November 11, 2011 in Idaho

Otter standing by decision not to spare killer’s life

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Jessie L. Bonner photo

The execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Boise is shown on Oct. 20 as Security Institution Warden Randy Blades looks on. Paul Ezra Rhoades, who was convicted of killing three people in Idaho Falls and Blackfoot in 1988, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Nov. 18.
(Full-size photo)

BOISE – Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, a Catholic who once studied for the priesthood, is the only one who can spare the life of condemned Idaho inmate Paul Ezra Rhoades, a multiple murderer scheduled for execution next Friday.

Otter, a supporter of the death penalty, has stuck by his position, even in the face of pleas for mercy from the pope, the Swiss ambassador and from the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Idaho.

“It’s tough, it’s tough,” said Otter, a conservative Republican, when asked about balancing his faith and the death penalty. He’s been reluctant to discuss the matter as Idaho approaches its first execution since 1994, when condemned murderer Keith Eugene Wells dropped his appeals and requested to be put to death. Unlike Wells, Rhoades has tried every appeal, exhausted every remedy, and still is fighting in federal court to challenge Idaho’s lethal-injection execution method as unconstitutionally cruel; a federal judge will decide Monday if that challenge should delay the execution.

Once before, an Idaho governor has commuted a death sentence. In 1996, then-Gov. Phil Batt agreed with Idaho’s pardons and parole commission and commuted the sentence of Donald Paradis from death to life without parole, amid questions about his original conviction; Paradis was released in 2001, after pleading guilty to being an accessory to murder.

There are no such questions in Rhoades’ case, however. His supporters simply plead for mercy.

“Paul is not the same man he was in 1987,” Rhoades’ mother, Pauline Rhoades, said in a statement. “Over the past 24 years, he has returned to being the same caring and unselfish person he was before we lost him to drugs. … He has taken responsibility for his actions, and he is doing everything in his power to make up for what he did.”

Otter told The Spokesman-Review this week, “I support the death penalty,” adding that it’s an issue he’s given a lot of thought to “all my life.”

“I think that as our criminal justice system … suggests, people have to be held responsible, and sometimes it’s to the max, and this is one of those cases,” Otter said. “They have to be held accountable for their actions.”

Rhoades’ crimes terrorized eastern Idaho in 1987, when three people, – two women and one man – were murdered in the space of three weeks. The string of kidnappings, rapes and murders shocked the conservative community; Rhoades received the death penalty for the murders of Stacy Baldwin and Susan Michelbacher, plus two life sentences for the murder of Nolan Haddon.

Mia Crosthwaite, a Catholic activist in Boise and who serves as spokeswoman for Idahoans Against the Death Penalty, said, “It’s just morally wrong. It’s unnecessary. My children will be no safer next Saturday after the execution is done than they are today, because the state of Idaho is perfectly capable of holding Paul Ezra Rhoades in prison for the rest of his life and protecting society.”

But some Idahoans who’ve flooded the governor’s office with letters and emails in recent weeks disagree.

“Did he show mercy to his victims?” asked Sharann Nafus, of Blackfoot. “You are in our prayers,” wrote a couple from Idaho Falls, urging the governor to uphold the sentence.

Most of his messages in recent weeks, however, oppose it, including one from Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, the personal representative of Pope Benedict XVI in the United States, who issued “a call for mercy beyond the strict confines of justice.”

The Rev. Michael Driscoll, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, wrote to Otter, “Other ways are available to punish criminals and to protect society that are more respectful of human life.”

Rhoades’ appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected Oct. 11, and Idaho’s state board of pardons and parole last week rejected his bid for a clemency hearing. Preparations for the execution are under way at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise.

Crosthwaite said she and other Idaho death penalty opponents met with Idaho Department of Corrections officials Thursday and were briefed on where they can protest, in a prescribed area at the state prison compound’s main gate south of Boise; a separate area will be set aside for protesters supporting the execution.

“They said ‘dress very warmly,’ which we already knew, but that was very kind of them to point that out,” Crosthwaite said. “They said it’s going to be cold. We intend to be prayerful and peaceful and just be present.”

The execution is set for 7 a.m. Pacific time Friday.

11 comments on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  Hunterman on November 11 at 5:30 p.m.

  Ya, Otter, you are a real christian and your ego will not be an excuse when you meet your maker…

• 

  Shadedmuse on November 11 at 6:42 p.m.

  For a Catholic to excute the guy he is going against the Catholic church. Catholics are against Abortion Death Penalty and War, and their are are alot of Hypocrtes in the Catholic church, SHAME ON YOU!!!!!!! I’m just gla I’m Muslim.

• 

  SpokaneLiberal on November 11 at 6:54 p.m.

  If he allows the execution would it be acceptable for the Church to excommunicate him or deny him communion like it has done for those who support abortion?

  Good for the goose…..

• 

  lowtechmaster on November 11 at 7:02 p.m.

  Well done, Governor! His victims had no trial, defense counsel, jury of their peers, judge, or rights to appeal. They were executed! Why should tax payers keep paying to keep slime like Rhoades alive???

