April 21
TEXAS:
Judge denies motion to remove death penalty from suspect in Breanna Wood's
death----Nueces County prosecutors revealed they're pursuing charges against
seven people related to the killing.
The death penalty remains on the table for capital murder suspect Joseph
Tejeda, who is accused in the death of Breanna Wood.
Judge Jack Pulcher, of the 105th district court, on Friday denied a motion from
Tejeda's attorneys, Fred Jimenez and Dee Ann Torres, that the death penalty not
be considered.
Tejeda, 27, is charged with capital murder, engaging in organized criminal
activity, tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse. The state is seeking
the death penalty against him and Sandra Vasquez, who is also charged with
capital murder in connection with Wood's death.
A third person, Christopher Gonzalez, is also facing a capital murder charge,
but prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty in his case. They are three
of 78 people charged with crimes related to the 21-year-old.
Wood's remains were found in early January 2017 after she was last seen with
Tejeda at a convenience store in October 2016.
It was decided at a previous hearing that motions filed by Tejeda's attorneys
would be heard in increments of 10. At his last hearing, among other motions,
his attorneys requested he be allowed to appear in court wearing "civilian
clothes" and that he not be shackled. Those requests were denied.
His attorneys have also filed a motion requesting his facial tattoos be either
removed or covered with makeup for his trial. Tejeda's attorneys requested more
time on that motion while they find an expert to speak about the tattoos.
(source: Corpus Christi Caller-Times)
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
Let's put an end to the death penalty
The New Hampshire House of Representatives will vote on Senate Bill 593, which
will repeal the death penalty in coming weeks. I support this repeal.
I am a Christian and my support of repeal is primarily based on my deeply held
religious understandings. I also believe that the death penalty is a deeply
flawed public policy. I believe the death penalty is highly arbitrary, risks
executing the innocent and is racially biased. No research evidence supports a
deterrent value. The monies currently used to prosecute and defend capital
cases would be better used supporting initiatives to reduce crime, funding
cold-case units and supporting victims. There is just no restorative or
rehabilitative value to the death penalty.
I urge our state representatives to overwhelmingly vote for SB 593.
MARTHA A. HUNT
Sutton
(source: Letter to the Editor, Concord Monitor)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Death penalty sought in Foster Township domestic slaying
Luzerne County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against a Foster
Township man accused of killing his girlfriend earlier this year.
Joseph John Marchetti Jr., 51, allegedly beat and shot Antoinette Wilkinson,
also known as Toni Lynn, 46, inside their Spring Street home in the township on
Jan. 28.
Investigators say Marchetti also beat his girlfriend's mother, Barbara
Wilkinson, 72, with a lead-filled club before shooting himself in the face. The
elder Wilkinson survived and testified about her ordeal at Marchetti's
preliminary hearing in March.
Marchetti, who faces counts of criminal homicide and aggravated assault, has
pleaded not guilty.
Paperwork filed Friday in Luzerne County Court indicated that a jury trial has
been requested, and has been set for Feb. 19, 2019.
Marchetti remains jailed at the county correctional facility without bail. He
is being represented by county public defenders Michael Kostelaba and Benjamin
Stanton.
The case is being prosecuted by assistant district attorneys Daniel Zola,
Justin Richards and Kyle Scanlon.
(source: Times Leader)
ALABAMA:
Justice is meant to be blind to all factors, including age
Justice is meant to be blind. She's blind to all of the outside factors that
would affect an outcome of fairness. I've seen a lot of people in the last week
oppose the use of the death penalty for Walter Leroy Moody, 83, due to his age.
They were wrong.
The state was right to execute him. He was sentenced to death in 1996 for the
capital murder of Judge Robert Vance.
The death penalty isn't an outcome that our justice system hands out lightly.
There are far more avenues for those convicted to escape it than there were for
their victims to escape their fate or their families and loved ones to escape
living in the shadow of reality of that included a heinous often violent crime.
