Dear Sis~
The Florida Supreme Court handed down an 18-page opinion denying my last and final appeal. It was a 6-1 vote, with Judge Anstead authoring a 2-page dissenting opinion. The dispositive issue in this appeal was similar to my 2005 DNA testing appeal, i.e., whether my death sentence is proper in light of the now openly conceded fact that I was not the triggerman (keeping in mind that I was sentenced to death by a jury and judge who were affirmatively misled to falsely believe that I was the triggerman). The majority basically repeated their holding (almost verbatim) in my 2005 DNA testing appeal, once again stating that "We hold that newly discovered evidence establishing that Van Poyck was not the triggerman probably would not have yielded a life sentence for Van Poyck." Once again, the court purports to know what my jury would have done had they known that I was not the shooter. This is in contrast to all other similar Florida death row cases where the Florida Supreme Court reversed the death sentences of those prisoners who were later able to prove (post trial and sentencing) that their co-defendant was actually the killer. The majority made it clear that I was the exception and that they have no intention of granting me the relief that their own precedents require...
Anyway, Sis my next step is to prepare and file a writ of certiorari in the US Supreme Court, which you know is, statistically speaking, a real long shot (less than 1/2 of one percent of all petitions filed are accepted for review by the US Supreme Court).
If the cert petition is unsuccessful, I will technically become eligible to have my death warrant signed by the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist. Under Florida's system, the governor has full, unfettered discretion as to whether to sign someone's death warrant, whose warrant to sign, and how many to sign. The governor can go for years without signing a death warrant, and if he is so inclined, or he can wake up some day and decide to sign 10 death warrants. (Governor Martinez used to do this back in the late 1980's and early 90's). At any given time in Florida (which has 375 men and women on death row) there are probably 20-40 prisoners who have exhausted their legal remedies, have nothing pending in the courts, and who are thus eligible to have their death warrants signed. That's a select crowd which I'm not keen on joining! At any rate, I'm hard at work on my cert petition, even if I can't generate much optimism. Despite the apparent poor odds I've gotta fight the good fight, metaphorically speaking. Don't worry about me, I'm in good spirits, Sis. I like a challenge and enjoy a good fight!
Love & Peace,
Bill
Friday, May 25, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
May 15, 2007
Dear Sis~
As you know, Christopher Scott Emmett is scheduled to be executed on June 13, less than a month from now, and it's very unlikely that anything will stop it. Virginia has an exceptionally high lethality rate in its death penalty process; nobody gets off here. If you receive a death sentence in Virginia you are going to be executed, and quickly. (Reminds me of a line from Kafka, "There is an abundance of hope, but none for us"). This will be Virginia's 99th execution since capital punishment was reinstated (Here's an oxymoron: the death certificate of an executed prisoner lists the cause of death as "legal homicide"). As you might guess, the atmosphere here on the row is somber. With only 19 of us here it's a small, intimate community; we all know each other fairly well and we see each other and interact with each other daily. My cell is only about 25 feet from Emmett's and I see and speak to him many times a day. To most people, the death penalty is just an abstract concept but it's very real and personal when the people being killed are guys I've known well for years. In the nearly 8 years I've been here I've watched about 35 men get chained up and taken away to Greensville to die. (My first year here, in 1999-2000, the Commonwealth engaged in a machete march through death row, killing 14 men in 12 months, about one man every 3 weeks). Three of those 35 guys - Mark Bailey, John Yancey Schmidt and Michael Lenz - were good friends of mine; another friend, Jeff Remington, hung himself. Being in the midst of so much organized death indelibly stains your memory and can suck all the energy from your spirit, if you let it...Not being in the mood for much small talk I'll close this up and post it (my next letter will be more upbeat, I promise!).
With Love,
Bill
As you know, Christopher Scott Emmett is scheduled to be executed on June 13, less than a month from now, and it's very unlikely that anything will stop it. Virginia has an exceptionally high lethality rate in its death penalty process; nobody gets off here. If you receive a death sentence in Virginia you are going to be executed, and quickly. (Reminds me of a line from Kafka, "There is an abundance of hope, but none for us"). This will be Virginia's 99th execution since capital punishment was reinstated (Here's an oxymoron: the death certificate of an executed prisoner lists the cause of death as "legal homicide"). As you might guess, the atmosphere here on the row is somber. With only 19 of us here it's a small, intimate community; we all know each other fairly well and we see each other and interact with each other daily. My cell is only about 25 feet from Emmett's and I see and speak to him many times a day. To most people, the death penalty is just an abstract concept but it's very real and personal when the people being killed are guys I've known well for years. In the nearly 8 years I've been here I've watched about 35 men get chained up and taken away to Greensville to die. (My first year here, in 1999-2000, the Commonwealth engaged in a machete march through death row, killing 14 men in 12 months, about one man every 3 weeks). Three of those 35 guys - Mark Bailey, John Yancey Schmidt and Michael Lenz - were good friends of mine; another friend, Jeff Remington, hung himself. Being in the midst of so much organized death indelibly stains your memory and can suck all the energy from your spirit, if you let it...Not being in the mood for much small talk I'll close this up and post it (my next letter will be more upbeat, I promise!).
