Showing posts with label child abuse gist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child abuse gist. Show all posts
Graphic- Woman Poured Hot Water On Her Housemaid(Photos)
Wicked!!! Mother Posts Facebook Photos of Her Son Being Treated Like A dog
Marilyn Tigas, head of the country's Department of Social Welfare and Development DSWD provincial office in Bataan, the Philippines, said that the images were taken while her son and his cousin were mimicking animals.
She said the images were taken and shared in 'jest' - but state officials are not amused.
Social welfare secretary Corazon Soliman said:
"Even if it was made in jest, it was done in bad taste. The child does not know that it is just a joke. "No one has the right to treat a child like a toy. Whoever does this can be punished under the law.
SHAME!!! Teacher Who Allows Students to Have Sex In His Classroom Arrested
He has been charged with four misdemeanor counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
An arrest warrant says Wright arranged times with students when the classroom would be empty and gave them condoms.The investigation began after a mother said she found text messages between Wright and her son.
“I was in a state of disbelief when I read all these messages," the mother said, asking to remain anonymous.
The mother said she looked at her 14-year-old son's phone and discovered a shocking exchange of text messages last Thursday between him and Quinton Wright, a math teacher and coach at Champion Theme Middle School in Stone Mountain.
"Basically he's allowing the students to have sex in a storage room of his classroom," the mother said. “He told my son you can have it from 7:30 to like 8:30,” the mother said reading some of the messages. “'Did you tell the girl what's going to happen? That she cannot tell anybody?’ basically don't tell anyone I'm allowing you to use my room.”
The mother said the teacher also sent her son a calendar showing teachers' schedules and a text saying he did not have condoms.
“It’s very sickening and disheartening, because we trust administrators and educators when we drop our kids off at school,” the mother said.
A DeKalb County Schools spokesman says they are cooperating with the District Attorney's Office and Wright has been removed from the classroom.
Is this an Act Of Child Abuse?
SHOCKING!!! Five-Year-Old Boy Tests Positive For Cocaine
His father, Cuevas, 31 was later found with several ounces of cocaine on him, with another half-pound found in the car, while is mom Sandy, 29 looked on.
$10,000 was also found on his father, which is believed to be suspected drug proceeds. The couple were both arrested on the spot. Guns seized: Some of the firearms police say were found at the Cuevos’ house
A search of the couple’s home also turned up cannabis, hundreds of prescription pills, and another $75,000 in cash. 16 guns and 3,000 rounds of ammunition were also recovered from their home.
The five-year-old boy has however been taken into protective custody along with two other children.
Both Mr and Mrs Cuevas have been accused of selling, conspiracy to sell cocaine and child endangerment.
Ceuvas is being held in custody on $1 million bail, while his wife has been released on bail and awaiting trial.
Wicked!!! Man Boils Daughter’s Hand For Stealing Fish
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| Innocent little girl crying after receiving treatment |
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| Abusive father |
According to the Police, Mr Joseph Adjetey Adjei, who is a resident of Apolonia and the landlord of Kuli, visited his Ashaiman house on June 26 at about 0600 hours.
Mr Adjei who entered the house after exchanging pleasantries with Kuli who was on his way to work, saw the victim with cane marks all over her body and burns on both hands.
The landlord questioned the victim on the cane marks and burns and was informed by the girl that her father boiled water and dipped her hands into it for taking fish from his soup.
Mr Adjei subsequently made a complaint to the Police and a medical form was issued for the victim to be sent to hospital.
NSCDC Arrest Pastor Who Abused His kids with Electric Wire
The pastor who hails from Akwa Ibom was paraded by the NSCDC at the state command headquarters for inflicting serious body injuries on two of his male children, Elijah (10) and Hope (8) said that they stole N180 and also sold some wares in his shop on credit without his permission.
As a result of the boys action he lost his temper, which led him to beating them with electric wire.
The command image maker, Mr. Kayode Balogun, speaking on the incident advised parents and guardians to be careful about the way they treat their children.
Balogun said children have some rights which needed to be protected under the Child Rights Act of Ondo State and the federation.
He said the suspect, with his two children, will be handed over to Child Rights Department of the Ministry of Women Affairs, Ondo State for prosecution in line with the Child Rights Act of the state after concluding investigation. culled
Pastor accused of rap**ng 12-year-old girl
A pastor, Alasco Sobowale, has been accused of raping a 12-year-old girl (name withheld) in Epe, Lagos State. The pastor was said to have allegedly had carnal knowledge of the girl at their home located at 10, Togodo Street, Temu Town.
The victim’s aunt, Mrs. Ngozi Anjorin, said the incident occurred on December 15, 2012
She said, “My niece was sent to Lagos about two weeks before the incident so I could send her to school because she doesn’t speak English Language. She only speaks Igbo and only I and the pastor, who is our neighbour, speak Igbo.
“On that particular night, my children were in the room watching television but I couldn’t find my niece. I kept on shouting her name but I got no answer. I then proceeded to the toilet which is detached from the building. I knocked on the door of the toilet and the pastor immediately ran out and I saw her inside the toilet.
“When I inquired of her what she was doing inside the toilet with the pastor, she said he lured her into the toilet and covered her mouth with his palm so she wouldn’t scream. She said the pastor brought out his penis and forced it into her anus. She said he also put his penis in her vagina and when she discharged a particular fluid, he used a handkerchief to scoop it.”
Anjorin said Sobowale, who lives with his wife and children in the same compound, fled after the incident.
Anjorin said two days later, she reported the matter to the Epe Police Division and the policemen began to look for him.
It was learnt that two days later, the police were able to arrest him.
Residents told our correspondent that after Sobowale’s arrest, some of his church members accused a six-year-old girl of bewitching the pastor and had her flogged and paraded.
A source, who craved anonymity, said, “Sobowale is not actually the head pastor. His wife is the senior pastor of the church known as Okiki Imole. A few days after the incident, a six-year-old girl was branded a witch and accused of manipulating the pastor to commit the dastardly act.
“The poor girl was beaten up and paraded round the town. They said when the pastor was conducting deliverance for her; her spirit took over his body.”
Anjorin said the alleged rape victim was rushed down to Epe General Hospital where tests were conducted on her.
A copy of the doctor’s report made available to PUNCH Metro, stated that the victim’s “vaginal hymen is no longer intact and bruises were observed in the anal region.”
The report further stated that there was sperm residue in the victim’s private part and it was concluded that she had been sexually assaulted.
A doctor, who spoke to our correspondent on the condition of anonymity, said because Sobowale had not provided his sperm sample, it was impossible to ascertain if it was his own sperm that was found in the victim’s private part.
PUNCH metro learnt that Sobowale was released a few days later and charges against him dropped.
Anjorin however protested the development, adding it was not safe for her niece to live in the same compound with Sobowale.
A neighbour, who craved anonymity, said it was the habit of policemen in the area to cover up such crimes.
“Whenever a crime of this nature occurs, the police would ask the suspect to offset the victim’s hospital bill and then grant the suspect bail. It is very common in areas like Epe because it is not situated in the metropolis,” he said.
When contacted, the spokesperson for the state police command, Ngozi Braide, confirmed that the girl was raped.
Braide said the police had not taken sides, adding that the pastor was released on bail because courts were not in session.
