GateHouse: A Florida murder trial, life imitating art

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

December 14, 2018

There is a trial going on in Tallahassee, Florida, that has all the twists and turns of a Hollywood movie. Denise Williams is standing trial for plotting to kill her husband Mike Williams.

Brian Winchester murdered Mike Williams - this much is known from dramatic testimony offered by Winchester during the ongoing Williams trial.

This past week, I was able to watch the testimony of Bran Winchester live while doing a segment on Law and Crime Network, a network that covers trials and crime 24/7.

Mike Williams went on a duck hunting trip the evening of Dec. 16, 2000, his wedding anniversary with his high school sweetheart, the Defendant Denise Williams. He told his wife he would return from the hunting trip at a nearby lake in time to leave for their planned anniversary getaway. Williams never came back. His friends and family, including Winchester, and his father, headed to the lake to find him.

Winchester and Mike were best friends. Winchester even sold Mike some of his life insurance, totaling $1.75 million. Winchester said that he and Mike Williams spoke nearly every day.

According to Winchester, the two had something else in common, they both were in love with the same woman - Denise Williams.

Eighteen years after Williams’ disappearance, Winchester, under the protection of immunity, confessed on the witness stand to fatally shooting Williams in the head after pushing him into the water during the hunting trip, then leaving Williams’ boat in the water to mislead investigators.

Winchester didn’t stop there - he testified that Denise was involved in every aspect of planning the killing over a period of 18 months. He even said at one point that Denise was “morally” opposed to divorce - but apparently not murder.

As Winchester calmly testified in detail about the events leading up to Mike Williams’ death, I thought this story - although diabolical - is made for the big screen. Then it struck me - this movie has already been made.

Seventy-five years ago, Paramount Pictures released a film noir classic, “Double Indemnity.” The star-studded cast included Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.

Had Denise Williams and Brian Winchester watched “Double Indemnity” they might have thought twice about their ill-fated plan.

Fred MacMurray played the role of an insurance agent who sold a life insurance policy to Barbara Stanwyck’s husband - sound familiar. Stanwyck and MacMurray’s characters become involved in a romantic relationship.

The two hatched a plan to throw Stanwyck’s husband from a train while on a business trip. They pulled off the murder and tried to cash in on the insurance. However, MacMurray’s boss, Edward G. Robinson, smelled a rat and began to investigate the insurance claim.

The scheme begins to unravel and MacMurray, having been shot in a confrontation with Stanwyck, returns at night to his office mortally wounded and begins to dictate his confession - not unlike Winchester’s testimony in court - into a recorder for Robinson’s character to receive.

Unlike the movie, Winchester and Denise Williams married after Mike’s murder. The marriage fell apart and Winchester kidnapped her in hope of winning her back. He is now serving 20 years in prison for that decision.

Denise Williams’ attorney suggested in his opening statement that Denise had nothing to do with Winchester’s plot to kill her husband. The only person to accuse her of conspiring to kill Mike was Winchester - a confessed killer and convicted kidnapper.

Playwright Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying,” “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

This is real life. A Florida jury will decide if this was a plan between two people to kill another human being for lust and money, or a fiction created by a desperate man to avoid responsibility for killing his friend.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Cross-Examination and Inaccurate Eyewitness Identification

The Pennsylvania Law Weekly
February 14, 2012

In the famous courtroom drama "12 Angry Men," rated by the American Bar Association as one of the 25 greatest legal movies of all time, juror No. 8, played by Henry Fonda, earnestly advocated for a not-guilty verdict.

Fonda started out as the only not-guilty vote. The turning point of the deliberations occurred when an older juror recalled that the state's prized eyewitness, who had observed the murder through her window as she laid in bed, had red marks on her nose left from wearing eyeglasses. The older juror asked a reserved bespectacled juror, "Do you wear your glasses when you go to bed?" The bespectacled juror responded, "No, I don't. No one wears eyeglasses to bed."

