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It all began on a bright spring day, May 6, 1992. I walked into Hartford Superior Courtroom A2 for the first time. I sat in the audience on the left side, behind the defendant, Richard Lapointe of Manchester, Connecticut, a 46 year-old, five-foot-four dishwasher with mental disabilities. I was there because a stranger called to say a travesty of justice was going on.
It was the first day of Lapointe's murder trial. I opened my notebook and prepared to jot down everything I saw and heard. Then it hit me that I was sitting on the left side of that courtroom alone. Everyone else sat on the right side, behind the prosecutor who was going for the death penalty.
Sitting in front of me was Lapointe, a soft, unathletic little man with an up-and-down thickness that even included his head. He wore thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears. It was easy to see how, when he grew up in Hartford's Charter Oaks Terrace housing project, he was given the nickname, "Mister Magoo".
All his life, he had fought valiantly to overcome the destructive effects of Dandy-Walker syndrome - a congenital brain malformation that caused a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in his skull. Unfortunately, the condition was not diagnosed until age 15. By that time, the pressure had damaged many of his physical and mental functions: eyesight, hearing, stamina, muscle coordination, his ability to learn abstract concepts as well as sophisticated social skills. In his concrete way of thinking, he survived by pleasing the authority figures around him.
Even so, he married a young woman with cerebral palsy. They became the parents of a son they loved deeply. Lapointe was a good breadwinner for his family, doing what he did best, washing dishes. He was a faithful member of his local Catholic Church and a regular member of the local Knights of Columbus.
Lapointe did have various odd habits due to his disability - staring at people too long, bringing up the same problem over and over again, and repeating the same corny jokes until the listener knew them by heart. But he was, above all, a family man with no criminal record and absolutely no history of violence. If anything, he would find a way to avoid any kind of confrontation. He had achieved a full life in the community in spite of his disabilities - until his life exploded on July 4, 1989.
On that holiday, Lapointe was helping his wife prepare for an evening picnic when the Manchester police called and asked if he would come to headquarters. He agreed to go and was driven to the station. As soon as he arrived, an officer read him the Miranda warning.
At that point, most people would become alarmed. But not Lapointe. He signed a statement that waived his rights. After all, why would he need to remain silent? Why would he need a lawyer?
He was walked past a number of "props" - large fake charts of supposed evidence and statements claiming that Lapointe was a brutal rapist and murderer. The police described the props in court as "devices for reducing suspect's inhibitions for telling the truth. But because Lapointe's eyesight and level of cognition, he didn't even react to them.
Next Lapointe was taken to an interrogation room where three detectives conducted a succession of unrecorded, one-on-one interrogations from 4:30 p.m until 1:30 the next morning. The first detective told him that the police had massive amounts of evidence, showing that he murdered his wife's grandmother, 88-year-old Bernice Martin, better than two years earlier on March 8, 1987.
Since Lapointe always took pains to befriend the police officers in town, he never dreamed that any of them would lie to him. Even so, he denied all accusations for quite some time.
Then according to the detective's testimony, Lapointe gave his first "confession". The detective printed it out large block letters:
"ON MARCH 8, 1987, I WAS RESPONSIBLE F0R BERNICE MARTIN'S DEATH AND IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. MY MIND WENT BLANK."
That wasn't much of a confession for such an overpowering explosion of violence: raping with a blunt object, delivering ten stabs to the back and one to the abdomen, the restraining of wrists and the complicated fashioning of a strangulation "ligature" from strips of cloth - then setting fires in three separate locations within the apartment.
The second "confession" - different from the first - was typed. It contained 157 words and ended with, "If the evidence shows that I was there, and that I killed her, then I killed her. But I don't remember being there ."
The third "confession" - different from the other two - was a 212-word statement that was again hand-printed by a detective. This one was more detailed, but it matched police reports on the crime. During the trial many forensic experts showed that the crime didn't happen the way the police reported it!
The police, now claiming to have their murderer, did a strange thing. Around 1:30 am. on July 5, they let him go home!
Unaware of his plight, Richard grabbed a few hours of sleep, woke up and walked two miles to his dish washing job that began at 5:30 am. That evening, after a full day's work, he was arrested.
Bail was set for $500,000. Family and friends, believing that police would never make a mistake, pull away. His wife and son, age eight at the time, were pulled away, too, by the rest of the relatives. Lapointe awaited trial for nearly three years virtually without a visitor.
When the trial began, not one friend appeared in court to support Lapointe. That first weekend, all I could think about was that small friendless man sitting all alone in that courtroom while the State of Connecticut went all out to kill him.
By 2:00 a.m. on Monday morning, my anguish peaked. I got out of bed and dialed into the answering machines of numerous persons who worked with people like Lapointe. In some instances I did more than share; I shouted.
Later, on Monday morning, eight people sat behind Lapointe. By the end of the 48-day trial, 40 newfound friends attended when they could. Every word of testimony and every legal argument took place with supporters sitting behind the little defendant.
Friends were there when the jury, basing their decision mostly on the confessions (no physical evidence tied him directly to the crime), found Lapointe guilty.
Friends were there when the jury decided that Lapointe's disabilities were a mitigating factor and he should not be killed.
Friends were there when the judge sentenced Lapointe to "life without parole plus 60 years". And some of them wept.
The judge and lawyers went on to other cases, but we who chose to become Richard's friends have not gone away. We organized as The Friends of Richard Lapointe. We began meeting every other Wednesday evening in the community conference room of the Wethersfield, Connecticut, Burger King.
We are journalists, lawyers, psychologists, professors, detectives, nurses, court monitors, nurses, literacy volunteers, businessmen, state workers, citizen advocates as well as numerous ordinary citizens whose sense of decency has been offended by what happened to Richard in a Connecticut court. Today, there are better than 100 members who are on call or working in close-knit committees.
Since the trial, more than three years ago, I and the other Friends of Richard have tried the case over and over again in our minds and have asked numerous questions that are yet to be answered. For example:
The Friends of Richard can't prove it, but we believe that if our vulnerable little friend had been left all alone in that courtroom, he would have gotten the electric chair.
On the other hand, it hurts to think that Richard has now entered his seventh year of incarceration.
So we keep working.
If you happen to be in the Hartford area on a Wednesday evening, come to the Wethersfield Burger King at 6:30 p.m., order your Whopper, go to the community room and take your seat.
ROBERT PERSKE is the author of Circles of Friends, Unequal Justice? and Deadly Innocence?
He can be contacted at -
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