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http://www.kfmb.com    SAN DIEGO - CBS news Nov 20, 2002   5pm News
 

July 30 — Arizona prisoners hope they do not appear on various advocacy groups' Web sites, or else they may be charged with a crime or have more time added to their sentences.
This has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to file a federal lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, alleging that the state law barring prisoners from communicating with the Web sites of advocacy groups violates the First Amendment rights of both the inmates and the organizations that want to tell their story. The law, adopted by Arizona in 2000, prohibits inmates from
communicating with Internet service providers, remote computer services and Web sites, either directly or through other parties.
 "It's really a matter of both infringing on both the First Amendment rights of the prisoners and the groups," said David Fathi of the ACLU National Prison Project. "The Corrections Department has the right to prevent prisoners from communicating with groups who want to put these prisoners on their sites. Organizations have been told that any mail sent to prisoners will be confiscated. So the First
Amendment rights of both have been heavily burdened."
However, Arizona prison officials say the issues surrounding the law involve more than freedom of speech. The law is intended to ensure both prison security and the rights of victims' families who feel violated by prisoners' presence on Web sites.
Advocating Free Speech — For Everyone
Under the law, Arizona inmates and their stories are not allowed to appear on sites outside the one maintained by the Department of Corrections. And if officials find stories about inmates posted on
outside sites, they can threaten the prisoners with punishment, even if they never initiated contacted with their advocates.
 "It is extraordinary that Arizona prison officials believe they can tell international groups opposed to the death penalty what they can and cannot say online about prisoners in Arizona," said Eleanor Eisenberg,
executive director of the ACLU of Arizona. "It is equally absurd that this law punishes prisoners even when they are not responsible for the posting of information about them on these outside Web sites."
                 The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three groups — Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and Stop Prisoner Rape. Before the
prisoner-internet law was adopted, Arizona inmates were not allowed to have direct computer access to the outside world.
Plaintiff lawyers said the goal of the lawsuit is not give direct computer access to prisoners and opportunities to conduct or plan crimes in cyberspace. They are trying to preserve the right to freedom
of expression of both inmates and the prisoner rights groups.
"We're not talking about giving prisoners access to computers with a modem or anything like that. We're talking about their communicating with groups through letters, phone calls, or they're telling other
parties to tell their story on the Web," said Fathi. "In the state's legislative history, it has not been an issue of prison security or maintaining prison security. There have been people out there who have
been annoyed that prisoners have been able to get information about them out there, saying things like, "I need a lawyer' or 'I'm innocent' or even things such as 'I'm lonely. I need someone to talk to.' This is really about nothing more than the suppression of free speech."
Preserving Victims’ Rights and Prison Security
However, Arizona prison officials there is more to the law than alleged suppression of speech. The families of murder victims were horrified when they learned that their loved ones' killers has postings on the Web asking for pen pals and professing their innocence without revealing all the details of their crimes.
                 Jennifer Johnson Lopez was disgusted when she found out that her father Roy Johnson's convicted killer, Beau Greene, appeared in a picture of a Web site searching for pen pals. Convicted killers are prohibited from contacting their victims' families in any way, and Roy Johnson's family, believing that Greene had violated their privacy, urged the Arizona state legislators to pass a law prohibiting other prisoners from telling what may be distorted versions of their stories.
"The law started when the wife and daughter of the victim of a homicide came across a picture of her father's killer, Beau Greene, and he was talking about how he was such a great lover of cats," said Gary Phelps, chief of staff for the Arizona Department of Corrections. "They were very upset, and she [the daughter] felt that her privacy had been violated."
Phelps also pointed out, despite the ACLU's arguments, that the law is also intended to buffer prison security. He recalled a 1997 foiled prison escape where Floyd Bennett Thornton Jr., a death row inmate, and his wife Rebecca were killed in a hail of gunfire. Thornton had enlisted his wife's help in his attempted escape as she fired a semiautomatic rifle at authorities before guards killed her and her husband near the prison fence.
Phelps said that further investigation showed that inmates were using the Internet to solicit help in escape plans.
 "As we were investigating the incident we found that some inmates were using a very remote Internet access system to try to solicit help with escapes, escape routes, maps," he said.
An Inmate’s Alleged ‘Catch-22’
Still, the ACLU argues that the Arizona law is too broad. Inmates, the federal complaint alleges, have received notices from officials who threaten to charge them with crimes or add time to their
sentences if they do not tell the advocacy groups to remove their names from their sites.
However, the prisoners, under the law, cannot contact the sites, leaving them in a no-win situation.
"It's really a Catch-22," said Fathi. "The prisoners are told to contact the sites and get their name off the sites or risk being charged with a crime. But if they contact the sites, they are still violating the law."
New York has a similar Internet prisoner access law forbidding inmates from receiving mail from third-party services. However, they are allowed to send mail to these services, as long as they disclose that they are prison inmates.
                 Arizona prison officials, Phelps said, do their best to monitor traditional correspondence between inmates and the outside world, inspecting all their letters. However, they will do anything
necessary to monitor non-traditional correspondence, especially if prison security is at risk.
                 "It's an issue that faces this country, even as we try to track down and protect the nation from terrorists," Phelps said.

            
            July 21, 2002 - WFLA-TV News Channel 8 NBC Affiliate in Tampa, Florida

                    Internet Gives Death Row Inmates Forum
JACKSONVILLE - Amos King, facing execution for the 1977 stabbing death of a woman, tells visitors to his Web site he was wrongly accused.
``I'm innocent of the charges I'm on death row for,'' King writes. ``I'm the victim of a frame-up.''
Several dozen Florida death row inmates have Web pages proclaiming their innocence and pleading for money and letters.
Although some sites are created by friends and relatives, many are supported by people in other countries who oppose capital punishment.
The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty is behind many of the sites.
Tracy Lamourie, co-founder and director of the organization, said it considers the death penalty a human rights issue and thinks death row inmates should have their say.
``In a lot of the cases, they probably have done some nasty things, but they don't deserve to be killed,'' Lamourie said.
The group currently sponsors about 350 inmate Web pages. Inmates mail the information to the organization, which develops a Web site. In most states, inmates do not have Internet access.
Lamourie said the purpose of the Web pages is to raise awareness of the death penalty, ``so that those in the U.S. become just as disgusted by the practice as those of us outside who look upon the death penalty in the way we look at slavery, at apartheid, at the way the mentally ill were treated a century ago.''
The site generates 100 to 200 e-mails a week, she said, some complimentary and some critical.
Ted Hires, founder of the Justice Coalition, a victims' right group in Jacksonville, abhors the killers' Web sites.
``I can't believe that we would tolerate a convicted, cold-blooded killer having a Web site,'' he said. ``It inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on the victims' families.''
Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, said inmates with Web pages are not violating any laws.
``There is nothing we can do to stop them,'' she said.
King, who received a stay earlier this month, has a site thanks to a group of Europeans and Americans opposed to the death penalty, said Sissel Egeland of Denmark.
``We fear Amos King is innocent,'' Egeland said in an e- mail. ``The risk of executing the wrong man and creating new victims should go to the heart of [Gov.] Jeb Bush and convince him to be cautious.''

June 10, 2002 WAKA-TV 8 CBS Affiliate: Montgomery, Alabama - Lead story on 6pm and 10 pm news

                    Death Row Website     06/10/2002    John Matson
                    The Canadian based website is home to the web pages of over
                    350 death row inmates. It's billed as the ultimate online death
                    penalty resource. Built by the Canadian Coalition Against the
                    Death Penalty, it house pages for death row inmates from every
                    state that uses the death penalty, including Alabama. Although
                    the state's death row prisoners don't have access to the internet,
                    they can still get their message across. Alabama Department of
                    Corrections spokesperson Brian Corbett says: "They can be on
                    their approved mailing list or friends or family of an inmate could
                    correspond wit this group and feed them info." Many of they claim
                    to be wrongly convicted, using the web to get their case heard by
                    possibly millions around the world. Brian Corbett says: "They're
                    using this group as their voice, going through somebody else to
                    get a message or whatever it might be out there." Victims of
                    Crime and Leniency director Miriam Shehane was shocked when
                    she first saw the site. Miriam Shehane says: "They go through 13
                    appeals and then they're able to do this, I find it appalling." She's
                    upset that the victim's side is not heard. Miriam Shehane says:
                    "The thing that concerns me is taking their statements at face
                    value." The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty's
                    website also lists up coming execution dates across the U-S.
                    Ironically, Canada does not have a death penalty. The state of
                    Alabama currently has 187 people awaiting execution on death row.
                           Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty

                      
May 31, 2002, Houston's NBC affiliate, KPRC TV, did a 3 minute piece in their news regarding the CCADPs webpages for death row prisoners, particularly the page of Texas prisoner Lonnie Johnson.
The piece included interviews with the mothers of the victims, who dispute Johnson's version of the killing, and his allegations that the killings stemmed from a racist attack against him. The piece
included a segment from a phone interview with the CCADP's Tracy Lamourie.

Transcript of May 31, 2002 segment from KPRC-NBC Channel 2 In Houston's story on the CCADP's inmate webpages and Lonnie Johnson's in particular :

KPRC - ...on a webpage, looking for penpals, asking for money and telling their stories.  But they're not hospital patients or the elderly. The web pages are for death row inmates, and two local mothers are outraged about one inmate's messages about their murdered sons."

Chris Schultz : And you have wounds that are there but they kind of scab over and its like they just ripped open again.

KPRC - For almost 12 years, Chris Schultz and Laura McCaffrey have been partners in pain.  The two Magnolia area mothers lost their teenaged sons on the same day, by the same killer.  Sean Fulk and Punkin McCaffrey were gunned down in 1990 after witnesses say they gave this man, Lonnie Johnson, a ride in their truck.  Johnson was later sent to death row for the murders, but even from his cell, the mothers say, Johnson is still victimizing their sons.

Chris Schultz : When something like this comes up, you start thinking of all the horrible things they had to go  through.

Laura McCaffrey : Then when you read all that, you start re-hashing it all in your mind, it brings it all back to you.   And it hurts.

KPRC - What they say hurts is whats on this website.  Its run by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty and features personal webpages for more than 350 US inmates on Death Row, and ninety from Texas, including Lonnie Johnson.  Johnson's page calls the women's sons racist, and says he was wrongly sent to Death Row for fighting his lynching.   They're the same arguments Johnson made throughout his trial, but its the fact that he's given this one sided forum that makes the mothers so upset.

Chris Schultz : There are facts that you can't dispute, and he's being allowed to say anything about these kids.

Tracy Lamourie (via phone) :  We really need to have a forum where they can put forward their best argument."

KPRC - Websute founder Tracy Lamourie, lives in Toronto, and by phone, says that her volunteer website offers free pages to Johnson and others to show the faces of the death penalty.  She says the pages are not meant to be objective or investigative, instead they use information mailed in by the inmates or their supporters and give them a place to tell their story.

Tracy Lamourie : We hate to, obviously, cause any more pain to any victims families..we are essentially attempting to open up the justice system to allow public scrutiny from all sides.  And with all information.

KPRC - But these mothers say its bad information that does nothng but taint their sons memories.  And they're fighting to get websites likes this one shut down.

KPRC ANCHOR : Website organizers say the inmates' arguments are usually nothing more than what they've said in legal appeals or even in media interviews.  Texas inmates don't have access to the website, but can simply mail information to the Canadian group.  Meanwhile Schultz and McCCaffrey are taking their concerns to legislators. 

CBC Radio, Vancouver, BC.

Dot con
Mark Oliver looks at the growing phenomenon of prisoners' websites and asks if links from the clink are a good idea

Mark Oliver
Tuesday December 17, 2002
The Guardian

Chris Morris' satirical TV news show the Day Today once had a sketch with prison authorities responding to the revelation that inmates at Strangeways had been running an international airport.

The notion of prisoners having their own websites may seem similarly comic, yet a small but growing group of high-profile inmates are now enjoying some of the freedoms of the information superhighway. And, as we shall see, the ones that exist have their surreal elements.

The prison service says prisoner internet access is heavily restricted as part of IT training courses, but there are no specific rules to stop material from prisoners that has been forwarded, for example by letter, being published online by third parties.

Last week the website of convicted murderer Jeremy Bamber raised eyebrows when it scooped three judges by revealing that he had lost his appeal 24 hours before they confirmed as much in court.

The site, jeremybamber.com, is an impressive affair, showcasing a tranche of evidential documents relating to his case. It also has a friendly colour picture of him, no doubt trying to look unlike a multiple-murderer.

Then there is Kingofhits.com the "official site" of pop impresario Jonathan King, jailed late last year for sex attacks on boys. The site carries postings from a "JK", ostensibly expressing his views of life inside (he says he was convicted by a jury of "well meaning but brain dead morons"). There are also denials of tabloid stories, advice on "how to be a success" and a section headlined "send money".

Bronsonmania.com claims to be the official site of serial hostage-taker and armed robber Charles Bronson, and showcases claims of prison brutality, pictures of his artwork, and opportunities to buy merchandise, including his book, Solitary Fitness.

However, the most recent one is barrygeorge.co.uk. The home page has two frosted pictures side-by-side of Barry George and Jill Dando, the TV presenter he was convicted of killing, and asks "A miscarriage of justice?". There are details of how to petition the home secretary for his release.

There is also convictsreunited.com, the friends reunited for lags, and the Guardian has a regular prison columnist, Erwin James, who is serving a life sentence (payments for the articles are donated to charity) and whose pieces are available online at Guardian Unlimited.

Earlier this year, the debate about prisoners writing for publication hit the headlines. In October, the prison service found Tory peer Jeffrey Archer to be in breach of prison rules for publishing an account of the start of his sentence for perjury. He was punished by being moved from a low security prison to a harsher regime for three weeks.

Prison rules - drawn up in 1963 - state inmates cannot publish for profit, compromise the privacy of other prisoners, or provoke disorder.

The Prison Governors' Association said that the parameters of prisoners publishing online would be governed by the "same principles". The prison service said governors would make decisions in individual cases, but added it was not possible for them to "police the internet".

Depending on their category, existing rules allow for authorities to monitor prisoner correspondence for offensive material, but aside from this, there is little else to impede inmates providing content for websites.

Dan Tench, a media lawyer at Olswang, says that under the European convention on human rights, prisoners have a right to freedom of expression which places the burden on the would-be restrainer to prove any material should be repressed. Mr Tench says: "There is no reason why prisoners should not have websites of their own ... it restrains unbridled government, the force of the executive just doing what it likes."

Yet some would disagree. The Mirror reported that when the Bamber site launched in March, it carried adverts for "sexy underwear" that had angered victims of crime groups.

Brian Caton, the general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, says: "The last thing we want is criminals being allowed to bask in some kind of fame." He added that while teaching computer skills was important, "there is always a chance that prisoners with internet access will go to areas that they shouldn't".

David Roddan, the general secretary of the Prison Governors' Association, said offence to victims and their families was a primary concern and that there was a responsibility to protect them and the public. "I think anybody who has suffered child abuse themselves or members of their family have, will be offended by the principle of Jonathan King being able to run a website," he said.

But Mr Roddan said it would be "quite difficult to have a computer scheme, which we do, and some sort of policing arrangement against people setting up their own website, except for high security prisoners".

Perhaps more crucially, he said that governors had to be very careful not to stray into moral judgments "that in fact legally we are not entitled to make, and find ourselves being challenged in the European court".

A positive reason to support prisoner websites, is that they could be useful tools in genuine miscarriages of justice. The band Asian Dub Foundation used their website to campaign for Satpal Ram, who was released this year after serving 16 years for a murder committed during an assault by a group of white men in Birmingham.

Over the Atlantic, though, there was a case last year where the family of murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas, from California, started a campaign to stop her killer and kidnapper, Richard Allen Davis, seeking young pen pals via a prisoners' charity website, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

Marc Klaas, her father, told wired.com: "This guy killed my daughter, and there he is, smiling and asking for pen pals ... I'd hack the [website of the] son-of-a-bitch if I could." But managers of the site, which has web pages and pen pal requests for more than 1,000 condemned prisoners, were defiant.

Constitutionality of Arizona law keeping inmates' information off Web to be decided
Anchorage Daily News, Alaska  - Copyright © 2002 Nando Media
Copyright © 2002 Christian Science Monitor Service
By TIM VANDERPOOL, Christian Science Monitor

FLORENCE, Ariz. (December 27, 12:10 p.m. AST) - Arizona's state prison
dominates the skyline of this small desert town southeast of Phoenix,
its perimeter a dense network of chain-link fences, guard towers and
concertina wire. For nearly a century, the state's worst criminals have
been sent here to serve their sentences or to await execution in
isolated captivity.

