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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Griffin gets life without parole in 1984 killing of Bradley Perry
By Tim GurristerLOGAN -- If leniency is a closet-sized cell for life, Glenn Howard Griffin got it Thursday in dodging the death penalty.
Ending five weeks of trial, his jury decided that instead of being executed, he should spend all the rest of his days in prison.
The same 12-member jury last week found Griffin guilty of aggravated murder in the May 26, 1984 death of Bradley Newell Perry, 22, who was bound, beaten, stabbed and bludgeoned as he worked the late shift at a Brigham City gas station. They deliberated 12 hours over a two-day period for that verdict.
They needed less than two hours before lunch Thursday to realize they would not have the unanimous vote required for the death penalty for Griffin, as they reported on their jury form to 1st District Judge Ben Hadfield. They instead chose life without parole, voting unanimously when only a 10-2 vote was needed.
"We're looking over the death of one man and the wasted life of another," Deputy Box Elder County Attorney Brad Smith told the jury in asking for the death penalty, which he called an "extraordinary, monumental choice."
But, he said, Griffin had earned it "because of his persistent choices made over his entire lifetime ... a violent, anti-social destructive life." Jailed often as a juvenile while constantly being expelled from school, beginning in the second grade, Griffin has spent almost all of the last 20 years in prison, mostly for drug dealing.
"Brad Smith has strutted before you today and demanded justice, and he throws out the proposition that justice requires execution," Griffin's lead public defender Randy Richards said in his closing arguments.
He asked the jury for mercy in the form of prison instead of death. Even with possible parole, he said prison policy would not allow Griffin a parole hearing for 25 years.
"He'd be 76 years old," Richards said. His only daily human contact will be a guard shoving a plate of food through a slot, he said.
"He'll die in prison in a solitary manner ... That, ladies and gentlemen, is, in a very real sense, justice."
Griffin, he said, would be confined to a 6- by 8-foot cell for 23 hours a day: "A steel and concrete cage. But Brad Smith wants death."
Quoting Shakespeare to the jury, Richards said, "The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesses him that gives and him that takes."
Judge Hadfield set formal sentencing for Dec. 3 in Brigham City. He moved the trial to Logan because of the volume of publicity the case received over nearly 25 years. The sentencing is merely a formality, officials said, since a jury can't sign a prison commitment order.
The Perry family, on hand throughout the trial, as they have been through the more than three-year prosecution, as a whole did not make public any preference in sentencing.
Judge Hadfield was almost tearful in lauding both the Perry family and the conduct of Griffin's family members during the trial in remarks from the bench after the jury began deliberations shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday. "I haven't seen any anger or vengeance from either family. That's remarkable."
As to how a family deals with waiting 21 years for an arrest, then more than three years more for a conviction, matriarch Claudia Perry, Brad's mother, said, "You just hang onto each other. Like it says on the T-shirt, 'Love, Faith, Hope and Joy.' That's what it is."
She and her husband, Newell, and Brad's siblings, Valerie, Nanette, Lee and Everett, have all attended nearly every hearing in the case. "Newell was bringing home every new police report on the case for the first few years after it happened," she said. "I had to have him stop that."
She pointed to the testimony of Laura Boyd Hill, Brad Perry's girlfriend at the time, who spoke of how close the two came to getting married, their engagement planned a week or so after what turned out to be the day Perry was killed. "Her brother drove all the way up from St. George to be here in support of her when she testified Tuesday," Claudia said. "That's what it takes."
And it requires a search for perspective, she said, pointing to some murders in which no body is found.
"At least we have Brad's gravesite we can take the grandkids and great-grandkids to."
The family regularly visits, maintains and decorates his grave in the Brigham City Cemetery, featuring a headstone with Perry's face in a remarkable likeness etched into the stone.
Griffin's is only the fifth death penalty case to go to a sentencing hearing in Utah in 11 years, officials said.
Griffin, 51, was arrested in June of 2005, when newer, advanced DNA testing linked him to a bloody dollar bill from the crime scene. The bill had been stored in a crime lab refrigerator for 21 years.
It was collected from customers who stopped at the former Texaco station -- now a Sinclair -- south of Brigham City, and received the bill in change from a man police say was Griffin pretending to be the station attendant after the killing. The blood-spattered Griffin gave them gas from a self-serve pump.
The jury's chosen verdict of life without parole made it on the table only this week.
Griffin had the choice of being prosecuted under Utah's capital homicide statute as it was in 1984, or as it was in 1992 when life without parole was added to the law. He initially chose the former.
Richards said after closing arguments he was able to convince Griffin only Tuesday to agree to including life without parole as an option for the jury, as a possible "compromise sentence."
Because of a partial gag order on the case, attorneys wouldn't speculate on how the jury came to choose that sentence. But they did say while jurors opted against taking his life, they obviously didn't want Griffin on the streets ever again.
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