Execution Foe Sees Shadow of a Doubt

The phone rings at Farrell/Minoff Productions and Mike Farrell answers. The conversation is brief, less than a minute, and Farrell hangs up.

“Hmph,” says the actor and well-known death penalty opponent. “That was Sam Sheppard.”

The playwright and actor? Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff”?

No, Farrell explains, not that Sam Shepard, but Samuel Reese Sheppard, the son of Dr. Sam Sheppard, the most celebrated murder suspect of the 1950s. Long before America obsessed over O.J. Simpson, the Sheppard case served up mystery and titillation with its tales of extramarital affairs. Sheppard spent 10 years in prison after the slaying of his wife before winning a retrial and acquittal, but suspicion and alcohol haunted him to his death at age 46.

This Sam Sheppard was 7 years old when his mother was brutally murdered and his father accused of the crime. He is a man who, 20 years after his father’s death, compiled striking evidence backing his father’s claims of innocence and building a case against another man, the Sheppards’ long-ago window washer.

Sheppard, Farrell explained, just wanted him to be aware of a development in the crusade to stop the execution of Thomas Thompson. Farrell was more than aware. His office four floors above Ventura Boulevard does double duty as a film production company and a nerve center for Death Penalty Focus, a leading advocacy group against capital punishment.

Hollywood is famous for its liberals who write checks and lend their names to causes, but Farrell’s commitment is extraordinary. Farrell, best known for the eight seasons he portrayed B. J. Hunnicutt in the sitcom “MASH,” brings a missionary’s zeal to the cause of saving the damned.

A few weeks ago, Farrell introduced himself to me by e-mail, reacting to a column I had written describing my ambivalence about the death penalty. We exchanged a few more messages and he sent a fax appealing for public support to stop the execution of Thomas Thompson.

Thompson, who was convicted of the rape and murder of 20-year-old Ginger Fleischli in a Laguna Beach apartment in 1981, is scheduled to be executed shortly after midnight Tuesday, unless 11th-hour appeals succeed before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case against Thompson, Farrell and others argue, is quite unlike cases against the four other men the state of California has killed since executions resumed with Robert Alton Harris in 1992.

Thompson, unlike the others, has consistently maintained his innocence, and evidence of his guilt is weaker, his supporters say. The evidence of rape--the “special circumstance” that made this murder a death penalty case--has been undermined by a second defendant, David Leitch. Sentenced to 15 years for second-degree murder, Leitch testified in a parole hearing that he had briefly witnessed Thompson and Fleischli engaged in consensual sex the night she died. Thompson’s advocates have also accused the prosecutors of misconduct, saying they changed the theory of how the crime occurred in the separate trials of Thompson and Leitch.

Death Penalty Focus did not round up the usual bleeding hearts to ask Gov. Pete Wilson to grant clemency for Thompson. Seven former prosecutors, including the one who wrote California’s current death penalty law, filed a friend of the court brief arguing that capital punishment is inappropriate, saying: “This is a case where it appears that our adversarial system has not produced a fair and reliable result.”

Gov. Wilson refused the request for clemency, siding with prosecutors who say the evidence of Thompson’s guilt remains overwhelming. Thompson’s alibi was that he passed out from a mix of booze and hashish, then slept until morning after having consensual sex with Fleischli. Prosecutors also note that Leitch’s stories have often changed.

Unlike the death penalty itself, Farrell does not discriminate among murderers. Raised Catholic, he says capital punishment never made sense to him. “I think it’s degrading to us as a civilized society.” And though this may sound like “a bumper sticker,” he adds: “Killing people to show people that killing people is wrong is inherently nonsensical.”

Children understand that, he says. It’s the adults who become confused. Or vengeful. Or ambivalent.

Yet a posture of moral superiority, acting holier than thou, is a lousy way to sway opinion. So put aside the fundamental moral question, Farrell says, and analyze this system operated by fallible people. Why do those prosecutors think Thompson deserves life, not death?

Active as a volunteer on prison issues since the 1960s, Farrell became more intensely involved in death penalty cases in the 1980s. “MASH” gave him a celebrity status that opened doors and attracted media interest. In one Virginia case, Farrell became so involved that he was recognized by the courts as part of the defense team.

In the Virginia case, as with Thompson, the theory of the condemned man’s innocence relies heavily on the claim that he was in a drugged stupor when the double murder occurred. The defense team’s efforts persuaded Virginia’s governor to commute the prisoner’s sentence to life, and appeals proceed for a new trial.

Claims of a blackout may seem the most hackneyed, Hollywood alibi of all. And yet, consider the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard.

Back in the 1950s, few people believed Dr. Sheppard’s tale: That he’d been sleeping on a daybed on the first floor when he heard screams in the night. That he ran upstairs to check on his wife and was clubbed from behind. That he later remembered a struggle on the beach of Lake Erie with an unfamiliar “bushy-haired man.” Seven-year-old Samuel Reese Sheppard slept through it all.

Dr. Sheppard’s tale apparently seemed so fishy that police didn’t pay much attention to the window washer, who told them that he had cut a finger working at the house; that’s why they might find his blood scattered here and there. That may sound like bad police work, but it’s worse than that: The window washer’s statements did not surface publicly until 1990, until the late Dr. Sheppard’s son sued to obtain police files.

All of which may help explain why Sheppard and Farrell and many other people now worry that we fallible Californians soon might execute an innocent man.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.