Report from Tour stop at American University.

On Nov. 11th the "Lynching Then, Lynching Now" tour stopped at American University. Guest speakers were Mike Stark, Lawrence Hayes, and Yusef Salaam. All three gave speakers gave accounts of their experiences with death row and urged the attendees to take action to help abolish prohibition. At the end of the workshop they engaged students in a brief question-and-answer session. The event was very successful with a large turnout. Many students stayed after it ended to speak individually with the speakers.

CAMPAIGN TO END THE DEATH PENALTY SPEAKING TOUR CIRCULAR

CEDP TOUR OFF TO A GREAT START!

The CEDP 2009-2010 national Tour, Lynching Then, Lynching Now: Roots of Racism and the Death Penalty in the US, is off to a great start, and shaping up to being a very exciting spring.

The Tour was designed to be a forum to delve into the injustices of the death penalty today and how inextricably race is bound up with it. But the Tour also aims to draw out the historical roots of capital punishment and its close ties to lynching in the US. Activists have much to learn from looking closely at the history of racism and how vigilante racist violence was used as a means to subjugate African-Americans through a reign of terror in the South. The Tour hopes to be a vehicle to turn opposition to death penalty into action based on the view that struggle will be more effective with a deeper understanding of what has come before.

To date, we’ve held stops at Cornell University, American University and Fordham University, featuring longtime civil rights activist Alan Bean from Texas’ Friends of Justice speaking on the case of Mississippi prisoner Curtis Flowers, Jena 6 and the Southern “injustice system.” Other speakers included Yusef Salaam, CEDP Board member and exoneree in the Central Park case, who spoke on the parallels between his case and that of Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys, and Lawrence Hayes, former death row prisoner and CEDP Board member, on the legacy of repression against the Black Panthers and those who fought against racism.

HOST YOUR OWN TOUR STOP

CEDP Chapters and other groups are strongly encouraged to host a Tour stop of their own. This year’s Tour is designed with a teach-in format in mind, where hosts are encouraged to hold workshops and discussions in conjunction with a panel or forum. The aim of the teach-in structure is to facilitate more in-depth discussion of the historical material and its relevance to racism, prisons and the death penalty today.

For questions or to set up an event, contact the Tour organizer, Lee Wengraf, at nyc@nodeathpenalty.org

SUGGESTED READINGS

And to help brainstorm and prepare for Tour events, including discussion topics and themes, following is a suggested reading list:

Bill Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916

Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Jackie Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature

Charles Ogletree and Austin Sarat, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America

Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900

We Dare Not Bury the Past - Another powerful piece by Tour speaker Alan Bean.

We Dare Not Bury the Past.

http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/curtis-flowers-and-the-cruel-legacy-of-montgomery-county/

We dare not bury the past while the past buries the innocent.

In July, 1996, four people were killed execution style at a Montgomery County furniture store: owner Bertha Tardy, bookkeeper Carmen Rigby, and two hired men, Bobo Stewart and Robert Golden. Golden was black, the other three victims were white. Six months later, Curtis Flowers, a young black Winona resident who had worked three days for Bertha Tardy, was arrested and charged with the brutal murder of four innocent people. Thirteen years, $300,000 and five trials later, Mr. Flowers remains behind bars and the state has been unable to obtain a final conviction.

No capital defendant in American history has ever gone to trial six times on the same facts. Curtis Flowers of Winona, Mississippi will soon be the first.

Winona is county seat of Montgomery County, a section of Mississippi that periodically produces startling narratives.

In 1937, two black Montgomery County bootleggers, Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack McDaniels, were accused of murdering and robbing a local merchant. The two men entered not guilty pleas at their arraignment and were being escorted back to the county jail in Winona when they were released into the custody of a large white mob. Townes and McDaniels were driven up the road to a field near Duck Hill where they were tied to trees and surrounded by brushwood. As a crowd of 500 looked on, the two men were tortured with blowtorches. Ears and fingers melted under the intense heat before the victims relented. They were then shot to death and their bodies burned. Loved ones were not allowed to remove the charred remains for weeks after the event.

The Duck Hill lynchings were reported by the Associated Press and featured in TIME magazine. After a particularly grisly account was read from the floor of Congress, the House passed the first anti-lynching law in American history. A few weeks later, passions having cooled, southern senators used the filibuster to kill the anti-lynching bill.

