The myth is that somehow this gigantic hole is going to be closed. [But] there’s never an end even if you do have a death penalty for the offender. How you move forward is not to have to be focused on the offender for the next two decades.
 –Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, co-founder, Illinois Victims.org, and sister of 1990 Winnetka murder victim Nancy Langert
Last Tuesday night, I searched my notes looking for some indication of what time Rodney Adkins’ sentencing hearing would begin the next morning. Finding nothing, I went online, using the Google web search engine (which, for those of you wondering, doesn’t contain records of the Maywood court schedule – but I was desperate).
My search yielded no useful information regarding the hearing time but did lead me to an Internet weblog – a “blog” – containing two entries from people claiming special relationships to the Adkins trial. One writer, who signed onto the blog under the name “brokenhearted,” claimed a close lifetime friendship with Cathy McAvinchey, the Oak Park resident murdered by Adkins in 2003. Writing on May 17 of this year – nearly four years after the crime occurred, and two months after Adkins’ March 2007 conviction for home invasion, residential burglary and murder – “brokenhearted” bemoaned Ms. McAvinchey’s untimely and gruesome death, and credited her late friend, godmother to the blogger’s two children, with having made the blogger “a better person because of her serene nature.”
“Better person” or not, “brokenhearted” went on to express her opinion of Adkins’ behavior, and life prospects, in not-so-serene language: “Rodney Adkins is an animal that doesn’t deserve to live out his life when he so brutally and intentionally took [McAvinchey’s]. If there is a perfect example of a situation that warrants capital punishment, this is it.”
Typical blog overstatement? Perhaps. But what followed – from a blogger named “Lady” – added eerie perspective: “I HOPE THAT MRS CATHERINE CAN REST IN PEACE, HOWEVER RODNEY WAS MY COUSIN AND HE UNDERSTAND [sic] THAT WHAT HE DID WAS TOTALLY WRONG HE’S NOT AN ANIMAL HE’S A PERSON AND HE IS A GOOD PERSON THAT MADE THE WRONG DISCISION [sic].”
Stripping aside the technical detail of applicable law, with its complicated balancing of factors for and against each available sentencing option (and not to minimize their importance – I am, after all, a lawyer), those two blog entries, to me, lay out the crux of a court’s decision in sentencing capital crimes in Illinois. How, exactly, does a diverse community, through its judicial process, decide between one life story and another – between the struggles and potential of one family and those of another – in the name of justice for all, and not just the lucky (let alone privileged) few?
Let’s remember that under current law, the alternatives available to Judge Thomas Tucker, in sentencing Adkins last Wednesday, were at least two: the death penalty, on the one hand, and life imprisonment without parole, on the other. For those of us who may believe even the second alternative is a punishment too good for a repeat house burglar, drug addict, and confessed murderer, I call, first, on French essayist Albert Camus, who answered those of his day who disdained the penalty of hard labor with the observation that “privation of freedom seems a slight punishment only insofar as contemporary society has taught us to despise freedom.”
Nor, realistically, can it be said that life imprisonment without parole is much improvement over the hard labor of Camus’ day. Now, as then, prison at its best means separation from the familiar – home, family, friends, work, school – and its replacement with a life that is regimented, colorless, and largely devoid of the satisfaction that comes from productivity, and which is spent among strangers, whether guards or other inmates, whose (sometimes uncomfortably close) proximity is simply no substitute for friendship or intimate family life. Compared to execution, of course, prison does offer the hope of rehabilitation, as well as a chance to experience, perhaps even express, remorse for one’s criminal acts. Still, “freedom” it’s not.
Then there’s the death penalty. Though currently suspended under an Illinois moratorium of indeterminate length, the penalty remains on Illinois’ books, and continues to be sought by Illinois prosecutors on, it seems, an almost daily basis. Judge Tucker’s decision on Wednesday to impose that penalty will send Adkins, for the time being, to prison, where he’ll join a dozen or so others awaiting either pardon (with or without commutation to a life sentence), a successful appeal on one or another issue raised by their respective arrests and/or trials, or the lifting of Illinois’ moratorium. If he’s average (and, again, assuming a relatively near-term lifting of the Illinois moratorium, not at all a certainty), according to figures on the Death Penalty Information Center website, he’ll spend 10 or more years in this holding pattern before his actual execution date.
As Adkins’ counsel, the talented Assistant Public Defender Preston Jones, Jr., pointed out in closing arguments on Wednesday, the healthy, 44-year-old Adkins may, indeed, spend the next 15 or even 20 years in state custody while exhausting his rights of appeal. At every such appeal, the McAvinchey family and friends will be, in some sense, re-victimized, forced to experience re-opening of the wounds which – as “brokenhearted”‘s blog entry so poignantly reveals – have not yet even begun to heal.
Meanwhile, the rest of us taxpayers will continue to pay the mounting costs of courtroom, judges, and appellate counsel on both sides (Adkins is indigent), spending resources which might be equally well spent solving or even preventing other crimes, or, perhaps, enhancing the bare-bones forms of direct assistance (including guidance through pre-trial and trial procedures) now provided by the State to victims of violent crime.
Am I suggesting some sort of “forgive and forget” scenario? Certainly not. In fact, after witnessing most of the Adkins trial – with its gruesome evidence and unforgettable taped confession – I could not myself imagine any sentence for Mr. Adkins short of life imprisonment without parole. I understand, and share, the need of all human beings to feel safe in our homes, as well as the deep frustration of today’s Americans – urban, suburban and rural; coastal and midland – who sense that violent domestic crime is on a long-term uptrend, often (as in Adkins’ case) drug- and/or alcohol-addiction-fueled, with preventive strategies lagging behind the inexorable curve, and the imposition of “police state” levels of control always a temptation.
Perhaps, too, it is only human that we sometimes call one another “animals” (or worse), or that we wish, momentarily at least, that our irreparable losses could be, at least, avenged with the ultimate penalty. But if we humans are nothing else, we are – all of us – “animals” who think, love and grieve. We are compassionate animals, who will not survive unless we learn to imagine, and consider, the feelings of others. We must learn, in other words, to imagine how cousins (or parents, children, or friends, for that matter) of even the most depraved drug addict are also victims of such a person’s unconscionable acts; to imagine how courtroom and prison personnel required to kill prisoners on behalf of those – us – on the “outside” are, themselves, systematically stripped of their own humanity (yet still expected to contribute to the rehabilitation of prisoners, even in cases where that seems impossible).
In short, to imagine, if we can, a better way.
For my part, I keep trying to imagine an Illinois in which murderers confess, not out of fear of the death penalty, but because (as Adkins intimated at the end of his taped confession, played in court last March) the opportunity to “come clean,” which lifts a burden from the wrongdoer and is the first step in rehabilitation; an Illinois in which bereaved families may routinely have the “closure” which comes from knowing what happened to their loved ones, but not pay the price of being exploited in the courtroom for the sake of obtaining a hollow “victory” for a State prosecutorial team.
To me, that scenario will only come about when the Illinois death penalty has been abolished.