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: What the Judge Ate for Breakfast

Anti-death advocates speak out about Thurber?s sentence

By Ron Sylvester

Sue Norton sat with the family of Justin Thurber as a jury said he should receive a death sentence for killing Jodi Sanderholm two years ago.

Norton now lives in Arkansas City but she’s from Oklahoma, where her father and stepmother were killed in January 1990. The man convicted of killing them, Robert Knighton, was executed by lethal injection on May 27, 2003.

“It was 13 years of wondering what would happen next,” Norton said. Then she watched Knighton’s execution.

“I can tell you, the death penalty is not absolution,” she said. “It didn’t bring them back.”

Norton may have gotten a little too involved in the Sanderholm case, Cowley County prosecutor Chris Smith said. Two weeks before the trial, when Thurber offered to plead guilty to killing Sanderholm, her family learned about it from Norton.

“We would have liked to have been able to present this to them and talk to them about it,” Smith said.

Don Anderson of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty also sat through the trial, as he has done in every capital murder trial in the Wichita area since I began covering courts in 2000.

Anderson was adamant that the state should have accepted Thurber’s plea. Afterwards, Anderson released a written statement:

The terrible murder of Jodi Sanderholm was an unspeakable tragedy.

The coalition affirms that life without parole is a sufficiently severe punishment for Justin Thurber that also protects the public.

More of Norton’s comments following the verdict:

(Video/Travis Heying, The Wichita Eagle)

Full post as published by What the Judge Ate for Breakfast on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).