A bit of news wonkery here: Alleged cop killer Richard Poplawski’s public defender argued in a hearing yesterday to suppress statements Poplawski made following his horrifying gun battle with City of Pittsburgh police last April. The public defender sought to persuade the court that Poplawski was hopped up on painkillers and therefore not stable enough to sign away his right to remain silent.

Poplawski did not, in fact, remain silent while being examined and treated at a local hospital after allegedly killing four police officers. He said some pretty terrible and inculpatory shit, actually.

That’s where the wonkery comes in.

Pittsburgh has two competing daily newspapers, the Tribune-Review and the Post-Gazette. Each ran a story about yesterday’s hearing. Their respective leads follow.

Post Gazette:

An attorney representing the Stanton Heights man who is accused of killing three Pittsburgh police officers is trying to get a statement he made from his hospital bed the morning after the shootings thrown out of court.

Public defender Lisa G. Middleman called a number of witnesses at a suppression hearing Friday for Richard Poplawski, trying to persuade the judge that her client was under the influence of painkillers and was not emotionally stable enough when he waived his right to legal counsel and spoke to police.

The defense plans to call one additional witness at a hearing in March before Allegheny County Judge Jeffrey A. Manning issues his decision.

Tribune-Review:

Richard Poplawski shouted racial slurs at a black detective and insulted other officers in the hospital following a shootout at his Stanton Heights home, witnesses said Friday in another hearing for the man accused of killing three policemen.

“(Expletive) like you are the reason people like me shoot people like you,” Poplawski said to officers guarding him at UPMC Presbyterian in Oakland, according to a prosecutor and testimony from nurse Diana Doherty.

Poplawski’s attorneys want to keep jurors from hearing statements he made to police when the as-yet unscheduled trial starts on charges he fatally shot Pittsburgh police Officers Eric G. Kelly, Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II. The officers died responding to a domestic dispute April 4. Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning will likely rule on the matter after the hearing concludes March 22.

Guess which one made Yahoo!’s landing page this morning.

While it was nice of the Trib to replace the word “cocksuckers” with “(Expletive)” in their report, their intro is much more sensational. But that’s the media issue: What’s fair? We know people have short attention spans. Since the hearing was about whether or not arguably inadmissible statements should be allowed at trial, should a newspaper lead with that, or with the most inflammatory statement itself? And if your answer is the latter, will that totally fuck up any chance Poplawski has at a fair trial?

Poplawski’s jury will be trucked in from a far away county, so apparently the court has determined too many local folks know too much about the case anyway. And if that’s the scenario, well, then — why not go hog wild?

In the post-conviction proceedings focusing on the rape of Penny Ann Beernsten four years earlier, the absence of Avery’s DNA was construed as proof of innocence. ‘But what if the DNA was not deposited during the initial attack,’ Collins & Jarvis inquired. ‘After all, Penny Ann Beernsten had been strangled and slipped into unconsciousness. What if Avery was, in fact, the initial attacker but failed to ejaculate? What if he then invited an accomplice to sexually assault Beernsten while she was unconscious — just like he allegedly did in the Teresa Halbach murder?’” –Crime Lab Report

When Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project in New York, was interviewed in a 2003 University of California television broadcast, he told the interviewer that working toward post-conviction exonerations “kept him going” because he hoped to reeducate people about how criminal justice unfolds in the United States.

“The real thing is a desire to see things change,” he said.

Neufeld and a large contingent of Innocence Project colleagues have assisted in hundreds of post-conviction exonerations nationwide, mostly through the use of DNA testing. That means they repeatedly proved in a court of law that certain criminal convictions were faulty — that people had been confined to prison or death row for crimes they did not commit.

But in an article, “Contextual Contamination of Forensic Evidence by Post-Conviction Litigators,” (PDF) released by the Institute for the Advancement of Criminal Justice journal last month, Jay Jarvis, and his colleague, John Collins, call the “desire to see things change” a form of  “DNA activism.” They say it creates a “dangerous contextual bias” that pollutes the minds of litigators and journalists investigating possible wrongful convictions.

