Rochester, NY (06/11/03) - A man on
Florida's death row, who victimized a local family 15 years ago, now
advertises
for pen pals on a Website describing himself as “caring and
easy-going.”
In September of 1988, Raymond Wike kidnapped Sarah and Sayeh
Rivasfar from their biological mother's home in Florida.
He killed 6-year-old Sarah and slashed Sayeh's throat, but the
8-year-old played dead and survived.
Sayeh was shocked when she saw her sister’s killer on a Website.
"It is very disturbing. It makes me think the criminal now has more
rights than the victim," she said. “I have no words for this, it is
disgusting. The lies!”
The Rivasfar family has fought to keep Wike on death row and to prevent
him from writing letters to Sayeh.
Now they want his Internet privileges taken away.
Wike isn't the only death row inmate appealing for pen pals on the site
set up by the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Tammy Rivazfar, the victim’s step-mother said, "I don't understand
where the justice comes into play here. He doesn't admit he's a
child-killer. If kids aren't monitored on the computer they could be
communicating with him!
"[If] you want to give him access, make him say he's a child killer who
killed a six-year- old and raped an eight-year-old!”
The Rivasfars believe Wike has too many freedoms for someone scheduled
to die in prison. They have contacted Florida’s governor and attorney
general and appealed to US.Senator Chuck Schumer.
They want legislation to that takes away Internet privileges for
death row inmates or requires them at least to disclose their
crimes on any site.
The Rivasfars are also preparing to fight Wike's latest appeal of his
death sentence.
When his ex-girlfriend's parents refused to tell him her whereabouts, he methodically shot them dead, firing at the mother once in each leg, once in the lower body and once between the eyes at point- blank range.
When he insisted on defending himself in his double-murder trial, despite pleas from defense attorneys that he had an IQ of 77 and was not competent to stand trial, he became the first person under the state's current capital punishment law to represent himself.
Now, nine years after the slayings of Joseph and Barbara Ann Lafayette in their Adams Run home, Reed has resurfaced from Death Row at Lieber Correctional Institution with another odd demand: He wants to be executed rather than continue with further appeals.
"I am standing upon my word that this case be dismiss [sic] or I be killed," Reed, 44, wrote in a letter to The Associated Press last week. He added that he has also decided against asking the governor for clemency, eating a final meal or making a last statement.
All of this sounds familiar to former 9th Circuit Solicitor David Schwacke. In television interviews before his trial, Reed ventured that if Schwacke could convict him and get the death sentence, then Reed would let Schwacke tie him to a tree and shoot him dead.
"This is pretty consistent with what he did at the trial stage, making the case personal," Schwacke said Monday. "Might just be the last act of a desperate man."
No motions have been filed pertaining to his request, said Assistant Public Defender Fielding Pringle of Richland County. She said Reed's request comes after his latest appeal for post-conviction relief was denied in a Richland County court. Reed has at least four more courts in which he could appeal his death sentence, said Pringle, including the South Carolina Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Fourth Circuit and the Federal District Court. She said she talks with him regularly, but declined to say whether he has changed his mind.
"His competency has been hotly disputed since Day 1," Pringle said Monday. "It is in the court transcript that he has an IQ of 77 and suffers from neurological impairment."
An IQ of 75 is considered the low end of normal, Pringle said.
"It is a very sad story. He should never have been allowed to represent himself in the first place. It is very sad."
The Lafayette family could not be reached for comment Monday. At trial, prosecutors said Reed and the Lafayettes' daughter, Laurie Rego, briefly dated while they were both in the Army. Rego testified that when she tried to break off the relationship and fled her own apartment to get away from him, he rammed a car into an Army officer who was trying to help her. Reed was sentenced to 37 months in prison after pleading guilty to assault, but he continued to write Rego threatening letters from prison.
When Reed was released from prison on April 25, 1994, instead of going to a federal halfway house in Fayetteville, N.C., to complete his sentence, he went to Greenville and bought a 9 mm pistol and 10 bullets. On May 18, Reed showed up at the Lafayettes' house looking for Rego.
For Reed to be executed voluntarily, he must be found competent by a judge. Five years ago, the state Supreme Court upheld Reed's conviction after considering whether Circuit Judge William Howard had erred by finding Reed competent and capable of representing himself. The high court held that the judge had made clear to Reed the inherent dangers in self- representation.
Assistant Deputy Attorney General Don Zelenka was on vacation Monday and unavailable for comment, and his department's spokesmen, Trey Walker, said he was unaware of Reed's expressed intentions to volunteer for execution.
