Sept. 3
FLORIDA:
Son indicted on 1st degree murder charge in mother's death
A grand jury made the decision Thursday to indict Lantz on the greater charge
which, upon conviction, carries only 2 possible penalties, life in prison
without parole or death.
"A lot of evidence had been developed that it was a premeditated act," said
Assistant State Attorney Angela Mason, who will prosecute the case.
Lantz is charged with fatally beating and strangling his mother, Robin Lantz,
sometime between 10 p.m., Aug. 1 and 12:45 a.m., Aug. 2.
The indictment was announced Friday in a news release from the First Judicial
Circuit???s State Attorney's Office.
Authorities had been called twice on Aug. 1 to intervene in domestic disputes
involving Justin Lantz. He had voluntarily left the Mary Esther home of Robin
Lantz at around 10 p.m. on the night of the killing, following the 2nd dispute.
"Officers responded to a call of an impaired driver under the Brooks Bridge.
There they found Lantz holding a large object in the water," the Friday news
release said. "When officers approached, Lantz let go of the object and it
began floating away. Lantz claimed it was his shirt. Officers searched and
found the body of Robin Lantz wrapped in a rug."
Authorities believe Lantz returned to his home following the domestic dispute,
killed his mother at her home and loaded her body into his truck before driving
to Brooks Bridge.
A panel will be convened to decide whether the death penalty is an appropriate
punishment in the Lantz case, Mason said.
He remains in custody with no bond, the news release said.
(source: nwfdaiynews.com)
*********************
Capital punishment: How one mother has battled to save the life of the man who
killed her daughter
On a Saturday evening in July 2013, just before 6:30, James Rhodes was recorded
on a surveillance camera walking into a Metro PCS phone store in Jacksonville,
Florida.
He was wearing a black do-rag and a blue bandanna, which he pulled over his
nose and mouth. Shelby Farah, the store manager, stood behind the counter.
Rhodes pointed a gun at her and demanded the money in the cash register. Shelby
gave it to him. Then Rhodes shot her in the head. She was 20 years old. He was
21.
Shelby, the oldest of 3 siblings in a family of Palestinian descent, was
working and planning to start college in the autumn. Her mother, Darlene Farah,
had been nervous when her daughter started as a manager of the Metro PCS
branch, which was in a high-crime part of town, miles from their home near the
beach.
But Shelby told her mother she felt comfortable in the neighbourhood; she'd
gone to high school nearby, attending a magnet programme on criminal justice.
She was nicknamed "peacemaker" in middle school because she couldn't stand to
see kids argue.
An accomplished cheerleader, she volunteered for 2 seasons as a coach for a
group of girls instead of pursuing a chance to make the cheerleading squad for
the Jaguars football team.
Rhodes, who is black, was placed in foster care at age 5 and went to live at a
state boys' home at 6. He reads at a 3rd-grade level and struggles with simple
math. At 17, Rhodes moved to an older cousin's house with his younger half
sister. After a couple of weeks, their cousin disappeared, leaving them without
money for food or rent. The landlord evicted them.
Within 14 months, Rhodes was arrested for petty theft at Sears, Walmart, and
Kmart and for jumping and robbing a man with 4 other boys. At 19, he was jailed
for brandishing a gun at 2 women. Rhodes says he was high when he killed Farah.
He told his lawyer, the assistant public defender Debra Billard, that he was
sorry for what he had done. In early 2014, Billard told prosecutors that Rhodes
would plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. Instead,
the state was determined to seek the death penalty.
In most of the US, it would be very unlikely for prosecutors to pursue death
for a defendant like James Rhodes. Execution is supposed to be a punishment for
the "worst of the worst", Justice David Souter wrote a decade ago. With violent
crime falling, and bipartisan concerns about the rising costs of capital murder
trials increasing - some states spend an average of $1m more on litigation for
a defendant sentenced to death than on one sentenced to life in prison - the
death penalty is on the decline in the US.
20 states and the District of Columbia have abolished capital punishment. Four
more have imposed a moratorium on executions. Of the 26 remaining states, only
14 handed down any death sentences last year, for a total of 50 across the
country - less than 1/2 the number 6 years before.
California, which issued more than 1/4 of last year's death sentences, hasn't
actually executed anyone since 2006. A new geography of capital punishment in
the US is taking shape, with just 2% of America's counties now accounting for a
majority of the people sitting on death row.
