June 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
After death penalty repeal, what’s next for Michael Addison?
Midway through debate over whether to abolish New Hampshire’s death penalty,
Sen. Sharon Carson issued a warning.
“If you think you’re passing this today and (Michael) Addison is still going to
remain on death row, you are confused,” she said, referring to New Hampshire’s
lone death row inmate. “Mr. Addisons’s sentence will be commuted to a life
sentence.”
The Senate voted to pass the repeal measure after an impassioned campaign that
supporters said had more to do with the principle than one person. Now, as the
dust settles, the question of Addison’s fate persists.
Addison, convicted in the 2006 slaying of Manchester police officer Michael
Briggs, is still fighting his conviction through state and federal appeals. But
advocates on both sides of the debate have conceded that Thursday’s repeal
could spell the end of his death sentence.
The law passed Thursday deliberately applies only to capital murder convictions
from that day on. What the courts do with it, though, is far from clear. For
now, many are looking to other states.
Enter Connecticut. In 2012, the Legislature repealed its capital punishment, 3
years after a previous effort had been vetoed by the governor. But the state
still bore the scars of recent tragedy: the 2007 murders of Jennifer
Hawke-Petit and her 17 and 11-year old daughters during a home invasion.
To exempt the convicted perpetrators – Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky –
from escaping execution, lawmakers explicitly limited their repeal bill to
future convictions. But the courts thought otherwise. In 2015, the state
supreme court invalidated the death penalty in State v. Santiago, pointing to
shifting “contemporary standards of decency” after the repeal.
In a flash, Hayes, Kominsarjevsky, and nine other death row inmates had their
sentences commuted to life without parole.
The Connecticut case featured heavily in New Hampshire’s repeal discussions
this year and last: an example of repeal applying backward whether or not
lawmakers allowed it so. Whether or not it would apply to New Hampshire’s case
is a different story.
To start, there may be a difference in court philosophy. Connecticut’s 4-3
decision was driven by the concept of an evolving standard of cruel and unusual
punishment, and a recognition that a death penalty repeal bill – even a
non-retroactive one – heralded a societal shift.
It is not unlike the way the U.S. Constitutional equivalent of cruel and
unusual punishment has been interpreted, said Miriam Gohara, a clinical
associate professor of law at Yale who has spent 16 years defending death row
inmates.
“It’s evolving standards of decency,” she said. “Meaning that by today’s
standards, would this punishment amount to cruel and unusual punishment, or in
the language of the Connecticut state constitution, would it be excessive or
disproportionate punishment?”
In Connecticut, the answer was yes, if by a slim majority on the court. But New
Hampshire’s highest court has historically taken a different tack.
In one of several decisions to deny Addison’s appeal and uphold his capital
punishment sentencing, the New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected the idea that
the death penalty was at odds with the state constitution’s “cruel or unusual
punishment” prohibition.
For that, they used something of an originalist argument.
“Given that, at the time the State Constitution was adopted, capital punishment
was a sanctioned penalty for specific crimes and that the plain language of the
constitution anticipates its use, the framers could not have considered capital
punishment to be ‘cruel or unusual,’ ” the court wrote.
Whether or not the repeal of the law in question changes that calculus is
difficult to predict.
“The short answer is: It’s up to the court,” said Buzz Scherr, criminal justice
professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. “Just because the
Connecticut Supreme Court did that does not have any binding authority over the
New Hampshire court.”
Scherr said the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s earlier decisions to speak
directly to the constitutionality of capital punishment could give weight to
the state in upholding the sentence, even despite the appeal.
“The language of the Addison opinion is different than the language in the
Connecticut Santiago opinion,” he said, pointing to the “common norms of
decency” argument used in that state. “New Hampshire has in the Addison cases
said they think the death penalty is constitution based on common norms of
decency.”
“I could see the court going either way,” Scherr added. “I don’t think it’s a
clear place one way or another.”
Of course, for any of this to be tested, the argument would need to be raised
in court on appeal.
Presently, Addison is appealing his conviction on habeus corpus grounds.
Progress on that petition, launched in 2016, has ground to a near halt in
Merrimack County Superior Court amid a flurry of mostly-sealed petitions over
the years. But its existence has put a stop to a key catalyst: the one-year
countdown clock between the end of Addison’s appeals and the possibility of an
execution.
Neither Michael Weisman, a Philadelphia-based lawyer representing Addison in
his present stage of appeals, nor Associate Attorney General Jeffrey Strelzin
would comment Friday on potential arguments around the retroactive
sustainability of the death penalty after repeal.
