[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
URGENT ACTION APPEAL - From Amnesty International USA Note: Please write on behalf of these persons even though you may not have received the original UA when issued on July 5, 2007. Thanks! 08 February 2008 Further Information on UA 175/07 (05 July 2007) -- Death sentence SAUDI ARABIA Rizana Nafeek (f), aged 19, Sri Lankan national A court in Saudi Arabia is reported to be considering Sri Lankan domestic worker Rizana Nafeek's appeal against her death sentence. If the sentence is upheld, she could be at imminent risk of execution. This concern is heightened as the rate of executions has increased in 2008, with at least 25 people, including three women, executed since 8 January. At least 158 people, including three women, were executed in 2007. Rizana Nafeek was sentenced to death on 16 June 2007 for a murder committed while she was 17 years old. Saudi Arabia is a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which prohibits the execution of offenders for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old. Rizana Nafeek was arrested in May 2005 on charges of murdering an infant in her care. She had no access to lawyers either during interrogation or at her trial, and it is believed that she confessed to the murder during police questioning, only to later retract her confession. She apparently told the authorities that she was born in February 1988, but they seem to have ignored this on the basis that her passport indicated that she was born in February 1982. According to information available to Amnesty International she was not allowed to present her birth certificate or other evidence of her age. BACKGROUND INFORMATION Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty for a wide range of offenses. Court proceedings fall far short of international standards for fair trial, and take place behind closed doors. Defendants normally do not have formal representation by a lawyer, and in many cases are not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them. They may be convicted solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress, torture or deception. Saudi Arabia assured the Committee on the Rights of the Child (which monitors states' implementation of the CRC) in January 2006 that no children had been executed in the country since the CRC came into force in Saudi Arabia in 1997. This is a weaker commitment than is required by the CRC, which demands that capital punishment not be imposed for offences committed by persons below 18 years of age, no matter how old they are when the sentence is actually carried out. RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible: - noting reports that Rizana Nafeek's appeal against her death sentence is currently under consideration; - expressing concern that Rizana Nafeek's birth certificate gives her date of birth as February 1988, meaning that she was 17 at the time of her alleged crime; - pointing out that the execution of juvenile offenders is prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Saudi Arabia ratified in 1996; - calling on the authorities to commute her death sentence immediately. APPEALS TO: His Majesty King Abdullah Bin 'Abdul 'Aziz Al-Saud The Custodian of the two Holy Mosques Office of His Majesty the King Royal Court, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Fax: (via Ministry of the Interior) 011 966 1 403 1185 Salutation: Your Majesty His Royal Highness Prince Naif bin 'Abdul 'Aziz Al-Saud Minister of the Interior Ministry of the Interior P.O. Box 2933 Airport Road, Riyadh 11134 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Fax: 011 966 1 403 1185 Salutation: Your Royal Highness His Royal Highness Prince Saud al-Faisal bin 'Abdul 'Aziz Al-Saud Minister of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nasseriya Street Riyadh 11124 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Fax: 011 966 1 403 0645 Salutation: Your Royal Highness COPIES TO: Mr Turki bin Khaled Al-Sudairy President Human Rights Commission PO Box 58889, Riyadh 11515 King Fahad Road, Building No.373 Riyadh Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Fax: 011 966 1 4612061 Ambassador Adel A. Al-Jubeir Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia 601 New Hampshire Ave. NW Washington DC 20037 Fax: 1 202 944 3113 Email:
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, ILL., NEB., TENN.
Feb. 8
TEXAS:
Aggie and her Killer
Texas, with 1/13 of the country's people, has killed 37 % of the convicted
murderers executed in the United States since 1976. As Adam Liptak's
December 26 report in The New York Times made clear, this is not because
Texans on juries bring in more death sentences than their fellow
Americansthey do notbut because the state's district attorneys, judges,
and other politicians are more aggressive in favor of killing convicted
killers. The recent use of DNA testing has cleared people we were getting
ready to kill, giving anyone with a conscience pause as we realize that
the states have probably been killing, quite irreversibly, some innocent
people. The likelihood that lethal injection as practiced sometimes causes
the dying prisoner agony and suppresses visible signs of it has resulted
in a de facto national moratorium on capital punishment until the
Supreme Court rules on that issue next June. In polls, Texans support the
states killing convicted killers, but when the option of life imprisonment
with no chance of parole is included in the questioning, opinion hitches
back clearly against state killing. In 2005, Texas legalized the
mandatory-life-sentence option. Yet last year Texas killed 62 %, almost
2/3, of the entire countrys executed prisoners, 26 of 42. As Observer
readers well know, there is something wrong here.{? Texas Solicitor
General R. Ted Cruz, who leads the state's legal brigades in executing
convicted killers in Texas, told Jonathan Gurwitz, an editorial board
member at the San Antonio Express-News, for a Jan. 19 Wall Street Journal
op-ed, that frequently, when those ... who are opposed to the death
penalty are presenting their arguments, one of the aspects that is
strikingly missing is any consideration of the nature and barbarity of the
crimes these people commit and any genuine consideration of the impact
these crimes have on the victims families.
