[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., N.C., FLA., TENN., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 15




TEXAS----impending execution

Final Execution Set in James Byrd Jr.'s 1998 Murder Case



On a spring night 21 years ago, James Byrd Jr. was looking for a ride back to 
his Jasper, Texas, home. The men who offered it to him viciously murdered Byrd 
in a crime that shocked the nation.

Byrd's sister, Louvon Harris, says those 24 hours threw the family into a state 
of disbelief.

"That's a moment where you say to yourself, is this really happening? Because 
we just left him the day before at my niece's bridal shower. And as a family, 
we're a normal family. And the only problem he had that day was, 'Am I gonna be 
the only male at that bridal shower? And he laughed about it," Harris told 
InsideEdition.com.

The next day, on June 7, 1998, three white supremacists severely beat Byrd — 
even defecated on him — before they chained his ankles to the back of a pickup 
truck and dragged him for 3 miles.

A pathologist testified Byrd was alive for much of it. He died about halfway 
through, after being decapitated and having his right arm ripped off.

"You deal with pain, shock, and we were numb and we became very angry. Who gave 
them the right to say my brother's not worth living because he was born black? 
Something he had no control over? And they said you don't deserve to live 
because of that,” Harris said.

Billy Rowles was head of the Jasper County Sheriff's Office at the time and saw 
the horrific crime scene.

"It made me sick to my stomach. For what it's worth. It's the remains of a 
human being who had been dismembered. Very sickening," he told 
InsideEdition.com.

Rowles said a witness told authorities he saw a dark colored pickup truck with 
loud mufflers barreling down the street. He said he spotted three white men 
inside and Byrd in the back.

"And when he got up on the porch, he heard a pickup truck with very loud 
mufflers coming toward his house. And he looked out there and when the truck 
went by in front of it."

They dumped Byrd’s body in front of an African-American cemetery.

Word got around town and Rowles said witnesses led them straight to Shawn Allen 
Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer and John William King. They were all tried and 
convicted of Byrd's brutal murder.

Back then, Byrd's son, Ross, spoke up against the death penalty and expressed 
that the punishment for murder should not be more murder. Brewer was sentenced 
to the death penalty.

Harris went to Brewer's execution in 2011 and said the man showed no remorse.

"I never been to an execution before, I never thought I'd be in this situation 
before. Of course I never thought I'd be a victim family of a hate crime 
either. It was pretty eerie because, to watch someone die. But it was also an 
eye opener to see how far hate will go. Will you take it to the grave?"

Berry received a life sentence. After numerous appeals, King was also sentenced 
to death by lethal injection. It is scheduled for April 24.

"I'm gonna be there. Yea. I'm not gonna watch it, I've seen too many people die 
in my life. But I am gonna be sitting outside on the grounds when it happens," 
said Rowles, now the Newton County sheriff.

Harris will be there too. "It won't bring James back, but justice was served. 
In history you find out very seldom two white men put to death for killing a 
black man. And so you have history there."

Byrd's family marked the 20th anniversary of his death last year.

Rowles said the loss, paired with Matthew Shepard’s grizzly murder in Wyoming 
four months later simply because he was gay, helped change the course of 
history.

"Everybody now knows what a hate crime is. Back then when this happened, it was 
a racially motivated murder. A civil rights violation.The man was murdered 
because of his race. The phrase, hate crime came out of this a few weeks after 
this, we had the Matthew Shepard case up in Laramie, Wyoming," Rowles said.

Rowles feels like the incident tarnished the image of the small Texas town — a 
wound still trying to heal.

Yet through pure heartache, Byrd's family found a ray of light: starting The 
Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing.

The foundation's goal is to encourage racial unity through education and reduce 
the number of racially motivated crimes. For the case that has haunted Rowles, 
the town and the nation for decades, closure can't come fast enough.

"I'll be glad when it's over. That would be the final act of this case. Would 
be when John William King is laid to rest, it's over," Rowles said.

James Byrd's memory and legacy continue to will live on.

"James was a fun loving person. He loved people. He loved music. He could pick 
up an instrument and just play it right there and not thinking about it. And he 
also teased the family, ‘I'ma put Jasper on the map, I'ma put Jasper on the 
map!’ And everything. And I keep hearing those words in my mind. We thought it 
would be through his music and through his playing. Never in my wildest dreams 
did we think it would be because of his death," Harris said.

