Aug. 24
TEXAS:
Judge Sees No Wrongs in Texas Executions
Texas' execution protocol is constitutional, a federal judge ruled, dismissing
a lawsuit from 5 death row inmates who say the state should retest its drugs
before killing them.
Texas revised its lethal-injection procedure in 2012 from a 3-judge cocktail to
a dose of compounded pentobarbital. Since then, Texas has executed 30 prisoners
without any reported problems, according to U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes'
Aug. 19 ruling.
Texas changed its protocol and started buying its pentobarbital from a
compounding pharmacy after large drug manufacturers, unwilling to be complicit
in the death penalty, stopped producing the drugs the state used.
Lead plaintiff Jeffery Wood sued 2 directors of the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice and the warden of the Huntsville prison on Aug. 12, seeking an
injunction to stop the state from carrying out his execution, which was set for
Aug. 24.
Though Hughes refused to grant Wood relief in the federal case, the Texas Court
of Criminal Appeals on Friday afternoon remanded Wood's case to the trial court
that oversaw his death penalty conviction.
The appeals court told the trial court to look into allegations from Wood's
attorneys that a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, the late Dr.
James Grigson, dubbed "Dr. Death" by the media, lied to the jury about how
often he found defendants pose a danger to society in the numerous capital
murder trials in which he had testified. Wood's reprieve came on his 43rd
birthday, the Texas Tribune reported.
Church leaders, death penalty opponents and state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, say
Wood does not deserve the death penalty because he didn't kill anyone.
Wood was sentenced under a Texas law that makes anyone involved in a crime that
causes death equally responsible.
A jury convicted Wood for the 1996 murder of a convenience store clerk in
Kerrville, though Wood was sitting outside the store in a pickup when his
friend fired the fatal shot.
Wood is fighting to overturn his death sentence in the state case, but his
conviction will stand.
In his federal lawsuit, Wood says that because Texas agreed to retest its
compounded pentobarbital before using it on inmates Perry Williams and Thomas
Whitaker in a settlement of their 2013 federal lawsuit, the state should do the
same for him and his 4 co-plaintiffs.
He claims that Texas will violate his Eighth and 14th Amendment rights to be
free from cruel and unusual punishment by using a drug that presents a
"substantial risk of causing severe pain," an argument his attorneys backed
with an affidavit, medical report and lab results from pharmacologist James
Ruble and anesthesiologist David Waisel.
Judge Hughes didn't buy it. Describing Ruble's report as a "pseudo-scientific
dump of partial facts and incomplete data" and Waisel's affidavit as rife with
"speculative, unsubstantiated, and partial data," Hughes dismissed the case
Friday.
Wood et al. claim Texas uses expired pentobarbital, an argument Hughes found
unpersuasive, because the state administers twice the lethal dose to execute
prisoners.
"The plaintiffs have not shown that Texas uses expired drugs to execute people.
That should end the inquiry. Their medical support is wholly unreliable to show
that the drugs have a demonstrated risk of severe pain," Hughes wrote in a
12-page order, voluminous compared to his typically terse rulings.
Hughes dismissed most of the claims for not meeting Texas' 2-year statute of
limitations for personal injury claims.
"The equal protection claim will be dismissed because the plaintiffs have not
shown that Texas has infringed upon a fundamental right," he wrote.
Here are the other plaintiffs and their execution dates: Rolando Ruiz, Aug. 31;
Robert Jennings, Sept. 14; Terry Edwards, Oct. 19 and Ramiro Gonzales, Nov. 2.
Texas leads the nation with 6 executions so far this year.
(source: Courthouse News)
**********************
The death penalty's essential futility
Maybe our society should congratulate itself occasionally on how much progress
it's made in the last half-century toward equality and individual rights,
especially for women, racial minorities and LBGT.
Or maybe self-congratulation isn't called for just for doing the right thing.
And some of our steps in the right direction have been timid and tentative.
