[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Nov. 24 USA: There is much to be thankful for in today's America. Despite its numerous economic, social, cultural, and political problems (and they are numerous), this is still a great country to live in and to work for social justice through peaceful means. I give thanks for many things, including the fact that occasionally we see an elected official stand on principle and the moral high ground to do what is right. Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber recently announced that he would no longer acquiesce in that state's ongoing system of capital punishment. He ordered a halt to the Dec. 6 execution there as well as announcing that no further executions would occur under his watch--[see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtK6m2H-ds0] Kitzhaber allowed 2 executions there to proceed earlier in his tenure, but no more. His moral beliefs and his political courage are in stark contrast to Texas Gov. Perry and his pride at having presided over 238 executions in his decade long tenure in office. Gov. Kitzhaber and those who specifically work for a death penalty-free America are a major reason I give thanks today; it's an honor and a privilege to work peacefully for a better society that will one day recognize that truly there is no such thing as a lesser person. (source: Rick Halperin, Amnesty International; Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, FLA., CALIF., ORE., N.C., IDAHO
Nov. 19 USA: Punishment, death penalty are misguided What do the spanking of children and capital punishment have in common? Hold that thought; we'll get back to it. In the meantime, consider the whipping Judge of Aransas County, Texas, who was caught on tape disciplining his 16-year-old daughter with a belt. 7 years later, the daughter posted a video of the event on YouTube; millions have watched it. The video is notable for its length -- almost eight minutes -- and for the fact that the man vigorously flogging his daughter is County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams, a local magistrate whose jurisdiction involves decisions about the fitness of parents to raise their children. YouTube labeled the video as graphic, and you'll probably agree if you find it hard to watch a man beat a pleading, weeping child/woman with a belt. In his own defense, the judge admitted he lost his temper, but he contended it's not as bad as it looks. Actually, it's worse than it looks. The judge would probably say that the beating was all about correction and guidance. His daughter had, against his wishes and perhaps illegally, downloaded games and music from the Internet. But the episode appears to be much more about power and domination than about correction. The judge threatens to beat his daughter into submission. As the girl writhes beneath the flogging, the judge fixates on forcing her facedown onto her bed so that he can have ready access to her backside with his belt. The girl's mother steps in and warns her to lie down and take it like a woman. It goes on and on in this humiliating and painful way. In short, it's a sorry, ugly scene that generated some short-lived attention. The daughter and her mother were flown to New York for an appearance on the Today show and with Anderson Cooper. Dr. Phil came to Aransas County. But one wonders how much notice this story would have collected if the father had not been a judge charged with presiding over parental fitness cases. Many of my students report that the Judge Adams episode is only a somewhat exaggerated version of what takes place regularly in many American households, including their own. Plenty of my students report having been whipped by belts and other implements. In fact, with some 80 % of American families using corporal punishment in some form, we are a nation of committed spankers. Parents who hit children defend the practice in various ways, and clearly some hitting is more benign than the whipping Judge Adams inflicted on his daughter. But entertain for a moment the assertion that all forms of corporal punishment reside on a spectrum; the difference between them is only quantitative, not qualitative. And everyone who hits children believes, like Judge Adams, that he's doing the right thing. Now, what does any of this have to do with the capital punishment mentioned in the 1st paragraph? Connecting capital punishment and spanking may sound like a stretch, but consider that many Americans are enthusiastic supporters of both. These practices help shape who we are, a nation that regularly kills people in the name of justice and hits children in the name of guidance. Of course, some form of punishment and discipline is necessary, for both criminals and children. But it's a mistake to allow our national self-definition to be driven, as happens so often, by emotions like anger and a thirst for revenge and dominance. Capital and corporate punishment have the same theoretical goals: deterrence, punishment, correction. In truth, however, we don't do a very good job of administering either one. We make too many mistakes, and we imagine better motivations than we really have. Both practices can go wrong quickly and easily, and neither can ever be undone. And neither has been shown to be very effective. In fact, often they cause more harm than good. Just watch Judge Adams in action. (source: Commentary; John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, TexasNews Chief) ** Death Row Exonerated Seek End to Death Penalty in US A new Gallup Poll shows that support for the death penalty in the United States remains high, but down to 61 % from 80 % in 1994. Part of the reason is the possibility of innocent inmates being put to death and the release of others after new evidence cleared them. Several men saved from execution are now telling their stories to the public. Ron Keine was convicted of murder in the southwestern state of New Mexico and was just days away from his scheduled execution when the man who had really committed the crime confessed to a preacher. Of course, the preacher said, 'I cannot absolve you, you have to go and do the right thing.' And the guy said, 'Yeah, I know.' At that time I was 9 days from execution, recalled Keine. After the truth came out, Keine gained his freedom and joined the effort to abolish
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
URGENT ACTION APPEAL - From Amnesty International USA -- For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF): http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa15411.pdf Note: Please write on behalf of these persons even though you may not have received the original UA when issued on 26 May 2011. Thanks! Further information on UA: 154/11 (26 May 2011) Issue Date: 17 October 2011 Country: USA DEATH PENALTY ON TABLE FOR GUANTANAMO TRIAL The death penalty has been approved as an option for the upcoming trial of a Saudi Arabian man held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He is to be tried by military commission, under a system which fails to meet international fair trial standards. Saudi Arabian national 'Abd al Rahim Hussayn Muhammed al Nashiri has been in US custody for nearly nine years. Arrested in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by local security forces in October 2002, he was handed over to US agents a month later, and held in secret custody at undisclosed locations by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for almost four years, during which time he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment and to enforced disappearance. In September 2006, he was transferred to US military custody at Guantanamo, where he remains. On 20 April 2011, the US Department of Defense announced that 'Abd al Rahim al Nashiri had been charged under the Military Commissions Act of 2009 with, among other things, murder in violation of the law of war, and terrorism. He is accused of having had a leading role in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen on 12 October 2000 in which 17 US sailors were killed and 40 others wounded, and in the attack on the French oil tanker MV Limburg in the Gulf of Aden on 6 October 2002, in which a crew member was killed. The prosecution's recommendation that the death penalty be an option at the trial was approved on 28 September 2011 by the convening authority of the military commissions, retired Navy Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, when he referred the charges against 'Abd al Nashiri on for trial as capital charges. 'Abd al Nashiri's arraignment hearing, at which the charges against him may be read and he will be called upon to plead, is scheduled for 9 November 2011 at Guantanamo. No date for his actual trial has yet been set. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty unconditionally. While international human rights law recognizes that some countries retain the death penalty, it prohibits the imposition and execution of a death sentence based on a trial that has not met the highest standards for fairness. The US military commissions fail to meet international fair trial standards. Any use of the death penalty after such trials would violate international law (see overleaf). PLEASE WRITE IMMEDIATELY in your own language: -Express concern that the charges against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri have been referred on for trial as capital; -Point out that international law prohibits the death penalty based on any trial that has not met the highest standards of fairness, and arguing that the military commission trials do not meet such standards; -Urge that the military commissions be abandoned in favor of trials in US District Court and that pursuit of the death penalty be dropped in any case, whatever the trial forum; -Condemn the USA's failure to respect international human rights law in the case of 'Abd al Rahim al Nashiri over the past nine years, heightening the need for rigorous respect for human rights principles now. PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 28 NOVEMBER 2011 TO: President President Barack Obama The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington DC 20500, USA Fax: 1 202 456 2461 Email: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ Salutation: Dear Mr. President Secretary of Defense The Honorable Leon Panetta Secretary of Defense 1000 Defense Pentagon Washington DC 20301-1000, USA Fax: 1 703 571 8951 Salutation: Dear Secretary of Defense Please check with the AIUSA Urgent Action Office if sending appeals after the above date. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Despite being named on an indictment in US federal court only months after his arrest in 2002, 'Abd al Nashiri was not brought promptly before a judicial authority and brought to trial without undue delay, as required by international law. Instead he was detained in secret until he was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006. During his time in CIA custody, he was subjected to torture, including by water-boarding, where the process of drowning the detainee is begun, as well as other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Information released into the public domain indicates 'Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was also subjected to shackling, hooding and nudity as well as to a number of unauthorized techniques, including being threatened with a handgun and a electric power drill, potentially injurious stress positions and the use of a stiff brush [used in
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, KAN., GA., PENN.
Oct. 10 USA: Families suffer grief of state-enforced death On the eve of World Day against the Death Penalty (October 10), a Swiss photojournalist gives his insight into the suffering of the families of the condemned. Fabio Biasio came face-to-face with the grim reality when he travelled to the execution capital of Texas for a reportage on capital punishment in 2003. “I wanted to tell a story about the death penalty,” said Biasio about his trip to Huntsville. He soon realised that there was no welcome on the mat in Texas for him. “I couldn’t get access to the execution room or death row,” Biasio told swissinfo.ch. “Huntsville is the capital of the Texan penal system. Every execution in this US state is carried out there.” After getting onto the visiting list of a prisoner, he could at least see the death row visiting room. That’s how he got to know Tina Morris, the sister of James Colburn. “Tina sat beside me, she was visiting her brother. It was the day before his first execution date, which was then postponed.” More victims He saw in Morris the possibility of telling a special story – the fact that an execution produces a second set of victims, the family of the perpetrator. “The perpetrator has caused great suffering to the family of the victim, and now the state causes great suffering to the family of the perpetrator,” Biasio explained. He called his story the “Diary of an execution”. The photos show Tina Morris in the week before the execution of her brother James. “I was not just a photographer but also her companion and chauffeur.” Her family was important to her this week but on her last visit to death row she felt so terrible that she did not want anyone from her family around her. “It was too close for her. I think she did not want her sons or her partner to see her like that. With me she didn’t care.” “Tina, I will also photograph you when you feel really bad, when you’re crying,” he warned her. She accepted that. “She wanted her story to be told.” Death row Colburn suffered from schizophrenia. “James committed a murder because of his illness. He stabbed a woman with a kitchen knife,” said Biasio, who only had contact with Morris’s brother twice. “I spoke to him for around 30 seconds by telephone. The conversation was very short, because it is forbidden to speak to inmates, without having an invitation from them. At the 2nd contact, James was dead.” When an inmate comes to death row he is locked away behind bullet-proof glass, also from his relatives. “The 1st physical touch takes place after the execution. There is no final hug, no final squeezing of the hand.” Made in the US In the US it is very unpopular, according to Biasio, to campaign against the death penalty. Even President Barack Obama steers clear of the subject. “It would cost him too many votes. Only small human rights groups take a position against the death penalty.” Why is the death penalty in the US not seen in the same way as in Europe, where only Belarus still implements it? “I think that it is has a strong religious base: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, the Old Testament approach, that is deeply rooted in the folk soul of the US,” the photographer said. Biasio sees the executions carried out by the state as delegated killing. “For the final implementation of the judgment, two anonymous executioners each press a button in a darkened side room. One of the buttons sets a mechanism in motion that releases the deadly injection. The second button is not connected.” Biasio recognises that society needs to be able to mete out punishment if it is to function properly. But it is often forgotten that every person should have the chance to improve themselves.” Enduring memories “I learned at that time that psychological torment can also cause physical pain,” the photographer recalled. “I have never seen someone suffer as Tina did during this week. That affected me personally a great deal.” At the exhibition of his photos in Winterthur he met Morris again – a year after her brother’s execution. She watched her story in the gallery of pictures. “It was an unbelievably intense moment.” Biasio also produced an internet slideshow of “Life and Death in Huntsville, Texas”. “Tina looks at it every day. The execution is part of her story. She has to live with this trauma.” Studies have shown that the psychological state of murder victims’ relatives does not improve after the convicted person has been killed. In the US there is even an association of murder victims‘ relatives who speak out against the death penalty. “In my opinion it leads to a brutalisation of society when the state practises a monopoly on this kind of violence,” Biasio said. “Deep inside I know that the death penalty is wrong. When Switzerland spoke in 2010 about the reintroduction of the death penalty I hoped nothing would go wrong. Because if something
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ALA., FLA., GA.
Oct. 9 USA: Error rates a sobering aspect of death penalty For a minute there, we paid attention to the death penalty. Death sentences aren't something we contemplate often here in New York, where the death penalty is on the books, but not in force because our state's highest court found its implementation too flawed to be just. But Georgia just executed a man whose guilt was in doubt. Texas executes people like it's the official state pastime. And it's Texas and Georgia that have brought the death penalty back to public consciousness in recent weeks. While Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential hopeful, was getting creepy cheers from a debate audience for his state having executed so many people during his tenure, Georgia was fixing to stick a needle in the arm of Troy Davis for the 1989 murder of police Officer Mark Allan MacPhail — despite 7 of the 9 key prosecution witnesses recanting or backing off their statements. Georgia executed Davis on Sept. 21. Texas just released a man — not on death row, but who served nearly 25 years behind bars — who was wrongly convicted of his wife's murder. New York has had its share of exonerations over the years, and some close calls. Let's not forget our own Christopher Bowman, charged with a murderous rampage through Middletown on Valentine's Day 1998. It was a 1st-degree murder case, death-eligible at the time. Bowman even confessed under questioning by police. But Bowman didn't do it. While New York state isn't using the death penalty these days, the feds still have theirs. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is currently pursuing a capital case against seven Newburgh men charged last year as part of that big Latin Kings roundup, and re-indicted in February on charges including murder in aid of racketeering. I'll grant that, should they be convicted, it's a hard slog to argue in support of the lives of the people responsible for three murders on the streets of Newburgh — in particular, the slaying of 15-year-old Jeffrey Zachary, an innocent bystander. The feds are also pursuing capital cases against some of the Newburgh Bloods charged in a September indictment, which also includes murder conspiracy charges. On the other hand, the Southern District of New York is not the killing floor. Federal prosecutors here sought the death penalty against four bombers from the 1998 embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. The jury deadlocked on the sentence, and the terrorists got life in prison without parole. That's not a cushy sentence. I'm not advocating a life of candy and flowers for violent felons. But the saying in the world of law is death is different. The idea is that the state must meet higher standards if it wishes to execute someone. But capital cases are as fraught with human error as any others. How many innocent people have been executed? We don't know. Since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 1,271 death-row inmates have been executed, and 138 have been exonerated.That's a pretty high error rate. (source: Column, Heather Yakin, Stockton Record) *** see: http://atlantapost.com/2011/09/27/exonerated-after-execution-12-men-and-one-woman-found-innocent-after-being-put-to-death/# (source: Atlanta Post) ALABAMA: Alabama capital murder cases rekindle debate over ‘judge override’Study: Elected judges often choose death sentence over life in prison The 2008 murder of Auburn University freshman Lauren A. Burk horrified Lee County and the surrounding community. But last fall, 12 jurors recommended life in prison for Courtney Lockhart, the man convicted of abducting Burk and forcing her to disrobe before fatally shooting her. Despite the jury’s consensus, Circuit Court Judge Jacob A. Walker III overruled the recommendation and sentenced Lockhart to die by lethal injection. The judge attributed his decision to a series of robberies involving Lockhart, saying jurors likely would have been swayed toward capital punishment if they had considered those alleged crimes. Walker now is tasked with a similar choice in another high-profile case in which jurors rejected a death sentence for Gregory Lance Henderson, the Columbus man convicted Tuesday of running over and killing a deputy sheriff. The Lee County cases have drawn attention to a controversial statute that allows Alabama’s elected judges to make life-or-death decisions entrusted to jurors in other states. Gregory Lance Henderson was convicted of capital murder last week. A jury recommended life in prison. Judge Jacob A. Walker III, who can overrule the jury’s sentencing choice and give Henderson the death penalty, will decide his fate on Jan. 31. Walker’s decision in the Lockhart case this March drew criticism from death penalty opponents and advocates for eliminating the option of “judge override.” “When a jury of your peers decides after saying you’re guilty of capital
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ALA.
Oct. 6 USA: Death penalty an unnecessary punishment Troy Davis, convicted of killing a police officer in 1991, was put to death on Sept. 21, but Davis insisted he was innocent until his dying moment. There have been 1,268 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, but how many of these people were actually guilty of the crimes they were killed for? We will never know. Take, for example, a man and a woman who have been having marital problems. They go out on a hike, and the woman supposedly falls to her death. When the man comes back to town, distraught, he is forced to face investigation. Let's say there is evidence he is having an affair, which can be used as motive for him to murder his wife. Now instead of falling, she was pushed off the cliff. But there is no real proof. There may be proof of an affair, a rocky marriage and other problems in his life that are enough to convict him, but should this man face execution? What if he really didn't commit the crime? What about his family? His friends? Going back through the ages, a life for a life has always been the popular form of punishment. But ultimately it doesn't do much good. Because of the extensive judicial process involved to ensure innocent men and women aren't being put to death for crimes they didn't commit, capital punishment is much more expensive than sentencing someone to life in prison without parole. According to ncadp.org the cost from start to finish in a single death penalty case can be as high as $7 million, while it's only estimated to be around $500,000 in cases resulting in life imprisonment. Not only is this a more humane punishment, but it is also the economical choice. The money taxpayers spend on death row prisoners could be put to better use in improving the communities we live in. And even with the extensive hearings, there is a chance someone innocent will be executed in the end. Another issue is whether or not the death penalty really deters murderers. Do they even care if they will get killed for committing such a terrible crime? Most murderers don't commit the crime planning to get caught. They think through their actions carefully and plan on getting away with the crime, so the punishment, if they do get caught, can't be that big of deterrent. Obviously if someone is going to commit a murder, then he or she doesn't care much for human life. Studies done in Oklahoma and California tried and failed to prove that capital punishment had any effect on violent crimes. In fact, they found an increase in stranger killings and homicides after the death penalty was reinstated. (William Bailey, Deterrence, Brutalization, and the Death Penalty, Criminology, 1998; Ernie Thompson, Effects of an Execution on Homicides in California. Homicide Studies, 1999) Think about the typical murders today. There's the average serial killer who murders for pleasure and doesn't plan on getting caught, so I doubt he or she gives much thought to the possibility of execution. Then you have rapists who fall pretty much under the same category. After that there's gang-related killings where it is often encouraged as part of the culture, so it's unlikely that they will think too deeply about their punishment. And lastly you've got your accidental murder, often committed in a moment of passion, when there is little time to consider the outcome. In the end, most murderers probably don't give a second thought to the death penalty. And even if they do, who's to say they see it as a punishment? In all reality, if I was given the choice between life in a cell, getting beat up every day, and put through who knows what else, or being put out of my misery, I'd choose death. A life for a life is a great idea, but it isn't going to bring back the victim. It just costs taxpayers billions of dollars that could be going toward improving the communities we live in and making life better for those of us who are not facing life in prison, or worse. So next time you're going to defend a death row case, just remember: An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. (source: Erica Poulsen, The (Dixie State College of Utah) Dixie Sun) ALABAMA: Make death convictions certain Should a condemned inmate be put to death even if his lawyers failed to meet a filing deadline for an appeal? That's something the U.S. Supreme Court will decide in the case of misdirected paperwork for Alabama death row inmate Cory Maples. Justices must weigh this case carefully to ensure our jurisprudence system is a model of fairness and justice. Maples, 37, was convicted in the 1995 murders of two acquaintances as they sat in his driveway in Morgan County after he had been drinking. He was arrested 2 weeks later in Tennessee in the car of one of his victims. Maples was convicted and sentenced to death by a Morgan County jury by a vote of 10-2 using evidence that included a
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, MO., OHIO, FLA., GA.
Sept. 28 USA: All Executions Are Wrong The morning after Troy Davis was executed, the state of Georgia set another execution date. Marcus Ray Johnson is slated to be put to death on October 5. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles should hear from us (fax: 404-651-6670; email: clemency_informat...@pap.state.ga.us) about this case too, because all executions are wrong. Even if there are no doubts about guilt (as there was in the case with Troy Davis, and as there is in the case with Reggie Clemons), even if there are no horrifying mitigating circumstances (like the ones that led Ohio’s Governor John Kacich to commute another death sentence), and even if the crime is particularly heinous (as was the case with the execution last week of Lawrence Brewer in Texas) the deliberate putting to death of a human being is not justice and is a fundamental violation of basic human rights. It is also a power that no government, and no fallible, human-being-operated justice system should be trusted with.P The same night that Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer were put to death in the USA, a 17-year-old was hanged in Iran. 2 days earlier, a Sudanese man in Saudi Arabia was publicly beheaded for the crime of “sorcery”. The day after Troy Davis’ execution, Alabama lethally injected Derrick Mason, its 5th execution of the year. Tomorrow, Florida is scheduled to execute Manuel Valle, who has been on death row for 33 years and has received no meaningful clemency process. The disturbing facts and stomach-churning drama surrounding Troy Davis’ case resulted in a remarkable amount of attention. But all these executions are wrong. The death penalty is wrong. It must be abolished. (source: Amnesty International USA blog) Drawing wrong lessons from the Troy Davis execution Georgia's execution of Troy Davis last week was a poignant reminder of the continued presence of capital punishment in the United States. The Davis execution generated extraordinary interest because of troubling doubts about his guilt. Some observers have already speculated that the Davis case might serve as the spark that could reignite the movement to abolish the death penalty. But lost in some of the attention that the execution has generated is the death penalty's unmistakable and precipitous decline over the past decade. If the battle has not been won by death penalty opponents, they are much closer to their goal than they realize. Death sentencing has dropped remarkably over the past 15 years, making what was already a marginal practice (in terms of the frequency with which murder is actually punished with death) an exceptionally rare one. Whereas over 300 defendants were condemned to die per year in the mid-1990s, the most recent figures show a nationwide average closer to 115 per year--a more than 60 % decline. Executions, too, have fallen significantly--by about 33 % if one compares 1997-2003 (about 75 executions nationwide per year) and 2004-2010 (about 50 executions nationwide per year). As a matter of politics, the momentum is clearly on the side of restriction rather than expansion. The past four years have seen the legislative abolition of capital punishment in New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois. Numerous other states have come close to abolition or have adopted new limitations on the death penalty (such as Maryland's requirement that death sentences rest on biological evidence or on a videotaped recording of either the offense or a confession by the offender). As a matter of law, the death penalty appears more fragile jurisprudentially than at any other time in American history, save the brief period of judicial invalidation in the early 1970s. U.S. executions, by the numbers Indeed, and in addition to legislative action, several members of the U.S. Supreme Court have expressed deep skepticism about the efforts to ensure reliable and fair administration of the death penalty. Moreover, in its decisions abolishing the death penalty as applied to juveniles, offenders with mental retardation, and offenders convicted of raping children, the Court has found those practices contrary to evolving standards of decency based on new gauges of contemporary morality--such as elite and professional opinion, international opinion, and polling data--in addition to legislative decisions and jury verdicts. In the cases involving juveniles and offenders with mental retardation, the Court declared the practices contrary to evolving standards despite the fact that a majority of death penalty states did not (yet) prohibit the challenged practice. In light of this dramatic decline of the American death penalty in practice, politics, and law, rather than portraying the Davis case as the spark that could inspire a new generation of anti-death penalty activism, we perhaps should view the Davis case as additional fuel on a fire that is already burning. The difficult question
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA., FLA.
Sept. 27 USA: Why Death Penalty Opponents Are Closer to Their Goal Than They Realize Georgia’s execution of Troy Davis last week was a poignant reminder of the continued presence of capital punishment in the United States. The Davis execution generated extraordinary interest because of troubling doubts about his guilt. Some observers have already speculated that the Davis case might serve as the spark that could reignite the movement to abolish the death penalty. But lost in some of the attention that the execution has generated is the death penalty’s unmistakable and precipitous decline over the past decade. If the battle has not been won by death penalty opponents, they are much closer to their goal than they realize. Death sentencing has dropped remarkably over the past fifteen years, making what was already a marginal practice (in terms of the frequency with which murder is actually punished with death) an exceptionally rare one. Whereas over 300 defendants were condemned to die per year in the mid-1990s, the most recent figures show a nationwide average closer to 115 per year—a more than 60 percent decline. Executions, too, have fallen significantly—by about 33 % if one compares 1997-2003 (about 75 executions nationwide per year) and 2004-2010 (about 50 executions nationwide per year). As a matter of politics, the momentum is clearly on the side of restriction rather than expansion. The past 4 years have seen the legislative abolition of capital punishment in New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois. Numerous other states have come close to abolition or have adopted new limitations on the death penalty (such as Maryland’s requirement that death sentences rest on biological evidence or on a videotaped recording of either the offense or a confession by the offender). As a matter of law, the death penalty appears more fragile jurisprudentially than at any other time in American history, save the brief period of judicial invalidation in the early 1970s. Indeed, and in addition to legislative action, several members of the U.S. Supreme Court have expressed deep skepticism about the efforts to ensure reliable and fair administration of the death penalty. Moreover, in its decisions abolishing the death penalty as applied to juveniles, offenders with mental retardation, and offenders convicted of raping children, the Court has found those practices contrary to “evolving standards of decency” based on new gauges of contemporary morality—such as elite and professional opinion, international opinion, and polling data—in addition to legislative decisions and jury verdicts. In the cases involving juveniles and offenders with mental retardation, the Court declared the practices contrary to evolving standards despite the fact that a majority of death penalty states did not (yet) prohibit the challenged practice. In light of this dramatic decline of the American death penalty in practice, politics, and law, rather than portraying the Davis case as the “spark” that could inspire a new generation of anti-death penalty activism, we perhaps should view the Davis case as additional fuel on a fire that is already burning. The difficult question for opponents is whether and how to focus this renewed energy. On the one hand, the Supreme Court’s new approach to gauging “evolving standards of decency” offers a potentially powerful constitutional litigation strategy. If the trend toward abolition and restriction on the state legislative front continues along its current trajectory, it will become easier for abolitionist litigators to marshal evidence of the death penalty’s domestic decline in support of a constitutional ban—and easier for courts to deem capital punishment an outlier practice that falls outside of an emerging constitutional consensus. This approach is attractive for 2 reasons: It is likely the only way to uproot capital punishment in certain entrenched jurisdictions (like Texas), and it provides a “backstop” against legislative backsliding in the inevitable moments of anger and fear that attend particularly heinous crimes—in much the same way that the European Convention on Human Rights serves as a backstop against backsliding for European countries, as reinstatement of capital punishment precludes membership in the European Union. However, constitutional litigation always carries with it the risk of backlash, as a previous era’s experience demonstrates. The movement to abolish American capital punishment in the 1960s and 70s proved to be successful in the short-term but tragic in the long-term. After bringing executions to a halt in 1967 and providing the first extended period in American history without executions (almost a decade), the brief moratorium was followed by enormous reaction. The dying practice of capital punishment returned with a vengeance following the U.S. Supreme Court’s invalidation of prevailing statutes in 1972.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 26 USA: An Indefensible Punishment When the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty 35 years ago, it did so provisionally. Since then, it has sought to articulate legal standards for states to follow that would ensure the fair administration of capital punishment and avoid the arbitrariness and discrimination that had led it to strike down all state death penalty statutes in 1972. As the unconscionable execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last week underscores, the court has failed because it is impossible to succeed at this task. The death penalty is grotesque and immoral and should be repealed. The court’s 1976 framework for administering the death penalty, balancing aggravating factors like the cruelty of the crime against mitigating ones like the defendant’s lack of a prior criminal record, came from the American Law Institute, the nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and law professors. In 2009, after a review of decades of executions, the group concluded that the system could not be fixed and abandoned trying. Sentencing people to death without taking account of aggravating and mitigating circumstances leads to arbitrary results. Yet, the review found, so does considering such circumstances because it requires jurors to weigh competing factors and makes sentencing vulnerable to their biases. Those biases are driven by race, class and politics, which influence all aspects of American life. As a result, they have made discrimination and arbitrariness the hallmarks of the death penalty in this country. For example, 2/3 of all those sentenced to death since 1976 have been in 5 Southern states where “vigilante values” persist, according to the legal scholar Franklin Zimring. Racism continues to infect the system, as study after study has found in the past 3 decades. The problems go on: Many defendants in capital cases are too poor to afford legal counsel. Many of the lawyers assigned to represent them are poorly equipped for the job. A major study done for the Senate Judiciary Committee found that “egregiously incompetent defense lawyering” accounted for about 2/5 of the errors in capital cases. Apart from the issue of counsel, these cases are more expensive at every stage of the criminal process than noncapital cases. Politics also permeates the death penalty, adding to chances of arbitrary administration. Most prosecutors in jurisdictions with the penalty are elected and control the decision to seek the punishment. Within the same state, differing politics from county to county have led to huge disparities in use of the penalty, when the crime rates and demographics were similar. This has been true in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and many other states. So far, under this horrifying system, 17 innocent people sentenced to death have been exonerated and released based on DNA evidence, and 112 other people based on other evidence. All but a few developed nations have abolished the death penalty. It is time Americans acknowledged that the death penalty cannot be made to comply with the Constitution and is in every way indefensible. (source: Editorial, New York Times) * The Death of the Death PenaltyThe courts and public are moving toward repeal but not fast enough for inmates like Troy Davis The executions last week of Troy Davis in Georgia and Lawrence Russell Brewer in Texas, as well as the United States Supreme Court’s recent decisions to stay the execution of two other Texas inmates, Duane Buck and Cleve Foster, have pushed the death penalty back into the national spotlight. Davis’s case, which inspired protests around the world, and Brewer’s, whose crime earned him universal loathing, remind us of the intense and conflicting emotions that continue to surround the vexed issue of capital punishment. The truth is that the death penalty in the U.S. is withering, albeit at a pace too slow for many. That may seem like a paradoxical observation coming after a week in which 2 men were put to death and 2 others still stand hours away from execution, but there is no doubting that momentum is moving against capital punishment. In the past 7 years, 4 states (New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, and New York) have abandoned it. Even in the 34 states where executions remain lawful, death sentences have grown rarer. There were 46 executions in the U.S. last year, compared with 85 a decade before. From 2000 to 2010, juries across the country imposed only 1/2 the number of death sentences they had in the 1990s. Yet some might say that someone like Brewer surely deserves the death penalty. Brewer made no bones about the fact that he was one of three white supremacists who kidnapped James Byrd because he was black and dragged him for 2 miles behind their pickup truck. It was a murder of unique savagery. Some Americans believe in the death penalty “because the victims deserve it,” yet Byrd’s son’s
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 26 USA: Think the Death Penalty Can't Be Abolished? Here's How It Happened Before With polls showing that roughly 6 in 10 Americans still support capital punishment in the US (even with that number declining somewhat) it’s hard to make the case that the practice will be abolished any time soon. But I’ve argued otherwise, pointing to support dropping to under 50% when life without parole is listed as an option, and the continuing fall in the number of executions in America. Still, most in the media find the end of executions in the US a farfetched dream. I’d guess that most probably are not even aware that the death penalty was once banned in America—and not so long ago. And it happened rather suddenly and unexpectedly. There was no one event or factor that caused it. Yes, there were several notable cases in the 1950s that sparked protest, including the Rosenbergs and Caryl Chessman (left). In 1959, Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a condemned murderess in I Want to Live, based on the true story of Barbara Graham. The film concluded with a graphic and troubling depiction of the woman’s execution in the San Quentin gas chamber. Pope Pius XII offered only a timid plea for “charity” in the Chessman case, but even that was breakthrough for Catholics, a “tentative step on the road to recovering the pastoral practice of St. Augustine, disapproving all executions, and especially those based on political motives,” James Mcgivern wrote in his book on this subject. Chessman’s pleas for a new trial inspired the first mainstream churches, such as the Methodists, to join the so-called “peace” churches in taking a stand against capital punishment. By the end of the 1960s, the Methodists were joined in the abolitionist camp by the American Baptists, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Lutheran Church, the National Council of Churches (but not the Catholic Church). Hawaii and Alaska entered the union abolitionist. Oregon and Iowa, which had gone abolitionist once before—only to reinstate the death penalty—now banned executions once again. Delaware outlawed executions in 1958, but then, following outrage over a brutal murder in the state, reinstituted it in 1961. More nations abolished executions. In 1955, Arthur Koestler had observed that Great Britain “is that peculiar country in Europe where people drive on the left side of the road, measure inches in yards, and hang people by the neck until dead,” a practice he likened to “a slightly off-color family joke.” 10 years later, England suspended the practice as an experiment; for years later it decided to make the ban permanent. In America, the average number of annual executions had stood at about 120 during the 1940s, but now declined to about 70 per year during the 1950s, and then to 21 in 1963, 7 in 1965, and 2 in 1967—the last executions for more than a decade. (My new book Dead Reckoning traces the death penalty in America right up to the Troy Davis case.) There were several reasons for this. New studies seemed to suggest that the deterrence theory was hogwash; in fact, in some states, the murder rate appeared to rise after a wave of executions. A new generation of anti-death penalty lawyers, led by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, adopted a strategy of contesting nearly every capital conviction, up the appeals process, log-jamming the death penalty machinery, hoping this might lead to a permanent shutdown. A kind of moratorium on state killings was established while numerous legal issues, often centering on the Eighth Amendment, were decided in the courts. Since the 1950s, under the influence of the Warren Court, the notion of equality before the law had held sway, and few could deny that the death penalty had been exacted on the poor and minorities far out of proportion. In addition, the trend in criminal justice was toward rehabilitation of inmates. For the 1st time, surveys showed that a majority of Americans, influenced by all of the above trends, and a general period of economic well-being and social stability, opposed the death penalty. One survey tracked the drop in support for the death penalty from 68% in 1953 to 51% in 1960 to 45% in ’65. So, much like today, prosecutors were hesitant to seek it and juries reluctant to grant it. Matters came to a head in 1972 when Furman v. Georgia came before the Supreme Court, and the justices were, essentially, asked to rule on the validity of the death penalty in light of the Eighth Amendment. The justices split into three factions. Marshall and Brennan felt that it indeed amounted to cruel and unusual punishment per se. Each cited evolving moral standards as one reason for their beliefs. Brennan, in addition, argued that capital punishment was degrading and humiliating and “does not comport with” the fundamental right to “human dignity.” Marshall stated that it was, in any case,
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, N.C., ILL., PENN.
