[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----CALIF., N.C., CONN.

[Rick Halperin]

June 24



CALIFORNIA:

A Serial Killer's Legacy----Charles Stevens' reign of terror went well
beyond the victims he gunned down. 18 years later, the survivors and
families can't forget


ED NEWBEGIN listened as a prosecutor asked a witness what his life had
been like since his son became a serial killer's final victim.

The witness replied, "I have no life  it ended that day."

"The revelation it led me to is that when something like a murder happens,
it's as if a bomb were dropped by the murderer right there at ground zero
where the victim is, but the blast has impact on the people closest to the
victim and the murderer" and ripples outward to investigators, jurors and
everyone else around the case, Newbegin said.

That revelation came 14 years ago, and 18 years now have passed since
Charles Arnett Stevens killed 4 people and tried to kill 6 more in a
3-month series of random shootings on or near Interstate 580 in Oakland.

California's Supreme Court upheld his conviction and death sentence June
4. But Stevens, now 38, still has another, separate court case pending and
has not yet asked federal courts to intervene. He's nowhere near a needle.

Now, Oakland Police say Stevens is responsible for another murder the
April 1989 stabbing of Brenda Belvins, 26, whose body was found on
theporch of a house on 54th Street in North Oakland. The case remained
unsolved until DNA found at the scene recently matched up with Stevens'.
Police are still gathering other evidence; charges haven't been filed yet,
but they're confident enough to say definitively that it was Stevens' dark
work.

So another set of friends and family are joining the sad fraternity of
those carrying the taint of Stevens' crimes in their minds and hearts
everyday. All these years later, the ripples keep buffeting those around
him.

He's on death row, but none of them are completely free. The high school
girlfriend

Mia Chatman was an Oakland Technical High School sophomore in 1987 when
she noticed a shy, good-looking senior named Charles Stevens. Her parents
said she was too young to date, but she flirted with him and soon they
were "dating"  which mostly meant hanging out together at school.

"He seemed to be a very shy kind of kid, he didn't have very many friends,
but I figured it to be that he didn't dress nicely, he didn't have a lot
of money," she said. "I'd say 'Let's go to lunch' and he would just say he
wasn't hungry  he wouldn't admit he didn't have any money."

"I always remember me doing more of the talking than he did," Chatman
said, and he ran home from school every day "like someone was chasing
him," saying he had duties there. He'd call furtively, saying, "If I hang
up with you, don't be upset with me, it'll be because my dad came home."

He always spoke kindly of his mother, she said: "I remember him talking as
if she were still there. ... I got the impression that his mother was
still alive." But his mother, a violent alcoholic, had died in March 1986.

"It didn't seem like he was crazy, it just seemed like he was embarrassed
by his situation and it didn't allow him to open up to people," Chatman
said. They dated for a few months before she broke up with him: "I thought
it was just too much  I was trying to have fun and he could not."

Two years later, as the I-580 shootings mounted, "I remember everyone
including myself afraid to drive on the freeway, it was so random," she
said. "And when I did hear that it was him,... it was like, 'Oh my God.'"

She considered writing to him in prison to ask "Why?" but she never did;
today she's a 36-year-old Stockton mom, still wondering. When she and old
Oakland friends reminisce, "it always comes up 'that Mia dated a killer,'"
but for her it's no laughing matter. Recent news reports brought it back
to the forefront, but it's never far from her mind.

"It just makes me sad for him," she said, starting to cry. "He was
actually a really nice kid."

An investigating officer

Oakland Police Sgt. Brian Thiem and his partner responded early one
morning in 1989 to I-580, where California Highway Patrol officers
checking a crashed car had found the driver shot to death. The homicide
investigators soon found themselves on a serial killer's trail.

By the time it was over, four people  Leslie Noyer, 29; Laquan Sloan, 16;
Lori Rochon, 36; and Raymond August, 28  would be dead, and at least six
others would have narrowly escaped death. Noyer and Sloan were slain while
standing on streets near I-580, Rochon and August as they drove the
freeway. The random shootings, from April through July of that year, held
the city transfixed in terror.

