January 5
NORTH CAROLINA:
Death penalty cases are rare across NC. But Wake County is pursuing one
starting Monday.
Wake County prosecutors on Monday will bring a rare death penalty case against
Seaga Gillard, a 30-year-old man accused of fatally shooting a pregnant woman
inside a Raleigh hotel room.
The case, which dates to the 2016 double slaying at America’s Best Value Inn,
will give jurors the option of capital punishment — a choice they have declined
in nine straight Raleigh murder trials.
North Carolina has not executed an inmate since 2006, and no death sentence has
been imposed statewide for more than 2 years.
Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said Thursday that her office
seeks the death penalty in fewer than 5 % of all homicide cases, reserving it
for “the most egregious.”
But the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit law firm that
represents defendants on death row, called Wake County “an outlier” for
pursuing capital punishment that its juries repeatedly reject.
Wake is the only county out of 100 statewide that sought death sentences in
each of the past 3 years, according to the center’s research. Since 2016, Wake
held a quarter of the 12 capital trials across North Carolina.
“Lorrin Freeman is really an outlier,” said Elizabeth Hambourger, attorney with
the center. “No other large county is seeking it as she is.”
Hotel room death
In December 2016, Raleigh police charged Gillard, then 28, and Brandon Xavier
Hill, then 30, with 1st-degree murder. Investigators said they shot April Lynn
Holland and her boyfriend, Dwayne Garvey, to death in a room at the hotel,
charging the 2 men after they were recorded by surveillance cameras.
Police accused Gillard of shooting Holland, who was four months pregnant, and
Hill of shooting Garvey. The couple had 3 young children.
April Lynn Holland and Dwayne Garvey, who were shot to death on the 2nd floor
of the America’s Best Value Inn at 3921 Arrow Drive, off Blue Ridge Road near
the Crabtree Valley Mall, before dawn on Dec. 2, 2016. The next day, police
charged Seaga Edward Gillard, 28, and Brandon Xavier Hill, 29, with 1st-degree
murder in the double homicide.
Courtesy of the Garvey family
Police did not specify a motive for the shooting, but Garvey’s older brother
told the N&O in 2016 that the slain man died defending the mother of his
children from a man who “she knew from her past, when she was much younger.”
Gillard had a criminal history that predates the hotel shooting, charged with
1st-degree kidnapping, first-degree forcible sexual offense and assault by
strangulation in connection with the 2016 rape of a woman at a Morrisville
hotel.
After the hotel shooting, investigators said in a search warrant, he used his
smart phone to Google the penalties for double and fetal homicide.
Investigators reviewing the search history of Gillard’s smart phone for Dec. 2,
2016 found entries in the search engine including “how much can you face for
double homicide.”
Last year, Freeman told the N&O the case was declared capital “a long time
ago.”
“The overwhelming majority of cases are not tried capitally,” she emphasized
Thursday. “That is consistent with our belief and position that capital
punishment is appropriate to be considered only in the most egregious of
cases.”
Asked about the possibility jurors will choose death in Gillard’s case,
Hambourger said “it’s impossible to predict. That’s one of the problems with
the death penalty. It’s a crap shoot.”
Jury selection begins Monday and is expected to last several weeks.
(source: newsobserver.com)
GEORGIA:
Motion for new trial, stay of execution filed in 1997 death penalty verdict
A death sentence was pronounced on Ray Jefferson Cromartie, then a Thomasville
resident, in September 1997, when the 30-year-old defendant was found guilty of
murdering a convenience store clerk during an 1994 armed robbery.
After more than two decades on Georgia’s death row and exhaustion of years of
appeals to the state’s and nation’s highest courts, Cromartie’s execution was
imminent when a lawyer filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial and for
post-conviction DNA testing.
The motion, filed Dec. 28, 2018, in Thomas County Superior Court, also wants
DNA testing performed on evidence in another case in which Cromartie was
convicted — shooting a convenience store clerk who survived.
The motion filed by Aren Adjoian of the Federal Community Defender Office for
the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Curtis Center in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, asks the court to grant a stay of execution and new sentencing.
The motion requests DNA testing of evidence in the shooting death of Richard
Slysz, a clerk at a West Jackson Street convenience store, as well as the
aggravated battery of Dan Wilson at a North Madison Street convenience store.
