[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, VA.

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 14



TEXAS:

Kevin Glasheen Fought to See Innocent Prisoners Compensated, Then Fought To 
Take Millions For Himself---- The Lubbock lawyer teamed up with Innocent 
Project lawyer Jeff Blackburn to see the state compensation for exonerees 
raised. Now both men are under fire from their clients.


Steven Phillips was about to boil over. This, the attorneys in the room must 
have known, wasn't good for anyone.


At 51, Phillips had a delicate drawl, but the rest of him was all rangy wildcat 
sinew. He was a bit of a genetic oddity. He didn't lift weights, yet his neck 
was thick, tapered upward from a large pair of muscles that sat like small 
hillocks on his shoulders. He was a native Texan, born in Abilene, but he'd 
grown up in the Arkansas Ozarks and had, until just recently, handled himself 
just fine for 25 years in a couple of Texas prisons, including the Coffield 
Unit, populated by violent felons.

Now, here he was, in January 2010, in a Dallas skyscraper getting prodded about 
his marginal history as a sex addict and a peeping Tom. Phillips wasn't denying 
any of that. He knew he'd come a long way since his parole got revoked in '97, 
when he scaled a woman's balcony and peered through her window. But those 
turbulent nights lay in the distant past. He worked at keeping it that way 
every single day, adhering to a rigid 12-step program. "Every man is 
responsible for working out his own salvation," Phillips liked to say.

As far as he was concerned, this lawyer was just flinging mud. He thought he 
was there to get grilled about a lawsuit he'd filed against a guy named Jeff 
Blackburn, a famed Amarillo defense attorney known for his work with the 
Innocence Project of Texas, and against Kevin Glasheen, a top-gun 
personal-injury lawyer from Lubbock, who was in the room at this very moment, 
monitoring the deposition. What did any of this have to do with his case?

Phillips' suit was over the $1 million and change he'd been charged by 
Glasheen. Their partnership, he says, began as a plan to file a lawsuit against 
the city of Dallas, whose police force decades before had made the arrest that 
sent Phillips away. The lawsuit never got filed, but in the spring of 2009, not 
long after Phillips hired Glasheen, Texas lawmakers passed a bill more than 
tripling the amount of money the state pays the wrongfully convicted. The law 
had been championed by Glasheen and Blackburn. According to Glasheen, that 
championing was part of their work as Phillips' lawyers. But after the law 
passed, Phillips fired Glasheen and filed the compensation papers with the 
state himself. Now he wanted a judge to void that contract and block Glasheen 
from collecting 25 percent on the $4 million coming Phillips' way.

Blackburn's attorney, Vince Nowak, was a testy bulldog, and he took the suit 
against his client and friend personally. He handed Phillips a book about sex 
addiction, in which Phillips had anonymously authored a chapter.

"Will you tell me what the title of Exhibit No. 4 is?" Nowak asked.

"Shut it down," one of Phillips' lawyers, Tom McKenzie, said.

But Nowak kept pushing buttons, and McKenzie kept pushing back. Phillips was a 
keening kettle now, and he'd had enough.

"Shut your bitch-ass up," Phillips swore at Nowak.

"Hey, hey, hey!" another of Phillips' lawyers cautioned.

Nowak didn't seem to hear him. He continued to argue with McKenzie.

"Fixin' to take your ass outside, dude, if you keep that up," Phillips warned.

Nowak heard him this time.

"Well, do you want to take my ass outside right now?" Nowak asked.

"Absolutely."

Phillips' attorneys attempted to defuse him.

"Steven."

"Steven."

"Take a break," Nowak said, dismissively. "Take a bathroom break."

"Shut your bitch-ass up, dude," Phillips muttered as he made his way toward the 
door, which put Nowak directly in the path of a pissed-off prison-hardened man.

"Call 911! I'm not joking," Nowak said. "Your witness just threatened me. Keep 
it on the record. You heard that."

