The Rake Magazine

Tag: crime

  • How Much is That Metaphysical Totem Pole in the Window?

    I was recently talking to a Minneapolis artist who was, as many Minneapolis artists of a certain generation are wont to do, rhapsodizing about the glory days of the Warehouse District art scene in the 1980s. Before it was home to a hundred thumping dance clubs and one of the most heroically awful franchises in the annals of professional basketball, downtown Minneapolis’ Warehouse District was a primo fine arts destination where one could live, paint and party in relative peace, on the cheap and with minimal interference from police, creditors and obnoxious suburban disco jocks. During that decade, there were a few dozen arts spaces which had carved out homes for themselves in the many spacious, abandoned buildings on and around First Avenue, and collectively created a little scene that carried on until the Target Center and the Federal Reserve muscled everyone out in the early 1990s.

    One of the most attractive aspects of a lot of the Warehouse District galleries, my artist friend went on to say, is that many of the best spaces were situated in storefronts. Storefronts are, in many respects, the perfect venue for an art gallery. They’re right on the street level and generally built all the way up to the sidewalk line in pedestrian-friendly parts of town, so they interact directly with passers-by. The windows encourage the viewer to engage the art inside, creating a sense of (literal!) transparency into the gallery’s inner workings. Storefronts are usually fairly cheap to rent and maintain, and modest enough in size that an emerging artist can focus their work in a clearly-defined space without having it be completely overwhelmed by cavernous ceilings or an all-consuming sea of white drywall. Art museums and more prosperous established galleries can seem citadel-like and exclusive – think of the MIA’s imposing neoclassical façade, or the Weisman’s metallic tangles sitting up on that river bluff. Storefronts, on the other hand, invite the casual person on the street to peer into the window and come in for a plastic cup of wine. They’re a fully integrated part of the city, and if they’re sitting next to a taquería or piano repair shop or discount plumbing service, all the better for that elusive "street life" your urban planner friends are fond of chattering on about.

    So theoretically, the most perfect way to interact with the community would be to strip down the storefront gallery to its most basic essence, and eliminate all the superfluous elements so that you’re left with just a front window. That’s the concept, anyway, behind south Minneapolis’ Shoebox Gallery, where the idea of the storefront gallery really is distilled it to its most basic essence. The Shoebox, run by artist Sean Smuda out of his upstairs apartment, is almost literally just a shoebox: an 8′ x 8′ display window on the Chicago Avenue side of Roberts Shoes on Lake Street (you know, "hardly a foot we can’t fit"). The window is two feet deep with drywall backing, and that’s it – minimal lighting, no floor, no front door, and certainly no wine and cheese table. When there are openings or performances, they happen out on the sidewalk on Chicago Avenue. It fulfills the basic democratic promise of an alternative arts space in essentially making the city itself a physical part of the gallery.

    The Phillips-Powderhorn neighborhood in which the Shoebox is located has come a long way in the last couple of years – an early opening was interrupted by an on-street five squad-car drug bust – but it still isn’t an area that one would tend to think of as an arts Mecca. Artists had lived in the building for several years, but there was no real sense of interaction between them and the community at large. When Smuda moved into an upstairs space in the Roberts Shoes complex six years ago, one of the first ideas he had was planting some traveling vines in a problematic, crime-ridden back alley to add some green space. He then went about installing a video camera back there and looping the footage in one of the store’s display windows 24 hours a day for public viewing – putatively to monitor the growth of the vines, but also to reflect the everyday life of the neighborhood back on itself. X-Ray Alley, the first show at the Shoebox, went live in July, 2003. Indeed, criminal activity in the alley dried up almost immediately, and the owner of Roberts asked Smuda if he wanted to continue to program art in the window on an ongoing basis. He and early contributor (and current UofM printmaking professor) Jenny Schmid dubbed the space the Shoebox Gallery. It has been going ever since.

    There are, of course, certain inherent limitations to running a gallery in such a space. Potential exhibitors are presented with a checklist of every conceivable calamity that could befall a piece of artwork: the space is uninsured, in direct sunlight much of the time, separated from the outside world by a mere sheet of plate glass, and alternately furnace-like or freezing, depending on the season. Moreover, it’s run by Smuda out-of-pocket, so work must be shipped by the artist at their own expense. Despite these limitations, Shoebox has consistently shown strong work by well-known artists and performers such as Schmid, Xavier Tavera, Alexa Horochowski and Emily Johnson in the last five years. The current show by Tynan Kerr, Metaphysical Totem Poles, is a charmingly ramshackle collection of art objects obsessively cobbled together from paper scraps, geometric shapes, photos, found text, wood, brick and paint. They look, sitting in the window, as if they could be the remnants of a fire sale for a psychedelic shamanistic wholesaler. Kerr left a number of his colorful, garish paintings on wooden panels outside the gallery, which over the course of the show have disappeared from the sidewalk, absorbed into the bustle of the gallery’s surroundings – who knows what southside bedroom wall they’re presently decorating? The line between the gallery and the environment it interacts with is blurred further.

    For the gallery’s fifth anniversary, a group show called Beautiful Deleuzers/Guattari Hero, based on the writings of post-war French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, will be opening June 21 with a performance on the sidewalk by Kelly Meister. That’s the beauty of a storefront gallery like Shoebox. It serves as a counteractive measure against both the idea of fine art as something mystical and unapproachable, and the idea of the American city street as an alternately bland and disintegrating public space being choked to death by corporate greed, rampant crime and/or civic shortsightedness. The storefront gallery promotes the almost utopian idea that in the marketplace of ideas, Felix Guattari can exist right across the street from Wireless Toyz.

  • …leaving community hurt, too

    Here’s the headline from yesterday’s Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

    It’s tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn’t every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

    I wish I had such an overstaffed news room that I could send a reporter out to the scene of a shooting to ask everyone who lives near the incident what they think of a little girl getting shot. What do they expect people to say? "Hey, no big deal. People get shot here all the time. What really makes me mad is the Twins letting Johan Santana get away."

    Actually, there was one detail of the Strib story that’s kind of funny. The assailant’s gun went off because his pants were so loose that the gun slipped down his pants leg and discharged when it hit the floor. How much funnier would the headline have been if the gun had hit with the muzzle pointed straight up?

    "Man, 20 or so, grazed by bullet, leaving future generations hurt, too."

  • Running Against Type

    The idea of a footrace in North Minneapolis seems to inspire two reactions from residents of other neighborhoods: incredulity and concern. “Do you want to get mugged?” “Are you wearing a flak jacket?” And, of course, the simplest question: “Why?”  

    It is no secret that North Minneapolis has a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the metropolitan area. Which is precisely what several local nonprofit organizations had in mind when they conceived the first annual Go! Northside 5K run, held a few weeks ago. A press announcement advertised that the course would be set in “one of the most blighted neighborhoods in Minneapolis, an area with high levels of crime and home foreclosures.” Not exactly typical terrain for a recreational road race. “A majority of our supporters are from the suburbs, and a lot of 5Ks are run out in the suburbs,” said Ryan Petersen, development director for Urban Homeworks, an affordable-housing organization that co-sponsored the race. “But then we figured we might as well do it in the neighborhood where we do most of our work.”

