Oct. 14

TEXAS:

Jon Mark Beilue: Ministry often reunites judge, defendants----Justice
visits inmates through international program

Hugging is an important welcoming part for Kairos prison ministry team
members. It's not too accepted in the prison population, like the one at
the William Clements Unit.

It was maybe two years ago during a four-day gathering of Kairos and
Clements prisoners that Pat Pirtle cracked a joke about hugging to ease
the tension. He then asked inmate Johnny Ray to come forth. And they
shared an embrace.

They had been in the same room once before, a courtroom in the early 1990s
when Pirtle was a 251st District Judge, and Ray, along with his
court-appointed attorney, stood before him. Pirtle pronounced sentence
upon Ray that he was to die by lethal injection for capital murder. And
now they hugged.

"It was,'' Pirtle recalled, "a real special moment.''

Pirtle is now a justice on the 7th Court of Appeals. Ray is no longer on
death row, his conviction overturned because of the fraudulent testimony
of pathologist Ralph Erdmann. He plea bargained a life sentence.

Those are the unexpected moments that very few members of Kairos, an
international prison ministry, can experience. There are about 30 in the
Panhandle who meet with 42 prison inmates for four-day "retreats'' twice a
year and follow-ups the first Saturday of each month.

They are from all over the Panhandle - Silverton, Tulia, Hereford -
including a man in his late 70s from Wheeler. A couple are in law
enforcement. One is a heart surgeon. But there is only one judge.

Pirtle estimates out of the 4,000 or so prisoners at Clements, he has
issued sentences on hundreds of them in his 17 years as a district judge.
All kind of crimes and all kind of times.

Not to diminish the work or the challenge for other Kairos members, but
only one has that kind of uneasy connection with hardened criminals who
don't think real highly of Pirtle and his opinions. And now he comes face
to face with several of them again.

Why do it? Pirtle has a simple, matter-of-fact explanation.

"I'm a Christian first and foremost,'' he said. "I really separate my role
as a judge from my life as Christian.''

Pirtle's last Kairos time with the 42 inmates was Sept. 20-23. It wasn't
his 1st rodeo. He's been doing this for 10 years after he tentatively
accepted an invitation from a friend.

"I was not real comfortable with the idea, but I thought I'd at least try
it,'' he said. "But I was so moved by the experience that I just kept
going.''

Pirtle says he's never felt threatened or been threatened because he was a
judge, and he could have been the target on several occasions. He's been
in groups where prisoners, like Ray, were ones he sentenced. He's seen his
position as a judge have negative and positive effects on prisoners.

Motivated by love for Christ

"Some are so turned off by the fact that I'm a judge that nothing I can
say will ever influence them,'' Pirtle said. "They've made up their minds
they don't like me or trust me.

"Others are so moved that someone representing the system would care for
them that it gives me an opportunity to talk to them. It opens a door.''

Pirtle has to be aware of who he talks with and what they talk about. It
was possible that his former district court could have jurisdiction on an
offense committed by a prisoner while at Clements and have a case pending,
so contact with a defendant was an ethical violation. Pirtle had to check
the list of inmates to see if any had pending charges before he had
contact with them.

And when some found out he was a judge, they would often want some free
legal advice.

"That made me feel uncomfortable,'' he said. "I don't want to be rude and
cut them off, but I turn the conversation to the fact I'm not there to
talk about the fairness of their sentence, but to talk about the fairness
of God. That's uncomfortable trying to deflect that.''

Cynics might suggest that Pirtle is trying to soothe a conscience or
alleviate some guilt harbored by his legal decisions on prisoners, but
that would miss the mark of his motives.

"I certainly don't go out there to feel better about what I've done in the
courtroom,'' he said. "I'm motivated by my love for Christ. I was asked
the question once by an inmate if I'd ever been unfair to someone
appearing before me.

"It was a real piercing question. Most defendants or inmates don't ask
about the fairness, but about the legality of it and the appeals. It
caused me to examine the justice of my judicial decisions.

"I started crying. I know I'm imperfect. There's bound to have been a time
when my sentence was not just. But there's nothing I can do to change
that. That's part of being a judge. You just have to live with it.''

That stays with Pirtle, but so do other things. Like most Kairos members,
he talks of the things he receives: the love from his fellow workers, the
satisfaction of trying to walk the walk, and the grace he says he feels
from God.

"There's not that much that distinguishes those on the outside from the
inside,'' he said. "We're all sinners, and it makes me appreciate the
grace that God pours out on me.''

A judge and a defendant are often two lives passing on two different
planes, never to meet again after the sound of the gavel. And then Pirtle
comes along, interjecting himself along with others in what he calls
"sowers of seed.''

