide her body and
left her to die, lying in a pool of blood resulting both from the vaginal
injury and the head injury. The panel finds this conduct to be
disgusting and outrageous."

Defense attorneys proved mitigating factors, including Riggan's minor
criminal history, his diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder and
the deplorable conditions of his upbringing, the judges said.

"Mr. Riggan's upbringing and, in particular, the lack of emotional
attention and support from his parents, are nothing short of tragic,"
the judges said. "Regrettably, this was a family plagued by incest,
sexual abuse, squalor, poverty and emotional neglect of Mr. Riggan and
his siblings."

But the judges said that doesn't mitigate or excuse the depravity of his
crime.
Still, the jury's deadlock on the intentional first-degree murder charge
convinced the panel that his life should be spared.

The deadlock may mean that one or more jurors didn't believe Riggan
caused Paley's fatal head injury, the judges said. It could mean that at
least one juror believed Riggan's claim that she was suicidal and jumped
from his van.
The judges concluded that trial evidence could leave reasonable doubt.

"A sentence of death cannot be imposed based upon possibilities or
scenarios," the judges said. If the jury couldn't agree on what Riggan
did, the judges concluded, a death sentence would be inappropriate and
contrary to legislative intent and Supreme Court precedent.

(source: Denver Post)

Some Riggan Art..

Looking Back

Rigganbottom

Mail!!

- Felony Murder Rule

- A First Test On Executions For Judges In Colorado

- Prison Penpals/ Life Without Parole

- Robert Riggan: Updates

'Fighting Injustice' � 2005 AnnEz / Sweden

Site Updated Nov 2009

Steven Green: US soldier gets life for rape and murder of Iraqi girl.

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:40:10 GMT

A US army soldier has received five consecutive life sentences for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.

By Our Foreign Staff
Published: 10:03PM BST 04 Sep 2009

The jury couldn't reach a unanimous decision about whether or not Green should get a death sentence, automatically making Green's sentence life in prison Photo: AP

Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, 24-year-old Steven Green will not be eligible for release from prison.

Judge Thomas Russell handed down the sentence on Friday in a federal court in western Kentucky after a jury convicted Green in May of conspiracy, rape and multiple counts of murder for the deaths of the al-Janabi family on March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

The jury couldn't reach a unanimous decision about whether or not Green should get a death sentence, automatically making Green's sentence life in prison.

He was considered the ringleader of a group of five soldiers who plotted the crime over whiskey and a game of cards at a traffic check point in Mahmudiyah.

Three other soldiers were given life sentences for the attack by military courts but will be eligible for parole in 10 years. A fourth was sentenced to 27 months in jail for acting as a lookout.

Green was tried in a civilian court after being discharged from the army due to a "personality disorder" before his role in the crime came to light.

Green made a rambling statement to the court and told prosecutors he had only been doing what he was told by the group's highest ranking soldier, Paul Cortez.

"Y'all can act like I'm a psychopath or a sexual predator or whatever," he said. "But if I had never gone to Iraq I would never have got caught up in anything like this."

Cortez and another solider testified that Green took Janabi's parents and sister into another room and shot them while two of the other soldiers raped her. Then Green took his turn with the sobbing girl before putting a pillow on her face and shooting her dead.

The soldiers set the house on fire by tossing a lighter onto a Kerosine-soaked blanket covering her naked body. Then they went back to their checkpoint about 200 meters away and grilled chicken wings.

Green, having left the military, soon confessed to a sergeant investigating the atrocity.

But the involvement of US soldiers did not come to light until a few months later when stress counsellors talked to the squad after an incident in which two soldiers were abducted at a checkpoint and later brutally murdered.

- Source

- Steven Green: Life for US soldier's Iraq crimes

- Green gets 5 life sentences for rape, murders

- Paul Cortez: 100 years for raping, killing Iraqi

- Steven Green: Docket Report

Fighting Injustice

Vladd's Soapbox

Michael Hernandez: Mentally ill teenager to be tried as an adult

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:12:23 GMT

THE CASE OF MICHAEL HERNANDEZ
Mentally ill teenager to be tried as an adult

Michael Hernandez at his competency hearing

Child advocates call for flexible juvenile justice system

By Noaki Schwartz
Sun-Sentinel
Posted February 8 2004

As authorities contemplate charging as an adult a 14-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate, the debate over how Florida handles juveniles charged with capital crimes is once again moving to center stage.

