WGBH Journal; Christmas In Wales

Good evening and welcome to GBH Journal. I'm Amy Sands. Tonight questions on whether Willie Sanders, arrested in last winter's Allston Brighton rapes, can get a fair trial. A packed public hearing argues rent control in Boston. A report on an early warning system for arson and Louis Lyons ponders the importance of Carter's cabinet. All of that right after the local news. Massachusetts is still without a state budget today as Governor King continues to contemplate the 5.4 million dollar spending package which was delivered to his desk last school last week. Action from the governor had been expected today but a legislative aide contacted earlier said that King was still working on his budget recommendations. Meanwhile the Senate today gave final approval to to a bill which would reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts. The bill now needs only routine anatman in both houses of the legislature before being sent to Governor King who is expected to sign the measure. A technical amendment was added to the bill today which in the words of its sponsor Arthur Lewis will guarantee that the bill not be overturned by the courts. Opponents to the death penalty have said that the bill cannot become law because it violates a state supreme court ruling which states

of the day that the death penalty is unconstitutional. A lawyer for the group mass law reform added that the technical amendment will not change the legal nature of the bill. Without a word of debate the Massachusetts House today rejected two of Governor King's welfare cost cutting measures with an estimated nine point three million dollars in savings. One bill would introduce a 15 percent discount on reimbursement to hospitals for escalating outpatient visits by Medicaid recipients. The other measure to discourage the overuse of some drugs would require Medicaid patients to contribute 50 cents toward the cost of selected prescriptions rejection of the bills was recommended by the legislature's health care committee and the report was accepted at an informal session with relatively few members present. These bills were part of a welfare package that King said could save 78 million dollars annually. A citizen activist group today warned of a winter heating oil crisis in Massachusetts. Leaders of fair share also singled out Shell Oil Company for quote putting profits

before social responsibility. The group called an oil company official and State Energy Office Director Joseph it's Patrick to sign contracts promising dealers deliveries of at least the same amount of heating oil that was supplied last year. This spring, Shell stopped supplying heating oil to the northeast. In Massachusetts, 80 percent of the homes are heated with oil. For the first time since 1969 it appears that the Massachusetts legislature will receive an increase in personal expense allowances. Yesterday the House overwhelmingly approved a doubling of their monthly allowance rate from 100 to 200 dollars per month. That figure represents a general expense increase for all legislators but an additional daily allowance increase allows for reimbursement based on the distance that each legislator must travel according to Jay headland executive director of Common Cause. The increase coupled with the assigning of legislative aides to all lawmakers will help to create more efficient functioning on Beacon Hill. Finally state gasoline deal dealers have temporarily taken their battle for higher profit margins away from the pumps and into the

political back rooms. But it appears that consumers will pay anyway. Meeting with Governor king's chief secretary Paul Gazi dealers received assurances that the governor will continue to support their push for gasoline decontrol. This week the dealers are frustrated by a federal Department of Energy ruling that allows an additional 5 cents per gallon profit which they say is nullified by other provisions in the ruling. Maurice ?Langgallie? executive director of the Association says that regardless of the ruling he expects consumers to be paying over one dollar per gallon on regular gas by Labor Day. And that's the local news. [music] I'm not saying those women weren't raped but I am saying they weren't raped by Willie Sanders.

So said Willie Sanders today as the case of the Commonwealth vs. Willie Sanders moved a step closer to trial. Sanders was arrested last February 1st as the alleged Allston Brighton rapist and was later charged with four out of a series of eight highly publicized rapes that occurred in Brighton during last November December and January. Today in Suffolk County Superior Court, with a large crowd of Sanders' family and supporters present Sanders lawyer Mack Stern argued an unusual defense motion asking that all four rape cases be tried at once. Normally defense lawyers dealing with multiple charges prefer to have cases tried separately. That way jurors won't assume guilt simply because the defendant before them is charged with so many crimes. But today attorney Stern argued that the potential jurors in this case, Suffolk County residents, are already prejudiced in that regard because of, because massive publicity surrounding Sanders arrest identified him as the quote Allston Brighton rapist implying he had committed all eight rapes. Winston Kendall explained this point after the hearing Kendall is a Boston attorney active on the Willie Sanders Defense Committee.

to those jurors, are not going to consider one case in isolation, because the news media and the police and the prosecution and the district attorney have consistently said that one person is responsible for all the rapes. And they're not going to be trying Willie Sanders if the judge denies the motion for [inaudible] that is. The jurors will be trying Willie Sanders in that one case. They will be trying him for the three others cases for which there is actually no evidence before the court. (Reporter) So you are feeling like that other three rapes will be in the minds of the jurors even if they're not being tried actually right now. (Speaker 1) Precisely, there's no way they can separate out in their minds. I mean the human mind doesn't work like that on whether the jurors realize it or not, they're going to be subconsciously influenced by the news reports (inaudible) of this one man who has been responsible for 8, 9,10 or 11 rapes in Brighton, and I don't see how they can separate and keep their minds closed and pure enough to hear one rape at a time. Almost from the moment of his arrest Sander's case has attracted increasing attention in Boston's black community and among some feminists some 30 of whom are now active in his defense committee.

