Dec. 9 TEXAS: European women drawn to Texas death row inmates Romina Deeken is a classic beauty long and lithe, cascading blond hair, green eyes set in alabaster not the type of woman who needs to solicit attention from men. But last year, the 24-year-old German reached out to a convicted killer on Texas' death row. Her motives were altruistic, she said, not romantic. In time, after more than 50 letters posted back and forth across the Atlantic, Ms. Deeken said, mutual feelings grew. "I have a connection with him," she explained recently, shaking slightly, tears running down her cheek. "Everyone in life has a vision, has dreams, has fears, is searching for something. He is the person I can talk deeply with about these things." Ms. Deeken's story is coffee shop talk in this small southeast Texas town, home of the maximum-security Polunsky Unit and death row. Each month, dozens of travel-weary, love-struck European women arrive in Livingston for visits with condemned inmates, a pair of 4-hour chats through Plexiglas. There is no touching. Exactly why they come depends on who is asked. Experts say many of these women have been scarred by violence or sexual abuse, though that's not the case for any of the women interviewed for this story. Others say the women are motivated by compassion and a desire to nurture, or an attraction to the baddest of the bad boys. Their relationships with the inmates typically begin when women join anti-death penalty groups like Amnesty International, or during Internet research. Pen-pal groups such as LostVault.com post free personal ads based on letters and pictures from death row inmates, like this one from Jose Noey Martinez: "The worst thing in life is loneliness and that's all I've had in my life so I'm hoping by me putting up this ad I can make some great friends out there in the free world. So if you like what you see, please write to me." In 1995, Mr. Martinez was convicted of stabbing to death a 68-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter. He sexually assaulted the older woman, defiled the corpse of the child, and reportedly threatened the victims' family as he was led from the courtroom, saying, "It's not over yet." Many people who live in Livingston say the European visitors are naive. Death penalty opponents counter that even the pathologically violent and vile deserve a dignified life. Terri Ray, a woman with a quick wit and shoulder-length silver hair, works the desk at The Lake Livingston Inn, which is recommended by an anti-death penalty group in Switzerland. She books about 10 international reservations a month. "They're so gullible, you just want to shake them and say, 'Are you women that stupid?' " she said, eyes wide behind horn-rimmed glasses. "Those guys over there are running a game. They've got 10 to 20 women at a time they're romancing." Ms. Ray shares the prevailing opinion in this lakeside town that idealistic amateurs are being played by professional players. "All those guys put down on their ads: 'I'm looking for a Christian woman for deep spiritual companionship,' " she said. "Please. What they're really looking for is a female who has nothing between her ears and deep pockets." Ms. Deeken, who works for a media company in Germany, says she knows the deal some death row inmates manipulate European women for sport, sexual stimulation and money just like men on the outside. The death penalty, Ms. Deeken said, is a barbaric punishment in a flawed U.S. justice system. "Everybody has a right to fair trial, but he never had that," she said, referring to her pen pal. "The fact that he is black well, there is a lot of discrimination. I know blacks are treated unfairly." People change, and there is goodness inside those who have committed evil, she said. Isolation, day after day Life on Texas' death row is austere and isolating. Condemned men spend 23 hours a day in a cell the size of a walk-in closet. Each day, they are allowed 1 hour alone for recreation, and a shower. Inmates may own a small radio, but not a television, and there is no Internet access. Men communicate with the outside world by letter. Snack food including coveted cups of Blue Bell ice cream may be purchased from the prison commissary. Often, that's where European women come in. Marlin Nelson, who's been on death row 19 years, said money motivates many of the inmates. "I think most of them have more than one woman," he said. "They do it to get whatever they can get, the money. It gets pretty lonely in here, and once you're with someone awhile, it gets boring." He said the men also frequently persuade women to send semi-nude pictures in the mail. Pornography and au naturel photographs were banned several years ago, but the current rules allow snapshots in bathing suits and revealing underwear. Inmates on death row hang the pictures in their cells and trade them like baseball cards. Mr. Nelson beat a man with a metal bar and stabbed him to death in 1987. He is married to an English woman who left her husband for Mr. Nelson about 6 years ago. Like all death row marriages, the ceremony was conducted by proxy. He said that their relationship isn't physically consummated but that they enjoy "letter sex" and intellectual intimacy. "Writing is real personal," he said. "You tell each other things you'd never tell God if he asked you." Relationships that are both close and distant, Mr. Nelson said, are what many women need. There is intensity in a life-and-death romance, and passion and poetry but little risk. "You can have a boyfriend out there, so if you want sex, you can go have sex," he said. "But if you want a relationship where you can tell anybody anything, this is it." In that way, he said, it's difficult to tell the players from the played. Both sides get what they need. An endless flow Christa Haber met her husband, Troy Kunkle, while he was on death row. He was executed in 1995. Now she makes about $1,100 a month running a guest house near death row that caters to European visitors. The Blue Shelter is booked solid the last 2 weeks of most months. One wall in the neat and modest home is decorated with nine pencil portraits of men on death row drawn by an inmate in Florida. 