It had all soured so quickly. Not just this deposition, but the whole case, the 
whole conversation about compensating innocent prisoners, about how much is 
owed to them when the legal system gets it wrong. This was only the latest 
dust-up in a knock-down brawl within the Texas exoneree and legal communities 
over the glut of cash loosed by the state comptroller following the passage of 
that bill. What should have been a great victory for Glasheen and Blackburn on 
behalf of Texas' exonerees — due in no small part to some inventive, 
outside-of-the-box advocacy — was now worn like a pair of scarlet letters 
signifying greed and suspicion. A pall was cast over the Innocence Project of 
Texas for its connection to these lawyers, who some now believed saw newly 
exonerated men as walking, talking paychecks.

Meanwhile, a big piece of the pie that should have eased Steven Phillips' life 
was destined for the pockets of attorneys, who in turn were fighting to keep 
the money from other attorneys. It was the sort of unhappy ending few foresaw 
during the heady days when Texas' compensation scheme went from criminally 
stingy to stand-out generous.

As Phillips strode to the bathroom to cool off, McKenzie tried to calm down 
Nowak. "Listen," he began.

"I don't give a shit if he did 26 years," Nowak broke in. "He called my client 
a liar, Mr. McKenzie. I'm asking him what lies my client told. I think that's a 
fair question."

Steven Phillips felt an inch taller that day in 2007, when Judge Lena Levario 
apologized to him on behalf of the State of Texas. He'd just finished serving a 
quarter-century bid for a 2-day spree of sex assaults in the early 1980s. In 
2006, the national Innocence Project, headquartered in New York, had taken an 
interest in his case, convincing Dallas County's newly elected district 
attorney, Craig Watkins, to allow DNA testing to rule out other suspects. When 
the results came in, what Phillips knew to be true was finally proven beyond 
doubt: It was another man whose DNA profile matched the real attacker's.

On August 5, 2007, the day of his official exoneration, Phillips had already 
been out for 6 months on parole. He'd been living in a halfway house near the 
American Airlines Center, a GPS unit strapped to his ankle. He thought he might 
strain from smiling as he hiked his pant leg and watched the unit cut from his 
body. What a day the Lord has made, he thought.

Inside the Frank Crowley Courts Building, camera lenses focused on Phillips' 
beaming visage. Visiting dignitaries, including Watkins and Innocence Project 
founder Barry Scheck, shook Phillips' hand in congratulations. The judge even 
gave him a hug. Phillips met his son Zachary for the 1st time that day. He even 
saw detective P.E. Jones — the man whose investigation led to his conviction — 
on the way out of the courthouse. Phillips swears the cop broke a sweat when 
they stood in the elevator together, a particularly sweet modicum of vengeance.

Even sweeter, he had his girl, Connie Jean — a wiry, garrulous firecracker with 
a deep suntan and a cigarette-roughened voice — at his side. They had met at 
the James Group Ministries, a faith-based 12-step program where they both 
worked on their respective addictions and edited its publications. She was 
smoking a cigar outside; he'd always wondered what it was like to kiss a woman 
who smoked cigars. Within 24 hours, he found out. And here she was at his side, 
propping him up when he felt he might dissolve under the joy of the moment.

Then came the next day. And the day after that, and Phillips suddenly found 
himself grappling with a world radically different from the one he'd left back 
in 1982. He could no longer count on the three square meals that he knew waited 
for him in the chow line at Coffield. The roof over his head, or the lack 
thereof, was now his own responsibility.

Not long after his exoneration, he and Connie Jean split up, so Phillips lit 
out for the Ozarks. His brother ran a three-star restaurant at a motel and 
motorcycle resort up in Marble Falls, Arkansas. Phillips washed dishes and 
cooked, took cigarette breaks and breathed in that clean air and the smoke, 
looking out over the mountains. He was just down the road from Harrison, his 
hometown, from the fishing and swimming holes he hadn't seen since he was 
younger, back from a stint with an artillery regiment in Germany. So he'd 
borrow his nephew's Ford pickup and fly down the country roads, the curves 
still etched into memory. He even looked up an old flame named Diana. He hadn't 
seen her since high school. When they saw each other after so many years, he 
says, it happened in the rain while Bad Company's "Feel Like Making Love" 
blared from the stereo of his shambling Isuzu Rodeo.

