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

[Rick Halperin]

March 27



TEXAS:

Man sent to death row for murdering Dallas officer could get punishment changed



The widow of murdered Dallas Police Officer Brian Jackson is angry that the 
killer's death sentence may soon be changed to life without parole.

The move comes after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a different Texas 
death row case. The court ruled Texas wasn't properly determining if a death 
row inmate was intellectually disabled.

“I think he'd be angry, upset if he were here and it was someone else,” said 
widow JoAnn Jackson of her late husband Ofc. Brian Jackson. “He would want 
justice to be served. He would also understand if he were truly I.D., he 
doesn't deserve the death penalty.”

More than a decade after Juan Lizcano was sentenced to die for murdering the 
Dallas police officer, his widow feels mixed emotions about the possibility of 
that sentence changing.

“He went out that night with the intent of harming someone -- whether it was 
his ex-girlfriend or whoever intervened,” Jackson said of Lizcano.

Jackson says she believes criminals who are intellectually disabled should not 
be executed. But she's not convinced that's the case with Lizcano, who gunned 
down Brian in front of a home in November 2005.

The case was emotional for the officer's friends because Jackson volunteered to 
help on a domestic disturbance call made by Lizcano's ex-girlfriend.

“If he didn't know the difference between right and wrong why did he leave when 
she called police the first time? Why did he wait up the street until they 
left, and then come back? Why did he run from police, why did he have a 
firefight?” Jackson asked.

Lizcano's trial defense argued he was intellectually disabled and that has been 
the basis of his appeals. With the recent supreme court ruling, Dallas County 
District Attorney John Cruezot believes his office can no longer challenge 
Lizcano's legal claim.

Jackson is coming to terms with the possibility of his death sentence being 
changed to life.

“I have to tell myself he won't be able to hurt anyone else,” Jackson said.

Thursday is the deadline for the trial court to submit findings of fact to the 
court of criminal appeals. Then, it will be up to a judge to decide if Lizcano 
is intellectually disabled.

If the judge finds that Lizcano is I.D., he will receive a sentence of life 
without parole.

(source: Dallas Morning News)








NEW HAMPSHIRE:

After Clearing The N.H. House, Fight To Abolish Death Penalty Reaches State 
Senate



The fight to abolish the death penalty in New Hampshire reached the state 
senate Tuesday morning after clearing the House earlier this month.

The measure would change the penalty for capital murder to life imprisonment. 
Richard Van Wickler, Superintendent of the Cheshire County jail says he's in 
support of the bill, as an official who's worked with the incarcerated for 26 
years.

"Their punishment is a lack of liberty and a life of discomfort, but certainly 
not corporal punishment,” Van Wickler said. “We left that hundreds of years ago 
because we claim to be a humane society."

Other advocates for repeal, including former New Hampshire Superior Court 
Justice Arthur Brennan, questioned whether the state should be trusted with the 
power to enforce capital punishment.

"We all make mistakes,” Brennan said. “And as a sitting judge and even today in 
my retirement, I reflect on my decision-making and I ask myself, did I 
mistakenly believe a liar?"

Laura Briggs, widow of slain Manchester police officer Michael Briggs, spoke in 
opposition to the bill. Her husband's convicted killer is the only person on 
death row in the state.

"It's not about an eye for an eye or revenge,” Briggs said. “It's about 
protecting our society from evil people that do evil things."

The N.H. Association of Chiefs of Police is opposed to the bill.

Governor Sununu vetoed a death penalty repeal bill last session, but this year 
the measure cleared the House with a veto-proof majority.

The last execution in the state was in 1939.

(source: nhpr.org)

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

Widow of NH officer: Keep death penalty



The widow of a slain Manchester police officer spoke against repealing New 
Hampshire’s death penalty Thursday in part because her son is now working in 
law enforcement.

Laura Briggs has largely stayed out of the public debate over capital murder 
since her husband, Officer Michael Briggs, was shot to death in 2006. But she 
told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday he would have opposed a repeal bill 
that passed the House earlier this month.

“Mike was a good person. He went to work, he was a good dad. He wasn’t perfect. 
Nobody is, but he was definitely a genuinely good person. He wasn’t the kind of 
person you’d speak for, but I’m going to speak for him today because I know he 
was for the death penalty,” she said. “Now that my son is working in law 
enforcement, I would like to know that if anything happened to him, he would 
get fair justice.”

New Hampshire’s death penalty applies in only seven scenarios: the killing of 
an on-duty law enforcement officer or judge, murder for hire, murder during a 
rape, certain drug offenses or home invasion and murder by someone already 
serving a life sentence without parole. The state hasn’t executed anyone since 
1939, and the repeal bill would not apply retroactively to Michael Addison, who 
killed Briggs and is the state’s only inmate on death row.

Laura Briggs and other death penalty supporters argued that courts might 
interpret it differently, however, giving Addison a chance at life in prison.

“The death penalty is about protecting society from evil. It’s not about an 
eye-for-an-eye or revenge. It’s about protecting our society from evil people 
that do evil things,” she said.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed an identical bill last year, but both the 
House and Senate now appear to have veto-proof majorities in favor of repeal.

Rep. Renny Cushing, D-Hampton, the bill’s main sponsor, urged senators to think 
about all the people who have been wrongly sentenced to death, as well as those 
who have lost loved ones. Cushing’s father and brother-in-law were both 
murdered.

