Howard Neal - Mississippi

[CCADP]

This story ran in the UK this year and generated a HUGE amount of interest in Neal and his case. He is looking for penpals - contact me for info :

The execution exam
Investigation by Leni and Peter Gillman
For 23 years on death row, Howard Neal has protested his innocence. He has a mental age of eight but has learnt to read and write in prison. Now he must take an IQ test. If he solves a series of simple puzzles, he dies
We have to remove everything we're carrying: jewellery, watches, pencil, notebook, handkerchiefs, even a finger puppet made by our granddaughter that has lodged in the seam of one of our pockets. The guards in the cavernous inspection hall remain expressionless as they pat us down, inspect our pockets, steer us through two electronic screenings, then point us to the bus waiting to take us into Parchman, the state penitentiary set in 28,000 acres of the monotonous landscape of the Mississippi delta. We pass between razor-wire compounds, with their watchtowers and armed guards, and stop at the largest of all. We negotiate sets of barred gates, each one sliding shut behind us before the next opens, until finally we are directed to a cubicle facing a Plexiglas window. This is Unit 32 — the euphemism for Parchman's death row.

Howard Neal shuffles in. He is wearing a red prison jump suit, shackles on his ankles, his wrists cuffed to a chain around his waist. He is a slight, middle-aged man, with green eyes and cropped light-brown hair. Unusually for a white man from rural Mississippi, his face is smooth and unlined, the result, we surmise, of so little time spent outdoors. He is anxious and curious, as he rarely has visitors apart from his lawyers. He picks up the phone on the far side of the window, straining against the handcuff to place it by his ear. As we start talking, his face relaxes and there is a glimmer of a smile. He has a Deep South accent that borders on the impenetrable, and he speaks rapidly, almost staccato, as he knows we have only an hour.

Neal has been on death row for 23 years. He was convicted of kidnap and murder in 1982 and sentenced to die in the Mississippi gas chamber. He relates the details of his arrest and interrogation, first by the California police, later by Mississippi detectives in Jackson, the state capital. He stammers as his words tumble out, yet he answers our questions without apparent guile.

"Were you carrying a gun when the police picked you up?"

"Oh sure, I had a gun in my car. I told them that. And I told them they could search my car."

He asks, several times, if we think he will get off death row. We tell him that his lawyers are doing everything they can. Since we had to remove our watches, we have no idea how time is passing. Without warning, a guard calls him to return to his cell. Neal asks for more time, but the answer is still no. We touch hands against the glass, then leave, back through the sliding gates and razor wire, through the inspection hall, out into the fierce Mississippi sun.

Already one anomaly is clear. Since we were allowed no contact with Neal, why did we have to remove all our possessions? We know that this is death row, where anomalies are rife, particularly given that the state of Mississippi is not content merely to have sentenced a man to death, but aims to render the rest of his life as uncomfortable and degrading as possible — and, it could be added, to humiliate his visitors as well.

Neal inhabits a cell 6ft square. He is allowed out for four hours' exercise a week. In summer, temperatures soar above 100F (37.7C). The death-row suits are made of nylon and are unbearably hot, but there is no air conditioning or a fan, and no access to cold water. The light is left on 24 hours a day and the cell is infested with mosquitoes. Once, family visitors could stay all day; then visits were restricted to an hour. Neal's mother stopped coming; he last saw her in 1992.

All this for a crime that Neal insists he did not commit. His trial can only be described as a travesty. The evidence against him was desperately thin, consisting of one unsupported confession and a single, shaky witness sighting. Although a federal court found that Neal was unfairly sentenced to death, it refused to give him a reprieve. He has been within three weeks of execution and owes his survival to a group of anti-capital-punishment lawyers, who have been using every twist and nuance of the American judicial system to keep him alive.

Now a new battle looms. Neal has an IQ of 54 and a mental age of eight, classifying him in the US as mentally retarded (the British would say he has learning difficulties). In 2002 the US Supreme Court ruled that the execution of retarded prisoners should be stopped. Although it left it to the individual states to decide how to define "mental retardation", it recommended as a benchmark an IQ of 70.

While some states have already stopped executing the mentally retarded, Mississippi is determined not to let Neal escape. Despite overwhelming evidence that he is retarded, Mississippi is insisting on testing him again. There is a controversy over what IQ tests truly represent, and whether a test first devised to identify the skills of illiterate people should be used to determine whether someone lives or dies. Nonetheless, a psychologist is to be assigned to measure Neal's intelligence in the next few weeks, using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, or WAIS.

