Rehabilitation?
Fighting to free 'the poster boy for punishment'
by Roger Lowenstein

It is late August of 1963 and John F. Kennedy is in the White House. I'm a 19-year-old college student working as an intern on Capitol Hill in the office of a liberal Jersey City congressman, and helping to organize Capitol Hill employees to join the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and shut down the Hill. I've been to Europe twice, but I've never met a convicted criminal. I venerate the working class but don't know any "workers." I'm naïve and idealistic and think the only real political organizing that needs to be done is to push Kennedy to the left. Why won't he fully embrace the Civil Rights movement?

Back in my home state of New Jersey some lowlife thugs are celebrating an armed robbery in Brooklyn by drinking and carousing with various girlfriends in a roadside dive in Lodi. One of the thugs, Frankie Falco, is wanted for murder. Another, Tommy Trantino, sits at the bar drinking himself into oblivion. He's had two dexedrine tablets and 20 double shots of whiskey. A police sergeant and an unarmed probationary policeman respond to a noise complaint at 2:30 in the morning. They enter the bar. The sergeant finds a gun wrapped in a towel on the bar. Trantino jumps him and disarms him, giving his service revolver to Falco. The cops are told to strip. They begin to comply. Trantino hits the sergeant with his gun, then both cops are shot to death. The next day the cops catch up to Frankie Falco in a New York City hotel room and execute him. Trantino turns himself in, is tried and sentenced to death in New Jersey's electric chair. Our lives will soon cross.

By the time I get my law degree and finish my clerkship on the New Jersey Supreme Court Tommy has been in the Death House for five years. Perhaps the best description of Tommy then is provided by Frank Bisignano, another cop-killer awaiting execution:

When he came in, he was very disjointed. He used to fly off on tangents. He was very withdrawn and introverted. It was like he was on drugs and they had kept him drugged during his trial. You're faced with two choices in a place like that. You do something for yourself or become a vegetable. For months, he wouldn't talk to anyone and he had a very bad temper.

They had a ventilation shaft running up by the cells and you could open it to get some air. We used it like an intercom system. We'd sit and talk for hours about the deepest feelings we had ... I saw Tommy become a totally different individual. He went from being a temperamental, moody person to a pacifist. He became very involved in topical events and very involved in the peace movement. He just couldn't hurt anybody anymore.

I was 22, and the first book I read was Peyton Place. I was reading things like that until Tommy started teaching me how to spell, how to punctuate, and to develop a vocabulary.

I'll tell you what kind of guy he was. I was broke for 10 years. But Tommy had a little money coming in and every time he would get a money order he would send me up a little bag with cigarettes, paint supplies, and things like that. He bought me my first typewriter. I never had to ask. And he did that type of thing for everyone on Death Row. ...When the guys were glum they all looked to him. It was like the whole institution was on his back, and he stood up to it.

By 1969 I am a fledgling public defender in Newark. When I had first entered a maximum security prison in Concord, Mass., as a first-year law student I couldn't make eye contact with the prisoners. They were an alien species. No more. I like my clients, and like getting them acquitted even better. I consider myself a "radical" and am one of many young protégés of Len Weinglass and Bill Kunstler. I share offices with Len and other members of the Newark "law commune." Len represents Tommy in failed attempts at post-conviction relief. In 1972 the death penalty is held unconstitutional nationwide. Tommy's sentence is commuted to life. He will be eligible for parole in 1977. By then Tommy is at the minimum security Wharton Tract facility training young inmates how to avoid recidivism. On one work release trip into the community he saves the life of a young girl who had fallen into the water and was drowning. Tommy doesn't swim but jumped in after her anyway. In 1978 Little Brown publishes his critically acclaimed book of autobiographical short stories and drawings entitled, Lock the Lock. Prison psychologists declare that Tommy has successfully rehabilitated himself and has channeled all his previously negative energy into positive accomplishments in an effort to make amends.

It is 1982. Parole has finally been granted, then rescinded and new conditions imposed following public outcry, candlelight vigils and a media circus that includes the repetition of mythology about the crime created by the police (they danced over the corpses, urinating on them, performing unspeakable sex acts, etc.). I make my first court appearance for Tommy at the Bergen County Courthouse and have to cross a picket line of uniformed cops chanting, "Kill him, kill him!" The ostensible reason for the hearing is to determine the amount of "restitution" that Tommy must pay as a condition of any future parole, but the real purpose of the hearing is to allow the victims' families to ventilate regarding the horrible impact of the crime. Tommy is being guarded by corrections officers, who have placed snipers on the courthouse roof. I sit next to the most hated inmate in New Jersey, becoming by osmosis the most hated lawyer in New Jersey. In a society that has given up on the concept of rehabilitation my client is the poster boy for punishment.

