February 10
ALABAMA:
Execution raises uncomfortable constitutional questions
The State of Alabama put a man to death Thursday. He was the 217th person to
die under the state’s death penalty – the 64th execution since a moratorium on
executions in Alabama was lifted in 1983.
Dominique Ray’s execution is troubling. Not because there was any question
about his guilt. Debates about the moral failings of the death penalty aside,
there was no reason why Ray should not see the sentence imposed on him for the
murder of 15-year-old Tiffany Harville almost 25 years ago carried out at long
last.
What’s troubling about Ray’s execution is the constitutional question it
raises. Ray, who embraced Islam while incarcerated, wanted an imam present with
him in the death chamber. Prison officials refused, saying they could provide a
Christian prison chaplain. Ray’s attorneys sued, and a stay of execution was
issued to sort it all out.
Prison officials argue that only corrections system employees are allowed in
the execution chamber as a matter of security, which is reasonable. In an
earlier editorial, we suggested the prison system work to create a pool of
spiritual leaders from other faiths, and vet them accordingly. That seems
reasonable as well.
However, Ray’s position was that he was receiving unequal treatment because he,
a Muslim, did not have the same opportunity in the execution chamber as a
Christian prisoner would. And he’s right – the constitutional religious
protections suggest that a condemned inmate of any stripe should have the same
access to a representative of their chosen faith.
The matter made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a 5-4 decision,
vacated the stay imposed by a lower court to allow the execution to proceed.
The reason – Ray had waited too long to raise his objection.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argues that Alabama’s policy of making
available only a Christian chaplain violates the constitution’s Establishment
clause:
“Under (Alabama’s) policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own
faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an
inmate practices a different religion—whether Islam, Judaism, or any other—he
may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes
against the Establishment Clause's core principle of denominational
neutrality.”
For Ray, the argument is moot. However, despite the high court’s green light
for Ray’s execution, Alabama officials must undertake an in-depth review of
procedures surrounding the treatment of the state’s inmates, not only to ensure
constitutional rights are upheld, but to avoid future litigation that the state
can hardly afford.
(source: Editorial, The Dothan Eagle)
OHIO:
Testimony to begin Monday in quadruple homicide
A trial is slated to begin Monday in a potential death penalty case alleging
murder in the fatal shooting of 4 people and an attack on another man, in
Pedro, Ohio, in 2017.
Arron L. Lawson, 24, of Township Road 1051, Ironton, faces 4 counts alleging
aggravated murder in the shooting deaths of Stacey Holston, 24; her son, Devin
Holston, 8; Stacey's mother, Tammie L. McGuire; 43, and McGuire's husband,
Donald McGuire, 50; all of Pedro. The attack occurred Oct. 11, 2017, at the
Holstons' home.
Another man, Todd Holston, was stabbed with a pocketknife inside the family's
trailer and survived his injuries.
Lawson also was charged with aggravated burglary, attempted murder and
felonious assault of Todd Holston, the rape of Stacey Holston, abuse of a
corpse, kidnapping of Devin Holston, tampering with evidence, theft of a motor
vehicle and failure to comply with the order or signal of a police officer.
Questioning of potential jurors, which had started Jan. 28, was completed in
the case Thursday.
The final jury is expected to be selected at 8:30 a.m. Monday at the Lawrence
County Courthouse in Ironton in Judge Andy Ballard's courtroom with opening
statements to follow.
According to an order from Ballard, spectators are asked to refrain from
displaying any messages in support of or against any party involved in the
case, either on clothing or items.
Those attending the trial are also requested to be seated 15 minutes prior to
the trial's start.
Following the killings, Lawson is accused of having fled the scene. A manhunt
by more than 100 law enforcement agencies from the Tri-State area, including
federal authorities, occurred for more than 36 hours before Lawson was arrested
along County Road 52.
A motive in the slayings has not been released.
Testimony is expected to last for more than a week as Lawson faces the death
penalty in the case.