But it wasn't long before Phillips was feeling the pinch. The Rodeo was 
sputtering and coughing. He figured it was the fuel pump. He couldn't afford 
the repairs, so Phillips placed a call to Kevin Glasheen's firm up in Lubbock. 
Michelle Moore, a Dallas public defender who helped free exonerees, had 
recommended Glasheen as someone who might help Phillips sue the city.

Glasheen was quick to come to Phillips' rescue. He dispatched one of his 
lawyers, Kris Moore, to Springfield, Missouri, an hour and a half north of 
Harrison. They met at a Waffle House.

"I needed a break, right? I was broke," Phillips recalls. "I hate to say it, 
but it was all about the money." And there was Glasheen's guy with a $3,500 
check. Moore told him the firm would take care of some living expenses and get 
him a truck — a cherry-red, late-model Toyota Tacoma with the full TRD Off-Road 
package.

In exchange, Phillips would have to sign a contract agreeing to pay Glasheen's 
firm a fee for any civil judgment or "statutory compensation." Phillips agreed. 
Moore drove him to the Bass Pro Shop so he could cash the check, and from there 
Phillips caught a bus down to Dallas.

On a recent afternoon, Kevin Glasheen parked his personal plane, which he'd 
just flown into Dallas from a camping trip with his son's Scout troop, and made 
his way to the gleaming office of his downtown PR reps. His thatchy brown hair 
was parted and looked courtroom-ready, but he seemed relaxed in a pair of 
hiking shoes, canvas pants and a short-sleeved button-down.

He spoke as only men who talk for a living do — in long, often winding complete 
thoughts laced with war metaphors. The son of a Garland dry cleaner and school 
teacher, Glasheen says he was a mediocre econ student at Texas A&M but found 
his legs at Texas Tech's law school. When he graduated, he turned down a 
lucrative job with a firm that represented insurance companies, and struck out 
on his own instead, starting his own firm out of a $400-a-month office space.

He considers himself an imperturbable optimist. His business relies on 
contingency fees; if the client doesn't get paid, neither does he. And in 
personal injury law, that often means reaching into the bottomless pockets of 
big companies knowing that he may come up empty handed — and out the money he 
spent digging around in there.

But he could come up big, and often did. In 1999, he backed international food 
giant Cargill into a corner when workers at its meatpacking plants started 
racking up injuries, forcing the company to settle. He obtained a $60-million 
verdict against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railways, after one of its trains 
killed a family at a Friona railroad crossing. And he got an undisclosed sum 
for Ben Johnston, a former employee of military contractor DynCorp, after 
Johnston was fired for blowing the whistle on employees who trafficked in young 
women.

Sitting across from his PR rep, Glasheen started by repeating a common 
accusation leveled against him: that he's been "cherry-picking" the most 
lucrative exoneree cases. But in 2006, when Blackburn first approached him with 
Billy James Smith's case, Glasheen didn't see a cherry, he says.

Smith's story was certainly heartbreaking. He'd served two decades in prison 
for a rape he didn't commit. Like all of the recent exonerees, he was freed by 
DNA testing. But Smith's civil case was a dog. No one wanted it, and with good 
reason. Wrongful conviction suits are rare, and there was little case law to 
light the way. Glasheen would have been setting out on a dark, seldom-trod 
path. Before he could even argue his case before a jury, he'd have to prove 
that Smith's constitutionally protected rights had been violated because of an 
officially endorsed police department policy, and not simply the random 
misdeeds of a few bad actors. Then he'd have to get past the qualified immunity 
protections that insulate public servants, like the investigators in this case, 
from the civil complaints lodged every time they take a shoddy investigation to 
the D.A. And even if he won at trial, he still needed to get past the 5th 
Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, renowned for its conservatism. He 
could see it all play out in his nimble legal mind — spending thousands in man 
hours and discovery, winning at the trial level, then getting reversed on 
appeal.

Cherry picking? Not a chance.

But those long odds seemed shorter with Blackburn in the mix. Back in 2003, 
Blackburn had won a legendary victory in Tulia, a tiny Panhandle town south of 
Amarillo. Ten percent of the town's black population had been convicted of 
selling drugs, based on the investigation of an itinerant cop who bounced from 
hamlet to hamlet in the Texas hinterlands, making questionable cases through 
dubious undercover work. Blackburn won a multimillion dollar judgment for his 
clients. The story became a PBS documentary and a book.

