Category Archives: capital punishment

Rape Theology

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The Missouri Senate went after the legislature’s favorite annual punching bag the other day—Planned Parenthood.  It argued about a bill that would keep the organization from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for dispensing family planning and other women’s health services including cancer screenings.

Planned Parenthood hasn’t provided abortions for a couple of years in Missouri.  But that’s not enough for the PP-haters who don’t want the folks working for the organization to even say the word. And suggesting someone who has thought through the issue and still wants an abortion to places in other states, well, that is calamitous.

One Senator wants to make it a crime for a woman to seek an abortion—although she’d have to leave the state to have it.  He also would have rapists castrated or shot.

Apparently the Senator is not familiar with Article 1, section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution that gives Congress exclusive power over trade among the states. It also limits state powers to limit interstate commerce. And abortions ARE interstate commerce. But ignoring the U. S. Constitution has not been a problem in the legislature on the hot issue du jour for some time.

Another Senator says rapists should get the death penalty and suggested forcing the victim to carry the fetus to term created by the rapist who should be executed “may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.”

Still another suggested that rape might be “mentally taxing…(but) it doesn’t justify an abortion.”

Missouri Independent reports she continued, “God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen. Bad things happen. I’m not gonna be able to support the amendment because I am very pro-life.”

I have often remarked that nothing screws up faith more than religion, or as one of my favorite cartoonists expressed it a few years ago:

To describe rape as “mentally taxing” is completely inappropriate.  So is the idea that executing the rapist would be a great healing agent. An African-American member of the senate attributed her existence to the rape of her great-grandmother, a slave, who by her white master.  The event was “mentally taxing” enough that the victim killed herself.

Several years ago, a similar argument against putting rape and incest exemptions into the abortion was pushed by a woman state representative who argued that it is God’s will that  something beautiful (the birth of a child) could result from something so bad as rape or incest.

I wrote in the old Missourinet Blog that, that kind of reasoning argues against rape being a crime. If God intended something beautiful, a baby, to result from something so ugly as a rape or incest, then God must have intended for the rape and incest to happen—especially since God is perfect.  And if that’s the case, rape should be considered an Act of God, not a crime.  After all, God does not make mistakes.

This is why we have, presumably, a separation of church and state.  Religious Dogma should not replace a law of humanity.  But it does and there are many who want to erase that separating line entirely. To do so would thus make one religion more free than others. And that would mess up the idea that this is a nation that practices religious freedom.

My theocracy is better than your theocracy. My God is better than your God. That’s what it all boils down to.

The major flaw in the “God does not make mistakes” argument is that God created people who make mistakes because God gave people free will.

So we live in an imperfect world and reconciling the imperfections in a way that makes living more humane is a never-ending argument. Killing others in the name of God has only produced never-ending wars.

Killing the rapist raises questions about the entire right to life philosophy. Would it be a “healing agent” to kill the rapist of a pregnant ten-year old girl who will likely not understand why she is left to bear what some consider God’s Gift? And if the product of a rape is a gift from God, how can killing the bearer of that gift be considered correct policy?

It is not our intention here to argue whether there should be abortions. But there are two innocent lives involved, not one.  And to try to make rape a theological issue is a political Gordian knot.

If we accept that God is perfect then we must accept that it was God’s will that we mortals are imperfect. And as imperfect creatures we make imperfect decisions. The challenge is in determining the fairness of the way we deal with those imperfections.

Maybe some issues are beyond the law and ongoing gyrations trying to make them fit within a law that carries equal rights and compassion for everyone the law touches is beyond human capabilities.  In those instances, the decision should rest with the individual, their doctor, and God.

Turn to faith, not religion, for the ultimate guidance.

Lynching

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The circulation of the word “lynching” in high political circles is an insult to one of the most despicable words in our language.

Missouri knows about lynching. A study by the Equal Justice Institute two years ago documented 4,084 lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950. It also found sixty lynchings in Missouri during that time, the second most of any state just outside the south. Oklahoma had 76 of the 341 events labeled by the institute as “racial terror lynchings.”