“The pastor is in charge of a white garment church in the area. He will be charged with sodomy. He was released on bail because courts are not sitting but once courts resume, he will be charged,” she said.
S*H*O*C*K*I*N*G! Woman Dumps Day-old Child in Bush.(PHOTO)
**considering nursing the child without any source of income and poor condition of my husband, I took him to a nearby bush and dumped him there.
A woman, simply identified as Mrs Ojo
of Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti State has been arrested by the police for allegedly dumping her day-old child in the bush. Also arrested by the police along with her was the husband, Mr Dada Ojo, a driver who claimed no involvement in the act, saying the woman did not tell him before carrying out the plan.
According to Mrs Ojo, she gave birth to a baby boy on Wednesday morning in her Ikere home after labouring for nearly an hour without anybody around to help her or a midwife to assist in delivering the baby. After considering the problems she would face in nursing the child without having reliable source of income and poor condition of her husband, she took the child to a nearby bush and dumped him there.
Narrating why she committed the act, the 26-year-old woman said it was poverty that led her into the act, saying there was no money to take care of herself even when she was pregnant, so much that she could not register in any hospital for antenatal and post natal treatment.
She added that her major source of worry was how to take care of herself and the three children she already had for the man because her husband was poor. Mrs Ojo’s husband, however, said the woman was not hungry because he gave her money for food but that the woman was jobless since her petty business collapsed about three years ago. “But would food money be sufficient to buy under-wears, cream, regular hair-do, clothes and other things necessary for women to keep herself constantly attractive to her husband?” This was the question the husband of Mrs Ojo could not answer as he tried to exonerate himself.
While narrating his poverty level, he said he made between N500 and N1,000 daily from his driving job, out of which he would take care of himself, give his wife some money for the upkeep of the family, He said when he returned home from his commercial driving business on that fateful day and observed that she had given birth and asked her about the baby, she simply told him that the baby was dead.
On why she could not seek the assistance of her family members, Mrs Ojo said her poor parents were in the village and were not expecting her to add to their burden if she could not assist them. The couple, who looked haggard when journalists were interrogating them at the command headquarters, had been remanded in police custody.
- Sun News.
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Apostle Paraded Nak*d For Rap*ng 8-Year Old Girl In Lagos
An Ogun State-born ‘cleric,’ George Akinyele, was almost lynched by an angry mob for allegedly having carnal knowledge of an 8-year-old girl. However, Akinyele, who is said to be the shepherd in charge of one of the branches of a leading pentecostal church in the Ejigbo area of Lagos state, did not escape being beaten black and blue and paraded naked, by the mob.
The victim’s father, known as Baba Akeem narrated how the unfortunate sexual knowledge of his little child began: “About a month ago, we were shocked when our daughter, Elizabeth complained of virginal pains, saying that she was sexually abused by ‘Baba’, the name she calls Akinleye the neighbourhood pastor. Her descriptions of what transpired between her and Akinleye showed that she was actually raped.”
The father, who was visibly shocked and enraged, continued: “Angrily, I confronted the man. He accepted getting close to my daughter, but denied raping her; I knew he was lying. I almost got the Police involved, if not for the advice from neighbours to allow the sleeping dog lie. Surprisingly, barely a month later, I came back home from work, only for my daughter to start demanding for the type of drug I gave her in the past when ‘Baba’ abused her. I asked her why she needs it, but to my shock, she said ‘Baba’ abused her again. That was how I raised the alarm and took my daughter to the nearest hospital, for medical examination and possible treatment. This was after the hospital confirmed the abuse”, he alleged.a
Akinyele who refers to himself as the ‘Apostle of the Most High’ during his early morning sermons in he area, defended himself thus: “We both live in the same environment, and the father is so close to me that sometimes I ask him for help which he always rendered. I’m innocent of this particular accusation-the recent one. The first time I was accused of raping her, I had gone to their house where I met the little girl working on her school assignment. I offered to help her with the assignment which she gave me and I later returned it to her. I don’t know why nobody believed me, I didn’t have sex with that girl”, he exonerated himself.
“This time around, she is saying that I ‘double crossed’ her at Somonu Animashaun Street and had sex with her again. How could I have done that? I wasn’t even at that area at the said time of the rape. Before God and man, I didn’t do anything to her this second time that I’m being accused.”
However following several threats, the preacher eventually admitted committing the ‘unholy act’ with the infant girl once.
Confirming Elizabeth’s rape, the resident doctor of the hospital where she was treated disclosed that, “she was brought here by her father and I can confirm she is okay now. I’m just appalled by how the accused man was treated. If care was not taken, he could have been lynched. I’m against jungle justice no matter the level of crime committed”, the doctor added.
If not for the timely arrival of policemen attached to the Ejigbo police station, the alleged child rapist could have been lynched after the mob heard him admit to the heinous and dastardly act.
The doctor however disclosed that due to the victim’s twin ailments of ulcer and diabetes, he couldn’t be detained for long and was subsequently released by the police on medical grounds.
Female Teacher Jailed For Having S**x With 14-Year-Old Male Student
A woman behind bars for allegedly having a s**xual relationship with a 14-year-old boy was a substitute teacher who possibly taught in his class.
Amanda Sotelo, 35, claims that she had a months-long affair with the boy and that she's pregnant with his child, according to KSAT.
The mother of the teen learned about her son's alleged weekly trysts with Sotelo and notified the Bexar County sheriff's department and school district, NBC News said.
Authorities locked up Sotelo on Nov. 1 and charged her with indecency with a child. The Southwest Independent School District, which covers part of San Antonio, fired Sotelo the same day, according to Fox 29.
A spokesperson for the school district said that Sotelo perhaps once worked in the boy's classroom, KSAT said.
Sotelo met the boy in March or April through her daughter, who occasionally brought him over to their Von Ormy home, according to an affidavit.
They bonded "because they were both going through problems," according to the affidavit, and "it wasn't until the end of this last school year that they began having a sexual relationship 'like grown ups.'"
In September, Sotelo went to an emergency room where she learned that she's pregnant. Although she's married, she says her husband couldn't be the father because he had a vasectomy, the affidavit said.
Sotelo claims she loves the boy and that he loves her too.
She was jailed on $75,000 bond.
Pharmacy Owner Arrested After Defiling 2 Years Old Girl And Giving Her N25 To Buy Sweets
A popular businessman in Ogoja, northern Cross River State,
southsouth Nigeria, has been arrested for allegedly raping a two-year
old girl (name withheld).The man, Mr. James Eze, was detained by the police after he was arrested for allegedly having carnal knowledge of the child.
Eze, who owns a well-known Edoh Pharmacy located on I, Mission Road,
Igoli Ogoja, allegedly lured the girl into his office where he defiled
her and thereafter gave her N25 to buy sweets.
Eze was alleged to have defiled the girl for ritual purposes as he
“collected the blood that gushed from the girl’s private part with a
white handkerchief. The handkerchief is now with the police,” an eyewitness says.
Mrs. Josephine Ibeh, the mother of the victim who owns a beer parlour
at the back of the building where Edoh Pharmacy is located, said her
daughter came back and told her that blood was coming out of her private
part and on close examination she realised that she had been defiled.
“I saw that her private part had wound and was bleeding profusely,
and when I asked her what happened, she told me that Edoh put his penis
inside her,” Ibeh said.Mrs. Ibeh said the girl’s private part was severely damaged by the
suspect and when she confronted him, he gave her money to pacify her.
