[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., PENN., N.C., FLA.

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 14



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

Evidence mounts against death penalty


"This bill suspends the imposition of the death penalty until such time that 
methods exist to ensure that the death penalty cannot be imposed on an innocent 
person."

That is the description of Senate Bill 463, a bipartisan piece of legislation 
that is the very definition of reasonable: Until the justice system is perfect, 
the state shouldn't execute anybody.

For opponents of the death penalty in New Hampshire, it is just another chapter 
in a fight that has been raging many for years. Unless a great number of 
lawmakers suddenly find the political will to do the right thing, its passage 
is doubtful.

The trouble is that this is a society too accepting of collateral damage. 
Politicians talk of innocents killed by American weapons overseas as if the 
victims weren't people at all but rather battlefield layers to be stripped 
away. And then they strip away the social safety net to punish the lazy and 
those who wish to exploit the system. If a few kids go to bed hungry or live on 
the streets, so be it. The same goes for death row. If 1 innocent person out of 
25 guilty ones has to die, that is simply the price to be paid in this 
eye-for-an-eye world.

Anyone who has read Franz Kafka should feel a chill: In his world, you are that 
1 out of 25. One day you are living your hardscrabble life and the next you are 
in a cell answering questions about a heinous crime of which you have no 
knowledge. But there's enough evidence, and enough investigative incompetence, 
to suggest otherwise. Once those who hold your fate in their hands are 
convinced of your guilt, it's just a matter of making the pieces fit together, 
even when they don't.

But that's not a Kafka novel; it's Kevin Cooper's story.

There is no riveting Netflix documentary about him, so don't feel bad if the 
name doesn't ring a bell. Cooper has been on death row in California since 
1985, after he was found guilty of murdering Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 
10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes in Chino Hills. It 
was a brutal crime. According to a lengthy NBC News report last month, the 
victims received more than 144 wounds in 4 minutes. The 1 survivor, 8-year-old 
Josh Ryen, had his throat slit.

Although Josh would later point the finger at Cooper, a black man, he initially 
told police that 3 white or Latino men murdered his parents, according to NBC. 
Other witnesses spotted 3 white men driving away from the house in the family's 
stolen station wagon. And a woman called police to say that on the night of the 
murders she found her husband's coveralls splattered with blood. He was a white 
man and convicted murderer. The police never tested the blood on the coveralls, 
NBC reported, and instead discarded them in a dumpster.

As sometimes happens, the police had their man and any evidence that didn't fit 
that narrative was discarded. So Cooper was sentenced to be executed on Feb. 
10, 2004. The Ninth Circuit Court decided at the last minute to review his 
case, NBC reported, eventually ordering new proceedings after a number of 
problems were found with the original case. That led to 5 years of legal 
wrangling before the conviction was ultimately upheld in 2009. This past 
November, California lifted its moratorium on executions, and so the hands of 
time began moving faster for a potentially innocent man waiting for his final 
day on Earth.

Cooper is black. He is poor. He was on the run from police - and hiding out in 
a house near the crime scene - when the murders happened. If Cooper is indeed 
innocent, as several federal judges have suggested, it has all the makings of a 
Kafkaesque nightmare.

One of these years, New Hampshire lawmakers will wake up and realize that to 
take one innocent life is to take one too many, and so will abolish the death 
penalty.

Let this be the year.

(source: Editorial, Concord Monitor)






PENNSYLVANIA----female may face death penalty

Grandmother charged in toddler's death in Pennsylvania----Grandma doesn't 
remember how baby died in her care, police say ; Pietrina Hoffman, 52, says she 
blacked out and when she awoke, her granddaughter was dead


A grandmother left responsible for 2 children is now charged with criminal 
homicide after police say she killed a toddler and starved another child.

Pietrina Hoffman, 52, burst into tears as she was walked out of the district 
magistrate's office in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania after being charged, WNEP-TV 
reports.

Mahanoy City police have been investigating this case for about a month after 
one-year-old Navaeh Doyle was found dead on January 10 inside Hoffman's home.

Her two-year-old granddaughter was also found, showing signs of starvation.

Hoffman says she doesn't remember anything about what led up to the death of 
little Navaeh, just that she took sleeping pills and blacked out, according to 
court documents.

Kathy Haage, a family friend, tells WNEP she believes the woman and says she's 
in shock over Hoffman's arraignment.

Investigators say, however, Hoffman left the baby's body on the floor for hours 
before calling 911.