Cromartie also was found guilty in the Wilson case.
“Advances in DNA technology now make it possible to develop DNA profiles from
minute quantities of DNA evidence, and to ascribe weight to potential
contributors to complex mixtures of DNA. This would not have been possible at
the time of the trial in 1997,” the motion sates.
It continues that new DNA processes make it possible to reliably test the
murder weapon, fired cartridge casings collected from the two crime scenes and
other physical evidence collected by investigators and retained by the court.
The motion states that Dr. R. Thomas Libby, “a preeminent molecular geneticist
and DNA expert,” concludes the following evidence potentially contains DNA
evidence:
• Shell casing collected at the Madison Street Deli crime scene.
• Black knitted cap found near the Madison Street Deli crime scene, presumed to
be the cap worn by the shooter in surveillance video.
• Green hooded sweatshirt found near the Madison Street Deli crime scene,
presumed to be the sweatshirt worn by the shooter in the surveillance video.
• 2 shell casings collected at the Junior Food Store crime scene.
• Basic Lights cigarette pack found near the body of the deceased at the Junior
Food Store.
• Handle section of the Budweiser beer case found on the ground outside the
Junior Food Store.
• 2 Budweiser beer cans found outside the Junior Food Store.
• The .25-caliber Raven Arms pistol and magazine recovered from where Gary
Young threw the firearm near train tracks between Cherokee Homes and the
Jail-Justice Center.
• Clothing recovered from suspects in the case, including Gary Young, Corey
Clark, Thaddeus Lucas and Cromartie.
• Cut portion of victim Slysz’s short sleeve with blood on it.
The evidence is being held in boxes in the evidence locker at the Thomas County
Superior Court clerk’s office — “as counsel has very recently confirmed.”
“It’s not unusual for these motions to be filed right before possible
executions,” said Southern Judicial Circuit District Attorney Brad Shealy.
Because Cromartie has been convicted, the burden is on the defense to reverse
the verdict, Shealy said.
“It’s just a delay tactic. ... Now he’s trying an extraordinary motion,” the
district attorney said.
Cromartie has always maintained that he did not shoot Slysz or Wilson, “and the
identity of the shooter was a significant issue in the case. It is only by
subjecting the evidence to DNA testing that (Mr.) Cromartie can demonstrate
that he did not shoot the victims,” the motion states.
The same gun was used in shootings at both businesses in April 1994, according
to the document. The firearm was found on April 12, 1994, near railroad tracks
between Cherokee Homes, a housing project, and the Jail-Justice Center.
As Cromartie and co-conspirators ran from the West Jackson store after the
clerk was fatally wounded, one of two packages of stolen beer ripped open, and
several beers fell on the ground. The state presented evidence that a
fingerprint found on a piece of the package was Cromartie’s, and a footprint in
mud near the store was from Cromartie’s Adidas shoe, the motion states.
Co-conspirators each received 25-year prison sentences for robbery. Before the
1997 trial, the then-district attorney offered Cromartie a plea deal to life in
prison with the possibility of parole, which, at that time, would have resulted
in parole eligibility after 7 years.
In Cromartie’s most recent appeal efforts, in January and March 2018, a panel
of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals denied his appeals. On Dec. 3, 2018, the
U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to review the lower court’s rulings.
(source: Thomasville Times-Enterprise)
FLORIDA:
State attorney’s office reviewing 1975 murder case recently featured in Times
series----Tommy Zeigler has been on death row since 1976. The state has
rejected his repeated requests for DNA testing.
The state attorney’s office that prosecuted Tommy Zeigler for the murders of
his wife, in-laws and another man at his furniture store on Christmas Eve 1975
says that it is taking a fresh look at his case.
And a Florida state representative says he wants to introduce legislation to
address both prosecutorial misconduct and problems with access to forensic
science, including DNA testing.
Zeigler, who has been on death row for 42 years, was recently the subject of a
multi-part investigation in the Tampa Bay Times. He has asked six times for
advanced DNA tests of clothing, fingernail scrapings and guns still in evidence
at a climate-controlled locker in Orlando. The 73-year-old’s lawyers have
agreed to pay for the testing.
