Posted on 02/14/2007 10:19:32 AM PST by jsmith1942
Catholic wrongly convicted devotes life to ending death penalty
By George P. Matysek Jr. gmatysek@catholicreview.org
CAMBRIDGE – If anyone has experienced sheer terror, it’s Kirk Bloodsworth.
Tried and found guilty of the brutal rape and murder of a 9-year-old Rosedale girl, the barrel-chested crabber from the Eastern Shore was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for his horrific crimes.
But Mr. Bloodsworth didn’t have anything to do with what he was accused of. A former marine with no criminal record, he had been wrongly convicted and would later become the first American on death row to be exonerated by DNA testing.
But as he was led onto the grounds of the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore in 1985 on his first day on death row, no one believed his story – least of all the other prisoners.
Handcuffed and shackled as he slowly made his way across the yard of the penitentiary, Mr. Bloodsworth noticed other prisoners racing to the fences to glimpse the monster they had heard so much about.
This was the man a Baltimore County jury convicted of beating Dawn Hamilton with a rock, sexually mutilating her, raping her and strangling her to death by stepping on her neck.
As the new prisoner shuffled onto the old prison campus, he was dwarfed by the gothic structure’s tall granite walls, silver spires and imposing turrets that loomed ominously over Forrest Street like a medieval castle.
Jeering at him, the inmates shouted repeated threats of violence.
“We’re going to do to you what you did to that little girl,” they screamed. “We’re going to get you, Kirk!”
Seated on the couch in the living room of his small home in Cambridge more than 20 years later, pain was still visible on Mr. Bloodsworth’s face as he recalled those long-ago events that forever changed his life. With his brow deeply furrowed, the plainspoken 46-year-old man said he believed hell is a place of torment and that his experiences must be similar to those in that place of misery.
“I remember that first night in my cell and the smell coming from this place,” he said, recounting how roaches frequently scurried along the walls of his small living quarters.
“Not only did it stink of every kind of excrement you could think of,” he said, “but you also could smell hatred – and it was all pointing at me.”
The threats that greeted him when he first entered the state penitentiary continued through the night and beyond, with inmates shouting through the air vents how they planned to torture him.
Despite the strong temptation to despair, Mr. Bloodsworth said he decided he would fight to prove his innocence. He believes God sustained him through nearly nine years of taxing prison life, sending him otherworldly consolations and leading him into the Catholic Church.
With the same steely determination that got him through his prison ordeal, Mr. Bloodsworth is now devoting the rest of his life to abolishing the death penalty and seeking reforms of what he calls a “broken” criminal justice system.
It’s a battle he is convinced he has been called to win.
A journey of faith
On the day he was found guilty, Mr. Bloodsworth said he remembers being housed in a Baltimore County holding cell with another man who sat in the shadows. For two hours, the stranger didn’t say a word as he ate a sandwich and sipped an orange drink. Then he turned to his fellow prisoner and told Mr. Bloodsworth not to worry. The Eastern Shore native couldn’t tell if the man was black or white because there wasn’t much lighting, which he said was “odd.”
“Everything is going to be alright,” Mr. Bloodsworth recalled the man saying. “You’ll be OK.”
After Mr. Bloodsworth heard the guilty verdict and returned to the holding cell, the man was gone and only half the sandwich remained. When he asked the sheriff’s deputy where the “other guy” was, the deputy responded that Mr. Bloodsworth had been the only person in the cell.
Looking back, Mr. Bloodsworth thinks he was visited by an angel.
“Maybe I wanted to see something – I don’t know,” said Mr. Bloodsworth, pausing to light up a cigarette – the white smoke of which swirled in soft vaporous pirouettes near his now-graying hair.
“But I tell you what, he was as real as you are,” he said emphatically.
The encounter with the “angel” wasn’t Mr. Bloodsworth’s only dealing in the spiritual realm. Another time, he remembers being touched on the shoulder with two fingers while he was alone in his cell. He thinks it was a sign from God that he wasn’t really alone.
Growing up in the Baptist and Methodist traditions, Mr. Bloodsworth had attended a small Christian high school and had counted himself a believer. His mother was a deeply devoted Christian who encouraged him to read the Bible – an assignment he took up in earnest in prison, reading through the Scriptures twice.
As a young man, Mr. Bloodsworth had worked for a funeral home where his only exposure to Catholics came during funeral liturgies. That’s where he first learned to genuflect and was impressed by the reverence Catholics showed in the practice of their faith.
While in custody with Baltimore County before going to death row, parishioners from the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Towson visited him and other prisoners during regular chapel services.
Encouraged by their visits, it was at the Maryland State Penitentiary where Mr. Bloodsworth began deep theological discussions with Deacon Al Rose, the Catholic prison chaplain there. The two would talk for two or three hours at a time. The more he learned, the more he wanted to convert.
