An Interview With Mark Fuhrman
An Interview with Mark Fuhrman – Author of “Death and Justice” by the late Bill Bickel – former Managing Editor of Crime, Justice and America magazine. Originally published in 2004 and reposted with permission from Crime, Justice and America magazine
In 2001, Oklahoma led the United States with 21 executions, 13 of which were prosecuted by Bob Macy, Oklahoma County’s district attorney (with the support of Joyce Gilchrist, director of the Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab, whose findings invariably supported whatever Macy needed). When Mark Fuhrman, former LAPD detective and now a writer and talk show host, heard from an on-air guest that the state was “executing people; we don’t know if they’re innocent or guilty”, he was skeptical – but traveled to Oklahoma to see for himself.
Despite the impression you might get from ads for the book (and even the book jacket), Fuhrman’s Death and Justice: An Exposé of Oklahoma’s Death Row Machine is not a blanket condemnation of the death penalty – and in fact, Fuhrman didn’t undergo a conversion into a death penalty opponent. He does, however, tell the often-harrowing story of an “old boy’s network” operating for many years in Oklahoma, apparently with the sole purpose of convicting, condemning and executing as many suspects as possible – doubts about their actual guilt notwithstanding.
I spoke with Mr. Fuhrman in January, a couple of weeks before Michael Ross was scheduled to be executed in Connecticut…
On the Death Penalty as deterrence:
When we look at statistics, the death penalty is about revenge once they’re caught. I’ve never heard, in 20 years in law enforcement, a guy sitting across from me on a murder or a gang homicide or a bank or anything else, say I’m really afraid of the death penalty, I’m afraid of getting killed for this, I’ll never do anything like this again. Nor have I ever heard anybody on the street, when I’m talking to them, bring up the death penalty. They really just don’t give a shit. They’re criminals. They’re like a little kid who wants a cookie. They don’t care. So it’s not a deterrent. And Joe Citizen, he doesn’t care, he just wants a pound of flesh. And in some regards, he doesn’t care how he gets it.
So the fact that a certain number of innocent people might be executed…?
I don’t think the public gives it much thought. As far as they’re concerned, we’re talking about people who come from another planet. They might as well be aliens who landed at Area 52 as far as they’re concerned. They’re not even people to them.
If you were called to serve on a jury, for a murder case, would you consider yourself “death qualified”?
Oh, absolutely. But I’d also be brave enough to say “Hey, look, there are absolutely so many areas in this case that haven’t been addressed” and I’d be able to see that you don’t skip from A to D – you know, where’s B and C? – and in my book, a lot of those cases that I expected these guys to do their job right, they skipped from A to D and they cherry-picked the evidence and it’s not too hard to do that if you want to; but when you’re a professional, if you don’t have the guy, you don’t have the guy.
So yeah, I could be death qualified, because I think the scrutiny that I would lay on it is, “This is the guy, without a doubt, absolutely, dead-bang sure,” and then you look at his crime. You look at how he committed it. If he’s lying in wait, premeditating, raping children and women and killing them, then great, put him to death, I have absolutely no qualms about that. If they want me to do it, I’ll take them out behind the jail, I’ll do it with a claw hammer. But… Can we just get the right guy?
Executing Michael Ross, then, you have no problem with?
Michael Ross has no problem with it. You know, it’s like Michael Skakel in the Greenwich case. People go “How do you know Michael Skakel did it?” I say, “Michael Skakel thinks he did it.” So I think I’m on pretty safe ground here.
It’s the same thing with any death row inmate who wants to die. He already knows he committed the crime. The guys that didn’t commit the crime don’t say, “Kill me.” So Michael Ross, sure, put him to death.
The thing is, Michael Ross, he’s probably really going to save his life by doing this. If he scratched and just begged and got on his knees, they’d probably kill him. They probably won’t kill him, because he’s kind of put it in their face that now he’s in power and the Legislature and the Governor are not. He’s saying “Kill me, come on, let’s see if you have the balls to do it,” you know, like a guy who puts a gun to his head and says, “Let’s see you come over here and squeeze the trigger.”
