Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  What is deeply troubling about the Morton case is not only the quarter century during which this man was vilified and robbed of his freedom, but also the fact that this was the forty-fifth case in Texas in which a prisoner or death row inmate had been exonerated by DNA evidence. When you add to this number all of the murder cases in which DNA would not be dispositive, you’ve got a margin for error that simply can’t support capital punishment for felony murder or single, patternless murders without an overwhelming amount of evidence in each individual case.

  At the very least, there has to be some independent system of review.

  When he was Florida governor, Bob Graham instituted yet one more level of protection for those facing capital punishment. It didn’t draw out the process needlessly, and it made the possibility of a wrongful execution remote. Private attorneys were appointed as special counsels outside the normal bureaucracy, law enforcement and political system for six-month periods, during which it was their responsibility to review and investigate all processes with an item that might warrant commutation. The special counsel could then report directly to the governor.

  Had this system been in place in Texas during the Cameron Todd Willingham appeals process, and had the governor had the same open attitude as Graham, it is highly doubtful that execution would have taken place.

  But as many of us have acknowledged, time and again, there are certain crimes for which anything less than execution just seems morally deficient for a decent and humane society.

  On the same night that Troy Davis was put to death in Georgia, Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in Texas for the murder of James Byrd Jr.

  On June 7, 1998, Byrd, a forty-nine-year-old African-American male, accepted a ride home from three men in a pickup truck who recognized him from around town in Jasper, Texas, northeast of Houston. The driver was Shawn Berry, age twenty-four. Lawrence Brewer, age thirty-one, and John King, age twenty-three, were riding with him. Instead of driving Byrd home, the three men took him to a remote location out of town; there, they beat him, urinated on him and then chained his ankles to the pickup. They drove him three miles along a bumpy asphalt road until his head and arm came off. Then they dumped the severely mutilated body in front of an African-American church and went off to a barbecue. Despite the fact that police found eighty-one separate pieces of Byrd’s body, medical examination of his head and brain indicated he was alive for most of the dragging ordeal.

  We pay a lot of attention to the specter of domestic terrorism these days. But lynching was an accepted and tolerated method of terrorism against blacks throughout the South for a hundred years, and so represents perhaps the ugliest and most repugnant aspect of our national history since slavery itself. And this crime was among the most reprehensible since the horrendous murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, a case that shocked and outraged the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement.

  The difference here was that unlike the shameful complicity of the Money community, the Texas State Police, the prosecutors and the good citizens of Jasper demanded justice. The three men’s involvement was quickly determined from evidence along the crime scene. Since Brewer and King were well known to be white supremacists, the police and DA labeled this a hate crime and called in the FBI.

  All three men were convicted of murder in the first degree. Brewer and King received death sentences. Berry was sentenced to life since he was not known to have expressed anti-black sentiments, meaning his action could not specifically be classified as a hate crime. I consider this a somewhat esoteric distinction, given that all three were in on the murder together, but that’s the way it went.

  The day before Brewer’s execution, he gave an interview to a Houston television station in which he commented, “As far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets. No, I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”

  It doesn’t get much more depraved than this. There was no question of Lawrence Brewer’s guilt, no question of the sickening evil of the crime, and no question of his attitude toward it. In my opinion, this is the kind of crime the death penalty was made for.

  People often ask me, given my stance on capital punishment, if I would be willing personally to throw the switch, push the button or what have you that would end another human being’s life. In a case like Lawrence Brewer and John King, or Sedley Alley, or any of those whose evil is tangible in their deeds, I would be happy to do so. I can think of few more righteous acts a just society can realize than sending a monster like this straight to hell.

  In the months before Brewer’s execution, much of the nation was horrified by reports from the first trial resulting from the murders of three members of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut, in July 2007.

  Early on the morning of July 23, Steven Hayes, forty-four, and Joshua Komisarjevsky, less than a month shy of twenty-seven, approached the home on Sorghum Mill Drive where William and Jennifer Petit lived with their two daughters, Michaela and Hayley. William was a well-known endocrinologist and Jennifer was a nurse and codirector of the health center at Cheshire Academy, a boarding school in town. Seventeen-year-old Hayley had just graduated from the prestigious Miss Porter’s School and had been accepted at Dartmouth, where she wanted to major in biology so she could follow her father into the medical profession. Eleven-year-old Michaela was a student at Chase Collegiate School. Hayes and Komisarjevsky had staked out the house for a robbery, which they planned to perpetrate long after the family had gone to sleep.

  When they arrived, though, they found Dr. Petit asleep on a couch on the porch. Grabbing a baseball bat he spied in the yard, Komisarjevsky bludgeoned William and then forced him at gunpoint into the basement, where he and Hayes bound him. They then went upstairs, grabbed Jennifer and the two girls, tied them up and left them locked in their own bedrooms. We can imagine the family’s terror at this point.

