Wideman brothers talk about case at criminal justice forum
1975 killing discussed at Duquesne event
On the night of Nov. 17, 1975, Robert “Faruq” Wideman and two others, Michael Dukes and Cecil Rice, planned to meet and rob used car salesman Nicola Morena in his lot on Pittsburgh’s Saw Mill Run Boulevard under the guise of selling him a truckload of stolen TVs.
“We predetermined, ‘Look, we ain’t going to shoot none of these guys. We’re going to scare them, we got guns, they’ll give us the money,’” Wideman recalled.
But the plan unraveled, and Dukes shot Morena in the back as he ran away. Morena died later after being taken to two hospitals.
Though Wideman did not pull the trigger, he — along with Dukes — was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Rice was convicted of murder in the third degree and has since finished serving his 20-year sentence.
Questioning felony murder charges for those who didn’t actually commit homicide but were present was the subject of an event Friday at Duquesne University that featured Wideman and his brother, acclaimed writer John Edgar Wideman, who for the first time spoke together about the case and Robert Wideman’s 2019 commutation.
“How can you say that I knew my co-defendant would shoot someone? ... It bothers the mind,”
said Robert Wideman, now 69 and on parole. “I know [prisoners serving life on a felony murder conviction] did something heinous, and they should go to jail. I don’t say, ‘Oh, they should just be let go with a pat on the back.’ But for the rest of their lives? That’s too harsh.”
Roughly 5,100 prisoners in Pennsylvania are serving life without parole. Of those, an estimated 1,100 were convicted of second-degree murder, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
Gov. Tom Wolf commuted Robert Wideman’s sentence in July, something Wideman describes as a “miracle.”
“Listening to the stories about me this morning, all the people who tried to help me ... so many things had to happen for me to be here [today],” he said at the event, hosted by the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law.
Wideman’s 44-year prison sentence included a period of false hope in 1998 when he was granted a new trial by former Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge James McGregor after his attorney, Mark D. Schwartz, presented evidence that medical malpractice, not the gunshot wound, contributed to or caused Morena’s death. (It came to light in the 1980s that Morena’s family had won a $100,000 malpractice settlement the year after his death.)
But District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala filed a last-minute appeal and successfully stopped Wideman’s release — a move that was roundly criticized at Friday’s panel.
Last summer, Mr. Schwartz — who viewed Wideman’s ordeal as a “bucket list case” — decided to begin writing a reconsideration letter to the state pardon board.
“A serendipitous thing happened: I get a call from Judge [Jeffrey A.] Manning, and he says, ‘This might be the time to petition the pardon board,’” Mr. Schwartz told the audience.
Judge Manning had prosecuted the 1975 case when he was working as assistant DA.
He told the Friday audience a story about being confronted in public in recent years after running into Cecil Rice at a beer distributor.
While he said he still believes Wideman was “no doubt” the “mastermind” of the robbery scheme, “he was no more guilty than Cecil Rice was” of the murder.
“The problem is there’s two words: without parole,” Judge Manning said.
A longtime critic of the state’s second-degree murder life sentence, the judge spoke in favor of Wideman’s release during the May pardon hearing in Harrisburg.
The board voted unanimously to grant Wideman clemency.
While the pieces fell in just the right place for Wideman’s pardon, the commutation process is “not the right venue” to address the issue, said John Wetzel, the state’s Department of Corrections secretary, who also spoke at the event.
“It’s the only venue today, but I think it’s not the best solution. I think public policy issues should be handled on the front end from a legislative standpoint, instead of reverse engineering at the back end,” he said.
John Edgar Wideman, 79, who wrote the award-winning 1984 book “Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir,” about the case and its consequences, shared a new essay about his brother’s release and criticized the political power of the district attorney’s office.
“It won’t change if we don’t change it,” he said.
Mr. Zappala’s office responded to the panel’s criticism of its 1998 decision via a written statement.
“The district attorney is not part of the panel that determines commutations or pardons. We took a position based, in part, on conversations with the victim’s family. Also, as a matter of fact, this individual directed the killing of another person,” spokesman Mike Manko wrote.