`Justifiable Homicide': When the Death Penalty Hits Home
Banks, Gabrielle
0N THE NIGHT Of Manny Babbitt's execution at San Quentin, Naomi White had a bad fall. Somewhere along the gravel path leading away from the prison, her ankle buckled and she tumbled...
...I don't find that possible...
...The man said, "You're fucking with me...
...JoJo was always looking out for the guys who were most overlooked, Derrel says, the Manny Babbitts of the world...
...The Babbitt sisters and their mother, Josephine, had already followed Bill to California...
...Almost immediately upon his return to the United States, Manny began experiencing flashbacks, blackouts, and angry outbursts...
...In other words, what kind of a world would create a person who would kill an innocent person like JoJo White or, for that matter, like Leah Schendel...
...Healing is a process, it's not an event," says Renny Cushing...
...She noticed the woman in the front seat was doubled over, moaning...
...Then Charles slowly walked her back...
...Manny was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic...
...It's not that I have this big heart and I can forgive and forget...
...I couldn't stand up...
...Her attacker had presumably entered through a slashed screen door...
...I went over and woke her," Bill says...
...Allen said, "C'mon, Donna, we gotta go...
...His father, Charles, emigrated from the Cape Verde Islands to work in the cranberry bogs of coastal Massachusetts...
...When Manny's daughters approached her at a post-clemency gathering to plead for forgiveness, Laura told them, "No, your father needs to die...
...Manny might have left the phone off the hook, they said, after attempting, in this altered state, to call in the medics...
...The loss of dear Leah...
...Each plane that landed was an enormous and conspicuous target for enemy fire once its twin headlights came into view...
...sUCH COINCIDENCES are not uncommon...
...Her hands went up to her face and she let out a wail...
...Out on the street, the police arrested him...
...In 1999, another Vietnam vet, California governor Gray Davis, denied him clemency and authorized his execution...
...At 12:01 A.M., the hour the prison officials were scheduled to administer the lethal injection, a disembodied voice announced over the loudspeaker that Babbitt had been granted a thirty-minute stay for a final U.S...
...After six young children are murdered by some lunatic, your response is to murder the lunatic...
...Although he was functionally illiterate, a recruiting officer helped him fill in the answers on the entrance exam...
...The newspaper said Leah Schendel had been playing the nickel slots in Reno just days before the murder...
...But JoJo was the last person his friends expected would die from gun violence...
...I can well imagine what Bill went through in deciding what to do, since I've been there myself," says David Kaczynski, whose brother, Ted, was convicted of murder...
...Although there was substantial and plausible evidence that Manny was in a dissociative, hallucinatory state at the time of the murder, his court-appointed defense attorney— who allegedly drank double vodkas during the trial lunch breaks—did not enter any of it into the court record at trial...
...Now, nineteen years later, Bill was the only family member Manny would allow to be present in the death chamber...
...While Jesse Morris's minivan sped toward the back gate, Manny's older brother Bill was inside the prison watching as an anonymous doctor delivered the prescribed dose of poison to Manny through an intravenous tube...
...It was a week of battle in the streets for the bodies, minds, and souls of these young men," she says...
...He'd rummaged through her drawers and taken her tefilin—a tiny, boxed scroll affixed to a leather strap, which religious Jews wrap around heads and arms for prayer—and tagged her ankle with it, just as the troops at Khe Sanh—where the onslaught lasted an unprecedented seventyseven straight days—had tagged ankles to distinguish dead soldiers among the wounded...
...Manny was in Donna's living room goofing around with her kids, making tents out of chairs and sheets...
...After Manny lost his clemency plea, Manuel Jr...
...One of the young men got out of the car to urinate next to a vacant building and came face to face with the assailant...
...He would drink or get high to numb his memories...
...Turning Manny in, he says, represented a great leap of faith...
...That strikes me as not really learning much from your experience...
...Linda, let's get down and pray...
...One love...
...Our suffering has not lessened the emotional upheaval of this crime in over 18 years...