“I’m one of a number of people who have had the unspeakable happen to them, had 
their loved ones ripped away from them, who have come to conclude at the end of 
the day that a ritual killing by a state of the person who killed our loved one 
does nothing to honor the lives that have been lost,” said Cushing, D-Hampton. 
“It does nothing to do the one thing we all want and that is to have our loved 
one come back.”

He added, “It just fills another coffin and expands the circle of grief and in 
a way that replicates the kind of behavior that brought us pain to begin with.”

(source: Associated Press)








PENNSYLVANIA:

Convicted killer must have another shot at escaping his double death sentences, 
Pa. Supreme Court rules



A state Supreme Court ruling issued Tuesday will give a York County man 
convicted of murdering his estranged wife and her boyfriend another chance to 
dodge his double death sentences for the slayings.

That decision, penned by Justice Max Baer, backs a ruling county Judge Richard 
K. Renn issued 2 years ago in the case of Milton Montalvo.

Like Renn, Baer upheld Montalvo’s 2 1st-degree murder convictions for the April 
1998 killings of Miriam Ascensio and Nelson Lugo. Baer also agreed that errors 
at trial require that a new penalty phase be held in the case so a jury can 
decide whether Montalvo should receive 2 new death sentences or be ordered to 
spend the rest of his life in prison.

The case came to the Supreme Court after Montalvo, now 56, and the district 
attorney’s office both challenged Renn’s 2017 ruling.

As Baer noted, police contended Montalvo and his brother Noel conspired to kill 
Ascensio and Lugo at a York City apartment. Ascensio’s neck was slashed several 
times, her skull was fractured and her partly-clothed body was found with 
panties on her face and a high-heeled shoe in her crotch. Lugo was stabbed in 
the chest.

Milton Montalvo was apprehended in Florida 8 months after the killings. His 
brother was captured in New Jersey in 2002. Noel Montalvo also was convicted of 
the murders and is under a death sentence. Baer noted.

During Milton Montalvo’s trial in 2000, police presented a recorded statement 
of a witness who said she heard the brothers say they intended to kill 
Ascensio. The woman told police the brothers later admitted committing the 
slayings. That same witness testified during the trial that police had coerced 
her into implicating the Montalvos. Blood evidence also linked Milton Montalvo 
to the murders, Baer wrote.

The justice noted Milton Montalvo’s defense at trial was that he had nothing to 
do with the killings. He blamed his brother for the murders. A decade after his 
conviction, Milton Montalvo told a psychiatrist that he had killed Ascensio in 
an intense jealous rage and had fatally stabbed Lugo in self-defense, Baer 
noted.

While Baer rejected Milton Montalvo’s claim that the evidence didn’t support 
his murder convictions, Baer also rejected the DA’s argument that a new death 
penalty phase proceeding isn’t warranted.

He seconded Renn’s finding that Milton Montalvo did not receive a fair penalty 
phase hearing because the prosecutor at the 2000 trial told the jurors their 
decision on a life or death sentence was merely a recommendation to the court. 
In fact, a jury’s decision on the life-death issue is binding on a court.

Baer agreed with Renn that the incorrect “recommendation” characterization 
could have caused a bias on the jury that was not corrected even when the judge 
told the jurors their decision on Montalvo’s punishment would be final.

(source: pennlive.com)

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

Closing arguments begin in sentencing of Jacob Sullivan



Closing arguments began Tuesday in the sentencing of Jacob Sullivan.

After that, the Bucks County jury will begin deliberating whether he should 
spend life in prison or be sentenced to death for raping and killing 
14-year-old Grace Packer in 2016.

During the hearing that started March 15, jurors have heard from hospital 
workers who cared for Sullivan after he tried committing suicide in 2017.

The jury also heard from Sullivan himself in audio tapes recorded while he was 
in the hospital. He describes how he and his girlfriend, Grace's adoptive 
mother, planned and carried out a shared rape-murder fantasy, which included 
assaulting the girl, zip-tying her and leaving her in a hot attic to die, then 
strangling her and dumping her dismembered remains in Luzerne County.

Sullivan's girlfriend, Sara Packer, testified that her adopted daughter Grace 
was a difficult child, and that Sara got wrapped up in Sullivan's fantasy. Sara 
Packer is expected to plead guilty after Sullivan is sentenced.

A forensic psychologist testified Sullivan was "vulnerable" to manipulation and 
that the worst was brought out of him by Sara Packer. Sullivan's defense team 
says Packer was the mastermind behind the plan.

In court Monday, family members testified on Sullivan's behalf, hoping to spare 
him from the death penalty.

They called what he did "heinous," but said he was a sensitive and loving 
person.

The jury will decide Sullivan's sentence. Jurors are expected to start 
deliberating Tuesday after closing arguments. All 12 jurors must agree in order 
to sentence Sullivan to the death penalty.

(source: WMFZ news)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Death penalty in play for man accused of double-murder



A judge on Monday approved the state’s request to seek the death penalty 
against a Calabash man accused of fatally stabbing a Shallotte couple and 
injuring their daughter earlier this year.

Torrence O’Neal Helms Jr., 30, of Calabash, has been indicted on 2 counts of 
1st-degree murder, 1 count of attempted murder, 1 count of robbery with a 
dangerous weapon, 1 count of flee to elude arrest with a motor vehicle and 1 
count of resisting a public officer.

Helms is accused of fatally stabbing Dennis Edmund Rowell, 66, and Theresa Lee 
Rowell, 55, in their home on Jan. 9. The Rowells’ 19-year-old daughter, Irene 
Elizabeth Rowell, 19, also was injured in the attack.

