Lexington Herald-Leader | 11/05/2002 | Age focus of death penalty debateClick
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Back to Home > Lexington Herald-Leader > Tuesday, Nov 05, 2002
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Posted on Tue, Nov. 05, 2002
Age focus of death penalty debate
MAN'S LIFE MARKED BY HORRIBLE ABUSE
By Jack Brammer
HERALD-LEADER FRANKFORT BUREAU
FRANKFORT - At age 5, a baby sitter forced him to have sex with a
young female cousin. His mother's biker friends introduced him to
liquor at age 7. By age 12, he was a drug addict. By 16, he was
living on the streets, helping adults commit armed robberies in
exchange for drugs.
Kevin Stanford was 17 when he sodomized, kidnapped and shot to death
Baerbel Poore, a 20-year-old Louisville gas station attendant who
had a 10-month-old daughter. He has been on Death Row for 20 years
for that crime.
Primarily because of his age when he killed and his tough childhood,
some people think that Stanford should not be executed. But others
say the 1981 crime was so horrible that the death penalty is
justified.
Now, it will be up to Gov. Paul Patton to decide whether Stanford,
39, should live or die. Last month the U.S. Supreme Court declined
to hear his case, exhausting his legal appeals.
"Kevin Stanford has grown up on Death Row," his attorney, Margaret
O'Donnell, said in a lengthy plea she submitted to Patton in
September to urge him to commute the death sentence.
"He arrived in 1982 a scared and angry young man, immature and
filled with rage and bravado. ... He is no longer the boy he was
when he came to Death Row 20 years ago," she said.
At issue from a legal standpoint is whether a juvenile who commits a
crime should be executed.
The issue has been brought up in recent legislative sessions, but
lawmakers have sidestepped it. This year, state House leaders
shelved a version of the budget bill that called for a two-year
moratorium on executing the mentally retarded or people who
committed their crimes as 16- or 17-year-olds.
Patton said last year that he would support such a ban, saying he
questions whether 16- and 17-year-olds fully understand the
consequences of their actions.
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court banned executions of those younger
than 16. Kentucky is among 17 states that allow death sentences for
those 16 and older. Five states set the death-penalty minimum at 17.
Florida voters will decide today whether to change their state
constitution to lower the capital-punishment age eligibility from 17
to 16.
Nationally, 81 offenders are awaiting execution for crimes committed
before age 18. Stanford is the only one in Kentucky.
The Kentucky case comes at a time of increased national debate over
the possible use of the juvenile death penalty in light of the
recent arrest of John Lee Malvo, 17. Malvo is one of two suspects in
the three-week killing rampage in the Washington, D.C., area.
Kentucky Attorney General Ben Chandler, who is required by law to
ask the governor to set an execution date, is researching questions
Patton has sent to him about Stanford's case, spokeswoman Barbara
Hadley Smith said Friday.
Chandler will not submit a death warrant until Patton's questions
have been answered, she said.
Patton, in a statement released Friday, said he also has asked his
staff to research Stanford's case and the broader issues of the
death penalty for juveniles.
"While I am philosophically opposed to the death penalty for
juvenile offenders, I do support the fair administration of the
death penalty," the statement said. Patton noted that he has signed
two death warrants, but both men were adults when they committed
their crimes.
The sister of the woman Stanford killed says it is past time for him
to die.
"Kevin Stanford planned and carried out the vicious rape, sodomy and
execution-style killing of my sister Baerbel," Mona Mills said last
week in a statement. She declined to be interviewed about her
sister.
"For 20 years, Baerbel's family has followed the court system
through the appeals process," Mills said. "Now the appeals have been
exhausted and the highest court in our land agrees to uphold the
sentence of Kevin Stanford that he should die for the heinous
robbery, kidnapping, rape, sodomy and murder of Baerbel Poore."
Stanford's wife of seven years, Eileen Cano, points to his family
background.
"I married him because I loved him and still do very much," said
Cano, who said she met Stanford in 1980. She lives 5 miles from the
Kentucky State Penitentiary near Eddy-ville and visits him every
Thursday.
"The truth about Kevin has not come out -- the horrible childhood,
the abuse, the drugs, things about him the jury never got to hear,"
she said. "He should not be put to death."
The state's Catholic leaders -- Louisville Archbishop Thom-as C.
Kelly, Covington Bishop Roger Joseph Foys, Owensboro Bishop John J.
McRaith and Lexington diocesan administrator Robert H. Nieberding --
agree.
