April 5
ALABAMA:
Prosecutors Will 'Answer To God' For Putting Innocent Man On Death Row
Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, spent half his life on Alabama's death row, sentenced
to die for 2 1985 murders that for decades he insisted he did not commit.
Over 28 years, the outside world changed while Hinton spent his days largely in
a 5-by-8-foot prison cell. Children grew up. His mother died. His hair turned
gray. Inmates he knew were escorted off to the electric chair or the
lethal-injection gurney.
He was set free Friday after new ballistics tests contradicted the only
evidence - an analysis of crime-scene bullets - that connected Hinton to the
slayings.
"They had every intention of executing me for something I didn't do," Hinton
said outside the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham.
Friends and family members rushed to embrace Hinton after his lawyers escorted
him outside of the jail on Good Friday morning. His sisters wiped tears, saying
"Thank you, Lord," as they wrapped their arms around their brother.
Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson, who waged a 16-year fight
for Hinton's release, said while the day was joyous, the case was tragic.
"Not only did he lose his life, he lived a life in solitary confinement on
death row, condemned in a 5-by-8 cell where the state was trying to kill him
every day," Stevenson said.
Hinton was convicted of killing 2 fast- food-restaurant workers - John Davidson
and Thomas Wayne Vason - during separate 1985 robberies at Mrs. Winner's and
Captain D's restaurants in Birmingham. Investigators became interested in him
after a survivor at a third restaurant robbery picked Hinton out of a photo
lineup.
The only evidence linking him to the slayings were bullets that state experts
then said had markings that matched a .38-caliber revolver that belonged to
Hinton's mother. There were no fingerprints or eyewitness testimony.
Stevenson said a defense analysis during appeal showed that bullets did not
match the gun. He then tried in vain for years to persuade the state of Alabama
to re-examine the evidence.
A breakthrough came last year when he won a new trial after the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled Hinton's trial counsel "constitutionally deficient." His defense
lawyer wrongly thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to rebut
the state's case. The only expert willing to take the job at that price - a
1-eyed civil engineer with little ballistics training who admitted he had
trouble operating the microscope - was obliterated on cross-examination.
The Jefferson County district attorney's office on Wednesday moved to drop the
case after their forensics experts were unable to match crime-scene bullets to
the gun.
Stevenson called Hinton's conviction a "case study" in what is wrong with the
American justice system.
"We have a system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty then if you
are poor and innocent and this case proves it. We have a system that is
compromised by racial bias and this case proves it. We have a system that
doesn't do the right thing when the right thing is apparent," Stevenson said.
"Prosecutors should have done this testing years ago."
The Alabama attorney general's office declined to comment.
Chief Deputy District Attorney John R. Bowers, Jr. said 3 experts with the
Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences examined the bullets ahead of the
anticipated retrial in the case.
Bowers said all 3 reached the same conclusion: They couldn't conclusively
determine whether or not any of those bullets were fired from the revolver
taken from Hinton's home, or even if they had been fired from the same gun.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Hinton is the 152nd person
exonerated from death row since 1973 and the 6th in Alabama.
As he left the jail, Hinton said he would pray for the victims' families as he
has done for the past 30 years. They have suffered a "miscarriage of justice"
as well, he said.
He had less kind words for those involved in his conviction.
"When you think you are high and mighty and you are above the law, you don't
have to answer to nobody. But I got news for them, everybody who played a part
in sending me to death row, you will answer to God," Hinton said.
Hinton planned to put flowers on his mother's grave. After that comes the
adjustment to the modern world after spending nearly 1/2 of his life in
solitary confinement.
"The world is a very different place than what it was 30 years ago," Stevenson
said. "There was no Internet. There was no email. I gave him an iPhone this
morning. He's completely mystified by that."
(source: Associated Press)
************************
Does Alabama have the guts to put grandma to death?
Death penalty advocates in Alabama are going to have to put up or shut up now.
The case of Joyce Hardin Garrard will either reinforce the authenticity of
their firmly held beliefs or expose them as 2-faced blowhards.
