[Deathpenalty]death penalty news----KY., CALIF., ILL., MD.

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 21


KENTUCKY:

Inmate hoping mental retardation claim will spare him death


Thomas Clyde Bowling sits on Kentucky's death row, awaiting execution on
Nov. 30 for the murder of a Lexington couple more than a decade ago.

His attorney, David Barron, wonders if Bowling has the mental capacity to
be put to death by the state.

Barron, an assistant public advocate, is taking on an issue that jumped to
the legal forefront when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2002 that
states cannot execute the mentally retarded.

The Kentucky Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday about whether to
stop Bowling's execution while it is determined if he is mentally
retarded.

The case Bowling is using, Atkins v. Virginia, set off a flurry of motions
and legislation across the country. Lawyers have sought to spare some
inmates execution and states have moved to deal with the prohibition and
set standards for determining who is mentally retarded, which is generally
defined as having an IQ of 70 or lower.

Since the Atkins decision, dozens of inmates have been removed from death
rows around the country. Those inmates, though, represent only a small
part of the estimated 400-plus death row inmates - about 4,000 nationally
- that may be mentally retarded, said David Dow, a University of Houston
law professor who studies the capital punishment.

Determining which inmates are mentally retarded is difficult because of a
crazy-quilt of laws and standards across the country, said Robert
Dinerstein, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

Some states have laws setting out a process of how to determine if someone
is mentally retarded, but Kentucky and nearly half of all states do not,
Dinerstein and Dow said. That's especially true in dealing with claims of
mental retardation after someone has been convicted, they said.

Despite that, inmates and their attorneys have been pursuing mental
retardation claims whenever possible, Dow said.

"Indeed, it would be malpractice for a lawyer not to raise this issue with
his or her client and pursue it unless the client directed him or her not
to do so," Dinerstein said.

Bowling, sentenced to death for the 1990 slayings of Lexington residents
Eddie and Tina Earley, owners of the Earley Bird Cleaners, is the first
Kentucky death row inmate to try to apply the Atkins decision to stop an
imminent execution.

Barron says Bowling's IQ is in the low 70s. Given the possibility that
test results vary with age, Bowling could fall below an IQ of 70,
qualifying him as mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for
execution, Barron said.

Barron cites Bowling's long history of poor performance in school, at jobs
and generally his inability to take care of himself as further proof of
previously undiagnosed mental retardation.

Kentucky Attorney General Greg Stumbo said the mental retardation claim
should not stop the execution.

"Bowling was sentenced to death, not simply a lifetime of litigating about
death," Stumbo said in his letter to the governor requesting Bowling's
execution.

John Roach, executive counsel to Gov. Ernie Fletcher, said claims such as
mental retardation were considered in reviewing Bowling's file. But, Roach
said, it wasn't the determining factor in Fletcher's decision.

"It was the totality of the case," Roach said.

Rosie Earley of Lexington, who has raised her grandson since her son and
daughter-in-law were killed, doesn't want any more delays.

"They should get it over with," she said of the execution.

(source: Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Substance Beats Style in Peterson Trial


In the world of high-profile murder trials, flash is often pitted against
substance. Celebrity attorneys, with all their flair, media savvy,
expensive suits and teams of tag-alongs, face off against generally
clean-cut, methodical and underpaid prosecutors.

But it was the spotlight-dodging prosecutor who claimed victory in Scott
Peterson's double-murder trial after months of bad press for a courtroom
style described as excruciating" by trial watchers.

When the jury found Peterson guilty, lead prosecutor Rick Distaso and his
team barreled down the front steps of the courthouse for the 1st time
during the 5-month trial and swept across the plaza to cheers of "Thank
you Rick!" It was a rare moment in the sun for Distaso, who slipped into
court through a back door each day and was criticized for presenting a
parade of sometimes confusing testimony. At times, he squeaked out
objections like a kid complaining on the playground.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos, meanwhile, swaggered past cameras, elicited
chuckles inside the courtroom and morphed from loud and accusatory, arms
flailing, to whisper-quiet. Reporters trailed behind him like a pack of
puppies.

"These guys were the exact opposites," said Chuck Smith, a former San
Mateo County prosecutor. "Flash and flamboyance versus dull and
methodical."

Geragos dominated at 1st, turning prosecution witnesses in his favor. A
detective had to acknowledge omitting a key witness account that didn't
fit the prosecution's theory, and Geragos pointed to unfollowed leads that
made police look sloppy.