For about 2 decades, the Ninth Judicial Circuit state attorney’s office has
rejected Zeigler’s requests. But State Attorney Aramis D. Ayala’s office now
includes a conviction integrity unit, established in September. And the
director of that unit is looking over the Zeigler case, according to a
spokesperson for Ayala’s office. The office’s policy states that it will only
“review applications where a plausible claim of innocence exists.” Ayala
herself has declined to be interviewed.
“That’s a big deal,” said Zeigler’s original attorney, Terry Hadley, who wrote
to Ayala last month, encouraging her to review the case. “It means that we at
least got her attention, if nothing else.”
Rep. James Grant, an attorney and a Republican from Tampa representing northern
portions of Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, said he wants to address the
issues that have made Florida the state with the most exonerations from death
row with reforms.
“If a defendant wants to bear the costs to test evidence as science continues
to advance but can’t access the evidence to test it, I find that troubling,” he
said.
Grant, recently named chairman of Florida’s House subcommittee on criminal
justice, would like to see changes included in the reform package likely to
emerge in the legislative session that convenes in March.
“If we take someone’s liberty, let alone their life, it’s pretty darn important
that we get it right,” Grant said.
He said he would like to see a process for inmates, particularly those
convicted with junk science, to use DNA and other reliable tests. But there
would have to be a mechanism to prevent senseless appeals. And he’d like to see
consequences for those who willfully withhold or destroy evidence, something
that rarely happens now.
Zeigler is one of almost 2-dozen men sent to death row in the 1970s and 1980s
who can’t get advanced DNA testing of evidence, even though Florida passed a
DNA testing statute almost 2 decades ago.
A Times review of 46 men on death row who asked for permission to conduct DNA
testing found that judges turned down 38 of them at least once. Nineteen men
were denied all DNA testing, including eight who were later executed.
Another 17 death row inmates, including Zeigler, were allowed tests initially
but then denied more advanced testing, including touch DNA.
Nearly 70 % of those denied at least 1 test were convicted before DNA testing
existed. Many of the cases are, like Zeigler’s, based on circumstantial
evidence and witness accounts.
9 of the men were found guilty with the help of microscopic hair comparison,
which has since been discredited. Another 4, including Zeigler, were convicted
with the help of blood spatter analysis, a method criticized as more
speculation than science.
In 2001, Zeigler got permission during a clemency appeal to test the blood on
his shirt and the pants of one of the dead, Charlie Mays. A forensic scientist
selected 4 locations for testing, which he said would identify whether Zeigler
was the killer. Zeigler and his attorneys have always maintained that Mays was
there with several others to rob the store that Christmas Eve.
The DNA analysis on Zeigler’s shirt did not reveal blood from his
father-in-law, Perry Edwards Sr., who had been shot at close range and
bludgeoned with a metal crank. Mays’ pants, however, did have Edwards’ blood.
Prosecutors said Edwards’ blood could be elsewhere on Zeigler’s shirt, but they
wouldn’t allow further testing.
Hadley, who defended Zeigler in 1976, said DNA testing would either “set him
free or it could affirm the crazy narrative of the prosecution.”
“For the prosecutor’s timeline to work,” he said, “a man with no criminal
record had to blow away 4 people on Christmas Eve and try to frame a group of
black men on the same night that the police chief was supposed to pick him up
for a party.”
Denials in Zeigler’s case have been used to prevent other men on death row from
getting DNA testing. Quite often, judges say the original evidence pointing to
the convicted person is too strong to overcome.
But experts say exonerations around the country have demonstrated how much
police and prosecutors got things wrong.
“The lesson from DNA cases is not that DNA has the possibility of establishing
that someone else did it,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington D.C. “It’s that the DNA proves that
all the other evidence in the case was wrong.”
Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, convicted and sentenced to death for fatally stabbing
two of his Altamonte Springs neighbors in 2004, is an example. The undocumented
Honduran immigrant, then 24, was found with the victims’ blood on his clothes.
He said he touched the knife because he feared the killer might still be
present and checked the victims for signs of life. DNA tests in eight locations
later uncovered the blood of a woman who had confessed to the murders. After 14
years in prison, Aquirre-Jarquin was finally released late last year.
And the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Paul Hildwin in 2014
after DNA testing showed he did not rape the victim, as prosecutors said at the
trial. Hildwin, who spent 32 years on death row, has been waiting four years in
the Hernando County jail for a new trial.