Going further, they imply that criminals are being wrongfully exonerated. continue »

Ernest Simmons, who sat for 18 years on Pennsylvania’s death row for murder and rape convictions, accepted a plea bargain Friday, confessing to a lesser murder charge — third-degree instead of first-degree. He’ll likely be out of prison before the year is over (third degree murder generally carries a 10-20 year sentence in Pennsylvania; he’ll get out on time served).

Guys like Simmons are very often penniless when they get out of prison, and so the financial question they often ask themselves is: “What do I do now?”

Even in cases of outright exoneration — in which prisoners are proven innocent of the crimes that landed them in prison — it’s not unusual for states to say “sorry for destroying your life” without offering any form of compensation.

The Innocence Project in New York — the heart of the Innocence Movement, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld at Yeshiva University — says a little over 40 percent of exonerated prisoners get any kind of compensation, and recommends that all states work to mandate the following:

* Compensate exonerated people immediately after release with a fixed sum or a range of recovery for each year of wrongful incarceration. Congress and President Bush have recommended that this amount be set at $50,000 per year of wrongful incarceration.

* Provide immediate re-entry funds and access to job training, educational, health and legal services after an innocent person’s release.

(Read the IP’s full recommendations here.)

Frontline’s “Burden of Innocence” compensation page shows that most states have ignored these recommendations and in fact that most states provide no statutory compensation whatsoever for wrongful convictions. Also:

“[M]any [states] have other restrictions such as requiring a pardon from the governor or prohibiting compensation to an exonerated individual who initially entered a guilty plea.”

Which means that if Simmons does get out of prison, he won’t get a dime.

But others aren’t so unlucky.

Last week, Thomas Doswell was awarded a $3.8 million settlement by Pittsburgh City Council after a DNA test exonerated him in 2005. He served 19 years on rape charges.

And in Omaha, Terry Harrington received $12 million after serving 26 years for a murder he didn’t commit.

Are Doswell’s and Harrington’s recent monetary fortunes indicative of future state decisions? Time will tell. In the meantime, it’s probably best for folks like Simmons to anticipate the joys of freedom rather than hoping their home state will bail them out of financial ruin.

Because — at least for the time being — they won’t.

I’m a little late on this, but MSNBC’s documentary prison series, Lockup, recently profiled two goofballs in an undisclosed (at least from what I can tell in the YouTube video) prison who for some reason decided to tattoo the whites of their eyes:

One of the creepier quotes in this notable piece of video journalism is the following: “We call my cellie ‘Hamster,’ but he’s more like a guinnea pig. You can take that any way you want.”

Are we, the viewers, to take that at face level? Or is something more sinister going on here? I’m having visions of the initial cellmate relationship between Beecher and Schillinger on Oz — which is to say Hamster is Old Blue Eyes’ bitch. Eh?

Perhaps.

From what I’ve read, Charles Lane at The Washington Post was the first to explicitly point it out, but the implication has been everywhere:

Maurice Clemmons, the primary suspect in the murder of four Seattle police officers earlier this week, should have been in prison for life, serving a 108-year sentence for crimes he committed before he turned 18. But Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, let him out after 11 years because he was still a juvenile when he committed those crimes.

Lane’s appraisal of the situation — and it’s relevance in the two Supreme Court cases currently being deliberated — is very good. And his closing thoughts are perhaps the most sobering elements:

Such matters as how the public might react if the justices were seen to take the side of a teenage career criminal, just after a former teenage criminal got back on the street and allegedly slaughtered four police officers in cold blood, do not enter into their decisions. Still, I can’t help thinking that, after the murder of the four cops, the chances that Terrance Graham is going to win his case just got a little bit slimmer.

Related articles

• Mike Huckabee In the Eye of a Storm (mydd.com)
• Huckabee’s office releases statement about police killings (seattlepi.com)
• Man wanted for shooting police officers was granted clemency by Mike Huckabee (telegraph.co.uk)