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The crime of Wyatt Matthews

National Review, June 29, 1984 by Joseph A. Rehyansky

GRAFENWOHR LIES in a remote corner of northeastern Bavaria, twenty miles or so from Czechoslovakia, just beyond the minefields. It is a training area for U.S. Army armored units in Germany; the units with their officers and enlisted personnel rotate in and out regularly, getting a taste of living in the field and firing their impressive weaponry for practice with live ammunition. It is cold there in February, as my family and I well know, for we lived in the tiny village of Vilseck, about 12 miles south of Grafenwohr, for a year in the mid-Seventies. The events I am about to describe took place on February 27, 1979, three years after we left. The aftermath dragged on for five years.

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Phyllis was 29 and beautiful, the wife of an Army career warrant officer helicopter pilot. She had been, for about a month, substituting as a camp librarian, filling in for a woman on maternity leave. Private First Class Wyatt L. Matthews, 22 and, some evidence indicates, mildly retarded as well as alcoholic, had been in the Army for 18 months, in Germany for one.

None of the following facts is seriously in dispute.

As Phyllis walked toward the library on the afternoon of February 27, Matthews followed her, attempting to strike up a conversation. She did not reply. Later, in the library, Matthews asked Phyllis for a date. She declined, replying that she was a married woman. He then asked her to find two "sexy books" for him, and she suggested that he try a nearby bookstore. After all, the other patrons had left the library, Matthews asked her to locate for him a book that he apparently knew to be in the rear of the library. Matthews did not follow her at first, instead lingering to remove the door key and library scissors from Phyllis's desk. HE wore gloves. After securing the front door, Matthews confronted Phyllis in the back of the library, covered her mount with his hand, forced her to disrobe or disrobed her himself from the waist down, and raped her.

During the rape Matthews stabbed her with the scissors, which were nine inches long. Fifty-one stab wounds later, Phyllis died, although her assailment stabbed her at least twice more. Carrying her underpants as a trophy, Matthews left the library, forgetting for a time the scissors and a six-pack of beer he had brought in with him; he later returned and cooly retrieved them before the body was discovered.

Phyllis's husband became concerned at her failure to return home at the accustomed hour. He went to the library and found her body at 9:20 P.M.

Brought to trial that summer in Grafenwohr, MAtthews was prosecuted by a law-school colleague of mine. Defended by both civilian and military counsel, he attempted to plead guilty to the charges: premeditated murder and rape. But because the prosecution was seeking the death penalty, the plea was rejected; in the military, whenever the accused is in jeopardy of forfeiting his life, the government's evidence must be put to the test. After a ten-day trial, Matthews was convicted of both charges and was sentenced to death by the only forum that can impose such a sentence in the military, a unanimous jury (called "court members" in military practice). Interestingly enough, the colonel who served as president of the court, functioning as a jury foreman, is black, as are Matthews and the commanding general who ordered the case to trial after and exhaustive investigation. But Phyllis was white, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, The ACLU, and other itinerant officious intermeddlers joined the battle to prevent Matthews from being the first person executed by the military in more than two decades.

The legal issues on appeal were, in fact, not complex, notwithstanding the 750 pages of briefs that were filed. Among them were, first, the constitutionality of the statute authorizing death as a sentencing option in cases of premeditated murder in the military after the Supreme court's 1972 decision in Fruman v. Georgia, which struck down the death penalties of the states as arbitrarily and capriciously imposed; second, the question of whether the military judge's charge to the jury adequately focused their deliberations on sentencing on whether to impose death; and, finally, one or two legalistic niceties so sublime in their hypertechnicality as to make a Buddha--or a founding Father--weep.

Certainly I do not mean to make light of Matthews's predicament, or of society's; no one should be put to death for a crime without a thorough and impartial review of the trial proceedings. Neither, however, is it unrealistic in most cases to posit that such a review can be completed within a year of the judgment of death. It is sheer fantasy to suppose that the drafters of our Constitution envisioned the talismanic patchwork of repetitive reviews amounting, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., to a "now familiar abuse of process" that has caused the death-row population in the United States to soar beyond 1,100--a total even more startling when one considers that the Supreme Court temporarily emptied our death rows with its decision in Furtherman just 12 years ago.

The crime of Wyatt Matthews

National Review, June 29, 1984 by Joseph A. Rehyansky

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