[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 9



TEXAS:

European women drawn to Texas death row inmates


Romina Deeken is a classic beauty  long and lithe, cascading blond hair,
green eyes set in alabaster  not the type of woman who needs to solicit
attention from men.

But last year, the 24-year-old German reached out to a convicted killer on
Texas' death row. Her motives were altruistic, she said, not romantic. In
time, after more than 50 letters posted back and forth across the
Atlantic, Ms. Deeken said, mutual feelings grew.

"I have a connection with him," she explained recently, shaking slightly,
tears running down her cheek. "Everyone in life has a vision, has dreams,
has fears, is searching for something. He is the person I can talk deeply
with about these things."

Ms. Deeken's story is coffee shop talk in this small southeast Texas town,
home of the maximum-security Polunsky Unit and death row.

Each month, dozens of travel-weary, love-struck European women arrive in
Livingston for visits with condemned inmates, a pair of 4-hour chats
through Plexiglas. There is no touching.

Exactly why they come depends on who is asked. Experts say many of these
women have been scarred by violence or sexual abuse, though that's not the
case for any of the women interviewed for this story. Others say the women
are motivated by compassion and a desire to nurture, or an attraction to
the baddest of the bad boys.

Their relationships with the inmates typically begin when women join
anti-death penalty groups like Amnesty International, or during Internet
research. Pen-pal groups such as LostVault.com post free personal ads
based on letters and pictures from death row inmates, like this one from
Jose Noey Martinez:

"The worst thing in life is loneliness and that's all I've had in my life
so I'm hoping by me putting up this ad I can make some great friends out
there in the free world. So if you like what you see, please write to me."

In 1995, Mr. Martinez was convicted of stabbing to death a 68-year-old
woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter. He sexually assaulted the older
woman, defiled the corpse of the child, and reportedly threatened the
victims' family as he was led from the courtroom, saying, "It's not over
yet."

Many people who live in Livingston say the European visitors are naive.
Death penalty opponents counter that even the pathologically violent and
vile deserve a dignified life.

Terri Ray, a woman with a quick wit and shoulder-length silver hair, works
the desk at The Lake Livingston Inn, which is recommended by an anti-death
penalty group in Switzerland. She books about 10 international
reservations a month.

"They're so gullible, you just want to shake them and say, 'Are you women
that stupid?' " she said, eyes wide behind horn-rimmed glasses. "Those
guys over there are running a game. They've got 10 to 20 women at a time
they're romancing."

Ms. Ray shares the prevailing opinion in this lakeside town that
idealistic amateurs are being played by professional players.

"All those guys put down on their ads: 'I'm looking for a Christian woman
for deep spiritual companionship,' " she said. "Please. What they're
really looking for is a female who has nothing between her ears and deep
pockets."

Ms. Deeken, who works for a media company in Germany, says she knows the
deal  some death row inmates manipulate European women for sport, sexual
stimulation and money  just like men on the outside.

The death penalty, Ms. Deeken said, is a barbaric punishment in a flawed
U.S. justice system.

"Everybody has a right to fair trial, but he never had that," she said,
referring to her pen pal. "The fact that he is black  well, there is a lot
of discrimination. I know blacks are treated unfairly."

People change, and there is goodness inside those who have committed evil,
she said.

Isolation, day after day

Life on Texas' death row is austere and isolating.

Condemned men spend 23 hours a day in a cell the size of a walk-in closet.
Each day, they are allowed 1 hour alone for recreation, and a shower.

Inmates may own a small radio, but not a television, and there is no
Internet access. Men communicate with the outside world by letter. Snack
food  including coveted cups of Blue Bell ice cream  may be purchased from
the prison commissary.

Often, that's where European women come in.

Marlin Nelson, who's been on death row 19 years, said money motivates many
of the inmates.

"I think most of them have more than one woman," he said. "They do it to
get whatever they can get, the money. It gets pretty lonely in here, and
once you're with someone awhile, it gets boring."

He said the men also frequently persuade women to send semi-nude pictures
in the mail.

Pornography and au naturel photographs were banned several years ago, but
the current rules allow snapshots in bathing suits and revealing
underwear. Inmates on death row hang the pictures in their cells and trade
them like baseball cards.

Mr. Nelson beat a man with a metal bar and stabbed him to death in 1987.
He is married to an English woman who left her husband for Mr. Nelson
about 6 years ago. Like all death row marriages, the ceremony was
conducted by proxy.

