Newspaper Page Text
KAFKA (AND GRISHAM) IN OKLAHOMA
Since 1973, 123 innocent persons awaiting
execution in 25 states have been exonerated
and released from death row. A list of these in
dividuals, in chronological order of exoneration,
is available from the Death Penalty Information
Center at www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. Exoneree
number 80 on this list is Ron Williamson, whose
strange and tragic tale is told in John Grisham's
first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder
and Injustice in a Small Town (Doubleday, New
York, 2006). (At a separate trial conducted a
week before Williamson's, a friend of his, Dennis
Leon Fritz, another innocent person, was also
erroneously convicted of the same murder as
Williamson but received a life sentence rather
than death 1 . After almost 12 years in prison,
Fritz, like V/illiamson, was exonerated by DNA
and released.)
On Dec. 8, 1982, 21-year-old Debbie Carter
was raped and tfv»n choked to death in her
apartment in Ada, an old oil town, population
16,000, in Pontotoc County, OK, about 80 miles
southeast of Oklahoma City. One of numerous
suspects was a local, Ron Williamson, once a
promising professional baseball prospect, who all
his adult life suffered from
psychoses and other serious
mental illnesses. On May 8,
1987, after his strongest
alibi witness had died, Ron
Williamson was arrested for
the Carter murder. His trial,
at which he was represented
by an court-appointed at
torney being paid a measly
$3,600 who was not only
inept but blind, began on
Apr. 21, 1988. The prosecu
tion's entirely circumstantial
case was palpably weak,
but it kept rebounding as
defense counsel repeatedly
committed colossal blun
ders, never challenging, for
example, the oral confes
sion police alleged they had
extracted from Williamson,
and not even introducing into evidence a vid
eotaped confession to the Debbie Carter murder
made to police by a man named Ricky Simmons.
Six days after the trial began, the jury found
Williamson guilty. The next day, Apr. 28, at a
punishment phase at which his abysmally inef
fective attorney failed to introduce any evidence
whatsoever, Williamson was sentenced to death.
"Ron Williamson," the prosecutor had solemnly
announced in his closing argument, "you deserve
to die for what you did to Debra Sue Carter."
(Previously, at the punishment phase of codefen
dant Fritz's trial, in an unsuccessful bid to have
Fritz sentenced to death, the same prosecutor
had told the jury, "Dennis Fritz, you deserve to
die for what you and Ron Williamson did to Debra
Sue Carter.")
Incredibly, in affirming Williamson's death
sentence on direct appeal, .the Oklahoma Court of
Criminal Appeals, a death penalty-friendly court
in an overwhelmingly pro-death penalty state,
opined that at his trial there had been "over
whelming evidence* of Williamson's guilt. "The
court spent little time discussing exactly what
evidence had been so overwhelming." Grisham
acidly comments. And none of »he judges of the •
state court "detected the obvious—an innocent
man was wrongly convicted." Oklahoma courts,
compromised due to their relish for capital pun
ishment and their determination to facilitate
executions, appeared to have lost their ability
to identify possible miscarriages of justice in tri
als resulting in a death sentence. "Since 1990,"
Grisham starkly notes, "Oklahoma has executed
more convicts on a per capita basis than any
other state."
In 1997, the federal courts, finding that
Williamson's trial violated his constitutional
rights, ordered that Williamson be retried. Before
the retrial could be held, however, Williamson
was exonerated.
At one point avoiding execution by only
five days, Williamson remained in custody un
til Apr. 15, 1999, when the trial court vacated
his conviction and set him free. His exonera
tion was the result of efforts by Barry Scheck's
famed Innocence Project. DNA tests conclusively
showed that both Williamson and Fritz were in
nocent of murdering Debbie Carter and that the
actual killer was a man named Glen Gore, who
had been a star witness for the prosecution at
Williamson's trial. (After Williamson's exonera
tion, Gore was tried and convicted of murdering
Debbie Carter—but received a life sentence.
Weirdly, therefore, an innocent man had been
sentenced to death for Carter's murder, whereas
the real murderer received a lesser penalty.)
Less than six years after his release from pris
on, prematurely aged, not yet 52 years old, Ron
Williamson died of natural causes, his life, he
thought, now bereft of meaning, his hopes and
expectations dashed, his mind and body ruined,
and his spirit extinguished. His cruel destiny had
been a horrible tragedy, his
fate unbelievably surreal.
Williamson's wrongful
conviction resulted from
some of the problems tra
ditionally associated with
erroneous convictions: sub
normal legal representation
by an underpaid, uncaring,
unskillful defense attorney;
prosecutorial misconduct,
including suppression of
exculpatory evidence; police
misconduct, including either
extracting a false confes
sion from the defendant
or fabricating a claim that
the defendant had verbally
confessed during custodial
interrogation; perjurious
testimony by shameless jail-
house snitches breathlessly
claiming that they overheard the defendant make
incriminating statements while he was impris
oned prior to trial' and what Barry Scheck calls
"White Coat Fraud," fraudulent or misleading
scientific evidence presented by so-called experts
from the state crime lab bent on helping the
prosecution achieve a conviction.
in his essay "Kafka in Oklahoma," journal
ist Robert Mayer aptly describes what befell
Williamson and Fritz (who also was the victim of
misconduct by prosecutors, police, crime lab ex
perts and jailbouse snitches), as "Kafkaesque," an
adjective variously defined to mean "incompre
hensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical." "marked
by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing
complexity," or "characterized by surreal distor
tion 9 r d a sense of impending danger." Unlike
Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka's famous fictional
character, Ron Williamson did not metamorphose
into a human-sized cockroach. However, for over
a decade, by insisting that an innocent man was
a rapist-murderer, demanding that .he be put to
death, denying him a fair trial, and subjecting
him to the inhuman conditions of confinement
detailed by Grisham, the state of Oklahoma did,
a la Kafka, treat Williamson as if he was a human
cockroach. In the end, therefore, whether inten
tionally or not, Ron Williamson's terrible demise
was an extermination, the fumigator being the
pitiless juggernaut we call government. If Franz
Kafka could have authored a short story based on
the Williamson case, he might well have ironical
ly entitled it "Pest Control in Pontotoc County."
Ooiiald E. Wilkes. Jr.
Donald E Wilkes Jr teaches m the University of Georgia
School of Law
.ion\
(IRISH \\l
ague Mwifo* 1 *
ifk BM«ls P‘FP* ,coW
Peai 6I««
Offering:
Neuromuscular Therapy
Deep Tissue
Swedish
Give the oft of relaxation
this Valentine’s Daij
• Prenatal
• Fibromyalgia Pain Reduction
• Ear Candling
• And More.
Ashley Bugg, l.m.t., n.m.t.
100 Seagraves Dr., Suite 28 (off Lexington Rd.)
(706) 552-0774
mi
S T j|
tXXJi
NEWS & FEATURES I ARTS & EVENTS I MOVIES I MUStC I COMICS & ADVICE I CLASSIFIEDS
FEBRUARY 7.2007 FIAGPOH COM 9