    The neighborhood surrounding North Commons Park, where the race’s starting and finish lines were located, did not appear particularly blighted—to the contrary, it seemed quaint on the sleepy and quiet Saturday morning of race day. Then a local drum corps shattered the morning silence. Some runners bobbed to the beat. Others were less than enthusiastic. “Ugh,” said a fifty-ish man, checking his watch and adjusting his singlet. “Grandma’s [Marathon] has thousands of runners and even they manage to start on time. We’re gonna be ten minutes late here!”

    The Go! Northside 5K drew more than two hundred participants—a modest but respectable draw for an inaugural race (though many wore T-shirts that identified them as members of teams from Urban Homeworks or the PEACE Foundation, two of the race’s sponsoring organizations). There was a 5K somewhere in the Twin Cities area every weekend this summer; why did runners choose this particular race? Certainly the cause of community-building in a beleaguered neighborhood was a worthy one, but also attached to it, as Petersen’s comment suggested, was the opportunity to see a place considered by many to be dangerous from the safety of a group of people, in a supervised setting.

    Whatever drew the runners, spectators were scarce. Some might think that a largely white pack of runners passing through a predominantly non-white neighborhood, one whose streets probably never have been blocked off for a road race, would draw onlookers; however, the majority of them were actually race marshals: officials in blaze-orange vests who mark the route and assist injured runners. With one at each intersection, this made for a strangely deserted course.

    The few other spectators were accidental—people out on their daily business as the runners trickled by. An elderly man stopped his lawnmower, pulling it back from the street so as to not spray the athletes with clippings. A man carrying groceries stopped and stared, greeting the runners’ waves and hellos with silence. A woman came outside in her robe and surveyed her car-free street as a handful of widely spaced runners passed. “There some sort of race today or something?” she called. “Yeah!” yelled a runner. “Wooo!” responded another.

    At the finish line, the mood was more celebratory than competitive. Recreational runners congratulated each other on finishing, and race geeks joked about setting course records (an easy feat in a brand-new event). “Were you fast?” inquired a sinewy running veteran. “I was fast by thirty seconds. Must be a short racecourse.” Two women at the end of the chute were keeping track of the order of finishers, and trying to get a chattering mass of teenage runners, all wearing blue PEACE Foundation T-shirts, to move along. The kids paid no attention, hollering and adjusting their iPods. In many ways, the finish-line celebration had more of the feel of a company picnic. The Urban Homeworks team held its own awards ceremony, and members of all teams stayed on for an afternoon softball tournament.

    Meanwhile, most of the runners packed up and left within an hour or two of the race’s end. Many returned to the suburbs (home to one-third of the morning’s runners, according to finish time listings) and still more to ritzier parts of the Cities (though the race did attract runners from such exotic locales as Texas, California, and North Dakota). The Go! Northside run doesn’t seem likely to spark a trend for road races on the North Side. But at least a few people got to see a hitherto unfamiliar part of town. “You know,” said a south Minneapolitan, taking in his new surroundings, “I suppose I had never really been up here before.”

  • Murder by Numbers

    Viewed through the prism of memory, some years take on a character, a distinctive tone. In 2006, crime reclaimed its place on the front pages of newspapers across the United States, including the Star Tribune. And in this year of murder, Courtney Brown and Trevor Marsh were like twin poles on a violent globe. Brown died on a Saturday night in September, while walking with friends near the intersection of Lyndale Avenue North and Dowling Avenue. He had been playing basketball. The young man who shot him wanted Brown’s basketball shoes and jersey, a replica of an old Morgan State University uniform. Brown was about to start his sophomore year at Edison High.

     

    Minneapolis had been recording homicides at a rate not seen here in a decade, but Brown’s killing, which occurred on the fringes of Minneapolis’ most troubled neighborhood, struck a chord. Spurred by media attention and aided by cooperative citizens, the police quickly arrested several suspects, including the alleged shooter. He was seventeen. Charges have since been dropped.

    Trevor Marsh’s murder occurred nine miles away, bringing a half-dozen squad cars and police barricades to a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. A student at South High, he was shot in the woods near the Mississippi River, below the intersection of Thirty-second Street and West River Parkway. It was October 26. Another South High student had been murdered just three weeks earlier.

    Police said little about the circumstances of Marsh’s killing, but rumors swirled at the school and throughout the Longfellow neighborhood, where violent crime is rare. Marsh had been in trouble. He was shot execution style. The killers had taken his shoes, a sign of gang involvement. In late December, Minneapolis police charged two alleged gang members, one of them only sixteen, with Marsh’s murder. According to the criminal complaint, Raine C. Neiss shot Marsh at close range near the left ear because he had lied about being a member of the Gangster Disciples. An eyewitness allegedly told investigators that Neiss was playing Russian roulette with a pistol that Marsh brought to the meeting.

    Along the river, a memorial grew and morphed, withered and was revived. A framed photograph in a wicker basket, flowers, balloons. Saints candles. Briefly, a blue bandanna. In December, a Christmas wreath with handwritten notes.

    These murders made for two sharply contrasting tales: One victim black, the other white. One lived north, one south. One was the epitome of innocence on the fringes of a troubled neighborhood; the other, apparently living what Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak indelicately called a “high-risk lifestyle,” albeit in a supposedly safe part of the city. And yet each death created the same anguish, confusion, and even rage.

     

    By year’s end, Minneapolis had recorded sixty homicides, thirteen more than in 2005 and the highest number since 1996, when eighty-eight people died violently in the city. Twenty-nine—nearly half—of last year’s killings occurred in a six-square-mile area of North Minneapolis, from Glenwood Avenue north to Dowling, and from the city’s western border to the Mississippi River on the east (minus the North Loop neighborhood in the southeastern corner). According to the 2000 Census, 49,405 people live here, which equates to roughly fifty-four homicides per hundred thousand residents. Were North Minneapolis a separate city, that murder rate would put it just behind such municipalities as Compton, California, and Gary, Indiana. If Longfellow neighborhood had the same homicide rate, there would have been fifteen homicides there in 2006, instead of three; in southwest Minneapolis, there would have been thirty-four instead of the single case—the shooting of graduate student Michael Zebuhr in Uptown—that caused such an uproar last March.

    Granted, last year’s total was far below the 1995 record of ninety-nine homicides, which earned the city mention as “Murderapolis” in the New York Times. And, in fact, experts routinely caution against extrapolating from homicide data for a single year, since the numbers involved are relatively small and can be influenced by many factors, including luck. But the Minneapolis-based Center for Homicide Research has used police data and other sources to locate all seven-hundred-odd homicides in Minnesota between 1996 and 2000. Zooming in on Minneapolis shows that nothing substantial has changed between those years and 2006—there are just more dots. “Homicide doesn’t occur randomly,” pointed out Dallas Drake, the center’s principal researcher. “It clusters. It clusters in space and time.”

