Samples of Interview Stories Featuring a Special Event or a Person

Clyde Haberman: Program Lets 2nd Chances Begin to Grow

11/19/99


November 22, 1999

Glitch Wins Freedom for N.Y. Inmate

Filed at 4:44 a.m. EST

By The Associated Press

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) -- Although Precious Bedell has won her freedom from prison on a technicality, there are plenty of people -- the current district attorney among them -- who say she is just as deserving of her release as if she had served her full sentence.

``Precious Bedell has done not extraordinary, but ultra-extraordinary in prison,'' said District Attorney William Fitzpatrick. ``She has served enough time and would be better off outside helping other women in similar circumstances.''

With her 1980 murder conviction thrown out, she will be able to do just that.

Bedell is expected to plead guilty to manslaughter today and win her freedom after serving 19 years in prison for fatally beating her 2-year-old daughter in 1979.

``Ms. Bedell was the captain of her own fate,'' said Kate Rosenthal, one of four attorneys who rallied on her behalf.

``If she were not such an exceptional person, all the support she received would not have made a bit of difference,'' Rosenthal said. ``She took her 20 years behind bars and made the best of it. She has not only worked to benefit herself, she has worked to benefit others.''

Yet, in the end, it was a legal glitch that won Bedell her freedom. A judge last week overturned her conviction because Bedell was not allowed to accompany jurors when they visited the crime scene and talked to unsworn witnesses. Her attorneys argued that her right to confront the witnesses was violated.

Fitzpatrick, one of Bedell's most ardent supporters, has agreed to let her plead guilty to the lesser manslaughter charge and be freed based on the time already served.

``This was a crime more of a reckless nature than intentional,'' Fitzpatrick said.

Bedell will wait until after her release to make any comments, said Nancy Hollander, an Albuquerque, N.M., attorney who first took up Bedell's case in 1986.

Bedell, who had her first child at age 16, was an unwed mother with a drug-abuse problem but no history of violence against her three children. She and the children were eating at a Syracuse restaurant on Nov. 7, 1979, when Lashonda began crying.

Bedell testified that she took Lashonda into the restroom to quiet her and Lashonda fell from her arms accidentally. She died four days later.

Medical testimony revealed Lashonda's skull was fractured in seven places, and Bedell was convicted of murder.

At age 26, she was sentenced to a maximum 25 years to life in prison.

``I'm not excusing what she did ... but I remember being surprised that she got the maximum. I thought 15 or 20 years would have been appropriate,'' said James Lantier, the ex-prosecutor who won the murder conviction.

During her time at the state's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Bedell became a success story of rehabilitative incarceration and an inspiration to other inmates. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees, worked her way into a position of trust at the prison's Children's Center, started a Parents as Reading Partners program and helped write handbooks about foster care, imprisoned parent's rights and responsibilities, and rage control.

``She ought to be able to do these things on the outside, where it will make a real difference,'' Hollander said.

In 1994, Bedell won the support of actress Glenn Close, who was filming a documentary at the prison. Also that year, Fitzpatrick began helping to fight for clemency on her behalf. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo rejected the plea.

Gov. George Pataki also twice passed over Bedell for clemency.

Her two surviving children, a son and daughter in their mid-20s, also helped push for their mother's release over the years. Neither wished to speak to the media until their mother is freed.

Still, not everyone agrees that Bedell has earned her freedom.

It was under Richard Hennessey's watch as district attorney that Bedell was tried. He said he still cannot help thinking about the woman Lashonda might have grown up to be.

``Precious Bedell belongs in prison. She killed her daughter. She slammed her head repeatedly against the bathroom wall,'' said Hennessey, who now practices law privately. ``The jury did the right thing and I don't think their judgment should be upset.''
Program Lets 2nd Chances Begin to Grow



FIRST, let's take a short stroll through recent history, because public memory sometimes has the shelf life of a bagel when it comes to such matters.

