And sometimes, like the man from the Galilee put to death on the cross of Tiberius, they are innocent.
My father explains to me that AG Speaker had his move well planned out. On the last day of Gov. Shafer’s administration, on January 19, 1971, Gov. Milton Shapp was sworn in.
Gov. Shapp appointed J. Shane Creamer, of Philadelphia, to be his attorney general. But the appointment would have no legal effect until the state senate confirmed Creamer more than a week later, and he was sworn in. Like that alert lawyer of Kurt Vonnegut’s description, Fred Speaker realized that in this transaction between two governors’ administrations, Speaker would still be attorney general with all the powers of the office -- though neither Governor Shafer nor Shapp could control him or would have to take political responsibility for his actions.
So on the day of Gov. Shapp’s inauguration, my father got into a car to take a ride with Attorney General Fred Speaker. The New York Times later recounted it like this:
“Biding his time until the day in January 1971 when Governor Shafer was replaced by a Democrat, Milton J. Shapp, Mr. Speaker, who was planning to drive to Washington with a friend (my father), listened on the car radio until the new Governor had been sworn in.
“Then, mindful that he would be Attorney General until his successor had been approved by the State Senate and sworn in, he got out of the car and mailed an official letter to the Rockville prison warden, ordering him to dismantle the electric chair and citing an accompanying legal opinion he had signed declaring the death penalty unconstitutional as ‘cruel and inhuman punishment.’”
Fred Speaker didn’t stop there. What really screwed up the works was that he ordered the prison warden to convert the death chamber to office space. AG Speaker’s Opinion and directive to Warden Joseph Mazurkiewicz read, in part:
“You are directed to remove the Electric Chair from the Execution Room at Rockview State Correctional Institution and begin conversion of the room into an office.
“This is another step toward a more rational and humane correctional policy and is intended to build upon the verbal instructions previously given you not to hire a new Public Executioner.
“These steps can be justified purely on the basis of economy. There have been no executions during the past two Administrations, and public pronouncements by Governor Shapp indicate that no electrocutions will be permitted in the foreseeable future. Because of the critical need for additional office space and because of the continued irrational expense of paying an inactive Executioner, sound management principles would indicate the wisdom of this decision.”
AG Speaker continued to the warden,
“But I am not content to base this directive on economics alone. I am convinced that the imposition of the death penalty constitutes ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution and perhaps is one of the ‘cruel punishments’ proscribed by Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights.”
AG Speaker cited the legal grounds for his opinion, but then provided an eyewitness account of an execution from no less a witness than a state Supreme Court Justice:
“Can anyone read the description of an electrocution by former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Curtis Bok and believe that savagely inflicted lingering death not to be ‘inhuman and barbarous’?
“’He started, painfully and uncertainly, to lower himself into the chair, but now the guards were swift. They lifted him deep into the seat and adjusted the electrodes at calves and wrists.
“’Then they fastened a thick belt across his chest and lowered over his head the heavy wired leather mask.
“’It hid all but the tip of his nose and his lips. He was making efforts to quiet them by biting his tongue, the best that he could do, against his racing mind and heart, to keep control and to sit erect . . .
“The guards stepped back. The Warden, who had stood by with arm raised, lowered his hand. It had taken a minute and thirty-seven seconds.
“’There was a low whine and a short loud snap, as of huge teeth closing.
“’Roger’s head flew back and his body leaped forward against the confining straps. Almost at once smoke arose from his head and left wrist and was sucked up into the ventilator overhead. The body churned against the bonds, the lips ceased trembling and turned red, then slowly changed to blue. Moisture appeared on the skin and a sizzling noise was audible. The smell of burning flesh grew heavy in the air.
“’Roger was being broiled.
“’The current went off with a distinct clap after about two minutes and Roger slumped back into his seat, his head hanging. No one moved. Then came the second jolt and again the body surged against the restraining straps and smoke rose from it. The visible flesh was turkey red.
“’Again the current slammed off and this time the doctor stepped forward to listen, but he moved back again and shook his head. Apparently Roger still clung faintly to life.
“’The third charge struck him, and again the smoking and sizzling and broiling. His flesh was swelling around the straps.
“’The doctor listened carefully and raised his head.
“’”I pronounce this man dead,” he said, folding up his stethoscope. It was seven minutes after Roger had been seated in the chair.” (Bok, Star Wormwood, 114-15 (1959).)
AG Speaker concluded by stating his honest intent and conscience to the warden,
“This directive is intended to constitute both an administrative order to you as an employee of the Justice Department and a formal opinion of the Attorney General. It is intentionally issued during that brief period after the termination of Governor Shafer’s incumbency but before I leave office as Attorney General. The Administrative Code of April 9, 1929, P. L. 177, gives the Attorney General the power to furnish legal advice, imposes the duty to comply upon Commonwealth departments and officers, and provides that he remains in office until a successor is ‘appointed and qualified.’ It is, openly and candidly, an attempt on my part to reach into the future.