In 1960, Montgomery County was back in the news when Sheriff Lawrence King was accused of hiring two black men to murder his deputy, William L. Kelly. King had reportedly been sleeping with his deputy’s wife. When all three defendants were charged with murder, former Mississippi governor James P. Coleman stepped forward to represent the white defendant. All three defendants received life sentences and eventually died in Parchman prison.

Although Montgomery County is 45% black, not a single African American was registered to vote in 1963. The civil rights movement arrived in the county in June of that year, when Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder and several other black women were refused service at the white restaurant at the Winona bus station. Arrested by Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge, his deputies, and a state trooper, the four women were beaten and sexually humiliated at the county jail. Fannie Lou Hamer was pummeled with a blackjack wielded by two black inmates who had been threatened with additional charges if they didn’t cooperate and rewarded with corn whiskey when they did.

When Fannie Lou Hamer was finally released from the Montgomery County Jail she had to be hospitalized for a full month and never fully recovered. A year later, Hamer related the story of her brutal encounter with Montgomery County law enforcement before the credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic Conviction in Atlantic City. Her testimony aired on all three national television stations and sparked outrage.

The men responsible for torturing Fannie Lou Hamer and her friends had to be tried in federal court when every prosecutor in the State of Mississippi refused to seek an indictment. After a cursory federal trial in which the judge referred to the victims as socialist agitators and praised the defendants as upstanding public servants, a jury returned not guilty verdicts.

But isn’t there a statute of limitations on stigma? With the dawning of the 21^stcentury, hadn’t Montgomery County outlived its reputation for racial injustice?

So it appeared. Then a federal census revealed that African Americans comprised over 50% of the voting population of the Montgomery County town of Kilmichael. The political grapevine suggested that a strong black candidate was running for mayor and at least three black candidates were eyeing seats on the city council. The white mayor and all-white council resolved the problem by cancelling the 2001 election.

Kilmichael’s cancelled election was vetoed by the Department of Justice. Five years later, when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came up for ratification, Senator Ted Kennedy used Kilmichael’s election-that-wasn’t to argue that Mississippi still needed federal elections oversight.

In 1996 and 1997, Curtis Flowers was convicted of murder by juries in Tupelo and Gulfport, but the convictions were vacated by the Mississippi Supreme Court because of blatant prosecutorial misconduct.

In 2004, Flowers went to trial before an all-white jury at the Montgomery County courthouse in Winona. The conviction was overturned when the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutor Doug Evans had removed blacks from the jury for reasons that were not race-neutral.

In 2007, at the conclusion of Curtis Flowers’ fourth trial, a jury of five blacks and seven whites retired to deliberate. All seven white jurors voted to convict; all five black jurors voted to acquit.

There were three black and nine white jurors when Curtis Flowers went to trial for the fifth time in September of 2008. According to post-trial interviews, two of the black jurors were willing to vote guilty if the white jurors settled for a life sentence. Convinced that Flowers was innocent, a retired school teacher named James Bibbs hung the jury.

At the conclusion of the fifth trial, Judge Joseph Loper had two requests for District Attorney Doug Evans: he wanted James Bibbs tried for perjury and he wanted the Mississippi legislature to pass a law allowing Doug Evans to choose a jury from an expanded seven-county judicial district.

In the spring of 2009, Senator Lydia Chassaniol successfully guided this bill through the Mississippi Senate, but the House bill, sponsored by Representative Bobby Howell of Kilmichael, was essentially vetoed by the black chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

As DA Doug Evans prepared to take Flowers to trial for an unprecedented sixth time, Montgomery County danced back into the media spotlight. State Senator Lydia Chassaniol gave a spirited pep talk to 2009 annual conference of the radically racist Council of Conservative Citizens, (the successor to the White Citizen’s Councils). Chassaniol admitted that she belonged to the CCC but didn’t see why that made her a racist. She appeared to be sincere.

Representative Bobby Howell, the Montgomery County Republican who carried the “Flowers Bill” in the state house, is one of the Council of Conservative Citizen’s best friends in the Mississippi Legislature.

Is an innocent man being framed in Montgomery County Mississippi; or has the strength of the prosecution’s case rendered history irrelevant?

A piece by Tour Speaker Alan Bean on the case of Curtis Flowers.

http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/a-brief-primer-in-wrongful-conviction-the-case-of-curtis-flowers/

A brief primer in wrongful conviction: the case of Curtis Flowers

Why are we so convinced that Curtis Flowers is innocent? Two reasons: the state’s theory of the crime doesn’t fit the actual evidence, and the state manufactured phoney evidence by manipulating, badgering and bribing witnesses

All are agreed that the gun that ended the lives of Bertha Tardy, Carmen Rigby, Bobo Stewart and Robert Golden was stolen from the car of Doyle Simpson while he worked at Winona’s Angelica garment factory. Simpson made two visits to his car on the morning of the crime and reported that his gun had been stolen from a locked glove compartment shortly before the crime was committed. Catherine Snow, one of Simpson’s co-workers, claims she saw Curtis Flowers leaning against Simpson’s car at 7:30 that morning.