Nevertheless, good things have been done. Yet our ambitious, magnificent
experiment in democracy, freedom, human rights and the progress of civilization
is hampered by our reluctance to abandon a practice that we share only with
repressive countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran: the prerogative of
the state to put citizens to death.
For many this characteristic of American life is largely invisible. 20 states
have abolished the death penalty already, and many of the others haven't
executed anyone in decades.
Even in my home state, Texas, which is the nation's most active death penalty
state, an execution doesn't draw much attention. Every month or so a short
article, buried in the B-section of the newspaper, announces that another
criminal has been put to death. Even in Texas, executions are generally beyond
the public's notice.
But a couple of Associated Press articles, literally adjacent in my local
newspaper last week, provide the occasion to consider the practice of capital
punishment in America in the 21st century.
If you were looking for someone who deserves to be executed, John Battaglia
would be a good candidate. In 2001, Battaglia murdered his 9-year-old and
6-year-old daughters with gunshots while his ex-wife listened on the phone. The
older child, Faith, begged for her life before he pulled the trigger. And,
indeed, last week a district judge in Dallas set an execution date of Dec. 7.
On the other hand, 3 defense psychiatrists testified at his trial that he has
bipolar disorder, which distorts his sense of reality, and he reportedly
suffers also from narcissistic personality disorder.
The court said Battaglia showed evidence of mental illness and delusions and
that his competence is in question. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has ruled
that a criminal may be executed if he understands that he has been condemned to
die, and why. In accordance with that low standard, Battaglia will be executed
in December.
The article just above Battaglia's reports the case of Sheborah Thomas, who
faces capital murder charges in Houston for drowning her 7-year-old son and
5-year-old daughter in the bathtub. Apparently, the children fought back,
struggling for their lives, but she held their heads under the water until they
died.
She waited a day and then dumped her children's bodies in a trash container
behind her house. Later she tried, unsuccessfully, to bury them and then rolled
them under a neighbor's house.
To say that a mother who could commit such a crime is mentally unstable seems
redundant. In fact, Thomas' attorney says that she has been diagnosed with
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression.
Don't mistake this column for an effort to generate sympathy for Thomas and
Battaglia. On the other hand, anger doesn't feel like the right response,
either. How about futility, in 2 versions?
The 1st is the futility of the principal argument in favor of capital
punishment, the idea that it serves as a deterrent to crime. Both Battaglia and
Thomas already live in an active capital punishment state, and it's impossible
to believe that crimes based in mental instability like theirs could be
deterred by the threat of execution.
The 2nd futility is the one we feel when we try to give people like Thomas and
Battaglia what we think they deserve merely by killing them. We'll never
succeed as long as we're limited by the "cruel and unusual" language in the
Constitution.
And since we've neither figured out how to administer the death penalty
equitably, without regard to race, gender or economic status, nor how to
prevent the occasional execution of innocent people, maybe it's time for the
U.S. to join the rest of the West and to abolish a practice whose only real
purpose is an essentially unsatisfying feeling of revenge.
(source: John M. Crisp, an op/ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in
the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas----Richmond
Times-Dispatch)
MASSACHUSETTS:
On 89th anniversary of execution, Sacco & Vanzetti remembered----Anarchists
were executed for murder in 1927; uncertainty remains over their guilt or
innocence
Tuesday marks 89 years since one of the most controversial executions in
American history. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were put to death by
electric chair on August 23, 1927 at the Massachusetts state prison in
Charlestown.
The 2 were convicted of the murders of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe
factory in Braintree. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, and generations of
defenders have charged that they were framed, or at least wrongfully convicted,
due to their radical political beliefs and Italian background. To this day,
there remains great uncertainty over their guilt.
From 5:30 to 7:00 Tuesday evening, a memorial service for Sacco and Vanzetti
was held at the Sinai Temple in Springfield. The service was also a meeting of
the Hampden County chapter of the Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death
Penalty.
