NUVO | Heat on the heat

Michael Hinkle was a man with an armed robbery conviction when he got into a fight with a relative, pulled out a gun and fired a shot into the back of the home. No one was injured, but last December a jury found him guilty of being a convicted violent felon with a firearm and sentenced him to 35 and a half years in the state klinkers.

Then there was Alfonzo Daniels, who got into an argument with his niece, pointed a gun in her face and then pistol whipped her. On Oct. 21, 1999, he received a 22-year sentence for being a convicted violent felon with a handgun.

Thus, the word should be getting out on the Prozac City’s mean streets. Being a bad dude packing heat will earn you dozens of years with the Indiana Department of Corrections.

In years gone by, the crimes that Hinkle and Daniels committed would have brought maximum, milquetoast-like six-year prison terms. Gangstas and white trash were walking free after 18 months to three years time. Now, thanks to a new Indiana state law passed in 1999 that went into effect last July 1, Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman has salted away about 90 cons packing heat. Of those, about 90 percent were unable to post the $50,000 to $80,000 bonds prior to trial. And out of the 90, those convicted under the new law have received an average of 13 years in prison.

Newman had been pressing then-Southern Indiana District Attorney Judy Stewart to emulate a successful program in Richmond, Va., called “Project Exile” — one that has been endorsed by President Clinton, former Mayor Stephen Goldsmith and current Mayor Bart Peterson. In Richmond, 254 local gun possession cases were transferred into federal court where those convicted were getting 55 month sentences. In response, the homicide rate tumbled. That compared to 40 gun cases heard by the Southern Indiana DA during the same time period.

Richmond was so enthralled with Project Exile’s success that it was posting billboards: “An illegal gun gets you 5 years in Federal Prison.”

It begged this question that we asked the Southern Indiana DA: What could be a more compelling cause than to help the state’s capital city combat its ongoing blood bath?

It was during that same time period that Indianapolis experienced its fifth record homicide year — topping out at 164 in 1998. In 1997, a full 79 percent of the homicides in Marion County were committed with guns, 56 percent by chronic offenders, with 50 percent of the victims being chronic offenders.

“Police are saying that guns are getting scarcer,” Newman said. “They are finding fewer guns on people and around the drug trade. I’m hoping that our activities these past several months are registering with the criminal population.”

The first three months of 2000 represent a burgeoning critical mass in the debate over guns and violence, not only here in the Prozac City, but nationally. It began last December when the Clinton administration began applying heat — legislatively — in Congress to toughen up gun control laws. President Clinton threatened to file his own suit against gun manufacturers if they didn’t settle a lawsuit filed by more than 20 big city mayors (Indianapolis did not take part, but Gary, Ind., did).

The murder of a 6-year-old Michigan school girl in February not only reopened the wounds and fears of the 1999 Columbine High massacre that induced the Indiana General Assembly to get tough, but prompted National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre to accuse Clinton of using gun victims for political purposes. “Has he looked into the eyes of Ricky Birdsong’s family? Because that blood is on his hands,” LaPierre said of the former Northwestern University basketball coach who was gunned down on July 4, 1999, by Benjamin Smith during an Indiana and Illinois homicide spree. Smith also killed Won Joon Yoon outside a Bloomington church.

LaPierre accused the Clinton administration of failing to enforce current federal laws (remember this, because we’ll get back to this topic in a minute).

Then came the big event: the March 16 agreement by Smith & Wesson in a landmark legal settlement by the nation’s biggest gun manufacturer. Smith & Wesson agreed to make significant changes in its marketing, manufacturing and design practices. It agreed to include child safety locks, demand background checks at retail stores and gun shows, and provide ballistic fingerprints of its guns. Glock is rumored to be considering a similar resolution.

President Clinton hailed the Smith & Wesson settlement as a “major victory for America’s families.”

There are signs that gun control will be a major 2000 presidential campaign issue. Republican nominees George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole polled only 37 percent of the female vote in 1992 and 1996. A CBS Poll last week revealed that while 56 percent of men favor stricter gun laws, 73 percent of women do. That poses a challenge for GOP nominee Gov. George W. Bush and his brand of “compassionate conservatism” as he tries to close the gender gap while signing bills allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons and forbidding municipalities from directly suing gun makers.

