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Life & Times Transcript

03/28/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

He spent nearly half his life in jail for a crime he didn't commit. What's it like to be wrongfully convicted?

Thomas Goldstein>> I lost between my thirties and fifties. You know, those are the main years of work and productivity and for family. You know, I was denied all that.

Val Zavala>> And then, he'll probably always be known as actor Dennis Hopper, but tonight we profile Dennis Hopper, the artist.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> We've heard the stories before, people who've spent years in prison claiming their innocence and then, sure enough, evidence comes along to exonerate them. Many times, that evidence is DNA, but not always. Sam Louie has the story of one man who spent more than twenty years behind bars for murder based on the testimony of an eye witness.

Sam Louie>> Serving time behind bars. It's the fate of more than two million prisoners here in the United States. The vast majority of inmates are guilty of crimes, but cracks in our justice system have imprisoned thousands of people for crimes they did not commit, people like Thomas Goldstein. Thomas was a young Marine back in 1980 fresh out of serving in Vietnam.

A man in Long Beach was found shot dead and Thomas was convicted of the murder. An eye witness claimed he saw Goldstein running from the crime and a jailhouse informant testified that Goldstein confessed to the murder while in jail. The jury was convinced and Goldstein was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life in prison. This is Goldstein today, a free man. In 2004 after spending twenty-four years in prison, he was exonerated.

Thomas Goldstein>> It's hard to look back. Yeah, I expected to be married. I expected to have kids and I wanted those and I wanted a career, you know. I was going to college to better myself. I lost between my thirties to fifties. You know, those are the main years of work and productivity and for family. You know, I was denied all that.

Sam Louie>> When Goldstein reflects back, he says he was surprised by the conviction, but still hopeful that justice would be done. When the jury read the conviction, what was going through your mind?

Thomas Goldstein>> Oh, I was in shock. When I had an appeal, you know, I was entitled to an appeal. I filed an appeal that time and I thought, well, when the appeal is completed, you know, I'll get out then and this would be, you know, kind of a unique experience (laughter). You know, I'd never been in prison before. I don't have a criminal record.

Sam Louie>> Goldstein appealed the conviction, but lost. Over time, he filed numerous petitions claiming the conviction violated his constitutional rights.

Thomas Goldstein>> I never filed a petition I didn't think would win. So I'm constantly thinking, well, in three months, in six months, in nine months, I'll be released from prison. It was about eleven years before I realized that I'm not going to be released in a few months.

Sam Louie>> Then in 1998, Goldstein found new evidence that promised to get him cleared. In a separate case, the credibility of a jailhouse informant was questioned, the same informant who testified against Goldstein.

Thomas Goldstein>> They did an exhaustive look into his background and they found police, prosecutors, prison counselors who considered him to be unreliable.

Sam Louie>> Shortly after this revelation, Bill Forman was appointed as one of Goldstein's defense lawyers. Forman recalled being very leery of Goldstein's case.

Bill Forman>> I wasn't certain at all. In fact, I'm very skeptical of wrongful imprisonment claims. I've represented a lot of people on habeas, but my obligation is not to impose my own gut reactions, but to go out and investigate and that's what we did here. Following on Tom's lead, we investigated that. We found that evidence and we told the federal court that we need a hearing to present this evidence so you can see that Tom has been wrongly convicted.

Sam Louie>> Forman eventually proved that the informant had been paid to testify against Goldstein and, just as critical, the eye witness who identified Goldstein at the scene of the crime wanted to recant his story.

Bill Forman>> Frankly, I just was dumbstruck at first. It's what you always expect a witness to say, but rarely happens. In this case, Loren Campbell just came out with it and said, "I identified the wrong man and I've been waiting twenty-five years to get this off my chest."

Sam Louie>> Campbell, the eye witness, told Forman he was pressured by police to identify Goldstein. He never imagined his testimony would lead to Goldstein's incarceration.

