Betty Smithey: Free at last...

Congratulations to Betty, and blessings to Donna Hamm for sticking with this fight all these years. Now we need to figure out how to get Brewer to let Bill Macumber go, too, before he dies...he doesn't even have a freedom4bill website anymore - I think he gave up.

-------------from AZCentral.com-------------

Betty Smithey with advocate/criminal justice consultant Donna Hamm 

after the clemency board decision Monday. 

Woman walks free after 49 years in Arizona prison

Nation's longest-serving female inmate was granted clemency

Bob Ortega 
Aug. 13, 2012

After 49 years behind bars, the nation's longest-serving female inmate is free.

Betty Smithey, 69, whose prison term began following her conviction for the murder of a 15-month-old Phoenix girl in 1963, appeared at a parole hearing Monday morning and by that afternoon walked, with the aid of a cane, out of the gates of the Perryville state prison in Goodyear.

"It's wonderful driving down the road and not seeing any barbed wire," Smithey said by phone as she traveled with relatives to her niece's Mesa home, where she will reside. "I am lucky, so very lucky."

"Like I told the (parole) board, I know it's going to be a big adjustment, but I'll take it and I'll make good," she said.

Members of Arizona's Board of Executive Clemency agreed that Smithey had proven she is no longer the troubled woman who at age 20 murdered Sandy Gerberick on New Year's Day 1963, while working as the family's live-in baby-sitter, or the woman who that same year threatened to kill herself after being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Board members voted 4-1 to grant an absolute discharge, not only freeing Smithey from prison but also any community supervision.

Smithey became eligible for discharge after Gov. Jan Brewer granted her clemency in June, reducing her sentence to 49 years to life.

"I really see no value in keeping you in prison any longer. I really see no value in keeping strings on you any longer," Parole Board Chairman and Director Jesse Hernandez told Smithey before voting to grant her discharge.

Monday's vote was a rare occurrence. Sentenced to life before August 1973, Smithey was numbered among the so-called "old-code lifers" who are eligible for parole only if first granted a commutation by the governor. She is only the third such inmate to be granted clemency since 1989.

In 1994 and 2003, boards recommended clemency for Smithey only to have first Gov. Fife Symington and then Gov. Janet Napolitano deny it.

Last spring, not long after the board unanimously recommended clemency for Smithey, Brewer replaced three of its five members; on Monday, the new members in particular sought reassurance that Smithey doesn't pose any danger of violence. Much of their questioning of Smithey, her attorneys and supporters and psychiatrist Elizabeth Kohlhepp focused on Smithey's youthful mental state, whether the board could be sure she'd changed, and whether she could handle the stress of returning to the outside world after five decades.

As the deciding vote came down in her favor, Smithey crossed herself and looked down briefly as if in disbelief that the moment had finally arrived.

Smithey endured a horrific childhood of abandonment, abuse and mistreatment by foster and adoptive parents, creating, Kohlhepp said, a fragile youth with poor coping skills who became psychotic under extreme stress.

In her early years in prison she was rebellious and troublesome, escaping four times from three different prisons between 1974 and 1981.

But Kohlhepp, who evaluated Smithey's mental health in 2003 and again recently, said that over the decades Smithey worked hard to transform herself.

"She has no risk factors for violence," said Kohlhepp. "She doesn't have a criminal mind-set."

The key moment, said Smithey, came in 1983 when she received a letter from Emma Simmons, Sandy Gerberick's mother, forgiving her for the crime.

"She made me feel that I wasn't a monster," said Smithey. "I felt if she could forgive me for taking her child's life, I could forgive myself. ... It was my responsibility to try to become a better person than I was."

Dozens of supporters turned out for Monday's hearing.

Andy Silverman, a University of Arizona law professor who has known Smithey since working on an appeal for her in 1971, said, "I've changed over those 41 years, and I can assure the board that she has as well. ... She's a good and caring person. She always shows more interest in others than in herself."