Under Ohio's death penalty laws, a potential death penalty case requires a
bifurcated trial. First is the guilt phase where a defendant is found guilty or
innocent. If a guilty verdict is returned, the same jury that heard the case
will recommend a penalty of life in prison or the death penalty.
(source: The Herald-Dispatch)
WISCONSIN:
Governor should bring back death penalty
Gov. Tony Evers should bring back the death penalty.
Why are the taxpayers feeding and housing murderers for life after they take
innocent people’s lives?
I am a 91-year-old veteran.
If we can let our decent military get the death penalty in wars and fight other
countries’ civil wars, it’s time to bring back the death penalty or the prisons
will fill to the limits with people who don’t deserve to live. advertisement
Fred Gilson
Salem
(source: Letter to the Editor, The Kenosha News)
IOWA:
Lawmakers introduce legislation
N’West Iowa lawmakers are making their marks on this year’s state legislative
session by way of sponsoring bills.
Rep. Skyler Wheeler (R-Orange City) sponsored House File 62, which would
implement the death penalty as a possible sentence in 1st-degree murder cases.
The practice of capital punishment ended in Iowa in 1965.
“Iowa needs to seriously consider reinstating the death penalty,” Wheeler said.
“The purposes are of course first and foremost, justice for the victims and
their families. Secondly, it gives prosecutors another tool to use when dealing
with first degree murder cases. Lastly, it sends a message that as a state we
will not tolerate the shedding of innocent blood and if someone does this, they
are subject to the highest punishment one can receive on the earth.”
Wheeler has a firm pro-life stance and also introduced a bill to erect an
abortion victim memorial. He said a person can be pro-life and pro-death
penalty.
“My stance comes from the Bible, which strongly support the death penalty, but
also supports protecting innocent and unborn life from the moment of conception
until a natural death,” Wheeler said. “When someone murders someone else, they
took their life without allowing that person to die a natural death. They
violated that person’s inalienable right to life, therefore their inalienable
right to life is essentially removed. There are consequences to actions, and
there should be an ultimate consequence for committing the ultimate act of evil
one can perform. The government’s job is to reward good and to punish evil, and
my stance on these 2 issues lines up with that.”
(nwestiowa.com)
COLORADO:
Abolish the death penalty in Colorado
If the worth of a public policy is its ability to achieve policy objectives,
then capital punishment is a failure. It hasn't been shown to deter crime. It's
not cost-effective. It's unevenly applied. It needs to be abolished.
Colorado abolished the death penalty in 1897 for four years, but subsequent
repeal efforts have fallen short of success. In 2009 a repeal bill failed by
just one vote in the Colorado Senate after passing in the House. Abolition
advocates hope that 2019 is the year when Colorado can finally relegate capital
punishment to history. There is growing public revulsion with the practice, its
value to justice is increasingly dubious, and the political circumstances are
as favorable to repeal as ever — abolition-leaning Democrats control the
Colorado House and Senate, the state's new attorney general, Democrat Phil
Weiser, is opposed to the death penalty, and new Gov. Jared Polis, also a
Democrat, has said he would sign a repeal bill.
The momentum is there. Now lawmakers must follow through.
Executions have become exceedingly rare in the state. The 1st execution to
occur in what is now Colorado was the 1859 hanging of murderer John Stoefel at
a cottonwood tree along Cherry Creek. Stoefel is one of 103 men the state has
put to death. (Every person Colorado has ever executed was a male murderer.)
The last execution in Colorado was that of Gary Lee Davis in 1997, and that
event came 30 years after the state's previous execution.
The death penalty in practice might in effect be dormant, but capital
punishment is still on the books. As long as the death penalty remains viable
law in Colorado, the state claims for itself the objectionable role of
institutional executioner. And it's no mere abstraction: Three men today sit on
Colorado's death row, and the prospect of a death sentence is an emotional and
practical factor every time courts in the state take up the most heinous
crimes, such as the prosecution last year of Frederick killer Christopher Watts
and the Aurora theater mass murderer James Holmes.
