April 15
TEXAS----impending execution
Man receives death penalty for killing San Antonio police officer
A man sentenced to death for the killing of a San Antonio police officer will
be executed this evening in Huntsville.
Manuel Garza Jr., 34, was arrested for fatally shooting Officer John Anthony
"Rocky" Riojas in February 2001 outside a Northwest Side apartment complex.
Riojas attempted to question Garza, who supplied the officer with a fake name
because he had 5 active arrest warrants at the time. Garza ran away after
giving the fake name, and that's when Riojas chased him down.
Testimony at Garza's trial showed the officer was shot with his own gun in a
struggle as he caught up with Garza, who had tried running away. Garza said he
ran because he had outstanding warrants and didn't want to go back to jail.
No late appeals for Garza are pending in the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court
refused to review his case last year.
My San Antonio reports that during the trial, Garza claimed he was acting in
self defense against an overly aggressive officer.
In one statement he gave to police he had admitted to pulling the trigger but
in another statement he said he hadn't intended to kill Riojas, that the gun
went off accidentally during the struggle.
It took jurors less than an hour to convict Garza and less than 3 to determine
he deserved to die for the crime.
Garza is the 6th convicted killer to be put to death this year in Texas. The
execution is set to take place at 6 p.m.
(source: San Antonio Sun-Times)
**************************
Cop killer: 'I made my peace with God' ---- Manuel Garza to be executed
Wednesday for slaying of SAPD SWAT officer in 2001
San Antonio police officer John Anthony "Rocky" Riojas was shot and killed in
February 2001 while trying to arrest Manuel Garza, 20, following a foot chase.
Riojas had approached Garza and asked for identification and Garza ran.
"I ran, that's where I messed up," Garza said during an interview from Death
Row with KSAT 12 News reporter Paul Venema just 2 weeks before Garza's
scheduled execution.
Garza told how the 2 struggled as Riojas tried to arrest him.
"He pulled his weapon and in the struggle, he's trying to get it back and I'm
trying to keep it away, and it fired," Garza said.
Garza was convicted in October 2002 of capital murder and sentenced to death.
He is scheduled to be executed Wednesday night.
Garza said he feels no remorse calling the shooting "an accident."
"To have remorse you have to kill somebody, and I don't think I did that," he
said. "I think you have to have the intent and want to kill somebody to have
remorse."
SAPD Sgt. Javier Salazar, who worked with Riojas, said that Garza did not kill
"just somebody." Salazar said he killed a man whom Salazar called "a cop's
cop."
"Rocky was just all out when it came to being a cop and fighting crime,"
Salazar said. "He was what I would call a silent professional."
Garza said although he still feels that Riojas' death was an accident, he has
accepted his fate.
"I try not to ponder it too much," he said. "I made my peace with God many
years ago."
(source: KSAT news)
***************
Texas to execute 6th man this year despite low supply of injection drug
Texas is set to put to death a second prisoner in less than a week as the state
ramps up its execution rate despite struggling to source lethal injection
drugs. Manuel Garza is scheduled to die in the Texas state penitentiary on
Wednesday evening for the murder of a Swat officer in San Antonio in 2001.
Last Thursday, Texas officials used the last of a batch of compounded
pentobarbital to execute Kent Sprouse, who also killed a police officer. They
have secured more supplies of the sedative - but only enough to carry out the
three other executions they have planned for April. Another three are scheduled
in May and June.
Garza would be the 6th man executed in Texas this year out of a national total
of 13.
If the country's most active death penalty state cannot find more
pentobarbital, it may be forced to change its protocol and use a different drug
or combination of drugs. However, other states that have resorted to
experimental protocols after similar supply problems have faced lawsuits after
a series of botched lethal injections that have placed the legality of the
process into question.
Garza, now 35, was convicted in 2002 of killing John Riojas. Garza had an
extensive prior criminal record and had outstanding warrants. Riojas chased him
into an apartment complex, where according to testimony, there was a struggle
and Garza grabbed the officer's gun and shot him in the head.
