Manuel Pina Babbitt, 50, 99-05-04, California

At San Quentin, Manuel Pina Babbitt, a decorated Vietnam veteran who murdered a Sacramento grandmother, was put to death by lethal injection early this morning, one day after turning 50 on death row.

Prison officials said the injection was delayed until they received word that the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected without comment the condemned man's eleventh-hour request for a stay of execution.

The execution took place at 12:29 a.m., 28 minutes later than scheduled. He was pronounced dead at 12:37 a.m. His last words, told to Warden Jeanne Woodford at around mindnight, were "I forgive you all."

The condemned man was strapped and handcuffed to a gurney with his arms out; intravenous lines injected him with a cocktail of chemicals. At one point during the somber proceeding, his body bucked several times, his chest straining against the straps.

Laura Thompson, Schendel's granddaughter, looked away at that point. In a statement after the execution, she said, "It is our hope that this conclusion will bring a sense of closure to our family. We know that nothing will bring Leah Schendel back to us, but we feel that we have done everything in our power to see that justice was done in her name."

Babbitt was sentenced to death for the 1980 murder and attempted rape of 78-year-old Leah Schendel--an attack he said he did not remember because it came during a post-traumatic stress flashback.

Babbitt spent his final hours in seclusion, reading poetry and meditating instead of speaking with a spiritual advisor, according to his attorney, Charles E. Patterson.

Patterson described Babbitt as "completely peaceful."

16 family members and friends had filed into the massive prison throughout the day to visit the condemned man for the last time.

As night fell and the execution neared, various members of the Babbitt entourage gathered near the prison gates, including childhood friend Patricia Tavares, who had traveled from Massachusetts, where "we don't have the death penalty and I'm proud of it," she said.

Gesturing from her wheelchair at the gathered family, Tavares said that "when you see these people, you're seeing Manny. Manny's not leaving us. . . . Manny just wants to go out in dignity, and that's all we want--privacy and dignity."

As the time ticked away, Babbitt's legal options narrowed. Late Monday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied his request to take his case to federal court, said state Public Defender Jessie Morris. With less than 2 hours to go before the execution, Babbitt's attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier in the day, the state Supreme Court had denied a request that Babbitt's execution be stayed while a hearing is held to decide whether the condemned man should have a new trial based on evidence his lawyers say has recently surfaced.

In a tersely worded ruling, Chief Justice Ronald M. George called defense arguments about racism in jury selection and excessive drinking by Babbitt's 1st attorney "untimely" and "repetitious." Only two of the seven justices voted for a stay of execution; one did not participate in the ruling.

Babbitt spent his day visiting with friends and family, waiting for word on court rulings, taking telephone calls and fasting. Instead of eating the traditional last meal, his attorneys said, he has asked that the money instead be donated to feed homeless veterans.

Beverly Lopes, Babbitt's 5th-grade teacher, who traveled from Massachusetts to support Babbitt's family, said she spent 5 hours with him and "he's doing very well.

"I told him I was honored to be his teacher," she recounted. "I blessed him on his birthday. . . . I told him to 'hold your head up high and face the world, so when I go back to my classroom, I will go and hold my head up high.' "

Scores of protesters, mostly demonstrating against the death penalty, had gathered at the gates of San Quentin as the execution neared, including a small group of men who walk 25 miles from San Francisco each time an execution is scheduled.

Babbitt "served our country well," said 65-year-old Lyle Grosjean of Santa Cruz, a Korean War-era veteran and one of the so-called "walkers."

"The least we can do is not kill him," Grosjean said.

Wearing a Purple Heart he earned during the Vietnam War, Larry Yepez brought his Marine dress uniform to the prison, hoping to leave it behind on the barricades "for Manny," he said.

Yepez said he, too, suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and believes that the country "turned its back" on soldiers like himself and Babbitt. The execution, he figures, is just another cold shoulder to Vietnam veterans.

A minority of voices in the crowd showed up to express support for the death penalty in general and Babbitt's execution in particular, calling capital punishment "American justice."

"Half those people in there should die," said Kristine McClymonds, 20, of Petaluma, as she stood in front of the prison gates. Said her companion Aaron, who refused to give a last name, "It's not about vengeance. It's about what's right."

