Mississippi hasn’t executed a Death Row inmate since former grocery store butcher Gary Carl Simmons Jr. was executed on June 20, 2012, for the grisly 1996 murder and dismemberment of Jeffrey Wolfe and the subsequent kidnapping and rape of Wolfe’s girlfriend in Pascagoula.
At that time, there were 53 inmates on Mississippi’s Death Row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Twenty years ago, Mississippi’s Death Row had 63 inmates. A decade ago, there were 57 inmates awaiting execution. Today, there are 37 condemned men and one condemned woman on Mississippi’s Death Row.
Over Mississippi’s nine-year execution hiatus, some inmates have died. Some, like Curtis Flowers, were exonerated and released. The global COVID pandemic has played no small role. There were nearly 3,600 U.S. inmates schedule for execution in the early 2000s, but that number has dropped to some 2,600.
But Mississippi’s Death Row population is smaller because our state is following national trends of fewer death sentences being given (only one in Mississippi in 2020), judicial inertia as the debate over lethal injection drugs continue, and national support for the death penalty has declined, according to the Gallup poll.
Between the peak of over 300 annual U.S. executions in the mid-1990s, consider that in 2020 only 17 people in the U.S. were executed. Legal scholar Ian Millhiser wrote that the total “would be much lower if not for the Trump administration resuming federal executions this year for the first time in nearly two decades. 2020 is the first year in American history when the federal government executed more people than all of the states combined - 10 of the 17 people executed in 2020 were killed by the federal government.”
Still on Mississippi’s Death Row are inmates Anthony Carr, 55, and Robert Simon Jr., 57, who were convicted and sentenced to death for the Feb. 2, 1990, murders of the Carl “Bubba” Parker family at their Walnut community home on Hwy. 322 southwest of Lambert in Quitman County.
The family left the Riverside Baptist Church Bible study class at about 9 p.m. to return to their home.
Parker, 58; his wife Bobbie Jo, 45;
daughter Charlotte Jo, 9; and son Gregory, 12, were active in the church
where Bobbie Jo served as the church secretary and pianist.
The family entered the isolated rural
home in the midst of an apparent burglary, Quitman County investigators
later testified. Court records show the killers shot all four family
members, sexually assaulted the little girl, cut
Parker’s finger off his bound body to steal his wedding ring and then
set fire to the home and left the wounded family to burn alive.
Carr and Simon remain on Death Row. Also waiting, also serving a different kind of time is Scott Parker, the sole survivor of the Carl Parker family – who stoically waits for justice to be done for his slaughtered family. In the Parker case, a remarkable thing happened. One of the poorest counties in Mississippi raised county taxes three years in a row in an attempt to pay for the criminal defense of Carr and Simon.
The Constitution guarantees every criminal the right to counsel. Criminals who are indigent don't forfeit those rights. That right is designed to keep the system honest and to keep the poor from falling through the cracks of the judicial system simply by virtue of their poverty and inability to hire quality attorneys.
And while local judges who must seek re-election from the majority of Mississippi voters who favor the death penalty may wink and nudge at the state's current inadequacies in indigent defense, appellate judges do not.
Mississippi's consistent failure to provide competent, reliable indigent defense to criminals slows down the appeals process to a crawl and is particularly advantageous to defendants in capital cases. In short, the failure of Mississippi taxpayers to pay for proper indigent defense in fact gives Death Row inmates a longer lease on life through more appeals.
14 comments:
If I read that right:
These two guys slaughtered a family and raped a kid, and the county raised taxes to pay to DEFEND these guys?
Absolutely unconscionable
Our AG would get lots of support in carrying out the execution of these vermin.
Good ol' Sid. We're never good enough and we're never paying the govt enough money.
You have to wonder how many innocent men the state has murdered over the years.
Sid Salter is a perfect example of what is wrong with this country. Why anyone would give him a platform is beyond me.
@ 8:11, "absolutely unconscionable" or absolutely necessary?
Do you really want to live in a country where accused rapists and murderers and child molesters (and homosexuals, "heretics," and political non-conformists) are summarily executed? There are lots of such places, even now in the 21st Century, and very few folks swimming rivers, riding rafts, or hiding in wheel wells to get into them. Point being there's room for guys who want to move there.
Let's face it, the Mississippi Bar does a poor job of regulating the profession and protecting the public. We have an elected appellate judiciary, with predictable results, i.e., nobody wants to be perceived "soft" on folks that need killing. The first real chance of meaningful review of death sentences is the federal habeas corpus process. That's the first time an Article III, life-appointed, federal judge passes on the perceived procedural deficiencies. That step requires "exhaustion" of state court remedies -- which can take years to decades depending on how dumb the AG's underlings are. On the other side are committed anti-capital punishment ideologues, generally smart, often trained elsewhere.
Who do you think is going to win? (And delay is a win, in this litigation.)
I well-remember the Quitman County case. I would have driven over and joined the lynch mob. Still would . . . provided we get the right guy(s).
There's the rub. It just takes one Curtis Flowers, wrongfully executed, one "Scottsboro Boys" case (where the CPUSA paid a New York lawyer to drive on down and save 9 human lives from wrongful execution) to spoil it for us "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" kind of guys.
If trying to sell the taxpayer on some claim that more lawyers mean faster sentencing ol' Sid is full of shit.
The best way to slow down ANY legal matter is to involve a bunch of lawyers.
Sounds to me, if Scott Parker is alive, HE can administer the justice the state refuses to
The murders of the Parker family still reminds me of the "In Cold Blood" murders of the Kansas family back in the 50's. Kansas hung both those killers. That killing was notorious for it's brutality and became a national sensation. No more. Brutal killings are now normal and the public is no
longer repulsed and angry at terrorist criminals. It's not personal anymore. Even though we have national news and lots of media information people no longer demand the death penalty, so it's going away. Just lock 'em up and we pay for their room and board.
I believe Edwin Hart Turner was executed in 2019.
I am sure Sid will agree that we need to take an individual’s life experiences into account whenever they commit a crime. Perhaps the accused was a victim of racism? Perhaps they were denied the opportunities afforded to the majority and that led them down a spiral of criminal acts. Either way, punishment is never the answer. Death for a death is never the answer. Rehabilitation and return to the free world is the only solution. I believe that efforts should be made to teach these wayward citizens to write code. Yes, like unemployed factory workers, they simply need to learn to write code and they can enter the high paying, high tech workforce.
Tell us about your cabin at the fair, Sid.
Curtis Flowers was not "exonerated". The AG decided not to pursue another trial, probably for several reasons, one of the most important being that she had run offf the lawyers who could have tried the case. A dismissal of a case is not the same thing as exoneration.
I have seen juries do too many dumb things to support a death penalty.
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