Bill Forman>> When we told him that Thomas Goldstein was still in prison, he said, "My God, I never would have guessed that guy was still in prison. I would have thought he would have been released years ago. I would have thought there's no point in my coming forward."

Sam Louie>> Unfortunately, wrongful conviction cases like Tom's are not isolated events. Numerous stories of innocent people being exonerated abound.

Stephen Rohde>> It just shows you that we have serious flaws in our criminal justice system.

Sam Louie>> Stephen Rohde is a constitutional lawyer and vice president of Death Penalty Focus, a group aimed at eliminating the death penalty and reforming the legal system.

Stephen Rohde>> It is a scandal that this country, considered to have one of the finest criminal justice systems in the world, executes people who are innocent, sends people to Death Row who have been innocent.

Sam Louie>> One major tool in uncovering wrongful convictions has been the development of DNA testing and forensic science.

Stephen Rohde>> I'm told that over ten thousand or more cases have been identified as wrongful convictions, not all death penalty cases, involving the use of DNA evidence.

Sam Louie>> But Rohde concedes that DNA can only go so far in overturning wrongful convictions.

Stephen Rohde>> As important as it is, there is DNA evidence in only about twelve to fifteen percent of all murder cases, so it's not as if we found the magic bullet and DNA is going to solve perfectly every crime. It's not.

Sam Louie>> Rohde says racism, errors by police and defense lawyers and, surprisingly, even eye witnesses put many innocent defendants in prison.

Stephen Rohde>> It used to be that we would take an eye witness account as gospel. My God, there's a person who's willing to swear they saw Mr. X kill Mr. Y. Well, the studies show that there are huge errors in eye witness accounts, that people see things and later recall things they didn't see.

Sam Louie>> In Goldstein's case, he was very lucky the witness recanted his testimony when he did. The man died several months later. His lawyers also credit Goldstein's dogged persistence and belief in himself.

Bill Forman>> Tom made some great arguments actually to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals all on his own. He's the one who put us in a position to litigate his case and he overcame hurdles that I don't think any lawyer would be able to, much less an inmate with no resources at his disposal.

Thomas Goldstein>> I had a sense of pride that all these years of work was finally realized, that it wasn't just, you know, a meaningless effort.

Sam Louie>> Goldstein says he's not bitter or angry at the witness, but he does feel betrayed by police and prosecutors.

Thomas Goldstein>> They have this football mentality. You know, we got to win, you know? And it helps their career to attain a conviction for a murder case and for a death penalty case.

Sam Louie>> Earlier this year, state lawmakers blocked a bill that would have banned California from carrying out death sentences for two years. The state has created a commission to examine the causes of wrongful convictions and make further recommendations.

Thomas Goldstein>> This is new to me, a driver's license. Of course, the VA wanted my identification and I have a credit card from Robinson's-May (laughter).

Sam Louie>> As for Goldstein, he's making the transition back to society, but he still takes time to share his prison experience with others in hopes of improving the judicial system.

Thomas Goldstein>> I get a lot of gratification out of that because it gives meaning to my years that were stolen from me.

Bill Forman>> It's great that he's been able to walk the streets, but it shouldn't have had to happen after twenty-four years. It never should have happened to begin with.

Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> He was a beloved uncle and a family man and he was murdered by gang members in the middle of the day. The killers are still at large. That begs the question: why do so many murders go unsolved and what can we do to keep our neighborhoods from being taken over by gangs? Hena Cuevas has the story of one woman who lost her beloved uncle.

Hena Cuevas>> As this Los Angeles police unit goes out on its daily rounds, the signs of gang activity are everywhere and it's a growing problem that's affecting even those who have nothing to do with gangs, like seventy-three year old Tony Kovos.

>> He was a very, very nice man.

Hena Cuevas>> Last October, Kovos was killed as he was defending his twenty-one year old grandson, Daniel. Because of how he died, his niece asked us not to use her name.

