In the interest of the innocent, the guilty should be punished appropriately.
http://www.fox19.com/Global/story.asp?S=1255086&nav=0zHFFY2h
James prichard, 23, admitted murdering his girlfriend, Carrie Smalling, last april. Smalling is the mother of their child.
A judge sentenced Prichard from Northern Kentucky Monday. He was sentenced to 35 years. The sentence prichard 's lawyer requested in exchange for a guilty plea.
"You're a coward to take somebody's life," Prichard didn't look...but he listened as the sisters of smalling spoke about the painful loss of their sister. "You J.C. you killed her execution style, you pressed the gun between her eyes as she pleaded for her life."
Smalling was was his live-in girlfriend, and the mother of his daughter.
Smalling's body was found by two kids on a gravel road near the couple's Silver Grove trailer home on April 27th 2002.
Smalling had a bullet wound in her head and another in her stomach. Police say Smalling and Prichard were together at a friends house the night before.
"I can't believe you actually killed my sister. You just took her, you took her away from us and it's not fair....." said one of Smalling's sisters in court Monday.
After the murder prichard went to his mother, told her what happened, and then disappeared. He drove north for about 600 miles. He got as far as Michigan when he decided to turn himself in.
Prichard will spend at least the next 20 years of his life behind bars.
"Your mother still gets to tell you she loves you....my mom and dad don't get to do that."
Is 20 years in jail "justice"?
http://www.nbc4columbus.com/news/2165364/detail.html
Confessed Ohio Killer Executed In Lucasville...
Ohio executed David Brewer Tuesday morning by for killing a 21-year-old woman in southwest Ohio...
Joe Byrne, the victim's husband, witnessed Brewer's execution. He said softly: "Where's your remorse? ...
Brewer, who lived in Centerville, near Dayton, and managed a rental appliance store, was a former fraternity brother of Byrne's husband, Joe Byrne. He later told police he was attracted to his friend's wife.
Brewer lured Sherry Byrne from her home to a suburban Cincinnati motel in 1985, on the pretense she would be meeting him and his wife.
Authorities said Brewer sexually assaulted and beat Byrne in a motel room before abducting her and driving around with her in the trunk of his car for several hours. Police said passing motorists at one point reported seeing a piece of paper with "help me please" written in lipstick shoved through the crack in the trunk of a car.
Brewer killed Byrne after she tried to escape in Beavercreek, a Dayton suburb. He later told police where to find her body. Police said she had been beaten, choked with a necktie and stabbed 15 times.
Both of these men confessed to their crimes. There is no doubt about their guilt.
Sherry Byrne. Raped, terrorized, murdered. She was a real person, completely innocent, who underwent a horrific experience through no fault of her own. She had a husband and a family, people who loved her. What about justice for her and her family?
In March 1985, Sherry and Joe Byrne were planning their future. Sherry, 21, and Joe, 25, had married a few months earlier. She was working as a part-time cosmetics saleswoman, and Joe had a job with a prominent financial company.
They bought a house in Springdale. They were trying to have a baby.
Then in a brutal and gruesome act, Joe's friend and fraternity brother, David Brewer, lured Sherry from her home on a ruse, then abducted, raped and killed her...
There's never been any question that Brewer killed Sherry on March 21, 1985. But his attorneys say death is not the right punishment for a 43-year-old man who led an upstanding life before and after the crime...
Sherry's family says death is exactly the right punishment.
David Brewer didn't just take Sherry's life when he strangled her with a necktie, stabbed her 15 times and slit her throat. He ruined the lives of everyone close to her.
Her mother, Myrtle Kaylor, had to be hospitalized. Grief overwhelming all other emotions, she and Sherry's stepfather, Lylburn Kaylor, soon divorced. Joe, too, said he was in and out of psychiatric care after his wife's death...
On the day he was sentenced for Sherry's murder, Greene County Prosecutor William Schenck told Sherry's family the appeals would take more than 15 years. Countless appeals in state and federal court have led to Tuesday.
Schenck has presided over four death penalty cases - Brewer would be the first defendant to die. Byrne asked him to witness the execution with him, and Schenck agreed.
He debunks the argument that Brewer should be spared because he is good person.
"Some crimes are so horrid nothing else matters," Schenck says. "What he did more than justifies the death penalty. He had more than a dozen opportunities to let her go and he chose the dark side."
A husband's grief
It's never been easy, but the first year was the hardest, Joe Byrne says. Twice that year he checked into the psychiatric unit of The Christ Hospital.
"I wanted to die," Byrne says.
He never went back to the home he shared with Sherry. Instead, he moved into his parents' Middletown home. He couldn't even go back to his job. When his boss pleaded with him to return, Byrne tried, but burst into tears on his way downtown. He turned around and went home...
Now the most difficult times are anniversary dates. The day Joe and Sherry got married, her birthday. The day she died.
In 1990 during a trip home to visit his parents, Byrne went to the deserted farm lane where his wife drew her last breath. "I just sat there are cried," he says.
Byrne has stayed close with the Kaylors over the years. That's helped, Myrtle Kaylor says.
"There's a void in my life as if it's never really complete," says Kaylor, who lives in Dayton...
Myrtle Kaylor displays family photos of her daughter Sherry, brutally murdered at age 21.
