August 26 NORTH CAROLINA: Pitt woman, boyfriend charged with killing her teenage son In Greenville, a woman whose 15-year-old son died late last month and her boyfriend are charged with murdering the teen. Bonnie Jean Sandoval, 36, and Kendrick Lenvadas Dunn, 28, were held without bond in the July 31 death of Robert Raines. The unconscious teenager had been brought to Pitt County Memorial Hospital the previous day, and doctors determined he was brain dead within hours. He was declared dead the next day. An autopsy established that Robert had died from physical abuse, prompting an investigation that revealed a history of abuse, though no police reports had ever been filed, Sgt. Shari Dennison said. Sandoval was arrested Tuesday and Dunn was arrested Wednesday, and both were charged with murder. Dennison said Robert had a 12-year-old brother who is now in his grandmother's custody. ****************************** 4th man charged in death of toddler In Roxboro, a 4th man has been charged in the death of a 2-year-old boy who was fatally shot while in his father's arms. Shidee Talley, 21, of Roxboro, allegedly led 3 burglary accomplices to the victims' home. He was charged with conspiracy to commit 1st-degree burglary and was being held Thursday on $5 million bond. District Attorney Joel Brewer said he hasn't decided whether to pursue the death penalty against other defendants in the case. Terrell Jerome Calloway, 19; Floyd Mims Jr., 22; and Robert J. Lyon, 18 - all of Durham - are charged with 1st-degree murder and 1st-degree burglary. Calloway and Lyon also have been charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill or inflict bodily injury, and Brewer said more charges are possible. Shyheim Paylor was shot to death Aug. 17 during a home invasion in rural Hurdle Mills. His father, Ray Anthony Paylor, 27, was wounded. (source for both: Associated Press) MARYLAND: Judge Orders Convicted Sniper Forcibly Fed A judge allowed corrections officials to forcibly feed convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad while he awaits trial in the county for 6 October 2002 killings. Muhammad had not eaten anything since being transferred to the Montgomery County, Md., jail on Monday, corrections officials said in court documents filed Thursday. He was apparently upset with the food he was being served and the handling of his legal material. Doctors had concluded that Muhammad, 44, was at risk of serious injury or death of he continued his hunger strike, corrections officials said. Judge James L. Ryan issued an order allowing officials at the county jail to forcibly feed and hydrate him. Muhammad and Lee Malvo, 20, are accused of killing 10 people and wounding three in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., during an October 2002 shooting rampage. Muhammad has already been sentenced to die following a 2003 conviction for a sniper shooting in Manassas, Va. Malvo was sentenced to life in prison for a shooting in Falls Church, Va. Montgomery County prosecutors plan to try the two men together for the shootings in their county, as insurance in case their Virginia convictions are overturned. They will be returned to Virginia when their trial is over. The 2 have also been linked to shootings in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Washington state. (source: Associated Press) FLORIDA: Sides disagree about long appeals process APPEALS: ---- State's death row population 3rd largest Alachua County's death row Inmates STEPHEN BOOKER, 51; burglary, rape and murder of an elderly Gainesville woman; has spent 26 years on death row. RONALD HEATH, 44; robbery and murder of Atlanta businessman visiting Gainesville; 14 years on death row. DANNY ROLLING, 51; murder of 5 Gainesville college students; 11 years on death row. [SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections] Notable Florida executions since 1976 TED BUNDY, 42; killed 2 women in Tallahassee sorority and 12-year-old girl in Lake City, may have committed as many as 100 murders in other states; executed after 9 years on death row. MICHAEL DUROCHER, 33; murder of his girlfriend and her 2 children in Clay County; executed after 2 years on death row. He was the 1st inmate to drop appeals and served the shortest time between sentence and execution. AILEEN WUORNOS; 46, murder of 7 men she claimed raped her while she was working as a prostitute; executed after 11 years on death row after she dropped her appeals. AMOS KING, 48; rape and murder of a Tarpon Springs woman; maintained innocence until execution after 26 years on death row. PAUL HILL, 49; killed a Pensacola abortion doctor and driver; executed after 9 years on death row after he dropped his appeals. [SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections] Moments after Danny Rolling was sentenced to death in 1994, the brother of 1 of his 5 victims exploded in anger in the courtroom. "5 years," Mario Taboada yelled at the man who killed his brother, Manny. "You're going down in 5!" Now, more than 11 years later, Taboada said he's frustrated by an appeals process that could last for years more before Rolling is executed. "Anything that gets dragged out works in his favor," Taboada said. To some, the length of time Rolling and other inmates spend on death row shows the need to speed up the appeals process. The average length of time between sentencing and execution in Florida is nearly 12 years, and the number would be much higher if not for a slew of recent "volunteers" for execution who abandoned further appeals they could have filed. To others, the cases of former Starke resident Joseph Nahume Green and other inmates exonerated from death row show the danger in rushing appeals. At least 21 death row inmates have been freed from Florida's death row since 1976, the most for any state in the country. Another inmate died of cancer on death row before he was exonerated. Green was sentenced to death for killing a Starke woman in 1992, but was cleared of the crime nearly 8 years later. The only witness in the case initially said the murderer was a white man before changing his story to identify Green, who is black. After the witness was revealed to be intoxicated at the time of the murder, and so mentally impaired he thought the White House was in Jacksonville, Green was acquitted. "Justice worked in that case, but it took a hell of a long time," said Miami attorney George Nachwalter, who represented Green in his civil lawsuit for compensation. The state now has 367 people awaiting execution, the 3rd-largest death row population behind California and Texas. 