The Untold Story - Summary
Kevin Stanford has been on Kentucky’s death row since 1982. He was 17 when he was arrested, along with two juvenile co-defendants, in January 1981 for the robbery, rape and murder of Baerbel Poore, a 20 year old gas station attendant. Kevin, an African-American born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, is next in line for execution in Kentucky. Yet, his compelling life story has never been told in any court of law.
The all white jury which sentenced Kevin to death knew only a small part of his life story which was readily available to his trial attorneys. What the jurors did know about Kevin’s life (poor relationship with his mother, drug abuse and juvenile institutions) was just the tip of the iceberg and was transformed into reasons to vote for the death penalty rather than reasons not to.
On January 7, 1981, seventeen year old Kevin woke up and began another day of drinking and heavy drug use, which included whiskey, marijuana and mescaline given to him by his cousin. Alcohol and drugs were not new to him. At age 7, he was introduced to liquor by his mother’s biker friends. By age 12 Kevin had already become an addict. He was virtually living on the streets. Adult criminals used him to assist in armed robberies in exchange for the drugs to which he was addicted. So, when David Buchanan called and asked Kevin to help rob the Chekker Oil Station, the two accompanied by Troy Johnson went to the station. Troy brought along his brother’s gun. Kevin was heavily under the influence of alcohol, marijuana and hallucinogens. While Kevin looked for money, David took the attendant, Baerbel Poore into the station bathroom and began to sexually assault her. When Kevin came to the bathroom, David encouraged Kevin to join in which he did, sexually assaulting Ms. Poore. The boys then took her to a more remote area in the neighborhood where she was shot twice in the head. Kevin returned and picked up two large boxes of cigarettes and $140.
Kevin Stanford has grown up on death row. He arrived in 1982, a scared and angry young man, immature, filled with rage and bravado. He is now 38 years old and is no longer the person he was when he came to death row. He accepts responsibility for his involvement in Baerbel Poore’s sexual assault, abduction, and murder. He was unable at the age of 17 to recognize the senselessness of his actions and the pain his behavior caused to Baerbel Poore and her family, as well, as to his own family.
Since arriving on death row, Kevin has obtained his GED and then two associate college degrees in business management and the liberal arts. He lacks only a few credits toward earning a sociology degree, which he would have completed but the program was eliminated for persons on death row. Kevin has also spent time developing the emotional maturity he did not have as a youth. In 1995 Kevin married a woman with whom he had established correspondence. They visit within the limits of prison protocol. Kevin, terrified that his young daughter, living with a drug addicted mother, would go down the same path he did, convinced his own mother who had rejected him throughout his life to take the child and raise her properly. Kevin is very proud of his daughter who is a 20-year old sophomore at Northern Kentucky University. In the face of few visits from family or legal counsel over the years, Kevin has turned to God for consolation, hope, and forgiveness.
The jury that sentenced Kevin to death never learned that his father had abandoned him at an early age and had deceived his mother about his intentions to marry her. Kevin did not learn his father’s identity until he was a teenager. The jury did not learn about the dysfunctional family from which Kevin’s mother came. His mother, overwhelmed by her own grief and needs, left Kevin unattended and neglected. Kevin still in diapers would cross a busy intersection by himself in order to get to a bar so he could ask employees and customers to feed him. Kevin was exposed to promiscuous behavior at a very tender age and witnessed the use of drugs and alcohol and stream of male visitors into an unstable home.
Kevin has never had a birthday party. His mother never read to him or helped him with homework. He can not remember sitting on her lap or her ever willingly hugging him. The only touching he recalls was inappropriate and came from adult caretakers and older neighborhood children, who sexually abused him from a very early age through early adolescence.
Beverly Johnson, a young woman in her late teens from the neighborhood, baby-sat Kevin and sexually abused him. She forced him, at the age of five, to have sex with his young cousin, which the cousin has confirmed. This continued for a year, but was only the beginning of the sexual abuse to which Kevin was subjected. Kevin was later forced by two neighbor boys to have oral sex with them or remain captive in a doghouse where they placed him. Later a male transvestite friend of his mother and a cousin regularly assaulted him. By the time he was ten, Kevin had endured years of sexual assaults. Kevin’s mother, his cousins, childhood friends and at least two of the perpetrators have all confirmed the sexual abuse.
Kevin had little understanding of human contact aside from sexual contact. He knew nothing about sexual boundaries or appropriate touching. The lack of an emotional support system isolated Kevin and made future victimization more likely and exacerbated the traumatic effects of ongoing sexual abuse. Kevin attempted to ward off the pain by abusing alcohol as early as the age of seven and heavily by age ten. He became withdrawn, isolated, and was emotionally closed-down. He showed little emotion or affect to the people around him.