  The two intruders searched the house for money and valuables and were disappointed in their take. But they did find a bankbook. Hayes found two gasoline cans in the garage, which he took to a nearby station. Records showed he purchased ten dollars’ worth of gasoline, which he took back to the house. He then forced Jennifer to drive with him to the bank to withdraw $15,000 on a line of credit. Jennifer managed to whisper to the teller what was going on. The teller called 911 while Jennifer left the bank and was picked up by Hayes, terrified of what would happen to her family if she didn’t cooperate.

  When they returned to the Petit home, the true horror began. Komisarjevsky raped Michaela, capturing the act on his cell phone camera. He then goaded the older Hayes into raping Jennifer.

  At this point, Komisarjevsky realized that William, despite his severe injuries and being bound, had escaped. He told Hayes, who then strangled Jennifer and poured the gasoline he had purchased that morning over her, Michaela and Hayley and their rooms. The two intruders lit the accelerant and fled the scene and got into the Petits’ Chrysler Pacifica.

  While this was all happening, Dr. Petit had managed to wriggle free and get out. He said he felt a “jolt of adrenaline” when he heard one of the intruders say to his wife or daughter, “Don’t worry. It’s all going to be over in a couple of minutes.” He got himself to the home of his neighbor, who didn’t even recognize him at first because he was so badly beaten up.

  When the 911 call had come in, police had set up a perimeter around the house, trying to evaluate the situation before taking action to avoid innocent bloodshed. They had no idea what was actually happening inside. But when Hayes and Komisarjevsky drove away, they were apprehended only a block away from the house when they ran into a police car.

  The medical examiner confirmed that Jennifer Petit had died from manual strangulation. Hayley and Michaela succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  Now let’s look for a moment at the particular dynamics of this crime. It began as what we categorize as a “criminal enterprise,” that is, a crime for profit. Certain methodologies are needed to accomplish the crime
. We collectively call these the modus operandi. We’ve all heard detectives on police dramas refer to the MO. The MO for this particular crime would include a way to get safely into and out of the house, time to look for valuables and a way to escape without being identified.

  “Smart” robbers try to accomplish these goals as cleanly and with as little interaction with the victims as possible. It doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to realize that this is best done when no one is home. But clearly, that was not Komisarjevsky and Hayes’s plan. Part of their MO was to neutralize the inhabitants. Also, despite Hayes’s later pathetic claims that “things just got out of control,” the fact that they bought gasoline suggests that their plan for avoiding identification by their victims was to burn the house down and the family members with it.

  Then, of course, there are the vicious assaults on the Petit family members. You could stretch the definition of MO enough to include the beating of Dr. Petit when the intruders were surprised by his presence on the porch. But the attacks on Jennifer and the two girls can only be chalked up to sexual cruelty and the desire to dominate and control. We refer to those aspects of the crime as “signature” to distinguish them from MO. They are not needed to accomplish the primary crime—in this case, the criminal enterprise—but are actions the offender takes because they make him feel better or fulfill some emotional desire. In other words, torturing the family had nothing to do with the initial criminal enterprise. The intruders did this because they wanted to, and that tells us a lot about them as individuals.

  Among the great individual tragedies of this horrible crime is that the police, who had been alerted by the bank teller, did not intervene in time to save the lives of the three Petit women. I am sure they were doing what they thought was best not to risk the safety of the hostages; clearly, though, they did not know what was going on inside the house until it was too late. I am equally sure that this response will be reviewed and second-guessed for a long time to come. But regardless of what may have been the shortcomings of the police plan, nothing takes away from the enormity of the two offenders’ evil.

  The two suspects were tried separately. Each suspect’s defense blamed the other as the leader and instigator. Two separate juries found them guilty of murder, capital felony and sexual assault, among other charges. Hayes was sentenced to death plus 106 years. The testimony and exhibits in the trial were so harrowing that for the first time in state history, its judicial branch offered post-traumatic stress counseling to jurors.

  Komisarjevsky went on trial on September 19, 2011. His defense team blamed the older Hayes for the crime “getting out of hand” and suggested Hayes was the criminal mastermind; their client was only an unwitting accomplice. Of course, that’s what an unwitting accomplice would do: rape a naked eleven-year-old and take photos of the act with his cell phone. There are no words in my vocabulary that can adequately express my contempt for this type of individual.

  He was convicted on seventeen counts. Following six weeks of testimony in the penalty phase, in December the jury reconvened to deliberate on his sentence for the most serious of those counts. After five days, they decided he should be put to death. On January 27, 2012, Connecticut Superior Court judge Jon Blue formally sentenced him to death on six counts. I say, “God bless Judge Blue and all the jurors!”

  Following the murders and anguishing trial, Dr. William Petit did not return to his medical practice. Instead, he established and runs the Petit Family Foundation and scholarship funds in memory of each of his daughters. It is one of the ironies of victimization that individuals who are good, caring and productive to begin with, often become even more so after their encounters with human horror.

