death penalty news June 6, 2004
ALABAMA: Death penalty: 22 people from area on death row On the first day of 1984, Billy Haney had been a police officer in Talladega for about seven years and had reached the rank of lieutenant, which he holds to this day. He was a night shift supervisor at that time. Shortly after arriving home at the end of his shift, he got a telephone call from his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Jerry, who was visiting her family in Georgia. "She said she couldn't get a hold of Jerry, and she was worried about him," Haney said. "She asked me to go to his house out in the country and check on him." When Haney arrived at his brother's house, he found him dead on his front porch from an apparent shotgun blast. As the case evolved, it turned out that Judy Haney, Jerry Haney's wife, had hired her brother-in-law, Jerry Paul Henderson, to murder her husband. Henderson and Judy Haney were arrested and charged with capital murder almost four years later, in September 1987. "Henderson went to trial in May 1989," Haney said. He was subsequently convicted and the jury recommended a death sentence by a vote of 11 to 1. The fact that Jerry Haney was killed pursuant to a "murder-for-hire" agreement provided the underlying basis for a capital charge and provided the aggravating circumstance that led the jury to vote in favor of death over life in prison without parole. Judy Haney was tried nine months later, with similar results, although her sentence was later commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole. Henderson remains on death row, nearing the end of his appeal process after 15 years. There are 196 Alabamians on death row awaiting execution, according to the Death Row U.S.A. Web site. Of those, 102 (52 percent) are white, 91 are black, two are Latino and one is Asian. Although blacks represent a minority of the overall number of Alabamians awaiting execution, their numbers are still disproportionate to their percentage of the overall population, by 46 percent to 26 percent, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Three of Alabama's death row inmates are women (two black, one white), and 15 of the state's death row inmates were less than 18 years old when they committed the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. There are now 22 death row inmates from The Daily Home's coverage area, eight from St. Clair County and 14 from Talladega County. All of them are men, all were adults when they committed their crimes. Eight of these local inmates are black, including one from St. Clair and seven from Talladega. One, from St. Clair County, is a Latino, according to the Web site. The Talladega death row inmates are, in ascending order by date of conviction, John Russell "Cody" Calhoun, William A. "Corky" Snider, Robert Sean Ingram, Anthony Boyd, James Charles Lawhorn, Larry Donald George, Derrick Anthony DeBruce, Charles Lee Burton, William Earnest Kuenzel, Charles Randall Stewart, Henderson, Daniel L. Siebert and John W. Peoples Jr. The 14th defendant, Shep Wilson Jr., was sentenced to death in Talladega County for the 1986 kidnapping, rape and strangulation death of a Sylacauga convenience store clerk, but was awarded a new trial by an appeal court based on a technicality. No new trial date has been set. The most recent death sentence handed down in The Daily Home's coverage area is that of Calhoun, handed down in September 2000. At that time, Calhoun was convicted of the murder of Tracy Lee Phillips on May 8, 1998. According to the testimony of his widow, Lauretta Watts Phillips Calandros, Calhoun broke into their home on Coffee Street, shot Phillips in the head in full view of Calandros, her daughter, and a friend, then repeatedly raped and sodomized Calandros. The St. Clair inmates, according to District Attorney Van Davis, are Harvey Lee Windsor, Colon Lavonne Guthrie, Freddie Woods, David Davis, Ricky Dale Adkins, Marcus Williams, Mark Allen Jenkins and Mario Centobie. Centobie was the most recently sentenced of the St. Clair inmates. In a trial in Elmore County in 1999, Centobie was convicted of the murder of Moody police officer Keith Turner after escaping from a state prison in Mississippi. Centobie also shot a sheriff's deputy in Tuscaloosa County during the same spree, but the other officer was not killed. The Alabamastate Legislature passed a series of acts reinstating capital punishment in 1981. The first capital case to be tried in Talladega County after that was Peoples. The trial lasted for more than a week, and was the first capital case presided over by Circuit Judge Jerry Fielding. Peoples, who beat three members of a Pell City family, including a 10-year-old boy, to death with a rifle butt, remains on death row. According to Talladega County District Attorney Steve Giddens, who prosecuted the cases against Calhoun and Snyder, said this is not at all unusual. Death penalty cases in Alabama average about 12 to 15 years between sentencing and execution, and 20 years between is not unheard of. Jerry Paul Henderson's case never became a popular cause. In fact, he is more or less the average Alabama death row inmate. He is white, male, and was an adult at the time he committed his crime. Although he has only a third-grade education, he is not mentally retarded. Even the attorney currently handling his appeal agrees there is no question he committed his crime. The 15 years of appeals have been based more on alleged conflicts of interest and ineffectiveness of Henderson's previous defense counsel and mitigating circumstances that were not brought out at the sentencing phase of his trial. Justin Ravitz, a former Michigan judge who is handling Henderson's appeal, said last week that he has filed a request for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments on Henderson's case. "The question is, will we get a response before the Supreme Court goes into their summer recess, and that's hard to predict," Ravitz said. "If we lose there, then it's curtains. Jerry (Henderson) gets executed." Haney said the state Attorney General's Office, which handles capital appeals, had told him they might be filing for an execution date as early as this fall. He plans to attend the execution. "Jerry was 33 when he was murdered," Haney