>> Because my uncle was murdered by gang members who were trying to get his grandson and they're still out there. They'd been harassing them for three years and I don't want the same thing to happen to myself or to anybody in my family. I just don't want to put anybody in harm's way.

Hena Cuevas>> Kovos and his family moved to Walnut Park three years ago. The neighborhood is just south of downtown near Huntington Park and Southgate. It's an area known for its gang activities. Kovos's niece says gang members started to harass the family as soon as they moved in.

>> My cousin's son, Daniel, is the one that started being harassed. Over the last three years, the gang members that lived in the apartment building catty corner to their house were always harassing him and just telling him, "Oh, you belong in the Valley. What are you doing here?"

Hena Cuevas>> She says Daniel, who was not a gang member, tried to ignore them, but that only made it worse.

>> They would do things to my uncle's car. They would just do all kinds of things. They would report it to the Sheriff and nothing would happen.

Hena Cuevas>> Your uncle was aware that there were gang members and there was this violence. Had he thought about moving?

>> Unfortunately, he was murdered on Friday and they were set to leave on Saturday to go and check out somewhere else and move because the harassment on Daniel had escalated so much. Unfortunately, things happened too quickly. They threatened to kill him, to kill the family, on the 5th and, on the 7th, they made good on their threats.

Hena Cuevas>> That Friday, October 7, she says, four gang members attacked Daniel as he was walking home. According to Kovos's daughter, they tried to push him into a white SUV. That's when Tony Kovos jumped in front of the car to stop them.

>> My uncle went around the front and the guy just drove the Escalade into him and then, as if that wasn't bad enough already, he took the big, huge wheels of the Escalade and just spun them out on my uncle's body. So his body was just mangled and just horrible.

Hena Cuevas>> Tony Kovos died less than half an hour later.

>> We've never had anyone in our family murdered, so this was just horrible. My uncle was such a wonderful person and kind.

Hena Cuevas>> The driver of the SUV has been identified, but no one has been arrested. The house Kovos had been planning to leave now sits vacant. After Tony Kovos's death, the family decided to leave the house, leave the neighborhood and move out of state because they said they feared for their lives. That's a feeling that's shared by many in this neighborhood and that, police say, is one of the biggest challenges of trying to investigate gang-related crimes like this one. People just aren't willing to come forward as witnesses.

Wes McBride>> Gangs kill communities just like their bullets kill people.

Hena Cuevas>> Wes McBride is the President of the California Gang Investigators Association. He says it's difficult to resolve these crimes because people who live with that kind of violence learn to look the other way.

Wes McBride>> These people have lived with these gangs. They live in this neighborhood and they know better. It's not so much as they come up and say "Don't testify" because that's already been done for years. I would describe it like a haze in the community. It's just there, you know, and they breath it all the time. They know better.

Hena Cuevas>> And Kovos's niece knows just how frustrating that can be.

>> And the neighbors said, "See? If you guys would have just kept your mouth shut." But is that how you're supposed to live your life? That these gangs just take control over your whole neighborhood, so you can't say anything? It seems like your hands are tied. You can't do anything because then they're going to get you.

Hena Cuevas>> It's estimated Los Angeles County has over a thousand gangs and nearly eighty thousand members. That's about the size of the population of Newport Beach. And last year, gang-related murders were up thirty percent in the areas under the Sheriff's jurisdiction.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> Lieutenant Ralph Ornelas is a member of Operation Safe Streets, the Sheriff's anti-gang unit.

Lieutenant Ralph Ornelas>> Can I give myself an A rating right now? No, because I wish we didn't have any murders at all. But that's our mission. That's our goal.

Hena Cuevas>> It's a lofty goal because the department has to distribute scarce resources among the unincorporated areas of the county. Over half its deputies are contracted to work in specific cities and can't be moved. That leaves a limited number to cover trouble spots.

