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Struggle for a 'Jewish Death' On Hold for a Texas Prisoner
A few years ago, Max Soffar made a fuss
when Texas prison officials
told him that he could not have a rabbi
attend him before his execution.
Not long afterward, he asked his lawyer
to make sure he would be buried
in the same Jewish cemetery as his
adoptive parents rather than under a
nameless cross in the prison cemetery
in Huntsville like his fellow
death-row inmates.
His struggles to ensure a "Jewish death"
are now on hold. After 20 years
on the nation's most populous death
row, a federal court panel has handed
Soffar his first partial victory, ordering
that he be either released or
retried because of flaws in his 1981
murder conviction. A three-judge
panel from the Fifth Circuit Court
of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision,
ruled last December that his conviction
relied "almost exclusively" on
confessions illegally made to the police
in the absence of a lawyer.
Soffar said he sought to recant the
confessions almost immediately after
making them, claiming he had been tricked
into confessing a crime he
never committed.
Following an appeal by the prosecution,
the entire appeals court will
rehear Soffar's appeal in September.
A decision is expected at the
beginning of next year.
"I often thought about abandoning my
appeals and committing judicial
suicide," Mr. Soffar, a medium-built,
black-haired man with worried eyes,
told the Forward in an interview at
the Polunsky Unit penitentiary in
Livingstone, Tex. "But now I am really
hopeful, because this is one of
the toughest courts in the U.S."
The panel's decision sheds light on
what has become a pattern in many
death penalty cases around the country:
woefully inadequate
court-appointed lawyering, weak investigations,
mental-health issues,
doubtful police behavior and trigger-happy
prosecution.
A former drug addict and police informer,
Soffar was charged with
committing an execution-style murder
in the course of an armed robbery
at a bowling alley in northwest Houston
on the night of July 13, 1980.
4 people were shot in the head at point-blank
range. One survived.
Soffar was arrested 3 weeks later for
speeding on a motorcycle that
turned out to be stolen. En route to
the station, Soffar, who was on
probation, told the officers that he
had details about the bowling alley
shooting.
"From then on, things fell like dominos,"
he recounted. "I was caught for
a stolen bike and ended up on death
row for murder."
Interrogated for three days without
a lawyer, Soffar initially told
police that he went to the bowling
alley with Latt Bloomfield, the son of
a Houston police officer, who he said
committed the robbery and murders
while Soffar waited outside. He then
confessed to participating in the
crimes, saying that Mr. Bloomfield
shot 2 of the 4 victims and then
he shot the other 2, including the
1 who survived, Greg Garner.
A year later, following a trial in which
his final confession formed the
bulk of the prosecution's case, a jury
found Soffar guilty of murder, and
he was sentenced to death. Mr. Bloomfield
was never charged.
>From his cell on death row, Soffar
has long claimed that he and Mr.
Bloomfield were nowhere near the bowling
alley, and that he fabricated
their involvement in order to punish
Mr. Bloomfield for cheating him in a
petty burglary scheme. He claims that
once he placed himself at the
scene, police, desperate for a lead
in a high-profile case, coaxed him
into admitting he pulled the trigger.
He lost all his state and federal
appeals until the panel ruling last
December.
"I always lost because no one listened
to me and my attorney did not do
his job," Mr. Soffar said, sitting
in sealed chamber behind a plexiglass
wall and speaking on a phone. One of
his lawyers, the now-deceased Joe
Cannon, became famous for falling asleep
during another capital trial.
His client was recently granted a new
trial as a result.
"The police needed someone and so they
got my confessions. But I got all
the information from the TV and from
them. But there is nothing else
against me no forensic evidence,
no witness, no gun, no fingerprints,
nothing."
The federal court panel concurred. "The
State introduced absolutely no
direct or physical evidence connecting
Soffar to the bowling alley
robbery-murders," the judges wrote.
Prosecutors continue to insist they
have the right man. "I have no doubt
he did it," Andy Tobias, the prosecutor
at the trial, told the Forward.
"I am not a redneck riding a horse
and trying to bring the death penalty
on everyone! I have a heart and if
I believed Maxy didn't do it, I
wouldn't have sent him to death."
Soffar claims he and Mr. Bloomfield
had concocted a scheme to rob each
others' parents' homes and share the
loot, but that after he robbed his
own parents, Mr. Bloomfield refused
to play his part.
After Mr. Bloomfield "an aggressive
no-good who hid behind Daddy's
badge," according to the testimony
of a local police officer tricked
him, Mr. Soffar said he "really wanted
to make him pay."
"I had this idea to implicate him in
a crime and get the reward. I was
out of control at the time," he said.
By all accounts, including his own,
Max Soffar was a deeply troubled
child who started taking drugs at an
early age, was in and out of mental
institutions and had a history of petty
run-ins with local police. At the
same time, he enjoyed hanging around
police stations to find some of the
guidance his aging adoptive parents
had been unable to provide him.