"As I started running, the cop was telling me to stop. I just wanted to get
away. I knew I was gonna go to jail and I didn't want that," Garza said,
according to court documents. He was arrested 2 days later.
He said in a statement to police: "I want to say to the media and to the
officer's family and everybody out there that this wasn't intentional and I
truly think this was the cop's fault. I don't see why he wanted to pull out his
gun. I want to say to the judge and the jury to please do justice and please
have mercy on me and give me the benefit of the doubt. I don't think I should
get death or life in prison. I think I deserve something under that. I need a
lot of help about how to do life. I wasn't raised right."
Garza mounted unsuccessful appeals based on claims that his trial lawyers were
ineffective for failing to establish that jurors were not biased in favour of
the death penalty for cop killers and because they did not introduce witness
testimony raising the possibility that the gunshot was accidental or medical
records suggesting that he was so badly beaten that he might have acted in
self-defence.
Garza also argued that his troubled upbringing in a violent, crime-ridden
family helped explain his antisocial behaviour and criminal history, that he
may have been a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome and that his background should
have been considered as a mitigating factor.
(source: The Guardian)
************************
Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----5
Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----523
Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #
6------------Apr. 15-------------------Manual Garza---------524
7-----------Apr. 23-------------------Richard Vasquez------525
8-----------Apr. 28-------------------Robert Pruett--------526
9-----------May 12--------------------Derrick Charles------527
10----------June 3--------------------Les Bower------------528
11-----------June 18-------------------Gregory Russeau------529
(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)
*********************
Man condemned for Arlington pastor slaying loses appeal
The state's top criminal appeals court has upheld the conviction of Steven
LaWayne Nelson, sent to death row for the beating and suffocation of a young
pastor during a robbery at a North Texas church 4 years ago.
Attorneys for the 28-year-old Nelson contended there were 15 errors at his 2012
trial in Fort Worth for the slaying of Clint Dobson, pastor at NorthPointe
Baptist Church in Arlington, and near fatal beating of Judy Elliott, the church
secretary.
The appeals court Wednesday rejected arguments that evidence wasn't sufficient
to convict him of capital murder and sentence him to death, that the jury
selection and jury instructions were improper and that text message evidence
improperly was allowed. The court also rejected constitutional claims raised
against the Texas death penalty.
(source: Associated Press)
OHIO:
Attorney: Mom in death penalty case also abused
An attorney for the woman charged in the death of her 2-year-old daughter
directed blame Wednesday at the man who fathered the girl.
Andrea Bradley had been in an abusive relationship for years, her attorney,
William Welsh, said in an interview. Welsh said Glen Bates, who also faces
murder charges, abused Bradley and the children they lived with, including
2-year-old Glenara Bates.
"This is a situation where abuse wasn't just directed at the victim - it was
directed at everybody, including my client," he said.
Bradley, he added, "wouldn't be the 1st woman to be abused, to be manipulated
to do things out of fear of getting punished or getting hurt."
Bradley, 28, pleaded not guilty Wednesday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court
to charges including aggravated murder. She sobbed through most of the hearing.
Judge Robert Ruehlman ordered her held without bond.
Both Bradley and Bates, 32, face the death penalty. He was arraigned Monday.
The couple most recently lived in a rented house in East Walnut Hills with 6
children, including Glenara, ranging in age from 1 to 8. Bates is 1 of 4 men
who have fathered children with Bradley, officials have said.
The other children who were living in the home are now in foster care. Another
of her children is living with the father's relatives, court documents say.
Bradley is pregnant with her 8th child.
Prosecutors previously said the other children did not suffer the same abuse
and neglect. Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Heile told Ruehlman that
Glenara at times was locked in a bathroom. She slept in a bathtub with her own
feces and blood, he said.
The house has 2 full bathrooms and one half bathroom, according to the property
manager.
When Bradley brought Glenara March 29 to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical
Center, the child was cold, limp and lifeless, prosecutors said. She weighed 13
pounds and injuries covered her body. She had bite marks, cuts and marks from
being whipped with a belt, Heile said. A cut to her head had been stitched up
with "thread and needle," he said.
