Thoughts on the execution of a pen-pal by Jack Payden-Travers

Teresa Lewis

Before leaving for our family week at the beach, I sent a goodbye card to a friend. She’s about to die. As any of us who have lost loved ones to death know, it is not easy to say goodbye. This case was especially difficult, for my friend isn’t ill. As far as I know she is in reasonably good health and turned 41 this past April. But she is set to die on September 23rd.

On that night Teresa Lewis will be strapped to a gurney and lethally injected at the death chamber inside the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. I know she is guilty of participating in the murders of both her husband, Julian, and her stepson, C.J., who was home on military leave prior to his Army reserve unit being sent to Iraq. She pled guilty in front of Judge Strauss. But what I don’t understand is how the two triggermen received life-without-parole sentences while the judge condemned Teresa to death. He referred to her “as the head of the serpent.”

But Teresa Lewis did not fire the shotguns that night. By their own accounts Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller did. Fuller is presently incarcerated at Sussex 1 State Prison. He will die in prison. Shallenberger is already dead. He committed suicide in 2006 while serving his life sentence.

According to news accounts Teresa has an IQ of 70 or 72 while Matthew Shallenberger’s was listed as 113. Yet I keep hearing that she was sentenced to death because she “masterminded” the affair. I question that scenario. Having corresponded with Teresa for the past seven years, I don’t believe she could be the “mastermind” in this affair. This strikes me like the case of Brandon Hedrick, an individual who suffered from a low IQ who was also sentenced to death for murder while the mastermind with a higher IQ got life. Could it be that the criminal with the higher IQ fingers the less intelligent one for the ultimate punishment and thus works a deal to get the lesser sentence?

I am praying that Governor McDonnell will review the mitigating evidence that the courts because of procedural limitations will not consider: the letter that Matthew Shallenberger sent to a female friend in August 2003 in which he wanted “to get her (Teresa) to ‘fall in love’ with me so she would give me the insurance money;” and the affidavit of private investigator Alfred Brown, who interviewed Shallenberger in 2004, in which Mr. Brown says that Shallenberger admitted he orchestrated the events; and the statement of Rodney Fuller, who killed the stepson, that says Shallenberger was the mastermind while Lewis was the dupe.

There is no doubt that Teresa Lewis is guilty of participating in murder but I believe there is a grave question as to her capability to be the mastermind of the plot and thus eligible for execution under Virginia’s “murder for hire” statute. She may be guilty but is she culpable? Governor McDonnell must weigh the evidence and hopefully come down on the side of mercy and commute Lewis’ sentence to life-in-prison-without-parole. It makes no sense for the killers to get life while the dupe gets executed.

--Jack Payden-Travers serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Advisory Board of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. A recent graduate of the Conflict Transformation program of Eastern Mennonite University, he resides in Lynchburg, VA.

Us and Willie McGee

Before we are anything else, the WMRA community is a community of listeners. This is why I want to be sure you knew of a rare listening experience to be had today on All Things Considered -- Radio Diaries' exploration of the case of Willie McGee, a black man who may or may not have been guilty of raping a white woman, who was put to death in Mississippi's traveling electric chair on May 8, 1951.

His trial and execution are generally considered to be a representation of Jim Crow's rough and racist justice on parade.
 
I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. In the fifth grade, my class went on a field trip to Raleigh. All I remember touring is the capitol and the penitentiary, where we were shown the electric chair. I can't remember what I felt at the time, but I can still picture that chair.

Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Onlookers in Jackson, Miss., gather around the executioner Jimmy Thompson, left, and the portable electric chair, which was mounted at the back of a truck.

The experience came back to me when I read Larry Rohter's fine piece in the New York Times about the execution of Willie McGee, and studied the children in this photograph. Don't you think they'd have much the same expressions if they were being photographed with Joltin' Joe DiMaggio? This electric chair, this executioner! Man, they're really something!

Was that me as a fifth grader? Surely not, but then children take their cues from adults, and evidently adults in the 1950's thought laying eyes on an electric chair was a real treat.

These days, no matter what our politics, no matter what we think about capital punishment, we do at least recognize now that it isn't "something!"  And there's probably no better context for considering the societal implications of the death penalty than the arrest, trial and execution of Willie McGee.

Here's Wikipedia's entry on it . . .

Willie McGee (died May 8, 1951) was an African-American from Laurel, Mississippi, who was sentenced to death in 1945 for raping a white housewife.^[1] In a time of intense racism in the United States, especially in The South, the outcome of McGee's first trial in December 1945 was effectively pre-ordained.^[1] With two confessions and overwhelming evidence against him he was convicted by three courts. The first trial lasted one day, and an all-white jury found him guilty after 2½ minutes of deliberations.^[1]
McGee's legal case became a cause célèbre.^[1] William Faulkner wrote a letter insisting the case against McGee was unproven.^[2] Bella Abzug brought his appeals in Mississippi and the Supreme Court in one of the first civil rights cases of her legal career.^[3] Other notable people spoke out: Jessica Mitford, Paul Robeson, Albert Einstein, and Josephine Baker.^[1] U.S. President Harry Truman came under international pressure to grant McGee a pardon.^[1]
McGee spent eight years in Mississippi jails prior to his execution, during which time the Communist Party Civil Rights Council gained him two new trials and several stays of execution.^[4] Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton ordered a stay in July 1950; however the full Supreme Court refused to hear McGee's final appeal.^[4]

The night before he was electrocuted by the state of Mississippi, he wrote a farewell letter to his common law wife, Rosalie:

Tell the people the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down.... They can't do this if you and the children keep on fighting. Never forget to tell them why they killed their daddy. I know you won't fail me. Tell the people to keep on fighting. Your truly husband, Will McGee.^[4]

Radio Diaries is the public radio production house that has already brought us such series as Prison Diaries and New York Works. In public radio lingo, their Willie McGee piece is a "format breaker," meaning it's luxuriously long, rich story-telling - much longer than the typical long ATC story. It is narrated by McGee's granddaughter, Bridgette Robinson, and includes a newly discovered recording of a local radio station's play-by-play account of McGee's execution.

It will air (provided ATC's schedule doesn't change)  from 4:35:30 -4:58:18 PM EST today