Dec. 8
COLORADO:
Announcement expected Friday in Montour murder cases
The 4th Judicial Circuit District Attorney will make a public announcement
about the case of Edward Montour Friday afternoon.
The man accused of beating his daughter to death in 1997 and then killing a
jail guard in 2002 has run through over a decade of court proceedings.
District Attorney Dan May will host a press conference in front of the
courthouse on Tejon, across from the Pioneer's Museum at 1:30 p.m.
Other law enforcement figures will be there, including Colorado Springs Police
Chief Pete Carey and Dr. Leon Kelly from the El Paso County Coroner's Office.
According to the DA, in March '97, Montour beat his 11-week-old daughter while
her mother was at work. Little Taylor Montour suffered a broken femur, multiple
broken ribs, a skull fracture and bleeding in her brain.
She would later die.
A jury of his peers found Montour guilty of 1st-degree murder and child abuse
resulting in death the following year, the DA's office says.
He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Time would pass before Montour was again in court, this time for allegedly
killing Eric Autobee, a prison guard at the Limon Correctional Facility's
kitchen.
While fighting those charges, he tried to revisit his conviction for killing
his daughter. The DA says he was trying to lessen the consequences he would
eventually face for killing Autobee.
Autobee's surviving family asked the DA to stop trying to get the death penalty
for Montour - during the 12 years of trials. Eventually, prosecutors did once
Montour pleaded guilty - and agreed to a life sentence without the possibility
of parole.
In their release announcing the press conference, the DA's office refers to
Montour's alleged "endless legal maneuvering, misinformation introduced as fact
and seemingly never-ending delays," in his case.
Those lines are most likely referring to, among other things, Montour's legal
team's successful lobbying in April 2014 to have the cause of his daughter's
death changed from "homicide" to "undetermined."
His legal team would then ardently, if unsuccessfully push that he was wrongly
convicted of his daughter's death - an outcome that allegedly led him to kill
Autobee.
He also pleaded not guilty to killing Autobee in 2013 by reason of insanity - a
plea that would be later dropped.
In 2003, he was ordered to be put to death by a judge. The ruling went all the
way to the state's Supreme Court where it was decided only a jury could put
someone to death.
The DA is expected to talk about Montour's case during their press conference:
what made it so unique, challenging and interesting? They'll also discuss what
they call the importance of the court's ruling.
(source: KUSA TV news)
ARIZONA:
Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty in Phoenix Serial Killings
Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against a former city bus driver
charged in a string of deadly nighttime shootings in Phoenix that led some
people in neighborhoods where the attacks occurred to stay inside after dark.
A notice of intent to seek the death penalty against 23-year-old Aaron Juan
Saucedo was filed Wednesday in 8 of the 9 killings in which Saucedo is charged
with 1st-degree murder. It's not known yet whether prosecutors will seek the
death penalty in the 9th killing.
Prosecutor Juan Martinez said in court records that the death penalty was being
sought because the killings were committed in a cold and calculated manner.
Thomas Glow, an attorney representing Saucedo, declined to comment on the plan
to seek the death penalty against his client.
Saucedo has pleaded not guilty to charges of 1st-degree murder, attempted
murder and drive-by shooting in attacks that killed 9 people and wounded 2
others during a nearly 1-year period that ended in July 2016. At court hearing
in May, Saucedo declared that he was innocent.
Investigators said the victims were shot by Saucedo as he prowled the
neighborhoods in a car and opened fire from inside it or stepped out briefly to
shoot before driving away. The victims were outside their homes or sitting in
cars during the attacks.
Most of the killings were in a mostly Latino neighborhood.
Police said the victims included a 21-year-old man whose girlfriend was
pregnant with their son and a 12-year-girl who was shot to death along with her
mother and a friend of the woman.
Authorities say a 9mm shell casing was found in Saucedo's car when it was
seized by police. Police say the casing was fired from the same gun as the
shells found in the aftermath of 9 of the 12 attacks.
