A Brief History
July 7, 2012
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‘Papers, Please’
July 7, 2012
This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
The newsroom in Georgetown, Texas, was grim, lonely and sparsely populated on Friday nights in October 2011.
But reporter Andrew McLemore, kept company by the occasional beer and his editor at the Williamson County Sun, Ben Trollinger, worked until the early hours of Saturday mornings editing and revising, determined to answer the overriding question for Williamson County: How could such a serious miscarriage of justice have occurred?
How could an innocent man spend 25 years in prison, wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife?
“The idea of getting to work on a story like this was thrilling from the get-go,” says the 25-year-old McLemore of the chance to cover the story of Christine Morton’s murder, a crime that left her husband Michael Morton languishing in jail for a quarter of a century.
The Williamson County Sun is a 10,000-circulation, biweekly newspaper in a county north of Austin often referred to as Wilco. McLemore had been a reporter at the paper for about a year when he began working on this story. He says having the chance to report on the case “was as great of an opportunity as I could have possibly asked for.”
His 17,000-word-plus, three-part series that ran in October 2011, “Until Proven Innocent,” won this year’s Livingston Award for local reporting. Livingston Awards are given to journalists under 35. McLemore left the Sun earlier this year and has been reporting for the Fort Worth Weekly since March.
A bit of background: Michael Morton was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife. The murder was sexual in nature and brutally horrific. Although the crime was discovered much earlier in the day on August 13, 1986, Morton did not find out something was wrong until he went to pick up the couple’s three-year-old son from daycare that afternoon. When he found out his son had never been dropped off, Michael immediately called home – a call that was answered by then-Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell.
Six weeks after his wife’s death, Morton was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. After his conviction, which took jurors less than two hours to decide, Morton waged a 25-year campaign to establish his innocence. DNA evidence is what ultimately exonerated Morton in 2011 and linked another man, Mark Alan Norwood, to the murder.
The Livingston Award announcement says McLemore’s reporting “showed the guilty verdict was accomplished when evidence gathered by the lead investigator was withheld by the prosecuting attorney’s office.”
Morton’s defense team says then-District Attorney Ken Anderson and his fellow prosecutors did not make available any exculpatory evidence – evidence favorable to the defendant.
McLemore wrote in the series, “Prosecutors are required by law to hand over any exculpatory evidence to the defense, regardless of whether or not they believe in its veracity. If the additional evidence wasn’t in that file, that means [Judge William] Lott never had the chance to rule on it, defense attorneys never had the chance to review it and jurors never had the chance to consider it.”
Although not the DA at the time of the trial, Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley lost reelection in May¯ largely, many think, because of his stance against the DNA testing of a crucial piece of evidence, a bloody blue bandanna found about 300 feet from the Morton’s home.
McLemore says he began covering the case for the Sun in August 2011, when “bombshell” DNA test results in the case were revealed: The DNA on the bloody blue bandanna did not match Morton’s, and instead connected Norwood to the crime. McLemore says Bradley fought against releasing Morton immediately, arguing it was still possible that he had killed his wife.
When Norwood’s DNA was linked to another case – the murder of a woman named Debra Baker – in September 2011, Morton was released from prison on bond…
There are times when Cairo’s Tahrir Square still evokes a revolutionary spirit, when crowds pack every corner and their unified shouts shake the surrounding buildings. Exactly such a moment came two Sundays ago, when Farouk Sultan, the chief of the Presidential Election Commission (PEC), announced that Muhammad Mursi had won the Egyptian presidency. Tahrir swelled as full as it had been since the final days of the revolution 16 months ago, and it throbbed with celebratory fever.
But on most other days, Tahrir Square is something else. The piles of trash are unavoidable, women are few, and there are almost as many Spongebob Squarepants T-shirts for sale as there are Egyptian flags. And politically, Tahrir has become a bureaucratic battleground. Political foot soldiers have filled the square over the last few weeks, carrying out the multilevel power struggle now under way between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Following Sultan’s announcement, workers dismantled the massive stage and by Monday traffic was flowing normally (by Cairo standards, at least) through Tahrir Square. Mursi’s formal ascension to the presidency is bringing a temporary shift in Brotherhood tactics, away from ground zero of the revolution and into the courthouses for judicial proceedings and back rooms for private negotiations. As a consequence, the emotional and strategic meaning of Tahrir Square has partially faded from its recent glory. For anyone who participated in the revolution, the vast public expanse will forever inspire memories of hope and triumph. But many of those revolutionaries have spent the last year slowly falling out of love with the place and what it has become.
The spirited and progressive mix that flooded the square throughout the revolution — secularists, Islamists, women, all peacefully together — is a token of a fondly remembered past. The crowds during the most recent two-week occupation were mostly Islamist and male, basically a combination of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, along with a few prominent secular revolutionary groups such as the April 6 Movement. Thanks to a combination of exhaustion with street politics, disillusionment with the progress of the revolution, and antipathy toward the Brotherhood, many of the original revolutionaries are fed up and no longer show their support on the street.
The fault lines in Tahrir Square reflect the divisions that emerged during the presidential runoff. The non-Islamist revolutionary contingent noisily split into three camps — boycotters, deliberate vote spoilers, and those who voted for Mursi only to prevent the Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq from winning. Many of those boycotters and vote spoilers have felt no particular urge to become pawns in a Tahrir-based chess match between the Brotherhood and the SCAF. Many wish, in fact, for a way both sides could lose.
