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August 29, 2009

Stephanie Salter: Notes from three sad, intense days in the county courthouse

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Friday afternoon, the three-day sentence hearing for Katron Walker came to a close. Judge David Bolk ordered him to serve 95 years in prison for the June 2006 murder of his 4-year-old son, Collin, and the attempted murder of his younger son, who was not yet 3 at the time of the crimes.

The sentence was only five years short of the maximum Bolk could have pronounced.

Throughout the intense and often dramatic hearing in the Division 3 courtroom, I sat a few rows behind the defense table and took 28 pages of notes on a legal pad. This handful of vignettes is from those pages.

n Over the three days, wrenching testimony was presented, from detailed descriptions of Walker’s butcher knife assault on his little boys to his half-sisters talking about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Walker’s biological father. But the most moving incident I observed during the entire hearing took place outside the courtroom after the second day of testimony.

Nancy McClaine, Walker’s mother, had delivered long and painful testimony for the defense about her son’s mental and emotional problems and what came to be referred to by all parties, including Bolk, as Katron Walker’s “dysfunctional family life.”

In an effort to get her son’s sentence decreased, McClaine allowed her parenting to be opened, examined and eviscerated by defense witnesses. At one point, she was so distraught in her testimony, the judge called a recess so she could compose herself.

After court adjourned for the day, McClaine and her third husband, Don McClaine, walked toward the stairs to leave, but she began to sob again, her cries echoing off the courthouse rotunda. Teresa Dwyer, Walker’s ex-wife and mother of his children, was perhaps 100 feet away from her former mother-in-law. The two have barely spoken for more than a year, and the division between them had been almost palpable in the courtroom.

But, as if in a trance, Dwyer walked the distance of the hall to McClaine, then wrapped her arms around her. The two women — mothers with broken hearts — wept together as one.

n Because of the configuration of the courtroom, it was almost impossible to see Walker’s face throughout the proceedings. Occasionally, I noticed the back of his neck grow very red, but he was remarkably unanimated most of the time, even as his attorneys questioned defense witnesses about his mental instability, drug use, inability to keep a job and bizarre religious beliefs.

Walker’s face was observable during a prolonged review of his paintings and drawings that required a projection screen.

An art therapist from Florida testified that the mostly abstract pictures — created from the mid-1990s to Walker’s present-day incarceration — showed that he suffered from schizo-affective disorder. Echoing psychiatrists before him, the art therapist defined that disorder as schizophrenia combined with a mood disorder, primarily depression.

The Florida therapist described the works as “beautiful” or “wonderfully rendered.” He said “professional fascination” inspired him to repeatedly review them.

n After two days of exhaustive defense testimony, much of it by expert psychological witnesses, Katron Walker was allowed on the last day to make a statement. In his rust-orange jail jumpsuit, his waist encircled by a huge chain, he rose and began to read from his legal pad.

His phrases and word choices were like oratory from another century. His voice choking, he spoke of hearing “the rhythm of my life through the stethoscope of others’ testimony” and of “the sea of sorrow I’ve inflicted on Teresa.”

That extreme emotion, as well as the wedding ring Walker continues to wear, was in ironic contrast about two hours later. After his sentencing, which includes a no-contact order with Dwyer and their living child, Walker passed his ex-wife on his way out of the courtroom. Sneering, he told her to tell their son, “I’ll be waiting for him.”

n If ever the term “vigorous defense” was warranted, it is for that put on by Jessie Cook and Joe Etling. For the past three years they have been preparing for a capital murder case, amassing evidence and testimony from doctors, Walker family members, former teachers and friends, the art therapist, a police practices and tactics specialist, and a mitigation specialist who investigated Katron Walker’s life history.

In May, however, Walker’s plea bargain took the death penalty off the table: The least he could have received was 45 years for both crimes, the most 100.

In cross-examinations, Prosecutor Terry Modesitt and Deputy Prosecutor Rob Roberts frequently asked the expert defense witnesses how much they were paid for their services. Dr. Robert Smith, a psychiatrist from Ohio, topped the list at $250 per hour. He testified he had traveled seven times to various jails to meet with Walker for a total of 35.5 hours.

The cost of Walker’s entire defense, including his attorneys, will be paid by public funds from Vigo County and the State of Indiana.

n During cross-examination of the mitigation specialist, Michael Dennis, Modesitt questioned his qualifications to do something that lies at the heart of an ancient, and ongoing, debate among civilized people — “distinguish between someone who has mental health problems and someone who is just mean and evil.”

U.S. law regarding insanity is fairly narrowly prescribed: You knew what you did was wrong. Mental illness, such as that displayed by Katron Walker over most of his sorry 36 years can weigh as a mitigating factor in verdicts and sentencing — but it doesn’t tend to weigh much.

My own definition of insanity is broader. I do not believe a sane man can take a knife to his own little boys, as Walker did. Due to meth-induced psychosis or lousy DNA, his was an insane act. That said, the warped brain that guides Walker’s actions has to be contained, for the good of Teresa Dwyer, her son and society.

I have never believed in the death penalty and I still don’t. (God’s job, not the state’s.) Dwyer’s decision to agree to a plea bargain that would spare her former husband’s life was one of the most courageous — and intelligent — I’ve ever seen. She knew that killing Walker, if he’d been convicted, would not return Collin to her or restore her surviving child’s innocence. Enduring a capital murder trial, however, might have done them both in.

Some people feel better chalking up Walker’s mess of a life to inherent evil and meanness. I’ve always had a problem with that concept — and the more we discover about genetics, neuroscience and the power of learned behavior, the less “just evil” explains anything for me.

Do I think Walker will be rehabilitated in prison and, when he’s 80 or so, be paroled as something he never before managed to become — a productive member of society? No.

But I do think he still possesses a right to seek and find redemption, from the God I believe in and from his fellow human beings. What that might look like, I have no idea.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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