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John Riggins and Sabrina
Gonsalves
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article101706942.html & https://web.facebook.com/VictimsFamiliesForTheDeathPenalty/posts/982991598489473
September 13, 2016 8:47 PM
Proposition 66
will bring much-needed changes; vote ‘yes’
I am the
mother of John Riggins. John
and Sabrina Gonsalves were murdered in December 1980.
The murderer was sentenced to the death penalty in 2013. He
destroyed the lives of our son and Sabrina Gonsalves. Having kidnapped them, he
left them to die in a ditch after slitting their throats. The fear and
suffering they endured continues to haunt us.
This man was
released from prison in the summer of 1980; in December 1980 he murdered
Sabrina and John.
His death
penalty punishment was the appropriate decision by the jury and judge. This
murderer is a very evil man.
It is
important to keep the death penalty as an option for law enforcement.
Imprisonment for life without parole is not what the murderer of John and
Sabrina deserves. Those sentenced to imprisonment without parole have a life
less restrictive than the individuals who are sentenced for capital punishment.
Proposition 66 will include changes in prison and speed up
the present system to review capital cases. Law enforcement and those in the
courts realized the present system needs some changes. Proposition 66 will make
those changes.
As a parent
and victim I ask you to mark Yes on 66!
Kate Riggins,
Pismo Beach
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Sabrina Gonsalves (left) and John Riggins (right)
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/10/04/65347/for-some-fixing-the-death-penalty-means-speeding-u/
For some,
fixing the death penalty means speeding up executions
Scott Shafer | KQED | California Counts
October 05 2016
Kate and
Richard Riggins’ son, John, was murdered along with his girlfriend, Sabrina
Gonsalves, in 1980. At the time, John was a freshman attending the University
of California at Davis.
“They
were kidnapped and left in a ditch to die with their throats slit,” says
Kate Riggins. The case was unsolved for decades, until
a DNA hit led cold case investigators to Richard Hirschfield, who was
serving time in a Washington State prison for child molestation.
In 2013,
Hirschfield was sentenced to death by a Sacramento jury, 33 years after
what became known as “the Sweetheart Murders.” Hirschfield is currently one
of nearly 750 people on California’s death row.
For Richard
Riggins, the execution can’t come soon enough.
“They’re
going to give him a general anesthesia, like people do every day for major
operative procedures,” Riggins tells me. “He just
isn’t going to wake up. He is going to die in his sleep. So cruel and unusual
punishment? Not really.”
On my visit
to death row late last year, Richard Hirschfield, the man who killed John
Riggins and his girlfriend, told me he wasn’t too concerned about getting
an execution date.
“I’m not too
concerned about it because I really don’t think that I’m going to be killed,”
Hirschfield said through the bars on his prison cell.
Hirschfield
has good reason to think that. Since California reinstated the death penalty in
1978, nearly 900 death sentences have been handed down by juries. And
yet the state has executed just 13 condemned inmates. The last was Clarence Ray
Allen in January 2006. Later that year, federal Judge Jeremy Fogel suspended
executions until the state revises the protocol it uses to put inmates to
death. There hasn’t been an execution since then.
Even before
Fogel stopped executions, legal appeals for death row inmates dragged on for 20
years or more. With that in mind, backers of Proposition 66 are seeking to reduce the time between a
death sentence being handed down and carried out.
Proposition
66 seeks to “mend, not end” the death penalty so that decades-long delays
are eliminated.
It would do
that by changing the procedures governing legal appeals, which are
automatic in California. It would also require more attorneys to accept
death penalty appeals cases and train them in how to handle those cases. And it
would shorten the amount of time allowed for state appeals and require death
row inmates to work while in prison and pay restitution to their victims.
“It’s
unconscionable that it should take 25 to 30 years, and that individuals are
dying on death row of natural causes, when a jury has said that this (death) is
an appropriate sentence for very rare circumstances,” says
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. She thinks Proposition 66
will help deliver more timely justice to crime victims.
Of course not
everyone agrees.
“That
initiative is a false promise of expediting death sentences,” says Santa Clara
University Law School professor Ellen Kreitzberg. She supports Proposition 62, a competing measure to end the death penalty.
“The danger
with Proposition 66,” she says, “is it does limit and narrow the ability to
present newly discovered evidence, which is how most of these innocence claims
are presented in court.”
She and other
critics of Proposition 66 think speeding up the appeals process could lead to a
catastrophic mistake in California — like executing an innocent person.
The weak link
in Proposition 66 might be funding it. The measure contains no language
requiring the state Legislature to spend the money on training additional
attorneys to handle death penalty appeals.
