Huh? Intelligent? Religious? Humorous? Useful? Are we talking about the same Joseph Paul Franklin? I guess he was intelligent in that he was able to kill people and rob banks without getting caught for several years. Perhaps you could say he was religious in that he thought Jesus Christ supported his deadly mission. If you call laughing at the killing of African Americans humorous, I suppose you could check that one off. And if you wished to see Adolf Hitler’s vision finally carried out in 1980s America, he was useful. But that is not how I would ever construe those terms. Oh, and just for the record, so far as I know, Franklin never did enrich anyone else’s life, though he sure ended enough of them.
Stott countered by saying that the only ones who deserved any sympathy were the two victims, that sniper killing in this manner was a particularly cowardly act. “The joggers, the young victims, were joking, they were laughing, they were kibitzing, they were just enjoying their lives. They didn’t know what hit them, they didn’t know who hit them, and they didn’t even know why they were hit. From the moment Joseph Paul Franklin stepped into that field and hid behind that mound of dirt with a rifle, he had made the decision to subject himself to the death penalty. Nobody forced him to make that decision.”
He went on to declare, “The true victims of circumstance in this crime were Dave Martin and Ted Fields; they were the ones who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
After two hours of deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom, split eight to four in favor of the death sentence. Since the verdict would have had to be unanimous, Judge Banks imposed a life sentence for each of the two murders.
In imposing the sentence, Banks stated he would recommend that Franklin never be paroled. Franklin began cursing the judge, and as he was being led out of the courtroom by the marshals, he shouted, “You’re the one who ain’t got no morals!”
After the sentence was announced, reporters asked Marilyn Garzan her feelings about her brother’s escape attempt. “It’s a shame he didn’t make it,” she replied.
A few days later, back home in Montgomery, Alabama, Carolyn Luster told the Birmingham Post-Herald that Franklin had planned the escape two days before. “It was not a spur-of-the-moment thing. If he had got out, they never would have found him.”
Under the terms of the writ by which Franklin was remanded to the state for the trial, since he was not sentenced more harshly, i.e., to execution, he was returned to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Missouri and federal custody to serve out his civil rights sentence.
“The federal authorities have better facilities to deal with Joseph Paul Franklin,” Utah prosecutor Stott said.
ON JANUARY 31, 1982, FRANKLIN WAS TRANSFERRED FROM THE MEDICAL Center in Springfield to the United States Penitentiary at Marion, in southern Illinois, which had been opened in 1963 to replace the decrepit and expensive-to-maintain Alcatraz maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay. By the time Franklin arrived, Marion had the reputation of housing the most violent and unmanageable inmates in the federal corrections system. Prisoners were only allowed out of their cells about an hour and a half a day, and outside recreation was even more severely limited.
Franklin was a fairly well-known con by the time he arrived, and given the prison’s large African American population, his reputation proceeded him. Just three days after he came to Marion, Franklin had returned from dinner and was hanging out briefly in another prisoner’s cell. A group of Black inmates surrounded and cornered him, then stabbed him fifteen times in the neck and abdomen with an ice-pick-like weapon made from a can. There were several guards nearby, but they said they did not see the attack. Franklin was rushed to Marion Memorial Hospital and taken into surgery.
“We really don’t know if it was racially motivated or not,” FBI special agent Robert Davenport of the Springfield, Illinois, field office stated. Though he was trying to be careful, I, on the other hand, didn’t see any other possibility. On March 3, Davenport said his office had given the results of its investigation to the U.S. attorney in East St. Louis, Illinois, but “prosecution was declined because Franklin could not identify his attackers and there were no witnesses who could identify the assailants.”
Franklin was returned to Marion and placed in a special basement unit that was kept apart from the prison’s general population. It was called the K Unit. It had somewhat larger cells with their own toilets and showers, in which the prisoners spent twenty-two hours each day. For security, no two men on the unit were allowed out of their cells at the same time.
While Franklin’s trail of bloodshed had stretched across multiple states, with the murder case in Utah officially closed, the case that became highest priority from Washington was his potential involvement in the shooting of Vernon Jordan. FBI director William Webster told the Los Angeles Times that Jordan had been gunned down by one or more people who had been stalking him. He said it was a calculated act and that the Bureau had discounted any nonpolitical or personal motives for the ambush shooting.
Franklin remained a principal suspect. The FBI had determined through matching handwriting on motel registration cards that Franklin was in the Fort Wayne area at the time of the crime. Through his lawyer, Franklin refused to submit to a polygraph. I have never put much faith in these so-called lie detector tests, and in most jurisdictions, they are not legal evidence. I was convinced that Franklin made a regular habit of lying through his teeth, so as with other sociopaths I have hunted, I didn’t think it would be any more challenging for him to lie to a metal box than to lie to other human beings. We’ve long established the idea that these kinds of people react differently, so I didn’t see that a polygraph would prove anything one way or another.
