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Thread: Kevin Thurmond - Florida

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    Kevin Thurmond - Florida

    Court to resentence Boynton man who killed rival when he was 17

    For a moment, Circuit Judge Charles Burton stared at 46-year-old Kevin Thurmond as Thurmond spoke, as if he were studying the face of the convicted murderer who has been behind bars since he was 17.

    Burton would later tell a prosecutor and Thurmond’s lawyers that he would take the next few weeks to decide whether to shorten his life sentence for the May 1988 shooting death of Johnny Anderson, whose only crime was to be the new boyfriend of the girl who had aborted Thurmond’s baby and broken up with him.

    But on Monday afternoon, face to face with Thurmond after his family members and others recalled the harrowing details of abuse and neglects that scarred his childhood, Burton only had one question. What was it like, he asked Thurmond, to grow up in prison?

    “Judge,” Thurmond responded, carefully choosing his words. “The way I made it through all this time was fear. I didn’t want to get hurt, I didn’t want to cause anyone to hurt. I didn’t want to live the way I came in.”

    Fear, Assistant Public Defender Crystal Kim and Palm Beach County Public Defender Carey Haughwout showed Burton through testimony in the hearing, was a great part of Thurmond’s life.

    Born to an alcoholic mother who witnesses say once tried to throw him in a canal and ultimately rejected him outright while opting to raise his siblings, Thurmond was bounced around to several homes.

    He spent some of his years with a Boynton Beach woman, Mary Carpenter, where babysitters sexually abused him and a mentally deranged relative in that house routinely chased him and the other children through the house with a knife.

    The son of sharecroppers, his father had at least 13 other children with three women and “maintained three different households,” Kim said, despite not working regularly.

    A half-sister, Burshelle Thurmond, said she and Thurmond at one point were both living in one of the homes of a woman who had mothered another set of their father’s children. That mother treated all the children who weren’t hers differently, the sister said, but Kevin got the worst treatment of all.

    He was often last to eat, she said, also remembering an incident where he was jumped by a group of boys at a local pool and had to run all the way home to avoid their blows.

    “I was just hurt because I couldn’t help him,” Burshelle Thurmond, four years younger than her brother, said on the witness stand. “He was very caring, very sweet. I can’t say anything bad about him.”

    Chad Carpenter was raised in the Carpenter house with Thurmond and said he considered Thurmond a brother, best friend and father he never had. He said Thurmond many times bore the brunt of the abuse and was beaten even for Carpenter’s mistakes.

    Carpenter testified at Monday’s hearing in shackles himself. When Burton asked him why he was in prison, he said murder.

    A psychologist later testified for the defense that Thurmond’s upbringing left him deeply scarred. So by the time he met Evelyn Tucker, whose family briefly took him in, the loss of what would have been his father’s first grandchild and subsequent breakup made him view Anderson as the one thing standing in the way of getting back the closest thing he’d ever felt to both love and family.

    Assistant State Attorney Terri Skiles acknowledged Thurmond’s upbringing was rough, but said that in no way mitigated the fact that Thurmond spent at least two days telling people of his plans to kill Anderson and even asked a few people for a gun — a classic case of premeditation, she said.

    Skiles also dismissed Kim’s references to two- to 15-year maximum punishments for juveniles convicted of crimes in countries such as Brazil, the Netherlands and Japan. Skiles said if Thurmond wanted to get off that lightly, he should’ve committed his crimes there.

    And although she didn’t call any witnesses on the state’s behalf Monday, Skiles said Anderson’s mother was scheduled to testify during the first part of the hearing weeks ago but called and backed out.

    “She could not bear to be here,” Skiles said, adding that the family’s anxiety over the years has increased with every call of an appellate ruling, new trial or other issue in Thurmond’s case. “She said ‘I just can’t do it anymore.’ She said her heart couldn’t take it.”

    Prosecutors once pursued the death penalty against Thurmond, but jurors tasked with deciding his punishment at the end of a 1989 trial took just half an hour to decide that a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years was the appropriate punishment.

    Burton is reviewing the sentence following a series of high court decisions regarding juvenile offenders.

    In back-to-back rulings, the Supreme Court said it’s unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life with no chance for parole. The court ruled that because their brains aren’t fully developed, juveniles act impetuously. The justices said offenders that age can be rehabilitated and therefore must be given the opportunity to prove they can live outside prison walls.

    Burton said he will issue a written ruling in Thurmond’s case at a later date.

    http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/...sIlJAnyrbKUoO/
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    The justices said offenders that age can be rehabilitated and therefore must be given the opportunity to prove they can live outside prison walls.
    ... sadly that appears to go pear shaped with regularity.

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