McKenna: Death would be for wrong reason

Rachael Levy

Thursday, Sept. 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

One of Nevada's most notorious prisoners, convicted killer Patrick McKenna, asked the jury to let him live, arguing that the state was seeking the death sentence for the wrong reasons.

McKenna said prosectors want him executed because he has embarrassed the state by escaping from prison three times and for planning the most elaborate jail break in Nevada history.

"Please do not let them execute me," McKenna said Wednesday. "They're doing it for the wrong reasons. They're using me as an example. They're using the death penalty to keep me from escaping."

The Clark County jury began deliberating Wednesday evening and was to resume this morning. It must decide whether to sentence McKenna to death for killing a cellmate on Jan. 5, 1979, hours after he was convicted of rape charges in a separate case.

McKenna went through two prior penalty hearings -- both ending in death sentences -- but appeals courts overturned them. The underlying murder conviction was upheld.

He spoke for about 10 minutes to the jurors, asking them to bear with his awkwardness because he was "out of my element." McKenna, 50, has spent much of his childhood and all his adult life in Nevada prisons.

"I don't know how to function out here," he said. "I don't understand the values. I don't know how to fight with words."

McKenna told the jury that for more than 30 years he has lived in a world of crime, a place ruled by a code of violence, a place with no room for compassion.

The people who shared that world with him accepted the inherent danger, but McKenna said he would never turn his violence on "real people, citizens."

"I don't tell you these things to justify my criminal behavior. There can be no justification," said McKenna, dismissing his family's efforts to place responsibility on his abusive father and brutal juvenile probation officers.

"I don't have the answers, but I know who's to blame: I blame myself. I blame myself for not having the strength to pull myself out of that life."

McKenna raped and sodomized a woman in 1964 and was sent to prison, but escaped three years later after taking one person hostage at knifepoint. He beat the woman with a beer bottle and with a piece of wood with nails in it.

In 1978, he was convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting two women who were acquaintances of his. He allegedly tied bed sheets around their necks and shoved the women off opposite sides of the bed and watched as they struggled to keep from suffocating.

During one of the rapes, McKenna allegedly threatened to shove firecrackers into a woman's vagina. The charges were never proved.

The night McKenna was convicted for raping the two women, he strangled his cellmate to death after allegedly losing a chess game and getting rejected after asking for sexual favors.

"You look at all he's done and all he's wrought, and you give him the amount of mercy he deserves, which, I submit, is none," Clark County Deputy District Attorney Doug Herndon said.

He urged the jury to not accept the "abuse excuse," or shifting of responsibility onto abusive parents. The prosecutor held up a large chart that detailed McKenna's criminal record from birth to the present and reminded them that childhood photos of McKenna were a minute part of the defendant's history.

"You're not sentencing a little kid in a cowboy hat from 1955," Herndon said.

But state Public Defenders Nancy Lemcke and Peter LaPorta argued that McKenna's life was a living hell and it was created during childhood. Those who lived similar lives of crime -- such as McKenna's victims -- invited such violence, LaPorta said.

"Some crimes are worse than others, some rapes, some sodomies are worse than others," he said. "These were not angels drug into a hellish plot."

Choking back tears, Lemcke asked on behalf of McKenna's family that his life be spared.

"For these crimes Patrick McKenna will die in Ely State Prison," she said. "He will leave Ely State Prison in a pine box. The question is 'Will God decide when or will you?'"

County prosecutor Dan Seaton said it was a "sad truth" that the state was seeking the death penalty. But the sentence was not being sought to spare prison officials further embarrassment, but to protect lives.

Should the jury give McKenna a life sentence without parole, his solitary confinement could be lifted and he could return to normal prison life, endangering the lives of guards and other prison workers, Seaton said.

McKenna is now confined to a solitary cell for 23 hours of the day. He is transferred to a small, cement-enclosed cell to exercise for one hour and is allowed to shower every third day. McKenna said he would prefer this life over death.

"My remorse, my guilt, my feelings and shame -- that's my humanity," he said. "That's what makes me alive. ... I refuse to give it up. I'm not going to do it for my sake and my family's sake. I'm not going to become like (a fellow death-row prisoner), hate-filled and unfeeling."