Prosecutors argue that Curtis Flowers murdered Bertha Tardy because she had docked $82 from his pay to cover the cost of damaged lawn mower batteries. Flowers worked at the furniture store for three days just prior to the July 4th weekend in 1996. When Curtis didn’t return to work after the holiday and when he eventually contacted Ms. Tardy he was informed that he had been replaced. Prosecutor Doug Evans claims this provided Flowers with a sufficient motive for the most vicious murder in Winona history.

Finally, Curtis Flowers can’t provide an iron clad alibi for the morning of the murder. He maintains that, apart from a brief visit to his sister’s home, he spent most of the fateful morning alone at home.

This sounds like a weak circumstantial case until you start asking hard questions. Then it falls apart altogether.

Everyone agrees that Bertha Tardy was the killer’s primary target and that the other three victims were murdered in an attempt to eliminate witnesses. All four victims were killed execution style with a bullet to the back of the head fired at relatively short range. Three of the victims were found lying side-by-side.

If Ms. Tardy was killed first, how could a single gunman keep the witnesses from fleeing? The evidence suggests the work of two gunmen: a single shooter and an accomplice.

The murders were methodical and horribly efficient: three of the victims died from a single shot. The Tardy murders (as they are now called) were not the fruit of blind rage. For practical and psychological reasons, only an experienced professional with a callous disregard for human life could pull off a crime like this, and no one in Winona (certainly not Curtis Flowers) fits that profile.

No employer-employee disagreement in Winona history ever spiraled into murder; what made July 16th, 1996 any different? If Curtis Flowers entered the store engulfed in homicidal rage how could he work with such frightful efficiency?

There is general agreement that the murder weapon was stolen from Doyle Simpson’s glove compartment. But the state has never been able to explain how Curtis Flowers could have known there was a gun in his uncle’s locked glove compartment unless Doyle told him? Simpson usually kept the gun at his mother’s home.

Questioned the day of the murder, Catherine Snow reported seeing a stranger leaning against Doyle’s car two hours before the likely time of the Tardy murders. Once it was common knowledge in the community that Flowers was the prime suspect, Ms. Snow was suddenly able to put a face to the man by the car. This is particularly odd considering that Snow knew Curtis Flowers from having seen him singing with a gospel group at her church.

No one could have known there was a gun in Doyle Simpson’s glove compartment unless Doyle himself told them were to look. A local gun points to a local killer, and an experienced killer from outside Winona would have valued such a weapon. A streetwise hustler with addiction issues, Doyle Simpson had friends in low places.

Why then did a test reveal a single micron of gun powder residue on the defendant’s right thumb? Gun powder residue is ubiquitous in police cars and police stations and Flowers had been in both environments immediately prior to the test. Doyle Simpson was interviewed as soon as Flowers left the building but neither he nor any other suspect was tested for gunpowder residue. This suggests that investigators had marked Flowers as the killer three hours after the crime and were studiously ignoring evidence pointing in any other direction.

A single micron of residue is the tiniest fragment that exists in nature. If Flowers had washed his hands before the interview no residue could have survived—the stuff is that ephemeral. But if Flowers was the killer, his entire body would have been bathed in residue. A single micron of residue suggests the kind of incidental contact that is inevitable in a police car or a police station.

The police have a bloody footprint at the crime scene, but no bloody shoe. They recovered a shoebox full of Christmas ribbons from a girlfriend’s closet. Like the footprint, the box was for size 10.5 shoe, America’s most popular men’s shoe size. There would have been nothing remarkable about Curtis Flowers owning a pair of Grant Hill Fila running shoes, of course; they were the hottest selling shoe in the nation at the time. But his girlfriend, Connie Moore, insists she bought the shoes for an adolescent son and the son has confirmed her story.

Speculation on the subject of Grant Hill sneakers is of academic interest. The footprint discovered at the Tardy Furniture store wasn’t left by the killers. The state suggests that approximately $300 was taken from the cash register near where three of the bodies were discovered. If so, one of the victims was probably forced to hand over the money before being killed. The killers didn’t step in the blood because, while they were at the scene of the crime, there was little blood to step in.