Lieutenant Ralph Ornelas>> And it doesn't mean we vacate any area at all to the rest of the contract cities or the Los Angeles County area. It's just that we have to prioritize and we have to, you know, put those people, our deputies, where we need them right now.

Hena Cuevas>> The shortage of deputies is one reason Kovos's niece believes she hasn't gotten any answers.

>> What happens, I think, with the Sheriff, they just have so many cases and they only have limited personnel. I don't know that they are actively working on the case. They probably wait to see if they get any leads or anything. That's where it's kind of frustrating. If I had the money, I'd hire a private investigator. I'd hire somebody to find this guy.

Hena Cuevas>> McBride, who's retired from Operation Safe Streets, says his group found that across the nation gang units are usually the first to go during cutbacks.

Wes McBride>> One of the biggest threats we found was the disillusionment of gang details, of the downsizing, after 9/11. They turned them into terrorist-hunting organizations. Well, we've only had a couple of terrorist attacks. We lose thousands of people every year in gang fights.

Hena Cuevas>> But even before 9/11, gang units were shrinking. Scandals and abuses in the 1990s led to some units being disbanded at the Los Angeles Police Department. But LAPD officer, Paul Vernon says that, since Chief William Bratton took over in 2002, he has increased the number of officers assigned to fight gangs.

Paul Vernon>> Each station now has its own gang unit and those gang units are based upon the needs of the station. The captain has some discretion in being able to decide how much emphasis he needs to put on the gang enforcement.

Hena Cuevas>> Last year, the number of gang-related crimes in LAPD areas went down to some of their lowest levels, but numbers don't matter to victims like Kovos's niece. Her priority now is to find this man, Jorge Alverto Vasquez, identified as the driver of the SUV.

>> I'm just hoping that they can find the guy that killed my uncle. I mean, we know who he is and we just need to find him.

Hena Cuevas>> Once he's caught, she says, he'll be one less gang member roaming the streets of Los Angeles. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> You know him best as an actor. His career stretches from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "24". He is Dennis Hopper, but there's a side of him you'll never see on the screen. Patt Morrison meets Dennis Hopper, the painter.

[Film Clip]

Patt Morrison>> From the very first, he was in Hollywood, but not of it. The guy on the outside, the rebel, the subversive, a fellow in a fringed jacket working at the fringes of the movie establishment. The man the world saw only as an actor saw himself as something more. A man of parts, an all-around artist of many media, all of them visual.

Dennis Hopper>> Being an artist, to me, is a state of mind. It's not something that you can really think about. It's part of you. It's just the way you stay alive. It's your juice that keeps you moving, you know? I look at everything. I mean, for years, I've been looking for that picture, that thing, that object, so everywhere I go, I'm looking for something. I see a lot of things that I think in my mind, "Boy, that would really be a great photograph, that would really be a great scene in a movie, that would really be a great painting." You know, on and on, all day long.

Patt Morrison>> The brush, the pen, the lens, any of them, all of them figure into the ways that Dennis Hopper sees the world and they have from his earliest days. Even as a child in Dodge City, Kansas, he exhibited an interest, a talent, a flair for the visual arts. When his family picked up and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, the young Hopper took advantage of the cultural offerings of a larger city to study at the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery.

In 1950, when Hopper was fourteen, the family came west to San Diego, the entry point for Hopper's own incarnation of the California dream. At the La Jolla Playhouse, the student who performed "Hamlet" in eighth grade, the boy named most likely to succeed by his high school classmates, worked as an apprentice. It was there that he met the actor, Vincent Price. Price was already an eager collector of contemporary artists whose names were not yet household words, painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

Dennis Hopper>> That's where I first saw my first abstract expressionist paintings. Even though I'd been doing abstract expressionist paintings before, I'd never really seen any. This was like 1954. I was shocked and relieved all at once because I never really considered anything I was doing anything more than like sort of something strange, you know? But then it sort of said it was okay, but it was okay how? (laughter) I wasn't quite sure.