Trauma leads to problems in cognitive functioning in children. Kevin’s school records document the emotional problems he suffered. His first grade teacher, Joanna Smith, recalls assigning the class the task of drawing a picture depicting what they wanted to do as adults. Kevin was unable to come up with anything. When encouraged, he said “all the men in my family go to jail…I don’t want to be anything.” She “will never, ever forget the blank page”, but the jury at Kevin’s trial did not hear this compelling testimony which foreshadowed the life of a boy with a blank future.
Kevin was raised surrounded by violence. At the age of four, his neighborhood was rocked by racial riots. When he was nine, he witnessed a man get shot in the stomach. Stabbings in Louisville’s West End were common. Kevin himself was subjected to beatings with long extension cords and still carries the scars on his legs and back from these lashings. When arrested for the crime of which he ultimately was convicted, he was taken to the police station, instead of to the juvenile detention center, where he was subjected to racist slurs and an officer put a gun in his mouth and threatened to pull the trigger if he did not tell them who killed Baerbel Poore.
As he grew older, Kevin's academic performance continued to deteriorate. His drug and alcohol use increased. Kevin had started drinking large amounts of liquor on a regular basis at the age of ten, and was dependent by the age of twelve. He began to use the one thing that seemed to be what others wanted from him, sex, as a means to obtain drugs, money and places to stay.
Kevin began his life of being institutionalized when he was twelve. He, however, was not a hardened criminal. No one wanted him or cared to help him deal with his problems that were created, in large part, by the rejection and sexual abuse he had suffered most of his young life. One foster placement release reports note that "Kevin has not really had a family since he was about eight years old." His mother admitted to social workers that she believed her failure to give Kevin the attention he required had led to her son’s delinquent behavior. Just before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin was sent to Green River Boys' Camp, a boot camp for juveniles, which, in 1994-95, was the subject of an expose by the Louisville Courier Journal and a United States Department of Justice investigation which focused on inappropriate treatment methods, including physical and verbal abuse and confrontational therapy. In this broken system, there was only more abuse and no treatment for Kevin.
Kevin went on trial for his life in a community that had been saturated with prejudicial publicity. The prosecutor collected petitions in favor of the death penalty and presented them to the trial court as the trial began. Petitions were also sent to President Ronald Reagan urging the death penalty for all three defendants. Even in the face of such community outrage, no motion for a change of venue was made. When Kevin was first charged, his lawyer asked news stations not to use his name because he was a juvenile. Every one of the local television stations, however, aired 17 year old Kevin’s name. Despite the fact that this was a crime against a white woman by African American juveniles, there were no African Americans on the jury that convicted Kevin Stanford and sentenced him to death. And there were very few African American jurors in the pool from which his jury was chosen. The human cost of this racial injustice is incalculable particularly in a death penalty context in which African Americans are frequently put to death for murdering whites and whites are almost never executed for murdering African Americans.
Kevin has very little memory of his trial, as he was heavily medicated by psychotropic medication. Prior to his trial, Kevin saw his lawyers only one time after he was transferred to the Department of Corrections in May 1982, and never while he was at Kentucky State Penitentiary, 215 miles from Louisville.
During the trial there were no fingerprints or physical evidence linking the murder weapon to Kevin. Co-defendant Troy Johnson, who received only nine months in juvenile detention, testified for the prosecution. Scientific evidence presented by the prosecution, as well as eyewitness identifications, however, refuted Johnson’s account of what had actually transpired. Co-defendant David Buchanan did not testify at the trial, but his confession was admitted. Kevin was never able to confront or cross-examine Buchanan about his highly incriminating statement.
An incoherent and weak defense to the crime was presented despite the availability of a substantial defense surrounding the positive identification by two eyewitnesses of Calvin Buchanan (David’s uncle) who had recently been released from prison as being at the scene of the murder. Kevin’s lawyers presented no evidence of his highly intoxicated state on the day of the crime. Nor did his attorneys make any attempt to challenge the testimony of two juvenile detention facility guards that Kevin, in front of other youths, had bragged repeatedly to them about the killing. This extremely prejudicial testimony could readily have been disputed had counsel interviewed staff and kids who never heard Kevin talk about his case, let alone brag and who could have testified that the detention center policy was that staff were never to be alone with the residents.
During the penalty phase, Kevin’s attorneys had done little investigation and little evidence was presented on Kevin’s behalf. What evidence was presented (drug abuse, under socialization, lack of support systems, lack of nurturing, and dysfunctional relationship with mother) touched only the very superficially on his life or his problems. The prosecution was allowed to argue that Kevin was just a “bad kid” and that his mother had done everything she could for him. Even the most cursory of mitigating investigation would have revealed numerous witnesses concerning the life circumstances that shaped Kevin and brought him to be who he was on January 7, 1981.