Weeks into the trial, experts agreed Peterson would probably walk, and a
dismissed juror seemed to confirm that suspicion, saying there was no way
to convict and griping about the prosecution's case.

But for all his flash, there was one thing Geragos couldn't spin -- the
fact that the bodies of Laci Peterson and her fetus washed up in San
Francisco Bay not 2 miles from where his client went fishing the day she
vanished, Christmas Eve 2002.

A turning point came with the testimony of Detective Craig Grogan, who
ticked off 41 reasons why police figured the bodies would be in the bay --
from a search dog picking up Laci's scent at the marina where Peterson
launched his boat to the fishing license Peterson purchased in advance.

The defense case followed -- and was "a huge disappointment," according to
former prosecutor and trial watcher Dean Johnson. Geragos presented just
14 witnesses, including a crucial medical expert who finally pleaded with
the prosecution to "cut me some slack."

Dr. Charles March was supposed to prove the most powerful point for the
defense -- that the fetus lived beyond the day Laci vanished. If that was
true, Geragos claimed, Peterson couldn't be the killer, since he was under
intense media scrutiny and police surveillance after she disappeared and
would have been seen committing murder.

It had been the highlight of Geragos' opening statement, and March did
testify that the fetus likely died, at the earliest, five days after Laci
vanished. But March became frazzled and squirmed nervously on
cross-examination, acknowledging that he based his findings in part on the
date when a friend of Laci's recalled the victim announcing she was
pregnant.

It was Peterson's last best chance to prove his innocence -- and it fell
tremendously short.

Geragos delivered little that he had promised in a dramatic opening
statement. He claimed witnesses saw a strange van in Laci's neighborhood,
and another saw Laci being shoved inside. The witnesses would never
appear.

"Doing that can really boomerang because jurors feel betrayed,'' said
Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. "The defense loses
credibility. That's the beginning of the end."

It was during Distaso's rebuttal to Geragos' closing that he would finally
get a laugh with the final words jurors heard from the lawyers before
entering deliberations.

Geragos had claimed all along that Peterson was framed and that transients
in the couple's neighborhood may have been responsible for Laci's death.
Geragos noted that articles in the hometown newspaper, the Modesto Bee,
revealed where Peterson launched his boat, and implied that the transients
followed a well publicized trail to the perfect frame-up.

"You've got to feel bad for the homeless people in this case. ... They are
taking a bad rap," the prosecutor told jurors. "In order to have framed
Scott you would have to know exactly where he was fishing on the day his
wife disappeared. ... The homeless people must be avid readers of the
Modesto Bee."

Jurors snickered.

Distaso then noted that the Bee didn't report the location until 4 days
after Laci vanished. By then, the area was crawling with police.

"How many of these coincidences does the defendant want you to swallow and
still call yourselves reasonable people?" Distaso said.

With his closing, Distaso placed all the circumstantial evidence into a
compelling narrative, delivering on everything he promised in opening
statements.

The case was "like a jigsaw puzzle," Distaso said. Completed, it shows
"that this man is guilty of murder.

After a chaotic week of deliberations, the jury agreed. Peterson faces the
death penalty or life without parole.

(source: Associated Press)

*********************

Will Cleaveresque Scott get a death row ticket?


San Quentin's death row conjures up images of Robert Alton Harris, who
murdered 2 teenage boys in 1978 and then ate the rest of their lunches. He
died in the gas chamber in 1992.

You think of people such as William Bonin, the so-called "Freeway Killer"
who raped, robbed and murdered 14 teenage boys in 1979 and 1980. He died
by lethal injection in 1996.

You think of serial killers, murdering rapists, psychopaths who beat
elderly people to death and career criminals who added new dimensions to
the term "heinous."

You're reminded of the worst of the worst.

Now the same San Mateo County jury that found Scott Peterson guilty of
killing his wife and their unborn son must determine whether he belongs in
that club. Legal wrangling could delay the penalty phase, scheduled to
begin Monday in Redwood City. The jury can recommend Peterson get the
death penalty or a life sentence, but the decision belongs to Judge Alfred
Delucchi.

Will Peterson's lack of criminal history be enough to convince jurors to
spare his life?

Did they, as defense attorney Mark Geragos suggested in his closing
statement, develop an intense dislike for the man who showed so little
emotion throughout the 5-months-long trial?

