For nearly three decades, Joe Amrine could only dream of life on the other side of his prison cell. But brutal reality now threatens the survival of this freed man, warping his dream into a nightmare. Now the 53-year-old stares into a daily struggle he never faced in prison.
Jobless, he has no money for life's necessities. For food he relies on food stamps; for housing he sleeps on his sister's couch; for transportation the bus system, when he can scrounge the change; and, most prized, a cell phone, which frequently is turned off due to his inability to pay the bill. The phone represents Amrine's only contact with potential employers, and the outside world. He's spent his freedom searching for a job and waiting to begin his life on the other side of cell bars.
For years, he was a victim of the justice system, a system that worked as designed when he was found guilty of stealing at age 17. But that same system went awry, says Amrine, when he was falsely convicted of murdering a fellow prison inmate. That injustice nearly dealt this man the harshest punishment in our legal system--death.
Amrine was one of ten children, a poor family with a run-down house in the projects of Kansas City. The family was so poor that Amrine remembers school officials sending him and his siblings home for lunch most days because none had the nickel required for a hot lunch. If they were lucky, their father had fixed a pot of onion soup.
"Sometimes, we didn't have nothin'," Amrine recalled. "So we just went home for 20 minutes, then went back to school."
Their father was an abusive man, an alcoholic who didn't earn his first legitimate paycheck until his late 30s.
"He was like a hustler," Amrine said, remembering his father. "He made money any way he could."
His mother functioned as the family breadwinner, but Amrine remembers that her salary was anything but adequate to meet the needs of this large family. So, Amrine and his brothers took lessons from their father and hustled to make money. They resorted to stealing--or worse--anything to make a buck. Skipping school, stealing, then hocking the goods became Amrine's life as a teenager.
His father and the other adults he encountered offered Amrine little hope for his future.
"The biggest role model I had was a pimp and a prostitute," Amrine remembered.
In fact, Amrine has few good memories of his father. He even remembers his father and some of his brothers fighting until they shot at one another. Their shots were intended to kill.
"If they had child abuse back then, my father would still be in jail," Amrine said.
Stealing was just a step away from armed robbery, and that crime eventually landed Amrine in jail. Police nabbed him after holding up a Safeway store in Independence. He was 17.
"I was out of control," Amrine said. "I already knew I was going to prison, so I didn't care."
Throughout his years in jail, Amrine remembers only one person who consistently visited and never gave up on him--his mother. She and one of Amrine's sisters visited the day after a fellow inmate was killed and Amrine was charged with his murder. That was 2000 and the story of the murder was recorded in such national news magazines as Time and Newsweek. The case was even made into a movie in 2002, titled "Unreasonable Doubt: The Joe Amrine Case."
Amrine's mother and a sister visited his prison in Potosi, asking if he had committed the murder. When he told them he hadn't, they believed him and most of the rest of the family believed him as well.
"They (his brothers and sisters) kind of got on the bandwagon then," he said.
With tears in his eyes, he remembered his mother's concern for his fate.
"'I'm just afraid I'm going to lose my first child to execution,'" he remembered his mother saying. His was not the only jail cell his mother visited. She spent her later years visiting her sons at various prisons, where they also were serving time.
Though he never finished high school, Amrine took on the responsibility of researching cases from his jail cell for fellow inmates, especially those on death row.
"A lot of guys on death row didn't know the law...and their (public-appointed) attorneys didn't do what they should," Amrine said.
Then Amrine was found guilty of the murder of fellow inmate Gary Barber in 1985. Throughout the case, Amrine maintained his innocence, but a guilty verdict led to his status on "death row." The prosecution relied solely on the testimony of fellow inmates and jail guard John Noble, the only guard present when Barber was stabbed to death.
Sean O'Brien, an attorney with the Public Interest Litigation Clinic, was monitoring death penalty cases when Amrine's then-lawyer missed a deadline for appeal and Amrine was placed on death row, to be executed in 1996. O'Brien noted a lack of evidence and questioned the reliance of prosecutors on testimony by fellow inmates, which traditionally has proven unreliable. Prisoners often testify in order to receive reduced sentences in the cases that landed them in prison.
"It (Amrine's case) rose to the top of our priority list, and we jumped on it," said O'Brien, now as associate professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
The guards and inmates who had testified against Amrine admitted they had lied under oath and Amrine eventually was exonerated and released.Since his release, Amrine has made some appearances, speaking against the death penalty at rallies and other events. He spoke at UMKC's Tent State event for peace and social justice. He planned to use the $40 he earned for speaking to pay on his cell phone bill.
Amrine is joined in his efforts by officials with the Catholic Church. Jude Huntz of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese said thousands of postcards were distributed to nearly half of the church's 100 Kansas City area parishes. Members of those congregations sent the pre-printed cards to their state legislators, asking them to consider supporting a two-year moratorium on the death penalty. While the bill failed to get enough support, another bill in both the Missouri House and Senate would establish a committee to study the issue, Huntz said. That bill stands a good chance to passage before the end of the current legislative session in May, Huntz said.
"Given the climate of our state on this issue, it is a huge victory," Huntz said, referring to Missouri's historic support of the death penalty.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City is where the Tribune caught up with Amrine, who joined Dennis Fritz in speaking out against the death penalty. Fritz has his own story of innocence, having spent more than 11 years in jail, waiting to be cleared of a murder conviction. Fritz together with Ron Williamson was wrongly accused in the sexual assault and murder of a woman who was found strangled to death in Oklahoma, where Fritz then lived. Fritz was serving a life sentence, while Williamson, his assumed partner in the crime, faced the death penalty. The two were convicted based on microscopic hair sample analysis that has since been discredited. DNA evidence later proved that Glen Gore, who testified against Fritz and Williamson, was actually the killer. Williamson was within five days of being executed for the young woman's murder.
Best-selling author John Grisham chronicled the case in his first non-fiction work, "The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town." The book was published in 2006, and became a best-seller. Fritz compiled a first person version of his false arrest in his own book entitled "Journey Toward Justice."
http://kctribune.com/article/KC_News_Features/Debbie_ColemanTopi/Innocent_But_Found_Guilty_Joe_Amrines_Life_After_Death_Row/18801
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