Without a motion to respond – and with progress in the courts slowed to a crawl
– Strelzin said the Department of Justice has no position to take.
“We’re not contending anything at this point,” he said Friday.
But with plenty of time before the Superior Court comes to its next decision,
and the ability of plaintiffs to add to their arguments, the shape of those
arguments could appear in court soon. Just not too soon.
(source: Concord Monitor)
LOUISIANA:
Break Louisiana's stalemate on capital punishment
Louisiana is supposed to allow executions as a punishment for the most heinous
crimes, but the state hasn’t put anyone to death since 2010.
That wide gulf between principle and practice is a prescription for cynicism
among citizens, who should naturally expect that their laws speak clearly on
basic values of justice.
Louisiana’s longstanding limbo concerning capital punishment isn’t tenable, and
if its elected leaders cannot resolve one of the most profound dilemmas of
public policy, then voters should get the chance to untie this Gordian knot
themselves.
That’s why we supported a bill this legislative session that would have allowed
Louisianans to decide, through a proposed amendment to the state constitution,
whether to keep capital punishment on the books. Lawmakers killed that bill,
apparently afraid of what might happen if citizens had a direct say about the
gravest act a state can employ.
Proposal to hide source of execution drugs killed by Louisiana Senate panel
Fear formed the basis of a different capital punishment bill, a measure to hide
the names of pharmaceutical companies that provide the drugs used for lethal
injections of death row inmates. The idea was that if citizens know less about
how executions take place, then it will be easier to carry them out. Such a
denial of democratic ideals has no place in a free republic, which should treat
its citizens as partners in law and order, not passive bystanders. That bill
was narrowly defeated in a state Senate committee, an encouraging victory for
transparency.
The Legislature’s dawdling this session leaves the state where it started on
executions, prolonging a stalemate that serves no one, including the families
of crime victims who might have looked to capital punishment for closure and
now face more waiting.
That delay stems from a simple, sobering fact. Executions have become so
controversial that drug companies don’t want to be publicly associated with
them. Questions concerning the legality of Louisiana’s lethal injection
protocol rest at the heart of an ongoing federal lawsuit that has also played a
big role in putting state executions on indefinite hold.
Polls show that most Louisianans still favor capital punishment, although
influential institutions such as the Catholic Church, along with some
conservatives, have questioned its value. Meanwhile, the state is spending
millions to support a form of punishment that hasn’t been carried out in nearly
a decade, raising obvious questions about its practical effect. According to
one recent study, Louisiana spent more than $200 million over the past 15 years
in court and prison costs related to capital punishment while executing only
one prisoner.
That dilemma should be at the center of the fall political campaign, and
Louisianans should demand that candidates for governor and the Legislature
commit to a statewide vote on capital punishment to help end the uncertainty.
(source: Editorial, The Advocate)
MISSOURI:
Murder Suspect Case Review Scheduled for Wednesday
1 of 2 Chicago men accused in the killing of a California resident in Miller
County is scheduled to be in court this week. Tyler Kroll is charged with
1st-degree murder in the shooting death of Tyler Worthington. A case review is
scheduled for Wednesday, June 5th. Kroll and Joseph McKenna were allegedly
involved a ring circulating vaping pens infused with marijuana oil supplied by
Worthington. The 3 allegedly met in Miller County to work on a deal that went
bad. The prosecution has announced they’ll seek the death penalty for McKenna.
(source: KRMS news)
USA:
New York’s last public execution, months before the Civil War, has lessons for
today
The last public execution in New York City took place on Friday, July 13, 1860,
the summer before the start of the Civil War. The hanging took place on
Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, where a crowd of 12,000 had turned out for
the spectacle.
Public hangings were, at the time, a regular occurrence in the city. A tree at
the northeast corner of Washington Square Park was known as Hangman’s Elm, and
the Marquis de Lafayette said he’d seen 20 highwaymen swing in the park on a
visit to Manhattan. At Executioner’s Corner – 13th Street and 2nd Avenue –
hangings were carried out in an empty field.
The events were often unruly. In 1824, for example, a crowd of 50,000 revelers
turned out for the public hanging of John Johnson, a hotel-keeper who murdered
one of his guests. And the public spectacles often seemed to have the opposite
of their intended effect: Instead of somber events to deter people from crime,
the hangings became parties. Meant to encourage right and punish wrong, they
became excuses for drinking and debauchery.
Today, U.S. executions are more private, though they still occur regularly. In
Alabama on Thursday, 46-year-old Christopher Lee Price was killed with a lethal
injection for stabbing a Fayette County minister to death in 1991. The
execution, the 2nd in Alabama in May, was witnessed by relatives of Price’s
victim.