Garrard was found guilty on March 26 of capital murder in the death of her
9-year-old granddaughter, Savannah Hardin, by forcing the child to run around
her backyard until she literally dropped dead from exhaustion in 2012.
Savannah's alleged crime was eating a candy bar and then lying about it. To
punish her, Grandma made the girl run for hours without a break.
Garrard screamed at Savannah to keep running while carrying sticks and pieces
of firewood.
The prosecution did not recommend the death penalty. Garrard's defense
attorneys did not push for a sentence of life without parole.
But the jurors split on what penalty Garrard should receive. 5 wanted her to be
executed. 7 preferred a life sentence.
How could this be? This seems counterintuitive in Alabama, where capital
punishment is popular and is widely regarded as an effective deterrent to
crime.
People who have argued loudly for executions in prior murder cases seem to be
shrinking from sending Grandma to her final resting place, even a Grandma who
abused her 9-year-old granddaughter to death.
3 other women are on death row in Alabama, all for killing their own children.
Are they somehow more worthy of execution than Garrard?
Prosecutor Jimmie Harp said he would respect the jury's decision and not push
for the death penalty.
But in talking with a local television reporter, Harp mentioned Garrard's
gender and lack of a prior criminal record as mitigating factors in the case.
Interestingly, he did not mention her age. She is 50 years old, somewhat young
for a grandmother. Does Harp think she's too young to be put to death?
Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, Alabama judges have
overridden jury verdicts in murder cases 111 times. In 101 of those cases, the
judge threw out the jury's recommended life sentence and replaced it with
death.
That's what might happen in the Garrard case. Judge Billy Ogletree will make
that decision on May 11.
I'm not arguing for or against the death penalty in this case. But I'm not
surprised that people who would be demanding the death penalty if the killer
were male, young or black are waffling when it comes to a 50-year-old white
woman.
Ironically, these are the same people who are dismissive of anti-death penalty
activists when they bemoan the unfair and uneven application of capital
punishment.
This is what comes of slavishly dogmatic adherence to a philosophy without some
rational assessment of the pros and cons.
In 1999, talk show host Phil Donahue sarcastically proposed airing a
state-sponsored execution on live television to find out whether Americans
would have the guts to watch what they say they want to happen.
How many people in Alabama have the guts to stick a needle in Grandma's arm?
(source: Column, Gina Logue----Murfreesboro Post)
LOUISIANA:
Capital punishment a Caddo Parish cottage industry in Louisiana
If it weren't for Caddo Parish, capital punishment would have been largely
phased out in Louisiana by now.
And Caddo largely owes its pre-eminence to just 2 prosecutors, Dale Cox and
Hugo Holland. Of the 8 death sentences handed down in the last 5 years, Cox
takes credit for 4 and Holland for 2. Such numbers suggest they approach their
grisly duty with relish. Indeed Cox, who is chief assistant district attorney
up there, recently said it is a shame that executions aren't more frequent.
The occasion for that heartwarming pronouncement was a recent letter to the
editor in the Shreveport Times from Marty Stroud, who, 30 years ago, occupied
the same position in the DA???s office as Cox does now. In that capacity,
Stroud managed to have Glenn Ford convicted of 1st-degree murder.
Fortunately for Ford, and for Stroud, the state is much better at imposing the
death sentence than at carrying it out. Ford was released from death row last
year after new evidence established his innocence. In his letter, Stroud called
for the abolition of the death penalty, calling it "barbaric," and apologized
to Ford, who, he averred, deserved to be paid for all his years in hellish
confinement.
Several days later, a state judge denied Ford's request for compensation. Not
that it will make much difference to Ford, because he is dying of lung cancer
and is probably way past expecting a fair shake in Louisiana.
It took Cox 10 months to sign off on Ford's release after evidence surfaced
showing the conviction was a mistake. While Ford may have regarded that delay
as excessive, Cox is evidently a patient man. "Every effort was made" to verify
the new information, he said, suggesting that Ford was out of there pretty much
in a jiffy. "It concerned me the most that we handled it timely. Don't sit on
this another year or 2. You can outthink yourself on this stuff," Cox said.
While Stroud's views on the death penalty have come full circle, so have Cox's.