Last month, in the 3rd of 4 days at Clements, a team member came to Pirtle
and said an inmate, whom he had sentenced, wanted to speak with him.

Pirtle had not recognized him. So that Sunday, Sept. 23, the 2 sat down
for a conversation.

"He just wanted to thank me,'' said Pirtle, "thank me for treating him
like a human being.''

(source: Amarillo Globe-News)

****************************

Value of eyewitnesses unclear----Critics charge current procedures often
lead to flawed identifications

Though no way of identifying suspects has emerged as foolproof, scientists
have reached a few general conclusions:

The certainty of a witness ID is no measure of its accuracy.

People are more accurate at identifying suspects within their own race.

Witnesses are very vulnerable to inadvertent cues from people
administering a suspect lineup, who are usually police detectives.

Certain types of lineups or instructions can lead witnesses to make a
positive ID more frequently. For those who work on behalf of inmates who
loudly proclaim their innocence and ask for DNA testing to prove it the
faulty identification of Ronald Gene Taylor was no surprise. The great
majority of DNA exonerations have involved bad eyewitness IDs.

"Eyewitness ID reform is the No. 1 priority of people who want to reduce
the number of wrongful convictions," said Edwin Colfax, state program
director for the Justice Project, a criminal justice reform organization.
"It is the single most important thing we can do."

Colfax said erroneous eyewitness testimony was the key ingredient in 24 of
the 30 Texas cases that have been reversed after belated DNA testing. That
high percentage rings true with Nina Morrison, the Project Innocence
attorney who worked on Taylor's case.

"I've had 11 cases of people freed from prison, and in eight of those
cases eyewitness ID was the primary or only evidence used to convict,"
Morrison said. "It remains among the most powerful evidence the jury can
hear. It's very, very hard for jurors to disbelieve someone taking the
stand and pointing the finger at someone."

Wary of new methods

It is equally hard to shake the faith of prosecutors and police officers
in its reliability. The fallibility of eyewitness evidence has been
discussed and demonstrated for more than a century never more so than
today when science can conclusively prove it but authorities are
sometimes reluctant to back off even in the face of conflicting DNA
testing.

Eyewitness evidence has been the staple of investigations and prosecutions
for so long that efforts to change the way it is obtained often meet
resistance from authorities. Such was the case in Texas during the last
legislative session, when lawmakers objected to provisions in a bill
offered by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, that would have mandated the use
of new methods.

Those methods are based on several decades of study and experimentation by
social scientists. They have used all manner of subjects, from young
children to the very old, as they explored the tricky world of memories
and how the brain stores them.

Criminal justice reformers widely support a method known as "sequential
double-blind" lineups. The witness is shown individuals or photos one by
one instead of in a group. The person administering the test does not know
whether a potential suspect is in the group, and the witness is informed
of that.

Eyewitness evidence reforms, including sequential double-blind lineups,
were recommended in a report by the National Institute of Justice in 1969.
Ellis' bill ran into immediate opposition from law enforcement groups and
was amended to create a working group that would come up with
recommendations that were not binding. Even then, it never reached a floor
vote.

Sudden recollection

In Taylor's case, the only eyewitness was the 39-year-old victim. She
immediately gave police a basic description of her assailant, admitting
she did not see him well in the dark room and was relying on having felt
his face and body with her hands. 2 weeks later, she expanded her
description slightly in an interview. She attended a lineup at a police
station the next week and did not pick out any of those placed in it.
Taylor was not among that group.

The victim finally picked out Taylor from a videotaped lineup that she
viewed on her TV almost six weeks after the crime. After seeing the tape,
she said she had a sudden recollection her attacker had a tooth missing or
unusually large space between his teeth. The investigating officer said it
was common for victims' memories to improve in subsequent weeks.

Perhaps more disturbing was the victim's later recollection that the
attacker had bumped into her refrigerator while leaving her apartment,
giving her an opportunity to see him for several seconds in the light
coming through a nearby window.

"That raises enormous questions about how that piece of evidence came to
pass," Morrison said. "By that time they had a suspect but no physical
evidence linking him to the crime. If the original statement had stood and
the victim said she could not see him, the conviction could never have
stood. This new opportunity to see him in the light came up only after
Ronnie had become the main suspect."

Taylor's appellate attorney challenged the validity of the victim's
identification. The court stumbled on the issue, however, in part because
the brief did not include a copy of the videotaped lineup. The tape had
gotten lost, and a dozen years later it still has not surfaced.

(source: Houston Chronicle)