July 30 CALIFORNIA: DEATH ROW COST OVERRUN: $40 MILLION-----New San Quentin housing also could run out of room, report says The cost of new housing for San Quentin State Prison's growing number of death row inmates will exceed estimates by nearly $40 million, and the compound could run out of space soon after it is completed, according to a state auditor's report released Tuesday. The auditor's new $395.5 million price tag for the project, which is expected to be completed by 2011, is new bad news for a state facing billions of dollars in budget shortfalls. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-controlled Legislature are still trying to hammer out a spending plan for the fiscal year that began nearly a month ago. California's prison system is already a big-ticket item, representing about 10 % of roughly $100 billion general fund spending. And with severe inmate overcrowding and claims of inadequate health care for prisoners, a federal receiver appointed by a judge in 2006 has asked the Legislature for an additional $7 billion to get the prison system to run adequately. "This is a giant black hole," said Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, chairwoman of the Senate public safety committee. "It's a never-ending gravitational force that'll continue to suck away money that should be spent on local government, education, health and human services and higher education." Seth Unger, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the latest figures for the San Quentin project are estimates at best. He added that the report "does validate that California needs a newly constructed, modern facility to house our condemned inmate population." The new complex would house a maximum of 1,152 inmates, providing adequate capacity until 2035 if most inmates are housed two per cell, the report said. But if plans for double-celling are challenged in court and the state loses, San Quentin could run out of space in 3 years. "We would simply go back to square one after spending all this money," said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, whose district includes San Quentin. Since the state Legislature reinstated the death penalty in 1977, there have been 14 inmates executed, starting with Robert Alton Harris in 1992, while the number of condemned inmates has risen steadily to the current number at 674. The vast majority of those prisoners - 635 - are held at San Quentin; 15 are held at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, and the rest are being held near courthouses, in long-term medical care facilities or in other states. Plans for new housing for San Quentin's death row inmates got its initial boost five years ago when state prison officials requested $220 million and the state Legislature approved the spending. New facilities were needed, prison officials said, because the 3 existing units - built in 1930, 1934 and 1960 - don't meet the state's standard for maximum-security facilities. Prison officials later said construction costs would be far greater as a result of rising prices of construction materials, design changes and unforeseen problems such as cleaning up contaminated soil. The corrections department also reduced the number of housing units from eight to six, which reduced the number of cells from 1,024 to 768. Despite the smaller size of the complex, the corrections department placed its latest construction cost estimate at $356 million, with the funds to be raised by selling lease-revenue bonds. California's Public Works Board would borrow the money to build the facilities and lease the building to the corrections department, whose rent payment would be used to repay the bond debt. But the state auditor concluded that prison officials underestimated the cost of construction by nearly $40 million. In addition, the report said operating costs for the facility would require an additional $1.2 billion over 20 years. "It looks very, very likely that we would be forced to build additional facilities whether we like it or not," Huffman said. "Frankly, I think we ought to be stepping back and taking a look at all of our alternatives in a comprehensive way." Huffman argued that the state should consider housing death row inmates in other areas of the state, given its plans to build more prisons. Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, said he has little doubt that the corrections department has underestimated the cost of building the new housing units. But the lawmaker, who supports death penalty, said the San Quentin project is the kind of prison infrastructure work that the state has ignored too long. "Costs are going up because we don't pay attention to our prisons on a regular basis," Spitzer said. "We've seen prisons largely as a place where you send people and don't think about them. Now, the chicken's come home to roost." Condemned in California 1,152--Inmate capacity in planned new death row housing at San Quentin 674--Number of California's condemned inmates 635--Death Row inmates at San Quentin State Prison 14--California inmates executed since death penalty reinstated in 1977 3--Years until new Death Row housing is expected to be completed [source: Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ] (source: San Francisco Chronicle) MARYLAND: Numbers, personal stories color hearing on death penalty Statistics reveal racial and jurisdictional disparities in Maryland's use of the death penalty, university researchers said Monday during the 1st hearing of a state commission on capital punishment. The panel heard nearly 5 hours of testimony from experts and advocates on both sides of the issue, which has stymied the General Assembly in recent years. Proponents of the death penalty argued that capital punishment can be a deterrent, especially for prison inmates who are serving a life sentence and have nothing to lose by killing a correctional officer. "Correctional officers are