Victims of parole

Some aim to abolish system to prevent future violent crimes

By Doug Pardue , Glenn Smith

The Post and Courier

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Alan Hawes
The Post and Courier

Debbie Spry, mother of murder victim Travis Spry, sits at his grave in Live Oak Memorial Gardens in West Ashley. She says she talks to him ‘like he was standing there’ during her regular visits to the cemetery.

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Christopher Bryant (center) was sentenced in August 2007 to 13 years in prison for being an accessory to murder in the killing of 17-year-old Travis Spry in Charleston. Bryant, 23, applied for parole in June but was denied.

Video

The daunting task of policing criminals on probation and parole. Watch »

Debbie Spry gently ran her hand across her only son’s grave marker, her eyes welling with tears as she stared at his smiling photo. Travis had been such a big-hearted kid, just 17 when he was strangled in Charleston for some car stereo speakers.

Last year, Spry watched as Travis’ boyhood friend, who set him up for the killing, received a 13-year sentence as an accessory to murder. Then, in utter disbelief, she found herself fighting to keep him in prison after he became eligible for parole just 10 months later.

Spry won that battle, but she doesn’t kid herself. There will be more parole hearings to come, more chances for this man to get out of prison early.

“Why does he get a break?” she said, and glanced down at Travis’ grave through misty eyes. “My son will never get out of here.”

If state Attorney General Henry McMaster gets his way, future victims and their families won’t have to deal with these perennial hearings and endless uncertainty. He wants to abolish parole in South Carolina and is criss-crossing the state to build support.

“No more parole; no loopholes; no exception.” McMaster pounds that message in speeches. He would release convicts only after they serve at least 85 percent of their sentences, if they behave in prison.

If his proposal passes, McMaster promises it also will be “the last day you will ever read of a criminal committing a crime and then later committing another one while on parole.”

Some, however, remain leery of the proposal, citing a mixed bag of results with similar plans in other states. For example, when Florida abolished parole in the 1980s and took a hard line on sentencing, its prisons exploded with inmates. The federal courts stepped in and ordered the state to release inmates early, sending Florida back to the drawing board.

McMaster says South Carolina needs to give it a try anyway and that the state has no shortage of tragic incidents with parolees to illustrate why.

Consider the case of Joseph Atkins, who went on a shooting spree in North Charleston in October 1985. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a machete, he stalked into a neighbor’s home and fatally shot a 13-year-old girl in the head as she slept before gunning down his 75-year-old father.

Fifteen years before the killings, Atkins was handed a life prison sentence for fatally shooting his 23-year-old half-brother. He served just 10 years for that crime before the parole board set him free.

Such incidents prompted South Carolina to do away with parole for many violent offenders in 1996, requiring that murderers, robbers, rapists and their ilk serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. But that still leaves a host of other “nonviolent” criminals still eligible for early release, including stalkers, accessories to murder, some child molesters and others.

McMaster’s plan simply would abolish parole across the board. To lessen the impact on the state’s prisons, he teams his parole ban with a proposal to create a “Middle Court,” where judges would handle nonviolent criminals with a carrot-and-stick approach. It would be similar to the present probation system, except with more direct court control and swift punishment if criminals mess up.

Does no parole work?

Other states have tried similar plans, with varying success.

Ronald F. Wright, a professor of law and associate dean at Wake Forest University, said 20 or so states and the federal government have abolished parole in one way or another. Most, he said, also adopted some form of sentencing reform to encourage judges to impose equitable and shorter sentences. That’s necessary, he said, to adjust for the fact that parole can no longer be used as a relief valve to balance prison populations.

McMaster says guidelines or changes in sentencing laws aren’t necessary. He thinks judges naturally will lower sentences if parole is abolished.

Wright cautions that relying on judges without guidelines or sentencing changes could be risky for the state’s prison system. “Think of this as a bathtub,” he said. The prisoners flow in through the faucet and out through the drain. If states lock up people longer and don’t change sentencing, “your tub’s going to fill up quickly.” Then you have to ask the question: “Do you need a bigger tub?”

That’s the case in Florida, which still is struggling with what to do despite sentencing reform and expanded prisons.

Connecticut had a similar experience and ended up reinstituting parole in 1994. But the grisly murder last year of a prominent doctor’s family prompted the governor to suspend parole for violent offenders. In the end, reform measures prevailed rather than a return to abolition.

Will prisons overflow?

South Carolina Corrections Department Director Jon Ozmint contends that a parole ban in the state would repeat missteps by other states and expose the overburdened prison system to ruin.

“To do something we know will add 12,000 new prisoners to the system in the next 19 years is an invitation to real disaster,” he said. “You simply could not fit that many inmates in the prisons we have. If you did, you will end up with a lot of dead bodies on your hands.”