But even today’s more private executions remain controversial, with the nation
deeply divided by the death penalty. The Supreme Court is also split on the
issue. In a recent case, the court rejected the petition of Russell Bucklew,
who claimed the method chosen for his execution (lethal injection) would, due
to a rare disease, cause him pain that violates the Constitution’s 8th
Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch,
writing for the majority, argued that the Constitution prohibits the state from
inflicting “terror, pain, or disgrace” unnecessarily, but does not promise a
“painless death.” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the court’s fiercest opponent of
capital punishment, has written about how, after a long career in law, he’s
come to suspect that “there simply is no constitutional way to implement the
death penalty.”
The last public execution in New York City was of Albert Hicks, a pirate. In
1860, he joined the crew of the E.A. Johnson, an oyster sloop docked at Spring
Street on the Hudson River. He waited until the boat neared Staten Island,
then, taking an ax from the wall, killed everyone on board and dumped their
bodies. When the police searched the decks, they found 4 fingers and a thumb,
which the killer had overlooked in the dark.
The ensuing manhunt was a huge newspaper story, and Hicks was finally tracked
to a boardinghouse in Providence, R.I. He was captured, returned to Manhattan
and tried for piracy in federal court. By that time, the state of New York had
quit holding public executions, but the federal government had no such ban, and
many New Yorkers wanted to see Hicks hang. 3 weeks after his conviction, the
prisoner was taken to Bedloe’s Island to be executed.
Hicks, who had undergone a religious conversion after his conviction,
approached his execution with tremendous stoicism, but the day itself turned
out to be one of the wildest in New York City history. When he got to the
island, tens of thousands of spectators on boats anchored in the harbor watched
as he dropped to his knees on the beach, prayed for a minute, stood and spoke
his last words. “Hang me quick – make haste.”
The executioner, standing beside the scaffold, slipped a black hood over the
pirate’s head, secured a rope around his neck, then pulled the lever. At 11:15
a.m., the weights dropped and Hicks was yanked 20 feet into the air. His neck
snapped at the third vertebra. His body danced at the end of the rope for three
minutes, then was still. At 11:20, his body jerked once more – wildly – then
was still again. A few minutes later, the hands of the pirate and the neck
below the hood turned purple.
The events of July 13, 1860, may seem gruesome, but many recent executions in
the United States have also been unnerving, if less public. Take the 2018
lethal injection of Alabama prisoner Doyle Lee Hamm. Officials spent more than
2 hours searching for a suitable vein, leaving a dozen puncture wounds in
Hamm’s arms and groin before calling it quits. Or the 2014 execution of Ohio
prisoner Dennis McGuire, who struggled for 25 minutes after being injected.
According to a lawsuit filed by the family, McGuire suffered “repeated cycles
of snorting, gurgling and arching his back, appearing to writhe in pain.” Or
the 1997 electrocution of Florida prisoner Pedro Medina, when a tower of flame
shot out of his head and the chamber filled with smoke. In “Gruesome
Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty,” Amherst professor
Austin Sarat reports that, of 8,776 executions carried out in the United States
between 1890 and 2010, 276 (3.15%) were “botched.”
The way we treat the condemned may in time seem as barbaric as the way Albert
Hicks was treated in 1860. The fact that the same island, under a new name, has
for decades been the home of the Statue of Liberty, needs no additional
comment.
(source: Op-Ed; Rich Cohen is the author, most recently, of “The Last Pirate of
New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer and the Birth of a Gangster Nation."----Los
Angeles Times)
*******************
Trial for man accused in disappearance of Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang to
begin
A small garden has been put in place to remember Yingying Zhang, the 26 year
old Chinese scholar who went missing almost two years ago. The garden rests in
the location that surveillance video recorded Yingying getting into a black
Saturn Astra.
She has not been seen since.
Her family has now returned to Illinois ahead of the trial of her accused
kidnapper.
“The family is under a great deal of stress. They are in an uncomfortable
setting, an unknown setting for them. It’s their daughter. It’s their daughter
that they spoke to every day and they are no longer speaking to her every day,”
said Steve Beckett, who is an Illinois-based attorney representing Zhang’s
family.
Brendt Christensen, 29, is charged with kidnapping resulting in death. Federal
prosecutors have already signaled their intent to seek the death penalty should
he be convicted.
He has entered a plea of not guilty.
But authorities believe Christensen was behind the wheel of that Saturn, when
Yingying disappeared, and it is believed that he ultimately killed her, though
a body was never found.
