News and Developments 2007: Victims

In a recent front-page article in the New York Times, Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Oregon, and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, indicated that most prosecutors with experience in death penalty cases are ambivalent about it: “Any sane prosecutor who is involved in capital litigation will really be ambivalent about it,” said Marquis, who has long supported the death penalty. According to the Times, he said the families of murder victims suffered needless anguish during what could be decades of litigation and multiple retrials. “We’re seeing fewer executions,” Mr. Marquis added. “We’re seeing fewer people sentenced to death. People really do question capital punishment. The whole idea of exoneration has really penetrated popular culture.”

The article also noted that 62% of the country's executions this year occurred in only one state--Texas--and that 40 out of the 50 states had no executions in 2007.

By ELIZABETH BENEDICT
November 11, 2007
New York Times
Opinions Section

HAPPY families are all alike. Every happy family touched by murder is shattered in its own distinctive way. For me, the news last summer of the savage killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters in Cheshire, hurled me back to the infamous murder that has haunted my own Connecticut family for more than 50 years.

Two months before my parents’ wedding in 1950, my mother’s older brother was shot to death in a botched hold-up in the package store he owned in West Hartford, leaving a wife and two daughters. In 1960, Joseph Taborsky, the man who killed him — and later six more people after his release from jail — became the last man executed in Connecticut — and in all of New England, for the next 45 years.

Nearly two decades after the 1988 robbery and murder of James Scanlon, his family now says that a sentence of life without parole for his killer - Ronald Rompilla - will end years of emotional strain resulting from the death penalty and will help them to start the healing process. "It's time to start remembering my dad for the good person he was and not always affiliating it with Ronald Rompilla and the death penalty. ... (I)t was time. I didn't think going after it again would be good for us as a family.

Billy Hill spent seven years as a district attorney in Shelby, Coosa, and Clay counties in Alabama, and has reconsidered his stance on capital punishment.  Mr. Hill says that he would welcome a moratorium on executions in Alabama while a study commission examines the state's death penalty to evaluate whether it is "a wise and humane use of our resources." Wrongful convictions, the arbitrary nature of capital punishment, poor representation, and the long-term suffering of victims' family members are among Hill's main concerns about current death penalty laws.