So this is what he’s doing. He’s just manipulating the system. I mean, he’s a serial killer. His whole life is stalking people, grooming them, and then killing him. That’s what he does. That’s what he’s doing to the state government in Connecticut, he’s manipulating them and controlling them.
So his fight to be allowed to die is a deliberate manipulation on his part?
Oh, absolutely. A serial killer is manipulating everything in his world from the moment he gets up in the morning until the moment he goes to bed.
See, I didn’t get that impression. Not like Timothy McVeigh. I thought McVeigh was controlling the media and enjoying himself way too much.
So is Michael Ross. And the way that he describes “I don’t want to go into the courtroom and see the girl’s mother on the stand, it’s all I see”, that’s all manipulation. It’s the requisite tears, it’s manipulation, it’s the requisite tears serial killers have at sentencing. It’s what they do. They’re making people feel bad for their revenge.
Very high-stakes poker this man is playing
Well, he knows he’s going to die anyway. I mean, 1987… How long is he going to be on Death Row? Are we going to kill him by “old age” injection?
You know, something I’ve been wondering about, maybe you have some insight on it having been in California law enforcement: California’s death penalty… Why do people make such a big deal about it? I mean a few years ago, Westerfield was ready to lead police to Danielle’s body, essentially pleading guilty to murdering her, in exchange for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty [the deal fell through when Danielle’s body was found]. But… We’re not talking about Texas. He’s not going to live to be executed. I did the math, and at the rate people are being executed in California, Scott Peterson won’t be executed until the 31st century.
Oh, I expect to be dead long before he’s executed.
Seriously… at the present rate, we’re talking about over one thousand years. So is there something I’m missing about the California death penalty that would make Westerfield willing to plead guilty to avoid it?
Some people say you’re treated better in Death Row, but they’re isolated more, so if you’ve committed the crime, and now you have to take it out of our way of thinking, you have to put it in their way of thinking, you say “Okay, I’m burned on this. I’m going down. So now what’s my life going to be?” If they get death, they’re going to be in Death Row. And if they’re in Death Row, then they’ve got X amount of people they’re with, and security’s higher, they have nothing to lose, their associations and social life are limited; so if they want to look at what it’s like to have life without possibility of parole, they’ll have more freedom, they’ll probably be able to have a prison job, they’ll have an exercise yard, they’ll get to play handball. It sounds bizarre that you can talk about it on this level, but there you are.
And then there’s the attorneys, they don’t want to do a death row case. You saw in Death and Justice, the expertise that is needed for all the appeals, and all the different law that’s involved, attorneys don’t want to do that, it’s too much work.
I’m looking at Westerfield’s case now… You’re a paunchy, middle-aged white guy, who’s abducted and sexually molested and murdered a 7-year-old girl … I would personally want to be in isolation. I mean, his life can’t be looking very good in the general population.
You’re right. And to take it on another level, if I were handling the case, as a detective, I’d go “Why put the standard on the jury, he’ll get the death penalty in the general population anyway, so let’s give him life without [parole], and send him in and let him be with other convicts who have 7-year-olds on the outside, he’ll die for a carton of cigarettes.
In California, though, the standard to seek the death penalty, at least when I was a detective, is very high. Forget the courts and forget the juries, and forget the public… we did not abuse it, we did not just seek the death penalty every time, because every gang homicide that’s more than one victim is an aggravated homicide, every time two people die in a robbery, it’s an aggravated homicide. Rarely do they seek the death penalty. Because it just takes a burden of proof that goes beyond the crime. It goes beyond aggravating circumstances, it goes beyond a death qualified jury. Then you’ve got a double trial, the sentencing, appeals, it goes on and on, and everybody knows “My god, it’ll be 22 years before he’s even up for it.”
