Parents of Murder Victims Speak Out : Personal Tragedies Fuel a Campaign Against Bird

Robert Henderson, a 56-year-old school bus driver from Murrieta, was talking about the murder of his son, a college student headed for the Peace Corps who was ambushed for no apparent reason along with a group of friends while they were making a film one afternoon eight years ago in the Mojave Desert.

The plain-spoken Henderson is neither intimidated nor intoxicated by the chance to tell his story to an audience, as he did most recently in El Centro. He said it was the 30th time he has spoken this year at a political gathering to rally voters against California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other members of the state Supreme Court.

Henderson proceeds matter-of-factly with the numbing account of his 24-year-old son’s murder and of the moment, just after the jury sentenced the killer to death, when the prosecutor took him aside and told him the sentence was sure to be reversed by the California Supreme Court.

“The prosecutor didn’t know why the court would do that. He just said they would find a way. And they did,” Henderson said. “I just don’t understand how they could do such a thing.”

Henderson is one of about two dozen people whose repeated stories of personal tragedy have given the campaign against Bird and Justices Joseph Grodin and Cruz Reynoso its cutting edge. These parents of butchered and bullet-riddled sons and daughters invite the crowds to share their anguish and their rage as they repeat their heart-rending stories and point a trembling finger at the court.

In reply, the justices argue that all of this is grossly unfair, that it makes tyrants of judges because they base their rulings on the law and not on raw emotion. They urge voters to reflect on the historic role of courts in society--to make sure that even those who commit the most despicable crimes receive fair trials.

Henderson, like the relatives of other murder victims who are campaigning against the three Supreme Court justices, does not say much about why the state Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of his son’s murderer. Instead, he recounts the grisly details of the crime--how the killer laughed as he fired point-blank into the chest of one victim who was pleading for her life, and how another victim, who survived to testify in court, watched his wife die in a torment of convulsions after she was shot.

Psychiatrist’s Testimony

Henderson tells audiences that the Supreme Court reversed the death sentence in the case because the justices objected to a psychiatrist’s testimony that the defendant was “violence prone.”

“Here you have a man who walks up to four people he has never met before and shoots them, and the court says it discriminates against his rights for a trained psychiatrist to testify that he has a homicidal nature,” Henderson said. “I don’t understand that. How can that possibly make any sense?”

In a 6-1 opinion with Bird, Grodin and Reynoso in the majority, the court did not take issue with testimony about the defendant’s prior history of threatening behavior. Rather, the court objected to the psychiatrist’s speculation that the defendant would commit violence in the future. The justices said it was wrong for a jury to decide whether a defendant should live or die based on “unreliable” and “frequently erroneous” psychiatric predictions about future conduct.

Hedging its conclusion a bit, the court said it might be willing to accept such predictions if the testifying psychiatrist had a long association with the defendant. But in this case, the court pointed out that the psychiatrist had interviewed the defendant just once.

Henderson still argues that the court used a “technicality” to reverse the death penalty.

Bird has said many times during the campaign that her heart goes out to parents like Henderson. Bird says she does not expect grief-stricken parents to appreciate the clinically dispassionate approach to all cases, including gruesome murder cases, that the court must take.

Politicians Blamed

Instead, Bird says she blames politicians and political consultants for using people like Henderson as cannon fodder in what she contends is a right-wing power play to get control of the Supreme Court.

Bird’s theory of the campaign does not go over well with Henderson. If one thing riles him, it is the notion that he is a pawn of politicians.

“I’m tired of being dismissed as some kind of stooge of fascist or totalitarianism bully boys. I’m tired of being called too stupid to understand how the courts work,” he said. The line was greeted with hearty applause in El Centro, and Henderson repeated it to similar effect at a rally a week later on the UCLA campus.

Henderson says no politician came to solicit his help in the campaign. He says he joined after the court reversed the death penalty of his son’s killer.

“I called a newspaper to try to find out if there was a group I could join that was campaigning against the court.”