The killings stumped investigators for months, but they got a break in April
when Saucedo was arrested in the August 2015 fatal shooting of 61-year-old Raul
Romero, whose girlfriend was Saucedo's mother. It's unclear whether prosecutors
are seeking the death penalty against Saucedo in Romero's death.
(source: Associated Press)
*******************
Media challenges judge's order on not naming prosecutor in murder case
High in a tower at the Maricopa County Superior Court complex in downtown
Phoenix, prosecutor Jeannette Gallagher was fighting to put John Allen on death
row for killing a 10-year-old girl by locking her in a plastic footlocker
overnight.
Meanwhile, in another courtroom in another Superior Court tower, Gallagher was
the victim in the trial of a man who had stalked her repeatedly after she put
him in prison in 2008.
When Gallagher's involvement in the 2 cases intersected, a court order was
issued that appears unprecedented in Maricopa County.
In a hearing Nov. 6, Superior Court Judge Erin Otis weighed a request from The
Arizona Republic for a still camera to be allowed into the Allen trial. She
approved the camera but ordered The Republic not to show the lead prosecutor,
Gallagher. Then she went further: No one would be allowed to use Gallagher's
name, not on the newspaper's website or in its print edition, not on TV news,
not in any media coverage.
Gallagher's name already had been published in news reports in the early stages
of Allen???s trial and throughout court proceedings for his wife and other
relatives tried for related crimes.
As she issued her order from the bench that day, Otis said she was protecting
the integrity of the stalking case that was not playing out in her courtroom.
She did not mention whether anyone had asked her to do so or why.
The attorney representing The Republic in the hearing to request camera access
argued against the order in court. Now, The Republic and other media companies
are challenging it, accusing the judge of violating the U.S. and Arizona
constitutions on First Amendment grounds.
At issue was the legal concept of "prior restraint," which is a pre-publication
censorship of the media.
The media companies contended that Otis was blocking them from reporting facts
- in a death-penalty case, no less - that any member of the public easily could
discover by walking into the courtroom during trial or going on the Internet
and reading the court record or viewing past news stories about Allen and the
10-year-old victim.
In essence, the media companies asked, if a judge could bar them from
publishing something as fundamental as the name of the prosecutor in a
death-penalty case, what other parts of a public court proceeding could be kept
secret, too?
The Republic, joined by the Associated Press, 12 News, and Channels 3 and 5,
filed what is known as a special action with the Arizona Court of Appeals,
seeking a higher court's ruling that such prior restraint violates the public's
right to know.
Otis and Gallagher filed responses saying the issue was moot because the cases
were decided shortly after Otis' order was made, and the bar on using
Gallagher's name was lifted.
On Tuesday, both sides appeared before a three-judge panel of the Arizona Court
of Appeals. Their arguments over a few sentences spoken from the bench Nov. 6
could affect future courtroom news reports for decades to come.
The Allen trial was in its last day of testimony Nov. 6 when attorney David
Bodney, who represents The Republic and other media outlets, attended a morning
hearing about The Republic's camera request.
Otis had found The Republic's initial request a week earlier to be "untimely"
because it had not been submitted early enough but set a hearing for seven days
later.
Even earlier, a TV station initially had submitted a request to video record
the trial but did not send a representative to its camera-request hearing. Otis
had declared that request abandoned.
For decades, camera requests had frequently been made and granted on short
notice at Maricopa County Superior Court trials. But recently, perhaps in the
wake of high-profile cases that went viral in the media, judges have begun
enforcing a rule that requires applying seven days "before the trial date."
Otis, when she made the order, said that she did not want the jury in the
stalking trial to know that Gallagher was in the middle of a capital-murder
trial.
Bodney told Otis that her order placed an unconstitutional prior restraint on
the media. He pointed out that Arizona court rules state that victims and
witnesses can be protected from being photographed or video recorded in certain
circumstances, but there is no mention that prosecutors should be shielded from
view, as they are the representatives of the government.