In April, 1906, Horace Duncan and Fred Coker, accused of rape in Springfield, were taken from the jail and hanged from a tower on the town square. Five-thousand white people—men, women, AND children—watched the hangings and then the burning and shooting of the bodies.

The men had alibis, confirmed by their employers. But the mob never let them have their day in court, never let them present evidence of their innocence. Newspaper reports after the fact said the men were innocent.

A third man, Will Allen, accused of murder without any evidence, was chase down and strung up on the same tower.

That was lynching.

1931. Raymond Gunn confesses to killing a woman at a rural school near Maryville. While Gunn was being taken in the sheriff’s car to a court hearing, a mob stopped the car, dragged Gunn out and took him to the school. He was tied to a roof ridge pole. He and the building were doused with gasoline and the building was set afire. About fifteen minutes later the building collapsed. When the fire burned down enough, spectators took burned fragments of the building as souvenirs.

That was lynching.

In 1919, Jay Lynch was convicted in Lamar of murdering the sheriff and the sheriff’s son during a jail break. Missouri had taken a brief break from having the death penalty so he was sentenced to life in prison. While Lynch was in the judge’s office saying goodbye to his family, two dozen people burst in, put a rope around his neck and dragged him to a nearby tree. When the first branch broke, the rope was thrown over a stronger one and Lynch was hauled up to die. A large crowd cheered. Lynch was one of four white men lynched that year, four out of 83 people lynched that year nationwide.

That was lynching.

1893, Audrain County. Emmett Divers, charged with murdering a white woman, was taken by an estimated crowd of 500 people to and bridge and hanged. After Divers died, his body was taken to the fairground and hung from a pole and later burned.

That was lynching.

1942, Scott County. Cleo Wright, accused of murdering a woman and shot eight times resisting arrest, was grabbed by a mob who poured gasoline on him and burned him in front of a Sikeston church. The incident led Governor Forrest Donnell to order the Highway Patrol and the local sheriff to put more officers on the scene.   But about 100 black residents who fled never went back. Some black residents who stayed armed themselves and patrolled their part of town.

That was lynching.

1923, Columbia. James T. Scott, a University of Missouri janitor, a World War I veteran, the grandson of a slave, was identified by a 14-year old girl as her attacker. A mob using sledge hammers broke into his jail cell, took him out and hanged him from the Stewart Road bridge over the MK&T Railroad tracks.. A University professor who tried to stop the mob was told to get out of the way or he’d be lynched, too. St. Louis newspapers reported the girl identified another man, who had shared the cell with Scott. Reports say Scott told the mob that took him from the jail that the other man, Ollie Watson, had told him that Watson was the attacker.

That was lynching.

Three years ago, the Association for Black Graduate and Professional Students at the university dedicated a historic marker alongside the KATY Trail near the spot where the Stewart Street Bridge, from which James T. Scott was hanged, once stood. “Lest We Forget,” it says at the top.

1882. Kansas City. Moments after a white policeman was shot, Levi Harrington was stopped by officers and arrested although there was no evidence to implicate him in the crime. A crowd forcefully seized Harrington and hanged him from a nearby bridge and shot him.

That was lynching.

In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a plaque not far from the bridge site, commemorating the lynching.

A century earlier, in 1918, Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill in the House of Representatives making lynching a federal crime. The Senate approved the bill last year. The House has yet to act. There remains no federal anti-lynching law.

Missouri has no anti-lynching law.  Participants can be charged under murder statutes.

Let us be clear. What is happening in Washington is not a lynching. Saying it is insults our language, cheapens the shameful actions of some of our ancestors, and dismisses the agony of those who fell victim to public savagery.

 

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

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(Being a compilation of observation not reaching the level of full blogviation.)

Has it occurred to anyone else that the wrapped Capitol dome kind of looks like the Stanley Cup?   Maybe if you squint a little?   Kinda? Sorta?

