U.S. v. Williams

• Decision Date: 28 November 1975
• Docket Number: No. 74-3297,74-3297
• Citation: 523 F.2d 1203
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. William August Halm WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 1203

523 F.2d 1203

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. William August Halm WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 74-3297.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

Nov. 28, 1975.

Tyrus R. Atkinson, Jr., Atlanta, Ga. (Court-appointed), George J. Parnham, Houston, Tex., William A. H. Williams, Atlanta, Ga., for defendant-appellant.

John W. Stokes, U. S. Atty., William P. Gaffney, Steven W. Ludwick, Asst. U. S. Attys., Atlanta, Ga., for plaintiff-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

Before TUTTLE, THORNBERRY and MORGAN, Circuit Judges.

THORNBERRY, Circuit Judge:

Appellant William Williams was convicted by a jury of extortion, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, use of the mails to transmit an extortionate communication, 18 U.S.C. § 876, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). The trial judge imposed sentences of twenty years, ten years, and another ten years on the respective convictions, all to run consecutively. The instant appeal followed, in which appellant raises an expansive array of challenges to his convictions. The decision reached by this court, however, limits the necessary scope of our consideration to three of the many arguments tendered by appellant. The difficult and delicate concerns of pretrial publicity, the extent to which prosecutorial zeal must remain checked by the rights of an accused, and the sometimes close relationship between the two all coalesce in this case to require reversal of appellant's convictions and remand for a new trial.

On the evening of February 20, 1974, appellant Williams arrived at the home of Reginald Murphy, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Appellant, representing himself to be a "Mr. Woods," had previously contacted Murphy regarding a possible donation of several hundred thousand gallons of fuel oil to a suitable charity during the energy crisis. Continuing his still unsuspected ruse, appellant lured Murphy from his home on the pretext of visiting an attorney in order that transfer of title to the fuel oil could be consummated. Shortly after departing the Murphy home, appellant produced a gun and informed Murphy that he had been kidnapped by a "colonel in the American Revolutionary Army." Bound and deposited in the trunk of an automobile, Murphy was taken to appellant's home where he was forced to spend the night. The next morning appellant induced Murphy to prepare a tape recorded ransom demand that was subsequently mailed to the offices of the Atlanta Constitution. The ransom demand was shortly met by Murphy's employer, ¹ and after forty-nine hours of captivity, Murphy was released unharmed. Approximately five hours after Murphy's release, the FBI apprehended appellant at his home and recovered the ransom money. Reaction of the news media to the kidnapping was virtually instantaneous, and the metropolitan Atlanta area was blanketed with radio, television, and newspaper coverage from almost the moment the ransom message was delivered. After Murphy's release, a four-thousand word article in the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ² under Murphy's byline, provided a first-person account of the kidnapping and Murphy's "positive identification" of Williams as the perpetrator of the kidnapping. Extensive reporting of Murphy's identification of Williams naturally followed in smaller area newspapers, the national wire services, and the national news magazines Time and Newsweek. ³ In addition to Murphy's identification, appellant's prior criminal record, his poor credit rating, excerpts from his diary that had been confiscated by the FBI, his overwhelming anti-Semitism, the impressions of his friends and neighbors, and in short, every aspect of his life became grist for the reporter's mill. The day of his arrest, appellant was briefly interviewed by television reporters while leaving a bail hearing. In response to questions, appellant stated for the television audience that while the American Revolutionary Army had suffered a defeat, he did not consider it a final defeat. Naturally, appellant's interview was widely and frequently rebroadcast. Record on Appeal, Vol. I at 175. Over one hundred articles on the kidnapping and the kidnapper appeared in the Journal and the Constitution before the hearing on appellant's motion for change of venue. Local media coverage continued unabated throughout the remainder of February and into early March. Appellant, along with his wife, was indicted on March 7, and the following day he entered a plea of not guilty. During the next two months close attention was paid by the media to the procedural moves made in preparation for appellant's trial, though the intensity of the coverage was somewhat diminished in comparison to that contemporaneous with the kidnapping. ⁴ In early May, however, the public's attention was again sparked when it was reported that FBI agents appearing at a hearing on appellant's motion to suppress certain evidence testified that appellant had confessed to the kidnapping following his arrest. ⁵ Shortly thereafter, on May 9, a one-hour television special devoted to the kidnapping and featuring an interview with victim Murphy was broadcast over WSB-TV in Atlanta. Similar television specials were aired prior to May 9, and at least two specials featuring Murphy were televised prior to the filing of appellant's motion for transfer on March 25. ⁶ We attach particular significance to the May 9 special because it was the closest in point of time to the beginning of appellant's trial. ⁷ In the course of the May 9 special, Murphy was interviewed regarding the details of his kidnapping and his impressions of appellant. Murphy again repeated his positive identification of appellant, and at several points in the interview ventured thumbnail sketches of appellant's character and personality. ⁸ The following excerpts, taken from various points in the transcript of the May 9 special, indicate the flavor of the character study provided by Murphy.