“When I confronted Edoh, he brought out N50,000 and told me to take
the girl to the hospital, saying that it was the devil that pushed him
to do it,” she said as tears streamed down her cheeks.
Mrs. Eze said the matter was reported to the police
at the Divisional Headquarters in Ogoja and the man was arrested while
the girl was taken to the General Hospital Ogoja where she was stitched.
A doctor at the hospital, who pleaded anonymity, says the girl had
“four stitches as the tear was deep and the lacerations caused by the
forced entry wide.”A source at the Divisional Police Headquarters confirmed that Edoh is
in their custody and may not be given bail immediately going by the
inflamed passion in the town over the act.
“We suspect ritual purpose for the man’s act because that man is rich
enough to have any woman of his choice in this town. The white
handkerchief the man used to collect the blood is in our custody,” the
police source said.
The matter, the source added, would soon be transferred to the state police Command Headquarters in Calabar
8 Day Old Baby Dumped At Kaduna Cemetery Found Alive With Maggots Over His Body(PHOTO)
A baby boy suspected to be eight-day-old was found wrapped inside a bag and abandoned at a cemetery in Kakuri, Kaduna South local government area of Kaduna State yesterday.
The boy, who had maggots coming out from every opening on his body, was still alive, according to two good Samaritans who located him in the area.
Mr. Robert Ogbole, a student of Bayero University Kano and Miss Grace Yahaya, a Kaduna State athlete who found the baby, narrated their experiences to newsmen at the Kakuri police station where it was taken to after receiving first aid at a nearby hospital in Kakuri.
Ogbole said: “I was at home at about 11: 30 am when my younger brother (Mike), who passed through the cemetery to the football field came with a report that he heard the sound of a baby inside a bag at the cemetery.
So, I quickly called my neighbour (Grace), and we ran to the place.
“On getting there, we found this baby boy rapped all over with cloth and was kept in the cemetery, so we picked him and this my neighbour helped to unwrap him, the baby had maggots coming from every opening of his body but was still alive.
“We then took the baby to Young Men Christian Association (YMCA) clinic in Kakuri where the baby was treated before we brought him to the police station.
“The nurse at the clinic confirmed that the baby should be about a week old and probably would have been in that condition for about four days,’’ she said.
When contacted, the Kaduna Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Aminu Lawan, confirmed the incident.
“When the baby boy was brought to our police station in Kakuri, our men immediately swung into action. We have taken the baby to the Saint Gerard Catholic Hospital for necessary medical investigation and treatment.
At the end of the treatment, we will process all the documents and hand over the baby to the social welfare for further necessary action.
Meanwhile, the PPRO said, the police will carry out necessary investigation with a view to unveiling the perpetrator of such dastardly act.
mercy for a murderer soon to be executed
On Monday afternoon, before the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons
in Harrisburg, lawyers for a man named Terrance Williams will attempt
to convince state officials that his life should be spared-- that
instead of being executed by lethal injection on October 3rd Williams
(shown at left) should instead be permitted to spend the rest of his
life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Despite the deadly
violence of Williams' crime, despite no questions about his guilt, it's
an unusually compelling clemency request-- and because of its timing, in
the midst of two local sex abuse scandals, a vivid test of the nature
of Pennsylvania's clemency process itself.
Williams' lawyers will make their case to five officials who will then make a recommendation to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, who signed Williams' death warrant on August 8th. The vote of the Board of Pardons must be unanimous in Williams' favor and, even then, under state law, Gov. Corbett is free to disregard it and push on with the execution.
Williams' lawyers will make their case to five officials who will then make a recommendation to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, who signed Williams' death warrant on August 8th. The vote of the Board of Pardons must be unanimous in Williams' favor and, even then, under state law, Gov. Corbett is free to disregard it and push on with the execution.
It would
be the first contested execution in the state in nearly half a century
(three executions between now and then occurred when the defendants in
the cases all agreed to waive their appeals). And it's clear that the
governor will be a tough sell.
This is so despite the fact that the widow of Williams' victim now believes that his sentence should be commuted to life. It is so despite the fact that eight former judges -- federal and state -- now believe his trial was unjust. It is so despite the pleas of 28 former prosecutors -- federal, state and local -- who have gone on the record saying that justice would be served by clemency.
This is so despite the fact that the widow of Williams' victim now believes that his sentence should be commuted to life. It is so despite the fact that eight former judges -- federal and state -- now believe his trial was unjust. It is so despite the pleas of 28 former prosecutors -- federal, state and local -- who have gone on the record saying that justice would be served by clemency.
It is so despite the fact that five
of Williams' trial jurors have come forward and declared,
under oath, that they never would have recommended a death sentence for
him had they known of material facts his defense attorneys did not
introduce at trial.
At its core, clemency is an act of mercy, an official acknowledgment that justice will be best served in a particular instance by the granting of relief to someone who is not, technically speaking, entitled to it. There are many legitimate legal reasons why Williams ought to be given a new trial-- just yesterday a state judge agreed to hear more about the new evidence in the case-- but clemency is not about law. It's about equity. It's about the power of the state to put to right an unjust result. Below are some of the facts that were not introduced at Williams' long-ago murder trial. Judge for yourself whether he deserves to die at the hands of the state.
At its core, clemency is an act of mercy, an official acknowledgment that justice will be best served in a particular instance by the granting of relief to someone who is not, technically speaking, entitled to it. There are many legitimate legal reasons why Williams ought to be given a new trial-- just yesterday a state judge agreed to hear more about the new evidence in the case-- but clemency is not about law. It's about equity. It's about the power of the state to put to right an unjust result. Below are some of the facts that were not introduced at Williams' long-ago murder trial. Judge for yourself whether he deserves to die at the hands of the state.
AN HORRIFIC LIFE
Terry Williams never really had a chance. From a young age onward, he remembers being beaten by his own mother, who used "belts, fists, extension cords switches or anything that she could get her hands on," according to the clemency petition which is the subject of Monday's hearing. When he was six, the testimony goes, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy in the neighborhood, coming home one day bleeding from his rectum. His mother did nothing in response -- except ultimately beat him some more. In private. In public. In school. At home. It didn't matter.
Terry Williams never really had a chance. From a young age onward, he remembers being beaten by his own mother, who used "belts, fists, extension cords switches or anything that she could get her hands on," according to the clemency petition which is the subject of Monday's hearing. When he was six, the testimony goes, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy in the neighborhood, coming home one day bleeding from his rectum. His mother did nothing in response -- except ultimately beat him some more. In private. In public. In school. At home. It didn't matter.
When Williams was 10 years old, he later told doctors, things got even
worse. His mother married a man who beat her, and who was beaten by her,
and who also beat Williams. Rage, and submissiveness, were everywhere
in the preteen's life. When Williams went to middle school, at the age
of 13, he was reportedly raped by one of his teachers, not once but over
and over again, the predator plying his prey with all sorts of gifts to
lure him in. Predictably, as he got older, and without anything
remotely akin to a safety net, Williams fell apart. He drank and abused
drugs and mutilated himself, all as a way of crying out.
