They Don't Know How They'll Feel

September 25, 1996.

That was the day Robert Charles Ladd raped, strangled, and beat to death Vicki Ann Garner, then set her on fire.  Today is the day the good people of Texas plan to strap him to a table, stick him with needles, and kill him for doing that.

What Ladd did was devastating to Garner's family.  Kenneth Dean of the Tyler Morning Telegraph spoke with some of them, including her sisters Teresa Wooten and Kathy Pirtle the other day.  They have, he reported, 

ridden an emotional roller coaster through the years topped with the deaths of their parents, who did not live to see their daughter receive justice.

The killing itself.  Just the loss, the emptiness.

“Part of our hearts were broken that day, and they have been ever since,” Teresa said.

Then the trial.   Ladd had been in prison before for a killing.  It took the jury 18 minutes to decide they wanted Ladd to be killed himself this time.  The family were happy with the verdict, but not satisfied.

They felt betrayed by the justice system, which they said failed them and all of the residents of Texas and allowed a killer to kill again.
"If he would have still been in prison, then our sister would be alive today," Teresa said, who now works as a sexual assault director in Mount Pleasant. "He was released on mandatory release, because the laws had changed, and this allowed him to kill our sister.”

And then the years.  

In 2003, the family were on their way to Huntsville to watch Ladd be killed when they learned he'd gotten a stay.  

More years while the federal courts reviewed.

And, of course, it's not over yet.  They plan to kill him tonight, and they probably will.  But executions do get halted at the last minute.  Ladd's intellectually disabled.  He has an IQ of 67.  The Constitution forbids executions of people with his disability.  Then again, Georgia killed Warren Lee Hill the other day, in violation of that same constitutional prohibition.  The courts let that one happen. Texas will likely get it's way.

For Vicki Ann Garner's family?

"It's really been a long, hard journey. Over the course of time, we have lost both our mom and our dad, and neither one of them ever saw justice," Teresa said of the lengthy process.
Her sister, sighed and added, "It's been real emotional roller coaster of ups and downs."
Kathy’s husband, Clint, said Vicki's death created a ripple effect in the family, but all of the couples managed to stay committed to each other, and the family as a whole grew stronger.
"It disturbed the family dynamic somewhat. ... Not so much the marriage, but in how we related to our children and everything. There was a ripple effect throughout everything that we did. It seemed everything happened at the most inopportune time whenever you're trying to be supportive ... you have to push everything aside and take care of that," Clint, a retired state trooper, said.
Kathy said the fabric of the family unit was stretched, but it never broke. Her sister agreed.
"It really has been a tough time for all of us. I can tell you that without Michael, I wouldn't have made it. This man has been throughout the past 18 years my rock, and I don't know what I would have done without him," she said clutching her husband's arm.
In a soft-spoken voice, Michael replied, "It was a really tough time, and you see a lot of emotions, but the days are getting shorter for him. He will have judgment day pretty soon."

But there's also this.

Despite losing their daughter tragically, Gene and Lawanta decided they needed to forgive the man who took her life.
Teresa said, a few years after the murders, her mother and father wrote Ladd, telling him they forgave him of the crime.

And she and her sister?

“For me it's been an on-going process. You know I forgive him, and I'm at peace, and then something happens, and so it's a constant thing. I can’t say I have forgiven and totally let go of it, but I am working on it," Kathy said.
Teresa said she wrote Ladd a letter telling him she forgave him, but she stressed the forgiveness was not for him, but for her peace of mind.

It's a hard thing this business of forgiving.  As Teresa said, it's not for him, it's for her.  That's how it works.  To ease the forgiver.  To make it possible, finally, to get on with life without the bitterness and hate.  

Still, forgiven or not, they want Ladd killed.  And they plan to see it happen.  They said they don't know how they'll feel when it happens.  But they'll be there.

When Wilford Berry was killed by Ohio in 1999, our first execution since 1963, then-Ohio-Attorney- General Betty Montgomery, who fought to make it happen, who we called Bloody Betty for her eagerness to finally get some people killed here, said in a rare moment of awareness,

There are no winners here tonight.

What she didn't say that night in 1999, but what was also true, is that everyone lost.

On September 25, 1996, Robert Charles Ladd raped, strangled, and beat to death Vicki Ann Garner, then set her on fire.  Today the good people of Texas plan to strap him to a table, stick him with needles, and kill him for doing that.

