On October
11, 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the current death penalty
statute unconstitutional, on the ground that it resulted in racial bias, thus
abolishing capital punishment in the state. It became the 20th state in the
nation to outlaw executions. The eight inmates that were on death row at the
time of ruling had their sentences converted to life in prison. The State
Supreme Court did not rule out the possibility that the state legislature could
enact a constitutional death penalty statute in the future.
We the comrades of Unit 1012: The
VFFDP, want you to remember the murder victims and hear from their families:
'Disappointed,'
says father of murdered 12-year-old girl on death penalty ruling
by Jennifer Sullivan
When Frank Holden got the call from Washington Gov.
Jay Inslee four years ago he was stunned – the man who killed his 12-year-old
daughter in 1988 wasn’t going to be executed anytime soon.
Holden, of Pocatello, Idaho, said Inslee told him
he was going to declare a formal moratorium on the state’s use of the death
penalty. Jonathan Lee Gentry, who was condemned to death in 1991, was already
one of the state’s longest serving inmates.
Holden told KOMO Thursday it was clear the
Governor’s mind was made up, so Holden hung up on him. But, he said, he held
out a sliver of hope that the moratorium would be lifted after Inslee’s term.
On Thursday, Holden learned that the state Supreme
Court took a stronger stand and struck down Washington’s use of capital
punishment –
finding it “arbitrary” and “racially biased.”
Holden said he was “disappointed.”
“This doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “I’ve been
waiting a long time.”
Cassie Holden was out picking flowers near her
mother’s Bremerton home in June 13, 1988 when she was attacked. The girl was
bludgeoned with a rock, her body found in a wooded area.
Frank Holden said he can’t even imagine how much
the state and Kitsap County spent on Gentry’s trials, appeals and to hold him
in prison for 30 years.
“You talk about it being more costly [to
pursue the death penalty], but the cost is because of the appeals,” he said.
Eight men, two from King County, will be freed from
death row to serve sentences of life in prison without the possibility of
release because of the high court decision.
Everett attorney Karen Halverson, whose client
Byron Scherf is among those eight, said Scherf called her Thursday morning to
tell her the news.
Halvorsen wasn’t sure where Scherf was going to be
held since he was convicted of killing a Department of Corrections Officer in
2011.
Officer Jayme Biendl was on patrol at the Monroe
Correctional Complex when she was strangled to death in the prison chapel.
In an email to KOMO, Snohomish County Prosecutor
Mark Roe said the Biendl family is angry.
“They are furious, and of course feel
betrayed or completely disregarded by the Governor, and now the court. Their
feeling is that this means there is no punishment for killing Officer Biendl.
None. Free murder,” Roe
wrote.
But for King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, the
Supreme Court decision is something he was waiting for.
Satterberg calls it “a moment that puts Washington
state on the right side of history, puts us in the national trend of getting
away from the death penalty and we will not suffer at all in public safety.”
Satterberg, in his more than 30 years working in
King County, has been part of the teams prosecuting some of the state’s most
notorious killers. He said he had an “ah-ha moment” in 2015.
King County had spent more than $15 million
prosecuting and defending a Carnation couple who murdered six people on
Christmas Eve 2007 and a Seattle man who killed Seattle Police Officer Timothy
Brenton on Oct. 31, 2009, still death penalty had little to no support by
jurors, Satterberg said.
“That was my a-ha moment. This isn’t working. It’s
costing a lot, it’s putting victim families through the wringer and we don’t
need it,” Satterberg said.
It was then that Satterberg’s office stopped
pursuing the death penalty.
“The alternative is an actual death sentence. You
go to prison and you never go out and you’re going to die there,” Satterberg
said.
Washington is now among twenty states to ban or
suspend the death penalty. The last inmate executed here was Cal Coburn Brown
in 2010 for the murder of Holly Washa in King County.
Satterberg witnessed that execution at the
Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
“It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t wonderful and after
we watched this happen Holly’s sister said to me ‘well now we don’t have to
think about him anymore’,” Satterberg recalled.
Satterberg believes the new sentence for the worst
of the worst killers – life in prison without release – will give families
closure sooner.
“The men on death row have done horrific things and
the two cases that are from King County who are still there killed seven women
and children,” he said. “Without the death penalty, we can give them [victims’
families] that certainty within three to four years.”
INTERNET SOURCE: https://komonews.com/news/local/disappointed-says-father-of-12-year-old-girl-murdered-on-death-penalty-ruling
Death penalty
ruling anguishes Spokane Valley mother who lost daughter in 1996 attacks
Fri., Oct. 12, 2018, 5 a.m.
Sherry Shaver felt some solace on the day in 1997
when a jury recommended the death penalty for the man who killed her daughter
in Spokane Valley.
But the ensuing 20 years brought more grief and
frustration, as Shaver watched the killer, Dwayne
Woods, exhaust his legal appeals and repeatedly stave off his execution.
She was further anguished by Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision to halt executions in 2014.
And in January 2017, Woods, one of nine people on death row at the time, died
of cardiac arrest at a hospital in Richland, out of Shaver’s view.
