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CounterPunch
February
21, 2003
In a Land Where Justice is a
Game
Killing Amos
King
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
As it now stands, on February 26 Jeb Bush will
give the order to execute Amos King, an inmate on Florida's death
row who seems almost certainly innocent of the murder that put
him there. There's nothing new here. The state of Florida has
been trying to kill King for the past 26 years. It is testimony
to King's fortitude and courage that he has survived all previous
attempts by the state to take his life. But time is running out.
King was convicted of raping and killing
an elderly white woman, Natalie Brady, in March of 1977. He maintains
he is innocent. The facts back him up. He claims his trial was
a sham. Even a cursory review of the court records reveals this
to be a stunning understatement. Even so, the Florida justice
system grinds on, as if in killing Amos King it might also extinguish
all traces of its grotesque errors.
The case of Amos King encapsulates nearly
everything that is wrong with the death penalty: he is a black
man in a southern state accused of raping and killing a white
woman; he is poor; he was represented by a shoddy lawyer appointed
by the court; cops lied on the stand and manufactured evidence;
the forensic analysis and autopsy were both botched; the judge
kow-towed to the prosecution; the judge, the prosecutor, the
public defender and the jury were all white; he is likely innocent
of the crime.
"My being on death row all these
years, yet not executed by now, represents to many what is wrong
with the death penalty and court inefficiency," says King.
"The truth is it represents very poor, ever treacherous
legal representation and serious abuse and misconduct by the
trial judge and prosecution. It represents the sort of treatment
anyone is subject to who can't hire a good attorney. My case
represents the triumph of politics over process. It represents
racism. An how it combines with politics in higher places to
victimize the weak."
One of the reasons Amos King is still
alive some 26 years after a death sentence was put on his head
is that he chose not to stay quiet. He has fought tenaciously
for his life and the lives of others in Florida's grim death
house. He has become a jailhouse lawyer, a poet, and an unwavering
voice for the condemned.
Indeed, King even made the bloodthirsty
Jeb Bush, a man with no detectable conscience, blink. Most recently,
King was slated to be executed on December 2, 2002. But a scant
15 minutes before his scheduled execution prison officials interrupted
King's prayer session with Buddhist priest Casey Walpole to tell
him that the governor had issued a rare 30-day stay of execution.
The stay came at the request of attorney Barry Scheck, co-founder
of The Innocence Project, who demanded that the state conduct
DNA tests on recently discovered evidence. The fact that there
is new evidence in a case from 1977 tells you a lot about how
the justice system works in Florida.
There was plenty of reason for Bush to
tread with caution. In 2001, Scheck proved that Florida had condemned
to death Frank Smith for the murder of Shandra Whitehead, an
8-year old girl. While awaiting execution, Smith died of cancer
on death row. Scheck produced DNA evidence that exonerated Smith
of the crime. Smith wasn't alone. Florida leads the nation with
24 death row inmates released after DNA tests proved their innocent.
In many of these cases, the state has deliberately concealed
evidence proving the innocence of the condemned.
The test results from King's samples
came back a few weeks ago as "inconclusive." This might
convince a fair person that there was more than a reasonable
doubt as to Amos King's guilt. But Jeb Bush is not a fair person.
He casually dismissed King's plea for clemency and reset his
appointment with death for February 26.
Let's revisit what the state claims happened
a few hours after midnight on March 18, 1977.
At the time, Amos King was serving a
sentence at the Tarpon Springs work release facility for a gun
theft charge. The night prior to the murder King was working
at a local restaurant. A bed check by prison counselor James
McDonough found King missing at around 3:40 am. McDonough said
he later found King outside the building with blood on his shirt
and with the crotch of his pants dripping with blood. The two
men got into a fight. McDonough claimed that King drew a knife
and slashed him several times on the hand. King left the office,
then returned again to find McDonough talking on the phone with
his superior. He supposedly slashed the counselor again and cut
the phone cord. Then King fled the scene, ending up at his girlfriend's
house. King later turned himself in for fleeing the work center.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away in an all-white
neighborhood the home of Natalie Brady was aflame. When police
arrived, they found Brady's body. She had been raped, beaten
and slashed to death with a paring knife. The prosecution alleged
that King fled the work center after returning from work, broke
into Brady's house, tortured her, raped her, stabbed her to death,
robbed the house and then lit it on fire. Then they added an
element of the macabre to the mix. Dr. Joan Wood, the coroner,
testified that before she was raped, King jabbed knitting needles
into the woman's vagina, causing a wound that the prosecution
said explained the bloody crotch of King's pants seen by McDonough.