Retards Killing the Intellectually Disabled

A bit of history.

The year was 1989.  Johnny Paul Penry was, as even polite folks said in those days, mentally retarded.  He was also on death row in Texas.  That combination of things, his lawyers said, should be impossible.  The berobed ones in Washington agreed to answer whether they were.  Sandra Day O'Connor put the question simply in her opinion for the Court.

We must also decide whether the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits Penry's execution because he is mentally retarded.

The answer (by a 5-4 vote) was a clear no.  Oh, it's something juries ought to be allowed to consider (Texas more-or-less prohibited even that at the time) when deciding what to do, but hey, killing the retards is cool.

In sum, mental retardation is a factor that may well lessen a defendant's culpability for a capital offense. But we cannot conclude today that the Eighth Amendment precludes the execution of any mentally retarded person of Penry's ability convicted of a capital offense simply by virtue of his or her mental retardation alone. So long as sentencers can consider and give effect to mitigating evidence of mental retardation in imposing sentence, an individualized determination whether "death is the appropriate punishment" can be made in each particular case.

Fast forward to 2002.  Daryl Renard Atkins was on death row in Virginia.  Like Johnny Paul Penry, he was intellectually disabled.  The Supremes decided to have another go at it.  John Paul Stevens, who'd dissented in Penry began his opinion (for a different 5-4 majority) this way.

Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law's requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes. Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants. Presumably for these reasons, in the 13 years since we decided Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U. S. 302 (1989), the American public, legislators, scholars, and judges have deliberated over the question whether the death penalty should ever be imposed on a mentally retarded criminal. The consensus reflected in those deliberations informs our answer to the question presented by this case: whether such executions are "cruel and unusual punishments" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Federal Constitution.

And so it was that Penry was overruled and execution of the intellectually disabled was recognized as unconstitutional.  

The catch was that the Court decided to let the each of the states that killed people decide for itself how to figure out who was sufficiently, er, slow.  Oh, sure, there were actual standards, clinical definitions by people who studied this shit out there, and the Court said they should count, but if you were, say, Florida, you didn't care about that.  You just made an arbitrary cut-off of 70 and said if someone had a number higher than that, 

Off with his head.

The Supremes took on Florida's rule last year in the case of Freddie Lee Hall.  By the familiar 5-4 vote, they said, in an opinion by Kennedy, Florida blew it.  That there were actual standards, clinical definitions by people who studied this shit.  Florida couldn't just make it up.  Alito, dissenting, said that sure they could.  

Hey, we're talking about whether to kill the retards, not whether to treat them.  Who cares what experts say?  We have elected legislators and judges who are far more able to decide who has an intellectual deficit than people who study the matter.  I mean, retards can always recognize another retard, right?*

Ah, but Georgia.  The Peach Tree State.  Where the guy on the row must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he's a retard (as they probably still think it's proper to say down there).

Warren Lee Hill was in prison when he killed Joseph Handspike, another inmate.  They've been trying to kill Hill ever since.  Thing is, as Alan Blinder writes in the Times,

Although Mr. Hill’s appeals sometimes involved questions about Georgia’s lethal injection protocols, his last legal campaign dealt with a contention of an intellectual disability. Mr. Hill, with an I.Q. of 70, had “the emotional and cognitive functioning of an 11-year-old boy,” Mr. Kammer [one of his lawyers] said.“Warren Lee Hill is intellectually disabled,” Mr. Hill’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing. “The lower Georgia courts have said this twice. All of respondent’s experts have acknowledged this fact.” 

Get that.  Hill's experts say he's intellectually disabled, and so do the experts Georgia dug up.  I mean, the state can't find an actual whore psychologist who'll say Hill isn't intellectually disabled (as they probably don't bother to say down there). 

And then there are the courts.  The ones that took the evidence and twice said he's intellectually disabled.  And were overruled by higher courts because they're fucking retards (as we say up here of the Georgia high court).

And last night, after Georgia parole board or whatever they call it said to kill and the governor signed off on it and the 9 in DC said, it was OK (actually, only 7 of the 9 - Breyer and Sotomayor voted to call a halt at least to consider), they did.  Last night.

By the way, around the time the good people of Georgia were committing an execution in violation of the 8th Amendment, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals announced that it had no problem with that state's killing Robert Ladd tomorrow night despite the fact that he's intellectually disabled. 

Because, really, nobody gives a damn.

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*Disclosure: That's not an actual quote.