At Easter time in 1989, Bishop John Ricard, Baltimore’s former urban vicar, visited Mr. Bloodsworth at Deacon Rose’s invitation. Mr. Bloodsworth had been studying his catechism for several months and was ready to be received into the church.
Deacon Rose remembered that a guard asked the bishop to leave Mr. Bloodsworth’s cell, requiring the urban vicar to administer the sacraments of confirmation and holy Eucharist through the bars of his closed cell door. Standing underneath the gas chamber where Mr. Bloodsworth’s life was to be ended, Bishop Ricard completed the solemn rites that initiated him into a new kind of life – a spiritual one Mr. Bloodsworth cherished.
Asked what it was like to receive Communion for the first time, Mr. Bloodsworth softened his serious countenance and smiled.
“Oh, it was an honor,” he said. “I felt clean. I felt accepted.”
The bond between Deacon Rose and Mr. Bloodsworth was one that strengthened over the years. The Catholic chaplain at the penitentiary for more than three years, Deacon Rose had heard plenty of inmates tell him they were innocent. But Mr. Bloodsworth was one of the few he believed.
“You work enough years among inmates and you get a feel for how guys tell stories,” said Deacon Rose, now retired and ministering at St. Isaac Jogues in Carney. “There was no question in my mind this was a guy speaking the truth.”
One of Mr. Bloodsworth’s darkest days was when his beloved mother, Jeanette Bloodsworth, died five months before the DNA evidence proved his innocence in 1993. Deacon Rose was the one to break the news of the death of Mrs. Bloodsworth to her son. The deacon accompanied him to a private viewing of her body with two armed guards.
“I told Kirk that your mom is up there in heaven,” remembered Deacon Rose, 76. “The saints do intercede for us and I just believe that lady had something to do with him getting the break with the DNA evidence.”
Fighting for justice
Mr. Bloodsworth believes one of the main reasons he was arrested was the tremendous pressure Baltimore County police were under to find the person who had committed those heinous acts in the summer of 1984. Two young boys identified him as the person they saw near the crime scene and an anonymous caller said he had been seen with the girl earlier in the day.
Mr. Bloodsworth, who never met the murdered girl, had told an acquaintance he had done something “terrible” that day. He was referring to his failure to buy his wife dinner, but it was used against him in a different context.
Although he lived in the area of the crime, Mr. Bloodsworth had returned to the Eastern Shore soon after the murder – making it look like he had fled. Misfortune seemed to conspire against him at every turn.
The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in 1986 because of withheld information at his original trial, but he was again found guilty by a second jury and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Of the nearly nine years he spent behind bars, two of them were on death row.
Mr. Bloodsworth was the one who had first proposed the idea of DNA testing. An avid reader in prison who served as the librarian, he learned about the new technology in a book called “The Blooding.” Robert Morin, his attorney, was able to get his client tested.
It was exactly that post-conviction testing that proved Mr. Bloodsworth’s innocence in 1993. He was released and paid $300,000 in compensation – the accumulated salary the state said he would have earned as a waterman. Gov. William Donald Schaefer pardoned him that same year.
Mr. Bloodsworth said he had to endure the suspicions of many who believed he had gotten off on a technicality. It was difficult for him to maintain a job after his release because people thought he was a murderer. DNA testing later identified the real killer – Kimberly Shay Ruffner, a man who had been previously charged with sexually assaulting children. He pled guilty to the Dawn Hamilton murder and is now serving a life sentence.
Ironically, Ruffner had been serving time for another crime in the same prison as Mr. Bloodsworth. The two had lifted weights together.
“I tell you the difference between the day before they found who really did it and day after was like I had just won the World Series for the town of Cambridge,” said Mr. Bloodsworth, who annually throws a “freedom party” complete with steamed crabs and beer. “Everyone treated me completely different.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Bloodsworth, now remarried, has become an outspoken advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, most recently speaking in Annapolis in support of a bill that would replace the death penalty with prison sentences of life without parole.
Working for The Justice Project, a Washington-based organization that pushes for criminal justice reform, Mr. Bloodsworth lobbied for the passage of a bill that provides funding for post-conviction DNA testing. President George W. Bush signed the Innocence Protection Act of 2003 on Oct. 30, a day before Mr. Bloodsworth’s birthday. The act established the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program.
“We need to do post-conviction testing to find out if there are other innocent people on death row before we start throwing switches,” said Mr. Bloodsworth, pointing out that since 1973, more than 150 people have been wrongfully convicted and later freed from prison based on DNA evidence.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” he said.
Bishop Ricard, the man who welcomed Mr. Bloodsworth into the church, said his story shows the urgency of abolishing the death penalty.
“It’s a barbarian, grotesque way of meting out justice,” said Bishop Ricard, now bishop of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla.
