EaBo Clipper

This story in the St. Peterburg Times revisits the Carl Songer Case. It's chilling to read the account of how Songer killed the Florida Trooper in cold blood. It's also worthy to note that Carl Ray Songer and his accomplice had escaped from "work relase" a la Willie Horton. Good character..... yeah right!

Oklahoma police already were looking for Jones and Songer when the shooting occurred. The pair had walked off a work-release job, where Songer was serving a three-year sentence for car theft, his third conviction. After a drug-fueled drive to Miami, they had turned for home when they ran into Smith.

Jones got a two-year sentence as an accessory after the fact. Songer, then 23, was sentenced to death.

For the next 11 years, Songer’s appeals delayed his execution. Gov. Bob Graham finally signed a third death warrant for Feb. 5, 1985.

Songer was little more than a week from the electric chair when the 13-year-old Alicia watched Patrick defending her father’s killer in that Inverness court room. A judge denied the appeal.

“We thought it was over with at that point,” Alicia Hayes said.

Patrick, then an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, kept trying. Less than 24 hours before the execution, Patrick won a reprieve.

A year later, the appeals court ruled that Songer had been denied his right to present evidence of his good character.

Prosecutors tried to get the death penalty reinstated, but in 1989, the court resentenced Songer to life with no chance of parole for 25 years. He has been denied parole twice.

After defending Songer, Patrick went on to serve in the Clinton administration as assistant attorney general for civil rights.

A child of Chicago’s tough South Side, he looks likely to become Massachusetts’ first black governor.
Patrick, 50, defended his record after the Songer ads began airing.

He said, “I am proud of the work I have done, and I will not have it trivialized or minimized by someone who has never seen the inside of a courtroom,” the Lowell (Mass.) Sun reported.