From Deseret News archives:
Family pleads with jury to spare convicted killer's life
"I don't want him to die. I don't think it would do any good," said Griffin's foster mother, Arlene Pyle, who adopted Glenn when he was just 3 months old. "I'd be sad he'd be gone."
Jury members will begin deliberating today after attorneys deliver their closing arguments, on whether Griffin should be sentenced to death or receive life with or without the possibility of parole.
Griffin was convicted last week for the 1984 murder of gas station attendant Bradley Newell Perry in Box Elder County. It was a case that had gone cold until it was reopened many years later thanks to advances in forensic evidence analysis.
Family members of Perry addressed the jury on Tuesday. Wednesday, it was the defense's turn. Griffin opted not to address jurors himself.
Calling him a man with true talents that could be beneficial to society, and a person who throughout his life always started off with good intentions but was never able to follow through, family members, defense attorneys and a forensic psychologist Wednesday pleaded with the jury not to sentence Griffin to death by lethal injection.
"We're going to ask you to look at the big picture," said defense attorney Dee Smith during opening arguments. Smith asked the jury for a sentence that showed "both justice and mercy."
The large majority of Wednesday's testimony was taken up by Dr. Ronald Houston, a clinical psychologist, and Dee Russell, a retired special agent with the U.S. Treasury Department who was hired by the defense to be a mitigating specialist.
Both men painted a picture of Griffin as a man who seemingly had the odds stacked against him since birth. As a toddler, Griffin was picked on by other children because of the thick-rimmed glasses he had to wear and constantly clashed with teachers as early as kindergarten and first grade, eventually being expelled from school in the second grade because "teachers couldn't handle him," Russell said.
It was the start of what would become a pattern for Griffin all his life, going through many schools, employers and even stints of probation because he would constantly get in trouble again after trying to start over.
The most dramatic part of Russell's testimony actually came from Pyle. During the course of his research, Russell videotaped a 45-minute interview with Pyle in which he asked her to recount the struggles in her son's life. That interview was played for jurors Wednesday.
