Post-Mortem

I really didn't want to write about Harry Mitts again.  

I thought I'd said all I had to say when I posted last night.

Mitts murdered John Bryant and Police Sergeant Dennis Glivar, shot and injured but didn't kill a couple of other cops.  Glivar's mother and sister forgave him quickly, shortly after the killings.  They said god wanted them to.  And they let him know.  Still they wanted him to die, said god wanted that, too.  And they planned to watch. Mitts himself was eager to be killed so he could get going toward what he believed would be his eternal reward with god since he repented and all.

Really, I figured I was done.

Then I read what Debbie Glivar, Sergeant Glivar's wife, said this morning.  She was there, at Lucasville, in the death house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, to witness Mitts being killed.  She wept, the AP reports, as he said his last words.  He asked forgiveness.  And he offered an apology.

"I had no business doing what I did,” he said.

But then, afterwards, stepping up to the microphones, she declared her commitment.

I won’t forgive him, ever.

Which is, of course, understandable.  Nineteen years ago, in an act of surpassing horror, Harry Mitts took from her what can never be returned and for which there can be no adequate compensation, the person we can safely assume to have been the love of her life.  Why should she forgive?  Why shouldn't she wallow in that hatred?  Which of us can fairly say with certainty that we would not.  I can't.

Nor could John Bryant's sister, Johnnal, though she thought maybe, some day.

“No, I don’t forgive him,” she said as she fought back tears. “Maybe one day I will, but right now I don’t.”

And yet, and here's the thing, the lesson we learn from those who manage, truly, to do the unthinkable, to fully forgive.  Sometimes even to embrace the ones who ripped apart their lives.

When they give up the hatred, when they give up the anger, that's when it stops being about the killer.  That's when they can fully open themselves up to the love that they had.  That's when they are able to achieve . . . not closure.  There's never closure.  But peace.  That's when they can move on and resume their own lives.

It's their voices I celebrate and honor in these posts because they're the engines of the grace and mercy I keep writing about.  Our "better angels" in Lincoln's words.

For them, in a way, we should rejoice.  For those who wallow in the hatred and anger, who insist upon it, for them we might well mourn.  Not mourn with them, for them.

The Death Reward

Harry Mitts, Jr.

They'll be killing Harry Mitts in the morning.  That's been pretty much a foregone conclusion for some time now.  If there was any doubt, it was dispelled last month when the Parole Board recommended against clemency and then when Governor Kasich denied clemency.  But really, we knew before then.  So did Mitts.

He's under constant surveillance.  He would be anyhow by now.  They keep a minute-by-minute log of the last days.  They were getting set to start doing that for Billy Slagle back in August, but he hanged himself just before they began.  Then Ariel Castro hanged himself in his cell.  And another guy less prominent.  They're not taking chances with Mitts, by god.  They're gonna kill him.  

Can't have him doing it to himself.  The sentence isn't death, after all, it's execution.  He's not supposed to die.  He's supposed to be killed.  Doing it himself?  That's how he "escaped justice" in the words of a Toledo Blade editorial.

On August 14, 1994, Harry Mitts shot and killed John Bryant and Police Sergeant Dennis Gilvar, shot but didn't kill a couple of other cops.  Just over three months later, Mitts was sentenced to be killed.  That's fast enough to raise eyebrows among the folks who have some idea how this system works.  But Harry wasn't kicking up all that much of a fuss.  At trial he didn't contest the evidence of what he did.  Instead, he argued, in the words of the Ohio Supreme Court, "that he was too intoxicated to form the required intent to kill."

His'll be the 52nd killing here in the Buckeye State, 3rd this year.  And perhaps the last for a while.  The supply of pentobarbital expires now, and there's really no more readily available.  So Harry's killing will be the last under the current murder protocol, and while they've said they'll be setting out a new killing plan by October 4 and that they intend to use it on Ronald Phillips in November, new plans mean new litigation and, well, who knows.  Harry may be the last for a while.  

We can wish he'd be the last forever, the coda to the killing fields of Lucasville.  Frankly, that's unlikely.  But it might be fitting.

None of that moves this far out of the mainstream of killing and death sentences in Ohio or anywhere else where we put folks on death row. If that's all there were, I'd be holding off on writing this.  Maybe I'd do a post-mortem piece after the killing, but not now.  Not the night before.  What has me writing now is the Bible.

Note the lower case t in the Bible.  That's because I'm not interested here in The Bible, Old Testament or New, with or without apocrypha, King James or Revised Standard or the abominable Good News.  No, this is about the Bible.  The one that Mitts has had since that day in November 1994 when he was sentenced to be killed.  The one that was handed to him by a chaplain at the Cuyahoga County Jail the day he was sentenced.  The one that he eventually learned was given to him by the mother and sister of Sgt. Gilvar, you know, one of the men he killed. 

He got a letter from Cheryl Janoviak, Gilvar's sister, too.  She wrote to tell him, to make sure he knew, that she and her mother forgave him.  JoAnne Viviano in the Columbus Dispatch.

“As Jesus forgave and still forgives, my mother and I also forgive you,” Janoviak wrote to Mitts in 1994. “Had you died on August 14, 1994, your eternal home would have been in hell. In God’s mercy, your life was spared, and He spared your life to allow you this time to choose where you want to spend eternity.”

Last week, Janoviak explained.

What my mom and I did was only a portion of what God desired to draw Mr. Mitts to the cross and the saving, redeeming, wonderful, cleansing grace that is available to all.

God works through people, but ultimately it is the Holy Spirit and his love that satisfies. Unfortunately, in this case, it took a tragedy to get (Mitts’) attention and hear God calling him.

As it happens, there's forgiveness and there's forgiveness.  

