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Title: The Death Penalty : An American History by Stuart Banner ISBN: 0-674-01083-3 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 31 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: RE: Florida cases: Roy Swafford and Peter Ventura:
Comment: For those interested in reading the four to three vote Florida Supreme Court opinions regarding two more death sentenced persons whose innocence is an authentic issue, please go to www.flcourts.org, then go to "Opinions and Rules", then chose the correct year and scroll down to the following two cases:
Roy Swafford: April 18, 2002 Case No. 92.173
Peter Ventura: May 24, 2001 Case No. 93.839
These two cases are findable under "Court Orders: Case Disposition Orders" and "Briefs in Other Cases" sections of the "Press Page":
Roy Swafford: March 26, 2004 Case Nos. 03.931 and 03.1153
Rating: 5
Summary: Introduction to the Florida history and more Florida history
Comment: First an introduction: From 1986 - 1992 I was employed as an investigator at the Office of Capital Collateral Representative (CCR) in Tallahassee, Florida, where Scharlette Holdman worked as the supervisor of the investigators from October 1985 - March 1988.
I have known Scharlette since the mid-1970s death penalty debates at Florida State University, including the debate between Professor Richard L. Rubenstein (author of "After Auschwitz", "My Brother Paul", "The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the American Future", "The Age of Triage", "Religion and Eros", and other books) vs. Baptist Minister and Philosopher Will Campbell (the debate was circa 1977).
Her office, the Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, was in the same wing of the Petroleum Building as my office at Common Cause in Florida (where I was a full-time volunteer during the day and worked at the Brown Derby Restaurant at night from 1981 - 1986).
The Petroluem Building was next to the State Capital, the Florida Supreme Court and the State Archives and Library. When it was torn down, the space and the space for the first CCR office became the Mary Brogan Art and Science Museum and a storm water retaining pond. The Petroleum Building was called by those of us who worked or volunteered there the "Forces of Good" (FOG) Building -- as opposed to FOE -- Forces of Evil, such as Associated Industries, the Chamber and other big business interests in Florida. The FOG building also included (not an exhaustive list) the Clean Water Action Project, the ACLU, NOW, Florida Legal Services, Migrant Farmworker's Organization (directed by Cliff Thaell, who has more recently been a Leon County Commissioner for about ten years or more), Mike Vasilinda's television news service.
About every two years at CCR there was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist purge due to the pressures and dysfunctions of the work and the people. I survived two such purges. With the third, I was the first to go in the spring and summer of 1992.
When Scharlette had essentially declared war upon CCR in 1987 and thereafter, some of us decided to investigate her background given some things that we had heard. Low and behold, Scharlette's claim of a PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawaii and a Master's Degree from (if my memory serves me correctly) the University of Birmingham don't exist.
We used Scharlette's Social Security number, her maiden name and her married name -- with all this information, both universities had no record of Scharlette having received any degrees from these institutions.
As I understand Scharlette, she needed the "degrees" to confer upon her "credentials" that she really never needed as she is indeed then and now a national expert on capital mitigation, litigation, etc. However Scharlette can be deceptive, as her lack of a PhD and Masters so demonstrates. Even today she claims to have the degrees as when she gives presentations regarding capital cases, she is identified as "Dr." A key word search of her name will bring up some of the presentations that she has made in the past several years with the title "Dr." preceding her name.
If she has received any honorary or other degrees since 1990, that would be new information for me. If anyone can assist in this matter, please contact me at [email protected] or my mailing address: P.O. Box 38458, Tallahassee, FL 32315-8458. Thank you.
Rating: 5
Summary: More Florida Death Penalty Litigation History:
Comment: After Mark Olive voluntarily resigned from CCR about March 1988, Billy H. Nolas became the next Chief Litigator. It is extremely odd that Michael Mello doesn't mention his name nor Martin "Marty" McClain's names in the book. For a vast variety of reasons he should have. One can only interpret Mello's non-inclusion of their names and histories because Mello is a Holdman-Olive extreme loyalist. With Olive I readily agree as I am a loyalist to Olive and his accomplishments and demeanor. As to Holdman, I have very mixed considerations as cited previously.
Nolas was and is an excellent litigator like Olive was and is. Nolas was the Chief Litigator for about the last two years of Gov. Martinez "regime", which was the most difficult time in CCR history (during my employment there) with Martinez signing death warrants as if he was at a Republican Party event signing autographs.
Nolas sadly resigned at the end of 1990, when Martinez had been defeated by former U.S. Senator Lawton Chiles and former U.S. House of Representatives member Buddy MacKay.
Nolas was completely drained from the years he endured and litigated while at CCR, both due to the hugh case load and due to the internecine warfare within the agency. McClain and his faction within CCR basically did their best to cause Nolas to leave -- eventually they were successful -- and THAT is when clients's cases began to suffer.
McClain can be an excellent litigator, however his strategic decisions in various cases is a different matter. When Mello writes on page 245 of the hardcover version regarding CCR, "Look beneath the surface of CCR's 'success rates', however, and you'll find an artifice typical of hack public defender officers. CCR has in the past farmed out the hardest cases to outside lawyers (by finding that it has a 'conflict of interest')"
As the penultimate example of McClain alleging a "conflict of interest" [and I can only assume with the director of CCR at the time, Michael Minerva, consent] is the client Jerry Layne Rogers, Sr. -- a clearly wrongfully convicted innocent man -- in Mr. Rogers's case there were 80 boxes of documents, from court files, prosecutor and law enforcement files, trial and evidentiary hearing transcripts, etc. Mr. Rogers's case was the largest and most complicated that CCR has ever represented. The second largest and most complicated was that of Mr. Gerald Stano, whose lead attorney during most of the development of his case was Olive.
McClain simply didn't want to have such a complicated case as a CCR case, so McClain, in my considered insider opinion as Mr. Roger's only investigator from 1989 until my involuntary departure in 1992, alleged in a misrepresentation to the Florida Supreme Court (FSC) that he had a "conflict of interest" with Mr. Rogers -- while Mr. Rogers's case was pending at the FSC.
As a result, Mr. Rogers had no counsel for an extended period of time until the Washington, D.C. law firm Covington and Burling became his pro bono counsel in 1995. The result was an unanimous FSC 26 page opinion ordering a new trial in Mr. Rogers's case due primarily to prosecutorial misconduct, in particular Brady v. Maryland violations.
To read the opinion, go to www.flcourts.org, then to Opinions, then to the year 2001, then toward the bottom on February 15, 2001, one will find the FSC opinion.
Two other cases in particular McClain's strategic decisions may very well cost the clients their lives: Peter Ventura and Roy Swafford. More on these two cases another time, except to note that in both cases the FSC decided 4 - 3 against Mr. Ventura and Mr. Swafford in their most recent FSC cases.
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Title: The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment by Franklin E. Zimring ISBN: 0195152360 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies by Hugo Adam Bedau ISBN: 0195122860 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Ultimate Punishment : A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty by Scott Turow ISBN: 0374128731 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty by Eliza Steelwater ISBN: 081334042X Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime by David Dow, Mark Dow, Christopher Hitchens ISBN: 041593267X Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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