From Lieber Correctional Institution, Reed said on his Web site at www.ccadp.org/jamesearlreed.htm: "The big issue within this death penalty case/trial was that I would be representing myself which I have come to find out this hasn't been done, until I became the first! ... I didn't become my own lawyer for no type of fame nor glory! Yet to save my life period!"
By
Nicholas
M. Horrock
From the
Washington Politics & Policy Desk
United
Press International
Published
5/20/2003 1:39 PM
WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- Prisoner-rights groups are closely watching a proposed rule in Florida Wednesday that would bar inmates from "advertising" for pen pals and other outside contacts after last week winning a major federal court ruling in Arizona that struck a law barring inmates from letting information appear on the Internet, advocacy officials said.
Tracy Lamourie, a director of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, said if Florida adopts the rules, proposed earlier this year, her group and others might consider another legal challenge. The proposed Florida rule would become part of prison regulations and would bar prisoners from advertising for anything.
"Inmates who post ads or have ads posted with the assistance of another person shall be subject to disciplinary action," the Florida regulation says.
The Arizona ruling and actions in other states underscore the power of the Internet both as a tool for social advocacy groups and a place where critics say prison inmates can make improper contacts and endanger the public.
U.S. District Judge Earl H. Carroll, sitting in Phoenix, ruled Friday that when Arizona moved to bar prison inmates from directly or indirectly providing information for the Internet it violated not only the prisoner's First Amendment rights, but also the rights of advocacy groups who set up Web pages.
Under pressure from the widow of a murder victim, the Arizona legislature passed a law in 2000, House Bill 2376, which forbade prisoners from communicating with any organization that had a Web site and from allowing their names and material about them to be displayed on the Internet, even if they had no control over its use.
The widow, Stardust Johnson, noticed in 1999 that the man who is serving a life sentence in the Arizona State Penitentiary for brutally beating her 59-year-old husband to death in 1995, had a Web page advertising for people to correspond with him through a service called "PrisonPenPals.com." Penpals, she told an Arizona legislative committee, was an Internet provider that sold prison inmates Web pages for $19.95.
The ad, she said, showed the inmate, Beau John Greene, holding a kitten, portraying him as a submissive person and gave no hint he had committed a crime in 1995 that prosecutors called "heinous and very depraved."
Johnson wanted to know what gifts, money and pen pals Greene acquired through the ad.
Johnson and other witnesses told the committee that access to these Web pages made it possible for inmates to stalk former victims, carry out fraudulent activity, and make improper contacts with children and other unsuspecting people.
Inmates in Arizona prisons did not have direct access to the Internet, but communicated with Internet providers by sending a letter. Under Johnson's prodding and the pressure of prison officials, the legislature passed a law that said "an inmate shall not receive mail from a communication service or service provider or remote computing service."
In addition to paid providers, prison-rights advocacy groups such as the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and Stop Prisoner Rape use the Internet to press social issues.
The Canadian Coalition puts pictures on the Web of inmates from around the world facing death sentences and publishes the details of legal cases where there have been questions about fairness and the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.
The coalition came under attack from an Alabama state Sen. Bill Armistead, R-Columbiana, who said it gave "death row inmates a forum, on the World Wide Web, to vent all their thoughts against society, along with so-called poems and artwork."
Shortly after the Arizona law was passed, prison authorities passed a regulation that even if prisoners did not purposefully lend their names and case details for a Web page, they could face punishment within the prison and possible criminal charges. The prisoners were told it was their responsibility to have their names removed from the Internet though the regulations prohibited their getting in touch with the providers.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit in July 2002 charging that the law's purpose was to "suppress the flow of information from prisoners to the outside world, and to chill the advocacy of plaintiffs and other anti-death penalty and prisoner-rights organizations."
The suit said the "Internet has revolutionized social political advocacy.
"In the past, advocacy had to pay for postage and stationary to send information to their members and supporters, and these costs imposed limits on the number of persons these groups could reach with their message. Now such groups can make information available to an unlimited number of persons at no marginal cost simply by posting it on the organization's Internet Web site."
Prison experts agree the Internet has become a powerful tool for spreading information on bad conditions in prisons, abuse of prisoners and other difficulties.
Many advocates, like Lamourie, agree some prison ads are inappropriate, but that this is offset by need to have some sort of human contact with the outside world for the 2 million prisoners in American institutions.
Carroll found that in addition to protecting victims, the Arizona's law had the intention of silencing outsiders, the advocacy groups that used the Web pages. He found that prisoners trying to misuse contacts could be prevented from doing so by current regulations that allow mail to be read by authorities and that other monitoring powers could also protect the public.