Sept. 25 USA: On death penalty, confidence does not replace truth 2000: Frank Lee Smith is posthumously exonerated — he’d died 11 months earlier — 14 years after being convicted of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl. The eyewitnesses were wrong. 2001: Charles Fain is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl. The scientific testimony was wrong. 2002: Ray Krone is exonerated and set free 10 years after being sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a bar worker. The scientific testimony was wrong. 2003: John Thompson is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for murder. The prosecutors hid exculpatory scientific evidence and the eyewitnesses were wrong. 2004: Ryan Matthews is exonerated and set free 5 years after being sentenced to death for killing a convenience store owner. The eyewitnesses were wrong. 2008: Kennedy Brewer is exonerated and set free 7 years after being sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter. The scientific testimony was wrong. 2010: Anthony Graves is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to death for the murder of an entire family. The sole eyewitness —who was himself the murderer — lied. I could make a much longer list. There are literally hundreds, of men and even a few women who have been exonerated and set free after being sentenced to death, life, 25, 60, even 400 years for awful things they did not do. I could make a longer list, but space is at a premium and there is more that needs saying here. They killed Troy Davis Wednesday night. He went to his death still proclaiming his innocence of the 1989 murder of a Savannah, Ga., police officer. Davis was convicted on “evidence” that boiled down to the testimony of 9 eyewitnesses, 7 of whom later recanted. But Spencer Lawton, who originally prosecuted the case, would not want you to worry your head about that. Hours before Davis was put to death, Lawton was quoted by CNN as saying he had no doubts about the case and was confident Davis was the killer. How much do you want to bet the prosecutors of Fain, Brewer, Krone or any of those hundreds of others would have said the same thing, expressed the same confidence? Without that confidence, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Meaning the death penalty, a flimsy edifice erected on the shaky premise that we always get it right, that human systems always work as designed, that witnesses make no mistakes, that science is never fallible, that cops never lie, that lawyers are never incompetent. You have to believe that. You have to make yourself believe it. Otherwise, how do you sleep at night? So of course a prosecutor speaks confidence. What else is he going to speak? Truth? Truth is too big, too dangerous, too damning. Truth asks a simple question: In what field of endeavor have we always gotten it right? And you know the answer to that. So truth is too pregnant for speaking. Better to avert your eyes and profess your confidence. But one day, too late for Troy Davis, too late for too many, truth will out. Godspeed that day the cards come tumbling down. (source: Column, Leonard Pitts, Jr., Miami Herald) ** Death penalty revisited UNRELIABLE eyewitnesses, the impact of race on a jury in the Deep South, the difficulty of proving innocence once convicted: Troy Davis’ long journey through the United States judicial system has hit nearly every sensitive button in America’s complex relationship with the death penalty. Hundreds of protesters gather at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest the planned execution of Troy Anthony Davis on Sept. 20. He was executed the next day. On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles declined a final clemency bid by Davis, 42, who has spent 20 years on death row for the murder of an off-duty Savannah, Ga., police officer in 1989. The board reaffirmed the validity of the original conviction by a jury of his peers. He was executed by lethal injection Wednesday evening. But to many legal experts, doubts raised about Davis’ guilt after his conviction raise new questions about the Supreme Court’s determination that so-called “executive clemency” — the power of a governor or review board to commute a death row sentence — is an adequate fail-safe for assessing death row innocence claims. “If a case like this doesn’t result in clemency, which is a discretionary process that calls a halt to an execution based on doubt surrounding the integrity of the verdict, then it suggests that clemency as a traditional fail-safe is not adequate,” says James Acker, a criminologist at SUNY-Albany. “The Davis case raises doubts about the discretionary clemency process and ultimately raises doubts about whether the legal system can tolerate this potential error in allowing
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
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[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 25 USA: Only conservatives can end the death penalty. How can we end the death penalty in the United States? Every so often, one capital case receives wide attention and makes a public spectacle of the American machinery of death. Last week, it was the controversy over Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia after years of impassioned argument, organizing and litigation. I honor those who worked so hard to save Davis’ life because they forced the nation to deal with all of the uncertainties, imperfections and, in some instances, brutalities of the criminal justice system. Yet after all the tears are shed and after the last candlelight vigil ends with a prayer, the repeal of capital punishment is still a political question. Can the politics of this question change? The answer is plainly yes. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1966, more Americans opposed the death penalty than supported it — by 47 % to 42 %. But the crime wave that began in the late 1960s and the sense that the criminal justice system was untrustworthy sent support for capital punishment soaring. By 1994, 80 % of Americans said they favored the death penalty and only 16 % were opposed. Since then, the numbers have softened slightly. Over the last decade, the proportion of Americans declaring themselves against capital punishment has bumped around between 25 % and 32 %. The mild resurgence of opposition — caused by a decline in violent crime and by investigations raising doubts about the guilt of some prisoners on death row — has opened up political space for action. Forgive me, fellow liberals, but we’re not going to be the ones who lead this fight. Too many Democratic politicians remember how the death penalty was used in campaigns during the 1980s and ‘90s, notably by George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988. They’re still petrified of looking “soft” on crime. Moreover, winning this battle will require converting Americans who are not liberals. The good news is that many of our fellow citizens are open to persuasion. Gallup’s own polling shows that support for capital punishment drops sharply when respondents are offered the alternative of “life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole.” When Gallup presented this option in its 2010 survey, only 49 % still chose the death penalty; 46 % preferred life without parole. And a survey last year for the Death Penalty Information Center by Lake Research Partners showed that if a variety of alternatives were offered to respondents (including life without parole plus restitution to victims’ families), hard support for the death penalty could be driven down to 33 %. If a majority is open to persuasion, the best persuaders will be conservatives — particularly the overlapping groups of religious conservatives and opponents of abortion — who have moral objections to the state-sanctioned taking of life or see the grave moral hazard involved in the risk of executing an innocent person. There have always been conservatives who opposed the death penalty, but perhaps now their voices will be heard. In Ohio this summer, state Rep. Terry Blair, a Republican and a staunch foe of abortion, declared flatly: “I don’t think we have any business in taking another person’s life, even for what we call a legal purpose or what we might refer to as a justified purpose.” Last week, Don Heller, who wrote the 1978 ballot initiative that reinstated the death penalty in California, explained in the Los Angeles Daily News why he had changed his mind. “Life without parole protects public safety better than a death sentence,” he wrote. “It’s a lot cheaper, it keeps dangerous men and women locked up forever, and mistakes can be fixed.” The most moving testimony against Troy Davis’ execution came from a group of former corrections officials who, as they wrote, “have had direct involvement in executions.” “No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt,” they said. “Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative?” We live in an unreasonable time when political ideology has built a thick wall that blocks us from acknowledging that some of the choices we face are tragic. Perhaps we can make an exception in this case and have a quiet conversation about whether our death-penalty system really speaks for our best selves. And I thank those conservatives, right-to-lifers, libertarians and prison officials who, more than anyone else, might make such a dialogue possible. (source: Column, E.J. Dionne; He is a twice-weekly columnist for the Washington Post Writers' Group and a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, a professor at Georgetown University and a NPR commentatorWashington Post) *** Ebenezer pastor continues fight against death
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 24 USA: Troy Davis execution protest confronts support for death penaltyWhile the Troy Davis execution may not be a game-changer for the death penalty, it has become part of a growing conversation about ensuring that innocent people aren't killed or die in prison. The execution Wednesday of Troy Davis, a Georgia death row inmate who convinced thousands across the world of his innocence, capped a sobering week of death penalty debate likely to play into shifting attitudes in the US over the ultimate sanction. The execution, also on Wednesday, in Texas of Lawrence Brewer, convicted of dragging a black man to death in 1998, led to the elimination of the execution day last meal in Texas after Mr. Brewer ordered an elegant feast that he declined to eat. Also this week, the US Supreme Court stayed the executions of two other Texas men in order to further review their innocence claims, while Alabama went forward with the 36th execution of the year in the US on Thursday, leading to the death of Derrick Mason for a 1994 murder. And lingering anger over the execution of Mr. Davis led filmmaker Michael Moore to urge a boycott of Georgia, which he called a murderous state. Taken together, these events aren't likely by themselves to spark reforms of the US death penalty system, which relies largely on states to mete out justice. Even as Davis supporters vow to keep up the fight to abolish the sanction, the loose coalition of human rights groups struggled to come up with a plan for where to focus their appeals next. His case could set in motion a chain reaction that galvanizes the innocence movement and put even more pressure on the justice system to get serious about reform, writes Dax Devlon-Ross, the author of a novel, Make Me Believe, about the execution of an innocent man. Or it could just be another moment. But while the Davis execution may not be a game-changer for the death penalty, it did become part of a growing conversation — more across kitchen tables than legislative chambers — about the courts' ability to ensure that innocent people aren't killed or die in prison. Troy Davis, whose case sparked a rare Supreme Court ruling for a new evidentiary hearing, built a phalanx of support on the fact that 7 of 9 eyewitnesses recanted or changed their testimony, which helped turn public opinion, including those of world leaders like Pope Benedict and President Jimmy Carter, in his favor. The European Union issued a statement against the execution of Davis, saying serious and compelling doubts have persistently surrounded the evidence on which Mr. Davis was convicted. But it's likely that not just the prosecutor and the victim's family were the only ones convinced of Davis' guilt in killing off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail outside a Burger King in 1989. Court after appeals court upheld the conviction. Last week, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles failed for a 4th time to be convinced by arguments of faulty ballistics testing and the alleged confession of another man to the crime. Davis was convicted in 1991 after witnesses — including strangers — testified they saw him shoot MacPhail as the officer came to the rescue of a homeless man that two men, including Davis, were pistol-whipping after he refused to give them a beer. Davis was also convicted of shooting another man earlier in the evening, with a gun that ballistics testing tied to the MacPhail murder scene. No conclusive physical evidence tied Davis to the crime, and he maintained his innocence until the end, telling MacPhail's family before the execution that he did not personally kill the officer, adding, I did not have a gun. While the bar for convincing courts of post-conviction innocence is high, Federal District Court Judge William T. Moore last year found the changed testimony unreliable and unconvincing. Defense attorneys, moreover, were loathe to put 2 eyewitnesses who substantively recanted their testimony on the stand at that hearing because of concerns about cross-examination. Critics say the global outpouring of support for Troy Davis was disingenious, an example of death penalty opponents picking sympathetic cases to tout while ignoring other claims of innocence, such as those expressed by Mr. Brewer, who was also executed Wednesday, in Texas, for the killing of James Byrd in a race-motivated dragging. While protesters helped shape the coverage of the execution, they ultimately came up against the determination of the court system as a brief delay in the execution as the US Supreme Court considered an appeal gave way to a lethal injection after the court, after several hours' consideration, dismissed the plea. There was this invisible support for the execution that didn't need to be shaped or guided, and I think Troy Davis supporters were blindsided by that invisible support, Michael Leo Owens, a political science professor at
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news------USA
Sept. 19 USA: The Death Penalty: Why We Fight for Equal JusticeThe Buck and Davis cases are a reminder of how far we've come, and how far we have to go, toward fair and accurate capital punishment in America Last week, Texas officials refused to halt the execution of Duane Edward Buck even though his 1997 capital murder trial was concernedly tainted by unconstitutional racial testimony from an expert witness. The Supreme Court, which temporarily blocked the execution, will review Buck's case later this month. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Georgia officials plan to execute convicted murderer Troy Davis, whose guilt is much more in doubt today than it was two decades ago when he was sentenced to die. Despite the public protests over Davis's fate, the justices in Washington will likely have to intervene there, too, if his life is to be spared while the new evidence is meaningfully re-examined. Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court first took away the death penalty, we may be closer than many people think to another turning point on capital punishment.At a Republican presidential debate earlier this month, just the mere mention of Rick Perry's record execution rate -- he's overseen more executions than any governor in modern history -- generated a primal war-whoop from the partisan crowd. And as to the solemnity of the act itself, of the lethal injection execution protocol whereby the government prematurely ends a natural life in the name of the people? Evidently it has become so routine in the Lone Star State that the governor qua presidential candidate was fundraising in Jefferson County, Iowa on the night Buck was scheduled to die. I can't imagine a more solemn or important function for an elected official than presiding over an execution. But for Gov. Perry, it was just another day out of state on the campaign trail. He was available by cellphone. The roiling uncertainty surrounding the Buck and Davis cases is a sad but timely reminder that the center has not held on capital punishment in America. The legal compact demanded by the United States Supreme Court when it reinstituted capital punishment as a sentencing option in 1976 has been broken, repeatedly, not by convicts, but by hundreds of overzealous administrators of the nation's justice systems. In Texas, Georgia, Florida, and in the other states which continue to push capital punishment, the law in capital cases now is mostly used as a weapon -- not as a shield for the individual against the might of government. It is not justice under law. And it is certainly not equal justice under the law. It is instead far too often a perversion of justice -- and of the Court's well-meant precedent. In the modern era of capital punishment -- since the Supreme Court's decision in Gregg v. Georgia -- three main camps have emerged. First, there are those who are for the death penalty all the way; the ones who lament the time and money it takes from trial to execution. Then, there are those who are against capital punishment all the way; the ones who believe that the state should never be in the business of killing its own citizens. And between the two solitudes, there is a vast middle; those who believe that there is a place for the death penalty, but only if it can be administered fairly and accurately, free from the sort of arbitrary and capricious decision-making that pushed the justices to do away with it in the first place in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia. With the Buck case coming back around later this month, with the Davis case right before us this week, with a leading presidential candidate making his capital punishment record a point of political pride, and with the Tea Party crowd cheering execution statistics, now seems as good a time as any to dig around a little at this strange legal confluence we've come to on the death penalty. Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court first took away the death penalty, we may be closer than many people think to another turning point on capital punishment. We may be reaching the Icarus point -- and don't say I didn't warn you. Hobbes v. Locke When the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976 in a brief per curiam opinion, it congenially (and conveniently) assumed an awful lot of unapparent virtue and goodness in the present and future participants of the criminal justice system. Justice Byron White, the Kennedy appointee who turned out to a staunchly conservative vote, endorsed Georgia's new death penalty statutes, writing that the law: not only guides the jury in its exercise of discretion as to whether or not it will impose the death penalty for first-degree murder, but also gives the Georgia Supreme Court the power and imposes the obligation to decide whether in fact the death penalty was being administered for any given class of crime in a discriminatory, standardless, or rare fashion. If that court properly performs the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 10 USA: From Wall Street to death row: Lawyer finds a calling in ministry When a prison chaplain first asked Dale Recinella to minister to the inmates at Apalachee Correctional Institution, Recinella's first thought was, Absolutely not. He never wanted to step foot inside a prison. Locked doors and small spaces make him sweat. But he had to consider: Was this God's will? He convened a family meeting to ask his wife and five kids what they thought. They all had their Bibles open to Matthew 25:26: I was in prison and you came to visit me. You always say that Jesus meant what He said, one daughter piped up. Well, he said this. Still not convinced, Recinella sought the advice of his pastor and his spiritual advisor. They were unanimous. God was calling him to this work. The former high-powered attorney, who was used to top-down decision-making, surrendered. Into prison he would go. Today, Recinella spends several days a week visiting death row inmates, getting to all 400 by the end of the month. And he sweats. The cells have no air conditioning and in the summer it feels like a furnace. But the worst part is witnessing executions. He's seen 5 of them. In his recently published book, Now I Walk on death row, Recinella writes about the spiritual journey that led him from a lucrative job as a finance lawyer to his ministry with death row inmates. On Sunday, he'll discuss the highlights of his book at 2 p.m. at the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas More. His talk is sponsored by Pax Christi, the Florida Catholic Conference and Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty. The story line is really about what God can do with us if we let him, Recinella said during a phone interview. I write about where he led us. Shirley Poore, a personal friend and a member of Pax Christi, said many people don't want to follow that inner voice. It will take you where you don't want to go, she said. But Dale is one of those people who listened. (The book) is the story about having the guts to do that. The Rev. Bernyce Clausell, pastor emeritus of Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, said she couldn't put the book down. Every spare moment I got, she said, I was reading it. His images of the conditions in the prison still haunt her, especially the description of one of the botched lethal injections he witnessed. He did what he could to make the conditions better, she said. He kept fighting the fight. I give him credit for telling the story. Giving up control Recinella said surrendering to God's will doesn't come naturally - that the 1st-generation Italian lawyer in him wants to do things his way. And in his case, figuring out what to do in life isn't just about him, it's about his whole family. I'm a married man with five children, so this has to be something the whole family is called to, he said. This is not a cowboy's journey. Recinella grew up in Detroit, the oldest of eight children. When he was 9, he experienced his 1st real tragedy - his younger sister, Jan, contracted encephalitis and never walked or talked again. She spent most of her life in a home for severely ill children. He begged God to take the life out him and give it to her, but nothing happened. As a teenager he entered a seminary, thinking if he became a priest, God would heal his sister. But seminary didn't work out. By his early 20s, he was married with 2 children and finishing up his law degree. After graduation, his career took off and by the early 1980s he was living in Miami and working as a public finance lawyer representing state and local governments on Wall Street. But his life was a mess. He drank. He smoked. In 1982, he got divorced. A year later, a 2nd marriage bombed. One day when he was drinking wine and vodka and smoking filterless Camels, his brother, Gary, came over. Gary suggested he give his life to Jesus. Recinella hardly could take it in. But his brother's sincerity impressed him. In his book, Recinella described that moment: Okay, I say with a nod, sweeping my hand in a gesture that takes in the empty rooms of my empty house and my empty soul. What have I got to lose? It's the first of many such decisions that propel him on his spiritual path. Finding their calling 2 years later, Recinella married his 3rd wife, Susan, and in 1986, they moved to Tallahassee and bought a spacious home in Highgrove. They became involved with Good News Ministries, Habitat for Humanity and Big Bend Cares. Still, they began to question if they were being called to do something more. They eventually downsized and moved to midtown where they could be closer to the people they were ministering to. Recinella started working part time and then quit altogether to become a stay-at-home dad. Later, the family sold all their belongings and went to Rome to live in an intentional Christian community. In 1998 they were back in the states searching for what to do
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Sept. 7 USA: US court allows life terms for juveniles A US federal appeals court today held that juveniles convicted of murder can be sentenced to life in prison without parole, seeking to settle a lingering debate over how the courts punish minors who commit serious offences. The US Supreme Court has already ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to death and that they also can't be sentenced to life in prison without parole for rape and other non-homicide offences. The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals today, though, upheld life sentences for juveniles convicted of murder. The decision came in the case against Kenneth Loggins, who was convicted in Alabama of killing a hitchhiker in 1994 and originally sentenced to die. He was 17 at the time of the killing, so his punishment was reduced to life without parole because the Supreme Court banned such executions in 2005. His lawyers had urged the 3-judge panel to broaden a 2010 Supreme Court ruling to include murders. That 5-4 ruling held that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole if they haven't killed anyone, and ordered the courts to allow them a meaningful opportunity to obtain release. But prosecutors argued that the high court took pains to specify the ruling only applied in non-homicide cases, and the 11th Circuit said it found no reason to toss out Loggins' prison sentence. The decision, written by Circuit Judge Ed Carnes, said there's nothing in law or logic to support the argument that a state shouldn't be allowed to impose the next most severe punishment if a death penalty sentence is banned. The 11th Circuit has jurisdiction over federal cases in Georgia, Alabama and Florida, but lawyers in other areas will likely use the opinion to back up their own arguments. Mr Carnes had been the head of Alabama's capital punishment unit before he joined the court in 1992. He also wrote that the state shouldn't be blocked from imposing the prison sentence because it lacked the clairvoyance to know that the Supreme Court would do an about-face and rule out death sentences for 17-year-old murderers. In the decision, he said only a few jurisdictions have repealed laws permitting life without parole sentences for homicides committed by juveniles, and that the national consensus seems to be in favour of keeping those laws on the books. The long-term national trend is not away from life without parole sentences for homicides committed by juveniles but toward them, he said. The ruling comes in a case involving the gruesome murder of a woman, who was picked up by Loggins and three other teens and taken to a secluded rural area as she was travelling to her mother's home in Louisiana. One of the men hit the woman in the head with a beer bottle and then tackled her when she tried to run away, and all four savagely kicked her, the court said. When they realised she was still alive after the vicious beating, Loggins stood on her throat until she died, the ruling said. Loggins and two others later mutilated the body by cutting off her fingers and thumbs and removing part of a lung. They were arrested after one of the teens was reported to have been showing one of the victim's severed fingers to friends. The 3 others - who were 19, 17 and 16 at the time of the killing - were also convicted of the slaying and sentenced to either death or life in prison. (source: Adelaide Now) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, FLA.
Sept. 5 USA/OKLAHOMA: Capital punishment a costly option “I no longer believe you can fix the death penalty. (It) throws millions of dollars down the drain. Give a law enforcement professional like me that $250 million, and I’ll show you how to reduce crime. The death penalty isn’t anywhere on my list.— New Jersey Police Chief James Abbott Those Jersey boys know how to lay it on the line. Abbott made that observation years ago when asked his opinion of whether his state should scrap its costly deathpenalty law. New Jersey did so in 2007. Forget all the arguments about the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment — if it is a powerful deterrent or morally repugnant, if its use is appropriate for worst-of-the-worst crimes. Should death-penalty laws eventually go by the wayside here and elsewhere, their demise won’t be based on philosophical debates. The issue will come down to the bottom line. In this era of fiscal peril, legislatures and voters must decide: Do they continue sustaining the nation’s most expensive punishment option — for a relatively small number of convicted murders — when other needs, including education, health care, infrastructure and public safety, go wanting? Budget cutbacks in Oklahoma since 2008 have resulted in layoffs and the drastic slashing of services and programs. The state’s safety net, which so many people rely upon, is ripping at the seams. Prisons are at capacity, yet the per-capita violent crime rate remains among the highest in the U.S. No reliable figures exist for how much Oklahoma deathpenalty system costs. Suffice it to say it’s tens of millions of dollars. Throwing political caution to the wind, some leaders have suggested dropping the death penalty. State Sen. Constance Johnson, DOklahoma City, was roundly ignored when she proposed scrapping that system and going to a far less costly lifewithout- parole system. A few states have abolished their systems in light of cost. In the 34 states with a death penalty, some are asking: Can the needs of so many be sacrificed to pay for punishment of so few? Death row numbers Nationally, about 3,200 people are on state and federal death rows, including 69 in Oklahoma. The average cost, from arrest to execution, for a single deathpenalty case ranges from $1 million to $3 million. Those costs, on a per-offender basis, rank as among the most expensive part of criminal justice systems. That fact has prompted countless studies, including an eye-popping one released in June in California. That state has the nation’s largest and costliest death row – 714 inmates. Since reinstating its death penalty in 1978, California has conducted nearly 2,000 capital trials and has executed 13 people. Over those 33 years, the death-penalty system cost the state $4.6 billion. Divided up, that equates to $308 million per execution. For a state teetering on the brink of financial collapse, here’s how the $4.6 billion broke down: pre-trial/trial costs, $1.94 billion, automatic appeals and state habeas corpus petitions, $0.925 billion, federal habeas petitions, $0.775 billion; costs of incarceration, $1 billion. In light of those costs, backers of a stalled legislative bill to abolish the death penalty recently kicked off a campaign to put the question on the November 2012 ballot. If approved, California’s death-penalty laws would become history. The measure would do something else, which could persuade voters to pass it: $100 million from the state’s general fund — the estimated savings from eliminating death row — would be distributed over the next 4 fiscal years to local police for solving more homicides and rapes. Death-penalty studies A North Carolina study also performed a cost-benefit analysis and found a $2 million difference between a death sentence and a lifewithout- parole sentence. In Texas, a death-penalty case costs about $3 million, 3 times the cost of imprisoning an inmate for 40 years. In Maryland, a death-penalty case costs about three times more than a case in which the prosecutor does not seek the death penalty, according to an Urban Institute study. Since 2000, death sentences across the U.S. have dropped precipitously. A 2008 poll of police chiefs, often cited by Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., produced surprising answers. Almost all the chiefs surveyed ranked the death penalty last among their priorities for crimefighting, saying that they did not believe — based on murder rates — that it deterred homicides. Most rated it as the least efficient use of limited taxpayer dollars. New York abolished its death penalty in 2007. In the many years the law was on the books, no death sentences were upheld by its courts nor was any offender executed. New Mexico abolished its death penalty in 2009. The death penalty is widely favored in Oklahoma, which has the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, N.C.
Sept. 5 USA (NEW YORK): Cop Killer May Escape Death Penalty Because Of Low IQ The question has resurfaced: Is Ronell Wilson a developmentally disabled man who murdered 2 cops or is he just a cold-blooded killer deserving of lethal injection? Wilson, 28, is responsible for the 2003 execution-style murder of undercover NYPD detectives, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrew. Wilson was on death row in a state penitentiary for the slayings, but will now be resentenced in “Brooklyn Federal Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals tossed out his death sentence last summer due to prosecutorial error,” according to the New York Daily News. In 2009, the widows of the 2 slain detectives were as determined as ever to see Wilson put to death by lethal injection. In a prior statement, Rose Nemorin said, “It’s been (nearly) 7 years, but it’s a wound that’s always open.” This latest change in Wilson’s sentencing is, without a doubt, a slap in the face to the victims’ families who desperately want justice for their loved ones. However, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court determined it unconstitutional to execute a person whose IQ falls below 70. Wilson’s new defense team has cited four previous instances involving clients who are “mentally retarded”(MR). Using similar strategies from those prior cases to support their claim of MR, the defense argues that they need more time to prove that Wilson’s mental disability does exists. If they are able to do so, Wilson may not face the death penalty in the resentencing phase of the trial. Although it has not yet been determined if Wilson is MR, the trial will not stop, and the judge does expect him to undergo expert testing by government officials. “Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis declined to postpone the March 2012 date for a penalty phase in which a new jury will be selected to decide whether Wilson should die by lethal injection or get life in prison,” the Daily News reports. “I appreciate your desire to leave no stone unturned in your defense of Mr. Wilson …but I’m not going to delay the trial a minute longer than I have to, consistent with the defendant’s constitutional rights,” Garaufis said. Clearly opposed to further delays by the defense, Michael Palladino of the Detectives Endowment Association said, “I think it’s a charade to further delay the trial. And I think it’s an insult to those individuals who God did not bless with an intellect. (source: yourblackworld.com) NORTH CAROLINA: Tuesday hearing in Fayetteville case is 1st under Racial Justice Act Marcus Reymond Robinson killed a teen in a robbery in 1991 and was sentenced to death in 1994. Still on death row 17 years after his conviction, Robinson is scheduled today to be the 1st condemned inmate in North Carolina to present statistical evidence of racism per the new Racial Justice Act to convert his sentence to life without parole. It's an historical hearing, said Ken Rose, senior staff attorney at the N.C. Center for Death Penalty Litigation. This hearing will be about the prosecutors in Cumberland County, the prosecutors in the judicial division that Cumberland County is a part , and the prosecutors across the state. And it will be about their use of strikes in a disproportionate way to exclude African-American jurors from service. The Racial Justice Act, enacted 2 years ago, gives death row inmates the opportunity to prove that their death sentences are the product of racism in the criminal justice system. Robinson is black. His victim, 17-year-old Erik Tornblom, was white. According to the record, Robinson and another man conspired to rob Tornblom. They forced Tornblom at gunpoint to drive them to a side street. Robinson shot him in the face, and then Robinson and the other man split $27 from his wallet and took his car. The other man, Roderick Williams, is serving life in prison. Robinson's lawyers have statistics that they say proves there is racism in the system. They say that in cases with white victims, the defendants, regardless of race, are more likely to be sentenced to death than in cases in which none of the victims were white. The law allows statistical trends to serve as proof of racism in the system. In court papers, prosecutors deny that racism had anything to do with Robinson's death sentence. Robinson's motion makes no allegation of racism in his case, wrote Assistant District Attorney Cal Colyer in a motion filed Aug. 16, and provides no evidence of it. Colyer argued that Robinson therefore is not entitled to a hearing to present evidence of racism. Defense lawyer Malcolm Tye Hunter of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation is one of Robinson's lawyers. He said Friday that he plans to offer a witness to testify about statistics. Statewide, 151 out of North Carolina's 158 death row inmates have Racial Justice Act claims pending. (source: Fayetteville Observer)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, US MIL., GA., NEV., LA.
Aug. 28 USA: Just how fair does justice have to be? The U.S. Supreme Court is getting ready to hear argument in the upcoming term on a core issue of the nation's legal system, one that goes to the heart of fairness in criminal cases -- under what circumstances do prosecutors have to reveal evidence that might help defendants show innocence? First, a disclaimer: You're about to read material on issues that should be of concern to every American who cares about the quality of U.S. society but usually dismissed by the average person. It largely concerns the rights of people who may be guilty of horrendous crimes. Technically, it comes under the heading of legal stuff. A major purveyor of legal stuff, the American Bar Association, says it's time to broaden the obligations of prosecutors who would just as soon Brady material -- evidence held by the prosecution that might help a defendant -- never see the light of day. Over the years, the courts have recognized that some prosecutors and police are so convinced of the guilt of some defendants, they are unwilling to introduce evidence that might needlessly confuse the issue in the minds of jurors. The Supreme Court's opinion in Brady vs. Maryland has been settled law for nearly 5 decades. In the case, a prosecutor had withheld from the defense evidence that might have helped John Brady, the defendant convicted in a murder trial, avoid the death penalty. The high court ruled 7-2 that suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates constitutional due process -- where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, regardless of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. But the court majority also said when the Maryland Court of Appeals restricted the defendant's new trial to the question of punishment -- the guilty verdict would stand -- it did not deny him due process or equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment, since the suppressed evidence was admissible only on the issue of punishment. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the majority opinion, but Justice William Brennan announced it. Petitioner and a companion ... were found guilty of murder in the 1st degree and were sentenced to death, their convictions being affirmed by the Court of Appeals of Maryland, Douglas wrote, adding, Their trials were separate, petitioner being tried first. At his trial Brady took the stand and admitted his participation in the crime, but he claimed that (Donald) Boblit (the companion) did the actual killing. And, in his summation to the jury, Brady's counsel conceded that Brady was guilty of murder in the 1st degree, asking only that the jury return that verdict without capital punishment.' Before trial, petitioner's counsel had requested the prosecution to allow him to examine Boblit's extrajudicial statements -- those statements not admitted as evidence. Several of those statements were shown to him; but one dated July 9, 1958, in which Boblit admitted the actual homicide, was withheld by the prosecution and did not come to petitioner's notice until after he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced, and after his conviction had been affirmed. A constitutional violation, but the parameters of that violation weren't infinite. Douglas concluded: A sporting theory of justice might assume that if the suppressed confession had been used at the first trial, the judge's ruling that it was not admissible on the issue of innocence or guilt might have been flouted by the jury just as might have been done if the court had first admitted a confession and then stricken it from the record. But we cannot raise that trial strategy to the dignity of a constitutional right and say that the deprival of this defendant of that sporting chance through the use of a ... bifurcated trial ... denies him due process or violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. 48 years after Brady, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear argument in November in a Louisiana case that revisits the Brady issue. The ABA says it may be time to recognize obligations beyond the constitutional level. In that Louisiana case, Smith vs. Warden Cain, Juan Smith was convicted of five counts of murder in the Morrison Road case and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The state trial court, the state 4th Circuit Court of Appeal and the state Supreme Court all denied Smith's petition for review. Smith contends that the Louisiana courts disregarded established precedents on Brady material. There was plenty of murder to go around in the case. On the evening of Feb. 4, 1995, Tangie Thompson, her boyfriend, Andre White and her 3-year-old child were killed in their New Orleans residence on Roman Street. Juan Smith was convicted in the Roman Street case and sentenced to death for the 3 murders. On the evening of March 1, 1995, 3 armed men entered
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
Aug. 18 USA: Research Examines the Black-And-White Issues Surrounding Executions in the South An examination of post-emancipation executions in the South is revealing how race played a significant and under-examined role in executions. Annulla Linders, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of sociology, will present the research on Aug. 21, at the 106th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas. Linders combed through newspaper archives in the Library of Congress to examine the meanings and understandings about race and justice that were produced in newspaper accounts of legal, public executions of African-American convicts -- reports produced by white reporters for white readers. Previous research has suggested that capital punishment in the South was used against African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century to ensure and reinforce white domination, says Linders. However, she writes that, Partially concealed under the weight of oppression is evidence that the execution also served as a critical site of resistance. She explains that the executions of black convicts also became black cultural events that evolved into sites of black resistance to oppression. Thus it is evident, despite many accounts to the contrary, that the white authorities recognized the danger of using capital punishment as a form of racial domination, even as they held on to the belief that the (public) execution of black criminals was an important tool in the control and submission of blacks, writes Linders. Linders explains that while white justice was put on public display, there could be hundreds of African Americans congregating at the site, taking off work and traveling long distances. It's quite clear that these events posed a potential source of conflict. Thousands of black people are coming to town to see one black person publicly executed. So, there are two fundamental ways in which the reporters addressed that conflict, says Linders. One was to try to reassure readers that the black community also felt the event was a 'just' execution. Also, the portrayal of hostility served different purposes, primarily to justify the oppression. So it was a difficult balancing act for the news writers in downplaying the oppression and legitimizing it at the same time. Linders adds that the reports of the religious fervor of the audience was another signal that these executions had become sites for black resistance, adding that segregated churches were the sites where the Civil Rights Movement was eventually born. Taken together, the subversion of executions by black audience members fits into the much larger mobilization of black resistance throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, concludes Linders. The research was supported by the University of Cincinnati's Charles Phelps Taft Research Center. (source: Science Daily) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
July 30 USA (NEW YORK)possible federal death penalty Syracuse man could face federal death penalty for shooting of Kihary Blue Syracuse police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office this morning accused a member of the V-Not Gang of shooting Kihary Blue and setting off a cycle of retaliation that included the death of 20-month-old Rashaad Walker Jr. Kahari Smith, 26, of Syracuse, faces state and federal murder charges in the shooting of Blue, a former star athlete at Henninger High School who was home from college when he was killed. Smith is being held in police custody and is accused of 2nd-degree murder and 2nd-degree criminal possession of a weapon, said Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler. He will be arraigned on those charges in Syracuse City Court. At the same time, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Katko announced that a federal indictment accusing Smith of murder in aid of racketeering activity in the Blue shooting was unsealed. Smith will be arraigned on those charges in federal court. The case is being considered for the federal death penalty, Katko said. The federal indictment accuses Smith of shooting at a car on Nov. 26 that was traveling on Interstate 81 near the Interstate 690 interchange in Syracuse. Blue was riding in the car with several members of the Bricktown gang. The shots struck Blue, who died later at Upstate University Hospital and another person riding in the car. The shooting was in retaliation for an earlier shooting, the federal indictment said. Authorities also said during a morning news conference: Bricktown gang member Saquan Evans, 21, mistakenly believed that the 110 gang was behind the Blue shooting. Evans is accused of second-degree murder in the Nov. 28 fatal shooting of Rashaad Walker Jr., whose father was a member of the rival gang. (source: The Post-Standard) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, MD., FLA., ARIZ.
July 24 USA (RHODE ISLAND): DOJ to review possible RI death penalty case as custody battle looms in federal appeals court Lawyers on both sides of a Rhode Island murder case that has spawned a custody battle involving Gov. Lincoln Chafee are set to meet with the Department of Justice about whether the suspect will face the death penalty. Jason Pleau's defense attorney David Hoose says both sides meet on Monday with the DOJ's Capital Case Unit. The group will recommend to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder whether Pleau should face the death penalty if convicted of killing a man outside a bank last year. Pleau does not want to be transferred to federal custody, where he could face the death penalty. Chafee last month refused to surrender Pleau, citing the state's opposition to the death penalty. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals hears the custody case Thursday. (source: Associated Press) *** Video of a Lethal Injection Reopens Questions on the Privacy of Executions As Andrew Grant DeYoung died by lethal injection in a prison in Jackson, Ga., on Thursday night, a video camera watched silently. The camera recorded his last words — “I’m sorry for everyone I’ve hurt” — and his eyes blinking as the drugs took effect. It registered his last breaths and the time of his death: 8:04 p.m. For decades in the United States, what goes on inside the execution chamber has been largely shrouded from public view, glimpsed only through the accounts of journalists and other witnesses. But the video recording of Mr. DeYoung’s death, the first since 1992, has once again raised the possibility that executions might be made available for all to see. In the process, it has reignited a widespread debate about how bright a light to shine on one of the most secretive corners of the criminal justice system. Legal experts say the decision by Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Fulton County Superior Court to allow the taping in Mr. DeYoung’s case opens the way for defense lawyers across the country to push for the video documentation of other executions. And it is inevitable, many experts believe, that some of those recordings will make their way onto television or even YouTube, with or without the blessings of a court. Brian Kammer, a defense lawyer who argued for allowing Mr. DeYoung’s execution to be recorded, said that documenting the death was essential because of the controversy over the drugs used in lethal injections. “We’ve had 3 botched lethal injections in Georgia prior to Mr. DeYoung, and we thought it was time to get some hard evidence,” Mr. Kammer said. Mr. DeYoung, who was convicted of the 1993 murders of his parents and 14-year-old sister, was given a three-drug cocktail, including pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals. Critics have argued that the use of pentobarbital represents cruel and unusual punishment. In pushing for the video, the lawyers argued that there were problems with an execution in June in Georgia that used the drug; the condemned man, Roy Blankenship, was described by a medical expert as jerking, mumbling and thrashing after the injection was administered. According to an account of the execution in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. DeYoung “showed no violent signs in death.” Lawyers for the state attorney general opposed the recording, saying that it would threaten security and that “in this day and age of almost thoughtless dissemination of information, there exists a credible risk of public distribution.” After Mr. DeYoung’s execution, the video was sealed and sent to a judge’s chambers for safekeeping, and Mr. Kammer, for one, said he hoped it stayed hidden. “It’s a horrible thing that Andrew DeYoung had to go through, and it’s not for the public to see that,” he said. But Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University who commented on the issue on his blog, Sentencing and Law Policy, said, “I think it would be foolish for anybody who is authorizing or supervising the videotaping of executions to assume that it will always remain sealed and unseen.” Mr. Berman added, “Somewhere, somehow, at some point, this will become publicly accessible.” Whether that development would be beneficial or harmful has for years been a subject of much contention. Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School who is an expert on the death penalty, says videotaping executions is important because it provides objective evidence that is not dependent on eyewitness accounts. The decision to allow the recording of Mr. DeYoung’s death was a sign of the courts’ growing awareness of the need for transparency, Ms. Denno said. “Presumably,” she said, court officials “are going to act responsibly, and the tape will never see the light of day.” But if such videos become public, she said, it might not be such a bad thing. She noted that television cameras are allowed in
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Feb. 9 USAbook review To Kill Or Not by Peter Byrne Turow, Scott: Ultimate Punishment, A Lawyer's Reflections On Dealing With The Death Penalty, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NYC 2003, ISBN 0-330 42688 5 HB, 164 pages. Reversible Errors, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NYC 2002, ISBN 0-374-28160-2 HB, 433 pages. The case never was about the victim, or the defendant, or even what happened. Not really. For the cop and the lawyer and the judge you could never keep it from being about you. Reversible Errors, (Page 344). In the fall of 2001 Scott Turow made up his mind. He could no longer support capital punishment. The long road to his decision had never confined him to libraries or the groves of academe. A public prosecutor in Chicago and then a defending lawyer, he knew violent life and death on a big city level. His writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, always started with people. His essay Ultimate Punishment recounts the anxious itinerary that led him to speak out against the death sentence. Turow is also a novelist who has earned a place among the best authors of legal thrillers. One of these, Reversible Errors, replays the drama of the death penalty in terms of the real, error-prone actors and the faulty institutions that regulate their work. The 2 books are best considered together as one thoroughly detailed enquiry whose point of departure isn't abstract principle but experience as concrete as a lethal injection. And both books deserve our attention in the wake of a noisy presidential campaign that relegated capital punishment to the category of subjects too serious to risk talking about. In Slate, December 28, 2007, Niko Karvounis listed a number of campaign firsts before concluding: There's another first that's gone largely unnoticed: This is the first election in 20 years in which the death penalty isn't a go-to issue for conservatives. For a generation, Republican candidates wielded their fondness for executions like a weapon, and Democrats either summoned their own righteous bloodlust and embraced capital punishment, or avoided the subject altogether. But the Bush years have witnessed a steady shift in how Americans perceive the death penalty, and this time around, it's the last thing Republicans want to talk about. And yet, faced with an opportunity to seize the high ground in a debate they've been losing for decades, the Democrats can't summon the nerve. So, 2008 could go down in history as the year the Democrats had the chance to confront the death penalty -- and didn't. Literary men who oppose the death penalty generally agree with what George Orwell wrote in his essay The Hanging: I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. Victor Hugo, Feodor Dostoievski, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus all dwell on the inviolability of life, the mental torture involved in a programmed putting to death and the essential barbarity behind any such undertaking. Turow, a lawyer to his fingertips, leaves aside these sentiments. No more does he debate the classic arguments of principle. He passes over Cesare Beccaria's utilitarian objection that capital punishment is not a greater deterrent than life in prison. He's unfazed by Immanuel Kant's reasoning that in the case of murder, nothing but capital punishment can make the culprit realize the significance of the wrong done. And Turow is probably unconcerned that in fact his own position echoes Kant's great commonplace that only the guilty may be punished -- that a system of punishment that does not protect the innocent is immoral. For it's the prospect of error that motivated Turow's decision. Unlike these writers and thinkers, Turow doesn't dwell on the instant when life is snuffed out, nor does he build syllogisms on the philosophic heights. He starts at the beginning with the presumed criminal's arrest and follows through with a thorough study of the legal process. It's a hands-on perspective. He considers honest but mistaken eyewitnesses; cops under pressure to produce quick solutions; their habit of choosing one scenario and closing their eyes to all others; state's attorneys who while investigating must think of the next election; overworked defense lawyers insufficiently financed; confessions obtained by torture or deception, misguided pleading by the innocent; opportunist jailhouse snitches; irrational pressure from families of victims; and juries that by law must not include anyone disapproving of capital punishment. The shift in American opinion noted by Karvounis was anything but steady in Illinois. It exploded in 2000 when Governor George Ryan declared a death-penalty moratorium after the state had been forced to release 13 innocent victims from death row. His move put 167 death sentences on indefinite hold. Unfortunately, the image of the Republican governor as a moral crusader didn't survive the fact that he's now a convicted felon serving time for corruption. His biographer
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, MD.