one group in society that has no protection without the death penalty," said Michael Schaefer of Baltimore, a former prosecutor and former San Diego city councilman. Sen. Alexander X. Mooney (R-Dist. 3) of Urbana used the same argument in 2007 when he cast the vote that led to a committee stalemate on a death penalty repeal bill, effectively killing the bill. Gov. Martin OMalley (D) testified in favor of the repeal, which failed to receive a committee vote this year. Death penalty supporters were outnumbered Monday by repeal advocates, including several clergy members. "This is an ethical and moral issue," said Brother Gerard Sullivan, a member of the Roman Catholic Marian Society who has worked as a prison chaplain in California and with inmates serving life sentences in Missouri. "My experience was that people can change," he said. "I strongly ask for changes in our correctional system that will help these men change themselves. Right now, our correctional system is a housing system and it doesn't help people very much." Maryland has had a de facto moratorium on executions since December 2006, when the Court of Appeals ruled that the state's lethal injection protocols were adopted without proper public input or legislative oversight. In May, OMalley directed Public Safety Secretary Gary D. Maynard to begin drafting new lethal injection regulations. The rules will not be completed before the commission is scheduled to make its recommendations on Dec. 15. The commission is Maryland's latest look at capital punishment. In 1996, a task force appointed by Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) found a pattern of racial bias in death sentencing and recommended a study. The study, by researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, was released in 2003. It found that killings of whites by African Americans and homicides in Baltimore County were the most likely to become capital cases. Raymond Paternoster, a criminology professor who was the study's principal investigator, presented statistics that showed prosecutors in Baltimore County were 13 times more likely to seek the death penalty than those in Baltimore city and 5 times more likely than those in Montgomery County. A New Jersey study also found disparities among counties, Deborah T. Poritz, a former chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, told the panel on Monday. "It is difficult to sympathize with a cold-blooded killer, but it makes no sense that a murderer in one county is subject to the death penalty when an identical crime would be treated in an entirely different way if it were committed in another county," Poritz said. New Jersey repealed its death penalty in December. The day's most emotional testimony came from 2 men who turned their brothers in for a capital crime. David Kaczynski said he and his wife, Linda, wanted to do the right thing when David first suspected his brother, Ted, might be the infamous Unabomber. "Yet because of the death penalty we were faced with a choice that any decision we made could lead to someone's death," Kaczynski told the panel. Ted Kaczynski killed 3 people and wounded 23 others, but was spared the death penalty, his brother said. But Bill Babbitt's brother, Manny, was executed in California in 1999 for killing a Sacramento woman. David Kaczynski compared the advantages his brother had a Harvard education and $3 million defense by the federal government over Babbitt a Vietnam veteran with only a grade-school education who had a poor defense by a court-appointed lawyer. "I was a supporter of the death penalty," Bill Babbitt said. "I voted for it consistently before it came knocking on my door." Babbitt and Kaczynski were suggested as expert witnesses by commission member Kirk Bloodsworth, who sat on Maryland's death row for 8 years until DNA evidence exonerated him. (source: Business Gazette) FLORIDA: The State Attorney is seeking the death penalty against Gary Michael Hilton. He is charged with the murder of Crawfordville resident, Cheryl Dunlap. She was found dead in December of 2007. The State Attorneys Office filed the notice in court on Monday. Hilton appeared for the first time in a Leon County on Monday and waived his right to a speedy trial. On Friday, a judge will hear a gag order motion from the defense as well as a review of whether the state attorney carried out the extradition process correctly. (source: WCTV News) USA: D-Day Approaching for Overflowing Death Row A high-level California commission has sounded the death knell for the state's "dysfunctional" death penalty system, calling for an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars or the closing down of the state's death chamber. "The time has come to address death penalty reform in a frank and honest way," the commission said in its 145-page report at the end of a 4-year-long study. "The witnesses described a system that is close to collapse," the study said, agreeing that it was "broken" and "a hollow promise" that required extensive reform. A yearly injection of 95 million dollars would be required to top up the current annual budget of more than 100 million dollars. The state would also need to spend about 400 million dollars on a new death row prison to relieve the chronic overcrowding at the 150-year-old San Quentin. The state was in a serious fiscal crisis and lawmakers were unlikely to agree to spend millions more on death penalty reform, said Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC). "The main recommendation is to spend more on lawyers. And there is no more money," Minsker told IPS. "I think this isn't the beginning of the end, it's the end of the end." But even after implementing all the study's recommendations, it would take 5 executions a month for 12 years to clear the "backlog" of 670 inmates awaiting execution, it noted. The size of California's death row -- the largest in the country -- was partly due to the