by Burl Barer
“You want to leave your client just sitting there by herself?”
The reason Sawyer wanted to walk out was because the only thing remaining before the sentence was read was what is termed “victim allocution.” That’s when the victim gets to make a statement to the court. It isn’t preserved in the court records, but the judge and jury hear it.
In this case, as Jimmy Joste could not speak, his brother was going to make a statement as allowed under recent “victims’ rights” rulings: Every victim must be allowed to speak at the time of sentencing. The victim, no less than the defendant, comes to the court to seek justice. When the court hears, as it may, from the defendant, his lawyer, his family and friends, his minister, and others, simple fairness dictates that the person who has borne the brunt of the defendant’s crime be allowed to speak.
Those who favor victim impact statements believe they reveal information about the harm of a crime, and that’s relevant to a purpose of sentencing: making sure that the punishment fits the crime. Proper punishment, advocates believe, cannot be meted out unless judges and juries know, in full, the harm caused by the crime. Victim impact statements educate judges and juries about these important facts so that an appropriate sentence can be imposed. Not everyone agrees, and one who disagrees is Joe James Sawyer. He is not alone in his criticism of the policy, and the use of the policy in America’s courtrooms.
Critics have taken the position that victim impact statements are such powerful evidence at sentencing that they overwhelm judges and juries. Some have even gone so far as to refer to the idea of victim impact as the “pollution” of sentencing with emotion.
Professor Susan Bandes, who might be the nation’s leading scholar on emotion and the law, put the claim this way: “Studies suggest that victim impact evidence, particularly when it conveys intense emotional pain, evokes sympathy and anger in jurors. Jurors perceive greater suffering after hearing such statements, and hear the emotional intensity of the statements as ‘a cry for help or relief.'”
There is evidence that the anger they feel upon hearing victim impact statements translates into feelings of punitiveness. There is also evidence, more generally, that anger tends to interfere with sound judgment—it inhibits detailed information processing, increases tendencies to blame, including mis-attributions of blame, and exacerbates the urge to punish.
“The legitimacy of victim impact statements is open to serious question,” confirmed Travis Webb. “After all, how much influence should an individual’s emotions have over the outcome of a case?”
The idea of fairness is popular but frequently disconnected from reality. There is even a more troubling concern, seldom expressed, that a call for equality between victims and defendants is actually a false front hiding the real objective: an abandonment of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Victims’ rights advocates often seek to portray the unrealistic dichotomy of the “good victim” and the “bad defendant.” Real life isn’t that simple. A mobster who gets shot by another mobster is just as much a victim as any other victim. The man who stabs his mother with a knife, and then is shot by his brother, might be the victim, or he might be the defendant, depending on what happened to whom, when and how.
Victims’ rights advocates, according to law professor Mary Margaret Giannini, believe that our nation’s scales of justice have tipped in favor of defendants and to the detriment of victims, who became faceless strangers expected to behave like good Victorian children—seen and not heard. The victim, an individual with a substantial personal interest in the trial proceedings, was sidelined and excluded.
Over the last thirty years, the victims’ rights movement has made great strides. The criminal justice system is far more accepting of the presence of victims in criminal proceedings and in responding to their needs and interests. One area where this is particularly evident is in victims’ increased participation at sentencing. Congress’s most recent piece of federal victims’ rights legislation, the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, highlights the victim’s expanded role at sentencing in that it grants to victims the express and enforceable right to be present and “reasonably heard.”
Jimmy Joste’s brother was reasonably heard in Judge Lynch’s courtroom. Joe James Sawyer didn’t walk out, after all. “Oh, c’mon, Jim,” chided his longtime acquaintance and frequent legal adversary Bryan Case.
“Okay, I’ll stay,” said Sawyer to Judge Lynch, “but only because my friend Mr. Case asked me to.”
The jury, entrusted with deciding the punishment, came back with a forty-six-year prison sentence for Rhonda Lee Glover. “I don’t know if Rhonda was surprised that she didn’t go free,” commented Fred Wolfson, “but there were people who knew her who thought she deserved worse.”
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“I know Rhonda very well,” stated a longtime acquaintance, “and she is completely insane. She would repeatedly tell me that she was Mary, the Mother of Jesus, [and] her son was Jesus Christ. There were snipers on the roof trying to kill him. George Bush was Satan and Joste was the Antichrist. She mentioned several times that those two teamed up and murdered and raped children in aquifers under the city, and then sold their meat in grocery stores. She should have gotten the death sentence.”
Rhonda Glover didn’t get the death sentence, but prison was almost the death of her. “She was a mental wreck,” reported a former inmate Rae, who became friends with Glover in the Mountain View Unit of the women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas. “She cried much of the time, and her hair was falling out by the handful. She had bald spots in several places over her head. Her heart was breaking over not being able to raise her son. She, too, had believed in the judicial system and found out the hard way that it is a joke. She was put on the field squad for her job assignment and it just about did her in. Women our age should not be put out in the fields to work. On the field squad, no matter what your age, you are expected to keep up with the twenty-year-olds. It is not a job for an older woman. At one point she just couldn’t do it anymore. She was not going to go, and she didn’t care about the consequences. Which is not good, the consequences or the fact that she didn’t care.
