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He's still brother's keeper after 23 years
Friday, October 30, 1998 By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Robert Wideman, in his chocolate Western Penitentiary jumpsuit, sat in a hard wooden chair, alone next to the plush chairs in which his lawyers could swivel and recline.
Twenty feet away, over his right shoulder, sat his brother, the man who has better explained the brutal urban sociology of the past quarter-century than any writer of his generation, John Edgar Wideman.
The writer has tried hard over the past few days not to be John Edgar Wideman, decorated scholar, but merely to be Robert's brother.
"I don't want to be a sideshow," he said after the second day of testimony. "Right or wrong, I'm here for Robby. I'm supporting him."
Robert's been trying hard not to be a Western Pen lifer, and it's looking as though he might succeed after 23 years in prison.
The only principal who can't get through this week being something he isn't is Nickie Morena, the used car lot owner Robert and two other Homewood men were robbing when one of them, Michael Dukes, shot him that day in November of 1975. Three hours later he was dead.
"My son never had a chance," Nickie's mother was saying near the top of the stairs outside Judge James R. McGregor's courtroom in the noon hour yesterday. "They call this justice? No way."
McGregor had just ruled that Robert Wideman, the protagonist in his brother's breakthrough 1984 book, "Brothers and Keepers," should have a new trial. This morning, McGregor will hold a hearing on whether Robert Wideman should be released on bond. For this, justice has taken an unusual path.
On Tuesday, McGregor heard testimony from medical experts including Dr. Cyril Wecht, in which they contended that Morena died of medical malpractice at the former St. Joseph's Hospital on the South Side, where he was brought after the shooting. That information was not available to the jury that sentenced Wideman to life on a second-degree murder charge, and Wideman's attorneys now contend that it would have changed the outcome of the trial.
The prosecution claims that such arguments are irrelevant because he could not have died of malpractice had he not been shot.
"I'm not going to be a commentator on the case; it wouldn't be appropriate," said John Wideman, who has sat in many courtrooms as the star-crossed scion of a violence-ravaged family. "We just want the justice system to work. It's not about any vendetta, it's not about ego, it's not about me."
As he watched his brother from another hard chair yesterday, John Edgar Wideman still had a brother serving a life sentence and a son serving a life sentence in Arizona. His nephew, Robert's son, was slain in 1993 in the outgrowth of a bar fight. You had to wonder if there was any relief in being in a courtroom where hope seemed to walk around a bit.
"No, to tell you the absolute truth," he said. "It's been too long and too difficult. We have seen too much for anyone to rejoice."
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