Follow-up to my post #252494(*):
In U.S., 'life' can mean dying behind bars
By Adam Liptak The New York Times
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2005
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania In the woods near Gaines, Pennsylvania, in late December 1969, Charlotte Goodwin told Jackie Lee Thompson a lie. The two 15-year-olds had been having sex for about a month, and she said she was pregnant. That angered Jackie, and he shot Charlotte three times at close range and then drowned her in the icy waters of Pine Creek.
A few months later, Judge Charles Webb sentenced him to life in prison. But the judge told him: "You will always have hope in a thing of this kind. We have found that, in the past, quite frequently, if you behave yourself, there is a good chance that you will learn a trade and you will be paroled after a few years."
Thompson did behave himself, learned many trades in his 35 years in prison - he is an accomplished carpenter, bricklayer, electrician, plumber, welder and mechanic - and earned a high school diploma and an associate's degree in business.
So exemplary is his prison record that when Thompson, now 50, asked the State Pardons Board to release him, the victim's father begged for his release, and a retired prison official offered Thompson a place to stay and a job.
"We can forgive him," said Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father. "Why can't you?"
The board turned Thompson down. Tom Corbett, the state attorney general, cast the decisive vote. "He shot her with a pump-action shotgun, three times," Corbett said. "This was a cold-blooded killing."
Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment, but deliver only 10 to 20 years.
But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure from governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into U.S. prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever.
Indeed, in just the past 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.
A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of prisoners in the United States, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the past decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, such as burglary and drug crimes.
Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, The Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole.
Last year, the number rose to 28 percent.
The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty.
Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the United States' enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive U.S. Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences.
As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime.
About 150 inmates have died there in the past five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number.
Prison wardens, criminologists and groups that study sentencing say the growing reliance on life terms raises a host of questions.
Permanent incarceration may be the fitting punishment for murder.
Few shed tears for Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, who was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms in Washington State, one for each of the women he admitted to killing.
But some critics of life sentences say they are overused, pointing to people like Jerald Sanders, who is serving a life sentence in Alabama. He was a small-time burglar and had never been convicted of a violent crime. Under the state's habitual offender law, he was sent away for life after stealing a $60 bicycle.
Fewer than two-thirds of the 70,000 people sentenced to life from 1988 to 2001 are in for murder, The Times analysis found. Other lifers, more than 25,000 of them, were convicted of crimes like rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, extortion, burglary and arson.
People convicted of drug trafficking account for 16 percent of all lifers.
Life sentences certainly keep criminals off the streets. But, as decades pass and prisoners grow more mature and less violent, does the cost of keeping them locked up justify what may be a diminishing benefit in public safety? By a conservative estimate, it costs $3 billion a year to house America's lifers. And as prisoners age their medical care can become very expensive.
At the same time, studies show, most prisoners become markedly less violent as they grow older.
"Committing crime, particularly violent crime, is an activity of the young," said Richard Kern, the director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.
In lawsuits around the United States, lifers are complaining that the rules were changed after sentencing. In some cases, they have the support of the judges who sentenced them.
In 2002, for instance, a Michigan judge tried to reopen the case of John Alexander, whom he had sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for a seemingly unprovoked street shooting in 1981.
The judge, Michael Sapala, said he had not anticipated the extent to which the parole board "wouldn't simply change policies but, in fact, would ignore the law" in denying parole to Alexander.
"If I wanted to make sure he stayed in prison for the rest of his life, I would have imposed" a sentence "like 80 to 150 years," the judge said.
An appeals court ruled that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over the case.
In Louisiana, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, has a large number of lifers, "it was common knowledge that life imprisonment generally means 10 years and 6 months" in the 1970s, the State Supreme Court said in 1982.
Since 1979, all life sentences there have come without the possibility of parole, and the governor rarely intervenes.
"The use of executive clemency has withered, as it has all over the country, especially with lifers," said Burk Foster, a recently retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Reginald McFadden is the reason lifers no longer get pardons in Pennsylvania.
McFadden had served 24 years of a life sentence for suffocating Sonia Rosenbaum, 60, during a burglary of her home when a divided Board of Pardons voted to release him in 1992. After Robert Casey, then the governor, signed the commutation papers two years later, McFadden moved to New York, where he promptly killed two people and kidnapped and raped a third. He is now serving another life sentence there.
Mark Singel was the lieutenant governor when he voted to release McFadden. When news of the New York murders broke, Singel was running for governor and was well ahead in the polls. The commutation became a campaign issue, and Singel was defeated by Tom Ridge, who did not commute a single lifer's sentence in his six years in office.
Ernest Preate Jr., the state attorney general at the time, was the sole dissenting vote in McFadden's case.
Then, it took only a majority vote of the board to recommend clemency. Preate worked to change that, and in 1997 Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote in cases involving the death penalty and life sentences.
Now, Preate is on the other side of the issue, working to overturn the amendment that he set in motion. He said his change of heart came after he spent a year in prison on a mail fraud conviction in the mid-'90s. Meeting older lifers convinced him that the current system could be unduly punitive, he said.
"That got me involved in the fight against the amendment I helped create and supported," he said.
Preate now supports legislation that would allow a parole board to consider the cases of lifers who have served 25 years and are at least 50.
"I never foresaw the politicization of this process," he said, "and the fear that has crept into the process."
Janet Roberts of The Times' computer-assisted reporting unit led the research for this series. She was assisted by Jack Styczynski, Donna Anderson, Linda Amster, Jack Begg, Alain Delaqueriere, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.
iht.com
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