Case of Steven Howard Oken
(AKA: Steve Oken, Steven Oken, Steven H. Oken)
This page is dedicated to the memory of
Dawn Marie Garvin, Patricia Hirt and Lori Ward
White Marsh, MD
Convicted of sexually assaulting and killing three women in 1987. Steven Oken, one of only a few Jewish inmates on any death row in the country.
On the evening of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken raped and shot to death newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin in her apartment in White Marsh, Md. Mrs. Garvin, whose husband was stationed at a Navy base in Virginia, had allowed Oken into her apartment after he asked to use the telephone. Then, on Nov. 16, Oken raped and murdered his own sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt. He then drove to Kittery, Maine, where the following day, he raped and murdered a third woman — a hotel clerk named Lori Ward.
On the evening of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken raped and shot to death newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin in her apartment in White Marsh, Md. Mrs. Garvin, whose husband was stationed at a Navy base in Virginia, had allowed Oken into her apartment after he asked to use the telephone. Then, on Nov. 16, Oken raped and murdered his own sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt. He then drove to Kittery, Maine, where the following day, he raped and murdered a third woman — a hotel clerk named Lori Ward.
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Table of Contents:
Table of Contents:
- Lives In Ruin (04/27/2001)
- Judge Agrees To Sign Warrant For Death Penalty: Death Row Inmate Faces Lethal Injection For 1987 Rape, Murder (01/23/2003)
- Maryland's Death Penalty Upheld (11/17/2003)
- Amnesty International - Library - USA (Maryland) (05/18/2004)
- Urge Governor Ehrlich to Grant Clemency to Steven Oken - Amnesty International (05/18/2004)
- Md. Rally Opposes Execution (05/27/2004)
- Joe Curran and the Death Penalty (06/01/2004)
- Oken Seeks Stay Of Death Penalty (06/02/2004)
- Maryland judge rejects one of inmate´s case to avoid execution (06/02/2004)
- For Rabbi, Stance On Execution Evolves (06/07/2004)
- Court agrees to hear request for stay of Oken execution (06/07/2004)
- Victim's family awaits killer's execution: After years of delays, lethal injection scheduled next week for Oken (06/08/2004)
- Md. puts Oken to death (06/18/2004)
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Lives In RuinBy Alan H. Feiler
Baltimore Jewish Times - April 27, 2001
Steven Oken smiles and rolls his eyes. A few fleeting hours before the start of Passover, he contorts his large, bulky frame like a question mark to enable a correctional officer to unlock the heavy metal handcuffs that bind his wrists behind his back. He seems embarrassed and mildly annoyed with the amount of time required to unshackle him.
Rubbing his elbows and massive forearms, he shakes his head and sits on a concrete stool. "Hey," he says from behind an ultra-thick plate glass window, running his fingers through his close-cropped, prematurely graying hair. "Happy Pesach."
Taken aback, I simply say, "Thanks," and pause for a moment. "You, too." I study his round, smooth, well-shaven face carefully, as I have during all of our meetings over the past four years in visitation rooms like this one at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, also known as Supermax prison in downtown Baltimore. It's a face I've known for nearly a quarter-century, since our days as schoolmates at Randallstown Senior High, Class of '80.
It might sound cliche but even then, something seemed different, perhaps inscrutable, about Oken. Maybe it was that smile, which really could be described as more of a kind of smirk, connoting a wise guy demeanor. Or those intense bluish-gray eyes that suggested a mixture of self-assurance and restlessness. "There was always a bit of an oddness about him," a childhood buddy of Oken's once told me, sounding like virtually anyone who's ever personally known a convicted killer.
Still, everyone — relatives, friends, former classmates, acquaintances — agrees he was basically your average suburban Jewish kid growing up in a tight-knit, hard-working, decent middle-class family that gave him lots of love and attention. Good grades, plenty of A-list friends, Pep Club member, strong athlete, cheerleader girlfriend, well-liked among teachers, attended temple, helped out at his parents' pharmacy.
"Lots of kids have tendencies where they might take the wrong road, but Steve wasn't one of them," Lincoln Bogart, Oken's varsity lacrosse coach at Randallstown, told me back in 1987. "There was nothing abnormal about him. As far as a sex maniac killer, I never saw it. He was a nice guy and got A's in all my classes."
Oh, he got into a little mischief, here and there. Some partying with pals. A few wild weekends. But no on-the-fringe, alienated, disgruntled, prone-to-violent-outbursts loner reminiscent of the Columbine killers or some type of deranged Unabomber figure. Nor was he an impressionable Timothy McVeigh ideologue in search of a cause and possible martyrdom.
Just your average Jewish kid.
But something went wrong. Terribly wrong. And not even Steven Oken himself is sure why.
Jewish kids from Pikesville aren't supposed to sexually abuse, terrorize and murder women.
But this one did — three of them.
Through the battered white speaker box mounted on the faded concrete wall, I barely hear Oken's voice above a din of clanging metal and shouting coming from the other side. We're exchanging grins and pleasantries, but he stops for a moment until the noise subsides. He still looks like the guy you share a beer or off-color joke with, but his face is somehow different this morning. A little older, more somber, maybe paler. He's wearing a green prison-issued jumpsuit, rather than his usual solid-colored shorts and T-shirt.
I immediately remind him that today — unlike our other meetings of schmoozing about old friends, current events, family news, his myriad appeals and frustrations with the prison system — we're finally going to talk, for the first time, about his case and the unspeakable, incomprehensible crimes he committed more than a decade ago. Up to now, it's been friendly, off-the-record chats between a pair of acquaintances who remember each other from their high school and college days. Now, it's a no-holds-barred interview.
He nods quietly, nervously, wringing his hands, knowing he's journeying into an area he hates to visit and rarely does, except within the solitude of his own mind and conscience, or maybe on occasion with legal counsel. It's a place he hates more than the hellhole of a home, also known as cell No. 34, that he landed for himself in the bowels of Supermax.
And he seems to hate it even more than the fate that could await him.
"There are no excuses for what I've done," says Oken, 39. "And I can't begin to imagine the suffering, the cost of what I've done to these people. It's a terrible thing I did."
In a community that prides itself on producing what's considered the best in society, Steven Oken is generally thought of as an aberration, an anomaly. He is a Jew on Death Row, one of eight to 10 in the United States, according to the Aleph Institute, HOPE-HOWSE International and Jewish Prisoner Services International, all organizations that offer assistance to an estimated 4,000 Jewish inmates.
Oken is also one of 13 inmates — and the only Jew — on Maryland's Death Row. More than 13 years following his capture and incarceration — after pleading guilty to committing murder and being sentenced to life without parole in Maine, extradited to Maryland, sentenced to death by lethal injection by a Baltimore County jury in January 1991, and countless appeals on the federal and state levels — Oken remains on Death Row, trying desperately to stay alive.
Living in an 8-by-8-foot cell with only an hour of outside time per day, Oken — known by the state as no. 212-612 — can understand why some people might be perplexed by his resolve to evade execution. But he says his reasons are selfless.
"I want to live for my family," he says. "They're also victims of what I've done. And if I'm executed, they'll be victims again. That's why I'm fighting this fight.
"Also, I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the past — what I did to get me here. Young people today, a lot of them are on drugs, alcohol abuse. I think a lot of people, myself included, can still contribute to society and talk to young people about the dangers of drug abuse.
"I'm a good example of the worst thing that can happen to somebody when under the influence."
In the aftermath of the defeat of legislation proposing a two-year moratorium on executions in Maryland, Oken bought some extra time — at least several months — to fight his sentence as the Court of Appeals agreed two weeks ago to consider his appeal on constitutional issues. The case probably will not be heard until this fall.
As a result, Baltimore County State's Attorney Sandra O'Connor said last week that she would not seek a death warrant for Oken. Thirteen prominent local and national religious leaders — including Rabbi Mark G. Loeb of Pikesville's Beth El Congregation — have called on Gov. Parris N. Glendening to halt executions for two years.
"All of this has been more difficult for my family than it has been for me," Oken says about the roller coaster ride of legal and political maneuverings involving his case in recent months. "But I have a good feeling for how things will probably go."
Their names were Dawn Marie Garvin, Patricia Antoinette Hirt and Lori Elizabeth Ward.
Over a 15-day period in November 1987, Steven Howard Oken sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered these three young women. He characterizes that time as a turbulent period in his life in which he was grappling with severe drug and alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, financial and business concerns, and a self-described void or depression in his soul that he's never been able to adequately identify or reconcile.
"I can't point to one thing that made this happen. I think I was trying to run from something," Oken says. "I don't know if run is even the right word. I just didn't want to deal with everything."
Oken, who had attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, was 25 and co-owned his family's Rexall Pharmacy near Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he worked as a clerk. His wife of a year, Phyllis, was away on business, near Seattle, during that time. The Okens, who did not have children and have since divorced, were planning a vacation in the Virgin Islands the following month.
But at the same time, Oken — who says he first experimented with marijuana while attending Old Court Junior High School — notes that he spent much of the period prior to the murders drinking heavily and taking cocaine, halcyon, Zanax and prescription drugs from his family's pharmacy.
"I was depressed. I don't think I really appreciated what was happening. And instead of dealing with problems that came up, I found a way to escape. Drugs were what I was all about," he says.
Despite his track record, Oken — knowing how incredible this sounds coming from someone on Death Row — doesn't consider himself a violent person.
"I know how I was brought up and the values my parents instilled in me, that taking someone's life is just horrendous," he says. "I've been a quiet, soft-spoken person all my life. Growing up, I didn't get into a lot of fights. I wasn't really confrontational.
"If I was in my right mind, this wouldn't have happened. I don't want that to sound like an excuse. But before this happened, I didn't ever have a desire to physically hurt someone. People tell my parents it was completely out of character, and I agree with that."
According to published reports, Oken's first victim, Garvin, a 20-year-old newlywed, was found Nov. 2 shot in the head and sexually assaulted in her third-floor White Marsh apartment, four blocks from his modest, two-bedroom townhouse on Stillwood Circle. Her husband, who was in the U.S. Navy, had just returned to his base in Norfolk, Va.
Neighbors in Garvin's Lincoln Woods complex reported that an apparently intoxicated man matching Oken's description had been knocking on doors the previous evening, claiming alternately to be a Baltimore County police officer, a physician whose pager went off, a stranded motorist needing assistance and a boyfriend who'd been kicked out of his house.
Hirt's nude body was found on the morning of Nov. 16 in a ditch beside White Marsh Boulevard. She had also been shot in the head, as well as strangled. The previous day, Hirt, 43, a Hamilton resident who was the sister of Oken's wife, had gone over to his house to drop off a camera. After receiving a missing person's report and finding her body, police searched Oken's home and found blood stains, signs of struggle, some of Hirt's clothing and the .25-caliber automatic pistol used to kill Garvin.
After stealing Hirt's 1979 white Ford Mustang, Oken drove to Kittery, Maine, and registered at the Coachman Motor Inn, using his real name and address. Hours later, Ward, a 25-year-old clerk at the motel who lived in Portsmouth, N.H., was found fatally shot in the head, bruised and sexually assaulted in an anteroom behind the front desk. More than $300 was missing from the cash register.
Oken, who knew the area well from vacationing there, subsequently drove 65 miles north to the Freeport Inn in the Maine coastal town of Freeport. The motel's manager, having heard a radio report about Ward's murder and a description of the Mustang, identified the car and called authorities.
After speaking on the phone with negotiators for a few minutes, Oken yelled, "I'm coming out, don't shoot," exited Room 215 unarmed and surrendered peacefully to Maine State Police Nov. 17 after more than 20 officers and tactical units surrounded the motel. Police found an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a .380-caliber automatic pistol, the one used to kill Hirt and Ward, in the blood-stained car.
Discovered in Oken's motel room in Freeport were wads of cash, a blood-stained surgeon's smock, a half-empty bottle of vodka and two pieces of nylon cord. He told police he had "a bad drug problem" and couldn't recall anything about the previous 24 hours.
According to court records, Oken had been seeing a psychiatrist for about six months prior to the murders. Also, on Nov. 9, a week after Garvin's murder, Oken had received probation before judgment and was given one year of supervised probation for a case in which he was arrested Oct. 13 for punching and trying to sexually assault an East Baltimore hotel desk clerk. He was fined and ordered to undergo alcohol and drug treatment.
"Steven Oken thought he was above God, and he destroyed the lives of so many people," says Fred Romano, Dawn Garvin's brother. "People who do what he did can't be helped. He raped my sister in a horrible manner and got a kick out of it, and then he shot her twice in the head and killed her. That's how my father found her.
"I don't care if he's Jewish or Arabic or what. If he goes to God and God forgives him, so be it. But as long as he's dead. Eventually, he's going to pay for what he did. He needs to accept his judgment and die for his crime. He should suffer."
Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, Romano, a former Marine, adds, "Let Steven Oken know I'm not going anywhere until he's dead. I won't rest."
Davida Oken paces around her tastefully decorated living room, talking on a cordless phone. In what's become a daily ritual, she's just accepted a collect call from her son on Death Row and is talking about the chances for a moratorium on executions.
Her tone, while for the most part controlled, occasionally borders on frantic. Mrs. Oken, who has become well-acquainted with state legislators and anti-death penalty groups, is a mother trying desperately to save her son's life.
"Our life is a living hell, as far as constantly worrying about what will happen to him," Mrs. Oken, a soft-spoken woman with short hair and a round face, says in almost a whisper. "It's like a tremendous veil is put over your life. Not a day goes by when you don't think about him and pray he's going to live."
Her husband, David, a silver-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses and an easy smile, takes it a step further. "It's taken a big chunk of our lives and put it down the toilet," he says. "Over the years, it's been a drain."
Both Baltimore natives, the Okens — who asked that the whereabouts of their home not be identified in this article — speak hesitantly to me at first. Since my initial correspondence by mail with Steven in December of 1992, they've been reticent about generating more publicity regarding the case.
But it seems that as Oken's possible execution has drawn closer, they changed their minds, perhaps as a last measure for clemency, a final effort to set the record straight and get their views across.
"The death penalty doesn't solve anything," Mrs. Oken tells me. "It doesn't prevent murders or save money. It's all about retribution. But why must another family suffer? We're victims, too. Why do my children and grandchildren have to suffer murder from the state? Living in the rat hole Steven lives in is punishment enough for any human being."
The Okens proudly point to their other two children, both of whom are younger than Steven and involved in the medical profession, as "proof in the pudding" of their strong parenting skills. And they insist that Steven was always a good kid who never got into any serious trouble or run-ins.
"He had a religious, moral upbringing," Mrs. Oken says, smiling. "He was a wonderful little boy, a happy-go-lucky child, carefree, just perfect, very obedient. He's the sunshine of my life. He was in the Boy Scouts, a Little Leaguer, you know? It was just the luck of the draw. Something went wrong, somewhere."
Mr. Oken, though, tries not to soft-pedal things. "He was always a little more mischievous than most," he says of his son as a youngster. "He always wanted to go a little further than he should. He could push the envelope a little. ... He was more aggressive, more willing ... to walk the thin line between right and wrong, what he should or shouldn't do. He always thought he could do a little more, stay out a little later."
But the Okens say they've still never quite figured out what — besides possibly drugs — really turned their son into a cold-blooded killer. And it's a subject they've never dared broach with Steven himself during their countless visits and talks. In some ways, it seems that it's something they've emotionally compartmentalized, separating Oken and his homicidal spree from the boy they raised and loved, as well as from the young man they've visited in prisons for the past 13 years.
"I've sort of let the 'why' go because ... why isn't important enough for me to hurt. And I don't want to hurt," Mr. Oken says. His wife cuts him off. "There is no 'why,'" she says. "He doesn't know why. He does not know. It's like another person. ... But I think he's a kinder and gentler person today. He's become more serious, more caring. He's matured."
Going down for their weekly visits to Supermax — a parent's nightmare if there ever was one — has become a routine matter, they say, although some things they'll never get used to.