But that isolation is coming to a high-tech end. Today, the pervasive
Internet has touched even this forbidding place, where a convicted
killer now stands at the center of a growing controversy over just how
far inmates' rights extend online.

Beau Greene was a 29-year-old drifter when he killed University of
Arizona music professor Roy Johnson in 1995. But after Greene was sent
to death row, information about him was posted on a prisoner-advocacy
Web site, including sympathetic details about his affection for cats.
Johnson's family was so outraged that two years ago they persuaded
Arizona's legislature to make it a crime for inmates' information to
appear online.

Prisoners are rarely given direct access to the Internet, and never in
Arizona, say officials. Arizona's Department of Corrections began
punishing inmates whose personal information - sent by mail, or passed
through friends or relatives - appears on the Web sites of
inmate-advocacy groups.

Members of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty are bitter
about the action. Arizona officials "hope to blackmail Web page owners
into submission by punishing those whom our work is trying to help,"
says David Parkinson, co-director of the Toronto-based group. In
protest, the coalition posted information on all Arizona death-row
inmates so none could be singled out for discipline.

The American Civil Liberties Union took up their case last summer with a
lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections. In mid-December,
District Judge Earl Carroll placed a temporary injunction on the
enforcement of the Arizona statute. In his decision, Carroll cited the
irreparable harm the law posed to First Amendment free speech rights.
The constitutionality of the law will be taken up again in the next few
months.

Critics say the Arizona measure violates the free speech rights of
inmates and their supporters and that it targets only prisoner-advocacy
groups since the Corrections Department continues posting information
about death-row inmates on its own Web site.

David Fathi, an attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project, calls
the law unconstitutional. "It's not about prison security," he says.
"It's not as if they're trying to prevent someone from sending
instructions into prison for how to make a bomb, or plans on how to escape."

But Steve Twist questions whose rights are being violated when inmates
gain even indirect access to the Web. A Johnson family friend who
championed victims' rights as assistant Arizona attorney general in the
1980s, Twist says online postings sympathetic to Greene "were deeply
traumatic" for Roy Johnson's survivors. "It's just another wanton,
needless infliction of pain that should not be permitted in a charitable
society."

Similar conflicts have occurred around the country, as prisons struggle
to fashion new rules governing Internet access. Sometimes those
conflicts are resolved in court.

For example, following an ACLU lawsuit in California, a federal judge
affirmed the right of inmates to receive e-mail correspondence.

But Oregon officials took action on their own against a convicted serial
killer who was selling his wildlife drawings online. And in New York's
Champlain Valley, where Scott Geddes raped and killed Susan Anderson
nine years ago, her relatives began a petition drive to prohibit Geddes
from operating a Web site he created with outside help.

"It sickened me when I saw it," Anderson's brother, Randy LeMieux, said.
"Basically, (Geddes is) looking for other victims, the way I look at it."

But banning Web sites from posting inmate information may pose
constitutional hurdles.

The Internet "has broken down many traditional walls, and in theory
gives prisoners access to the outside world to plead their cases," says
Tracy Westen, a professor of media law at the University of Southern
California's Annenberg School for Communications. "But to retaliate
against prisoners for cooperating with citizens who have full First
Amendment rights seems to diminish the public's rights."

Citing the ACLU lawsuit, Arizona prison officials declined to comment.

But Arizona DOC spokesman Gary Phelps has said that the law deters
crimes by a "death row subculture" that attempts to scam outsiders via
the Internet. Prisoners have preyed on women with personal ads and
raised thousands of dollars through online defense funds, he says. "One
inmate on death row, who is no longer with us, told investigators that
it's a game," that the prisoners "have to get something out of everyone."

Westen agrees that there's a potential for inmates to perpetrate crime
on the Internet but adds that "anyone could use the Web for illegal
purposes." Since outgoing correspondence is screened, "there are ways
prison officials could control how inmates use the Internet short of
prohibitions directed by the Arizona law," he says.

Fathi is more strident. "We see these (laws) as periodic attempts to
silence prisoners," he says, "and keep the eyes of the public away from
what goes on in our nation's prisons and jails, where two million
American citizens live."

--------------020405010406020207
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/21219editinmates.html

Tucson, Arizona  Thursday, 19 December 2002

<http://cgi.azstarnet.com/cgi-bin/print/print.cgi>


    			Unlock free speech

      A badly crafted Arizona law trampled First Amendment rights.

      A federal court judge has temporarily blocked an Arizona law that
      aimed to keep sympathetic information about inmates off the
      Internet. Critics view the injunction as an early Christmas gift
      to some of the worst felons in Arizona's prison system - a view
      that completely misses the point.

In limiting the information about inmates on the Internet, the Arizona
law also limits the free speech rights of anyone - inmate, lobbyist or
ordinary citizen - who would put information about the convict on the
Internet. For that reason, the law is likely to be found unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union, acting on behalf of the Canadian
Coalition Against the Death Penalty, filed a lawsuit against the Arizona
Department of Corrections last July. It contended the state law
illegally seeks to regulate free speech outside prison walls.

Some critics of the temporary injunction, issued Tuesday by U.S.
District Judge Earl H. Carroll, are no doubt under the impression that
inmates in Arizona prisons have direct access to the Internet. They do not.

Inmates are not sitting in their cells with a personal computer and an
Internet connection. They cannot surf the net or exchange e-mail with
anyone.

What they can do, however, is send information about themselves to the
Canadian group, which then sets up a Web site for that prisoner. Inmates
can use the space to discuss their cases or request pen pals. Anyone who
wanted to do so could then write to the inmate through the regular mail.

Arizona law says that if information about a prisoner appears on the
Internet, the inmate can be punished. One of the attorneys who
challenged the law says that potential punishment in effect imposes
restrictions on what those outside the state can publish on their Web
sites. The punishment can be severe: It includes reducing or eliminating
early release time the prisoner has earned.

The Canadian coalition has been publishing Web sites for each inmate on
Arizona's Death Row, whether or not the inmate requests it. It says
Arizona's law embodies a double standard by permitting the Department of
Corrections to post inmate records on its Web site but making it illegal
for anyone else to post any other version of the inmate's information on
another Web site.

The Arizona law that is now blocked from enforcement was a poorly
crafted bill that resulted from the emotional appeal of a Tucson woman
whose husband had been murdered. Stardust Johnson's outrage at
discovering her husband's killer portrayed on the Internet as a kindly
animal-lover is entirely understandable, but it is not grounds for
disassembling the First Amendment rights of people who are not killers.

Mrs. Johnson is the widow of University of Arizona music professor Ron
Johnson, who was murdered in 1995. The Web site dedicated to the
convicted killer, Beau Greene, "gave no clue he was a brutal murderer,"
Mrs. Johnson said in a story in Wednesday's Star. "Instead he
represented himself as a lonely man holding a cuddly kitten who was
misunderstood."

Any victim, or any member of a victim's family, would likely react with
the same degree of anger. Mrs. Johnson channeled her outrage into the
law, which the federal court has now temporarily blocked. That law says
"An inmate shall not send mail to or receive mail from a communication
service provider or remote computing service."

By temporarily blocking Arizona from enforcing that law, Judge Carroll
wisely noted that the law infringes upon the First Amendment rights of
those who have created the Web sites. We do not minimize the despair of
those who were victimized by brutal, remorseless felons, but emphasis
should be placed on controlling those felons in ways that do not violate
the constitutional rights of free citizens or groups with whom officials
may happen to have political or philosophical differences.

Judge Blocks Attempt By Arizona To Ban Prisoners From Cyberspace
http://www.thedeathhouse.com/deathhousenewfi_337.htm
By Robert Anthony Philips  Dec 17, 2003

Death Row inmates and other state prisoners banned from cyberspace are
now back in - probably permanently.

A federal judge Monday temporarily stopped prison officials from
enforcing a law that forbids prisoners
<http://www.thedeathhouse.com/deathhousenewfi_109.htm> from sending
information, pictures and stories about their cases or themselves to Web
sites that publish them.

District Judge Earl Carroll issued the temporary injunction on the
Arizona law, enacted in 2000 to protect families of murder victims,
saying the law violates freedom of speech.

David Fahti, staff counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union's
National Prison Project and co-counsel on the legal challenge, said the
"battle is over" and doubts whether Arizona will push to have the
statute upheld and enforced.

"The judge's opinion makes very clear he thinks this statute is
unconstitutional," Fahti said. "I doubt there is anything the state can
do to change his mind...At some point, the preliminary injunction will
turn into a permanent injunction with either the state's agreement. As
of today, the state cannot enforce the statute."

A spokeswoman for the Arizona Attorney General's office did not
immediately return a telephone call for comment Tuesday morning.

The Arizona law banned prisoners from posting information about their
cases on the Web or corresponding using a remote computer service or
communication service provider. Various anti-death penalty groups and
other prisoner rights sites frequently provide inmates with Web space to
tell about their cases, post pictures and solicit pen-pals.

Under the law, prisoners who kept information on the Web were subject to
disciplinary measures and criminal prosecution. Fahti said that although
no prisoner was criminally charged, some did loose prison privileges for
having information posted about themselves on Web sites.

Prisoners Disciplined

The ACLU argued that the law had a chilling effect on advocacy groups
who give prisoners Internet space and also sought to punish prisoners
who spoke out. The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of anti-death
penalty and other advocacy groups

The groups involved include the Canadian Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty and the Florida- based Citizens United for Alternatives to the
Death Penalty <http://www.cuadp.org/>, both of which maintain prisoner
pages.

"Arizona's attempt to censor Internet content was a frightening step
toward government repression of free speech," said Eleanor Eisenberg,
the executive director of the ACLU of Arizona, in a prepared statement.
"Today's court order puts a timely and immediate stop to this
ill-conceived law."

"Prisoners should not be punished for making public their claims of
innocence," said Abe Bonowitz, director of Citizens United for
Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "Today's decision is a tremendous
victory for civil liberties and freedom of speech. And it's not just
about prisoners. This benefits everyone."

Killer's Picture On Net Sparked Push For Law

Attempting to restrict prisoner speech is not a new battleground and
prison systems across the Untied States have been given wide leeway in
the courts, under the guise of security, to prohibit certain activities
by inmates.

In September, a U.S. district court judge in California ruled that
prisoners have a First Amendment right to receive mail that contains
material printed from the Internet

Gary Phelps, the chief of staff for the Arizona Department of
Corrections, said in a interview with The Death House.com last July that
the cyberspace ban was put in place to prevent victims from coming
across the pictures and reading letters from the men and women who
committed crimes against them.

Phelps said the law was proposed after relatives of a Tucson man who was
murdered came across a Web site portraying the man convicted of the
killing as a caring person and included a photo of him holding a cat.

He said the law was enacted by legislature, and not proposed by the
Arizona Department of Corrections.

Stardust Johnson, the widow of the man killed, testified on behalf of
the bill, saying that prisoners are sometimes manipulators, sociopaths
and pscyhopaths who want to prey on people - and the Internet is a good
way for them to do it.

"I think its a shame that this judge has determined that prisoners can
have access," said State. Rep. Linday Gray, a Republican lawmaker from
Phoenix who co-sponsored the legislation that led to the ban. "Because
of their offenses against society, they should lose the priviledges that
the rest of free American enjoys."

But, apparently not to say what they want on Web sites.

Feisty Anti-Death Penalty Site

Fahti said the genesis of the law proves that it was to "surpress
unpopular speech" and not enacted for any legitimate security concern.

Prisoners, especially death row inmates who are held in isolation most
of the day, frequently write to the sites requesting pen-pals,
soliciting donations for defense funds or proclaiming their innocence.
Some letters even tell of the inner workings of prison systems and
alleged abuses. Many of the inmates also have their pictures posted on
the sites.

On the forefront of the battle was the Canadian Coalition to Abolish the
Death Penalty <http://ccadp.org/arizona.htm>, a feisty group that refers
to Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating as "Killer Keating" and rips President
George Bush, who the coalition accuses of "homicide," for okaying
executions while governor of Texas.

After the Arizona law was enacted, the CCADP stated that an "Iron
Curtain (was) emerging around America's death camps."

In response to the ban, the CCADP announced that it had put the all
Arizona death row prisoners online "to ensure they were not effectively
silenced by the law."

Law barring online information about prisoners enjoined

    * Although prisoners do not have access to the Internet, the law
      would prevent communication between advocacy groups and the
      prisoners they sought to assist.

Under a recent state law, prisoner and civil rights groups had a choice:
They could either delete information they published on their Web sites
about Arizona prisoners or risk punishment of those prisoners they are
trying to help.

But for now, this is not a choice the groups will have to make.

Recognizing that this law implicated First Amendment rights, federal
judge Earl Carroll temporarily enjoined enforcement of the law, which
punishes prisoners if they write to an Internet site provider, if any
person accesses a Web site at a prisoner's request, or if prisoners have
access to the Internet.

Carroll's Dec. 16 order came after the American Civil Liberties Union,
on behalf of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Stop
Prisoner Rape, and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death
Penalty, filed suit to declare the law unconstitutional and moved to
stop enforcement of the law.

The law was enacted in January 2000 to maintain prison security, but
plaintiffs argue that it goes too far.

Arizona prisoners do not have access to the Internet; however, by
writing to an advocacy group that maintains a Web site, inmates are able
to have information about themselves or their case published online.

In their motion to enjoin enforcement of the new law, the plaintiffs
argued that the law violated the First Amendment because prisoners are
punished when their names are mentioned on a Web site, even if the
prisoner was not responsible for the material.

The law also violates prisoners' rights because it prohibits them from
writing to advocacy groups about their innocence or sexual assault while
in prison, and could be used to punish prisoners when a Web service
provider publishes an account of their case that differs from that
offered by the Arizona Department of Corrections, they argued.

In addition, plaintiffs argued that the law burdens the speech of
Internet service providers because they must regulate the circumstances
under which free persons can access their Web sites to ensure that no
one is accessing the Web site at the request of a prisoner.

As applied, the law "will inhibit communication between plaintiffs and
the very population they wish to reach," argued attorneys for the ACLU.
"With no audience, and severed from the people for whom they advocate,
plaintiffs' political speech is significantly chilled."

The court found that there is a strong likelihood that the restrictions
are "not rationally related to legitimate penological objections" and
ordered the Arizona Department of Corrections not to enforce the law.

The Department of Corrections argued that the law was necessary to
prevent crime victims from encountering information about prisoners on
the Internet that would cause them further pain.

However, "the fact that someone is offended by speech does not give that
person a veto on the speech," said Alice Bendheim, co-counsel for the ACLU.

The court also rejected the department's argument that the law is
necessary to prevent fraud by prisoners or inappropriate contact with
the public since these concerns are already addressed by existing
department policies and criminal statutes.

The temporary injunction will remain in effect until the court has a
full hearing on the issue.

According to the ACLU, Arizona is the only state in the country to have
enacted a statute that imposes such severe restrictions on the First
Amendment rights of inmates and non-inmates.

(Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty v. Stewart: Counsel: David
Fathi, ACLU National Prison Project, Washington, DC; Ann Beeson, ACLU
Technology & Liberty Program, New York, NY; Pamela K. Sutherland,
Arizona Civil Liberties Foundation, Phoenix, Ariz.; Alice L. Bendheim,
Alice L. Bendheim P.C., Phoenix, Ariz.) -- ST
<http://www.rcfp.org/news/2002/1218canadi.html#init>

------------------------------------------------------------------------


© 2002 The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

By Michelle Delio
<http://www.wired.com/news/feedback/mail/1,2330,1-167,00.html>

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56880,00.html

02:00 AM Dec. 17, 2002 PT

Citing fears of irreversible damage to the First Amendment, a federal
judge in Arizona on Monday overturned a state law that banned
information about state prisoners from appearing on the Web.

Under the law, prisoners were barred from corresponding with a
"communication service provider" or "remote computing service" and were
also charged with a misdemeanor if anyone created a website or accessed
the Internet at a prisoner's request.

Acting on behalf of three prisoners' rights groups, the American Civil
Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Canadian Coalition Against the Death
Penalty v. Terry L. Stewart <http://ccadp.org/arizona.htm> in federal
district court last July, seeking to overturn what the ACLU and its
clients saw primarily as a global free speech issue.

"Arizona's attempt to censor Internet content was a frightening step
toward government repression of free speech," said Eleanor Eisenberg,
executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.

"It is extraordinary that Arizona prison officials believe they can tell
international groups opposed to the death penalty what they can and
cannot say online about prisoners in Arizona."