The case broke with bravery and luck, when Rodney Stokes, 24  an I-580
motorist at whom Stevens, riding alongside in his own car, had shot but
missed moments before  shut off his headlights and tailed the assailant as
he fatally shot August in the wee hours of Thursday, July 27, 1989. Stokes
watched the shooter exit the freeway and then park on the opposite side's
onramp to watch police arrive; Stokes pointed the car out to police, who
nabbed Stevens, 20, right there with his .357-caliber Desert Eagle
semiautomatic handgun.

"When he was arrested, we got to interview him first," Thiem said. "When
we walked into the interview room with him and read him his rights and he
agreed to talk, we could tell right from the beginning that this was not
the normal type of Oakland murderer. ... He really thought he was smarter
than (Sgt. John) McKenna and I, and he might've been right. He wouldn't
even admit to being on planet Earth when these murders happened, we could
get absolutely nowhere with him."

"There was a very arrogant, defiant air about him," Thiem added. "This is
the kind of guy we knew should never walk the streets again."

The feeling was confirmed when Thiem helped search Stevens' home and saw a
crude scorecard Stevens kept of his crimes. "It gave me a chill."

Thiem, now 52, retired in 2005 and now lives on the East Coast. He often
had to consult old notes when testifying about cases, but details of this
one come easily  sometimes, unbidden  to his mind.

"That was one of the more notorious cases I ever worked on. It's not often
we get a true psychopathic serial killer, and Charles Stevens was one," he
said. "Most homicide investigators will go through their entire career and
will not see anything remotely like this."

2 who got away

Paul Fenn and Julia Peters were riding in a van on I-580 early on the
morning of July 16, 1989, when it was hit by gunfire; Peters was cut by
flying glass and was treated at a local hospital.

Fenn e-mailed this newspaper June 4, the day the state Supreme Court had
upheld Stevens' death sentence. "Depressing news, is there a date?" he
asked.

When told Stevens probably has years still left to him, Fenn replied he'd
been shocked to read of the case after so long "but I am an opponent of
the death penalty. Neither Julia nor I was killed. John Cutler was also
with us when we were attacked, I married Julia and John is my good friend.
Julia was injured.

"So I might feel different if one of us were among the man's fatalities,"
he wrote. "But I oppose the death penalty and would likely say something
against the execution of this fellow, as life without parole would solve
the problem without killing the man."

Fenn is now executive director and Peters is managing director of Local
Power, a nonprofit helping implement California's community-choice
electric utility law. Fenn initially agreed to be interviewed further for
this story, but later declined, saying he found discussing the case
"depressing.... It's hard to get excited about it."

The jury foreman

Ed Newbegin said his fellow jurors chose him as foreman because he was a
high school and Little League baseball umpire, which he remains today.
"You've got to keep bringing fairness to the world," the 52-year-old dog
sitter and folk singer from Concord said with a chuckle.

But those months he spent in the courtroom in 1993 were emotionally
trying, he said.

"We had one fellow on the jury who'd been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam,
and we had to put Post-it notes over some of the photos because it was
bringing back bad memories for him," he recalled  photos like those of
Leslie Ann Noyer, 29, shot thrice in the head, point-blank and with
particularly powerful ammunition, on April 3, 1989, on a street near
I-580.

"It took us an hour and a half to decide what to do, and the only reason
it took that long is there was one juror who didn't quite know how to
vote" on punishment, he said. They discussed it, and soon agreed "we were
not the ones who were sending him to his death  here was a man who had
made decisions that sent him down a road, and at the end of that road is a
chair."

Their 1st formal vote was unanimous, and after the judge dismissed them,
"we all went out to a bar ... just sort of like a wake, if you will,"
Newbegin said. "We knew we weren't going to be getting together for
reunions or anything afterward. We'd been brought together in this little
psychological crucible, and now we were free. We were euphoric and
melancholy all at the same time."

Newbegin since has come to believe the death penalty "simply isn't applied
properly, evenly," and these racial and socio-economic inequities warrant
a moratorium until the system can be made fairer. But Stevens was a
death-penalty "poster boy," he said, adding he's unconcerned that the
appeals are 14 years in progress with no end in sight: "Let anybody who's
condemned have all the days in court they can have, because some will be
exonerated. He won't be."

