On the night of September 19, 1974, someone murdered the owner of the Suezy Massage Parlor on South Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs. The owner, Sun Ok Cousin, was the Korean wife of a retired Army man. Her assistant, Elizabeth Yon Cha Lee, a very recent arrival from Korea, was attacked with a knife and left in the building her assailant had set on fire, but she survived.
On October 30, Park Estep, an active duty soldier, was arrested and later brought to trial. The jury took two days to find Estep guilty of first degree murder, first degree assault, first degree arson, and aggravated robbery. They recommended leniency in sentencing. Presiding Judge Hunter Hardeman interpreted that recommendation as an authorization to give Estep the maximum sentence available (Colorado had no capital punishment at that time), which he did.
After Park Estep was convicted, his criminal defense investigator Jerry Mosier spent the next couple of years trying to talk me into taking an interest in the case. Finally, Jerry wore me down – he was not a man to take “no” for an answer- and he brought the case files, enough to nearly fill a foot locker, over to my house.
I think it was the crime scene photos that hooked me first. I’d never seen such photos before, and I hated what I saw. I also hated the case brought against Park, the more I looked at it closely. Today, I still think it was a case that should never have been prosecuted, but I’m also startled by my own ignorance. I knew nothing of the ways the criminal justice system worked, or of the ways juries behaved, or of the power of the press to manipulate public opinion. I would soon begin to learn about those things, and to learn more about the pathetic weakness of reasoned argument to bring about change.
At some point during my study of the case, Jerry Mosier took me down to Old Max in Canon City to meet Park. I don’t remember much of anything we talked about. I think the realities of incarceration – the sounds of slamming steel and angry voices echoing against stone walls – stunned me. I do remember how calm and sane and unthreatening Park seemed. And I remember driving back to the Springs with Jerry in his truck, Jerry saying how much going to that place made him want a beer, adding, “Damn it! Park ought to be able to have a damn beer with us!” It would be a long time before that happened. Shortly after we got back home, I began writing. Surprisingly, the Rocky Mountain News, then Denver’s second major newspaper, printed what I wrote:
Did Murder Jury Convict the Wrong Man?
Rocky Mountain News, 1/22/78
Park Estep stands to be an inmate of the State Prison until near the end of this century, convicted of a particularly terrible murder, unless he wins an appeal of his conviction. A few months ago I was persuaded to take an interest in his case, and I eventually became curious enough to study the transcript of his trial. That transcript convinced me that our need for justice can somehow overwhelm our sense of justice. And it left me with a considerably more concrete concern. I don’t think Park Estep is guilty.
On Sept. 19, 1974, Sun Ok Cousin, a Korean masseuse, was murdered in Suezy’s Massage Parlor in Colorado Springs. Young Ja Lee, a Korean employee, was stabbed in the back and throat. The massage parlor was set on fire, and some passing security guards saw smoke and helped Miss Lee out of the building. She survived the attack to testify.
After Miss Lee had partly recovered from her wounds, she identified a photograph of Park Estep, a soldier stationed at Fort Carson. This, she said, was a picture of the man who attacked her. Estep, a specialist fourth class, was arrested and placed in a line-up, and Miss Lee again identified him as her attacker. Two soldiers who had been at the car wash next to the massage parlor were equally certain that Estep’s truck closely resembled the truck they had seen parked outside the parlor on the night of the crime.
The post-mortem examination of Sun Ok Cousin’s body revealed that she had been shot in the head with what is known as “shot shell,” almost certainly from a .38 caliber pistol. She had had sexual contact fairly recently with a man whose blood group was type A. Park Estep had owned a .38 caliber pistol and been in possession of shot shells at the time of the murder, and his blood group is type A.
Those are the facts of the case against Park Estep. Little was suggested by way of motive, although the prosecution did imply that Mrs. Estep had said that she and her husband were short of cash around the time of the crime.
District Attorney Robert Russel, who personally prosecuted the case against Estep, still thinks it’s a strong one. All the pieces of evidence, particularly the identification by Miss Lee, are such that “Jimmy the Greek could give you some pretty good odds” that Estep is guilty, he says.
It is obvious that one piece of evidence stands out: Young Ja Lee positively identified Estep as the man who came into the massage parlor and bound her wrists with a coat hanger and cut her throat and stabbed her in the back. That piece of evidence, at first glance, seems to make the rest of the evidence of no more than academic interest. If I examine the other evidence first, it is not to try to disguise the fact that Miss Lee’s testimony is critical, but to emphasize that fact.
Park Estep did own a .38 caliber pistol at the time of the murder. It is impossible to determine how many .38 caliber pistols existed in Colorado Springs on the night of the crime; any one of them might have fired the round which killed Mrs. Cousin. A few weeks after that night, Estep sold his .38 to an acquaintance. He kept written records of the sale and voluntarily told the police that he had owned and sold the pistol.
He also volunteered the fact that he owned shot shells; his wife, he told the police, had bought him a small number of them for his birthday. Shot shells, which replace the ordinary bullet with a plastic capsule of bird shot, are designed for use against small game and snakes. The Esteps were avid campers, and Mrs. Estep had bought the shells for use against snakes. At the time of the murder, more than 8 million rounds of shot shell had been sold in the United States. It is not possible, once a shot shell has been fired, to determine what particular gun has fired it, unless the shell casing happens to be available. No shell casings were found at the murder scene.
Park Estep’s blood group is type A. This fact places him among slightly more than 37 million American males.
Another piece of circumstantial evidence which supposedly linked Park Estep to the crime was the identification of his truck by two soldiers, one of whom worked at the car wash. These two men recalled a number of details about the truck they saw: it had no hubcaps, black tire rims or white lettering on the back of the tailgate. They did not recall seeing military or manufacturer’s stickers on the vehicle, though one of them specifically looked for the military sticker which would have identified the truck as belonging to a fellow GI. The rear bumper they saw had a pattern raised from the metal. None of these details applies to Park Estep’s truck.
The memories of the two men, in other words, tended to dispute their identification of Estep’s truck as the one they saw near the massage parlor the night of the murder. The principal witness of the two admitted that he was “not certain” of his identification. If you believe the two men were capable of remembering the truck they saw in detail, then the truck they saw was not Park Estep’s. If you believe that they could but imperfectly remember (as most of us could) the truck, then their testimony simply includes Estep in the group of persons who own or have access to late model, red Chevrolet pickup trucks with tool boxes.