Neal will be asked to complete a range of tests, such as reversing a set of numbers and completing jigsaw puzzles. The psychologist will, presumably, instruct Neal to do his best. If he scores well, his reward will be a journey to Unit 32's execution chamber. But even if Neal falls below the 70 watershed, he may not be spared. In two cases, Mississippi has accepted the psychologists' verdict. In others, it has gone on the offensive. Prosecutors have attacked the validity of the tests and have accused prisoners of deliberately failing. A grandmother who declared that her grandson was "a good father" found the state prosecutors using her words to argue that he should be executed.

Supporters of the death penalty, an overwhelming majority in Mississippi, see nothing wrong in this, since they believe that the Supreme Court decision is a denial of retributive justice. To its opponents, it exposes the contradictions inherent in trying to distinguish between capital and non-capital offences — one of the two principal reasons capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965. The other, that mistakes were both inevitable and irrevocable, is also relevant in the case of Howard Neal.

In its rawness, its catalogue of family cruelty and abuse, his story resembles something out of those talismanic Mississippi writers Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner. It can be related from details in the court records, and from Neal's letters, written in short, repetitive sentences, after a fellow prisoner taught him to read and write.

Howard Monteville Neal was born in Mount Carmel, Mississippi, in 1953, one of his mother's 11 children by three different fathers. The family lived in a two-bedroom shack with no electricity or running water. His father was an alcoholic. "My daddy tore my mother's clothes off in front of all the kids," Neal wrote. "He hit my mother with a brick in the head and blood was run down her face." Neal's father beat him and abused him sexually, including making him perform fellatio on him. He taught Neal to steal from neighbours and drowned his dog in the local creek. "I was always afraid of my daddy. I never understood why he was so bad, so mean," he wrote. He was ridiculed by his siblings for seeming so slow and dumb. "All my family hate me. My family always told me I was no good for anything at all."

[CCADP]

Neal's teenage years were spent in institutions where he suffered further cruelty. His parents separated when he was 10 and Neal was sent to a children's home. "He was just throwed away," a sister said. He recalls sleeping in a cell with a bucket for a toilet, and attending classes for two hours a day. His older half-brother, Bobby, took him home for visits but subjected him to sexual abuse, threatening to cut out his tongue if he told anyone. "Bobby called me a retard and all kinds of bad names. He always told me I was no good for anything. I was very, very afraid of Bobby."

At 16, he was sent to the state mental hospital near Jackson, where he was locked up with the most disturbed and aggressive inmates. "It was a real bad place." At 18, after a spell living with his mother and latest stepfather, he headed for Oklahoma, where he was jailed for assault. While in prison he was raped and sodomised and, in the worst incident, forced to commit fellatio on more than 30 prisoners and to spit their semen into a bucket. A prison psychologist, Thomas Norwood, declared that Neal's was the most tragic case he had ever encountered.

In 1979, Neal married a retarded woman called Glenda Snow, but after a few months her parents took her back home. After further jail time in Mississippi, Neal married again. His wife, Darla, was 15, and they had a daughter. They went on the road, looking for work in Texas, Kentucky and California, where Darla's brother tried to enlist Neal in drug-dealing. He refused. In March 1981 he was arrested in Stockton, California, for stealing a baseball cap. When the police checked his identity, they found he was wanted over three killings back in Mississippi.

The horror of the crime still resonates in the town of Monticello. During the night of January 24-25, 1981, say state prosecutors, Howard's half-brother Bobby Neal was driven from his home in a car. With him were his daughter, Amanda Joy, 13, and a cousin, Melanie Polk, 14. Bobby Neal was taken out of the car and shot. The girls were driven to a clearing in the woods, where police said they were raped and shot.

As Neal tells it, the first he knew of the killings was when he was questioned by the California police. He denied any knowledge of them through three days of intensive interrogation. He was refused a lawyer — the police told him "in California you don't need one" — and was tricked into signing an extradition paper allowing him to be sent back to Mississippi. He was questioned for three days by the Jackson police, who demanded to know what he had done with the murder weapon. As Neal describes it, he was placed under such intense pressure that, out of desperation, he told them: "In the river."

"I had to tell them something," he told us. "I thought they were going to kill me."

