[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, VA., TENN., N.C.

[Rick Halperin]

June 4


USA:

REVIEW----Does legal system fail the nations mentally ill?


"Crazy" by Pete Earley, Putnam, $25.95

Every cry for social change begins with a personal tragedy. Pete Earleys
began when his son Mike, a graduate student, became psychotic. In a
Virginia emergency room, a doctor explained that while Mike was clearly
insane, he was an adult, and not an imminent danger to himself or others.
Since he refused to take medication, there was nothing they could do.

Two days later, Mike broke into a strangers house, went upstairs and took
a bubble bath. It required five police officers and an attack dog to
subdue him. But even being charged with two felonies and nearly being shot
was not sufficient proof that he was dangerous, or in danger. His father,
picking up the broad hints of the police, falsely claimed his son had
threatened to kill him. That got Mike in for a two-day observation at the
same hospital where he had been refused admittance. Even then, his fathers
worries were only beginning.

"'How long does it take antipsychotic medicines to work?' Earley asked a
nurse.

"The nurse seemed surprised. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but just because your
son is being admitted into the hospital, doesn't mean hes going to be
treated there.'"

Thus begins a nightmare of interlocking Catch-22s, of well-meaning,
dedicated people working at cross-purposes, of a legal system that, in
short, is more insane than the psychotics it processes. Pete Earley is an
investigative journalist, and in "Crazy" he presents a gripping,
disturbing, firsthand account of mentally ill people who have stumbled
into our criminal justice system.

Earley builds a compelling case that Americas legal system is distorted by
its deference to the irrational wishes of people incapable of
understanding their own best interests. But it's the individual stories
that really bring the sick system to life.

Homeless and mentally ill for decades, Alice Ann Collyer of Miami accused
an elderly woman of stealing her thoughts and pushed her. The woman was
not injured, but assaulting an elderly person in Florida is a felony. The
victim signed a complaint only when told Collyer might be hospitalized and
helped. But this was Collyers third pushing incident, and under the states
"3 strikes" law, the minimum penalty was 5 years imprisonment.

Before she could be brought to trial, she had to be found mentally
competent. Thus began an odyssey that had lasted 1,151 days by the time
Earley met her, during which Collyer was shuttled back and forth between
the state mental hospital and jail. Because she had not been convicted of
a crime, the mental hospital could not treat her. Its job is to hold
inmates until they can be judged competent, by training them to answer
questions such as: "Do you know where you are?" "Do you know what you are
being charged with?" After months of this, the hospital sends the inmates
back to jail.

The job of the jail is to hold the prisoners until they can be seen by a
judge. The judge requires exams by three psychiatrists, and that takes
three or so months more. Jails are never pleasant, but the psychiatric
cell block is a hellhole. The psychotic patients, for their own
protection, are held in bare cells and most are kept naked. Many don't
even have blankets to cover themselves. Of course, the jail is not allowed
to treat them against their will.

After all this, many inmates, including Alice Ann Collyer, are incompetent
again, and cannot be tried. So back they go to the mental hospital.

Everyone involved is frustrated. Everyone wonders why these people are not
being helped. And everyone knows that they would be far better off simply
being treated, at a fraction of the cost of their incarceration. But the
law is the law, and must be obeyed.

In Mike's own, far less tragic story, problem follows problem. The only
real villains in this book are the couple whose home he broke into.
Frightened and vindictive, they insist that Mike be found guilty of at
least 1 felony, which would kill his chances of a career and a normal
life. This despite pleas from the defense attorney, the prosecutors, and
even the investigating police detective that a proposed plea bargain to 2
misdemeanors will actually double Mikes punishment (to 2 years of
probation) and be more effective in forcing him into treatment. The true
story of how this plays out is tense and dramatic.

Pete Earley avoids assigning blame to political ideologies, but there is
plenty to go around. Liberals can be faulted for defending the mentally
ill persons right to live untreated in squalor, conservatives for a
reluctance to spend money on treatment.

