Bring death penalty back to Alaska for next J. Wade

Until James Dupree Henry.

Never heard of him? No surprise. He was a piece of garbage who murdered his neighbor, a prominent 81-year-old civil rights leader, in Orlando 36 years ago.

Henry broke into Zellie L. Riley's small home in an older neighborhood to rob him on March 23, 1974. He gagged the old man. Tied him up. Beat him with a pistol. Slit his throat with a razor and then jammed in a sock. Riley was strangled. What did Henry pocket? Sixty-four dollars.

When police officer Ronald Ferguson tried to arrest Henry a few days later, Henry snatched Ferguson's gun and shot him twice as he pleaded for his life. Henry quickly was arrested. He was offered a first-degree murder plea. He refused. Three months later, Henry had been tried, convicted and sentenced to die.

I was at his sentencing when he twisted away from bailiffs and sprinted down a court hallway. In a flash, he was buried under a pile of cops, reporters and court personnel. I looked up and, at the hallway's end, just beyond an unlocked glass door, was a still-mending Ferguson. Armed. Waiting. Emotionless.

Florida Gov. Bob Graham signed Henry's first death warrant in November 1979, but the killer bounced up and down the appeals process in state and federal courts for a decade. Wins. Losses. Setbacks. In the end, a second death warrant. There were pleas to spare Henry. They went unanswered.

A few months before he was electrocuted, Henry was on TV, speaking from prison. There was a long, disfiguring scar across his face. He had been stabbed or slashed and blinded in his left eye while in prison. He was agitated, saying the state should not kill him, that it would not bring Riley back, that it would be wrong. Wrong? I remembered the tiny house where Riley died. The sobbing friends and relatives; the crime's cavalier depravity; the vision of an old, defenseless man bleeding, struggling to breathe; a cop shot twice; an attempted escape. No, I thought, it would be just about right.

On Sept. 20, 1984, James Dupree Henry rode Florida State Prison's "Old Sparky" to wherever such trash goes. He was 34. "My final words are -- I am innocent," he said in a final lie.

From the day Riley was murdered, the death penalty made sense.

I remembered Henry when I saw a picture of Joshua Alan Wade after he made a deal to dodge the death penalty. To live, he confessed to killing Della Brown in 2000 -- a crime he earlier was acquitted of -- and Anchorage nurse Mindy Schloss in 2007. Schloss was a neighbor Wade murdered six months after getting out of prison for evidence-tampering in the Brown case.

"The fact that he chose to kill again, and kill quickly, demonstrates his indifference to human life, his inability to be rehabilitated, and his omnipresent danger to society," federal prosecutors said in their sentencing memorandum.

Wade supposedly will spend his life in an Alaska prison with no parole, but he will endanger everybody around him -- every minute, every day. Corrections officers. Medical staff. Anybody. Everybody.

The question? What would have happened if federal laws were not applicable and the federal death penalty was off the table? Wade's confessions show us Alaska needs its own death penalty.

As a state, Alaska never has had one. As a territory it did, with the last person executed being Eugene LaMoore in Juneau in 1950. The Territorial Legislature in 1957 abolished the death penalty.

That was a mistake. We can ensure fair, quick trials and streamline appeals. We have DNA analysis and other sophisticated technology to evaluate evidence. We can make it work. Expensive? Maybe. How much was Mindy Schloss' life worth? Or Della Brown's? Wade shows us such a statute can be a valuable tool in bringing killers to justice, even if they avoid death. We cheat the future by not having one.

A death penalty bill is pending in the Legislature, sponsored by House Speaker Mike Chenault and Rep. Jay Ramras. We compound a mistake if it is not enacted -- for Alaska's next Wade, or Henry.

Or the next victim.

Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.