Emptying of death row in Illinois stirs outrage

Emptying of death row in Illinois stirs outrage Action by governor inflames prosecutors, survivors of victims

CHICAGO - Calling the death penalty process "as capricious and arbitrary as who gets hit by a bolt of lightning," Republican Gov. George Ryan announced Saturday he was clearing Illinois' death row by commuting the death sentences of 156 condemned inmates, a move on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history.

Ryan's action, just two days before he leaves office, drew immediate angry reaction from prosecutors, the incoming governor and relatives of some of the victims.

Ryan said he sympathizes with the families of the men, women and children who were murdered, but he felt he had to act.

"I am not prepared to take the risk that we may execute an innocent person," he wrote in an overnight letter to the victims' families warning them of what he planned.

"Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die," Ryan said Saturday. "What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

"Because of all these reasons, today I am commuting the sentences of all death-row inmates."

All but three of the 156 inmates will now serve life in prison without possibility of parole. The three will get shorter sentences and could eventually be released from prison, though none will get out immediately.

Ryan had halted all executions in the state nearly three years earlier after courts found that 13 Illinois death-row inmates had been wrongly convicted since capital punishment resumed in 1977 - a period when 12 other inmates were executed.

He said studies conducted since that moratorium was issued had only raised more questions about the how the death penalty is imposed. He cited problems with trials, sentencing, the appeals process and the state's "spectacular failure" to reform the system.

"Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," he said.

Other governors have issued similar moratoriums and commutations but nothing on the scale of what Ryan announced.

"The only other thing that would match what he's done is in 1972 (when) the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty and 600 death sentences were reduced to life with that decision," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The most recent blanket clemency came in 1986 when the governor of New Mexico commuted the death sentences of the state's five death-row inmates.

Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, who last year issued the country's only other moratorium on state executions, has no plans to pardon or commute the sentences of any death-row inmate before leaving office Wednesday, spokesman Chuck Porcari said.

Ryan chose Northwestern University - where journalism students investigating Illinois death-row cases helped exonerate some inmates - to publicly announce that he was commuting the 156 death sentences.

Corrections Department spokesman Sergio Molina said Ryan had signed commutation orders for 167 people - 156 on death row and the others in jails awaiting hearings or sentencings for other crimes.

Within a week the department will start moving prisoners out of the state's two condemned units" and into the general population of maximum-security prisons, Molina said.

Vern Fueling, whose son William was shot and killed in 1985 by a man now on death row, was outraged that the killer will be allowed to live.

"My son is in the ground for 17 years, and justice is not done," Fueling said. "This is like a mockery."

Incoming Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, also criticized Ryan's action, calling blanket clemency "a big mistake." Each case should be reviewed individually, Blagojevich said. "You're talking about people who've committed murder."

Ryan on Friday went a step farther in four other death-row cases, issuing pardons for four men he said had been tortured by police into making false confessions.

A few hours later, Aaron Patterson, 38, walked out of prison a free man and ate his first steak dinner in 17 years, while Madison Hobley and Leroy Orange spent time with their families.

Stanley Howard, 40, the fourth man pardoned Friday, remained in prison. He had also been convicted of a separate crime for which he is still serving time. All four had been convicted in murders.

"It's a dream come true, finally. Thank God that this day has finally come," said Hobley, 42, as he left the Pontiac Correctional Center Friday.

Looking a bit dazed, Orange, 52, walked out of Cook County Jail with his two daughters by his side.

"Thank you with all my heart and please do something for the remaining group on death row," he said, addressing Ryan.

Ryan announced the pardons Friday at DePaul University in the first of two speeches capping his three-year campaign to reform the state's capital-punishment system.

Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine said the future of the four men should have been decided by the courts. His office is trying determine if the pardons could be challenged, but Devine said the clemency powers for an Illinois governor are among the broadest in the country.

"Instead, they were ripped away from (the courts) by a man who is a pharmacist by training and a politician by trade," he said. "Yes, the system is broken, and the governor broke it today."

Ollie Dodds, whose 34-year-old daughter, Johnnie Dodds, died in an apartment fire that Hobley was convicted of setting, said she was saddened by Ryan's decision.