4 of them have red letters in the corner, "EX" for executed. Ms. Haber, a German who has lived in the U.S. since 1993, said many of her guests romanticize the men on death row. "I think violence is very interesting," she said. "Most normal men are boring, but if you are in a relationship with a violent man, you have something to tell others and ... you are interesting, too." Ms. Haber said her guests often mortgage their lives to travel thousands of miles to Livingston. Then they spend all day at the prison visiting their pen pals, and all night at her kitchen table writing letters to their convicts. Once women driven initially by a philosophical opposition to the death penalty meet the condemned men, she said, nurturing instincts often take over. They say things like, "This man has never known what love means. His parents did not love him and the teacher in the school did not love him," Ms. Haber said. "Nobody loved him his entire life, but I do, and I will show him what love is." Even though some people see inmate relationships as an oddity, Lene Gabrielsen, a mother of 3 and a nursing student from Norway, says she knows many stories of long-standing love. "There are a lot of women out there who start out as pen pals and get married and stay married for years and years and years," said Ms. Gabrielsen, who corresponds with 2 condemned inmates. "I think that's great. If they're happy, why not, because there's so much hate in the world." There is no way to track the number of Texas death row inmates who marry each year, or how many wed Europeans, but death penalty opponents estimate the former figure at between 10 and 20. Hybristophilia is the clinical term for women who are attracted to notorious criminals. A mother and daughter married 2 of the infamous Texas Seven, who broke out of a South Texas maximum-security prison in 2000. 2 women called San Quentin in California the day Scott Peterson arrived in 1995. They told the staff they intended to marry the man convicted of killing his wife and unborn child. Doreen Lioy, a freelance writer, married Richard Ramirez, the serial killer who raped and mutilated his way across California in the mid-1980s. In a television documentary, the college-educated woman described the man known as the Night Stalker as "sweet and funny." Troubled pasts Sheila Isenberg interviewed 3 dozen women in relationships with murderers for her 1991 book Women Who Love Men Who Kill. She is working on a sequel that will focus on the allure for European women and Internet-inspired pen pals. While not scientific, her research suggests the women have common experiences. "I found they all had been damaged in their earlier lives or in their earlier relationships," she said from her home in upstate New York. "Many of them had abusive parents, generally fathers, who beat the crap out of them or sexually abused them." Lon Glenn, a warden for the last 10 of his 30 years working for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said women of all nationalities, including guards and other prison staff, often fall for inmates. "I've seen a 30-something married registered nurse with two kids leave her husband and kids for a 3-time-loser convict doing a life sentence," he said in an e-mail. "I've seen a prison school teacher, caught having sex on her desk with a convict, request to be placed on his visiting list as she's being fired. I've lost count of the number of female 'officers' caught in romantic encounters with convicts, some veterans of many years." Rick Halperin, a board member of Amnesty International USA, offered no excuses for state employees who have affairs with inmates. But he said it's important to remember that most European women initially are motivated by compassion, not lust. "I do not believe the majority of these women are thrill-seekers who are hoping to marry death row inmates," said the Southern Methodist University history professor. "I think they write as a way to try to reaffirm the basic humanity of these condemned prisoners." Europeans, he said, are steeped and educated in human rights. "It's easy to scoff at these women when you live in this country," he said. "But this is a real difficult thing they're doing, and it's very human." (source: Dallas Morning News) ********************* Some crimes deserve death ---- Re: "The Myth of Deterrence Death penalty does not reduce homicide rate," last Sunday Editorials. I became ambivalent enough about the death penalty a few years ago to become the only person in Texas to request that his name be removed from a state building. That facility is the death row prison unit at Livingston. My concerns were fairness to those convicted on the limited testimony of witnesses, racial fairness in some areas of our state, the absence of DNA testing when it was possible