Hoffman is also accused of having a cup of coffee and phoning her husband 
before calling for help.

If convicted, she could face the death penalty. The magistrate did not set bail 
for Hoffman.

(source: ABC news)






NORTH CAROLINA:

Justice demands the death penalty


Olivia's Italian Restaurant employee Debbie French weeps against the memorial 
taped to the door of the restaurant for Sudanese delivery driver Bakri Khidir 
Mohamed Khidir.

Tammy Weeks speaks to the media in Blacksburg, Va. Weeks says her 13-year-old 
daughter, Nicole Lovell, fought health problems all her life and had dreams of 
singing on "American Idol."

On Christmas Day, a 1-year-old girl in Chapel Hill was shot in the head and 
killed. The child, Maleah Williams, was outside playing with toys when 2 men 
emerged from a vehicle and opened fire.

2 months earlier, Bakri Khidir Mohamed Khidir, a driver for Olivia's Italian 
Restaurant, was shot and killed when he delivered an order to a vacant house on 
Greensboro's Farlow Drive. Jeremy Alexander Carter, 21, has been charged with 
the murder in the death of Khidir, a 30-year-old Sudanese immigrant.

Finally, consider this opening paragraph from an article by The Associated 
Press published in early February: "2 Virginia Tech students carefully planned 
the kidnapping and killing of a 13-year-old girl, arranging a predawn 
rendezvous online after buying cleaning supplies and a shovel at separate 
Walmart stores, a prosecutor alleged on Thursday."

The body of the victim, Nicole Lovell, was dumped in woods in Surry County. She 
had been stabbed to death. David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keepers, 18 and 19, 
respectively, have been charged.

The late Russell Kirk, one of the 20th century's most influential writers, 
would be alarmed by this sequence of events. Order, he wrote, is "the principle 
and the process by which the peace and harmony of society are maintained." It 
"implies the obedience of a nation to the laws of God, and the obedience of 
individuals to just authority. Without order, justice rarely can be enforced, 
and freedom cannot be maintained."

If we are serious about the restoration and preservation of order, the only 
appropriate punishment for the likes of Carter and Eisenhauer, if they are 
found guilty, is death. The majority, in fact, supports capital punishment.

Yet, abolitionists - those who oppose capital punishment - have a peculiar 
tendency to empathize with the perpetrators rather than the victims of such 
crimes. While the majority demands justice, abolitionists urge understanding, 
compassion and forgiveness.

Debate over the death penalty often gets bogged down in the minutiae of 
economics: Is it cheaper to house and feed a killer for decades, or are we 
better off, financially, to execute him? But this is merely a peripheral 
concern; the majority's objective is retribution, expense be damned. Besides, 
what price do we put on justice?

Other commentators wring their hands over whether capital punishment is a 
deterrent, but this, too, is only somewhat relevant. If the death penalty is 
the just sentence for a convicted murderer (and it is), whether it deters other 
potential killers is interesting only as an intellectual exercise. (It is worth 
noting that an executed man has never killed again.) If capital punishment were 
widely practiced and carried out in a timely fashion, we would send an 
unmistakable message: If you take an innocent life, we will take yours.

The family of Bakri Khidir believes the man who killed him should be executed, 
and their reasoning is profoundly persuasive. In these pages last month, 
Khidir's cousin, Abdelrahman Ali of Greensboro, said that in his religion, "If 
you kill an innocent person, it's as if you killed the whole community." 
Indeed.

In the wake of the killing of Maleah Williams, News & Record editors opined: 
"The beginning of the solution is to face this crisis squarely and to not 
accept it as simply the way things are - to declare that we, as a community 
united, denounce it and won???t stand for it anymore."

Well, yes, but rhetoric alone is insufficient. The best way to demonstrate that 
we mean business is to swiftly execute those who prey on the innocent, the weak 
and the defenseless. Order must be restored.

(source: Opinion, Charles Davenport Jr. is a freelance writer in 
Kernersville----greensboro.com)






FLORIDA:

Dying Inside: Teenage Murderer James Morgan Wasn???t Executed, But Is His Life 
Worth Living?


In 1987, when I first interviewed James Morgan, he was on death row in Florida, 
sentenced to die in the electric chair for murdering a widow in a small town 
north of Palm Beach. He killed her when he was 16 years old.

Local newspaper reporters struggled to find words for the crime: Heinous, 
grisly and senseless didn???t do it justice. Nothing could describe what Morgan 
did to 66-year-old Gertrude Trbovich, a widow who lived on a narrow drive where 
homes sat on manicured lawns, flanked by hibiscus and palm trees.