60 inmates have been on Florida's death row 2 decades or longer, the same number as have been executed since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976. 9 different avenues Death row inmates have at least 9 possible stops for post-trial appeals in the state and federal courts before execution. Rolling has been through 7. It could take another year or 2 before his last 2 appeals wind through the system, said Carolyn Snurkowski, an assistant deputy attorney general who handles the state's case against him. "You never know what's going to creep up," she said. In Rolling's case, appeals have centered around the question of whether his attorneys were ineffective in failing to win him a change of venue. Rolling pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death in Gainesville, the site of the murders and immense pre-trial publicity. The courts have repeatedly rejected that argument, finding that his attorneys made a strategic decision to stay in the city because of its liberal reputation. In July, the U.S. District Court denied his latest appeal on that basis. He's since filed a petition declaring his intent to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. If that court also denies his appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court would be his final recourse before execution. Taboada said he worries about new issues arising the longer Rolling's appeals last. From 1973 to 2003, Florida's Death Row inmates were seven times more likely to have their sentences overturned or commuted than be executed, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. State Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, was prosecutor in both the Rolling and Green cases. He said he doesn't like what has happened with either case since the original trials. He still questions whether Green is actually innocent, but views his case as an example of the system working properly. "Certainly we err on the side of being correct," he said. But proponents and opponents of the death penalty say overturned cases show the system is broken. Too much time and resources are used for a system in which so many cases are overturned, said Abe Bonowitz, director of the Gainesville-based Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "It makes me wonder how any . . . fiscally responsible politicians could keep a system with such a failure rate," he said. But Sharon Tewksbury, spokeswoman for Parents of Murdered Children, said the figure shows judges delay and overturn sentences because of their personal opposition to the death penalty. "When personal issues and agendas get involved, every delay that's possible is made," she said. Record stays Even if Rolling's appeals take several more years to resolve, he would still fall far short of the longest current stay for a death row inmate. That distinction falls to Gary E. Alvord, who has delayed his execution 31 years over questions of his competency. Alvord killed 3 Tampa women in 1973 after he escaped from a Michigan mental hospital. Another inmate, William Elledge, has appealed his death sentence for 28 years despite confessing to strangling a Hollywood woman in 1974. His latest appeal argued that the very fact he hasn't been killed yet is cruel and unusual punishment. After that appeal was rejected last month, he received a letter from a member of the group Citizens for Swift Justice. The group sends letters to death row inmates across the country asking that they volunteer for execution. "You have an opportunity to shape your own destiny and be thought of as a man, instead of a coward," the letter read. "By choosing to drop your appeals you get to choose your own legacy and help to bring closure to the people that you have hurt in the past." 6 of the the last 9 executions in Florida have been inmates who dropped their appeals. The so-called "volunteers" include serial killer Aileen Wuornos, subject of the movie "Monster," and Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor and the man's driver. But many more inmates use their full number of available appeals. And Florida's record number of death row exonerations shows the need for such a process, said Susan Cary, a Gainesville attorney who handles death penalty cases. Many wrongful convictions involve false eyewitness identifications, witnesses who lied to receive a lesser punishment for their own crimes and other issues that are difficult to sort out, she said. "Sometimes it takes years and years before the truth is really known," she said. In Green's case, it took nearly 8 years. In December 1992, Judy Miscally, the society page editor of the weekly Bradford County Telegraph, was shot and killed at a pay phone in Starke. Green was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death largely on the statements of the state's only eyewitness, Lonnie Thompson. Finding Thompson's testimony "inconsistent and contradictory," the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1996 and ordered a new trial. After the trial judge found Thompson was mentally retarded, intoxicated at the time of the murder and couldn't remember basic details of the event, he acquitted Green in 2000. Green subsequently sued authorities for compensation, which was resolved in a sealed settlement. Nachwalter, who represented Green in that case, said he believes he couldn't have received a fair trial the first time around. "They wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted a lynching," he said. State lawmakers and the courts have long wrangled over how to make executions both fair and fast. A botched execution in which