Dance of the Reptiles (23 page)

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 consistently 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.

Then they went national, and that’s when the circus started—the wailing Bible-thumpers, the goofballs with their homemade crucifixes, the pious anti-abortion lobby and their rabidly misinformed bloggers.

Close behind were politicians on the scent of votes and money. “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating [it],” said a memo sent last weekend to Senate Republicans, who then passed the bill that recycled the Schiavo case once more through the courts.

Topping the list of shameless exploiters is House Speaker and shakedown king Tom DeLay, who’s already touting the Schiavo crusade to raise legal funds in advance of a possible unrelated indictment by Texas prosecutors.

DeLay is highly selective with his compassion. He recently voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, which would adversely affect millions of needy patients who, unlike Schiavo, actually have a chance to recover.

Next among the hypocrites is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a doctor who knows better. But he so badly wants to be president that he couldn’t pass up a chance to ingratiate himself with evangelical church leaders.

As a lawyer, our own freshman Sen. Mel Martinez also knew the inevitable outcome. Yet he had no qualms about floating false hope for Schiavo’s parents in exchange for scoring a few brownie points with the right-to-lifers.

All this was staged with blithe disdain for the judicial process, which isn’t surprising. The Bush administration loves to bad-mouth judges. How fitting that some of those who ruled in Michael Schiavo’s favor were appointed by the president’s own father.

The whole thing was one of the most cynical charades in memory. From the Congress to the White House to the state-house, they all got their piece of Terri Schiavo.

By the time this column appears, she might be gone, but you can be sure that the politicians and the zealots they’re courting will never let this poor woman die.

Even when she’s dead.

June 12, 2005

In Gitmo, Diet Rich in Carbs, Lean on Rights

To rebuff accusations that the United States is running a “gulag” at its Guantánamo Bay naval base, the Pentagon last week revealed that it’s spending $12.68 per day to feed each of the 520 detainees at the controversial Camp Delta prison.

The Gitmo Diet includes whole-wheat bagels, fresh fruit, baklava, yams, veggie patties, and nearly 10 pounds of halal-certified meat every month for the Muslim inmates. The menu was made public to reassure the Islamic world and
concerned Americans that the Guantánamo facility isn’t such a bad place, compared to other lockups.

Nutritionally, that certainly seems true. The $12.68 spent on each detainee’s daily meals at Camp Delta is about five times what it costs to feed a prisoner in Florida. On the other hand, all prisoners in Florida get a few things that the Guantánamo inmates do not. For starters, they get charged with an actual crime.

Then they get a lawyer.

Then they get a day in court and an opportunity to defend themselves.

In lieu of indictments, the Camp Delta detainees are served bagels and fruit salad. There’s reason to believe that many would gladly trade their healthy breakfast for a good old-fashioned American trial.

Most were rounded up during the U.S. military incursion into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Classified as “enemy combatants,” they’ve been sitting behind razor wire in Cuba for more than three years. Few, if any, have been charged with a crime.

That—not dietary issues—was the main reason that former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Joseph Biden, and the respected columnist Thomas Friedman all recently urged President Bush to close down Camp Delta. Its existence has become an incendiary propaganda weapon for radical Muslim factions—a symbol for what is seen as American harshness and hypocrisy.

Recent allegations that the Koran was being desecrated by military personnel at the prison ignited deadly riots abroad. Only five incidents of “mishandling” of the holy text by Guantánamo staff were confirmed by the Pentagon, but the report has done little to quell emotions in the Mideast.

The administration reacted sharply when Amnesty International
described the Gitmo detention facility as “the gulag of our times.” While living conditions are infinitely better than those of the old Soviet labor camps, there’s one ugly similarity: the indefinite and distant imprisonment of persons with no legal recourse.

Siberia is a lot closer to Moscow than Cuba is to Kabul. The Guantánamo prison, said Amnesty’s Irene Khan, “is a disgrace to American values and international law.”

Preposterously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says our justice system—the most advanced in the world—can’t handle the sort of cases to be found at Guantánamo and other secret military prisons established since 9/11.

It’s all part of the administration’s ongoing efforts to white-out parts of the Constitution in the name of fighting terror. Even the U.S. Supreme Court couldn’t stomach the Pentagon’s position that Camp Delta, being in Cuba, was exempt from judicial review. Last summer the justices ruled that Gitmo inmates can legally challenge their detentions. Since then, more than 550 military tribunals have been held.

Many detainees are denying having terrorist sympathies, and some have complained of abuse by American guards. The Pentagon says that the prisoners, from 40 countries, are mostly Taliban or Al Qaeda supporters. It would be comforting to believe that everyone was a dangerous terrorist whose jailing has made the world safer, but that’s not true. Innocent persons have languished at Camp Delta, evidenced by the fact that the United States has started shipping home inmates who it has finally decided didn’t belong there. And if those guys didn’t hate our guts before we put them in a cell, they probably do now.

The Pentagon’s assertion that the detainees are providing valuable intelligence is increasingly shaky. Somebody who’s been locked away for three years isn’t likely to know Osama
bin Laden’s cellular number or much else that’s currently going on in the Al Qaeda underground. It’s ludicrous for the United States to present itself as the model of a free and fair society while maintaining internment camps where foreign prisoners are presumed guilty without trial.