California Gov. Pete Wilson is considering the clemency request of death row inmate Jaturun “Jay” Siripongs, scheduled to die by lethal injection Nov. 17. Wilson has rejected the five previous clemency requests he’s faced in his eight years as governor. But Siripongs, a Thai national on California’s death row for murdering two people since 1982, may test his resolve.

Siripongs’ case, with an unknown accomplice still at large, appears to be the most compelling appeal for clemency in Wilson’s tenure. In the past several days, two of the jurors who convicted him have reversed themselves, saying they do not think he acted alone, and that an accomplice actually committed the murders. Additionally, the former warden of San Quentin prison, Daniel Vasquez, has asked Wilson to spare Siripongs after calling him a model prisoner.

But Wilson is said to be thinking about a 2000 presidential bid, and a 6-0 record on executions may be important to him. A likely Republican front-runner for the nomination, Texas Gov. George Bush Jr., recently refused to grant clemency to Carla Faye Tucker in a case in which even many death penalty advocates suggested clemency. Wilson can’t afford to look weak on capital punishment if he wants to take on Bush.

“It’s political. The Thai government has offered to take Jay, and Wilson won’t let them do that,” said Laura Magnani, a spokeswoman for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that opposes capital punishment. “With people who’ve committed crimes here, he’s asked for federal assistance to deport them. But when you get an actual case here he doesn’t do that.” Wilson spokesman Ron Lowe called the charge “sad” and said politics would have no bearing on the governor’s decision.

Living in the United States two years at the time, Siripongs took part in a robbery of the Panthai market in the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove on Dec. 15, 1981. During that robbery, Packovan “Pat” Wattaporn and Quach Nguyen, of Thai and Vietnamese background, respectively, were murdered, their bodies left where they fell and discovered several hours later. Caught trying to use Wattaporn’s credit card the next day, Siripongs was the only person arrested in the crime.

But the case against Siripongs has become complicated. The head of the Orange County public defender’s office, Carl Holmes, said in a letter to the governor last week that he believes his office provided an inadequate defense. And two jurors have signed statements attesting to doubts about Siripongs’ guilt and about the quality of defense he received.

“All of the jurors thought Mr. Siripongs could not have acted alone,” wrote juror Sylvia Twomey in a statement this week, adding she “had grave doubts that Mr. Siripongs was the killer.” Twomey, who now lives in Oregon, wrote that she had expected his sentence to be reduced to life in prison, and learned of Siripongs’ planned execution only when she was contacted by reporters.

Twomey said she was convinced to vote for death in part because her boss at California Polytechnic College in Pomona, where she worked, was concerned about paying her during her absence for the long trial. She also claimed that anti-immigrant bias in the jury room clouded the case.

“One male juror argued that we should not sentence Mr. Siripongs to prison because California’s citizens would then be required to pay to house him,” wrote Twomey. “The juror complained that Mr. Siripongs was an immigrant wrongfully taxing the American system. I told this juror that we could not sentence a man to die simply because he was an immigrant, but I do not think my words made an impact.”

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A second juror, Sandra Ferguson, also said in a statement that Siripongs received an inadequate defense, and asked he be resentenced to life in prison.

Orange Country Deputy District Attorney Jim Tanizaki, who is handling the case for the county, said the letters should be disregarded. “This juror is almost having buyer’s remorse. You have to wonder what is really behind it. If you have questions you don’t wait 15, 16 years. I don’t find much credibility in this.”

Tanizaki says he is confident Siripongs is guilty of murder. An accomplice drove Siripongs from the crime, argues Tanizaki. “It’s always been the opinion that there was an accomplice. It appears that whoever sat in the driver’s side didn’t bleed or didn’t have blood,” while Siripongs had wounds on his hands, he said. Siripongs’ lawyers describe the injuries as defensive wounds, and argue Siripongs attempted to stop the crime.

Defense papers filed with appeals in the case claim unidentified fingerprints, hair and blood were discovered at the crime scene. They suggest several possible suspects, including the sister of Siripongs’ girlfriend and a man suspected of murder in Thailand. Siripongs has refused to name his accomplice, a reluctance his lawyers claim is based on his Buddhist background.

