Aug. 24
NEVADA:
I-Team: Nevada unable to carry out death penalties
The Clark County District Attorney's Office is getting called out for how it
handles death penalty cases. Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project
released a report alleging "an overly aggressive prosecutor" ... and unfair
treatment for the mentally ill.
While this report came out Tuesday referring to the process in the courts, the
Department of Corrections has its own challenge with the death penalty.
Nevada is a death penalty state, but there is no way currently to execute
anyone on death row. The Department of Corrections is scrambling to address the
matter.
Serial killer Michael Ross was on death row in Connecticut in 2005 when he gave
up the fight and said he wanted to die.
"I was a warden at the time of one of the state prisons and I had a position in
the execution at that time," said James Dzurenda, director, Department of
Corrections.
He has been in the position since April and has concerns that could happen in
Nevada.
"We don't know when this happens. It could happen at any time," he said.
80 inmates are on death row in Nevada prisons. Dzurenda says all are in the
appeals process, but if 1 of them asks to be executed, the death chamber has to
be ready in 45 days and right now, it wouldn't be.
2 drugs are needed together for a lethal injection. The state has both drugs,
but one drug is expired and the other drug will expire in January of 2018.
The state can't get the expired drug because drug makers like Pfizer refuse to
sell it for executions so Dzurenda says he's put out a national request to get
the drugs.
"Just sitting and waiting til the process is done and seeing if someone will
respond or a company out there will respond," he said.
The other challenge is construction.
Dzurenda says the death chamber in Carson City was last used in 2006 and is
outdated.
A new one is being built in Ely State Prison for an estimated $650,000. It's
expected to be finished on Nov. 1. While critics of the death penalty call it a
waste of money, Dzurenda says his hands are tied due to state law.
"If we don't have an appropriate chamber and policy and medication, we can't
even abide by a court order," Dzurenda said.
He says the new death chamber in Ely State Prison will have mutiple purposes.
He says it will have 3 rooms where meetings and attorney visits can be held and
it can be used for storage.
One defense attorney told the I-Team, he wouldn't want to meet with a client in
the same place where an inmate could potentially be executed.
(source: lasvegasnow.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Don't abolish death penalty, make the system work: Michael A. Ramos
743 criminals sit on California's death row. Prisoners like Randy Kraft who
sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered 16 young men between 1972-1983 or
Dennis Stanworth, who was convicted of raping and murdering 2 girls and was
sentenced to death in 1966 for the heinous crimes he committed.
California's Supreme Court set aside Stanworth's death sentence in 1972 after
the California Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was
unconstitutional. So, instead they gave this brutal killer life in prison with
the possibility of parole. In 1990, he was paroled and by 2013 he killed again
- this time his elderly mother.
And who could forget Richard Allen Davis? A career criminal who was 3 months
out of prison and "rehabilitated" only to end up raping and killing 12-year-old
Polly Klaas. Davis has now been sitting on death row for 17 years - at
taxpayer's expense.
Inmates on California's death row include notorious serial killers, cop
killers, child killers and rape/torture murderers. Many of these individuals
have been on death row since the 1980s and have used endless appeals, spread
out over years and years to delay justice. Families of murder victims should
not have to wait decades for justice. Hundreds of killers have sat on death row
for more than 20 years forcing taxpayers to fund their meals, clothing, housing
and health care. This is unacceptable.
Proposition 62 will abolish the death penalty altogether and instead give
killers already on death row, and future killers, a life sentence. This is the
wrong tact to take. Prop 62 means these murderers will live the rest of their
lives at taxpayers' expense, long after their victims are gone. Instead, a more
prudent move is to reform the death penalty by mending what's broken. The
current system is out of balance, we need to restore the balance between the
rights of defendants and the need to provide justice and closure for the
families of victims and protect society. Voting no on Prop. 62 and voting Yes
on Proposition 66 is the answer. Prop. 66 speeds up the appeals process by
eliminating legal and procedural delaying tactics while assuring due process
protections for those sentenced to death.