Some anti-death-penalty groups such as the Canadian Coalition Against
the Death Penalty <http://www.ccadp.org> and Citizens United for
Alternatives to the Death Penalty <http://www.cuadp.org> host sites for
prisoners on death row who want to publish information about their
cases, or who would like to communicate with pen pals.

Shortly after the law went into effect, the Arizona Department of
Corrections scoured the Internet and informed prisoners whose names
appeared on websites that the information had to be removed within three
weeks or they could face criminal charges.

But the Canadian anti-death-penalty group refused
<http://ccadp.org/arizona-letter2DOC.htm> to remove inmate pages from
its website, saying that the information had been posted before the law
went into effect and that the information belonged to the group.

According to Tracy Lamourie, one of the CCADP's directors, for the past
several months the coalition had received reports from prisoners
charging they were being punished as a result of surfing activist
groups' websites.

"Today's decision stops the state and prison authorities from basically
attempting to blackmail groups like ours by punishing those whom we are
trying to help," Lamourie said.

"We are pleased that the Arizona court recognized that states cannot
legislate or restrict the action or First Amendment rights of prisoner
advocacy groups or human rights groups such as ours, nor can they
attempt to dictate what can be reported on websites or other methods of
communications."

A spokeswoman from the Arizona Department of Corrections said that to
her knowledge no prisoners had faced criminal charges because of the
law, but several had been disciplined "by losing minor privileges for a
short period of time."

The relative of a man allegedly murdered by an Arizona prison inmate had
mixed feelings on the ruling.

"I hate to even think of the bastard who murdered my stepbrother sharing
the same Internet as I do," said Keira Sherman, a secretary in
Wisconsin. "And I also hate to think that people are wasting their time
fighting for that bastard's rights.

"But I guess when I calm down a bit, I'd say I support the advocates'
right to do what they feel is correct," she added. "I just don't believe
in censorship, even though sometimes I wish I did."

    Judge halts law banning inmates on the Internet

Beth DeFalco
Associated Press
Dec. 17, 2002 03:00 PM

A federal judge ordered the Arizona Department of Corrections to stop
enforcing a policy forbidding inmates from corresponding with, or
appearing on, Web sites.

U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll granted an injunction request by the
American Civil Liberties Union to stop enforcement of the law, which is
the subject of a pending lawsuit."Putting free speech behind bars simply
because it concerns prisoners sets a dangerous precedent," said Arizona
ACLU attorney David Fathi. "The court's decision makes clear that
Arizona may not jail the Internet."The statute, passed by the
Legislature in 2000, makes it a misdemeanor for an inmate to communicate
with Internet service providers, send a letter to a Web site or to a
third party who then forwards it to a Web site or publishes it for the
inmate.Inmates can lose privileges, good-behavior credits or face other
punishments for violations, corrections officials said.The lawsuit was
filed by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which is
represented by the ACLU.The group claims the law violates prisoners'
constitutional right to free speech, and attempts to suppress
unfavorable opinions about the Corrections Department.In his ruling,
Carroll wrote that protecting the First Amendment is a "compelling
public interest."Department of Corrections Chief of Staff Gary Phelps
said that since the law went into effect, 53 inmates have been cited for
violations. However, until a final ruling is made on the case, those
citation will not be dealt with or removed from prisoners records.He
said the law is necessary because inmates use the Internet to defraud
the public, contact minors and even plan escapes.The department only
investigates inmate Internet publications when information is brought to
its attention."The Internet in general is difficult to police," Phelps
said.An increasing number of prisoners are going online to post their
stories on Web sites.Debra Jean Milke, the only woman on the state's
death row, has a site proclaiming her innocence and soliciting donations
for her defense. She was sentenced to die for having her 4-year-old son
killed before Christmas 1989."The public will surely be disgusted with
what they see on the Internet from murderers and rapists," said DOC
spokesman Mike Arra. "Many people could, and are, preyed upon by inmates
through their Internet games."The state Legislature passed the 2000 law
after being lobbied by Stardust Johnson, whose husband Roy - a
University of Arizona music professor - was murdered after leaving a
church recital he had given.  Mrs. Johnson was outraged when she came
across a Web site her husband's killer was using to solicit pen
pals.Eisenberg said the inmate Internet law was created in response to
Mrs. Johnson and that prison security arguments made were an
afterthought."I don't mean to sound unempathatic," Eisenberg said. "But
there's a powerful tool - it's called the (power) off button."---On the
Net:Arizona Department of Corrections:
http://www.adc.state.az.us/American Civil Liberties Union:
http://www.aclu.orgCanadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty:
http://www.ccadp.org





Find this article at:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1217inmates-internet-ON.html

U.S. judge bars law keeping inmates off Net

 By Howard Fischer
 CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES

 PHOENIX - A federal judge barred the state from enforcing a law
 blocking prison inmates from soliciting correspondence on the Internet.

 U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll said the law illegally infringes on
 the First Amendment rights of those with whom the inmates want to
 correspond. He said that while officials from the Department of
 Corrections have legitimate security concerns, they can be addressed
 in less obtrusive ways.

 Mike Arra, spokesman for the agency, said attorneys are studying the
 ruling before deciding whether to appeal.

 Carroll's decision drew an angry reaction from Stardust Johnson whose
 husband, Ron, a University of Arizona music professor, was murdered in
 1995.

 It was Stardust Johnson who spurred lawmakers to enact the ban after
 seeing a Web site set up on behalf of Beau Greene, the man convicted
 of her husband's killing.

 She said that without the legal barriers inmates, including
 pedophiles, can make contact through the Internet with people who are
 unaware of the crimes they committed.

 Johnson had particularly harsh words for one of the three
 organizations that sued, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death
 Penalty. "They ought to go back to Canada and take care of their own
 business there," she said.

 Johnson said Greene's Web site was misleading at best.

 "It gave no clue he was a brutal murderer," she said. "Instead he
 presented himself as a lonely man holding a cuddly kitten who was
 misunderstood."

 Ron Johnson disappeared after an organ performance at a Green Valley
 church. He was found beaten to death four days later, face-down in a
 muddy wash west of Tucson. Greene was sentenced to die for Johnson's
 murder.

 Inmates have no direct Internet access. But various groups, like the
 Canadian Coalition, make Web pages available for inmates who send them
 information about themselves, either seeking to tell their story or
 looking for pen pals to write them through the regular mail system.

 The 2000 law closed that avenue by making it a crime for inmates to
 send information that would be posted on the Internet.

 In defending the law, the state said the restrictions are necessary to
 prevent attempts to defraud the public and preclude "inappropriate
 contact" with minors, victims or other inmates.

 Carroll, however, said there are other ways to do that, pointing out
 that inmates have no direct Internet access.

 He noted that prison staffers can open incoming and outgoing mail and
 examine it for contraband. And letters that are not privileged may be
 read to determine if the contents "might facilitate criminal activity."

 The judge also said current prison regulations permit staff members to
 monitor and record inmates' telephone calls.

 Carroll also said this is not strictly about the rights of inmates. He
 said those who wish to communicate with inmates also have a right to
 do so - and that the ban on inmates' sending or receiving mail from
 groups that post information on their Web pages infringes on those
 rights.

 David Fathi, an attorney representing the three organizations, said
 the law amounted to Arizona trying to impose its restrictions on what
 others outside the state could post on their Web sites.

 But Assistant Attorney General Jim Morrow said the only bar was to
 inmates' sending information. He said nothing precluded inmate rights
 groups from posting stories about Arizona inmates.

 Arra said there are other reasons to limit what inmates can post.

 "Many inmates put advertisements seeking pen pals on the Internet and
 seek donations to their causes or to their defense funds," he said.
 "But there's really no authority that is monitoring where that money
 might go other than the inmate himself."

 Arra acknowledged that the law covers only Internet postings - and
 never precluded inmates from doing the same thing in individual
 letters or even through ads in commercial publications.

Bank-robbery slayer's execution set for tonight 
Debt, overdue bills blamed for heist plot, mass murder
By Bob Doucette
Staff Writer

Thursday, December 12, 2002 Edition: City, Section: NEWS, Page 1-A  Dateline: McALESTER 		

McALESTER - For Jerry Bruno, life as he knew it ended Dec. 14, 1984. 
While working as a manager at a Lawton discount store, he received an urgent call to go to his wife's workplace, the First State Bank of Chattanooga in Geronimo. When he arrived, he learned that his wife, Kay, had been stabbed during a robbery that left her and three other people dead. 
"All my kids were cheated; I was cheated," he said of that day. 
He since has remarried and lives in Wichita Falls, Texas. 
Police eventually caught the killers, Jay Wesley Neill and Robert Grady Johnson. 
Time has caught up with Neill. 
Neill, 37, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 tonight at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for his part in what then was one of the state's worst-ever mass murders. 
Although it's been nearly two decades since the killings, the wounds of those left behind are still deep. 
"It's been 18 years of hell without my daughter," said Janie Bowles, mother of 19-year-old Jeri Bowles, a bank employee who was killed in the robbery. 
"You stop and think of how things might be if she was still here." 
The crime had its roots in the financial condition that Neill and Johnson faced in the months before the robbery. 
The two met at a bar in February 1984 and became romantically involved. They shared an apartment, a car and the bills, but soon found themselves in money trouble. 
Neill, who had left the Army in August of that year, was struggling to find work. Johnson also was unemployed. Creditors, including First State Bank, threatened to repossess their car and television. Weeks before the robbery, their landlord told them to pay up or face eviction. 
At one time, friends of the men told authorities the pair had $7,000 in past-due bills, according to court records. 
Neill had told two friends the bank would be easy to rob because it had little security, according to transcripts from his 1992 retrial. Neill and Johnson started planning the robbery three weeks before it occurred. 
In the days before the robbery, Neill and Johnson bought two knives and booked plane tickets to San Francisco. Johnson later obtained a handgun permit from the city. On the day of the robbery, the men bought a .32-caliber pistol and a box of ammunition, according to trial transcripts. They also moved their flight departure time up from 6 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. 
At about 1:30 p.m. Dec. 14, Neill held up the bank, officials said. He forced three employees - Kay Bruno, 42, Jeri Bowles and Joyce Mullenix, 25 - into a back room where they were stabbed a total of 75 times, authorities said. Slash wounds across their necks were so deep that two of the women were nearly decapitated. 
"It was like everything else blacked out and you're not really aware of what was going on," Neill said during a taped interview with the religious television show "The 700 Club" in 1986. "I could hear my heart beating in my ears. Everything was going a million miles an hour." 
Bank customers who came into the building during the robbery weren't spared. Using the pistol he bought less than an hour before, Neill shot three customers in the head, killing Ralph Zeller, 33, authorities said. 
"I was just praying, 'Oh dear God, send someone in here. Send someone in here to rescue us," survivor Marilyn Roach said during Neill's 1992 retrial. 
Bible verses went through her mind moments before she was shot twice in the head, she said at trial. 
Bellen Robles, her husband, Ruben, and their baby, Marie, were also targets. Bellen, then 15, suffered two gunshot wounds. Ruben Robles told the court in 1992 that he saw a hand gripping a pistol aimed at his 14-month-old daughter's head and saw it dry-fire, apparently out of bullets. 
Although Neill claims to have robbed the bank alone, Roach told the court he heard one voice say, "I thought I told you not to shoot anybody," then a different voice answered, "Well, they moved." 
The controversy over who was in the bank continues today. Johnson claims he wasn't there and denies involvement in the robbery. The FBI says Neill was alone in the bank. Many victims' relatives, including Janie Bowles, said it would be impossible for one person to carry out that much violence in so little time. 
"The only thing for Jay Neill to do is to tell the truth before he dies," she said. 
An hour later, the men boarded a plane in Lawton headed for Dallas, then caught a connecting flight to San Francisco. They left Oklahoma with nearly $17,000 and booked a hotel room and 24-hour limousine service. While there, they shopped, toured the city and went to night clubs. 
Witness accounts and tips from the men's friends led the 
FBI to their San Francisco hotel. Police in Lawton found a bloody knife in the men's abandoned car, and roughly half the cash was recovered back at the hotel room. 
In the wake of the killings was a trail of broken dreams. 
The Bruno family lost a mother and wife. Jerry Bruno said in 1992, "I felt like I was robbed of my golden years." 
Mullenix, whose husband was a basketball coach at Geronimo, was seven months pregnant with their first child. The couple had just bought a home, and they were working on a nursery. 
Jeri Bowles, who graduated from Geronimo High School in May 1984, was less than two weeks away from being engaged. Her ring was wrapped up as a present under the family Christmas tree. 
"She loved children, loved family, loved sports," Janie Bowles said. "She was looking forward to a career in banking." 
Neill and Johnson were both convicted and sentenced to death. Their sentences were overturned in 1992 when the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that they should have had separate trials. 
Neill was again convicted and sentenced to die later that year. Johnson received a life-without-parole sentence after his 1993 conviction. 
For his part, Neill said he regrets what he did and apologized during the sentencing portion of his 1992 trial. 
"I just wish I knew more about life when I was a confused 19-year-old," he is quoted as saying on the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty's Web site. 
He maintained correspondence with Roach, who said in the 1986 "700 Club" program that she has forgiven him. But for others, it's been more difficult. 
"I'm not like some of the other people. I haven't forgiven him," Jerry Bruno said. "I'm just glad justice is going to be served after 18 years. It's about time." 
Janie Bowles expressed similar feelings. 
"People talk about closure. I think closure is an ending. But this will never end for us." 
She said family members plan to spend Saturday doing what they do every Dec. 14 - going to Jeri's grave site. 
But this visit will be different, she said. 
"I'll be able to say to her, 'Baby, we got one.'"

By Alex Roth
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 17, 2002

SAN QUENTIN – Twenty years ago Mark Crew, a Santa Clara County truck mechanic, shot his wife to death, after which a friend chopped the woman's head off and dumped the corpse into San Francisco Bay.

Now Crew lives on death row at San Quentin State Prison. His home is a single cell in a section known as East Block, which has more than 400 condemned inmates, six exercise yards and several exercise cages for inmates who might be in danger if they mingled with anybody else.

Crew spends up to six hours a day in a crowded yard with a basketball goal and the rest of his time in his cell, where he crochets and draws pictures of castles.

Other condemned men pass the time listening to CD players, watching television or doing push-ups by their beds. If they live in North Segregation, a unit reserved for the most senior and best-behaved death row prisoners, they can leave their cells and play board games together on their tier.

On Friday, David Westerfield is scheduled to be sentenced in San Diego Superior Court for the kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam, a neighbor in Sabre Springs.

If Judge William Mudd follows the jury's recommendation and imposes the death penalty, Westerfield will be sent to this prison 15 miles north of San Francisco, the home of California's death row for men.

San Quentin has become a monument to the glacial pace of capital punishment in California.

When Crew first arrived, there were fewer than 200 men on death row. Now there are nearly 600, and the population increases by roughly 25 to 40 annually. The pace of executions is about one a year. Death row has grown crowded enough to create logistical issues.

"Many of us have been here 10, 15, 20 years," Crew wrote in a recent letter to the Union-Tribune. "After so much time even our families give up on us and move on."

The prison is adjacent to the Marin County town of San Rafael, on the edge of San Francisco Bay, and some of its buildings date to the 19th century.

As a work of architecture, the place looks almost medieval. As a penal institution, its design is woefully outdated. The ever-expanding population of death row inmates is forcing officials to come up with creative solutions to house them.

The prison now holds more than 5,700 inmates, with the condemned kept separated from other prisoners. Decades ago, all of death row was fully contained in North Segregation, a 68-cell unit that sits on the top floor of North Block and thus is nicknamed "The Shelf."

Now the prison needs three separate buildings for all the death row prisoners – North Segregation, East Block and the Adjustment Center, for condemned inmates who won't behave. There may be the need for a fourth unit in three or four years. Officials have proposed a plan to build a $200 million facility at San Quentin that would house more than 900 condemned men in one building.

The power of privileges

As their appeals creep through the courts or remain in limbo because they don't have lawyers, these inmates spend most of their time in cells the size of a walk-in closet, roughly two paces across and five or six paces deep, each with a toilet and sink. They eat their meals in their cells.

On death row, just like at most penal institutions, privileges are bestowed so that they can be taken away if necessary. Otherwise, a prison would be too dangerous to control.

So it is that well-behaved inmates who can afford them have televisions, CD players, limited canteen privileges. Some even have acoustic guitars. They play chess by yelling out moves between cells or tiers.

They can visit with relatives in small, private rooms, during which they are allowed brief embraces at the beginning and end of the session. Although the condemned don't have computers or access to the Internet, a Canadian anti-death-penalty group has a Web site, www.ccadp.org, on which it posts writings, artwork and other information mailed by death row prisoners seeking pen pals or financial support.