Bates and Bradley were together more than 2 years. At some point, Welsh said,
Bates took control.
He described Bradley as vulnerable. She has been diagnosed with depression and
bipolar disorder. She has been under psychiatric care for most of her life, he
said.
"If an abuser comes into the relationship," he said, "the abuser takes
control."
(source: cincinnati.com)
******************
Exonerated death row inmates want changes to death penalty system
6 of the 9 Ohioans who were exonerated after being sentenced to death want
state lawmakers to consider changes to capital punishment in Ohio.
Joe D'Ambrosio spent 22 years on death row for a Cleveland murder he didn't
commit.
"If it can happen to me, it can happen to you, or your children, or your
grandchildren," D'Ambrosio said.
He and 5 other exonerated former death row inmates want state lawmakers to
seriously consider the 57 recommendations made by an Ohio Supreme Court task
force on capital punishment last year.
Their statements came in a press conference Tuesday called by Ohioans to Stop
Executions.
Ricky Jackson of Cleveland served longer than any of the other 5, or any other
exonerated inmate in the U.S. - 39 years in prison.
"Most of my life, most of this man's life, most of this man's life," said
Jackson. "And I don't want to see it happen again to anybody."
Many of the 6 are also still fighting for financial compensation, though they
all say there's no amount of money that could make up for the years they've
lost. (source: WVXU news)
USA:
The Death Penalty Deserves the Death Penalty
At the end of this month, the Supreme Court will reckon with execution by
lethal injection in Glossip v. Gross, the case of Oklahoma death-row inmates
who are challenging the three-drug protocol that the state has chosen to carry
out death sentences.
In the history of capital punishment in America, the 2010 case of Jeffrey
Landrigan seems inconsequential, but it is worth revisiting now because it
shows how hard the conservative majority has tried to avoid grappling with the
grisly realities of this execution method and, really, with the death penalty
in general. It also helps to explain why the national system for administering
capital punishment is in such turmoil, with executions now halted because of
concerns about lethal injection in 15 of the 32 states where the death sentence
is still an option.
Arizona convicted Landrigan of murder and scheduled his execution, but a
shortage in the United States of the barbiturate called sodium thiopental threw
off that plan. Almost all states with the death penalty were then using three
drugs for executions - a short-acting anesthetic followed by a paralyzing agent
and then a heart-stopping drug. Sodium thiopental was meant to be the
anesthetic. From a foreign wholesaler, later identified as Dream Pharma, a
fly-by-night business run out of a driving school in London, the state of
Arizona bought some made by a German company in Austria. It was allowed into
the United States in violation of federal law, and it was neither checked nor
approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
In federal court, Landrigan's lawyers asked the state to confirm its
effectiveness, so he wouldn't suffer the agony that the other drugs were known
to cause if the anesthetic didn't work. The state refused the request to
provide that proof. The trial judge ordered it to do so, and Arizona defied the
order. The judge stayed the execution. Without F.D.A. approval or proof from
the state, she wrote, she couldn't determine whether the drug would actually
anesthetize Landrigan.
The state's secretiveness especially "perplexed" her. She wrote that she had
"never experienced a situation such as this where a defendant opposes a motion
for emergency relief by claiming it has the evidence necessary for resolution
of the matter but that evidence should not be produced." The U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed her ruling.
But then the Supreme Court's 5 conservatives, in an order written by Justice
Anthony Kennedy over the dissenting votes of the 4 moderate liberals, quickly
vacated the stay. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug
obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," Kennedy wrote. Arizona executed
Landrigan that night.
Kennedy disregarded what the trial and appeals courts had found about the
increased risk from a drug provided by a source the F.D.A. didn't approve,
which was evidence in the record. He also ignored the central reason for the
stay of execution: that Arizona had defied an order from a federal judge to
produce evidence that the sodium thiopental obtained for the execution would be
effective as an anesthetic.