An even smaller fraction of these counties still imposes death sentences
regularly. In June 2015, in the US Supreme Court case Glossip v Gross, which
involved lethal injection, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in a dissent that only
15 counties - out of more than 3,000 across the US - had imposed 5 or more new
death sentences since 2010.
The number rises to 16 counties if Breyer's count is extended through the end
of 2015. Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, a city of nearly 900,000
where Shelby Farah was killed, is among the 16.
In his dissent in Glossip, Breyer staked out new territory in the debate over
whether the death penalty has proved too unfair, and racially discriminatory,
to continue. His opinion sent a wave of excitement through a community of
scholars and advocates around the country who have been fighting for years, and
in some instances decades, to end executions. A deep examination of the
counties where the death penalty is concentrated, several of them argue,
reveals that in many, the justice systems are riddled with flaws, influencing
the fates of countless defendants, as well as James Rhodes.
The Supreme Court has been trying for more than 40 years to write rules that
can fairly determine which murderers live and which die. In 1972, the court
came close to abolishing the death penalty - because, as 5 justices argued for
different reasons in 5 separate opinions, it was being imposed arbitrarily, and
thus qualified as the "cruel and unusual punishment" that the Eighth Amendment
prohibits.
Justice Potter Stewart likened receiving the death penalty to "being struck by
lightning" for "a capriciously selected random handful". Justice Thurgood
Marshall argued that the "impotence" of the poor and of minorities "leaves them
victims of a sanction that the wealthier, better-represented, just-as-guilty
person can escape".
And yet the US court allowed states to try to correct the problem by passing
new laws that limited the death penalty to certain types of crimes the state
considered most blameworthy. "The idea was to make sentencing decisions turn on
the severity of a defendant's offence instead of random factors, such as where
the crime occurred, or insidious factors, such as race," says Evan Mandery, a
professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of A Wild
Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America.
Strong public sentiment in favour of maintaining capital punishment propelled
35 states to pass revised death-penalty laws. The Supreme Court allowed the new
statutes to stand if they enumerated "aggravating factors" that weighed in
favour of death, and allowed the defence to present mitigating evidence that
weighed against it.
Back then, Breyer explained in his Glossip dissent (in which he was joined by
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the court believed "that the constitutional
infirmities in the death penalty could be healed". But he argued that the court
now knows otherwise: "Almost 40 years of studies, surveys, and experience
strongly indicate, however, that this effort has failed." Breyer wrote that
there is "convincing evidence" that innocent people have been executed in 3
states, and he described near-misses, with more than 100 exonerations on death
row.
He also laid out the proof that race affects who is selected for execution. The
seminal study in the field, conducted in Georgia in the 1970s, found after
controlling for many other factors that the death penalty was far more likely
if a victim was white, especially if a defendant was black. Research since then
has confirmed the disparity in states across America.
"Racism is the historical force that has most deeply marked the American death
penalty," says Carol Steiker, a Harvard law professor and an author of the
forthcoming book Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment From
Colonial Days to the Present. But in 1987, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court
rejected a challenge that sought to abolish the death penalty based on the
evidence of racial discrimination in the Georgia study. Justice Lewis Powell,
who cast the 5th vote, said 4 years later that he regretted it. By then,
however, he had left the court.
In light of this history, Breyer emphasised a geography-based argument in his
dissent last year. "Perhaps as a result" of the death penalty's demonstrated
flaws, he began, "most places within the United States have abandoned its use".
Along with pointing out the concentration of death sentences in a small number
of counties, Breyer mentioned that only 1/3 of the American population lived in
a state that had conducted an execution in the previous 3 years. Last year's
total number of executions - 28 - is less than 1/2 the annual total of a decade
earlier.
Breyer was building on an analytic approach the court had used before. At least
three times in the last decade-and-a-half, a majority of justices has found a
punishment to be cruel and unusual, and therefore unconstitutional, because it
was rarely used in "actual sentencing practices", as the court put it.
The justices ended the execution of intellectually disabled people in 2002
after observing that such executions had become "uncommon" even though they
remained legal in many states. 3 years later, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the
court's crucial swing voter, wrote a majority opinion declaring that a
"national consensus" had emerged against the death penalty for juvenile
offenders. Kennedy cited the "infrequency of its use even where it remains on
the books". He took the same approach in 2010 to ban life without parole for
juveniles convicted of a crime other than murder.
