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CONTENTS
PRINCETON
16
MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2012
44
FEATURES ·
HERE & THERE
BOOK SCENE
THE FERTILE CRESCENT
The Case for Fear:
A Halloween Harvest
Challenging Westem stereotypes of Middle Eastern women
12
26
ART SCENE
THE COXSWAIN AND THE INDUSTRIALIST,
OR HOW PRINCETON GOT ITS LAKE
BY ILENE DUBE
In the Search of an Absolute:
Valery Yurlov's Singular View
BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS
What would Princeton be without its lake?
16
36
MARKYOURCALENDAR
22
THINK SMALL: MINIATURE BUILDING
COLLECTION OF RICHARD TAYLOR
SHOPPING
It all began with a model of the Empire State Building
44
Wine & Chocolate
20
Black Magic!
74
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
BY ELLEN GILBERT
"My father always rai sed me to have a career"
52
DESTINATIONS: NANTUCKET
BY LESLIE MITCHNER
72
FREEING THE INNOCENT: JIM McCLOSKEY
AND CENTURION MINISTRIES
THE TASTES:
BY LINDA ARNTZENIU S
BY LE SLIE MIT CHNER
"I consider myself a lucky man, to have stumbled into this calling"
Keeping it Real
Tortuga ' s Mexican Village
& El Tule
76
Dining Guide
82
58
LAST WORD
BILL LOCKWOOD
BY A NNE LEV IN
McCarter Theatre's Renaissance Man
VINTAGE PRINCETON
Rex Goreleigh
86
ON THE COVER : Ayana Friedman, still from Red Freedom, 2008
Video 5:40 minutes, courtesy of the artist. On view at Mason Gross
Galleries: The Fertile Crescent project.
88
ramed newspaper
clippings recording
moments of
jubilation and
triumph cover the
walls of Jim
McCloskey's office
at Centurion
Ministries (CM), the Princeton non-profit
he founded in 1983 to free im1ocent
people wrongly imprisoned across the
United States and Canada. Headlines and
faces. Lou Thomas of Philadelphia who
spent 40 years behind bars for a crime he
did not commit. "Geronimo" Pratt, framed
in Los Angeles on false testimony until a
new trial brought his release after 27
years. Edward Baker, convicted on the
word of the real killer and freed after 26
years. Jim Driskell who received a fmmal
apology from Canada's Federal Minister
of Justice for the mistakes that led to his
wrongful conviction. And then there's
Clarence Brandley, whose freedom came
just eight days before he was to be
executed in Texas in 1990. And Joyce
Ann Brown, who served nine years of a
life sentence for a robbety and murder
because she happened to look like
someone else. In spite of the fact that the
error was discovered before Brown's trial,
police and prosecutors went ahead with
the case anyway. Hard to believe? And
yet it happened, as was demonstrated by
Centurion Ministries and a 60 Minutes
expose on CBS. Brown's conviction was
reversed and all charges were dismissed.
On November 3, 1989, Brown was free .
Such nightmares of mistaken
identity, false confessions, and coercive
interrogation: justice undermined by
police con1.1ption, laziness, or simple
indifference, are also stories of justice
served because of the dogged
determination of McCloskey and his
dedicated team that even now comprises
just seven full-timers, four patt-timers,
and some 20 volunteers.
"There 's an amazing stmy to each
.one of these," says McCloskey, who has
earned a reputation for taking on the most
difficult cases. Cases tried years ago,
before advances in DNA and other
forensic tests, can take years of
painstaking research and tedious hours of
sifting through trial transcripts, pouring
over every document, report, and phone
message, re-interviewing witnesses,
working with defense lawyers, retracing
the steps of police and prosecutors, and
gathering new evidence: all that is
required to free innocent men and women
from life sentences or death row.
Centurion Ministries differs from
later groups in that most of its cases call
for a great deal of legwork "in-the-field"
investigation. The Innocence Project, for
example, which was founded in 1992
focuses solely on exonerating prisoners
via DNA evidence. Its famed director,
lawyer Barry Scheck, describes
McCloskey and CM co-manager Kate
Germond as "a national resource."
JIM MCCLOSKEY:
HIS STORY
It was some time before James
McCloskey found his life's work, his
"calling." He was born in 1942 and raised
in Havertown, Pa, just ten miles west of
Philadelphia. His father worked in the
construction business started by
McCloskey's grandfather and his brother,
James and Matthew McCloskey. The
latter served the Kennedy administration
as Ambassador to Ireland in the 1960s.