"One of the reasons I wanted Jeff on all these cases was because there was a 
lot of issues pertaining to their criminal prosecutions and exonerations that 
are outside my field of expertise," Glasheen says. "I was not willing to take 
on these cases without some competent lawyer, and preferably the best lawyer."

So they went to work, preparing Smith's case for trial and praying the City of 
Dallas would settle. Glasheen filed his first civil complaint in August 2007. 
At first, the city attorneys blew him off, identifying all the weaknesses in 
his case he was hoping they wouldn't see: the 5th Circuit's reputation and the 
twin ticking clocks that resounded in everyone's ear.

Smith could have filed with the state for compensation, $25,000 for each year 
he spent in prison. He didn't think that was enough, given the decades stolen 
from him. But under the law, he only had three years to collect. The city 
attorneys knew how drawn-out civil actions could be, Glasheen says, so they set 
about playing a game of legal chicken. They forced Smith to choose between 
staying the course and potentially losing, or collecting a guaranteed $500,000 
from the state. If he chose the latter, he'd have to walk away from the lawsuit 
forever.

Glasheen, Blackburn and Kris Moore, Glasheen's associate, began gathering 
discovery. They identified the defects in the Dallas Police Department's 
eyewitness ID processes and the incurious police work that led to so many 
wrongful convictions. They attended dozens of churches, enlisting the city's 
religious leaders, and they rallied media and politicians around their cause.

This small army leaned on the city to do right by Billy James Smith. Meanwhile, 
Blackburn approached Glasheen with another potential client: Greg Wallis, who'd 
served 17 years for an Irving rape and burglary he didn't commit. Word moved 
around the cloistered exoneree community. More sought Glasheen's services. 
Momentum was building. Glasheen now had a stable of exonerees on whose behalf 
he filed complaint after complaint, against Dallas and a couple other cities. 
He filed 7 in all, with other complaints at the ready. The message was 
unmistakable: A sizable group of men weren't going to accept the pittance 
offered by the state, and they were ready to go to court to collect what was 
owed.

In the fall of 2008, Kris Moore says, he got on a conference call with Dallas' 
city attorneys, attempting to schedule a slate of hearings. "They said, 'Be 
honest, how many more are you planning on filing?'" Moore recalls. He began to 
list the other suits they planned to file. "There was silence on the other end 
of the line." (The City Attorney's Office had not responded to questions from 
the Observer at press time.)

Shortly after, at a brainstorming session in Glasheen's office, they devised a 
plan: Why deal with the headache and uncertainty of litigation when you can get 
more money for all of the clients at once, by petitioning the legislature to 
raise the compensation rate? Both Moore and Glasheen claim they ran the idea 
past their clients and got thumbs up all around.

So on October 28, 2008, in a letter to Dallas' attorneys, Glasheen proposed a 
highly unusual settlement: Help us lobby the legislature to increase the 
compensation to $250,000 for every year imprisoned. In exchange, Glasheen would 
drop the lawsuits.

He was rebuffed once again, but the pressure on the city was growing, from 
legislators like Texas Representative Rafael Anchia, ministers, news stories 
and a budget shortfall that increased calls for austerity over litigation. As 
more men convicted in Dallas were exonerated on DNA evidence — more than a 
dozen have been cleared since Watkins took office in 2007 — the kind of pattern 
Glasheen needed was rapidly emerging.

Finally, in March 2009, after months of stalled negotiations, Dallas Mayor Tom 
Leppert agreed to join Glasheen's cause in the 81st Texas Legislature. Irving 
was in too, but support from a couple municipalities didn't mean legislation 
was guaranteed. Of all the states in the union to take the lead on exoneree 
compensation, smart money would have steered clear of Texas. And there was no 
guarantee Glasheen's clients wouldn't pursue a civil rights action anyway.

