June 3




TEXAS:

Life after death-row case: Both sides search for justice as 22-year Cook saga ends


Editor's note: This story originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News on Feb. 21, 1999.

"You cannot put things back together when you inherit a case with material misconduct," said Smith Chief County Felony Prosecutor David Dobbs, after the 22-year-old saga ended with a plea bargain on Tuesday.

After 20 years on death row - once coming within 11 days of execution - Mr. Cook walked free Tuesday. Mr. Cook, who had been out of prison on bond for 14 months, pleaded no-contest and was convicted on a lesser charge of murder in the death of Linda Jo Edwards, a result that left both sides unsatisfied.

Mr. Cook and his lawyers question why a fourth jury was nearly asked to digest that so-called turnip - a case already tried three times, hobbled and scarred by investigative and prosecutorial misdeeds that occurred when Mr. Dobbs, the lead prosecutor, was in high school.

"It was pride that kept them coming back," said Mr. Cook, who maintained his innocence after the deal. He said he took the deal despite his innocence to end his "nightmare."

"This was about them trying to save face, not them going after a guilty man."

Prosecutors cite a simple reason for pushing on: They say they believed they had the right guy, and only agreed to a deal because appeals courts ruled that prior prosecutors' conduct ruled out the use of key evidence.

"They're are other district attorneys' offices that would have dropped the case," Mr. Dobbs. "But we felt Cook was guilty,

Legal experts said that the decision to try, retry, retry and retry again is complex, even when a "turnip" is involved. Prosecutorial persistence does not automatically mean a defendant is being unfairly treated, they said.

"The law provides that a prosecutor's duty is not to obtain a conviction, but to see that justice is done," said Robert Dawson, a professor of criminal law at The University of Texas Law School. "But, it doesn't define "justice.'

"There are no really concrete legal guidelines, no set number of bites at the apple," he said, "assuming a person is found guilty and that conviction is thrown out."

Mr. Cook was convicted and sentenced to death in 1978 and spent 13 years on death row until a state appeals court threw out the conviction, after a series of problems with the case were discovered by The Dallas Morning News and the New Jersey based Centurion Ministries, which investigates questionable death penalty convictions.

Among the problems, a state's witness testified in the 1st trial fingerprint in the victim's apartment had been left by Mr. Cook about the time of the crime. Mr. Cook maintained that the print was left during an earlier visit to the apartment, and the expert later conceded that such dating of fingerprints is impossible.

The court also found fault because a psychiatrist who interviewed Mr. Cook and later testified at his trial didn't tell him that their conversation could be used against him.

A 1992 retrial ended with a hung jury. In 1994, Mr. Cook was again convicted and sentenced to death. An appeals court overturned that verdict in 1996, saying evidence used in that trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct in 1978. That included the failure to tell the defense that Robert Hoehn, a key prosecution witness, had given conflicting testimony to the grand jury and at 1978 trial.

Because of that, the government was barred from using the testimony of Mr. Hoehn, who died between Mr. Cook's first 2 trials.

Factors for retrial

Experts described a number of factors that typically influence the decision whether to retry a case, though the sides in Mr. Cook's case disagreed on how relevant they were:

* The stakes: "Had this been a burglary, the matter would have been resolved after the first verdict was thrown out," said Professor Dawson. "With a capital murder case, it's harder for both sides to back off."

Indeed, to the end neither side budged from their stands on whether Mr. Cook killed Ms. Edwards. The way the brinkmanship ended in a deal was a no-contest plea, which allowed both sides continue maintaining their absolute declarations of Mr. Cook's guilt or innocence.

* The state's willingness to accept conviction of an innocent person: "No matter how airtight a case appears, you can never be 100 % sure," Professor Dawson said. "The question is where the prosecution's threshold of risk is. Most will not accept a high risk of wrongful conviction."

The reluctance to convict an innocent man was quantified by the 18th century British legal commentator William Blackstone - since echoed by thinkers from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin:.

"It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffer," Blackstone wrote, an attitude that defense lawyers complain has been turned upside down by the Cook prosecutors.

"They'd rather see 1 innocent man locked up, than a guilty man go free," defense lawyer Cheryl Wattley said.

Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen said such formulas were irrelevant in the Cook case. He said the prosecution's certainty about Mr. Cook's guilt easily cleared any threshold of concern about wrongful conviction.

"We have no doubt," he said.

* Quality and quantity of evidence: Prosecutors trying decades-old cases must deal with fading memories, dead or vanished witnessed, and a general lack of momentum over time, experts said. In the Cook case, they lost the right to use evidence tainted by earlier prosecutor misconduct.