Many of these postings read like personal ads. Charles Ng, who arrived at San Quentin in 1999 after his conviction for the torture and murders of 11 people in Northern California, describes himself on the Web site as "a self-taught artist who loves animals."

Ng seeks pen pals and offers to sell his artwork so that he can "raise money for my day-to-day items." He can be reached at his mailing address, his inmate number and the ZIP code for San Quentin.

While prison officials say the growing population creates security concerns, some inmate-rights groups worry that death row may soon get so crowded as to border on inhumane.

In theory, well-behaved death row prisoners are supposed to get up to six hours a day in a yard with a basketball hoop and exercise equipment. But some of the yards for the condemned are so jammed that it's hard to move around, much less exercise.

In a letter to the Union-Tribune, one inmate referred to an East Block yard as "a total zoo." Another said he goes out only on Sundays, when most of the other death row inmates stay inside watching football.

"They're running out of space," said Steven Fama of the Prison Law Office, which offers legal aid to inmates. "It's a problem, and it's only going to become a bigger problem."

Caste system among inmates

In October, the Union-Tribune wrote letters to dozens of inmates to find out about life on death row. Of the three who responded, one said he believes in the death penalty, although he thinks the system has flaws – the most notable example, he says, being that he has been unfairly convicted.

"Some people like to kill, and that's all they want to do. They don't deserve to live," said the inmate, who shot and killed a San Bernardino County man execution-style after kidnapping the man and his wife during a residential burglary. The inmate asked that his name not be used.

Indeed, when it comes to their fellow convicts, condemned inmates are a remarkably intolerant lot. Serial killers are unpopular on death row. So are thieves and inmates who try to profit from their crimes.

In a 1995 article for an Orange County magazine, death row resident Michael Hunter expressed his disgust at fellow inmates William Bonin and Lawrence Bittaker, two serial killers who tried to make money from their notorious sprees. Among other things, Bittaker offered to sell the public autographed copies of his victims' autopsy reports.

"Almost without exception their exploitation of their victims for dollars is loathed and considered filthy lucre by the men here," Hunter wrote. "Yes, there are different degrees of hell, and Bonin and Bittaker are, for the most part, treated as pariahs."

Perhaps the most unpopular inmates are child killers. Indeed, one of the three prisoners who wrote to the Union-Tribune requested anonymity out of fear that this article would focus on the Westerfield case, which many of the condemned men followed through the news.

"I don't want to be associated with an alleged baby killer, directly or indirectly," wrote the inmate, a serial rapist convicted of killing a 16-year-old girl.

According to the inmates who responded, the most hated man on death row is Richard Allen Davis, convicted of killing 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Not only did Davis kill a child, but his crime gave rise to California's "three strikes" law.

Many unpopular inmates on death row never leave the security of their cells. In 1997, Los Angeles gang member Jimmy Palma, whose murder victims included a 5-year-old girl and an infant boy, was stabbed to death in one of the yards.

There are, however, a couple of options if a particularly reviled inmate feels compelled to get sunlight. On East Block, for instance, there is one yard reserved for death row prisoners who need protection. There they mingle with a few other condemned men who aren't a threat to each other.

Then there are the 10-by-4-foot outdoor cages commonly referred to as walk-alones or dog runs. A death-row inmate who can't be outside with anybody else can exercise there.

Prison Capt. K.J. Williams, who manages death row, wouldn't specifically discuss what Westerfield's daily routine might be if sent there, but he said all new arrivals are evaluated to make sure they can assimilate in the most non-disruptive way possible.

"I wouldn't want to put him in harm's way, nor do I want my staff in harm's way," Williams said.

Cauldron of hostilities

"Death row isn't what you think," wrote the inmate convicted of murder, kidnapping and burglary.

"It's not dark, dank and full of cynical people. . . . People have made as good a life as possible. And as such they go from day to day living that life. The reality of the sentence is always present. How could it be otherwise? But it's not predominant. It's like the cell bars. After a while you don't even see them."

Several years ago, Crew, the inmate who killed his wife, got himself kicked out of North Segregation by getting into a fight. Now he lives on East Block with the majority of the other death row inmates.

Unlike the condemned on North Segregation, those on East Block aren't allowed to socialize on their tiers. They're either in the yard or in their cells, doing whatever it is they do to pass the time.

Crew says he's grateful for a change in scenery, even though East Block is "a madhouse" and the yard a cauldron of hostilities, with inmates jostling for position around the dip bars and pull-up bars.

"The yard I'm on now is crowded; there's no room to run," he wrote. "There's more tension, so I have to do a whole different type of time. I must keep my mind totally aware of things going on around me. I can't focus on my exercising like I used to.

"But I'm OK. I've been locked up 19 years. I know how to survive."

       Death row unplugged
       Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

       10.02.02 - "They are sentenced to death, not to silence," Tracy Lamourie,
       one of the founders of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty,
       recently told the Advocate News of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Official in the
       state of Arizona have a different point of view. In mid July, the state
       began enforcing a two-year-old law banning prisoners from contributing
       information about their cases to web sites run by outside organizations.

       Toronto NOW, the city's local independent weekly newspaper, reported
       that the Arizona bill would "control and censor Web pages for death row
       inmates" provided by the Toronto-based Canadian Coalition Against the
       Death Penalty (CCADP) - (www.ccadp.org). "The Coalition has teamed up
       with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the state regulation
       [HB 2376] in court," the paper added. "But we don't know what's sadder.
       Arizona's need to further dehumanize prisoners about to be murdered by
       the state or the fact that the coalition maintains over [450] web pages for
       death-row prisoners across the U.S."

       Tracy Lamourie and Dave Parkinson run the Canadian Coalition Against the
       Death Penalty. Via several email exchanges they told me that of the 450
       web pages of death row prisoners that they maintain, 370 are living on
       death row, 4 have been released and 8 had been re-sentenced. Parkinson
       wrote that "10 percent of American death row prisoners have a page on
       our site. We also have pen pal requests for hundreds more. "

       The idea, for the web pages Lamourie has said, is to give a voice to a
       segment of society that is often written off by the public and to remember
       those who were executed. "It isn't glorifying anyone to allow them a voice
       before they are executed -- to allow them to send us reports of abuses
       going on in the prison, legal issues in their cases, even writings and poetry
       detailing life in a cage waiting to be killed."

       Lamourie told me that she and Parkinson founded CCADP after they heard
       about the case of Jimmy Dennis. "This," said Lamourie is "a Pennsylvania
       case of actual innocence that was garnering little or no attention or
       support. After reviewing the legal materials realizing the credibility of his
       claims of innocence, we set up the first CCADP web page - devoted to the
       Jimmy Dennis case - and included information about the behavior of the
       police as well as witness statements, photos and contact information.
       Dennis has since gained the support from people around the world, and
       web pages for him have sprung up in the UK, Germany, Singapore, and
       elsewhere. Dennis is now being represented by a large law firm in
       Washington who were specifically seeking a case of actual innocence. We
       hope and expect to hear that Jimmy Dennis will be exonerated in the not
       too distant future."

       For many of the isolated, depressed and desperate prisoners, CCADP's web
       pages often serve as their only lifeline. One inmate on Texas' death row
       wrote: "I want to thank you. I do not dramatize or exaggerate when I tell
       you I believe you have served as a conduit that saved my life. In the
       despair that can overwhelm us here, I was very seriously considering
       suicide or waiving my appeals. Because of you I have found reason for
       fighting, reason for living, and happiness beyond measure."

       Another wrote: "Your site has changed my life, it taught me to love to
       write, except when it gets over 100 degrees in my tiny cell. But it helped
       me hang on to life; most times while on death row I wanted to give up and
       die, not only cause someone was gone because of me or cause I lost
       everything. But I felt like I was worthless. [Because of you]… I was
       blessed with another chance."

       Not everyone believes prison inmates should have access to the Internet,
       let alone have their cases publicized through special web pages. "I think
       they [CCADP] are just misguided individuals," East Baton Rouge, Louisiana
       Assistant District Attorney John Sinquefield told the Advocate News.
       Sinquefield, who has prosecuted death penalty cases, said the people
       running the Web site aren't related to the victims of "the people
       slaughtered by some of the worst, most heinous criminals around."
       Sinquefield added that he thought CCADP is "intervening in something
       that's not really their business. I think they should stay in Canada. I'm
       sure there's plenty of criminals up there to keep them busy."

       Several members of victim's rights groups have also found the web pages
       for prisoners unsettling. "These people are bad dudes," Frank Parish, a
       board member of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered
       Children, whose stepdaughter was abducted from the parking lot of a
       Houston grocery store and murdered, told Wired News. "It doesn't bother
       me at all that they don't have their Bill of Rights. They forfeited those
       when they made the deliberate choice to violate the law."

       Arizona silences inmates

       On July 18, 2002, according to the Canadian Coalition's website (CCADP),
       the organization filed suit in the Arizona courts "to have the law that
       attempts to cut off communication between advocacy groups and
       prisoners declared unconstitutional." The ACLU is representing the CCADP,
       Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and Stop Prisoner
       Rape in this action.

       Because of HB 2376 and the "actions now being taken against prisoners by
       ADOC" [Arizona Department of Corrections], CCADP has decided to place
       all Arizona death row prisoners online, to "ensure they are not effectively
       silenced by this law."

       In actuality, prisoners do not have direct access to the Internet. The
       ACLU explained in a letter to Terry Stewart, Director Arizona Dept of
       Corrections that inmates "have no access to computers… linked to the
       outside world." What the law is trying to prevent, the ACLU claimed, is
       "correspond[ence] or attempt[s] to correspond with a communications
       service provider or remote computing service."

       What the prisoners have had access to is the ability to communicate with
       outside organizations that have set up web pages on their behalf. These
       days, with so many legitimate questions raised about falsely convicted and
       incarcerated prisoners on death row, it's common sense to allow prisoners
       an outlet to talk about their lives and cases. Especially so, given the
       recent number of cases involving prisoners - now numbering more than
       100, including six from Arizona - removed from death row after information
       that they had not committed the crimes they were convicted and
       sentenced for was discovered.

       According to CCADP, the statute that went into effect July 2000 reads:

       "EXCEPT AS AUTHORIZED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, AN
       INMATE SHALL NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THE INTERNET THROUGH THE USE
       OF A COMPUTER, COMPUTER SYSTEM, NETWORK, COMMUNICATION
       SERVICE PROVIDER OR REMOTE COMPUTING SYSTEM.

       Inmates are prohibited from sending or receiving mail from an Internet
       service provider or "remote" computing company. Any inmate found in
       violation of this statute "is guilty "of a Class 1 misdemeanor," and could be
       denied "earned release credits." In addition, the statute applies if "any
       person accesses the provider's or service internet web site at the inmate's
       request."

       In a letter from the Arizona Department of Corrections, prisoners have
       been advised that to "avoid possible criminal charges and/or disciplinary
       sanctions," they need to have their names "removed" from the CCADP web
       sites "within three (3) weeks." Officials will be monitoring the web site and
       if "your name/information etc. has not been removed… or is located on any
       other web site on the internet system, disciplinary actions WILL BE
       administered and possible criminal charges may result."

       CCADP Stands firm

       In response to the ADOC, CCADP's Directors Dave Parkinson and Tracy
       Lamourie advised Arizona authorities that although they've received the
       inmate's request for removal, they will not comply. "We believe that ANY
       and ALL requests received by the CCADP from the State of Arizona,
       regarding removal of information from the internet," Parkinson and Lamourie
       wrote," have been made under duress and as a direct result of Prison
       Administration trying to coerce and intimidate prisoners through threats of
       retaliation, punishment and/or criminal charges."

       The CCADP insists that it holds the rights to all the materials received from
       inmates before the statute went into effect and it will continue to post
       these materials "with or without the permission of the prisoner in question.
       Prisoners are not aware when they contact us that we may or may not
       comply with the prisoners request for removal at a later date."

       The Coalition also announced its intention of creating web pages for all
       Arizona death row prisoners, "with or without their knowledge or consent"
       and promised to "diligently scour the internet to locate any and all current
       postings by prisoners that may not yet be deleted and copy them as well
       to include on our new Arizona Prisoners section."

Death Row Off The Web  -  Arizona Censors Communications By Death Row Inmates
Bill Berkowitz is a long time political observer and columnist.

 "They are sentenced to death, not to silence," Tracy Lamourie, one of the founders of the Canadian
 Coalition Against the Death Penalty, recently told the Advocate News of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Officials in the state of Arizona have a different point of view: In mid-July, the state began enforcing a two-year-old law banning prisoners from contributing information about their cases to Web sites run by outside organizations.

 Toronto NOW, the city's local independent weekly newspaper, reported that the Arizona bill would
 "control and censor Web pages for death row inmates" provided by the Toronto-based Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CCADP). "The Coalition has teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the state regulation [HB 2376] in court,"  the paper added. "But we don't know what's sadder.  Arizona's need to further dehumanize prisoners about to be murdered by the state or the fact that the coalition maintains over [450] Web pages for death-row prisoners across the U.S."

Tracy Lamourie and Dave Parkinson run the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Via several e-mail exchanges they told me that of the 450 Web pages of death row prisoners that they maintain, 370 are for prisoners living on death row, 4 are for prisoners who have been released and 8  are for prisoners who had been re-sentenced. Parkinson wrote that "10 percent of American death row prisoners have a page on our site. We also have pen pal requests for hundreds more. "

 "The idea" for the Web pages, Lamourie says, "is to give a voice to a segment of society that is often written off by the public and to remember those who were executed.

 "It isn't glorifying anyone to allow them a voice before they are executed -- to allow them to send us reports of abuses going on in the prison, legal issues in their cases, even writings and poetry detailing life in a cage waiting to be killed."

 Lamourie told me that she and Parkinson founded CCADP after they heard about the case of Jimmy
 Dennis. "This," said Lamourie, is "a Pennsylvania case of actual innocence that was garnering little or no attention or support. After reviewing the legal materials and realizing the credibility of his claims of innocence, we set up the first CCADP Web page -- devoted to the Jimmy Dennis case -- and included information about the behavior of the police as well as witness statements, photos and contact information. Dennis has since gained the support from people around the world, and Web pages for him have sprung up in the U.K., Germany, Singapore, and elsewhere. Dennis is now being represented by a large law firm in Washington who were specifically seeking a case of actual innocence. We hope and expect to hear that Jimmy Dennis will be exonerated in the not-too-distant future."

 For many of the isolated, depressed and desperate prisoners on the nation's death rows, the CCADP's
 Web pages serve as their only lifeline. One inmate on Texas' death row wrote: "I want to thank you. I do not dramatize or exaggerate when I tell you I believe you have served as a conduit that saved my life. In the despair that can overwhelm us here, I was very seriously considering suicide or waiving my appeals.
 Because of you I have found reason for fighting, reason for living, and happiness beyond measure."

 Another wrote: "Your site has changed my life, it taught me to love to write, except when it gets over 100 degrees in my tiny cell. But it helped me hang on to life; most times while on death row I wanted to give up and die, not only cause someone was gone because of me or cause I lost everything. But I felt like I was worthless. [Because of you]... I was blessed with another chance."

 Not everyone believes prison inmates should have access to the Internet, let alone have their cases
 publicized through special Web pages. "I think [the CCADP] are just misguided individuals," Assistant
 District Attorney John Sinquefield told the Advocate News. Sinquefield, who has prosecuted death penalty cases, said the people running the Web site aren't related to the victims of "the people slaughtered by some of the worst, most heinous criminals around." Sinquefield added that he thought CCADP is "intervening in something that's not really their business. I think they should stay in Canada. I'm sure there's plenty of criminals up there to keep them busy."

 Several members of victim's rights groups have also found the Web pages for prisoners unsettling. "These people are bad dudes," Frank Parish, a board member of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, whose stepdaughter was abducted from the parking lot of a Houston grocery store and murdered, told Wired News. "It doesn't bother me at all that they don't have their Bill of Rights. They forfeited those when they made the deliberate choice to violate the law."

 Arizona silences inmates

 On July 18, 2002, according to the Canadian Coalition's Web site, the organization filed suit in the
 Arizona courts "to have the law that attempts to cut off communication between advocacy groups and
 prisoners declared unconstitutional." The ACLU is representing the CCADP, Citizens United for
 Alternatives to the Death Penalty and Stop Prisoner Rape in this action.

 Because of HB 2376 and the "actions now being taken against prisoners by ADOC" [Arizona Department of Corrections], CCADP has decided to place all Arizona death row prisoners online, to "ensure they are not effectively silenced by this law."