“It’s so clear that the administration of capital punishment in this country is dismally unjust,” he said. “It really singles out the poor and minorities. If you have the money for proper legal counsel, you don’t receive the death penalty.”
Bishop Ricard commended Mr. Bloodsworth for his contributions to the abolitionist cause.
“I hope the very best for him,” he said.
Forgiveness and fate
Mr. Bloodsworth acknowledged that he might have good reason to be angry for all he’s been through. But he doesn’t hate the prosecutors who pursued him, the police officers who arrested him, members of the community who distrusted and harassed him, or the real killer who kept quiet all those years.
“I forgive them all,” Mr. Bloodsworth said. “God has to sort that out now. I leave that all up to him.”
The former discus-throwing champion admitted to some actions in prison that don’t square with his faith. Early during his sentence, he fended off an attack by three prisoners in the shower. In order to prevent future attacks, he later physically assaulted each of them.
“I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but it was the right thing to do for me,” he said. “I’m not proud of it at all, but it probably saved my life in the end.”
Returning to the importance of faith, Mr. Bloodsworth said his belief in God made him a survivor.
“We all go through these trials in life,” he said. “You just have to kind of accept what happens to you with some sort of grace.”
God never asks his people to have faith the size of a mountain, Mr. Bloodsworth said, he just asks to have faith the size of mustard seed to “move that mountain.”
“That’s what makes people achieve greatness,” he said. “It’s not necessarily themselves, it’s the electricity that drives them – it’s that lump of coal that’s burning bright in their own soul that gets them through it and for me that’s God, the Catholic Church and my mother and what she taught me.”
Does he see any divine plan in the course of his life?
“I don’t want to sound like I’m grandiose on my part, but it’s certainly something,” Mr. Bloodsworth responded. “In the bigger sense of it all, I think that maybe that was all meant to be. There is a bigger picture.”
Even if you could argue justified killing by the state, the fact that a poor person is much more likely to be "worthy" of execution is indefensible.
I find it incredibly ironic that conservatives who want the government out of our lives also think they should have the ultimate power of life and death upon the people.
Unless, of course, "poor" people (by whatever definition of "poor" is being used at the moment) are much more likely to commit first degree murder.
Even if what we have currently are half and three quarter measures to sentence people to death, then there should be at least half and three quarter measures to punish those who bear false witness. Such as Nifong should at this point be tried and convicted with a heavy sentence 25 years to life for his conspiracy.
If wealthy folks can afford to escape penalty through conspiracy and collaboration, then those same wealthy folk should be held accountable for that. If a DA or Sheriff conspires against a fall guy for other reasons then that Sheriff and DA should be held fully accountable. Make them indistiguishable from Journalists held accountable for their sources.
I realized I was preachin to the choir- I wasn't really responding to what you said so much as I was basically agreeing and making a statement for this thread.
I'm referring to a comparison of first-degree murder representation, wherein the wealthy can hire the slickest, most experienced lawyer on the planet and avoid the death penalty while some dish-washer gets stuck with a somnabulist, state-provided defense attorney. Who do you think is going to the chair? Phil Spector or Joe Blow? You know, third class compartment on the Titanic, and all that...
I agree. People who conspire to frame the innocent or doctor evidence to point to an innocent person should face the same potential sentence as the crime they framed their victim for. If Nifong was facing 25 to life, I think he would have handled the evidence exonerating the Duke players with greater...um...respect for the law.
A hypothetical statistical analysis that doesn'tr capture reality.
The definition of "poor" can be engineered to produce whatever result you like.
A drugdealer who makes $500,000 a year in unreported tax-free income magically becomes "poor" when he is up on first-degree murder charges. Why? Because from a legally-reported income perspective he is an unemployed school dropout whose last legal address was in an impoverished neighborhood.
A truck driver who makes $35,000 a year in pre-tax income becomes "middle class" when he is up on first-degree murder charges.
Why? Because he is gainfully employed, pays taxes and lives in a respectable neighborhood.
The designation is almost completely arbitrary unless we are talking about the microscopic percentage of accused first-degree murderers who actually are independently wealthy.
In that case we are talking about 1 out of 100,000 and not 20 out of 100.
One could then argue that there should be no life-without parole sentences, or even custodial sentences at all, because the hyperwealthy will generally be able to avoid the harsher end of sentencing for any crime.
If you don't meet Jesus on death row, you will never meet him.
I think innocent men have been executed. I am also a strong supporter of the death penalty. It is a foregone conclusion that nothing created by man is perfect, but we don't let that hamstring us. We don't refuse to build skyscrapers becuase an innocent person may be killed during construction and we don't abolish cars.
Accidents happen. That is life.
“We’re going to get you, Kirk!”
