A punishment is excessive … if it is unnecessary: The infliction of a severe punishment by the State cannot comport with human dignity when it is nothing more than the pointless infliction of suffering. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 276 (1972) (Brennan, J. Concurring).

Offering parole to a woman who has served 20 years for murder then snatching it away is cruel. For that matter, so is alerting the family of the victim that the killer who slew the family patriarch is going to be released without giving that family the opportunity to object.
If anything demonstrates what Justice Brennan meant by “pointless infliction of suffering” it is the ordeals of the Pugh and Pipines families.
In February 2004, two decades after she was convicted of killing her boss and sometime-lover, Cynthia Pugh was granted parole after her first appearance before the New York State Board of Paroles.
A month later the Parole Board reversed its decision and told Pugh that she would be staying behind bars.
Dangling freedom in front of a prisoner and then snatching it away is akin to the punishment handed down by the gods of Olympus to Tantalus. Cynthia deserves to pay for her crime, but teasing her like that is piling on.
Denying the victim of a crime (or his or her survivors) a chance to offer mercy or to demand further restitution is akin to telling a victim he or she does not matter.
The Pugh parole saga is peculiar. Not only is it unusual for New York to grant early release for murderers appearing before the board for the first time, the decision was unique because Cynthia steadfastly refused to take responsibility for the crime for which she was convicted. During her 20 year term for killing 58-year-old James Pipines, Cynthia has always maintained her innocence.
Cynthia wasn’t alone in claiming that she was wrongfully convicted. Besides family members who have stood by her since she went on trial for shooting Pipines while he slept, 11 jurors from her first trial voted for acquittal and numerous friends have decried the alleged injustice of her conviction and sentence.
Letters to the editor proclaiming Cynthia’s innocence and the unfairness of her sentence frequently appear in local newspapers. Dozens of letters of support are part of the Parole Board’s records.
There was little direct evidence linking Cynthia to James Pipines’s murder.
“The only firm, hard evidence they had was that the man was dead and police said her husband’s gun did it,” a member of Cynthia’s first jury told the press.
The circumstantial evidence pointing to Cynthia’s guilt, however, strongly indicates that she did put a .38 Derringer to the temple of James Pipines and pulled the trigger.
When the 64-year-old Cynthia received word from the Parole Board that she would be finally returning to her home outside Syracuse, NY, she phoned her daughter, who told her children that they would no longer have to visit grandma in prison.
But within days the Pipines family and William Fitzpatrick, the man who prosecuted Cynthia in 1983, cried foul. They had not been advised that Cynthia was up for parole, so they did not have an opportunity to share their views with the panel. The clamor was such that the Parole Board held a recission hearing and reversed its decision. The board told Cynthia to come back in two years.
Cruelty courses through the fallout of James Pipines’s murder like a dirty river.
“It’s been utter hell,” Tom Pipines told the Syracuse Herald-Journal during Cynthia’s second trial. “You’re living the murder and reliving it and reliving it a third time…The only thing you can do is get down on your knees and pray that you can have the strength and courage to go through it.”
In 2005, from inside her prison cell, a bitter Cynthia lashed out at a system she felt had wronged her.
“If you have political/wealthy connections — or in this case, both — you can do anything you please,” she wrote in a Herald-Journal op-ed piece. “Even destroy people’s lives.”
Few cases in Syracuse strike a nerve like the Pipines-Pugh trial. There is little middle ground. If you were in the area in 1983 when James Pipines was slain and paid attention to the case, she either did it or she didn’t.
“I’m convinced she would do anything in her power to walk away from this crime,” Fitzpatrick said.
The Pugh family was just as strongly convinced that she had been railroaded.
“How could they do this to her?” Cynthia’s sister, Anne, asked after her sister was convicted. “She would never hurt anyone.”
Cynthia and James appeared to come from different worlds. James was a well-to-do contractor who served as president of Central City Roofing. Cynthia was a mother of six with a common-law husband. She was also a long-time employee with whom James became physically intimate.
His family later called this James’s “one big mistake.”
“The mistake was the involvement on a purely physical basis with Cynthia Pugh,” Tom Pipines said.
In February 1983, the prosecution said, James had broken off his relationship with Cynthia, and was planning on terminating her from the company because she was allegedly stealing. Her motives for killing him were anger, jealousy, fear — you name it.
