Victims always pay the price in system that mocks justice

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Anger is self-destructive. You have to let go of it. You have to get past it. That's what psychiatrists say.

Priests say it, too. And ministers and rabbis. Turn the other cheek. Hate the sin but love the sinner. Forgive.

Ten years ago, I read "Victim" by Gary Kinder. It told the story of Cortney Naisbitt, 16, the youngest son of Carol and Byron Naisbitt, a sophomore at Utah's Ogden High School. On the afternoon of April 22, 1974, Cortney flew solo for the first time. Flying was his passion. Soloing had been the culmination of a dream.

He was on his way home to tell his parents of his accomplishment when his life changed forever.

Cortney made a quick stop in downtown Ogden to pick up some slides for his parents and was cutting through a hi-fi shop to get to his car when the life he had lived for 16 years ended.

Two men were in the process of robbing the shop. One of them pointed a gun at Cortney's face, said, "Take another step and I'll put a bullet in you." He kicked the boy, punched him in the stomach and shoved him down the cellar stairs.

In the basement, another man tied Cortney's hands behind his back with plastic speaker wire, then bound his feet.

By the time the men finished stealing everything they could drive away with, five people were tied up in the store's basement: Cortney; Stan, a 20-year-old employee; Michelle, 19, also an employee; Stan's father and Cortney's mother, who had come looking for her son.

The thieves could have left the people bound, taken the goods and run. But they didn't. They chose not only to shoot each of them in the head, but to torture them first. They forced Drano down their throats, then bound their mouths so they couldn't spit it out, so it burned their tongues and their throats and their esophagi, so they writhed and gagged and choked in agony.

A half-hour later one of the men started shooting. Cortney heard a bullet enter his mother's head. Then he felt his own head explode. Stan's father was next. Then Stan. Then Michelle, but only after she was raped.

Michelle, Stan and Carol Naisbitt died that night. Stan's father and Cortney miraculously survived.

Within 24 hours, U.S. Airmen Dale Pierre and William Andrews were arrested and charged with first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. Seven months later a jury found the men guilty on all counts. Both were sentenced to death.

On Aug. 27, 1987, 13 years after the crimes, Dale Pierre was finally executed by lethal injection. His death was painless.

His partner, William Andrews, remains on death row. His 19 appeals and his 17 1/2 years behind bars have cost taxpayers nearly $1 million.

Andrews is scheduled to be executed July 30, but he has had six previous execution dates, so no one is counting on this one.

And so the travesty continues.

The book "Victim" focused only on one victim, Cortney Naisbitt. Cortney, who doesn't fly anymore because he can't remember how. Cortney, whose memory and motor skills were ravaged by a bullet. Cortney, whose insides were eaten away by acid, who has to be fed through a plastic tube, who saw his mother killed, saw her blood spill on the basement floor, who has spent more years as a victim than he lived as a non-victim.

Hate the sin but love the sinner? Forgive and forget? How is this possible when the sinner doesn't repent, when the sinner isn't sorry, when the sinner commits irreparable harm, yet continues to play legal games?

The hi-fi killings were acts of raw meanness. And yet to hear Steven Hawkins talk (Hawkins is a Utah attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) you would think that Andrews was the victim.

Andrews is black. So was Pierre. The victims were white. The jury was all white. Therefore, Andrews didn't get a fair trial, Hawkins maintains.

Andrews poured Drano down the throats of terrified, powerless people. He did nothing to stop his partner from shooting them in the head. Andrews is not a victim. He is irredeemable slime who should have been executed years ago, who should be force-fed Drano himself, not killed in any humane way.

Hawkins has said that Andrews' execution could spark a Los Angeles type riot. "William will be national news. This story will shock the nation."

What should shock the nation is that for 17 1/2 years a merciless killer has lingered on death row, making a mockery of the courts, of the system and of justice itself.