April 22
TEXAS:
Capital murder suspect argues death penalty in final pretrial hearing
A final pretrial hearing for capital murder suspect James Calvert was held
Wednesday afternoon, 1 day before jury selection was scheduled to begin. The
hearing got underway with Calvert addressing the Smith County District
Attorney's Office's decision to pursue the death penalty. Calvert argued
against the possibility by citing a list of chemicals used in the execution
process by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice; none of which are
currently used. The state uses pentobarbital, which was not included in the
list.
Calvert later argued the use of the drug, saying injection chemicals affect
people differently, saying "death is not a light switch."
"Lethal injection is a good idea, if you want to kill somebody," Calvert
chuckled in court Wednesday.
Calvert complained Smith County Judge Jack Skeen, Jr. was "short-circuiting"
him.
"You don't sit in here and dictate the proceedings," said Skeen.
Calvert is accused of killing his ex-wife and kidnapping their son in October
of 2012. The Smith County DA has said they intend to seek the death penalty in
the case. Calvert is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.
(source: KLTV news)
MASSACHUSETTS:
Boston's Last Brush with Capital Punishment
Last Monday, a few days after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of helping his
late brother, Tamerlan, plant and set off 2 bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon,
a local cable station invited a man named Bob Curley on air to discuss whether
Tsarnaev should be put to death. Curley was once a vocal proponent of capital
punishment. In 1997, his 10-year-old son, Jeffrey, was kidnapped, murdered, and
then raped. It was among the city's most talked-about crimes since the days of
the Boston Strangler, in the early 1960s, and Curley and his allies inundated
state representatives with requests to reinstate the death penalty, which had
been effectively banned in Massachusetts since 1984. And yet, when he appeared
on television last week, Curley argued against Tsarnaev's execution, a position
that, according to recent polls, his fellow-Bostonians share by a factor of
more than 2 to 1. What made Bob Curley and the citizens of Massachusetts change
their minds?
For those who were following the news in Greater Boston at the time, the Curley
murder seemed like the crest of a wave of gruesome and high-profile crimes. In
1995, a local mother was stabbed 98 times by her adolescent neighbor. In 1996,
in a northern suburb, 2 men dragged a woman into some bushes and bludgeoned her
to death with a rock. In the fall of 1997, a woman and her 2 young sons were
strangled by her former boyfriend, who stuffed the boys' bodies into his locker
at the Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. And then came the murder of
Jeffrey, the lively boy from a working-class neighborhood in Cambridge.
Unbeknownst to his parents, he had been befriended by a 23-year-old pedophile
named Charles Jaynes. One day, Jaynes and another man, Salvatore Sicari, took
Jeffrey to buy a bicycle. Later, in the car, Jaynes smothered him with a
gasoline-soaked rag. Then the men put the boy's body in a plastic tub, weighted
it with concrete, and dumped it in a river in Maine.
In truth, 1997 was a peaceful time in Massachusetts, with the homicide rate at
a 34-year low. The state was heavily liberal and Catholic, as it remains today,
and both groups were opposed to the death penalty. But the image of the
freckle-faced boy in a Little League uniform, a Louisville Slugger perched on
his shoulder, was everywhere in the press. His father, Bob, a fire-engine
mechanic, became part of the coverage, too - at first reluctantly, as a
stricken parent, and then passionately, as an advocate for the death penalty.
Within days of the killing, some 60,000 people had signed petitions demanding
that executions be made legal again. One representative, from a liberal suburb,
received 2,000 phone calls urging the same. The issue split families. Tim
Toomey, a state representative from Cambridge and a longtime death-penalty
opponent, became the 1st of his colleagues to publicly reverse his position,
much to the disappointment of his brother, a Catholic priest who had presided
at Jeffrey???s funeral. The Massachusetts Senate easily passed a reinstatement
bill, and the House of Representatives narrowly passed its own version, 81
votes to 79. All that was left was for the 2 houses to come up with a
compromise bill and send it to Paul Cellucci, the state's Republican governor,
who had pledged to sign it.