"We haven't touched him in five or six years. [Before,] I could hold his hand, I could kiss him," Mrs. Oken says. "But it just becomes a way of life. You do what you have to do. It's better than the alternative. He makes me feel good. I adore him. At least I know he's living."
Says Mr. Oken, partially to himself: "It's a consequence of his actions. These are the consequences he has to live with. I just wish some people could understand that life in prison, particularly the way he is imprisoned, is a terrible punishment. Life in prison can be as severe as the death penalty."
The Okens, who adopted Steven when he was 2 days old and arranged for his conversion to Judaism shortly afterward, suspect that his insecurities about being adopted may have played a role in his descent into substance abuse, particularly during high school.
"In his teen years, he often said to me, 'You don't know what it's like not to know where you come from,'" recalls Mrs. Oken. "He was trying to research his birth mother, never successful. And it breaks my heart because I wish I could help him. And when his wife began traveling [prior to the murders], I just think he felt like somebody else abandoned him."
At this point in the conversation, Mr. Oken adds, with his voice breaking, "We're not biological. There's a difference here that I can't understand. I guess you have to be the person who's adopted. I'd think about it and say to myself, 'Who cares? I've got two people here who love me.'"
Lost in her thoughts, Mrs. Oken acknowledges that most adopted people are law-abiding citizens. "I just think some people handle it better than others, like other things. If I knew the answer," she says, with her voice trailing off.
Oken himself agrees with his parents that being adopted might've contributed to his penchant for drug experimentation, but he rejects the notion that it might've led to the murders. "Being adopted is hard," he says, "but I don't think it had anything to do with what happened. I think anyone who was adopted has to have that little place in their heart and mind — where did I come from? What's important is I have a family. They've always been there for me. I can't begin to say how much I love them," he says, struggling to keep his composure.
Furthermore, he scoffs at the tendency among some Jews to dismiss his unusual status as a Jewish serial rapist/murderer merely because he wasn't born Jewish. Accept it or not, he says, he is a Jew, regardless of his ethnic or genetic makeup.
"I don't think that makes any difference," Oken says during the only slightly testy moment of our 80-minute interview. "I grew up Jewish and lived in a Jewish house. When I was 8 days old, I had a bris. My Hebrew name is Shimon Hirsch. I'm Jewish, period."
Like many inmates, Oken, who became a bar mitzvah at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, has become progressively more religiously observant since his incarceration. The Jewish Big Brother/Big Sister League has been involved with Oken since his extradition to Maryland in 1990, and the agency's executive director, Louis H. Jacobs, personally meets with him on a monthly basis. In its prison outreach program, the league visits and maintains contact with 177 inmates across Maryland.
"We're not close buddies. I don't think he thinks of me as among his most private confidants," Mr. Jacobs says of Oken. "Our conversations are usually fairly superficial. He's a well-defended guy. He has a cloud hanging over his head, so there's a place that's very sensitive. But I enjoy my time with him, being with him. He's engaging, bright, thoughtful."
Mr. Jacobs finds that most people in the Jewish community are unfamiliar with Oken's case and are "floored" to learn of a local Jew on Death Row. "There's a morbid curiosity," Mr. Jacobs says. "My parents always want to know about it and why the agency reaches out to him, or if it affects my personal feelings about the issue."
Moishe Davids, a league volunteer, also meets with Oken once a month. Since 1997, Mr. Davids, who belongs to the Bais Lubavitch Congregation, has provided religious books, commentaries on weekly Torah portions, holiday packages and spiritual instruction to Oken. During one of their meetings a couple of years ago, Mr. Davids, a retired probation officer, brought a pair of tefillin, or phylacteries.
"I showed him how to put them on," he says. "Of course, at Supermax you can't have physical contact so I showed him through the window, with a telephone propped on my shoulder, and then I gave the tefillin to a guard to give to Steve on the other side. He got the hang of it."
For Mr. Davids, Oken is a soul to reach, a Jewish heart and mind to win over, languishing in one of the most remote and terrifying places imaginable. And he's had some success.
"He's undergone a religious transformation," says Mr. Davids, who lives in Park Heights. "There's definitely been a change in his Jewish outlook and commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people. He now fasts on all of the fast days and observes the major holidays, and he reads articles and books [on Judaism] and asks me to discuss them. He's a smart fellow."
Despite the heinous nature of Oken's crimes, Mr. Davids says he feels no apprehension or moral quandary about visiting with him. Oken, he says, is not a monster or a demon but a lost Jew. And he turns to the Torah and its emphasis on compassion and non-judgmentalism for guidance.
"We're taught that a Jew is a Jew even if he sins. That's the Jewish way," Mr. Davids says. "Mitzvahs are not always easy to do. This is a hard mitzvah. I understand it's difficult for some people to separate sins from the sinner. But I can't ignore him because of the crimes he's convicted of."
Oken, who says he now puts on tefillin just about every day, describes Mr. Davids' visits as nothing short of life-changing. The tone of his voice perks up and his eyes glow when discussing his blossoming interest in Judaism.
"I'd never heard the word HaShem growing up," he says. "We celebrated the High Holidays, Passover and Purim, but I never knew there was a fast day before Purim, or about the Ninth of Av or the Fast of Gedaliah or the 17th of Tammuz.
"I try to do as much as I can," Oken says. "I consider myself now a spiritual person. It calms me and brings peace to me. It makes me feel like there's a purpose."
And becoming a more observant Jew, he says, has helped him deal better with the actions of his past.
"I hurt a lot of people," he says, staring at the floor, "and I pray they forgive me — for themselves, to get some peace. I've done teshuva [repentance]. I've admitted I did it, recognizing this is a horrible act and I'm responsible for it. I have this awful feeling about what I did.
"But it's not just what I did against people," Oken says, barely audibly, "but what I did against God."
A soft evening rain falls on the roof as Davida Oken glances at a table full of framed family photographs, including one of Steven standing on a balcony with the ocean in the background. She thinks it was at Bethany Beach, a few months before the murders. He's grinning, holding a rolled-up newspaper, looking like he doesn't have a worry in the world, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and jeans.
It's a nice memory, she says, the kind that keeps her going. But other memories make her seethe.
"Almost the first day [after Oken was arrested], I was in Pikesville and someone I've known since high school came up to me and said, 'Didn't you ever teach your son that you don't do things like that?'" she recalls. "What do you say to a stupid, ignorant person like that? For someone to say something that stupid is unbelievable."
The Okens, who are former longtime congregants of Baltimore Hebrew, say that type of disregard for them has been a hallmark of the Jewish community's behavior toward their family since the slayings. In conversation, they can barely contain their bitterness toward the community — individuals and as a whole — for failing to provide virtually any emotional, spiritual or political support to them or their son.
Over the years, they've called and sent scores of letters to rabbis and other Jewish communal leaders, particularly those who've publicly stated their opposition to capital punishment. They say few have responded. Interestingly, the Catholic church, particularly Archbishop William H. Keeler, has been in touch frequently to offer encouragement.
"I thought the Jewish people were a brotherhood. I don't feel that way now," says Ms. Oken. "I needed someone to help us handle this. When you reach out to your leaders and they turn a cold shoulder, you have to wonder what it's all about."
Oken himself is more disappointed in his old friends' unwillingness to visit or keep in touch. "I don't think people want to be bothered. Maybe they can't deal with it," he says. "But I think if the shoe was on the other foot, I would've kept in touch. I feel let down."
As far as the organized community is concerned, "I don't care for myself but for my family. They were members of Baltimore Hebrew for many years," he says. "I don't know if it's politics or what."
Lou Jacobs, of Jewish Big Brother /Big Sister, agrees with the Okens' assessment of the community, even though he acknowledges that Jews are as divided about the death penalty as the rest of America. Last fall, he sent a form letter to more than 40 area rabbis to inform them about Oken's situation, and to suggest using the case as a means of creating dialogue about capital punishment in their congregations.
He was shocked when he received only a few responses, including one from a rabbi who was "indignant" that Mr. Jacobs advocated discussions about the death penalty merely because a Jew was on Death Row.
"Shouldn't the Okens feel they're getting support from somewhere, or do they have to live with this black mark forever? The community institutions and leaders haven't been there for them," Mr. Jacobs says. He attributes it to a tendency among Jews to avoid viewing themselves in an unflattering light.
"We don't think the Jewish community has a substance abuse problem or domestic violence. We think we're immune to those problems, whether because of genes or conditioning," he says. "But a Jew could be executed in Maryland, and one way or another our community will have to make a decision about this."
However, the Oken matter is simply not a Jewish issue and that's why the case has received scant attention from the community, counters Arthur C. Abramson, executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council.
"He's an individual who committed atrocious crimes, was found guilty and happens to be Jewish, but it had nothing to do with his ethnic or religious beliefs," says Mr. Abramson, whose agency supported the moratorium bill.
Rabbi Donald R. Berlin is one of the community leaders to whom the Okens wrote a letter requesting assistance. The former spiritual leader of Temple Oheb Shalom, who has publicly criticized the death penalty, admits that he never responded, largely because he wasn't really sure what to do with this matter.
But he says he also felt the Okens were specifically seeking his involvement in the campaign for their son's clemency, something he didn't feel comfortable doing since "the crime was so horrific."
"I understand why they feel abandoned. This must be excruciatingly painful for them. Their child is in trouble," he says. "But they seemed only to want a rabbi who'd intervene for their cause. I had no major reason to get involved. ... The death penalty is wrong. But I wouldn't want to come to his defense. Because he's Jewish?"
When he was contacted by the Okens, Baltimore Hebrew's Rabbi Rex D. Perlmeter delegated the matter to an associate rabbi who met with them about a month ago. "I don't have a personal history with them," he says, noting that he sent a "letter of concern" about the case to the governor's office.
But in retrospect, Rabbi Perlmeter says he could've handled the situation better, and that embarrassment played a role. "When I see someone in these circumstances, I feel a sense of shame and sorrow that this has happened to a member of the Jewish community," he says. "If I had to do it again, I think I would've read between the lines and provided comfort for them."
That's exactly what Rabbi Jacob A. Max, of Moses Montefiore-Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation, has tried to do. After being contacted by a mutual friend, Rabbi Max visited recently with the Okens and Steven. He has also written a letter to the governor requesting that Oken be returned to Maine to complete his life sentence.
Rabbi Max says he can understand why many of his colleagues and others in the Jewish community don't want to deal with the Oken case. "Our people used to be convicted for white-collar crimes, not violent crimes. But a Jewish guy on Death Row? It's a new creature of its type. The community doesn't know how to handle it," he says.
But the rabbi feels people must rise above it, especially for a fellow Jew. "He's still a person, created in the image of God until the very end," he says. "The act he did was monstrous, but he's not a monster. He still has a neshamah, a soul."
Unlike most of us, Steven Oken doesn't look at capital punishment from a theoretical point of view. It's something real, vibrant, immediate, an organism that shares his cell with him, along with his sink, toilet, shelves, TV, stacks of books and magazines, and concrete slab with a mattress.
Not surprisingly, Oken, who's become so adept in legal matters since his incarceration that his parents suggest he would've made a superb attorney, is quite eloquent in his opposition to the death penalty. And he's willing to take his case to the Supreme Court if he has to.
"Look at the company this country is in — China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan," he says. "This is a country that executes children and the mentally retarded. And it's not fairly applied. Nobody on Death Row in Maryland is here because they killed a black person, and the vast majority of homicides in this state are black-on-black. It just doesn't address the situation, and it's unfair."
Unfair like the fate of his three victims, their families, and that of his own parents and siblings. Oken says he thinks about his victims every day of his life. It's a pain that's beyond words, he says, knowing how hypocritical and insensitive that might sound. But he appears to really mean it — at least from this side of the window.
"It's something you can never block out of your mind," Oken says. "You wake up every morning and you're here, and you know why you're here — you took lives, the pain you gave their families, all the happiness you took from them."
At this point in the interview, he studies his large folded hands. He pauses and begins to mumble. It's apparent he's no longer talking to me but to a few unseen forces that seem to be crowding the tiny visitation room.
"I just want to be clear that I did this. Not the drugs, it was me. I can't express how sorry I am. There are no words."
Maybe Steven Oken is someone who learned too late during his time on earth about the preciousness of life — that of his own and others. While his victims lost their lives, so did he, to a certain extent. His is now an existence, spent from moment to moment trying to maintain his sanity by reading books and working on appeals. For all intents and purposes, he ceased being alive, stopped being a functioning human being, the moment he lured Dawn Garvin into her apartment that chilly November night and proceeded to torture and kill her.
He knows there are those who would like to do the same to him, who feel that death by lethal injection is simply not good enough. But that, he points out, will still not rectify the actions that forever concluded his life as a member of society, at the age of 25.
And so he presses on, to stay alive, to keep moving. As an armed guard wearing a bulletproof vest arrives to inform us that our time is almost up, Oken and I stare at each other for what seems a long time. Without saying a word, he reminds me that he comes from the same place I do, with the same values and ethics and belief system and culture that permeated the lives and times we once shared. And it makes me shudder when I look at my reflection in the window and beyond, at Oken.
"I was brought up to care about people and respect them," he insists, still sounding like a nice Jewish boy from the old neighborhood. "I just think I'm basically a good person who's done terrible, terrible things."
And when the guard returns and begins to place handcuffs on Oken and usher him away, he waves and again wishes me a happy Passover.
Baltimore Jewish Times - April 27, 2001
Steven Oken smiles and rolls his eyes. A few fleeting hours before the start of Passover, he contorts his large, bulky frame like a question mark to enable a correctional officer to unlock the heavy metal handcuffs that bind his wrists behind his back. He seems embarrassed and mildly annoyed with the amount of time required to unshackle him.Rubbing his elbows and massive forearms, he shakes his head and sits on a concrete stool. "Hey," he says from behind an ultra-thick plate glass window, running his fingers through his close-cropped, prematurely graying hair. "Happy Pesach."
Taken aback, I simply say, "Thanks," and pause for a moment. "You, too." I study his round, smooth, well-shaven face carefully, as I have during all of our meetings over the past four years in visitation rooms like this one at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, also known as Supermax prison in downtown Baltimore. It's a face I've known for nearly a quarter-century, since our days as schoolmates at Randallstown Senior High, Class of '80.
It might sound cliche but even then, something seemed different, perhaps inscrutable, about Oken. Maybe it was that smile, which really could be described as more of a kind of smirk, connoting a wise guy demeanor. Or those intense bluish-gray eyes that suggested a mixture of self-assurance and restlessness. "There was always a bit of an oddness about him," a childhood buddy of Oken's once told me, sounding like virtually anyone who's ever personally known a convicted killer.
Still, everyone — relatives, friends, former classmates, acquaintances — agrees he was basically your average suburban Jewish kid growing up in a tight-knit, hard-working, decent middle-class family that gave him lots of love and attention. Good grades, plenty of A-list friends, Pep Club member, strong athlete, cheerleader girlfriend, well-liked among teachers, attended temple, helped out at his parents' pharmacy.
"Lots of kids have tendencies where they might take the wrong road, but Steve wasn't one of them," Lincoln Bogart, Oken's varsity lacrosse coach at Randallstown, told me back in 1987. "There was nothing abnormal about him. As far as a sex maniac killer, I never saw it. He was a nice guy and got A's in all my classes."
Oh, he got into a little mischief, here and there. Some partying with pals. A few wild weekends. But no on-the-fringe, alienated, disgruntled, prone-to-violent-outbursts loner reminiscent of the Columbine killers or some type of deranged Unabomber figure. Nor was he an impressionable Timothy McVeigh ideologue in search of a cause and possible martyrdom.
Just your average Jewish kid.
But something went wrong. Terribly wrong. And not even Steven Oken himself is sure why.
Jewish kids from Pikesville aren't supposed to sexually abuse, terrorize and murder women.
But this one did — three of them.
Through the battered white speaker box mounted on the faded concrete wall, I barely hear Oken's voice above a din of clanging metal and shouting coming from the other side. We're exchanging grins and pleasantries, but he stops for a moment until the noise subsides. He still looks like the guy you share a beer or off-color joke with, but his face is somehow different this morning. A little older, more somber, maybe paler. He's wearing a green prison-issued jumpsuit, rather than his usual solid-colored shorts and T-shirt.