    Minneapolis is not alone. From Orlando to Oakland, Philadelphia to Indianapolis, to Milwaukee, to Little Rock, violent crime, particularly murder, was big news in 2006. Oakland, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last October, “has hit a 10-year high for homicides.” A headline in the Houston Chronicle proclaimed that same month: “Homicide rate on track to be worst in a decade.” Wrote the Orlando Sentinel on November 3: “Death brings murder count to record 44.” In August, the Philadelphia Daily News reported that “blood is spilling at a record rate this year—not only on the streets of Philly—but in supposedly friendlier locales …”

    These figures in many cases rose for the second year in a row. “Among violent crimes,” the Washington Post reported, “the biggest rise in 2005 came in the number of homicides, which leapt 4.8 percent, to nearly 17,000. Some of the hardest-hit cities included Milwaukee (up 40 percent), Cleveland (38 percent), Houston (23 percent), and Phoenix (9 percent).” According to recently released FBI figures, violent crime rates accelerated four percent in the first half of 2006. This follows a 2.5 percent increase in 2005, which was the largest increase in a decade.

     

    No matter how it’s broken down statistically, murder is ultimately just a surrogate for the broader perceptions about security and danger that profoundly shape our lives. We focus on homicides, in part, because they can be measured with relative accuracy. Few go unreported; the demarcation between life and death is clear. In legal terms, too, it makes a huge difference: When a man was shot at a downtown Minneapolis bus stop in late November, the fact that he survived meant that the shooter could not be charged with murder. Knowing that the victim survived, however, does not make those who witnessed the shooting, or who wait at that bus stop every day, feel measurably safer.

    Among themselves, criminologists often speak of homicide as merely one type of aggravated assault, in which numerous factors—the shooter’s skill, proximity to advanced trauma care, and sheer luck—influence the fate of the victim. A half-inch difference in where a bullet hits can mean the difference between life and death. Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts have estimated that the U.S. murder rate would be roughly three times higher without the advances in emergency-room medicine that have occurred since 1960. And so Minneapolis’ overall homicide rate is surely reduced by the proximity of two Level I trauma centers, at Hennepin County and North Memorial Medical Centers.

    But trauma surgeons saving the lives of gunshot victims masks the true dimensions of the problem, which is not so much murder as it is violence in general. A better measure of that violence might be a tally of those who are intentionally shot, or shot at, in the city; however, such figures are unfortunately only “semi-accurate,” said Minneapolis police Lieutenant Greg Reinhardt. “You don’t see a gang member saying, ‘I want to make a report that I was shot at.’ They’re going to take care of it themselves.”

    Still, even the number of reported shootings in 2006 rose twelve percent over 2005, according to police figures. Aggravated assaults, which include shootings, were up sixteen percent in the same period, and weapons-related arrests were up fourteen percent. Nearly three-quarters of Minneapolis’ homicide victims in 2006 were killed with handguns; a decade earlier, when the city had eighty-eight homicides, handguns were used in about half of them. One logical response to violent crime, then, might be to take away guns from those with a propensity for violence. Police in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, cut gun crimes nearly in half when they dramatically increased enforcement in “gun crime hot spots” of laws that prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons. They took away sixty-five percent more guns than in the previous year. Researchers have reported similar results in other cities, but the methods used to seize those guns have often proved controversial, with frequent charges that police rely on racial profiling to decide whom to search.

    At universities and think tanks across the United States, a small cottage industry of researchers has tried to understand why and how murder occurs, and by extension how to curb it. There is even a peer-reviewed journal, Homicide Studies. (From its November 2006 issue: “The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill.”) Like law-enforcement officials, those researchers routinely classify homicides in a variety of ways: by the relationship between victim and killer, say, or by looking at whether illegal drugs or gang membership were involved.

    If the goal is to reduce the number of murders, those distinctions make sense. Preventing the death of a young child at the hands of a caregiver (No. 13, three-year-old Ethan Hamilton) or of an intimate partner (No. 43, Martell Delaney) requires a different strategy from, say, stopping drive-by shootings (No. 50, South High student Gennaro Knox ), violent robberies (No. 12, Michael Zebuhr), or drug-related murders (No. 16, Garey Hannah). Likewise, this analysis helps us gauge risk and protect ourselves.

    But these distinctions have negative consequences, as well. They inherently place at least part of the blame for murder on the victim. One was buying illegal drugs, a second argued with a gang member, another chose to live with a violent partner. In this crude calculus, it is the random act of violence that haunts urban America. Thus, as the Star Tribune reported in the wake of that November bus-stop murder: “The downtown shooting wasn’t random … The boy was shot by another person who … knew the parties involved.” The subtext: You, dear reader, are safe.

    These distinctions create a sort of economy of homicide, in which some lives are more valuable than others. And in this economy, daily news coverage becomes a rough measure of value. Only a handful of the city’s murders in 2006 made front-page news, and those often had a ready-made nickname (the Block E shooting, the Uptown murder), or at least a shocking detail (killed for a basketball jersey). The killing of Michael Zebuhr merited 7,500 words. Including the trial and its aftermath, the death of Alan Reitter, near Block E, generated more than 11,000 words. Michael Eide, shot near Twenty-ninth and Morgan Avenues North, was worth 313. Erman Edmonds, shot on the 3700 block of Columbus Avenue South, warranted 105.

    At the very nadir of this process, the act of living in or even visiting a neighborhood plagued by violence tacitly becomes equated with risk. Murder, Drake says, “becomes normal. ‘That’s just a bad neighborhood.’ It becomes acceptable—expected—that homicide will occur there.”

    In recent years, researchers in the field of public health have become involved in this discussion of homicide. From their perspective, murder might be seen as a disease that disproportionately afflicts men: In Minneapolis, the murder rate for men (27.9 per hundred thousand residents) is nearly eight times higher than it is for women (3.6). Homicide disproportionately affects African Americans, especially men: Their murder rate in Minneapolis (eighty-seven per hundred thousand) is about fifteen times that of white men (5.6). Homicide rates for black male teenagers (202 per hundred thousand) and black men aged twenty to twenty-nine (244 per hundred thousand) are staggeringly high. (The rates for whites are fifteen and eleven, respectively.) As with the maps plotting out murder locations in Minneapolis, these figures remain fundamentally consistent, year after year, decade after decade, both here and in many American cities.

    Not that plenty of people aren’t trying to reduce the violence, using myriad strategies, both obvious (a police juvenile-crime apprehension unit, gun buy-back programs, increased patrols in hot spots, the new “Shotspotter” technology) and not so obvious (nonprofit organizations that rehabilitate problem properties).

    We also talk good. Last August, Mayor Rybak spoke of public safety as a “civil right.” Quoting the mayor, the Strib wrote an impassioned editorial, pointing out how angry we would be if armed thugs terrorized the streets of Edina. Governor Pawlenty called the violence in Minneapolis “a statewide concern.” We write this article.