Neal stood trial a year later in an atmosphere of extraordinary drama. He was accused only of the murder and kidnap of Amanda Joy, and the evidence was farcically thin. A California detective testified that Neal had confessed to him on the third day of questioning. He had no written statement or recording of the confession, and no other officers were present. A local motel-keeper, a former security officer who had often worked with the police, said Neal had checked in around the time of the killings. He said he had completed a registration card on Neal's behalf, but this was never produced in court. He had not previously known Neal, and identified him from a picture shown to him by the police six weeks later.

That was all. There was no forensic evidence — no fingerprints, blood, fibres, ballistics — linking Neal to the crime. The police had claimed that Amanda Joy had scratched her initials in the boot of Neal's car, but no evidence was produced. The police could not find the murder weapon, despite searching the river. There was no account of Neal's motive or how the killing was carried out. Most striking were inconsistencies in his uncorroborated confession in California. Although he had supposedly confessed to raping Amanda Joy, the pathologist testified that her hymen showed "no evidence of recent laceration" and there were no other signs of sexual activity or assault. He had taken vaginal swabs and would normally have tested them himself. However, they were sent to the police crime lab and were never produced in court.

Neal always insisted that he had been in Texas, trying to get work on the oil rigs. But he couldn't prove this. He wanted to testify in court, but his trial lawyer dissuaded him. The view of his subsequent lawyers is that the small-town jury had been far too credulous of the police evidence and swayed by the claims of the prosecuting attorney, who told them to convict Neal to save other children from being murdered. After a trial lasting less than three days, the jury found him guilty on both charges and awarded him the death penalty. (He was given a life sentence for the murder of Bobby Neal in a separate trial, but never stood trial over Melanie Polk.)

The story of Howard Neal might have ended in the Parchman gas chamber had it not been for a network of lawyers whose mission it is to oppose the death penalty in the US. They believe it is immoral and hypocritical; it is administered in an arbitrary and capricious manner; mistakes are rife and your chances of evading the death penalty depend overwhelmingly on your ability to hire expensive lawyers. (Neal himself says: "There aren't any rich folks on death row.")

The US holds third place in the global execution league, behind China and Iran. In some US states, the tide of executions is receding, but Mississippi remains determinedly in favour. In 1994 its governor said he wanted Mississippi to become the capital-punishment capital of the US (an honour then held by Texas) and proposed abolishing juries in capital cases. He was defeated, but in 2000, Mississippi set up a special department whose aim is to speed death-penalty cases through the judicial system.

The campaigners maintain a kind of deathwatch, monitoring court decisions and trying to intervene. They usually step in after the first post-trial appeal, automatic in death-penalty cases. They tend to work from cramped offices that may be funded by charities or federal funds. Jim Craig, the lead lawyer in Neal's case, became involved when he was working at the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Center in Jackson. He has continued to handle it at his current law firm, a busy commercial practice in Jackson. A devout Christian, he believes that the death penalty is inherently wrong and that our sins are atoned for through the suffering of Jesus, not executions. He works obsessive hours, unpaid, on Neal's case and those of three other death-row prisoners.

Craig faces an equally determined opponent in Mississippi's assistant attorney-general, Sonny White, the lead prosecutor in capital cases for almost 20 years. Craig says: "He's very difficult and quite smart. His style of litigation is more personal and more virulent than other kinds of litigation I have dealt with. He seems to be of the opinion that this is war and that he is to give no quarter."

Neal's first execution date was set for February 6, 1985. The first death-row lawyers to examine his case were appalled. As Neal told it, the California police had refused him a lawyer. They had not read him his rights — and even if they had, he could not possibly have understood (in court, the police denied any irregularities). The procedures in the solitary instance of identification were a farce. He'd been prevented from testifying in his own defence. The jury had heard numerous references to the other two murders, even though they were not the subject of the Amanda Joy trial. The supposed murders were entirely out of keeping with his previous record of minor offences. And Neal was clearly mentally retarded.

Neal's new lawyers managed to have his execution date set aside with three weeks to spare. Since then, they have done their best to find a legal argument to get Neal off death row. It has been a lengthy and frustrating process. Twice, they seemed to be close to success. In 1987 they submitted a new case to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which had already denied their first appeal, as well as the appeal by the trial lawyers. They argued that the jury had not learnt enough about Neal's upbringing and retardation before voting for the death penalty. The jury had heard just two witnesses, Neal's mother and a psychologist, and the lawyers produced a dozen more.

[CCADP]

The Sunday Times Magazine
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The outcome was utterly perverse. Of the nine judges, five agreed to allow Neal's appeal. But these five couldn't agree on what should happen next. Three said he should have another hearing; two thought he should come off death row at once. Bizarrely, the four who rejected the appeal prevailed, and Neal stayed on death row.