They are questioning in particular the process by which Sanders was identified as the rapist by 4 out of the 8 women who were attacked. The identifications were made in a in police lineup shortly after Sanders arrest. But the defense committee says all four women were shown Sanders picture several weeks before his arrest. And did not identify him then. Magnolia Sanders, who is Willie Sanders sister, says intervening prejudicial publicity made the difference. (Magnolia Sanders:) I think there were a lot of factors that contribute to them ID'ing my brother. One be his picture was put over television before the lineup so people actually saw him his picture. So it was easier for them to pick him out there in the lineup as being the rapist. (Reporter:) Winston Kendall says the defense can only bring out the question of identification if all 4 cases are tried at once. (Other speaker:) If you have a trial of all 4 cases joint. Then all 4 victims will have to take the witness stand to testify to what happened to each and every one of them. Then the defendant's counsel have (?) to cross examines each and every

1 of them about identification that were made and not made. However if you have a trial of only 1, Then you won't be able to cross-examine the other 3, I mean the defendant would not be able to subpoena the other 3 and put them on the witness stand. and asked you know how do you explain the fact that you would take us with you if I didn't fight you so we speak you have to write a book. arrested. [Reporter]: Mm-hmm. [Kendall]: So this is why it's a, it's a, a ?signal? advantage to the defendant to have the four cases joined for trial. [Host]: Assistant District Attorney Sandra Hamlin, who is prosecuting Sanders on behalf of the four women who were raped argued against the motion to consolidate the cases. She said there was no evidence all Suffolk County residents had watched TV, listened to the radio, or read newspapers during the time of the rapes and Sanders's arrest. Therefore she said there was no evidence Sanders couldn't get a fair trial. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Francis Keating was obviously surprised by Sanders's motion, but there were no courtroom fireworks until he realized the 50 people packed into the spectator section and the 25 more outside the door were there on Sanders's behalf. He angrily asked

Sanders's lawyer Max Stern if he had told the spectators to come. Stern replied he had not, but the judge went on to accuse Stern of trying to influence his decision on the motion through the use of what the judge called quote mob psychology. The judge later took Sanders's motion under advisement, saying he would have a decision within two days. [interlude music] In the past few months, Cambridge and Boston tenants have organized to fight for the preservation of rent control in their communities. The Alliance For Rent Control in Boston and the Cambridge Rent Control Cambridge Rent Control Task Force are gearing up for the November elections of their city councils, making their views on rent control known to their councilors, and encouraging voters to vote

only for those councilors who are for rent control. In Boston, the debate on rent control is becoming rather heated, especially after a public hearing held last night which Becky ?Rohr? report. [Rohr]: Last night a public hearing on rent control was held at the Boston City Council chambers. An emotional crowd of more than 400 people came to express their concern about the fate of rent control in Boston. At this point rent control will expire on December 31st of this year. Representatives from real estate interests spoke out in favor of rent control ending. They claim that rent control disrupts the creation of new housing stock, because it's not economical to build apartments which will have regulated rents at a low level. According to George Sly of the Rental Board Housing Task Force, rent control discourages a business climate for housing interests. [Sly]: Several years ago, we alerted the city council that if rent control were to become a way of life in Boston that you could expect a deterioration in the rental housing stock. It is now occurring through a variety of things. It is not just conversions to condominiums

but it is mostly the fact that the supply of new housing, as this gentleman alluded to, has been entirely choked off. May I ask you to view the problem of one as the business climate. By eliminating rent controls, you can tell the home building industry and its necessary counterpart in the area of finance that Boston is serious about providing a climate where we can return to the business of providing decent housing for our citizens. [Rohr]: In 1970, five communities in Massachusetts voted to establish rent control. Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline are still clinging to rent control, but the remaining two communities, Lynn and Somerville voted to discontinue it, Somerville doing so this last winter. A rent control proponent at last night's meeting pointed to Somerville's rental situation as an example of the repercussions that may face tenants when rent control ends. [Proponent]: Some rents have gone up in Somerville 45%. Whose income here has gone up 45% since March? No one. No one. The absolute dispassionate talk we've heard, about investments, about

