Post by Anja on Jun 11, 2006 16:48:46 GMT -5
Wrongly convicted of murder, man moves on with life----Experts say lawyer,
system failed him.
To survive in prison, Jim Tenny says, one must first abandon all
expectation.
You drive out the anger at your attorney, whose defense left you wrongly
convicted of murder. You accept as false your hope that the system will
recognize its terrible mistake. And when everything you've trained
yourself to be is betrayed by the promise of freedom, you hold back until
you hear the judge say, "Mr. Tenny, you are free to go."
Tenny heard those words from Llano County Judge Gil Jones on March 8,
nearly seven years after another judge sentenced him to 65 years in prison
for killing his girlfriend Joyce Mulvey.
He never said he didn't kill her. He trusted an attorney to make a case
that he had done it in self-defense. When the attorney and a jury failed
him, Tenny resolved, above all, to survive. Tenny could not allow himself
to expect, to hope, that a federal judge would eventually believe his
story and assign to him a million-dollar defense that would win him a new
trial and his freedom.
Tenny, 53, wonders whether his case, one of a growing number of murder
cases in Texas that have been retried or overturned, is evidence the
system works, as his prosecutor believes. Or whether it suggests, as his
defense lawyers suspect, that many more would be freed if only they could
afford better representation. Or maybe Sam Newton Jr., the inmate who
taught Tenny the law while he was in prison, is right: The system is
simply and irretrievably corrupt.
Tenny has now had months to wonder about it, living with old friends on a
little ranch near Wimberley. There is work here for a man like Tenny, who
is good with his hands. And there are hours to think, late evenings with a
glass of wine, rocking on the hanging chair on his friends' cool patio.
"I spent many hours of weeping after I got out," Tenny says. "There wasn't
any sadness to it. Or resentment over what happened to me. Just this
amazement that there were so many people who put heart and soul into doing
the job."
Life of leisure
Tenny was the kind of boy who let life wash over him: smart enough but not
particularly ambitious.
"He was just never able to find himself," says his mother, Shirley, who
lives in Cedar Hills, Mo. When he got out of the Navy in 1974, he
hitchhiked around the country for 4 years, playing his guitar, taking
welding and carpentry jobs.
Tenny met his former wife, Gwendolyn, when he blew into Blanco in 1978.
She was 19 and had never been to a dance or on a date. They had four
children, all of them delivered at home by Tenny. Nathan is now 24, Joshua
22, Keenan 20 and Paul 18.
Money was always short, and Gwendolyn, who declined to be interviewed for
this story, chafed at her husband's reluctance to get a steady job. She
divorced Tenny in 1989, when their oldest was 7 and the youngest 1. The
kids stayed with Gwendolyn.
"I guess I was never a workaholic. I liked my leisure," Tenny says. "I
guess I could have been a better husband, and I've always tried to be a
good dad."
Tenny thought he'd gotten a second chance when he met Joyce Mulvey in 1993
at the Renaissance Market on 23rd and Guadalupe. Tenny was making
religious and novelty items out of wood. Mulvey was a regular, selling her
beadwork.
She was 13 years his senior but fit and a good match for Tenny's easy
temperament, he says.
The couple put everything they had into two trailers on 2 acres in Blanco,
one for living in and one for Tenny's woodworking, in 1997.
In May, Tenny's son Joshua, then 13, upset the balance. He couldn't get
along with his stepfather, and when he asked to move in, Mulvey resisted.
Mulvey had raised 3 boys of her own and wasn't about to start in raising
any of Tenny's, he says.
Tenny didn't think he had any choice. If Joshua couldn't move in, Tenny
would move out.
For several days, Tenny and Mulvey avoided each other. Tenny would learn
later that Mulvey told friends she would burn down the trailer with Tenny
in it rather than give it up to creditors.
On May 11, Tenny was separating things he had shared with Mulvey, music,
photographs, an old stereo, when she came home.
A fatal fight
They talked a little about their split, and an argument became a bloody
brawl. Mulvey came at Tenny with a gas can, splashing him in the eyes and
mouth and down his front. She tried flicking a lighter, and Tenny will
never know why it didn't light.
Tenny later testified that he punched Mulvey twice in the face, breaking
her nose. She bloodied his skull with a dinner plate and stabbed him
twice, puncturing his lung and missing his heart by less than an inch. In
a hand-to-hand struggle, Tenny testified, he plunged the knife into
Mulvey's stomach and back. Tenny made 2 911 calls before STAR Flight
airlifted him to Brackenridge Hospital.