 In actuality, prisoners do not have direct access to the Internet. The ACLU explained in a letter to Terry
 Stewart, Director Arizona Dept of Corrections that inmates "have no access to computers... linked to the outside world." What the law is trying to prevent, the ACLU claimed, is "correspond[ence] or attempt[s] to correspond with a communications service provider or remote computing service."

 What the prisoners have had access to is the ability to communicate with outside organizations that have set up Web pages on their behalf in the form of written letters, poetry and art. These days, with so many legitimate questions raised about falsely convicted and incarcerated prisoners on death row, it's common sense to allow prisoners an outlet to talk about their lives and cases. Especially so, given the recent number of cases involving prisoners -- now numbering more than 100, including six from Arizona -- removed from death row after information that they had not committed the crimes they were convicted and sentenced for was discovered.

 According to CCADP, the statute that went into effect July 18 reads:

 "Except as authorized by the department of corrections, an inmate... shall not have access to the Internet through the use of a computer, computer system, network, communication service provider or remote computing system."

 Inmates are prohibited from sending or receiving mail from an Internet service provider or "remote" computing company. Any inmate found in violation of this statute "is guilty "of a Class 1 misdemeanor," and could be denied "earned release credits." In addition, the statute applies if "any person accesses the provider's or service Internet Web site at the inmate's request."

 In a letter from the Arizona Department of Corrections, prisoners have been advised that to "avoid possible criminal charges and/or disciplinary sanctions," they need to have their names "removed" from the CCADP Web sites "within three (3) weeks." Officials will be monitoring the Web site and if "your name/information etc. has not been removed... or is located on any other Web site on the Internet system, disciplinary actions WILL BE administered and possible criminal charges may result."

 CCADP Stands Firm

 In response to the ADOC, CCADP's Directors Dave Parkinson and Tracy Lamourie advised Arizona
 authorities that although they've received the inmate's request for removal, they will not comply. "We believe that ANY and ALL requests received by the CCADP from the State of Arizona, regarding removal of information from the Internet," Parkinson and Lamourie wrote, "have been made under duress and as a direct result of Prison Administration trying to coerce and intimidate prisoners through threats of retaliation, punishment and/or criminal charges."

The CCADP insists that it holds the rights to all the materials received from inmates before the statute went into effect and it will continue to post these materials "with or without the permission of the prisoner in question.  Prisoners are not aware when they contact us that we may or may not comply with the prisoners request for removal at a later date."

 The Coalition also announced its intention of creating Web pages for all Arizona death row prisoners, "with or without their knowledge or consent" and promised to "diligently scour the Internet to locate any and all current postings by prisoners that may not yet be deleted and copy them as well to include on our new Arizona Prisoners section."

 Lamourie points out the bind in which prisoners have been placed by this legislation. "If Arizona prisoners are punished for even contacting groups like ours, how are they able to comply with requests to be removed if it means they have to write us in order to do so? The question is indicative of how crazy this law is, and is a point raised in our brief. Also, prisoners have no way to confirm that the group or individual maintaining a site for them has received their request for removal, and have absolutely no control over what someone on the other side of the planet may have on their Web site."

death row on the web

In a punitive act thats being called an attack against constitutional rights, the state of Arizona is trying to control and censor Web pages for death row inmates provided by the Toronto based Canadian Coalition
Against the Death Penalty (www.ccadp.org).  The Coalition has teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the state regulation in court.  But we don't know whats sadder, Arizona's need to further dehumanize prisoners about to be murdered by the state or the fact that the Coalition maintains over 350 Web pages for death row inmates across the US."

Aug 20, 2002
Inmates on death row share their stories via the Internet
By BRETT BARROUQUERE - Advocate staff writer

Like many single men, John Francis Wille is out on the Internet, looking to make a connection.
Wille acknowledges his place on Louisiana's death row in his Web posting and says he likes camping, sports, collecting postcards and listening to various types of music.
"I enjoy learning about people & their cultures. I love to travel, but have not gotten a chance to do that in a long time," Wille wrote in his Web posting.
What the description omits is that Wille doesn't have a computer and why he's on death row -- for the 1985 rape and murder of 8-year-old Nichole Lopatta in LaPlace.
Wille's page is one of five by death-row inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and many around the country on a Web site sponsored by a Canadian anti-death penalty group.
The group, Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, posts Web pages for inmates, using writings, pleas for pen pals, photos, court records and even artwork mailed to them by the
incarcerated.
"They are sentenced to death, not to silence," said Tracy Lamourie, one of the directors of CCADP.
But the way Lamourie is allowing the inmates to speak out rankles some prosecutors.
"I think they are just misguided individuals," said East Baton Rouge Assistant District Attorney John Sinquefield, who has prosecuted death penalty cases.
Sinquefield said the people running the Web site aren't related to the victims of "the people slaughtered by some of the worst, most heinous criminals around."
"These are people … who are intervening in something that's not really their business," Sinquefield said. "I think they should stay in Canada. I'm sure there's plenty of criminals up there to keep them
busy."
The Internet site (http://www.ccadp.org) features access to Death Row inmate Web pages from around the country.
 Some inmates ask for pen pals, others write about prison life. Few make direct reference to what they were convicted of, unless, like Elzie Ball, it is to plead their innocence or accuse police and prosecutors of misconduct.
Ball was convicted of killing Ben Scorsone Jr., 44, who tried to stop the armed robbery of a bar in Gretna in May 1996.
 On his Web page, Ball, on Death Row since August 1997, pleads for help in overturning his conviction and claims he was set up by deputies in Jefferson Parish.
 "I have been falsely accused, tried and convicted for a crime I did not commit," Ball wrote. "I am a living witness, there are innocent people on the death rows of America."
Lamourie also posts photos of executions and memorial pages to people  executed by various states, including Feltus Taylor of Baton Rouge, who was  executed in June 2000 for the 1991 murder of Donna Ponsano during a robbery at a Baton Rouge fast-food restaurant.
The idea, Lamourie said, is to give a voice to a section of society that is often written off by the public and to remember those who were executed.
"It isn't glorifying anyone to allow them a voice before they are executed -- to allow them to send us reports of abuses going on in the prison, legal issues in their cases, even writings and
poetry detailing life in a cage waiting to be killed," Lamourie said.
 Family members and friends pass along the opportunity to go online to interested inmates, Lamourie said. From there, the inmates or their supporters can directly mail the materials that they
want online, Lamourie said.
 The only restrictions on the Web site are ones set by Lamourie and Dave Parkinson, who operates the page with her.
The pair say they won't post anything that is "blatantly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, pornographic or glorifies the crime the person is accused of committing."
"This has never become an issue," Lamourie said.
It's all legal and doesn't violate rules about contacting inmates, prison officials  here said.
 Angola prison has no prohibition on inmates contacting outside groups or people with letters or photos of themselves, officials said.
That's not the case everywhere. Lamourie's group is locked in a legal battle with the Arizona Department of Corrections over a law passed punishing prisoners who take part in Web pages put up by advocacy groups.
  But for one anti-death penalty group, the Web site and some of its graphic images -- including photographs of botched executions -- may not be the best route to take.
Kathy Gess, co-director of Louisiana CURE (Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants), said the Web site appears to be a way to raise awareness about the use of the death penalty in the United States.
Yet Gess said the entries by the Death Row inmates don't reflect the seriousness of the issue.
"We personally would not use this Web site, but we see it as another reason to not use executions to solve our social problems," Gess said.
 Sandy Krasnoff, executive director of Victims and Citizens Against Crime, a victims' rights group, said so long as no one is getting hurt by the Web site, he has no problem with such projects.
He said the Canadian group has the right to post the Web pages.
"We might not like some of the things they do," said Krasnoff, a former New Orleans Police officer. "But, we have no problem with those people."

John Marquard, a 35-year-old widowed father whom his friends call J.C., posts intricate pen-and-ink drawings on his Web page. Anthony LaMarca, a former Dunedin resident, uses his page to show off samples of his poetry and handmade greeting cards. And Michael Rivera, 40, who announced recently on his page that he got engaged, says he's quite handy with a crochet hook.
You can buy some of his work. Or he can make something to order.
"If you'd like an afghan, baby blanket, baby booties, baby bonnets or some types of sweaters," writes Rivera, "contact me and we can work something out."
What Rivera doesn't highlight on his Web page is that in from the bicycle she was riding near her home in Lauderdale Lakes, molesting her, choking her to death when she struggled, and dumping her body in a field in Coral Springs. Like Marquard and LaMarca, Rivera was convicted of first-degree murder and is awaiting execution on Florida's death row. (Marquard was convicted of killing a North Carolina woman, LaMarca of shooting his son-in-law twice in the head.)
Rivera, Marquard and LaMarca are among at least 50 Florida death row inmates who have Web pages where they display their artistry or literary talents, plead for donations and legal help, solicit pen pals, and in nearly every case, swear they are innocent.
It's a voice they've never had before. It's free to the inmates. It can be accessed by people all over the world. And it's legal.
In Florida, no death row inmate has ever seen his or her page. (Of the three women on death row, at least one has a Web page.) None of the 372 inmates on death row has any access to a computer. At most, a few inmates have small portable radios or black-and-white TVs outside their cells that get only local stations.
But inmates are allowed to write letters.
"And that's how it's done -- through the mail," said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.
"They write letters to groups that host these sites -- mostly antideath penalty groups outside the United States. We can't do anything to prohibit them from sending mail to anyone other than victims or their families.
"It's a shame," Ivey added, "that these groups are using these Web sites to perhaps cause further conflict to the victim's families." The father of one victim wants to know what he can do to stop the practice.
But the people who set up and maintain the pages say their concern goes beyond the inmates' guilt or innocence. They don't want to see anyone, even a convicted murderer, put to death.
On his Web site, hosted by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, death row inmate Troy Merck claims police hid crucial evidence, that his juvenile record was improperly used against him, and that he was wrongly found  guilty of murder.

                              
                                                         (image taken from the CCADP site used in the article)

                                                 The Garth Brooks fan
Jimmy Newton was celebrating his 25th birthday and the recent birth of his son at the City Lites nightclub near Pinellas Park on Oct. 12, 1991. According to witnesses, Newton and some friends left the club at closing time. In the parking lot, they found Troy Merck, 19, and a friend leaning against one of their cars. Newton asked Merck and his friend to move.
Merck, who had come to Florida a few days earlier from North Carolina, challenged Newton to a fight. Newton, a Little League coach, refused. Witnesses said Merck then removed his shirt, grabbed a hunting knife from his car, and attacked Newton from behind. He lifted Newton's head by the hair, slit his throat and stabbed him at least a dozen times.  Witnesses heard Merck tell Newton, "Guess I'm going to have to show you how to bleed," and "Happy birthday!"
As Merck and his friend left the parking lot, witnesses said Merck repeatedly boasted, "I f--- killed him" and "If I didn't kill him. I'll go back . . . find him in the hospital and finish the job."
At various points during his two trials (the first ended in a hung jury), Merck gave the thumbs-up sign to Newton's family, blew kisses to Newton's sister and made remarks about her figure. He smirked at the judge, sang country songs, and threw a temper tantrum that got him hog-tied by deputies.
The vehemence of Merck's attack and his attitude afterward were among the aggravating circumstances Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Nelly Khouzam cited when she sentenced Merck to death in 1993, heeding a jury's recommendation.
After hearing Khouzam's instructions during sentencing, Merck responded, "You mean it takes 30 minutes to say this s--?"
Nothing more was heard from Merck until 1998, when his Web page appeared. On it, he claims police hid crucial evidence, that his juvenile record was improperly used against him, and he suggests that the real killer was his companion on the night of the murder.
 "It was proven I wasn't the person who started the argument with the victim," Merck writes. "A man that was possibly the one who had the best and most contact with the killers was supposedly never questioned by anyone as to what he saw.
Another witness who said he got a very clear look at the driver of the getaway car was never shown a photo lineup or questioned."
Merck, 30, also writes that he enjoys reading about mythology and listening to Garth Brooks. An example of his art work appears on his page. A sketch of flowers, trees and ferns.
 Ron Cheek is 59. Retired from his job as a supervisor at GE, Cheek now works part-time as a bartender at a Clearwater VFW hall.
He is also Jimmy Newton's father.
He remembers Merck giving him the thumbs-up sign during the trial. And 10 years later, it still eats at him.
Cheek had heard that some death row inmates had Web pages, including the man convicted of killing his son. But he never looked.
"I think it just sucks," Cheek says from his St. Petersburg home. "I mean, come on. The criminals get all the rights. The victims get nothing. This is just disgusting."
Cheek has Internet service. He volunteers to log on to Merck's page for the first time. But before he even sees it, he wants it gone.
"What can I do about this?" he asks. "How do we stop them? If I need to talk to a Congressman, I'll do it.
"This isn't right."

                                                    Angry e-mails
In Toronto, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty maintains Web pages for about 350 death row inmates nationwide (including the 50 in Florida, which can be found at ccadp.org/florida.htm) and plans to add another 300 pages soon. Coalition leaders say they want to humanize the men and women on death row, create a permanent record in case someone is executed and later found to be innocent, and ensure that no one falls through the cracks of the justice system.
"We get a lot of angry e-mails," said Tracy Lamourie, co-founder and director of the CCADP. "But also a lot of positive comments."
The CCADP was founded in 1998 and receives no funding. "We work out of our own pockets and we're all volunteers," Lamourie said. "We do these pages in the evenings and on weekends out of our homes. We don't ask for membership and don't charge for the pages."
Lamourie said her group does not pass judgment on the inmates' claims of innocence. "We just think a lot of people don't know about executions. They think the death penalty is simply the killing of the worst of the worst. The Ted Bundys. But it's mostly the ones who had the worst lawyers. You don't see millionaires on death row.
"We're seen as being mean or insensitive to the victims and their families," Lamourie added. "All we can say is we'd have no interest if they (convicted murderers) weren't being killed. That's why we don't have Web pages for people sentenced to life."
Lamourie said nothing is posted on the death row pages that would be considered objectionable or would glorify the crime.
"I deeply apologize for any added distress or pain,"
Lamourie said. "I can understand how people can be angry. "But it's not about agreeing with (the inmates) or supporting  this person and what he did. It's about killing people. I'd rather see them do life in prison without parole.
"This is a human-rights issue," she said. "In other countries (where there is no death penalty), when the victims or their loved ones walk away (after a murderer has been convicted and sentenced to life without parole), they don't feel like they've gotten second-best. They feel they've gotten closure. That person is going to die in prison, and they know it.
"Killing another person is not necessary. These people are locked away forever, and society is protected. It's over."

                                                    Thumbs down
Ron Cheek calls. He says he found the  page and saw the man who killed his son. He read what Troy Merck had to say.
"This irks the s-- out of me," Cheek says. "What right does he have? He's a convicted murderer. They shouldn't have rights. End of story.
 "Why isn't there a Web site where people like myself can say, 'Here's the guy's record. Judge for yourself'?"
Cheek says the Canadian death penalty group doesn't understand the magnitude of the inmates' crimes, especially the one involving his son.
"These people don't see the whole picture," he says. "They're against the death penalty, but they don't realize how heinous, brutal and unnecessary this was.
"This guy (Merck) doesn't deserve this. Look, I'm a logical-thinking guy. I know people get wrongly convicted. But in this case, there's no doubt.
"And Jimmy wasn't a violent kid. He never had a fight in his life. He was a night-shift supervisor for Wal-Mart. He was handing out cigars that night because his son was born . . .
"If they gave Merck life, he probably wouldn't live long anyway. Not someone like him. But I just don't want to take that chance.
"And then he turns around on this Web page and pulls all this horse s--.
"I just hope I live long enough to see it (Merck's execution).  If they have to carry me on a stretcher, I want to be there.  "And I hope the last thing he ever sees is me standing there at the window, giving him the thumbs-up sign."

                                            What about Danny Rolling?
Serial killer Danny Rolling, Florida's most infamous death row inmate, doesn't have a Web site; he has not sent any material to the Canadian death penalty opponents who are posting Web sites for condemned people. But least a dozen Internet sites are devoted to Rolling and the 1990 murders
of five Gainesville college students. Most are accounts of the crime and profiles of Rolling.

The owners of a Canadian anti-death penalty Web site are trying to invalidate an Arizona
law that bans the state's prisoners from communicating with organizations like it, and others.
It is a controversial law that one Magnolia resident says she wishes Texas would adopt.

