Jan. 27
MISSOURI:
Prosecutor: Death penalty system unfair to victims
Landis Shippert goes down into his basement every day, turns on some light
music and spends a few quality moments near the urn holding the ashes of his
daughter.
When Quintin O'Dell killed 22-year-old Alyssa Shippert in May 2011, Landis lost
his youngest daughter, a well-liked young woman who soon before her death was
inquiring about a mission trip to Joplin to help victims of the deadly tornado.
O'Dell admitted on Thursday to hacking Shippert to death with a hatchet, and
seven months later slicing another friend open with a razor so badly that her
intestines fell out onto her living room floor. The second woman, who also was
sexually assaulted by O'Dell, survived and was able to identify her attacker
for authorities.
Landis Shippert, of Platte City, thinks O'Dell should die for his crimes, but
he said the prospect of spending the next several years in courtrooms listening
to graphic details of his daughter's brutal slaying was too much for his family
to bear.
"I'm a very faithful person and the Bible tells us we have to forgive,"
Shippert said. "One day I wanted to hate him, but I just can't. His family has
lost a member, too."
Platte County prosecutor Eric Zahnd said he accepted O'Dell's offer to plead
guilty in exchange for a life sentence to spare the Shippert family of the
continued nightmare of a capital murder trial. He said the state's death
penalty process "puts victims' families in a tragic dilemma."
Zahnd, president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said the
organization is looking for ways to streamline the system and cut out some of
the appeals - especially in cases like O'Dell's in which the defendant
confessed and was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.
He said a bill filed by state Sen. Joe Keaveny, a St. Louis Democrat, to
address costs of death penalty cases could open the door for a broader
discussion of the state's capital punishment system.
Keaveny, a death penalty opponent, agreed that if his bill is approved, the
results of an audit could lead to further discourse.
"If it's as expensive as I think it is, I would hope it sparks a much broader
debate on the viability of the death penalty," Keaveny said. "We need to take
some of the emotion out of criminal prosecutions, and in my mind, the death
penalty is strictly driven by emotion.
"I'm not saying some people don't deserve to die for what they do. I'm saying,
who am I to kill them?"
O'Dell's public defender, Thomas Jacquinot, said he has handled death penalty
cases for 15 years and has seen instances in which prosecutors overreached by
insisting on the death penalty. But that wasn't the case this time.
"The prosecutor saw this as somebody who had done some very serious, graphic
crimes that appeared to be perhaps the early stages of a pattern," Jacquinot
said. "I think it was appropriate to settle the case, but if they had filed for
the death penalty, I don't think you'd consider it overreaching by any
stretch."
Sean O'Brien, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who was chief
public defender in Kansas City from 1985 through 1989, said Zahnd apparently
doesn't remember efforts in Missouri decades ago to streamline the death
penalty system. He said in the 1980s, the state experimented with "egregious
time limits" that created chaos in the public defender system because there
were not enough qualified death penalty attorneys to represent those on death
row.
O'Brien, who noted 3 men who were sentenced to death in Missouri later were
exonerated, said Zahnd's argument also ignores the already-overwhelming
caseloads being handled by the public defender system.
"The government spends vast resources, but a public defender has to work cases
into a budget stretched too thin to begin with, assigned to lawyers whose
caseloads are way too high," he said.
(source: The Daily Journal)
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