In a Land Where Justice is a Game
Killing Amos King
by
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dissident Voice
February 21, 2003
As
it now stands, on February 26 Jeb Bush will give the order to execute Amos
King, an inmate on Florida's death row who seems almost certainly innocent of
the murder that put him there. There's nothing new here. The state of Florida
has been trying to kill King for the past 26 years. It is testimony to King's
fortitude and courage that he has survived all previous attempts by the state
to take his life. But time is running out.
King was convicted of raping
and killing an elderly white woman, Natalie Brady, in March of 1977. He
maintains he is innocent. The facts back him up. He claims his trial was a
sham. Even a cursory review of the court records reveals this to be a stunning
understatement. Even so, the Florida justice system grinds on, as if in killing
Amos King it might also extinguish all traces of its grotesque errors.
The case of Amos King
encapsulates nearly everything that is wrong with the death penalty: he is a
black man in a southern state accused of raping and killing a white woman; he
is poor; he was represented by a shoddy lawyer appointed by the court; cops
lied on the stand and manufactured evidence; the forensic analysis and autopsy
were both botched; the judge kow-towed to the prosecution; the judge, the
prosecutor, the public defender and the jury were all white; he is likely
innocent of the crime.
"My being on death row
all these years, yet not executed by now, represents to many what is wrong with
the death penalty and court inefficiency," says King. "The truth is
it represents very poor, ever treacherous legal representation and serious
abuse and misconduct by the trial judge and prosecution. It represents the sort
of treatment anyone is subject to who can't hire a good attorney. My case
represents the triumph of politics over process. It represents racism. An how
it combines with politics in higher places to victimize the weak."
One of the reasons Amos King
is still alive some 26 years after a death sentence was put on his head is that
he chose not to stay quiet. He has fought tenaciously for his life and the
lives of others in Florida's grim death house. He has become a jailhouse
lawyer, a poet, and an unwavering voice for the condemned.
Indeed, King even made the
bloodthirsty Jeb Bush, a man with no detectable conscience, blink. Most
recently, King was slated to be executed on December 2, 2002. But a scant 15
minutes before his scheduled execution prison officials interrupted King's
prayer session with Buddhist priest Casey Walpole to tell him that the governor
had issued a rare 30-day stay of execution. The stay came at the request of
attorney Barry Scheck, co-founder of The Innocence Project, who demanded that
the state conduct DNA tests on recently discovered evidence. The fact that
there is new evidence in a case from 1977 tells you a lot about how the justice
system works in Florida.
There was plenty of reason
for Bush to tread with caution. In 2001, Scheck proved that Florida had
condemned to death Frank Smith for the murder of Shandra Whitehead, an 8-year
old girl. While awaiting execution, Smith died of cancer on death row. Scheck
produced DNA evidence that exonerated Smith of the crime. Smith wasn't alone.
Florida leads the nation with 24 death row inmates released after DNA tests
proved their innocent. In many of these cases, the state has deliberately
concealed evidence proving the innocence of the condemned.
The test results from King's
samples came back a few weeks ago as "inconclusive." This might
convince a fair person that there was more than a reasonable doubt as to Amos
King's guilt. But Jeb Bush is not a fair person. He casually dismissed King's
plea for clemency and reset his appointment with death for February 26.
Let's revisit what the state
claims happened a few hours after midnight on March 18, 1977.
At the time, Amos King was
serving a sentence at the Tarpon Springs work release facility for a gun theft
charge. The night prior to the murder King was working at a local restaurant. A
bed check by prison counselor James McDonough found King missing at around 3:40
am. McDonough said he later found King outside the building with blood on his
shirt and with the crotch of his pants dripping with blood. The two men got
into a fight. McDonough claimed that King drew a knife and slashed him several
times on the hand. King left the office, then returned again to find McDonough
talking on the phone with his superior. He supposedly slashed the counselor
again and cut the phone cord. Then King fled the scene, ending up at his
girlfriend's house. King later turned himself in for fleeing the work center.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away
in an all-white neighborhood the home of Natalie Brady was aflame. When police
arrived, they found Brady's body. She had been raped, beaten and slashed to
death with a paring knife. The prosecution alleged that King fled the work
center after returning from work, broke into Brady's house, tortured her, raped
her, stabbed her to death, robbed the house and then lit it on fire. Then they
added an element of the macabre to the mix. Dr. Joan Wood, the coroner,
testified that before she was raped, King jabbed knitting needles into the
woman's vagina, causing a wound that the prosecution said explained the bloody
crotch of King's pants seen by McDonough. The state never produced those pants.