to do so and my belief that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is far worse than a death sentence for young offenders. I do not oppose your earlier call for a moratorium while the issue is debated. That said, your editorial challenging the deterrent effect of the death penalty could lead us down the wrong road. There are certain hideous crimes that demand the death penalty as our response. Those situations include the murder of a police officer, killing prison or jail personnel in escape attempts, serial killers and multiple sex attack murderers. I don't care if the death penalty is a deterrent or not. Certain horrible crimes merit the harshest response possible. Has Texas gone too far in executions? Probably. But the public should continue the ultimate penalty for the worst criminals. It is easy to shout "death no more" as your editorial did, until someone you love is the victim of the worst kind of brutality and horrible death. Then your opinion would immediately change. Think about it. The victim must always come first. Charles T. Terrell, former chairman, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, chairman, Safer Dallas Better Dallas (source: Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News) ******************************** Discriminatory Justice: Flawed death penalty system values whites over blacks When convicted murderer Larry Allen Hayes was put to death in 2003, he made headlines. In Texas the country's lethal injection leader many executions draw relatively little notice. But Mr. Hayes was newsworthy: He was the first white Texan in decades to be put to death for killing a black person. The state has executed 405 people since reinstituting capital punishment in 1974; Mr. Hayes is the only white executed whose victim was black, according to available records. And although earlier reports are incomplete, Mr. Hayes may be the only white to die for killing a black since the middle of the 19th century. Earlier this year, this newspaper reversed its longstanding support for the death penalty because the process is both deeply flawed and irreversible. One of the most glaring defects in the system may be that deep-seated bias seems to play a significant role in life-or-death decisions. In general, capital punishment has been meted out somewhat arbitrarily in our country, with factors such as politics and geography affecting the level of justice a murder victim's family can expect. But one detail has been a consistent predictor of who lives and who dies race. Specifically, the race of the victim appears to have a profound impact on a killer's punishment. Although whites and blacks are murdered in almost equal numbers, killers whose victims are white are about four times as likely to pay with their lives. A mountain of studies has reached the same conclusion: The judicial system discriminates. In fact, an analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center found that the statistical correlation between race and the death penalty is stronger than the link between smoking and heart disease. While research about cigarettes and health problems spurred legal and cultural changes, the capital punishment studies are gathering dust. The fact that blacks who kill whites are executed in disproportionate numbers is not in dispute. When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of a black man sentenced to death for killing a white police officer, the justices did not challenge the damning studies showing racial disparities in capital punishment cases. But in 1987, they ruled 5-4 that a larger pattern did not prove bias in an individual case. Later, Justice Lewis Powell, who authored that decision, expressed regret and said he thought that capital punishment should be abolished. Still, this decision has presented a significant obstacle for other defendants going forward. To those who point to racial disparity to challenge their death sentences, the courts seem to be saying: Even a confirmed pattern of unfairness does not establish that you have been treated unfairly. Experts who have studied discrimination and the death penalty list an array of political and psychological factors that intrude on the judicial process. They point to all-white juries and mostly white prosecutors deciding whether black defendants should be put to death. They cite deep-rooted biases about race and class, tracing back to a time when certain crimes were punishable by death for blacks but not for whites. And they note the highly subjective nature of sentencing. No doubt the reasons for the disparities are complex and not easily resolved. But instead of taking decisive action by calling a halt to this unfair punishment, Texas and other states continue to tinker with the apparatus of death. Right now, the Supreme Court is considering the merits of the particular cocktail of drugs used to dispense death sentences, but it is ignoring the bigger issue: Decades of evidence prove that the sentences are handed out unevenly and unfairly. The underlying message is clear: Some lives simply are deemed more valuable by our deeply flawed justice system. To impose an irreversible punishment in such an imperfect and discriminatory way is indefensible. (source: Editorial, Dallas Morning News)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS
Rick Halperin Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:56:55 -0600 (Central Standard Time)
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS Rick Halperin