A Public at Risk
A look at South Carolina’s broken probation and parole system
Georgetown County Sheriff Land Cribb works at the scene of Julianne Blakeley’s killing in Litchfield Beach on Sept. 26, 2007. Police later arrested Shane Earl Lawshe, a convicted felon released on parole two months earlier, for the crime.
Julianne Blakeley did what many do when they need their homes painted. She hired a contractor. And, as with most homeowners, she knew almost nothing about the painters she invited in.
On the morning of Sept. 26, firefighters rushed to Blakeley’s Litchfield Beach home after neighbors saw smoke coming from the house. They found the 63-year-old woman dead, partially clothed in her bed. She had been stabbed in the neck and raped. Fires were set in several places.
A week later, police arrested Shane Earl Lawshe, a 33-year-old convicted felon with a record of assault and burglary. Just two months earlier, state officials released him on parole. It was the third time in five years he had been freed on probation or parole in connection with a series of crimes, a string prosecutors characterize as an upward spiral of danger.
Blakeley’s killing sent shock waves through her community, but it was no anomaly. Criminals free on probation or parole kill, rob and rape all too often in a state where repeat offenders routinely are released into a system that is too under-manned and ill-equipped to maintain control.
Take the case of Derringer Lamont Young, 22, who faced a possible 30-year prison term after he shot and wounded a man during a 2004 robbery in downtown Charleston. Instead, a judge sentenced him as a youthful offender and he spent just one year in prison before he was released on parole. Soon after, he violated the terms of his release and went back to prison, only to be paroled again.
One week after his November 2007 release, Young was accused of messing up again — this time with deadly consequences. Witnesses said he showed up at a North Charleston club on Thanksgiving morning, pulled out a gun and opened fire on two men, killing one and wounding the other.
“Why was this guy even on the street?” North Charleston Police Chief Jon Zumalt said. But Zumalt hardly was shocked. Nearly a third of the homicides in North Charleston are committed by people on probation or parole.
“This group of repeat, violent offenders is really hurting us,” he said. “We’ve got to do something about this.”‘
A public at risk
South Carolina established a probation and parole board in 1941. Though its titles and duties have changed over the years, its mission remains much the same: to supervise criminals and help them on a path toward rehabilitation.
The daunting task of policing criminals on probation and parole.
State officials boast an overall 65 percent success rate for people completing their supervised release time without repeat criminal activity, but that leaves 35 percent who might continue to prey upon their communities.
Johnnie Walker Gaskins is one such example. The 27-year-old was accused of spraying gunfire inside a Columbia sports bar in February 2007, killing two people and wounding three others. Gaskins had a history of violent crimes and was on probation for drug charges when the shooting occurred, authorities said.
Or consider Kenneth Williams, 42, charged with beating an 81-year-old Port Royal man to death and stealing his wallet in September 2007 after he was hired to do yard work. Williams was on probation at the time, having been convicted of more than 10 charges since 1983, ranging from grand larceny to domestic violence to receiving stolen goods.
Or take Shannon McGee, 39, who sexually assaulted a child younger than 11 years of age in Georgetown County in 2005 while on probation for possessing a stolen weapon and driving under suspension. He had avoided prison time on those charges despite a lengthy record that included convictions for armed robbery and assault of a high and aggravated nature.
Those cases were among dozens identified by the The Post and Courier in an investigation that reveals a criminal justice system broken at every turn:
–The state lacks enough probation and parole agents to oversee more than 48,000 criminals. This load leaves some agents with more than 170 criminals to keep up with, more than double the recommended national average.
–Agents often don’t have key resources necessary to do their jobs. In Spartanburg County, 20 agents must share just six cars to cover an 819-square-mile area with some 3,200 offenders. In Richland County, front-line agents recently had to turn in their state cell phones because there was no money to pay for them.
–Judges, faced with swollen dockets and overcrowded prisons, often allow probation violators to remain free instead of putting them behind bars. Between 2003 and 2007, fewer than half of the 64,970 criminals arrested for violating the terms of their release had their probation revoked by a judge.
Glossary of terms
PAROLE: An act of clemency that gives an inmate a conditional, early release from prison. Parole comes from a French word meaning “word of honor.”
PROBATION: An alternative sentence to imprisonment that allows people convicted of crimes to remain free in the community under state supervision on the promise of good behavior. The word probation is derived from a Latin word meaning “to test or prove.”
REVOCATION: The early termination of supervised release for a criminal who has violated the conditions of his release.
YOUTHFUL OFFENDER ACT: A state law allowing indeterminate sentences of up to six years for offenders ages 17 through 24. Roughly 150 young offenders are released each month to be supervised by probation and parole agents.
–Frustrated police end up arresting the same people over and over. In 2005, for example, Charleston County sent roughly the same number of people to prison as were released back into the community.
