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Thread: Pennsylvania Capital Punishment History

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Pennsylvania Capital Punishment History

    Pennsylvania Death Penalty
    History & Statistics of the Death Penalty in PA

    Execution as a form of punishment in Pennsylvania dates back to the time the first colonists arrived in the late 1600s. At that time, public hanging was capital punishment for a variety of crimes, ranging from burglary and robbery, to piracy, rape, and buggery (in Pennsylvania at the time, "buggery" referred to sex with animals).

    In 1793, William Bradford, Attorney General of Pennsylvania published "An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania." In it, he strongly insisted that the death penalty be retained, but admitted it was useless in preventing certain crimes. In fact, he said the death penalty made convictions harder to obtain, because in Pennsylvania (and all other states), the death penalty was mandatory and juries would often not return a guilty verdict because of this fact. In response, in 1794, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished capital punishment for all crimes except murder "in the first degree," the first time murder had been broken down into "degrees."

    Public hangings soon grew into lurid spectacles and, in 1834, Pennsylvania became the first state in the union to abolish these public hangings. For the next eight decades, each county carried out its own "private hangings" within the walls of its county jail.

    Electric Chair Executions in Pennsylvania
    The execution of capital cases became the responsibility of the state in 1913, when the electric chair took the place of the gallows. Erected in the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, Centre County, the electric chair was nicknamed "Old Smokey." Although capital punishment by electrocution was authorized by legislation in 1913, neither the chair nor the institution were ready for occupancy until 1915.

    In 1915, John Talap, a convicted murderer from Montgomery County, was the first person executed in the chair. On April 2, 1962, Elmo Lee Smith, another convicted murderer from Montgomery County, was the last of 350 people, including two women, to die in the Pennsylvania electric chair.

    Lethal Injection in Pennsylvania
    On November 29, 1990, Gov. Robert P. Casey signed legislation changing Pennsylvania's method of execution from electrocution to lethal injection and, on May 2, 1995, Keith Zettlemoyer became the first person executed by lethal injection in Pennsylvania. The electric chair was turned over to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

    Pennsylvania's Death Penalty Statute
    In 1972, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Bradley that the death penalty was unconstitutional, using as precedence the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia. At the time, there were about two dozen death cases in the Pennsylvania prison system. All were removed from death row and sentenced to life. In 1974, the law was resurrected for a time, before the PA Supreme Court again declared the law to be unconstitutional in a December 1977 decision. The state legislature quickly drafted a new version, which went into effect in September 1978, over the veto of Governor Shapp. This death penalty law, which remains in effect today, has been upheld in several recent appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    How is the Death Penalty Applied in Pennsylvania?
    The death penalty may only be applied in Pennsylvania in cases where a defendant is found guilty of first degree murder. A separate hearing is held for the consideration of aggravating and mitigating circumstances. If at least one of the ten aggravating circumstances listed in the law and none of the eight mitigating factors are found to be present, the verdict must be death.

    The next step is formal sentencing by the judge. Frequently, there is a delay between the sentence verdict and formal sentencing as post-trial motions are heard and considered. An automatic review of the case by the state Supreme Court follows sentencing. The court can either uphold the sentence or vacate for imposition of a life sentence.

    If the Supreme Court affirms the sentence, the case goes to the Governor's Office where it is reviewed by appropriate legal counsel and, ultimately, by the Governor himself. Only the Governor may set the execution date, which is done through the signing of a document known as the Governor's Warrant. By law, all executions are carried out at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview.

    http://pittsburgh.about.com/cs/penns...th_penalty.htm

  2. #2
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    True crime: The Reinert murder rocked our area



    A quiet English teacher who was the mother of two young children. A beloved and trusted fiancé who was a fellow English teacher and a devoted follower of poet Ezra Pound. A suburban high-school principal who had served as an Air Force colonel.

    But two of those three had a double life that eventually led to murder. Turns out the trusted fiancé was living with another woman while dating at least two other women, one of whom was a former student, while badmouthing the woman who believed she was his fiancée to anyone who would listen. The principal turned out to have a strong fascination with Satan and bestiality and was arrested for armed robbery after being found with guns, drugs, pornography and nitric acid.

    The trio’s twisted involvement ended in the brutal murder of the quiet teacher and the disappearance of her two children. It would take years but eventually both the fiancé and the principal would be found guilty of their murders.

    Sound like the stuff movies are made of? It was. Actually one television miniseries and four crime novels. Unfortunately for those who loved Susan Reinert, a 36-year-old teacher from Ardmore, and her two children, Karen, 11, and Michael, 10, the story was all too real.

