by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
March 5, 2020 is the scheduled execution date for Nate Woods of Birmingham, Alabama. Same old story of witnesses being coerced to testify against a friend. Same old story of prosecutors concocting a highly implausible scene.
A few days ago, GumshoeNews carried a report on the citizens of Ohio who want a special prosecutor for the cases of missing and murdered women. And we in Australia are warming to the subject of someone to act for the Protective parents whose children get trafficked within the Child Protection racket.
I am posting this article as a way of making available to Alabamians the petition I have Express-mailed to the Court, asking for a Writ of Coram Nobis for Nate Woods. It is self-explanatory:
To the Jefferson County Court, Alabama March 4, 2020 From Mary Maxwell, PhD, LLB, 177 Loudon Rd, Apt 203, Concord NH 03301
I hereby respectfully ask the Court that convicted Nathaniel Woods in 2004, and sentenced him to death, to grant a Writ of Coram Nobis based on fraud-upon-the-court that occurred at trial. This could lead to a new trial.
I cite Judge Marilyn Patel’s opinion of 1984 in the Federal District Court of Northern California, in which she set aside the 1942 conviction of Fred Korematsu, based on the fact that the prosecutor, the federal government, misled that court by not letting the court hear available information about the loyalty of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In Nathaniel Woods case, the jury did not hear information that was withheld about the policemen who were killed. The actual killer, Kerry Spencer, has said that Woods is 100% innocent. Missing from the trial was available information that the police who were killed ran a protection scheme with drug dealers in Birmingham. They had entered the house earlier in the day looking for their debtor, Tyran Cooper.
The prosecutor built a case that Nathaniel Woods “masterminded” the killing of police out of hatred of cops. The evidence for that came from Woods’ girlfriend who later said she was coerced by threats, as she had violated probation. The killer, Kerry Spence, attests that there was no masterminding — the shooting took place in an extreme moment of self-defense.
Additionally, in Woods’ case, the Court was misled by not knowing of an error that the defense attorney had made. That attorney led Woods to reject a plea offer by telling him that since he did not pull the trigger, he could not get capital punishment. This was a wrong reading of the law of Alabama.
I humbly petition the Court to set aside the conviction that was obtained by such errors. It is not too late for principles of justice to step in.
On the matter of my standing, as a citizen, to petition the court, I note that Wilson M. Brown III, of Drinker Biddle petitioned the US Supreme Court in 2003 re Reynolds.
We see, in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 60(b) Grounds for Relief from a Final Judgment, Order, or Proceeding: On motion and just terms, the court may relieve a party… from a final judgment, order, or proceeding for the following reasons:
… (3) fraud (whether previously called intrinsic or extrinsic), misrepresentation, or misconduct by an opposing party…
In respect to authority, I note Tyler v. Magwire, 17 Wall. 253, 84 U. S. 283:
“Repeated decisions of this court have established the rule that a final judgment or decree of this court is conclusive upon the parties, and that it cannot be reexamined at a subsequent term, except in cases of fraud…”.
In the 1944 United States Supreme Court ruling in Hazel-Atlas Co. v Hartford Co., Justice Black opened with the words:
“This case involves the power of a Circuit Court of Appeals, upon proof that fraud was perpetrated on it by a successful litigant, to vacate its own judgment entered at a prior term.”
In concurring, Justice Owen Roberts wrote:
“No fraud is more odious than an attempt to subvert the administration of justice. The court is unanimous in condemning the transaction disclosed by this record…. The resources of the law are ample to undo the wrong and to pursue the wrongdoer…. Finally…, to nullify the judgment if the fraud procured it…. This is a suit in equity in the District Court to set aside or amend the judgment. Such a proceeding is required by settled federal law, and would be tried, as it should be, in open court with living witnesses….”
Although it may seem that I am acting on behalf of Mr Woods, with this petition for a Writ of Coram Nobis, I am not. I am acting on behalf of the court, of society, and of rightness.
Signed on this 4th day of March, 2020,
Mary Maxwell, widow, of 177 Loudon Rd, Apt 203, Concord NH 03301
E-mail MaxwellMaryLLB@gmail.com
I Am Not Finished with Troy Davis!
Troy Davis was executed in Georgia in 2011. It was an utter scandal. Eight and a half years have gone by, during which I did not — yet — carry out my promise to deal with persons who committed this judicial murder.
