by Nancy Grace
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searchers have been unable to find a single case in which an innocent person was executed. The 68 percent error rate actually deals with any and all reversals of death-penalty cases for any reason at any stage in the process, be it a failure to read Miranda rights, not severing cases of codefendants, or any ground constituting legal error. And don’t leave out the leagues of anti-death-penalty appellate judges who reversed sentences for their own political reasons, causing statistics to appear as actual miscarriages of justice.
Then there is the matter of confusing guilt with punishment. The
“study” ignores the distinction between a determination of guilt of murder and a determination that the killer should get the death penalty.
Reversals because of sentencing were lumped in with reversals on actual guilt—evidentiary grounds—i.e., did the suspect actually kill?
The question of greatest concern was risking executing a person who’d neither killed the victim nor been a party to the killing. The report indicates that only 7 percent of cases remanded for retrial on guilt-innocence issues ultimately ended in acquittal. That’s even including cases that are retried years later with missing witnesses and dimming memories.
Our system is so stacked in favor of the defendant that countless guilty people are deemed not guilty. Factor that into the 7 percent and find this conclusion: The incredibly low levels of acquittal on retrial bear out that the system works. The unvarnished truth is a far cry from the claim that we convict and execute the innocent. We don’t.
T H E D E A T H P E N A L T Y D O E S
D E T E R C R I M E
When an allegedly wrongful conviction has taken place, we hear about it eternally. My question is, why do we rarely hear the truth about perpetrators of violent crimes who are released and become repeat offenders? There are too many stories of murderers who, for whatever 2 6 8
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reason, get out of jail. The headlines have been full of tales of violent criminals who are released from prison and graduate to murder. The news is rife with horrific killings committed by repeat offenders. Here are two tragic examples:
Polly Klaas’s killer, Richard Allen Davis, had spent years in and out of jail. Just a few months before he kidnapped that sweet little girl at knifepoint from her Petaluma, California, home in 1993, he had been released after serving just half of a sixteen-year sentence for kidnapping. Davis’s crime against Klaas so horrified the nation that it became a driving force behind the passage of a California law that mandates a life jail term for defendants convicted of a third felony crime. Klaas’s killer received the death penalty and remains on death row today.
On November 22, 2003, Dru Sjodin, a twenty-two-year-old college student, finished her shift at the Victoria’s Secret store in the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and called her boyfriend, Chris Lang, on her cell phone. The conversation came to an abrupt end when Sjodin uttered a surprised cry and the line went dead. Three hours later, Lang got another call from the same cell phone, but all he heard was static on the line. It was subsequently determined that the call had originated from the vicinity of Fisher, Minnesota.
A registered Level 3 sex offender named Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. was arrested in connection with Sjodin’s disappearance in December 2003.
Earlier that year, the convicted rapist had been released from prison after serving a twenty-three-year sentence for an attempted kidnapping and assault of a woman in 1980. At the time, Rodriguez should have been considered for civil commitment, but it never happened. If it had, Rodriguez would have been kept in custody indefinitely and Dru would be alive today.
Sjodin’s body was discovered in a ravine near Crookston, Minnesota, in April 2004. KVLY-TV in Fargo, North Dakota, reported that her cell phone was found near her body and had remained on for nearly twenty-four hours after Sjodin was abducted. Authorities were unsuccessful in trying to track the signal. There is no death penalty in MinO B J E C T I O N !
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nesota, so the feds stepped in. In May 2004, a federal grand jury charged Rodriguez with kidnapping and murder. Since he is charged with crossing the state line with Sjodin before killing her, Rodriguez will be tried in federal court and faces the death penalty. His trial is set to begin March 6, 2006.
The repeat-offender crisis never seems to be adequately addressed.
What about those repeat offenders who have graduated to murder number two or worse? Believe it or not, according to an August 2002 report by John O’Sullivan in the National Review, at that time there were 820 people in U.S. prisons serving sentences for their second murder committed while behind bars, typically of a prison guard, sheriff, or another inmate. Obviously, had the death penalty been sought the first time around, 820 victims would be alive and with their families today. One wrongly accused versus 820 innocent victims. I know it’s not about numbers, but repeat murderers make a powerful argument for the death penalty.
One of the most disturbing facts about many murder cases is that the perpetrator is often a repeat offender. The Manhattan Institute reported that the average prison term of murderers released in 1992 was only 5.9 years. While the victim is sentenced to death, murderers are released after just 6 years, free to prey on the innocent—and free to kill again.
Let’s take a hard look at murder with a dose of common sense.