My fathers parents died when he was very young, and he and his brothers
and sisters were distributed among relatives and close friends. He was
adopted and raised by Florence and Herman Zeuhl of the farming town of
Zeuhl near Seguin, south of San Antonio. That makes me family, but not
blood kin, with their daughter, Aggie Zeuhl Herden, one of the toughest,
lovingest, and most whimsical of women, and her husband Herman, who drove
my dad to work early every morning in San Antonio. When I was 6 or 7,
visiting out at my Aunt Florence's farm, the Herdens' 2 little girls,
Aggie Beth and Mary Jane, conspired one delirious and terrifying midday to
give me my first kiss, and prevailed. Spending some summers out there, I
learned what I know about farming life. Early mornings I collected the
chickens' eggs from their nests. I watched the milking. Aunt Florence told
me I could grind all the popping corn I wanted for the school year. Later,
my mother and Aggie used to visit a bar or two together, simulating the
freedoms of men, but not women, in those days. They would walk down to the
newspaper where Aggies husband worked and visit him, then duck in for a
few beers, and walk home. Sometimes, when my mother was fed up with my
father, she and Aggie would tie one on. For my mother, born in Glasgow,
and with no relative of her own anywhere near, Aggie was her nearest kin,
her pal there in little whiles of freedom from housework and selling
women's clothes for wages downtown. The thing about Aggie was her smile,
kind of crooked-like, a worldly smile that turned on for a lot of things
that werent supposed to be funny. She knew the world. And she loved. When
her Herman died, I showed up at her house in San Antonio at 801 Aransas
Avenue with a bottle of Jack Daniel's for her, and we hugged and hugged
and hugged. She was a devout Catholic like my father, and in her late 70s
she was living alone and taking care of the cooking and housekeeping for a
group of priests at the St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church. Her sons,
worried about her alone in her South San neighborhood, got her a black
pistol. She bought an alarm system for the house, but the company only
wired one of the many windows. She had a hearing aid, but when she went to
sleep she turned it off.
At 3 or 4 oclock the early morning of July 4, 1990, when Aggie was 79, a
troubled young man who had been drinking, 23-year-old Steve Rodriguez,
pried the screen from an open back window and climbed in. He threw a TV
and a fan out that same window, encountered Aggie, who was up, and stabbed
her with a Buck hunting knife 6 times, once in her face, three times in
her neck, and twice in her chest. She fell back partly on and partly off
her bed. He pocketed her black pistol and some jewelry, threw another TV
and a stereo out the window, and left. The police had been alerted at 4:15
a.m. by a silent alarm in her house and, going to a nearby house where one
of them said he knew burglars lived, arrested Rodriguez with items he was
alleged to have stolen. At 5:10 a.m., one of Aggie's
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, CALIF., GA., N.C., ALA.
