Son's plea: Don't free mom's killer

Every year for the past 20, Rick Ehrhart of Charlotte has made a pilgrimage to Raleigh to beg strangers to keep the man who killed his mother locked up.

This week, his plea became more desperate and the outcome more uncertain. Ehrhart asked the state Supreme Court to step in and keep Bobby E. Bowden in prison, along with dozens of other inmates set for release by recent court rulings.

Ehrhart's plea is a long shot. The Supreme Court already spoke on the issue this month, when it declined to weigh in on a 2008 Court of Appeals ruling that said Bowden's life sentence should be defined as 80 years long. Now, a Cumberland County judge will be asked to determine whether Bowden is due enough "good behavior" credits to be freed.

"This is just insane," Ehrhart said. "To go from coldblooded murderer facing the death penalty to the possibility of parole to unqualified release? This is a tragedy of errors."

These days, Ehrhart is awash in memories of the summer morning in 1975 when his mother, Norma Ehrhart, was killed. He was 20, home from college, living with his family in Fayetteville. They were low on milk, and his mother ran out to a convenience store before the family rose to grab another gallon.

Bowden and his friend Gregory Cousin shot her and the store clerk to death and robbed them of $76.

"I think about how things could be different. There were two stores near our house. What if she'd gone to the other one?" Ehrhart said by phone Wednesday from Charlotte, where he works for a technology company.

With the possibility that Bowden and other murderers and rapists would be freed, Ehrhart decided this week he would not sit back. Trained as a lawyer but no longer practicing, Ehrhart typed up a formal appeal. He faxed it off to the clerk of the N.C. Supreme Court, asking that the justices step in.

State leaders have said that the Department of Correction overstepped its authority by awarding credits to Bowden and dozens like him. A 1981 law authorized the secretary of Correction to adopt rules for granting credits to those sentenced before that year. State officials say they will keep these inmates in prison until the courts settle that dispute.

They portray the inmates as violent criminals who deserve to spend the rest of their years in prison. Civil rights activists and legal experts have pushed back, saying the inmates are aging men and women who've paid for their crimes with the best years of their lives.

Staples Hughes, the state appellate defender, whose office represented Bowden at the Court of Appeals, said he is sorry for the pain of Ehrhart's family.

"But for the grace of God, there go I," Hughes said. "They have every right to have their wishes made known, but a victim can't affect a release date."

Double death sentences

Bowden and Cousin were initially sentenced to death -- twice each. Once for Norma Ehrhart, a bubbly real estate agent and Girl Scout leader, and another time for Larry Lovett, the 21-year-old clerk working his last shift before a long vacation.

In those years, death was the automatic punishment for first-degree murder. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that a process such as that was unconstitutional.

North Carolina inmates sentenced to death between 1973 and 1976, Bowden and Cousin among them, were taken off death row and had their punishments converted to life terms.

"We were told that life meant natural life," Ehrhart said. "For us, that was fine, it seemed they still wouldn't be a threat."

In the years since the Ehrhart family's battle against Bowden's parole began in 1988, Ehrhart said, he was never quite sure their pleas would be heard.

This time is no different. The State Supreme Court hasn't let Ehrhart know whether they will grant him a hearing.

News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.

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