...When my grandmother was killed it was a terrible thing for the family," says Bill Pelke, whose nonprofit group, Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing, offers joint panels whereby murder victims' family members speak alongside family members of death row inmates...
...The driver offered Naomi and Derrel a ride to their car, explaining he couldn't take them right away...
...She was hoping Jesse had gotten word that Manny was going to live, and they would drive around to the back entrance and find out Manny had been granted a reprieve...
...David and his wife, Linda, befriended Bill and Linda Babbitt several weeks before Manny's execution...
...Naomi and Derrel sat in the backseat, witnessing the scene they had hoped to avoid...
...It was clear to everyone there that they were going to execute him in thirty minutes," Naomi later explained...
...She had recently returned from one of these trips on the night she was killed...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 59 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE "Just like me, Bill Babbitt was led to believe that if he helped the police, the police would help his brother...
...We have to get around to the back gate...
...He'd also attended Black Panther meetings and called the police "pigs...
...The coincidence for Aundre Herron, an attorney at the California Appellate Project, was that she was working on behalf of death row inmates when her brother was murdered...
...When planes approached the runway, everyone scrambled to take cover...
...The van charged forward into the vacant night...
...For years, he couldn't clear these images from his memory...
...Like Naomi and Derrel, he'd protested U.S...
...Instead, Bill says, "I delivered Manny to the hands of his executioner...
...He got busted for robbery...
...Manny's unit had to go in and literally pick up the pieces of their fellow GIs...
...You can't bring the person you lost back...
...Her dresser drawers had been ransacked, and the phone was off the hook...
...Bill and Linda Babbitt were caught at a moral crossroads...
...The Soldier Manuel Pith Babbitt, the sixth of eight children, grew up in Wareham, Massachusetts...
...The Back Gate When the minivan pulled in, about a dozen members of the Babbitt family were waiting, huddled together, bracing themselves against the night wind...
...The police agreed to provide treatment for Manny and to spare his life...
...When the siege finally ended, an estimated ten thousand North Vietnamese and more than a thousand American soldiers were dead, a hundred thousand tons of bombs littered the surrounding countryside, and the United States had abandoned its post in Khe Sanh...
...He attempted to commit suicide several times...
...The Crime In the early morning of December 19, 1980, an elderly Jewish woman named Leah Schendel died from a heart attack after being brutally beaten in her home...
...But, the Sacramento Police Department had no authority to make such promises...
...It was one way, she knew, that people could improve their circumstances...
...AROUND THE same time that Manny was preparing to go to war, a young Naomi White was waking up at 3 A.M...
...Jesse had been assigned to accompany Manny's family at all public appearances during a whirlwind clemency campaign...
...I'll never stop missing JoJo...
...One day, Linda found money stashed in odd places around the house...
...JoJo had been driving a few friends home on a Friday afternoon...
...People get tricked into thinking there's some kind of closure," she says...
...I got physically ill and dizzy...
...To this day, military buffs question General William Westmoreland's decision to order so many young men into such a precarious situation: the North Vietnamese army outnumbered the American GIs six to one...
...A few days before his death, he had attended a rally in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the now famous journalist on Pennsylvania's death row...
...It all fell together when she realized that the van was charging fullspeed out the front entrance, around the San Quentin peninsula toward the death chamber...
...You got out!' He looked crisp...
...Manny's youngest brother, Stephen, remembers thinking at the time, "Manny had no judgment, he couldn't make decisions, he had no idea how to take care of himself in the real world...
...If we'd known somebody was going to attack her, people would have been there and stopped it...
...Schendel lived alone in Sacramento Manor, an independent-living community for seniors...
...Her article on Bill Babbitt, "My Brother's Guilt Became My Own," appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January...
...In fact, our members are just normal, flawed people who have had horrible 6o n DISSENT / Summer 2001 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE ' experiences vested upon us...
...The Army lowered its passing test score to 10 percent and took recruits with IQs as low as 62...
...The road behind them led to only one place, so it was clear that, like Derrel and Naomi, the two men and the woman in the front passenger seat had just come from the vigil at the prison entrance...
...Part of it, I try to bury in my thoughts, but it comes up in dreams...