Henry Sireci, 70, has, like Zeigler, spent 42 years on death row. He was
sentenced to death for killing a used car lot owner on Dec. 3, 1975 in Orange
County, about three weeks before the murders at the Zeigler furniture store.
A crime lab analyst compared a hair found on the victim’s sock with a hair from
Sireci and said it was a match, “in all probability.” But a Justice Department
review has since found many hair comparison examiners made claims that exceeded
the limits of science. In 2013, the FBI and American Society of Crime
Laboratory Directors acknowledged that previous hair comparison analysis was
invalid.
But the courts concluded there was enough other evidence against Sireci, so he
was not allowed to conduct a DNA test of the hair. Sireci had confessed to the
crime multiple times, though his lawyers say he has brain damage and is
“functionally retarded.”
In 2016, Sireci’s attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court whether his federal
rights had been violated when the trial court refused to grant him a new trial
or the DNA test. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, arguing that keeping men on death row for
decades essentially amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. (In fact, 10 men
have spent more than 40 years on Florida’s death row, including Sireci and
Zeigler.)
Breyer complained that some of those executed are not the “ ‘worst of the
worst’ but rather, are individuals chosen at random on the basis, perhaps of
geography, perhaps of the views of the individual prosecutors, or still worse
on the basis of race.”
Florida has a history of convictions tainted by racism, official misconduct and
questionable judgments.
For every Ted Bundy and Aileen Wuornos executed in Florida, there was a Willie
Darden and Beauford White and David Livingston Funchess.
Darden, a black man once known as the Dean of Death Row, was convicted in 1973
by an all-white jury of killing a white Lakeland furniture store owner.
Prosecutors purposefully kept blacks off the jury, a practice later declared
unconstitutional. White did not shoot anyone and tried to talk his fellow
robbers out of killing 6 people in a Miami suburb. The jury gave him life. But
a judge overruled the jury, and he was executed -- 26 years before 1 of the men
who pulled the trigger. Funchess, a Vietnam vet and Purple Heart recipient with
post-traumatic stress disorder, was executed in 1986 for stabbing 2 employees
at a bar in Jacksonville.
Today, every state has a DNA testing law, but inmates across the country
struggle for access.
In December, California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered DNA tests to be conducted in
the 35-year-old case of a man accused in a quadruple murder after prodding from
New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris and Kim
Kardashian.
Several death penalty experts and Florida attorneys working on appeals for
death row inmates said judges are tired of frivolous appeals. They have large
dockets and are unwilling to allow “fishing expeditions.”
“It’s a battle between finality and the truth,” said Michelle Feldman,
legislative strategist for the Innocence Project in New York City. “I
understand that you don’t want procedures to go on forever, but truth is more
important.”
(source: Tampa Bay Times)
ALABAMA:
Alabama death row inmate to get new trial
A 43-year-old man who has sat on Alabama’s death row for 15 years is getting a
new trial.
The Alabama Supreme Court announced in its weekly orders on Friday that Emanuel
Aaron Gissendanner, who was convicted of murdering Margaret Snellgrove in 2001
during a robbery and a kidnapping, will receive a new trial.
After Gissendanner’s conviction, his lawyers filed a direct appeal and in 2007,
the Dale County judge who sentenced Gissendanner to death granted him a new
trial based on claims of ineffective counsel. “In his 70-page order, Judge
[Kenneth] Quattlebaum found that Gissendanner's defense counsel were deficient
in both the guilt phase and the penalty phase of the trial. The judge found
that defense counsel failed to investigate and to prepare for trial. The judge
also found that the State had violated [case law] in failing to disclose
handwriting samples to the defense,” the state’s highest court noted in its
Friday ruling.
Prosecutors appealed the judge’s order granting a new trial, and in 2014 the
Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reversed Quattlebaum’s ruling and told the
lower court to reinstate Gissendanner’s conviction and sentence.
Today’s ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court overrules the appeals judgement,
and orders the lower court to hold a new trial.
Snellgrove was attacked and killed on June 22, 2001, with court records noting
her cause of death as severe neck and head injuries. At Gissendanner’s original
trial, police said Snellgrove was assaulted in her carport and then taken to a
remote area near an abandoned trailer where Gissendanner sometimes stayed.
