November 22, 2022 • 36 mins
Jason Flom talks with Marc Bookman about his latest book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Marc Bookman is the director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and has served in the Homicide Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. He is a tireless advocate for abolishing the death penalty. https://www.witnesstoinnocence.org/
https://www.atlanticcenter.org/
https://thenewpress.com/books/descending-spiral
Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, It's me Jason, the host of Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flaman. Today we're sharing a bonus episode presented with
minimal editing that gives you the listener behind the scenes
look at this series. Today we're going to have an
interview with Mark Bookman, who spent years in the Philadelphia
the Vendors Association fighting almost exclusively capital cases. And there
are two things to unpack there. If you listen to
(00:26):
my other podcast, Wrongful Conviction, you know about how unjust
Philadelphia was, especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, will
help pretty much straight on through until Larry Krasner got
there to clean up that mess and to be working
mostly death penalty cases. Mark Bookman was pretty much at
the i of that storm. And secondly, if you know
me at all, you know that I am a devout
(00:46):
death penalty abolitionists. So when I got to reading Mark's book,
The Descending Spiral, Exposing the death penalty in twelve essays,
I just had to make an extra episode just for him.
Mark is the co founder of a nonprofit of the
Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, where he continues his fight
for the indigent dependence in Philly and beyond Mark Bookman
(01:09):
right now on righteous Convictions are fantastic. Okay, al right, good,
all right. So Mark is the executive director of the
Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, a nonprofit that provides services
for those facing possible execution, and before that, he spent
a lot of years in the homicide unit of the
(01:29):
Defender Association in Philadelphia. He's published essays in the most
prestigious magazines and journals, and his new book, which I'm
really excited to talk about, which I'm reading now, is
called The Descending Spiral, Exposing the Death Penalty in twelve Essays,
And I'm gonna read the quote that starts your book,
which is a quote from the great Martin Luther King Jr.
Who said, the ultimate weakness of violence is that it
(01:52):
is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks
to destroy. And we're here really to talk about the
book and the death penalty, but let's start by talking
about the death penalty, and just a brief background on you.
How did you end up becoming leading advocate and voice
(02:12):
for the voiceless, the people who are sentenced to death
in this country, many of whom were innocent, some of
whom are guilty, but you really have have done a
fantastic job, in my view, of highlighting the fact that
one size doesn't fit all, and even among the people
who are guilty, there's a lot of nuance. So how
did you get into this work? So from pretty early on,
(02:33):
I always knew that I wanted to be in a courtroom,
and I always knew that I wanted to, you know,
affect social change in some way. I knew early on
that I wanted to be a public defender and to
you know, work at what I thought was the highest
levels in the most serious cases. So that combination of thinking,
I guess, kind of naturally led me to doing death
(02:56):
penalty work. I was in Philadelphia. Had I been I
think in Michion again or Wisconsin, some state that was
smart enough not to have capital punishment, it's possible I
wouldn't have been doing that. But since I was in Philadelphia,
which is what I like to call a Petrie dish
for capital punishment, it was logical for me, or reasonable
for me to try to do that work. It wasn't
(03:17):
all that easy because politics had prevented the Defender Association
from doing death penalty work. They were giving these cases
to court appointed lawyers, and it wasn't until a million
scandals broke about the job that the courter apointed lawyers
were doing that the court administration finally decided to give
the defender of the homicide cases. And so that's when
(03:41):
I got started doing death penalty work. Once we started
doing them, I was in the homicide unit for for
seventeen years, just doing largely death penalty work because that
was the nature of the Philadelphia practice. So, you know,
I don't see that work very differently from writing about
the death penalty arguing about it in a higher court.
(04:04):
It's all kind of of one piece. You said something earlier,
Jason that I thought, you know, it is exactly right.
It's it's a sense of individualized sentencing. That's the legal
phrase for what you were saying, which is that everybody.
Everybody is different, and it's that individualized sentencing that is
the most important part of death penalty work. I mean,
aside from the moral problems of the death penalty itself,
(04:27):
everyone is different, and everyone has an incredibly important story
to tell. And when that story is told correctly, no
matter what the story is, a jury of twelve will
see the humanity in that person and not think that
capital punishment is the right answer innocent people and guilty
people alike. It takes no sense whatsoever to me on
(04:51):
any level. And you know, I'll never forget greeting the
story of Tony Wright that was first published in Rolling
Stone magazine. And there was a pool quote that will
stick with me probably as long as I live, which
was that it said, paraphrasing, but in the nineties black
man had a better chance of getting justice in Philadelphia,
Mississippi than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And you know, that's one
(05:15):
of those raises. Like I said, you just you live
with it. And of course, one thing we know about
the death penalty is that there are no rich people
on death row. Right. Everyone who's been sentenced to death,
I think, without exception in America, and there are thousands
of thousands and thousands of them was poor. And that
is something that really is It should trouble everyone of
(05:38):
good conscience. I'm gonna quote again from this is from
the flap of your book, and again the book is
a descending spiral exposing the death penalty in twelve essays.
The very first paragraph on the inside flap of the book,
it starts. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg has noted, people who
are well represented a trial rarely get the death penalty.
But the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than
(06:01):
just bad representation as a result of prosecutorial misconduct, racist
judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and
the mentally ill. Precious few people on trial for their
lives get the fair trial. The constitution demands. That kind
of says it all, doesn't it. Mark, Yeah, that's the
Philadelphia story in a nutshell. Now, it's it's the story
(06:23):
of many places. But the quote that you talked about,
the Philadelphia, Mississippi quote, when we were looking at the
resources given to court appointed lawyers during all these years
when the defender was was just starting to handle cases,
the fees paid to the court appointed lawyers in Philadelphia,
Mississippi were higher than the money paid to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
(06:46):
The fact is that indigent clients don't get proper representation
when the lawyers are paid nothing, because the lawyers that
are paid nothing end up doing nothing. That's the kernel
of the injustice and that's the story of Philadelphia, where
they were taking the defenitalty so non seriously that they
were paying practically nothing to the lawyers. The lawyers would
(07:07):
do nothing, a death sentence would ensue, and then some
good lawyers in the Federal Defender Office in Philadelphia would
then reverse that death sense. It was an endless cycle
of death sentence reversal, death sense reversal. And you know,
that's one of many problems with the death penalty at
this point. You know, there's a great movie called Gideon's
(07:29):
Army that highlights the plight of public defenders. It follows
three public defenders, I think in the South, as they
struggled to make ends meet. I mean, there's a tough
scene to watch, really where one of these lawyers is
literally trying to find quarters in the couch to get
gas to get to court to represent her client. And
(07:53):
I think, you know what you said is so true
death penalty case, or even in a more mundane case.
If a lawyer can't pay their bills, can't put food
on the table, you can hardly expect them to be
prepared adequately for case or to mount a proper representation
of their clients. And that's something that's just one of
the many, many problems that we need to address in
(08:16):
our criminal legal system. So I want to talk though specifically.
This is what I'm really interested to talk to you about.
What I learned from the very first chapter in your
book is that even among the people that society has
come to categorize as monsters, right, you know, people who
(08:38):
were involved in heinous crimes, even among them, the nuance
is ignored or trampled on. And when I say the nuance,
the nuances really of their background, upbringing their history, their
psychological limitations. I'm talking, of course, about the Carol City killings.