What about the Peterson case where, okay, everybody knows he’s guilty, but you’re still putting somebody on Death Row for what in the end is circumstantial evidence?
It’s always circumstantial evidence.
But sometimes you have witnesses, physical proof, a motive that made sense… something concrete you can point to.
Oh, I think the motive made absolute sense. Two thousand women died at the hands of their boyfriends or husbands while we were watching the Peterson trial for two years.
But you can’t convict somebody based on statistics.
What I’m saying is, it’s an example of what goes on in this country each and every week.
Granted. But they’re still putting a man on Death Row based on very little evidence, mostly because they didn’t like the guy.
Oh, there was plenty of real evidence, and most of it came from his own mouth. People don’t lie about what they’re fishing for. They don’t lie; they don’t change their story about the last time, the last hour, the last thing they saw when they left home. They don’t lie about making anchors, they don’t lie about laying concrete in their driveways, they don’t lie about a hair on the pliers. It’s like I said on Fox [News Network] about there being no physical evidence, there’s Laci’s hair on a pair of needlenose pliers, in the boat, in a tacklebox, on a boat Laci didn’t even know Scott owned. I said, “Okay, every woman watching this show, I want you to go out to the garage to the toolbox, and I want you to pull out a pair of needlenose pliers, and I want somebody to call in and tell me your hair is on it.” That is powerful evidence. The fact that he makes five anchors and four are missing. Powerful evidence. And circumstantial, yes. And the worst kind of evidence is eyewitness, especially if they don’t know the person.
I think the Peterson case was a solid case, the detectives made the case. One guy drove three hours on Christmas Eve, from a family vacation, because an officer at the scene said this isn’t a missing, this is a homicide, you’ve got to come out.
And that’s what makes a case because had the detective waited until after the holiday, Peterson would have gotten his shit together and the house would have cleaned up the boat probably would have been cleaned up better, everything.
That was a solid case, but see, America wants to pick it apart. They see a case and they expect certain things. They watch CSI and all these other bullshit shows on TV, and that’s what they expect, and that isn’t reality. Scott Peterson would have been convicted even without Amber Frey.
But maybe not without his lawyer.
Ha. No, Mark Geragos really didn’t do him much good, did he?
I wrote a day after the opening statements, “This guy’s going to be convicted.” Because Geragos got up there and said, “I promise I’m going to prove to you that Laci lived until March,” and I’m thinking, “Why’s this guy making promises about what the defense is going to prove?” My 11-year-old knew that was wrong.
People say Geragos is one of the best criminal attorneys in America, but I’ll tell you he’s probably average at best.
Has he ever won a case?
I kind of wonder; but I think the Peterson case will probably be his last one, at least his last one on TV, and he will revert to mediocre cases out of the media, because he’s a joke now. He hasn’t won anything. And he got out of the [Michael] Jackson case because he knew that was going to be a loser. There’s somebody who should get the death penalty, Michael Jackson. WE wouldn’t be killing a human being, though; he’s an alien.
I’m not sure there’s enough of the original body to count, though.
Okay, it’ll be half a death penalty.
One last thing I have to ask, and I know it’s irrelevant to everything else, but I have to ask it: In your book, you mention that McAlester Prison [in Oklahoma] has a rodeo? I’m an eastern boy, so maybe this makes sense out there, but they have a rodeo? In a prison?
Yes, and in fact a lot of prisons in the west do. A lot of them do in Texas, I think they have one in Arizona, Montana, in Idaho. They have livestock there, the prisoners help take care of them, and they have rodeos, they invite other people in. Rodeo’s a big deal out here.
The prisoners ride in the rodeos?
Yeah, the prisoners ride.
I can just see one of these escape movies, this prisoner riding out on a bronco. I assume they take precautions against something like that.
There already was a movie with a prison rodeo in it, that movie where Burt Reynolds was in prison. But sure, there are precautions, and obviously you’re not going to have people on Death Row doing this, but you will have people who have something to lose by trying anything.
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