Park Estep was convicted of aggravated robbery (in addition to first-degree murder and assault and arson), perhaps indicating that the jury gave some credence to the suggestion that the Esteps were short of cash, and that Estep had entered the massage parlor intending to rob it. It is hard to understand how that credence could have developed. A certified public accountant presented documented evidence that the Esteps were, as of Sept. 19, 1974, about $11,000 in the black, and had in their possession, in addition to several bank accounts, an undeposited check for $853.
The Esteps were not short of cash, nor was their long-term financial position anything but promising. Nor had Park Estep ever been accused of stealing anything (or any act or crime of violence or any other felony; the sum total of his previous criminal record was an arrest for vagrancy when he was a teen-ager, hitchhiking across the country.)
What remains, of course, is the fact that Young Ja Lee, who was stabbed and cut by someone, and whose account of events at the massage parlor strongly indicated that her assailant was also the killer of Mrs. Cousin, testified that Park Estep was that someone. It is natural for us to assume that a person would clearly remember the man who attacked her with a knife. It is natural; but is it correct and reasonable to make that assumption?
Young Ja Lee had been in the United States about three months when she was attacked. I ask myself how accurately I would perceive or remember the appearance of a Korean who threatened me with a gun and stabbed me. Of course, I can’t be certain, but I don’t believe my perception or memory would be at all good. Growing up in Chicago, I twice had occasion to look at people who were pointing guns at me. I don’t believe I could have identified either one of them, though I still remember how large and dark the muzzles of those pistols looked. As a GI in Germany, I was once beaten up on the street by a group of German teenagers. I could not have identified any of them; I was too busy trying to protect myself. My own small experience of how well I perceive threatening strangers leads me to give no particular credence to Miss Lee’s identification of her assailant. In the words of Alex L. Gregory, a noted criminologist: “The honest but mistaken witness is one of the most serious problems in our system of justice…. unfortunately the mistaken witness is all too frequently the most positive.”
Miss Lee first Identified Park Estep’s likeness from a group of Polaroid photos of men whose appearance in some way corresponded to the description she had given of her assailant. The detective showing the photos immediately stopped the proceedings, turned on his tape recorder and caused Miss Lee to re-enact her identification of Estep’s photograph. He then asked her repeatedly if she were sure, committing her very fully to her identification of the photograph. When she later identified Park Estep in a physical line-up, it is a question whether she was simply identifying the man whose photograph she had seen, rather than the man she may or may not have remembered clearly as her assailant. Given the confusion possible in a Korean woman’s perceptions of a menacing Occidental male, it may be that the photograph simply supplanted Miss Lee’s memory of her assailant.
That argument sounds considerably less tortured when certain repeated assertions by Miss Lee are considered. Park Estep, in the photograph Miss Lee identified and in person, had a rather prominent mustache. When she first identified the photograph, Miss Lee steadfastly insisted that her assailant had not had a mustache. She did not say that she didn’t remember a mustache; she said, again and again, that the man who stabbed her did not have a mustache at the time, but now he “wore one.” Numerous witnesses testified that on Sept. 19, 1974, Park Estep did have a mustache. In a number of other details, Park Estep did not fit Miss Lee’s description of her assailant. (Her description and identification of the truck she saw were too uncertain to be worthy of much comment. Her first description of the truck, for instance, gave its color as white. Estep’s truck is red.)
In other words, if you believe Miss Lee very clearly and accurately recalled her attacker, then her insistence that he had no mustache destroys her identification of Park Estep. If you believe that her memory of her attacker was so imprecise that she did not notice or remember his mustache and incorrectly remembered other aspects of his appearance, then her identification of Park Estep is of questionable value.
The question of the mustache is at the heart of Estep’s first-round success in the appeal of his conviction. The state Court of Appeals ordered him a new trial on the grounds that the court failed to hear a potentially crucial piece of evidence. The evidence was to be the testimony of a Korean pastor to the effect that, to a Korean, a mustache is not taken lightly; it is a sign of age and high station. The Korean’s testimony was to bolster the defense’s contention that the presence of a mustache is something that Miss Lee would not be likely to forget.
That decision has been appealed by District Attorney Russel. A decision by the state Supreme Court is expected soon.
Miss Lee’s entire account of what happened that night in the massage parlor was never seriously questioned, even though several aspects of her account did not correspond with physical evidence at the scene. The possibility that her account was partly or wholly fabricated was evidently never considered. If, for instance, Miss Lee knew either her attacker or the likely identity of her attacker’s employers, and felt that she was still in danger, might she not have felt moved to identify someone other than her actual assailant? That is speculation, but not entirely without foundation. Three nights before the murder, Mrs. Cousin and a friend who was visiting her at Suezy’s Massage Parlor both received phone calls from an unidentified male. He told them he was going to kill them and burn the parlor down if they didn’t go out of business. During this period, a good deal of conflict was occurring in the city within and about the massage parlor business.
The closer I look at Miss Lee’s Identification of Park Estep, the less convincing it seems. But without it, there is simply no evidence whatsoever to connect Estep to Mrs. Cousin’s murder.
My presentation of the case against Park Estep has admittedly been selective; the trial transcript runs over a thousand pages. I have tried to be fair, complete and accurate in my presentation of the case. If I have come anywhere close to being so, I am am left wondering how under heaven a jury could have brought in a verdict of guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps the jury had some questions of its own. They found Park Estep guilty of murder, assault, robbery and arson. And recommended leniency in sentencing.
I stopped being puzzled by this verdict when I saw, for the first time, the color photographs of the murdered body of Mrs. Sun Ok Cousin as it was left by her killer. I’d rather not write about those pictures. They are disgusting and heartbreaking.
Mrs. Cousin’s body was left naked. I don’t mean only that she was left with no clothing. I mean her body was left robbed of the dignity and respect which is our only real clothing in this life. She was left on her back, one leg bent at the knee, foot resting against the calf of her other, outstretched leg. The positioning looked like an obscene caricature of the pose in which an artist might paint a well-loved model.
But there was nothing of love in the rest of it. Mrs. Cousin’s temple had a hole blown into it. Her eyelids were swollen nearly shut. Her body was splattered with blood, and nearly half of it was covered with second and third-degree burns. Third-degree burns blacken the flesh and split it down to the white of bone. The deputy coroner was quite certain that Mrs. Cousin had been set on fire before she was shot.
There is no way to use words to give the effect of those pictures. They show a human being treated with something more awful than hate – with a contempt so total that it flows over onto all human life. What was done to her was a statement, a statement that said this: Human beings are merely worthless hunks of meat, to be killed and tortured and wasted for sport or gain.