(09:00):
Know what's funny, when you were doing your introduction, I
actually thought you were talking about the next chapter, which
is about a man named Andre Thomas who committed a
really horrible crime. But it's very profoundly mentally ill. So
let's let's go back to the Carol City Killings. I'm
looking through it now. Even on page by page thirteen,
you're already hooked. I like books where you don't doesn't
(09:21):
take too long to get into it, you know, like
for me, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm slightly a
d D or something, but this book hooks you from
the very opening. And you know this particular case to
Carol City killings. On the face of it looked like
as bad of a crime as you could have. Right
for the media and for the general public, it looked
(09:41):
like sort of a home invasion, lots of people killed,
three perpetrators, bad guys. These are guys that need to
go down for this crime, right, this is this is
an open and shut situation. And as you read along
you start to find out that there's a lot more
of the story than what meets the eye. Can you
set this stage of us what was the Carol City case?
(10:02):
So it depends on what version you're hearing. You're right
that when it was presented, it was basically an assassination
of strangers. And I don't know how many people ended
up getting killed. I think it was six maybe, so
it was Buford White and John Ferguson and another man.
It's hard to separate the actual facts from the presented facts.
(10:23):
The actual facts are that it was a huge drug
deal that was set up in Carol City. That's not
the way it was portrayed in the initial press. It was,
you know, a home invasion robbery, and it was presented
as a as a bunch of strangers who just happened
to be there and were executed. As it turned out,
the strangers had come in preparation for a major drug deal.
(10:47):
There was some double crossing involved that had resulted in
killings by this very profoundly mentally ill guy, John Ferguson. Yeah,
and I'm gonna I'm gonna just go through a few
of the pertinent fact here, right. So this is back
in the nineteen seventy seven when Miami was a wash
and coke and coke money, and there was a huge
(11:08):
amount of corruption, you know, amongst police as well as
obviously you know, drug dealers running wild in the city.
So what happened was this guy Ferguson entered into the house.
Eight people were forced to lie on the floor, their
hands were tied behind their backs. It sounds like something
had a scarface and they were shot in the back
of the head. Two of them, somehow or others survived,
(11:30):
which is a sort of a miracle. But Ferguson and
Francois pulled the triggers. No one ever claimed that Mr
White pulled the trigger. And Buford White he thought he
was just going there for a robbery. He wanted no
parts of the murder, and they asked him to get
rid of the gun. He said, I'm not getting rid
of anything. He wasn't involved at all, didn't pull the trigger,
(11:52):
didn't want to be involved in the murder, didn't want
to help after the murder, and that's why the jury
gave him a twelve nothing vote for life. That didn't
matter to this judge. The law allowed him to override
the jury's vote. The fact that that was even allowed
to take places is shocking for me. There's so much
in each of these stories it's hard to capture, you know,
(12:14):
one concept, but but the one that really jumps out
from from that story is the the arbitrary nous of
the death penalty. Where the person that's barely involved in
the horrible murders he gets executed in a few years.
The other man who's much more involved, John Ferguson, is
(12:34):
profoundly mentally ill and very very disturbed. He's actually deeply
involved in the murders, and he lives another thirty years
before being executed. You talk about the nuances of someone's life,
really it's just getting to know them in detail, whether
they are the nicest guys in the world, who had
(12:56):
a really awful day, or whether they're profoundly mentally ill
and also had an awful day. Unless the capital defense
team presents the full picture of that person, then the
jury doesn't know. When you get to know someone, whether
it's Buford White or John Ferguson or Andre Thomas, if
the jury really gets to know that person, there's not
(13:17):
a chance in the world that they're going to vote
to execute them. Think about Mr. White, his attorney did
basically nothing to help him, didn't didn't talk about his background.
But his background is pretty much as bad as it gets. Right,
I'm gonna read from the book now. His mother, who
started having children at twelve and had had her fifth
by the age of twenty, was routinely and savagely beaten
(13:39):
by his father, Ernest we're talking about Buford White now,
And when his father was not beating her, Beauford himself
became the target. When he was three, his father knocked
him out cold, driving his teeth through his tongue. A
doctor later concluded, it's hard for me to even read
this so disgusting. A doctor later concluded that this assault
(13:59):
and there's were a little likely cause of seizures that
plagued Beautford through his lifetime. When the father, Ernest, left
the family to go to Detroit, his mother took up
with a series of men just as abusive, eventually killing
one of them and going to prison for a seven
year sentence. Beautiford abandoned time and again as a youngster,
and now without a mother or a father, nonetheless shown
in school twenty five years later in a statement given
(14:21):
to Beautiford's lawyers but never presented a court, that's me
editorializing there. His junior high school principle recalled him as
quote an ideal young person, academically gifted. He probably would
have been a straight A student if he would have
um just turned the page, if you would have had
some stability in the home, in a place to study.
One of those kids that a teacher looks forward to
(14:42):
being around. Another teacher described him as quote truly one
of my tops. A third said the reasons she remembered
him all those years later was because I liked him
so much, and he was also a terrific athlete with
major league potential. You know, so this is a guy,
I mean, he's like a perfect example of a person
who is background the system should take into consideration. But
(15:05):
for all these reasons, none of that stuff mattered. And
you make the important point that the jury voted twelve
nothing for life without even knowing a lot of this information.
But I don't know if anything would have changed this
judge's mind. It's inconceivable that that we would allow a
judge to overrule that, and yet that's what happened. But
(15:26):
but this is one of my biggest concerns in writing
this book is that people will read about Beauford White
and they'll think that that's the exception, that it's one
of those really rare cases where justice wasn't done. And
this is the point I kind of make at the
end of the book, which is these cases are typical.
(15:48):
There's nothing about Buford White's background that stands out from
hundreds of other people's backgrounds on death rout These are
the rules there, not the exceptions. And so the Buford
White case, you know, I didn't cherry pick when I
wrote these essays. I wrote them about stories that I
think people don't know, you know, not the high profile
(16:11):
cases Scott Peterson or O. J. Simpson, or the cases
that have been you know, well trod. These are, to
a certain extent run of the mill cases that are
extraordinary because every one of these stories, everyone on death
row has this extraordinary story, and so I just think
it's important for people to know that these essays haven't
(16:31):
been cherry picked. What happened to Buford White has happened
to hundreds of people with similar backgrounds. As horrifying as
that sounds, it's hard to believe that we're still talking
about the death penalty in the present tense, but we
still execute people in America. Sierra Leone banned the death penalty, right.
(16:52):
I mean, we are in such a terrible place in
the world in terms of our standing. You know, when
you look at the countries that still have the death
I don't and the ones there's there are very few
that execute more people than we do. And it's not
a list you would want to be on. You can
guess the countries. I'm not going to reread them off,
but it's it's really the United States does not belong
on that list. We need to abolish it completely. And
(17:14):
one of the reasons I feel that we need to
abolish is because it really depends not on the trime
that you committed, but on the well. As we talked
about It depends on the quality representation, but also depends
on what state you're in and what county you're in,
and who the prosecutors and who the judges, and if
you could talk about an individual case mark like which
case keeps you up at night of all the ones
(17:37):
that you've worked on or known about or written about
before I do that, Jason, let me just say there
is hope here. Virginia just got rid of the death penalty.
