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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
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