“Several of us got together and gave her a pep talk and finally got her to go. I think if she could have sat down and made her heart stop beating, she would have. There was not much left of her at that point. I talked to Rhonda a lot about putting her attention on God and not to take her eyes off Him. He was her only hope to help her get through the valley she was going through. I also encouraged her to take some classes to keep busy.
“You cannot know the feeling unless you have been there,” said Rae, who chose to take Glover’s version of reality at face value. “We have been taught our entire lives to respect police and the judicial system. The feelings you have when you realize that the system has betrayed your trust is like a brick wall hitting you in the face. With that realization you also realize there is nothing you can do about it. That pretty much takes all hope away and without hope, what do you have? Rhonda would sit in the dayroom and talk to us mostly about her son, some about her case and the betrayal of attorneys and witnesses. You could feel her pain when she talked to you. Most people you talk to about their case, laughing about the stupid things they did to get where they are—not Rhonda. She was so distressed over the situation, I truly felt what she told me was truth. I have never met anyone that could stay in character that long for it to be an act.
“She was living in the hell of reality that she could do nothing about. She had been given a long sentence for defending her life, and what was the point? Her body got to live longer on this earth, but her spirit was without hope, therefore, dead. Rhonda began to go to church, spend her time reading her Bible, and before I left, I thought she was going to be okay if she stayed focused. I was very excited when I began to get letters from her that actually had a little hope in them. As time went on, she began to get to a better place in her own head and began to fi
ght back.
“Let me tell you,” said Rae, “the system does not make it easy for you to fight back. To get to the law library is a major ordeal. It is such an ordeal that most people give up. There was not a law library on Sycamore Unit. Offenders had to be bused to another unit and back. Returning from another unit, you had to wait in a fenced-in area to be searched before allowed back on the unit. We are talking year-round—cold, rain, hot—it didn’t matter and it took several hours of waiting in the outside area at times before an officer would come to perform the strip search to allow you back on the unit. There is no access to typewriters, copies have to be handwritten, books outdated. Work had to be done in the library one hour at a time. Each trip to the library had to be a separate request that could take up to several weeks to get. God bless, Rhonda. She kept at it, wrote letters, and just kept on until she finally got to a unit with a law library. You would think that would solve the problem, but they would send her layins to go to the law library between work and college classes and there just wasn’t time to go. I haven’t gotten any reports of making this as difficult in some time, so, hopefully, she kept on until she resolved the issue. I pray every day Rhonda gets another day in court.”
In July 2008, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined a petition to review the Travis County murder conviction and forty-six-year prison sentence of Rhonda Glover. The 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin had previously affirmed the sentence and conviction.
Glover asserted that the district court abused its discretion by refusing to submit an instruction on the lesser included offense of criminally negligent homicide. Every case in which someone points a loaded gun at another does not require that a charge of criminally negligent homicide be given. Nor does the allegation of accidental discharge necessarily raise the issue, stated the court. The attendant circumstances from which the defendant’s mental state can be inferred must be collectively examined in light of the definition of criminally negligent conduct. Evidence that a defendant knows a gun is loaded, that he is familiar with guns and their potential for injury, and that he points a gun at another indicates a person who is aware of a risk created by that conduct and disregards the risk, such a person is at least reckless.
The evidence at trial established that at the time of the shooting, Glover was familiar with firearms, had practiced on multiple occasions using the specific firearm that was used in the shooting, and had received lessons in “advanced firearms training” involving “very specific scenarios.” Americo Mastroianni, Glover’s instructor, testified that Glover was “very efficient” at hitting targets, and Mack Farrel, the general manager of Red’s Indoor Range, testified that Glover had improved her shooting technique “tremendously” from the day she purchased her gun to the day of the shooting. In light of this evidence, no rational jury could have found that Glover was unaware of the risks associated with her use of firearms or with her firearm in particular.
Furthermore, the physical evidence at the crime scene established that Joste was shot ten times, and that some of the bullet wounds and bloodstain patterns found around his body indicated that Jimmy Joste was shot while he was retreating from the shooter and after he had already fallen to the ground. This evidence, along with Rhonda Glover’s own testimony, excludes criminally negligent homicide as a “valid rational alternative” to murder. There was no evidence that would permit a rational jury to acquit Glover of murder while convicting her of criminally negligent homicide, and, accordingly, the district court did not abuse its discretion in refusing the instruction.
Glover contended that the district court erred in admitting evidence seized in her Houston apartment. Specifically, Glover argued that the state failed to prove that she “freely and voluntarily consented to the search of her apartment. “ The basis of this complaint during trial was that on November 1, 2004, Glover had been found incompetent to stand trial, although she was later found competent to stand trial. At the competency hearing Detective Walker’s videotaped interview of Glover—in which Glover consented to the search of her apartment—was admitted as evidence of Glover’s incompetence. Glover contended that if the interview was evidence of her incompetence to stand trial, then it was also evidence that she was incompetent to give her consent to search the apartment. We need not address the merits of this issue, said the court, because any error in admitting the evidence was harmless.