Feb. 3 USA: The Tide Shifting Against the Death Penalty If there were such a thing as a golden age of capital punishment in America, it peaked in 1999. There were 98 executions in the U.S. that year, the highest number since 1976, when the Supreme Court, which had overturned all death penalty laws in 1972, began approving them again. For most of the 1990s the number of death sentences handed down annually by courts had been humming along in the range of 280 to 300 and above. And it had been years since the Supreme Court had done much to put limits on whom states could execute and how they could do it. A False Consensus on Lethal Injection A decade later, capital punishment has a lot less life in it. Last year saw just 37 executions in the U.S., with only 111 death sentences handed down. Though 36 states and the federal government still have death penalty laws on the books, the practice of actually carrying out executions is limited almost entirely to the south, the region where all but 2 of last year's executions took place. (The exceptions were both in Ohio.) Even in Texas, still the state leader in annual executions, only 10 men and 1 woman were sentenced to death last year, the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In recent years the Supreme Court has voted to forbid the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded, and barred the use of the death penalty for crimes that did not involve killings. And in 2007 they put executions all across the country on hold for eight months while they examined whether lethal injection, the most common means of executing prisoners, violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; in the end they ruled 7-2 that it did not. Even more significantly, where states once hurried to adopt death penalty laws, the pendulum now appears to be swinging in the other direction. In 2007 New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty. In that same year repeal bills were narrowly defeated in Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico, all of which are revisiting the issue this year. And now the focus is on Maryland. After years of failed attempts by death penalty opponents to bring a repeal bill to a vote in the state legislature, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is personally sponsoring this year's version, promising he will fight to have the legislature pass it during its current 90-day session. In his state of the state address last week O'Malley called capital punishment outdated, expensive and utterly ineffective. ( Death penalty opponents say the use of DNA evidence, which has led to a number of prisoners being released from death row, is a big part of the reason for the decline in executions generally. That's had a ripple effect, says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group. The whole legal system has become more cautious about the death penalty. Prosecutors are not seeking it as much. Juries are returning more life sentences. And judges are granting more stays of execution. Last year there were over 40. Maryland restored its death penalty in 1978, but it was 16 years before it carried out its 1st execution under the new law. Since then the state has put to death 4 more convicted killers, the last of them in 2005. Today there are five men on Maryland's death row, but the state suspended executions 2 years ago after its highest court ruled that regulations governing lethal injections had been adopted improperly. Until new protocols are in place, no executions can go forward, and the governor, a longtime death penalty opponent, has been in no hurry to issue them. Last year, after months of public hearings, a state commission on the death penalty voted 13-9 to recommend that it should be abolished. In its final report the commission, which had been headed by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, cited the usual objections to capital punishment cost, racial and jurisdictional disparities in sentencing, its ineffectiveness as a deterrent against crime and the possibility that innocent people might be put to death. One of the commission's members was Kirk Bloodsworth, who had been on death row in Maryland for 2 years in the mid-1980s before he was cleared by DNA evidence. Even so, repealing the Maryland death penalty is by no means a done deal. Bills to repeal it have been introduced repeatedly since the 1st of them 6 years ago, only to die every time in the Senate's judicial proceedings committee. And the make-up of that committee is no different now than it was 2 years ago, when the bill fell 1 vote short of the number needed to release it to the full Senate. But supporters of repeal think that this year, with the governor's support and the commission's verdict still fresh, the bill will make it to the floor for a vote that they are confident they will win. This year we have momentum to move it, says Jane Henderson, director of
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Jan. 21 USA: BOOKS: Love, life and death on Execution Row Writing for Their Lives: Death Row USA edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts University of Illinois Press, $19.95 IF I had nothing more to do each day than consider matters of life and death and all that happened in between from the confines of an 8ft x 8ft cell then I'd probably be a much better writer. I'd probably also go insane and hope to die before someone else killed me. The madness of death row in the USA is described in graphic detail in this collection of testimonies, short stories and poems. In addition to contributions from prisoners, included are accounts from people employed in the business of killing: defence lawyers, psychiatrists, spiritual advisers, abolitionists and executioners. The journey to a horrific and excruciating death is documented from a capital trial to the point of execution through the testimony of the prisoners themselves and those who love, watch, listen and write to them. It is an uncomfortable journey, however far removed you may be from the ultimate destination when you embark on it. Whether it is the careless humiliations heaped upon Martin Draughton's elderly and infirm mother by his jailers when she comes to visit him on death row in Texas, or the complicity of the guards in allowing a violent assault on Michael Ross, a serial killer from Connecticut, by another (non-death row) prisoner, conditions on death row mean it is nothing short of miraculous that residents make it to the death chamber at all. When they do, prisoners can expect to be gassed, injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs that shuts down the vital organs one by one, a process that can take up to half an hour to complete, or electrocution, depending on which state condemned them to die in the first place. In many states death row prisoners are not allowed any form of socialisation with each other and some are even denied their choice of spiritual adviser if they do not practice a recognised, sanctioned religion. Most moving, inevitably, are the testimonies of the prisoners themselves. Most do not question either their guilt or their fate, accepting their lot with resignation. It is a tragic expectation of American life that if you are poor or black or both then this is the way things have always been. It is the accounts from those in a position to effect change that carry the most weight. These include an account from former Illinois governor George Ryan, who became so concerned about miscarriages of justice on his watch that he took the unprecedented step of commuting the death sentences of all death row prisoners to life imprisonment. For anyone brave enough to wonder what being killed by the state entails, Erika Trueman details the final hours leading up to the execution of her friend Ignacio Ortiz. In stark prose she takes you inside the prison, allowing you to wait those excrutiating final hours with her before being taken to the death chamber. The curtain opened and we saw Ignacio. He was already strapped onto the gurney, with a white sheet covering him up to his neck. We could not see the straps that held him, nor could we see the needles they had inserted ready for the poison to flow. Ignacio lay still. His eyes shut and head towards the ceiling. An officer announced that there was no stay [of execution]. The microphone was switched off and the officer walked out without looking at the man waiting to die. Ignacio's head and chest heave up once as if he was choking. He breathes twice more, and lies still, his mouth slightly open. An officer came in and announced: 'Death at 3.05pm.' It was as if the man on the gurney did not exist, as if he had already gone, left his humanity behind like an old coat that one can just take off or put on as one pleases. Very few books have the power to change the world. This book is unlikely to be the exception. And for that we should all be very sorry indeed. (source: Tribune Magazine; Cary Gee) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
Jan. 19 USA: 9/11 suspects declare guilt at Gitmo war court 2 alleged orchestrators of the 2001 attacks on America casually declared their guilt on Monday in a messy and perhaps final session of the Guantanamo war crimes court. This week's military hearings could be the last at Guantanamo President-elect Barack Obama has said he would close the offshore prison and many expect him to suspend the military tribunals and order new trials in the U.S. Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the terrorist attacks, were unapologetic about their roles during a series of outbursts as translators struggled to keep up and the judge repeatedly sought to regain control. We did what we did; we're proud of Sept. 11, announced Binalshibh, who has said he wants to plead guilty to charges that could put him to death. The judge must first determine if he is mentally competent to stand trial. Mohammed shrugged off the potential death sentence for the murder of nearly 3,000 people in the Sept. 11 attacks. We don't care about capital punishment, said Mohammed, whose thick gray beard flows to the top of his white prison jumpsuit. We are doing jihad for the cause of God. Mohammed, representing himself, insisted that a uniformed lawyer assigned to assist him be removed from his defense table, saying he represents the people who tortured me. In another diatribe over secrecy, the acknowledged terrorist ridiculed the government's position that national security had to be protected. They want to hide their black sites, their torture techniques, he said. Told by the judge to limit his remarks to a legal issue being discussed at that moment, Mohammed bristled: This is terrorism, not court. You don't give me the opportunity to talk. Mohammed has openly sought to become a martyr at the hands of the Americans. He threw his death-penalty trial into disarray in December when he declared that he would confess to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks. In March 2007, he told a military panel that he played a central role in about 30 other terrorist plots around the world. Separately, a judge held pretrial hearings for Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a grenade during a battle in Afghanistan in 2002. Lawyers for the Toronto, Canada native want to exclude statements they say Khadr made through torture and coercion. Prosecution witnesses denied their allegation. One, identified only as interrogator 11, characterized some sessions as lighthearted, and testified that he always came in smiling and very willing to talk to us. In both cases, judges denied defense requests to make the Pentagon arraign the men all over again after withdrawing and refiling charges in about 20 cases, a step the Pentagon described as merely procedural. The judge in the Sept. 11 case, Army Col. Stephen Henley, acknowledged doubts about the future of the hearings, saying one legal matter could be addressed at later sessions, if later sessions are scheduled. Lawyers and representatives of human rights groups who observed the hearings believe Obama will suspend the military commission system created by Congress and President George W. Bush in 2006 to prosecute dozens of men held at Guantanamo. Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, in his confirmation hearing, said the commissions lack sufficient legal protections for the defendants, and said they could be tried in the United States. The military commissions should be at the very least suspended immediately, said Gabor Rona, observing as the international legal director of New York-based Human Rights First. I'm certainly optimistic and hopeful that it will happen as one of the first orders of business. (source: Associated Press) ___ DeathPenalty mailing list DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/ ~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
here is a current breakdown of impending USA executions thus far in 2009: execution by month: January (8 total)--in Texas--6 in rest of USA2 February (6 total)-in Texas--3 in rest of USA3 March (6 total)in Texas--4 in rest of USA2 April (3 total)in Texas--1 in rest of USA2 Total:Texas--14 rest of USA-9
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ORE. FLA.
Jan. 5 USA: Even killers don't deserve to die THANKS TO the Globe for pointing out good reasons to oppose the death penalty (Cruel and more unusual, Editorial, Dec. 28). Left unmentioned, however, was any argument against a common justification for execution: murderers deserve to die because they freely choose to kill. Were we to take a fully scientific, cause and effect view of the genesis of a killer's character, motives, state of mind, and situation, we would no longer suppose that he could have done otherwise given his genetic and environmental history, and his current circumstances, internal and external. This view doesn't diminish the moral gravity of the offense or the necessity to protect society, but it calls into question the free will justification for retributive punishment. As psychologists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen conclude in their 2004 paper, For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything: Free will as we ordinarily understand it is an illusion generated by our cognitive architecture. Retributivist notions of criminal responsibility ultimately depend on this illusion. Give up the illusion, and we've got another good reason to oppose the death penalty: Killers don't deserve to die. THOMAS W. CLARKSomerville; The writer is director of the Center for Naturalism. (source: Letter to the Editor, Boston Globe) OREGON: Oregon justice suggests death penalty review An Oregon Supreme Court justice has recommended that the court review the constitutionality of the death penalty. Justice Martha Walters wrote in a concurring opinion on a Portland case that the court should consider Oregon's experience with the death penalty and again examine its constitutionality. Her recommendation came as the court affirmed the aggravated murder conviction and the death penalty for Michael Andre Davis. Although Davis had been a suspect since the November 1991 killing of a couple at a Portland hotel, prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to convict him until 2005. (source: Associated Press) FLORIDA: 2 face death penalty in family's killing Prosecutors in West Palm Beach, Fla., say they'll use fingerprints found on a turnpike toll card to link 2 men to the slayings of a family of 4. Federal death penalty trials are to begin this week for Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez Sr., charged with the execution-style shooting deaths of Yessica Escobedo, 25, and Jose Luis Escobedo, 28, and their 2 sons. Yessica's arms were wrapped around the bodies of 4-year-old Luis Damien and 3-year-old Luis Julian when the family's bodies were found Oct. 13, 2006 along the Florida Turnpike in Port St. Lucie, the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post reported Monday. Fingerprints on a toll card found in the Escobedos abandoned Jeep led police to Troya and Sanchez, who allegedly knew Jose Escobedo through drug runs he brokered between Texas and Florida, police said. The family's Jeep was found 3 days after the killings about 70 miles from the crime scene, police said. Troya and Sanchez have said they were 50 miles from the crime scene at the time of the shootings, said their lawyer, Donnie Murell. (source: United Press International)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, CALIF., ILL.
Jan. 3 USA: Religions, American Public Differ on Death Penalty Many religious groups advocate the abolition of the death penalty. On the other hand, strong evangelistic church communities are in favor of it. The Pew forum has researched the different positions religious groups have about capital punishment across the United States. Their findings reveal that religions have different points of view on the subject of taking a life as a means of formal retribution. In the midst of war in many places, the issue of capital punishment is one that is being discussed, especially concerning acts of terror. In the United States, the issue of capital punishment has long been debated in churches and in the halls of government. With the increase in crime that experts maintain accompanies recessions, this debate is likely to be part of the discussion. The trend around the world is towards abolishing the death penalty, but in America most people are in favor of it. Since religious groups are thought of as exercising some moral authority on questions like these, it is important to know what they believe on the matter of the death penalty. Those religions thought of as having Asian influence, such as Buddhists and Hindus, have various beliefs on the matter of life and death as discussed in articles about the issue of the death penalty. Although there is no specific position for Buddhists about capital punishment, their tenets advocate nonviolence and appreciate of all life. It is rare that capital punishment is given for any crime. Hindus have no writings on the matter, and therefore adherents of Hinduism have different beliefs about it. The Catholic Church in the United States has repeatedly called for discontinuance of capital punishment in all situations. Although the Catechism says that the death penalty is possible under certain conditions, the formal church has taken a stand against it. Protestants are of differing views, depending upon denomination. The Episcopal Church has taken a stand against the death penalty since 1958. The Evangelical Lutheran Church has no official position about it, whereas its sister church, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has stated that capital punishment is in accord with the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions. Mormons leave the matter to the States or civil law. The National Association of Evangelicals supports capital punishment. The Presbyterians have been against capital punishment for nearly 50 years whereas the Southern Baptists believe in the death penalty so long as it is enforced equitably. The Unitarian-Universalists and the Methodists are opposed to capital punishment, the former for decades and the Methodists since 2000. The umbrella group for Christians, the National Council of Churches, is on record as against the death penalty. With the violence in the Middle East on both sides, Jew and Muslim, perhaps it is important to know what these groups believe. In the United States there is no official Muslim position, but in Islamic countries capital punishment is undertaken if there is intentional harm or threat to the state or intentional murder or physical harm of another person. This includes the spread of terror. All of the major Jewish groups advocate either the abolition of the death penalty or a moratorium on its use. (source: Digital Journal) CALIFORNIA: Man charged in shooting deaths of 2 people A 46-year-old Los Angeles man was charged with murder today for the shooting deaths of 2 victims, including a civilian employee of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Deputy District Attorney Joseph Shidler said Leonard Mitchell is charged with 2 counts of murder with a gun use allegation and a special circumstance allegation of multiple murder, making Mitchell eligible for the death penalty. Mitchell is due to be arraigned today in Department 30 of the Foltz Criminal Justice Center. He is being held without bail. Following a verbal confrontation, the defendant allegedly shot multiple rounds from a handgun at victim Alexander Castro. The victim, who was inside of his vehicle at the time of the alleged attack, was hit several times, including twice in the head. Castro was pronounced dead at the scene. Adriana Pizarro, an employee at the Compton Sheriff's station, was shot in the eye while standing in front of her residence 150 feet away. Pizarro was transported to a hospital where she died. If convicted as charged, Mitchell faces the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole. The District Attorney's office will not decide until the case moves closer to trial whether to seek the death penalty against the defendant. (source: Contra Costa Times) ILLINOIS: Court OKs Death Penalty Against Quadruple-Killer A federal appeals court ruled today that Indiana can reinstate the death penalty against a convicted quadruple-killer. Last year, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago heard arguments about
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, ALA., GA., OHIO
Jan. 1 USA: Abatement of capital punishment continues in U.S. Executions and new death sentences each continued their sharp nationwide decline in 2008, as states wrestled with legal, moral and financial concerns about capital punishment. 37people were executed in 9 states, the lowest total in 14 years and a 62 % drop from the 98 death sentences carried out in 1999, according to statistics compiled by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. A total of 111 death sentences were handed down, the fewest since executions resumed in 1976, according to the center, a repository of reports and research on capital punishment run largely by opponents. The total declined from 115 in 2007 and was barely a third of the numbers condemned each year in the 1990s. The economic realities of cash-strapped state and local governments have undermined capital punishment where moral and legal arguments have failed to alter majority support for the death penalty, said Richard Dieter, a Catholic University law professor and director of the information center. I don't know that it will change public opinion but the practical effects of the economy are just that if you're a politician and you have to cut something, do you want fewer police officers on the streets ... or do you cut one death penalty and save a few million dollars? Dieter said. At a time when states are cutting back on teachers, police officers, health care, infrastructure, and other vital services, citizens are increasingly concerned that the death penalty is not the best use of their limited resources. A Gallup poll in October showed 64 % support for capital punishment. But even in Texas, where 18 of the 37 executions occurred last year, the number of death sentences issued has declined by 1/2 over the past decade. In New Mexico, the state Supreme Court ruled last year that death penalties couldn't be pursued unless the Legislature budgeted adequate funding for legal representation of condemned inmates who cannot afford attorneys. Utah judges also signaled that they would overturn death penalties for convicts inadequately defended. New Jersey and New York dropped the death penalty in 2007, and a vote expected early this year in Maryland on whether to abolish capital punishment has been driven in part by taxpayers' sticker shock at reports that each of the 5 executions there cost about $37 million. In California, home to 1 in 5 of the country's condemned prisoners, prosecutors are wary of seeking death penalties when life without parole accomplishes the objective of keeping killers off the street. San Quentin's death row, the nation's most populous, continued to grow last year, with 21 new capital judgments swelling the ranks of condemned prisoners to 677. Executions were suspended for legal review of the state's lethal injection procedures and reconstruction of the idled death chamber. (source: Los Angeles Times) *** Sen. Webb's Call for Prison Reform This country puts too many people behind bars for too long. Most elected officials, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, ignore these problems. Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia, is now courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy. Other members of Congress should show the same courage and rally to the cause. Prisons and PrisonersThe United States has the worlds highest reported incarceration rate. Although it has less than 5 % of the worlds population, it has almost 1/4 of the world's prisoners. And for the 1st time in history, more than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes, including minor drug offenses. It also is extraordinarily expensive. Billions of dollars now being spent on prisons each year could be used in far more socially productive ways. Senator Webb a former Marine and secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration is in many ways an unlikely person to champion criminal justice reform. But his background makes him an especially effective advocate for a cause that has often been associated with liberals and academics. In his 2 years in the Senate, Mr. Webb has held hearings on the cost of mass incarceration and on the criminal justice system's response to the problems of illegal drugs. He also has called attention to the challenges of prisoner re-entry and of the need to provide released inmates, who have paid their debts to society, more help getting jobs and resuming productive lives. Mr. Webb says he intends to introduce legislation to create a national commission to investigate these issues. With Barack Obama in the White House, and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, the political climate should be more favorable than it has been in years. And the economic downturn should make both federal and state lawmakers receptive to the idea of reforming a prison system that is as wasteful as it is inhumane.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, WASH., KY.
Dec. 9 USA: 9/11 suspects may not plead guilty if no death penalty Blunt warning on emissions issued by top UN officialElaborate farewell for Russian Orthodox patriarchPoland 'optimistic' on German backing over coal powerUkraine's fractious coalition set to be reinstatedIn crisis time for Pakistan, president's ability under scrutiny'Tokyo Two' at centre of war over whalingKhalid Sheikh Mohammed (centre) and co-defendant Walid bin Attash in court on Monday. 5 men accused of planning the September 11th, 2001, attacks have changed their minds about pleading guilty after a military judge suggested it might prevent them from receiving the death penalty. Are you saying if we plead guilty we will not be able to be sentenced to death? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, asked a military tribunal at Guantnamo Bay. Two of the five men have not yet been judged competent to represent themselves, and Mr Mohammed and the two others said they would defer a decision on a guilty plea until all 5 could act together. Mr Mohammed has expressed a desire to die as a martyr but the presiding judge, Col Stephen Henley, questioned whether a death sentence was permissible without a verdict by a military jury. The men are charged with conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, terrorism, and providing material support for terrorism. Military prosecutors have asked for the death penalty but some of the defendants, including Mr Mohammed, claim they were tortured by CIA interrogators. Civil rights lawyers argue it is unacceptable to accept a guilty plea from someone who has endured torture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the detention centre at Guantnamo Bay and to abolish the military tribunal system established by the Bush administration. Mr Obama's advisers have yet to decide, however, what to do with about 250 inmates who remain in Guantnamo. Some cannot be repatriated to their home countries because they could face torture or death. The Bush administration has approached a number of third countries about accepting some Guantnamo inmates. Others are likely to go on trial in the US in conventional civilian or military courts, but allegations of torture mean that much evidence could prove inadmissible in the US court system. Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, said the judge should hold a full hearing to determine that any pleas are free from coercion and investigate Mr Mohammed's influence over the other defendants. In light of the men's severe mistreatment, the judge should require a full and thorough factual inquiry to determine whether or not these pleas are voluntary, she said. (source: Irish Times) WASHINGTON: Capital Punishment Trials Open Wounds For Family Members Convicted double murderer Darold Stenson was to be executed last week at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington. Stenson is alive because federal and state courts issued temporary stays of execution. But last week the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the federal stay on the execution. As the case goes forward in state court, the Washington State Attorney General's Office says it plans to fight to carry out Stenson's death sentence. In the first installment of a 3-part series -- State of Execution -- KUOW's Patricia Murphy examines 2 executions through the eyes of the victims' relatives. The framed photos on Peggi Hendrickson's coffee table look like any family's holiday snapshots until they're put into context. Peggi Hendrickson: This is my mother and that was taken the Christmas before she was murdered. On April 14th 1982 Charles Campbell walked away from an Everett work-release facility. Six years earlier, Campbell had raped Renae Wicklund after holding a knife to the throat of her then 18-month old daughter Shanna. After the crime, Wicklund fled with her daughter to Peggi's mother's house. Barbara, Peggi's mom, later testified during the trial that sent Campbell to prison for 40 years. But now he was freed, intent on getting revenge. He went to Renae Wicklund's home and murdered Renae and her daughter. Then he killed Barbara. The murders were vicious. When the police arrested Campbell, they found one earring from each of his victim's in his pocket. Peggi Hendrickson: He had lived his life brutalizing people. You bother me I will hurt you worse. That was his creed In December of that year Campbell was sentenced to death for the murders. For the survivors who are already grieving the violent death of a loved one, the realities of a capital trial can be overwhelming. Mark Roe: This will be over no time soon. Snohomish County Deputy Prosecutor Mark Roe has tried many murder and death penalty cases. In those first meetings with family members, Roe is honest about what's ahead. He
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, KY.
Dec. 5 USA: Carry out the death penalty quickly if guilt isn't in doubt Troy Davis and Joseph Zangara. Remember those names. They're important in any discussion of the death penalty. Any rational one, that is. Let's take Davis first. Back in 1989, a security guard intervened when he saw Davis and two others bullying a homeless man in Savannah. Shots rang out, and the guard - an off-duty police officer - slumped over dead. 9 witnesses identified Davis as the killer. He was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Here's where it gets tricky: 7 of those witnesses later recanted their testimonies. A 3judge panel is to decide in a few days whether that's grounds for him to challenge his conviction. I wrote a blog about this awhile back, and several readers responded. Almost all were outraged that an innocent man had been sentenced to death. But was he innocent? Really? What we know is that 7 people probably lied. But which time? When they said he did it? Or when they said he didn't? We don't know. None of us know. Like in the O.J. Simpson case, we can say we know. We may really think we know. But we don't. What should happen? It's hard to say. But, because a life is at stake, it would be better to err on the side of caution. The thing that bothers me - and some legal experts, too, I gather - is the timing. The affidavits weren't submitted to the courts until eight days before his first scheduled execution date, law.com reports. A stall tactic? Maybe. Davis has been on death row since 1991. That's 17 years. His lawyers are very skilled at slowing down the process. I believe the death penalty works ... on those rare occasions when it's actually used. An executed killer, kills no more. And would-be murderers, I think, generally are deterred if the killer is put to death while his crime is still fresh in the public's mind. If people no longer remember the crime, however, an execution has very little impact. Go slow if there really is a legitimate doubt about guilt. But, in most cases, the process should be speeded up. Florida's death row inmates are almost as likely to die of natural causes as to be executed, The Associated Press says. It shouldn't be that way. Now, about that other name: On Feb. 15, 1933, Zangara tried to kill Franklin Roosevelt as the president-elect rode in a Miami motorcade, according to Great American Trials. Zangara had terrible aim, however. He hit 5 people but missed FDR altogether. One of his victims, Miami Mayor Anton Cermak, languished about 3 weeks, then died. On March 9, 3 days after the mayor took his last breath, Zangara was convicted of his murder and sentenced to die. 11 days after that, on March 20, he was put to death. My kind of justice. And why not? If you know for a certainty he's guilty, pull the plug. Give the killer, and survivors of his victim, some finality. (source: Column, Phil Fretz, Florida Times-Union) KENTUCKY: Death Penalty Possible For MapelMapel Could Face Death In Ex-Girlfriend's Killing Prosecutors may seek the death penalty against a jail escapee who allegedly murdered his ex-girlfriend in Morgan County last month. Robin Mapel is charged with killing Melissa Patrick. According to the Mount Sterling Advocate, the prosecuting attorney cites aggravating circumstances in the case in seekin the death penalty. Authorities say they found Melissa Patrick's body in the passenger seat of her car after troopers say Robin Mapel allegedly kidnapped her from her house in Morgan County on November 10. Police say Mapel was also shot in the chest by Patrick's father, whose home is located next door. He was eventually released from the hsopital and is being held at the Rowan County Detention Center. Mapel is accused of kidnapping his 15-year-old son, running from police, and engaging them in a lengthy stand-off back in July. He escaped from the Montgomery County Detention Center October 16. Prior to that, Melissa Patrick told LEX 18 he kidnapped their son in another situation that led to an Amber Alert before the child was eventually found safe. Mapel had pleaded not guilty in the kidnapping and standoff case earlier in October before his escape. His arraignment had been delayed because psychiatrists spent weeks evaluating his mental condition at the state penitentiary. The Montgomery County jailer said Mapel, whom he had made a trustee, was unloading the commissary truck on the morning of October 16 when he took off. Mapel was being held on charges of kidnapping, burglary, and running from police. (source: LEX18 News)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ILL., VA., CALIF.
Nov. 22 USAfemale federal death row inmate U.S. Supreme Court denies review of Forest City woman's death sentence The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition Wednesday to review convictions and sentences against Angela Johnson, 44, of Forest City, for aiding and abetting the drug-related murders of five people in 1993. She was convicted of 10 counts of murder in furtherance of a drug conspiracy and continuing criminal enterprise on May 24, 2005. The jury determined Johnson should be executed on 8 of the 10 counts involving the premeditated murder of 2 sisters, ages 6 and 10, the girls' mother and Johnson's former boyfriend. The murders occurred in the summer and fall of 1993, and the victims were buried in shallow graves in rural Cerro Gordo County. She also received a life sentence for her role in the murder of the 5th victim, a federal witness. Johnson's death sentence was the 1st in more than 50 years that a woman has been sentenced to death in federal court. Johnson appealed her convictions to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which affirmed her convictions and the death penalty. The Supreme Court denied Johnson's petition in a two-sentence order. An execution date for Johnson is pending her petition for post-conviction relief, which she has one year to file. (source: Gazette Online, IA) ** Abolishing the Death Penalty in the Era of Hope The outcome of the election for President, and for state and local legislators, not only demonstrates how much Americans want change. It confirms Americans' commitment to our fundamental values of equality and fairness. It gives me reason to hope that we will soon see the end of the death penalty. The American public simply cannot maintain the death penalty and be true to these deeply held values. There are too many instances of innocent men and women being sentenced to death, of people of color, both defendants and victims, being treated more harshly, and dealt with as if they were expendable. This is why New Jersey abolished the death penalty in 2007, and why we fully expect other states will follow. Americans can't square our values of what is right and lawful with the operation of the death penalty in practice. As we learn more about it, support for the death penalty has dropped over the years, to 63%. Support declines even further when we learn about alternatives to the death penalty, and are given the opportunity to choose life rather than death. With the current economic downturn, all government programs -- including the death penalty -- should and will be evaluated on whether they deliver on their promises and whether the benefits they confer are worth the cost. Measured against this stricter standard, the death penalty comes up short. Having failed to deliver on the promise of accurately selecting only the guilty to receive the punishment, it also fails miserably at being cost efficient, and worse, it siphons precious resources from helping crime victims heal and move on with their lives, or preventing the tragedy of murder from occurring in the first place. Americans would be appalled to discover how much of their tax dollars support the flawed, ineffective death penalty system. For example, it costs Florida $51 million a year to enforce the death penalty above what it would cost to sentence 1st degree murderers to life in prison without parole. Imagine how that money could be spent on better ways to ensure public safety, such as hiring and training more police to protect our neighborhoods, and enabling them to purchase the equipment they need to do so, such as updated patrol cars, and more efficient information technology systems, As newly elected and incumbent state legislators take their seats in statehouses next year, they should remember that constituents expect them to provide leadership and creative thinking on a range of social problems, including criminal justice reform and the death penalty. To paraphrase one commentator's post-election analysis, Americans want a more pragmatic and concrete approach to our nation's problems, not rhetoric and symbolic nods in that direction. An honest assessment of the problems associated with the death penalty is long overdue. The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and its more than 100 affiliates looks forward to engaging state legislators in a reasoned, thoughtful discussion about capital punishment and its alternatives. (source: Diann Rust-Tierney is the Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty; Huffington Post) ILLINOIS: Young Guilty of Killing Buffalo Grove Couple The jury for the double murder trial of Robert Young split its guilty verdicts Friday, Nov. 21, convicting Young of 1st-degree murder for the fatal stabbing of Sharmaine Gregory, a 42-year-old mother with 3 sons, and 2nd-degree murder for the slaying of her boyfriend, Catonis Jones, in Buffalo Grove. Had the jury convicted former Arlington
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Nov. 16 USA: Easing the Burden of Public Defenders: Letters to the Editor: Re Citing Workload, Public Lawyers Reject New Cases (front page, Nov. 9): The assertion that despite increasingly overwhelming workloads, public defenders must tighten their belts during these times of severe reductions in state and local revenues is an affront to the constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of counsel for indigent criminal defendants. We must not shortchange our Constitution regardless of our economic woes. There are, however, huge savings to be had that would substantially reduce the financial burden on public defenders offices and other components of our criminal justice system while maintaining our constitutional commitment to ensuring that all defendants receive quality representation. As has been established by numerous studies in numerous states, including California, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey and Tennessee, the repeal of capital punishment would save taxpayers many millions of dollars a year. The time has come for Americans and their elected representatives to seriously consider whether we can afford our error-prone, discriminatory and bankrupting death penalty system. John Holdridge Director, A.C.L.U. Capital Punishment Project Durham, N.C., Nov. 10, 2008 To the Editor: Your article accurately described the difficulties public defenders across the country are facing as they grapple with increasing caseloads and diminishing resources. Ethics requires that they resist more cases than they can effectively handle. What is not so apparent is how this problem reaches beyond public defenders and their clients and then to our communities. Public defense like the prosecution, the courts and the police plays a vital role in ensuring that the justice system works reliably and efficiently. When the system is working right with adequate resources, the guilty are convicted, victims get the closure they deserve, the rights of the innocent are upheld and community safety is maintained. When public defenders lack the time and resources necessary to prepare a full and fair defense for each client, the horrible result can be wrongful convictions that inevitably leave criminals free in our communities. Public defenders are seriously overworked and underpaid. States that fail to recognize the importance of public defenders to a functioning justice system are ultimately playing Russian roulette with our safety. John Wesley Hall President, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Little Rock, Ark., Nov. 10, 2008 To the Editor: I just got back from working an arraignment shift, and decided to check my e-mail before I left for the Elmhurst Hospital prison psychiatric ward, where I need to interview a client who has been waiting for an arraignment since last Sunday (first arrest, minor charges). It is Saturday. I need to interview her tonight, because I don't have enough time to conduct a proper interview on Monday, which is her arraignment date. On Monday, I have to handle 7 cases in 4 court parts, including 3 cases on which hearings are supposed to occur, and must attend a psychiatric examination as well as make time for this arraignment. These 7 cases include 2 assault, a contempt, a burglary, an attempted murder of a corrections officer, and a homicide case. A rare-bookseller friend of mine e-mailed me your article, which I then e-mailed to the lawyers in my office. One of my colleagues promptly replied (from her office): I can't believe you are in the office. Get a life (LOL). This is the life of a public defender. Mary Beth Anderson Kew Gardens, Queens, Nov. 8, 2008 The writer is a mental health lawyer with the Legal Aid Societys criminal defense practice. (source: Letters to the Editor, New York Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, KY.
Nov. 10 USA: Waiting to Die: The Cruel Phenomenon of Death Row SyndromeAs prisoners across the country spend decades awaiting execution, the psychological effects are devastating. The length of time convicted murderers wait for their execution is steadily rising in the U.S., raising concerns that more will suffer from the mental illness known as death row syndrome. The United States' 3,300 death row inmates can now expect to wait an average of 12 years from the day of their sentencing to death by lethal injection or electric chair, a doubling of the time gap in the mid-1980s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. This increase is mainly due to mandatory appeals introduced after capital punishment was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976 after a four-year suspension. These reforms have led to lengthier appeals, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. The 667 death row inmates in California can expect to wait nearly 20 years. California's last execution was in January 2006. A month later, a judge halted the execution of Michael Morales, already on death row for 25 years, calling for measures to ensure no unnecessary pain during a state killing. The temporary moratorium put in place then has not yet been lifted. In other death penalty states, inmates have also sometimes waited a quarter of a century or more to know the date of their execution, reprieve or exoneration. On Sept. 16, Jack Alderman was executed in Georgia for killing his wife in 1974 after spending 33 years on death row. In April, Renardo Knight had spent nearly 25 years on death row before his conviction was reversed due to evidence tampering. Last year, Carey Dean Moore was moved from Nebraska's death row after waiting 27 years for the electric chair. The state's Supreme Court ruled this method of execution -- the only one on its statute books -- was unconstitutional. Typically, death row inmates wait out the years for their punishment alone in solitary confinement, spending 23 hours a day in their cells. They are excluded from prison training and recreation programs. Visits and exercise privileges are restricted. A few states, such as North Carolina, California and Georgia, allow varying levels of communication between death row inmates. There is a distinct syndrome associated with solitary confinement, Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former professor at the Harvard Medical School of Psychiatry, told IPS. In published research he has found that in the most sever cases this can lead to agitation, psychotic and self-destructive behavior. The healthy often became mental ill. There was a severe deterioration in the condition of those already mentally sick. Grassian said the long appeals process of the condemned was most worrisome. There is an enormous agony in endlessly, and helplessly, waiting while others decide whether you live or die. Generally, over time, the inmate learns he cannot afford to actually befriend his fellows; they keep disappearing into the death chamber. The horror of all that, the endless tedium and tension, often proves unbearable. Rights activists say an illustration of the mental damage being done is seen in the case of Raymond Riles, on the Texas death row for the past 33 years. No execution date has been set because he suffers from delusions and paranoia. But in 1975, there were no mental health barriers in the way of his sentencing. They also suggest death row syndrome may have played a role in the decision of 131 death row inmates since 1976 abandoning their appeals and volunteering for a quick execution. Many inmates in these circumstances cannot stand it any longer, fire their attorneys, drop their appeals, and hence volunteer for execution, said Grassian. 75% of these volunteers had a history of mental illness, according to John Blume, professor of law at Cornell University. Rights activists have also raised concerns at the difficulties inmates with death row syndrome may face when their appeals succeed and they are given a lesser sentence and transferred to cells in the general prison. Only Missouri does not segregate death row inmates from the rest of the prison population. The problems of adaptation and regaining their mental health may be more acute when they are exonerated and leave prison. So far this year, 4 death row inmates have been exonerated, bringing to 130 the number since 1973. Experts question the reasoning behind the austere, often mentally damaging conditions on death row. The rational is that these inmates have nothing to lose and therefore they are potentially the greatest security risk, Grassian said. But it had been proven that they were less violent and disruptive than many other groups. Ronald Tabak, a New York-based lawyer experienced in capital punishment issues, agreed. They tend to be less dangerous than other prisoners, he told IPS, adding: There is no public sympathy for those who are sentenced to death.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, KY., ALA., N.C.