(source: insideedition.com)

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

Boy, 18, ‘slits mum’s throat then beat her to death when she caught him 
stealing her things’----Death penalty for Matthew Dempsey and his friend if 
convicted after being charged with the murder of Mary Helen Dempsey



A son has been accused of slitting his mum's throat and beating her with a 
baseball bat after she caught him stealing her things.

Matthew Dempsey and his pal Daniel Saucedo, who are both 18, have been charged 
with capital murder in connection with the murder of Mary Helen Dempsey.

Mary Helen Dempsey's body was found by her daughter after she failed to show up 
at work

If convicted they face the death penalty for the murder of the 53-year-old in 
San Antonio, Texas.

According to an arrest affidavit, Dempsey confessed to killing his mother with 
Saucedo's help, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

He reportedly told investigators he went to his mum’s house at late on Monday 
night or early Tuesday morning and entered with a key.

The pair then began gathering items to steal but they were interrupted when 
Mary Dempsey returned and turned on the lights.

At that moment her son immediately attacked her from behind with a bat Saucedo 
then joined in and beat her with a bat as well, the affidavit states.

Dempsey then went to the kitchen to get a knife with which to slit his mother’s 
throat.

'THROAT SLIT'

The affidavit says he gave Saucedo some duct tape to bind her and then covered 
her with a blanket from his mother's bedroom.

It’s alleged the pair went through her wallet and loaded the stolen items into 
her car.

Saucedo left in Mary Dempsey's car and they later withdrew money from her 
account at an ATM.

After Mary Dempsey failed to show up at work and she couldn’t be reached by 
phone, her employer notified her daughter Jessica.

She went to her mum’s house and found the door unlocked, the house ransacked 
and her car missing.

Jessica Dempsey then saw the blanket in the living room and “saw it was 
covering a person and saw a pool of blood", according to the affidavit.

Mary Dempsey was pronounced dead at the scene, and investigators began 
questioning neighbours in the area who said two males had been seen leaving the 
home.

Detectives began to suspect Dempsey may have been involved in his mother's 
death and they visited his mobile home, where he was later arrested when he 
returned with his girlfriend.

Dempsey's girlfriend told police he had confessed to killing his mother with 
Saucedo, the affidavit says.

Saucedo was arrested shortly after and is being held with Dempsey at Bexar 
County Jail on $1million bail.

(source: thesun.co.uk)

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

Family wants gunman who killed mother, daughter, infant to face death 
penalty----'My pain is triple to one of them,' Melinda Quiroz said



After a mother, daughter and granddaughter’s deaths following a shooting 
Tuesday, family members hope the shooter gets the death penalty.

Janette Quiroz, 37, and her daughter Bernadett Quiroz, 18, were standing next 
to an SUV at the Rosemont at University Park apartments in the 100 block of 
Emerald Ash Tuesday night when a juvenile male opened fire, San Antonio Police 
said. Police have not announced any arrests in the case or any possible motive.

Janette Quiroz died at the scene, but Bernadett, who a family member said was 
seven months pregnant, was brought to San Antonio Military Medical Center where 
she later died.

Bernadett’s daughter, Tabitha Bernadette Quiroz, was delivered by c-section 
before Bernadett died, said her grandmother, Melinda Quiroz.

However, the Quiroz matriarch said Tabitha was brain dead and had “a leakage on 
her tummy, a leakage in her brain, and again, she didn’t have no signs of 
life.”

So she made the difficult decision to take the infant off life support.

“Even though I would have liked for her to be here with us, but unfortunately, 
I didn’t want her to suffer," Melinda Quiroz said. "So I made that decision. 
And all I can say is she went with her mom because she was dead by the time 
they got her to the hospital, too. She was brain dead. So I'm saying she died 
with her mommy. And the only thing that consoles me is that ‘OK, well this 
happened. So I have to return her back to her mommy.’”

So on Friday night at just three days old, Tabitha Quiroz also died.