Sam Jones, an elderly black gentleman who occasionally helped out at Tardy Furniture, was the first person to arrive at the crime scene. Sam is now dead, but at the first trial he testified that he saw no trail of bloody footprints when he first observed the crime scene—and he was in the building between five and eight minutes. Jones then hurried off to a hardware store where he called 911 and waited for a police car to arrive at the scene.

Porky Collins testified at two trials prior to his death. Collins had a Wal-Mart receipt showing that he left the store at 9:43, about the same time Sam Jones arrived at Tardy’s Furniture. Collins then drove three miles to a mechanics shop, made a brief stop at home, then drove by Tardy’s Furniture on his way to the cleaners. By this time, Sam Jones had left the furniture store and was still waiting for the police to arrive.

As Collins passed Tardy’s he saw two black men engaged in a passionate argument. One man had his hands on the hood of a brown car; the other was standing beside the car making dramatic hand gestures. Collins only got the brief glimpse of one man’s eyes as he passed.

Concerned by what he had seen, Porky Collins made the block and when he returned to the scene the two men were crossing the street on foot. Collins testified that he didn’t know where the men went next.

For the most part, Porky Collins makes a convincing witness. Any mistakes he made can be laid at the feet of law enforcement. Although he shared his story with the police on the day of the crime, Collins wasn’t shown a photo array for five weeks. He was showing an interest in one of first six pictures he was shown when an officer asked, “Do you know Doyle Simpson?” This comment cued Collins that he had the wrong man. Shown a second array of pictures, Collins’ finger wandered to a photo where the person’s head was much bigger than the heads in the other pictures. “Do you know Curtis Flowers?” an officer asked. This told Collins he had the right man. By August 24th it was common knowledge in Winona that Flowers was the state’s prime suspect.

Although Collins’ identification of Flowers can’t be taken seriously, the central thrust of his testimony should be taken seriously. Collins saw two men arguing in front of Tardy’s just after Sam Jones had left the building. If either man was involved in the crime it is unlikely that they would be ostentatiously drawing attention to themselves. It is more likely that they arrived at Tardy’s Furniture store just after Sam Jones disappeared into the hardware store. The lights inside Tardy’s were on, the door was unlocked, and Jones’ truck was parked on the street outside—the store appeared open for business. If the two men wandered inside they could easily have stepped in the steadily-growing pool of blood on the floor.

The fact that Sam Jones saw no blood track when he first entered the store and that he and Police Chief Johnny Hargrove immediately spied bloody footprints shortly after 10:21 makes this scenario probable.

This explains the dispute Collins witnessed. One man, believing they were the first to encounter a crime scene, wanted to file a report with the police. The second man protested that a black man with the slightest connection to the scene would immediately become a suspect. This argument prevailed and the two men left the scene.

This reconstruction is hypothetical, of course, but it is the only scenario that fits all the known facts. The state’s theory, by comparison, can’t account for any of the facts I have noted.

Prosecutor Doug Evans has a love-hate relationship with Porky Collins’ testimony. With considerable coaching from law enforcement, Collins placed Curtis Flowers at the scene of the crime even though the events he witnessed transpired at least half an hour (and as much as an hour) after the killings took place and involved a second person the state can’t account for.

As an ex-employee, Curtis Flowers knew that Tardy Furniture has a back entrance. If he were the murderer he certainly wouldn’t have made a spectacle of himself at the murder scene.

There has never been any room in the state’s theory of the crime for an accomplice. The state has an impressive stable of eyewitnesses, but they all report seeing Curtis Flowers walking alone.

Although Sam Jones, Porky Collins and Catherine Snow talked to the police the day of the murder, none of the other witnesses didn’t recall seeing Curtis Flowers on the morning of the murder until a $30,000 reward appeared on the black side of town.

Few of the states witnesses came forward voluntarily even then. I have interviewed several people who were picked up by police officers, taken to police stations in Winona or nearby Greenwood and enticed with the $30,000 reward. They were also threatened with dire legal consequences if they refused to cooperate with the investigation. This carrot and stick approach, applied over the six-month period between Flowers initial interview and his arrest in early 1997, produced a string of “weak-minded black folk” (as one local pastor described them) who can’t get their story straight.

Curtis Flowers walked to work at Tardy’s on three occasions two weeks before the crime and some or all of the witnesses may have seen him pass on his way to work. But could they remember, weeks and even months later, that they had seen Curtis on the morning of the Tardy murders?