He said that their relationship isn't physically consummated but that they
enjoy "letter sex" and intellectual intimacy.

"Writing is real personal," he said. "You tell each other things you'd
never tell God if he asked you."

Relationships that are both close and distant, Mr. Nelson said, are what
many women need. There is intensity in a life-and-death romance, and
passion and poetry  but little risk.

"You can have a boyfriend out there, so if you want sex, you can go have
sex," he said. "But if you want a relationship where you can tell anybody
anything, this is it."

In that way, he said, it's difficult to tell the players from the played.
Both sides get what they need.

An endless flow

Christa Haber met her husband, Troy Kunkle, while he was on death row. He
was executed in 1995.

Now she makes about $1,100 a month running a guest house near death row
that caters to European visitors. The Blue Shelter is booked solid the
last 2 weeks of most months.

One wall in the neat and modest home is decorated with nine pencil
portraits of men on death row drawn by an inmate in Florida. 4 of them
have red letters in the corner, "EX" for executed.

Ms. Haber, a German who has lived in the U.S. since 1993, said many of her
guests romanticize the men on death row.

"I think violence is very interesting," she said. "Most normal men are
boring, but if you are in a relationship with a violent man, you have
something to tell others and ... you are interesting, too."

Ms. Haber said her guests often mortgage their lives to travel thousands
of miles to Livingston. Then they spend all day at the prison visiting
their pen pals, and all night at her kitchen table writing letters to
their convicts.

Once women driven initially by a philosophical opposition to the death
penalty meet the condemned men, she said, nurturing instincts often take
over.

They say things like, "This man has never known what love means. His
parents did not love him and the teacher in the school did not love him,"
Ms. Haber said. "Nobody loved him his entire life, but I do, and I will
show him what love is."

Even though some people see inmate relationships as an oddity, Lene
Gabrielsen, a mother of 3 and a nursing student from Norway, says she
knows many stories of long-standing love.

"There are a lot of women out there who start out as pen pals and get
married and stay married for years and years and years," said Ms.
Gabrielsen, who corresponds with 2 condemned inmates. "I think that's
great. If they're happy, why not, because there's so much hate in the
world."

There is no way to track the number of Texas death row inmates who marry
each year, or how many wed Europeans, but death penalty opponents estimate
the former figure at between 10 and 20.

Hybristophilia is the clinical term for women who are attracted to
notorious criminals.

A mother and daughter married 2 of the infamous Texas Seven, who broke out
of a South Texas maximum-security prison in 2000.

2 women called San Quentin in California the day Scott Peterson arrived in
1995. They told the staff they intended to marry the man convicted of
killing his wife and unborn child.

Doreen Lioy, a freelance writer, married Richard Ramirez, the serial
killer who raped and mutilated his way across California in the mid-1980s.
In a television documentary, the college-educated woman described the man
known as the Night Stalker as "sweet and funny."

Troubled pasts

Sheila Isenberg interviewed 3 dozen women in relationships with murderers
for her 1991 book Women Who Love Men Who Kill. She is working on a sequel
that will focus on the allure for European women and Internet-inspired pen
pals.

While not scientific, her research suggests the women have common
experiences.

"I found they all had been damaged in their earlier lives or in their
earlier relationships," she said from her home in upstate New York. "Many
of them had abusive parents, generally fathers, who beat the crap out of
them or sexually abused them."

Lon Glenn, a warden for the last 10 of his 30 years working for the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice, said women of all nationalities, including
guards and other prison staff, often fall for inmates.

"I've seen a 30-something married registered nurse with two kids leave her
husband and kids for a 3-time-loser convict doing a life sentence," he
said in an e-mail. "I've seen a prison school teacher, caught having sex
on her desk with a convict, request to be placed on his visiting list as
she's being fired. I've lost count of the number of female 'officers'
caught in romantic encounters with convicts, some veterans of many years."

Rick Halperin, a board member of Amnesty International USA, offered no
excuses for state employees who have affairs with inmates. But he said
it's important to remember that most European women initially are
motivated by compassion, not lust.

"I do not believe the majority of these women are thrill-seekers who are
hoping to marry death row inmates," said the Southern Methodist University
history professor. "I think they write as a way to try to reaffirm the
basic humanity of these condemned prisoners."

Europeans, he said, are steeped and educated in human rights.

"It's easy to scoff at these women when you live in this country," he
said. "But this is a real difficult thing they're doing, and it's very
human."