When Craig took over as the lead counsel, he too filed a series of appeals. All were denied. In 2000 he returned to the issue of whether or not the jury should have heard more about Neal's upbringing and retardation, filing a fresh appeal to a federal appeals court. In March 2002 the court ruled that the previous decision by Mississippi had indeed been wrong: the full evidence about Neal's mental retardation should have been heard, and could have tilted the jury against the death penalty. But then came the rub. The federal court added that although Mississippi was wrong, it was not "unreasonably" wrong. By that semantic nicety, Neal was to be executed.

His lawyers were running out of options. White had already declared that Neal would be the next person to be executed. "Our backs were against the wall," Craig says. In desperation, Craig argued that Neal had been sentenced to die in the gas chamber and, as Mississippi had switched to lethal injections, a new execution order was required. But White was ahead of him, having already asked for a new hearing on that issue. Then came grounds for hope.

In 1996 a man named Daryl Atkins had been sentenced to death for murder and robbery in Virginia. Atkins had an IQ of 59 and a mental age between 9 and 12. His lawyers appealed to the US Supreme Court on the grounds that he was mentally retarded and therefore should not be executed. Craig was pessimistic, as the court had previously refused to exempt the mentally retarded. But in June 2002 it ruled by six votes to three that to execute Atkins would constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" under the US constitution. Its reasons could have been scripted with Neal in mind: the mentally retarded were likely to make poor witnesses, to be of little assistance to their lawyers, and even to make false confessions. Besides, executing them would not serve as either deterrence or retribution.

To Craig, nothing could be clearer. Throughout the long series of appeals, there had been endless evidence to the effect that Neal was retarded. But White was not about to give up.

"We're going to have frivolous litigation," he predicted the day after the Supreme Court verdict. "There are people on death row who all of a sudden are going to be retarded."

Mississippi had long resisted the idea that the mentally retarded should not be executed. In 1984, Mississippi's attorney-general declared that if Neal were spared, it would "virtually eliminate the death penalty". It had also attempted to undermine evidence of mental retardation. In numerous tests conducted over 20 years, Neal's IQ was consistently measured in the mid-fifties, placing him in the bottom 1% of the population. The only experts to dispute this were two state psychologists. Even though they had obtained an IQ score of 61, they claimed Neal was "smarter than he lets on". They also argued that because Neal could recall once buying a shotgun, he was "faking it" when he was unable to repeat digits backwards in an intelligence test.

Similar arguments are being dusted off again in Mississippi. The Supreme Court didn't instruct individual states on how to determine mental retardation, but it did recommend definitions drawn up by the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR). The AAMR had issued its definition to assist the social acceptance of mentally retarded people, rather than help decide if they should be killed. It also viewed the IQ figure as the principal benchmark, to be backed up by what it termed failures of adaptive behaviour — someone with a borderline IQ score, 70-80, could still be classed as mentally retarded if they were unable to cope with the exigencies of everyday life. But in Mississippi, White made it clear he intended to use the concept to challenge the IQ tests.

"Some states have adopted a 70 IQ [as their standard] but I think that is fairly restrictive," he said. "Somebody can have the IQ itself of 70 but still not meet the other standards."

White used this strategy in the case of William Wiley, whose application for what has become known as an Atkins hearing was heard earlier last year. Wiley's most recent IQ score was 68, but White argued that this was outweighed by his "adaptive behaviour" — he could drive, run errands and baby-sit, and was "a good son and grandson". The prosecutors also attacked the credentials of the psychologist who measured his IQ. The Mississippi Supreme Court sided with the prosecution and Wiley remained on death row. In another case, a Parchman guard's evidence that a death-row inmate could count the cigarettes he had purchased was said to prove adaptive behaviour. And when the Mississippi Supreme Court was asked to arbitrate in a case where psychologists had clashed over a prisoner's IQ scores — one marked him at 62, the other at 80 — it voted for execution.

Craig is appalled. The terms used by the APA and AAMR, he says, are "clinical definitions used to determine whether someone needs help", yet now they will be deployed in an adversarial setting as if they have the force of law.

Mississippi and its attorney-general "are trying to frustrate the constitution. They do not like Atkins and they are trying to make the exceptions the rule".

