Why I oppose the death penalty - Democratic Underground

H2O Man

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Wed Sep-21-11 02:56 PM
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Why I oppose the death penalty

In 1966, a person who I would later become friends with was arrested and charged with a brutal triple-murder. In his 1967 trial, the state of New Jersey would seek the death penalty. Although he was convicted, the jury recommended “triple life,” and my friend served 20 years before his case eventually reached the federal court level.

If an objective person looked solely upon the police and prosecutors' case, my friend was indeed guilty. Four white people in a bar were mercilessly gunned down by two black assassins. Three of the four died. Three witnesses testified that they saw my friend and another man leaving the bar, carrying guns. A police officer found bullets in the trunk of my friend's car. He had a reputation as a violent black militant who hated hated all white folks. And, with a bald head, fu-manchu and goatee, he looked dangerous.

As a young teenager, who was a nationally ranked amateur boxer featured in boxing magazines, I would read an article that raised questions about if this convicted murderer was actually guilty. I wrote to him, and began what has become a 40-year friendship. As a young adult, I would actually do work with his legal defense team, and hence have access to legal documents and court transcripts, many of which were never made public. But even what was included in those public papers was more than enough to convince a federal judge that my friend not only was denied his Constitutional rights to a fair trial – instead having one that relied on deception, concealment of evidence, and appeals to racism – but that he was indeed innocent.

The person that the police caught that night, actually robbing money from the victims, was an ex-convict wanted for a string of armed robberies in nine counties. Tapes of police interviews that were not provided to the defense attorneys showed that this gentleman repeatedly told the detectives that my friend and his co-defendant were not the gunmen. The head detective told him the two were “murderers, Muslims, assassins, (and) killers.” They told him that they would have outstanding charges against him reduced or dropped if he would agree to identify my friend, and that he would get the $10,500 reward being offered. “You would be doing justice for the victims' families,” the lead detective told him. “It'd be an eye-for-an-eye” in what he described as “the race war” in America.

The bullets found in my friend's car illustrate how far one bad cop can go. Though he would testify in court that he found them on the night of the murderers, police records that were only provided to the defense a decade later show that was untrue. In fact, this cop would not even file any report about the bullets at the time of the murder. More, they turned out to be NOT the type used in the triple murder; rather, they came from a different murder scene.

I do not believe that “all cops are bad.” In fact, I come from an extended family that has produced some outstanding investigators and detectives. But I do know that when two cops coordinate efforts to fabricate and plant evidence on someone they believe is guilty, that this influences the thinking of the honest ones. And when the honest ones present information they believe is real to a prosecutor, it becomes likely that an innocent defendant will be convicted. This is perhaps the number onereason why appellate courts are so important: it isn't merely the process of a fair trial for someone who was formerly considered “not guilty” before being convicted, it is the remedy for innocent people who are falsely convicted.

The top NJ prosecutor in my friend's case had believed he was a murderer. He submitted “evidence” to the jury that my friend was motivated by “racial revenge” – that a previous murder of a black man by a white man caused him to go into a bar and shoot four people he didn't know, simply because they were white. The fact that my friend didn't know the black victim wasn't important to the prosecutor. Neither were the facts that my friend had many good social and business relationships with white people, and that there was no record whatsoever that he ever had spoken negatively about white folks in general. In fact, when challenged in court to provide any evidence that my friend dislike white people, all the prosecutor could point to was the triple murder.

The shooting victim who survived the attack told detectives that it was not my friend or his associate on the night of the shooting. He gave a physical description that absolutely cleared my friend. In the trial, he would only say that he could not identify the gunmen.

A woman who was shot, and died from complications a month later, gave police a similar description of the gunmen. It would not be for another decade that we would find out that she had actually identified the gunmen to the police. The two crooked police concealed this information, for obvious reasons.

More, there were several other witnesses in the neighborhood who saw the actual gunmen, and who would talk to the police investigators. One knew the identity of the killers – the same people the one victim named. But this, too, was concealed from the defense. Several potential defense witnesses would be threatened and intimidated by police; two would actually be held against their will in other states, both before and during the trial. Years later, a witness – white, with no personal connection to my friend – would surface; he was a taxi driver who was in the same room with my friend, by chance, at the time of the murders. Police pressure had kept him afraid and quiet for many, many years.

I'm against the death penalty, in large part because my friend came so close to dying in the electric chair. In many ways, his case is not so different from that of other wrongly convicted people. He just happened to have the assistance of Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, and others. Today, he works with a law school in Canada, assisting the wrongly convicted, and fighting against the death penalty.

But I'm also against the death penalty, even for murderers. I do understand what it is like to have loved ones – friends and relatives – murdered. When I was a teenager, a girlfriend was murdered by a creep who then cut her up with a chain saw, to dispose of the body. I had an uncle murdered over a card game. Two brothers who were friends of my family since I was three would be shot and killed in a parking lot, in a racially-motivated hate crime. One of my cousins, an ex-Marine, was murdered over a ten dollar bag of pot. So my thinking on this topic is not the result of being isolated from the horrors of murder.

Finally, I do not frown upon everyone who is pro-death penalty. There are some people who I like and respect who favor capital punishment. Not many, mind you, but some do. There are certainly more people I view as limited in their insight by fear and hatred, who are more blood-thirsty, much in the manner of those people cheering Governor Rick Perry's record at a recent Tea Party “debate.”

Your friend,
H2O Man