That's the state that has executed more than anyone else ever,
so you know we can learn. Virginia did it by
bringing in competent lawyers like we've been talking about, who
(17:59):
essentially eliminated the death penalty as an option. And finally
the legislature turned around and said, what's the point. We're
not getting any more death sentences. We're throwing away all
this money. And so Virginia, of all states, that would
be one of the last states you would expect to
get rid of it. They used to execute very very regularly.
So there's hope even for the United States. We're moving
(18:19):
in the right direction, just slowly. So you're asking me
to pick one case, it's it's a little bit of
the Sophie's choice. Frankly, because it's so hard to just
isolate one case. I worked on a case very recently,
Karnem Johnson. He's actually referenced in the afterward. I didn't
write about him. He's a man that went to death
(18:40):
row for nine years based on the commonwealth's argument that
the victims blood was on his hat. The defense attorneys
did not look at the hat, they did not look
at the DNA report, they did not look at the
photographs of the crime scene or of the hat, and
the prosecution argued strong enough to put a man on
(19:03):
death row for nine years that the blood on the
hat was the unbiased evidence of his guilt. And nine
years later it turned out there was no blood on
the hat at all, zero and they were looking at
a different hat. It was a hat worn by the victim,
so naturally the victim's blood was on the hat worn
by the victim when he was shot. So you know,
(19:25):
there are countless cases like that where the defense attorneys
are sleeping through the trial, either literally or figuratively. The
prosecution ultimately said that they had not done it intentionally,
They had just done it what the court called reckless
indifference to the facts. So imagine putting a man on
(19:46):
death row for nine years when neither side has actually
looked at the facts of the case. You know, if
that case doesn't give you pause about the death penalty,
I don't know what case would. Well, I can. I
can recite a bunch of them. And there's a wonderful
organization called Witness to Innocence that people should look up,
(20:07):
which is made up entirely of death row survivors who
travel the country advocating for the abolition of the death penalty.
My great friend Kirk Bloodsworth, death row survivor from Maryland,
led the organization for quite some time. They're doing fantastic work.
Let me just say, Jason, I love Kirk. He's a
fantastic spokesperson. And Witness to Innocence is based in Philadelphia.
(20:27):
I agree. Great organization, great organization, and please, like I said,
do check them out of following on social media, go
to their website whatever it's Witnessed to Innocence and will
link to that in the episode Bio. You know you
could oppose the death penalty on all kinds of different grounds, right,
Sister Helen Prejon, You know she comes at it from
the religious perspective. But for me, you know, one of
(20:49):
the most disturbing things is the fact that we have
executed so many innocent people, and we continue to keep
innocent people on death row, even sometimes long after they've
proven their innocence. But you look at this like Florida, right,
and there's a statistic that foggles my mind, which is
that since the reinstatement of the death palthy in Florida,
(21:11):
people have been executed, and during that same period of time,
thirty one people have been exonerated from death row in Florida.
So even if you assume that all the people that
Florida has executed were guilty, we know that's not true
because of jesse Ta Pharaoh and others. But they're not
even getting it right any reasonable percentage of the time.
(21:33):
It's not how can we continue to do this? I
think what you're describing as a failed government program. Try
to imagine an airline that stays in business where one
in four planes take off and crash. That's basically what
we're talking about here. When you when you use those
statistics from Florida, who in their right mind would think
(21:53):
that this is a successful public policy Given those numbers.
Mark tell us more about the book. You know, if
someone was going to pick up the book and they said,
I only have time to read one chapter, which one
would you point them towards? And why? Well, like I said,
it is, that gets to be a little bit of
a Sophie's choice picking between essays. But I think I
might suggest too. There's only one autobiographical essay in the book.
(22:18):
It's it's about a team that I worked on in
the Defender office, and it's the last essay in the book,
and it's called Smoke, and uh, I think that really
provides the best insight I could find as to the
work that defense teams do. And the other essay I
think is the Andre Thomas essay. There's actually two of them,
(22:40):
but the first one is how crazy is too crazy
to be executed? And I mentioned Andre earlier, profoundly mentally
old person who ultimately blinded himself while on death row.
And this is really a long story, but Andre is
profoundly mentally ill. He killed his estranged wife and two children.
(23:04):
Andre is an African American. His wife was white. Three
jurors said that they were opposed to interracial marriage, and
so you would think that that is sort of overtly
racist jury making judgments. But the Fifth Circuit just said
that was okay, just a couple of months ago. So
(23:24):
that case is headed to the Supreme Court, and we'll
see what happens when three jurors kind of exposed themselves
that way and the defense attorneys don't do anything about it.
All of this, for me, comes down to the idea,
if you indulge me, I get a lot of insight
from believe it or not, The Lion King. The Lion King,
(23:45):
you'll recall, is about heinous murderer Scar, and he kills Mufasa,
the king of the jungle, a terrific citizen, and and
Scar then compounds that the heinous crime he's committed by
framing Mufass's son, Simba, so it's, you know, the worst
kind of premeditated murder that you can have. Simba grows
(24:08):
up and put Scar on trial basically and beat Scar
in a lion like trial. They tumble around the in
the dirt and Simba ends up on top, and then
Scar asks this million dollar question. He says, what are
you going to do now? Simba? Are you going to
kill me? And I tell the story a lot. I
stopped the tape where this was many many years ago,
(24:30):
and I asked my six year old daughter what she
thought Simba should do, and she said, well, it's not
nice to kill people, even if they're mean. And Simba
then says the magic words, which is, I'm not going
to kill you, Scar, I'm gonna banish you from the community.
That's basically what he says. So, you know, when I
think of DeAndre Thomas story, we're asking jurors to act
(24:55):
like the most heinous murderers. And that's an awful thing
to do. You know, when we look at Andre Thomas
and we see a profoundly mentally ill guy, you know
what should we do. Should we act like that profoundly
mentally ill guy, or should we act calmly and deliberately.
And that's what Simba does. I mean. Imagine if Simba,
(25:18):
instead of saying I'm going to banish you from the community,
said yes, Scar, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna bind
your hands and feet to a guerney and then I'm
going to inject poison in your veins until you're dead.
Every little kid would go running out of the theater screaming,
and the parents would be suing Disney. So you know,
somewhere between the age of six and the age of
(25:40):
adulthood we lose this this sense that we should not
be acting like a murderer. I don't know why we
lose that sense, but a lot of us seem to
lose it. So DeAndre thomas story hopefully captures that that idea. Mark.
Let's talk, if you would, about the crazy case of
(26:02):
Russell Weinberger and Felix Rodriguez. If I'm not mistaken, this
is a wrongful conviction death penalty case with a false
confession thrown in right and false confessions are so important
that we have an entire series devoted to it called
Wrongful Conviction False Confessions, which of course is hosted by
the incredible team of Laura and I Writer and Steve Drizzen.