Back in the spring, the Giuliani administration was a gavel's swing away from auctioning off more than 100 community gardens that had bloomed on city-owned lots. Green types were desolate.

Then to their rescue came Bette Midler, with an interest in horticultural matters worthy of an actress whose first major movie was called "The Rose." An organization that Ms. Midler runs, the New York Restoration Project, bought dozens of lots. That cleared the way for the rest to be purchased by another conservation group, the Trust for Public Land.

And so the administration got the money it wanted. Mostly poor neighborhoods got to keep their gardens. The concept that open spaces are essential in this overbuilt city was left intact. Everyone could walk away happy, tra-la.

End of story? Not really.

There are still 450 or so other community gardens on city-owned lots that could be put up for auction, which means that last spring's drama might be replayed at any time. Some experts doubt that is about to happen, among them Rose Harvey, senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land. But others are less confident, including Green Guerillas, a nonprofit group that helps develop and preserve public spaces.

"What is missing is community input in deciding what is to be done with these lots," said Kate Sullivan, the organization's director of programs.

For Green Guerillas, this has been a week to exult in the power of gardens to affect lives, especially in destitute sections of New York where triumphs often come vest-pocket size.

To glance back again for a moment, the group was a guiding force last summer behind four projects that created large murals of tile and glass at four community gardens in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. The workers were teenagers, many of them at odds with their families, or the law, or the world at large. They were honored by Green Guerillas the other night in a ceremony at a hotel off Times Square.

What happened in Manhattan was typical. The site, at the corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 126th Street in Harlem, is supervised by another nonprofit organization called Cases, an acronym for Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services.

As the name suggests, the group's purpose is to offer ways other than imprisonment to deal with young people convicted of low-level crimes   —   the sort who are hardly angels but who are also far from ready to be written off. Like the gardens, they are eminently salvageable.

CASES put them to work in the summer, breaking tile and reordering the pieces into a colorful, 20-foot mosaic on the garden wall. At first, the teenagers resisted. They didn't want to be there. They didn't want to stand for hours under the merciless July sun. They didn't, some anyway, know what a mural was.

"Everybody was, like, this is stupid," said a 17-year-old named Arkron. "I thought it was going to take up too much of my time. But once I got into it, I started liking it. And it brightened up Harlem a little."

The theme for the mural was rivers, drawn from an early Langston Hughes poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." The young workers created images of whales, dolphins, turtles and other sea creatures. They shaped the tiles to form the names of distant rivers like the Congo, Nile and Euphrates, but balanced them with rivers a bit more familiar to them, bearing names like Hudson, Harlem and East.

"It was the poem that did it," said Darwin, also 17, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Hughes work, with its refrain: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

An interesting thing happened as the work progressed, said Todd Murphy and Allen Dotson, two officials at Cases. "The mural gave these kids a chance to leave their mark," Mr. Dotson said. "These are kids who pretty much have no control over their lives. This was like owning something for them."

Was life for all 80 teenagers on the project turned miraculously around by a mural? No way. "You can't save everyone," Mr. Murphy acknowledged. "To keep the garden metaphor going, it's like planting a seed. Sometimes it blooms right away. Sometimes it takes a while."

"I'm big on second chances," he said.

Oh, almost forgot. The Cases plot was one of the community gardens saved from the auction block last spring. It got a second chance, too.

A Homeless Man Challenges New York City Crackdowns

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Even before New York's police commissioner pledged last week to arrest homeless people who persist in sleeping on sidewalks, a homeless Army veteran who has improvised a bed on the city's streets for a decade was quietly trying to stop him through the courts.

In some ways the veteran, Augustine Betancourt, 33, is an unlikely legal adversary. But nobody knows better that the announced police tactic is not new. Nobody more clearly illustrates its mixed results.

