A man may die under cover of secrecy

A man may die under cover of secrecy

Spaziano, Joe

Capital punishment

Joe Spaziano's execution is still likely to occur even though the only witness recanted his testimony. Most of the evidence that Governor Lawton Chiles has to condemn Spaziano has not been made publicly available or brought to court.

Dyckman, Martin

Dyckman, Martin. "A man may die under cover of secrecy." St. Petersburg Times.

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

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St. Petersburg, FL

[handwritten] Sunday- Aug. 27

[handwritten] St. Pete Times

A man may die under cover of secrecy

Martin Dyckman

If Joe Spaziano had a fair trial, so did the Salem witches. For 302 years, no other American has been put to death on the unsupported testimony of an addled teenager.

The state’s only witness now insists he lied under the influence of police pressure, hypnosis and possibly drugs at Spaziano’s murder trial 20 years ago. Yet the governor has ordered Spaziano’s electrocution to proceed Sept. 21. I do not understand how Lawton Chiles, a decent and considerate man, can be so certain. Even the jurors weren’t. They recommended life.

Because this killing will be done in our names, we had all better pray that Spaziano really is the man who raped and butchered Laura Lynn Harberts, an Orlando hospital clerk, and left her body at a trash dump. But even if he is, there are serious implications that will outlive him.

 It will be the first time in memory that someone went to his death on the strength of secret evidence. Secret evidence! Even the Salem witches were condemned entirely in public.

The governor has a Florida Department of Law Enforcement Report supposedly showing that the key witness, Tony DiLisio, was telling the truth then (and not now) when he testified that Spaziano took him to the dump and boastfully showed him the corpses of Harberts and another woman who was never identified. The FDLE’s new witnesses have never been heard or cross-examined in any court, however. They never will be, if the governor has his way, because the FDLE promised them confidentiality.

It is claimed they are afraid of Spaziano’s former associates in the Outlaws motorcycle gang. This may be true. Still, courts have ways of putting witnesses on the stand without jeopardizing them. For example, one of the governor’s secret witnesses is said to be another former Outlaw already in the federal government’s witness protection program as an FBI informant. He says - according to the governor’s news release - that Spaziano had admitted to him before standing trial that he had killed the two women and had showed their bodies to a young man who he feared would betray him. Very interesting. For all we know, it could have been this witness himself who killed the women.

The governor’s secret witnesses also supposedly include friends and family members who assert that the police and their lay hypnotist didn’t manipulate DiLisio and that he told the story he now denies before the hypnosis, before the trial, and for 20 years since. That too maybe true. But that governor’s secret evidence also includes the FDLE’s videotape of a June 14 interview with DiLisio in which he insists in forceful terms that what he says NOW is the truth. Such conflicts belong in open court rather than a secret file – especially when a life is at stake.

I haven’t seen the tape. I do have what purports to be a transcript, sent by Spaziano’s attorney, Michael Mello, who has filed his bootleg copy of the tape with the Florida Supreme Court under seal. In the transcript, DiLisio says of the crucial visit to the dump that “The cops brought me there. I had never been there in my life until they brought me there.”

Did Spaziano ever take him?

“No, never.”

Had he ever told the police anything before being hypnotized?

“No, all the facts that I had I got from them to be able to read them back to them.”

Throughout the transcript, the FDLE’s crack agent repeatedly refers to Spaziano as “Foranzo,” ”Sporanzo,” or “Spilanzo,” until DiLisio eventually corrects him. Could that be one of the reasons the governor doesn’t want the file made public? What else did the FDLE get wrong?

And what has happened to the nation’s best open-government laws? Relying on a 1993 revision that caught the media lobby napping, Chiles invokes a total exemption for any record having to do with executive clemency. How convenient. Clemency happens to be one of the black holes of American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court won’t touch it. For all the courts care, the governor could go to Doak Campbell stadium at halftime and let the crowd decide Spaziano’s fate with thumbs up or thumbs down, Roman style.

The governor’s spokesman, Ron Sachs, tried to persuade me it’s not a secret report because the governor and his staff have reviewed it “thoroughly.” Indeed. Much as we all love and respect Lawton Chiles, secrecy is a petri dish for corruption as well as for honest miscarriages of justice. Under such cover, a less trustworthy administration easily could sell pardons. It happened in Tennessee under Ray Blanton.

Only the Florida Supreme Court, it appears, can now interrupt this fatal farce. Though the court no longer allows hypnotically induced testimony in criminal trials, it has refused to reopen Spaziano’s case on the grounds that his lawyers raised the issue too late. The state would argue that DiLisio’s recantation also comes too late.

But, God help us all, what if he is telling the truth?

Martin Dyckman is associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times.

Newspaper

Williams, Megan