Comments on Current Events In Criminal Law from the Federal Criminal Courts in Texas

September 10, 2007

CRIME VICTIMS MOVEMENT AND THE DEATH PENALTY

Essay by Billy Wayne Sinclair
E-mail Billy Wayne Sinclair Billy@JohnTFloyd.com

Newton Anderson was put to death by lethal injection in Texas on February 22, 2007 for a double murder that occurred eight years ago.

“For all those that want this to happen,” he said in final statement before his execution, “I hope you get what you want and it makes you feel better and gives you some kind of relief.”

It didn’t.

Revenge always leaves the person who exacts it feeling empty, cheated, and somewhat shallow.

The death penalty is fueled by the demands for revenge of crime victims.

Why?

Organized anger, or what has become known as “the victim’s rights movement,” first injected itself into the nation’s criminal justice system in California in the late 1970s. The first notable target of the movement was Willie Archie Fain who, in the 1960s, killed a 17-year-old boy and raped his teenage girlfriend. A “Keep Fain In Committee” was formed by relatives and friends of Fain’s victims with the specific purpose of keeping the convicted murderer in prison. With careful orchestration of public outrage against crime in general and a growing public dissatisfaction with the way the criminal justice system functioned, the committee collected some 84,000 letters opposing Fain’s release. With those letters and the publicity they generated, the “victim’s rights movement” was born.

Victims of violent crime make eloquent arguments for justice. Violence strikes their lives suddenly and forcefully, shattering dreams and plans. Violence introduces the ugly specter of death into the unsuspecting lives of its victims, filling their lives with grief and agony. The mother and father of a murdered child are so torn by loss and sorrow that hate and anger become the only solace for their pained hearts. The lives of these victims are altered, quite often destroying their very faith in humanity. The emotional and psychological damage caused by their tragic loss is often irreparable.

I know. I killed a convenience store clerk during a botched robbery attempt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1965. I spent more than four decades in the Louisiana prison system for that crime. Over those decades I came to understand the irreparable damage that crime had on the parents of my victim. For years I experienced a moral and intellectual appreciation for the harm I had caused with that death. But in 1990 Harvey Bodden, the father of my victim, was interviewed by a local television station following a pardon board hearing in my case. He was feeble but determined. He spoke to the camera.

“He kilt my boy,” he said, adding that he wanted me to spend the rest of my life in prison.
That grief was expressed twenty-five years after the crime occurred. The image of that old man, eyes filled with tears of sorrow, still haunt me, and forever will.

The anger experienced by the victims of violent crime begs release. Stifled, it becomes an incurable cancer of hate and resentment. Expressed, it demands absolute justice; the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye concept of justice. Nothing else will appease their anger. They expect ultimate vengeance – and when denied the death penalty, they demand natural life imprisonment.

While such organized anger has a legitimate role in the nation’s criminal justice system, it does not give the victims of violent crime an all-encompassing right to use the system to wage personal vendettas. The ancient emotion of revenge, which fuels vendettas, is base and evil. The justice system cannot administer punishment equitably and reasonably when it responds exclusively to the demands of such primitive emotions. The justice system must arbitrate the need of crime victims to have just vengeance, the collective interest of society to exact retribution, and the penological need to have rehabilitation.

The law is man’s social savior. It protects him from his worst enemy: himself. If the justice system permits the primitive emotion of revenge to dominate its decision-making process, then we have lynch-law working in disguise. No one can reasonably dispute that the justice system has a basic obligation to respond to the collective interests of society’s law-abiding majority, but that obligation should not impale the interests of the individual on the stake of revenge to appease forces of revenge.

Punishment for the mere sake of punishment – without purpose or design – simply to satisfy the demands of revenge offends the basic tenets of equity and fairness. Just desserts is a concept that justice is achieved by doing the right and equitable thing. It is justice tempered with mercy for the individual while responding to the retributive demands of society. Those ends are continuously in conflict as the justice system grapples with the gnawing question, “how much was enough?”

