Current Events

Current Events

Capital punishment

Orlando (Fla.)--Maps

Journalism

False testimony

Hypnotism

The rivalry between two newspapers over the guilt or innocence of Joey Spaziano leads to a new trail, of a case that's over twenty years old. In the end, Justice won over newspaper sales.

Ericsson Jr., Edward

Orlando Weekly

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

1996, February, 15-21

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8 JPGS

300 DPI

English

Orlando, Florida

[Page 1] Cover Story/Page 8
[title]Current Events
[subtitle] This is Florida's electric chair. And here is the story of how two newsperps fought over wheter a man dervered to die in it [End Page 1]

[Page 2]
[title]Current Events
[subtitle] Orlando's hometown newspaper thinks a killer might get off because The Miami Herald crusaded on his behalf. Whose truth is right?

On Jan, 22, a Seminole County circuit judge granted Joseph "Crazy Joe" Spaziano a new trial on a 20- year-old conviction for murder. The ruling, now on appeal, capped an eight-month legal [crusade] and presumably shocked readers who followed the story in The Orlando Sentinel.

Those who read The Miami Herald, however, were likely less surprised. Indeed, the two papers' competing, sometimes conflicting reports carried over into editorials following Judge O.H. Eaton Jr.'s ruling. "Justice awakens," crowed the Herald. “Justice clearly cheated,” huffed the Sentinel. 

Who was right?

In a way, both. A Herald reporter and editors read Spaziano's trial transcript, passed it off to experts, and [concluded] that the state's star wit- ness against Spaziano, Tony DİLisio, lied when he told a jury here in 1976 that Spaziano had shown him two bodies in a dump. The Herald's reporting raised the idea that DiLisio's original testimony sprang from a suggestive hypnotist, and that he was fed details by authorities who may have promised him lighter punishment for juvenile crimes. The Herald also [resurrected] DiLisio's past with an abusive father and a stepmother Who had some kind of sexual [page end]

[page start] relationship with Spaziano, and therefore every motive to use their sons as a way to get back at him. To the question of whether Spaziano received a fair trial based on the paper [concluded] no.

But the Sentinel countered with reports from law [enforcement] experts and others, includ- ing the former “old lady" of the once fearsome biker Spaziano, plus two of his brothers, who say Spaziano was involved in other murders and rapes. Darcy Fauss, who lived with Spaziano for about 18 months when he was on the lam, described him to the Sentinel as a sadistic gang enforcer who kept her in virtual slavery. To the question of whether Spaziano is a killer, some former associates say yes. Yet his only conviction for [murder] has now been reversed, and a new trial ordered.

The discrediting of DiLisio creates a huge burden for the state to make its case again. But just as difficult is the question that served as undercurrent to the recent coverage: Can Florida afford to put a vicious thug back on the street because prosecu- tors and police did a poor job 20 years ago? Conversely, can Florida afford a standard [justice] that would execute a man based on dubious, and perhaps concocted, evidence?

Together, the two papers did an unparalleled job of exploring the complex underpinnings of a death row case. Separately, [however], each paper subtly snubbed the truths reported by their rival, to their readers' detriment. “Orlando Sentinel readers who picked up the Herald on any given day were probably [confused]," posits Ron Sachs, until recently a spokesman for Gov. Chiles, who had signed Spaziano's execution order.

If the Sentinel and the Herala competed directly for readers—a once common fact only rarely seen among newspapers today—the Spaziano case would have boosted the circulation of both and fomented a lively debate among readers across their [coverage] area. But because each paper dominates in its own [market], nobody except news [professionals] and elites like Sachs saw the alternative arguments.

As efforts to deregulate [communications] hit their stride and leave ever-diminishing circles for competing viewpoints, the Herald-Sentinel contest serves as a parable of sorts for the age of media monopolies

Lori Rozsa of the Herald says she took the assignment to check up on the Spaziano case. because it was her turn.

Spaziano was only weeks away from his scheduled execution June 27 in the electric chair for killing Laura Harberts, an 18- year-old Orlando hospital clerk. A reinterview of DiLisio, his accuser, would be a routine part of Rozsa's job.

"I totally expected him to say I stand by my story; leave me alone," Rozsa says.

But DiLisio said he didn't remember his testimony of 20 years earlier. Rozsa didn't believe him. "I kept saying, 'How could you not remember your testimony in a murder case?"

Rozsa returned several times to DiLisio's North Florida home with more questions. Finally DiLisio cracked. He said he had made up his testimony against Spaziano, then a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, at the urging of police. Suddenly the Herald had a major story.

Suddenly all hell broke loose.

Along with supportive [editorials] in the St. Petersburg Times, the Herald's coverage caused Chiles to stay the execution. He then ordered the Florida Depart- ment of Law Enforcement to investigate even as Spaziano's Lawyers pushed for a new trial and all before the Sentinel ran a [page end]

[page start] single, locally reported place on what should have been, for them, a local story.

