Post by Anja Nieser on Sept 14, 2006 12:07:15 GMT -5
A one-time convicted axe-murderer becomes the local
death-penalty-abolitionists' frontman.
Harold C. Wilson walks up the grand marble center stairway at the Free
Library. He's carrying a black leather bag with a laptop that a ladyfriend
taught him to use. Not a night passes that he doesn't check his e-mail on
it.
On the 2nd floor, he slips past the legal reference collection and into a
corner of the Business and Science alcove. There, 4 rectangular tables
make a square where a "reserved" sign perches. He sits down anyway, then
gets down to business on a very unscientific topic, the death penalty.
"I've filed lawsuits to be in places like this," he says in a voice barely
louder than a library whisper. "No administration ever wanted me to learn,
or to read books."
When he was pent up on Pennsylvania's death row following a conviction for
a 1989 triple axe murder in South Philly, he used to get a library hour,
or 2, a day. He had to bang on his cell bars until guards shackled and
escorted him there. While other inmates watched the World Series, CNN or
Fox News, he'd take their library hours. Others would listen to radios, or
sit silently in the blue-black cold - taking refuge in "pacifiers," Wilson
says. He made his bunk his desk. Grievances were his pacifiers. He
studied, earned his GED and "did things most don't - and won't."
Prison changed him. Before it, he wasn't concerned with anybody or
anything else. He had his own agenda. He was a free spirit. An adventurer.
3 death convictions, one for each homicide, forced him to challenge
himself.
He weaned himself off cigarettes. "They were already going to kill me, so
why kill myself?" he reasoned. "I became a fighter and struggled to do
another day, a month, another year. Others would say, 'Mr. Wilson, why you
spending so much time in that law library? It's not going to help you.'
Well, they're all still there!"
Wilson, 48, who now talks freely about freeing others, is a free man. On
Nov. 15, 2005, he became the 122nd exonerated death row prisoner in U.S.
history after more than 16 years in the worst clinks in the state. He says
rickety representation, racist jury selection and DNA evidence set him
free. Wilson is the 6th death row exoneree in Pennsylvania since 1982, and
the 4th in 7 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 1,045
people - including 3 Pennsylvanians - have been executed. More than 3,370
inmates remain on death row.
Some may be innocent.
At the library, Wilson's salt-and-pepper hair matches a full beard. He's
wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, a white button-down, short-sleeved
cotton shirt and a cell phone earpiece hooked on his right ear. He didn't
know what a cell phone was when he first called for a ride home from the
Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center. The lightbulb went off on
State Road outside the prison, like a scene from Star Trek. "You know,
'Beam me up, Scottie,'" he says. "I was like, 'Whoa!'"
Seemingly, it would be easy for Harold Wilson to get a job and put the
past behind, but he couldn't "live a comfortable life" if he did. Or he
could change his name, move to Hawaii or Haiti. Just hit the road and
hide.
Instead, Wilson is using his freedom to help others. Speaking out
everywhere he can, including at a conference this month in Germantown,
he's also launching the Harold C. Wilson Foundation to convert
now-abandoned properties into housing for ex-cons. This, even though he
doesn't yet have a home of his own. He says he wants to provide medical
care, transportation and jobs for released prisoners, and has joined the
Board of Witness to Innocence and the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Now he
can enter prisons as a guest, without restrictions.
Through his resolve, Philly's anti-capital punishment movement is growing
and while others say he still belongs in jail, Wilson has become its
poster boy.
"Since Harold has been out, he's leading the charge," says Peggy Sims, a
community organizer for Family and Friends of Death Row, a member of the
Prison Society and CEO of Reunification Transportation Services, which
shuttles inmates' families to prisons for visits. "It's definitely
centering around him."
The recent spree of Pennsylvania exonerations underscores the need for an
immediate moratorium on executions while the system is examined, says Lisa
Ziemer, co-chair of the Philly-based Southeastern Chapter of the
Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty. (In 2003, a
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the
Justice System recommended a moratorium, but neither the legislature nor
Gov. Ed Rendell, who supports the death penalty, has acted on it.)
