Sept. 6
OHIO:
Anti-death penalty group wants court recommendations enacted
Ohio's largest anti-death penalty group wants more recommendations for changing
the state's capital punishment law to be enacted.
Ohioans To Stop Executions says lawmakers have only approved 4 of 56 proposals
made by an Ohio Supreme Court task force in 2014. The organization says in an
annual report released Tuesday that 6 more are pending in the Legislature but
have yet to receive support in both the House and Senate.
The report also says prosecutors sought the death penalty in 26 cases last
year, 5 more than in 2014.
Most cases came from counties that traditionally seek the death penalty more
often. Those include Franklin, Hamilton, Lake, Mahoning, Stark and Trumbull
counties.
Ohio hasn't executed anyone in almost 3 years because of a lack of lethal
injection drugs.
(source: Associated Press)
ARIZONA:
Death penalty possible in killing of BHC 8-year-old girl
A police detective has testified in a court hearing for a man accused of
killing an 8-year-old Bullhead City girl two years ago that there was evidence
the victim was sexually assaulted.
The Kingman Daily Miner and the Mohave Valley Daily News reported that
Detective Brandon Grasse testified Friday during a Mohave County Superior Court
hearing in the case of Justin James Rector.
Prosecutors said they plan to seek the death penalty if Rector is convicted of
first-degree murder in the September 2014 killing of Isabella "Bella"
Grogan-Cannella. Rector is also charged with kidnapping, child abuse and
abandonment of a dead body.
The girl's partially clothed body was found in a shallow grave near her home.
Judge Lee Jantzen ruled during the hearing that prosecutors had established
probable cause to seek a death sentence for Rector, if he is convicted of
murder.
Circumstances cited for a death sentence included: the victim's age being under
age 15, the death being committed in a cruel or heinous manner and the
defendant having committed a serious offense other than murder.
"Asphyxia due to strangulation," Grasse said when asked by prosecutor Greg
McPhillips during the hearing to comment on the autopsy and how the girl died.
He also said there was evidence of sexual assault.
"It was cruel and it was horrible," McPhillips said.
Rector's attorney, Gerald Gavin, argued that there was no evidence of sexual
abuse and there was no evidence the murder was cruel or heinous compared to
other death row inmates whose victims were tortured over time. He argued that
the girl was killed quickly, but he conceded that she was under age 15.
McPhillips countered that the girl's death was cruel because of her young age
and that she trusted Rector, a family friend, who had stayed with her family.
(source: Associated Press)
CALIFORNIA:
Death is Different: What defenders of capital punishment get wrong
Last week, in a reactionary op-ed littered with Trump-inspired flourish,
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert ramped up her personal,
public, and political crusade for Proposition 66 in California (and its dubious
promise of quick, yet somehow still accurate, state-sanctioned killings).
Schubert was responding to my column published at the end of last month,
"California Voters can tip the balance in death penalty debate," or as Schubert
assailed it, "Stephen Cooper's latest rant against the death penalty in
California." Following her dismissive, Trump-style personal attack, Schubert's
response immediately devolves into Trumpish narcissism ("Proposition 66 was
conceived by some of the brightest legal minds in California"), followed by the
trumpeting of a controversial and misleading poll concerning Californians
alleged support for the death penalty.
Schubert's op-ed extols Proposition 66 - which promises to speed executions in
California, though not hardly as much as advertised - given Schubert's
remarkable concession that: "The initiative does not impose a rigid deadline
that must be met in every case. Courts are allowed to go longer in
extraordinary cases."
Schubert badly needs to brush up on Supreme Court case law because, as The New
York Times observed 14 years ago: "The Supreme Court has long professed the
principle that 'death is different,' that in order to deprive someone of his
life, the state must be punctilious about providing him every procedural
protection." Just 1 eloquent example of this is Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1,
45-46 (1957) (on rehearing) (Frankfurter, J., concurring) ("The taking of life
is irrevocable. It is in capital cases especially that the balance of
conflicting interests must be weighed most heavily in favor of the procedural
safeguards of the Bill of Rights.").
What Schubert troublingly fails to grasp, despite touting her background having
prosecuted death penalty cases, is that each and every death penalty case is
"extraordinary." In ignorance of this well-established principle, Schubert
cheer leads for the continued arbitrary, inhumane, racist, financially unsound,
unjust, state-sanctioned killing by California (of usually its poorest, most
mentally ill, most vulnerable, most abused, and worst-represented citizens).