It would be a far more sweeping change for the US Supreme Court to declare a
national consensus for ending the death penalty. Today polls show that more
than 60% of Americans continue to favour capital punishment, though more than
1/2 say they would prefer to impose life without parole if given the option.
Nonetheless, Breyer was laying the groundwork for abolition, by making an
argument, anchored in the Constitution's "cruel and unusual" language, that the
retreat of the death penalty county by county could one day persuade the court
to end it everywhere. And Kennedy has expressed the view that the rare use of a
punishment should be seen as evidence that the penalty is unconstitutional
because it's not serving a meaningful purpose.
What separates the 16 counties where the death penalty regularly endures from
the rest of America, where it is fading away? The 16 counties span seven states
in the South and West. They include major cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Las
Vegas, and Phoenix; suburban areas like Orange County and San Bernardino in
California; and semi-rural pockets like Mobile County, Alabama, and Caddo
Parish, Louisiana. Some are dominated by Democratic voters, some by
Republicans, and a few are evenly split. Many of the counties have high numbers
of murders, but so do plenty of other places that don't use the death penalty.
Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, along with a
research team at Harvard Law School called the Fair Punishment Project, has
been trying to identify the factors that explain why certain counties still
regularly impose capital punishment.
They have been delving into the death-penalty records of the 16 counties and
comparing them with those of other jurisdictions and have found three key
features that often characterise the 16. "The people who get the death penalty
tend to live in places with overaggressive prosecutors and defence lawyers who
aren't up to the task of defending against them - that's a double whammy," says
Robert J Smith, who directs the project.
"Then in some places there's a 3rd element: A cultural legacy of racial bias
and exclusion. It's just not true that we execute the people who are the most
culpable."
In the weeks after her daughter died, Darlene Farah, distraught, fantasised
about smuggling a gun into court to kill James Rhodes. At the same time, she
wanted to learn everything she could about the murder. She talked to people who
knew Rhodes, and she hired a former FBI agent to help her investigate his
background. They found a trail of abuse and neglect.
Darlene Farah, the mother of gun victim Shelby, initially fantasised about
bringing a gun into court to shoot James Rhodes before she found out about his
traumatic early life story.
Rhodes's mother abandoned him when he was 8 months old. His father was a drug
addict who was in and out of prison, leaving Rhodes with his elderly
grandmother. A bus driver who picked him up from her house for daycare reported
that he was often dirty and crying from hunger.
After Rhodes went to live in the boys' home at 6, the state periodically tried
to reunite him with his father. Rhodes would dress up and wait, his caseworker
reported, but often his father didn't come; once, after his father did visit
with his girlfriend and a baby, Rhodes was so upset that he curled up in a
foetal position, sucking his thumb to comfort himself. When he was 9, an older
boy at the home sexually assaulted him.
The more Farah learned, the more complicated her feelings became. Then, after a
pretrial hearing in February 2014, Farah was approached by Debra Billard,
Rhodes's lawyer, in the company of a prosecutor, to discuss the possibility of
a guilty plea and a life sentence.
Farah, who was raising her children on her own, was inclined to avoid a trial.
Her younger children, Caleb, then 17, and Nycole, then 15, were struggling with
their grief and having difficulty concentrating in school. They wanted the case
to end. "We all knew Shelby wouldn't have wanted him to die," Farah told me
when I visited her this spring. Still, she hesitated. What if Caleb and Nycole
blamed her for not pressing to punish Rhodes as much as possible? What if
people judged her?
Farah took her children to pray with the Rev Reginald Gundy, the senior pastor
at Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church. She had known him since her younger
children were in middle school, when they went to his church with neighbours.
They prayed together and decided they wanted Rhodes to plead guilty and live
with what he had done to Shelby and to them. Farah asked Pastor Gundy to go
with her to tell the prosecutor. "The state raised him," she often says. "How
can they say now that they want to kill him?"
Angela Corey, the state attorney in Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit, which
includes Duval County, gave no indication of offering a plea deal. Corey
prosecuted dozens of murder cases herself over 36 years as a trial lawyer. (In
2012, governor Rick Scott tapped her to oversee the prosecution of George
Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted; she was
criticised for overcharging him.) Corey, 61, has made her reputation, in part,
by winning verdicts that carry the death penalty. She has one of the highest
rates of death sentences in the country, with 24 (19 in Duval) in the eight
years since she was elected.