It hasn't been off stage that long. Last week's incident, in which a Southwood Middle School student confessed to repeatedly stabbing his friend Jaime Gough in a bathroom, follows a recent successful campaign to free Lionel Tate, who became the poster child for Florida's juvenile justice laws when he was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 13 for killing a 6-year-old.

A judge threw out his 2001 conviction and Tate, now 17, was freed Jan. 29 and will spend 10 years on probation under a plea deal. Violation of the terms of his deal could send him back to prison. Another 13-year-old, Nathaniel Brazill, tried as an adult in 2001 for killing his middle school teacher in Lake Worth, is serving a 28-year sentence.

Miami-Dade prosecutors are seeking a grand jury indictment to try the Southwood eighth-grader in adult court. A conviction could result in a life sentence. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is not naming the suspect because of his age.

"I would hope that Lionel's case has shown the world we shouldn't stick our children in jail for the rest of their lives without parole," said Richard Rosenbaum, Tate's appellate attorney.

Some states use "blended sentencing," allowing young offenders to be confined in the juvenile system until they reach age 21 and then transferred to an adult prison system if the courts think it is necessary.

Child welfare advocates say children who commit horrible crimes should not be treated or punished as adults because they think, act and perceive the world differently than adults. And, most of all, there is a possibility they can be salvaged.

"I don't think it's appropriate to send children that young into the adult system because studies show they are less competent, and they are rehabilitatable," said Stephen Harper, a veteran public defender who once headed the juvenile division in Miami-Dade County. "There should not be just this instant reaction of grand jury, adult court, end of story."

If the Southwood student is sentenced as a juvenile, he could be free by age 21, Harper said. If the teen is convicted of first-degree murder as an adult, he could be in prison the rest of his life.

As Harper put it: "If they charge him with first, the options are there aren't any options."

In the wake of Tate's release, almost everyone involved in the case, including the victim's family, agreed Florida's justice system should be reformed to give judges more discretion in sentencing juveniles who are charged as adults.

Ed Griffith, a spokesman for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, said she has lobbied the state Legislature unsuccessfully to pass a measure that would allow blended sentencing.

SEEKING OPTIONS

Prosecutors take into account factors such as the juvenile's record, the seriousness of the crime and the child's age when deciding whether to charge juveniles as adults.

Blended sentences, Griffith said, would "ensure that those juveniles whose crimes merit extensive supervision are able to receive it so that the community is safe."

Griffith also noted that juvenile crime has gone down in recent years.

"Getting tough on juveniles who needed tougher sentences has certainly had an impact on the level of crime committed by juveniles and young adults," he said.

State Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale, has introduced a bill that would allow children under 16 who have been convicted of a capital crime to become eligible for parole if they have never previously been convicted of a felony. Under his bill, the child would have to be imprisoned as a juvenile offender for eight years and only then be considered for parole.

"The problem is that people are treating children as short adults, and they're not," Geller said. "If they still believe in the tooth fairy, it's inappropriate to sentence them to life in prison.

"I'm not willing to accept that you're going to put 11- and 12- and 13-year-olds in prison for the rest of your life for one act."

But Geller expects significant opposition in Tallahassee.

"No member of the Florida Legislature has ever been defeated for re-election or election to a higher post because they're seen as too tough on crime," Geller said. "You only lose because you're seen as too soft on crime."

Geller said the bill does not guarantee juveniles convicted of murder would automatically be released after eight years, only that they would get a second chance.

"We're not talking about gang bangers here," Geller said. "We're talking about kids who have not previously done anything wrong. Then it makes them eligible for parole after eight years. You do away with the mandatory minimum and with keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives.

"We're not letting anyone out of prison," he said. "We're just giving them a chance at redemption."

Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, D-Tamarac, last year tried unsuccessfully to introduce similar legislation.

"The purpose of the penal system is to punish, but I believe it's also to rehabilitate," Campbell said. "If we don't allow the rehabilitation side to be pursued, then we're really not a true, honest society."

COMPREHENDING CRIME

Many are reluctant to compare last week's killing to Tate's case.

Tate maintains he accidentally killed his friend Tiffany Eunick in 1999, while playing with her. In the Southwood Middle School case, police say the 14-year-old confessed that he had planned the murder, and a knife and bloodied latex glove were discovered in his backpack.