I felt, and I think anyone who saw those pictures would feel, a tremendous need to say, No – that statement is a lie, and whoever made that statement is so hopelessly far from humanity that he must be found and put away from all of us who hope to be human. I needed to say that this could not be allowed.
I believe that everyone who saw that body, or the photographs of that body, very probably felt the same way. I think that is why the case against Park Estep, which seems so frail in print, convinced the prosecution and the jurors: they needed so deeply to find the person who had made this awful statement and to cast him out of contact with their community. (The jurors have agreed not to talk about the case, the foreman, former Colorado Springs newscaster Bill Yeager, told me. Two did so anyway but said nothing helpful about the photographs.)
I think that the need for justice, or something even deeper than justice, was so pressing that it clouded the very ideal of justice which ordinarily tempers human behavior in a court of law. In the words of Estep’s attorney, Doug Thompson: “Mr. Estep stands before this court accused of one of the gravest crimes a man could be charged with, and sometimes I think that all of us….become corrupted by the magnitude of the accusation, and, as such, do not see the evidence for what it is.”
If all those who shared responsibility for the conviction of Park Estep were, in fact, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crimes of which he was accused, I certainly do not write to condemn them. I can’t in honesty say that I would not have been led, in the heat of the trial and the horror of the crime, to blink at what now seem to me the tremendous weaknesses of the case against Park Estep.
But if, as Estep maintains and as I believe, he is innocent, then his conviction has done more than leave us with a man wrongfully convicted in our penitentiary. Alex Gregory makes one more observation about the serious problem of the mistaken witness: “He not only convicts the innocent but he permits the guilty to go free.” If Park Estep is innocent, then the person who made a statement with the body and spirit of Mrs. Sun Ok Cousin has had 3 and 1/2 years in which to make more such statements. By our very need to reassert the sanctity and dignity of human life, we may have become unwitting accomplices to the person – whoever and whatever that person may be – whose inhumanity we sought to condemn.
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My, how earnest and NPR I sounded. I especially like the suggestion I made that the prosecution’s eyes were clouded by the need for justice. Neither Park nor Jerry had told me, then, that District Attorney Robert Russel, in his customary post-sundown condition, had visited Estep when he was still in the city jail awaiting trial. “I know you’re not guilty,” Russel leered. “I’m gonna convict you anyway.” Maybe something other than a need for justice was clouding his eyes. What it was became clearer in a few years.
The appeal granted by the Colorado Court of Appeals was overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court on the grounds that while the defendant had a right to a fair trial, he did not have the right to a perfect trial. It looked as if Park Estep would be living in prison until 1996.
Despite his continued work as a criminal defense investigator, Jerry was never content to let Park’s conviction stand, nor was Park’s local attorney, Dick Tegtmeier. Jerry kept pursuing suspects the police had either abandoned or never investigated, flogging his old truck all over the country.
The first ten years after Park’s conviction was summed up nicely by Denver Post reporter Jim Carrier:
Friends Kept 10-Year Vigil
Jim Carrier, Denver Post, 9/9/1984
Colorado Springs – Every month for eight years, Nan Rose would get in her ’75 Grenada and drive the 35 miles from Colorado Springs to the state prison in Canon City to visit Park Estep. She would go on Saturday, arriving an hour or so after the big rush of relatives visiting convicts, and she would stay about four hours.
She made the trip at least once a month. Sometimes more often. Every month until last December.
That’s when they found a brain tumor, and lung cancer. They gave her from two days to a year to live and told her she couldn’t drive again.
So Nan Rose got somebody to take her to Canon City.
Such was the dedication of one person who believed in Park Estep. A person who knew in her heart he was no killer. A woman so dedicated to Estep that she became mother to him, and grandmother to his daughter.
She was one person – one of many – who believe Park Estep is innocent of murder.
For a decade, since Estep was convicted of murdering massage parlor owner Sun Ok Cousin, a group of people have kept a vigil for him. Not as a group, but as individuals: clergy, members of his church, Army buddies, a legal investigator, lawyers – maybe 50 people – who in their own way and on their own time, worked and prayed and waited for the day when the system would work. For the day Park Estep would walk out of prison a free man.
Like the lawyer, now a judge, who wrote the governor on his behalf.
Like the newsman-turned-investigator who ran around the country chasing leads on his own time in a consuming effort that took its toll on his own life.
Like the three dozen people who wrote him regularly, and the half-dozen families who visited him in prison.
Like his lawyer, who spent thousands of dollars of his own money to try to find something, anything that would free Estep.
Like Nancy Rose.
All believers.
“We are all people who believed Park was innocent, right from the beginning,” said Rose, a 54-year-old widow. “I sat through every day of that trial, and came out thoroughly convinced he was innocent. I used to come out of the prison in Old Max with tears and cry all the way home. He was no more guilty than I am.”
Because of chemotherapy and radiation, Rose’s brain tumor virtually disintegrated; but it left a blind spot in her eye and she stopped driving. She caught rides to the prison a couple of times, but found the trip too taxing. Since then, she has written and he has called, including an excited call last Saturday that told of new evidence – a possible confession to the crime by serial killer Ottis Toole.
“I’m thrilled,” said Rose. “I have great hope. I’ve prayed and prayed about this. I have never doubted him.”
“I never believed – ever – that he committed the crime,” said Richard Borchers, recently appointed a district judge in the 17th Judicial District. Several years ago, when Estep came before the governor’s commutation committee, Borchers wrote to Gov. Dick Lamm and recommended that the governor set Estep free.
“I felt we had an innocent man in one of our prisons,” the judge said.
At the time of the slaying, Borchers was a legal assistance officer with the Army at Fort Carson, where Estep recently had been assigned. Aware that a grand jury was investigating him, Estep went to Borchers, who advised him to say nothing. Later, Borchers helped the defense by arranging a Korean language interpreter and by testifying for Estep.
“Park was a good soldier, a good human being,” said Borchers, who in 3 1/2 years in the Army tried more than 300 courts martial – some of them, he said, involving “awful, awful” soldiers.
“The Army has a tendency to turn its back on soldiers in trouble off-base,” said Borchers. In Estep’s case, “they didn’t do it because they had faith in the guy.”
MORE THAN A CASE
Estep’s defense team came to regard the case as more of a cause than just another murder. Money (they seem to remember the figure $15,000) put up by Estep’s relatives covered expenses, but not their time. After losing the trial, they worked free for the next 3 1/2 years to conduct appeals.