Deputies responded to the family’s home on Iveystone Court around 4:40 a.m. in 
reference to a stabbing. During a frantic 911 call to dispatchers, Irene Rowell 
said Helms, who she identified as a family friend, stabbed her and her parents 
then took off in their black Kia Optima.

On the way to the home, law enforcement spotted the Kia and initiated a 
pursuit.

Deputies pursued the car, reaching speeds of approximately 105 mph, before 
performing a pursuit intervention technique (PIT) maneuver, which caused the 
vehicle to crash into a wooded area off Ocean Isle Beach Road near US 17, about 
5 miles away from Iveystone Court.

Helms was apprehended after a brief foot chase and taken to the hospital to be 
treated for injuries.

(source: WECT news)








GEORGIA:

Augusta man on death row for triple murder has post-conviction hearing

5 years ago this month, a jury convicted Adrian Hargrove of committing a triple 
homicide and voted to sentence him to death. He was back in Richmond County 
Superior Court on Tuesday for his first post-conviction hearing.

At trial, Hargrove’s defense attorney sought a verdict that would have taken 
the option of a death sentence off the table. A verdict of guilty but mentally 
ill or intellectually disabled would have done that.

On Tuesday, Hargove’s appellate attorneys presented an expert in psychology, 
specifically intellectual disability. Marlyne Israelian testified about the 
complexity of determining the disability when a person is in the mild range, as 
opposed to moderate or profound.

The legal standard in Georgia death penalty cases requires the defense to prove 
such a disability beyond a reasonable doubt. Israelian testified that it would 
be extremely difficult if not impossible to meet that standard in cases of mild 
intellectual disability.

On Feb. 9, 2008, according to trial testimony, Hargrove lured 18-year-old 
Allyson Pederson from her home. Pederson, who was pregnant, was stabbed at 
least 21 times with a butcher knife in an abandoned trailer on Horseshoe Road. 
Hargrove then took her to the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam and set her body 
on fire. Hargrove also returned to the Bennock Mill Road home where Pederson 
lived with her parents, Sharon and Andrew Hartley. Both were repeatedly 
stabbed. Andrew Hartley was also beaten with an ax handle.

One of the trial witnesses was a Richmond County Sheriff’s Office crime scene 
investigator, who described the crime scenes and provided bloodstain analysis 
testimony as the jury viewed photographs.

Hargrove’s hearing will continue Wednesdaywith an expert in forensic science 
who teaches university crime scene courses, which includes bloodstain analysis.

Hargrove’s appellate attorneys contend he was unfairly convicted because, among 
other alleged mistakes, evidence with withheld from his attorneys until trial.

(source: Augusta Chronicle)

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

Buddy Pittard believed every death row inmate deserved his fate. Then he met 
Keith Tharpe.----As a conservative Christian, Pittard thought his beliefs about 
capital punishment were unshakable. Tharpe, a death row inmate, proved him 
wrong.



AS HE DROVE DOWN I-75 TOWARD THE STATE PRISON NEAR JACKSON, Robert “Buddy” 
Pittard wondered again what he thought he was doing, exactly, and why. The 
literal answer was fairly simple: Something had called him to try to witness 
his Christian faith, itself fraught with doubts frequent enough to trouble him, 
to some of the prisoners. But in hopes of . . . what? Saving their souls? Well, 
yes, maybe, though that sounded a bit theatrical. He wasn’t Billy Graham. He 
was just a man from Snellville—Georgia, through and through—who, after selling 
a lucrative concrete business a few years earlier, had regularly wrestled his 
skepticism about Jesus to the ground and felt he could share his journey with 
others who’d failed to have a “white light” moment but longed for a spiritual 
awakening.

About one thing he did not feel conflicted: his view toward the felons with 
whom he would spread the Good News. To him, every death row inmate (the Georgia 
Diagnostic and Classification Prison, better known as Jackson state prison, is 
home to Georgia’s only execution chamber), every robber, every dope dealer, 
every gangbanger, every reprobate in every cell of that vast expanse of 
concrete looming up at the end of Prison Boulevard, just past Corrections Lake, 
deserved his fate. Pity? Empathy? In his mind, they deserved neither of those 
things. How that squared with the Gospel of Jesus Christ that he drew upon in 
teaching a Sunday school class—words very much filled with mercy and 
compassion—did not concern him.

“I had it in my brain that the problem was solved. All of those people should 
go to hell. [Saving them] wasn’t part of my job.”

Pittard had been forewarned that the prison would be intimidating, but nothing 
could have prepared him not only for what he saw but what he felt, a sort of 
malevolence that clocked his nostrils like ozone after a lightning strike. 
Miles of coiled concertina wire glinted in the sunlight. Overhead at every 
corner, he could make out the silhouettes of the guards manning the towers, 
some pacing, rifles at the ready. The forests of barbed wire reared in 2 great 
rows, with a path in between that allowed a car with an armed guard to cruise 
the perimeter 24 hours a day.

The entrance yawned in the center of a bunker. Once inside, Pittard was 
confronted with a TSA-style metal detection system. Shoes off. Belt off. 
Anything with the slightest bit of metal, off. Then came the sound—a low roar 
of shouting and screaming mingled with the concussive bang of heavy steel doors 
rumbling open and slamming shut. He was about to come face to face not with the 
abstractions that he’d imagined cruising down I-75 but the realities of men 
with faces and voices and stories and, as it would eventually become clear, 
humanity.

