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PAGE TITLE: FrontPage Magazine
ARTICLE TITLE: Setting Murderers
Free
AUTHOR: Ben Johnson
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Ben
Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and co-author, with David
Horowitz, of the book Party of
Defeat. He is also the author of the books Teresa
Heinz Kerry's Radical Gifts (2009) and 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa
Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving (2004).
DATE: Wednesday 5 October
2005
Setting Murderers Free
By: Ben Johnson
Wednesday,
October 05, 2005
The New
York Times decides a "life sentence" should mean 15 years -- even for
child killers.
THE ONCE-RESPECTED NEW YORK
TIMES now specializes in “news” stories that undermine the war in
Iraq, strengthen the prejudices of Bush detractors, cover the tracks of
Islamic terrorists (aka “militants”), promote left-wing radicals (Lynne
Stewart, Stanley
Cohen, et. al.), and obscure the pro-terrorist and pro-Communist agendas of
the organizers of “peace” demonstrations (International
ANSWER and UFPJ).
Now it has found a new favored group: child murderers.
The New York Times made a political
statement by merely choosing to run this kind of story. The Times could
have investigated loopholes in the legal system that allow violent criminals to
go free. It could have exposed left-wing judges, appointed by Clinton and
company, who hand out light sentences to conservatives, or like Bill O’Reilly,
examined how each state’s judges react to child abuse. Instead, it runs
a sympathetic biography of a child murderer who, in its hoary opinion, has
suffered enough.
That
murderer is Jackie Lee Thompson. On December 30, 1969, Thompson invited
his girlfriend Charlotte Goodwin, to go hunting with three of Thompson’s
friends near Gaines, PA. Although the 15-year-old Thompson confessed later that
he had no feelings for Goodwin, he talked her into having sex with him
for the past month. Goodwin picked this moment to tell him (falsely) that she
was pregnant. Hearing this, Thompson shot her three times with a pump-action
shotgun. Why three separate shots? Thompson explains it was a simple childhood
game. He and Dennis Ellis, one of his companions that frosty day, “always had a
habit of going out in the woods with a gun and see how fast we could empty a
gun. That's where the second and third shots come from.” [sic.] In this case,
he chose to empty his gun into his girlfriend and their presumptive unborn
child. However, the gunshots did not kill her, so the three chums drowned her in
a creek – but the resilient Charlotte kept surfacing. Finally, the trio forced
Charlotte under an ice-covered patch of water, and unable to find her way out,
she drowned five days after Christmas.
For his
crime, the judge sentenced the young offender to life in prison, where he
remains. Today, Thompson “has a cell to himself, with a television and a
guitar.” He plays second base on the softball team. He has learned six trades,
completed high school, and earned an Associates Degree in Business, all free-of-charge
(to him).
But not
all is idyllic: he wants to be free.
The
Sunday New York Times chronicled Thompson’s story in a front-page
article written by Adam Liptak entitled, “To
More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars” – a headline that belongs
alongside, “To Most Humans, Breathing Means Inhaling and Exhaling.” Most people
naively think when a judge sentences a murderer to a life sentence, that person
will die “behind bars.” However, for a generation or longer the dilapidated
state of American jurisprudence dictated that “life in prison” meant the
average life sentence consisted of seven years in
jail. That has recently edged up to around a decade, but this is far from
universal. Even in a “law and order” state like Georgia, most murderers remain
eligible for parole after seven years, and
only a
little more than half (57 percent) of Georgia’s lifers have served longer.
Thus, argues the Times, since “life in prison” often meant 7-15 years,
no judge actually meant to sentence a lifer to serve more than 15 years.
Even in
cases where a prisoner is sentenced to life “without the possibility of
parole,” Liptak laments the death of gubernatorial pardons. That is to say,
Liptak stands against legislatures overruling local judges’ rulings…except
when that will let potentially violent people back on the street.
With the
advent of such conservative judicial reforms as mandatory sentencing and “three
strikes and you’re out,” inmates are approaching serving a sentence that fits
the crime. This is precisely the trend the Times wishes to counteract.
Walking an ever-narrower line between reporting and editorializing, the Times
indicated in this frontpage story that a life sentence should not mean life
in prison – even when the judge specifies “life without parole”; life should
mean at most 15 years.
Liptak
begins by rehabilitating the teenage murderer. Thompson insists he is nothing
like the troubled young man whose brutality presaged Scott Peterson. Back then,
he says, he was just a scrawny “special-ed kid.” With a speech impediment. From
a troubled family. Who was frequently taunted and beaten up. Liptak
describes Thompson as “a
slight, almost elfin man.” One can nearly hear the strains of “Officer
Krupke” as the Grey Lady relates this murderer’s tale
of woe.