    But lacking a coherent, systematic plan to address violence, all of the above amounts to tinkering. Some years see more cops added to the police force, or more dollars budgeted for overtime. But by leaving the problem to the cops (as though a thousand more officers might alone solve the problem), we forget that our safety depends most on voluntary adherence to law. As a city and state, we make a cost-benefit analysis, essentially deciding that a certain number of lives are expendable.

    By contrast, Boston radically reduced its youth homicide rate in the 1990s with a comprehensive, multidisciplinary effort that has been dubbed the “Boston Miracle.” According to figures published in Murder Is No Accident, by Doctors Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Howard Spivak, fourteen children aged sixteen and under were killed by handguns there in 1988. By 1996, the city had in place more than a dozen antiviolence programs that involved numerous organizations, including community groups, the police, and hospitals. Schools, for example, taught an antiviolence curriculum. Hospitals assessed victims of violence to determine whether they were at risk of additional attacks; doctors, social workers and nurses attempted to prevent them much as they might try to prevent asthma attacks. Community groups sought to give young people alternatives to joining gangs. The police department instituted community policing and worked with probation officers to hold youth offenders accountable. The result: Between 1996 and 1998, Prothrow-Stith and Spivak report, not one child sixteen and under was killed with a handgun in Boston. Over an eight-year period, the city averaged just one such killing a year, compared with an average of seven per year in the preceeding eight years.

    Many of these same programs have been implemented in cities all over the U.S., including Minneapolis. So what made Boston special? Even the authors of Murder Is No Accident, who were themselves primary architects of the Boston Violence Prevention Project, say they “don’t know exactly what happened.” While politicians and police chiefs are often quick to claim credit for reductions in crime, criminologists admit in moments of candor how little we truly know. “It’s a Crime What We Don’t Know About Crime,” the Washington Post titled one essay last July.

    In this context, Courtney Brown’s death in September was, paradoxically, both random and predictable. There was no way to know that this “innocent” and “sweet” boy (as then-Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar described him) would die a “senseless” death, any more than we can know exactly who will die from secondhand smoke, and when. But the circumstances were volatile in Courtney Brown’s neighborhood. Similar killings outraged the city in the Murderapolis years. A similar killing will likely happen this year, too.

    “When the [homicide] rates are going down, we feel relieved,” said Drake, “but there’s never a sense that we can eliminate homicide altogether. We expect a certain number. That’s a sick way of thinking. Not all countries have the homicide rate that we have.” By implication, the invocation of public health tells us something else important: Murder is preventable. So says a sign on the wall of Drake’s office.

  • Paying for Crime

    The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s worth of funding to keep open three libraries that had been proposed for closing—that and the promise from Mayor Rybak to lobby the Legislature for more. 

    Given the previous record of Rybak at the Legislature, I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were on the Library Board, (disclosure: I am on the Friends of the Library Board) I wouldn’t give the Council the political cover they seek, either. Keeping those libraries open for a year while Rybak begs for state money just lets the Council off the hook. They, not the Library Board, determine the library budget. If the Council wanted to find permanent funding for libraries, they could. Instead, we get funding for more liquor license inspectors (to speed approval of licenses for Council candidate donors,) and an aide for education policy for Mayor Rybak, although the Mayor’s office has nothing to do with the schools.

    The most maddening component of the debate was the Council’s concerted positioning of permanent library funding against funds for additional police officers. To paraphrase the Council’s argument: do you want three more libraries, or forty-three more police officers? Putting it more vividly, Council Member Don Samuels, representative of Minneapolis’s most-likely-to-be-murdered-in ward, said this: “When you are a person at the other end of a gun … the only use for a book is to throw it at them, or block a bullet with it.”

    Is the choice really books or cops? Perhaps the Minneapolis Council could call their counterparts in St. Paul, who, in their budget passed in early December, somehow found funding both to hire more police officers and to expand Library hours. Of course, St. Paul has a strong mayor system, and Minneapolis has a weak mayor system. Given that context, Chris Coleman and R.T. Rybak both seem to be ideally suited to their roles. Coleman gives St. Paul open libraries; Rybak gives Minneapolis Bonnie Bleskachek.

    In June 2005, Rybak made the following statement about how he was addressing increasing crime: “We need to remember that these recent murders have been driven by people living high-risk lifestyles: kids buying and selling drugs and guns. Minneapolis is a safe city for people who are not engaged in buying and selling drugs and guns.” Minneapolis didn’t become an “unsafe” city until a few other things happened. First, Rybak’s opponent in the 2005 mayoral race, Peter McLaughlin, started making points by calling for more cops. Then, Michael Zebuhr was murdered in Uptown while walking with his mother, and Alan Reitter was killed in Downtown while walking with his fiancée. So, as long as the “high-risk lifestyle” meant “African American high-risk lifestyle,” we didn’t need more cops—but when white people walking on the street get killed, we’re just going to have to close some libraries and address the crime problem head-on.

    Minneapolis needs both more cops and more library hours. It’s particularly unfair to the police and disingenuous in the extreme to make it an either/or question. The Minneapolis Police Department, just like the Library Board, has been handed an impossible task since the city began to lose Local Government Aid funding from the state in 2002. Police staff levels declined just as precipitously as library hours. After a decade-low number of forty-three homicides and 1732 aggravated assaults in 2001 (when there were over 900 Minneapolis cops), the numbers of both crimes have ticked up to the point where, as of this writing, we have had fifty-nine murders and over 2700 aggravated assaults in 2006. When the forty-three cops authorized this year are added to the force, on top of the seventy added as a result of last year’s campaign promises, Minneapolis will be back up to 893.

    According to Deputy Chief Rob Allen, the restoration of the force will allow more “proactive and preventative” police work. For example, he expects that the Juvenile Crime Unit, which had been disbanded for lack of manpower, will be restored. He also hopes that the investigative squad will restore the ten detectives who had been cut. “Case loads are overwhelming,” he said.

    Without being asked, Allen volunteered, “We’re conscious that the city has made the sacrifice to bring back the police department [staffing levels]. It’s critically important that we’re putting our officers where they’re needed, and that we’re efficiently using our people, otherwise that sacrifice is in vain. I don’t like being pitted against library hours, and it’s important for people to know that our officers are aware of that.”

    We do know that. And we also know that no sentient person thinks we need fewer cops in Minneapolis. What we do need is less cynical manipulation of budget priorities by the Mayor and City Council. Don’t hold your breath for that, either.

  • No Way Home

    The dorm house where Khan Moek works is on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It is run by the Returnee Integration Support Program (RISP), a venture supported by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. The program offers a number of support services to help Cambodian felons who are deported from the U.S. learn to live in a country where they are nominal citizens, but utter foreigners in every other way.

     

    The house is a dusty fifteen-minute ride on the back of a motor scooter. I wrap a scarf around my nose and mouth as my motor-scooter driver weaves through heavy traffic, heading from the Independence Monument in the city center to a lesser-developed neighborhood. There are no traffic lanes and few stop lights, but everyone drives courteously. From the paved street the driver turns onto a narrow dirt road, barnacled with rocks, leading to the RISP house. Chickens loiter inside the concrete-walled yard and Toby, a pet monkey given to one of the staff members, swings about in his cramped cage, excited to see new people on the premises.