"I loved to watch the lights on the
police cars," Soffar said, smiling.
"I would set the house on fire to see
the firefighters and the cops."
He eventually became a "snitch." One
of the detectives he was
collaborating with was Bruce Clawson,
who intervened repeatedly to get
him out of jail for minor offenses.
When Soffar was arrested after the murders,
Mr. Clawson was asked by the
detectives handling the case to "get
Max to talk," as he later testified.
Soffar complied. "I trusted Bruce and
I asked him what I should do," he
recalled.
According to court documents, he asked
Mr. Clawson how he could get a
lawyer and how much time it would take.
Mr. Clawson, the federal judges
found, deceived him and cajoled him
into talking to the police instead of
getting a lawyer, violating his Fifth
Amendment rights.
After he gave his 1st accounts implicating
only Mr. Bloomfield in the
killings, Soffar said he "got mad"
when the police told him they had
released Mr. Bloomfield for lack of
evidence. He then gave a 3rd
confession in which he admitted shooting
2 of the victims. The
prosecution based its case on this
final confession.
"I didn't realize I was incriminating
myself," Soffar said, adding that
he had been sleeping at his parents'
home the night of the murder. "I
thought it was the best way to put
Latt behind bars and that Bruce
[Clawson] would help me out of jail
like usual."
Mr. Clawson, who declined to be interviewed
by the Forward, eventually
testified that the Houston detectives
fed information to Soffar. That was
confirmed by several medical experts
brought by the defense who testified
that given Soffar's brain damage and
mental problems at the time of the
offense, he could not possibly have
independently made such complex
statements.
Mr. Tobias, the prosecutor, denied any
"spoon-feeding" and said Soffar
knew some facts that "only the murderer
could know."
"The police and the prosecution have
a 20-year investment in the Max
Soffar theory, so they don't want to
abandon it," retorted James Schropp,
Soffar's Washington, D.C.-based appellate
lawyer, who works pro bono.
Casting further doubt over the truthfulness
of the confessions, the
federal judges said Soffar's statements
"appear dramatically at odds"
with statements made by Greg Garner,
the surviving victim most notably
on the number of assailants, the number
of bullets shot and the position
of the bodies.
Soffar believes Mr. Garner, who did
not recognize him or Bloomfield in a
lineup, did not testify at the trial
"because his truth did not
correspond to what the police wanted"
and not because he suffered from
amnesia, the official reason.
Nellie Garner, Mr. Garner's mother,
said her son did not want to talk to
reporters. "He knows and we know Soffar
is guilty and we don't like the
idea of him getting out on a little
flop," she said.
In any case, the police never clearly
answered one obvious question: Why
was Latt Bloomfield never seriously
investigated for the 2 murders
Soffar blamed on him in the statement
the prosecution relied on to
convict Soffar?
Mr. Bloomfield, who is reportedly living
in Waynesboro, Miss., could not
be reached for comment.
Soffar also confessed to a rape in nearby
Alvin in 1979. Because the
confession was made without a lawyer
present, the federal court panel
ruled that it was illegal. Soffar was
never charged, but always affirmed
that he was guilty. At the urging of
attorney Schropp, he would not
discuss the issue on the record with
the Forward. "In any case, the issue
is long irrelevant," Mr. Schropp said.
Soffar's case got an important, unexpected
boost two years ago when
another Texas inmate, Stewart Cook,
claimed the real bowling-alley
murderer was his former robbery accomplice
in the Houston area, John Paul
Reid, currently on death row for seven
execution-style killings in
Tennesee. In an affidavit, Cook said
Reid had alluded to a bowling alley
incident in 1982 and that the modus
operandi resembled Reid's pattern
throughout his career.
"Yes, Max is innocent," Cook wrote in
an answer to a written query by the
Forward from his prison in Diboll,
Tex. Reid, he added, "in trying to
save his own ass from facing a trial
in Texas, will maintain his
innocence to the grave."
Reid did not return a letter seeking
comments from the Forward. His
Memphis-based public defender, Mike
Engle, said that his client denied
his involvement and that Cook was likely
trying to cut a deal with the
prosecution to help indict Mr. Reid.
Mr. Schropp said he was unable to issue
a subpoena to Reid and that the
Houston police had told him they were
not interested in pursuing that lead.
Throughout his death row years, Soffar
did not receive much help from the
local Jewish community. He said he
had written in mid-August to the local
offices of the Anti-Defamation League.
As of press time, both the Dallas
and the Houston offices said they had
not received any correspondence
from him.
"The Jewish community doesn't give a
damn about him, unfortunately," said
Rabbi Ted Sanders, the lead Jewish
chaplain in Texas, who visited Soffar
on several occasions and still corresponds
with him.
"I am not angry at anyone, except at
myself for starting all this,"
Soffar concluded, slightly relaxing
his tense face.
(source: The Forward)
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