But this past May and July, respectively, Philadelphia and Harrisburg's
city councils passed resolutions supporting the Innocence Commission Act,
which would establish the Innocence Commission of Pennsylvania to study
the state's DNA exonerations and wrongful convictions for trends. The bill
is currently in the state House Judiciary Committee.
4 of the state's 6 exonerations are Philadelphia cases, but death penalty
numbers, which hinge on race, wealth and geography, have always been
Philly-heavy. Lynne Abraham's Philadelphia accounts for 53 % of the
state's condemned inmates; 108 of the city's 118 death row inmates are
minorities.
So this month, Wilson expects to share center stage with fellow exoneree
Nicholas J. Yarris, a Philadelphian who after his 2004 release moved to
England, where he's writing a book. Wilson and Yarris, who declined an
interview, plan to tag-team the issue in stops around the city. The focal
point of their efforts is a Sept. 23 conference, "United by Love, Divided
by Bars," at First United Methodist Church of Germantown. Free and open to
the public, speakers include Marge Oliver, convener of the Philadelphia
chapter of the Prison Society, who will present a nuts-and-bolts lecture
titled "Introduction to Department of Corrections."
"People are starting to reason," she says, "but we have to break through
so much prejudice, bias and fixed mind-sets."
National voices will include keynote speaker Diann Rust-Tierney, executive
director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who says
"there's a great deal of energy and commitment" in Philadelphia.
Wilson will coordinate an at-risk-youth workshop and a panel on the impact
of the death penalty on families. He calls the conference a "unification"
and "awareness" effort.
"It's a start," he says. "We have to wake up the dead. A lot of people are
dead to what's actually going on."
It took Wilson, who grew up at 18th and South streets - what's now
Graduate Hospital - a while to wake up. The youngest of 7, he was running
the streets, doping and dropping out by junior high. He was 17 when his
pop passed. He'd cautioned Harold about an almost feral, street-corner
existence but Wilson would still bag homework, climb out his bedroom
window and head to the playground. His friends played hoops, but he'd
scale the walls and rooftops on buildings in Fairmount Park.
"I always had a date with death," he says. "Then I ended up on death row."
In October 1989, Wilson was convicted of the murders of Dorothy Sewell,
64, her nephew, Tyrone Mason, 33, and Mason's girlfriend, Cynthia Goines,
40. He was prosecuted by former Philly Assistant District Attorney Jack
McMahon (now a private defense attorney), whose jury selection tactics
fell under scrutiny in 1997 when Abraham leaked a training video of him
advising new city prosecutors how to keep poor blacks off juries to the
media. (She was waging a tight re-election campaign against McMahon.)
Ultimately, the video got Wilson another trial; a 2003 appeal found
McMahon's jury selection violated a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision
barring the elimination of jurors based on race. A 2nd trial ended in a
mistrial, but after a 3rd that began on Oct. 31, 2005, a jury armed with
new DNA evidence acquitted him of all charges. The decision still rankles
McMahon.
"It's a crock," he says. "Harold Wilson caught a break when he got caught
up in what was going on with me, then he got lucky. Now, he believes he's
vindicated, but that doesn't, in any way, mean he's innocent."
But on Aug. 9, Wilson's civil attorney Richard F. Ostriak refiled a 2003
civil suit that lists the city, McMahon and former District Attorney Ron
Castille as defendants.
"The DA's office maintained and sanctioned a policy that would so
obviously have violated a defendant's rights, that it should be liable for
the end result of that violation," Ostriak says. "Mr. Wilson was,
unfortunately, a victim of just such a policy."
A jury could decide the case in 6 to 9 months.
"It's corruption, an abuse of morals that keeps them controlling people's
minds and spirits," Wilson says. "We try to recruit people, but they're
all in fear."
It's nearly 5 p.m. on a Friday, and the library's closing. A uniformed
security guard warns Wilson it's time to go, then ushers him through the
turnstiles past a trio of guards. He walks out a free man, then reflects
on what that means.
Wilson remembers when he was let loose with only a copy of his release
papers, 65 cents, a bus token and a trash bag of belongings.
