June 18
PENNSYLVANIA:
Will Pennsylvania abolish the death penalty?
It might surprise most Pennsylvanians that the state has one of the nation’s
largest death rows, with well over 100 condemned prisoners. The state’s death
penalty has fallen into such disrepair that no executions have been conducted
in 20 years. Now, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is considering whether the
system as a whole is unconstitutional.
The court case focuses in part on problems documented in a bipartisan
government study issued last year. I was a member of the advisory committee
that conducted the study and chaired a subcommittee on procedures in death
penalty cases.
The problems are manifold. For budget hawks, the death penalty is a gaping
money hole. Capital cases typically cost millions of dollars each, and yet
nearly half of the death sentences in Pennsylvania are later overturned because
of legal error.
From a civil rights point of view, the news is similarly abysmal. Most death
row prisoners are African American, and yet African Americans make up only 12%
of the state’s population. Poor and mentally ill Pennsylvanians are also highly
overrepresented on death row.
Another sign that something is really amiss here is that at least 6 death row
prisoners were ultimately found to be innocent. We would never let a plane off
the ground if it were as dangerously error-prone as this state’s death penalty.
Among the many reasons for this sorry situation, one stands out. Our
legislators have not stepped up to ensure a fair and effective process for
deciding these cases. Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that does
not fund a statewide capital defender program or contribute to the costs of
representing indigent capital defendants. Each county must fund the defense
individually, and most simply cannot afford the price tag. Without adequate
representation, Pennsylvania has sentenced numerous defendants to death only to
later find that they were severely mentally ill or innocent or intellectually
disabled and thus ineligible for a death sentence.
Providing an efficient, accurate, and fair death penalty system would require
immense resources and political will. But while much support is needed, little
has been found. The problems we identified are not new. They were flagged years
ago by the American Bar Association, the RAND Corporation, numerous scholars,
and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court itself. Our study recommended many of the
same reforms highlighted by these expert observers.
While the legislature has been happy to repeatedly expand the reach of the
death penalty, it has shown no appetite to repair the system and address its
critical flaws. Even when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court appealed to the
legislature for help sorting out a fair process to identify capital defendants
with intellectual disabilities, the legislature did nothing. As the chairman of
the House Judiciary Committee recently admitted, “There’s a lot that has been
talked about regarding criminal justice reform, but [the death penalty] is not
one of those front-burner issues.”
Now, however, the death penalty is on the front burner in the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court. Lacking the legislative power to fix the problems, the court may
have little choice but to dispense with the system as a whole. Our society has
rules and norms and at some point a court can no longer ignore a death penalty
system that does not conform to them.
(source: Opinion; Daniel Filler is professor of law and dean of the Drexel
University Kline School of Law----Philadelphia Inquirer)
GEORGIA:
Georgia Prepares to Carry Out the 1,500th Execution in the U.S. Since 1976
On the night of June 20, the United States will mark a grim milestone: the
1,500th execution since the return of the death penalty in 1976.
42-year-old Marion Wilson Jr. is scheduled to die by lethal injection on
Thursday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. A
clemency hearing will take place in Atlanta beforehand, but the execution will
almost certainly proceed. The Georgia Department of Corrections announced
Wilson’s last meal last week.
If there’s nothing inherently significant about the number 1,500, it is at
least a moment for reflection. The 1,000th execution in the U.S. took place
amid candlelight vigils in North Carolina in 2005. Cameron Todd Willingham had
been executed in Texas the previous year, for a crime many now recognize he did
not commit. Then-President George W. Bush — who himself oversaw 152 executions
in Texas — took the occasion to laud the death penalty, with no sense of irony,
as saving “innocent lives.” Yet there were also signs of the death penalty’s
decline. Earlier that year, the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed death sentences
for juvenile defendants, a historic ban already in place throughout most of the
world.
Today, the shifting landscape around the death penalty remains filled with such
contradictions. The White House is occupied by a man who fantasizes about
executing drug dealers, yet executions and new death sentences are on a steep
downward trend. 60 executions were carried out across the country in 2005. Last
year, there were 25. North Carolina has not carried out an execution since
2006, with a recent report calling its death penalty system a “relic of another
era.” In the meantime, nine states have ended the death penalty by legislation
or court order, while another 4 have put a moratorium in place.
Yet executions persist. In some states, they are surging. Last year, the
electric chair returned to Tennessee, a state that had seen no executions for
the better part of a decade, only to kill 4 men in just over 9 months. Now is
confronting doubts over the guilt of a man it killed years ago. Faced with a
crisis over lethal injection, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to
rein in the machinery of death, upholding execution methods that experts
describe as torture. The death penalty may be dying, but it will not go quickly
or quietly.
