The supreme question

The supreme question

Capital punishment

This newspaper article discusses Joseph Spaziano's appeal to the Florida Supreme Court that was schedule the day of the newspaper article's release. The article also describes the flaws in the case against Joseph Spaziano.

The Herald

The Herald. "The supreme question." The Miami Herald, September 7, 1995.

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

1995-09-07

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2 JPGs

300 DPI

English

Miami, FL

[heading] The supreme question
[subheading] Hear for 'Crazy Joe' The State Supreme Court today weights a case that never should have reached death's brink.

[start of the first column]
Today the Florida Supreme Court will hear, possibly for the last time, the simple, compelling case against the execution of Joseph Spaziano. If the justices consider the full, dismal story of Spaziano's trail, conviction, sentencing, appeals, and impending execution. They will pull the brake, just in time, on an accelerating injustice.
If they don't, a person whose guilt was never proved -- in any ordinary, logical sense of the word -- will die in Florida's electric chair just after sunrise two weeks from today. The state will have killed a man without any credible proof that he committed a capital crime.
As reporter Lori Rozsa set out in detail in yesterday's Herald, the twisted story of "Crazy Joe" Spaziano is not the stuff of sentimental Hollywood movies. Head of the aptly named Outlaw Motorcycle Club, Spaziano's contributions to society were unwholesome at best. But in 1975 he was found guilty of the ultimate crime, a gruesome torture-rape-murder, based entirely on the say-so of ne wily teenage drug addict named Anthony DiLisio.

Guesswork and improvisation
Mr. DiLiso's testimony was contradictory from the start. Most of it was cooked up under hypnosis -- at the hands of a hypnotist who previously had helped manufacture at least two false murder convictions. The scarcity of corroborating information -- no eyewitnesses, no physical evidence, not even a known cause of death -- gave the whole proceeding a noxious odor of guesswork and improvisation.
Mr. DiLisio now admits what many people already suspected: He made the whole thing up. He never saw any bodies, never heard Spaziano boast of the crime, never suspected Crazy Joe of murder. He did it, he says, to please his father (who had a grudge against Spaziano), to impress police, and to get himself out of a juvenile detention center.
Yet even after weighing all this, Gov.
[end of the first column]

[start of the second column]
Lawton Chiles last month came to the astonishing conclusion that none of it matters. On Aug. 24 he ordered the execution to proceed. His rationale lies buried in a secret Florida Department of Law Enforcement report whose partially revealed contents are flecked with self-contradictions, innuendo, and irrelevance.

Worse, Spaziano's pro-bono lawyer -- like nearly all lawyers representing indigent clients on Death Row -- no longer has an investigator working for him. Government funding for such services was terminated on Aug. 24 -- the day the governor signed Spaziano's current death warrant. Press reports, the attorney says, are now his only was of scrutinizing the state's case.

Three questions for the court
Now Just 14 days from an irreversible conclusion to this matter, the Supreme Court has invited lawyers in for one last set of arguments. Here, then, is a final opportunity for the court to ask, in behalf of all Floridians, the elementary questions that haunt this case"

Is there any reason to continue believing Tony DiLisio's weird, hypnotically induced 1975 testimony? Is there any reason to believe him now, when with evident anguish, he claims to have sent an innocent man to Death Row?

But the court shouldn't stop there. It also needs to answer a third question, only broadly related to Spaziano's case: Can the State continue to administer a death penalty with integrity when most of those on Death Row will have no means for effective representation? Until it can answer that question, the court will be hard-pressed, morally at least, to let any execution proceed.

Joe Spaziano's guilt or innocence is unknown. The Supreme Court needs to face that reality and stop the death train. Then it needs to ask: Who will prevent the next such error? Spaziano's worrisome ordeal dare not become the prologue to an era of death sentences without effective counsel.
[end of the second column]

[[ The image is of Joseph Spaziano speaking through a glass barrier. This image was taken by the Associated Press.]]

PRISON INTERVIEW: Joseph Spaziano talks about his case at Florida State Prison.

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