Man executed despite lawyer’s negligence, substance abuse

Compiled by Brendan Conley

Asheville, North Carolina, Aug. 31— North Carolina prison officials executed a man early today whose lawyer admitted he drank 12 shots of rum a day during the penalty phase of his murder trial. Death penalty opponents throughout the state protested the execution and vowed to continue their campaign against capital punishment.

With all legal avenues exhausted, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley rejected Ronald Wayne Frye’s appeal for clemency Thursday night, saying there was no doubt that “the defendant senselessly and brutally killed and robbed an elderly, innocent man.”

Earlier Thursday, the US Supreme Court denied a stay of execution. State and lower federal courts had turned down Frye’s numerous requests for a retrial.

He was executed by lethal injection at Raleigh’s Central Prison.

Frye, a 42-year-old construction worker, robbed his landlord in 1993 and stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors. There is no doubt he committed the crime, but during the penalty phase of his trial, Frye’s lawyer presented little evidence of a nightmarish childhood that might have swayed a jury into sparing his client’s life.

The court-appointed lawyer, Tom Portwood, admitted he was drinking heavily during the case, downing nearly a pint of 80-proof rum every afternoon. He also revealed he was in a car wreck around the same time and was found to have a near-lethal blood alcohol level of 0.44 — at 11 am.

“This case completely violates our sense of fairness,” said Stephen J. Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a North Carolina group calling for a death-penalty moratorium. “This man essentially didn’t have a lawyer, and if we think that’s a fair trial then our death-penalty system is completely out of control.”

Frye’s is the latest case to raise troubling questions about the impact of poor lawyers in death-penalty trials. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court overturned the murder conviction of a Texas death-row inmate because his court-appointed attorney slept through substantial portions of his trial.

Frye’s lawyers said he would not have been sentenced to death had the jury known the full story of his upbringing. When Frye was 4, his alcoholic parents gave him away at a diner. His new father beat him with a bullwhip, leaving such severe scars that police still use the pictures at child-abuse seminars.

Frye started sniffing glue at age 10, then turned to cocaine. He was shuffled from family to family, six changes in all, before he dropped out of high school. He was a crack-addicted construction worker when he stabbed his 70-year-old landlord in the chest in a Hickory, NC, trailer park. He owed the landlord money and was facing eviction.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that a defense lawyer has the responsibility to present “mitigating” factors about a client’s background — child abuse, drugs, an especially tough environment — that might persuade a jury to spare the defendant’s life.

No one from Frye’s family was called to the witness stand. A psychologist did testify but shared little about Frye’s childhood.

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty is organizing throughout the state against capital punishment. The Asheville chapter will host a membership meeting and “open space gathering” on Sunday, Sept. 9, from 2pm to 6pm, at Beth Israel Synagogue.

The statewide coalition will host the “NC Journey of Hope,” from October 5-18, a speaking tour of murder victim family members who support alternatives to the death penalty.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty will hold its annual conference in Raleigh from October 18-21.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty.

For more information: PFADP Asheville, Pam Beattie, 828-665-7940; PFADP statewide, Angie Wigodsky, 919-933-7567.

Environmental groups oppose draft permit for Blue Ridge Paper

Statement of Dead Pigeon River Council, Clean Water Fund of NC, American Canoe Assoc., Dogwood Alliance, and Western NC Alliance

A week before the scheduled September 6 public hearing in Waynesville on the permitted discharge of Blue Ridge Paper Products to the Pigeon River, environmental and recreational groups, which three months ago worked with the company on a joint study of bleaching improvements for the mill, announce that they must oppose the Division of Water Quality’s (DWQ) “low expectation” permit provisions for discharged color.

“Again and again, we’ve been told that this time was going to be different”, says Bobby Seay of the Dead Pigeon River Council, who has fought the Mill’s discharge for over two decades, “but North Carolina has NEVER voluntarily reduced the discharge. This tiny amount of reduction isn’t even worth talking about. It’s long past time for the mill to meet NC water quality standards.”

Seay and other downstream activists have been part of a coalition of environmental groups that co-contracted this spring with Blue Ridge Paper for a study of water quality benefits from oxygen based pulping and bleaching.