    The two parts of the city are worlds, and seemingly decades, apart. Near the urbane square, you can pay U.S. prices for an iced latte in a café run by a Westerner and patronized by expats, or check email at any of a handful of internet cafés. Meanwhile, in the neighborhood where the RISP house is located, many homes lack indoor plumbing.

    Moek greets me as I pay my driver what amounts to about one U.S. dollar. Warm and soft-spoken, with a fit, slim build, Moek is obviously proud of the condition of the home and its grounds—he is in charge of managing this place. He invites me to sit beneath a banana tree at a chunky wooden picnic table. The heat and humidity is indescribable. “Oppressive” and “stifling” mean nothing, even though I scribble these words on my notepad. I’ve only been in Phnom Penh a couple of days, and when I breathe, it’s with the same heaviness as if I were in a sauna. Sweat drips, clothes stick. You forget about even attempting to look as cool or composed as the Cambodians seem to be. Moek looks at me and smiles. He knows what it’s like to be dropped into this climate from Minnesota’s cooler temperatures.

    “It’s not easy to acclimate,” I say, rolling up my pant legs. “I know,” he replies. A resident at the dorm house brings us shade-cooled bottles of water (ice is out of the question). Like the others, he was deported from the U.S. for committing a felony. I’m curious to know what he was convicted for, but I don’t ask—due to the recent tightening of immigration laws, it could have been anything from rape to theft.

    Moek, however, wants to tell me his story. As he begins talking, he sounds sincere and, well, honest. “I’ll tell you the truth because you can find it out anyway,” he says. He bounces back and forth between the past and present with unease and trepidation. Moek, who is twenty-four, says he has two big regrets: joining a gang and not encouraging his parents to become U.S. citizens. If they had, citizenship would also have been conferred upon their children under the age of eighteen. By the time Moek was eligible to take the test for himself, his trouble with the law disqualified him from pursuing citizenship. He didn’t know it at the time, but those choices sealed his fate: not only to be convicted of a crime, but also to be banished from the only country he knew.

    Moek was three-and-a-half years old when he—along with two younger sisters, Savan and San—arrived in the U.S. with their parents. It was 1984, and the family had been living in a Thai refugee camp since 1977, when Moek’s parents fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Their story is not unusual. The conditions of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge are well-known. Eighty-five percent of the population was subjected to brainwashing and forced labor, and suffered lack of food, water, shelter, and medical care. Thirty-six percent of the people reported torture; seventeen percent reported rape or sexual abuse; and fifty-four percent experienced the murder of a family member or friend. In all, an estimated two million of Cambodia’s eight million citizens perished from disease, starvation, overwork, or outright execution during one of the world’s most notorious genocides. Meanwhile, those who made it to refugee camps suffered from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a host of other psychological ailments.

    With the help of U.S.-sanctioned policies and programs, Cambodian refugees began arriving on our shores in the mid-seventies. However, critics say poor preparation, as well as a lack of resources and other support, laid the groundwork for an immigrant community that would remain at risk for all kinds of problems associated with poverty and racism—including drug use, gangs, and crime. Even those Cambodians who came here as toddlers or were born here would suffer.

    Moek’s parents had two more children, his brothers Sokhen and Sohkom, after arriving in the U.S. They were U.S. citizens from birth, while the rest of the family lived here as permanent residents. It’s a common scenario. “My mother and father never became citizens because they couldn’t pass the language requirements,” Khan tells me. “I never even thought about citizenship for myself—honestly, I didn’t think I needed it.”

    As a teenager, Moek was a good son, said his mother, Sath Soa. “Family was important to him,” she told me, while sitting cross-legged on the floor in her living room in St. Paul, cradling a newborn grandchild. “He helped take care of the younger children and was good in school.” Moek worked at the United Cambodia Association of Minnesota translating letters and organizing events for Cambodian youth, she said. He scored A’s and B’s at Guadalupe Alternative Programs, an alternative school in West St. Paul. Jody Nelson, the principal, remembers Moek well. “He was a leader—that was clear early on,” she told me. She cannot seem to say enough glowing things about him as a student. “He was respectful to his peers and teachers and was very involved in extracurricular activities, including the student government board.” Nelson and other staff members at the school were saddened by the “mistake,” as she called it, that lead to his arrest. “But that didn’t make a difference to me.”

    Nor, apparently, did Moek’s involvement in the Red Cambodian Bloods gang. “It’s an urban reality,” Nelson said. “Many of our students are gang members, but I wouldn’t categorize them as serious gangsters. Many of them belong out of safety or the need to belong to something. But what I see is that most of the kids eventually grow out of the gang activity when they are ready to graduate, have kids, or find girlfriends.” She saw that in Moek. “He was close to his girlfriend, they seemed to have a good relationship, and he was really involved in their baby’s life.”

    Unlike Sath Soa and Jody Nelson, Moek readily admits that he wasn’t a perfect teenager. But he echoes Nelson in explaining why he joined the Bloods. “It doesn’t matter if you’re not in a gang,” Moek says. “Members of other gangs figured I was and targeted me anyway, just because I was Cambodian. I guess I joined the RCB so I’d have some power and they’d know to leave me alone.”

    Nelson said that Guadalupe Alternative Programs only admits students whom teachers and other staff members believe they can invest in. “[Moek] was one of those students,” she said. “He was someone who had a lot of potential to make a difference in the world.”

    Before he could do that, however, Moek was one of seven men indicted on charges stemming from five bank robberies that took place in the St. Paul area in 1998 and 1999. Between December 1998 and March 1999, authorities tracked guns, body armor, ammunition, and cars that they believed were used to carry out the robberies. One gun was linked to Moek. He was arrested in July 1999 and charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, for supplying one of the weapons.

    “I had it, but it wasn’t mine,” Moek says of the gun. He doesn’t offer any further explanation, but does note that “it was my first charge as an adult.” He had faced previous offenses as a juvenile—and spent time one summer in a correctional program that involved living and working on a family farm—though again, he won’t elaborate. “I never hurt anyone,” he insists.

    Moek was eventually let out of jail pending trial. In 2001, he was convicted on the conspiracy charge and sentenced to three years in the Allenwood Federal Correctional Institution in Union Country, Pennsylvania. Only after serving those three years did he find out that his lifelong sentence had just begun. Upon his release from Allenwood in 2004, he was immediately transferred to a nearby county jail. That’s when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stepped in to begin what is called the “removal process.”

