Kimen Lee was reaching out the window to drop sales receipts into a bank deposit box in 1993 when a series of gunshots interrupted her nightly routine. When Lee, then the manager of a local Piggly Wiggly, turned around, her off-duty police escort Cpl. Betty Smothers had already been shot. She died almost instantly.
Two gunmen ambushed the women and riddled Smothers’ marked squad car with bullets, wounding Lee with multiple gunshots. She managed to reach across Smothers’ body, climbed into the driver's seat and steered herself away from the hail of bullets.
Lee went on to testify against Henri Broadway and Kevan Brumfield, the two gunmen responsible for the January 1993 shooting. She helped secure death penalty sentences for both men. But a federal appeals court reduced Brumfield’s sentenced to life in 2015, ruling he had an intellectual disability.
On Tuesday, Broadway was among 51 inmates currently on death row in Louisiana that filed clemency applications with the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, asking Gov. John Bel Edwards to soften their sentences to life imprisonment.
When reached Tuesday, Lee indicated she sensed a shift coming in the state's stance on capital punishment, but said she's "very opposed" to the notion of death row inmates having their sentences reduced.
"I think it's ridiculous, honestly," she said. "I think that in my particular case, they should've been executed a long time ago."
Another victim’s family member, Wayne Guzzardo, speculated that the clemency petitions were filed because attempts to abolish the death penalty failed in the legislative session that just closed last week.
Todd Wessinger shot and killed Wayne’s daughter, 27-year-old Stephanie Guzzardo, during a robbery of Calendar’s restaurant in Baton Rouge in 1995. Stephanie worked there as the restaurant manager; Wessinger was a former employee.
“It’s been 28 years. If they give this jerk clemency, hell’s going to break loose,” he said when reached Tuesday. “It’s been 28 years. He’s been through over 20 appeals, lost every one of them, and they’re still trying to play games with me. I’ve had enough.”
Wessinger’s sentence has been reversed twice during the course of his appeals. Currently, his sentence has been vacated by a federal court.
He added that if the governor “goes along with” the inmate’s clemency efforts, “hell’s going to hit the fan.”
“He murdered my daughter in cold blood while she was begging for her life,” Guzzardo said. “He deserves to die.”
But there are also victims' family members who oppose the death penalty.
Brett Malone, the eldest son of Mary Ann Shaver Malone, submitted a letter for testimony at the legislature this past session urging lawmakers to abolish the death penalty. Jeremiah Manning abducted and murdered his mother from her Plain Dealing home in 2000 and sits on death row.
Malone, who now lives in Shreveport, recalled how the district attorney told his family soon after the murder the state was going to seek the death penalty.
“When I heard that, my body went cold,” he wrote. “I remained silent back then – even knowing that my mother – and her mother – both opposed the death penalty based on their deeply held religious beliefs in the sanctity of life.”
Malone maintains, two decades later, that killing Manning will bring “more pain” and “more suffering” because “it takes away all hope for reconciliation or redemption.”
“His mother loves him – just as my mother loved me,” he wrote.
He also criticized the state for barring him from communicating or meeting with Manning to find some type of closure beyond capital punishment.
Retired East Baton Rouge prosecutor Prem Burns, who handled nearly 20 death row cases during her days as a state litigator, bristled at the prospect of so many capital sentences being commuted.
She noted that death row cases are often years-long marathons through grueling trials followed by several post-conviction appeals.
“I think it’s a disservice to the community and it’s also insulting to the people that sat on these juries,” she said. “(Broadway’s) never even admitted that he did it. Why are we willing to do them a favor now?”
Burns worried that if inmates are let off death row, some could later go before a parole board that votes to reduce their life sentences even further and the result could be a few of them walking free.
She cited the case of Bernardo Antonio Vasquez, who was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder for helping orchestrate the 1986 killing of federal drug informant Adler “Barry” Seal.
U.S. authorities said Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, leader of the fabled Medellin cartel, ordered the hit after learning that Seal agreed to cooperant with federal investigators. The longtime pilot turned drug smuggler spent years flying cocaine from Central and South America to the U.S., authorities said. Seal was a key witness set to testify against Escobar in a trial in Baton Rouge when Vasquez was tracking his whereabouts for two accomplices, who killed Seal in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge parking lot.
In November, the state's Board of Pardons agreed to reduce Vasquez’s life sentence to 99 years and recommended him for immediate parole after he’d served 36 years in prison. Gov. Edwards intervened at the final hour, denying Vasquez’s petition for clemency in January.
“Don’t overturn a jury’s verdict,” she said. “Making victims relive all of this again when it’s not really ever out of their systems, that’s what’s breaking my heart. It’s making people say, ‘What did I do this for? I almost died, I was raped, I was stabbed. And now you’re telling me I made a mistake.’”
Editor's Note: This story was updated to reflect the disposition of Todd Wessinger's case. It was also updated to correct a name error.
