by Carl Hiaasen
The nurses say they’re innocent. Grand jurors say they are but two of “numerous individuals” who played roles in Paisley’s death.
To appreciate the prevailing culture at M-DRJDC, consider this: Rules forbade workers from calling 911 without the approval of a supervisor. Worse, when grand jurors toured the facility, they found that the phones in the housing modules were programmed to block even detention officers from dialing 911. If somebody had tried to help Paisley, they would have needed to use a cell phone—violating yet another regulation.
The true situation at the Miami-Dade lockup contrasted sharply with that portrayed by Larry Lumpee, the assistant secretary of the Department of Juvenile Justice. He told a legislative hearing that any detention officer can call 911 from any facility, whenever it’s necessary. Grand jurors were unimpressed by Lumpee’s testimony, which they said “failed to accurately portray the reality” at M-DRJDC.
Either the state was blind to the disarray at the jail or committed to whitewashing the crisis. In any case, the juvenile agency’s response to Paisley’s needless death has been little more than a shrug.
Last week’s grand jury report set forth 20 recommendations for M-DRJDC, many of them based on procedures successfully implemented in Broward.
None of the ideas are radical or frivolous. Among them:
* More staff, better supervision.
* An intercom system so that guards and staff members can communicate instantly in emergencies.
* Direct employee access to 911. (There’s a concept!)
* A video surveillance system with cameras and recorders that actually function.
* Twenty-four-hour on-site medical care.
* Rules requiring nurses to see an inmate on the same day that he or she gets sick, to keep complete charts, and to have those records reviewed by an actual physician.
Grand jurors also urged “immediate sanctions” against any jail worker who fails to give CPR or administer emergency first aid. Who would do such a thing, you ask?
Every detention worker in Omar Paisley’s unit was trained in CPR, but not one tried to revive him when he was found without a pulse, collapsed over a chair outside Room 13.
It was the chair to which Paisley had dragged himself to wait for the help that never came. And that’s how the kid died, waiting.
Declared the grand jurors: “We were appalled at the utter lack of humanity demonstrated by many of the detention workers charged with the safety and care of our youth.” Such a searing censure kindled no obvious shame at the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice. Instead came a flat, written response from Secretary William G. Bankhead, displaying his customary reluctance to take action.
Bankhead said that an investigation of “administrative issues” has commenced and that the M-DRJDC workers have been “retrained” in emergency medical protocol. He also said he would enact the grand jury recommendations where “appropriate,” coldly implying that some were not.
It was a decidedly indecisive response to a homicidal act of negligence. You’ve got to wonder if that “utter lack of humanity” lamented by the grand jurors is leaking down from the top of the bureaucracy.
May 30, 2004
New Rules Trap Immigrants with Old Secrets
Sleep soundly, America.
Our government has finally tracked down Fidencio Resendiz and is diligently taking action to boot him back to Mexico.
Not that Resendiz, who came here 20 years ago, was terribly hard to find. He’s been living in Homestead, working construction jobs, and raising a family. In fact, he’d be a model candidate for President Bush’s recent proposal to grant legal status to thousands of illegal immigrants now employed in the United States—except for one dark secret.
No, Fidencio Resendiz isn’t an agent of Al Qaeda. As far as authorities can tell, he’s never plotted a single act of terror or advocated overthrowing our government or even littered in a national park.
But 10 years ago, at age 23, he got caught with a single marijuana joint in his pocket. It was the first and last time he was ever arrested. This happened in Missouri, coincidentally, the home state of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Under his vigilant eye, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is avidly deporting noncitizens with criminal convictions, no matter how minor.
Interestingly, Missouri considers Fidencio Resendiz never to have been convicted at all. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge and received a suspended sentence. After a year on probation, his record was expunged by the state. However, by the time Resendiz applied for permanent U.S. residency, Congress had passed tough new immigration rules that made him and thousands of others retroactively eligible for deportation.
It is the same controversial law that ensnared Kari Rein, an Oregon woman whose outlandish case I wrote about in April. A Norwegian citizen, Rein has lived in the United States legally for 15 years. But last December, she was detained and then jailed by immigration agents as she returned home from Europe with her husband and two children.
The reason: A computer check had turned up a 1993 arrest for growing six marijuana plants. She and her husband had pleaded guilty, paid a fine, and served out their probations. The judge in that case had said there was no reason to put Rein in jail because she was a productive member of the community and had no prior arrests.
Eleven law-abiding years later, the Department of Homeland Security decided Rein was a threat and that she should be sent back to Norway. She and her family were stunned. After three weeks, she got out on bail and began a legal battle that seems to have ended with a victory for sanity and common sense.
Last Monday, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski pardoned Rein for the 1993 pot conviction, wiping her record clean. Kulongoski made the decision after meeting with Rein and her family. A spokesperson for the governor told The Oregonian: “He was very impressed by her and the fact that she feels absolute remorse for the whole thing. He believes that she’s a very good citizen of Oregon.” The very next day, U.S. immigration officials said they would “terminate” their efforts to deport Rein to Norway. Because her conviction has been nullified, she’s finally free to apply for U.S. citizenship, which she intends to do.