Will the photos they saw - of wife Laci beaming as a mom-to-be mixed with
the graphic autopsy shots - convince them he should be put to death?

Since California restored the death penalty in 1978, 10 people have been
executed among the 717 to reach death row. On deck is Donald Jay Beardslee
who, like Peterson, was convicted in San Mateo County. He's one of 18
convicts - including one woman - whom the county's jurors have sent to
death row. 4, like Peterson, committed crimes elsewhere and had their
trials moved to San Mateo County.

Peterson's past was nothing like any of the 10 executed by the state or
most of the others awaiting execution. He comes from an affluent family.
He fished, played golf and attended college. He was married and working.
He had no criminal convictions.

The 10 who have been executed mostly were career criminals. None had
college educations, nor do most now on death row. Many had horrendous
upbringings that didn't include the Beaver Cleaver-like childhood Peterson
enjoyed.

Some of the 18 sentenced to death row by San Mateo County juries include:

A cop who tortured 5 prostitutes and one's boyfriend to death in 1986.

A man who beat 2 women to death and then set their place on fire.

A hit man.

A guy who shot 2 people and killed a 3rd, using a board spiked with nails.

A man who killed 4 women.

Another who killed 7, including family and co-workers.

A woman who killed 2 simply for the thrill of it.

We still don't know - and might never know - how Peterson did it, where
the murders took place or when.

The case against him relied on enough circumstantial evidence to make it a
common-sense decision, as prosecutor Rick Distaso put it. The jurors
obviously agreed.

They convicted Peterson of 1st-degree murder with special circumstances
that make him eligible for the death penalty in Laci's murder, and
second-degree for killing their unborn son, Conner.

So it comes down to this: They will determine the heinousness of
Peterson's crimes. Will he spend the rest of his life living among the
worst?

Or, when his appeals are exhausted, will he join the worst of the worst?

(source: Column, Jeff Jardine, Modesto Bee)

*************************

Killer offered a deal----Bargain would spare Shermantine's life for help
finding bodies

The 6-year search for Cyndi Vanderheiden's body may end and a convicted
multiple murderer may be taken off death row if Wesley Shermantine Jr.
accepts a deal proposed to him by the San Joaquin County District
Attorney's Office.

Shermantine, who was convicted in 2001 on four counts of 1st-degree
murder, was offered his life and immunity for any crimes of his discovered
in the future in return for his testimony against longtime friend Loren
Herzog and his help finding the bodies of his victims, several people with
knowledge of the deal said.

It is not clear whether Shermantine will accept the deal, nor whether the
district attorney has the power to carry out such a bargain.

But the offer was run past families of alleged victims, discussed with
members of the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office and provided as legal
discovery to Herzog's defense attorneys.

The monumental offer would bring a sense of closure to at least 2 families
of murder victims whose bodies have not been found.

In a letter to The Record dated Nov. 3 and sent from California State
Prison at San Quentin, Shermantine wrote, "If I was given a helluva deal,
I would testify and tell everything Herzog told me and (where) he put his
victims."

Herzog, 38, is being retried in the killing of Vanderheiden, a Clements
woman Shermantine killed in November 1998. Her body was never found.

The body of Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, killed in 1985, also has not been
found.

Herzog was convicted in 2001 of three counts of first-degree murder --
including one for Vanderheiden's death -- and sentenced to 78 years in
prison. But California's 6th District Court of Appeal ruled in August that
police had interrogated Herzog improperly and overturned those
convictions. The appellate ruling allowed Herzog to be retried for
Vanderheiden's murder.

Shermantine, 38, was convicted separately of 4 counts of murder -- also
including Vanderheiden's -- and sentenced to death.

Kim Wrage-Vanderheiden, Cyndi Vanderheiden's sister, said the deal offered
to Shermantine had been run past her family.

"I'm all for it," she said. "If he's going to be taken off of death row,
he's going to die in prison anyway. Therefore, what's the big deal?"

However, Wrage-Vanderheiden said she wasn't getting her hopes up.
Shermantine has offered in the past to lead authorities to his victims'
bodies but never followed through.

Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa would not confirm that the deal had
been offered to Shermantine. Not wanting to add to media coverage of the
trial, Testa has refused in recent weeks to speak with reporters.