Almost three years ago, on the cold night of Feb. 27, 1997, Betancourt tucked himself into cardboard and fell asleep on a bench in a small park across the street from the Criminal Courts building in Lower Manhattan. About 1:30 a.m., he was awakened by two police officers. And for the first time in his life, he was arrested.

"Direct order from Giuliani," an officer told Betancourt before taking him to jail, according to court affidavits. "You're not supposed to be sleeping here."

Betancourt, a slight, soft-spoken man who has shunned most social interaction since his honorable discharge in 1987, was strip-searched, held for 27 hours and handed a summons. The ticket, on an obscure sanitation code violation -- one of several ordinances typically used by the police to arrest or ticket the homeless -- turned out to be invalid.

But in Betancourt v. Giuliani, a little-noticed 1997 federal class-action lawsuit now nearing a conclusion, Betancourt and the lawyer he found in a soup kitchen's legal clinic have mounted a small but significant challenge to police crackdowns on the homeless.

The lawsuit contends that he and all 25 others in the park area the same night were falsely arrested in a police sweep for violating a sanitation ordinance that was impermissibly vague, and only a pretext for punishing the homeless. It asks that the police be barred from using the ordinance as a tool for making targets of the homeless.

The city argues that the arrests were legitimate and necessary to reclaim the area near the Criminal Courts building from debris left by homeless people who had rejected earlier offers of shelter.

Betancourt is still homeless. But now he sleeps in an alley not far from the park, hidden in a cardboard box. And since he was dropped from the welfare rolls three years ago for failing to appear for a work assignment, he will not qualify for a shelter bed if Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani succeeds in his other effort to tackle homelessness: enforcing state regulations that make work and all other welfare rules conditions of shelter.

"The years I spent out in the street, people watch me collect cans or kids laugh when they see me at night getting into a cardboard box, I've never felt insulted or less than human," Betancourt, who won a merit award as a soldier, said in a deposition. "But incarcerated, I felt deprived of humanity."

Even if it was a mistake to arrest Betancourt under a sanitation statute that makes it unlawful to leave "any box, barrel, bale of merchandise or other movable property" in a public place -- the district attorney declined to prosecute the case -- the city contends that he still could have been legitimately arrested for other reasons.

A 1996 police manual for carrying out such sweeps, "Quality of Life Enforcement Options: A Police Reference Guide," lists 35 offenses that can prompt an arrest, including camping in the park without a permit and being present after the official 1 a.m. closing time.

Last week, after a Midtown office worker was left in critical condition by a random attack that may have been committed by a homeless man, Mayor Giuliani promised to renew such crackdowns. He dismissed any civil liberties opposition to his plan as romanticism that did the homeless no favors.

"Streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there," the mayor said. "Bedrooms are for sleeping."

Police Commissioner Howard Safir seconded his remarks, declaring that if homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks refuse help from the police and then "don't obey, we're going to arrest them."

For city lawyers defending against the Betancourt suit, the remarks came at an awkward moment. Betancourt's lawyer Doug Lasdon, who directs the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, with lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison who are donating their time, have argued that the Giuliani administration has transformed administrative ordinances into anti-vagrancy laws in a bid to outlaw homelessness.

The city has responded in legal papers that there is no police policy aimed at the homeless. In September 1997, the city successfully opposed the plaintiffs' demand for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily barred such enforcement of the sanitation ordinance, arguing in part that Betancourt and his fellows had not established that they were at risk of being arrested again.

Last week, the plaintiffs asked the court to bar the city immediately from such enforcement of the ordinance. Judge John S. Martin of Federal District Court in Manhattan could rule early next year.

Police depositions in the case open a rare window on the broad discretion an ordinance can afford. One officer testified that a person sitting on a park bench with a coat around the shoulders would be in violation of the section, but would not be in violation if the coat were zipped.

Another testified that a person sitting beside a newspaper that was "touching their body" would not violate the code, but the person could be arrested if the same newspaper was "one inch away."