But Glasheen hadn't yet played all his cards. A perennial GOP donor, his firm 
wields significant political clout in North Texas, particularly with Senator 
Bob Duncan, a Lubbock Republican. Duncan agreed to carry the bill through the 
Senate as a cost-saving measure for cities.

Meanwhile, Glasheen had clients to manage. Many of them had forgotten how to 
live on the outside. They were often unemployable. Persistent health problems 
made their lives expensive and messy, and sex offenses are hard to scrub from a 
criminal background even for the exonerated.

Betting on success, the firm bankrolled its clients' living expenses. Glasheen 
says the payments are common in personal injury work, and says he advanced $1 
million to the exonerees he represented, including Phillips. They were forgoing 
the quick and easy buck, Glasheen says, so it was up to him to provide in the 
meantime. The law allows for "necessary and reasonable" advances for living 
expenses, he says, like the $2,500 he paid to have a cancerous lesion removed 
from Phillips' skin and the insurance premium on that Toyota.

But Glasheen often stretched the definition of "reasonable," leaving his 
critics convinced that the advances were nothing but golden handcuffs. The 
payments appeared designed to induce the recently released men into signing 
contracts they'd later regret, and to entice others to sign up, too.

Johnnie Lindsey, a Dallas exoneree, served 26 years for a rape he didn't 
commit. When he got out in 2008, he says, Glasheen tried to entice him with a 
car and a check. At the time, Lindsey was one of the longest-serving exonerees. 
He was due a hefty payout if Glasheen's efforts at the capitol panned out. 
Lindsey wouldn't sign on the dotted line, but he watched as others did. "It's 
like taking a hungry dog that hasn't eaten for a week and settin' a steak in 
front of him and telling him not to eat," he says.

The money continued after the clients signed up. Glasheen's firm paid for Billy 
James Smith's wedding. "What can you do when you've got a guy who wants to get 
married and he wants to have a wedding?" Glasheen says. James Woodard, an 
epileptic wrongfully convicted of murdering his girlfriend, got money to buy 
his fiancée a car. It was an advance hard to claim as "reasonable," seeing that 
Woodard's fiancée was Joyce King, a former CBS Radio News anchor and an 
Innocence Project of Texas board member. King was on Glasheen's payroll, he 
says, charged with looking after Woodard when the two fell in love. (He quit 
paying her, he says.)

With their clients sufficiently dependent, Glasheen and his firm kept them 
coming back to the well for monthly advances. Jaimie Page, a social-work 
professor formerly at the University of Texas at Arlington, organized the Texas 
Exoneree Project, which provides post-release assistance. Someone from the firm 
was always there to monitor the exoneree group meetings she moderated, she 
says.

"I think the money he was dangling in front of them A) kept them under control, 
B) helped them, but C) he's in Lubbock," she says, so he couldn't actually help 
them. "There's no case management,"

Glasheen disagrees, saying his services went beyond advances. He hired a lawyer 
to manage the client's personal affairs, counsel them, even drive them to the 
DMV to get their driver's licenses. But Page says the firm's ministrations were 
suffocating. When she tried to arrange mental-health counseling for exonerees, 
to address the memories and traumas of prison, she says she met only resistance 
from Glasheen, who later threatened to sue for tortious interference. He viewed 
her contributions as intrusions, she says, like she was cutting in on his 
action.

In April 2009, Blackburn won the posthumous exoneration of Timothy Cole, a 
black Texas Tech student convicted of raping a white student in 1985. Cole had 
died in prison in 1999 after suffering an asthma-induced heart attack. He was 
38, and his death was just the rallying cry Glasheen and Blackburn needed to 
convince state legislators that $50,000 a year — although raised from $25,000 
in 2007 to match the federal compensation level — was still insufficient to 
repay an innocent prisoner.

On May 27, 2009, the Timothy Cole Act was signed by Governor Rick Perry after 
passing almost unanimously in both the House and Senate. On September 1, less 
than a year after Glasheen dropped his cases against Dallas, the law took 
effect. Though they hadn't reached the $250,000-per-year goal Glasheen had 
targeted, the bill had more than tripled the payout Texan exonerees could 
collect — and guaranteed Glasneen a flood of legal fees.