  In the Petit case, what happened and who did it are not in dispute. The crimes speak for themselves. The only issue is what should be done about them. As in the Brewer and King case, there is zero chance that police apprehended the wrong men or the juries reached inaccurate verdicts. Whether you are for or against the death penalty, I would challenge any decent human being to state that these men didn’t deserve to die for what they did.

  To the defendants themselves, I would like to say: “Given what you’ve done, the cruelty you intentionally inflicted, what right can you claim to live after you willfully denied that right to others?”

  And to those, just as appalled as I am, who would say that the civilized state must rise above the actions of perverse and conscienceless killers, I would respond: “They refuse to behave on our level, so we must behave on theirs. It is a simple matter of self-defense for our society.”

  Those of us in law enforcement for any length of time all have our perfect examples of perfect candidates for capital punishment.

  “Ted Bundy was a classic case for when the death penalty was appropriate,” stated former governor Graham.

  I can’t disagree with that one.

  Between 1974 and 1978, Theodore Robert Bundy, better known as “Ted,” killed at least thirty women in seven states. There were probably a lot more, though we’ll never know. His victims of preference were pretty, college-age women, with long, straight hair. If it was parted in the middle, that was even better. He was sufficiently good-looking, glib, charming and sophisticated that he could often find these particular victims, either by feigning a broken arm with a removable cast and asking for help, picking up hitchhikers or simply coming on to them. Once they were inside his VW Beetle, they would realize that the passenger-door handle had been removed and there was no escape.

  Despite his college education, acceptance at the University of Utah College of Law and previous participation in both a Seattle suicide hotline crisis center and the Young Republicans, Bundy’s main motivation in life was to capture beautiful young women, hurt them, violate them and then butcher them. Crime scene evidence shows that he continued to enjoy relations with a number of them even after they were dead.

  After escaping from jail while awaiting trial for murder in Colorado, he made his way to Florida by a combination of busses and stolen cars, and rented a room near Florida State University in Tallahassee, to be as close as possible to his victims of choice. On the night of Saturday, January 14, 1978 or the early hours of the 15th, he broke into the Chi Omega sorority house, because he had heard it had the most beautiful girls on campus. When he left only fifteen minutes later, two young women were dead in their beds—beaten, bitten and molested. A few blocks away, he broke into another apartment, where he attacked the attractive resident, leaving her covered with her own blood and her skull fractured in five places. Miraculously, she lived, but her permanent injuries destroyed her dreams of becoming a professional dancer.

  His final victim, less than a month later, was a beautiful, dark-haired twelve-year-old named Kimberly Leach. She was last seen in the courtyard of Lake City Junior High School talking to a stranger, who was motioning her toward a white van. Her body was found two months later in an abandoned hog shed; her neck was sliced through and there was massive trauma to her pelvic area. The position of the body suggested that the choice of the hog shed had not been accidental. He had slaughtered her like a pig.

  The Pensacola PD finally caught up with him on February 12, 1978, when an officer ran the plates on his stolen VW (he even stole his car of preference). Even then, Ted tried to escape, but he was overpowered.

  At his trial, Bundy arrogantly opted to serve as his own attorney and may even have been surprised when he was convicted. It wasn’t until the day of his execution—January 24, 1989, in the electric chair of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke—that he finally realized he wasn’t going to manipulate or bargain his way out of his sentence. I only hope that in the hours leading up to his confrontation with his own fate, he suffered one tiny percentage of what he put his victims through. And having both studied and consulted on this case, I can tell you that though he’d been in prison for more than a decade, hearing about his execution was the first time I rested easy that this monster would not kill again.

  We can
talk about Bundy’s bad background and the social upheaval of his youth. We can speculate that had someone noticed his early cruelty, lack of empathy and antisocial behavior, perhaps there could have been some intervention that would have set him up on the right path, or at least made authorities aware of him. And if he had been incarcerated for his early burglaries and car thefts, maybe he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to kill those women.

  But a lot of people have bad backgrounds—a lot worse than Ted Bundy’s—and they don’t end up as serial killers. Bundy did what he did because he wanted to, because it gave him greater pleasure and satisfaction than any other life experience or endeavor. I defy anyone to tell me that an individual such as this could be rehabilitated.

  Even one of his own defense attorneys, Polly Nelson, stated that, “Ted was the very definition of heartless evil.”

  With violent, serial sexual predators like Ted Bundy, the normal rules don’t apply. They have no conscience and cannot be given one through any known means of therapy, correction or behavioral modification. By their very definition, they have killed repeatedly and in a definable pattern, so we are virtually never worried that we have caught or convicted the wrong man. Because their motive has to do with the emotional satisfactions of manipulation, domination and control, and therefore tend to be particularly cruel and sadistic, involving a maximum amount of suffering on the part of the victim, their crimes generally qualify as “special circumstances.” And we now know enough about their pathology to know that the vast majority of them, if ever freed or able to escape from prison, will kill again.