When he was 16, Williams got in trouble with the law. He committed crimes, some of them serious. When he was sent to a juvenile facility, he says he was raped by two older males-- an event so common in our criminal justice system that it beggars belief (Lovisa Stannow and others have written, bravely, about this topic). No one came to rescue Williams during those awful years. No one came to help him. And as he got older, as the physical and emotional damage inflicted upon him grew, his fear became profound. And that fear turned into anger. He was, you could say, a coiled spring.
CLEMENCY
The right of the executive to grant clemency, to pardon an individual convicted of a crime or to grant amnesty, is at least a few thousand years old and likely much older. The ancient Egyptians practiced it. So did the ancient Greeks (the word amnesty, for example, comes from the Greek word amnestia, which means "forgetfulness). The Romans, too; Pontius Pilate changed the course of human history by pardoning Barabbas and not Jesus. In Britain, clemency was a feature of royal rule as early as the 14th Century, although for a few hundred years afterward the King had to share that right with the Church.
And all of this history was funneled into the American constitution, the power of pardons being made an express power of the president. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in case of impeachment." Because criminal law is typically state law, state executives also have carved out for themselves the power to grant pardons or clemency. This power varies from state to state and the exercise of it has, from time to time, generated challenges that have reach the United States Supreme Court.
The power of clemency is most profound in capital cases, of course, because it can literally mean the difference between life and death. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that 272 capital prisoners have been granted clemency. Illinois accounts for 187 of these case-- all in the past decade, all because of the institutional flaws in that state's capital punishment scheme. But otherwise capital clemency is rare and, in some states, like Texas now and during the George W. Bush/Alberto Gonzales era, an absolute disgrace.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
When he was 17, Terry Williams snapped. On January 26, 1984, when a man named Herbert Hamilton tried to sexually assault him, when the older man plied the teenager with gifts and then tried to rape him, Williams finally fought back. Hamilton stabbed Williams. Williams stabbed back, 20 times the autopsy revealed, until and after Hamilton was dead. Prosecutors portrayed the crime as a homosexual love affair gone wrong. In 1985, a jury convicted Williams of third-degree murder and a judge sentenced him to 10 to 20 years in state prison.
While Williams isn't on death row today because of the Hamilton case that case is instructive in establishing a pattern of behavior on the part of Williams during that period in his life. A few months after Williams murdered Hamilton, a few months after the young man turned 18, he murdered another sexual predator, another one of the reported child rapists into whose realm he had wandered, another man who he says had violently assaulted him, a man named Amos Norwood, leader of the acolytes at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Norwood plied Wiliams the same way the others had. The more violent the sexual predator became during his repeated rapes the more money he would give Williams. On June 10, 1984, Norwood took Williams to an unlit parking lot and raped him until he bled. The next day, June 11, 1984, Williams brutally murdered Norwood with a tire iron, the culmination of an attack Williams' doctor later attributed to his years of abuse. This time, following a brief 1986 trial, a jury convicted Williams of first-degree murder. This time, he was sentenced to death.
CLEMENCY IN ACTION
Clemency has never been a static concept. Over the years, over the centuries, it has evolved, or devolved, depending upon the prevailing political and moral winds. It's never been easy for convicted prisoners to get a break from the head of state but it's never been designed to be. The critics who say that clemency is arbitrary and capricious are both absolutely correct and missing the point. The best people like Williams' can hope for, when they throw themselves on the mercy of the politicians and bureaucrats, is an honest review of the evidence and a level of compassion that isn't supposed to surface anywhere else in the justice system.
Pennsylvania has tinkered with its clemency processes. The latest big shift occurred in 1997 when voters amended the state constitution to require the vote of the Board of Pardons to be unanimous in cases involving clemency requests for prisoners sentenced to death or life in prison. Prior to 1997, the rule required a simple majority and, after a series of commuted prisoners committed violent crimes, the unanimity requirement was added. It makes it that much more difficult for prisoners like Williams to get the recommendation they need from the Board -- and that much easier for a sitting governor to avoid having to make the call.
In their petition, Williams attorneys cite five recent examples -- from Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee and Oklahoma -- where governors have granted a measure of clemency in capital cases where the defendant had brutally murdered a victim after being physically abused as a child or young adult. A trend? Maybe yes and maybe no. What these other governors did is not binding on Gov. Corbett. But none of those other cases contained the breadth or depth of pleas for clemency seen in the Williams' case. So far, as far as I can tell, no one has stood up in the clemency process and proclaimed that Williams still deserves to die.
When he was 16, Williams got in trouble with the law. He committed crimes, some of them serious. When he was sent to a juvenile facility, he says he was raped by two older males-- an event so common in our criminal justice system that it beggars belief (Lovisa Stannow and others have written, bravely, about this topic). No one came to rescue Williams during those awful years. No one came to help him. And as he got older, as the physical and emotional damage inflicted upon him grew, his fear became profound. And that fear turned into anger. He was, you could say, a coiled spring.
CLEMENCY
The right of the executive to grant clemency, to pardon an individual convicted of a crime or to grant amnesty, is at least a few thousand years old and likely much older. The ancient Egyptians practiced it. So did the ancient Greeks (the word amnesty, for example, comes from the Greek word amnestia, which means "forgetfulness). The Romans, too; Pontius Pilate changed the course of human history by pardoning Barabbas and not Jesus. In Britain, clemency was a feature of royal rule as early as the 14th Century, although for a few hundred years afterward the King had to share that right with the Church.
And all of this history was funneled into the American constitution, the power of pardons being made an express power of the president. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in case of impeachment." Because criminal law is typically state law, state executives also have carved out for themselves the power to grant pardons or clemency. This power varies from state to state and the exercise of it has, from time to time, generated challenges that have reach the United States Supreme Court.
The power of clemency is most profound in capital cases, of course, because it can literally mean the difference between life and death. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that 272 capital prisoners have been granted clemency. Illinois accounts for 187 of these case-- all in the past decade, all because of the institutional flaws in that state's capital punishment scheme. But otherwise capital clemency is rare and, in some states, like Texas now and during the George W. Bush/Alberto Gonzales era, an absolute disgrace.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
When he was 17, Terry Williams snapped. On January 26, 1984, when a man named Herbert Hamilton tried to sexually assault him, when the older man plied the teenager with gifts and then tried to rape him, Williams finally fought back. Hamilton stabbed Williams. Williams stabbed back, 20 times the autopsy revealed, until and after Hamilton was dead. Prosecutors portrayed the crime as a homosexual love affair gone wrong. In 1985, a jury convicted Williams of third-degree murder and a judge sentenced him to 10 to 20 years in state prison.
While Williams isn't on death row today because of the Hamilton case that case is instructive in establishing a pattern of behavior on the part of Williams during that period in his life. A few months after Williams murdered Hamilton, a few months after the young man turned 18, he murdered another sexual predator, another one of the reported child rapists into whose realm he had wandered, another man who he says had violently assaulted him, a man named Amos Norwood, leader of the acolytes at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Norwood plied Wiliams the same way the others had. The more violent the sexual predator became during his repeated rapes the more money he would give Williams. On June 10, 1984, Norwood took Williams to an unlit parking lot and raped him until he bled. The next day, June 11, 1984, Williams brutally murdered Norwood with a tire iron, the culmination of an attack Williams' doctor later attributed to his years of abuse. This time, following a brief 1986 trial, a jury convicted Williams of first-degree murder. This time, he was sentenced to death.