Stanford "must be held accountable for the crime committed, but he
should not be executed," the four said in a letter sent last week to
Patton.
"Our request is made not only out of concern for Mr. Stanford, but
also because of our belief that the use of the death penalty
diminishes us all. This would be especially true in this instance
because of Mr. Stanford's age at the time he committed his crime,"
they wrote.
The Rev. Patrick Delahanty, who is state chairman for the Kentucky
Coalition Against the Death Penalty, said he worries that Stanford
will be executed and the U.S. Supreme Court later will say execution
of juveniles is unconstitutional.
"The court was bitterly divided, 5-to-4, in not hearing his case,"
Delahanty said. "I think it eventually will rule against such
execution."
Stanford's horrific childhood is "not reason alone to excuse him
from the death penalty, but it helps you understand what happened to
him," Delahanty added.
Stanford's first 17 years
In the clemency plea, O'Donnell, Stanford's attorney, paints a
picture of a teen-ager who was no stranger to violence and abuse.
His first-grade teacher once asked him to draw a picture showing
what he wanted to be as an adult. Stanford, whose father abandoned
him at a young age, drew nothing. He told his teacher, "All the men
in my family go to jail. I don't want to be anything."
At 7 or 8, an older neighborhood boy took Stanford to a garage and
anally assaulted him. Two other older neighborhood boys forced him
to have oral sex with them or stay locked in a doghouse. A male
transvestite friend of his mother, Barbara Boller, repeatedly took
advantage of him sexually. An older cousin assaulted him sexually
for about five years when his mother left him in his care.
Stanford was 17 years and four months old when he got a phone call
Jan. 7, 1981. His 18-year-old buddy, David Buchanan, wanted him to
help rob a Cheker Oil Station on Louisville's Cane Run Road.
Stan-ford, who was in debt to Buchanan's uncles for drugs, agreed.
Another youth, Troy Johnson, 15, went with them. Stanford was under
the influence of whiskey, marijuana and mescaline. Johnson carried
his brother's gun.
At the station, Stanford looked for money while Buchanan took
attendant Poore into the station bathroom and sexually assaulted
her. She was white. Her attackers were black. All their jurors would
be white.
When Stanford came into the bathroom, Buchanan encouraged him to
join in the assault. He did.
They drove Poore to a remote area and allowed her to smoke a
cigarette. Then Stanford shot her twice in the head at close range.
They returned to the gas station, ransacked it and took 2 gallons of
gas, $140 and 30 cartons of cigarettes.
Court records say Stanford later told a jail officer, "I had to
shoot her. The bitch lives next door to me and she would recognize
me."
O'Donnell contends Stanford never said that or ever bragged about
the murder.
Buchanan was sentenced to life for murder and to 65 years for rape,
sodomy and robbery.
Johnson testified for the prosecution and received nine months in
juvenile detention.
Stanford was sentenced to the death penalty.
The last 20 years
Stanford has turned his life around in prison, says his attorney.
O'Donnell says Stanford has "very little memory of his trial, as he
was heavily medicated by psychotropic medication."
Because he was tired of his past and wanted to be a role model for
his daughter, Lakiesha, who was born in January 1981 shortly after
his arrest, Stanford enrolled in the prison's education programs. He
has his GED and an associate college degree in business management
and liberal arts. He is a few credits short of a sociology degree.
Stanford, O'Donnell said, "accepts responsibility for his
involvement in Baerbel Poore's sexual assault, abduction and
murder."
"He was unable at the age of 17 to recognize the senselessness of
his actions and the pain his behavior caused to Baerbel Poore and
her family, as well as to his own family," she said.
O'Donnell said Patton has broad powers to commute Stanford's death
sentence.
"He wants to so very much to live," she said. "He will become a
grandfather in a month or so. He wants to be a good grandfather."
In her clemency petition to the governor, she put on her cover page
a 1932 quote from famed lawyer Clarence Darrow in defending a
teen-age killer in Illinois.
It said: "The mind of the child is not the mind of the man. The
child does not have the experience that alone can guide life. The
civil laws recognize this. Why should not the criminal laws
recognize it?"
But Mills, the sister of Stanford's victim, said Baerbel Poore also
wanted to live -- and Stanford decided she would not.
Many people come from abusive homes and don't murder people, she
said.
"What he did to my sister was not the act of a child," she said.
Herald-Leader news research-manager Lu-Ann Farrar contributed to
this article.
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