    June 25, 1979, and June 25, 1985

    While Susan Reinert’s nude and badly battered body was found stuffed in the trunk of her car in the parking lot of a Harrisburg hotel on June 25, 1979, the bodies of her two children were nowhere to be found.

    On the sixth anniversary of her death, June 25, 1985, Principal Jay Smith was charged with Reinert’s murder, three years after her “fiancé,” William Bradfield, had been charged and convicted with conspiracy to commit the three murders, even though the bodies of the children had never been found.

    Theirs were not the only bodies that were never found. About a year earlier, Smith’s daughter, Stephanie, and her husband, Edward Hunsberger, both said to be heroin addicts, went missing. For years rumors abounded that Smith may have killed all four of them, while other rumors had the Hunsbergers raising the Reinert children in some obscure location.

    Thirty-two years later the four victims remain unfound as the fascination with the murder mystery continues, even though both Smith and Bradfield have since died, with each maintaining his own innocence while accusing the other of the murders.

    A fiancé and an inheritance

    Susan Reinert was living in Ardmore, having recently been divorced from her husband, Ken, when she began dating a fellow English teacher at Upper Merion Area High School. The quiet woman, who wore large glasses and kept mostly to herself, was drawn to William Bradfield, a man with blue eyes and a beard who didn’t have the appearance of a lying Lothario, but whose charismatic personality seemed to draw women to him.

    While Reinert did not mind keeping their relationship quiet, Bradfield was busy denying there even was a relationship. He would tell fellow teachers and friends that he and Reinert were just colleagues and that he was not the least bit romantically interested in her. He told this to not only his friends but also to the woman he lived with, Susan Myers. She was a teacher at the same high school.

    Over time Reinert became so enamored of Bradfield, and so certain of her happily-ever-after future with him, that she changed the beneficiary in her life insurance from her brother and two children to Bradfield. She made Bradfield the sole beneficiary of her insurance, and even added to her insurance so that he would inherit $730,000 should she die. With the new insurance policy, in which Reinert called Bradfield “my intended husband,” her children wouldn’t get even a penny.

    From the beginning of the murder investigation, prosecutors believed the inheritance was one of the motives for Reinert’s death and that Bradfield was one of their prime suspects.

    Bradfield arrested for $25,000 theft

    Even after years of investigating the murders, there was not enough evidence to charge Bradfield with Reinert’s death. But there was enough evidence for prosecutors to charge Bradfield with theft by deception, stemming from the allegations that Bradfield had convinced Reinert to withdraw $25,000 from her bank and invest with him in what turned out to be a bogus investment.

    While still in jail awaiting the trial, Bradfield made what many believe to be the most brazen of all his actions. Just 72 hours before his theft trial was to begin, Bradfield filed suit from his jail cell to collect Reinert’s life-insurance money.

    Also arrested in connection with the $25,000 theft was another of Bradfield’s paramours, Wendy Zeigler. Police allege she had hidden the money in a safe-deposit box, at Bradfield’s request, and had later withdrawn the money the day Reinert and her children disappeared. While investigators were not really interested in sending Ziegler to jail, they did want to scare her into cooperating with the case against Bradfield. Her arrest did the trick.

    She was just one of many witnesses who testified in the trial as the jury found him guilty on Aug. 3, 1981. He was sentenced to up to two years in jail.

    Confiscated pornography, guns and drugs

    Even before Susan Reinert was murdered, Principal Jay Smith found himself in trouble, both with the law and with his school colleagues. Nicknamed by some “the Prince of Darkness,” Smith’s unusual personality was often the topic of conversation in the faculty lounge. After the murders, the rumor mills went into overdrive with tales of teachers involved in swinging sex parties and devil worship and allegations Smith had burned bodies in the school incinerator and buried chopped-up body parts on the school grounds.

    Smith had come to the attention of law enforcement long before Reinert was murdered.

    On Aug. 19, 1978, Smith was arrested at the Gateway Shopping Center in Chester County after police were called to the scene for suspicious activity. Found in his Ford Granada were several loaded handguns, a hooded mask, a syringe filled with a tranquilizing drug and several other items described by police as burglary and robbery tools. Smith tried to explain away the devastating evidence, saying he had the guns because he needed to “scare off” people who were harassing him and the drugs must have belonged to his addicted son-in-law.

    A search of Smith’s home revealed even more secrets and evidence, including more drugs and guns, security-guard uniforms and badges, and a slew of pornography, much of which dealt with bestiality. Also found were four gallons of nitric acid and office equipment, all allegedly stolen from Upper Merion Area High School.

    The ensuing investigation eventually linked Smith to armed robberies at two Sears stores, in St. Davids and at the Neshaminy Mall. On both cases the robber had been dressed in a bank security-guard uniform and pretended he was there to pick up the day’s receipts.