    The U.S. removes, or deports, any non-citizen of any status who is convicted of an aggravated felony, following an administrative procedure to find the person removable on that basis. This includes people who are convicted on misdemeanor charges that are then elevated to the status of an aggravated felony. That elevation became possible with legislation passed by a Republican congress during the height of anti-immigrant sentiment in 1996. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) greatly expanded the number of crimes that are considered an aggravated felony for immigration purposes, including non-violent misdemeanors like shoplifting and possession of marijuana. Conspiracy charges are also considered an “aggravated felony” under the act. What’s more, the law is retroactive—which means that officials have leeway to target, round up, and banish untold thousands of non-citizens years after they had done time for a misdemeanor. By cementing relationships among local law enforcement, the Justice Department, and immigration officials, the act has ensured that increasing numbers of immigrants caught up in local judicial systems will also find themselves facing the feds. In the four years after the act passed, the number of defendants in federal courts facing immigration charges more than doubled, from 6,605 in 1996 to 15,613 in 2000.

    According to the most recent statistics, in fiscal year 2005, a total of 204,193 people were deported—usually back to their country of citizenship. Most were categorized simply as non-criminal removals, but 87,256 of those people had been convicted of crimes and so were categorized as criminal removals.

    Moek is one of 145 Cambodians convicted of crimes in the U.S. who have been removed by the U.S. government in the last four years. They also include a man in his eighties and a woman who left her children behind in the U.S. with relatives. According to the Southeast Asian Action Center in Washington, D.C., twelve Cambodians were sent to Phnom Penh this February, and an estimated 1,500 more are caught in the removal process, perhaps to be deported. Removals to Cambodia began only in 2002, after the country signed a repatriation agreement with the U.S. in March of that year—just months after Moek went to prison in Pennsylvania. The terms of the agreement were hashed out in secret talks that determined Cambodia would receive its citizens who had been convicted of crimes and had completed their jail or prison sentences in the U.S. The U.S. would pay the Cambodian government two hundred dollars per person, money intended to help the person get settled.

    Before 2002, the U.S. didn’t deport anyone—refugees, permanent residents, or convicts—to communist countries. After all, it was held, these people (or their parents) had fled persecution; what’s more, U.S. diplomatic ties with such countries weren’t particularly strong. Now, the U.S. is negotiating agreements with Vietnam and Laos that are similar to its deal with Cambodia; however, Cuba is not on the list. Given how the U.S. government portrays Fidel Castro, forcing Cubans on our soil to go back there would be politically explosive—remember Elian Gonzalez? Cambodia and Laos, however, don’t carry the same political and diplomatic stigmas, and have even become legal tourist destinations. Deporting Cambodians to that country—despite the fact it is foreign to them—doesn’t seem so harsh when more and more Americans are traveling there to see Angkor Wat, or reading about Angelina Jolie adopting a child from one of its orphanages.

    By far, Mexicans make up the largest number of deportees in both criminal and non-criminal cases. Some Asian, African, and Central American countries represent most of the rest of the removals from the U.S. But unlike those countries, Cambodia suffered an intensive U.S.-led conflict—at least one that’s in the history books. Between 1969 and 1973, American planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia in a campaign aimed at wiping out the Vietcong. The bombings, secretly ordered by President Nixon without congressional approval, killed as many as 150,000 civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands more, eventually destabilizing the country enough for the Khmer Rouge rebels to take over.

  • Guns in the City

    The sound of the well-made gun is precise. If you pull the slide back smoothly, the sound of the hammer locking back echoes with a sharp “clock” through the hollow grip. Slap a magazine into the grip, pull the slide back a little more and let it go. The sharp “smack” tells you a bullet has seated in the chamber. The tiny pin sticks out in front of the hammer to confirm the bullet is in place. If you pull the trigger, the next sound you hear will be considerably louder. While the boom reverberates on the range, you will hear the next clock-smack. The gun will fire again.

    It’s not just a fine machine. It’s actually quite elegant in its function. The plastic grip is perfectly shaped to the hand. A tail protrudes from above the grip to protect the webbing of your thumb from being hit by the slide. The safety lever and slide catch are within easy reach of your thumb. The trigger, when the gun is cocked, takes a very light pull with the pad of your index finger. The barrel tapers smoothly out of the heavy slide down to its front sight, which is the shape of a shark’s dorsal fin. It is slightly beveled forward, though, so it won’t catch at all as you draw it from the leather holster.

    The holster is also thoughtfully designed. It is heavy leather, with a flap that covers the gun to keep out the muck of war. But the strap that holds the flap down is simply impaled on a round steel knob and comes up easily. A second rear flap on the holster breaks away to allow the grip to come back, instead of just up, and permits the muzzle to bear on the target immediately.

    The magazine holds eight 9 mm Parabellum rounds. The name comes from the old Roman adage, si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

    The gun has the usual markings and serial number. But nowhere is the name of its designer—Walther. There is clearly stamped on the left side of the slide “P.38,” the model, and “byf44,” which indicates it was built in 1944 at the Mauser factory in Oberndorf. On both sides of the slide, on the frame, and on the barrel are marks made after test firing the gun at the factory: “WaA135.” Between the two inspector’s marks on the right side is a tiny eagle perched on a swastika.

    The Germans manufactured a fine gun sixty-two years ago. It still fires a very tight group. I shot 232 out of 250 with it three months ago on my proficiency exam to get my state permit to carry a pistol. Of course I wasn’t under the same pressure as the German officer who gave it up to my father six decades ago. Dad was able to take it, he once told me, because the officer “didn’t need it any more.”

  • The Grounded Man

    Editor’s Note: In May 2005, The Rake ran a story by former KSTP-TV reporter Dean
    Staley about Clancy Prevost, the man whose suspicions about his flight
    student Zacharias Moussaui led to the apprehension of the “twentieth
    hijacker” behind the 9/11 attacks. Before our story hit the street in
    print, but after it was posted on our website, the     StarTribune, in an
    attempt to discredit us and Prevost, (and to take credit themselves for
    the story of who caught Moussaui) ran a front page story the day before
    our story hit the streets crediting the tip that led to Moussaui to Tim
    Nelson and Hugh Sims, colleagues of Prevost at the Pan Am Flight
    Academy.

    As noted in a Strib story today (January 25, 2008), the State and Justice
    Departments gave a $5 million reward for the Moussaui tip to Clancy
    Prevost, not to Nelson and Sims. It seems the State and Justice
    Departments thought     The Rake story had it right, and the Strib had it
    wrong. Our story is below.

    —Tom Bartel

    He wraps his long fingers around his coffee cup, measures me with steady pale blue eyes, the eyes of an airline pilot. He smiles at the absurdity of his story. We are just a few miles down the road from the Eagan flight school where, one month before the September 11th attacks, he tried to teach Zacarias Moussaoui how to fly a Boeing 747.

    His name is Clancy Prevost. He is sixty-eight years old, a retired pilot for Northwest Airlines, a lapsed Catholic, and a recovering alcoholic. He shakes his head as he recalls his story publicly for the first time.

    The morning of August 13, 2001, was warm and humid, the Minnesota summer nearing its peak. Clancy Prevost left his room at the Spring Hill Suites, his local lodging when he commutes from the East Coast. He jumped on the hotel shuttle and headed for the nearby offices of the Pan-Am International Flight Academy. He wore a blue polo shirt, khakis, and red Converse sneakers.

