Aug. 23
FLORIDA:
Man accused in death of Metro PCS employee awaits Florida's death penalty
ruling
Florida's death penalty debate has delayed the trial of the man accused of
killing 20-year-old Shelby Farah.
Florida's death penalty was ruled unconstitutional.
Darlene Farah, the victim's mother, said coming to these court appearances are
draining. The case is expected to go to trial in the spring.
As courts await instruction a Duval County judge said Monday that the trial
against James Rhodes won't happen before next April.
Farah was killed in 2013 while working at a Northside Metro PCS store. Darlene
Farah believes if Rhodes is convicted, he should be in prison for life without
the possibility of parole or opportunity to appeal.
Farah hopes a new state attorney will take office and reconsider her plea.
Rhodes is scheduled to be back in court on Oct. 24.
As courts await jury instruction from the Supreme Court for Florida's death
penalty cases, death penalty cases similar to Rhodes continue to see delays.
(source: actionnewsjax.com)
WASHINGTON:
Allen Ivanov pleads not guilty to killing 3 teens, wounding a 4th at Mukilteo
party
The quiet of the courtroom was interrupted by the sound of anguish when accused
killer Allen Ivanov faced a judge on Monday.
Ivanov, 19, pleaded not guilty to all charges, as the families of the teenage
victims sat just 3 seats behind him.
Police say Ivanov confessed to plotting the mass shooting for days, fueled by
jealous rage after his ex-girlfriend Anna Bui refused to get back with him.
Police say Ivanov hid behind a bush outside a Mukilteo house party attended by
his ex-girlfriend for 2 hours, spying on party-goers, before he opened fire.
Detectives say Ivanov shot and killed 19-year-old Jake Long first, after Jake
stumbled upon Ivanov hiding.
Then, police say, Ivanov stormed the house, killing Jordan Ebner and Anna Bui,
both 19. Will Kramer, an 18-year-old who was also shot during the rampage,
survived his wounds.
A prosecutor sought a no-contact order between the defendant and Kramer as well
as family members of the other victims.
Kramer's dad was one of the parents who showed up to court, listening in as 5
counts of charges were read out loud.
The prosecution could decide to seek the death penalty. The defense has until
December to provide any mitigating circumstances to persuade the prosecution
not to seek the death penalty.
Detectives say Ivanov started getting jealous after seeing images of Anna and
Kramer on social media. Detectives say Ivanov texted 2 of his friends prior the
shootings about going through with the killings.
One text message read
"I hate Anna I need revenge."
"I'm 2 minutes from shooting."
But those friends never warned police,
Now 3 young lives are gone and the pain is indescribable.
Jake Long's mom, Autumn Snider, wrote on her Facebook page: "I was supposed to
send you back off to college, not have your funeral. I miss you so much. The
pain is like nothing I can even put into words. It's all consuming, constant
and runs from my head to my toes."
Snider says she hopes the prosecution will seek the death penalty.
Anna Bui's father was not in court, telling Q13 News it's simply too painful to
attend, and that he will leave it up to the court to determine Ivanov's
punishment.
(source: Fox news)
USA:
No Time For Trump: Killing Off The Death Penalty
The death penalty exoneration reported in the New York Times contained the
customary horrors.
In 1983, police in rural North Carolina arrested 2 mentally-disabled
African-American teenage half-brothers for the rape and murder of an
11-year-old girl. After hours of interrogation without a lawyer, the oldest
brother cracked under threats of execution, signing a confession written by
police. Then, bewildered, he asked his interrogators: "Can I go home now?"
He never did. Confronted with the coerced confession after hours of the same
unrelenting pressure, the intellectually disabled 15-year-old brother signed a
confession of his own.
At trial, both recanted their confessions, the only evidence against them. But
a Bible-thumping prosecutor later known as America's "deadliest DA" sought the
death penalty. The jury sent them to death row.
In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. In dissent,
Justice Harry Blackmun noted that the older brother had the mental age of a
nine-year-old. "This factor alone," he wrote, "persuades me that the death
penalty in this case is unconstitutional."
After 30 years, pro bono lawyers pressed for DNA testing of a cigarette butt
found near the victim's body. The testing matched the DNA on the cigarette to a
man with a history of sexual assaults who lived a block from where the body was
found. A man who - only weeks after the murder - had confessed to the rape and
murder of an 18-year-old girl in the same town. Remarkably, the local police
had never questioned him about the strikingly similar crime for which the
brothers were sentenced to death.