Note the above-cited ruling in Hazel-Glass. The judge said, in a concurrence:
“The resources of the law are ample to undo the wrong and to pursue the wrongdoer.”
Pursuing I will go.
Note: Before he died, Troy Davis said to the world “Please don’t forget me when I’m gone.”
Check.
The “age 44” of the two guys looks wrong in the caption. I suppose the photos were taken at trial. Nate Woods was tried 16 years ago, so maybe he was only 28 in that picture.
Similarly, Troy was arrested in 1989, from memory, and was on Death Row for 22 years. During that time, according to his sister Martin Correia, both parents died from the stress of it all. Possibly Troy was 22 in the photo, or older if it was at an appeal hearing.
I heard today that Martin Luther King’s son has made a plea for mercy for Nate Woods.
Any Aussie who wants to make a call to Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, please note that you will get her office answering machine now (9:020pm) and you can just say “Spare Nate.” Dial 0011-1- 334-242-7100. Yay!
Mary,
Thank you many times.
It is so tragic that good men get murdered, yet reassuring that good men do not murder.
Bad news. It appears that the execution will go ahead in about 6 hours from now. (6pm est.)
This is terrible. Can the state’s Attorney General Steve Marshall be so ill-informed of reality? In my top paragraph I said the case against woods involved a “highly implausible” scene. I should have said “an absurd scenario.” It was claimed that the reason the 3 cops were inside the house of the drug addicts-and-dealers (Kerry Spencer and Nate Woods) is that Nate, being a cop-hater, LURED THEM IN as part of his plan to kill them.
I mean come on, folks, is there any man, black or white, who would so risk his own life for the “benefit” of terminating his enemy? He would soon be arrested — would it be worth it? Of course not.
And since Nate supposedly had a “plan,” what was his plan for removing three large bodies? Does he own a truck? If the prosecutor cannot furnish evidence of a plan, the man should not have been convicted for having a plan. Perhaps Nate should be convicted of other crimes. ( But if it is drug crimes, don’t get me started on how the drugs get into the cities in the first place, OK?)
Here is the drill on the innocence of James Earl Ray as the convicted murderer of MLK in 1968. Ray was said — by the media of course — to have felt a need to get the civil rights leader out of the way. (Stop right there for absurdity.) Ray did not do it; he was a patsy, set up to make the MLK death look race-based. Later a man named Jowers admitted to shooting MLK. Coretta Scott King sued him for the minimal sum of $100, to get a court to declare it. NO MEDIA showed up for the trial. Coretta did in fact win the $100.
Dear Attorney-General Marshall, wake up. Consult your moral compass. Also, please know that my Coram Nobis thingie has arrived in Jefferson Courthouse this AM. That will give you an excuse to put a hold on the execution. When I lived in Tuscaloosa in 2017, I thought Alabama was heaven. I found the racial harmony to be thrilling. Come on, man, you can be a big fellow and not kowtow to “other forces.” Tell the lethal injection doctor to go home.
Dear Lethal injection doctor, your life will not be easy after you commit this sin. By the way, the state of Georgia paid Troy Davis’s lethal injector $18,000. Does that tell you something?
CNN is covering the story here:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/us/alabama-nathaniel-woods-execution/index.html
Hmm. I sent the Coram Nobis yesterday, March 4 to the address listed on Google for the Jefferson County Court. Price: $31.95. Just now I tracked it at USPS. It says:
“Your package has a delivery exception. Your item was returned to the sender at 10:11 am on March 5, 2020 in BIRMINGHAM, AL 35203 because the forwarding order for this address is no longer valid.”
OK, I will now ask Alabama persons to consult this Gumshoe article for a complete and unaltered copy of the Coram Nobis.
Don’t you love it? Where is Sir Wm Blackstone when you need him?
Pamela Woods has collected 92,000 sigs at Change.org and there is another one called savenate.
(Death is still 75 minutes away. I think they will relent.) I uploaded this message and please feel free to use it:
Woods was offered a plea deal, originally, of 4-6 years. Therefore, the state was “OK” with him going free by 2010. So what is the great barrier now? There is no great barrier. It would take no effort on the governor’s part to grant a pardon or commutation. Really, no one stands to gain by this execution, and the whole population stands to lose. We will all have been complicit in a killing.
The government bigwigs represent us, and we say NO.
Wow. The Postal Service just emailed me to say the judge did sign for it (my package with the coram nobis) at 12.22 today.