Oct. 31 USA: If Elected ...Records of Obama and McCain as Lawmakers Reflect Differences on Crime As an Illinois legislator for 7 years, Senator Barack Obama sponsored more than 100 bills on crime, corrections and the death penalty, making criminal justice one of his top priorities as a state lawmaker. In his nearly 3 decades in Washington, Senator John McCain has had a reputation for taking strong law-and-order stances. But compared with many past presidential elections, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have paid little attention to issues of criminal justice as they compete for the White House. The change is a reflection, experts say, of 15 years of declining crime rates, an electorate less anxious about public safety and the fact that crime and law enforcement issues are less partisan than they used to be. The political climate has shifted, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization for criminal justice reform. Democrats and Republicans both embrace a more evidence-based approach to public safety that looks at programs and policies that work. Still, the 2 candidates positions on criminal justice have been defined over their years in public life and provide some insight into how they might govern as president. In a speech before the National Sheriffs' Association this year, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, called for tougher punishment for violent offenders and appeared to disagree with Mr. Obamas contention that the prison population is too high. We still hear some academics and politicians speaking as if a rising rate of incarceration and a reduction in crime were unrelated facts, Mr. McCain said. But, of course, when the most violent and persistent criminals are in prison, crime rates will go down. Mr. McCain has also opposed assault rifle bans and restrictions on certain kinds of high-capacity ammunition magazines, positions contrary to those of Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Both candidates say they will increase financing to law enforcement agencies Mr. Obama has said he would like to reinstate the COPS grants created by President Bill Clinton but abandoned by President Bush. Mr. McCain said he would eliminate Justice Department earmarks, calling them the broken windows of the federal budget process. As it is, funds distributed by the Department of Justice are too often earmarked according to their value to the re-election of members of Congress instead of their value to police, Mr. McCain said. Mr. McCain also favors tougher sentences for illegal immigrants who commit crimes and more federal money to help local agencies detain them. Both candidates supported the Second Chance Act of 2007, which provides money for job training and for drug counseling and other re-entry programs. Mr. Obama has emphasized civil liberties, sensitivity to racial inequality and tough penalties for the most violent felons. He was a state lawmaker when the Illinois police and prosecutors were under siege. In 2003, doubt was cast on the convictions of several Illinois death-row inmates leading to a death-penalty moratorium that is still in effect. Some critics say Mr. Obama's role in the death-penalty moratorium has been exaggerated. Christine Radogno, a Republican state senator, said that Mr. Obama took credit for work accomplished by Gov. George Ryan, a Republican who imposed the moratorium, pardoned a number of death-row inmates, and established a commission to study capital punishment. To claim that Barack was the impetus for those reforms is an overstatement, Ms. Radogno said. Recent disclosures have revealed that Chicago police officers had tortured suspects into giving false confessions. A member of the State Senate's judiciary committee, Mr. Obama on several occasions was helpful in placating law enforcement officials while also helping pass criminal justice legislation opposed by many of them, according to Illinois police officers and prosecutors. As a state lawmaker, Mr. Obama supported changes to the death penalty, including a bill that let judges reject a death sentence for someone convicted on the sole basis of an informants testimony. He also opposed a measure that would have applied the death penalty for gang-related murders because he feared that the law would be applied unevenly. He had to bridge a very diverse constituency which included Hyde Park and some very tough areas on the South Side, said Richard Devine, the Cook County state's attorney, who at first opposed and then supported Mr. Obama's videotaped interrogations measure. He had to keep the liberals happy, but also protect people in high-crime areas, Mr. Devine said. Among the most hotly contested measures was one that required police officers to electronically record homicide interrogations, a requirement intended to reduce the number of forced or false confessions. Illinois was the 1st state to pass legislation requiring such a widescale electronic recording, and it was
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, CALIF., ALA., OHIO
Oct. 23 USA: Death penalty opposedAE's Bill Kurtis speaks out at ISU Bill Kurtis, the narrator of Will Ferrell's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, promoted his book Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice Monday night in Tilson Auditorium to a crowd of 450 to 500 people. Kurtis opened with a joke, saying he tries to lighten the mood before delving into his speech about the death penalty. Kurtis, who is also known for his work as host of the AE series American Justice, and producer of Cold Case Files, began his speech by giving a background of the Charles Manson murders of 1969. He explained how the accused were sentenced to death. During their time on death row the laws of California were changed, and the death penalty was suspended, he said. Kurtis said he believes we need the death penalty in some circumstances. However, he is critical of the way the U.S. judicial system works. He followed up his story of the Manson murders with the story of Ray Krone, a man from Arizona accused and convicted of a murder he did not commit. Krone spent 10 years on death row before he was released after DNA evidence proved that he was not the murderer. I believe the system makes too many mistakes to have the power of life and death, Kurtis said. Kurtis believes the problems can range from overzealous prosecutors to accidental mistakes made by detectives or forensic analysts. Sometimes a combination of both can lead to people being wrongly convicted, he said. It is cheaper for a prisoner to serve a life sentence without parole than it is to impose the death penalty, Kurtis said. Linda Crossett, the interim director of continued education, booked Kurtis to come and speak. The speech was very thought provoking, she said. Brian Royer, 50, a Terre Haute resident who received a criminal justice degree from ISU, thought the speech was very entertaining and informative. The speech confirmed my thoughts on flaws in the judicial system, Royer said. Lindsay Measel, a criminology and criminal justice graduate student who attended the speech with her criminology fraternity, Lambda Alpha Epsilon, said, I really enjoyed the speech. It's not every day you get to hear such a well respected and educated speaker. ( source: The (Indiana State University) Statesman; Jake Sutterfield is a sophomore open preference major) CALIFORNIA: CALIFORNIA ELECTIONSProposition 9 would give crime victims a stronger voice, but critics say it could violate inmates' rights; Opponents of the measure include Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley. A quarter-century after the slaying of Marsalee Nicholas, a college student from Malibu, voters will consider an initiative launched in her name that would give a stronger voice to crime victims and their families, and impose harsher treatment on convicted killers. Proposition 9 would alter the state Constitution to require that crime victims be notified and consulted on developments in their cases. It would give them 1st claim on any restitution to be collected from offenders, and it would force prosecutors to take their opinions into account. The measure, known as Marsy's Law and the Victims' Bill of Rights of 2008, also would make the state criminal justice system tougher in ways that critics, such as Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, say could violate prisoners' constitutional rights. Ex-convicts accused of violating parole would lose their right to a lawyer provided by the state. Those serving possible life sentences could be denied parole for up to 15 years, triple the current maximum. And an unlimited number of victims would be able to testify at an inmate's parole hearing and say whatever they want -- uninterrupted -- without having to answer questions from an inmate or the inmate's lawyer. Victims just have no rights, said Marcella Leach, 79, Marsy's mother. All anybody cares about is the rights of the criminals. Marsy Nicholas was 21 when she was shot in the head and killed by an ex-boyfriend while home from UC Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving in November 1983. The Proposition 9 campaign has received $4.8 million from her older brother, billionaire Henry T. Nicholas III -- who is currently under federal indictment on fraud, conspiracy and drug charges. Marsy's mother, a proponent of the measure, co-founded Justice for Homicide Victims with her late husband, Robert, and with Ellen Dunne, whose daughter with author Dominick Dunne also was murdered. Opponents say that Proposition 9's provisions on notification and restitution duplicate a crime victims' bill of rights that voters approved in 1982, and that they are designed to distract from the ballot measure's true -- and less advertised -- purpose: to keep prisoners locked up longer. In a system that now grants parole to about 1% of eligible prisoners, inmates would be denied a chance for release for up to 15 years at a time without clear and convincing evidence for a shorter
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA----Representation of People Facing Execution
Attached is a pdf version of an 11-page article by Ron Tabak entitled The Private Bar's Efforts To Secure Proper Representation For Those Facing Execution. It appears in a special issue of the Justice System Journal, focusing on Court-Related Aspects of Capital Punishment. The pdf's first page is the table of contents of the entire issue. This journal is published by the National Center for State Courts.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, OHIO
Oct. 13 USA: Life after death row In 1992 Ray Krone, a former sergeant in the US Air Force, was sentenced to death row for the murder of Kimberly Ancona, a bar manager found stabbed to death in a restaurant near his home in Arizona. 10 years later, after running newly developed DNA tests on the victim's clothes, he was found innocent and freed. Krone was the 100th prisoner in the US to be exonerated from death row. Now a campaigner against the death penalty, he describes the long fight to clear his name Being arrested was quite a surprise. On the day they found the body, they brought me in to the police station and questioned me for 3 hours. I told them everything I knew and thought that would be the end of it. The next day they brought me to the police station to take blood and hair samples, as well as dental casts of my teeth, and they questioned me for yet another three hours. But again, I told them the truth. I knew I had nothing to hide. The next day was New Years Eve, December 31, 1991; I'd just got home and was in my driveway, getting out of my car, when all of a sudden a van screeched up behind me, the doors flew open and people were shouting Freeze! Don't move! Armed officers in full riot gear spilled out of the van and arrested me right there. Without any real evidence or any scientific support for it, the lead detective decided that I was guilty, and he acted on it quickly. I worked at the post office and it wasn't as if I was going anywhere. But within 2 days the analysis had come back confirming that my fingerprints, footprints and hair had been found on the victims body. That stuff couldn't possibly have come back from the lab in 2 days. I knew the fingerprints and strands of hair at the crime scene weren't mine. The footprints were of size 9 shoes and I'm a size 11. DNA testing wasn't as prevalent then as it is now and they simply said that whatever prints didnt match mine had nothing to do with the murder. The size 9 footprints at the crime scene were not only found in the kitchen where the murder weapon a butcher's knife was taken from, but they were also on the floor tiles next to where the body was discovered. I found out later that whoever made the initial police report had changed the killer's footprints to a size 11 to make it fit my profile, and when they went to my house they couldn't match them to any of my shoes. But then they found a local medical examiner who would testify that the bite marks on her body matched my teeth. It didn't matter what I said after that. It was like the frustration you feel when you're a kid and your parents blame you for something your brother or sister did, only this time it was a sharper intensity of pain and lasted for a lot longer. I was in contact with my sister regularly. I would tell her: Don't worry about it, I'll be out of here any minute. 7 months went by and I was put on trial for murder, but I was still telling her it would all work out. Then I got convicted and sent to death row. That was when it became a heck of a burden on my mom and my family. I was the oldest in the family, and had always been the responsible one my folks knew to trust me if I said everything would be all right. Death row changed that. When you get sent to death row you're in a little cell the size of most people's bathroom and youre kept separate from all the other inmates. You can see them in the distance and yell out to them, but you don't have any physical contact. I realised in a short time that if I was going to fight the system Id better get to know it. I started going to the law library, reading up on case law. Eventually it became known that the prosecutor had been withholding evidence and the Arizona Supreme Court granted me a new trial. The judge convicted me again, but said that there was lingering doubt of my guilt and sentenced me to life imprisonment instead of death row. In 2001 a new law was passed making it easier for inmates to request DNA testing. The police still had items of the victim's clothing so I asked the judge if I could have them tested. The prosecutor objected, as did the attorney generals office, but nevertheless the judge ordered that it go ahead. The Phoenix police department put some of the DNA into the nationwide data bank, which is where the DNA of convicted felons all over the US is stored, and it came back with a match. It was a man who had a history of sexual assaults on women and children and lived 500 feet from the bar in which the murder took place. I remember that day clearly from start to finish. It was April 8, 2002. A Friday. It began as just another day in prison but at noon I was told my attorney was on the phone. He asked me how I was doing and I said: Oh you know, fine, just another day in paradise. He laughed and said: What are you hungry for, Ray? and I said that I guessed I'd eat whatever was in the chow hall. But he kept on and said: No really, you want steak, seafood? How about a Margarita? I
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, MD., WASH., N.Y.
Oct. 12 USA: Catholic Voters and the Teachings of the Church A Fight Among Catholics Over Which Party Best Reflects Church Teachings (October 5, 2008) Re A Fight Among Catholics Over Which Party Best Reflects Church Teachings (news article, Oct. 5): Here we go again! It must be October in a presidential election year and the Democratic candidates must be poised to win: time for pastoral letters from some Roman Catholic bishops urging rejection by me and my co-religionists of candidates (read: Democrats) who are not in lock step with the churchs teachings on abortion. As a practicing Catholic, I would find these directives more credible if they also admonished Catholic voters to reject candidates who endorse or condone capital punishment, that other form of state-sponsored homicide. Until then, I will continue to dismiss these quadrennial broadsides as nothing more than the partisan political handouts of right-wing clerics. John A. Rudy--Cooperstown, N.Y., Oct. 5, 2008 (source: Letter to the Editor, New York Times) *** Sentencing Panel Mulls Alternatives to Prison As the nation's inmate population climbs toward 2.5 million, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is considering alternatives to prison for some offenders, including treatment programs for nonviolent drug users and employment training for minor parole violators. The commission's consideration of alternatives to incarceration reflects its determination to persuade Congress to ease federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws that contributed to explosive growth in the prison population. The laws were enacted in the mid-1980s, principally to address a crime epidemic related to crack cocaine. But in recent years, federal judges, public defenders and probation officials have argued that mandatory sentences imprison first-time offenders unnecessarily and disproportionately affect minorities. If the commission moves ahead with recommending alternatives to Congress, it would send a strong signal to state sentencing commissions and legislatures, and could pave the way for a major expansion of drug courts and adult developmental programs for parolees, advocates said. We are leading the world in incarcerating adults, and that's something Americans need to understand, said Beryl Howell, one of six members of the commission, which drafts federal sentencing guidelines and advises the House and Senate on prison policy. People should be aware that every tough-on-crime act comes with a price. The average cost [of incarceration] across the country is $24,000 a year per inmate. . . . It's going up far faster than state budgets can keep up. About 2,000 drug courts nationwide spend between $1,500 and $11,000 per offender, according to the National Drug Court Institute. Those scattered courts handle only a small fraction of the 1.5 million nonviolent drug offenders who are arrested and charged with a crime, said C. West Huddleston, chief executive of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. The courts operate under similar principles: At sentencing, a judge gives a nonviolent offender the option of going to prison or committing to a rigorous treatment program, where he or she submits to frequent tests and supervision. The aim is to reduce the 67 % recidivism rate of addicted offenders. The government has established a discretionary grant program, operated by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which is distributing $13 million to drug court programs this year. Drug courts are the most successful strategy in terms of reducing crime, but they're tremendously underutilized, Huddleston said. I think a Sentencing Commission recommendation to U.S. courts would create momentum. It'll wake up state legislatures. It's a conversation that should have been had years ago. The commission held a symposium to discuss alternatives to incarceration in July after a study this year by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States revealed that more than one in 100 American adults are in jail or prison. That study was followed by a Bureau of Justice Statistics report in June that showed that a record 7.2 million people are under supervision in the criminal justice system. The cost, about $45 billion a year, has forced states such as California to export inmates to private prisons as far away as Tennessee. Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's office of justice programs, said the burgeoning prison population might be worth the cost. Research has shown that crime rates decline as the incarceration rate rises, he said. In other words, as the number of people under correctional supervision goes up, crime goes down. Sedgwick said the cost of housing prisoners should be weighed against other factors, such as the cost for victims of violent crimes to piece their lives back together. He said conservative estimates put the cost of violent crime at about $17 billion. But the Justice Department is open to discussing
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA. GA., ALA., MICH.
Oct. 10 USA: Capital punishment scope narrows, IU experts say Child rape does not merit death, Supreme Court rules The U.S. Supreme Court recently issued a ruling that child rape is a crime that does not merit the death penalty, and IU experts say the ruling narrows the scope of capital punishment. In the recent Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Court denied re-hearing the case involving the death penalty for a child rapist. On Oct. 1, the Supreme Court amended but held its initial decision on the case. Indiana is among the more than 40 states that do not have laws extending the death penalty to child rape cases. Jody Madeira, associate professor at the IU School of Law, said this lack of law might have played a role in the Courts decision. There are 2 open questions going into the Supreme Court's hearing of Kennedy v. Louisiana, Madeira said. In its decision, they basically said there is not enough of a nation-wide consensus to authorize the death penalty for child rape. The majority of states that have the death penalty do not have books authorizing execution for child rapists in their state statutes. In 1998, defendant Patrick Kennedy was convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Initially, Kennedy's lawyers appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which struck down the appeal, ruling the death penalty was a suitable punishment in this case. The U.S. Supreme Court did not agree. The Court not only considers laws on the books, but also public consensus, she said. Public ire not withstanding is not enough to demonstrate public consensus, Madeira said. People are angry about the decision. Many people, such as current law school student John Keele, said they agree with the court's decision because they believe capital punishment is an unconstitutional act. I felt the decision was correct out of the general principle I have that the death penalty is wrong, Keele said. I just object to the death penalty in general. Despite some outrage with the Court's decision, Madeira said there are some positive aspects of the ruling. She said the court noted in the original opinion that if capital punishment were to be upheld, rapists might have less incentive to keep the child victims alive. The other thing is that if family members know that a relative is molesting a child they might not turn their relative in for fear that they will be setting them up for the death penalty, Madeira said. It facilitates reporting as well. A case like this one would take consensus across the nation for the Supreme Court to revisit the issue and likely new judges to overturn the decision. For Michael Grossberg, a professor of history and adjunct professor of law at IU, the court's ruling was not a surprise. It seems to me the basic message of the case is that the courts have become more and more insistent that the death penalty only be used in cases that are clearly cruel that involved murder, Grossberg said. This case represented a case to get beyond that by including child rape and the courts said no to that. It strikes me as part of a trend in the court, to narrow the kinds of crimes and the kinds of individuals subject to the death penalty. The decision of the court would suggest that if a law like that were passed in Indiana it wouldnt meet constitutional muster. And even if the court had upheld the Louisiana Supreme Court's decision, the death penalty might not have affected the numbers of criminals or victims. Child rapists aren't going to be deterred by punishment, Keele said. For child rapists, I don't think they are going to take punishment into account. (source: Indiana Daily Student) GEORGIA: New evidence hits the stand in Nichols' trial Atlanta police Detectives A.B. Calhoun, Nicole Redlinger and Mark Cooper dominated the Brian Nichols murder trial Thursday by putting on the record the reams of evidence including crime scene photographs, videos and Nichols' reputed writings that are expected to be the subject of powerful testimony today as the prosecution rests its case. Calhoun read portions of notes handwritten by Nichols that were found among a cache of personal papers Nichols took to court with him the morning of the Fulton County Courthouse shootings. The charges stem from a 7-year relationship gone bad, Nichols wrote on what appeared to be notebook paper. A tale of love, lies, betrayal, the thin line between love and hate shattered. Atlanta police Detective Mark Cooper shows the jury a diagram of the crime scene in the Fulton County courtroom on March 11, 2005. Brian Nichols was then on trial for kidnap and rape charges when he fatally shot 3 people at the courthouse and 1 in Buckhead. Evelyn Parker, court reporter and friend of slain court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, watches video footage from the 2005 courtroom crime scene. Nichols was on trial March 11, 2005, on charges he kidnapped and raped his girlfriend. The alleged attack came after Nichols
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ILL., CALIF.
Sept. 11 USA: Abolitionists Hope for Swing to Democrats in States The 2 U.S. presidential candidates have both expressed support for the death penalty, but abolitionist activists are hoping that pragmatism and a swing to the Democrats in the state elections in November will inevitably edge the country along the road to total abolition whoever wins the presidency. John McCain and Barack Obama have told voters they want the death penalty for convicted child murderers and rapists. They have also called for the death penalty for Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Barack Obama's position is clear. By any means, bin Laden has committed heinous crimes that deserve the death penalty, Moira Mack, of the Obama presidential campaign staff, told IPS. McCain has also said that he wanted the death penalty for bin Laden, if tried and found guilty in a court of law. Anti-death penalty activists note McCain's more outspoken support of the punishment goes back many years. McCain has frequently called for more executions at a federal level. The last federal execution was in 2003, bringing to three the number since the late 1960s. Most crimes in the U.S. are prosecuted at a state rather than federal level. But there are now 51 people on the federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. Rights activists have called for a moratorium on federal executions, citing racism. A Justice Department study in 2000 found that in 80 % of cases where prosecutors sought the death penalty, the defendant was a member of an ethnic minority. But although McCain's support of the death penalty at federal level was a long-standing policy, he would not impose federal standards on the death penalty states, Taylor Griffin, McCain's spokesman, told IPS. Each state must decide whether they want it. Ultimately, this is an administrative issue, rather than an issue for the campaign, Griffin said. In January 2000, McCain called for the death penalty to be generally used more frequently. 6 years before, he voted in favour of a successful motion that prevented death row inmates anywhere from using sentencing statistics to argue that they had been racially discriminated against. African Americans make up 12 % of the U.S. population, but 43 % of the 3,200 on death row. Richard Dieter, executive director of the rights group Death Penalty Information Centre, said he did not believe that the opinions of the 2 candidates on the death penalty would play a role in the presidential elections. Americans vote on larger issues -- the economy, foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said. However, he added, I think the public is moving significantly away from the death penalty, and that is going to happen no matter who is elected president. Obama was likely to be more sympathetic to those pressing for abolition, he suggested. Obama sees that there are problems with the death penalty. When he was a local politician in Illinois, he saw that there were problems with such things as police interrogations and tried to address these problems, Dieter said. Diana Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), told IPS that whoever won the presidency would take a pragmatic stand on the death penalty. We do not put policy-makers in boxes or categories, especially presidential candidates. We think there is too great a risk of error if you do that. People's perceptions of the death penalty change over time, she said. The question is not whether or not we are going to continue dragging along this non-working policy, but whether we are going to re-evaluate this. People all over the U.S. were starting to concentrate on answering the question: 'Is this in our best interest?' I am optimistic that we are going to continue to see changes in America regarding death penalty policies, she said, adding that these would be carried through at a state level. Dieter agreed that the future of the death penalty would be decided by politicians in each of the remaining 36 states out of 50 which allow the practice. State legislatures have more direct effect on the death penalty than the president of the U.S., he said. He agreed that a large liberal Democratic Party win in the state legislatures in November might eventually result in abolition bills. That is a possibility. Then we would start to see some real changes, Dieter said. But since it often takes months or even years for such legislation to pass, it would still be a long time before we would see such states abolishing the death penalty. According to the DPIC, there were 42 executions in the U.S. in 2007, all of them in southern states. 26 of these executions were in Texas. Since the lifting of a 7-month unofficial moratorium in April while the Supreme Court ruled on challenges to lethal injections, there have been 20 executions. (source: IPS News) ILLINOIS: DuPage prosecutors seek more
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, CALIF., COLO., VA., KY., ILL.
Aug. 23 USA: Death Penalty - Strongly Retentionist: Biden's record on death penalty reform is the weakest of any of the 2008 Democratic candidates. He is a supporter of capital punishment, and holds the distinction of being the author of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (often referred to as the Biden crime bill), which expanded the federal death penalty to include drug trafficking, a nonviolent offense. ** Biden Law of 1994 created several new capital offenses Biden is credited for authoring several significant pieces of legislation in the area of federal law enforcement, including The Violent Crime Control Law Enforcement Act of 1994, widely known as the Biden Law, which: Banned the manufacture of 19 specific semiautomatic assault weapons Allocated more money to build prisons set up bootcamps for delinquent minors Designated 50 new federal offenses, including gang membership, and created several new federal death penalty offenses, including murders related to drug dealing, drive-by shooting murders, civil rights-related murders, murders of federal law enforcement officers, and death caused by acts of terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. The law was passed shortly before the Oklahom City bombing, and its provisions were applied to execute Timothy McVeigh. The legislation received bipartisan support, but was reviled by death penalty opponents and civil libertarians. Some believe it broke ground for the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. (source: The Contenders, by Laura Flanders, p.179 Nov 11, 2007) ** Voted NO on limiting death penalty appeals. Vote to table, or kill, a motion to send the bill back to the joint House-Senate conference committee with instructions to delete the provisions in the bill that would make it harder for prisoners given the death penalty in state courts to appeal. (Reference: Bill S.735 ; vote number 1996-66 on Apr 17, 1996) CALIFORNIA: Jury rules out death penalty for man who killed girlfriend Judge could reverse recommendation Jurors rejected the death penalty yesterday for a Serra Mesa man convicted of torturing and killing his longtime girlfriend in 2005. Instead, Jack Henry Lewis Jr. will likely be sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole for the murder of Jan Hasegawa, 48. The jury deliberated for about 2 days before its verdict was announced. Lewis is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 24. San Diego Superior Judge John Einhorn has the option of rejecting the jury's recommendation and sending Lewis to death row. However, it is rare for a judge to go against a jury's recommendation in a capital case. Lewis, 39, turned immediately to hug his defense attorneys after the verdict was read. Visibly emotional, the lawyers dabbed tears from their eyes and one of them mouthed the words Thank you to the jury. Several jurors appeared emotionally shaken after their deliberations were over. One woman sat on a bench in a courthouse hallway and sobbed as others tried to console her. Stephen Sims, the jury foreman, explained outside the courtroom that the jurors weighed numerous factors before reaching their decision, including Lewis' troubled childhood and the sadistic nature of the killing. Hasegawa's niece said she didn't believe Lewis deserved mercy. But juror Bruce Graham said that's not how he believes the verdict should be interpreted. This was what we felt he earned, Graham said. Last week, the same 5-man, 7-woman panel found Lewis guilty of 1st-degree murder and torture in connection with Hasegawa's death. Her body was found Sept. 8, 2005 in the bedroom of a the couple's apartment on Daley Center Drive. Deputy District Attorney Nicole Cooper argued during the trial that Lewis punched, stomped and strangled Hasegawa, leaving her nude body covered with more than 150 bruises. A large flashlight was found nearby, which matched the circular shape of many of the injuries. Cooper said that Hasegawa's death was the result of a pattern of abuse by Lewis and that the circumstances of the slaying warranted a death sentence. But defense attorneys argued that Lewis never intended to kill Hasegawa, with whom he had a 12-year romantic relationship, and that she died during a methamphetamine-fueled sexual encounter that turned violent. During the second part of the trial, called the penalty phase, Deputy Public Defenders Juliana Humphrey and Douglas Miller described their client as a broken man, who was capable of redemption. He's different now than 3 years ago, Humphrey said outside the courtroom yesterday. Miller stressed that both Lewis and Hasegawa suffered from drug addiction, and that much of their long relationship was not violent. It was their mutual use of methamphetamine that led to this terrible crime, he said. (source: San Diego Union-Tribune) COLORADO: Death penalty ruled out: Chase family says they didn't push for capital punishment Colorado prosecutors will not seek the death penalty
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, CALIF.
Aug. 21 USA: FOR OBAMA, A PRAGMATIST'S SHIFT TOWARD THE CENTER Barack Obama has taken a stroll this week away from traditional liberal political positions, his path toward the political center marked by artful leaps and turns. On Thursday, he seemed to embrace a Supreme Court decision, written by the courts premiere conservative and upheld 5-4, striking down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns. Obama seemed to voice support for the ban as recently as February. On Thursday, however, he issued a Delphic news release that seemed to support the Supreme Court, although staff members later insisted that might not be the case. I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures, Obama said. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view. He added, Todays decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe. In the last week, Obama has taken calibrated positions on issues that include electronic surveillance, campaign finance and the death penalty for child rapists, suggesting a presidential candidate in hot pursuit of what Bill Clinton once lovingly described as the vital center. A presidential candidates great desire is to be seen as pragmatic, and they hope their maneuvering and shifting will be seen in pursuit of some higher purpose, said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. It doesnt mean they are utterly insincere. George W. Bush, too, maneuvered toward the political center in 2000 presidential campaign, convincing many that he might rule in the moderately conservative tradition of his father. And Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, shifted several positions in the Republican primary, taking conservative lines on taxes and immigration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for generations a liberal Democratic lode star, was no easier to define. He slipped and slid his way through the 1932 election. Herbert Hoover called him a 'chameleon on plaid,' Dallek said. Obama has executed several policy pirouettes in recent weeks, each time landing more toward the center of the political ring. On Wednesday in Chicago, he confirmed that he would not fight a revised law that would extend retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government spy on American citizens. (He had previously spoken against immunity provisions in an earlier version of the bill.) And recently he backed away from his own earlier support for campaign finance spending limits in the 2008 election. Obama describes his new turns as consistent with long-held beliefs. On Wednesday he painted his decision to opt out of the campaign finance system as a reformist gesture, noting that most of his donors are not wealthy. Our donor base is the American people, he said, adding that this was the thematic goal of campaign finance reform. This most observant of politicians has throughout his career shown an appreciation for the virtues of political ambiguity. In February, a local television anchor asked Obama to explain his support of the Washington gun ban. The candidate, a transcript shows, did not object to that characterization of his position, even as he said he favored the Second Amendment and supports law-abiding people who use guns for sport and protection. And so I think there is nothing wrong with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets, we are going to trace more effectively how these guns are ending up on the streets, to unscrupulous gun dealers, who often times are selling to straw purchasers, he said. In South Carolina this year, Obama lent his voice to the battle against the Bush administrations program of wiretaps without warrants. This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security he demands, he said in South Carolina earlier this year. The bill since has been modified, with internal safeguards put in place on wiretaps without warrants. This has not pleased Obamas Democratic allies on the Hill; Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, strongly oppose the bill. But Obama indicated on Wednesday he probably would vote for it. The issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security of the American people, he said. On the death penalty, Obama wrote in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, (Crown, 2007), that the penalty does little to deter crime. But he added that society has the right to express outrage at heinous crimes. During his 2004 Senate campaign, he publicly supported the death penalty, even as he called the justice system flawed and urged a moratorium on executions. Obama is an
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
July 24 USA: Prisoners' time spent on death row doubles The time prisoners spend on death row has nearly doubled during the past 2 decades. Legal experts predict it will rise further as states review execution procedures and prisoners pursue lengthy appeals. Waits rose from 7 years in 1986 to 12 years in 2006, the latest Justice Department statistics show. In all five states with the most prisoners on death row California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Alabama offenders spend more time in prison than they did 4 years ago, a USA TODAY survey of state records through 2007 found. In California, wait times average nearly 20 years, a state commission report in June says. It costs about $90,000 more per year to house a death row inmate than other inmates. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's lethal injection method, ending an informal halt to executions nationwide for 7 months. Of the 10 states with the most prisoners on death row, 5 launched their own reviews of lethal injection procedures in the past 2 years. Those resulted in suspensions or delays in executions. Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno says lethal injection challenges create a snowball effect that prolong death row waits. Death penalty cases should be the highest priority for the courts, says Clay Crenshaw, chief of Alabama's death penalty litigation unit. It isn't any more. Crenshaw says courts take about 5 years to rule on appeals. The 3 offenders executed in Alabama in 2007 spent an average of 23 years on death row. The wait times amount to prisoners getting 2 distinct punishments: the death sentence and years in solitary confinement, says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty. The California commission said excessive delays had rendered the nation's largest death penalty system dysfunctional and in danger of collapse. Death row was only supposed to be temporary, Denno says. Now we have inmates on death row for more than a quarter-century. (source: USA Today)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
July 18 USA: USADouble standards and second-class justiceFederal judge clears way for first military commission trial 18 July 2008 AI Index: AMR 51/082/2008 As assurance against ancient evils, our country, in order to preserve 'the blessings of liberty', wrote into its basic law the requirement, among others, that the forfeiture of the lives, liberties or property of people accused of crime can only follow if procedural safeguards of due process have been obeyed. US Supreme Court, 1940 The USA considers itself to be a country committed to due process for those suspected of criminal conduct. It even preaches what it says it practices. In its annual assessment of human rights around the world, for example, the USA condemns unfair trials occurring at the hands of other governments. Cuba, for one, routinely comes in for criticism. In the latest US report, the Cuban authorities were brought to task for trials which the USA said failed to observe due process rights. Restrictions on the right to a defence, a lack of transparency in proceedings involving state security, and the use of confessions obtained under duress and without legal advice, were among the issues that drew the critical words of the US State Department. It is a good divine, wrote William Shakespeare, that follows his own instructions. The USA is not following what it instructs others, however. In its offshore prison camp in Guantnamo Bay, it is about to open a new chapter in its unlawful treatment of detainees in the war on terror. On 17 July 2008, US District Court Judge James Robertson cleared the way for the first US trial by military commission for more than half a century, when he refused to stop the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. This Yemeni national - now in his seventh year in Guantnamo - had sought to challenge the constitutionality of the commission system following last month's Boumediene v. Bush ruling by the US Supreme Court that the Guantnamo detainees have the constitutional right to habeas corpus in the US federal courts. However, Judge Robertson ruled that Hamdan's claims of unlawfulness are all claims that should first be decided by the military commission and then raised on appeal. Salim Hamdan's military commission trial is scheduled to begin next week, under procedures that if concocted the other side of the 17-mile fence that separates the US naval base from the rest of Cuba, would surely lead to vigorous protests on the part of the USA. At a pre-trial hearing in front of a US military judge in late April 2008, Salim Hamdan put it thus, according to Amnesty International's observer at the proceedings: There is no such thing as justice here. The law is clear. International law is clear. But this is not justice: I see a piece of paper - I say it's white, you say it's black. I say black, you say it's white. I am not speaking to you, Judge. I am speaking to the American Government. These words are not directed at you America tells the world about freedom and justice. Hundreds of detainees do not see justice. Give me a just court Give me my human rights. The US government says it aims to hold governments accountable to their obligations under universal human rights norms and international human rights instruments. Judge Robertson yesterday missed an opportunity to hold the US government accountable for a trial system that does not meet international fair trial standards and should be called to a halt. This is the US government's second attempt since 2001 to try foreign nationals it has branded as unlawful enemy combatants in front of military commissions. The first system - for four years promoted by the administration as guaranteeing full and fair trials - ended in June 2006 when the US Supreme Court ruled that the structure and procedures of the commissions violated US and international law. The response of the political branches was not to turn to the existing US courts, but to continue the experiment and legislate to replace the condemned commissions with a revised system that offered little improvement on its predecessor. These are second-class trials to which the US government would not subject its own nationals. The very law under which they are convened is incompatible with the international prohibition on discrimination. I want to emphasize that the Military Commissions Act does not apply to American citizens, said the US Attorney General the day after the MCA passed into law in October 2006; Thus, if I or any other American citizen were detained, we would have access to the full panoply of rights that we enjoyed before the law. Displaying the disregard for the presumption of innocence that has become a hallmark of the US administration's public commentary on the war on terror detainees, the country's then chief law enforcement officer added that under the MCA,every terrorist will receive a full and fair trial. According to such commentary, the unlawful enemy combatant label is synonymous with
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
July 7 USA: Who Misread the Data on Deterrence? In their June 30 op-ed, A Death Penalty Puzzle, Cass R. Sunstein and Justin Wolfers asserted that the opinions issued recently in Baze v. Rees by Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia on opposite sides of the death penalty debate are flawed by a misreading of the data on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. After asserting that homicide rates are not closely associated with capital punishment, they criticized Justice Stevens's conclusion that there remains no reliable statistical evidence that capital punishment in fact deters potential offenders and that in the absence of such evidence, deterrence cannot serve as a sufficient penological justification for this uniquely severe and irrevocable punishment. The authors dismissed this position by stating that the absence of evidence of deterrence should not be confused with evidence of absence. Justice Stevens, however, asserted only what the empirical studies of the question tell us and what the authors themselves concluded: that there is no reliable and consistent evidence of a deterrent effect. It is hard to see how Justice Stevens misread the evidence. Indeed, it seems that Mr. Sunstein and Mr. Wolfers have misread Justice Stevens. Perhaps they thought that they needed to be evenhanded in their criticism of both sides of the debate, despite what the evidence clearly shows. HARRY MERRYMAN Rochester, N.Y. (source: Letter to the Editor, Washington Post)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
July 2 USA: In Weighing Death Penalty, a Flaw in Fact When the Supreme Court ruled last week that the death penalty for raping a child was unconstitutional, the majority noted that a child rapist could face the ultimate penalty in only 6 states not in any of the 30 other states that have the death penalty, and not under the jurisdiction of the federal government either. This inventory of jurisdictions was a central part of the courts analysis, the foundation for Justice Anthony M. Kennedys conclusion in his majority opinion that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the evolving standards of decency by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied. It turns out that Justice Kennedy's confident assertion about the absence of federal law was wrong. A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial. Anyone in the federal government or anywhere else, for that matter who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it. The Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, did not even file a brief, evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisianas death penalty for child rape was constitutional. The provision was the subject of a post over the weekend on the blog run by Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals. Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Courts decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. We're not talking about ancient history, he said in an interview. This happened in 2006. He titled his blog post The Supremes Dis the Military Justice System. Jeffrey L. Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who successfully represented the defendant in the case, Patrick Kennedy, said that he and others on the defense legal team, in researching how various jurisdictions treat child rape, had actually looked into what military law said on the subject. All they found was an old provision making rape a capital offense; it predated the courts modern death penalty jurisprudence, under which the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman was ruled unconstitutional in 1977. We just assumed it was defunct, Mr. Fisher said of the military provision. We figured if somebody in the government thought otherwise, we'd hear about it. The Justice Department declined to comment. We do not comment on internal deliberative matters, said Erik Ablin of the departments Office of Public Affairs. The lawyers in the Jefferson Parish, La., district attorney's office who handled the case for the state, in defense of Louisiana's child rape law, were out of the office this week. Steve Wimberly, the lawyer in the office designated to handle press inquiries about the Supreme Court case, did not return a telephone call. Any losing party in the Supreme Court can file a petition within 25 days asking the justices to reconsider their decision. Granting such a petition requires a majority vote. Although these petitions are filed rather often, they are, not surprisingly, almost never granted. R. Ted Cruz, who argued the case in support of Louisiana on behalf of a coalition of 10 states, said in an interview that the chance that the court would reconsider the decision was extremely unlikely even if Louisiana brought the omission to the justices attention. A member of the majority would have to change his mind, but it's obvious that both sides gave this case very careful consideration, Mr. Cruz said. The vote in the case was 5 to 4. At the time of the argument, Mr. Cruz was the Texas solicitor general. He has since gone into private practice. In preparing for the case, he said, the existence of the military provision simply eluded everyone's research. No one in the military has been charged with a capital crime yet under the revised provision. And despite the flurry of activity surrounding the death penalty, the military has not in fact executed anyone for decades. Its last execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Pvt. John A. Bennett was put to death by hanging. His crime: the rape of an 11-year-old girl. (source: New York Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ARK., MONT., ILL.