Mike recovers sufficiently to finish graduate school, but by then his
father has seen so many psychotics cycle in and out of sanity, and talked
to so many parents of young people shot to death by police during
psychotic episodes, that he knows he has a lifetime of profound worry
ahead. The best he can do is announce that Florida has finally passed a
law allowing a judge to order treatment of an insane person who has a
history of violent behavior or multiple hospitalizations. This, however,
would have made no difference in his son's case.

And so the awful waste of money and lives continues. We can only hope that
this time, the cries for reform will be heard.

(source: Knight Ridder)






VIRGINIA:

Lawyers in last effort to save 'insane' killer from death row


Percy Walton's attorneys describe their client as a man who has lost all
touch with reality: He keeps no personal effects in his death row cell,
save for a mountain of salt and pepper packets. He rarely speaks, although
occasionally bursts into random bouts of laughter. The guards call him
"Horse" - short for "Crazy Horse" - and complain of his unbearable stench.

When asked what he believes will happen to him if he is executed, the
triple killer's response, his attorneys say, was that he would go to
Burger King.

Whether Walton - who is scheduled to die by injection on 8 June - is
indeed insane and mentally retarded has been debated for nearly a decade.

Some believe he is faking his behaviour to get off death row. Others argue
he does not meet the legal definition of insanity or retardation.

The issue - one that has sparked frenzied debate - is before the US
Supreme Court, which has just days to decide whether to take the case and
determine if Walton should be executed for the 1996 slayings of 3
neighbours in Danville, Virginia.

Walton, 27, pleaded guilty in 1997 to the murders of Jessie and Elizabeth
Kendrick, a couple in their 80s, and Archie Moore, 33. The victims were
robbed and shot in the head; Moore's body was found in a cupboard, his
corpse doused in cologne.

"The police told me later that Daddy was face down on the carpet in the
living room with his hands above his head, as if in prayer," the
Kendricks' daughter, Barbara Case, said. "Mother was in the dining area
... she had begged him not to kill her."

The Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional to execute the insane and
mentally retarded, but left it up to individual states to define
retardation. Walton's attorneys argue that Walton is schizophrenic and
incapable of understanding the concept of death, and so isineligible for
execution. They have also filed a clemency request with Virginia's
Governor, Timothy Kaine.

(source: The Independent (UK)

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

A matter of life and death----Percy Walton is scheduled for execution on
Thursday for a triple murder in Danville a decade ago.


North Danville was the scene of a grisly triple murder during Thanksgiving
1996.

Within 2 days of each other, the bodies of Jessie and Elizabeth Kendrick
and Archie Moore were found inside their respective Cabin Creek homes.
They had been shot in the head.

Nearly 10 years and numerous court proceedings later, Percy Lavar Walton
is scheduled to be executed at 9 p.m. Thursday for their murders. He was
18 years old at the time of the crimes.

Three years ago, Walton narrowly avoided a date with death. Just three
days prior to his May 28, 2003, execution date, a federal judge in Roanoke
granted a stay.

At issue over the years has been Waltons mental state. His lawyers say he
is both mentally retarded and schizophrenic. Waltons fate now lies in the
hands of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and the U.S. Supreme Court, if it chooses
to intervene.

Jennifer Givens last saw her client on Tuesday. She said he has displayed
no type of emotion regarding his impending death.

"He doesn't express any kind of sentiment," said Givens, a lawyer with the
Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center in Charlottesville. "It
doesn't register with him in any way."

The case

Barbara Kendrick Case was looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with
her parents, 81-year-old Jessie and 82-year-old Elizabeth. She had
specifically requested that her mother make her famous cabbage rolls.

Case lives in Brandon, Miss. Normally when she visited, she flew into the
Raleigh-Durham, N.C., airport. Elizabeth Kendrick had specifically
requested her daughter fly into the Greensboro, N.C., airport because she
wanted to do some shopping at nearby outlets, Case said recently.

