Objection! (38 page)

that Stewart, never one to be idle, was mulling over offers estimated to be worth upwards of $5 million from publishers. And of course, the domestic diva will be the new star of
The Apprentice
.

While it’s true that the Stewart case is just one of a number of criminal indictments handed down against corporate executives in recent history, the small dollars at stake in Stewart’s trial compared to the millions and millions in other trials make it stand out. Why Stewart? Why not others like her? And why did Stewart’s case get the fast track to trial and sentencing? The reality is that her case, simply because of who she is, sent a powerful message that white-collar crime will be prosecuted.

But will it? Or will prosecutors rest easier because they’ve now bagged their trophy defendant? I’m sure thousands of other corporate fat cats across the country are secretly laughing at Stewart, all the while devis-ing methods in order to escape prosecution themselves.

Reverberations from the Stewart trial go on. In 2004, a sixty-four-year-old woman who was upset with the prosecutor’s treatment of the homemaking icon, was convicted of jury tampering in Shasta County, O B J E C T I O N !

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California. The unabashed Martha fan was accused of trying to influence a juror in an unrelated murder case thousands of miles away from the Manhattan courtroom where Stewart was tried and convicted. During a quick break during the trial, Alice Thomas reportedly told a woman wearing a juror’s badge, “Just remember, the district attorney lies,” according to California deputy district attorney Josh Lowery. Ms. Thomas just happened to be in the courthouse that day on a completely unrelated matter when she ran into the juror on the elevator. After being charged with jury tampering, Thomas found herself on trial and revealed on cross-examination that she was upset with Stewart’s prosecution.

The felony charge carries a maximum of three years behind bars. Whether the sixty-four-year-old jury tamperer actually does time remains to be seen. This unusual case is hard evidence that Martha has some serious die-hard fans and that sentiments about her prosecution—both pro and con—run deep. And P.S.—don’t worry about the juror who was “tampered with” on the elevator. The case was thrown out by the judge (because of lack of evidence) before the jury heard a word!

C H A P T E R N I N E

T H E D E AT H - P E N A LT Y B AT T L E

I’VE HEARD THE DEATH PENALTY DEBATED SO

many times, in court and out, that when the argument starts up on air, I brace myself. The death penalty is not a “debate.” It’s a very real issue: the single most important determination a jury will ever make. Life or death. Both victims’ and defendants’ families know the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, life-changing meaning of the words “penalty phase.”

Without that firsthand knowledge, legal pundits, law professors, and politicians don’t know what it feels like to go through the experience.

During my years as a prosecutor, I had to go to the morgue and see autopsies of innocent victims. The crime-scene photos of murder victims I’ve seen are too numerous to count. People can say whatever they want about the death penalty, but unless they’ve walked a mile in the shoes of a victim or a victim’s loved one, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

But I do.

One morning in 1980, I said, “I love you!” and waved good-bye to my fiancé. There was a chill in the early-morning air even though it was summertime in Georgia. I waved until he was nearly out of sight, because I’ve always heard that watching until someone is out of sight is bad luck. I ducked inside the kitchen just before his car disappeared O B J E C T I O N !

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around the curve in the road. His arm was waving outside the window, above the car. I never saw him alive again, except in the sporadic dreams I’ve had over the years.

I learned of Keith’s murder during a phone call with his sister. I could hardly put the phone back on the hook, my hands were like but-terflies flying around inside the phone booth . . . not following orders from my brain. Everything after that is a blur. I barely remember the events of the days and nights that followed, including the funeral and even the trial. There are, though, a few things that stand out in my mind. Before trial, the prosecutor on the case came to see me. I remember he was chewing tobacco. I was so young at the time, and he seemed so old—he was probably the age I am right now. He asked me matter-of-factly, “You want me to get the death penalty?”

I had never considered such a thing. I had never known such a possibility. All I knew was that Keith was dead. Nothing, no grief-counseling, no verdict, no death sentence could ever change that. In my youth, I answered, “No.” Since that day, I’ve had twenty years to think about it.

I was wrong.

W H O D E C I D E S ?

In this country, we
have chosen to retain the death penalty as the ultimate punishment and deterrent. The battle has been raging for as long as I can remember regarding whether that decision is right or wrong.

Who—just who, may I ask—should be the intellectual and moral ar-biter of the will of the people? Television pundits? Law professors who have never tried a case, been on a crime scene, or sat in the back pew during the funeral of a cop gunned down in the line of duty? Do we want politicians who have never held the hand of a crime victim or walked through a housing project where crime rules the day, deciding the issue? Should it be some “investigative journalist” who once wrote a story 2 6 0

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about the “injustices” of death row or, at the other end of the spectrum, who rants and reminisces about bringing back the electric chair to cast the deciding vote?

I say, “No!”

Those people should not be the decision makers. It is our job. The victims, their families, the defendant’s family who stands behind them, the workers whose taxes foot the bill for justice, the schoolteachers who see the defendants growing up, the preachers who visit the inmates, the nurses who try to save crime victims in the ER, and the mothers whose hearts ache with grief are the people who should decide.

We, the people, as members of the jury, must decide in each and every case where the death penalty is at issue, and then we must be strong enough to carry it out or wise enough to stop it if it is not warranted. It is our duty and burden. It is our obligation to decide when, how, and why the death penalty is carried out, answering only to our own consciences. I trust and I believe in us. I have the faith that we, the people, can live up to what our Founding Fathers believed we could be: a nation founded under God and indivisible, with a justice system that is blind to race, religion, sex, and creed. Our system is based on the belief that a jury will return a verdict that speaks the truth and decide if the penalty should be life or death. It comes down to twelve people in a jury box. “They” are us . . . the ones who should decide.