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We’ve heard several folks who don’t watch hockey remark that they were glued to the Stanley Cup finals. “That’s really intense,” one of them has said a couple of times, referring to the constant, fast, physical play.   Some folks who watched the games because a Missouri team was playing—and making history by winning—are likely to watch games next year because they’re hockey.

The fact that the Royals are dismal and the cardinals have been fighting hard to achieve mediocrity probably drove some of those fans to the Blues games.

One of the observers also has remarked that the championship by the Blues makes the absence of an NFL team in St. Louis a whole lot less important.

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Back when we were covering the Senate, Eric Schmitt claimed to be the tallest state senator in Missouri history. We found some ancient references indicating he had some historic rivals but the record remained fuzzy enough that Schmitt remained firm in his convictions although we think we introduced reasonable doubt in at least one case.   He is now definitely the tallest State Treasurer in Missouri history.

But he is not the biggest man ever to work at the Capitol.

Until somebody comes along to disprove the information, we’ll report that title belongs to Clyde Perkins, a former restaurant man from Barnard. The Jefferson City Daily Democrat reported in January of 1923 that Perkins had been hired as an accountant for the House Accounts Committee. House Speaker Oak Hunter was the big guy in the capitol until then at 274 pounds.

The article about Perkins’ appointment said he had been “off his feed” since losing an election the previous November in Nodaway County, but he thought he’d be back at full strength when he regained fifty pounds. Perkins was to be paid five dollars a day. That’s about $74 a day in 2018 money, $370 for a five-day week. Probably not enough to sustain a man very long who weighed 476 pounds..

A 2008 Nodaway County history by Michael J. Steiner says Perkins topped out at 536. Steiner’s book has a picture of two women, each standing in one leg of Perkins’ bib overalls.

Clyde was called “Fatty” by the people back home in those less-sensitive times.  He was the Nodaway County Treasurer when he died at the age of 44 in April, 1936. His death certificate says a contributing cause of death was “extreme obesity; patient weighed 480 pounds.”

Better to be tall, we guess.

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Administration of the death penalty in Missouri was a local affair, hanging in the counties, until the late 1930s when the gas chamber was built at the state penitentiary.

The Cole County Democrat observed on February 7, 1907, “The residents of Jefferson City get mad at least every two years. When the legislature meets some untamed jackass introduces a bill to have all hangings pulled off in (the) penitentiary. No person with sense enough to grease a gimlet can blame them for getting angry. The idea of making Jefferson City the human slaughter pen for the state is disgusting in the extreme.”

The disgust lasted three decades.

The legislature in 1937 approved asphyxiation by lethal gas at the state penitentiary instead of hanging at county seats. The first victim of the new gas chamber was a 100-pound pig that stopped struggling three minutes after fifteen cyanide eggs were dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid on December 13. The death of the pig convinced state officials that the gas chamber could be safely used on humans.

Three months later it was. John Brown and William Wright were strapped to the side-by-side chairs at 6:18 p.m. on March 3, 1938. The fumes hit them three minutes later. Medical personnel say they died within three or four minutes. A newspaper story recounted, “Only twenty-five witnesses—as compared with thousands which often-times made ‘Roman Holidays’ out of hangings—peered through the five windows to watch the lethal gas deaths.”

Prisoners were gassed from 1938 to 1965 in Jefferson City. The first drug-induced execution, in 1989, was done in the gas chamber before executions were moved to Potosi, then to Bonne Terre. Gas couldn’t be used because the rubber seal around the chamber door had rotted through disuse and the gas would have been fatal to witnesses, too.

Today, people on tours of the old pen can go into the gas chamber. Many of them get their pictures taken sitting in the chairs.

It is still legal to use gas for Missouri executions. But there’s no place in the state where such an execution could be held safely.

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Well, that was pretty heavy, wasn’t it? Here’s something a little lighter.

About three years back (April of 2016) we put together a fanciful discussion of how a member of the family became his own grandfather, kind of along the lines of the famous 1940s popular and country song.