state's 21 capital crimes, more than in any other state. But another reason was that inmates languished for decades on death row waiting for the completion of all appeals. A shortage of free, publicly-funded lawyers was at the root of the delay in hearings, the report said. All death row inmates were poor and eligible for legal aid. But the state had not adequately funded its offices of public defenders so inmates waited an average of three to five years before being allocated a court-appointed lawyer. Death row prisoners generally filed three major appeals. Executions were scheduled only after all appeal rights have been exhausted. Currently, 79 death row inmates had not been able to file their first appeal because they had not been assigned an attorney, the report stated. The long delay meant that the 13 prisoners executed in California since 1977 spent an average of 17 years on death row, compared to 12 years in other death penalty states. 14 California death row prisoners had committed suicide while waiting for execution. 38 death row inmates had died of natural causes. 70 % of inmates who appealed were granted new trials or hearings, illustrating the high degree of judicial error, the report said. Since 1977, 98 prisoners on California's death row have had their sentences reversed. The average wait before a sentence was reversed by a state court was 11 years. The commission also studied the cost of replacing the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole. This would slash the current spending of more than 100 million dollars to 11.5 million. Elizabeth Zitrin of Death Penalty Focus in California told IPS any new spending could be better used for "crime prevention, cold cases, hiring more police officers, highway patrol officers and more teachers." The commission did not push for any particular option. But some commissioners felt compelled to attach to the report dissenting opinions and a clarification of views. "California should follow the lead of other civilised societies who have concluded that the death penalty be abolished," one group said. By highlighting the state's delay in providing legal assistance for death row inmates, the report could be used by lawyers to challenge the legality of the Californian death penalty system, Minsker suggested. If a judge ruled in favour of an inmate, the case would shut down the state's death penalty system until it allocated more money for public defenders. "The chief justice of the Supreme Court of California testified before the commission and said if nothing is done the death penalty will collapse under its own weight. If he thinks it's that dysfunctional, how long will it be before a court intervenes on behalf of a prisoner?" Minsker asked. A de facto moratorium on executions is currently in place in California due to 3 court challenges to its lethal injection procedures. Abolitionist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Death Penalty Focus (DPF) are already preparing voters for a death penalty ballot question in the next state elections in November 2010, the only legal way to end the death penalty in California. The groups are giving talks and holding workshops on such issues as costs, racial inequities and whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent. "What we're really focused on is how the death penalty impacts their local community. Ten of 58 (state) counties sentence most people to death. We talk about how much these counties cost the others. It's a local issue," Minsker said. 6 people had been exonerated from death row in California. But unlike elsewhere, the issue of innocence was not a big one for California voters, Minsker said. People were worried about the "disastrous" state finances, private health care costs and public education cuts. "That's what is driving voters." The commission's findings on the racial inequities in the application of the death penalty should be a wake-up call for Californians, Minsker said. The report may "hasten changes among other states", added Zitrin. California's decision to appoint a commission to review its death penalty follows a growing trend among the country's remaining death penalty states. Similar commissions are currently at work in Maryland, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee. And grassroots abolition groups in Arkansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Texas and other states are campaigning for their own commissions, according to news reports. In 2007, a state commission in New Jersey recommended the scrapping of its death penalty, making the state the 1st in more than 40 years to outlaw capital punishment. (source: IPS) ************************ DOJ seeks Supreme Court rehearing of child rape death penalty case Officials from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed a motion with the US Supreme Court requesting permission to petition for rehearing in Kennedy v. Louisiana, in which the Court found that a death sentence constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when imposed for a crime of child rape in which the victim was not killed. The majority in the case supported its reasoning by saying that very few states had such laws and that - incorrectly - there were no federal laws allowing the punishment for rape. Shortly afterwards, the DOJ said that it had mistakenly failed to brief the Court on the existence of a military law allowing capital punishment for child rape. The motion, filed Monday, notes: While the United States believes that the Court's decision is incorrect and that the State's law should be upheld under a proper analysis, even if the Court reaches the same result following rehearing, rehearing is warranted to ensure that a material omission in the decisionmaking process has not tainted the Court's decision on a matter of such profound constitutional, moral, and practical importance. Accordingly, the United States urges the Court to grant