It is a long time since he was opposed to it, however, and he is not about to
change his mind again just because Ford has joined Louisiana's long line of
exonerated death row inmates.
Cox agrees with Stroud that capital punishment is "state-assisted revenge." But
whereas that is one reason Stroud is for abolition, it is precisely why Cox
takes the opposite view. Cox does not believe the death penalty is a deterrent,
because we allow the condemned to linger too long. He just thinks society is
entitled to take its revenge and is being short-changed these days.
"I think we need to kill more people," he said. He believes "we're going the
wrong way with the death penalty; we need it more than ever, and we're using it
less now." He and Holland have certainly done their best to keep the executions
coming.
Holland is no longer on the DA's staff in Caddo. He and another assistant, Leah
Hall, who was also on the prosecution team in 4 of the successful capital
cases, were fired in 2012 after obtaining a slew of automatic rifles from the
Federal Property Assistance Agency to be used in the course of highly hazardous
- but imaginary - joint operations with police and sheriff's departments.
Holland and Hall remain in the prosecution game in various Louisiana
jurisdictions. Hall last year pulled a gun on a colleague in the Claiborne
Parish DA's office. Holland is currently under investigation by the state bar's
Disciplinary Board for failing to turn over evidence favorable to David Brown,
1 of 5 Angola lifers tried in 2012 for the murder of a guard. Brown's death
sentence was thrown out late last year.
Cox, meanwhile, remains much possessed by death in Caddo Parish and is fond of
invoking Scripture when urging juries to show no mercy. Such is his dedication
that he is sometimes accused of dirty pool; when the state Supreme Court hears
the appeal of Lamondre Tucker next month, for instance, attorneys are expected
to argue that Cox tainted the sentencing phase with a false account of an
earlier shooting.
It is a life-or-death issue such as the court would seldom confront, if Caddo
Parish weren't so out of step.
(source: The New Orleans Advocate)
ARKANSAS:
Arkansas law about the death penalty creates confusion
The Arkansas Governor signs into law new protocols for carrying out the death
penalty.
However, there's some confusion.
"Without question, there's going to be litigation," said attorney, Bill James.
James, a Little Rock attorney, has defended around ten death penalty cases and
counts himself among the lawyers who'd like to see capital punishment gone.
"There are some very smart lawyers against the death penalty that are going to
do everything they can to stop it," said James.
After legislation passed setting new death penalty protocols, the Attorney
General's Office came up with a list of 8 death row inmates who've exhausted
their legal options and are ready to be executed.
"There's nothing about what the Legislature has done that's going to stop the
litigation," said James.
One of the main points of contention will be the drugs used for the lethal
injection.
New legislation gives the Arkansas Department of Correction options of using a
barbiturate or a 3 drug cocktail.
The Attorney General's Office says it's waiting on ADC to pick which one it'll
use before sending the list of 8 to the Governor to set execution dates.
However, ADC says it's waiting for the Attorney's General's Office to review
new legislation and advise on how to proceed.
As the state stumbles to find its way forward on this controversial issue,
death penalty opponents are hoping something stops it.
"That would certainly be our fear now that we would start seeing executions
carried out in the state of Arkansas," said Stephen Copley.
Copley is the Chair of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The new legislation also contains a clause granting suppliers of lethal
injection drugs to act anonymously.
(source: arklatexhomepage.com)
*****************
New Protocol Created For Lethal Injections
A new law passed by the legislature sets protocols for carrying out the death
penalty in Arkansas.
Many, including the Arkansas Department of Corrections, are concerned about
potential lawsuits as the state moves forward with lethal injections.
One of the main points of contention will be the drugs used for the lethal
injection.
The new legislation gives the Arkansas Department of Correction options of
using a barbiturate or a 3-drug cocktail.
The attorney general's office says it's waiting on ADC to pick which one it
will use before sending the list of 8 to the governor to set execution dates.
But ADC says it's waiting for the attorney general's office to review the
legislation and advise on how to proceed.
"We are aware that defense attorneys already have drafted a lawsuit that they
plan to file when this bill is enacted," ADC spokeswoman Cathy Frye said in an
email Friday. "We therefore have no immediate plans to develop a protocol."