The disappearance shook staff and students at the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign.
“I think for the whole University community, it was just horrifying. Many of
our Chinese students were very frightened. It was very unsettling for everyone,
but I think a lot of our students thought was she targeted because she was
Chinese and that made it especially scary for folks,” said Robin Kaler,
Associate Chancellor for Public Affairs at University of Illinois.
There are many questions that remain following the events of June 2017 and the
disappearance of Yingying.
Her friends and family hope that some of those answers can be found over the
course of the next few weeks and months.
Beckett says the family still has questions: “they want answers and they are
assuming, the answers they are getting, won’t be the answers that they want so
they want consequences.”
Her family still holds out hope she somehow escaped.
But federal investigators have made clear, it is their belief, that is not the
case.
(source: america.cgtn.com)
************************
Let's Stop Executing Our Veterans
This past Memorial Day weekend, as your timeline filled up with stock images of
flags and coffins alongside effusive posts thanking our servicemen, did you ask
yourself: are we as a nation really thankful?
If we are truly thankful, what does that gratitude look like?
There are a multitude of answers to that question that cannot all be summed up
here (employment, healthcare, no more unconstitutional wars). But I will tell
you what gratitude does not look like — the country executing hundreds of those
very same veterans.
It’s estimated that at least 10% of our death row population is made up of
veterans, and many others have already been executed.
There are a whole host of problems to unpack from that factoid. First, roughly
7% of the population has served in the military. Based on those figures alone,
veterans are over-represented on the country’s death rows. Secondly, it’s hard
to overlook the socioeconomic bias of this reality, a bias that permeates the
system of capital punishment but also carries an extra gut-punch when you
consider how many people from lower-income backgrounds pursue enlistment as a
means of escaping poverty.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is the underlying trauma that so
many veterans incur during the course of their service. Veterans suffering from
trauma face physical and emotional issues that often don’t get proper medical
treatment. We now know that, left untreated, those issues can result in
outbursts of rage and violence.
One study that examined the exposure to trauma experienced by veterans from the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan found that 88% witnessed a dead body, 83% saw
someone killed (often a fellow soldier), 40% were injured themselves, 31%
caused the death of an enemy, 21% handled human remains, 20% caused the death
of a civilian, and 12% were directly responsible for the death of a child.
It is absurd to think that we can expose people to these horrors and not live
with consequences. Seeing war and participating in death can change a person’s
brain function and chemistry. We know this, but we aren’t doing enough about
it.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the disorders that frequently
affects veterans. While it has garnered far more recognition by the general
public in recent decades, its impacts and severity have not. Caused by
traumatic stress, PTSD alters the stress response areas of the brain (amygdala,
hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex) and increases the cortisol and
norepinephrine responses to stress. This can lead to an over-triggering of the
nervous system, flashbacks, and irritable or aggressive behavior. Yet there are
still many who believe this is a condition that individuals should simply get
over or that they can fake. We’re far from viewing the disorder through its
proper lens of something that can lead to violence.
Traumatic brain injuries are a lesser known yet frequent problem for many
veterans. Damage to specific areas of the brain, including the frontal and
temporal lobes, amygdala, and hippocampus can leave survivors vulnerable to
agitation, volatile emotions, memory impairment, verbal attacks, physical
aggression, and impaired impulse control. These are serious injuries that alter
a person’s behavior and actions, and should be seen weighed properly as
mitigating evidence, but they frequently are not.
On Memorial Day, we should be ashamed that our country asks people to serve in
war zones on our behalf, where they are often severely harmed, and provides
them with little to no treatment for disorders that we know can lead to
violence. Then, the same government they were injured trying to protect
executes them for that violence.
None of this is to suggest that people, veterans included, are not responsible
for their actions. All people should be held accountable, and violent people
should be separated from society. But we must begin to recognize the different
culpability of people who have incurred severe trauma. There are scientific
differences in their brain functions that cannot be ignored.
So, instead of that Facebook post next Memorial Day weekend, take it a step
further and commit to finding ways that you can actually support our troops and
show our gratitude for their service. Advocate for better mental health
services for those who have given so much for us, and pay attention to how
they’re being treated in our criminal justice system. Those actions would be a
great start in supporting our troops and thanking our veterans.
(source: Hannah Cox is the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About
the Death Penalty. Hannah was previously Director of Outreach for the Beacon
Center of Tennessee, a free-market think tank. Prior to that, she was Director
of Development for the Tennessee Firearms Association and a policy advocate for
the National Alliance on Mental Illness----newsmax.com)
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