In one of those cells, on Death Row, a man in his late fifties named Keith “Bo” 
Tharpe had long ago grown used to the prison’s conditions. They were his life 
as he and his neighboring inmates awaited execution. Pittard was not there to 
see Tharpe that day—he was to do Christian counseling with other prisoners in 
other cell blocks—and Tharpe initially heard nothing of any such visits, not 
from the prison’s chaplain, much less from prisoners who’d met some guy who 
taught Sunday school at a church an hour and a half away.

Tharpe did know Jesus, or at least claimed to, and expressed trust in Him to 
see him through whatever lay ahead. He had been reading the Bible faithfully 
for more than two decades, having decided a few years into his sentence to 
abandon his early rebelliousness that included doing contraband drugs and 
mouthing off at the guards. More importantly, he read it to try to find some 
peace from the daily torture of memory, the film on a spool in his head 
replaying what he remembered of the horrendous acts he committed.

There is no way to soft-pedal it, nothing that can be said to scrub the 
brutality. At the time of the crime, Tharpe’s only prior arrests were for 
driving violations, but those weren’t the worst of his offenses.

On August 28, 1990, Tharpe’s wife of 11 years, his high school sweetheart, left 
him after the man she knew had been swallowed by a drug addiction—and the one 
in his place had repeatedly threatened her with violence. Migrisus Tharpe took 
their four daughters (her husband had a fifth daughter from a previous 
relationship) and moved in with her mother northwest of Macon. She secured a 
restraining order against her husband, but on September 24, he called her 
anyway. If she wanted to “play dirty,” he told her, he would show her “what 
dirty was.”

The next morning, after an all-night crack and alcohol binge, Bo Tharpe stopped 
his pickup truck in the middle of the road leading to his mother-in-law’s 
house. Unaware of what was awaiting her, Migrisus hurried out of the house and 
into the car of her brother’s 29-year-old wife, Jackie Freeman, who was going 
to drop off Migrisus at work at the Medical Center of Central Georgia on the 
way to her own job at Physician’s Diagnostic Center. Freeman was running late 
and joked that if they happened to hit a deer on the way, they’d have to drag 
it all the way to Macon because there was no time to stop.

But the women were forced to stop after all, when they reached the stretch of 
Ellis Church Road where Bo Tharpe, armed with a shotgun and tweaking hard, 
blocked their path.

According to testimony (Tharpe would later recall some details differently), 
Tharpe ordered Freeman to get out of their car. When she refused, he waved the 
shotgun, saying he was going to “fuck you up.” When she continued to refuse, 
Tharpe pulled her out, took her to the rear of the vehicle, and shot her. He 
pushed her into a ditch on the side of the road, reloaded the weapon, and 
pumped 2 more shotgun blasts into her.

Tharpe drove away from the scene, taking his wife with him. Unable to rent a 
motel room, he allegedly raped her on the side of the road. She was able to 
call police when the couple stopped at her credit union, after she’d promised 
her husband she’d withdraw some cash..

Meanwhile, moments after the shooting, Freeman’s husband, a fireman and 
part-time EMT, was driving on Ellis Church Road to take his two children to 
school. He noticed something in a ditch and rushed from his truck to his wife’s 
side, frantically trying to find a pulse that wasn’t there. He ordered the 
children to get down in the back seat of the truck so they wouldn’t see her 
body.

Less than 4 months later, Tharpe was tried and convicted of Freeman’s murder 
and sentenced to death.

BUDDY PITTARD’S VIEWS ON THE DEATH PENALTY—as with most of his other political 
beliefs—had long been deeply conservative. I know this because he is my uncle. 
Like him, I was born in Atlanta but moved north at age 10.

As a boy, I worshipped Uncle Buddy and my other uncle, Pat Pittard, with the 
kind of adulation most any boy would feel for the kind of uncles they were (and 
are): funny, playful, generous. They were the life of the party, both of them. 
They were successful and lavished my sister and me with the coolest toys and 
gifts on our birthdays and Christmases.

We didn’t see, of course, the tension behind the laughter and 
good-ol’-boyness—the drinking, the jetting off to gamble in the Bahamas or 
Vegas while the wives stayed home, the late-night parties, and the all-day 
hangovers. Eventually, as 30 years old became 40, 40 became 50, the hollowness 
of the life Uncle Buddy was leading—to say nothing of the damage he was causing 
to his marriage and those who loved him—weighed on him enough that he quit 
drinking and started looking for spiritual answers. “I think my respect for 
women was born then,” he told me on a drive down to Macon one January morning. 
“Through most of my marriage, I was going out at night. If my wife wanted to 
go, that’s fine. If she didn’t, that’s fine. I hurt her a lot of times, but I 
thought I was treating her fairly.

“Then I started appreciating how important the family was and how important 
Christianity was,” he continued. “I got a chaplain for my business. I did 
things to help people. I began to change.”

He started attending church every Sunday and not just skimming the Bible but 
trying to understand it, especially the New Testament, attempting to tease 
apart the real meaning of some parables.

One that stumped him was a story Jesus told in Matthew. “It was about a 
landowner that hired workers to work in his vineyard,” he says. “He hired some 
guys in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some just an hour before 
quitting time.

“When it was over and he was paying everybody, he gave all the workers the same 
amount. Of course, the people who had worked all day complained and said, ‘Hey, 
this guy worked one hour, yet you paid him the same that you paid me. I worked 
10 hours.’

“The landowner said, ‘It’s my vineyard. It’s my land. You agreed to the amount 
you were going to get paid. Are you just jealous of somebody else who, in your 
eyes, got more for less work? If that’s your thinking then you’re wrong.’

