I understand this blog is read by millions. That kind of resonance would help cause ripples in the well of silence where Debbie Milke has been languishing for sixteen years. That's how long she has been on death row in Arizona. Until a couple of years ago she was the only woman there under sentence of death. And, if executed, she will be the first since Eva Dugan's head was torn off by the hang rope in 1930.
In 1981, two men took Debbie's four-year-old son into the desert on the outskirts of Phoenix, and shot him to death; the little boy thought he was going to the mall to see Santa Claus. Debbie was accused and convicted of manipulating those two men into perpetrating the crime, though the majority of the evidence in the case points to her innocence. One of the men had already shot one child to death, in Vietnam. He was brain-damaged and taking anti-psychotic medication. He has never said Debbie had anything to do with the crime, and denied pulling the trigger himself. The other man led the cops to the body and claimed that the mother had put them up to it. Every time he was questioned following his initial accusation, he was so incoherent and self-contradictory that the prosecution never dared to call him to testify against Debbie. Both men are on Death Row.
The sole piece of evidence against Debbie is an uncorroborated confession to a Phoenix police detective -- a confession supposedly elicited when he got her alone in the infirmary of a Sheriff's office 60 miles from the city, the day after the crime. He did not tape-record the interrogation, and she never signed an affidavit. In fact, no document calling itself a confession was submitted for her signature, or even drawn up, let alone entered at trial. The detective was a hulk of a man, with a brutal demeanor, and a history of eliciting confessions which did not exclude shaking a hospital bed-ridden suspect into consciousness long enough to extract a "confession" -- a confession later thrown out of court. To compound the injustice, extracts from the detective's personnel file that might have enlightened the jury about his heavy-handed tactics were ruled inadmissible.
The trial lasted from July to September 1990. The judge presiding over Debbie's trial -- noticeably biased against the defense -- was later barred from presiding over criminal trials, but not before ineptly handling Debbie's case. The judge wanted to rush the trial because one or two of the jurors had vacation plans. This in a capital trial! Debbie's court-appointed attorney defended Debbie less than rigorously, failing for the entire length of the trial to return calls from Debbie's family members. One of the jurors, later interviewed, said that the group was swayed to convict Debbie, not by the evidence presented in court, but by a tape they found on the table when they entered the jury room for their deliberations. The tape consisted of Debbie's sister bad-mouthing Debbie to the confession-eliciting detective. The tape had not been played during the trial. Anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the legal system knows that an introduction of extra-judicial evidence is grounds for appeal. And yet, as of now, all of Debbie's appeals have been turned down. Why has justice, at every possible turn, failed Debbie Milke? This is the question I've been asking myself for 9 years.
I first learned of the case in June, 1998, by reading the number-one news magazine in Europe, Der Spiegel. I wondered why I had to find out about a trial in Arizona from a foreign language magazine. It turned out it never had been covered by the national media in this country. Why, I wondered, had something so ripe with injustice been ignored? And, more importantly, how many scents of similar cases aren't picked up? As I began to ask these questions, I also found myself becoming increasingly invested in trying to get an issue of life and death, literally, into the public's consciousness. My efforts over the past nine years have been full of powerful lessons about the so-called justice system in the United States.
It took me until January, 2003 to get A&E to do an episode on it for American Justice. I was not interested in any crime shows except American Justice, because A&E provides the least sensationalistic treatment, and Bill Kurtis, the host, comes across as a gentleman. I first called them in 1999, and they expressed interest. But then they sat on the story for three years -three years while Debbie sat on Death Row. Finally, after four years of phone calls, the ball got rolling, and the episode, "A Mother's Tale of Murder," was produced, as was as balanced as could be expected.
After the A&E special aired, feeling as though some momentum was building, I contacted all the major media. Even though I have no formal PR training, I felt competent to talk about an important case of injustice, and I was sure others would see it in the same light. I only got one acknowledgment -- a secretary at Larry King said she would pitch it to the show's producers. I never heard back. I think about this as I flip past CNN, and night after night of Anna Nicole Smith autopsy and custodial issues of ashes and babies.� Debbie Milke still sits on Death Row.
Today, Debbie is one judicial step closer to execution: on November 28th, 2007, the Habeas decision we had been waiting for since 1998 came from Federal District Court . Despite telling her lawyer over lunch that he saw four places where Debbie's rights had been violated, the judge flatly denied her appeal. Now the only hope left is the U.S. Ninth Circuit. The defense will file an appeal by May 29, 2007, and the ultimate decision should be handed down by January 2009. Debbie Milke still sits on Death Row.
Again, another question of "Why?" arises. Why has Debbie Milke been railroaded through the Arizona judicial system? I think the state of Arizona wants to kill Debra Milke as much for statistical reasons as for any other. They will be able to say: "We don't only execute minorities. Why, we just executed this lily-white woman." But my hypotheses are not going to help. At this point, I'm not sure what will, but what I do know is that having become aware of Debbie's case, and feeling that I could do something about it, I did. I reached out, made contact, made this story, a story in a magazine, something personal. News is not personal anymore. It is hard to connect with the stories on the television, or the words on the page; there are too many of them, and there is too much sadness. But in a world in which historic events are small-print runners across the bottom of a screen, making contact is what makes the events human again.
Throughout the last 9 years, I had become a regular correspondent of both Debbie and her mother, Renate Janka, who lives in Switzerland. (You can read about the case in great detail at the website Renate established years ago: debbiemilke.com.) Renate has written a book on the case, a bestseller in Europe . I translated it, and hopefully we will get it published in English. Renate is probably the most famous mother in Europe, having appeared on talk shows many times. A press conference on the case has been scheduled for May 2007, in Phoenix. One of the organizers is Uschi Glas, the most famous German-language actress. Hopefully other luminaries will show up, and give light to this case, too-long kept in the dark.
Ultimately, my involvement with this case proves that you don't need to be a family member of Debbie Milke, or against the death penalty, or a Sixth Amendment advocate to understand the implications of this case, and feel connected. Think about this fact: Only in Alaska and Minnesota do suspects' confessions have to be "memorialized", or recorded in some way. What this means is that what happened to Debbie could happen anywhere, to anyone at the mercy of a heavy-handed detective and a system full of deaf-ears. I look upon the Milke case as being less about the death penalty than it is about the abuse of power: the way the law (in Arizona) reads now, is that if you have no alibi, and a cop can get you alone for five minutes, you can be executed. So, what is the moral for the ordinary citizen who might chance upon a similar case and want to do something about it? Is it worth it? So far I can't say I have accomplished anything, but my involvement has not cost me anything, and it has granted me a rare sense of connection to a story on the pages of a magazine.