The state never produced those pants.
In Florida, the justice system works
like a fast-food restaurant. The murder of Natalie Brady occurred
on March 18. A grand jury indicted King for the crime less than
a month later. The first trial date was set for May 31. It was
continued until July 5, only two months after the indictment.
The trial, including the death penalty phase, lasted less than
three days. King was convicted and sentenced to death on July
8. He was put on death row on July 13, where he has resided ever
since-making him the dean of Florida's death row.
Why did King's case go to trial so quickly?
There's an unbelievably venal explanation. The presiding judge
in the case, Harry Andrews, was in a race with other judges in
Florida to preside over the first televised trial in the state.
In fact, Judge Andrews moved up the starting time of the trial
by a half-day in order to beat another televised trial starting
on the same day in Miami.
King's lead attorney was a public defender
and drunk named Thomas Cole. Cole and King knew each other. In
fact, Cole had unsuccessfully defended King on the gun theft
charges that had landed him in Tarpon Springs. King had criticized
his handling of that case and Cole had called him an annoyance.
As soon as King learned that Cole had been slated as his lawyer
for the Brady murder trial, he petitioned the court to appoint
a new lawyer. The court refused.
Cole was totally unprepared for King's
trial. In fact, he only met twice with King before the trial
began. Like many public defenders, Cole had been working several
other cases at the time. Indeed, the judge in the King trial
wanted Cole to try another felony case simultaneously.
In any event, Cole entered the King trial
in a state of mental and physical fatigue. On the morning the
trial was to begin, Cole asked the judge to remove him from the
case. "As an officer of the court, I cannot give Amos King
a fair trial today, or this week," Cole implored. The judge
denied his request. During the trial Cole again begged the judge
for a recess, saying on the record: "Judge, I am beat. I
have to go home and get some sleep." Later in the trial,
Cole announced again that he was exhausted. "I can't think
anymore," Cole told the judge. Again the judge refused.
If Cole was tired, it wasn't because
he was spending too much time exerting himself in the defense
of Amos King. Cole barely roused himself to cross-examine witnesses.
He offered only minimal challenges to the most critical (and
suspect) pieces of evidence offered by the prosecution. He failed
to poke holes in the prosecution's shifting timeline for the
murder, which would have demonstrated it would have been nearly
impossible for King to have committed the crime. He didn't probe
the biases of witnesses, including a prison guard with a record
of tampering with evidence and fixing polygraph tests. Cole also
failed to aggressively pursue the fact that the cops interrogated
King without an attorney and without reading him his Miranda
rights. Even worse, Cole inexplicably chose not to present exculpatory
evidence, such as hair and fiber samples taken from Brady's nightgown
and sheets, that might have cleared King.
Things started to go wrong from the start,
beginning with jury selection. In his rush to get on TV, the
judge corrupted the jury selection process by combining it with
the consolidation of the indictment and the particulars of the
charges, a scenario ripe with prejudice. Cole stood mute as the
prosecution empanelled a dream jury of 10 women and two men.
All white. Average age: 65. This jury of white grannies was ready
to consign King to death before the trial even started. In fact,
as the trial convened one of the jurors covered her face with
her hands, got the attention of the judge, and asked to be given
another seat because she was "horrified" of being so
close to King.
King was stunned as Cole sat on his hands
through the trial, allowing witness to present testimony that
veered sharply pre-trial depositions and the known facts of the
case. King repeatedly sent messages to the judge challenging
Cole's competency, only to be rebuffed and chided for making
a nuisance of himself. "Were I as violent as they portrayed,
I would've attacked Mr. Cole in the courtroom," says King.
The jury was primed to convict before
opening statements. But they were certainly enticed into voting
to King to death by the sensational testimony of the coroner,
the infamous Dr. Joan Wood. In the 1977 trial, Wood testified
that Brady died between 2:45 and 3:45 am, geared to harmonize
with the prison counselor's testimony that King was missing from
his bunk. But six years later Wood backpedaled. In her 1985 testimony,
Wood said death could have occurred as early as 1:45 am, when
King was working at Nellie Kelly's restaurant.
At the original trial, Wood also testified
that King jabbed knitting needles into Natalie's Brady's vagina
prior to the rape, opening a bloody gash. There were gasps from
the women jurors as Wood described this horrific scene. Wood
said she took vaginal washings of blood and semen. This potentially
exculpatory evidence has never turned up. The knitting needles
themselves didn't show signs of blood and looked weathered, as
if they'd been laying outside for months and not beside the bed
of the slain seamstress. Cole, of course, didn't follow up on
these anomalies.