I remember that line in a Star Trek episode...
Here are some interesting remarks about that point from a poster on Jimmy Akins blog. I've often thought the same, but the poster, Deacon John Bresnahan, expressed the point very well:
Rarely do I ever hear mentioned that to keep some of the most vicious murderers in jail costs innocent lives. How many guards a year are murdered by escaping murderers who should have been executed? We had one recently here in anti-death penalty Ma. How many people in prison for crimes far lower than murder are murdered by murderers who should have been executed. We've had a series of them in Ma. including one this week. A few years ago in another state a young man in jail for a very short period (for drunkeness) was murdered by a murderer. Are anti-death penalty people willing to endorse creating jails where the imprisoned murderers are always chained, never have human contact or receive privileges of any kind the rest of their lives?? If such a jail were even proposed I can hear the howls and screams from the same people whose hearts bleed for murderers on the dp issue. Yet to keep those who are the most vicious class of murderers alive costs the lives of innocent people--by the hundreds over the years.This is a whole separate issue from whether the dp is a crime preventative in the wider society.Consequently it seems those states which have separate categories such as dp for those who are serial murderers or especially violent murderers and those who kill prison guards or inmates after already dodging the dp for an earlier killing--are handling the issue in the best and fairest manner and within traditional Christian ethics which especially values innocent human life but also is willing to accept the dp in definitely needed situations.
It is often stated as a fact beyond debate that modern technology can secure the safety of society at large as well as prisoners within the walls. I'd like to see some evidence of this. I've also never heard a convincing argument that the death penalty doesn't deter criminals.
Having said that, I think the death penalty is probably overused in our society and in the current politicized climate can be abused by unscrupulous prosecutors. If it's possible to secure the safety of society and the population inside the prison walls, then less drastic punishments should be used. I'm just not sure such a thing has been proven and am somewhat sceptical about the prospects. Just my opinion.
If General Motors started manufacturing vehicles that every once in a while exploded for no good reason, the public would demand it to be removed from production and either fixed or scrapped altogether. Whereas there will always be instances of innocent people going to jail, when it's a matter of life and death, I don't think we can support a system which so obviously favors the O.J. Simpsons of the world over you or me.
Since we can't realistically devise a system that provides equal representation to every single criminal, I feel that we should err on the side of the handful of innocents that are going to have their lives cut short in the name of "justice". Even if it means a thousand other bona fide murderers will spend the rest of their lives in jail cell instead of on a gurney, I think the lives of a few innocent people are worth it.
The very DNA testing that this guy helped bring to the forefront DRASTICALLY reduced the possibility of innocent men being convicted of crimes of the type that end up with the death penalty.
He is trying to implement a solution to a problem that was already drastically reduced in risk factor, by many magnitudes.
I like that idea: it is what is always cited when we discuss absolutely frivolous lawsuits which nonetheless wind up bankrupting innocent parties that are sued."It's what they do in Britain", they always say. Sometimes this is done by representatives of "Government", like Nifong, sometimes not. But it is ALWAYS perpetrated by LAWYERS/ Either way , the lawyers and/or the prosecutors should be held liable for the same punishments they are promoting for the accused parties. But sometimes they are VERY careful about pushing it to the very edges of legality in their transparently self-serving prosecution....my guess is that Nifong will retire soon, and for the sake of nicey-nice the lawyers for the LaCrosse players will just accept a dropping of charges./
It's not about power over life and death. The death penalty is as old as man. There are some crimes that cannot be atoned for. Therefore the state is dutybound to be the avenger.
If someone killed my wife, or raped and killed my daughter, or slaughtered my sons, am I a bad person for wanting the murderer executed?
A murderer has already committed execution on an innocent person. The have killed that person, wrecked families forever, ruined lives, and prevented that person from having a legacy. They deserve death.
Murder is when someone plays God who shouldn't be playing God. When the state executes someone, they are doing that with authority not only from God, but from man.
That's why I said it must be absolute that the guilty has committed the crime. If so, justice is required.
I wouldn't want to be a victim of that sort of "accident".
How many people in prison for crimes far lower than murder have killed prison guards?
With all due respect to Deacon Bresnahan, murderers aren't the only ones who kill prison guards. If he's going to use that argument, then he's also arguing for the execution of thieves, rapists, drug-dealers, and pretty much anyone in a maximum security prison.
I've also never heard a convincing argument that the death penalty doesn't deter criminals.
States such as California (which implements the death penalty) are seeing a horrendous uptick in violent crime between gangs (and sometimes involving innocent bystanders) in the L.A. area. Unless someone runs a Gallup poll of armed robbers and rapists, I don't know how one measures deterrance except by crime statistics, which are going in the opposite direction, if that's the case.
>>I wouldn't want to be a victim of that sort of "accident".<<
Me neither.
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