It is perhaps fitting that the 1,500th execution should take place in the state
that ushered in what we commonly call the “modern death penalty era.” It was a
Georgia case — Furman v. Georgia — that led the U.S. Supreme Court to stop
executions in 1972, on the basis that it was arbitrary and capriciously
applied. 4 years later, Gregg v. Georgia upheld a revised death penalty law
that would become a model for other states — a new chapter in capital
punishment. Executions resumed the next year.
But its promise of Gregg was never fulfilled. Instead, the 4-year gap between
Furman and Gregg created a false distinction between the death penalty then and
now; one that would severe executions from their roots in racial violence —
especially in the South — while giving cover to a system that remained largely
unchanged: racist, biased against the poor, and condemning the most vulnerable
rather than the “worst of the worst.”
Georgia has consistently exposed the ugliest truths about who we condemn to
die.
With some 50 people on death row — and having carried out 73 executions since
Gregg — Georgia is neither the largest nor the most active death penalty state
in the country. But it has consistently exposed the ugliest truths about who we
condemn to die. Almost 8 years ago, the state killed Troy Davis amid widespread
outcry. In 2015 alone, Georgia killed a Vietnam veteran with severe PTSD, a man
diagnosed with an IQ of 70, a woman who became a theologian and mentor to
scores of incarcerated women, and a man who credibly insisted until his last
breath that he was innocent. The next year, Georgia killed Kenneth Fults
despite a juror’s openly racist views. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme
Court refused to take a case involving another racist juror, who wondered “if
black people even have souls.”
Against this backdrop, the case of Marion Wilson is notable in one important
way. Unlike most who face execution in the U.S., he was sentenced to die for
killing a black person. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of
the 1,499 executions carried out to date, 1,170 involved white victims. In
Georgia, this dynamic was especially stark at the time Wilson was tried. By the
time he arrived on death row in 1997, 22 people had been executed in Georgia’s
death chamber. All but two victims in those cases were white.
“What we can clearly see here with Georgia is that black lives continue to not
matter, except maybe when they are blue,” says Abe Bonowitz, director of Death
Penalty Action, which is coordinating demonstrations against the 1,500th
execution. Had the victim in his case not been a law enforcement officer,
“would the prosecutors have sought the death penalty? The statistics say no.”
In other ways, Wilson’s case is all too typical. Like so many who end up on
death row, he was represented by lawyers who had no experience with capital
cases. One later went to prison himself. This was an era, as veteran death
penalty attorney Stephen Bright wrote in 1994, in which death sentences were
imposed “not for the worst crime, but for the worst lawyer.” It was not until
2005 that the state opened the office of the Georgia Capital Defender to
provide attorneys qualified to handle capital cases. Speaking to me about
another Georgia execution, in 2016, Bright called cases like these “zombie
cases,” convictions that reveal the unfairness of Georgia’s old death penalty
system.
This phenomenon goes well beyond Georgia. If the 1,500th execution can tell us
anything about capital punishment in the modern death penalty era, it’s how
stuck in the past it actually is.
There is no denying that the murder that sent Wilson to death row was senseless
and cruel.
It was the night of March 28, 1996. Donovan Corey Parks had left the home he
shared with his father and brother in Milledgeville, Georgia, to buy cat food.
The 24-year-old worked full-time as a prison guard, but that day, he’d done a
shift at the Winn-Dixie where he worked to make ends meet. As he exited the
local Walmart, Parks was approached by 19-year-old Wilson and 18-year-old
Robert Earl Butts Jr. Witnesses said Butts asked if Parks could give them a
lift. “And the victim, being the nice guy he was, said, “Sure, I’ll give you a
ride,” then-District Attorney Fred Bright told jurors in 1997. The pair had a
sawed-off shotgun. Soon after that, Parks was dead from a blast to the head.
By an awful twist of fate, Parks was discovered by his own father, Freddie
Parks, who was driving to see a friend when he saw a body lying face down on
the road in a pool of blood. He ran to the nearest house to call 911, waiting
for police to arrive. “But I didn’t have no idea that was my own son,” Parks
would later testify. It was only after he left that he realized that the suit
the dead man was wearing looked like the one his son had worn to church that
night.
“The state cannot prove who pulled the trigger in this case. I’ll tell you that
point-blank.”
The murder enraged residents of Baldwin County, a community closely identified
with the Georgia Department of Corrections. The elder Parks, who worked with
the GDC himself, had just lost his wife the year before. It was his son Donovan
who often took care of things around the house, including the cat his wife had
left behind. As Wilson’s trial got underway in the fall of 1997, a large
portion of the prospective jury pool were employed by — or related to employees
of — nearby prisons or jails.
Wilson insisted from the start that he had not set out to kill anyone that day.
In a taped interrogation, he repeatedly told police that Butts had shot Parks.