In 1985, Wood recanted this sickening
theory. In court, she testified she couldn't determine what had
caused the wound to Brady's vagina. "Whether the injury
to her vagina is only tearing caused by a penis, or whether it
is an injury resulting from the insertion into the vagina of
some foreign object I can't say."
In retrospect, the macabre story of the
knitting needles seemed designed only to enflame the fears of
the elderly women on the juror. It worked. The deliberations
were swift and merciless. When the jurors entered the courtroom
to read their verdict they all sported dark sunglasses. A reporter
asked them why they were wearing shades. A juror explained that
the sunglasses were meant to conceal their sad eyes, reddened
by profusive tears for the victim.
As for Wood, she was later run out of
office for negligence and providing misleading and false testimony
in numerous criminal cases. The Pinellas county attorney Paul
McCabe vowed to "review all questionable cases" in
which Wood was involved. But despite the dramatic backtracking
in her testimony, McCabe didn't review Wood's conduct in the
case of Amos King.
How bad was Wood? In 1998, one of her
autopsies was reviewed by another medical examiner. He found
that Wood had misidentified the sex of a dead child and wrongly
attributed the cause of death to "blunt head trauma &
neck injuries." In fact, the child had died of pneumonia.
The accused was exonerated.
In 1983, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals
agreed with King that his lawyer Thomas Cole, who died in 1979
car crash, was incompetent. His death sentence was vacated on
the grounds that he had received "ineffective assistance
of counsel." In his opinion overturning the death verdict,
Federal Appeals Court Judge Paul Roney wrote: "King was
convicted on circumstantial evidence which, however strong, leaves
room for doubt that a skilled attorney might raise to a sufficient
level that, though not enough to defeat conviction, might convince
a jury that the ultimate penalty should not be executed."
But even this ruling was absurd. The court ruled that Cole was
incompetent, but only overturned King's death sentence, not his
guilty verdict.
So King's case bounced back and forth
from one court to another over the next 20 years. Stays have
been granted and overturned. New evidence has come forward; old
evidence has been lost. It took King almost 20 years to get a
complete trial record and 2,000 new pages showed up days after
the stay of execution had been granted. Lawyers and judges came
and went. One judge was disqualified for bias. In the 1985 retrial
on the death verdict, King, unable to offer evidence of innocence,
was sentenced to death once again. Last year, King ended up in
the courtroom of Judge Susan Shaeffer, who greeted him with an
outrageous salutation. "Why aren't you dead yet?" Shaeffer
taunted. "Why are you still alive?" It turns out that
Shaeffer had been a colleague of Thomas Cole in the Pinellas
county public defenders office. Welcome to the criminal justice
system in Florida, where judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors
are all members of the same grim fraternity.
The answer to Shaeffer's horrific question
is simple when you get to know the kind of man Amos King is.
Despite facing a stacked deck in a state that places no value
on the life a black inmate, he has never stopped fighting for
his life and fighting to expose the malign system that is conspiring
to extinguish it.
King is almost certainly innocent of
the crime for which Jeb Bush seems intent on putting him to death.
But it shouldn't matter. The history of his case starkly illustrates
the unspeakable cruelty of the nation's death penalty system,
where people are killed with barely a ripple crossing the conscience
of the state or the press. King's execution has been set and
reset numerous times. He has been saved from the death needle
with only fifteen minutes to spare and then told he will face
its lethal spike once again. This is a kind of mental torture
that few of us can comprehend and few other societies tolerate.
He watched helplessly as his botched, fast-forwarded trial was
declared to be fair over and over again. He witnessed his own
alcoholic lawyer slump through his trial as if suffering a 3-day
hangover. He has seen officers of the court lie, cops and the
coroner fabricate evidence and the press demands his head, instead
of exposing the corruption at the heart of the case. He never
got a jury of his peers. Not even one juror. But still, at this
late hour, he cries out for justice.
This is what it's come to. We live in
an age of casual barbarity, where we tolerate humanitarian bombings
and embrace politicians who send people to death as a demonstration
of their machismo. Don't look too closely at the way this all
works, because you'll be forever repulsed by what you see. For
this isn't a justice system; it's a bloody sewer.
Please spare a moment to help spare Amos
King's life. Send Jeb Bush an email demanding that he stop the
execution of Amos King.
fl_governor@myflorida.com
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at stclair@counterpunch.org
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February 15
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