Senate bill challenges death penalty; victims protest

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A bill to eliminate the death penalty moved to the Senate floor Tuesday after hours-long testimony from victims, faith leaders and law enforcement representatives.
Sen. Dan Claitor’s Senate Bill 142 was sent favorably after a 6-1 vote, with Sen. Bodi White, R-Baton Rouge, the lone opposing vote. It wasn’t his job to forgive murderers, said White, saying that power belongs to the victims’ families and God.
It was a day of Old Testament readings and emotional personal stories.
SB142 would eliminate the death penalty as a possibility in cases involving first degree murder, first degree rape and treason. It provides instead for life imprisonment without parole, probation or a suspension of sentence in the case of treason. Claitor said the bill would only apply to crimes committed after Aug. 1, and would not alter the sentences of the inmates currently on Angola’s death row.
Southern University law professor Michelle Ghetti said if the death penalty is abolished it’s unlikely inmates currently on death row will be executed. Ghetti was domestically abused by ex-husband, John Battaglia, who is currently on death row in Texas for the 2001 double homicide of his 6-year-old and 9-year-old daughters from his subsequent marriage.
Ghetti said the legislation, coupled with parole and probation reform bills, could result in death row inmates having the opportunity to get out. Ghetti said if her ex-husband were on death row in Louisiana, she and her daughter would continue to be victimized.
Christie Battaglia, Ghetti’s daughter, wept as her mother recounted the details of her half-sisters’ killings. Battaglia acknowledged some people are reformed by their prison experience and do turn their lives around, but her father isn’t one of them, though she has forgiven him for his crimes.
Battaglia said if given the chance she believed her father would kill her to hurt her mother, who he has said he regrets not killing the first time.
“I am confident that if he had the chance to not be in prison anymore then I probably wouldn’t be here. I am positive that his hatred for her tops his love for me.”
Battaglia said if the death penalty didn’t exist she would be living in fear. She acknowledged the criminal justice system requires reform and that people can be wrongfully convicted, but said the legal and judicial system should be improved so that innocent people don’t reach death row in the first place.
Not all victims or family members of victims agreed with Ghetti and Battaglia. Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force member Flozell Daniels, whose stepson Nnamdi Louis was murdered in May 2016, said maintaining the death penalty will not bring back his stepson or other victims.
Daniels said we need greater investment in individuals and the community to prevent people from reaching a position where they kill another. Though difficult life experiences do not excuse terrible crimes, he said, it also does not give the state the right to assume the role of God.
“The state is acting as a formal actor in this business, deciding that we’re going to do something extraordinary,” Daniels said. “We’re going to take ourselves up as God and take people’s lives. We have no moral authority to do it.”
Daniels’ sentiment was echoed by religious leaders. Bishop Shelton Fabre of New Orleans, who represented the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the death penalty is an offense to God and Christians, and helps perpetuate a culture of death and violence.
Fabre said though it’s important to stand with victims and help ease their grief, doing so does not compel us to support the death penalty.
Rep. Steve Pylant, R-Winnsboro, and a former sheriff, said he believes in capital punishing and that those convicted of first-degree murder deserve to be put to death. But, he argued, it is no longer a financially practical solution.
The cost today of prosecuting and defending appeals is too expensive for poorer parishes to handle, he said, and so prosecutors seldom seek the death penalty. The average appeal time for a Louisiana death row inmate is 14 years.