The family of my crime victim always maintained that the death penalty was the only punishment that fit my crime. But the justice system did not execute me. Instead it imposed a life sentence with a reasonable expectation that I would one day be free man if I satisfied the criteria traditionally used in Louisiana for measuring punishment and rehabilitation. The family of my crime victim said that was too much to expect; that I was shown enough mercy when spared an appointment with the executioner and given the life sentence.

Only the vindictive and misinformed could regard such a punishment as mercy. A mercy to be locked in perpetual torment, struggle and misery; forced to fight to live just to live to fight another day, suffering each day for the mere sake of suffering solely to appease the unrelenting demands for revenge, with the only relief to come later in the form of death. That is not mercy. That is not a punishment that fits the crime but rather surpasses it in cruelty, Death, by comparison, would have been mercy.

When a man endures three, four or five decades in a prison only to hear demands for more invokes the scene of a crowd watching a man being brutalized by a gang, beaten to the ground and savagely kicked almost to the point of death, while the crowd urges the gang to kick more. It’s obscene. It runs against the grain of human decency and fairness. It’s humanity at its worst. They want more. They will always want more— this day, next year, the next decade. Those who make such demands will never be satisfied them unless, of course, they can wash their hands in the offender’s life blood.

The world of the crime victims are torn apart when they are suddenly and unexpectedly informed that love one has been killed. That news cast them into a brutal, kaleidoscopic world of mixed emotions—anger, guilt, grief, loneliness, depression, and regret. Those unforgiving emotions consume the core of their being as they make funeral arrangements. They can bury a body but not the sorrow of the human loss. Each morning for days, months, and, yes, years, they awaken to a reality that brutally slaps them in the face. Parents look at each other and cry, a crying so deep that there are no words to express its horrible pain.

Dr. Elliott Luby, an expert on victimology, once said that “when your parent dies, you have lost your past. When your child dies, you have lost your future.”

A wide circle of friends and relatives assemble to comfort and assist the parents. While these people understand the pain the parents are in, they cannot grasp that the very heart of their lives had been ripped from them. Parents suddenly have no future. Friends and relatives try to comfort them with sentiments like “it was God’s will” that torch their pain only more.

In her excellent 1980 book entitled THE COURAGE TO GRIEVE (Lippincott and Crowell), Judy Tatelbaum wrote:

“Confronting death is hard for us survivors. One of the consequences of the denial of death in our society is that we are often unskilled in coping with loss, be it our own or another’s. We may want to help, but we don’t know how. Having no idea what to do when we hear of death, many of us run away from helping the bereaved. However, there are many ways we can help.
“Our friendships and support are essential for our grieving friend to go through and complete the mourning process. We need to reach out and take the initiative. Our presence is the most valuable thing we can give. Our presence is far more important than our knowledge or out advice, for the companionship of family and friends is the greatest source of support and solace. We can help our grieving friend the most by sitting near, holding a hand, giving a hug, passing a tissue, crying together, listening, sharing our feelings. In coping with loss the bereaved are greatly depleted of energy. The presence of others helps to renew them.”

In 1984 I met two of Louisiana’s leading crime victims advocates, Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey. The couple would teach me a great deal about crime victims and the movement they advocated. I will always admire the level of respect they accorded me as they shared their most private emotions and sensitive memories of the murdered daughter.

Four years earlier the Harveys’ daughter, Faith Hathaway, was brutally murdered by Robert Lee Willie. As co-editor of THE ANGOLITE, the prison newsmagazine, I was allowed to attend a pardon board hearing at which Sister Helen Prejean and others sought clemency for Willie. I interviewed Vernon Harvey after that hearing.