“Murder” occurs when one human willfully kills another who has posed no physical threat to the killer. Webster’s defines “murder” with the term of “malice aforethought.” This is not self-defense, not an accident or a mistake, and not due to diminished capacity. Murder is murder.
Those 820 murders I mentioned earlier, contrary to anti-death-penalty sermons, constitute a powerful argument for capital punishment.
Simply put, dead men can commit no more murders. That argument alone is more than adequate justification for capital punishment. It is a deterrent, and maybe that’s why we hear it so rarely.
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John Stuart Mill said there is nothing that makes a more dramatic impression on the imagination than the finality and the severity of the death penalty. The loudest shriek from anti-death-penalty proponents is that “no evidence” supports the contention that the death penalty is a deterrent. Even if that were true, it is not decisive, because there remains the issue of punishment sufficient to fit a heinous crime.
A noted group of economists from Emory University—Paul Rubin, Hashem Dezhbakhsh, and Joanna Melhop Shepherd—released a study in January 2001 titled “Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect?” Based on a statistical analysis of the recent data amassed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s, they proved that the death penalty is an extremely significant deterrent of potential murder. They conclude that each execution deters other murders to the extent of saving between eight and twenty-eight innocent lives, averaging eighteen lives saved per execution.
The idea of punishment greatly affects the imagination. The restraining influence the death penalty holds over a person considering a capital offense is impossible to assess. In evaluating the alleged failure of punishment by death as a deterrent, who is qualified to be the judge?
We know there are those who were not deterred and went on to commit horrific crimes, but who will ever know when the fear of the death penalty stopped someone in his tracks? Can we ever really know who was deterred from committing murder or how many lives have been saved simply because of the existence of the death penalty?
W E A R E A C I V I L I Z E D
S O C I E T Y
Opponents argue that the death penalty somehow makes us less civilized than the rest of the world. In America, we have more freedoms than any other country, nation, or people in the world. Where there is great freedom, there is great responsibility. We value justice and fair O B J E C T I O N !
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play in our courts, insisting that the punishment fit the crime. Unlike some soc
ieties, we do not chop off a hand that steals, we don’t gouge out the eye that covets, stone the spouse that commits adultery. We do not cane the perpetrator or employ torture or deny prisoners food, shelter, or medical care. We try to do good and remain blind as to gender, race, creed, or color in meting out justice. This is also true for the imposition of the death penalty. We are neither barbaric nor draconian. The simple truth is, if you do the crime, you pay for it. If you commit the ultimate evil, murder, there is a chance you will face the ultimate punishment—
the death penalty.
The Danes and the Norwegians abolished the death penalty before the First World War but restored it for a period of time after 1945 in order to mete out justice to the Nazis. Uncivilized? Absolutely not. It was the appropriate response to unspeakable evil. The Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, China, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Malaysia, Morocco, the Philippines, St.
Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, Taiwan (Republic of China), and Thailand are some of the other countries around the world that agree with Americans that the death penalty is appropriate in the face of heinous crime. So where does that leave the broad assertion that capital punishment cannot exist in a civilized society? What do opponents of the death penalty think a civilized society is? “Civilization”
has created the measured response of the death penalty specifically to avoid the less civilized alternative called vigilante justice—or mob rule, to put it more bluntly.
Is a civilized culture one that claims low crime rates? Is that civility? O’Sullivan wrote in National Review that in the fifties, America had the highest-ever level of social tranquility and its lowest crime rate ever. At that time, we also had the death-penalty alternative. As use of the death penalty was gradually minimized by outright formal statute and by judges’ reluctance to impose it, crime and violence increased markedly. America reinstated the death penalty in the 1970s, and within two decades violent crime finally began to decrease again. I believe a 2 7 2
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truly civilized society hears the cries of crime victims instead of the protests of heartless killers. That is civilized. And for those of you who disagree: This is not about gentility. Go spread your butter with your teaspoon, drink your water from your teacup, and pray like hell that you or someone dear to you is not the victim of a repeat offender.
I T ’ S T H E W I L L O F
T H E P E O P L E . . .
L E T ’ S S U B V E R T I T !
Why do anti-death-penalty advocates insist that the majority of Americans are wrong and they are right? Why are these entitled few allowed to subvert the will of the many—in direct contradiction to the U.S. Supreme Court? America supports the imposition of the death penalty in egregious cases. The death penalty is authorized by thirty-eight states, the federal government, and the U.S. military. Those jurisdictions without the death penalty include twelve states (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) and the District of Columbia.
Support for the death penalty is high despite the concern of most Americans over the possibility that innocent people have been put to death in the past five years (although most consider this a rare occurrence). According to a nationwide poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in May 2004, the latest numbers show a continued high level of public support for the death penalty for those convicted of murder.