"People will compare him to Tate because you have a young defendant," said Brian Tannenbaum, a Miami criminal defense attorney. "But the means and methods are very different. This is not rough play that turned into a death.

"I think there's no question that he will be treated as an adult."

Before confessing to the crime, police said, the boy waived his rights to be questioned with an attorney present. Psychologist Helen Orvaschel says a teenager may not fully understand the ramifications of such decisions.

"At 14, it is difficult to conceive of long-term consequences. Long-term at 14 is this week or this month," said Orvaschel, a professor at Nova Southeastern's Center for Psychological Studies. "To be able to truly waive one's rights, I don't know if he comprehended the moment."

Staff Writer Diana Marrero and Miami Bureau Chief David C�zares contributed to this report.

Noaki Schwartz can be reached at nschwartz@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5004.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com

Attorney hired for boy charged with murder

David C�zares
Sun-Sentinel
Posted March 3 2004

The parents of a 14-year-old Miami-Dade County boy accused of killing his best friend in a school bathroom have hired the attorney who won Lionel Tate's release from prison.

Tate, who was sentenced to life at age 13 for killing a 6-year-old, walked free in late January after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

His attorney, Richard Rosenbaum of Fort Lauderdale, confirmed on Tuesday he has been hired to represent Michael Hernandez, who is charged with first-degree murder in the Feb. 3 slaying of Jaime Gough.

Rosenbaum filed a notice of appearance in court on Tuesday and entered a not guilty plea on behalf of his client, whom the South Florida Sun-Sentinel is naming because he is being tried as an adult.

"I'm representing him and looking forward to doing the best job we can do on this case," Rosenbaum said.

Hernandez's parents, Jesus and Kathy Hernandez, decided to hire Rosenbaum after a Miami-Dade County judge denied their request for a public defender on the grounds they have too many assets.

"If he files a notice of appearance then I guess that is for sure and for certain that he is the attorney at this point," Assistant Public Defender Tamara Gray said.

Staff Writer Paula McMahon contributed to this report.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com..

Judge: Miami-Dade teen can stand trial for murdering classmate

By Ihosvani Rodriguez
Miami Bureau
Posted December 9 2004

Fatal slashing in a Miami middle school restroom

Michael Hernandez is mentally ill, but the 14-year-old is competent to stand trial on charges he killed an eighth-grade classmate earlier this year, a Miami-Dade County judge ruled on Wednesday.

The highly awaited ruling by Circuit Court Judge Henry Leyte-Vidal clears the way for prosecutors to pursue first-degree murder charges in the stabbing death of Jaime Gough, 14, at Southwood Middle School.

Authorities say Hernandez confessed to stabbing his friend more than 40 times inside a school bathroom stall on Feb. 3.

Last month, a New York psychology professor hired by the teen's attorney testified Hernandez is a delusional schizophrenic who has no concept of the judicial system or the seriousness of the charges.

Prosecutors, however, countered with two experts who said Hernandez has obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental illness that shouldn't stop the teen from going to trial.

The judge considered his decision for more than a week before issuing a two-page order on Wednesday.

"The court finds based on review of the file and the testimony of the witnesses ... that the Defendant has a mental illness," Leyte-Vidal wrote. "However, the mental illness does not impact on the Defendant's competency to proceed with trial."

The judge did not indicate what mental illness he thinks Hernandez suffers. To reach his decision, the judge had to determine whether Hernandez meets a number of legal factors including understanding the potential penalties he faces and having the ability to testify relevantly if he chooses.

Had the judge ruled differently, Hernandez would have been institutionalized until deemed competent.

"It's a sad day in American jurisprudence when someone orders a severely psychotic teenager to go to trial," said defense attorney Richard Rosenbaum, who is contemplating presenting an insanity defense.

However, he did find solace in Leyte-Vidal's acknowledgement that Hernandez is mentally ill.

"I think people are starting to realize that he truly has serious mental problems and that it's not make-believe," Rosenbaum said.

Prosecutors did not return calls seeking comments.

If convicted, Hernandez could receive life in prison. A trial date has not been set.

Ihosvani Rodriguez can be reached at ijrodriguez@ sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5005.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com..

- Police, state assailed by grand jury over treatment of mentally ill

- From The Sun-Sentinel..

- Suicide Theory In Student's Slaying..

- Judge Weighs Access To Victim's PC..