I learned at Willie’s clemency hearing that on May 28, 1980 Faith Hataway was to be inducted into the United States Army. Fluent in Spanish, French and Creole, the 18-year-old teenager planned to study Russian and perhaps become an interpreter. Foreign languages came easy to Faith because she loved to read about distant places. Sometimes she would read as much as eight hours a day, dreaming of the places she had never been and longing for the natural adventures and joys that life promised. Tomorrow stood before her as a prophecy of hope and happiness. Faith had been reared in a close-knit family whose parents instilled in her the belief that every dream was attainable with work, effort, and hope.

With that strong parental guidance under her belt, Faith was ready to leave home. It Was time for her to discover life’s realities – the brevity of man’s days, the loneliness of night, the heartbreak of unfulfilled love, and the sorrow of shattered dreams.

On the night of May 27 Faith went out for a good time, to celebrate her last night as a civilian. It was something almost every service person did. They want to enjoy a last night of unrestrained freedom before becoming part of the disciplined, regimented life of military service. Faith went to the Lake Theatre Disco, a lounge in Mandeville, Louisiana. The night slipped quickly into morning, too quickly. At approximately 4:30 a.m. Faith was standing in front of the disco when Willie and Joseph Vaccaro offered her a ride home. Not sensing any danger, she accepted the offer.

But Willie and Vaccaro didn’t take Faith home in St. Tammany Parish. Instead they took her to Fricke’s Caves, a secluded and heavily wooded area in Washington Parish. They repeatedly raped, tortured and finally slashed her to death. No one, except the killers, knows what really happened that cruel, evil night. What is known is that Willie or Vaccaro, or both of them, raped Faith before one of them held her hands while the other stabbed her numerous time in the throat.

“Go away and let me die by myself,” she begged her killers.

After the killers’ frenzy had been exhausted, Faith’s body lay unrecognizable, her hands frozen in pain with several fingers severed.

The Harveys had to wait two agonizing days before their daughter’s purse and clothes were found. It was a nightmare of uncertainty; their desperate prayers fell silently from their lips. Even after Faith’s belongings were found, they hoped beyond hope that she would be found safe. They could not understand why such an incomprehensible tragedy had been visited upon them.

Why had it happened to them? It had always happened to others.

On June 4 the Harveys learned the horrible, bitter truth. Faith’s battered and mutilated body was discovered. But the Harveys wanted to be sure the body found was actually their daughter. Elizabeth asked her brother, a dentist, to make a positive identification through Faith’s dental records. It was the most difficult thing the doctor had ever been asked to do.

“I never realized then what a hard thing I asked my brother to do,” Elizabeth told me.

Vernon Harvey told me that both he and Elizabeth were forced to learn about grief the hard way – through trial and error, much like, I’m sure, the Bodden parents had to do. The Harveys came to realize that grief does not have a time table; that everyone, especially parents, experience it differently. They learned that grief causes marital friction. Some crime victim experts say as many as 90 percent of parents whose children have died experience serious marital difficulty within months after the death of their child.

Former Baton Rouge Catholic Diocese Bishop Stanley Ott said in a 1984 interview with THE ANGOLITE that he believed bereaved parents should have strong religious guidance as they work through grief.

“From a human point of view,” Ott said, “I would understand the anger and outrage, the very strong emotional feelings parents experience when their child is taken in such a violent way. I would be understanding of these natural feelings and try to assist them in coping with the feeling.

“But as a religious leader, I would pray with them asking that God guide and direct us. Many times when we come across the mysteries of life, like the unexplained loss of a loved one by a criminal act, we expect immediate answers to some hard questions. We should compose ourselves in prayer, and while faith will not take away the pain of our loss, I believe that prayer, in God’s spirit, will help us to understand and live with our grief. God is the Good Shepherd – He is going to be their support and help. Their pain will be eased through his mercy.”

Pope John Paul II in 2000 visited Italy’s horribly overcrowded prisons urging the government “in the name of Jesus for a sign of clemency toward all prisoners.”