...IN 198o, the American Psychiatric Association first described an anxiety disorder called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders...
...Then, when they found out the perpetrator of the crime hadn't been caught, they would immediately lose interest...
...JoJo's friends also wanted desperately to find the person who could pay for his needless death...
...Everyone turned to watch...
...Naomi agrees...
...There were at least three dozen body bags stacked in rows," Manny later recounted...
...Manny, too, was hoping for a fresh start...
...These two families had little in common up until this moment...
...Limbs that were torn apart, they put them on top so they wouldn't get so messed up...
...But Manny was so completely different from how he had imagined that he was overcome with guilt that he hadn't come to meet him sooner...
...It's that I want a bigger kind of justice...
...Their idea is not to create another unfillable void...
...Once Bill made his decision, the justice system took over, rendering him and Linda immobilized spectators...
...Donna and the men were African-American...
...That had to affect anyone...
...Now, by this surreal coincidence, their lives were converging in the uncharted territory of irreconcilable loss...
...The last thing Manny remembered was dense fog and headlights narrowing into focus as he walked along the road in front of the Manor...
...Like I'm talking right now and five minutes later I see the person I was just talking to, their head laying over there, their arm, body parts, insides hanging out...
...Years later, as Manny's execution date drew near, Manny's attorney told Bill to track down Manny's five estranged children...
...For the Babbitt family, the ironies seemed infinite...
...They pulled over...
...The valley of Khe Sanh was about three miles from the North Vietnamese border, right next to the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...He was a jock and a poet...
...Open Wounds People often ask Naomi and Derrel who killed their son...
...Her haze now clearing, Naomi realized she knew nothing about her companions, not even where they stood on the death penalty...
...Ultimately, eleven years after his return from combat, the family decided that Manny should move to Sacramento to live with Bill...
...I felt like I had done a good thing, but something in the back of my mind told me I had done a bad thing," he says...
...The friend ran back to the car, got in, and urged JoJo to leave quickly because this man looked crazy...
...JoJo came from a stable, middle-class home...
...But how about preventing the lunatic from becoming one...
...All my brothers were...
...aircraft landed on a foggy airstrip where soldiers unloaded supplies and ammunition and picked up wounded comDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 57 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE' rades bound for hospital units...
...He repeated every grade in school until he dropped out at seventeen, a seventh grader...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 61...
...And to see my brother come home with a nice, bright white T-shirt, it was almost like, `You made it...
...GIs in Vietnam were also known to pilfer personal 58 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE' effects when they raided civilian homes (a practice known as souveniring), which explained why, rather than taking jewelry or a stereo, Manny stole small change, a watch, and a lighter...
...I didn't know where I was at, either...
...He challenged Manny to a game of pool over at Styx...
...He "came to" in unlikely places and started to disconnect from his wife and their children...
...Back in the minivan, the man in the backseat asked Derrel what his placard said...
...Somewhere along the gravel path leading away from the prison, her ankle buckled and she tumbled face forward in the darkness...
...When Manny insisted he didn't remember what happened that night, Detective Terry Brown was recorded on tape saying, "You know you're not going to go to the gas chamber or anything like that...
...JoJo answered, "No, no...
...Only one year before, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara initiated Project 100,000 to counteract the deficit caused by draft resistance and college deferments...
...involvement in the Vietnam War...
...The whole purpose of living," she says, "is not to replicate the bad things that were done to you or to do them to other people...
...Just a few years earlier, Bill considered himself a militant...
...Jesse looked over at Allen, Donna's husband, and gently nodded...
...Initially, we're looked at as being either psychos or saints," says Renny Cushing, Director of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR...
...Jesse, Allen, and Donna's son Charles tried to restrain her, but Donna broke free and bolted off toward the dark waters where a cliff dropped off into the San Francisco Bay...
...MVFR and other abolition groups consider the families of executed inmates like Manny to be murder victims' families...
...Unlike Manny, Ted Kaczynski—who is white and college-educated— was convicted of three counts of murder and granted life in prison...