The intervening 9 days were among the most fraught in the history of the State
House, as the Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie wrote in his book "The
Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father's Journey from Rage to
Redemption." No prisoners had been executed for half a century, and Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian-born anarchists who were sent
to the electric chair under dubious circumstances in 1927, still held a place
in the public mind. (In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis had declared Sacco and
Vanzetti's trial flawed and said that "any disgrace should be removed from
their names.") Members of the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty - one of its founders was
Sarah Ehrmann, whose husband had been on Sacco and Vanzetti's defense team -
flocked to the State House to make a stand against a measure that they saw as
useless and barbaric.
When the final vote was taken, on November 6th, it was not religious or moral
arguments that held sway but a growing distrust of the American justice system.
By the end of 1997, the Innocence Project had reversed the convictions of 50
people, 13 of whom had been wrongfully convicted of murder. John Slattery, a
Democratic representative from the northern coastal town of Peabody, cast the
decisive vote. Though he had supported reinstatement when the House drew up its
bill, he had subsequently spent several days interviewing legal experts and
constituents, and what he learned about the fallibility of the legal system was
enough to change his mind. Before the vote, he made a speech on the House
floor. He explained that he did not want to be lying awake, fifteen years in
the future, knowing that someone had been wrongfully executed because of a law
that he had helped create. "I need to be able to look myself in the mirror the
next day and like the person that I see," he said.
The House split evenly on the bill, eighty to eighty, which under Massachusetts
law effectively killed it. That vote was a tipping point: never again would the
Commonwealth come close to reinstating capital punishment. In 2005, Governor
Mitt Romney proposed a bill that would set a "gold standard for the death
penalty in the modern scientific age.??? Sentencing would require a "no doubt"
standard of proof, reinforced by DNA and the most advanced forensic techniques.
The bill lost in the House by nearly two to one. The truth is that, in a state
with one of the lowest murder rates in the nation (tied with Oregon for eighth
lowest), capital punishment has ceased to seem necessary. "There's a
self-reinforcing quality of these policies," Phyllis Goldfarb, a George
Washington University Law School professor who taught at Boston College at the
time of the Curley hearings, told me. "If you haven't had the death penalty for
a long time, the appetite for it kind of dissipates."
2 years after his son's murder, Bob Curley appeared on a local talk show to
debate Bud Welch, a death-penalty opponent whose daughter was killed in the
Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. Later, in getting to know Welch and meeting
other parents of murdered children, Curley began to change his mind. In 2001,
at the first national conference of Murder Victims' Families for
Reconciliation, held at Boston College, Bob Curley "came out" as being against
capital punishment. This stance, he told the television interviewer last week,
"is solely based on the inequities of our criminal-justice system," which he
has witnessed firsthand. Jaynes, who could afford an excellent lawyer, was
convicted of 2nd-degree murder and kidnapping; his sentence included the
possibility of parole. Sicari, whom Curley called "just a tag-along stooge,"
had no financial resources; he was convicted of 1st-degree murder and sentenced
to life without parole. "These guys are scum - the worst of the worst," Curley
said, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his comment. "But how do you decide which
one is worth the death penalty and which one is not?"
Given capital punishment's history in the state, it seems strange to many
Bostonians that Tsarnaev could be executed. Yes, he was tried and found guilty
under federal antiterrorism statutes, and as such legally faces the death
penalty, which would likely be carried out at the federal penitentiary in Terre
Haute, Indiana. But, in order to make that punishment a possibility, the judge
had to "death qualify" each member of the jury - that is, confirm that each
person was prepared to vote in favor of lethal injection. In a state that made
the death penalty illegal more than 30 years ago, and in a city whose citizens
overwhelmingly oppose it, to what extent does that jury represent the
community?