“Prisons,” he warned, “cannot be used as a means of “social retaliation or institutionalized vendettas. Punishment and prison make sense only if, while affirming the needs of justice and discouraging crime, they serve man’s renewal. Prison must offer inmates the possibility to reflect and change their lives, in order to fully become part of civil society.”

I understand, as every one must understand, that there is no grief quite as powerful and intense as that of a parent who has lost a child to murder. The crime often consumes the parents with rage and hatred. It happened to the Harveys.

Vernon and Elizabeth had no prior experience with such rage or hatred before Faith’s brutal murder. She was brutally snatched away from them, leaving a vacuum they filled with revenge. They demanded that Robert Lee Willie be brought to justice. Death in the electric chair was the justice they demanded. Vernon demanded the right to witness Willie’s execution.

“When they take him out of the chair,” he said, “I want to be there to see the smoke fly off his body.”

The crime of murder inevitably produces this kind of bitter harvest of revenge in the family of a murdered victim. I came to realize that the aftermath of my crime – the harvest of revenge it produced – was a wrong greater than the actual shooting death of my victim.

Death penalty advocates say revenge is a natural crop of civilized man. So intense was Vernon Harvey’s need for revenge that he began to read everything he could about crime and the death penalty.

“I actually rejoiced when I find out someone has been executed,” he said. “If I don’t stay up at night to hear that they did it, it’s the first thing I want to know in the morning.

Harvey said these feelings of revenge developed while sitting through Willie’s trial and listening to the graphic details of how his daughter was mutilated and tortured – a trial at which he was mocked and taunted by the killer immortalized in Sister Prejean’s book DEAD MAN WALKING.

“There was a time when I kept these feelings inside of me,” Vernon said, “and I often wondered if I was going crazy for feeling as I do. But I’ve come to realize that other people not only understand but share my feelings as well. They want to see justice done. Justice will be done when they execute Robert Lee Willie, and the rest of those people on death row.”

The Harveys lived to see Willie executed.

Writing in the May 29, 1998 edition of the Houston CHRONICLE, Celeste Dixon wrote about the murder of mother and the futility of revenge:

“When everyone around me was talking about the murderer in derogatory terms, using expressions like, ‘He’ll get what’s coming to him,’ or ‘We’ll make him pay for what he did,’ my aching, broken heart could not help but respond. Since all I really wanted was for the pain to go away, I naturally assumed that what they were doing and saying was right, that a dearth sentence and execution would help take that pain away.

“Later, I came to realize that those statements weren’t taking my pain away. Instead, they were feeding my anger and hatred, which seemed to intensify the unbearable pain in my heart. The more I concentrated on my hatred for the murderer, the more I missed my mother and the angrier I got over losing her. I looked forward to the beginning of the trial and the promise of the death sentence which would bring an end to the pain for me and my family”

But a strange thing happened at the trial. She began to see the murderer as a human being, not the monster the prosecution had made out to be.

“Through my experience,” she wrote, “I have come to believe that the greatest disservice you can do to victims’ family members is to expect them to want the murderer to die. This is a tremendous burden to carry because it forces us to keep our anger alive and put our compassion aside, when for our own sakes we need to do the opposite.

“I eventually reached a point where I could let go of my desire for the murderer to die, and then actually forgive him for what he did. It was those two things that finally helped me heal and get relief from the pain and to let go of the anger and hatred that is necessary to support capital punishment.”

The 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, and the law-and-order agenda he imposed on the nation, created fertile soil across the nation for the demands for rights of crime victims. The movement quickly spread from California where the cases of Willie Archie Fain and Gregory Powell, the Onion Field Killer made famous by Joseph Wambaugh, had become synonymous with the term “victim opposition. The Reagan law-and-order agenda, and in particular the fanatically conservative judges he appointed to the federal judiciary, accelerated the pace of executions nationwide and created a social climate receptive to the demands for revenge made by crime victims.