Cynthia denied embezzling from the company she had worked for 12 years.
“If anyone is truly interested,” she wrote from prison, “I will tell who really was misappropriating corporate funds.”
In her defense, Cynthia used the tried-and-true SODDI argument: Some Other Dude Did It. She glommed onto a witness statement about a Lincoln with several well-dressed men leaving the area of the murder scene like a drowning man grabs a rope.
Those men in the Lincoln were hired killers, she alleged. She offered no evidence that James Pipines had anything to fear from mobsters.
On February 24, 1983 — the Pipines’s wedding anniversary — James Pipines did something quite unusual. He did not show up for work. Normally, James showed up between 10 and 10:30 a.m. One of the employees of Central Roofing told police that he spoke to James around 7:30 a.m. that morning. Investigators found out later that the man only saw a note on Pipine’s home telling him that he was not needed to do work there that day.
At 2 p.m. Cynthia called James’s partner in Rochester, Pluto Poulios, to tell him that she had not heard from James all day. She told Poulios that she was about to call the corporation’s lawyer, William Mackay. She was told MacKay was on vacation.
Cynthia telephoned Poulios again and he told her to go to the Pipines home to check on James. Both Poulios and Cynthia repeatedly called the house before she left.
Cynthia told police that she arrived at the Pipines home around 3:30 p.m.
“I got out, and I knocked on the door next to the garage, rang the bell,” she testified at her second trial. “I went to the front door. I rang the doorbell several times.”
With no one answering she started to leave and noticed James’s Mercedes parked on the right side of the circular drive. Crime scene photographs clearly show James’s Mercedes parked in place that would be obvious from anyone arriving at the home. Cynthia’s statement that she didn’t see it until preparing to leave simply does not match the facts. In addition, the car was parked in the spot where James moved it when he was expecting Cynthia, who told police he did this so she could park in the garage.
She testified that she returned to the house after noticing the car.
“I put my hand on the knob of the inside door next to the garage and touched it.” she said. “The door just gave way, and I went into the house.”
Oddly, the Pipines’s elaborate security system did not go off despite a door that Cynthia alternatively described as unlocked and “ajar”
Passing through the house, Cynthia ended up at James’s bedroom and encountered a bloody scene.
“Mr. Pipines was lying in bed, facing away from the doorway,” she testified. “I called to him; I walked over to the bed.”
After unsuccessfully trying to roll him over, Cynthia went to the other side of the bed.
“I walked around to the other side of the bed,” she told the court. “His one hand was up in front of his face. I pushed on his shoulder, and as I looked down I could see blood.”
She told the court that she fled the house in search of a telephone, ending up at the Fayetteville Mall. She spoke to Poulios, who instructed her to return to the home and call police, which she did.
Two weeks later, a .38 caliber Derringer, registered to Cynthia’s common-law husband, Gary, was found near the mall. Ballistics tests proved it was the weapon that killed James.
On the day of the murder Cynthia was questioned by police for nearly 12 hours. She denied at the time that she and James were lovers.
“It wouldn’t do any good to tell them,” she explained. “All it could do is hurt everyone: his family and mine.”
Cynthia later claimed that James was planning to leave his family to move to Key West, something that his family vehemently denied.
“He hated the Keys,” his brother said.
“He wouldn’t allow my son to go scuba diving in the Keys,” James’s wife told the Syracuse Herald-Journal. “He was going to leave his son? Leave his family? Never. Never.”
James was killed by a bullet that entered behind his right ear and emerged in front of his left. The spent bullet was caught in his cupped left hand and fell to the ground when he was jostled slightly by a police officer.
During her interview with police, Cynthia told police that when she first saw James’s body she tried to find a pulse by feeling his neck. His body was still warm, she claimed.
In her first interview Cynthia told authorities that she attempted to give him mouth-to-mouth resucitation. She later recanted that assertion. She also said that she climbed onto the bed and tried to turn him over by tugging on his shoulder. Unable to move James, Cynthia moved to the front and tried to push him over.
The prosecution argued that she was lying, because either effort would have shaken the bullet loose from James’s hand.
At trial, Cynthia admitted that she knew James was dead when she saw the blood, but thought he had suffered a stroke.
