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 
is it society’s responsibilty or the responsibilty of the parent(s) to raise the child in a proper manner. If more people would decide to take responsibilty for the consequences of the actions that they take, then society would be better off.
So who should we blame that you apparently can’t grasp the complexity of the issue, Virginia Voter? Your parents or society?
~
Excellent post, Vivian.
I sat through a few hours of the trial while it was going on, although I missed the sentencing portion.
I am opposed to the death penalty. It cannot be fairly applied or equally administered and if there is a mistake there is no recourse. Nevertheless, there was never any doubt in my mind that the jury would not only find him guilty but sentence him to death.
The testimony of several witnesses described a man who was looking for a confrontation. He went to the apartment of a bunch of young women with a gun and showed it to them, threatening to start “clapping” them. The young women clearly understood it to mean that he intended to shoot someone. When one of the women commented that she saw the man with whom Porter had arrived outside talking to a police officer in a cruiser Porter went outside. The officer approached him and put a hand on his left arm, apparently intending to ask him about the report he was carrying a weapon, and Porter drew out the handgun from his right pocket and shot the officer point-blank in the forehead. The ME described the second and third shots to the officer’s head as having been administered after the officer was already face down on the ground and dead or dying. He never drew his weapon and posed no real threat to Porter. Porter is an impressively large and athletic looking man and the police officer was much shorter and rather roly poly. Frankly, if Porter had taken off running the officer would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of catching him. This seemed to me to be an execution by a man full of rage and hoping to vent it on the first person who gave him a reason.
There was heartbreaking testimony from the investigators of going to the hospital, finding the officer was dead, and then having to bag all of his effects for evidence collection. The attending nurse, who knew Officer Reaves from prior encounters, was too distraught and the job ended up being done by one of the investigators.
Mrs. Reaves had to leave the courtroom during portions of the testimony.
CA Doyle did an excellent job of building the Commonwealth’s case. He presented the case in a methodical and low-key fashion, introducing and using exhibits in an almost seamless weaving of the tale with no irrelevancies or dead ends. He let the story tell itself with his questions and eschewed drama. The evidence was dramatic enough without any contribution from him.
As a defense attorney I had nothing but sympathy for Porter’s defense counsel who were handed a pig in a poke and had no way to dress it up and slap lipstick on it. The testimony proceeded inexorably onward, the witnesses obviously striving for truthfulness to the best of their ability, and the defense attorneys had nothing for which they could attack the witnesses.
You are right, of course, about the failure to do something about Thomas Porter before he grew up into the cold killer he has become. He sat emotionless through the parts of the trial I saw him in, as unconcerned as a guy waiting for an appointment. Maybe he’s a psychopath. He seemed unaffected by the testimony. Perhaps early childhood intervention would have saved him, but perhaps not. It’s just too bad this officer and his family had to pay the price of one man’s malevolence.
Carla – thanks for the first-hand account of the trial. Although the Pilot has covered it, your experience as an attorney puts it in a totally different light.
There is nothing complex about this issue. Two people had a child and failed in their responsiblity to raise this child and to teach this child the rights and wrongs of life. People are always trying to make things more complicated than they are. When people have children, their responsiblity is to raise and teach the children they have. That is their job. Too many parents are not taking care of their responsbility to raise the children they bring into this world.
So MB, while it is always the liberal way to blame everyone but those who really are to blame, and also to make the issue complex, there is nothing complex about this issue. The people responsible for bringing this young man into this world had the duty to raise and love this child and to teach this child the ways of the world.
You still didn’t answer my question.
And they (the parents) didn’t do their job so an officer pay with his life. We, as a society, have responsibilities as well. One of those is to pickup the slack when parents fail to do their part. If we don’t, we are not only punishing the child, but also punishing ourselves via higher costs, including incarceration costs.
Bottom line is that are are all in this together. And it is to our collective advantage that everyone be a productive member of society. To do otherwise is to invite chaos.
Obviously you didn’t read my post. My parents took the time to raise my correctly. They taught me right from wrong, they taught the notion of responsibilty for one’s actions. They taught me that society is not responsible for me, I am. Liberals like yourself, like to cloud every issue and make everything more complicated than really is. I feel for the man, but I blame his parents for his problems, not society. In my lifetime, I have known many men like this man.
No, VV, liberals like me understand the reality we live in, where not everything goes perfectly. Things and people fail. Sometimes it’s small, like the batteries in your remote or forgetting to pick up the milk on the way home. Sometimes it’s really big, like parenting. The difference between me and you, is that you look at the kid and say “Well, I guess you’re fucked. Shoulda picked better parents.” and I look and say “Well, you got fucked. Let’s see what we can do to help from here.”
I can live with that. I can’t understand how you could.
pwned.
Fry him. Put him to death and if no one is availabl, I will flip the switch or push in the needle.
Sadley, this Governor may prevent this from happening.
People do not fail at parenting. People just do not parent. That is the point that people like you miss. Once a person decides to have a child, that child becomes their sole responsibilty and charge in life. That child is a blank slate that is waiting for the parent to instruct him/her on the ways of life. Things such as right and wrong, left and right, up and down. When people decide that they do not want to parent then the child suffers and that parent should be held to account for that. I do not blame the child, I blame the parent and those who decide that they will not parent when they produce children.
We as a society need to start holding these people accountable. Imagine if responsibilty and accountable were high everyone’s list, then children like Mr. Porter would have a better chance at life. All the programs in the world, will never replace the love of one’s parents and attention and instruction children want and need from their parents.
I can live with myself, because I understand what the real issue.
Ha hahhaaahaa hhaa haaah hahaha ah ha ha.
You know, if it weren’t so goddamn sad.
And really, you’ve no place lecturing anyone about accountability, with these tortured gymnastics of yours aimed at avoiding any responsibility as a member of society.
VV – I read your post. And so you were lucky enough to have parents that taught you things. Good for you. But what of all of the kids that don’t? Are you saying that our society has no responsibility to help, to fill the gap?
No, you don’t understand the issue, because you aren’t able to see beyond the end of your own nose. It’s all about you – not about the greater good. And that is quite scary.
The jails are full of folks whose parents failed, as well as ones whose parents did not fail.
Shall we also begin holding parents accountable if their children are also the victims of crimes, then? If perhaps a school teacher, next door neighbor or church pastor sexually mollests a child, does blame ultimately rest with the parent for not parenting appropriately?
Since we’re apparently going to argue that the child happens to society but that society does not happen to the child.
BTW, Squeaky Wheel, your enthusaism for taking the life of another human being is truly touching and reminiscent of the days gone by when we could lynch a man from the nearest tree and call it justice. Thank you for your civic-minded volunteerism. Because lusting to participate in the killing of another is in no way a sin.