In Florida, the justice
system works like a fast-food restaurant. The murder of Natalie Brady occurred
on March 18. A grand jury indicted King for the crime less than a month later.
The first trial date was set for May 31. It was continued until July 5, only
two months after the indictment. The trial, including the death penalty phase,
lasted less than three days. King was convicted and sentenced to death on July
8. He was put on death row on July 13, where he has resided ever since-making
him the dean of Florida's death row.
Why did King's case go to
trial so quickly? There's an unbelievably venal explanation. The presiding
judge in the case, Harry Andrews, was in a race with other judges in Florida to
preside over the first televised trial in the state. In fact, Judge Andrews
moved up the starting time of the trial by a half-day in order to beat another
televised trial starting on the same day in Miami.
King's lead attorney was a
public defender and drunk named Thomas Cole. Cole and King knew each other. In
fact, Cole had unsuccessfully defended King on the gun theft charges that had
landed him in Tarpon Springs. King had criticized his handling of that case and
Cole had called him an annoyance. As soon as King learned that Cole had been
slated as his lawyer for the Brady murder trial, he petitioned the court to
appoint a new lawyer. The court refused.
Cole was totally unprepared
for King's trial. In fact, he only met twice with King before the trial began.
Like many public defenders, Cole had been working several other cases at the
time. Indeed, the judge in the King trial wanted Cole to try another felony
case simultaneously.
In any event, Cole entered
the King trial in a state of mental and physical fatigue. On the morning the
trial was to begin, Cole asked the judge to remove him from the case. "As
an officer of the court, I cannot give Amos King a fair trial today, or this
week," Cole implored. The judge denied his request. During the trial Cole
again begged the judge for a recess, saying on the record: "Judge, I am
beat. I have to go home and get some sleep." Later in the trial, Cole
announced again that he was exhausted. "I can't think anymore," Cole
told the judge. Again the judge refused.
If Cole was tired, it wasn't
because he was spending too much time exerting himself in the defense of Amos
King. Cole barely roused himself to cross-examine witnesses. He offered only
minimal challenges to the most critical (and suspect) pieces of evidence
offered by the prosecution. He failed to poke holes in the prosecution's
shifting timeline for the murder, which would have demonstrated it would have
been nearly impossible for King to have committed the crime. He didn't probe
the biases of witnesses, including a prison guard with a record of tampering
with evidence and fixing polygraph tests. Cole also failed to aggressively
pursue the fact that the cops interrogated King without an attorney and without
reading him his Miranda rights. Even worse, Cole inexplicably chose not to
present exculpatory evidence, such as hair and fiber samples taken from Brady's
nightgown and sheets, that might have cleared King.
Things started to go wrong
from the start, beginning with jury selection. In his rush to get on TV, the
judge corrupted the jury selection process by combining it with the
consolidation of the indictment and the particulars of the charges, a scenario
ripe with prejudice. Cole stood mute as the prosecution empanelled a dream jury
of 10 women and two men. All white. Average age: 65. This jury of white
grannies was ready to consign King to death before the trial even started. In
fact, as the trial convened one of the jurors covered her face with her hands,
got the attention of the judge, and asked to be given another seat because she
was "horrified" of being so close to King.
King was stunned as Cole sat
on his hands through the trial, allowing witness to present testimony that
veered sharply pre-trial depositions and the known facts of the case. King
repeatedly sent messages to the judge challenging Cole's competency, only to be
rebuffed and chided for making a nuisance of himself. "Were I as violent
as they portrayed, I would've attacked Mr. Cole in the courtroom," says
King.
The jury was primed to
convict before opening statements. But they were certainly enticed into voting
to King to death by the sensational testimony of the coroner, the infamous Dr.
Joan Wood. In the 1977 trial, Wood testified that Brady died between 2:45 and
3:45 am, geared to harmonize with the prison counselor's testimony that King
was missing from his bunk. But six years later Wood backpedaled. In her 1985
testimony, Wood said death could have occurred as early as 1:45 am, when King
was working at Nellie Kelly's restaurant.
At the original trial, Wood
also testified that King jabbed knitting needles into Natalie's Brady's vagina
prior to the rape, opening a bloody gash. There were gasps from the women
jurors as Wood described this horrific scene. Wood said she took vaginal
washings of blood and semen. This potentially exculpatory evidence has never
turned up. The knitting needles themselves didn't show signs of blood and
looked weathered, as if they'd been laying outside for months and not beside
the bed of the slain seamstress. Cole, of course, didn't follow up on these
anomalies.