“When I found out that she was not going to make it, it tore me a lot. Because 
then I won’t have anything left of my sister besides memories,” said 
Bernadett’s older brother, Damian Quiroz.

It has been an emotional few days for the family, and both Damian and Melinda 
Quiroz said they want the shooter to face the death penalty when they are 
caught.

“I feel like, we’re in Texas. So I want them to get the full punishment. I 
don’t care how old you are, or how young you are, you deserve the death 
punishment,” said Damian Quiroz.

“My pain is triple to one of them,” Melinda Quiroz said.

(source: KSAT news)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Sean Kratz, accused in Bucks murders, scheduled for court hearing



The 2nd suspect in the murders of four young men in Bucks County is scheduled 
to be in court Monday.

The trial for Sean Kratz was set to begin Monday but court records show that 
has been canceled and a miscellaneous criminal hearing is scheduled for 9:30 
a.m. instead.

Kratz and his cousin, Cosmo DiNardo, were charged in the deaths of 4 men found 
dead on the DiNardo family farm in Solebury Township in 2017.

Kratz, 22, is accused of helping DiNardo with 3 of the killings.

Kratz rejected a plea deal in May. Prosecutors at the time said they would seek 
the death penalty against him. He's charged with three counts each of homicide, 
abuse of corpse, robbery and related offenses.

DiNardo pleaded guilty to killing the 4 men and is serving a life sentence.

(source: WFMZ news)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Death penalty sought in North Carolina child abuse death



Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a North Carolina man convicted of 
killing a 2-year-boy and who they say was the drug dealer and pimp for the 
child's mother.

The Winston-Salem Journal reports the sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin 
Monday for 33-year-old Charles Thomas Stacks of Winston-Salem. Stacks was 
convicted last week of 1st-degree murder in the death of Jaxson Sonny Swain in 
August 2015.

Evidence showed Stacks repeatedly slammed the child on the ground.

Prosecutors said Stacks was angry that Jaxson's mother owed him for drugs and 
that she left him alone with Jaxson and without any heroin. They say Stacks 
whipped, kicked and hit Jaxson because he wasn't potty-trained and didn't call 
him "sir."

Prosecutors said Stacks was the pimp and drug dealer for Jaxson's mother.

(source: newsobserver.com)








FLORIDA:

Marion Gavins Jr. in custody, charged with 1st-degree murder in death of Curtis 
Gray----Gray's death was the 1st homicide in Flagler County in 2019.



After a 36-hour investigation, the suspect in the murder of 18-year-old Flagler 
Palm Coast High School student Curtis Gray has been arrested, Flagler County 
Sheriff Rick Staly said at a press conference on the afternoon of Sunday, April 
14.

Marion Lee Gavins Jr., 17, of Palm Coast, got into an altercation with Gray 
outside Coin Laundry on Belle Terre near Palm Coast Parkway at around 12:30 
a.m. Saturday, April 13. Deputies found Gray bleeding from a gunshot wound to 
the abdomen. He was taken to Halifax Health, where he died.

Deputies were able to identify Gavins, a previous offender, as a suspect nearly 
12 hours after the shooting.

Deputies conducted a felony traffic stop on a car leaving the suspect's house 
on Saturday afternoon. Deputies, along with a SWAT team, served a search 
warrant at a residence on Woodfaire Lane in Palm Coast on Saturday afternoon. 
The vehicle the suspect was in during the shooting was located in the garage 
but the suspect was not in the home, and he was not in the vehicle that was 
previously stopped.

At 11 p.m. Saturday, a 1st-degree murder warrant was issued for Gavins' arrest.

The family of Curtis Gray set up a GoFoundMe account to help raise money for 
the funeral and memorial services. You can donate here: 
https://www.gofundme.com/LongLiveCurtis.

“Our team did not give up. They put the pressure on," Staly said. "Our deputies 
and detectives did a great job.”

At around 2 p.m. Sunday, deputies spoke with Gavins' mom, who wished to turn 
him in. She agreed to meet at the Sheriff's District 2 Office in Palm Coast. 
Gavins turned himself in at 3 p.m.

“These things can end very poorly for the suspect," Staly said. "I think the 
mom was trying to keep her son alive because he was obviously making bad 
decisions. So I’m glad that she did that.”