Morgan was evil, wicked and vile, the prosecutor said at trial. Yes, he was 
young. But he was incapable of change and would never find a moral compass. 
People like him were a danger to society whether they were 40 years old, 60 or 
beyond. (As of 2016, Morgan's "expected release date" is set for 2094, when 
he'd be 134 years old.)

"Have you watched how he doesn't move?" Morgan's public defender told jurors at 
1 of his trials. Morgan had 4, each one ending in the death penalty and each 
overturned on appeal.

"Look at him," the public defender said, trying to make jurors see that Morgan 
was mentally ill. "He sits in the same position for hours and hours!"

What jurors saw was a blank-faced young man who didn't look sorry enough. At 1 
trial he wore a blue and yellow checked sports coat and light blue pants, the 
local newspaper noted. He was described as emotionless.

The jurors' compassion evaporated, as it would for anyone, when they saw the 
full-color photos of Trbovich beaten and slashed to death, and a knife 
encrusted with her blood. In Morgan's case, the prosecutor placed the knife on 
the railing of the jury box. It took jurors only about an hour of deliberating 
before they recommended the death penalty.

By the time I met Morgan, I'd also looked at crime scene photos. But I was 
trying to look at another part of the picture, as well. I was traveling to 
death rows around the country for a magazine article about the dozens of 
juvenile offenders who'd been condemned to die, a number that would eventually 
grow to 226. Some of the teens were as young as 15 at the time of their crime. 
In all, 22 would be executed.

There was a central theme in their cases: Prosecutors argued that the teens 
could never change.

How anyone could predict the future that way was a mystery to the American 
Psychological Association, the American Bar Association, human rights groups, 
social workers, adolescent psychiatrists, and parents, who knew that teenagers 
turned into a different person often enough to cause whiplash.

For years, on and off, I thought about the death row teens and wondered how 
they'd grown up. Morgan was among the most damaged of all of them. If he could 
transform himself even in a small way, it could prove prosecutors wrong, I 
imagined. But I knew I couldn't gauge his progress unless I could meet him 
decades in the future.

This past year, I got the chance.

The murder

On June 6, 1977, Gertrude went shopping with 1 of her friends before returning 
home to Stuart, on the Treasure Coast in southeast Florida. The beloved mother, 
mother-in-law and grandmother lived in a pretty neighborhood on a street above 
the St. Lucie River.

Morgan lived on the poorer side of town. His father had a lawn maintenance 
business and asked his 3 kids to help out with the mowing when they weren't in 
school. By 9th grade Morgan was free to help out every day.

Morgan had struggled in school since kindergarten, about the time an older 
cousin introduced him to sniffing gasoline, court documents said. The habit 
made Morgan hallucinate and hear things that nobody said. But Morgan didn't 
mind it, aside from the fact that he got a whipping from his mom if she caught 
him.

In grade school one of Morgan's uncles began to sexually abuse him; 2 cousins 
molested Morgan as well, legal documents said. Morgan's parents argued over his 
father's heavy drinking, which his mother didn't approve of, the documents 
added. Sniffing gasoline, at least, helped Morgan forget things.

It also caused brain damage. Morgan dropped out of school after 8th grade. He 
still couldn't read or write. By age 15 and 16, he was getting drunk more and 
more often. His father put him to work.

On the day in question, Morgan was mowing the lawn for Trbovich. He had a 
hangover from sniffing gas and getting drunk the night before.

When a cousin dropped him off at Trbovich's house that afternoon he was 
barefoot and wearing a denim jacket, despite the pressing heat. That day he'd 
sniffed gasoline and had some beer, and now he felt even sicker. He wanted to 
call his father and get a ride home.

Trbovich was in the cool of her dining room when she heard the knock on the 
door. She opened it and saw a pale, bedraggled 16-year-old with dirty blond 
hair to his shoulders, tall for his age, and shoeless. Morgan asked to use the 
telephone, and she let him inside.

But when Morgan dialed his father, he got no answer. Morgan was starting to 
feel angry. He asked to use the bathroom. Trbovich gave him permission.

As he walked past her - she sat quietly at her desk, writing a letter - he 
began to think she'd smelled the beer on his breath. He thought he heard her 
mumble something about reporting it to his mother.

Trbovich was going to tell his mother he was drinking, he convinced himself. 
His mother hated drinking. He was going to be in big trouble.

