After three decades (and a billion dollars wasted), Penry gets a life sentence
The AP here details remarkable final chapter to an infamous and telling Texas capital punishment story:
The state will not seek the death penalty against convicted killer Johnny Paul Penry in an agreement that will require Penry to serve three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, officials said Friday. Polk County Criminal District Attorney William Lee Hon reached the agreement with attorneys for Penry, who was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing a woman at her home in Livingston in 1979….
The agreement means Penry’s case will not have to go back to a jury to consider his punishment for a fourth time. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court, acting on an appeal from the Texas Attorney General’s Office, refused to reinstate Penry’s death sentence, clearing the way for a new penalty phase….
Penry has spent more than half of his life on death row for the slaying of 22-year-old Pamela Moseley Carpenter, the sister of former Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley. Penry confessed to attacking the woman and stabbing her with scissors…. Mark Moseley said that while Friday’s agreement brought the tragedy back to the forefront and made him feel “almost like it just happened again,” he was glad to get the legal situation behind him.
Penry’s longtime attorney, John Wright, said he was pleased with the decision. “They’ve finally come around to what should be done,” Wright said. “I’ve been asking for a life sentence since November 1979.” Wright said, though, that “there aren’t any winners in these cases. … I’m not claiming a victory.”
Penry’s attorneys had contended their client, who has said he believes in Santa Claus, has the reasoning capacity of a 7-year-old. While psychological tests have put Penry’s IQ between 50 and 60, at least five juries have found Penry to be legally competent to stand trial or have rejected defenses based on mental retardation. The high court in 2002 ruled mentally retarded people, generally considered having an IQ below 70, may not be executed….
“Why don’t they just lock me up and throw away the key?” Penry told The Associated Press in 2001. “That’s all I want.”
The Supreme Court first agreed to hear Penry’s case in 1988, and the following year overturned his death sentence on 5-4 vote. In 2000, he got within about three hours of execution when the justices halted the punishment. Penry was again sentenced to death, which was voided in 2001 by the Supreme Court on a 6-3 vote. Both times the high court reasoned the jury was not allowed to properly weigh Penry’s alleged retardation. A new trial in 2002 led to a death sentence that was reversed in 2005 by the Court of Criminal Appeals, which ruled 5-4 to send Penry’s death sentence back for another punishment hearing. It was that decision the attorney general’s office appealed to the high court.
So, let’s review: in Penry’s case there was no question about guilt, only whether he would get a life sentence or the death penalty. Because Texas prosecutors for 30 years were not content with anything less than a death penalty, they put three juries through the agonizing experience of having to condemn a person to death. And, in part because prosecutors were so effective in getting many juries to return a death verdict, this case made its was to the US Supreme Court twice and was the subject of dozens of lower court rulings.
I wonder how much time, money and energy was spent by Texas and US taxpayers trying to figure out Johnny Paul Penry’s fate. Given the estimate that over $2.3 million extra dollars are spent on an average capital case in Texas, I seems reasonable to guess that over $1,000,000,000 has been spent by US and Texas taxpayers to decide whether Johnny Paul Penry should be executed for his crime! And, after all this time and money was devoted to this capital case, it ends with the LWOP sentence that the defense has been urging for nearly three decades. I wonder how many underfunded local police forces or local schools or crime victim funds or roads construction crews could have been more productive than was the criminal justice system with this billion dollars wasted by Texas prosecutors trying to have the state kill Johnny Paul Penry for his admitted crime.
The particular irony in the Penry case is that prosecutors’ pursuit of the death penalty lead to accomplishments, but mostly by those favoring death penalty abolition. The time and money spent on the Penry case surely diverted some Texas prosecutors from spending time and money pursuing other capital cases. Moreover, the two Supreme Court Penry decision were critical catalysts for the Court’s ultimate ruling in 2002 that the Eighth Amendment demands a categorical ban on the execution of all persons who suffer from mental retardation. So, to be accurate, the billion dollars invested by Texas prosecutors in the Penry case did have some positive pay-off — but really only for those who oppose capital punishment.
Some related posts on the extraordinary economic costs of capital punishment: