Hussy! A single bacterial cell can divide into 16 million cells in 8 hours.
Sadly, Jobs died from pancreatic cancer in October 2011. By then the business, now known as Apple Inc., had passed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable publicly traded company on Earth. Its stock price continued to climb after his death: By January 2012, Apple had a market value of more than $393 billion.
Estimates of the present value of Ron Wayne’s original Apple stake vary depending on what assumptions are made, but all the estimates are in the billions. If he had owned 5.2 percent of Apple in early 2012, it would have been worth more than $20 billion, making him one of the 13 richest people in the United States, just behind the Wal-Mart heirs and just ahead of Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, and Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. He’d also be well ahead of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who sold much of their stock in the 1980s.
LIFE’S A GAMBLE
Wayne had continued to consult with Apple after withdrawing from the partnership. He designed the first Apple logo (an image of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree), wrote the Apple I user’s manual, and helped organize an inventory system. After he left Apple, he worked a variety of jobs in government and industry. He didn’t own a computer until 1996. When he finally did get one, he bought a Dell. He didn’t own any Apple products until 2011, when an event organizer gave him an iPad 2 during a personal appearance in the United Kingdom.
By 2012, Wayne had retired and was living in the desert community of Pahrump, Nevada, 60 miles west of Las Vegas. He still makes occasional appearances at Apple events. When he’s in Pahrump, he supplements his social security income by selling rare stamps and coins from his home. For entertainment, he plays the penny slot machines in a nearby casino.
In interviews, Wayne invariably puts a brave face on his famous missed opportunity, but occasionally a twinge of regret does slip out. “Unfortunately my whole life has been a day late and a dollar short,” he told a reporter in 2010.
Better to drink soda? 30% of bottled water is contaminated with chemicals or bacteria.
JOIN THE CLUB
Ron Wayne wasn’t the only one to say no to a big slice of Apple. Here are a few others who made the same regrettable decision.
Hewlett-Packard. Because he built the Apple I at his cubicle in the HP’s calculator division, Steve Wozniak felt obliged to offer it to the company. The calculator division didn’t want it, so an HP attorney called the heads of all the other departments and asked, “You interested in an $800 machine that can run BASIC (an early computer language) and hook up to a TV?” No one was. The lawyer drafted a letter renouncing any claim to ownership by HP and gave it to Wozniak for nothing. Later, after Wozniak finished work on the Apple II, he offered to join an HP team designing a personal computer. HP turned him down.
Haltek Surplus Electronics. Jobs offered Haltek a stake in Apple in exchange for the $15,000 in parts he needed to build the first 50 computers. No deal: The owner thought the “scruffy-looking” Jobs and Wozniak would never succeed in business. Haltek closed its doors in 2000 after the landlord raised the rent.
Atari. When HP turned Wozniak down, Jobs offered the Apple I to Atari, but they were busy creating a home version of Pong and passed. Later, when Jobs was trying to raise the $200,000 needed to launch the Apple II, he made Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, another offer: 30 percent of Apple Computer for $50,000. Bushnell said no. The Atari brand is still around, but the company is long gone. After losing $500 million in 1983, its parent company, Warner Communications, split Atari into two separate companies and unloaded them both. Both are now defunct.
Commodore Computers. After Atari said no to a 30-percent stake, Jobs tried to sell the entire company to Commodore Business Machines. Price: $100,000 in cash, plus some Commodore stock and $36,000-a-year jobs for both Jobs and Wozniak. Commodore passed on the offer and introduced its own computer in 1977. After years of losing market share to Apple and IBM PCs, Commodore filed for bankruptcy in 1994.
In ancient Rome, a father had the right to sell any member of his family into slavery.
THE INNOCENCE PROJECT
Today everyone knows about DNA evidence because it’s a part of every cop show on TV and in the movies. But have you ever wondered about the cases and the people that started it all? We did.
ANEW CASE
In 1986 Barry Scheck, professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, and Peter Neufeld, who ran a private law practice nearby, were sent a case file regarding a man in a New York prison. Scheck and Neufeld had both started law school in the late 1960s, and both were steeped in the social justice themes that defined the era. As young lawyers in the 1970s, they’d cut their teeth as public defenders in the South Bronx, where they had worked on the most desperate cases—cases very similar to the one they’d just been handed.
Marion Coakley, 30, had been convicted of a violent robbery, kidnapping, and rape that had taken place in a Bronx, New York, hotel in 1983. The victim had described her attacker as a dark-skinned black man with a Jamaican accent and a short Afro. She later picked Coakley—a light-skinned black man with no Jamaican accent and no Afro—out of a police lineup. Seventeen people, including a priest, said they were with Coakley at a church meeting miles from the scene of the crime at the time it occurred, but he was convicted anyway.
A NEW TECHNOLOGY
Scheck and Neufeld agreed to look into the file. A blood expert they sometimes worked with, Robert Shaler, told them the case might be a good one to test out an emerging technology called “DNA testing.” Naturally, the two criminal defense lawyers were interested in promising forensic technologies, so they took their colleague’s advice. That DNA could be used to identify individuals had only been discovered a few years earlier, and it had never been used in a criminal case in the United States. Such testing was, in fact, being used for the very first time in a case in England. (For more on the story of DNA testing in forensics go to Page 585.)