rehearing. The DOJ motion is highly unusual as groups not party to the original case are usually barred from seeking rehearing. Patrick Kennedy was sentenced to death in Louisiana for raping a minor, 1 of the few remaining crimes where the death of a victim is not required for the death penalty. The Court found that in cases where the victim was not killed, the death penalty fails to serve "deterrent or retributive" purposes invoked for its use. Last week, Louisiana state prosecutors petitioned the Court to reconsider the case, arguing that a 2006 amendment to the Uniform Code of Military Conduct does in fact allow the death penalty at court-martial for rape and child rape. The Court rarely agrees to such petitions, but Louisiana lawyers said a review was warranted because of that oversight. The oversight was first raised by a civilian Air Force lawyer in his blog on military justice. (source: The Jurist) TENNESSEE: Church shooting gives victim pause on death penalty A note on Knoxville's church shooting, and why I have to bring it up now Victims updates The conditions of 2 victims from Sunday's shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church have been upgraded, a 3rd remains serious and a 4th is stable. All 4 are at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. Jack Barnhart, 69, serious Linda Chavez, 41, serious Tammy Sommers, serious Joe Barnhart, 76, stable To donate: A Knoxville relief fund has been set up by the international Unitarian Universalist Association to bring "ministry, spiritual care and practical financial assistance to those affected by the tragedy," the association announced Tuesday. Donations will assist the Tennessee Valley and Westside Unitarian Universalist churches. Both congregations as well as many who were not members of either church came together Sunday at Tennessee Valley to view a children's musical performance when a shooter opened fire, killing 2. Four days after being shot at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, Joe Barnhart's stance on capital punishment has weakened. Barnhart - struck in the back by at least 20 pellets - had previously been a supporter of the death penalty. But the injury to three of his family members, and the death of one of his closest friends, co-author Linda Kraeger, has put doubt in his mind. Kraeger, 61, opposed the death penalty. Now, Barnhart is recalling his friend's moral argument against the death penalty, and he's not sure he can support it. "She might be right," Barnhart said of Kraeger's opposition to capital punishment. But the gunman "should never see the light of day." Barnhart - in stable condition and recovering well at University of Tennessee Medical Center - said he was hit in the back Sunday by shotgun pellets while going to the ground to assist Kraeger. "She was not getting up," he said. Three of Joe Barnhart's other family members were injured by the gunfire, and co-author Kraeger was killed in the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. The other family members are Barnhart's daughter Linda Chavez, 41, and brother, Knoxville homebuilder, Jack Barnhart, 69, who are both also being treated at University of Tennessee Medical Center, and Jack's wife, Betty Barnhart, 71, who was treated and released from UT. The Barnharts and Kraeger were at Sunday's service to watch Chavez' 14-year-old daughter perform in a youth musical. Chavez 6-year-old daughter, Chloe, was seated in her lap when her mother and other family members were shot. Joe Barnhart and his wife, Mary Ann, moved to Knoxville about a year ago after he retired as chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of North Texas, where he had served on the faculty since the 1960s. Joe and Mary Ann Barnhart was recently joined by Chavez and her 2 daughters. Kraeger and her husband also moved from Texas to Knoxville and she was helping care for the Chavez children. She was a member of the Westside Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Farragut but attended the Tennessee Valley congregation in Sequoyah Hills on Sunday to watch the musical performance and was seated with the Barnharts, who were not members. Barnhart, a native Tennessean who graduated Carson-Newman College in 1953, has published numerous books on philosophy and religion and co-authored books with Kraeger, including: "Trust and Treachery: A Historical Novel of Rogers Williams In America," about an early-American minister, and the 2001 "In Search of First-Century Christianity." Among his other books are "The Billy Graham Religion," "Religion and the Challenge of Philosophy," "The Study of Religion and Its Meaning: New Explorations in Light of Karl Popper and Emile Durkheim," "Jim and Tammy: Charismatic Intrigue Inside PTL," "The New Birth: A Naturalistic View of Religious Conversion (with Mary Ann Barnhart)," "The Southern Baptist Holy War," and "Dostoevsky on Evil and Atonement." (source: Knoxville News) ***************************************** Church shooting victim drops death penalty support One of the injured victims of Sunday's church shooting rampage in Tennessee says the tragedy has ended his support for the death penalty. Retired philosophy professor Joe Barnhart spoke Wednesday from a Knoxville hospital, where he's being treated for more than 20 shotgun pellets in his back, neck and head. A longtime friend of his was 1 of 2 people killed and 3 of his family members were among the 6 wounded. The 76-year-old says he used to support capital punishment, but now it doesn't seem the answer for what he calls "this kind of evil." Barnhart says if suspect Jim D. Adkisson is convicted, he should "never see the light of day in an orderly society" again. (source: Associated Press)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----CALIF., MD., FLA., USA, TENN.
Rick Halperin Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:31:20 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
