Burke, William F., Jr.

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BURKE, William F., Jr.

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Home—Virginia Beach, VA. Offıce—c/o Virginian-Pilot, P.O. Box 449, Norfolk, VA 23501-0449. E-mail—bill.burke@pilotonline.com.

CAREER: Journalist. Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, VA, journalist and editor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Four-time nominee, Pulitzer Prize, for journalism.

WRITINGS:

(With Joe Jackson) Dead Run: The Untold Story ofDennis Stockton and America's Only Mass Escape from Death Row, Times Books (New York, NY), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: Virginia journalist William F. Burke, Jr., cowrote Dead Run: The Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America's Only Mass Escape from Death Row, a 1999 study of death-row inmates and the American criminal justice system. In 1984 six prisoners broke out from Virginia's Mecklenburg Prison's death row. The men were subsequently captured, but in investigating how they came to escape from this supposedly maximum security facility, Burke and fellow journalist Joe Jackson encountered Dennis Stockton, sentenced to death for murder and originally part of the escape plot. Stockton, however, stayed behind, protesting his innocence and recording events in the journal he kept. Burke and Jackson used this account in their story of the breakout; they also became convinced of Stockton's innocence. As the clock ticked out on the convicted man's life, and as further appeals were denied, the journalists persuaded their newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, to publish Stockton's journals of the final days of his life.

Burke and Jackson later gathered these disparate pieces—the story of the death-row breakout, Stockton's life story, a glimpse at the American criminal justice and prison system—into a "coherent, compelling whole" with their book, according to Steve Weinberg for Ironminds. Christine A. Moesch, writing in Library Journal, noted that the journalists' "familiarity with the case shines through in this tightly woven volume." Mel McKinney, reviewing the book in the ABA Journal, called Dead Run a "masterful collage of a man who, in spite of his tattered life and frequent run-ins with the law, held an unshakable faith in the criminal justice system." McKinney further noted that the book "vividly reminds us that clinical objectives of finality and order articulated by appellate courts often ignore the fragile nature of innocence and the brutal strength of perjury." Stockton was convicted, his defenders said, on the word of the very man who committed the murder. The Washington Post Book World's Colman McCarthy felt that Burke and Jackson "credibly argue that strong doubts exist that [Stockton] committed the crime," and that they also "expose the bleak conditions" of Mecklenburg Prison. For a contributor to Publishers Weekly, the authors "offer a gripping inside look at the life usually hidden behind prison walls and a frightening indictment of the criminal justice system." However, Charles Salzberg, writing in the New York Times Book Review, felt that though Burke and Jackson "clearly intend Dead Run to be an anti-capital punishment treatise, . . . they probably make a better case for the death penalty," because of their "fascinating and honest portrayal of the violent men who inhabit death row."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

ABA Journal, May, 2000, Mel McKinney, review of Dead Run: The Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America's Only Mass Escape from Death Row, pp. 80-82.

Library Journal, October 15, 1999, Christine A. Moesch, review of Dead Run, p. 85.

New York Times Book Review, January 9, 2000, Charles Salzberg, review of Dead Run, p. 21.

Publishers Weekly, October 4, 1999, review of DeadRun, p. 53.

Washington Post Book World, January 16, 2000, Colman McCarthy, review of Dead Run, p. 13