A few months later, the Justice Department told Arizona that it could not use
any more of the drug from the batch used to kill Landrigan because the state
had obtained it illegally. In 2012, a federal district judge in Washington,
D.C., confirmed that the drug was illegally imported and ordered the F.D.A. to
immediately obtain whatever remained from Arizona and other states that bought
the drug from Dream Pharma.
The debate over lethal injection dates back to 1976, when the Supreme Court
reinstated capital punishment after a 10-year moratorium. The following year,
as Jeffrey Toobin explained, Oklahoma chose it as a supposedly humane
alternative to the then-preferred, clearly excruciating methods of execution
-strapping a convict to a chair and pulsing electricity through his body until
he died of shock or choking him to death by making him breathe poisonous gas in
a sealed chamber.
In making the choice, the Oklahoma legislature consulted no experts and did no
studies on the procedure before adopting it as the state's primary method of
execution. The legislature left to prison officials, not trained for this task,
decisions about which drugs to use, how much of each, and how to administer
them.
None of the many other states that later adopted lethal injection as their
method of execution made up for the slapdash way that Oklahoma developed the
procedure by doing studies of their own. In 2008, Alison J. Nathan, who was
then a law professor and is now a federal trial judge in New York City, wrote,
"Historical accident (or what sociologists would call a 'cascade to mistaken
consensus') explains far better than science or medicine the current ubiquity
of the 3-drug protocol."
There have been more than 1400 executions in the United States since the
Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, almost 9 out of every 10 by lethal
injection. There have been dozens of accounts of ghastly executions by lethal
injection gone wrong, especially since 2011, when sodium thiopental became
unobtainable. As states have experimented with new drug combinations, they have
introduced new uncertainties about the effects of lethal injection. 9 states
have used or plan to use drugs from compounding pharmacies, whose products are
not approved by the F.D.A.
One experiment the Court could not ignore was carried out a year ago on Clayton
D. Lockett in Oklahoma, a case that Paige Williams described in The New Yorker.
The executioner tried and failed at least twelve times to find a usable vein
for delivering the injections. After almost an hour, he found one in Lockett's
groin. 7 minutes after he was given a sedative, Lockett was deemed ready and
the lethal drugs were administered. Then, "after being declared unconscious,"
lawyers for the death-row inmates told the Court, "he began to speak, buck,
raise his head, and writhe against the gurney." A federal appeals court
reported, "In particular, witnesses heard Lockett say: 'This shit is fucking
with my mind,' 'Something is wrong,' and 'The drugs aren't working.'" About 20
minutes later, when the state's director of corrections thought that Lockett
had not received enough of the execution drugs to kill him and that there was
not enough of them left to complete the execution, he ordered the executioner
to stop administering any drugs. Lockett died anyway soon after.
In executing Lockett, Oklahoma used for the first time as the anesthetic a
sedative called midazolam, which is usually employed to treat serious seizures
and severe insomnia. As lawyers for the inmates told the Court, it has no
pain-relieving properties, hasn't been approved by the F.D.A. to maintain
general anesthesia in surgical operations, and has a "ceiling effect," meaning
that even a large dose of it may not put someone under. The lawyers noted that
"there are actual scientific and medical data demonstrating that midazolam
cannot reliably render a person unconscious and insensate for purposes of
undergoing surgery."
Nevertheless, Arizona, Florida, and Ohio used midazolam in executions last
year. In Arizona and Ohio, the deaths of the inmates were so protracted and
painful that the states began looking for alternative drugs to use instead. In
February, the Florida Supreme Court ordered the state government not to execute
an inmate by the same combination of drugs used on Lockett until the U.S.
Supreme Court resolves the issue. Roche and Akorn, which make midazolam, have
declared their opposition to its use in executions.
In Glossip v. Gross, lawyers for the inmates want the Supreme Court to rule
that Oklahoma's current sequence of drugs for lethal injections is
unconstitutional because the use of midazolam creates an "objectively
intolerable risk of harm."
In 2008, in Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court ruled that challenges to a state's
lethal injection protocol must show that it "creates a demonstrated risk of
severe pain" and that "feasible" and "readily implemented" alternatives would
"significantly" reduce the risk. Lawyers for the Oklahoma inmates also want the
Court to reconsider this very hard-to-meet standard because the methods of
lethal injections have changed in the past 7 years and "new experiments have
resulted in the types of unconstitutional executions that Baze was designed to
prevent."