said, "four years older than me, with two children. He worked in the textile industry for 16 years, and he raised horses. We were very close. I was probably closer with him than with any other member of my family. We did lots of different things together. There's really no way to explain how it feels. When you lose a sibling like that, especially as close as we were, there is a void there that can never be filled. "I went through all of the emotions you can imagine in a situation like that," Haney continued. "I went through denial, but reality hits you pretty quick when you see your brother dead on his own front porch. I went through a hatred phase that lasted for a few months. But I realized that was just tearing my insides out, especially through the long, drawn out process of just getting to trial. You just have to let go of that, let it out after a while." Although the delay is undeniably frustrating, "I don't hate the system," Haney said. "I've worked for the system for 28 years. I believe in due process, but when you know in your heart and mind, when the person even admits that he did it, 15 years is just too long. I have no problem with appeals, and I believe these cases should be reviewed by the state. I know how hard a time I would have if I sent an innocent person to the penitentiary or the death chamber." Haney said he has also learned a great deal of compassion through his family's ordeal. "It's taught me to do my job better. I would hate to see anyone go through what my family and I have been through, and as long as I'm wearing this badge, I will do whatever I can for crime victims and their survivors. And I know there is really nothing anyone can say to someone who is going through that kind of trauma, but I do believe I am more compassionate for having been through it myself." (source: The Daily Home) ============================= MICHIGAN: Training couldn't save cop Sterling Heights identifies suspect in slaying of officer, renews push for death penalty When he joined Detroit police in the summer of 2000, Mark Sawyers gave up his ambition to be a teacher. After graduating from Hazel Park High School, he entered Wayne State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in education. In September 2000, however, Sawyers, 30, graduated from the Detroit Police Academy and was assigned to the city's west-side Second Precinct. He served there until he joined the Sterling Heights Police Department seven months ago. His training, however, would not have saved his life. Sawyers died about 7:30 a.m. Saturday at St. John Macomb Hospital after being shot Friday night. He was filing a report into a computer in his cruiser while parked lot near Van Dyke and 15 Mile when he was shot. Sterling Heights police identified Timothy William Berner, 33, as the suspect. A witness said she saw a man lean into the police car through a broken passenger side window before driving off in a car police said was a red 1994 Camaro. Police said Sawyers' service weapon was missing. Maria Ruvolo, who has lived near the Berner family on Brougham Drive for 25 years, said she was surprised to hear that Berner was a suspect in the killing of Sawyers. "He seemed like a good kid. He never struck me as the kind of kid who would get into this kind of trouble," she said. In the wake of Sawyers' killing, police are renewing the push for capital punishment for those who kill members of law enforcement. "Detroit went through this recently with a cry for capital punishment," said a somber Sterling Heights Police Chief Barnett Jones. "We are going to make the same cry again. ... We need capital punishment." Detroit Police Officers Matthew Bowens and Jennifer Fettig were fatally shot in the line of duty Feb. 16, touching off similar demands for capital punishment for police killers. The issue however failed to pass a vote of the state House earlier this year. Officer Sawyers was married and the father of a young child. Police are searching for Berner and the 1994 cherry-red Chevy Camaro with the license plate YSR497. Berner has never served time in prison in Michigan, according the Michigan Department of Corrections records. Police declined to expand on his criminal history. In his brief time with the police force, Sawyers had already made a lasting impression on his co-workers, Sterling Heights Lt. Mike Reese said. Officers enjoyed working with Sawyers, who was energetic and personable, Reese said. "We are going to get through this. ... That's what we do," Chief Barnett said. (source: The Detroit News) ======================== MARYLAND: For rabbi, stance on execution evolves Pleas from Oken's parents reversed his support for capital punishment It was a speech like no other that Rabbi Rex Perlmeter had given -- delivered inside a Baptist church and pressing the argument that the death penalty is "killing the soul of this country." When he finished his talk last week at Mount Hope Baptist Church in Northwest Baltimore, the rabbi walked over to the parents of Steven Oken -- a death-row inmate who could be executed as early as next week -- and wrapped his arms around them. Then Perlmeter, senior rabbi of the 1,500-family Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, kissed Davida Oken and whispered in her ear, asking her forgiveness for ignoring her pleas for help on behalf of her son years ago. "It meant a lot to me," she says. "For so many years, I felt very angry and upset that the rabbis wouldn't put out their hands to help." Steven Oken is believed to be one of only a few Jewish inmates on any death row in the country. And his parents say they have long looked for support from a Jewish community that remains divided in its views on capital punishment. When he was put on Maryland's death row in 1991, Oken's mother sought to connect him with the Aleph Institute, which provides religious material to Jewish prisoners across the country. A member of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation for the previous 27 years, Davida Oken says she asked the synagogue for records on her son -- who had his bar mitzvah there -- to send to Aleph. But she says that she was so upset with the response to her request that she withdrew her family's membership. For years, Davida Oken says, the congregation leaders didn't lend her family