Quote:

Love Triangle Gone Vicious

Lodi, San Joaquin County -- Terri Lynn Winchell left home on the last night of her life in January 1981 to help a boy she knew hated her.

That's just the way she was, friends and family said. Good-hearted. A devout believer in turning the other cheek, in giving people a second chance.

But this was a chance she should not have given.

By the end of the evening, the 17-year-old church choir singer and high school beauty lay raped, hammered and stabbed to death, her corpse sprawled between two rows of grapevines.

She had no inkling of it, but she had been caught in the middle of a love triangle gone hideously bad. Her boyfriend, unbeknownst to her, had been involved in a gay relationship with another man -- whose jealousy drove him to recruit a street thug who would take Winchell out of the picture.

Twenty-five years later, that early-'80s thug, Michael Morales, is due to be executed at San Quentin State Prison for a crime that capped years of running with gang-bangers and snorting, gulping or smoking every mind-twisting substance he could get his hands on. He would be the 14th person to be put to death in California since executions resumed in 1992 after a 25-year halt.

Morales is 46 now, and by his supporters' accounts he has transformed himself into the sort of mild-mannered, devout Christian that his victim Winchell was. In his family's eyes, he is a gentle artist, a remorseful, very loving and caring man who deserves a last-minute reprieve to avoid his appointment with the lethal injection chamber at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, and should instead live out his years in prison without parole.




I'm opposed to capital punisment on GP but I've noticed a reccurring theme in pleas for clemency. The claim that a religious conversion has altered the prisoner so profoundly that he/she should be pardoned for their crime. It is always a Christian conversion that is claimed, too.

If capital punishment is to continue, the religious experience should be disallowed in the appeals process as well as in clemency pleas. The state should not be placed in the position of judging the sincerity and veracity of a convict's religious experience. Neither should the state judge the qulity of one religion v. another. Would a conversion to Islam, Judaism or Paganism be viewed with the same sympathy as one to Christianity?

Thoughts anyone?