In 2014, the brothers were released - 31 years too late.
This case typifies the reason that the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party
states succinctly: "We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a
cruel and unusual punishment. It has no place in the United States of America."
But If Donald Trump becomes president, we will have more such cases - many
more.
Trump is a longtime death penalty enthusiast who has committed to expanding its
reach. This despite all the evidence that its application is unconscionable -
entrapping the innocent, and disproportionately ensnaring the poor and the
miserable, while bypassing those whose guilt is often greater.
Start with the innocent. By March of this year, the number of official death
row exonerations reached 156. The reasons are not hard to pinpoint.
First, race. In almost 80 % of the cases where the defendant is executed, the
victim was white. In contrast, the majority of death row inmates - that is, the
10 % of defendants eligible for the death penalty who actually receive it - are
black or Latino.
To this add the most dire personal hardship. The biographies of death row
inmates are numbingly similar: fetal alcohol syndrome, organic brain damage,
medical inattention, economic and educational deprivation, and repeated
familial beatings, torture and sexual abuse which makes mere parental neglect
enviable by comparison. In itself, the laser-like focus of our death penalty on
those who suffer society's most terrible conditions exposes its inescapable
inequity.
Cement all this with terrible lawyers. Routinely, the disadvantaged get the
defense that they can pay for.
A review of death row cases documents the inevitable results. Lawyers who are
overworked, inexperienced, unprepared and underpaid. An absence of vital expert
witnesses. Forensic or scientific evidence which is botched or phony. A failure
to investigate facts essential to the defense.
But not all of the distortions of justice are inadvertent. Add police and
prosecutors who, unchecked by a zealous defense, run roughshod at trial and, at
times, withhold potentially exculpatory evidence. Or "eyewitnesses" who are
vengeful or mistaken. Or crafty snitches who shift blame to the defendant in
exchange for a lighter sentence. Or, in some cases, all of this.
There is no way to redeem these miscarriages. Far from being a magic bullet,
DNA exonerations expose but the tip of the death penalty's dark iceberg.
Contrary to popular delusion, DNA evidence is available in less than 10 % of
murders - steel bullets, which account for the majority of killings, do not
create human DNA. The only question is how often we have buried our mistakes.
This is, perhaps, the ultimate price of a regime so blatantly discriminatory:
while it unerringly selects the underprivileged, it does not exclude the
innocent. But the American system is specifically engineered to ensure that
those are convicted stay convicted, guilty or not.
This is the dirty secret which few of us understand.
In 1996, responding to the widespread perception that death sentences were
being unreasonably delayed by last-minute legal maneuvers, Congress passed the
Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act - AEDPA. Its aim is to place
"finality" of sentencing and execution above the risk of executing the wrong
person.
If "effective" means putting the innocent to death, AEDPA is an indubitable
success. Once convicted a defendant can present new evidence of innocence only
through a habeas corpus petition - the very remedy AEDPA seeks to curb. And its
effects on habeas corpus are draconian.
Suppose that a defense lawyer uncovers persuasive new evidence that the man
about to die is, quite possibly, innocent. Under AEDPA, that is not nearly
enough to prevent his execution. Instead, the new evidence must be so "clear
and convincing" that no reasonable jury would now convict him of murder.
"Reasonable doubt" no longer applies. 50-50 does not pass the test. Even "more
likely not" won't do it. In short, AEDPA reverses the burden of proof.
And yet, unbelievably, even if the defendant musters "clear and convincing
evidence of innocence," the state can still execute him.
Why? Because AEDPA erects yet more barriers against the use of this new
evidence.
First, the evidence is barred if his original lawyer could have discovered it
had they been reasonably diligent. So if the lawyer who defended him was too
incompetent or inexperienced or just plain lazy to uncover what he should have
found, the prisoner is out of luck.
Second, even if the exculpatory evidence could not have been found before
conviction, it is still barred if the reviewing court finds that the original
trial was "constitutionally fair." Chilling as it it may seem, a man who newly
discovered evidence appears to vindicate can nonetheless be executed if the
trial which convicted him - however wrongly - is deemed "fair."
Under AEDPA, this is hardly a daunting standard. The most common claim of
unfairness is that the defendant's lawyer was so grossly inadequate that this
denied his client a fair trial. And drunks and drug addicts and lawyers who
fell asleep at crucial moments have been found good enough to get their client
executed.
