These are the sorts of evidence that led to our judgment that miscarriages of justice resulting in the execution of the innocent have occurred. To the best of our knowledge, no state or federal officials have ever acknow!l- edged that a wrongful execution has taken place in this century. As for the causes of the errors, our research has shown that the two most frequent are perjury by prosecution witnesses and mistaken eyewit- ness testimony. Accordingly, in Part I of this book, “Bearing False Witness,” we have devoted three chapters to cases where one or both of these causes are prominent factors, In Chapter 1, we look closely at the story of James Foster (Georgia, convicted and sentenced in 1956); the good-faith testimony of a woman who believed she saw him murder her husband sent him to death row. The case of Isidore Zimmerman (New York, 1937), told in Chapter 2, illustrates how false testimony deliber- ately fabricated by “witnesses” coached by the prosecution can convict an innocent man, Chapter 3 is the story of Randall Dale Adams (Texas, 1976); perjured testimony provided by none other than the real culprit led to Adams’s wrongful conviction,ers ted to jump the holdup men, once it appeared safe to do so. Newly arrived police officers had their hands full erying to contain the action. The two men Gallagher had rounded up in the kitchen were easily identified: Arthur “Hutch” Friedman and Dominick Guariglia. Their companion who had been standing watch at the door had disappeared, bur was apprehended a few hours later. With one police bullet in his chest and another in his arm, Joseph Harvey O"Loughlin delivered himself to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. There he became the third member of the holdup gang to be taken into custody, The next evening, April ro, Detective Foley died of his wounds. He was no longer merely an officer wounded in the line of duty, but a martyr to the cause of public safety. The desire to catch everyone in any way connected with the raid on the Boulevard Restaurant rose to a fever pitch. Michael Foley’s death, his fellow officers were determined, would not go unavenged. Before long, Guariglia talked. His rambling remarks alerted police to the possibility that several other men were involved. Philip “Sonny” Chaleff came under particular suspicion, and the police started looking for him. Five days later, hearing he was wanted, Chaletf saved the police further trouble by turning himself in. For three hours he protested his innocence, but he finally confessed to having been an unarmed participant in planning the raid. Insisting he had never been in the restaurant itself, he said he had been only the look-out man. The police became convinced that at least six men had had something to do with the holdup, though they still had only four under arrest and did not know who the others were. They proceeded to file murder charges, asa result of which the four known culprits—Friedman, Guariglia, ‘O'Loughlin, and Chaleff—were indicted on April 23, a scant two weeks: after the bungled robbery. The police continued working on the case, determined to find the rest of the gang so they could be arrested and indicted as well, ‘Within less than eight weeks, they had almost succeeded. They had the names of two more men who were clearly involved. Benjamin “Little Benny” Ertel was the fourth of those who had burst into the Boulevard Restaurant in the wee hours of April ro, and Isidore “Little Chemey™ Perlmutter (though he was not one of the actual armed gang) had been on hand for some of the planning sessions. With that, the police had worked out very nearly everything: who had helped to plan and orches- trate the attack on the Boulevard, who had actually been there, who had been armed—and who had shot Detective Foley. The only thing they didn’t know for sure was where the guns had come from. To make the case tight, they needed an “armorer.” Then the name of Isidore “Beansy” Zimmerman came up. The police were told that he,too, had been in on the planning sessions and that he knew about the guns. That was ali the authorities needed to conclude that Zimmerman was their man. For one thing, the police already knew him; they had picked Zimmerman up fourteen months earlier as a suspect in another murder case, Though they had released him in the end, they remembered Zimmerman; the decision to arrest him was an easy one. A second, modified indictment followed on June 21, which listed seven persons: the four named in the first indictment, the two not yet apprehended (Ertel and Perlmutter}, and Isidore Zimmerman, Actually, any of a number of feckless young men in the area near the Dutchman’s might have been plausible candidates for arrest. To be sure, Friedman and Guariglia had been caught in the act, as had been—to all intents and purposes—O"Loughlin. But the net that brought in Chaleff and Zimmerman, and the names of Perlmutter and Ertel, could easily have included others. It just happened not to. Crisscrossing paths created a tangled web around that group of unemployed and bored young men. ‘They and their friends appeared almost like interchangeable parts as they moved from one hangout to another: Muskin's