foot-long flames shot from an inmate's head in 1997 caused a delay in executions, until the state Supreme Court upheld the electric chair as a form of punishment two years later. Lawmakers passed a measure in 2000 allowing lethal injection as an alternative form of execution. The bill also aimed to reduce the time of death sentence appeals to 5 years, but the state Supreme Court struck down that part of the law. Connie Ankney, a Punta Gorda woman who lobbied for the law, said she was frustrated the court made her efforts moot. Ankney, whose son and daughter-in-law were murdered in 1997, said the scales of justice are tilted toward inmates at the expense of victims. "Now that they're in prison, they have so many rights and we have had our rights taken away," she said. Both victims and advocates for death row inmates should support appeals that expose wrongful convictions, said Jenny Greenberg, director of the Florida Innocence Initiative In Tallahassee. Keeping innocent people behind bars means guilty parties remain free, she said. She points to the case of death row inmate Frank Lee Smith, who spent 14 years appealing his conviction for raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in South Florida. He died in prison of cancer 11 months before DNA evidence revealed another man committed the crime. Police said they believe that man, Eddie Lee Mosley, a convicted rapist and murderer who was living in the Tacachale center for mentally retarded defendants in Gainesville, raped dozens more women while Smith was behind bars. "Many more victims were made and that was completely unnecessary," she said. The cases led lawmakers to pass a measure in 2001 allowing some inmates to get DNA testing of physical evidence. But the law had a two-year limit and called for evidence to be destroyed at the end of that period. The deadline was later extended and is now set to expire Oct. 1. Gov. Jeb Bush ordered earlier this month that evidence be preserved past that time, but the other elements of the law will expire if no action is taken. Smith was one of the original proponents of the deadline. He said the deadline was meant to ensure innocence cases get DNA quickly tested, but now that it hasn't happened, he supports lifting it. "We have to allow testing no matter how long it takes," he said. But Smith, now a candidate for governor, said he thinks cases in which innocence isn't a question should be treated differently. Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter, Christa, was killed by Rolling, said she believes cases like Rolling's - where there is both a confession and DNA showing he did it - should be expedited. "There's a difference and I think there needs to be a different way that they're handled," she said. Taboada said he will keep pushing for Rolling's speedy execution. But he rejected the idea the execution will provide some sort of closure for his family. "In reality, there is no closure," he said. "This is something that lasts and sticks with you forever." (source: Gainesville Sun) USA: Unfair trial? Too bad----The Streamlined Procedures Act seeks to keep the federal courts from examining the fairness of state trials - a move even state jurists oppose. With more than 40 death row inmates in the last 6 years having been found innocent and released from prison, you would think Congress would focus any new legislation on strengthening access to the courts so prisoners are not wrongly put to death. But you would be wrong. When Congress returns from its summer recess, it is expected to consider a bill designed to close the federal courthouse doors to prisoner appeals and speed death row inmates to their final end. The misnamed Streamlined Procedures Act is about gutting procedures, not streamlining them. 2 versions of the measure would go a long way toward eliminating federal habeas corpus review of state convictions. Prisoners use habeas corpus to claim that their trial or sentence was constitutionally faulty or that there is new evidence of actual innocence. Those pushing the changes say the federal courts unduly inject themselves into death penalty cases where the state procedures have been fully and fairly followed. In fact, the federal courts have been a vital check on state trials. When state appeals courts disregard trial errors, such as incompetent defense lawyers, prosecutors who have engaged in misconduct or juries that have been racially rigged, the federal courts have been there to redress the wrong. Allowing an unfair process to stand can have life and death consequences for someone wrongly accused. The 2 bills - the House version is only slightly more draconian than Senate's - would create virtually insurmountable procedural hurdles to all federal habeas review, whether the case involves a death row inmate or not. If an inmate has a legitimate claim but his attorney made some procedural error, the federal courts would be essentially barred from hearing it. While there is an innocence exception, it is so narrowly drawn that many of the innocent people who have recently left death row would not have been able to meet the proposed standard. The bills contain a host of other barriers to keep the federal courts from examining the fairness of state trials. The measures reek of hostility toward the federal judiciary and the constitutional rights they uphold. Some of the most vocal opposition to the measures is coming from conservative legal circles. The president of the Rutherford Institute, for example, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the proposal "would likely result in the execution of citizens who have been wrongly convicted." More than 50 former prosecutors have declared their opposition. A resolution raising serious objections to the measure and calling for additional study recently passed the Conference of Chief Justices by an overwhelming vote. These are the very state jurists whose relative autonomy and power would be increased by cutting off federal court review. They don't want this congressional favor. Congress should listen. (source: Editorial, St. Petersburg Times)
