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March
5, 2007
VOL.
45, NO. 5Oakland,
CA
Wrongly convicted
Catholic
devotes life to ending death penalty
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Kirk Bloodsworth CNS PHOTO/OWEN SWEENEYIII/CATHOLIC REVIEW |
CAMBRIDGE,
Md. (CNS) -- If anyone has experienced sheer terror, it’s Kirk Bloodsworth.
Tried and found guilty of the brutal 1984 rape and murder of 9-year-old
Dawn Hamilton near Baltimore, the barrel-chested crabber from the Eastern
Shore was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
But as he was led into the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore in
1985 no one believed his story -- least of all, the other prisoners. “We’re
going to do to you what you did to that little girl,” they screamed.
“We’re going to get you, Kirk!”
Seated on the couch in the living room of his small home in Cambridge
more than 20 years later, Bloodsworth said, “I remember that first
night in my cell and the smell coming from this place. ... Not only did
it stink of every kind of excrement you could think of, but you also could
smell hatred -- and it was all pointing at me.”
Despite the strong temptation to despair, Bloodsworth said he decided
he would fight to prove his innocence. He told The Catholic Review, Baltimore
archdiocesan newspaper, that he believes God sustained him through nearly
nine years of taxing prison life, sending him otherworldly consolations
and leading him into the Catholic Church.
With the same steely determination that got him through his prison ordeal,
Bloodsworth is now devoting the rest of his life to abolishing the death
penalty and seeking reforms of what he calls a “broken” criminal
justice system.
He could get his wish in Maryland, where legislation has been introduced
to substitute life in prison without parole as the maximum penalty for
crimes currently punishable by death. Gov. Martin O’Malley has said
he will sign such a law if it comes to his desk.
On the day he was found guilty, Bloodsworth said he remembers being housed
in a Baltimore County holding cell with another man who sat in the shadows.
For two hours, the stranger didn’t say a word as he ate a sandwich
and sipped an orange drink. Then he turned to his fellow prisoner and
told Bloodsworth not to worry. “Everything is going to be all right,”
Bloodsworth recalled the man saying. “You’ll be OK.”
Summoned back to the courtroom, Bloodsworth heard the guilty verdict and
was taken back to the holding cell. He said the man was gone and only
half the sandwich remained. When he asked the sheriff’s deputy where
the “other guy” was, the deputy responded that Bloodsworth
had been the only person in the cell.
Looking back, Bloodsworth thinks he was visited by an angel.
“Maybe I wanted to see something -- I don’t know. But I tell
you what, he was as real as you are,” he told a Catholic Review
reporter.
Bloodsworth was raised in the Baptist and Methodist traditions. In prison
he began deep theological discussions with Deacon Al Rose, the Catholic
prison chaplain there. The more he learned, the more he wanted to become
a Catholic.
At Easter time in 1989, then-Auxiliary Bishop John H. Ricard of Baltimore
visited Bloodsworth at Deacon Rose’s invitation. The guard would
not let Bishop Ricard enter the cell, so he had to administer the sacraments
of confirmation and the Eucharist through the bars of the closed cell
door.
Asked what it was like to receive Communion for the first time, Bloodsworth
smiled. “Oh, it was an honor,” he said. “I felt clean.
I felt accepted.”
When DNA testing proved Bloodsworth’s innocence in 1993, he was
released and pardoned and was paid $300,000 in compensation for wrongful
imprisonment -- the accumulated salary the state said he would have earned
as a waterman.
Bloodsworth said he still had to endure the suspicions of many who believed
he had gotten off on a technicality -- until 2003 when the DNA from the
crime scene was identified as that of Kimberly Shay Ruffner, a man who
had been previously charged with sexually assaulting children. Ruffner
subsequently pleaded guilty to the Dawn Hamilton murder and is serving
a life sentence.
“I tell you the
difference between the day before they found who really did it and day
after was like I had just won the World Series for the town of Cambridge,”
said Bloodsworth. “Everyone treated me completely different.”
Bloodsworth has become an outspoken advocate for the abolition of the
death penalty. He recently went to Annapolis to speak in support of the
pending bill that would abolish capital punishment in Maryland.
Working for the Justice Project, a Washington-based organization that
pushes for criminal justice reform, Bloodsworth lobbied for the passage
of the federal Innocence Protection Act, which was signed into law in
2004. The act established the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing
Program, through which the U.S. government helps states defray the costs
of such DNA testing.
“We need to do post-conviction testing to find out if there are
other innocent people on death row before we start throwing switches,”
said Bloodsworth, pointing out that since 1973, more than 150 people have
been wrongfully convicted and later freed from prison based on DNA evidence.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” he said.
In an unusual move that highlights the priority Maryland’s bishops
have placed on abolishing the death penalty, Auxiliary Bishop Denis J.
Madden of Baltimore testified in person at a Feb. 21 committee hearing
in Annapolis on a bill that would replace the death penalty with life
sentences without parole.
“The teachings of our Church recognize the right of legitimate government
to resort to capital punishment, but directly challenge the appropriateness
of government’s doing so in a society that is capable of defending
the public order and ensuring the public’s safety,” said Bishop
Madden.
Bishop Madden spoke on the same day Gov. Martin J. O’Malley forcefully
argued for a ban on the death penalty.