"This is where I used to come," he says, "and I've been coming here ever
since."
In those first weeks of freedom, while Stanley Tookie Williams and his
flock were resisting his eventual execution by lethal injection in
California, Wilson was across from the library in Logan Square. At 4:30
p.m. on Tuesdays last winter, volunteer college students fed the homeless,
and offered a $10 registration for a nondriving photo ID. His feet were
freezing, but Wilson remembers being warmed by a sense of hope. "Vans were
lined up along the curb here filled with people leaving the prisons, all
trying to get their lives rebuilt," he says.
He had no idea then that he'd be starting a foundation, but in February he
made application through City Hall. He's looking for board members and
asking for $10 and $15 donations for a CD of an interview he did with
Washington, D.C.'s Democracy Now! last December. He also takes time to
write inmates, sometimes including a $20 money order, sending them money
he could use to help himself.
"There may come a time when I can only include $10," he says. "Right now,
I'm just fresh, and I have such remorse and sorrow for those left behind."
He's also begun a home goods business, Quality Merchandise at Your Finger
Tips, with a partner in Virginia. A percentage of each sale goes to the
foundation.
"You can't keep a good man down," Wilson pledges.
Why share? Why rebuild his life by taking his freedom and running with it
-and not away with it?
"It's the hardships I've lived coming from the ghetto," he says. "It's
because I never did what was right before. It's because my parents always
told me the reefer would get me sick or get me in a situation,then it
happens. Now, even though I'm at peace with myself, there's still this
force that keeps me fighting."
Sims, a Germantown conference organizer, says the 1st time she visited
Wilson she sensed his determination, energy and resolve. Now, she knows
he's also dependable, prepared and committed.
"His life is a prime example," Marge Oliver agrees.
Wilson is inspired by hundreds of letters he's received commending him for
his strength and spirit. Most fulfilling, he says, is when people tell him
after one of his speeches, "Mr. Wilson, that was a great story. I'm sorry
it happened, but I didn't know the city of Philadelphia was in that kind
of business."
And then add that they're no longer in favor of capital punishment.
(source: The Philadelphia City Paper)
death-penalty-abolitionists' frontman.
Harold C. Wilson walks up the grand marble center stairway at the Free
Library. He's carrying a black leather bag with a laptop that a ladyfriend
taught him to use. Not a night passes that he doesn't check his e-mail on
it.
On the 2nd floor, he slips past the legal reference collection and into a
corner of the Business and Science alcove. There, 4 rectangular tables
make a square where a "reserved" sign perches. He sits down anyway, then
gets down to business on a very unscientific topic, the death penalty.
"I've filed lawsuits to be in places like this," he says in a voice barely
louder than a library whisper. "No administration ever wanted me to learn,
or to read books."
When he was pent up on Pennsylvania's death row following a conviction for
a 1989 triple axe murder in South Philly, he used to get a library hour,
or 2, a day. He had to bang on his cell bars until guards shackled and
escorted him there. While other inmates watched the World Series, CNN or
Fox News, he'd take their library hours. Others would listen to radios, or
sit silently in the blue-black cold - taking refuge in "pacifiers," Wilson
says. He made his bunk his desk. Grievances were his pacifiers. He
studied, earned his GED and "did things most don't - and won't."
Prison changed him. Before it, he wasn't concerned with anybody or
anything else. He had his own agenda. He was a free spirit. An adventurer.
3 death convictions, one for each homicide, forced him to challenge
himself.
He weaned himself off cigarettes. "They were already going to kill me, so
why kill myself?" he reasoned. "I became a fighter and struggled to do
another day, a month, another year. Others would say, 'Mr. Wilson, why you
spending so much time in that law library? It's not going to help you.'
Well, they're all still there!"
Wilson, 48, who now talks freely about freeing others, is a free man. On
Nov. 15, 2005, he became the 122nd exonerated death row prisoner in U.S.
history after more than 16 years in the worst clinks in the state. He says
rickety representation, racist jury selection and DNA evidence set him
free. Wilson is the 6th death row exoneree in Pennsylvania since 1982, and
the 4th in 7 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 1,045
people - including 3 Pennsylvanians - have been executed. More than 3,370
inmates remain on death row.
