TUCSON —
Jared L. Loughner was sentenced Thursday to seven consecutive terms of life in
prison at a court hearing punctuated by raw emotion as former Representative
Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark E. Kelly, for the first time confronted
the man who shot her in the head during a rampage last year that left 6 dead and
12 others wounded.
Ms. Giffords, her right arm in a sling, stared at Mr. Loughner as Mr. Kelly
delivered his defiant remarks before a packed courtroom, from a dais a few feet
from the defendant’s chair.
“By making death and producing tragedy, you sought to extinguish the beauty of
life, to diminish potential, to strain love and to cancel ideas,” Mr. Kelly
said. “You tried to create for all of us a world as dark and evil as your own.
But remember it always: You failed.”
Mr. Loughner’s punishment — in addition to the life terms, he was sentenced to
140 years in prison — came as no surprise. It was a condition of the guilty plea
he entered on Aug. 7, admitting to the shootings and bringing to an end a case
that had prompted much soul-searching about mental health treatment and the
country’s gun laws.
From the bench in Federal District Court, Judge Larry A. Burns said he was not
going to make “political statements,” that he was just “a single federal judge”
who had “no intention to change the law.” Still, he questioned the wisdom of
allowing the unrestricted sale of high-capacity magazines, like the one Mr.
Loughner used to carry out his crimes.
“I don’t understand the social utility of allowing citizens to have magazines
with 30 bullets in them,” Judge Burns said.
For Mr. Kelly, though, who has been Ms. Giffords’s unrelenting companion and her
voice as she has struggled to articulate her words since the shooting, the
politics of gun control is the “elephant in the room.” He denounced politicians
who are “afraid to do something as simple as have a meaningful debate about our
gun laws,” singling out Gov. Jan Brewer, whom he called “feckless,” and the
Legislature, which “thought it appropriate to busy itself naming an official
Arizona state gun just weeks after this tragedy.”
Mr. Kelly went on, “After Columbine, after Virginia Tech, after Tucson and after
Aurora,” the Colorado suburb where a gunman killed 12 and wounded 58 in a movie
theater in July, “we have done nothing.”
A spokesman for the governor said in a statement that “on this solemn occasion,”
Ms. Brewer “isn’t interested in engaging in politics.”
Ms. Giffords did not say anything, only stroking her husband’s back when they
slowly made their way back to their seats.
On Jan. 8, 2011, Mr. Loughner, now 24, arrived at a constituents meeting hosted
by Ms. Giffords, then a member of the House of Representatives, in a shopping
center parking lot. He had a loaded Glock 9-millimeter pistol and carried 60
extra rounds of ammunition. In less than 30 seconds, he fired 31 shots.
Onlookers tackled and restrained him when he paused to reload. One of them was
Pamela Simon, an aide and close friend of Ms. Giffords’s who was shot by Mr.
Loughner and was one of seven victims to speak in court.
Ms. Simon, who taught at the middle school Mr. Loughner had attended, said she
remembered him as “a kid who loved music.” On Thursday, she told him, “You
remind us that too often we either do not notice the signs of mental illness, or
we just choose to look away.”
Mavy Stoddard, whom Mr. Loughner shot three times, told him she cradled her
wounded husband, Dorwan, in her arms and whispered, “Breathe deeply, honey.”
Ten minutes later, he was dead.
Mr. Loughner stared at each of them, virtually motionless. He slurred his only
words, “That’s right,” which he spoke after the judge asked if he had indeed
waived his right to address the court.
He had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but was deemed competent to
agree to the plea deal, which makes him ineligible for parole or to appeal. He
has been held at a federal hospital in Missouri for more than a year, undergoing
psychiatric evaluations and treatment. On Thursday, Judge Burns said he should
stay “in a place where he can get continual medical treatment.”
His mother, Amy Loughner, sniffled loudly at times, convulsing as people
described the horror her son had unleashed. His father, Randy, was also there.
Representative Ron Barber, a close aide of Ms. Giffords’s at the time of the
shooting who was struck by a bullet in the leg, told them, “Please know that I
and my family hold no animosity toward you.”