Here in Florida, Fidencio Resendiz is fighting deportation by trying to point out the government’s own maddeningly inconsistent policies. In federal court, first offenders found guilty of simple possession of small amounts of marijuana may have their charge dismissed after a year’s probation, leaving no record. By law, the case cannot be considered a criminal conviction “for any other purpose”—including deportation proceedings. But, like most first-timers caught with a joint, Resendiz was prosecuted in a state court. At the time, though, U.S. officials didn’t typically go after illegal immigrants for small-time dope offenses.
Unfortunately, Resendiz didn’t apply for permanent residency until after 1996, when the new immigration rules were enacted. A heavy crackdown began after 9/11, and since then, even first offenders in state drug cases have become targets for deportation.
Resendiz says he deserves the same break offered to first offenders in federal court. Immigration officials say he doesn’t qualify because he wasn’t prosecuted by the feds. In other words, not everybody in the same fix gets the same second chance. It all depends on your luck. When the ruling comes, it will impact many deportation cases.
If, back in 1994, Resendiz had been busted by a DEA agent instead of a Missouri cop, the immigration service wouldn’t be hassling him today. He could’ve had a clean pass as a federal first offender, and gotten a green card with no problem. His case was argued last week in Miami before a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. When the ruling comes, it will impact many pending deportation cases.
Whether it will stop the bumbling excesses of the so-called war on terror is doubtful.
At a time when we’re warned that more Al Qaeda fanatics are loose within our borders and planning another bloodbath, it’s idiotic to be spending a single penny of the fed
eral budget—or a single minute of an immigration prosecutor’s time—pursuing the harmless likes of Kari Rein or Fidencio Resendiz.
Such cases will seem worse than foolish if the latest Al Qaeda threat proves real. They will seem tragic, for what was wasted.
August 15, 2004
State Fought to Keep Innocent Man in Prison
At 3 A.M. Thursday, Wilton Dedge and his father took a walk. It was warm outside, but the air smelled glorious, and Dedge couldn’t stop staring up at the crystal Florida sky. “It was just unreal,” he said, “just to go out at night and see the stars.”
Dedge hadn’t taken a walk with his dad in 22 years. Since May 3, 1982, every night had been spent under a prison roof, locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. He went away at 20 and came out as a middle-aged man, robbed of his youth by a colossal injustice.
Last week, the state of Florida admitted what Dedge has been claiming all along: He is completely innocent of the violent rape for which he was convicted.
His story is one of tragically mistaken identity, made worse by cold prosecutorial obstinacy. It’s awful enough that he spent more than half his life behind bars for something he didn’t do. More outrageous is the fact that prosecutors have known for more than three years of a DNA test pointing to Dedge’s innocence. Yet they tenaciously battled to keep that evidence out of court—and to keep Dedge imprisoned.
Dedge wrote to me in June, after I’d done a column about him: “Had you told me 22 years ago that our justice system would do what it has done to me, I would have laughed in your face.… But I can no longer do this and it truly saddens and angers me that I can’t.”
The case was shaky from the start. The 17-year-old victim initially described her attacker as six feet tall, balding, and 200 pounds. Dedge weighed 130 pounds dripping wet, stood five feet six, and had all his hair. Unaccountably, the victim picked him from a photo shown to her by police. Today she is said to be “devastated” to know that she made a mistake.
At the first trial, six of Dedge’s coworkers at an auto body shop testified that he was working there at the time the rape occurred. But a technician from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement took the witness stand to say that a pubic hair found in the victim’s bed was “microscopically identical” to Dedge’s. Brevard prosecutor Robert Wayne Holmes told jurors that the hair “proves that Mr. Dedge was the rapist.” A special crime-scene dog was also said to have detected Dedge’s scent in the victim’s room.
The jury convicted Dedge, though he was later given a new trial after the reputed talents of the crime-sniffing canine were embarrassingly discredited.
At the second trial, prosecutors produced a sleazeball prison informant who claimed that Dedge casually admitted to the rape. In exchange for his testimony, the informant had 120 years lopped off his own sentence. Dedge was convicted again and received 30 years to life. He served his time stoically, though he simmered on the inside.
As DNA testing evolved into an accepted forensic technique, Dedge saw hope for exoneration. In 1996, he asked that his DNA be matched against that of the pubic hair found at the rape scene. Prosecutor Holmes opposed his request and, for eight long years, would not yield.
In the meantime, the case caught the attention of attorney Barry Scheck, a DNA defense specialist and one of the founders of the Innocence Project. He, Nina Morrison, and Miami defense lawyer Milt Hirsch took up Dedge’s cause pro bono.
The DNA test was finally done in late 2000. The results were sobering and unequivocal: The hair from the rape victim’s bed belonged to someone other than Dedge.
Prosecutor Holmes didn’t challenge the findings but, astoundingly, shrugged them off. He insisted that Dedge had committed the crime, even if the telltale hair wasn’t his.
The same physical evidence that Holmes once trumpeted as decisive was suddenly of “little significance.” Moreover, the state said that Dedge’s test should be ignored because it had been conducted a few months before Florida finalized its rules on DNA procedure.