With the high criminal court’s decision to decline review in the case, the conviction and sentence stood. Rhonda Glover remained at Mountain View.
It’s not really so bad here, wrote Rhonda Glover to the author. While those on death row bemoan their treatment, inmates such as Rhonda Glover don’t seem as miserable as one might imagine.
It’s not like I’m in a dreary cell with bars and all that stuff. I live in a dorm like I’m in college. I have a cubicle with a big window and red tiled and a red brick wall. I am not locked behind any cell block bars. God is good. I know a lot of Jimmy’s people wish I were dead but they have no clue what he did to us. He had totally lost his mind. I spend a lot of time in the law library, and I had to fight for that time in the law library, I’ll tell you that. I do a lot of work for the blind here, making things in Braille. I’m being useful. When are you coming to see me? Do you know that there is going to be a television show about my case? I’m being interviewed here in prison, Glover wrote.
The television show Snapped airs on the Oxygen Network, and has a loyal following. The 2009 season finale featured the story of Rhonda Glover and Jimmy Joste.
Lest anyone think that life at Mountain View is like a live-in junior college, here is an indication of the types of concerns voiced by inmates in a recent petition to the warden:
The inmates are unable to sleep through, because of permanent checks all 30 minutes throughout the night. During the checks, the riot door is being opened and slammed shut loudly; huge key rings are clanging up and down the run, lest the inmates have to be awakened every 30 minutes. At 4:00 a.m. they are waken up again for breakfast and then once again at 5:30 a.m. to get ready for work. The constant broken sleep leads to mental and physical health problems for the women. We understand that checks may be necessary, but ask to do them without interrupting the sleep.
Those that need medication have to get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. in the night to take their medicine. Additional to the early time they have to take the medication, the huge flood lights are turned on for a mouth check. They have to open their mouth and stick out their tongue and raise their tongue to inspect whether or not the adult persons were able to swallow their medicine. Why aren’t they given the medication together with breakfast?
There are daily cell-searches, often combined with humiliating strip searches. Sometimes the women are forced to strip off their clothes several times a day, and get searched. These searches are often conducted by male prison personnel, which is degrading and has to be refused as a violation of their female intimacy and human dignity. Mountain View and all US-prisons should join international standards in making sure that women are only [to] get searched by female staff.
Since in-cell-crafting has been taken away from the
inmates, they are not allowed to crochet, knit, do needlework or any other kind of craft in their cells, which was most of all their solace and distraction. This restriction also cut the women off the possibility to do handicrafts for their children’s birthdays or Christmas gifts to their relatives. The women who decided to work are allowed for group recreation in a common room from 6 to 8 p.m. after work. They are only allowed to do crafting during this recreation time. With the TV playing on high volume it’s hard for the women to concentrate. The women who do not work, have no chance to do any crafting. We ask to take off this restriction and allow in-cell-crafting again.
Rhonda Glover sits at Mountain View, miles north of Gatesville, on FM 215 in Coryell County. There are 314 total employees, of which 232 are correctional officers. As for medical staff, there are 19 contract medical employees for 645 residen
ts, and a psychiatric staff of 5. According to the facility’s online information, ambulatory medical care, dental and mental-health services and inpatient psychiatric care are available. The health care is managed by UTMB HealthCare Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB).
Mountain View holds all levels of custody, including a death row for women scheduled for execution. Death row offenders are housed separately from the rest of the prisoners in single-person cells measuring sixty square feet (5.6 m2), with each cell having a window. They don’t have recreation individually. They are allowed to watch television, and all have a radio. Rhonda Glover isn’t the worst inmate at Mountain View by any stretch of the imagination. Among the better-known death row offenders at Mountain View are Brittany Holberg and Darlie Routier. Holberg, awaiting execution, robbed and murdered an eighty-year-old man in his home after asking him if he would be nice enough to let her use his telephone. The victim was struck with a hammer and stabbed nearly sixty times. The weapons used were a paring knife, a butcher knife, a grapefruit knife and a fork. A foot-long lamp pole had been shoved more than five inches down the victim’s throat. No one suggests that she is innocent.
Darlie Routier, convicted of slaughtering her two young boys, has mounting widespread support for a new trial due to various legal irregularities, plus the possibility of new evidence that could vindicate her.
“I have widespread support too,” Rhonda Glover has insisted, but there are no organized grassroots campaigns to get Rhonda a new trial or a pardon by the governor. The simple fact of the matter is that Rhonda Glover killed Jimmy Joste. There was absolutely nothing in her testimony, or in the physical evidence, that came even close to meeting the definition of self-defense under the law.
You can’t claim self-defense based on alleged bad acts by the victim in the past. Such justification may work in the troubled mind of the person who did the killing, but not in the rational minds of twelve jurors, or in the laws of the state of Texas.