There was reason to believe that Wilson was the least culpable of the two;
prosecutors initially offered Wilson a plea deal, but he refused, insisting
that he should not be held responsible for someone else’s actions. At trial,
Bright conceded that he did not have evidence that Wilson was the gunman. “The
state cannot prove who pulled the trigger in this case. I’ll tell you that
point-blank,” he said, adding, “It could have been either one.” Nevertheless,
the jury convicted Wilson and sent him to die.
But at Butts’ trial the next year, Bright changed the story. He cast Butts as
the triggerman, based on the statements of jailhouse informants who claimed
that Butts had admitted his guilt. Such testimony is highly unreliable, a
common factor in wrongful convictions, but it was more than he had against
Wilson — and good enough for a death sentence. In 1998, Butts, too, was
sentenced to die.
Wilson had been on death row for 10 years when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
published a front-page special report in its Sunday edition. “Death Still
Arbitrary” was the 2007 headline, part of a series investigating the state’s
death penalty system. It found that of the 132 “most heinous” murders in the
state over a recent 10-year span, only 29 had ended in death sentences. There
was nothing clear to set these apart from the remaining 103. Decades after
Furman, the report concluded, paraphrasing one of the iconic quotes from the
decision, “getting the death penalty in Georgia is as predictable as a
lightning strike.”
The findings of the AJC investigation would be familiar to anyone who studies
the death penalty today. As in other states, death sentences came down to the
county in which the crime was committed and the DA in charge at the time.
Prosecutors did not exactly dispute this point; the newspaper quoted one DA who
simply said about a death penalty case, “You know it when you see it.”
To illustrate the arbitrariness of Georgia’s death penalty statute in practice,
the AJC chose the convictions of Wilson and Butts. Their crime had striking
similarities to a 1995 murder in a nearby county — one in which two young men
killed a college student from Gambia. In both cases, the co-defendants had
asked for a ride, then shot the victim and burned the car. In both cases, who
exactly fire the fatal shot remained unclear. Yet Wilson and Butts were
sentenced to die, whereas the other men received life without parole.
In theory, there was supposed to be a safeguard against such disparate
outcomes: a process called comparative proportionality review. When Georgia
revised its death penalty statute following Furman, it included the requirement
that the Georgia Supreme Court regularly assess capital cases to ensure that
sentences were not “excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in
similar cases, considering both the crime and the defendant.” But, according to
a sweeping study by the American Bar Association, this stopped happening in
1994 — before Wilson was even tried. Rather than consider all murder cases that
could have resulted in a death sentence, the court merely began finding
examples of similar crimes that sent other defendants to death row. The review
became a toothless exercise, “incapable of uncovering potentially serious
disparities — whether those disparities are geographical, racial or ethnic, or
attributable to any other inappropriate factor,” the ABA found.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari to a black man who challenged
his death sentence based in part on Georgia’s failure to conduct
proportionality review. Justice John Paul Stevens expressed alarm about the
case, noting that the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Gregg was based “on
an understanding that the new procedures the statute prescribed would protect
against the imposition of death sentences influenced by impermissible factors
such as race.” But in this case, the state Supreme Court had barely glanced at
similarly situated defendants before rubber-stamping the death sentence. In
fact, Stevens wrote, “It now appears to be the court’s practice never to
consider cases in which the jury sentenced the defendant to life imprisonment.”
Such a “truncated review,” he wrote, is likely to lead to “the arbitrary or
discriminatory imposition of death sentences in contravention of the Eighth
Amendment.”
The situation is not unique to Georgia. In Tennessee, whose death penalty law
also requires proportionality review, the state Supreme Court has “eviscerated”
the process, according to a major death penalty study published last year. The
state’s own post-Furman statute was modeled on Georgia’s, to ensure that death
penalty cases were “distinguishable in a meaningful way from non-capital 1st
degree murder cases.” Instead, the authors found, the state’s death penalty is
“a cruel lottery, entrenching the very problems that the court sought to
eradicate.”
A Background of Trauma and Abuse
On June 12, Wilson’s lawyers submitted a clemency petition to the Georgia Board
of Pardons and Paroles. It shed light on his childhood, one that resembles the
background of so many who end up on death row. “Marion Wilson’s life from
conception to incarceration was characterized by instability, neglect, abuse
and trauma,” they write. As with many cases, this history was only uncovered
after Wilson was sent to death row.
Evidence of Wilson’s early suffering was previously described in his state
habeas filings. Raised by a single mother who was herself a victim of abuse,
their home lacked heat, water, and food. At one point, Wilson’s mother took him
to live with her father in Oklahoma, but the grandfather, who was white,
rejected him because he was black. Like other male figures who came in and out
of Wilson’s life, the man beat him constantly.