Even compared with the 3 other Florida counties on the list of 16, Duval County
is an outlier. The state attorney in one of the three, Miami-Dade County, which
has twice the population of Corey's jurisdiction and twice the annual number of
murders, has 5 death sentences over the same period. Death-penalty opponents
question whether Corey gives too little weight to the backgrounds of
defendants. "Other prosecutors in Florida care about mitigating evidence like
chronic and serious child abuse," says Stephen K Harper, the executive director
of the Florida Centre for Capital Representation. "Angela Corey does not."
As most prosecutors cut back on the death penalty, they typically reserve the
punishment for murders with heinous circumstances or defendants with clearly
violent histories. But Florida's statute, which includes 16 "aggravating"
factors, gives them broad discretion to seek the death penalty.
In Rhodes's case, in addition to citing the robbery at the time of the murder,
Corey said Rhodes had previously committed a crime involving violence when he
brandished the gun. Though Rhodes didn't hurt anyone at the time, he was
accused of pointing the weapon towards 2 women while standing on the street in
front of their house.
1 of them, he said, had been arguing in text messages with a girl he liked.
Rhodes pleaded guilty and received a 3-year prison sentence. "I don't think
this would be a death case in Gainesville, and it would surprise me if it was a
death case elsewhere in the state," says Alan Chipperfield, the chief assistant
public defender in Gainesville and former head of the homicide unit for the
public defender's office in Jacksonville.
With Corey refusing to relent, Farah began speaking to the press about her
opposition to the death sentence in her daughter's case. Last summer, Billard,
Rhodes's lawyer, met with Corey and Bernie de la Rionda, the prosecutor
handling Rhodes's case, to argue for her client's life. De la Rionda has
obtained more than 25 death sentences in his career, making him one of the
"deadliest" trial lawyers in the country, according to the Fair Punishment
Project. "I will not apologise for seeking the death penalty in appropriate
cases," he told me.
Billard presented Rhodes's history of abuse and neglect and pointed out that
while in jail for Farah's murder, Rhodes received a 67 on an IQ test, a score
that makes him potentially ineligible for the death penalty because of
intellectual disability. Though prosecutors might persuade the jury to overlook
the low score, because Rhodes tested in the 70s during his childhood, they
could lose on appeal over this issue. Corey wouldn't budge, however, and in
July 2015 the trial judge ruled that the death-penalty case could proceed
despite Rhodes's low IQ score.
This February, over Farah's objections, de la Rionda showed her son, Caleb, now
19, the video of his sister's murder. That night, Caleb stopped staying at his
mother's house. He told the press he had changed his mind: He wanted the state
to execute his sister's killer. At a hearing in May, Caleb sat apart from his
mother, who held a framed picture of Shelby on her lap. When she caught her
son's eye, he barely acknowledged her. After the hearing, de la Rionda hugged
Caleb. "It feels like they're trying to punish me," Darlene said.
I spoke to Corey in July and asked why she insisted on the death penalty in
Rhodes's case. "It's my statutory and constitutional duty to seek justice for
this community and to give the victim's family justice," she said. When I asked
about Darlene Farah's wish for justice through a life sentence, Corey told me
that the families of victims "do not control the seeking of the death penalty".
The Metro PCS store where Shelby Farah was killed sits on an industrial strip
of Main St in north Jacksonville near an auto-parts store and a King Crab
House. To the west are smaller streets pockmarked by abandoned houses, where
drug dealers sometimes stash supplies. This is one of the parts of the city
that is mostly black, a residential pattern that dates to the 1930s, when
"coloured districts" were adjacent to 2 incinerators, according to a city plan.
Over the years, attempts at integration were met with violence. On a Saturday
in August 1960, a white mob of 200 chased black demonstrators who had been
sitting at whites-only lunch counters, beating them with bats and axe handles.
"There was no police protection during 2 weeks of sit-ins," says Rodney L Hurst
Sr, an NAACP leader who helped organise the protest and has written 2 books
about the city's history.