I immediately remind him that today — unlike our other meetings of schmoozing about old friends, current events, family news, his myriad appeals and frustrations with the prison system — we're finally going to talk, for the first time, about his case and the unspeakable, incomprehensible crimes he committed more than a decade ago. Up to now, it's been friendly, off-the-record chats between a pair of acquaintances who remember each other from their high school and college days. Now, it's a no-holds-barred interview.
He nods quietly, nervously, wringing his hands, knowing he's journeying into an area he hates to visit and rarely does, except within the solitude of his own mind and conscience, or maybe on occasion with legal counsel. It's a place he hates more than the hellhole of a home, also known as cell No. 34, that he landed for himself in the bowels of Supermax.
And he seems to hate it even more than the fate that could await him.
"There are no excuses for what I've done," says Oken, 39. "And I can't begin to imagine the suffering, the cost of what I've done to these people. It's a terrible thing I did."
In a community that prides itself on producing what's considered the best in society, Steven Oken is generally thought of as an aberration, an anomaly. He is a Jew on Death Row, one of eight to 10 in the United States, according to the Aleph Institute, HOPE-HOWSE International and Jewish Prisoner Services International, all organizations that offer assistance to an estimated 4,000 Jewish inmates.
Oken is also one of 13 inmates — and the only Jew — on Maryland's Death Row. More than 13 years following his capture and incarceration — after pleading guilty to committing murder and being sentenced to life without parole in Maine, extradited to Maryland, sentenced to death by lethal injection by a Baltimore County jury in January 1991, and countless appeals on the federal and state levels — Oken remains on Death Row, trying desperately to stay alive.
Living in an 8-by-8-foot cell with only an hour of outside time per day, Oken — known by the state as no. 212-612 — can understand why some people might be perplexed by his resolve to evade execution. But he says his reasons are selfless.
"I want to live for my family," he says. "They're also victims of what I've done. And if I'm executed, they'll be victims again. That's why I'm fighting this fight.
"Also, I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the past — what I did to get me here. Young people today, a lot of them are on drugs, alcohol abuse. I think a lot of people, myself included, can still contribute to society and talk to young people about the dangers of drug abuse.
"I'm a good example of the worst thing that can happen to somebody when under the influence."
In the aftermath of the defeat of legislation proposing a two-year moratorium on executions in Maryland, Oken bought some extra time — at least several months — to fight his sentence as the Court of Appeals agreed two weeks ago to consider his appeal on constitutional issues. The case probably will not be heard until this fall.
As a result, Baltimore County State's Attorney Sandra O'Connor said last week that she would not seek a death warrant for Oken. Thirteen prominent local and national religious leaders — including Rabbi Mark G. Loeb of Pikesville's Beth El Congregation — have called on Gov. Parris N. Glendening to halt executions for two years.
"All of this has been more difficult for my family than it has been for me," Oken says about the roller coaster ride of legal and political maneuverings involving his case in recent months. "But I have a good feeling for how things will probably go."
Their names were Dawn Marie Garvin, Patricia Antoinette Hirt and Lori Elizabeth Ward.
Over a 15-day period in November 1987, Steven Howard Oken sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered these three young women. He characterizes that time as a turbulent period in his life in which he was grappling with severe drug and alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, financial and business concerns, and a self-described void or depression in his soul that he's never been able to adequately identify or reconcile.
"I can't point to one thing that made this happen. I think I was trying to run from something," Oken says. "I don't know if run is even the right word. I just didn't want to deal with everything."
Oken, who had attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, was 25 and co-owned his family's Rexall Pharmacy near Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he worked as a clerk. His wife of a year, Phyllis, was away on business, near Seattle, during that time. The Okens, who did not have children and have since divorced, were planning a vacation in the Virgin Islands the following month.
But at the same time, Oken — who says he first experimented with marijuana while attending Old Court Junior High School — notes that he spent much of the period prior to the murders drinking heavily and taking cocaine, halcyon, Zanax and prescription drugs from his family's pharmacy.
"I was depressed. I don't think I really appreciated what was happening. And instead of dealing with problems that came up, I found a way to escape. Drugs were what I was all about," he says.
Despite his track record, Oken — knowing how incredible this sounds coming from someone on Death Row — doesn't consider himself a violent person.
"I know how I was brought up and the values my parents instilled in me, that taking someone's life is just horrendous," he says. "I've been a quiet, soft-spoken person all my life. Growing up, I didn't get into a lot of fights. I wasn't really confrontational.
"If I was in my right mind, this wouldn't have happened. I don't want that to sound like an excuse. But before this happened, I didn't ever have a desire to physically hurt someone. People tell my parents it was completely out of character, and I agree with that."
According to published reports, Oken's first victim, Garvin, a 20-year-old newlywed, was found Nov. 2 shot in the head and sexually assaulted in her third-floor White Marsh apartment, four blocks from his modest, two-bedroom townhouse on Stillwood Circle. Her husband, who was in the U.S. Navy, had just returned to his base in Norfolk, Va.
Neighbors in Garvin's Lincoln Woods complex reported that an apparently intoxicated man matching Oken's description had been knocking on doors the previous evening, claiming alternately to be a Baltimore County police officer, a physician whose pager went off, a stranded motorist needing assistance and a boyfriend who'd been kicked out of his house.
Hirt's nude body was found on the morning of Nov. 16 in a ditch beside White Marsh Boulevard. She had also been shot in the head, as well as strangled. The previous day, Hirt, 43, a Hamilton resident who was the sister of Oken's wife, had gone over to his house to drop off a camera. After receiving a missing person's report and finding her body, police searched Oken's home and found blood stains, signs of struggle, some of Hirt's clothing and the .25-caliber automatic pistol used to kill Garvin.
After stealing Hirt's 1979 white Ford Mustang, Oken drove to Kittery, Maine, and registered at the Coachman Motor Inn, using his real name and address. Hours later, Ward, a 25-year-old clerk at the motel who lived in Portsmouth, N.H., was found fatally shot in the head, bruised and sexually assaulted in an anteroom behind the front desk. More than $300 was missing from the cash register.
Oken, who knew the area well from vacationing there, subsequently drove 65 miles north to the Freeport Inn in the Maine coastal town of Freeport. The motel's manager, having heard a radio report about Ward's murder and a description of the Mustang, identified the car and called authorities.
After speaking on the phone with negotiators for a few minutes, Oken yelled, "I'm coming out, don't shoot," exited Room 215 unarmed and surrendered peacefully to Maine State Police Nov. 17 after more than 20 officers and tactical units surrounded the motel. Police found an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a .380-caliber automatic pistol, the one used to kill Hirt and Ward, in the blood-stained car.
Discovered in Oken's motel room in Freeport were wads of cash, a blood-stained surgeon's smock, a half-empty bottle of vodka and two pieces of nylon cord. He told police he had "a bad drug problem" and couldn't recall anything about the previous 24 hours.
According to court records, Oken had been seeing a psychiatrist for about six months prior to the murders. Also, on Nov. 9, a week after Garvin's murder, Oken had received probation before judgment and was given one year of supervised probation for a case in which he was arrested Oct. 13 for punching and trying to sexually assault an East Baltimore hotel desk clerk. He was fined and ordered to undergo alcohol and drug treatment.
"Steven Oken thought he was above God, and he destroyed the lives of so many people," says Fred Romano, Dawn Garvin's brother. "People who do what he did can't be helped. He raped my sister in a horrible manner and got a kick out of it, and then he shot her twice in the head and killed her. That's how my father found her.
"I don't care if he's Jewish or Arabic or what. If he goes to God and God forgives him, so be it. But as long as he's dead. Eventually, he's going to pay for what he did. He needs to accept his judgment and die for his crime. He should suffer."
Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, Romano, a former Marine, adds, "Let Steven Oken know I'm not going anywhere until he's dead. I won't rest."
Davida Oken paces around her tastefully decorated living room, talking on a cordless phone. In what's become a daily ritual, she's just accepted a collect call from her son on Death Row and is talking about the chances for a moratorium on executions.
Her tone, while for the most part controlled, occasionally borders on frantic. Mrs. Oken, who has become well-acquainted with state legislators and anti-death penalty groups, is a mother trying desperately to save her son's life.
"Our life is a living hell, as far as constantly worrying about what will happen to him," Mrs. Oken, a soft-spoken woman with short hair and a round face, says in almost a whisper. "It's like a tremendous veil is put over your life. Not a day goes by when you don't think about him and pray he's going to live."
Her husband, David, a silver-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses and an easy smile, takes it a step further. "It's taken a big chunk of our lives and put it down the toilet," he says. "Over the years, it's been a drain."
Both Baltimore natives, the Okens — who asked that the whereabouts of their home not be identified in this article — speak hesitantly to me at first. Since my initial correspondence by mail with Steven in December of 1992, they've been reticent about generating more publicity regarding the case.
But it seems that as Oken's possible execution has drawn closer, they changed their minds, perhaps as a last measure for clemency, a final effort to set the record straight and get their views across.
"The death penalty doesn't solve anything," Mrs. Oken tells me. "It doesn't prevent murders or save money. It's all about retribution. But why must another family suffer? We're victims, too. Why do my children and grandchildren have to suffer murder from the state? Living in the rat hole Steven lives in is punishment enough for any human being."
The Okens proudly point to their other two children, both of whom are younger than Steven and involved in the medical profession, as "proof in the pudding" of their strong parenting skills. And they insist that Steven was always a good kid who never got into any serious trouble or run-ins.
"He had a religious, moral upbringing," Mrs. Oken says, smiling. "He was a wonderful little boy, a happy-go-lucky child, carefree, just perfect, very obedient. He's the sunshine of my life. He was in the Boy Scouts, a Little Leaguer, you know? It was just the luck of the draw. Something went wrong, somewhere."
Mr. Oken, though, tries not to soft-pedal things. "He was always a little more mischievous than most," he says of his son as a youngster. "He always wanted to go a little further than he should. He could push the envelope a little. ... He was more aggressive, more willing ... to walk the thin line between right and wrong, what he should or shouldn't do. He always thought he could do a little more, stay out a little later."
But the Okens say they've still never quite figured out what — besides possibly drugs — really turned their son into a cold-blooded killer. And it's a subject they've never dared broach with Steven himself during their countless visits and talks. In some ways, it seems that it's something they've emotionally compartmentalized, separating Oken and his homicidal spree from the boy they raised and loved, as well as from the young man they've visited in prisons for the past 13 years.
"I've sort of let the 'why' go because ... why isn't important enough for me to hurt. And I don't want to hurt," Mr. Oken says. His wife cuts him off. "There is no 'why,'" she says. "He doesn't know why. He does not know. It's like another person. ... But I think he's a kinder and gentler person today. He's become more serious, more caring. He's matured."
Going down for their weekly visits to Supermax — a parent's nightmare if there ever was one — has become a routine matter, they say, although some things they'll never get used to.
"We haven't touched him in five or six years. [Before,] I could hold his hand, I could kiss him," Mrs. Oken says. "But it just becomes a way of life. You do what you have to do. It's better than the alternative. He makes me feel good. I adore him. At least I know he's living."
Says Mr. Oken, partially to himself: "It's a consequence of his actions. These are the consequences he has to live with. I just wish some people could understand that life in prison, particularly the way he is imprisoned, is a terrible punishment. Life in prison can be as severe as the death penalty."
The Okens, who adopted Steven when he was 2 days old and arranged for his conversion to Judaism shortly afterward, suspect that his insecurities about being adopted may have played a role in his descent into substance abuse, particularly during high school.
"In his teen years, he often said to me, 'You don't know what it's like not to know where you come from,'" recalls Mrs. Oken. "He was trying to research his birth mother, never successful. And it breaks my heart because I wish I could help him. And when his wife began traveling [prior to the murders], I just think he felt like somebody else abandoned him."
At this point in the conversation, Mr. Oken adds, with his voice breaking, "We're not biological. There's a difference here that I can't understand. I guess you have to be the person who's adopted. I'd think about it and say to myself, 'Who cares? I've got two people here who love me.'"
Lost in her thoughts, Mrs. Oken acknowledges that most adopted people are law-abiding citizens. "I just think some people handle it better than others, like other things. If I knew the answer," she says, with her voice trailing off.
Oken himself agrees with his parents that being adopted might've contributed to his penchant for drug experimentation, but he rejects the notion that it might've led to the murders. "Being adopted is hard," he says, "but I don't think it had anything to do with what happened. I think anyone who was adopted has to have that little place in their heart and mind — where did I come from? What's important is I have a family. They've always been there for me. I can't begin to say how much I love them," he says, struggling to keep his composure.
Furthermore, he scoffs at the tendency among some Jews to dismiss his unusual status as a Jewish serial rapist/murderer merely because he wasn't born Jewish. Accept it or not, he says, he is a Jew, regardless of his ethnic or genetic makeup.
"I don't think that makes any difference," Oken says during the only slightly testy moment of our 80-minute interview. "I grew up Jewish and lived in a Jewish house. When I was 8 days old, I had a bris. My Hebrew name is Shimon Hirsch. I'm Jewish, period."
Like many inmates, Oken, who became a bar mitzvah at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, has become progressively more religiously observant since his incarceration. The Jewish Big Brother/Big Sister League has been involved with Oken since his extradition to Maryland in 1990, and the agency's executive director, Louis H. Jacobs, personally meets with him on a monthly basis. In its prison outreach program, the league visits and maintains contact with 177 inmates across Maryland.
"We're not close buddies. I don't think he thinks of me as among his most private confidants," Mr. Jacobs says of Oken. "Our conversations are usually fairly superficial. He's a well-defended guy. He has a cloud hanging over his head, so there's a place that's very sensitive. But I enjoy my time with him, being with him. He's engaging, bright, thoughtful."
Mr. Jacobs finds that most people in the Jewish community are unfamiliar with Oken's case and are "floored" to learn of a local Jew on Death Row. "There's a morbid curiosity," Mr. Jacobs says. "My parents always want to know about it and why the agency reaches out to him, or if it affects my personal feelings about the issue."
Moishe Davids, a league volunteer, also meets with Oken once a month. Since 1997, Mr. Davids, who belongs to the Bais Lubavitch Congregation, has provided religious books, commentaries on weekly Torah portions, holiday packages and spiritual instruction to Oken. During one of their meetings a couple of years ago, Mr. Davids, a retired probation officer, brought a pair of tefillin, or phylacteries.
"I showed him how to put them on," he says. "Of course, at Supermax you can't have physical contact so I showed him through the window, with a telephone propped on my shoulder, and then I gave the tefillin to a guard to give to Steve on the other side. He got the hang of it."
For Mr. Davids, Oken is a soul to reach, a Jewish heart and mind to win over, languishing in one of the most remote and terrifying places imaginable. And he's had some success.
"He's undergone a religious transformation," says Mr. Davids, who lives in Park Heights. "There's definitely been a change in his Jewish outlook and commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people. He now fasts on all of the fast days and observes the major holidays, and he reads articles and books [on Judaism] and asks me to discuss them. He's a smart fellow."
Despite the heinous nature of Oken's crimes, Mr. Davids says he feels no apprehension or moral quandary about visiting with him. Oken, he says, is not a monster or a demon but a lost Jew. And he turns to the Torah and its emphasis on compassion and non-judgmentalism for guidance.
"We're taught that a Jew is a Jew even if he sins. That's the Jewish way," Mr. Davids says. "Mitzvahs are not always easy to do. This is a hard mitzvah. I understand it's difficult for some people to separate sins from the sinner. But I can't ignore him because of the crimes he's convicted of."
Oken, who says he now puts on tefillin just about every day, describes Mr. Davids' visits as nothing short of life-changing. The tone of his voice perks up and his eyes glow when discussing his blossoming interest in Judaism.
"I'd never heard the word HaShem growing up," he says. "We celebrated the High Holidays, Passover and Purim, but I never knew there was a fast day before Purim, or about the Ninth of Av or the Fast of Gedaliah or the 17th of Tammuz.
