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Randy Lee Guzek confers with defense attorney John Connor at his fourth death-penalty trial in 2010.
(Montoya Nakamura)
Timing is everything in the renewed scrap over Oregon's death penalty.
Gov. Kate Brown has extended John Kitzhaber's moratorium on executions because she understands this may not be the time for a contentious "broader discussion" on the just rewards for Randy Guzek, Jesse Caleb Compton and Craig Bjork.
Given the suddenness of Kitzhaber's vanishing act, no one is yet prepared to resume hostilities over Gary Haugen.
And, finally, there's the crucial time stamp on those death sentences, a detail that is all but lost in the timeless campaign by Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
In Kitzhaber's final days in power, OADP urged him to commute the sentences of the 34 long-suffering residents of Oregon's Death Row.
On Feb. 15, the advocacy group boldly announced, "While Governor Kitzhaber is still in office ... he has the power to commute death row sentences, changing them to life without parole."
Say again? "Life without parole."
"That is simply not true," Josh Marquis has countered, often, over the last 10 days.
Why? Because timing is everything. Marquis -- the district attorney in Clatsop County -- was the prosecutor in three of Guzek's four death-penalty trials. Should a governor commute a death sentence in Oregon, he argues, that inmate is subject to the next most severe penalty available at the time he or she was sentenced.
And for seven of those found guilty of aggravated murder -- Guzek, Michael Martin McDonnell, Marco Antonio Montez, Mark Allen Pinnell, David Lynn Simonsen, Jeffrey Ray Williams and Robert Paul Langley -- life without parole is not an option.
"When they committed their crimes and when they were sentenced, 'true life' was not a penalty that existed in Oregon," Marquis says.
For the gentlemen sentenced before July 1, 1990, the only other option for the somber juries was life ... with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
It's been difficult to find someone who disagrees with this. Only one member of OADP's Board of Directors responded to phone calls or emails over the last week.
"I think you are right that commutation would make several people eligible for parole," Tom O'Connor, the former head chaplain with the Oregon Department of Corrections, wrote. "I will check on the website and let you know."
As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, the OADP's curious argument was still prominently featured on the website. Then, again, so was this Sister Helen Prejean quote:
"Government ... can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of it's (sic) citizens to kill."
The disdain for our imperfect union -- not to mention punctuation -- is almost as savage as Prejean's contempt for juries.
"Hundreds of jurors - 48 in Guzek alone - took the tortuous path in deciding death was the right decision in these cases," Marquis reminds us.
The last 12 Guzek jurors bumped into this problematic true-life issue in 2010. One of the reasons Guzek's fourth death-penalty trial became necessary is that the Oregon Supreme Court decided life without parole should have been an option for the jury in Guzek III.
At the onset of jury selection, however, Guzek delivered a six-page legal brief, arguing that "the application of life without parole to my case" violated his constitutional rights on several counts. After Judge Jack Billings took true life off the table, Guzek was, once again, sentenced to death.
Unless these seven Death Row waive ex post facto objections to sentencing options that didn't exist prior to July 1990, Marquis says, commutation would make them eligible for parole hearings.
In Guzek's case, that would force those who still love and remember Rod and Lois Houser -- murdered by Guzek and Mark Wilson in 1987 -- to listen to him preach about mercy and rehabilitation.
Time, I suspect, is pushing us in that direction. Time heals wounds. Haunts witnesses. Ages prosecutors. Fogs memories. Numbs us all.
-- Steve Duin
sduin@oregonian.com
503-221-8597; @SteveDuin