"I don't know how he could do it. It's a hurting thing to hear him say something like that," she said, adding that she still believes Hobley is responsible.

Sun Times

Notorious killers get huge break

When Gov. Ryan issued a blanket commutation to every man and woman on Death Row in Illinois, he knowingly spared the lives of some of the most vicious killers in the state's 185-year history.

The governor acknowledged as much Saturday but said that fundamental flaws in the system necessitated his actions.

Here are some of the most infamous killers saved by Ryan:

Danny Edwards

To make the point that he has been personally touched by the horror of murder, Ryan on Saturday described the murder of an old family friend, Kankakee businessman Stephen B. Small, in 1987, in a kidnapping plot.

Danny Edwards, who at the time was a small-time drug dealer and electrician in Kankakee, was found guilty of burying Small alive in a wooden box.

Edwards made an air hole in the box and apparently thought Small could survive for some time while he--Edwards--attempted to extort a $1 million ransom from Small's wealthy family. But Small died within four hours of being buried.

While conceding that the evidence against his client was "overwhelming"--Edwards was seen building the box, and his fingerprints were found inside--defense attorney Thomas Allen expressed surprise at the quick guilty verdict, calling the jury "the coldest I've ever seen."

Henry Brisbon

Brisbon and three other men decided to rob somebody. When they couldn't find the right pedestrian to rob in Kankakee, they drove toward Chicago on Interstate 57. While riding along, they came up with the idea of robbing motorists by staging phony accidents.

One of the killers tricked motorists out of their cars by asking them to inspect minor collision damage, then led them to Brisbon, who brandished the shotgun and robbed and shot them.

Betty Lou Harmon, 29, of suburban Darien, was forced to undress at gunpoint. She ran away, but was caught by Sanders, who led her to Brisbon, who fatally shot her in a field.

An engaged North Side couple, Dorothy Cerny and James Schmidt, both 25, who were returning from a family gathering in Matteson, also were shot to death by Brisbon after being stripped of their valuables.

Brisbon told the couple to "kiss your last kiss" before firing shotgun blasts into their backs as they lay on the side of the highway.

But Brisbon was not on Death Row for the I-57 murders. He was put there because he used a sharpened spoon to kill another inmate while in prison.

Fedell Caffey & Jacqueline Williams

Caffey and Williams decided they wanted a baby. So they stabbed to death a pregnant woman, Debra Evans, in her Addison apartment and cut her nearly full-term fetus from her body, according to prosecutors.

To eliminate witnesses, they also murdered Evans' 10-year-old daughter, Samantha, and 8-year-old son, Joshua.

Another child, Jordan, was spared in the 1995 murder--children under the age of 2 aren't likely to be good witnesses. And the newborn boy also survived.

Fortunately, Jordan's grandfather, Sam Evans, says Jordan has no recollection today of the horrors he witnessed.

Gabriel Solache

In an eerily similar case, little 2-month-old Guadalupe Soto and her toddler brother Santiago had both parents ripped away by vicious killers who wanted to steal a baby in 1998.

One of them was Solache, who agreed to help kill Jacinta and Mariano Soto and snatch the baby so Adriana Mejia could pretend it was hers. Mejia targeted the Bucktown family after seeing Jacinta with the children at a local health clinic. She followed them home on a bus to see where they lived.

Early the next morning, Solache, Mejia and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes surprised the family, stabbing the parents more than 60 times as the sleepy toddler looked on. Mejia and DeLeon-Reyes got life in prison.

Luther Casteel

At JB's Pub in Elgin in 2001, Casteel was booted out for harassing female customers and employees. Roaring drunk and enraged, he shot straight home, shaved his hair into a mohawk and changed into military fatigues, armed himself with several guns and returned to the bar.

Screaming, "I am a natural born killer," he shot bartender Jeffrey Weides and customer Richard Bartlett to death and wounded 16 others before being wrestled to the ground by bar patrons and employees.

At his trial, Casteel almost dared a Kane County jury to impose the death penalty.

"I'm not someone who asks for mercy or pity for my actions," he said during a stunning half hour of testimony. "I have absolutely no fear of anything anyone can put upon me."

