Jan. 17
VIRGINIA:
Activists seek end to juvenile death penalty
Brian Bills says the state recognizes that at 16, he's not responsible
enough to vote or drink alcohol--yet he's old enough to be eligible for
the death penalty.
"I think there's a fundamental flaw in this logic and it needs to be
addressed," the Charlottesville High School sophomore said Monday at a
news conference to promote legislation ending capital punishment for
juveniles.
The House Courts of Justice Committee killed similar legislation in 2004.
Bills have been filed in both the House and Senate this year, and the
Virginia Alliance to Abolish the Juvenile Death Penalty is planning a
vigorous lobbying effort. The new coalition consists of 32 religious,
civil liberties, mental health and child-advocacy organizations.
The capital murder statute now allows the death penalty for offenders who
are at least 16 at the time of the crime. The legislation would raise the
minimum age to 18.
Activists are making their appeal to delegates looking to bolster their
law-and-order credentials for their fall campaigns. All 100 House seats
are up for election in November.
"The elections don't play a part with our schedule," said Jack
Payden-Travers, executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the
Death Penalty. "It's time to end the practice regardless of who's running
for what office."
Payden-Travers said a jury's refusal to order the death penalty for
teenage sniper Lee Boyd Malvo reflects "evolving standards of decency"
that warrant abolishing capital punishment for juveniles.
But Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax and chairman of the Courts of Justice
criminal law subcommittee, said the Malvo verdict proves the current
system works. He said the jury determined Malvo was less culpable than his
adult accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, because of Muhammad's influence and
the teenager's own troubled childhood.
Activists also say recent studies show that the portion of the brain that
governs impulse control is not fully developed in minors, which means they
should not be held as accountable as adults.
"Anyone who has teenage children knows on a daily basis how bad their
judgment can be," said Del. Albert C. Eisenberg, D-Arlington, who along
with Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr., R-Fairfax, is sponsoring the House
bill.
Albo said a defense attorney can use the clinical evidence to try to keep
a juvenile client from being certified as an adult. Certification for
adult court is "a very, very involved process" reserved for the worst
juvenile criminals, he said.
Payden-Travers said Virginia has executed 21 juvenile offenders - 19 of
them black--and 1 is currently on death row. Only Texas has executed more
juveniles than Virginia, he said.
Amnesty International has documented executions of juvenile offenders in
only four countries since 2000--9 in the United States and 1 each in
Pakistan, Iran and the Congo.
(source: Associated Press)
INDIANA:
County will find money for death penalty, says commissioner
A Delaware County commissioner says he'd would work to find the money
needed to seek the death penalty against a man charged with killing a
convenience store clerk during a robbery.
The county's prosecutor is already considering whether to seek the
execution of Ronald Hatfield for the December shooting.
Police officers arrested Hatfield about 10 minutes after 59-year-old
Carolyn Goodwin was gunned down during the robbery at Ricker's Convenience
Store on the Muncie's south side.
Reed was paroled last August after 17 years in prison on armed robbery,
assaulting police and illegal weapons convictions.
(source: WTHR News)
*********************************
TRANSCRIPT: Wallace's first letter to the Courier & Press
In May 2004, Indiana death -row inmate Donald Ray Wallace Jr. began
writing a series of letters to the Evansville Courier & Press. He wrote to
respond to an article he'd read in the Courier & Press on a hunger strike
he'd led to protest conditions on death row. He'd also read letters to the
editor, sent in response to the hunger strike story, and he was upset by
what he read.
The Evansville native was sent to death row in 1982, after he was
convicted of killing an Evansville family, Teresa and Patrick Gilligan and
their children, Lisa and Gregory, on Jan. 14, 1980. In this, his first
letter, he argues that the Evansville community has a distorted image of
who he is, and invites the Courier & Press to rectify that. Here is an
excerpt from that letter:
May 13, 2004,
Dear Maureen,
(T)here is no getting around the fact that my case strikes at the heart of
things by being against home, family and children.
So, 24 years later, it still provokes outrage. It stands as a reminder
that what we cherish most is vulnerable. I've come to understand many
things in this past quarter century. I am so far removed from that
confused, 22-year-old dopefiend that Evansville came to know in 1980, that
day and night have less contrast. If you sit in a cell long enough, you
eventually have to face yourself. And when that occurs one either goes mad
and gets worse or one begins to stumble toward the light. There will never
be forgiveness. You know that. But what can you do? You're alive; you live
and grow ... and suffer your karma. You would not believe all the things
I've studied and learned. The richest treasures of human thought -
philosophy, wisdom, religion, ethics - are mine. And for all that, I can
never be redeemed in the eyes of others. I am infinitely thankful that I
will die with my eyes open.
