Roger Willemsen: Cold Pizza for an Innocent Man

Roger Keith Coleman went to the electric chair in 1992 for the brutal murder of Wanda McCoy, his wife's sister. McCoy in 1981 was raped, stabbed and nearly beheaded. Though Coleman never confessed to the crime, he was sentenced to death in 1982 based on the (strong) evidence available then. Through the years, Coleman - who steadfastly proclaimed his innocence - became the poster boy for the death penalty opposition. (story)

Now genetic testing on semen found in McCoy proved Coleman committed the crime:

DNA testing of a man executed in 1992 ordered by Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner has confirmed that Roger Coleman was not only guilty of the murder and rape of his sister-in-law Wanda Fay McCoy, he was a liar until his last breath. ... According to the DNA lab report, "The probability that a randomly selected individual unrelated to Roger Coleman would coincidentally share the observed DNA profile is estimated to be 1 in 19 million." (source)

There were many who believed Coleman's lies, because they wanted to believe it. One shining example is Roger Willemsen, a prominent media person frequently present on German public tv channels. Here's his take at Coleman, in an interview published in amnesty international's German journal in January 2004:

Question: The battle against the death penalty is one of AI’s (Amnesty International) core concerns. Among other things, you held an interview with Roger Keith Coleman, who was confined to the death cell and executed.

Roger Willemsen: I’ll never forget that TV interview. I interviewed Coleman in the death cell via satellite link. It was important to our editorial staff that Coleman be allowed to speak so that people could understand his life circumstances. What he sees when he looks out the window, what photo stands on the table next to him, does he have access to his trial records and so on.

Coleman was subjected to every perversion of justice during the trial the likes of which we’d expect from Iran. Susan Sontag once said she was basically labeled a representative of the American alternative media because she opposed the death penalty. That’s all it took. We hoped for Coleman’s pardon to the last. On the evening of his execution, two of our editors were on location. They reported the gigantic media turnout and that they had to defend themselves from their colleagues’ attacks when it became known they were against the verdict.

Coleman wanted a pizza as his last meal. He gave one of the journalists a piece of this pizza. That’s how we found out the jailor had served the pizza extra cold. That’s one of the deeply barbaric little traits of the average man who sits at home with his family and decides to personally punish someone who’s been locked up in a death cell for 18 years - and who’s demonstrably innocent: he makes sure to let the guy’s pizza get cold.

Coleman’s fate occupies me very much to this day. I’ve written about it several times. For me literature is an ongoing appeal to the ability to empathize.

Can you imagine - such a nice chap being served cold (!!!) pizza on execution day?

Well, Mr. Willemsen, but how about a little empathy for the relatives of Mrs. McCoy, now that you know that Roger Coleman is guilty of murder? I mean, Roger Coleman already got all the empathy he deserved - a cold pizza for a cold blooded murder plus a free serving of electrocution.

(Translation of Willemsen quote by Richard Bartholomew)

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Comments

[Oh Eric!]

@FranzisM: Well, that's a true difference between us. You may be content to be done in by an Islamic culture more vital than your own, but I'll be kicking and screaming all the way.

[LC Mamapajamas]

@FranzisM: From my point of view, I cannot distinguish between loyal and rogue agents, and must remain ambigous whether the NSA narrative is just frivolous science fiction or evidence of actual datacrimes.

Ah. Of course.

Guilty until proven innocent.

I personally would like to see someone come foreward with a REAL complaint before I'll even entertain the idea.

[joe]

FranZ,

Where is that right - not to be spied on - contained? Is that part of the EU constitution.

Do you think Germany might attack the US (please with its ally the french) over this? This must surely be some form of human rights violation.

[FranzisM]

@Oh Eric! - The difference between us is that I live just 4.000km from Mecca, while you live in your own hemisphere. But your reference to colonialism was correct: For all their wrongs, the colonialists knew that the fates of our hemispheres are intertwined. A renaissance of Africa requires the liberation of the Carribean, where the hope of Africa currently has its focus. But the old uniform fetishist of Havanna is whoring a German philosopher, at least until he decides to follow the conversion invitation the Ayatollahs of Iran enunciated on the day Angela Merkel took office. Then there's the young fingerwaving gnome of Caracas with his sick Caesar complex who threw himself at the chest of Khatami. I don't know whether there's anything other else than the European-American relationship which prevents these Europe-whoring totalitarians from converting to Islam, and certainly I do not wish you the experience of Islamic theocracy in your hemisphere, not even when we have disagreements.