Eventually, he said, he was directed to Crime Victims for Court Reform, one of the two largest organizations working to defeat Bird, Grodin and Reynoso.

Privately, Henderson said he does not doubt Bird’s intelligence or her sincerity.

“I’m sure she is very sincere in her beliefs. It’s just that I can’t accept them,” he said.

Henderson believes that the justices devote their talents to protecting the rights of criminal defendants. During his speech in El Centro, he quoted statistics showing that Bird, Grodin and Reynoso side with defendants in at least 80% of the cases that come before them.

The statistics go to the heart of one of the stickiest debates of the campaign--whether the court under Bird is soft on crime.

Figure Disputed

Opponents of the justices base their figure, the one cited by Henderson, on criminal convictions that the court has agreed to rehear. The court reverses most of those convictions. However, defenders of the court say that approach is not fair because it fails to take into consideration the many convictions that the court declines to hear and that are, as a result, automatically affirmed. When those cases are factored into the equation, it gives the court a conviction rate of well over 80%.

Prosecutors, police officers and other political opponents of the justices say that, regardless of which figure is correct, the statistics do not begin to reflect the devastating impact of the court’s rulings. They argue that a single reversal can jeopardize hundreds of pending cases by disqualifying time-honored law enforcement procedures.

But there are dissenters from that view, even within the ranks of court critics.

Philip Johnson, a law professor at UC Berkeley who has emerged as academia’s most outspoken critic of the court, said that while the court is overly indulgent of criminal defendants, its decisions have not set back law enforcement in California.

“Some of the decisions have made it harder to get convictions, but, by and large, I think prosecutors are putting the same number of people in jail that they would if the court were coming out with different opinions,” Johnson said recently. “The jails, after all, are full of people.”

Johnson does believe, however, that the court’s rulings have made the process of gaining convictions more costly and time consuming than it should be.

“The court is very blind to what it is doing in terms of the cost of administering justice. The wastefulness and delays, more than anything else, have lowered respect for the court,” Johnson said.

Henderson does not have a rebuttal for the experts. He is not a debater. He says his feelings about the court are a product of his own experiences with the legal system. He says his disillusionment began when he found that no one would be permitted to say anything about his son during the trial.

‘What His Potential Was’

“I thought the jurors should have been able hear what kind of a life he led and what his potential was. But we were told we couldn’t do that because it might create sympathy for the victim. Can you imagine that?

“You don’t know what the judicial system is like until you go through something like this, until you wait eight years and the murderer of your son is still sitting up there getting free food and board.”

The defendant, who was not freed from prison after the high court decision, has been resentenced to death by another jury. But Henderson says he believes that the new sentence, which has been appealed, will be overturned by the Supreme Court if Bird, Reynoso and Grodin are not defeated.

Henderson and other relatives of crime victims have made some 300 speeches to a combined audience of 25,000 people during the past year, according to officials of Crime Victims for Court Reform.

But Steven Glazer, director of communications for the Bird campaign, said he does not think the efforts of Henderson and others like him have had much impact on the campaign.

“It may have done some good for them in terms of therapy, but, to the extent the campaign against the court has been effective, it’s because of the politicians who have had the money to go on television with their message,” Glazer said.

Henderson concedes that he is no expert at judging what is an effective political message.

“People have responded well to what I’ve had to say. But I can’t say how all of them will vote in November.”

And he said that being able to speak to people about what happened has helped him cope with his grief.

A few days after his son’s killer was arrested, Henderson said, he even wanted to talk to the man’s family.

‘Staying Close to My Son’

“I walked up to where his dad and his brother were working. They almost fell over backwards when they saw me coming. I guess they thought I was coming to get revenge. I just needed to be connected somehow with what happened. It seems kind of strange, but it was my way of staying close to my son.”

Henderson looks like his son, down to the soft fringe of beard that rings his face. He said he owes his involvement in the court campaign to something his son once said to him.

“I never used to get involved much in politics, and I guess that sort of ticked him off, because he used to say that if we didn’t fight for what we believed in, we had no business complaining.”