The McCloskey Constmction Company
specialized in big projects and was said to
have changed the Philadelphia skyline
until hard times hit the business in the
1970s.
"I had a great childhood," recalls
McCloskey whose brother Richard was
born in 1944 and sister Lois in 1954. He
admits to having been somewhat
spoiled- he received a car when he was
16 years old- but his father "could hold
his feet to the fire when needed."
The McCloskeys assumed their
children would do well in school and go
on to college. They were also "churched"
as McCloskey puts it. They lived around
the comer from the Bethany Collegiate
Presbyterian Church and McCloskey
spent evety Sunday from 4th grade
(ABOVE) Smiling fa ces of innocence proved at last in photog raphs lining the stairwell of th e Centurion Ministries offices in Princeton.
5s 1 PR INCEToN MAGAZ INE
OCTOBER 2012 PRINCETON MAGAZ INE
I 59
through high school in Church activities.
By the time he was a student at Bucknell
University (Class of 1964), McCloskey
had had his fill. "I'm done with Church,"
he told his parents.
Looking back on his life ' s trajectory,
McCloskey laughs when he recalls that
his one, rather undeveloped, ambition was
to become a "successful international
business man." He joined the U.S. Navy
in hopes of traveling to Japan and spent a
year and a half there (having his heart
broken by a young Japanese woman.)
In the spring of 1966, with the war in
Vietnam starting, McCloskey decided he
wanted to get into the action, moved
partly by youthful drive and partly by the
ideal of doing his part to counter the
domino-effect of Communism. After
training at Camp Pendleton, he was sent
to Saigon as an advisor to the South
Vietnamese Naval Junk Fleet, the 50-foot
long wooden boats that were patrolling
the Mekong Delta. He won a Bronze Star
for valor but came to see the war as a
losing cause and the American
government's ambitions as misplaced, a
waste of lives and money.
Seeing false reporting, cruelty and
barbarity on both sides-eroded his faith in
government authority. "I grew up in
Vietnam, I saw the world and how it
works and I was disillusioned."
To further his dream of"intemational
business," he went to the American
Graduate School for International
Management in Arizona. Then, with no
job lined up but with tons of chutzpah, he
headed back to Japan where he landed a
job as a consultant for American
businesses. But after years of moving up
the corporate ladder in Japan and
Stateside, McCloskey concluded that
something was missing from his life. "I
felt empty. What did it matter ifl brought
in another big contract." Being "a
successful international businessman" left
McCloskey unfulfilled.
At the age of37, he astonished
friends and family by announcing his
intention to become an ordained minister.
He embarked on a three year master of
divinity at Princeton Theological Seminaty
(PTS); a path that would lead him in a
direction he could never have anticipated.
In his second year at the seminary,
McCloskey joined a program that took
him into the Trenton State Prison as a
student chaplain. Pastor Joseph Ravenell
(now retired) assigned McCloskey to the
maximum security section. There he met a
compelling personality: a man who
(ABOVE) Volunteer Fidel is Machado at work in the office of Centurion Ministri es in Princeton.
(OPPOSITE) "There's a lot of joy in this wo rk," says McCios~ey.
6o I PRINCETON MAGAZINE
ocTOBER 2012
persistently proclaimed his innocence.
"It's a great canard that all prisoners
maintain their im1ocence," says
McCloskey. On the contrary, he 's found
that the guilty are usually remorseful.
"Jorge De Los Santos was a Puerto Rican
out of the Trenton projects and there was
something about him that moved me,"
McCloskey says. But the rule was that one
was not to get involved. To do so might
jeopardize the program that Ravenell had
worked hard to achieve. Nonetheless,
McCloskey had to follow his feelings .
He took a year off from his studies in
order to prove De Los Santos's innocence,
moving out of the seminary and into
accommodation offered by a kindly
Princeton resident. A grant of $7,500 from
the National Presbyterian Church allowed
him to hire Defense lawyer Paul Casteleiro.
The trial transcripts revealed that the
conviction was based on the testimony of
one man, who claimed De Los Santos had
confessed to the crime while in prison.
The infmmant, named Delli Santi, just to
confuse things, had made a deal with the
district attorney's office that the jury
knew nothing about. Ultimately,
McCloskey heat·d Delli Santi admit that
his accusation was false.