When Morgan left the bathroom he saw Trbovich, still writing a letter. It was 
to his mother, he thought.

He took a crescent wrench from his pocket and bludgeoned her on the head. She 
looked at him, terrified. He saw "a look of disgust" - the same look he'd seen 
on his mother's face when she was angry about his father's drinking.

Enraged, Morgan beat Trbovich with the wrench and smashed her with a vase. He 
fractured her skull and pounded one of her hands so hard that her wedding ring 
flattened into an oval.

He picked up a serrated bread knife and stabbed her 67 times, court records 
said. He bit her on the breast, sexually assaulted her, made a brief attempt to 
clean up some of the blood and fled.

Police found Morgan's bloody bare footprint on a piece of stationery that fell 
to the floor. Trbovich had written the time in the corner: 3:15 p.m. The letter 
stopped in midsentence.

Morgan deserved life imprisonment, not death, his public defender argued at the 
trial 6 months later. The boy couldn't remember the stabbing; he was a 
brain-damaged 16-year-old with the emotional maturity of a grade-schooler; he 
was in a psychotic frenzy when he attacked the elderly woman; and he was 
legally insane at the time, the defense attorney said.

The prosecutor countered that Morgan was utterly sane and that the murder was 
premeditated. The teenager was "a pretty cool cat" and "a controlled, 
insensitive" killer, a psychiatrist testified. Jurors agreed.

By New Year's Eve, 1977, Morgan was in an airplane for the first time in his 
life, handcuffed and shackled in a single-engine plane en route to prison in 
the piney woods of north Florida. He'd be on Florida State Prison's death row 
for more than 16 years.

The meeting

I heard Morgan before I saw him. He wore handcuffs connected to a chain around 
his waist, and leg shackles that kept him at a shuffle, the chain clinking 
between his ankles.

Morgan was 6-foot-2 and bone-thin, with a pale, narrow face. A guard brought 
him to the narrow concrete and plexiglass interview room and he arranged 
himself across the table from me, clanking even more loudly. He said hello, 
almost inaudibly. He looked disoriented.

"I didn't know the interview was today," he said.

Morgan was 27 years old. He'd lived for a decade in a windowless 6-by-9-foot 
death row cell, 23 hours a day, at Florida State Prison, home of the 
notoriously malfunctioning electric chair Old Sparky, which in the future would 
set a man's head on fire.

His cell was a stifling, 3-sided concrete vault, big enough to take a few 
strides up and back. He couldn't see other inmates without holding a mirror 
through the front bars. But he could hear them. The din was relentless: shouts, 
screams, mouthing off and the metal-on-metal overdub of banging steel doors, 
slamming gates and jangling shackles.

The sounds traveled everywhere, including to the narrow room in the main part 
of the prison where I'd waited for Morgan to appear. "I'm a little nervous," he 
told me.

That morning he'd been strip-searched, shackled and escorted off the row. 
Nobody mentioned the interview. Morgan was convinced the guard was taking him 
to the colonel's office, where inmates went if the governor signed their death 
warrant. He was going to be electrocuted, he told himself. Then a guard locked 
him in a holding cell for hours. The whole time, he was terrified that he was 
going to die soon in the electric chair.

He had a receding chin and long, delicate fingers, the only thing about him 
that seemed willing to move. He mumbled. His right hand gravitated to the side 
of his face and wanted to stay there, fingers near his mouth, as if trying to 
guard his words. There weren't many of them.

He missed his parents. "I miss everybody." His eyes welled up. "My mom 
especially," he said.

No, he didn't remember the murder, he said. He shook his head, looking 
miserable. "I think about what I done every day. I'd do anything to take it 
back. I'm sorry for the pain I caused the victim's family," Morgan said. "But I 
don't remember nothing."

How could he not remember? He'd killed an innocent woman; he'd demolished the 
lives of Trbovich's children, who would spend more than 10 anguished years 
attending his criminal trials, seeing the gruesome crime scene photos, hearing 
the details of the murder again and again, constantly reminded of her last 
minutes.

He'd wounded his family; ruined his life; and haunted even his lawyers and 
jurors, who had to stare at the evidence. It was hard to believe he couldn't 
remember the horror when he was the one who created it.

But some of the court testimony backed him up. Morgan's lack of recall was so 
profound that one of his public defenders - desperate for information so he 
could mount an insanity defense - hired a hypnotist to pry out the details. 
After an hourslong trance, Morgan described the delusion about Trbovich 
tattling on him, a psychologist testified.

