Dateline: April 8, 2008 Location: from a prison cell
"Innocent man wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit - FREED!"
"Florida Legislature approves $1.25 million for innocent man imprisoned 26 years."
I remember Alan Crotzer in the mid-1980's at Zephyrhills Correctional Institution as a small, quiet, shy man from Tampa who attended the "GOLAB" Program I taught. He told us that he was innocent, and I said, "Amen, brother, I can identify with that."
Fortunately for him, a DNA test and the work of "Innocence Projects" freed him. I haven't been so lucky.
What is interesting is that with all the national media attention, not one peep has been heard from Hillsborough County State Attorney Mark Ober, who was an assistant state attorney along with his partner, Norman Cannella, when Alan Crotzer was railroaded and hustled off to state prison. And they are the same people who worked for state attorney E.J. Salcines, who committed egregious prosecutorial misconduct in order to guarantee my conviction and their political careers.
Norman Cannella's political career went down the tubes when the photograph of him in handcuffs with head down was featured on the front page of the Tampa Tribune after FBI agents arrested him for bribery, corruption, and being a member of an international drug cartel. He slithered out of those charges, but any hopes for higher office went KAPUT. His partner, Mark Ober, was able to keep from getting splashed with Cannella's mud, got rich as a private lawyer with Cannella, and after Harry Lee Coe's suspicious and convenient "suicide," he was elected state attorney. The foxes got into the henhouse. And they've been gorging themselves ever since.
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