[Ppnews] New Murder Charge in ’66 Shooting

[Political Prisoner News]

September 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/us/19philadelphia.html?hp

New Murder Charge in ’66 Shooting

By 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/u/ian_urbina/index.html?inline=nyt-per>IAN 
URBINA

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 13 ­ William J. Barnes shot 
and partly paralyzed a Philadelphia police 
officer in 1966, and he served 20 years for it and related offenses.

But last month, 41 years after the shooting, the 
district attorney filed new charges of murder 
after the officer, Walter T. Barclay Jr., died of 
an infection she says stems from the shooting. 
Mr. Barnes, now 71, was sent back to prison.

“The law is that when you set in motion a chain 
of events,” District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham 
said, “a perpetrator of a crime is responsible 
for every single thing that flows from that chain 
of events, no matter how distant, as long as we 
can prove the chain is unbroken.”

She plans to prove that the bullet that lodged 
near Mr. Barclay’s spine in 1966 led to the 
urinary tract infection that led to his death last month.

The case has drawn national attention as most 
legal experts say they have never seen an attempt 
to stretch causation medically across four 
decades, and some say they worry about the 
precedent the case could set concerning double jeopardy.

Moreover, establishing an unbroken chain could be 
difficult in light of Mr. Barclay’s medical history.

After his initial paralysis, his condition 
improved significantly and he regained motion in 
his legs, walking with braces and riding short 
distances on a stationary bicycle. But he 
reinjured his spine repeatedly, in two car 
accidents and in a fall from his wheelchair, 
according to interviews with relatives and news reports from the era.

While paralyzed, Mr. Barclay also contracted 
hepatitis, according to his family, which medical 
experts say could have weakened his ability later 
to fight off infections. The district attorney’s 
office has also confirmed that although the 
coroner’s office ruled his death a homicide, no 
autopsy was done on Mr. Barclay, who was buried last month.

Mr. Barclay himself even spoke of the role his 
own actions played in worsening his medical condition.

“The guy started spraying bullets around, and I 
caught two of them in the back,” Mr. Barclay said 
in a 1978 interview about the night he was shot. 
“I got over that pretty much, but then I had a 
car accident and hurt my back again. Then I had 
another and hurt my back some more.”

Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/temple_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Temple 
University who researched Mr. Barclay’s history 
and invited Mr. Barnes to speak to his class 
about having turned his life around after a 
career in crime, said the new charges were “vindictive, pure and simple.”

“Barnes served his time, but the police and the 
city want him to pay extra because he shot one of 
their own,” he said, adding that even if the 
charge is dismissed, the case will probably take 
so long to get to that stage that Mr. Barnes, who 
has had two heart attacks in the last three 
years, will die waiting. Ms. Abraham has denied 
that the victim’s being a police officer played 
any role in her decision to file new charges.

Ms. Abraham also argues that double jeopardy, 
which means a person cannot be charged twice for 
the same crime, does not apply in this case 
because the original crime was aggravated assault 
and the current crime ­ now that Mr. Barclay is 
dead ­ is murder. Mr. Barnes’s court-appointed 
lawyer has not decided whether to challenge that view.

William Barclay, 59, the slain officer’s brother, 
feels the prosecution is justified. “Barnes 
deserves to be back in prison,” he said “He is 
71, and that’s seven more years of life than my brother had.”

“This was murder delayed,” Mr. Barclay added, 
recounting his brother’s bouts of pneumonia, 
painful and constant bedsores and the full-body 
muscle spasms that threw him from bed. “The 
length of time since the shooting shouldn’t matter.”

Asked about the car accidents, Mr. Barclay, who 
has lived in California since the 1970s, said he was not aware of them.

Mr. Barnes is being held without bond, and he 
will not see a judge until his first court date 
in December, said his lawyer, Bobby Hoof.

In many states, the year-and-a-day rule, a 
19th-century common law rule, prevents new 
charges from being filed if a victim dies more 
than 366 days after the initial injury. But Paul 
Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an 
independent monthly, said that as medical 
advancements have prolonged the lives of injured 
people, at least 20 states, including 
Pennsylvania, have eliminated the rule. Medical 
and forensic advancements, however, have also 
increased the burden of proof on prosecutors to 
clearly show how an injury led directly to a victim’s later death, he said.

Such convictions, however, are not unprecedented. 
In Michigan, a man was convicted of assault with 
intent to murder in 1983 after shooting another 
man. Four years later, after sustaining head 
injuries in a fight, the shooting victim suffered 
seizures and died. Prosecutors filed new murder 
charges against the gunman, and using an autopsy 
were able to prove that the victim’s death 
resulted from damage to his heart from the shooting, not the head injuries.

Jeffrey M. Lindy, a former federal prosecutor in 
Philadelphia, said he believed Ms. Abraham was 
pursuing the case against Mr. Barnes to please 
the police, but he predicted it would probably 
not make it to trial. “A judge will first have a 
hearing, and at that hearing a doctor is going to 
say, ‘Look, the causation is not there,’ ” he said.

Sitting in a four-by-five-foot room at Graterford 
prison, 31 miles north of Philadelphia, Mr. 
Barnes said, “I was trying to start over.”

Having spent 48 of his 71 years in prison on 
multiple offenses and parole violations, he was 
released in 2005 and had started meeting family 
who never knew he existed as he lived in a 
halfway house and worked as a janitor at a drugstore.

“Nothing shames me more than what happened that 
night,” he said about the shooting. “I had a good 
family, a good life and bad morals. I’ll have to 
answer to my maker for the suffering that man went through.”

“But I’m an old man now,” he said. “I paid my debt.”

Mr. Barnes earned that debt one cold November 
morning in 1966 as he tried to pry open the back 
door of a beauty parlor. Responding to a call 
about a prowler, Officer Barclay, 23 at the time, 
arrived to find Mr. Barnes, who says he was 
drunk. Mr. Barnes shot Officer Barclay twice, 
once in the left thigh and once in the shoulder, 
the second shot lodging an inch from Officer Barclay’s spine.

That bullet shattered his life, his family said. 
And yet he fought to recover. Within nine months, 
he was walking short distances with leg braces. 
He soon began driving a car with hand controls 
and moved into a ground-floor apartment to live 
on his own. He worked a desk job at police headquarters for a year or so.

Things took a turn for the worse, however. One 
morning while driving to work, Officer Barclay’s 
car skidded off an icy road. He reinjured his 
spine, and the Police Department put him on 
permanent disability, according to court 
documents and news reports from the time. In the 
mid-1970s, he became a clerk at the information 
booth at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

But “age began to tell on him,” said Rosalyn 
Barclay Harrison, Mr. Barclay’s 68-year-old 
sister. There were also various injuries along 
the way. In 1975, he fell from his wheelchair, 
which left him without use of his left arm, 
according to a column written by Mr. Barclay’s 
close friend Larry McMullen, a Philadelphia 
newspaper writer. In 1976, he was in a second car 
accident for which he underwent rehabilitation at 
Rolling Hill Hospital in Montgomery County, according to newspaper accounts.

Ms. Harrison said her brother’s life was pure “agony.”

She confirmed that Mr. Barclay was in at least 
one serious car accident and that in later years 
he got hepatitis. But she endorsed the new 
charges against Mr. Barnes. “In my own mind, I 
don’t see this as double jeopardy,” she said.

“I have no qualms about Barnes being recharged 
for murder,” she added, with a pause, “because I do feel it that way.”




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