The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty maintains more than 350 active Web pages for prisoners sentenced to death across the United States. As part of the organization's educational outreach efforts the Web pages are free and available to all prisoners sentenced to death. According to the organization's co-director, Tracy Lamourie, the Web pages can include anything from detailed legal transcripts highlighting claims of innocence, to the personal writings of death row inmates, as well as artwork and requests for correspondence. But many in Arizona and elsewhere, including some in the Magnolia and Tomball area, are troubled that many of the pages contain false statements that sometimes end up haunting the families of murder victims. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty and other anti-death penalty advocacy groups are claiming the Arizona law punishes that state's prisoners, even when they are not responsible for the posting of information about them on outside Web sites. The suit, filed in a federal district court, claims Arizona bill HB 2376 bans all communications by third parties about the state's prisoners - preventing any communication between prisoners and advocacy groups such as the Canadian Coalition.

 According to the ACLU's filed complaint, notices were also handed out to prisoners instructing the inmates to remove their names and all information pertaining to them from Web sites within three weeks or face criminal charges and disciplinary sanctions.

 "We say in our suit that the bill violates both the First and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution," said ACLU's National Prison Project staff council, David Fathi. "It prohibits prisoners from corresponding. This law suppresses the flow of information from prisoners to the outside world and it chills the advocacy of the plaintiffs and other anti-death penalty and prisoner rights organizations. The law just says 'no.' It is not narrowly tailored to ban defamatory statements."

 Fathi told The Potpourri that the bill, adopted by the Arizona legislature in 2001, essentially makes the posting of death-row information a criminal act of the prisoner even if the prisoner has no knowledge of the Web page.

 "In that case, Arizona's Department of Corrections is violating their own law," Fathi said. "There own Web site lists information about their inmates. And we don't see them enforcing the law regarding pro-death penalty Web sites."

 According to an Arizona State Senate fact sheet for the bill, the purpose of the legislation is to prohibit "prison inmates from posting or retrieving Internet information either personally or through a third party." And the ACLU claims the state's own Department of Corrections director, Terry Stewart, has stated that the "statute is intended to prohibit direct or indirect access to Web sites through the Internet, particularly for the purposes of communication."

 "The legislative history of the bill reveals that it was enacted, not in response to concerns for prison order or security," claims Fathi, "but because some persons were annoyed by the Web sties that maintained a prisoner's innocence, challenged the fairness of the prisoner's trail, or solicited legal and political support for the prisoner."

 The ACLU's filed complaint refers to the bill as a "bare desire to suppress such speech because it is unpopular..." And that, the law group claims, "is not a legitimate governmental objective." The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty accepts written submissions from death-row inmates and volunteers input their writings onto Web pages set up on their behalf. During a previous interview with the organization's co-director, Lamourie said she expects that some inmates are using their Web site to post bogus information about their cases.

 "We don't say it is true," she previously stated to The Potpourri. "In some cases, inmates may lie. But if they are doing that, they are shooting themselves in the foot."

 Lamourie stated that financial restrictions at the anti-death penalty organization prohibit them from hiring fact-checkers to research claims made about inmates regarding their cases.

 "There have been some instances where inmates have provided reams of information on their Web pages and were able to get better lawyers that helped them get free because they were actually innocent," she said.

 She told The Potpourri that although she personally understands what the families of murder victims must go through emotionally after reading inmate statements on the Coalition's Web site, "there would be no need for the site if the United States ended the death penalty."

 Despite the few and in-between cases of wrongful convictions Lamourie speaks of, Magnolia resident Chris Schultz said she is in favor of Arizona's law and she hopes Texas will soon enact a similar legislation. The man who was convicted by a Harris County Court of Law for the murder of her son, Gunnar "Sean" Fulk, and his friend, Leroy McCaffrey Jr., has a Web page on the Canadian Coalition's Internet site.

Lonnie Earl Johnson was convicted of murdering the two teens in August 1990. According to police and medical reports and court documents, Johnson hitched a ride with the boys from a Tomball convenience store during the late night hours of Aug. 15, 1990. The boys' bodies were found the next morning. Both had multiple gunshot wounds.

Fulk had brush-burn abrasions on his back indicating that he had been dragged across a nearby asphalt road while still alive. He died as the result of three close-range gunshot wounds to his face and another to his chest, one of which fractured his right eye bone and burst his eye. Another bullet was found at he base of his skull.

 McCaffrey's death, claim state medical reports, was the result of a gunshot wound to his neck and head. He also suffered two superficial gunshot wounds to his chin and shoulder. His neck wound was seven inches below the top of his head, and one of the bullets severed his spine. Johnson was turned in by his girlfriend who claimed he had bragged about killing two boys upon his return to Austin in Fulk's vehicle. On the Canadian Coalition site, the Texas death-row inmate claims he killed the boys in self defense and he says they were racists. After an initial story ran about the Web site and how the parents of the two murdered boys felt about Johnson's statements, a representative from the Canadian Coalition sent The Potpourri an e-mailed letter on Johnson's behalf where the inmate maintained his innocence and said Fulk had learned his racist attitude from his mother. He claims Schultz called him a "nigger" during his trail.  *

*  NOTE:  The above statement is inaccurate.  NO Official representative of the CCADP ever contacted the paper about this, or would refer to members of the victims families as racists.
The email referred to may have been sent by one of Lonnie's supporters, NOT the CCADP.

 "Children usually learn and have a lot of the same feelings on issues like that as their parents...," he said in the letter to The Potpourri.

 Schultz said Web sites such as the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty place the same anguish on the families of victims that was experienced when they first hear that their loved ones are dead.

 "There doesn't seem to be much truth on that Web site because there are no safeguards to check what really happened," Schultz said. "They can make up any story they want to and continue to slander their victims. If they want to put up a Web site for death-row inmates, all the facts should be there."

 According to the ACLU lawyer, it is not against the law to lie.

 "It is against the law to defame someone, but people make incorrect statements all the time," Fathi explained. "This isn't about if what they said was true or not. It is about their First Amendment rights.
It is not illegal to post info that is not true or is inaccurate. The Arizona law is not narrowly tailored. It restricts all communication."

 Schultz said it seems like it would be easy to at least check an inmate's story before publishing it on the Internet by researching court documents and by reviewing police and medical reports. "But, for myself, I don't believe they should be able to do stuff like that at all," she added. "These guys have gone through the justice system and they are on death-row. I think it would be a really good idea for Texas to follow Arizona and keep inmates from accessing these sites. It is being misused."

 Andy Kahan, the City of Houston's Crime Victims Assistance director, Arizona is the first state to undertake the death-row restriction. It is an idea he would like to see Texas undertake as well. His advisory work with the non-profit victims advocacy group Justice For All helped persuade Texas' congress to pass a bill making "murder-bilia" - memorabilia sold by death-row inmates - illegal in the state. He said Justice For All may place their own version of the Arizona bill on the group's legislative agenda for 2003.

 "I am meeting with the Justice For All board members in September and this is one issue we may plan to push," he said. "I can't say for sure if they will decide to put it on their agenda this time or not, but it is definitely on the table. Schultz is not the only one out there who are being victimized by these sort of sites."

 Tomball resident Marsha Craven, president of the non-profit support organization Parents of Murdered Children, says that although she is not a member of Justice For All, the organizations often work "hand-in-hand" on issues involving victims rights.

 "I was there testifying before the Texas House and Senate about the Murder-bilia Bill and if Justice For All takes up this cause, I would fight for it as well," Craven said.

 She said she doesn't understand why Canadians should have any say-so over Arizona's or any U.S. laws.

 "What do they know about First Amendment rights? They don't live here," she said. "It seems they just don't have anything else to do besides harass us. They need to wake up and smell the roses."

 Craven said thinks the Canadian Coalition truly believes in their plight but that they are "wearing blinders."

Arizona state law bans prisoners in its jails from internet contact with their friends and
families - and now from campaign groups trying to defend their rights. Three such
groups have now recruited the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the bans
on freedom of speech grounds.

Three prisoners' rights organisations are suing jail managers in the western US state of Arizona over a new law that criminalises communications with prisoners and punishes them if information about their cases appear on websites run by their supporters.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is representing Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR), the Canadian
Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CCADP) and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
(CUADP) in their case against Terry L Stewart, Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.

They argue that his department's enforcement of Arizona's House Bill 2376 violates both their and their
prisoner contacts' first amendment rights to free speech and severely hampers their advocacy work on behalf of prisoners.

SPR, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CCADP) and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CUADP) seek to invalidate a state law that seeks to ban all information from Arizona prisoners from being posted on the internet.

"For many prisoners, we are the only source of information about surviving sexual assault, and we rely
on the internet," says Lara Stemple, executive director of SPR.

SPR, a non-profit human rights organization dedicated to ending sexual violence against men, women, and youth in all forms of detention, posts survivor stories, comments, and excerpts from prisoners' letters on its website.

"Men and women who have been raped in prison are often too ashamed to speak out," explains Stemple.
"SPR's website gives survivors a chance to connect with one another, and when you are isolated, ashamed, and afraid, that connection can be a matter of life and death."

All three organisations maintain websites containing information about prisoner rights, as well as information about specific inmates.

The SPR posts contributions from inmates written about their own personal experiences of sexual abuse while incarcerated while the CUADP and CCADP websites posting of personal case information from prisoners and appeals for legal and political assistance.

The CCADP website held information from 45 prisoners in Arizona jails at the time the suit was launched. SPR regularly sends fact sheets, survivor stories, and referrals printed from its website to survivors who are still incarcerated.

"Arizona's attempts to restrict and censor the content of advocacy organizations' own websites certainly violates the Constitution and establishes a troubling precedent," says Ann Beeson, Litigation Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program.

"Prisoners and the groups that choose to assist them retain the same vital freedom of speech that all
Americans do."

The bill reinforces restrictions on unmonitored inmate access to the internet and aims to restrict
correspondence between prisoners and 'communication service provider[s]' or 'remote computing service[s]', though not communications with newspapers and magazines.

The law also imposes disciplinary action against inmates whose names or personal information appear on the websites. Inmates may also be disciplined if any person outside prison walls accesses a provider or service website at a prisoner's request.

The July 18 order reads in part: "Except as authorized by the department of corrections, an inmate shall not have access to the internet through the use of a computer, computer system, network, communication service provider or remote computing system. An inmate who violates this section is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanour."

The penalties include removal of good behaviour points towards parole. Prisoners whose names are spotted on the sites are issued with an order demanding that they contact the site and have their names withdrawn.

In May and June of this year CUADP was contacted by two prisoners requesting that information about them be removed from the website. CCADP has similarly been contacted by at least four inmates.

"This ill-conceived law places prisoners in a Catch-22," said Eleanor Eisenberg, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona. "The only way for prisoners to stop information from being posted on the Internet is to
contact the very organizations the prisoners are now banned from contacting."

SPR, CCADP and CUADP are challenging the bill's 'chilling effect' on their right to free speech and its
effective censorship of their public concerns about prisoner safety.

They also note that pro-death penalty organisations such as ProDeathPenalty.com and organisations which seek harsher penalties for prisoners such as the National Organisation of Parents of Murdered Children also post information about inmates, their crimes and their sentences.

To date Stewart and his department have not asked prisoners named by these pro-death penalty websites try to contact them to have their names removed. It seems that inmates are only vulnerable to punishment when their cause is taken up by organisations that try to argue their innocence on their behalf.

In its letter to Stewart, the ACLU said it believed that the legislation would be swiftly invalidated by the courts.

"There can be no doubt that the purpose and effect of this legislation is to suppress the flow of information from prisoners to the outside world, and to chill the advocacy of CCADP and other anti-death penalty and prisoner rights organizations," the ACLU letter added.

"The Internet is a vital source of news and information for millions of people in the United States and around the world," said David C. Fathi, staff counsel with the ACLU's National Prison Project.

"The government may not ban information about prisoners from the Internet any more than it could ban
such information from newspapers or television."

This item is awaiting a comment from the Arizona Department of Corrections.
Additional reporting by Avery Davis-Roberts.

ACLU CHALLENGES ARIZONA LAW CENSORING DEATH PENALTY SITES

On July 18th, the American Civil Liberties Union, acting on behalf of anti-death penalty and other advocacy groups, filed a suit in Arizona federal district court seeking to overturn a state law that bans all
information about Arizona prisoners from the Internet. The lawsuit, Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty v. Terry L. Stewart, was brought on behalf of three prisoners' rights groups against the Arizona Department of Corrections, which is responsible for enforcing this law. The law (Arizona House Bill 2376) also bars prisoners from corresponding with a "communication service provider" or "remote computing service" and disciplines prisoners if any person outside prison walls accesses a provider or service website at a prisoner's request. The groups represented by the ACLU include the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which has information about 45 Arizona prisoners on its
website; Stop Prisoner Rape, a group that seeks to end sexual violence against individuals in detention; and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, a group that organizes public education campaigns with the intention of abolishing the death penalty. All of the ACLU's clients maintain websites with prisoner information. Recent state agency notices demand that prisoners have their names and case information removed from advocacy websites or face prison discipline and possible criminal prosecution. The ACLU's complaint alleges that the legislation in question has the effect of suppressing the flow of information about prisoners to the outside world and stifles the advocacy efforts of the ACLU's clients and other anti-death penalty and prisoner rights organizations. The complaint in the case may be found at: http://www.aclu.org/court/stewart.pdf

                   In his Internet personal ad, Luther Casteel lounges in a well-cut suit and stares out seductively while expressing a love for slow dancing, jazz and hiking with his dogs.
                  He is a spiritual person, he says, who likes fine cars, clothing and the Chicago nightlife. And incidentally, he was convicted of murder and makes his home on Death Row.
 "The state says I'm a `Natural Born Killer,' but I am a very ompassionate man and a born-again Christian!" his ad says.   Casteel, 45,convicted of killing two people and  wounding 16 others in a shooting at an Elgin pub in April 2001, one of thousandsof convicts, from petty criminals to
some of the region's notorious killers,who have placed ads seeking correspondents, legal
help and long -term relationships on a quickly growing list of prison pen pal Web sites.
 The quest for prison pen pals is not new--for years, prisoners have sought them through newspaper and
magazine ads. But "the Internet seems to have replaced that," said Gary Phelps, chief of staff for the
Arizona Department of Corrections. "It's quicker,  cheaper, you get a much broader market.... It's harder
 to control."
The trend has infuriated victims' rights organizations and victims' families, who are concerned the sites
could lead to scams or influence impressionable young people to commit similar crimes.
                   Victims' relatives also are incensed at the idea that murderers and rapists, whose punishment is supposed to include their isolation from society, are entitled to any kind of pleasant interaction with the outside world.
                   Robert Weides, the father of the bartender Casteel killed, sees the ads as an "absolute outrage."
                   "To imagine this man has any rights is just unconscionable," he said. "When you did what he did, you lost your right to be a human being."
                   But Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Fairchild said such sites are legal and the prisons can do little beyond monitoring mail and calls, because prisoners have a right to correspondence.
                   Prison reform groups argue the sites can shine light on prison abuses while socializing inmates, making them feel more connected to the outside world and less likely to re-offend.
                   Internet pen-pal sites are growing rapidly in number and membership. Cyberspace Inmates lists 1,625 inmates and gets 5,000 to 10,000 hits a week, while PrisonPennPals.com has 1,006 inmates and averages 2,600 hits a day, according to the founders. The people writing include homemakers, oil riggers, students and police.
                   Prisoners do not have Internet access, Fairchild said.
                   Instead, they mail information to Web sites to develop the ads, which often include protestations of innocence alongside paintings, poems and photos of prisoners taken in better days, or in the visiting room while subtly flexing their muscles.
                   Inmates primarily learn about the sites from other prisoners, though family members also can provide information. Many sites have applications that family and friends can send to an inmate to fill in the necessary details.
                   As for what the inmates write, PrisonPennPals.com founder Stephen Hartley said his site corrects grammatical errors and edits out profanities or sexually explicit material. Beyond that, he said, the material runs as the inmates provide it.
                   People generally can write letters directly to inmates or via the Web site, which would mail the messages to the prisons.
                   Some human-rights sites, such as the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, cost nothing. More commercially oriented sites charge inmates up to $80 a year, or charge the people who wish to write to prisoners a fee for each message.
                   Among the extras available to prisoners, one site will digitally alter dank visiting-room photos into fantasy vacations, showing inmates in resorts they have never visited or on cruises they have never taken.
                   Kept from `going insane'
                   Such idyllic spots are a far cry from the cell where Jesus Padilla Jr., 28, of Cicero, is locked up for 23 hours a day. An inmate at the Downstate Tamms super-maximum-security prison, Padilla was sentenced to 60 years after strangling an Oak Park woman, hiding her body
in a shed and reportedly bragging about it.
                   The lack of human contact spurred him to place an ad on an Internet Web site, where he averaged nine hits a day.
                   "The Web site would provide a means for me to be able to have people from outside write to me and keep mefrom going insane in this place," Padilla said in a letter. "It is not every day that one can smile in a place such as this, but when you see the smiles radiating from a prisoner when he receives a letter from a friend you will grasp the profound meaning behind the contact we have made."
                   Padilla, whose ad says he is an animal lover and an American Indian who upholds the ways of his ancestors, said he has corresponded with a teacher, another professional and a business owner. They write him out of curiosity about prisoners' lives or "just out of the kindness of their hearts," he said.
                   Though the medium has changed from pen and paper to cyberspace, the controversy over such communications remains the same, said professor Ned Benton, who heads the public management department at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
                   "As always in corrections, you're balancing questions of security and public safety, and questions of individual freedom," he said.
                   Susanna Orr, Jeffrey Weides' mother, called for a ban on third-party communication. Her son, who had two children, was considering going into the landscaping business before Casteel's bullets ended the dream.
                   "I don't think [Casteel] should have any contact with people he can be an influence on," Orr said.
                   New York and Arizona prohibit third-party mail and Internet access. But even with penalties including a loss of good-time credits, inmate Web pages in Arizona recently topped 150, Phelps said.
            Arizona's law, which human rights groups challenged in court this month as a violation of free speech, was created after a woman searching for information about
her late father discovered his killer's Internet ad instead, Phelps said.
                   "My concern is public safety," Phelps said. "I think these inmates are continuing to fleece the public, putting the money into accounts that someone else manages, and we
have no idea."
                   But proponents argue that prisoners have rights and need contact with the outside world.
                   Some of the sites document prison abuses and bring legal help to the innocent, said Tracy Lamourie, a co-founder of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. She hopes the Web will help end the death penalty by showing the human face of those sentenced
to die.
                   Engaged to a prisoner
                   Texan Laura Rawls, who writes inmates in several states, including Illinois, said inmates lose everything, even their families, as the years pass.
                   "I saw there was so much pain behind those walls," said Rawls, who runs a prison ministry. "I wanted to do what I could to help, to let them know they're not alone. Society kind of shuns these guys. That's one of the main reasons they can't make it in this world."
                   Rawls is engaged to an inmate pen pal. She said she hasn't received much support from the outside world.
                   "They think you're stupid for writing to inmates," she said.
                   Though Rawls acknowledged the need to be cautious, she said she does not worry about writing inmates or her plans to marry one. "I believe everybody has the right to a second chance."
                   "Most of the guys ... they're going to get out," said Cyberspace Inmates founder Rev. Rene Mulkey. "I would much prefer someone who's been rehabilitated, who has taken college courses, who has written with people and interacted as my neighbor, than someone who has spent time in a cage."