As the state stumbles to find its way forward on this controversial issue,
death penalty opponents are hoping something stops it.
"That would certainly be our fear now that we would start seeing executions
carried out in the state of Arkansas," said Stephen Copley, chair of the
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The new legislation also contains a clause granting anonymity to suppliers of
lethal injection drugs. However, the ADC still may have trouble finding them.
Many drug companies refuse to sell for use in executions, and this week the
American Pharmacists Association told members no to sell for that purpose.
(source: localmemphis.com)
WASHINGTON:
Accused killer of 2 in Everett waiting for prosecutor's decision
A man accused of gunning down 2 people outside an Everett house won't know
until June whether Snohomish County prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
Tye Patrick Fleischer's attorneys have until late May to provide information to
Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Roe to persuade him not to seek
their client's execution.
Fleischer, 37, is charged with 2 counts of aggravated murder and 1 count of
attempted 1st-degree murder. Prosecutors allege that Fleischer opened fire on
Feb. 13 and shot 3 people in the driveway of a house in the 2400 block of 75th
Street SE.
The house has been the site of 2 other deadly shootings since 2008.
Kevin Odneal, who lived in the home with his mother, and Irene Halverson were
killed. A 2nd woman was shot in the pelvis and survived the gunfire.
Prosecutors alleged that Fleischer ambushed the 3 and later confessed to being
responsible for the violence.
"OK, so I am a junkie. I got clean. My kids deserve a better father. I am just
taking a couple of pieces of (expletive) that (expletive) hurt and kill people
out while I'm doing it because I know these people really well and I know these
people have done it," Fleischer allegedly told a 911 dispatcher after the
shooting.
Detectives believe Fleischer, a convicted felon, was good friends with the
34-year-old woman who survived the shooting. She and Odneal, 50, were in a
relationship. Halverson, 42, had stopped by the house shortly before the
gunfire.
Odneal had been at the center of numerous drug and stolen-property
investigations. Detectives were at the home in December investigating an
illegal chop-shop operation.
Fleischer surrendered to police at Forest Park after they reportedly talked him
out of killing himself. They found a semi-automatic 9mm handgun in his van.
If Fleischer is convicted as charged, the only possible punishments are life
behind bars or execution.
Roe has said a moratorium on the death penalty imposed by Gov. Jay Inslee will
not play in his decision.
(source: heraldnet.com)
USA:
Cost of Colorado shooting case top $2.2 million before trial
Public spending to investigate and prosecute Colorado theater shooting
defendant James Holmes has surpassed $2.2 million, weeks before opening
statements in his trial, according to documents obtained by The Associated
Press.
That figure does not include how much it has cost to defend Holmes, who is
represented by the Office of the State Public Defender because he cannot afford
private attorneys.
The number is neither complete nor exorbitant, said Hollis Whitson, a Denver
defense attorney who specializes in appellate law and who has studied the costs
of a Colorado death penalty case in terms of days spent in court. But, she
added, tallying the total cost of a death penalty case in dollars is difficult
if not impossible.
"In order to have a death penalty trial, even if you're never going to execute
a single person, there's an enormous cost to maintaining the machinery of
death," which includes expert witnesses, specialists, private attorneys and
others involved.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of killing 12
people and injuring 70 on July 20, 2012. Jury selection began in January, and
opening statements are set for April 27.
Holmes' lawyers acknowledge he was the gunman, but they say he was in the grips
of a psychotic episode. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Officials in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where the massacre occurred, say they
have spent more than $928,500 on the case. That includes more than $517,000 in
overtime pay for police and other city employees.
John Schneebeck, business manager for the Aurora Police Department, said
Wednesday that the total includes other city departments, but he said a list of
those departments and a breakdown of their share wasn't available.
More than $200,000 of the overtime was for police officers who responded to the
theater and to Holmes' apartment, where explosives were found, he said. The
U.S. Department of Justice reimbursed that expense, Schneebeck said.
Prosecutors previously said they had incurred more than $920,000 in costs, not
including salaries, which would have been paid anyway. Court officials have
said they have spent $435,000, mostly on courtroom security.
