Governor Won’t Block Execution of Vietnam Veteran

Gov. Gray Davis on Friday denied clemency for convicted murderer Manuel P. Babbitt, removing the last significant obstacle to next week’s execution of the Marine Corps veteran who says he committed the crime during a post-traumatic flashback to his bloody Vietnam experience.

In a 15-page decision, Davis, also a Vietnam veteran, said “countless people have suffered the ravages of war,” but “such experiences cannot justify or mitigate the savage beating and killing of defenseless, law-abiding citizens.”

“As difficult and unsettled as Mr. Babbitt’s childhood, military service and return to civilian life may have been, such harsh life experience is not the type of mitigation sufficient to grant clemency for a brutal capital crime,” Davis said in his statement.

Babbitt, who has a seventh-grade education and a history of mental illness, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison shortly after midnight Tuesday morning, one day after his 50th birthday.

Babbitt was convicted of beating to death 78-year-old Leah Schendel in her Sacramento apartment on Dec. 18, 1980, 10 years after his discharge from the Marines.

Schendel, who weighed less than 100 pounds and stood 4 feet 10 inches tall, died of a heart attack as a direct result of the attack. Babbitt, who had spent the night drinking and smoking marijuana, claims to remember nothing of the assault.

The case has become a cause celebre for many Vietnam veterans, particularly Marines who, like Babbitt, survived the 77-day siege at Khe Sanh, the single worst battle of the war.

Ernie Spencer, a Khe Sanh vet, said Friday that he spoke to Babbitt by telephone. “Manny asked that I relay to the governor that as a good Marine, Manny will follow the governor’s orders, and go to his death with dignity and honor and no hate in his heart.”

In his decision, Davis relied heavily on the pleas of Schendel’s family members, who asked that the governor allow the execution to proceed.

“The guy’s going to die--and I hope he suffers like my mother did,” Donald Schendel, the victim’s son, a Mission Hills resident, said Friday. “I don’t think he will. I hope mentally that he’s tormented somewhat as he goes in there and is strapped down.”

While Leah Schendel’s family praised Davis’ decision, Babbitt’s lawyers, including one who also is a Marine Corps veteran of Khe Sanh, vowed to fight on, asking the state Supreme Court to take one more look at the case.

Charles Patterson, the former Marine and senior partner at the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro who took a lead role in Babbitt’s defense, said he was not “particularly surprised” by Davis’ decision.

“Very few people understand post-traumatic stress disorder, that it’s the real thing and actually does happen,” Patterson said.

With courts increasingly impatient over last-minute appeals in death penalty cases, Babbitt’s lawyers believed that his best chance of avoiding execution rested with Davis, who speaks often of his Vietnam experience as an Army captain and courts the political support of veterans.

In his decision, however, Davis cited instances of misconduct during Babbitt’s military service. The governor also rejected as insufficient the defense’s contentions that two of Babbitt’s trial jurors now supported a sentence of life in prison without parole for Babbitt, and turned aside claims that Babbitt’s trial defense lawyer drank heavily during the trial.

Davis made no mention in his decision of the plea for mercy by Babbitt’s brother, William, among the case’s most tragic figures.

Manuel Babbitt, who grew up in New England, had come to Sacramento two months before the murder to stay with William, who hoped that he could help his brother find work. But William soon realized that Manuel was mentally ill.

He didn’t realize how disturbed Manuel was until he read news accounts of Leah Schendel’s murder and came to suspect his brother of the crime. Believing that authorities would help his brother, he turned him over to waiting officers.

Prosecutors, however, sought and obtained a verdict of death.

“I will always take the high road,” William Babbitt said, convinced that he did the right thing but fighting tears as he pleaded for mercy at his brother’s clemency hearing earlier this week.

“I don’t want Manny’s blood on my hands,” William Babbitt said.

Leah Schendel’s family members expressed sorrow Friday for Babbitt’s family.

“I really feel sorry for Bill, his brother, his kids,” said Donald Schendel. “[Manuel Babbitt’s] son is going to be deprived of seeing him, just as I have been deprived of seeing my mom. I feel for them, for I’ve been there. There is no such thing as closure.”

In a brief interview in Los Angeles after he had issued his decision, Davis said: “I feel badly that this decision will disappoint [Bill

Babbitt] . . . but I am not about to overturn the wisdom of the jury and nine separate courts that have reviewed this matter over 17 years.”

Babbitt’s defense team mounted an extraordinary campaign, generating thousands of letters in support of clemency. Many were from unusual quarters, such as victims rights advocates, Vietnam veterans and novelists who have chronicled the aftereffects of the war, including Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Tobias Wolff and Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa.

David Kaczynski, brother of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, was among those who have spoken out on the case. Three years ago, Kaczynski turned in his brother to federal authorities investigating a string of deaths and injuries across the country caused by bombs usually delivered through the mail.

“Whereas my brother was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, Bill’s brother, who is black, was sentenced to death at the recommendation of an all-white jury,” Kaczynski wrote in a recent opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee. “Evidently the justice system does not work the same for everyone.”

But more than any others, it was Vietnam veterans who rallied around Manuel Babbitt. Touched by his tale of post-traumatic stress disorder, they mailed letters by the hundreds, signed petitions and spoke out to anyone who would listen.

Their message: Babbitt had served his country; now the nation was ignoring his disorder and wanted to execute him for what that ailment made him do. They demanded that his sentence be commuted to life without parole.

Babbitt’s defenders told of his strange behavior after the war, how late at night, he would move as if he were on military patrol in a jungle, and would stop Asian Americans on the streets to ask if he had killed their family members. They are convinced that on the night of the murder, Babbitt believed that he was somehow back in Vietnam.

Babbitt enlisted in the Marines in 1967, with the aid of a recruiter who helped him pass his entrance test. He was sent to defend Khe Sanh with 6,000 other Marines. As the North Vietnamese army barraged the outpost, Babbitt was wounded in the head--a wound for which he was awarded the Purple Heart in an extraordinary ceremony at San Quentin last year.

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Times staff writer Alan Abrahamson contributed to this report.