In early adolescence, however, Whitey’s and Bill’s lives would take very different turns.
Whitey stayed local and fell in with the gangs down on Mercer Street. The boys he hung out with skipped school and got into fights and sometimes worse. Whitey was fourteen when he was first arrested for stealing. In short order he would be picked up for larceny, forgery, battery, assault, and armed robbery.
Age fourteen was similarly pivotal for Bill: it was then that he decided to head across town to Boston College High School rather than sticking with his friends at South Boston. While Whitey was brawling and getting into trouble, Bill was doing his homework and working at John and Mary Karp’s meat market for tuition money. Later, while Bill was immersing himself in the scholarly world of Boston College, Whitey was robbing banks, a pursuit that eventually landed him a major prison sentence.
The further the brothers walked, the more their paths diverged.
Bill went off to law school and made law review, which set him on a road that would see him grow into a powerful and effective politician: a state representative and Massachusetts Senate president. As a legislator, he fought against child abuse and for education and welfare reform, among other issues. He was later appointed the twenty-fourth president of the University of Massachusetts and would go on to collect more than twenty honorary degrees.
And Whitey? After he was released, following nine years in prison, he rose to be the major organized-crime boss in Boston—and the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie The Departed. When Osama bin Laden was killed, Whitey moved into his spot as America’s most wanted man. After authorities finally caught him, he was convicted of participating in eleven murders, along with drug trafficking, extortion, racketeering, and other crimes, and given two life terms in prison plus five years.
All that said, we shouldn’t overstate the case: Bill, like many twentieth-century Boston politicians, did not have a career free of controversy, and he remained staunchly loyal to Whitey, refusing to assist authorities in catching him. Still, cronyism and hardball politics are quite different from murder and drug trafficking. And whatever affection he maintained for his older brother, Bill’s love of scholarly endeavors, his professional experiences, and his everyday life set him in a wholly different sphere.
It is possible, of course, that Whitey and Bill were different genetically—they were not identical twins, after all; they were just brothers. It is also possible that in one of those teenage fights Whitey suffered a traumatic brain injury that led to problems with impulse control. But the most plausible explanation is simply that the brothers inhabited two very different environments at critical moments in their lives. Our surroundings often exert such a powerful influence that they all but erase the effects of disposition.
Consider a modern-day Whitey. He is sixteen years old, wearing a mask, and his hand is on a gun inside his jacket. As part of a gang initiation, he is supposed to rob the first person who walks by the graffitied alley he’s standing in. He does—shooting and killing the man, a father of three, in the process.
Reading this brief description, most of us already have a causal story in mind that focuses on the flawed character and poor choices of the boy. But what role might the situation have played in the terrible crime?
As a starting point, let’s rule out some of the elements of the situation that clearly could not have played any sort of causal role—the mask he was wearing, for example. The conventional account of the criminal’s mask is that bad people who want to commit bad acts cover their faces in stockings or wear balaclavas so that they can do what they want—burglarize, rob, rape, or murder—without being identified and caught. It is a tool employed by a person to assist him in accomplishing his chosen end.
That seems uncontroversial enough, but researchers have found that the mask itself can be the source of harmful behavior. In one experiment, a group of elementary school students at a Halloween party played games—first wearing their normal clothes, then their costumes, then their normal clothes again. In the “anonymous” second set of games, students were significantly more aggressive, but that aggression disappeared when they removed their masks for the final games. It seemed to be the costumes and not the children’s inherent character that mattered—a finding that some have connected to anthropological research showing that societies in which warriors mask or change their appearance during battle are far more likely to also kill and torture their victims.
As a follow-up, the researchers decided to look at whether the anonymity of wearing costumes could encourage kids to commit an actual crime. In the experiment, young trick-or-treaters entered a home where there was a bowl of candy and a bowl of coins. The person who greeted the children told them that they could have one piece of candy each and, if they asked, told them that the money was for charity.
So what did the kids do as soon as the greeter left to go into another room?
Well, lots of them stole candy, as well as money. Some groups took the entire bowl of treats. But there was an interesting twist: in one condition of the experiment, the woman first asked the children for their names and addresses. These kids didn’t steal. The anonymity effect of the mask had been neutralized.
Now consider another of the tools used in the modern-day Whitey’s crime: the gun. We have all heard the expression “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Even for those who view the NRA with deep distrust and contempt, this bumper-sticker wisdom has a certain logic: guns are inanimate objects, after all. They don’t have the power to influence someone’s behavior.
Except that research now suggests they do.
Clutching a weapon can change us. In one set of studies, participants were each given either a toy gun or a non-weapon, like a ball, to hold while images of different people appeared on a screen. Participants were told that when the picture showed someone with a gun, they should quickly point the object they were holding at the screen; when the image revealed someone with a phone, wallet, or shoe, they should aim at the ground.
