A witness says he lied, but the execution is on

A witness says he lied, but the execution is on

Death Penalty

Witnesses

A witness in the Spaziano case says that he lied and fabricated the story of Spaziano murdering a young Orlando women.

Rother, Larry

The New York Times

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

1995-10-01

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300 dpi

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English

Miami, Fl

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[heading]
A witness Says He Lied, But the Execution Is On

[subheading]
Florida Says Case Review Raises No Doubt

By Larry Rother

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MIAMI, Sept. 30- At his trial, no physical evidence linked Joseph Spaziano to the murder of a young Orlando woman, only a drug-addled teenager's lurid testimony about being taken to a garbage dump and shown the sexually mutilated decomposing remains of the victim. That was all the jurors needed to convict him.

But now, 20 years later, with Mr. Spaziano's death warrant already signed and the electric chair waiting, that witness, Tony DiLisio, has come forward to say he lied. He fabricated the story, he asserts, to please police investigators, who planted details of his testimony in his memory during hypnosis and promised to spring him from a drug rehabilitation center if he cooperated

"I've been bound up in lies, and I finally made a decision to do what's right," Mr, Dilisio, a 38-year-old automobile restore and lay preacher who lives in Pensacola, Fla., said in a telephone interview. "I've been shaking inside for the last 20 years, and it finally came tome to speak the truth. I had a path I had to choose because the man was going to be expected in two weeks."

But despite Mt. DiLisio's recanting his story and other irregularities that have been documented but lawyers, private investigators, and

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newspaper reporters, reexamining the Soaxiano case, Florida is pressing ahead with its effort to electrocute Mr. Spaziano. Earlier this month, Gov. Lawton Chiles denied that "there has been no rush to judgment on this thing," and assailed Mr. Spaziano's lawyer, saying his tactics "look pretty manufactured to me." 

By his own admission, Mr. Spaziano was anything but a model citizen when he was arrest for the 1973 
torture-murder of Laura Lynn Harberts, an 18-year-old hospital clerk. President of the Orlando chapter of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, Mr. Spaziano earned the nickname Crazy Joe from his erratic behavior after a truck ran over his head in his hometown of Rochester. He was also well-known in Central Florida as a marijuana dealer, fence, and pimp.

But transcripts of the trial reveal that the prosection's case against Mr. Spaziano rested not on his notoriety but almost exclusively on the account of Mt DiLisio, who was a 16-

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year-old biker wannabe at the time of the killing. "If we cant get in the testimony of Tony Dilisio, we'd have absolutely no case whatsoever," one prosecutor told the judge on the case at the time.

What the jurors were not told was that Mr. DiLiso's testimony had been induced by hypnosis. Nor was the panel informed that his only visit to the murder site was conducted by police, who were frustrated at his inability to recall even the most basic details of the killing under hypnosis.

In 1985, a decade after Mt. Spaziano was convicted, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the testimony derived from memories refreshed by hypnosis is so intrinsically suspect as to be inadmissible in court. But, in an effort to avoid a series of lengthy and costly retrials the decision was not applied retroactively, and Mr. Spaziano's conviction stood.

"They should have ordered a new trail back the," argued Michael Mello, a lawyer who, until recently, had been representing Mr. Spaziano since the case was handed over to him the day he joined the public defender's office more than a decade ago."This is the only capital case I am aware of in which the critical testimony was the product of hypnosis."

Mr. Mello now teaches law at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, VT., and had continued to handle the Spaziano case on a pro bono basis until the Florida Supreme Court removed him from the case, criticizing him got what the justices called his "flagrant disregard of this Court's procedures and directions."

Mr. Mello said in a telephone interview that he had represented more than 70 condemned men but that Mr. Spaziano is the only one he was absolutely convinced was innocent. 

According to affidavits Mr. Mello has obtained from the jurors in the case, Mr. Spaziano's conviction was obtained despite lingering doubts,
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But as Justice Gerald Kogan a member of the Florida Supreme Court who has criticized what he calls the state's "unseemly rush to execute a man," noyed recently, judges in Florida no longer have authority. Instead, the "jury's vote for life imprisonment would be legally binding today," and Mr. Spaziano would automatically be spared the electric chair even if convicted.

At the time he was being questioned, Mr. DiLisio was a frequent user of LSD and marijuana who had been sentenced to a drug rehabilitation center and was largely estranged from his family. Police detective took him to see Joe B. McCawley, a hypnotist whose work had been previously discredited in another notorious Florida murder trial. 

During an initial hypnosis session, the transcript reveals, Mr. DiLisio was not helpful, talking of hearing Mr. Spaziano brag about hiding stolen motorcycles at an orange grove by a lake but supplying no useful details about the Jarberts killing.

But two days later after police took him to the garbage dump to "refresh" his memory. Mr. DiLisio

[Image of Joseph Spaziano- Associated Press]

was again put into a light trance and questioned. This time, after some prodding, was asked about a corpse he said: "I think I saw one," but then described the remains as that of "an old woman" before Mr. McCawley furnished him with the correct details.

Mr. DiLisio said that he has known all along that "what I did was bad," but thought that because perjury laws "I would have to go to prison for it if I ever brought the truth forward." He now accuses the police of brainwashing and manipulation him, describing himself as a frightened and confused teen-ager, eager 

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for attention and affection and eager to get out of juvenile detention at any cost.

"I was like a fog on a leash, with a bone in front of me," he said. "They liked what I did, and it gave me gratification that I was cooperating with them. I was a disturbed child at that time."

Following the public outcry about the case as a result of Mr. DiLisio's recantation in June, Gov. Lawton Chiles issued an indefinite stay of execution pending investigation by the Florida Police Department of Law Enforcement. On Aug. 24, though he signed another death warrant, saying that "this exhaustive review removes any doubt in my mind about the case." 

Since the death penalty was restored in Florida in 1978, 34 people have died in the electric chair, making the state second only to Texas in the number of executions. During his successful reelection campaign last year, Mr. Chiles, a populist Democrat, was stung on television ads sponsored by a conservative opponent, Republican Jeb Bush, that accused him of being soft on the more 300 convicted killer sitting on the state's death row.

Just after Labor Day the Florida Supreme Cout rejected, by a 4-3 voted, a request for an indefinite stay of execution and approved a Sept. 21 execution for Mr. Spaziano in the electric chair at the Florida State prision in Starke, But less than a week later the court partially reversed itself, ordering a hearing on the new evidence by Nov. 15.

Mr. Spaziano's case is now being handled by a state agency that presents indigent inmates on death row, and by a Miami law firm.

To help the proceedings along, Mr. DiLision has agreed to take a polygraph test, be injected with truth serum to yo cooperate in any other fashion that is requested.

"I don't know whether Jow Spaziano is guilty or innocent," Mr. DiLisio said. "but I know that I lied then and that the only thing I have to gain now is a clear conscience. I'm not defensive, I'm not confused. I have no fear, and as long as I speak the truth at all times, I can stand strong, and the truth will prevail."
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Newspaper

Williams, Megan