CLEMENCY IN ACTION
Clemency has never been a static concept. Over the years, over the centuries, it has evolved, or devolved, depending upon the prevailing political and moral winds. It's never been easy for convicted prisoners to get a break from the head of state but it's never been designed to be. The critics who say that clemency is arbitrary and capricious are both absolutely correct and missing the point. The best people like Williams' can hope for, when they throw themselves on the mercy of the politicians and bureaucrats, is an honest review of the evidence and a level of compassion that isn't supposed to surface anywhere else in the justice system.
Pennsylvania has tinkered with its clemency processes. The latest big shift occurred in 1997 when voters amended the state constitution to require the vote of the Board of Pardons to be unanimous in cases involving clemency requests for prisoners sentenced to death or life in prison. Prior to 1997, the rule required a simple majority and, after a series of commuted prisoners committed violent crimes, the unanimity requirement was added. It makes it that much more difficult for prisoners like Williams to get the recommendation they need from the Board -- and that much easier for a sitting governor to avoid having to make the call.
In their petition, Williams attorneys cite five recent examples -- from Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee and Oklahoma -- where governors have granted a measure of clemency in capital cases where the defendant had brutally murdered a victim after being physically abused as a child or young adult. A trend? Maybe yes and maybe no. What these other governors did is not binding on Gov. Corbett. But none of those other cases contained the breadth or depth of pleas for clemency seen in the Williams' case. So far, as far as I can tell, no one has stood up in the clemency process and proclaimed that Williams still deserves to die.
Williams' guilt was never in doubt. But his trial was nevertheless
wracked by misfeasance and malfeasance. By failing to introduce at the
penalty phase of Williams' trial all the obvious mitigating evidence
above, by failing even to adequately investigate the matter, Williams'
trial attorneys gave him "ineffective assistance"
of counsel. And, by cutting a deal with Williams' friend, a young man
named Marc Draper who took part in the Norwood murder, prosecutors
enabled the lies Draper would tell at trial. The lies, incidentally,
that he has now renounced (and which are now the subject of next
Thursday's court hearing).
At trial, and afterward, prosecutors portrayed Williams as a serial criminal who transposed his violent crimes with the appearance of being a well-adjusted teenager. Prosecutors cited the reports of doctors who purportedly "examined" Williams in 1983 and 1984, in the months before he committed the Norwood murder. None of those doctors spent any significant time reviewing Williams' record or interviewing Williams himself, however, and earlier this year, one of them recanted his original diagnosis, confessing that he and his colleagues routinely rushed through such examinations to minimize the "backlog" of pending cases.
And what have the state and federal courts said about such shoddy work? The recanting witnesses. The negligent representation. The faulty medical evaluations. For the most part, the judges who have reviewed this case agree that Terrance Williams did not get a fair trial. But so far they also have agreed that it wouldn't have mattered even if he had. The standard for a new trial in these circumstances is that new evidence would have altered the outcome of the trial -- that the jury would have reached a different conclusion had it known the true facts. This is the institutional injustice of modern capital litigation. Will Pennsylvania make it right?
At trial, and afterward, prosecutors portrayed Williams as a serial criminal who transposed his violent crimes with the appearance of being a well-adjusted teenager. Prosecutors cited the reports of doctors who purportedly "examined" Williams in 1983 and 1984, in the months before he committed the Norwood murder. None of those doctors spent any significant time reviewing Williams' record or interviewing Williams himself, however, and earlier this year, one of them recanted his original diagnosis, confessing that he and his colleagues routinely rushed through such examinations to minimize the "backlog" of pending cases.
And what have the state and federal courts said about such shoddy work? The recanting witnesses. The negligent representation. The faulty medical evaluations. For the most part, the judges who have reviewed this case agree that Terrance Williams did not get a fair trial. But so far they also have agreed that it wouldn't have mattered even if he had. The standard for a new trial in these circumstances is that new evidence would have altered the outcome of the trial -- that the jury would have reached a different conclusion had it known the true facts. This is the institutional injustice of modern capital litigation. Will Pennsylvania make it right?
On Monday afternoon, before the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons
in Harrisburg, lawyers for a man named Terrance Williams will attempt
to convince state officials that his life should be spared-- that
instead of being executed by lethal injection on October 3rd Williams
(shown at left) should instead be permitted to spend the rest of his
life in prison without the possibility of parole. Despite the deadly
violence of Williams' crime, despite no questions about his guilt, it's
an unusually compelling clemency request-- and because of its timing, in
the midst of two local sex abuse scandals, a vivid test of the nature
of Pennsylvania's clemency process itself.
Williams' lawyers will make their case to five officials who will then make a recommendation to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, who signed Williams' death warrant on August 8th. The vote of the Board of Pardons must be unanimous in Williams' favor and, even then, under state law, Gov. Corbett is free to disregard it and push on with the execution. It would be the first contested execution in the state in nearly half a century (three executions between now and then occurred when the defendants in the cases all agreed to waive their appeals). And it's clear that the governor will be a tough sell.
This is so despite the fact that the widow of Williams' victim now believes that his sentence should be commuted to life. It is so despite the fact that eight former judges -- federal and state -- now believe his trial was unjust. It is so despite the pleas of 28 former prosecutors -- federal, state and local -- who have gone on the record saying that justice would be served by clemency. It is so despite the fact that five of Williams' trial jurors have come forward and declared, under oath, that they never would have recommended a death sentence for him had they known of material facts his defense attorneys did not introduce at trial.
At its core, clemency is an act of mercy, an official acknowledgment that justice will be best served in a particular instance by the granting of relief to someone who is not, technically speaking, entitled to it. There are many legitimate legal reasons why Williams ought to be given a new trial-- just yesterday a state judge agreed to hear more about the new evidence in the case-- but clemency is not about law. It's about equity. It's about the power of the state to put to right an unjust result. Below are some of the facts that were not introduced at Williams' long-ago murder trial. Judge for yourself whether he deserves to die at the hands of the state.
AN HORRIFIC LIFE
Terry Williams never really had a chance. From a young age onward, he remembers being beaten by his own mother, who used "belts, fists, extension cords switches or anything that she could get her hands on," according to the clemency petition which is the subject of Monday's hearing. When he was six, the testimony goes, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy in the neighborhood, coming home one day bleeding from his rectum. His mother did nothing in response -- except ultimately beat him some more. In private. In public. In school. At home. It didn't matter.
When
Williams was 10 years old, he later told doctors, things got even
worse. His mother married a man who beat her, and who was beaten by her,
and who also beat Williams. Rage, and submissiveness, were everywhere
in the preteen's life. When Williams went to middle school, at the age
of 13, he was reportedly raped by one of his teachers, not once but over
and over again, the predator plying his prey with all sorts of gifts to
lure him in. Predictably, as he got older, and without anything
remotely akin to a safety net, Williams fell apart. He drank and abused
drugs and mutilated himself, all as a way of crying out.
When he was 16, Williams got in trouble with the law. He committed crimes, some of them serious. When he was sent to a juvenile facility, he says he was raped by two older males-- an event so common in our criminal justice system that it beggars belief (Lovisa Stannow and others have written, bravely, about this topic). No one came to rescue Williams during those awful years. No one came to help him. And as he got older, as the physical and emotional damage inflicted upon him grew, his fear became profound. And that fear turned into anger. He was, you could say, a coiled spring.
