News Cut: February 13, 2009 Archive

Shirley Iverson wants death penalty for Alfonso Rodriguez

Posted at 7:05 AM on February 13, 2009 by Tim Nelson (10 Comments)

If you were in Courtroom 5A of the Warren Burger Federal Building at 9 a.m. on Thursday morning, you would have seen the judges and attorneys leafing through a legal brief about as thick as a major metropolitan phone book, a veritable catalog of legal arcana.

The appeal of Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.'s death penalty for the rape and murder of a North Dakota college student covers scores of issues. Among them: his attorneys contend the the all-white jury was racially biased against him. They objected to U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley's pleading final argument, urging them to remember Dru Sjodin, a young woman who lay abandoned, dead in a ravine, all winter, five years ago.

But judges James Loken, Michael Melloy and Duane Benton and the attorneys in the case spent most of their time on one of the least-known aspects of the case: the fall of 1974.

That October, Shirley Iverson was home in Crookston from college and offered to give Rodriguez, the son of a school lunch lady, a ride home after a night out with her girlfriends. He was the older brother of a classmate. "He used to fish in the river behind our house," she remembers. "He lived right up the hill."

But on the way home, he got her to stop the car and he sexually assaulted her. "I think the only reason he didn't kill me is that he didn't know how long it would actually take," Iverson said, in a call after the hearing ended. "He was into strangulation. That was his thing."

Iverson, 18 at the time, survived and reported the attack to police. According to court documents, Rodriguez admitted what he'd done and was charged with aggravated rape. The attack was the first in what turned out to be a long string of tragedies. Rodriguez got out of jail on bail and a month later attacked another woman in Crookston, raping her at knife point. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to the two assaults and spent the next 23 years in prison.

But the cases were back in court this week -- for the third time.

They'd been revisited again three years ago, when Rodriguez was on trial in Fargo. The prosecution cited them as an indication of Rodriguez's criminal history, and one of the "aggravating factors" in the case. Those factors are legally required for a defendant to be eligible for the federal death penalty. Shirley Iverson retold her story in court when the North Dakota jury was weighing the evidence against Rodriguez in the Sjodin case.

Iverson actually suspected Rodriguez all along, because she knew he'd been released from prison just months before Sjodin disappeared. The crime fit his pattern and she says she even looked a little like Dru herself back during the Ford administration.

Defense attorney Robert Hoy conceded Rodriguez had killed Sjodin on Thursday. But he told the judges that the his client's previous convictions didn't clear the legal bar for aggravating factors because the 1974 cases did not specifically spell out "substantial bodily harm."

"You have no idea," Iverson said, remembering the attack, 35 years ago. She'd lost consciousness as Rodriguez strangled her that night. "I had bruises all over."

She read the MPR News story online about the morning's Appeals Court argument from her home in Oregon on Thursday, and remembered the pain all over again.

Any assertion that it wasn't substantial, Iverson says, is just flat wrong. Rape is among the most violent of acts, she says, whether it's done with a knife, a gun or a rope - or no weapon at all.

She objected to the arguments made by Rodriguez's attorneys. It's like, she said, "you get to get a couple of these sort of freebie rapes, because it's 'no harm no foul,' and it isn't until later that you seriously hurt somebody that they really count. You just have this system that continues to minimize the crime, minimize the impacts of the crime, and minimize how people across the country reading this, women, are going to feel about it. One of the things I think that has made such a huge difference for women, is that we've tried to have this crime acknowledged [as] a horrible thing. And to me, this appeal just begins to undermine that. For me, personally, it feels like 35 years later, I'm still having to argue that this was a horrible crime."

And don't think this is just a debating point for Iverson.

She wants Alfonso Rodriguez dead.

Iverson fears still that he'll be freed on a technicality, maybe to strike again -- even find her, perhaps. And she doesn't think just locking him up securely and throwing away the key is sufficient, either.

"The other thing that you have to understand about sex offenders, is that they fantasize about their crimes, both prior to committing it and after they commit it. And the fact that he has time in prison to be able to do that is galling to me," Iverson says. "You know, it's so easy to be socially liberal when you're sitting in your arm chair, thinking about the death penalty. But, given who gets to spend the rest of their life in prison fantasizing about killing Dru or fantasizing about what he's done to his other victims ... He doesn't deserve to be one of them."

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What is Sylvia going to do?

Posted at 5:47 PM on February 13, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

I drove up -- and back -- to Moorhead today, which gave me plenty of time to listen to Minnesota Public Radio along the way. In between, I heard details of an estimated 14-percent budget cut at the University of Minnesota Morris. It's amazing, really, how every moment of my day these days is somehow consumed with the economy. I find it difficult to end the day with the same hope with which I start it. How about you?

Some excerpts from MPR's broadcast day are worth considering:

KEEP HOPE ALIVE

The first is the Midday rebroadcast of the Commonwealth Club speech by journalist and former Clinton administration adviser Matt Miller. He discussed his new book "The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity."

What got me yelling back at the radio was his claim that we have overemphasized -- or at least overvalued -- the power of the individual to change his or her life; that the "you can grow up to be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough" mantra is dead or dying.

I come from New England with an overdose of the Protestant work ethic so it's virtually impossible for me -- DNA wise -- to accept the premise, although I find it an intriguing one worthy of discussion.

But it requires the dissolution of hope and I, personally, can't let that be an early casualty of this economy. I'm not talking about the black, former drug-using, kid who grows up to be president, I'm talking about the people I've met on the News Cut on Campus tour. To accept Miller's premise is to say the very heart of those kids' endeavors -- and there's a lot of heart involved -- is a charade.

WHAT HOPE?

And that idea lasted me from Pelican Rapids to Maple Grove, and then I heard the story of Silvia Martinez on All Things Considered. I tried to get at the emotional toll of the economy earlier this week in this post. And Brandt Williams gave it a similar go.

But nothing that's been said about the economy for the last year anywhere put a human face on the desperation like her story did. She loved her job. She was the sole provider for her family, and she got laid off. She was too ashamed to tell her children. She not only feels unemployed; she feels worthless.

"I would start thinking about it and my heart would start racing and I would start sweating and [having] chest pains," she says. "And, of course, at that point I would try to hide, because I didn't want my children to know what was going on with me. So I would go to the bathroom and just stay in there. Just go through it in the bathroom."

In the three months since she was let go, this sense of panic and fear has not improved.

"I apply for jobs and apply for jobs and no one calls. Nobody. I've even gone as far as applying at fast-food places; I've applied at Wal-Mart, at Kmart, at Target," she says.

Be sure you listen to the audio.

I thought to myself, "someone with a job will hear this story and offer her a job," but I quickly realized those days are probably gone, too.

During the drive out, I listened to two state senators talk about transportation and the best way to jumpstart the economy. They disagreed on most things. Lots of talk about numbers and each uttered the usual talking points of their party, but they never really talked about what it's like for people who don't have a guaranteed job through at least November 2010.

On the drive back, I heard the House approved a stimulus bill and heard our local delegation arguing about whether it was too much.

But there's something I didn't hear from any of the politicians: What is Sylvia -- and no doubt, the tens of thousands just like her -- going to do? Where is she going to live? How is she going to take care of her children? Now that her kids can't go to community college, how are they better off?

I don't have an answer, either. But after listening to her story "just work harder" seems insulting.

What would you do?

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