Death penalty opponents like to point out the possibility of persons wrongly
convicted of capital offenses and sentenced to death being executed. The fact
is there is not a single documented case of this ever taking place in
California due to the expertise and painstaking quality of investigation and
prosecutorial work that has gone into death penalty cases. Prop. 66 ensures
that all appeals are heard within 5 years and no innocent person is executed.
In addition, convicts on death row would lose various special privileges they
enjoy and will be required to pay restitution to victims' families out of their
prison work pay.
No on Prop. 62 and yes on Prop. 66 is supported by hundreds of district
attorneys, sheriffs, law enforcement organizations, elected officials and
victims' right advocates and community leaders. They all joined forces to
ensure that the worst of the worst killers receive the strongest sentence to
help bring closure to families while saving California taxpayers millions of
dollars every year.
California's death row inmates have murdered more than a thousand victims,
including 226 children and 43 police officers; 294 victims were raped and/or
tortured. It's time California reformed our death penalty process so it works.
(source: Opinion; Michael A. Ramos is San Bernardino County district
attorney----San Bernardino Sun)
USA:
Scathing new report: Racism, bias and prosecutor misconduct plague "dying" U.S.
death penalty
The Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School is out with a damning new
report this morning that seems certain to put another nail in the coffin of the
death penalty in the United States. This is from the release that accompanied
"Too Broken to Fix: Part I - An In-depth Look at America's Outlier Death
Penalty Counties":
"Today, Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project released a new report
offering an in-depth look at how the death penalty is operating in the handful
of counties across the country that are still using it. Of the 3,143 county or
county equivalents in the United States, only 16 - or 1/2 of 1 % - imposed 5 or
more death sentences between 2010 and 2015. Part I of the report, titled Too
Broken to Fix: An In-depth Look at America's Outlier Death Penalty Counties,
examined 10 years of court opinions and records from 8 of these 16 "outlier
counties," including Caddo Parish (LA), Clark (NV), Duval (FL), Harris (TX),
Maricopa (AZ), Mobile (AL), Kern (CA) and Riverside (CA). The report also
analyzed all of the new death sentences handed down in these counties since
2010.
The report notes that these "outlier counties" are plagued by persistent
problems of overzealous prosecutors, ineffective defense lawyers, and racial
bias. Researchers found that the impact of these systemic problems included the
conviction of innocent people, and the excessively harsh punishment of people
with significant impairments. Many of the defendants appear to have one or more
impairments that are on par with, or worse than, those that the U.S. Supreme
Court has said should categorically exempt individuals from execution due to
lessened culpability....
In conducting its analysis, the Project reviewed more than 200 direct appeals
opinions handed down between 2006 and 2015 in these eight counties. The Project
found:
--60 % of cases involved defendants with significant mental impairments or
other forms of mitigation.
--18 % of cases involved a defendant who was under the age of 21 at the time of
the offense. In Riverside County, 16 % of the defendants were age 18 at the
time of the offense.
--44 % of cases involved a defendant who had an intellectual disability, brain
damage, or severe mental illness. In 4 of the counties, 1/2 or more of the
defendants had mental impairments: Maricopa (62 %), Mobile (60 %), Caddo Parish
(57 %), and Kern (50 %).
--Approximately 1 in 7 cases involved a finding of prosecutorial misconduct.
Maricopa and Clark counties had misconduct in 21 % and 47 % of cases,
respectively.
--Bad lawyering was a persistent problem across all of the counties. In most of
the counties, the average mitigation presentation at the penalty phase of the
trial lasted approximately 1 day....
--A relatively small group of defense lawyers represented a substantial number
of the individuals who ended up on death row. In Kern County, 1 lawyer
represented 1/2 of the individuals who ended up on death row between 2010 and
2015.
Happily, as the report also points out, the death penalty in the United States
is dying. As with other vestiges of a bygone era - think of corporal punishment
in our schools - the main challenge now is to bring the shrinking number of
jurisdictions that cling to the death penalty into the 21st Century. The report
seems certain to abet that process.
(source: ncpolicywatch.org)
**************
Death sentences decline but dominate in Florida, Alabama
The number of death sentences in the United States has declined significantly
since 1976, but the few remaining are clustered primarily in 2 states --
Alabama and Florida, Harvard's Fair Punishment Project said in a report
released Tuesday.
