Death penalty offers families no closure, Law School speakers say

By Linda Grace-Kobas

Manny Babbitt joined the U.S. Marine Corps when he was 17. During two tours of duty in Vietnam, he fought in five major campaigns, including the bloody conflict at Khe Sanh. His unit was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, and he was given the Cross of Galantry, a Purple Heart and other medals.

Cornell Death Penalty Project forum participants -- from left, Bud Welch (obscured), Manny Babbitt, Gary Wright and David Kaczynski -- speak during a press conference, March 12, in Myron Taylor Hall. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

He came home. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he lived with his brother, Bill, and Bill's wife in Sacramento, Calif. One day in 1980, Bill came across evidence that Manny had perpetrated a break-in robbery and beaten an elderly woman, who died of a heart attack afterward. Bill made the agonizing decision to turn his brother in to the police, so that he couldn't harm others. The police assured him he had done the right thing, that his brother would be given treatment for his problems in prison and would not be subject to the death penalty.

The authorities lied, Bill Babbitt said. They arrested Manny, who confessed. Manny later told Bill, "What they said I did, I must have done it." He was tried, convicted and given the death penalty. His first lawyer took Bill's money and dropped the case. His second, a court-appointed lawyer, refused to allow blacks on the jury, drank heavily and was later disbarred and sued for racism. Manny's military heroism and mental problems were not disclosed during his trial.

Bill Babbit, who once supported the death penalty, tried to work within the system to save Manny's life, until "everybody -- the DA, the police -- didn't want to deal with me anymore," he said. The system didn't bend.

Bill attended Manny's execution, along with the family of the victim. When Bill had his last view of his brother, waiting for the fatal injection, "he was laying with his arms out like he was on the Cross."

"I feel like I was betrayed, like my brother was betrayed," Babbitt told reporters at a press conference at Cornell Law School, March 12. "I have to help educate people. The more people know about the death penalty, the less they like it."

Babbitt was one of four speakers who came to Cornell to participate in a program sponsored by the Cornell Death Penalty Project titled "Justice Overcoming Revenge: Responsibility, Community and Healing in Response to Violence." An audience of more than 60 people, mostly law students, attended the March 12 program in the MacDonald Moot Court Room of Myron Taylor Hall.

The other speakers were David Kaczynski (brother of Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber"), who is now executive director of the Albany-based New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty; Gary Wright, who in 1986 was almost killed by one of the Unabomber's bombs; and Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Putting a human face on the issue were two men who turned their brothers in to an American justice system that, they say, failed offenders and their families, and two "victims" -- Wright prefers the term "survivors" -- who suffered but overcame pain and grief to unite in trying to reform a system that, as Welch said, politicizes death.

"I don't think anyone can look at the current system and can support it," Kaczynski said at the news conference. "I think the truth is a very very powerful thing. Manny Babbitt never got a welcome home. He was failed everywhere along the line."

"The thing that sticks out the most is that the only ones we kill in this country are the easy ones, the poor ones," Welch said. "For every eight we execute, we turn one loose who's innocent." He added, "The death penalty is really and truly about politics." Welch added that when convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed, "there was nothing about that process that gave me peace."

Wright said: "You have so much violence going on right now. It affects people. People are grappling with, will it take the death of another person to make me feel better? At what point is it enough? If I can make one person think about it, I've done my job."

During the program, Kaczynski described the way the justice system sets up a polarized process that deals with "bits and parts," not the whole reality. "I felt tremendously betrayed by the inhumanity and injustice I saw in the system." He said he formed a partnership with FBI investigators that worked well until his brother, Ted, was arrested. Despite a promise that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty, Kaczynski said, "The focus was not on saving life, but on taking life. The choice they made was to choose vengeance and retribution."

Welch lovingly described his daughter, Julie, and her college search, and her later choices in education and career. He described putting her cherished teddy bear in her coffin and the grief, rage and bitterness that tormented him for months, a state he described as "temporary insanity," when he wanted vengeance on the bomber. Finally, he said, he realized that executing McVeigh would be surrendering to revenge and hate, the same emotions that motivated McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Building.

And when he saw Bill McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh's father, on TV, he said he saw "a large man physically stooped in grief." He made the effort to travel to Lockport, N.Y., to see Bill McVeigh, whom he described as "a bigger victim of the Oklahoma City bombing than myself. I can tell you many stories about Julie, but Bill McVeigh can never mention he had a son."

Timothy McVeigh's execution was "a huge, staged political event," Welch said. Afterward, he was told by other victims' families that McVeigh's death did not give them the "closure" promised by politicians and that they, like Bill Babbitt and David Kaczynski, felt betrayed by the death system.