The exonerees say they did just as much work as Glasheen to push for the bill's 
passage, making repeated trips to Austin to tell their stories. But the reality 
is, legislative staffers say, the law would have never picked up the inertia it 
did if Glasheen hadn't enlisted support, both from lawmakers and the cities 
that endorsed the bill.

"One of the selling points for the bill was that Glasheen had pending lawsuits 
in the cities of Irving and Dallas on behalf of a number of exonerees, and he'd 
made agreements not to sue them for federal civil rights violations if the 
compensation increase happened," says Senator Rodney Ellis, a Democrat from 
Houston who co-authored the bill with Senator Bob Duncan.

Exonerees who apply — and agree to not sue — are now entitled to $160,000 for 
each year spent in prison. Half of that is doled out immediately in a lump sum. 
The other half is annuitized and paid out on a monthly basis, collecting 5 
percent interest each year until the day the recipient dies or commits a 
felony.

Under the old law, Phillips would have received roughly $1.2 million — $800,000 
after taxes. Under the new one, instead of a one-time payment of $1.2 million, 
Phillips was due more than $2 million, plus an additional $2 million over the 
rest of his life. If he lived an additional 30 years, that $2 million could 
become $3 million, all of it tax-free. Before the law's passage, Kris Moore 
obtained an IRS exemption so the payouts were viewed as personal injury 
settlements, which generally aren't taxable. In a dramatic meeting with the 
agency, Glasheen says, their client, James Woodard, suffered an epileptic 
seizure. His illness hadn't been properly treated in prison, driving the point 
home to frightening effect: Everyone comes out of prison damaged in some way.

Glasheen says he also added the language about the annuity to the bill himself, 
basing it on the structured-settlement mold he'd used for years as a personal 
injury lawyer.

But when it came time to sign on the dotted line, Phillips balked. He says the 
payout projection he'd received from Glasheen's firm stunned and angered him. 
"I realized, good Lord, I'm about to get screwed big time!" Phillips says. He 
wondered why he was getting a bill when Glasheen had yet to file his lawsuit 
against the city. "I did not hire him to do that," Phillips says. "I hired him 
for litigation."

Adding insult to injury: Glasheen's initial take was actually bigger than 
Phillips'.

According to the contract, Glasheen's fee was 25 % of the total package — 
including the present value of the $2 million annuity. Under the terms of their 
deal, Phillips would get a check up front for a little less than a million 
dollars; the rest would be paid out over his lifetime, provided he didn't 
suffer an untimely death or catch a felony conviction. The firm, however, 
calculated that its entire take, more than a million dollars, should come up 
front. That left Phillips on the hook for fees based in part on money he didn't 
yet have — and may never see.

It's a quirk of the new law's conditions. While structured settlements often 
call for legal fees to be paid up front, that money is legally guaranteed. This 
money isn't. If Phillips died in a traffic accident tomorrow, the state would 
stop sending annuity checks — but Glasheen would already have his cut of the 
cash.

"I'm telling myself, 'No friggin' way!'" Phillips says. "It's not going down 
like that."

Upon receiving his bill, he stopped returning Glasheen's calls. The firm 
dispatched a flunky to track him down. Steve Steele, Phillips' old boss at the 
James Group Ministries, says one of them strode past his secretary, sat down in 
his office and tried to buttonhole him on the wayward client's whereabouts. As 
Steele, a Harley-riding Vietnam vet, would later recall, he was "barkin' up the 
wrong tree."

Phillips fired the firm on September 16, 2009, filed for the compensation on 
his own, and watched the money come in. He also hired Randy Turner and sued 
Glasheen, citing breach of contract for failing to pursue a civil suit against 
the city. A couple of other Glasheen clients defected to Turner's camp, too — 
James Giles and Patrick Waller, who both chafed at the big-dollar sums 
Glasheen's firm carved from their payouts. The rest paid up and moved on, 
waiting to see how the judge comes down on the question.

In Phillips' lawsuit, he argues that the deal had always been to file a civil 
lawsuit against the city. He wasn't about to pay him for lobbying. Besides, 
hadn't he been down to the legislature, too?

