Some changes were made as a result of Goldkamp’s review, particularly within the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. But Goldkamp quickly found that the Board of Probation and Parole was far more resistant to any type of change whatsoever.
His suggestions for the parole board were relatively innocuous. He said the guidelines for making parole decisions should be reviewed and revised, training for parole agents should be improved, and post-release supervision should be strengthened as a way to minimize the risk of violent crime. The board’s capacity to gather information for the decision-making process and supervision of parolees should be improved, Goldkamp found, and the board should strive for a greater understanding of the challenges facing long-term prisoners recently released into the community.
But while some of the people working on the board were very cooperative, Goldkamp found that others—especially the higher up the totem pole they went—were less inclined to heed his advice. Goldkamp felt most of his suggestions to the board fell on deaf ears.
“The parole board was much more a political animal,” Goldkamp said, looking back years later. “I didn’t get the impression the parole folks followed through with what we did.”
In his final report, Goldkamp warned that the predictable knee-jerk reaction to high-profile violent crimes by parolees was to crack down on parole releases or, as some legislators had proposed, to do away with parole altogether. Goldkamp warned that this type of reaction ran a high risk of backfiring. It might lengthen the prison terms for violent offenders, he said, but once they were finished with their maximum sentences, they would be free to return into the community unconditionally, with no support or supervision.
“The likely effect of this approach is to increase the numbers of potentially violent offenders returned to the community with ‘no strings attached’ to inhibit or help them in their readjustment,” Goldkamp wrote.
Some disagreed with Goldkamp’s conclusions, including John Morganelli. In a December 2009 editorial in the Express-Times, he cited a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections report that analyzed recidivism—former prisoners who returned to prison after their release—in the state from 1995 to 2000. The report found that inmates released on parole were significantly more likely to return to prison than those who went free after serving their maximum sentence.
For example, according to the study, 51.6 percent of those paroled in 1998 returned within three years, where only 19.3 percent returned after serving their maximum. That same study, however, noted that the majority of parolees returning to prison did so for a technical violation, as opposed to committing a new crime.
Morganelli, however, felt there are too many liberals on the Pennsylvania parole board. While Morganelli himself is a Democrat, he noted that recidivism rates dropped when Republican governor Tom Ridge was in office, then went back up once Democratic governor Ed Rendell took office. While tragic crimes such as the murder of Officer Patrick McDonald or the killings by Michael Ballard always resulted in a backlash and investigation into the parole system, Morganelli knew it was only a matter of time before things went back to business as usual.
“The combination of liberal parole policies and bleeding-heart do-gooders who believe even the most violent of criminals deserve a ninth and tenth chance, has resulted in the taking of hundreds of innocent lives,” Morganelli wrote in the editorial. “… After each of these tragedies, we hear how the parole board, governor or pardons board will review its decisions. The reality is there is nothing to review. This is the result of the intentional design of the process. The fact is violent criminals shouldn’t be out on parole or given clemency. They should be in prison, period.”
But other states had gone even beyond Governor Ed Rendell’s brief flirtation with the idea of revoking parole. Some had ended their parole systems altogether, and the results proved even more problematic than they were in Pennsylvania.
As of 2012, sixteen states have abolished their discretionary parole boards, most in favor of a determinate sentencing system. This method dictates that prisoners serve a certain percentage of their term and then be released, according to the Association of Paroling Authorities International. Many, however, still have some sort of alternative program that considers prisoner releases outside of the standard time frame, and many still have parole boards to handle old cases from the time before parole was revoked.
In the early 1990s, Michigan underwent major changes to its parole system, partially in response to offenders committing violent crimes after having been paroled. Stricter parole guidelines were adopted, and prison sentences were lengthened. In 1992, as part of a promise to get tougher on crime, Governor John Engler changed the parole board from one of corrections professionals to one made up of political appointees.
Parole release rates dropped from 68 percent to 48 percent, according to the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending (CAPPS), and many more inmates were returning to prison for relatively minor technical violations. Critics said these tougher stances were keeping people in prison who could be safely released. Inmates sentenced to life in prison prior to 1992 by judges who had intended for them to be eligible for early release were now being categorically denied parole.
Michigan prison population swelled from 40,500 in 1994 to 51,550 in 2007, one of the highest per-capita incarceration rates in the nation, according to CAPPS. Correctional facilities were overcrowded and, at an average annual cost of nearly thirty-five thousand dollars per inmate, corrections spending soared. By 2008, the state was spending $2.1 billion on its prison system.
Eventually, the rising numbers in both population and dollars led the state to increase the number of parole releases and reduce the number of inmates serving more than their minimum sentence. By 2010, the prison population had dropped to around 45,500, and parole revocations dropped by 35 percent compared with eight years earlier.
And, perhaps more important, fewer people appeared to be reoffending. According to CAPPS, the state saw a 32 percent reduction in recidivism for high-risk parolees compared with 1998 thanks to enhanced supervision of inmates returning to society.