• 

  woamike on November 11 at 7:40 p.m.

  @shadmuse,

  You said “For a Catholic to excute the guy he is going against the Catholic church. Catholics are against Abortion Death Penalty and War, and their are are alot of Hypocrtes in the Catholic church, SHAME ON YOU!!!!!!! I’m just gla I’m Muslim.”

  Q: As a proud, and I assume non-hypocritical Muslim, are you against all things homosexual and most abortions?

• 

  dataxman on November 11 at 7:43 p.m.

  So keep religion out of politics unless you need to use it make the politician take a course of action you supprt…

• 

  kb7bth on November 12 at 1:27 a.m.

  hummmmmm……………..ask butchs’ boys: ALL LIFE IS SACRED;

  unless you’re on death row.

• 

  oneanddone on November 12 at 4:12 a.m.

  His mama says he’s changed. Well, hey, then let’s just let him go. He might cure cancer, create world peace, join the Obama administration. And for all you dogmatic freaks out there, I believe God would have no issue with eliminating this fool. My only problem with the death penalty is that my taxes are paying for the moronic lawyers who are pushing this as a way to add to their bottom line. Since the money’s already spent - adios muchacho.

• 

  straighttalk on November 12 at 7:56 a.m.

  This execution should have happen years ago.
  This is a perfect example of the miscarriage of justice when a criminal is protected for decades within the system. We are doing nothing to discourage criminal behavior when we provide free room and board and all the extras which may good citizens do without while criminals receive such services, programs and material goods at tax payer expense. What is to discourage criminal behavior; our current system does not.

• 

  dudleysharp on November 12 at 11:24 p.m.

  The is no conflict between executions and being Catholic.

  Romano Amerio, a faithful Catholic Vatican insider, scholar, professor at the Academy of Lugano, consultant to the Preparatory Commission of Vatican II, and a peritus (expert theologian) at the Council.

  “The most irreligious aspect of this argument against capital punishment is that it denies its expiatory value which, from a religious point of view, is of the highest importance because it can include a final consent to give up the greatest of all worldly goods. This fits exactly with St. Thomas’s opinion that as well as canceling out any debt that the criminal owes to civil society, capital punishment can cancel all punishment due in the life to come. His thought is … Summa, ‘Even death inflicted as a punishment for crimes takes away the whole punishment due for those crimes in the next life, or a least part of that punishment, according to the quantities of guilt, resignation and contrition; but a natural death does not.’ The moral importance of wanting to make expiation also explains the indefatigable efforts of the Confraternity of St. John the Baptist Beheaded, the members of which used to accompany men to their deaths, all the while suggesting, begging and providing help to get them to repent and accept their deaths, so ensuring that they would die in the grace of God, as the saying went.” (3)

  Some opposing capital punishment ” … go on to assert that a life should not be ended because that would remove the possibility of making expiation, is to ignore the great truth that capital punishment is itself expiatory. In a humanistic religion expiation would of course be primarily the converting of a man to other men. On that view, time is needed to effect a reformation, and the time available should not be shortened. In God’s religion, on the other hand, expiation is primarily a recognition of the divine majesty and lordship, which can be and should be recognized at every moment, in accordance with the principle of the concentration of one’s moral life.” (3)

  Some death penalty opponents “deny the expiatory value of death; death which has the highest expiatory value possible among natural things, precisely because life is the highest good among the relative goods of this world; and it is by consenting to sacrifice that life, that the fullest expiation can be made. And again, the expiation that the innocent Christ made for the sins of mankind was itself effected through his being condemned to death.” (3)

  3) “Amerio on capital punishment “, Chapter XXVI, 187. The death penalty, from the book Iota Unum, May 25, 2007 ,
  http://www.domid.blogspot.com/2007/05/amerio-on-capital-punishment.html

• 

  dudleysharp on November 12 at 11:34 p.m.

  Quaker biblical scholar Dr. Gervas A. Carey agrees with Saints Augustine and Aquinas, that executions represent mercy to the wrongdoer:
  
  “… a secondary measure of the love of God may be said to appear. For capital punishment provides the murderer with incentive to repentance which the ordinary man does not have, that is a definite date on which he is to meet his God. It is as if God thus providentially granted him a special inducement to repentance out of consideration of the enormity of his crime … the law grants to the condemned an opportunity which he did not grant to his victim, the opportunity to prepare to meet his God. Even divine justice here may be said to be tempered with mercy.” (p. 116). “A Bible Study”, Essays on the Death Penalty, T. Robert Ingram, ed., St. Thomas Press, Houston, 1963, 1992.
  
  Pius XII: A word must be said on the full meaning of penalty. Most of the modern theories of penal law explain penalty and justify it in the final analysis as a means of protection, that is, defense of the community against criminal undertakings, and at the same time an attempt to bring the offender to observance of the law. In those theories, the penalty can include sanctions such as the diminution of some goods guaranteed by law, so as to teach the guilty to live honestly, but those theories fail to consider the expiation of the crime committed, which penalizes the violation of the law as the prime function of penalty (Address to Italian Catholic Jurists, May 12, 1954)