Mr. Skeen and Mr. Dobbs said the exclusion of Mr. Hoehn's "crucial" testimony weakened their case to the point they were willing to cut a deal, which the victim's family said they didn't like but understood.

In order to obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove "future dangerousness," that a defendant will pose a continued threat to others in prison or the free world.

Sometimes, evidence on that issue can actually get stronger over time. In cases where a prisoner wins a new trial after years on death row, there is usually a very complete record of his behavior - good or bad - in prison, said University of Texas Law Professor Jordan Steiker.

That new evidence can affect the subsequent case, he said, but it's unclear how Mr. Cook's prison record, which included instances of self-mutilation, would weigh on that issue. His lawyers explained the incidents as natural reactions to sexual assaults in prison.

Prosecutors were ready to argue that the episodes, combined with the original killing, showed Mr. Cook is dangerous enough that he should be executed.

Instead they agreed to a deal that let Mr. Cook go free.

"That was the hardest part," Mr. Skeen said.

Although she tried to convince a federal judge otherwise, Ms. Wattley conceded that the current law allows the government to retry no matter how many convictions are thrown out.

"You can lie, cheat and steal," she said, "then come back and do it again and get a chance to correct your mistakes."

But, she said the law would be more fair if, after a certain number of fouls, the government was declared ineligible to continue the game.

Questions of costs

* Financial and political cost: Prosecutors, as elected officials, must concern themselves with both the financial and political price of their decisions to try or not try a case, said University of Houston law professor Sandra Guerra.

"Some smaller jurisdictions cannot afford to retry a capital case. It's very expensive," she said.

Mr. Skeen said that the Cook case was under a cloud caused by decades of problems. But, he said, neither politics nor money controlled his decision, although the savings from avoiding a fourth trial and round of appeals were attractive.

The Cook defense team said the casedragged on because Mr. Skeen's office was too concerned with saving political face, and not concerned enough with the public expense of a misdirected prosecution.

* Wishes of the victim's family: Mr. Skeen, the district attorney, said he consulted and got approval for the deal from Ms. Edward's family, but that they did not have veto power.

"It's our office's position that we zealously represent victims," as part of the duty to pursue justice, said his assistant, Mr. Dobbs said.

The victim's wishes are a legitimate consideration, experts said. But Mr. Cook's lawyers said the district attorney's office put the victim's family's wishes above a higher obligation to the truth.

Ms. Edward's family left no question where they stood. After the plea, they issued a bitter statement, supporting prosecutors but reproofing the appeals court for throwing out the earlier conviction.

"There are no lies, excuses or twisting of the facts that will change his record as a convicted murderer and felon," they wrote, "nor will it make the public any safer."

To that, Mr. Cook said, "I am a gentle man. I am not a thug. I am not a street-smart guy, whose going to go out and do bad things."

Mr. Cook, who accepted a felony murder conviction in exchange for his freedom, said he realizes that the outcome of the case leaves people wondering about his guilt or innocence.

"The system didn't put an end to my nightmare," he said. "I really can't say, with any degree of comfort, that this is a case in which the system worked."

On that one point, Mr. Cook and Mr. Dobbs agree.

"This case highlights more than anything else," the prosecution said, "that our system is imperfect."

(source: Dallas Morning News)






FLORIDA:

'Woohoo!' says Clearwater man sentenced to death


Pinellas County Circuit Judge Philip Federico sentenced Craig Wall, a Clearwater man convicted of murdering his girlfriend and their infant son in 2010, to death on both murder counts Friday.

After receiving his death sentences, Tampa Bay Times reporter Laura Morel said Wall's response was, "Woohoo!"

Wall then asked the judge if he will come watch him die, to which the judge said he would consider it.

Wall met 29-year-old Laura Taft after getting out of prison following a 14-year sentence for armed robbery and armed burglary in 2008. Their baby, Craig Wall Jr., was born shortly after in 2009. Five weeks later, the boy died after going into cardiac arrest.

A few days later, Wall was arrested for violating a domestic violence injunction and he was released on bond.

3 days after that, Wall broke into Taft's apartment and stabbed her death.

Last February, Wall pleaded guilty to killing Taft and no contest to killing their baby.

Before his sentencing, the Times reported Wall said several times in court in the past several months that he wanted the death penalty.

On Friday, he got what he wanted.

(source: WTSP news)






USA:

Meet the red-state conservatives fighting to abolish the death penalty


Colby Coash can point to the moment his evolution in thinking about the death penalty began.

