Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 13, 1994 TAG: 9406270133
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
While Gov. George Allen and his Commission on Parole Abolition were meeting Wednesday in Roanoke, a federal judge in Roanoke was overturning Tuggle's 1984 capital-murder conviction. Tuggle had been sentenced to die after his conviction for raping and murdering a Marion woman.
The state attorney general's office says it is likely to appeal U.S. District Judge James Turk's ruling, but whether his decision is found, finally, to be legally sound is not at issue here. The foremost question to be asked about this case is: Why was Lem Davis Tuggle in court in 1984? Why was he not still in prison?
Tuggle had been released just four months before the woman he was convicted of killing, Jessie Havens, left a dance with him in 1983 and was shot to death with a gun later found in his possession. He had been freed on parole after serving eight years - eight years - for strangling a 17-year-old woman who had left a dance with him in 1972. For that, he had been sentenced to 20 years and, as a first offender, been eligible for parole after serving just five.
It is such people, who have committed cold-blooded, violent crimes, who enrage the public when they are released early to prey on the innocent. After his crime is discovered and the danger that he poses known, after he is captured and convicted - after he is stopped - law-abiding citizens don't want to have to fear dealing with him for a long, long time. And they shouldn't have to.
Anger that they do, on occasion, gave Allen an issue that resonated with voters in his successful campaign for the governorship last year. The resonance was amplified by a growing public awareness that rotating lesser thugs in and out of prison as if it were a sort of tough club has led not to remorse and redemption but to cynical disdain among youthful offenders. Allen understood how desperately the public wants reform of the criminal-justice system.
Yet, America is now imprisoning almost 1 million of its people. It is spending billions to build and staff prisons and support the inmates. The trend has been building for years. In 20 years, the number of inmates has quadrupled. For two decades, the country has been trying to build walls to keep the dangerous incarcerated so that the innocent can be free.
But more than ever, law-abiding citizens feel it is they who are imprisoned, in their own homes.
Clearly, changes must be made. A 20-year sentence for strangling the life out of a 17-year-old should be 20 years served. For that offense, 20 years in prison is, if anything, too few. The system must do a better job of separating out those soulless inmates who, because of lack of nurture or a lack in their nature - the cause matters not a whit to their victims - should be locked away until they are too feeble to do further harm.
And more needs to change than the proposals under consideration by Allen's parole commission. Rather than concentrating money and effort exclusively on punishment, America must also spend more of both on helping, at the earliest possible time, children at risk of turning to crime. America must help them to, instead, stake out a future in the mainstream of society. The country needs their abilities, and it can't afford their alienation.
The United States must not become a Fortress America, building ever more walls against an enemy within. The country needs to work toward making sure violent criminals are incarcerated - and rare.
by CNB