As Nice a Guy as Ever Lived on Death Row : 8 Shackled Killers Testify to Character of a Convict

They were character witnesses all right--dubious characters, desperate characters, dangerous characters.

Friday, eight shackled murderers--six of them on furlough from Death Row itself--testified here at the resentencing hearing of one of their own, killer James Ernest Hitchcock.

“A peacemaker,” they called him: “Fair . . . good . . . a help.” As nice a guy as ever lived on the Row.

“I didn’t have any tennis shoes to go out and play basketball, and Ernie bought me some,” said murderer Amos Earl Robinson in praise that was common during a proceeding that was not.

Eleven and a half years ago, Ernie Hitchcock raped, beat and strangled his stepniece, 13-year-old Cindy Driggers of nearby Winter Haven. For this, he was quickly sent to Florida’s Death Row.

Appeals kept him from the electric chair, however. Then, last April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his death sentence had been unfairly determined: No character witnesses had been permitted during the sentencing phase of Hitchcock’s trial.

So this week a new jury was impaneled to recommend to the judge who will make the final decision whether the guilty man should get a life term or the death penalty. And, going by the rules, it was required to listen to the murderer’s choice of character witnesses.

In this case that required the extraordinary. Hitchcock, 31, has spent the last third of his life in prison. All his friends and neighbors are killers, the pals he has found in those anterooms of purgatory known as Death Row.

But will the jury--which is expected to begin deliberating today--be swayed by the benevolent words of malevolent men?

“How many times have you been convicted of a felony?” Jim Eric Chandler, a rather scholarly looking murderer, was asked.

“Approximately 14,” he said, his eyes seeming to do the arithmetic up on the ceiling.

Like the others, Chandler was dressed in prison blues. The jurors were removed while he was brought in, so they never saw the chains binding his legs together.

While some of the other character witnesses were shy, cautious and monosyllabic, Chandler rambled along.

‘Doesn’t Need to Die’

“Ernie doesn’t belong (on Death Row),” he said. “I’ve known him seven years and I’ve never seen him violent. I’ve never seen him in trouble for violence. He doesn’t need to die.”

With that endorsement, a gasp sprang from the part of the gallery where some of the victim’s family sat. Then the gasp became a groan, and the groan became an angry murmur.

“None of these guys should even be here,” said Lynn Pinkley, the victim’s sister. “They don’t have any rights anymore and they shouldn’t be allowed out.”

As he listened, Ernie Hitchcock rarely flinched. He sat between his attorneys, nodding slightly as his witnesses were brought in one at a time--far from their home at Florida State Prison, 150 miles away.

Charles Kenneth Foster recalled the day Hitchcock stopped him from attacking a guard who had failed to deliver his mail:

“I said I’m going to get him the next time he comes by, go upside his head with a bar of soap. But (Ernie) said, ‘Kenny, he’s just kidding you.’ ”

‘Helped Teach Me to Read’

And James Morgan remembered how Hitchcock read to him: “He helped teach me how to read and write.”

Defense attorneys admitted they were taking a big risk by putting a flock of killers on the stand. But these are the people Ernie Hitchcock has lived with, they said.

Ground rules for the unusual testimony was argued back and forth with the prosecutors. Friday, the jurors were told the witnesses were killers, but not the details of their crimes.

They did not find out that Morgan beat and stabbed a woman, that Robinson choked a man and ran over him with his car, that Chandler robbed an elderly couple and bludgeoned them, that Foster cut a man’s throat and buried him alive.

“Do you think Mr. Hitchcock is a pretty nice fellow?” prosecutor Belvin Perry asked Morgan.

“Yes.”

“Are you familiar with Mr. Hitchcock’s criminal record?”

“We never talked about it.”

Dozens of Guards

With so many killers in the county courthouse, dozens of guards were in force. No one entered the hearing without a pat-down search.

Today, the jury is expected to hear more testimony, though none from the murderers. Other defense witnesses will describe Hitchcock’s impoverished boyhood in northeast Arkansas.

Already, the prosecution has made its case for renewing the death sentence.

Grisly photos were shown of the beaten teen-age victim. The coroner described each abrasion and laceration. The girl’s mother and stepfather recalled the terrible discovery of the body behind the bushes of their home.

Then, too, James Ernest Hitchcock himself was heard from--his somber voice coming from an 11-year-old tape recording.

He confessed back then: “I choked her and I just kept choking and choking. I don’t know what happened. I just choked and choked.”