Latasha Pulliam

In 1991, 6-year-old Shenosha Richard was playing in her South Side Chicago neighborhood when she was approached by Pulliam and Pulliam's boyfriend, Dwight Jordan. She went with them after they purchased her a bag of chips and promised to take her to a movie.

At Pulliam's apartment, over several hours, Pulliam and Jordan sexually assaulted the girl with a shoe polish applicator and a hammer, and then used the hammer to pulverize her skull, according to prosecutors. Pulliam also beat and strangled the girl.

Attorneys for Pulliam said she was drug-crazed at the time, but a court psychologist described her as "a female John Gacy" who got sexual satisfaction from hurting someone weaker than she.

This particular article has been posted to FR earlier

Death penalty gains unusual defenders

USA TODAY ^ | 1/06/03 | Richard Willing

NEW YORK — Robert Blecker sat quietly as other professors ticked off their reasons for opposing the death penalty: It's unfair to blacks. It doesn't really deter crime. Innocent people could be executed.

But Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, was having none of it. When it was his turn to speak at the recent death-penalty forum at John Jay College, he summed up his support for executions in three words: "Barbara Jo Brown."

Blecker then launched into a staccato description of the 11-year-old Louisiana girl's slaying in 1981, how she was abducted, raped and tortured by a man who later was executed. The story drew gasps from a crowd accustomed to dealing in legal theories and academic formulas. "We know evil when we see it, and it's past time that we start saying so," Blecker said later. "When it comes to the death penalty, too many in academia can't face that."

For years, professors and civil rights leaders have led the charge against the death penalty, raising questions about its fairness that caused two states to suspend executions. But now death-penalty supporters have found some unlikely allies: a small but growing number of professors and social scientists who are speaking out in favor of the ultimate sanction.

Challenging themes that have been the foundation of the anti-death penalty movement, about a dozen professors and social scientists have produced unprecedented research arguing that the penalty deters crime. They also are questioning studies that say it is racially biased, and they are attacking one of the anti-death penalty movement's most effective talking points: that more than 100 people released from death row during the past 30 years were "innocent."

The researchers say that only about a third of those released from death row could show they were innocent of murder, and that the rest were released for other reasons, often legal technicalities. The researchers say that those convicts' names have remained on the "innocent" list to exaggerate the case against the death penalty.

The pro-death penalty researchers are still a tiny minority in U.S. academia, which Blecker guesses is "99%-plus" against executions. But the researchers are changing the nature of the death-penalty debate.

Justice Department lawyers have cited their work in legal briefs defending the death penalty. Republican senators have used the new research to try to stave off proposals to make it more difficult to execute inmates. Some death-penalty supporters, noting that more than two-thirds of Americans back capital punishment, say the research validates the views of a relatively silent majority.

And victims' rights groups that have felt excluded from the debate over executions say the professors give them moral support.

"It's been easy for the media to dismiss (death-penalty supporters) as just a rabble that wants to 'hang 'em all,' " says Dudley Sharp, resource director for Justice For All, a victims' rights group in Houston. "Now we've got research, respectability — things that have always been conceded to the other side. It's more of a real debate."

Some death-penalty foes say the new research is a desperate reaction to successful efforts to stop executions. "If the public wasn't concerned with (the possible execution of) innocents, if courts and the Congress and state legislatures weren't beginning to get involved again, (pro-death penalty academics) wouldn't be noticed," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group in Washington, D.C., that opposes capital punishment.

Fairness of executions questioned

Executions had been declining in the USA for years when states halted them in 1967, in anticipation of a Supreme Court ruling on whether death-penalty laws violated the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment."

The court banned executions in 1972, ruling that the death penalty was being imposed arbitrarily. But the court reinstated the penalty four years later, backing new laws that guided judges and juries in imposing death sentences. Since then, more than 800 killers have been executed in the USA.

Soon after executions resumed, studies suggested that blacks were more likely than whites to receive death sentences, especially when their victims were white. Other studies compared murder rates in the 38 death-penalty states with lower rates in the 12 states that don't have the penalty, and concluded that capital punishment does not deter homicides.