There are ways to get out of the death penalty. The courts allow an appeal
process that often leads to years and years of waiting to see justice served.
This process should not be allowed to be an automatic get out of your sentence
card if you can take up as much time as possible.
The question of fairness or kindness should not fall to a system that is
rendering a punishment chosen by a judge and/or jury. No magic age or magic
turning point in health should mean one deserves compassion over justice.
Where was compassion when the defendant committed the crimes that got them
there?
If anything this latest execution should serve as a motivator for justice to
move more swiftly for everyone involved. If it is unfair or unjust to execute
the old, than once they've exhausted all reasonable appeals, let the punishment
be handed down without further pause.
Was justice served, yes. Due process allowed this man more years than he
probably should have had but it owes him no more. The court doesn't hand down
sentences based on the old man you may become in an over burdened criminal
justice system.
The sentence is given based on the acts of the man sitting in court. That is
what is right that is what is fair.
The physical treat posed by this man may not have been grave today but the
threat posed by setting a precedent that you can evade justice with time is and
was grave.
(source: Apryl Marie Fogel, altoday.com)
**************
Alabama should speed up executions, state auditor says
Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler said the decades Walter LeRoy Moody sat on
Alabama's death row was another example of justice delayed equaling justice
denied.
Moody was executed Thursday night for the 1989 pipe bombing death of Federal
Judge Robert Vance in Birmingham. Moody, 83, became the oldest inmate executed
in the United States since the return of executions in the 1970s.
Last Words and Meals
Moody's tenure of close to 3 decades behind bars and 20-plus years on death row
defeats the deterrent element of capital punishment, Zeigler said.
"Thirty years is too long to carry out a sentence. Killers are not worried
about what may happen 30 years from now. They think in terms of the next 30
minutes," Zeigler said. "It is very little deterrent to a would-be killer that
he might be executed 30 years later."
In 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody of 71 charges related to the death of
Vance and Georgia civil rights attorney Robert Robinson, who was also killed by
a pipe bomb blast. He was sentenced to 7 concurrent life sentences and 400
years. He was placed on death row in 1996 after being convicted of capital
murder in state court.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average time on death row it
190 months, or almost 16 years.
Zeigler said Moody's long period on death row also meant taxpayers had to foot
the bill for his room, board and medical expenses.
"We have got to correct this problem and start carrying out swifter justice,"
he said.
Zeigler said he is working on a plan - dubbed "Execution Delayed is Justice
Denied" - that will "greatly speed up executions without increasing the danger
of executing the wrong person."
A timeline for the plan to be released was not announced.
(source: al.com)
CALIFORNIA:
California has over 700 people on death row and executions could begin soon
California is often viewed as the center of progressive politics in the United
States. It has some of the strongest environmental regulations in the country,
the strongest pesticide regulations and along with Connecticut the strongest
gun control measures. California's legislature is already working to reinstate
the net neutrality measures recently dumped by the Federal Communications
Commission, and many cities have spent the last 18 months actively resisting
the Trump administration's siege on undocumented immigrants.
Yet California also has more than twice as many people on death row as the next
highest state - 746, compared with Florida's 347. That is the largest
population of inmates awaiting execution in the entire Western Hemisphere and
two-thirds of the total number of people known to have been executed by their
governments worldwide in 2016.
Even a careful observer of the Golden State can be forgiven for not knowing
these figures. The state has executed only 13 people since 1992 and none since
2006, when a federal court ruled that California's lethal injection procedures
violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. (The state has
spent the last 12 years trying to revise those procedures. On April 11, several
media organizations in California sued the state over the latest rules, saying
that the administration of lethal injections would occur out of view of the
journalists who witness the executions on behalf of the public.)
"We've had such a long lull now between executions," says Mary Kate DeLucco,
communications director at Death Penalty Focus, "that many residents aren't
even aware we have it."