Mississippi has also introduced a criterion that was not mentioned in the APA or AAMR definitions. It is following the lead of Justice Scalia, the most conservative of the nine Supreme Court judges, who dissented from the Atkins decision on the grounds that the mentally retarded can cheat in the IQ tests. The idea that someone of limited intelligence could cheat on an IQ test is deeply contentious, since it would require them to decode the strategy behind the tests, identify the correct answer and select a wrong answer, all within a time limit. However, Mississippi now requires prisoners seeking Atkins hearings to take a test known as the Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory (MMPI). As Craig points out, the basis for using the MMPI to detect malingering is highly dubious, since it was designed for such uses as job applications (Craig took one when he was thinking of becoming a priest). And while it contains internal checks to detect cheats, they only reveal cheating on the MMPI itself.

This is the legal arena into which Neal will step when he returns to Monticello for a hearing before the original trial judge this spring. Despite the voluminous evidence of Neal's retardation, Craig is concerned. For most of his time on death row, Neal has led a solitary life. He is wary of making friends "because they tease me and make fun of me". His greatest compensation derives from having learnt to read and write. He inscribes long, laboriously penned letters that reflect the confines of life on death row. "It has been rain a lot here today," he wrote last year.

"I hope you got some rain in London now. I love to watch the pretty rain outside my window. We have a lot crazy weather in MS."

[CCADP]

White has made it clear that he intends to use Neal's letters to argue that even if his IQ is 60 or below, they comprise adaptive behaviour that shows he is not mentally retarded. White also intends to cite a play, staged in London three years ago, that was based on an account of Neal's life a welfare worker had suggested he write. As Craig points out, Neal's writings are irrefutably childlike, with a repetitious, limited vocabulary, entirely consistent with his IQ and mental age. "He has the intelligence of an eight-year-old, and an eight-year-old can write letters. To argue that to be able to communicate in this way does not make him mentally retarded is preposterous."

As Craig prepares for the hearing, he dutifully opines that the judge is a "studious and intelligent man" who will apply the logic of the Atkins test, even if he dislikes the outcome. But Neal has another test to run, where he may prove his own worst enemy. Before the hearing, he is due to take yet another IQ test. What concerns Craig is that Neal has little real understanding of how his fate is being determined, as was revealed the last time he was tested. The psychologist noted that he asked if she thought he was mentally retarded. She asked what he thought that meant, and he replied: "It means you're a bad person, a nobody."

Neal, the psychologist related, had been proud to show her that he could read and write. He was also "highly motivated" to do well on the tests, and appeared not to know that his life could depend on the outcome. He was disappointed when she told him it was time to stop, and asked her to let him finish it.

[CCADP]

LETTER HOWARD NEAL WROTE CCADP in 1999 :

From Howard Neal's pen-pal request to the CCADP. June 8, 1999.
(errors are as in the original.)