    At 10:30 that morning, Prevost walked into the air-conditioned lobby of the Northwest Aerospace Training Corporation, Northwest Airlines’ affiliated training facility. Here his employer, Pan Am Flight Academy, leases time on a range of multimillion-dollar simulators, including the 747-400 model, which realistically mimics the flight deck of a Boeing 747. There, thirty days before September 11th, he shook hands with the man the government would later call “the twentieth hijacker.”

    ”He was pleasant, but I expected him to be better dressed. He just was wearing Dockers and they didn’t fit real well, he was a little overweight, and he had this baseball hat, and growth of beard,” Prevost recalls. There was nothing remarkable about Moussaoui. In fact, Prevost’s first impressions of Moussaoui barely registered at all.

    Prevost expects young pilots to arrive with energy, even nervousness, but from Moussaui, he got nothing. “I guess I wanted him to be a little more alive and comin’ at ya. But there wasn’t much comin’ at ya. It was just, ‘Hello.’”

    Prevost wrote off Moussaoui’s timidity to first-day jitters. “It’s understandable since it’s all new. It’s daunting even to the experienced pilots that show up, let alone this guy who’s wandering in to supposedly kill everybody.

    Moussaoui’s demeanor may have helped him go unnoticed during the five and a half months leading up to his arrest. He arrived in Chicago from London on February 23 and declared at least thirty-five thousand dollars in cash on his customs form. He traveled to Oklahoma City, and later to Minnesota. Along the way, Moussaoui bought knives and flight-training videos and inquired about starting a crop-dusting company. Not once did he draw the attention of authorities. Not even when he walked into the Pan Am flight school, counted out sixty-eight one-hundred dollar bills, and signed up to learn how to fly a 747. His luck ended the day he met his flight instructor, Clancy Prevost.

    At first glance, Moussaoui was the kind of client Prevost had seen before: a wealthy civilian with no ties to the airline industry who wanted to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner. One might be surprised to learn how many “vanity clients” come to flight school, men of means with lots of free time, whose ultimate hope is apparently to impress women with a 747-type rating—bragging rights worth thousands of dollars. (Normally, most of Pan Am’s students are working, commercial pilots who are training to upgrade their ratings from smaller passenger jets. Maybe two or three vanity students turn up each year.) But that first day, Moussaoui would prove unlike any other student Prevost had known.

    At 10:45, Prevost and Moussaoui took a shuttle van a mile and a half to the Pan-Am classroom building to start ground school. Michael Guess, a twenty-one-year-old support worker, met them at the reception desk. Guess set them up in a room with a projector and a PowerPoint presentation on the systems of the 747-400. (Guess, an aspiring pilot himself, would die a year later copiloting the flight that crashed and killed Senator Paul Wellstone in the woods of Northern Minnesota.)

    The room was not much bigger than a large office. Moussaoui sat down. Prevost drew the blinds. Standing, he projected the PowerPoint presentation onto the white wall. Prevost paged his way through the schematics of the 747-400. Using color-coded charts and graphics, he described the hydraulic systems that power the flight control surfaces: the rudder, flaps, and horizontal elevator at the rear of the aircraft.

    Moussaoui repeated some of the technical phrases and asked a few questions. Prevost, who flew 747s for Northwest Airlines, smiles and says, “I knew he wasn’t pilot material, because he’d actually read his manuals and he didn’t talk about pussy.” But over the course of the lesson, an odd pattern emerged. Moussaoui used the correct jargon, but his questions often didn’t make sense or were out of context.

    Prevost tried to explain to Moussaoui the complex backup systems that in an emergency mean the difference between life and death. “There are two parts each. You have your engine-driven pumps and the backups to the engine-driven pumps, which are the man (manual) pumps. Two of them are electric. Two of them are air-driven. One and four are air-driven. Two and three are electric. The EDPs (engine driven pumps) are the main pumps and floor systems.”

    Moussaoui was plainly bewildered. “So you say stuff like that and he’s sitting there like…” Prevost drops his jaw, gives a blank look. “It’s useless. He doesn’t have any knowledge on anything.” Moussaoui’s reaction exposed him as a man profoundly out of his depth trying to learn to fly a 747. Frustrated, looking for a break, Prevost suggested they get lunch. By 11:30, they were back at the NATCO building.

    They sat down to lunch in the cafeteria. Prevost asked Moussaoui what he did for a living. Moussaoui said he worked in the import/export business, that his family was covering for him while he was gone. Though Moussaoui is a French national of Moroccan descent, he never said specifically where he was from. Moussaoui told Prevost he had to get his training done as soon as possible, because there was only so much time his family would cover for him.

    Prevost remembers trying to stall, because the training seemed pointless with such an unpromising student. “We’re sitting up there in the cafeteria and I’m thinking, I’m going to stay here for two or three hours because I don’t want to go back to the classroom building and try to teach him something, because you can’t. There’s no awareness of anything.” Moussaoui seemed equally discouraged. He had good reason.

  • The Botched Hanging of William Williams

    A couple of months after President Theodore Roosevelt had given the inaugural address for his second term of office, an itinerant named William Williams was convicted of first-degree murder. In one of Minnesota’s most infamous crimes, Williams had killed a teenage boy, Johnny Keller, and his mother. An English laborer, Williams had worked as a miner and a steamfitter before befriending the teenager two years earlier while they were both hospitalized for diphtheria. Keller had roomed with Williams in different places in St. Paul, and the two had traveled together to Winnipeg in the summer of 1904. Williams and Keller’s father quarreled over his relationship with Johnny. The father told Williams that he would rather put his son in a reform school than let the boy fraternize with Williams.

    In a fit of rage, Williams shot Johnny Keller and his mother in April 1905 when the boy refused to go back to Winnipeg with him. Williams had written letters to Keller that had contained professions of love intermixed with threats. These had gone unanswered. “I want you to believe that I love you now as much as I ever did,” read one letter. “It won’t be long before we will be together.” Another read, “Keep your promise to me this time, old boy, as it is your last chance. You understand what I mean, and should have sense enough to keep your promise.” When Williams returned to St. Paul intent on seeing Johnny Keller, the boy’s father was away. At the Keller home, Williams shot Johnny at close range while he lay in bed. A bullet pierced the back of Keller’s skull, leaving powder marks and singed hair, and another bullet wound was found in the back of the boy’s neck. With Keller’s death, their turbulent relationship, thought by many to be of a homosexual nature, came to an abrupt end.

    The murder trial of William Williams began in May 1905. A police officer testified that Williams appeared at the station on the night of the shooting and said that he had shot someone at No. 1 Reid Court. A doctor also took the stand for the state, testifying that Williams told him he did not know why he shot Johnny Keller, only that he wanted the boy to come with him. Williams himself testified that he had not slept for three nights prior to the shooting, had been drinking that day, and that Mrs. Keller scolded him when he showed up at the Keller residence. After saying she would not let her son go with him, Williams testified, he and the boy had gone to bed until the mother rushed in and seized the boy, screaming that she would not let him go. At that point, Williams said, he lost all consciousness. He claimed that the next thing he knew he was in her room with a revolver in his hands and the room full of smoke. Williams’s unsuccessful defense at trial, as articulated by his lawyer, was “emotional insanity.”