July 1 USAfederal death penalty Pentagon seeks death penalty in Cole bombingThe destroyer Cole was bombed during a refueling stop in Yemen. Authorities say the suspect in the attack is also linked to the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998. The accused, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, faces charges of murder and conspiracy in the 2000 terrorist attack. He is being held at Guantanamo. The Pentagon announced Monday it would seek the death penalty against a Saudi Arabian accused of plotting the October 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, whom officials allege was the Al Qaeda chief for the Arabian Peninsula before his capture in 2002, faces charges of murder, conspiracy, treachery and 5 other terrorism-related acts if the proposed capital case is approved by the civilian head of the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunal. Nashiri was 1 of 3 terrorism suspects subjected to the controversial interrogation tactic known as waterboarding while in secret CIA custody abroad, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress in February. The procedure simulates drowning and has been deemed torture by human rights advocates and most U.S. allies. Military interrogators and FBI agents have renounced its use. Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, was among 14 so-called high-value detainees moved from secret CIA prisons to the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006. At his Combatant Status Review Tribunal six months later, a court-mandated intake procedure for each prisoner after his arrival at Guantanamo, Nashiri said that while in CIA custody he was tortured into confessing to the Cole bombing and other acts of terrorism. Evidence submitted to the March 2007 review also linked Nashiri to the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998 that killed at least 224 people. He was also said to have plotted the October 2002 attack on the French supertanker Limburg in which a crew member was killed and 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden. Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal advisor to tribunal Convening Authority Susan J. Crawford, was asked at a Pentagon news conference on Monday how the government expected to convict Nashiri on evidence that would be inadmissible in any other U.S. court. Hartmann said all evidence, including the allegations of torture, would be addressed by the tribunal. Hartmann has spearheaded a drive by the tribunal to get high-profile cases under way before the November elections. The advisor was disqualified in May from one war crimes case after a judge ruled he lacked independence from the prosecutor function. Nashiri would become the sixth Guantanamo prisoner facing the death penalty if Crawford approves the charges drafted by prosecutors. He is the 20th Guantanamo prisoner to be identified for prosecution from among the 270 still detained there. The government has said it plans to bring charges against as many as 80. Calls for Guantanamo's closure have escalated after three Supreme Court rulings accorded the foreign prisoners rights the military had argued didn't apply to them because they weren't held on U.S. soil. A June 12 high court ruling held that the terrorism suspects had the right to challenge their detention in U.S. federal courts -- an action that is expected to result in the transfer or release of dozens of prisoners. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the ACLU would provide an experienced civilian defense attorney for Nashiri to augment what he called under-resourced military defense teams for defendants threatened with execution. No matter how hard the Bush administration pushes in its waning days, our defense team is committed to doing everything possible to ensure that this case does not become a political show trial where prosecutions and convictions happen in the blink of an eye without regard for due process, the rules of evidence and the U.S. Constitution, he said. In New York, U.N. human rights special envoy Philip Alston deemed the Guantanamo tribunal flawed for the restricted rights accorded detainees and rules that allowed coerced evidence and hearsay. It would violate international law to execute someone following this kind of proceeding, Alston said at the end of a 2-week U.S. visit. The Pentagon charge sheet on Nashiri alleges that he joined Al Qaeda in 1998 and rented a residence in Aden, Yemen, where the Cole attack occurred two years later. He is said to have procured the boat and explosives used to attack the Cole. The same vessel was used 9 months earlier, in January 2000, in a failed attempt to blow up another U.S. Navy vessel, The Sullivans. He was arrested two years after the Cole bombing in the United Arab Emirates. The CIA hasn't disclosed where it held him for the 4 years between his capture and his transfer to Guantanamo along with 13 others, including
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
June 30 USA: UN rights expert calls on United States to ensure death penalty is applied fairly Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions 30 June 2008 The United States should take immediate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied fairly and justly in states where it is practised, a United Nations human rights expert said today, voicing particular concern that officials in the state of Alabama seem strikingly indifferent to the risk of executing innocent people. Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, also called for the country's military justice system to be improved so that victims of possibly unlawful killings can receive justice. In a preliminary statement issued after completing an official visit to the US, where he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in Washington, DC, New York, Alabama and Texas, Mr. Alston said he was disturbed by how authorities in Alabama and Texas had responded to recognized flaws in their systems. When we are talking about a situation in which innocent people have probably been executed, you would expect a greater sense of urgency about reforming the criminal justice system, he said. In Texas, there is at least significant recognition that reforms are needed, Mr. Alston said, noting that in Alabama officials give a range of standard responses to criticisms, most of which are characterized by a refusal to engage with the facts. The reality is that the system is simply not designed to turn up cases of innocence, however compelling they might be. It is entirely possible that Alabama has already executed innocent people, but officials would rather deny than confront flaws in the criminal justice system. Since 1973, 129 people across the US have been exonerated while waiting on death row and this number continues to grow, according to Mr. Alston. He called for a multi-pronged strategy to reform the criminal justice systems in Alabama and Texas, starting with the immediate tackling of problems such as judicial independence and the lack of an adequate right to counsel. Partisan elections for judges have placed them under popular pressure to impose and uphold death sentences whenever possible, the Special Rapporteur said. Yet the role of the judiciary is to ensure that justice is done in individual cases and to avoid the execution of innocent persons. It is not to ensure that the popular will prevails over other considerations. He called on the US Congress to enact laws that would allow federal courts to review all issues in state and federal death penalty cases on their merits, and he also criticized Texas for failing to review the cases of foreign nationals on its death row who have been deprived of the right to consular assistance from their home countries. Turning to Guantnamo Bay, Mr. Alston called on the US Government to release the results of investigations and autopsies into the death of 5 detainees who died in 2006 and 2007. The text of the Military Commissions Act, under which six alien unlawful enemy combatants at Guantnamo Bay are being tried, indicate clearly that these trials utterly fail to meet the basic due process standards required for a fair trial under international humanitarian and human rights law. Access to counsel has been severely limited, 2nd- and 3rd-hand hearsay evidence can be used, the prosecution can withhold evidence from the accused, and the defences ability to obtain witnesses is restricted. Any death sentence imposed as a result of such trials would clearly violate international law, Mr. Alston said. He also urged the Government to publish information on civilian casualties resulting from its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and to make it possible for US citizens and ordinary Afghans and Iraqis to follow the workings of the military justice system. As it stands, following a case through the military justice system is remarkably difficult, and outside observers have no basis upon which to conclude that the system is in fact operating fairly. Although some steps have been taken to ensure accountability for killings carried out by private military contractors, more needs to be done, the Special Rapporteur added. It's the Department of Justice's job to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings, but it has done next to nothing. Mr. Alston, who serves in an unpaid and independent capacity, will report on his findings to the UN Human Rights Council later this year. UN Special Rapporteur concludes official visit to the United States Today, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, concluded an official visit to the United States. During the visit, he looked at a range of issues, including the use of the death penalty and the operation of the military justice system. The press release
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
June 30 USA: A Death Penalty PuzzleThe Murky Evidence for and Against Deterrence Although the Supreme Court banned capital punishment for child rape last week, the justices have made it clear that for homicide, states may inflict the ultimate penalty. Last month, capital punishment resumed after a seven-month moratorium. Rapid scheduling of executions followed the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees, reaffirming the constitutionality of the death penalty in general and lethal injection in particular. To support their competing conclusions on the legal issue, different members of the court invoked work by each of us on the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Unfortunately, they misread the evidence. Justice John Paul Stevens cited recent research by Wolfers (with co-author John Donohue) to justify the claim that there remains no reliable statistical evidence that capital punishment in fact deters potential offenders. Justice Antonin Scalia cited a suggestion by Sunstein (with co-author Adrian Vermeule) that a significant body of recent evidence shows that capital punishment may well have a deterrent effect, possibly a quite powerful one. What does the evidence actually say? One approach notes that in states with the death penalty, the average murder rate is about 40 % higher than in states without the death penalty. Yet such comparisons are surely confounded by other influences, as those states that impose the death penalty also have a historic culture of violence, including lynching. If we compare countries, the United States has higher execution and higher homicide rates than nearly all other industrialized countries. Here, too, many alternative explanations remain, making it hazardous to conclude that the death penalty does not deter murder. Other studies have evaluated changes in homicide rates over time. In the 1960s, as the death penalty fell into disuse, homicide rates rose sharply, leading some studies to infer a deterrent effect. Moreover, a large-scale decline in homicide in the past two decades coincided with renewed use of the death penalty. Countering this, homicide and execution rates rose together in the 1920s and early 1930s, then fell together through the 1940s and 1950s. Because conclusions are so sensitive to the time period evaluated, these studies fail to provide much help. More sophisticated studies compare the evolution of homicide rates across jurisdictions. Over the past 6 decades, the homicide rate in Canada has tracked that in the United States even as the countries' punishment policies have diverged sharply. Similarly, the 12 states that have not executed a prisoner since 1960 comprise a useful comparison group; murder rates in these states have largely tracked those in states that subsequently adopted or rejected the death penalty. One might like to conclude that these latter studies demonstrate that the death penalty does not deter. But this is asking too much of the data. The number of homicides is so large, and varies so much year to year, that it is impossible to disentangle the effects of execution policy from other changes affecting murder rates. Moreover, execution policy doesn't change often or much. Just as a laboratory scientist with too few experimental subjects cannot draw strong conclusions, the best we can say is that homicide rates are not closely associated with capital punishment. On the basis of existing evidence, it is especially hard to justify claims about causality. Justice Stevens argues, In the absence of such evidence, deterrence cannot serve as a sufficient penological justification for this uniquely severe and irrevocable punishment. Perhaps. But the absence of evidence of deterrence should not be confused with evidence of absence. Justice Scalia relies on the suggestion by Sunstein and Vermeule that some evidence suggests a possible deterrent effect. But that suggestion actually catalyzed Donohue and Wolfers's study of available empirical evidence. Existing studies contain significant statistical errors, and slightly different approaches yield widely varying findings, a problem exacerbated by researchers' tendency to report only those results supporting their conclusions. This led Sunstein and Vermeule to acknowledge: We do not know whether deterrence has been shown. . . . Nor do we conclude that the evidence of deterrence has reached some threshold of reliability that permits or requires government action. In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty. Why is the Supreme Court debating deterrence? A prominent line of reasoning, endorsed by several justices, holds that if capital punishment fails to deter crime, it serves no useful purpose and hence is cruel and unusual, violating the Eighth Amendment. This reasoning tracks public debate as well. While some favor the death penalty on retributive grounds, many others (including President Bush)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
June 26 USA: USA: Another step up the evolutionary ladder Supreme Court prohibits death penalty for child rape 26 June 2008 AI Index: AMR 51/069/2008 Based both on consensus and our own independent judgment, our holding is that a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Kennedy v. Louisiana, US Supreme Court, 25 June 2008 On 25 June 2008, by 5 votes to 4, the US Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law allowing the death penalty for the non-homicidal rape of a child. The five Justices in the majority opinion held that execution was an excessive punishment in such cases, and that the USA's constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments bars imposition of the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death. Amnesty International welcomes the judgment, while acknowledging the serious nature of the crimes targeted by such legislation in a number of states in the USA. In addition to its absolute opposition to the death penalty in all cases, the organization has been concerned that such laws run counter to international standards seeking to narrow the scope of the death penalty, and that they contradict the global trend towards eradication of capital punishment. While children must be protected from violence, the death penalty is not the way to do it. And while the victims of childhood sexual assault deserve all possible therapeutic assistance, executing the offender does nothing to heal the trauma caused by the crime. Indeed, a law that increases the punishment for child rape from imprisonment to death may put the life of the child at increased risk. If such an offender rapes or otherwise sexually abuses a child, and is aware of the detail and scope of the law, he might decide that he has nothing to lose by killing the child, the only witness to the offence. The death penalty would thus have become a counter-deterrent. Such laws may also bring with them particular risks to the accused. A child who becomes a witness is vulnerable to making unreliable statements, a matter of extreme concern when such evidence may be what secures a death sentence. The case here concerned Patrick Kennedy, who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 2003 for the rape of his eight-year-old stepdaughter. Only one other man is on death row for the rape of a child in the USA. A Louisiana jury sent Richard Davis to death row in 2007 for the rape of a five-year-old child. Of the approximately 3,300 individuals on death row in the USA, these 2 men are the only condemned inmates who were convicted of crimes not involving murder. As in its rulings in 2002 and 2005 outlawing the execution of people with mental retardation (Atkins v. Virginia) and of people for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old (Roper v. Simmons), the Supreme Court applied its evolving standards of decency analysis. In Trop v. Dulles in 1958, the Supreme Court had held that the meaning of the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments was not static, but draw[s] its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. In a brief filed with the Supreme Court half a century later in the Kennedy case, urging the Justices to uphold the Louisiana child rape law, the state prosecuting authorities in Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Washington argued that such evolution need not be in only one direction. Nevertheless, authoring the majority opinion in the Kennedy v. Louisiana ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that: Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person, and the punishment of criminals must conform to that rule When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint. Justice Kennedy explained that this is why capital punishment in the USA is limited to those offenders who commit a narrow category of the most serious crimes and whose extreme culpability makes them the most deserving of execution. Thus, children and the mentally impaired had been excluded from the death penalty by the Roper and Atkins decisions because such defendants were categorically less culpable. In earlier decisions, the Court had held that death was an impermissible punishment where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the death of the victim. In Amnesty International's view, the death penalty per se is incompatible with human dignity. As the United Nations General Assembly said in its landmark resolution against the death penalty adopted in late 2007, the use of the death penalty undermines human dignity, and a moratorium on the use of the death penalty
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, ARIZ., UTAH, COLO.
June 15 USA: Last meal is irrelevant Re: Dallas woman's killer is executed 'I am so terribly sorry,' he tells victim's relatives, Thursday news story. I never cease to be amazed and repulsed by the media's incessant fascination with the last meal of a condemned inmate. What relevance does this have to anything related to the horrors of the crime or the sufferings of the family members of both the victim and the inmate? Reporting the content of a condemned inmate's last meal does nothing to move society forward toward a healthy dialogue that is so necessary when confronting the great social justice issues of our times. Rick Halperin, president, Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Dallas (source: Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News) * British resident could face death penalty in Guantnamo trial Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who lived and worked in the UK for more than 7 years, was 1 of 4 Guantnamo prisoners recently put forward for trial by Military Commission. The four were charged with terror offences, and their cases referred to the United States militarys Convening Authority, which must now decide whether to press ahead with a full trial. His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who had recently visited Mohamed in Guantnamo, told the press he was in a very bad state, adding that all a trial by Military Commission would produce is evidence not of terrorism, but of torture. Stafford Smith said, I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco. Mohamed sought asylum in Britain in 1994 and was subsequently granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK. In 2002, he was kidnapped while travelling in Pakistan and was eventually handed over to the US military. He was then subjected to extraordinary rendition, being flown in a secret CIA plane to Morocco, where he was held and tortured for 18 months. He claims his captors inflicted severe beatings and also used a scalpel to make cuts to his chest and penis in order to force a confession from him. Before finally being transferred to Guantnamo in September 2004, he was also rendered to the Dark Prison in Kabul, the notorious US-run torture facility, where inmates describe being denied food and drinking water while they were chained to walls in total darkness with loud rap music or other sounds blaring out for protracted periods. (source: IndyBay News) * Death penalty doesn't deter criminals I'm 15 and attending a high school in Broome County. I play sports and lead a common teenage life. However, I am ashamed of the times we live in. What has the world come to where the value of human life is being diminished, where people are being punished with death and torture? As a student and member of the Catholic Church, I am letting my voice be heard. A teacher recently told me that we have to let our voices be heard if we want something changed. It is a proven fact that capital punishment does not deter murder. So why do it? Why should the government have the right to take away lives as a means of punishment? What does that say about humanity? The only true way to answer these questions is through enlightenment and understanding. All human life is sacred, no matter how misguided. The death penalty just shows our ignorance, and inability to deal with our problems. Open your hearts to new ideas, and explore different options. Michelle McCabeEndwell (soruce: Press Sun-Bulletin) ARIZONA: Execution protocol challengedInmate's attorneys question Arizona's injection process Is the lethal-injection procedure that Arizona uses to carry out the death penalty too complex and too risky to pass constitutional muster? The attorneys representing the prisoner next likely to be executed say yes, and they're hoping the Arizona courts will follow recent rulings in Tennessee and Ohio that knocked down those states' lethal-injection protocol. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that the lethal-injection protocol used in Kentucky did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. But that decision also left the door open for defendants in other states to challenge their procedures used to administer death. Jeffrey Landrigan, 48, was given the death penalty for killing a Phoenix man in 1989, and he was scheduled to die last November. But his execution was put off while the high court deliberated the Kentucky case. Federal public defenders have since filed a petition for post-conviction relief in Maricopa County Superior Court on Landrigan's behalf. It's a petition that provides an unprecedented, detailed look at how the condemned are put to death. The motion alleges that Arizona's use of a 9-person team to administer three drugs is too complex. It also claims that use of an IV
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, IND., S.C., CALIF.
June 12 USA: New Criminal Record: 7.2 MillionNation's Justice System Strains to Keep Pace With Convictions The number of people under supervision in the nation's criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons. According to a recently released report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million offenders were either in jail or prison in 2006, the most recent year studied in an annual survey. Another 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole. The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee. There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening, said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You're paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense. The bureau's report comes on the heels of a Pew Center on the States report showing 1 % of U.S. adults behind bars, a historic high. The United States has the largest number of people behind bars in the world, according to the Pew report. Black men, about one in 15, were most affected, and Hispanics, one in 35, were well represented among offenders. The number of women in prison rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years, mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report said. In 1980, about the time that tough sentencing laws, particularly for drug offenses, began to be passed by federal and state legislators, 1.8 million people were in the system and $11 billion was spent on corrections. It's really like a runaway train, said Ryan King, policy analyst for the liberal Sentencing Project. Nobody's taking a step back and asking where all these billions of dollars are going. With so much overcrowding, King said, states need billions of dollars to build enough beds to catch up to where they need to be. Defenders of the system argue, however, that the rise in the prison population means that more dangerous criminals have been taken off the streets. If you look at the fact that these are people who are committing a crime, creating a danger to the public, you can't look at it as wrong, said Scott Thorpe, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association. What is the appropriate number of people to be incarcerated to ensure public safety? I don't know if you can answer that. State contracts with private prisons to house offenders grew by 6 %, or about 6,000 inmates, the report said. Nearly 114,000 state and federal prisoners were in private institutions in 2006. Tim Lynch, director of the criminal justice project for the libertarian Cato Institute, called the numbers scandalous and said states have resorted to tinkering to solve prison overcrowding. I think these numbers demonstrate that we've lost our way, Lynch said. We've lost our way when our laws require such a massive scale of incarceration. Lynch and others said the drug war is destroying American inner cities almost as much as the drug trade. When you lock up a bank robber, a child molester or a mugger, you're removing a career offender from the street. When you lock up a drug dealer, he is immediately replaced, Lynch said. We tried this with alcohol during Prohibition and it didn't work. We're not reaching the same conclusion with the drug war. It's slowly sinking in, but it will take politicians some time to turn this around. (source: Washington Post) * High Court: Gitmo detainees have rights in court The Supreme Court ruled today that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts. The justices handed the Bush administration its 3rd setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court's liberal justices in the majority. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first 2, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban. The administration opened the detention facility at
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, OHIO, LA., KAN., N.H.
June 8 USA: US: Exonerations Speed Change of Mind After more than a decade of DNA tests, appeals and waiting on death row, Texas prisoner Michael Blair is likely to be exonerated soon, further undermining public confidence in the infallibility of the U.S. death penalty system. Recent extensive DNA tests on microscopic hair samples established no link between Blair and a child who was murdered in 1993, according to state prosecutors. It is expected that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will grant Blair a new trial and that state prosecutors will then dismiss charges against him because they believe there is no evidence to convict him. There is no good faith argument to support the current conviction in light of the facts and the law..., John Roach, chief prosecutor for Collin County, said in an open letter to the press and public on May 23. All the DNA pointed toward his innocence, Philip Wischkaemper, Blair's attorney, told IPS. Blair -- convicted largely on the basis of microscopic examination of hair samples -- was nearly executed in 1999. This case starkly shows that the system makes mistakes and that those mistakes can have chilling consequences. Even more troubling is the reality that the kind of evidence that led to Michael Blair's wrongful conviction is used in countless cases nationwide every day, said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which assisted in the Blair case. The Innocence Project is a national organisation dedicated to exonerating people using rapidly advancing DNA techniques. The 1st DNA exoneration in the U.S. was less than 20 years ago. A key factor in convicting Blair of murder was bias against him because of his criminal history as a child sex offender, Wischkaemper said. 7-year-old Ashley Estell was found strangled in 1993 after being abducted from a busy playground in Plano, Texas. There were no sightings of her with him (Blair), no linkage with him, Wischkaemper said. Blair admitted abusing children -- when exonerated he will remain in prison for life for child sex offences -- but denied he had ever murdered. The crime was so emotionally charged that the trial had to be moved 300 miles away. At the time, everyone wanted to kill Michael Blair, Wischkaemper said. The legislature reacted by passing special laws, the so-called Ashley's Laws'', aimed at better tracking convicted child sex offenders and imposing stiffer sentences. If Blair is officially exonerated, he will join 129 other people who since 1973 have been found innocent while awaiting execution on death row in the U.S. These are not simply cases in which the defendant's sentence was reduced and he was later released. Nor are these cases where a subjective judgment was made that the defendants were probably innocent, even though they were found guilty, Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC), said recently. Rather, the justice system had reviewed the death sentences and concluded that the people could not have been convicted of even the slightest offence related to the crimes, he added. Juries and judges in the U.S., apparently reflecting a growing public unease, are handing down significantly fewer death sentences today compared to a decade ago. The pace of exonerations has sharply increased in recent years and this has raised doubts about the reliability of the whole system, the DPIC said, commenting on this trend. I would say innocence is the most important issue in moving mainstream Americans away from the death penalty, Judi Caruso, director of Voices United for Justice, an abolition group, told IPS. They still believe that it's a moral punishment that someone should be put to death. But they're re-evaluating the system and considering that it is broken -- and broken beyond repair, Caruso added. The Innocence Project, begun in 1992, focuses exclusively on exonerations through DNA testing. It has helped free 16 people from death row. Other state-based innocence projects and individual attorneys have been behind most other exonerations in the U.S., many of which have not involved DNA evidence. Their work was crucial as only between five and 10 percent of criminal cases have evidence available that can be DNA-tested, according to the Innocence Project. The evidence may often be too old -- some people on death row were convicted of their crimes 20 or more years ago -- missing or inadequate. In 2001, the Centre on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School analysed the cases of 86 of those exonerated and released from death row and found there were many common reasons. These included false testimony, mistaken identity and police and prosecutorial misconduct. Poor legal representation and false testimony is what kept Bo Levon Jones, a black man wrongly convicted of murder, on death row in North Carolina for 15 years, until May this year. Jones received two (court)-appointed attorneys that spent virtually no time or effort
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news---USA, OHIO, MISS., PENN., LA.
June 6 USA: Unabomber's brother, victim forge unique friendship If Gary Wright wanted nothing to do with anyone with the last name of Kaczynski, few would blame him. Even David Kaczynski would understand. After all, it was Kaczynski's brother, Ted, who tried to kill Wright with a bomb outside his Utah office in 1987. The blast sent him flying through the air, and more than 200 pieces of shrapnel tore into his body, some shards severing nerves in his left arm. But David Kaczynski and Wright have forged the type of bond that has taken them canoeing in the Adirondacks together and touring the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. They also travel the nation for speaking engagements about pain and reconciliation. He helped me see that I could reconnect, Kaczynski told CNN. There was hope that things would get better and not worse. Gary was, in some sense, my psychological lifeline through this terrible ordeal. Kaczynski recalls the moment just a few days before Thanksgiving in 1996 when he finally called Wright. He took a deep breath before dialing the phone number. The answering machine picked up. Hello, you've reached the Wright house at the wrong time, please leave a message. Kaczynski left a voice mail telling Wright that he was Ted Kaczynski's brother and that he would call back in a few days. Unlikely Friendship CNN's American Morning explores the unique relationship between the Unabomber's brother and a victim. It was David Kaczynski who earlier that year turned in his own brother to federal authorities as a suspect in the Unabomber attacks. Ted Kaczynski had just been arrested for carrying out a nearly 20-year bombing crusade against technology. He killed 3 people with his homemade bombs and wounded more than 20 others. Wright was the Unabomber's 11th victim. He was severely wounded outside his computer company in 1987 when he bent down to pick up a piece of lumber in the parking lot. It turned out to be a bomb planted by Ted Kaczynski. For some reason, I thought someone had come around the corner of the building and shot me with a shotgun, Wright said. When David Kaczynski and Wright finally spoke by phone, Kaczynski offered his apologies and then braced himself for Wright to lash out in anger. It's not your fault, Wright recalls telling Kaczynski. You really don't have to carry that [burden]. An intense feeling of relief overwhelmed Kaczynski. He had written letters to every victim's family. Only a few responded. And those who did had not offered Wright's warmth and compassion. The 2 men didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of their unlikely friendship. Kaczynski and Wright recently detailed the evolution of their relationship for CNN during a speaking appearance in Miami. I have learned things that no other victim of these set of crimes will ever know, and it's because of that relationship, Wright said. There's more knowing you have a good family that raised this person [Ted] and that one person inside the family doesn't define the whole family. They say that after their initial conversation, the phone calls became more frequent. Their families soon met. In fact, Wright traveled to New York and met David Kaczynski's mother and sat down in her living room, thumbing through family photo albums, looking at the childhood pictures and hearing stories of the boy who would become the Unabomber, the very man who tried to kill him. I've been able to see things, see photos that were outside of the norm, Wright said. See a family that was a family unit before something went wrong. In 1999, Wright and Kaczynski started traveling the country together telling their story. Thousands of miles on the road have developed a brotherhood born of tragedy. They admit their relationship is unique. There is a lot of pain for me with the word 'brother,' a lot of emotion, Kaczynski said. But I see Gary as my brother. Wright added, I don't take that lightly, either. I don't use that word, 'brother,' lightly. Kaczynski says Wright has not replaced Ted as his older brother, but Wright has clearly filled in. David Kaczynski says he doesn't know what his brother would think of the friendship. Ted Kaczynski has not spoken to his family since April 3, 1996, the day he was arrested. He's serving a life sentence at the supermax federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. David writes him letters on his birthday and holidays. Their mother writes Ted every month, he said. But a return letter has never arrived. Kaczynski and Wright see each other only a few times a year, typically when they give a speaking engagement. Kaczynski lives in New York; Wright still lives in Utah where he now works as a technical sales engineer in the biopharmaceutical and medical device industries. But both men say dealing with the aftermath of the Unabomber tragedy would have been a much lonelier road without this newfound brotherhood. I liken it to like World War II vets. They went through
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, CALIF., TENN., GA.
June 5 USA: Alleged 9/11 mastermind gets court day The suspects face the death penalty 2 offers from the Navy and Air Force are representing Mohammed Tribunals have been mired in confusion over courtroom rules, dogged by delays The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the military commissions in 2006 The military expects a confrontational hearing when the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and four alleged confederates are brought before a Marine colonel presiding over their war-crimes tribunal. The sun sets over Camp Justice and its adjacent tent city at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba on Wednesday. At an arraignment scheduled for Thursday, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was expected to make his first public appearance since being captured in Pakistan in 2003, held in CIA custody at secret sites and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006. Air Force Brig. Gen. Tom Hartmann, a top tribunal official, told dozens of journalists late Wednesday he expects defense lawyers will robustly argue points with prosecutors and Judge Ralph Kohlmann on behalf of their clients, who face the death penalty. Expect to see challenges tomorrow, and the intensity of the process, Hartmann said at a briefing in an abandoned aircraft hangar near the courthouse at this isolated U.S. Navy base. Army Col. Steve David, chief defense counsel for the tribunals, said the military commissions -- which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in 2006 as unconstitutional before they were altered and resurrected months later -- are fundamentally flawed. We will zealously identify and expose each and every flaw, he said. The tribunals have been mired in confusion over courtroom rules and dogged by delays. Military commissions have been conducted since George Washington used them after the end of the Revolutionary War, but this is the 1st time the United States has used them during an ongoing conflict, Hartmann said. Mohammed is represented by 2 officers from the Navy and the Air Force. Two civilian attorneys from Idaho, including one who defended a client accused in the white supremacist Ruby Ridge case, also represent the Pakistani. Defense attorneys for the 5 detainees accused in the Sept. 11 attack that killed 2,973 people say the U.S. is rushing the case to trial to influence the presidential election. They recently asked Kohlmann to throw out the case and remove Hartmann, who was accused of political meddling by a former chief prosecutor for the military commissions. 2 weeks ago, Deputy Secretary of State Gordon England declared that providing fair trials at Guantanamo is the No. 1 legal services obligation for the Defense Department, said Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunals. He said he has not been asked to recuse himself from the upcoming trial. Mohammed will be arraigned simultaneously with the four men inside the high-tech courthouse, part of the expeditionary legal complex arrayed on an abandoned airfield at Guantanamo. Guards will be near the men but no firearms are allowed in the courtroom, said Army Col. Wendy Kelly. Mohammed and the other four detainees can be restrained by retractable leg chains hidden underneath the raised courtroom floor if they become unruly, Kelly said. The arraignment will launch the highest-profile test yet of a tribunal system that faces an uncertain future. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down an earlier system as unconstitutional in 2006, and is to rule this month on the rights of Guantanamo prisoners, potentially delaying or halting the proceedings. And with less than 8 months remaining in President Bush's term, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both say they want to close the military's offshore detention center. Obama opposed the Military Commissions Act that in 2006 resurrected the military commissions, but McCain supported it. The modular courtroom can be taken down and sent to Fort Bragg, Fort Lewis, or any installation that needs a big courtroom, Kelly said. Dozens of U.S. and international journalists arrived at Guantanamo on Wednesday on a military plane for the joint arraignment, which the military expects to last just 1 day. The 5 prisoners will be formally notified of the nature of the charges, will be told of their rights to attorneys and will be given the opportunity to enter a plea, though they do not have to enter one, Hartmann said. All 5 are charged with murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, attacking civilians, terrorism and other crimes. The 4 defendants due to appear with Mohammed are: Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and al Qaeda leaders; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew and lieutenant of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; al-Baluchi's assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who allegedly selected and trained some of the 19 hijackers. * Accused 9/11 mastermind wants death sentence
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
May 26 USA: More fears about executing the innocent Defense attorneys worry bad evidence, witnesses send men to chambers Nobody has produced irrefutable proof that any innocent man was executed Former prosecutor: Death penalty for a greatly cruel, sadistic-type crime Since 1973, 129 people have walked off death rows based on evidence A call from death row inmate Terry Lyn Short interrupted a meeting in the office of his attorney, James Rowan. Short wanted a promise that, after he is put to death next month, he won't end up in a pauper's grave in the cemetery that contains the bodies of many of those hanged, electrocuted and lethally injected at the 100-year-old Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Rowan told his 47-year-old client not to be concerned about that. It's not going to cost you anything, so don't worry about it. That's the least of your worries, he said. What worries Rowan and other defense attorneys is the possibility that an innocent man could be executed now that the nation's death-row machine is gearing up again following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection. They point to past death sentences of men who were later exonerated, blaming ineffective lawyers, overzealous prosecutors and shoddy evidence. The answer is yes, it could happen, said Rowan, who has defended more than 40 capital cases. Since 1973, 129 people have walked off death rows in 26 states after evidence proved they were wrongfully convicted, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Florida leads all states with 22 exonerations, followed by 18 in Illinois. Oklahoma is 1 of 5 states that have each freed eight inmates from death row. One of the Oklahoma men, Ron Williamson, spent 9 years on death row and came within 5 days of execution before he was set free by DNA evidence. The case formed the basis of John Grisham's best-selling The Innocent Man. Oklahoma's executioners have administered lethal injections to 86 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, trailing only Texas with 405 and Virginia with 98. Nobody has ever been able to produce irrefutable proof that any innocent man was executed in recent U.S. history, but Oklahoma's execution of Malcolm Rent Johnson has troubled many death penalty opponents. He went to his execution proclaiming his innocence. A star prosecution witness against Johnson, convicted of the 1981 rape and strangulation of an elderly woman, was police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, who was later fired amid allegations of shoddy forensic work and misleading testimony. There were serious questions about his case, said Vicki Werneke, chief of the capital post-conviction division of the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence in that case, but he was executed in 2000, right before the whole issue with Joyce Gilchrist came to light. Attempts to contact Gilchrist for comment were unsuccessful; there is no listed telephone number for her in Oklahoma City. A current case that has raised questions is that of Paris Lapriest Powell, convicted in the 1993 shooting death of a 14-year-old in a gang-related, drive-by shooting in Oklahoma City. Powell, then 19, and a co-defendant were convicted and sentenced to death based largely on the testimony of prosecution witness Derick Smith, a convicted drug dealer who has since recanted his testimony and said he lied. A federal judge has ordered a new trial for Powell, now 34. The state has appealed the judge's ruling. Powell, one of 83 condemned inmates in the H-unit of the state penitentiary, has always maintained his innocence. I've never really sat back and contemplated my last meal or anything like that. I've refused to accept that, Powell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. He describes a sense of community on Oklahoma's death row, where inmates share a common goal of avoiding the nearby death chamber. You can't help but to think about it. You always know that it's there, Powell said. I don't prefer death at all, but if I have to die ... I'd choose old age. Both Powell and Johnson were prosecuted by the office of Bob Macy, Oklahoma County's chief prosecutor for more than 2 decades. Macy, now 78 and retired, oversaw an office that sent to death row 34 of the 86 inmates who have been executed in Oklahoma since executions resumed in 1990. While Macy acknowledges that forensic science has advanced greatly in recent years and that appellate courts sometimes criticized his arguments, he said he never sought the death penalty unless he was convinced a defendant was guilty. I have always believed the death penalty is a deterrent, and it's one reason I sought the death penalty as often as I did, he said. We tried at least 60 capital murder cases, and I think we got the death penalty in 54 of them, he said in a telephone interview. The only time you get the death penalty is when you have greatly cruel, sadistic-type crime. (source:
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, GA., IND.
