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  1. #1
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    Kerry Lyn Dalton - California Death Row




    Kerry Lyn Dalton


    Summary of Offense:

    Convicted and sentenced to death for the 1988 torture and murder of Irene Louise “Melanie” May.

    Dalton was sentenced to death in San Diego County on May 23, 1995.

  2. #2
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    April 4, 2002

    Jillian's side of the story

    I'd heard that she had an interesting story. A sad story. One she was eager to tell because she was still angry.

    Jillian Hansert answered the door of her Colerain Township apartment with an exceptionally cute newborn baby tucked in the crook of one arm. Sarah, she says, born March 22. Jillian rubs her finger absently through the infant's abundant dark hair. The baby looks like her mother, she says.

    Mothers and daughters. That's what Jillian wants to talk about.

    A year ago, in a business law class at Colerain High School, Jillian was watching a taped TV show about women on California's death row. As Joan Lunden interviewed Kerry Lyn Dalton, Jillian realized she was listening to the woman who murdered her mother. “It made me feel kind of sick,” she says.

    A perfectly understandable reaction.

    Before she died in 1988, Irene Louise May was beaten, stabbed, injected with battery acid and tortured with electric shocks. Jillian knew these things, having read news accounts. But she had never seen the woman convicted of the murder.

    “Then I had to listen to her talk about how tough it was for her to be in prison,” Jillian says. “She said her children don't come to see her. At least, that's their choice. I have no choice. She took that away from me.”

    It made her angry, she says, that the woman had a national audience for her complaints. “They never asked me how I felt.”

    Bad memories

    Jillian was only 5 when her mother was killed. Her memories are not good. Addicted to drugs, Irene May often left Jillian and her two younger brothers to fend for themselves. “We'd be in the bedroom, kind of hiding, and I'd try to take care of them,” she says.

    It's hard, she says, to separate “what I really remember from what I've been told over and over.” She believes she sometimes begged for food. But she knows that she did her best to take care of her little brothers.

    “My mother loved us,” she says. “She was trying to stay clean.” She has seen records from San Diego social services. The children had been removed from their home, but their mother was trying to get them back. “She never got the chance to be a better person.”

    Jillian was adopted two weeks before her seventh birthday. “They wouldn't let me be adopted with my brothers,” she says. “Because all I wanted to do was to take care of them. I thought that was my job.”

    At age 5.

    Now, here comes the good part. Her adoptive parents are Steve and Cinda Gorman, co-pastors of Westwood First Presbyterian Church. “I came with a lot of baggage,” Jillian says, “but I'm proud of who I became. And I love the family I have now.” This includes her husband, Charlie, a mechanic.

    As we talk, Sarah fusses a little, and Jillian soothes her. Competently. Kindly. A good mom, I am thinking.

    Child neglect, drugs, murder. A tiny girl hiding with her brothers, thinking they were her responsibility. Then taking on real responsibility as an adult.

    Proud of who she became.

    Writing her own ending to the story.

    Source

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Dalton filed her direct appeal on December 21, 2006.

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    Woman crusades to save sister’s life, end the death penalty

    They stood in front of a shopping mall, shackled together, heads down, nameplates dangling around their necks, bearing the names of men and women who have died on America’s death row.

    Cal Brown.

    Teresa Lewis.

    Cameron Todd Willingham.

    Behind them, stood Victoria Ann Thorpe, dark makeup painted on her cheeks and a sign painted to look like blood stains waving above her head: “Their blood is on our hands.”

    Somehow, despite Thorpe’s gory exterior, she’s approachable.

    “Would you like information on the death penalty?” she asks shoppers as they exit the mall, unable to avert their eyes from the scene in front of them. She hands them a clipboard and one by one, they fill out postcards showing their support to abolish the death penalty in Washington. The cards will later be sent to state lawmakers. The group has also protested at Gonzaga University and so far has collected more than 200 signatures.

    Thorpe, along with the Safe and Just Alternatives organization and The Inland Northwest Death Penalty Abolition Group, is seeking to pass a state law to replace the death penalty in Washington state with life without parole.

    Some passersby wave Thorpe away. Some argue.

    “The Bible says eye for an eye,” says one man, clutching a novel by Frank Peretti, a popular Christian fiction author.

    “I understand sir, but...”

    He interrupts, anger rising, “If you want to let them all go, then you can’t complain when they come into your house and kill you!”

    He storms away.

    What the man doesn’t know is that Thorpe’s older sister, Kerry Lyn Dalton, has been on California’s death row for almost 18 years. (On Nov. 6, Californians will vote on a ballot initiative that will decide whether to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

    Thorpe remembers when she got that phone call in 1992.