Restaurant, Tobias Han- ‘over’s candy store, the Madison Bar and Grill, Artie’s Poolroom, the Scammel Street Boys’ Club, Louis Golden's Bar and Grill, Loew's movie house, an empty building here or there. Sometimes an off-duty cab would serve as.a meeting place for “friends” to whom some money or favor was likely owed. None of the young men stayed in any one place very long. All of them were generally looking for a little action. ‘The shifting cast of characters would make it difficult to determine later which of these friends had spent the afternoon or evening of April g, or the early hours or April 19, in each other's company. Abe Kirschner was a friend of Hutch Friedman's; so were Joseph Reibach and Isidore Meichenbaum. They had spent ume together on Apnl 9. Guariglia met ‘O'Loughlin and Ertel at one point, though everyone knew he didn’t like either of them, and then they had gone their separate ways. They met again later and ran into Perlmutter and Friedman, But in between? And prior to their first meeting? By the time it mattered, no one was able to recall with any certainty. Danny Rose. “Popeye” Cooperman. Salvatore Scalogna, Buddy Boyles, and Philip “Footke” Savoy. Each of them seemed to have had some connection with the guns used at the Dutchman's, but it was all rather vague, Furthermore, “Chester,” “Smitty,” and “Fat”—three other youths. from the neighborhood—had all spent time with one or another of the accused robbers at critical points just prior to the invasion of the Boulevard. But the police never showed an interest in these three, espe- cially once Guariglia, Friedman, and O’Loughlin—the clearly guilty parties—had all implicated Zimmerman, and Danny Rose had testifiedthat Zimmerman knew someone im the group had guns. When Rose said he remembered telling Beansy Zimmerman about the guns, that linked Zimmerman directly with the murder. It also fit neatly with the testimony of Popeye Cooperman, who said he had heard Zimmerman volunteering to ask Rose for guns. Cooperman and Rose admitted their own involve- ment in the crime, but the prosecution found it more convenient to believe their testimony about the others (especially Zimmerman) than to indict them, because that testimony gave the prosecutors what they needed: In Beansy Zimmerman, they had the armorer, the crucial supplier of the guns—one of which had been used to kill Detective Foley, Actual evidence that Zimmerman had played a role in obtaining the guns, apart from the testimony given under pressure by Rose and Cooperman, was nonexistent. But the police and prosecutors, sliding over the lack of confirmation from any other sources, chose to be content with what they had. They then further concluded (on what basis is not clear) that Zimmerman had planned the robbery. Everyone agreed that Zimmerman was not involved in the actual holdup in any direct way, and no one ever disputed his claim that be had not set foot in the Dutchman's that Friday night or Sarurday morning. His own account was that he had spent the evening with his girl friend, a lass with a “pretty little Irish face’ and a “cute lithe rurned-up nose.” But of course an alibi of that sort is not enough to make a person innocent of behind-the-scenes complicity. If Zimmerman knowingly pro- vided weapons for the felony, he was an “accessory before the fact and under the law just as guilty as the person who fired the bullet that killed Detective Michael Foley. And from the standpoint of the prosecutor, convicting the gun supplier was essential. Eager to have justice done on Foley’s behalf and in his memory, the prosecution wanted no obvious gaps in the case. The failure to take Lite Benny and Little Chemey into custody made it all the more important to have someone to label as the first link in the chain of events that led to Foley's murder. When the trial started, the defense table consisted of twelve attorneys who together summoned twenty-four witnesses. The prosecution called sixty. Not surprisingly, given the number of witnesses, testimony was confusing and sometimes contradictory; the trial lasted twenty days. The five defendants were tried together despite the fact that each had a different lawyer or team of lawyers. Zimmerman’s lawyer, James Murray, made a motion for a scparate trial for his client—so obviously in a different category from the others, as both Murray and Zimmerman saw it—but Judge Charles C. Nott, Jr., denied the motion. In so doing, he denied Zimmerman a chance to establish a separate identity for himseli. Instead, Zimmerman was repeatedly linked with the known culprits by virtue of his name always showing up on the list of defendants. Oddly,even so, only rarely during the trial did anyone mention Zimmerman explicitly. Mast of the time it was as if everyone had forgotten that he, too, was on trial—let alone trial for his life. (Years later, Zimmerman’s lawyer rightly called his client “the forgotten man."") It was almost as if Zimmerman’s name had been added to the list inadvertently, and no one had bothered to delete it; none of the damning evidence presented against the four known culprits—Friedman, Guariglia, O'Loughlin, and Cha- lefi—implicated Zimmerman. The truth was that he had