May 9 USA: Difficult Bible Passages and the Penalty of Death Previously, we saw how capital punishment is compatible with love, honors God's sovereignty over life, and encourages the condemned to repent and be saved. Now, let's finish our discussion by looking at 3 biblical counter-examples to execution. Religious Objection: What about Cain? In Genesis 4, Adam and Eve's 2 sons bring their offerings to God. God accepts Abel's and rejects Cain's. In his anger, Cain strikes and kills his brother. God discovers Cain's violence and banishes him for life while also protecting him with some sort of divine mark. Doesn't this show that even God does not favor executing murderers? One way to explain Cain's survival is that the law against murder wasn't given by God for another 1,600 years after Noah's flood. Even the Old Testament wasn't written by Moses for another 900 years after that. But this response fails since there is the punishment of banishing. If it wasn't a crime because the law hadn't been given yet, there would have been no punishment at all. Also, Cain clearly expected to be punished by God and men. Thus, his severe but non-capital banishment demands explanation, and the only biblically plausible answer is that this wasn't murder. Nothing in the text indicates that Cain intended Abel's death. Not only are there hundreds of ways to strike a man and kill him unintentionally, but it's even possible, as the first homicide in history, that Cain didn't even understand the consequences of his assault. Furthermore, even if Cain did intend to kill Abel in a moment of rage, it's not clear this would legally qualify as pre-meditated. God's penal system distinguishes negligent homicide from murder. Thus, one might say we know it wasn't murder precisely because God merely banished him. Religious Objection: What about King David? In 2 Samuel 11, King David sees Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop near the palace, commands her to be brought to him, commits adultery with her, discovers she is pregnant, fails to trick her husband into sleeping with her to cover the pregnancy, and then has him killed through a complex military conspiracy. How does God respond? He sends Nathan the prophet to chastise David, who repents for his crimes and goes on living, but God condemns the bastard child to death. If God is for capital punishment, why doesn't David get executed? Both adultery and murder were capital crimes in Israel, and this must have been the worst-kept secret in the Mediterranean. There were even witnesses for every part of the conspiracy (a necessary component of Old Testament capital law). So why the leniency? I believe it's because David was King of Israel, anointed by God Himself through the prophet Samuel. Though this will sound strange to our ears which have been trained by the concepts of law as king, the rule of law, and equality before the law, David was above the law. No matter what the anointed of God does, he is still holy because of the anointing and cannot be touched. David demonstrated this by refusing to kill King Saul, who deserved it many times over. Moreover, when David learns that an aide assisted Saul's suicide in battle, David immediately executes him for touching God's anointed. So David was spared a doubly-deserved death only because he was king. Nevertheless, a life penalty was still taken: the child. Thus, the Bible gives one precedent to explain why David wasn't killed and also a reason to think that the murder still required the compensatory death of a human. It's certainly a difficult passage, but its also certainly not a clear repudiation of the death penalty. Religious Objection: What about the woman caught in adultery? In John 8:1-11, the Pharisees bring Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery to see if He will authorize her execution. After He famously says, He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her, they all depart. Jesus proceeds to send the woman on her way, saying, Neither do I condemn you; go your way; from now on sin no more. Of all passages in the Bible, this one most clearly shows that Jesus opposed capital punishment, right? First, we should note that this passage is textually dubious. The best manuscripts don't include it, and both its placement and style controvert its authenticity. Even so, the Christian community has long considered this an iconic story of Jesus' mercy. So, to merely throw it out would be inappropriate. Besides, it may well be a legitimate story, just not one included in the John manuscript. Hence, an interpretation would be more helpful than a dismissal. The trouble is that most people wildly misunderstand this story. The Pharisees' only reason for bringing this woman to Jesus was to put Him in a dilemma. On the one hand, Jesus couldn't call for her execution since Roman law prohibited anyone other than a Roman court from doing this. The Pharisees proved they knew this when they later brought
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, N.H., MD., PENN.
May 6 USA: Death Row Inmates Plead for HumanityGiven the Chance to Say a Last Statement, Many Sing Their Own Praises Let's ride were the last words spoken by Michael Richards before the syringes containing a lethal concoction of chemicals were pumped into his veins in Texas' Huntsville death chamber Sept. 25, 2007. Richards was the last man to make the long walk from death row to the death chamber before an unofficial moratorium was placed on executions that same day when the Supreme Court began to deliberate on the constitutionality of the three-drug lethal injection method. As with each person executed for a crime, Richards got to state his own epitaph, and while some remain defiant, many use that last breath to try to redeem themselves. The grim and often haunting tradition of a doomed inmate's last words will resume today -- 3 weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection April 16 -- when William Lynd will be led into Georgia's death house. Lynd, who has spent 17 years on death row for killing his girlfriend in 1988 with 3 shots to her face, will be the first execution in the United States in more than 7 months. But what Lynd will say, should he decide to speak at all, is likely to include one of the many themes heard in the last statements made by the condemned. Texas Death Row Execution #386 'I Love You All I Am Ready Warden' Larry Traylor, the director of communications for the Virginia State Department of Corrections, has witnessed more than 40 executions and told ABCNEWS.com that the final words of offenders typically possess a sort of very calm anger. Some are very repentant and some are not, said Traylor. A lot of times they may ignore us and not say a thing. Virginia is 2nd only to Texas as the state with the most executions, having carried out 98 executions since the death penalty's reinstatement in 1976 compared to Texas' 405. Some, in their last moments, defy reason or compassion. Granville Riddle, for example, was the 295th person put to death in Texas and until his very last breath argued his good character. I would like to say to the world, I have always been a nice person, said Riddle, who was 19 when he was convicted of murdering an Amarillo, Texas, resident with a tire tool during a break-in. I have never been mean-hearted or cruel. And a few, either from a perverse taunting of society or a plea for a posthumous exoneration, insist on their innocence. There have been those who have said that they're innocent, but in the last 40 or so that's generally been a small percentage, said Traylor. The larger percentage say nothing or ask God for forgiveness. In Georgia, the most recent final statement was that of John Hightower, who was executed in June 2007. Hightower, 63, apologized for what he had done and thanked his family for standing by him, according to Paul Czachowski, the spokesman for the Georgia Department of Corrections who witnessed the execution. Some last statements are pretty simple. The No. 1 theme was that offenders tend to give well wishes, said Scott Vollum, who studied 292 execution cases that occurred in Texas from 1982 to 2002 as research for his book Last Words and the Death Penalty: Voices of the Condemned and Their Co-Victims. They express their love and good luck to family and loved ones and sometimes express words of encouragement to other inmates, said Vollum. Others even wish the [victims' families] peace and closure. Upon his execution, David Herman, Texas execution No. 110 and one of the cases Vollum studied, said, [I]f my death gives you peace and closure, then this is all worthwhile. Herman, 39 when he was executed, was convicted of the 1989 murder of a 21-year-old topless dancer. Whether Acknowledging Guilt or Not, All Want Sense of Humanity After well wishes, Vollum's research showed references to religion, requesting forgiveness, expressing gratitude and pleading their innocence were among the more common themes among last statements. To see people asserting themselves in the moments before they're going to die is fascinating, said Vollum, who did not witness an execution during his research of the Huntsville death chamber. Most people don't have the opportunity to do that, and it's an odd thing to see a lot of them trying to redeem themselves. 12 of the 292 cases Vollum studied explicitly referred to their desire to humanize themselves. You have these individuals who are defiled -- and rightfully so, they're capital murderers, said Vollum. They're dehumanized, depicted as animals in a lot of ways. And so at the very point of their death, it's interesting to see them trying to make something out of their lives. (source: ABC News) * Death-row cons not as lucky as horse How is it that a veterinarian is able to euthanize a 1,000-pound Thoroughbred quickly and humanely, whereas the punishment of lethal injection often continues to be applied in such a manner as to
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, N.C., CALIF., MD.
May 5 USA: Sky-High Costs - But Few Executions Forget the ethics of capital punishment in the United States. Forget the disproportionate number of blacks on death row, or the possibility of executing an innocent victim. The death penalty may really be just too expensive, according to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC). In its 43-page report The Hidden Death Tax, the organisation estimates that Californian taxpayers pay at least 117 million dollars a year seeking the executions of those already on death row. This averages out at roughly 175,000 dollars a year for each death row inmate. A major part of these costs is the extra 90,000 dollars a year to keep an inmate on death row rather than locked up in a general prison. According to the report, if California abolished capital punishment today and allowed all 669 inmates to die a natural death in prison, the state would save 4 billion dollars in future costs. Of the 36 states which still have the death penalty, California has the largest number of death row inmates at 669, although only 13 have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. The ACLU-NC estimates that each capital trial costs an average of 1.1 million dollars more than a non-death penalty case. This is the organisation's minimum estimate. California has the broadest death penalty statue in the country, said Natasha Minsker, who began working on the report for ACLU-NC last June. It gives prosecutors a lot of discretion, and as a result we've overloaded our system with too many cases. (The report) identifies issues of growing importance, Richard Dieter, the executive directory of the Death Penalty Information Centre, told IPS. States are feeling economic constraints. The cost becomes important because you realise you can't shorten the process. There's either an expensive death penalty or no death penalty. There's no third option. But the extra spending on litigation after a capital conviction is critical for the death row inmates. Since 1977, more than 130 death penalty sentences in California have been reversed. Essentially what you're getting is life without parole at an expensive price, said Dieter, commenting on the long process. You have a build-up of people on death row. Expenses in maintaining the complex death penalty system accrue in a variety of forms. U.S. Supreme Court rulings require higher, lengthier trial processes when seeking a sentence which is irreversible. Judges and lawyers must be specially qualified, as well as jurors selected during a drawn-out questioning process. Prosecution and defence costs are also significantly higher due to the rigorous investigation requirements. There is also a post conviction phase entailing a direct appeal and a habeas corpus challenge. Usually there are 2 trials -- 1 to determine guilt and another to decide whether to implement capital punishment. I was shocked by the amount of money it took, and how quickly that amount is growing, Minsker told IPS. California is not the only state spending exorbitant amounts of money in the pursuit of capital punishment. In Washington State, the Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defence determined in 2007 that capital punishment cases cost 467,000 dollars more to try than ordinary murder cases. In Texas it is estimated that a death penalty trial costs an additional 2.3 million dollars, according to Dieter. In Florida in 2000, The Palm Beach Post estimated the state paid out 51 million dollars annually enforcing the death penalty. Recently, in New Mexico prosecutors were unable to press two death charges when the money-strapped state legislature failed to provide adequate funding for defence attorneys in a prison riot case that had already cost millions of state dollars. The cost factor in maintaining the death penalty is undoubtedly playing a role in the recent attempts in state legislatures to repeal capital punishment. Last year, New Jersey, which spent 10.9 million dollars annually on maintaining the death penalty, became the first state to abolish the practice since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. Similar legislation was attempted -- but failed -- in Nebraska, New Mexico and Montana. Last year, Colorado came close to repealing the death penalty when a bill that would have banned capital punishment in the state, using the money saved for investigating unsolved murder cases, was narrowly struck down. The extra money spent on the death penalty could be spent on other means of achieving justice and making the community safer: compensation for victims, better lighting in crime areas, more police on the streets, or ... funds for pursuing cold homicide cases, Dieter had said during testimony to the Colorado House of Representatives Judiciary Committee before the vote. Earlier, polls in Colorado conducted by RBI Strategies and Research found that voters were
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, N.C., TENN., ALA.
May 3 USA: After Hiatus, States Set Wave of Executions Here in the nation's leading death-penalty state, and some of the 35 others with capital punishment, execution dockets are quickly filling up. Less than 3 weeks after a United States Supreme Court ruling ended a 7-month moratorium on lethal injections, at least 14 execution dates have been set in 6 states between May 6 and October. The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things, said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. So in some sense, they're back from vacation and ready to go to work. Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national and international issue of capital punishment. When people confront a new wave of executions, they'll be questioning not only how people are executed but whether people should be executed, said James R. Acker, a historian of the death penalty and a criminal justice professor at the State University at Albany. Texas leads the list with 5 people now set to die here in the Walls Unit, the state's death house, between June 3 and Aug. 20. Virginia is next with 4. Louisiana, Oklahoma and South Dakota have also set execution dates. Some welcome the end of the moratorium. We'll start playing a little bit of catch-up, said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a victims rights group based in Houston. It's not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty. Mr. Hubbarth said. But, he added: The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It's not about killing the inmate. It's about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed. More inmates whose appeals have expired are certain to be added to execution rosters soon, including, in all likelihood, Jack Harry Smith, who, at 70, is the oldest of the 360 men and 9 women on Texas' death row (though hardly a row any more, but an entire compound). Mr. Smith has been under a death sentence for 30 years for a robbery killing at a grocery in the Houston area. If it's my time to go, it's my time to go, said Mr. Smith, who maintains his innocence and was delivered by guards for a prison interview in a wheelchair. So far, at least 9 others elsewhere, including Antoinette Frank, a former police officer convicted of a murderous robbery rampage in New Orleans, have been given new execution dates, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment research group that puts the latest death row census at 3,263. Dozens more are likely to get execution dates in coming months, but most under death sentences have not exhausted their appeals. Yet public support for capital punishment may be dwindling. Death sentences have been on the decline, and a poll last year by death penalty opponents found Americans losing confidence in the death penalty. There will be more executions than people have the stomach for, at least in many parts of the country, said Stephen B. Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, a leading anti-death-penalty litigation clinic. Last year, Texas accounted for 26 of the 42 executions nationwide. That includes the last two people executed before the Supreme Court signaled a moratorium on executions while considering whether the chemical formula used for lethal injection in Kentucky inflicted pain amounting to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The justices ruled 7 to 2 on April 16 that it did not, while allowing for possible future challenges. But the scheduling of executions comes as prosecutors and juries have been turning away from the death penalty, often in favor of life sentences without parole, now an option in every death-penalty state but New Mexico. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, death sentences nationwide rose from 137 in 1977, peaked at 326 in 1995 and fell steadily to 110 last year. We're seeing a huge drop-off, said Mr. Bright, attributing the decline to the time and trouble of imposing death sentences, and a recent wave of exonerations after DNA tests proved wrongful conviction. Close to 35 people have been cleared in Texas alone, including, just days ago, James L. Woodard, who spent more than 27 years in prison for a 1980 murder he did not commit. The 1st inmate now set for execution is William E. Lynd, 53, on Tuesday in Georgia. Mr. Lind was convicted of shooting his girlfriend, Ginger Moore, in the face during an argument in 1988, shooting her again as she clung to life, and a 3rd time, fatally, as she struggled in the trunk of his car. After burying her, he attacked and killed another woman he had stopped on the road. With 2 other executions pending but not yet scheduled in Georgia, the state seeks clearance of the backlog, said Russ Willard, a spokesman for Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker. We will work our way though the system at a much more rapid pace than
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, MONT., MD., OHIO
April 29 USA: Dueling justices on death penalty Should interpreting the Constitution smack more of knight errantry than a genuine search for the intent of its makers? That question was center stage as Justice John Paul Stevens dueled with Justice Antonin Scalia in Baze v. Rees (April 16, 2008) over the death penalty in a detour from upholding the constitutionality of lethal injections. Justice Stevens consulted his evolving moral compass (he had previously endorsed the death penalty 32 years earlier in Gregg v. Georgia); and, his own experience, i.e., 33 years sitting on the United States Supreme Court in sublime tranquility where a falling pin can be heard. He concluded in the manner of a papal encyclical that, [T]he imposition of the death penalty represents 'the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernable social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the state [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.' Justice Scalia assailed Justice Stevens' opinion with the ferocity of a gladiator. He roared at Justice Stevens' for marginalizing or subordinating all experience with the death penalty but his own, which epitomizes a jurisprudence of idiosyncrasy: The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment is dismissed as 'the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.' The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most veiled condemnation, as stemming from a thirst for vengeance.' Justice Scalia underscored that the Fifth Amendment expressly contemplates the death penalty by prohibiting a deprivation of life without due process and requiring a presentment or indictment by a grand jury to hold a person charged with a capital crime. To interpret the Eighth Amendment to proscribe what the Fifth Amendment permits is to make the Constitution war with itself and to impute nonsense to its makers. Justice Stevens sallied forth with an arsenal of additional sophistries. He asserted the climb in statutes authorizing life imprisonment without parole destroys the incapacitation rationale for the death penalty. But life imprisonment may be foiled by escape. It does not foreclose murder of a fellow inmate. In addition, the threat of a death sentence can elicit cooperation from a co-conspirator implicated in murder. A lesser punishment can be promised in exchange for state's evidence. Justice Stevens harrumphed that a recent poll suggests public support for the death penalty dips when life without the possibility of parole is presented as an alternative option. Death penalty statutes will be repealed, however, when they fail to reflect majority sentiments. Moreover, no juror can be compelled to vote for death. Any juror who believes life imprisonment with no parole is indistinguishable from capital punishment can vote against death. Justice Stevens disparages the absence of definitive proof that the death penalty deters. But reciprocally there is no definitive proof that death does not deter. A befuddling array of factors contributes to crime for example, age, education, income, employment and local culture. Every methodology that has attempted to isolate the influence of capital punishment has triggered criticism. Where, as with the death penalty, the evidence is inconclusive, the high court should not end more analysis and research by ipse dixit. Learned, attentive and deliberate legislators could conclude that a penalty that may save lives through deterrence is worth keeping until cogent evidence discredits the possibility. Justice Stevens' cerebral stumbles reach their apex in disputing the retribution rationale for the death penalty. Court decrees interpreting the Eighth Amendment have made executions less painful. Accordingly, Justice Stevens maintains (without ever asking a single family of Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing victims), the retribution experienced by the death penalty has been commensurately diminished, and can no longer justify capital punishment. Only demands for retribution that can be satiated by the rack and screw are cognizable under the Eight Amendment, which itself forbids such barbarity! Finally, Justice Stevens fretted that the innocent may be convicted in capital cases in races to punish grisly crimes. Death prosecutions, however, characteristically attract skilled defense counsel especially on appeal and scrupulous scrutiny by the courts. That explains why Justice Stevens did not cite a single instance where he believed an innocent person had been executed. Further, changes of venue to avoid a mob atmosphere and a higher required proof of guilt in death cases adequately answer
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
April 28 USA: Killing in Secret: Death by Lethal Injection The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of freely communicating thereon... has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.-- James Madison In our post-9/11 world, government secrecy has become an accepted norm, whether the topic is national security, government spending or constitutional protocols for executions. (Consider that Americans barely protested at the news that President Bush had authorized government agents to secretly listen in on our phone calls and read our emails.) Yet transparency in government is critical to maintaining a democracy. Meaningful public review enables citizens to hold their elected officials accountable, which ensures an open and free government. Without transparency in government, those in power fall prey to corruption and general incompetence. The present controversy over lethal injection protocols is a prime example of this. For 3 decades, prison employees in states across the nation have implemented virtually every aspect of lethal injection executions, largely outside of public view and without legislative or executive oversight. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court dodged the issue of government secrecy and its impact on lethal injection procedures and executions when it recently handed down its ruling in Baze v. Rees. The case challenged Kentucky's lethal injection protocol, which uses a three-drug injection sequence that has been shown to carry an unnecessary risk of inflicting pain on the condemned. Currently, 36 of the 37 states that have the death penalty use lethal injections and have protocols similar to Kentucky's. This method of execution was first used in Oklahoma and then adopted by other states with no scientific study as to its effects on those executed. However, studies have since indicated that the risks of torturous death are real and significant. In fact, the possibility exists than an inmate executed by lethal injection could remain conscious, experiencing severe pain as he slowly dies. For example, Angel Diaz took more than twice the usual time to die and had to be given a rare second dose of deadly chemicals. Consequently, a medical examiner reported that Diaz had chemical burns on both arms. It really sounds like he was tortured to death, said Dr. Jonathan Groner of the Ohio State Medical School. Diaz's botched execution led Florida Governor Jeb Bush to suspend all executions. Regrettably, incompetence resulting in botched executions has become a hallmark of many state and federal executions. Even so, states continue to cloak their lethal injection protocols and executions in secrecy. For example, some of the most closely guarded secrets relate to the qualifications and training (or lack thereof) of those administering lethal injections, often to the detriment of death row prisoners. In Missouri, for example, when the media uncovered the identity of the state's lethal injection supervisor, they also learned that he had confused dosages during executions and had lost his privileges to practice in two hospitals. Incredibly, after a federal court barred him from participating in Missouri executions, he was hired as part of the federal government's execution team. Incredibly, the responsibility for creating lethal injection procedures is often delegated to prison employees without discussion, meaningful study or oversight by elected representatives. In California, in response to a federal court order, corrections officials agreed to reexamine their policies but then sought to keep the review process secret. Although the judge denied that request, the construction of a new death chamber began without the public, their elected representatives or even the governor knowing anything about it. Many states even refuse to disclose information about their execution procedures to lawyers whose clients will be subjected to lethal injections. The shroud of secrecy remains even after an inmate's death, preventing a final assessment of the lethal injection procedure. All but 2 states maintain complete secrecy regarding post-execution records and autopsies. These records contain data that is critical to evaluating whether inmates were conscious during execution, but government officials refuse to release this information. However, scientists who have studied post-execution materials in the 2 states where they are available, North Carolina and California, have concluded that lethal injection is not working the way states claim. The manner in which capital punishment is meted out in this country is nothing less than a travesty of justice. And lethal injections, with their shroud of secrecy, are just one part of the problem. We must hold our government accountable, especially when it comes to the state executing citizens. If we are going to allow the government to kill us, then we certainly need to know all the facts beforehand.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, PENN., CALIF., ILL., MISS.
April 25 USA: Death penalty debate depends on purpose of punishment To the Editor: [Last] week's opinion articles about the death penalty [Checks and Balances] did not touch on the real debate over capital punishment. The real debate that faces America is about our justice system as a whole. We must decide the purpose of punishing criminals before we can dole out sentences. If punishment is meant to be a deterrent, then sentences should reflect deterring future criminals. In such a case, the death penalty would seem appropriate as a warning against the most heinous of crimes. Others believe that punishment, however, is about justice; healing wounds in the moral fabric of society. This opinion holds that society should not tolerate murderers. By putting the worst criminals to death it would be felt that the great wrong of murder has been righted by an appropriate response. If punishment is instead meant to rehabilitate criminals to prevent them from committing crime again, then the death penalty should only be used against criminals who cannot be rehabilitated. In this case, sentencing would be dependent on the criminal's mental state, and not the actual crime committed. Before we can debate whether the death penalty is an acceptable form of punishment, we must first debate our reasons for punishing criminals. While we can agree with any combination of philosophies, it would be wrong to judge criminals according to different standards. While one may argue against the death penalty because it statistically is not an effective deterrent, you must also then evaluate our minimalist sentencing against underage drinking, because it obviously is not an effective deterrent either. The debate about the death penalty cannot be resolved without a clear understanding of the purpose of punishment. John FieldUndergraduate student (source: Letter to the Editor, The (Case Western Reserve University) Observer) We don't have to be cruel when carrying out death penalty When you have to kill a man, said Winston Churchill, it costs nothing to be polite. When you choose to execute a condemned person, likewise, it costs little or nothing to do so without inflicting gratuitous pain. But reaching agreement on how to achieve that, as the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision upholding Kentucky's execution protocol shows, can be anything but cheap. The federal government and 36 states insist on maintaining the regrettable practice of capital punishment. The uncertainty over this issue resulted in an effective nationwide moratorium that lasted for months. Now, some states can be expected to resume executions. The court's mixed ruling, however, guarantees more lawsuits and more appeals. The court splintered on whether and why this particular method of lethal injection complies with the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. For the most part, the justices agreed authorities may not use a procedure that carries a genuine risk of needless suffering. But they couldn't reach a consensus on what is required to meet that standard. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia denounced the entire effort. In their view, anything is permissible except methods that are actually meant to inflict torture as well as death never mind if they inflict torture through indifference or carelessness. But Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a three-justice plurality, reached the sensible conclusion that the Constitution forbids any method posing a substantial risk of serious harm in the form of pointless suffering. Lawyers for the two killers challenged Kentucky's use of a 3-drug protocol the first to induce a coma-like state, the second to cause paralysis and shut off breathing, and the third to stop the heart. If the first drug is administered incorrectly, they pointed out, the other drugs could produce suffocation and agony. The plurality agreed, but found that the state has adequate safeguards to ensure that doesn't happen. Roberts and Co. also concluded that the alternative method the inmates offered is untried and might be even worse. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, in dissent, noted that other states have adopted precautions to make sure the first drug has taken effect before the others are injected. Among them: speaking the inmate's name, touching eyelashes and using smelling salts to confirm unconsciousness. Maybe those steps aren't so foolproof that they should be required by the court. But it's hard to see why any state should mind incorporating them. One sure thing is that this ruling will generate more lawsuits and a blizzard of briefs to sort out its full implications. Instead of using money to prevent crime and provide secure prisons, a lot of states will get to waste it defending their brand of capital punishment. They could do themselves a favor by just giving it up. (source: Chicago Tribune) PENNSYLVANIA: Death PenaltyA rush to kill Now that the U.S.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
April 23 USA: LETHAL-INJECTION CASE After Court Ruling, States to Proceed With Executions States began moving forward with plans for executions this week after the Supreme Court declined last Wednesday to review the appeals of death row inmates who had challenged lethal-injection methods in nearly a dozen states. The court had issued orders staying several executions last year and earlier this year while it weighed whether Kentucky's lethal-injection procedure constituted cruel and unusual punishment. States had postponed at least 14 scheduled executions pending the high court's decision, creating a de facto moratorium on capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. In a 7 to 2 vote last week, the justices said the three-drug cocktail used by Kentucky, which is similar to the one employed by the federal government and 34 other states, does not carry so great a risk of pain that it violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. With three executions already scheduled for this summer, Virginia could be the 1st state to carry out the punishment after the resolution of the Kentucky case. The state has scheduled a May 27 execution date for Kevin Green, who killed a couple in Brunswick County; June 10 for Percy L. Walton, who killed three neighbors in Danville; and July 24 for Edward Nathaniel Bell, who shot a police officer in Winchester. I actually expect to see a spate of scheduled executions, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Dieter said that despite its approval of Kentucky's lethal-injection procedure, the Supreme Court left room for lawyers to contest other states' procedures. That sets the stage for a state-by-state resolution of this conflict, he said. Attorneys contesting lethal injections have focused on training and procedures as ways to challenge them. In numerous cases before federal and state courts, attorneys have argued that people who deliver anesthesia do not know how to insert a needle properly into a vein. They have contended that lighting has been poor during some executions, limiting the ability to see mistakes. And they have argued that some technicians hired to conduct medical procedures are not qualified. Opponents said court arguments over these subjects are likely to continue. Ty Alper, associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley's law school, said the Supreme Court's ruling in the Kentucky case means nothing has changed: State officials will try to carry out executions and opponents will question their procedures. It's going to be like it was before, Alper said. In some states, prison officials are going to be pushing for round-the-clock injections -- there are 40 or 50 in Texas. The open question will be whether those states can reach the standard that the court has set for lethal injection. After the Supreme Court declined to step in yesterday, some state courts, governors and corrections boards vowed to press forward with their execution plans. Texas will attempt to reschedule the execution of Carlton Turner Jr., who killed his parents and hid their decomposing bodies. Mississippi will try to schedule the execution of Earl Wesley Berry, who kidnapped a woman and beat her to death after she left choir practice. And Alabama will seek to schedule the lethal injection of Thomas Arthur, who fatally shot a man through the eye as he slept. Clay Crenshaw, chief of the capital litigation division in the Alabama attorney general's office, said a motion will be filed with the state Supreme Court to set an execution date. Shortly after the Supreme Court decided the Kentucky case, the attorney general asked the state's highest court to schedule executions in 3 other cases. Crenshaw said challenges to the executions are likely to fall on deaf ears. I think all nine justices basically say that based on what they've seen, there is no question that if the anesthesia goes in the bloodstream, the execution will be painless, he said. The problem with their argument is there is just nothing to it. Mississippi was awaiting the high court's decision to move forward with Berry's execution, said Jan Schaeffer, a spokeswoman for the state's attorney general. Texas, the state with the largest number of inmates on death row and stayed executions, said the discretion of rescheduling lethal injections is left to state district courts. Tennessee corrections officials said stays on three executions set for December and January might soon be lifted by the state attorney general and the executions rescheduled. Oklahoma requested execution dates for Terry Lyn Short, who was convicted of killing a man in a fire, and Kevin Young, who was convicted of killing a man during a bungled robbery. Arkansas is reviewing the court's ruling before deciding how to proceed with three stayed executions. In Florida, where the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
April 17 USA: States abandon execution moratorium Virginia lifts death penalty moratorium Mississippi, Oklahoma say they'll move to get execution dates for inmates Supreme Court upheld lethal injection method on Tuesday Nation's last execution was September 25, in Texas Many states wasted little time trying to get executions back on track following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the use of a 3-drug lethal cocktail. Guard Joe Dellabruna opens a door to death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Almost immediately, Virginia lifted its death penalty moratorium. Mississippi and Oklahoma said they would seek execution dates for convicted murderers, and other states were ready to follow. The ruling Wednesday should put an end to the de facto moratorium on the death penalty caused by legal challenges to this method of execution, said Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports the death penalty. The chief prosecutor in Houston, Kenneth Magidson, whose surrounding Harris County sends more inmates to death row than any other, said he would seek execution dates for the six inmates awaiting execution in due course. The nation's high court voted 7-2 Wednesday to reject inmates' challenges to the procedure in Kentucky that use three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly 3 dozen states. Inmates and death row advocates were frustrated that the court brushed aside their arguments that lethal injections are unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. It's just terrible, said Paris Powell, a convicted killer at the Oklahoma State Prison in McAlester. He added: It's like the air has just been let out of a balloon. There's disbelief that the ruling came so quickly, but it goes further than just right now. It's now official that the death penalty is here to stay forever, really. Lawyers for death row inmates said challenges to lethal injections would continue in states where problems with administering the drugs are well documented. The nation's last execution was September 25, when a Texas inmate was put to death by injection for raping and shooting to death a mother of 7. They've effectively been on hold as states awaited a ruling from the high court. After the ruling Wednesday, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine promptly lifted a moratorium on executions that he imposed April 1 when he stayed the execution of Edward Nathaniel Bell, who killed a police officer. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling affirms that the procedure used in Arizona is humane and allows us to proceed and administer justice. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist praised the court's ruling and said he asked one of his lawyers to put together a very short list of death warrants to consider signing. There are 388 people on Florida's death row. Justice delayed is justice denied, and an awful lot of families of the victims have been waiting for justice to be done, and so that's certainly an important factor, he said. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the decision supports California's lethal-injection procedure and will allow executions to resume. They have been on hold for 2 years because of legal challenges in federal and state courts. California currently has 669 convicts awaiting execution, the most in the country, although Texas leads the way in the number of executions. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 405 inmates. Virginia is 2nd with 99. 26 of the 42 U.S. inmates put to death last year were in Texas. Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said he hadn't yet been able to determine the legal ramifications of the decision. Ohio also uses a regimen to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates, although its procedure is not identical. You would just think that because the methodology is quite similar that the legal outcome would be similar as well, Strickland said. But I just don't want to make that assumption without having a little deeper understanding about what they said. Prosecutors in many states said they were studying the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling to determine how to proceed. Others said there may not be an overnight change. We're going to read it and see how it impacts us, Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said. There are going to be specific issues of law and fact in Arkansas that are going to be different from Kentucky. It may answer all of our questions, but it may leave some others unanswered. In some states, inmates awaiting execution have pending appeals that are expected to take a long time to finish, meaning the ruling may have no immediate impact. The high court's decision may have helped Nebraska figure out how to proceed with its executions. The state's Supreme Court ruled in February that its only method, electrocution, was unconstitutional. We now have a road map for selecting a new method of execution for our state, Attorney General
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
April 16 USA: Supreme Court upholds Kentucky's use of lethal injections The Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's use of lethal injection executions Wednesday. The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses 3 drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment, Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only 3 votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented. Executions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume. The argument against the 3-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other 2 drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort. The case before the court came from Kentucky, where 2 death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death. At the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly. Kentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed. But executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs. (source: Associated Press) * Court Rejects Lethal Injection ChallengeExecutions Had Been on Hold Nationwide While Justices Considered Case The Supreme Court has upheld the three-drug lethal injection method used by the state of Kentucky in a 7-2 decision, clearing the way for a nationwide stay on executions to be lifted. Chief Justice John Roberts penned the case opinion, while two Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, dissented. The two convicted murderers at the center of the case, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, had unwittingly caused an unofficial moratorium on executions across the country. Since the high court took their case last September, no executions were carried out as state and federal courts waited to see how the Supreme Court was going to rule. Of the 36 states with a death penalty law on the books, all but one has designated lethal injection as the primary method of execution. Baze and Bowling had argued that death by lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The drugs included in the protocol are sodium thiopental, which anesthetizes; pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes; and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Lawyers for the inmates argued that the drugs are administered by untrained officials who can botch the execution and cause extreme pain. They also argued that other drug combinations could be more effective in carrying out the death penalty. Donald Verrilli, an attorney for the Kentucky inmates, has said, It really is not about fine-tuning the system to create an incrementally less amount of pain. This is about avoiding torture. But in court, the justices seemed skeptical of the argument. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said, Where does this come from that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain? We have approved electrocution. We have approved death by firing squad. I expect both of those have more possibilities of painful death than the protocol here. There have been instances across the country of fumbled executions. In Florida, convicted murderer Angel Diaz was executed in 2006. But a medical examiner's postmortem examination revealed that due to the improper injection of the anesthetic in his case, he had chemical burns on both arms. Experts believe he would have felt extreme pain for 20 to 30 minutes. In Ohio, Joseph Clark was sentenced to death for killing a gas station attendant. But his 2006 execution was botched. It took him 86 minutes to die while he screamed in pain. Even his victim's brother, Michael Manning, watched in horror. He started to shake his head from side to side, said Manning. It took a technician 19 tries to insert the deadly intravenous needle. Manning said what he saw in that execution chamber should not have happened. I believe in the death penalty, but I side on the constitutionality side of it. The Eighth Amendment says no cruel and unusual punishment, and that's what I think it was.
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
April 16 USA: NCADP: BAZE RULING SIDESTEPS THE CRITICAL ISSUES; DEATH PENALTY SYSTEM REMAINS AS FLAWED AS EVER April 16, 2008 - The U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Kentucky's lethal injection protocol sidesteps the critical issues surrounding the death penalty debate in the U.S., the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said today. The death penalty system was a flawed public policy before the Supreme Court agreed to review Kentucky's lethal injection protocol, said NCADP Executive Director Diann Rust-Tierney. It was a flawed public policy while the Court debated the protocol. And now that the Court has ruled, it remains as deeply a flawed public policy as ever. The relatively narrow scope of the Court's deliberations did not address basic issues of fairness, bias, ineffective assistance of counsel or innocent people being convicted and sentenced to death, Rust-Tierney said. She noted that the U.S. has gone almost 7 months since an execution - the longest period of time without an execution since a 17-month hiatus that stretched from early 1981 into late 1982. Now, with the possible resumption of executions, we renew our commitment to discuss the critical issues surrounding the death penalty system, Rust-Tierney said. Since the last person was executed - on Sept. 24, 2007 - we have seen a number of remarkable events. Four names have been added to the list of people freed from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged, bringing that number to at least 128. New Jersey has abolished the death penalty. Nebraska has no effective death penalty after its Supreme Court ruled the electric chair unconstitutional. The American Bar Association has called for a nationwide moratorium on executions. And the United Nations, reflecting evolving trends around the globe, has voted for a worldwide moratorium. In addition, Rust-Tierney said, California and Tennessee have held state hearings in order to study their respective death penalty systems. Constitutional questions have been raised in New Hampshire and New Mexico and wrongful conviction and DNA lab scandals continue in Texas. And that's just in 7 months, Rust-Tierney noted. It seems that the more we learn about the death penalty, the more we learn we can live without it. Indeed, Rust-Tierney noted Justice Stevens' concurrence in today's opinion in which he warned that debate will continue - not just over lethal injection protocols but also about the justification for the death penalty itself. (source: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, FLA., TENN., KY.
April 16 USA: Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky's method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, not only clearing the way for Kentucky to resume executions but ending an unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that have the death penalty. However one justice predicted that the ruling would not end disputes over lethal injection and could reignite the debate over capital punishment itself. By 7 to 2, the court rejected challenges to the Kentucky execution procedure brought by two death-row inmates, holding that they had failed to show that the risks of pain from mistakes in an otherwise humane lethal execution protocol amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Constitution. The prisoners had contended that the 3-drug procedure used on death row - 1 drug each to sedate, paralyze and end life - was unconstitutional, and that in any event there were strong indications that Kentucky had bungled some executions, creating unnecessary pain for the condemned. Through their lawyers, they maintained that problems could be largely solved by administering a single overwhelming dose of a barbiturate, as opposed to the 3-drug procedure. The prisoners' challenge had implications far beyond Kentucky. Of the 36 states with the death penalty, all but Nebraska, which uses the electric chair, rely on the same three-drug procedure that Kentucky uses. So does the federal government. Now, with the Kentucky challenge disposed of, other states that had set aside executions seem poised to begin them again. Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia quickly announced that his state would lift its moratorium on executions, and the Rev. Pat Delahanty, head of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said, We're going to be facing some executions soon, The Associated Press reported. Executions across the country have been on hold since last September, when the Supreme Court decided to take the Kentucky case. About 2 dozen executions did not go forward as scheduled while the case was pending, death penalty opponents told the A.P. Because pre-execution procedures can be time-consuming, there was no immediate way to gauge how quickly they might resume. One prisoner who could be facing death soon, in view of the Governor Kaine's remarks, is Edward Bell, who is on Virginia's death row for killing a Winchester police officer. Mr. Bell's execution had been set for April 8. In a decision written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., which weighed the Kentucky prisoners' claims that they faced an unacceptably high risk of suffering at the hands of their executioners, the court concluded that Kentucky's continued use of the three-drug protocol cannot be viewed as posing an objectively intolerable risk when no other state has adopted the 1-drug method and petitioners have proffered no study showing that it is an equally effective manner of imposing a death sentence. The prisoners who brought the challenge were Ralph Baze, who killed a sheriff and a deputy who were trying to serve him with a warrant, and Thomas C. Bowling, who killed a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot. The procedure that they challenged uses a barbiturate, then pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, followed by potassium chloride, which stops the heart and brings about death - but with terrible pain if the barbiturate does not work as intended, the condemned men's lawyers maintained. And because of the paralyzing agent, a prisoner could appear peaceful and relaxed even while suffering, they argued. Lawyers for the prisoners contended that the barbiturate-only method is widely used by veterinarians, who are barred in many states from using the same paralyzing agent employed in executing people. But the court rejected that argument, stating that veterinary practice for animals is not an appropriate guide for humane practices for humans. The 6 justices who concurred in the judgment - with varying degrees of agreement - were Anthony M. Kennedy, Samuel A. Alito Jr., John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer. Alluding to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, the court said history leads to the conclusion that an execution method violates the Eighth Amendment only if it is deliberately designed to inflict pain, a standard that bars disemboweling, burning alive and other excruciating ways of bringing about death. Judged under that standard, this is an easy case, the court held. But the deliberations were not easy, if the number of opinions is any indicator. Although 7 members concurred in the judgment of the court, only Justices Kennedy and Alito (who filed a concurring opinion of his own) joined Chief Justice Roberts's opinion. Justices Scalia and Thomas joined each other's concurring opinions. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter dissented from the court's judgment. I would not
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA., ALA.