“I wanted to be the last person he saw,” she said. “I wanted him to
look me in the eyes before he died. And now I won’t get that.”
Shaver said a final blow came Thursday when the
Washington Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty. She had held
out hope that the next governor might reverse Inslee’s moratorium on
executions.
Woods’ sentencing, it turns out, played a role in
the court’s decision. As a black man, he had become part of a troubling
statistic in Washington’s criminal justice system.
The ruling cites a 2014 University of Washington
study which found that jurors in the state were “more than four times more
likely to impose a death sentence if the defendant is black.” The decision
stemmed from another 1996 case in which Allen Eugene Gregory was sentenced to
die for the rape and murder of a woman in Tacoma.
Woods was
convicted in June 1997 on two counts of aggravated first-degree murder for the
killings of Telisha Shaver, 22, and a friend, Jade Moore, 18. Presented with
DNA evidence, the nine-woman, three-man jury also determined that Woods raped
Moore and beat and stabbed Telisha Shaver’s sister, Venus Shaver, who was 20.
All three women were clubbed in the head with an aluminum baseball bat. Only
Venus Shaver survived.
The attacks
happened in the early hours of April 27, 1996, in a mobile home near Sprague
Avenue where Venus Shaver and Moore were living. Venus Shaver testified that
Woods, an acquaintance, came over after 3 a.m. and grew angry because Moore was
not awake. Venus Shaver said Woods attacked her when she refused to have sex
with him.
Sherry Shaver
testified that when she arrived that morning, she spotted Woods leaving through
another door of the trailer. “I looked him in the
eyes,” she told the jury.
Moore and
Telisha Shaver died the day after the attacks at a Spokane hospital. Venus
Shaver spent 10 days in the hospital and eventually recovered. She later
married and had children.
Three days
after his conviction, Woods stunned the courtroom by asking to be sentenced to
death. The jury granted his wish the next day. While incarcerated in the state
penitentiary in Walla Walla, however, he insisted he was innocent and filed
several appeals, most recently in June 2016.
Sherry Shaver
said she supported the death penalty even before her daughters were brutalized.
She said she was concerned about racial disparities in how the punishment was
applied, but she dismissed concerns that lethal injection is inhumane and about
the large public expense of adjudicating death-row cases.
“I
would like to ask people this one question: If you walked in on someone hurting
or killing your children, wouldn’t you try to kill that person on the spot?”
she said. “And I don’t think there’s a mother or a
father alive who wouldn’t say, ‘You bet.’ ”
Published: Oct. 12, 2018, 5
a.m.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/oct/12/death-penalty-ruling-anguishes-spokane-valley-moth/
‘He got away
with murder’ – Family of corrections officer reacts to court ruling on death
penalty
By Hanna Scott
October 12, 2018 at 9:00 am
Convicted
rapist and murderer Byron Scherf was already serving life in prison without
parole in 2011 when he killed Monroe Corrections Officer Jayme Biendl.
It was a
lengthy trial that took a toll on Biendl’s tight-knit family.
When he was
sentenced to death in May of 2013, Biendl’s sister, Lisa Hamm, was ecstatic.
“I’ve
been waiting 837 days, exactly, to hear those words that he’s got the death
penalty,” Hamm, told reporters at the time. “I’m going to continue to count until he’s finally dead.”
The family
went out to celebrate that day.
“We
all wanted to see him get the death penalty, we all felt like justice was
finally served,” Hamm said.
Less than a year
later, Governor Inslee issued a moratorium on executions, saying he was not
convinced equal justice was being served in Washington state death penalty
cases. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court agreed, issuing a ruling
effectively ending capital punishment in Washington state.
All eight
death row inmates will now have their sentences converted to life without
parole, which Biendl’s killer was already serving.
“It’s
like the rug is being pulled out from under us,” Hamm said
after hearing the news.
“I
feel like we went through a lot of pain and suffering to get the result that we
all wanted …
we
took time out of our lives, and stress to sit through something so painful
because we all wanted the same result and that’s the result we got and it made
us feel better. It made us feel like justice was served and that he should get
what he got (the) death penalty. So, to take it (away) I can’t say it enough …
it’s devastating.”
For the last
several years, Hamm traveled to Olympia to appeal to lawmakers every time they
took up a bill to abolish the death penalty, testifying earlier this year.
“She
was murdered by an inmate in the chapel in the Monroe state prison,”
Hamm testified. “The inmate was already serving a life
without parole sentence. By abolishing the death penalty, that effectively
removes any type of punishment for the monster who killed my sister.”
Hamm takes
issue with Governor Inslee and others praising Thursday’s court ruling as equal
justice for all.
“It’s
equal justice for everyone except Jayme,” Hamm said. “And any other correctional officer that this may happen to,
I know it’s rare, but is this opening the door for them (inmates serving life
without parole) to start killing corrections officers because it’s not going to
matter?”
As for her
sister’s killer, Hamm said, “It’s a free murder.
He got away with murder because he was already in for life without parole.”
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