The FDLE review convinced Chiles to sign another death war- rant. But the Florida Supreme Court ordered a hearing on DILASIO's wavering. Herald edito- rials called for a new trial, while it's news coverage questioned the FDLE report's accuracy. The Sentinel, investigating on its own, lamented the slow pace death penalty justice in its edito- rials and began running stories attacking DiLisio.

The newspapers even sniped at one another's reporters.

The competition had been sparked in early summer, when Michael Mello, a Vermont law professor who was then Spaziano's lawyer, began urging Gene Miller, a Herald editor, look at the case. For 19 years Spaziano had languished on death row, despite four death warrants. His case had been reviewed 16 times, including once by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Miller, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that overturned another death row conviction, was intrigued. No physical evidence tied Spaziano to Harbert's death and, indeed, the body was so decomposed by the time it was discovered that medical examiners could not even fix a cause of death. Another body found at the same site has never been identified.

More troubling was this: Tony DILisio, a 17-year-old acid haad and biker wannabe at the [page end] [page start] Miami cop and founding chair- time of the trial, had been hyp- notized by the same man who had elicited tainted testimony in the earlier overturned case. The Florida Supreme Court banned the use of hypnosis-enhanced testimony in 1985, saying it was inherently unreliable. But the ruling was not retroactive.

Mello sent the case file to Miller, who in turn shared it with Warren Holmes, an ex- man of the American Polygraph Association's case review com- mittee. Having read hundreds of murder cases in his 40-year career, Holmes bills himself as an expert in sniffing out perjury, and claims to have worked on major cases from the John F. Kennedy assassination to the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. "I got the file and read it over Memorial Day weekend," he says. "I went back and said DILisio lied through his teeth and they should look into it."
And so they did.

Mello had written a fiery op ed piece pleading for a new trial, and Miller called friends at the Sentinel and The St. Petersburg Times and asked them to run it as well. It appeared in all three on June 4-seven days before the Herald's first report.

"We ran the original plece that Mello wrote," says John Halle, vice president and editor of the Sentinel, But the piece arrived too late for Sentinel editors to confirm its veracity. "We did some research," Haile says. "We wanted a of another point of view, and then we wanted to do a little poking around."

The result of the Sentinel's poking, published a month after Mello's op-ed piece and in the midst of the FDLE investigation, was a July 2 story that ques- tioned the assertion by Spaziano's supporters that he was a veritable martyr, and delved into DiLisio's claims to be reformed alcoholic and born- again Christian who had straightened out his life. 64 [page end]

[page start] A former state attorney pro- nounced Spaziano "a cold-heart- ed killer," while a check on DILisio found nine Florida arrests, two recent DUIS and a pending court date for stalking. În short, the reformed DiLisio did not appear to be anyone's paragon of veracity and stability.

Then again, the Herald never claimed he was.

"The guy's a flake," says John Pancake, the Herald state editor who helped direct Rozsa's reporting. "The question is, do you want to send a man to the chair based on the word of a flake? He's not a [page end] [page start] witness for Spaziano; he's a wit- ness for the state. If he is unreli- able, it's the state's problem."

Mello refused to talk to the Sentinel after its report. “In my view," he wrote in a fax after Chiles refused Spaziano's request for clemency, "you are an accomplice to murder."

With the FDLE report and the governor's refusal, the tle lines were drawn: The Herald would bolster DİLisio's retreat and denigrate both the original investigation and the FDLE report; the Sentinel, with the help of police sources, would blast away both at DiLisio and Spaziano, suggesting the jailed biker is in fact a serial killer without portfolio.

"The Orland Sentinel was trying to answer one question: Is 'Crazy Joe' Spaziano a bad guy?" says the Herald's Pancake. "We were trying to answer, 'Did he get a fair trial?"

Sentinel editor Haile denies his paper's aim was to paint Spaziano one way or the other. "From the beginning there was just one issue in the case: Is Tony DiLisio telling the truth?" he says. "Everything else had 

The Sentinel reported DiLisio was being pressured by the Outlaws to change his testimo- ny, and that he was a publicity seeker who may have recanted with an eye toward a book deal.

Investigating DiLislo was a duty, Halle says, as was reminding readers what the Outlaws- and Spaziano in particular did and were capable of doing at the time Harberts disappeared.

All coverage might have ended with the new Sept. 21 execu- tion date, but for what happened next. Mello obtained a deposition from DILisio in which he, for the first time, recanted under oath. Based on that, the state Supreme Court on Sept. 8 ordered a new hear ing. And Spaziano was spared again.

Now things got weird. The FDLE report, which all but doomed Spaziano, was leaked sub- stantially to the Sentinel but minimally to other news out- lets. It con- tained all sorts of evidence not available in the original trial, including state- ments from sev- eral jailhouse snitches. Sealed by the governor's office allegedly to protect the safety of witnesses, the report would never be tested in court. Both the Sentinel and the Herald called for its release But the Herald was unable to speak to its major sources. Prosecutors "wanted to try that case in the Sentinel," gripes James Russ, the Orlando attor ney who replaced Mello as Spaziano's lead counsel. "And In the Sentinel they found a willing participant."