Well, friends, that song isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

Herewith is a story we discovered while trying to find something else in the State Historical Society newspaper library, straight from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune of July 29, 1924:

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

Frank Lueckenhoff, well known and popular merchant at St. Thomas, and Miss Frances Sommerhauser, step-daughter of H. J. Lueckenhoff, the grooms [sic] brother, are to be married next month, according to word received from St. Thomas.

Mr. Lueckenhoff’s brother will be his father-in-law and his sister-in-law will become his mother-in-law.

Henry J. Lueckenhoff, the older brother married the widow of John Sommerhauser. She had two daughters and Frank Leuckenhoff (the spelling changed in this paragraph) marries the oldest one next month.

Five grams

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The state used five grams of pentobarbital in May to execute Earl Forrest, the 87th Missouri inmate executed by lethal injection since George Mercer died in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary more than twenty-seven years ago.  Mercer was executed in the gas chamber because the prison system did not have a place for lethal injections. Although gas was still an option, the gas chamber was no longer safe to use. It was good enough for the inmate’s experience but the chamber’s sealing gaskets were so bad that it was likely no witnesses would have been left alive to testify that he had been legally executed. The chairs were removed from the gas chamber and a gurney was placed inside for Mercer.  

Twenty-five men remain under death sentences in Missouri but it might be some time before your correspondent or someone else on behalf of the Missourinet goes back to Bonne Terre for another execution.  

Forrest was the 22nd execution these eyes have watched.  Those men were responsible for at least 36 murders.  Several, including Forrest, were considered likely killers in other states or were suspected but not charged in other Missouri murder cases. 

He killed three people, including a Dent County Deputy Sheriff, in a meth-related incident.  Death for Forrest came peacefully, a situation that seems unfair to many.  When the curtains around the execution room were opened, witnesses could see him lying on the medical gurney, his head turned toward those he had invited as his witnesses.  He, as has been the case with all of the others we’ve seen, was tightly strapped down so that only his head and feet could move.  Although the time of death was set at 7:18 p.m., he might have died sooner.  He stopped wiggling his feet and talking to his witnesses only about 45 seconds after the drug started flowing.   The curtains are closed after five minutes to let the medical staff check for signs of life, then reopened when they have certified the inmate is dead.  

The Attorney General’s office calls witnesses a few days later to see if we saw any signs of suffering or pain, just in case death penalty opponents try to claim the drug causes the recipient to suffer.  For the record, we have never seen any of the 22 men we have watched indicate any sign of pain and suffering.  Forrest showed no indication of discomfort.

Missouri used to use a three-drug procedure to produce death.  But it now uses only one because of court rulings and industry actions against the use of FDA-regulated drugs for executions.

These 112 men, living and dead—the 87 executed and the 25 waiting—are not the only ones who have been sentenced to death by lethal injection in Missouri.  The Corrections Department says 181 men and five women have been given that sentence. What about the others?  

The department gives reporters an information packet at each execution that includes a list of the disposition (a pretty cold word, but we are talking about murder cases here) of all of those sentenced to death.  You may interpret what we are about to tell through whatever lens you view the death penalty.  For some, it will be an indication that the system works.  For others, it will be an indication that it is flawed and might have led to executions of innocent men.   Some, perhaps many, of those who have been re-sentenced to life without parole won new trials and took a plea bargain instead of risking another death sentence in a new trial. 

This stuff can get pretty complicated but we think we have a pretty good handle on the people who have been facing a death sentence but are not facing it now, and why.

Thirty-nine inmates have gotten new trials that resulted in sentences of life without parole.  One of them has since died.  Those surviving range in age from 36 to 76. Two are women.

Five more were sentenced to life with a chance for parole after fifty years. They are now 55-68 years old. Although one is now in his 37th year in prison, he is not thirteen years from possible parole because his new sentence came after a new trial and the clock is resent with that new sentence.  He’s 61 now and still has a long time to go.

Four men were resentenced to life for a lesser crime, second-degree murder.  Two, ages 46 and 55, remain in prison.  One completed that lesser sentence in 2010 and was released. The fourth died in prison.