construction starts, about a, a good atmosphere for commerce and and real estate does not speak to the needs, the very human needs, that are being caused by serious economic problems right now. Those problems as you know, and those words, "serious economic problems", are not cliches anymore. You go to bed with them, you wake up with them. The price of gasoline, the price of oil are not something you have to worry about in winter (?). They're things you have to worry about right now. [Rohr]: Today two ordinances on rent control were presented to the Boston City Council: the Home Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Councillor Ray Flynn, proposes first of all that rent control continue beyond December 31st and that vacancy decontrol be repealed and that condo conversions be banned in Boston. The second ordinance, proposed by Mayor White, calls for an extension of the present rent control legislation until 1982. This would continue the practice of vacancy decontrol. Councillor Ray Flynn comments on how he thinks vacancy decontrol affects Boston tenants. [Flynn]: I'm opposed to vacancy

decontrol because I think that uh it's it's unfair. Why should one person living in a unit pay $200 a month when the person living in an almost identical unit with the same economic situation be required to pay $350 a month simply because unit is, one unit is controlled and the other is decontrolled. So I think it's uh, it's discriminatory and for that reason I don't consider that to be a viable solution to the rent control problem in the city of Boston. [Rohr]: What happens to rent control in Boston is undoubtedly a political issue. One speaker at the public hearing last night assured the gathered city councilors that they will work to make sure that pro-rent control candidates are elected this November. For GBH Journal, I'm Becky ?Rohr?. [interlude music] [Sands] Between 1974 and 1977, arson nearly decimated the Symphony Road section of

Boston. Out of these fires came 33 indictments and proof that arson is not only a crime of vandals but a profitable white collar crime as well. These fires killed five people and displaced 500. From the tragedy also came a new understanding of arson, and now a group of people are putting that understanding to the test by developing an arson early warning system. Newt Walker has more. [Ristow]: By family classification, this is a fairly typical sociological survey study. We've got a population not of people but of buildings. We've separated out only those buildings that we think we can handle fairly simply, which is rental apartment buildings where the owner, uh, not lived in by the owner, with no commercial use, and we're trying to ?define? the characteristics of uh, two different subpopulations of these buildings: buildings that get burned and buildings that don't get burned. [Walker]: That was Richard Ristow, a computer expert working with Urban Educational Systems to develop a program which will pinpoint a target of arson long before a match is struck. The premise is that arson is not a random crime, that in most cases it is planned to put money

into someone's pocket. In fact the prevailing philosophy at UES is that arson is only a symptom of a broader economic disease associated with the housing market. According to UES founder David Scondras, housing policy is based on profit, and in many cases profit comes quicker by torching than by providing decent housing. He gives this grim example. [Scondras]: The kind of fire where you're losing money in a building. You don't want to lose any more money in the building, and essentially, you're in a declining neighborhood, you've been handed a lemon, you can't deal with it. Uh, and what you do is burn the place down, uh to stop you from losing any more money, so I'd call it a stop-loss arson. Then it seems to me there's a very bizarre one that, one that's even more closely related to greed, uh, and that is what happens when you have uh the kind of legislation that's vacancy decontrol, where um you can only raise rents as high as you choose if the tenants are gone from a building.

And at the same time what happens if that happens to coincide with a quote rediscovery of your neighborhood. Well, I suspect that what may happen is some fires are set to chase tenants out of a building uh for a rehab that then can be sold for a lot higher prices, can be rented out for a lot higher prices. There's a whole sort of class of fires in that same bag: parcelization fires, gentry fires, if you will. Condominiumization fires and so forth and so on. You can give 'em all sorts of names. But um if you wanted to put them in one, under one broad heading is: "how can I make more money" fires. Scondras and his coworkers maintain that an arson early warning system is feasible because arson seems to come at a specific point in a building's history. The theory is that inner-city housing is exploited. Rents are collected but repairs aren't made. Ownership changes. The property deteriorates. It is abandoned or burned. UES believes that if a building's footprints in this cycle are followed, then its risk

can be ascertained. Richard Ristow says that the footprints the computer will use are public records: the more a building generates, the higher its risk. [Ristow]: We go to uh the Registry of Deeds and pick up anything that affects the title. That's not only sales but uh mortgages, liens against the property, tax liens, uh civil suits against the owner. Lot of indicators that the owner's in economic trouble show up that way. We catch uh when the owner is behind on his property taxes, or whether he's uh just fallen behind recently or been sort of dragging by dragging by for a long time. We catch uh citations for violations of the building and housing codes. Uh, we think among these that we have a pretty fair indication of uh the, the kind of trouble the owner's in and uh the kind of intent he has toward the building. [Walker]: Ristow expects that within a year or so, the system will be able to pinpoint high risk buildings, perhaps 90 days before they are torched. Dan Jaffe of the attorney general's office explains

what will happen from there. [Jaffe]: In the event that we thought it was likely that the building was going to be burned very soon, what we would try to do is look for a legal basis to remove that building from the physical control of the owner, by means of of remedies such as such as re- housing court receivership. The less stringent kinds of responses we make is to try to call a conference between the building owner, his mortgagee, or his, um, um, insurance company. And let them know that we think this building is in economic difficulties, that we'd like to assist him in getting it out of these economic difficulties, and try to work out a plan that would decrease the pressure on that building. [Walker]: Jaffe shares a view that arson is an economic instrument used in the housing market, most often against the poor.

