Controversy rages about capital punishment as innocent men and women are being released from death rows all over the country. Into the debate steps Mark Fuhrman, America's most famous detective, and no stranger to controversy himself.Are innocent people being executed? Are death penalty cases being investigated and tried as if someone's life depended on it? Is capital punishment justice or revenge?Fuhrman seeks to answer these questions by investigating the death penalty in Oklahoma, a place where a "hang 'em high" attitude of cowboy justice resulted in twenty-one executions in 2001, more than in any other state in the nation. The majority of these death penalty cases came from one jurisdiction, Oklahoma County, where legendary district attorney Bob Macy bragged about sending more people to death row than any other prosecutor, and police chemist Joyce Gilchrist was eventually fired for mismanaging the crime lab. These two figures loom large in Fuhrman's investigation. Examining police records, trial transcripts, and appellate decisions, and conducting hundreds of interviews, Fuhrman focuses his considerable investigative skills on more than a dozen of the most controversial Oklahoma death penalty cases, including two in which innocent men nearly lost their lives.When he began Death and Justice, Mark Fuhrman was a firm believer in the death penalty. What he saw in Oklahoma changed his mind. It may change yours.

Mark Fuhrman is the New York Times bestselling author of Murder in Brentwood, Murder in Greenwich, and Murder in Spokane. He lives in Idaho.

Acknowledgments	xi
INTRODUCTION Welcome to Death Row	1	(16)
ONE Frontier justice	17	(18)
TWO The Guest House Murders	35	(19)
THREE Lingering Doubt	54	(16)
FOUR Catfight in the Crime Lab	70	(19)
FIVE Reverse Conviction	89	(17)
SIX Blindsided by Science	106	(17)
SEVEN DNA Doesn't Lie	123	(14)
EIGHT A Robbery Gone Wrong	137	(19)
NINE Helpless Victims	156	(19)
TEN The Wrong Man	175	(16)
ELEVEN Over a Barrel	191	(20)
TWELVE The Factory Breaks Down	211	(20)
THIRTEEN The Impact of Violence	231	(13)
EPILOGUE "Heinous, Atrocious and Cruel"	244	(9)
APPENDIX Macy's Death Penalty Cases	253	(14)
Index	267

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Death and Justice
An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine

Chapter One

Frontier Justice

"It's a mess down here in Oklahoma!" Jack Dempsey Pointer said in his booming good-ol'-boy voice. "We're executing people; we don't know if they're innocent or guilty. It's a regular death factory."

Pointer, president of the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association, was a guest on my radio show for KXLY Spokane in October 2001. I told Pointer I was skeptical.

"Fuhrman, you're just saying that because you're a cop and I'm a defense lawyer. It's your job to put criminals in jail and it's my job to keep them out," Pointer said. "But if you don't believe me, then come down here and see for yourself."

So I did. At first glance, I liked Oklahoma. The landscape is flat and somewhat monotonous, but the people are friendly. They wear Wranglers and eat red meat and listen to country music and vote Republican. Instantly I felt I was among friends.

In many ways, Oklahoma is like a place lost in time. The cowboy past is more powerfully felt there than in most other places because that past is still so recent. Originally a territory for displaced Indian tribes, Oklahoma did not achieve statehood until 1907. The ethos offrontier justice has dominated Oklahoma since the 1890s, when "hanging judge" Isaac Parker sent eighty-seven men to the gallows.

On my first night in Oklahoma City, I met Jack DempseyPointer, a jovial, outspoken man who is so large that he can barely fit in the front seat of his Jaguar. Pointer took me to the Oyster Bar, a downtown watering hole where people on both sides of Oklahoma City law enforcement go to unwind, gossip, and sometimes even negotiate plea bargains.

Over the next few days I met defense lawyers, prosecutors,judges, and cops. I was taken by how friendly and open people were. Even if they didn't want to tell me anything, they would be very polite about it. After my rather chilly treatment in Greenwich, Connecticut, while investigating the murder of Martha Moxley, or Spokane, Washington, on the trail of a serial killer, Oklahoma was apleasant surprise.

Hanging around with the folks in Oklahoma made me feel like I was back among my old LAPD colleagues. We traded stories about crime and punishment. They had a good sense of humor and weren't easily offended. Even those few who didn't want to talk to me were very gracious about it.

The attitude among most Oklahomans -- not just law enforcement professionals but also waitresses, cabdrivers, and businesspeople -- was basically "hang'em high." It was reassuring to hear even some defense attorneys defend the death penalty. In Oklahoma it's politically correct to support the death penalty. If you have any doubts about it, then you must be a liberal or something even worse.

Death penalty cases in Oklahoma City are prosecuted by the Oklahoma County District Attorney's Office and investigated by the Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD). The trial defense is either private attorneys or the Oklahoma County Public Defender's Office. The Oklahoma Indigent Defense System (OIDS)is a state agency that represents defendants in jurisdictions where there is nopublic defender's office and handles death row appeals for those already convicted at trial. Many Oklahoma City defendants will have a public defender at their trials and OIDS lawyers during the appellate process. The OIDS office is in Norman, on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Although many of them have worked for the Oklahoma County Public Defender's Office, OIDS lawyers are a bit removed from the Oklahoma City law enforcement scene (they don't hang out at the Oyster Bar) and are more outspoken in theircriticism of the death penalty and Oklahoma's criminal justice system. They, too, were unfailingly polite, even friendly.

When I first began this project, I didn't think there was anything fundamentally wrong with the death penalty. Instead, I had the conviction that any problems with capital punishment were rare and isolated instances where mistakes, usually unintentional, had been made. I certainly didn't want to see the death penalty abolished, which I believed was the ultimate motivation for many of its critics. They didn't want the system to work, because they wanted to change it.

I knew the system wasn't perfect, but I believed that it worked. Criminals were convicted because they were guilty. And if they weren't guilty of the crime for which they had been convicted, well,they had done something else for which they should have been punished. When it came to the death penalty, I assumed that there was an even lower percentage of wrongful convictions, since capital caseswere certainly held to a higher standard than other felonies, from investigation to arrest to trial to punishment.

The scandal that had brought Oklahoma to my attention, and made Jack Pointer almost burst a blood vessel on my radio show concerned a forensic chemist named Joyce Gilchrist. In 2001, the same year that the state of Oklahoma was executing inmates at an unprecedented rate, a series of high-court rulings, of ficial investigations, memos, and reports, as well as the usual chorus of outrageddefense attorneys, had criticized Gilchrist for lying under oath "enhancing "the value of the evidence in her testimony and mismanaging the OCPD crime lab.

Gilchrist had been a forensic chemist for more than twenty years. She had worked on more than fifteen hundred felony cases. Cops and prosecutors loved her; defense attorneys didn't.

"Joyce Gilchrist is a kick-ass expert witness, "Assistant District Attorney Richard Wintory told me. "That's why everybody is out to get her."

"Joyce Gilchrist is the most lyingest, cheatingest bitch on this earth, " said one prominent Oklahoma defense attorney ...

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An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine. Copyright © by Mark Fuhrman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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