The new speaker of the PA House

The media coverage of new PA House Speaker Dennis O'Brien (R-Phila) has been largely positive. If you never heard of O'Brien before yesterday, you're now learning that he is a friend of organized labor, a "people person," and has "a passion for making the lives of people better" (the last one according to Governor Rendell).

All of that may true, as I've had little reason to notice Rep. O'Brien. He might be really great in a lot of ways. But here is what I do know about him. His stances on the Innocence Commission Act and the death penalty for those with mental retardation do not indicate a man who is fair or a decent person. His positions on those two issues lead me to question who he is.

The ICA passed the Senate unanimously in April. It would establish a commission to study the reasons why innocent people are convicted of crimes and then make recommendations for legislation to prevent it from happening in the future.

But after passing the Senate without a single dissenting vote, the bill sat in O'Brien's judiciary committee. It never saw the light of day. O'Brien couldn't be bothered to allow the state to study why innocent people are convicted.

Does this sound like someone who is fair?

On the death penalty and persons with mental retardation, O'Brien defied the disabilities community (you know, the people who actually work with folks with disabilities on a regular basis) to side with Attorney General Tom Corbett and the PA District Attorneys Association. The disabilities community, including the Arc of PA and the Disabilities Law Project, supported the process in which a defendant's mental capacity would be determined by the judge before trial. The DAs and Corbett believe the jury should make that determination after they've convicted the defendant of first degree homicide. This procedure was called "clearly prejudicial against the defendant" by Senator Stewart Greenleaf (R-Montgomery), who is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This might be a bit of hyperbole, but O'Brien believes it's fine that innocent people are convicted of crimes and it's fine to execute persons with mental retardation. Ok, of course he doesn't believe that, but what can one be expected to believe in light of these stances he has taken?

This jury is still out on just how "fair" Dennis O'Brien really is.

Justice for Dennis Counterman. Sort of.

Dennis Counterman is finally a free man. He absolutely deserves to finally be free and no one can question his decision to take a plea.

I can't help but feel a bit melancholy, though, that Dennis was forced to plea to charges for a crime that never happened. The Lehigh County DA had him over a barrel, knowing full well that prosecutors could manipulate the facts again to win a conviction, and Dennis and his attorneys certainly could not trust the justice system after what has happened to him for the last 18 years.

You come here looking for justice and that's what you find. Just us.

Morning Call op-ed: Counterman case highlights death penalty problems
CounterPunch, Joey DeRaymond of Lehigh Valley Committee Against State Killing: A case of injustice in Pennsylvania

Is Dennis Counterman's day of justice finally coming?

Last week Lehigh County Judge Lawrence J. Brenner announced a trial date for Dennis Counterman of Allentown. Five years after Brenner first declared a retrial, there is finally a date set for December 11. This trial would have and should have occurred long ago. In fact, death penalty abolitionists thought Dennis might be the nation's 100th exoneration, a designation that went to Ray Krone in 2002. Alas, delaying tactics by the Lehigh County DA's office kept this trial from happening. Until now.

Ironically, Lehigh County DA James Martin recently co-authored an op-ed entitled "Prosecutors are held to highest ethical standards" in The Daily Item. Sadly, ethical behavior has been but a distant memory in the Counterman case. Although Martin, an assistant DA in 1989, was not involved in the original prosecution, he has been directly involved in the delaying tactics during the appeals process.

Last Sunday, Morning Call columnist Paul Carpenter pulled no punches in criticizing the DA's office and, specifically, original prosecutor Richard Tomsho, who now works in the PA Attorney General's office:

The abuse of power never starts with victims who are bright, robust and respected.

It starts with the most vulnerable, perhaps someone of modest means with low intelligence who does not handle himself very well, and who has used illegal drugs — a guy like, say, Dennis Counterman.
(snip)
Too often, a piece of work like Tomsho gets away with subverting the way the legal system is supposed to work, but now and then, a judge will come along and say, "whoa."

In 1990, when Tomsho was a prosecutor in Lehigh County, he convinced a jury that Counterman murdered his three sons by setting his own house ablaze in 1988. Counterman has been incarcerated since then, including more than a decade on death row.

In 2001, Lehigh County Judge Lawrence Brenner threw out the conviction because Tomsho had hidden nine pieces of evidence indicating it might have been one of Counterman's sons who set the fire.

The evidence included a statement to that effect by his wife, Janet, which Tomsho "whited out" in a police report. Also hidden was evidence the boy had a history of setting fires, and witness accounts that Counterman tried frantically to put out the fire.

For a comprehensive retelling of Dennis's story, check out this 2002 Baltimore Sun article.

The danger of false confessions

Bill Moushey of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette has an excellent piece in last Thursday's paper about false confessions. It seems strange to the layman that someone would confess to something that he/she didn't do, but it happens:

Innocent people confess to crimes for many reasons, including the desire for notoriety. That was the apparent motive in the celebrated unraveling this week of John Mark Karr's false admission that he had killed JonBenet Ramsey.

But false confessions usually involve coercive interrogations in which police claim to have evidence of a suspect's guilt and then promise leniency for cooperation or severe punishment for non-cooperation.

In a study of 340 overturned convictions between 1989 and 2003, Dr. Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan Law School and his colleagues found that 51, or 15 percent, involved false confessions. Most of those confessions resulted from police coercion.

The case of Walter Ogrod of Philadelphia is one in which a confession, potentially coerced, is playing a role.