The evidence told the rest of the story. Morgan left the knife in the house, as 
well as his fingerprints, handprints, and footprints. A forensic dentist said 
Morgan's teeth even matched Trbovich's bite mark.

"I wish I hadn't of hurt my family," Morgan said. He hated it that his parents 
suffered, sitting through his criminal trials and waiting for legal appeals.

Morgan's father died before the start of Morgan's 3rd trial, in 1985. His 
mother died of cancer the month after the trial, after hearing her son 
condemned a third time. The Palm Beach Post noted her death in a small item 
that called her "the mother of 3-time convicted murderer James Morgan and said 
nothing else about her life. Morgan didn't hear from his siblings after his 
parents' deaths.

Since his time on the row, 17 fellow inmates had been executed. "You know when 
it happens because the lights flicker," he said. The state power company didn't 
provide electricity for executions, so the prison used an on-site generator for 
the 2,000 volts. The lights blinked when the generator powered on. "It's not a 
good feeling," Morgan said.

Do you have hopes you'll get out, I asked. He paused long enough for me to 
wonder if he was going to answer. "I never did have too many hopes about 
anything," he managed.

Not long after, the interview time was up.

There was no way I could tell if he'd changed since he was 16. Morgan was 
polite and remorseful. But more than anything, he was dazed.

If I wanted to know whether he could become a different person, I'd need to see 
him in the future. And I wasn't sure he had one.

The law

Morgan and the other death row teens around the country were part of a uniquely 
despised group of teenagers who, because of racial bias, retribution, rage or 
other reasons - none of them scientific - were singled out for the most extreme 
punishment.

Typically, they were poor. "One searches our chronicles in vain for the 
execution of any member of the affluent strata of this society," as U.S. 
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once put it.

Efforts to address unfairness in teen sentencing continue to be nudged along, 
incrementally, by the high court. As recently as Jan. 25, in the case 
Montgomery v. Louisiana, the justices extended the chance of freedom to 
juveniles serving mandatory life without parole, a sentence that in the past 
guaranteed that they'd "only leave in a coffin," as critics put it.

Imprisoning a minor for life under an automatic sentencing scheme is cruel and 
unusual punishment, the court had ruled in the landmark 2012 case, Miller v. 
Alabama. Children must be sentenced on an individual basis, with an eye to 
mitigating circumstances, the court found. Montgomery v. Louisiana forces 
states to apply Miller retroactively, potentially giving some 1,000 juvenile 
lifers the possibility of leaving prison.

But there's no telling how much impact the case will have.

Teens who were 15 and committed murder in the 1970s, like Wayne Thompson in 
Oklahoma, could be sentenced to death. A 15-year-old who murdered after 1988 
could not be condemned because of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Thompson 
v. Oklahoma, which abolished capital punishment for pre-16-year-olds.

After 2005, the line of demarcation was 18. The high court that year ruled in 
Roper v. Simmons that it is unconstitutional to give a death sentence to people 
who were minors at the time of their crime. Juveniles are inherently capable of 
reforming themselves, the justices decided. They aren't likely to have an 
"irretrievably depraved" character, because their character isn't fully 
developed yet.

The Roper decision ended a practice that had survived for more than 350 years 
and resulted in more than 360 deaths. Now, the court was saying all those 
executions were wrongheaded.

"The juvenile death penalty is built around the premise that these offenders 
are hopeless and will never lead decent lives, and we might as well take them 
out," said retired law professor Victor Streib, one of the world's leading 
authorities on capital punishment of juveniles, who was a co-counsel for 
Thompson v. Oklahoma.

"The very nature of children is that they're never hopeless," Streib said. "To 
say that they can never be rehabilitated and they can never change - that is 
always wrong with kids."

Morgan, for his part, was saved by 4 legal appeals to the Florida Supreme 
Court. In each case the justices reversed his death sentence, finding that the 
trial court made serious errors. In all, Florida spent 17 years and probably 
more than $1 million in its effort to execute Morgan, Streib once estimated.

Morgan's 1st trial was a do-over because the proceedings were split into an 
insanity and a guilty phase, which was unconstitutional.

Attorney Michael Salnick represented Morgan in 1984, the 2nd appeal: He argued 
that the trial court improperly denied Morgan an opportunity to present an 
insanity defense. The justices agreed and remanded again.

In Morgan's 3rd trial, jurors weren't allowed to hear medical experts testify 
about what Morgan said while hypnotized, the key to his insanity defense. 
Another reversal followed.