"The statutes codifying HB 2376 are not rationally related to legitimate penological objectives and are therefore unconstitutional," he wrote. He ordered Arizona prison authorities to immediately stop enforcing the law.
Arizona Judge Strikes Down
Law that Censored Anti-Death Penalty Web Sites
May 15, 2003
PHOENIX -- The American Civil Liberties Union today welcomed a federal judge’s ruling permanently striking down a state law that punishes prisoners who post information about themselves on the Internet and denies organizations the right to post information about prisoners on their own web site.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PHOENIX -- The American Civil Liberties Union today welcomed a federal judge’s ruling permanently striking down a state law that punishes prisoners who post information about themselves on the Internet and denies organizations the right to post information about prisoners on their own web sites.
"We are delighted and encouraged by the judge’s order to protect the First Amendment rights of prisoners and their advocates," said David C. Fathi, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project and lead counsel in the case.
The ACLU’s lawsuit, Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty v. Charles L. Ryan, was filed on behalf of anti-death penalty and prisoner advocacy organizations in July 2002. The lawsuit challenged broadly worded legislation that also barred prisoners from corresponding with a "communication service provider" or "remote computing service" and disciplined prisoners if any person outside of prison contacted one of these agencies at a prisoner’s request.
In striking down the censorship law, the court said that it was unconstitutional and "not rationally related to legitimate penological objectives." Today’s decision makes permanent a preliminary order issued last December that halted enforcement of the law.
The Arizona Department of Corrections imposed disciplinary sanctions on at least five prisoners found to be in violation of the law, according to the ACLU lawsuit. Penalties included disciplinary detention and loss of privileges like visits with family, phone calls and access to the commissary.
"The Internet provides an integral connection to the free exchange of ideas and information," said Eleanor Eisenberg, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona. "As the court today found, attempts by the government to punish individuals in order to silence their unpopular voices are clearly illegal. Given the court’s decision, I am hopeful other states will choose to avoid Arizona’s mistakes."
National ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson and Alice Bendheim and Pamela K. Sutherland of the ACLU of Arizona all served as co-counsel in the lawsuit.
The ACLU’s organizational clients are the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty; 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. By
Peter Page
SPECIAL TO THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL
Stardust Johnson wanted never again to see the face of Beau John Greene after he was led away in handcuffs in 1996 to await execution for the murder of her husband.
She didn't get her wish.
Johnson says she was appalled in 1999 when she saw a photograph of Greene holding a kitten on a Web site he maintained to solicit pen pals.
Determined to do something about it, Johnson persuaded the Arizona Legislature in 2000 to make it a misdemeanor for prison inmates to communicate with Internet service providers, either directly or through a third party.
The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, an advocacy group that creates Web pages for death row inmates and links them to sympathetic pen pals, successfully challenged the law in federal court on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the law infringes on free speech rights not of inmates but of groups such as themselves. Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty v. Ryan, No. CV02-1344 PHX EHC.
The suit is one of many legal disputes between prison administrators, who have long-established authority to limit inmate speech, and civil-liberty and prison-reform advocates who argue that curtailing inmate communication via the Internet abridges the First Amendment rights of people outside prison walls. Texas, California, Washington, Wisconsin and Colorado have been battlegrounds.
So far, the legal tide is running in favor of the activists. In Arizona, a federal court has enjoined enforcement of the law pending appeals by both sides.
Another federal judge enjoined a regulation banning inmates at California's ultra-maximum security Pelican Bay prison from receiving information that people outside the prison download from the Internet, print and mail to them. Clement v. California Department of Corrections, 220 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (C.D. Calif. 2002).
There is mounting opposition to a Texas bill that would forbid inmates to use Web sites to profit from telling the stories of their crimes, similar to so-called Son of Sam laws precluding convicted criminals from profiting from books or movies detailing their crimes.
The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty successfully challenged the Arizona law in federal court on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the law infringes on speech rights not of inmates, but of groups such as themselves.
"The idea that the Arizona Legislature can tell people in New York or Canada or Sweden what they can or cannot put on their Web site is absurd," said David Fahti, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who argued the case for the coalition.
Arizona authorities, who are pursuing a summary judgment to overturn the injunction and uphold the state law, argue that the state has never tried to limit the speech of anyone outside prison. The real concern, the state asserts, is that even indirect access to the Internet allows inmates to thwart the controls on communications with the outside that have long been accepted as valid management tools.
