Parole skipper a killer in 2012

Policy that freed absconders in place at time of LR case

By June 2009, Steven Witzke had stopped reporting to his parole officer. It was clear it would take more than home visits and phone calls to track him down.

His parole officer obtained a warrant for Witzke’s arrest for violating his parole, and for the next 2½ years, no one with the Arkansas Department of Community Correction saw Witzke, records show.

Even so, the Community Correction Department gave Witzke credit for those years on the lam and discharged his sentence as served in December 2011.

A month later, on a cool, rainy Tuesday night, Witzke stabbed a man to death in a west Little Rock hotel room. The 36-year-old Witzke is now in prison, serving a35-year sentence for first-degree murder.

ADVERTISEMENT

More headlines

Witzke is one of at least1,129 parolees over the past five years who stopped reporting to parole officials yet were released from supervision by the Community Correction Department because of a policy that was meant to be temporary but instead remained in effect for years.

The policy was discontinued this summer after it became public in the wake of articles in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that prompted increased scrutiny of the Community Correction Department.

Parolees will no longer get credit on their sentences for the time they fail to report to parole officers. Only when they’re back under the supervision of the parole system will their sentences resume.

But state law likely won’t allow those parolees set free under the old policy to be returned to supervision, said Sheila Sharp, who took over as the interim head of the Community Correction Department on July 8.

Only those who reoffend will come back into contact with the department. Sharp said her staff hasn’t calculated how many of the 1,129 released under the old policy have reoffended.

The long-lasting effects of the policy are alarming, she said.

“It worries me a lot, but I can’t do anything about what was done in the past,” Sharp said.

Community Correction Department officials say they don’t know how the policy became permanent, but where it started is clear.

In 2007, Board of Parole Chairman Leroy Brownlee wrote a memorandum to the Community Correction Department ordering the department to take parolees who had failed to report off state supervision if their sentences had expired.

Brownlee issued the memorandum, which excluded sex offenders, in response to a Democrat-Gazette article published in January 2007 that found that only 45 of the 311 arrest warrants issued by the Parole Board the previous month had been served. The majority of the warrants were for parolees who weren’t reporting as required.

In an article in April 2007, Brownlee called the memorandum a “one-time thing” intended to get rid of old backlogged parole files.

But since then, the Community Correction Department adopted the memorandum as policy.

Members of the Parole Board have said they first learned of Brownlee’s memorandum when lawmakers asked about it during a July 18 meeting.

Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot, took a copy of the memorandum to the meeting and asked the agency’s assistant director of parole and probation services, Dan Roberts, about it.

Roberts admitted that the policy outlined by Brownlee was still in effect. Roberts later told another legislative committee that he wasn’t told that the policy was supposed to be temporary and conceded that he “probably should have” done more to question its implementation.

In an interview Friday, Williams said he didn’t know the department was still using the policy when he asked Roberts about it.

“I was under the assumption that it was a one-time memo,” Williams said. “I never knew it became permanent.”

“I was shocked when he said that it’s our policy now,” he added.

Brownlee, who is no longer board chairman, hasn’t responded to several phone messages over the past few weeks.

Williams said he first heard Witzke’s name when he read about his Jan. 11, 2012, arrest in the newspaper.

At the time, the state senator said he was starting to hear from Community Correction Department officers who had concerns about ineffective policy and unresponsive management.

The Witzke case, he was told by officers, was a prime example of some recurring problems they were facing.

What made matters worse, according to Williams, was that parole officers told him that there was a chilling effect over parole cases like Witzke’s.

“It was a conscious decision, it appeared to be, to not talk about [the case] within the department,” Williams said.

The Democrat-Gazette pieced together the past several years of Witzke’s story through interviews and files from the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney’s office, the Arkansas Department of Correction and the Community Correction Department - all obtained through the state Freedom of Information Act.

In October 2005, he went to prison for theft by receiving and forgery. He was sentenced to 72 months but served only about a year and a half before being paroled in March 2007.