Throughout the city's history, officials have periodically enforced vagrancy laws that blurred the line between poverty and criminality. In "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898" (Oxford University Press, 1999), Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows describe how early in the 19th century, vagrancy laws were used for street roundups "at the behest of merchants and shopkeepers determined to improve New York's business climate by scouring away peddlers, scavengers, beggars and potential criminals."

In the 1870's and again in the 1890's, an increase in street begging and pauperism that historians attribute to economic dislocations led reformers to discontinue or tighten municipal poor relief, and to step up enforcement of vagrancy statutes, arresting and locking up "tramps" and sending them to workhouses.

A series of high court rulings from the 1950's through the 1970's invalidated the old vagrancy laws. In a recent case, in 1995, the United States District court in Manhattan ruled that people arrested or ejected from Pennsylvania Station by the Amtrak police for "hanging out" there had been deprived of their constitutional rights.

Like people in cities around the country, many New Yorkers went from compassion to exasperation about the homeless in the 1980's. Despite the city's uniquely far-reaching right to shelter, established by advocates through court rulings in 1981, there seemed to be disheveled figures huddling on every Manhattan sidewalk grate in 1987, when Betancourt returned to New York after three years in the Army.

He soon stopped contact with his elderly immigrant parents, who were unaware, he said, of the deep depression and anxiety attacks that had overwhelmed him in adolescence. His jobs as kitchen helper or stock clerk grew scarcer after the stock market crash, and in 1988 he lost his room in a cheap hotel.

Turning to the city's shelter system, he was placed in the Franklin Armory in the Bronx, where about 600 men, many mentally ill or addicted to drugs, slept on a drill floor. He found the street less frightening.

Someone helped him obtain public assistance in 1992, about $100 every two weeks. But he was one of thousands dropped from the rolls when the city instituted a strict workfare requirement in August 1996.

In a sense, Betancourt did become more self-reliant, though not as city welfare officials had envisioned: he dug himself deeper into a solitary groove of life bound by the schedules of soup kitchens and shower programs, coping with his constant anxiety by killing time in libraries and bookstores, paring down his needs to what would fit in a small book bag, and hunting nightly for cardboard to make his bed.

"It's the people that you don't see that are actually most vulnerable to these anti-homeless laws and ordinances, because they're most reluctant to seek help," Betancourt, who does not smoke or drink, said in a recent interview, unobtrusive in his plain black baseball cap, white T-shirt, checked shirt and khakis.

The mayor's first round of sweeps in 1996 were welcomed by many New Yorkers. But though they broke up major encampments of homeless people and offered services, their limitations quickly became apparent. In monthly spread sheets laid out by location, internal reports by the Department of Homeless Services reflect that homeless people routed from one place showed up somewhere else, or ebbed back to the old spot over time.

Issued summonses, many homeless people failed to show up in court, resulting in bench warrants later used to arrest them. Many spent time in jail on Rikers Island, where mental health unit beds cost $91,000 a year, compared with $20,000 for a city shelter bed and $12,000 for the supervised apartments that have been the greatest success for the mentally ill homeless, but remain in short supply. Annual admissions at the jail reached an all-time high of 133,300 in 1997, up from 106,000 in 1993. Admissions are now about 127,000 a year.

The Franklin Avenue shelter that frightened away Betancourt in 1988 was cut to 200 beds through lawsuits brought by advocates for the homeless. More than 70 percent of the shelter system is now run by private nonprofit agencies.

But through shelter regulations Giuliani himself sought from the state, the legal right to shelter underpinning this improved system is now under challenge as never before.

On a recent Friday night, no one was sleeping in the park where Betancourt was arrested. But about 11 p.m., homeless people began slipping out from the chilly shadows of the surrounding streets one by one, until more than a dozen stood in the dim light of a street lamp as a small yellow truck pulled up.