John Fitzgerald, a death penalty opponent who is one of the organizers of the
evening's event, says that death penalty opponents have much to be proud of.
"The biggest change has been brought about by DNA examination. Several people
who were on death row were exonerated because they were not the perpetrators of
the crime," Fitzgerald said.
He added that they are hoping to keep the death penalty out of Massachusetts,
and also find ways to possibly reduce sentences of life without parole for
younger people convicted of murder, who may have a chance to be rehabilitated.
Several western Massachusetts men and women will be recognized Tuesday night
for the work they have done in opposition to the death penalty.
(source: WWLP news)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Full 3rd Circ. Finds Witness Errors in PA Death Row Case
Testimony by 3 confident eyewitnesses placed a Philadelphia father near the
site of teenager's grisly murder near a train station in 1991.
That was enough for a jury to send James Dennis to death row for 21 years,
until a federal judge found 3 years ago that there was more to his case than
met their eyes.
By a 9-4 margin, a decisive majority of the Third Circuit's entire bench
affirmed the decision on Tuesday in a ruling that skewered the state for
depriving Dennis of a fair trial by withholding evidence corroborating his
alibi and implicating a different perpetrator.
The ruling also bolsters a growing body of evidence that one of the most common
grounds for a death-penalty conviction is also among the shakiest.
On the afternoon of Oct. 22, 1991, Dennis was spotted from afar near a train
station in Northeast Philadelphia, where the teenage Chedell Williams died in a
robbery-murder with a bullet in her neck.
At 5 feet 6 inches tall and 125 pounds, Dennis was considerably shorter and
more slight than witness descriptions of the killer.
Of the 9 witnesses at the scene, the state presented 4 - and only 3 of them
picked Dennis out of a photo array. The 4th had told authorities that the
suspect stood at 5 feet 9 inches and 170 pounds.
Dennis hoped to convince a jury that he had been on a bus from his father's
home to the Abbotsford Homes project at the time of the crime, and that a woman
from his neighborhood saw him in transit.
But the woman had been fuzzy about what time she saw on her ticket - which was
stamped in military time - and Dennis was convicted in 1992.
More than 2 decades would pass before Senior U.S. District Judge Anita Brody
found that the state "covered up evidence pointing away from Dennis," in a
scathing opinion.
Early last year, a 3-judge Third Circuit panel reversed Brody's decision,
inspiring a new round of en banc appeals before the Philadelphia-based
appellate court's full 13-judge bench.
But in upholding Brody's ruling for the full court, Senior Circuit Judge
Marjorie Rendell also ripped prosecutors for shirking their duties to provide
exculpatory evidence, a right since the Supreme Court decided the case of Brady
v. Maryland in 1963.
"The suppressed Brady material - a receipt corroborating Dennis's alibi, an
inconsistent statement by the commonwealth's key eyewitness, and documents
indicating that another individual committed the murder - effectively gutted
the commonwealth's case against Dennis," Rendell wrote for the majority. "The
withholding of these pieces of evidence denied Dennis a fair trial in state
court."
For the dissenting judges, "the evidence against Dennis was strong - it is hard
to discount the identification of 3 witnesses."
But Chief Circuit Judge Theodore McKee questioned this premise in a concurring
opinion that his colleagues called a "masterful" dicing of the science of
identifications.
"In the last 30 years, over 2,000 studies have examined human memory and
cognition and their relationship to the reliability of eyewitness
identifications," McKee noted. "This impressive body of scholarship and
research has revealed that eyewitness accounts can be entirely untrustworthy.
As the International Association of Chiefs of Police has concluded, '[o]f all
investigative procedures employed by police in criminal cases, probably none is
less reliable than the eyewitness identification."
The Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group, has emphasized the same
point repeatedly in their campaigns against wrongful convictions, and the
group's friend-of-the-court brief in the Dennis case made an impression on
McKee.
