Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

The WCADP Steering Committee has announced that Teresa Mathis will receive the 1998 Abolitionist Award. The award will be presented at the Coalition's annual dinner on Friday, February 27, 1998.

Teresa, who lives and works in Seattle, is the National Chair of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), the Executive Director of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and a veteran campaigner against the death penalty.

"The entire abolition movement is indebted to Teresa's outstanding work," says Jeanette Star, President of the Coalition. "Were it not for Teresa's vision and relentless activism, I doubt the Coalition would be here today. Teresa's dedication has greatly inspired my own involvement and that of many others."

Teresa became involved in anti-death penalty work in the early 1980s. Shortly after her brother, Charlie, was murdered in 1983, she wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, opposing a columnist's suggestion that executions be televised as a comfort to the families of murder victims. Later, Teresa became a founding member of the Coalition when the American Friends Service Committee asked her to represent it at the Coalition's organizing meeting. She served on the Coalition's Steering Committee continuously until 1997, when she took a leave to devote more time to her work with MVFR.

Christie Hedman, Executive Director of the Washington Defender Association, served on the Steering Committee with Teresa. "Quite simply, the Coalition would not be what it is today without Teresa's extraordinary dedication and organizational skills," she says. "Her leadership has shaped the Coalition's activities and contributed immeasurably to its successes. It is impossible to imagine the Coalition without Teresa."

Teresa's activism has ranged from writing and speaking against the death penalty to personal witness at the prison gates. She recalls Washington's hanging of Charles Campbell in 1994, when she accompanied Campbell's lawyer, Jim Lobsenz, through the final days of attempts to save Campbell's life, and ultimately to the prison on the night of the execution. "What I recall most vividly is the dehumanization of the process, all the meticulous procedure, all the use of bureaucracy to make the killing of a human being seem like something different than it really was. I remember thinking that, unlike my brother's murder, this was a killing that could have been stopped, if only certain people had chosen to act."

While colleagues in the abolition movement praise her as "heroic" and "inspiring," Teresa simply describes herself as "persistent and stubborn." Her work against the death penalty, she says, springs from the values she learned from her parents. "My father was a volunteer firefighter, and my mother was in the firefighter auxiliary. So I learned growing up that the lives of strangers are important. It doesn't matter who it is -- when someone is in danger, you stop what you're doing, and you try to save them."

The 1998 Abolition Day Dinner will be held at The Mountaineers on Friday, February 27 at 6:00 PM. This year's dinner features keynote speaker Todd Maybrown, a successful appellate attorney, whose recent victories include favorable rulings for clients Mitchell Rupe and Blake Pirtle. The 1998 Abolitionist Award will be presented to Teresa Mathis.

74 executions were conducted in the United States in 1997, the most in one year since 1955 when 76 were killed. The Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice reported on December 14 that Texas by itself was responsible for the increase from the 45 executions in 1996. Texas carried out 37 executions following a state appeals court decision upholding the death penalty in the state, compared to three in 1996 while the court decision was pending. 37 is the largest annual number of executions reported by a single state since the federal government began keeping statistics in 1930. Virginia ranked a distant second, but its total of nine was still its highest since 1909, when the state put seventeen people to death.

Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, pointed out that the number of executions outside of Texas had actually declined in 1997 compared to 1996, to 37 from 42. 21 states with the death penalty on the books had no executions in 1997. Among the aggressive "death belt" states, Georgia conducted no executions the whole year.

Dieter did attribute part of the overall national increase to the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, saying, "The law is already restricting inmates with new evidence of innocence from obtaining review because of its stringent time limits and barriers to conducting evidentiary hearings."

The Bureau of Justice Statistics report noted that of the seventy executed by November 30, 44 were white, 24 were black, two were of other races and all were men.

Bud Welch is scheduled to speak to WCADP members at a dessert reception in Seattle on January 28. After his daughter Julie-Marie was killed in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Welch, a service-station owner and farmer, was one of the few to speak out publicly against the death penalty. This was a stand defended by his grandfather who arrived in Oklahoma in 1892 during one of the last rushes westward. "He had personal memories of executions without trial tolerated by corrupt sheriffs and lynchings of innocent people by rivals who wanted their land." Welch owes it also, he says, to the memory of Julie, a 23-year-old employee of the Social Security Administration. "It's my way of honoring her memory.

"Many members of the families of the bombing victims think like me," he says. "They tell me so but refuse to repeat it in public: they're afraid of not being understood. I am their voice."

Welch wrote in Time Magazine last June, "There's been enough bloodshed ... . We don't need to have any more. To me the death penalty is vengeance, and vengeance doesn't really help anyone in the healing process. Of course, our first reaction is to strike back. But if we permit ourselves to think through our feelings, we might get to a different place. ... I think my daughter's position on this would be the same as mine."

Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg announced that he will personally argue the appeal before the US Supreme Court on February 23 of the state's case against Randolph Reeves. In December, 1996, the Eighth Circuit issued a ruling which would either grant a new sentencing trial to Randolph Reeves or change his sentence to life imprisonment. Many WCADP members will remember Reeves' father, Don Reeves, who discussed his son's case at a WCADP event in the winter of 1996.

The Supreme Court will use this case to clarify when jurors are allowed to consider convicting someone of a crime not punishable by death. Reeves, 41, has been on Nebraska's death row since 1981, convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the stabbings of Janet Mesner and Victoria Lamm at a Quaker meeting house in Lincoln. The appeals court said Reeves' jurors should have had the opportunity to convict him of lesser charges such as second-degree murder or manslaughter, neither of which carries the death penalty. The Eighth Circuit ruling was based largely on the Supreme Court's decision in Beck v. Alabama.

