March 7 INDIANA----impending execution Vigil will focus on victims before killer's execution A woman whose sister was murdered by Donald Ray Wallace plans a prayer vigil on the eve of his execution -- not for Wallace, but for his victims. Wallace, 47, is scheduled to be executed by injection early Thursday at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City for the 1980 murders of Theresa and Patrick Gilligan and their children Lisa, 5, and Gregory, 4. Diana Harrington, Theresa Gilligan's sister, said they will be the focus of the "Time for Healing" prayer service scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday. The vigil will be at St. Theresa Catholic Church, where Theresa and Patrick Gilligan were married and where their funerals were held in January 1980. "It'll feel so good to talk about them. There will be a flood of memories, but I think it will be so comforting." Wallace was convicted of the murders in 1982. Wallace -- who had been released from prison just two months earlier -- bound the victims and shot them to death after they surprised him while he burglarized their home. Wallace claimed for years that an accomplice had committed the murders, but later admitted in letters to Harrington that he had killed the family. He has exhausted all his appeals after 23 years on death row and has not sought clemency. (source: Indianapolis Star) OHIO----impending execution Ohio execution may proceed A federal appeals court lifted a stay of execution Sunday for an Ohio prisoner. William H. Smith claimed an abnormality in his brain may have affected his behavior when he raped and killed a woman in 1987. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the lethal injection of Smith should proceed as scheduled Tuesday. "The execution is moving forward," said Kim Norris, a spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general. Smith's attorney, Jennifer Kinsley, said an appeal would be filed today with the U.S. Supreme Court, but she declined to reveal details. (source: Associated Press) VIRGINIA: Inmates seek words to live by----Thousands of men on death row in the U.S. are looking for pen pals. Jerry T. Jackson may have raped and killed an 88-year-old widow, but he isn't a monster once you get to know him, says his pen pal, Mikhaela Payden-Travers. It's interesting to talk about how different their lives have been, and his problems help put her own in perspective, she says. "He's also really funny," Payden-Travers says. Jackson - or "Terrell" as she knows him because he goes by his middle name - brings more than the usual amount of baggage to a relationship. In August 2001, he broke into the James City County apartment of Ruth Phillips, stole money from her pocketbook, raped her and smothered her to death with a pillow. Now 23, he lives on death row at Sussex I State Prison, pending the outcome of the appeals process, which typically takes about seven years in Virginia. He is among nine death row inmates listed on the Web site of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty who seek pen pals. His profile on the Web site says he was raised Baptist but doesn't have a religious preference, that he speaks English but is trying to learn Spanish and that he writes poems. As for what he seeks in a pen pal, his profile says, "Just someone who is nice and will write me often because that contact with the outside world would be lovely. I would prefer a female because I find that it is easier for me to talk to women." Jackson declined to speak to a reporter for this story. "I'm glad he has a pen pal, but it doesn't take away what he did," says Williamsburg-James City County Commonwealth's Attorney Mike McGinty, who prosecuted Jackson. Dick Phillips, the son of the woman Jackson murdered, says people like Payden-Travers are nave and misguided though probably well intentioned. As of October, 3,471 people were on death row in the U.S, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a D.C.-based non-profit organization. Organizations that post death row pen pal information on their Web sites include the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Bridging the Gap in the United Kingdom and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty in Chicago. There are also commercial Web sites that charge inmates a fee to post their profiles or charge would-be pen pals a fee to get inmates' addresses. "The average period before execution is about seven years; many prisoners have been there for ten or more years," says Bridging the Gap's Web site. "The conditions in which they are held are harsh and dehumanizing. Many are abandoned by their family and friends and have very little, if any, contact with the outside world. Consequently, letters can be a very real lifeline to them." But why would someone want to correspond with a stranger behind bars, let alone on death row? They fall into 2 groups, says Janet I. Warren, a professor of clinical psychiatric medicine and associate director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. One group is motivated by altruism, although even altruists get something out of their charitable acts such as an enhanced appreciation of their own lot in life compared to their less fortunate pen pals, she says. The second group, primarily women, is looking for romance, Warren believes. They find "bad boys" attractive, and a man on death row is nearly as glamorous to them as a movie star. Research shows th at about 25 percent of death row inmates are psychopathic, Warren says, and psychopaths tend to be charmers. For women afraid of intimacy, falling in love with a man behind bars can provide emotional intensity without the mundane frustrations and conflicts involved in real relationships. Warren says she's surprised by the number of women who actually come to believe their death row sweethearts are innocent. William Menza, a retired federal employee in Northern Virginia, began writing death row inmates about 20 years ago after joining Amnesty International and becoming aware of their plight. Many inmates come from dysfunctional families and often don't even know where their family members are, Menza says. Their friends have moved on. Society doesn't care about them; it wants them dead. They're being held in concrete boxes, waiting to be killed, Menza says. "It must be a living hell," he says. "Helping someone in a very bad place gives me a great deal of satisfaction." Payden-Travers is 24 and has a boyfriend on the outside who knows about her friendship with Jackson and is involved in anti-death penalty work himself. Jackson also knows that Payden-Travers has a boyfriend. That helps both her and Jackson maintain some clear limits on their relationship, she says. She and Jackson have never discussed his crime or his legal situation, even though they've exchanged letters about once a week for almost six months, and she's visited him in prison twice. She knows about his crime because she read newspaper accounts of the case while she was a student at the College of William and Mary. She graduated in 2003 and now lives in Charlottesville, where she works as the office administrator for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Her father, Jack Payden-Travers, is the agency's director. Payden-Travers says she accepts that Jackson committed the crime, although