Some argue that reluctance to rally is a strategic error, a decision that lacks political maturity. “Some traditional Tahrirists feel that the square is now owned by the Brotherhood,” says Wael Khalil, a socialist activist who backed Mursi in Tahrir and urged his compatriots to do the same. “It’s silly for some revolutionaries to say, ‘This is the [Brotherhood's] game to play.’” For Khalil, Mursi’s victory proved that Tahrir — and by proxy, street politics in general — is still relevant. As the vote counting dragged on for days, the Brotherhood rallied its forces to stage an open-ended sit-in, which served as a warning to the PEC to refrain from rigging the contest. “Tahrir is still a symbol of the struggle,” Khalil says. “It will remain as our assembly hall.”
Khalil makes it clear that his support for Mursi is conditional on the new president’s policies. For him and many others, the president will be operating with very little margin for error. If the Brotherhood does come to some sort of power-sharing accommodation with the military, as many expect, Tahrir Square could fill up again with protests calling for a plague on both houses…
DeeDee Trotter was on an airplane in 2006 when she overheard a passenger seated behind her discussing the steroids scandal. Federal investigators in the Balco case, named for a lab that produced supplements, would eventually implicate more than two dozen athletes for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, including Barry Bonds, baseball’s home run king, and Marion Jones, the track-and-field star, who would end up in jail, stripped of five Olympic medals.
“This guy was reading the newspaper and he said, ‘Oh, they’re all on drugs,’” recalls Trotter, a runner who won a gold medal in the 4 x 400 meter relay at the 2004 Olympics. She was furious. “I turned around and said, ‘Hey—excuse me, I’m sorry, but that’s not true. I’m a professional athlete and Olympic gold medalist, and I’m not on drugs. I’ve never even considered it.’ ” Currently vying to join the U.S. team and appear in her third Olympics, Trotter projects a sassy confidence. “It really upset me that it’s perceived that way—that if she runs fast, then she’s on drugs. I hated that and I gave him a little attitude.”
That airplane conversation prompted Trotter to create a foundation called Test Me, I’m Clean! “It gave us clean athletes a chance to defend ourselves,” says Trotter. “If you see someone wearing this wristband”—she holds up a rubbery white bracelet emblazoned with the group’s name—“it means that I am a clean athlete. I do this with hard work, honesty and honor. I don’t take any outside substances.”
As Trotter tells me this story, I catch myself wondering if it’s all just a bunch of pre-emptive PR. It pains me to react this way, but with doping scandals plaguing the past three Summer Olympics and nearly every disgraced athlete insisting, at least initially, that he or she is innocent, it’s hard to take such protestations at face value.
My most profound disillusionment came from a one-time friend, Tyler Hamilton, my teammate on the University of Colorado cycling team. When he won a gold medal in the time trial at the 2004 Olympics, I was thrilled to see someone I’d admired as honest and hardworking reach the top of a sport that had been plagued by doping scandals. But in the days that followed, a new test implicated Hamilton for blood doping. His supporters began hawking “I Believe Tyler” T-shirts, and he took donations from fans to fund his defense. The evidence against him seemed indisputable, but the Tyler I knew in college was not a cheat or liar. So I asked him straight-out if he was guilty. He looked me in the eye and told me he didn’t do it. Last year, after being subpoenaed by federal investigators, Hamilton finally confessed and returned his medal.
The downfall of Olympic heroes has cast a cloud of suspicion over sports. And the dopers’ victims aren’t just the rivals from whom they stole their golden podium moments but every clean athlete whose performance is greeted with skepticism.
Doping, or using a substance to enhance performance, is nothing new. Contrary to romantic notions about the purity of Olympic sports, ancient Greeks ingested special drinks and potions to give them an edge, and at the 1904 Games, athletes downed potent mixtures of cocaine, heroin and strych- nine. For most of Olympic history, using drugs wasn’t considered cheating. Then, in the 1960 Olympics, Danish cyclist Knut Jensen passed out during a race, cracked his skull and later died. The coroner blamed the death on amphetamines, and the case led to anti-doping rules. Drug testing began with the 1968 Games, with a goal to protect athlete health. In addition to short-term damage, certain drugs also appear to increase the risk of heart disease and possibly cancer.
The original intent of anti-doping rules was to prevent athletes from dropping dead of overdoses, but over the years the rules have come to focus just as intently on protecting the integrity of the Games. The complex task of upholding the standards falls to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its American counterpart, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), established in 1999 and 2000, respectively. These agencies oversee drug testing and work with Olympic organizers to manage testing at the Games.
Previously, testing was carried out by the U.S. Olympic Committee and cases were judged by each sport’s governing body. But governing bodies promote their sports, solicit sponsorship money and help deliver the astounding performances that fans crave. No sport wanted a dirty reputation, and officials were reluctant to tarnish their stars. Though performance-enhancing drugs were prohibited, in some sports the ban was treated the same way many drivers view speed limits—go ahead and speed, just don’t get caught…
View From The Left
July 7, 2012
This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
View From The Right
July 7, 2012
This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