Stenberg argued in his brief to the Supreme Court that Beck was not applicable to Reeves' case. He also said in a release that the appeals court's interpretation is an invasion of the states' right to define crimes and their punishment. Reeves is represented by Tim Ford of Seattle.

At WCADP's annual meeting held January 10, 1998, the following officers were elected to serve from February, 1998 through January, 1999. The Coalition's President is Jackie Lent, Vice-President is Jeanette Star, Stacey Smith is Treasurer and Kirsten Voris is Secretary. A statewide meeting has been tentatively set for Saturday, June 20 in Yakima; further details will be announced in the next issue. Goals for 1998 include continued public education and events at the state capitol and in Tacoma protesting the death penalty.

Washington

On October 11, Federal District Judge Jack Tanner ordered that David Rice be given a new trial. Rice, 38, was originally sentenced to die for the 1985 Christmas Eve slayings of Charles and Annie Goldmark and their two sons, Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, at their Seattle home. Charles Goldmark was a celebrated civil-liberties attorney, as was his father, John; Rice had confused Charles with John and incorrectly thought that John Goldmark was a Communist and Jewish. Tanner ruled that Rice's first lawyer, Bill Lanning, had inadequately defended him. Rice's current lawyers argued that Lanning, who was in his seventies during the trial and has since died, was physically unable to keep up with a capital-punishment case. They said that Lanning allowed police to extract a confession from his client without an attorney present, and he didn't object to the confession being admitted into evidence during trial. They said that these actions were devastating to Rice's case.

Rice's attorneys also contended that Lanning incompetently prepared for the penalty phase of the trial. Thorough preparation, they said, would have unearthed a psychiatrist's evaluation that Rice suffers from paranoid delusional disorder, supporting the contention that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. "That evidence about mental illness would have made a difference, and the jury never heard it," Peter Offenbecher, one of Rice's attorneys, said.

During the course of Richard Clark's initial interrogation in 1995, he exercised his right to request an attorney. The law requires the police immediately to cease an interrogation if the suspect makes such a request. Instead, the state sent an FBI agent who pretended to be an attorney available for representing Clark. The agent's actual purpose was to seek information leading to the whereabouts of Clark's alleged kidnap victim and any other incriminating responses. The similarity between this event and the experience of Richard Jewel, who was exonerated last year after being investigated for the Olympics bombing in Atlanta, indicates that such subterfuge may not be an isolated practice. The Washington Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys has formally complained of this abuse of a suspect's rights. Clark's case remains in the early stages of appeal.

Charles Finch was shackled during his 1995 trial. He is now appealing partly on grounds that this violated his presumption of innocence.

The Supreme Court of Canada on December 4 agreed to hear the appeal of Canada's Justice Minister requesting the extradition of Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay, the two young men who fled to Vancouver and who are wanted for the 1994 murder of Rafay's family at their home in Bellevue, Washington. In July, 1996, former Justice Minister Allan Rock concurred with an earlier court ruling that they should be extradited without assurances that the death penalty would not be imposed were they to be found guilty in King County. Burns and Rafay, who are Canadian citizens, appealed Rock's decision to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, which ruled on June 30, 1997 that their right under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada's version of a Bill of Rights) to return to Canada would be violated by a death sentence. The majority opinion also stated that the Justice Minister ought not "to expose a citizen of Canada to a penalty we have abolished here. Abolition reflected the will of the majority and their concern for the sanctity of life and the dignity of the person."

National

Sister Helen Prejean, the counselor of death-row inmates and murder victims, author of the book Dead Man Walking on which the movie is based and who has been on occasion a speaker at WCADP events, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Albert Sabo, a Philadelphia judge widely considered to be biased towards prosecutors and who has sentenced more defendants to death than any other judge in America, is no longer permitted to hear any cases. Sabo had been serving in a special status as a retired judge, but he and three other judges had this status revoked by the state Supreme Court. He is perhaps best known as the judge who presided at the 1982 trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal and who rejected Abu-Jamal's petition for a new trial in 1995. Abu-Jamal's appeal of that decision is pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Florida State Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan, who at one time was a prosecutor who sought death sentences, is travelling the state to say that he believes that the death penalty does not work. He said in an interview, "If the person who deals with it on a daily basis doesn't call the public's attention to the fact that it's not working, then who will?" Kogan says that the judiciary is bogged down with capital cases and that some justices spend up to half their working hours on them. He asked, "As a matter of proportion, are we going to spend all of our time on the minute portion of cases that in the long run do not impact a great number of people?"

In two widely followed bombing trials, Terry Nichols was convicted in a mixed verdict on December 23 of helping Timothy McVeigh to carry out the April, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the trial of Theodore Kaczynski as the "Unabomber" was delayed as this newsletter went to press. An article on the Oklahoma and Unabomber trials is scheduled for our spring newsletter.

On January 7, the Nichols jury informed Judge Richard Matsch that they could not unanimously decide Nichols' sentence. Judge Matsch therefore will sentence Nichols himself sometime after early February; the maximum sentence would be life without parole. Following the trial, some jury members received death threats from persons outraged that Nichols was not sentenced to death.

Until January 8, Kaczynski had refused to undergo psychiatric testing. He maintained that he was sane and at one time that week he attempted to fire his court-appointed attorneys, who hoped to save him from a death sentence by demonstrating his mental illness. However, he both attempted suicide on January 8 and also requested that he be allowed to represent himself. To obtain the latter request, Kaczynski agreed to the judge's condition that Kaczynski be tested for mental competence. The testing began on January 12.