Advocates for justice staged an international day of action, May 19, to raise awareness of the plight of Troy Davis, a 40-year-old man who has spent the past 18 years on death row in Georgia for a crime he evidently did not commit. Davis was on the scene when a law enforcement officer was murdered and was convicted on the basis of witness testimony which has since been recanted. Jurors have come forward to insist they were misinformed about evidence in the case. No weapon was ever found. Furthermore, one of the witnesses who testified against Davis is a principal suspect in the case.

In Asheville, more than three dozen people gathered at the Brooks-Howell Home, for a candlelight service and vigil Tuesday evening. Dr. Kiran Sigmon, a local physician and friend of Davis, led the service, describing her family’s contact with Davis over several years, and reading a profoundly moving letter the inmate had sent to his supporters around the world last November. Sigmon’s daughters participated: Joy played a quiet piano accompaniment and read a list of states which still embrace capital punishment, together with the number of inmates on each state’s death row; Lee lit a candle of hope for each state as the names were read. The ceremony was interspersed with song, “How can I keep from singing?” and poetry.

Yesterday the NC Senate approved the Racial Justice Act on the second reading but added a provision that will make it easier to execute people in this state. The amendment was added in apparent reaction to the NC Medical Association rule prohibiting doctors from participating in executions. (Anyone recall, “First, do no harm” ?)

The Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court ruled last week that the medical group could not impose penalties on its members if they helped kill people. Their convoluted ruling said, in effect: Lethal injection is not a medical procedure, therefore it is appropriate for the state to require a doctor to oversee the execution.

Huh?

Well, the pro-execution majority in the Senate has now moved to enshrine that rule in the Racial Justice Act. If the bill passes as now written, we can only hope that the doctors themselves will simply refuse to participate.

This says it all. We need to pass the NC Racial Justice Act.

The Rovian dividers who seek to ride bigotry into office are at it again. This week the so-called “Defense of Marriage” act will resurface in the NC General Assembly.

Those who believe that healthy marriages are threatened by other people’s livestyles are either paranoid or duplicitous. It’s almost funny that self-identified conservatives, who generally pretend to want the government to butt out of people’s private lives, get their shorts in a bunch when they think about what others might be doing in the privacy of their bedrooms. Are they so tempted to join in the imagined romps of others that their own marriages may collapse? Are they tapping their toes in airport men’s rooms? Are they e-mailing smut to their interns?

You can take action to tell our legislators to mind their own business, and mind ours—by addressing the real issues facing our state instead of raising straw issues that fan the flames of hate and bigotry.

Click here.

Asheville attorney P.J. Roth filed a complaint this week in the matter of the death of Marvis Davidson in the Buncombe County Detention Center. Davidson died of complications due to diabetes in the summer of 2004 and witnesses say she was denied treatment for her medical condition. The complaint charges the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department with wrongful death due to criminal negligence. If Roth wins his case, the outcome would almost certainly mean a major change in liability protection for North Carolina municipalities.

I first reported on this matter for Mountain Xpress back in 2005. As I wrote at that time: “A former guard (who re quested anonymity, fearing reprisals) described having seen serious problems while working there.

Two complaints, the guard said, were filed ‘about [Marvis Davidson's] medical treatment, including failure to correctly administer insulin. And I was told by another guard that Davidson said she had severe stomach pains for four days before she died.’ the former guard said. Davidson was a diabetic, and her autopsy report says she died due to an ischemia (decrease in blood supply) and resulting hemorrhage of her small intestine. Diabetes is a contributory cause of ischemia.”

Following that story I was contacted by a former inmate who had been in an adjacent cell during Davidson’s death. She told me Davidson had been literally screaming in pain, begging for help, and that guards had not only ignored her but had told her to shut up and quit causing a disruption.

Astonishingly, Davidson had previously been incarcerated in the Buncombe County jail, had received treatment for her diabetes, and had been hospitalized from the jail during a diabetic crisis. So there is no reason whatever that the database would have lacked information in this case.

Also following my story, I was contacted by April Nicole Welch, Marvis Davidson’s daughter, who asked me if she might have some basis for legal action concerning her mother’s untimely death. I put her in touch with P.J. Roth who took up her case just days before the statute of limitations ran out. Roth opened the case a couple of years ago, and it has moved through the system in the slow way that civil cases do. Finally, this week, four years after Davidson’s death.

This was the second death at the jail in less than three years. In September 2001, Joey Max Rogers was arrested for operating his lawn mower in a drunken state. The medical examiner noted: “Arrested by B.C. Sheriff’s Dept. for drunk & disorderly — apparently was combative — placed in locked room at approximately 2100 hrs. … Checked at 2130 & found dead on floor.” Neither the medical authorities nor the Sheriff’s Department has explained how a highly intoxicated man who was also found to have a high level of phenobarbital in his blood (a legally prescribed medication, according to medical reports) had managed to break his own neck while alone in a locked room.

According to former guards who have talked to me, Rogers was thrown against a wall by a jailer. But nothing was ever done about the death.

What I’ve learned in the years since then is that North Carolina law protects municipal governments from liability in a major way and that permits jailers to do what they will pretty much without consequence.

The state law prohibits damage claims against municipalities UNLESS the municipality carries liability insurance. But IF the municipality carries liability insurance, it is given a pass on the first $500,000. That is to say if someone wins a claim for $1 million, the winner only gets $500,000. That means that attorneys are very unlikely to take cases in which damages might be less than that amount.

If you are an occasional criminal, working for minimum wage, it is entirely possible that a jury will decide that your life was worth less than $500.000, so your family could win a case and get nothing—including payment to your attorney. It’s no wonder that lawyers in this state are reluctant to take on liability cases involving municipalities, given that they may put years into litigation and come up empty handed. Roth has now been working on the Davidson case for two years and is only now moving toward a hearing.