Similarly, Colorado abolished discretionary parole release in 1979, then reinstated it six years later. Elected officials, along with law enforcement and corrections professionals, lobbied to reinstate parole release and supervision after data suggested that the length of prison sentence served had actually decreased following the elimination of parole. They also found the ability to provide surveillance of treatment of high-risk offenders had significantly declined, according to the magazine Corrections Today.
Connecticut also abolished parole in 1980, the same year the state doubled and in some cases tripled prison terms for certain offenses. According to the Knight-Ridder News Service, those changes grew the state’s prison population from thirty-seven hundred in 1980 to more than ten thousand in 1990. And, according to the Hartford Courant, Connecticut ended up spending more than one billion dollars on new or expanded prisons during the latter half of the 1980s.
By 1989, Connecticut prisons were so overcrowded that prisoners were being released early in supervised home release. About seven thousand offenders were released by 1989, according to Knight-Ridder, some of whom served as little as 5 percent of their sentences. In 1989 and 1990, there were at least ten homicide cases in which the person charged was prematurely freed from Connecticut prisons, according to the news service.
By 1990, legislators were already drafting bills to reinstate Connecticut’s parole board. They had concluded that revoking parole altogether was not the answer after all.
“The apparent solution contributed to the worsening of the problem,” William A. Carbone, chairman of the state’s Prison and Jail Overcrowding Commission, told Knight-Ridder. “In 1980, I supported abolishing parole. Since then, I’ve come full circle.”
Connecticut Corrections Commissioner Larry Meachum made a similar comment to the news service that sounded almost like a warning to anyone else who would co
nsider following Connecticut’s example.
“Any state that eliminates parole may one day look back and say, ‘What have we done to ourselves?’”
CHAPTER 23
On April 20, less than two weeks before his trial was to begin, Ballard did something that, once again, sent shock waves through the region: He pleaded guilty.
Appearing in Northampton County wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and glasses, with a beard and a shaggy head of hair, Ballard appeared completely devoid of emotion as he admitted before Judge Edward Smith to the four counts of first-degree murder. The guilty pleas meant that Ballard faced a guaranteed sentence of no less than life in prison without parole. Since Morganelli had made clear that he would not offer a plea bargain that took capital punishment off the table, Ballard’s pleas also meant the possibility of the death penalty was not excluded.
“Do you understand that your guilty pleas may put you one step closer on the path to execution?” Smith asked.
“I’m aware,” Ballard responded in a monotone voice. Even as he pleaded guilty, he still maintained contempt for the whole judicial process and the “goof troop” state police, whom he felt did nothing impressive when it came to his case.
I’d given them a case even Stevie Wonder could solve, Ballard thought.
Thirty-five people were packed into the courtroom for Ballard’s pleas, most of whom were friends or family of the victims. In order to create a clear and concise record, Smith questioned Ballard about what he did to all four of his victims, starting with Dennis Marsh.
“I intentionally killed him,” Ballard said.
“How did you kill him?” Smith asked.
“By stabbing him repeatedly with a knife,” Ballard replied.
“You admit that you knew what you were doing at the time you killed them, and you knew it was wrong?” Smith asked.
“I do, Your Honor,” Ballard said.
Ballard made the same admissions when questioned about Denise Merhi, Alvin Marsh Jr., and Steve Zernhelt. Representatives from Steve’s family sat listening, and it made Janet Zernhelt feel sick to her stomach for Ballard to describe his horrible crimes in such a nonchalant tone of voice.
It’s so easy for him to say what he did, Janet thought. It’s so easy for him to say it.
At one point during the hearing, Smith mistakenly referred to Zernhelt as the third victim, prompting Ballard to shake his head and raise four fingers to indicate that Zernhelt was, in fact, killed fourth.
The correction rankled some in the audience, but not nearly as much as when, during the same conversation, Smith accidentally mispronounced Zernhelt’s last name. Ballard interrupted the judge and corrected the pronunciation, infuriating members of the audience who believed it was wrong for Ballard to speak for Zernhelt, especially in such an offhand manner.
Express-Times reporter Sarah Cassi, who was among other members of the media in the crowd, felt it was just another example of Ballard’s love of control. There was no need for Ballard to correct Smith’s pronunciation, as there was certainly no chance anyone in the room failed to understand whom the judge was talking about. Ballard was simply reveling in the opportunity to correct a judge, Cassi thought, and thus trying to control him.
As Smith and Ballard continued their exchange, Ballard spoke in such a cold, monotone voice about his grisly crimes that some in the crowd couldn’t take it. Shelly Youwakim, Denise’s cousin, who had been sitting next to Geraldine Dorwart, dabbed at her eyes with tissues and tried to control herself, but it proved too difficult.
“Sick bastard!” she yelled out before standing and storming out of the courtroom, muttering several other obscenities as she left.
Those two words were the banner headline in the Express-Times the next day, a source of some controversy and discussion among the newspaper’s readers. One reader, Easton resident Karen Smith, wrote a letter to the paper calling the headline insensitive, inappropriate, and offensive, particularly for young people who might see the front page.
Others felt the headline perfectly conveyed the grief and contempt of those touched by Ballard’s crimes. Some compared it to the famous “Bastards!” headline that ran in the San Francisco Examiner the day after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which was meant to convey the visceral feeling of anger stemming from the event.
