Burden of Proof

Jim McCloskey desperately wanted to save Roger Coleman from the electric chair. Maybe a little too desperately

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post
Sunday, May 14, 2006

The article

(This is a verrrrrry long article, but it is an interesting look at how one murderer pulled the wool over the eyes of so many ... some excerpts follow ....)

* * *

SIX WEEKS LATER, SITTING IN HIS ETERNALLY CLUTTERED OFFICE IN PRINCETON, N.J., Jim McCloskey is still perplexed. "I don't argue at all with the DNA results," he says, "but there are elements to this case that are still a mystery to me."

Part of the puzzle is the circumstances of the crime. McCloskey still sees nagging holes in the prosecution's case. Chief among them is the timeline: He can't figure out how Coleman had enough time to rape and murder his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy and still be seen in various places by various people that March evening in 1981. He still harbors strong suspicions about a neighbor of the murder victim whom he believes had the character, motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

And part of it is the convicted killer himself. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Roger Coleman had presented his case calmly and articulately, with logical explanations and apparent sincerity. He also was a model prisoner who founded a program to counsel young men in trouble. He convinced not only McCloskey, a self-taught and experienced investigator with a skeptical nose. He also won the admiration and affection of three strong, intelligent women.

Foremost among them was Kathleen Behan, an attorney with Arnold & Porter, the high-powered Washington law firm that pursued Coleman's legal appeal without fee for eight years. There was Marie Deans, who headed a small shoestring operation that counseled and comforted Virginia's death row inmates and who came to think of Coleman as a son. And Sharon Paul, a former elementary schoolteacher who as a college student started a pen-pal friendship with Coleman and who eventually fell in love with him.

Each came to believe in Coleman's innocence. And each worked hard to help him prove his case. Between them, McCloskey and Behan made more than a dozen trips to Grundy, the coal-mining town in southwest Virginia where the murder took place, interviewing dozens of people. They concluded that Coleman had been framed by police and prosecutors, defended by incompetent lawyers and condemned to death by a small-town jury bent upon vengeance. They pushed for a new blood test of the evidence, and when the test implicated Coleman as the killer, they sought to discredit their own expert. And they accused a local man of being the "real killer," a claim they stuck with even after they learned of information indicating he had the wrong blood type.

* * *

Back in Grundy, a scrappy community of 1,500 in the heart of Appalachia, many people were appalled. They viewed Coleman's supporters as a powerful group of lawyers, activists and journalists who were blinded by their loathing of the death penalty and taken in by a clever psychopath. "They were trying to build this case for Roger's innocence, and they didn't care who they threw to the dogs," says Pat Hatfield, the victim of an earlier incident, in which Coleman had exposed himself and masturbated in front of her at the public library. "It didn't matter whose life was destroyed as long as they could save Roger."

* * *

"He was very calm, collected, rational, didn't come off as slick at all. He wasn't a salesman. He didn't try to persuade me. But he answered whatever questions I had." McCloskey was impressed, and he trusted his instincts. "I walked away believing he was not the kind of person who would commit such a brutal murder."

* * *

Blake says that this was the moment when Coleman's defenders lost their ethical bearings. Fixated on Coleman's innocence, they ignored or discredited evidence that pointed to his guilt: "Somewhere along the way these people who were supposed to be in the fact-finding business abandoned their responsibility to facts and truth, and started operating on belief."

* * *

"I had serious problems with that woman's credibility," says Tommy Scott, the former prosecutor. "But Arnold & Porter and Jim McCloskey and the national media bought into it hook, line and sinker."

* * *

"IS IT DIFFICULT TO BE OPTIMISTIC?" Bryant Gumbel asked Coleman on the "Today" show, 15 days before the execution date.

With six days to go, Larry King wanted to know: "How do you feel? Are you bitter? Angry?"

Five days later, Phil Donahue went straight to the point: "Wow. You've 30 hours left to live."

Having failed in the legal process, Jim McCloskey and Kitty Behan turned to the court of public opinion. They sent out press kits to dozens of publications, eliciting a parade of newspaper and magazine stories that tended to portray Coleman as an innocent victim and the citizens of Grundy as hillbillies run amok.

In a piece headlined "Hung on a Technicality," Newsweek portrayed a "small, sooted town" from which had "spun the kind of twisted tale that gives Southern Gothic a good name." As for the original trial, "the courthouse should have had a big top." The Washington Post reported that the crime had "whipped this Appalachian town of 1,500 into a frenzy of hatred and suspicion," and quoted Coleman's claim that "every minute of my time that night was accounted for." The Los Angeles Times reported that "startling new evidence has emerged" in the form of the Ramey allegation and Teresa Horn's untimely death, but neglected to mention Blake's DNA test implicating Coleman.

Then came the television cameras. Coleman made excellent, even mesmerizing TV, as he patiently explained the timeline and the witness statements, analyzed the DNA evidence and coolly dissected his own emotions.

"There's a lot of anger," he told Larry King. "There's a lot of bitterness, and a lot of frustration." During his first years of incarceration, he said, "I had a tremendous amount of hate, and it was consuming me. I had to deal with it, and I did a pretty good job of getting a handle on it . . . But now I'm six days away from being executed, and those feelings are back, and they're multiplied by a factor of 10."