So what has any of this to do with you or the Courier & Press? Because
I've been silent for the great part of these 24 years, the public doesn't
know much about me at all. What am I? Good? Evil? Mad? Sane? Wise?
Idiotic? Cogent? Incoherent? If you were to have a conversation with me
without knowing who I was, what impression would you come away with? Is
the answer to that question newsworthy? I offer this: I will exchange as
many letters with you ... as are necessary to develop a complete portrait
of my mind. What does the world look like through my eyes? Is there
something revealing in that vantage such that it would confirm what people
imagine about me? Or does it confuse the issue? Am I as bad as people
think? Or not? ... It's easy to prop me up as a target, or as an Azazel
upon whom you can project your sins and drive out into the wilderness.
Most people would prefer that, and (some) will rage against your giving me
a "platform." The question is, how serious about journalism is the Courier
& Press? Does it owe the public some attempt at ferreting out the five W's
of Donald RayWallace? Or does it want to please the mob?... Are you
interested?
Sincerely, D.W.
(My fellow cons have called me by my initials since I first entered our
adult maximum security prisons in 1975 ... but call me whatever is most
comfortable for you.)
******************************
"An obvious sociopath"----His "homicidal tendencies" diagnosed in teen
years
By the time Donald Ray Wallace Jr. was a teenager, he was already a killer
in the making.
It took him years on Indianas death row, awaiting execution, to figure
that out, he writes.
But a battery of experts knew it long before he killed 2 little children
and their parents 25 years ago.
One of those experts even said so - warning Wallace had "homicidal
tendencies" and was "capable of killing." That opinion, contained in a
psychological evaluation for the Indiana Parole Board, came just before
Wallace was released from a state prison on a drug conviction in November
1979.
Two months later, he was arrested for the murders of Theresa and Patrick
Gilligan and their children, Lisa, 5, and Gregory, 4.
What those experts knew is one reason why Wallace doesnt think he should
be executed. If all those experts knew he was a tragedy in the making, why
didnt they do more to stop him?
Its one of the questions posed by the convicted killer in a series of
letters he has sent to the Evansville Courier & Press in recent months.
Facing death, he says, he now wants to talk about his life. His challenge
to our readers is to find the answer to this question: "What does the
world look like through my eyes?"
An angry childhood
It looks frightening.
In his letters, Wallace offers details of an angry childhood, triggered by
the breakup of his teenage parents marriage when he was 4, and his blind
determination to reunite them.
"At 5, I had one mission in life: To reunite my parents," he writes. "(I)t
seemed the only way to regain the happiness that had been so brief and
fugitive in my short life."
He thought he could accomplish it by turning nasty. Reprimands only
escalated his rotten behavior. "Punishment," he writes, "rolled off my
back like water off a duck."
Churned in with anger was guilt, and he blamed himself for another early
childhood traumatic event: his grandfathers suicide.
"One day I was playing with my grandfathers double-barrel, 12-gauge
shotgun on the back porch, pretending to shoot things," Wallace writes.
"My grandmother said (to Wallaces grandfather), go take that away from
Donnie I dont want him playing with that gun. My grandpa was almost
apologetic about spoiling my fun. He put the shotgun in the trunk of his
car. Later he left. He never came home."
Wallace knew who was to blame: "I began to feel like I was poisonous."
His mother, unable to control or discipline him, sent him to live with his
father, who Wallace says didnt really want him. Eventually, his mother
left town, leaving him abandoned.
He had few friends. He became a troublemaker at school.
"I was just plain bad," he writes. "I didnt know why. But it was confirmed
in every way. It was like a grain of sand in an oyster, slowly gathering
nacre until a part of me was aloof and detached and hardening like a dark
pearl."
He writes of becoming "lawless" by the time he was 11, daring friends to
spend nights in a neighborhood cemetery, later losing those friends when
parents began keeping their children away from him.
"Pretty soon, I had only outlaw kids for company. And graveyards were no
longer the dare, but girls, drugs and petty theft instead. I became good
at all 3."
He was expelled from school in the eighth grade. Before he turned 12, he
was living at the Evansville Psychiatric Childrens Center. It was the
first of a handful of institutions in which he would live for the next 10
years.
By 13, he was a criminal. Arrested for vandalism, he was sent to the
Father Gibault School for Boys, a reform school in Terre Haute, Ind.
There, Wallace was first diagnosed as a "sociopath." The term would be
used repeatedly in Wallaces adolescence.
Distanced from family
Wallace hated every institution because it distanced him further from his
family, he writes, and simply reinforced his feelings that he was "toxic."