Staly said he has already spoken with State Attorney R.J. Larizza and requested 
that Gavins be charged as an adult. There is no known motive “for this 
senseless killing," he added.

In addition, Gavins has a criminal history dating back to 2014. He was arrested 
in October 2014 for sale of marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school. He was 
arrested in 2015 for violation of probation and possession of a weapon on 
school campus (an 8-inch kitchen knife). And he was arrested in 2016 for 
domestic violence.

Gray's death was the first homicide in Flagler County in 2019.

“This is a tragedy for two families,” Staly said. "One who has lost a son who 
was an aspiring athlete. And the other who’s son will likely spend the rest of 
his life in prison or possibly face the death penalty."

(source: palmcoastobserver.com)




TENNESSEE:

How a Former Death Row Prisoner and a Murder Victim’s Daughter Joined Together 
To Fight the Death Penalty



If you ask Cynthia Vaughn and Sabrina Butler Smith how they met, there’s a good 
chance they’ll erupt in laughter. It’s not your typical funny story — not as 
awkward first encounters go. But it’s pretty epic.

“Tell it, Cynthia,” Sabrina says. “Take it away!”

“It was at this big church,” Cynthia begins. Somewhere in Memphis. The two of 
them had been invited to speak on a panel organized by Tennesseans for 
Alternatives to the Death Penalty. They had never heard of one another — or so 
they had thought. “I’d seen the flyer and it hadn’t clicked yet,” Cynthia says. 
Sabrina giggles.

“We were sitting there getting ready to do everything,” Cynthia continues, “And 
they were introducing her. And they’re talking about how she was convicted.” 
Listening to the story and looking out at the audience, it suddenly dawned on 
Cynthia. “Ohhhhh,” she says, her eyes wide, her voice lowering to a dramatic 
whisper. “I remember this lady.”

Sabrina had once been notorious in Mississippi, where Cynthia grew up. Arrested 
in 1989 for killing her infant son, Walter, Sabrina swore she was innocent. But 
a nearly all-white jury sentenced her to die. She was only 19. After her 
conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, however, a second 
jury acquitted Sabrina in December 1995. She was the 1st woman ever exonerated 
from death row in the United States.

Losing both parents in a way most people couldn’t fathom, Cynthia had grown up 
filled with rage.

News of Sabrina’s release had enraged Cynthia, who had just graduated high 
school in 1995. As a staunch supporter of capital punishment, Cynthia had no 
patience for those who claimed their innocence, let alone death penalty 
opponents who had no clue about the system in real life. She did. Her mother, 
Connie Johnson, was murdered in Tennessee in 1984, when Cynthia was just 7 
years old. Her stepfather was sentenced to die for the crime.

Losing both parents in a way most people couldn’t fathom, Cynthia had grown up 
filled with rage. It radiated beyond her stepfather and toward the world around 
her. She became a devoted member of pro-death penalty forums, often posting 
during her overnight shifts as a police dispatcher. “When we weren’t busy, I 
would be online arguing with anti-death penalty people,” she says. One of the 
cases that especially incensed her was Sabrina’s.

But in 2012, everything changed. Cynthia went to see her stepfather at 
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She had planned to 
confront him with every ounce of anger that had built inside her since she was 
a child — and she did. But in spite of herself, she also found herself 
forgiving him. It transformed her whole life. Cynthia felt freer, happier, more 
present for her own children. A few years later, she gathered up the courage to 
tell her story publicly for the first time. The response was so positive, she 
kept telling it. And that’s how she found herself at the church in Memphis, 
side by side with a woman whom she once wanted dead.

After the panel ended that night, Cynthia went to look for Sabrina in the 
bathroom. “And I just bombarded her,” she says. “I was like, ‘Alright, look. 
You don’t know me. But I know you. And I’m sorry ’cause a long time ago, I said 
really bad things about you.’” Sabrina forgave her.

Today, Cynthia and Sabrina tell the story like old friends. Traveling across 
the state to speak against the death penalty, they have worked out a routine. 
“I tell her, ‘You go first,’” Sabrina says. “We fought about it for a long 
time,” Cynthia laughs, but she agreed that it made sense. The story she shares 
now is not just about her own ability to forgive her stepfather anymore; it’s 
about a deeper transformation, the kind that will be necessary to abolish the 
death penalty once and for all.