“We really wanted this study to be the beginning of getting cooperatively through this permit cycle,” said Scot Quaranda of the Asheville-based Dogwood Alliance. “Blue Ridge was saying all the right things about environmental stewardship ... they said that they wanted to meet NC water quality standards by the end of the coming permit, so we were very hopeful. We want to work together on creative solutions for forest stewardship and air quality problems as part of a continuing effort with the new employee-owners. DWQ has badly undercut the communication with this draft permit.”

The draft permit appears to call for a minimum of 19% reduction in effluent color to the river. Because the mill is already well below current permit limits, the net reduction could be even less than this. Even the apparent 9,000 lb/day reduction is far short of what is needed to remove the long-standing and highly controversial color variance to the state color standard the Mill has had since the late ‘80s. North Carolina has a narrative in-stream color standard, calling for “no objectionable color” to be discharged into state waters, but EPA’s interpretation of that standard has been 50 color units, not very strict, according to Scott Jackson, Research Director for Clean Water Fund of NC.

Perhaps most important in setting limits for this permit is the commitment made in a 1997 Settlement Agreement by all parties to continue reducing color “at the quickest possible pace”, and the long history of downstream distrust perpetuated by still visible color even 40 or more miles downstream in Tennessee. In 1996, after DWQ called for a final limit of over 98,000 lb/day of color for Champion’s permit, citizen groups, towns and the state of Tennessee contested the permit and forced an EPA negotiated settlement.

“If it hadn’t been for the 1997 Settlement Agreement,” said David Jenkins, Conservation Director for the American Canoe Association, “the Pigeon River would be fully twice as dark as it is right now. The Agreement set aggressive color reduction goals that were achievable and effectively reduced color throughout the permit. This new DWQ drafted permit represents a dramatic departure from that proven approach and ignores a real chance to end the variance by the end of this permit term.”

EPA was forced to take over the Champion permit in 1987, and called at that time for reducing color in the Pigeon River to 50 color units just below “the pipe” within five years. Despite major technology improvements to the Canton Mill, driven by continuing activism, it is still not meeting that standard 14 years later. “What DWQ has done is tragic”, says Hope Taylor-Guevara of Clean Water Fund of NC, “this permit hearing should have been a celebration of a new era of high expectations and collaboration.”

Drug policy expert Sanho Tree to speak in Asheville

By Nicholas Holt

Sanho Tree (pictured right) is the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He will be speaking about drug policy reform and American involvement in the Colombian civil war this Tuesday at Jubilee! (for more information see Resource Guide).

AGR: Who is using illegal drugs in the United States?

Sanho Tree: It’s across the board, across all classes and races.

AGR: The United States has long used, what IPS [Inter Press Service] literature refers to as “a punitive and coercive social control model of drug policy.” What have been the effects of this strategy of drug control?

ST: The results of this punitive model have been, naturally, disastrous.

There are three major indicators the federal government itself uses (to examine the drug trade): price, purity and availability, and those are at, or near, record levels of failure. The prices are lower than ever, they’re more pure than ever on the streets, and they’re more available than ever, when it comes to hard drugs.

In terms of use rates, sometimes they fluctuate a little bit, but that’s within a certain range.

The prison population, however, has absolutely exploded. We now incarcerate 2 million people in this country....we have one twenty second of the world’s population and we have one quarter of the world’s prisoners.

And, of those 2 million, almost a half million, a quarter of them, are there for non-violent drug offenses.

So, put another way, we incarcerate more people for nonviolent drug offenses alone, than the entire European Union incarcerated for all offenses combined.

And the European Union has a 100 million more people than we do.

If you look at it as a criminal justice problem, rather than a public health problem, then your solutions are very limited.

If, however, you look at this as a public health problem, one that has social and economic consequences, then it opens a whole new range of solutions.

Prop. 36 in California that just passed last year is a landmark... For the first two nonviolent drug offenses you cannot be sentenced to prison. You’re given the option of treatment, the treatment being broadly defined for the first time.

You receive counseling if you are in an abusive relationship.

If you can’t read you can get literacy help. For the first time, it starts to look at some of this [as a] holistic thing, fixing peoples lives rather than punishing their behaviors.

I would submit that the drug war now causes more harm than the drugs themselves. And that, in my opinion, is the definition of bankrupt policy.

AGR: It seems to a lot of people that the negative effects of the drug war are obvious. Why, would you speculate, has our government, for so many years, continued to maintain this attitude towards drug control?