To Mr. Loughner, he said, “You must pay the price.”
Timothy
Williams contributed reporting from New York.
This article
has been revised
to reflect the following correction:
Correction:
November 8, 2012
An earlier version of this article and headline
misstated the number of life
sentences
received by
Jared L. Loughner. It is seven, not six.
March 14,
2012
The New York Times
By GAIL GARINGER
Boston
IN the late 1980s, a small but influential group of criminologists predicted a
coming wave of violent juvenile crime: “superpredators,” as young as 11,
committing crimes in “wolf packs.” Politicians soon responded to those fears,
and to concerns about the perceived inadequacies of state juvenile justice
systems, by lowering the age at which children could be transferred to adult
courts. The concern was that offenders prosecuted as juveniles would have to be
released at age 18 or 21.
At the same time, “tough on crime” rhetoric led some states to enact laws making
it easier to impose life without parole sentences on adults. The unintended
consequence of these laws was that children as young as 13 and 14 who were
charged as adults became subject to life without parole sentences.
Nationwide, 79 young adolescents have been sentenced to die in prison — a
sentence not imposed on children anywhere else in the world. These children were
told that they could never change and that no one cared what became of them.
They were denied access to education and rehabilitation programs and left
without help or hope.
But the prediction of a generation of superpredators never came to pass.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, violent juvenile crime declined, and it has
continued to decline through the present day. The laws that were passed to deal
with them, however, continue to exist. This month, the United States Supreme
Court will hear oral arguments in two cases, Jackson v. Hobbs and Miller v.
Alabama, which will decide whether children can be sentenced to life without
parole after being convicted of homicide.
The court has already struck down the death penalty for juveniles and life
without parole for young offenders convicted in nonhomicide cases. The rationale
for these earlier decisions is simple and equally applicable to the cases to be
heard: Young people are biologically different from adults. Brain imaging
studies reveal that the regions of the adolescent brain responsible for
controlling thoughts, actions and emotions are not fully developed. They cannot
be held to the same standards when they commit terrible wrongs.
Homicide is the worst crime, but in striking down the juvenile death penalty in
2005, the Supreme Court recognized that even in the most serious murder cases,
“juvenile offenders cannot with reliability be classified among the worst
offenders”: they are less mature, more vulnerable to peer pressure, cannot
escape from dangerous environments, and their characters are still in formation.
And because they remain unformed, it is impossible to assume that they will
always present an unacceptable risk to public safety.
The most disturbing part of the superpredator myth is that it presupposed that
certain children were hopelessly defective, perhaps genetically so. Today, few
believe that criminal genes are inherited, except in the sense that parental
abuse and negative home lives can leave children with little hope and limited
choices.
As a former juvenile court judge, I have seen firsthand the enormous capacity of
children to change and turn themselves around. The same malleability that makes
them vulnerable to peer pressure also makes them promising candidates for
rehabilitation.
An overwhelming majority of young offenders grow out of crime. But it is
impossible at the time of sentencing for mental health professionals to predict
which youngsters will fall within that majority and grow up to be productive,
law-abiding citizens and which will fall into the small minority that continue
to commit crimes. For this reason, the court has previously recognized that
children should not be condemned to die in prison without being given a
“meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and
rehabilitation.”
The criminologists who promoted the superpredator theory have acknowledged that
their prediction never came to pass, repudiated the theory and expressed regret.
They have joined several dozen other criminologists in an amicus brief to the
court asking it to strike down life without parole sentences for children
convicted of murder. I urge the justices to apply the logic and the wisdom of
their earlier decisions and affirm that the best time to decide whether someone
should spend his entire life in prison is when he has grown to be an adult, not
when he is still a child.
October 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON
The defendant came to Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday ready to
ladle out several minutes of anti-American justification for his act of
terrorism in Times Square. But the judge, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, best known
of late for presiding over Martha Stewart’s trial, came ready, too.
She repeatedly interrupted the defendant, Faisal Shahzad, to spar with him over
his interpretation of the Koran, his invocation of a Muslim warrior in the
Crusades and, above all, the relevance of any of it to the life sentence that
hung over him like the dozen United States deputy marshals who guarded the
prisoner in court.