    “Vickie, I been arrested for something — something real bad ... You’ll see it in the paper but don’t believe it! Not any of it!,”

    Kerry, a methamphetamine addict, had called for help before. But this was different. Her words were mumbled. Her voice was nasally. She was hysterical.

    “They say I — I — I killed someone.”

    Thorpe writes about the phone call in her new book, “Cages” where she tells the story of her troubled childhood and her sister’s murder trial. She also writes about her own spiritual transformation from “Bible toting right-wing Christian...(who) wore long loose dresses and sensible shoes” to a survivor of spiritual abuse, forging her own divine path.

    “Women were worthless in my family, absolutely worthless,” she recalls.

    Today, she considers herself a spiritual person, but not somebody who subscribes to a particular denomination — anything that stands for compassion is something she can support, she says.

    There’s no evidence of such fragmented confidence when Thorpe speaks publicly about her sister, about “Cages,” or about the injustices of the death penalty. With a tender smile she responds to all questions and contentions.

    No, she says, the death penalty isn’t a violent crime deterrent.

    No, she says, life without parole isn’t more expensive than an execution.

    No, she says, her sister didn’t kill Irene “Melanie” Louise May.

    Dalton was accused of torturing and murdering May in 1988 at a mobile home park in Live Oak Springs, California. She was arrested in 1992, convicted of first degree murder in 1995, and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

    In “Cages,” Thorpe explains that her sister was sentenced based on hearsay evidence. According to court records, Dalton allegedly killed May using a cast-iron frying pan, a knife and a syringe filled with battery acid. But there was no crime scene, she notes. No evidence. Not even a dead body; May was never found.

    Thorpe, who spent three years writing “Cages” and has re-read the 4,000 page court transcript again and again, maintains that her sister was wrongly accused as a way to get attention off the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, which had been unable to solve a series of serial murders in the area.

    “By the end of the book I think there should be a sinking feeling of’Oh, wait a minute, how’d they convict her?’” Thorpe says.

    Dalton is still waiting for her first appeal.

    “My viewpoint used to be that the system was wonderful and perfect and only out for justice,” Thorpe said in interview. “I thought the district attorney was the truth seeker. And I thought prosecutors were looking for the truth. Nope.”

    Thorpe, of course, wants her sister’s case re-examined. But, she says, even if her sister were guilty, “I wouldn’t want her tortured in a cage, waiting to be killed, like she is now.”

    And Dalton literally is living in a cage — nine cells with a’cage’ over it where she lives with 19 other women at the Central California’s Women’s Facility. (Some of the women sleep outside of the cage because of space limitations). The special enclosure was built in 1991 when the first women were sent there to await execution.

    “It’s just like a zoo cage. It’s heavy mesh with a metal roof. Nobody goes in, and nobody goes out,” Thorpe described.

    The death penalty is legal in 33 states, including Washington, which has seven people “on the row.” But there has been an increased focus on the justice of the system. Since 1992, 15 death row inmates have been wrongfully accused and released back into society, according to The Innocence Project.

    Thorpe believes there are numerous innocent people in prison, but says that’s not the only reason why she wants the death penalty abolished. She says the death penalty is itself an evil that ruins lives by promoting revenge.

    ‘The death penalty doesn’t work, we cannot reconcile the past,” she said. “It stigmatizes the convicted as monsters, allowing us not to think of them as humans, taking away the guilt ... and allowing the state to kill another human being.”

    Jesus, she says, wouldn’t stand for such a thing.

    “Nothing that he did or said can be manipulated into harshness. He’s an example of a loving human being,” she said, adding that people need to learn a convict’s story, before judging them.

    “I believe good is at the heart of everything and love is at the heart of everything and pain and hate comes from hurt and injury.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...a_story_1.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  5. #5
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Dalton's case has been fully briefed on direct appeal before the California Supreme Court since June 9, 2009.

    Dalton also filed a habeas petition before the California Supreme Court on December 7, 2009.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...doc_no=S046848

  6. #6
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    Dalton's state habeas case has been fully briefed since June 2, 2014.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...pSMCAgCg%3D%3D

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    i ve just found a interview with Kerry Lyn Dalton. video also shows inside world's largest maximum security prison for women, the Central California Women's Facility. İnterview starts 4:08.


  8. #8
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On February 5, 2019, oral argument will be heard in Dalton's direct appeal before the California Supreme Court.

    http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/c...s/SFEB519A.PDF

  9. #9
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    In today's opinions, the California Supreme Court REVERSED Dalton's death sentence and ordered her to be re-sentenced to 25 years to life.

    https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/d...ts/S046848.PDF

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