ST: As you said, I think the people are well ahead of the politicians. Whenever it’s been put to the general public, in terms of state referenda, or public opinion polls, 3/4 of the American people believe the drug war is a failure.

But the politicians are usually the last people to get it, and what they’re afraid of (is) a fifteen second negative attack ad during campaign season.

So, all things being equal, they tend not to vote against anything with the word “anti-drug” in it for fear of being labeled soft on drugs.

AGR: Could you give us some back ground on the relationship between Colombia and the US drug trade?

ST: Right now Colombia supplies the majority, maybe up to 90 percent of the US heroin on the East Coast and something like 70-80 percent of the cocaine. The drug warriors have declared a crisis in Colombia, but it’s important to note that, in terms of our policies in the rest of Latin America, we’ve squeezed, in the past couple of years, very hard on countries like Bolivia and Peru, and the drug warriors (in the) State Department say these are success stories.

Well, what happened, is that we squeezed very hard on those countries, at great social cost...particularly in Bolivia, where its caused tremendous upheavals. That has basically pushed the cultivation of coca leaf from those two countries into southern Colombia.

Instead of Plan Colombia this year it’s called the Andean Regional initiative. We’re giving money to Colombia, to Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, and Venezuela and all these other countries to basically try to rein in all the drugs we’re trying to chase out of Colombia. It’s the same old game; we’re pushing it around from one place to the next, from one continent to the next.

AGR: Since Plan Colombia has been implemented, has there been any change in the amount of cocaine and heroin that’s been making its way into the US from that area?

ST: In terms of the price, purity, availability in the United States streets, there’s been virtually no change.

AGR: Could you elaborate on the roles of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the Colombian army in the drug trade?

ST: The drug trade is an equal opportunity corrupter. All sides in this conflict have been involved in the drug trade. The most famous, in this country is, of course, is the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the guerrillas, and that’s what a lot of our US assistance is targeting, coca cultivation in southern Colombia, areas which the FARC controls.

However, the paramilitaries are even more deeply involved in the drug trade, by their own admission. Carlos Castana, one of the heads of the paramilitaries, has gone on national television and admitted that he gets 70 percent of his revenues from the drug trade. However, we’re not really going after him.

The Colombian military itself has historically been very corrupt.

Last year there were a number of famous busts involving Colombian Air Force planes and lots of cocaine being intercepted in Miami.

And this reaches right into the US embassy. Last year, Col. James Hiett and his wife were busted for using the diplomatic pouch to send heroin back to the United States.

And he was in charge of our counter-narcotics down there.

As long as we have this mechanism of drug prohibition that creates this wealth, we’ll have the conflict go on and on down there. The paramilitaries and the guerrillas can continue to arm themselves and fight their war, and fund themselves through this drug trade. They no longer need a Washington or a Moscow or Beijing to back their insurgencies. They can do it themselves now.

Right now we don’t have enough public support to commit US forces down there in the drug war. So one of the ways that they’ve been able to get around this is the use of private military contractors. A lot of these are former military people. A lot of people call these people mercenaries. In many ways they are just that. When a mercenary, when a contractor gets killed down there, you don’t have these flag draped coffins coming into Dover Air Force Base. There’s very little media scrutiny of this in the past. A number of these pilots working for a company called DynCorp...have been killed already.

But they’re listed as US citizens who died in the line of work. They’re not US service personnel. Now that there’s so much media attention focused on this, its only a matter of time before one of these pilots or a helicopter full of these people gets shot down and killed or captured. And then we’ve really got a problem because...there isn’t public support to commit US forces and if they do get shot down or captured, then suddenly Congress has to decide, are we going to retaliate and escalate this war?. Or are we going to turn the other cheek and forget it happened? Or are we going to tuck our tail between our legs and run away?

My guess is that we’ll retaliate. And this could lead us into a back door (like) the kind that got us into Vietnam. So this back door, privatized escalation of the war is a very dangerous thing.

AGR: That was the Clinton administration that managed to push through plan Colombia.

ST: Oh yeah. This is a bipartisan mess. I suspect one of the main reasons the Clinton administration pushed for this last year so hard was to inoculate Al Gore and the Democratic Party. The conjunction of the Colombian aid vote and the election year was a terrible coincidence.

And now we’ve committed to this course and we should listen to the first rule of holes -- when you find yourself in one, stop digging.

Miriam DesHainais assisted greatly in the editing of this interview.