Earlier, Patterson described the condemned man as resigned to his fate and wanting "to die with dignity." He said Babbitt viewed the execution as God's way of calling him home.
While on death row, Babbitt was able to get to sleep "by listening to his heart beat," Patterson said. "He tries to catch that last heartbeat before falling asleep. He believes that if he is executed, he will again listen to that last heartbeat."

Babbitt's execution made 1999 only the 2nd year since then that California has killed 2 men. Jaturun Siripongs, 43, of Garden Grove, was executed in February for a double murder he committed in 1981.

California has the most crowded death row in the nation, with 536 inmates waiting to die, and the pace of executions is increasing. Opponents of the death penalty expect at least 1 or 2 more executions in California before the millennium.

Late Friday, after Gov. Gray Davis denied Babbitt's clemency petition, the condemned man's attorneys asked the state Supreme Court for a stay of execution and a hearing on a new trial. Patterson argued in the legal filing that his client did not get a fair trial in 1982 because of the "racial animus and alcohol-induced ineptitude" of his attorney at the time.

Recently uncovered evidence shows that Babbitt's trial attorney routinely drank 3 or 4 double vodkas at lunch during the trial, Patterson alleged in court documents. He described blacks in derogatory terms and did not object when prosecutors excused the only African Americans from the jury pool, the documents show.

Don Schendel, the dead woman's son, decried what he called the defense's "raising the race card" at this late date, more than 18 years after Schendel was killed in her Sacramento home.

"I don't remember anyone speaking about the color of a person throughout this whole ordeal," Schendel said. "It's all subterfuge. It's a shame."

In the days and hours before Babbitt's execution, Lance Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, a nonprofit organization opposed to capital punishment, received an unusual number of calls from veterans and law enforcement officials supporting Babbitt, who claimed he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his Vietnam War experience. Babbitt served at the siege of Khe Sanh, one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.

"They're not the usual suspects that are always against the death penalty," said Lindsey, who planned to lead a vigil outside San Quentin Monday night in protest of the execution.

On a foggy night just before Christmas in 1980, Manuel Babbitt was walking home along a Sacramento street after a day spent drinking and smoking marijuana. When he paused at an intersection, he said he saw the headlights of cars coming down a hill. They looked to him like the lights on enemy aircraft in Khe Sanh.

"I don't know how I made it across," he said in a clemency tape presented to Davis. "The next thing I remember was waking up on a lawn somewhere in Sacramento on one of those streets. That's all I remember of that night."

Babbitt sliced through the screen door of Leah Schendel's small apartment with a knife and beat her so brutally that he shattered her dentures. She died of a heart attack as a result of the assault.

Babbitt becomes the 7th condemned prisoner - and the 1st African American - to be executed in the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison since California resumed executions in 1992.

(sources: Los Angeles & Rick Halperin)

 

California executes mentally ill Vietnam veteran

By Jerry White - World Socialist Web Site

May 5, 1999

Manuel Babbitt

Sacramento Bee

After Laura Thompson watched her grandmother's killer die early Tuesday inside San Quentin's converted gas chamber, she sounded steadfast and sure that her years-long fight for the execution had been just.

"Crime is not pleasant," Thompson said. "We cannot expect that justice will always be pleasant."

But her words, contained in a statement she dictated to the Associated Press shortly after she watched Leah Schendel's killer put to death by lethal injection, did not appear to match her reactions to what she saw inside the chamber viewing room where 50-year-old Manuel Pina Babbitt died.

At times, she could not bring herself to look at the man she had fought so hard to see executed, especially when his body involuntarily convulsed as the lethal drugs hit his system.

Sometimes, Thompson looked down at the floor, other times she gazed off into space with a hard, blank look on her face.

A few feet away, through the thick glass of the chamber, Babbitt was dying for the 1980 murder of Thompson's 78-year-old grandmother in her south Sacramento home.

But the closure that Thompson and other relatives said they sought through witnessing the execution appeared elusive, at least early Tuesday.

Perhaps it would come later, with time, Thompson said afterward, but it was clear that it was not there early Tuesday.

One Schendel relative stood at the back of the chamber softly crying. Another held hands with a fellow witness. The prosecutor who sent Babbitt to death row -- Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Kit Cleland -- sat hunched over in a chair, staring down at the floor and never appearing to look at Babbitt.

And Thompson, the most vocal of those working to see that the death sentence was carried out, appeared pained and uncomfortable as she watched it happen before her.
As the troubled former Marine died, his guilt-wracked older brother watched from a corner, smiling wanly several times.