This explains why the physical descriptions presented by the various witnesses fail to overlap at a single point. Memory is fragile of course, and we should expect some discrepancies in testimony. But when one witness has Curtis wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, the next has him in dress clothes, and a third has him decked out in a jogging outfit the state has a problem. Either these folks are describing actual sightings that took place on different days or they are lying. The evidence suggests we are dealing with a bit of both.

Mary Fleming, the woman who says she saw Curtis walking in the direction of Tardy’s, gave her statement seven months after the crime. Her Curtis was wearing a gray jacket, white shirt and brown pants. Mary Fleming is the aunt of Clemmie Fleming, a young woman who claims she saw Curtis Flowers running away from Tardy furniture on the morning of the crime. Clemmie has admitted to friends and family members (one of whom has an audio tape) that her testimony is a complete fabrication. The elderly man who was driving Clemmie around town that morning grudgingly corroborated her story at the first trial. But he surprised the state at the second trial by telling the jury he had been bullied into false testimony at the first trial and wanted to set the record straight. In his amended testimony he saw a man (who looked nothing like Curtis Flowers) running before picking Clemmie up at her home and never drove by Tardy’s.

And then there is Patricia Hallmon Sullivan, the woman who says she saw Curtis Flowers leaving his home at 7:30 the morning of July 16th. Ms. Sullivan’s brother, Odell Hallmon, says he talked Patricia into concocting a Curtis Flowers story so they could split the $30,000 reward. Odell Hallmon put this admission in letter to Lola Flowers (the mother of the defendant) and defense attorney Andre de Gruy—two people who had nothing to give him in exchange. Then, realizing how unwise it is for prisoners doing hard labor at the notorious Parchman prison plantation to get on the wrong side of the prosecution, Hallmon changed his story. He only wrote the letters, he now says, because Curtis Flowers promised to supply him with free cigarettes. What kind of prosecutor would use the testimony of a witness who had publicly surrendered the last shred of credibility?

A prosecutor who is rapidly running out of options.

At the first trial, the state produced two jailhouse snitches who testified that they had heard Curtis Flowers confess to the Tardy murders. These witnesses didn’t appear at subsequent trials. Since Doug Evans uses dubious witnesses like Odell Hallmon, the disappearance of the jailhouse snitches remains a mystery.

Under enormous pressure to produce an indictment, Doug Evans and investigator John Johnson latched onto the first suspect who lacked an airtight alibi. Unable to build a solid case against this man, Evans and Johnson used threats, bribes and flagrant manipulation to shape testimony around Flowers. The Winona newspaper reveals that Evans and Johnson were the targets of harsh criticism when Curtis Flowers was finally arrested in early 1997.

A dispassionate review of the available evidence suggests the following conclusions:

• Bertha Tardy was the victim of a professional hit

• Two assailants were involved

• Neither man was from Winona

• Doyle Simpson made his gun available to the killers

• Simpson knows who took his gun but may not know the identity of the killers

• The bloody footprint wasn’t left by the killers

Therefore, the state of Mississippi should release Curtis Flowers to the free world and appoint an independent investigator to conduct a fresh and unbiased investigation.

Really excited for this year's Tour!

Hi Folks,

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty hosts a National Speaking Tour every year. Last year's tour was called Live From Death Row and went all over the country. Many different prisoners called in and spoke via live speakerphone, including Mumia Abu-Jamal from Pennsylvania, Stanley Howard from Illinois, and Kevin Cooper from California (to name just a few).

The Tour stops were held in a variety of places, at schools like Howard University and the University of Texas, at progressive conferences like Critical Resistance, and in communities nationwide. Many of these places did not have a CEDP, and worked with our national tour organizer to build and promote these events within their communities.

We hope to match that success with our tour events this year. The tour this year is designed for folks to get an in-depth look at the effects of racism historically in the US, and the impact racism has currently on our criminal "injustice" system. With the election of Barack Obama comes a new opportunity to discuss the continuing impact of systemic racist ideas and policies in America.

We'd like these events to be a place where folks can come and hear an amazing array of speakers with a wide diversity of experiences and expertise. From discussions of historical movements against slavery, lynching, and jim crow laws, to ideas for challenging racism today, the Anti-Lynching Tour is a key event for anti-racist activists to attend in the coming months.

This blog will include reports from Tour Stops all over as well as news reports on the events (and whatever else we think of). We hope the blog can help people all over feel part of a bigger project and give inspiration to those who are organizing or would like to organize one of these events!