"I don't even remember making those calls. I was just trying to get her to
stop coming at me. When she did, I did chest compressions on her, but all
that was coming out was blood," he says.
"Basically, I just, I couldn't believe it happened," Tenny told the jury
in his first trial. "I was just, I just felt like, oh, my God. Oh, my God,
you know."
Blanco County charged Tenny with first-degree murder while he recovered at
Brackenridge, his left ankle handcuffed to the bed. Tenny hired a local
attorney, John Bennett, who had been suggested by another lawyer one of
his friends knew. Tenny's parents came up with a $5,000 retainer.
Tenny was confident: "No 12 people in the world are going to find me
guilty of murder when I tell my story."
Thomas Cloudt, the prosecutor, was surprised that Tenny testified that he
killed Joyce Mulvey in self-defense. At the start of the trial, Bennett
seemed to be arguing a case for voluntary manslaughter.
"Judging from the reaction of Mr. Bennett, the self-defense argument of
his client came as a surprise," Cloudt recalls. "I don't think the jury
saw him as an innocent man; they saw him as a man who bludgeoned and
stabbed this woman."
When contacted at his law office in San Marcos, Bennett expressed
disappointment that the case was being rehashed.
"I've just been beat to death with this," Bennett says. "For the record, I
have no comment."
To the end of the trial, Bennett did almost nothing to change the jury's
view, according to transcripts. Seven witnesses who later provided sworn
statements attesting to Mulvey's anger and her intention, who said they
were alarmed by her threats against Tenny, did not testify.
Cloudt interpreted Bennett's move as a tactic, one that might have been
sound under the circumstances. 2 of the 7 witnesses were, at the time,
under indictment for child indecency. In less than an hour, the jury found
Tenny guilty of murder. Cloudt offered to recommend a sentence of 10 years
if Tenny would testify against one of the indicted witnesses. He says he
knew nothing that could help their prosecution.
The judge, Charles Hearn, handed down a sentence of 65 years.
"Nothing prepared me for it. I was numb. But even after the sentencing, I
thought that Bennett had done a good job," Tenny says. "It wasn't until
later that I realized that a trial is really more of a show. People don't
really understand the law."
New life, new rules
For the next 6 years, Tenny says, he acted on instinct. He sought out
older inmates to help him navigate the complicated prison dance. Don't
gossip. Never use the N-word. Don't even think it. Always have a way out.
Tenny used his job as a cook to carve out a place in the Darrington Unit
in Rosharon, south of Houston. He knew precisely whom to give the extra
pork chop to or when to make peanut butter sandwiches for the infirmary
nurses.
He took his share of punches, one of them knocking out two of his teeth,
but he understood that it was safer to remain angry on the inside. He
began ordering books of Eastern philosophy. His routine of morning
meditation and solitary walks in the yard gave him the air of an ascetic.
"Jim Tenny was DIFFERENT because he is like myself. He has self respect
and dignity and integrity," Sam Newton Jr. wrote last month from his
prison cell. "There are not many in here who maintain those attributes, as
you sure as Hell don't develop them in here."
Newton had become an institution, helping dozens of fellow inmates
research, write and file criminal appeals. Tenny became his prize pupil.
"I spent months with the Black's Law Dictionary. It took me days and days
to understand what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means."
What Tenny learned, beyond the courtroom jargon, was what Bennett had
failed to do. Tenny filed a 22-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus,
questioning the legality of his imprisonment, on June 25, 2001, in U.S.
District Court in Austin. In effect, the writ argued that the state was
holding Tenny illegally because Bennett had failed to represent him
properly.
After reading Tenny's writ, federal Judge Sam Sparks ordered an
evidentiary hearing.
"For me, Tenny was an easy one," Sparks says. Bennett "didn't put on any
evidence. He couldn't possibly have mounted an adequate defense."
Sparks so believed Tenny had received a poor defense that he sought out
Bill Schuurman, whose Houston-based firm, Vinson & Elkins, took a
prominent role among the firms in pro bono legal work.
Sparks was not concerned that Schuurman, a patent lawyer, lacked criminal
defense experience. He selected a firm that had the resources to carry
through on Tenny's case.
"A good attorney knows how to try a lawsuit and look up the law," Sparks
says.
Schuurman and Avelyn Ross, an eager young associate, joke that they didn't
know what habeas corpus was. But they promised to do everything they could
for Tenny.