"I try to do as much as I can," Oken says. "I consider myself now a spiritual person. It calms me and brings peace to me. It makes me feel like there's a purpose."
And becoming a more observant Jew, he says, has helped him deal better with the actions of his past.
"I hurt a lot of people," he says, staring at the floor, "and I pray they forgive me — for themselves, to get some peace. I've done teshuva [repentance]. I've admitted I did it, recognizing this is a horrible act and I'm responsible for it. I have this awful feeling about what I did.
"But it's not just what I did against people," Oken says, barely audibly, "but what I did against God."
A soft evening rain falls on the roof as Davida Oken glances at a table full of framed family photographs, including one of Steven standing on a balcony with the ocean in the background. She thinks it was at Bethany Beach, a few months before the murders. He's grinning, holding a rolled-up newspaper, looking like he doesn't have a worry in the world, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and jeans.
It's a nice memory, she says, the kind that keeps her going. But other memories make her seethe.
"Almost the first day [after Oken was arrested], I was in Pikesville and someone I've known since high school came up to me and said, 'Didn't you ever teach your son that you don't do things like that?'" she recalls. "What do you say to a stupid, ignorant person like that? For someone to say something that stupid is unbelievable."
The Okens, who are former longtime congregants of Baltimore Hebrew, say that type of disregard for them has been a hallmark of the Jewish community's behavior toward their family since the slayings. In conversation, they can barely contain their bitterness toward the community — individuals and as a whole — for failing to provide virtually any emotional, spiritual or political support to them or their son.
Over the years, they've called and sent scores of letters to rabbis and other Jewish communal leaders, particularly those who've publicly stated their opposition to capital punishment. They say few have responded. Interestingly, the Catholic church, particularly Archbishop William H. Keeler, has been in touch frequently to offer encouragement.
"I thought the Jewish people were a brotherhood. I don't feel that way now," says Ms. Oken. "I needed someone to help us handle this. When you reach out to your leaders and they turn a cold shoulder, you have to wonder what it's all about."
Oken himself is more disappointed in his old friends' unwillingness to visit or keep in touch. "I don't think people want to be bothered. Maybe they can't deal with it," he says. "But I think if the shoe was on the other foot, I would've kept in touch. I feel let down."
As far as the organized community is concerned, "I don't care for myself but for my family. They were members of Baltimore Hebrew for many years," he says. "I don't know if it's politics or what."
Lou Jacobs, of Jewish Big Brother /Big Sister, agrees with the Okens' assessment of the community, even though he acknowledges that Jews are as divided about the death penalty as the rest of America. Last fall, he sent a form letter to more than 40 area rabbis to inform them about Oken's situation, and to suggest using the case as a means of creating dialogue about capital punishment in their congregations.
He was shocked when he received only a few responses, including one from a rabbi who was "indignant" that Mr. Jacobs advocated discussions about the death penalty merely because a Jew was on Death Row.
"Shouldn't the Okens feel they're getting support from somewhere, or do they have to live with this black mark forever? The community institutions and leaders haven't been there for them," Mr. Jacobs says. He attributes it to a tendency among Jews to avoid viewing themselves in an unflattering light.
"We don't think the Jewish community has a substance abuse problem or domestic violence. We think we're immune to those problems, whether because of genes or conditioning," he says. "But a Jew could be executed in Maryland, and one way or another our community will have to make a decision about this."
However, the Oken matter is simply not a Jewish issue and that's why the case has received scant attention from the community, counters Arthur C. Abramson, executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council.
"He's an individual who committed atrocious crimes, was found guilty and happens to be Jewish, but it had nothing to do with his ethnic or religious beliefs," says Mr. Abramson, whose agency supported the moratorium bill.
Rabbi Donald R. Berlin is one of the community leaders to whom the Okens wrote a letter requesting assistance. The former spiritual leader of Temple Oheb Shalom, who has publicly criticized the death penalty, admits that he never responded, largely because he wasn't really sure what to do with this matter.
But he says he also felt the Okens were specifically seeking his involvement in the campaign for their son's clemency, something he didn't feel comfortable doing since "the crime was so horrific."
"I understand why they feel abandoned. This must be excruciatingly painful for them. Their child is in trouble," he says. "But they seemed only to want a rabbi who'd intervene for their cause. I had no major reason to get involved. ... The death penalty is wrong. But I wouldn't want to come to his defense. Because he's Jewish?"
When he was contacted by the Okens, Baltimore Hebrew's Rabbi Rex D. Perlmeter delegated the matter to an associate rabbi who met with them about a month ago. "I don't have a personal history with them," he says, noting that he sent a "letter of concern" about the case to the governor's office.
But in retrospect, Rabbi Perlmeter says he could've handled the situation better, and that embarrassment played a role. "When I see someone in these circumstances, I feel a sense of shame and sorrow that this has happened to a member of the Jewish community," he says. "If I had to do it again, I think I would've read between the lines and provided comfort for them."
That's exactly what Rabbi Jacob A. Max, of Moses Montefiore-Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation, has tried to do. After being contacted by a mutual friend, Rabbi Max visited recently with the Okens and Steven. He has also written a letter to the governor requesting that Oken be returned to Maine to complete his life sentence.
Rabbi Max says he can understand why many of his colleagues and others in the Jewish community don't want to deal with the Oken case. "Our people used to be convicted for white-collar crimes, not violent crimes. But a Jewish guy on Death Row? It's a new creature of its type. The community doesn't know how to handle it," he says.
But the rabbi feels people must rise above it, especially for a fellow Jew. "He's still a person, created in the image of God until the very end," he says. "The act he did was monstrous, but he's not a monster. He still has a neshamah, a soul."
Unlike most of us, Steven Oken doesn't look at capital punishment from a theoretical point of view. It's something real, vibrant, immediate, an organism that shares his cell with him, along with his sink, toilet, shelves, TV, stacks of books and magazines, and concrete slab with a mattress.
Not surprisingly, Oken, who's become so adept in legal matters since his incarceration that his parents suggest he would've made a superb attorney, is quite eloquent in his opposition to the death penalty. And he's willing to take his case to the Supreme Court if he has to.
"Look at the company this country is in — China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan," he says. "This is a country that executes children and the mentally retarded. And it's not fairly applied. Nobody on Death Row in Maryland is here because they killed a black person, and the vast majority of homicides in this state are black-on-black. It just doesn't address the situation, and it's unfair."
Unfair like the fate of his three victims, their families, and that of his own parents and siblings. Oken says he thinks about his victims every day of his life. It's a pain that's beyond words, he says, knowing how hypocritical and insensitive that might sound. But he appears to really mean it — at least from this side of the window.
"It's something you can never block out of your mind," Oken says. "You wake up every morning and you're here, and you know why you're here — you took lives, the pain you gave their families, all the happiness you took from them."
At this point in the interview, he studies his large folded hands. He pauses and begins to mumble. It's apparent he's no longer talking to me but to a few unseen forces that seem to be crowding the tiny visitation room.
"I just want to be clear that I did this. Not the drugs, it was me. I can't express how sorry I am. There are no words."
Maybe Steven Oken is someone who learned too late during his time on earth about the preciousness of life — that of his own and others. While his victims lost their lives, so did he, to a certain extent. His is now an existence, spent from moment to moment trying to maintain his sanity by reading books and working on appeals. For all intents and purposes, he ceased being alive, stopped being a functioning human being, the moment he lured Dawn Garvin into her apartment that chilly November night and proceeded to torture and kill her.
He knows there are those who would like to do the same to him, who feel that death by lethal injection is simply not good enough. But that, he points out, will still not rectify the actions that forever concluded his life as a member of society, at the age of 25.
And so he presses on, to stay alive, to keep moving. As an armed guard wearing a bulletproof vest arrives to inform us that our time is almost up, Oken and I stare at each other for what seems a long time. Without saying a word, he reminds me that he comes from the same place I do, with the same values and ethics and belief system and culture that permeated the lives and times we once shared. And it makes me shudder when I look at my reflection in the window and beyond, at Oken.
"I was brought up to care about people and respect them," he insists, still sounding like a nice Jewish boy from the old neighborhood. "I just think I'm basically a good person who's done terrible, terrible things."
And when the guard returns and begins to place handcuffs on Oken and usher him away, he waves and again wishes me a happy Passover.
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Judge Agrees To Sign Warrant For Death Penalty: Death Row Inmate Faces Lethal Injection For 1987 Rape, MurderAssociated Press and The WBAL-TV (NBC) - January 22, 2003
BALTIMORE -- A judge has agreed to sign the first death warrant after Gov. Bob Ehrlich was sworntook office, effectively lifting the moratorium on the death penalty. The agreement paves the way for the execution of convicted killer Stephen Oken, and the brother of Oken's victim pulled no punches about how he feels.
The pending execution would be the state's first in nearly five years as well as the first capital case to move forward under Ehrlich's administration.
In 1991, Oken, 40, (pictured, left), was sentenced to death for the 1987 sexual assault and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old White Marsh, Md., newlywed. Garvin was raped and killed just four months after her wedding. Oken is scheduled to die by lethal injection the week of March 17, according to his lawyers.
"We knew that there was a substantial possibility that the warrant would be signed as soon as Gov. Ehrlich took office," Oken's attorney Fred W. Bennett said.
Then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening halted executions in May, saying it was necessary to give lawmakers the chance to analyze the results of a two-year University of Maryland study on the use of the state's death penalty.
Garvin's brother, Fred Romano, (pictured, right), told WBAL-TV 11 NEWS he has been waiting for justice for 15 years.
"I want him to die. I want him to die so bad. I wish they'd let me get a hold of him," Romano said.
But Romano said he won't be a witness Oken's execution.
"If he was getting lit up by a firing squad, I'd be there in a heart beat. If he was getting hung, I'd be there in a heart beat. If he was getting electrocuted, I'd be there. I have no desire to see that scumbag fall asleep," he said.
According to the Ehrlich administration, the governor does not plan to extend the state's moratorium on the death penalty which was in effect to allow for the university study.
"Consider the moratorium lifted," said Shareese Deleaver, a spokeswoman for Ehrlich.
Baltimore County State's Attorney Sandra A. O'Connor said her office would have asked Judge John G. Turnbull II to sign Oken's death warrant last May. "We've been on hold since the moratorium," she said.
But even with Ehrlich in office, and the warrant promised within the next week, O'Connor said it was not certain that Oken's execution would go forward in seven weeks.
"Anything can happen in these cases," O'Connor said.
Bennett said he will file motions in Baltimore County Circuit Court challenging the state's death statute in an attempt to halt his client's execution. He said at least one of those motions is based on the University of Maryland study, which found "systemic disparities" in the state's use of the death penalty.
And Dr. Terry Fitzgerald, a member of the Physicians For Social Responsibility, is fighting to have all executions in Maryland stopped. He said Romano's desire for retribution may not bring closure.
Is Maryland's death penalty fair?
"As a professional, I see no evidence that revenge is healing. It demeans the dignity of the state by carrying out roles as acts of revenge," Fitzgerald said.
That study, released this month, found that defendants who kill whites are significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of nonwhites. It also found that jurisdiction greatly affects a defendant's chances of ending up on death row.
Of the 12 men awaiting execution in Maryland, nine -- including Oken -- are from Baltimore County. Eight of those nine are black, and all were convicted of killing whites.
Oken is white, as was his victim.
Because of his race, and because his crimes were so brutal -- in addition to the killing of Dawn Marie Garvin, (pictured, left), for which he received the death sentence, Oken was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law and a college student -- Oken has become something of a rallying point for death penalty supporters.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller has often referred to Oken when defending the state's death penalty statute.
On Tuesday, moratorium advocates said it was not surprising that O'Connor was pushing Oken's case as the first one likely to reach Ehrlich's desk.
"In many ways, this just shows the politics that drives this issue," said Jane Henderson of the Quixote Center, a faith-based organization that has fought to abolish the death penalty. "His case obscures the issues of systemic bias that we've been trying to focus on."
But O'Connor said her reasoning was simple. Oken is the only Baltimore County death row inmate who has exhausted all of his appeals, she said, and is therefore the only defendant for whom they can reasonably seek a death warrant.
Regardless of what may happen, Romano said he hopes to have the chance to say goodbye to his sister's killer in his own way.
"I want him to look at my face, into my eyes, and when he's in his way to hell, I want him to remember my eyes and that I am the one who sent him there," he said.
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BALTIMORE -- A judge has agreed to sign the first death warrant after Gov. Bob Ehrlich was sworntook office, effectively lifting the moratorium on the death penalty. The agreement paves the way for the execution of convicted killer Stephen Oken, and the brother of Oken's victim pulled no punches about how he feels.
The pending execution would be the state's first in nearly five years as well as the first capital case to move forward under Ehrlich's administration.
In 1991, Oken, 40, (pictured, left), was sentenced to death for the 1987 sexual assault and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old White Marsh, Md., newlywed. Garvin was raped and killed just four months after her wedding. Oken is scheduled to die by lethal injection the week of March 17, according to his lawyers.
"We knew that there was a substantial possibility that the warrant would be signed as soon as Gov. Ehrlich took office," Oken's attorney Fred W. Bennett said.
Then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening halted executions in May, saying it was necessary to give lawmakers the chance to analyze the results of a two-year University of Maryland study on the use of the state's death penalty.
Garvin's brother, Fred Romano, (pictured, right), told WBAL-TV 11 NEWS he has been waiting for justice for 15 years.
"I want him to die. I want him to die so bad. I wish they'd let me get a hold of him," Romano said.
But Romano said he won't be a witness Oken's execution.
"If he was getting lit up by a firing squad, I'd be there in a heart beat. If he was getting hung, I'd be there in a heart beat. If he was getting electrocuted, I'd be there. I have no desire to see that scumbag fall asleep," he said.
According to the Ehrlich administration, the governor does not plan to extend the state's moratorium on the death penalty which was in effect to allow for the university study.
"Consider the moratorium lifted," said Shareese Deleaver, a spokeswoman for Ehrlich.
Baltimore County State's Attorney Sandra A. O'Connor said her office would have asked Judge John G. Turnbull II to sign Oken's death warrant last May. "We've been on hold since the moratorium," she said.
But even with Ehrlich in office, and the warrant promised within the next week, O'Connor said it was not certain that Oken's execution would go forward in seven weeks.
"Anything can happen in these cases," O'Connor said.
Bennett said he will file motions in Baltimore County Circuit Court challenging the state's death statute in an attempt to halt his client's execution. He said at least one of those motions is based on the University of Maryland study, which found "systemic disparities" in the state's use of the death penalty.
And Dr. Terry Fitzgerald, a member of the Physicians For Social Responsibility, is fighting to have all executions in Maryland stopped. He said Romano's desire for retribution may not bring closure.
Is Maryland's death penalty fair?
"As a professional, I see no evidence that revenge is healing. It demeans the dignity of the state by carrying out roles as acts of revenge," Fitzgerald said.
That study, released this month, found that defendants who kill whites are significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of nonwhites. It also found that jurisdiction greatly affects a defendant's chances of ending up on death row.
Of the 12 men awaiting execution in Maryland, nine -- including Oken -- are from Baltimore County. Eight of those nine are black, and all were convicted of killing whites.
Oken is white, as was his victim.
Because of his race, and because his crimes were so brutal -- in addition to the killing of Dawn Marie Garvin, (pictured, left), for which he received the death sentence, Oken was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law and a college student -- Oken has become something of a rallying point for death penalty supporters.Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller has often referred to Oken when defending the state's death penalty statute.
On Tuesday, moratorium advocates said it was not surprising that O'Connor was pushing Oken's case as the first one likely to reach Ehrlich's desk.
"In many ways, this just shows the politics that drives this issue," said Jane Henderson of the Quixote Center, a faith-based organization that has fought to abolish the death penalty. "His case obscures the issues of systemic bias that we've been trying to focus on."
But O'Connor said her reasoning was simple. Oken is the only Baltimore County death row inmate who has exhausted all of his appeals, she said, and is therefore the only defendant for whom they can reasonably seek a death warrant.
