Over the weekend, William
''Tommy'' Zeigler, a lifelong Christian who joined the Catholic
Church earlier this year, spent his 29th Christmas on Florida's
Death Row. Who can comprehend the grief of having one's wife and
in-laws brutally murdered in the family store on Christmas Eve? Who
can imagine the trauma of being rushed to the hospital with a
near-fatal bullet wound through the abdomen on the very same
Christmas Eve? Or the agony of spending the next 29 Christmases on
Florida's Death Row, wrongfully convicted for those murders.
That was Christmas for Zeigler, a white businessman widely
thought to be on Death Row because he helped defend Andrew James, a
black man, against a group of corrupt white residents trying to shut
down his legitimate business.
Zeigler arranged for a lawyer to defend James and appeared as his
character witness. Judge Maurice Paul appeared as the character
witness for Herbert G. Baker, the white man who brought the charges
against James.
James was successful in the case and kept his business. A few
months later, on Christmas Eve, there was a multiple murder at the
Zeigler family furniture store. Zeigler was charged with the
murders. Paul was the trial judge who presided over Zeigler's
fate.
Paul overrode the jury's recommendation and sentenced Zeigler to
death. Zeigler has maintained his innocence.
Ironically, Edward Williams, the man who turned the principal
murder weapon over to the police and had acquired the two other
murder weapons involved in the crime, became the state's star
witness. He claimed to be an innocent bystander.
In the 1989 nationally syndicated television program on the case,
A Matter of Life and Death, television journalist Ike Pappas
noted: ``Zeigler was attempting to clean up corruption right in his
hometown of Winter Garden, Florida. He was helpful in shutting down
the old Edgewater Hotel, a center of prostitution and drug dealing.
But he was also trying to gather information on other illegal
activities such as gun running and, most importantly, loan
sharking.
``The loan sharks made a fortune letting [black] migrant workers
buy groceries on credit at an interest rate of 520 percent per year.
And Tommy Zeigler alleges that certain members of the Winter Garden
police force were in on the action.''
Now DNA evidence offers Zeigler the hope of a very different
future Christmas.
DNA evidence has played a significant role in 14 of the 117
exonerations from U.S. Death Rows. Such evidence is vital,
especially in Florida, which -- according to the Death Penalty
Information Center in Washington, D.C. -- has had 21 people found
innocent on its Death Row, more than any other state.
Lawson Lamar, the state attorney in Zeigler's death-penalty case,
fought for years to prevent DNA testing of the crime-scene blood. In
August 2001, the court ordered the tests. The results, which were
reported in June 2002, hopelessly devastate the state's theory of
Zeigler's culpability. The results completely support Zeigler's
innocence.
On Dec. 20 and 21, Circuit Judge Reginald Whitehead heard the DNA
evidence in Orlando. The lawyers for Zeigler asked Whitehead to
grant Zeigler a new trial so that -- for the first time -- a jury
could look at all the evidence of the case.
The state attorneys argued against a new trial. The state seeks
to execute Zeigler without any jury ever seeing the mountain of
lately discovered evidence of Ziegler's innocence.
Whitehead now must decide whether to grant a new trial for
Zeigler.
How can anyone resist a new trial in this case? There can be no
doubt that if the information now available had been known in 1976,
Zeigler would never have been prosecuted. One of the original jurors
has even signed a sworn affidavit that she would have voted ''not
guilty'' if the new evidence had been available at the trial.
The purpose of DNA testing in this case was to establish whose
blood was on the clothes of Charlie Mays and Zeigler to show who
committed the murders.
No jury has heard most of the evidence of Zeigler's innocence:
the DNA test results; the buried original police report, which
contradicts the state's case; the buried tape recording of the
investigator from the state attorney's office trying to induce
potential witnesses to change their testimony; the gunshot-residue
tests, which establish that Williams had no residue in the pocket of
the pants in which he claims to have carried the freshly discharged
murder weapon; or even the testimony of the Roaches and the Nolans,
all credible eyewitnesses, that contradicts the state's
''eyewitnesses,'' including Williams.
No jury has wrestled with these questions:
• What was Oakland Chief of Police
Robert Thompson doing in uniform outside his jurisdiction, sitting
at a restaurant across the street from the killings while Zeigler
was being shot?
• Why did Thompson write the
original police report, allow it to be buried by the state attorney
and then testify under oath to facts inconsistent with his own
buried police report?
• Why are Thompson, Mays, Williams
and Felton Thomas (the state's other star witness) all connected
through the city of Oakland and its migrant camps, the very place
where illegal practices that preyed upon black migrant farmworkers
were being attacked by Zeigler?
The DNA evidence and the other post-trial evidence of Zeigler's
innocence are absolutely clear. Zeigler was wrongfully prosecuted,
wrongfully convicted and wrongfully sentenced to death.
After Zeigler's 29 Christmases on Death Row, it is high time to
correct this horrendous error. Zeigler's case demands a new
trial.
Bianca Jagger is goodwill ambassador of the Council Of
Europe.
