Tag: jury

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Editorial Opinion

Where the Buck Stops

It turns out that District Attorney General Bill Gibbons and U.S. Attorney David Kustoff are in the habit of talking daily. And, though some small talk gets in once in a while (the two are longtime acquaintances who share a background as Republican activists), most of their conversations involve decidedly serious matters — such as who gets to handle which cases.

The fact is, several of the high-profile recent prosecutions of prominent political figures involved potential violations of both state and federal law and could have been investigated and gone to grand jury and subsequently to trial either way. One such is the ongoing case of former MLGW president Joseph Lee and retiring councilman Edmund Ford, charged with trading political and financial favors. Another is the forthcoming prosecution of former county commissioner Bruce Thompson for allegedly doing something similar in lobbying the Memphis school system on behalf of a high-stakes contractor.

In one sense, there is no mystery as to why both these cases are scheduled for federal court. The preliminary investigations were done by the FBI, in tandem with the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the normal handoff is from one set of feds to the other. But that’s not the only consideration, according to Gibbons, who has at least a nominal claim to prior intervention and ultimate jurisdiction on these and other prominent cases that end up being dealt with at the federal level. The D.A. says there’s another issue involved: the well-known fact that punishments in federal court, subject to fixed sentencing guidelines, tend to be more severe.

For one thing, Gibbons notes, there are fewer sidetracks like early parole or even outright diversion, both of which are available in the state system. As Atlanta Falcons quarterback and dog-murderer Michael Vick discovered only this week, the maximum early release he might expect from his federal sentence of 23 months incarceration is fixed by established practice at 15 percent of that time — three months. Had he been tried in state court in Virginia, where his crimes were committed, Vick might somehow have wangled a way to cop a plea and get suited up for the current football season. And that, given widespread public revulsion to Vick’s deeds, would not have gone down well.

Conversely, we suppose, there are instances in which the wider discretions available to jurists in state prosecutions might be more suitable to a specific kind of crime by a specific kind of criminal.

An instructive saga is that of the late Mafia chieftain John Gotti, who escaped conviction several times before finally being nailed — at least partly because New York and federal courts competed for the honor of trying him and got in each others’ way. So if our two chief local prosecutors do in fact coordinate policy on criminal prosecutions — if each occasionally, and for good reason, agrees to pass the buck to the other, as it were — the ends of justice will presumably end up being well served. But it is an aspect of the judicial process that bears continued scrutiny.

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Editorial Opinion

Looking for the Thread

With the impact of last week’s “voluntary manslaughter” verdict in the Mary Winkler murder case in Selmer still reverberating, John Ford’s trial on bribery and extortion charges headed toward its own conclusion this week in federal court in Memphis. And by now nobody — but nobody — was thinking slam-dunk about anything. Even if the Ford case were to go the government’s way (and that was still in doubt at our press time), most observers who had logged time at the former state senator’s trial — hearing all the testimony, weighing all the evidence — were well aware that the exact shape of the outcome still remained in doubt.

The reason? Juries these days weigh so many factors, including subjective ones, that dramatically contrasting conclusions can quite obviously be drawn from the same set of facts — especially when the prosecution and the defense make a point of presenting radically different interpretations of the same circumstances.

Consider what happened in Selmer: Rev. Matt Winkler had been slain a year ago by a shotgun blast, one that quite clearly came from a gun being held by his wife, Mary, who then fled with the couple’s three children toward the Alabama coast before being apprehended in that state. Authorities both in Alabama and Tennessee promptly claimed to have confessions from Winkler.

End of story? Hardly. By the time crack defense attorneys Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin had presented their version of the case last week, enough doubt had been raised that the slain Matt Winkler himself appeared to have supplanted his surviving wife as the true “defendant” in the case.

Much of this might have been foreseen. Even while most news accounts of the crime last year marveled over how such an inexplicable and shocking crime could have occurred in what had appeared to be a model church-centered family, the Flyer came across the first chink in that construct. That was when a neighbor family disclosed to senior editor Jackson Baker that Matt Winkler had angrily and without much apparent provocation threatened to kill their dog for wandering over onto the Winkler property.