But this particular case stands out tell us why this
(26:26):
really is a remarkable set of facts. In the early eighties,
I guess it was an eye doctor gets killed in
a sort of the poor section of Philadelphia and a
detective named Saminsky. He gets confessions from two people, Felix
Rodriguez and Russell Weinberger, and then ultimately the Commonwealth cuts
(26:48):
a deal with Weinburger, and Weinberger agrees to testify against
his friend Rodriguez, so both of them go to prison
for very very long period of time time Rodriguez for
life and Winburger. I think his deal is for fifteen
to thirty years, and twenty years later they're both still
(27:08):
in prison. Twenty years later, a man named Anthony Sylvanus
gets arrested on a cold case. They match his fingerprints
to a crime, and I represented Mr Sylvanus along with
my partner, Carl Schwartz, and Mr Sylvanus couldn't be stopped
from confessing, so he confessed to the crime he got
caught for. He also confessed to four or five other murders.
(27:32):
He just he wanted to clear his conscience at that point,
and so they arrested him for all the murders he
confessed to, except for one, because one of the murders
he confessed to was the murder that Russell Weinberger and
Felix Rodriguez were serving their time for. So Sylvanus had
come along and confessed to the killing of this eye doctor,
(27:53):
and sure enough, one thing led to another. An investigation
was done by the Commonwealth and they realized that Winburger
and Rodriguez were totally innocent and had been made to
falsely confess by the threat of the death penalty that
this detective had threatened that they would get to death
(28:14):
penalty if they didn't confess, And so they both did confess,
even though they were completely innocent. And what is truly
remarkable about the case, I think, is that Weinberger a
very low functioning man. He's now passed away, so no
one could test him for intellectual disability. But but but
by all accounts, he was intellectually disabled, and he was
(28:38):
persuaded not only to falsely confess, but to take a
deal for years in prison and testify, actually testify that
he was guilty and that his friend was guilty. So
they ultimately confessed because of the threat that they might
be executed. The detective had persuaded them that they might
both be executed. So it's a false confession of a
(29:03):
magnitude that you almost never see, which is not not
only did they falsely confess, but that one of them
actually testifies that he did it, and yet both men
were clearly innocent. Both men were released from prison. Mr
Sylvanus persuaded me and everyone else, uh that he had
committed that crime was guilty by all accounts, he has
(29:24):
since committed suicide. So so you know, false confessions are
an amazing phenomenon. There's a lot of social science that
backs this up. You ask people if they believe in
false confessions to a person, they will almost always say yes,
I believe in false confessions. But if you ask those
same people if they would falsely confess to a horrible crime,
(29:46):
they almost uniform we say they would not. So you
know there's a disconnect there. But we know that false
confessions are this, you know, horrifying phenomenon, and I don't
think any case lays the groundwork for that more than
this one. The Confessions of of innocent Man just a
remarkable story. And you know, I talked to Mr Rodriguez.
(30:08):
I would have assumed he was horribly bitter about his
friend Russell Weinberger testifying, but he wasn't. He was actually
bitter at the detective who had threatened them with death
because he knew that his friend was was intellectually disabled,
and he didn't blame him. He blamed this option of
the death penalty for something that neither one of them
(30:29):
had done. And that's what really got under his skin. Ultimately,
these both these men did twenty years in prison for
for something they clearly didn't do. And and I'll never
forget the judge who thanked the Commonwealth for avoiding what
might have been an injustice. And I was just I
was in the courtroom, I was thinking, you know, might
(30:51):
have been an injustice. Both these innocent people did twenty
years in prison. It's a horrifying story, as most of
these stories, the best that happens is a horrible injustice.
The worst that happens is an even more horrible injustice. Right,
and then on top of that, there's an even more
horrible injustice than that, which is that in so many
of these cases, the actual perpetrator remains free and goes
(31:14):
on to uh, you know, main murder, you know, brutalize
other people who never should have been victims in the
first place. If the system had actually operated in a
faithful or steadfast or even honest way, and had well
had not pursued the innocent guys or persecuted and prosecuted
the innocent guys, but had instead done the will work
(31:34):
to find the person who actually committed these these hanous
crimes and of course the death builty cases, the crimes
really are hamous. So with that being said again, the
book is a descending spiral exposing the death penalty, and
Twalve Best says, I recommend it. It's it's it's informative,
but it's also reads like a novel, so I'm really
enjoying it. It's by Mark Bookman, who's our guest today. Mark.
(31:56):
I'm sure there's a lot of people listening who are saying, well,
what can I do to help? Mark? Tell us about
the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and if people want
to donate or get involved, if you could just talk
a little bit about how they can do that. Yeah.
So I left the Defender Association in two thousand and ten.
With Dana Cook, we started the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation.
(32:16):
It's it's a resource for anyone facing execution in Pennsylvania
and and and more and more lately nationally. We do
our best to help people, whether it's pre trial or
post conviction, to help. We're an independent nonprofit. Encourage people
to go to Atlantic Center dot org for a good
(32:37):
sense of what we do. We do largely death penalty
work and juvenile resentsing work as well, and we've been
lately branching out into commutations because there's so many people
in prison who are desperately looking for help and really
should be getting released. So we're doing our best. We
we really could use the support, and and again Atlantic
(33:00):
Center thought o RG will give everybody a pretty good
sense of the range of of work that we do.
Our our slogan since we started was trying to put
ourselves out of business since and that's really the goal.
We're sort of far away from that goal right now.
But the donations that we get, the resources that we
get from people that you know, it goes directly to
(33:21):
the work of representing poor people in trouble. Yeah, So
we're gonna link to the website in the bio, and
of course we'll also have a link for people who
want to get a hold of the book. I am
personally holding in my hands right now, my own autograph
copy I order brag anyway, um, and I will say,
you know, I want to close we we opened the
(33:42):
show with a quote from Martin Luther King. I think
I should close with a quote from somebody who I
consider to be almost a modern incarnation of Martin Luther King.
Tourists I'm talking about Brian Stevenson, but he said that
proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including
this vital lesson each of us is more than the
worst thing we've ever done. My work with the poor
(34:04):
and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of
poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.
And you can look up to quote is much more
nuanced and and longer than that, but it's a great
quote from a great man. So um again, Mark Bookman,
thank you for joining us here today. The ending of
our show is the same as well. It's always different,
(34:25):
but it's always the same each week. Um. First of all, again,
thank you for being here. And now I turned my
microphone off. I leave yours on where you can just
rant about as little or as much of anything that's
bothering you as you want. I said this earlier, but
I think it's it's important for people to know that.
(34:49):
And this is kind of how I ended the book,
which is that these essays are the tip of the iceberg.
That's what I really wanted to drive home. I didn't
want people to think that I just looked far and
wide and found a lawyer who was drinking a court
of vodka night during a capital trial, and and then
a juror who said he gave the death penalty of
(35:10):
a person because he was an N word. And these
two intellectually disabled people who confess to a crime. I
didn't want the readers to come away thinking, Man, these
are really bizarre, unusual exceptions. They are the tip of
the iceberg. You could look at virtually every case on
(35:31):
death Row and find similarities to these twelve essays, and
so you know that. I guess my point was that
this really is a failed policy. And if you read
these these essays, I'm hoping you'll be appalled and flabbergasted,
but I hope by the end you will come to
the conclusion that we got to do something about this,
(35:52):
because these cases are not unusual. These cases aren't the exception,
they are the rule. Yeah, thank you for listening to
Righteous Convictions with Jason plom I'd like to thank our
production team Connor Hall, Jeff Claverne, and Kevin Wardis. With
(36:15):
research by Laila Robinson. The music in this production was
supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph follow
us On Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava for Good.