Jim Morrow, an attorney with the Arizona attorney general's office, said that the statute and the prison policies built on it meet the criteria for curtailing inmates' First Amendment protection established by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows restrictions to deter crime or to maintain security. Turner v. Sasley, 482 U.S. 78.
"The Internet is an important means for people to interact with society," Morrow said. "Prison is about taking people out of society. If we allow them to interact with society in the same way you and I do in the normal course of business on the Internet, we have lost that avenue for making prison life different from the life of a law-abiding citizen."
Gary Phelps, chief of staff at the Arizona Department of Corrections, said the use of the Internet has been a concern there since 1997, when a death row inmate and the woman he had married after meeting her through a Web site were both killed in a violent escape attempt. The investigation revealed what Phelps called "a death row subculture" in which inmates, with the help of outside parties, use the Internet to woo women.
Broad bans problematic
Bill Rich, a constitutional law professor at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan., with a specialty in prison issues said inmates retain limited First Amendment protections but prison authorities can restrict speech for "a legitimate penological interest."
Establishing a legitimate purpose is harder when restrictions are imposed by a legislature instead of prison administrators, he said.
"The courts tend to bend over backward when prison administrators demonstrate a legitimate concern that inmate communications can lead to further criminal acts or disturbances within the prison," Rich said. "Where the legislature enacts broad bans, I would expect the courts to be much more skeptical about the argument that there is a legitimate interest rather than a desire to punish by restricting speech."
Administrators at the Pelican Bay prison in California declared hard copies of downloaded material to be contraband, but enforcement of the regulation is on hold by a federal court order.
"This is a regulation that defies belief," said attorney Ann Brick of the ACLU of Northern California in San Francisco. "Prisoners were not allowed to receive anything in the U.S. mail, including legal papers, that had been downloaded from the Internet, but the same thing photocopied from hard copy is allowed."
Holly Jordan, spokeswoman for the California prison system, said the ruling, which is being appealed, is so broad that "it would allow a prisoner to download tips on how to escape or kill a corrections officer."
Meredith Martin Rountree, director of the Prison and Jail Accountability Project at the ACLU of Texas, said she is watching a bill that would prohibit inmates from profiting from Web sites that detail their crimes.
"Some legislators think this will prohibit Web sites for communicating with pen pals and that sort of thing, but I don't think the bill covers that and I am skeptical of the constitutionality of any bill that would," she said.
Duane Gallagher, chief of staff to the bill's sponsor, Republican state Representative Sid Miller, said the bill will not keep inmates off the Internet.
"Our bill does not prohibit inmates from having Web sites or telling their life story or soliciting funds for appeals, but they cannot sell a re-enactment of the crime," he said.
FROM
APRIL 2003 PRISON LEGAL NEWS :
By Tim Vanderpool - Tuscon Weekly Jan 23, 2003
Arizona's state prison dominates the Florence skyline, 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 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 on the World Wide Web.
Beau Greene was a 29-year-old drifter when he killed UA 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. The posting so outraged Johnson's family that, two years ago, they persuaded The Arizona 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. But Arizona's Department of Corrections has begun punishing inmates whose personal information--sent by mail, or passed through friends or relatives--appears on the Web sites of prisoner-advocacy groups.
This move has outraged members of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. 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 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 in July, with a lawsuit against the Arizona DOC. Other ACLU clients in the suit are Stop Prisoner Rape and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Like the Canadian Coalition, they run Web sites devoted to prisoners' concerns,
Critics say the Arizona measure violates the free speech rights of inmates and their supporters, and targets only prisoner advocacy groups while 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 on its face. It's not about prison security. 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," he says.
But Steve Twist questions whose rights are being violated when inmates gain even indirect access to the Web. A Johnson family friend who championed crime victims' rights as an 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."
Arizona isn't alone in this controversy. Similar free speech clashes have occurred around the country, as prisons struggle to fashion new rules governing Internet access. Often those conflicts land 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 on the Internet, after an article about him appeared in a local newspaper. 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, told reporters. "Basically, (Geddes is) looking for other victims, the way I look at it."
Still, banning Web sites from posting inmate information raises a slew of constitution questions. 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 law professor 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."
And constitutional rights seem to be on the mind of U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll. Saying the Arizona law could cause irreparable harm to the First Amendment, on December 16 Carroll placed an injunction against enforcement of the statute until a final decision is made within the next few months.
Citing the ACLU lawsuit, Arizona prison officials wouldn't comment for this story. But speaking to the Phoenix New Times in September, Arizona DOC spokesman Gary Phelps said 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 said. "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."
Tracy 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.
The ACLU's David Fathi is less circumspect. "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."