Interviewer: Tell us about the Colonel. Give us a personality sketch. You know him pretty well.

Murphy: Yeah, he's an old friend of mine. He told me that he grew up in Florida, that his father used to beat him so badly when he was a small child that he was ashamed to go to school. When he was eleven, he tried to kill his father. When he was thirteen he ran away from home. He said he went to Florida State University and he used to play handball. Whether that's true, I don't know. He said he was in the military twice, he said he was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for four years. I am told that it (is) not the case, but I don't know.

He said that he had some military experience in the Air Force, and I think, in fact, he was in the Navy, somebody told me later, and as a matter of fact I think his record shows he went AWOL, but he certainly didn't tell me that. He told me that he was a Colonel in the Air Force. He also wanted me to think, he told me that he had a master's degree in economics, and he said "I guess you've already figured that out," and I said, "Colonel, I knew that you knew a great deal of economics, but I certainly didn't realize what the degree was," because, you see, I really had to flatter a guy like that, particularly him. He was really very insecure.

Let me go back. I didn't even have access to television at that time, but there were radio people who jumped by an hour and a half the time when I really got released and that really gave me butterflies because the Colonel felt like he could then say, "Well, I released him and somebody else must have done this." It was a crazy kind of idea from his point of view.

He is almost the most anti-Semitic man I've ever heard in my life. Everything is a conspiracy run by Jews.

Record on Appeal, Vol. I at 182, 193, 196.

Following hearings before a magistrate on April 22 and May 2, the district court denied appellant's motion for a change of venue on July 28. The denial was, however, conditioned on the ability of voir dire examination to produce a fair and impartial jury. The examination subsequently conducted was meticulous in every respect. All panel members were carefully questioned regarding, inter alia, their knowledge of the facts of appellant's case, the degree of their exposure to the media coverage of the kidnapping and later events, and the extent to which they held any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of appellant. All members of the jury panel were familiar to some degree with the facts of the kidnapping, See Record on Appeal, Vol. VI at 24, and twenty-two out of seventy-one panel members were excused on the basis of a pre-existing opinion as to appellant's guilt. Satisfied with the jury ultimately empanelled, however, the district court called appellant's case to trial on the following day, July 29. The consistently argued defense position was lack of mental responsibility at the time the offense was committed. Taking the stand in his own defense, appellant Williams conceded that he was in fact the perpetrator of the kidnapping. The defense witnesses called were for the purpose of establishing appellant's insanity defense, and at no point was the evidence in dispute that Williams had in fact been the kidnapper of Murphy. Without attempting a lengthy review of the evidence adduced at trial, it can only be remarked that the issue of appellant's mental responsibility was sharply contested. On August 4, final argument to the jury began. After summarizing the evidence, the Assistant United States Attorney made the following argument to the jury.

Ladies and gentlemen, I will submit to you that this defendant wants to fool you. He's heard all the testimony. It's by virtue of his testimony, when he was asked "Tell me about your childhood?" "Oh, my childhood it was a very unhappy childhood". I just felt he was reading from that (psychiatric) report. This defendant is a put-on. I submit to you that ...