You can also follow me on TikTok and Instagram at
it's Jason Flom. Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a
production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with Say
(36:36):
About Company Number one
Hi, It's me Jason, the host of Righteous Convictions with
Jason Flaman. Today we're sharing a bonus episode presented with
minimal editing that gives you the listener behind the scenes
look at this series. Today we're going to have an
interview with Mark Bookman, who spent years in the Philadelphia
the Vendors Association fighting almost exclusively capital cases. And there
are two things to unpack there. If you listen to
(00:26):
my other podcast, Wrongful Conviction, you know about how unjust
Philadelphia was, especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, will
help pretty much straight on through until Larry Krasner got
there to clean up that mess and to be working
mostly death penalty cases. Mark Bookman was pretty much at
the i of that storm. And secondly, if you know
me at all, you know that I am a devout
(00:46):
death penalty abolitionists. So when I got to reading Mark's book,
The Descending Spiral, Exposing the death penalty in twelve essays,
I just had to make an extra episode just for him.
Mark is the co founder of a nonprofit of the
Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, where he continues his fight
for the indigent dependence in Philly and beyond Mark Bookman
(01:09):
right now on righteous Convictions are fantastic. Okay, al right, good,
all right. So Mark is the executive director of the
Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, a nonprofit that provides services
for those facing possible execution, and before that, he spent
a lot of years in the homicide unit of the
(01:29):
Defender Association in Philadelphia. He's published essays in the most
prestigious magazines and journals, and his new book, which I'm
really excited to talk about, which I'm reading now, is
called The Descending Spiral, Exposing the Death Penalty in twelve Essays,
And I'm gonna read the quote that starts your book,
which is a quote from the great Martin Luther King Jr.
Who said, the ultimate weakness of violence is that it
(01:52):
is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks
to destroy. And we're here really to talk about the
book and the death penalty, but let's start by talking
about the death penalty, and just a brief background on you.
How did you end up becoming leading advocate and voice
(02:12):
for the voiceless, the people who are sentenced to death
in this country, many of whom were innocent, some of
whom are guilty, but you really have have done a
fantastic job, in my view, of highlighting the fact that
one size doesn't fit all, and even among the people
who are guilty, there's a lot of nuance. So how
did you get into this work? So from pretty early on,
(02:33):
I always knew that I wanted to be in a courtroom,
and I always knew that I wanted to, you know,
affect social change in some way. I knew early on
that I wanted to be a public defender and to
you know, work at what I thought was the highest
levels in the most serious cases. So that combination of thinking,
I guess, kind of naturally led me to doing death
(02:56):
penalty work. I was in Philadelphia. Had I been I
think in Michion again or Wisconsin, some state that was
smart enough not to have capital punishment, it's possible I
wouldn't have been doing that. But since I was in Philadelphia,
which is what I like to call a Petrie dish
for capital punishment, it was logical for me, or reasonable
for me to try to do that work. It wasn't
(03:17):
all that easy because politics had prevented the Defender Association
from doing death penalty work. They were giving these cases
to court appointed lawyers, and it wasn't until a million
scandals broke about the job that the courter apointed lawyers
were doing that the court administration finally decided to give
the defender of the homicide cases. And so that's when
(03:41):
I got started doing death penalty work. Once we started
doing them, I was in the homicide unit for for
seventeen years, just doing largely death penalty work because that
was the nature of the Philadelphia practice. So, you know,
I don't see that work very differently from writing about
the death penalty arguing about it in a higher court.
(04:04):
It's all kind of of one piece. You said something earlier,
Jason that I thought, you know, it is exactly right.
It's it's a sense of individualized sentencing. That's the legal
phrase for what you were saying, which is that everybody.
Everybody is different, and it's that individualized sentencing that is
the most important part of death penalty work. I mean,
aside from the moral problems of the death penalty itself,
(04:27):
everyone is different, and everyone has an incredibly important story
to tell. And when that story is told correctly, no
matter what the story is, a jury of twelve will
see the humanity in that person and not think that
capital punishment is the right answer innocent people and guilty
people alike. It takes no sense whatsoever to me on
(04:51):
any level. And you know, I'll never forget greeting the
story of Tony Wright that was first published in Rolling
Stone magazine. And there was a pool quote that will
stick with me probably as long as I live, which
was that it said, paraphrasing, but in the nineties black
man had a better chance of getting justice in Philadelphia,
Mississippi than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And you know, that's one
(05:15):
of those raises. Like I said, you just you live
with it. And of course, one thing we know about
the death penalty is that there are no rich people
on death row. Right. Everyone who's been sentenced to death,
I think, without exception in America, and there are thousands
of thousands and thousands of them was poor. And that
is something that really is It should trouble everyone of
(05:38):
good conscience. I'm gonna quote again from this is from
the flap of your book, and again the book is
a descending spiral exposing the death penalty in twelve essays.
The very first paragraph on the inside flap of the book,
it starts. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg has noted, people who
are well represented a trial rarely get the death penalty.
But the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than
(06:01):
just bad representation as a result of prosecutorial misconduct, racist
judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and
the mentally ill. Precious few people on trial for their
lives get the fair trial. The constitution demands. That kind
of says it all, doesn't it. Mark, Yeah, that's the
Philadelphia story in a nutshell. Now, it's it's the story
(06:23):
of many places. But the quote that you talked about,
the Philadelphia, Mississippi quote, when we were looking at the
resources given to court appointed lawyers during all these years
when the defender was was just starting to handle cases,
the fees paid to the court appointed lawyers in Philadelphia,
Mississippi were higher than the money paid to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
(06:46):
The fact is that indigent clients don't get proper representation
when the lawyers are paid nothing, because the lawyers that
are paid nothing end up doing nothing. That's the kernel
of the injustice and that's the story of Philadelphia, where
they were taking the defenitalty so non seriously that they
were paying practically nothing to the lawyers. The lawyers would
(07:07):
do nothing, a death sentence would ensue, and then some
good lawyers in the Federal Defender Office in Philadelphia would
then reverse that death sense. It was an endless cycle
of death sentence reversal, death sense reversal. And you know,
that's one of many problems with the death penalty at
this point. You know, there's a great movie called Gideon's
(07:29):
Army that highlights the plight of public defenders. It follows
three public defenders, I think in the South, as they
struggled to make ends meet. I mean, there's a tough
scene to watch, really where one of these lawyers is
literally trying to find quarters in the couch to get
gas to get to court to represent her client. And
(07:53):
I think, you know what you said is so true
death penalty case, or even in a more mundane case.
If a lawyer can't pay their bills, can't put food
on the table, you can hardly expect them to be
prepared adequately for case or to mount a proper representation
of their clients. And that's something that's just one of
the many, many problems that we need to address in
(08:16):
our criminal legal system. So I want to talk though specifically.
This is what I'm really interested to talk to you about.
What I learned from the very first chapter in your
book is that even among the people that society has
come to categorize as monsters, right, you know, people who
(08:38):
were involved in heinous crimes, even among them, the nuance
is ignored or trampled on. And when I say the nuance,
the nuances really of their background, upbringing their history, their
psychological limitations. I'm talking, of course, about the Carol City killings.