With Love,
Bill
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
April 29, 2007
Dear Sis~
I've (very belatedly) received a packet of downloaded responses ("comments") to my various blog entries which you mailed to me some time back. The comments are dated as far back as April of last year and I feel bad that I was unable to timely reply to the few of them which asked me specific questions. One young lady, Rosa, from Iceland, wrote back on January 31st asking me to help her (by answering some questions re: conditions on death row) for an essay she was writing (apparently a class assignment) about life on death row. She probably thought I was a bum for never answering her! And, I was really pleased to read the long comment from my old childhood friend, Tom Aggeles, (dated Nov 29th). We were in the juvenile halfway house together back in the summer of 1970, in Tallahassee, when I was 15 or 16 years old. Tom was one of the "elder" residents, a JC (Junior Counselor) who was, even then, unusually wise and avuncular. He was probably around 19 or 20 years old, which made him about the oldest guy there, and everyone looked up to him (I still vividly recall us together once in the tiny library, where I pulled a book off the shelf about Mao Tse-tung and, reading from the front cover, I mispronounced the name as "Mayo Tee See Tung" and Tom began laughing hysterically. I was embarrassed at my ignorance (especially since I was reasonably familiar with who Mao was; I just didn't know how to pronounce his name!) but that incident segued into a pretty deep and wide-ranging conversation about politics, history and current events (the Vietnam war was raging at the time and the national cultural and political landscape was undergoing a dramatic seismic shift and awakening) which still sticks in my mind after 37 years later. I've often thought about Tom over the years and wondered whatever became of him, so I was pleased to read his comments and learn that he is alive and well, and as wise and enlightened as ever (he's been blessed with five sons!) I also vividly recall how well Tom played the electric guitar; boy could he wail on that stratocaster! I wrote about my experiences in the halfway house in my autobiography, A Checkered Past; that was a real crossroad in my life and unfortunately I took the wrong fork in the road. Anyway, I want to take this time to thank those writers who posted positive comments, and to apologize to those asking me questions I was never able to answer. Some of the comments were very touching...
That's it for now, Sis!
With Love,
Bill
I've (very belatedly) received a packet of downloaded responses ("comments") to my various blog entries which you mailed to me some time back. The comments are dated as far back as April of last year and I feel bad that I was unable to timely reply to the few of them which asked me specific questions. One young lady, Rosa, from Iceland, wrote back on January 31st asking me to help her (by answering some questions re: conditions on death row) for an essay she was writing (apparently a class assignment) about life on death row. She probably thought I was a bum for never answering her! And, I was really pleased to read the long comment from my old childhood friend, Tom Aggeles, (dated Nov 29th). We were in the juvenile halfway house together back in the summer of 1970, in Tallahassee, when I was 15 or 16 years old. Tom was one of the "elder" residents, a JC (Junior Counselor) who was, even then, unusually wise and avuncular. He was probably around 19 or 20 years old, which made him about the oldest guy there, and everyone looked up to him (I still vividly recall us together once in the tiny library, where I pulled a book off the shelf about Mao Tse-tung and, reading from the front cover, I mispronounced the name as "Mayo Tee See Tung" and Tom began laughing hysterically. I was embarrassed at my ignorance (especially since I was reasonably familiar with who Mao was; I just didn't know how to pronounce his name!) but that incident segued into a pretty deep and wide-ranging conversation about politics, history and current events (the Vietnam war was raging at the time and the national cultural and political landscape was undergoing a dramatic seismic shift and awakening) which still sticks in my mind after 37 years later. I've often thought about Tom over the years and wondered whatever became of him, so I was pleased to read his comments and learn that he is alive and well, and as wise and enlightened as ever (he's been blessed with five sons!) I also vividly recall how well Tom played the electric guitar; boy could he wail on that stratocaster! I wrote about my experiences in the halfway house in my autobiography, A Checkered Past; that was a real crossroad in my life and unfortunately I took the wrong fork in the road. Anyway, I want to take this time to thank those writers who posted positive comments, and to apologize to those asking me questions I was never able to answer. Some of the comments were very touching...
That's it for now, Sis!
With Love,
Bill
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