CLEMENCY
The right of the executive to grant clemency, to pardon an individual convicted of a crime or to grant amnesty, is at least a few thousand years old and likely much older. The ancient Egyptians practiced it. So did the ancient Greeks (the word amnesty, for example, comes from the Greek word amnestia, which means "forgetfulness). The Romans, too; Pontius Pilate changed the course of human history by pardoning Barabbas and not Jesus. In Britain, clemency was a feature of royal rule as early as the 14th Century, although for a few hundred years afterward the King had to share that right with the Church.
And all of this history was funneled into the American constitution, the power of pardons being made an express power of the president. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in case of impeachment." Because criminal law is typically state law, state executives also have carved out for themselves the power to grant pardons or clemency. This power varies from state to state and the exercise of it has, from time to time, generated challenges that have reach the United States Supreme Court.
The power of clemency is most profound in capital cases, of course, because it can literally mean the difference between life and death. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that 272 capital prisoners have been granted clemency. Illinois accounts for 187 of these case-- all in the past decade, all because of the institutional flaws in that state's capital punishment scheme. But otherwise capital clemency is rare and, in some states, like Texas now and during the George W. Bush/Alberto Gonzales era, an absolute disgrace.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
When he was 17, Terry Williams snapped. On January 26, 1984, when a man named Herbert Hamilton tried to sexually assault him, when the older man plied the teenager with gifts and then tried to rape him, Williams finally fought back. Hamilton stabbed Williams. Williams stabbed back, 20 times the autopsy revealed, until and after Hamilton was dead. Prosecutors portrayed the crime as a homosexual love affair gone wrong. In 1985, a jury convicted Williams of third-degree murder and a judge sentenced him to 10 to 20 years in state prison.
While Williams isn't on death row today because of the Hamilton case that case is instructive in establishing a pattern of behavior on the part of Williams during that period in his life. A few months after Williams murdered Hamilton, a few months after the young man turned 18, he murdered another sexual predator, another one of the reported child rapists into whose realm he had wandered, another man who he says had violently assaulted him, a man named Amos Norwood, leader of the acolytes at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Norwood plied Wiliams the same way the others had. The more violent the sexual predator became during his repeated rapes the more money he would give Williams. On June 10, 1984, Norwood took Williams to an unlit parking lot and raped him until he bled. The next day, June 11, 1984, Williams brutally murdered Norwood with a tire iron, the culmination of an attack Williams' doctor later attributed to his years of abuse. This time, following a brief 1986 trial, a jury convicted Williams of first-degree murder. This time, he was sentenced to death.
CLEMENCY IN ACTION
Clemency has never been a static concept. Over the years, over the centuries, it has evolved, or devolved, depending upon the prevailing political and moral winds. It's never been easy for convicted prisoners to get a break from the head of state but it's never been designed to be. The critics who say that clemency is arbitrary and capricious are both absolutely correct and missing the point. The best people like Williams' can hope for, when they throw themselves on the mercy of the politicians and bureaucrats, is an honest review of the evidence and a level of compassion that isn't supposed to surface anywhere else in the justice system.
Pennsylvania has tinkered with its clemency processes. The latest big shift occurred in 1997 when voters amended the state constitution to require the vote of the Board of Pardons to be unanimous in cases involving clemency requests for prisoners sentenced to death or life in prison. Prior to 1997, the rule required a simple majority and, after a series of commuted prisoners committed violent crimes, the unanimity requirement was added. It makes it that much more difficult for prisoners like Williams to get the recommendation they need from the Board -- and that much easier for a sitting governor to avoid having to make the call.
In their petition, Williams attorneys cite five recent examples -- from Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee and Oklahoma -- where governors have granted a measure of clemency in capital cases where the defendant had brutally murdered a victim after being physically abused as a child or young adult. A trend? Maybe yes and maybe no. What these other governors did is not binding on Gov. Corbett. But none of those other cases contained the breadth or depth of pleas for clemency seen in the Williams' case. So far, as far as I can tell, no one has stood up in the clemency process and proclaimed that Williams still deserves to die.
TRIAL AND ERROR
Williams' guilt was never in doubt. But his trial was nevertheless wracked by misfeasance and malfeasance. By failing to introduce at the penalty phase of Williams' trial all the obvious mitigating evidence above, by failing even to adequately investigate the matter, Williams' trial attorneys gave him "ineffective assistance" of counsel. And, by cutting a deal with Williams' friend, a young man named Marc Draper who took part in the Norwood murder, prosecutors enabled the lies Draper would tell at trial. The lies, incidentally, that he has now renounced (and which are now the subject of next Thursday's court hearing).
At trial, and afterward, prosecutors portrayed Williams as a serial criminal who transposed his violent crimes with the appearance of being a well-adjusted teenager. Prosecutors cited the reports of doctors who purportedly "examined" Williams in 1983 and 1984, in the months before he committed the Norwood murder. None of those doctors spent any significant time reviewing Williams' record or interviewing Williams himself, however, and earlier this year, one of them recanted his original diagnosis, confessing that he and his colleagues routinely rushed through such examinations to minimize the "backlog" of pending cases.
And what have the state and federal courts said about such shoddy work? The recanting witnesses. The negligent representation. The faulty medical evaluations. For the most part, the judges who have reviewed this case agree that Terrance Williams did not get a fair trial. But so far they also have agreed that it wouldn't have mattered even if he had. The standard for a new trial in these circumstances is that new evidence would have altered the outcome of the trial -- that the jury would have reached a different conclusion had it known the true facts. This is the institutional injustice of modern capital litigation. Will Pennsylvania make it right?
THE PLEA FOR MERCY
Whether or not she knew at that time what her husband was, Norwood's widow now wants no further killing. She argues that Williams is "worthy of forgiveness" and has signed onto the defense request for clemency. It is unclear how state lawyers have reacted to Mamie Norwood's request (the state's response to a clemency request is not provided to defense attorneys). But whatever else it does, it undercuts the traditional argument offered by prosecutors when they seek to justify the results of an unfair capital trial -- that the state is there to protect the rights and interests of the family members of the victim.
Nor can the state plausibly argue today that evidence of the abuse Williams suffered wouldn't have made a difference to the jury. Five jurors have come forward to say that the errors made by the defense very definitively would have made a difference. And no fewer than three jurors even said they would have voted for life imprisonment had they known it meant without the possibility of parole. Pennsylvania evidently is the last state which does not require trial judges to tell jurors the truth about the lack of parole for capital life sentences. Respecting the jury's work is another traditional argument against clemency. Here, it cuts the other way.
Another argument prosecutors ceaselessly pitch is the one about retributive justice -- that society has an interest in ensuring that criminals get what they deserve. But what, exactly, does Terrance Williams deserve after suffering for all those years before taking Hamilton and Norwood off the streets? This July, Gov. Corbett praised investigators in the Sandusky case "who have worked very hard to get the result -- that justice was served and a monster was taken off the street." With the stroke of a pen, Pennsylvania's governor can do what no one before has ever really done for Williams -- show him some tender mercy.
