death penalty news June 14, 2004
NEBRASKA: Views Of Judge On Death Penalty Again Questioned The man who prosecuted those responsible for a murderous 2002 Norfolk bank robbery wants to make sure a judge from North Platte can be impartial about the death penalty. Prosecutor Joe Smith is concerned about previous reports that District Judge Donald E. Rowlands of North Platte has acknowledged being morally opposed to capital punishment. Rowlands previously said that personal feelings wouldn't influence him in applying the law impartially. Rowlands is one of three judges that will determine the sentence of Erick Vela, convicted on five counts of first-degree murder. "If the judge has a conflict or if statements made by him or attributed to him would cause the public in any way to suspect the impartiality of any of the proceedings, then I would like him to" recuse himself from the case, said Smith, the Madison County attorney. Questions were raised about Rowlands' impartiality in 2000 when he was chosen for a three-judge panel to re-sentence former death-row inmate Randolph Reeves. In that case, Lancaster County Attorney Gary Lacey presented an affidavit by Lincoln County Judge Kent Turnbull, which said Rowlands told him on several occasions while Turnbull was a prosecutor that he opposed the death penalty. "I can recall on three or four occasions Judge Rowlands specifically stated that he could never vote for the death penalty, especially if he didn't know what the opinions of the other two judges on the panel were," Turnbull said in the affidavit. In a pre-sentencing hearing in the Reeves case, Rowlands said his Catholic faith had fostered a belief that the death penalty was wrong, but he had kept his judicial oath to apply Nebraska law fairly and impartially, including in first-degree murder sentencings. The issue of Rowlands' feelings about the death penalty wasn't resolved in the Reeves case because Lacey decided against seeking the death penalty. Smith said he does not want any questions to remain after Vela is sentenced. Vela's sentencing by the three-judge panel has been delayed so he can hire an expert to determine if he is mentally retarded. Under state law, retarded people cannot be put to death. Rowlands will join district judges Patrick Rogers of Madison County and Sandra Dougherty of Douglas County on the panel. (source: Nebraska StatePaper) ======================== MARYLAND: Years of anguish and frustration on the long, long road to justice PEOPLE HAVE asked me whether I am excited about the impending execution of Steven Oken. I tell them no, that I wish I weren't in this situation. If it were a perfect world, my older sister, Dawn, still would be alive and raising a family. But those dreams were cruelly shattered by her brutal rape and murder 17 years ago. Since then, I have vowed to see justice for these crimes. We're a hard-working, blue-collar family. Both my father and I served our country in uniform, and we've always been respectful toward our neighbors, our laws and our church. But after the loss of Dawn, we have felt that this loyalty was turned against us when we needed it most. Recently, elders of the Catholic Church aligned themselves in favor of sparing Mr. Oken, who murdered not only my sister but also Patricia Hirt and Lori Ward. Also, some elected officials imposed their personal ideologies against the death penalty to put roadblocks in our path, prolonging appeals and forcing us to visit Annapolis annually to plead against moratoriums that would further delay this case. It is easy to express a detached philosophical perspective against the death penalty. Accused and convicted murderers are granted considerable media coverage, while victims are reduced to a single still photograph and a body-bag shot on the evening news. If they could just see the crime scenes and absorb the graphic details of how savagely victims were murdered, I suspect opinions might change. There is one thing that the opponents of the death penalty never want you to see, and that is the face of the victim. They are happy with having them labeled as just a statistic or a faceless number. The fact is, they were all people; all had lives, loved ones and futures. Their memories are worth more than the lives of their executioners. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Hirt's family. They are very private and close-knit, and they also want to see nothing more than justice served through the execution of Mr. Oken. Her family wants it known that she was not a rape victim. Death penalty opponents have made boilerplate claims attacking our judicial system. These include claims that it is applied unfairly, that innocents are endangered and that it is too time consuming and expensive. Yet these snazzy sound bites are little more than static when one tunes in to the numbers. Frankly, some state's attorneys in areas with lots of murders never seek the death penalty. This discretion is tailored to the whims of the citizens. Why should their view be forced on areas such as Baltimore County, where citizens want to see the law enforced to its utmost? The thorough litigation involved in death penalty cases assures us that the guilty will be punished, but for one near-miss. That was the Maryland case of Kirk Bloodsworth, who was convicted of murder, sexual assault and rape in March 1985 in the brutal killing of a 9-year-old girl and sentenced to death. DNA testing exonerated him in 1993. Today, DNA tests would ensure that such a case never would go to trial. The occasional exoneration from death row shows the system works. There should not be a dollar or time limit placed on the pursuit of justice. All we have sought is for the sentence of the court to be carried out. This quest to pursue this case through the years is similar to the efforts to bring war criminals responsible for the Holocaust to justice decades after the fact. Time may fade memories, but not the losses. Finally, although I disagree with her intent, I can understand the turmoil facing Davida Oken, the killer's mother. It is most unfortunate that her son chose this path. If it were a perfect world, perhaps he would have gone a different way. Our lives then never would have become entangled in anguish. Fred A. Romano is the brother of Dawn Marie Garvin, one of Steven Oken's murder victims. He lives in Belcamp. (source: Op-Ed, Baltimore Sun) ************************************************** Trying to aid son before execution - Oken's parents attend rallies, speak to him daily as sentence draws near Steven Oken and his mother talk on the phone nearly every day, and