    Among the defense witnesses at Smith’s March 1979 trial was Bradfield, who offered him an alibi. Jurors apparently didn’t buy it as they found Smith guilty. He was free on bail while appealing the conviction.

    Bradfield arrested for murder

    Almost four years after Susan Reinert’s death, her fiancé, Bradfield, was arrested and charged with the three murders on April 6, 1983. Testimony during the trial included details about Reinert’s will and her belief the two would be married as well as Bradfield’s conversation with friends in which he professed his concern for Reinert that Smith might kill her. In none of the testimony did any witness say Bradfield shared those concerns for Reinert’s life with either Reinert herself or any police official.

    Although Smith was not on trial at the time, and would in fact not even be charged with the murders for another two years, much of the state’s testimony connected evidence between Reinert and Smith, including a hair from Reinert matching one taken from Smith’s house as well as a comb found in the car under Reinert’s body that belonged to Smith’s Air Force unit. The defense later proved that while the comb seemed damaging at first, it was discovered hundreds of that comb had been given out at a promotional event.

    In fact little of the physical evidence in the case connected Bradfield to the actual murder. Instead the state sought to connect Bradfield to Smith and suggested the two had been involved in a conspiracy to kill Reinert. Her children, they argued, were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    On the advice of his defense attorney, Bradfield never testified in his own defense. On Oct. 28, 1983, he was found guilty on three counts of conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to three life sentences to be served consecutively.

    While serving his sentence at Graterford Prison, Bradfield tutored fellow inmates and helped them file appeals. He died in January 1998 of a heart attack at the age of 64, never admitting any guilt.

    Smith goes on and off death row

    While still in jail on robbery charges, Smith was arrested on murder charges on June 25, 1985, the sixth anniversary of Reinert’s murder.

    Although trying to blame the other man didn’t prove successful in Bradfield’s trial, Smith’s defense attorney, William Costopoulos, sought to show Smith was innocent of the murders and had in fact been framed for them by Bradfield. Among the witnesses produced by prosecutors was a former police officer in jail on burglary charges who claimed Smith confessed the murders to him.

    At the age of 58, Smith was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to death. While he awaited his execution in a tiny, isolated cell on death row, Costopoulos filed an appeal, citing among other things prosecutorial misconduct. Just in time for Christmas 1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Smith was entitled to a new trial, thereby ushering Smith off death row.

    Costopoulos didn’t stop there. He campaigned for a change to the state’s double-jeopardy law and while it took three years for the state Supreme Court to rule, it did so in Smith’s favor. In late September 1992 Smith was released from prison. Still proclaiming his innocence, Smith died in May 2009 at the age of 80 of a heart condition.

    http://mainlinemedianews.com/article...mode=fullstory

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Addict Stro07's Avatar
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    May 3, 1995

    Pa. Last Carried Out Death Penalty In 1962 - Elmo Smith Died For Raping And Killing A Manayunk Schoolgirl.

    The night of April 2, 1962, Gov. David L. Lawrence shuffled papers at his desk in Harrisburg, somberly awaiting what would turn out to be Pennsylvania's last execution in 33 years.

    Attorney General David Stahl paced uncomfortably in an adjoining office, watched by Lawrence's secretary and Saul Kohler, an Inquirer reporter whose deadline approached. No one spoke.

    About 100 miles away in Bellefonte, guards at Rockview Penitentiary, as the State Correctional Institution at Rockview was then known, strapped a freshly shaved murderer named Elmo Lee Smith into the great, solid-oak electric chair where 349 men and women had died since 1915. A chaplain loudly chanted ''Nearer My God to Thee." An open telephone line connected the governor to the death chamber.

    At 9:02 p.m., Kohler remembers, Lawrence raised the phone to his ear. Two minutes later, the governor called out to him through the open door.

    "Get your (rear) in gear, Kohler. He's dead."

    The execution of Smith, a 41-year-old handyman from Bridgeport, was front- page news throughout the Philadelphia area the next day.

    Predictably so. Smith's grisly rape and murder of a Manayunk schoolgirl in 1959 had horrified a public not yet numbed by such brutality.

    "Up until that case, I didn't like the death penalty. But the death penalty fit that crime," said Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Vincent A.

    Cirillo, who prosecuted Smith in 1960 when Cirillo was an assistant district attorney in Montgomery County.

    The victim, Maryann Theresa Mitchell, 16, was a student at Cecelian Academy who sang in school musicals and hoped to become a nurse. The week after Christmas 1959, Smith abducted her from a Philadelphia bus stop, raped her, beat her to death with a car jack and dumped her body in a roadside gully in Whitemarsh Township, Montgomery County.