Over the following decades, African-Americans were shut out of city contracts
and often relegated to menial or dangerous jobs. In a 1989 report commissioned
by the city, black businesspeople said they commonly had to leave Jacksonville
to make a living. That year, 2 residents died in the north-west quadrant
because of flooding, and 3 African-American members of the city council pleaded
unsuccessfully for money for sewers and drainage.
When they walked out of a council meeting in protest, sheriff's deputies
marched them back inside, with one of them in handcuffs. Alvin Brown became the
1st African-American to be elected mayor in 2011. Pastor Gundy campaigned for
him, as did Darlene and Shelby Farah. During his single term, students and
activists waged a battle to remove the name of Nathan B Forrest, a Confederate
lieutenant general and the 1st Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, from a mostly
black high school. They finally succeeded in 2014. "Cities like Atlanta, Tampa,
and Fort Lauderdale confronted their racial problems after the 1960s," Hurst
says. "Jacksonville did not. It put its head in the sand."
Corey took office in 2009 with a law-and-order message and strong ties to the
police. She increased the rate of convictions, but some of her decisions
regarding charges alienated leaders of the private bar. "This city has been
embarrassed across the country by Angela Corey," Hank Coxe, a former president
of the Florida Bar, told me.
He talked about 2 cases that have drawn attention. In 2010, Marissa Alexander,
a 31-year-old black woman in Jacksonville who had been abused on multiple
occasions by her husband, fired a warning shot at the wall near him while his 2
children were in the room. Alexander, who had no criminal history, said she
acted out of fear that her husband would hurt her. Corey said she acted in
anger and charged Alexander with 3 counts of aggravated assault with a firearm,
each carrying a 20-year mandatory-minimum sentence.
After Alexander was convicted, Jesse Jackson travelled to Jacksonville to ask
Corey to intervene. The state attorney said there was nothing she could do, and
Alexander spent nearly 3 years in prison before an appeals court threw out the
verdict against her.
In 2011, Coxe joined other private lawyers to represent Cristian Fernandez, a
12-year-old whom Corey charged, as an adult, with first-degree murder. Cristian
was left at home alone with his 2-year-old half brother, David. At some point,
prosecutors claim, Cristian hurt David; the 2-year-old lost consciousness, and
Cristian called his mother. It took 8 hours for her to take David to the
hospital, where he died. Cristian had a history of being abused: When he was a
toddler and his mother was 14, they were both placed in foster care after they
were found in a filthy trailer without electricity. His mother later married a
man who beat him. When his school reported the abuse and the police tried to
arrest Cristian's stepfather, the man shot himself in the head.
The murder charge Corey brought against Cristian carried a mandatory sentence
of life in jail. Corey also ordered the boy to adult prison, where he spent his
1st month in solitary confinement. In 2013, Cristian's lawyers negotiated a
plea bargain to the juvenile version of manslaughter, with a 7-year sentence in
a juvenile facility.
Corey embraced the outcome and said her aim had always been a balance between
punishment and rehabilitation for Cristian. But in a documentary about the
case, Corey said: "Everyone's saying, 'Oh, but, but they're just a child.'
Well, there's a line in the sand you have to draw, and you have to say at some
point, 'This person has already had a chance at rehabilitation, or the crime is
so serious and done in such a manner as rehabilitation may not be possible.'"
Human rights groups say Corey's policies have disproportionately affected black
defendants. She has continued to charge juveniles as adults, moving more black
teens than white ones into the adult system, according to the Southern Poverty
Law Centre.
In a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch, Judge Henry Davis, at the time the only
black judge on the local circuit court, called prosecutors' decisions about
which teenagers to charge as adults "basically arbitrary". When black children
commit minor infractions and are eligible for civil citations, an alternative
to arrest, they are less likely to receive them than eligible white children.
Duval County's population is 30% African-American. During Angela Corey's
tenure, 80% of the defendants sentenced to death were black, compared with 73%
of those arrested for murder. In July, when asked at a forum hosted by black
lawyers in Jacksonville if the local justice system was fair to black
residents, Corey said: "There is no disparity on the basis of race."
Black jurors are relatively absent from death-penalty trials, which can affect
their outcomes. "Research shows the mere presence of blacks on capital juries -
on the rare occasions they are seated - can mean the difference between life
and death," saud Melynda J Price, a law professor at the University of
Kentucky. But to be seated on a death-penalty case, a prospective juror must
say he or she could vote for execution without substantial moral or religious
qualms, in keeping with the test set by the Supreme Court. Since
African-Americans oppose capital punishment at a higher rate than whites, fewer
of them can serve.
