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Victims’ kin know anguish of plea deals
Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 12:04 a.m.
<snipped>
Three young mothers, the widows of slain San Diego State University professors, sit around a conference table in the District Attorney’s Office, holding hands and sobbing. Please don’t seek the death penalty for our husbands’ killer, they beg. A mother in Chula Vista answers a knock on her door one night. It’s a lawyer for the man accused of molesting and strangling her 13-year-old son. Please don’t push for my client’s execution, he asks her.
When the question is life or death, the answer is rarely easy. Those who have had to confront the issue sympathize with the anguish that went into the deal allowing John Albert Gardner III to escape the death penalty by pleading guilty Friday to killing North County teens Amber Dubois and Chelsea King.
“In the end, you have to make the decision you think is best for you,” said Deana Alonso, one of the three widows from the 1996 SDSU shooting. “For us, we all had young children. We didn’t want to be going to court all the time. We wanted to concentrate on healing and moving forward.”
Maria Keever wishes she could move forward, too. It has been 17 years since her son, Charlie, and his friend Jonathan Sellers were killed, and more than five years since their murderer was sentenced to die.
The case was horrific: Two boys out for a bike ride to get hamburgers in Palm City are lured into a fort made of brush along the Otay River and sexually assaulted, tortured and strangled. The crime went unsolved for nearly eight years until new DNA testing methods linked it to Scott Erskine, already in prison for raping a San Diego woman.
Faced with overwhelming evidence of guilt, Erskine’s attorneys put all their effort into saving his life. They offered to exchange a guilty plea for life in prison. Erskine said he would submit to medical and psychiatric testing “to help society understand why I have done the terrible things I have done.”
Keever said one of the lawyers even came to her house one night for a personal plea. “He wanted me to convince Mrs. Sellers not to seek the death penalty,” Keever recalled. “I didn’t really say anything. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe he was asking me that.” No deal was struck — “We were never going to plea-bargain with this monster,” the prosecutor said in court — and Erskine, then 41, was sentenced to die. He’s one of about 675 inmates on death row in California, including 40 from San Diego County. “I always say I’ll feel a lot better when he is not breathing on this Earth,” Keever said. “He’s watching TV. He’s living. My son is not.” She’s haunted by what happened to her son. “I think about him every second of my life,” Keever said.
She thought it would help if she could talk to Erskine, find out why he did what he did, maybe learn her son’s last words. But he has refused to meet with her, she said.
That hasn’t stopped her from going to San Quentin State Prison, where Erskine is housed. A counselor there arranged for her to meet with other convicted killers, to hear their stories — and for them to hear hers. “Some of them cried,” Keever said. “But they couldn’t answer the questions I needed to have answered.”
*More at link!
Article:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/18/victims-kin-know-anguish-of-plea-deals/
Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 12:04 a.m.
<snipped>
Three young mothers, the widows of slain San Diego State University professors, sit around a conference table in the District Attorney’s Office, holding hands and sobbing. Please don’t seek the death penalty for our husbands’ killer, they beg. A mother in Chula Vista answers a knock on her door one night. It’s a lawyer for the man accused of molesting and strangling her 13-year-old son. Please don’t push for my client’s execution, he asks her.
When the question is life or death, the answer is rarely easy. Those who have had to confront the issue sympathize with the anguish that went into the deal allowing John Albert Gardner III to escape the death penalty by pleading guilty Friday to killing North County teens Amber Dubois and Chelsea King.
“In the end, you have to make the decision you think is best for you,” said Deana Alonso, one of the three widows from the 1996 SDSU shooting. “For us, we all had young children. We didn’t want to be going to court all the time. We wanted to concentrate on healing and moving forward.”
Maria Keever wishes she could move forward, too. It has been 17 years since her son, Charlie, and his friend Jonathan Sellers were killed, and more than five years since their murderer was sentenced to die.
The case was horrific: Two boys out for a bike ride to get hamburgers in Palm City are lured into a fort made of brush along the Otay River and sexually assaulted, tortured and strangled. The crime went unsolved for nearly eight years until new DNA testing methods linked it to Scott Erskine, already in prison for raping a San Diego woman.
Faced with overwhelming evidence of guilt, Erskine’s attorneys put all their effort into saving his life. They offered to exchange a guilty plea for life in prison. Erskine said he would submit to medical and psychiatric testing “to help society understand why I have done the terrible things I have done.”
Keever said one of the lawyers even came to her house one night for a personal plea. “He wanted me to convince Mrs. Sellers not to seek the death penalty,” Keever recalled. “I didn’t really say anything. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe he was asking me that.” No deal was struck — “We were never going to plea-bargain with this monster,” the prosecutor said in court — and Erskine, then 41, was sentenced to die. He’s one of about 675 inmates on death row in California, including 40 from San Diego County. “I always say I’ll feel a lot better when he is not breathing on this Earth,” Keever said. “He’s watching TV. He’s living. My son is not.” She’s haunted by what happened to her son. “I think about him every second of my life,” Keever said.
She thought it would help if she could talk to Erskine, find out why he did what he did, maybe learn her son’s last words. But he has refused to meet with her, she said.
That hasn’t stopped her from going to San Quentin State Prison, where Erskine is housed. A counselor there arranged for her to meet with other convicted killers, to hear their stories — and for them to hear hers. “Some of them cried,” Keever said. “But they couldn’t answer the questions I needed to have answered.”
*More at link!
Article:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/18/victims-kin-know-anguish-of-plea-deals/