In April 1999, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno came to Indianapolis to announce its inclusion in a Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative. While she attempted to put a rosy face on the crime picture here, at one point she pulled Newman and Stewart aside. “She was opportuning Judy to come up with a principled way of taking more gun cases without flooding the federal system,” Newman recalled. “She was talking about Stewart taking 60 to 70 cases a year instead of a dozen or 20.”

Stewart told Reno that she was not ignoring the problem; that she had established the Violence Reduction Partnership that coordinated local and federal police, probation and prosecutor offices. “Frankly, she did facilitate that,” Newman said. “It did not require her to stick her neck out, even though it was a worthwhile effort.”

Prosecutor Newman said that he didn’t grasp the “whole political undercurrent of this” until he traveled to Washington last year. “The Justice Department and most district attorneys across the country don’t like Project Exile,” Newman said, adding that it had a “Republican taint to it.”

“There is a strong cultural current among DAs about not taking local cases,” Newman said. “There are a lot of reasons for that. The feds think of themselves as having the best criminal justice system and one of the ways they do it is limiting the number of cases. The other reason, frankly, is that district and federal judges don’t want these cases in their courtrooms. They will make life difficult for DAs who start filing these types of cases.”

Stewart told NUVO in December 1998 that Marion County had 100 prosecutors, compared to the 15 she had to cover 60 counties. “I’m not sure that I would anticipate doing exactly the same thing in Richmond. I don’t see us substituting federal prosecution for local,” she said.

But, Stewart added, “Federal prosecutors and investigators do have to become involved in violent street crime. The days are past where we have to say, ‘That’s a local problem.’”

Nationally, there has been some response to President Clinton’s call for increased federal prosecutions on gun crimes. They went up from 4,754 in 1992 to 5,500 cases in 1999. In Indiana, Stewart resigned earlier this year to become Brown County Circuit Court judge, and her successor, Timothy Morrison, did not respond to NUVO’s request for recent statistics on federal gun prosecutions from his office.

Other federal offices in Indiana did respond to their local blood baths. Northern Indiana District Attorney David Capp launched a similar effort to Project Exile in Lake County. Operation Bull’s-Eye resulted in 100 indictments on gun charges, with two-thirds getting stiff sentences. Lake County’s homicide rate has subsequently dropped from 166 in 1995 to 103 in 1999. The City of Gary, long known as “Murder Capital USA,” has seen a dramatic decrease in its homicide rate. Capp has since announced plans to expand that anti-gun program to Fort Wayne, South Bend and Lafayette.

Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman said that essentially, the ground has shifted here. “Not because of what the district attorney did, but because of what the legislature did.”

The new law that creates a B felony for convicts possessing any kind of firearm “completely changed the equation on what we send to the feds. When we screen a case and decide whether it goes federal or local, we look at where we can get the longer sentence. This law has changed the landscape. We hold one of the strongest cards now.

“It’s a good preemptive strike,” Newman said. “You don’t have to murder anyone. The old law didn’t have anything to say about long guns — shotguns and rifles. But now a convicted felon cannot touch a gun at home or in business. No guns. You don’t touch a gun.

“She wouldn’t do it,” Newman said of Judy Stewart. “I can guarantee sentences as good as what Exile was getting.”

Acting DA Timothy Morrison announced last week a federal indictment of Wade Maurice Havvard of Indianapolis for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Ronnie Rose was convicted on a similar charge last week. So was Darren Starks, who received a 30- month federal sentence on March 3.

“Gun prosecutions keep going. We keep prosecuting them, but I didn’t see anyone in the courtroom,” Morrison said of the news media. “All I can tell you is that we continue to cooperate with Marion County. The homicide rate has gone down.”

District Attorney Morrison is right. The homicide rate is down — 20 for the first three months of 2000 (to date), compared to 32 for the same time period in 1999. It was April 1999 that Indianapolis’ brutal bloodletting began to subside. Some point to the demographics of an ebbing crack cocaine trade, with its purveyors either dead or locked up. The young teen-age sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of crackheads don’t want to go there, having seen living ghosts of people they loved staggered on the mean streets.