At an evidentiary hearing years ago, a slew of witnesses described Wilson as a
vulnerable child abandoned first by his parents and then by the state. “I
remember telling one of the other teachers that Marion didn’t stand a chance
growing up in such circumstances,” one of his former elementary school teachers
testified. An attorney who represented Wilson in juvenile court remembered him
as “someone who needed and actually wanted someone to look up to” but had
“essentially no parents and no home.” An expert on the state’s juvenile justice
system testified that Wilson’s case contained “every risk factor I can think
of.”
At an evidentiary hearing, a slew of witnesses described Wilson as a vulnerable
child abandoned first by his parents and then by the state.
Yet numerous witnesses also descried how Wilson showed potential, especially
when placed in a structured environment. He thrived for a time under the
supervision of the Georgia Youth Development Center, gaining early release. The
law required that he be subsequently supervised by the Department of Juvenile
Justice, but his case fell through the cracks.
In a failing that was emblematic of the era, Wilson’s trial attorneys did not
investigate this evidence, presenting a limited picture during the penalty
phase. Although they elicited testimony of a time that a young Wilson saw his
mother’s common-law husband put a gun to her head, they left largely
unchallenged the prosecution’s contention that Wilson had “more than every
chance in life.” The clemency petition quotes one juror who has said she would
likely not have voted for the death penalty if she had known more about his
background.
Fred Bright, the district attorney, testified years later that he personally
believed Butts probably shot Parks. But he defended his actions at Wilson’s
trial. He did not live to see Georgia carry out either of the death sentences,
however. Bright died in May of last year, just 1 week before Butts was killed
by lethal injection. But Freddie Parks was there as a witness. Now in his 70s,
he plans to attend Wilson’s execution as well.
“It’s not easy,” Parks told me on the phone last week. “It’s not easy to wait
23 years.” It was by the grace of God that he lived this long, he said. But he
does not expect Wilson’s death to bring him any closure over his son’s murder.
After leaving the prison last time, Parks said, “I felt just like I’m feeling
now. Just aggravated, really. Like it never should have happened.”
(source: theintercept.com)
OHIO:
Supreme Court refuses Lorraine case
The country’s highest court refused to review the case of a Trumbull County man
on Ohio’s death row.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday released a list of orders Monday denying
numerous pleas for the justices to examine their cases to ensure there were no
irregularities in lower court proceedings. Among them, the court denied the
writ requested by attorneys for Charles L. Lorraine, 52, requested in April.
Lorraine is scheduled to die March 15, 2023, for the 1986 slayings of
77-year-old Raymond Montgomery and his bedridden wife, Doris, 80, inside their
Warren home on Haymaker Avenue NW.
He was convicted of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary, robbery and
complicity to burglary, and is being held in Chillicothe Correctional
Institution, according to state records.
Defense attorneys argued that the way Ohio hands down death sentences is
unconstitutional.
Lorraine’s attorneys wanted the Supreme Court to review an 11th District Court
of Appeals ruling upholding a Trumbull County Common Pleas Court ruling that
went against Lorraine’s claims for relief from the death penalty, a decision
supported by the Ohio Supreme Court.
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins and Charles Morrow, Trumbull County
assistant prosecutor, responded in opposition to Lorraine’s writ.
The Supreme Court denied a similar writ in November, according to the
prosecutors.
In 2010, a Trumbull County Common Pleas Court judge denied a claim from
Lorraine that he was too intellectually disabled to be executed, and admitted
he used the appeal process as a ploy to put off his death by 7 years, according
to the prosecutor’s response in opposition.
After he exhausted state and federal appeals, Lorraine’s execution date was set
for Jan. 18, 2012. However, on Jan. 11, 2012, a temporary stay was placed on
the executions of 3 death row inmates, including Lorraine’s, as a result of a
challenge of Ohio’s death row protocol. On March 9, a U.S. District Court
dissolved the stay of execution for the 3 inmates.
Lorraine is one of 138 people on Ohio’s death row, according to the Ohio
Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
(source: tribtoday.com)
ARKANSAS:
Chambers family seeks death penalty in son's murder case
A man who says his son was targeted for murder wants the suspect arrested for
the crime to face the death penalty.
Police arrested Leonard Piggee for the killing of Jeremy Chambers last week.
Piggee is facing a 1st-degree murder charge.
Robert Chambers says Piggee threatened to kill his son months ago and made good
on that threat.
He wants justice carried out to the fullest extent.
"We believe the charge should be upgraded to capital murder, making Leonard
piggee eligible for the death penalty. it is my opinion Leonard Piggee needs to
die by lethal injection."
Overall, Chambers asks where is the community outcry following his son's murder
along with the murder of 3 women last week.
He plans to meet with the prosecuting attorney to discuss upgrading the charges
in his son's death.
(source: KARK news)
ARIZONA:
Supreme Court upholds death sentence in Pinal County murder case
The U.S. Supreme Court has rebuffed the efforts of a man who married and then
killed a Pinal County woman for her life insurance to escape the death penalty.