In 1985, Wood recanted this
sickening theory. In court, she testified she couldn't determine what had
caused the wound to Brady's vagina. "Whether the injury to her vagina is
only tearing caused by a penis, or whether it is an injury resulting from the
insertion into the vagina of some foreign object I can't say."
In retrospect, the macabre
story of the knitting needles seemed designed only to enflame the fears of the
elderly women on the juror. It worked. The deliberations were swift and
merciless. When the jurors entered the courtroom to read their verdict they all
sported dark sunglasses. A reporter asked them why they were wearing shades. A
juror explained that the sunglasses were meant to conceal their sad eyes,
reddened by profusive tears for the victim.
As for Wood, she was later
run out of office for negligence and providing misleading and false testimony
in numerous criminal cases. The Pinellas county attorney Paul McCabe vowed to
"review all questionable cases" in which Wood was involved. But despite
the dramatic backtracking in her testimony, McCabe didn't review Wood's conduct
in the case of Amos King.
How bad was Wood? In 1998,
one of her autopsies was reviewed by another medical examiner. He found that
Wood had misidentified the sex of a dead child and wrongly attributed the cause
of death to "blunt head trauma & neck injuries." In fact, the
child had died of pneumonia. The accused was exonerated.
In 1983, the 11th Circuit
Court of Appeals agreed with King that his lawyer Thomas Cole, who died in 1979
car crash, was incompetent. His death sentence was vacated on the grounds that
he had received "ineffective assistance of counsel." In his opinion
overturning the death verdict, Federal Appeals Court Judge Paul Roney wrote:
"King was convicted on circumstantial evidence which, however strong,
leaves room for doubt that a skilled attorney might raise to a sufficient level
that, though not enough to defeat conviction, might convince a jury that the
ultimate penalty should not be executed." But even this ruling was absurd.
The court ruled that Cole was incompetent, but only overturned King's death
sentence, not his guilty verdict.
So King's case bounced back
and forth from one court to another over the next 20 years. Stays have been
granted and overturned. New evidence has come forward; old evidence has been
lost. It took King almost 20 years to get a complete trial record and 2,000 new
pages showed up days after the stay of execution had been granted. Lawyers and
judges came and went. One judge was disqualified for bias. In the 1985 retrial
on the death verdict, King, unable to offer evidence of innocence, was
sentenced to death once again. Last year, King ended up in the courtroom of
Judge Susan Shaeffer, who greeted him with an outrageous salutation. "Why
aren't you dead yet?" Shaeffer taunted. "Why are you still
alive?" It turns out that Shaeffer had been a colleague of Thomas Cole in
the Pinellas county public defenders office. Welcome to the criminal justice
system in Florida, where judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors are all
members of the same grim fraternity.
The answer to Shaeffer's
horrific question is simple when you get to know the kind of man Amos King is.
Despite facing a stacked deck in a state that places no value on the life a
black inmate, he has never stopped fighting for his life and fighting to expose
the malign system that is conspiring to extinguish it.
King is almost certainly
innocent of the crime for which Jeb Bush seems intent on putting him to death.
But it shouldn't matter. The history of his case starkly illustrates the
unspeakable cruelty of the nation's death penalty system, where people are killed
with barely a ripple crossing the conscience of the state or the press. King's
execution has been set and reset numerous times. He has been saved from the
death needle with only fifteen minutes to spare and then told he will face its
lethal spike once again. This is a kind of mental torture that few of us can
comprehend and few other societies tolerate. He watched helplessly as his
botched, fast-forwarded trial was declared to be fair over and over again. He
witnessed his own alcoholic lawyer slump through his trial as if suffering a
3-day hangover. He has seen officers of the court lie, cops and the coroner
fabricate evidence and the press demands his head, instead of exposing the
corruption at the heart of the case. He never got a jury of his peers. Not even
one juror. But still, at this late hour, he cries out for justice.
This is what it's come to.
We live in an age of casual barbarity, where we tolerate humanitarian bombings
and embrace politicians who send people to death as a demonstration of their machismo.
Don't look too closely at the way this all works, because you'll be forever
repulsed by what you see. For this isn't a justice system; it's a bloody sewer.
Please spare a moment to
help spare Amos King's life. Send Jeb Bush an email demanding that he stop the
execution of Amos King:
Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-author of Five Days
that Shook The World: The Battle For Seattle and Beyond with Alexander
Cockburn, and is a co-editor of Counterpunch,
the nation’s best muckraking newsletter. Email:
stclair@counterpunch.org.