Community
college begins two-day forum discussing death penalty.
By Tom Donahue
/ The Times Herald
OLEAN – In the American criminal justice system, money talks and
people to have it walk away from the death penalty, says Shirley Dicks.
Hers
was once “just like any family – I had a husband, four kids, a dog, a new
home, “ Mrs. Dicks said Wednesday in a talk at Jamestown Community College
that opened a two-day forum on the death penalty.
Twenty
years ago, however, the Dicks family entered what she calls “an absolute
hell” when 19-year-old Jeffrey, the oldest son, was convicted of murdering a
Tennessee shop owner and sentenced to death.
He remains on Tennessee’s death row and is about to exhaust his last
appeal.
Her son is innocent, Mrs. Dicks said, a victim of betrayed trust in a
justice system that rewards the rich and convicts the poor.
Her son had been with a 19-year-old
man he had known for only three weeks when the man robbed and murdered the owner
of the used clothing store. Jeffrey
was waiting outside in a car for his new friend, known as “Chief” unaware of
what was happening inside the store, Mrs. Dicks said.
Fearing
that “Southern Justice” might wrongly target her son, Mrs. Dicks helped him
and his new wife move from Tennessee, “hoping they’d never connect Jeff to
the crime,”
“He
would later return to Tennessee to turn himself in, to to the right thing,”
Shirley said. “When he went
in to tell the truth, however, he went alone, without an attorney.
We didn’t know that’s what you’re supposed to do.,” she said.
Her
son, like Chief, would be charged with first-degree murder.
Shirley sold their home and all they had, but it wasn’t enough to get
the legal help needed to win a capital murder case. When Chief was sentenced to death, Mrs Dicks said she feared
the same fate awaited her son.
“I
couldn’t raise the kind of money needed,” she said.
“I kept thinking I could save my son if I had money, but I didn’t
have it.”
She
was crazy with the idea to save her boy. She
plotted a jailbreak, only to have the plan discovered and her son moved to a
secure prison. She wrote “hot”
checks to get cash, a scheme that, after the trial resulted in her taking her
eleven year old son Trevor and her one year old granddaughter she adopted and
went on the run.
“I
wish I had done things differently,” Mrs. Dicks said, “but I didn’t know
that innocent people are convicted all the time.”
Since 1900, more than 400 people sentenced to death have later been found
to be innocent, she said. Twenty-five
innocent people have been put to death in that time.
Each year, 22,000 defendants are convicted of murder and about 200 are sent to death row. “It’s like a lottery,” she said, “the whole system is wrong.”
Mrs.
Dicks has written several books on American justice and the death penalty and
has appeared on TV talk shows. She
continues to search for an attorney who will take her son’s case through the
last door open to them in the federal appeals process.
Her
son Trevor who also spoke Wednesday is often at her side.
“We was a happy family, a normal family,” Trevor Said.
“We believed in the justice system, apple pie and all that.
At the age of 11, I woke up to discover that it just wasn’t so.”
Two
years later Trevor was the victim of a mugging.
Mrs. Dicks continues to fight for her son and an end to the death
penalty. “I’ve written to
everyone for help,” She says, “I’ve written to the President, singers and
movie stars. About the only thing
she has done for fun in the past twenty years is to climb aboard a motorcycle
and learn to ride at the age of fifty-seven.
“For
a few minutes it lets me forget that the state of Tennessee wants to put my son
in a chair and fry him.