It would be unconstitutional, the lawyers for the inmates argue, to execute an
inmate using only the paralyzing and heart-stopping drugs. That "would cause
intense and needless pain and suffering" and be cruel and unusual punishment
under the Constitution's Eighth Amendment. It should be unconstitutional to use
a sedative that carries a significant risk of causing unnecessary suffering,
they also argue. They note that mounting evidence shows that midazolam is
unreliable as an anesthetic.
Even if lethal injection is fatally flawed, of course, there are other means of
execution available. Electrocution, asphyxiation by poisonous gas, shooting by
a firing squad, and hanging are alternatives in states where lethal injection
is currently the primary means of execution. The inmates' plea may also seem
myopically focussed on one means of death when it is the end - execution as a
form of punishment - that should be judged. But any means inevitably connects
to the end. It raises the fundamental question of whether any state is capable
of administering capital punishment in a way that meets constitutional
standards. If states can't do that, shouldn't the United States abolish the
death penalty?
Since 1976, when it reinstated capital punishment, the Court has tried to
improve the odds that states will carry it out fairly and justly by
establishing a series of rules, or constitutional regulations, intended to
limit the use of the death sentence to instances where the punishment fits both
the crime and the criminal.
Since 2002, offenders with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation)
cannot be put to death, because of, among other things, their "diminished
capacities to understand and process information." Since 2005, juvenile
offenders cannot be executed because of their "underdeveloped sense of
responsibility." Since 2008, murder is the only crime for which a convicted
offender can be put to death, and not just any murder. To warrant a death
sentence, an offender must have displayed what the Court called "extreme
culpability" with "a consciousness materially more depraved" than that of a
typical murderer - for example, by brutally killing more than one victim.
But some of the rules have not solved the problems they were meant to. They
increase the arbitrariness and unfairness of who gets sentenced to death. In
addressing the widespread problem of ineffective counsel for people charged
with murder who might get a death sentence, for example, the Court set the bar
so low that it has allowed courts to tolerate what 1 federal judge called
"abysmal lawyering" in capital cases. In many instances, lawyers were drunk or
fell asleep during trials in which their clients were convicted and sentenced
to death.
The Court has also failed to solve the most divisive problem that has entangled
capital punishment throughout American history: racial discrimination. In 1987,
with the moderate conservative Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., writing for the
majority in a 5-4 decision, the Court rejected as proof of intentional
discrimination in death-penalty cases overwhelming statistical evidence of
disparities in outcomes explained only by differences in race: many studies
have shown that an offender who killed a white victim is much more likely to be
sentenced to death, especially when the offender is black. Instead, the Court
held that a death-row inmate, to have his sentence overturned, must prove that
a judge, jury, or prosecutor in the case intended to discriminate against him
on the basis of race. That is almost impossible to do.
It also helps to explain why, as Powell's biographer, John C. Jeffries, Jr.,
wrote, the Justice "came to believe that the system as a whole would always be
plagued by doubt." In 1991, Powell, who was by then retired, told Jeffries that
if he could change his vote in any case he would have voted in 1987 to abolish
capital punishment, because it "serves no useful purpose" and "brings discredit
on the whole legal system."
The discredit is profound when someone sentenced to death is later exonerated,
as has happened a hundred and 52 times in the past 42 years. But it is
indelible when a state executes someone who should never have been sentenced to
death under the current rules. As Robert J. Smith, Sophie Cull, and Zoe
Robinson documented in a report published last year, 87 of the 100 people
executed in the United States between the middle of 2011 and the middle of 2013
had one or more traits that a court is supposed to regard as reducing
blameworthiness. 54 had been diagnosed with or showed symptoms of an acute
mental illness that disrupted their thinking and diminished their ability to
cope. 50 had suffered a serious childhood trauma, like chronic homelessness or
sexual molestation. 32 had intellectual impairments, like a traumatic brain
injury or a significant cognitive deficit. The authors of the report speculated
that failures on the part of the defense lawyers kept juries from learning
about mitigating traits and taking account of them, as the law required them
to.