Fifteen inmates facing the death penalty have died of natural causes.  They were 33 to 82 years old. Two were women.

One inmate became a prison murder victim four years after he arrived in a state prison.

Three have committed suicide. One killed himself at the age of 61, ten months after being sentenced. One died at 31.  The third, a woman, committed suicide in her cell at age 43 just a few hours after a jury had convicted her in her second trial.  

One inmate, whose conviction was reversed not long after being put in prison, was transferred to a federal prison on federal charges and remains there. If he’s released, he still faces the murder charge in Missouri.

A half-dozen have been released, some after their convictions were reversed, including one who was retried and convicted of manslaughter and then released after finishing the manslaughter sentence.

Some inmates are awaiting new trials and we’ll assign them to a category after those trials take place. 

Four inmates are under a “special circumstances” category.   The death sentence for Roosevelt Pollard is under a stay because he’s been declared mentally incompetent.  His conviction remains and if his condition improves, he still could be executed.  He’s been in prison thirty years and is now 53. 

We’re not sure where to put David Barnett although he could be the fortieth inmate in the “life without parole” category.  His conviction was reversed last year by a federal judge and sent back to the lower court.  The prosecution had 180 days to file a request for a new death sentence. It appears that time has elapsed, meaning Barnett automatically gets life without parole.

Two inmates achieved “special circumstances” status under Governor Mel Carnahan.

Darrell Mease, who murdered a man, his wife, and their paraplegic son, was scheduled for execution January 27, 1999.  That would have been the second day of Pope John Paul II’s visit to St. Louis.  The Missouri Supreme Court re-set the date for February 10 after realizing the situation with January.  The Pope, in a private conversation with Carnahan, urged him to show mercy to Mease.  Carnahan, who had approved 26 executions by then, later said that he could not resist making an exception with Mease after the Pope looked him in the eye and asked for mercy.  So Mease shows up as one of the 39 on the “life without parole” list.

William Boliek, now 60 years old, was to be executed in 1997.  But two days before he was to die, Carnahan ordered a three-member board to investigate claims that his court defense had been inadequate.  The board submitted a report to Carnahan who was killed in a plane crash in 2000 before acting on its recommendations.  The wording of Carnahan’s stay is such that only he could have lifted it. Governor Holden asked the Missouri Supreme Court to vacate the stay but the court refused.

It’s hard to predict how many of the 25 still under a death sentence will be executed.  All still have enough appeals remaining to lead to speculation that Forrest will be the only execution this year.  Questions about the pentobarbital used for executions remain.  Two days after Forrest’s execution, Pfizer announced steps to keep any of its products from being used for executions.  Industry observers say that shuts the door on access to open-market drugs used in that process.

The Corrections Department refuses to identify the source of the drug it uses although some sources say Missouri gets it from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma.  Texas and Georgia also get the drug from compounding pharmacies. 

Licensed pharmacists, licensed doctors, or a third party supervised by a licensed pharmacist can mix or change the ingredients of a drug to tailor medication for a specific purpose.  Sometimes a patient needs medicine in liquid form although it is available on the open market only as a pill the person cannot swallow.  Or maybe the medication has a dye in it that causes an allergic reaction.   The compounded drug is not under Food and Drug Administration regulation, meaning the FDA cannot verify its safety or its effectiveness.

Regardless, five grams of pentobarbital does the job.  Effectively.

Killing death

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We’ve gotten emails from a conservative group proudly announcing that the conservatives appear to have realized the death penalty needs reassessment.

It’s interesting that there is a certain amount of chest-thumping about this discovery because until now the conservative majority in the Missouri legislature has turned up its collective nose at any proposal by Democrats to study the issue or to just repeal the death penalty.

You can ask Senate minority leader Joseph Keaveny about the seemingly sudden shift. He has tried to get legislation approved to study the issue for several years but has been rebuffed repeatedly.