“He believes if you do evil, you must do good,” said his current lawyer, Linda Schilling. Naming his accomplices would compound his guilt, she says, even if it might exonerate him. “He believes punishment comes in the next life.” Schilling contends the initial defense attorney, James Spellman, was too busy running for Congress to pay attention to the case.

“This assignment is crazy,” wrote Spellman in a memo to his supervisor at the time. “I have two 187s [murder cases] going on in Aug — one of ‘em a Spec Circs [special circumstances] — How the hell am I to adequately prepare on this case or for that matter on my dozen or so other cases?” Spellman has not commented on the case.

Siripongs’ case has also brought to light a widespread but little-known section of the penal codes, the felony murder rule, applied in 37 states, according to Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. The rule allows murderers’ accomplices to be charged and sentenced as if they were the actual murderers in many situations. That complex law, and its guilt-by-association overtones, may ultimately have contributed to Siripongs’ death sentence.

At the time of the trial, 1982, California allowed capital punishment for accomplices convicted of murder under the rule. Whether or not he was the killer, simply proving Siripongs’ involvement in the robbery would have been sufficient to qualify him for capital punishment, according to Ira Robbins, a criminal law expert at American University in Washington.

But the law soon changed. In 1983, the California Supreme Court “clarified” its felony murder rule to make life without parole the stiffest sentence for accomplices. The change, had it happened a year earlier, may have altered Siripongs’ lawyers’ tactics. But with the felony murder rule hanging over their head, it appears Siripongs’ lawyers tried to prove he had nothing to do with the crime at all.

“If that was the law 10 months earlier, then Siripongs’ lawyers wouldn’t have gone for an all-or-nothing defense,” said San Francisco attorney Andrew Love, part of the legal team that defended the last person killed on California’s death row, Thomas Thompson, executed in July.

Siripongs’ Thai background may also place Wilson, a strong capital punishment advocate, into the middle of an issue extending beyond California, to at least Washington and perhaps as far as Bangkok.

Both the Thai foreign ministry and Thailand’s ambassador to the United States have written Wilson seeking Siripongs’ release and offering to remove him to Thailand and imprison him there, according to Wilson’s office. Also, Siripongs was not offered an opportunity to consult with the Thai consulate after his arrest, a right normally guaranteed under the Vienna Convention, an international agreement that in part establishes terms for criminal cases involving foreign nationals. Thailand, however, is not a signatory to the convention.

A similar case in Virginia two years ago, involving the death sentence of a Paraguayan citizen, led to an international incident. In that case, the man was executed at the insistence of Virginia Gov. Jim Gillmore, over the protest of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the Hague and Paraguayan officials. A Honduran man was executed in Arizona the following week.

The Thai requests are receiving no special consideration, according to the governor’s office.

“The question is, if it wasn’t him, was there enough evidence to justify capital punishment,” said criminal law expert Frank Zimring, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law. “And it doesn’t appear that there is.” He does not believe Wilson will commute Siripongs’ sentence, however.

“The quality of mercy in California is more than strained,” said Zimring. “If the governor grants mercy, they’re going to have to find him a pen.”

In May 1994, an assistant editor at Harper’s magazine called me in San Francisco to ask if I wanted to intern at the magazine that summer. This came as somewhat of a shock. I’d been rejected for the same internship two months prior.

In the competition for one of the four internships available, the assistant editor explained, I had apparently come in a close fifth. Fortune looked down on me when one of the lucky four opted to take a paid position at New York Newsday. His space was mine, the editor said, if I agreed to move on short notice back to Manhattan, a city I’d left just two months prior, homesick for California, tired of constant noise and fed up with crummy, overpriced apartments.