Roth told me that he took the case for two reasons. The first is that he wants to attempt to secure justice for Davidson’s family, but the second is that he thinks the case might make “good law.” Under this state’s rules, if a public official’s failure to perform required duties is judged to be criminal, penalties are tripled which could bump any reasonable jury award above the $500,000 threshold. Roth predicts that if he wins this case Buncombe County will appeal the decision up to the state Supreme Court if necessary, and that his hope is that an ultimate favorable decision will help protect inmates statewide from jailer abuse.

As he told me, “Since I believe there are actually a bunch of well-meaning lawyers out there, a success in Marvis’ case might encourage more of them to take inmate suits across the state and thereby increase pressure on the municipalities to clean up their act.”

Deceptive robo-calls which have reportedly targeted black voters in North Carolina have been traced to Women’s Voices Women Vote, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit. Women’s Voices founder and President Page Gardner has made substantial contributions to the Clinton campaign.

The calls suggest that one cannot vote unless one returns a signed statement to be found in a registration packet that the listener received in the mail. Women’s Voices has been implicated in similar illegal voter suppression efforts in multiple states across the country. The NC NAACP has filed a formal complaint with Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Numerous voters in WNC have reported getting the deceptive calls.

For more, click here.

The following letter was sent to the Asheville Citizen-Times by local attorney Frank Goldsmith. We should all be paying attention.

***

Dear AC-T Editors and Publishers,

On Friday I was contacted by a nice young woman who is working as an intern for your newspaper, who asked if I would agree to be interviewed about the case of Glen Edward Chapman, the Catawba County man who was recently released from Death Row after being incarcerated for over 15 years for crimes he did not commit. I agreed because of the importance of the story, which exposes the substantial frailties of our system of justice. When I arrived for the interview, I was surprised to learn from the intern that her editor – I do not know which one – had decided that the story was not sufficiently newsworthy to merit inclusion in the weekend edition. The young lady did not tell me that in order to criticize the editor or the paper, but simply to let me know why I would not be reading the story in the Citizen-Times over the weekend.

I find this baffling – all the more so after weighing the significance of the stories that turned up in the weekend edition. This case is about a man who was very nearly sent to his death because police detectives lied at trial, covered up the existence of a confession by the real killer, ditched the results of a photo lineup in which someone else was positively identified, hid witness statements that pointed to innocence, and altered other witness statements to make them better fit the officers’ theory of guilt (it was those fabricated statements that were disclosed to the defense lawyers, to throw them off the track). It is a case of official corruption so striking that I cannot see how any responsible journalist could decide that it is not “newsworthy.” The deceit was compounded by the complete ineptness of the lawyers assigned to defend Chapman at his trial, as well as by other flaws, including forensic medical evidence that questions whether one of the victims’ deaths was actually a homicide at all.

I realize the Asheville Citizen-Times is a small regional paper that gives prominence to items of local interest. But even if locality is the criterion for coverage, this case has connections to Western North Carolina, if only any of the paper’s editors had bothered to inquire. Most people in the state consider Hickory, where the alleged crimes occurred, to be part of Western North Carolina. Every member of Chapman’s post-conviction defense team is from Asheville or Marion. Our mitigation specialist and investigator, Dr. Pamela Laughon, is a well-respected professor of psychology (and chair of that department) at UNCA. Several of her UNCA psychology students worked on the case under her supervision. Our other investigator, Lenora Topp, lives and works in Asheville. Jessica Leaven, my co-counsel, formerly practiced in Asheville and has family here, although she recently took a job in Chapel Hill. I practice in Marion and live in Buncombe County. Of course, I would hope the paper would not exclude any story that has significance for our system of capital punishment merely because the news is not sufficiently provincial.

I am not raising this issue merely to see my name in print. Frankly, having been interviewed about the case by all of the major newspapers in the state and by several television stations (including WLOS), as well as by CNN, NPR, and other media, I would be just as happy if a story ran about this case and omitted any mention of me. On the other hand, I am very concerned that our criminal justice system lacks any meaningful safeguard against the possibility that the truth-finding process will be perverted by unscrupulous officers bent on justifying an arrest, even when the result is to send an innocent man to his death in the execution chamber. I believe your readers need to understand the gravity of that flaw through a story about a man who was unjustly robbed of 15 years of his life. If such a story is not newsworthy, I do not know what is. The state’s major newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer, have each written excellent editorials (in addition to their front-page news coverage) about the case and its exposure of the frailties of our criminal justice system, yet all the Asheville Citizen-Times chose to do was bury a very small story taken entirely from a wire service in the inside pages of Section B. Even The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran stories with more information.

If this were an isolated failure on your paper’s part, perhaps it would be understandable. But last November, after Judge Robert Ervin of Morganton issued his ruling finding that the officers had lied and concealed evidence, on the basis of which he awarded Mr. Chapman a new trial, your paper was completely silent, despite the statewide coverage at that time, including pointed editorials in the News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer. On that occasion I made sure you knew about this significant ruling by a respected judge, because on the day after it appeared, I e-mailed to you a copy of a press release from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (which you should already have received from the Center the day before), as well as links to some of the other news articles. I followed that up with another inquiry to make sure my messages were received. I heard absolutely nothing in reply, and your newspaper completely ignored the story.

I gave an interview to the intern anyway, since she genuinely seemed interested in the case. She appears to be very competent and has, I believe, a bright future as a journalist. I can only hope that she succeeds in finding a position with a paper capable of recognizing news worth reporting.

Sincerely yours,

Frank Goldsmith