(source: Dallas Morning News)

*********************

Some crimes deserve death ---- Re: "The Myth of Deterrence  Death penalty
does not reduce homicide rate," last Sunday Editorials.


I became ambivalent enough about the death penalty a few years ago to
become the only person in Texas to request that his name be removed from a
state building. That facility is the death row prison unit at Livingston.

My concerns were fairness to those convicted on the limited testimony of
witnesses, racial fairness in some areas of our state, the absence of DNA
testing when it was possible to do so and my belief that a sentence of
life without the possibility of parole is far worse than a death sentence
for young offenders.

I do not oppose your earlier call for a moratorium while the issue is
debated.

That said, your editorial challenging the deterrent effect of the death
penalty could lead us down the wrong road. There are certain hideous
crimes that demand the death penalty as our response. Those situations
include the murder of a police officer, killing prison or jail personnel
in escape attempts, serial killers and multiple sex attack murderers.

I don't care if the death penalty is a deterrent or not. Certain horrible
crimes merit the harshest response possible.

Has Texas gone too far in executions? Probably. But the public should
continue the ultimate penalty for the worst criminals.

It is easy to shout "death no more" as your editorial did, until someone
you love is the victim of the worst kind of brutality and horrible death.
Then your opinion would immediately change.

Think about it. The victim must always come first.

Charles T. Terrell, former chairman, Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
chairman, Safer Dallas Better Dallas

(source: Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News)

********************************

Discriminatory Justice: Flawed death penalty system values whites over
blacks


When convicted murderer Larry Allen Hayes was put to death in 2003, he
made headlines.

In Texas  the country's lethal injection leader  many executions draw
relatively little notice. But Mr. Hayes was newsworthy: He was the first
white Texan in decades to be put to death for killing a black person.

The state has executed 405 people since reinstituting capital punishment
in 1974; Mr. Hayes is the only white executed whose victim was black,
according to available records. And although earlier reports are
incomplete, Mr. Hayes may be the only white to die for killing a black
since the middle of the 19th century.

Earlier this year, this newspaper reversed its longstanding support for
the death penalty because the process is both deeply flawed and
irreversible. One of the most glaring defects in the system may be that
deep-seated bias seems to play a significant role in life-or-death
decisions.

In general, capital punishment has been meted out somewhat arbitrarily in
our country, with factors such as politics and geography affecting the
level of justice a murder victim's family can expect. But one detail has
been a consistent predictor of who lives and who dies  race. Specifically,
the race of the victim appears to have a profound impact on a killer's
punishment.

Although whites and blacks are murdered in almost equal numbers, killers
whose victims are white are about four times as likely to pay with their
lives. A mountain of studies has reached the same conclusion: The judicial
system discriminates.

In fact, an analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center found that
the statistical correlation between race and the death penalty is stronger
than the link between smoking and heart disease. While research about
cigarettes and health problems spurred legal and cultural changes, the
capital punishment studies are gathering dust.

The fact that blacks who kill whites are executed in disproportionate
numbers is not in dispute.

When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of a black man sentenced
to death for killing a white police officer, the justices did not
challenge the damning studies showing racial disparities in capital
punishment cases. But in 1987, they ruled 5-4 that a larger pattern did
not prove bias in an individual case.

Later, Justice Lewis Powell, who authored that decision, expressed regret
and said he thought that capital punishment should be abolished.

Still, this decision has presented a significant obstacle for other
defendants going forward. To those who point to racial disparity to
challenge their death sentences, the courts seem to be saying: Even a
confirmed pattern of unfairness does not establish that you have been
treated unfairly.

Experts who have studied discrimination and the death penalty list an
array of political and psychological factors that intrude on the judicial
process. They point to all-white juries and mostly white prosecutors
deciding whether black defendants should be put to death. They cite
deep-rooted biases about race and class, tracing back to a time when
certain crimes were punishable by death for blacks but not for whites. And
they note the highly subjective nature of sentencing.

No doubt the reasons for the disparities are complex and not easily
resolved. But instead of taking decisive action by calling a halt to this
unfair punishment, Texas and other states continue to tinker with the
apparatus of death. Right now, the Supreme Court is considering the merits
of the particular cocktail of drugs used to dispense death sentences, but
it is ignoring the bigger issue: Decades of evidence prove that the
sentences are handed out unevenly and unfairly.

The underlying message is clear: Some lives simply are deemed more
valuable by our deeply flawed justice system.

To impose an irreversible punishment in such an imperfect and
discriminatory way is indefensible.

(source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News)