Opinion: 'View from America', The Guardian

Friday, November 11, 2005

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How to Max up death row tale: by James Silver

Ohio is disparagingly known to some as one of the "fly-over states" - one best enjoyed from 35,000 feet - but even by its standards the small town of Mansfield, with its largely pre-fabricated buildings, is a drab and dreary place. Its only real significance is that it is home to Mansfield Correctional Institution, which provided the backdrop for the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Among the state's 200-odd death row prisoners incarcerated there, behind rolls of razor wire and a so-called "death zone" where guards can shoot to kill, is Scottish-born Kenny Richey.

Richey, 41, has been on death row since 1986 for an arson attack which left a two-year-old-girl dead. I went to interview him nearly three years ago for the BBC's 5 Live Report and the Observer, and it is impossible to forget the image of him shuffling painfully through the long corridors on death row shackled at the wrists and ankles. Eleven years ago, he came within an hour of the electric chair - the use of which has since been abolished by the state - but he got a last-minute reprieve.

State prosecutors successfully argued that on the night of June 30 1986, Richey, in a drink-fuelled fury, started a fire in an apartment to kill his ex-girlfriend, believing she was sleeping with her new lover in the apartment below. Her daughter, who was home alone, died in the blaze. Richey was the only suspect and was charged with arson, aggravated murder and child endangerment. The man I met that day simmered with hate and anger. "The rage," he told me, "just builds up in you until you are about ready to explode." Richey, whose mental and physical health have deteriorated as 13 dates were set for his execution and then cancelled after appeals, certainly has cause to be angry. Over the years the case against him - always flawed - has unravelled, leading Amnesty International to describe his as "the most compelling case of innocence we have come across on America's death row".

The fact that more than 800 articles have been written about Richey's plight is due to the persistence of anti-death penalty group Reprieve UK, including its founder Clive Stafford- Smith, and Richey's "fiancée", Karen Torley of Cambuslang, Lanarkshire. Torley has made stirring up media interest in his case her life's work. Indeed it is reported to have wrecked her marriage. A former death row letter-writer who fell in long-distance love with Richey, Torley has shown an instinctive grasp of how to grab headlines combined with an almost pathological desire to speak to the press. What was essentially a Scottish story has gradually turned into one that all the nationals and the broadcasters could not ignore.

In recent weeks Richey's tale has taken more twists than a M Night Shyamalan movie script. In January his conviction was finally overturned by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeal, which ruled that the state of Ohio must either release him or retry his case within 90 days. The euphoria quickly evaporated a few days ago when it emerged that the state had resolved to retry him after all. Then there were reports - described to me as "inaccurate" by Richey's Boston-based lawyer, Ken Parsigian - that a new witness, who supposedly heard the Scot confess to the crime, had stepped forward.

The media onslaught has finally proved too much for Torley, which is why the services of Max Clifford have been retained to handle the feeding-frenzy if and when Richey prevails at the retrial. Clifford confirms that he has already been approached by at least six independent TV production companies, two film companies, the BBC, ITN and Sky for access to Richey. He has also fielded calls from US networks ABC and CBS.

The state is in no hurry to set a date for the retrial, which Parsigian argues should occur within the 90 days. Given the drawn-out history of this case, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Richey will not be facing the cameras for a while yet.

Newspapers try to get streets ahead of their rivals

You only have to step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal or Pennsylvania Station in the Manhattan rush hour to be engulfed by sharp-elbowed newspaper hawkers or "newsies" attempting to hand you a free commuter paper. Hawkers for amNew York, which launched in October 2003, are jostling for business with Metro International's New York edition of Metro, which hit the streets seven months later, as the race to attract newspaper-resistant 18-34 year olds - a story all too familiar to industry observers here - turns increasingly fractious.

The ubiquity of the freesheets at one end of the market and the continuing dominance of the New York Times, which has an average weekday circula tion of 1.14 million, and the Wall Street Journal at the other, has put the squeeze on the mid-market tabloids, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and the New York Daily News.

Now the sellers for those titles are scrapping for sidewalk space with their rivals. The loss-making Post, which has a circulation of 678, 086, sells for just 25 cents (about 14p) and has narrowed the gap with the Daily News, which sells a weekday average of 735,536, and, with a cover price of 50 cents, makes a small profit. But both papers are feeling the heat.

A Post insider reveals that the Daily News is fighting Murdoch by slashing its cover price at select commuter locations in the afternoon by 50%. "They hire hawkers in the late after noon to catch people travelling home and it's a tactic that the New York Times is using on the quiet too."

The most worrying factor in the downward circulation trend is that most newspaper readers are ageing, and they are not being replaced.

Hence the last-ditch scramble into the 20- and 30-something commuter market. Earlier this year the New York Times bought a 49% share in the free-sheet Metro Boston, while last month it launched a free weekly commuter tabloid in New York City. Metro International has titles in Boston and Philadelphia, while in Washington DC, the Washington Post has launched Express. These may be tough times for papers, but hawkers are enjoying something of a golden age.

Weighing up the television anchors

In a week in which the professionalism of TV broadcasters has been much in evidence in Britain, the debate over whether newsreading requires anything more than the most basic of journalistic skills has reached the US.

John Humphrys claimed his toddler son could present the headlines just as well as those who are paid millions to do it, and the launch issue of Radar magazine, a US satirical glossy which purports to cover "Pop, Politics, Gossip, Glamour", would seem to support his thesis.

In an exquisitely bitchy piece entitled TV's Dumbest Anchors, the magazine - which claims to have interviewed "more than 40 agents, on air personalities and producers from every national TV news division" - recounts a story from the early days of CNN in which two anchors somehow got their teleprompter scripts muddled up, leading one to sign off at the end of the newscast with the other's name. Another network news anchor is dismissed by a producer as "so dumb she can't even read off a teleprompter", while a staffer says of a top CNN name: "Everything has to be scripted for her. She's the dumbest person I have ever met."

But when it comes to cruelty, male hosts win hands down. Another CNN anchor allegedly once "humiliated a producer by getting down on his hands and knees saying, 'I'm tired of looking down on you all the time. I'd like to look up to you for a change'."

(The Guardian, November 11th 2005)

Posted by James Silver - On Friday, November 11, 2005

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