Feb. 27 VIRGINIA: Have vertebrae against vengeance Robert Willingham's letter ["Convicted killers don't deserve compassionate treatment," Feb. 15] is typical of the knee-jerk, never-think-things-out, downright lubricious mind-set that has come to dominate many of the issues in the U.S. He claims that taxpayer money is "wasted" on 20-year appeals. Does he suggest that after a conviction a person should be led into a room in the courthouse and "fried"? We have a Constitution for a reason, and we must fight for it. The justice system is designed to protect our citizens and, though it may be a complex and slow process, it works overall. Appeals are part of that process. When the taking of a life is the issue, we must not succumb to those who call for vengeance. What about the 20-year appeals processes that have exonerated death row inmates through DNA? What would Mr. Willingham tell the families of people who were wrongfully put to death? Mr. Willingham suggests that the country should get a "backbone" when it comes to executions. I believe its takes more of a backbone to stave off vengeance and anger and serve justice. Philip Morrow----Fredericksburg (source: Letter to the Editgor, The Free Lance-Star) IOWA: Dead wrong Committees in both chambers of the Iowa Legislature are starting that troublesome death penalty talk again, and although Senate Democratic Leader Michael Gronstal insists legislation will make it to the floor over his dead (by lethal injection) body, I wouldn't bet on it. In an election year, anything can happen, especially when one of the leading Democratic candidates for governor wants limited reinstatement of a license to kill. (Chet, Chet, Chet ...) I used to be a 100 % dyed-in-the-wool pacifist. Lately, though, I've begrudgingly come to accept that there may be issues worth going to war over, even if the war in Iraq doesn't involve any of them. I could have argued against going to war in Afghanistan, but for it as well, and that's the side that won out. It is hard to argue that capturing Osama bin Laden isn't in the national interest. So perhaps it's just a matter of time before I hop on the "if you don't know how to rehabilitate criminals, get people worked up into a fevered pitch to kill them" bandwagon. (If that happens, I'll probably also be hosting a "draft Pat Roberton for president" coffee klatch. Stranger things have happened. I'm not sure what they are, but Im sure they have.) Clearly, we're neophytes when it comes to knowing what to do with sex offenders, as is clearly indicated by last years ridiculous 2,000-foot residency restriction that offers not a single hope of protecting children from deviants. Weve practically turned convicted sex offenders into cartoon caricatures lurking in the shadows to steal our children's innocence, yet the fact is that an overwhelming majority of sex crimes against children are committed by family members or acquaintances. It wasn't that long ago that incest and other sex crimes against children were considered family matters and werent talked about aloud and - this ought to chill you to the bone - a county prosecutor once used her own caseload to convincingly argue that day is yet to come in some rural areas of the state. So, obviously, the state should just kill these people. Many of our base instincts, even my own on certain days, tell us we should chase down convicted sex offenders, beat them to the fabled bloody pulp and cut off certain body parts. A lawful society can't exist with people running around in a fevered vigilante pitch, and most people realize this. So we do the next best thing. We pass laws that achieve the same end. We dress it up and call it "death by legal injection," which is accurate, instead of "death at the hands of an angry mob," which is also accurate. It's just semantics. Unfortunately, at a time when television sound bites increasingly are Americans' chief source of news and when emotions ring louder than facts, anyone who opposes the death penalty is equated to a hand-wringing, mollycoddling left-wing nut job who favors the rights of criminals over victims. Let's be clear. I feel no sympathy for deviants who emotionally and physically scar young people. Im all for locking them up for an interminably long time - 25 years or so for a first offense - and allowing them to rot away in obscurity and irrelevancy, which some would argue is far more vengeful than sticking a needle in their arms. My conscience is clear. I just don't want to see Iowa regress, or dumb down, by abandoning the good sense that prevailed 40-some years ago when legislators declared it illegal and joined the rest of the civilized world in thinking that a government should never kill its own citizens. (source: Beth Dalbey, Des Moines Business Record) PENNSYLVANIA: More juries split over death penalty decisions Murder cases Allegheny County's most recent capital murder cases: Jan. 21, 2006: A jury deadlocks on the death penalty for Alvin Starks, 32, of Sheraden, resulting in a life sentence for the fatal shooting of his ex-girlfriend, Andrea Umphrey. Oct. 3, 2005: Michael Michalski, 23, of Shaler, pleads guilty to three counts of 1st-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence. He killed his ex-girlfriend, her sister and another man. May 13, 2005: A jury deadlocks on the death penalty for Dion Horton, 27, of West Mifflin, after convicting him of killing his friend, Kenneth Sharp. He gets life in prison. Feb. 18, 2005: A jury sentences Rodney Burton, 23, of North Braddock, to life in prison for the torture and killing of Dana Pliakas. Jan. 24, 2005: Prosecutors decide not to seek the death penalty during a 2nd trial for Andre Crisswell, 31, of Lincoln-Lemington, and William George Thompson, 35, of Homewood. A jury had deadlocked on the pair's guilt in the fatal