Some argue that the death penalty deters would-be killers, but the evidence
just isn't there. "Research to date on the effect of capital punishment on
homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty
increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates," said a 2012 report from
National Research Council of The National Academies. Prominent death penalty
scholar Michael L. Radelet, a professor at the University of Colorado, and
co-author Traci L. Lacock wrote in 2009 that 88 % of prominent criminologists
"do not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent," and there was an
"overwhelming consensus ... that the death penalty does not add deterrent
effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment." The New York City Bar
Association in a 2017 presentation asserted that murder rates did not rise in
states that abolished the death penalty.
Not only does the death penalty fail to deter, it's a costly failure. In "The
Death Penalty vs. Life Incarceration: A Financial Analysis," a 2016 study
published in the Susquehanna University Political Review, Colorado was shown to
spend about 15 % more on death row inmates than those in the general
population. But that's just incarceration costs. Account for the enormous legal
expenses of trying death penalty cases and the outlays skyrocket. The analysis
found that in the United States each death penalty inmate costs about $1.12
million more than a general population inmate.
An especially egregious defect in American death penalty cases is their
susceptibility to great economic, geographic and racial disparities. A case
that results in a death sentence often depends less on the underlying facts of
the alleged crime than on the financial means of the defendant. Of the almost
1,400 executions that occurred in the United States between 1976 and 2015, 71 %
were carried out in the South. All manner of racial imbalances can be found in
capital cases: More than 3/4 of executions stem from cases involving a white
victim, yet only half of murder victims in America are white. White and black
inmates make up equal shares of the death row population — 42 % — even though
the country's population is 61 % white and 13 % black. All 3 death row inmates
in Colorado — Nathan Dunlap, Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray — were prosecuted
in Arapahoe County, and all 3 are black. The location of the county line in
relation to a crime should not determine whether a defendant lives or dies, and
neither should the skin color of the accused.
It is implausible to think that in the United States innocent people have not
been executed. Since 1973, more than 160 death row inmates have been set free
because evidence showed they were innocent. "For every 10 people who have been
executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S., one person has
been set free," notes the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. No
executed inmate in the United States has been posthumously proved legally and
factually innocent, but this is largely because the justice system has little
incentive to expend resources on cases in which the defendant is dead. In 2011,
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter took the extraordinary step of granting a posthumous
unconditional pardon to Joe Arridy, who had been executed in 1939 for a murder
in Pueblo. "(An) overwhelming body of evidence indicates the 23-year-old Arridy
was innocent, including false and coerced confessions, the likelihood that
Arridy was not in Pueblo at the time of the killing, and an admission of guilt
by someone else," Ritter proclaimed.
The state-sanctioned killing of an innocent person is more morally repugnant
than the execution of a guilty one could be morally just. For this reason alone
— given that innocent people almost certainly die under a regime of capital
punishment — Colorado should abolish the death penalty. But the reasons are
many. Colorado is among the 30 states that still permit capital punishment.
Legislators this year should withdraw the state from that ignoble club.
(source: Editorial; Quentin Young, for the Editorial Board, Boulder Daiy
Camera)
MONTANA:
Curious find casts doubt on 1922 execution
Even with a noose around his neck in a stockade behind the Missoula jail, Joe
Vuckovich swore he hadn’t murdered Mrs. Jerry Shea.
“I am losing my life as innocent as any man that ever was hung,” the
33-year-old Serbian maintained in broken but clear English on a February
morning in 1922.
Nora (Goff) Shea was shot dead on Missoula’s Northside on Feb. 12, 1921.
Vuckovich was there and then he wasn’t, leading authorities on a manhunt that
ended with his capture 4 days later 35 miles east of town.
A convicted bootlegger and known womanizer prone to violence, Vuckovich was
tried and convicted of murder in Missoula district court. He was sentenced to
die, but for most of a year his lawyer’s appeals delayed the hanging.