He ran away from the Gibault school, got arrested in Chicago (where at 14,
he convinced Cook County jail officials he was 18), and then was sent to
the Indiana Boys School, a medium- and maximum-security prison for
juveniles, now known as the Plainfield Juvenile Correctional Facility.
"They should call it the crime school," Wallace writes of the facility.
"Because thats where I learned to hot-wire cars, break-and-enter, rob and
so forth."
Its also where, he says, he learned he had to "get tough."
"Id never been violent before," he writes. "When I was young, I was easily
pushed around. But Boys School taught me that if you could generate
insanely overreactive violence, then no one would mess with you. So I
learned to portray violence. Thats how I thought of it. It was just an act
meant to fool people into not messing with me. Except that you had to
actually be violent in order to give a convincing performance."
And it was only a performance, Wallace says.
"Its an odd and dubious distinction, but I had no hatred or malice in me.
I learned that fear in such places is trump. There was rarely any middle
ground: You either instilled fear or you lived in it. So I learned to
instill it. But it was a device, not a natural tendency."
By 14, he had escaped from the Boys School, joined up with an accomplice
and got a gun.
"It was kind of scary doing robberies at first," he writes. "But as with
all things that scare you beforehand, you always come through better than
you thought you would."
Became a survivor
Wallace, who has a near-genius IQ of 130, says he knew he was smarter than
the adults around him. After one of his escapes from Boys School, he
traveled the country on his own.
"You could drop me in any city and I could thrive..." he writes.
"(I)magine being on your own like that, of surviving and thriving where
many adults could not, and then to be captured and treated once again as
if you were a child by adults who were not independently as capable as
you. Galling."
His education, he says, came from the streets.
"The slicker and/or bolder a criminal you are, the more you are respected.
So I was disconnected from normal society, feeling no kinship with
ordinary people. And among my people - lawless runaways and escapees,
street kids - I got positive reinforcement aplenty for being a skillful
and adaptive thief."
He couldnt stay out of trouble, and after each arrest, his punishment
escalated. He went from the medium-security Indiana Boys School to the
maximum security wing of the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Center.
He wanted it that way, he writes.
"If I was going to be a con, let me go to a real prison," he writes.
He was mean on the outside, but still just a boy on the inside, he writes.
So he steeled himself for being a "smooth-faced 17-year-old in prison by
focusing on a little mantra."
The mantra, he writes, was this: "Dont try to talk your way out, dont
think, just strike fast and hard and dont stop until you win or die.
"I would pace the floor of my jail cell day and night chanting the mantra.
Id envision every possible situation that might arise so Id not be too
surprised to react. Over and over I chanted that mantra. ? Until it began
to chant itself through me. I became like a coiled spring. I was locked
and loaded 24/7."
At Pendleton, he assaulted 2 inmates, stabbing one in the chest and
cutting the throat of the 2nd. The latter had threatened to rape him, he
writes.
The mantra was now a part of him. When an inmate nicknamed "Cloudy"
threatened him, heres how he responded: "I had 18 inches of 3/4 inch steel
plumbing pipe hidden in the cell house. ... I bashed him in the head with
it, then wore him out with the blows to the limbs and body."
No one, he writes, "messed with me after that."
He couldnt turn the mantra off when he was released, once again, from
prison. He was 19.
By 1977, he was back in his hometown and back to an old trick, he writes.
Posing as a doctor, hed call in prescriptions for potent painkillers, and
then send a girlfriend to get the drugs. She got caught. And Wallace,
waiting in the pharmacys parking lot, was sent back to prison.
"And that insane mantra played continuously, looping forever: Dont think,
dont talk, strike fast and hard and dont stop till you win or die."
On Nov. 14, 1979, exactly two months before the Gilligans murders, Wallace
was out again.
Bright, manipulative
Much of what Wallace writes about his childhood and adolescence is
mirrored in public records that tell a chilling story of a bright and
manipulative child who felt abandoned and betrayed, responding with
escalating acts of violence.
He was first evaluated by a psychiatrist while in 3rd grade. By 15, he
twice attempted suicide. By 17, he had twice been diagnosed as a
sociopath.
His childhood and the teenage years spent in institutions are described in
a "mitigation report" filed with the Indiana Supreme Court in 1992 by his
attorneys.
They were asking the court to overturn Wallaces death sentence, arguing
that Wallace was seriously mentally ill when he killed the Gilligans.
He spent his life trying to control situations and always felt rejected,
the attorneys wrote.
"The irony is, if Don is executed, the state of Indiana will have imposed
the final and ultimate rejection and abandonment of him that society can
inflict," they wrote.
(source for both: The Courier & Press)