“We felt an innocent person was convicted,” said lawyer Richard Tegtmeier. “That hangs really heavy on us. No lawyer wants the system to fail. We spend hundreds and hundreds of hours, past the conviction, on this case. Much of it Park never knew about.
“Many times we’d say, ‘Let’s forget about this case,’ and we’d forget about it,” said Tegtmeier. “But something would come up and we would start over.”
It became an obsession for Tegtmeier’s investigator, Jerry Mosier.
“I had the easy part, to help direct the investigation,” said Tegtmeier. “Jerry was putting in the long hours on the road.”
Mosier, 44, a former newspaperman, had jumped into the murder case with the enthusiasm of an investigative reporter but the knowledge of a rookie. The conviction stung him, and for the next 10 years he spent money he didn’t have and time he would never regain trying to recoup the loss.
He ate sprouts he grew in an old wreck of a house that he rented for fix-up labor. He borrowed Tegtmeier’s credit cards, bummed cash where he could, and drove a beat-up pickup that could hardly make it across town. But he pushed it to Kansas and Oregon, Washington and Missouri, chasing leads. He rigged up a can on the engine to heat food and water as he drove.
Mosier even took a job as a house painter once because he “wanted to be in the mind” of a fresh suspect, a housepainter. He wanted to know when the guy drank, what his sex drive was. But mostly he worked just to fill his gas tank, to run down yet another lead. He spent so much time on the case it ruined personal relationships. It also got in the way during the years his son grew to be a man.
“I let the case get to me,” said Mosier. “It’s my case. It’s the only case not closed in 10 years.”
Mosier’s “office” in those days was a bunch of 3-by-5 cards stuck in his hip pocket. Today, he has a one-room walk-up office right out of a private eye movie set. Below a faded mirror, a half-eaten watermelon and a horn-handled knife sit in an old sink. There’s a tall, narrow radiator and a bentwood coat rack with no coat. A map on one wall was used in his last murder investigation. On another hangs a “David’s sling,” the primitive Biblical weapon for throwing stones at giants. The symbolism is appropriate.
“The verdict outraged Jerry’s sense of justice,” said Malcolm McCollum, an English instructor at Pikes Peak Community College and a friend Mosier roped into helping with the case. “Jerry probably has a stronger sense of justice and fairness than anyone I know. It is that that kept him from being able to rest.”
MONTHS OF WORK
McCollum himself worked for months on the case. He read every piece of paper in the case, amounting to more than an Army footlocker full. He pursued for hours a theory that the slaying was drug-related. He helped Mosier write a 15-page appeal, summarizing new evidence, to Lamm. He provided bed, board and gas for Mosier. And most recently, he made initial inquiries to set up a bank account for Estep if he gets out.
“Once involved, it was like a pike with a plug stuck in his mouth,” said McCollum. “He swims around with it – and it’s still there.”
McCollum and others took the plug when they saw the evidence – or lack of it – in the case against Estep. Circumstantial, they said. Twisted, they claimed. The strongest evidence, an eyewitness identification, was suspect, they said.
Borchers is even more blunt: the State Supreme Court, he said, didn’t understand the importance of Estep’s mustache when it upheld the conviction. The eyewitness, a Korean woman who spoke little English and had been in this country only a few months, never told the police about facial hair. According to Borchers, who served in Korea before Fort Carson, “No one who was Korean would ever miss facial hair.” It is worn only by elders in Korea. “Park had a clearly visible mustache.”
Estep is described by those who came to know him as direct, honest and genuine, a man with intelligence and a sense of humor. He impressed them with his refusal to repent, just to win commutation of sentence. “He was constantly confident that the system would work,” said lawyer Tegtmeier. He apparently convinced many of his innocence simply by his bearing.
“I was persuaded that he was not involved,” said the Rev. Ben Dickerson, pastor of the Highland Park Baptist Church. The Esteps had joined his church just weeks before the arrest. Dickerson, now with a marriage counseling ministry, visited Estep every week from his arrest until the trial, a period of several months.
“I sensed he was very genuine, and totally consistent in what he said,” said Dickerson. “I believe to this day that either he didn’t do it, or he has no recollection of it.” Dickerson has kept sporadic contact with Estep in prison. A year ago, he sent Estep a subscription to Personal Computing magazine.
Many of Estep’s most loyal supporters came from that Baptist congregation. It was there that Nan Rose first began her attachment.
“They had a little girl, Miriam, ” she said. “I remember holding the baby at choir practice one night. When I heard it on the news that he had been arrested, I called his wife and offered to help. Two days later she called. She brought the baby. That’s how it got started.”
During the appeal years, Rose often kept Miriam while Estep’s wife visited her husband in prison. After the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, Estep urged his wife to divorce him, and she moved away. But through Rose, he maintained his relationship with his daughter. She visited each summer, staying with Rose.
“And as she grew up she started calling me Grandma Nan. The whole church calls me that now, including my own grandchildren.”
It was the faith of another woman in Estep that led, coincidentally, to the Toole confession supporters hope will free him. Bob Brown and Fred Cope, former sheriff’s deputies turned private detectives, were interviewing a woman two months ago about an arson case. Out of the blue, and totally unrelated to the fire, she mentioned Estep.
“She felt strongly he was in prison for a crime he didn’t do,” said Brown. The woman had corresponded with Estep in prison.
The arson case took them to the courthouse, and Brown and Cope decided to check the Estep file while they were there. They became intrigued. They interviewed Estep in prison.
“Being former police officers, we read people fairly well,” said Brown. “After a number of hours with him, we were able to walk away and say it should be investigated and he was innocent.
“We also got involved because we had been advised there were a number of people who believed in his innocence.”
Working for free initially, Brown and Cope eventually found a link to Toole – they won’t say how – and then called in a colleague, lawyer Lyle Robertson. They drove to Florida and obtained the 75-page statement from Toole that they say will free Estep.
Through his lawyer, Estep last week thanked the people who have stuck by him for a decade. Reserved and intellectual, he may never be able to adequately thank them for their help. But Nan Rose knows he cares, and knows he drew strength from them, just as they did from him.
A few days after Christmas, when Rose learned of her cancer, someone called Estep and told him she was dying. “It shattered him,” Rose said. As soon as she got out of the hospital, someone drove her to Canon City.
“Park’s not a demonstrative person. But he hugged me, and hung on to me all the time I was there. And the tears were almost there.”
“He’s lost everything he ever had. He had nothing else,” said Rose. “I think he thought he’d never see me again.”
“Someday he’s going to get out of that place,” said Rose, “and I’m going to pick him up. It’s going to be soon.”
