Victims' families never forget
GARRICK FELDMAN - Leader editor and publisher

___Bilenda Harris-Ritter's parents– retired Army Col. William James Harris and his wife Evelyn – were murdered 23 years ago in north Arkansas. She thinks about them every day and her three little sisters, who saw their parents killed in their home.
___ Harris-Ritter also thinks about the man who killed her parents and how he'll get out of prison if Gov. Huckabee keeps pardoning killers and drug dealers and drunk drivers and other thugs who seem to mean more to him than their victims.
___ A Republican lawyer now living in California, she grew up in Arkansas and went to elementary school in Mountain Home.
___ Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger re-cently appointed her legal adviser to the chairman of the Public Employees Relations Board, a huge, quasi-judicial body that oversees five collective bargaining agreements with 7,000 employers (state and local agencies, school, colleges and universities) and more than 2 million employees.
___ "My parents (father and stepmother) were murdered in Stone County on Feb. 28, 1981, in front of three of my half-sisters, who were then 2, 5 and 7 years old," Harris-Ritter recalled. "The murderer then told my sisters he was their babysitter, made himself dinner and spent most of the night in the house. He then wrecked the inside of the house and stole a shotgun and the .45-handgun my father received when he retired as a colonel after 31 years in the U.S. Army.
___ "Francis Nolan Holland is the name of the murderer. He was out of jail on probation after shooting a 14-year-old girl the year before. He murdered my parents because he was mad at the world over the fact that he would have to pay her medical bills," Harris-Ritter said.
___ "After he murdered my parents, the next day, he shot and nearly killed another man. That man was able to call for help and Holland was arrested.
___ "On Oct. 21, 1981 he plead guilty to capital murder (to avoid the death penalty) and was sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
___ "He has repeatedly petitioned for clemency.
___ "Gov. Huckabee's administration has done a bad job of handling this," she continued. " In 1997, after I sued over the way the case was handled, I was contacted by then State Sen. (now Attorney General) Mike Beebe, who crafted legislation to change the time period between petitions for clemency from one year to four years. I sued again in 2002 and in 2004.
___ "After I sued in 2002, Holland wrote to me personally. I went to court to get a permanent injunction barring him from any further contact with my family or his other victims. I was successful, but Holland represented himself and I had to be subjected to being cross examined by him."
___ She always remembers that terrible time her parents were murdered.
___ "I was in graduate school in California on the night of the murders," she says. "My sisters are now grown and doing as well as can be expected with that in their past. They live in different states. One is married with a new baby, one just received a master's degree and the third works for a major corporation in sales.
___ "We are very close, and they have a lot of difficulty still in dealing with all of this. They have all been to Arkansas at various times for appearances in court and before the Post-Prison Transfer Board."
___ Harris-Ritter has fought the state penal system for years, and because she's an attorney, she hopes she can use her legal skills to keep Holland locked up, although the Huckabee administration has not made that task any easier.
___ She must put up with heartless bureaucrats who won't even tell her the status of Holland's clemency petitions. When she shows up at one of the hearings, they'll tell her she protests too much. After all, she's just an ordinary citizen, not a criminal like Wayne DuMond, who convinced the Post-Prison Transfer Board that he wasn't really a rapist and deserved a chance to go free. He's now serving a life sentence for murder in Missouri, which will not parole him anytime soon.
___ Holland is not eligible for parole, but he still keeps petitioning for clemency.
___ "It has been denied, but I believe that is because of my lawsuits," Harris-Ritter says. "Holland will be eligible to apply for clemency again in 2008. This last time the state lost his file and let him petition a second time before the governor acted on the 2002 petition, even though the Post-Prison Transfer Board voted to deny clemency.
___ "The state is supposed to be investigating why the file was lost (and when) and why I was notified that the second petition had been filed six weeks before it was filed. When I write to ask about the status of the investigation by the Department of Corrections, I receive no response. I last wrote in February and am about to send another inquiry."
___ But feeling the heat from victims' families, the Huckabee ad-ministration has promised it would reform the Post-Prison Transfer Board and make it more open to relatives. The board's record is not very good.
___ "I have been to two meetings of the Post-Prison Transfer Board," Harris says. "The first one was in August 1997. We went through hell getting permission to address them with a clemency petition pending before them. Finally, at the last minute the approval was given."
___ They figured out they couldn't keep a lawyer from speaking out.
___ "In October 2002, there was also a petition for clemency before them in our case. I was told that the petition would be reviewed at that meeting. I attended, it never came up, there was no public comment period and after the meeting I was told they had already considered the petition and that they recommended it be denied. They also told me that the file had already gone to the governor. It was the file that was lost and never found."
___ It's the Keystone Kops in action.
___ Although the Post-Prison Transfer Board will receive public comment on proposed reforms, Harris says, "Based on that experience, I find it unlikely that they would allow me to address the board."
___ But given her persistence, Bilenda Harris-Ritter should win out over the board and Huckabee and keep Holland locked up for at least two more years, when the governor will leave office, and there's little chance his successor will even think about freeing murderers.