Others familiar with the deal would not comment on it, citing a gag order
restraining potential witnesses in the trial.

District Attorney John Phillips could not be reached Friday evening.

"The only one thing that (Testa) could do for Shermantine would be to get
the death penalty off him," said Doug Jacobsen, who was Shermantine's
defense attorney during his trial.

Shermantine is not currently represented by an attorney and is waiting for
one to be appointed for his pending death-sentence appeal.

Herzog's defense attorney, Peter Fox, said Shermantine's cooperation,
while unlikely, would be valuable to victims' families.

"He holds something no one else does," Fox said. "Loren never did know
where Cyndi Vanderheiden's body was taken. If he did, he would have showed
police then."

Meanwhile, in San Joaquin County Superior Court on Friday, attorneys
argued over whether to return Herzog's case to Stockton or to retry him in
Santa Clara County, where his first murder trial was held in 2001.

Both Herzog and Shermantine were tried before Santa Clara County juries
because a judge determined they could not get a fair trial in San Joaquin
County, where their cases are among the county's most notorious.

Testa tried to convince Judge F. Clark Sueyres that 12 impartial jurors
could be found in San Joaquin County, which has grown by 80,000 people
since Vanderheiden disappeared in 1998.

He called to the witness stand Robert S. Ross, a professor of political
science at California State University, Chico, who is an expert in polling
about whether a change of venue is necessary in criminal trials.

Ross conducted a survey Nov. 5-12 of 405 San Joaquin County residents who
are eligible for jury duty and found that 61 percent of them recognized
the Herzog case. Of that 61 percent, Ross testified, 60.7 % felt that
Herzog was "definitely" or "probably" guilty.

If that is an accurate representation of the entire San Joaquin jury pool,
it means 37 percent of likely jurors already believe Herzog is guilty.

Ross called the number low and opined that a fair trial could be held in
the county.

"It's very seldom that a case with these numbers gets changed," Ross said.

But Fox said the bar is higher when determining whether to return a case
to its home jurisdiction once it already has been moved. The court must
find that the circumstances that led to the original change no longer
apply.

Ross cited numbers from 2001, when he had prepared a report related to the
Shermantine trial that suggested a change of venue was appropriate. That
survey found that 39 % of prospective jurors thought Shermantine was
guilty.

Fox argued that, with the margin of error, the two surveys are
statistically the same.

The attorneys' arguments centered on media coverage of the murder cases.
Fox pointed out several front-page articles and television news stories
published or aired in the county in recent weeks, saying the recognition
rate certainly will increase before jury selection.

Sueyres said he would make his ruling Wednesday.

(source: The Record)






ILLINOIS:

Serial killer preys on rural Illinois


Police on all-terrain vehicles, horseback and airplanes have combed fields
and forest in search of one or more serial killers believed responsible
for the deaths of 6 women whose bodies have been found along
little-traveled Illinois roads.

The women, all of them black, had a history of prostitution or drug abuse
and had cocaine in their systems when they were strangled or died of drug
overdoses over the last 3 1/2 years.

None showed signs of a struggle, investigators said.

Until a suspect is identified, authorities are trying to reassure nearly
312,000 residents of two largely rural counties southwest of Chicago,
while also cautioning them to be on guard.

"I don't think anybody's entirely safe," Peoria Mayor Dave Ransburg said.
"If someone can do what they've done to these 6 women, they could do it to
someone else."

Deputies in Peoria and Tazewell counties joined city and state police in
September to form a 13-person task force devoted to the unsolved cases
that have mounted since March 2001, when the first body was found near
tiny Pottstown. 4 other women have been reported missing.

"If you take a surface look at everything, it's easy to say, 'Absolutely,
it's a serial killer,'" Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy said. "But when
we get into it a little bit more, I tend to think there might be more than
one person."

Detectives have scoured an area about 3/4 the size of Rhode Island --
1,278 square miles.

They also have checked out more than 300 leads that have streamed in since
late September, fueled in part by the urging of black church leaders and
by a $20,000 reward.

The tips include "a couple pieces of information that we think have some
substance," McCoy said, but he wouldn't elaborate.

At two community forums on the slayings, some residents expressed fears
that the killer or killers might begin targeting mothers or children
instead of prostitutes and drug users.

Experts say that's unlikely if a serial killer is involved.