Feb. 8 OHIO: Victim's Family Helps Keep Killer Off Death Row A man convicted of raping and killing an 11-year-old girl will not die for his crime, thanks in part to the girl's family. Christopher Ballard admitted last month that he sexually assaulted and beat Tina Dykes to death in October 1987. In court on Friday, Dykes' family asked the three-judge panel to spare Ballard's life. (source: WLWT News) COLORADO: ACLU: Take death penalty off tableDA researching death sentence in Chase murder Civil-liberties advocates are urging Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy to declare that the death penalty is off the table for a man suspected of killing University of Colorado senior Susannah Chase. Lacy has said her office is researching whether a death sentence is an option in the case against Diego Olmos Alcalde, 38, who was arrested Jan. 27 on suspicion of beating Chase, 23, to death a decade ago. Because Alcalde must be tried under the laws that existed at the time of the crime -- and Colorado's death-penalty statute from 1997 has since been deemed unconstitutional and amended -- Lacy said prosecutors are unsure if they can push for a death sentence if Alcalde is convicted. Now, she said, her office is focused on the homicide investigation and isn't yet researching sentencing options. It's not a high priority right now, she said. Judd Golden, director of the Boulder County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a letter sent to Lacy on Friday that his organization opposes the death penalty in all situations and that capital punishment is the ultimate denial of civil liberties. Alcalde was arrested last month in connection with Chase's homicide after his DNA -- which was entered into a national database -- matched evidence recoveredfrom Chase's body. She was found nearly dead early Dec. 21, 1997, in an 18th Street alley between Pearl and Spruce streets. Police said she had been brutally beaten with a baseball bat across the street from her 1802 Spruce St. home, dragged down the sidewalk and sexually assaulted. She died the next day. Alcalde is expected to be charged Wednesday in Boulder County District Court with 1st-degree murder, felony murder, second-degree kidnapping and first-degree sexual assault. In the ACLU's letter to Lacy, Golden said research indicates race and gender play a role in which cases prosecutors choose to pursue the death penalty. According to one analysis cited in the letter, 123 death-row prisoners have been released since 1976 because they were innocent. Lacy said her office will treat the letter the same way we treat all letters from members of the community who are expressing their opinions. We read them and take into consideration what the community has to say, Lacy said. But we don't change our process based on pressure from community groups. Denver defense attorney David Lane said he thinks Lacy will find that the financial costs associated with a push for the death penalty far outweigh the odds that a jury in Boulder County will sentence a person to death. It's virtually impossible to convince 12 jurors to sentence someone to death, he said. And in Boulder, it's probably harder than impossible. (source: Daily Camera) GEORGIA: Death-penalty defendant sues judge A death-penalty defendant in Pike County has filed a lawsuit against his trial judge over the judge's decision to replace his lawyers with local public defenders. The suit was filed Thursday against Pike County Superior Court Judge Johnnie Caldwell by Jamie Ryan Weis, accused of killing a woman in her home on Feb. 2, 2006. Late last year, Caldwell removed lawyers Bob Citronberg and Tom West, who had been appointed to Weis' case and were billing their work at hourly rates to the cash-strapped state agency that funds capital defense. Caldwell said he wanted to prevent the case from being stalled if the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council ran out of money. Caldwell replaced them with two state-salaried public defenders, who quickly filed motions to withdraw on the grounds they do not have the resources to defend a death case on top of their ongoing case loads. The standoff comes at a time when the state defender council is asking the Legislature for emergency funding to keep the agency from running out of money to defend capital cases before the end of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. The unusual lawsuit was filed on Weis's behalf by Atlanta lawyers Stephen Bright, Ed Garland and Don Samuel. They contend Caldwell violated Weis's right to counsel by replacing his long-standing attorneys. We believe he has that right, notwithstanding any budgetary problems or any legislative wrangling that might be going on, Samuel said Friday. The Sixth Amendment's right to effective assistance of counsel, especially in a death penalty case, trumps. Citronberg and West represented Weis for more than a year. They filed scores of motions and spent considerable time
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO
Arthur Tyler has been on Ohio's Death Row for 25 years for a crime someone else had admitted to more than 5 times. Time is running out for Arthur and in all the years he has been on death row, he has not had any real support. See www.torley.org for more info on his case. There is so much more to be added. Add him to your myspace site. www.myspace.com/justiceforarthurtyler Sign his petition Please and pass around. http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/investigate-the-case-of-arthur-tyler/ Please send a card to Arthur and let him know he has support. Arthur Tyler 175-637 Ohio State Penitentiary 878 Coitsville-Hubbard Road Youngstown, OH 44505 It won't take a lot of time to do and it won't cost much to make someone know they are no longer alone. it would mean so much to Arthur. Thank you in advance Karen www.torley.org
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEB., ILL., OHIO, MISS.