Thus began, off and on, my now more than 18-year struggle with the New Jersey parole and corrections system on Tommy's behalf. In a system designed to have no more than two parole hearings before release, Tommy has had 11. He is the longest-serving New Jersey inmate. He will be 63 in February, having donated his entire adult life to the prison system. Frank Bisignano and the others in the Death House with Tommy have been paroled 15 years ago. Every time Tommy comes up for parole his record of accomplishments has grown, requiring consistently more fantastic rationales to justify denial. By now, with no bad conduct for the last 37 years to justify any negative conclusions, the Parole Board must resort to new psychological "evaluations" in order to make the case that the "real" Tommy Trantino is lurking beneath the benign affect, just waiting for release so he can recidivate. As in the Soviet Union, the so-called "healing" professions have been inducted into the criminal justice system in order to bury political prisoners. Tommy's case has been before the Supreme Court of New Jersey four times, most recently in September 2000. We wait for an opinion.

In 1990 I moved to Los Angeles to become a television writer. I got rid of my law practice. Other lawyers took my other cases, but no one would take Tommy's case. A hundred lawyers told me, this guy's never getting out. Give it up. But they warned us in law school to beware the lawyer with only one case. I am now that lawyer, and I keep on plugging. It is clear to me and any fair-minded observer that Tommy is being held illegally by New Jersey authorities. In 1995 I filed a state habeas corpus petition. Since April of that year, without any break (or compensation), I have been litigating Tommy's case non-stop in a court system now 3000 miles from home. I have been before the Appellate Division three times and the Supreme Court twice. Last year the Appellate Division finally granted relief and ordered immediate parole. In an exhaustive 62-page opinion the Court held that the Parole Board had no factual basis for denying parole. But after the usual public outcry the Attorney General obtained a stay from the Supreme Court. That Court granted review, and Tommy remains in prison.

By the time this article is published there will be an opinion. Either Tommy will be free or he will have to serve an additional 20 years before his next eligibility, his second death penalty. Tommy is the eternal optimist. He believes in the law, and finds my arguments irrefutable. What an irony. A double cop-killer stands up for the rule of law, while those whose job it is to enforce the law - the Attorney General, the members of the Parole Board, the Governor - do everything in their power to distort and subvert the law. When I as the attorney get furious at the injustice, the interminable delays that have robbed Tommy of his adult life, his marriage, his ability to see his mother before she died, it is Tommy who reassures me and calmly predicts ultimate victory.

To me there is no question why I have to fight this case to the end, whenever that may be. There are important issues at stake. The criminal justice system cannot buckle under political pressure as the U.S. Supreme Court recently did in Bush v. Gore. More importantly, the issue of rehabilitation is one that defines who we are as a society. Every major religion promotes the concept of redemption. The sinner must be given the opportunity to repent and to do penance through prayer and good works, and we in turn must forgive. Each side of that equation is critical, and each side is imbedded in our criminal justice system. Parole can and should be earned. No matter how heinous the crime, Tommy Trantino today is not the drugged-up thug who committed it. He has changed, and society must accept that if we are to advance as a civilization. We cannot abdicate our criminal justice system to vengeance and the victims' rights movement, or we will all be the lesser for it.

The above paragraph explains intellectually why I fight for Tommy, but ideas are only part of the story. I will fight to the end for Tommy because I am committed to him as a person. Our paths crossed and I agreed to help him. He is being screwed and I happen to know how to fight it. I'm not Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, looking for innocent clients who can be cleared by DNA tests. Give me a guilty client any day. But then the onus is on me to judge my client - not based so much on guilt or innocence as on whether this person deserves to be in the jam he/she is in, and whether he/she deserves the massive psychic energy needed to reverse his/her fortunes. In Tommy's case the answer is clear. In the course of our journey we have become friends. Maybe it's because we both had strong Jewish mothers with a biting sense of humor, or we're news junkies, or in an odd way we are progressive men who came of age in the 1960s, but we talk on the phone every week as two people on the same trip. The young inmates call Tommy "Pops" and make him feel old and irrelevant in the same way as ageism is pushing me out of the television writing business. Sometimes I'm Don Quixote and he's Sancho Panza; other times it's the reverse. I know how much better I am as a person because of our relationship. I, and our community, will be so much better off with Tommy walking free among us.

Roger Lowenstein lives in Los Angeles. On January 18, 2001, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Thomas Trantino must be transferred to a halfway house within 30 days, then after a 12-month successful adjustment, paroled to the street. The "facts" offered by the parole board to justify denial of parole were described as "makeweight." New Jersey's longest serving inmate (37 years) is finally free.