Officers also located the victim’s cell phone, purse, and other belongings in
that trailer, trial records show.
Snellgrove’s partially nude body was found in a ditch covered with tree limbs.
The Alabama Supreme Court also announced in its weekly list the denial of
rehearing for another death row inmate, Jessie Livell Phillips.
Phillips was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the fatal
shooting of his wife, Erica Droze Phillips, and their unborn child in Marshall
County. It was the first prosecution and conviction under Alabama’s Brody Act,
which makes it a homicide to kill an unborn baby in an attack on the mother.
The shooting happened Feb. 27, 2009 at an Alabama 69 car wash in Guntersville.
Jessie Phillips became angry because his wife had not changed the wet diaper of
their young daughter, court documents state. Records say Phillips then shot his
wife in the back of the head, leaving her body lying in one of the car wash
bays. The 23-year-old died at a local hospital the next day.
In 2015, the criminal appeals court upheld Jessie Phillips' conviction, but it
remanded the case back to the trial court for a resentencing. The next year,
Marshall County Circuit Judge Tim Riley again sentenced Jessie Phillips to
death. Jessie Phillips appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2017.
(source: al.com)
ARKANSAS:
Evil babysitter, 34, who raped girl, 6, then strangled her with her pyjamas
launches appeal bid----Zachary Holly, 34, claims he should be spared the death
penalty and released from prison after whining about the jury at his trial in
Arkansas
A twisted babysitter who raped a 6-year-old girl before strangling her with her
pyjamas has launched a bid for freedom.
Evil Zachary Holly, 34, claims he should be spared the death penalty and
released from jail after killing little Jersey Bridgeman in 2012.
The monster has whined about the jury and a lack of evidence presented about
his underlying mental health issues.
He has also moaned that his legal team should have sought to exclude certain
evidence from his trial.
Holly is set to file a formal request to be freed by the end of next month with
a hearing due to take place in July.
Jersey was discovered naked in a wardrobe at an abandoned house next to Holly's
home in Arkansas in November 2012.
(source: thesun.co.uk)
NEBRASKA:
Judge orders state to pay nearly $60K in public-records case over death penalty
drugs
A Lincoln judge has ordered the state to pay nearly $60,000 in attorneys fees
in connection to public-records lawsuits filed by the state's 2 largest
newspapers and the ACLU seeking information on how it got lethal injection
drugs.
In June, Lancaster County District Judge Jodi Nelson, in response to
open-records lawsuits filed by the Journal Star, Omaha World-Herald and ACLU of
Nebraska, ordered the state to release records of communications with its
lethal injection drug supplier, as well as several other documents related to
Nebraska's efforts to carry out the death penalty.
But she found certain other documents are exempt from disclosure under a state
law protecting the identities of members of the state's execution team. Those
documents include purchase orders and chemical analysis reports.
The Corrections Department appealed the decision, and the records ordered to be
released remain undisclosed.
Oral arguments in the case are set before the Nebraska Supreme Court later this
month.
At a hearing last month, the Journal Star, World-Herald and ACLU asked Nelson
to award attorneys fees and costs, arguing that they substantially prevailed in
the cases.
In an order this week, she agreed and awarded $59,177 in attorneys fees
($19,518.50 to the Lincoln and Omaha newspapers and $20,140 to the ACLU), plus
$249 in costs.
The Attorney General's office had argued that the judge shouldn't award fees
and costs, in part because the motion came after the state had filed notice of
appeal.
Nelson said that ignored the fact that the request was made in the complaints.
(source: Lincoln Journal Star)
OKLAHOMA:
Netflix’s The Innocent Man: The American injustice system
Netflix’s 6-episode documentary, The Innocent Man, is based on bestselling
novelist John Grisham’s only non-fiction effort, The Innocent Man: Murder and
Injustice in a Small Town, published in 2006. The series, released in December,
is directed (and co-created) by Clay Tweel, with Grisham serving as an
executive producer.
The Innocent Man In the early 1980s, 2 young women were murdered in the small
town of Ada, Oklahoma. In the midst of the Reagan-era law-and-order hysteria,
four men were railroaded into prison for the killings. The new miniseries
blends interviews with the families of the victims and those of the wrongfully
incarcerated men, as well as presenting damning archival footage and testimony
from legal experts. Grisham is also one of the central commentators. “If I
wrote The Innocent Man as a novel, fiction, folks probably wouldn’t believe
it,” he tells the camera.