Americans say that the death penalty is not imposed enough rather than imposed too often.
The poll found 71 percent of Americans in favor of and 26 percent opposed to the “death penalty for a person convicted of murder.” While Gallup has been asking the death-penalty question since the 1930s, support has been above 70 percent over the last two years, after having O B J E C T I O N !
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been in the mid- to high 60 percent range in 2000–2001. The current number is the highest support level Gallup has obtained on this measure since May 1995, when 77 percent supported the death penalty. The highest support level was 80 percent in 1994, and the lowest was 38
percent in 1965.
In the last couple of years, there has been a growing belief that the death penalty is applied fairly in this country, despite news reports that some individuals were incorrectly given death sentences. Fifty-five percent of Americans now say that the death penalty is applied fairly, while 39 percent disagree. In 2000, 51 percent said it was applied fairly and 41 percent said it was not. That year, Illinois instituted a death-penalty moratorium, and the death penalty in Texas under then-governor George W. Bush was a major issue in the 2000 presidential campaign. The numbers were unaffected.
L I V I N G L A R G E B E H I N D B A R S
Do convicted murderers repent? Are they remorseful? Do they exhibit a concern for their innocent victims? Let’s examine the evidence.
Stardust Johnson was shocked when she logged on and inadvertently spotted a photograph of her husband’s killer on the Internet, pleading for female pen pals to end his boredom on death row. Johnson’s husband, Roy, a music professor at the University of Arizona, was kidnapped, robbed, and beaten to death after a concert in Tucson in February 1995. Beau Greene was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. Johnson learned the hard way that while her husband was dead and buried, his killer was free to advertise for female com-panionship. The pen-pal site stated that it was “pleased” to present Greene and shows off a picture of the condemned killer cuddling a cat.
Ferreting out Internet mail generated from the Web and separating it from regular mail would necessitate more investigators, but with all the money federal, state, and local authorities lift from our wallets, I 2 7 4
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think they can afford it. The dating game shouldn’t be allowed on death row. I was shocked to learn that multiple Web sites, created by everyone from human-rights groups and ministers to moneymakers, actively try to find “pen pals” for inmates. I won’t give them the free publicity by listing their names here, but trust me when I tell you there’s more than a handful of them out there. The sites solicit letters from those outside prison walls to fill the “lonely” hours of inmates on death row. Some are looking for women. Others solicit donations to their defense funds and ask people to send them stamps. Some insist they only want to hear from the outside world. Many inmates even have set up Web sites devoted to publicizing their cases and maintaining their innocence.
It’s not surprising to learn that there have been several cases of inmates scamming people on the outside to support them. Individuals have gotten sucked into pen-pal relationships with inmates and have actually ended up mortgaging their homes and maxing out their credit cards as a result. There have been cases where women have sent inmates sexually explicit audio tapes and photographs and wound up depositing thousands of dollars of their own, hard-earned money into inmate bank accounts and defense funds. Here are just a few examples of killers looking for a little TLC through the personals: Triple killer Michael E. Correll is a death-row Casanova and a self-described lover of “animals and nature” who actively tries to convince women he meets on the Internet to finance his legal defense. Robert Moorman, who killed his mother and chopped up her body, has said he wished women would write him to discuss poetry and Star Trek. Kenneth Laird, who strangled a woman with rope he tightened around her neck with a screwdriver, says he’s trapped in a “lonely and scary place” and wants women of any age to write him.
In his personal ad posted on the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty’s (CCADP) Web site, Correll claimed he was wrongly convicted of murder. He said he was seeking “sincere and caring hearts” who wish “to bring the light of day” into his life. Correll has placed several ads on the Internet to garner support for his case. He O B J E C T I O N !
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even provided a Fabio-like picture of himself, showing off his muscular body and long hair.
[ sic].”
Death-row inmate Danny Jones turned to the Internet to “meet new friends and share their thoughts, ideas and dreams.” In his online personal, he wrote that he enjoys reading novels and poetry and makes his own floral designs and greeting cards. Jones was convicted of killing three people, including a seventy-four-year-old grandmother and a seven-year-old child. Jones used a baseball bat to kill his friend Robert Weaver. He then went inside Weaver’s house, attacking and killing the victim’s elderly grandmother. Finally Jones chased down Weaver’s seven-year-old daughter and hauled her from under a bed, where she’d been hiding during his murder spree. He strangled her. Jones then stole a gun collection from the home. ADC records show that during his time on death row, Jones has been found guilty of two minor and one major violation. His last infraction occurred in 1996, a major violation for drug possession and manufacturing.
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