In the beginning, McCloskey, was
parents, McCloskey founded Centurion
Ministries, named for the Roman soldier
who said of Christ on the cross: "Surely
this man was innocent." [Luke 23:47.]
LEGWORK AND
PERSIST ANCE
skeptical that an innocent person could
end up in prison. "That was my belief
system," he says. "I was wrong."
Why would Delli Santi lie? Because
it benefitted him to do so. A career
criminal, Delli Santi was always in
trouble with the law (with some 40
arrests). His way of getting reduced
sentences was to be a snitch, providing
"evidence" on others. "Neither Delli Santi
nor De Los Santos were saints," says
McCloskey with a rueful smile. "But
whi le Jorge was a drug addict, he wasn't a
murderer." De Los Santos spent almost 9
years of a life sentence until he was freed
by f01mer U.S. District Court Judge
Frederick B. Lacey who concluded that
62
I PRI NCETON MAGAZ IN E OCTOBER 2012
Delli Santi's testimony "reeked of
perjury" and the prosecutor knew it.
"This was my wake-up call and my
baptism," says McCloskey, who
remembers the words of a Newark Police
Lieutenant: "Everybody lies." Now
beyond disillusionment, McCloskey
argues that "it's wrong not to hold
prosecutors accountable for subverting
justice" as in the De Los Santos case, and
others, as McCloskey would discover.
De Los Santos was freed on July 26,
1983 (names and dates are burned into
McCloskey' s memory like family
anniversaries) . That same year, after
having completed his seminary studies
and with a gift of $10,000 from his
McCloskey was introduced to his next
cases by De Los Santos: two other
innocent men behind bars: Nate Walker
(anested 1974, Elizabeth, N.J., freed
1986) and Rene Santana (anested 1976,
Newark, N.J., freed 1986).
Scientific evidence overturned
Walker's 1976 conviction at a time when
DNA testing .was not widely available.
The officer that CM had to persuade to
re-open the case turned out to be Walker's
trial prosecutor and so took some
convincing. But to his credit, he agreed to
send a vaginal swab from the murder
victim to the FBI for testing. Blood type
can be determined from body secretions
such as sweat, saliva and semen. Of
course, even if the blood typed matched, it
didn't mean Walker was guilty, but if it
did not match, it was proof of innocence.
The blood type did not match. Two days
later, Nate Walker was a free man. His
release was widely covered in the media,
including features in People, Ebony, The
New York Times, and 60 Minutes .
"Walker's story took Centurion Ministries
national," says McCloskey who appeared
with Walker on The Today Show.
The exposure brought CM more
requests from prisoners claiming their
innocence (about 1,200 are received a
year). It also prompted Kate Germond,
who had just moved to Princeton from
California, to reach out to McCloskey. "I
thought he could use my help as I had a
strong background as a volunteer."
The two couldn't be more different.
McCloskey avoids reading murder
mysteries. Germond devours them.
McCloskey's focus is razor sharp and he' s
able to switch off when need be. Germond
admits to being more easily distracted by
thoughts of fixing the system and prison
refmm. Cases keep her awake at night.
Once she opened her home to an
exonerated prisoner when she discovered
he had nowhere else to go. John Kogut,
who falsely confessed after an
uninterrupted 18-hour coercive
intetTogation by police, was found
not-guilty at re-trial and freed in 2003. He
lived with Germond and her husband for
three months.
McCloskey and Gennond
complement each other. They share a
passion for what is right. Germond finds
that released prisoners open up to her
more easily about their fears and the post
traumatic stress disorder they all
inevitably suffer in varying degrees.
"When first released they are very happy,
of course, but it's hard for them to express
difficulties, they don't want to seem
ungrateful, especially to Jim, whom they
don't want to disappoint." Germond has
observed that those with strong family
support or strong religious beliefs do
better than those who don't. "But they all
usually get their sea legs within three
years and are working and managing their
lives," she reports. And while wrongly
convicted people are sometimes
compensated, there is a significant
percentage who are not. Compensation
laws vary from state to state and there
isn't always an obvious person to sue.
These are the cases brought to
successful closure. But outside
McCloskey's office is a board with the
names and dates of all the active cases of
falsely convicted people across the
nation serving life sentences: 23 at
present, in different stages of
development. As soon as one comes to
an end, the freed man (and it's men by
and large, and mostly black), will be
invited to Princeton to ceremoniously
remove his name from the board.
