Alabama Attorney General KING, D.A. Smith Protest William Shank Parole; Ask Prison Chief To Join In Petition To Cancel Credit Fo

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Alabama Attorney General KING, D.A. Smith Protest William Shank Parole; Ask Prison Chief To Join In Petition To Cancel Credit For Time Not Served

January 25, 2005 -- (MONTGOMERY)—Attorney General Troy King today praised Alabama's special Board of Pardons and Paroles for its decision to deny parole to William Shank, who was convicted for the savage beating death of a 12-month-old infant girl and evaded his sentence for 15 years fighting extradition after his erroneous release from prison was discovered."The Parole Board made a good decision today," said Attorney General King. "Speaking as Attorney General, and as a Daddy, they made the right decision today. William Shank is a man who savagely, brutally murdered Dana Louise Smith, a 12-month-old infant girl who was left in his care. It is a horrible, horrible crime. Before he began serving his life sentence for the murder, he was erroneously released from an earlier sentence for burglary, and fled to New York. Multiple extradition attempts by the State were turned back, and it was 15 years before he was returned to Alabama to serve his sentence. It is only because he was credited with all of the years he spent as a fugitive—free and fighting his return--that Mr. Shank was considered eligible for parole, and that is simply wrong."

Attorney General King and Tuscaloosa District Attorney Tommy Smith today appeared before the special Board of Pardons and Paroles to protest parole for Shank. The Board also granted Attorney General King's request to delay any further consideration of paroling Shank for five years, which is the maximum time allowed by state regulations.

Regardless of whether Shank's years as a free man are counted or not toward his prison sentence, Attorney General King told the Board that Shank does not deserve to be paroled. "The brutality of his actions earned the sentence that he received. His crime is uniquely brutal, it is uniquely heinous, and it is uniquely savage. What he did to that little girl is unspeakably evil. It just defies my understanding how you could take a one-year-old infant, beat her to death, and then leave her in her baby bed to bleed to death internally, which is what he did. This tiny innocent girl was left with over a hundred bruises that indicate the vicious rage that was unleashed upon her small body."

King thanked Board members for "serving justice by returning Shank to the prison cell in which he sits where he will continue making payments on the debt that he owes to society for his murderous ways and the pain he has inflicted—-a debt he can never fully repay. To take an accident made by the State when Shank was released in the first place, and compound it by a deliberate decision to release him again, would have been an unimaginable travesty, a miscarriage of justice, that must not be allowed to happen."

After the parole hearing, Attorney General King and District Attorney Smith hand-delivered a letter to Department of Corrections Commissioner Donal Campbell, asking that he join them in filing a petition to correct the situation that led to Shank's years of freedom being counted toward his time served in prison. State appellate courts previously have ruled that if the State voluntarily releases an inmate by mistake, the inmate is entitled to count the time after his release toward his sentence. "I don't think that the courts intended the result that we faced today," said Attorney General King. "I think their intention was to allow credit for the time that elapsed until the mistake was discovered, not the years afterward spent fighting the State's effort to correct the mistake and deliver justice."