...In the nineteen years following Leah Schendel's murder, her granddaughter, Laura Thompson, sought resolution—or at least some solace—in Manny's execution...
...In Stockton, California, Derrel Myers, a young man with working-class, rural roots, had considered joining the army at seventeen...
...It was like waiting for this murder to take place and I couldn't stand it...
...Robert Harrell, a vet from Manny's unit, remembers, "You were seeing people blown up, our friends, next to us...
...The pace at Khe Sanh was relentless and unpredictable...
...At various stages in the appeals process, Manny's attorneys posed the theory that Manny had seen Schendel's open door and burst through the screen door to take cover from what he imagined was enemy fire...
...Quest for Closure Though the Schendels and the White-Myers may never agree on the matter of punishment, both families have endured an insurmountable loss...
...That same year-1967—he enlisted in the Marines...
...Manny's mother, Josephine Piña Santiago, would eventually send four sons and two grandsons to serve in the military...
...Manny's eldest son, Manuel Jr., later told Donna that deep down he was hoping he wouldn't like his father...
...She attended every demonstration...
...Two men got out of a minivan and came to Naomi's side...
...At twentythree, JoJo was just coming into his own personally and politically...
...Middle School in San Francisco...
...Naomi and Derrel wanted this man off the streets, but Derrel tried to convey to them that he would never be satisfied with a fingerprint or a name or a positive ID...
...The "great leap" included providing evidence for the prosecution and aiding in Manny's arrest...
...Jesse climbed back into the minivan...
...But for families to know that a loved one is going to be killed and nobody will do anything about it . . . to me, that's barbaric...
...She had what looked like a leather strap tied around her ankle...
...Manny Babbitt never denied his role in Leah Schendel's murder...
...Babbitt, the convicted murderer awaiting execution, was a decorated African-American Marine Corps veteran who had survived the seventy-seven-day siege at Khe Sanh, Vietnam...
...He began organizing antiwar newspapers and coffeehouses where returning GIs could tell new recruits what they'd seen firsthand...
...His learning disability landed him in special education classes, where the majority of his classmates were poor people of color, and they became his cohort...
...From January to February 1968, the base was under direct attack in what became one of the bloodiest, costliest battles of the war...
...out in California and padding her clothes with newspaper to prepare for violent clashes with the police at the Oakland draft center...
...Donna and Allen joined them...
...The classic moral measuring stick for the question of capital punishment is, "What if your loved one were killed...
...His Brother's Keeper The act of turning his brother in reshaped the course of Bill Babbitt's life...
...He couldn't make sense of it...
...The particular conditions at Khe Sanh would become a crucial factor in Manny's clemency plea more than thirty years later...
...But he didn't simply turn in his brother as David Kaczynski did in the famous Unabomber case...
...She has written about the death penalty for National Public Radio affiliate KQED FM and the Los Angeles Times...
...It was to honor JoJo's blossoming political consciousness that they conDISSENT I Summer 2001 n 55 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE' tinned to participate to this degree in public demonstrations...
...The police never identified or apprehended JoJo's murderer...
...While on death row, Manny was belatedly awarded a Purple Heart...
...This young man killed somebody who would have stood up and defended him with his life," Naomi says...
...She called in to each radio station Bill Babbitt and David Kaczynski visited on their campaign to halt the execution...
...Donna started pounding on his chest...
...After Derrel first told JoJo's story at a San Quentin vigil under the auspices of an abolition group called Death Penalty Focus, he found himself surrounded by death penalty advocates...
...He went in there looking for a better life...
...Before he left Khe Sanh on one of these transports with a shard of shrapnel embedded in the lobe of his brain, Manny saw dozens die...
...With my hands, I'd feel around and move certain things...
...I was doing a lot of crying and I was sick from that and I started to vomit," Donna recalls...
...The driver and the man in the back seat took turns saying, "It's okay, Donna" and "We'll make it...
...Manny Babbitt's death certificate deems it "justifiable homicide...
...JoJo said, "No, peace...
...At that moment, the "crazy" young man walked up to the driver's side of the car and said to JoJo, "Are you trying to fuck with me...