“When I first read that, I thought it just meant that a landowner can pay 
whatever he wants and you have to go along with it. But that wasn’t it. That 
wasn’t it at all.”

SITTING ON THE TINY FRONT PORCH of Bo Tharpe’s childhood home in Macon, a 
weather-beaten clapboard slumped at the entrance to a cul-de-sac dotted with 
similarly faded houses, his brother-in-law, Bruce Pope, smiled when asked about 
Tharpe’s upbringing. In many ways, of course, it couldn’t have been more 
different than that of Buddy Pittard, who sat on the porch with me and Pope on 
a mild afternoon. As he talked, Pope gripped the top of a tall oxygen tank from 
which a plastic tube curls up and into Pope’s nostrils. “COPD,” he said. “From 
smoking.”

To begin with the obvious, Pittard is white, and while his father wasn’t near 
wealthy, he was able to provide for his family without struggle. Tharpe is 
black and, though his family wasn’t prosperous either, it benefited from a 
dairy farm owned by his grandfather. Tharpe’s father also worked for the post 
office, but his home was not a stable one.

Tharpe’s mother admitted in a court document that, while pregnant with him, she 
drank both moonshine and beer “excessively.” Tharpe’s father ran a “shot house” 
out of the home—a side hustle, yes, but also a social club where the men who 
lived in the neighborhood would gather in the backyard and drink and play 
checkers. The liquor was provided by Tharpe’s father, who recognized that his 
friends didn’t want to or couldn’t afford to pay for a full pint of liquor but 
would hand over a buck for a shot of whiskey or gin poured into Gerber Baby 
Food jars.

“You’d take that thing and fill it up twice and for two dollars that’s half a 
pint,” Pope said.

While the father poured, he had his son, Bo, hand out the jars. By the time he 
was 5 years old, Tharpe started taking sips of the alcohol. By age 10, he was 
drinking enough that he would sometimes pass out.

As he grew into his body, he would intimidate the men who didn’t pay their 
tabs. His nickname is derived from “elbow,” because when he played football, he 
was known for elbowing the other players.

His childhood wasn’t all chaos. “We’d play ball out here all the time,” Pope 
said, his eyes roaming over a swath of lawn dappled with brown patches. “I was 
dating his sister, and they’d come here and we’d take Bo to the bowling alley.” 
On Sundays, Bo’s grandmother took him to church.

Tharpe’s fondest memory was of catching catfish and blue gill in a pond near 
his home. He and a friend would sneak onto the property, a rolling, pine 
needle–carpeted expanse on which stood a small house, the two boys weaving 
their way through a path worn into the surrounding woods. “I think my momma and 
my grandmama raised me pretty good ’til I was 15,” Tharpe wrote many years 
later. “Then I [became] too headstrong. All my life I was the little kid that 
had to be tough. When they started calling me Bo in high school, I got tougher 
and tougher.”

“All I can say is I’m sorry for my whole life.”

By the time Tharpe was in his late 20s, the crack epidemic had begun to ravage 
his neighborhood. Or, as one of his childhood friends would say: “When crack 
hit Macon, it was like a bomb blast.” Another friend recalled, in a letter for 
Tharpe’s lawyers, that “me and Bo made the mistake of trying crack, not knowing 
how it would affect us. We had only ever smoked weed before that and we thought 
we could handle it, but we were ignorant of what crack could do.”

That same friend also wrote: “I witnessed how loving Bo was to his wife and 
daughters. I wasn’t always the best father when my kids were growing up, but I 
remember Bo being a good dad and being there for his kids.”

“Drugs really hit Keith hard,” his aunt wrote, also for his lawyers. “He kept 
it away from his family as much as he could, but we live in a small community 
and we all knew he was using and it changed him. He loved his wife and he loved 
his kids, but once he got hung up on that stuff, it was all that mattered.”

His life spiraled into the hell of a junkie chasing the next high “until I was 
totally crazy,” he wrote. “Liquor and weed didn’t make me crazy, but cocaine 
did.” It was not a matter of enjoyment; he was seeking a high he could never 
reach. “You know the one thing you don’t hear in a crack house?” he would later 
say. “Laughter.”

By the time he made his way toward his mother-in-law’s house that September 
morning almost 30 years ago, high, erratic, and desperate, he had lost it all, 
including, as he later put it, his concept of reality.

To this day, he wrote, “I just can’t figure out why I hurt her. . . . I never 
had anything against Jackie. I just don’t know why I would do such a thing. I 
don’t remember everything. I must have been crazy.

“All I can say is I’m sorry for my whole life.”

ONCE PITTARD STOPPED drinking, he set off on a spiritual quest. “I studied the 
Koran—well, not word for word, but in its summation form. And Buddha and 
Confucius, all these things. For some reason, Christianity seemed to be more 
real for me.”

His faith was all but cemented, he says, on a trip to Israel, where he was 
baptized in the Jordan River. But deep down, he still struggled with some 
doubts—not so much about Jesus as the Son of God but about specific Bible 
stories and their seemingly impossible events. He attended church regularly. He 
took over the Sunday school class. In 2016, he felt an odd pull to tell his 
story to prisoners. He secured permission through the prison chaplain and 
started paying visits.

Before his 1st visit to Jackson, prison officials briefed him on what he might 
face upon meeting the men held there. “I was told that one of them might spit 
on you or urinate on you, or what’s called ‘spraying.’ They set a cup up on 
their bars, and then when you walk by, they hit it with a newspaper or 
something and spray you with whatever liquid material they may have available 
in the cell.” He was also warned that prisoners “may grab you and pull you 
towards the bars.”