As the judge noted, the project's researchers found that mistaken
identifications have factored into 75 % of all wrongful convictions -
comprising more than 300 cases.
To McKee, criminologists have now successfully tested an observation that late
Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan made more than 3 decades ago.
"All the evidence points rather strikingly to the conclusion that there is
almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand,
points a finger at the defendant, and says 'That's the one!'" Brennan wrote in
1981, in a dissent over a robbery conviction in Kentucky.
A spokesman for the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office declined to reveal
whether prosecutors would put the troubled case to rest or pursue a final stage
of review before the Supreme Court.
But the prosecutors praised what they called a "compelling dissent by 4 federal
judges, who concluded that the evidence against Dennis remains 'strong.'"
The Supreme Court has been tough on federal appellate rulings that overturn
state convictions.
In 1 of Tuesday's dissents, Circuit Judge D. Michael Fisher pointed out that
the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act - signed by then-President
Bill Clinton - limited federal judges' power to overturn the state-court
convictions of 7 innocent defendants.
"Congress has decreed that we may not grant a writ of habeas corpus unless the
judgment of the state court was clearly unreasonable, not merely incorrect," he
wrote.
Crunching some numbers, Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote in a separate
dissent that the Supreme Court has reversed 34 out of 46 cases for insufficient
deference to state courts under the act.
"By my count, of the 19 cases arising under AEDPA in which the Supreme Court
has granted certiorari, 14 involved questions of federal-court deference to
state-court decisions," he said.
Dennis's attorney Amy Rohe, from the Washington-based firm Reisman Karron
Greene, said that the uncertainties surrounding the case have not dampened the
celebrations of her client and his family.
"As you can imagine they are overcome with emotion that their father, son, and
brother might finally come home to them," she told Courthouse News. "Mr. Dennis
hopes, as he has hoped every day for more than 25 years, that his innocence
will finally be known."
She added, "While no decision can give him back those 25 years, he is grateful
that a 2nd federal court has now condemned the unconstitutional prosecution
that put him there. We can only hope the DA's office will waste no more of the
people's resources delaying his freedom."
A countdown clock on a website for his supporters, JimmyDennis.org, shows
Dennis hurtling steadily toward a grim benchmark: his 9,000th day behind bars.
"As of July 1, 2016, Jimmy Dennis has been stolen from his family for a total
of 8,989 days for a crime he didn't commit," the page read on Tuesday
afternoon.
For his attorney Rohe, there is another tragedy to the case.
"It's important to remember that a young girl's life was taken and that her
family also deserves justice against the men who killed her," she wrote in an
email.
(source: Courthouse News)
FLORIDA:
New York Times article highlights Jacksonville death penalty cases
A scathing New York Times Article about the death penalty in Jacksonville,
highlights the murder of Shelby Farah.
Farah was shot and killed while working at a Metro PCS store in 2013. Her
accused killer, James Rhodes, could be put to death if he's convicted. However,
Shelby Farah's mother doesn't agree with the death penalty.
The numbers show the area has one of the highest rates of death sentences in
the country.
According to Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project, Duval County stands
out from other counties when it comes to the death penalty.
A jury verdict and the penalty phase of a trial often come the same day.
The report calls out State Attorney Angela Corey and Assistant State Attorney
Bernie De La Rionda as overly aggressive prosecutors.
The New York Times article said Rhodes was abandoned by his parents as a boy
and was sexually abused in a boys' home, calling Rhodes a child of the system
and who might remain there for the rest of his life if he is convicted.
The article says Rhodes is said to have an IQ of 67, possibly making him
ineligible for the death penalty. Farah's mother, Darlene, asked the state
attorney to take death off the table, calling the trial and foreseeable appeals
her own life sentence.