A final entreaty to Gov. Joseph Dixon, accompanied by 5,000 signatures on a
petition asking the sentence be commuted to life in prison, was rejected in the
final hours. Vuckovich was hanged at 6 a.m. on Feb. 17, 1922, and pronounced
dead 10½ minutes later.
Tom Donovan, in his 2007 book “Hanging Around the Big Sky,” said Vuckovich was
the last man in Montana to be put to death on a jerk-type gallow. A 320-pound
weight was dropped, pulling the 140-pound Vuckovich off the ground and breaking
his neck. 2 hundred invited guests watched.
Donovan listed it as the 8th legal execution in Missoula County dating back to
1883. The 9th was that of confessed murderer Philip “Slim” Coleman from a
scaffold inside the Missoula County jail in September 1943. That was the last
hanging in Montana and the last execution outside the walls of the state
penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
History tucked the murder and hanging into its macabre pages, to be resurrected
on occasion over the years but with no further twists.
***
Which makes Cliff Iverson’s “confession board” all the more curious.
The pine board is all of a foot long and five inches wide. It came from an old
house Iverson’s father had moved from Missoula to Piltzville in the Bonner area
decades ago. The small house still stands as a rental off Rustic Road.
Anton “Tony” Iverson immigrated from Norway in 1928 and went to work for the
Anaconda Forest Products mill in Bonner. He retired in 1970 as head outside
millwright. The same year L.A. Hurt moved the house from the 400 block of East
Broadway. It joined four others displaced when Interstate 90 was built earlier
in the 1960s.
After Tony Iverson’s death in 1990, and his wife Thyra’s passing in 1993, Cliff
Iverson and his siblings prepared the homes for sale.
That’s when the confession board caught his eye.
“I’m thinking it must have come out of the garage,” he said last week. “It was
probably lying on a workbench or something.”
On one side of the board, in what Iverson thinks is his father’s writing in the
carpenter’s pencil a millwright always carries, is a synopsis of the Vuckovich
story:
The handwriting on one side of Cliff Iverson's board states that Jerry Shea
confessed on his deathbed to killing his wife Nora in 1921.
Hanged on Feb. 17, 1922, for the murder of Mrs. Jerry Shea … ran away to the
hills … captured near “Bear Mout Mont.” … convicted … granted stay of execution
… maintained innocence … “last words were that he was not guilty of the Crime
in wich he was Convicted.”
Turn the board over, and in the same handwriting: “A few years later Mrs Sheas
husband confesced on his death bed that he had killed her.”
Trial by 2-by-4 is no trial at all. There appears to exist no other evidence
that Jerry Shea admitted to killing his wife. For history’s sake, justice was
served when Vuckovich was hanged. He wasn’t the first to go to his death
proclaiming innocence.
But what if he was telling the truth?
Jerry Shea died 30 years later in Miles City. Obituaries in 1952 said he was
there visiting his daughter, Mrs. Frank Carlson. Marie Carlson had been 2½ and
her sister Elizabeth 5 when their mother was murdered.
According to the Montana Standard, Shea was born in Michigan in 1886 and spent
his childhood in Butte. The family moved to the Bitterroot Valley in 1899, and
Shea lived at the original home place 3 miles west of Stevensville.
“In 1914 he was married to Nora Gofee (sic), who preceded him in death,” was
the only mention of Mrs. Shea.
No word of their home in Missoula in 1921, which news reports said was at 504
N. First St. Today that’s kitty-corner across the street from the north end of
the Northside pedestrian railroad overpass. At least for a time, Jerry Shea
worked in the Northern Pacific yard in Missoula, not on a ranch near
Stevensville.
Nora Shea was shot two blocks to the east, at a corner of North First and what
was then Rose Avenue, now Woody Street. Sun Mountain Sports and the Zootown
Arts Community Center are in former warehouses across the street.