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That someday seemed to become imminent when Ottis Toole confessed to the crimes at the Suezy Massage Parlor. Jubilation prevailed among “Estep’s people” for a while. Even People magazine took notice:
Is An Innocent Man Behind Bars? Park Estep Has Served 10 Years for a Murder a Mass Killer Now Admits
PETER CARLSON November 5, 1984 12:00 PM
On Sept. 2, after he had served nearly 10 years in Colorado State Prison on a murder conviction, Park Estep received a phone call that sent hope flooding through him. The call came from Bob Brown, a private investigator working with Estep’s attorneys. Brown nearly exploded with the good news. ‘We have found the man who did it,’ he told Estep. ‘We have a confession from the guy who did it.’ Estep went dizzy with relief. ‘My heart stopped,’ he says. ‘My brain stopped. If you’d been doing 10 years, what would your reaction be?’
The confession that Brown had obtained was a long and detailed admission by convicted serial killer Ottis Toole, 37, that he had committed the 1974 Colorado Springs murder for which Estep had been sentenced to serve at least 20 years in prison. When the story broke in Colorado newspapers, Governor Richard Lamm announced that he would act ‘within the hour’ to free Estep if the original prosecutor of the case, El Paso County District Attorney Bob Russel, would agree. But Russel, 54, who is in the midst of a tough reelection campaign for the prosecutor’s post he has held for 20 years, won’t free Estep because he says the confession is ‘tainted.’ He adds, ‘Can you believe this is happening to me just before my election? I’m going to lose votes if people think I have convicted an innocent man.’
So Park Estep, 35, former Army engineer, Vietnam veteran and divorced father of a 10-year-old daughter, remains in jail. His only hope now is that a judge will order a retrial when his plea is heard on Oct. 31.
Estep’s entanglement with the criminal justice system began on Sept. 19, 1974. Late that night a man entered Suezy’s Oriental Massage Parlor in Colorado Springs, pulled a gun and demanded money from proprietor Sun Ok Cousin and masseuse Yon Cha Lee. The women surrendered $60 but that did not satisfy the intruder. He tied up Lee, stabbed her and sliced her throat, nearly killing her. In another room he raped Cousin and shot and stabbed her to death. Before fleeing he set both women on fire. Lee survived and at first described the assailant to police as a 6’2″, 195-pound man who drove a white pickup.
On Oct. 30 police arrested 5’10”, 150-pound Park Estep, a Spec 4 in an engineering battalion at nearby Fort Carson. He had a full mustache and drove a red pickup. Estep, who had no previous criminal record, denied any connection to the murder. He was sick on the night it took place, he said, and had been at home with his wife, Rozanne, and their newborn daughter. His wife confirmed his story and passed a lie-detector test. Estep’s Army-appointed attorney, Richard Borchers, also proclaimed his client’s innocence for years after his involvement in the case ended. ‘I never believed—ever—that he committed the crime,’ says Borchers, who is now a Colorado state district judge. ‘The case should be reopened in the interest of justice. There should be a new trial. Park was a good soldier, a good human being…. The command at Fort Carson thought the world of Park Estep.’
Estep was charged with murder, robbery, assault, arson and rape. The case rested almost entirely on Yon Cha Lee’s eyewitness identification of Park, even though she continued to insist that her attacker had been clean shaven. In court she identified the mustachioed Estep—but only after the prosecutor pointed him out to her. On March 16, 1975, after two days of deliberation and several deadlocked ballots, the jury finally convicted Estep of all the charges except rape. Then, strangely—considering the brutality of the crime—the jury recommended leniency. Ignoring that recommendation, the judge sent Estep to prison on consecutive terms, making him ineligible for parole until 1995. ‘I was stupid enough to really believe in the system,” says Estep. “Then came the verdict and I was angry.’
Angry, but not resigned, Estep appealed his case with the aid of attorney Richard Tegtmeier and private investigator Jerry Mosier, both of whom worked on his case for years without pay. Two years after the jury’s verdict, a Colorado appeals court reversed Estep’s conviction and ordered a new trial. But prosecutors appealed that decision, and in 1978 the Colorado Supreme Court reinstated Estep’s conviction.
Shortly after he lost that appeal, Estep asked his wife to divorce him. ‘I said there was no point being married in name if we couldn’t be married in fact,’ he explains. His ex-wife later remarried and lives with their daughter, Miriam, on a farm in the Midwest. Miriam knows both her jailed father and her stepfather as ‘Daddy.’ Despite their divorce, Rozanne still staunchly backs her former husband. ‘I don’t just believe he is innocent,’ she says. ‘I know he is.’
His legal appeals seemingly exhausted, Estep remained in prison, working as a clerk, reading history and science fiction, and in 1981 converted to Judaism. Then, in 1983, Texas police arrested Ottis Toole and Henry Lucas, who claim to have killed more than 100 people, including a woman slain in Colorado in 1974.
Reading of that confession, private detectives Brown and Fred Cope—both former deputies in the El Paso County sheriff’s department—wondered again about Estep’s claim of innocence. They interviewed him in prison and in late August traveled to Florida State Prison to interview Ottis Toole on death row. Toole proved to be cooperative: ‘You guys want me to tell you about when I went to the steam bath in Colorado….’ He admitted the killing and described in grisly detail both the crime and the building in which it was committed. ‘Y’all found the lady lying on the front floor with the hell shot out of her,’ he told them. Toole’s details matched with the 1974 statements of Yon Cha Lee. He also fit her original description of the killer—and he said he was driving a white pickup.
When news of Toole’s confession broke, District Attorney Russel called a press conference and charged that the private investigators had fed Toole the details of the crime in order to give a concocted confession the ring of truth. ‘We set out from the beginning to prove that the Toole confession was false,’ Russel said. ‘I don’t want this killer Estep back on the street.’
In late September Russel and an aide traveled to Florida to interview Toole. A videotape of the meeting shows that, at first, Toole defended his confession. Then, after 85 minutes of skeptical cross-examination by Russel, he stopped insisting that he was the killer. ‘Okay,’ he told Russel. ‘If you say I didn’t kill her, then maybe I didn’t.’
Upon his return to Colorado, Russel announced that Toole had recanted his confession. To Jerry Mosier, the investigator for the defense, Russel’s actions are selfishly political: ‘He is concerned with only one thing in this matter—and that is how it will affect his election.’
