Vinson’s Variety” Death penalty case filled with holes
An upcoming death sentence, an electrocution, scheduled to be carried out April 10, cracks the door and allows a ray of light to enter into and illuminate what, arguably, is a dark and murky area of Tennessee: due process of the law verses undue process of the law.
I am referring to Tennessee prisoner Abu-Ali Abdur?Rahman (also spelled Rah’man), formerly known as James Lee Jones, an African-American accused of stabbing to death an alleged drug dealer and nearly stabbing to death the drug dealer’s girlfriend in Nashville in 1986. As mentioned, Rahman is scheduled to be executed April 10. While incarcerated, Jones was converted to the Islamic faith, thus the change in name, as is customary.
Concerning that 1986 crime/murder, there was an accomplice with Rahman. Reportedly, the two, both then residents of Nashville, had become members of an unsanctioned militia-type group, who trained for the purpose of, and supposedly were committed to, helping rid their neighborhood of society’s bad elements, in this case, drug dealers.
Rahman and the accomplice went to the home of a reputed, local drug dealer, Patrick Daniels. Also present that day was Daniels? girlfriend, Norma Jean Norman. When the mayhem ended, Daniels was dead from stab wounds, and Norman was left critically injured, a butcher knife still stuck in her back. Ultimately, the accomplice, himself, a questionable character, turned state’s evidence, fingering Rahman as the one who committed the stabbings, while denying doing any actual stabbing, himself.
Without question, Rahman’s recorded testimonies, at the very least, are contradictory: “I’m going to submit to the fact that I am the individual that committed these particular felonies or assaults upon these two people. But I don’t remember, you know,” testified Rahman/Jones.
Taking into account what has been printed, and whether Rahman should be executed, I find the following circumstances particularly troublesome:
• State technicians found no blood on the coat Jones [Rahman] allegedly wore during the bloody crime.
• The jury did not hear about Rahman’s life history, which purportedly included: parental sexual abuse as a child; many years spent in penal institutions where he was repeatedly raped, homosexually; stabbing to death, in prison in 1972, a fellow “inmate after an argument about pressured gay sex,” supposedly suffering “hysterical blackouts” and being “treated with psychotic medicine.”
• Original defense attorneys for Rahman now admit they could have done a much better job defending him.
• Original prosecutor of Rahman has been accused by Rahman’s current defense of illustrating, “A pattern of withholding evidence and misleading judges.”
• Original prosecutor purportedly misled the jury by claiming that Rahman’s mentioned 1972 stabbing death of a fellow inmate was “gang- and drug-related,” as opposed to “pressured gay sex.” A juror stated the 1972 conviction – rather, the original prosecutor’s misleading presentation of that 1972 conviction – “swayed me to vote for death.”
Current Davidson County District Attorney General Torry Johnson was quoted as commenting: “What happens in these cases is an exercise in hindsight. It is up to the [appeals] court to say, “Would that have made a difference or is that important?”
Consider Davidson County District Attorney General Johnson’s “thats” to be those circumstances, I find particularly troublesome about the Rahman case. Would they have made a difference? Are they important? As attorneys so often demand in court, when cross-examining, please answer each of the latter two questions with either, and only, a yes or a no.
It will prove interesting to see whether Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist intervenes, or allows Rahman’s execution to take place as scheduled.
(Mike Vinson is a Warren County columnist. His e-mail is: [email protected].)