12 20 256 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/3fce3c76a5dfb2098b66c6e5b8a2794f.jpg aa0518c29c76125c9972a13034b73454 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/9916906e34b7cab40d985a13238734db.jpg 1d8946cd7f980ad33cb55d342bf81680 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data newspaper article Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. King, Paul Text Any textual data included in the document Let me begin by saying that the Bullet will be playing a role of increasing importance to Mary Washington College in the coming years. MWC will soon face, I believe, a series of crises which will in large measure define the direction that the College will take in the future. The crises will occur because of conflicts between dissatisfied male students and an Administration that refuses to change school policy in certain important ways. The number of male MWC students has greatly increased over the last four years, and it appears that this trend will continue. In the long run, the increase will benefit the College; it will lead to more realistic learning and living environment. But there will be problems in the immediate future: because I don't think that an increasing male population will tolerate the anachronistic rules of this institution. Further, there are signs that the sexual revolution that swept the nation in the late sixties might finally be reaching MWC; if so, then the women on campus will oppose certain policies of this school as vocally as will the men. the classical example of MWC's refusal to accept the Twentieth Century is the College's visitation rules, but there are other, more subtle points as well. And, as discontent festers, the administration will probably respond with still more rules and still more trenchant enforcement of those rules. A more hard-line administrative policy might delay change for a little while, but eventually, the Powers That Be in GW will have to relent. As this situation progresses, the Bullet must keep the College informed of events as they occur. It must aggressively investigate the issues, and coherently define and editorialize on those issues. As The Free Lance-Star wrote a few years ago, "the Bullet must be free to express controversial subjects, to challenge the Establishment or the Administration or whatever." But the newspaper must always remember that if a publication is to be effective, it must be considered legitimate and credible by the community within which it exists---and the Bullet's community consists of faculty and administrators as well as students. If a newspaper readership is distrustful of the publication's motives and intentions, the paper will be impotent as a force for change. The Bullet must keep three things in mind if it expects to be considered a legitimate voice of the College community. First and foremost, its reporters and editors must do their journalistic homework. News stories must be coldly dispassionate and objective. And editorials must also be grounded in solid research; personal cheap shots at the Administration, for example, can serve no purpose except to demean the quality of the paper in the eyes of everyone. The recent experience of the Prometheus should stand as compelling evidence of what happens when a publication is taken over by a few hotheads who react to situations with passion and emotion rather than with calm reflection; nothing will destroy the credibility of a newspaper faster. Now Prometheus is trying to change its stripes and become a Phoenix, but it probably will not be able to rise from the ashes of its history. And MWC has a long memory; once lost, legitimacy is difficult for a publication to regain. Next year's Bullet editorial board had better learn this lesson quickly. Secondly, the Bullet must be acutely aware of the consequences that the material it publishes can have on others. It took me a long time, but I am finally beginning to internalize the reality of this fact. Arnold Rosenfeld, editor of the Dayton Daily News, put it well: "we see ourselves as driven professionals, informed by good intentions and purposes. Readers see us as moral vigilantes, driven only by the desire to sell newspapers. We protest our meritorious intentions. But the public does not understand. We protest that we bear no responsibility for the consequences of our journalism. It is a world, many of us feel, we never made. We only report. "Baloney. As human beings, editors and reporters ought to be terribly burdened, haunted, by the very real consequences of our decisions to publish. We ought to live uncomfortably with the fact that our journalism does damage. It can only be redeemed by the knowledge that, on balance, it helped more than it hurt." Thirdly, the Bullet must remain an integral part of the Mary Washington College community; members of that community must see the newspaper as their institution and their voice. Rosenfeld argues convincingly that any newspaper must remain an "organic part of the community, rather than a brooding presence towering above it in judgment. Newspapers need to be alert to community needs and failures, yet also be seen as institutions of fundamental goodwill, sharing pride as well as problems." The Bullet can be a powerful voice in the future; given the problems MWC must confront and solve in the near future, it must be a strong voice. But whether anyone listens to that voice and takes it seriously will depend on how much credibility the College community gives to its newspaper. And that will depend on how the Bullet handles itself in the months to come. MAM Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Bullet: Sink or Swim Description An account of the resource An article about the proper responsibilities and attitudes of a newspaper in order to remain relevant to the students and faculty of the school campus. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979-4-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, University of Mary Washington, Subject The topic of the resource general works--newspapers-- Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mello, Michael Allen Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Michael Mello. "The Bullet: Sink or Swim". The Bullet (VA), April 17, 1979. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 jpegs 300dpi Language A language of the resource English editorial letter integrity journalism Michael Allen Mello paper responsibility views https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/c9d1053373f7f88a1d0b8cef293451b7.jpg f4f8d341dffb1d5290db2567c109bcfd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The case of the hypnotized witness Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 3, 1995 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Kintz, Amber Text Any textual data included in the document Since 1978, 34 men convicted of homicide have been killed in Florida’s electric chair, a.k.a. “Old Sparky.” The 35th was to have been Joseph Spaziano, on death row for 19 years for the 1973 murder of Laura Harbets, a young hospital worker whose body was found in a Seminole County dump. In the 1975 trial, the jury, which was twice deadlocked but ordered to push on, recommended for a life sentence for the former president of the Orlando Outlaws Motorcycle Brotherhood. Florida is among the states allowing judges, in their robed wisdom and knowing they must run for reelection, to override sentencing juries. This one ordered death. In late May, Gov. Lawton Chiles issued a death warrant for Spaziano’s execution on June 27. On June 16, following an unprecedented outflow of editorial’s in the state’s major newspapers calling for either clemency or a new trial because of the flimsiness of the state’s case, Chiles granted a temporary stay of execution. Like previous chief executives of Florida—the state is second to Texas in the number of executions—Chiles does not hesitate to sign death warrants. He is not alone in his belief. Congress, the Supreme Court and Bill Clinton are now a united chorus for quickening the pace of executions. The president, calling appellate delays “ridiculous” and “interminable,” agrees with Republican death penalty champions that one appeal is plenty. The Spaziano case starkly counters this voguish faith in hurried justice. Twenty years were needed for doubts about Spaziano’s guilt to filter up to a governor and persuade him to pause and consider the defendant’s persistent claim of innocence. Among the glaring dubieties, the major one involves the fingering testimony of the state’s key witness, Tony Dilisio, a 16-year-old LSD and pot user when the crime occurred. When first questioned he offered only vague and uncorroborated accounts of what Spaziano allegedly said in general about murdering people. To jog the youth’s memory—no physical evidence was found to connect Spaziano to the crime—police interrogators called upon a hypnotist. Thus entranced, Dilisio now “remembered” that Spaziano had taken him to the dump to show him the victim’s body and brag of killing her. The jury was not told by Spaziano’s lawyer that the recollection of the dump site was induced by hypnosis. Florida now thinks better of allowing this sort of quackery into courtrooms. It was outlawed—though not retroactively—in 1985. Dilisio, now 37, agrees. Located by Miami Herald investigative reporters last month, he stated: “Surely they’re not going to let Spaziano go to the chair, to have his blood shed, on what a confused and scared kid said.” Dilisio added that he “could very well have been brainwashed. . . . With hypnosis, they plant things in your head.” The case turned on that planting. The prosecutor told the court, “If we can’t get in the testimony of Tony Dilisio, we’d have absolutely no case whatsoever.” As in nearly all death penalty cases involving questionable procedures and sketchy evidence, it was a lawyer of relentless energy who argued for Spaziano’s innocence. Michael Mello, a professor of Vermont Law School, author of two dozen law review articles on capital punishment, and one of a handful of specialists in post-conviction homicide law, is a former Florida public defender who has represented some 70 condemned men. Mello has practiced long enough to know that review courts, including the Supreme Court trade in questions of procedure and rarely on evidentiary issues of guilt or innocence. They are part of an increasingly busy assembly line, with death rows packed with nearly 3,000 people. Mello is an experienced professional skilled in unearthing evidence that persuades skeptics. This case, so riddled with questionable tactics, and based on one person’s sketchy testimony, prompts him to say: “I’m convinced Spaziano is innocent. I have never encountered a murder conviction that smells so rotten at its core.” Of his role in gaining the governor’s attention, Mello, who has worked pro bono on the case, is modest: “The execution was stayed because of the Miami Herald’s old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. It tracked down Dilisio and for the first time in 20 years he talked. It was not any defense lawyer or judge who stopped this execution. The Herald saved the legal system from itself.” True, so far. Spaziano could still get the chair. His hope for freedom is to be decided this month by the Florida Board of Executive Clemency, consisting of the governor and his Cabinet. One of its seven members is the attorney general, whose office is hellbent to see Spaziano killed. In a July 27 motion, it smear Michael Mello as “unethical” for having successfully publicized the case: He “lathered up the media to accomplish exactly what he wanted.” That’s quite a claim. It’s about as credible as the original—and now disavowed—testimony of the hypnotized teenage druggie. Student Editor of the Digital Item Dickinson, Terra Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The case of the hypnotized witness Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McCarthy, Colman Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-08-05 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 1 JPG 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Washington, D.C. Subject The topic of the resource Capital punishment Hypnotism Chiles, Lawton, 1930-1998 Spaziano, Joe Mello, Michael Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived "The Case of the Hypnotized Witness,” The Washington Post, August 5, 1995. McCarthy, Colman Description An account of the resource The article discusses the swiftness that the judicial system prefers the capital punishment system operate. Joseph Spaziano's case received a large amount of publicity and another appeal due to the vague testimony offered by a witness who had been hypnotized to "remember" what he had seen. https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/504de99032b535e3978bb801b564c20d.jpg 21e5b2e508ee5e45592873f85884d2e7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper aticle Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Martin Carille Text Any textual data included in the document Last week's episode left the cadre of Mary Washington revolutionaries alone in the dark of Seacobeck Hall--an unostentatious beginning for the infant regime. But after endurig a night in Seacobeck (it builds character, they say) the revolutionaries found renwed vigor. A week later we find them in full control of the dining hall and of neighboring Chandler Hall. The base of support has been broadened and the college was vitually paralyzed. But the Administration has yet to play its hand . . . President Prince Briggs Woodard leaned back in his swivel chair, exhausted. He was rudely disturbed by the buzzing of the intercom. Startled he fell backwards, catching himself on the edge of the desk. He lifted the receiver, bracing himself for the unbearable wheezing of his private secretary. “Mr. President, Mr. Mello from the Washington Post is here for his appointment.” “Mello?!” Ward blurted in near hysteria. His secretary’s voice fell to a whisper. “Not the same one, Mr. President, not even related. We had him checked out when he called for his appointment.” “Thank God,” the President sighed. “Give me a minute, then send him in.” He hung up, not waiting for an answer. What was happening? Leave for a week and come back to find open rebellion! A shooting! Violent retaliation? And then what? Nothing! “We didn’t want to do anything until you got back, Mr. President,” Bishop said. Obviously, no one understood him when he had said that the only threat to college security came from the inside! Now, despite his best efforts, word of the disturbance had leaked. Must have been one of those damned day students. “I know I should’ve locked ’em in their damned lounge,” he mumbled to himself. What would he tell the reporter? The truth. Always the truth. But in what form? The door swung open and the Post reporter entered. To Woodard’s delight, the man was nearly his age—but oh how the poor man showed it! Those ugly lines, that white hair, and that double chin. Woodard smiled. “Mister Mello! It’s my pleasure to have you here. It’s not often we get someone from the Post. What’s on your mind? Clean drug record this year . . . And I’m sure you noticed how many boys—er—men we have this year, but our women, OUR WOMEN! They’re still as attractive as ever, eh?” He winked slyly. The reporter did not respond. Instead, he pulled out a small pad from his breast pocket and flicked it open ominously. “Is it true that you’ve been serving store-bought cold cuts in the dormitories for dinner for the last week? Woodard’s face dropped, then he smiled coyly raising a chubby finger in realization. He walked over to his desk and stared intently at his calendar. “I thought so,” he remarked finally. “Halloween. You’ve been trying to throw a scare into me. How trite. Who put you up to this—Ray? Ed? Forrest? Who?” “Dr. Woodard, before I came over here, I took the liberty to look around a little bit. Tell me frankly, sir, have classes begun yet or are you taking a semester off? “Oh that!” Woodard pounded his fist on the desk. “It’s Halloween. We’ve never had classes on Halloween . . . as long as I’ve been here anyway.” The reporter breathed impatiently. “Dr. Woodard, do you know where your students are right now?” Woodard was outraged and he tried in vain to hide it. “Of course, I make a point of touring this campus at least once a week . . .” He stumbled over his words. “Mister Mello, I take great offense at your insinuations. If I have nothing else I have control over this campus. I make sure of that!” The reporter seemed placated. He shook his head pensively. He replaced the pad in his pocket and turned towards the door. Stopping short, he fished diligently in his pocket and pulled out a dime. He flipped it into the unsteady hands of the President. “There, now you have something.” He closed the door behind him. Woodard waited until he heard the wheezing amenities of his secretaries and the closing of the outer door. Immediately, he summoned his secretary on the intercom. “Mrs. Johnson, take this down. First, tell Servant to have his people report to Secobeck as usual starting tomorrow morning. We’re going to storm it.” He paused. “And get Chief Bishop on the phone for me . . . oh, and Mrs. Johnson, how many loyal students are there now? Is that all? Have them assemble in the ballroom immediately.” The wheezing voice protested. Woodard raised his eyebrows. “Cannon fodder? Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just that the rebellion is too obvious. We need them to attend more classes and walk around a little more. I want no one in their dorms before dark. That’s all.” The President listed impatiently to the pointless, but friendly suggestions. Finally, her voice tailed off and she hung up politely. The harried college president grinded his teeth as he began to develop a scheme. “Hmm, cannon fodder!” he thought to himself . . . TO BE CONTINUED Note: This writer feels no personal animosity towards Dr. Woodard or any other characters used (and to be used) in this series. Character distortions are purely for satirical purposes. Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Coup d'Etat Part IV Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathski Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Gathski. "The Coup d'Etat Part IV." The Bullet. October 30, 1979. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979-10-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 1 jpg 300 dpi Language A language of the resource English Subject The topic of the resource University of Mary Washington--Newspaper--Satire Satire--University of Mary Washington Description An account of the resource The fourth part of a satiracal column about a student protest articulated as if it were a revolution. This part depicts President Woodard's realization of the revolution's severity and his plan on combating it. 1979 Fredericksburg Gathski Michael A. Mello Michael Mello Prince B. Woodward Prince Woodard Satire University of Mary Washington https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/faccc93022869c23233eed745c3d7802.jpg 48bb27a5326fd1f8cecd4dfa2bf425f0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Colman McCarthy Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Washington Post Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989/09/03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 jpgs Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Mecklenburg, Virginia Title A name given to the resource The Debate Over Capital Punishment https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/bc012d0cb5719e817947ce60b80fde46.jpg f40963f646c132d639e91c35fde4fa10 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 2, 1983-1994 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Jaster, Matthew C. Text Any textual data included in the document When I visited Joseph Giarratano in early June in a state prison in Mecklenburg, Va., the sustaining life force in his death-row cell was a typewriter. It had the sacredness of a chalice, from which he drank of hope. Giarratano, convicted of killing two people, but whose guilt I and a fair number of others who have studied the records of the case see as open to grave doubt, is a gifted writer. He has produced articulate legal briefs on behalf of fellow prisoners, and his disciplined efforts are keeping with the view of Justice William Brennan: “Writing…is not an egotistical act. It is a duty. Saying ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind’ is not self-indulgence-it is very hard work we cannot shirk.” Giarratano occasionally sends me some of his essays. Their quality matches his “The Pains of Life,” one of 16 essays in this valuable collection of perspectives that examines the effects of legalized killing on both the condemned and those involved in the judicial watch. Giarratano, along with C. Michael Lambrix, one of the more than 300 death-row prisoners in Florida, and Willie Darden Jr., who was executed in Florida on March 15th, 1987, are the three voices from within the walls. The outsiders, including attorneys, criminologists, historians, a philosopher, a journalist and a minister, tell of their personal involvement with the condemned or offer their assessments of what governmental homicide means at the time when death rows hold more than 2,200 people- a record- and are sent more than 200 citizens a year. Collectively, the authors are ones whom many Americans dismiss or ridicule for misplacing their sympathies with criminals, not victims, or for leading the soft-on-crime lobby. That image is as hollow as the disproven notion that capital punishment is a deterrent. The authors’ sympathies are with justice and compassion, neither of which has been on display when murderers kill or governments kill murderers. “As I see it (though others will disagree)” writes Watt Epsy, the Alabama historian who has documented some 15,780 legal executions, “no murderer is so heartless and cruel as the society that executes him. No individual murderer confines the victim to restricted quarters over a sustained period of time, or arranges things so that the person to die knows the manner in which death will come and the time at which it will arrive, hoping against hope for the magical reprieve, stay, or commutation that might prolong his life.” In his essays Giarratano, who is 32 and has lived 10 years on death row, writers of conversations with cellblock guards, “most of whom avoid the subject of my death, the possible deaths of the men around me, and their own role in this death ritual. There are a few who avoid my eyes and say “Joe, it’s not my doing. I don’t want to see you die. There are other people who deserve it more than you.’ Many find it easy to avoid the subject, since they will not be the ones who actually pull the switch- they will only escort me to the death house and let their co-workers take over.” Giarratano’s phrase, “this death ritual,” touches on what may be the only explanation for 70 percent of Americans-according to Gallup-favoring executions. In their essay, Elizabeth Purdum and J. Anthony Parades, anthropologists at Florida State University, compare the rituals of death in U.S prisons with the sacrificial killings of the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the 16th century. The Aztec’s believed that killing prisoners maintained universal order and the government’s well-being. Purdum and Parades argue persuasively that a similar view prevails today. A “groundswell of support for capital punishments in the United States,” they argue, “springs from the universal ancient human impulse to do something in times of stress, even if it is only ritual…In the face of all the evidence that capital punishment does no more to deter crime than the bloody rituals of Tenochtitlan did to keep the sun in the sky, we must seek some broader, noninstrumental function that the death penalty serves…Modern capital punishments is an institutionalized magical response to a perceived disorder in American life and in the world at large, an attempted magical solution that has an especial appeal to the beleaguered, white, God-fearing men and women of the working class. And in certain aspiring politicians they find their sacrificial priests.” Most of America’s state killings occur in the South. Nearly all of the executed have been poor, were victims of violence themselves and had pre-conviction lawyers who were inept. It is the judicial system’s rank unfairness that helped motivate Michael Mello to represent death row citizens. In his essay he recalls working for a man who was executed in May 1986 after the Supreme Court, five minutes before the electrocution, voted five to four to deny a stay: “I will never forget the waves of helpless rage that washed over me as the clerk of the Supreme Court read me the orders [of denial]. It would have been easy-too easy- to blame the Court as an institution…Instead I found that the real target of my rage was myself: a participant in the system of legal homicide…Was I serving to legitimate the system by helping to provide sanitized executions, executions with the aura of legalism and therefore the appearance of fairness?” In the months before Willie Darden was electrocuted in Florida, I encouraged a number of my students at the University of Maryland to write to him. He answered their letters faithfully, and no student failed to have new slants about capital punishment. Darden wrote to them much the same message he offers here: “We execute for the traits of the person found guilty. If the person is black, uneducated, poor, outspoken, slightly retarded, eccentric, or odd, he stands a much greater chance of being executed than do those convicted of even worse crimes than he. Juries find it hard to convict one of their own, so middle-class whites are rarely in our ranks…Most, if not all, of the humans on death row have souls that can be made clean through love, compassion, and spirituality. However, to acknowledge this threatens our ability to execute, as we must dehumanize before we can kill in such a predetermined fashion.” The only lack in this collection of essays is the thinking of a murder victim’s family. Marie Deans would have been ideal. She is a Richmond, Va., women whose mother-in-law was murdered by an escaped prisoner. Deans not only fought the death penalty in that case but regularly visits death rows for her Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons. Few are more enlightened on the madness of killing for punishment than Deans, and few have gone as far beyond the myth that executions bring solace to the victims’ families. A growing literature- from Robert Johnson’s Condemned to Die, to The Death Penalty in America by Hugo Adam Bedau- offers alternatives to thinking and acting violently about punishing murderers. This work stands with the best of what’s been written. It represents the best of those who have seen the worst. Student Editor of the Digital Item Dickinson, Terra Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Debate Over Capital Punishment: Facing the Death Penalty Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McCarthy, Colman Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Washington Post Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989-09-03 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPGs 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Mecklenburg, VA Subject The topic of the resource Death row Executions (Administrative law) Giarratano Mello, Michael Description An account of the resource McCarthy anayzles the flaws of executions in death row. Talking with soon to be victim of exectuion, Giarrantano, among others, McCarthy lays out how complicated the legal use of executions are, and how many people think rather too quickly when favoring it ignorantly. https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/49fe268685b560eea95dd44f6c7c629e.jpg 1d913c434208338ecd4581e1c700d5f9 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/8128a96413fb9d37545af05bcc257536.jpg f21e76fd3f3ef519f2c67c690a8ef933 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 5 Text Text Any textual data included in the document The Feds’ Case Against Kaczynski By William Claiborne and William Booth The Washington Post Sacramento, Calif. – By the time a suspect was apprehended in April of last year, after the most extensive and expensive manhunt ever, the terrorist known as the Unabomber had become one of the most widely known serial killers in history. With the arrest of Theodore John Kaczynski in Montana, FBI agents uncovered a cabin filled with damning evidence, including not only a signature explosive device in the style of the Unabomber, but a draft of his infamous 35,000-word manifesto against technology and diaries providing incredible detail about Kaczynski’s thoughts and actions, material that appears to amount to a virtual signed confession. This trove of incriminating evidence will form the core of the government’s case against Kaczynski when his federal trial begins here with jury selection today. What possible defense will Kaczynski, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, offer? His lawyers appear to be ready to tell the jury that despite all that prosecutors know about the defendant, there is something missing: Kaczynski is mentally ill, they are expected to argue, probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. It is a high-risk strategy, yet one that many trial lawyers agree may be the only way to keep Kaczynski, 55, from being put to death if he is found guilty at the end of his trial, which is expected to last at least four months. Kaczynski’s defense lawyers, viewed as highly capable and impassioned, have said little to the press about their trial strategy, signaling only through court documents that they intend to marshal a partial defense arguing that the former mathematics wunderkind-turned-hermit, who according to his family harbored inside him a seething rage, suffered from “a mental defect.” If they do pursue this strategy, it would not be as a traditional insanity defense – excusing the crime because of mental illness. Instead, Kaczynski’s attorneys may attempt to present testimony that would suggest that their client suffered from a so-called “diminished capacity” and therefore was incapable of fully forming an intent to murder and maim. In other words, Kaczynski may have committed the crimes, but his sense of reality was so abnormal, so delusional, that he cannot be held responsible. Kaczynski’s lawyers, too, want the jurors to enter his primitive cabin, trucked more or less in its entirety to Sacramento from Montana, and to experience what his world was like: the tiny dark cell, without electricity or running water, where he lived alone for a quarter of a century, aloof from daily social interactions that, according to his family, so troubled him. “I think it’s pretty clear that the defense is going to introduce the issue of mental disturbance one way or another,” said Paul Mattiuzzi, a forensic psychologist in Sacramento who has testified in other mental-defect cases. “The evidence of mental defect may be important in the guilt phase. But it may be even more valuable in the punishment phase (if he is found guilty) … .” Legal experts agree. “This is what I suspect is really is going on,” said Peter Arenella, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and nationally recognized authority on insanity and diminished-capacity defense. “All sorts of mitigating evidence might be presented to show that he’s a strange bird, not someone we should execute, because he’s crazy as a loon.” Kaczynski was transferred Thursday from the Federal Correctional Facility in Dublin, south of San Francisco, back to the Sacramento County Jail, where he had been held for more than a year after his arrest. He was moved to Dublin in September after complaining of excessive noise and insomnia at the Sacramento jail. Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Michael Nelson said the accused Unabomber, who has abandoned his shaggy, mountain-man beard in favor of a neatly trimmed style, spends most of his time in his single cell quietly reading books from the jail library. “He’s a very prolific reader. He goes through books pretty quickly,” said Nelson. Nelson said Kaczynski’s cell is isolated from the other prisoners and that he is under 24-hour watch. He is allowed out of his cell for an hour of exercise a day in an exercise yard – alone – and is a “model prisoner,” the chief deputy marshal said. Kaczynski’s two lead defense attorneys are Quin Denvir, a federal public defender who has won reversals of three guilty verdicts in death-penalty cases, and Judy Clarke, who convinced a South Carolina jury that Susan Smith did not deserve the death penalty for drowning her two sons in a lake. Smith was sentenced to life in prison. After months of legal wrangling, however, Kaczynski last week refused to submit to examination by the prosecution’s psychiatrists. Such a refusal might serve to bar the defense from offering testimony from its own experts as to Kaczynski’s mental state, but it would not necessarily preclude other witnesses – such as family members, including his brother David, who alerted authorities that Kaczynski might be the Unabomber – from telling jurors they believe that the hermit is mentally impaired. [image – Theodore Kaczynski] [image caption] Kaczynski It is unknown whether Kaczynski’s brother or mother will be called to testify. David Kaczynski has said in interviews that he is tormented by the idea that his decision to turn in his brother to save the lives of other potential victims may end up costing his brother his life. The accused Unabomber has refused to meet with his family since his arrest. In the government’s own trial brief filed with the court last week, prosecutors laid out their case against Kaczynski – and it was clear from the documents that the government will seek to show that Kaczynski was a cold, calculating murderer who sought, in words from his diary, as quoted by the prosecution, to “kill someone I hate” and to gain “revenge on society.” They will attempt to show that the defendant knew exactly what he was doing as he patiently handcrafted his bombs, often with intricate carvings, and picked victims who somehow offended his anti-technology sensibilities. The former mathematics professor at the University of California at Berkeley is charged, specifically, not with murder, but with transporting and mailing explosive devices with the intent to kill and injure. Though the government seeks to prove that Kaczynski is the elusive Unabomber, who over a period of 18 [end page one] [start page two] years beginning in 1978 mailed or placed 16 bombs that killed three victims and injured another 29 persons, he is charged in the Sacramento trial with only four bombings between 1985 and 1995, which resulted in two deaths and two serious maimings. Most damaging to Kaczynski’s defense are voluminous diaries, hand-written journals, experimental logs and an uncompleted autobiography seized in the recluse’s primitive cabin near Lincoln, Mont., when he was arrested on April 3, 1996. A few excerpts from the written material have found their way into the court record, though the bulk of the material has not been made public. During a motions hearing in September, lead prosecutor Robert J. Cleary called the journals “the backbone of the government’s case.” Consisting of thousands of pages, many of them in three-ring binders and some written in Spanish or in an easily deciphered code, the writings include explicit admissions – indeed, prideful boasts in many instances – to each of the Unabomber’s attacks, according to prosecutors. Many of the writings, Cleary said, are innocent entries like “you know, my day in the woods, what I ate for dinner – that sort of thing.” But a smaller set of documents about a foot high contains devastating admissions, Cleary told U.S. District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., who will preside at the trial. Among other things, the government said, the notes reflect the writer’s experimentation with bomb components, his method of construction of at least seven explosive devices and chilling commentary of the success of his attacks. One journal entry offered by the prosecution was made shortly after the Unabomber’s first fatal victim, computer-store owner Hugh Scrutton, 38, was killed in Sacramento by a device left behind his store. “Experiment 97,” the entry reads, “Dec. 11, 1985, I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech computer store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20, the ‘operator’ … was killed, blown to bits.” Another entry, from 1980, describes the mail-bomb attack on the former president of United Airlines, Percy Wood: “After complicated preparation I succeeded in injuring the Pres of United A.L. but he was only one of a vast army of people who directly or indirectly are responsible for the jets.” Although many of the diary entries referred to in the government’s filings have been edited for tactical and legal reasons, prosecutors said the documents clearly show Kaczynski’s “desire to kill, his joy when he does so and his frustration when he does not.” Since the defense team has already agreed to a stipulation that virtually all the handwritten documents found in the cabin were written by Kaczynski, its efforts at keeping them out of the trial have centered on arguments that they are uniquely personal papers that should be held inadmissible on the basis of the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution. Burrell so far has refused to suppress the diaries, saying that “voluntarily prepared” documents are not protected by the Fifth Amendment even if they are private diaries that are self-incriminating. Michael Mello, a Vermont Law School professor who has consulted with defense attorney Judy Clarke on the issue, said, “They have to (suppress them), because what is so intuitively clear to me, as a keeper of diaries for 15 years, is a logical line of demarcation between diaries and other kinds of papers.” Unlike letters, Mello said, “There is something special about a diary, and there is something especially unsettling to the American spirit in the government sending a man to death … on the basis of his diary.” Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Martin, Kathleen Student Editor of the Digital Item Van Doren, Jamie Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Feds' Case Against Kaczynski Subject The topic of the resource Insanity defense--United States Kaczynski, Theodore John, 1942- Description An account of the resource The defense attorneys for Theodore John Kaczynski, the accused Unabomber, will attempt to argue that their client suffered from "a mental defect" and cannot be held responsible for his crimes. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Claiborne, William Booth, William The Washington Post Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Claiborne, William, and William Booth. "The Feds' Case Against Kaczynski." Valley News, November 12, 1997. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-11-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPGs 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English capital punishment criminal defense Insanity defense Michael Mello Theodore Kaczynski Unabomber https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/e51e3754b2a3c09a74a8b4cd9aa48018.pdf a1d73303322a0752730d58d30215e162 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/c18be8fda08a6d95c027d9e7f45c3a0e.pdf 4e3298685531229cc7e6c20bceb932b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Text Any textual data included in the document Part two in a three part series on the Mary Washington College Board of Visitors The present day Board of Visitors of Mary Washington College was created on April 10, 1972, when Virginia Governor Linwood Holton signed into law Senate Bill 433. This legislation provided for the separation of the College from the University of Virginia and the establishment of MWC as an independent institution with its own governing body: “The Rector and Visitors of Mary Washington College.” The legislation further provided that the Board “shall be subject at all time to the control of the (Virginia) General Assembly.” The twelve members of the Board would be appointed by the Governor, subject to confirmation by the General Assembly. At least nine of the Board's members must be residents of Virginia, and they may serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. The General Assembly gave the Board broad powers: the 1972 law specified that “the Board shall control and expend the funds of the college and any appropriate hereafter provided, and shall make all needful rules and regulations concerning the College; appoint the president, who shall be its chief executive officer, and all teachers, and fix their salaries, and provide for the employment of other personnel as required and generally direct the affairs of the College... fix... the rates charged the students of the college for tuition, fees, and other necessary charges.... have the right to confere degrees.” There, then, are the broad parameters within which the Board of Visitors must operate. But the Visitors found them too general to serve as a guide for the direction of a College; so the Board, at its organizational meeting in September 1972, approved a proposal that a BOV Manual be prepared which would serve “as the official expression of Board policy... the purpose of The Manual is to give interested persons particularly new members of the Board an insight and understanding of the Board functions and its relationships to the administrative officers.” This Manual is probably the best available insight into operations of the Board of Visitors of Mary Washington College. The Manual begins with a statement of Institutional Purpose. This declaration of College goals, which was ratified by the faculty in 1970 and re-affirmed by the Board of Visitors in 1973, states that “As a liberal arts institution, Mary washington College is convinced that a broad education in the arts, the sciences, and humanities, complemented by intensive study in a particular field of interest, constitutes an excellent preparation for life and citizenship. The College upholds the values of freedom of inquiry, personal responsibility, and intellectual integrity.” The Board of Visitors, as “the governing body of Mary Washington College,” is responsible for the effecting of these goals. To this end, the Board holds a regular annual meeting on the second Saturday of September at the College. At that meeting, the Board elects from its number an Executive Committee, which consists of the Rector, the Secretary of the Board, and two elected Board members. The Manual states that “The Executive Committee shall meet upon the call of the Rector. It shall consider all matters referred to it by the Rector or the President, and shall, in the interim between meetings of the Board, be vested with the powers and authority of the full Board and shall take such action as in its judgment is required.” The Executive Committee, as well as the Board of Visitors as a whole, is presided over by a Rector. The Rector, who serves two-year terms, is “especially charged” with the duty of “wise planning for the future, intelligent and considerate observance of the rights of the faculty and student body, including the preservation of the Honor System, and the maintenance of the independence of the Board.” The Rector presides over all Board meetings; he fixes the agenda and appoints committees (other than the Executive Committee). The Board of Visitors has within its numbers a host of consultative committees. The Rector appoints the standing committees (Finance, Building and Grounds, Alumni and Student Affairs, and Academic Affairs), and their chairmen every year at the annual meeting. The Manual states that the Rector is also “an ex officio member of all standing and special committees; the Rector and President may attend, and one or the other is expected to attend, all meetings. No committee is vested with any authority except the Executive Committee... All other committee recommendations are to be presented to the Board or, if appropriate, the Executive Committee.” The Visitors duties include the selection and appointment of the President of the College, and on February 8, 1974, the Board elected Prince B. Woodard to succeed the retiring President Grellet Simpsori. In a RESOLUTION, the Board stated that Woodard is to “serve at the pleasure of the Board of Visitors... he shall enjoy full faculty status and the rank of Professor of Education. The President shall be the chief executive, administrative and academic officer of the College, and as such, he is hereby directed, authorized and empowered to appoint and employ, upon such terms as he shall think best, such administrative and staff personnel as he shall deem proper for the administration and operation of the College, to fix their duties and functions, and to discharge any such appointee or employee; to receive, handle, and disburse the funds of the College from whatever source derived, and to authorize the execution of, on behalf of the College or of The Rector and Visitors of Mary Washington College, such documents as shall be necessary and proper for the operation of the College, the conduct of its business and the carrying into effect of its programs; to provide for the admission of students, for student discipline, including suspension and dismissal, and for the regulation of the various aspects of student life at the College; to make interim faculty appointments pending formal appointment by the Board; to fix, and from time ti time, to change the curriculum and academic requirements of the College, including those for the granting of degrees, and to authorize and grant degrees in the name of The Rector and Visitors of Mary Washington College; and to exercise such general authority and control over the assets, affairs and programs of the College as shall be desirable for its proper operation.” Three more aspects of the Boards operation, as outlined in The Manual, are of interest. First, “all communications directed to the Board shall be channeled through the office of the President. All communications from the Board shall be similarly channeled.” Second, “the Board at its discretion or upon recommendation of the President, shall consider appeals which may arise from the administration or operation of the College.” Third, “the minutes of the Board shall be open to inspection of any citizen in accordance with the law.” These minutes may be found in Dr. Woodard's office, and may be inspected by students during regular business hours. This discussion of the Board of Visitors of Mary Washington College is, of course, incomplete. Board meetings are not open to the general public (to say nothing of students) , so it is difficult to glean a penetrating understanding of what they are, what they do, and why they do it. But we are granted fleeting glimpses; in their Manual, in their Minutes of their meetings. These glimpses are better than nothing; but they are not sufficient to either give us a real understanding of the Board. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. O'Donald, Brexton Notes Additional information regarding your item. This content will not be viewable in the Public View. For the Mello 47-2 file, the first two scans are the same as the third, just not as legible. Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Function of the BOV Subject The topic of the resource Student newspapers and periodicals Description An account of the resource A Bullet article in which Michael Mello discusses the operations of the MWC Board of Visitors. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mello, Michael A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Michael A. Mello Papers, 1957-2008. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-04-11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPG Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, VA Board of Visitors Mary Washington College Michael Mello Rector University of Mary Washington https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/411627c9858df9a241d2d9ed7ddec345.jpg 375c37d69edb75fc19d255335c8dc6b4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Text Any textual data included in the document The verdict in the Anne Kight judicial case brings to the Mary Washington College judicial system a principle that has long been at the core of the federal court system: the principle that violations of the rights of students accused of judicial offenses, the violation of "due process," is in itself grounds for the invalidation of an entire case. Anne Kight was guilty; she did violate the visitation regulations. But because she was not read her right prior to the questioning, as is required by the Student Handbook, she received no penalty for her offense. In the words of the court, "we find you unanimously guilty of a visitation violation; however, we are dismissing the charges on the ground that you were not advised of your rights." The impact of this case on Mary Washington College is impossible to determine. Since the College judicial system does not employ the concept of precedents in its handling of individual court trials, the Kight decision can hardly be seen as setting a legal precedent. However, this decision certainly does establish a de facto precedent and may pave the way to making the "rights of the accused" a reality at Mary Washington College. This case brings the MWC judicial system more in line with the federal system. Both systems demand trial by peers; both have extensive appeals procedures. But most importantly, both have the power to impose serious penalties. When errors in procedure (such as occurred in this case) occur in federal court, the case against the defendant is invalidated. When a prisoner is not read his rights, the case is thrown out of court; when evidence is obtained illegally, the case is thrown out of court. The reason for this is simple: it is the only way to guarantee that the rights of the accused are protected throughout the critical initial stages of the judicial process. Anne Kight summed it up: "there is only one remedy to deter future violations of The Handbook directions by dormitory officials. Only by throwing these cases out of court can this court impress upon careless of overzealous dormitory officials that violation of The Handbook will do them no good. If the officials are made aware that failure to observe Handbook requirements will result in the voiding of the entire case, they will take those requirements much more seriously than they did in this investigation." This perhaps will be the over-riding significance of the Kight decision: no the rights of the accused must be observed. This decision must not be interpreted as any kind of license to commit visitation violations. On the contrary, it must be remembered that Kight was found guilty, though the sentence was suspended. The decision is directed more towards judicial officials than towards individual offenders. The message to offenders is as clear as ever: you will be caught, tried and punished. But now the message to dormitory officials is equally clear: you have an important responsibility, and you must fulfill it. The Kight decision had defined "due process." Defendants in judicial trials are guaranteed "due process" by the SA Constitution, by the Student Bill of Rights, and by the Statement of Rights and Responsibility of Members of the College Community. A precise definition of "due process" is difficult; the Supreme Court Justice Moody once wrote that the phrase is "elusive of exact comprehension." But the Court apparently agreed with the defense that "certainly it requires, as an absolute minimum, that the established investigative and judicial safeguards than guarantee our fundamental liberties must not be abridged by over-zealous law enforcement officers." Due process is precisely that: a guarantee that the duley established judicial procedures must be followed. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Velapoldi, Zachary Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Impact on Due Process Description An account of the resource BULLET New Analysis of the Anne Kight controversy in the Spring Semester of 1978. The article is primarily concerned with the idea of campus "due process", and the enumeration of rights, as well as the problem of "overzealous" dormitory officials that violate the THE HANDBOOK. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mello, Michael A. Webb, Gary Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Bullet Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-04-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 1 JPG Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, VA Subject The topic of the resource Student newspaper and periodical editors Anne Kight due process HIST 298 Judicial proceedings Mello news analysis student discipline The Bullet https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/f1200e9d4a4664fddfa45eddbc62cb90.jpg 4826dfd71c59872698ce3abd2c037242 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/76ea6ff2d3755e9ec5437f91965c7689.jpg f2d7b8ad065390bb59f35655e3f18cfc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 4 Text Text Any textual data included in the document [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. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Browning, Abbey Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The supreme question Subject The topic of the resource Capital punishment Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Language A language of the resource English Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-09-07 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPGs 300 DPI Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource The Herald Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Herald. "The supreme question." The Miami Herald, September 7, 1995. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Miami, FL Description An account of the resource 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. https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/33ee5cd1dcec9d0fd9dfe8050747442a.jpg eee50c05e1711378e9303802b86017d2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The two Crazy Joes Subject The topic of the resource Spaziano, Joe Description An account of the resource Joe "Crazy Joe" Spaziano became a point of interest for two magazines: The H Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barstow, David Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Barstow, David. "The two Crazy Joes." St. Petersburg Times, February, 1996. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996-02-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 5 JPGS Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant St. Petersburg, FL Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Text Item Type Metadata https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/1227e9b787a87555970c8164277ab644.jpg a07efcdc14236e16f7a4adf302f39299 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/294137f3e8f0cdc3f6bc328be0c3bb87.jpg 8bffce3d3f823e98e2b269eff7945681 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/936ffa4a531b2c7ced6fad400516e0ba.jpg 36b4083ccae5a6940abf2528c3945be7 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/4a4e277632e9b3c12f99853da7851ec9.jpg 56bcecb7b7556a04e5850e5fc6c3a21e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 4 Text Text Any textual data included in the document [Page One] [Title] The two Crazy Joes [Photographs of Joseph Spaziano during his first trial and one of his appeals to court] [Caption] Two photographs, one man. As different as Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano looks in these pictures is about as different as the coverage of his case in the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel. [Page Two] [Column One] With the help of God and the Miami herald, we’ll cross the finish line together. And alive. And free. Attorney Michael Mello, in a letter to his client, death row inmate Joe Spaziano The Sentinel will write whatever it wants, and if another (death) warrant comes, your blood will be on their hands. Mello, in another letter to Spaziano Last summer, two newspapers—the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel—set out to do the same thing. Each dedicated itself to finding The Truth in the case of Joseph “Crazy Joe” Spaziano, the Outlaw biker condemned to death 20 years ago for the murder of a young Orlando medical clerk. Each produced a stream of news stories based on standard reporting techniques: digging up records, tracking down witnesses, pumping sources, talking to key participants. But a strange thing happened on the trail to truth. In eight months of compelling coverage, as execution dates came and went, the two newspapers arrived at separate truths about Crazy Joe’s case, truths as incompatible as life and death. The Herald found in Spaziano a pathetic victim of injustice. The Sentinel found a “dead-eyed” rapist-killer. The Herald found shabby evidence, shaky witnesses and a lead detective who drove around the countryside in a squad car with a psychic holding a skull in her lap. The Sentinel described incriminating evidence, unshakable witnesses and a former Outlaw enforcer called Gatemouth who said Spaziano bragged that sex was best after a killing. The Herald found a guild-ridden prosecution witness who had motives to lie 20 years ago but now [End of First Column] [Beginning of Second Column] wanted to set the record straight? The Sentinel described the same witness as a troubled flake with reasons to spring forth with a bogus recantation. This extraordinary divergence was neatly summarized in headlines on editorials last month, when a judge ordered a new trial for Spaziano. The Herald: “Justice Awakens.” The Sentinel:”Justice Clearly Cheated.” How could two newspapers—both pro-death penalty and each committed to the truth—see the same case so differently? The coverage was shaped by forces unseen by readers. These newspapers pursued different questions and were driven by different ideas about the proper role of journalism. Their coverage was molded by ego and instinct. Stories were affected by reactions to what the other newspaper was writing, and by the manipulations of a few key sources. Coverage was even affected by one reporter’s premature delivery of a baby and another reporter’s childhood memories. The stakes were high: Either an innocent man was about to be executed, or a murderer was going to beat the system. “I think they were both zealously going after the truth, or what they perceived to be the truth,” says Ron Sachs, a former reporter who until recently was Gov. Lawton Chiles’ spokesman. ‘And I have no doubt in my mind that they were guided and motivated by pure altruism. That doesn’t mean they got closer to the truth. Both papers wrote accurate stories—factual stories. “But this was a classic example of how you can vigorously pursue a particular viewpoint and generate the facts to support your viewpoint. “The trouble is, at least one of these great newspapers is probably wrong.” Please see CRAZY JOE 8a [Heading] Crazy Joe from IA [Page Three] [First Column] Early last May, Michael Mello nervously dialed the number of Gene Miller, an editor at the Miami Herald. They knew each other by reputation alone. Mello teaches law in Vermont. He also represented death row inmates, including Spaziano. Mello usually avoided the media and confined his advocacy to the strict procedural rules that govern death penalty appeals. But this case was different. Of the 70 men he had represented on death row, Spaziano was the first Mello thought truly innocent. With appeals exhausted and the hour of execution drawing near, Mello decided to approach the Media. It was the first such phone call he says he had ever made. Gene Miller is a legend in journalism circles. He has built a career crusading against miscarriages of justice. His first Pulitzer Prize, in 1967, was for stories that cleared two convicts of murder they did not commit. His second Pulitzer, in 1976, came for reporting that led to the release and pardon of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, sentenced to death for murdering two Panhandle gas station attendants. Plenty of people want Miller to crusade for them, but he thinks most “innocent-man” claims are baseless. When Mello called and asked him to review Spaziano’s case, Miller agreed—expecting that he would take a quick look and toss it aside. But his interest surged when he saw Joe McCawley’s name in Mello’s records. McCawley was the discredited hypnotist who some say implanted false memories in a key witness in the Pitts and Lee case. Here he was again in the Spaziano case, and his role was even more prominent. Police had no eyewitnesses or physical evidence tying Spaziano to the murder of 8-year-old Laura Lynn Harberts. Her body left to rot in a dump, was too decomposed to even determine cause of death. The sole evidence linking Spaziano to the murder came from a troubled 17-year-old who, under McCawley’s hypnosis, said Spaziano had taken him to a dump to show off the body. The teenager, an Outlaw wannabe, also said Spaziano bragged of mutilating Herberts’ genitals with a knife while she was alive—testimony that sealed a death sentence for Spaziano. Miller asked Miami polygraph examiner Warren Holmes to read Spaziano’s trial transcripts. Holmes had worked with Miller in most of his big miscarriage-of-justice stories. Miller considers Homes “a man with a ruthlessly logical mind” and “a superb homicide interrogator.” Holmes told Miller it was obvious that the 17-year-old lied in his testimony. He didn’t even get basic details of the crime scene right. [End of First Column] [Beginning of Second Column] Without conducting a single interview, Miller decided Spaziano was probably innocent. He was appalled that testimony induced by hypnosis—a practice since barred from trials as unreliable—would be enough to send a man to the chair. Yes, the highest courts in the land had blessed the fairness of Spaziano’s trial, including the hypnosis. To Miller, that still didn’t make it right. In Miller’s aggressive brand of journalism, the reporter’s mission is to find the truth and then persuade others to do something about it. When the clock is ticking on a man’s life, that can mean stepping outside the ordinary boundaries of Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” journalism. It can mean taking a side and advocating a position. It can mean lobbying a governor in person (as he did for Pitts and Lee)m or lining up legal help for the condemned (as he did for Pitts and Lee and others). To those who say journalists should remain neutral and objective, he responds simply: “ A man’s life is at stake. I think I’m doing the right thing.” Miller had Mello write an impassioned opinion piece raising doubts about the Spaziano case. Miller edited the piece and arranged its simultaneous publication in Sunday editions of the Herald, the Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Miller also urged other editors at the Herald to dispatch a reporter to investigate Spaziano’s case. They decided to focus on a question that already had all but settled in their own minds: Did Spaziano get a fair trial? . . . Reporter Lori Rozsa has never covered an execution. Working out of Herald’s Palm Beach bureau, she writes mainly about the environment. When Gov. Chiles scheduled Spaziano’s execution for June 27, 1995, Rozsa’s editors asked if she had any qualms about witnessing an execution. She didn’t. She believes the Ted Bundys of the world probably deserve to die. Like Miller, Rozsa felt strong misgivings as she read through the trial records. The key to the case was the 17-year-old witness, Tony DiLisio. The prosecutor admitted he didn’t have a case without him. Rozsa, 35, flew to Pensacola to interview DiLisio. Nobody was home the first two times she visited. The third time he shut the door on her foot and threatened to call 911. The fourth time he said a few words then cut her short. Rozsa didn’t give up. On her fifth try, DiLisio began to talk. At first, he said he couldn’t remember a thing about the case. The longer he talked, the closer he edged toward saying his trial testimony had been a lie. He called hypnosis “witchcraft.” He said he was just a scared, confused kid. He said Spaziano never took him to the dump to see a body. [End of Second Column] [Beginning of Third Column] He said the execution should be halted. Rozsa’s gut told her DiLisio was being truthful. To her, it was significant that he had been so reluctant to talk. After the interview, Rozsa called Mello from her hotel. “She couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t believe it,” Mello recalls.” She was on cloud five or six.” Until then, Rozsa had remained skeptic about Spaziano’s claim of innocence. DiLisio’s recantation convinced her Spaziano was an innocent victim of an outrageous miscarriage of justice. “That sealed it for me,” she says. . . . Rozsa’s story describing DiLisio’s recantation ran on page one of the Herald on June 11. Remember, the murder occurred not in Miami, but near Orlando. As sometimes happens when newspapers get scooped in their own back yard, the Orlando Sentinel was slow to react to the story. The governor was not. He immediately asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate. Days later, the Sentinel ran a short Associated Press story about the FDLE investigation. The story was buried inside the paper. When Chiles stayed Spaziano’s execution, the Sentinel finally had its own reporter write a story. In it, he included references to the Herald’s work. His editors at the Sentinel wanted to cut out any references to other newspapers. “They didn’t want to admit that the story got by us,” recalls the reporter, Michael Griffin, the Sentinel’s Tallahassee bureau chief. Griffin was upset with his newspaper. He had asked permission to pursue the Spaziano case after the Sentinel published Mello’s opinion article. “I read that and thought,’Holy Christ, this guy could be innocent,’” he says. His editors put him off, and the Spaziano story languished in another bureau of the newspaper. When Griffin read Rozsa’s page one story about DiLisio’s recantation, he thought,” This should have been our story. This is our story.” Griffin’s editors belatedly agreed and quickly threw a platoon of eight reporters at the story. But their mission was shaped by journalism principles far different from the ones guiding the Herald. “You don’t have an opinion in this case,” Sentinel editor John Haile told his news staff. Haile considered it “terribly presumptuous” for any reporter to judge the fairness of a 20-year-old trial and decades of subsequent appeals. “I’m not sure where we are vested with this authority to say,’We know better than you,’” Haile says. He didn’t want his reporters crusading. Spaziano deserved justice, but so did the [End of Page Three] [Beginning of Page Four] [First Column] Victim, Laura Harberts. “We didn’t set out to try and free anybody; we didn’t set out to try and convict anybody,” Haile says. “A reporter’s job is to go out and find the truth, whatever that may be. The Herald began with the question: Did Spaziano receive a fair trial? The Sentinel’s editors decided to focus narrowly on a different question: Is Tony DiLisio telling the truth now? Like Lori Rozsa before him, Michael Griffin went to Pensacola to interview DiLisio. But where Rozsa left DiLisio’s home certain his recantation was genuine, Griffin left his interview equally certain that DiLisio was lying. “I caught the guy in the first 15 minutes in a half-dozen lies,” Griffin recalls. DiLisio said he had been “Christian and clean” for more than a decade. Griffin knew DiLisio had been arrested twice for DUI, and twice more for hitting a former girlfriend. Rozsa’s and Griffin’s opposite impressions of DiLisio resulted in distinctively different coverage. Believing DiLisio’s recantation was bogus, Griffin and other Sentinel reporters wrote stories tearing into his credibility now. They explored his recent brushes with the law. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio is a compulsive liar—but that he was telling the truth 20 years ago. Sentinel reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie now—possible fear of the Outlaws, maybe to cash in with tabloid TV. They dissected inconsistencies in his current story. They made not mention of the hypnosis checkered past. Certain DiLisio’s recantation was real, Rozsa and other Herald reporters wrote stories ripping into DiLisio’s credibility 20 years ago. They described him as a desperate, drugged-out teenager. They quoted friends and relatives who said DiLisio was a compulsive liar—but that he is telling the truth now. Herald reporters emphasized DiLisio’s motives to lie then—because Spaziano had supposedly raped DiLisio’s stepmother, because he wanted to please the police, because his father told him to. They dissected inconsistencies in his testimony from 20 years ago. They barely mentioned DiLisio’s recent troubles with the law. Rozsa would see Sentinel stories and wonder,” Are they reading the same stuff as me?” Griffin was no less dumbfounded by the Herald. “For the life of me I cannot understand how you can look at the same amount of material that we both looked at and come back with such widely different takes on this.” At times, Griffin felt he had to set the record straight. He thought the Herald painted too rosy a picture of Spaziano and his fellow Outlaws. Griffin, 34, grew up in Orlando, and he remembered the fearsome reputation of the local Outlaws in the 70s. There were tales of gang rapes and killings, and he recalled his parents keep- [End of Column One] [Beginning of Column Two] -ing him inside at night when women’s bodies began turning up in local dumps. After Spaziano was arrested for one of the “dump murders,” the newspapers were filled with Spaziano’s violent exploits. When Griffin wrote that Spaziano lived “a misfit’s life of spontaneous brutality and murder,” he says he was trying to counter the Herald’s depiction of Crazy Joe as a clownish charmer—”the most popular guy on death row.” “I was aiming that at his supporters, and I include the Miami Herald in that,” he says. On Aug. 24, 1995, Gov. Chiles reset Spaziano’s execution date. He said FDLE investigators turned up new evidence of Spaziano’s guilt, including witnesses who said DiLisio talked of seeing a body at the dump long before he talked to police and the hypnotist. The Sentinel had the story first. “It was a bad, bad day when Chiles signed that death warrant,” Rozsa recalls. She was upset at being scooped, of course. More deeply, she was upset that Spaziano seemed destined for the chair. Obviously I haven’t done my job,” she thought. If it came to it, she decided, she would not attend the execution. She could not bear to watch the electrocution of a man she believed to be innocent. . . . In politics, they say, perception can become reality. The same can hold true for journalism. In the Spaziano case, perceptions that the newspapers were biased only widened the split in the coverage. Spaziano’s attorney, Michael Mello, had assumed early on that the Sentinel would largely echo the Herald’s coverage, and he was thrilled when Griffin first called him about the case. Mello offered to open up his records to the newspaper. His strategy for saving Spaziano depended on generating sympathetic coverage that would put pressure on Chiles. When the Sentinel stories began to tail spin unfavorable to his client, Mello worried his strategy had backfired. The way he figured, the Sentinel was giving Chiles political cover to execute Spaziano. In response, Mello publicly labeled the Sentinel an “accomplice to murder.” He stopped taking Sentinel phone calls. He withdrew his offer to allow them full access to his files. He instructed Spaziano not to talk to the Sentinel. Tony DiLisio also clammed up on the Sentinel. The Herald—whom Mello referred to as his “investigative partner”—continued to get red-carpet treatment. Another key source was John Gordy, the FDLE agent in charge of the governor’s investigation into the Spaziano case. Early on, he spoke several times with Lori Rozsa. She impressed Gordy as a reporter who [End of Second Column] [Beginning of Second Column] Wanted to uncover what was “righteous and real.” But when Rozsa wrote a page one story about flaws and errors in Gordy’s investigation, Gordy felt betrayed. He and other law enforcement sources began to view Rozsa and the Herald as an extension of Spaziano’s defense team. “We ended our relationship,” he says. Gordy did not, however, end his relationship with the Sentinel. If anything, Gordy talked even more openly with Sentinel reporters. He fed them information he hoped would “set the record straight. One Sentinel story reported that DiLisio’s attorney declined comment, followed by this small dig: “He and DiLisio then walked down the street with a Miami Herald reporter, who first reported DiLisio’s recantation in June.” With key sources taking sides, perception became reality. “If you’re only hearing one side of the story, it’s kind of hard to be objective and balanced,” Griffin says. Editors and reporters at both papers say they strived to keep their stories balanced and their minds open. Sometimes fate interfered. Having written so much about Spaziano and DiLisio, Rozsa planned to write a profile of the victim, Laura Harbert. But Rozsa was pregnant, and her baby came several weeks early; the Harberts profile was scratched. To the discomfort of the reporters, both newspapers fueled perceptions of bias—and not just with their editorials (Herald—free him; Sentinel—fry him.) The Herald helped line up one of the state’s best law firms to represent Spaziano for free. And Gene Miller wrote a several page letter to Ron Sachs, the governor press secretary, explaining “why I think the state is very close to executing a man who in all probability is innocent.” In the letter, Miller offered to make Rozsa available to the governor, even providing her home number. (“I was wondering why he did that,” Rozsa says.) The Sentinel, on the other hand, ran this page one banner headline last month, on the first day of a crucial court hearing to decide whether Spaziano should get a new trial: “Former Outlaw: Spaziano Enjoyed Killing.” (Michael Griffin cringed when he saw that. “The headline,” he says,”was just way over the top.”) . . . In the Herald newsroom, some suspected the Sentinel of climbing into bed with the governor’s office to knock down [End of Fourth Page] [Beginning of Fifth Page] [Heading] At the Miami Herald [Photograph of Gene Miller] Gene Miller, a Miami Herald editor, had won two Pulitzer Prizes crusading against unfair convictions. [Photograph of Lori Rozsa] Herald reporter Lori Rozsa wasn’t sure if Spaziano was innocent until after the state’s star witness told her his trial testimony was a lie. [Heading] The witness [Photograph of Tony Dilisio] Tony Dilisio testified in 1976 that Spaziano showed him the victim’s body; 20 years later, he took it all back after Rozsa knocked on his door. [Heading] At the Orlando Sentinel [Photograph of John Haile] Sentinel editor John Haile didn’t want his reporters trying to judge whether Spaziano received a fair trial 20 years ago. [Photograph of Michael Griffin] Reporter Michael Griffin says he has never worked harder on a story. “I’m proud of the newspaper, proud of the way we did this story.” [Column One] their findings. What better what ease the sting of being scooped on your home turf? At the Sentinel, some suspected the Herald of climbing into bed with Spaziano’s attorneys. What better way to win a Pulitzer Prize than to get a guy off death row? People at the Herald took offense when a Sentinel reporter asked one of their writers,” Has the Herald lost its objectivity on the story?” Likewise, some at the Sentinel were angered by a letter Gene Miller wrote to the editor of the Sentinel’s editorial page, an old friend of Miller’s. Miller argued for Spaziano’s innocence and he included copies of the Herald’s coverage. In the Sentinel newsroom, Miller’s letter was taken as arrogance and insult. As if they hadn’t been reading the Herald’s coverage! Years ago, in college, Michael Griffin was an enthusiastic proponent of the death penalty. Then he read Invitation to a Lynching, Gene Miller’s 1976 book about the Pitts and Lee case. The book left him far more skeptical of the death penalty, though not quite an opponent. It also made him an admirer of Miller and his brand of crusading journalism. Covering the Spaziano story has changed Griffin’s mind—about Miller and the death penalty. “I am 100 percent opposed to the death penalty,” he says. How can the ultimate punishment possibly be fair if it is subject to the whims and judgments of newspapers? “Cops don’t matter, prosecutors don’t matter, judges don’t matter, juries don’t matter. Gene Miller is all that matters,” Griffin says bitterly. “He’s gonna sit back 20 years later and decide this guy is innocent.” So which newspaper got it right? Only Spaziano knows for sure. Last month a judge granted him a new trial. “In the United States of America every person, no matter how unsavory, is entitled to due process of the law and a fair trial,” the judge ruled. “The defendant received neither.” Prosecutors are appealing. It could be months before that appeal is resolved, and even longer if a jury ever gets a chance to sort through this tangled case. If and when that happens, count on one thing. The Herald and the Sentinel will be there, each in pursuit of the truth. Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Carolyn Hardnett contributed to this story. [End of Article] Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Barstow, David Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Debes, Elizabeth Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The two Crazy Joes Subject The topic of the resource Spaziano, Crazy Joe Description An account of the resource As two newspapers, the Herald and the Sentinel, cover the same story of Joseph "Crazy Joe" Spaziano, they report two completely different stories. David Barstow evaluates why these two reliable newspapers published two different views of the case, as well as asking the question of which one was correct in the end. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barstow, David Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Barstow, David. "The two Crazy Joes." St. Petersburg Times, February, 1996. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02-25-1996 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 5 JPGS Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant St. Petersburg, FL "Crazy Joe" Spaziano 1995 Against Execution court cases Court decisions and opinions. criminal defense death penalty Florida capital sentencing statute Florida death penalty Florida Death Row Florida newspapers Gene Miller newspaper The Herald The Sentinel https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/37ab0bd363ed4521f11e328ee953538d.jpg dff1090559915c06f6b221667860c56a https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/396e4840126874148ce2920bd17bfdd1.jpg f2c0569057338a231411959972489f46 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Text Any textual data included in the document For the past ten to twenty years there has been a constant rise in awareness of religious cults in the United States. There are the Hare Krishna's, scientologists, Zen Buddhists, and many others. Yet one stands out as the largest and perhaps the most controversial-the members of the Unification Church, commonly referred to as "Moonies". The Unification Church was founded by Sun Myung Moon. Moon claims that he decided to form the church after a vision of Jesus appeared to him on Easter morning, 1936, while meditating on a mountain. In the vision, Jesus told Moon to go forth and finish the job that he, Jesus, had started. From that point on, Moon worked at building his following to to what is now a membership of several million which spans the world. The basic belief of the Unification Church is published in the Divine Principle, a book written by Moon. The Unification Church claims that there have been three stages in the history of human development, the first Adam, the second Adam, and the Lord of the Second Advent. The first Adam refers to the Adam of Genesis. Moon claims that the spiritual downfall of humanity was a result of Eve's having had sexual intercourse with Lucifer. Then, in an attempt to redeem herself with God, she had intercourse with Adam. This constituted the physical downfall of man. The Second Adam, according to Moon was Jesus. Moon claims that Jesus was no more the son of God than the rest of humanity. However, he claims that Jesus was intuned to God and was aware of his desires. Jesus' mission was to complete the job Adam and Eve began, forming the kingdom of Heaven and Earth. Yet, before he could accomplish this, he was crucified. We now come to the last stage-the Lord of the second advent. According to Moon, this person was born in Korea around 1920 and is already married. His job is the same as that of the first two Adams. Despite the fact that Moon fits the above stated description, neither he nor the Divine Principle pubicaly claim that Sun Myung Moon is the Lord of the second advent. Although the theology of Moon is controversial, it is more the method Moon uses to indoctrinate his members that invites criticism. They are first asked to attend a weekend retreat where they are bombarded with love, brotherhood, and teachings of the church. Constantly accompanied by dedicated believers, they are always kept busy and given little time to sleep. Afterwards, it is strongly suggested that they attend an intensified, week-long version of their initial experience. The end of the second retreat leaves potential members exhausted and saturated with Moon's ideas. Many will become believers. Once they join the church, there are a great many of demands placed on them by Moon (i.e. selling flowers, prosleytizing). They are expected to comply with all demands without question. In an interview with Time Magazine in June 1976, Moon stated, "I am a thinker, I am your brain when you join the effort with me you can do everything in utter obedience to me. Because what I am doing is not done at random, but what I am doing is under God's complaint". Another major area of controversy is the way in which children reject their parents once they join the movement. Moon, in the same Time article explained "You must start over again your new life, from that point denying your past families, friends, neighbors and relatives". Moon goes on to claim that he and his wife are the true parents of his followers. Sun Myung Moon is indeed a very controversial man. Not only does he challenge the authoritative position of Jesus Christ but seems even to imply that he himself is a Divine Figure. What is most interesting, however, is the nature of the prevailing arguments against Moon. The majority are concerned with Moon's indoctrination techniques and the power he wields over the lives of his followers. Few involve objections to his theological doctrines. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Ivancic, Bailey Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Unification Church: Faith or Mind Control? Subject The topic of the resource religious groups Description An account of the resource Describes the controversy surrounding Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Samuel, Jordan Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Newspaper Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPG 300 dpi Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context mello: 36 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, VA religion Sun Myung Moon Unification Church https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/ec7af6ee7090560875d0e91879a5ad77.jpg d1eaecdd739a0de26f57b8b59f20f600 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 3, 1995 Text Text Any textual data included in the document Time is running out Gov. Lawton Chiles should ask himself this question: Does he really want to send Joseph Spaziano to his death knowing that there are serious doubts about the man's guilt? It's not enough to suggest, as Chiles has done, that the courts have the responsibility for making sure that innocent people are not executed by the state. Chiles signed Spaziano's death warrant and only Chiles can spare him from his date with Florida's electric chair on June 27. Time is running out for both the gover-nor and the condemned man. What's the rush to execute Spaziano when so much doubt hangs over his conviction? Spaziano was convicted for brutally murdering Laura Lynn Harberts, an 18-year-old Orlando hospital technician whose body was found tossed on a garbage dump in Seminole County in 1973. Everyone wants her killer brought to justice. But we risk compounding the the tragedy by turning our backs on the significant questions about Spaziano's guilt. As we have said, Spaziano is no Boy Scout. A member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, he earlier was convicted of raping and slashing a 16-year-old girl. He may deserve to rot in prison for that crime, but he does not deserve to die for a crime that he may not have committed. The case against him dangled on a thin thread of hypnotically induced testimony from a witness who now says he doesn't remember a thing about his court appear-ance. "How do I know what I said back then was reliable?" Tony Dilisio asked in an interview with the Miami Herald last week. Dilisio's pleas are just the latest in a stockpile of circumstances that ought to make Floridians uncomfortable. Wanting justice for Laura Harberts and her family is not mutually exclusive to being horrified that the state might electrocute a man based on blatantly flawed treatment by the courts. Spaziano's jury, badgered by a judge to come to a verdict, had enough doubts about his guilt to recommend a life sentence., which was bumped up to death by the judge. Jurors were never told the state's witness recalled his convicting testimony only after he was hypnotized, evidence that is no longer admissible in Florida. For two decades the case was appealed, and it was reviewed by the state Supreme Court four times; at no time during the process did anyone revisit Dilisio. After the Herald found him, the governor's office says it will try to do just that. Micheal Mello, a former appellate attor-ney for Spaziano and now a law professor in Vermont, hopes Chiles will see the case for clemency, but he's not optimistic. "So many people have blood on their hands that it sticks to the skin of no one," Mello says. "It's always someone else's responsibility to ensure that an innocent man is not de-stroyed by the Sunshine State." People who believe it is their duty should send a fax to Gov. Lawton Chiles at (904) 487-0801, or write him at Plaza 5, The Capitol, Tallahassee, FL 32399. Although citizens reported they got the run-around this week when trying to phone the governor's office on the matter, his citizen's services office, (904) 488-7146, is keeping track of "yes" or "no" opinions on clemency for Spaziano. Your Voice is important. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Vol. No./Issue No. Volume and issue number for the newspaper (if available) vol. 68, issue 5 Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Elms, Jason Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Time is running out Subject The topic of the resource Capital punishment Editorials Description An account of the resource A 1995 St. Petersburg Times editorial urging Florida residents to contact gov. Chiles to pardon Joseph Spaziano's death penalty. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. Petersburg Times (FL). Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived St Petersburg Times. "Time is Running Out." (St. Petersburg, FL). June 15, 1995, p. 14a. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource June 15, 1995. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 1 JPG 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant St. Petersburg, FL. https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/e42d31e9796722644ec47f1058f3b08e.jpg b5afe018f8bd9c8c8bf65099548b9c52 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Text Any textual data included in the document Tuesday, September 26, 1978. Photo by Paul Hawke. "Toga!" Hamlet House, without John Belushi, will be giving a toga party on September 29. Three of the House "Animals" are shown lounging on the porch of their cage. Pictured are Michael Mello, Skib Skibinski, and Randy Kirby. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Latane, Sharon C. Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Toga! Photo Subject The topic of the resource Student newspapers and periodicals Description An account of the resource A photo of three male students standing on the porch of Hamlet House with a sign advertising a toga party. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hawke, Paul Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Hawke, Paul. "Toga! Photo". Mary Washington College Bullet, Tuesday, September 26, 1978, Michael A. Mello Papers, 1957 - 2008, Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-09-26 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpg 300 dpi Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, VA Hamlet House Mary Washington Bullet Mary Washington College Michael Mello Paul Hawke Randy Kirby Skib Skibinski student social life The Bullet toga party https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/c5c776f0e912e99428210eeb9bbfabe9.jpg 8b2108f1c1fc36768328b77d489b3228 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/cab416e22515ee6518dfde71283d581e.jpg d5cf8b20448de817ec0ec57d81c2a772 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 3, 1995 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Skibinski, Nicholas Text Any textual data included in the document Gov. Lawton Chiles was right to stay the execution of Joseph Robert Spaziano. The convicted murderer may actually be a victim of unreliable testimony, inept legal representation and questionable police work. Spaziano, 49, had been scheduled to die in the Florida electric chair on June 27. He stands convicted of the murder and mutilation of Laura Lynn Harberts, an Orlando nurse whose body was found in a trash dump near Altamonte Springs in 1973. Chiles had previously signed the fourth death warrant ordering his execution. Spaziano will remain on death row, where he has been since 1976. In addition to granting the stay, Chiles has ordered a thorough investigation of the case by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. This is long overdue. On the surface it sounds as if Spaziano were a perfect candidate for execution. His sentence has survived repeated appeals; he was already in prison on a heinous charge when police brought murder charges against him; and before going to prison he was the leader of an Orlando motorcycle gang. AND YET, THERE are aspects of his case that raise serious doubts about his guilt. Spaziano's prosecution and conviction is a story that does not inspire confidence in the judicial system. The key witness against him was a Tony Dilisio, who was 16 years old at the time of the murder. He said he had once idolized Spaziano as an outlaw biker and hoped to become a member of the gang himself. About a year after the crime, Dilisio told police he had a vague recollection of Spaziano bragging about mutilating and murdering young women. After being placed under hypnosis, he said that Spaziano had taken him to the dump and boasted, "Man, that's my style," as they viewed the remains of two dead women. It is a sickening account, if true. Dilisio, now 37, has said he remembers getting married at 21, but everything before that is a blank. He was 18 at the time of Spaziano's trial. The prosecution's case rests largely on Dilisio's testimony. Spaziano and the victim were slightly acquainted, and she was overheard telling someone on the telephone, "Hold on a minute, Joe," as she turned o speak to her roommate shortly before she was killed. But the identity of the "Joe" on the telephone was not Spaziano. The police knew that the "Joe" on the telephone was actually Joe Suarez, a co-worker at the hospital where Laura and her roommate worked. But this was never disclosed to the jury. Another troubling aspect of the trial is that the jury never knew Dilisio's hazy story was drawn out of him by police using hypnosis. This takes on even more significance in view of the hypnotist's credentials. Michael Mello, a lawyer who has handled appeals for Spaziano, said the hypnotist was shown to be a quack by Miami Herald editor Gene Miller in his book "Invitation to a Lynching." Ten years ago the Florida Supreme Court held that hypnotically induced evidence was unreliable and inadmissible. The ruling was not retroactive so it did not apply to Spaziano's case. The defense was also not apprised of another suspect the police had considered during their two-year investigation. Mello said records show that police were zeroing in on a known rapist and had a witness who placed him at the scene of the crime with several women near the time of the murder. The suspect flunked more than one polygraph test and told police "he didn't know whether he committed the murder." None of that information was given to the defense at the time of the trial. One would expect that these omissions would get the attention of an appeals court. Gail Anderson, a state-appointed lawyer representing Spaziano, said those facts were unknown to the defense until 1989, well past a time limit for raising such objections. Spaziano was also not helped in his trial by his friends, fellow Outlaws who turned out in full biker dress in an idiotic show of "support" for their pal "Crazy Joe," whose nickname appeared on his indictment. Spaziano maintained his innocence but never took the stand to deny the charges. The jury twice told the judge they could not reach a verdict, and both times were sent back with instructions to be more diligent. Finally, they convicted Spaziano of first-degree murger but recommended life in prison. The trial judge overruled them and sentenced him to die. It appears, too, that Spaziano had incompetent legal representation at the time of his trial. Mello described the inmate's defense attorney's work as "not totally abysmal," pointing out that the lawyer knew about Dilisio's hypnotically enhanced testimony but didn't bring it up or attack the credentials or methods of the hypnotist. Laura Lynn Harberts has been dead for 22 years, and that terrible fact must not be forgotten. Society has an obligation to render justice for her death and punishment for the perpetrator of this grotesque crime. But Florida has an equally important obligation to make sure that the state, acting on behalf of the people, does not put an innocent man to death. That could be the case with Joseph Spaziano. CHILES AND THE STATE Cabinete have the power to grant clemency, which ranges from immediate release to a sentence of life in prison. The governor has indicated he is reluctant to interfere with judicial decisions without great cause. He is right to have such a cautionary attitude. In court, one hopes, the facts are separated from speculation and emotion. Witnesses are under oath and face perjury for lying. Sometimes, though, the system fails. This could be one of those times. We trust the governor and Cabinet will weigh the evidence and do what is right. There are some serious holes in the case and nagging doubts about the guilt of this man. There should be no room for doubt when the penalty is death. Student Editor of the Digital Item Dickinson, Terra Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Too much doubt in Spaziano case Subject The topic of the resource Capital punishment Description An account of the resource This editorial describes the case of Robert Spaziano, a murder convict on death row. The editorial points out inconsistencies in the case against Spaziano and argues that doubt cannot exist with the death sentence. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived "Too Much Doubt in Spaziano Case." The Tampa Tribune (Tampa Bay, FL), June 17, 1995. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-06-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPGs 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Tampa Bay, FL https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/808bd0b756eafdc41396af80991ab380.jpg 028eaef7e11c047881a1c82d1d577321 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/a64befea40e6f4091dac49dfdc0a1a6d.jpg 39370f5c482cb7f874a0f4fa70fdf345 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/f0583045667f1452690f531d5e41cf98.jpg 4dd2c94d31edfc5da61db85d457899f4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 2, 1983-1994 Text Text Any textual data included in the document Vermont prides itself on its progressive approach to incarceration, especially in its treatment programs for offenders. But a recent visit to the state by the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project is bringing those programs under closer scrutiny, and raising questions that cross and recross the lines between philosophy, physiology, and law. Do these programs mean to punish people or change them? Do they work> Are they Legal? Last month, the ACLU sent Gov. Howard Dean a long letter criticizing conditions in Vermont's prison system. In the letter the ACLU claims that the states treatment programs for violent offenders and sexual offenders are "of an extraordinarily intrusive and dubious nature," that they are coercive, and that they force prisoners to waive their rights to confidentiality. Drawing on reports from inmates and their lawyers, the ACLU also criticism the way programs are staffed, claiming that the programs "vest untrammeled power to practice 'psychotherapy' in the hand of unqualified guards, ex guards, caseworkers and contractors, whose attitude towards prisoners is usually hostile and adversarial at best, and not infrequently vindictive and sadistic." The ACLU refuses to comment on the letter, which has been obtained by the Valley News, or on its past prison activities elsewhere in the country. Nor would Department of Corrections Commissioner John Gorczyk talk about the ACLU's criticisms of the state's treatment programs other than to say they are "more philosophical than legal in nature." The Comment is telling. Mental health professionals, lawyers and corrections officials interviewed for this story had difficulty restricting their comments and observations exclusively to their own disciplines. "It's a problem you encounter whenever you introduce medicine, or mental health, into law," says Michael Mello, a Vermont Law School professor who specializes in criminal and constitutional law. "The agendas are so different it introduces a warping effect." The agenda of psychiatry is to make people well, he says. The agenda of criminal justice "is ot making people well but making them act right, behave a certain way, and also to punish them even if they're well and are acting right now. The punitive dimension is the most dramatic difference." Punishment is the issue that falls under Constitutional protection. The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Since the early 1970s, the legal test of that provision has been "whether a punishment violates the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," Mello says. "It;s a good, evocative term, supplied most often in capital punishment cases. And, as it implies, the standard of what's constitutional changes as the cultural norms change." Vermont's program for violent offenders is mandatory for all inmates convicted of violent crimes, as well as those who are determined to have a history of violence. Inmates serving time for sexual offenses are told that parole and probation may hinge on their successfully completing a program for sexual aggressors. Is that coercion? "Probably no more coercive than plea bargaining," Mello says. But similar policy on sex offenders, passed by the Kentucky legislature in 1986, is being challenged in the state's circuit court, according to Barbara Jones, general counsel for the Kentucky Department of Corrections. The Legal issue, says Jones, is that in order to participate in the program, a sex offender must admit his guilt. "Some don't believe they have a problem," she says. "Others, who are challenging their conviction on appeal, have been advised by their attorneys not to admit." And there's the rub: Admitting guilt could be self-incriminating, and might mean a conviction for a second crime. So far, the state court has ruled that the program and the requirement to admit are constitutional, Jones says. "But out case, or someone else's, could wind up in the (U.S.) Supreme Court." In the past the Supreme Court has upheld the prosecution of criminals for crimes they admitted to under treatment, Mello says. "But I wouldn't want to make book on the way these questions would be resolved by the Supreme Court and presently constituted." Nor would he wager on the outcome under Vermont's Supreme Court. "That court has always gone beyond the minimum standards to protect the rights of suspects." Vermont's sex offender program also requires that offenders admit guilt, says William Pithers, a clinical psychologist and director of the Vermont Treatment Program for sexual Aggressors. In the 11-year history of the program, Pithers can remember only one istance in which an inmate's admission led to a second conviction. "His sentence ran concurrently, so he would up not doing any more time than his original sentence," he says. Under state law, teachers, doctors and counselors in Vermont are required to report the sexual abuse of minors to authorities. Counselors in Vermont's treatment program are bound by this mandate as well. Minors are given this protection because the state assumes they may not have access to treatment otherwise, Pithers says. Counselors are not required to report crimes involving adults. Sex offenders who agree to treatment are required to sign a waiver of confidentiality, according to a published description of the program. The programs are constructed and supervised by mental health professionals. Although the treatment team makes recommendations to the parole board, the board is under no obligation to follow the recommendation. "The parole board is an independent agency and has, in the past month, paroled four people against the recommendation of the treatment program," Pithers says. "That's the way it should be - a system of checks and balances." Pithers emphasiszes that the program itself is not coercive. Offenders are taught that committing a crime is a personal choice - actually, one in a long series of choices that has resulted in their arrest and conviction. Counter to popular myth - and to old, disproven theories - sexual aggressors are not mentally ill, they are not swept away by irresistible impulses, and they are not oversexed, Pithers says. Nor are sexual aggressors suffering from a simple lack of self esteem. The philosophy behind the program: what sexual aggressors need is to become conscious of the choices the make that lead to acts, and to recognize the consequences of their behavior on other people. The focus of treatment is teaching others to empathize with their victims, and to identify the patterns of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that lead them into abusive behavior. Depending on the individual, offenders are taught to acknowledge their emotions and their "thinking errors," to manage their anger, to alter abusive sexual fantasies and urges. The goal: to give offenders the skills they need to catch themselves slipping into old patters and correct the behavior and ultimately to prevent relapses. A Corrections Department study using cumulative figures from 1982 to 1991 shows the treatment to be most successful for child sex offenders, somewhat less so for rapists. Since the beginning of the program, about 30 of the 473 offenders treated have been brought back to prison for repeating their crimes. "No form of treatment wil eliminate all recidivism by sexual aggressors. No form of treatment can remove a person's ability to exercise free choice," Pithers says. The philosophy behind the treatment program: Sexual aggressors need to become conscious of the choices they make that lead to criminal acts, and to recognize the consequences of their behavior on other people. But when does treatment become punishment? A technique that raises red flags to civil libertarians is the use of an instrument called a penile plethysmograph. The device, when attached to the penis of a male offender while he views slides or listens to tapes of people in various sex acts result in arousal. Proponents of the device say it is necessary to break through the denial that keeps many offenders from seeking treatment for their deviance. "Some men don't get aroused until they hear that blood is spurting from the face of the women they have just punched," Pithers says. "They can deny it, but a counselor in the next room can see the evidence clearly." In some cases, recognizing a deviant pattern of arousal is a necessary step toward treatment. Pithers says that Vermont uses the plethysmograph primarily in a mandatory assessment of offenders before treatment begins. Offenders are alone when they use the device, which is attached to a measuring instrument in an adjoining room. "Even I wish those things weren't necessary. It would be wonderful to be able to treat individuals who are turned on to fantasies about assaulting people by making them feel better about themselves, but the reality is we can't. Violent Offenders Program Unlike Vermont's sex offender program, the State's treatment program for violent offenders is mandatory and is not supervised and carried out by mental health professionals. "We don't assume people are sick. We assume they're lawbreakers," says Jack Bush, a consultant who designed Vermont's program. Bush, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, says that the program doe not rely on confidential disclosures or an intimate alliance with a therapist. "The program is very pragmatic and methodical," he says. Though treatment is mandatory, it's a soft shell, Bush says. Inmates are told "your history demonstrates you're a high risk offender. Our solution is to incarcerate you for the maximum sentence. Another is to teach you skills, give you the ability to control your own risk. You get to choose your course." If offenders successfully complete the program, they may be released earlier on parole. The program, like the state's treatment for sexual aggressors, is built around the theory that violent behavior is a choice, based on patters of thought, feelings, and beliefs. Once a person is aware of that pattern, he can chose to change it. "This is not a therapy we impose on offenders or something we do to offenders. It's a technique we teach them, a rational hopeful process," he says. Treatment takes place in groups, where offenders listen to each other vocalize the thoughts that run through their heads in situations that inspire them to violence. Offenders are taught to recognize false assumptions and to substitute non-violent problem-solving techniques. They keep journals - or Thinking Reports - of their efforts to recognize and change their own abusive patters. Offenders are also taught that partial lapses do not mean total failure, that a chain of events that results in a crime can be stopped at several places. The program was deliberately designed to use corrections officers, not mental health counselors, because it is meant to be integrated into day-to-day life inside the system, Bush says, not separated from it. Ideally, the program could be an impetus for system-wide change, a model of a new, collaborative relationship between corrections officers and inmates. At a training workshop sponsored by the New England Council on Crime and Delinquency in Burlington earlier this month, Brian Bilodeau, a former guard and now a case work supervisor at the Northwest Stat Correctional Facility in St. Albans, offered himself as an example of someone who'd turned around from a punitive attitude toward inmates to a positive one. It was his participation, as a corrections officer, in the violent offender program that made him aware of the destructive role he was playing, he said. For more than an hour, he and a small group of consultants and corrections officers talked about the difficulties in translating a good idea and a hopeful vision into real change. "We're not very good at implementing ourselves into a new vision," said Bush. "But there are glimpses of the light all over here." Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Vol. No./Issue No. Volume and issue number for the newspaper (if available) Vol. 42: Number 158 Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Stroh, Cooper Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Treatment Programs For Inmates Raise Deep Questions Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Serrell, Nancy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993-10-26 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 3 jpgs 300 DPI Language A language of the resource English Subject The topic of the resource Constitutionally legality of correction facility's treatment programs for sexual offenders and violent offenders in Vermont. Description An account of the resource An article about treatment programs in Vermont dealing with sexual and violent offenders. Programs in Vermont deal with the rehabilitation of inmates with questionable methods that some argue are not constitutional. Mello, Pithers, and Bush, three authorities on the subject provide counter arguments and a description of the programs purpose and execution. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Valley News Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Vermont American Civil Liberties Union Inmate Treatment Programs Jack Bush John Gorczyk Law and Mental Health Michael A. Mello Prison Correction Programs Rehabilitation Sexual Offender Treatment Programs Vermont Violent Criminals Violent Offender Treatment Porgrams William Pithers https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/9c161b76eaf50dc1c3af3e03742b8d95.jpg 72cb6a8701476fd97e7c421e1bab76e2 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/34c5b8ba3c624b9e8d6c193a2b768134.jpg c85742f05d84966929059cbeaa9c9356 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 1, 1976-1979 Text Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Carretto, Suzannah Text Any textual data included in the document Ninety-three percent of those students responding to a recent S.A. Senate survey indicated that they feel that there is a need for more open student body meetings. One such meeting was held on Tuesday, February 13 at 7:30 p.m. Out of a total student population of 2360, approximately 30 attended. The meeting took place immediately after MWC President Prince B. Woodward addressed the Student Senate. Many people at the open student body meeting expressed the opinion that the content of some questions asked of Woodward at the earlier meeting were pretty and that their presentation was immature. Others disagreed, arguing that the issues presented to Woodward were important to the MWC academic community. Still others asserted that the issues themselves were important, but that the students were not following the "proper channels" in dealing with them. For example, it was suggested that the absence of washers and dryers in Tyler and of locks on the bedroom doors of Marye were not matters to be raised in a forum with the President of the college. The open student body meeting began with a short address by Patrick Everett, S.A. Academic Affairs Chairman. Everett stated that plans were being made to convert ACL Lounge A into an all-night study room. The room is scheduled to open Wednesday on a probationary basis. Following this, S.A. Vice President Steve Schlimgen opened the floor for questions about his performance in office. It was at this point that the debate concerning the quality of the questions asked of Woodward at the Senate meeting began. One student said that "Woodward gave us one hour and we blew it; we wasted it with petty gripes rather than centering on the big problems that face MWC." Another student, taking exception, argued that these "petty problems" were really the tangible things that directly affect the quality of like at MWC. She felt that the meeting with Woodward had been productive. "Our goal tonight was to open lines of communication between the President and the students. We have made him aware of our problems and he listened." The question then became: How did Woodward respond to the student views presented to him? Some felt that his attitude was condescending and evasive, that he interacted with the audience at the meeting as a father does when explaining things to a small child. Others felt the opposite: that the President had been open and honest, explaining what he could and promising to look into that which he could not explain offhand. Despite Schlimgen's attempts to give the meeting some semblance of coherence, heated discussion continued between members of the audience. A matter raised at a recent Senate meeting was brought up: a student left MWC under what some believe to be suspicious circumstances. One member of the audience argued that the entire question is a private matter between the former students and the college administration. The point was then made that the ex-student herself had requested an investigation of the circumstances surrounding her departure; hence, it was a matter within S.A.'s jurisdiction. Student Association President Laura Buchanan advised the audience that she and Campus Judicial Chairman Jane Daniels had already contacted all parties involved (including the former student), that their investigation was complete and that there were no irregularities in the student's departure from MWC. At least one member of the audience remained unsatisfied, however, and suggested that the investigation should continue. Three issues were raised toward the end of the meeting. First Schlimgen announced that Dean Clement had refused to join President Woodward in addressing the Senate because of the treatment she received the last time she met the S.A. Senate. Schlimgen added that he feels Clement is the recipient of much "unjustified grief--it's her job to enforce the rules set up by the B.O.V." Second, Judicial Chairman Jane Daniels reported that the present system of monetary fines for judicial offenses in ineffective and that more cases would come to trial in the future. Finally, S.A. President Laura Buchanan revealed that Greg Sokolowski, President of the Day Student Association, recently told her that the Day Student Association is ineffective and should be abolished. She also noted that several commuter students had complained about the job Sokolowski is doing as President. One member of the audience suggested that the interests of the commuter students could be better served by removing Sokolowski as president than by abolishing the entire Day Student Association. Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Turnout Small at Student Meeting Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1979-02-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPEGs 300 dpi Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Fredericksburg, VA Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Mello, Michael. "Turnout Small at Student Meeting." The Bullet (VA), February 2, 1979. Description An account of the resource This Bullet article discusses the desire for more "open student body" meetings, according to a student survey. One such meeting took place on February 13, 1979, although out of a total student number of over 2,300, only 30 students attended. The main area of discussion regarded a previous meeting with MWC President Prince B. Woodward. Discussion dwelt mainly on the types of questions students asked of Woodward and opinions of his responses to those questions. There was no consensus among the students. The article goes on to describe other topics of discussion and points of contention. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mello, Michael Subject The topic of the resource Mary Washington College, Student Meetings Jane Daniels Mary Washington Bullet Mary Washington College Michael A. Mello Michael Mello Prince B. Woodward Student Association University of Mary Washington https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/073604719de1bca53b55de127e34c5fa.jpg 5cb7345ed77b54060436e2225196dcf4 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/e4a868f906a23ad450235efca887c0f3.jpg 41a833f68b43135b55a1546e594582c5 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/15685434c00def988fb104b08a3cdcde.jpg 3d118b47d94857712071fef9ddcbd6f1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 5 Text Text Any textual data included in the document Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility By William Glaberson SACRAMENTO, Calif., Nov. 9 — A year and a half after a shaggy recluse stepped out of a Montana cabin and ended one of the most remarkable manhunts in American history, Theodore J. Kaczynski is to go on trial here this week on charges that he was the Unabomber who sent a chill through the country with a string of package bombings that began in 1978. In Federal Court here, Mr. Kaczynski’s fight to avoid conviction and the death penalty will force his lawyers to contend with an extraordinary trove of prosecution evidence found in his cabin, including a carbon copy of the anti-technology manifesto the Unabomber had sent to news organizations, an unexploded bomb and detailed entries from his journals like “I mailed that bomb.” And the case is likely to present the riveting picture of Mr. Kaczynski’s younger brother, David, taking the stand to try to save the life of the very sibling he turned into the authorities after reading the manifesto. It was David Kaczynski who went to the F.B.I. in 1996 and told them he thought his brother could be the man they were looking for. But in recent weeks, it has become clear that a central theme, both inside and outside the courtroom, will be how to assess individual responsibility for acts that seem at once meticulously planned, and at the same time, fiendishly arbitrary. The campaign that left more than two dozen people wounded and three dead was so irrational it could only have been the product of madness, some people including Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers say. Arguing that Mr. Kaczynski’s mental deterioration rendered him incapable of forming the criminal intent necessary to be held responsible under the law, they say the death penalty would compound the irrationality. But others, including the Yale University computer-science professor David J. Gelernter, who may be the Unabomber’s best known target, have begun to argue in public that the Unabomber is the personification of unrepentant evil and that only a weak nation would shrink from imposing the ultimate penalty. Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers have signaled that they may argue that Continued on page A26 [image- cabin] Theodore J. Kaczynski, whose trial will begin in Sacramento, Calif., this week with charges involving serial bombings, lived in a small cabin in Montana for years without electricity or plumbing. It was there, Federal authorities, that say he made many of the package bombs that wounded more than two dozen people and killed three in the attacks aimed at stopping technology. In June, Mr. Kaczynski was led out of a court in Helena, Mont., before he was transferred to California. Continued From Page A1 he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The prosecutors have asked the judge to bar that effort because Mr. Kaczynski refused last month to be examined by Government psychiatrists. The debate will pit two images against each other. One is that of the mysterious figure with the hood and sunglasses in the much-circulated law-enforcement sketch of the Unabomber, so named by investigators because his first targets were at Universities and airlines. With the help of elliptical letters and demands the bomber made to The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish his 35,000 word anti-technology tract, that hooded figure with the aviator glasses seemed to be making a bid for folk-hero status. Legal experts say that will be the image the prosecution will try to project to coax jurors into fury at a man they will portray as a manipulative killer. The other image is the one the defense is likely to recall the jurors: the loner with tangled hair who emerged from the tiny cabin in the Rockies and who fertilized his vegetable garden with his own excrement. “The prosecution is going to say, ‘Yeah, this guy is eccentric but so are all terrorists and mass murderers,’ “ said James B. Jacobs, a criminal law expert at New York University School of Law. “The defense is going to say: ‘This is a guy who lived in the woods. For years! He’s completely antisocial. He’s [a] paranoid schizophrenic.’ ” In the battle of images, some criminal defense lawyers say, Mr. Kaczynski may be a victim of his own success. If he was the Unabomber, they say, he skillfully played to a segment of the populace that was suspicious of technology. The attention in the news media made him seem an enigmatic genius who meticulously crafted parts of his bombs by hand. In 1995, People magazine named him one of the most intriguing people of the year. “He was presented as a pop hero, a rebel who was protesting the encroaching oppression of technology and he had a hand in creating that image. It’s hard to portray a pop hero as insane,” said Robert Precht, a defense lawyer who represented the lead defendant in the World Trade Center bombing case. In the case before Judge Garland Burrell Jr. of Federal District Court here, Mr. Kaczynski, 55, faces charges as a result of the deaths of two Sacramento men, Hugh C. Scrutton, who ran a computer store, in 1985 and, Gilbert B. Murray, the president of the California Forestry Association, in 1995. In addition, he is accused of mailing the two bombs from Sacramento that wounded Dr. Gelernter at Yale in New Haven in 1993 and Charles J. Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, in 1993. Because the new Federal death penalty was not in force at the time of Mr. Scrutton’s death, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty only if he is convicted in the 1995 killing of Mr. Murray. On Friday, Judge Burrell rejected a defense request to bar the possibility of the death penalty. After the current trial, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty again when he is to be tried in Federal Court in New Jersey for a 1994 bombing that killed Thomas J. Mosser. Mr. Mosser was an advertising executive who was killed at his North Caldwell, N.J., home when he opened a package. [Image] After jury selection, which is expected to take as long as a month, the trial will begin with a so-called guilt phase in which the prosecutors will be required to prove that Mr. Kaczynski not only committed each of the bomb attacks but also intended to injure his victims. If Mr. Kaczynski is found guilty, a second phase of the trial would be conducted to determine whether he would be sentenced to death. Lawyers who have been following the case say they sense that there has been a behind-the-scenes struggle between Mr. Kaczynski and his lawyers over the question of how he should be portrayed. They believe that Mr. Kaczynski has been resisting the lawyers’ efforts to describe his actions as the product of mental illness. These lawyers say that the two experienced Federal public defenders in the case would surely have advised Mr. Kaczynski that if they made a claim of diminished-capacity, the prosecutors would demand an examination by their own psychiatric experts. When prosecutors made that demand and Mr. Kaczynski refused, lawyers say, it was predictable that the prosecutors would try to bar the defense from introducing any psychiatric evidence and they did. Judge Burrell has yet to rule on the prosecution motion to preclude that evidence. In this way, Mr. Kaczynski may have jeopardized his psychiatric defense, and that, the lawyers who have been watching the case say, may have been what he hoped. Mr. Kaczynski, they say, appears unwilling to go along with suggestions that his best chance to avoid the death penalty would be [to] portray him as mentally ill. Mr. Kaczynski is represented by Quin Denvir, the chief Federal defender here, who is known as a consistent opponent of the death penalty, and Judy Clarke, the chief Federal defender in Spokane, Wash., who was one of the lawyers for Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who was convicted of murdering her two sons. Ms. Clarke helped to convince the jury that Mrs. Smith should not be put to death. The chief prosecutor in the case, Robert J. Cleary, has been pushing strongly for the death penalty. Mr. Cleary, 42, the son of a retired New York City police officer, is the second in command of the Federal prosecutor’s office in Newark. He was appointed to lead the Unabom case by Attorney General Janet Reno. At Yale, Dr. Galarnter said Mr. Kaczynski’s trial was important partly because of the stark debate it presents over personal responsibility. He stands squarely with the prosecutors who are expected to call him to the stand. “A lot of people in this country have a predisposition to believe that if you kill people with bombs, you must be insane,” said Dr. Gelernter, who was injured in one eye, lost part of his right hand and hearing in one ear. “We know that’s not true. We know sane men are capable of arbitrary bestiality.” Some legal experts say that to draw their portrait of a troubled Theodore John Kaczynski, the defense lawyers may not fight too strenuously against the avalanche of evidence expected from the prosecution. “Both sides have the same facts,” said Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School who recently wrote a law review article on the Kaczynski case. “But they are going to be asking the jurors to draw very different logical inferences from those same facts.” The defense lawyers may simply allow the prosecutors to tell their story to the jurors. It will be a story of a Harvard prodigy who grew up to live alone in a mountain cabin with no water or electricity and who is charged with assembling bombs that he would ship off to people he had never met. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Student Editor of the Digital Item Van Doren, Jamie Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Salp, Evan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility Subject The topic of the resource Unabomber Trial Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource The New York Times Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The New York Times. "Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility ." New York Times, November 10, 1997. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1997-11-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 3 JPGs 300 DPI Description An account of the resource Discussion of the proposed prosecution and defence of Ted Kaczinski. Language A language of the resource English https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/c20f9710978228eb79bb145aa4bbfe0e.jpg 03e70ce54f317559ac26b0a0e871f89e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 2, 1983-1994 Text Text Any textual data included in the document [image] END OF THE LINE: Los Angeles police form a line to prevent a crowd from going into a building Thursday. National Guard troops moved in Thursday to seize control of neighborhoods torn by riots. [image] LOOTING SUSPECTS: Police stand over handcuffed looting suspects in Los Angeles on Thursday. Looters plundered businesses and torched buildings in brazen daytime assaults. SOUTH ROYALTON --- Convicting a police officer of a crime is a hard thing for a jury to do, Vermont Law School professor Michael Mello said Thursday. But Mello, who teaches criminal procedure and said he specializes in “the general issue of regulating police behavior,” was nonetheless surprised Wednesday when a jury found four Los Angeles Police officers innocent of charges in the beating of motorist Rodney King. “I was stunned by the verdict,” Mello said Thursday. “My jaw just dropped. When I had heard earlier that they were deadlocked on all counts but one, I had assumed that they were ready to convict.” Mello’s personal reaction to the jury’s decision was tempered, though, with a professorial view of the jury’s job. “You need to be careful about trashing the jury’s verdict without knowing what they had in front of them,” he said. “They had a responsibility to view the evidence, listen to witnesses and then make judgements about the credibility of what they see and hear. “On the other hand, you had an all white jury making those credibility judgements.” Rodney King is black. The four officers charged in his beating are white. Police on trial, Mello said, begin with a built-in advantage. “Juries identify with cops,” he said. “They tend not to identify with the victims of police brutality, especially in the case of someone who is not clearly an innocent victim.” Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Lindsey, Megan Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verdict 'stuns' Vt. law professor Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hacker, Tom Subject The topic of the resource Verdicts King, Rodney Description An account of the resource Michael Mello gives his thoughts on the jury’s verdict of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, who were found innocent. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Tom Hacker, “Verdict 'stuns' Vt. law professor,” HIST298, https://hist299.umwhistory.org/admin/items/show/142. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-05-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 300 DPI 1 JPG Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Los Angeles, CA 1992 Los Angeles Los Angeles Police Rodney King Verdict Vermont https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/3a3f2ab371efbcedbda1e75cd2d2c6e7.jpg 246468f71fe289b3e61bba4dd82d4872 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/15d49b05601869d9675647119a429750.jpg 4c0692b85fc295492882908ee7f79cff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 2, 1983-1994 Text Text Any textual data included in the document A jury's recent verdict acquitting four Los Angeles police officers of using excessive force on a black motorist has drawn a mixed reaction from local police and attorneys. All those interviewed agreed that if one were to judge the men by the infamous videotape, then they were guilty. But some of those interviewed said they did not know what other evidence was presented court, and believed that the jury system should be supported. I'll was not sitting on a jury for seven weeks. All I saw was 83 seconds of a tape," Woodstock Police Chief Byron Kelly said. But, judging from the videotape, Kelly said, "I would have thought they were guilty." Woodstock Attorney Tom Zonay agreed. A former police officer, Zonay believes the officers used excessive force against Rodney King. On the other hand, Zonay said that from the perspective of an attorney, he was obliged to respect the jury's decision. "I am a believer that you have to respect the system and the system sometimes makes decisions that many people are not pleased with," Zonay said. Slate Police Lt, Bruce Lang said this week that "All of us are shocked at the verdict" Lang said the verdict "sends a signal to the public that police officers can get away with that activity. There was no excuse for that." An all-white jury last week acquitted the officers of beating King in March 1991 following a high-speed chase. An amateur videotape of the beating was shown on television stations across the nation, creating an outcry over the tactics police used to subdue King. The verdict led to an orgy of rioting and looting in Los Angeles last week, resulting in the deaths of 58 people. Demonstrations were held in other cities across the United States. These demonstrations sometimes turned into in riots. Locally, a demonstration was staged by students at Dartmouth College. Michael Mello, a criminal law professor at the Vermont Law School, said the verdict was the result of the trial's location being moved from Los Angeles to Simi Valley. While Mello agreed with changing the trial's location, he said Simi Valley was' a poor choice because of its overwhelmingly white population. He said the jury should have been picked from an ethnically diverse area. Mello said the population of Simi was comprised of middle class whites who had fled Los Angeles. The jurors, according to Mello, were more inclined to believe a police officer than a victim of police brutality. Mello cases with the media. In this instance, however, Mello said "This verdict sickened me as a lawyer and as a citizen." Lang, said he too, was surprised that an all-white jury had been picked to decide the case. "I just don't understand that, especially in an area like Southern California," Lang said. Lang has been a police officer in Vermont for 15 years. In that time, he said he has never seen a single case of police using excessive force against anyone. As commander of the Bethel Barracks for the past five years, Lang has only received one complaint about an officer using excessive force to apprehend a suspect. Lang said the person who made the complaint was not the defendant in the case. Lang investigated the complaint and found that the officer was justified in using his nightstick to apprehend the suspect. Lang added that Vermont Slate troopers are taught never to strike defendants above the shoulders. U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders criticized the 11-year Reagan- Bush presidential "reign" as the underlying cause behind the riots that resulted from the verdict. "During the same period as' the rich were getting richer, lower-income black workers saw their wages drop by 50 percent. The percentage of qualified his statements, saying that besides the videotape, he did not know what other evidence was presented to the jurors. For this reason, Mello said, he usually declines to discuss African-American fathers who did not earn enough at their jobs to keep their families out of poverty jumped from 25 to 40 percent,” Sanders said. He called for a “fundamental change in national priorities. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verdict shocks Cops, Lawyers Subject The topic of the resource Police brutality--United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brown, Julian P. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2 JPGs 300 dpi Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Florida Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992-05-07 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Vermont Standard Description An account of the resource A recent verdict has acquitted four Los Angeles police officers for using excessive force on a black motorist. This verdict has drawn a mixed reaction from local police and attorneys. https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/08c0dfab3a8795025f7a0361689913e4.jpg 8c56e5e1ed1267a035fe7e1a8ba80b39 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource VLS Prof Doesn't Hide His Feelings Subject The topic of the resource Vermont Law school Professor makes feelings known about court case verdict. Description An account of the resource Vermont Law Professor Michael Mello makes his feelings known regarding the O. J. Simpson court case verdicts. He took a moment during a seminar on preparing a U.S. Supreme Court petition to summon the case. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Marquard, Bryan K. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Valley News Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available History 298 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 3, 1995 [based on the date of O.J. verdict decision] Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant South Royalton, VT Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 4 Text Text Any textual data included in the document [start page one] [heading] VLS Prof Doesn't Hide His Feelings [subheading] By BRYAN K. MARQUARD Valley News Staff Writer [start of the first column] SOUTH ROYALTON- At Vermont Law School, Professor Michael Mello was teaching a capital punishment seminar a few hours after the verdicts were announced in the O.J. Simpson case. Mello, an expert who has been involved in dozens of capital punishment cases in Florida, makes no secret of his feelings about the Simpson case. A footnote in his curriculum vitae gives a concise list of the major newspapers he has appeared, but notes, "I am pleased to say that I have never been quoted in the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murder trial." Nevertheless, he paused to invoke that case during a seminar that is a clinic on preparing a U.S. Supreme Court certiorari petition on behalf of his client, Joseph Spaziano, who is on death row in Florida for a murder in which the state's chief witness has now recounted his testimony. "We can't let this day pass without a reference to the O. J. Case," Mello told the second- and third-year law students in the seminar. "As it turns out, I have a tie-in to Joe's case." [start of the second column] He then held up an editorial cartoon for the Miami Herald. On one side of the panel, Simpson was dancing, his shackled hands above his head with the shackle breathing. On the other side, Spaziano sat in an electric chair while the governor of Florida threw the switch. Simpson and the governor were smiling; Spaziano's head was covered with a hood and smoke was rising from his body. Above Simpson, the text read, "Los Angeles, CA: Defendant faces voluminous forensic evidence, witnesses, and strong motive, but his case is investigated by a foul-mouthed, egomaniacal, racist cop..." Above Spaziano, it read, "Tallahassee, FL: Defendant faces no forensic evidence, motive, and a main witness who admits to lying after police coerced his incriminating testimony..." The grim, biting humor of the cartoon was mitigated a while later when a student misheard a judge's name that came up in the discussion. "They have another Judge Ito in Florida?" the student asked. "No, Judge Eaton," Mello replied. "There's only one Lance Ito and there's no Dancing Eatons," he said, alluding to the Dancing Itos, a comedy sketch that has become a staple of The Tonight Show. [end of article] Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Morton, Mariah Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource VLS Prof Doesn't Hide His Feelings Subject The topic of the resource Mello, Michael. Simpson, O. J. Description An account of the resource Vermont Law Professor Michael Mello, while teaching a seminar on capital punishment, could not hide his feelings regarding the O. J. Simpson court case verdict. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Marquard, Bryan K. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Valley News Staff Writer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 3, 1995 [according to the O.J. Simpson verdict date] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant South Royalton, VT Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 1 JPG 300 DPI https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/ccde875d75630b0e60b58e64d4908d49.jpg 7121df0ef9d96ba8b635d50a0c533df4 https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/029b1f47863bbff1115e75467358cc82.jpg 4841d041d89053064532305a2667f990 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Volunteer Lawyers Resources Centers budget eliminated https://hist299.umwhistory.org/files/original/3daf94eaeaf06d024c08d972fbf091a7.jpg 1360eba2045e8e08815d825707b0c30c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michael A. Mello Papers, Series 1 News Clippings, Binder 4 Text Text Any textual data included in the document [Heading] Operation to shut its doors this month Volunteer Lawyers Resource Center's budget eliminated By Mark D. Killian Associate Editor [Start of First Page] “We’re boxing it up and moving it out,” said Jennifer Greenberg, co-director of the Volunteer Lawyers’ Resource Center in Tallahassee. The organization, created in 1988 to assist death row prisoners in their ap-peals, is closing its doors following a House of Representatives vote to elimi-nate federal funding for the VLCR and 19 similar organizations throughout the country. The cuts are part of the 99-page House Appropriations Bills for the Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the ju-diciary and related agencies for fiscal year 1996. “None of the funds provided in this Act shall be available for Death Penalty Re-source Centers or Post Conviction Defendant Organizations,” the bill, destined to become law, says. “It has not passed the senate yet, but our understanding is that there will be absolutely no problem with that occ-uring,” Greenberg said, adding that the Administrative Office of the Federal Courts has Directed the Resource Center to prepare to shut its doors on September 30. The news of the Resource Center’s closing came as a blow to Florida’s Office of the Capital Collateral Representative, which serves as counsel for all Florida death row prisoners not otherwise represented. Saying it has to many cases and too few lawyers, CCR Michael Minerva told the Supreme Court in a petition for re-lief that the center’s closing “threatens to send the system into chaos because an already overburdened CCR could not possibly absorb the sudden addition of other clients.” Minerva said out of the approximately 350 people on death row in Florida, his office represents 141 of them, with an-other 25 who are eligible for representation but have yet to be assigned counsel. The Resource Center and its volunteers represent another 50 prisoners, he said. A couple of others are represented by volunteers not associated with the Resource Center and the balance of death penalty cases are still on direct appeal. With the end of the Resource Center, the responsibility for finding lawyers for those sentenced to death again will ultimately fall on the Bar, president who sits on the Resource Center’s board of directors. Rinaman organized the Bar program in the mid-1980s that recruited law firms to handle death penalty appeals, and was instrumental in establishing the VLRC and CCR. ”I think the Bar is going to be called upon to play a role,” Rinaman said. “The question is, what role?” Layoffs Greenberg said the VLRC has already laid off most of its 23 employees, which includes six lawyers and four investigators, along with paralegals and other support staff. “We are down to just those who will physically close the operation,” she said. [Quote] “It is really frightening what we as citizens are going to allow to happen to our condemned.’- Jennifer Greenberg VLRC co-director. [End quote] The Resource Center also has notified the Governor’s Office of its closing, and the center’s present inability to represent or assist in the representation of anyone under a death warrant. “Our board has told us to stop taking new cases, stop investigating, stop doing anything other than what we need to do to close,” Greenberg said. “We have reached a point where in order to fulfill our exiting obligations we have to focus on that and not do anything new.” Greenberg said VLRC is working to transfer ongoing cases and trying to ensure former clients ”have something approaching effective representation in the future.” With the closing of the Resource Center, Greenberg said she thinks post-conviction for Florida death-sentenced inmates with be thrown into turmoil. “I think it is particularly distressing in Florida where we have tried very hard to ensure effective representation and ensure there is some order in the pro-gress,” Greenberg said. The Resource Center performed ser-eral functions. It provided direct repre- [End of Page 1] [Beginning of Page #2] a rate far exceeding that in any prior years,” the petition said. “Whereas CCR’s capacity for accepting affirmed death cases was capped at 26 per year, mean-ing a filing rate of one 3.850 motion ev-ery two weeks, the number of affirmances by this court in calendar year 1994 rose to 46. As those cases move into post-con-viction, they are again overloading CCR’s staff at its present funding level.” CCR has asked the court to make a detailed finding on what constitutes full funding for CCR, to repeal the one-year limit for filing collateral appeals and to stay orders designating counsel and for filing collateral motion. The Bar’s Rinaman chaired the Bar committee in the 1980s that was asked by the Federal/State Judicial Council to find volunteers to handle appeals for inmates awaiting execution. “For about three years the Bar carried the ball single-handedly,” he recalled. In 1985 the Florida legislature created CCR to provide direct representation to death-sentenced individuals in post con-viction proceedings and the Volunteer Lawyers’ Resource Center was created in 1988 in an attempt to alleviate a case backlog. [Quote] ‘I think the Bar is going to be called upon to play a role. The question is, what role?’- James Rinaman, Former Bar President. [End Quote] “Over the years we have developed a program that is barely adequate, and now without the Resource Center we will be back in a situation where we don’t have an adequate program,” Rinaman said. Supreme Court Justice Ben F. Overton asked the Board of Governors at its February meeting to help find lawyers to take cases that can’t be handled by CCR Rinaman expects the Bar to again hear from the Supreme Court to set up a meeting to determine what to do next. “It is not going to be an easy task, but I’m sure we are all up to it,” Rinaman said. “And in the name of going back to true federalism, maybe we will figure out a way to do it.” [End of Page #2] [Start of Page #3] sentation for inmates seeking collateral review in cases where CCR has a con-flict, or where CCR lawyers are over-loaded. The center also recruited volunteers to represent death row inmates in post-conviction matters. As an inducement to attract volunteers, the Resources center provided research, con-sultation and investigation services. “I have relied, totally, on the investigative and logistical resources of the Florida Volunteer Lawyers’ Resource Center,” Said Vermont law professor Michael Mello, who has represented several death row inmates in Florida, including Joe Spaziano, who is currently under a death warrant. ”The key to effective capital appellate work is not being a good researcher on case law; the key is being a good gumshoe investigator of fact–or being able to rely on the investigative skills of a law office like VLRC.” Greenberg said for a decade the legal community in Florida had an understanding that the people sentenced to death must have lawyers. “It really is a very sad day when not only are we faced with the prospect of having unrepresented people under death warrant, but we are really losing that incredible opportunity to bring in sole practitioners and bring in civil law-yers,” Greenberg said. “It really is fright-ening what we as citizens are going to allow to happen to our condemned. CCR Impact CCR Minerva doesn’t know how many death row inmates will wind up without representation because of the closing the Resource Center. “We were already staggering under the load of the combination of the one-year time limit for filing collateral appeals, the unprecedented number of affirmances in 1994 by the Florida Supreme Court, and now this on top of it,” Minerva said. “This is the third major occurrence that has really affected the way we provide services.” Minerva said he would like the Resource Center’s volunteers to continue representing the clients they do now, but said CCR is unable to offer them the kind of support the Resource Center provided. “For me to try to tell them to stay the course when I don’t have anything to of-fer is not really very helpful,” Minerva said. “I think each of those volunteers is going to have to assess their own situa-tions and see if they can stay or not.” CCR has petitioned the Supreme Court to drop the one-year limit for filing collateral appeals, adopted following a 1991 report of the Supreme Court Committee on Post-Conviction Relief in Capital Cases. The agency also asked the court to find that CCR is not fully funded and to stay its orders for designating council and fil-ing Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850 motions in specific cases. The supreme Court Committee on Post- Conviction Relief found that for the process to work, counsel had to be assigned quickly following the end of direct appeals. The committee recommended that counsel be appointed within 30 days after the last direct appeal, and that a one-year limit be placed on filing collateral appeals, assuming that CCR would be funded to meet that deadline. The rule went into effect January 1, 1994, and the court said it would review the rule this year. CCR operations were boosted by the legislature in 1993, based on an estimate of handling around 24 new cases per year. The problem, the CCR said, is that while the office budget was increased 50 percent, the client caseload has increased 69 percent and that figure was set to rise to 76 percent when five more cases were assigned. And the caseload continues to be above projections. ”[A]fter January 1, 1994, death sentences were affirmed on direct appeal at [End of Page #3] Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Newspaper Contributor of the Digital Item Person submitting the digital item to the collection. Parise, Rebecca Notes Additional information regarding your item. This content will not be viewable in the Public View. These Newspaper clippings at the top of the page seemed to be out of order, not sure if I was allowed to change the order of them or not, so I left it in the order that they came in when I transcribed them. That is why some words at the end of pages are cutoff and do not seem to match up with the next page. Student Editor of the Digital Item Williams, Megan Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Volunteer Lawyers Resource Center's budget eliminated Subject The topic of the resource Capital Punishment Rinaman, James C. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Killian, Mark D. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Killian, Mark D. "Volunteer Lawyers Resource Center's budget eliminated"The Florida Bar News, September 15th, 1995. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HIST 298, University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-09-15 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 3 JPGs 300 DPI Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Tallahassee, FL Language A language of the resource English Description An account of the resource This newspaper was describing how volunteer lawyer programs are being shut down due to lack of funding. There are other programs besides CCR that are trying to help prisoners on death row be represented in court. There has also been a dramatic increase in the amount of inmates who need a lawyer for criminal punishment charges in Florida. Budget Capital punishment. death penalty lawyers Representation for Inmates Volunteer Lawyers