Meanwhile, Park Estep awaits the decision on his motion for a new trial with renewed optimism. ‘I eventually will get a new trial,’ he predicts. ‘I expect to be acquitted. I don’t believe I can be convicted. On the other hand, I didn’t believe it 10 years ago either.’ If he is freed, Estep might become a defense investigator, or he might rejoin the Army, receiving more than $150,000 in back pay because he was kept on the rolls until his honorable discharge in early 1983. If his professional plans are vague, his personal plans are not. ‘We have a daughter who was 9 weeks old when I was arrested,’ he says. ‘If I get out, a big part of my plans will be getting acquainted with her.’”
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Park continued to wait. And wait. And wait. I had less patience, and wrote to the Rocky Mountain News in some exasperation:
Colorado Courts Dally While Man Languishes in Prison
Rocky Mountain News, 7/19/85
More than 10 months have passed since Ottis Toole confessed to the murder of Sun Ok Cousin, a crime for which another man, Park Estep, has already served over 10 years in the Colorado State Penitentiary. As the months pass, the state of Colorado’s official response to this case is looking more and more outrageously dilatory. All the elements of Toole’s customary method of operation – rape, murder by knife and/or pistol, robbery, arson – were present in the crime that took Cousin’s life, and very nearly took the life of her companion, Yon Cha Lee.
The similarities prompted two investigators, both veteran detectives, to approach Toole. His knowledge of details of the crime, sequence of events and crime scene were remarkably accurate. In August 1984, he made a full, recorded confession.
The response of the judicial system was prompt. Robert Russel, Colorado Springs district attorney at the time of the murder and current El Paso County district attorney, immediately dispatched Lou Smit, the Colorado Springs police detective who had led the investigation of Estep, to Florida, where Toole resides on death row.
Russel later joined Smit in Florida, where Toole, confronted with a parade of documents he was unable to read, admitted that his confession “must have been a mistake.” After this statement, he continued to make statements indicating that he had done the crime, or believed he had.
This response to Toole’s confession was a potentially tragic one.
Ottis Toole, as one comes to know him through interrogation transcripts, is basically a 6-year-old boy in the body of an adult male who knows a lot about how to kill people. He is very nearly illiterate. (When asked by one investigator how he chose aliases, he replied that he chose “ones I could spell.”) He has the 6-year-old’s incomprehension of “truth.” Truth, for him, is what he thinks will dispose his interrogator to be pleased with him. Clearly, any statement he makes needs to be subjected to careful scrutiny.
Russel and Smit did not subject Toole’s confession to careful scrutiny. Instead, they set out to manipulate Toole into a recantation. Russel’s public statements about the accuracy of details in Toole’s original confession have been extremely misleading, concentrating on the very few discrepancies between Toole’s memory and the facts of record, ignoring the overwhelming similarities.
All this seems understandable. Russel and Smit had a natural human stake in “proving” that they hadn’t convicted the wrong man. What is not understandable is how these individuals, subject to the most compelling kind of conflict of interest, could have been allowed to investigate Toole’s confession. Richard Nixon “investigated” the Watergate break-in, but nobody took his findings very seriously.
There is now a motion before the Colorado Supreme Court asking that the original trial judge be replaced so that another judge would hear motions for a new trial for Estep. The court seems to be moving with its customary alacrity in this matter. It took almost exactly one year for it to overturn the appeals court’s reversal of Estep’s conviction; perhaps a year’s consideration is now the precedent in this case.
The Supreme Court’s apparent paralysis is disturbing, not only because it is further prolonging what is very likely an injustice, but because Toole is on death row, and, in addition, is not the sort of criminal who is popular among other inmates. With every passing day, the likelihood of a true examination of his testimony diminishes.
And with every passing day, Park Estep – a man with no previous criminal record, a man with an alibi witness of spotless reputation who has never ceased to insist that she knows Park Estep is innocent, a man convicted on the most dangerously unreliable sorts of evidence – gets one day closer to spending the rest of his life in prison.
It appears to this citizen that it’s about time a federal grand jury was convened to look into the way this case is not being dealt with by the state of Colorado.
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No federal grand jury materialized, and my frustration eventually led me to bite the hand that had once fed me (after a fashion – with column inches, not with salary):
Some Points on Estep Case
Colorado Springs Sun, 1985
Your coverage of the Estep/Toole story continues to maintain its sterling quality. Peter Roper’s Sept. 4 piece on the removal of Judge Hardeman from the case contains the following two sentences: “Estep’s lawyers claim that Ottis Toole, a confessed mass killer being held in Florida, has admitted killing the Colorado Springs woman” and “Toole, who with his traveling companion Henry Lucas is being investigated by police for dozens of murders across the nation, later recanted the confession.”
Estep’s lawyers do not “claim” Toole confessed. Toole confessed. He confessed in very impressive detail. The transcripts of his confession have been part of public record since January or so. Your paper has covered Mr. Russel’s selective version of them. There can be very few reasons for your reporter to call the confession a “claim.”
Conversely, your reporter states as unquestionable fact the “recantation” of Ottis Toole. The videotapes and transcripts of that particular segment of Mr. Russel’s Theatre of the Phony have also been available for quite some time. A comparison of the confession and the “recantation” support the view that “Mr. Russel claimed Toole recanted” much better than it supports Mr. Roper’s version.
Your paper also covered the original submission of the defense motion which culminated in Judge Hardeman’s removal. Presumably you are aware that sealed affidavits were submitted with the motion. Perhaps it has occurred to you that the Supreme Court granted the defense more than they asked (which was only for a hearing to determine whether the judge should be replaced), but by granting them more, also made it certain that the contents of the affidavits would not come to public light. Since, as a newspaper, you are the public light, I’d be grateful if you’d start shining yourself around a little and try to tell this story with some curiosity and thought, instead of acting as if the world began anew every day and everything that came out of an official mouth was the pure-T truth.
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The Sun maintained its equanimity and indolence. Toole was brought to Colorado Springs for a hearing, which he turned into a hopeless travesty. I had written of Sun Ok Cousin’s killer that he must be “so hopelessly far from humanity that he must be found and put away from all of us who hope to be human.” I had had no idea what that meant, really, but Ottis Toole certainly showed me. He was a wild animal, contemptuously indifferent to any human or legal norms. His complete separation from any accepted rules of behavior or concepts of truth became overwhelmingly apparent, I think, to everyone in the courtroom. No one could believe anything he had said or would say. There would be no new trial. Toole died in prison of cirrhosis several years later. Park returned to a low-security prison in Canon City, to which he’d been transferred pretty promptly after he was incarcerated.