But that's not what the contract says. It allows for a two-pronged recovery for 
Glasheen — either through a 40-percent take in a civil rights claim or 25 
percent of the statutory compensation "for services rendered." To Glasheen, 
those vague "services" weren't just lobbying. The legislation was passed 
because of litigation, and the threat of litigation, that Glasheen brought 
against Dallas and Irving. Those suits inspired those cities to throw their 
weight behind his campaign to raise the compensation rate, and he claims he 
spent more than $400,000 preparing all those claims. Phillips is a beneficiary 
of all that work, he says.

Glasheen also benefited. He represented a dozen clients in the three years 
leading up to the law change, some of whom collected multimillion-dollar checks 
from the state. In all, he says, he made $4 million.

Blackburn got his, too. In almost every case, Glasheen split the total proceeds 
60/40 with Blackburn. (Phillips' was a rare exception, so Blackburn's name was 
eventually dropped from his lawsuit. It remains on Giles' and Waller's.) 
Blackburn's take of the proceeds raised more than a few eyebrows, given his 
position as the visionary behind the Innocence Project of Texas and its chief 
counsel. He's been accused by Phillips' attorneys and others of doing little 
more than funneling exonerees to Glasheen to earn his 40 % cut, abusing his 
position within the organization.

Kris Moore, the workhorse behind Glasheen's civil suits, says Blackburn guided 
his court filings and articulated long-range strategy. "His presence may not 
have been felt in terms of his name being in pleadings, but he was always 
there," Moore says.

"It is offensive to me now that when (Blackburn) happened to make a modest fee, 
and not through the Innocence Project of Texas, and not through referrals of 
people he helped, but through clients, people are coming after him," 
Blackburn's attorney, Vince Nowak, says. "Where the hell were these people when 
Jeff was spending his money and his considerable talent to exonerate these 
guys?

"Where was Randy Turner ... when Jeff was working on behalf of all wrongfully 
convicted people? I tell you what, they're here now because Jeff and Kevin made 
them some money and they can take an hourly fee and they're taking it to come 
after Jeff and to come after Kevin."

The Innocence Project of Texas defends Blackburn's right to make a living. But 
others inside the organization see it differently. John Stickels, a 
UT-Arlington professor who served on the organization's board, left the 
organization over the fee arrangements. Michelle Moore, a Dallas public 
defender who works innocent-prisoner cases, split with the Innocence Project of 
Texas for similar reasons.

Phillips' lawsuit is scheduled for a jury trial in November, but it's not just 
exonerees who are pursuing legal action against Glasheen. In January, the State 
Bar of Texas, the member organization for the state's attorneys, sued Glasheen 
in a Lubbock court, citing professional misconduct. They accused him of drawing 
up a contract that claimed an interest in an "administrative action" — filing a 
1-page compensation form — and for lobbying for a contingency fee. They also 
dinged him for taking cut of an annuity that hadn't been paid.

If even some of what the bar alleges is illegal, it won't be just Glasheen's 
contract that's in trouble. Other attorneys have taken percentages of exoneree 
compensation for doing little more than filing paperwork. Clay Graham, an 
attorney once employed by Glasheen to help his newly released clients, and 
Anthony Robinson, an exoneree now practicing law, took on the case of Jerry Lee 
Evans, who served 22 years on a false sex-assault conviction. Graham tells the 
Observer that Evans' compensation claim was fairly straightforward, and that 
they advanced him "pocket money." When Evans collected $1.82 million, Graham 
says, he and Robinson took 10 %.

It's often not that simple, Glasheen argues. The comptroller has been 
inconsistent in determining who gets paid and who doesn't, and Glasheen says 
he's seen clients' compensation forms rejected, requiring Glasheen to compel 
the Texas Supreme Court to make the state pay.

Getting Phillips to pay may prove trickier. Judge Ken Molberg has yet to rule 
on a motion filed by Glasheen to freeze Phillips' newfound assets, some of 
which Phillips already spent buying and restoring a house. At a hearing last 
year, Molberg said he wasn't sure Glasheen had shown him enough to keep 
Phillips from spending the money. But he did make a comment that hinted at how 
he feels about how the case has been characterized.