It was Sept. 3, 1994, and Coash - now a conservative senator in the Nebraska legislature but then a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln - decided to go with some friends to the state penitentiary. Willie Otey, convicted of 1st-degree murder, was set to be executed at midnight, and people were gathering in the parking lot outside. Coash can still remember the scene: the live band, the grilling meat, the revelers popping cans of beer and chanting "Fry him!"

"You wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the parking lot of the penitentiary and a tailgate. It was pretty ugly," Coash says now. Even though he went to the event as a supporter of capital punishment, he says, "it kind of changed my heart. I thought, 'I don't want to be a part of state-sponsored killing.???'"

For much of the past 40 years, public support for the death penalty has been high, topping out at 80 % in 1994, according to Gallup polling. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the death penalty was so popular that it was used as a political cudgel by Republicans looking to depict opponents as soft on crime. In the 1988 presidential race, Democrat Michael Dukakis was hammered by George H.W. Bush's campaign and the media after he said at a debate that he would not support the death penalty, even if someone raped and murdered his wife. In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and looking to avoid a repeat of Dukakis's trouble, returned to his home state to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled prisoner named Ricky Ray Rector. Since the Supreme Court legalized capital punishment in 1976, "most individuals of all political orientations were for the death penalty when asked the question in the abstract," says Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

But that has started to shift. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both support the death penalty - but Trump is much more enthusiastic, and Clinton has had to answer for her husband's criminal justice policies during her primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders. A Pew poll found that just 40 % of Democrats supported capital punishment last year, down from 71 % in 1996.

That same poll showed GOP support for the policy dropping 10 points, from 87 to 77 %, over the decade. Times are changing for conservatives, too - but for markedly conservative reasons. In the past year, Republican lawmakers in red-leaning Nebraska, Utah, Missouri, Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and New Hampshire have all sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty. They're organizing themselves in places like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington state, too. Coash is now part of a small group of activists who argue that the best case against the death penalty is a conservative one - and that the best way to make progress on the issue is to convince other Republicans in red states where the death penalty is, for the most part, uncontroversial.

***

After that night in Lincoln, Coash decided he couldn't support the death penalty as a pro-life Catholic. But it wasn't until he made it into the Nebraska legislature in 2008 that he could do anything about it. For years, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a progressive firebrand from North Omaha, had been introducing bills to stop the death penalty, but only twice - in 1979 and 1999 - had they passed, and both were promptly vetoed. In 2015, though, Coash sensed an opening. Though Nebraska's legislature is technically nonpartisan, it's not difficult to tell that many of the members are, like their voters, Republicans - and voters had sent a group of freshman lawmakers to the state House that year whom Coash figured might be open to his conservative arguments. So he began reaching out to his new colleagues, one by one, and asking them to sign on to Chambers's bill.

Coash realized that the traditional arguments against the death penalty - the potential for error; the way it is unevenly applied to poor, black and mentally handicapped defendants - were not working on conservatives. Those arguments, he figured, were too abstract for death penalty supporters, who looked to death row inmates and saw men who they felt didn't deserve their sympathy. So he tailored his approach. "I started to frame the death penalty in a different way, to change the narrative," he says. "I used Republican principles to argue that this was a broken system."

First, he made the case that the death penalty was costly and ineffective. Nebraska had spent an estimated $100 million on death penalty cases and executed only 3 people since the Supreme Court's 1976 ruling that affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment. 2nd, Coash argued, conservatives are supposed to be the party that pushes back against unjust overreach into individuals' lives, and what would be a better example of that intrusion than potentially taking an innocent life through capital punishment? 3rd, he said, the families of victims - many of whom had testified before his committee that the endless appeals on death penalty cases were traumatizing and unjust - deserved better. When asked to describe his position in personal terms, he said it was consistent with a promise he made to always vote pro-life.

The debate on the bill was long and emotional. But in May 2015, Nebraska's legislature voted to repeal the death penalty, becoming the 19th state to ban it and the 7th since 2007. A week later, lawmakers wrangled enough votes to overturn Gov. Pete Ricketts's veto. The governor has poured his considerable financial resources into a November ballot measure to reinstate it, but the efforts of Coash and his colleagues have turned Nebraska into a test lab for opposing the death penalty from the right.

***

Religiously committed conservative activists have received a number of boosts over the past few decades, including Pope John Paul II's declaration of Catholic opposition to the death penalty in 1995. (Pope Francis has been just as emphatic.) The past several years have also seen what Dunham calls the "innocence revolution" - more prisoners being exonerated, sometimes through new investigations, other times through DNA evidence - which has drawn attention to the potential for error. Dunham thinks the resurgence of activist groups focused on limited government in the wake of the recession reignited the dialogue about the costliness of the policy. Younger voters, too, are slightly less likely to support capital punishment than older conservatives.