Several days after Curley's TV appearance, the Boston Globe ran a front-page
editorial by Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of Martin, an 8-year-old boy
who died in the Marathon bombing. They urged the U.S. Department of Justice to
"take the death penalty off the table" and sentence Tsarnaev to life without
parole. To sentence him to death, they argued, would force them to relive the
tragedy with each inevitable appeal. Curley, one of the few people in the state
who can honestly claim to understand their feelings, agreed. "I could care less
what happens to this kid," he said of Tsarnaev. "He should just be gone, and
that should be the end of it." The next time people hear of him, he added,
"should be when they read his obituary."
(source: Douglas Starr, The New Yorker)
PENNSYLVANIA:
York DA asks Gov. Wolf not to commute death-row killer's sentence
York County's district attorney has sent a 3-page letter to Gov. Tom Wolf,
asking him not to issue a reprieve to death-row inmate Hubert Michael Jr.,
whose execution is scheduled for this summer.
Wolf has issued what he calls a moratorium on death sentences in Pennsylvania,
and has said he will issue reprieves to inmates scheduled for execution.
State law requires a sitting governor to sign a death-row inmate's death
warrant within 90 days after judicial appeals end, unless a pardon is granted
or the person's sentence is commuted.
Wolf has said he will not sign death warrants.
It was state Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel who on Tuesday
signed Michael's death notice, according to the department's website.
Michael, 58, formerly of Lemoyne, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on
June 5, according to the department.
A call to Wolf's staff seeking comment was not immediately returned.
DA's letter: In his letter to the governor, dated Wednesday, District Attorney
Tom Kearney, wrote, "I urge you, in the name of justice, to allow the execution
to proceed."
16-year-old Trista Eng, who lived in the Dillsburg area, "was a totally
innocent victim" who was kidnapped, raped and killed because Michael "was angry
about his Lancaster County rape case then pending, and wanted to take his anger
out on a woman," according to the letter.
Trista's family "feels very strongly that the sentence should be carried out,"
Kearney wrote in the letter, and both former DA Stan Rebert and Michael's trial
prosecutor, Christy Fawcett, oppose commutation of the sentence.
'Poster child': Taking a page from his predecessor's playbook, Kearney
described Michael as "the poster child" for the death penalty. When Rebert was
in office, he used the same phrase to describe cross-state spree murderer Mark
Newton Spotz, who in 1995 killed 3 women in 3 counties in 3 days while on the
run for killing his brother.
Kearney's letter notes there is no doubt about Michael's guilt.
"(The) crime is heinous," he wrote, and Michael has never "made a full
disclosure of the magnitude of his conduct," except privately to his own
defense attorney.
The murder: Michael told his former defense attorney, York County chief public
defender Bruce Blocher, that he offered Trista a ride as she was walking to her
job at Hardee's in Dillsburg on July 12, 1993.
At some point during the ride, Michael stopped the car and used the electrical
cords to tie up Trista, then drove her to state game lands in Warrington
Township, according to Blocher.
He raped her, put a bag over her head and shot her 3 times, Blocher has said,
and then hid her body in a wooded area.
Blocher revealed details of Michael's confession when called to the stand
during a 1997 appeals hearing in the case.
Michael fled the state 10 days after murdering Trista. At the time, he was free
on bail for a Lancaster County rape charge.
Captured: He was captured July 27, 1993, in Utah. Police found the murder
weapon in the car he was using, officials said. He was charged with homicide in
late August 1993.
Trista's body was found by Michael's own family members after he confessed the
murder to his brother.
In November 1993, Michael escaped from Lancaster County Prison but he was
captured in New Orleans in March 1994, according to the Department of
Corrections. He was later sentenced to 10 to 20 years for the Lancaster County
rape.
He pleaded guilty to 1st-degree murder for killing Trista and was sentenced to
death.
Previous stay: Michael was scheduled to die at the state prison in Rockview in
Centre County on Sept. 22, but the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals issued a
stay of execution in August so his case could be reviewed. It was the 4th stay
Michael's attorneys have obtained on his behalf.
Kearney's open letter to Wolf notes "you and I have taken an oath to support
the laws enacted by our legislature," and argued that granting a reprieve to
Michael "makes a mockery of the judicial system."