San Mateo
District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, president of the California District Attorneys
Association, admits that getting Proposition 66 funded could be
problematic, especially with a governor and state Legislature opposed to
capital punishment.
“We recognize
it’s going to have to rely on the Legislature implementing the will of the
people” Wagstaffe says. “And if they do not, well, that is on them.”
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.abc10.com/mb/news/local/dueling-death-penalty-propositions-draw-controversy-on-eve-of-election/345215261
Dueling death
penalty propositions draw controversy on eve of election
Sarah Moore , KXTV
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UC Davis sweethearts
Sabrina Gonsalves and John Riggins, both 18, were brutally murdered in December
1980. Their killer was condemned to death in 2013. Riggins' parents support
Proposition 66, which would speed up the execution process in California.
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Kate Riggins believes
the world would be a better place without Richard Hirschfield.
In
1980, Hirschfield abducted and murdered a young couple – raping the
woman – before dumping their bodies in a ravine 30 miles east of Davis.
The man,
John Riggins, was Kate Riggins’s son, a UC Davis
pre-med student who was taking his girlfriend Sabrina Gonsalves to
her sister’s birthday party when somehow they strayed
into Hirschfield’s path on a foggy December night. They were only 18,
and photos around that time show the beaming couple in the full blush of youth
and promise.
“They
were young people who would have contributed a great deal to the lives of
many,” Kate Riggins said in a telephone
interview Monday. “They had ambitions to go into
the medical field, and they had such caring feelings about them.”
Riggins and
her husband, Richard, had to wait more than three decades to see justice for
John and Sabrina. Hirschfield was finally identified by a DNA match
to semen found in John Riggins’ van.
But they will
never get over the horror of the young couple’s death.
“Certainly
a day does not go by that we don’t have these thoughts about them,”
Kate said. “As parents, there’s nothing we can do. It
just haunts us.”
They support
continuing the death penalty in California, and in fact making it more
efficient through the passage of Proposition 66. And they don’t trust that life
without parole will deliver what it promises. As long
as Hirschfield is alive, there’s a chance he can be released, a
chance he could commit another crime – the terrible possibility that another
family will suffer the heartbreak hers did.
If there is
any chance that the thought of the death penalty could dissuade someone
like Hirschfield from killing, it’s worth having, she said.
Likewise,
Harriet Salarno doesn’t think her daughter’s killer would be any
great loss to the world, should he be executed – although he won’t be, as his
lawyers managed to save him from the death penalty.
Burns
murdered Catina Rose Salarno Sept. 3, 1979 and was
sentenced to 17 years to life. For the past 37 years, each time Burns came up
for parole, Harriet and her family have traveled to Coalinga to
oppose his release.
Catina was
only 19, studying at the University of the Pacific, when Burns shot her because
she broke up with him.
At the time
of Burns’ trial, Salarno would have likely supported a life without
parole sentence, had it been available, she said in a telephone interview
Monday. But she has since changed her mind. After wrangling with legislators
and the criminal justice system in the scope of her work with Crime Victims
United, Burns has become mistrustful. Like Riggins, Salarno is
concerned that life without parole could be reversed, and offenders released.
Salarno founded
the Crime Victims United group after Burns’ trial to help and support others
dealing with devastating losses and to lobby for stricter laws against crime.
However, not
all victims are in lockstep on their positions on the death penalty.
Some
supporters of Prop. 62, which would repeal the death penalty, have lost
loved ones to killers who are now on death row.
Dionne
Wilson’s police officer husband was killed in the line of duty in 2005, and at
the time of the killer’s trial, she asked for the death penalty, thinking it
was the right thing.
“But I was
wrong,” she said in a
video on the “Yes on Prop 62” website. In a story posted on
another death penalty abolition website, Death Penalty Focus, Wilson said she
was jubilant when Irving Ramirez was sentenced to death, but as time passed,
she wasn’t really feeling any better.
It was only
when she began to work on forgiveness that she was able to move on and find
peace again.
The
Rev. Isreal Alvaran, United Methodist Clergy, said Wilson’s
experience is universal.
“I
really am mindful of the pain and suffering of people who have lost,”
he said in a telephone interview. “The best closure
is not to see someone die out of your need for revenge. Forgiveness is
healing.”
Alvaran said
some killers are people who have been deeply wronged themselves, born into
poverty, suffering from racial prejudices – sometimes mentally ill. He believes
everyone should have the chance to redeem themselves, and if they are killed,
that right is taken from them.
“It’s
a moral issue,” he said. “As a person
of faith, I believe in the sanctity of life. I believe everyone has a chance to
be transformed.”
Copyright
2016 KXTV
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