Regardless of what may happen, Romano said he hopes to have the chance to say goodbye to his sister's killer in his own way.
"I want him to look at my face, into my eyes, and when he's in his way to hell, I want him to remember my eyes and that I am the one who sent him there," he said.
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PRESS RELEASE
MARYLAND'S DEATH PENALTY UPHELD
MARYLAND'S DEATH PENALTY UPHELD
Release Date: November 17, 2003
Contact: Sue Blake (916) 446-0345
In a 4 to 3 decision in the case of Oken v. State released today, the Maryland Court of Appeals (the state's highest court) upheld the death sentence given to convicted murderer Steven Oken, rejecting his claim that a June 2002 United States Supreme Court decision in Ring v. Arizona voided the state's death penalty law.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation filed a "friend of the court" brief in the case on behalf of the father and brother of the murder victim, Dawn Garvin. "This decision is important not only because it upholds the death sentence for a horrible murderer, but also because it makes it clear that the Supreme Court's decision in Ring only affects at most nine states. Those are the states which allowed the trial judge, rather than the jury, to determine if there were aggravating circumstances related to the murder which made the defendant eligible for the death penalty," said CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger.
In its opinion, the Maryland court states, "Because the Maryland statute already requires that the finding of the existence of an aggravating circumstance must be made by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the Maryland statute is unaffected by the Ring holding."
The case of Oken v. State involved the 1991 conviction and death sentence given to Steven Oken for the sexual assault and murder of a young navy wife. According to evidence introduced at trial, Oken gained entry into the apartment of Dawn Garvin on the evening of November 1, 1987. The young woman's husband had left earlier that evening to return to his Naval base in Virginia. Once inside, Oken attacked the woman, ripped off her clothes and sexually assaulted her. He then shot her twice in the head and left her to die. Less than two weeks later, Oken sexually assaulted and murdered his sister-in-law in his Maryland home. He then fled to Maine where he murdered a motel clerk on November 16. He was arrested at another motel the next day.
Prior to his trial for Dawn Garvin's murder, Oken was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law. Following his conviction on overwhelming evidence of the sexual assault and murder of Garvin, a Maryland jury sentenced Oken to death. Both his conviction and death sentence were upheld in 1992 by Maryland's highest court. Over the next eleven years, eight state and federal courts reviewed and rejected Oken's claims of trial and sentencing errors.
In the spring of 2002, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Ring v. Arizona, which held that a procedure used in death penalty cases by some states was unconstitutional. The procedure allowed the judge in a capital case to determine if a factor related to the murder (such as kidnapping or rape) made the defendant eligible for a death sentence. Maryland, which had always required juries to make this determination, was not affected by the decision.
In spite of this difference in the laws, Oken filed a petition in the Maryland circuit court, claiming that the Ring decision did change Maryland law and that it applied retroactively to his case, requiring that he receive a new sentencing hearing. Specifically, Oken alleged that the decision requires sentencing juries in every state to determine whether the aggravating factors related to a murder outweigh any mitigating factors beyond a reasonable doubt. He also claimed that the Constitution required that this new process apply retroactively to every death sentence. Last February, after the circuit court rejected this claim, the Maryland Court of Appeals stayed Oken's execution to consider it.
CJLF joined the case at the request of Dawn Garvin's father (who discovered her body) and her brother. The Foundation sought to prevent a ruling expanding the meaning of Ring which could be cited by other state courts. In a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, the Foundation defined the limited scope of the Ring decision and cited a line of Supreme Court decisions (including several CJLF victories) limiting its expansion or retroactive application. "Had the Maryland court accepted this murderer's version of Ring, it would have sparked new appeals to overturn the sentences of hundreds of the nation's worst murderers," said Scheidegger.
Contact: Sue Blake (916) 446-0345
In a 4 to 3 decision in the case of Oken v. State released today, the Maryland Court of Appeals (the state's highest court) upheld the death sentence given to convicted murderer Steven Oken, rejecting his claim that a June 2002 United States Supreme Court decision in Ring v. Arizona voided the state's death penalty law.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation filed a "friend of the court" brief in the case on behalf of the father and brother of the murder victim, Dawn Garvin. "This decision is important not only because it upholds the death sentence for a horrible murderer, but also because it makes it clear that the Supreme Court's decision in Ring only affects at most nine states. Those are the states which allowed the trial judge, rather than the jury, to determine if there were aggravating circumstances related to the murder which made the defendant eligible for the death penalty," said CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger.
In its opinion, the Maryland court states, "Because the Maryland statute already requires that the finding of the existence of an aggravating circumstance must be made by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the Maryland statute is unaffected by the Ring holding."
The case of Oken v. State involved the 1991 conviction and death sentence given to Steven Oken for the sexual assault and murder of a young navy wife. According to evidence introduced at trial, Oken gained entry into the apartment of Dawn Garvin on the evening of November 1, 1987. The young woman's husband had left earlier that evening to return to his Naval base in Virginia. Once inside, Oken attacked the woman, ripped off her clothes and sexually assaulted her. He then shot her twice in the head and left her to die. Less than two weeks later, Oken sexually assaulted and murdered his sister-in-law in his Maryland home. He then fled to Maine where he murdered a motel clerk on November 16. He was arrested at another motel the next day.
Prior to his trial for Dawn Garvin's murder, Oken was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law. Following his conviction on overwhelming evidence of the sexual assault and murder of Garvin, a Maryland jury sentenced Oken to death. Both his conviction and death sentence were upheld in 1992 by Maryland's highest court. Over the next eleven years, eight state and federal courts reviewed and rejected Oken's claims of trial and sentencing errors.
In the spring of 2002, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Ring v. Arizona, which held that a procedure used in death penalty cases by some states was unconstitutional. The procedure allowed the judge in a capital case to determine if a factor related to the murder (such as kidnapping or rape) made the defendant eligible for a death sentence. Maryland, which had always required juries to make this determination, was not affected by the decision.
In spite of this difference in the laws, Oken filed a petition in the Maryland circuit court, claiming that the Ring decision did change Maryland law and that it applied retroactively to his case, requiring that he receive a new sentencing hearing. Specifically, Oken alleged that the decision requires sentencing juries in every state to determine whether the aggravating factors related to a murder outweigh any mitigating factors beyond a reasonable doubt. He also claimed that the Constitution required that this new process apply retroactively to every death sentence. Last February, after the circuit court rejected this claim, the Maryland Court of Appeals stayed Oken's execution to consider it.
CJLF joined the case at the request of Dawn Garvin's father (who discovered her body) and her brother. The Foundation sought to prevent a ruling expanding the meaning of Ring which could be cited by other state courts. In a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, the Foundation defined the limited scope of the Ring decision and cited a line of Supreme Court decisions (including several CJLF victories) limiting its expansion or retroactive application. "Had the Maryland court accepted this murderer's version of Ring, it would have sparked new appeals to overturn the sentences of hundreds of the nation's worst murderers," said Scheidegger.
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Amnesty International - Library - USA (Maryland)
PUBLIC
AI Index: AMR
51/084/2004
UA 175/04 Death penalty
May 18, 2004
USA (Maryland) Steven Howard Oken (m), white, aged 42
Steven Oken is scheduled to be executed in Maryland in the week beginning 14 June 2004. He was sentenced to death in 1991 for the rape and murder of 20-year-old Dawn Marie Garvin in 1987.
If Steven Oken is executed, he would be the first person to be put to death in Maryland since a moratorium on executions announced by the previous governor, Parris Glendening, on 9 May 2002. He imposed the moratorium pending the outcome of a University of Maryland study that he had commissioned in 2000 to look into the fairness of the state's death penalty, particularly geographic and racial disparities in capital sentencing. Upon taking office in January 2003, Governor Robert Ehrlich lifted the moratorium, stating that he would review every death warrant on a case-by-case basis.
On 7 January 2003, the final report of the study was released. An Empirical Analysis of Maryland's Death Sentencing System With Respect to the Influence of Race and Legal Jurisdiction, by Professor Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland, examined all first and second-degree murders committed in Maryland from August 1978 (the time when the new capital punishment law took effect) until September of 1999, approximately 6,000 cases in all. This is the most comprehensive study of the impact of race and geography on the death penalty in Maryland. It concluded that, even when other factors are accounted for, people who kill white victims are "significantly" more likely to face the death penalty than killers of non-whites. It also concluded that prosecutors in different counties "exhibit considerable variation" in their pursuit of the death penalty. In terms of whether a particular "death-eligible" murder will be pursued as a capital crime, therefore, "clearly the jurisdiction where the homicide occurs matters and matters a great deal". Murders in Baltimore County are more likely to be pursued as death penalty cases than other counties. Baltimore County accounts for two of the three people executed in Maryland since 1977 and five out of the eight men currently on death row. Steven Oken was prosecuted in Baltimore County. Dawn Marie Garvin was white.
Maryland's death penalty continues to draw scrutiny and the state has been unable to move forward with legislative remedies addressing the acute concerns raised by the University of Maryland study. In the last three and a half years the number of death row inmates in Maryland has shrunk from 18 to eight without a single execution. The decline is attributable to appellate decisions granting prisoner's new trials, DNA evidence, or new sentencing because of legal flaws in the initial proceedings. During the 2004 legislative session, legislation to establish the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment passed the Maryland Senate (30-16), but ultimately failed in a House Committee.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases. Every death sentence is an affront to human dignity, every execution a symptom of a culture of violence, rather than a solution to it. Today, 117 countries are abolitionist in law or practice. In contrast, the USA has already executed 24 people this year, bringing to 909 the number of people it has put to death since executions resumed in 1977. Maryland accounts for three of the 909 executions.
There are eight people on death row in Maryland, seven blacks and one white. All were convicted of killing white people. Studies of the US death penalty have consistently shown that race, particularly race of victim, plays a role in who is sentenced to death. In 1994, a US Supreme Court Justice said: "Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die." The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions wrote following his visit to the USA in 1997: "Race, ethnic origin and economic status appear to be key determinants in who will, and who will not, receive a sentence of death". In its report on the USA in 2001, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted the "disturbing correlation between race, both of the victim and the defendant, and the imposition of the death penalty..." The Committee urged the authorities "to ensure, possibly by imposing a moratorium, that no death penalty is imposed as a result of racial bias on the part of prosecutors, judges, juries and lawyers or as a result of the economically, socially and educationally disadvantaged position of the convicted persons."
Steven Oken was previously the subject of EXTRA 09/03 (AMR 51/017/2003, 10 February 2003).
PUBLIC
AI Index: AMR
51/084/2004
UA 175/04 Death penalty
May 18, 2004
USA (Maryland) Steven Howard Oken (m), white, aged 42
Steven Oken is scheduled to be executed in Maryland in the week beginning 14 June 2004. He was sentenced to death in 1991 for the rape and murder of 20-year-old Dawn Marie Garvin in 1987.
If Steven Oken is executed, he would be the first person to be put to death in Maryland since a moratorium on executions announced by the previous governor, Parris Glendening, on 9 May 2002. He imposed the moratorium pending the outcome of a University of Maryland study that he had commissioned in 2000 to look into the fairness of the state's death penalty, particularly geographic and racial disparities in capital sentencing. Upon taking office in January 2003, Governor Robert Ehrlich lifted the moratorium, stating that he would review every death warrant on a case-by-case basis.
On 7 January 2003, the final report of the study was released. An Empirical Analysis of Maryland's Death Sentencing System With Respect to the Influence of Race and Legal Jurisdiction, by Professor Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland, examined all first and second-degree murders committed in Maryland from August 1978 (the time when the new capital punishment law took effect) until September of 1999, approximately 6,000 cases in all. This is the most comprehensive study of the impact of race and geography on the death penalty in Maryland. It concluded that, even when other factors are accounted for, people who kill white victims are "significantly" more likely to face the death penalty than killers of non-whites. It also concluded that prosecutors in different counties "exhibit considerable variation" in their pursuit of the death penalty. In terms of whether a particular "death-eligible" murder will be pursued as a capital crime, therefore, "clearly the jurisdiction where the homicide occurs matters and matters a great deal". Murders in Baltimore County are more likely to be pursued as death penalty cases than other counties. Baltimore County accounts for two of the three people executed in Maryland since 1977 and five out of the eight men currently on death row. Steven Oken was prosecuted in Baltimore County. Dawn Marie Garvin was white.
Maryland's death penalty continues to draw scrutiny and the state has been unable to move forward with legislative remedies addressing the acute concerns raised by the University of Maryland study. In the last three and a half years the number of death row inmates in Maryland has shrunk from 18 to eight without a single execution. The decline is attributable to appellate decisions granting prisoner's new trials, DNA evidence, or new sentencing because of legal flaws in the initial proceedings. During the 2004 legislative session, legislation to establish the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment passed the Maryland Senate (30-16), but ultimately failed in a House Committee.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases. Every death sentence is an affront to human dignity, every execution a symptom of a culture of violence, rather than a solution to it. Today, 117 countries are abolitionist in law or practice. In contrast, the USA has already executed 24 people this year, bringing to 909 the number of people it has put to death since executions resumed in 1977. Maryland accounts for three of the 909 executions.
There are eight people on death row in Maryland, seven blacks and one white. All were convicted of killing white people. Studies of the US death penalty have consistently shown that race, particularly race of victim, plays a role in who is sentenced to death. In 1994, a US Supreme Court Justice said: "Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die." The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions wrote following his visit to the USA in 1997: "Race, ethnic origin and economic status appear to be key determinants in who will, and who will not, receive a sentence of death". In its report on the USA in 2001, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted the "disturbing correlation between race, both of the victim and the defendant, and the imposition of the death penalty..." The Committee urged the authorities "to ensure, possibly by imposing a moratorium, that no death penalty is imposed as a result of racial bias on the part of prosecutors, judges, juries and lawyers or as a result of the economically, socially and educationally disadvantaged position of the convicted persons."
Steven Oken was previously the subject of EXTRA 09/03 (AMR 51/017/2003, 10 February 2003).
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Take Action!
Urge Governor Ehrlich to Grant Clemency to Steven Oken
Amnesty International
USA (Maryland) Steven Howard Oken
Steven Oken (m), white, aged 42, is scheduled to be executed in Maryland in the week beginning 14 June 2004. He was sentenced to death in 1991 for the rape and murder of 20-year-old Dawn Marie Garvin in 1987.
If Steven Oken is executed, he would be the first person to be put to death in Maryland since a moratorium on executions announced by the previous governor, Parris Glendening, on 9 May 2002. He imposed the moratorium pending the outcome of a University of Maryland study that he had commissioned in 2000 to look into the fairness of the state's death penalty, particularly geographic and racial disparities in capital sentencing. Upon taking office in January 2003, Governor Robert Ehrlich lifted the moratorium, stating that he would review every death warrant on a case-by-case basis.
On 7 January 2003, the final report of the study was released. An Empirical Analysis of Maryland's Death Sentencing System With Respect to the Influence of Race and Legal Jurisdiction , by Professor Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland, examined all first and second-degree murders committed in Maryland from August 1978 (the time when the new capital punishment law took effect) until September of 1999, approximately 6,000 cases in all. This is the most comprehensive study of the impact of race and geography on the death penalty in Maryland. It concluded that, even when other factors are accounted for, people who kill white victims are "significantly" more likely to face the death penalty than killers of non-whites. It also concluded that prosecutors in different counties "exhibit considerable variation" in their pursuit of the death penalty. In terms of whether a particular "death-eligible" murder will be pursued as a capital crime, therefore, "clearly the jurisdiction where the homicide occurs matters and matters a great deal". Murders in Baltimore County are more likely to be pursued as death penalty cases than other counties. Baltimore County accounts for two of the three people executed in Maryland since 1977 and five out of the eight men currently on death row. Steven Oken was prosecuted in Baltimore County. Dawn Marie Garvin was white.