In 1993, a U.S. House of Representatives panel led by a death-penalty foe, Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., found that 68 people had been released from wrongfully imposed death sentences during the previous 20 years. The report was the basis for the list of 102 "innocents" that anti-death penalty groups now promote.

The idea that innocent people had been sent to death rows across the nation was politically potent, and capital punishment foes exploited it. The Edwards list was taken over by the Death Penalty Information Center, which has added to the list 34 death-row inmates who have been exonerated. Among those were 12 who were freed by DNA tests done on evidence years after their convictions.

The center doesn't vouch for the validity of the initial 68 cases. To be added to the center's "innocents" list, a condemned inmate must have his conviction overturned and be acquitted at retrial. Ex-prisoners also are added to the list if prosecutors don't pursue a retrial.

The ongoing campaign against the death penalty has been effective. Analysts say it likely contributed to a dip in the still-strong public support for capital punishment. (Surveys in October said that about 70% of Americans back the death penalty, down from 80% in 1994.)

Meanwhile, the governors of Illinois and Maryland have suspended executions in their states to study whether the death penalty is being imposed fairly.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that states cannot execute killers who are under 18 when they commit their crimes and that juries, not judges, must impose death sentences. In the latter case, Justice Stephen Breyer called studies of the death penalty's impact on deterring crime "inconclusive."

And last July, a U.S. district court judge here declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional, a decision that applied only in his court and that was appealed by the Justice Department. Judge Jed Rakoff based his ruling on research, including the list of 102 "innocents," that he said suggested there is a high risk that inmates could be wrongly executed. A U.S. appeals court panel reversed that ruling on Dec. 10, saying that the matter should be left to the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision, too, is likely to be appealed.

"There's no way to underestimate the importance of the innocence issue," Dieter says. "It's created an irresolvable concern on the part of the public."

How innocent are they?

But how innocent are the "innocents"?

Ward Campbell, a deputy attorney general in California, said in a study last year that at least 68 of the 102 ex-death row inmates on the "innocents" list don't belong there. Campbell says some on the list had their convictions reversed because of prosecutors' errors or misconduct but seem certain to have committed the crimes of which they were convicted. Others avoided retrials or were acquitted because witnesses died, evidence was excluded for legal reasons, or because they were in prison for similar crimes.

In some cases, death sentences were overturned because the convict was an accomplice, not the killer. Campbell found that nine "innocents" were exonerated because courts said the evidence against them was valid but did not establish guilt beyond a "reasonable doubt."

Eight of those on the list were not actually on death row when they were exonerated; two others never received a death sentence, Campbell said. In more than a dozen cases, death sentences were overturned only because later Supreme Court rulings invalidated a state's death-penalty statute.

For Campbell, a recent addition to the list shows the problem with its standards: Larry Osborne was convicted of breaking into a Louisville couple's home in 1997 and killing them. He won a new trial because the conviction was based in part on grand jury testimony from an accomplice who died before Osborne's trial. An appeals court said the testimony should not have been admitted as evidence because Osborne's lawyer could not cross-examine the dead witness. Osborne was acquitted in a second trial. He made the "innocents" list in August.

Dieter says convicts whose sentences have been overturned "truly are innocent, in the legal sense." A spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., sponsor of a bill aimed at eliminating wrongful convictions, says that "quibbling over numbers" misses the point.

"Even the staunchest defenders of the status quo must admit that ... innocent people have been sent to death row," Leahy spokesman David Carle says.

Pro-death penalty professors say the number of innocents does matter.

"The idea that 100 innocent people have just missed execution has undermined the public's confidence" in the death penalty, says Barry Latzer, a political scientist at John Jay College. "If it's substantially fewer, it's not nearly as powerful a story."

Latzer and his colleagues are challenging death-penalty foes on other fronts as well.

John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, acknowledges that African-Americans appear to be overrepresented on death row, where they account for about 42% of the prisoners, compared with about 12% of the U.S. population. (Since 1977, 57% of those executed have been white; 35% have been black.)