emotional support or join her family's fight to save her son's life. But when Rex Perlmeter arrived in 1996 as the new senior rabbi, the family wrote to him, thinking they would try again for help. Perlmeter, now 45, says he remembers feeling uncomfortable when he received the Okens' request. He supported use of the death penalty against the most heinous of criminals. And he thought that Steven Oken, convicted of sexually assaulting and killing three women in 1987, fell into that category. "I was very ambivalent," he says now. "I felt sadness for their family, but I also felt that justice was being served." He passed the note to another rabbi, but that, he says, marked the beginning of his evolution from favoring capital punishment in some cases to opposing it altogether. "Over the years, thinking about how I had failed the Okens, sensing their pain, knowing that they could not get the help they asked for from their community, that influenced me," Perlmeter says. As Perlmeter was examining his views, Davida Oken says she found help in other places. The Jewish Big Brother/Big Sister League of Baltimore sent someone to visit Oken every month and delivered kosher foods so he could observe Passover, says Mark Levine, institutional coordinator for the league. "We want to make sure that the inmate is not forgotten," he says. "And we do what we can to maintain their connection to the religion." It's a religion that -- unlike Catholicism, for example, which has taken a strong stance against capital punishment -- includes varied views of state executions. The Reform Jewish Movement, which includes Baltimore Hebrew and 900 other synagogues, has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959. But the Baltimore Jewish Council, a government and community relations agency for the area's synagogues and rabbinical organizations, does not oppose capital punishment. "Judaism does not equate state-sponsored execution with murder, and we would not support an outright ban on capital punishment," says David Conn, director of government relations and public policy for the council. He adds that the council would like to see various reforms to make the death penalty more equitably applied. "Our religion values life so highly that we insist on a criminal justice system that practices the utmost caution in carrying out the ultimate punishment," he says. Even within synagogues, members and clergy have differing opinions: Perlmeter had long supported capital punishment, but another rabbi in the congregation, Robert Nosanchuk, has always opposed it. Because of his views, Nosanchuk has been counseling the Oken family for about two years. Disparate opinions "Jewish tradition cautions that more death does not equal fairness and justice," Nosanchuk says. But he adds that Jewish texts offer disparate opinions about capital punishment, and that the Torah also says that when one is guilty of murder, one should be put to death. It was that passage, Perlmeter says, combined with U.S. law's approval of the death penalty and society's -- and his own -- embrace of vengeance that were at the root of his belief in capital punishment. He traces his feelings toward vengeance to a miniseries on the Holocaust that he saw as a boy. He recalls that the miniseries followed a fictitious Jewish family through World War II. All but one member of the family was killed by Nazis, and, in one scene, the surviving relative plunges an ax into a guard at a concentration camp as he escapes it. "In that one moment, I wanted with all of my being to be the one planting the ax into the back of that monster," he says. "And that's when I recognized within myself my own capacity for vengeance. It fed into my support for the death penalty." About the time he received the note from the Okens, Perlmeter says, he began thinking deeply about the reasons behind capital punishment. A year ago, he says, he confronted what he calls the ultimate paradigm for any Jew considering the death penalty: Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, who was in charge of the "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jews, is the only man to ever face capital punishment in Israel. "As long as I believed that it was an appropriate punishment for him, how could I feel that it was inappropriate for everyone else?" Perlmeter says. But he says he came to realize that "his death did not effectively avenge the death of 6 million Jews." Three murders Steven Oken was sentenced to die for the 1987 murder of White Marsh newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin, whom he raped and shot before sexually assaulting and killing his sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt, and fleeing to Maine. There, he raped and fatally shot motel clerk Lori Ward. Still bloody, he was captured by Maine authorities a day later. Judge John G. Turnbull II signed a warrant in April for Oken's execution. Oken's lawyer, Fred Warren Bennett, has asked the Maryland Court of Appeals to delay the execution, set for the week of June 14. Yesterday, the Okens were among the 40 death-penalty opponents who gathered in an East Baltimore park to protest the impending execution. They marched a half-mile in the rain to Supermax, the maximum-security prison on Madison Street where Oken is being held. Davida Oken thanked the protesters -- a mix of college students, city residents and activists from the Washington, D.C., area -- for showing support for her son yesterday. The execution is scheduled to take place in the hospital of the Metropolitan Transition Center across from Supermax. Earlier yesterday, members of the news media were shown the gray-walled room that was last used for an execution in 1998. When Perlmeter spoke before the death penalty opponents gathered last week at Mount Hope Baptist, he said it was not up to him to forgive Oken for his crimes. "That is between Steven, his victims' families, and his God," he said. About the passage in the Torah that calls for death when one has killed another, Perlmeter said: "God knew we needed the threat of death, but God knows we should have outgrown it by now." Listening from a pew in the rear of the church, David and Davida Oken, who were sitting with Rabbi Nosanchuk, nodded slightly and held hands. (source: Baltimore Sun)