The results were astounding. The simple act of wielding a gun biased participants’ assessment of how dangerous someone was. With a gun in hand, participants were significantly more likely than those holding benign objects to aim at people on the screen. Moreover, simply having a gun conspicuously visible inside the laboratory did not have a significant effect; participants had to be holding it.
The best explanation is that using a gun as a pointer leads people to perceive ambiguous objects as guns because perception and action-planning employ shared processes in the brain. And that suggests that having a gun at your fingertips can make the world seem a far more threatening place, with potentially deadly consequences.
Even the surrounding landscape—the spray-painted alley, the trash in the gutter, the abandoned row houses—may influence a modern-day Whitey’s actions. Back in the early 1980s, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson advanced a “broken windows” theory, which asserted that potential criminals took cues from their environment: “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken….One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” For a long time, the notion that litter, rundown buildings, and burned-out cars could encourage criminal behavior was based mostly on anecdote, but recent empirical work has begun to bolster Kelling and Wilson’s ideas.
In one set of experiments, researchers in the Netherlands found that by making very minor changes to the visible disorder in a real neighborhood, they could alter people’s behavior. When there was more graffiti, significantly more people stole a five-euro note (visible inside a letter perched in the slot of a post office box). When the experimenters illegally locked bikes in plain view, more than triple the number of people trespassed in an area clearly marked NO THROUGHWAY.
On a positive note, green space in cities may have the opposite effect. Crime, it turns out, does n
ot lurk in the bushes. Indeed, in my hometown of Philadelphia, a recent study found that areas with trees, shrubbery, and grass experienced less crime, in particular fewer robberies and assaults.
Even accepting that the backdrop can play a causal role in human dramas, it seems hard to believe that elements in our situations could ever lead a person to commit a truly atrocious act—say, killing a man. But, in fact, the most famous series of experiments in psychology came remarkably close to proving just that. The question that sparked it all was a straightforward one: What percentage of the population would deliver a potentially lethal shock of electricity to another human being simply for getting a question wrong on a test?
Although logic suggested that only a sadistic person would flip the switch, Stanley Milgram found that 63 percent of experimental subjects delivered the full 450 volts when an experimenter instructed them to. What was even more interesting was that Milgram could get compliance rates to vary between zero and 92.5 percent just by changing minor elements in the environment. Did the participant first see two peers refuse to obey orders? If so, obedience plunged. Did the instruction to continue the experiment come from a scientist in a gray lab coat or a lay administrator? With a scientist, compliance shot up. Was the location of the experiment Yale University or a private facility in Bridgeport, Connecticut? In the Bridgeport lab, the number of committed shockers plummeted.
We want to believe that atrocious crimes are always caused by atrocious people who are very different from us. But that is simply not the case. There is psychological truth behind Hannah Arendt’s famous characterization of evil as “banal.” Arendt was writing about the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, and in observing the proceedings she was struck by how utterly ordinary Eichmann seemed. Here was someone who had done monstrous things—overseeing the Final Solution—yet he did not appear to be a monster. Although subsequent research has revealed that Eichmann may have been a more enthusiastic executioner than he let on, Arendt’s broader message has endured.
The implications are hard to accept: we may all have the potential to harm, to be criminals. But the threat to our self-esteem is actually graver than that. Acknowledging the science means losing vital cover. If situational factors play such a powerful role in offending, we can no longer claim to be outside observers. When we decide not to regulate weapons, when we elect to leave swaths of our neighborhoods blighted or cut nutrition programs for women, infants, and children, when we provide young inner-city men with few options but to join gangs, we become implicated in the crimes that eventually result.
The major effect of knocking down the “mug shot” view of criminals, then, is to eliminate the barrier that stands between us and those we lock up. This is difficult, but it’s critical to achieving a just legal system—a topic we’ll return to at the end of the book. When we appreciate that a person’s likelihood of committing a crime drastically increases with the wrong genes or a blow to the head, it makes it easier to feel empathy for those who have done wrong, to forgive them, and to offer help rather than hurt. And when we understand that the power of our environments can lead us all to commit terrible acts, we suddenly have a reason to change those conditions to ensure that no one is led astray.
Without a “mug shot” notion of crime, we’d look at the photographs of Frank Masters, John Powell, Alick Evan McGregor, and William Johnston with different eyes. Real mug shots would no longer be objects of amusement and curiosity. We’d see them for what they are: reminders of the work still left to be done.
PART II
Adjudication
4
BREAKING THE RULES
The Lawyer
It isn’t just murderers who make deathbed confessions. Sometimes prosecutors do, too.
Gerry Deegan was dying of cancer. He had worked for the D.A. in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, since law school, battling to put bad men away. Now his number had come up, and he wanted to tell his friend Michael Riehlmann something. Riehlmann was a former prosecutor himself—same parish. He listened.
Nine years earlier, Deegan had done something he now regretted.
