Mass Murder in California's Empty Quarter by Ray A. March

Author:Ray A. March [March, Ray A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies, TRU002000 True Crime / Murder / General
Publisher: Bison Books

27

“They’re just Indians, who cares if they kill each other. It’s certainly not worth the cost of a death penalty trial.”

There was a familiar ring to these complaints. They were echoes of complaints Kandi heard from her students at Modoc High. “Why are we reading about other races if this is American Lit?” “Why aren’t we reading about Americans if this is American Lit?” “Why are we wasting time reading about Indians?”

The grumbling was loud enough to reach the district attorney. For nearly a year before Cherie’s case went to trial—and well in advance of the change of venue that Funk eventually agreed to—he was aware of the antipathy between the Native and white populations in Modoc County.

“In the course of the case a few people said to me, ‘Why are we spending the money to prosecute an Indian who killed other Indians?’” Funk said. He heard that people were hearing the same complaint from others they knew. The message was clear to Funk: “If she wants to plead to multiple life terms, that’s good enough.” Why waste white taxpayers’ money to execute an Indian? Indians weren’t worth it. After the trial, he admitted he had encountered a “fair bit of virulent racism as push-back against seeking the death penalty for Cherie Rhoades.”

“I heard the argument. I understood the argument. But the bottom line was it was a cold-blooded, premediated mass shooting perpetrated by ambush. The crime deserved the death penalty if a jury would render it. It was that simple,” Funk said. It wasn’t that the grumblers were opposed to the death penalty. Most of them, according to Modoc County voting statistics, favored lethal injection.

Funk knew some of the victims and their families because he had either prosecuted them as district attorney or defended several when he was in private practice. However, their brushes with the law didn’t mean they weren’t entitled to his pursuing the death penalty, which was what they wanted.

There were two reasons for imposing the death penalty. One was the severity of the crime. The other was that surviving members of the tribe wanted Cherie executed no matter the cost to taxpayers. Tribal dynamics could not be ignored. As Funk later explained, Cherie’s crime was a cold-blooded, premeditated killing. At the same time there was a lot of passion behind it. She hated her brother and the tribal government for their treatment of her. What didn’t help in preparing his case—in Funk’s opinion—was that the tribe was tragically dysfunctional.

While Funk was deciding whether he would accept Cherie’s offer of a plea deal or seek death, California and the nation were debating the moral, legal, and economic merits of legally killing someone. On July 16, 2014, U.S. District Judge Cormack J. Carney ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional. His decision pivoted on a petition by death row inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, who had been sentenced to die nearly twenty years earlier for the rape and killing of his girlfriend’s mother. Jones’s attorneys argued that California’s dysfunctional death penalty system caused delays in carrying out a backlog of executions.

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