Last year, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition voted unanimously to oppose the death penalty. In October, the National Association of Evangelicals updated its 1973 resolution in support of the policy to acknowledge the opposition of some of its members.

To help reach pro-death-penalty Republican voters, anti-death-penalty conservatives are turning to people who can speak in ways conservatives might identify with, even if these advocates aren't, themselves, conservative - such as Christy Sheppard, a counselor from Ada, Okla., whose cousin, Debra Carter, was murdered in 1982. A few months ago, Sheppard traveled to Nebraska to tell the story of what happened after her cousin's death. 5 years after the slaying, police arrested 2 men, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, and charged them with murder. Fritz received life in prison; Williamson was sentenced to death. For years the family was satisfied, even happy with the outcome - until DNA testing 11 years later proved that both men were innocent. The man eventually found guilty in Carter's death, Glen Gore, was already in prison on other charges by the time a DNA test identified him. He walked away from a work crew after learning that he was a suspect in the 1982 murder but turned himself in a week later. He was convicted in 2006. .

Sheppard felt tremendous guilt over the ordeal that Williamson, who suffers from bipolar disorder, faced. "To think that we wanted him to die for a crime he wasn't even guilty of - he didn't even know her - is just horrible,' she says. When anti-death-penalty groups began asking her to tell her story, she says, "I felt like I couldn???t not say anything."

But anti-death-penalty conservatives are still working against broad support for capital punishment, especially among their fellow conservatives. Kentucky's bill failed by one vote to make it out of the House Judiciary Committee. In Utah, the Senate passed a bill, but it was pulled from the House floor after leaders realized that it didn't have enough votes. And in Nebraska, Ricketts and his billionaire father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars backing November's ballot initiative to bring the death penalty back. The group organizing those efforts, Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, said in a news release last year that, according to its polling information, 64 percent of Nebraska voters agreed with its position.

***

The thread running through Nebraska, Kentucky, North Carolina and other states where conservatives have been working against capital punishment is Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a group founded by Heather Beaudoin, a 31-year-old from Michigan with a background in conservative politics.

Beaudoin was raised in an evangelical family. She likes to say that her opposition to the death penalty is "of the Lord," because it's something she's felt passionate about since she was a little girl. After a brief stint in Washington, D.C., after college, Beaudoin moved to Montana to work for AmeriCorps, and one day, outside her office, the Montana Abolition Coalition held a rally with exonerees and their family members. Beaudoin landed a job with the coalition by suggesting that she lead outreach to evangelicals and the law enforcement community. After a few years, she went to Equal Justice USA, a group that works on criminal justice reform issues, to launch a national organization aimed at conservatives. That turned into Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.

Beaudoin reaches out to evangelical and other faith-based leaders and gets them talking about policy; her colleague Marc Hyden, the group???s national advocacy coordinator, works with movement conservatives, college Republicans, tea party activists and libertarians.

"For me, it's about redemption," Beaudoin says. "I think that is true for most evangelicals as well. That's at the center of our faith. We believe in grace, we believe that God can do wonderful things. How can we say, 'You are the worst of the worst, you are not worthy, and we will dispose of you?' What does that say about us and what we believe?"

Hyden says he and Beaudoin have been surprised by how they've been welcomed at events like the Conservative Political Action Conference and on conservative college campuses. "I'm finding that we are being accepted in some of the most conservative circles of America," he says.

Hyden, who previously worked for the National Rifle Association, frames his arguments to movement conservatives in a slightly different way than Beaudoin does. "There's nothing limited about giving power to the state to kill you," he says. Especially "if you don't trust the government to launch a health-care site or deliver mail."

But he understands as well as anyone that the journey to opposing the death penalty is a long and difficult one. "I used to support it, I'm a little ashamed to say," Hyden says. "I was willing to violate my own conservative principles." The harder he looked at the issues, though, "the less I could justify supporting it. It risks innocent lives, there's no way it's pro-life and it costs more than life without parole."

That kind of introspection, Coash and his allies say, is exactly what their side needs.

During the debate over the death penalty in Nebraska, Coash said, his father-in-law, a farmer, was shocked and asked him, "What the hell are you doing?" Coash laid out his case, landing on the fact that the state hadn't even carried out an execution in 20 years. Coash says his father-in-law responded: "Well, shoot, get rid of it then!" He knows that the pro-death-penalty movement is formidable, but he remains hopeful.

"Nebraskans," he says, "are very practical people."

(source: Washington Post)

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