Ultimately, Fonda succeeded in convincing his fellow jurors to acquit the young defendant accused of stabbing his father. Justice prevailed not because of an effective cross-examination — apparently the eyeglasses-less observation at night through a window did not come up during trial — but rather a persistent juror in search of justice won the day.

The 1957 movie raised an issue that is only now beginning to gain traction, the reliability of eyewitness identification.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided Perry v. New Hampshire . The case involved the prosecution of Barion Perry, who was convicted of theft based on the testimony of a woman who said she saw the theft and described the suspect as tall and black. Then, without prompting from the police, she went to her window and identified Perry, who was standing outside next to a police officer. The identification was used to convict Perry, despite objections from his lawyers that seeing him next to the police officer could have unfairly influenced the woman's identification, the Washington Post reported.

Prior to Perry , judges were required to screen testimony for reliability when police were suspected of using suggestive tactics. Prescreening was to deter police from creating "suggestive circumstances" that point to a specific suspect, although some evidence obtained through suggestive practices was still admissible.

Perry's lawyer wanted the court to expand the prescreening practice to all identifications made under any suggestive circumstance, not just those created by the police.

"The potential unreliability of a type of evidence does not alone render its introduction at the defendant's trial fundamentally unfair," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote on behalf of the majority in Perry . The sole reason to impose a judicial prescreening process is to deter police from creating suggestive circumstances that point to a specific suspect.

"When there is no improper police conduct there is nothing to deter," Ginsburg added. The Perry court maintained the status quo.

Ginsberg's opinion noted that the rules of evidence, jury instructions and most importantly, cross-examination are safeguards that protect an accused from the use of unreliable evidence like inaccurate eyewitness identification.

In "12 Angry Men," cross-examination failed to expose a witness' inability, due to impaired vision, to credibly identify the accused. In the movie, the failed cross-examination probably had more to do with ineffective assistance of counsel than a fissure in the mechanism of cross-examination.

In real life, things do not always work out like they do in the movies. Jules Epstein, in "The Great Engine that Couldn't: Science, Mistaken Identification, and the Limits of Cross-Examination," wrote that even effective cross-examination can be inadequate to protect an accused wrongfully convicted through the testimony of an eyewitness.

Epstein referred to a passage in James M. Doyle's book, "True Witness." Doyle wrote about the trial of Ronald Cotton. In 1984, a college student was assaulted in her apartment by an unknown intruder. Two days later, the victim picked Cotton's photograph out of a photo array. She said Cotton's photograph "looks most like her assailant." Later, the victim hesitatingly picked Cotton out of a lineup and ultimately identified him as her attacker at trial.

Cotton's defense counsel, through cross-examination, unlike in "12 Angry Men," was able to establish "the eyewitness victim, who wore eyeglasses, did not have them on during the assault." The witness later admitted the light source for the identification came from blinds, a bedroom window and lights from a stereo.

Cotton was nonetheless convicted. He was later exonerated through DNA evidence. Epstein argues that "judges and lawyers must disabuse themselves of the notion that cross-examination's great engine has the efficacy to redress and prevent the recurrence of mistaken identification." The Perry decision has essentially left, in part, cross-examination as the primary means to expose a suggestive eyewitness identification that did not directly involve the police. Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court established a test for determining when due process requires suppression of an out-of-court identification produced by suggestive police conduct. In Manson v. Braithwaite , instead of creating a rule of exclusion the court required judicial prescreening of the identification to determine if the suggestive procedure was reliable when judging the totality of the circumstances.

The Perry court reiterated the rule in Braithwaite . Once the conduct is determined not to be the product of the police, no matter how suggestive, the inquiry is over. It is not about a search for justice.

Some would suggest that the suppression of incriminating evidence due to police misconduct is also not in the interest of seeking justice. The search of a home without a warrant is the type of police conduct that must not be condoned regardless of what nefarious conduct is interrupted, even though, in essence, justice is denied the state.

Here, the absence of police misconduct seems to deny justice to the accused. Suggestive eyewitness identification should be subject to a judicial prescreening whether or not it was initiated by the police. To do otherwise seems to exclude a layer of protection easily accessible to an accused.