Assistant Attorney General Bonnie Jean Parrish carried that argument to the Fifth District Court of Appeal. The judges seemed incredulous when she said that the issue was not Dedge’s guilt or innocence but the premature timing of his DNA test.
The panel bluntly rejected that position, so prosecutors launched a startling new tactic. After years of trying to block Dedge’s DNA evidence, they abruptly embraced the science. They asked a judge for a new test—not on the hair but on a semen sample taken from the victim. The sample had degraded during the two decades, but new technical advancements enabled experts to check for a genetic match.
The result was the same as before: The semen, like the pubic hair, belonged to someone other than Wilton Dedge. He could not possibly be the rapist, and prosecutors could no longer duck the truth.
Holmes finally agreed to drop all charges. A judge signed the paper, and at 1 A.M. Thursday Wilton Dedge stepped out of the Brevard County Jail into the summer night and freedom. The first thing he did was hug his mother and father. “I’m just trying to soak it all in right now,” he said.
Seminole-Brevard State Attorney Norm Wolfinger called a press conference. “It is truly tragic,” he intoned, “to have an innocent person spend time behind bars, not to mention as much time as Wilton Dedge.” As for the new DNA test, Wolfinger said, “Frankly, we anticipated different results.”
Unbelievable. His office had seen similar exculpatory results three years earlier and wouldn’t give Dedge a new day in court. It’s worse than disgraceful; it’s an abomination.
Dedge is a free man only because he and his lawyers never gave up. Prosecutors did everything in their power to keep him in prison, and he’d be rotting there still if they’d had their way.
Although Dedge is richly entitled to bitterness, there’s no trace in his voice. “Right now I’m not even thinking about that. I kind of blocked it out. I’m just enjoying being with my family.”
I asked if he always thought that someday he’d be free.
“I believed it,” he said, “but I was beginning to have doubts.”
Robert Wayne Holmes hasn’t apologized to Dedge for taking 22 years of his life, and it wouldn’t matter much if he did. The damage is done, the time is lost, and nothing can give it back.
Nothing under the stars.
Note: The Florida Legislature eventually awarded Wilton Dedge a compensation package of $2 million.
March 27, 2005
Easy Prey for Exploiting Politicians
As this is being written, Terri Schiavo is still barely alive and still easy prey for the politicians who have so despicably exploited her tragedy. They will exploit her in death, too. You can bet on it.
Rebuffed again by the courts, Gov. Jeb Bush hit a new personal low last week. He called a press conference to declare that a “renowned neurologist” had raised doubts about whether Schiavo was really in a “persistent vegetative state.” The doctor, William Cheshire, turns out to be a conservative evangelical who is renowned mainly to close friends and immediate family.
In addition to working at the Jacksonville branch of the Mayo Clinic, Cheshire is “director of biotech ethics” for an outfit called the Center of Bioethics and Human Dignity. He has expounded against stem-cell research and other issues of interest dear to the Christian right.
Cheshire offered up his wisdom about Schiavo’s condition after spending 90 minutes at her bedside and watching tapes provided by her parents, who’ve opposed removing her feeding tube. He did not perform a medical examination of Schiavo, which makes his report all the more suspect.
Dr. Ronald Cranford is a University of Minnesota neurologist who did examine Terri for the state of Florida. Here’s what he told The New York Times: “You’ll not find any credible neurologist or neurosurgeon to get involved at this point and say she’s not vegetative. Her CAT scan shows massive shrinking of the brain. Her EEG is flat-flat. There’s no electrical activity coming from her brain.”
That’s c
onsistently been the medical finding, and one reason the courts have ruled repeatedly in favor of Michael Schiavo’s efforts to remove his wife’s feeding tube.
Even if Gov. Bush sincerely believes all those judges were wrong, it’s reprehensible that he would at the eleventh hour scrounge up a sympathetic physician and try to pass him off as an expert on the vegetative condition. Cheshire hasn’t published a single paper on the subject in any known medical journal. Most of his articles focus on headache pain, which was never Terri Schiavo’s problem.
But the governor wasn’t finished posturing. He said the state Department of Children and Families might physically take custody of Schiavo because of anonymous allegations of abuse in the hospice.
Pinellas Circuit Judge George Greer promptly said he would tolerate no such theatrics. Still, Floridians had to marvel at the absurdity of Jeb seeking DCF “protection” for Schiavo. Under his watch, the agency has been a disaster, marked by contract scandals, ineptitude, and horror stories of children left to die or even disappear while under state supervision.
Given a choice between DCF care and a hospice, take the hospice. At least you won’t get misplaced there.
Speaking of lost, that’s where some sober-minded Republicans find themselves after this debacle. The party that preaches state’s rights and individual freedom has now given us the biggest, most intrusive federal government of all time.
That the Congress basically climbed into Terri Schiavo’s private deathbed is not only disgraceful, it’s scary. This was a family matter and nobody else’s business. Five years ago, in the midst of their guardianship battle with her husband, Schiavo’s parents conceded that their daughter was in a persistent vegetative state.