"Across the country, the death penalty is on life support," the researchers
said.
Last year, juries returned the fewest number of death sentences since capital
punishment was reinstated in 1976 -- 49. That represents a decline of 50 %
since 2009 when there were 118 death sentences. And in 1996, there were 315.
And only 14 of the 31 states with the death penalty imposed at least 1 capital
sentence.
The project, titled "Too Broken to Fix: Part 1" broke down the numbers by
county,
Of 3,143 country or county equivalents, just 16 imposed imposed 5 or more death
sentences between 2010 and 2015.
6 counties were in Alabama (Jefferson, Mobile) and Florida (Duval,
Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Pinellas). These are the only states that permit
non-unanimous death verdicts.
In Florida, only 10 jurors need to agree to the death sentence. But in May,
Florida Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch declared its latest death penalty law in
violation of the state's constitution. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court
declared the state's death sentencing system unconstitutional because it gave
too little power to juries.
Of the remaining 10 counties, 5 are located in highly populated Southern
California (Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino). The
others are in Louisiana (Caddo), Nevada (Clark), Texas (Dallas, Harris), and
Arizona (Maricopa).
The report, in the first part, examined 1/2 of them -- Caddo, Clark, Duval,
Harris, Maricopa, Mobile, Kern and Riverside.
"Our review reveals that these counties frequently share at least three
systemic deficiencies: a history of overzealous prosecutions, inadequate
defense lawyering and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion," the report said.
"These structural failings regularly produce 2 types of unjust outcomes which
disproportionately impact people of color: the wrongful conviction of innocent
people and the excessive punishment of persons who are young or suffer from
severe mental illnesses, brain damage, trauma and intellectual disabilities."
The report noted that with 14,000 homicides a year and only 49 death sentences
last year, "it is safe to conclude that most prosecutors do not seek the death
penalty in most of the cases in which the punishment is available."
But the report found that it's not prosecutorial restraint. "Our research
doesn't support this claim," the report said. "Since 1976, the year capital
punishment resumed in America, a tiny handful of prosecutors account for a
wildly disproportionate number of death sentences."
Just 3 prosecutors obtained a combined 131 death sentences: Joe Freeman Britt
of Robeson County, N.C.; Robert Macy of Oklahoma County, Okla.; and Donald
Myers of the 11th Judicial District of South Carolina. They were also noted in
a June report by the Fair Punishment Project titled "America's Top 5 Deadliest
Prosecutors: How Overzealous Personalities Drive the Death Penalty." Britt and
Macy have retired and Myers plans to step down in 2017.
The trio also were heavily cited for misconduct -- 33 %, 37 % and 46 %. The
report also noted that once these prosecutors left office, the the death
sentencing rates declined in their counties.
"The prosecutors who have obtained the most death sentences in these counties
tend to exhibit an obsession with winning death sentences at almost any cost,
even in cases with less culpable defendants," the report said. "Their
willingness to cut corners, even in cases that literally involve life-and-death
decisions, casts grave doubt on the legitimacy of capital punishment - and also
tarnishes the entire justice system in America."
No. 1 on the list was Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. It had 28 death
sentences between 2010 and 2015. Its death rate was 2.3 times higher than the
rest of Arizona. Its percentage of misconduct in the cases was 21 %.
Andrew Thomas, elected to serve as Maricopa's County attorney in 2004, pursued
capital charges at nearly twice the rate of his predecessor, resulting in a
backlog of cases. In 2012, a 3-member panel of Arizona Supreme Court voted
unanimously to disbar Thomas.
One of the prosecutors who served under Thomas was Juan Martinez, who was found
to have committed misconduct in at least 3 capital murder cases by the Arizona
Supreme Court. He prosecuted the conviction of Jody Arias, a case that drew
national attention, for her murder of Travis Alexander in 2008. Arias was
convicted of 1st-degree murder, but 2 juries failed to agree on the death
penalty and instead the judge imposed a life sentence.
"Killing somebody is not love," Martinez said after the Arias trial."It's just
a show that this person belongs to you and that if you can't have them, nobody
else will."