There was no eyewitness to the shooting, which happened between 7 p.m. and 8
p.m. on a Saturday evening and prompted a banner front-page headline in the
Sunday Missoulian: “Missoula Mother Shot in Cold Blood.”
The subheads included: “Mrs. Jerry Shea is Murdered by Joe Vockolvich (sic).
Whole City Startled … Talk of Lynching Heard.”
Missoulian front page reporting Nora Shea's murder
Missoulian archives via Newspapers.com
Jerry Shea told police his wife had left their home to buy candy in preparation
for a family trip to the Bitterroot to visit relatives. A 13-year-old boy told
police he’d seen her walking down the street with Joe Wines, as Vuckovich was
known.
Near the Burkhart grocery store at the corner of North First and Rose, “Wines
crowded Mrs. Shea off the side walk and put his face close to hers,” the boy
said and the Missoulian reported. “Apparently they were quarreling. A few
minutes later a shot was heard and Wines was seen running west on North First.”
The initial news account included an interesting detail. Jerry Shea said he was
in his yard when the shooting occurred. He wasn’t first on the scene, but he
was there quickly, while his wife was still lying unconscious on the ground,
her bloodied head on a pillow provided by one of the first arrivals.
“He knelt beside his wife with one knee upon her body. ‘Here, don’t do that,’
someone called. ‘She is my wife,’ Mr. Shea replied.”
She was taken by ambulance to St. Patrick Hospital but never regained
consciousness.
***
Vuckovich sure acted like a guilty man. Neighbors said Shea knew Vuckovich was
“tampering with his wife’s affections” but was afraid to interfere, the
newspaper reported.
Vuckovich’s troubles began a couple of weeks earlier. He and Peter Kossich were
arrested following a disturbance at the Shea home on Jan. 25. Vuckovich was
said to have slapped Mrs. Shea, bloodying her nose, and to have taken her two
children as far as the gate of the yard before leaving them and jumping in an
automobile with Kossich. They only stopped after Chief of Police W.J. Moore
fired into the back of the car when they returned.
Vuckovich threw away a gun and the car stopped. The men were arrested and
Vuckovich was fined $250. Nora Shea would not appear against him.
The gun that police found on Joe Vuckovich when he was arrested near Bearmouth,
which was believed to have been used to shoot Nora Shea.
Five days later, Wines/Vuckovich was back in the police report, arrested for
bootlegging whiskey. He was released on bail the following day.
Just before dawn on Feb. 13, the morning after the shooting of Nora Shea,
Vuckovich showed up cold and hungry at a ranch house in Grant Creek. He
allegedly told E.C. Henry that the law was after him and said, “They have got
me this time — they will sure hang me this time."
The Henrys thought he was referring to a Prohibition violation. They fed him
and let him stay, only to discover later that day he’d robbed them of clothing
and food and disappeared. Vuckovich walked east through the Rattlesnake, to
Bonner where he stayed a night in an empty cabin, then up the Clark Fork
Valley. He was spotted by a train crew and captured west of Drummond near
Bearmouth.
At trial the following month, Deputy Sheriff Barney Wheeler, one of his
captors, testified that Vuckovich confessed to the murder on the way back to
Missoula. Wheeler said Vuckovich told him, unbidden: "Well, she wouldn't give
my money back and I got so mad I shot her. When I get mad I get awfully mad."
Testimony by the Missoulian’s Ray Rocene seemed to clash with Wheeler’s story.
Rocene had interviewed Wheeler when he returned from Bearmouth with his
prisoner. He said Wheeler told him Vuckovich had not confessed, “but that he
thought he would plead guilty.”
***
Meanwhile, Jerry Shea came under suspicion for his wife’s murder, at least in
the eyes of defense attorney James L. Wallace.
“Did you shoot your wife?” Wallace asked at Vuckovich’s trial in March.
“No,” Shea replied, adding that he’d ejected Vuckovich from his home on Jan.
25, when Vuckovich assaulted his wife.
Shea denied he had received $1,500 from Vuckovich, and said he didn’t know Mrs.