April 14 USA: Death Penalty for Child Rape, a Thing to Reconsider This is the 1st time in more than 30 years when the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to accept the death penalty for the crime of raping a child. Until now, murder was a single crime category that could be punished by execution. The court has to consider all the arguments and to conclude if the crime of raping a child represents unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. On the other hand, the decision to analyze the situation of death penalty related cases comes after a growing nationwide debate on capital punishment itself. The United States is one of the few democratic states which still permit the capital punishment. This is a controversial issue in the United States and in other parts of the world. Arguments for and against it are based on moral, practical, religious, and emotional grounds. Advocates for the death penalty argue that this is the just punishment for a terrifying crime, saying that it improves the community by making sure that convicted criminals do not find their way out onto the streets to offend again. Opponents of the death penalty say that capital punishment puts government on the same moral level as criminals who have taken the life. Someone who objects to capital punishment in itself believes there is no circumstance in any kind of situation in which capital punishment is a justified form of punishment. Today no Western nation authorizes the death penalty for any kind of rape, said Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford University law professor representing Kennedy, who argued that the U.S. Constitution bars imposing the death penalty for rape, regardless of the victim's age, according to Reuters. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty which occurred in 1976, there have been 1,099 executions in the United States as of October 2006. The last case which ended with the execution penalty for rape occurred 44 years ago. (source: eNews) * Another crime added to death penalty list The Supreme court this week is expected to hear arguments that could add the death penalty to a crime other than murder. The Country's high court will consider whether capital punishment can be imposed on people convicted of raping a child. Earlier this year the justices listened to arguments challenging lethal executions with a 3-drug cocktail. A ruling on that is expected by late June. (source: WPTV News) *** Child Rape Tests Limits Of Death PenaltyLa. Law Spurs Review Of Eighth Amendment Ever since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty more than 30 years ago, justices have been finding ways to limit it. In the intervening years, they have employed their interpretations of society's evolving standards of decency to remove juvenile and mentally retarded killers from death row. Before that, they excluded kidnappers who did not kill and even some accomplices to murder. In 1977 the court also concluded that a state could not execute a man who raped an adult woman. But on Wednesday the court will consider whether a person who rapes a child is different. Louisiana prosecutors will argue that the same societal mores that have persuaded justices to spare certain categories of criminals lead in the opposite direction when it comes to child rapists, demanding an expansion of capital punishment, not a retrenchment. Proponents say society demands retribution for those who harm its most vulnerable members. But some child advocacy experts say the unintended consequences of the death penalty might be a decline in the reporting of sexual assaults by family members, or even an incentive for the rapist to kill the victim. The argument comes as the court has imposed a de facto moratorium on capital punishment while justices decide in a separate case whether the current methods of lethal injection are constitutional. Even as the number of death sentences imposed in the United States has fallen -- there were the fewest last year since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 -- Louisiana and a handful of other states have changed their laws to allow executions for those who rape children. They are supported by additional states that say they might want to do so in the future. The 'evolving standards of decency' framework is not a one-way street that may lead only towards the elimination of the death penalty, the state of Texas argues in a brief joined by eight other states. Each state's legislature should be allowed to . . . reflect its citizens' current moral judgment regarding the just deserts for certain capital crimes. Of the 3,300 inmates on death row across the country, only 2 are there for a crime other than murder. Both were convicted under Louisiana's child rape statute, passed in 1995 and still the broadest in the land. Those facts alone are a powerful argument that executing someone for rape would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, DEL., N.Y., VA., TENN.
April 12 USA: The problem with measuring evolving standards of decency is that they tend to evolve and devolve in multiple directions at the same time. Trend It, Don't End It--Tracking the inscrutable social consensus on capital punishment for rapists. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case about whether-for the first time in decades-a criminal can be executed for a crime that isn't murder. Patrick Kennedy was convicted in 2004 for the rape of a child, his 8-year-old stepdaughter, and the state of Louisiana contends that his crime is tantamount to murder and worthy of death. Nobody in this country has actually been executed for anything other than murder since 1964, although five states, including Louisiana, have laws permitting capital punishment for the rape of young children. Several others are contemplating broadening their laws to do the same. The court must determine, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, whether the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of someone who didn't commit a murder but did violate a young child. Kennedy is somewhat confounded by the quiet moratorium on executions the United States is experiencing, while the high court mulls another case. That one tests the constitutionality of the lethal injection procedures used in Kentucky and all but one of the 38 states permitting capital punishment. The court will decide the lethal-injection question this spring. But, in the meantime, there's been a pause in capital punishment since last September: a good opportunity to reflect on what life would be like without it and to take the public temperature on the death penalty in general. Capital punishment in America has been in a slow-repeat, slow-decline for years. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, which compiles statistics on capital punishment nationally, the number of executions has dropped steadily since 1998. Even before the 2007 moratorium took effect, the execution numbers had hit a 10-year low of 53 in 2006. American confidence in the death penalty has also dipped slightly: A Gallup poll taken in 2006 showed that while two-thirds of Americans endorsed capital punishment for murderers, given the choice between the death penalty and a life sentence without parole, slightly more preferred life in prison for the 1st time in decades. This dip has been variously attributed to the reported 127 death-row exonerations now logged by DPIC (though death penalty supporters strongly dispute that statistic), as well as popular books by the likes of John Grisham and pervasive evidence that racism still taints the capital sentencing system. Still, public opinion on the death penalty remains in favor of it-at least for murder. And while the number of states imposing or contemplating moratoriums on the death penalty grows, many seem bent on mending-not ending-the capital system with cleaner execution protocols and higher-quality capital defense. All of the statistics, polls, and trends I've just cited would be utterly irrelevant to any legal discussion of whether a child rapist can be executed, were it not for the odd constitutional test that weighs cruel and unusual punishment against evolving standards of decency. This is an exercise in molar-grinding frustration for members of the Supreme Court devoted to adhering to the Constitution's original text. When the Supreme Court ended the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders in 2002 and again for those who were minors at the time of their crimes in 2005, it did so via an elaborate interpretive dance that required putting one finger on the pulse of foreign courts and the other to the wind of American public opinion. For those of us who are not big fans of public hangings on the Pubclicke Square, the notion that standards of unusual cruelty can evolve has its appeal. But the new fight over executing child rapists reveals that attempts to measure the shifting winds of public opinion for some ephemeral national consensus often says more about which justice is doing the measuring than whatever it is that's being measured. The Supreme Court tackled the death penalty with regard to the rape of a 16-year-old in 1977, in Coker v. Georgia, and prohibited capital punishment for the rape of an adult. The majority found that the death penalty, which is unique in its severity, is an excessive penalty for the rapist who, as such, does not take human life. Coker has since stood for the general principle that the death penalty is unavailable for nonmurder crimes, no matter how heinous. But Louisiana contends that child rape is different from adult rape, and its Supreme Court, in upholding the death penalty for Kennedy, wrote that if the court is going to exercise its independent judgment to validate the death penalty for any non-homicide crime, it is going to be child rape. Kennedy's lawyers measure the national discomfort with executing child rapists by counting to 2: the number of
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, PENN.
April 6 USA: Execution by lethal injection under renewed scrutiny Most US states that permit lethal-injection executions prevent veterinarians from using the same method to put animals down, according to a new study. One of the 3 drugs injected into condemned prisoners, the one that causes paralysis, has been banned from use in animals by at least 42 states, said the study's author, Ty Alper, a death penalty opponent and associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. The states include the 5 leaders in lethal injections Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Missouri and North Carolina and account for 907 of the 929 executions by that method since 1982. Lethal injection has been on hold while the Supreme Court considers a challenge to it in a case from Kentucky, which is among the roughly three dozen states that administer 3 drugs in succession to knock out, paralyse and kill prisoners. The major criticism of this is that if the executioner administers too little anaesthetic, the inmate could suffer excruciating pain from the other 2 drugs. This may go undetected because the paralysing drug would prevent any change in the dying prisoner's expression. In Kentucky, 2 death-row inmates argue that a large dose of a barbiturate, the most common way of putting down animals, is a less painful way to carry out executions. The state prohibits using a paralytic in animal killings. Federal judges in Missouri, California and Tennessee have ruled that the way lethal injections are carried out in those states is unconstitutional, mainly because of the risk of severe pain. Yet states have refused to approve injection of a single drug, in part from fear that this might precipitate a new round of lawsuits to stop executions. (source: The Independent) PENNSYLVANIA: Head Strong: Evidence the Pa. death penalty is punishment existing in name only Maureen Faulkner called me in a panic. She'd just retrieved a voice mail from Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns, alerting her to a federal appellate decision concerning the man who a jury said murdered her husband. But her messaging system had garbled the important news. She was desperate to know whether I'd learned the outcome. How incredibly sad, I thought. Twenty-six years removed from Danny Faulkner's execution, and she still jumps when the telephone rings. Hers is the sort of apprehension a parent experiences when a child is out late and the nighttime silence is pierced by a ringing phone. Given the volatility of the case and the endless appeals, she's found no silence since that early morning knock awakened her Dec. 9, 1981. And it's still not over. Which is why I believe we need to rethink the death penalty. By now, we all know the news: While the 1982 conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal was upheld, the jury's sentence will not be imposed - short of a successful appeal by the D.A.'s Office, or a re-reversal at yet another sentencing hearing. The death sentence has been stayed, not because of any actual finding of confusion on the part of the jury, but because a three-judge panel decided that the jury instructions and the verdict form created a reasonable likelihood that the jury believed it was precluded from finding mitigating circumstance that had not been unanimously agreed upon. As District Attorney Lynne Abraham summarized for me last week, Sometimes, the court substitutes what it believes might have happened for what really happened - in an abundance of caution. Now, we don't always agree with this, because the court is saying, 'Well, we think there's the possibility that there's an ambiguity in the jury form, and we think they may have been confused.' Well, they didn't ask the jury whether they were confused. They're just thinking for the jury. That's the way the system goes. The written decision reminded me of something I'd heard when sitting through the appellate arguments last spring, when one of the lawyers based his argument on how many words removed from unanimous the word mitigating appeared on the verdict slip. Today, that is the technicality sparing Abu-Jamal's life. So, even though the court has again affirmed Abu-Jamal's guilt, it nevertheless refuses to allow him to be executed. It's more proof that the death penalty in the commonwealth is a sham, a paper tiger, and a form of punishment that exists in name only. Consider that there are currently 228 individuals on death row in Pennsylvania. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978, 3 people have been put to death (the last was Gary Heidnick 9 years ago) - and only after each of the 3 gave up his appeal. It's time to stop kidding ourselves. The death penalty needs to be removed from the Pennsylvania sentencing options, at least until the appellate procedure is streamlined by a legislature willing to oversee judicial obfuscation. Apparently, I am not alone in these feelings. Joseph McGill prosecuted Abu-Jamal
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, OHIO, UTAH, CALIF., N.C., VA., N.M.
April 4 USA: Majority Of Americans Regard Death Penalty As Just Punishment Nationwide support for the death penalty has waned since 2003, though most Americans still regard it as a just punishment. The results of a Harris Interactive poll published in March indicate a majority of Americans think the death penalty poses no deterrent to crime, and innocent people have sometimes been convicted of murder. However, the poll shows most do not favor a decrease in the number of executions. Michael Miller, minister for United Campus Ministry-Wesley, said he opposes capital punishment on moral grounds. Miller, history lecturer, said people should be against the death penalty because an innocent person could be put to death and it is used disproportionately against poor and uneducated individuals. I think it's appropriate to punish people; I think it's even more than appropriate to rehabilitate people, Miller said. Clearly there are people who are so antisocial, so broken, so dangerous, they have to be kept from the mainstream of society. But I don't see anything in the teachings of Jesus that justifies the death penalty. Texas led the nation in executions with 26 last year, twice as many as all other states combined. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 405 people have been put to death in Texas since 1976. Virginia comes in second with 98 executions. Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said capital punishment is more costly to taxpayers than other sentencing options. Dieter did not take a stand for or against the death penalty, but said if the people want it they ought to implement it justly. To do it right you need higher paid lawyers, better qualified lawyers, full appeals, experts allowed, DNA testing, psychiatric experts, mental retardation experts, et cetera - it is expensive, Dieter said. He said attempts at low cost implementations of the death penalty fail because such cases are likely to be overturned on constitutional grounds and result in new trials. According to a Death Penalty Information Center fact sheet, an average of 5 people were released from death row each year from 2000 to 2007 because of evidence of their innocence. The fact sheet cites studies indicating the odds of receiving a death sentence in North Carolina can rise by 3 1/2 times among offenders whose victims are white. A California study found people convicted for killing whites are about 3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than those who murdered blacks. Those convicted for murdering Latinos are 4 times less likely to receive the death penalty than if he or she murdered a white person. According to the fact sheet, 41 % of Texas death row inmates in 2006 were black. Black people comprise 12 % of the state's population. That's the problem with the death penalty. It tends to value lives differently based on a whole bunch of factors that have nothing to do with the crime, Dieter said. All dead people are not equal in the eyes of the death penalty. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Web site, Harris County leads all other counties with 120 death row inmates and Dallas County comes in 2nd with 46. District Attorney Sherri Tibbe said there are no death row inmates in Hays County, but she has one pending capital murder case. Tibbe said she has not called for the death penalty during her tenure. She declined to comment directly about whether or not her office would seek the death penalty in any case. It's the law in the state of Texas - the death penalty is an option, Tibbe said. It's always something you would consider as a prosecutor ... You do have the discretion, but you always consider the full range of punishments - the death penalty or life without parole when yo're looking at a capital murder case. You make the decision on a case-by-case basis. Dieter said because death penalty cases are expensive to pursue, district attorneys in counties with small budgets do not tend to ask for the punishment. He said the death penalty has more to do with politics than criminal justice. Dieter said some district attorneys, as elected officials, pursue the death penalty because it may help their political careers and make them appear tough on crime. The criminal justice system tends to say, 'you commit a certain crime, you get a certain punishment, and that's what we think is the proper punishment for a lot of reasons,' Dieter said. The death penalty doesn't work like that. It's very selective and symbolic. It's not punishment for murder. It's not even for the worst murders. The worst murderers typically don't even get the death penalty because they usually have good lawyers. So you have to wonder what purpose it is serving, and I think the political purpose is one of the chief ones. Miller said he presided over the funeral of a woman who was murdered. Miller said he found it difficult to believe the victim's family would be able to soon forgive
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA.
March 31 USA: The Vienna ConventionThe U.S. must ensure that arrested foreigners can contact their consulates. Jose ERNESTO Medellin is a Mexican national who has lived in the United States for most of his life. In 1993, he was arrested in connection with the rape and murder of 2 Texas girls. Although he was read his Miranda rights and was defended by two court-appointed lawyers, Texas law enforcement officials failed to inform Mr. Medellin of his right under the Vienna Convention to notify the Mexican consulate of his arrest. Mr. Medellin was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death, but he failed to raise the Vienna Convention argument at trial or during sentencing and did so in federal court only after he filed a habeas petition. Mexico filed a grievance with the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial arm of the United Nations. The ICJ ruled 3 years ago that the United States had violated the rights of Mr. Medellin and 50 other Mexican nationals after failing to inform them of their Vienna Convention rights. The ICJ declared that the United States should review these cases to determine whether the defendants had been harmed by the lack of notification; the court also concluded that procedural rules, such as those in Texas barring introduction of new arguments in appellate proceedings unless they've been raised earlier in the process, could not be used to block a new review. After the ICJ ruling, President Bush issued a memorandum saying that the states should comply with the judgment of the ICJ. Texas balked, giving rise to the case decided by the Supreme Court last week. A 6 to 3 majority wisely decided that rulings from the ICJ do not automatically trump state laws and procedures. It also ruled that if the president believed it was important to respect the ICJ edict he should have engaged Congress and the states to fashion a solution that would give the ruling legal effect in the United States without explicitly undermining U.S. and state sovereignty. In a brief filed earlier in the Medellin case, Texas suggested that the president, with the state's cooperation, could create a panel of former federal judges to review the 51 cases. This would avert constitutional conflict, while respecting the spirit of the ICJ ruling and signaling to the world the United States' recognition of its treaty obligations. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his concurring opinion, The Court's judgment, which I join, does not foreclose further appropriate action by the State of Texas. In the future, the federal and state governments should be meticulous in upholding the stricture of the convention; law enforcement officers should be told that they must make foreign nationals aware of their Vienna Convention rights, just as they now inform them of their right to remain silent. It's the least the country can do, especially if it expects its nationals to receive fair treatment in a foreign land. (source: Editorial, Washington Post) GEORGIA: Death penalty to be sought in boy's death in home invasionKilling linked for 1st time to testimony child's family was to give at trial the next day. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a man accused of killing a 7-year-old boy in a home invasion, DeKalb District Attorney Gwen Keyes Fleming said Monday. And for the first time, Keyes Fleming linked the slaying of Timothy Johnson Jr. last Sept. 16 to a trial scheduled the next day in which his parents and sister were expected to testify. Willie Kelsey, 29, of Decatur, was charged with the murder in December. The allegation that Kelsey was trying to kill a witness is contained in indictments returned by a DeKalb grand jury, Keyes Fleming said. Johnson's 15-year-old sister, Alexus Sheppard, was critically wounded by gunfire in the same bedroom with Timothy at their grandfather's home in southern DeKalb. Alexus was to testify in a Sept. 17 trial of 4 men accused of staging a home invasion against her family in 2006. Kelsey was not a defendant in that trial. Keyes Fleming declined to say what evidence authorities have to link Kelsey to that case. The district attorney said she consulted Timothy's family about seeking the death penalty and they agreed with the decision. State law requires the prosecution to prove one of a specified list of aggravating circumstances to justify a death penalty. Keyes Fleming said those factors in Kelsey's case will include committing a murder during a burglary, during an aggravated battery and in an outrageously wanton way. DeKalb police in January also charged Jarvis Marquez Gibson, 24, with murder in the case in January. Prosecutors have not yet decided how to proceed with his case, said Artealia Gilliard, spokeswoman for Keyes Fleming. Troy Davis' attorneys ask high court for new trial Attorneys for condemned cop killer Troy Davis asked the Georgia Supreme Court Thursday to reconsider his request for a new trial. Davis is
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, VA., WYO., CONN.
March 28 USA: U.S. state efforts advance to abolish death penalty In 1985, Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted of rape and murder and sent to Maryland's death row. In 1993, DNA testing proved he was innocent. He joined the 127 people in the United States who have been released from death rows after being found innocent of the capital crime for which they were convicted. Because innocent persons are sentenced to death and because there is documented racial and geographical bias, everyone should question the death penalty, said Beth Reilly, a United Methodist working to abolish capital punishment in Maryland. Reilly's convictions come from Scripture and The United Methodist Church's Social Principles. For United Methodists, a death penalty is antithetical to the New Testament message, she said. As our state seeks to punish perpetrators of heinous crimes and as it works to protect society from those who may do harm, we, as Christians, must consider a higher calling. In the United Methodist law book, called the Book of Discipline, the denomination states that the death penalty denies the power of Christ to redeem, restore and transform all human beings. It goes on to state opposition to the death penalty and to urge its elimination from all criminal codes. Delegates to the 1956 Methodist General Conference took the historic action of officially opposing the death penalty. Each Methodist and United Methodist General Conference since that time has reaffirmed that position. Meeting every 4 years, these assemblies are the only bodies that can speak officially for the denomination. The 2008 General Conference will meet April 23-May 2 in Fort Worth, Texas. Making strides Tremendous strides were made in the past year against capital punishment, according to Bill Mefford, director of civil and human rights with the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the church's social advocacy agency. New Jersey became the first state in 42 years to legislatively end the death penalty, he said. Abolitionist legislation also was filed in Colorado, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico. The number of executions in the United States hit a 13-year low in 2007 with 42 people being executed, due in large part to a challenge from 2 Kentucky death row inmates. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the challenge in September. The inmates allege lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. Mefford noted 3 more exonerations: Curtis McCarty of Oklahoma after 21 years on death row; Michael Lee McCormick of Tennessee after 16 years; and Jonathan Hoffman of North Carolina after 10 years. The United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and since that time 1,099 people have been executed. Lethal injection is used in 35 states and by the U.S. military and U.S. government. 9 states use electrocution, 5 states use the gas chamber, 2 states executive by hanging and 2 states use a firing squad. Lethal injection is allowed as an alternative in most states. California, North Carolina and Tennessee are currently studying their death penalty process, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Indiana is considering legislation that would exempt seriously mentally ill defendants. Statehouse activity In December, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine signed legislation passed by state lawmakers to abolish the death penalty in that state. The law was the result of many years of hard work by abolitionists. I pray their commitment will encourage us to continue in our struggle for complete abolition through the United States and throughout the world, Mefford said. We continue to pray for the other innocent death row inmates. Death penalty opponents in Maryland had hoped to follow New Jersey in 2008 but settled on a compromise designed to keep the momentum going. When Maryland lawmakers met in a gridlock in March, the opponents rallied around the push to establish a commission to study the law. A task force study had preceded New Jersey's new law. With the 2008 repeal still one vote short of passage in the same committee, this legislation offers a constructive way forward, said Sara Klemm, with the Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. Added Reilly: (The study commission) empowers a broadly representative and distinguished state body to conduct the first comprehensive review our state's death penalty and, as important, to make recommendations about its future. Another close vote Nebraska lawmakers rejected an attempt to repeal the death penalty with a vote of 20-28 on March 25. The legislation needed 25 votes to pass. Mark Weddleton, statewide organizer for Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty, said United Methodist pastors and lay leaders have been the backbone of the effort to eliminate the death penalty in that state. As I was thinking about the different cities where we have been, it was the United Methodist churches where local organizing meetings were held, he said. It is some retired United
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
March 27 USA: Amnesty International USA: Government must ensure meaningful judicial review of Mexican death row cases 27 March 2008 AI Index: AMR 51/025/2008 On 25 March 2008, in a case involving the USA's obligation to comply with judgments of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of the State of Texas and against a Mexican national on death row there. The Supreme Court has effectively passed the buck to the other branches of government to act to ensure that the USA meets its international obligations. Amnesty International urges them to do so. The 6-3 ruling, Medelln v. Texas, concerns the case of Jos Medelln, a Mexican national and 1 of 5 people sentenced to death for the murder of 14-year-old Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in 1993. All 5 were teenagers at the time of the crime. 2 of them who were 17, Raul Villareal and Efrain Perez, had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment in 2005 following the Supreme Court's decision to exempt under 18-year-olds from the death penalty (the USA, led by Texas, was until then a world leader in executing child offenders). A 3rd, Sean Derrick O'Brien, was executed on 11 July 2006. He was 18 at the time of the murders, as were Peter Cantu and Jos Medelln, who remain on death row. Under article 36 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), the Texas authorities should have notified Jos Medelln without delay after his arrest of his right to have the Mexican consulate informed of his detention. They failed to do so. He subsequently became one of more than 50 Mexicans on death row in the USA named in a case brought against the USA by the government of Mexico in the ICJ, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations (UN). By ratifying the VCCR Optional Protocol on the compulsory settlement of disputes, the United States recognized the authority of the ICJ to order legally binding remedies for its Vienna Convention violations. On 31 March 2004, the ICJ handed down its judgment (the Avena decision) finding that the USA had violated article 36 of the VCCR by failing to notify the detainees of their right to contact their consulate after arrest. The ICJ stated that the remedy to make good these violations should consist in an obligation on the United States to permit review and reconsideration of the cases in the US courts, to determine any prejudicial impact of the VCCR violation on the defendant. The Court emphasised that this judicial review and reconsideration must be meaningful and effective, and must relate to both sentence and conviction. It added that the US doctrine of procedural default - whereby claims not raised earlier are generally not considered by appellate courts - was not a legitimate obstacle to such review. Moreover, review by executive clemency authorities alone would not be sufficient, the ICJ stated. After the ICJ's decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed Medelln's appeal on the grounds that the VCCR did not confer individually enforceable rights and that his claims were anyway procedurally defaulted. The Supreme Court agreed to take the case, but before it heard oral arguments, President George W. Bush issued a memorandum to the Attorney General stating that the United States will discharge its international obligations under the Avena ruling, by having State courts give effect to the decision. The Supreme Court dropped the case, but after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed Medelln's appeal, finding that neither the ICJ's opinion nor the President's memorandum overrode limitations on the filing of successive habeas corpus applications, the Supreme Court again agreed to consider the issue. In its ruling on 25 March 2008, a majority of Justices stated: No one disputes that the Avena decision constitutes an international law obligation on the part of the United States. But not all international law obligations automatically constitute binding federal law enforceable in United States courts. The question we confront here is whether the Avena judgment has automatic domestic legal effect such that the judgment of its own force applies in state and federal courts. The majority found that it did not. The VCCR Optional Protocol, they concluded, was not self-executing (automatically enforceable as federal law upon ratification) and no implementing legislation to give it such domestic effect had been passed by Congress. Having found that the Avena ruling did not constitute binding federal law that pre-empts state restrictions on the filing of successive habeas petitions, the Justices moved on to consider whether the President's memorandum to the Attorney General altered their conclusion. They concluded that it did not. They said that although the President seeks to vindicate United States interests in ensuring the reciprocal observance of the Vienna Convention, protecting relations with foreign governments, and
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
February 11, 2008 USA: U.S. Said to Seek Execution for 6 in Sept. 11 Case Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday. The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale. The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case. A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial. The system hasn't been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date, said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the 20th hijacker, who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks. Under the rules of the Guantánamo war-crimes system, the military prosecutors can designate charges as capital when they present them, and it is that first phase of the process that is expected this week. The military official who then reviews them, Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals court judge, has the authority to accept or reject a death-penalty request. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on Sunday. Some officials briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years. Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be many months or, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers said, in part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals courts. Federal officials have said in recent months that there is no death chamber at the detention camp at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that they knew of no specific plans for how a death sentence would be carried out. The military justice system, which does not govern the Guantánamo cases, provides for execution by lethal injection in death sentence convictions. But the United States military has rarely executed a prisoner in recent times. The last military execution was in 1961, when an Army private, John A. Bennett, was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder. Currently, there are six service members appealing military death sentences, according to a recently published article by a lawyer who specializes in military capital cases, Dwight H. Sullivan, a former chief military defense lawyer at Guántanamo. One official who had been briefed on the war-crimes case said the charges were expected to be lodged against six detainees held at Guantánamo, including Mr. Mohammed, who is said to have presented the idea of an airliner attack on the United States to Osama bin Laden in 1999 and then coordinated its planning. The official identified the others to be charged as Mohammed al- Qahtani, the man officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and leaders of Al Qaeda; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, who has been identified as Mr. Mohammeds lieutenant for the 2001 operation; Mr. al-Baluchis assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers. Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have expressed differing views of potential death sentences, with some arguing that it would accomplish little other than martyring men for whom martyrdom may be viewed as a reward. But on Sunday, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the pilot of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon, said she would approve of an effort by prosecutors to seek the execution of men she blames for killing her brother. Ms. Burlingame said such a case could help refocus the publics attention on what she called the calculated brutality of the attacks, which she said has been largely forgotten. My opinion is, she said, if the death of 3,000 people isn't sufficient for a death
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, OHIO
Feb. 1 USA: UM researchers say lethal injection could violate Eighth AmendmentStudy suggests lethal injection causes unnecessary pain INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH: UM researchers say execution by lethal injection could violate the Eighth Amendment. A death row inmate is given a fatal dose of chemicals, but the excruciating pain, suffocation and burning sensation associated with the toxins will be masked by an anesthetic. Or, maybe it won't. A study published in May 2007 by Teresa Zimmers and Leonidas Koniaris, two researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, suggests the use of lethal injection to execute death row prisoners may be violating the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel an unusual punishment. [Before conducting the study] my colleagues and I, like most Americans, thought the lethal injection was like a medical procedure and therefore painless, Zimmers said. We were very surprised to discover that there is substantial proof of pain. Lethal injection, the most common form of execution in the United States, is currently considered to be the most humane form of capital punishment. Zimmers and Leonidas' research shows that in 43 out of 49 lethal injection executions, not enough painkiller was administered, and inmates were fully aware of their suffering. The researchers also discuss multiple problems with the lethal injection procedure, including a lack of training for the people who administer the serum and poor regulation of the process. There is a fairly entrenched opinion among prison officials that the current protocol is fail-safe, and if administered correctly, will result in a painless death, Zimmers said. The use of lethal injection is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. The review began on Jan. 7, four years after two death row inmates from Kentucky sued the state claiming that death by lethal injection violates the Constitution. Though the court is focusing on defining the acceptable amount of pain allowed under the Eighth Amendment, some Supreme Court justices are not too worried about inmate suffering. This is an execution, not a surgery, said Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, refuting arguments that lethal injection causes an unnecessary risk of pain. The two inmates are asking to be euthanized, which is the same procedure used to put down pets. This method would render the inmate unconscious and induce death within a few minutes. Many states are refusing to change their protocol, including California, Florida and Texas. If you change, you are admitting that there was something wrong with the prior method, said Professor Deborah Denno, an authority on methods of execution as Fordham University to the New York Times. All those people you were executing, you could have been doing it in a better, more humane way. Nevertheless, 14 states plus the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty. Out of the remaining 37 states that allow the death penalty, including Florida, only Nevada demands that inmates be executed by electrocution. The Supreme Court's ruling on lethal injection is not expected until June 2008. Lethal injection as a form of execution is flawed and cannot be fixed, Zimmers said. There are so many flaws at so many levels. It would be better if it was discontinued. -Approximately 3,350 people are on death row in the U.S. Of these, 2 inmates have received the death penalty for a non-homicide crimes, although no one in the U.S. has been executed for a crime other than murder since 1964. -The last time the Supreme Court considered the humanity of the death penalty was in the case of Willie Francis, a Louisiana inmate sentenced to death in 1945. He was strapped into the electric chair and shocked, but somehow survived. He pleaded for his sentence to be commuted in the Francis v. Resweber case, but the court ruled that it was a technical malfunction and the state could attempt again. Francis was successfully executed in 1947 at the age of 17. (source: University of Miami Hurricane) * Is the death penalty an effective crime deterrant? YES There does seem to be evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to some people and for that reason it should be available to judges. In the UK the death penalty for murder was abolished early in the 1960s. Since then, murder has gone from being almost unheard of to being a daily affair, so routine as to be hardly newsworthy. It is true that the crime rate had been slowly rising before the death penalty was abolished, but the explosion of violence since has been quite extraordinary. Not all of the increase can be attributed to abolition, of course, since society itself has changed a great deal. However, the absence of the death penalty has meant that no criminal, sexual pervert or street punk needs to worry about what he does. The worst penalty will be jail, with time off for 'good behavior'! There will always be the deranged few who
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, CALIF., MD., GA.
Jan. 22 USA: Physicians Shouldn't Be Involved in Executions Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Baze v. Rees, a Kentucky case challenging current practices regarding lethal injectionthe modality of death in almost all of the 38 states that allow capital punishment. The decision, expected by June, is likely to focus on the narrow question of the proper standard for assessing whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. However, as the case turns out, one of the most troubling aspects of lethal injection will remain at issue: the involvement of physicians in the process of execution. Physicians have a long history of involvement with the death penalty. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin inspired the device that later bore his name, hoping that it would be a humane means of ending the life of condemned prisoners. Executioners often called on physicians for assistance in calculating the proper drop for death by hanging. Even modern forms of execution such as the gas chamber and the electric chair involved physicians in the determination that the prisoner had actually died. Lethal injection, which as currently practiced involves a three-stage sequence of drugs that induce anesthesia, paralyze breathing, and stop the heart, was suggested by an Oklahoma physician in yet another attempt to find a painless means of execution. Since it has the trappings of a medical procedure, though, it has pulled physicians and other medical personnel even more closely into the process of putting prisoners to death. Of the 38 states that have the death penalty, with lethal injection the preferred mode of execution in all of them, 17 require physician involvement and 18 more permit it. Thus, physicians have been reported to assist in preparing the lethal drugs, selecting sites for IV lines, inserting the lines, supervising personnel in administering the drugs, monitoring vital signs, and declaring death. If the initial doses are ineffective, physicians may recommend additional amounts that will more reliably induce death. Advocates of physician involvement in these roles point out that non-medical personnel are unlikely to do them correctly, with the result that condemned prisoners will suffer needlessly. Hence, a humanitarian rationale is offered for physicians to be involved. To be sure, accounts of mangled executions make clear that lethal injection is far from the painless and sterile procedure for death that its developers sought. Personnel often have trouble inserting IV lines, sometimes requiring many painful tries at locating a vein. When done incorrectly, the lines may not feed directly into a vein, leading to excruciating pain, burning and blistering when the drugs are injected. Improperly mixed medications can clog IV lines, stopping executions in mid-stream. Reports of insufficient medication to induce full anesthesia indicate that some prisoners have experienced paralysis of their breathing muscles while still sentient or felt the burning sensation of the potassium solution intended to stop their hearts as it was injected into their bodies. The American Medical Association, AMA, however, along with every other U.S. and international medical group that has spoken on the issue, has condemned physician participation in execution. In the AMAs words, A physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution. Ending life is so antithetical to the core mission of physicians that the use of medical skills for that purpose seems a clear corruption of the profession. The analogy to the futuristic firemen in Fahrenheit 451who ignite fires to burn books rather than extinguishing themis close enough to be viscerally disturbing. Commentators worry about a variety of consequences stemming from physicians playing a role in executions: loss of public trust, a slide into the practice of euthanasia in clinical settings, and the distortion of the debate over the legitimacy of the death penalty by dressing it up as a medical procedure. From a policy perspective, the last of these is especially problematic. Whatever one's view of the death penalty, it is clearly a punitive procedure rooted in a retributive goal. Our debate regarding its appropriateness should focus on the appropriateness of death as a means of retribution. Sanitizing the procedure by turning it over to the medical profession masks the true nature of the death penalty and undermines informed discussion. Ironically, a number of courtstaking note of the bungled executions that seem all too prevalent with current protocolshave required physician involvement if executions are to continue. Thus, states have been recruiting physicians for this purpose, offering them anonymity and legal insulation from sanctions that state medical boards may impose for unethical behavior. Given the strong case that can be made for
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, N.J., VA., OKLA., IND.