- Butterflies For Jaime Gough..

- Evidentiary hearing April 2007..

- Trial 2008: A Victim Of An Impulse Control Disorder.

- Jury Finds Michael Hernandez Guilty Of First-degree Murder in Sept 2008.

- Michael Hernandez Sentenced To Life Without Parole..

-Articles and pictures..

- Blog Updates..

'Fighting Injustice'

Updated:
July 2009

Anthony Keith Johnson: Executed by lethal injection in Alabama 12th Dec 2002

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:03:46 GMT

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.

Johnson, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. after receiving a series of injections that first knocked him out and then stilled his heart.

Prison Commissioner Mike Haley said the execution went "very smoothly."

Witnesses estimated Johnson stopped breathing within five minutes after the first injection was administered.

"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.

Johnson was convicted of capital murder in the 1984 shooting death of Kenneth Cantrell of Hartselle, in Morgan County in north Alabama.

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.

Elder said Johnson was calm in the days leading up to his death, all the way to the moment he was strapped to the gurney, providing comfort to the many family members and friends who visited.

"Keith made it much easier for us. He reassured us," Elder said. "He was not concerned about Keith. He was concerned about his family."

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.

A prison chaplain knelt beside Johnson as the first chemical was injected and the two seemed to be exchanging prayers, Smith said.

"Keith seemed to be mumbling something and then he just stopped," Smith said. "About five minutes later, you could see death coming over him. The color was gone. It did not seem like he suffered. It seemed like he died in a prayer."

Johnson first received sodium pentothal and then Pavulon to render him unconscious. Finally, a dose of potassium chloride was injected to stop his heart.

###

12/13/02 State executes first by injection

KIM CHANDLER News staff writer

ATMORE .... Anthony Keith Johnson, 46, was put to death at 6 p.m. Thursday night, becoming Alabama's first Death Row inmate to be executed by lethal injection. Johnson was executed for his role in the 1984 slaying of Hartselle jeweler Kenneth Cantrell during a robbery attempt. Cantrell was killed in his home after being shot five times in an exchange of gunfire with men who came to his home under the guise of buying gold.

Johnson, strapped to a gray gurney with his arms outstretched and held in place by black straps and orange buckles, was executed in a clinical looking chamber at Holman Correctional Facility. Just before the drugs were administered at 6 p.m., Johnson made the hand sign for "I love you" in the direction of a friend and family pastor, his witnesses. His final statement was to acknowledge his friends and family. "They know I love them," Johnson said. The prison chaplain knelt at the side of the gurney and prayed while Johnson nodded and appeared to mouth words in unison with the prayer until becoming still.

The Alabama Legislature changed Alabama's primary form of execution to lethal injection.

###

ALABAMA:

Johnson executed by lethal injection

With a few deep breaths shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, Anthony Keith
Johnson became the first Alabama inmate to die by lethal injection.
Johnson, 46, was convicted of capital murder in the 1984 killing of a
Hartselle jeweler, who was shot when robbers entered his home.
Authorities said Johnson was not the triggerman but was injured by the
victim in an exchange of gunfire.

A Morgan County jury convicted Johnson in 1985, recommending he spend
life in prison without parole. A judge overrode that recommendation and
sentenced Johnson to die in the electric chair. Others who took part in
the robbery have never been charged, according to Johnson's pastor, who
witnessed the execution.

"This is an immense injustice," said the Rev. Thomas Elder, pastor of
Oak
Ridge and Basham United Methodist Churches in Hartselle.

Elder said he did not excuse Johnson for his role in the crime, but
"what
happened after is the most wrong." He warned that those who were
involved
in the crime, as well as the officials who allowed the execution to
move
forward, would face judgment themselves one day.

Prison officials said Johnson had remained hopeful most of the day
Thursday that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and another to Gov.
Don
Siegelman asking for a reprieve would at least postpone the execution,
but both appeals turned down by 4:45 p.m.

5 media witnesses watched the lethal injection. Elder and Johnson's
friend, George Dudley, also witnessed the execution.

At 5:53 p.m., corrections officers opened the curtain to the execution
chamber where Johnson lay strapped to the gurney, intravenous lines
already in place in each arm. He waved at witnesses and smiled.

Warden Grantt Culliver read the death warrant and asked Johnson if he
understood. He said, "It's clear enough, I guess."