    Florida death row inmates push their views on Internet
                    JULY 21 - 2002       By Ron Word - Associated Press

Amos King, facing execution for the 1977 stabbing death of a woman, tells visitors to his Web site that he was wrongly accused.
"I'm innocent of the charges I'm on death row for. I'm the victim of a frame-up," King writes.
It's a familiar theme. Several dozen Florida death row inmates have Web pages where they proclaim their innocence and plead for money and letters. Although some sites are created by friends and relatives, such as the site originally set up for Gainesville student killer Danny Rolling by his former girlfriend, many of them are supported by people in other countries who oppose capital punishment.
The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty is behind many of the sites.
Tracy Lamourie, co-founder and director of the CCADP, said the organization considers the death penalty a human rights issue and feels it is appropriate to let death row inmates have their say on the Web.
Web pages are available to anyone on death row anywhere in the world, including the United States.
"In a lot of the cases, they probably have done some nasty things, but they don't deserve to be killed," Lamourie said in a telephone interview from her office in Toronto.
The group currently sponsors about 350 inmate Web pages and expects to have as many as 650 soon. Inmates mail the information to the organization, which develops a Web site. In most states, inmates do not have Internet or e-mail access.
Lamourie said the purpose of the Web pages is to raise awareness of the death penalty, "so that those in the U.S. become just as disgusted by the practice as those of us outside who look upon the death penalty in the way we look at slavery, at apartheid, at the way the mentally ill were treated a century ago. It is wrong, and it must stop."
The site generates 100 to 200 e-mails a week, she said, some complimentary and some critical.
"I'm sorry for any added stress or pain it causes victims," she said.
Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty also provides Web pages to inmates who believe they are wrongfully convicted. Ted Hires, founder of the Justice Coalition, a victims' right group in
Jacksonville, abhors the killers' Web sites.
"I can't believe that we would tolerate a convicted, cold-blooded killer having a Web site," he said. "It inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on the victims' families."
"It just keeps that wound open," Hires said.
Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, said inmates with Web pages are not violating any laws.
"There is nothing we can do to stop them," she said.
King, 47, who received a stay two deaths before his scheduled death earlier this month, can thank a group of Europeans and Americans who are opposed to the death penalty for his Web site, according to Sissel Egeland, who lives in Denmark.
"We fear Amos King is innocent," Egeland said in an e-mail. "The risk of executing the wrong man and creating new victims should go to the heart of (Gov.) Jeb Bush and convince him to be cautious."
King is under a death warrant for the 1977 stabbing death of death of Natalie Brady, who lived near a corrections center in Tarpon Springs, where King was incarcerated.
Earlier this month, King posted a message on his Web site inviting Gov. Bush to his execution, which has been stayed while the constitutionality of the state's death penalty laws are challenged.
"In as much as you have issued your proclamation of his guilt by signing the warrant for his execution, we ask that you have the courage to attend his death and stand for your beliefs and convictions in person," the invitation states.
Another condemned killer Carl Puiatti poses in a picture with his mother at the top of his Web site.
"I have been sentenced to death for a murder I did not commit and would like to take a plight to the people of the world in order to help me obtain defense monies needed to hire competent legal counsel," Puiatti writes.
Puiatti's co-defendant Robert Glock was executed Jan. 11, 2001, for the 1983 slaying of Sharilyn Johnson Ritchie, a Manatee County home economics teacher.
"I killed Ms. Ritchie. I'm sorry for it," said Glock as he lay strapped to a gurney just moments before his death.
On another site, inmate, Samuel Jason Derrick, 35, claims he was unjustly convicted for the 1987 murder of Rama Sharma, 55, who owned the Moon Lake General Store in Pasco County .
"Almost 13 years later, no end to this nightmare is in sight. Since I have been on death row, I have become divorced. I have sat helplessly, not being able to help my family. My father has died. I have missed out on my son's daily life, and have not been able to be there for him when he needed me most. My potential is being wasted," Derrick's site states. "Still, I remain positive. I am optimistic that someone will eventually hear my cries," said Derrick, who posted a picture of him and his son.
One of the three women on Florida's death row, Virginia Lazelere, also has a Web site where she proclaims her innocence to the 1991 shotgun murder of her husband, Norman, an Edgewater dentist.
The Web site asks for donations to her legal defense fund.
On the Net:
Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty: http://ccadp.org/
Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty: www.cuadp.org
(source: Associated Press)

The day Stardust Johnson ran across her husband's killer on the Internet, holding a kitty cat and searching for female pen pals to alleviate his death row boredom, was the day she went from a mild-mannered widow to outspoken victims' rights advocate.
"I curled up into a fetal position on the floor, screaming," said Johnson, whose husband Roy was on his way home from giving an organ recital at a Tucson, Arizona, church when he was kidnapped and bludgeoned to death with rocks by a meth addict. "He didn't mention that he'd brutally murdered my husband and thrown his body into a wash."
Johnson's outrage led to the creation of a 2-year-old Arizona law that makes it a criminal offense for inmates to publish personals, pen pal ads, financial aid requests or even their artwork and musings on the Internet.
Critics charge that the ban violates inmates' free speech, but prison officials say they're doing their duty: protecting victims and their families from additional emotional distress, and the public from professional scam artists.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday in the federal district court of Phoenix challenging the law's constitutionality on First Amendment grounds.
"This isn't about security, it's about suppressing unpopular speech," said David C. Fathi, the staff attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project. "Basically some people in Arizona didn't like the fact that prisoners were able to express themselves on the Internet, so they're trying to shut them up."
The subject of prisoners' rights is complicated, Fathi said, with security indeed being a valid concern for the government.
"The short answer is that prisoners forfeit rights that are, by their very nature, incompatible with incarceration -- freedom of movement, freedom to gather together with persons of one's choosing, freedom to engage in one's preferred occupation, etc.," Fathi said.
"They do not forfeit rights that are not incompatible with incarceration -- freedom of speech, freedom to practice their religion, etc. These latter rights may be limited only to the extent necessary to maintain prison security."
It's not the first time the ACLU has fought to defend prisoners' First Amendment rights. In Nevada, the ACLU successfully sued state officials on behalf of an advocacy newsletter called Prison Legal News when it was banned from cells. And in California, the ACLU is currently challenging a Pelican Bay State Prison policy that prohibits inmates from receiving any document printed from the Internet.
Victims' rights groups argue that free speech protections don't apply to prisoners.
"These people are bad dudes," said Frank Parish, a board member of the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, whose stepdaughter was abducted from the parking lot of a Houston grocery store and murdered. "It doesn't bother me at all that they don't have their Bill of Rights. They forfeited those when they made the deliberate choice to violate the law."
Meanwhile, prisoner websites -- especially death row inmate sites -- are flourishing. Although most inmates don't have Net access themselves, they snail-mail material to friends and activists who post it online for them, enabling them to reach millions of potential sympathizers with their pleas of innocence, requests for financial or legal aid, denunciations of guard abuse and lonely-hearts ads.
And that worries Gary Phelps.
The chief of staff for the Arizona Department of Corrections said his department conducted an investigation of the state's death row subculture and found a warren of lying, conniving baddies.
"They were using the tremendous worldwide reach of the Internet to fleece people and run scams from prison over which we had no control," Phelps said.
Phelps said several death row Don Juans were using the Web to drain the bank accounts of lovesick women, pledging affection to multiple female fans at once in an elaborate con game to see which inmate could bilk sympathizers out of the most money.
Then there was the stranger-than-Hollywood case of death row inmate Floyd Thornton. In 1997, Thornton's wife Rebecca, whom he met through an Internet personals ad, arrived at Arizona's maximum-security facility in Florence brandishing an AK-47 and tried to bust her hubby loose as he was weeding the prison vegetable garden. She was killed in the shootout with guards, but not before fatally plugging her husband by accident as he sprinted toward the fence.
For all these reasons, cutting off prisoners' Internet access to the world seemed like a logical step to Phelps, who insisted that protecting "vulnerable" women from manipulative inmates was not patronizing.
"It's a public safety measure to protect people from their own stupidity, like the laws against drinking and driving. It's the government's duty to protect people from the con artists of the world," he said.
Arizona inmates are given three weeks to remove their material from the Internet or face misdemeanor charges, although most are punished by having their "good time" credits or visitation rights revoked, he said. So far this year, 53 inmates have been cited for their online content. (Arizona has 29,000 prisoners, and roughly 130 are on death row.)
But the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, the largest purveyor of Web space to condemned prisoners, has not only refused to take down Arizona inmate sites, but has indeed pledged to create a page for every death row dweller in the state, with or without their consent.
"They're sentenced to death, they're not sentenced to silence," said CCADP co-founder Tracie Lamourie. "As far as we are concerned, the letters they send requesting to take down their material were written under duress and (we) won't honor them."
For every letter the group gets from a prisoner asking to be taken off the site, the CCADP shoots off a response stating that the materials are the property of the CCADP and won't be removed. Lamourie said the group has been thanked by inmates for the bold action.
She downplayed criticism that inmates misrepresent themselves, noting that the public can easily search news or state prison sites for the particulars of their crimes. Her goal is to give death row prisoners an outlet to speak freely, she said, not to fact-check every account for accuracy.
"We're giving prisoners a voice. Americans should know who they're killing."

PHOENIX, Az. - Two anti-death penalty groups have filed a lawsuit
against the Arizona prison system for enforcing a law that bans
prisoners, including death row inmates, from sending letters to their
Web sites.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit for the
groups, charges that the broadly worded Arizona state law, which went
into affect in July 2000, is a violation of free speech rights and seeks
to punish inmates who write letters to the Web sites.

The ACLU said that inmates have been threatened with disciplinary action
or criminal prosecution and the law has a "chilling" effect on advocacy
groups.

Gary Phelps, the chief of staff for the Arizona Department of
Corrections, said the law was put in place to prevent victims from
coming across the faces and reading letters from the
men and women who committed crimes against them.

Phelps said the law was proposed after relatives of a Tucson man who was
murdered came across a Web site portraying the killer, who is on death
row, as a caring person and holding a cat.

Corrections officials said that so far, 53 prisoners have been given
disciplinary tickets for violating the Web rule and 24 have lost prison
privileges as a result.

Disciplinary tickets are given to inmates who violate prison rules. A
ticket can result in loss of privileges inside the prison for specific
periods of time.

The prisoners, especially death row inmates who are held in isolation
most of the day, frequently write to the sites requesting pen-pals,
soliciting donations for defense funds or
proclaiming their innocence. Some letters even tell of the inner
workings of prison systems and alleged abuses. Many of the inmates also
have their pictures posted on the Web sites.

The ACLU says one of the targets of the law is the Canadian Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty, which has an extensive Web site that
publishes letters from death row inmates around the United States,
including Arizona.

The CCADP said on its site that a "new Iron Curtain is emerging around
America’s Death Camps." It views the Arizona law as an attempt to
legislate what advocacy groups can put on their Web site.

The CCADP is a rabble-rousing Web site that not only publishes letters
from death row prisoners, but includes a memorial page for convicted
murders who have been executed; Web pages for individual death row
prisoners; information on upcoming executions; and requests from death
row inmates for pen pals.

The site also accuses President George Bush of 154 "homicides," the
number of executions he allowed during his time as governor in Texas.
The site also calls Bush a "serial killer." The site refers to Oklahoma
Gov. Frank Keating as "Killer Keating" for allowing executions in his
state.
                             
             President Bush and Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating:
                Targets of Canadian anti-death penalty group.

The Arizona law bars inmates from having access to the Internet through
the use of a computer, computer systems, network, a communications
service provider or remote computing system. Inmates are also forbidden
from sending or receiving mail from a communication service provider or
remote computer site.

The ACLU had sent a letter to the Arizona Department of Corrections in
June demanding that the law be suspended, calling the measure an attempt
at censorship and a violation of freedom of speech.

The ADOC countered that it had no authority to suspend a law passed by
the legislature and signed by the governor.

The ACLU said it brought the lawsuit on behalf of three groups: the
Florida- based Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
(CUADP), the Canadian Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and Stop
Prison Rape. The lawsuit was filed in Arizona federal court Thursday.

Abe Bonowitz, director of the CUADP, said the Arizona law is aimed at
suppressing information.

"I am concerned that a prisoner can be punished for making public his or
her claims of innocence," Bonowitz said in a prepared statement. "The
purpose and effect of this legislation is to suppress the flow of
information from prisoners to the outside world, and to chill the
advocacy of CUADP and other anti-death penalty and prisoner rights
organizations. As the lawsuit contends, pro-death penalty organizations
have not been targeted
by the Arizona Department of Corrections."

Bonowitz said his group’s Web site lists three Arizona death row
prisoners in its "Wrongful Convictions" section. One of the prisoners,
Robert Murray, wrote to the site saying he was innocent. Bonowitiz said
that Murray later wrote to the Web site saying he could be disciplined.

David C. Fathi, legal counsel for the National Prison Project (part of
the ACLU), said the Arizona law not only violates the rights of
prisoners, but also the rights of advocacy groups, such as CCADP, that
publish inmate letters on the Internet.

"The purpose of (the law) is to prevent information about what is
happening from getting out," Fathi said. "They are threatening prisoners
with criminal prosecution for having information about themselves on the
Web site.

"If you look at the statute, there is not a word about prison security
or the dangers of someone trying to break someone out," Fathi said.
"Some people just didn’t like the fact that prisoners were able to
express themselves on the Internet and, therefore, tried successfully,
to pass legislation. The law is very clear that speech that annoys or
upsets someone is not sufficient reason to allow government to ban it."

Phelps said that by banning inmates from expressing their views and
telling about themselves on the Internet, the state is helping prevent
crime victims from "coming across" the postings on the Web.

"We supported this law," Phelps said.

The Canadian anti-death penalty group says it provides free Web space to
all prisoners under a sentence of death as part of its educational and
outreach efforts. The CCADP says there are 350 Web pages devoted to
death row prisoners on its site.

"Prisoner pages can include anything from detailed legal transcripts
highlighting claims of innocence to prisoner's writings, artworks and
requests for correspondence," the group said in a prepared statement.

The CCADP said it will not remove any prisoner information from its
site, viewing the law as an attempt to "silence the voices of human
rights advocates..."

