Posted on 06/19/2002 9:41:13 AM PDT by madprof98
An AJC editorial last week asserted that the courts of Georgia were dangerously remiss in upholding the death sentence of Wallace Fugate, who killed his ex-wife in 1991. "[T]here is ample evidence to suggest that Fugate shot his wife accidentally," the editorial said.
There is not. The murder committed by Wallace Fugate was particularly terror-drenched and brutal. Armed with a gun, Fugate broke into his ex-wife's home through a window and lay in wait for eight hours. When she entered the house, he attacked her. When she attempted to call the police, he pistol-whipped her, fired his gun to subdue her and continued beating her as he dragged her toward his van. There, he shot her in the head.
What part of this was accidental? Fugate maintains that the gun fired into his wife's head accidentally, possibly due to a manufacturing defect. He has filed several appeals on the grounds that his court-appointed attorneys failed to raise the subject of this alleged defect with the jurors at his trial.
Each of these appeals was rejected by the courts, yet on the grounds of this flimsy claim, Fugate has attracted the attention of anti-death-penalty activists searching for a story with media "legs." And the media, in this case, has complied all too well, publishing articles and editorials that trumpet Fugate's claims of insufficient legal representation without providing the public with any of the facts that the courts used to reject this complaint over and over again, let alone the facts that resulted in Fugate's conviction in the first place.
Forget the broken basement window, the gun barrel crashing down on Pattie Fugate's neck. Forget the 50 blows she received while being dragged from her living room to her ex-husband's van. Forget the finger that pulled the trigger enough, defect or no defect, to end her life.
The AJC's editors saw fit to report that Wallace Fugate had no prior criminal convictions, but they didn't mention the restraining order taken out against him because he threatened to kill Pattie Fugate "if he ever caught her alone." They described his involvement in community organizations but didn't tell how he disabled his son's rifle so the boy couldn't defend his mother. They described his fine carpentry skills but left out the part about him hammering his ex-wife's skull with a gun as she tried to dial 911. They made much of the existence of a discrepancy in his son's eyewitness testimony but avoided detailed description of the discrepancy itself -- whether the boy saw his father's hand grasping his mother's head an instant before or after the bullet tore through her skull.
Wallace Fugate is no victim, but he is being depicted as one. I imagine this is because the editors want to articulate their sincere opposition to the death penalty, but there is no excuse for presenting to the public a version of the facts and legal issues surrounding Pattie Fugate's murder that cannot be called accurate. Unfortunately, the legal endgame arising from the death penalty appeals process often leads to this type of skewing of the facts -- about the victim's suffering and the criminal's responsibility and malice.
By all means, Wallace Fugate's sentence should be commuted to life in prison; the state should not put prisoners to death. But death penalty opponents, including those on the AJC's editorial board, might actually find more public support for their position if they refrained from denying the criminal's culpability or the horror of the crime.
Tina Trent of St. Simons writes about the criminal justice system.
I personally oppose the death penalty, and I work with death-row prisoners myself. I know what a joke it is for these guys when the media portrays them as hapless victims of an oppressive system. Like Trent, I think it's wrong for the government to put even the most vicious killers to death, but I think it is just as wrong to deny their moral responsibility for the horrendous crimes they committed.
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