Bodney also pointed out that this was no ordinary case but rather a
death-penalty murder case, one of the highest seriousness.
Otis responded that the media could freely use the name of the 2nd-chair
prosecutor in the case, and the media would be able to use the lead
prosecutor's name again when her other case had come to a close.
Bodney suggested to Otis that there were less-limiting means to protect the
integrity of the stalking trial, such as ordering jurors not to follow media
coverage.
As Bodney would later describe to the appeals court, there were no judicial
findings, no explanation of why Otis was intervening in another trial, no
arguments - just an order.
In his pleadings to the appeals court, Bodney quoted Otis' response as, "I just
don't want her name in print or her image on the news until that trial comes to
completion."
Otis' final word in the trial court: "That's my order, and I need to get
going."
Jeannette Gallagher has been a prosecutor in the Maricopa County Attorney's
Office since 2000, the year she came up from Pima County. She has prosecuted
accused child abusers, a notorious prison hostage-taker and countless
murderers.
She is a strong supporter of the death penalty and, under County Attorney Bill
Montgomery, she is the bureau chief of the office's capital litigation section.
In effect, she is in charge of the office's death-penalty prosecutions.
A former social worker, she has told The Republic that she remembers the name
of every victim in every case she ever prosecuted.
Gallagher is known for her hard-driving style. She is famous for being
combative, so much so that she has ardent fans, many of them former jury
members, who come to her trials to watch her in action.
Otis, the judge in the Allen case, was a sex-crimes prosecutor at the Maricopa
County Attorney's Office from 2003, the year after she graduated from law
school, until 2012, when she was appointed to the bench. She and Gallagher
worked at the office at the same time, although not in the same bureaus.
It is not unusual for a former prosecutor to become a judge. Of the 94 judges
at Maricopa County Superior Court, 51 - more than 1/2 - were prosecutors, and
32 came from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. By contrast, only 7 judges
on the Maricopa County bench specialized as public defenders.
And it was not unusual that Gallagher would lead the prosecution of John Allen.
Allen was accused of murdering his wife's cousin, 10-year-old Ame Deal, in July
2011. He had locked the girl in a plastic footlocker as punishment and left her
there overnight.
Allen's wife, Sammantha Allen, already had been sentenced to death for the same
murder, and 3 other relatives have been sentenced to prison for crimes related
to the girl's death.
Gallagher had tried the Sammantha Allen case as well, and her name had been
printed in numerous stories about that trial and her husband's.
On Nov. 8, 2 days after Otis barred the media from identifying the prosecutor,
Allen was found guilty. 8 days later, the jury sentenced him to death.
A stalking case
In her earlier order issued from the bench, Otis told the attorneys and the
media that she was barring use of Gallagher's name in the John Allen case
because of an order in another case, presumably the stalking case.
The Republic has not been able to locate that specific order. During Tuesday's
Court of Appeals hearing, the attorney for the state did not know what kinds of
instructions had been given to the jury in the other case.
Otis said she did not want the jury in the other case to be influenced by
Gallagher's appearance in the Allen case. That jury, as with juries in all
cases, presumably would have been under admonishment from the court not to read
or watch or research any news coverage or social-media discussion of the case.
Gallagher was personally represented in that trial by two attorneys who
specialize in victims' rights. To demonstrate her vulnerability, prosecutors
had filed on her behalf a motion to bring a "facility" dog into court to
accompany her during her testimony. It was essentially a service dog that would
sit with Gallagher to calm and assure her.
"The witness is anxious about testifying in front of a group of people," said
an appendix to the motion. "The service dog met the witness this past Friday in
preparation for the trial. Think of the dog like an interpreter, an aid to get
the witness' testimony across to you more clearly."
The defendant was Albert Karl Heitzmann, 69, a tall, slender man with glasses
and unruly white hair and an apparent dislike for Gallagher that dates back to
2007.