"The certainty that we have executed many hundreds of innocent people should
cause us to recoil."
But stop and consider the resulting Catch-22. If the defendant had a lawyer bad
enough to pass test 2 - that his trial was unfair - then he probably has failed
test 1: very often the new evidence could have been discovered by more diligent
lawyer.
Yet even if a defendant clears every one of these hurdles, another barrier
awaits. In order to get a hearing to consider the new evidence, he needs the
approval of the federal court overseeing his case. If the court turns him down
- no matter how arbitrary the reason - he is barred from appealing.
In other words, he's dead. If his claim was presented before, no matter how
badly - or incompletely - he's dead. And even if the U.S. Supreme Court hands
down a new rule of law which would prevent his execution were he tried today,
it does not matter unless the Court expressly applies the rule to habeas corpus
petitions. Otherwise, he's dead.
Truly, this is justice in a fun house mirror - Franz Kafka as executioner.
That should haunt us all. And the certainty that we have executed many hundreds
of innocent people should cause us to recoil. As Justice William Brennan once
wrote: "It is tempting to pretend that those on death row share a fate in no
way connected to our own... Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the
reverberations of justice are not so easily confined... [ T]he way in which we
choose who will die reveals the depth of moral commitment among the living."
Instead, the way we choose who will die betrays a moral blindness, a preference
for punishment as palliative which allows the ills of our society to permeate
the gravest judgment we can make about a fellow human - that we are entitled to
take his life. And with this, all too often, comes class bias - the idea that
these people are not like us, and therefore should be of no concern.
A word of personal honesty, for the death penalty can never be a bloodless
subject.
Many occupants of death row have committed murders too hideous to describe
here. Were the victim a member of my family, I would be gripped by the desire
for vengeance. But society does not owe me that. The loss of a loved one cannot
be redeemed - not this way, not through this system. For the error and
injustice embedded within is rooted in human flaws beyond our power to abolish.
But, state-by-state, it is within our power as citizens to abolish the death
penalty. And it is within the power of the Supreme Court to bar it all together
- yet another reason to care about which president appoints our justices, and
which party has now committed to ridding us of capital punishment.
This last point is crucial. A Supreme Court ruling would bar the federal
government from imposing capital punishment, a step Congress is unlikely to
take. And the states most enthusiastic about the death penalty - Texas,
Missouri, Georgia and Florida - have the least qualms about its inequity. In
particular, Texas - which leads the country in death row exonerations -
continues to briskly execute its prisoners.
In the near term, these and other states are no more likely to abolish the
death penalty than are countries like China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia and Yemen. When it comes to capital punishment its advocates, typically
conservative, forget that it is something they scorn in other contexts - a
government program. So the question is whether the federal government or any
state can constitutionally maintain a regime of death so discriminatory and
prone to lethal error.
"In crucial areas of the law, much may depend on who takes Antonin Scalia???s
place. Including whether America, like Yemen or North Korea, continues to
execute the innocent."
Here, again, the death of Antonin Scalia looms. On the Court, no one advocated
the death penalty more fiercely; no one was more cavalier about the prospect -
indeed, the certainty - of wrongful executions. To read his opinions on the
subject is to wonder at the callousness, smugness and sheer self-satisfaction
which so blithely permeates his prose. But his unwonted exuberance may have had
an unwanted result - pushing his colleagues closer to abolition.
Before Scalia's demise, a 5 to 4 Republican majority upheld Oklahoma's lethal
injection protocol. In dissent, Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg,
questioned the death penalty as a whole. "Today's administration of the death
penalty," Breyer wrote, "involves three fundamental constitutional defects:
serious unreliability, arbitrariness in application, and unconscionably long
delays that undermine [it's] penological purpose."
Now Donald Trump has offered us a list of prospective nominees to fill the
vacancy Scalia left. All are hard-line conservatives, all but certain to uphold
this shameful aspect of our justice system. In this way, as in others, Trump
has promised to perpetuate Scalia's dubious legacy.
In crucial areas of the law, much may depend on who takes Antonin Scalia's
place. Including whether America, like Yemen or North Korea, continues to
execute the innocent.
In murderous dictatorships, we find that unacceptable. And so we should at
home.
(source: Richard North Patterson, Huffington Post)
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