Feb. 9 NEBRASKA: Court: Nebraska Electric Chair Not Legal A year ago, Carey Dean Moore wrote a short letter to the Nebraska Supreme Court from his cell on death row. Appellant wishes to be executed, it said. On Friday, the court said electrocution is unconstitutional, a stunning response to Dean, nine others on death row and those who question whether the electric chair constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes, Judge William Connolly wrote in the 6-1 opinion for the court. The decision erased Nebraska's distinction as the only state with electrocution as its sole means of execution. State courts are left with the ability to sentence people to death but no way to carry out the penalty. The high court made the ruling in the case of Raymond Mata Jr., convicted for the 1999 kidnapping and killing of 3-year-old Adam Gomez of Scottsbluff, the son of his former girlfriend. Parts of the boy's body were found at Mata's home in a freezer and dog bowl. Bone fragments also were recovered from the stomach of Mata's dog. The court said in its opinion that evidence shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering and that it has proven itself to be a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than a state prison. There are conflicting views on whether federal courts might agree to hear an appeal. Attorney General Jon Bruning said he would ask the state court to reconsider its decision, and spokeswoman Leah Bucco-White said, We're exploring all our options. Gov. Dave Heineman's spokeswoman, Jen Rae Hein, said Heineman is considering introducing a bill this legislative session to replace electrocution with lethal injection. Today the court has asserted itself improperly as a policymaker, Heineman said. Once again, this activist court has ignored its own precedent and the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court to continue its assault on the Nebraska death penalty. The state's high court said electrocution violated the Nebraska Constitution rather than the U.S. Constitution, a move that one expert on death penalty law said appeared to shield its decision from federal review. But Chief Justice Mike Heavican wrote in dissent that the majority's stated reliance on Nebraska's constitution is misleading because the court based its decision entirely on federal precedent. The court stressed that its ruling did not strike down the death penalty -- just electrocution as the method. Approving another method, however, could prove difficult. Past attempts to replace electrocution with lethal injection in Nebraska have failed, largely due to the efforts of the Legislature's staunchest opponent of capital punishment, Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha. Chambers pointed out Friday that a bill to replace the execution method would have to be approved by the Judiciary Committee. That's unlikely, he said, given that on Thursday the committee sent to the full Legislature a bill that would repeal the death penalty. It would be stupid and a waste of time and strictly for political purposes to introduce a bill to replace electrocution with lethal injection, Chambers said. Last year, a state bill to repeal the death penalty failed after 1st-round debate by just one vote. Bills must go through three rounds before they get final approval. Legal experts said it doesn't make sense for Nebraska to rush to establish a new method of execution. Courts across the country have put off several executions pending a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed in September to hear a challenge filed by 2 Kentucky death row inmates over that state's lethal injection method. The use of the electric chair began to decline when Oklahoma adopted lethal injection in 1977, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, when executions resumed following a U.S. Supreme Court ban, there have been 154 electrocutions and more than 900 lethal injections, Dieter said. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia still allow electrocution, but some of those states do not allow newly condemned inmates to choose it. The last person to be executed by electrocution was Daryl Holton on Sept. 12. in Tennessee. Holton, who confessed to murdering 4 children in 1997, chose the electric chair over lethal injection. Moore was to have been electrocuted in May, but the Nebraska Supreme Court stopped it less than a week before his scheduled date because of the case it ruled on Friday. On the Net: Death Penalty Information Center: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org (source: Los Angeles Times) ** Dissenting opinion offers roadmap for appealing execution ruling Legal experts agree the dissenting opinion filed today by the Chief Justice of Nebraska's Supreme Court will help shape both the debate over the death penalty in Nebraska and any
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
Feb. 9 AFGHANISTAN: Execution could affect ISAF mission, warn Dutch Dutch Defence Minister Eimert van Middelkoop has warned that if the Afghan authorities permit the execution of an Afghan journalist, it could affect Western support for the ISAF peacekeeping mission. Mr van Middelkoop issued the warning to his Afghan counterpart Abdul Rahim Wardak at a NATO conference in Lithuania. A number of countries, including Great Britain, supported the Dutch standpoint. The minister, whose comments follow a Dutch diplomatic offensive on the journalist's behalf, said he was particularly disturbed by the reason for the conviction. The journalist was sentenced for downloading and distributing an article from the Internet that was regarded as anti-Islamic. (source: Radio Netherlands) IRAN: Iran envoy defends amputation Iran's ambassador to Spain has compared chopping off the hands of thieves to a surgeon amputating a limb to prevent the spread of gangrene. In a defence of Iran's tough implementation of Islamic law, Seyed Davoud Salehi called for the traditions, religion and economic development of Iran to be taken into account by those monitoring human rights in the country. He also argued that the death penalty was necessary to preserve the health of society as a whole. advertisementMr Salehi said during a speech in Madrid that the highest court in Iran had decided to limit public executions to prevent images of hangings and stonings in public squares being broadcast around the world and used as propaganda against the regime. Our laws allow for the amputation of the hand that steals. This is not accepted by the West, but the field of human rights should take into account the customs, traditions, religion and economic development, he said in comments reported by the newspaper El Mundo. Some laws are needed to preserve the health of society, if not, it would be in danger. Iran has the second highest number of recorded executions in the world after China, according to Amnesty International. More than 300 people were condemned to death last year, an increase of more than 70 % on 2006. So far this year 20 public executions have taken place and the hands or feet of at least 5 offenders have been amputated. The ambassador criticised claims that Iran had a poor record in human rights and attributed it to the arrogance of the West, which used the argument to harm the image of the country. (source: The Telegraph)