He was nervous on those first visits, but nothing like that ever happened to 
him. The first prisoner he met was a gang leader. “He was maybe 21. Just a 
beautiful young man, very sharp, kept his cell sharp.” He was in isolation, he 
told Pittard, “so I cannot make contact with anybody else. They’re afraid that 
I will tell somebody to kill somebody.”

“And I said, ‘Well, how about Jesus?’” Pittard recalls. “‘Is Jesus able to help 
you in this isolated situation that you’re in?’ And he says, ‘Oh, yes. But I’m 
not sure I believe in him enough for him to help me.’”

The discussions Pittard had with the incarcerated men would start like that. 
“Before I knew it,” Pittard says, “I was leaning on the bars and touching the 
man’s hand when I said a prayer with him.”

As the months passed, Pittard says he found himself staring at the ceiling at 
night, unable to sleep, thinking. All his life he had viewed convicts, felons, 
prisoners—to the extent he ever thought of them—as something less than human, 
as evil, irredeemable, faceless.

“I had it in my brain that the problem was solved,” Pittard says. “All of those 
people should go to hell. [Saving them] wasn’t part of my job. I never came in 
contact with them. They’re not part of my life, and I’m never going to let 
[crime] be part of my life.”

Again and again, he asked himself: “What in the hell have you gotten yourself 
into? What are you doing down here? You’re not even a great Christian.” But 
through the prisoners—and Tharpe in particular—he would become one.

WORD ABOUT PITTARD’S WORK began to spread at Jackson—all the way to the most 
sequestered of prisoners. One day, about 6 months after Pittard’s 1st visit, 
the prison chaplain said there was a man on death row who wanted some Christian 
counseling.

It was the first request Pittard received from Death Row, and he was skeptical. 
Tharpe, by that time, had exhausted most of his appeals but was still hoping 
for a reduction of his sentence. Jailhouse conversions for reasons of 
convenience are legion, of course. Pittard was not naive to that. He’d seen 
enough men snoozing in chapel, who were there simply to enjoy a few minutes out 
of their cell, to know that piety was often professed out of expediency.

Pittard and Tharpe first met in early November 2016. The encounter occurred not 
through glass or over phones but across the table in a day room with other 
prisoners huddled with lawyers or family. Both men were wary. Each took the 
other’s measure.

“When Bo first came up the hall, I was a little surprised at him and his 
demeanor, his relaxed attitude,” Pittard says. “He was so friendly to everyone 
he saw. He made sure that he spoke to everyone. Some were shackled more than 
Bo. The guards joked with him, and it was shocking to me because it was like 
meeting at a barbershop.”

Many of the prisoners Pittard had counseled, men without a death sentence 
hanging over their heads, were sullen or even hostile. At times, they were 
sincerely friendly, but they could quickly shift into a more glib and 
manipulative mood.

Tharpe wasn’t like that—but Pittard still wasn’t sure about him. “The first 
time I talked to him, he said he had become a Christian a long time ago in 
prison,” Pittard says. “I had been trained to be careful about people trying to 
play you.”

But one thing was clear to Pittard about Tharpe: His self-described journey was 
the opposite of most. “He kind of did it backwards in the sense that he said, 
‘I want to clean myself up so that Jesus might talk to me. I need to be a 
different person first.’”

Tharpe said that each night, he reviewed his day for sins he might have 
committed. “When he laid his head on his pillow, he would say, ‘I made another 
sinless day.’”

Pittard listened. In a journal he began keeping, he wrote, “I didn’t know for 
sure if he was trustworthy.”

The two men agreed to meet again in a week. Soon, they were talking every 
Tuesday (later, every Wednesday)—Pittard making the hour-plus drive down I-75, 
sometimes before the sun had risen.

IN THE SAME WAY THAT PITTARD had studied the Bible, looking for answers, he 
studied Tharpe. As weeks of visits became months, he noticed an admirable 
consistency in the condemned man’s beliefs—and a slow awakening deep within 
himself.

During one visit, Tharpe told Pittard that, in the infinitesimal chance that 
he’d someday be released, one of the first things he would do is return to the 
place that was his closest encounter to heaven: the fishing hole by his house. 
He would sit on the bank like he did with his friend, back when he was a boy, 
before the drugs and the horrific crime he committed; before the death 
sentence, the nearly 3 decades on death row; before all the regrets, the 
torture of memory, the awful knowledge that while he was still alive and able 
to regret, the person whose life he took was not.

Tharpe would later write to Pittard that his biggest sorrow and regret was 
“that if Jackie was going to find Jesus, I cut off her chance.”

Nearly three decades later, there’s still unimaginable pain coursing through 
the family. Tharpe wrote in a letter to Pittard that one of his granddaughters 
“said her happiest day was going to be the day I took my last breath.” He wrote 
to Pittard (and, indirectly, to his granddaughter): “If these are my last 
words, I say don’t let hate be any part of you. Forgive me for yourself.”

(Attempts to reach the Freeman family, Tharpe’s estranged wife, and his 
children were unsuccessful.)

Pittard’s own family initially had a hard time understanding what motivated him 
to return to Jackson week after week. “I wasn’t on board at first,” says Marsha 
Pittard, his wife. “I was worried if they had some kind of incident, or they 
went into a lockdown, that these are murderers, these are rapists, these are 
criminals. But then I saw how Buddy got involved in Bo’s life.”

