Ex-death row inmates speak at Southeast

On the day when Mark Gill of Cape Girardeau was sentenced to death for a 2002 murder, two former death row inmates spoke about the judicial systems that put them on death row. Confessions of the real killers and the advent of DNA technology eventually proved their innocence.

Joe Amrine and Kevin Green spoke at Southeast Missouri State University and the Osage Community Centre at the request of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty and Amnesty International.

Amrine was in a Missouri prison for burglary and robbery in 1986 when he was accused of murdering a prison guard. Despite a confession from the real killer, Amrine was sentenced to death. Amrine said he believed justice would prevail until he learned he was defended by an attorney who had more prisoners on death row than any other in the state.

When the Missouri Supreme Court questioned the assistant attorney general before releasing Amrine, the prosecutor told the Supreme Court that "I don't care how innocent he is, we want to execute him," Amrine said. "They asked why, and the attorney general said 'he had a fair trial.' That's how outrageous the death penalty is."

Opponents of the death penalty say they want to revisit it because it is arbitrarily administered. Poor people and blacks, like Amrine, are five times more likely to be sentenced to death. If for no other reason, said Bob Polock, who leads the Cape Girardeau chapter of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty,the death penalty should be abolished because it is not cost-effective. It costs more to execute a prisoner, Polock said, than it does to house him in prison.

Amrine said he came to believe that God put him in jail for a reason and that he's a stronger man for it. To him, the death penalty is not justice.

"It's revenge," he said. "When you execute people you create more victims."

The evidence in Green's case pointed to a serial murderer who was killing women in Orange County, Calif., in 1979 when his pregnant wife was beaten and their unborn daughter killed. Green, then a young Marine, had stepped out of their home to buy a late supper for himself and his wife from a nearby restaurant. He came back to find his wife near death.

As a result of the beating, Green's wife, now his ex-wife, suffered severe brain damage and amnesia. Despite evidence that pointed to the man who eventually confessed, Green was convicted on his wife's testimony.

Sixteen years later, Gene Parker confessed because he, also a Marine, regretted that another Marine was doing time for a crime he had committed. Parker is now on death row.

Still, Green does not support the death penalty. "Even though people like Gene Parker deserve the worst we can do, it is not our job to judge the soul of this man. When he confessed, it freed me. What I wish for him is what I had to do -- do the time."

Amrine and Green have both put their lives back together. They speak anywhere they're asked to speak against a penalty they believe needs to be if not abolished, at least put on hold and reviewed until the inequities can be taken out.

"We're not saying you should support or oppose the death penalty," Jeff Stack, legislative coordinator for Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty in Columbia, Mo., told the audience. "But say that you want a moratorium while a commission looks at it."

lredeffer@semissourian.com

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