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Philadelphia Spotlight 2000
Harold C. Wilson copyright 7/24/2000
As more and more light is focused on
the death penalty across this nation, more people are coming to understand
how it has been abused over and over again. In the case of my own capital
conviction, I had a court-appointed, egregiously incompetent defense lawyer,
Willis W. Berry, Jr., who had never tried a capital case before (Mr. Berry
is now a Pennsylvania trial judge in Philadelphia Commonwealth Court),
and the police detectives tampered with evidence. Nonetheless, in total
disregard of the United States Constitution, and ignoring the known corruption
of Philadelphia's police force, in the names of police detectives Walter
Hoffner and Jeff Piree, this state plans to commit premeditated murder.
The prosecutor in my case was none other than Philadelphia's former district
attorney, known for his unethical, illegal, racist training tape in which
he told a group of new assistant district attorneys that it was not their
job to pick a fair and competent, impartial jury, despite the Supreme Court's
landmark ruling cited in Batson vs. Kentucky, 47 U.S. At 87, stating: "The
very fact that members of a particular race are singled out and expressly
denied . . . all rights to participate in the administration of the law
as jurors, because of their color, though they are citizens, and may be
in other respects fully qualified, is practically a brand upon them, affixed
by the law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to the race
prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race
that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others."
The Federal Court has repeatedly noted
violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution
in cases prosecuted by the Philadelphia District Attorney's office. The
former prosecutor Jack McMahon's training tape gets into the exact details
of how to get rid of Black people and then cover up this unconstitutional
misconduct for the court records.
For example, Mr. McMahon states on the videotape:
"People from Mayfair are good and people
from 33rd and Diamond stink . . .
You don't want any jurors from 33rd
and Diamond." (Mayfair is a highly segregated white neighborhood, and 33rd
and Diamond is a low income
Black neighborhood.)
Further examples
from McMahon Tape: At 25: "Let's face it, again; there's the Blacks
from the low-income areas . . . you don't want those people on your jury."
47-48: "You know, in selecting Blacks, you don't want the real educated
ones . . ."
55: "In my experience, black women,
young black women, are very bad."
57: "You're not going to have some
brain surgeon from Chestnut Hill with some nitwit from 33d and Diamond."
69-71: "The case law says that the object of getting a jury is to get -
- I wrote it down. I looked in the cases. I had to look this up because
I didn't know this was the purpose of a jury: 'Voir dire is to get a competent,
fair, and impartial jury.' Well, that's ridiculous, you're not trying to
get that. And the only way you're going to do your best is to get jurors
that are as unfair and more likely to convict than anybody else in that
room."
McMahon's
consciousness of the race-based nature of his prosecutorial misconduct,
and the legal impropriety of such, is evidenced by his advice to the young
assistant prosecutors in how to create a pretextual race-neutral explanation
for the removal of Black jurors to satisfy Batson vs. Kentucky. McMahon
states:
"In the future, we're going to have
to be aware of Batson, and the best way to avoid any problems with it is
to protect yourself. . .
And on this little sheet that you have,
mark something down that you can articulate later if something happens
. . . So let's say you strike three Blacks to start with, the first three
people, and then it's like the defense attorney makes an objection saying
that you're striking Blacks. . . .Well, you're not going to be able to
go back and say, 'Oh,' and make up something about why you did it."
Failure of the application of the law is not something new; it has not
been applied in decades. No less an authority than the prestigious Columbia
Law School in New York City, in their new study, "A Broken System: Error
Rates in Capital Cases," analyzed every death penalty conviction and appeal
in the nation over a 22-year period from 1973 to 1995. They found that
in nearly 7 out of 10 cases of someone being sentenced to death, substantial
errors in the way the case was handled ultimately resulted in the court's
sending it back for review. In other words, in nearly 5,500 court decisions
over 22 years, a death sentence was overturned 68% of the time because
of errors committed during the trial.
This does not even take into account anyone who may be found innocent through
subsequent DNA testing, just errors made during the trial. Prosecutors'
misconduct, I would say, represents a total breakdown of what we as Black
African Americans have been struggling for and trying to build in this
country for centuries, and certainly since 1954 in the landmark case Brown
vs. Board of Education decision. Short of an end to injustice in the U.S.,
this is a call that the people should consider. The case is now before
the Honorable Carolyn Engel Temin in the Philadelphia PA Court of Common
Pleas, Criminal Justice Center, 1301 Filbert Street, Philadelphia, PA.
Harold C. Wilson
BC-1712
SCI Greene G/Unit,
C-Pod
175 Progress
Drive
Waynesburg, PA
15370
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