The Perry decision seems wholly inadequate in light of the growing body of scientific evidence supporting a closer look at eyewitness identification.

Since 1977, advances in the social sciences and technology have cast a new light on eyewitness identification. Since Braithwaite , hundreds of studies on eyewitness identification have been published in professional and academic journals. One study by University of Virginia Law School professor Brandon L. Garrett found that eyewitness misidentifications contributed to wrongful convictions in 76 percent of the cases overturned by DNA evidence.

The Supreme Court ignored the research and acknowledged no shortcomings in the system currently in place to challenge eyewitness identification. Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged a potential problem with the status quo. In her dissent, Sotomayor acknowledged that the majority had turned a blind eye toward its own precedents and the abundance of scientific research, The New York Times reported. "This court has long recognized," she wrote, "that eyewitness identifications' unique confluence of features — their unreliability, susceptibility to suggestion, powerful impact on the jury, and resistance to the ordinary tests of the adversarial process — can undermine the fairness of a trial."

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The Cautionary Instruction: Hollywood goes to trial, military style

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
January 6, 2012

The court martial of Sgt. Frank Wuterich began this week in California on charges of manslaughter and assault. Wuterich, was a squad leader in Haditha, Iraq in 2005 when a roadside bomb exploded, killing a Marine and injuring two others. In the aftermath of the attack, 24 Iraqis were killed including women and children.

Most of what we know about military trials comes from Hollywood. This is not to diminish the gravity of the ongoing proceeding, but three pictures that do “justice” to military trials are Paths of Glory, Breaker Morant and A Few Good Men.

Paths of Glory, released in 1957, was based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb. The novel was loosely based on the court-martial and execution of four French soldiers during World War I. Kirk Douglas played Colonel Dax, a unit commander, who was a lawyer in civilian life. He defended the soldiers charged with cowardice after they refused to continue a suicidal attack.

The trial was a predetermined exercise to set an example for the rest of the French army. Colonel Dax, well aware of his clients’ fate, memorably told the court, “Gentlemen of the court, there are times that I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race and this is one such occasion.”

Breaker Morant was an Australian film released in 1980. The movie was also based on a true story. The movie explores, in detail, the court-martial of three Australian soldiers, carrying out unwritten orders to kill Dutch prisoners of war during the Boer War in 1902. The movie won a Golden Globe for best foreign film. The court room action is entertaining as typified by this exchange during the examination of a prosecution witness:

Prosecutor: How did Lt. Handcock look?
Witness: Like he was thinking, sir... like... I can't think of the ...
Prosecutor: Did he look like he was agitated?
Witness: Agitated? Yes, that's it, sir. Yes, sir, he looked agitated.
Defense Attorney: Objection. Major Bolton (prosecutor) is leading the witness.
Prosecutor: I will rephrase the question, sir. Tell me, how did Lt. Handcock look?
Witness: Agitated, sir!

The final film, A Few Good Men, was released in 1992. Originally written as a play and adapted for the big screen, the movie is based, in part, on a real incident that occurred at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

Two Marines are on trial for carrying out a ‘Code Red’ order that resulted in the death of another marine. The code was ordered by the base commander to bring a wayward Marine into line. The movie’s well known ending, with Tom Cruise as Lt. Kaffee and Jack Nicholson as Colonel Jessup, lights up the screen with one of film’s all-time great cross-examinations.

The lead-up to, “You can’t handle the truth,” is so well underplayed that it is often forgotten. As Lt. Kaffee’s examination seems to unravel, Colonel Jessup goads him into the decisive confrontation, “Now, are these the questions I was really called here to answer? Phone calls and foot lockers? Please tell me that you have something more, Lieutenant. These two Marines are on trial for their lives. Please tell me their lawyer hasn't pinned their hopes to a phone bill.”

If you haven’t seen them, all three films are worth watching. If you have seen them, they’re worth another look.

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