In a brief order, the justices rejected arguments by attorneys for Michael
Apelt that his counsel at his trial had been deficient and that required a new
sentencing.
The high court did not disturb the conclusion of the 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals that the attorney may have botched the job of representing Apelt at
sentencing and finding evidence to urge a trial judge to spare his life. But
they also left intact the appellate ruling that said even if the attorney had
done a better job it would not have made any difference — and Apelt still would
have been sentenced to death.
“Nothing in the record indicates that any explanation for why Apelt became a
monster would have changed the sentence,” they wrote.
It was that ruling that the Supreme Court left intact on Monday without
comment.
Court records show Apelt and his older brother Rudi came to the United States
from Germany in 1988.
Over the next few months the brothers met and “conned” a series of women,
telling tales of wealth and intrigue. The goal was both to get money and,
ultimately, to find a woman to marry Michael Apelt.
That culminated with the October marriage to 30-year-old Cindy Monkman.
Less than a month later they began shopping for $1 million in life insurance
policies, ultimately resulting in the purchase of $400,000 worth of coverage
after they could not get more.
Then, in December, the brothers hatched a plan to kill Monkman.
Her body was found in the desert near Apache Junction 2 days after the
insurance policies were obtained. She had been stabbed multiple times and
nearly beheaded.
The brothers flew to Los Angeles, paying a homeless man to recite a message
onto Monkman’s answering machine suggesting he had killed her and was coming
after Rudi and Michael next.
Both eventually were found guilty and sentenced to death, though Rudi was
declared mentally disabled, making him ineligible for the death penalty.
In reviewing the sentence, a federal judge found various flaws in the defense
mounted by Michael Apelt’s original attorney, including failing to find ways of
investigating his mental health and background.
That conclusion was affirmed by the 9th Circuit where the appellate judges said
that the trial judge was presented a very different picture of Michael Apelt’s
background than what might have been seen had the lawyer produced other
evidence. But that, the appellate judges concluded, was not enough, saying
there was no showing that he would have escaped the death penalty even if other
evidence had been presented.
One big issue, the appellate judges said, was that the murder was “premeditated
and calculated.”
“The record shows that from the time Apelt entered the United States around
Labor Day 1988, he lied to and manipulated others, and borrowed and stole money
from women,” the judge said.
They noted he had proposed to 3 different women in less than a month and got
Monkman to secretly marry him in Las Vegas by leading her to believe he was
wealthy. And there was the decision to seek life insurance on her a little over
a week after the marriage.
“As borne out by subsequent events, Apelt’s unwavering intent was to murder the
woman he had convinced to marry him in order to collect on the insurance
policy,” the court concluded.
(source: tucson.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Poll finds Californians support the death penalty — and Newsom’s moratorium on
executions
Californians narrowly support Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on death row
executions but they oppose abolishing the death penalty outright, a new poll
shows.
The findings offer some political affirmation for the Democratic governor who,
after calling the death penalty immoral and unjust, stirred up controversy in
March by issuing temporary reprieves to more than 700 inmates on California’s
death row.
Conducted for the Los Angeles Times by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental
Studies, the poll found that 52% of California voters backed Newsom’s decision
to grant a blanket reprieve to all condemned inmates on death row, compared
with 48% who opposed the governor’s action. The partisan divide was
substantial, with 72% of Democrats supporting the moratorium and 85% of
Republicans against it.
But the survey also shows that a majority of Californians support capital
punishment. Just over 61% of California voters said they supported keeping the
death penalty as a “possible punishment for serious crimes,” compared with 39%
who said it should be abolished, the poll found.
That might not portend well for a proposed 2020 statewide ballot measure that
would end executions and replace death sentences with life imprisonment without
the possibility of parole. Just over 46% of California voters support the
proposed constitutional amendment but a majority, 53%, oppose it, the poll
found.
Shilpi Agarwal, a staff attorney with an expertise in criminal justice at the
American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said the support for
both the death penalty and the moratorium may be because of a difference in how
people feel about capital punishment in theory versus how they see it being
carried out.
“A majority of people recognize that it is a broken system in practice and for
that reason a moratorium is appropriate,” she said.
When announcing the moratorium on executions, Newsom argued that the death
penalty discriminates against defendants who are poor, mentally ill, African
American or Latino. He also noted that death row inmates in California and
other states have been exonerated.
Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies pollster Mark DiCamillo said the
survey results could indicate that those arguments may have been convincing
enough for Californians to back Newsom’s moratorium.
A majority of voters surveyed, however, did not support permanently abolishing
the death penalty, probably because of awareness of slaying suspects such as
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., charged with killing at least 13 people and accused
of raping more than 50 women in the Golden State Killer case, DiCamillo said.
“There’s a certain class of crime that is so heinous that the public just wants
to reserve the right for death,” DiCamillo said.