Hours after watching the execution, William Babbitt gathered his thoughts at a Half Moon Bay hideaway -- and let them fly.

"I'm at peace," said William Babbitt on Tuesday. "I pray that the Schendel family is."

But any peace he feels is tinged with bitterness stretching back years. William Babbitt turned his brother into police for Schendel's murder after, he says, he was assured that his younger brother would get help -- not execution.

While police interrogated his brother, who was barefoot, William Babbitt recalled asking for socks for his younger brother.

"I was so grateful for those socks. That's the only benefit I got for turning in my beloved brother," Babbitt said.

If Manuel Babbitt, a former Vietnam veteran, tortured by postwar mental disorders, had been kept safely in a mental hospital, if he had gotten the help he needed, he and Leah Schendel would not have died the way they did, William Babbitt said Tuesday afternoon.

"My brother died as a result of state-sanctioned murder, and history will come to realize that fact," said Babbitt, who plans to spend time away from his Sacramento home following the execution.

Unlike some on death row who spend their last days in near solitude, Manuel Babbitt was never far from familiar faces. Family and friends came in swarms, swelling to as many as two dozen in one day, said Vernell Crittendon, spokesman for San Quentin State Prison.

"He was completely calm," said Chuck Patterson, an attorney for Babbitt, who kept company with him in his last hours and witnessed his execution.

It was family and friends, not Manuel Babbitt, who urged last-minute legal appeals, Patterson said.

When his time came, Manuel Babbitt himself never appeared to open his eyes, never looked around at the witnesses gathered to see him die or to bid him farewell.
Instead, he issued his last words through the warden: "I forgive all of you."

Babbitt's was the 7th California execution to take place since 1992 and one of the more unusual ones in many ways.

Unlike the 6 men who went before him, Babbitt chose no last meal, deciding instead to continue the fast he had begun several days ago as it became evident his execution would go through as scheduled.

When he was led to the death chamber, Babbitt was restrained with narrow handcuffs, instead of the wider leather restraints, to make it easier to find a vein in his wrist, if one was needed, Crittendon said.

Unlike the four previous lethal-injection executions conducted inside San Quentin, Babbitt's body appeared to react as the three powerful drugs entered his bloodstream. He yawned heavily, apparently as the heavy dose of tranquilizer hit him, then convulsed as the other 2 drugs -- one to stop his breathing, another to stop his heart -- were administered. He was pronounced dead within 8 minutes at 12:37 a.m.

Manuel Babbitt had been scheduled to die at one minute after midnight, but even the half-hour delay was unusual in the manner in which it occurred.

In past executions, prison officials have rushed to conduct their "ritual" as soon as court rulings are handed down. The very timing of them -- 12:01 a.m. -- gives them as much time as possible to fight off court appeals during the life of the 24-hour death warrants.
This time was different, however.

Shortly after 11 p.m., the state Department of Corrections said it had decided to voluntarily push back the procedure until the U.S. Supreme Court was given one last chance to review the case.

Even after the high court declined to intervene, there was a slow-paced, almost leisurely progression toward the end.

Now that it is over, William Babbitt said he will take his brother's body back to Massachusetts and bury him next to their father, who died when the 2 were teenagers.

Manuel Babbitt was convicted of murdering an elderly Sacramento woman.

Babbitt, 49, was sentenced to death for murdering Leah Schendel, 78, while robbing her retirement complex apartment in December 1980. The coroner said she died of a heart attack brought on by a severe beating and possible suffocation.

Babbitt was convicted of murder, robbery and attempted rape. He was also convicted of robbing and attempting to rape another Sacramento woman, whom he grabbed and beat unconscious the following night.

Babbitt did not deny the attacks. But he claimed insanity or diminished capacity because of head injuries suffered at age 12 and aggravated during 2 combat tours as a Marine in Vietnam.

State and federal courts have upheld his convictions and sentence, and the Supreme Court denied review of his appeal.

Leah Schendel had a large and close family and had spent the evening of her murder with her siblings.  Her brother and sister-in-law drove her home and walked her to the door.  As they left, they saw a man walking nearby. 

Later that night, Leah's apartment was ransacked; the intruder had cut through her screen door and viciously attacked her.  Leah was only 5 feet tall and weighed less than one hundred pounds.  Her brutally beaten body was found partially undressed, under a mattress in the bedroom. 

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