That work has taken on a new urgency recently. In the summer of 2018, Tennessee 
carried out its first execution in nearly a decade. By the end of the year, it 
had killed 2 more men on death row. 6 more people are scheduled to die between 
this year and 2020. The next execution is set for May 16, 2019. The man 
scheduled for death is Don Johnson, Cynthia’s stepfather.

After years of supporting his execution, Cynthia now desperately wants Johnson 
to live. She explained why at an event in February at the Vanderbilt University 
Divinity School. It wasn’t just about forgiveness. Cynthia always craved 
knowledge about her mother growing up. For most of her life, she said, her 
mother was “like a character in a storybook,” one she could never fully 
picture. After recovering from the initial shock of forgiving her stepfather at 
the prison that day, Cynthia told Johnson, “Now you’re going to tell me things 
I want to know.” She asked basic questions, “simple things that people take for 
granted all the time. ‘What was her first car?’ And he told me. It was a Ford 
Torino. ‘What kind of music did she like?’ Her favorite band was the Rolling 
Stones.” Her favorite perfume? Chanel No. 5. “Little things that made her a 
human that I did not know. He gave that to me. … Nobody had ever done that for 
me.”

Cynthia has gone back to visit Johnson several times. And she is still asking 
questions. “There is so much more about her I want to know,” she says. “But I 
can’t do that if the state of Tennessee executes him.”

In the official narrative of capital punishment, there are victims and there 
are victimizers. The latter forfeit any value they might have to society; their 
death brings comfort and closure to the people they have harmed. Barriers to 
their execution — or those who protest against it — are an affront to victims 
and all grieving families.

The reality is far more complicated. There are the cases of actual innocence, 
in which the victimizer is the state. There are the revelations about the 
condemned that sometimes surface long after trial; childhoods often marked by 
extreme trauma, violence, or abuse, which complicate the definition of who we 
consider victims. There are the divisions within families over support for the 
death penalty for a loved one’s murder. And there is the inescapable reality 
that executions widen the trauma of a violent crime, impacting people in ways 
often invisible to society. In families like Cynthia’s or Sabrina’s, these are 
the same people who have already been victimized by the original tragedy. 
“People always want to say ‘victims’ family, victims’ family’ — and I’m one of 
those people,” Cynthia says. “But we have to understand that every single one 
of those inmates also have family.”

The reality of the capital punishment is far more complicated than its official 
narrative.

That understanding can lead to powerful acts of compassion. On the eve of the 
2017 execution of Kenneth Williams in Arkansas, for example, the daughter of 
one of his victims not only wrote a letter asking the governor to spare his 
life — she flew Williams’s daughter to Arkansas to see her father before he 
died. “If Mr. Williams is executed,” she wrote, “her loss, her pain, will be as 
real as mine.” Her letter was ignored.

Despite the resurgence in executions, the reality is that death sentences are 
on a steep decline in Tennessee. This mirrors trends across the country, where 
support for the death penalty has reached historic lows. But the notion that 
the death penalty is justice for victims remains widely entrenched. The 
narrative was recently on display in Nashville, where the governor quietly 
signed a bill to speed up the appellate process in capital cases. Named the 
Sgt. Daniel Baker Act in homage to a sheriff’s deputy who was gunned down while 
on duty last year — and whose alleged killers have yet to be tried — the 
sponsors cast the legislation as an overdue remedy that has unfairly denied 
closure to victims’ families for years.

It’s true that the lengthy appellate process is burdensome for all involved, 
but Tennessee’s law will do very little to mitigate the problem. For one, it 
only applies to death sentences imposed after its passage — a vanishingly small 
number. In the meantime, politicians and prosecutors keep promising closure to 
victims’ families while continually delivering the opposite. “Every time I 
would try to get to a point in my life where I felt like I could move on, where 
I felt like I could try to lead some type of normal life, the death penalty is 
right back in my face,” Cynthia told the audience at Vanderbilt.

Politicians and prosecutors keep promising closure to victims’ families while 
continually delivering the opposite.