For the most part, with the exception of in a swath of states (like Georgia,
Florida, or Alabama), the overwhelming majority of judges, thank God, rightly
believe, and act all of the time, in accordance with Supreme Court precedent -
that each and every death penalty case is extraordinary. They do so because of
the irrevocable, God-like sanction involved - one that human beings,
particularly state governments with a penchant for messing small things up,
like fixing potholes - should never be allowed to engage in (except in war, and
then, only when assisting the federal government in self-defense with the sober
understanding that, "war is hell").
Accordingly, because of the "extraordinariness" that is inherent in capital
punishment (and the law as established by the Supreme Court of the United
States), what Schubert stubbornly eschews admitting to California voters is
that, if Proposition 66 were to pass, this whole 5-year death penalty appeal
business we keep hearing about is like that blob of orange "hair" atop The
Donald's head: as fake as all get-out.
(source: Opinion; Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as
an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015 --The
Hill)
USA:
Execution drop makes some think death penalty is fading away
Is the death penalty in America gradually dying? There have been just 2
executions since May 1 and the total for 2016 probably will hit a 25-year low.
Execution drug shortages, sometimes grotesque errors in death chambers and
legal challenges to sentences imposed by judges have contributed to a dramatic
decline in the number of states that are carrying out executions.
Just 3 states, Texas, Georgia and Missouri, are using the death penalty with
any regularity, though Texas has not executed anyone since April. 4 executions
are scheduled in the state before the end of the year.
The reduction in executions and in the number of states that are enforcing
death sentences led Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to conclude
recently, "I think the death penalty is fading away." There is not enough
support on the court to abolish capital punishment, Ginsburg said, but added
that may not be necessary.
"Most states don't have any executions. The executions that we have are very
heavily concentrated in a few states and even a few counties within those
states," she said in an interview with The Associated Press in July. Ginsburg
joined a lengthy dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer last year that
highlighted problems with the death penalty that led the 2 justices to conclude
that it probably is unconstitutional.
States that have had to halt executions, though, are trying to figure out how
to resume. Ohio and Oklahoma are among states that intend to re-start
executions once they have corrected well-publicized problems in their death
chambers.
Ohio, which last executed an inmate in January 2014, has set a January 12
execution date for a man convicted of raping and killing a three-year-old girl
in Akron. But it's unclear whether his execution, or more than two dozen others
that are scheduled into 2020, will take place because the state lacks lethal
execution drugs and has struggled to find a supplier, as have other states.
In Ohio's last execution, in January 2014, Dennis McGuire gasped and snorted
repeatedly during a 26-minute execution that used a never before tried
combination of 2 drugs. That protocol has since been eliminated and those drugs
aren't available for executions.
Oklahoma last execution was in January 2015, amid the use of the wrong drug and
other problems. The state's prison system is expected to adopt new execution
procedures soon. Even then, Attorney General Scott Pruitt says he will wait at
least another 5 months before asking a court to schedule an execution.
Oklahoma imposed a moratorium on the death penalty after two problem-filled
executions and a third that was called off when prison officials noticed they
received the wrong drug. The top lawyer for Gov. Mary Fallin urged officials to
go forward anyway, telling another lawyer to "Google it" to confirm the drug
could be used, according to a grand jury investigation.
Alabama and Florida haven't put anyone to death since January because of
questions about the way death sentences are imposed in those states.
Even Texas has seen a reduction in executions. The state's highest criminal
appeals court has stopped 4 executions in the past month, though each case
raised different issues. Separately, the Supreme Court will take up 2 Texas
death row cases in the coming months, also involving discrete issues.
California has the largest death-row population, 746 inmates as of early
August, but hasn't executed anyone in 10 years. Voters in the nation's most
populous state will consider separate ballot questions in November that would
abolish the death penalty on the one hand and speed up the appeals process on
the other.
The longer states go without executions, the harder it may be for them to
resume, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information
Center.
"The law of inertia is that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at
rest tends to stay at rest. There are policy parallels for that with the death
penalty. Right now most states are comfortable not executing anybody. And for
the most part, the public is comfortable, even in death penalty states, with
their states not executing anybody," Dunham said.
At the current pace, there would be 19 executions this year, the fewest since
1991, when 14 people were put to death.
The number of new death sentences also is approaching historic lows as most
jurisdictions are forgoing costly capital trials in favor of seeking life
sentences with no chance of parole. Texas, which has executed more people since
the modern resumption of the death penalty in 1976 than the next 6 states
combined, had only 2 new death sentences last year.
Many of the executions that are being carried out are for crimes committed up
to 30 years ago, before some states enhanced the legal representation in
capital cases, said Stephen Bright, an experienced death penalty lawyer who is
president of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
"There are a lot of people who are getting executed who would never be
sentenced to death today," Bright said.
(source: Associated Press)
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