The Kendricks never picked up their daughter from the airport. A day
later, Nov. 26, 1996, the Kendricks bodies were discovered inside their
townhouse at 629 Springfield Road.

Ironically, questions about Moore's whereabouts were raised when he failed
to pick up his sister at the same airport the night before Thanksgiving.
On Thanksgiving Day - Nov. 28, 1996 - the 33-year-old Moore was found
inside a closet in his apartment at 110 Cherokee Court, located 3/10 of a
mile away from the Kendricks' home.

Moore, a part-time Averett University student and flight instructor and
employee of Belk department store in Greensboro, had been shot in the
head, above his left eye, and his body stuffed behind a suitcase.

Later that day, Walton, who lived at 328 Seminole Trail, just a few
hundred yards away from the Kendricks and Moore, was arrested and charged
in connection with Moore's death after police found Moores car, a Ford
Mustang, parked near Walton's house and neighbors said they had seen
Walton driving it.

On Jan. 3, 1997, Walton was indicted for murdering Moore. On Aug. 28,
1997, Walton was indicted for murdering the Kendricks after bragging about
committing the murders to his fellow Danville City Jail inmates.

Walton pleaded guilty on Oct. 7, 1997, to three counts of murder in the
commission of robbery, one count of car theft and six firearms charges.

He told police investigators that he had been a heavy user of alcohol,
marijuana and cocaine since he was 16 years old. His juvenile record
included burglary and assault convictions. Danville Circuit Judge James F.
Ingram handed Walton three death sentences on Oct. 31, 1997.

A question of competency

Death row inmates are isolated. A death row cell at Sussex I State Prison
in Waverly is 73 square feet and contains a window, bed, desk and a
combination sink/toilet. The inmates in the death row unit spend most of
their time in their cells.

Walton is more isolated than his fellow death row inmates, his attorney
says. Givens said Walton has no form of entertainment in his cell, writes
no letters and makes no phone calls - even to her.

"As far as we can tell, all he does is pace back and forth in his cell,"
said Givens, who has represented Walton for about 7 years.

He carries on no meaningful conversations, she said. Much of what he says
consists of "I don't know, I don't even know."

This behavior, his lawyers say, is a result of the schizophrenia that has
progressed now for a decade. They also say Walton is mentally retarded.
Walton's mental state has been debated back and forth in the courts for
the last 10 years. On May 25, 2003, U.S. District Judge Samuel G. Wilson
granted a stay to Waltons execution to allow medical experts to
investigate new information that supported Walton being both mentally
retarded and schizophrenic.

Givens said the most recent IQ score for Walton - 66 - was obtained in
2003 from a test administered by the Department of Corrections.
Individuals with scores below 70 are considered mentally retarded.

The U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally retarded people in
2002, ruling it was a violation of the Eighth Amendments protection
against cruel and unusual punishment.

Wilson later ruled that Walton's life could not be spared under Virginias
definition of mental retardation, which requires proof of onset before age
18.

Waltons lawyers then set out to prove that he did not understand the death
penalty or why he would be executed due to the progressing schizophrenia
that had rendered him incompetent. A 1986 Supreme Court decision prohibits
the execution of defendants who are mentally ill.

Givens said the onset of Waltons schizophrenia was age 16, which she said
is a typical age of onset for the mental illness in males. In previous
court hearings, prison staff has said Walton does not shower. Givens said
the majority of the time she sees her client he "smells horrible" and that
he usually looks disheveled, wears dirty prison garb and uses a string for
a belt.

Lack of personal hygiene is also a classic symptom of schizophrenia,
Givens said.

Danville Commonwealth's Attorney William Fuller, who prosecuted Walton,
said whether Walton is schizophrenic is not the issue.

"The issue is - does he know why he is supposed to be executed and what he
did to cause that," Fuller said on Friday.

On March 4, 2004, Wilson ruled that Walton understood both those issues,
considering expert analysis that concluded while Walton was probably
schizophrenic, he was competent to be punished by death. A prison
psychiatrist labeled Walton a "mentally limited, street-wise predator."