Johnson’s death has been scheduled before. One date was in 2006, when Cynthia 
still supported his execution. Her bags were packed to drive to Nashville. “I 
was ready to go,” she said. “I wanted him dead. That was my revenge. That was 
what I had been waiting for.” But mere days beforehand, she got a phone call 
telling her that he had gotten a stay. “That was probably the 1st time that I 
realized that something is just not right,” she said. “The state is making me a 
victim over and over and over again.” Meanwhile, she had never received the 
help she needed to process her trauma.

In the archived pages of the pro-death penalty websites where she once spent so 
much time, there’s a lot to show Cynthia wasn’t alone. The posts weren’t all 
bloodthirsty rants; in one thread, participants described how much they were 
struggling with their physical, mental, and emotional health. A mother could 
see how her depression was impacting her child; the grown son of a murder 
victim described feelings of guilt over his own mourning process. There was 
talk of the news media that swarm around trials or execution dates. How do you 
cope when everybody seems to care about you one moment and the next minute it’s 
like you don’t exist?

Sabrina never had a chance to mourn the loss of her son. To this day, in fact, 
she cannot access his grave. After she was exonerated, she became a seasoned 
public speaker with groups like Witness to Innocence. Yet she struggled to get 
a job. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” she says. Although Mississippi passed 
legislation in 2009 to provide compensation for the wrongfully convicted, no 
sum of money could address the enduring effects of her incarceration. “They 
didn’t give me any type of mental service, nothing.”

In a memoir published in 2011, Sabrina describes how she “became the living 
dead” after the death of her son. “I was an emotional zombie for many years.” 
The loss was compounded by the terror she felt over the threat of execution. 
Her first official “death date” was set soon after her conviction in 1990. 
While this was a mere formality given her right to appeal her conviction, 
Sabrina did not understand this, and her defense attorneys never explained it. 
A woman in a neighboring cell tried to reassure her that the state would not 
kill her so fast, but on that day, Sabrina woke up at 3 a.m. and paced 
furiously, scared for her life. “Every time I heard some keys,” she wrote, “I 
thought they were coming for me.”

On a Thursday afternoon in March, Sabrina and Cynthia met up again, this time 
at LeMoyne-Owen College, a historically black college in Memphis. Cynthia wore 
pink nail polish and a black top, her sleeves rolled up to the colorful tattoo 
she got as an homage to her mother. Sabrina wore braids and a T-shirt that read 
“Journey of Hope … From Violence to Healing,” which she got during a tour with 
an abolitionist group whose members have been impacted by murder and 
state-sanctioned executions.

Sabrina and Cynthia were scheduled to speak that evening, at an event 
co-sponsored by Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and the local 
criminal justice reform group, Just City. In their introductory remarks, 
speakers would trace the death penalty to its roots in lynchings and other 
forms of racial violence. The legacy is ever-present in Memphis, where 
Confederate statues were removed from city parks in 2017. A couple blocks away 
from the LeMoyne-Owen campus, a historical marker stood on the site of the 
People’s Grocery, whose three employees were murdered in a notorious lynching 
that helped inspire the activism of journalist Ida B. Wells.

Sabrina and Cynthia are no strangers to this history. Both grew up in small 
Southern towns with mostly white populations. After her mother’s murder, 
Cynthia was raised by an aunt in Tunica, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. 
Sabrina was born in Jackson, Mississippi, later moving across the state to 
Columbus. “In Columbus,” Sabrina told me, “they still have a mural on the wall 
in the post office of people in the field picking cotton.”

This legacy makes their particular bond a point of some pride. “I’ll go there, 
I’ll say it,” Cynthia said as we discussed the ways their message resonates 
with audiences. “She’s a black woman and I’m a white woman.” In a region where 
racial divisions run so deep, and at a time when people seem more politically 
polarized than ever, Cynthia and Sabrina believe that they can reach more 
people together than they ever could apart. Their stories remind people of the 
many ways women are affected by the death penalty — it is not all about men 
facing execution. And they defy people’s expectations of what friendship can 
look like. “We’re a force,” Sabrina says.