Shea withdrew money that belonged to Vuckovich from a bank on the day of the
shooting.
“Didn’t you know,” Wallace pressed, “about a proposition between your wife and
Vuckovich whereby she was to get a divorce and marry him and go back to Serbia
with him?”
No.
“Didn’t you go to see about a divorce from your wife?”
No.
“Didn’t your wife on several occasions threaten to shoot herself?”
No.
The evidence against Vuckovich was strong but circumstantial. Nonetheless,
after 3 hours of deliberation on March 28, the jury of 12 men convicted
Vuckovich of 1st degree murder and fixed the penalty of death by hanging.
***
French Ferguson, managing editor of the Sentinel evening paper, interviewed
Vuckovich the day after he was captured and asked him straight out if he
murdered Mrs. Shea. Vuckovich seemed to feel a responsibility to reply, but
said finally, “Maybe, maybe I answer you some time, but I think I better see a
lawyer first.”
Ferguson concluded Vuckovich was “a contradiction in human form, a mild,
sparrow-like little man who, probably, has murdered a woman in cold blood upon
a public street, yet who disliked to refuse to answer a question put to him by
a man he had never seen before.”
Vuckovich was hanged a year to the day after the interview. The Missoulian
printed a message from him thanking those who signed the petition to the
governor on his behalf.
“I want to say as my last message to you that I am losing my life for a crime I
did not commit,” he wrote. “I want to tell you from my heart that I am an
innocent man. I am going to my death with a smile. I have no hard feelings in
my heart toward anybody. They have just made a terrible mistake.”
***
Mike Hopkins hadn’t heard the tale of the Vuckovich hanging and the mystery
confession until Friday, when he got a summary over the phone at the state
Capitol in Helena.
“That’s the most interesting story I’ve heard in the Legislature this session,”
he quipped.
A Republican representative from Missoula House District 92, Hopkins has
introduced legislation for the 10th session in a row to abolish the death
penalty.
He said he’s not sure how the story applies to his bill’s quest, “other than
there are multiple examples throughout the U.S. of individuals who have been
put to death by the state, via the death penalty, who turned out being
innocent.”
Hopkins pointed to the recent pardon by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of the
so-called “Groveland Four,” four young black men who were wrongfully accused of
raping a white woman in 1949. Three were convicted. The 4th was beaten to death
by an angry mob before the trial after he’d escaped from jail. None of the
three was legally executed but all were dead within a few years by either
violent or mysterious means.
“The only thing I would add,” Hopkins said, “is obviously the only way to
guarantee the state isn’t in a situation of executing an individual only to
find out later they’re not guilty is not to execute the individual.”
***
If boards could talk …
There had to be a reason Tony Iverson wrote about Jerry Shea’s “confescion” in
1952 in so definite terms on such an unorthodox surface.
As far as Cliff Iverson knows, his father never met Jerry Shea in the years
from 1928 to 1952 when he lived in the Bonner area and Shea lived on the family
ranch near Stevensville.
He can only speculate.
“They would insulate the houses with newspapers in the olden days, do you
remember?” he said. “My son-in-law said he’s sure the story must have been on a
newspaper in the walls of the house and caught his eye, so he grabbed the board
and wrote it down.”
Shea’s obituary in 1952 was in at least 3 state newspapers. But no published
account can be found of a confession, in the Missoulian archives or other
Montana newspapers digitized on newspaper.com.
Tony Harbaugh, sheriff of Custer County where Shea died, graciously took time
last week to search the coroner records for the entire year of 1952 but came up
empty.
In fact, he said in an email, “There is no coroner log or report on Mr. Shea’s
death.”
Keith Belcher, manager of the Missoula County records center, pored through
records there with no luck.
Belcher said he didn’t know where an official confession would be recorded.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that here,” he said.
Willis and Susan Hintz, both retired from the Missoula County Sheriff’s
Department, are longtime keepers of law enforcement history in Missoula.
