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Death penalty opponents' organization stops in Meriden

MERIDEN — The Unitarian Universalist Church hosted a talk Wednesday afternoon denouncing the death penalty from someone well-versed on the topic.

Juan Melendez sat on death row in Florida before new evidence proved his innocence and led to his freedom.

"I spent 17 years, eight months and one day on death row," Melendez said. "I was not saved by the system. I was saved in spite of the system."

Melendez, 52, has since taken his story on the road in conjunction with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

With Melendez was the organization's executive director, Abe Bonowitz, and Bill Pelke, who told his story of forgiving the teenager sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of his grandmother, Ruth Pelke, in Indiana.

The death penalty debate regained prominence since Illinois Gov. George Ryan pardoned four death row inmates in 2003 and commuted the death sentences of 156 death row inmates to life sentences before he left office.

The stop in Meriden was part of a 14-week tour of the United States the trio is making to spread the word about why the death penalty should be abolished.

"I can understand the human desire for retribution, but I hold myself to a higher principle. State-sponsored violence is not something I support," said the Rev. Lucy Ijams, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Meriden. "By having capital punishment, saying the state has the right to take someone's life, it teaches children violence is an acceptable punishment."

Ijams and a room full of church members at the church's office on Paddock Avenue leaned in and listened to the stories the men had to tell. Pelke told the true-life story of four teenage girls who stabbed and killed his grandmother for money they intended to use at an arcade. Of the girls involved, Paula Cooper — dubbed the ringleader of the attack — was sentenced to death.

"I pictured my grandmother's death. It tore me up," Pelke said.

But Pelke said he came to terms with the killing — he could better remember his grandmother if he forgave Cooper.

"Whenever I thought about my grandmother again, I thought about how she lived, not how she died ... The death penalty has nothing at all to do with the healing process," he said.

Cooper stood to be the youngest woman to be executed in the United States, but pressure from the public prompted prison officials to give her a life sentence instead, which Pelke supported.

Then Bonowitz introduced the Unitarians to Melendez. He told the group how investigators and the prosecution protected an informer by fingering him as the killer of a cosmetology school owner in 1983. They chose someone who wouldn't put up a fight — someone who spoke little English, didn't know the system and didn't have family nearby to rally around him.

The Brooklyn-born man with Puerto Rican roots was convicted in the killing, on the word of the police informant and another man who wanted to negotiate a lesser sentence in his role in the killing. A taped confession made by the informant was withheld by the prosecutor but turned up nearly 18 years later.

"I was lucky. That's all I can tell you," Melendez said. "I missed the things we take for granted. I learned how to have compassion."

In Connecticut, Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky was the last person executed — in 1960 by electrocution. Six convicts sit on death row, including Michael B. Ross, who was convicted in 1984 for the serial murders of six women and young girls in eastern Connecticut.

Although all the legal mechanisms exist for executions in the state, and the death penalty has the support of Gov. John G. Rowland and a majority of legislators, the laws allow too many loopholes, according to state Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, chairman of the legislative judiciary committee.

"It's not the death penalty opponents getting in the way. It's not going to happen," said Lawlor, who opposes the death penalty. "We are spending millions of dollars on appeals, not to mention their names getting in the papers. Instead, the victims of the Michael Ross case have to constantly worry about an appeal. They should just be rotting in a jail cell with anonymity."

jbarry@record-journal.com

(203) 317-2475