The report compares Rhodes' case to similar cases across the country, reviewing
more than 200 direct opinions between 2010 and 2015. In 8 counties, 18 %
involved a defendant under the age of 21. When the crime was committed in Duval
County, that number was 20 %, with 48 % of defendants under the age of 25.
The study also found that between 2010 and 2015, 16 counties were deemed
"outliers" or standouts. Out of the 3,000 counties in the U.S. with 5 or more
death sentences imposed, Duval County is 1 of them.
Rhodes' death penalty trial has been delayed until next year while the state
considers changes in the way it handles jury instructions.
(source: actionnewsjax.com)
************************
Prosecutors to seek death penalty for inmate accused of killing
State Attorney Glenn Hess filed notice Tuesday that he would be seeking the
death penalty against Daniel J. Craven Jr. if he is convicted of 1st-degree
murder.
Craven, 30, is accused of stabbing and killing his cellmate, John Anderson, 52,
at Graceville Correctional Facility the morning of June 28. Florida Department
of Law Enforcement investigators say Craven stabbed Anderson with a shank more
than a dozen times while Anderson was in his bunk and initiated the attack
while Anderson was sleeping.
Hess filed notice of intent to seek the death penalty based on 4 aggravating
factors. Craven was previously convicted of a felony and was under a sentence
of imprisonment; Craven was previously convicted of murder; Anderson's murder
was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel; and was committed in a cold,
calculated and premeditated manner, officials wrote in a news release.
(source: mypandle.com)
*************************
Harvard Law: Duval County among nation's leaders in death penalty sentences
In Duval County, it has taken just 66 minutes in the sentencing phase to decide
to impose the death penalty on a murderer. And often, it has been done without
a unanimous jury.
That stat illustrates why one group believes Duval is among the worst of the
worst when it comes to death penalty sentences, with roughly 1/4 of Florida's
death sentences coming from Duval County, with a mere five percent of the
state's population.
A new report from the Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project contends
Duval County is one of a group of "outlier" counties, where the death penalty
is used more than anywhere else in the country.
The report contends Duval and other so-called outlier counties are "plagued by
prosecutorial misconduct, bad lawyers, and racial bias."
Turning its attention to Duval County specifically, the report contends 48 % of
Duval County death penalty cases involve defendants who have an intellectual
disability, brain damage, or mental illness.
The report cites a death penalty conviction for a man with an IQ of 67 who had
been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a vivid example.
Further, 20 % of those death penalty cases involve defendants under the age of
21.
Duval County had findings of prosecutorial misconduct in 16 % of its cases;
Angela Corey, the current state attorney, and her chief prosecutor Bernie de la
Rionda were named in the report specifically.
"Of the death sentences that the Florida Supreme Court has reviewed from Duval
County since 2006, 1 in every 6 cases involved a finding of inappropriate
behavior, misuse of discretion, or prosecutorial misconduct, including 2 recent
death sentences tried by Bernie de la Rionda that the Florida Supreme Court
vacated due to their excessive harshness," the report contends.
Other issues arose also, according to the Fair Punishment Project.
In Duval, the guilty verdict and the sentencing often occurred in the same day,
permitting no mitigating evidence to be offered.
Of the defendants sentenced to death in Duval County, 87 % were
African-American.
This trend predated Corey, claims the FPP, though it has escalated under her
watch.
"Between 1991-2009, 62 percent of death sentences from Duval County were
imposed against African-American defendants, compared to just 33 % in the rest
of Florida. Since 2010, 1 year after Angela Corey took office, 87 % of death
sentences have been imposed against African-American defendants, compared to 44
% in the rest of the state. African-Americans make up approximately 30 % of
Duval's population, and 17 % of the state's population," the report contends.
Of those sentenced to death, 88 % were "non-unanimous," the report added.
An expert quoted in the press release lamented the insufficiency of defense in
counties like Duval.
"This report vividly shows how the last remnants of the American death penalty
still survive: in counties that have wholly crippled the defense function,"
said Professor Brandon Garrett of the University of Virginia School of Law.
