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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (47808)	10/17/2000 3:17:17 PM
From: ColtonGang	Respond to of 769667

Texas Inmate's Confession Slips Through the Cracks By JIM YARDLEY HOUSTON, Oct. 16 — The letter began "Re: Murder Confession." It was written by a Texas prison inmate who said "my conscience sickens me" because two men were serving life sentences in prison for a rape and murder that the inmate claimed he had committed. The inmate, Achim Josef Marino, a born-again Christian, made the confession in a February 1998 letter to Gov. George W. Bush. Mr. Marino told how evidence linking him to the crime, including the victim's keys, could be found at his parents' house. He said he had written a letter to the police in Austin, Tex., a year earlier but had received no response. He wanted Mr. Bush to intervene, even saying the governor was "legally and morally obligated" to do so. "I tell you this sir," wrote Mr. Marino, who is serving three life sentences for other convictions, "I did this awful crime and I was alone." Nothing, however, was done. The two inmates Mr. Marino mentioned, Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger, remain in prison, a decade after their conviction. Recent DNA tests, in fact, confirmed that semen taken from victim did not match Mr. Ochoa or Mr. Danziger, several people knowledgeable about the case said. A sample of Mr. Marino's DNA is now being tested to see if it does match. "This is all unprecedented," said District Attorney Ronald Earle of Travis County, whose office reopened the case earlier this year and is working with lawyers for the two inmates convicted of the crime. Mike Jones, a spokesman for Governor Bush's office, confirmed that the letter arrived in 1998 and remains on file. Mr. Jones said about 1,400 letters from inmates were received by the governor's office every year, and standard policy calls for forwarding them to the appropriate law enforcement agency. But, he said, Mr. Marino's letter fell into a different category because it indicated that a copy was also being sent to Mr. Earle. In such cases, Mr. Jones said, a letter would not be forwarded, to "avoid duplication." "It was already in the hands of the law enforcement agencies," said Mr. Jones, adding that Mr. Bush never saw the letter. But, Mr. Earle said, the confession never arrived in the mail at his office. Prosecutors on his staff were later made aware of it by the Austin Police Department, which had received it. Mr. Earle said he had no idea how the police received the letter, unless perhaps Mr. Marino mistakenly mailed it to them instead of his office. Told that Mr. Earle's office had not received the letter in the mail but from the local police, Mr. Jones said, "We're not sure how it came there, or how they got it, but they got it." Barry Scheck, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York and a co-director of the Innocence Project, a program that uses DNA evidence to overturn murder convictions, said his group and another Innocence Project affiliated with the University of Wisconsin became involved in the case in late 1999. "This case should shock anyone," Mr. Scheck said. He chided Mr. Bush's office for failing to act on the letter and said the case undermined the governor's oft-stated confidence in the Texas criminal justice system. "This has got to tell Governor Bush that he can't have confidence that all these death penalties and other convictions in his state are sound and just because officials have proclaimed them sound," Mr. Scheck said.