Some may be innocent.
At the library, Wilson's salt-and-pepper hair matches a full beard. He's
wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, a white button-down, short-sleeved
cotton shirt and a cell phone earpiece hooked on his right ear. He didn't
know what a cell phone was when he first called for a ride home from the
Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center. The lightbulb went off on
State Road outside the prison, like a scene from Star Trek. "You know,
'Beam me up, Scottie,'" he says. "I was like, 'Whoa!'"
Seemingly, it would be easy for Harold Wilson to get a job and put the
past behind, but he couldn't "live a comfortable life" if he did. Or he
could change his name, move to Hawaii or Haiti. Just hit the road and
hide.
Instead, Wilson is using his freedom to help others. Speaking out
everywhere he can, including at a conference this month in Germantown,
he's also launching the Harold C. Wilson Foundation to convert
now-abandoned properties into housing for ex-cons. This, even though he
doesn't yet have a home of his own. He says he wants to provide medical
care, transportation and jobs for released prisoners, and has joined the
Board of Witness to Innocence and the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Now he
can enter prisons as a guest, without restrictions.
Through his resolve, Philly's anti-capital punishment movement is growing
and while others say he still belongs in jail, Wilson has become its
poster boy.
"Since Harold has been out, he's leading the charge," says Peggy Sims, a
community organizer for Family and Friends of Death Row, a member of the
Prison Society and CEO of Reunification Transportation Services, which
shuttles inmates' families to prisons for visits. "It's definitely
centering around him."
The recent spree of Pennsylvania exonerations underscores the need for an
immediate moratorium on executions while the system is examined, says Lisa
Ziemer, co-chair of the Philly-based Southeastern Chapter of the
Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty. (In 2003, a
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the
Justice System recommended a moratorium, but neither the legislature nor
Gov. Ed Rendell, who supports the death penalty, has acted on it.)
But this past May and July, respectively, Philadelphia and Harrisburg's
city councils passed resolutions supporting the Innocence Commission Act,
which would establish the Innocence Commission of Pennsylvania to study
the state's DNA exonerations and wrongful convictions for trends. The bill
is currently in the state House Judiciary Committee.
4 of the state's 6 exonerations are Philadelphia cases, but death penalty
numbers, which hinge on race, wealth and geography, have always been
Philly-heavy. Lynne Abraham's Philadelphia accounts for 53 % of the
state's condemned inmates; 108 of the city's 118 death row inmates are
minorities.
So this month, Wilson expects to share center stage with fellow exoneree
Nicholas J. Yarris, a Philadelphian who after his 2004 release moved to
England, where he's writing a book. Wilson and Yarris, who declined an
interview, plan to tag-team the issue in stops around the city. The focal
point of their efforts is a Sept. 23 conference, "United by Love, Divided
by Bars," at First United Methodist Church of Germantown. Free and open to
the public, speakers include Marge Oliver, convener of the Philadelphia
chapter of the Prison Society, who will present a nuts-and-bolts lecture
titled "Introduction to Department of Corrections."
"People are starting to reason," she says, "but we have to break through
so much prejudice, bias and fixed mind-sets."
National voices will include keynote speaker Diann Rust-Tierney, executive
director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who says
"there's a great deal of energy and commitment" in Philadelphia.
Wilson will coordinate an at-risk-youth workshop and a panel on the impact
of the death penalty on families. He calls the conference a "unification"
and "awareness" effort.
"It's a start," he says. "We have to wake up the dead. A lot of people are
dead to what's actually going on."
It took Wilson, who grew up at 18th and South streets - what's now
Graduate Hospital - a while to wake up. The youngest of 7, he was running
the streets, doping and dropping out by junior high. He was 17 when his
pop passed. He'd cautioned Harold about an almost feral, street-corner
existence but Wilson would still bag homework, climb out his bedroom
window and head to the playground. His friends played hoops, but he'd
scale the walls and rooftops on buildings in Fairmount Park.
"I always had a date with death," he says. "Then I ended up on death row."