"Conversely, in the places that provide minimally fair resources for defense
representation, we have seen a steep decline in death sentences. Readers of
this report will learn that what is left of the death penalty persists only
through extreme unfairness and arbitrariness."
With Corey facing a competitive primary in the state attorney race, national
scrutiny has been inconveniently timed for the 2-term incumbent.
The Nation posed the question: "Is Angela Corey the cruelest prosecutor in
America?"
When asked about this article last week, Corey was dismissive, saying that the
article was from a "liberal blogger in San Francisco."
One can expect a similar response to this report.
(source: floridapolitics.com)
**********************
State Attorney Angela Corey calls new Harvard study about death-sentencing
unfair and untrue
Duval County is again among a handful of U.S. counties that most frequently
send convicted criminals to their deaths, according to a Harvard University
study released Tuesday.
The Fair Punishment Project, of Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston
Institute for Race & Justice and its Criminal Justice Institute, highlighted
the 16 U.S. counties that sentenced at least 5 people to death from 2010 to
2015. Duval had 16 death sentences, and 88 % of its death sentences since 2006
were not unanimous.
The same day the Harvard report was released, a New York Times Magazine story
highlighting the top death-sentencing counties focused on the murder of Shelby
Farah of Jacksonville. Farah's mother, Darlene, has asked local prosecutors not
to seek the death penalty, but they are still seeking death.
The feature also discussed the area's chief assistant public defender, Refik
Eler, who has had 2 death cases overturned because of his ineffective
assistance of counsel.
"I wouldn't say it's troubling. There were only 2 cases reversed" and 1 is
pending on appeal, Eler said. "In a 30-year career, I've tried several hundred
cases."
As one of the attorneys who's represented many poor clients in death cases,
Eler said, he's proud of the times he has succeeded. "You have to really be
there and do it and understand the many factors that go into strategic
decisions."
State Attorney Angela Corey rebutted the Harvard Law School report, saying the
statistics were unfair and the researchers should've shared data with her
before publishing.
The report focused on:
-- Corey's "overzealous" prosecution
-- Public Defender Matt Shirk's office providing ineffective counsel
-- Racial bias at the courthouse.
("Since 2010, 1 year after Angela Corey took office, 87 % of death sentences
have been imposed against African-American defendants, compared to 44 % in the
rest of the state. African-Americans make up approximately 30 % of Duval's
population, and 17 % of the state's population.") The Times story was the 2nd
magazine article in a week focusing on Duval's role as a leader in
tough-on-crime sentencing. Last week, liberal magazine The Nation published a
feature asking, "Is Angela Corey the Cruelest Prosecutor in America?", and back
in June, conservative magazine National Review criticized her.
"It's totally without merit," Corey said of the report, saying she was unfairly
targeted when she didn't divert from her predecessors' approaches to
prosecuting death-penalty cases.
COREY HAS ANOTHER EXPLANATION
Corey called the Fair Punishment Project report and the magazine story untrue.
She questioned why the report came out a week before her Aug. 30 primary.
But Rob Smith, the legal research fellow who headed the project, said the
election had nothing to do with the timing.
"We looked at the study not to persecute her. We weren't just picking anecdotes
out and picking on people. We wanted to have an objective, thematic, national
look. Surely she doesn't believe the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law
School decided to create a gigantic project with a dozen people working on it
over months to pick a time period just to affect Angela Corey's election. ...
Contrary to Ms. Corey's belief, the world doesn't revolve around her."
Smith said, 'I also think that she's a bully, and what I mean by that is that
when a Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz called her out in a case,
she calls and threatens the university. When her predecessor critiques
something she did, she criticizes Mr. Shorstein. When her IT person criticizes
something she does, she fires that person. She gets upset and she lashes out.
Bullies shouldn't be deciding who lives and who dies."