By 1994, the fed-up Florida Supreme Court ended the cycle, having found that 
the 4th trial was flawed, too. The court commuted Morgan's sentence to life in 
prison, meaning he would serve 25 years minimum and, at least technically, get 
a chance of parole.

Salnick, based in West Palm Beach, is one of the few people who stayed in touch 
with Morgan. He's been in contact with him on and off ever since handling the 
appeal, when Morgan was in his early 20s.

"James was always respectful," Salnick recalled. "He was calm. He read the 
Bible. Whoever he was on the outside, he wasn't that person on the inside."

Since speaking to me about Morgan last year, Salnick has decided to represent 
Morgan again for what he hopes could be a resentencing.

"I am so happy to be able to attempt to assist him," he wrote in a Jan. 15 
email. No action has been taken yet, but he said he and Morgan settled on a 
fee. "I had to charge a retainer, so God bless him, he sent me a stamp and we 
were even." The walking death sentence

It is March 2015 when I meet Morgan again. I'm in a large, sunny hearing room 
setting up a camera, and I'm certain I'll hear him arrive, jangling with metal 
like last time. Then I look up, and he's already through the door.

He isn't wearing shackles, or even handcuffs. He ambles up to me and gives a 
tentative smile. He is 54 years old, with the thin lips and weary presence of a 
much older man. He's been behind bars for 39 years.

Morgan's hair is silver, and he's wearing prison blues and dark-framed, 
oversize glasses that reach a third of the way down his cheeks. A correctional 
officer pops her head into the room, says, "Here's your inmate," and leaves.

Morgan's current home is Union Correctional Institution, up the road from 
Florida State Prison. We sit on leather chairs at a long wood table. Birds 
gabble outside the windows. Morgan sits across from me, occasionally raising 
his hand to his face, the way he did when I first met him 28 years ago.

This time it has nothing to do with guarding words. He talks slowly, but he 
doesn't stop for nearly 3 hours. He hasn't seen or heard from a relative in 20 
years. Almost no one has visited in decades.

How have you survived, I ask.

"Have I? I dunno," he says.

He spent his entire young adulthood - from age 17 to 34 - on death row: Dec. 
30, 2015 was the 38th anniversary of his death sentence. Now he lives in an 
"over-50 camp" for the "elderly." The Department of Corrections calls inmates 
elderly at 50 because they age quickly, owing to poor health care before 
prison, and to poor health care inside it, human rights activists would add.

Morgan tells me straight out that he's a different person than the teenager who 
arrived in 1977.

"Am I better than him? Yes. Can I change the mistakes he done? No. Am I sorry 
for what he done? Yes. But I ain't the same person no more. That 16-year-old 
kid is dead," he says. His voice trembles. "That 16-year-old kid died a long 
time ago.

"The trouble is, some people see prisoners as the animal they arrested," he 
goes on. "They see you as the animal they put in prison.

"I sometimes I wonder if I would've been better off being executed. Because the 
only difference between being on death row and being out here is having a 
walking death sentence. That means never getting out of prison," he says. "It 
means being in a parole system that doesn't wanna parole nobody. Especially an 
ex-death row inmate or people with a life sentence."

By the time the Florida Supreme Court took him off death row in 1994, he was 
already in his 30s. Now he had a new survival challenge.

For his entire adult life he lived alone in a single cell and barely left it 
aside from brief showers and a few hours a week in an exercise yard. (He played 
volleyball: "Basketball is too violent.")

The living within a crowd

Now he was in the general population. His new cell was only slightly larger 
than the one on death row, and he had to share it with another prisoner. He was 
in rec yards and chow halls with crowds of men. He saw fights and a few 
stabbings. He got in fights himself decades ago. "But I matured."

In the past 12 years he went a decade without a disciplinary report, but he 
recently got 2 DRs, he says. 1 was for "passing a magazine or book or 
something" from 1 cell to another; the other was for lying to staff about it, 
"like a dummy," he adds. "The correctional officer was right to give 'em to 
me."

Death row, in one way, had some happier times. In 1989, while in county jail 
awaiting his fourth trial, Morgan, 28, married Rita Runge, 26. They met through 
a "looking for pen pal" ad in a tabloid. They divorced 2 years later.

"She told me she can't live her life anymore without knowing what's gonna 
happen in the future," Morgan said.

I had tried to contact dozens of people to ask them how Morgan had changed over 
the years, including his siblings, who didn't respond to phone calls, and 
Florida State Prison inmate James Hitchcock, who taught Morgan how to read and 
write when the 2 men were neighbors on death row.