–Rehabilitation efforts with jail and prison inmates are virtually nonexistent because of budget cuts and belt-tightening. The state’s Attorney General says prison provides too many inmates with a “PhD in crime.”
–Criminals thumb their noses at a toothless system they’ve learned to manipulate. Many have been placed on probation or parole multiple times, despite shared histories of failing to live by the programs’ rules.
–The most potentially violent criminals, those ages 17 to 24, often get the most lenient sentences under laws designed to give young offenders a second chance. The problem is that these criminals also have the highest failure rate in supervised release and often end up committing new, violent crimes.
Where they live
The problem is not new. Horror stories have made headlines for decades. Take the case of Sidney Ross Goolsby, who was on parole for two previous murders when he strangled a Columbia woman in 1978.
Or consider Doyle Lucas, who broke into a home and slaughtered a Rock Hill couple just hours after his parole in 1983.
Or Bobby Wayne Stone, a parolee who shot and killed a Sumter County sheriff’s deputy in 1996 while on community supervision for burglary and grand larceny charges.
Despite such examples, the state has done little. The result: more crimes, more victims.
Problems nationwide
South Carolina is hardly alone. Innocent people across the country often pay the price when overwhelmed criminal justice officials allow the wrong criminals to go free on probation or parole with the hope they will go straight.
At the end of 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available, more than five million men and women were on probation or parole in the United States. Of those on probation, about one in five ended up back behind bars. Sixteen percent of those on parole also ended up re-incarcerated by year’s end, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Periodically, the bureau tracks criminals who have been released from prison to study recidivism rates. The most recent study, published in 2002, found that more than two-thirds of prisoners released in 1994 were arrested within three years for a new offense. Most were picked up for felonies and serious misdemeanors, including some 2,900 new homicides.
Perhaps the most infamous recent case is the March 5 slaying of Eve Carson, the 22-year-old student body president of the University of North Carolina. According to reports, two young men on probation for numerous burglary and theft charges abducted Carson from her apartment, withdrew money from her bank account and shot her dead on a street. Both face murder charges.
North Carolina officials blamed an untrained, overwhelmed probation officer who was supposed to be supervising one of the suspects while juggling 125 cases. The other suspect, officials say, got lost in the system as his case was assigned to 10 different agents. A federal report released last week found North Carolina’s probation offices were struggling with heavy caseloads, high turnover and a host of other problems.
“This is a dark cloud over our agency,” Robert Lee Guy, director of the state Division of Community Corrections, told reporters. “It’s flat-out embarrassing. It’s totally unacceptable by our standards — by any agency’s standards.”
Unfortunately, similar tragedies aren’t hard to find.
In Largo, Md., a man on probation for drug offenses faces charges in a triple homicide at a pizza restaurant on Super Bowl Sunday.
In Louisville, Ky., a man on probation for drug and assault offenses is charged with a home invasion in which a man was shot fatally and a woman was wounded last year.
And in Cheshire, Conn., two paroled burglars who met in a halfway house are accused of taking a prominent doctor and his family hostage in the early hours of July 23, 2007. The pair reportedly strangled 48-year-old Jennifer Hawke-Petit after forcing her to withdraw money from her bank. She and her daughters, 17 and 11, were then doused in gasoline before their house was set on fire. The girls died of smoke inhalation. The lone survivor, Dr. William Petit, was beaten severely but escaped, authorities said.
Abolishing parole?
Many states have enacted comprehensive reforms designed to address the problem. Ironically, one of those is North Carolina, which abolished parole in 1994 and established sentencing guidelines that basically place the criminal in one of three levels of seriousness. The system was designed to lock up the violent criminals and try to work with the nonviolent through probation.
Abolishing parole has produced mixed results there and around the country. Virginia, which did away with parole in 1994, credits the move with dropping the state’s crime rate to a 30-year low.
Other states have not fared as well. Connecticut, for example, abolished parole in 1981 but brought it back 13 years later because the resulting increase in inmates led to early-release programs to alleviate prison overcrowding.
Still, Ronald F. Wright, a professor of law and associate dean at Wake Forest University, said abolishing parole remains the current trend among states for tackling systemic problems with criminal justice.
South Carolina’s Attorney General, Henry McMaster, wants this state to join that movement. He would make anyone sentenced to prison serve a minimum of 85 percent of the sentence. Most nonviolent criminals would be handled by a new “middle court,” which would allow them to go free under strict control of a judge, who could lock them up immediately for violating conditions.
South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal agrees the system needs some restructuring but doesn’t agree with McMaster that the state should just take his idea and run with it. She wants a thorough review by a study commission, a move lawmakers approved this past session.