“I believe deeply that our practice of killing criminals is both a disgusting indecency and demeaning to the society that tolerates it. In conscience I am compelled to speak out and to do what I can to stop it.
“The Death Room is an obscenity. Hopefully legislation to abolish the death penalty will be enacted this year. In the meantime I am unwilling to leave intact, as I depart my office, a cruel instrument of public vengeance.
Sincerely, Fred Speaker, Attorney General.”
As I was myself the occasional object of Fred Speaker’s good-natured elbow into my ever-slouching young back, I have some idea what he meant when he writes that he often attempted to “reach into the future.” I’m trying to give you a sense of the man.
AG Speaker’s Opinion rendering the death penalty unconstitutional would be rescinded just eight days later by his newly confirmed successor, state Attorney General J. Shane Creamer, in his Official Opinion No. 1, signed on January 28, 1971. Creamer was a former federal attorney with Robert Kennedy and then worked in the Nixon administration under John Mitchell.
“Although philosophically I agree with Mr. Speaker’s position on capital punishment, this remains with me a personal view and one which cannot influence my judgment,” Creamer interestingly says in his own opinion. “If the death penalty in Pennsylvania is to be abolished at this time, such action should be taken, either by the Legislature by repeal or by a court of competent jurisdiction declaring the death penalty unconstitutional.”
Legal briefs are easy enough to write, taking only a few hours or days, if that, to type out and file. A man’s life can be ended in a quick pen stroke. The real kibosh to the death system in Pennsylvania came because AG Speaker thought to order the death chamber converted into prison office space.
The old death room in Rockview already had been remade into the new offices of the prison psychologist. A bureaucrat is a lot harder to kill than a condemned man. As Fred Speaker and my father
knew all too well, once you move those bureaucrats into a space with their filing cabinets, where all those legal papers are stored, they are mighty damn hard to displace. The paperwork is harder to kill than a man. Even the new AG had to admit in his opinion, “no useful purpose would be served by reinstalling the (electric) chair.” While the political and court arguments over capital punishment would drag on for years, Pennsylvania would accordingly have no working death chamber again for the rest of the decade, if not longer.
All this is to again point out something that every state attorney general knows: There may be a thousand ways to skin a cat, but there are a 1,001 ways to protect a cat. It all depends on where your heart is, and what you want to do with the office and its powers. It depends mightily on priorities.
In his account, Mr. Thomas, The New York Times reporter, points out, “Partly because there had been no executions in Pennsylvania since 1962, it was a largely symbolic gesture. Indeed, his ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional was quickly rescinded by the new Governor, but by then the electric chair had in fact been dismantled and the death chamber converted to an office for prison psychologists.”
What Thomas doesn’t realize is that one of the reasons there had been no executions in Pennsylvania since 1962 was that my father had made it his mission to demolish the arguments of the lawyer sent to brief Gov. Bill Scranton about pending death warrants. And it was my father in the car with AG Speaker the day they, as still-young men, mailed off the letter to disassemble the chair. Draw your own conclusions.
AG Speaker thought about his plan and carried it out very carefully, my father recently told me. He did it between the administrations as he thought it would have been wrong of him to saddle the problem or his own convictions on either of the two governors.
Calamitous Shapp years bring an end to the appointed AG
After Fred Speaker’s tenure, a true calamity would befall the appointed office of Pennsylvania Attorney General. The calamity was arguably a man named Milton Shapp.
Milton Shapp served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1979. He was a self-made millionaire who made his money as a pioneer in the cable television business. Cutting corners in the cable business in Philadelphia made Shapp his fortune, but it turned out to be a bad idea for government. Shapp was a bright man whose heart was in the right place. But he was a terrible judge of horse flesh. Many of his appointments were bad. Some were outright criminals. His administration would be riddled with corruption.
Right from the gate, as he was sworn into office, Shapp sought major changes in the role of the state office of attorney general. Gov. Shapp’s appointment of J. Shane Creamer as his attorney general, Shapp wrote, was meant to change the sleepy and amiable state Justice Department into a “Public Interest Law Firm.” The state AG would no longer be just “The Governor’s Lawyer.”
“We will be aggressive in our attempts to move constructive forces for positive social change,” AG Creamer announced at his appointment in 1971.
One of the biggest yet not-so-noticed changes under AG Creamer would be that the attorney general’s office would physically relocate from its close proximity to the governor in the governor’s suite in the main capitol building to a separate building next to the rotunda on the capitol grounds.
The AG no longer would be close to the governor’s side, hour-by-hour, day-by-day.
Former AG Sennett recalls that he ran into AG Creamer shortly after the latter moved his office and staff to their own building outside the governor’s office.
“I asked Shane why he’d moved the office,” Sennett recounts, “and didn’t he miss no longer being in the thick of things?”
“I have a different sort of relationship to this guy,” he says AG Creamer said of Gov. Shapp.
AG Creamer, in fact, wouldn’t last long.
Despite Shapp’s good intentions, under his administration the state attorney general’s office quickly got bigger and, by most accounts, far worse, and far more political.