McAdams notes the widely held belief that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted in similar slayings. But he says that doesn't take into account that blacks make up nearly 50% of all murder victims, and that all but a few are killed by other blacks. Blacks who kill blacks, he argues, are far less likely to get the death penalty than whites, blacks or Hispanics who kill whites.

"Why are the lives of black victims less valued?" McAdams asks. "There's a subtle kind of racism going on here, and it's got to do with the victims of crime, not how we treat the perpetrators." He realizes that his analysis has a provocative implication: that more black killers should be executed. He favors "more executions generally."

But fellow death-penalty supporter Blecker says that the death penalty should be reserved for the "worst of the worst, the ones almost everyone can agree are worthy."

Death-penalty supporters also say there is plenty of evidence that executions deter homicides.

A study last year by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta examined the nearly 6,000 death sentences imposed in the USA from 1977 through 1996. The authors compared changes in murder rates in 3,000 U.S. counties to the likelihood of being executed for murder in that county. They found that murder rates declined in counties where capital punishment was imposed. The researchers said a statistical formula suggested that each execution saved the lives of 18 potential victims.

Recent studies at the University of Houston and at the University of Colorado at Denver had similar findings. Blecker, who is researching deterrence, says they square with what he found in interviews with 60 killers. "They are cognizant of whether they are operating in a death-penalty state before they pull the trigger," he says. "They're operating in the real world, not the realm of political theory."

To McAdams, the debate over deterrence is unnecessary. "If you execute a murderer and it stops other murders, you've saved innocent lives," he says. "And if it doesn't, you've executed a murderer. Where's the problem?"

Academics who back executions are gaining some acceptance. Senate Republicans countered Leahy's bill by citing research from pro-death penalty academics. The bill was approved by the Judiciary Committee but is stalled in the Senate. Meanwhile, Blecker says he's getting asked to more academic conferences on the death penalty — usually as the only voice in favor. " 'A lion in a den of Daniels' is one way I've been introduced," he says.

MURDERS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN AVERTED BY EXECUTION:
A sample of the murderers freed to kill again after receiving a "Life" sentence

•Charles Fitzgerald
--Killed a deputy sheriff and was given a 100-year prison sentence as a result.
--Reeased after serving just 11 years.
--Then murdered a California policeman.
--Given "life" for that killing.
--Paroled again in 1971.

• "Gypsy" Bob Harper
--Convicted of murder, given a so-called "life" sentence.
--Escaped from a Michigan prison and killed two persons.
--Recaptured, then killed the prison warden and his deputy.

• Ed Jover
--Convicted committed two murders, sentenced to execution
--Execution overturned and he received clemency for each
--Murdered twice more after clemeny.

• Joseph Taborsky
--Sentenced to death in Connecticut for 1951 murder
--Freed when the courts overturned the sentence on technitalities.
--Later was found guilty for another murder, for which he was electrocuted in May 1960. Before his execution, he confessed to the 1951 murder.

• Allen Pruitt
--Convicted of knife slaying of a newsstand operator and sentenced to "life" in prison.
--Later charged with fatally stabbing a prison doctor and an assistant prison superintendent, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
--In 1968, his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Virginia Supreme Court. He was re-tried, again found guilty, but given a 20-year sentence instead of life. Since he had already served 18 years, and had some time off for "good behavior," he was released.
--December 31, 1971: Arrested and charged in the murder of two men in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

• Richard Biegenwald
--Murdered a store owner during a robbery in New Jersey.
--Convicted, given a "life" sentence rather than death.
--After serving 17 years, he was paroled. He violated his parole, was returned to prison, but was again paroled in 1980.
--He then shot and killed an 18-year-old Asbury Park, New Jersey girl. He also killed three other 17-year-old New Jersey girls and a 34-year-old man.

•Oral Kolame
--Found gulity of brutally murdering his wife. Pleaded with the judge and jury to impose the death sentence, but was given "life" instead.
--Later killed a fellow inmate and was executed for the second killing in 1966.

• Arthur James Julius
--Convicted of murder and sentenced to "life" in prison.
--In 1978, he was given a brief leave from prison, during which he raped and murdered a cousin.
--He was sentenced to death for that crime and was executed on November 17, 1989.