They’re familiar with the details of the Vuckovich hanging but said they’ve
never heard a whisper about a confession by Jerry Shea.
Shea was in and out of Missoula hospitals 3 times in 1952. He was discharged
for the last time in early July, and a blurb in the paper said his daughter
Elizabeth had arrived from her home in Fairbanks, Alaska, to see him.
Did she take him, sick as he was, to her sister’s home in Miles City? Were both
of Shea’s daughters at his bedside when he died there on Aug. 21? Did Shea have
something to get off his chest that somehow ended up on a pinewood board in a
Missoula home?
“Maybe something new will turn up with this story,” Cliff Iverson said.
Until then we, like the rogue Joe Vuckovich, will be left hanging in history.
(source: missoulian.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Dennis McCarthy: ‘Tool Box Killer’ Lawrence Bittaker got the death penalty
nearly 40 years ago. But old age will take him in the end----A front-page Daily
Breeze story from 40 years ago sparks reflection on a murder case and a
convicted killer who has outlived many of the players in his murder trial.
A promise was made 38 years ago to the families of 5 teenage girls in the South
Bay and San Fernando Valley who had been kidnapped, raped, tortured, and
murdered by a monster.
It was a promise not kept.
A jury had voted unanimously to sentence Lawrence Bittaker, 39, to die in the
San Quentin gas chamber for the gruesome murders, but he lives on today,
approaching his 80th birthday on death row.
4 of his 5 victims never saw their 17th birthday. One had just turned 18. The
girls never had the chance to graduate from high school, go to college, have a
career, get married, have kids, and, by now, grandkids.
They never got the chance to grow old like their murderer is.
When the time came during sentencing for the defense to call character
witnesses, they could find no one to take the stand on Bittaker’s behalf.
The closest they came was a landlord who said he paid his rent on time.
Bittaker hasn’t paid a dime of rent since. We’ve been picking up his room and
board for nearly 40 years. He’s outlived half the jurors, the judge, the lead
detective on the case, an assistant prosecutor, and many others who were part
of his trial.
“I think they’re just going to let him die of old age,” says Stephen Kay,
former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the
Bittaker case, and the Manson family.
That’s the death penalty in California today for cold-blooded killers – old
age.
Since 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated, 13 condemned men have died
in the San Quentin gas chamber, the last in 2006 by lethal injection.
Meanwhile, more than 100 others have died in their beds.
“I had nightmares for almost two years after the Bittaker trial,” Kay says.
“I’d hear the girls screaming, and run to help them, but always get there too
late. I’d wake up in a cold sweat.”
He’s 76 now, a grandfather of five, who still replays in his mind a terror tape
made of a young Burbank girl, Lynette Ledford, 16, begging for her life as she
is being tortured and brutally murdered by Bittaker.,P> The audio tape was
found in the back of Bittaker’s van with his tool box – the final piece of
evidence that there could be no doubt he was guilty, no chance of DNA testing
later finding a mistake had been made.
It was a slam dunk. The “Tool Box Killer,” as he was known during his 6 month
killing spree in 1979, was sent off to San Quentin’s death row to bide his time
until the appeal’s process ran its course – which could take, incredibly, as
long as 25 years because of the massive back log.
Bittaker blew by 25 years, then 35, and now begins his 38th year waiting for a
promise that hasn’t been kept, and probably never will. Two lawsuits
challenging the use of lethal injections have everything on hold.
Bittaker had been on death row 2 years when I went up to San Quentin to
interview him in 1983. I had covered his trial, seen all the evidence and heard
the terror tape. I knew I was talking to a monster.
Five minutes into the interview, he began crying. Yes, he had raped the girls,
but he didn’t murder them, he said. His partner had done that, not him.
And then he smirked. It was the same smug look he had on his face sitting at
the defense table doodling on a pad when Kay played the terror tape in court,
and people in the gallery began crying and running out of the courtroom – sick
to their stomachs for that poor girl begging this monster for her life.
