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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
But Paula Kurland says survivor families don't get to rest quite so easy. In 1986 Kurland's 21-year-old daughter, Mitzi Johnson Nalley, was stabbed to death in a vicious attack at her Austin apartment by a person who also took the life of her roommate, Kelly Joan Farquhar, 24, and who seriously injured a friend who tried to come to their aid. Kurland, a death penalty supporter who now works for victims of domestic violence and sexual assaults, says the murder of her daughter completely consumed her life until her daughter's killer was executed in 1998. "My children lost their sister and their mother the same night Jonathan Wayne Nobles brutally murdered my daughter and her roommate. Jonathan was the focus of my life for 12 years."
Kurland says that whether they support the death penalty or oppose it, what survivors want above all is "certainty" that the perpetrators of these crimes will never be free to kill someone else. The way to provide that certainty, she and an increasing number of Texas legislators as well as prosecutors say, is to give jurors in capital murder cases two choices: death or life without parole.
Kurland says that the current 40-year "life" law leaves survivors' families in a state of limbo because parole remains a possibility, however remote. "And if I'm not alive to fight to keep my child's killer in prison, then I have to pass that burden on to my children or grandchildren. And that's a horrible burden to pass on to anyone."
To remedy that situation and bring Texas into the 21st century -- and more in line with the death-sentencing practices of other states -- state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat and death penalty supporter, authored the pending legislation to allow juries to impose an unambiguous life sentence when they determine that there are mitigating circumstances that warrant sparing the defendant from death. "Life without parole means certain punishment," Lucio says. Or it would, if the one he proposes replaces the current law.
In addition to the 36 death penalty states that currently provide the option of life without parole, juries in 11 of the 12 non-death-penalty states have that option.
Lucio had originally proposed retaining life with parole as a third option for jurors. That would leave open the possibility that the parole board might show mercy for a convicted murderer dying of an incurable illness. Or the board might conclude that someone who killed at 18 had changed his life and was no longer a menace to society by age 58 or 88. But Lucio was forced to drop the third option to win passage of his bill in the state Senate.
Somehow, what was once the tough-on-crime position -- saving the current law with parole eligibility -- has become a weak-kneed position compared to the life-versus-death approach.
This is not entirely surprising inasmuch as legislators have come to recognize that current law has a huge element of flimflam. This is a law, after all, defended by prosecutors who argue that the possibility of parole gives prisoners "hope" and makes them less prone to violence once incarcerated. Then again, these prosecutors also argue for death sentences because, they say, you can't be sure the defendants won't kill fellow prisoners and prison guards.
Lucio has been using a soft sell to win passage of his bill, suggesting that it won't really change very much and that it's primarily designed for the benefit of crime victims. But Steve Hall, director of the Standdown Texas Project, which advocates on behalf of reforms in the Texas capital-punishment system, believes the changes "would have the potential to significantly reduce the number of death sentences." Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death-penalty research group in Washington, thinks executions in Texas could decline by as much as 25 percent.
Opponents of Lucio's life-without-parole bill suggest that it could literally doom the death penalty in Texas, a claim many find far-fetched in a state where 75 percent of the population consistently supports capital punishment. At a recent hearing on the bill, Dallas County assistant district attorney John Rolater argued that abolitionists hope to use life without parole as a "step in eliminating what we view as an important penalty."
Although there is no direct evidence in other states correlating life-without-parole statutes with reduced death sentences, there are a number of reasons to believe that Texas death sentences will decline if this law is enacted.