In March of this year, a federal appeals court in Richmond agreed with
Wilson.

In April, Waltons execution date was reset.

Judgment day

About 2 weeks ago, Case called her aunt Irene Jurscaga in Suffolk to
deliver some good news about her daughter. Jurscaga had some news of her
own. She told her niece an execution date had been set for Walton.

Walton is not someone Case thinks much about these days.

"I have put it behind me and gone on with my life," said Case, 68, of the
murders.

Case said she has forgiven Walton. However, that road to forgiveness was a
long and bumpy one for her. She was depressed for a long period of time.
She recalled having to plan her parents funeral.

"I went through the whole thing like it was a play," Case said. "It was so
unreal to me."

At the time Case visited Danville that Thanksgiving week, she had not seen
her parents in three years. She says she never got to see them even after
their deaths because funeral home officials begged her not to do so.

"I will never get over the way Mother and Daddy left this earth," Case
said. "They were both shot in the head. Thats horrible."

Case said she went through grief counseling to help her deal with her
parents deaths. She has no desire to witness their murderer executed.

"What satisfaction would I get out of watching him die?" she said.
"Absolutely none."

Jurscaga, on the other hand, plans to be at the Greensville Correctional
Center in Jarratt on Thursday.

"I want him executed," said Jurscaga, Elizabeth Kendrick's younger sister.
"He killed 3 people. He deserves that. Absolutely."

Jurscaga, who is 85 years old, plans to attend the execution with the
Kendricks' son, Grady Kendrick, who lives in South Carolina.

Jurscaga cried while speaking about her sister and brother-in-law over the
telephone. She last saw her sister in July of 1996. She said it would "do
my heart good" to see Walton executed. The retired nurse said she would
have no problems watching him die.

Walton, now 27 years old, will be moved from the Sussex prison to
Greensville this week. Condemned inmates in Virginia are given a choice of
electrocution or lethal injection. If they decline to make a choice,
lethal injection is chosen.

3 years ago, Walton chose electrocution. He declined to make a choice this
time around, said Larry Traylor, director of communications for the
Virginia Department of Corrections.

If the execution is carried out, Walton will be the 2nd person executed in
Virginia this year.

(source: Danville Register Bee)






TENNESSEE:

Man pleads guilty to triple murder


A Chattanooga man avoided the death penalty when he pleaded guilty to
killing his wife, infant son and stepdaughter.

Tony Pope pleaded guilty yesterday to beating and strangling his wife
Andrea, her 13-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and their infant
son on May 2nd, 2005.

Police say Pope confessed to murdering the three because his wife was
preparing to divorce him.

Prosecutors arranged the plea deal in exchange for life sentences without
the possibility of parole on each 1st-degree murder count.

Pope was on parole after serving 5 years of a 15-year sentence for killing
a girlfriend in 1995.

(source: Associated Press)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Friend to the condemned


It's not as if Dorothy King thinks about the deaths of her 4 friends a
lot. Just the opposite, in fact: She works hard to keep the topic from her
mind. She knows her friends will die eventually. Everyone does. But King's
friends, murderers all, could depart this life at the collective hand of
the community.

Those friends, all of whom are women, are not people most of us would
choose as pals. They have done horrible things, which is why they are on
death row.

Their world has been reduced to a single common room where they spend
their days and the cells that surround that space. Their visitors tend to
be family members or attorneys. Friends -- that is, people who enjoy their
company and will devote hours to conversation -- hardly exist. Killers
don't usually have friends, at least not in the way the word is normally
defined.

But these 4 do. They have Dot King.

Every Tuesday for the past 14 years, King has visited death row. She
passes through eight locked gates and doors to reach it, but when she gets
there, no glass barrier separates King and the inmates. A feeling of
kitchen-table intimacy warms that common room when King makes her weekly
visit. They talk about the Bible -- the official reason for King's
presence -- but about other things, too: kids, family, current events,
etc.

