‘I‘VE stood over the bodies. I’ve talked to the families. I’ve seen the remorselessness of killers. Evil. I’ve seen it.”
So says Heide Mason, 39, a Brooklyn assistant district attorney and – because she really knows what murder is – a reluctant believer in the death penalty.
Mason knows the long and difficult road her Queens counterparts will walk if DA Richard Brown decides to prosecute the accused Wendy’s killers for murder one – which could result in a death sentence.
She does not envy them.
Mason knows what’s coming. She was a lead prosecutor on the team that won the first capital conviction in New York state after the death penalty was reinstated in 1995. Darrel Harris, a former correction officer, was handed the supreme penalty in 1998 for a triple murder in Bed-Stuy.
It was a moment of triumph for Mason and her co-counsel, Jonathan Frank. It didn’t feel that way. After the courtroom had cleared, she sat on a bench and wept.
“The people I respected didn’t slap me on the back and say, ‘Yeah!'” Mason says. “The people I respected called me and said, ‘Congratulations. Are you OK?'”
Mason says no conscientious prosecutor considers a capital case lightly. A defendant’s life hangs in the balance, and sending even a man you are certain committed murder to his death weighs on one’s soul.
But 10 years of prosecuting homicide cases has convinced her that, in rare circumstances, a death sentence is the only appropriate response to the crime. In cases where there are multiple killings, where there are aggravating factors (such as robbery), where the evidence of guilt is overwhelming, and where the victims’ families want execution – then yes, the death penalty is warranted.
The Wendy’s massacre fits the bill. Mason cannot stop thinking about the terror in which those victims spent their last moments of life.
“That seventh person heard six people shot first, and knew through bang, bang, bang, bang,bang, bang what was coming – and couldn’t get away from it,” she says.
“It weighs on you that you are the one giving those victims a voice. And you want that voice to be heard.”
She’s thinking about the voice of Jeannine Glanda, the Lake Placid woman strangled by her husband Jeffrey, who dumped her body in a lake and tried to collect insurance money.
Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes loaned Mason to Essex County DA Robert Briggs to help in a death-penalty prosecution. She interviewed Glanda, whom she describes as “pure evil.”
“There was never a lick of remorse in him,” she says. He was convicted but was spared the needle at the request of his small children – a result Mason called “fair.”
Spending half an hour talking with Mason will cure anyone of the sentimental notion that human evil is an old-fashioned or abstract concept.
“I took a statement once from a man who sodomized and beat to death his 21/2-year-old stepson,” she says. “He smiled when he talked about it.”
What about convicted killers who are released from jail after DNA testing, or evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, reveals their innocence? Doesn’t that give Mason pause?
Down South, where prosecutors are notoriously hungry to try death-penalty cases, yes. But not in New York, where the threshold for a capital case is mountainous.
The New York death-penalty statute, she explains, allows for capital punishment to be considered in only the most heinous cases. Even if the jury returns a conviction, the death sentence must be considered in a separate proceeding.
If John Taylor and Craig Godineaux are tried for murder one, the Queens team that goes after them will face crushing pressure, Mason warns.
“They’ll have five victims’ families to deal with. There’ll be constant media scrutiny. The defense will inundate them with motions. It’s an endless pile of work, with unbearable responsibility.”
And there’s no glory in getting someone condemned to death.
But there is the satisfaction of having done justice.
Says Mason, “There’s nothing like being able to turn around in the courtroom, look at the victims’ family members, and say: ‘We got him.'”
e-mail: [email protected]