"What impressed us about Jim was how reasonable he was," Schuurman says.
"He wasn't angry. He explained how difficult it was to get anyone's
attention from prison, and he seemed genuinely grateful for ours."
Ross and Schuurman assembled a team of volunteer lawyers from the firm,
enlisted Austin criminal attorney David Sheppard, a veteran in trying
murder cases, and began a new investigation. Vinson & Elkins estimated the
value of its assistance in time and expenses at well over $1 million.
In April 2004, Sparks ordered the state to give Tenny a new trial or
release him. His ruling was upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals. The Vinson & Elkins team asked for a change of venue to Llano
County, and on Feb. 27, Tenny was tried a second time for 1st-degree
murder.
Sheppard and his team made its case for self-defense. After nearly 10
hours of deliberation, the jury compromised and convicted Tenny of
aggravated assault. Its sentence of 5 years was less time than Tenny had
already served in prison.
Did the system work?
Both the prosecution and the defense claimed that the outcome was a
victory for the judicial system.
"I don't think money influenced the outcome; I think the circumstances
did," Cloudt said. "I don't feel insulted by the outcome or view it as
anything untoward. Do I believe Mr. Tenny committed a murder? Yes, I do. I
think the jury came to a compromise."
Schuurman has come to believe that the system fails when people like Tenny
cannot afford good representation, that perhaps the pool of top-flight pro
bono attorneys is too small, that there isn't enough accountability for
lawyers.
"I really think something is wrong with the system when there are so many
people who cannot have good representation," Schuurman says. "We all want
this system to work, but if we all don't work hard, the system breaks
down."
Tenny says he would like to hold Bennett accountable, but he isn't exactly
sure how. He is convinced that there are others in prison who might be
freed if they had the help he had, but so far, Tenny hasn't applied what
he learned to any of their cases.
Ed and Shirley Tenny say they've seen a spiritual growth in their son.
"You might say that I couldn't have gotten this experience any other way,"
Tenny says.
Still, they worry. At 53, Tenny has no savings, no Social Security and no
job, his mother says. "We think now is the time for him to get out and do
it himself," she says.
"I'm just not ready to deal with the responsibility yet," Tenny says,
swinging in a late afternoon breeze. "There's a lot of work to do out
here. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
(source: Austin American-Statesman)
system failed him.
To survive in prison, Jim Tenny says, one must first abandon all
expectation.
You drive out the anger at your attorney, whose defense left you wrongly
convicted of murder. You accept as false your hope that the system will
recognize its terrible mistake. And when everything you've trained
yourself to be is betrayed by the promise of freedom, you hold back until
you hear the judge say, "Mr. Tenny, you are free to go."
Tenny heard those words from Llano County Judge Gil Jones on March 8,
nearly seven years after another judge sentenced him to 65 years in prison
for killing his girlfriend Joyce Mulvey.
He never said he didn't kill her. He trusted an attorney to make a case
that he had done it in self-defense. When the attorney and a jury failed
him, Tenny resolved, above all, to survive. Tenny could not allow himself
to expect, to hope, that a federal judge would eventually believe his
story and assign to him a million-dollar defense that would win him a new
trial and his freedom.
Tenny, 53, wonders whether his case, one of a growing number of murder
cases in Texas that have been retried or overturned, is evidence the
system works, as his prosecutor believes. Or whether it suggests, as his
defense lawyers suspect, that many more would be freed if only they could
afford better representation. Or maybe Sam Newton Jr., the inmate who
taught Tenny the law while he was in prison, is right: The system is
simply and irretrievably corrupt.
Tenny has now had months to wonder about it, living with old friends on a
little ranch near Wimberley. There is work here for a man like Tenny, who
is good with his hands. And there are hours to think, late evenings with a
glass of wine, rocking on the hanging chair on his friends' cool patio.
"I spent many hours of weeping after I got out," Tenny says. "There wasn't
any sadness to it. Or resentment over what happened to me. Just this
amazement that there were so many people who put heart and soul into doing
the job."
Life of leisure
Tenny was the kind of boy who let life wash over him: smart enough but not
particularly ambitious.
"He was just never able to find himself," says his mother, Shirley, who
lives in Cedar Hills, Mo. When he got out of the Navy in 1974, he
hitchhiked around the country for 4 years, playing his guitar, taking
welding and carpentry jobs.
Tenny met his former wife, Gwendolyn, when he blew into Blanco in 1978.