Grisham’s book opens with a brief portrait of the town: “There are rigs
scattered through the farmland around Ada, an old oil town of 16,000 [now
17,000] with a college and a county courthouse. The rigs are idle, though—the
oil is gone. Money is now made in Ada by the hour in factories and feed mills
and on pecan farms.
“With sixteen thousand people, Ada is considered large for rural Oklahoma, and
it attracts factories and discount stores. Workers and shoppers make the drive
from several counties. It is 80 miles south and east of Oklahoma City, and 3
hours north of Dallas.”
The miniseries opens with the brutal December 1982 murder of 21-year-old Debbie
Carter. Two years later, 24-year-old Denice Haraway was abducted from the
convenience store where she worked and later killed. Investigating police
officer Dennis Smith, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) agent Gary
Rogers and District Attorney Bill Peterson are the key figures in both cases.
In each incident, 2 men were arrested and convicted of the crime. The pair
found guilty of Debbie’s killing, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, have since
been exonerated by DNA evidence. However, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot,
convicted of Denice’s murder, remain in prison, despite overwhelming evidence
suggesting they are innocent.
Defense attorneys and legal experts compile a chilling picture of how either
prosecutors or law enforcement officials, or both, withheld a large quantity of
exculpatory evidence, including Williamson’s mother’s journal that provided an
alibi for her son on the night of Debbie’s slaying.
In Ward’s case, attorney Cheryl Pilate and private investigator Dan Clark were
obliged to hunt through 60 boxes of documents. “Throughout this case, we see a
persistent pattern where exculpatory evidence is hidden, buried, concealed, and
not turned over to the prosecutor and, therefore, had not been turned over to
the defense in the case,” asserts Pilate.
Out of the more than 800 pages of evidence, Ward’s attorneys only received 146,
a clear constitutional violation. Furthermore, a career criminal, Terri
Holland, was a “snitch” for the prosecutor in both cases. In one moving scene,
Holland’s ex-husband and son describe how women like Terri are compelled to
have sex with the local authorities, becoming pawns to be used at will.
“In Ada, if you’re poor, you’re nothing,” a group of Ada residents tell the
camera, describing how police treat impoverished people like Tommy Ward. For
the record, all the crime and frame-up victims in this case are white.
False confessions expert Richard Leo adamantly contends that the confessions of
Ward and Fontenot were coerced. He points to evidence of the suspects being fed
lines and rehearsing a script. Both confessions ran counter to the forensic
evidence.
After 12 years behind bars, Dennis Fritz contacted the Innocence Project, a
non-profit group dedicated to clearing wrongfully convicted prisoners through
DNA evidence (Grisham is a member of the organization’s board of directors). In
1999, Fritz and Williamson were cleared of the homicide charges.
Upon release, in an emotional scene, Fritz hugs his daughter, Elizabeth, who
earlier in the series recounted how her mother was shot and killed by the
nephew of the family’s landlord (after being chastised for inappropriately
touching toddler Elizabeth).
Williamson shockingly tells reporters he had once been five days away from
being executed. Untreated in prison for serious mental illness, Williamson was
so damaged that he tragically drank himself to death a few years after being
freed.
Writes Grisham: “Oklahoma is very serious about its death penalty. When the
U.S. Supreme Court approved the resumption of executions in 1976, the Oklahoma
state legislature rushed into a special session for the sole purpose of
enacting death penalty statutes. The following year, the lawmakers debated the
innovative idea of death by lethal injection, as opposed to going back to Old
Sparky, the state’s dependable electric chair. The rationale was that chemicals
were more merciful; thus, less likely to attract constitutional attacks of
cruel and inhuman punishment; thus, more likely to speed along executions.
“Thirteen long years passed without an execution. Finally, in 1990, the waiting
ended, and the death chamber was used once again. Once the dam broke, the flood
came. Since 1990, Oklahoma has executed more convicts on a per capita basis
than any other state. No place, not even Texas, comes close.”