• Jimmy Lee Gray
--Conviction for killing a 16-year-old high school girl and given a "life" sentence
--Later freed on parole thanks to "good" behavior.
--Kidnapped, sodomized, and suffocated a three-year-old Mississippi girl. He was executed for that second killing on September 2, 1983.

• Timothy Charles Palmes
--Found gulity of a manslaughter conviction
--Was on probation fo this murder when he and two accomplices robbed and brutally murdered a Florida furniture store owner.
--Palmes was executed for the killing on November 8, 1984. An accomplice, Ronald Straight, was executed on May 20, 1986.

•Wayne Robert Felde
--Convicted of manslaughter in Maryland
--Later given a work release program
--Violated parole, while being taken to jail in handcuffs, pulled a gun hidden in his pants and killed a policeman.

• Donald Dillbeck
--Convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for murdering a Florida sheriff.
-- In 1983, he tried to escape. In January of this year he was transferred to a minimum-security facility. On June 22nd, he walked away from a ten-inmate crew catering a school banquet.
--Two days later, he was arrested and charged with stabbing a woman to death at a Tallahassee shopping mall.

• Jack Henry Abbott
--Convicted killer, serving "life" sentence in New York for murder of fellow inmate
--In 1981, author Norman Mailer and many other New York literati embraced Abbott and succeeded in having him released early from a Utah prison.
--July 18, 1981 (six-weeks after his release), Abbott stabbed actor Richard Adan to death in New York. He was convicted of manslaughter and received a "15-year-to-life sentence." Mrs. Adan sued Abbott for her husband's wrongful death and her pain and suffering.
--On June 15, 1990, a jury awarded her nearly $7.6 million.

• Lowell Jensen and Gene Dinkins
--Both serving "life" terms in Marion, IL for previously murdering inmates
--On October 22, 1983 at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, two prison guards were murdered in two separate instances by the inmates
--On November 9, 1983 the Associate U.S. Attorney General told a Senate subcommittee that it is impossible to punish or even deter such prison murders because, without a death sentence, a violent life-termer has free rein "to continue to murder as opportunity and his perverse motives dictate. "

• Benny Lee Chaffin
--Convicted of murder in Texas, but not executed
--Later kidnapped, raped, and murdered a 9-year-old Springfield, Oregon girl.
-- The same jury that convicted him for killing the young girl refused to sentence him to death because two of the 12 jurors said they "could not determine" whether or not he would be a future threat to societ.

• Thomas Eugene Creech
---Convicted of three murders and had claimed a role in more than 40 killings in 13 states as a paid killer for a motorcycle gang, but never sentenced to death
-- Later killed a fellow prison inmate in 1981 and was sentenced to death.
--1986: his execution was stayed by a federal judge and has yet to be carried out.

•Dalton Prejean
-- When he was 14, he was convicted of killing a taxi driver.
-- When he was 17, he gunned down a state trooper in Lafayette, Louisiana.
-- Despite protests from the American Civil Liberties Union and other abolitionist groups, Prejean was finally executed for the second murder on May 18, 1990.

•Ted Bundy
-- Serial killer murdered many women starting in 1974. There is no speculation as to how many women he killed. Anywhere between 30 and 40 is what he claimed.
-- Captured August 16, 1974. Found guilty of aggrevated kidnapping and attempted murder, and was to go for psychiatric exams.
--June 7, 1977: Bundy escaped. Headed to Florida State University campus.
--January 14, 1978: Bundy murdered two women and gravely injured two more at the Chi Omega sorority house. Days later, Bundy's last victim was 12 year old Kimberly Leach. He left her body to decompose in an abandoned hog shed.
-- Bundy was recaptured on February 15, the jury convicted Bundy on two counts of first-degree murder in the Chi Omega sorority slayings. He got another death sentence for the murder of 12 year old Kimberly Leach. Bundy was taken to death row. Bundy's confessions finally came out, and left everyone in disgust. He talked about clubbing his victims to death, sexually violating them and strangling them.
-- Bundy was electrocuted in February 1989

On March 17, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a congressional subcommittee that 19 of the killers responsible for the murder of policemen during the 1960s had been previously convicted of murder.

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