shootings of an 8-year-old girl, her father and a family friend. April 26, 2004: Christopher Scott, 25, of Penn Hills, pleads guilty to killing 4 men in exchange for a life sentence. March 4, 2004: A jury deadlocks on the death penalty for Carl Scott, 22, of Duquesne, resulting in a life sentence for the slayings of his mother and 2 men. Dec. 5, 2003: A jury deadlocks on the death penalty for Charles Sadler, 30, of Turtle Creek, who killed his elderly neighbor and her caretaker. Cindy Lang hoped to see the man who tortured and killed her teenage daughter put to death, but she also anticipated the Allegheny County jury's decision last year that spared his life. "I was warned that it's hard to get the death penalty now," said Lang, of Murrysville, Westmoreland County, whose daughter, Dana Pliakas, 17, was beaten, forced to strip, marched down a stairway and shot in the head in North Braddock in 2003. Lawyers and prosecutors say the growing number of prisoners freed by DNA testing and shifting social attitudes about the death penalty have caused juries to lose their taste for capital punishment. Just 10 years after reaching a modern-day peak, the number of death sentences in the U.S. has plunged to its lowest level in 30 years. "My personal belief is that the heyday of the death penalty is over," said veteran Downtown attorney Caroline Roberto, former president of the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Prosecutors are still seeking the death penalty with the same frequency they did a decade ago, but publicity over DNA exonerations, lower murder rates and increased training for defense attorneys have contributed to the decline, legal experts say. Death sentences dropped nationwide from 317 in 1996 to 125 in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Juries in Western Pennsylvania have put only 2 killers on death row in the past 4 years. One of them, "kill-for-thrill" murderer Michael Travaglia, already was on death row last year when a Westmoreland County jury re-sentenced him. Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. has failed to win a death sentence in his last eight attempts. Although trying such cases is expensive for taxpayers, Zappala said he will continue to seek the death penalty when warranted. "As long as it's the law of Pennsylvania, I have an obligation to apply it in a consistent fashion," said Zappala, who earlier this month said he will seek the death penalty for Leslie Mollett, 31, of St. Clair Village, who is accused of fatally shooting state police Cpl. Joseph Pokorny during a Dec. 12, 2005 traffic stop in Carnegie. The increased use of DNA to convict and clear stands atop the list of reasons experts cite for the drop in death sentences. "Every day they hear news of the irrefutable evidence of people on death row or in prison somewhere being freed because they didn't belong there," said Art Patterson, of State College, Centre County, a jury consultant for 20 years and senior vice president of the legal consulting firm DecisionQuest. In 2003, then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan imposed a death-penalty moratorium, commuting the sentences of 167 death row inmates to life because of concerns about fairness. Lawyers said such events have caused jurors to second-guess capital punishment. Jurors are instructed to convict only if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Then they're told to impose death if certain "aggravating circumstances" -- such as the victim was a child, a police officer or a crime witness -- outweigh "mitigating circumstances" such as the killer's troubled childhood. "We're seeing doubt from the guilt phase of the trial trickle over to the penalty phase," said defense lawyer David DeFazio, who is preparing to defend Timothy James Caldwell, 29, in his capital murder trial in Butler County. Caldwell and 2 other people are accused of torturing and killing Jason Ritzert, 30, in a Butler apartment. "Jurors are realizing the death penalty doesn't accomplish anything because the public is protected by a life sentence," DeFazio said. Doubt played a role in Zappala's decision last year to reverse his decision to seek the death penalty against the gunmen who fatally shot 3 people, including an 8-year-old girl and her father, in a Homewood diner. The 1st jury to hear the case deadlocked on the killers' guilt. For the 2nd trial, Zappala said he took the death penalty off the table to secure convictions. Some lawyers said the circumstances of the case must be egregious for a jury to impose a death sentence. Prosecutors have a better chance when there are multiple victims, or, as is the case with Mollett, the victim is a law enforcement officer or the accused killer has a criminal history. A Fayette County jury in May 2004 sentenced Mark D. Edwards Jr. to death for killing three members of a family in their North Union home. Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck won a new death sentence for Travaglia in July because the jury knew he and co-defendant John Lesko had killed a police officer and three other people. "You need a case that's significant," said Peck, who has sought death for four other killers in his 11 years as district attorney. "I won't even seek (the death penalty) when defendants have no prior felony history." Defense attorneys also are better trained and prepared for death penalty cases than they were 5 years ago, when the state Supreme Court ordered training for lawyers who represent clients facing death. "We've been taught how to present a unified defense, so that the guilt phase ties in to the penalty phase," DeFazio said. "I hope better training has had an effect," Zappala said. "We can only have justice if we have the best effort on both sides." Although Pennsylvania has 225 people on death row -- the 