Norfolk police officer Stanley Reaves was shot to death in October 2005. His killer, Thomas Porter, fled the area but was captured in NY and returned here for trial. Due to the pre-trial publicity, the trial was moved to Arlington. There, Norfolk Commonwealth Attorney Jack Doyle presented his case while Norfolk Capital Defender Joe Migliozzi did his best to prevent his client from receiving the death penalty.
Yesterday, the jury recommended that Porter be sentenced to death. According to the Virginian-Pilot:
The clerk read the jury’s verdict form and the jurors’ finding that Porter posed a continuing threat to society because of the probability he would commit crimes in the future. It was one of two factors they had to find to reach the death penalty.
During the sentencing phase of the trial, several Norfolk teachers testified on Porter’s behalf. One, Grace Houchins, spoke about his behavior at Granby Elementary School, where he was disruptive. The jury did not hear all of her testimony, however, especially this part:
“We recite all the time, ‘It takes a village,’ ” she said. “In my opinion, there was no village. This child was all by himself.”
The article goes on to say:
The documents showed he repeatedly left classes during the middle of a school year to shuttle between his mother in New Jersey and an aunt in Norfolk. The documents also showed more behavioral problems, such as fighting in school, classroom disruptions and inappropriate touching of female students.
I think this gets to the core of what Jim Hoeft said in this comment:
Other than oversimplifying the outcome of “they broke the law”, there are underlying reasons as to why…
Things like poverty, lack of education, mental illness, etc.
It is not a cost-effective or responsible civic solution to simply “put people away.”
The punishment must certainly be there, but I would much rather try to prevent crime in the first place by devoting some time, energy and resources to eliminating its “causes”.
Perhaps one day we will spend as much time, energy, and resources on preventing crime as we do on convicting people. In this case, the signs were all there but were ignored. The former teacher wrote years ago:
The necessary help now will prevent much sorrow down the road.
With proper intervention, would Porter have still grown up to be a criminal? Perhaps. But we’ll never know.
A Norfolk police officer lost his life in the line of duty and another young man will likely lose his. Such is the price we all pay when society breaks down.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Oh and SW – the governor has upheld the death sentences of all but one of the cases presented, so I think your comment regarding him is off-base. No one is saying that Porter has a mental disability like Walton.
Virginia Voter, you have a remarkably inflexible and limited view of the world. The issue is complex because human beings are complex. For twenty years I have been watching the comings and goings of people through our criminal justice system, through our juvenile and domestic courts, and through our administtrative law systems. Things happen. Even people who mean well when they first have children, and who do everything right, can end up with a bad situation.
You say that you were taught right from wrong and you had two parents and all that. Lucky you. Where is there room in your universe for those who aren’t so fortunate? I’m encountering the children of deployed soldiers, the children of illegal aliens, the children of people who’ve suffered some sort of systemic breakdown – depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, chronic or terminal physical illness, poverty, loss – you name it. What about their kids? Some of these people, well-meaning though they may have started out – are literally at their wits’ end. They don’t have a reserve left for their children because something else has intruded.
What about the kids who are born with certain proclivities which make them susceptible to developing an acquaintance with the criminal justice system? The kids who suffer from mood disorders, or early-onset bipolar disorder, or sociopathic tendencies, or fragile X syndrome, or Asperger’s syndrome, or any other of a number of different disorders which have far more to do with chemistry than they do with child-rearing methods? In my practice I’ve encountered children who’ve demonstrated tendencies toward deviance as early as 8 or 9 years old. I’ve known parents through my church and church run school who, despite all their best efforts to provide a loving and nurturing environment, have found themselves with a child only a mother can love – a sexual psychopath or a child so damaged by mere exposure to humanity that he develops into what we would call a monster.
Do not feel so secure in your world that you believe it can never happen to you. Psychiatric problems happen. Mental disorders happen. No one sets out to be the mother of a schizophrenic or a person suffering from a severe personality disorder. You can attack it and call it liberal all you want, but the human mind is perhaps the most complex of all entities, straddling as it does the ineffable domain of mind and the solid domain of biochemistry. Are people responsible for their own actions? Yep, most of the time. Do people have free will? Yep, most of the time. Does raising kids “right” mean they won’t have serious anti-social issues? Yep, most of the time. But God help those who fall by the wayside, whose lives for whatever reason become so warped or so deprived that they trigger deep-seated problems or deranged views of society.
Your eagerness to be the instrument which destroys such people repels me.
Carla – Well put. I also struggle frequently with these problems in my work. I absolutely believe in parental responsibility, and personal responsibility. However, that does not address the issue of what happens to troubled youth when parents are not available, or have contributed to the trouble, as frequently occurs. Some individuals and families really are an accident waiting to happen. I think the loss of this police officer, and the similar circumstances under which we have lost other police officers in this area, underscore the need for the government, as the instrument of our community, to do more than wait for the inevitable explosion and then pick up the bodies and the perpetrators. I am not sure that is what happened here, but it is unfortunately what happened in other cases. We simply have too much at stake, in terms of personal and public safety, to wait for the inevitable outcome and then preach about “personal responsibility” or “parental responsibility.” Unfortunately, our Commonwealth’s philosophy of limited government, premised on the unquestionably good idea of low taxes, sometimes has very, very high costs in the long run.
Vivian, in my opinion this is one of the biggest threats to our society as we know it. It’s truly frightening that people are more concerned with getting ‘revenge’ on criminals than FIXING the problem and the system thereby hopefully PREVENTING stuff like this from happening in the future. Great post, thanks!!