In October 1989, Wilson was convicted of the murders of Dorothy Sewell,
64, her nephew, Tyrone Mason, 33, and Mason's girlfriend, Cynthia Goines,
40. He was prosecuted by former Philly Assistant District Attorney Jack
McMahon (now a private defense attorney), whose jury selection tactics
fell under scrutiny in 1997 when Abraham leaked a training video of him
advising new city prosecutors how to keep poor blacks off juries to the
media. (She was waging a tight re-election campaign against McMahon.)
Ultimately, the video got Wilson another trial; a 2003 appeal found
McMahon's jury selection violated a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision
barring the elimination of jurors based on race. A 2nd trial ended in a
mistrial, but after a 3rd that began on Oct. 31, 2005, a jury armed with
new DNA evidence acquitted him of all charges. The decision still rankles
McMahon.
"It's a crock," he says. "Harold Wilson caught a break when he got caught
up in what was going on with me, then he got lucky. Now, he believes he's
vindicated, but that doesn't, in any way, mean he's innocent."
But on Aug. 9, Wilson's civil attorney Richard F. Ostriak refiled a 2003
civil suit that lists the city, McMahon and former District Attorney Ron
Castille as defendants.
"The DA's office maintained and sanctioned a policy that would so
obviously have violated a defendant's rights, that it should be liable for
the end result of that violation," Ostriak says. "Mr. Wilson was,
unfortunately, a victim of just such a policy."
A jury could decide the case in 6 to 9 months.
"It's corruption, an abuse of morals that keeps them controlling people's
minds and spirits," Wilson says. "We try to recruit people, but they're
all in fear."
It's nearly 5 p.m. on a Friday, and the library's closing. A uniformed
security guard warns Wilson it's time to go, then ushers him through the
turnstiles past a trio of guards. He walks out a free man, then reflects
on what that means.
Wilson remembers when he was let loose with only a copy of his release
papers, 65 cents, a bus token and a trash bag of belongings.
"This is where I used to come," he says, "and I've been coming here ever
since."
In those first weeks of freedom, while Stanley Tookie Williams and his
flock were resisting his eventual execution by lethal injection in
California, Wilson was across from the library in Logan Square. At 4:30
p.m. on Tuesdays last winter, volunteer college students fed the homeless,
and offered a $10 registration for a nondriving photo ID. His feet were
freezing, but Wilson remembers being warmed by a sense of hope. "Vans were
lined up along the curb here filled with people leaving the prisons, all
trying to get their lives rebuilt," he says.
He had no idea then that he'd be starting a foundation, but in February he
made application through City Hall. He's looking for board members and
asking for $10 and $15 donations for a CD of an interview he did with
Washington, D.C.'s Democracy Now! last December. He also takes time to
write inmates, sometimes including a $20 money order, sending them money
he could use to help himself.
"There may come a time when I can only include $10," he says. "Right now,
I'm just fresh, and I have such remorse and sorrow for those left behind."
He's also begun a home goods business, Quality Merchandise at Your Finger
Tips, with a partner in Virginia. A percentage of each sale goes to the
foundation.
"You can't keep a good man down," Wilson pledges.
Why share? Why rebuild his life by taking his freedom and running with it
-and not away with it?
"It's the hardships I've lived coming from the ghetto," he says. "It's
because I never did what was right before. It's because my parents always
told me the reefer would get me sick or get me in a situation,then it
happens. Now, even though I'm at peace with myself, there's still this
force that keeps me fighting."
Sims, a Germantown conference organizer, says the 1st time she visited
Wilson she sensed his determination, energy and resolve. Now, she knows
he's also dependable, prepared and committed.
"His life is a prime example," Marge Oliver agrees.
Wilson is inspired by hundreds of letters he's received commending him for
his strength and spirit. Most fulfilling, he says, is when people tell him
after one of his speeches, "Mr. Wilson, that was a great story. I'm sorry
it happened, but I didn't know the city of Philadelphia was in that kind
of business."
And then add that they're no longer in favor of capital punishment.
(source: The Philadelphia City Paper)