WASHINGTON —
At about noon EST yesterday, former drug enforcement agent Celerino Castillo III went before news cameras at the Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. hoping to raise an old story to new heights. Castillo claimed that the Nicaraguan Contra army, assisted by the C.I.A., ran cocaine to the United States out of a U.S. Government airstrip at Ilo Pango, El Salvador in 1985. Castillo’s statements supported San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb’s recent reports that drugs from the Contras were funneled to street gangs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, fueling the crack plague and inner-city street wars of the past 10 years.
The press greeted Castillo’s claims with considerable skepticism, and Castillo’s performance did little to change that. Castillo produced little evidence to support his allegations. He promised “documented” evidence of links between Contra drugs and C.I.A. — names and dates and tail numbers of actual smuggler planes — but produced only one page of xeroxed notes. When pressed by a local D.C.-area television reporter for the most damning piece of evidence he had, Castillo responded that he was going to withhold the information until he was convinced the press was “serious” about following the story. The room was already packed.
Nor did the people Castillo chose to appear with — aging comedian/amateur nutritionist Dick Gregory, who cracked jokes at points throughout the proceedings, and John Newman, a University of Maryland professor best known for his books on the Kennedy assassination — improve his credibility. Gregory and Newman did make some points apparently worth investigation — particularly that Senate hearings in the late ’80s on the Contra-drug connection had turned up worrisome evidence, and that no one has yet explained how tons of expensive cocaine and arsenals of weapons suddenly showed up in some of America’s poorest neighborhoods over the course of a few months in 1985. But Castillo might as well have invited Oliver Stone, as far as the effect on much of the assembled media went.
A reporter from the Washington Post finally put a stop to the dancing around, demanding forcefully that Castillo give specific names and dates. This indeed resulted in a few concrete answers, with the room’s audience suddenly going all scribbly. Castillo claimed that in 1985, the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador had told him to stop investigating the drug smuggling at Ilo Pango, and said the number two man in the DEA at the time had knowingly ignored Castillo’s cables regarding the smuggling. Iran/Contra investigators failed to contact DEA agents on the ground during their inquiries into drug-running attached to the Iran/Contra events, he added. Again, reporters muttered that they were “not convinced,” and that “all we have is a sheet of notes and that’s it.”
The Mercury News stories also came under critical scrutiny. Some journalists raised questions about some of Webb’s sources, in particular “Freeway” Rick Ross, a currently incarcerated L.A. drug lord. Ross, a serious criminal who likely has his own agenda, possesses dubious credibility as a source with which to discredit the entire C.I.A.
In the face of any serious allegation, a healthy dose of press skepticism is justified. But the press seems to apply its skepticism unevenly. In other recent scandals, in particular those involving President Clinton, the press has been ready and willing to blow the story sky high, even though the sources may be equally dubious. When Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones accused the President of sexual improprieties, Clinton was guilty until proven innocent. The same holds true for Whitewater.
Seen in this perspective, the press’ nudge-nudge attitude towards the CIA-crack story seems more than a little inconsistent. On the credibility of Ross: Who in this sort of story isn’t a criminal, and isn’t out for themselves? And is Castillo any less credible than a prostitute who was paid for her story or a longtime enemy of the accused, as in the Dick Morris and Whitewater scandals?
So far, the story has received comparatively little press play. (See last Friday’s Newsreal for more on the media’s handling of the story.) “We’ve had media interest, but nothing to the level that we would have expected given the gravity of the charges,” said Joseph Lee, a legislative assistant for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who represents the district in South-Central Los Angeles and is researching Castillo’s allegations. Senator John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) office reported receiving “many phone calls” for transcripts of the Contra/drug hearings run by Kerry in the late ’80s, though an assistant in the office added that Salon’s call was “the first call today” following Castillo’s press conference.
In addition to Rep. Waters, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, also California Democrats, have called for hearings to investigate the Mercury News evidence. Those hearings have been granted though not yet scheduled.
It will be interesting to see whether those hearings are covered as fully as the Whitewater ones. The line between fair coverage and irresponsible sensationalism can be hard to draw, particularly when one is talking about stories full of hatred, lies and, in Castillo’s case, high corruption with genocidal overtones: the claim is that the C.I.A. conspired to start a drug war in the inner city, and succeeded.
It may be our better nature that leads us to consider such charges beyond possibility. And it may be fair professionalism to question its messengers. But amid the half-smiles at the press conference yesterday was enough lingering suspicion for the proceedings to make the evening news. Castillo seemed worth a real look and a fair hearing in the public discourse, fully critical but hopefully less arch than the one greeting him yesterday. As Washington Post columnist William Raspberry noted yesterday morning, no one believed Watergate at first either.