A sentence of 45 years in prison, along with laughs from the man who escaped custody and then killed his girlfriend, capped the high-profile case on Friday that helped put New Jersey's privately run system of halfway houses under intense public scrutiny.
State officials now say the number of ``walkaways'' from halfway houses has declined a year after reports of frequent escapes, drug use, sexual abuse and other violence inside the poorly monitored facilities.
But several pieces of related legislation that lawmakers say are needed have yet to move forward a year after a flurry of legislative activity that included hearings in the State House on the halfway houses.
The escapes, and the need for reform, were once again highlighted when a Superior Court judge sentenced David Goodell to 45 years in state prison. Goodell had been living in a Newark halfway house when he faked an illness, evaded security at a hospital and then killed his girlfriend, Viviana Tulli, 21, of Garfield.
But the importance of the case, and the solemnity of a murder sentencing, seemed to have been lost on 33-year-old Goodell, who laughed after the judge announced the sentence in Hackensack on Friday.
"Live long, ha ha!'' he shouted as sheriff's officers led him out of the courtroom.
Goodell had said during an interview with a probation officer that he felt remorse and took full responsibility for the murder. His court-appointed attorney, Francis Meehan, described him as a man who had a heroin addict for a father and an alcoholic for a mother, who left school in the seventh grade and who took to the streets where the wrong crowd recruited him for a life of crime and violence.
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"He really never had a chance,'' Meehan said.
The pleas for leniency, however, were drowned out by calls for a tough sentence from the prosecutor and from Tulli's relatives.
Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi described Goodell as a man who spent more of his life in prison than out, a life replete with arrests, convictions, restraining orders and repeated violence against women.
Wayne Mello, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor, quoted a woman who once told investigators that Goodell was so violent that "he will not stop until some girl is dead.''
There was also Stella Tulli, Viviana Tulli's sister, who tearfully described how the killing devastated her family, calling Goodell "someone who shouldn't matter, who has no place among us.''
Pleading guilty to a charge of murder, Goodell admitted in June that he was living at the Logan Hall in Newark in August 2010. He said he faked a seizure and was taken to a hospital, where he escaped and took a cab to a friend's home in Elmwood Park.
He said he met Viviana Tulli there and the two went for a ride, but he lost his temper during an argument, grabbed her by the neck and strangled her in the car.
What was exceptionally tragic about the murder, Mello said, was that Goodell killed the one person who was trying to give him "a semblance of what is good in life, a concept he does not understand.''
"He is bereft of what makes us human beings, bereft of any compassion, any decency,'' Mello said.
Two years after Tulli's death, New Jersey's halfway house system faced full public scrutiny when a series of articles in The New York Times detailed examples of drug use, sexual abuse and other violence inside many of the privately run facilities, as well as frequent escapes. One of the articles focused directly on Goodell's case.
In response, state lawmakers held hearings and introduced several bills aimed at reforming the state's roughly $65 million network of privately run halfway houses.
Governor Christie, whose campaign chairman, attorney William Palatucci, was a top executive of one of the halfway house operators, also ordered stepped-up inspections.
The latest information on the halfway houses provided to The Record of Woodland Park by the state Department of Corrections shows marked improvement in at least two areas since last year.
So far, the numbers for 2013 indicate halfway house escapes _ what the department calls walkaways to distinguish them from the inmate escapes out of state prisons _ are down 21 percent compared with the level in 2012.
Also, for much of 2012 there were roughly 100 individuals at large after escaping from halfway houses, a number that has now been whittled down to about 40, according to the department.
The state has also picked up its inspections of the facilities, one of the areas that was deemed to be too lax in a substantial audit report released in June 2011 by state Comptroller Matt Boxer.
There have been 457 inspections so far in 2013, with 366 of those being unannounced visits, breaking from the norm of past years. New contracts with the halfway house providers were also just signed in July, requiring new performance standards from the private operators, the department said.
But there's also more work to be done at the state level. None of the bills introduced in the wake of the newspaper series have made it to Christie's desk. And the governor rejected an initial attempt by lawmakers to give them more oversight of the facilities.
The state has also decided not to try and recoup roughly $587,000 in overbilling by the halfway house operators going back to 2004 that was detected by Boxer in his audit. The effort to recover that money will cost too much, according to state officials, who also assure the same mistakes won't be repeated because of the newly drawn up halfway house contracts.