Elvis gave Muhammad Ali a $10,000 white robe with “People’s Champion” on the back.
THE VERDICT
Scheck and Neufeld tried to use DNA testing to get Coakley’s conviction overturned. It didn’t work: Not enough DNA could be extracted from the evidence to identify the attacker. Fortunately, they were still able to get Coakley’s conviction overturned by proving his innocence via other evidence, including a bloody palm print on the rearview mirror of the victim’s car, which the actual assailant had stolen as part of the attack. Coakley was released in September 1987, after serving two years. But even though the use of the technology hadn’t been successful, the die was cast. Scheck and Neufeld had been introduced to DNA testing—and they knew that it was going to be a game changer.
For the next couple of years, people in both law enforcement and science worked to figure out how DNA testing was going to fit into the world of forensics. Think about it: Fingerprinting alone took decades to be fully integrated into forensic science. If DNA testing was going be accepted, it would have to be made understandable to investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and—especially—juries. Scheck and Neufeld became closely involved with this process, and they are credited today with getting DNA testing to become a standard part of forensics as quickly and thoroughly as it did.
THE COURTS SPEAK
Two significant events occurred to push DNA testing along:
• In 1987 the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that DNA evidence could be used in a trial (it was a rape case), giving the use of DNA evidence in a courtroom its first major legal precedent.
• In 1989 Gary Dotson of Chicago, Illinois, became the first person in history to have a conviction overturned through the use of DNA testing. It was a heart-rending case. Dotson had been convicted in 1979 of the violent rape of a 16-year-old girl and sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison. Six years into his sentence, the “victim” admitted she’d made up the whole thing. Earlier that day, she’d had sex with h
er boyfriend for the first time, and was afraid she’d become pregnant. Yet even with that recantation, it took Dotson another four years—and, finally, DNA evidence proving that semen taken from the girl’s underwear was her boyfriend’s, not Dotson’s—for him to be exonerated.
Just take our word for it: Raw termites taste like pineapple.
Scheck and Neufeld followed Dotson’s case closely, and when he was finally proclaimed innocent, they decided it was time to put on their superhero costumes.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE
Because they had used DNA testing early on, Scheck and Neufeld got letters from prison inmates pleading for their help. By the early 1990s, they were inundated. Neufeld described this period in 2001, in an interview with the University of California, Berkeley’s online show, “Conversations with History”:
The first thing that happened is that we began doing these cases on an ad hoc basis. Someone would write us a letter; we would try and respond to it and take on the case. And we realized that this was inadequate.
In 1991 Scheck dealt with that inadequacy by starting an experimental project for some of his students at the Cardozo Law School: The students would read the letters from inmates and their lawyers, and develop a set of criteria a case would have to meet in order to be accepted. The most important: There had to be sufficient reason to believe that the person may have been wrongfully convicted (as in Marion Coakley’s case), and there had to be biological evidence—blood, other body fluids, or hair—still available, from which DNA could be extracted. Scheck and Neufeld decided to call it “The Innocence Project.”
When a case was accepted, the students would search through old evidence, do their best to find witnesses, and go over testimony, while Scheck and Neufeld would help on the larger legal issues. When they had what they thought was enough, they’d present what they’d discovered to the prosecutor where the case was tried, and ask that the prosecutor’s office order a DNA test. Prosecutors hate having cases overturned, so it was an uphill battle.…but sometimes it worked.
THE NEXT CASE
One such case was that of Kirk Bloodsworth. In April 1985, Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, 23, went on trial for the 1984 sexual assault and murder of a 9-year-old girl in Maryland. Bloodsworth, a former Marine with no criminal record, pleaded innocent. No physical evidence linked him to the crime, and he had witnesses who put him somewhere else at the time of the crime. In addition, the eyewitnesses who testified that they’d seen him near the scene of the crime were shaky at best: Two of them were boys aged 7 and 10, who had been unable to pick Bloodsworth—a large man with bright red hair and prominent sideburns—out of a police lineup. Despite all this, Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death.
Legal briefs: In Thailand, it’s illegal to leave your house if you’re not wearing underwear.
TRIED AND TRIED AGAIN
The trial was such a mess that the original conviction was overturned on appeal—but the second trial saw Bloodsworth convicted again. This time he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Seven years passed. Then, in 1992, Bloodsworth read a book that had a reference to DNA testing in it. He told his lawyer, Robert Morin, about it. Morin enlisted the help of The Innocence Project.
The team reviewing the court record was able to determine that biological evidence had been taken in the case. They asked for it, but were told it had been destroyed. The team persisted. The evidence suddenly “turned up.” In April 1992, the prosecutor agreed to have DNA testing done. Another year passed. (Testing took much longer back then than it does today.) But on May 17, 1993, the DNA test conclusively proved that Kirk Bloodsworth could not have been the person who committed the crime for which he’d been convicted (twice) and for which he had already served eight years—two of them on death row. He was freed from prison, given a full pardon by the governor of Maryland, and in 1994, he was awarded $300,000 compensation.