According to court records, Heitzmann was a substitute math teacher at the
Adobe Mountain School, a reform school and juvenile prison run by the Arizona
Department of Juvenile Corrections.
While there, he became acquainted with an inmate named Brian Womble and, when
Womble was released from Adobe Mountain, Heitzmann let him live in his home. In
2002, Womble asked Heitzmann to store 2 handguns in his safe-deposit box, and
Heitzmann agreed to do so.
Womble later used those guns to murder a man, and when he went to trial,
Gallagher was the prosecutor.
She called Heitzman as a witness. After she had obtained death sentences for
Womble and his accomplice, she charged Heitzmann with misconduct with weapons,
perjury and tampering with a witness.
Heitzmann went to prison for 2 1/2 years. He got out in May 2010. 2 years
later, he sent a letter to an attorney saying he had a plan to assassinate
Gallagher.
Heitzmann was sent back to prison for another 4 years for intimidation and
another weapons charge. He was released in September 2015.
According to statements made by prosecutors in court Nov. 9, he already had
filed a notice of claim against Gallagher. And then, the next year, in
September 2016, he showed up twice in courtrooms where Gallagher was appearing
at hearings, though he was forbidden to have contact with her.
He was charged with 2 counts of stalking and one count of misconduct with
weapons. According to court filings, he could spend up to 15 years in prison on
each of the counts.
On Nov. 7, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury found him guilty on both
stalking charges. The next day, the jurors found aggravating factors that would
allow the judge to impose a stiff sentence.
The weapons charge was severed from his trial because the gun in question had
nothing to do with the stalking. It was to go to trial before a new jury later
in December.
Arguments before the appeals court
There was no official court document lifting the ban on using Gallagher's name
or image in coverage of Allen's murder trial. Instead, the week after Allen was
convicted, a Superior Court public information officer sent an email to Bodney
saying his clients were "free to use the prosecutor's name."
The media companies' special action on Otis' order in the Allen case was filed
after both Allen and Heitzmann had been convicted.
At Tuesday's hearing in appeals court, Bodney called Otis' decision to protect
jurors in the stalking case "speculation upon guesswork upon conjecture."
Were the judges coordinating with each other? he asked.
"Where does that end if the court does not send a message?"
"Was it to get convictions for Ms. Gallagher in both cases?" he asked.
He emphasized the lack of judicial findings. Generally, a judge would be
expected to explain her reasoning and weigh the respective constitutional
rights of the defendant, the victims and the media.
Gerald Grant, a deputy Maricopa County attorney who represented the court and
the prosecution, said the request for Otis' order did not come from his office.
Grant also argued there was no need for Otis to issue a formal order indicating
she had lifted the media ban because she said at the outset that it would
expire as soon as there was a verdict in the case in which Gallagher was the
victim.
Asked by the appellate panel what he wanted from the court, Bodney said he
wanted a ruling to prevent the same kind of order from happening in the future.
"Where does that end if the court does not send a message?" he asked.
Grant's answer was that the circumstances were unique, "incapable of
repetition, and there's no need for the court to get involved in it."
The court took the matter under advisement. The panel gave no indication when
it would issue its decision.
(source: Arizona Republic)
CALIFORNIA:
Death sentence upheld for Antioch man who killed pregnant wife and daughter
The state Supreme Court upheld the death sentence Thursday of an Antioch man
who killed his pregnant wife and their 2-year-old daughter in 1996, and later
told his mother he did it because his wife "wouldn't stop blabbing" about his
bank robberies.
Christopher Henriquez was 24 when he strangled his wife, Carmen, 25, who was 8
months pregnant, and clubbed and choked their daughter, Zuri, in their
apartment in August 1996. He admitted the killings to police.
Henriquez had been paroled from prison in New York in July 1995 after a robbery
sentence and, the court said, robbed 2 banks in San Francisco a month before
the murders. His wife moved out that month but, according to relatives,
returned to her husband after he promised not to rob another bank.
