BRIEFING: Edmund Zagorski
Edmund George “Ed” Zagorski was born on December 27, 1954, in
Michigan.
He grew up very impoverished in Tecumseh, Michigan. Ed suffered from a
learning disability and a bad stutter as a child, both of which he fought to
overcome. He never finished high school, but trained to become a boat
captain.
Ed was just 28 when he went to jail; he is now almost 56. He is on death row
in Tennessee for the killing of two drug peddlers – John Dale Dotson and
Jimmy Porter -- in a marijuana deal gone bad in 1983. By the time he is set to
die – on January 11, 2011 – he will have been awaiting the death penalty for
half of his life, 28 years. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that
forcing a prisoner to wait more than five years for his death is, standing alone,
degrading and inhuman punishment.
Ed was convicted and sentenced to death based in part upon statements
abused out of him. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have described Ed
Zagorski’s treatment in the Robertson County jail as “torture”:1
Arrested in May of 1983, Mr. Zagorski invoked his rights to remain
silent and to counsel. The State of Tennessee then placed Mr.
Zagorski in a windowless, unventilated 8′ x 8′ steel box. After fifty two
days of near total isolation and sensory deprivation – a period
punctuated by an oppressive heat wave – Mr. Zagorski was
physiologically compromised and psychologically disturbed. Thirty
pounds lighter and despondent, he offered a confession in return for
the ability to dictate the terms of his execution. Subjected to harsh
confinement conditions similar to those used for the express purpose of
“breaking” pretrial detainees, it is little surprise that Mr. Zagorski’s will
was broken.
The local Sheriff justified this treatment in part because Ed had attempted
suicide in jail. He put Ed in the isolation cell despite a court order forbidding it.
Ed implicated himself simply to put an end to the interminable abuse. Indeed,
he was attempting suicide by a more official route. According to the police,
“he said, well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do—if you’ll let me pick the type of execution
and the day of execution, I’ll confess to these murders.”
1
http://phrblog.org/blog/2010/02/22/phr-research-on-impact-of-torture-on-detaineesused-in-brief-to-support-findings-of-involuntary-confession-in-domestic-deathpenalty-case/.
Typically for the unreliable kind of death sentence that often tarnishes the
reputation of the U.S. justice system, significant evidence against Ed was
supplied by an informant who had bartered for his testimony, who worked
closely with the authorities, and who appears to have taken part in planting
incriminating evidence against Ed. Ed has been under a death sentence for
almost three decades despite suggestions that other people had the form, and
the motive, to commit the murders.
Tormented by his depression, when he was convicted of the crimes, Ed
Zagorski just asked to die. Therefore the jurors heard nothing in mitigation of
his sentence. The abuses of his human rights have been ignored by the
courts, with the federal appellate courts refusing even to consider most of his
claims based on “procedural bars”.
The original prosecutors recognized that Ed Zagorski did not merit the death
penalty, offering him a sentence of life imprisonment before trial – a sentence
that would have allowed him to seek parole in due course. Ed has been a
model prisoner for the past 27 years and he is well-respected by other
inmates and prison personnel. In other words, his execution will be wholly
pointless.
January 11, 2011, is slated to see another “drug deal gone bad”, with the
drugs sold by a British company used to kill him – notwithstanding the fact
that nobody felt this was a death penalty case to begin with.
Ed’s contact details are: Edmund George Zagorski # 102839, Riverbend
Maximum Security Institution, Unit 2, 7475 Cockrill Bend Industrial Blvd.,
Nashville, Tennessee 37209. U.S.A.