Sunday, June 10, 2007
STAN DIEL News staff writer Birmingham's
Mary Kate Gach has watched sadly for years as her daughter's killer repeatedly reached out from behind bars, selling sometimes macabre sketches and posting essays about the crime on the Internet.
Inspired to keep the families of other murder victims from going through the same thing, she championed a "murderabilia" bill in the state Legislature that would have greatly limited Alabama inmates' ability to profit from their crimes.
"These are people down there who don't have any compassion," Gach said late last week.
She was talking about the lawmakers, not the murderers.
On the same day fisticuffs on the floor of the state Senate vaulted Alabama into the national news, the "murderabilia" bill was among several killed in the Senate in an act of political retribution, lawmakers said.
It began Thursday after lunch, with Gov. Bob Riley's use of a line-item veto to excise from a budget bill an earmark that would have directed $1 million to Tuscaloosa County roadwork. The roadwork was a project favored by Sen. Phil Poole, D-Moundville.
House Democrats tried to override the veto, and Republicans countered with an effective filibuster, keeping the earmark out of the budget.
Then, just before midnight, Poole led a group of Democrats out of the Senate chamber with a list of lawmakers. "They just took the list upstairs and went through those of us who refused to (oppose the veto), and took any of us who had bills on the calendar and just had them carried over when they came up for a vote," said Rep. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster.
Ward was the sponsor of the "murderabilia" bill, which along with a bill that would have created a rainy-day fund and one that would have increased penalties for truckers who don't adequately secure steel coils, was carried over. On the last day of the session, that effectively killed them.
Efforts to reach Poole for comment Friday were not successful. But lawmakers and others who were present, and an Associated Press account of events, tell the same story.
Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who was also an advocate of the "murderabilia" bill, said it was especially difficult for him to see it die because the bill came within minutes of passing. It had already passed the state House on a unanimous vote. Now it's possible that Congress will pass a bill inspired in part by Gach's story before her own state Legislature, King said.
"There's a degree of shame for the state," he said.
Ward, in his fifth year in the Legislature, said the late-hour killing of the bills for political reasons and the punch thrown at Sen. Lowell Barron, D-Fyffe, by Sen. Charles Bishop, R-Arley, set a new legislative standard for wretchedness.
"Every once in a while there's a tit-for-tat. `You killed my bill in the House, I'm going to kill yours in the Senate.' ... You see that every once in a while. But never this open and blatant," he said.
Gach, whose 21-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was killed in 1992, was less circumspect. "It makes me want to throw my hands up and move away," she said.
E-mail: sdiel@bhamnews.com
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