But when I tried to reach Rita Runge, all I found was an online obituary that 
said she died in 2011. I decide, reluctantly, to tell him about it. He clears 
his throat and can't talk for moment. He'd like to see the obituary, he says, 
and asks me to send it to him.

He got used to thinking about dying on death row, he says, after staring at the 
table for a while. "It's like having a job - getting up every morning and going 
to it, right? You get up every morning, you realize you're on death row and the 
chances are you're gonna die.

"Compared to then, when I was on death row - am I more competent? Yes. Am I 
more aware? More educated? Yes. Do I want to go out there and make a life for 
myself? I would like the opportunity to."

Do you think you have enough remorse? I have to ask.

"I look in the mirror every morning and have to face the fact that I took a 
human life. And ... I can't even begin to express," he pauses again. "I don't 
even know what I could say to 'em, except, 'I'm sorry.' I can't blame the 
victims for wanting me dead," he says.

"I've paid almost 40 years for my mistake," he says. "They can make me pay for 
the rest of my life. And I'm not saying they would be wrong. But at some point 
you gotta give someone the opportunity to show that he's changed. Unless you 
got proof that we're a threat to society, give us a chance to prove ourselves."

"But no one wants to take a chance that an inmate might murder someone again," 
I say.

"I'm not going to hurt anybody. The other old people in the prison are like 
that, too. We're too old to go out and commit crimes. We're harmless to the 
public.

"Guys in here is 70, 75 years old - they can hardly get around anymore. I'm 
blessed because I'm still physically capable. But I don't know what next year 
holds.

"If I'm physically disabled," he says, "and I can't hold a job, and I can't 
take care of myself - then there's really no reason to get out of prison."

It's one of his biggest fears. "When they're old, the majority of guys in here, 
they just stop trying to get out. I don't want to be one of them. I want to get 
out!"

Today he works at the tag factory, making Florida license plates. Previous jobs 
were pouring cement, working in the kitchen, and doing maintenance and 
construction work.

I mention that it can be hard out there. Paula Cooper, one of the only death 
row teens to win parole, was sentenced to death for a murder in Indiana when 
she was 16. She was released in 2013, was engaged to be married, had a dream 
job and was beloved by friends and co-workers. But she couldn't forgive herself 
for her crime. She committed suicide in May 2015.

"I don't know," Morgan says. He doesn't seem to take in the story. "People say 
it's harder getting out than it is getting in. And maybe some of that is true. 
But I don't think it'd be that difficult."

The last time Morgan was out in public was at his father's funeral in 1985. He 
was in county jail for his 3rd trial, and he was allowed to attend.

The whole family was there, but the guards didn't want Morgan to get close to 
anyone. "I mainly wanted to see my mom," Morgan says. His eyes tear up. He 
adjusts his glasses and clears his throat. "They let me stand next to her," he 
says. It was the last time he saw her or any other relative.

He went from his parents' home to a prison cell. He doesn't know about the 
Internet, or Walmart, or spending a day without having someone tell him what to 
do. Everything outside of prison would have to feel alien to him after this 
many years. The transition would be unimaginable.

Maybe in the end what Morgan represents is a problem that's unimaginable. No 
one can undo the harm to the Trbovich and Morgan families. No one can repay 
Morgan or other teenagers for their years on death row, which - as it turns out 
- is cruel and unusual punishment, akin to torture, the U.S. Supreme Court has 
said.

For now, Morgan says he reads the Bible, and goes to church services and AA 
meetings. "But I know I can go out there if they gave me the chance."

He doesn't know exactly what he'd do first if he got freed. But he thinks he'd 
go to McDonald's, then to the beach. And he'd like to see the St. Lucie River 
near his home.

He makes customized license plates these days that say "Save the Manatee," and 
those are his favorites. When he was a kid, he saw a manatee once in the river.

"You gotta love manatees," he says. "They're so harmless. They're so innocent."

(source: Amy Linn, a 2015 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, is a freelance 
writer and magazine editor.----Juvenile Justice Information Exchange)

*********************

History of Death Penalty for Juvenile Offenders


In 1642, Thomas Granger, 16, was hanged in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, for 
having sex with a mare, a cow and some goats. It was America's 1st documented 
execution of a child offender and the debut of the juvenile death penalty. The 
practice would end 363 years later after the deaths of at least 366 child 
offenders - people under the age of 18 at the time of their crime.