From "The Death House -Online Source For Unique & Objective Death Penalty News" 

When two Magnolia area women discovered a Web site discussing their two teen-age sons, the mothers were outraged - not because the site's owners didn't first get their permission to write about their boys, but because the founders of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty did not check the facts supplied by Lonnie Earl Johnson who sits on death row for killing their sons.
A binder filled with newspaper clippings and old photos and a stack of Harris County District Attorney's Office documents tell the story of how Gunar Sean Fulk and Leroy "Punkin" McCaffrey Jr. died Aug. 15, 1990. It is a story of a gruesome death that the two women, Chris Schultz and Laura McCaffrey, know by heart. They have memorized every detail of their sons' deaths. If truth be told, there is hardly any need for their binder and stack of court papers because they have had to inscribe the events surrounding their boys' demise into the dark recesses of their brains. "Sean had brush-burn abrasions on his back indicating he had been dragged across the asphalt while still alive," Schultz said. "He died because of three close-range gunshot wounds to his face and one to his chest. One fractured his right eye, bursting it. A bullet was recovered from the base of his skull."
Schultz also said her son's best friend, McCaffrey Jr., died from a gunshot wound to his neck and head.
"The District Attorney's office also said he suffered two gunshot wounds to his chin and shoulder. One of the bullets severed his spine," she said.
According to newspaper archives at The Potpourri and The Houston Chronicle as well as court documents, on Aug. 15, 1990, at about 1:30 a.m. Fulk was called to stop by a Tomball Stop 'N Go where his friend, Tammy Durham, was working the graveyard shift. Being alone, she wanted Fulk to keep her company. Before Fulk arrived at the store the black male who would be convicted of his murder was already there.
At approximately 2 a.m., Fulk arrived with McCaffrey Jr., both teen-agers had just gotten off work.
Durham stated that after visiting with her for about 10 minutes, the boys walked outside. According to Schultz, Durham had left the store's doors open to let the place air-out and it allowed the store clerk to overhear a conversation between the boys and Johnson, who asked for a ride.
Johnson claimed his car was out of gas and that he needed a lift. Durham said the boys looked for a gas container inside the store. She provided them with a container and the boys left telling Durham they would be right back. As they drove down FM 2920 in Fulk's truck, Durham told investigators that she noticed Johnson was riding between the two boys in the cab of the vehicle. That was the last time Durham saw the boys alive. Later that morning, a man driving to work on FM 2920 saw a dead body lying on the side of the road. When he pulled over, he noticed a second body lying about 125 yards from the first. A second motorist, according to Harris County investigators, stopped at the scene and called police.
When Harris County Sheriff's Department homicide investigator Max Cox arrived at the scene, he reported that blood in the middle of the road, lead him to believe that Fulk had been shot in the roadway and dragged to the roadside. Cox also noted in his statement to the District Attorney's Office that he determined McCaffrey Jr. had been running away when he was shot. The truck was gone and so was Johnson.
It was Aug. 31 outside an Austin topless bar that Johnson was finally located and arrested. Johnson's girlfriend, who worked at the bar, helped police obtain an arrest warrant for suspicion of two counts of capitol murder by confessing that Johnson had told her on the night of the murders he had killed the two boys.
It wasn't until November of 1994 that Johnson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death row. And now, nearly 12 years later, the mothers of Fulk and McCaffrey Jr. say their sons are victims once again with the establishment of the Canadian Web site which allows death row inmates to publish whatever thoughts they may have.
Johnson's pages on the anti-death row Web site features a poem he wrote, a pen pal request, bank account information for appeal expenses, an inside view of death row, and his version of the Aug. 15, 1990 events which lead to the deaths of Fulk and McCaffrey Jr. Johnson claims he was looking for a ride that night but that the trip turned into a struggle of self-defense when the two teenagers began to call him racist names and pressed a gun to his side.
At 27 years old and standing 5 foot nine inches and weighing 219 pounds, Johnson said he was able to fight back but that fear and rage took over causing him to kill the teens in self preservation. He said he struggled against Fulk first, who was bigger than McCaffrey Jr. He grabbed the gun from Fulk when McCaffrey Jr. jumped on his back. The gun went off, he claims on the Web page, and the "big guy falls."
"I have the pistol now," he wrote to the Web site's founders. "The other guy comes at me with a knife. So I pull the trigger."
After being arrested and spending four years in jail, he wrote, state appointed legal aid did little to defend him. He said his family and friends were in court every day and that "everyone expected him to be acquitted."
"But my attorney didn't call any witness on my behalf," he wrote. "The jury heard only the prosecution side. Because of this I had a gut feeling I'd be found guilty but I tried to stay positive. I kept saying to myself, 'They can free me.' I didn't take the stand. I wanted to, but my attorney said it was better not to."
He was found guilty. The Coalition's Web site says that Johnson's appeals limit is almost up. Johnson goes on to reflect on life in prison and the hardship his conviction has brought to his family, which consists of his mother and a son and daughter. He claims life on death row is not pleasant due to frequent strip searches and seven minute showers, an unclean environment, the lack of proper heating, and spoiled food. He says death row inmates are permitted only two hours of recreation and that a color TV is mounted on a wall outside the cells, "about three meters away" and that has to be watched "through wire mesh." He claims staff members are also allowed to come into inmate cells, cuff them, pull them out of the cell and lock them in the showers while they rummage through their personal property.
"They can take anything they think you shouldn't have," he wrote. "If they feel like it they destroy family pictures and property and leave your cell in chaos. You have no rights while you're in this hotel."
And it is his version of life which has Schultz and McCaffrey so upset. They say the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty have not done any background checking to see if Johnson's version of the murders or if his claims of mistreatment on death row are accurate.
It was McCaffrey's brother-in-law who first discovered the Coalition's Web site. After McCaffrey saw the site for herself, the first thing she did was to call Schultz.
"I was mad," McCaffrey said. "After I read it all and sat and thought about it, I called Chris and told her. There was a guy on there (a Coalition member who published Johnson's writing on the Web site) and I wrote him. I just told him what I thought."
McCaffrey said she sent the publisher an e-mail, asking him what was wrong with him. Why would anyone defend these people and put this junk on the Internet, she questioned. She told the Coalition member that Johnson's statements were nothing but lies.
The publisher did respond to McCaffrey's e-mail saying that America was similar to China, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and to Sept. 11's terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden in that the government was not protecting its citizens by not murdering them to make victims happy. McCaffrey claims the Coalition publisher said Americans should be content to lock convicted murders up in life imprisonment.
"And then I went off on him (e-mailing the Coalition publisher again)," McCaffrey said. "Who is supposed to feed and clothe them? I told him I had a good suggestion, why don't they just ship them (convicted murderers) all over there and let them feed them and clothe them and take care of them and let them loose with their friends and families."
The publisher did not respond back. Schultz also e-mailed her views on the Web site to the Coalition. Schultz said Johnson's story does not even coincide with the events of the trial. "You really should check the true facts of this case," Schultz wrote in an e-mail dated April 21, 2002 to the Coalition. "My child ... can not speak for himself and now another crime is being committed by this trash being allowed without checking for truth."
Both mothers also maintain that their sons were not racist as Johnson recounts on his Web pages through the Coalition. Schultz said that her son, Fulk, had many black friends and that he often got upset when derogatory remarks were made against race.
And the women say that Johnson's concern for his family doesn't compare to what they are going through as mothers. Schultz said that "at least his mother and children can still visit Johnson and prepare for his death."
"We have only these files and newspaper clippings to use in understanding our sons' deaths," Schultz explained. "We can only visit our sons at the graveyard."
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they were not familiar with Johnson's claims of death row mistreatment. But a spokeswoman did say that inmate showers are in their own cells and that the inmates are not removed to a main shower location. The Department spokesperson also said they are not allowed to restrict letters the inmates mail to others in any form or fashion.
"They can write to anyone in the free-world," the spokesperson explained.
The Web pages that claim to represent Johnson's view of life on death row was established, according to Coalition co-founder Tracy Lamourie, as a means of letting the inmates express their views on the death row system and not to take a side in claiming innocence.
"If there wasn't a death row, there would be no need for the Web site," said Lamourie. She explained that because the Coalition is non-profit, they do not have the means to hire personnel to censor or fact-check what the inmates write. She said that visitors to the site should check into what death row inmates are claiming by looking up court documents and searching for newspaper articles about the cases before taking a side on innocence.
"That info is available. Prisoner info is online (elsewhere) and people can look up what they did. There are newspaper Web sites online also. We are putting forth a perspective (of life on death row) that most people haven't seen. If any of these people are lying, they are not going to be able to get an attorney to help them appeal."
The Coalition began the Web site in 1998. It did help one innocent death row inmate get free. But he, explained Lamourie, did post facts concerning his case. She says some on the Web site have reams of documentation giving light to their situations.
"We don't say it is true," she added. "In some cases, they may lie. If they do that though, they are shooting themselves in the foot."
Canada's last execution was performed in 1962 and a law making it legal to sentence criminals to death was repealed in the 1970s. The Coalition's founders claim instituting a death sentence does not work to deter murder anyway. In the entire country of Canada, they say, there have only been 40 murders - less than most major American cities.
"People have the impression that those sentenced to death are the worst of the worst," Lamourie said. "But serial killers are not all getting put to death. It is not the people you would expect to see on death row. Most of those who are there are the ones who couldn't afford lawyers."
Lamourie did say she personally feels horrible by e-mails she receives from the families of murder victims. She says the Coalition's members do care about the families but that the Coalition maintains their view that "there wouldn't be a Web site if there was no death penalty." There are currently no provisions for the families of crime victims regarding such Web sites or the publication of false information regarding the cases.
Tomball resident Marsha Craven, co-chairman of the Houston chapter of the Parents of Murdered Children, said that the families of murder victims are in need of more rights in order to battle Web sites such as the Canadian Coalition's, but that until citizens band together to pressure law makers to create more laws, there is little that can be done.
In the mean time, she recommends that Schultz and McCaffrey continue to send letters to the Coalition's site and she urges them to enlist the help of other family members and friends and neighbors to do the same in protest of the site.
She also said the women may want to get involved in another organization called MINE (Murder Is Not Entertainment) which protest the trend of glamorizing killing. Craven said that is basically what the Coalition's Web site is doing by publishing the criminals' writings.
Schultz did say she was planning to get active in various organizations again. She was once a member of Parents Of Murdered Children but her ill health forced her to subdue her involvement. She said other than receiving periodic appeals Johnson has made in attempts to get off of death row, she thought the victimizing of her son and his friend were over. She was wrong, she said. "We are having to relive this all over again," she said. "I am mad right now, but I will allow myself to cool off so that I can be level headed in my involvement to boost the rights of victims. I don't want an innocent person to go to death row but Johnson is not an innocent person. And what he is doing on that Web site is wrong."
May 8, 2002

 Put me out of my misery

 An Ontario rapist says he would rather be executed than
 languish indefinitely in a psych ward

 by Terry O'Neill

 Federal law in Canada allows neither assisted suicide nor capital
 punishment, but that is not stopping an Ontario sex offender from
 asking government officials to kill him. Gerald Vaughan, 51, made the
 unusual request last month as a way of drawing attention to his belief
 that he has been unfairly incarcerated for more than two decades in a
 mental-health facility, with no hope of gaining his freedom. But
 government documents show the former sexual predator is not as
 harmless as he would have the public believe.
 Mr. Vaughan freely admits to having committed a string of sexual
 assaults in the spring of 1979. "The offences were all against adult
 females," he said in a telephone interview from the Penetanguishene
 Mental Health Centre (PMHC) in Ontario, where he is incarcerated.
 "Rapes and attempted rapes. There were a whole series of them over a
 five-week period. It was like a spree. I was in a state of depression
 at the time and blaming women for problems which were really my own."

 He was found not guilty of the 15 offences by reason of insanity and
 sent to the forensic division of the PMHC, which incarcerates and
 attempts to rehabilitate "mentally disordered offenders." Officials at
 the centre are not allowed to comment on his case, but Mr. Vaughan
 maintains he is no longer a threat to the community and that, starting
 in the mid-1980s, psychiatrists repeatedly recommended that he be
 released from custody.
 Nevertheless, the Ontario Review Board (ORB) refused to set him free.
 Despondent, Mr. Vaughan attempted to commit suicide in 1988 and, since
 then, has refused any further treatment. Instead, he buried himself in
 law books, an exercise that culminated last month with his filing of a
 50-page legal factum arguing that authorities' refusal to release him
 constitutes " cruel and unusual punishment." Since such punishment is
 prohibited by the Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms, he says, the
 justice system must allow him to be executed.
 Mr. Vaughan denies his death wish is a public-relations stunt. "I
 think people need to take a good look about what's going on here in
 the system," he says. "These politicians have their own agenda about
 keeping people locked up in these places, and it's not what people are
 led to believe."
 On the other hand, the ORB, which is mandated to review the status of
 those found not criminally responsible or unfit to stand trial for
 criminal offences on account of a mental disorder, appears to have
 good reasons for keeping Mr. Vaughan locked up. According to documents
 disseminated by the board's counsel, Maureen Forestell, the body
 considers Mr. Vaughan to be a threat to public safety (see story,
 opposite page, for more details).
 Under a 1991 Supreme Court of Canada ruling, there is supposed to be a
 cap on the length of time someone in Mr. Vaughan's position can be
 incarcerated, but only one province, Manitoba, has moved to amend its
 laws. Mr. Vaughan's lawyer, Anita Szigeti of Toronto, says this has
 led to "a level of hopelessness" becoming common among people in her
 client's situation. "He's just locked up there, and there doesn't seem
 to be a reasonable prospect of his getting out." Ms. Szigeti says she
 personally is not in favour of capital punishment, "but I am entirely
 in favour of individual choice. This is his choice, which none of us
 can really appreciate unless we are in his shoes."
 But it is a choice that some Canadians think Mr. Vaughan should not be
 allowed to make. John Tackaberry, spokesman for Amnesty International
 (AI) Canada, concedes Mr. Vaughan's gambit is "not an illogical
 response, given the description of the problem he is in."
 Nevertheless, AI is " unequivocally opposed to the death penalty." On
 the other hand, the organization is concerned about the apparent
 injustice in his open-ended incarceration and will be watching for
 developments.
 The director of the Toronto-based Canadian Coalition Against the Death
 Penalty also has concerns. Dave Parkinson points out that any court
 ruling to sanction Mr. Vaughan's death would set "a very dangerous
 precedent," not only because it would support capital punishment, but
 also because it would, in effect, be legitimizing a type of assisted
 suicide in a case where the patient is not terminally ill.
 There is also another consideration, Mr. Parkinson argues. Mr. Vaughan
 has to understand that one of the reasons for his incarceration was to
 punish him for the crimes he committed. "If the whole purpose is to
 punish for the crime, why would you cut back that punishment by
 executing him?"
 Still a danger to the public
 Determined to teach "loose women" a lesson, Gerald Michael Vaughan
 went on a rampage of sexual assault in Toronto in the spring of 1979.
 As he saw it, his attacks constituted "a mission to purify the world."
 By the time the knife-wielding madman's spree came to an end, he had
 assaulted eight women and faced four charges of rape, four charges of
> attempted rape, four charges of attempted choking, and one charge each
 of assault causing bodily harm, choking, and break and enter with
 intent. The courts found Mr. Vaughan, a one-time member of the Satan's
 Choice Motorcycle Club, not guilty by reason of insanity.
 Mr. Vaughan says he is cured now, but the Ontario Review Board
 determined last year that he "continues to represent a significant
 danger to the public," and ordered he be kept locked up. In making the
 ruling, the board cited a report indicating Mr. Vaughan's "behavioural
 patterns have not changed." Moreover, "He does not appear to have
 resolved many of the complex interpersonal issues that precipitated
 his admission to this facility."
 On one occasion, Mr. Vaughan complained about another patient's
 habits, and said, "I'll get someone to punch him out if something
 isn't done." Another time, Mr. Vaughan demanded hospital staff tell
 him the name of a patient who had reported that Mr. Vaughan harboured
 homicidal thoughts. Ironically, authorities also cite Mr. Vaughan's
 determination to use legal methods to free himself as a reason to keep
 him locked up. One doctor said Mr. Vaughan's "anger and resentment
 towards others, once expressed as stalking and extreme violence, may
 now be expressed as litigiousness."
 According to board documents, another doctor concluded, "There was no
 real chance that Mr. Vaughan's condition would ever improve
 significantly...[ and] that the accused's level of dangerousness is
 still equal to" what it was in 1979.

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This page is maintained and updated by Dave Parkinson and Tracy Lamourie in Toronto, Canada