Grisly facts hurt defense's gamble
In deciding how to fight for Gary Lee Sampson's life, his lawyers took a giant risk. Sampson would take the rare step of admitting his guilt, they decided, and the trial would fast-forward to the single question of whether he deserved to die at the hands of the federal government.
They believed the strategy would spare Sampson, who greatly damaged his own legal defense by confessing to his crimes in great detail, every criminal defendant's worst nightmare: weeks of jurors soaking up graphic evidence and testimony about his violent acts. And Sampson would show the jurors that he was taking responsibility for his crimes, perhaps suggesting that he was remorseful and bolstering his bid for a sentence of life in prison.
But yesterday's verdict -- 12 jurors unanimously agreed that Sampson should die -- showed the difficulty of such an approach.
Legal analysts acknowledge that Sampson was extremely difficult to defend, from the vicious nature of his crimes to his violent background to his confession, and perhaps no tactical decision could have persuaded jurors to spare his life. But when Sampson admitted he was guilty of carjacking and murdering Philip A. McCloskey and Jonathan Rizzo, he wiped out the possibility for any of the jurors to harbor a speck of doubt that he was guilty. Some studies have suggested that the main reason juries reject the death penalty, even after they have agreed to convict the defendant, is that they can't be 100 percent sure that the defendant is guilty.
Reynold A. Ilg Jr., chairman of the criminal justice section of the Massachusetts Bar Association, said he suspects that Sampson's admission of guilt in such grisly crimes weighed heavily in the minds of jurors.
"If you have a kernel of doubt, that can be turned into a vote of sympathy," said Ilg. "It makes it that much more difficult to say, `I'm going to sentence this man to death.' "
Ilg and other lawyers cautioned that it is impossible to argue that Sampson's lawyers should have chosen another strategy without knowing what they knew as they went to trial. "Monday morning quarterbacking is easy," Ilg said.
Sampson's lawyers, Stephanie Page and David A. Ruhnke, shocked families of Sampson's murder victims when they announced Sept. 9 that the defendant would plead guilty and ask a jury to decide what penalty he should face, life in prison or execution.
Lawyers are given more leeway in the information they can introduce during the penalty phase of a trial. When jurors are considering the question of guilt, lawyers must hew closely to the facts of the case. For the defense, that meant Sampson's lawyers could try to make him more human by introducing testimony about Sampson's difficult childhood with a cold, physically abusive father, information that probably would not have been admissible as jurors decided whether to convict him.
But it also allowed prosecutors more latitude. They presented testimony suggesting Sampson would be a danger to other inmates and guards if he were sentenced to life in prison. They also put relatives of the murdered men on the stand, who wept as they described their loss. The jury forewoman, Mary E. Dever, interviewed by the Globe after the verdict, said that such testimony stayed with the jurors as they deliberated.
"Every one of these jurors are going to be thinking of those families and their loved ones for a long time," Dever said.
Jurors' verdict forms also showed they weren't swayed by some of the key arguments of defense lawyers, especially that Sampson deserved to live because of mitigating factors such as mental-health problems and his abuse as a child.
Only five jurors agreed that Sampson had accepted responsibility for his crimes. Not a single juror found that he was remorseful for his conduct.
And none of them agreed that Sampson was verbally, emotionally, or physically abused as a child or that he was impaired by mental or emotional disturbances, key components of defense lawyers' arguments.
The last time Massachusetts jurors decided whether to impose the federal death penalty, they reached a different decision. In March 2001, the jurors who had convicted former nurse Kristen H. Gilbert of killing four patients in a Northampton veterans' hospital decided to spare her life.
James Sultan, one of Gilbert's appellate lawyers, said Gilbert had some advantages that Sampson didn't have: her gender, her motherhood, and her lack of a previous criminal record.
Her parents were also a daily presence in court, sitting stiffly on a bench, often in the front row. One of the jurors who rejected the death penalty for Gilbert later told the Globe she didn't want to bring any more pain to those parents.
Gilbert's two young boys never entered the courtroom, but they, too, were a powerful presence as jurors weighed her fate. During closing arguments, one of Gilbert's lawyers stared straight into the eyes of jurors and asked them, "If you choose to kill Kristen Gilbert, which of you will explain to her children why it had to be done?"
In contrast, Sampson had no children who knew him; he left two of his wives before they gave birth and gave up another child for adoption. He had no sympathetic family members crying through the trial. His parents, sister, and brother refused to speak to his lawyers; a letter Sampson sent to his parents from prison was returned to him unopened.
"It would be hard to imagine a much more unsympathetic defendant," Sultan said.
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.
