Nearly a month after Aaron Lee Skeen entered a plea bargain in Blount County court to avoid the death penalty for the murder of former Scott County resident Sandy Jeffers, brother Scott Jeffers - representing all of Sandy's siblings - says the plea agreement was the best option available.
As conditions of the agreement, 21-year-old Skeen admitted to the May murder of Jeffers and
was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 124 years.
Because he pled guilty, he will have only one shot at an appeal, and the case should see closure within two years.
Scott Jeffers said last week that the family wasn't happy with the sentence, but that it was the best option because it was the only way to insure that Skeen will never be free again.
"We aren't satisfied, but given what we were given, we feel like we made the best decision,"
Jeffers said. "You aren't always able to make choices that are simply good or bad. You just have to do the best you can.
"What we were afraid of was life with parole. And from our understanding, that was a very real possibility."
Because of the way Tennessee's legal system works, Skeen could have possibly been sentenced
to life in prison with the possibility of parole even though the state was prepared to seek the
death penalty. Once the case goes to trial, Skeen's fate would lie in the hands of the jury. Additionally, a case moving through the trial and sentencing stages would have opened itself to a variety of appeal opportunities for Skeen. The possibility, however small, of him being allowed back on the street someday was "unacceptable," Jeffers said.
"The thoughs of him running around with our children and grandchildren . . . That was purely unacceptable," he said. "Because he would do this again, if he had the chance."
Jeffers said that the district attorney's office approached the family shortly after Thanksgiving to inform them that the plea bargain was a possibility. The family gave the D.A. their approval of the decision.
"We knew it was their decision to make one way or the other, but they made it clear that our opinion was important," Jeffers said. "We talked it over, and it was a tough decision, because it was one of those things where you're going to feel guilty one way or the other."
Jeffers said the family accepted the plea agreement because they wanted to do the right thing for their sister.
"It was a tough decision to make. We didn't want to do it, we didn't like to do it, and we still don't like it. It aggravated us that some of the media said we were satisfied. No, we weren't satisfied. What we wanted was to do right by Sandy as best we could. It was important to get as much justice for her as we could."
After Skeen was arrested by Maryville police in early May, he admitted in a statement to a Maryville Police Department investigator that he had broken into Jeffers' apartment, raped her, then kidnapped her and drover her to an overlook on the Foothills Parkway in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he pushed her over a ledge. Autopsy results showed that Jeffers died as a result of the fall.
Despite that statement, there was no guarantee that the case was simply open-and-shut, something that worried the Jeffers family.
"They had him dead to rights, and that's what irritates us so much," Jeffers said. "Having the evidence they did, we were still bound to a system that, chances are, wasn't going to go all the way."
Jeffers said the family felt that even if the case had gone to trial and Skeen sentenced to death, they wouldn't see him executed in their lifetime. Appeals processes, and the fact that the death row process moves slower in Tennessee than in some other states, meant that the case might not see closure for more than 20 years. When the District Attorney's office assured the family that the plea agreement would leave no doubt that Skeen would ever leave prison a free man, Scott and his family decided it would be the best option.
"It wasn't what we wanted, it's not what he deserves, but it's the best way to make sure he doesn't get free," Jeffers said of the decision.
Jeffers said that, ideally, Skeen should have faced the death penalty.
"Given what we wanted, we felt like that even if it hadn't been our sister, he would've deserved the death penalty," Jeffers said. "But when we started looking at the appeals process and how few people this state actually executes, that wasn't the best option."
Jeffers said it is ironic and sad that society will have to keep up a criminal who took from society in his crime.
"We pay to keep them up. That's irritating," he said. "A person like this, I think they just take from society. And if you put them behind bars, society still has to pay. You take someone like Sandy, she would have been one of those assets to society, one who would have contributed a great deal."
A determined student, Sandy Jeffers said before starting high school that she would be the valedictorian of her graduating class, a goal that she achieved. As a student at East Tennessee
State University and later at the University of Tennessee, she was a 4.0 GPA student. She was to have graduated from UT in May with her second bachelor's degree.
Though there is no satisfaction in the sentence, Jeffers thinks Skeen will have a tougher prison life with a life sentence, as opposed to a death sentence.
"I honestly believe he'll have a rougher way to go in the general prison population," he said. "That wasn't our prime consideration, although a lot of people said they thought it was better
because of that. But we did feel like that even if they did execute him, he would have an easier way to go up until that time."
Jeffers hopes that some good will come from the case so that, eventually, families don't have to face the delimma that the Jeffers family faced.
"What I would like to see come out of this is the legislators put politics behind them and sit down and figure out how to make the system work," he said. "I hope people will contact their legislators. We had a case here where he wasn't innocent and there was no problem proving it, but there would have been no other way around it, he could've gotten off. I don't think he would've gotten of completely, but you see the people running around here who have killed people and have gotten a few years and then were out. That was unacceptable to us.
"I understand that these are tough political issues and you take chances with your career when you choose one side or the other, but they have to realize that their families are out there walking around just like ours are," he said.
Jeffers, who says he is more galvanized for the death penalty after his sister's death, stresses the importance of due process, but said that it should be easier to sentence people to death.
"Ideally, I wish it were that simple. I wish you could convict them and take them out and hang them in a week or two," he said. "But I'd hate to be the person on the other side, and it has happened, probably more than we know. I don't necessarily think everybody should be executed for every little thing, but I just think society tries to walk too much of a politically correct line."
The bottom line, according to Jeffers, is that Skeen stole Sandy's life and should have to forfeit his own. But the state's legal system doesn't make that a sure thing.
"We felt like she was robbed," he said. "It took everything. It took her life. In this life, that's as much as you get.
"(Agreeing to the plea bargain) was a difficult decision, and we didn't like making it. It's a question of how do you make people understand. We know that there's people who won't understand. But we feel like everybody ought to at least hear our side. It would've been nice to feel good about this decision."
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