she visits him every week. But in 17 years of conversations about such varied topics as local sports teams and world events, there's a topic that Davida Oken says she hasn't ever broached: the crimes that put her son on death row. "Why bring it up?" she asks. "I have never asked him for details, for an explanation. What good would it do?" Steven Oken, the son of a pharmacist, was 25 years old and married in November 1987 when he raped and killed three women. Now, his mother says, there's another subject that she avoids when talking to her son: his scheduled execution, which could take place as soon as today. "It's hard to make conversation without him getting upset or me getting upset," Davida Oken says. "There will be plenty of time for me to be upset later. Right now I try to keep him laughing and smiling." As the scheduled execution has neared, Davida Oken and her husband, David, have participated in several anti-death-penalty rallies. Attorneys for Steven Oken are working to delay his execution to allow a legal challenge to Maryland's lethal-injection process. They were preparing an appeal to the Supreme Court, and a hearing is scheduled for this afternoon in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt. Steven Howard Oken was adopted at birth and raised in a stable, upper-middle-class family in Randallstown, his mother says. He has a younger brother and a sister, both of whom have successful careers. Davida Oken says the siblings remain in contact with their brother. Oken's bar mitzvah was Jan. 25, 1975, at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, his mother says, and though the family was never strictly observant, the children spent High Holy Days at the synagogue, where their parents were members for 27 years before withdrawing their membership. He played many sports and was on the lacrosse team at Randallstown High School, Davida Oken says. He studied health science for three years at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, but he withdrew a few credits shy of a degree, she says. Although Oken had a conventional childhood, Davida Oken says, he reacted badly when his parents told him at age 10 or 11 that he had been adopted. At Oken's sentencing hearing in 1991, she testified that he "screamed in disbelief for two hours." As he grew into a young man, Oken began working alongside his father at his business, Oken's Rexall Pharmacy, across from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He married a young woman named Phyllis Hirt, whom his mother says he had met through the pharmacy. (She divorced him after his arrest.) Davida Oken says signs of trouble emerged in 1986, when her son started "running away from a lot of things. He used drugs -- cocaine, marijuana, prescription medications -- and abused alcohol." She says she noticed a physical change in her son and that she and his father demanded that he seek help if he wanted to continue to work as a pharmacy technician. Oken saw a psychiatrist off and on for about a year, she says. But in the fall of 1987, he began getting into trouble with the law, according to police and court records. He was arrested Oct. 13 and charged with beating up a motel clerk in East Baltimore. A week later, Oken attacked a prostitute in a parking lot at the Inner Harbor after he refused to pay her in advance, police said after his arrest in the three women's murders. The night of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken posed alternately as a stranded motorist and a doctor as he sought entrance to apartments in White Marsh, court testimony would show. His wife was in California on a business trip. According to the testimony, he knocked on Dawn Marie Garvin's door. Her husband of four months had left that evening to return to his naval base in Virginia. She let him inside. Oken raped Garvin and sexually assaulted her with a condiment bottle, and then he shot her twice in the head. As Baltimore County police searched for Garvin's killer, Oken attended a Nov. 9 hearing in the motel clerk's assault. He received probation before judgment and was ordered to seek alcohol treatment. He was arrested Nov. 14 just south of White Marsh and charged with driving while intoxicated. The next day, Patricia Hirt disappeared. Police found her nude body in a ditch along White Marsh Boulevard on Nov. 16. They searched Steven Oken's apartment and found evidence that he had sexually assaulted and killed Hirt, his wife's older sister. There they also found ballistic evidence linking him to Garvin's death. That day, driving Hirt's white Ford Mustang, Oken made it to Kittery, Maine, where he sexually assaulted and fatally shot motel clerk Lori Ward. He checked into another motel, and that's where Maine police arrested him Nov. 17. From the moment Oken was arrested, his parents have been unconditionally supportive, paying expensive legal and psychiatric bills and spending as much time with him as they can. "He is my son," his father told The Evening Sun in 1989. "It's horrible. We close our eyes sometimes and hope it will all go away, but then you realize that it happened and is a fact and you have to deal with it." Attempts to obtain an interview with Steven Oken were unsuccessful. In a 2001 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, he talked of his drug and alcohol abuse, personal problems and depression, and said, "I can't point to one thing that made this happen. ... I just didn't want to deal with everything." "There are no excuses for what I've done," he told the Jewish Times. "And I can't begin to imagine the suffering, the cost of what I've done to these people. It's a terrible thing I did." He has become more religious during his time behind bars, his mother says. He practices Orthodox Judaism, attaching tefillin, boxes containing biblical verse, to his body, she says. Oken is 42 now. His 5-foot, 10-inch frame is heavier than it used to be, his mother says, and his hair is gray. Because of prison rules, the Okens say, they have not been able to touch their son in more than a decade, ever since he was moved to the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, better known as Supermax. Still, Steven Oken is allowed to call his parents, sometimes more than once a day. In her 30- to 45-minute visits, Davida Oken says, the two talk about their family. They talk about auto racing, the Ravens and the Orioles. Davida Oken says she has seen her son every day since June 1, when he was moved to solitary confinement in preparation for his scheduled execution. She says she is running out of ways to make small talk. (source: Baltimore Sun)
