Dec. 15 USA: Abolish the death penalty The state of Californias cold-blooded execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams throws a harsh light on the barbaric practice of capital punishment in the United States. Williams execution was a travesty of justice. Williams maintained his innocence until the end. His trial was full of holes - a key witness later recanted, and others were themselves felons with something to gain by testifying against him. But regardless of whether he was guilty or innocent of the crimes for which he was executed, Williams was a model of the redemption that our "justice" system is supposed to bring about. He went from being a gang leader to a peacebroker between rival gangs and an author of childrens books with an anti-gang message. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The problem goes beyond the issue of redemption. The death penalty is inextricably bound up with our racist and class-biased justice system and for that reason alone can never be just. Look at the spectacle around murder trials of wealthy people. They are able to hire "star" lawyers, and almost always wind up with relatively mild prison time, if any. Who can remember the last rich person to be executed? A working-class person, especially one who is Black, Latino or another minority - like Williams - generally ends up with an overworked public defender, often facing a jury picked to exclude his or her peers, and an unsympathetic judge. Check the statistics: although crimes actually committed by African American or Latino are roughly proportional to their percent of the population, African Americans and Latinos make up a vastly disproportionate percentage of those who have been executed, or are on death row, and of those incarcerated. As has been widely documented, with the shortcomings and inequities in our judicial system, the existence of the death penalty guarantees the execution of innocent people. The death penalty has never produced a decrease in crime. It is not only useless - it is itself a crime. It should be abolished. (source: Editorial, People's Weekly World) MONTANA----inmate wants to drop appeals Death row inmate asks for execution date: 'Enough is enough' A man on death row for the last 18 years for murdering three members of a family at a Billings motel told a District Court judge today he is ready to die. "I have no hopes, no dreams," David Dawson told Judge Gregory Todd. "All I have is 20 years preparing to be executed. Enough is enough. There has to be an end." Dawson appeared by video from the Montana State Prison during a hearing to consider his request to stop all appeals and set an execution date. Dawson was convicted at trial and sentenced to death for the 1986 murders of an 11-year-old boy and the boy's parents. Dawson appeared calm and spoke clearly while answering questions from Todd, who said he will rule later on several requests filed by Dawson. Several attorneys also participated at the hearing, including the 2 court-appointed lawyers whom Dawson said he wants removed from his case. Todd spent about an hour asking Dawson to articulate why he wants to drop his appeals and have an execution date set. Dawson said he has always wanted his appeals to move quickly, but the attorneys representing him have ignored his request. "It's just my belief that a defense attorney should be willing to defend a client up until that client doesn't want or need them any more," Dawson told the judge. Todd held the hearing after the Montana Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a district judge should determine whether Dawson's request to drop his appeals is made "knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently." Dawson is representing himself, but Todd previously appointed attorney Edmund Sheehy to act as standby counsel to advise Dawson. Todd described the case as "literally, a matter of life or death." He asked Dawson if he knew what would happen if his legal motions were granted. "I would fully expect that an execution date would be set and eventually carried out," Dawson responded. On Monday, Senior U.S. District Judge Jack Shanstrom granted similar motions by Dawson to end his appeals in federal court and remove his attorneys from the case. William Hooks, one of the attorneys, said Thursday he has not decided whether to take Shanstrom's ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hooks and Washington state attorney Kathryn Ross have represented Dawson in his appeals at both the federal and state courts. Ross participated at the hearing held Thursday by teleconference. Yellowstone County Attorney Dennis Paxinos and Montana Assistant Attorney General Pam Collins also attended the hearing, which lasted about 90 minutes. After the hearing, Hooks said attorneys have an ethical obligation to represent their clients. He declined to elaborate, saying he could not disclose the content of any conversations he has had with Dawson. At one point during the hearing, Todd asked Dawson if he had followed news reports of the recent execution in California of a man convicted of murdering three people. Dawson said he was aware of the case, and that the man, Tookie Williams, had claimed he was innocent. Todd then asked Dawson if he had a similar claim of innocence. Dawson hesitated before answering. "Um, I've never claimed that I wasn't part of something that resulted in 3 people dying," Dawson said. Hooks and Ross immediately objected, and Todd advised Dawson he did not have to answer that or any question if he chose not to. He then asked Dawson if he wanted to say any more on the topic. "No, we're good," Dawson said. Todd said he is considering having a psychiatrist who evaluated Dawson earlier this year visit Dawson again before he makes a ruling. Todd set a tentative date for a hearing on the evaluation for Feb. 16. He also told the attorneys to submit briefs about how the case should proceed before he makes a final ruling. "I'm comfortable with whatever you decide as long as we can get something going," Dawson told the judge. (source: Billings Gazette) CALIFORNIA: Judgment Day--Arnold's star turn as a California Supreme Court justice. When students first enter law school, they learn to read with 4 highlighters at the ready. Their casebooks are filled with neon rainbows: blue for the case's facts, pink for the reasoning, yellow for the case holding, and green for significant - but secondary - legal pronouncements, known as dicta. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 5-page statement denying clemency to Stanley "Tookie" Williams earlier this week could well be included in future criminal-law casebooks and receive the same obsessive-compulsive treatment. Chances are even the most java-jolted law student wouldn't notice it didn't come from a court. In the world of the televised, the telegenic are kings. Thus Schwarzenegger's 1st major foray into text merits special attention. Schwarzenegger's statement is probably the single most effective document he has produced in his Sacramento tenure. The California governor, although armed with a broad and unreviewable power of clemency, took cover under the legal process, with its strict forms and putatively objective methods of reasoning. But here, the judicial form was being used to make judgments that no court can ever undertake. The clemency power is a blank check to governors precisely because they are supposed to take into consideration facts and arguments that courts may not - such as the personal qualities of the petitioner and the effect unfair punishments may have on the public peace. Co-opting the judicial method in order to undertake this fundamentally political task is dangerous because it masks what's really going on: a fundamentally political act. But offering them such cover may, in the end, be the best way to convince governors to consider these questions at all. To anyone even peripherally aware of the politics of capital punishment, it will come as no surprise that Schwarzenegger's clemency statement sounds and cites just like a court opinion. Since 1978, when the Supreme Court established that juries had a very broad power to impose life terms instead of death sentences, governors have steadily retreated from using their clemency power to the tune of 87 % fewer commuted sentences per year, according to Mercy on Trial: What It Means To Stop an Execution, by professor Austin Sarat. Clemency is designed to be arbitrary, though governors have constrained its use over the years. As Sarat explains, "The clemency power can be used for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all." Governors, however, have recently tended to use it only when there has been a very good legal reason, in the form of an egregious error in the trial court below, such as lost evidence or a lazy lawyer. More and more, governors see themselves as superappellate courts, presuming the correctness of the legal decisions below and reversing them only in light of what courts call "clear error." Schwarzenegger contributed to this trend earlier this year when he said he would only grant clemency where there had been a "miscarriage of justice." That's a legal notion, not a political one. Schwarzenegger's written denial of clemency is both surprising and ultimately effective for two reasons: First, it doesn't merely impose a judicial standard for determining Williams' guilt; it also uses judicial language and form, sustained for 1,656 words. President George Bush, while governor of Texas, needed only 214 words to deny Karla Faye Tucker clemency(http://www.cnn.com/US/9802/03/bush.text/) in 1997, when, like Williams, she argued for mercy on the basis of personal redemption. Schwarzenegger's statement, in contrast, works its way patiently through a statement of facts, the procedural background, and each of Williams' claims before addressing the various additional arguments - such as suspicious book dedications to violent criminals - supporting his decision to deny clemency. The language itself is pitch-perfect in its aping of judicial style. Bush wrote his denial of clemency in the `st person ("I will not grant a stay"); Schwarzenegger prefers the judicial 3rd-person omniscient, a passive voice that conveniently denies his own agency ("Williams' request is denied"). Throughout, the statement employs legal phrases. Williams' claim "triggers an inquiry." The fact that he tried to escape from jail is "consistent with guilt." The decision is made (by someone) "based on the totality of the circumstances." Schwarzenegger doesn't just allude to judges and the decisions they have made in this case, he seizes upon that role and makes it his own. And like some of America's most famous judges, he uses the judicial form to hide a decidedly nonobjective argument. This is the second, and more compelling reason Schwarzenegger's statement worked as well as it did as a final ruling on the merits of Williams' claim. There was, recall, no riot in Los Angeles. There were protests, but not furor. According to the Los Angeles Times, gang members interviewed on the street didn't even mention Williams' name - though he is the fallen Adam to their modern-day Cains. Indeed, the Bible, and not the law books, is a useful place to start when reading the Schwarzenegger statement for its moral, and even personal, content. The governor's main argument, responding to Williams' primary argument, is that this man had not, in fact, redeemed himself. Without admitting guilt, there was no way he could have. In an austere line, crammed into the middle of a crescendo of a last paragraph, Schwarzenegger writes: "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption." The Book of Acts is full of similar mandates. "Therefore repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that the intent of your heart may be forgiven you," says Acts 8:22. Elsewhere, as in I John 1:9, the language is more encouraging, but the mandate just as clear: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Schwarzenegger's quite religious theory of atonement is the moral and emotional crux of an argument that is styled as dispassionate legal analysis. In fact passages of this executive opinion can barely contain their disgust for the petitioner. The statement of facts recounts the murders, closing with the haunting image of Williams laughing for six minutes straight when talking about the sound the victim made as he was shot. The statement plays up the racial animosity in the