(09:00):
Know what's funny, when you were doing your introduction, I
actually thought you were talking about the next chapter, which
is about a man named Andre Thomas who committed a
really horrible crime. But it's very profoundly mentally ill. So
let's let's go back to the Carol City Killings. I'm
looking through it now. Even on page by page thirteen,
you're already hooked. I like books where you don't doesn't
(09:21):
take too long to get into it, you know, like
for me, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm slightly a
d D or something, but this book hooks you from
the very opening. And you know this particular case to
Carol City killings. On the face of it looked like
as bad of a crime as you could have. Right
for the media and for the general public, it looked
(09:41):
like sort of a home invasion, lots of people killed,
three perpetrators, bad guys. These are guys that need to
go down for this crime, right, this is this is
an open and shut situation. And as you read along
you start to find out that there's a lot more
of the story than what meets the eye. Can you
set this stage of us what was the Carol City case?
(10:02):
So it depends on what version you're hearing. You're right
that when it was presented, it was basically an assassination
of strangers. And I don't know how many people ended
up getting killed. I think it was six maybe, so
it was Buford White and John Ferguson and another man.
It's hard to separate the actual facts from the presented facts.
(10:23):
The actual facts are that it was a huge drug
deal that was set up in Carol City. That's not
the way it was portrayed in the initial press. It was,
you know, a home invasion robbery, and it was presented
as a as a bunch of strangers who just happened
to be there and were executed. As it turned out,
the strangers had come in preparation for a major drug deal.
(10:47):
There was some double crossing involved that had resulted in
killings by this very profoundly mentally ill guy, John Ferguson. Yeah,
and I'm gonna I'm gonna just go through a few
of the pertinent fact here, right. So this is back
in the nineteen seventy seven when Miami was a wash
and coke and coke money, and there was a huge
(11:08):
amount of corruption, you know, amongst police as well as
obviously you know, drug dealers running wild in the city.
So what happened was this guy Ferguson entered into the house.
Eight people were forced to lie on the floor, their
hands were tied behind their backs. It sounds like something
had a scarface and they were shot in the back
of the head. Two of them, somehow or others survived,
(11:30):
which is a sort of a miracle. But Ferguson and
Francois pulled the triggers. No one ever claimed that Mr
White pulled the trigger. And Buford White he thought he
was just going there for a robbery. He wanted no
parts of the murder, and they asked him to get
rid of the gun. He said, I'm not getting rid
of anything. He wasn't involved at all, didn't pull the trigger,
(11:52):
didn't want to be involved in the murder, didn't want
to help after the murder, and that's why the jury
gave him a twelve nothing vote for life. That didn't
matter to this judge. The law allowed him to override
the jury's vote. The fact that that was even allowed
to take places is shocking for me. There's so much
in each of these stories it's hard to capture, you know,
(12:14):
one concept, but but the one that really jumps out
from from that story is the the arbitrary nous of
the death penalty. Where the person that's barely involved in
the horrible murders he gets executed in a few years.
The other man who's much more involved, John Ferguson, is
(12:34):
profoundly mentally ill and very very disturbed. He's actually deeply
involved in the murders, and he lives another thirty years
before being executed. You talk about the nuances of someone's life,
really it's just getting to know them in detail, whether
they are the nicest guys in the world, who had
(12:56):
a really awful day, or whether they're profoundly mentally ill
and also had an awful day. Unless the capital defense
team presents the full picture of that person, then the
jury doesn't know. When you get to know someone, whether
it's Buford White or John Ferguson or Andre Thomas, if
the jury really gets to know that person, there's not
(13:17):
a chance in the world that they're going to vote
to execute them. Think about Mr. White, his attorney did
basically nothing to help him, didn't didn't talk about his background.
But his background is pretty much as bad as it gets. Right,
I'm gonna read from the book now. His mother, who
started having children at twelve and had had her fifth
by the age of twenty, was routinely and savagely beaten
(13:39):
by his father, Ernest we're talking about Buford White now,
And when his father was not beating her, Beauford himself
became the target. When he was three, his father knocked
him out cold, driving his teeth through his tongue. A
doctor later concluded, it's hard for me to even read
this so disgusting. A doctor later concluded that this assault
(13:59):
and there's were a little likely cause of seizures that
plagued Beautford through his lifetime. When the father, Ernest, left
the family to go to Detroit, his mother took up
with a series of men just as abusive, eventually killing
one of them and going to prison for a seven
year sentence. Beautiford abandoned time and again as a youngster,
and now without a mother or a father, nonetheless shown
in school twenty five years later in a statement given
(14:21):
to Beautiford's lawyers but never presented a court, that's me
editorializing there. His junior high school principle recalled him as
quote an ideal young person, academically gifted. He probably would
have been a straight A student if he would have
um just turned the page, if you would have had
some stability in the home, in a place to study.
One of those kids that a teacher looks forward to
(14:42):
being around. Another teacher described him as quote truly one
of my tops. A third said the reasons she remembered
him all those years later was because I liked him
so much, and he was also a terrific athlete with
major league potential. You know, so this is a guy,
I mean, he's like a perfect example of a person
who is background the system should take into consideration. But
(15:05):
for all these reasons, none of that stuff mattered. And
you make the important point that the jury voted twelve
nothing for life without even knowing a lot of this information.
But I don't know if anything would have changed this
judge's mind. It's inconceivable that that we would allow a
judge to overrule that, and yet that's what happened. But
(15:26):
but this is one of my biggest concerns in writing
this book is that people will read about Beauford White
and they'll think that that's the exception, that it's one
of those really rare cases where justice wasn't done. And
this is the point I kind of make at the
end of the book, which is these cases are typical.
(15:48):
There's nothing about Buford White's background that stands out from
hundreds of other people's backgrounds on death rout These are
the rules there, not the exceptions. And so the Buford
White case, you know, I didn't cherry pick when I
wrote these essays. I wrote them about stories that I
think people don't know, you know, not the high profile
(16:11):
cases Scott Peterson or O. J. Simpson, or the cases
that have been you know, well trod. These are, to
a certain extent run of the mill cases that are
extraordinary because every one of these stories, everyone on death
row has this extraordinary story, and so I just think
it's important for people to know that these essays haven't
(16:31):
been cherry picked. What happened to Buford White has happened
to hundreds of people with similar backgrounds. As horrifying as
that sounds, it's hard to believe that we're still talking
about the death penalty in the present tense, but we
still execute people in America. Sierra Leone banned the death penalty, right.
(16:52):
I mean, we are in such a terrible place in
the world in terms of our standing. You know, when
you look at the countries that still have the death
I don't and the ones there's there are very few
that execute more people than we do. And it's not
a list you would want to be on. You can
guess the countries. I'm not going to reread them off,
but it's it's really the United States does not belong
on that list. We need to abolish it completely. And
(17:14):
one of the reasons I feel that we need to
abolish is because it really depends not on the trime
that you committed, but on the well. As we talked
about It depends on the quality representation, but also depends
on what state you're in and what county you're in,
and who the prosecutors and who the judges, and if
you could talk about an individual case mark like which
case keeps you up at night of all the ones
(17:37):
that you've worked on or known about or written about
before I do that, Jason, let me just say there
is hope here. Virginia just got rid of the death penalty.