Nan Rose died, and Park was brought to her funeral at the Highland Baptist Church in chains. Many of his other long-time correspondents faded away or died, and he let me know he was looking for some new ones. I knew my sister June liked writing letters, and asked her on the phone if she wanted to correspond with Park. She readily agreed.
I’ve never believed I have any sort of extrasensory powers, so that conversation remains a memorable mystery to me. June had shown no interest in romance or men as long as I’d known her, yet as soon as I hung up the phone I knew that she and Park would fall in love. I glanced up toward the Heaven I didn’t believe in. “This’ll get me in solid with Dad and Mom,” I said to myself. June and Park started corresponding immediately, daily.
June was then living back in Northern Illinois in Lake Villa, a little community west of Waukegan. She and some unconscionable number of poodles were crammed into a small cottage in the trees. She started corresponding with Park, then talking with him on the phone, on May 29, 1988. She flew out to meet him at the prison for the first time on July 31, and by January of the next year, she’d found new homes for nearly all her herd of poodles and moved to Colorado Springs, where she got a job as a veterinary assistant and rented an apartment. Then she went to work on getting Park sprung.
June knew nothing about the law or about politics, but Jerry and Tegtmeier and I were all glad to give her access to all the case materials, and during the next two years she bulled her way into the offices of the Assistant Director of Corrections, of judges, of District Attorney Robert Russel, and wrote endless letters pleading Park’s case to then Governor Roy Romer and to President George H.W. Bush. She found a judge of the Colorado Court of Appeals who heard her out, investigated the existing case files, and discovered two outstanding appeals that had never been heard. June isn’t certain to this day what action the judge took then, but on January 1,1991, Park was unconditionally released. June picked him up from the prison and brought him back to Colorado Springs, where he would find a cold reception.
I’d been pretty busy, myself, during the ’80s, getting married, becoming a father, getting divorced, marrying once again, selling one house and buying another (at which, in 1991, June and Park were married). They tried to start a life in Colorado Springs, but it became apparent after a while that the powers that controlled things in the city were not going to let that happen, and they moved to Phoenix, where Park began working part time for Honeywell, using the computer knowledge he’d gained while in prison. He loved working at Honeywell, and he’d just gotten a full time position when he walked out the door one morning and suffered a massive heart attack.
Rejecting the offer of a heart transplant, Park walked himself back to health. Meanwhile, June found a job at a kennel outside Phoenix which offered both a salary and a trailer she and Park could live in, and for several years they lived there happily, with Park doing volunteer work for a local theater group, among other activities he was able to manage. June was up visiting me and Lis early in 2002 when when she got a phone call informing her that Park had had another heart attack, this one fatal.
The remaining local paper reported this with its customary accuracy and delicacy:
Notorious Springs Killer Dies in Arizona
Jeremy Meyer, The Gazette, c. 2/1/2002
Park Estep, a man convicted of one of Colorado Springs’ most notorious crimes, died Saturday in Phoenix of natural causes.
Estep was convicted of killing a downtown Colorado Springs massage parlor operator in 1974, a charge he steadfastly denied. He served 16 years in Colorado prisons and was released in 1991.
Estep’s case drew attention because of its brutality and its many legal twists.
On Sept. 19, 1974, Sun Ok Cousin was set on fire before being shot to death inside a downtown massage parlor. Another employee was stabbed but survived. Witnesses saw a red truck at the business when the crime occurred, and it was similar to the one driven by Estep, a 25-year-old Fort Carson soldier at the time.
The surviving employee picked Estep out of 250 photographs and reportedly “nearly fainted when she saw him in the lineup,” according to an article in The Gazette at the time.
A jury convicted Estep in 1975, and he was sentenced to 48 to 64 years in prison on various charges. He won his first appeal when the Colorado Court of Appeals reversed his conviction on grounds the prosecution improperly questioned a defense witness.
But the Colorado Supreme Court upheld it in 1978. Then in 1984, convicted serial killer Ottis Toole, who was on Florida’s death row, claimed he was the murderer and also admitted to committing several other slayings across the country.
Estep demanded a retrial, but a judge denied it, saying Toole wasn’t credible. The appeals court again sided with Estep, saying the judge couldn’t have made that decision based on the transcripts.
Toole was flown to Colorado Springs to testify. But then he said he had never been to Colorado before and it was all a hoax.
In 1987 a judge shortened Estep’s sentence, saying some of the charges could be served concurrently. He was released in 1991 and married a Colorado Springs woman. They lived for a time in Fountain before moving to Arizona.
Estep died of heart disease. He was 52.
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The headline made me angry, and I fired off a letter to the reporter:
Letter to Jeremy Meyer
2/1/2002
Dear Mr. Meyer:
I write you because a friend whose professional judgment I respect referred to you as “a good kid,” which I took to mean that he thought you were serious about trying to be a good reporter. I should also say immediately that I am the brother-in-law of the “notorious Springs killer,” Park Estep, and that I know you had nothing to do with that appellation in the headline over your story, unless something has changed in the newspaper business since time immemorial, and that your story was probably the most carefully written one about Park’s case ever printed by the paper you work for.
Because you relied on that paper for some historical background, you necessarily left out the same kinds of “detail” your paper was always careful to eliminate. I’ll give one example; others in plenty reside in the enclosed pieces from the old Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post. When “the surviving employee,” Elizabeth Lee, picked Park’s photo out of a set of (as I recall) 8 or 10 photos, and again when she identified Park at a physical lineup, she was insistent on one point: the man in the photograph and in the lineup had not had a mustache when he did the crimes. This issue is dealt with at length in the enclosures, so I won’t elaborate. Not dealt with is the fact that Elizabeth Lee was sequestered in a safe apartment in Denver by the CSPD, that she had virtually no English, that on the day Lou Smit showed her the “photo lineup” in that apartment the CSPD had already homed in on Park as the perpetrator.
The “improper question[ing] of a defense witness” to which you refer consisted of this: asked to identify Park from her witness seat, Miss Lee was unable to do so until the prosecuting attorney walked behind Park and asked her again to identify her attacker. But then, as the Colorado Supreme Court said of this incident, the Constitution entitles us to a fair trial, “not a perfect trial.”
When Ottis Toole finally appeared in a Springs courtroom, he proved to be not only not credible, but crazier than a shithouse rat, which came as no shock to anyone who’d researched his ghastly life story. But I hope sometime you’ll be moved to seek out the tapes of the interviews Lou Smit and Robert Russel did with Toole after he confessed to the crime to two Colorado Springs investigators. The highlight of those tapes, to my mind, comes when the District Attorney, whose job description suggests that his job is to discover the truth, tells Toole, (I paraphrase from memory) “We’re not here to convict you, Ottis….We’re here to find you innocent.”