Ever-growing and outrageous corruption, and what was increasingly seen as Gov. Shapp’s blatant political misuse of the office of attorney general to cover up these misdeeds, would by the end of his terms spell the demise of the appointed state attorney general, and would directly lead to the elective office of AG that plagues Pennsylvania today.
The exact amount of corruption in the administration of Gov. Milton Shapp remains a matter of controversy. It depends on who is counting, and what they’re counting.
In their book A History of Pennsylvania, Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom write, “Corruption penetrated all levels of government in Pennsylvania. David Runkle of the Philadelphia Bulletin calculated 238 Pennsylvania public officials from 1970 to May 1978 were convicted of, admitted to, or pleaded no contest to charges of corruption.”
Paul Beers, in his book Pennsylvania Politics Today and Yesterday, counts it this way: “In eight Shapp years, seven lawmakers and 11 high party officials were convicted.” Beers writes, “The dismal facts could not be ignored.”
Most prominent to fall, in Shapp’s own cabinet, was Frank Hilton, secretary of property and supplies. Hilton would be convicted of extorting $74,000 from a New York insurance company. Sec. Hilton was also reputed to pocket payoffs in a parking garage near the state capitol. Under Gov. Shapp, even the state’s top cops were drawn into the politics of corruption. Several of Shapp’s state police commissioners went down in clouds of suspicion.
Charges of internal corruption involving a state police commissioner quickly cost Shapp’s AG Creamer his job. Attorney General Creamer in late 1972 accused state troopers working under State Police Commissioner Rocco Urella of tapping the telephones of investigators working for the state’s independent Crime Commission.
The state Crime Commission has a pertinent yet short-lived role in our story. Gov. Ray Shafer and the legislature created the Crime Commission in October 1968. The Crime Commission, Gov. Shafer said, “should function as an independent, non-partisan watchdog empowered to investigate serious crime wherever it exists in Pennsylvania.” Organized crime would be a subject of its investigations, but any systemic crime, including political corruption, fell within its portfolio.
The Crime Commission was hobbled from the start. It would have subpoena power, but no ability to file charges. It would inform, not indict. Still, corrupt elements in the state police and the AG’s office were never happy with the existence of this third, independent law enforcement body. The AG and the state police commissioner would have a seat on its board, but neither would control it. It was a loose spanner in a broken political machine.
When the Crime Commission was only four years old, in November 1972, AG Creamer accused State Police Commissioner Urella of ordering state troopers to tap the phones of Crime Commission investigators. Commissioner Urella denied the accusations. The controversy spilled into the newspapers.
Gov. Shapp characteristically responded to the flap in one fell swoop over the New Year’s holiday of 1973 by forcing AG Creamer to resign and firing State Police Commissioner Urella. AG Creamer had also been chairman of the Crime Commission’s five-member panel, while Urella had been one of the other five members.
To protest AG Creamer’s sacking, the three remaining members of the Crime Commission board, including former AG William Sennett, resigned. The three resigning members sent Gov. Shapp a telegram stating they’d quit “in view of the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Atty. Gen. J. Shane Creamer.” They wrote the governor, “in good conscience we believe we can no longer continue to serve on the Pennsylvania Crime Commission and do hereby submit our resignations.”
They as much accused the governor of misusing the office of state attorney general for political ends. But Shapp didn’t blink.
To replace the resigning members of the Crime Commission, Gov. Shapp appointed three new, usual suspects, including former Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilsworth -- Bill Scranton’s old opponent. “It’s all whitewash,
Mayor Dillworth, all whitewash.”
This New Year’s Day massacre set the dynamic for much of what was to come in the remaining six years of the Shapp administration.
State Police Commissioner Urella’s replacement, James Barger, would himself before long be forced out in a scandal involving the falsification of drunk driving records of state troopers.
We begin to discern a pattern: If you can’t eliminate the corruption, it’s important to make the reports of the corruption go away.
Back in the 1970s, as corruption grew around Gov. Milton Shapp, his office of attorney general became a revolving door. One AG appointee and special prosecutor after another would be seen as a political operative meant to either protect the governor or to do the governor’s political dirty work.
Soon growing numbers of the governor’s staff and his prominent friends in the leadership of the legislature -- including the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Finance Committee Chairman -- were ensnared in charges of corruption. In response, the state AG’s office became a tool used to prevent investigations.
Everyone knew it was pointless to expect a Shapp-appointed attorney general to investigate anything.
It became an open butt of jokes. The story goes that Gov. Shapp himself had a punch line so good that he could tell it at press conferences and shake the room with laughter.
“I’m turning this matter over to my attorney general,” Shapp would say, deadpan.
“Though personally honest, Shapp must be held responsible for the rampant corruption during his administration,” Klein and Hoogenboom sum up in A History of Pennsylvania. “He both tolerated misdeeds and failed to set a good example. Placing friends and relations on the public payroll, he demanded neither efficiency nor high ethical standards, nor was he outraged by those betraying his trust.”
JoePa Takes the Fall Page 10