Maryland's death penalty continues to draw scrutiny and the state has been unable to move forward with legislative remedies addressing the acute concerns raised by the University of Maryland study. In the last three and a half years the number of death row inmates in Maryland has shrunk from 18 to eight without a single execution. The decline is attributable to appellate decisions granting prisoner's new trials, DNA evidence, or new sentencing because of legal flaws in the initial proceedings. During the 2004 legislative session, legislation to establish the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment passed the Maryland Senate (30-16), but ultimately failed in a House Committee.
Background
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases. Every death sentence is an affront to human dignity, every execution a symptom of a culture of violence, rather than a solution to it. Today, 117 countries are abolitionist in law or practice. In contrast, the USA has already executed 24 people this year, bringing to 909 the number of people it has put to death since executions resumed in 1977. Maryland accounts for three of the 909 executions.
There are eight people on death row in Maryland, seven blacks and one white. All were convicted of killing white people. Studies of the US death penalty have consistently shown that race, particularly race of victim, plays a role in who is sentenced to death. In 1994, a US Supreme Court Justice said: " Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die." The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions wrote following his visit to the USA in 1997: "Race, ethnic origin and economic status appear to be key determinants in who will, and who will not, receive a sentence of death". In its report on the USA in 2001, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted the "disturbing correlation between race, both of the victim and the defendant, and the imposition of the death penalty..." The Committee urged the authorities "to ensure, possibly by imposing a moratorium, that no death penalty is imposed as a result of racial bias on the part of prosecutors, judges, juries and lawyers or as a result of the economically, socially and educationally disadvantaged position of the convicted persons."
Further Information
» Amnesty's Work to Abolish the Death Penalty
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Md. Rally Opposes Execution
Death Penalty Foes Concede Difficulties in Case
By Susan Levine
Washington Post - Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page B05
With Maryland's first execution since 1998 scheduled in less than three weeks, opponents of capital punishment are mobilizing once again, loudly and passionately decrying how Steven Oken's life seems likely to end.
Outside the medieval-looking edifice of the former Maryland penitentiary, where murderers once were hanged and where the next execution could take place as early as June 14, a parade of protesters demanded yesterday that officials reconsider the punishment -- or ensure that it be carried out in a humane and constitutional way.
Hours later, in a warm church basement in Takoma Park, a town meeting that sometimes bordered on revival rally was even more strident. "When the state of Maryland executes . . . when they kill, they will be doing it in your name," said Diann Rust-Tierney, director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project.
"Do you stand for answering violence with violence?" she asked.
"No," roared the audience.
The voices speaking out yesterday included a lawyer and an emergency room physician. A minister and state delegate. Former Illinois and California death row inmates and the brother-in-law of the last person killed by injection in Maryland. And Oken's mother herself, who quietly and briefly during the afternoon news conference asked what the state had to gain "by killing more people."
But those who lead the fight against capital punishment in Maryland acknowledge that Oken's can be a difficult case with which to push their cause forward.
That's not just because of the brutal crimes he committed, but because Oken can lay claim to few of the issues -- of race, retardation or representation -- that have swayed the courts or public opinion in recent years.
"There's a temptation to approach it as if, because Oken is white, the issues don't apply," said Jane Henderson of the Quixote Center, a Maryland-based social justice organization. "In a time when everyone is talking about the problems of the death penalty, there's a certain calculated way in which people have moved forward with it."
Another obstacle for Oken is the death penalty proponent in the governor's mansion, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. With Oken's appeals all but exhausted in the 13 years since his conviction, he has turned to Ehrlich (R) for clemency.
The governor said yesterday that the case "fits the usual pattern -- many, many years between the crime and the ultimate date of execution."
Ehrlich said he would not wade into the debate over lethal injection. "I am not going to ponder the legality of methods of execution," he said.
At the Baltimore news conference, the medical and legal professionals focused on whether one of the three chemicals used in the procedure would cause Oken great suffering -- particularly if his execution is "botched" similarly to the 1998 lethal injection of Tyrone X. Gilliam, charged attorney Jerome Nickerson.
"It was obvious to everyone in the execution chamber," said Nickerson, who represented Gilliam and witnessed his death. The intravenous line through which a barbiturate flowed to render the inmate unconscious "started dripping" at the start and by the end had pooled on the floor, he said. If Gilliam received too little sedation, then he felt and sensed and saw everything that followed with the final two drugs. "He's going to feel the suffocation. He's going to feel the heart attack," Nickerson said.
The family of Oken's victim in this case has stressed that she experienced far worse. Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old college student and newlywed, was sexually tortured and shot after Oken talked his way into her apartment in late 1987. Within two weeks, Oken killed his sister-in-law and, after fleeing to Maine, a young motel clerk there.
The trio of slayings, and the details that emerged about Garvin's death in particular, explain why his own attorney wrote in a recent motion that Oken was "an individual thoroughly despised by the polity."
That blunt and harsh assessment was alluded to at the Takoma Park gathering.
"The fact that Steven Oken is demonstrably guilty makes it appear that capital punishment has no flaws," said Michael Stark, of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
For this audience, nothing could be more demonstrably wrong.
Staff writer Matthew Mosk contributed to this report.
Death Penalty Foes Concede Difficulties in Case
By Susan Levine
Washington Post - Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page B05
With Maryland's first execution since 1998 scheduled in less than three weeks, opponents of capital punishment are mobilizing once again, loudly and passionately decrying how Steven Oken's life seems likely to end.
Outside the medieval-looking edifice of the former Maryland penitentiary, where murderers once were hanged and where the next execution could take place as early as June 14, a parade of protesters demanded yesterday that officials reconsider the punishment -- or ensure that it be carried out in a humane and constitutional way.
Hours later, in a warm church basement in Takoma Park, a town meeting that sometimes bordered on revival rally was even more strident. "When the state of Maryland executes . . . when they kill, they will be doing it in your name," said Diann Rust-Tierney, director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project.
"Do you stand for answering violence with violence?" she asked.
"No," roared the audience.
The voices speaking out yesterday included a lawyer and an emergency room physician. A minister and state delegate. Former Illinois and California death row inmates and the brother-in-law of the last person killed by injection in Maryland. And Oken's mother herself, who quietly and briefly during the afternoon news conference asked what the state had to gain "by killing more people."
But those who lead the fight against capital punishment in Maryland acknowledge that Oken's can be a difficult case with which to push their cause forward.
That's not just because of the brutal crimes he committed, but because Oken can lay claim to few of the issues -- of race, retardation or representation -- that have swayed the courts or public opinion in recent years.
"There's a temptation to approach it as if, because Oken is white, the issues don't apply," said Jane Henderson of the Quixote Center, a Maryland-based social justice organization. "In a time when everyone is talking about the problems of the death penalty, there's a certain calculated way in which people have moved forward with it."
Another obstacle for Oken is the death penalty proponent in the governor's mansion, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. With Oken's appeals all but exhausted in the 13 years since his conviction, he has turned to Ehrlich (R) for clemency.
The governor said yesterday that the case "fits the usual pattern -- many, many years between the crime and the ultimate date of execution."
Ehrlich said he would not wade into the debate over lethal injection. "I am not going to ponder the legality of methods of execution," he said.
At the Baltimore news conference, the medical and legal professionals focused on whether one of the three chemicals used in the procedure would cause Oken great suffering -- particularly if his execution is "botched" similarly to the 1998 lethal injection of Tyrone X. Gilliam, charged attorney Jerome Nickerson.
"It was obvious to everyone in the execution chamber," said Nickerson, who represented Gilliam and witnessed his death. The intravenous line through which a barbiturate flowed to render the inmate unconscious "started dripping" at the start and by the end had pooled on the floor, he said. If Gilliam received too little sedation, then he felt and sensed and saw everything that followed with the final two drugs. "He's going to feel the suffocation. He's going to feel the heart attack," Nickerson said.
The family of Oken's victim in this case has stressed that she experienced far worse. Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old college student and newlywed, was sexually tortured and shot after Oken talked his way into her apartment in late 1987. Within two weeks, Oken killed his sister-in-law and, after fleeing to Maine, a young motel clerk there.
The trio of slayings, and the details that emerged about Garvin's death in particular, explain why his own attorney wrote in a recent motion that Oken was "an individual thoroughly despised by the polity."
That blunt and harsh assessment was alluded to at the Takoma Park gathering.
"The fact that Steven Oken is demonstrably guilty makes it appear that capital punishment has no flaws," said Michael Stark, of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
For this audience, nothing could be more demonstrably wrong.
Staff writer Matthew Mosk contributed to this report.
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Joe Curran and the death penalty
Editorial Op-Ed
Washington Post - June 1, 2004
For doctrinaire opponents of capital punishment like Amnesty International and Maryland Attorney General Joseph Curran, condemned murderer Steven Oken is a public-relations nightmare. They can't play the race card or the poverty card, because Oken is white and his family well-to-do. And there is no question that he committed the crimes for which he is scheduled to be executed the week of June 13: the 1987 rape-murder of newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin. Still, given the fact that this case has been permitted to linger in the courts since Oken's 1991 conviction and death sentence, there is good reason to be suspect that he will not be executed this month.
The facts of Oken's crimes are clear and uncontested: On the evening of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken raped and shot to death newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin in her apartment in White Marsh, Md. Mrs. Garvin, whose husband was stationed at a Navy base in Virginia, had allowed Oken into her apartment after he asked to use the telephone. Then, on Nov. 16, Oken raped and murdered his own sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt. He then drove to Kittery, Maine, where the following day, he raped and murdered a third woman — a hotel clerk named Lori Ward.
In his recent efforts to escape execution, Oken has had plenty of help. In 2001, the Maryland Court of Appeals halted executions for eight months on the novel legal theory that a Supreme Court decision overturning a New Jersey hate-crimes law might somehow apply to the Maryland death-penalty statute. The following year, then-Gov. Parris Glendening imposed a moratorium on executions. Shortly after Gov. Robert Ehrlich ended the moratorium last January, the Court of Appeals postponed Oken's execution again. The announcement came less than two weeks after Mr. Curran stood in front of the State House in Annapolis and denounced the death penalty, saying there is too great a possibility that an innocent person could be executed.
Now, Oken has filed suit challenging Maryland's use of lethal injection. Mr. Curran's office is charged with responsibility for defending the state's position on appeal. But, given Mr. Curran's opposition to capital punishment, his office cannot credibly represent the people in the Oken case. If Oken evades execution this month, Marylanders need to ask themselves: Does the fact that Mr. Curran opposes the death penalty have any relevance to the fact that triple murderer Steven Oken repeatedly emerges as the court victor?
Editorial Op-Ed
Washington Post - June 1, 2004
For doctrinaire opponents of capital punishment like Amnesty International and Maryland Attorney General Joseph Curran, condemned murderer Steven Oken is a public-relations nightmare. They can't play the race card or the poverty card, because Oken is white and his family well-to-do. And there is no question that he committed the crimes for which he is scheduled to be executed the week of June 13: the 1987 rape-murder of newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin. Still, given the fact that this case has been permitted to linger in the courts since Oken's 1991 conviction and death sentence, there is good reason to be suspect that he will not be executed this month.
The facts of Oken's crimes are clear and uncontested: On the evening of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken raped and shot to death newlywed Dawn Marie Garvin in her apartment in White Marsh, Md. Mrs. Garvin, whose husband was stationed at a Navy base in Virginia, had allowed Oken into her apartment after he asked to use the telephone. Then, on Nov. 16, Oken raped and murdered his own sister-in-law, Patricia Hirt. He then drove to Kittery, Maine, where the following day, he raped and murdered a third woman — a hotel clerk named Lori Ward.
In his recent efforts to escape execution, Oken has had plenty of help. In 2001, the Maryland Court of Appeals halted executions for eight months on the novel legal theory that a Supreme Court decision overturning a New Jersey hate-crimes law might somehow apply to the Maryland death-penalty statute. The following year, then-Gov. Parris Glendening imposed a moratorium on executions. Shortly after Gov. Robert Ehrlich ended the moratorium last January, the Court of Appeals postponed Oken's execution again. The announcement came less than two weeks after Mr. Curran stood in front of the State House in Annapolis and denounced the death penalty, saying there is too great a possibility that an innocent person could be executed.
Now, Oken has filed suit challenging Maryland's use of lethal injection. Mr. Curran's office is charged with responsibility for defending the state's position on appeal. But, given Mr. Curran's opposition to capital punishment, his office cannot credibly represent the people in the Oken case. If Oken evades execution this month, Marylanders need to ask themselves: Does the fact that Mr. Curran opposes the death penalty have any relevance to the fact that triple murderer Steven Oken repeatedly emerges as the court victor?
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Oken Seeks Stay Of Death Penalty
WBAL Radio and The Associated Press - Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Steven Oken has asked Maryland's highest court to delay his execution so that he will have time to challenge the state's use of lethal injections to carry out death sentences.
A stay of execution request filed with the Court of Appeals Tuesday alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture."
Oken is scheduled to die the week of June 14 for the 1991 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old Baltimore County woman. He was also convicted of killing two other women in Maryland and Maine.
Oken's lawyers, Fred W. Bennett and Michael E. Lawlor, filed suit alleging that the state's method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering. State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution.
When the suit was filed challenging use of lethal injections, it was described as an "abusive delay" by the state attorney general's office. Oken's lawyers responded that he has a right to question the method of execution and "has not manipulated the system."
The court of appeals has already issued a stay of execution for Oken on two occasions.
Oken's lawyers also filed an appeal Wednesday of the decision by a Baltimore judge that his suit challenging the method of execution should be transferred from Baltimore, where it was filed, to Baltimore County, where the crime occurred and where he was convicted.
In addition to that suit, Oken also has a motion outstanding in Baltimore County Circuit Court based on what Bennett said is a disparity between the procedures for lethal injection contained in the law and the way it is administered by the Maryland Division of Correction.
WBAL Radio and The Associated Press - Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Steven Oken has asked Maryland's highest court to delay his execution so that he will have time to challenge the state's use of lethal injections to carry out death sentences.
A stay of execution request filed with the Court of Appeals Tuesday alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture."
Oken is scheduled to die the week of June 14 for the 1991 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old Baltimore County woman. He was also convicted of killing two other women in Maryland and Maine.
Oken's lawyers, Fred W. Bennett and Michael E. Lawlor, filed suit alleging that the state's method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering. State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution.
When the suit was filed challenging use of lethal injections, it was described as an "abusive delay" by the state attorney general's office. Oken's lawyers responded that he has a right to question the method of execution and "has not manipulated the system."
The court of appeals has already issued a stay of execution for Oken on two occasions.
Oken's lawyers also filed an appeal Wednesday of the decision by a Baltimore judge that his suit challenging the method of execution should be transferred from Baltimore, where it was filed, to Baltimore County, where the crime occurred and where he was convicted.
In addition to that suit, Oken also has a motion outstanding in Baltimore County Circuit Court based on what Bennett said is a disparity between the procedures for lethal injection contained in the law and the way it is administered by the Maryland Division of Correction.
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Maryland judge rejects one of inmate´s case to avoid execution
Associated Press - Thursday, June 3, 2004
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A Baltimore County judge rejected Wednesday one of Steven Oken´s attempts to avoid execution.
Circuit Judge John G. Turnbull II granted the state´s motion for summary judgment in Oken´s lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of lethal injection, the method Maryland uses to carry out the death penalty.
Turnbull also denied Oken´s request for an emergency hearing on a motion based on what Oken´s attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, said is a disparity between the procedures for lethal injection contained in the law and the way it is administered by the state Division of Correction.
Oken is scheduled to die the week of June 14 in Baltimore for raping and murdering Dawn Marie Garvin, 20. She was the first of three women Oken was convicted of killing in Maryland and Maine in 1987.
He also was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law in Maryland and motel clerk Lori Ward in Kittery, Maine. He was taken into custody in Freeport, the day after the Ward murder.
Bennett said he welcomed Turnbull´s decisions because it allows him to focus his energy on Oken´s motion before the Maryland Court of Appeals.
"We couldn´t be happier because we´re in a race against the clock here and the sooner the case gets before the Court of Appeals the better," Bennett said.
Oken filed the request Tuesday, asking the state´s highest court to delay his execution so he would have time to challenge the state´s use of lethal injections to carry out death sentences.
