Friday, October 12, 2018

MURDER VICTIMS’ FAMILIES REACTION TO WASHINGTON STATE ENDING THE DEATH PENALTY



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.”



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.


‘He got away with murder’ – Family of corrections officer reacts to court ruling on death penalty
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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