Hi there, Judge, be a hero. Think society won’t offer you the recognition you deserve as a hero? Thinks again. People know a hero when they see one.
Yay!
This is a different convict. (and now they are saying 7pm, not 6pm, for Nate):
From John Archibald at al.com
Because it happens, in Alabama and a bunch of other states, too. If a band of guys go into a convenience store and the meanest one goes all Hollywood inside and kills a witness, every one of those guys can be held to the same account, assuming the prosecutor can make the fairly easy case for intent.
So I was silent, leading up to the scheduled death of Nathaniel Woods this evening.
It was just the way things were, the way things are. It was business as usual. It was the Alabama way. It was the risk a criminal takes when becoming involved in crime. It was the heinous death of three police officers, for Pete’s sake.
But it was really just silence, which is like cowardice or malpractice, or impotence for a columnist. It was just silence, which quite literally adds nothing to a needed conversation. It was just silence, which seems safe, and secure, but is built only on nothingness.
The more I think of Nathaniel Woods – or Charles Burton, for that matter – the more I think of silence as sin. Not because those are great humans, but because they are human.
And so must we be.
It’s no excuse to be numbed by “the way things are” or “the way things have always been.” It’s not enough to be outraged by a heinous crime. It’s not enough to accept wrongs because the state or the majority calls them right. It’s not even enough that the state probably has a legitimate right under the law to kill these men.
Those are not reasons to be silent. They are reasons to be loud.
Because being able to do something does not make it the thing to do. Because eagerness to kill is as ugly in a state as it is in a serial killer. Because death is a final and brutal act from which we cannot return, and cannot take lightly. Because the moment we accept government-imposed killing without so much as a question is the moment we become complicit.
Woods deserves punishment, I am sure. But execution should be reserved for those who clearly, wantonly, intentionally kill.
We cannot become killers in the blind pursuit of those who kill. And we cannot say silent about it.
John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register, Birmingham Magazine and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.
FWIW:
“5:38 p.m.: The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay of execution for Woods. That stay is in place until further order from the nation’s high court.
Woods’ execution could proceed later tonight if the court issues an order lifting the stay, as long as the execution procedure begins before Woods’ death warrant expires at midnight.”
Just throwing this in in case anyone is using my idea of coram nobis. Got this from wikipedia. I did see from several cases that it is in use in Alabama state cases:
“Rule 32, Ala. R. Crim. P. is applicable only to a “Defendant convicted of a criminal offense”. Under Alabama law, a juvenile is not convicted of a criminal offense so as to be able to take advantage of the provisions of Rule 32. The writ of error coram nobis is an extraordinary remedy known more for its denial than its approval. Even so, Alabama Courts allow the writ of error coram nobis to attack judgments in certain restricted instances. When no rule or statute controls, “[t]he common law of England, so far as it is not inconsistent with the Constitution, laws and institutions of this state, shall, together with such institutions and laws, be the rule of decisions, and shall continue in force, except as from time to time it may be altered or repealed by the Legislature.” § 1-3-1, Ala. Code 1975.”
You’ve gotta watch this short video:
https://www.wvtm13.com/article/protest-planned-to-try-and-stop-the-executon-of-nathaniel-woods/31223504
sorry. This is from the Daily Beast:
In a late twist on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court entered a temporary stay just before the execution was set to begin at 7 p.m. ET‚ a move fairly common in capital punishment cases while the justices review a last-minute request for clemency by Woods’ legal team.
A little over an hour later, the Supreme Court lifted the stay and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statement declining to intervene—officially ending any final chance for Woods’ execution to be repealed.
Not that we’re in any position to talk.
https://gumshoenews.com/2019/09/05/further-to-the-discussion-of-martin-bryants-innocence/
Just to really irritate you, here is a sister of one of the deceased cops:
Chisholm’s sister has come out against the execution, saying in a statement to ABC News provided by Wood’s family: “I am writing to express my sincere wishes for Governor Ivey to stop the execution of Nathaniel Woods. I am the sister of Harley Chisholm III. I do not think that Nathaniel is guilty of murder. I urge Governor Ivey to reconsider her decision not to intervene.”
“There is no harm in allowing more time for the courts to investigate,” the statement added. “I want the new evidence to be brought forward and evaluated by new attorneys. Please do not move forward with the hasty decision to execute Nathaniel. My conscience will not let me live with this if he dies. I beg you to have mercy on him.”