It all started with Raymond T. Liuzza Jr., the son of a well-known New Orleans businessman, bleeding to death in front of his house in the early morning of December 6, 1984. The only witness to the shooting described the assailant to police as a six-foot-tall African American with “close cut hair.” But that didn’t narrow things down much, and the police were casting about until the Liuzza family announced a $15,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Raymond’s murderer.
The money lured Richard Perkins out of the depths: “I don’t mind helping [you] catch [the perpetrator],” he told them, “but I would like [you] to help me and, you know, I’ll help [you].”
According to Perkins, two men were behind the crime: Kevin Freeman and John Thompson. The police snagged Freeman first, then kicked in the door to Thompson’s grandmother’s house. Thompson’s two sons were there, and his girlfriend, his mom, his brother and sister, and his grandmother. They watched as the police, guns drawn, took Thompson away. He was twenty-two years old.
Freeman matched the description the witness had given: tall, with closely cropped hair that had earned him the nickname Kojak. But it was Thompson—four inches shorter and hair in a large Afro—who would catch the charge.
His photo in the paper had attracted the eye of a father whose three children had recently been involved in a seemingly unrelated incident—an attempted carjacking. Now, looking at the Afro in the photograph, the children thought they were staring at the carjacker once again. And when they went down to the station, they picked out the same newspaper photo from an array of mug shots.
The D.A.’s office had their man. What’s more, Freeman had turned quick and easy and was ready to be the key witness in a murder trial against Thompson. All they had to do was think about strategy: they had been dealt a strong hand for the death penalty, but they had to play their cards right.
The opening move was to try Thompson on the armed robbery of the kids, because a conviction would discourage Thompson from testifying in his own defense during the more critical murder trial. If he chose to testify, the rules of evidence would allow the prosecution to introduce his robbery conviction to impeach his credibility—a potentially devastating hit. And without Thompson’s testimony, the defense would have a much harder time presenting his side of the story and reducing the impact of the testimony against him. Just as important, a prior violent felony on Thompson’s record could help secure an execution verdict in the second case.
Deegan was enlisted to assist James Williams on the armed robbery case, while Williams and Eric Dubelier handled the murder case. And Deegan and Williams knocked it out of the park: Thompson was sentenced to 49.5 years in prison without the possibility of parole on the robbery charge based on the identifications of the three victims, which set the stage for a clear win for the prosecution in the murder trial. Thompson was going to be executed. Harry F. Connick Sr., the district attorney for Orleans Parish (and father of the musician and actor of the same name), had a signature victory—a sign that, even in the sometimes-troubled Big Easy, justice eventually came to the wicked.
John Thompson was sent to prison and then to death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary—the infamous Angola, Alcatraz of the South. He was sitting there now, as Deegan and Riehlmann spoke.
So what did Deegan want to get off his chest?
He hadn’t done right in the first trial. During the carjacking, the eldest child had injured the assailant, and the man had bled onto his pants. A crime-scene investigator had taken a swatch of the bloody fabric, and the crime lab had run a pretrial test of the swatch, which had conclusively identified the blood type of the assailant. But Thompson’s lawyer never knew about it because the report had not been handed over, and Deegan himself had checked the swatch out of the evidence room on the first day of trial and never returned it.
He had kept all of this to himself
for nine years: he had suppressed blood evidence.
Back in 1963, in the case of Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court made clear that prosecutors must turn over evidence that is favorable to the defendant and material to issues of guilt or punishment. Failing to do so—in common parlance, committing a Brady violation—is a contravention of the constitutional right to due process.
Riehlmann suggested that Deegan reveal what he had done—come clean. It was the right thing to do. But when Deegan elected to keep his mouth shut, so did Riehlmann.
For five more years Thompson sat in his isolation cell, waiting for the day he would die. His execution had been scheduled six times. Each time it was delayed for an appeal, but the appeals had run out. His seventh and final date was May 20, 1999.
In a last-ditch effort, Thompson’s lawyers hired a private investigator to look through the evidence one final time. It was less than a month before the execution. There wasn’t much hope the P.I. would turn up anything, but nonetheless she scanned through the microfiche of the crime lab archives. And then there it was: a copy of the lab report with the carjacker’s blood type.
B, it said.
Thompson had type O blood. He was innocent.
His conviction for the armed robbery was vacated, which led to a reversal of his murder conviction. Thompson was finally able to testify in his own defense. At the new trial, Thompson presented evidence that the man who had been the government’s key witness against him in the first trial—Kevin Freeman—was actually the murderer. It took the jurors only thirty-five minutes to find Thompson not guilty.
After more than eighteen years in prison, Thompson walked out of Angola on May 9, 2003.
—
How does such an atrocity—there is no other word for it—occur? What could lead someone to hide evidence that could potentially save an innocent man’s life?
Unfair Page 8