Preserving the death penalty was favored by a majority of men and women and
across age groups, incomes and regions of California. A majority of registered
Democrats, African American voters and Californians with post-graduate degrees
opposed the death penalty, the survey found. Kent Scheidegger, legal director
of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said support for
capital punishment has been consistent in recent years.
That point was most recently proved in 2016, when California voters rejected a
ballot measure to abolish capital punishment and approved another to expedite
the appeals process. Leading up to that election, campaign ads by pro-death
penalty groups highlighted murders committed by death row inmates.
“It’s one thing to talk about this issue in the abstract and it’s quite another
when you know the actual facts of what people really did,” Scheidegger said.
“That affects people’s decision, and it should because that’s really what it’s
all about.”
Still, support for the death penalty has steadily declined in California. 30
years ago, 82% of California voters supported capital punishment and just 14%
wanted it abolished, according to a Field Poll. DiCamillo worked for the Field
Poll before moving to the Berkeley institute and said that, while the polls
used differently methodologies, the wording of the death penalty questions on
the two polls was identical.
The new poll found California voters were more amenable to a proposed ballot
measure to abolish the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without
the possibility of parole. The constitutional amendment was proposed by
Assemblyman Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) in March and will appear on the 2020
ballot if approved by a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the California
Legislature.
Though a slim majority of those polled said they opposed the measure, Levine is
confident that Californians will vote to abolish the death penalty because he
expects Newsom and Democratic leaders in the Legislature to make a case in
favor of ending capital punishment that is strong enough to overcome the
messaging of death penalty supporters.
“We need moral leadership to make the case to voters who have otherwise been
led to believe that the death penalty makes us safer when we know it doesn’t,”
Levine said. “If we lock murderers up and throw away the key, we still protect
victims and their families of those crimes and never risk executing someone who
is innocent.”
DiCamillo said the poll results indicate that some death penalty supporters
would back the proposed ballot measure, likely in part because of its assurance
that current death row inmates would not leave prison if executions were
abolished. Still, arguments against execution were not persuasive enough to win
majority support in the poll.
“People in some ways think that that’s the preferable way to go,” DiCamillo
said of life in prison without the possibility of parole. “But there’s a
segment of the public that believes there will be some way, somehow down they
road they will be able to get out.”
The poll, which also asked voters about the 2020 presidential race and other
issues, surveyed 4,435 registered voters statewide and was conducted online
June 4 to 10. The results have an estimated sampling error of roughly 3 %
points in either direction.
California has executed 13 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the
death penalty in 1976. During that same time, 80 death row inmates have died of
natural causes and 26 have died by suicide, according to the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Using his executive powers under the California Constitution, Newsom in March
imposed a blanket reprieve of all death row inmates in California and vowed
that no executions would take place while he served as governor. He also
ordered the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison to be shuttered and
suspended the state’s efforts to devise a method of lethal injection that would
pass constitutional muster.
Reprieves are in essence temporary stays of execution and can be lifted when
Newsom leaves the governor’s office.
The moratorium was one of the first major actions Newsom made after being sworn
in as California’s 40th governor in January. Newsom’s first proposed budget,
which was approved by the California Legislature last week, expands Medi-Cal
coverage for immigrants in the country illegally and paid family leave.
Close to 57% of California voters approve of the job Newsom has been doing as
governor, with 42% saying they disapprove, according to the poll.
(source: Los Angeles Times)
****************
Hearing held for man accused of killing San Diego police Officer Jonathan De
Guzman
A San Diego police officer who survived a shooting that took the life of his
partner testified today that the assailant shot him in the throat without
provocation before turning the gun on his colleague, prompting him to return
fire.
Officer Wade Irwin took the stand as preliminary hearing testimony got underway
to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant a trial for Jesse
Michael Gomez, who is charged with murder and attempted murder, with a special
circumstance allegation of murder of a police officer.
The 58-year-old defendant, who is being held without bail, could face the death
penalty if convicted. Gomez is accused of shooting Irwin and fellow gang-unit
Officer Jonathan "J.D.'' DeGuzman about 11 p.m. on July 28, 2016, when they
tried to detain him in the 3700 block of Acacia Grove Way.
DeGuzman, a 16-year SDPD veteran, was pronounced dead after being rushed to a
hospital. Gomez was taken into custody in a ravine off South 38th Street, a
short distance from the scene, and was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his
upper body.
Irwin testified that as he and DeGuzman were patrolling the area, they saw 2
men split up and start walking along the north and south sidewalks of Acacia
Grove Way. Irwin said he believed the man on the south side -- who he later
learned was Gomez -- was someone else he had previously arrested. DeGuzman
stopped the car and Irwin got out of the passenger side, leaving the door open,
he said.
