This is how a witness to Jennifer Reali’s crime recalled its climax outside a community center in Colorado Springs: “I saw her eyes,” Karen Johnson said, “and they were dark eyes and full of hate. She walked over to where Dianne [Hood] was lying. Dianne was begging for her life, and she took very careful aim and shot her again.”
Reali conducted a cold-blooded execution of a woman with three small children. The killer wore a ski mask and camouflage fatigues and grabbed at Hood’s purse to mislead investigators searching for a motive. Cruel and calculating, Reali got the life sentence she deserved at her trial in 1992, despite the defense portrayal of her as a helpless pawn of her co-conspirator and lover, Brian Hood, the murdered victim’s husband.
Now Brian Hood is being invoked again on Reali’s behalf — although this time by our recent governor. In one of his final acts, Bill Ritter commuted Reali’s sentence so she will be eligible for parole on June 25 this year, the same day that Hood is.
Ritter meant to be fair and merciful, but his action was a profound mistake.
“It was a heinous crime,” the former governor’s spokesman said. “They shared responsibility, and this commutation brings balance to the conviction and the sentencing.”
Balance to the conviction? No. She was convicted of first-degree murder and Hood was not. A jury actually acquitted Hood of first-degree murder, finding him guilty instead of solicitation and conspiracy to commit the killing.
Attorney General John Suthers, who offered his cautious blessing to Ritter’s decision, also discussed it in terms of Hood’s punishment. “Brian Hood was the consummate evil force [in the conspiracy],” he told me, whereas Reali “thought Brian Hood was her knight in shining armor.”
Suthers is apparently right about Hood — although several witnesses at his trial, including the victim’s own brother, told a different story — but that would only mean Hood got a break, not that Reali’s punishment was too harsh. Suthers himself made a similar argument back in ’92, when he was El Paso district attorney.
“Our only disappointment and sense of less than full justice in this case is that Brian Hood did not receive a life sentence,” Suthers said at the time.
“We felt that he deserved at least life in prison and that it would be appropriate for the jury to consider the death penalty.”
A woman now in her 50s, Reali is presumably a threat to no one these days. Still, the same could be said of many prisoners who killed for special reasons that will never reoccur. Either cold-blooded murder deserves a life sentence or it does not. And it does; not only do we owe no less to murder victims and their families, but the legal system’s moral credibility also is at stake if we fail them.
Since the taking of a life is permanent, the punishment should recognize that permanence somehow. One possibility is the death penalty, but those of us who oppose capital punishment like to point out that it will never be applied to most murderers in this day and age.
Hence the importance of a life sentence that means just that and nothing less.
Dianne Hood was only 32 when she was executed for being an inconvenience to her husband’s and Reali’s lust. The possibility that the trigger woman might still enjoy decades of freedom is nothing less than obscene.
“Had you not been involved with [Brian Hood],” the judge at Reali’s trial told her, “I doubt you would have committed anything worse than a traffic violation.”
The observation may be tragically true, but so what? Every life has a turning point, and most of them occur by chance. Many of us may never face the temptation of a monstrous evil, but many others do — and somehow overcome it.
When Reali encountered her monstrous temptation, she embraced it, and for that choice she should remain right where is today, until the end.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