she considers it possible he wasn't alone. A fingerprint and a pubic hair found at the scene incriminated Jackson. He also confessed to police. But he later recanted, admitting he was there but claiming 2 other men were involved and one of them killed Mrs. Phillips. "Although the things they've done are horrible, they aren't monsters," Mikhaela Payden-Travers said of the inmates on death row. "When you look at where they've come from, you see it's a cycle of abuse." According to witnesses for the defense at Jackson's trial, he first came to the attention of authorities as a toddler with an unexplained broken arm. As a child, he was reportedly beaten with a strap and a 2-by-4, often had bruises, was verbally and emotionally abused and was sexually assaulted. "He's no angel. I'm not going to make excuses for what he did," Payden-Travers said. "At the same time, he is a human being. If he'd had a little more direction or oversight, I don't think he'd be where he is today." Jackson often complains about the food in prison and talks about being lonely, she says. Aside from her, he's had few visitors. They also talk about sports and music. Payden-Travers is surprised at how much she's gotten out of the friendship. "I can be a champion whiner," she says. But when everything seems to be going wrong in her day, she thinks of Jackson and realizes how minor her problems are. She believes she has also become a better person, more aware of the dignity of every human being and less judgmental. Not that these pen pal relationships don't also have drawbacks. Even the organizations that promote them warn people not to begin them lightly because being dropped can be emotionally devastating for an inmate. Some caution pen pals about how to set boundaries so that the inmate doesn't manipulate them for money or imagine that the relationship is a love affair. And the pen pal outside has to be prepared for the grief of losing a friend to the death chamber, something Payden-Travers says she worries about and has seen other pen pals struggle with. But for those who can handle it, these relationships fulfill a spiritual mission to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the afflicted, Jack Payden-Travers says. He says no one deserves to be judged entirely on the basis of the worst thing they've ever done in their lives. "We want them to know that we think of them as part of our community, and we want to keep in touch," he says. "We want them to know they're not forgotten." (source: Daily Press) SOUTH CAROLINA: Lawyers eye limits on death penalty----Some see hope for mentally ill in ruling Encouraged by last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning executions of teen killers, defense lawyers and others hope the top court will next spare death row inmates who are severely mentally ill. A 1986 ruling bars the death penalty for insane defendants - those who could not tell right from wrong when they committed their crimes. But defendants who couldn't control their actions because of their mental illness can be put to death. "People whose mental illnesses are so severe that they can't control their behavior should not be subjected to society's punishment reserved for the most violent, heinous people," said Dave Almeida, executive director of the S.C. chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Almeida and S.C. defense lawyers surveyed by The (Columbia) State newspaper said they don't expect the nation's high court to rule on the issue any time soon. But they think it is the next legal frontier on the death penalty. "I think the court system is starting to realize, and I think society is starting to realize that ... this experiment - the death penalty - is not being used for the worst of the worst," said Columbia lawyer Bill Nettles, past president of the S.C. Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has restricted the use of the death penalty. In 2002, it banned capital punishment for mentally retarded defendants. On Tuesday, it expanded the exemption list to defendants who were 16 or 17 when they committed their crimes. Some defense lawyers think the logic the high court used in the latest ruling - that juveniles have underdeveloped brains, which prevent them from controlling their impulses - could be applied to defendants with brain diseases that cause them to act violently. But several prosecutors contacted questioned the need to prohibit the death penalty in all cases involving mentally ill defendants. "That should be a factor that 12 jurors should consider," said David Pascoe, solicitor for Orangeburg, Calhoun and Dorchester counties. "We're taking away too much responsibility from the jury for making those kinds of decisions." The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill estimates about 16 % of death row inmates nationwide have severe illnesses, but a precise number is unknown. Based on that percentage, more than 500 of the nation's 3,455 inmates on death row would be severely mentally ill. In South Carolina, at least 10 of the 72 death row inmates have made claims of "severe psychosis," said Teresa Norris, a lawyer with the nonprofit Center for Capital Litigation in Columbia, which primarily represents death row inmates on appeal. One of those is Jamie Wilson, who pleaded guilty but mentally ill in the 1988 shooting deaths of 2 8-year-old girls at Oakland Elementary School in Greenwood. His lawyers said Wilson, a diagnosed schizophrenic, at the time was the only defendant in the country sentenced to death after a judge ruled he couldn't stop himself from committing his crimes because of his mental illness. "We thought it was a good case to test the waters after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 ruling banning executions of mentally retarded defendants, said Ron Honberg, the director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. But the high court in June refused to hear Wilson's case, effectively ending his formal appeals. The next month, the state Supreme Court ordered a hearing for Wilson to determine whether he is competent to be executed; a final ruling hasn't been made. Another schizophrenic death row inmate, Mar-Reece Hughes, also is trying to stop his execution on the competency issue, said his lawyer, Norris. Hughes, of Charlotte, N.C., was sentenced to die for the 1992 murder of York County Sheriff's Deputy Brent McCants during a traffic stop. "It just seems the obvious issue to raise in Mr. Hughes' case because everybody agrees he is sick," Norris said. But trying to define severe mental illness is hard, which would make it difficult for the U.S. Supreme Court - if it chooses to take up the case - to issue a clear ruling, defense lawyers say. "You're dealing with a much larger Pandora's box because there are so many things that fall under the ambit of mental illness," Columbia defense lawyer Tara Shurling said. "Where do you draw the line?" "The problem defense lawyers have is they are not successful at convincing juries these 'illnesses' are real," said Trey Gowdy, solicitor for Spartanburg and Cherokee counties. Honberg said he is participating in an American Bar Association task force that is developing a proposal state legislatures could use in limiting the death penalty for severely mentally ill defendants. (source: Knight Ridder)