The request alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture." Oken´s lawyers allege that the state´s method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.
State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution.
When Oken filed the suit challenging use of lethal injections, the state attorney general´s office described it as an "abusive delay." Oken´s lawyers responded that he has a right to question the method of execution and "has not manipulated the system." The Court of Appeals has already issued a stay of execution for Oken on two occasions.
Oken´s lawyers also filed an appeal Wednesday of the decision by a Baltimore judge that his lawsuit challenging the method of execution should be transferred from Baltimore, where it was filed, to Baltimore County, where the crime occurred and where he was convicted.
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Associated Press - Thursday, June 3, 2004
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A Baltimore County judge rejected Wednesday one of Steven Oken´s attempts to avoid execution.
Circuit Judge John G. Turnbull II granted the state´s motion for summary judgment in Oken´s lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of lethal injection, the method Maryland uses to carry out the death penalty.
Turnbull also denied Oken´s request for an emergency hearing on a motion based on what Oken´s attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, said is a disparity between the procedures for lethal injection contained in the law and the way it is administered by the state Division of Correction.
Oken is scheduled to die the week of June 14 in Baltimore for raping and murdering Dawn Marie Garvin, 20. She was the first of three women Oken was convicted of killing in Maryland and Maine in 1987.
He also was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law in Maryland and motel clerk Lori Ward in Kittery, Maine. He was taken into custody in Freeport, the day after the Ward murder.
Bennett said he welcomed Turnbull´s decisions because it allows him to focus his energy on Oken´s motion before the Maryland Court of Appeals.
"We couldn´t be happier because we´re in a race against the clock here and the sooner the case gets before the Court of Appeals the better," Bennett said.
Oken filed the request Tuesday, asking the state´s highest court to delay his execution so he would have time to challenge the state´s use of lethal injections to carry out death sentences.
The request alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture." Oken´s lawyers allege that the state´s method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.
State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution.
When Oken filed the suit challenging use of lethal injections, the state attorney general´s office described it as an "abusive delay." Oken´s lawyers responded that he has a right to question the method of execution and "has not manipulated the system." The Court of Appeals has already issued a stay of execution for Oken on two occasions.
Oken´s lawyers also filed an appeal Wednesday of the decision by a Baltimore judge that his lawsuit challenging the method of execution should be transferred from Baltimore, where it was filed, to Baltimore County, where the crime occurred and where he was convicted.
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For Rabbi, Stance On Execution EvolvesAssociated Press - June 7, 2004
BALTIMORE -- In a recent speech, Rabbi Rex Perlmeter said the death penalty is "killing the soul of this country."
When he finished, he walked over and embraced the parents of Steven Oken - a death-row inmate who could be executed as early as June 14. Perlmeter, who is senior rabbi of the 1,500-family Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, asked Davida Oken her forgiveness for ignoring her pleas to help her son after he was sent to death row.
"It meant a lot to me," she told The Baltimore Sun. "For so many years, I felt very angry and upset that the rabbis wouldn't put out their hands to help."
The parents of Steven Oken, one of only a few Jewish inmates on any death row in the country, say they have long looked for support from a Jewish community divided on capital punishment.
For years, Davida Oken says congregation leaders didn't lend her family emotional support or join the fight to save her son's life.
Oken was put on Maryland's death row in 1991. Davida Oken, a member of the congregation for the previous 27 years, says she asked the synagogue at the time for records on her son, who had his bar mitzvah there, to send to the Aleph Institute, which provides religious material to Jewish prisoners.
She was so upset with the congregation's response, she says she withdrew her family's membership. But when Rex Perlmeter arrived in 1996 as the new senior rabbi, the family tried again, sending the rabbi a note.
Perlmeter, now 45, says he supported use of the death penalty against the most heinous of criminals. And he thought Steven Oken, convicted of sexually assaulting and killing three women in 1987, fell into that category.
"I was very ambivalent," he says now. "I felt sadness for their family, but I also felt that justice was being served."
The Okens' note, he says, marked the beginning of his evolution from favoring capital punishment in some cases to opposing it altogether.
"Over the years, thinking about how I had failed the Okens, sensing their pain, knowing that they could not get the help they asked for from their community, that influenced me," Perlmeter says.
The Reform Jewish Movement, which includes Baltimore Hebrew and 900 other synagogues, has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959. But the Baltimore Jewish Council, a government and community relations agency for the area's synagogues and rabbinical organizations, doesn't oppose capital punishment.
Another rabbi in the Baltimore congregation, Robert Nosanchuk, opposes the death penalty and has been counseling the Oken family for about two years. He points out that the Torah says that when one is guilty of murder, one should be put to death.
That passage, combined with U.S. law's approval of the death penalty and society's embrace of vengeance were at the root of his belief in capital punishment, Perlmeter said.
A year ago, he confronted what he calls the ultimate paradigm for any Jew considering the death penalty: Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jews. He's the only man to ever face capital punishment in Israel.
"As long as I believed that it was an appropriate punishment for him, how could I feel that it was inappropriate for everyone else?" Perlmeter says. But he came to realize that "his death did not effectively avenge the death of 6 million Jews."
Perlmeter said it wasn't up to him to forgive Oken for his crimes. "That is between Steven, his victims' families, and his God," he said.
About the passage in the Torah that calls for death when one has killed another, Perlmeter said: "God knew we needed the threat of death, but God knows we should have outgrown it by now."
BALTIMORE -- In a recent speech, Rabbi Rex Perlmeter said the death penalty is "killing the soul of this country."
When he finished, he walked over and embraced the parents of Steven Oken - a death-row inmate who could be executed as early as June 14. Perlmeter, who is senior rabbi of the 1,500-family Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, asked Davida Oken her forgiveness for ignoring her pleas to help her son after he was sent to death row.
"It meant a lot to me," she told The Baltimore Sun. "For so many years, I felt very angry and upset that the rabbis wouldn't put out their hands to help."
The parents of Steven Oken, one of only a few Jewish inmates on any death row in the country, say they have long looked for support from a Jewish community divided on capital punishment.
For years, Davida Oken says congregation leaders didn't lend her family emotional support or join the fight to save her son's life.
Oken was put on Maryland's death row in 1991. Davida Oken, a member of the congregation for the previous 27 years, says she asked the synagogue at the time for records on her son, who had his bar mitzvah there, to send to the Aleph Institute, which provides religious material to Jewish prisoners.
She was so upset with the congregation's response, she says she withdrew her family's membership. But when Rex Perlmeter arrived in 1996 as the new senior rabbi, the family tried again, sending the rabbi a note.
Perlmeter, now 45, says he supported use of the death penalty against the most heinous of criminals. And he thought Steven Oken, convicted of sexually assaulting and killing three women in 1987, fell into that category.
"I was very ambivalent," he says now. "I felt sadness for their family, but I also felt that justice was being served."
The Okens' note, he says, marked the beginning of his evolution from favoring capital punishment in some cases to opposing it altogether.
"Over the years, thinking about how I had failed the Okens, sensing their pain, knowing that they could not get the help they asked for from their community, that influenced me," Perlmeter says.
The Reform Jewish Movement, which includes Baltimore Hebrew and 900 other synagogues, has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959. But the Baltimore Jewish Council, a government and community relations agency for the area's synagogues and rabbinical organizations, doesn't oppose capital punishment.
Another rabbi in the Baltimore congregation, Robert Nosanchuk, opposes the death penalty and has been counseling the Oken family for about two years. He points out that the Torah says that when one is guilty of murder, one should be put to death.
That passage, combined with U.S. law's approval of the death penalty and society's embrace of vengeance were at the root of his belief in capital punishment, Perlmeter said.
A year ago, he confronted what he calls the ultimate paradigm for any Jew considering the death penalty: Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jews. He's the only man to ever face capital punishment in Israel.
"As long as I believed that it was an appropriate punishment for him, how could I feel that it was inappropriate for everyone else?" Perlmeter says. But he came to realize that "his death did not effectively avenge the death of 6 million Jews."
Perlmeter said it wasn't up to him to forgive Oken for his crimes. "That is between Steven, his victims' families, and his God," he said.
About the passage in the Torah that calls for death when one has killed another, Perlmeter said: "God knew we needed the threat of death, but God knows we should have outgrown it by now."
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Court agrees to hear request for stay of Oken executionAssociated Press - Monday, June 7, 2004
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Lawyers for convicted killer Steven Oken will get what could be a last chance to delay his execution at a hearing scheduled Tuesday before the state Court of Appeals.
"It´s judgment day, in effect," Fred Warren Bennett, Oken´s lawyer, said Monday after the court agreed to a hearing on his motions challenging the use of lethal injection as the method of execution.
Unless the appeals court intervenes, Oken is scheduled to die next week for the 1987 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old Baltimore County woman. She was the first of three women Oken was convicted of killing in Maryland and Maine in 1987.
Oken was taken into custody in Freeport, Maine, the day after the murder of Lori Ward, a motel clerk in Kittery. He received a life sentence for that killing.
In his motion filed with the Court of Appeals, Bennett alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture."
Oken´s lawyers allege that the state´s method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.
State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution. Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said thousands of hours have been devoted to examining the procedure.
The state´s first execution by lethal injection was in 1994.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Lawyers for convicted killer Steven Oken will get what could be a last chance to delay his execution at a hearing scheduled Tuesday before the state Court of Appeals.
"It´s judgment day, in effect," Fred Warren Bennett, Oken´s lawyer, said Monday after the court agreed to a hearing on his motions challenging the use of lethal injection as the method of execution.
Unless the appeals court intervenes, Oken is scheduled to die next week for the 1987 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old Baltimore County woman. She was the first of three women Oken was convicted of killing in Maryland and Maine in 1987.
Oken was taken into custody in Freeport, Maine, the day after the murder of Lori Ward, a motel clerk in Kittery. He received a life sentence for that killing.
In his motion filed with the Court of Appeals, Bennett alleges that "due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture."
Oken´s lawyers allege that the state´s method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.
State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution. Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said thousands of hours have been devoted to examining the procedure.
The state´s first execution by lethal injection was in 1994.
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Victim's family awaits killer's execution: After years of delays, lethal injection scheduled next week for Oken
By Julie Bykowicz
Baltimore Sun - June 8, 2004
The Romano family is getting ready.
Betty Romano, mother of Dawn Marie Garvin, has pulled out two of her slain daughter's stuffed animals to bring along if the state carries out the death penalty against the killer. She has affixed handmade signs to the windows of her Buick announcing the scheduled execution.
Garvin's father, Fred J. Romano, and brother, Fred A. Romano, are makng plans to stand outside Maryland's death row, amid death penalty protesters, on execution night.
The Romanos know that Steven Oken - who nearly 17 years ago raped and murdered Garvin and two other women - has a motion before the state's highest court today asking the judges to delay his court-ordered death by lethal injection. And they know that twice before the court has granted similar requests.
But, Betty Romano, 57, said yesterday, "This is the closest we've ever come."
Less than a week before the first day that Oken's death sentence could be carried out, the Romanos hope that they might finally see what they call justice for Garvin.
When a Baltimore County prosecutor called Betty Romano yesterday at her Aberdeen apartment with a daily update, she told him, "If this falls through, I will be a disaster." The signs in her car windows urge people to "join us at the execution for Steven H. Oken. ... Free Admission."
Deputy State's Attorney Stephen Bailey said that for the Romanos the years of delays have been "a hellish emotional roller coaster."
In the early morning hours of Nov. 2, 1987, Fred J. Romano found his only daughter dead in her White Marsh apartment, nude, her face covered by a pillow, in a pool of blood on her bed. She had been raped and sexually assaulted with a condiment bottle before Oken, a man she'd never met, shot her in the head. A stuffed bear - one her mother plans to hold if she witnesses Oken's execution - was tucked under her arm.
Garvin, 20, an accountant and college student, had been married about four months to her high school sweetheart, naval officer Keith Garvin. He had returned to base in Virginia the day she was murdered.
Fred J. Romano, 60, said the memory of that scene and the loss he feels stoke bitterness and hatred. But he said he tries to contain those feelings and approach capital punishment in a matter-of-fact way:
"The death penalty was rendered after a trial, and the state is obligated to carry out that sentence," he said yesterday at his son's townhouse in the Belcamp area of Harford County.
"My dad is much more rational than me," said Fred A. Romano, 34. The younger Romano makes no attempt to couch his feelings about Oken:
"There is one person on this Earth that I could kill in cold blood," he said. "And that person is Steven Oken."
About three years ago, Fred A. Romano said, he came to believe that the voices of family members of murder victims were being drowned out by outspoken death penalty opponents.
He created a Web site, called Maryland Coalition for State Executions, mc4se.org, and began posting information about death penalty cases in Maryland. Last year, his wife, Vicki Romano, developed a national companion, prodeathpenalty.org.
Recently, he added a clock that counts the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the death warrant for Oken goes into effect.
Garvin's death and the shocking way that she died have taken a heavy toll on the family.
Her parents separated about three years ago, something that Betty Romano attributes, at least in part, to the murder and its aftereffects. She created a support group called Families of Murdered Loved Ones, but she eventually dissolved the group because "every minute of every day, I was reliving the pain."
Fred A. Romano said it pains him to know that his children - two little girls and a teenage stepson - never got to meet "Aunt Dawn."
"Oken cheated them, too," he said.
He contemplated what he would write on the signs he plans to hold outside the prison hospital in Baltimore the night of Oken's execution, if it happens. He thinks they will say, "Judgment Day has come."
Sun staff writer Laurie Willis contributed to this article.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––By Julie Bykowicz
Baltimore Sun - June 8, 2004
The Romano family is getting ready.
Betty Romano, mother of Dawn Marie Garvin, has pulled out two of her slain daughter's stuffed animals to bring along if the state carries out the death penalty against the killer. She has affixed handmade signs to the windows of her Buick announcing the scheduled execution.
Garvin's father, Fred J. Romano, and brother, Fred A. Romano, are makng plans to stand outside Maryland's death row, amid death penalty protesters, on execution night.
The Romanos know that Steven Oken - who nearly 17 years ago raped and murdered Garvin and two other women - has a motion before the state's highest court today asking the judges to delay his court-ordered death by lethal injection. And they know that twice before the court has granted similar requests.
But, Betty Romano, 57, said yesterday, "This is the closest we've ever come."
Less than a week before the first day that Oken's death sentence could be carried out, the Romanos hope that they might finally see what they call justice for Garvin.
When a Baltimore County prosecutor called Betty Romano yesterday at her Aberdeen apartment with a daily update, she told him, "If this falls through, I will be a disaster." The signs in her car windows urge people to "join us at the execution for Steven H. Oken. ... Free Admission."
Deputy State's Attorney Stephen Bailey said that for the Romanos the years of delays have been "a hellish emotional roller coaster."
In the early morning hours of Nov. 2, 1987, Fred J. Romano found his only daughter dead in her White Marsh apartment, nude, her face covered by a pillow, in a pool of blood on her bed. She had been raped and sexually assaulted with a condiment bottle before Oken, a man she'd never met, shot her in the head. A stuffed bear - one her mother plans to hold if she witnesses Oken's execution - was tucked under her arm.
Garvin, 20, an accountant and college student, had been married about four months to her high school sweetheart, naval officer Keith Garvin. He had returned to base in Virginia the day she was murdered.
Fred J. Romano, 60, said the memory of that scene and the loss he feels stoke bitterness and hatred. But he said he tries to contain those feelings and approach capital punishment in a matter-of-fact way:
"The death penalty was rendered after a trial, and the state is obligated to carry out that sentence," he said yesterday at his son's townhouse in the Belcamp area of Harford County.
"My dad is much more rational than me," said Fred A. Romano, 34. The younger Romano makes no attempt to couch his feelings about Oken:
"There is one person on this Earth that I could kill in cold blood," he said. "And that person is Steven Oken."
About three years ago, Fred A. Romano said, he came to believe that the voices of family members of murder victims were being drowned out by outspoken death penalty opponents.