The Herald attacked some of the reports' claims, like the one that said Spaziano had likely killed at least two other bikers in Chicago while he was on the run from Florida police. That case had been closed years ago with- out prosecution but with anoth- er suspect, the Herald reported.

And as for the notion that DILisio still fears the Outlaws, "why did he have a listed phone [page end]

[page start] from Mello, the attorney.

The Sentinel reponded by reporting that Chicago police had reopened their 20-year-old murder case. Holmes, the Herald's expert, is doubtful. "Do they have people out actually interviewing people?" he scoffa, The FDLE report, he says, "offered all kinds of witnesses they did not produce in court. They Just assumed axiomatically the guy was guilty as hell."  

But there were questions raised about journalism ethics as well. Miller, the Herald editor, had sent a lengthy letter to Chiles in August, pleading for him to meet with Mello's wit- nesses while he mulled Spaziano's bid for clemency. The letter went through Sachs, then the governor's press officer. Sentinel editorials later cited letter to suggest the Herald was in bed with Spaziano's team.

But the letter doesn't concern Sachs so much as what he regards as close ties between Miller and Mello at the project's beginning. "I think some stan- dards of journalism were breached," Sachs says. "The roots of the Herald's involvement were not properly planted."

Although Halle insists there- was no war, Pancake recalls that a Chicago Tribune reporter enlisted by the Herald for help was quickly called off the case. The Herald is a Knight-Ridder paper, the Tribune is the flagship of the Tribune Co., which owns the Sentinel. (The Chicago writer eventually was listed as a con- tributor to a Sentinel report.)

"Reporters and editors involved in both newspapers were not detached, were not objective," contends Sachs. They were determined on a sec- ondary level to prove each other wrong. I think there is gomepro- fessional pride in that, but I also think there is a danger in that kind of case, that maybe a side bar that should be written is nbt assigned because it might defuse the boom."

The boom in this case is the new trial for Spaziano, a trial in which evidence is long gone and witnesses, their memories cloud- ed by time, can easily be Impeached. Herald editorials have said that Spaziano likely will remain behind bars for the rest of his life anyway, based on his eariler conviction in the rape of an Orlando teen.

But the Heraldla Investigal- Ing the rape trial as well. Among the problems: The young victim failed to pick Spaziano from a lineup at first, and had described her attacker as having red hair and no tattoos: Spaziano has black hair and many tattoos And the main prosecution wit- ness was Tony DILisio.

The court ruling gave the Herald its first victory. "The judge said he believed DILisio now," says Haile. "Reasonable people can disagree."

But the question of whether justice won is still open. Holmes is convinced that Spaziano was a victim of anti-biker hysteria, which the Sentinel shamelessly renewed in its recent coverage. He says a close reading of the trial transcript leaves only the conclusion that Spaziano didn't get a fair trial. "They don't understand the margin of error in the criminal justice system." he says of the Sentinel, "To assume someone's guilty because they were found guilty is absurd. There is a legal truth and there is an absolute truth. They don't always coincide."

Haile would probably agree. Evidence that is good enough for a news story may never stand in court, and Orlando now faces the prospect of Crazy Joe Spaziano, aging biker socialized by 20 years on death row, back on the streets. "It's really frus- trating," Haile says. "Here you have a case that's been lying around for 20 years, and now you're going to have a new trial? Gimme a break. You can't go back and find justice.

The Herald's coverage was challenged on several occasions, most abruptly during the hear- ing that preceded Judge Eaton's ruling when its former associate editor, Tony Proscio, was approached by Sentinel reporter Jim Leusner, who asked, "Has the Herald lost its objectivity?"

Proscio, who left the Herald this year, subsequently offered an impassioned defense of his paper and its viewpaint. "Does Florida dare-does any decent Society dare-to electrocute a human being based on a trial like the one they gave Joe SpazianD 20 years ago?" he wrote in a Jan. 21 op-ed plece. "And if so, why bother with trials at all?"

Not included in Proscio's nar- rative, Sentinel staffers note, was the context: When Leusner asked his question, Proscio had just stepped down from the stand where he had been called to testify in Spaziano's defense.

But Proscio's question still holds, and it leads to another, ane regarding the fundamental purpose and duty of the press. If the justice system falls, then what is a newspaper's duty?

The danger in today's con- stricting media world comes from the assumption that painstaking objectivity -an excellent business strategy-also makes for excellent journalism.

The Spaziano coverage by either the Sentinel or the Herald 10 puts the lie to that theory. Other newspapers can claim to have maintained their objectivity. But they can't claim to have made a difference. Or saved a life.

[page end]

Newspaper

Spage, Wyatt

Williams, Megan