To date, Centurion Ministries has
freed 49 individuals who have collectively
served 956 years. Its efficient and
dedicated team has become skilled in
choosing where best to place its limited
resources. Cases where further
investigation reveals guilt rather than
innocence are rare but it does happen.
Roger Coleman's was an infamous case of
rape and murder in Virginia. McCloskey
worked four years on his behalf. "I
believed him innocent and was with him
when he died," he recalls. But, after
Coleman's execution, DNA testing
showed that his sperm was on the victim.
McCloskey immediately held a press
conference. "If we can't admit that we
sometimes get it wrong we are no better
than those working in the system who
refuse to admit their enors," he says.
A more difficult pill to swallow are
cases where CM is convinced of
innocence but unable to get a retrial. "The
hardest part of the job is when we put our
resources into working with/for someone
in whose innocence we believe but after
reinvestigating their case we don't have
enough evidence to get the case back to
court," says McCloskey. "We have to
leave them behind. Many people sit in
prisons wrongly convicted and we just
don't have the resources to help them all."
Each case is a living breathing
individual. CM spent the last 12 years
reinvestigating and litigating the case of
Bany Beach with the help of attorneys
Peter Camiel of Seattle and Teny Toavs
of Montana. Last year, Beach was
released after 29 years of false
imprisonment following a new trial granted
by Judge E. Wayne Phillips. The new trial
showed overwhelming new evidence of
Beach's innocence and incriminated four
other people as the killers.
Yet, in spite of the judge's decision,
Beach's name is still on CM's 'active'
board. Why? Because the Montana State
Attorney General decided to appeal the
judge's reversal of the conviction to the
Montana State Supreme Court. Until the
appeals process is done and dusted, Beach
remains unfinished business for CM.
"This case is another of the all too
frequent convictions of the innocent based
on a false confession extracted by law
enforcement in their zeal to convict
someone for odious violent crimes so
that they can look good to the public
and to each other," says McCloskey,
who acknowledges that CM is not
always welcomed by those who work in
the prosecutorial system.
It's not every case that is
adversarial, however. McCloskey cites a
District Attorney who helped free
Johnny Briscoe in 2006, after serving 24
years, on the basis of new DNA
evidence. "The prosecutor was open to
the possibility of his innocence whereas
in other cases, such as Beach, they've
fought us tooth and nail," says
Germond.
The case of David Alexander and
Hany Granger reads like a dime-store
novel: the two men were set free by the
Louisiana Parole Board after CM
argued their case with the help of a
former county sheriff and former deputy
sheriff. Evidence showed that both men
were innocent and that a corrupt sheriff,
rather than admit his mistakes, went so
far as to bury the murder weapon and to
convince the real killers, who had later
confessed to the crime when anested by
the FBI, to retract their confessions. A
10-year effort by McCloskey and his
team working with a receptive Parole
Board ultimately achieved justice for
Alexander and Granger, freed in 2006
after 30 years behind bars.
"There's a lot of heartache in this
work," says the redoubtable
McCloskey. "But there's a lot of joy,
especially when you bring home the
innocent to their mothers. I consider
myself a lucky man, lucky to have
stumbled into this calling." liJ
CENTURION MINISTRIES, INC.,
221 WITHERSPOON STREET,
PRINCETON , NJ 08542,
IS RECOGNIZED AS THE PIONEER
IN THIS FIELD FOR HAVING
SUCCESSFULLY REINVESTIGATED
AND FREED SCORES OF FACTUALLY
INNOCENT PEOPLE. ALTHOUGH ITS
NAME HAS ITS ORIGINS IN THE
CHRISTIAN FAITH, IT IS A SECULAR
AND INDEPENDENT NOT-FORPROFIT AGENCY THAT WORKS
AT NO COST TO THOSE IT SERVES,
BEARING ALL THE EXPENSES
NECESSARY FOR THE SUCCESSFUL
COMPLETION OF ITS MISSION.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON
CENTURION MIN ISTRIES, INC.,
CALL 609.921.0334, EMAIL;
INFO;aCENTURIONMINISTIRES.ORG,
OR VISIT:
WWW.CENTURIONMINISTRIES.ORG.
Volunteer Fidelis Machado and full-t ime staffer Janet Baxendale at work for Centurion
Ministries in Princeton.
OCTOBER 2012 PRINCETON MAGAZ INE
I 63