In his notes at the end of his book, Grisham writes: “The journey also exposed
me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former
lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem
peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in
every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the
same—bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad
defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors…”
Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot “are now serving life terms. Tommy might one day
be eligible for parole, but, through a procedural quirk, Karl will never be.
They cannot be saved by DNA because there is no biological evidence. The killer
or killers of Denice Haraway will never be found, not by the police anyway.”
Since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, some 20,645
years have been lost in the lives of the 2,363 people exonerated, a staggering
destruction of life.
Overall, The Innocent Man presents a damning indictment of the judicial system
in rural towns like Ada, quasi-dictatorial set-ups where the police and
authorities run roughshod over democratic rights. The population is at the
mercy of backward, reactionary forces—filthy representatives of the American
capitalist order.
(source: World Socialist Web Site)
CALIFORNIA:
Governor — commute the death sentences of 300 youthful offenders
Given a second chance in the governor’s office, Jerry Brown has, in his own
words, “carved out a piece” of criminal justice reform. Unfortunately, his
“piece” didn’t include the darkest corner of our broken system.
Signing bills that allow for science-informed reconsideration of sentences for
those who committed crimes as youthful offenders is a great step. But how could
Brown have forgotten those who received the most inhumane sentence? More than
300 youthful offenders (those who were sentenced as juveniles) in California
weren’t sentenced to decades in prison — they were condemned to death.
Shut away, virtually forgotten, these youthful offenders were too often
condemned not because of the nature of their crimes, but because of their skin
color, their ZIP code, their history of abuse and trauma, or their inability to
afford a qualified attorney.
I’ve visited California prisons and sat in on programs with people who
committed crimes as teenagers. They work incredibly hard to be recognized as
more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
Some have been released and now are back home: I met with one last month. He
told me about the week he lived under the threat of a sentence of death. He
talked about his mom’s anguish as she waited to hear whether her 19-year-old
boy would live or die.
Thankfully, he did not get a death sentence, but instead was sentenced to
41-years-to-life, which must have sounded like forever. Now, thanks to the
“youthful offender” reconsideration, he was released after serving 20 years in
prison and is back in his community volunteering, supporting his family,
mentoring youth, working for a nonprofit. No longer a burden of the state, he
is now a credit to it.
It was great to see this man I had first met inside the walls of San Quentin
State Prison, and I told him so. He was quick to credit the programs made
available to him at the prison for his growth. I was struck by the irony he
embodied: but for the lucky break that sent him to the “mainline” instead of
death row, none of those programs and opportunities for change would have been
available to him. He likely still would be spending 23 hours a day in a
concrete and metal box about 4-feet wide.
How can we call it justice when one teenager has been spared and offered
programs of rehabilitation that can lead to early release when another teen,
convicted of a similar crime, continues to suffer, condemned to die at the
hands of the state?
It was good that Gov. Brown commuted 131 sentences on Christmas Eve. But with
more than 180,000 people in the custody of the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation, there are thousands of rehabilitated people who
did not receive the Christmas mercy they were so hoping would be granted.
Unlike the governor, I can’t forget the hundreds who hoped for a simple act of
mercy — that they be spared from a death sentence. No one was asking that they
be released, simply that they not be left to die. A dozen other governors have
done this, and six former governors publicly asked Brown to do the same; none
could have the impact available to the governor of the largest death row in the
nation.
While I don’t believe the women and men sentenced to death really expected that
mercy would suddenly find its way to the most hidden and forgotten, I did. Like
the many others who reached out to Brown over the last few weeks, I couldn’t
help but feel there was reason to believe that this leader — the man who in his
20s once protested an execution outside San Quentin —would be the one to make
such an historic, merciful, and good use of his authority. Only one person is
blessed with the life-saving power to grant clemency to the 739 souls on
California’s death row. For the next few days, that person is Jerry Brown.
After that, it will be up to Gov. Gavin Newsom to ensure science-based and
equitable reform reaches the darkest corner of our criminal justice system.
Given the governor-elect’s support of death penalty reform and knowing he, too,
has personally gone inside San Quentin to get to the heart of the system, I
find myself optimistic that California will not always be known for having the
largest death row in the Western Hemisphere.
(source: Opinion; Mike Farrell is the president of the board of Death Penalty
Focus, a nonprofit committed to ending the death penalty----San Francisco
Chronicle)
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