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Journalist embodied the spirit of selflessness

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published June 26, 2005

COCONUT GROVE - Gene Miller wanted his memorial service to end with four specified tracks from Turk Murphy's San Francisco Jazz, but he did not select the Bible passages. However, what they chose from Isaiah 61 was the perfect fit: ". . . (T)he LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. . . "

My friend Gene, as you may have read, was the Miami Herald reporter and editor who won two Pulitzer Prizes for setting four prisoners free and helped save the life of a fifth who remains wrongfully imprisoned.

Gene's heroics were uniquely unselfish. He would share the story with the competition if necessary, and he did it twice.

The first time was for Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, the young black men framed and sent to death row for two murders at Port St. Joe to which another man later confessed. Miller's relentless reporting won them a new trial but they were convicted and condemned again just before the Supreme Court put a temporary end to the death penalty. To free them from life sentences, Miller wrote his second book, Invitation to a Lynching.

"The truth to be told, Gene wrote the book for only one man, the governor of Florida, and it worked," Phillip Hubbart, who had been the lawyer for Pitts and Lee, told some 600 fellow mourners Wednesday.

Gene sent the prepublication galley proofs to Gov. Reubin Askew. Not long after, Askew pardoned Pitts and Lee. At great political cost, Attorney General Robert Shevin - another hero who is now gravely ill - concurred in the pardon.

That "killed the book sales," as former state Sen. Jack Gordon wrote in tribute to the man who "would sacrifice his own profit in order to see that justice was done."

Gene probably helped to put more people in prison than he helped to get out and he was famously skeptical of inmates claiming innocence. But in 1995, the facts persuaded him that Florida was about to execute an innocent man, Joe Spaziano, and he wanted other newspapers to help him stop it. It was his doing that the St. Petersburg Times printed an appeal by Spaziano's lawyer, Michael Mello, on the same day that the Herald did.

Few newspapers would let even one of their stars get away with that, but Gene's reputation for "speaking truth to power," as one of the pastors put it, wasn't earned just at the expense of public officials.

". . . We were mere instruments to be used to drive the Herald where Gene believed it needed to go," executive editor Tom Fiedler said in his eulogy Wednesday.

It was to Gene's reporter Lori Rozsa that the principal witness recanted the testimony that had convicted Spaziano of raping one woman and killing another.

When Miller finally met Mello in person, during a Vermont vacation a few years ago, "He spent most of the lunch trying to persuade me that I was the one who saved Joe's life and I spent it trying to persuade him that he was," Mello said.

Spaziano's murder conviction was reversed but the rape conviction stood. Spaziano accepted a no-contest plea bargain to avoid the risk of another death sentence for the murder. He remains in prison for a rape he almost certainly did not commit. Florida's prosecutors are not good losers, particularly when it's a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang - never mind his innocence - on the other side.

In August, Spaziano will have served 30 years for that rape. Anyone else would likely have been paroled by now, but the Parole Commission has twice made it clear that he never will be. His pro bono lawyer, James Russ, is suing the commission in Leon County Circuit Court. Russ is also searching for DNA evidence despite the state's claim to have discarded it many years ago.

So Miller's last great crusade remains unfulfilled. It will not be forgotten.

The wonderful thing about the memorial at Plymouth Congregational Church was that some 600 people came to honor him. Many were reporters whom he had generously, tirelessly and thoroughly trained to be good fact-finders and good writers and who now strengthen the staffs of this paper, the Washington Post, and others. It was truly a celebration of his life, with more laughter than tears, but there was one mournful thought on everyone's mind.

What will happen to journalism without him?

Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is dyckman@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 24, 2005, 22:49:01]