...My wife was sleeping...
...Derrel remembers saying, "I understand your anger...
...Then he remembered reports in the newspaper about an old woman who'd been killed that week in the neighborhood...
...Schendel was found under a bloody bedspread, with no undergarments on, a nightgown pulled up above her waist, and a teapot placed over her genital area...
...Certainly, the ruptured screen door, the tagged ankle, the teapot, and the unhooked phone receiver (covered with fingerprints) indicated that Manny was not of sound mind when he entered and left the scene of the crime...
...Effectively, he lowered test standards so as to "recruit and rehabilitate" a hundred thousand previously ineligible GIs for service in Vietnam...
...For me, going to the police was an act of growing up and showing citizenship at its finest and showing faith in the system...
...Naomi has avoided accepting invitations from victims' groups that advocate tougher sentencing and execution of violent criminals...
...Bill considered giving Manny a bus ticket back to Providence...
...Donna remembers when Manny came home from boot camp on a furlough before leaving for Vietnam...
...He was in and out of institutions...
...And we wasn't but eighteen, nineteen...
...Before the two could exchange a word, a pair of headlights appeared...
...Bill spent several hours the next morning interviewing with police detectives...
...He knelt at the bedside...
...We'd get these reporters calling from all over," Naomi remembers...
...He'd been drinking and smoking dope...
...When Manny was twelve, he was hit by a car and sustained debilitating cerebral injuries...
...He turned around to Naomi and Derrel...
...Together with Derrel, the strangers lifted Naomi to her feet...
...Bill went in alone...
...Before she reached the edge, the three men caught up with her and held her while she wept...
...In a letter to Governor Davis, Leah Schendel's niece, Joyce Weinberg, asked that he uphold Manny's sentence...
...We were very, very poor...
...and the rest of Manny's children surrounded Bill at the podium of a rally and publicly forgave him, as Manny long ago had done, for his decision to turn Manny in to the police...
...Earlier that evening, in the same crowd, Manny's youngest sister, Donna Kendricks, experienced similar symptoms...
...Protesters were barricading themselves in front of buses full of inductees going off to Vietnam...
...In December of 1980, Bill Babbitt had turned his brother in to the police when he discovered evidence pointing to Manny as the perpetrator of the highly publicized Sacramento murder...
...She had been fasting for a few days in anticipation of this night...
...He handed Linda the article and said, "I think Manny did this...
...has] created an emptiness that can never be replaced," she wrote...
...The Cape Verdean people were colonized and ripped off culturally and economically by the Portuguese, sort of like France ripped off the Vietnamese," Bill says...
...But until the end, he claimed he had no recollection of it...
...He attacked her, and according to the autopsy, she fought back as best she could...
...I really couldn't believe they'd let someone like that into the Marines...
...He looked really good and I was really proud of him...
...But both potential employers and potential girlfriends were put off by his manner and by his morbid obsession with the war...
...The man pulled out a pistol and shot him in the heart...
...He accompanied them to Donna's house...
...As in the case of Leah Schendel, the motivation of JoJo's attacker was unclear...
...Schendel liked to play the nickel slots on the trips she took with her sister to Reno...
...Naomi remembered reading in the paper that Manny had a sister named Donna...
...Jesse listened and nodded...
...An all-white jury convicted Manny of first-degree murder with special circumstances—burglary and attempted rape—which qualified him for the death penalty...
...Just after midnight, Jesse Morris, one of the public defenders on the Babbitt case, got a call on his cell phone saying the stay had been lifted...
...Her husband, Derrel Myers, knelt down beside her...
...Jesse Morris got another call on his cell phone...
...Just two months beforehand, Manny had left Providence, Rhode Island, to stay with Bill, Bill's wife, Linda, and their children in Sacramento...
...Then David began to speak publicly about the inequities between the two cases...
...They threw me on top of a few of them...
...At that moment, he said, he flashed back to the airstrip at Khe Sanh...
...Six months after his visit home, Manny's unit arrived at the American military base at Khe Sanh...
...Naomi and Derrel had tried to instill in JoJo a sense of social responsibility...
