State-Journal.com - Group urges end to death penalty in Kentucky

Photo By Kelly MackeyShujaa Graham, a former death row inmate, speaks about his experience and exoneration.

Photo By Kelly MackeyTerri Steinberg talks about her son, Justin Wolfe, Virginia's youngest death row resident.

Photo By Kelly MackeyBill Pelke talks about how he helped save his grandmother's killer from being executed.

Kentucky needs to join 15 other states that have abolished the death penalty, speakers who oppose it told an audience at Kentucky State University Tuesday.

They included the grandson of a woman brutally murdered by teenage girls, the mother of the youngest killer on Virginia’s death row, and a man who faced execution for three years after being framed in the murder of a prison guard.

They are part of the Journey of Hope, a national group touring Kentucky campuses speaking against the death penalty.

Today, there are 37 people (all but one are men) on Kentucky’s death row. In Kentucky, the death penalty is applied in murders with aggravating circumstances.

No circumstance justifies the death penalty, according to Journey speakers. They include Bill Pelke, whose grandmother was stabbed to death; Terri Steinberg, the mother of Justin Wolfe, the Virginia death row inmate; and Shujaa Graham, whose death sentence was overturned in 1979.

“It’s on our backs to change this,” said Kate Miller, with the American Civil Liberties Union, as she introduced the speakers in Hathaway Hall Auditorium. “Our tax dollars pay for these murders.”

The death penalty is unjust, unnecessary, expensive and ineffective, Miller said.

The ACLU of Kentucky and The Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty invited the advocates to speak and encouraged the more than 100 students in attendance to send postcards to their legislators.

Shujaa Graham

Graham is one of 138 innocent men who lived on death row. “Think about the innocent people who have been condemned to death,” said Graham, who spent three years there before he was cleared.

In and out of trouble in South Central Los Angeles, Graham spent much of his adolescent life in juvenile institutions, until he was sent to Soledad Prison at age 18.

In prison, Graham became a leader of the Black Prison movement as the Black Panther Party expanded. He fought against racism and guard brutality in the prison, he says.

He says that’s why, in 1973, he was framed in the murder of a prison guard at the Deul Vocational Institute, Stockton, Calif. The community became involved in his defense and supported him through four trials. Graham and his co-defendant, Eugene Allen, were sent to San Quentin’s death row in 1976 after a second trial in San Francisco.

“The most horrifying thing for me was when you would get a visit, the guards escorted you out, they would holler ‘Dead man walking!’ and the other prisoners would get up against the wall as you went by,” said Graham, his voice shaking and sweat forming on his brow.

In 1979, the California Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction. A third trial ended in a hung jury, and after a fourth, Graham and Allen were found not guilty.

“I am here today not because of the system but in spite of the system,” he said.

Terri Steinberg

A devoted mother who often visits her son on death row, Steinberg asked students to think about the collateral damage that goes with the death penalty.

She held up a photo of her other children and asked, “How do you explain the death penalty to a 4-year-old?”

Steinberg did that after her son, Wolfe, a 19-year-old marijuana dealer, was convicted in 2002 of hiring another dealer to kill a third one.

Steinberg maintains her son’s innocence and fights the death penalty.

“They’re going to kill my son,” she said fighting tears. “People can prove their innocence and become free. Maybe one day my son will be free, and he can tell this story instead of me.”

She is currently in the appeals process and dreads the outcome.

“If he does get executed, we’re the ones who will be left behind. How are we going to keep going? How are we going to trust in our justice system knowing what they’ve done to us?”

Bill Pelke

Pelke, the founder of Journey of Hope, arrived at his argument from the other side. He is a murder victim family member who is morally opposed to the death penalty and has dedicated his life to abolishing the practice.

“The death penalty has nothing to do with the healing,” he says. “It just continues the cycle of violence.”

He’s told his story more 5,000 times, but he still choked up Tuesday during the telling.

Four teenage girls skipped out early from their Indiana high school in 1985. After drinking wine and beer and smoking pot, they decided they needed money to go to a local arcade. One girl knew her neighbor, 78-year-old Ruth Pelke, would invite the other three girls in if they asked for a Bible lesson.

“She was a very religious woman, and her passion was telling Bible stories to young people,” her grandson said.

She invited them in.

One girl hit her over the head with a vase; another pulled a knife and stabbed her. Then another took a turn with the knife. The girls ransacked the house and came up with $10 and an old car.

Paula Cooper, 15 at the time, was the one who first pulled out the knife and was deemed the ringleader. When she was sentenced to the electric chair by the state of Indiana, Pelke supported the judge’s decision.

A year later, however, he asked God for compassion for Cooper and her family.

When he imagined his grandparents’ home, he saw his grandmother butchered to death on the dining room floor where they had celebrated Easter and Christmas and birthdays.

Forgiving Cooper changed that.

He became involved in an international crusade on Cooper’s behalf in 1989, and through those efforts, she was removed from death row and her sentence commuted to 60 years.

When she’s paroled, Pelke hopes she’ll spread her story through Journey of Hope.

“People think, ‘If I get revenge, I’ll feel better,’” he said. “The answer is love and compassion. You’re never going to want to see anyone put in the death chamber.”