Now he is
older and wiser, but Pennsylvania authorities seem to think a life
sentence should be, well, life. Which is more than Charlotte Goodwin got. After
all, she's dead and never got the opportunity to grow older and
wiser. A lone member of the parole board turned down Thompson's most
recent petition. In the Times' view this was very conservative,
reactionary, and unprogressive thing to do. The Times portrays
Thompson as the model of a reformed prisoner, disappointed but more concerned
for the lifers in jail who were pulling for him:
I didn't cry this time. I
committed a crime. Even though I think I've been punished enough[!], I'm to the
point where I'm worried about my people, my supporters, because it really does
take a toll on them.
How could
anyone justify keeping a man like this in prison? Liptak cites Marc Mauer of
the left-wing
Sentencing Project (which wants to grant felons the right to vote) as an
expert. Crime, Mauer says, is a young man’s province, and, “Many lifers are
kept in prison long after they represent a public safety threat.”
The Times
then observes how America is out of step with Old Europe of course.
Liptak quotes left-wing Yale Law prof (but then I repeat myself) James Q.
Whitman, author of Harsh Justice: “Western Europeans regard 10 or 12
years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to
life.” With the Supreme Court having recently cited international law as a
basis for interpreting the U.S. Constitution, this is no incidental point.
Liptak adds,
“[W]hen Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II
in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, “‘No one stays 20
years in prison.’” Why don’t we consider 20 years “cruel and unusual
punishment”? Dr. Michael H. Tonry of the University of Minnesota blames
America’s backward religious tradition, which is “the same reason we're not a
socialist welfare state.” Apparently, not enough people read the Times.
Or
perhaps they're concerned about individuals like Reginald
McFadden. Liptak notes McFadden
had served 24 years of a life
sentence for suffocating Sonia Rosenbaum, 60, during a burglary of her home
when a divided Board of Pardons voted to release him in 1992. After Gov. Robert
P. Casey signed the commutation papers two years later, Mr. McFadden moved to
New York, where he promptly killed two people and kidnapped and raped a third.
He is now serving another life sentence there.
The Times
cites this story, not as a warning of the pitfalls of “rehabilitation,” but
as the unfortunate setback that has caused governors to rethink their free use
of pardons. (Bill Clinton did not get the memo.)
McFadden
is but one of a very long list of people the system declared “no longer a
threat” and could enjoy personal autonomy again. Ben Wattenberg cites a tiny
litany of such figures in his book, Values Matter Most:
- Willie Horton, the recipient of Michael Dukakis’ benevolent furlough program;
- Larry Demery and Daniel Green, the men who murdered Michael Jordan’s father, James, in North Carolina. Green, an attempted axe murderer, had been released on parole after serving one-third of his sentence;
- Richard Allen Davis, the convict with a long history of violence who violated his parole by kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. [1]
These
examples do not make an appearance in the Times’ story. Instead, Liptak
insinuates American democracy virtually demands shorter sentences for
murderers. He claims that support for the death penalty is slipping,
leading to more life sentences. Curiously, the Gallup poll reports that two-thirds of
Americans support the death penalty for murderers. The Times reporter must
have missed this. Probably because he was worried in most un-liberal
fashion, about the costs of incarceration. “By a conservative estimate,” Liptak
writes, “it costs $3 billion a year to house America's lifers.” Releasing them
early would spare taxpayers needless expense. In a scenario custom-made for Mona Charen’s
Do
Gooders, leftists argue for life in prison as an alternative to
“barbaric” capital punishment, then they blame the additional costs on the
Right. The remedy: shorter sentences.
Unwittingly,
the Times has made a powerful argument for capital punishment. If
the liberals' endgame is freeing all murderers (actually Angela
Davis has campaign to do precisely that) then capital punishment
would save society from that fate. On other hand, if the goal is to save money,
executions cost less than housing, feeding, and caring for an inmate for 15
years. On the other hand, if our hope is to see that these inmates die in
prison, the death penalty provides a more direct method to secure this end.
To follow
the path laid out by the Left (and the Times) is to ignore the
brutality of the offenders. Under their program even vicious murderers –
people who fire three shotgun rounds into a pregnant fifteen year old and
then drown them for good measure, Communist agents who try to assassinate the
Pope, and sociopathic rapist/murderers like the BTK killer – should
never spend more than 15 years in jail. After all that would deprive them of
their opportunity to “grow.”
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