"From time to time, I've wished honestly that I could sit in front of that
guy and just ask him, 'Why, why did you do it?'" he said. "He didn't have
such a bad life, he had a brain... I still don't get it, why he felt it
was so important to take that gun and go out and kill people, innocent
lives, people he didn't even know."

The murderer

Barry Karl, the Redwood City attorney representing Stevens in his ongoing
habeas corpus case  a re-investigation of the whole case in which new
evidence can be brought in or existing evidence can be recast  said he
hasn't seen his client in person for years.

Death-row inmates undergo body-cavity searches upon leaving and
re-entering their cells for attorney visits, and those visits must be
arranged weeks in advance, so attorneys tend not to go unless necessary.
Karl said Stevens has written to him as recently as about a month ago, but
attorney-client privilege precludes him from discussing the letters or
Stevens' condition and state of mind.

Richard James Clark Jr. in May 1993 pleaded no contest to voluntary
manslaughter, admitting he was with Stevens the night that Leslie Noyer
was shot; neither ever admitted pulling the trigger. He was sentenced to
13 years in prison; Karl said Clark served his time and was released, and
Clark's lawyer since then has refused to let Karl talk to Clark about
Stevens' appeal.

Karl filed his last papers in Stevens' habeas case in March 2004, and the
ball is now in the Supreme Court's court  it could schedule oral
arguments, or it could rule on the case immediately, or it could continue
considering the briefs for years to come. Nobody knows.

"I do think that Mr. Stevens should've gotten a more complete defense, and
had he got that more complete defense, there is a reasonable likelihood
that the jury would not have sentenced him to death," Karl said.

For example, he said, Stevens' trial lawyer never hired an expert to
challenge the ballistics evidence, and didn't adequately probe Stevens'
childhood sexual and physical abuse. On one of the slayings, Karl claimed,
Clark's testimony was the only rock-solid link between Stevens and the
crime.

These and other factors might've convinced jurors to let Stevens live,
Karl contends, or even might've led them to find him guilty of a lesser
degree of murder, making him ineligible for the death penalty altogether.

If the state Supreme Court disagrees, Karl will file a habeas corpus
petition in federal court. Meanwhile, Stevens remains among 665 inmates on
death row, of whom 41  including Stevens  were sent by Alameda County. The
average time from arrival on death row to execution is 17.5 years.

But California's executions have been halted for 16 months so far by a
federal judge who ordered prison officials to revise procedures to ensure
inmates don't suffer unnecessarily. Of 71 deaths on death row since 1978,
14 have been executions and the rest have been from natural causes or
suicides.

A victim's father

William August was the witness who inspired Newbegin's revelation about
the case's ripple effects by testifying in 1993 that his own life had
ended when his son's did.

"My whole life just went on hold, the things I'd planned to do before,
they're not even in the plans anymore, so here I am," August said
recently, sitting in the East Oakland home he and his wife used to share
with his son.

Raymond August was born on President John F. Kennedy's inauguration day,
Jan. 20, 1961, so the airline mechanical engineer  who abhorred violence
so much that as a child he refused the BB gun his father gave him  would
now be 46 had he not died at Highland Hospital 18 years ago next month.

William August, a 74-year-old retired Alameda postmaster, slips into
speaking in the second person  as if talking to Stevens directly
seemingly without awareness: "At the rate that we're executing people in
California, I don't know if we're going to get to you. ... All you're
doing is getting life in prison."

"This has been an aching process for me all this time because I don't know
what I can expect  I expect he will die in prison, probably," he said,
adding that's unfair. "There are certain crimes that the death penalty was
instituted for, and this is one of those. You have to take those kind of
people out of society. They have lost their right to live."

He visits his son's grave in St. Mary's Cemetery every week, and attends a
support group for murder victims' families every month. His wife,
Geraldine, doesn't go to the support group; she went to private counseling
for a few years, but still can't bear sharing her pain so often, so
publicly.

"It was a very frustrating time, and I'm still in a very sad state,"
William August said. "Losing your kid is the worst thing that can happen.
You never expect to bury your kid, and I had to do that, and I can't get
over it."

(source: Inside Bay Area)

******************

Schwarzenegger making surprise visit to Austria


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will make a surprise visit to his Austrian
hometown on Sunday, returning for the first time since he severed official
ties with the city 2 years ago following a flap over his position on the
death penalty.