The $2.2 million figure highlights a debate over whether Holmes' public
defenders should have to disclose their costs. A bill to require public
defenders to reveal such costs failed recently in the Colorado Legislature.
Public defenders are rarely required to release those costs, according to the
National Association of Public Defense. They cite attorney-client privilege and
argue that disclosure would unfairly tip prosecutors about how much is being
spent on expert witnesses and investigative services.
The office of Colorado Public Defender Doug Wilson denies open-records requests
for almost any information, not just inquiries about specific cases, according
to state Democratic Rep. Rhonda Fields and Republican Rep. Polly Lawrence, who
sponsored the failed disclosure bill.
Wilson's office currently has an $83 million operating budget to cover 160,000
cases, according to its website, which does not provide further details. The
office has cited a gag order, attorney-client privilege and state Supreme Court
rules for declining to disclose its expenses to the AP.
The FBI and the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department have refused to release
their expenses in the case. The FBI said releasing its costs could interfere
with an active case. Sheriff David Walcher cited security reasons, noting
Holmes is still being held at the county jail.
Other federal, state and local agencies have spent at least $1.6 million in
costs directly attributable to the Holmes case, according to records released
by the agencies.
Costs for the state judiciary system include grants for courtroom security;
printing and mailing; office equipment; and 10 new courtroom chairs to
accommodate the 12 jurors and 12 alternates who will hear the case.
(source: Associated Press)
**************************
Justice Kennedy's Plea to Congress
Members of the Supreme Court rarely speak publicly about their views on the
sorts of issues that are likely to come before them. So it was notable when
Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer sat before a House appropriations
subcommittee recently and talked about the plight of the American criminal
justice system.
Justice Kennedy did not mince his words. "In many respects, I think it's
broken," he said.
It was a good reminder of the urgency of the problem, and a stark challenge to
a Congress that remains unable to pass any meaningful sentencing reform,
despite the introduction of multiple bipartisan bills over the past 2 years.
The main topic of the subcommittee hearing was the Supreme Court's budget, but
a question on prison overcrowding from Representative Steve Womack, Republican
of Arkansas, gave Justice Kennedy a chance to lay out his views.
"The corrections system is one of the most overlooked, misunderstood
institutions we have in our entire government," he said. He chastised the legal
profession for being focused only on questions of guilt and innocence, and not
what comes after. "We have no interest in corrections," he said. "Nobody looks
at it."
That is not entirely fair; many lawyers and legal scholars have devoted their
careers to studying the phenomenon of mass incarceration in America and to
improving intolerable prison conditions. But Justice Kennedy was right that all
too often decisions about sentencing and corrections are made without
meaningful consideration of their long-term costs and benefits, or of their
effect on the millions of people who spend decades behind bars.
"This idea of total incarceration just isn't working," he said. "And it's not
humane."
Justice Kennedy has often talked about human dignity in his nearly 3 decades on
the court, and that principle figured into his assessment of one of the most
widely used control techniques in modern American prisons: solitary
confinement. The practice "literally drives men mad," he said, describing 1
case the justices heard recently involving a man who had been held in isolation
for 25 years.
One obvious way to end this practice would be for the court to ban it under the
Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. Justice
Kennedy - whose regular role as the swing vote on a closely divided court gives
him tremendous power - has a mixed record on that amendment. Several times he
has voted to uphold breathtakingly long sentences for nonviolent crimes. For
example, in 2 2003 cases, he joined the 5-member majority that let stand
sentences of 25 years to life and 50 years to life for men convicted in
California of thefts totaling a few hundred dollars.
Justice Kennedy's response to such manifestly unjust results is that fixing
prison sentences is the job of lawmakers, not the courts. But that too easily
absolves the justices of their constitutional responsibility. The four justices
dissenting in the California cases argued that those grossly disproportionate
sentences violated the Eighth Amendment.