    The case dominated news coverage for weeks. Smith had just been paroled after 10 years in prison for a series of assaults against Norristown-area women, one of whom nearly died. He was also suspected, but never charged, in the rape and murder of a 5-year-old Montgomery County girl in 1947.

    Publicity was so intense that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered Smith's trial moved halfway across the state to Gettysburg. He was convicted and, on Sept. 1, 1960, sentenced to death.

    Feelings ran high, even in Gettysburg. As Smith was taken to court one day a woman rushed at him, screaming, "You rat, you rat!" After trial he was returned to Montgomery County, where a mob of 500 threw stones and yelled, ''Hang him."

    "It was like a typical Wild West mob scene," Cirillo said.

    Yet, compared with the coverage of the murder itself, the attention paid Smith's execution was minimal.

    "When he walked the last mile, it was anticlimactic," said Kohler, who now works in public relations but who covered the crime, trial and execution. ''Every little detail was not out there on the front page like it was World War III."

    Times were different then. Murder still shocked the public, but capital punishment, if not wholly accepted, had not become the political tinder it is today.

    Gov. Lawrence, for example, opposed the death penalty and was not afraid to say so. Enough state legislators felt likewise that a bill to abolish capital punishment in Pennsylvania was debated in 1961.

    The governor halted executions until the bill could be voted upon. When it failed, Lawrence lifted his moratorium in the fall of 1961.

    Smith's attorneys appealed his death sentence. While never disputing his guilt, they said he was insane and should have been spared.

    Smith, a native of Virginia, grew up in Chester County, served in the Army during World War II, married and had a son in 1947.

    After the child's birth, Smith launched a string of random burglaries and vicious attacks on women. He beat one with a milk bottle, another with a frying pan, another with a rolling pin. Some he attempted to rape. Others he jumped at on the street, nude.

    The judge who sent him to prison in 1948 called Smith a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality who should never be released. A psychiatrist said he had "sexual tendencies which led to caveman tactics," yet Smith received no treatment before being paroled.

    In the murder case, prosecution psychiatrists deemed him sane, with an

    average IQ. But two defense psychiatrists called him a schizophrenic unable to control his impulses.

    Toward the end, Smith ordered his lawyers to drop their appeals.

    The morning of his execution, he rode in a four-car motorcade from Graterford prison to Bellefonte. He spent the day in one of six triple-locked, death-row cells, where he was bathed, shaved, fed, fingerprinted, photographed, weighed, dressed in blue-and-white prison clothes and allowed to read the Bible. A prison chaplain visited five times to pray with him.

    At 8:55 p.m., the cell was unlocked. Smith was led 13 paces to the death chamber as the chaplain walked ahead of him.

    Minutes later, Pennsylvania's 350th electrocution was over. As a doctor pronounced Elmo Smith dead, a prison official lifted the phone to notify the governor.

    http://articles.philly.com/1995-05-0...cution-cirillo

  4. #4
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Jail featuring 27 cells, dungeon, gallows is up for sale

    By Bo Koltnow

    WFMZ 69 News

    JIM THORPE, Pa. - Not often is a jail cell and graffiti from a 19th century death row inmate a selling point in real estate.

    In the case of the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe, they're building blocks of success.

    "It's a profitable business, a fun business," said owner Betty Lou McBride.

    After 24 years, McBride and her husband have put the Carbon County jail on the market for $750,000, WFMZ-TV reported.

    It has 27 cells, a dungeon, gallows and a lots of stories, like when a prisoner squeezed through a window to escape. The building is best known as the place where seven Irish coal miners known as the Molly Maguires were hanged.

    That nefarious history is a magnet for tourists.

    McBride says 24,000 visitors tour the jail in the three months it's open every year.

    Greg and Melissa Wakefield came to the area to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

    "We were in the Poconos and staying here. On the way home, this was one of the things we wanted to see," Wakefield said.

    WFMZ asked Alice Wanamaker, of the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, if closing the jail would affect the area.

    "It would impact visitors coming here to see the jail, the history, put their hand on the wall and see if it matches up kind of thing," she said.

    McBride, who gets visitors from every state and a dozen counties per year, calls the sale bittersweet and said they are in negotiations with a serious buyer, with tours set to continue.

    "The best part for me is meeting the nice people that walk in and having the chance to talk with them," she said.

    Jail attracts thousands of tourists each year

    https://www.krdo.com/lifestyle/jail-...sale/790841003

    I've actually been this to this prison. It's extremely tiny.
    Last edited by Mike; 09-05-2018 at 05:31 PM.

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