THE POLITICS OF THE MATTER
The Board of Pardons is a political institution, not a legal one. It is made up of the Attorney General Linda Kelly, who is the state's highest law enforcement officer, Lt. Governor Jim Cawley, who isn't likely to buck his boss, a "corrections expert," a "victim representative" and a psychologist. These folks, and perhaps Gov. Corbett, will have to confront this particular case at a particularly sensitive time in the state's history, a moment when two of the most cherished institutions around -- the Catholic Church and Penn State University -- are themselves struggling to cope with sexual abuse allegations, new and old.
The Williams' case comes across Gov. Corbett's desk right in the middle of Pennsylvania's torturous acknowledgment of the deeds of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State coach convicted of child rape in June. There is no escaping the links between the two stories. The outpouring of sympathy and grief for Sandusky's many victims, including public comments from Gov. Corbett and Attorney General Kelly, surely animates some of the support Williams recently has received. And it surely raises the question, pondered aloud by the governor, of how difficult it is for these poor victims to step forward from the darkness.
The Williams' clemency also comes just a few months after Monsignor William J. Lynn, of Pennsylvania, was found guilty of child endangerment for shielding predatory priests from the law. The Catholic Church, short on irony and long opposed to capital punishment, has been a vocal supporter of Terrance Williams' cause. So have law professors and the medical community. Whether all of this support will be enough is a question now in the hands of five Pennsylvanians who must speak for the rest of the state. What's the point of clemency itself if not for people like Terrance Williams? Maybe they'll answer that question, too.
Williams' lawyers will make their case to five officials who will then make a recommendation to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, who signed Williams' death warrant on August 8th. The vote of the Board of Pardons must be unanimous in Williams' favor and, even then, under state law, Gov. Corbett is free to disregard it and push on with the execution. It would be the first contested execution in the state in nearly half a century (three executions between now and then occurred when the defendants in the cases all agreed to waive their appeals). And it's clear that the governor will be a tough sell.
This is so despite the fact that the widow of Williams' victim now believes that his sentence should be commuted to life. It is so despite the fact that eight former judges -- federal and state -- now believe his trial was unjust. It is so despite the pleas of 28 former prosecutors -- federal, state and local -- who have gone on the record saying that justice would be served by clemency. It is so despite the fact that five of Williams' trial jurors have come forward and declared, under oath, that they never would have recommended a death sentence for him had they known of material facts his defense attorneys did not introduce at trial.
At its core, clemency is an act of mercy, an official acknowledgment that justice will be best served in a particular instance by the granting of relief to someone who is not, technically speaking, entitled to it. There are many legitimate legal reasons why Williams ought to be given a new trial-- just yesterday a state judge agreed to hear more about the new evidence in the case-- but clemency is not about law. It's about equity. It's about the power of the state to put to right an unjust result. Below are some of the facts that were not introduced at Williams' long-ago murder trial. Judge for yourself whether he deserves to die at the hands of the state.
AN HORRIFIC LIFE
Terry Williams never really had a chance. From a young age onward, he remembers being beaten by his own mother, who used "belts, fists, extension cords switches or anything that she could get her hands on," according to the clemency petition which is the subject of Monday's hearing. When he was six, the testimony goes, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy in the neighborhood, coming home one day bleeding from his rectum. His mother did nothing in response -- except ultimately beat him some more. In private. In public. In school. At home. It didn't matter.
When
Williams was 10 years old, he later told doctors, things got even
worse. His mother married a man who beat her, and who was beaten by her,
and who also beat Williams. Rage, and submissiveness, were everywhere
in the preteen's life. When Williams went to middle school, at the age
of 13, he was reportedly raped by one of his teachers, not once but over
and over again, the predator plying his prey with all sorts of gifts to
lure him in. Predictably, as he got older, and without anything
remotely akin to a safety net, Williams fell apart. He drank and abused
drugs and mutilated himself, all as a way of crying out.When he was 16, Williams got in trouble with the law. He committed crimes, some of them serious. When he was sent to a juvenile facility, he says he was raped by two older males-- an event so common in our criminal justice system that it beggars belief (Lovisa Stannow and others have written, bravely, about this topic). No one came to rescue Williams during those awful years. No one came to help him. And as he got older, as the physical and emotional damage inflicted upon him grew, his fear became profound. And that fear turned into anger. He was, you could say, a coiled spring.
CLEMENCY
The right of the executive to grant clemency, to pardon an individual convicted of a crime or to grant amnesty, is at least a few thousand years old and likely much older. The ancient Egyptians practiced it. So did the ancient Greeks (the word amnesty, for example, comes from the Greek word amnestia, which means "forgetfulness). The Romans, too; Pontius Pilate changed the course of human history by pardoning Barabbas and not Jesus. In Britain, clemency was a feature of royal rule as early as the 14th Century, although for a few hundred years afterward the King had to share that right with the Church.
And all of this history was funneled into the American constitution, the power of pardons being made an express power of the president. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in case of impeachment." Because criminal law is typically state law, state executives also have carved out for themselves the power to grant pardons or clemency. This power varies from state to state and the exercise of it has, from time to time, generated challenges that have reach the United States Supreme Court.
The power of clemency is most profound in capital cases, of course, because it can literally mean the difference between life and death. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that 272 capital prisoners have been granted clemency. Illinois accounts for 187 of these case-- all in the past decade, all because of the institutional flaws in that state's capital punishment scheme. But otherwise capital clemency is rare and, in some states, like Texas now and during the George W. Bush/Alberto Gonzales era, an absolute disgrace.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
When he was 17, Terry Williams snapped. On January 26, 1984, when a man named Herbert Hamilton tried to sexually assault him, when the older man plied the teenager with gifts and then tried to rape him, Williams finally fought back. Hamilton stabbed Williams. Williams stabbed back, 20 times the autopsy revealed, until and after Hamilton was dead. Prosecutors portrayed the crime as a homosexual love affair gone wrong. In 1985, a jury convicted Williams of third-degree murder and a judge sentenced him to 10 to 20 years in state prison.
While Williams isn't on death row today because of the Hamilton case that case is instructive in establishing a pattern of behavior on the part of Williams during that period in his life. A few months after Williams murdered Hamilton, a few months after the young man turned 18, he murdered another sexual predator, another one of the reported child rapists into whose realm he had wandered, another man who he says had violently assaulted him, a man named Amos Norwood, leader of the acolytes at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Norwood plied Wiliams the same way the others had. The more violent the sexual predator became during his repeated rapes the more money he would give Williams. On June 10, 1984, Norwood took Williams to an unlit parking lot and raped him until he bled. The next day, June 11, 1984, Williams brutally murdered Norwood with a tire iron, the culmination of an attack Williams' doctor later attributed to his years of abuse. This time, following a brief 1986 trial, a jury convicted Williams of first-degree murder. This time, he was sentenced to death.
CLEMENCY IN ACTION
Clemency has never been a static concept. Over the years, over the centuries, it has evolved, or devolved, depending upon the prevailing political and moral winds. It's never been easy for convicted prisoners to get a break from the head of state but it's never been designed to be. The critics who say that clemency is arbitrary and capricious are both absolutely correct and missing the point. The best people like Williams' can hope for, when they throw themselves on the mercy of the politicians and bureaucrats, is an honest review of the evidence and a level of compassion that isn't supposed to surface anywhere else in the justice system.