In interviews Tuesday, Corey said it was unfair to report on the findings
without first reviewing the data the project collected. Over the course of 2
telephone interviews, Corey grew increasingly combative while 2 of her top
homicide attorneys remained collegial. 3 times she interrupted one of them to
tell him to stop being apologetic.
Those attorneys, Bernie de la Rionda and Mark Caliel, addressed many of the
statistics in the report and said why they felt they were misleading. Caliel
said when considering the race of all 1st-degree murder suspects, there likely
isn't a disparity between those who qualified for death and those sentenced to
death. They said they believe seeking the death penalty honors the many black
victims of murder.
"What scholars tend to forget is all lives matter," de la Rionda said. "I'd
venture to ask this question. Who are our victims? If the focus is going to be
on race, what was the race of our victims?"
He said he respects organizations that oppose the death penalty, but he
believes it's the right punishment for certain crimes.
Corey and de la Rionda also said the manner of handling death cases and the
number of death cases haven't changed much since Ed Austin and Harry Shorstein
were the elected state attorneys before Corey. Smith disagreed, saying that
while most the country reduced the number of death sentences, Corey increased
it even when the murder rate dropped.
THE TIMING OF THE REPORT
Harvard's Smith, who has handled death-penalty cases, said the decision to do
this study came after a Supreme Court dissent last summer noted the geographic
concentration of death-penalty cases. At the time, only 15 counties had 5 or
more death penalties from 2010 to 2015; that number grew to 16. Many viewed
that dissent as an open invitation to challenge the constitutionality of the
death penalty. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that the intellectually
disabled and juveniles should not be executed. Smith said he wanted to see if
the few counties still sending people to death were sentencing "the worst of
the worst" or the types of people the Supreme Court said shouldn't be executed.
Smith has previously published reports noting that de la Rionda is one of the
nation's most prolific death-penalty prosecutors.
"In Duval what happens is you have both this aggressive prosecutor in Angela
Corey where she seeks the death penalty in cases where many other prosecutors
would not and this non-unanimous jury rule," he said. The law didn't used to
require any specific number of jurors to agree to a death sentence; it now
requires a 10-2 decision. "Those 2 things work together."
Smith said in places like Duval County, he found that the people on death row
were not the most heinous criminals. Instead, the report noted, 48 % had an
intellectual disability, severe mental illness or brain damage. 1 in 5 were
younger than 21.
And shockingly, he said, the sentencing phase of the trial - when prosecutors
explain why a crime is particularly egregious, defense attorneys explain why
someone shouldn't be executed and a jury decides death or life - in
Jacksonville lasts one day. That means opening statements, witnesses, evidence,
closing statements and jury deliberation all occur in the same workday.
For that, Smith blamed defense attorneys. "You have an overaggressive
prosecutor and defense lawyers who you wouldn't want to represent you in a
parking ticket case."
(source: jacksonville.com)
ALABAMA:
Suspect in Alabama house murders used ax, gun in middle of night, police say
A man accused of slaying 5 people at an Alabama home brought an ax to attack
his victims, striking one who had been sleeping in a reclining chair, and also
used guns he took from the house to shoot them, an Alabama sheriff said
Tuesday.
Derrick Dearman entered the house in Citronelle before dawn Saturday, Mobile
County Sheriff Sam Cochran told The Associated Press.
"They were down for the night sleeping, and he had enough familiarity with the
house when he entered - I guess you could say in a rage - and he's disabling
people as he's in there," Cochran said. "He was able to overpower them before
they were able to protect themselves."
An ax and a gun were used in the killings of each of the 5 adult victims,
police allege in criminal complaints filed Tuesday in Mobile County District
Court.
On Monday, as Dearman was led to jail in shackles, he professed his love for
the estranged girlfriend whose family and friends were massacred and blamed the
killings on drugs.