...Manny was on this airstrip when he sustained his injury...
...At 10 P.M., she started to feel lightheaded...
...When the news of Jojo's murder first broke, it was a constant question...
...Manny was sent to kill colonial subjects like us...
...When she collapsed, he covered her body with a bedspread...
...A few rolls of coins, a watch, and an engraved cigarette lighter were also missing...
...Manny later told his brother Bill he felt sorry for the Vietnamese people...
...Throughout the barrage of incoming and outgoing mortar fire, U.S...
...Linda worked nights as a corrections officer...
...What really mattered, they explained in a joint editorial following Jobo's death, was not who killed Job°, but what killed JoJo...
...Seven relatives of the victim, seventy-eightyear -old Leah Schendel, also watched from the observation room...
...And the messy ironies dredged up at executions are not lost on the eclectic coalition of organizations known as the "death penalty abolition" movement...
...Then Bill found a piggy bank stuffed with five or six rolls of nickels and a cigarette lighter engraved with the initials LS...
...The death penalty creates a hierarchy of victims that somehow seems to say that somebody's loss is greater than somebody else's," Renny says...
...But the Babbitts and the White-Myers family agree that the "eye-for-an-eye" mentality perpetuates an endless domino reaction...
...Derrel refused to sign the loyalty oath...
...So do I." Derrel explained that on January 19, 1996, their twenty-three year old son was shot to death in cold blood on his way home from work at Martin Luther King Jr...
...When it comes to an execution, it doesn't matter how many times you kill somebody," Renny says...
...Manny didn't try to resist...
...He left the Styx on foot, using a shortcut that ran from the rundown strip mall where the bar was located through Sacramento Manor to Bill's house...
...Charles foresaw the hardship and indignity his children would face, and he 56 • DISSENT / Summer 2001 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE' wanted to toughen them up...
...At Khe Sanh, soldiers covered dead bodies with anything at hand in order to preserve them...
...Manny fell for it...
...But neither he nor Linda wanted to live with that kind of burden...
...At this point, Naomi turned to Derrel and said, "Let's get out of here...
...Supreme Court review of his case...
...She and Donna also tried to introduce him to a number of single women...
...during the day she drove Manny to job interviews...
...Bill wanted to get help for his brother, a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder...
...Earlier that evening, about seven hundred death penalty opponents descended on San Quentin— schoolchildren, folksingers, and burly Vietnam vets—engulfing the usual contingent of about twenty death penalty supporters...
...Before the end of the day, Bill agreed to help get Manny to confess...
...On the night of the murder, Manny had been shooting pool at a bar called Styx, one block from Schendel's home...
...When he'd whip us," Bill Babbitt recalls, "he used to say he was doing it so we didn't end up in prison...
...Long before the murder investigation ended, Naomi and Derrel realized they needed to refocus their efforts...
...Soldiers then carted him onto a helicopter bound for the hospital ship in Da Nang...
...GABRIELLE BANKS is a writer in San Francisco...
...Then he walked over to Donna and whispered something...
...Peace, brother...
...He startled Schendel, who was four foot ten and weighed under a hundred pounds...
...They wanted to spend more time remembering their son and less time in pursuit of the perpetrator...
...Naomi and Derrel, white human rights activists who had come of age during the Vietnam War, had come to San Quentin to protest what they considered a premeditated murder...
...One of the key selling points district attorneys use when they approach victims' families about pursuing the death penalty is the alluring possibility of closure...
...Some heads and some arms and stuff like that...
...Donna didn't ask why...
...Manny Babbitt got swept up in the tide...
...But by the time he was called to register for the draft at twenty-two, he had undergone a political awakening...
...Bill didn't want to ride in the patrol car with Manny...
...Pasted to the posterboard was a blow-up of Naomi and Derrel's late son, JoJo, with the words "My son opposed the death penalty...
...However, by the time the Veterans Administration opened the first facility to treat patients with PTSD, Manny Babbitt was living on death row...
...I'll take you to your car now," he said...
...He couldn't contain his tears or get a handle on his emotions...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
