Eagle Eye
I just finished reading the brand-new manual, Evaluation of Sexually Violent Predators by Philip H. Witt and Mary Alice Conroy, and I regret to say that I was disappointed. Perhaps the title should have been a clue: We are supposed to be evaluating convicted sex offenders to see whether they meet the legal criteria of being "Sexually Violent Predators," not making an a priori assumption that they do. At any rate, I found the book superficial and one-sided.
But Willie Bosket hasn't been in that room for just a day or a week or a year. He has spent two entire decades there, and he is scheduled to be there for another four - until the year 2046. In fact, since the age of 9, the 45-year-old New Yorker has been locked up for all but about two years of his life. He gets three showers a week, plus one hour a day of solitary "recreation."Despite his bleak situation, Mr. Bosket refused to concede defeat: "I'm not broken down and never will be."The full story, "Two Decades in Solitary" by John Eligon, is here. If Bosket's name sounds familiar, it is because he is rather infamous. It was his case that led to New York's law allowing children to be tried as adults. His family is the subject of a controversial 1995 book by journalist Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (available in a new paperback edition this year) that traces the family's descent from slavery in South Carolina. The Crime Library also has an online version of Bosket's life story. The prisoner portrait above was drawn by his father, Butch, when he was an inmate at the Wiltwyck School for Boys as a child; by the time his son Willie was born, Butch himself was already serving life in prison.His life has always been empty, he said. "I grew up with nothing," he said. "I was born with nothing. I still have nothing. I will never have nothing. Forty-five years of living the way I have lived, I like 'nothing.' No one can take 'nothing' from you."
"I've become so callous to the poking of the sword that, literally, instead of bleeding to death, the blood was drained and I became absent of concern, void of emotions, cold - plain cold to the degree that not much affects me anymore," he said.
Yet Mr. Bosket did hint at something of a life of suffering.
"If somebody came to me with a lethal injection, I'd take it," he said. "I'd rather be dead."
Under Watkins' proposal, all pending death cases will be reviewed by his office's Conviction Integrity Unit, which was created last year.Troubled that innocent people have been imprisoned by faulty prosecutions, District Attorney Craig Watkins said Monday that he would re-examine nearly 40 death penalty convictions and would seek to halt executions, if necessary, to give the reviews time to proceed.
Mr. Watkins told The Dallas Morning News that problems exposed by 19 DNA-based exonerations in Dallas County have convinced him he should ensure that no death row inmate is actually innocent.
"It's not saying I'm putting a moratorium on the death penalty," said Mr. Watkins, whose reviews would be of all of the cases now on death row handled by his predecessors. "It's saying that maybe we should withdraw those dates and look at those cases from a new perspective to make sure that those individuals that are on death row need to be there and they need to be executed."
He cited the exonerations and stories by The News about problems with those prosecutions as the basis for his decision. The exonerations have routinely revealed faulty eyewitness testimony and, in a few cases, prosecutorial misconduct.
Fred Moss, a law professor at Southern Methodist University, said he had never heard of another prosecutor in the country who had conducted the type of review Mr. Watkins proposed.
"It's really quite extraordinary," Mr. Moss said.
It remains to be seen whether this remarkable about-face will rub off on Harris County, which as of the latest count had surpassed the next-highest state (Virginia) in number of people executed.