4th-highest number in the country -- the state has carried out only 3 executions since 1962. The most recent execution was in 1999, when Gary Heidnik was put to death by lethal injection for killing 2 women and torturing at least 6 others in his so-called House of Horrors in Philadelphia. For Lang, justice can only come if her daughter's killer, Rodney Burton, 24, is executed. "We're using our tax dollars to keep them alive, people who have ruined lives, like my daughter's, and changed lives like mine and my family's," she said. "That's not justice." (source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) WASHINGTON: Father turns his hate into plea against death penalty When he first spoke against the death penalty -- including the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- Bud Welch got dirty looks and cold shoulders. Especially from the families of those who died with his daughter Julie that day. One night he got a phone call from a man who told Welch, "You didn't love your daughter at all. You're only doing it for your own publicity." Welch wanted to hang up. Smash the phone. Instead, he talked to the angry, accusatory man for 15 minutes, at least getting an "Uh-huh," and an "OK," along the way. A woman who lost 2 grandchildren in the massive 1995 blast went from refusing to speak to Welch except to yell at him, to giving him a hug and a shock. She had begun, she said, to correspond with McVeigh's accomplice, Terry Nichols, in prison. Not everyone in America can have a phone conversation about the death penalty with a father who lost his smart, petite, multilingual 23-year-old daughter to terrorism. Still, as Welch travels the country toward a March 4 appearance in Seattle, he told me he senses that people are turning against executions in their name. Or at least listening. 2 weeks ago, Bernard-Henri Levy, the French author of "American Vertigo: Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville," was in Seattle saying that he discovered a definite shift away from support for the death penalty, even in the South and Midwest. Last week the execution of murderer Michael Morales was postponed indefinitely when 2 physicians walked out of San Quentin, refusing to participate. Questions about inequities in the proportion of minorities and the poor who are put to death are giving people pause. So is publicity about the release, due to DNA testing, of the wrongly imprisoned, including inmates on death row. But, for Welch, the transformation was so personal and wrenching that the result -- speaking out against executions across the country -- now consumes his life. In the first weeks after Julie's death, Welch frankly didn't even want a trial. "I just wanted the bastards fried," he said last week. He brimmed with such vengeance he tried to drown it with alcohol and burn it up in the smoke of 4 packs a day. Each day for nearly a year Welch went to the bomb site, the last place Julie lived. He watched people hang flowers and rosaries on the chain-link fence around the footprint of what had been the Murrah Federal Building, his hung-over head splitting while he wondered how to go on. "Finally it came to me that, when they took both of them (McVeigh and Nichols) from the cage to the death chamber, that would be an act of revenge and hate. The same kind of revenge and hate that they had against the U.S. government after Waco," he said. Welch said he felt he was lugging around "a bushel basket full of crap." He had to get rid of the alcohol, the cigarettes and the taste for blood. And he did. Until then, it had been Julie, not her dad, who had been the activist. Now it's his turn. But what about closure? I asked. What about the families who say that, only after they watch their child's killer die will they be able to get a night's sleep? Doesn't work, Welch said. He's talked to people who have seen their monster die only to experience emptiness. "God didn't make us so that we somehow get a feel-good out of taking someone else's life," he said. "It isn't part of the healing process." But confrontation or contact is. Welch tried several times to meet with McVeigh. He even testified for the defense in the sentencing trial in which Oklahoma sought death for Nichols. It helped him go on. "Being able to approach or confront the person or send them a letter is so important," Welch said. "If they're dead, you never can do that." Welch will speak about all that March 4 at the annual fund-raising auction of the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty at Seattle's College Club. The more people know about the mechanics of the death business, the more they come to believe it's a business they don't want to be in, he said. That includes the machinery, the cost, the injections that may or may not work and the hollow, haunting feeling afterward. Not to mention the fact that the death penalty is not a deterrent. Of course, he knows that some people still cling to the righteousness of revenge. They still use the Scripture of an eye for an eye to support death by the state. The Bible has been invoked to support other evils, too, including slavery, he said. But a recent Zogby poll of Catholics (like himself) showed that only 49 % support execution and 48 % oppose it, down from 68 % in favor of the death penalty just 7 years ago. Welch is getting more knowing nods than chilly shoulders these days. He thinks that would make Julie smile. HOW TO GO The annual dinner-auction of the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is March 4 at The College Club, 505 Madison St. Silent auction is at 6 p.m., followed by a reception, dinner and program at 7 p.m. Tickets: $60, with proceeds going to education. More information: www.abolishdeathpenalty.org or 206-622-8952. (source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
