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<font size=3>September 19, 2007<br>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/us/19philadelphia.html?hp" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/us/19philadelphia.html?hp<br>
</a></font><h1><b>New Murder Charge in ’66 Shooting
</b></h1><font size=3>By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/u/ian_urbina/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
IAN URBINA</a><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.” <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Moreover, establishing an unbroken chain could be difficult in light of
Mr. Barclay’s medical history. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Mr. Barclay himself even spoke of the role his own actions played in
worsening his medical condition.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/temple_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Temple University</a> 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.”<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
Asked about the car accidents, Mr. Barclay, who has lived in California
since the 1970s, said he was not aware of them.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
“But I’m an old man now,” he said. “I paid my debt.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Ms. Harrison said her brother’s life was pure “agony.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“I have no qualms about Barnes being recharged for murder,” she added,
with a pause, “because I do feel it that way.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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