When Culliver asked if Johnson had a last statement, Johnson said only
that he wanted to tell his friends and family he loved them, "but they
know I love them."

Johnson smiled at Elder and Dudley, raising his left hand, forefinger,
little finger and thumb extended in the sign language gesture for "I
love
you."

He lay with this head elevated, and at 5:58 closed his eyes, praying
along with the prison chaplain. At 6 p.m., his breathing slowed, he
shook
his head slightly and moved his jaw as his body went limp. His abdomen
constricted several times, and by 6:01 there was no further movement.
At
6:05, the color drained from his face. He lay motionless for nearly 20
minutes before the curtain was closed.

Physicians placed the time of death at 6:27 p.m.

Culliver said the process took a few minutes longer than anticipated,
but
the prison staff took care to avoid problems.

In July, Alabama legislators switched the state's primary means of
execution from electrocution in a chair nicknamed "Yellow Mama" to
lethal
injection. Besides Nebraska, Alabama was the only state left in the
country that still used electrocution as its primary method of
execution.

Johnson was the 1st to be executed in Holman's remodeled death chamber.
"Johnson said he had turned his life over to Christ; he was prepared
for
whatever happened," Culliver said.

Lynda Lyon Block, 54, was executed on May 10. She was the last person
to
die in the state's electric chair when that method of execution was the
only one called for by Alabama law.

Officials said there are 285 inmates on Alabama's death row.

(source: Associated Press)

- Trial Judge Overrode Jury's Recommendation Without Explanation..

###

Lynda Cheryle Lyon:

Executed by the state of Alabama on 10th May 2002.

Lynda Lyon and I corresponded for 7 years before she was sent to the electric chair ( Alabama's infamous 'Yellow Mama' )

I believe that the Governor of Alabama was fulfilling his intention to kill a woman as the last victim of the chair before it became redundant on July 1st 2002.

Lynda wrote the Governor asking for a reprieve (extra time) but he chose to state that she asked for clemency/mercy.
There is a radical difference between the meaning of these two words.

All telephone contact was cut off to and from her a few days prior to her execution and even her husband, George Sibley, was not allowed to call or fax her.
He was transferred away from Holman prison where he was incarcerated on death row and to where she was taken to be killed in the electric chair and so they never got to say goodbye. She was denied a TV interview but eventually after pressure
was applied, she was allowed a telephone interview with WSFA TV.

###

From The Poem "Song Of Myself" by Walt Whitman..
(Words sent to me by one of Colorado's "most dangerous" inmates..)

...I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

###

Both these people, Keith and Lynda, were Believers, as I am, and so
I know I will meet them in the next phase.

The Death Penalty..

Ottis Toole: Adam Walsh case transformed missing kid searches.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:51:38 GMT

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

25 mins ago

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.

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.

www.prisonpotpourri.com

Thomas Silverstein: The Caged Life (Florence, CO- ADX )

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:04:04 GMT

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

###

When the goon squad showed up at his place at five in the morning, Tommy Silverstein knew something was up. He wasn't accustomed to greeting guests at such an ungodly hour � much less a team of corrections officers, helmeted and suited up for action.

Lockdown world: Thomas Silverstein in 2005, a few months after his arrival at ADX, in Atlanta in the 1980s (inset) around the time he began his tour in solitary.
High lonesome: Located in the heart of a four-prison complex outside Florence, ADX was the government's solution to violence at other high-security prisons.
Dreams of flight: Silverstein learned about art in prison and discovered his "niche in life."
Alone in the crowd: Any trip outside his cell requires a heavy escort for inmate #14634-116.

In fact, Silverstein wasn't used to company at any hour. His home was a remote cell, known as the Silverstein Suite, in the special housing unit of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He'd been cut off from other inmates and all but a few emissaries from the outside world for more than two decades.

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 Mu�oz 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

Joseph Druce: Priest's Murder Video Online Prompts Probe.

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:19:26 GMT

Priest's Murder Video Online Prompts Probe

Inmates Do Not Have Internet Access

POSTED: 10:57 am EDT July 6, 2007

UPDATED: 12:18 pm EDT July 6, 2007

BOSTON -- A security video of prison guards ferociously tugging at the wedged-shut door of the cell where a convicted killer was strangling and beating defrocked pedophile priest John Geoghan has shown up on the Internet, prompting an investigation by Massachusetts prisons officials.