Janoviak said she and her mother plan to attend the execution. When asked whether they support clemency for Mitts, she referred to a Bible verse from the book of Romans: “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Look, I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in God.  On balance, it seems to me that religion has been far more a force for cruelty and pain than for good which has nothing to with the existence of some deity but everything to do with the consequence of believing in her (him? it?).  But if I don't believe in god, I do believe (if you've been a reader of this blawg for any length of time you already know this) in grace.  

So Sergeant Gilvar's mother and sister believe that their god wants Harry Mitts to be killed by a bunch of prison guards in the morning.  And they plan to watch the killing themselves.  But they also believe that their god wants them to embrace love and not hate, to turn pain to forgiveness, and to give Harry Mitts what they believe to be eternal peace and happiness.

To Harry, that means a lot.  And so he looks forward to being killed.

 [M]y reason for desiring to be executed is simple. I’ll be in the presence of Jesus, and I will never sin against God again!” 

Which kind of takes the sting out of punishment, turns it into something more like reward (or so the condemned guy thinks).  But, hey, nobody said this thing made any sense.

Two Stories: The Harry Potter Edition

VOLDEMORT IN COURT

It was 1995 when the good people of the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico for you folks who haven't marveled at the Sangre de Cristo mountains), through their elected representatives in the state Senate, unanimously approved an amendment to a bit of legislation.

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant's competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts.

Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant's competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.

Did I mention that it passed unanimously?

It's not just the mental health folks, of course. So-called "experts" who testify in court are, too often, no more than paid whores.  Not all, maybe not even most.  But plenty.  And of course juries struggle because they really haven't a clue whether Expert A for the prosecution who says "Yea" has any better handle on the truth or any greater degree of integrity than Expert B for the defense who says "Nay."  Who's more credible has, frankly, almost nothing to do with who's right.

Enter Dr. William B. Barr, "Witness for the Prosecution," as the headline of Russ Buettner's article in the Times puts it.

After hours of harsh questioning from a defense lawyer, the psychologist testifying for prosecutors twisted ever so slightly in the witness stand.

How could it be, the defense lawyer had asked, that 20 other doctors examined the defendant, a Portuguese fashion model, and concluded he was in the throes of a manic episode at the time he killed his companion — and only you determined that he was faking it?

How could it be that the rule book for your profession says a manic episode can come on rapidly — and yet you insist that the book is wrong on that point?

And how could you conclude that the defendant, who has a degree in physical education from a college in Portugal, learned how to invent an insanity defense in a college psychology class, without having any idea whether he even took such a class?

With that, William B. Barr shifted a bit in the witness chair. He tilted his head to one side, but he did not lose his cool.

“It’s my assumption that getting a general degree from a university, that chances are that someone has studied psychology,” he answered calmly.

Barr has respectable credentials.  He also has a point of view.  That's one reason the prosecutors turn to him.  The other is that he presents well.  Jurors believe him.  They believed him in that case, and the defendant's now serving time for murder.  

It's theoretically possible, I suppose, that Barr was right in that case.  The thing is that the jurors didn't know either.  But they believed - or believed enough.  After all, proof in the courtroom and the law isn't about what happened.  It isn't about what's true or correct.  Proof, including proof beyond a reasonable doubt, is simply whatever the jury believes.  (It's a bonus, of course, if what the jury believes comports with reality, but it's not a feature of the system.)

DUMBLEDORE KEPT OUT OF COURT

Occasionally, the experts agree.  They do about Warren Lee Hill.  All seven of them.  The ones tapped by the state of Georgia and the ones Hill's lawyers hired.  They all agree.  He has mental retardation.  

That might not be a big deal, but Hill's on death row and Georgia wants to kill him.  The thing is, unless those experts are all wrong, it's unconstitutional to execute him.  (See Atkins v. Virginia.)  And there's no evidence that they're all wrong.  Georgia's efforts have so far been stymied, but , of course, is planning to kill him.  They've been stymied in the effort so far, but it looks like, well really, it may all be up to Anthony Kennedy.

See, Georgia said that Hill didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he drooled uncontrollably and walked hunched over and couldn't tie his shoelaces had mental retardation which is the peculiar and perhaps unconstitutional test (I say "perhaps" because the question hasn't been answered by the courts) that the Peach Tree State employs.  And Hill has already had one pass through federal court which means he can't go back there.  So he's now gone directly to SCOTUS.  Jesse Wegman in the Times.

The Supreme Court’s next term is full of big-ticket issues — from campaign finance to affirmative action to the separation of powers — but a largely overlooked death-penalty appeal the court hasn’t agreed to hear yet could clarify how broadly it views its ultimate power to stop unjust executions.

Of course, talking about the Court as if it's a unified body with a single point of view is to miss the point rather dramatically.  The question isn't how the Court "views its ultimate power," it's how 5 votes come out.  Typically in these cases (not always, but typically) that means, as I said, that Anthony Kennedy probably holds Warren Lee Hill's life in his hands.

My guess is that he doesn't see it exactly that way.  I suspect he thinks of himself as a judge/Justice making a decision.  Which he is, of course.  But he's also in this case (if the vote turns 5-4, as it very well could) a god with the very specific power of life or death over an individual guy.  

Whichever side you're on, there's something troubling about a system that relies on the wisdom and judgment of any one person to decide whether this person or that one should be killed.

There are, of course, two solutions.  Stop killing people or make the decisions of the jury unreviewable.  The latter guarantees that legal and factual outrages will never be checked.  The former just means we don't go out of our way to make corpses and to turn prison guards into killers.  

Seems like an easy choice to me.  But it's not where we are.  

Which, again, puts it on Anthony Kennedy.