Pittard and Tharpe became more than counselor and inmate. “I think we both feel 
like we’re brothers,” Pittard says. “I talk about my family; he talks about 
his. There were so many things we could relate to—he fished, I fished. He 
played football, I played football.” And both men went to church when they were 
young and lost their way.

“Things look far simpler the further you are from them,” Pittard says, alluding 
to his earlier beliefs about men in prison. “You get involved in them, and it’s 
a pretty complicated mess. There are things involved you never have thought 
about. It’ll definitely change you.”

What changed were not just his views, but the philosophical foundation on which 
he had built his life. “It was the people,” Pittard says. “I began seeing human 
beings. I began hearing their life stories. Everything in me softened.”

Tharpe—and his faith—impressed Pittard most of all. “He trusts that there is a 
God, and that He has forgiven him,” Pittard says. “And I think Bo is forgiven. 
And I’m never gonna be in favor of the death penalty again. I became, you could 
say, a bleeding heart, a person I had always detested. I am that person now.”

Suddenly, the meaning of the Matthew 20 parable, the one about the workers 
receiving the same wages no matter how much time they’d spent on the job, the 
one that Pittard assumed he understood, crystallized: The message wasn’t that 
the landowner had the right to pay people whatever he wanted. It was that the 
landowner—God, in Pittard’s new way of thinking—was explaining that those who 
accept Him, even “at the last minute of our lives, can get the same reward as 
someone who has lived their life as a preacher,” Pittard says. “That we’re 
never unworthy. He will accept us and give us the same reward no matter how bad 
we’ve been, no matter what we’ve done, including these prisoners—and including 
myself, when I was coming back to the church.”

ONE DAY, ABOUT 6 MONTHS into their relationship, Pittard and Tharpe were 
reading a Bible passage that touched on the necessity of baptism. Pittard 
paused for a moment and looked at Tharpe: Would he like to be baptized? “He 
said, ‘Absolutely,’” Pittard recalls. Tharpe asked if Buddy could do it.

Pittard’s 1st reaction was, yes, of course. By then, Pittard was signing his 
emails to Tharpe with “Love ya, Buddy,” and Tharpe was writing him with the 
subject line “Buddy, my brother.” Pittard had become so convinced of Tharpe’s 
faith and repentance that he had contacted Tharpe’s attorney and offered to 
speak on the inmate’s behalf at any hearings, write letters—anything they felt 
might help his case. He had not made such an offer to any other inmate he 
counseled.

“I think Bo is forgiven. And I’m never gonna be in favor of the death penalty 
again.”

In quiet moments, however, he struggled with the idea of baptizing someone, 
much less a man on death row desperate for salvation. Was Pittard spiritually 
qualified? He was just a lay Christian and, in his words, not a strong one. 
Among the things that nagged him was whether his actions in regard to his faith 
were what God actually wanted him to be doing—whether he was acting “in God’s 
will.”

There was also the question of whether the prison would allow it. He settled 
that aspect quickly. If he were to baptize Tharpe, he would do it without 
telling prison officials. “They could either kick me out or whatever would 
happen.”

Finally, Pittard agreed: He would perform the rite on July 18, 2017. But he 
still lay awake each night, wondering, questioning. Could he be given a sign? 
The Bible was full of signs.

Three days before the baptism date, Pittard’s granddaughter called. She knew 
little if anything about his prison ministry, certainly nothing of his internal 
struggle over Tharpe’s baptism. She told Pittard that she had a friend who’d 
just returned from Israel and that he had insisted she give her grandfather 
something he brought back: a vial of water from the Jordan River.

“You can imagine all the things that little vial of water went through to get 
to me,” Pittard says. “From the Jordan River, through customs. He had to make 
sure the bottle didn’t get broken. Put it in his luggage somehow or another. 
Get it back to the Atlanta airport and then bring it to Athens, where he lived, 
and then give it to [my granddaughter]. And then she happened to call me on 
that day, of all days, to give me the vial.”

He believed his question was answered. “It is the only time in my life that I 
know I have been in the will of God, that I know I was doing what He wanted. 
Logically, I couldn’t see there was any way those things could come together if 
they weren’t a God thing.”

ON JULY 18, 2017, in the visiting room of the prison, with other inmates 
sitting unaware on benches talking with family, Pittard and Tharpe knelt on the 
prison floor. Tharpe began to recite the “sinner’s prayer,” a pledge of 
repentance among Evangelical Christians.

Other people in the visiting room—inmates, lawyers, and visitors—realized what 
was happening, gathered around, and knelt beside them.

Pittard poured some water from the vial into his hand and, while intoning the 
words, “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . ” 
sprinkled it on Tharpe’s bowed head. Pittard brought out a handkerchief for 
Tharpe to wipe his brow. When Pittard reached to take the fabric back, Tharpe 
told him, “No, Buddy. I think I’ll leave it there. It feels warm.”

2 MONTHS LATER, in early September 2017—nearly 27 years after his crime—a Jones 
County Superior Court judge set a date and time for Tharpe’s execution: 
September 26 at 7 p.m.

Tharpe’s lawyers scrambled to file appeals and stays. As the execution date 
approached, all were unsuccessful.

The day before the execution—on the anniversary of Freeman’s death—the state 
Board of Pardons and Paroles held a hearing to consider a clemency petition 
filed by Tharpe’s legal team. (The lawyers declined to comment for this story.) 
In the petition, Tharpe’s relatives—including his 95-year-old mother, his 
sister, and the eldest of his five daughters (from his previous relationship), 
along with prison staff and at least 20 friends—pleaded that his sentence be 
reduced to life without parole.