Schwarzenegger left California on Saturday - a day earlier than expected -
for a trip to Paris and London to meet with French President Nicolas
Sarkozy and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Schwarzenegger also decided to fly to Graz, Austria to visit friends, said
Aaron McLear, the governor's press secretary.

McLear stressed that the celebrity governor's visit has nothing to do with
the death of Former Austrian President and U.N. chief Kurt Waldheim, who
was buried in Vienna on Saturday. Waldheim left public life in disgrace
after revelations surfaced that he belonged to a German army unit that
committed World War II atrocities.

Schwarzenegger's office declined to comment when Waldheim died on June 14.

It was unclear late Saturday, however, if Schwarzenegger would make any
public appearances in Graz.

In 2005, Graz authorities stripped Schwarzenegger's name from the city's
soccer stadium after he refused to block the execution of a convicted
California gang founder.

Capital punishment is illegal throughout the European Union, and many in
Schwarzenegger's hometown - the official slogan of which is the "City of
Human Rights" - considered Schwarzenegger's actions barbaric.

Schwarzenegger actually ordered his name be removed from the stadium, a
pre-emptive move before city leaders held a scheduled vote to do so. He
also returned Graz's highest award, its ring of honor, which was given to
him by city officials in 1999. In a letter to the city 2 years ago,
Schwarzenegger said the ring had "lost its meaning and value to me."

Graz officials also removed all references of Schwarzenegger on the city's
Web site.

Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 in the village of Thal, just outside Graz,
where he began his bodybuilding career. He emigrated to the United States
in 1968 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1984, but has retained
his Austrian citizenship.

After leaving Austria, Schwarzenegger will meet with Sarkozy on Monday in
Paris.

Schwarzenegger has billed the visit to Elysee Palace as both a planning
meeting for a larger European trade mission, possibly as early as next
year, and as an opportunity to spread his environmental diplomacy.

Following the meeting with Sarkozy, Schwarzenegger is scheduled to travel
to London and hold a private meeting on Tuesday with Blair on his last
full day in office.

Blair will step down as prime minister on June 27 and be replaced by
British Treasury chief Gordon Brown.

Schwarzenegger's office said the meeting with Blair will mirror the one
the 2 held in Southern California last summer. They will meet with
business leaders to discuss ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions without
stifling economic growth.

Schwarzenegger's European trip was originally designed to reciprocate
Blair's visit to California last summer to announce a trans-Atlantic
alliance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He has since added the stops
in Austria and France.

(source: Associated Press)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Volunteer's prison visits raised female inmates' dignity, hope


Dot King's last wish was to say goodbye to her friends: the 4 women living
on North Carolina's death row.

Every week for the past 14 years, King, 83, would come to the N.C.
Correctional Institution for Women and spend 2 hours teaching the Bible to
these convicted murderers.

Those visits stopped at the end of last year when King became ill related
to kidney failure. She died at her Raleigh home on May 28.

Prison ministry was not new to King when she and her husband retired to
Raleigh in the late 1970s. She soon began volunteering at the local
women's prisons. In 1992, the prison chaplain approached her about working
with the inmates on death row. From then on, King faithfully showed up at
noon on Tuesdays, even cutting vacations short to do so.

King and the women not only talked about the Bible, but discussed their
children, their families and current events. Over those years, the women
became close to King, even calling her at home 3 or 4 times a week. "They
were just so much like a 2nd family," said her husband, Ed King of
Raleigh.

Ed King would often go to the prison with his wife on the first Tuesday of
the month. On that day, which the women called "goodie Tuesdays," the
Kings would bring a meal to share with the women and the staff. Lunch
would be barbecue, tacos or Burger King. Around the holidays, the Kings
would bring a feast "as lavish as anything at your house," said a prison
chaplain, Marilyn Gasswint.

Warden Annie Harvey explained that King's visits were valuable to the
women, and therefore they followed the rules in order not to jeopardize
that privilege.

Harvey is selective about who interacts with the women on death row but
believes King was a positive influence on these women's lives.

"She was not judgmental. She truly believed, from my observation, that
people deserved the right to be treated with respect and dignity. They
should be given the opportunity to hope for a better tomorrow," Harvey
said. "Even though you are on death row, you can still have a meaningful
relationship with your Maker."