And after the judge formally sentenced Mr. Shahzad to life in prison, she left
him a parting shot: “I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison
thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.”
The six or eight minutes or so of back and forth brought a bit of drama to the
endgame of a case that, as nerve-rattling as it was at its inception, with the
discovery of a potentially lethal bomb in Times Square on May 1, had drawn to a
close with the sentencing on Tuesday.
The hearing was a part-sentencing and part-scolding, and the latter started
before the former. Judge Cedarbaum looked at Mr. Shahzad, seated between
lawyers, his beard thick and his hair long under his white skullcap, and said,
“I think you should get up.”
Mr. Shahzad, 31, rose. He seemed to have aged in the last five months from the
boyish man who was arrested aboard a jet that had been cleared for takeoff at
Kennedy Airport.
He asked the judge for 5 or 10 minutes, then launched into a soliloquy that was
at times rambling, at times threatening and delivered with the crinkly-eyed grin
of a man who acted as if he could not be happier than where he was at that
moment.
“This is but one life,” he said. “If I am given a thousand lives, I will
sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our
lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.”
He made his one and only reference to his arrest by claiming, for the first
time, that his rights had been denied. Law enforcement officials have said that
immediately following his arrest, on May 3, Mr. Shahzad cooperated, but he said
otherwise on Tuesday.
“On the second day of my arrest, I asked for the Miranda,” he said, referring to
the required notification of his right to counsel. “And the F.B.I. denied it to
me for two weeks” and threatened his wife and children, he said. The judge,
prosecutors and defense lawyers stayed silent as Mr. Shahzad, who has mounted no
substantive defense in his case and who pleaded guilty to all charges against
him on June 21, continued to speak. His lawyer, Philip L. Weinstein, had no
comment on the statements after the hearing.
Mr. Shahzad attacked the American military forces “who have occupied the Muslim
lands,” and said that attacks like his attempted bombing would continue.
“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” he said.
“Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”
He went on about the war and about the “fragile economy” that he said would soon
prove unable to sustain the troops, when Judge Cedarbaum interrupted and asked,
“Do you want to comment in any way in connection with sentence?” He said he was
getting to that, his motivations, when the judge asked, “Didn’t you swear
allegiance to this country when you became an American citizen?”
He smiled like a boy caught in a fib, and said as much: “I did swear, but I did
not mean it.”
“You took a false oath?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Sure,” he began, and went on to say, “Blessed be” Osama bin Laden, “who will be
known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade, and blessed be those
who give him asylum.”
The judge stopped him again. “How much do you know about Saladin, as you called
him?”
He is known in the Middle East as Salahuddin al-Ayubi, but commonly known in the
West as Saladin, the Muslim leader who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in
1187. He is remembered in biographies as being a lover of peace who waged war
reluctantly.
“He didn’t want to kill people,” the judge told the defendant.
“He liberated — ” Mr. Shahzad continued.
“He was a very moderate man,” Judge Cedarbaum said. Mr. Shahzad spoke more about
the war in Iraq and said, “If you call us terrorists, then we are proud
terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people
at peace.”
He finished, and it was time for the sentencing by Judge Cedarbaum. “Although
happily, the training you sought in making bombs was unsuccessful and you were
unsuccessful in your effort to kill many Americans,” she said, the facts of the
case “require that you be incarcerated for life.”
She began going through the 10 separate sentences he faced: “I sentence you to
life in prison,” she said.
“Allahu akbar,” he replied. (“God is great.”)
“I understand that you welcome that,” the judge said.
July 30, 2009
Filed at 3:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHOENIX (AP) -- A sentence of life in prison for one of two men convicted in
a series of random nighttime shootings closes a significant chapter in a case
that unnerved metropolitan Phoenix residents in 2005 and 2006.
A jury decided Wednesday to spare Samuel Dieteman from the death penalty, unlike
his partner in the Serial Shooter case, Dale Hausner. Authorities say the two
preyed on pedestrians, bicyclists and animals in attacks that ended in August
2006 when both men were arrested at the apartment they shared in Mesa.