That's the state that has executed more than anyone else ever,
so you know we can learn. Virginia did it by
bringing in competent lawyers like we've been talking about, who
(17:59):
essentially eliminated the death penalty as an option. And finally
the legislature turned around and said, what's the point. We're
not getting any more death sentences. We're throwing away all
this money. And so Virginia, of all states, that would
be one of the last states you would expect to
get rid of it. They used to execute very very regularly.
So there's hope even for the United States. We're moving
(18:19):
in the right direction, just slowly. So you're asking me
to pick one case, it's it's a little bit of
the Sophie's choice. Frankly, because it's so hard to just
isolate one case. I worked on a case very recently,
Karnem Johnson. He's actually referenced in the afterward. I didn't
write about him. He's a man that went to death
(18:40):
row for nine years based on the commonwealth's argument that
the victims blood was on his hat. The defense attorneys
did not look at the hat, they did not look
at the DNA report, they did not look at the
photographs of the crime scene or of the hat, and
the prosecution argued strong enough to put a man on
(19:03):
death row for nine years that the blood on the
hat was the unbiased evidence of his guilt. And nine
years later it turned out there was no blood on
the hat at all, zero and they were looking at
a different hat. It was a hat worn by the victim,
so naturally the victim's blood was on the hat worn
by the victim when he was shot. So you know,
(19:25):
there are countless cases like that where the defense attorneys
are sleeping through the trial, either literally or figuratively. The
prosecution ultimately said that they had not done it intentionally,
They had just done it what the court called reckless
indifference to the facts. So imagine putting a man on
(19:46):
death row for nine years when neither side has actually
looked at the facts of the case. You know, if
that case doesn't give you pause about the death penalty,
I don't know what case would. Well, I can. I
can recite a bunch of them. And there's a wonderful
organization called Witness to Innocence that people should look up,
(20:07):
which is made up entirely of death row survivors who
travel the country advocating for the abolition of the death penalty.
My great friend Kirk Bloodsworth, death row survivor from Maryland,
led the organization for quite some time. They're doing fantastic work.
Let me just say, Jason, I love Kirk. He's a
fantastic spokesperson. And Witness to Innocence is based in Philadelphia.
(20:27):
I agree. Great organization, great organization, and please, like I said,
do check them out of following on social media, go
to their website whatever it's Witnessed to Innocence and will
link to that in the episode Bio. You know you
could oppose the death penalty on all kinds of different grounds, right,
Sister Helen Prejon, You know she comes at it from
the religious perspective. But for me, you know, one of
(20:49):
the most disturbing things is the fact that we have
executed so many innocent people, and we continue to keep
innocent people on death row, even sometimes long after they've
proven their innocence. But you look at this like Florida, right,
and there's a statistic that foggles my mind, which is
that since the reinstatement of the death palthy in Florida,
(21:11):
people have been executed, and during that same period of time,
thirty one people have been exonerated from death row in Florida.
So even if you assume that all the people that
Florida has executed were guilty, we know that's not true
because of jesse Ta Pharaoh and others. But they're not
even getting it right any reasonable percentage of the time.
(21:33):
It's not how can we continue to do this? I
think what you're describing as a failed government program. Try
to imagine an airline that stays in business where one
in four planes take off and crash. That's basically what
we're talking about here. When you when you use those
statistics from Florida, who in their right mind would think
(21:53):
that this is a successful public policy Given those numbers.
Mark tell us more about the book. You know, if
someone was going to pick up the book and they said,
I only have time to read one chapter, which one
would you point them towards? And why? Well, like I said,
it is, that gets to be a little bit of
a Sophie's choice picking between essays. But I think I
might suggest too. There's only one autobiographical essay in the book.
(22:18):
It's it's about a team that I worked on in
the Defender office, and it's the last essay in the book,
and it's called Smoke, and uh, I think that really
provides the best insight I could find as to the
work that defense teams do. And the other essay I
think is the Andre Thomas essay. There's actually two of them,
(22:40):
but the first one is how crazy is too crazy
to be executed? And I mentioned Andre earlier, profoundly mentally
old person who ultimately blinded himself while on death row.
And this is really a long story, but Andre is
profoundly mentally ill. He killed his estranged wife and two children.
(23:04):
Andre is an African American. His wife was white. Three
jurors said that they were opposed to interracial marriage, and
so you would think that that is sort of overtly
racist jury making judgments. But the Fifth Circuit just said
that was okay, just a couple of months ago. So
(23:24):
that case is headed to the Supreme Court, and we'll
see what happens when three jurors kind of exposed themselves
that way and the defense attorneys don't do anything about it.
All of this, for me, comes down to the idea,
if you indulge me, I get a lot of insight
from believe it or not, The Lion King. The Lion King,
(23:45):
you'll recall, is about heinous murderer Scar, and he kills Mufasa,
the king of the jungle, a terrific citizen, and and
Scar then compounds that the heinous crime he's committed by
framing Mufass's son, Simba, so it's, you know, the worst
kind of premeditated murder that you can have. Simba grows
(24:08):
up and put Scar on trial basically and beat Scar
in a lion like trial. They tumble around the in
the dirt and Simba ends up on top, and then
Scar asks this million dollar question. He says, what are
you going to do now? Simba? Are you going to
kill me? And I tell the story a lot. I
stopped the tape where this was many many years ago,
(24:30):
and I asked my six year old daughter what she
thought Simba should do, and she said, well, it's not
nice to kill people, even if they're mean. And Simba
then says the magic words, which is, I'm not going
to kill you, Scar, I'm gonna banish you from the community.
That's basically what he says. So, you know, when I
think of DeAndre Thomas story, we're asking jurors to act
(24:55):
like the most heinous murderers. And that's an awful thing
to do. You know, when we look at Andre Thomas
and we see a profoundly mentally ill guy, you know
what should we do. Should we act like that profoundly
mentally ill guy, or should we act calmly and deliberately.
And that's what Simba does. I mean. Imagine if Simba,
(25:18):
instead of saying I'm going to banish you from the community,
said yes, Scar, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna bind
your hands and feet to a guerney and then I'm
going to inject poison in your veins until you're dead.
Every little kid would go running out of the theater screaming,
and the parents would be suing Disney. So you know,
somewhere between the age of six and the age of
(25:40):
adulthood we lose this this sense that we should not
be acting like a murderer. I don't know why we
lose that sense, but a lot of us seem to
lose it. So DeAndre thomas story hopefully captures that that idea. Mark.
Let's talk, if you would, about the crazy case of
(26:02):
Russell Weinberger and Felix Rodriguez. If I'm not mistaken, this
is a wrongful conviction death penalty case with a false
confession thrown in right and false confessions are so important
that we have an entire series devoted to it called
Wrongful Conviction False Confessions, which of course is hosted by
the incredible team of Laura and I Writer and Steve Drizzen.
But this particular case stands out tell us why this
(26:26):
really is a remarkable set of facts. In the early eighties,
I guess it was an eye doctor gets killed in
a sort of the poor section of Philadelphia and a
detective named Saminsky. He gets confessions from two people, Felix
Rodriguez and Russell Weinberger, and then ultimately the Commonwealth cuts
(26:48):
a deal with Weinburger, and Weinberger agrees to testify against
his friend Rodriguez, so both of them go to prison
for very very long period of time time Rodriguez for
life and Winburger. I think his deal is for fifteen
to thirty years, and twenty years later they're both still
(27:08):
in prison. Twenty years later, a man named Anthony Sylvanus
gets arrested on a cold case. They match his fingerprints
to a crime, and I represented Mr Sylvanus along with
my partner, Carl Schwartz, and Mr Sylvanus couldn't be stopped
from confessing, so he confessed to the crime he got
caught for. He also confessed to four or five other murders.