A similar story was told during the trial by a defense witness — a dog-owner from McMinnville, the Winklers’ prior home. But that was as nothing compared to the testimony from the defendant herself about a lengthy history of alleged mistreatment from an overbearing and often irrational husband. Explicit claims by her of aberrant and oppressive sexual behavior on her late husband’s part were buttressed somewhat by evidence of stored pornography on the Winklers’ home computer, even if specific details (involving garish high-heeled shoes and a garish wig, among other artifacts) were in the “he said/she said” category. The late Rev. Winkler, of course, was well past saying.

There was much else that could be read one way or another, and it was up to a jury of 10 women and two men to unravel the contradictions. In the end, the unraveling produced a dominant thread that most observers had not expected. Jury nullification, as some critics of the verdict complained? We think not. It was a group operating as the dominant conscience of a community, and that, after all, is one way of defining what a jury of one’s peers is and does.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Trying Times

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

On the surface, there is little to connect the well-observed tribunals now going on concurrently in downtown Memphis and in outlying Selmer, 100 miles away. But there are synchronicites — and more.

Steve Farese, Leslie Ballin, and Michael Scholl, all of them well acquainted with each other, belong to a small fraternity of well-regarded blue-chip defense attorneys in the greater Memphis area. Farese and Ballin, used to working as a team, have undertaken to defend Mary Winkler of the murder of her husband, a well-known Church of Christ minister. Scholl is defending former state senator John Ford, the best-known defendant in the Tennessee Waltz bribery/extortion sting.

Both defendants are, as they say, up against it. By her own admission, Mary Winkler had issues with Matthew Winkler and was physically holding the shotgun on her sleeping husband when it fired once and lethally on that fateful morning more than a year ago. Nor do a multitude of surveillance videos introduced by the prosecution leave any doubt that John Ford took large sums of cash in connection with legislative services promised and performed for E-Cycle, an FBI-front company supposedly in business to refurbish used computers.

But neither trial is quite the slam-dunk it would appear to be. Farese and Ballin have labored hard to suggest that the Winklers’ 12-gauge might have gone off on its own and that their client, clearly drowning in a personal stew that included a history of abuse and, of all things, being duped by an Internet lottery scam, was as much victim as perpetrator.

And even Ford, despite his dual reputation as bon vivant and kingfish in the wheeler-dealer world of Nashville’s Capitol Hill, is being portrayed by Scholl as a veritable innocent under siege from government-funded high-livers determined to bait-and-switch the reluctant senator into compliance with an extortion scheme.

That a number of close observers think that both defenses may have made headway is in itself a reflection of the times.

Through his cross-examination of FBI operatives so far, Scholl has drawn a portrait of an entrapment operation whose principals, to further their sting, lived lavishly — consuming mountains of public money, driving “high-end” luxury cars, imbibing impressive quantities of food and drink, entertaining their marks aboard confiscated yachts, and staying only in the finest hotels.

The resultant storyline blurred distinctions and may have given the jurors, all stoutly working class in appearance, a plausible alternative to the usual cops-and-robbers, good vs. evil scenario.

Dividing lines have also come under attack in the Selmer trial, where, both in their cross-examinations and in presenting their own witnesses, Farese and Ballin have done their best to obscure the presumed distinctions between the victim and the accused.

The late Rev. Winkler, a towering man, has so far been represented as A) a committed male chauvinist; B) an importer of suspect images to the household computers; and C) a man given to rages, who on more than one occasion threatened to kill neighbors’ dogs that had disturbed his peace of mind and who once — reacting to toothache medication, said his father, also a minister — locked his wife out of the family’s house.

Nor has Mary Winkler, who appeared waif-like in the first pictures of her incarceration, made any points toward sanctification. During the trial, she has managed for the most part to appear stoic and then some — even cracking grins or, alleged one TV reporter who was there, even offering what looked like a smirk when the Winklers’ oldest daughter gave dramatic testimony about hearing the shot and seeing her father’s body.

Both tribunals involve trusted members of the social order — a state senator and a minister’s wife — and both have so far involved defenses that impugn the reliability of both law-enforcement officials themselves and the would-be incriminating documents they have brought to court.

Ever since the O.J. Simpson not-guilty verdict of 1995, the issue of “jury nullification” has concerned students of American justice. Another way of putting that is to suggest that our system rarely metes out pure justice, administering its verdicts, rather, within a defining social context.

That’s one good reason why no one should be surprised at any verdict that comes out of either trial.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor, whose trial reports, along with those of senior editor John Branston, appear atwww.memphisflyer.com.