After Monday's vote, Smithey smiled and waved to her supporters, mouthing "thank you" and then clutching her niece Rebecca Henderson in a tearful hug. Smithey shook each board member's hand and thanked them before being led into the prison to prepare for her release.

Family members said they painted and decorated a room for her to live in.

Freedom Now for Will Macumber!

He's still wasting away in Jan Brewer's dungeon, folks, at over $20,000/year and the irreplaceable cost of his life...

Freedom4Bill

Freedom4Bill

Freedom Now

- Traci Chapman


They throwed him in jail
And they kept him there
Hoping soon he'd die
That his body and spirit would waste away
And soon after that his mind


But every day is born a fool
One who thinks that he can rule
One who says tomorrow's mine
One who wakes one day to find
The prison doors open the shackles broken
And chaos in the street


Everybody sing we're free free free free
Everybody sing we're free free free free
Everybody sing we're free free free free


They throwed him in jail
And they kept him there
Hoping his memory'd die
That the people forget how he once led
And fought for justice in their lives


But every day is born a man
Who hates what he can't understand
Who thinks the answer is to kill
Who thinks his actions are god's will


And he thinks he's free free free free
Yes he thinks he's free free free free
He thinks he's free free free free


Soon must come the day
When the righteous have their way
Unjustly tried are free
And people live in peace I say
Give the man release
Go on and set your conscience free
Right the wrongs you made
Even a fool can have his day


Let us all be free free free free
Let us all be free free free free
Let us all be free free free free


Free our bodies free our minds
Free our hearts
Freedom for everyone
And freedom now


Freedom now
Freedom now
Freedom now


Let us all be free free free free
Let us all be free free free free
Let us all be free free free free

------

Freedom4Bill.com

Update: Free William Macumber

I just started a petition to Free William Macumber at Change.org. Help us out with it. Here's the New York Times article you'll find as part of the letter there to Governor Brewer, if you need a refresher. William will turn 75 on August 31. Lets try to give him and his family some encouragement. He may have been juggled around because of the escapes, but his last known address there was:

William Macumber 033867

ASPC-Douglas/Mohave
PO Box 5002
Douglas, AZ 85608

-----------------------------------------

Governor Rebuffs Clemency Board in Murder Case

By ADAM LIPTAK

New York Times

June 14, 2010

WASHINGTON — Ronald Kempfert was a young boy in 1975 when his father was sent to prison for murder, and they had no contact for 28 years.

Then, in 2003, Mr. Kempfert heard from a lawyer who had been looking into the case. “Your father is innocent,” said the lawyer, Larry A. Hammond. “And we’re pretty sure your mother framed him.”

That would seem a lot to digest, but Mr. Kempfert, 42, said he felt no hesitation. “My reaction was that it didn’t surprise me,” he said. “She’s my mother, and I love her. But I think she’s capable of anything.”

Mr. Kempfert is now certain that his father, William Macumber, is innocent. Arizona’s clemency board, citing Mr. Kempfert’s “very moving testimony” and saying there had been “a miscarriage of justice,” unanimously recommended last year that Mr. Macumber be freed.

But Mr. Macumber remains in prison, and Gov. Jan Brewer has refused to explain why.

The case against Mr. Macumber began in 1974 as his marriage was disintegrating. His wife, Carol, who worked in the local sheriff’s office, went to her superiors with a surprising story. Her husband, she said, had recently confessed to the unsolved murders of a young couple shot to death a dozen years before, in 1962, in the open desert north of Scottsdale, Ariz.

Largely on the strength of his former wife’s testimony, Mr. Macumber was convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

But the jury did not hear a significant piece of evidence.

In 1967, five years after the murders in the desert, a drifter named Ernesto Valenzuela was charged with a similar double homicide. He told his lawyer that he had also killed the couple in the desert.

“He was just making a point about bragging about the people he killed,” the lawyer, Thomas W. O’Toole, said. “He was a cold-blooded killer who relished committing the murders.”

