A pro-execution
pastor’s death row journey with a murderer
Minister bonds with William Sallie and
finds peace, pain
By Rhonda Cook - The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
Posted: 6:00
a.m. Monday, December 26, 2016
 |
|
|
Five years
and four months ago, the Rev. Larry Townsend met condemned murderer William
Sallie in a visiting room at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison
near Jackson.
Sallie’s
mother, who lives in Indiana, had asked Townsend to visit and counsel her son
as he waited to be executed for killing his father-in-law in 1990, a murder
committed during a bitter divorce and child custody fight.
Townsend
agreed to meet with the death row inmate even though the pastor and his
church — the Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod — support the death penalty.
“I
believe that capital punishment is biblical,” said
Townsend, a retired Army colonel and dentist who went on to become a minister.
But, Townsend
said, “God had a plan over five years ago and,
evidently, I was in his plan. Everything that’s happened has been God’s doing.”
On Dec. 6,
Sallie became the ninth prisoner executed in Georgia in 2016. Townsend
sat with Sallie just hours before his lethal
injection, and he was in the execution chamber as a witness.
Townsend, 67,
had never been inside a prison or jail until his first meeting with Sallie in
2011.
From then on,
once a month for two hours, the preacher and death penalty supporter sat
knee-to-knee with a condemned murderer free of leg or waist chains.
“I never felt
ill at ease,” Townsend said. “I never felt anything was going to happen to me.
It was like a peace I can’t explain.”
The pastor
completed his “journey” with Sallie by traveling to Indiana to preside over his
funeral and burial.
“He
(Sallie) never denied killing his father-in-law,” Townsend
said. “He did what he did. As I grew in my journey with
him and him with me … I realized that was a one-time event for him. Did he
deserve to be incarcerated? Did he deserve consequences for what he did, for
the crimes he did? Yes.”
But, Townsend
said, the death penalty was misapplied in Sallie’s case.
The family of
Sallie’s father-in-law has not responded to telephone calls seeking comment.
Sallie’s mother also has not publicly commented, preferring to keep her son’s
past a family secret, according to Townsend.
The Crime
With the marriage
ending, Sallie struck his wife, Robin, during an argument in December 1989.
Robin Sallie then filed for divorce and took their 2-year-old son to live with
her family in Bacon County.
A few weeks
after Robin Sallie moved in with her parents and younger sister and brother,
William Sallie picked up the boy under the pretense of having a visit. Instead,
Sallie took his son to Indiana, where Sallie had grown up.
A judge in
Indiana eventually ruled that the child had to be returned to his mother in
Georgia.
Sallie had a
friend buy him a gun, followed his son to South Georgia, and used a fake name
to rent a mobile home in nearby Liberty County.
Shortly after
midnight on March 29, 1990, Sallie broke into the Alma home of John and Linda
Moore. He shot John Moore six times as he slept, then fired four shots to wound
his mother-in-law, Linda Moore.
Sallie
handcuffed Linda Moore to her 9-year-old son, Justin, leaving them and his
toddler son in the bedroom with John Moore’s body. Sallie then took his
estranged wife and her 17-year-old sister to his rented trailer and sexually
assaulted them.
He released
the sisters hours later after begging them not to seek criminal charges.
The Trials
In 1991
Sallie was convicted and sentenced to die. But a new trial was ordered on
appeal because of a conflict of interest — Sallie’s defense attorney in the
first trial was also a full-time law clerk in the Waycross Judicial Circuit,
which includes Bacon County, where the murder occurred.
In 2001
Sallie was again convicted and sentenced to die by a jury in Houston County,
where the trial was moved because of pre-trial publicity.
It later came
out that a juror in that second trial would likely have been
disqualified had she not misled attorneys and the judge during jury selection.
No one knew there was a potential appeal on the basis of juror bias until after
a crucial filing deadline had passed.
That juror —
who had experienced domestic abuse, four bitter divorces, and child custody
fights similar to those in the Sallie marriage — told an investigator for
Sallie’s lawyers that she’d pressured six other jurors to vote for death.
According to
an affidavit attached to Sallie’s clemency petition, that juror — whom The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been unable to reach for comment — told the
investigator: “I said that laws can change and he could be set free. … They
(other jurors) tried to push that he had found God in prison, but what person
in prison hasn’t?”
The Criticism
That juror
issue confounds Townsend.
“I really
think the Georgia judicial system blew it, and I will go to my grave with that
same feeling,” he said.
Townsend
referenced a New York Times op-ed, published Dec. 5, in which retired Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher
discusses the Sallie case in denouncing “specific problems with the way
capital cases are handled.”
The pastor
also referenced the case of Brian Nichols, who in 2005 murdered a judge, a
court stenographer and a deputy at the Fulton County Courthouse, then killed a
federal agent several hours later. Because a Fulton jury could not agree
unanimously on a death sentence, Nichols is serving several back-to-back
sentences of life without parole.
Townsend’s
son-in-law, coincidentally, was a deputy assigned to the Fulton County Courthouse
at the time of the Nichols killing spree.
The Execution
After
Sallie’s execution warrant was signed in mid-November, Townsend’s and Sallie’s
conversations about faith and forgiveness became more urgent.
“I
told him how he was in good company with Jesus, himself … a condemned
criminal,” Townsend said. “And with
Paul and Peter in the Bible. … Never forget the thief on the cross with Jesus.”
Townsend said
he told Sallie that if his
execution were carried out, “‘You’ve got to
know that you’re going to be with Jesus in Heaven.’”
“He
confessed what he needed to confess,” Townsend said. “I said, ‘God has wiped your slate clean. You may have to
face the punishment for your earthly sins,
but now you don’t have to face your heavenly damnation through your belief in
Jesus Christ.”
Hours before
the scheduled time of the execution, Townsend performed the Lutheran
commendation of the dying, using grape juice instead of wine.
 |
|
|
Townsend said
his last words to Sallie were to ask a favor. “‘Will
you say hello to Jesus for me, and when you see me coming up to Heaven (will
you) come over to greet me? I don’t know when it will be, but I’m looking
forward to the day I see you again.’”
The next
morning, Townsend drove the 700 miles to Indiana with Sallie’s parents.
“I
do not regret one second of the last five years and four months,”
Townsend said. “My journey with him has strengthened my
faith. I don’t get angry with God. Things happen. He allows them to happen. And
we don’t know what (God is) thinking. Maybe he wanted William with him now.
Maybe he wanted to use William … to show people if you’re going to give out the
death sentence, tighten it up a little bit. … Save it for the worst of the
worst and give a little leeway if something is uncovered after the fact.”
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.myajc.com/news/local/pro-execution-pastor-death-row-journey-with-murderer/JF2v0xL3X05la2XmX8MeIK/
No comments:
Post a Comment