essentially nothing to do with the defendants or the case. When the prosecution mentioned him along with the other defendants, however, the testimony against them was nonetheless applied to him bit by bit as well. ‘Three witnesses for the prosecution turned out to be particularly devastating for Zimmerman. He later described them as “millstones” around his neck. The prosecution handled these wimesses very effectively, however, and no one on the jury seemed to notice or care how unsavory these three characters were. ‘One of the millstones was Tobias Hanover, who owned and ran the candy shop that served as one of the meeting places for the young men in. the neighborhood. Simply by being in his store, he had been a witness {though not a very attentive one} co the comings and goings of several of the defendants on the evening of April 9. For business reasons, however, Hanover wanted nothing to de with the case, and during the trial his chief concern was getting out of the witness box and back to his shop as quickly as possible. Anxious lest he damage his own reputation or that of his business any further, he gave information under oath that he thought would get him off the hook. In the process he conveyed greater certainty than he actually had, “definitely” placing Beansy with the conspirators at some point during the evening of the crime. If Zimmer- man had been meeting with the known gunmen, as Hanover’s testimony implied, he must have been plotting with them. Vague and unreliable though Hanover’s recollections were, they became part of the record. Danny Rose and Popeye Cooperman were the other rwo millstones. Given that they could easily have been defendants themselves, there was some reason to be skeptical about theie motivation in testifying. When they appeared as witnesses for the prosecution, one might have wondered whether they had been granted immunity in exchange for their coopera- ton, In fact, Judge Nott acknowledged thar Cooperman was an accom- plice, though he stopped just short of saying the same about Rose. The lead attorney for the prosecution—Jacob J. Rosenblum—skillfully re- minded the jury, however, that the question of Rose’s or Cooperman's guilt was nor the issue before it. The jury's views on that subject, he pointed out, were ircelevant. What mattered was Rose's testimony that Zimmerman knew about the guns, and Cooperman’s claim that bothRose and Zimmerman were with him when he walked to the place where the guns were hidden. The upshot of the testimony from these two witnesses was that Zim- merman knew about the guns used in the holdup and that he was involved in supplying them to the actual robbers. The likelihood that Rose and Cooperman would say anything to keep themselves as far removed from suspicion as possible never came up at the trial. They had good reason ta ‘connect Zimmerman (or, for that matter, anyone they could) with the guns. Zimmerman’s lawyer tried to show how patently self-serving Coop- erman’s testimony was. He argued that che jury ought co give no credence to testimony from an acknowledged accomplice in the crime. The argu- ment was to no avail, On April 14, 1938, ten months after the filing of the second indictment, a jury convicted Isidore Zimmerman and his co-defendants of first- degree murder. Even before the sentencing eight days later, Zimmerman knew that all five of them were headed for the electric chair. Now, more than half a century later, no one can go back and sort out exactly what influenced the jury. Zimmerman’s testimony should have raised serious questions about the two contradictory statements the police had taken from him. After he had made the first statement, he was released. He was then brought in for questioning again, and made a second statement in which he admitted knowing where some guns were hidden {though be consistently denied handling the guns or knowing about a plan to use them in a felony). While his second statement was being taken, however, there were numerous interruptions, and some of what he said was modified before it was written down for his signature. When he testified in court later, Zimmerman said he had been told more than once to “answer that question in a different way.” And it was only after he had made the second statement the way the authorities wanted it that he was held in jail. The jury failed to grasp the significance of these irregularities or to see that the dubious testimony of an unwilling bystander like Hanover and two sleazy characters like Rose and Cooperman hardly constituted proof of Zimmerman’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The stories these three told, however, were the stories the prosecutor wanted the jury 10 hear—and the jury apparently believed them. Furthermore, the prosecu- tion succeeded in convincing the jury that most of the points the defense team brought up were mere “side shows.” They would be better described as violations of due process, for they included police brutality, perjured testimony, forced confessions, statements taken without benefit of wit- nesses and with no records kept, altered documents, and suppressed evidence. Any one of these flaws by itself, had the trial judge so ruled, might have