    Williams’s case would put the Ramsey County sheriff, three Twin Cities newspapers, and the state’s death penalty law on a collision course. On May 19, 1905, Williams was found guilty of intentionally killing Johnny Keller, whom Williams, in the Minnesota Supreme Court’s words, had “a strong and strange attachment to.” “There is no evidence to support this defense of complete lapse of memory and consciousness,” the court would rule later, “except the defendant’s improbable testimony to the effect that up to the moment the fatal shots were fired he remembered everything in detail and everything that occurred after they were fired, but has no recollection of firing them.” The deck was stacked against Williams from the start. Williams made incriminating statements prior to trial, his suspected sexual orientation probably aroused bias, and to make matters worse, any potential juror who opposed the death penalty would not be allowed to sit on his jury. During jury selection, Ramsey County Attorney Thomas Kane had successfully excluded otherwise acceptable jurors because of their scruples against the death penalty.

    The early twentieth century’s judicial system moved with considerable speed. Right after Williams’s verdict was read, the trial judge told him that he would be “hanged by the neck until dead.” The appeal process was relatively quick too. On December 8, 1905, the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed Williams’s conviction and death sentence, saying Williams had shot Keller with “premeditated design to effect his death.” One justice dissented, however, believing that Williams should get a new trial because of irregularities in the proceedings and skepticism about whether Williams really had committed a premeditated murder. The killing had the earmarks of a crime of passion, but the appeal failed.

    Even though he opposed the death penalty, Minnesota Governor John A. Johnson felt compelled to enforce the state’s laws. He thus wasted no time in setting Williams’s execution date for February 13, 1906. Because Ramsey County Sheriff Anton Miesen had been known to invite large numbers of his friends to be execution spectators, Johnson sent Miesen a sternly worded letter accompanying Williams’s death warrant. The letter reminded Sheriff Miesen to “observe” that a state law enacted in 1889 “is very specific as to who may witness executions of this state.” His letter then commanded Miesen, in no uncertain terms, to rigorously adhere to the provisions of that law:


    In view of violations of this law in the past I deem it necessary to charge you with a strict observance of the law. It has been customary in some cases for the sheriff to designate many people as deputy sheriffs for the sole purpose of permitting them to be present and witness the execution.

    Persons permitted by you, except those specifically named in the statute, must not exceed six in number. I trust that the custom that has hitherto obtained will not obtain in this instance.

    It is the duty of this office to hold all officers of the law to a strict accountability in the performance of their duties in upholding the majesty of the law and it would become my duty in case this law is violated to take proper action in the premises.

    Believing you will do your full duty in this matter and be governed strictly by the letter and spirit of the law, I am, sir, yours with great respect.

  • Dead Serious

    The largest public execution in U.S. history took place in 1862, down in Mankato. Since the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Indians, public sentiment against the death penalty had been building in Minnesota. Nineteenth-century politicians tried to pacify the public outrage not by banning the death penalty, but by carrying it out in relative secrecy. An 1889 law prohibited the public view of an execution, provided that executions be carried out only in the middle of the night, and prohibited newspapers from reporting any of the details.

    The grotesque hanging of William Williams (and, ironically, the gruesome reporting of it by a St. Paul reporter who had sneaked into the execution) provided the final impetus which ultimately led to the abolition of Minnesota’s death penalty in 1911. Now, spurred again by media attention to the Dru Sjodin abduction, Governor Pawlenty wants to reinstate the ultimate punishment.

    One could argue that Minnesota has already gone a long way toward imitating Texas with last year’s passage of the concealed carry law and emaciation of the public education budget, but, philosophical questions aside, reinstatement of the death penalty in Minnesota is a bad idea for many empirical reasons that should even appeal to conservatives with a natural bent for injecting first and asking questions later.

    Here’s why we don’t want the death penalty here:

    The very nature of the crimes that would be punished by death virtually ensures that mistakes will be made and innocent people will be convicted. As Pawlenty’s immediate reaction demonstrates, people who are elected to office, including sheriffs, county attorneys, and legislators, have to be seen to be doing something about terrible crimes. The impetus of the abduction and presumed murder of a young woman grows into an emotional momentum that cannot be resisted. The police must find the killer; the county attorney must ask for the death penalty; the jury can’t take the presumption of innocence seriously when the stakes are so high if they fail to convict. Even when an error is later uncovered, what are the chances any of the above will admit their mistake? Not high, especially when any elected official will be called “soft on crime” by his next opponent. What’s the result of this pressure? Nationally since 1973, 108 people have been sentenced to death for crimes they were later proven not to have committed.

    Enforcement is uneven. For what crimes does one get the death penalty? Every state with the death penalty has its own list of criteria, but the one incontrovertible statistical correlation is that the race of the victim is what counts. A crime with a white victim is 350 percent more likely to draw the death penalty than one with a black victim. If you need an example of what could happen here, ask yourself if you recall then House Majority Leader and gubernatorial candidate Pawlenty calling for the death penalty for the killers of eleven-year-old Tyesha Edwards in 2002.

    We wouldn’t be doing it for the victims. If the logic of the penal system is to provide for the victims, then all punishment is based on revenge. Instead, if we are to maintain the belief that it is society which metes out punishment, then society’s only logical reason to punish is to prevent further outrages by the convict. Life without parole in a maximum security facility serves that purpose. Moreover, a life sentence removes at least some of the reason for the nearly endless appeals that constantly raise the specter of the perpetrator being released. Closure for the victims is more likely when the process comes to a quicker end.

    Isn’t it cheaper to kill them than house them for life? No. Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California have all done studies that show the cost of a death penalty case exceeds the cost of a sentence of life without parole by an average of $2.3 million dollars, primarily because of the cost of the initial trial and subsequent appeals. In other words, Texas, which has executed 317 people since 1976, has spent over $600 million. Florida has spent $24 million for each of the 44 people it has executed since 1976.

    It doesn’t deter crime. Does someone who commits a heinous murder first think of what’s going to happen to him if caught? Psychologists say no. In fact, most evidence points to a murderer exhibiting near-total disassociation from society and its rules. Second, let’s examine the statistics. Of the seventeen states which have murder rates higher than the national average, sixteen have the death penalty. Only Michigan does not. Indeed, some studies show that murders actually increase around the time that executions are carried out. During the time of frequent executions in California and New York, murder rates doubled. Rates receded again when executions were suspended. When Oklahoma reinstated the death penalty after a twenty-five-year moratorium, murders increased. Finally, as we look southward to Texas—by far the national leader in executions—we might envy their death-penalty and concealed-carry laws. But do we envy their murder rate, which is almost three times that of Minnesota?