“The words of a grieving relative need not be criticized,” Elizabeth Miller of Bethlehem wrote in another letter to the editor. “The Express-Times’ ‘sick bastard’ headline was not insensitive. It is intended to express to others that the raw emotion expressed by a grieving relative is real, not make-believe.”
After Smith and Ballard finished discussing his guilty pleas, they moved on to a discussion about the sentencing portion of the trial. A jury would still have to be convened, but now instead of hearing arguments over whether Ballard committed the murders, they would be hearing testimony to determine whether he should get the death penalty. Michael Corriere then withdrew the motions he had previously filed seeking an out-of-county jury, meaning that the jurors would be selected from Northampton County after all.
While the jury was originally to be chosen from Wayne County, Corriere explained that upon reviewing the populations of both, they decided that a Northampton County jury would be in their client’s best interests. As he told the Morning Call, the Northampton County population was more diversified than that in the heavily rural Wayne County, and Corriere believed Northampton jurors were less likely to opt for capital punishment.
But Sarah Cassi believed there was much more to it than that. Just a few weeks before, the defense had been arguing that a Northampton County jury couldn’t possibly judge Ballard fairly, and now suddenly they reversed course? No, Cassi believed, this turn of events put the interview Ballard had given Riley Yates into a whole new perspective. The timing of Ballard’s guilty plea only three days after Yates’s story ran couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Now that the story had been printed, Ballard believed it was more likely that prospective Northampton County jurors would have read it, and might be more sympathetic to Ballard’s side of the story.
He had to have some idea he would plead guilty or have a trial, and he wanted his story out there, Cassi thought. He thinks in his mind that he is smart enough to get a jury to believe him.
With the sentencing phase ready to proceed, Ballard was led out of the courtroom, but not before one more emotional outburst from the crowd.
“You’re a real pussy, Ballard!” a man shouted as Ballard was escorted by guards out of the courtroom. The chains from his shackles could be heard dragging on the floor for several minutes after he was out of the courtroom.
Outside, reporters scrambled to interview members of the victims’ family for their reactions to Ballard’s guilty pleas. Geraldine Dorwart told Cassi that the seven months since Ballard had pleaded not guilty—and the idea of a long trial ahead—had been the worst days of her life, and that the pleas had brought her a little bit of closure.
“It was a prayer that was answered,” Geraldine said. When asked what, if anything, she would say to the jurors during the sentencing hearing, she replied, “I would tell them he killed me seven months ago.”
Speaking to the Morning Call, Shelly Youwakim expressed her disbelief of Ballard’s hopes to avoid the death penalty.
“He had no reason to go there purposefully to kill an eighty-something-year-old grandfather in a wheelchair who couldn’t see and couldn’t hear,” Youwakim said. “It’s ridiculous. And he doesn’t want to die?”
The only person who spoke in Ballard’s defense was Danielle Kaufman. She told the Express-Times she was pleased Ballard had pleaded guilty because she believed a long and drawn-out trial “would have been hard on everyone and it would have been for nothing.” She also expressed her firm belief that Ballard didn’t deserve to die.
“He did a horrible, horrible thing … [but] he’s not a bad person. He’s not,” she told the newspaper. “I’ll never say Michael’s a bad p
erson because he’s not.”
While many were shocked by Ballard’s decision to plead guilty, John Morganelli knew exactly what Ballard was up to. The district attorney knew it was extremely rare for a defendant to plead to first-degree murder when capital punishment was still a possibility. But he also knew that Ballard was making his best possible play to spare himself from death.
Like everyone else, Morganelli had read Yates’s story, with Ballard’s claims that he didn’t want to die. But he also knew that Ballard was a smart man who knew as well as anyone that hardly anybody ever gets executed in Pennsylvania. Based on the evidence he had reviewed, which included the correspondence and phone calls Ballard had made from prison, Morganelli knew that Ballard was trying to avoid the death penalty not because he feared death, but because he would have a much better quality of life serving a life sentence than he would on death row.
Life without parole meant more time outside, more time for visitors, more freedom and flexibility. And Ballard had spent the majority of his life in prison. Morganelli believed that serving life as opposed to death row would be the norm for a man like Ballard, and what kind of a punishment would that be for killing four people?
Morganelli was convinced that Ballard was just doing what he had always done. He was trying to manipulate the system, just as he had done with the parole board and with the media. And the worst part was, considering the state of capital punishment in Pennsylvania, and with jurors so reluctant to hand out death sentences, Morganelli knew there was a chance that Ballard just might get his way.
* * *
Jury selection for the death penalty phase of Ballard’s case began on May 2, a Monday, and lasted throughout the rest of the week. Visitors already had to walk through a metal detector as they entered the courthouse but for added security, Judge Edward Smith arranged for a second security station to be set up directly outside his courtroom to make sure that nobody brought in weapons or cell phones. Sixty-seven prospective jurors were brought in and questioned by John Morganelli, Michael Corriere, and James Connell.
Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder Page 21