Romney had said the bill had strict safeguards and would seek the death penalty only in "very, very rare circumstances," such as terrorism, serial killing or murdering police officers or other public servants.

But critics said innocent people could still have been put to death.

The House defeated the bill on a 99-to-53 vote. The Senate has not debated the bill.

Romney, who is weighing a Republican presidential run in 2008, said his plan would have set the nation's highest standard of proof for ensuring that only the guilty were executed, using scientific evidence such as DNA and multiple checks and balances, including review by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

But Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty, a Democrat, said scientific evidence presented at trial can sometimes be flawed or misinterpreted.

Some death penalty supporters who voted for the bill said Romney's legislation was too cautious and should also have included those found guilty of first-degree murder or the killing of children.

Supporters said the death penalty would not only deter people from committing murders, but is also fair justice. Without the death penalty, the life of the murderer is given greater value than the life of their victim, supporters said

But opponents said the death penalty is unfairly applied to the poor and racial minorities, is too expensive and runs counter to the worldwide trend. Increasing numbers of countries have abolished capital punishment.

Massachusetts has not executed anyone since 1947. It's one of a dozen states without capital punishment.

-- Mark A. Larrañaga, Law Offices of Walsh & Larrañaga

Time is short!  Please spread the word quickly!

Friday, December 9, 2005

By SAM SKOLNIK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

A federal appeals court overturned the death sentence Thursday of a man who had been expected to be the next person executed in Washington.

The three-judge panel concluded that the King County judge in the case of Cal Coburn Brown had unconstitutionally excluded a potential juror who had expressed some reservations about the death penalty.

In 1991, Brown carjacked 21-year-old Holly Washa and drove her to a hotel near Sea-Tac Airport. He held her hostage and raped and tortured her there for two days. He left her to bleed to death in a parking lot.

Brown, 47, turned himself in after he raped and tried to kill another woman in Palm Springs, Calif. He admitted to both crimes. In 1993, a King County jury convicted him and sentenced him to die.

But three judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously found that at least one of the bases for Brown's appeal, regarding the selection of the jury in his case, was valid.

Brown's defense lawyers argued that prosecutors had erroneously objected to three potential jurors being removed during jury selection because they were against the death penalty. In two of the cases, the appeals judges said, the jurors should have been excluded.

But in the case of a man identified as "Juror Z," the judges found that although he agreed that such mitigating factors as childhood trauma or mental illness could be taken into account when deciding a death case, he had "expressed no antipathy toward the death penalty" and had been removed from the panel unfairly.

King County Superior Court Judge Ricardo Martinez presided at his trial. He is now a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle.

Martinez imposed the jury's death sentence in what he called at the time "one of the most horrible, most brutal crimes" he had seen in his years as a prosecutor and judge.

On Thursday, state Assistant Attorney General John Samson expressed disappointment that the death sentence may not stand. Samson, who argued the case on appeal, said the appeals judges had applied incorrect legal standards when reviewing the claim.

Samson said the state likely will appeal the ruling to the full, nine-judge appeals court, and to the Supreme Court if necessary. If the state loses all its appeals, another King County jury would be chosen to sentence Brown a second time.

The appeals judges were "just reaffirming that the state can't use the jury selection process to stack the jury in favor of death," said Brown's attorney, Suzanne Lee Elliott of Seattle. She added that Juror Z seemed exactly like the type of fair-minded person citizens should want on a death penalty jury.

The appeals panel did not address one of Brown's other appeals claims: that his trial lawyers had not argued strenuously enough that he was mentally ill and off his medication at the time of Washa's murder.

For years, Rodney Bowser spewed raw hate for Glenn Benner II, the man who raped and killed his beloved little sister.

``I couldn't even hear his name without going grrrrrrr,'' Bowser said in an interview Thursday at his Tallmadge home. He clenched his fists to emphasize the hatred.

But all that has changed.

It happened after the two met at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville shortly before Benner was executed last week.

Rodney Bowser calls this ``the most bizarre ending'' he could imagine.

Bowser, a 48-year-old machinist, spent two decades cursing the former childhood friend who killed his 21-year-old sister, Trina, a wholesome and pretty secretary, in 1986.

He and his parents, Joyce and Willard Bowser, and his three older brothers spent years tracking the Benner case's torturous progress through the courts. They couldn't wait for Benner to die; they begged Gov. Bob Taft not to grant him any leniency.

Rodney Bowser was so overcome at Benner's clemency hearing in January that he couldn't make his remarks. Instead, he covered his face with his hands and wept.

Questions answered

But he didn't want Benner, 43, to go to his grave without answering questions about Trina's death, clearing up mysteries that baffled police and family alike.