Pennsylvania has tinkered with its clemency processes. The latest big shift occurred in 1997 when voters amended the state constitution to require the vote of the Board of Pardons to be unanimous in cases involving clemency requests for prisoners sentenced to death or life in prison. Prior to 1997, the rule required a simple majority and, after a series of commuted prisoners committed violent crimes, the unanimity requirement was added. It makes it that much more difficult for prisoners like Williams to get the recommendation they need from the Board -- and that much easier for a sitting governor to avoid having to make the call.
In their petition, Williams attorneys cite five recent examples -- from Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee and Oklahoma -- where governors have granted a measure of clemency in capital cases where the defendant had brutally murdered a victim after being physically abused as a child or young adult. A trend? Maybe yes and maybe no. What these other governors did is not binding on Gov. Corbett. But none of those other cases contained the breadth or depth of pleas for clemency seen in the Williams' case. So far, as far as I can tell, no one has stood up in the clemency process and proclaimed that Williams still deserves to die.
TRIAL AND ERROR
Williams' guilt was never in doubt. But his trial was nevertheless wracked by misfeasance and malfeasance. By failing to introduce at the penalty phase of Williams' trial all the obvious mitigating evidence above, by failing even to adequately investigate the matter, Williams' trial attorneys gave him "ineffective assistance" of counsel. And, by cutting a deal with Williams' friend, a young man named Marc Draper who took part in the Norwood murder, prosecutors enabled the lies Draper would tell at trial. The lies, incidentally, that he has now renounced (and which are now the subject of next Thursday's court hearing).
At trial, and afterward, prosecutors portrayed Williams as a serial criminal who transposed his violent crimes with the appearance of being a well-adjusted teenager. Prosecutors cited the reports of doctors who purportedly "examined" Williams in 1983 and 1984, in the months before he committed the Norwood murder. None of those doctors spent any significant time reviewing Williams' record or interviewing Williams himself, however, and earlier this year, one of them recanted his original diagnosis, confessing that he and his colleagues routinely rushed through such examinations to minimize the "backlog" of pending cases.
And what have the state and federal courts said about such shoddy work? The recanting witnesses. The negligent representation. The faulty medical evaluations. For the most part, the judges who have reviewed this case agree that Terrance Williams did not get a fair trial. But so far they also have agreed that it wouldn't have mattered even if he had. The standard for a new trial in these circumstances is that new evidence would have altered the outcome of the trial -- that the jury would have reached a different conclusion had it known the true facts. This is the institutional injustice of modern capital litigation. Will Pennsylvania make it right?
THE PLEA FOR MERCY
Whether or not she knew at that time what her husband was, Norwood's widow now wants no further killing. She argues that Williams is "worthy of forgiveness" and has signed onto the defense request for clemency. It is unclear how state lawyers have reacted to Mamie Norwood's request (the state's response to a clemency request is not provided to defense attorneys). But whatever else it does, it undercuts the traditional argument offered by prosecutors when they seek to justify the results of an unfair capital trial -- that the state is there to protect the rights and interests of the family members of the victim.
Nor can the state plausibly argue today that evidence of the abuse Williams suffered wouldn't have made a difference to the jury. Five jurors have come forward to say that the errors made by the defense very definitively would have made a difference. And no fewer than three jurors even said they would have voted for life imprisonment had they known it meant without the possibility of parole. Pennsylvania evidently is the last state which does not require trial judges to tell jurors the truth about the lack of parole for capital life sentences. Respecting the jury's work is another traditional argument against clemency. Here, it cuts the other way.
Another argument prosecutors ceaselessly pitch is the one about retributive justice -- that society has an interest in ensuring that criminals get what they deserve. But what, exactly, does Terrance Williams deserve after suffering for all those years before taking Hamilton and Norwood off the streets? This July, Gov. Corbett praised investigators in the Sandusky case "who have worked very hard to get the result -- that justice was served and a monster was taken off the street." With the stroke of a pen, Pennsylvania's governor can do what no one before has ever really done for Williams -- show him some tender mercy.
THE POLITICS OF THE MATTER
The Board of Pardons is a political institution, not a legal one. It is made up of the Attorney General Linda Kelly, who is the state's highest law enforcement officer, Lt. Governor Jim Cawley, who isn't likely to buck his boss, a "corrections expert," a "victim representative" and a psychologist. These folks, and perhaps Gov. Corbett, will have to confront this particular case at a particularly sensitive time in the state's history, a moment when two of the most cherished institutions around -- the Catholic Church and Penn State University -- are themselves struggling to cope with sexual abuse allegations, new and old.
The Williams' case comes across Gov. Corbett's desk right in the middle of Pennsylvania's torturous acknowledgment of the deeds of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State coach convicted of child rape in June. There is no escaping the links between the two stories. The outpouring of sympathy and grief for Sandusky's many victims, including public comments from Gov. Corbett and Attorney General Kelly, surely animates some of the support Williams recently has received. And it surely raises the question, pondered aloud by the governor, of how difficult it is for these poor victims to step forward from the darkness.
The Williams' clemency also comes just a few months after Monsignor William J. Lynn, of Pennsylvania, was found guilty of child endangerment for shielding predatory priests from the law. The Catholic Church, short on irony and long opposed to capital punishment, has been a vocal supporter of Terrance Williams' cause. So have law professors and the medical community. Whether all of this support will be enough is a question now in the hands of five Pennsylvanians who must speak for the rest of the state. What's the point of clemency itself if not for people like Terrance Williams? Maybe they'll answer that question, too.
Female Lesbian Teacher Arrested For Defiling 3 Year Old Pupil
Detectives attached to the State Criminal Investigation Department, Yaba, Lagos, are currently investigating a teacher, Patience Orunma, for allegedly defiling a three-year-old pupil at a private school in Berger, Ojodu in Lagos State
The victim’s mother spotted blood in the pupil’s private part on June 21 when bathing her.
On inquiry, the victim told her mother that the teacher used a pencil to prick her v*g*na in the school toilet.
The victim also reportedly said after she was defiled, the teacher used a white piece of cloth to clean the blood.
A detective at the SCID, who craved anonymity, said the victim’s parents immediately challenged the school authorities and later reported the matter to the Isheri Police Division when they were not satisfied with the school’s response.
He said, “The mother of the victim told us that her daughter returned from school and when she decided to bath her at about 8pm, her daughter began to cry when she was about washing her private part. The victim told her mother that her teacher inserted a pencil into her private part in their school’s toilet.
“The mother said she reported to the head teacher of the school the next day. The head teacher called the suspect and two other female teachers for her daughter to identify the person who used pencil on her private part and her daughter still pointed at the suspect.
“The mother reported the case at Isheri Police Division where she was given a letter to go to Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja. After medical examination, the doctor confirmed that the child had been defiled.”
The police source said he suspected that the alleged crime could be for spiritual purpose but added that investigations were ongoing.
the girl’s parents were not happy with how the police division handled the matter and alleged that the police were attempting to cover up the alleged crime.
When contacted, the spokesperson for the state police command, Ngozi Braide, confirmed the incident.
She said, “The incident actually occurred in May.
The mother was bathing the girl when she complained that she had pains in her private part. The mother took her daughter to the school where she identified the teacher. The mother met with the head teacher but was not satisfied with the outcome and then reported to the police.
“The police at Isheri then transferred the case to the SCID where investigations are ongoing. The teacher however denied the allegation.
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