In July, Darlene Farah's son, Caleb, called de la Rionda, the prosecutor, to
say he was putting his personal feelings aside: He thought the state should let
Rhodes plead guilty and take a life sentence. "He said he doesn't like what
this case is doing to our family," Darlene said. "My heart hit the floor."
Soon after, Darlene got a card from James Rhodes, which he made for her 50th
birthday. "I thank your son for changing his mind," he wrote. "I thank you for
trying to save my life when I gave up on my own life."
In January, the Supreme Court invalidated Florida's capital-punishment law,
because it didn't require juries to find at least 1 aggravating factor before
imposing the death penalty. (Alabama has a similar rule, which the court's
decision called into doubt.) The Florida Legislature rushed to pass a new
sentencing law, which was also challenged, and an appeal is pending before the
Florida Supreme Court. Depending on the court's ruling, many of the nearly 400
inmates on the state's death row could have a new avenue of appeal, and hope of
averting execution.
It's not clear how the election for state attorney will affect Rhodes's trial,
which was postponed in early August because of the uncertain status of
Florida's death-penalty law.
One of the candidates, Melissa Nelson, who supports capital punishment, has not
promised to spare him if she is elected. But she has publicly faulted Corey for
treating Darlene Farah badly, and Farah hopes she can discuss the case with
Nelson if she wins.
While unseating a chief prosecutor like Angela Corey tends to reduce death
sentences, the long-time expectations of veterans in the system - judges and
staff lawyers who specialise in trying homicide cases - can keep the gears of
death-penalty prosecutions turning.
Lee Kovarsky, a University of Maryland law professor, calls this "muscle
memory". The prosecutors who try death-penalty cases are often "some of the top
people in the office", says Brandon Garrett of the University of Virginia.
"It's a tall order to make them stop."
The surest way to reverse the momentum is to make it hard to win in court by
raising the quality of the defence. In the last several years, Virginia and
Georgia each adopted a statewide system of capital-defender offices with
salaried lawyers and investigators. In Virginia, formerly the nation's 2nd
biggest executioner (after Texas), no one has been sentenced to death in 5
years. Juries in Georgia have delivered only 4 death sentences in the last 6
years.
A related shift is evident even in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston and
its suburbs and the centre of capital punishment since the 1970s. Cost concerns
and a statewide string of exonerations have reduced support for the death
penalty to the lowest point in 35 years.
Only 27% of residents would choose to impose it over life imprisonment,
according to an annual survey released in April. Texas Defender Service, a
public-interest legal group, has been training and consulting with
court-appointed lawyers to improve the quality of death-penalty representation.
No one has received a new death sentence in Harris County since 2014.
Advocates see the shrinking geography of capital punishment as the most
promising path to ending executions in the country for good. It's a
self-reinforcing strategy: Once a county loses the habit of meting out death
sentences, it's probably less likely to do so in the future, Garrett's research
suggests.
And the more unusual the death penalty becomes, the more emboldened the Supreme
Court could be to decide that it is also cruel, as justices including Kennedy
and Breyer have come to understand that word.
To receive a death sentence remains as random as being "struck by lightning",
Justice Breyer wrote last year, echoing Justice Potter Stewart's words from
half a century ago. "How then," Breyer asked, "can we reconcile the death
penalty with the demands of a US Constitution that first and foremost insists
upon a rule of law?"
(source: Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the New York Times magazine and
the Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School. She last wrote about Kamala
Harris, the California attorney general.----The Irish Examiner)
MISSOURI:
Death-Row Inmates Have A Right To Know The Identities Of Lethal Injection
Suppliers, Court Rule----Missouri can't keep secret the names of those who
provide it with pentobarbital, a deadly anesthetic.
A federal appeals court said on Friday that Missouri must disclose the
identities of the drug suppliers who provide the chemical used in the state's
single-drug execution protocol.
In 2015, 2 death-row inmates from Mississippi challenged the constitutionality
of the 3-drug cocktail in their impending executions, but to make their case
they sought information from Missouri, which uses pentobarbital - an anesthetic
that is used as the sole drug in a number of states.