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down the death sentence because the
judge allowed Martinez to argue that the defendant, Shawn Patrick Lynch, could
be potentially dangerous when he would be locked up forever.
In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, there were 25 sentences -- about
1/4 of Florida's death sentences imposed. The rate is 40 % higher than the rest
of the state. The report found the percentage of misconduct at 16 %.
Angela Corey is the state attorney in Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit, which
includes Duval County. Like Gonzalez in Arizona, Corey headed a high-profile
case.
In 2012, Corey was appointed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott as special prosecutor
to investigate the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. She charged
him with 2nd-degree murder, but he was acquitted of the charges.
One recent case is James Xavier Rhodes, a now-24-year-old man who is facing a
death sentence for shooting a young woman at a MetroPCS store.? Darlene Farrah,
the victim's mother, has unsuccessfully asked Corey to grant her daughter's
killer a plea deal for a life sentence.
"It's my statutory and constitutional duty to seek justice for this community
and to give the victim's family justice," said told The New York Times. And she
said the victims "do not control the seeking of the death penalty."
Corey says she can't be blamed for these disproportionate numbers. "We have so
many sets of rules we are bound to follow," said told The Nation. "There are so
many checks and balances."
Duval has had no capital cased exonerated.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 ruled that juvenile offenders and persons with
intellectual disabilities should not be executed. However, the report noted
there are "many defendants who also have a diminished culpability similar to
these 'categorically exempted' defendants, but fall through the cracks of
justice."
The report concluded: "Our findings, taken together, suggest that the small
handful of counties that are still using the death penalty are plagued by
persistent problems of overzealous prosecutors, ineffective defense lawyers,
and racial bias, resulting in the conviction of innocent people and the
excessively harsh punishment of people with significant impairments that are on
par with, or even worse than, the categorical exclusions that the Court has
said should exempt individuals from execution due to lessened culpability."
(source: UPI)
********************************
Just 16 counties are fueling America's use of the death penalty
Just 16 counties in the US are driving the use of the death penalty, despite a
nationwide movement away from the sentence, a new report from the Harvard Law
School's Fair Punishment Project has found.
The "outlier counties" - scattered throughout Alabama, Florida, California,
Louisiana, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona - have each imposed five or more death
sentences between 2010 and 2015, a major departure from the overall downward
trend in death penalty use since it peaked in 1996 with 315.
The report determined that the reasons behind the counties' deviation can be
boiled down to 3 "structural failures" that they tend to have in common:
overzealous prosecutors, inadequate defense lawyers, and racial bias and
exclusion.
The outcomes of these sentencings, according to the report, regularly resulted
in wrongful convictions and excessive punishment of young people, or those who
suffer from mental illnesses or disabilities.
"Studies have shown [death sentences] to be extremely expensive, prone to
error, applied in discriminatory ways, and imposed upon the most vulnerable,
rather than the most culpable people," the report said.
For instance, in Maricopa County, Arizona, the report found that a
disproportionate 57% of those sentenced to death between 2010 and 2015 were
people of color. The county is notable for drawing national scrutiny in recent
days - its sheriff, Joe Arpaio, was referred by a federal judge for criminal
contempt charges last week after he allegedly failed to abide by a court order
meant to prevent his office from racially profiling Latinos.
Arpaio has been accused by the Department of Justice of overseeing the "worst
pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in US history."
The report also looked into Duval County, Florida, where 87% of its death
sentences since 2010 have been used on African-American defendants. The report
attributed much of the county's outlier status to State Attorney Angela Corey,
who is currently campaigning for re-election and was dubbed the "cruelest
prosecutor in America" last week by The Nation magazine.
Corey slammed the Fair Sentencing Project's statistics as being unfair in an
interview with the Florida Times-Union on Tuesday.
The study's focus on 16 counties hearkens back to Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer's dissent in the 2015 Glossip v. Gross case, in which he pegged
geography as being a major factor in determining which defendants are sentenced
to death.
"Within a death penalty State, the imposition of the death penalty heavily
depends on the county in which a defendant is tried," Breyer wrote.
The report, released Tuesday, examined just 8 of the 16 counties, while a
second report detailing the remaining eight is set to be released in September.
(source: Business Insider)
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