The video posted last month was brought to the attention of the Boston Herald, apparently by Joseph Druce, the man convicted of killing Geoghan inside a cell at Souza-Baranowski maximum security prison in August 2003.

"The truth about officer involvement in John Geogan's (sic) death," a handwritten note sent to the Herald and signed "Joseph Lee Druce" says.

The note then has the address www.youtube.com/JosephDruce in parentheses, followed by "The truth about officers allowing J.G. to die through their neglect. Let the truth be know (sic)."

The 10-minute video shows up to five guards at a time tugging at the door Druce had wedged shut with a paperback, while other guards stand at the ready to enter the cell as soon as it's opened.

About halfway through the video, guards pry the door open, and a number rush into the cell before emerging seconds later dragging someone out, presumably Druce, and pinning him to the floor. What appears to be medical personnel then rushes into the cell. Viewers can neither see the slaying in progress nor Geoghan's body.

Inmates do not have access to the Internet and state Department of Correction officials are investigating how the video made it to the Web, department spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said.

"We have no idea where he got it from. We don't know where the tape came from or how it got on the Internet," Wiffin told the Herald on Thursday night. "It is under investigation."

The president of the guards union said the state should "immediately use any legal remedy available" to get the video off the Web.

"We are deeply concerned that an internal security video was posted by an inmate or an inmate's family," said Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union.

"It's absolutely a public safety issue, posting emergency response actions of correction officers on the Web."

Druce was already serving a life sentence for murder when he killed Geoghan, 68, a central figure in Boston's clergy sex abuse scandal. Geoghan was serving a nine- to 10-year sentence for groping a 10-year-old boy, but had been accused of molesting as many as 150 boys.

Druce claimed he was chosen by God to kill pedophiles and unsuccessfully used an insanity defense at his trial.

In August 2005, the Herald obtained a video that showed Druce re-enacting the slaying in which he strangled Geoghan with a pair of socks, tightening them with Geoghan's own sneaker. Druce then climbed on his cot and jumped off repeatedly to show how he crushed the convicted molester's body.

Previous Stories:

July 6, 2007: Priest's Murder Posted On YouTube

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Seth Penalver:Convicted killer in 1994 triple homicide getting new trial.

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:12:12 GMT

Posted on Sat, Jun. 02, 2007

Convicted killer in 1994 triple homicide getting new trial

BY ROBERTO SANTIAGO

The chilling, grisly triple murder on Miramar's East Shore Drive was caught on tape -- on a home video surveillance camera hidden in the living room.

Casimir ''Butch Casey'' Sucharski, the flashy owner of Casey's Nickelodeon, a popular South Broward watering hole, had taken two beautiful young models to his Miramar Isles home the night of June 25, 1994.

The next morning, on a Sunday, at 7:18 a.m., two men later identified as Pablo Ibar, 27, and Seth Penalver, 26, entered Sucharski's East Shore Road home through a rear sliding glass door.

In the 22-minute video, an intruder in a hat and sunglasses can be seen tying and pistol-whipping Sucharski, 48, with a Tec-9 semiautomatic handgun. The gunman never removed the disguise.

Fifteen minutes later, a man later identified as Pablo Ibar kills Sucharski by shooting him at close range in the back of the head.

TOOK OFF HIS MASK

Ibar, the tape showed, had removed his mask and could be identified on the tape.

The models, Marie Rogers and Sharon Anderson, both 25, were tied up facedown near Sucharski. They also were murdered.

The intruders then took off in Sucharski's black Mercedes Sl convertible, drove it to Palm Beach County and set it ablaze on a remote road.

Miramar Police discovered the bodies the next morning, Monday, after Rogers' mother reported her daughter missing.

The heinous crime that fateful night 13 years ago remains among Miramar's ugliest. And the subsequent trial of the two defendants convicted in the murders was one of the county's costliest -- about $300,000. Both are now serving life sentences for the murders. The first trial ended in a hung jury in 1998. The second, in 2000, resulted in convictions.

Last year, the Florida Supreme Court turned down Ibar's appeal for a new trial but approved Penalver's.

During Penalver's appeal, justices questioned the value of the videotape, noting that there was no hard evidence, such as DNA or fingerprints, linking Penalver to the crime.

IDENTITY UNCLEAR

''It is difficult to determine whether Penalver is the individual with the hat and sunglasses,'' said the opinion, authored by Florida Chief Justice Barbara Pariente.