The appellate court hearing her request for a new trial found this hard to believe.
“Examination of the pictures of the decedent makes graphically clear that no one viewing that body, the condition of the head and the substantial amount of blood on the sheet could possibly have failed to recognize immediately that the man had been shot,” the opinion reads.
Prosecutor Fitzpatrick also latched on to the discrepancy between the murder scene and Cynthia’s description and asserted that she was describing the condition of James’s body after she shot him, not after she allegedly saw his body in the afternoon.
The medical examiner testified that after the fatal shot was fired James did not instantly. Although very likely comatose, he continued to bleed and lost brain tissue through the gaping wound in his head.
“Are you sure you’re not reenacting what happened earlier in the evening, when you kicked off your shoes and crawled into bed with him?” Fitzpatrick asked.
Cynthia countered by telling Fitzpatrick that the room was dark, disguising the blood. Police, however, said that although there were no lights on in the room, sunlight was streaming into the crime scene to the extent that it bright enough to read.
The M.E. also refuted Cynthia’s claim that James’s body was still warm. When the body was removed at 12:05 a.m. the next day, full rigor mortis had set in, indicating a time of death no later than noon on February 24.
Cynthia attempted to establish an alibi for her whereabouts the morning of the murder. It was a feeble attempt that raised more questions than it answered.
She testified that she woke up that morning sometime between 5 and 5:30 a.m when one of her dogs demanded to be let outside. She sat for awhile on a dog house inside the home, let the dogs inside and went back to bed.
A houseguest of the Pughs testified seeing Cynthia wearing a coat around 5:45 a.m.
When she awoke for a second time, Cynthia went downstairs around 7:30 a.m. to retrieve underwear from the clothes dryer. She said she put another load in the wash and folded the clothes in the dryer. The prosecution speculated that Cynthia did not run the wash at 7:30, but ran it later, trying to wash blood and gunshot residue from the clothes she wore when she killed James.
During that time, her son, Gary Jr., awoke and looked in his mother’s bedroom and failed to see her. He then left the house — and testified that when he left, he did not see his mother’s car.
“We have a goat and it’s in a pen at night,” Cynthia explained on the stand, claiming that she always drove down to shine her lights on the pen for going in for the evening (she was bowling the night of February 23 and returned home around midnight). “To make sure it hasn’t gotten out, broken loose.”
That would explain why Gary Jr. did not see his mother’s car.
Cynthia regularly arrived at work by 8:30 a.m., but on the date of the murder she went to Denny’s for breakfast — something she admitted on the stand that she never did. She stayed for about an hour, reading the newspaper. She told authorities that her server was a dark-haired woman in her mid-40s. The only staff member who answered that description, however, was working the counter, not the section of tables where Cynthia was seated. Moreover, the woman did not have a check for the food Cynthia said she ordered.
When Cynthia arrived at work, she explained that she was late because she was tired from bowling the night before — she did not tell anyone that she had been at Denny’s.
After the Derringer registered to Gary Pugh Sr. was found near where Cynthia called Poulios, she explained that she had given it to James because he was alone in the house (the family was down in Florida on vacation) and he was concerned about a recent attempted burglary in his home. To the Pipines family this held no sway.
“My brother was in the Marine Corps for four years. He taught me how to hunt,” Peter Pipines told The Herald-Journal. “There was no way he would take a little .38 Derringer for protection when he had shotguns in the basement. And if he was threatened, why didn’t he have the alarm system on that morning.”
In the end Cynthia’s conviction hinged on her believability.
“Her credibility went down the drain,” a juror said. “That’s what we based in all on. There were too many discrepencies in her questioning, her testimony.”
After 50 hours of deliberation the jury convicted Cynthia of murder.
When the foreman read the verdict Cynthia fainted and slid from her chair underneath the defense table. She was removed from the courthouse — under guard — and taken to a local hospital. After a brief examination, Cynthia was transported to the jail to await sentencing.
“I can’t show any guilt or remorse,” she told the judge at the sentencing hearing. “I did not kill Jim Pipines.”
The judge handed down a 20-year-to-life sentence.
In January 2006, the Parole Board rejected Cynthia’s second bid for parole. She will be eligible in 2008. This time, the Pipines family will be ready.