Foremost was this: When Trina left a girlfriend's house in Stow at 10 p.m. on Jan. 1, 1986, to go home, what happened in the next two hours?

A little after midnight on that snowy night, passersby spotted Trina's car ablaze, parked on the berm of Interstate 76. Rodney and his parents opened the trunk to find Trina's naked body, her fake fur coat covering her torso and underpants covering her face.

That horrid picture would flash over and over in Rodney Bowser's mind.

In the final weeks before Benner's execution on Feb. 7, the Bowser family tried to set up a meeting with Trina's killer to fill in the lost two hours. Rodney, closest in age to Benner, was drafted for the job.

The first meeting at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown on Jan. 30 didn't happen.

Benner, then housed there, got angry over unrelated issues, an official told Bowser.

But on the night before his execution, right after he had said goodbye to 17 family members and friends, Benner made a phone call to Rodney Bowser. It was the first time the two had talked in 20 years.

The call lasted for about 20 minutes. They agreed to meet the next morning, minutes before Benner would die.

But Benner wasn't sure officials would permit that. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction had never allowed a member of a victim's family to meet with a prisoner in the death house, the spartan building at the Lucasville prison in which all executions take place.

So Benner called Rodney Bowser back for a second talk -- just in case. This one lasted 90 minutes.

They talked about their lives. They'd grown up two houses from each other -- Bowser in Tallmadge and Benner in Springfield Township. They'd played bows and arrows together.

Benner talked about how he hated prison. He implied that he had faced almost as much violence in prison as he had doled out on the outside. He said this was no way to live.

They talked about the awful details of Trina's death.

``Don't sugar-coat it,'' Bowser said he told Benner. ``Give it to me straight.''

Bowser won't repeat those details, except to say that Benner and Trina met accidentally at a Lawson's store. Benner was buying cigarettes; Trina pulled in the parking lot and approached him, not knowing he had raped and killed Cynthia Sedgwick, 26, of Cleveland Heights the previous August. Trina knew him from the neighborhood. She was just being friendly.

Meeting face-to-face

About an hour after Benner and Rodney Bowser had their second phone conversation, Rodney was in the car, headed as planned to the Lucasville prison in southern Ohio.

His confidence buckled when he walked into the death house early in the morning on Feb. 7 for his person-to-person talk with Benner, who was scheduled to die at 10 a.m.

``I almost backed out,'' he recalled. ``I was shaking like a leaf.''

Major David Warren, the prison's head of security, was dubious. Before he let the two meet, he sat Bowser down. Stay calm, he warned him. Keep Benner calm.

Prison officials didn't want to have to drag an upset Benner to his execution, Andrea Dean, spokeswoman for the Ohio prison system explained this week.

So Benner and Bowser talked in low voices through the jail bars. They went back over the same topics covered in the phone calls. About 10 members of Benner's execution team stood just out of earshot.

Bowser said Benner didn't know why he killed. He didn't blame marijuana and alcohol, his companions since age 12.

`` `All my friends did those, and they didn't end up killing anybody,' '' Bowser quoted Benner as saying.

They called each other by their childhood nicknames -- ``Bimbo'' for Benner and ``Rodney Man'' for Bowser.

Bowser clocked their talk, which began at 8 a.m., at 17 minutes -- two minutes over the limit. They were calm. There were tears. They shook hands.

After that, Bowser was so overcome with emotion he gave up his execution witness seat to one of his brothers. He didn't want to see it happen. More surprising, he didn't want it to happen at all.

``I didn't want to deal with it,'' Bowser said, ``and I didn't want to take away from what the rest of the family wanted.''

At 8:55 a.m., he called Benner back. He was told that Benner was being readied for his execution and couldn't talk. But his spiritual advisor passed on Bowser's message -- that Bowser forgave him.

About an hour later, just before he died, Benner publicly apologized to the Bowser and Sedgwick families. He called Trina and Cynthia ``beautiful girls who didn't deserve what I done to them.''

A changed man

As Rodney Bowser sees it, by the time of his death Benner was a changed man. He had become religious. He wanted the Bowser family -- and especially Rodney -- to learn what they wanted to know. Though Benner didn't attend his own clemency hearing, he did see news reports and read the transcript of the remarks that Bowser was too overcome to deliver. Bowser knows that because Benner talked about those remarks.

Since Benner's death, Bowser has compared the known facts about Trina's death with what Benner told him. Bowser has concluded that Benner told the truth.

Rodney Bowser also has shared Benner's story with his parents -- as much as they wanted to hear, that is.

A weight has been lifted. Rodney Bowser doesn't have nightmares any more.

He doesn't believe in the death penalty anymore, either. A life sentence for Benner would have been just fine, he says now. People can change, he now believes.

After all, his sister's killer did.