The real rapist and killer in the Kirk Bloodsworth case wasn’t discovered for another ten years after Bloodsworth’s 1993 exoneration. When Bloodsworth heard the man’s name—Kimberly Shay Ruffner—he said, “My God. I know him.” Ruffner had spent five years in the same prison as Bloodsworth. “I gave him library books,” Bloodsworth said, “and he never said a word.”
SUCCESSES
Bloodsworth was just one of five wrongfully convicted people exonerated by DNA testing in 1992, all of them with at least some help from The Innocence Project. After that, things really got rolling. In the years since Scheck and Neufeld began their quest, The Innocence Project has become an enormous phenomenon, with chapters in all 50 states, as well as in several other countries. All of the cases are done pro bono. A few of the more notable ones:
First U.S. president to name an African American to his cabinet: Lyndon Johnson (Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, 1966–68).
• The Ford Heights Four. In July 1996, DNA evidence proved that Dennis Williams, Willie Rainge, Kenneth Adams, and Verneal Jimerson were not guilty of the 1978 rape and murder of a young couple in the Ford Heights neighborhood of Chicago. Williams, Rainge, and Adams spent almost 18 years in prison for that crime, Jimerson almost 11. In 1999 they settled with Cook County, Illinois, in a $36 million wrongful conviction lawsuit—the largest civil rights settlement in history at the time. (During the investigation that freed them, it was revealed that a witness had told police that four other men were seen running from the crime scene—but police never investigated that. In 1998, DNA evidence proved those four other men had committed the crimes. One was in jail for having murdered another woman.)
• Marvin Anderson. In 2001 Anderson was exonerated in the violent 1982 rape of a young woman in Hanover, Virginia. He was just 18 when he was convicted, and he had no criminal record. The only reason he was suspected in the case: The victim, who was white, told police that her assailant, who was black, said he had a white girlfriend—and Anderson was the only black man in the area that they knew of who had a white girlfriend. (He was convicted by an all-white jury in about 45 minutes—and sentenced to 210 years in prison.) In 1988 John Otis Lincoln, also from Hanover, admitted in a courtroom that he’d committed the crime—but the judge said he was lying. Anderson was freed on parole in 1997, after serving more than 15 years. It took another five years to get a DNA test done, which proved his innocence. In 2002 he was granted a full pardon. He was the 99th person in the United States exonerated, post-conviction, through the use of DNA evidence. (Further testing showed that John Otis Lincoln had committed the crime. He was convicted of the 1982 rape in 2003.)
• James Bain. In December 2009, James Bain of Brooklyn, New York, was proven by DNA testing to be innocent of the kidnapping, burglary, and rape of a 9-year-old boy—for which he had spent 35 years in prison. It’s the longest sentence served by any person exonerated by DNA evidence. One of the reasons Bain had been convicted: The victim picked him out of a police lineup. The boy admitted years later than he’d been directed to pick Bain.
So far, 289 wrongfully convicted people in the United States have been exonerated through the use of DNA evidence, most of them with the help of The Innocence Project or related organizations. Average length of time served: 13.5 years. Of the 289 total, 17 were freed from death row.
In 1994 the FBI began operating CODIS (“Combined DNA Index System”), a massive database of DNA profiles for millions of people who have been convicted of violent and sexual crimes. Of the 289 exoneration cases, use of CODIS has led to the arrests of 139 actual perpetrators. The prosecutor in Bloodsworth’s case, Ann Brobst, finally apologized to him in 2003.
* * *
A LUCKY FIND
Zach Bodish, 46, of Columbus, Ohio, restores vintage furniture that he finds in thrift stores. One day in March 2012, he was perusing a local Volunteers of America store when he found what he thought was a poster that featured a reproduction of a Picasso print made for a 1958 exhibit of his pottery in France. Bodish bought the poster for $14.14.
When he got the post
er home he noticed some French words written in pencil at the bottom. They translated as “original print, signed proof,” and the notation “6/100.” He also found some faded red pencil markings on the lower-right corner. The “poster,” it turns out, was actually a limited-edition print—only 100 had been made. The low number, 6th out of the 100 printed, meant that it was an “artist’s proof” that Picasso personally reviewed and approved before the remaining prints were made by the printer. Those faint red marks? Picasso’s signature!
While Picasso’s paintings have sold for more than $100 million apiece, his signed prints are worth far less. Bodish’s print was appraised at just $4,000, but he found a buyer willing to pay him $7,000. “I realized it wasn’t going to make me rich, but how often do you find a Picasso?”
The first TV broadcast of an atomic bomb detonation took place on station KTLA in 1952.
HIYO, SILVER—AWAY!
What better way to celebrate the silver anniversary of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader than to “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” when a masked man rode the plains on a horse named Silver?
THE LONE STATION
In the late 1920s movie theater owner from Detroit named George W. Trendle convinced his business partner that they should expand into the fledgling medium of broadcast radio. They bought the local CBS affiliate, and promptly renamed it WXYZ.
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 57