Alabama State Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement Wednesday that Woods was “correctly found guilty and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers.”
“The only injustice in the case of Nathaniel Woods is that which was inflicted on those four policemen that terrible day in 2004,” Marshall said in the statement.
Report dated 9:57pm says he is now deceased.
I wonder what sort of person signs up for an occupation of executioner.
Im sorry Mary.
Could it be doctors who want the $18,000?
Anyway, Fair, who was the real executioner in that prison last night? I say it was Governor Kay Ivey. Yes, a woman. She had in her hand 92,000 requests to commute the guy’s sentence. Just as Trump had the ability to pardon Kerik last week — and did so — Ms Ivey had every legal prerogative to either pardon or remove the death penalty.
If I were in Montgomery today (“Thine alabaster cities gleam”) and Gov reached out to shake hands with me, I would not shake her hand.
A big word of thanks to Kerry Spencer (who is also on death row), for telling the truth, and to the sister of the murdered cop, Harley Chisholm, for telling the truth. That cop and his buddies apparently caused the whole thing.
Collecting the protection money is classic Mafia behavior, isn’t it? I had a friend who was relieved when her Dad died of natural causes, as she was always in fear of him getting his legs broken for not paying his (loan-sharked) debts on time. That was in Boston.
The Nate Woods tragedy has nought to do with race. White cops do similar to white guys too. In fact I don’t happen to know the skin-color of Kerry Spencer or Harley Chisholm.
Which is not to deny that the March 5th tragedy is intended as a whack against all downtrodden people. Whack! Whack! And a reminder to the Mary Maxwell law-mongers of this world of their powerlessness. Whack!
(Oh yeah?)
Allow me to quote from Rachel Barkow’s “Prisoners of Politics,” page 136:
“Prosecutors have come to dominate decisions about criminal justice. … The result has been .. a weakening of other forces to act as a check against them. It is this institutional setup that makes real criminal justice reform almost impossible….”
That’s just one of hundreds of insightful paragraphs in Barkow’s book.
I’d like to mention the solution to prosecutorial control given by Bill Windsor, in his Youtube series “Lawless America” (which is easily translatable to Lawless Australia). He says peeps should restore the citizen-led grand jury system. (Please be cautious of writers who say “Let’s rid of grand juries.”)
If your state prosecutor has illegally taken control of the GJ, Windsor recommends that you go to court for an injunction against that. By the way, White-guy Windsor served two terms for his orneriness, and may now be in jail again — he sure has not been posting on his website for years.
My Grandmother”s uncle was a hangman–my fathers cousin a hit man part of the syndicate.
Those carrying out the torture in our youth detention centres and places of incarceration are military trained and are following the orders of the World Gov.
In the name of the virus.
Martial Law-all part of the plan-FEMA -Crisis Management.
Heard an interview this morning—some statements re Bio Security Act
New Powers to “Protect” Australians
New Powers -control orders–forced to give health information–restricting certain behaviours-isolating communities.- also creating health zones–reponse zones–restrictions in and out of areas.- an emergency action. If necessary, if haste is needed, enforced vaccination or other action will be taken- there will be a right to appeal. A Judiciary review process.
” if under an order will be subjected to certain measures–only on the recommendation of the medical officers–Chief medical officers. There will be a judicial review in some cases–although
-if directed you must comply-if refuse to comply–police force is to be used
https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/03/04/coronavirus-covid-biosecurity-act/?utm_campaign=Weekender&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wkndr=MGRlSUphdm94bk1QNm95S05sMjliQT09
Thank you, Diane. They are closing in. Judicial review is meaningless if the injection has inserted a chip.
Most Americans do not know that The Homeland Security Act allows forced vaccinations. The word used for vax is “covered counter-measures”. Who would guess?
Diane, I think you may have bested Ned for pedigree.
“They are closing in”. Illuminati fait accompli All part of the plan. Australia the Headquarters
Listen to Robbie Thorpe
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS81NDI1NTEucnNz&episode=QnV6enNwcm91dC0yNDE2NTUz&hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwjTq6ef6_fnAhVNo54KHVaTAQAQjrkEegQIBxAE&ep=6&fbclid=IwAR25LXlcfbftyayutL0b3g34R4pdFsU56qJvCP_ffkXpSew8CdE7NT2ae_Q