Speaking with reporters as he was escorted to jail by deputies in Mobile,
Alabama, Derrick Dearman said Monday that he was on methamphetamine when he
went to the house, on a dead-end dirt road.
"Drugs (were) making me think things that's not really there," said Dearman,
27, hanging his head and dressed in a bright yellow jail uniform.
After the killings, authorities said, Dearman abducted estranged girlfriend
Laneta Lester, who had sought refuge at the house, and a child of two of the
victims. Dearman said he spared their lives because "I came down and realized
what was really going on."
"(I) turned myself in because I was sober and knew what was the right thing to
do," Dearman said.
In videotaped comments broadcast on Mobile-area television, Dearman expressed
his love for Lester and apologized "to all the family members." Dearman, saying
all the victims were friends, added: "Don't do drugs."
A man who said his family provided a home for Dearman and Lester earlier this
year near Leakesville, Mississippi, said Dearman was often on methamphetamine
and physically abused Lester during walks in the woods in rural southeast
Mississippi.
"He was taking her out there and beating the crap out of her," said Charlie
Passarelli Jr., who said he had known Dearman for years. Passarelli said he
suspected that Dearman was either buying or selling drugs before he and Lester
moved out in late spring.
The slaying victims included a pregnant woman and her unborn child. A teenager
who said she was related to all 5 victims by marriage or blood shook her head
and fought back tears as she described her anguish over the slayings.
"They were really good people. They'd call and check on you, ask if you want to
come down and eat," said Madison McDaniel, 17, who lives near the scene of the
violence.
They had also become targets by welcoming Dearman's ex-girlfriend into the
home, the sheriff said.
"I think the motivation was that he felt like they were keeping her from him,"
Cochran said.
"He couldn't deal with her being away from him and accept that she was leaving
him," he said. "They were what was standing between them."
Relatives of the victims started an online fundraiser to help cover funeral
expenses, and clerk Dawn Sullivan collected donations in a plastic jug on the
counter at D&B Quick Stop, where the victims often stopped for snacks and
drinks.
"It's a sad situation. It never should have gotten to that point," said
Sullivan, whose husband was related to 1 of the victims.
Dearman, of Leakesville, is charged with 6 counts of capital murder and 2
counts of kidnapping, including 1 charge for the unborn child, Mobile County
District Attorney Ashley Rich said.
"At this time it appears it will be a death penalty case, but it's very early
in the investigation," Rich said.
Dearman's first court appearance is scheduled for Wednesday morning. Alabama
court records don't indicate whether he has an attorney who could speak on his
behalf.
The slain were identified as Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner,
26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; Chelsea Marie Reed, 22; and Robert Lee Brown, 26,
said Mobile County sheriff's spokeswoman Lori Myles.
Turner was Lester's brother and had let her stay at the house, which all the
victims shared, McDaniel said. Turner and Randall were married.
"I'd always get on my horse and ride down there bareback," McDaniel said. Her
step-aunt Randall would say, "'Be careful because you're already got a hurt
knee.' I'd say, 'OK, Shan-Shan.' That's what I called her."
Brown was Randall's brother, McDaniel said, and Chelsea Reed was Randall's
niece. Chelsea Reed was pregnant with the child of her husband, Justin Reed,
said McDaniel.
About 1 a.m. Saturday, someone inside the home called 911 and reported that
Dearman was on the property, authorities said in a statement. Citronelle police
came to the house, but Dearman had left before officers arrived, sheriff's
officials said.
Before daylight Saturday, Dearman returned to the home to begin the attacks,
the sheriff's department said.
After the killings, Dearman forced Lester and a 3-month-old identified by
relatives as the child of Randall and Turner into a vehicle, and they drove to
Dearman's father's house in Mississippi. Dearman released Lester and the infant
and turned himself in, authorities said.
As he was led away to jail on Tuesday, Dearman said he barely remembers what
happened but said that he deserves a harsh punishment.
"I deserve to die," he said.
(source: Fox news)
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