The Rodriguez brothers were both found guilty of first-degree murder at separate trials, then moved on to death-penalty hearings. Defense lawyers in both cases asked Sunderland to testify as to their client's remorse, a potential mitigating factor for the jurors to consider.
Sunderland didn't doubt that the Rodriguez brothers had committed the crimes. As far as he was concerned, they deserved to spend the rest of their lives in a maximum-security prison, locked away in small cells where they could contemplate their crimes. But they didn't deserve a death sentence. No one deserved that.
John Johnston
Jim Sunderland and Sheila Curry on a date in 1943.
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Sunderland even felt compassion for the little boys they had once been -- raised by an alcoholic felon of a father who beat them and their mother on a regular basis. It was no wonder that they were so vicious themselves; they'd been trained like junkyard dogs.
He knew that many people, maybe even most, wouldn't understand why he would agree to help them. But he couldn't preach about the power of forgiveness and then repudiate it by doing nothing. He was the link between men like these and God; he was the man in the middle.
Chris Rodriguez's hearing came first. After testifying that Chris had shown some remorse, prosecutor Mike Little wondered aloud if Sunderland could have been conned by Chris. "Is it possible for a Jesuit to be conned?" he asked.
Sure, Sunderland replied. In the 450 years of their existence, the Jesuits had been conned twice. It was meant as a joke, and as he smiled, so did several jurors.
Little did not smile. "No more questions," he said.
For Sunderland, the most difficult part of the trial was weathering the reactions of the victim's family and friends. After his testimony, one woman who'd been sitting with the Martellis demanded to know how he, a Catholic priest, could testify on behalf of a killer who had done such horrible things. He'd tried to approach the family, to tell them how sorry he was for their grief and pain, but they'd walked right past him. He learned later that they'd been told by the prosecutors not to talk to the priest. "He's on their side," the prosecutors had said.
Sunderland knew his place was not on the side of the killers, but rather in opposition to state-sanctioned murder. And "other victims" needed comfort, including family members of the killers.
He'd come to know the mother of the Rodriguez brothers, a poor, churchgoing woman who'd been powerless to deal with her boys when they became brutal men like their father. Yet she was hounded by the press as though she'd committed some crime. One day, as she tried to escape down a stairwell, Sunderland suddenly thrust out his arms to hold the cameramen and reporters at bay so that she could escape. It was so easy to place blame on someone else's shoulders, he thought angrily.
The anger was unusual for Sunderland, who generally tried to deflect hostility with kindness and humor. When a television station showed him walking with Chris Rodriguez, a woman called to chastise him. "You are a disgrace to the Catholic church," she spat.
That's funny, Sunderland thought. The Pope is opposed to capital punishment, but this lowly priest is a disgrace? But he knew the woman wouldn't listen to his argument, so he tried to joke with her. "I know," he replied, "but I was trying to keep it a secret. How did you find out?" She answered by slamming the phone down.
In the end, Sunderland's testimony didn't make a difference in Chris Rodriguez's sentence. But while the jurors didn't accept his remorse as a mitigating factor, they also balked at condemning him to death when he hadn't done the actual stabbing. Chris was sentenced to life without parole.
Testifying on behalf of Frank Rodriguez was more problematic; there just wasn't much to him. "Pathetic" was the first word that came to Sunderland's mind when he thought of the killer. Frank had commited a truly evil act, and yet Sunderland did not believe the man himself was evil.
As he had at Chris Rodriguez's hearing, prosecutor Little pointed out that Sunderland was opposed to the death penalty in all cases, so that anything the priest said should be considered in that light. "Would Hitler have deserved the death penalty?" Little asked.
Before Sunderland could reply, the defense lawyer objected. But it was an interesting question, one for which the Jesuit had an answer: No, no human being deserved to die.
The jury disagreed and sentenced Frank Rodriguez to death. He would soon be joined on death row by John O'Neill, who'd killed a man in a drug deal gone awry. (O'Neill's sentence was later commuted to life in prison, where he died of cancer.) They were joined by a third man in 1987: Gary Davis.
On July 21, 1986, Davis and his wife had kidnapped 33-year-old Virginia May from her family ranch near Byers, then driven her to a remote area where they sexually assaulted her, crushed her skull with the butt of a rifle and shot her fourteen times.
Sunderland was visiting other inmates at the Adams County jail when Davis and his wife were brought in. A jail official told the Jesuit about the crime and said that Davis wanted to see him. It turned out that Davis wanted Sunderland to do him a favor: get a refund for a waterbed he'd recently purchased in Aurora.
