On Thursday, Jan. 8, 1981, Barbara Christian was sick in bed. Her 17-year-old daughter, Terri, a senior at Tokay High School in Lodi, went out to buy dinner. She never came back.
At 2:00 a.m. Saturday, police found Terri’s body in a vineyard on the outskirts of town. She was naked from the waist down; her shirt and bra were pulled up over her chest. She had been hit in the head 23 times, mostly with a claw hammer. Her skull was shattered. Her cheekbones and jaw were broken. She had four stab wounds in her chest.
Terri Winchell should be 42 years old today. She should have gone to college; she should have had the opportunity to be a mother, an aunt, a friend, a lover. She should have had a rich, meaningful life. Instead, she never saw her 18th birthday.
Michael Morales and Rick Ortega were found guilty of this heinous crime. Ortega got life in prison and Morales—tried and convicted in Ventura County—is scheduled to be executed on February 21 at San Quentin Prison.
We cannot know what it’s like to be Barbara Christian, to survive the murder of a daughter. It’s almost obscene to ask.
So we must mourn for Terri and all the other victims of our national homicide epidemic. We must listen carefully to the families of murder victims. We must provide them the special services they need; we must help them heal, and we must protect society from other murderers.
But we must not execute Michael Morales. Or anyone else.
We need no longer dispute the troubling aspects of the Morales case. Let’s assume there was no jailhouse informant conveniently placed in a cell opposite Morales’ and rewarded with a sentence reduction. Let’s assume there was no perjured testimony given under duress and recanted 10 years later. Let’s assume the dissent to overturn this verdict by a State Supreme Court justice on grounds of a racially discriminatory jury pool is irrelevant. Let’s assume it’s just a coincidence that among the three California executions over the past three months one was an African American, one an American Indian and one a Latino. Let’s assume that indigents get the same quality of legal representation as wealthy people. Let’s assume that Morales should get a death sentence, while his cousin who planned and helped carry out the crime, should not. Let’s assume that a quarter of a century between arrest and execution is not too long. Let’s assume that there is nothing better to spend our billions of taxpayer dollars on than sustaining this whole macabre and excruciatingly painful process.
Let’s assume there is no reasonable doubt.
The question remains, should we, at the execution hour of 12:01 a.m. on February 21, care if Michael Morales lives or dies?
The answer is yes. We cannot ignore the intrinsic immorality of state-sponsored murder. If the right to life is a fundamental human right, it must apply universally, to all human beings.
We will always fall short in our efforts to honor human rights, to forgive, to reconcile, to rehabilitate and to heal. But we cannot, must not, institutionalize murder.
The only legitimate question to ask for Terri Winchell’s sake is how can we prevent the next rape, torture and murder of a 17-year-old girl. The answer is the hard work of education, prevention and intervention among both our at-risk and general population. Our disadvantaged communities in particular lack basic social services from pre-natal care through birth, infancy, childhood and adolescence. If we nurture our young in the ways of love and nonviolence, our violent crime rates will plummet.
“An eye for an eye,” said Gandhi, “makes the whole world blind.” He meant not only that warfare perpetuates a cycle of violence, but also that killing deprives us of a vital social sensibility—compassion. Capital punishment dehumanizes us. In avenging the murder, we become the murderers.
There are only three ways to deliberately kill another human being: murder, war and the death penalty. With a little effort we could quickly eradicate one of these scourges forever. Let’s do it in honor of Terri Winchell.
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