Word: shaw
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...Bobby Shaw cannot remember when the voices started talking to him. Growing up in impoverished, rural Missouri, he had always been an odd boy, slow yet sometimes excitable, likable but strange. Bobby often wandered into the homes of others; he would sit in their living rooms, as if he lived there, until his father came and got him -- and punished him. "I thought if I whupped him, he would think harder the next time," Bobby's father David told a social worker. Bobby's sister Martha, two years his junior, helped him through first grade after he flunked it twice...
Family and friends in St. Louis, Missouri, where the Shaws had moved, decided that Bobby needed time to adjust. Martha's common-law husband Calvin Morris decided to "bring Bobby along." "They were good friends," says Martha. Morris bought Bobby clothes and took care of him. But on Sept. 17, 1975, Bobby Shaw shot and killed Calvin Morris with a 20-gauge shotgun. Rushing to the scene, Bobby's older brother Vancell asked him what had happened. "I don't know," Bobby said. And then he asked Vancell for cigarettes...
...Bobby Shaw, 42, is a prisoner at Missouri's Potosi Correctional Center. When questioned about his life, he parrots courtroom legalese: "Read the record . . . I have no comment." When a photographer asks to "take" his picture, he replies in all seriousness, "I don't have one." On June 9, at one minute past midnight, unless he receives executive clemency, he will die by lethal injection...
...story of Bobby Shaw's life makes some people cry. At his recent competency hearing, the court stenographer had to stop several times to compose herself. But guilt or innocence is not in dispute here. Nobody argues that Bobby Shaw did not kill Calvin Morris. No one suggests that he did not then fatally stab prison guard Walter Farrow while doing time. For many who have followed the case, anger rises from the story of his journey through America's justice and social-welfare system. For Bobby Shaw has never been able to raise the defense of insanity, even though...
...system has failed Bobby in just about every way possible," says Sean O'Brien, Shaw's pro bono lawyer and the director of the nonprofit Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center. Notes Dr. Jonathan Pincus, chairman of Georgetown University's neurology department: "The greatest tragedy in this case is that he has a treatable disorder. If he had been diagnosed and treated properly, two victims would probably be alive, and he would not be on death...