Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004220050
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUG STRUCK THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
Other scenes from that day in 1972 are sharp as a blade on skin. She remembers rushing to the house, just minutes after an escaped convict had gunned down Evelyn "Penny" Deans. She remembers hope crushed with a policeman's casual remark: "Yeah, we just sent her body for an autopsy."
She remembers, with tears now 18 years old, the fussing pride with which Penny Deans had prepared to be a grandmother and had doted over Marie's pregnancy.
So she finds it curious, this one blind spot in her memory. After all, she does not recoil from the subject of murder. She has made murderers her life's work.
Her goal is to save them.
At a time when gubernatorial campaigns in California, Florida and Texas are turning on who favors executions most fervently, Marie Deans spends her days on death row and in courtrooms trying to keep murderers from execution.
"Marie is a life preserver for these men. Nothing less than that," said Russell Ford, a chaplain for condemned men at the Virginia State Penitentiary.
"I am not for killing people," Deans explains simply of her opposition to the death penalty.
She is a tall woman, 49. Brown hair flashed with grey. A South Carolina accent peeks through occasional words. From a cramped office between a tire store and a mattress shop in Richmond, she runs the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons. She finds lawyers, by persuasion or coercion, to represent those accused of murder. She guides lawyers new to the work through the arcane capital crimes laws with a deft understanding of the courts.
"Beyond argument, she has saved lives," said Gerald Zerkin, a defense lawyer who has worked on four death penalty cases with her. "She is dedicated, works extraordinary hours, and is extremely knowledgeable. She is truly the expert in Virginia and the nation" on sentencing procedures.
Her record supports that. Of 79 cases on which she has worked from 1986 and 1989, she says, only one man received the death sentence. One was acquitted. The others got life sentences.
She also spends long days with men already sentenced to die, plotting appeal strategies, counseling, comforting and listening. She figures she has worked with 300 on death row.
For Deans, the work comes from a conviction born early.
"When I was about 16 years old, I read Camus' `Reflections on the Guillotine.' Camus talked about us putting a human being in a cage and telling that human being every day that we were going to kill him - we'd let him know when, but we were going to kill him. I started throwing up. I was horrified."
Still, that subject was far from her mind in 1972. She lived in her native Charleston, S.C., close to her husband's family. She was a free-lance writer, happy, and pregnant.
It was to be Penny Deans' first grandchild. Though only 52, Penny Deans had just watched her husband die of cancer, and "had lost her whole will to live. When I became pregnant, it was like this whole new life for her. We became especially close," said Marie Deans.
On Aug. 20, 1972, Penny Deans returned from a short trip. As she unloaded her car in a carport, a stranger approached. A convicted rapist, he had killed a woman as he escaped from prison in Maine, and then fled to South Carolina. It was a random encounter. He may have sought shelter. Another son, stopping by, heard two shots.
"We all felt so deprived. Penny was what held us together. I wanted her there," recalled Deans, tears welling. "I was stunned, I was traumatized, I was angry. I started hemorrhaging, and I almost lost my child." She did not: "He's an incredibly wonderful 17-year-old boy now."
When the murderer, turned in by his sister, was sentenced to prison in Maine for the slaying there, the Deans' family opposed his extradition to South Carolina. They did not want to endure a trial, with the chance of capital punishment in South Carolina.
"Penny was not a vindictive woman," said Deans. "We didn't believe she would have wanted someone killed in her name. We didn't want her [name] attached to the electric chair."
That attitude, soon well-known in what she describes as "small Charleston," led to her first invitation to death row in 1977. An inmate, J.C. Shaw, had dropped an appeal of his murder conviction because he felt remorse for the victim's family. At the urging of the man's lawyer, Deans went to see him.
"I said, `I'm a member of a victim's family, and I'm not so sure that you are going to help the victim's family. I don't think you should do this.' " she recalled. "He said, `Why?' I said, `I believe that life is sacred, and that makes you sacred, too.' He got tears in his eyes."
That launched her career with condemned men. She moved from South Carolina to Virginia in 1983 to work on death-penalty cases. With a trickle of donations from individuals and churches, she keeps a staff of two, and draws $18,000 to support herself. She is now divorced.
The presence of this woman on death row "probably made some prison staff members suspicious," said William Leeke, the former commissioner of corrections for South Carolina who first permitted Deans to work with the men. "But inmates related to her better than to the employees."
"When I go in there, they know I am a member of a murder victim's family," said Deans. "What they expect is that I must be a real bleeding heart liberal, so they can play my string. But they can't.
"Even wardens tell me I'm harder on the inmates than they are. The guys on the Row call me the `Slam Dunker,' because I am hard on them. I will not take any . . . off them. And I don't want to hear them whine.
"I want them to take responsibility. I want them to know what they have done. They can't change until they take responsibility. A lot of them will say to me, `Tell me what I've done. I have no idea what I've done to the family of who I've killed.'
"You know, we think of these people as hardened monsters with no feelings. But I've seen an awful lot of crying."
She plunged into her work, she said, to "figure out why all this is happening. Why does our murder rate keep increasing? I wanted to get over there on death row and answer that question: Why? Why had Penny been killed?"
In part, she says, the answer is in the background of the men.
"I never met anyone on death row who wasn't abused, violently, or sexually molested. And when I say abused, I mean use cattle prods on your kids, beat them unmercifully, bang their heads against the walls, throw them against walls, drop them out of windows."
She has not watched an execution. The state does not want her as a witness. She must leave just before the condemned man is escorted to the electric chair.
When she thinks of this final act, she recalls leaning against a police car in 1972, waiting for news of Penny Deans. "This cop came up, and put his hand on my shoulder and said, `Don't worry about it, we'll catch this guy and fry him.'
"It stunned us. It was like, `What has that got to do with Penny lying on the floor in all this blood?' It just didn't compute for us."
Capital punishment has never computed for her. "When we treat people inhumanely, we dehumanize ourselves," she said. "None of us wanted to have [Penny's murderer] executed."
About 10 years ago, she realized she had forgotten the killer's name. So had her husband and others in the family. They had dismissed him from their memory, just as efficiently as he had dismissed the life of Penny Deans.
She is not sure that she wants to retrieve it.
"I imagine he's still incarcerated," reflects Deans. "Sometimes I think I want to go talk to him. Sometimes my [former] husband thinks he wants to go talk to him. Other times we don't."
She no longer has the choice. The man charged with Penny Deans' murder was Lloyd Wayne Northup. He was sentenced to life in prison in Maine in December 1972. The sentence was carried out. According to authorities there, Northup, 55, died in custody of the Maine State Prison last Aug. 10.
He died of a heart attack.
by CNB