Over the next year, he failed to report to his parole officer for a few months but was returned to supervision before the end of 2007.

The Community Correction Department is barred from releasing details about Witzke’s time on supervision, but Correction Department records indicate he made good on his parole until June 10, 2009, when a failure-to-report warrant was issued.

More than two years later, on Dec. 8, 2011, the Community Correction Department took him off its active parole lists.

Slightly more than a month later, on Jan. 10, 2012, Little Rock police received a 911 call that led them to Room 335 of the Extended Stay America at 600 Hardin Drive where they found Witzke jittery, intoxicated and wearing a jacket covered in shaving cream.

Witzke told police his friend, George Johnson, 48, who stayed just three doors down from where Witzke was staying with his girlfriend, had been stabbed in the neck in a “bad drug deal.”

Johnson was found face down, dead, with a knife buried to the handle in his back. His room was covered in blood smears. Johnson’s body was covered in shaving cream and dish-washing soap.

After telling police that he was with Johnson trying to buy cocaine when their dealer attacked Johnson, Witzke admitted to drinking, drug-taking and sharing oral sex with Johnson before his death. Witzke also was wearing the dead man’s jacket.

According to Witzke, Johnson tried to have sex with him, but Witzke refused. They fought and Witzke said he stabbed Johnson twice in self-defense.

But Johnson’s pants were on and fastened, detectives noted. Instead of two wounds, he was stabbed 28 times, they reported. Seventeen of the stab wounds, according to medical examiners, were made after Johnson already was dead.

“The scene appeared as if the defendant had spent some time in the room washing up and cleaning up as opposed to leaving immediately as he said,” a prosecuting attorney wrote. “It also appeared he sprayed shaving cream on victim and poured dish washing liquid on victim (pooled in the small of his back) after the murder.”

Witzke’s case recently surfaced in records compiled by the Community Correction Department after the state Board of Corrections ordered a statewide audit of the department’s 55,000 parole and probation files.

Word of the audit was announced after investigations and hearings into the parole agency’s handling of an eight time parole absconder, Darrell Dennis, who was charged with kidnapping and capital murder on May 22 in the May 10 slaying of 18-year-old Forrest Abrams in Little Rock.

On June 17, a Democrat-Gazette article illustrated Dennis’ history of parole violations, including at least 14 arrests and 10 new felony charges since he was paroled from prison in late 2008.

The day the article was published, Gov. Mike Beebe called the Community Correction Department’s chief, David Eberhard, into his office and then announced that his office would be reviewing the Dennis case, as well as looking for broader, more widespread problems in the parole system.

Arkansas State Police began its own investigation a few days later, and within a few weeks, three legislative committees started reviews of the Dennis case as well as general parole policies and practices.

On June 21, the Board of Corrections announced six new policies. The new rules lowered the number of absconder offenses it takes to be eligible for a parole-revocation hearing and made it mandatory that a revocation hearing be requested if a parolee picks up any new felony charge.

On July 1, Eberhard retired and Sharp was appointed interim director of the Community Correction Department.

At that time, the Board of Corrections didn’t address the policy allowing the discharge ofthose who fail to report. That policy was officially abolished July 25 at a Parole Board meeting.

A closer examination of the Community Correction Department files shows that up until this summer that policy was in regular use, with an average of 226 nonreporting parolees being let off supervision each year since July 2008.

The Community Correction Department has yet to release the number of nonreporting parolees let off supervision between 2007 and mid-2008.

Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley called the revelation that parole officers were letting parolees go even if they stopped reporting “crazy.”

“It doesn’t make any sense at all,” Jegley said. “What we thought was being done wasn’t being done and now we know.”

Sharp said she immediately disapproved of the policy that allowed absconders to run out the clock on their parole.

“I know the justifications,” she said Friday. “But it should have stopped right at the time.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/11/2013

Upcoming Events