Former death row inmate fights to avoid return trip to prison
Posted on 07/05/2005 3:49:01 PM PDT by BillyBoy
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
By Mike Robinson
The Associated Press
Aaron Patterson walked out of prison two years ago, a free man with a pardon from Gov. George Ryan and a chance to start fresh.
But the happy ending never came for Patterson, whose story of torture by police and long years on death row helped to launch an emotional campaign against the death penalty in Illinois.
These days, the 40-year-old Patterson sits glumly in a federal jail awaiting the start of jury selection today in a drug and firearms trial that could hand him a return trip to prison.
And chances are, Patterson won't even be allowed to sit in the courtroom for his own trial but instead will have to watch on closed-circuit TV from the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
"I'm concerned that he could very well poison the proceedings," U.S. District Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer said of Patterson, who was hustled out of the courtroom by husky federal marshals Friday following a series of angry, leather-lunged outbursts laced with profanity.
"Mr. Patterson has been unable or unwilling to conform his behavior to the standards of the court," said Pallmeyer after what has become a pattern of outbursts by Patterson in court.
The case is attracting attention because atterson was prominent among four former death row inmates who were pardoned by Ryan in one of his last acts in office in 2003. A day later he commuted the sentences of all 160 other death row inmates to life in prison without parole.
Patterson insisted that he was tortured by police into confessing to a double murder he did not commit. His claims have been echoed by dozens of others and are now under investigation by a special prosecutor. The head of the unit that investigated his case, Lt. Jon Burge, was later fired for allegedly mistreating a suspect.
Ryan's actions drew harsh criticism from prosecutors but were warmly applauded by opponents of the death penalty, who nominated the former governor for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the cheering for both Patterson and Ryan has long since faded.
The former governor is facing a racketeering indictment, and federal prosecutors are asking the judge — who by coincidence is Pallmeyer — to bar his lawyers from using his moratorium on capital punishment and clearing of death row to try to impress the jury.
They say those things have nothing to do with charges that when Ryan was secretary of state he gave a lobbyist friend free reign to steer major state contracts and leases to his clients.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors Christopher S. Niewoehner and Carrie E. Hamilton say that Patterson emerged from prison to become a leader of the South Side's P. Stones street gang.
The 13-count indictment charges him with brokering heroin sales to a federal informant through an alleged pusher and selling bags of marijuana out of his home. It also charges him with buying four guns, including a MAC-10 machine pistol.
Another alleged gang member, Mark Mannie, is also charged in some of the counts.
Patterson and his defense attorneys, Demitrus T. Evans and Paul Camarena, argue that when he left prison he dedicated his life to rooting out corruption in government and the police force.
They say he was the victim of a set-up arranged by the very people he was investigating.
As for the gun charges, Patterson says that he never meant to buy real guns but wanted the kind of replicas that some people collect. He says a government tape that would prove his claim.
"Play the tape, play the tape," he said repeatedly in hearings leading up to trial.
While defendants in federal trials are supposed to let their lawyers do their talking for them except when they take the witness stand, Patterson's outbursts have been loud and frequent.
They got worse after Pallmeyer turned down a last-minute bid by Patterson to fire Evans and Camarena and serve as his own attorney.
" If you force me to go to trial like that, Your Honor, this is going to be another Chicago 7 trial — they're going to have to tie me to the chair and gag me," he said, recalling the riot conspiracy trial three decades ago following chaos at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Judge Julius J. Hoffman ordered one defendant gagged and tied to his chair.
Rather than do that, Pallmeyer opted for a closed-circuit TV hookup at the correctional center where Patterson will be able to see the judge and witnesses but not be disruptive.
Two defense psychologists testified that Patterson's outbursts show he shouldn't go to trial at all — that he's mentally incompetent and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of torture by Burge. One psychologist, Steve Farmilant, even said that if Patterson were one more notch up on the self-destructiveness scale he should be placed on suicide watch.
But a prosecution psychiatrist, Dr. Stafford C. Henry, testified that Patterson is competent and could control his courtroom outbursts if he wanted to do so.
Competent or not, no one denies that Patterson has serious personality problems following his years on death row.
"He's deeply scarred," says defense attorney Standish E. Willis who worked for years to secure Patterson's release from prison. "And he does need some help."
Someone should do a followup newstory on what happened to the four "innocent" scumbags that Lyin' Ryan freed, we have a raving maniac like Patterson ABOUT to be locked up again and I know for a fact that another one of the "innocent" murderers is ALREADY back on death row. If anything turned out to be "fatally flawed", I'd say it was George Ryan's blanket amnesty.
On the plus side, maybe ol' George and Aaron can be bunkmates in prison next year!
Ladies and Gentleman, this is Exhibit A of what happens when you vote for "electable" RINOs because they "can win"!
Reminds me of my favorite Scalia quotes, from the old "Delicate Balance" series on PBS: Discussion centered on a hypothetical execution of a factually innocent but legally convicted man, whose only salvation lay in the violation of attorney-client privilege. Scalia was in the "follow the rules" camp, where you don't make bad law to get one good result, and opined that he would allow the execution rather than violate the privilege. This outraged the moderator, leading to something like the following exchange:
Moderator: But he didn't do it, and he'll be EXECUTED!
Scalia: Well, at some point, he probably did SOMEthing.
He could well have added, "and he'll probably do something else if you let him go."
Where'd this guy learn to write? What the hell is a "leather-lunged outburst"? The reporter seems to be writing a novel. Then he goes off on a tangent about the potential defense for George Ryan when he goes on trial. Then he ads this bit of nonsense. "Competent or not, no one denies that Patterson has serious personality problems following his years on death row". So he had a sparkling personality before that?
As someone in the Law and Order business, I can testify that the old adage of "once a convict, always a convict" is universally true almost every single time.
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