She was 19 and had never been to a dance or on a date. They had four
children, all of them delivered at home by Tenny. Nathan is now 24, Joshua
22, Keenan 20 and Paul 18.
Money was always short, and Gwendolyn, who declined to be interviewed for
this story, chafed at her husband's reluctance to get a steady job. She
divorced Tenny in 1989, when their oldest was 7 and the youngest 1. The
kids stayed with Gwendolyn.
"I guess I was never a workaholic. I liked my leisure," Tenny says. "I
guess I could have been a better husband, and I've always tried to be a
good dad."
Tenny thought he'd gotten a second chance when he met Joyce Mulvey in 1993
at the Renaissance Market on 23rd and Guadalupe. Tenny was making
religious and novelty items out of wood. Mulvey was a regular, selling her
beadwork.
She was 13 years his senior but fit and a good match for Tenny's easy
temperament, he says.
The couple put everything they had into two trailers on 2 acres in Blanco,
one for living in and one for Tenny's woodworking, in 1997.
In May, Tenny's son Joshua, then 13, upset the balance. He couldn't get
along with his stepfather, and when he asked to move in, Mulvey resisted.
Mulvey had raised 3 boys of her own and wasn't about to start in raising
any of Tenny's, he says.
Tenny didn't think he had any choice. If Joshua couldn't move in, Tenny
would move out.
For several days, Tenny and Mulvey avoided each other. Tenny would learn
later that Mulvey told friends she would burn down the trailer with Tenny
in it rather than give it up to creditors.
On May 11, Tenny was separating things he had shared with Mulvey, music,
photographs, an old stereo, when she came home.
A fatal fight
They talked a little about their split, and an argument became a bloody
brawl. Mulvey came at Tenny with a gas can, splashing him in the eyes and
mouth and down his front. She tried flicking a lighter, and Tenny will
never know why it didn't light.
Tenny later testified that he punched Mulvey twice in the face, breaking
her nose. She bloodied his skull with a dinner plate and stabbed him
twice, puncturing his lung and missing his heart by less than an inch. In
a hand-to-hand struggle, Tenny testified, he plunged the knife into
Mulvey's stomach and back. Tenny made 2 911 calls before STAR Flight
airlifted him to Brackenridge Hospital.
"I don't even remember making those calls. I was just trying to get her to
stop coming at me. When she did, I did chest compressions on her, but all
that was coming out was blood," he says.
"Basically, I just, I couldn't believe it happened," Tenny told the jury
in his first trial. "I was just, I just felt like, oh, my God. Oh, my God,
you know."
Blanco County charged Tenny with first-degree murder while he recovered at
Brackenridge, his left ankle handcuffed to the bed. Tenny hired a local
attorney, John Bennett, who had been suggested by another lawyer one of
his friends knew. Tenny's parents came up with a $5,000 retainer.
Tenny was confident: "No 12 people in the world are going to find me
guilty of murder when I tell my story."
Thomas Cloudt, the prosecutor, was surprised that Tenny testified that he
killed Joyce Mulvey in self-defense. At the start of the trial, Bennett
seemed to be arguing a case for voluntary manslaughter.
"Judging from the reaction of Mr. Bennett, the self-defense argument of
his client came as a surprise," Cloudt recalls. "I don't think the jury
saw him as an innocent man; they saw him as a man who bludgeoned and
stabbed this woman."
When contacted at his law office in San Marcos, Bennett expressed
disappointment that the case was being rehashed.
"I've just been beat to death with this," Bennett says. "For the record, I
have no comment."
To the end of the trial, Bennett did almost nothing to change the jury's
view, according to transcripts. Seven witnesses who later provided sworn
statements attesting to Mulvey's anger and her intention, who said they
were alarmed by her threats against Tenny, did not testify.
Cloudt interpreted Bennett's move as a tactic, one that might have been
sound under the circumstances. 2 of the 7 witnesses were, at the time,
under indictment for child indecency. In less than an hour, the jury found
Tenny guilty of murder. Cloudt offered to recommend a sentence of 10 years
if Tenny would testify against one of the indicted witnesses. He says he
knew nothing that could help their prosecution.
The judge, Charles Hearn, handed down a sentence of 65 years.
"Nothing prepared me for it. I was numb. But even after the sentencing, I
thought that Bennett had done a good job," Tenny says. "It wasn't until
later that I realized that a trial is really more of a show. People don't
really understand the law."