We, the people, will make that decision and nobody, but nobody, will make it for us. Not the European Union, the United Nations, visiting dignitaries, pundits with an agenda, not crusaders or hard-liners or bleeding-heart liberals should have the power to make that call. We, the people—we, the jury—have that right and that power. We are society’s conscience. We decide right from wrong in our courts. Nobody can—or should—take that right away from us.

O B J E C T I O N !

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R U L E O F L A W ,

N O T R U L E O F M A N

When there is no
justice in the court systems, people will take justice into their own hands. The people of the United States and their English forebears, the source of our common law, made provisions to avoid just that eventuality with the alternative of the death penalty. This is no longer the case in the United Kingdom, where, despite overwhelming public support, the last vestiges of the death penalty were wiped out in 1998. A 2001 report in
Time
magazine stated, “While European advocacy groups, political officials and the media are touting the

[Timothy] McVeigh execution as an argument against the U.S. death penalty, there is no sign of a mass mobilization of public opinion. . . .

In Britain support for the penalty remains around 60%.” Yet politicians refuse to act.

Against that backdrop, both America and Great Britain confronted the death-penalty issue head-on when faced with similar crimes in 2002, crimes that were so horrible, so despicable, I could hardly bring myself to think through the details of the murders. Both cases involved the worst crime on the law books: child murder and possible sexual assault on the little victims before their deaths.

When I heard about the facts of the case that took place here in America—including the existence of a tiny palm print beside the defendant’s bed, the little girl’s blood on his jacket, her blond hair in the sink at his home and her blood on his carpet—I got chest pains. I’m talking, of course, about the kidnap and murder of seven-year-old Danielle van Dam at the hands of David Westerfield. The sight of his jacket physically repelled me when it was held up before the jury with her blood on it. I cried when the jury saw the little Mickey Mouse earring used to identify her remains. A California jury found him guilty. If the jury had
not
returned a guilty verdict as well as the death penalty, I fear the courthouse 2 6 2

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would have been overrun by citizens fueled with righteous anger. God help me, but between righteousness and peace, I chose righteousness.

Thousands of miles across the ocean, the people of Great Britain were horrified over the disappearance of two ten-year-old girls. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, school chums from Soham, a small community in the English countryside, went for a walk together and never came home. Their disappearance launched one of the largest manhunts in the country’s history. The search made the news every night, and with every passing day the sense of foreboding that hung over the case grew and grew. Thirteen days after Holly and Jessica vanished, the worst fear of every parent was realized. The burned remains of the two little girls were discovered in a ditch in the neighboring county of Suffolk, just eight miles from their homes. Ian Huntley, a twenty-eight-year-old school caretaker, was charged with their murders, and his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was suspected of complicity.

In both cases, here and abroad, the public wanted the death penalty imposed for the crimes. During the trials, citizens of both countries who were seeking justice had to take on not only the defense but also the “intellectuals” who seem to know better than everyone else what is right and wrong. Westerfield was found guilty and today sits on death row. Huntley was also found guilty at his trial in 2003. Upon pronouncing sentence, the judge there said, “There are few worse crimes than your murder of those two young girls.” When asked what should become of his daughter’s killer, Jessica’s father, Leslie Chapman, replied, “The next time I’d like to see him was how we last saw our daughter—and that was in a coffin.” I believe that the laws of a country should reflect the will of its people. Thanks to the elected officials in Great Britain, the girls’ families had no hope of seeing justice in the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

It’s clear that Great Britain is bullied by the European Union, of which it is a part and which collectively denounce the death penalty, declaring it to be unacceptable for EU members. All too often, death-penalty opponents point at the United States and claim that no modern O B J E C T I O N !

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civilized nation endorses the enforcement of the death penalty. In the minds of these naysayers, it is more “civilized” to tolerate, feed, clothe, and house a child molester who killed without mercy and allowed the child’s family to beg, cry, and suffer on national TV while watching from the comfort of his sofa at home.

Here, not everyone’s silence can be taken as support. In California, politicians and judges have been far too politically correct and too worried about their own skins to actually come out and state that they oppose Westerfield’s sentence to death by lethal injection. That would never do . . . they may not get reelected. Instead they employ much more insidious methods of opposition. Silently, protractedly, and under the guise of “justice,” politicos endorse a decades-long appeals process that all but guarantees that when Westerfield does finally die, it will likely be of old age, with an AARP card clutched to his chest.

But at least American juries have the choice, in a majority of states, to impose the death penalty for a crime so heinous that it warrants the ultimate punishment. If we really care about preserving that right, we should inspect the records of politicians and, more important, judges, and then vote accordingly. Our friend and ally, Great Britain, is so emasculated by the EU that the country’s politicians cower in the face of opposition by their own people. Thankfully, that is not the case here.

Still, we are sometimes left with the failure to implement the will of the jury—and when the rule of man takes over the rule of law, the threat of vigilantism looms. Militia movements like the Freemen, Christian Patriots, Branch Davidians, and vigilantes like the subway shooter Bernhard Goetz are just a few examples of what can happen when individuals take the law into their own hands.

Because Wisconsin does not have the death penalty, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee serial killer who murdered sixteen young men and boys and committed unspeakable acts of cannibalism, dismemberment, and necrophilia, was sent to prison for his crimes. The notorious murderer was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms in 1992; another 2 6 4

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one was added to his sentence the following year for his first murder when it was discovered that it had occurred in 1978. A life sentence for butchering sixteen people? Is that justice? Even Dahmer’s fellow inmates were outraged by his gruesome acts. No tears were shed when another prisoner killed him in November 1994.