"The odds are they have a particular profile and they're going to stick
with that," said Deborah Laufersweiler-Dwyer, a former police officer and
now an associate professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville,
where she teaches a class on serial killers.

Prostitutes are often a serial killer's easiest victims because they're
"very accessible and no one notices right away when they turn up missing,"
said Eric Hickey, a criminal psychology professor at Fresno State
University in California who has studied serial killers since 1981 and
written 3 books.

Serial killers generally kill within their race, and most are eventually
caught, though the pursuit often takes years, Hickey said.

(source: Associated Press)






MARYLAND:

When justice isn't served


In 1985, Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted of raping and murdering a
9-year-old Maryland girl named Dawn Hamilton. It was a horrible, grisly
crime, and a crowd packed the Baltimore County courtroom to hear the young
ex-Marine sentenced. When he received the death penalty, they stood up and
cheered; some of them shouted "Give him the gas, give him the gas!"

Justice, it seemed, had been served. There was only one problem:
Bloodsworth was innocent.

Bloodsworth spent 9 years in prison, vigorously protesting his innocence
throughout. (In 1987, an appeal was granted, based on evidence that had
been suppressed in the first trial. He was retried, found guilty again,
and sentenced to 2 consecutive life terms.)

He didn't give up. In an astonishing 1993 reversal, Bloodsworth became the
1st person in the country convicted in a death penalty case to be
exonerated with DNA evidence.

But that wasn't the end of the story. After he was freed, Bloodsworth did
what few ex-cons in his position would have done. At his urging -- and
after another lengthy delay -- prosecutors used the same DNA that had
convicted Bloodsworth to find the man who had actually committed the
crime.

How it happened is the stuff of great crime fiction. Yet Bloodsworth's
story is factual, and author Tim Junkin recounts it in searing detail in
"Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by
DNA."

Familiar terrain

Junkin, who maintains dual careers as a lawyer and author, is on intimate
terms with the legal system that convicted Bloodsworth. He started his
career as a public defender in Washington, D.C., and now continues to do
criminal defense work in private practice. In 25 years as a lawyer, he
thought he had seen it all. But on a recent stop in the Bay Area, he said
he's never met anyone like Kirk Bloodsworth.

"Kirk is a remarkable person," says Junkin. "I didn't really understand
how remarkable until I heard his story."

Junkin, 53, was born in D.C., but spent much of his childhood in and
around Chesapeake Bay. Like Bloodsworth, the author worked for a time as a
waterman on fishing boats in the area (his 1st novel, titled "The
Waterman," was about the local culture).

He didn't know Bloodsworth, but 1st learned of his case in 1984. "I heard
that a Chesapeake Bay waterman had been arrested and charged with the rape
and murder of a 9-year-old girl," he recalls. "Having grown up with
watermen, I just didn't believe it. It seemed incongruous. But I lost
track of the story, and I practiced law."

Flash-forward to 2001. Junkin was the author of 2 novels and was
considering writing a nonfiction book. He came across a new article about
Bloodsworth's case. He recognized the name -- and then another name caught
his eye. Bloodsworth's latest lawyer (he'd had several by then) was Robert
Morin -- a former colleague of Junkin's.

Acting on impulse, Junkin called Morin and arranged a meeting with
Bloodsworth, already convinced that he wanted to write about the
exonerated man. Their 1st meeting didn't go as well as he'd hoped.

"Kirk was wary at first," recalls Junkin. "He had trusted people before to
do things for him, and they had not come through. It took a while to break
down some of those barriers. But gradually, he came around to agreeing
with me to work on the project."

Disquieting research

Junkin began reviewing the case from a legal standpoint. He spent months
poring over the records of the trials, interviewing witnesses and
reviewing the forensic evidence. He talked to prosecutors, police, judges,
witnesses and Bloodsworth himself. He obtained FBI reports, psychological
profiles, grand jury transcripts.

What he found was deeply disturbing. According to Junkin, Bloodsworth's
fate was largely decided before he ever went to trial.

"The records showed how they came to be aware of Kirk, how they very
prematurely trusted their instincts instead of carefully deciphering the
facts," says Junkin. "How they mishandled the eyewitness identification
testimony, which is a classic problem in many cases such as this one. How
they contorted their interpretation of his statements to fit their theory,
how they misused the psychological profile. How the prosecutors withheld
exculpatory information."