Smile God love you more than anyone.
Hello Friend. I hope and pray this letter will find in very good spirit today.
My name is Howard Neal. I am on dead row. I have been on dead row since 1981.
I am looking for a friend to write to me. It is very hard for me to find a true friend to write me.
I hope you can read my handwrite. I have learn to read and write since I been here.
I never had a chance to go school before. I know I still have alot to learn. I want you to know I am not perfect in this life. I do love to learn about things. You made not believe me, I have learn more in here I had in my hold life. I was not for God help me in here I could not make the long I have. Yes I turn my life over to God. That the best thing every happen to me.
It has been about five year ago. I know God love me very very much. The Holy Spirit is teach me thing. The Holy Spirit is best teacher I never had. I believe the Lord is coming back in my lifetime. I wish God would come back right now. I would been very happy to see the Lord.
I still have alot to learn about God. I love to read my Bible. God word is more real I am, everything will pass way, but God word will not pass way. One day we going to have a new body like Jesus Christ. Do you believe in Christ Jesus ? I sure hope so. Time is run out.
The only hope we have on this life is Jesus. If you do not have God in your life, life is no good.
I was born and raise in Mississippi. I was born 1953. I am 45 years old now. My birthday is September 14. I am still a very young man. I am white. I have brn hair, eyes haz, HI 140,
HI 68. My people do not have anything to do with me. My mom she had 12 kids. All my brothers and sisters got adopted when they was very little. I do not know where my brothers and sisters is today. Only God know. My mom threw me away like a dog when I was about 8 years old. When I was little no one want me, because they said I could not learn anything.
My dad was very mean to me, my dad was a real bad alcohol. He spend all his money on alcohol. He beat me up alot. My mom and dad they fight all the time, they try to kill each other. My dad did bad things to me. He was no good. We have a little food to eat.
At nighttime my dad would go out and steal out people garden. If I did not help him steal out people garden, he would beat me up real bad. He was very mean. My dad kill my dog.
He put my dog in a sack through it in the creek. He did all kinds things like that. He is dead now. He his been dead for a very long time. My brothers and sisters did not grow up to other. I never had anyone to love me when I was little. My own people hate me. I do not understand that. I learn what love was since I been here, I learn what love was in my Bible.
We live way back in the wood in a old wood house. We had one room. Me and the kids we slept on the cold flood. The house was very little. We did not have no bathroom. We use the bathroom in the wood. We got hour drinkwater from a little creek. We took a bath in the creek. We did not have no electricity anything like that. I did not know what a TV or a radio was till I got old. We cook hour food in wood stove. We live off animals. I was very hard
on me. My own people make fun of me. They told I was no good. This is something what happen to me. It was very hard for me to get a job in the free word. No one want to work with me. Because I did not know anything. I learn thing the hard way. I did not have anyone to teach me anything. I still think about my people alot. I do get very lone in here. I wish
I had a good friend to write to me and help me a little. Its very hard for me to find a friend.
I do need someone to help me in here. I need a very good friendship. That way I have someone to talk to. Do you ever get very lonely ? and want someone to talk to ?
Sometime I wish I was dead. I think I would been alot better off. I know I will be going to
alot better place. My time is get very short. I have two more appeal left. Not to long ago the court turn me down on my appeal. I do believe the Lord has a purpose for my life.
God can do anything. God is a very BIG. I have state lawyer work on my case. He does
not care anything about me. He is work for the state. My lawyer does not write to me.
He does not tell anything. What would you do if you was me ?
You know one day we all got to die, are you afraid to die ? I use to been afraid of dead,
not no more, because I have Jesus Christ with me, each day, I hope you will write to me.
If you do not want to write me I understand.
Please try to find someone out there to write me.
Does your people care anything about you ? What do you like to do in life ?
Do you have any animals ? I love animals very much. Animals are very smart. I love to watch the birds and listen to them. Do you know animals talk each other ? I wish I could understand them. God made everything very beautiful. Alway remember God love you more than anyone. You are very special to God. The Lord make you in a special way.
No one is like you. Do you have kids ? Some kids are alot smart I am, they learn very fast.
I will keep you in my prayer. God bless you. Please take care of yourself.
Your brother in Jesus,
Howard Neal

[oztash]

All I can say is this is why Iam against the death penalty...This story breaks my heart and shows me how far we as human's have advanced... NO WHERE...Its the yr 2005 and how do we treat our fellow man, we murder them...

God save us from ourselfs..
Tasha

[ukfoto]

Thanks for making people aware of this shocking case !!
How could the death of someone of this mental age be seen to be justice ??

[cajunricejr]

This makes me asshamed to have been born in Mississippi.

[ukfoto]

Hi again,
anyone based in the USA interested in helping me raise awareness of Howard and this awful case
Thanks
UKfoto

[ukfoto]

I would be very interested to know if this case has had much media attention in the USA.
If anyone one knows that would be much appreciated !!
Thanks guys !!
Ukfoto

[ukfoto]

Hi all !!
Thanx CCADP for the info that Howards case has had little or no
coverage in the USA. Dose any one know any news papers, journalists etc who might be interested in publishing some sort of article about this case ??
Thanks as always for your help !

[ukfoto]

Hi, dose any one have any news about Howard and if his case has been given any US publicity.
Dose any one know how i might raise his profile in the USA.
Thanks

[ukfoto]

Hi people.
Its howards Birthday on Sept 14th, if any one wants to send him a card let me know.
All the best
ukfoto

[ukfoto]

Hi friends,
anyone have any news updates on Howard's case. I still write Howard every week and he asks if i know anything about his case. Not living in the USA its difficult for me to find out anything for him other than from you guys.
Thanks as always

[Maggie]

Hi ukfoto,

I tried to find some recent news on Neal's case, but most of it was a few years old..... I did find this:

laws.lp.findlaw.com/getcase/5th/case/9960511cv0&exact=1

Was there any forensic evidence that linked Neal to the crimes? With two rapes I'm wondering if anyone ever tried to exclude him? Surely there was evidence to test?

Then their is the problem of his IQ and confession. It looks like the only thing that convicted him was the confession, which should be suspect given his IQ.

Do you know where things stand now?