He created a Web site, called Maryland Coalition for State Executions, mc4se.org, and began posting information about death penalty cases in Maryland. Last year, his wife, Vicki Romano, developed a national companion, prodeathpenalty.org.
Recently, he added a clock that counts the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the death warrant for Oken goes into effect.
Garvin's death and the shocking way that she died have taken a heavy toll on the family.
Her parents separated about three years ago, something that Betty Romano attributes, at least in part, to the murder and its aftereffects. She created a support group called Families of Murdered Loved Ones, but she eventually dissolved the group because "every minute of every day, I was reliving the pain."
Fred A. Romano said it pains him to know that his children - two little girls and a teenage stepson - never got to meet "Aunt Dawn."
"Oken cheated them, too," he said.
He contemplated what he would write on the signs he plans to hold outside the prison hospital in Baltimore the night of Oken's execution, if it happens. He thinks they will say, "Judgment Day has come."
Sun staff writer Laurie Willis contributed to this article.
Md. puts Oken to death
Ending years of appeals, killer dies by lethal injection
By Julie Bykowicz and Alec MacGillis
Baltimore Sun - June 18, 2004
After a furious legal battle that ended only in his final hour, Steven Howard Oken wrote a letter expressing remorse, smiled with a priest and submitted to his death by lethal injection last night for the 1987 rape and murder of a White Marsh newlywed.
Maryland's execution of Oken, a Baltimore County pharmacist's son, at 9:18 p.m., brought chants of "justice has been served" from a crowd of 60 people gathered with relatives of murder victim Dawn Marie Garvin outside the old state penitentiary on East Madison Street in Baltimore.
Garvin's mother, Betty Romano, was among four relatives of the victims who witnessed the execution.
"My family has been put through hell for 17 years," she said. "Steven Oken has been brought to justice. The only problem is that Steven Oken died in peace, and my daughter didn't have the luxury to die in peace like I saw him die tonight."
Oken, 42, sexually assaulted and killed three women - two in Maryland, one in Maine - in as many weeks in the fall of 1987.
His legal team filed appeal after appeal over the years. But last night, witnesses said, he was anything but combative. He chuckled and chatted with a Roman Catholic priest in the death chamber and did not resist when the procedure began.
At 9:11 p.m., two minutes after the curtain snapped back, signaling that Oken had begun receiving the deadly chemicals, his large midsection heaved two or three times, and then he appeared to stop breathing.
Oken's attorney, Fred Warren Bennett said he last saw his client at 7:30 p.m., and at that point, "he pretty much knew ... there was nothing left," the lawyer said, crying as he recalled the conversation. "I told him he wouldn't be alone. We'd all be there with him."
Speaking of Oken, who he said was not only his client but a friend, Bennett said, "He was a good man. He was not a monster. He was sick. He was mentally ill. You should not kill mentally ill people."
On Wednesday, Oken appeared to have won at least another month of life when a federal appeals court upheld a stay to obtain more information about the state's execution procedures. But that stay was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court later that day.
A flurry of additional court appeals by Oken's attorneys came to naught yesterday, with one Supreme Court rejection arriving at 8:32 p.m., less than an hour before his death. By then, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., facing his first clemency appeal from a death row inmate since lifting an unofficial death penalty moratorium when he took office last year, had denied Oken's request.
"After a thorough review of the request for clemency, the facts pertinent to the petition, and the judicial opinions regarding this case, I decline to intervene," Ehrlich said in a statement released by his office at 6 p.m. "My sympathies tonight lie with the families of all those involved in these heinous crimes."
Bennett said Oken wrote a letter before he died, addressed to Ehrlich after the governor had denied him clemency. In the letter, Bennett said, "He talked about how sorry he was. It was sent to show remorse."
Bennett said he will ask Oken's family to make it public today.
Oken's last meal was a chicken patty, with potatoes and gravy, green beans, marble cake, milk and fruit punch. "It was the standard meal that happened to come up in the meal rotation for today," said prison spokesman Mark A. Vernarelli.
Oken's parents said good-bye to their son and went home at 3 p.m., said Rabbi Jacob Max, who counseled the condemned man for about 90 minutes yesterday afternoon.
"He was very much at peace," Max said. When Max left Oken's holding cell at 4:30 p.m., a second rabbi, Moshe Davids, talked with him for another 30 minutes. Both rabbis witnessed Oken die from behind one-way glass.
The man who went into prison as a relatively fit 25-year-old had become a much heavier middle-age man with close-cropped white-ish hair. He wore a gray jumpsuit he was given for the execution in place of his usual orange one.
Oken was convicted in 1991 in the 1987 rape and murder of Garvin, whom he attacked after tricking her into letting him into her White Marsh apartment to use the phone. Two weeks later, he sexually assaulted and killed his wife's older sister, Patricia Antoinette Hirt, in White Marsh, and fled to Maine, where he sexually assaulted and killed a college student and motel clerk, Lori Elizabeth Ward.
Outside the prison, supporters and opponents of the death penalty gathered in separate groups. Shortly before 9 p.m., chanting arose from the group of about 60 supporters, who included victims' relatives: "turn on the juice."
When word spread that Oken was dead, several relatives huddled briefly and said a prayer, and others broke out in cheers.
"The burden has been lifted. Oken's dead," said Fred A. Romano, Garvin's brother. He taunted Bennett through a bullhorn: "How can you sleep? How much money did you make?"
Down the street, many of the 40 death penalty opponents assembled cried when they learned that Oken had been put to death. Those who were carrying lit candles blew them out.
"Tonight the state extinguished a life, but it ignited a flame in each of us. I want you to walk away from this event tonight stronger," said Sedira Banan, 19, of the American University Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
The execution - the 84th in Maryland's history, its fourth since resuming executions in 1994 after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and its first since 1998 - occurred in amid an intensifying statewide debate over capital punishment. Over the past two years, Ehrlich's predecessor, Parris N. Glendening, had imposed a temporary moratorium on the death penalty, state Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. called for abolishing it, and a state-commissioned report questioned the fairness of the state's use of the sentence.
Oken's case, which included two previous death warrants that were not acted upon because of appeals, grew closely entwined with the larger debate. His parents became vocal critics of the death penalty, while Garvin's family became outspoken advocates of it.
Death penalty critics noted that Oken's case fit what they said was a disturbing trend in Maryland: like a disproportionate number of death row inmates, Oken was sentenced in Baltimore County, and his victims were white. But advocates of the death penalty noted that, as a middle-class white man, he could hardly be portrayed as a victim of prosecutorial bias.
Steven Oken admitted to his crimes. He sexually assaulted and shot to death three women in November 1987. Then 25 years old and married, Oken gave few hints that he would commit such crimes, his family has said.
In a 2001 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, Oken talked of his drug and alcohol abuse, personal problems and depression, and said, "I can't point to one thing that made this happen ... I just didn't want to deal with everything."
Adopted at birth by David and Davida Oken, Steven was raised in a Jewish family with a younger brother and sister.
Oken's mother, Davida Oken, said signs of trouble emerged in 1986. She said her son had been abusing alcohol and drugs, including cocaine, marijuana and prescription medications that he had stolen from his father's pharmacy.
On the night of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken knocked on doors in a White Marsh neighborhood near where he and his wife lived, trying to convince residents to let him inside by posing alternately as a stranded motorist and a doctor.
According to court testimony, he knocked on 20-year-old Dawn Garvin's door. She let Oken inside. Garvin's father, Frederick J. Romano, found his only daughter's body early the next day.
Two weeks later, Oken attacked his wife's older sister, Patricia Hirt, inside his White Marsh townhouse, where the 43-year-old Hirt had come to return a camera.
Two days later, he was arrested in Maine - but not before he sexually assaulted and fatally shot motel clerk Lori Ward.
Suzanne Tsintolas, Ward's older sister and a Rockville lawyer, said a few days ago that the execution would "help to maintain my faith in our judicial system."
"My sister was ripped away from our family, and we can't get her back. But at least this evil person won't be walking among us."
Outside the prison after the execution, the crowd of death penalty advocates lingered to celebrate. As the hearse containing Oken's remains pulled away at 10:25 p.m., the crowd chanted "na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey goodbye."
Taking in the scene, Fred J. Romano, Garvin's father, said "I'm feeling great right now. I feel finally justice has been done. And I just want to say this: I cradled my dead daughter's body in my arms when I found her. I attempted to give her CPR. The way this guy died, he died too easy. He had no right to die in dignity, no right at all."
Sun staff writers Andrew A. Green, Lynn Anderson, and Laurie Willis contributed to this article.
Ending years of appeals, killer dies by lethal injection
By Julie Bykowicz and Alec MacGillis
Baltimore Sun - June 18, 2004
After a furious legal battle that ended only in his final hour, Steven Howard Oken wrote a letter expressing remorse, smiled with a priest and submitted to his death by lethal injection last night for the 1987 rape and murder of a White Marsh newlywed.
Maryland's execution of Oken, a Baltimore County pharmacist's son, at 9:18 p.m., brought chants of "justice has been served" from a crowd of 60 people gathered with relatives of murder victim Dawn Marie Garvin outside the old state penitentiary on East Madison Street in Baltimore.
Garvin's mother, Betty Romano, was among four relatives of the victims who witnessed the execution.
"My family has been put through hell for 17 years," she said. "Steven Oken has been brought to justice. The only problem is that Steven Oken died in peace, and my daughter didn't have the luxury to die in peace like I saw him die tonight."
Oken, 42, sexually assaulted and killed three women - two in Maryland, one in Maine - in as many weeks in the fall of 1987.
His legal team filed appeal after appeal over the years. But last night, witnesses said, he was anything but combative. He chuckled and chatted with a Roman Catholic priest in the death chamber and did not resist when the procedure began.
At 9:11 p.m., two minutes after the curtain snapped back, signaling that Oken had begun receiving the deadly chemicals, his large midsection heaved two or three times, and then he appeared to stop breathing.
Oken's attorney, Fred Warren Bennett said he last saw his client at 7:30 p.m., and at that point, "he pretty much knew ... there was nothing left," the lawyer said, crying as he recalled the conversation. "I told him he wouldn't be alone. We'd all be there with him."
Speaking of Oken, who he said was not only his client but a friend, Bennett said, "He was a good man. He was not a monster. He was sick. He was mentally ill. You should not kill mentally ill people."
On Wednesday, Oken appeared to have won at least another month of life when a federal appeals court upheld a stay to obtain more information about the state's execution procedures. But that stay was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court later that day.
A flurry of additional court appeals by Oken's attorneys came to naught yesterday, with one Supreme Court rejection arriving at 8:32 p.m., less than an hour before his death. By then, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., facing his first clemency appeal from a death row inmate since lifting an unofficial death penalty moratorium when he took office last year, had denied Oken's request.
"After a thorough review of the request for clemency, the facts pertinent to the petition, and the judicial opinions regarding this case, I decline to intervene," Ehrlich said in a statement released by his office at 6 p.m. "My sympathies tonight lie with the families of all those involved in these heinous crimes."
Bennett said Oken wrote a letter before he died, addressed to Ehrlich after the governor had denied him clemency. In the letter, Bennett said, "He talked about how sorry he was. It was sent to show remorse."
Bennett said he will ask Oken's family to make it public today.
Oken's last meal was a chicken patty, with potatoes and gravy, green beans, marble cake, milk and fruit punch. "It was the standard meal that happened to come up in the meal rotation for today," said prison spokesman Mark A. Vernarelli.
Oken's parents said good-bye to their son and went home at 3 p.m., said Rabbi Jacob Max, who counseled the condemned man for about 90 minutes yesterday afternoon.
"He was very much at peace," Max said. When Max left Oken's holding cell at 4:30 p.m., a second rabbi, Moshe Davids, talked with him for another 30 minutes. Both rabbis witnessed Oken die from behind one-way glass.
The man who went into prison as a relatively fit 25-year-old had become a much heavier middle-age man with close-cropped white-ish hair. He wore a gray jumpsuit he was given for the execution in place of his usual orange one.
Oken was convicted in 1991 in the 1987 rape and murder of Garvin, whom he attacked after tricking her into letting him into her White Marsh apartment to use the phone. Two weeks later, he sexually assaulted and killed his wife's older sister, Patricia Antoinette Hirt, in White Marsh, and fled to Maine, where he sexually assaulted and killed a college student and motel clerk, Lori Elizabeth Ward.
Outside the prison, supporters and opponents of the death penalty gathered in separate groups. Shortly before 9 p.m., chanting arose from the group of about 60 supporters, who included victims' relatives: "turn on the juice."
When word spread that Oken was dead, several relatives huddled briefly and said a prayer, and others broke out in cheers.
"The burden has been lifted. Oken's dead," said Fred A. Romano, Garvin's brother. He taunted Bennett through a bullhorn: "How can you sleep? How much money did you make?"
Down the street, many of the 40 death penalty opponents assembled cried when they learned that Oken had been put to death. Those who were carrying lit candles blew them out.
"Tonight the state extinguished a life, but it ignited a flame in each of us. I want you to walk away from this event tonight stronger," said Sedira Banan, 19, of the American University Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
The execution - the 84th in Maryland's history, its fourth since resuming executions in 1994 after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and its first since 1998 - occurred in amid an intensifying statewide debate over capital punishment. Over the past two years, Ehrlich's predecessor, Parris N. Glendening, had imposed a temporary moratorium on the death penalty, state Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. called for abolishing it, and a state-commissioned report questioned the fairness of the state's use of the sentence.
Oken's case, which included two previous death warrants that were not acted upon because of appeals, grew closely entwined with the larger debate. His parents became vocal critics of the death penalty, while Garvin's family became outspoken advocates of it.
Death penalty critics noted that Oken's case fit what they said was a disturbing trend in Maryland: like a disproportionate number of death row inmates, Oken was sentenced in Baltimore County, and his victims were white. But advocates of the death penalty noted that, as a middle-class white man, he could hardly be portrayed as a victim of prosecutorial bias.
Steven Oken admitted to his crimes. He sexually assaulted and shot to death three women in November 1987. Then 25 years old and married, Oken gave few hints that he would commit such crimes, his family has said.
In a 2001 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, Oken talked of his drug and alcohol abuse, personal problems and depression, and said, "I can't point to one thing that made this happen ... I just didn't want to deal with everything."
Adopted at birth by David and Davida Oken, Steven was raised in a Jewish family with a younger brother and sister.
Oken's mother, Davida Oken, said signs of trouble emerged in 1986. She said her son had been abusing alcohol and drugs, including cocaine, marijuana and prescription medications that he had stolen from his father's pharmacy.
On the night of Nov. 1, 1987, Oken knocked on doors in a White Marsh neighborhood near where he and his wife lived, trying to convince residents to let him inside by posing alternately as a stranded motorist and a doctor.
According to court testimony, he knocked on 20-year-old Dawn Garvin's door. She let Oken inside. Garvin's father, Frederick J. Romano, found his only daughter's body early the next day.
Two weeks later, Oken attacked his wife's older sister, Patricia Hirt, inside his White Marsh townhouse, where the 43-year-old Hirt had come to return a camera.
Two days later, he was arrested in Maine - but not before he sexually assaulted and fatally shot motel clerk Lori Ward.
Suzanne Tsintolas, Ward's older sister and a Rockville lawyer, said a few days ago that the execution would "help to maintain my faith in our judicial system."
"My sister was ripped away from our family, and we can't get her back. But at least this evil person won't be walking among us."
Outside the prison after the execution, the crowd of death penalty advocates lingered to celebrate. As the hearse containing Oken's remains pulled away at 10:25 p.m., the crowd chanted "na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey goodbye."
Taking in the scene, Fred J. Romano, Garvin's father, said "I'm feeling great right now. I feel finally justice has been done. And I just want to say this: I cradled my dead daughter's body in my arms when I found her. I attempted to give her CPR. The way this guy died, he died too easy. He had no right to die in dignity, no right at all."
Sun staff writers Andrew A. Green, Lynn Anderson, and Laurie Willis contributed to this article.
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Some of the information on The Awareness Center's web pages may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.
I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml . If you wish to use copyrighted material from this update for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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