"They laugh. They listen to a lot of radio," King says. "They get the
paper, so they're cognizant about the news. They'll bring up topics,
especially about the criminal justice system."

After an hour or so of visiting, King makes her way back to her car,
through the eight gates and across the prison complex. It can be a long
walk for an 82-year-old woman. King's husband, Eddie -- who sometimes
accompanies her -- thinks the weekly visits are a strain on her. "I wish
you would [stop]," he tells her. "It takes a lot out of you."

But King doesn't want to quit. The four death row inmates "have done a lot
more for me than I ever have done for them," she says. "They've taught me
how to really love somebody unconditionally."

Who they are

Let's talk about unconditional love for a moment -- specifically, the
objects of that love.

* Patricia Jennings was a 44-year-old nursing home employee in Wilson in
1983 when she met and later married an elderly, retired businessman. Six
years later, after the couple had arranged to have half of the man's
assets transferred to his wife, paramedics called to a Wilson hotel room
found the husband nude on the floor. Jennings was also there, wearing a
nightgown and cowboy boots. A pathologist later determined that the
husband had died of internal injuries consistent with a kick to the
abdomen. The pathologist also said that he'd apparently been sexually
tortured and assaulted.

* Blanche Moore was a preacher's wife in 1989 when her husband fell ill
from arsenic poisoning. He survived, but an investigation eventually led
to the exhumation of the bodies of Moore's father, her first husband and a
former boyfriend. Evidence of arsenic poisoning turned up in all three.
Moore was charged with the death of Raymond Reid, the boyfriend. Reid
became sick after spending a New Year's Eve with Moore. Over the course of
the following months, Reid was treated at two hospitals while Moore often
brought him meals from home. After months of agony, he died. Moore refused
an autopsy, declaring that "he has been through too much. He wouldn't want
to be cut on like this."

* Carlette Parker was a health-care worker serving the elderly. In 1998,
she kidnapped an 86-year-old Raleigh woman from a grocery store parking
lot and drove her to the drive-up window of a Smithfield bank, where
$2,500 was withdrawn from the elderly woman's account. Later that day,
Parker took the woman to her home in Angier and drowned her in a bathtub.
Testimony at the trial showed that Parker was $4,000 behind in restitution
payments she was making for stealing money from another elderly woman. She
had worried out loud to her parole officer about coming up with the money.

* Christina Walters, of Fayetteville, was a member of the Crips in 1998
when 3 gang members kidnapped a fast-food manager and drove her to
Walters' home, where Walters shot her eight times. (The woman survived,
miraculously.) Then, the gang stole another vehicle and kidnapped the pair
of women driving it. The 2 victims were executed by a bullet to the head.
The bullets had been coated with blue fingernail polish -- blue being the
Crips' color.

There's an unmistakable conclusion to be drawn here: Obviously, some love
has to be unconditional.

How mission began

King didn't set out to be friends with the four women. At first, she only
wanted to help them get right with God.

She made her 1st visit to a jail 30 years ago while living in Washington,
D.C., where Eddie King was serving in the U.S. Army as a command sergeant
major. Their church volunteered to do a Bible study program at the
municipal lockup, "and when we were ready to leave the jail, the matron
asked if anyone would be interested in coming back," King says. "No one
said anything, so I said, 'Well, I think I would.'"

She didn't know it at the time, but that momentary discomfort with silence
would evolve into a life's work.

King went back to the jail the next week, and every week thereafter for
the remaining year they lived in Washington. When Dot and Eddie King
returned home to North Carolina -- both are Kinston natives -- she joined
another group that made weekly visits to inmates. In 1980, King began
making a weekly trip to the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women in
Southeast Raleigh, ministering to the prison's general population.

In 1992, the prison chaplain approached King about visiting death row. "I
asked her if I was being promoted," King says. "She said she didn't think
so, but I said I was ready to give it a try. I've been doing it ever
since."