In their lawsuit, the inmates, Richard Jordan and Ricky Chase, are relying on
language from Glossip v. Gross, a 2015 Supreme Court case that required
prisoners defying their methods of execution to name a "known and available
alternative method of execution" before pressing forward with their claims.
So their attorneys filed a subpoena requesting more information about how
Missouri obtains and uses pentobarbital. The state resisted, leading to a court
battle resulting in Friday's ruling.
Acknowledging that "the public disclosure of a pentobarbital supplier's
identity may have detrimental consequences for a state," the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that Missouri couldn't show that disclosing
the information would impose an "undue burden" as required by law.
Officials had argued that its pentobarbital suppliers "require the assurance of
confidentiality" before doing business with the state, but the appeals court
found these claims "speculative," noting instead that suppliers may also
consider "financial, political, and other factors" in deciding whether to
continue providing pentobarbital to Missouri.
The 8th Circuit also rejected arguments that revealing the identities of the
suppliers of the lethal chemical threatened Missouri's sovereignty, or that the
information is otherwise protected by the state secrets privilege, which the
court said applies to military or national security concerns.
Like other death penalty states, Missouri has laws shielding the public from
knowing how its lethal injection drugs are obtained. Because of this secrecy,
the inmates turned to courts to shed some light on how Missouri - as well as
Texas and Georgia - does things to hopefully help their own case in
Mississippi.
Friday's decision complements a BuzzFeed News report published earlier this
week that called into question states??? claims that secrecy is needed to
protect lethal injection suppliers from threats of violence.
"Missouri's lethal drug suppliers are selling to a public agency; they cannot
expect their sales to be kept a secret from the public, let alone prisoners who
need that information to prove that Mississippi's execution procedures will
cause a severely painful death," said Jim Craig, a lawyer for the MacArthur
Justice Center, responding to an earlier ruling on the case in July.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Craig, a long-time death penalty
attorney, put his clients' case in starker terms.
"This is really about a concern that Mississippi is going to torture these men
to death," he said.
(source: Cristian Farias, Legal Affairs reporter Huffington Post)
NEBRASKA:
Death-row inmate argues for new trial
Death-row inmate Jeffrey Hessler's attorney Friday made his case to the
Nebraska Supreme Court for why he should get a new trial on a prior sex assault
involving another victim.
Omaha attorney Alan Stoler is asking the high court to find that a Scotts Bluff
County judge erred by denying Hessler post-conviction relief in the case, later
used as 1 of 3 aggravators to make him eligible for the death penalty.
"What's the overall strategy here?" Justice John Wright asked Stoler, cutting
to the point.
Is it that if Hessler's attorneys were ineffective in allowing him to enter a
no-contest plea that he's entitled to a new trial, and therefore, a new
sentencing in the capital case, the justice asked.
Stoler acknowledged that would be his argument down the road.
Hessler is on death row for raping and killing Heather Guerrero, a 15-year-old
Gering newspaper carrier, in 2003.
Friday's arguments involved the sexual assault of another girl in August 2002.
Stoler said the state filed the cases at the same time and, he argued,
Hessler's trial attorneys were ineffective for advising him that if he entered
a no-contest plea it may be double jeopardy for the state to use it against him
as an aggravator at the trial for the killing.
James Smith of the Nebraska Attorney General's office defended the actions of
Hessler's attorneys, saying the law was in flux at the time following a U.S.
Supreme Court ruling, Ring v. Arizona. The double-jeopardy argument, he said,
was an extremely creative strategy to try to keep Hessler off death row.
"It didn't work. But that's not the test," he argued.
Smith said Hessler didn't want a trial and there was overwhelming evidence of
his guilt.
Stoler countered that what Hessler wanted wasn't relevant if he wasn't
competent. He said while his attorneys raised the issue and Hessler had been
found competent, they should have raised it again when he entered his plea.
After hearing evidence from a doctor and nurse who treated Hessler around the
time of his plea, Scotts Bluff County District Judge Randall Lippstreu rejected
the motion to find he was incompetent to enter his plea.
Hessler was sentenced to 30 to 42 years in that case.
Last month, Stoler filed another motion challenging Hessler's death penalty
conviction, arguing that the state's procedures for imposing a death sentence
violate a U.S. Supreme Court holding earlier this year.
In that filing, he is asking Lippstreu to declare the state's death penalty
laws unconstitutional and vacate Hessler's sentence.
(source: Lincoln Journal Star)
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