Then the news media discovered the crime victims movement because news directors and editors across the nation realized that “crime sells” so the war was on for ratings and circulation increases.

The 1980s also spawned some of the nation’s worst “serial killers” – John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ted Bundy, to name a few. These horrific killers created so much social outrage that the demand by crime victims for revenge was legitimized. John Walsh, the bereaved father of young Adam Walsh (who was probably murdered by Lucas and Otis Smith) became the spokesperson for the national crime victims movement. The interests of justice, and the voices of reason, were silenced by public outcry for revenge articulated by Walsh and others.

As Walsh’s popular “America’s Most Wanted” and local “crime stoppers programs” flourished, local news gathering shifted gears from “reporting” crime to “preventing” crime. Law-and-order politicians jumped on the bandwagon. They became the real power in the legislative process. They passed a slew of “get tough on crime” laws that prompted a growth-explosion in the prison industry. The “prison expansion movement” was an inevitable byproduct of the crime victims movement. The prison industry could not keep up with the demand for more prisons.

Then President Bill Clinton co-opted the “law-and-order” movement from the Republicans, forcing the movement on liberals and civil libertarians. Clinton gave “law-and-order” a political prominence that crossed gender, racial, and political lines. Support for the death penalty reached all-time highs during his administration. Prisons became more brutal, more violent as penal administrators embraced the social climate for revenge. It became their quasi-official license to abuse, torture and murder inmates. The federal judiciary created by Ronald Reagan blessed these actions by penal administrators by resurrecting the historical “hands-off doctrine” which had been dismantled by the Warren-era Supreme Court.

In 1992 Richard Stalder became head of the Louisiana prison system. He immediately supported a 20-year parole eligibility for lifers. The public backlash, and the outrage from crime victims advocates, was so intense that he quickly abandoned the proposal. That political experience caused Stalder to abandon any notion of “penal reform.” He shaped a prison regime that became one of the most repressive and brutal penal regimes in the United States.

In 1996 Murphy J. “Mike” Foster, the grandson of one of Louisiana’s most racist and corrupt governors, was elected governor of the state with the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Foster’s candidacy was supported by prominent crime victims advocates who called themselves “crime fighters.” Irvin Magri, a former New Orleans cop, and Peggy Landry, who liked to be called “pistol-packin’ Peggy,” were rewarded for their political support with appointments to the state’s pardon and parole boards. Foster reappointed Stalder as corrections secretary who created a “crime victims” section within the department of corrections, emphasizing victims’ rights over inmate rights.

The same year Foster was sworn in as Governor of Louisiana promising a “law-and-order” friendly administration President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act. AEDPA effectively eliminated the writ of habeas corpus (historically known as the “Great Writ”) for state prisoners and the PLRA effectively slammed shut the doors of federal (and ultimately state) courts on prisoner abuse claims. The PLRA became the “official” license penal administrators needed to legitimize their abuse, torture and murder of inmates while AEDPA became a license for state prosecutors to manufacture false evidence, suppress favorable evidence, and use perjured testimony to pack the nation’s death rows which created a consistent flow of condemned inmates into its death chambers.

America now executes the mentally ill with the same gusto as it executes serial killers; it incarcerates children in adult prisons with no moral reservations; and it incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world (more than two millions people locked up in federal/state/local facilities).

The nation’s criminal justice system has effectively been hijacked by the crime victims’ movement. It no longer faces normal “moral outrage” or legitimate “organized anger.” It now faces an all-consuming demand for revenge – demands that have prompted some prosecutors to argue that our sacred constitution allows for the execution of innocent inmates so long as they received a procedurally correct trial.

Victims now routinely witness executions.
It is not enough.
Where do we go from here?
It is not the worst among us we must fear – it is the way we respond to them.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Portions of this article about the Harveys and the murder of Faith Hathaway appeared in THE ANGOLITE (July/August 1984), the newsmagazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, of which the author was co-editor.

next...»

[ Back to top ]