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Insanity hangs over the death sentence
Sunday, May 14, 2000
Tuesday a psychiatrist testified during Common Pleas Court competency proceedings that Richard S. Baumhammers is not able to stand trial, because he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is easily distracted and is delusional.
The commonwealth of Pennsylvania has charged Baumhammers with five counts of homicide, attempted homicide, aggravated assault, arson, ethnic intimidation, reckless endangerment and weapons violations for the rampage of death and destruction April 28 that shocked this community to its roots.
You know and I know that the matters described in the first paragraph above are going to be determinative in the ultimate disposition of Baumhammers' case and that it is very unlikely most of those charges in the second paragraph are ever going to stick. And even if Baumhammers is convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be executed, the chances of the latter event ever occurring are remote in the extreme.
The same can be said of Ronald Taylor, who is accused of killing three people and shooting two others in Wilkinsburg on March 1. Taylor already has been determined to be unfit mentally to stand trial and has been remanded to a state hospital for treatment of a disease very similar to the one that apparently afflicts Baumhammers.
The result is that, if Baumhammers follows Taylor's path, which seems almost assured, two killers who have been caught dead to rights will be given medical treatment until such time as physicians judge them to be capable to be tried for their crimes, at which time they will most certainly be convicted and sentenced to death.
I say this because experience over the last 40 years strongly suggests that juries in Pennsylvania have demonstrated no interest whatsoever in the so-called "insanity defense." On the basis of the evidence, they are also less than enthusiastic about the much less absolute claim of "guilty but mentally ill." Juries like to give prosecutors what they want: death sentences.
But that is a small part of the story. If Baumhammers and Taylor are sentenced to death, their cases will be appealed up to the state Supreme Court, where there is every likelihood that the verdicts will be sustained, following which a governor of Pennsylvania will sign an execution order, at which time the really serious appeals will begin.
Defense lawyers - paid, appointed or volunteer - will re-examine every step of each case and use every means possible to entice the federal courts to get involved and stay any execution. This will take 15 to 20 years, by which time Taylor will be 59 and Baumhammers 54.
On those far-off occasions, Taylor and Baumhammers will have been taking their medicine regularly, be at peace with the world and ready to meet their Maker. If you think this overstates matters, or overdramatizes the ludicrous nature by which the commonwealth deals with capital crimes, look again at what has happened since 1962, when Pennsylvania executed its last criminal before what might be called the modern era, the one that arrived when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1976 that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment.
Three people have been executed by lethal injection, two in 1995 and one last year. This last case mirrors almost precisely the scenario hypothesized above: Gary Heidnik was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988 for enslaving women in his Philadelphia house and killing at least two of them. A paranoid schizophrenic himself, Heidnik said he was prepared to die to prove the evils of capital punishment. The state took him at his word 11 years after his arrest. There are 227 people on death row today, more than all but three other states.
If capital punishment were not an option in the Baumhammers and Taylor cases, there would be neither the plethora of charges filed against them that will take up the state's time and money nor the exotic, complicated and expensive defenses that the possibility of a death sentence always prompts. The two men would be found guilty and they would be found mentally ill and they would be sentenced to the appropriate state institution for the remainder of their natural lives. Cases closed.
To point this out minimizes in no way the absolute horrors for which they are responsible. In fact, I would argue that trials focused on the crime rather than on the tangential questions of whether or not the defendant should get the death penalty are more likely to place public attention where it belongs: On the most vile of human acts, the taking of one human's life by another human being and the consequences thereof.
To point this out also is a reminder to all of us in Pennsylvania of the negative social consequences of living a lie.
The catharsis of sentencing criminals to death, which we hang on to for dear life, is a fleeting one because it is almost immediately undermined by the ongoing hypocrisy (not to mention unseemly expense) of condemning criminals to a fate that there is no stomach for. We like sentencing people to death but we don't like killing them. Why not stop this charade?
John G. Craig Jr. is editor of the Post-Gazette.