It’s not all about shared suffering or pain, either, although the feeling of 
being understood brings its own joy. They have a lot of funny stories to tell, 
like the time at a nice restaurant after an event in Chattanooga, when they 
both felt out of place deciphering the menu. (“We’re not fancy people,” Cynthia 
says.) Driving home later that night, Cynthia got a flat tire in the middle of 
the night; it was Sabrina who stayed on the phone with her to make sure she got 
through it OK.

As the event came to a close later that night, a young woman in the audience 
asked Cynthia a question that gave her pause. “You are both family of the 
victim and family of the accused,” she said. How did she find space to grieve 
her mother? “I think you’re the 1st person to ever ask me that,” Cynthia said.

On April 3rd, a small press conference was held at Riverside Seventh-day 
Adventist Church in Nashville. Members of Johnson’s legal team handed out 
copies of a clemency petition that had been delivered to Governor Bill Lee 
earlier that morning. It told the story of Cynthia’s journey to forgiveness as 
well as Johnson’s own transformation while on death row. “It is not uncommon 
for inmates to have a religious experience while they are incarcerated,” Pastor 
Furman Fordham said. But Johnson became such a powerful leader in the prison 
ministry at Riverbend, the congregation took the rare move of ordaining him as 
a church elder in 2008.

Fordham recalled a day after church when a man approached him to say he had 
received bible study from Johnson in prison, a powerful testament to the role 
he has had helping men leave Riverbend “as changed individuals.” The clemency 
materials include portions of letters written on behalf of Johnson from dozens 
of men on death row. But the petition urges the governor to consider Cynthia 
above all. “She is the human being most deeply and directly affected by the 
weighty decision before you.”

Cynthia was not at the press conference that afternoon. It was her birthday. As 
she does most days, she spent the morning sleeping after her overnight shift at 
the casino where she works. She woke up to a chocolate cake and well-wishes 
from her friends. But she was bracing herself for the response to news of the 
clemency petition, including from family members who do not support her 
activism. On Facebook a couple of days later, Sabrina liked a post Cynthia put 
up quoting Tupac Shakur: “Y’all supposed to be happy I’m free.” (“You get it 
don’t ya Sabrina,” Cynthia replied.)

As Cynthia waits to hear from the governor, there is hope in the people 
supporting her stepfather. But the most relief right now comes from those who 
simply don’t judge or require explanations or expect anything from her. Sabrina 
gets this too. For all the years she has been telling her own story, it is 
always exhausting to recount your worst trauma — to reporters, to people at 
public events. “When you’re looking out into the audience, it’s like you have 
to prove something to the people,” Sabrina says. “That’s not easy. It’s not 
easy to put yourself right back where you started. That’s hard. So I love her 
because I can look over there and I can know that she shares what I know.”

(source: theintercept.com)








USA:

Capital punishment a flawed system



Editor: Capital punishment, also referred to as the death penalty, is the 
government-authorized killing of a person who has committed a serious crime. 
This flawed system does not meet modern-day values, it has not been proven to 
deter crime, may result in the killing of an innocent person and therefore 
should be abolished in all states.

Although supporters of capital punishment will argue that the possibility of 
death will prevent one from committing a crime, evidence shows that there is no 
way execution deters crime more than a life sentence in prison.

Current and past presidents of the country’s top academic criminological 
societies participated in a study in which 88 % of these experts claimed that 
the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to murder. The death penalty as a 
punishment is completely irreversible and within 42 years, 148 prisoners on 
death row were found innocent and released. The state of Florida will 
mistakenly sentence someone to death row around once every 18 months. The death 
penalty system is incredibly flawed as factors such as race and intellectual 
disabilities may contribute to a faulty death sentence.

A study proved that jurors in Washington are 3 times more likely to recommend a 
death sentencing for a black defendant than a white defendant. Mental illness 
and intellectual disabilities may also lead to an unrightful killing.

One must prove that the accused person is not mentally ill, thus creating a 
large risk factor. With the use of the death penalty in the last hundreds of 
years, the abolishment is long overdue and needs to be enacted immediately. 
There are too many factors that may contribute to an unrightful death for death 
sentencing to be an option of punishment.

Mia Reinert

SHAVERTOWN

(source: Letter to the Editor, Citizens Voice)