Soon a small caravan of volunteers from a New Jersey group called Bridges was distributing hot soup, toiletries and blankets to the men. Betancourt withdrew to his cardboard box, set in the shadows between lofts and sweatshops. When he was most fearful of being arrested again, he said, he never slept in the same place twice. He sought out recessed crannies in the financial district and moved on before the rumble of garbage trucks at dawn.

"My motivation in this lawsuit doesn't have anything to do with money or some kind of vendetta against the city,' he said. "My motivation is to avoid any further disruption and living like a fugitive."

Woman Fatally Stabs Another at Bowling Alley in Queens, Police Say

By JUAN FORERO



An 18-year-old teacher's assistant enjoying an evening with friends at a Queens bowling alley was killed early Sunday by a young woman who had been harassing her for about 45 minutes before the attack, the police and the victim's family said.

The woman, Adrian Davis of Jamaica, Queens, had been bowling with friends and an uncle at Van Wyck Lanes on Metropolitan Avenue in the Richmond Hill section when the other woman plunged a knife into her neck at 2:18 a.m., the police said. Ms. Davis, who had been standing near a railing in the cavernous, three-level building, fell from one floor to the next as a roomful of bowlers watched, the police and relatives said.

Ms. Davis, who lived with her mother and two sisters on 108th Avenue, was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 3 a.m. The police said the attacker ran out of the building and into a car driven by a male friend who had been with her.

The police were trying to determine whether Ms. Davis and her assailant had had a previous altercation or confrontation, possibly even years ago, that might have prompted the violence.

But Ms. Davis's relatives said she had not known the woman. "She was with friends and then it just happened," Ms. Davis's mother, Patricia Davis, said in a telephone interview.

"She didn't know the girl and the girl didn't know her. They didn't have no argument or anything."

Roosevelt Davis, an uncle of Ms. Davis, acted as the family spokesman during an interview outside her home. He said that in the 45 minutes before the attack, the assailant had made snide comments to Ms. Davis and had asked Ms. Davis to introduce her to men. Initially, relatives said, Ms. Davis had been bowling in Lane Three, while the other woman was bowling with a friend in Lane Eight or Nine.

"My niece never saw this woman before," Davis said. "She tried to engage her in conversation, and my niece ignored her."

Another uncle, who was with Ms. Davis at the bowling alley when the attack occurred, said he had been on a lower floor of the building when he heard her wail in pain. "She let out a yell," said the uncle, who asked to remain anonymous. "She called me and then she fell down. It happened so fast it seemed to come out of nowhere."

Ms. Davis's relatives said the assailant had been behaving oddly all night. They said she had walked back and forth with her pants unbuttoned and without a shirt. She also apparently displayed a pierced navel and a blue tattoo depicting a lion or tiger on her abdomen. The police said witnesses had recalled her wearing just a red bra for a top.

Ms. Davis's relatives asserted that the bowling alley, which takes on the feel of a nightclub on weekends with a disc jockey playing hip-hop and rock music, has been the site of violence before and that security is lax. The chief executive officer of the corporation that owns the bowling alley, AMF Bowling Worldwide in Richmond, Va., could not be reached for comment yesterday. The chairman of Primary Security Services of Queens, the company that provides security at the lanes, also could not be reached, and the lanes were closed early Sunday.

At Ms. Davis's home, family members huddled together for comfort, grief-stricken by the death of an "innocent, pretty young girl," Davis said.

Relatives described Ms. Davis as energetic and full of promise. A graduate of Jamaica High School, she had been employed since the summer as a teacher's assistant at the Summit School in Forest Hills, Queens, a job she obtained after working as a summer camp counselor at the school, Davis said.

Ms. Davis also wanted to enroll in college, relatives said, with the goal of becoming a teacher. "She was a bright, intelligent woman, with no enemies, who went to work every day and loved her job," Davis said.

Ms. Davis had been looking forward to her 19th birthday on Dec. 13 and had asked workers at Van Wyck Lanes Sunday about the possibility of renting a floor to hold a birthday party.