For his part, Vernon Jordan seemed to gather new strength and determination when confronted by darkness and violence, much as did his inspirational ideal, Martin Luther King Jr. Following a three-month recovery, during which he lost forty pounds, Jordan told a news conference at the National Urban League’s New York headquarters, “It is an indescribable experience. All of a sudden there you are stretched out on the pavement bleeding and with some notion that it might be curtains.” Declining to speculate on who shot him, Jordan said, “I have not spent the last few months concentrating on who did it or why they did it. I was just trying to get through the next operation or the next shot, the next bad-tasting medicine, the next exercise some nurse demanded and which I did. . . . Violence is nothing new to Black people. We have been its victims from the time the first slave ship landed on these shores. We recognize we are vulnerable in a society in which racism still thrives.”
But the legacy of the crime loomed large in other ways. According to an account by the Associated Press reporter Masha Hamilton, Fort Wayne was still agonized over the Jordan shooting. “Jordan’s health apparently has returned,” she wrote on May 29, 1981, “but this northeastern Indiana city of 175,000 won’t recover fully until a suspect is arrested, city officials and Black leaders say.” She went on to describe “a sense of paranoia that exists in the local Black community,” underscoring how one malign individual can transform an entire region.
Franklin’s attorney David Yocom, though, considered the government’s pursuit of the Jordan shooting “ridiculous.” When a grand jury of the U.S. District Court in South Bend, Indiana, returned an indictment on June 2, 1982, against Franklin for violating Jordan’s civil rights—shooting him because of his race and color—Yocom called it “a waste of taxpayers’ money.”
“It’s ridiculous that a man serving four consecutive life sentences . . . would even be considered for being prosecuted for a maximum ten-year [sentence],” he told the AP. “The Justice Department must really be looking for points with the Black people.” Residents of Fort Wayne and the surrounding area, on the other hand, were relieved and gratified that the crime and alleged perpetrator were finally facing justice, according to newspaper reports.
On June 11, Franklin pled not guilty to the charge and Judge Allen Sharp s
et a trial date in August.
While newspapers around the nation, from the New York Times to the Lafayette, Indiana, Journal and Courier, regularly referred to Franklin as “an avowed racist” and “a drifter,” in a pretrial hearing Judge Sharp warned prosecutors they would not be allowed to rely on any of Franklin’s other proven or alleged crimes in presenting their case. “There will be no retrial of the Utah case in my courtroom,” he declared. Sharp was apparently skeptical of the strategy to go forward with a federal civil rights action because there didn’t seem to be enough solid evidence to pursue a state murder charge. Toward the end of the trial he was quoted by UPI as saying the case was “pushing federal court jurisdiction close to its constitutional limits.” And he was concerned enough about the public passion surrounding the case that he ordered all spectators to be physically screened and pass through metal detectors.
Admittedly, going the civil rights route on a case like the Vernon Jordan shooting meant going through some legal contortions, which seemed to me even more challenging than a straight murder trial. The prosecution would have to prove not only that Franklin was the one who pulled the trigger, but that he did so to prevent the victim’s use and enjoyment of public facilities because of his race.
The prosecution was headed by Barry Kowalski, an antiwar activist who nevertheless enlisted in the Marine Corps and led a platoon in Vietnam because he didn’t think only poor people should have to go and fight. He was already securing his near legendary status as a civil rights attorney and “the Justice Department’s pit bull.” He would go on to secure convictions against KKK members James Knowles and Henry Hays for the 1981 abduction and lynching of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald; the 1988 conviction of neo-Nazis for gunning down Jewish radio host Alan Berg outside his Denver home in 1984; and the 1993 federal conviction of two white LAPD officers for the beating of Rodney King in 1991 after they had been acquitted in local court.
Still, Kowalski encountered roadblocks from the start. The judge denied his motion to introduce evidence from the Salt Lake murders and the time Franklin reportedly sprayed Mace at the mixed-race couple in Maryland in 1976. Kowalski conceded to the all-white, eight-man, four-woman jury at the outset that there was no eyewitness to the crime and that the murder weapon had never been found, but asserted that there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence and that two prison inmates would testify that Franklin had bragged to them about shooting Vernon Jordan. One of them would say that while watching television coverage of the Atlanta child murders, Franklin expressed approval of killing the Black children. Franklin was “so thoroughly obsessed with a passionate hatred,” Kowalski declared, that “he attempted to take another man’s life.”
Specifically, he hammered, “Franklin shot Vernon E. Jordan because Mr. Jordan is Black and was in the accompaniment of a white woman and because he was using facilities of the Marriott Inn.”
On the second day of the trial, Jordan himself came in to testify, but later conceded he didn’t have much to contribute in his testimony other than to describe the sensation of “sailing through the air and a rather dramatic pain in my back” as the bullet struck him and wondering whether he was dreaming. He said he didn’t even hear the gunshot sound. He repeated that he had no idea who had attacked him or why. “It seemed an eternity as I lay there. It seemed like help would never get there,” he said.
His surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Towles, testified, “I think he was just about as close to dying as one can come without dying,” describing the wound as large enough for him to place his fist in, and how close the bullet came to Jordan’s spinal cord.
Walter White, a supermarket security guard, told the jury he overheard Franklin asking a clerk if President Jimmy Carter was coming to Fort Wayne, and about Jordan’s medical condition. White testified that Franklin told the clerk the shot that hit Jordan “was about perfect. If it had been a little bit different, it would have gotten him just right.”