Hausner received six death sentences in the case earlier this year.
Dieteman, who never asked for leniency and was a key witness against Hausner,
thanked the court for treating him like a human being after the verdict was read
Wednesday.
''I'm truly sorry for the pain that I've caused to many, many people,'' said
Dieteman, 33.
Dieteman met Hausner in April 2006 -- about nine months after the Serial Shooter
attacks began, and Dieteman's defense attorneys painted him as being Hausner's
follower.
Paul Patrick, a victim of the shooting spree who nearly died when Dieteman shot
him as he walked down a street in June 2006, was in the court for the verdict
and said he agreed with it.
''It's not a cause to celebrate; a mother just lost a son, and children lost
their father,'' he said of Dieteman's family. ''No hatred for the family. Too
much time has been wasted on that.''
Patrick said if there is such a thing as closure for him, the verdict is ''the
closest thing to it.''
Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill, who also was in court, said the verdict
was the culmination of four years of pain and suffering for the victims in the
case and their family members.
''This is a closure,'' he said. ''The verdict, we think is just. Without the
forthrightness of Sam Dieteman coming forward we might not have had a verdict
today.''
Dieteman, who had been charged with murdering two people and attacking 14
others, had admitted to fatally shooting 20-year-old Claudia Gutierrez-Cruz in
Scottsdale in May 2006 and assisting in the deadly shooting of 22-year-old Robin
Blasnek in July 2006 as she walked from her parents' home to her boyfriend's
house in Mesa.
Testimony at Dieteman's sentencing trial included a written apology from
Dieteman to Patrick, in which he said he would make ''no cries for mercy.'' He
also said he regretted his actions, including not turning in Hausner to
authorities when he first learned of the shootings.
''There's so many things I would change back then,'' he told jurors.
Ulysses Fuentes, one of the jurors who decided to spare Dieteman's life, said he
initially wanted to sentence him to death.
''I felt that what he had done was just irresponsible and there was just no
excuse for that,'' said Fuentes, a 19-year-old customer service representative
of Phoenix.
He said he didn't feel sympathy for Dieteman. ''Mercy would be a better term.''
Doug Budner, the jury foreman, said he also wanted the death penalty at first.
''The way I was brought up was an eye is for an eye, but as you go into the jury
room, then you start seeing evidence unfold in front of you, you have to really
listen and really dissect all the information out there and from there make an
educated decision,'' said the 53-year-old aircraft mechanic of Phoenix. ''We
know we came up with the most lawful decision.''
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty for Dieteman. They painted him as a
drifter who was a willing participant, pulling the trigger and serving as
Hausner's lookout.
Investigators said their big break came when one of Dieteman's drinking buddies,
Ron Horton, called police to say that Dieteman had bragged about shooting
people. ''They called it 'RV'ing.' Random Recreational Violence,'' Horton told
The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. Horton died last year.
During Hausner's trial, Dieteman said Hausner professed a hatred for prostitutes
and homeless people as they looked for victims in areas frequented by
streetwalkers. Dieteman said Hausner never explained why he wanted to shoot
people.
In describing one shooting, Dieteman said he and Hausner found humor at the
sight of one of their seriously injured victims, who held his stomach and
appeared angry.
The Serial Shooter case was one of two serial murder investigations that put
Phoenix-area residents on edge during the summer of 2006. Police attributed 23
more attacks, including nine slayings, to an assailant dubbed the Baseline
Killer.
PHOENIX
(AP) -- A man accused of being the Phoenix Baseline Killer was sentenced to 438
years in prison Friday for the sexual assaults of two sisters. Mark Goudeau
still faces trial for the slayings of eight women and a man in 2005-2006, and
faces a possible death sentence if he is convicted. He has pleaded not guilty.
The 43-year-old former construction worker was sentenced for his September
conviction on charges of raping one woman and sexually attacking another as they
walked home from a park.
During the two-month trial, both sisters identified Goudeau as their attacker.
DNA evidence also linked him to the rape.
Goudeau has maintained his innocence, and told Maricopa County Superior Court
Judge Andrew Klein that what happened to the two young women was horrible, ''but
I had nothing to do with it.''