(27:32):
He just he wanted to clear his conscience at that point,
and so they arrested him for all the murders he
confessed to, except for one, because one of the murders
he confessed to was the murder that Russell Weinberger and
Felix Rodriguez were serving their time for. So Sylvanus had
come along and confessed to the killing of this eye doctor,
(27:53):
and sure enough, one thing led to another. An investigation
was done by the Commonwealth and they realized that Winburger
and Rodriguez were totally innocent and had been made to
falsely confess by the threat of the death penalty that
this detective had threatened that they would get to death
(28:14):
penalty if they didn't confess, And so they both did confess,
even though they were completely innocent. And what is truly
remarkable about the case, I think, is that Weinberger a
very low functioning man. He's now passed away, so no
one could test him for intellectual disability. But but but
by all accounts, he was intellectually disabled, and he was
(28:38):
persuaded not only to falsely confess, but to take a
deal for years in prison and testify, actually testify that
he was guilty and that his friend was guilty. So
they ultimately confessed because of the threat that they might
be executed. The detective had persuaded them that they might
both be executed. So it's a false confession of a
(29:03):
magnitude that you almost never see, which is not not
only did they falsely confess, but that one of them
actually testifies that he did it, and yet both men
were clearly innocent. Both men were released from prison. Mr
Sylvanus persuaded me and everyone else, uh that he had
committed that crime was guilty by all accounts, he has
(29:24):
since committed suicide. So so you know, false confessions are
an amazing phenomenon. There's a lot of social science that
backs this up. You ask people if they believe in
false confessions to a person, they will almost always say yes,
I believe in false confessions. But if you ask those
same people if they would falsely confess to a horrible crime,
(29:46):
they almost uniform we say they would not. So you
know there's a disconnect there. But we know that false
confessions are this, you know, horrifying phenomenon, and I don't
think any case lays the groundwork for that more than
this one. The Confessions of of innocent Man just a
remarkable story. And you know, I talked to Mr Rodriguez.
(30:08):
I would have assumed he was horribly bitter about his
friend Russell Weinberger testifying, but he wasn't. He was actually
bitter at the detective who had threatened them with death
because he knew that his friend was was intellectually disabled,
and he didn't blame him. He blamed this option of
the death penalty for something that neither one of them
(30:29):
had done. And that's what really got under his skin. Ultimately,
these both these men did twenty years in prison for
for something they clearly didn't do. And and I'll never
forget the judge who thanked the Commonwealth for avoiding what
might have been an injustice. And I was just I
was in the courtroom, I was thinking, you know, might
(30:51):
have been an injustice. Both these innocent people did twenty
years in prison. It's a horrifying story, as most of
these stories, the best that happens is a horrible injustice.
The worst that happens is an even more horrible injustice. Right,
and then on top of that, there's an even more
horrible injustice than that, which is that in so many
of these cases, the actual perpetrator remains free and goes
(31:14):
on to uh, you know, main murder, you know, brutalize
other people who never should have been victims in the
first place. If the system had actually operated in a
faithful or steadfast or even honest way, and had well
had not pursued the innocent guys or persecuted and prosecuted
the innocent guys, but had instead done the will work
(31:34):
to find the person who actually committed these these hanous
crimes and of course the death builty cases, the crimes
really are hamous. So with that being said again, the
book is a descending spiral exposing the death penalty, and
Twalve Best says, I recommend it. It's it's it's informative,
but it's also reads like a novel, so I'm really
enjoying it. It's by Mark Bookman, who's our guest today. Mark.
(31:56):
I'm sure there's a lot of people listening who are saying, well,
what can I do to help? Mark? Tell us about
the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and if people want
to donate or get involved, if you could just talk
a little bit about how they can do that. Yeah.
So I left the Defender Association in two thousand and ten.
With Dana Cook, we started the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation.
(32:16):
It's it's a resource for anyone facing execution in Pennsylvania
and and and more and more lately nationally. We do
our best to help people, whether it's pre trial or
post conviction, to help. We're an independent nonprofit. Encourage people
to go to Atlantic Center dot org for a good
(32:37):
sense of what we do. We do largely death penalty
work and juvenile resentsing work as well, and we've been
lately branching out into commutations because there's so many people
in prison who are desperately looking for help and really
should be getting released. So we're doing our best. We
we really could use the support, and and again Atlantic
(33:00):
Center thought o RG will give everybody a pretty good
sense of the range of of work that we do.
Our our slogan since we started was trying to put
ourselves out of business since and that's really the goal.
We're sort of far away from that goal right now.
But the donations that we get, the resources that we
get from people that you know, it goes directly to
(33:21):
the work of representing poor people in trouble. Yeah, So
we're gonna link to the website in the bio, and
of course we'll also have a link for people who
want to get a hold of the book. I am
personally holding in my hands right now, my own autograph
copy I order brag anyway, um, and I will say,
you know, I want to close we we opened the
(33:42):
show with a quote from Martin Luther King. I think
I should close with a quote from somebody who I
consider to be almost a modern incarnation of Martin Luther King.
Tourists I'm talking about Brian Stevenson, but he said that
proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including
this vital lesson each of us is more than the
worst thing we've ever done. My work with the poor
(34:04):
and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of
poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.
And you can look up to quote is much more
nuanced and and longer than that, but it's a great
quote from a great man. So um again, Mark Bookman,
thank you for joining us here today. The ending of
our show is the same as well. It's always different,
(34:25):
but it's always the same each week. Um. First of all, again,
thank you for being here. And now I turned my
microphone off. I leave yours on where you can just
rant about as little or as much of anything that's
bothering you as you want. I said this earlier, but
I think it's it's important for people to know that.
(34:49):
And this is kind of how I ended the book,
which is that these essays are the tip of the iceberg.
That's what I really wanted to drive home. I didn't
want people to think that I just looked far and
wide and found a lawyer who was drinking a court
of vodka night during a capital trial, and and then
a juror who said he gave the death penalty of
(35:10):
a person because he was an N word. And these
two intellectually disabled people who confess to a crime. I
didn't want the readers to come away thinking, Man, these
are really bizarre, unusual exceptions. They are the tip of
the iceberg. You could look at virtually every case on
(35:31):
death Row and find similarities to these twelve essays, and
so you know that. I guess my point was that
this really is a failed policy. And if you read
these these essays, I'm hoping you'll be appalled and flabbergasted,
but I hope by the end you will come to
the conclusion that we got to do something about this,
(35:52):
because these cases are not unusual. These cases aren't the exception,
they are the rule. Yeah, thank you for listening to
Righteous Convictions with Jason plom I'd like to thank our
production team Connor Hall, Jeff Claverne, and Kevin Wardis. With
(36:15):
research by Laila Robinson. The music in this production was
supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph follow
us On Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Lava for Good.
You can also follow me on TikTok and Instagram at
it's Jason Flom. Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a
production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with Say
(36:36):
About Company Number one
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!