Tennessee woman released after 25 years on death row

Tennessee woman released after 25 years on death row
By Tim Ghianni | Reuters – 20 hours ago

NASHVILLE, Tenn (Reuters) - A Tennessee woman who sat on death row for a quarter-century for the killing of her husband was released from custody on Friday.
Gaile Owens, 58, was greeted by a small group of friends and family when she was released from the Tennessee Prison for Women.
"Her release plan was approved and she will be reporting regularly to a parole officer here in Nashville," said Melissa McDonald, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole, which last week approved the release.
Owens had been scheduled to die by lethal injection September 28, 2010, but that sentence was commuted by then Governor Phil Bredesen, which made parole a possibility.
Bredesen said at the time that he spared Owens after a review showed she had admitted her guilt and that other people who committed similar crimes generally drew lesser sentences. Bredesen also noted that she had accepted a conditional plea agreement for life imprisonment prior to her original trial.
Bredesen said that while Owens' claims that she had been physically abused by her husband were "inconclusive," she may have been suffering from "battered woman syndrome," which was another factor in his decision.
Parole was recommended by the single member of the board who was at her first parole hearing September 7, 2011. That recommendation was forwarded to other members of the board, who considered the case and recommended 4-2 to parole her.
During her parole hearing, Owens testified about sexual assaults and physical abuse she suffered from her husband that she said led her in 1984 to contract a man to kill him. She said that during her court trial in 1986 she hadn't talked about abuse because she felt it would harm her children.
A year to the day after she was scheduled to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than a century, the board announced that she would be given her freedom.
Owens had been sentenced to die after being found guilty in 1986 of arranging to have her husband killed.
Evidence showed she had solicited several men in poor Memphis neighborhoods with offers of up to $10,000 to kill her husband Ron Owens.
Sidney Porterfield, the man Owens hired, used a tire iron to beat her husband in the couple's suburban Memphis home while Owens and their two sons were away.
Porterfield, now 68, also was sentenced to death and has been on death row since, according to Dorinda Carter, spokeswoman for the state Department of Correction. Owens was convicted in 1986 of being an accessory to first-degree murder.

You know, I cannot get my head around this idea of keeping people on Death Row for decades and THEN executing them.

bb1 wrote:You know, I cannot get my head around this idea of keeping people on Death Row for decades and THEN executing them.

Me neither. It is very cruel; yes, they have done a dreadful thing, taken another life, but Death Row is a refined torture, IMO. The UK way of sentencing, appeal, then setting a date and then carrying out the sentence was always far more humane. It's like making people wear shackles, or that awful 'Pervs Walk' the NYPD make people, not even tried or convicted, do in the full glare of the media, that turns my stomach. LL

No, nor me. Some of them spend more time on Death Row than others spend in prison sentences in other states for the same crime. Sometimes opposing states even fight over who is going to try the suspects.
It's time The US of A got it's act together, and at least abolished The Death Penalty. They are a disgrace to the civilised world.

I suspect there would be fewer cries of Bring back hanging in the UK if life really did mean life for the most heinous of crimes; all too often, it's only meant 15 - 20 years.

I always have been in two minds about the death penalty; after Troy Davis, I would have to say it's legalised murder.

All of the people that I have come across who oppose The Death Penalty do want longer prison sentences.
So very rarely does Life mean Life. It's the act of Judicial Murder that I am opposed to, and not the harshness of a prison sentence.

I see Robert Black, the killer of Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg and Susan Harper is up at court for the murder of 8 year old Jennifer Cardy in Ireland at the moment.

He's already serving life for those 3 murders.

He was caught whilst abducting a young girl from the Scottish borders but a guy mowing his grass seen her legs disappear from under a van that was pulled up on the side of the road, she'd already been assaulted before the police got to her. He's a suspect in numerous other cases.

personally, I'd like to see scum like that sit on death row for years and years before being put down.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-15215541

Oh God - he killed another child? I hadn't realised it was Black who was in court for that murder, I hadn't made the connection at all.
I suspect he is another Tobin, to be truthful.

have a read of this---he is one sick sick fecka, he has victims all over Europe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Black_%28serial_killer%29