The petition also states that “many of the victims’ family members support 
clemency for Mr. Tharpe,” but that portion of the document was redacted “to 
protect the victims and victims’ family members’ identities and privacy.”

At the hearing, 20 people testified that he deserved mercy. It’s unclear 
whether Migrisus Tharpe was among them. Decades earlier, she had testified in 
her husband’s defense at his sentencing hearing, in an attempt to convince a 
jury to spare him the death penalty. According to Pittard, Tharpe’s estranged 
wife has never visited him in prison, though she has made contact with him and 
eventually allowed at least one of their daughters to see him.

The board also heard from those whose “lives were shattered” by the crime, 
according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In a statement to Atlanta 
magazine, Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney Stephen A. Bradley wrote: 
“The victim’s family are truly some of the finest people I have ever met and 
have been forever devastated by this horrible crime. The description that Gary 
[Freeman] gives of pulling up with his children to find their mother’s body in 
the ditch will never leave me.”

At the end of the hearing, the parole board voted to uphold Tharpe’s death 
sentence.

Pittard was not among the people who were allowed to witness the execution the 
next day—the 28 places were taken by officials, media witnesses, and a few of 
Tharpe’s family members. “I wouldn’t have wanted” to witness it, Pittard says. 
“But if he had wanted me there, I would have gone.” Yet Pittard was among the 
handful of people to visit Tharpe that day.

“When he greeted us, he was cheerful,” Pittard recalls. “He said, ‘Don’t worry 
about me. God either had a job for me here or has a job for me in heaven.”

Tharpe took a chair in the middle of the visitation room, and the four other 
men present—Pittard, another minister, a chaplain, and a good friend of 
Tharpe’s—sang Tharpe’s favorite gospel song, “Oh Happy Day.” Then, in a broken 
voice, Pittard sang another song to Tharpe: “Soon, and Very Soon, We Are Going 
to See the King.” Tharpe didn’t know the words but smiled and tried to sing 
along.

Tharpe, on this day, was not shackled, and when it was time for Pittard to 
leave, he was able to give Tharpe a hug. “We love you,” Pittard told him. “Keep 
your faith.”

On the drive back up I-75, the strength that Pittard had been projecting 
finally dissipated. “I can’t really say I’ve ever been a boo-hoo kind of guy,” 
he says. “But the ride back was pretty rough.”

At 3 p.m., four hours before the execution, Tharpe was put on death watch to 
make sure he didn’t try to kill himself. At 5 p.m., the Georgia Supreme Court 
denied Tharpe’s request for a stay of execution, leaving one slim, last-ditch 
hope that the U.S. Supreme Court might issue a stay.

The clock ticked down to the final half hour, then 20 minutes, then 15. The 
hour of the execution came and went as prison officials awaited the final word 
from the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, more than three hours after Tharpe was 
supposed to have been executed, the phone rang. The high court had granted a 
temporary stay, halting the execution for at least as long as it would take for 
the court to review an appeal by Tharpe’s lawyers that cited racist comments 
made by one of Tharpe’s jurors years after the trial. In a 1998 sworn 
affidavit, the juror stated: “After studying the Bible, I have wondered if 
black people even have souls.”

Unable to bear hearing news of the execution, Pittard had gone to bed early. At 
just after 11 p.m., however, he heard his wife yelling from upstairs.

“They said Bo has received a stay of execution!” she hollered.

At first, Pittard couldn’t believe it. He ran up the stairs and hugged his 
wife. “It was just like another miracle,” he says, confirmation that “maybe, 
just maybe, God has another plan.”

SITTING ON HIS FRONT PORCH, POPE, Tharpe’s brother-in-law, told my uncle: “He 
mentions you all the time.”

“Oh, he’s called you?” Pittard asked.

“Yes, he calls me just about every other day.”

Pope said he and Tharpe talk about life in the old neighborhood, about the 
status of Tharpe’s case, about God. He said he would love to visit Tharpe, but 
then he points at the oxygen tank next to him.

There’s likely not much time left for a visit, regardless. Not only is Tharpe 
receiving chemotherapy for liver cancer, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last 
week not to take up his case. That clears the way for the state to set an 
execution date.

Pope recalled trying to talk Tharpe out of going to what would become a murder 
scene that day. “Man, don’t even go near [your wife] until you get yourself 
together,” he recalled saying.

“Yeah, his thinking at the time was real mixed up,” Pittard said.

The conversation trailed off. Pittard did not want to think such thoughts on 
this day. He was here to see Tharpe’s boyhood home and, if possible, the 
fishing hole the condemned man was drawn to as a child.

Pope pointed out to Pittard the direction of the pond. “It’s up there on top of 
the hill,” he said, motioning across the property. “When you get on top of the 
hill, it will be on your right.” We made our way up the hill. The old house 
just off the water looked abandoned when Pittard peered through the chain-link 
fence, but the pond itself—ringed by tall, gently swaying grass—seemed ready to 
yield catfish even now.

“I don’t know if Bo will ever get there in this lifetime,” Pittard said once we 
returned to the car to head back up I-75. “If not, I believe he will in the 
next.”

We might have lingered longer, but my uncle needed to get home. The next day, 
he was going to make yet another trip to see Tharpe. “I guess,” he said, “I’ll 
keep visiting him until the day one of us dies.”

(soruce: Atlanta Magazine)