Mary Howell, a maid at a Fort Wayne motel, identified Franklin as the man she knew as “Joe,” who, a few days before the Jordan shooting, “said he couldn’t understand why the manager would rent rooms to so many Black people,” and that “all the maids should carry a gun to protect ourselves against Black people.”
Steven Thomma, a former newspaper reporter in Fort Wayne, testified to a telephone conversation he had had with Franklin in the Salt Lake County Jail. He said Franklin claimed never to have been in Fort Wayne and that the motel registration cards the prosecution claimed placed him in the city at the time of the shooting were forgeries meant to frame him because of his racist views. Franklin did admit to selling a .30-06 rifle after placing a classified ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Peggy Lane, an Enquirer reporter, said she had come across the ad run on June 7 and 8, 1980. She traced the phone number listed to a motel in Florence, Kentucky, the suburb where Franklin was first arrested and escaped the police station.
Robert Herrera, Franklin’s former jailhouse neighbor who’d provoked so much anger from the defendant when he testified at Franklin’s federal trial in Salt Lake City—where he’d been found guilty of having violated the civil rights of Ted Fields and David Martin III—testified that Franklin admitted to the shooting in “Fort Something, Indiana.” As with the earlier trial, the strength of Herrera’s testimony came with something of a “jailhouse snitch” caveat: although he said he wanted nothing in return for his time on the stand except a letter to the parole board, it came out that on another case, he was paid for his testimony.
Another witness to take the stand against Franklin was a white supremacist named Frank Abbott Sweeney. Back in the general population at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Franklin and Sweeney befriended each other. Franklin was impressed that Sweeney had once served in the Rhodesian army, which had been one of Franklin’s aspirations, where he dreamed of killing Black people at will. According to what Sweeney later reported, Franklin told him of his exploits traveling around the country targeting African Americans. He said he would sometimes venture into Black neighborhoods to scout them out wearing an Afro wig and blackface. Knowing Franklin’s predilection for committing his crimes at a distance, I suspected he stayed in his car on such occasions and never got close enough for anyone to see how ridiculous his disguise must have looked. When Sweeney was paroled, he contacted the Cincinnati Police Department. Investigators were wary of him and his racial views but were apparently impressed that he felt killing the two teens in Cincinnati went too far.
On the stand, Sweeney related how Franklin had told him about shooting someone important in Indiana.
“Vernon Jordan?”
“Yes,” Sweeney said Franklin confirmed. “ ‘I shot him, but he wouldn’t die. I’m sorry that I didn’t shoot the white slut first.’ ” He further stated Franklin had told him no one had seen him shoot Jordan and that they couldn’t tie him to the murder weapon because he “got rid of the piece.”
Under cross-examination, Sweeney admitted that prosecutors promised to write a favorable letter for him to his parole board in Newark, New Jersey, but denied he had been paid anything for his testimony. He said he didn’t need the money because he had recently inherited $250,000.
Franklin’s defense attorney scored a point when he got one of the government’s final witnesses, Lawrence Hollingsworth, to admit that his memory of Franklin confessing to shooting Jordan while he and Franklin were both in the Salt Lake County Jail had been “improved,” or, as Franklin’s court-appointed attorney J. Frank Kimbrough put it, “tainted,” by hypnosis. Hollingsworth had related that while both men were watching a television documentary about the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Franklin bragged that “he shot or killed someone named Jordan.”
The fact that Hollingworth was serving time for arson and jury tampering didn’t help matters.
With the jury out of the courtroom, Kimbrough moved for a mistrial on the grounds of the “tainted” evidence. Judge Sharp, who had alre
ady demonstrated his strict commitment to fairness and objectivity when he admonished the prosecution about retrying previous convictions, turned down the request, stating, “It is not the job of a trial judge to sort through and weigh the evidence. The jurors are the judges of the facts.”
That is legally and procedurally true. But testimony from inmates, otherwise known as jailhouse informants or jailhouse snitches, is one of the most problematic areas of trial evidence. Brandon Garrett, a distinguished law professor and author, now at the Duke University School of Law, names it as one of the five common reasons for wrongful convictions—along with false confessions, junk science, ineffective counsel, and bad judging. The issue is a double-edged sword. In many instances, other inmates are the only ones who would get to hear a confession if it was not shared with detectives. But it is undeniable that many informants do so to make a favorable impression on the authorities regarding their own legal situations. Therefore, their testimony is almost always to some degree suspect, and juries can have a difficult time separating fact from self-serving invention. The mere fact that a prisoner may have something to gain from his testimony does not nullify it. But every prosecutor knows that the jury will subject that kind of witness to special scrutiny.
Also outside the jury’s presence, Sharp unsealed a motion Franklin had filed asking him to bar Jewish reporters from the courtroom because Jews controlled the mass media and had waged a “campaign of lies and slander” against him. Among his charges was that Jewish journalists had spread “race equality and other communist propaganda.” Franklin wasn’t a deep thinker, but he certainly was consistent. Not surprisingly, Judge Sharp rejected his motion.
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