murders, recalling when Williams referred to his Chinese victims as "Buddha-heads." These details aren't necessary to the governor's point, except to set up his unspoken standard - that it's doubtful anyone could have redeemed himself from these crimes. They are designed to provoke outrage, creating the right political atmosphere to allow the state to respond to Williams' barbarism with its own. The statement further addresses what was thought to be Williams' strongest argument - that he would do more good for society alive than dead. Courts engage in this kind of utility analysis all the time. Some judges, like Richard Posner, celebrate it. But courts never directly address the value of a person. They may do so indirectly - rewarding battered women with a special claim to self-defense when they shoot their no-good abusive husbands, for example - but a court will rarely state, head-on, that a person does or does not have moral worth. Schwarzenegger does so here by blatantly opining that it's unclear whether Williams actually did any good in the world. Children's books? Mentioned and dismissed. Nobel Peace Prize nominations? Relegated to a footnote that states they have no persuasive weight. Like a punch to the stomach, Schwarzenegger reasons, again in the impersonal third person, "the continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one to question the efficacy of Williams' message." Williams couldn't stop the war he helped to start, says the governor, and so he must die. Through clemency, our justice system occasionally redeems itself for mistakes it has made. But it presents a philosophical dilemma: Do we think the individuals it convicts are similarly capable? Because juries cannot revisit cases 20 or 30 years after handing down death sentences, only governors (and the president) are given the power to venture the answers to these questions. By addressing such questions, as a court and not as a king, Schwarzenegger finally gave himself, and maybe other elected leaders, permission to start engaging these issues again, even if they need to don imaginary judicial robes to do so. (source: Slate.com--Judy Coleman is a 3rd-year student at Yale Law School. She is organizing the Yale Law Journal's Symposium on Executive Power, to be held this March. ************* Gov. Speaks Out On Williams' Execution By Nannette Miranda For the 1st time since denying death row inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency, Governor Arnold Schwarzengger is speaking out about his decision. Given today's comments by the governor, clemency is likely to be rare under this administration. In the meantime, more calls in Sacramento today to reform California's death penalty. This time to put inmates to death sooner. In his 1st public appearance since denying clemency to Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the governor said the evidence of guilt was too overwhelming to commute the inmate's death sentence. Williams' anti-gang crusade behind bars apparently did not come into play. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-California: "There was nothing there that made me go against the will of the people, or the law, or the opinions of all the judges in the courts, all the way up to the top." Williams was actually on death row for nearly a quarter of a century, before he was put to death Tuesday. California's next execution is that of convicted killer Clarence Ray Allen on January 17th. The 76-year-old has been on death row for as along as Williams. He's asking for mercy because he's blind, wheelchair-bound and has heart problems. St. Senator Roy Ashburn will introduce a bill next month that will triple the size of the California Habeas Corpus Resource Center from 45 lawyers to 127. He says that will speed up the appeals process and shorten most inmates time on death row to 2 years, avoiding a decades long stay like Williams or Allen. St. Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield: "How many people whose lives he touched negatively had an opportunity to know any peace, any justice, any conclusion? It's certainly unfair to the person who has committed the crimes and more unfair to the victims and their families." The governor has denied clemency to 3 death row inmates based heavily on evidence. If his track record continues, it's unlikely requests for mercy will save Allen's life. In fact, clemency has not been granted in this state since 1967. Michael Satris, Allen's clemency attorney: "The recent history of governors concerns me greatly in their failure to recognize the value of clemency to implement in cases that cry out for it." (source: KGO TV news) ILLINOIS: Court OKs appeal of death sentence that was commuted by Ryan The Illinois Supreme Court today allowed an appeal to move forward even though it involves a death sentence that has already been lifted. A Boone County woman named Bernina Mata was sentenced to die for a 1998 murder, but former Governor George Ryan commuted her sentence to life in prison before he left office 3 years ago. Mata was appealing her conviction at the time. The courts threw out her appeal when her death sentence was commuted, saying the issue was now moot. But the Supreme Court disagrees. It says Mata should get a chance to prove she was never eligible for the death penalty in the first place. If she succeeds, she could spend 20 to 60 years in prison instead of the life sentence imposed by Ryan. (source: Associated Press) VIRGINIA: Appeals Court Upholds Suffolk Man's Death Sentence A federal appeals court today upheld a Suffolk man's death sentence in the slaying of his former girlfriend nearly 8 years ago. A three-judge panel of the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected claims by 42-year-old Dexter Lee Vinson that his trial attorneys had a conflict of interest because one was suing the other for employment discrimination at the time. The appeals court also rejected claims by Vinson that his constitutional right to a competent defense was violated and that the prosecution improperly withheld evidence. Vinson was convicted of capital murder, carjacking, abduction with intent to defile and sexual penetration with an inanimate object in the 1977 slaying of Angela Felton. (source: WTKR News)