It’s the same smirk you can see today on his most current mug shot in a line up
with more than 750 other condemned men on death row waiting for their promise
to be kept.
Bittaker’s hair is neatly combed, and his shirt pressed. He looks like a man
who has aged well and adapted nicely to prison life. He doesn’t look worried
that the promise will ever happen to him.
I hadn’t thought of him in a long time until this week while going through a
stack of old newspapers I’d kept. I came across a front page headline from Feb.
26, 1981 in the Daily Breeze with my byline on the story.
“Bittaker May Outlive the Jurors,” it read.
And, damn if he isn’t.
(source: Los Angeles Daily News)
USA:
Killer's hearing highlights prolonged nature of death-row appeals
The recent post-conviction hearing for Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. underscored how
prolonged the appeal process can be for a federal death penalty case.
The appeal process for Rodriguez started in 2006 after he was convicted at
trial and sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing 22-year-old Dru Sjodin.
Sjodin, a native of Pequot Lakes, Minn., was a student at the University of
North Dakota in 2003 when she disappeared from the Columbia Mall in Grand
Forks.
During a nine-day hearing in federal court in Fargo that concluded Thursday,
Feb. 7, a video clip was played in which Rodriguez told an interviewer in 2013
how he hid Sjodin's body in a ravine near Crookston, Minn., shortly after he
killed her.
The hearing focused on a defense claim that Rodriguez is intellectually
disabled, a condition that would — if the court accepts it as fact — make
Rodriguez ineligible for execution.
Federal Judge Ralph Erickson, who presided over the trial and is handling
appeal issues, has given lawyers in the case four months to prepare briefs on
the mental health question that was explored during the hearing, a timetable
that doesn't start until the hearing has been reduced to a transcript and
provided to lawyers.
But the mental health question is not the only issue the judge must decide.
A past hearing covered a claim by the defense that some jurors at Rodriguez's
trial made false and misleading statements about their background.
A second set of hearings focused on defense claims of alleged false evidence
presented at trial regarding how Sjodin died and whether she was sexually
assaulted. The defense also maintains that legal counsel Rodriguez had during
his trial was ineffective because it failed to recognize and challenge the
alleged false evidence.
To date, most of the defense claims have yet to be ruled on by the judge.
Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the latest hearing, the defense notified
Erickson that additional appeal issues could be brought forward in the near
future, though the issues in question were still being investigated.
With all that remains pending, one knowledgeable court watcher suggested that
final resolution of all appeal issues may not happen for many, many months, if
not years.
Taking the mental health question in isolation: If Erickson rules that
Rodriguez is intellectually disabled, one outcome could be that the court would
vacate the death sentence and re-sentence Rodriguez to life in prison.
If the court finds that Rodriguez did not fully prove that he is intellectually
disabled, but nevertheless rules that trial counsel were ineffective in
pursuing intellectual deficits as a mitigating issue, 1 possible outcome would
be a retrial of the sentencing phase with a new jury.
Although the ultimate resolution of his case remains a mystery, 1 thing is
clear: Rodriguez, who is 65, is living in a setting he has become very familiar
with.
Information presented during the latest hearing highlighted the fact that prior
to being arrested in 2003 in connection with Sjodin's kidnapping and murder,
Rodriguez had already spent nearly 3 decades behind bars for 2 rapes and 1
attempted rape.
Since that 2003 arrest, he has spent approximately 15 more years behind bars.
Expert witnesses who testified for the defense described Rodriguez as a person
whose mental development as an infant was severely compromised by malnutrition
and possibly by chemicals he and his family were exposed to as migrant farm
workers.
By contrast, expert witnesses testifying for the government noted that several
of Rodriguez's siblings grew up to achieve advanced academic degrees.
They also suggested that problems Rodriguez experienced in school, including
failing several grade levels, could be understood, at least in part, by
language issues tied to the years his family traveled back and forth between
Minnesota and Texas.
(source: The Bismarck Tribune)
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