This attitude toward his job characterized Mr. Russel’s conduct of the case, and your report of this segment of the case unfortunately is characteristic of your paper’s treatment, not only of this case, but of every criminal case in this county in the 30 some years I’ve lived here. Your paper defines its job to be reporting the prosecution’s case in the most selectively damning detail as soon as an arrest is made and to eliminate any confusing facts that might argue against the prosecutorial view. While hardly “evidence” of this overwhelming bias, I offer you the following anecdote.
About ten years after Park’s conviction, I performed an experiment with two of my freshman English classes at Pikes Peak Community College. I first wrote a 3,000 word account of the Suezy Massage Parlor crime, investigation, and trial. I wrote it as objectively as I was able, real Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” stuff. (And as an English teacher of 30 years, I think I know something about what “objective” means and about how to use the language as cleanly as you can ever use it.) After my students had a week to read this account, I asked them to vote, as jurors, on the guilt or innocence of the defendant. (Naturally, I’d altered all the names and places and dates in my account.) 38 of 40 students found the defendant innocent because reasonable doubt existed.
Then I gave them your paper’s accounts of the same events. I actually typed them up – and this in the days when the only way to copy things was to mimeograph them – so that their origin wouldn’t be clear and so that I could change the names, places, etc. to correspond with the first account they’d read – and gave them another week to read them, and asked them to vote again as jurors. 38 of 40 students changed their votes to guilty.
I recognize that that anecdote might be interpreted to show that I was an inferior reporter to Joyce Trent, who covered the case. But it might also suggest that your paper tends to act as a town crier and cheerleader for the DA and CSPD. I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Finally, I want to tell you a few things about the notorious Springs killer. He served two tours in Nam, mostly with the Montagnards in the Central Highlands. He had no criminal record whatsoever before he was convicted. He had no criminal record in the years he had left after his release. Had he not been the somewhat guileless North Dakota boy he was when he was called in for questioning, none of the circumstantial evidence used against him at trial would ever have been available to the prosecution. In the seventeen years he served at Canon City, he became trusted by the prison administration and his fellow prisoners, innumerable ones of whom he helped, taught, and urged to quit feeling sorry for themselves. The Army thought so highly of him that they immediately provided him with counsel when he was arrested, and only discharged him (honorably) well after his appeals were exhausted. His Rabbi in Canon City performed his marriage ceremony.
My sister happened to be visiting me when we got the news of Park’s death. At one point during our many conversations during the next days, I said, somewhat bitterly, “He’s got a hell of a good life coming next time around.” My sister caught me up on that. “He never met a stranger,” she said, “he tried to help everyone he met. He lived every minute of every day. What’s a better life than that?” I couldn’t disagree.
I’m not the only relative Park has in this town, and a long way from the only friend. As you pursue your career, I hope you’ll bear in mind in the future that wrongful convictions are a significant percent of the convictions in our fair land, and that even the rightly convicted are human beings who have human relatives and friends. I’d ask you to pass that message on to your employers, but I’m all too well aware that they wouldn’t understand a word you said.
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I didn’t hear back from Meyer.
One of my missions in life, it’s seemed, has been to put together people who can do each other good, in all sorts of ways, and I don’t mind claiming that I’ve excelled at doing that. But when I got my sister and Park together, I performed my finest service.
I learned many painful lessons about the unreliability of the legal system and the press during the years of knowing Park. I learned, for example, never to say anything to a policeman except “I’d like to talk to my attorney now,” or anything at all to the press. I learned how very difficult it is to discover any kind of truth about a piece of human behavior, and about the pressures on police and prosecutors that are likely to warp their supposed commitment to finding the truth. I learned I wasn’t cut out to work in the legal system.
Most valuable of all, I got to be part of the life of Park Estep, and my sister’s summary can’t be improved: “He never met a stranger. He tried to help everyone he met. He lived every minute of every day. What’s a better life than that?”
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Even now, I can’t resist trying to get some good for someone out of the awful injustice Park went through. Recently a young woman who writes for the Independent published a column about being called for possible jury duty in a capital trial, and her mixed feelings – she was “for” the death penalty, she said, but didn’t know if she could actually vote to subject someone to it. She wasted a lot of words describing her aborted drama – she didn’t get called – and her woolly state of mind. Her paper, amazingly, saw fit to print my rejoinder to her column:
“Perhaps Laura Eurich’s confusion over the advisability of supporting the death penalty (“Faced with the Death Sentence,” Colorado Springs Independent, May 9-15, 2018) might be relieved by the following facts.
“Statistical studies by reputable researchers suggest that a 4.1% wrongful conviction rate in capital cases is a conservative estimate. The most recent U.S. Bureau of Justice assessment (2016) lists 2, 814 people on death rows in the United States. 115 of these, then, are wrongly convicted. The chances that their wrongful convictions will be overturned before they are executed are slim.
“My late brother-in-law was convicted of murder, rape, arson and robbery back in the 1970s. His conviction was overturned by the Colorado Court of Appeals, but reinstated by the Colorado Supreme Court on the grounds that the Constitution guaranteed “a fair trial, not a perfect trial.” Fortunately, Colorado had no death penalty at that time, so my brother-in-law was not executed. Not only I, but a great many people, including judges, attorneys and clergy, are convinced that he was wrongly convicted in the first place.
“Indeed, we cannot guarantee perfection in any human activity. If Ms Eurich is comfortable with a 96% chance that the prosecution’s case is legitimate and has been proved, then she should be comfortable voting for a death penalty conviction. If she is not comfortable with that margin of error, then she should no longer support the death penalty.”
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You hear every day of unconscionable crimes of violence, and see many more portrayed in vivid detail for entertainment purposes. It is difficult to resist the desire to punish such crimes “appropriately,” taking eye for eye, life for life. I find that impulse lives on in me, with all I know about the undependability of human institutions (such as “the criminal justice system”), the uncertainty of most forms of “evidence” (particularly eyewitness identifications), and the great volume of criminal activity, often of a lethal nature, that goes unpunished or rewarded in our society. Because I cannot trust that prosecutors, police investigators, or the press are doing their best to find the truth, nor that witnesses can ever be relied on for accurate identification or memory, I don’t believe that I, or anyone else, has a moral right to call for the execution of another human being. While vengeance is seductive in many cases, I wind up, like a good minister, quoting the Bible: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
Or, as that dear, great Lenny Bruce said, “‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ means that, not ‘Amend Section A.'”
