How Much Was Kathleen's Life Worth?

In my researches today I stumbled across an old criminal case that gave me pause.

In September 1986 there was a 17-year-old girl, beautiful and full of promise, by the name of Kathleen Holland. She had a high-school sweetheart, 18-year-old Joseph Porto. They had graduated high school together in June 1986 and started college in August 1986.

Then, in September 1986, just a few days shy of her 18th birthday, Kathleen went missing. Her frantic boyfriend Joseph assisted in the search...and when her body was discovered in a wooded area by the Long Island Expressway, he broke down and confessed to the police. Confessed to what? In a 45-minute videotaped confession, Porto confessed to having exploded in a rage of jealousy and hurt pride when Holland told him she wanted to date other men. He further confessed that that he had strangled his girlfriend till "my hands got tired," then used his high school graduation tassel to finish the job. Pretty, isn't it? Apparently he told a prosecution psychiatrist the same thing. Porto was then charged with second-degree murder in Holland's death.

Flash forward to Porto's trial, April 1988. On the witness stand, Porto recanted his confession from a year-and-a-half previously, and instead tearfully insisted that he had made up the murder confession to cover the truth. What, might you ask, was the truth? The truth, said Porto, was that he and Holland had been playing a sex game that had gone too far...that she wanted him to strangle her in order to heighten sexual pleasure, e.g., erotic asphyxiation or sexual asphyxia. In his excitement, he said, he killed her accidentally. This particular defense, known as the "rough sex" defense, had been used in the "Preppie Murder" trial of Robert Chambers in 1987, and Chambers had been convicted of manslaughter rather than of murder in the killing of Jennifer Levin. Instead of being convicted for second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty years, Porto was instead convicted on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide and sentenced to four years. And he was out in December 1990, a mere two-and-a-half years later, for good behavior.

Why, might you ask, am I writing about this today?

Because I find it really nauseating that for the taking of this young woman's life, Porto was only required to sacrifice two-and-a-half years of his. Basically, Porto's wily defense attorney Barry Slotnick (who had also defended the "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz) put a new spin on the well-worn, time-honored defense attorney strategy of "blame the victim". To paraphrase Alan Dershowitz, the defense went beyond "she asked for it", and instead basically said that "she demanded it."

The defense quite handily turned the tables on the prosecution, and instead of the trial being about Porto and what he had done, it became about whether or not sexual asphyxia would even be part of a teenage girl's sexual...uh...repertoire. Slotnick even went so far as to put an expert witness on the stand to testify that indeed, sexual asphyxia was more common than people would otherwise think, and not just among masturbating males either. The jury bought it, and Porto got a pretty damn light sentence for the taking of a human life. This, despite the fact that according to Holland's friends, Porto had a penchant for hurting women, and the fact that Holland had been trying to break up with him prior to her death. Given the convenient way that Porto recanted his original confession and came up with the "rough sex" defense a year and a half after the fact, my instinct is that his original confession is probably the real story...and that the "rough sex" defense was theater put on by his attorney, to get him the lightest sentence possible. Since there could be no doubt that Porto killed Holland, how better to get him a light sentence than to make the trial about her rather than him, to dirty her up, basically making her death her fault?

You may ask, why do I even care? I suppose I shouldn't, because in this wreck of a world, anything is possible. Anything can happen, and it usually does.

But I feel sadness for Kathleen. She never got to date other guys, finish college, have a career, get married, have a family...and the piece of shit who killed her was out of prison in two-and-a-half years, and wherever he is now, at least he's had a life.

People shouldn't be forgotten. Kathleen, I will remember you.