Three Wrongs That Were Righted

By Bennett H. Beach

The justice system can make amends, but never completely

Bigotry Pulled the Trigger

On a dark, rainy Boston street six years ago, two policemen leaped from their car and ran toward a blue Buick that was about to pull away. Eight or nine shots rang out. A black man slumped over the Buick's steering wheel with fatal wounds in the back of his head and between his shoulder blades. As residents of a nearby public-housing project milled about, James Bowden, 25, was taken to the morgue, another casualty of the war between inner-city Americans and the nation's embattled police. The policemen said that Bowden was suspected of robbing a grocery store and that after their warning shouts, he had tried to run one of them down and had threatened them with a gun. Three department investigations exonerated them in the shooting.

Yet in the eyes of Bowden's 33-year-old widow, Patricia, the case was not closed. Insisting that her husband was an innocent victim, she shopped for a lawyer willing to help her take on the police department and finally found Lawrence O'Donnell, 59, a onetime patrolman with a penchant for bold courtroom tactics and underdog clients (among them: three of the Brink's robbers). "He's a tiger," says one court official who has observed him over the years. "When he gets something in his teeth, he never lets go." For O'Donnell, Bowden's story touched a soft spot: O'Donnell's own mother had been widowed at an early age. He agreed to take the case.

Two things caused O'Donnell to question the officers' account. Bowden had worked as a janitor at Boston City Hospital since the age of 17. O'Donnell doubted that someone who had held a steady job for that long would suddenly turn to robbery. Then there was the policemen's claim that Bowden had tried to ram one of them with his car. "I happen to know," O'Donnell told TIME's Ruth Mehrtens Galvin, "that when police want an out, they always say that. When I read the newspaper story, my life behind the badge gave me an X ray no one else would have, and I said, 'They're liars.' "

O'Donnell launched a three-year investigation, passing up some lucrative cases and spending $13,000 of his own money. As befits a man who practices law with two sons (Michael and Kevin) and whose wife is the firm's comptroller, he marshaled family forces. Another son, Larry Jr., 29, used his Spanish to interview dozens of residents in the housing project near the scene of the shooting. Michael, 37, served as co-counsel.

The police, meantime, made the O'Donnells' job as tough as they could. They ignored subpoenas and court orders for information, cooperating only when the commissioner himself faced contempt-of-court charges. Even then, they turned over photocopies of documents that obviously had been folded before being reproduced, presumably in order to keep certain facts secret.

When the trial began three years ago, the family's involvement grew, as the two remaining children--William, 30, and Mary, 23--chauffeured witnesses and fetched documents. At center stage, their feisty father, using a Styrofoam model of the scene complete with toy cars, stressed numerous inconsistencies in the officers' testimony. He discredited the meager evidence that Bowden had been carrying a gun. He produced as a witness a reporter who, having ridden with the officers and listened to the episode while lying on the floor of their car, testified that there had been no warning shouts. Finally, he developed a strong case that Bowden could not have committed the robbery that led police to stake out his car in the first place. For example, the suspects were tall and thin; Bowden, at 5 ft. 4 in. and 180 Ibs., was neither. He had only one thing in common with the holdup men: he was black. Said O'Donnell in his final argument: "Bigotry pulled those triggers."

The jury awarded Mrs. Bowden and her two young children $250,000 plus interest. This is believed to be the first time in the U.S. that civil damages have been awarded for a victim of a police killing without a criminal conviction beforehand. The policemen won an appeal, but a second trial in the same court two months ago produced an identical verdict. Just before Christmas, O'Donnell got more good news: the losing side was to pay him and Son Michael $213,000.

Nor is the saga over. One night in 1975, according to Larry Jr., a moonlighting Boston policeman drove a cab into a parking lot where the younger O'Donnell worked, and blocked the entrance. When asked to move the car, claims Larry Jr., the officer slugged the young attendant and, with the help of plainclothes colleagues who rushed over from the street, thoroughly beat him up. Now they are defendants in a $175,000 suit filed by Larry Jr., who has a book about police killings due to be published later this year.

A Gestapo Ghost

Ten witnesses in a Chicago court said they had seen Franciszek Walus beat and murder Jewish residents of Kielce and Czestochowa while serving as a Gestapo agent from 1939 to 1943. Though Walus, a Polish emigre, insisted that he spent those years on labor farms in Germany, Federal Judge Julius Hoffman, 85 (who presided at the Chicago Seven trial in 1969), ruled that he had won citizenship by hiding his Nazi past. Facing deportation, Walus, 58, hired a new attorney who found documents showing that the Gestapo had a 5-ft. 7-in. height minimum (Walus is 5 ft. 4 in.) and did not accept Poles. An appeals court overruled Hoffman, and the Government has dropped the case.

Delivered from Death Row

Jerry Banks, 29, an inmate on death row in a Georgia prison, received an astonishing visit from his lawyers two weeks ago. Banks, a black, had been convicted twice in rural Henry County of murdering two whites in 1974. Now after six years in prison he was preparing for another trial, since the second verdict, like the first, had been tossed out by the state supreme court. But instead of discussing his defense, his lawyers asked what he would like for Christmas. "To go home," replied Banks. Said the lawyers: "Then let's go." They announced that the prosecution was dropping the case and he was a free man.

Banks' release ended an ordeal that began on a pleasant fall day when the unemployed truck driver took out his aging single-shot shotgun and went hunting. His dog came across the bodies of a 38-year-old high school band leader and a 19-year-old woman who once had been one of his students. Banks went to the road and stopped a motorist, who in turn summoned police. Five weeks later, Banks was locked up. For the trial, Banks' original lawyer, who later was disbarred for shoddy work in other cases, failed to turn up several witnesses who probably could have cleared him with testimony that they had heard a series of rapid shots, clearly not the product of an old shotgun. Police, it turned out, had been aware of some of these witnesses' accounts, but had either ignored them or lost the records. Nor had they revealed the discovery of three shell casings at the scene that could not possibly have come from Banks' weapon. The shells produced at trial, theorize defense attorneys, came from test firings by the then chief of detectives, who had custody of Banks' gun and was a major state witness. The detective, Phillip ("Shug") Howard, has since lost three police jobs for tampering with evidence and forgery, and prosecutors concluded that he would be useless at a third trial. "What's right," says Banks, "comes out at the end.''

--By Bennett H. Beach

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