Klein said before handing down the sentence that Goudeau must have two
''diametrically opposed'' personalities, one calm and respectful in court and
the other sociopathic and brutal.
One of the victims told the judge Friday through an interpreter that she still
wakes up crying at times: ''I will hope for him to never get out.''
The Associated Press has not identified the woman because she is the victim of
sexual assault.
Prosecutors had said earlier that Goudeau faced a maximum of 285 years in
prison. But Deputy County Attorney Suzanne Cohen proved a prior violent record
in court Friday that made him eligible for the higher sentences.
Goudeau is suspected of being a serial predator known as the ''Baseline
Killer,'' named for the south Phoenix street where many of the early attacks
took place.
He is the first of three suspected serial killers to go on trial for a rash of
random attacks that terrorized the Phoenix area for more than a year. All three
were arrested last year.
Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were arrested in the so-called ''Serial
Shooter'' case in August 2006 and are expected to go on trial next year. Hausner
faces seven murder counts and Dieteman is charged with two. Their trial is
expect to begin next year.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The former roommate of one of the
nation's most prolific child molesters was sentenced
Friday to at least 800 years in prison for sexually abusing three boys.
Fred Everts, 36, was convicted
last year of molesting the youngsters, ages 3, 9 and 11. He was sentenced to
800 years to life.
Police discovered the crimes two years ago while investigating Dean Arthur
Schwartzmiller, who authorities say may have molested hundreds of youngsters
over decades and kept detailed logs on the children.
Schwartzmiller, 65, was sentenced in January to 152 years in prison for abusing
two 12-year-old boys. He and Everts had met in prison on earlier molestation
charges and eventually moved in together in San Jose.
Steve Fein, who prosecuted both men, said Everts admitted molesting about 40
children, including his 3-month-old biological son. He asked for the maximum
sentence of 1,175 years to life.
Everts' sentence was compounded under California's three-strikes law because of
two felony convictions in Oregon in 1993 for sodomy and sexual abuse on his
young stepson.
In asking for leniency, defense lawyer Steven Woodson asked the judge to
disregard the previous two felonies and consider his client's admission to the
crimes and cooperation with investigators.
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - A Utah man who
confessed to killing his pregnant wife to try and cover up his own lies about
his education and plans to become a doctor was sentenced to six years to life
in prison on Monday.
Mark Hacking, 29, who appeared in court hand-cuffed and wearing a bullet-proof
vest amid tight security, broke down in tears, saying he was "tormented" by the
killing.
He pleaded guilty in April to shooting his wife Lori while she slept and then
throwing the body into the garbage.
"She was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, but I killed her and put
her and my unborn child in the garbage. And I can't explain why I did it," he
said in a hearing before the sentence was handed down.
The sentence was the only one that Judge Denise Lindberg could hand down
under state guidelines but she called Hacking "the poster child for
dishonesty."
Lindberg said a parole board would determine how long Hacking would serve
but said she would recommend he stay in prison a "very, very long time."
The murder drew international attention when Lori Hacking, 27, was reported
missing July 19 by her husband who told police she had never returned from a
morning jog.
Police quickly focused on Mark Hacking as a suspect.
Shortly before the murder Hacking had told friends and family he had been
accepted to a medical school. Records later showed he had not graduated from
college.
In October police found Lori Hacking's badly decomposed body in a landfill. They
were unable to determine if she was pregnant at the time of her death, a factor
that deterred prosecutors from seeking the death penalty.
Lori's mother, Thelma Soares, told the judge since her daughter's death she had
received correspondence and gifts from concerned people in every state in
America and 63 nations.
"Mark's infamy extends well beyond the borders of Utah," she said. "He killed my
daughter and grandchild and then threw them in the trash with the intent that
they never be found and that I never know what happened to them. Those acts
constitute the very epitome of depraved indifference."
"I can't think of one good reason why Mark should ever walk free again," Soares
told the judge.
Several members of the Hacking family made statements to the judge including
Mark's brother Scott Hacking. "We will continue to love Mark and pray for him,"
he said.