The killings occurred a day after the couple and their child returned from a
trip to Disneyland. His mother, Deborah Henriquez, who was also on the trip,
testified that her son came to her house the day after they got back, looking
dazed. The next day, she said, he told her that he had killed his wife and
child in a fit of anger.
(source: San Francisco Chronicle)
USA:
Capital punishment is obsolete - this is why it should be abolished
There is overwhelming evidence why the United States should abolish capital
punishment.
Former President Jimmy Carter in his 2014 book, "A Call to Action," said have
done so.
The only nations in Europe, North, Central and South America that still execute
its citizens are the United States, Belarus and Suriname.
In 2007, Nebraska became the 19th state to abolish the death penalty.
The Michigan Law School has a registry of 1728 exonerated folks who had been
incarcerated for an average of 11 years for crimes they did not commit.
Since there is no fail-safe example of a way a jury can reach a verdict of 1st
degree of murder, there is an enormous danger of taking the life of an innocent
person.
Cameron Todd Willingham of Corsicana, Texas was executed for the arson murder
of his 3 children based on false evidence.
More than 3 years later, the Houston Chronicle, with input from The Washington
Post, detailed how Willingham's conviction was based on false testimony of a
jailhouse snitch to benefit himself through a lesser sentence and the
prosecution misconduct of 2 district attorneys.
Poor and black? You won't get a fair shake in death sentences, new report
confirms
A new report raises troubling questions about the fairness of Pennsylvania's
criminal justice system.
Middleweight boxer, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, spent 19 years in prison. He was
accused of murdering 3 white people in New Jersey, and convicted by an
all-white jury, mostly on the testimony of two thieves who later recanted their
stories.
Following his release, he found injustice until he died in 2014 at the age of
76. Fortunately, he had received life without parole instead of the death
penalty.
To quote Carter, "Perhaps the greatest argument against the death penalty is
its extreme bias in its use against the poor, minorities, and those with
diminished mental capacities.
Although homicide victims are 6 times more likely to be black than white, 77 %
of death penalty cases involve white victims".
In 2002, the United States Supreme Court banned capital punishment of the
intellectually disabled and in 2005 adolescents under the age of 18. Studies
have shown it is not a deterrent.
Violent crime defined as murder, rape, and armed robbery reached its peak in
1990 and has dropped remarkably since with 58 % in Washington D.C., 70 % in
Dallas, 74 % in Newark, 75 % in Los Angeles.
What caused the previous peak?
Is lethal injection cruel and unusual punishment?
?Most consider lethal injection a far more humane form of capital punishment
than hanging or the electric chair.
An investigative reporter, Kevin Drum, from Mother Jones wrote, "The American
real criminal element was lead."
A HUD counselor, Rick Nevin, noted there was a link between lead exposure and
juvenile delinquency.
Also there is a marked fall in the IQ of children when exposed to lead. Lead is
known to be toxic to brain neurons and causes shrinkage in the size of the
frontal cortex responsible for judgement leading to antisocial behavior and
adult violence.
Graphs of blood lead levels from 1937 to 1986 show it peaked about 23 years
before the violent crime peak in 1990.
The biggest source in the post-war years was not lead paint but leaded gas. In
the 1920's, General Motors, in order to prevent engine pinging and knock, added
tetraethvl lead to gasoline.
In 2000, Nevin concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions
from autos explained 90 % in the variation in violent crime.
In 2007, Nevin showed lead data curves peaking 20 years or so before violent
crime; this fit astonishingly well in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great
Britain, Finland, Italy and West Germany. During the 1970's and 80's stringent
environmental agency regulations led to less pollutants as did the catalytic
converter.
Ending capital punishment means that some guilty of the most heinous crimes and
serial killers will remain in prison for life.
(source: Guest Editorial; Dr. James P. Bond is a retired oncologist who
previously practiced in Bryn Mawr, Pa. and currently lives in Beaumont, Texas.
He is a retired Pennsylvania Prison Society member----pennlive.com)
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