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s, Pennsylvania has put to
death 3 death-row inmates, all of whom had abandoned their appeal rights.
(source: York Dispatch)
DELAWARE:
Interfaith group calls for Delaware death penalty repeal
Delaware's top clergymen came together Wednesday in Dover to call on lawmakers
to repeal the state's death penalty, calling the punishment unjust and
ineffective.
"It has often been felt that the death penalty brings justice, we often quote
the Bible, 'An eye for an eye,'" said the Rev. John Deckenback, of the
Conference Minister for the United Church of Christ Central Atlantic. "Those
type of responses tend to alleviate our emotional need for revenge, but we
would question whether they bring about true justice."
Deckenback, Bishop W. Francis Malooly, from the Diocese of Wilmington; Bishop
Wayne Wright, from the Episcopal Church of Delaware; and Rabbi Yair Robinson
spoke during a press conference Wednesday afternoon supporting the push to
repeal Delaware's death penalty.
Backers of the repeal effort have increased their presence in Legislative Hall
as the controversial measure heads to the House Judiciary Committee. The
hearing on Senate Bill 40 has yet to officially be scheduled, but House prime
sponsor Rep. Sean Lynn, D-Dover, said he was told it would be during the 2nd
week of May.
"We are hearing that the people in our pews believe that this is the right time
for the death penalty to end here in Delaware," Wright said.
Earlier this week, a poll commissioned by the Delaware Center of Justice found
that 63 % of Delawareans support the death penalty. In a follow-up question, 64
% said life with or without parole was a better option than death for those
convicted of murder. About 1/2 the 573 people polled said they supported the
measure to repeal the death penalty.
"There is no justice in the death penalty," Robinson said. "There is no peace
in the death penalty and the time to repeal this form of punishment is now."
The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Stanton, includes an
exemption for the 15 inmates currently sitting on Delaware's death row, who
would still face execution by lethal injection. The Senate passed the
legislation 11-9 earlier this month.
Gov. Jack Markell has yet to weigh in. A spokeswoman for Markell has said that
the governor is following the debate, but would not take a position. The clergy
said they are planning to try and meet with Markell Wednesday afternoon.
Police groups strongly oppose repeal and are expected to step up opposition in
the House, where they have an ally in powerful Speaker Pete Schwartzkopf, D-
Rehoboth, a retired state trooper.
Delaware is 1 of 32 states that employs capital punishment. The last inmate put
to death was Shannon Johnson, 28, in April 2012 by lethal injection.
Advocates for the death penalty have long argued that it is a fair penalty for
the most heinous of prisoners and deters crime, but opponents say execution
violates human rights, is expensive, encourages a cycle of violence and is used
disproportionately against minorities and the poor.
(source: The News Journal)
***************************
Take the lead on death penalty repeal
I respond to the April 7 letter, "There's a price to pay for breaking the law,"
whose author asserts that God invented the death penalty and, therefore, it
should not be fiddled with. Unfortunately, the death penalty is not perfect,
and does not uphold the sanctity of human life in the way that anyone's God
could have intended.
I'm not a member of the clergy, but I am a person of faith. As a member of the
Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware, I am proud that the Unitarian
Universalists of America have long opposed the death penalty, holding capital
punishment as inconsistent with the sanctity of human life on account of its
retributive, discriminatory, and non-deterrent character.
It's comforting to me that Delaware bishops and leading clergy of the following
faith groups are all advocating strongly for repeal: The Roman Catholic Church,
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America, The Episcopal Church, The United Methodist Church, The Presbyterian
Church, the United Church of Christ, as well as the leading Jewish clergy
members in our state.
It is clear from the experience of our neighbors in New Jersey and Maryland
that we do not need the death penalty in order to be safe from violent
offenders or to hold them accountable.
I urge Speaker of the House Pete Schwarzkopf to take the lead on this issue and
help get SB40 passed.
Don Peterson,Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware
(source: Letter to the Editor, Cape Gazette)
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