That is what happened, basically, in the case of Jeffrey Landrigan. The Arizona
judge who presided over the trial - and, under the state's rules at the time,
decided on his punishment - later submitted an affidavit on his behalf to the
Arizona Board of Executive Clemency. She said that, if she had known about
mitigating factors that his lawyers never presented, like his organic brain
damage and the impact of fetal alcohol syndrome on his behavior, she would not
have sentenced him to death.
In 2009, the American Law Institute - the country's most prestigious legal
organization involved in law reform and the architect of the Supreme Court's
approach to reforming the use of the death sentence - "voted overwhelmingly"
that the endless political controversy surrounding the penalty, as well as many
other factors, make it impossible to ensure "a minimally adequate system for
administering capital punishment." In other words, as Adam Liptak wrote in the
Times, the organization believes that "the capital justice system in the United
States is irretrievably broken."
In the Oklahoma case, the Supreme Court is unlikely to act on this wisdom by
abolishing the death penalty. But the upcoming argument will require the
justices to face some of its grisly realities. They will provide an ugly
reminder that, while capital punishment has contributed negligible benefits to
American criminal justice, it has imposed enormous, ever-increasing, and
terrible costs.
(source: The New Yorker)
*****************
U.S. should be held to higher standard with death penalty
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 federal counts in the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombing case, 17 of which carry a possible death penalty, USA Today
reports.
The case is sparking a national debate on the validity of capital punishment,
and after hearing both sides duke it out on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, I
decided to take a firm standpoint.
Currently, there are 32 states where capital punishment is legal, with 60 % of
Americans in favor of the death penalty for convicted murders, according to a
2013 Gallup poll.
As the idiom goes, "you can judge a man by the company he keeps," and the
United States is not in good company. In 2010, the overwhelming majority of all
known executions took place in five countries: China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen
and the United States, according to Amnesty International.
No offense to the other guys, but the United States should hold itself to a
higher standard. And the problem is it isn't even most of the country that is
sentencing people to death; instead, like Dracula after he's gone for a jog,
it's the South that is thirsty for blood.
From 1976 to 2015, 1,392 executions occurred in the United States, and 995 of
them took place in the South, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
If you're thinking, "C'mon Alex, why are we paying to keep these jerks alive?
They obviously deserve to fry or at least have battery acid injected in their
arms," then I'd tell you to Google due process. In the United States, it
actually costs more to keep an inmate on death row due to the astronomical
costs of criminal investigations, lengthy trials and appeals than to give them
a life sentence.
There's also a matter of the question of what exactly the point of capital
punishment is: Is it meant to stop that person from ever committing another
heinous crime again? Is it meant to punish the criminal? Is it meant to create
closure for the aggrieved? What does it do?
Well, for one, the death penalty does not act as a crime deterrent. FBI data
shows that the 14 states without capital punishment in 2008 had homicide rates
at or below the national average. I very much doubt Jeffrey Dahmer was worried
about the death penalty when he was munching on human heads.
Which brings up another good point: The death penalty does not account for the
mentally ill. 1 out of every 10 people who have been executed in the United
States since 1977 have been mentally ill, according to the National Association
on Mental Illness.
The mentally ill may not be able to participate in their trials in a meaningful
way and may appear unrepentant to a jury.
Those who are tried under the death penalty are arbitrarily chosen. Of the
15,000 to 17,000 homicides committed every year in the United States,
approximately 120 people are sentenced to death, less than 1 %, according to
Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
140 people have been released from death row since 1973 due to evidence of
being wrongly convicted. The system is also racially biased and almost all
death row inmates could not afford their own attorney at trail.
Sadly, people are stubborn and despite the mounting evidence against the death
penalty, they'll continue their adamant support of the "eye for an eye"
theology, but we all know what Gandhi said, don't we?
(source: Alex Wexelman is a Senior Staff Writer for the Central Florida Future)
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