Impending Execution Rends

As New Mexico prepares to carry out its first execution since 1960, few here question whether child killer Terry Clark should pay for his awful crime. Where the disagreement begins is whether Clark should pay with his life.

A statewide debate, spurred by the execution Tuesday, has refocused attention on capital punishment in a place that has for decades been reluctant to impose it.

Activists are calling for the repeal of New Mexico’s death penalty statute. They have been whipping up public sentiment in a law-and-order state that, organizers say, supports the death penalty but is growing ever more averse to carrying it out.

The grass-roots movement here is being watched closely by national anti-capital punishment groups, which historically have found little traction for their cause in the Rocky Mountain West.

“There is a huge amount of interest in what’s happening in New Mexico,” said David Elliot, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “There is a growing momentum to repeal the death penalty in many states, but nowhere is that more true than in New Mexico, where support for the death penalty is a mile wide and an inch deep.”

On a chilly autumn evening, Bill Stanton sits alone in a folding chair in front of the state Capitol, reading Thoreau. Surrounded by guttering candles and windblown pamphlets, Stanton is taking his turn at a sit-in organized by New Mexico’s resurgent anti-death penalty movement.

The 41-day vigil has remained low-key. Volunteers sit under a tree at the Capitol for 12-hour shifts. A few curious tourists linger, reading from a bulletin board and asking questions, but lobbyists and legislators rush past.

The broad-based New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty is organizing the vigil and a letter-writing campaign, asking Gov. Gary Johnson to intervene to stop Clark’s execution. The group includes clergy, officials from law enforcement and the corrections system, victims’ families and a former governor whose last act in office was to commute the sentences of all five men on death row.

But the subject of the campaign is not likely to provoke public sympathy. Clark, a 45-year-old former ranch hand, ended his appeals and has told a judge he wants to die. He has expressed no interest or support for the campaign that has sprung up around his impending execution. He has for some time fought his own lawyers’ efforts to avert execution.

“He’s not a great poster boy for the cause, that’s for sure,” Stanton said. “But it’s the issue we want discussed. His guilt is not in doubt, but innocent people have been put to death.”

Even the mechanics of the execution have come under fire. New Mexico’s correction officials--unschooled in carrying out lethal injections--have hired two moonlighting Texas state prison workers to perform the execution. A lawsuit filed last week unsuccessfully claimed that was illegal.

Clark is one of four men on New Mexico’s death row, but it was not until Clark’s execution was scheduled that the state’s dormant anti-death penalty movement began to stir. The other inmates do not have execution dates set.

Until now, the various groups had little reason to protest--the state hadn’t executed anyone in 41 years. Also, New Mexico juries have shown a marked reluctance to impose the death sentence.

Although polls have consistently shown support for the death penalty here, activists note the tide is turning. A poll taken in New Mexico last year found that support for the death penalty dropped 20%, to 47%, when the alternative of life in prison was offered. A Gallup poll last year showed 65% approval for the death penalty, down from 80% in 1994.

“The numbers seem high, but when it comes to actually killing someone, support really drops,” said Cathy Ansheles, the coordinator of the coalition. “We haven’t faced an execution in this state for a long time. This is a law and order state, but New Mexicans also have a great respect for life. The Catholic church and the Native American population here have that tradition. The state is unusual in that way.”

Legislative efforts to repeal the death penalty have gained momentum in the last year. A bill repealing the death penalty statute was killed in the state Senate earlier this year, but proponents took heart in the narrowness of its 21-20 defeat.

“We were floored by that vote,” Stanton said. “We saw that as a great victory. It’s never been that close.”

Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, no state has repealed the death penalty. It is unlikely that another repeal bill will be presented this session in the New Mexico Legislature. But the coalition and other groups believe that legislation repealing the death penalty will pass in 2002 and will land on the desk of a more receptive governor.

None of which will happen in time to alter Clark’s fate.

He was sentenced to death after pleading guilty in 1986 to kidnapping and killing 9-year-old Dena Lynn Gore, taken as she rode her brother’s bike near her home in Artesia. Clark told a minister he raped the child, who was found in a shallow grave. The case outraged the state and Clark’s name became notorious.

Jeff Gore, the girl’s father, expressed the family’s frustration last week with the pace of the justice system, especially as others have intervened to save Clark.

“I’m getting fed up with these people sticking their noses in what’s none of their business. They’re liable to get it broken off,” Gore told Associated Press.

Johnson, New Mexico’s iconoclastic Republican governor with Libertarian tendencies, has rejected appeals to stop the execution from the ACLU, the European Union, Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” Amnesty International and Pope John Paul II. In recent days, in response to a massive letter-writing campaign to the governor’s office, Johnson said he is open to debating the repeal of the death penalty but reiterated that he would not commute Clark’s death sentence.

Former Gov. Toney Anaya is one of those who has met with Johnson, seeking support to repeal the death penalty or to impose a moratorium on executions. Anaya said his conscience is haunting him because of his role in keeping Clark on death row.

On Thanksgiving eve in 1986, Anaya, a lame duck Democrat and longtime opponent of the death penalty, commuted the sentences of all five men on death row to life. The move created a massive controversy for Anaya, but Clark’s public defenders saw in it a way to save their client’s life.

Clark had not yet been tried but his attorneys were certain that he would be sentenced to die. So they persuaded him to plead guilty, believing that Anaya would then commute his sentence. But the judge got wind of the tactic and refused to schedule a sentencing hearing before Anaya left office.

Desperate and running out of time, Clark’s attorneys pleaded their case to Anaya: grant Clark a conditional pardon that would guarantee him a life sentence. By law, a governor here has the power to pardon before a sentence is imposed.

Anaya reluctantly refused, saying state lawmakers, already incensed with his wholesale clearing of death row, were threatening to take away the governor’s pardon powers.

“I couldn’t do that to those who would succeed me,” Anaya said from his law office here. Ironically, the right Anaya preserved for his successors has not been exercised since he left office.

“That decision haunts me today,” he said.

Since Clark confessed to committing the crimes 15 years ago, his legal case has rarely left the courts. He was sentenced to death in 1987, but that ruling was overturned by the state Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. A decade later Clark was again sentenced to die. The New Mexico Supreme Court upheld that decision in 1999.

Since then--overruling strenuous objections from his attorneys--Clark dropped all his appeals. But as his execution loomed this year, his lawyers claimed he was not mentally able to make such a judgment. A judge ruled in August that Clark was competent and ordered the execution to proceed.

Tuesday, a group of lawyers and death penalty opponents filed a last-ditch appeal in District Court to delay the execution. A judge on Friday denied that petition.