There were seven eyewitnesses at the first trial, for example, but two of
them were children whose descriptions of the suspect -- including height
and hair color -- didn't match Bloodsworth. The other five were tainted,
according to Junkin, by seeing Bloodsworth on television before they were
asked to identify him in a lineup.

Even with no forensic evidence connecting Bloodsworth to the crime, he was
found guilty. Junkin says the verdict isn't hard to understand.

"In a crime of this magnitude, it's almost as if the burden of proof is
reversed," he says. "If you're sitting there as a juror and there's any
chance this person could have committed such a horrific crime, do you want
to take the chance that by finding him not guilty, he might go out and
murder another little girl? There's a tremendous amount of pressure on
jurors in that situation to convict. Instead of the presumption of
innocence being with the defendant, it's a presumption of guilt that has
to be overcome."

Attitude reversal

Junkin says that his view of the legal system has changed throughout his
years of legal work, and particularly with the experience of writing the
book.

"When I was a public defender back in the '70s, we didn't think there were
innocent people in prisons," he says dryly. A case like Bloodsworth's, he
adds, should "make us all sit back and think long and hard about these
cases.

"For decades people have been saying, 'We will never kill an innocent man
in America, there are too many safeguards.' One of the things I wanted to
show was how easily this could happen."

Once Bloodsworth was exonerated, he continued to press for justice. He
made repeated requests to the district attorney's office to test the DNA
evidence that had cleared him, hoping it would match a registered sex
offender.

The prosecutors on the case denied his requests for 10 years. "That was a
scandal," says Junkin. "They claimed they didn't have enough money, which
is absurd when you think about how much they spent fighting Kirk."

Eventually, the DNA was put into the state's database, and a match was
found. In a bizarre twist, the new suspect turned out to be a fellow
inmate of Bloodsworth's. Based on the evidence, Kimberly Shay Ruffner was
arrested and convicted of Dawn Hamilton's murder.

"Bloodsworth" reads like a legal thriller -- Joseph Wambaugh is said to be
interested in writing a screenplay based on the book -- but Junkin says
it's having a deeper impact in the legal community. The author cites a
letter he recently received from a former colleague. "He's a tough, highly
acclaimed lawyer in his 60s, a former president of the Maryland Bar
Association," says the author. "He went to Yale with Dick Cheney. He wrote
me a three-page letter saying that his entire professional life, he's been
in favor of the death penalty. This book changed his mind."

Moving on

As for Bloodsworth, Junkin says he's getting on with the business of
putting his life back together. After his arrest, he endured the scorn and
hatred of his community. He was humiliated, beaten and tortured on death
row, at the hands of both guards and his fellow inmates. His father went
bankrupt trying to finance his legal battles, and his mother, who
supported him throughout his ordeal, died shortly before he was
vindicated. Junkin says there's "no question" that Bloodsworth, now 44,
continues to suffer the after-effects of his incarceration.

"He was just a kid when he was locked up, and those key years for a young
man between 20 and 30 were taken away from him," he says. "He was
profoundly institutionalized, and I'm sure that to some extent he'll never
overcome that."

Yet Bloodsworth is using his prison experience as a platform for speaking
out for legal reform and against the death penalty (he actually made a
plea for leniency in Ruffner's case). He is an advisor to the Justice
Project and the Criminal Justice Reform Education Fund and a champion of
new legislation to help states defray the costs of post-conviction DNA
testing. He and Junkin have made numerous appearances together in law
schools, colleges and high schools, as well as on radio and television.

"I think we're seeing a real sea change in the way communities are looking
at the issue of how many innocent people may be in their prisons," says
Junkin. "Kirk has been partly responsible for that.

"What he's accomplished with his life in the last 6 years is remarkable.
He stands up in front of people with real moral authority because he went
through this experience. He holds this book up and says he's lucky to be
alive. Twenty years ago, if you'd told him he'd be standing there and
people would be clapping and cheering -- not to give him the death penalty
this time, but to thank him for his work -- he never would have believed
it. I think he's fulfilled, and very gratified."

PROFILE

- WHO: Tim Junkin

- WHAT: Author of "Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row
Inmate Exonerated by DNA" (Algonquin, $24.95, 304 pages)

- RELATED EVENT: Tim Junkin and Kirk Bloodsworth are scheduled to appear
on "Larry King Live," 6 and 9 p.m. Friday on CNN.

(source : Contra Costa Times)