Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
IT HAS BEEN 22-1/2 years since Cassie Holden, 12, on the second day after arriving in Bremerton from Pocatello, Idaho, to spend the summer with her mother, went for a walk near her home and never came back.
Her body was found two days later near the Rolling Hills Golf Course.
She had been raped and beaten to death with a rock.
Witnesses reported seeing a black man in the area and Jonathan Lee Gentry, 30, already in jail for the knife point rape of another young woman in Kitsap County, was quickly suspect.
When hair and blood were found on his shoe laces that linked him to the Holden murder, he was charged with the crime in 1990, tried and convicted of aggravated first degree murder in 1991 and sentenced to death.
The state Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in January 1995.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in October 1995.
The state Supreme Court upheld it again in February 1999.
So is Jonathan Lee Gentry now moldering in the grave?
Nope. Not only is he the longest serving prisoner on Death Row in Walla Walla, he just made the news the other day. After serving the mandatory one year in solitary confinement way back in 1991, he had been living in a special unit where prisoners are allowed daily contact with other prisoners and family contact visits until the state shut it down last year for lack of money to keep it going.
GENTRY appealed his return to solitary confinement, saying it was unconstitutional to increase the severity of his punishment just because the state was broke. The state Supreme Court said it wasn’t an increase since he had already been in solitary.
Question: why do we let death row prisoners, actually lawyers for death row prisoners, drag these things out interminably when the proof is incontrovertible that they are guilty? In fact, our state court in 1994, in upholding the death penalty for Brian Keith Lord, who kidnapped, raped and bludgeoned to death a 16-year old Kitsap girl with a hammer, sent an irate message to defense lawyers across the state.
Stop throwing everything but the kitchen sink into your appeals, they said. Don’t leave it to us to sort out the meritorious claims from the “frivolous and repetitive.” An appeals brief that’s 1,200 pages long and raises 67 issues, some of which were rejected previously, “borders on abuse of process. We hereby provide notice that such behavior WILL NOT (capitalization by the justices) be tolerated in the future.”
But the warning from the court apparently carried little weight concerning the fate of Jonathan Lee Gentry and the seven other prisoners on Death Row.
There is a never ending campaign to end the death penalty. Justice David Souter said in 2006 that pressure for prosecutors to win convictions, witness misidentifications and false confessions have contributed to the hazards of capital prosecution.
THE SUPREME COURT has ruled twice that juries, not judges, must impose the death penalty. It ruled in 2002 that the mentally retarded cannot be given the death penalty because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment and control of their impulses. Teenagers under 18 were granted immunity from the death penalty in 2005 because, the court said, they are still developing their character and should not be held as culpable as adults.
So will Jonathan Lee Gentry ever pay the price for his crime? I don’t know, except that consideration seems to be ever on behalf of the criminal, not the victim. Cassie Holden will never go back to her home with her father in Idaho, or visit her mother again. And all because she took a walk on a sunny June day in 1988 and ran into Jonathan Lee Gentry about whose welfare the justice system cares more than it did her.
(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)
Reader Comments(0)