Because she's a volunteer on the chaplain's staff, King's task is to
conduct a Bible class. The aim, says prison warden Annie Harvey, is to
teach the 4 death row inmates "how to live each day to the fullest in
their circumstance."

It's a special challenge. As King points out, "Nobody writes material for
people on death row. It's written for Sunday school classes, that sort of
thing." Furthermore, the four women range in age from mid-20s to 70s,
which means there are no one-size-fits-all cultural references that King
can invoke. Finally, there is the weight of Harvey's seemingly simple
instruction: How full can a life on death row be?

And as the families of the victims might ask: How full should it be?

At the prison

The Correctional Institution for Women is shady and unobtrusive, 192 acres
occupied by 2 dozen low-rise buildings and numerous old-growth trees. Were
it not for the fence that surrounds 35 of those acres, as well as most of
the buildings, any passer-by might mistake it for a medical complex gone
slightly to seed.

It was originally a Cool Hand Luke-style prison camp for male inmates,
until 1938, when it became a full-fledged women's prison. These days,
every woman who serves time after a felony conviction in North Carolina
passes through NCCIW or stays there to serve her time. A few of them end
up in a separate cell block in a remote corner of the compound, where
death row is.

King has made the walk to that cell block something in the neighborhood of
700 times. She says she'll continue to make that walk as long as she can.

"They have become very dear people to me," King says. "They are my
friends. They really are."

That's a startling thing to hear, until you acknowledge the several layers
of that friendship. One is the simple familiarity that comes with seeing
the same person on a regular schedule. If you visit, say, the same grocery
store every week for years and see the same clerk every time, you'll end
up asking about each other's children, health, recent vacations, etc. In
short, you'll become friends, in a limited,
pals-only-while-we're-here-each-week kind of way.

Another layer is the fundamental human impulse to befriend the friendless.
Warden Harvey says almost all the other visitors to death row are either
family members or lawyers involved with the inmates' appeals -- in other
words, people with an obligation to honor blood ties or serve the legal
system. A volunteer to the prison chaplain is, almost by definition, meant
to be a friendly presence in a bleak place.

Finally, there is the fact that while the law allows society to execute
these four women for their crimes, it doesn't also demand that they die
friendless. "One of the things Miz King has figured out is that the
punishment is being sentenced to death, and it's not for her to judge,"
Harvey says. "That's already been done."

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that "Miz King" has done exactly
that: not judged.

Loving the sinner

That refusal to judge is a tough thing, sometimes even for death-penalty
opponents. That most famous of activists -- Sister Helen Prejean, who
chronicled her relationship with death-row killers in the book "Dead Man
Walking" -- found herself shaken by the brutality of the crimes that
condemned the men to death. One of the victims, a young woman who was
raped and viciously murdered, "was all alone in the darkness of the woods
with these two savage people, who were not acting in a human way," Prejean
once told a television interviewer. "Who were completely unresponsive in a
human way. It must have been so terrifying."

John Strange, communications director for Carrboro-based People of Faith
Against the Death Penalty, which gave King its 2005 Community Service
Award, also understands the challenge in loving the sinner in such
horrific cases. The less you know about the specifics of a crime, the less
likely it is that your opposition to the death penalty will waver.
"Forgiveness is one of the most difficult things that humans are called to
do," he says. Knowing details only makes it harder.

Strange, long an opponent of the death penalty, only recently started
writing to a death-row inmate.

In King's case, the topic just doesn't come up. "We don't ever talk about
their crimes," she says. The events that sent the four women to death row
are between them and the juries; between them and the appeals court; and
between them and God. King feels no need to insert herself into the legal
and moral algebra of the equation. Justice and divine forgiveness are
wrought by others. King brings acceptance to the table.

"You can't love somebody and minister to somebody, then say, 'I won't go
beyond this point,'" King says.

She wants only one thing out of this deal: She wants to die first.

"If God is truly good and gracious, I will go before them," she says.

(source: News & Observer)