"These people did do something that increased this man's recovery to a 
significant extent," Molberg began. "And it's kind of odd to me that that is 
not recognized and it's all this white-knight stuff over here and all the black 
hats over here, if you get my drift. Now, whether or not they can ever recover 
to the extent or whether or not it was excessive or unconscionable is a 
different question.

"But ... basically the testimony coming to me today is that ... Mr. Glasheen 
was useless and worthless, and I'm not buying that, because he wasn't."

The judge's is a sentiment not uncommon, especially in the tight-knit community 
of exonerees. Even among those who are now suing him, their emotions conflict.

"They love Kevin Glasheen," former client James Giles says of his exonerated 
brethren. "I love him too. But I ain't gonna take no chance that he gonna give 
me no money if I don't file a lawsuit."

"I thank God for what Kevin and them did," adds James Waller, a former client 
who isn't currently suing Glasheen. "But like I say, we need to make things 
right and keep it right."

Steven Phillips sits with his thin, bare legs crossed in the kitchen of a 
Carrollton house just off the interstate. It's a hot August afternoon. His 
straw panama is shoved down on his head, and he peers from beneath it through a 
pair of thick wire-frame eyeglasses that amplify his bright green eyes.

Around him are the kinds of men he knows well — addicted, broken, paroled. He 
bought this house with the compensation money he got from the state. It serves 
as a halfway house and spiritual center for men on their 2nd, 3rd, even their 
4th chances. In the beginning, instead of paying rent, the men slept on the 
unfinished floors and restored the place, laying new tile, refinishing the 
walls, making the place livable again. Phillips liked the metaphor. They 
restored the house and, while they were at it, they restored that part of them 
they lost in prison or to drugs.

"I don't know if they can learn anything from me," he says. "I just show up and 
not be a bad example. There's something to say for showin' up."

He's trying to be an example for Charles, 24, whom he's taken into his home as 
a son, along with Charles' pregnant girlfriend and child. Charles spent time in 
juvenile lock-up for aggravated robbery. He's the same age now that Phillips 
was when he went to prison.

Frank, a stocky guy with a neatly trimmed goatee, is on probation now, facing 
at least 5 years in prison — which would be his 3rd trip — if he gets violated.

J.D., a new tenant, has only been out a couple of months after doing a long bid 
for prison-gang related stabbings. He belonged to the Texas Mafia, and would 
have beefed with Frank in prison. Now they're on the same softball team.

As they talk prison life, J.D. mentions that he served his sentence out at 
Coffield Unit. Phillips snatches his straw hat off of his head and looks at 
J.D., eyes wide through his eyeglasses.

"Remember me?"

The men laugh for a moment, and then Phillips grows serious. "We don't hold any 
of that against you here."

He knows that here, in the company of men whose past lives are a litany of 
mistakes, no white knights will be found. Or, for that matter, are there bad 
guys in black hats.

(source: Dallas Observer)






VIRGINIA:

Dear Friends,


The Daily Press, a Virginia paper that serves the Hampton Roads region ran 3 
stories this morning on the death penalty centered on the upcoming execution of 
Jerry Terrell Jackson on Thursday August 18th. At the bottom of their online 
homepage they have a poll that needs to be turned around. When I just voted 
only 1% were opposed to the execution. I have pasted it below:

TODAY'S POLL QUESTION

Poll: Is the death penalty appropriate punishment for crime?

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said Friday he will not stop Thursday's scheduled 
execution of a man who was convicted of raping and killing an elderly 
Williamsburg woman. A serial killer in Ohio was sentenced to death this week. 
Heinous crimes - paid for with death.

Do you feel that the death penalty is appropriate punishment?

* Yes. There's no excuse, no reliable rehabilitation and no other punishment 
that fits horrendous crimes.

* Probably. Those criminals took lives. I tend to think that while nothing will 
bring the departed back, some crimes can only be paid with death.

* Not sure. You read about people released from prison when new evidence proves 
their innocence. There's no going back if we allow prisoners to be put to 
death.

* No. Some crimes are sickening. But I cannot support the taking of a life

see: www.dailypress.com

Jack Payden-Travers----Social Responsibility Educator/Organizer