Harvey said King urged the women to live better lives in prison, to follow
the rules, to have a relationship with God.

"If a person doesn't have hope, it causes the prison to be very volatile
and unsafe," Harvey said. "She assisted us in making the prison more safe
by giving them hope."

And so, when Ed King called Harvey about his wife's last request, Harvey
agreed to arrange an opportunity for her to say goodbye.

While the plans were set, King's daughter, Sonia Bradshaw, 62, of Raleigh,
said she wasn't sure her mother would be well enough to go. Her mother had
been sleeping a lot and talking very little that week. But on Friday
morning, Bradshaw said she got a call that her mother insisted on going to
the prison for the scheduled visit.

King -- in a wheelchair -- her husband and their two daughters went to the
prison at noon, bearing a lunch of pizza, ice cream and iced tea. Instead
of going to death row, the group was taken to the chapel where the four
women clapped upon King's arrival. It was an emotional reunion because
King had been too sick to visit for several months.

Bradshaw said they ate lunch and talked with the women, but her mother
wasn't talking. Eventually, her mother indicated she was tired and needed
to leave.

But as they wheeled her down the chapel's aisle, Bradshaw said, her mother
stopped them. "She found the strength to talk to them -- to tell them
goodbye, tell them how much they meant to her. She had a thing to say to
each of them," Bradshaw said. "They needed that closure. My mother needed
to tell them goodbye."

3 days later, King died in her Raleigh home. As the family gathered at the
house, unsure whom to call first with the news, the phone rang.

It was a collect call from death row. Those women were among the first to
know.

King is survived by her husband, Edwin "Eddie" M. King of Raleigh;
daughter Dorwin K. Lanham of Raleigh; daughter Sonia Bradshaw and her
husband, Lee Bradshaw, of Raleigh; and 2 grandsons and 7
great-grandchildren.


(source: News & Observer)






CONNECTICUT:

Death penalty saves lives


The debate over the death penalty isn't likely to go away in Connecticut.
The state's attorney in Bridgeport said this month he will seek the death
penalty if Christopher DiMeo is convicted of shooting to death 2 people in
their Fairfield jewelry store in 2005. DiMeo is already serving a life
sentence for the 2004 murder of a Long Island jeweler.

The state now has 8 inmates on death row.

After Connecticut executed Michael Ross, a serial killer, in 2005, the
legislature had a lengthy debate in 2006 on repealing the death penalty,
but decided to let it stand.

Nationally, the racial disparity among death row inmates, the high number
of death sentences in a few states and publicity about wrongful
convictions overturned thanks to DNA analysis have all kept alive the push
against the death penalty.

In 13 states, executions have been suspended over concerns about pain and
suffering caused by the means of execution, primarily lethal injection.

Largely ignored in the death penalty debate is a 3rd generation of studies
by economists showing that both a death sentence and execution have a
deterrent effect.

The studies date to the 1970s, when crime data was first looked at to see
if the cost of something, in this case, murder, were high enough, would
people change their behavior.

The original study by Isaac Ehrlich, an economist at the University of
Buffalo, concluded, after examining economic and crime data from 1933
through 1969, that each execution resulted in seven to 8 fewer murders.

Others who used the same data did not find a deterrent effect. More
refined studies by economists through the 1990s found contradictory
results.

Since 2001, 12 studies by economists using better data and more advanced
techniques have all found the death penalty is a strong deterrent,
preventing from 3 to 18 more murders, according to a review of the studies
given in 2006 testimony before Congress by Paul H. Rubin. Rubin is a
professor of economics and law at Emory University.

One study looked at the impact of the 1972 through 1976 moratorium on
executions following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. It found an increase in
murder rates during the moratorium and, 70 % of the time, a drop when a
state passed new death penalty legislation.

Another study by an economist at the University of Colorado not only found
a deterrent effect but that commuting death sentences resulted in an
increase of murders.

The new studies will attract close scrutiny from death penalty opponents
who argue that execution risks the possibility of taking an innocent life.
The economists' studies say there is a certainty that more innocent lives
are saved by the death penalty.

(source: Editorial, New Haven Register)