However, in Virginia, where parole was abolished and non-binding sentencing guidelines were established in 1994, officials said the state has seen a significant drop in the rate of increase of the prison population. In the decade before the reform, Virginia’s prison population jumped more than 150 percent.

In the decade since, the increase was about 30 percent, nearly the same as the state’s increase in population.

Rick Kern, director of Virginia’s Criminal Sentencing Commission, said the state’s crime rate is the “lowest in 30 years” and the number of violent criminals who re-enter a life of crime after prison is down.

South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, a Democrat from Charleston, says the state’s system is fine as is. The main need, Ford said, is for more judges to try criminals who are out on bail, committing more crimes while awaiting trial.

Dwayne M. Green, a state parole board member from the Charleston area, said abolishing parole would be a big mistake. “Parole and probation offer the best way to govern and regulate prison populations.” Many of the people paroled are about to max-out on their sentences anyway, and without parole there’s no way to keep a level of control over them, he said.

Asked what he would say to the victims of criminals who commit violent crimes when paroled, he replied, “My heart goes out to them. … We all want a system that’s perfect, but it’s difficult whenever you have to deal with crime.”

Momentum might be on McMaster’s side.

McMaster enjoys key support in the Republican-led state Legislature, where House Speaker Bobby Harrell and Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, both of Charleston, say they favor the concept of abolishing parole and finding alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals.

Harrell promises to begin pushing McMaster’s bills in January “and get them through fast. … I want to get it done.”

The aftermath

To Debbie Spry, who lost her son Travis three years ago, the debate is about more than numbers and strategies. It’s about justice for a good life taken at far too young an age.

Travis went out of his way to help others and worked hard for every penny he had. He put in long hours at a North Charleston Waffle House to earn money for his prized possession, a fire-engine-red Pontiac Bonneville. He died in that car, choked to death by a young ex-con who had been granted an early release from prison just 84 days earlier. Travis Lavar Casey had served less than two years of a six-year youthful offender sentence on five counts of burglary and two counts of grand larceny.

Travis Spry’s body was left in a wooded dump in Dorchester County. By the time he was found, his family didn’t have a whole body to bury because of decomposition and scavenging animals. People who would do that to another human being don’t deserve to go free, Debbie Spry says.

“Why should they get another chance at life?” she said. “My son will forever be 17 in a box in the ground.”

Tormented memories

Charleston had always been home for Christan Rainey (above), even after he moved to Louisiana for college.

But home now carries tormented memories of the late September day two years ago when he learned that his mother, three younger brothers and sister had been shot to death. Michael Anthony Simmons, the man his mother married a year earlier, was charged with killing them.

Rainey, an aspiring marine biologist, never really liked Simmons but tolerated him because his mom “seemed like she was happy.” Still Rainey had reservations and couldn’t help but notice the jealousy Simmons seemed to harbor toward him because of his closeness to his mother and his three brothers and 6-year-old baby sister.

Part of Rainey’s hesitation stemmed from Simmons’ violent criminal history. He served 16 years in prison on convictions for armed robbery, assault and battery with intent to kill and burglary. When he was paroled in 2004, he still had 8 years hanging over him.

Rainey wonders about a parole system that allows violent criminals to leave jail early but knows that it has helped turn some into useful citizens.

But should Simmons have been freed? Rainey answers without hesitation: “I feel like the crime that he did, he shouldn’t have been out of jail.”

Justice for whom?

Years have passed since Sandi Wofford lost her sister in the winter of 1984. But she recalls the late night phone call from police, the disbelief, the pain that consumed her world.

Her sister, Rhonda Smith, worked at a Dorchester Road convenience store when she was robbed and abducted by a twice-paroled felon who had been convicted of attempted armed robbery.

Leroy Joseph Drayton took the 19-year-old single mother to an abandoned railroad trestle above an inlet leading to the Cooper River. There, he shot her between the eyes and watched her body tumble 20 feet to the rocks below.

Wofford’s grief turned to anger when she learned Drayton had been paroled. If he had been made to serve his full sentence on the holdup charge, her sister likely would be alive, she said.

“He was a bad person and he committed a crime. Why did they allow him out?” she said. “This made all of us understand that what we thought the criminal justice system was just wasn’t true.”

Her sister’s killing inspired Wofford, then a Ladson homemaker, to get involved in the fight for crime victims’ rights. She volunteered with Citizens Against Violent Crime, served as a Republican lawmaker from 1987 to 1996 and helped spur passage of a victims’ bill of rights in the Legislature.

Since 1997, Wofford has worked as a victim’s advocate for the attorney general’s office in Columbia. Though state laws have been strengthened since her sister’s death to make if harder for violent criminals to win parole, she still sees far too many people victimized by repeat offenders who should have been behind bars.

When she looks into the eyes of the victims and their families, Wofford sees herself many years ago.

“They had the same idea of the criminal justice system as I did back then,” she said. “But it’s not the victims’ justice system. It’s the criminals’ justice system.”