Tom Scott and fellow prosecutor Michael McGlothlin, Pat Hatfield, Jean Gilbert, Brad McCoy and Brenda Ratliff, the woman whom Coleman had attempted to rape in 1977, all journeyed to Richmond to support Coleman's execution. "We tried to set the story straight, but no one ever really listened to us," McCoy recalls. The media had decided that Coleman was the victim. "No one ever really understood that Wanda was the real victim."

* * *

Coleman told McCloskey he saw a positive side to his ordeal. "He said, 'If I hadn't been wrongly convicted, I would be a nobody from Grundy for my entire life. And here I am, I've met Sharon, she means the world to me, I'm famous, my face is on Time magazine. I'm a somebody.' "

* * *

Each of Coleman's closest supporters had expected the test results to exonerate him, and each has had to deal with the news of his guilt. Marie Deans and Sharon Paul say they do not feel betrayed. "I have to believe something," says Paul, "and what I believe is, if Roger committed the crime, he had no memory of it, and that's why he was able to be such a strong advocate for his own innocence right until the end."

Still, the result has made her wonder about Jim McCloskey and Kitty Behan. "I just can't believe they were so wrong. I mean, these are people who do this for a living; they're not naive, they don't get duped. And that Roger, this little person from southwest Virginia, could have fooled them for so long -- that's the most difficult part for me to believe."

Behan has told friends that she still believes Coleman was innocent and that she doesn't accept the test findings. "This was a huge piece of Kitty Behan's life and how she sees herself," says author John C. Tucker, who wrote the 1997 book May God Have Mercy about the case. "It was not easy for anybody to find out that you were wrong. It's easy to try and rationalize these results."

Unlike Paul and Deans, McCloskey doesn't buy the theory that Coleman somehow had erased Wanda McCoy's murder from his memory, but he's not surprised that Coleman stuck to his claim of innocence even when sitting in the electric chair. "It was too late to tell the truth," says McCloskey. "What would all those who were near and dear to him think if he ever admitted that he did this? He couldn't allow that to happen. So he had to go down to the end drowning in the lies."

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

Glenn Frankel is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

[This message was edited by Shannon Edmonds on 05-15-06 at .]

[This message was edited by Shannon Edmonds on 05-15-06 at .]

Gee, anyone think that this article will become required reading for all those anti-DP spring breakers who converged on Austin a couple of months ago?
Who am I kidding!

This isn't exactly on point, but I think it's in the same vein ...

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

Paris suburb names street for cop-killer Abu-Jamal

Tue, May. 16, 2006
Philadelphia Inquirer

As Philadelphians cope with another police slaying, news comes that a suburb of Paris has named a street for Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Hundreds of supporters of Abu-Jamal attended a ceremony on April 29 to dedicate the Rue Mumia-Abu Jamal in the city of St.-Denis.

"In France, they see him as a towering figure," said Suzanne Ross, cochair of the Free Mumia Coalition of New York City, who was part of the ceremony.

Ross said the street is in the town's Human Rights district, which includes Nelson Mandela Stadium.

Richard Costello, past president of the Philadelphia lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the street dedication was "deplorable" but "consistent with the offensive position the French have taken in this matter. They've made him into some type of hero."

Abu-Jamal, 53, was sentenced to death in 1982 for the shooting of Faulkner, who was 25. A memorial plaque honoring Faulkner has been installed at 13th and Locust Streets, where he was shot.

Abu-Jamal, a former Philadelphia journalist, Black Panther member, and critic of police brutality, has maintained his innocence.

Last year, a federal appeals court agreed to consider Abu-Jamal's appeal of his conviction. The court said it would consider Abu-Jamal's allegation of racial bias in jury selection, as well as claims that the prosecutor gave an improper summation and that a judge in a previous appeal was biased.

The street naming in St.-Denis was part of a three-day event sponsored by the French city, Ross said.

She said there were speakers on such issues as the death penalty, human rights, the Abu-Jamal case, and the 1985 bombing of the MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia.

Ross said Pam and Ramona Africa, MOVE leaders and supporters of Abu-Jamal, spoke about the "unfulfilled quest for justice in that case."

When notified of the French dedication, Maureen Faulkner, widow of the victim, called it "disgusting."

"This is so unnerving for me to get this news," Faulkner said from Los Angeles, where she lives. "It's insulting to the police officers of Philadelphia that they are naming a street after a murderer."

The campaign to free Abu-Jamal has generated international attention, particularly among anti-death-penalty activists in France. At the dedication ceremony, Julia Wright, a translator in Paris and daughter of the late African American author Richard Wright, called Abu-Jamal "our Mandela."

Maureen Faulkner, on the other hand, urged Americans to boycott Paris.

"The people of Philadelphia should think if they have any trips to Paris this summer, to cancel those trips," Faulkner said.

Of the French support of Abu-Jamal, she added: "These are the people who sheltered Ira Einhorn" - a fugitive who was finally returned to Philadelphia and convicted of killing his girlfriend, Holly Maddux.