He believes that an early warning system will go far as a diagnostic tool that could help revitalize neighborhoods as well as save lives. Both Jaffe and the people at UES stressed that arson is only a symptom of a deeper problem, which only new policies and new attitudes can change. For GBH Journal, I'm Newt Walker. [interlude music] Well, while we're all wondering who's going to go and who's going to stay in President Carter's cabinet, Louis Lyons is wondering whether the cabinet is all that

important anyway. [Lyons]: Obtaining the mass resignations of his Cabinet and staff further dramatizes the president's promise to turn the country around. It's also a reminder of how little difference the Cabinet makes. In a parliamentary government, a crisis that caused such a sweep would include the head of the government. It would force an election. But as our Cabinet have no seats in Congress, their departure makes no change in the Congress leadership or the political alignment. What it does for the President is to make it easy for him to make such replacements as his own change of direction indicates. Ordinarily members of a Cabinet tender their resignation upon the election of a President to a second term. This Cabinet has held without change through all of Jimmy Carter's term so far, which is called a record. The President is expected to take advantage of the wholesale resignation offers to make only a few changes. Two that are generally considered inevitable are of James Schlesinger, Secretary of Energy, and Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury. These are the two areas, energy and finance, most critical in the President's plans. To bring new

faces into these two key places would go with the President's picturing of the oil crisis as a war. In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt brought two Republicans into key Cabinet places: Henry Stimson as Secretary of War and Frank Knox as Secretary of Navy. That gave a bipartisan look to the War Cabinet. But actually Roosevelt ran the war operations largely through agencies outside the Cabinet. Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Administration, and Harry Hopkins as FDR's alter ego are the names remembered when the Cabinet are forgotten. Secretary Schlesinger had become the scapegoat for the failures of energy policy. He'd never got control of the jungle that the Congress created and called a new Department of Energy. Secretary Blumenthal has persisted in strong views of his own as to coping with inflation and the shrinking dollar. Beyond those two, some people would have a little less to offer the President, headed perhaps by the Transportation Secretary Brock Adams, whose contribution to the gasoline shortage

is to reduce the railroads. But how many can name half the Cabinet? Their ?face card? is to balance various political elements in the outward aspects of the administration. Forced changes in presidents' Cabinets have been few in modern times. William Jennings Bryan resigned as Secretary of State when he felt President Wilson's policy was leading us into war. Calvin Coolidge had to cleanse the Harding cabinet he inherited. But in his characteristically cautious way Coolidge managed to limit the firings to two and waited in each case till Attorney General's Daugherty's corruption and Secretary Denby's stupidity had been publicly exposed. President Truman fired Henry Wallace for making unauthorized policy speeches that embarrassed his administration. He dropped James Burns as Secretary of State also for becoming too big for his britches. President Eisenhower had to drop his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, over a vicuña coat. Carter staff resignations may open larger change.

We know even less about most of them. When Congress provided 6 to Franklin Roosevelt, they were to be anonymous presidential aides. Now each is a chieftain of his own staff who plan programs, provide liaison with every element with a political voice, write speeches, shape a presidential image. Unless all these changes are obviously very able and non-political people, the President will be accused of playing politics for re-election. But the politics of nomination is already in full swing. 15 state Democratic organizations have come out for Senator Kennedy. The Cabinet resignations come out on the 10th anniversary of Chappaquiddick. Kennedy himself marked the day with an interview to get out ahead of those who would exploit the anniversary against him. One hate Kennedy group had advertised a Mary Kopechne memorial in newspapers right across the country. The Kennedy interview shows him no longer utterly quiescent about the presidency. He insisted on reviewing the questions in advance. He added no new

information to the tragedy in accepting his full responsibility for it. He made no announcement but he said he did not believe that Chappaquiddick would be a deterrent to his running for president. Latest polls show that three quarters of those asked say it would not deter them from voting for him. Public reaction to Carter's Cabinet changes and to Kennedy's test of Chappaquiddick together may show whether Jimmy Carter's bugaboo of a Kennedy candidacy has substance. [Sands]: Commentator Louis Lyons. [interlude music] [interlude music] [Sands]: That's GBH Journal for this Wednesday evening. Producer for tonight's show was Marcia Hirtz and the Engineer Perry Carter. We had production assistance from Pat

Bodner, Steve Medeiros, and Lisa Mullins. My name is Amy Sands. Have a good evening. [music] [music] [music] [music]