Be that as it may, Senator Paul Wieland’s bill to repeal the death penalty has cleared a Senate committee and is going to the full senate for debate with a committee recommendation that the Senate approve the bill. Wieland’s latest press release squarely addresses an issue that critics say the pro-life forces have sidestepped for years—at least in the eyes of death penalty opponents. “I am a devout Catholic,” says Wieland in his release, “and I believe if I’m going to be pro-life, I should be so on both ends of the spectrum—from conception to natural death.”

No one will be watching this bill more than Earl M. Forrest.

The state Supreme Court has set a May 11 execution date for him because back in 2002 he got into an argument with a woman about her purchase of a mobile home and a lawn mower from him. He killed her and a man who was at her home, took $25,000 worth me meth and went to his home. When law enforcement officers showed up, he got into a shootout with them and killed a Dent County deputy sheriff and wounded the county sheriff. Forrest was wounded. He’s now 66 years old. The U. S. Supreme Court has refused to review his case and all of his state and federal appeals otherwise appear to have run out. The legislature is to adjourn two days after his scheduled execution so there is some urgency to deal with Wieland’s bill.

Lloyd Leo Anderson, the last man to be executed by lethal gas in Missouri, was in a position similar to that of Forrest. After Anderson’s appeals ran out, St. Louis Representative Jay Howard introduced a bill to end capital punishment. Governor Warren Hearnes stayed Anderson’s execution until the legislature decided the issue. When the legislature killed Howard’s bill, Hearnes lifted the stay and Anderson was gassed on January 26, 1965. But not before some angry last words: “Tell them I didn’t get a fair trial. Tell Hearnes to kiss my ___ ass. The same to the rest of you guys,” apparently referring to the large number of witnesses that crowded around the gas chamber, peering through windows to watch him die minutes later.

Missouri executed eighteen men between November, 2013 and September 1, 2015 when I watched Roderick Nunley die quietly for the kidnap, rape, and murder of a fifteen-year old Kansas City school girl a quarter century earlier. He was the eighty-sixth Missouri inmate executed by drugs. The first drug-induced execution was that of George Mercer January 6, 1989—in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary. No new execution facilities were available then.

There are twenty-seven men left under a death sentence in Missouri. No one has been sentenced to death in the last two years, mostly because of plea bargains—as we understand the situation.

Wieland’s bill says anyone sentenced to death by the time his bill would become law on August 28 would be re-sentenced to life without parole. At least twenty men who had been sentenced to death already have been re-sentenced to life without parole after further re-evaluation of their cases. Two men, Robert Driscoll and Joseph Amrine, have been released after their death sentences were overturned. One has been declared mentally incompetent to be executed although he’s still under a death penalty.

Your correspondent has watched more than twenty men die on a gurney from lethal injection. After several of those executions, relatives of the victims have spoken with reporters in a prison press room. No one has ever indicated any regret about the inmate’s ultimate fate. And in the last few times, they have expressed resentment at a system that has taken so long to put a killer away. More than once they have complained about the cruel and unusual punishment that the system has inflicted on the survivors of the victims. We wonder how the families of the victims of the twenty-seven men under a death sentence feel about Wieland’s bill.

Missouri has repealed the death penalty before. It did it in 1917 only to have the legislature reinstate it in 1919 when sponsors spoke of a marked increase in murders since the repeal. It was repealed again after Anderson’s 1965 gassing and a U. S. Supreme Court ruling in 1972 that gassing was cruel and unusual punishment. That let every inmate in America under a death sentence be re-sentenced to life. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a new system of executions was not cruel and unusual punishment, leading Missouri to reinstitute the penalty in 1977. The legislature changed the law allowing executions by gas or lethal injection in 1988 with lethal injection the preferred means.

So now, it appears, conservatives seem to be deciding that liberals might have had a good idea after all. Is this just the start of a new cycle of thinking or has society forever changed on this issue? Is there nobody whose crime is so abhorrent that the forfeiture of life is the only just punishment? Is life in prison with no hope of ever getting out the worst possible penalty?

Consider part of the last statement of David Zink before his execution July 14, 2015:

“For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering death.”