@LC Mamapajamas - This is an inter-cultural exchange not a trial, so I can't act as if I had the NSA on the dissection table. I had to work with a blackbox model, and some of my experiments showed certain reproducible but still ambiguous results. Since the next scientific step, isolation of the phenomenon in a laboratory, was not practicable, the theological concerns against the U.S. government began to gain weight. The First Commandment forbids making an image of God, so a certain sense organ in a characteristic geometric figure should not be used as a state symbol, regardless how much of the alleged omniscience is bluff and how much not. Hence the broad nature of my complaint against the use of the panopticon. If you think only small businesses in the cannabis market were interested in privacy, then you fool yourself.

@joe - Please. The right not to be spied on is self-evident to everyone but the EU bureaucrats. It's basic hacker ethics that would be automatically included in any job ad you put out for a hacker, as self-evident as the knowledge that it would be sacrilegous to cut a Vermeer into little pieces. You shall not covet your neighbor's data... when I see a potential partner acting as if he could not see that, what else can I do than try to test his faith until he sees it?

[Oh Eric!]

@FranzisM: Well, this topic is getting a little old to keep checking, but I'll just respond to one thing. If you think that Africa's fate depends on Cuba, or that there's any chance at all of Castro converting to Islam, then I really don't see how we can have a rational discussion on this limited forum. Sure, countries affect each other, even small ones like Cuba, but you're so far out there, I don't even know where to begin.

[LC Mamapajamas]

@FranzisM: If you think only small businesses in the cannabis market were interested in privacy, then you fool yourself.

If you think that ANY communications via a phone or computer are "private", they it is you who fools yourself.

How do you tap a telephone these days? They used to have to attach real hardware to the actual phone line of the person they were tapping to do that. We lost a lot in the way of privacy when we gave up the old analogue telephones.

Today, all they have to do is grab the signal out of the air.

Today's phones are no more "private" than radio waves. In fact, they ARE radio waves. Even land lines spend a portion of their lifespan in the air as a radio signal, transmitted from phone company node to phone company node. You only need to know the number of the person you want to tap. Cell phones are even MORE public. Private conversations are frequently picked up by sheer accident by the wrong phone.

To think that anything going through a computer or phone line these days is "private" is not a reasonable expectation.

Therefore, it is the responsibility of the phone user to not say anything that you don't want everyone else to know.

Just telling the truth of the technology here.

[LC Mamapajamas]

Addendum to prior message: "If you think that ANY communications via a phone or computer are "private", they it is you who fools yourself."

Make that "computer" a home or small business computer.

Large corporations spend fortunes building firewalls and taking other security measures for their computers, and STILL have problems with people hacking into them. So how safe is your home model? Not very!

Just warning...

[FranzisM]

@Oh Eric! - I knew you would come back. The Carribean also influenced the fate of Europe, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco the communists firewalled the intra-German borders. Since you helped us to bring it down I thought America was aware of what it was cleaning up there. If you take the current rules of the game too far out then they can blind you for the opportunity of improval. Don't let your knowledge that the world is not yet a free and open place become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

@LC Mamapajamas - Don't confuse the possibility of data crime with its immorality. There are a lot of immoral things which are technically possible, to distinguish them from the moral possibilities is after all why you want firewalls and hacker ethics. I am a compass not a flyswatter, babysitting backstage lurkers goes at the expense of my motivation. Until the gaucking will reveal whether the praise of "free dissent" and "trust" in the Second Inaugural Address was serious I hope that the statue of the NSA is as hollow as that of Saddam.

[Oh Eric!]

Franzis, ya I'm back, I can't help myself.

Well, I notice you didn't follow up on the absurd notion that Castro or Chavez is going to convert to islam. That's not to say that I'm unaware of what's going on there, but you're not going to impress me with the gravity of the situation with kooky theories like that.

I'm not blind at all to the opportunity for improvement. Things are going fantastic in Iraq and Afghanistan! Tens of millions living in countries formerly under the thumb of leaders literally as ruthless and brutal as Hitler or Stalin in their heyday, now have a reasonable chance of living in a stable society, under a government responsive to their people.

[FranzisM]

@Oh Eric! - I did not expect you to be impressed, as little as you did when you suggested I might prefer to live under Islamic rule. But since the spies failed on 9/11 and Iraq, I have to treat any reliance upon them as cognitive dissonance.