Mr. O’Toole, who went on to serve 24 years as a state judge, said his client was dead serious about claiming responsibility for the 1962 murders. “There is no doubt in my mind that Ernesto Valenzuela committed those crimes,” Mr. O’Toole said.

For years, Mr. O’Toole kept his client’s secret, as he was required to do by the canons of legal ethics. But after Mr. Valenzuela was himself killed in prison in 1973, and with the permission of Mr. Valenzuela’s mother, Mr. O’Toole offered to testify at Mr. Macumber’s trial.

The judge refused to let the jury hear from Mr. O’Toole, saying his account was unreliable hearsay. The judge also excluded testimony from a second lawyer and a psychiatrist who had heard similar confessions from Mr. Valenzuela.

The jury did hear about two kinds of physical evidence — a partial palm print and bullet casings — that prosecutors said connected Mr. Macumber to the killings.

Mr. Kempfert said he believed that his mother had done more than lie.

“I can fully see how my mother could have set him up and framed him,” Mr. Kempfert said. “She had access to the evidence. She was doing fingerprint courses at the time.”

Last year, the five members of the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency unanimously recommended to Ms. Brewer that Mr. Macumber be released after 35 years in prison “to correct a miscarriage of justice.”

But Ms. Brewer rejected the board’s recommendation without explanation in November. It is possible that politics played a role in her decision; Ms. Brewer, a Republican who became governor last year, is running for a full term in November.

“She denied the application right after she announced that she was running for governor,” said Katherine Puzauskas, a lawyer with the Arizona Justice Project at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. The project, which was founded by Mr. Hammond and works to overturn wrongful convictions, has represented Mr. Macumber since 2000.

There is little political upside to granting clemency, but there is a substantial risk, as Mike Huckabee learned when a man whose sentence he commuted as governor of Arkansas in 2000 killed four police officers last year.

P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., has been fuming about Ms. Brewer’s handling of the Macumber case. “I have been following state clemency for 30 years,” Mr. Ruckman said, “and this is easily, easily, the most disturbing. It’s borderline despicable.”

“Common-sense notions of justice should compel a governor to provide an explanation for imprisoning a man deemed innocent by an official board created to make such judgments,” he added. “You don’t imprison a man for no reason.”

A spokesman for the governor said Ms. Brewer had reviewed the case thoroughly, but he provided only boilerplate concerning her reasoning.

“Every executive clemency case is carefully scrutinized as the governor balances the very real and important concepts of public safety, justice and mercy,” the spokesman, Paul Senseman, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Macumber is 74 and in failing health, with heart problems and arthritis, and the threat he poses to public safety is not obvious.

But Mr. Macumber’s former wife, now known as Carol Kempfert, said he was a dangerous sociopath who deserved to die in prison. She denied making up his confession and tampering with the evidence used to convict him.

It is her former husband, she said, who is a pathological liar. “I was in law enforcement for almost 20 years, and no one came close to being able to manipulate like Bill,” she said. “This man could sell water to a drowning person.”

Mr. Macumber, she said, would have said anything to save their marriage.

For instance, she said, he once falsely claimed to have a heart condition. “He intimates that if I hang around long enough, he’ll die and I’ll get the insurance money,” she said. “Well, I hung around, and he didn’t die.”

Then he threatened to kill himself. “If you’re going to do it, go outside” she recalled telling her husband. “I don’t want blood on the walls.”

In the course of a half-hour conversation, Ms. Kempfert accused Mr. Macumber of terrible and disturbing crimes beyond the killings in the desert. Asked if he deserved clemency, she said, “Absolutely not.”

“Actually,” she added, “I think he’s lucky. If he had been caught sooner, he would have gotten the death penalty.”

Ms. Kempfert and her son no longer speak. Ronald Kempfert, who took his stepfather’s last name when he was a child, is in the process of changing it back to Macumber.