Now comes before the court the case for doing away with the Death Penalty, as brought forth by James R. Acker, a teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany (Georgia). Acker says no case better supports the need to do away with the death penalty than that of Troy Davis, scheduled to be put to death this week by the state of Georgia for the murder of off-duty police officer Mark McPhail.
Davis was tried and convicted some 20 years ago, but now, seven of the nine witnesses have recanted or changed their testimony, and therefore Davis’ guilty verdict deserves another look. No one wants to execute someone under the death penalty law if they are not guilty, but looking at this one case certainly, at least in my opinion, doesn’t mean there aren’t those who deserve capital punishment.
We don’t need to look very far for examples of those kinds of people. In recent memory, we have the case of the Harvey family who were brutally murdered at the hands of Ricky Gray and Ray Joseph Dandridge.
The two had put together a murder spree that spread from Pennsylvania to Richmond, Va. Certainly, it would be hard not to justify capital murder in the case. How does that stack up against the Davis case?
Then there’s an even more egregious capital murder trial that occurred right in Chester. It involved a 10-year-old child who was abducted, raped, and murdered by Everett Lee Mueller. Surely there is no bigger a boogey man than the likes of Mueller.
It so happens that I was in the courtroom the day he took the stand on his own behalf. Foolhardy though it was, Mueller decided he could take on the likes of Chesterfield’s chief prosecutor at the time, Warren von Schuch. It took little time for von Schuch to show the court what Mr. Mueller was really like. As I recall von Schuch telling the media after the trial, it was just a matter of following Mueller’s psychology profile and pressing the right buttons.
In no time, von Schuch had Mueller screaming at him in the court room. The really sad thing about that case is that it needn’t have happened. If Mueller would have been kept in prison for his crimes, which absolutely no one denies were heinous in the extreme, Charity would be alive today and Mueller would also be alive, albeit locked up.
The problem then?
Virginia had a mandatory release program. That left Mueller, a two-time convicted rapist, outside prison. He actually had a third rape conviction, but that one happened in California, where he was sentenced to a psychiatric ward. As a result of that, that rape conviction was legally overlooked when it could have resulted in his being convicted under Virginia’s three-time loser law, which would have amounted to life in prison. Real life in prison, not some shortened sentence for good behavior or anything like that.
Instead, 12-years later, we have Mueller out of prison and making his rounds one late Friday night at the Hardee’s near the Chester Skateland. He admitted talking to Charity, and later confessed to the rape and murder charge. Her body was found buried in a shallow grave a few hundred feet behind the house he was living in at the time.
There are those who say that capital punishment doesn’t work as a deterrent, and in some respects that is true. But in the cases of Gray and Dandridge and Mueller, it works better than a deterrent. It takes some of the worst criminals in the state out of the game forever. No one will have to worry about someone kicking in their door and beating their family to death, or abducting their 10-year-old child and raping and murdering her.
Yes, perhaps the death penalty won’t keep the next person from murdering someone. But it certainly stops the ones who already have murdered people from murdering anyone else.
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