“We’ve got major problems with our sentencing structure and we have not looked at it in years,” Toal said in a recent interview. She called the present system “a hodgepodge.”
Others, including probation and parole agents, worry that McMaster’s plan — or one like it — would become just another under-funded state program that adds to the burdens of South Carolina’s prisons and those who monitor criminals in the community. They argue that the state should fix the system it has by adding more judges to hear cases and more agents to supervise those on probation and parole effectively.
Charleston County Public Defender Ashley Pennington said the probation and parole agency, through no fault of its own, is just treading water at present and has become almost a non-entity in helping offenders move beyond a life of crime. And this is just one example of how the state has made its criminal justice system more dangerous by failing to fund it properly, he said. “This has become a serious public safety issue,” he said.
Gov. Mark Sanford’s office said he wants state lawmakers to consider putting more resources into the state corrections system and the Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services. From their comments, top legislative leaders seem to agree. But, so far, nothing much is getting done on the subject in Columbia.
Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, has pushed a variety of anti-crime measures, from adding more judges to allowing warrantless searches of criminals on probation and parole. He hopes those changes will come in the next session. But he knows it won’t be easy, particularly getting the money in tight fiscal times.
“It makes no sense to me to have people out on probation and parole if there is not going to be an adequate check on them,” McConnell said. “We simply have to put more resources into protecting the public.”
Sadness, anger and questions
Olivia Lee Charney, one of Julianne Blakeley’s quadruplets, can’t shake the numbness she feels from her mother’s murder at the Litchfield Beach home last year.
“We’re still processing the aftermath,” she said from Weston, Conn., where she runs an interior design company. She said her family is going through “a lot of anger. There’s a lot of sadness. We’re all dealing with it differently.”
She’s certain of one thing: Something is seriously wrong with South Carolina’s probation and parole system for allowing men such as the one accused of killing her mother to be free. “Obviously,” she said, “it is a prime example … I think there are a lot of weak links.”
Then, Charney told a story about her brother’s dog biting her daughter a while back. She recalled how an animal control officer in Weston kept coming by afterward, almost religiously, to make sure the dog was tested and everything was OK. “I was astounded by all of the attention and care,” she said.
She compared that to what happened with the paroled convict awaiting trial in her mother’s murder. “It was pretty ironic. We all marveled at that,” she said of the attention the dog got compared with that of the suspect in her mother’s killing.
“It’s just too easy for people on parole to fall through the cracks … There are criminals out there running free and no one’s paying attention,” she said.
Mic Smith
The Post and Courier
‘Lost the will to live’
Pearl Savage can’t bring herself to eat. Her nerves are too jangled, her appetite gone.
“I just sit here and feel like I’ve lost the will to live,” she said.
It’s been almost a year since Savage found her sister and nephew lying dead in the blood-soaked bedrooms of their North Charleston home. Those images never are far from her thoughts. After all, for months after the killing, she lived just a few yards away.
“I spend a great deal of time thinking about it,” she said. “It was my baby sister and my nephew. Living right next door has been unbearable.”
The man accused of killing Linda and Victor Griffitts is a career criminal who spent his life preying on others. But Larry Troglin Jr. never seemed to run out of second chances. Not after he stole from his grandmother. Not after he ran from police. Not after he robbed people.
Troglin was paroled from prison in 2006 after serving just one year of a five-year robbery sentence. He quickly violated the terms of his parole, skipped out on a work-release program and picked up a new crack-cocaine charge. The state’s answer: probation and a trip back to the same work camp he walked away from in 2006.
He skipped out again and was on the run from probation agents when the Griffitts gave him a place to stay. They didn’t know he was a wanted man. He just seemed like someone who needed help.
As Savage waits for Troglin to come to trial in the killings, she can’t help but wonder why he received so many chances in the past. She hopes he will pay this time.
Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier
She’ll never see him again
For Celestine Nelson the hardest thing to accept was that she’d never see her grandson again.
Jermaine Witfield, 19, was shot and killed, supposedly in retaliation for a fight. Police found Witfield on a November evening in 2007 lying on the front porch of a home on Madden Drive. Blood poured from a bullet wound in his head. Witnesses said a gunman standing in the open sun roof of a white station wagon fired two shots as the car drove by. Witfield died the next morning at Medical University Hospital.
Police charged Travis Deangelo Richardson, 20, and Recardo Antwon Richardson, 18, with murder. The older Richardson had a record of drug possession and criminal domestic assault and was awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault. The younger had charges pending on drugs and possession of a stolen weapon.
Celestine Nelson said she thinks violent criminals should be locked up with no chance at parole or probation. But even if they are locked up, it’s tough for her to accept, she said. “Their mother and grandmother can still see them. I can’t see my grandson.”
By Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith
The Post and Courier
August 24, 2008