Tuesday (March 27), in an example of how legal language often conflicts with real-world language, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously threw out James Granvil Wallace’s death sentences for the 1984 murders of Gabriel and Anna Insalaco, aged 12 and 16 respectively. The children were both bludgeoned to death, hit at least ten times with an 18-inch pipe wrench (Gabriel) and a baseball bat (Anna) baseball bat. When the baseball bat broke, he finally killed Anna by impaling her with the broken bat.
He later killed their mother, his former girlfriend, with the pipe wrench.
Wallace was sentenced to life imprisonment for Susan Insalaco’s murder, and death for the children’s murder, the aggravating circumstance being the “heinous nature” of those killings.
Yesterday’s ruling stated that legally, a heinous murder required that the killer “relished” the crime, used gratuitous violence, or inflicted torture — and that while Wallace’s crimes were “atrocious” and “senseless,” the prosecution didn’t disprove his claim that he inflicted only as many blows as he believed necessary to kill his victims.
I thought [Anna] would die with one blow… like in the movies… I wanted to put her out of her misery -from Wallace’s confession, one day after the murders
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© 2012 by Bill Bickel unless otherwise noted.
Gee, maybe I misunderstood the question, as I seem to be alone in the Yes column at this point. I didn’t mean that I support Arizona’s definition of ‘heinous’ — just that I do support making a distinction, based on a more reasonable understanding of what is heinous.
I’m with you Mitch. I think there should be some distinction, but it definitely needs to clear. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to set a standard on something that is, by it’s nature, subjective.
But isn’t that for the jury to decide? They would decide whether “heinous” applied to this case, using current community standards?
Impaling after bludgeoning with the same weapon? That sounds fairly heinous to me.
I’m mildly curious: was the victim impaled, or just stabbed? The word is seldom used in its actual meaning. If the girl had been impaled, the death would have been by torture, and probably by sexual assault, as well. Of course, the guy probably doesn’t have that much imagination.
I voted “no;” murder is murder. The death penalty is simple self-defense, to prevent a recurrence. Not “justice,” not “revenge,” just self-defense.