The youngest girl to be executed was 12-year-old Hannah Ocuish, a Native 
American child who was hanged in Connecticut in 1786 for murdering a 6-year-old 
white girl.

James Arcene, a Cherokee, was the youngest ever to be condemned. He was hanged 
in Arkansas in 1885 for a murder-robbery he helped commit when he was 10. The 
execution came 13 years later (not out of deference for his young age, but 
because it took that long for lawmen to arrest him).

Others were rushed to their deaths.

In 1944, African-American George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted in South Carolina 
when he was 14, making him the youngest person executed in the 20th century.

Stinney died less than 3 months after his arrest for allegedly murdering two 
white girls in small-town South Carolina. His trial took a day. An all-white 
jury deliberated 10 minutes before finding him guilty. His lawyer didn't file 
an appeal. (In 2014, a South Carolina court took the remarkable step of 
exonerating him posthumously, finding that he'd suffered an egregious 
miscarriage of justice.)

In 1964, Texas executed African-American youth James Echols - the last teen to 
get the death penalty for rape. Echols' victim was a white woman. He was put to 
death at 19, 2 years after the crime.

After Echols' execution, laws allowing the penalty stayed on the books but 
weren???t used for the next 21 years. Capital punishment's popularity was 
waning. States held back from imposing it, waiting to see how court challenges 
would resolve arguments that it was unconstitutional.

Abolitionists asserted that the penalty was meted out to a fractional number of 
teens who - for reasons of discrimination, caprice, fear, rage, tough-on-crime 
politics or some inchoate loathing - were punished far more harshly than scores 
of other offenders who committed equally horrific or worse crimes.

By 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia largely agreed. 
Death sentences for all age groups were imposed so arbitrarily - so "wantonly" 
and "freakishly" as Justice Potter Stewart put it - that they violated the 
Eighth Amendment, the court held. The ruling in effect struck down all death 
penalty statutes as they then existed, but it allowed states an opportunity to 
craft new, less discriminatory laws.

More than 30 states enacted statutes that would pass judicial muster. The 
modern era of the death penalty began. By 1974, teenagers once again arrived on 
death row.

They would leave it for good, three decades later. The U.S. Supreme Court 
outlawed juvenile death sentences in 2005 in the landmark case Roper v. 
Simmons, brought by Christopher Simmons, a Missouri teen who was 17 when he and 
a friend murdered a woman. Executing juvenile offenders was cruel and unusual 
punishment, the high court found. Teens are inherently capable of 
rehabilitating themselves; they are too immature to be considered as culpable 
as adults, the justices decided.

The Simmons ruling spared the lives of 72 juvenile offenders still on death row 
at the time. For others, the decision came too late.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BY THE NUMBERS

The juvenile death penalty in the modern era, 1974-2005

Number of juvenile offenders executed between 1974 and 2005, when the U.S. 
Supreme Court abolished the punishment: 22

Number sentenced to death: 226

% executed who were African American: 50

% of African Americans in population as a whole: 12

Number of executed who were white: 10

Who were Hispanic: 1

Of all executed teens, % whose victims were white: 81

Of executed blacks, % convicted by all-white juries: approximately 30

Approximate number of former death row teens who are behind bars today, 
resentenced to life in prison with little or no possibility of parole: 187

Who are now almost 60 years old: 9

Number of juvenile offenders exonerated: 3

Years that juvenile exoneree Kwame Ajamu spent in an Ohio prison for a murder 
he did not commit: 28

That Leon Brown spent in a North Carolina prison for a rape and murder he did 
not commit: 30

Male juvenile offenders sentenced to death: 221

Female: 5

Number of females executed: 0

% of teen offenders executed in Texas: 60

% executed in Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma combined: 81

Year the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for offenders younger 
than 16: 1988

Aside from the United States, number of United Nation members today that have 
refused to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans 
the juvenile death penalty and protects children's health and welfare: 0

Number of countries other than the United States that officially and publicly 
sanctioned the juvenile death penalty in 2005: 0

% on death row in 2005 who were people of color: 66

About 95 % or more of death row inmates of all ages who experienced at least 
one (and up to 9 or more) of the following:

--physical, sexual, psychological abuse;

--neglect, poverty, trauma, mental disorders, illiteracy, substance abuse;

--intellectual or neurological impairments, head injuries;

--witnessing family violence;

--parental substance abuse or mental illness;

--death or absence of parent:

(source: Juvenile Justice Information Exchange)