Three Fights for Justice

From Emile Zola's "J'Accuse" on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus to Columnist William F. Buckley's decade-long effort to free convicted Murderer Edgar Smith, there has been a long history of laymen trying to overturn what they see as injustice wrought by police, lawyers and judges. Undoing the law's due process is an enormously difficult task. But last week two such efforts by laymen were gathering momentum and one was finally triumphant.

RALLYING FOR REILLY

To Playwright Arthur Miller, the why of violence has always been dramatically crucial--whether it is a man's murder of his family benefactor (A View from the Bridge) or the suicides of Willy Loman and Miller's former wife, Marilyn Monroe (Death of a Salesman and After the Fall). So last year Miller's interest was aroused when he heard about Peter Reilly, 18, who had been convicted of manslaughter for the 1973 killing of his mother in Canaan, Conn.--not far from Miller's home. Reviewing the evidence and the confession (which Reilly made after many sleepless hours of interrogation and later recanted), Miller had doubts. For example, says the psychologically oriented playwright, Reilly, after confessing, "reached no cathexis ... no discharge of a new order of feeling toward the hated mother he [supposedly] killed. This is not believable."

Well aware that it would take more prosaic evidence to convince a court, Miller and some friends--including Novelist William Styron and Director Mike Nichols--hired a new lawyer and a private detective and persuaded the New York Times to look into the case. Last week a story by Times Reporter John Corry detailed Reilly's movements on the fatal night. According to various witnesses (not all of whom, inexplicably, were called at the trial), the boy left a church meeting at about 9:40, dropped off a friend at 9:45, then made the five-minute drive to his own home where he says he found his mother's body. Her neck had been nearly cut through; she had other stab wounds; three ribs and both thighs were broken. About 9:50, he made a frantic call to a friend's house, then phoned a doctor's home and spoke to the doctor's daughter-in-law for about three minutes before deciding to call a hospital. Police say that the hospital's evening supervisor called them at 9:58.

Miller and the others looking into the case point out that in that time sequence, Reilly would scarcely have been able to commit a brutal, time-consuming murder. They also claim numerous other flaws in the prosecution's case. Reilly is now out on bail, a request for a new trial has been filed, and a simultaneous appeal is pending in the Connecticut Supreme Court.

STORM OVER HURRICANE

Fred Hogan was serving an Army hitch in Europe when he read about the 1966 murder conviction of Rubin Carter, once the third-ranked middleweight boxer in the U.S. Hogan had known "Hurricane" Carter slightly, and to him the prosecution story just did not seem to add up, even though around Paterson, N.J., where Carter lived, he was known as a trouble-prone black militant. The case gnawed at Hogan until 1970 when he became an investigator in the Monmouth county public defender's office and was finally allowed to visit Carter in prison. Convinced that the boxer was innocent, Hogan could not interest his office in helping. So he began looking into the case on his own time.

In June 1966 two black men armed with a shotgun and pistol shot up a white working-class bar in Paterson, killing the bartender and two of three customers. Fears of racial violence that summer were high, a $10,500 reward was posted, and the mayor pledged three months' vacation to the cop who solved the case. Four months later, police charged Rubin Carter and his friend John Artis, who had been seen driving their car in the vicinity of the shooting minutes afterward. Though the surviving bar customer insisted that Carter and Artis were not guilty, the two were convicted--largely on the "eyewitness" testimony of two whites--petty criminals who had been burglarizing a nearby office and claimed to have seen the fleeing gunmen.

Hogan was not able to get very far toward breaking the jury's verdict until he and Film Writer Richard Solomon, who was also interested in the case, enlisted the aid of Selwyn Raab, a seasoned investigative reporter then working for a local public-TV station (later for the New York Times). In 1974 Hogan got one of the burglars to admit that he had not witnessed the murder; under Raab's questioning, the other independently admitted that the two gunmen he had seen were not Carter and Artis.

But the original trial judge turned down a bid for a retrial, saying that the recantations "lacked the ring of truth." With an appeal now before the New Jersey Supreme Court, a campaign of publicity and pressure (masterminded by New York Adman George Lois) has been aimed at getting Governor Brendan Byrne to look into the case and at least release Carter and Artis from prison until the state supreme court acts. Two weeks ago, the campaign culminated in a Manhattan fund-raising concert headlined by Bob Dylan, who has written a protest song about Carter. Meanwhile, Governor Byrne has ordered and received his own investigative report. He is expected to announce his decision this week.

THE UNSAVORY BIKERS

More than a year ago, recalls an editor of the Detroit News, "this girl wrote us about her old man and some others being convicted of murder. Naive guy that I am, I thought she meant her father." The editor might have done nothing about the letter if he had realized the girl was talking about a man she used to live with--one of four bearded, cocky, foul-mouthed motorcyclists sentenced to the gas chamber in New Mexico for the mutilation slaying of an Albuquerque man in February 1974. Still, some of the condemned cyclists were from Michigan, and the News decided to send a reporter to cover the story. Last week--some 100 stories later--the paper proudly bannered the news that the four had been freed.

From the outset News Reporter Douglas Glazier, a police-beat veteran, sensed the possibility of a railroading. The nomadic bikers had been picked up elsewhere on another offense; they were convicted of the Albuquerque murder after a motel maid fingered them and testified she had been raped, tortured with a hot knife and made to watch the killing. Glazier rounded up gasoline credit-card receipts backing the bikers' claim that they had not been in Albuquerque at the time. Then a former policeman admitted to Glazier that the maid had told him she had lied. News Reporter Stephen Cain found her in Minnesota, where she recanted: she had no scars from her supposed torture and said that police had promised to pay her tuition in secretarial school in return for her testimony. But when she repeated the new version of her story to a judge, he ruled that there was not sufficient reason to disbelieve her first story.

Then last September, a drifter named Kerry Lee "found God," as he put it, and confessed to police in South Carolina that he had committed the murder. With Albuquerque police none too anxious to attack their own original theory, Glazier and defense attorneys for the bikers went to South Carolina to get Lee's story. They confirmed that the murder gun, for example, had belonged to the father of Lee's girl friend. Though the district attorney persisted in backing his first charge, a judge last week finally quashed the murder indictments and turned the bikers loose. "Sure these were unsavory guys," says News Editor Martin Hayden, "but if they were innocent of murder, we couldn't see them executed."

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