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Sometimes the wheels of justice should grind slowly

By SUE CARLTON
Published May 10, 2006

Even the day they lifted 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson's casket from his grave, even before the second medical examiner's report went public, people demanded arrests.

Now. They wanted the guards on that boot camp security video charged now. Yesterday even.

And who could blame anyone for wanting justice for Martin? Sentenced to six months in boot camp for joyriding in his grandmother's stolen car and then trespassing on school grounds, he didn't make it even one day.

Maybe you've caught the video on the news. Guards are pushing the lanky teenager to keep exercising. He is hit, kneed, roughed up. He goes limp and is dragged upright. Ultimately, paramedics load him onto a gurney, one arm dangling.

He died the next day at a hospital.

Though the first autopsy blamed complications from sickle cell trait, the second concludes he suffocated in the struggle. His mouth was clamped shut and he was forced to inhale fumes from ammonia capsules. Somehow, this sounded not much better than the initial assumption that he died from the blows he took.

In a world where justice can be racially lopsided, news of the boot camp death caught fire. People marched, rallied, staged a sit-in at the governor's office. They are determined no one will forget and no one will think they aren't watching for what happens next. Gov. Jeb Bush has called the guards' actions deplorable and urged the state attorney to act swiftly. Other politicians demanded arrests even as investigations got under way.

Now, we need to take a breath.

No doubt, some observers are in the charge-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out camp. But consider the complexities that play out on that video.

Nine guards. One nurse. Who did what? How responsible is each individual - the ones who administered the ammonia, who covered his mouth, who held down his arms?

How about the ones who watched?

The video shows most of the guards putting their hands on him, but two appear not to have touched him at all. Did they have a duty - a legal one - to intervene, to help, to make it stop?

And what about the nurse who stands watching, sometimes with her hands planted on her hips? Put aside her moral responsibility, what we wish she had done. Did she break the law?

I called Bill Cervone, the state attorney in Gainesville, whose office prosecuted the 1999 case of prison guards acquitted in the stomping death of death row inmate Frank Valdes. (It's important to note it was a very different sort of case, starting with the fact that no videotape showed what happened to Valdes.) I asked Cervone about the task of sorting through any case where several people could face charges.

"We don't want to be making snap judgments," said Cervone, who knows only what he's read in the paper about the boot camp case. "I know that frustrates many folks . . . but many times there are reasons why they're methodical."

"Once we make charging decisions, that sets the road map for everything," he said. "To proceed precipitously is a mistake."

Want signs of progress? State lawmakers have eliminated boot camps. The head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement resigned after he was criticized for sending e-mails in defense of boot camps after Martin's death. A lawyer for the teenager's family expressed confidence in Mark Ober, the Hillsborough state attorney specially assigned to the case.

So for now, we need to wait. And watch. And let investigators work.

The family of the boy who died that day deserves no less than a painstaking examination of every minute and every action of every person who was there. They deserve appropriate charges that are no more and no less than what the law allows.

The accused deserve that, too. Anything else would be less than justice for Martin Lee Anderson.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 10, 2006, 01:07:05]