Irwin then asked Gomez, "Hey, do you live in the area?'' and Gomez "almost
immediately'' shot him, the witness testified. The officer said Gomez then
approached the open passenger door of the patrol car and fired into the
vehicle, where DeGuzman was sitting.
After being shot, Irwin said he fell into the side of the patrol car and was
sitting up near the rear tire. He said he had "a lot of blood'' in his throat
and it was hard to breathe.
"I believed (Gomez) was going to execute me if he saw I was still alive,''
Irwin testified. He said that after Gomez shot his partner, he drew his gun and
fired 3 to 4 times on the shooter, who was running eastbound.
Irwin testified that he was taken to UC San Diego Medical Center for treatment
of a collapsed lung, paralysis to his right diaphragm and vocal cords, facial
numbness and nerve damage.
Irwin said he remained in the hospital for 23 days and still suffers from the
lingering effects of the injuries.
While in the hospital, he was shown photographic lineups that included Gomez
and the man he originally believed Gomez to be. He testified that he identified
Gomez as the shooter and that the other man was not at the scene or involved in
the shooting.
(source: ABC News)
USA:
Abolishing the death penalty requires morality
In “How to Convince Americans to Abolish the Death Penalty,” Amherst College
Professor Austin Sarat asserts “important lessons about how abolitionists can
be successful around the country” can be learned from New Hampshire – which
just last month became the twenty-first state to abolish capital punishment –
including: “The moral argument doesn’t work.”
Acknowledging New Hampshire is hardly the front-line in the fight to abolish
the death penalty – because as the Washington Post editorial board observed
“[t]he last time the Granite State executed someone, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt was midway through his second term” – Sarat nonetheless urges
abolitionists to follow New Hampshire’s lead “by shifting the grounds of the
debate so as not to be painted as soft on crime or out of touch with mainstream
American values.”
This feat can be accomplished, Sarat says, by eschewing the argument “even the
most heinous criminals are entitled to be treated with dignity or that there is
nothing that anyone can do to forfeit their right to have rights.” Sarat argues
this is a “pitfall” because it “puts opponents of the death penalty on the side
of society’s most despised,” and “rejects the simple and appealing rationale
for capital punishment: retribution.”
While Sarat is correct, high approbation is due New Hampshire abolitionists –
for how they effectively “enlisted conservative allies” and aligned “themselves
with the plight of the families of murder victims” (by arguing “the death
penalty does not make citizens safer and that it is archaic, costly,
discriminatory and violent”) – his call for abolitionists to abandon appeals to
morality and human dignity in crusading to end capital punishment, is, with all
due respect, unwise, and even worse, immoral.
Because as I’ve urged in essays like “The prospective gassing of human beings
in Alabama is an abomination,” “Battling the Death Penalty with James Baldwin,”
“Life without parole for Hitler,” “Gov. Kasich: ‘Amazing Grace’ Starts With
You” and, more recently, in “My Unforgettable College Stabbings:” “If we want
to live in a better and safer world together” our response to violence as a
caring, conscious society cannot be “random, reactive, or retributive, as it
often tends to be.”
Sarat’s regretful and regressive capitulation to the fallacious dogma of
retribution is, therefore, in my opinion, as disturbing as it is disappointing.
In his book “The Ethics of Punishment,” Sir Walter Moberly sagely observed
about retribution that “[t]he executioner pays the murderer the compliment of
imitation,” and, more keenly: “Much demand for retribution certainly has a
shady origin. It springs from the crude animal impulse of the individual or
group to retaliate, when hurt, by hurting the hurter. In itself such resentment
is neither wise nor good and, in its extreme forms, it is generally condemned
as vindictive.”
To advance that it is a “pitfall” to argue “heinous criminals are entitled to
be treated with dignity” is to dangerously disregard now-retired Justice
Anthony Kennedy’s 2011 opinion in Brown v. Plata, confirming “prisoners retain
the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity
animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual
punishment.” It further ignores Kennedy’s doubling-down on this critical
principle, in his 2014 majority opinion in Hall v. Florida, when he wrote: “The
Eighth Amendment’s protection of dignity reflects the Nation we have been, the
Nation we are, and the Nation we aspire to be.”
The constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment bears no
asterisk for crimes committed by “society’s most despised.” Abolitionists
should continue to proudly and affirmatively demand the Eighth Amendment’s
guarantee of dignity for everyone, while continuing to make reasoned
morality-and-dignity-based arguments to end the death penalty – when it makes
sense to – notwithstanding whether or not this strategy was employed during the
recent abolitionist success in New Hampshire.
Demanding dignity for society’s most despised is the lifeblood of our weakened,
chronically underperforming Eighth Amendment. And it is still at the heart of
what it means to be an abolitionist.