In more recent years, Justice Kennedy has increasingly invoked the amendment in
sentencing cases, as he did in writing the 2008 decision prohibiting the death
penalty as a punishment for child rape, and in 2010 and 2012 when he voted to
bar sentences of life without parole for juveniles in most circumstances. He
also relied on it in a 2011 decision ordering California to reduce overcrowding
in its prisons, a condition that threatened inmates??? physical and mental
health.
Justice Breyer, who before joining the court helped design the modern federal
sentencing guidelines in the 1980s, told the committee of his own concerns
about the justice system, and in particular was sharply critical of mandatory
minimum sentences. Such sentences, he told the representatives, are "a terrible
idea."
The justices were right to lay these issues directly at Congress's door. They
can accomplish only so much on their own. Meanwhile, states from Texas to
California to New York to Mississippi have been reforming their prisons and
their sentencing laws for several years now, with overwhelmingly positive
results. Now it is Congress's turn to reform the unjustly harsh and ineffective
sentencing laws it passed in the first place.
(source: Editorial, New York Times)
*******************
Death penalty wars with conscience
In his March 27 column, Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote of Louisiana's release of a
30-year resident of death row. Now that he knows of exculpatory evidence, the
Louisiana lead prosecutor wrote a nicely-worth-reading Shreveport Occasions
column, deploring his personal lack of the individual and qualified qualities
important to seek death. "Had I been additional inquisitive, possibly the proof
would have come to light years ago. But I wasn't, and my inaction contributed
to the miscarriage of justice in this matter," Marty Stroud wrote.
Also in March, Mark L. Earley Sr., a former Virginia state senator and lawyer
basic, and a a single-time conservative candidate for governor, wrote in the
University of Richmond Law Review an write-up titled: "A pink Cadillac, an IQ
of 63, and a 14-year-old from South Carolina: why I can no longer assistance
the death penalty." Earley recounts three death penalty prosecutions that were
eventually reversed, such as a 70-year-old South Carolina prosecution which led
to the execution of a wrongly convicted youngster. Earley recognizes the close
to-150 men and women who have been released from death row nationwide due to
the fact 1973, some by means of DNA exonerations, and some for findings of a
lack of proof. In each of these cases of wrongful conviction, a prosecutor
filed a notice of intent to seek death.
Right after decades as a prosecutor and defense lawyer, watching and listening
and creating errors, I argue that the death penalty should really have no
additional than a tiny spot in our justice system, to be initiated only by an
educated, knowledgeable and wise committee of prosecutors. Extremely couple of
folks possess the requisite levels of education, knowledge and wisdom to
reliably participate in a committee choice of who must reside or die. Quite
handful of of these really few people turn out to be prosecutors. If we ever
come to recognize an inability to reliably type committees of appropriately
qualified prosecutors, we must abolish the death penalty. Whether or not we are
already there ought to be the debate, but the Louisiana lead prosecutor clearly
describes to his deep sorrow the difficulty of acquiring such prosecutors.
I assert that no one possesses the important qualities to individually decide
who should reside or die. I accept that when I was a chief prosecutor so
extended ago that I, also, may well have lacked the qualities needed to jointly
make such decisions. When given notice of openings in the homicide unit, I
declined to apply. Perhaps I knew then what I know now, but I admit that
memories of these old choices likely have been affected by subsequent
encounter.
When some of our forefathers met to declare independence, they were perceived
by fellow rebels as these greatest able to draft a declaration. When other
rebels met to sign the Articles of Confederation as representatives of
newly-independent states, they were perceived as those very best able to
assessment the articles. When a group of citizens convened to draft a
constitution as representatives of confederated states, they have been
perceived as those greatest capable to draft either a constitution or new
articles. When community delegates have been elected for ratification
conventions, they have been perceived as those most effective able to accept or
reject the federal constitution.
At every step in the creation of independent government, groups of our
forefathers met for reasoned discussion and compromise, but couple of served
for more than a single step. The idea that any a single person was sufficiently
educated, knowledgeable and wise adequate to individually draft, sign, present
or ratify these documents was foreign to those men it ought to be so to us
nowadays. Beware the claims of any generation of the quickly sensible person he
or she is not.
(source: Column; Ray Warren is a defense attorney from Port Orange----Daytona
Beach News-Journal)
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