Patt Morrison>> It was inevitable that Hopper would make his way to Los Angeles where two different forms of artistry claimed his time and his attention: acting and photography. He fell in with a group of young artists who would in time be internationally renowned: Ed Rouche, Ed Keinholz, Wallace Berman, George Herms, John Altoon, Robert Irwin. Hopper listened and he watched and he learned.

Dennis Hopper>> I took photographs from 1961 to 1967, black and white photographs, and they're all full frame. I didn't crop them because I was going to direct movies and I wanted to make sure that I learned how to compose without thinking I could crop because you can't crop a movie film, so I wanted to learn how to do composition. Part of me said, well, you know, maybe the only important thing you're ever going to do is take these still photographs, so you should have some sort of historical-like point of view about all this. I'll photograph the ones that I think are going to become famous. My picks, you know?

Patt Morrison>> It was a seminal time in Los Angeles artistic history and not only because, for so many decades, the city had been thin in the visual arts department. In that free-thinking, free-range climate, everything seemed possible and the artists reveled in the wide open vitality of the place and the times.

Dennis Hopper>> Well, there was a moment in the 1960's when La Cienega was shut down and all the galleries were in La Cienega. Monday nights was art night. It seemed very sophisticated and very heady, but it was really the beginnings of an art scene in Los Angeles. Our history really begins in the 1950's.

Patt Morrison>> As the poet Wordsworth wrote of another kind of revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." The young Dennis Hopper found that, like the times, the arts too were a'changin'.

Dennis Hopper>> At this time, everybody was talking about a return to reality. We were into third generation abstract expressionism and they said, "Where's the return to reality?" Then I saw a couple of pictures of Warhol soup cans and big comic book characters by Liechtenstein and I went, "Wow". I said, "Now, that's a return to reality. The artist of the future will merely be a person that points his finger and says it's art and it'll be art."

I started doing assemblages with the photographs. I stopped painting and started using objects in photographing. The photographs that I like are all found objects or all un-cropped, full-frame abstract. I call them abstract reality because they're only abstract because I've abstracted them.

Patt Morrison>> In 1967, Hopper left Los Angeles to direct and star in the classic and influential film, "Easy Rider". Its success propelled him deep into the world of moviemaking and it was not until 1983 that a museum exhibition of his works persuaded him to put down the movie camera and once again pick up the artist's oldest tool, the paintbrush.

Dennis Hopper>> To emphasize that I had gone back to painting, I decided on a trick that I'd seen when I was a kid at a rodeo in Dodge City, Kansas, the human stick of dynamite, where I proceeded to blow myself up.

[Film Clip]

Then when I directed "Colors", I did a series of paintings. In Los Angeles, you have the graffiti, the taggers, and then the city comes along and paints it out. Then they become these Rothko-like images where the graffiti's gone and now there's some paint that doesn't match the paint behind it and the squares and the rectangles and these forms. Then the kids come again and spray and then they paint it another color and it becomes this interaction. So those became the basis of allowing me to become an abstract expressionist again.

Patt Morrison>> In the years since, his works have hung on gallery walls alongside those of Frank Stella, David Hockney, Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe. Today Dennis Hopper can give free rein to his artistic impulses with camera or with canvas.

Dennis Hopper>> Robert Graham, who is somebody that I really admire and is a good friend, is married to Anjelica Huston, lives right down the street, was at dinner the other night. He said to me, "Why in the world are you into fine art? Do you realize that, with "Easy Rider", you changed more peoples' lives than Jackson Pollock will ever change, so why in the world would you want to leave the motion picture area and go into such a limited, limited area that has such a limited amount of people that even go to see it or have knowledge about it?" I don't have an answer to that, but maybe that's why I find it so interesting.

Val Zavala>> You can see a retrospective of Dennis Hopper's work. It's at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. It's up through July 1. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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