New life, new rules
For the next 6 years, Tenny says, he acted on instinct. He sought out
older inmates to help him navigate the complicated prison dance. Don't
gossip. Never use the N-word. Don't even think it. Always have a way out.
Tenny used his job as a cook to carve out a place in the Darrington Unit
in Rosharon, south of Houston. He knew precisely whom to give the extra
pork chop to or when to make peanut butter sandwiches for the infirmary
nurses.
He took his share of punches, one of them knocking out two of his teeth,
but he understood that it was safer to remain angry on the inside. He
began ordering books of Eastern philosophy. His routine of morning
meditation and solitary walks in the yard gave him the air of an ascetic.
"Jim Tenny was DIFFERENT because he is like myself. He has self respect
and dignity and integrity," Sam Newton Jr. wrote last month from his
prison cell. "There are not many in here who maintain those attributes, as
you sure as Hell don't develop them in here."
Newton had become an institution, helping dozens of fellow inmates
research, write and file criminal appeals. Tenny became his prize pupil.
"I spent months with the Black's Law Dictionary. It took me days and days
to understand what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means."
What Tenny learned, beyond the courtroom jargon, was what Bennett had
failed to do. Tenny filed a 22-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus,
questioning the legality of his imprisonment, on June 25, 2001, in U.S.
District Court in Austin. In effect, the writ argued that the state was
holding Tenny illegally because Bennett had failed to represent him
properly.
After reading Tenny's writ, federal Judge Sam Sparks ordered an
evidentiary hearing.
"For me, Tenny was an easy one," Sparks says. Bennett "didn't put on any
evidence. He couldn't possibly have mounted an adequate defense."
Sparks so believed Tenny had received a poor defense that he sought out
Bill Schuurman, whose Houston-based firm, Vinson & Elkins, took a
prominent role among the firms in pro bono legal work.
Sparks was not concerned that Schuurman, a patent lawyer, lacked criminal
defense experience. He selected a firm that had the resources to carry
through on Tenny's case.
"A good attorney knows how to try a lawsuit and look up the law," Sparks
says.
Schuurman and Avelyn Ross, an eager young associate, joke that they didn't
know what habeas corpus was. But they promised to do everything they could
for Tenny.
"What impressed us about Jim was how reasonable he was," Schuurman says.
"He wasn't angry. He explained how difficult it was to get anyone's
attention from prison, and he seemed genuinely grateful for ours."
Ross and Schuurman assembled a team of volunteer lawyers from the firm,
enlisted Austin criminal attorney David Sheppard, a veteran in trying
murder cases, and began a new investigation. Vinson & Elkins estimated the
value of its assistance in time and expenses at well over $1 million.
In April 2004, Sparks ordered the state to give Tenny a new trial or
release him. His ruling was upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals. The Vinson & Elkins team asked for a change of venue to Llano
County, and on Feb. 27, Tenny was tried a second time for 1st-degree
murder.
Sheppard and his team made its case for self-defense. After nearly 10
hours of deliberation, the jury compromised and convicted Tenny of
aggravated assault. Its sentence of 5 years was less time than Tenny had
already served in prison.
Did the system work?
Both the prosecution and the defense claimed that the outcome was a
victory for the judicial system.
"I don't think money influenced the outcome; I think the circumstances
did," Cloudt said. "I don't feel insulted by the outcome or view it as
anything untoward. Do I believe Mr. Tenny committed a murder? Yes, I do. I
think the jury came to a compromise."
Schuurman has come to believe that the system fails when people like Tenny
cannot afford good representation, that perhaps the pool of top-flight pro
bono attorneys is too small, that there isn't enough accountability for
lawyers.
"I really think something is wrong with the system when there are so many
people who cannot have good representation," Schuurman says. "We all want
this system to work, but if we all don't work hard, the system breaks
down."
Tenny says he would like to hold Bennett accountable, but he isn't exactly
sure how. He is convinced that there are others in prison who might be
freed if they had the help he had, but so far, Tenny hasn't applied what
he learned to any of their cases.
Ed and Shirley Tenny say they've seen a spiritual growth in their son.
"You might say that I couldn't have gotten this experience any other way,"
Tenny says.
Still, they worry. At 53, Tenny has no savings, no Social Security and no
job, his mother says. "We think now is the time for him to get out and do
it himself," she says.
"I'm just not ready to deal with the responsibility yet," Tenny says,
swinging in a late afternoon breeze. "There's a lot of work to do out
here. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
(source: Austin American-Statesman)