(source: Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an
assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has
contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and
overseas----alreporter.com)
*********************
Testimony Resumes After Jurors Hear Brendt Christensen Admit To Killing
Yingying Zhang
The federal death penalty trial of a former University of Illinois student
accused of killing a visiting Chinese scholar continues on Monday.
Brendt Christensen’s defense attorneys are expected to continue their
cross-examination of an FBI agent, following explosive recordings of
Christensen bragging about killing Yingying Zhang.
To this day, no one knows what happened to Zhang’s body, which is exactly what
Christensen boasted about in conversations secretly recorded by his girlfriend,
who became a paid informant for the FBI a week after Zhang was kidnaped on June
9, 2017.
“I won’t tell you where she is. I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “They will never
find her.”
On Friday, an FBI agent testified Christensen’s girlfriend became a key part of
the case when she agreed to make the recordings. From June 16 to June 29, 2017,
she recorded nine conversations with Christensen.
Investigators said the final recording was made the day of a walk and concert
in support of Zhang, an event Christensen attended with his girlfriend. The
recording revealed he talked about the crime on the walk home.
“I cut her clothes off and just started doing stuff to her,” he said.
Earlier in the conversation, he said “She was resilient. I tried to choke her
to death but she didn’t.”
“I choked her for what must have been 10 minutes. Then I released her. Her
breath. I couldn’t believe she was still alive,” he added.
Christensen said he hit Zhang in the head with a bat and stabbed her, and she
was still alive, so he decapitated her.
He told his girlfriend he had been wanting to talk to someone about the murder,
and he wanted to kill more people.
“I still want to do it,” he said. “It’s my legacy.”
Monday will be the 4th day of testimony in the trial. Prosecutors have said
they could wrap up their case this week.
Defense attorneys have conceded Christensen killed Zhang, but have disputed
some details about how and why he did it, and are seeking to spare him the
death penalty.
(source CBS news)
**************************************
A comment on a cardinal’s tweet re capital punishment
Earlier today Cdl. Dolan of New York tweeted: “With the clear and cogent
clarification of the successor of St. Peter, there now exists no loophole to
morally justify capital punishment.”
The supposedly clear and cogent clarification that Dolan has in mind must be
Pope Francis’ 2018 modification of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to
assert that the death penalty is “inadmissible”. But, while it is likely that
Francis meant what Dolan said, the pope did not quite claim what the cardinal
clearly did. Francis (or his handlers) left just enough wiggle room (by using
“inadmissible”, an ambiguous term in magisterial-moral discourse) to avoid
flatly declaring the DP “immoral” and setting off thereby a magisterial
firestorm such as has not been seen for some centuries.
Dolan, in contrast, tweeting in terms well-known to tradition, plainly stated
that the DP is immoral, thus going beyond what Francis was willing to say.
That’s a problem. Indeed, it’s 2 problems.
Numerous serious studies argue (convincingly, in my view) that the liceity of
the DP in certain cases is taught by the Church’s infallible magisterium
(specifically, as “secondary object” thereof); at the very least, such studies
make a prima facie case for the liceity of the death penalty under the
infallible magisterium. Therefore, Church leaders contradicting that position
must, simply must, deal with the possibility that infallibility is in play
here, and, at a minimum, they should refrain from unnuanced declarations that
might, in the end, be shown as “opposed to the doctrine of the Catholic Church”
per Canon 750 § 2. See also Canon 1371 n. 1.
But the stakes might be higher still.
2. Many of the sources invoked for the liceity of the DP as a secondary object
of infallibility (Scripture, Patristics, etc.) are those commonly associated
with infallible assertions of primary objects of infallibility, that is, with
matters of revelation. Now, while contradicting infallible assertions regarding
secondary objects is, as stated above, to make one opposed to the doctrine of
the Church, contradicting primary objects of the Church’s infallible
magisterium is a specific element of heresy per Canons 750 § 1 and 751. See
also Canon 1364. Obviously, this characterization risks even greater harm to
the Church.
Am I saying that Dolan has committed heresy in his tweet or that he has
expressed opposition to the teaching of the Church? No, but I am saying that
declaring the DP as immoral per se puts one at risk of asserting something that
many qualified scholars argue powerfully is opposed to infallible Church
teaching, and possibly even to contradicting something divinely revealed. The
real possibility of so offending the truth should, I think, trigger more
respectful caution by those in positions of authority when speaking on these
matters.
Think of it this way: A hunter shooting toward something moving in the
underbrush can’t defend his accidental killing of a human being by saying “I
did not know it was a man, I thought it was a deer.” The hunter has a duty to
verify the status of his target before he shoots. Likewise, popes and bishops
taking shots at the long-recognized moral liceity of the DP have a duty to
verify the magisterial status of that teaching lest they accidentally hit
something they had no business aiming at in the first place.
(source: Edward Peters, JD, JDC, In the Light of the Law Blog,
catholiccitizens.org)
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