Twice since 2006, California voters have had the chance to end the death
penalty via referenda. Both initiatives failed. In the most recent case in
2016, a proposition to ban executions competed against another to speed up the
process of appeals. A week before the vote, pollsters for the Los Angeles Times
found that 40 % of those who supported ending the death penalty were confusing
the 2 initiatives. In the end, the proposal to quicken the process, Proposition
66, passed with 51 %.
So at a time when much of the country seems to be moving away from the death
penalty - 2017 saw just 23 executions nationwide, the second lowest since 1991
- California may soon begin executing people again.
Among the many organizations working to keep that from happening is the
Catholic Mobilizing Network, a national ministry of the Congregation of the
Sisters of St. Joseph. Since 2009 C.M.N. has been engaging with Catholics
around the country to stop the practice of executing criminals. "We're kind of
the convening power," says the group's managing director, Krisanne Vaillancourt
Murphy, "bringing Catholics who are concerned about these things together and
leveraging their impact."
California has 746 people on death row, or 2/3 of the total number of people
known to have been executed by their governments worldwide in 2016.
While their work takes many different forms, one thriving C.M.N. program is the
Mercy in Action Project, in which Catholics send letters to state officials on
behalf of those soon to be executed, pleading for clemency. "Some are really
powerful," says Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy, "especially when victims' families
reach out and say, 'Please don't take another life, this won???t help.'"
Their network has "grown exponentially" in the last 2 years, Ms. Vaillancourt
Murphy reports. "We now see upwards of 1000 letters per clemency call." And
last year across the United States there were 18 stays of execution; some were
a matter of legal issues, while others involved state leaders stopping the
process.
"We feel pretty excited that people feel connected to that effort," says Ms.
Vaillancourt Murphy. "We see our role to really channel that call for
clemency."
Contrary to prevailing narratives, C.M.N. finds that banning the death penalty
often enjoys bipartisan support. "What we're finding is that the death penalty
is not a liberal or conservative issue, a Democrat or Republican issue," she
explains. So in Utah, for instance, a recent bill to end the death penalty was
sponsored by Republicans, though it ultimately failed to reach the House floor.
"They had tons of conservative support," says Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy.
"There are libertarians who argue the government can't even properly deliver
the mail, how can they execute someone? But there's also just the cost of it
[the overall appeals process]. It's exorbitantly expensive," she explains.
Despite the results of the 2016 vote, the constitutionality of the death
penalty as currently administered in California remains tied up in state and
federal court. Proposition 66 has also created new legal issues, the state
legislature having used it to pass responsibility for the development of the
process of execution to the state corrections agency. "We think this violates
the separation of powers," says Linda Lye, senior staff attorney at the
American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
"Our elected leaders are responsible for setting policy," Ms. Lye says. "They
don't want to have to decide the politically unappealing questions like how
painful [an execution] should be, how quick it should be. But we think
constitutionally they are required to."
In recent years some have also accused Gov. Jerry Brown, a Catholic who is
personally opposed to the death penalty, of dragging his feet on setting
executions back in motion. As he approaches retirement in January, others hope
he will offer some final gesture of mercy to those on death row. California law
prevents him from commuting the sentences of anyone convicted of two or more
felonies (the Los Angeles Times reports that over half the people on death row
fall into this category) without the support of the state???s Supreme Court.
But on his own the governor could potentially offer stays of executions to the
rest.
"The good news about California," says Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy, "is they've got
some amazing groups on the ground making it really hard for the state to move
forward with executions."
"But we really can't sit back," she notes. "If these couple of court challenges
were ironed out, we could start seeing people being killed in California within
the next year."
She also admits that grassroots letter writing has its limits. "I'm not going
to say a constituent in Kentucky writing to the California governor has all the
weight in the world," she says. "But it does have an impact, knowing that there
are others are taking note of what a governor is doing, what their board of
parole is doing.
"If you're not in a state that has the death penalty, you probably don't think
about it that much. But it's still this practice that we use that's inhuman and
contrary to the Gospel. So really it involves each one of us, and we all have a
say on that."
(source: americanmagazine.org)
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