The justices ruled that jurors were prejudiced by ''irrelevant and inadmissible'' evidence.

The killers' identification and the credibility of witnesses who testified are sure to crop up again during Penalver's appeal. A court date has not been set.

Ibar's attorney, Peter Raben, was out of town and unavailable for an interview.

And Hilliard Moldoff, Penalver's attorney, could not be reached by The Miami Herald.

FLAUNTED CASH

It is believed the two gunmen targeted Sucharski, a lady's man who flaunted rolls of cash and flashy jewelry at his nightclub, a place one clubgoer described as opening when the sun went down and closing when the sun came up.

Ibar and Penalver are believed to have gone to Sucharski's nightclub, where they saw Sucharski in action.

The video shows the men rummaging through the house and stuffing things in their pockets, even removing Sucharski's boots.

Prosecutors said Sucharski, who owned a Cartier watch, kept between $10,000 and $20,000 in cash at his home.

Now, Casey's, at 5590 Hallandale Beach Blvd. in Pembroke Park, is long gone.

In its place is a soon-to-open restaurant/lounge called The Polo Club Inc.

Walter Blatch, who once worked as a dishwasher at the club, hangs out at the convenience store across the street from his old workplace, sitting on a plastic milk carton outside. ''Casey's Nickelodeon was a great little place, and the owner, God bless him, was a man who knew how to entertain and cater to his customers real good,'' said Blatch, 59, holding his walking stick and sipping a beer. ``He worked hard and partied hard, but the partying is what did him in.''

Blatch said Casey's late owner didn't deserve to die in such a vicious manner.

``I was surprised he died the way he did. He was always good to people and knew how to show them a good time.''

A decade before his murder, in November 1983, Sucharski's Pembroke Park club temporarily lost its liquor license after police arrested three employees on charges of selling cocaine to customers.

Sucharski claimed he didn't know of drug activity going on at his club.

DRUG CHARGES

But a few years prior, while he was owner of a nightclub in Buffalo, N.Y., Sucharski was arrested on cocaine and weapons charges.

Sucharski ''had a lot of friends and a lot of contacts,'' said Chuck Febro, Miramar's deputy police chief at the time. ``And he definitely had some enemies.''

If Sucharski had enemies, Blatch said, it was because of jealousy. The club owner's life was all about women, music, partying and making money.

''It's just a damned shame he is dead,'' Blatch said.

Willie Crain: A Plea From A Father To A Killer On Florida's Death Row

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:44:42 GMT

I read this article in the St Petersburg Times and would like to add my own plea to Willie Crain to divulge the whereabouts of this little child's body so she can be laid to rest.

Surely, if he is truly guilty as charged, Willie Crain would like to clear his conscience before his Maker before he dies of colon cancer. It would be the wisest and kindest thing to do.

Should anyone reading this article be corresponding with Willie Crain, please send him this message and article and try to persuade him to do the decent thing.

In closing:

� World's worst judge of men: Not only did Tampa's Kathryn Hartman invite Willie Crain Jr. home with her, so he allegedly could kill her 7-year-old daughter, but then she selected as her successor boyfriend James Olive, 48, who was just arrested for beating her up and going nuts when the cops arrived..

Source

It does seem as if mothers tend to put their children at risk by their choice of men. How can we remedy this failing? Feedback is welcomed.

Thanks..

AnnEz / 'Fighting Injustice'

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

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

Dysfunctional Family: Trial of boy in his father's death adds to legal battles in the case.

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:39:37 GMT

PLAY | BACK | NEXT " src="http://images.chron.com/images/icn-next.gif" width=9 border=0 minmax_bound="true" vsapce="1">

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

No one involved in the case, including defense attorney Chris Tritico and prosecutors Bill Hawkins and Mia Magness, can comment because the judge has imposed a gag order.

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

In a protective order earlier this year, a judge prohibited Geisler from contact with her younger son after finding that she had committed family violence in the past and could do so again, court papers show. The boy lives with the Greenes, but Geisler is still fighting for custody.

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

Court papers in a case concerning Rick Lohstroh's life insurance suggested that, in a writing exercise at school in April, the younger boy partially blamed his mother for the shooting.

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

If the 12-year-old boy accused of killing his father is incarcerated, he would begin his sentence at a Texas Youth Commission lockup but could be moved to a state prison once he turns 16.

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