Jan. 17 USA: Court upholds challenge to death row interview banThe federal prison media policy focused too much on restricting rights rather than ensuring the prison's security, the court held. A federal policy prohibiting death row inmates from conducting face-to-face interviews with reporters might have been enacted for political rather than safety reasons, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Indianapolis (7th Cir.) ruled on Tuesday. The 3-judge panel sent the case back to the trial court, which had upheld the Bureau of Prisons' (BOP) rule banning face-to-face interviews. David Hammer, then a prisoner on death row, sued various Bureau of Prisons officials in 2001, after he was denied face-to-face interviews with the media. Between August and December 1999, Hammer conducted three in-person interviews at the prison he was housed at in Terre Haute, Ind. But, in 2000, he learned the prison wouldn't allow him to speak in-person to members of the press. The new rule was put in place after fellow death row inmate Timothy McVeigh spoke about the Oklahoma City bombing with 60 Minutes in March 2000. In response to the interview, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and former BOP Director Kathleen Hawk-Sawyer announced a blanket media policy banning all federal death row inmates from giving face-to-face interviews with reporters. The policy also banned inmates from talking to the press about other inmates, which created an especially difficult challenge for Hammer, since he was placed on death row for killing a fellow prisoner. The district court dismissed Hammer's initial suit at the pleading stage, but the appeals court reversed and sent the case back for review. The district court subsequently dismissed a number of Hammer's claims before granting summary judgment to the defendants. Back before the appeals court, Judge Llana Rovner again sided with Hammer, noting that a jury must decide whether the media policy was a result of negative press coverage or a valid safety and security concern. Ashcroft explained that his distaste for the content of interviews given by death row inmates was the reason for the policy, Rovner wrote. That is direct evidence of the actual motivation, and it creates a genuine issue of material fact as to whether (former warden Harley) Lappin was motivated by a desire to prohibit a disagreeable viewpoint or to advance prison security. Stephen Key, general counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association, which represents Indiana newspapers, said that although this is only a preliminary victory, he remains hopeful that the policy will be changed. It was the speech issue that prompted the ban, and not the security issue that was raised at a later date, Key said. If that's the case, we feel that the courts will rule that the ban should be lifted. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, which was joined by the Hoosier State Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, urging the court to overturn the trial court's decision. (source: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press) ** Fleeing to Mexico Thwarts Death Penalty A methamphetamine dealer who gunned down a deputy during a traffic stop in Southern California. A man in Arizona who killed his ex-girlfriend's parents and brother and snatched his children. A man who suffocated his baby daughter and left her body in a toolbag on an expressway overpass near Chicago. Ordinarily, these would be death penalty cases. But these men fled to Mexico, thereby escaping the possibility of execution. The reason: Mexico won't send anyone back to the United States unless the U.S. gives assurances it won't seek the death penalty a 30-year-old policy that rankles some American prosecutors and enrages victims' families. We find it extremely disturbing that the Mexican government would dictate to us, in Arizona, how we would enforce our laws at the same time they are complaining about our immigration laws, said Barnett Lotstein, special assistant to the prosecutor in Maricopa County, Ariz., which includes Phoenix. Even in the most egregious cases, the Mexican authorities say, `No way,' and that's not justice. That's an interference of Mexican authorities in our judicial process in Arizona. It may about to happen again: A Marine accused of murdering a pregnant comrade in North Carolina and burning her remains in his backyard is believed to have fled to Mexico. Prosecutors said they have not decided whether to seek the death penalty. But if the Marine is captured in Mexico, capital punishment will be off the table. Fugitives trying to escape the long arm of the law have been making a run for the border ever since frontier days, a practice romanticized in countless Hollywood Westerns. Mexico routinely returns fugitives to the U.S. to face justice. But under a 1978 treaty with the U.S., Mexico, which has no death penalty, will not extradite
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
Jan. 18 USA: Kenny Richey is proof that the death penalty doesn't need to be carried out to destroy a lifeThe Scot has considered suicide more often in the past week than during his time in jail Kenny Richey, the 43-year-old Scotsman who returned home 10 days ago after 21 years on death row in the US, says he has never been more miserable than since he was let out. In a BBC interview, he reveals that he has considered suicide more often in the past week than during all his time in an American jail. He says that in Scotland he feels left behind by a world that has moved on, and that he is finding it hard to fit in. So much has changed - even the scenery, he says. This is a society that has grown up without me. Richey has always protested his innocence of causing the death of a two-year-old girl, killed in an alleged arson attack in Ohio on the house of his former girlfriend and her lover in 1986. I believe in his innocence, since he even refused a plea bargain that would have changed his conviction from murder to manslaughter and reduced his sentence from death to 11 years. As a result, he once came within an hour of being executed. Yet even this horror pales before what he has endured since becoming a free man again. This may seem extraordinary, but it is a well-documented fact that his experience is far from unique. In the great controversy that continues to rage in America about the death penalty - that great blot on the country's reputation for humanity and human rights - the plight of those on death row who are eventually released is almost totally overlooked. They may have been spared the terrible finality of lethal injection or the electric chair, but nevertheless they have had to spend years in prison expecting it, dreading it and preparing for it. Then, all of a sudden, when doubt as to their guilt is grudgingly recognised by the authorities, they are suddenly set free. But to what? Not to a normal life, but to broken marriages, unemployment and social ostracism. In America, state governments that have spent millions of dollars trying to get them executed offer them almost no help or support. The most they may get is the standard gate money of between $10 and $200, which is given to all prisoners upon release. It has repeatedly been shown that the death penalty doesn't have to be carried out to rob people of their lives. Richey, it seems, is one such victim. Asked if he feels bitter, he replies: They took 21-and-a-half years of my life for something I didn't do. Of course I'm bitter. Who wouldn't be? It is terribly sad. (source: The Guardian)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Jan. 12 USA: Should Christians support the death penalty? Unquestionably the news of the day is the political primaries. For the first time in many years there is no clear heir apparent to be the nominee in either party, and the pundits are absolutely beside themselves because they don't yet have an easy call to make. It will be the news for some time to come. But while all of this is going on there is another story of greater importance in my opinion taking place at the Supreme Court. Last Tuesday the Court began hearing arguments in a pair of Kentucky lawsuits challenging the lethal 3-drug cocktail used in most U.S. executions. The argument against the method is that if the drugs are not administered properly the criminal may be paralyzed but still conscious when the Potassium Chloride causes cardiac arrest, leading to excruciating pain. Some say this amounts to a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution subjecting the criminal to cruel and unusual punishment. But for all of the prima facie rationales offered against the use of this form of execution the root motivation for this challenge is against the death penalty altogether. Many believe strongly that capital punishment is morally barbaric and should be banned by civilized nations. Many Christians agree with this. There are growing numbers in the body of Christ that believe only God can make the call as to whether someone should live or die, and if someone deserves to die God will take care of that in His own way. For them the Biblical commands to practice the death penalty are Old Testament laws that have no place in the New Testament kingdom of Christ. But such a position cannot pass the scrutiny of Biblical teaching. First of all punishment by death is sanctioned by God, and God did not place a statute of limitations on its use. In Genesis 9:6 (before the Mosaic law was given) God said to Noah: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man. In the Bible some sins, especially those which constituted desecration of the family, were particularly heinous to God. He instructed His people to after due process remove such offenders from their community and into the judgement of God immediately. Their sin could not be restituted adequately in this world to allow for them to restored to society and they were executed. The attempt to relegate capital punishment to only an Old Testament practice ultimately fails in the face of the teaching of Jesus. Many Christians are surprised when they hear that Jesus approved of the death penalty as they have superimposed on Him a humanistic morality. In Mark 7 Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for prizing their traditions over the Word of God, and His specific example was how they ignored punishing a capital crime in favor of the rules of men. God authorized the civil magistrate to carry out such punishment in His behalf. It is the role of the civil government to judge rightly, and enforce the law so that peace and justice are upheld a point clearly spelled out by the Apostle Paul in Romans 13. Occasionally there are some who believe that while capital punishment is permissible it ought to be suspended in certain circumstances, such as when a death row inmate comes to faith in Christ. This was seen most vividly when Pat Robertson joined the ultra-liberal World Council of Churches in appealing to then Texas Governor George W. Bush to commute the sentence of Karla Faye Tucker (which was a moot issue since under Texas law governors cannot commute death sentences). Tucker was convicted of brutal first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Tucker converted in prison and was immediately the cover story of several Christian magazines. Robertson (and others) believed that Tucker should be allowed to live and tell her story in the hopes that she could have a positive influence on others. But their efforts failed and she was executed in 1998. While the desire to spare Tucker was understandable it was not Biblical. Not only would this lead to a flood of spurious and convenient conversions, but it puts the church squarely in league with the Pharisees who believed that they could sidestep Gods Law so long as the ends were noble. No one questions whether someone like Tucker can repent of their sin and be saved by God's grace. But the Bible does not say that conversion absolves anyone of the consequences God has spelled out. It remains to be seen what the High Court decides. But regardless of that Christians need to remember that the Supreme Court does not stipulate morality by arbitrarily interpreting law. Law and morality are not democratically determined. They ultimately come from God and those laws need to be followed and upheld even when they are unpopular. (source: The Rev. Marty Fields is the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Laurel; The Laurel (Miss.) Leader Call)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Jan. 12 USA: Humane Executions? It hath often been said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible.Henry Fielding, Amelia The question everyone is asking is whether anything is happening in the United States of America other than a two year long marathon to decide who will be the next president of the United States, news of each milestone being covered as though it were the determining factor in establishing the winner. As we draw closer to the time when there will be an event that actually determines that fact, news of all else is virtually eclipsed by news of what was, was not, is, is not, will be, may be, or wont be insofar as it affects those seeking the presidency. I am happy to report that there is other news even though it is not altogether new news. It concerns the death penalty. And it is a subject with which 2 countries that treasure human rights above all else-the United States and China-are dealing. In the United States the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 5 addressing the important question, simply stated, of whether being executed by a e drug lethal injection is more likely to hurt than being put to death by a one drug injection because of the protocol accompanying the injection. If it does, it may be unconstitutional and if it doesn't, it isn't. The people who are best able to answer that question are those who have received the injections and they are unable to give an opinion. Next best, however, are lawyers and Supreme Court Justices and it is the lawyers who presented the arguments as to why the 3-drug injection is apt or not apt to hurt, and the Justices who will decide whom to believe. As the Supreme Court case demonstrates, many people in the United States are concerned about the pain inflicted on those being executed notwithstanding Justice Antonin Scalia's sensitive observation during oral argument that there's no constitutional requirement that executions employ the least painful method possible. Some medical evidence suggests that a single barbiturate is easier to administer and less likely to cause pain than the 3-drug approach now commonly used. The one drug method is used by the humane society in Kentucky and other states when euthanizing animals and is reportedly painless yet effective. According to Adam Liptak of the New York Times, however, one of the objections to switching to the single drug method employed on animals is that it is employed on animals. Death penalty proponents think that human beings are better than animals and should not be put to death the same way animals are put to death. It devalues the entire procedure. While the Supreme Court contemplates the question, China has announced it, too, is trying, to use Chief Justice Roberts' words from the oral argument, to have a procedure that produces a humane death. Traditionally China has executed those who have earned the right to be put to death by one shot to the back of the head. Mindful of the sensitivities of the survivors, those being shot have been asked to open their mouths when the shot is fired so that the bullet can pass through the head and out the mouth without disfiguring the victim. Early in the New Year, Jiang Xingchang, vice-president of the Supreme Peoples Court announced that lethal injection was more humane than the shot to the back of the head and would eventually replace the latter method of execution. It is already being employed in some places in China although the formula is the same three-drug formula that the Supreme Court is considering. Thanks to a relatively new invention, however, death by lethal injection has been made much more pleasant as well as efficient, in China. According to a report in USA Today, in 2004 authorities began acquiring a new death van designed by Kang Zhongwen in which executions by lethal injection take place. Mr. Kang says that their introduction shows that China promotes human rights. The vans enable executions to take place in the communities where the condemned lived thus making it more convenient for family members who want to attend, a truly thoughtful touch. Mr. Kang was quoted in USA Today as saying of the van: I'm most proud of the bed. It's very humane, like an ambulance. He then shows how the bed in the van slides out so the victim can lie down and when secure, be powered into the van. All in all, it seems like a highly civilized approach to state sponsored death. Whether China will be influenced by the U.S. Supreme Courts opinion of 3 drugs vs. 1 drug only time will tell. Now you readers who have wasted 2 minutes reading the foregoing can go back to the internet to see if the polls that are frequently wrong but slavishly reported and commented on, show any change in the standings of the candidates. (source: Christopher Brauchli; Common Dreams)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, N.J.
Jan. 12 USA: see these videos: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123767 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123542 (source: ABC News) NEW JERSEY: The difference Lubbock County will soon be home to the 1st regional public defender office in Texas. The office will be devoted to handling only West Texas capital murder cases for those who cannot afford an attorney. This could mean big savings for taxpayers and county budgets. With a $2.5 million budget the West Texas Public Defender will handle capital defense in 80 counties from the tip of the Panhandle, to Lubbock, and on down to Midland/Odessa and San Angelo. The difference could not be starker between New Jersey, where Gov. Jon Corzine commuted to life without parole the sentences of the last eight on death row after the legislature abolished the measure, and Texas, where 370 await execution. Texas paused only when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay pending its ruling in the lethal injection challenge Baze v. Rees. Of the 1,097 U.S. legal executions since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Texas, with a weak defender system, has accounted for 405. Of the 42 executions in America in 2007, 26 were in Texas. In 2007, like every year since we restored the death penalty in 1982, none was in New Jersey, where the state public defender coordinated defenses statewide. When we ask what is the difference, two groups come to mind in addition to our conscientious Supreme Court and its proportionality reviews, and our legislators who moved beyond the simple retributive logic of a life for a life. The Office of the Public Defender and the citizen organization New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP), led by Celeste Fitzgerald stand out to explain how New Jersey has again led the way - this time by abolishing the death penalty through the vote of our elected representatives. Our Supreme Court needed the adequately funded, dedicated lawyers of the statewide Office of the Public Defender. Without the public defenders' relentless advocacy for each of their clients, including those guilty of heinous crimes, the high court could not have carried out its conscientious constitutional and fairness-based analyses of every death sentence. Were it not for the public defenders who blocked death sentences in 80 % of the trials where it was sought, we would have had a death row so crowded, and our Supreme Court's docket so huge, that the careful review we came to expect could not have been delivered. NJADP showed our legislators that for many bereaved family members closure meant not the vengeance of execution, but confidence that the killing has ended in life imprisonment without parole. Fitzgerald and NJADP united the bereaved members of 46 families of murder victims to form New Jersey Homicide Survivors for S-171. The bipartisan bill, now law, was aided by the survivors' powerful public appeal to legislators: We are family members and loved ones of murder victims. We desperately miss the parents, children, siblings, and spouses we have lost. We live with the pain and heartbreak of their absence every day and would do anything to have them back. We have been touched by the criminal justice system in ways we never imagined and would never wish on anyone. Our experience compels us to speak out for change. Though we share different perspectives on the death penalty, every one of us agrees that New Jersey's capital punishment system doesn't work, and that our state is better off without it. To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. Life without parole, which begins immediately, is both of these; the death penalty is neither. Capital punishment drags victims' loved ones through an agonizing and lengthy process, holding out the promise of one punishment in the beginning and often resulting in a life sentence in the end anyway. A life without parole sentence for killers right from the start would keep society safe, hold killers responsible for their brutal and depraved acts, and would start as soon as we left the courtroom instead of leaving us in limbo. Citizen campaigns like NJADP's have received international recognition for such seminal work. In 1976 Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, a Protestant and a Catholic, founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1997 the prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its founder Jody Williams for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines. A day after New Jersey acted, the U.N. General Assembly called for all nations to enact a moratorium on executions with a view toward abolition. In Rome, the ancient site of public executions, the Colosseum was illuminated each night in tribute. We see in NJADP, the Office of the Public Defender and their leaders the caliber of effort, the quality of leadership exemplified by the Northern Ireland peace and the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, N.J.
Jan. 12 USA: see these videos: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123767 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4123542 (source: ABC News) NEW JERSEY: The difference Lubbock County will soon be home to the 1st regional public defender office in Texas. The office will be devoted to handling only West Texas capital murder cases for those who cannot afford an attorney. This could mean big savings for taxpayers and county budgets. With a $2.5 million budget the West Texas Public Defender will handle capital defense in 80 counties from the tip of the Panhandle, to Lubbock, and on down to Midland/Odessa and San Angelo. The difference could not be starker between New Jersey, where Gov. Jon Corzine commuted to life without parole the sentences of the last eight on death row after the legislature abolished the measure, and Texas, where 370 await execution. Texas paused only when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay pending its ruling in the lethal injection challenge Baze v. Rees. Of the 1,097 U.S. legal executions since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Texas, with a weak defender system, has accounted for 405. Of the 42 executions in America in 2007, 26 were in Texas. In 2007, like every year since we restored the death penalty in 1982, none was in New Jersey, where the state public defender coordinated defenses statewide. When we ask what is the difference, two groups come to mind in addition to our conscientious Supreme Court and its proportionality reviews, and our legislators who moved beyond the simple retributive logic of a life for a life. The Office of the Public Defender and the citizen organization New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP), led by Celeste Fitzgerald stand out to explain how New Jersey has again led the way - this time by abolishing the death penalty through the vote of our elected representatives. Our Supreme Court needed the adequately funded, dedicated lawyers of the statewide Office of the Public Defender. Without the public defenders' relentless advocacy for each of their clients, including those guilty of heinous crimes, the high court could not have carried out its conscientious constitutional and fairness-based analyses of every death sentence. Were it not for the public defenders who blocked death sentences in 80 % of the trials where it was sought, we would have had a death row so crowded, and our Supreme Court's docket so huge, that the careful review we came to expect could not have been delivered. NJADP showed our legislators that for many bereaved family members closure meant not the vengeance of execution, but confidence that the killing has ended in life imprisonment without parole. Fitzgerald and NJADP united the bereaved members of 46 families of murder victims to form New Jersey Homicide Survivors for S-171. The bipartisan bill, now law, was aided by the survivors' powerful public appeal to legislators: We are family members and loved ones of murder victims. We desperately miss the parents, children, siblings, and spouses we have lost. We live with the pain and heartbreak of their absence every day and would do anything to have them back. We have been touched by the criminal justice system in ways we never imagined and would never wish on anyone. Our experience compels us to speak out for change. Though we share different perspectives on the death penalty, every one of us agrees that New Jersey's capital punishment system doesn't work, and that our state is better off without it. To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. Life without parole, which begins immediately, is both of these; the death penalty is neither. Capital punishment drags victims' loved ones through an agonizing and lengthy process, holding out the promise of one punishment in the beginning and often resulting in a life sentence in the end anyway. A life without parole sentence for killers right from the start would keep society safe, hold killers responsible for their brutal and depraved acts, and would start as soon as we left the courtroom instead of leaving us in limbo. Citizen campaigns like NJADP's have received international recognition for such seminal work. In 1976 Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, a Protestant and a Catholic, founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1997 the prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its founder Jody Williams for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines. A day after New Jersey acted, the U.N. General Assembly called for all nations to enact a moratorium on executions with a view toward abolition. In Rome, the ancient site of public executions, the Colosseum was illuminated each night in tribute. We see in NJADP, the Office of the Public Defender and their leaders the caliber of effort, the quality of leadership exemplified by the Northern Ireland peace and the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA (fwd)
my postings to this list will resume on Jan. 9 Jan. 3 USA: Should the death penalty be abolished? Ahead of a Supreme Court case on lethal injection, the Pew Forum took a look at how U.S. religious groups view capital punishment. Here are some of their beliefs: American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.: Since 1982, it has opposed capital punishment in the United States. Buddhism: There is no common position among Buddhists on capital punishment, but many emphasize nonviolence and appreciation for life. As a result, in countries with large Buddhist populations, such as Thailand, capital punishment is rare. Catholicism: Although the Catechism of the Catholic Church sanctions the use of the death penalty as a last recourse, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has repeatedly called for the abolition of capital punishment in the United States in all circumstances. Episcopal Church: Since the 1958 General Convention, U.S. Episcopal bishops have maintained a position against the death penalty. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: Although the Churchwide Assembly added the death penalty to the church's social agenda in 1989, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has yet to establish an official stance on the issue. Hinduism: There is no official position on capital punishment among Hindus, and Hindu theologians fall on both sides of the issue. Islam: In the United States, where Islamic law is not legally enforced, there is no official Muslim position on the death penalty. In Islamic countries, however, capital punishment is sanctioned in only two instances: cases involving intentional murder or physical harm of another; and intentional harm or threat against the state, including the spread of terror. Judaism: All of the major Jewish movements in the United States either advocate for the abolition of the death penalty or have called for at least a temporary moratorium on its use. Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: In 1976, it asserted that capital punishment is in accord with the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions. Mormonism: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has no official position on the issue and considers the death penalty to be a matter of the state and civil law. National Association of Evangelicals: Since its 1972 and 1973 resolutions on the issue, the National Association of Evangelicals has continued to support the use of capital punishment in cases involving premeditated murder as well as crimes such as hijacking and kidnapping where people are physically harmed. National Council of Churches: The National Council of Churches, which represents 35 mainstream Protestant and Orthodox churches, has advocated for the abolition of the death penalty since 1968. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A): Since its first official statement on the issue in 1959, reaffirmed again in 1977 and 1978, it has opposed the death penalty. Southern Baptist Convention: In 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution in support of the fair and equitable use of capital punishment. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations: It has called for a moratorium on executions since 1961. United Methodist Church: In 2000, it declared its opposition to the death penalty and encouraged its membership to advocate for the abolition of capital punishment. (source: The Daily Journal)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA presidential candidates, religion, dp
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has an interesting synopsis on where the presidential candidates stand on the death penalty, including any key votes they've taken on the issue: http://pewforum.org/religion08/compare.php?Issue=Death_Penalty There's also some analysis of public opinion polls on the issue: For most religious traditions, there are only slight differences in opinion on this issue between those who attend religious services at least once a week and those who attend less often. The one exception is white non-Hispanic Catholics. Among this group, those who attend services more frequently actually take a more liberal view on the death penalty: 39% of white non-Hispanic Catholics who attend religious services at least once a week oppose the death penalty, compared with only 22% of those who attend less often. http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=272
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, MD., ARK., WASH.
Dec. 30 USA: Death watch With its flaws becoming more and more apparent, no wonder the death penalty is losing favor among many Americans. It is the one punishment imposed by the legal system that once carried out cannot be corrected with a turn of the key or an order from the courthouse. When an execution has been conducted, the condemned person has no more avenues of appeal. A penalty like that must be flawless then, right? But consider: The use of DNA evidence, a fairly recently development, has shown some people in prison to be innocent. Some death row inmates have been exonerated. Most such inmates of course are guilty of terrible crimes, but given that wrongful convictions have occurred, it's not too much of a jump to speculate that innocent people have been executed in this country. Cases in North Carolina and other states -- where the constitutionality of lethal injection as a method of killing someone convicted of a capital crime has been challenged -- presumably will be settled by a Supreme Court ruling on lethal injection protocols this summer. But the main focus of a New York Times report carried in Wednesday's NO was a shift in public opinion on the death penalty. Once it was an issue shamelessly exploited by politicians. A candidate for statewide or national office who dared to announce firm opposition to the death penalty could expect to see himself or herself portrayed in opponents' commercials as someone ready to fling open the jailhouse doors, a coddler of criminals with no sympathy for victims. There may be some of that still, but it's clear that full-throated support for the death penalty also might alienate a goodly number of voters who aren't quite so sure that it's a really great idea for the state to kill people. New Jersey, which had not executed anyone in over 40 years, recently abolished its death penalty after a commission determined that the punishment was not worth trying to retain. A couple of other states are pondering similar action. Most of the remaining states with capital punishment statutes have yet to reach that point, although there is a reluctance on several counts about the death penalty. There even seems to be a touch of hesitation now in Texas, where the legal system has been pushed to accelerate the process from conviction to the death chamber and where by far the most U.S. executions take place. The questions and hesitations aren't just based on objections to the death penalty on moral grounds, or on the premise that mistakes are made every day in the judicial system but cannot afford to be made with the death penalty. In addition to those concerns, some in the legal system believe the long appeals process and the uncertain outcome of that process, often with retrials and extensive publicity, cause the families of victims too much pain. And the expense to the public typically is far greater than the expense of locking someone up for life without parole. If public support for the death penalty is waning, good. When the penalty was in full-speed-ahead mode, the courts used to spend weeks, even months, on the highest profile cases. Now that life without parole is more often used, it has become acceptable to some who once might have objected to it. And perhaps some people who saw themselves as supporters of the death penalty have come around to believing that it is a little too much like revenge instead of justice. The latter is part of punishment. The former never should be. (source: News Observer) MARYLAND: Social issues due for debate: Legislature not likely to resolve same-sex marriage, death penalty High-profile social issues such as overturning the death penalty and either banning or allowing gay marriage will be back on the General Assembly agenda in the session that begins Jan. 9, but legislative leaders are doubtful any side can gain enough momentum to make a difference. A bill to overturn the death penalty was defeated by 1 vote in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee last year even though Gov. Martin O'Malley testified on its behalf. Since then, New Jersey has become the first state in 40 years to strike capital punishment, and Mr. O'Malley and other opponents in the legislature are hoping that gives renewed energy to their cause in the upcoming session. Sen. Lisa Gladden, D-Baltimore, is planning to introduce a bill that would replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Currently, Maryland is under a de facto capital punishment moratorium. Last December, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled the state's lethal-injection protocol was improperly adopted because it did not receive the proper public review. Mr. O'Malley has been unwilling to submit new rules to reinstate the practice until the General Assembly has another chance to consider a ban. The governor's stance has irritated local prosecutors and relatives of crime victims because it leaves the death penalty - and its
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, US MIL., N.H., N.J.
Dec. 14 USA: Death penalty ban distant, despite state vote New Jersey's abolition vote this week highlights scrutiny of the death penalty in America, and analysts say it could be a small step in the direction of an eventual nationwide ban. But with capital punishment still on the books in 36 states, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and broad political support for putting the worst offenders to death, the road to abolition will be long. Ultimate abolition is indeed a long way off, said Stuart Banner, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and author of The Death Penalty: An American History. I'd be very surprised if the (Supreme) Court casts any doubt any time soon on the constitutionality of capital punishment in general. New Jersey on Thursday became the first state legislature since the 1960s to abolish the death penalty. Coming on top of an unofficial moratorium on executions, some had questioned whether the move by New Jersey was a step toward national abolition. The unofficial moratorium has been in place since just after the Supreme Court said on September 25 that it would decide an appeal by two death row inmates from Kentucky arguing that the three-chemical cocktail used in lethal injections inflicted unnecessary pain and suffering. One convicted killer was executed in Texas hours later but none have been since then. Lethal injection has come under increased scrutiny after executions in Florida and California in which inmates took up to 30 minutes to die. All but one of the states with the death penalty and the federal government use lethal injection for executions. The court's decision is not expected before the middle of next year but if it decides that the current cocktail is unconstitutional, states could seek alternative methods. Still, capital punishment opponents have taken heart because of 2 trends: declining numbers of both executions carried out and death sentences being handed down. The number of death sentences imposed in 2005 -- the last year for which there is complete data -- was 128, way down from 317 in 1996. And if the moratorium holds as expected until the end of this year, America will have executed 42 inmates in 2007, the lowest number since 1994, when 31 were put to death. One of the main reasons for this newfound hesitancy is concern about wrongful convictions, many related to perceived racial bias against black defendants. No U.S. court has found that anyone has been executed in the past three decades for a crime they did not commit, but DNA and other evidence has exonerated 125 inmates since 1973 who were awaiting execution on death row, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. There is broad political support for the death penalty, especially for the most heinous crimes. This spans the political spectrum, from liberals who do not want to be seen as soft on crime to conservative Christians who see Biblical sanction for taking an eye for an eye. All the Republican presidential candidates with the exception of Texan maverick Ron Paul support the death penalty. On the Democratic side, the three front-runners, Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all back it. And political support is strongest in the South, which is expected to keep executing people until the Supreme Court tells it otherwise. The South is a region with a traditional political culture which sees the death penalty as a means of maintaining social order, said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the South has carried out 901 of the 1,099 executions, since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ban on the practice in 1976. Texas had led the way by far with 405, while the Northeast has only carried out 4, highlighting the regional divide. New Jersey had not executed any convicted criminals since 1963, making its vote mostly symbolic. However, some commentators see the possibility of a domino effect from New Jersey's move, albeit over a period of years. States have often looked to their neighbors in deciding whether to modify or abolish capital punishment. If several states were to abolish the death penalty over the next decade, the constitutional basis for attacking the death penalty would be substantially strengthened, said Jordan Steiker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. If death sentencing rates continue to decline, execution rates remain low, and several states abandon the penalty as a matter of law (and not just practice), judicial abolition would become a very real prospect, he said. (source: Reuters) US MILITARY: Death penalty is possible in court-martial on Suffern captain's slaying A military authority presiding over the court-martial of an Army soldier accused of slaying two officers in Iraq has ruled that it will remain a death penalty case. Lt. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III's ratification of a
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Dec. 5 USA: 25th Anniversary of Lethal Injection in US - Amnesty Intl statementAmnesty International USA Press Statement LETHAL INJECTION IS ANOTHER 'FAILED EXPERIMENT' THAT 'HAS A CORROSIVE EFFECT ON THE MEDICAL PROFESSION,' SAYS AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, released the following statement regarding the 25th anniversary (on December 7) of lethal injection administered in the Unites States: In the past 25 years, the United States has carried out 929 executions by lethal injection. These include numerous botched executions that contradict the notion of a gentle death. Various autopsies have revealed severe, foot-long chemical burns, collapsed veins and multiple puncture marks on the skin. In some cases executions have lasted up to an hour, with prisoners visibly gasping for air or convulsing in visible pain. Texas was the first state to use lethal injection with the December 7, 1982 execution of Charlie Brooks. Since then almost half of such executions have been carried out in Texas, where the chemical mix has been used to put 405 human beings to death. Ironically, in 2003 Texas passed a law prohibiting the use of this very same cocktail to euthanize cats and dogs -- a ban that exists in law or in practice throughout most of the country. If this procedure is unacceptable for pets, clearly it is unacceptable for human beings. Furthermore, lethal injection has a corrosive effect on the medical profession, which finds itself reluctantly conscripted to play a lead role in state-sanctioned killing. Health professionals who have sworn to do no harm and to sustain human life are mired in an ethical morass when they must participate in a process that extinguishes it. In January the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments to determine if lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Amnesty International maintains that lethal injection is a failed experiment designed to make the death penalty seem more sanitized and humane. At its core, this system is arbitrary, capricious, racially biased and includes the very real potential of executing the innocent. It exacts a toll on all involved and can never be humane. # # # For more information on Amnesty International's work on the death penalty, please see: www.amnestyusa.org/abolish (source: Amnesty International USA)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Dec. 1 USA: Stats where executions have been blocked or postponed due to the recent US Supreme Court's decision to take the Kentucky (Baze) case: Florida Missouri Maryland California Ohio Delalware Tennessee Texas Arkansas North Carolina South Dakota (source: Death Penalty Information Center)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, N.J., IND., ALA.
Nov. 27 USA: No humanity in capital punishment processThe methods used for the death penalty in the U.S. serve no true justice. In the hours preceding an execution, the San Quentin California State Prison offers its doomed prisoner every measure of lukewarm comfort. The inmate is provided with Valium (optional), clean clothes and slippers (mandatory), access to radio and television and, of course, as extravagant a last meal as $50 can buy. At midnight, he or she is ushered into the execution chamber, strapped on a gurney and given alcohol swabs to prevent an infection that would never affect the inmate. The warden gives the signal, the three-drug cocktail is administered, and somewhere between three minutes and half an hour, the inmate's heart finally gives out. This is the ostensible beauty of lethal injection: quick, painless and, most importantly, easy for the onlookers. The needle has often been lauded as the humane alternative to capital punishment; there is no cringe-inducing crack of the neck, no smell of seared flesh, no shots fired. Recent challenges to the alleged painlessness of this mode of killing, however, have brought capital punishment to a standstill in California. In February 2006, Michael Morales, a San Quentin inmate convicted of rape and murder, was granted a last-minute stay of execution after filing a suit attacking the constitutionality of lethal injection. Since then, all executions in the Golden State have been placed on an indefinite moratorium, barring the resolution of the case. This, and many other lawsuits around the nation, have brought into perspective the flaws inherent in our current system of capital punishment, mainly, that the boasted humaneness of the procedure applies more to the witnesses rather than the prisoners. The lethal concoction of drugs does an expert job of keeping the ghastliness of what occurs far away from the innocent eyes of the bystanders. Like the 37 other states that employ the death penalty, California uses a standard combination of three drugs to sedate, paralyze and, of course, murder, its prisoners. First, the inmate is given a large dose of sodium thiopental, which acts as a general anesthetic; second, pancuronium bromide is administered, which relaxes the muscles and paralyzes the lungs, eventually stopping respiration. The final blow comes in the form of potassium chloride, which essentially stops the heart. Conveniently enough, the same drug that stops breathing also immobilizes facial muscles, rendering it impossible for the condemned to betray the writhing pain inevitably caused by each organ shutting down, one by one. The process is not necessarily as expedient as it is made out to be. Cases have shown that some inmates live up to 30 minutes before being pronounced dead; one convict in a Florida State Prison lived 34 minutes, and even required a 2nd dose before his heart stopped. With no easy solution in sight, Morales' case won't be addressed until January at the earliest, when the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on similar allegations of unconstitutionality in Kentucky. California is not the only state seriously reviewing the death penalty, and though several temporary solutions have already been posed, (e.g. increasing the amount of anesthetic administered), recent lawsuits suggest a more sweeping reform will be necessary. After all, it is only in keeping with its own pattern that the American judicial system continues to cycle through methods of humanizing killing. From hanging, to the firing squad and the electric chair, and, more recently, the gas chamber, the United States is in a constant search for the perfect method of guiltless retribution - anything to make us forget the most cruel and unusual punishment of all is death itself. We can continue to look, try new methods of murder, perpetuate a culture of killing - or we can realize there is no such thing as a humane murder. (source: Univ. Southern Calif. Daily Trojan; Lucy Mueller is a freshman majoring in English) *** Etzioni Disputes Economists on Death PenaltyP Just when America is coming to its senses about the barbarity and futility of capital punishment, Amitai Etzioni writes, some economists with misleading, half-baked stats muddy the facts. The economists have a model that, they say, shows that the death penalty deters crimes and hence saves lives, says Etzioni. Because most people do not read the math involved and have a hard time following the intricacies of these models, these kinds of 'findings' are often taken seriously. . . . Actually the data on which this model is based are extremely thin. First, there are simply not enough executions for most statistical methods to work properly; in 2003, while there were more than 16,000 homicides nationwide, there were only 65 executions. Adding to this statistical shortfall, too many other factors change over the same period as the number of executions changes to permit
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Nov. 27 USA: Legal challenge forces death to take holiday It's too late for Stephen Wayne Anderson, the last Inland killer executed by the state. But for condemned inmates whose appeals are nearing the end, an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case could alter the way they get the 3-drug lethal-injection cocktail used in executions nationwide. At issue before the Supreme Court is not the death penalty itself, but whether the protocols used in administering lethal injections violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The debate has halted executions across the country. The drugs used to anesthetize, paralyze and stop the heart of condemned inmates can, if administered incorrectly, cause a sensation of suffocation and excruciating pain, lawyers and doctors said. This method, which everybody thought would be much less cruel and a more humane way to kill people, maybe isn't so humane, said Frank Peasley, a Riverside lawyer who has defended eight capital cases but does not oppose the death penalty. Some people deserve to die because of the atrocity of their crimes, he said. The Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case filed by attorneys for two Kentucky inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., who contend that the protocol creates an unnecessary risk of suffering. In hearings set to start in January, they will ask the high court to set a standard for lethal injection. Used by 36 States Lethal injection is used in all but one of the 37 states that have the death penalty -- Nebraska uses the electric chair -- and most use the same 3 drugs. Among the potential problems cited by foes of lethal injection: The execution team is unable to find a suitable vein for the intravenous drip; the flow from the intravenous drip is directed toward the hand rather than the heart; the chemicals are shot into tissue instead of the bloodstream; or the prisoner does not react normally to the drugs. Such problems could cause an inmate to feel torturous pain from the final two drugs, even while sedated from the first drug. Increasing numbers of court cases challenging lethal injection have sprung up in the past few years. In a recent case in federal court in California, an expert witness testified that intravenous bags for administering the drugs at San Quentin State Prison hang from ducts so high that it would be impossible to determine whether they were working properly. The leader of the execution team testified that he had carried out executions while he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and was taking antidepressants and after he had been disciplined for a drunken-driving conviction. After the 2002 execution of Inland killer Anderson, who shot 81-year-old Elizabeth Lyman in the bed of her Bloomington home, opponents of capital punishment were astounded that the procedure had taken 29 minutes to complete, twice as long as most. Even after Anderson was unconscious, his stomach heaved dozens of times for about four minutes, far more than the once or twice that is typical, witnesses said. In their arguments, opponents cite the 2005 execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, founder of the Crips gang, who had shot and killed 4 people during robberies in 1979. In the death chamber at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, it took the execution team 20 minutes to set the intravenous lines, causing Williams to wonder, You doing that right?, according to witness accounts. Attorneys in court filings have said a nurse, after struggling to start a backup line in Williams' left arm, left the chamber in frustration without setting it properly, and the execution continued without the backup. 'I Just Want Him to Hurt' Riverside resident Carol McVeigh, whose son was murdered during a 1994 robbery, is tired of the debate about killers' rights. What about the victims? she wonders. McVeigh's son, Tim, 34, was working as night manager at an Orange County supermarket when Stephen Redd entered the store with a gun and demanded money. Tim was shot point blank in the stomach and bled to death three hours later. McVeigh can't help thinking about Tim's slow and painful death. She often wonders what her son, an aspiring commercial pilot and a history buff, would be doing today. Whatever Redd's punishment -- death or life in prison -- McVeigh said she wants it carried out. If he is finally executed after more than 20 years of appeals and he suffers some pain in the process, she is OK with that. When I hear that it's cruel and inhuman punishment, was it not what (many convicted killers) do? McVeigh asked. I just want him to hurt, and maybe that will cause him someday to have remorse. California Executions When the Supreme Court takes up the matter, it will be the first time in more than a century that it has ruled on an execution method. Over the years, the United States has used hanging, firing squads, poison gas and electrocution to execute its condemned killers. Even before the
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA. MO., LA., ARK.
Nov. 20 USA: Morality and the Death Penalty To the Editor: Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate (November 18, 2007) Re Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate (front page, Nov. 18): The revived debate over the death penalty already seems destined to miss the mark. It is not a technical or empirical issue, but a moral one. As such, economists and other social scientists have little to tell us as empirical chroniclers about the death penaltys continued use. Although a demonstration that the death penalty has no deterrent effect would be morally significant in curbing its use, there is no particular or free-standing moral significance to the claim that it does have some deterrent effect. There are all manner of punishments and innovations that might be introduced if deterrence were the only or main determinant of its social acceptability: chopping off limbs, stoning people and corporal punishment might be usefully retried. The fact is that the death penalty, like limb-chopping or stoning, is a morally outrageous practice whatever its deterrent effect: it reduces society to the ethical level of the murderer. In a society that aspires to be moral and just, there is no room for such a state-sanctioned uncivilized practice. Allan C. Hutchinson Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 18, 2007 The writer is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. To the Editor: Statistical analysis may sound scientific, but people dont behave according to economists' mathematical formulas. If the death penalty deterred killers, we would be able to find at least 1, in a state without the death penalty, who expected to be caught and imprisoned for life but committed murder anyway. No rational person would make that exchange. Economists will keep debating the numbers, but they should support public policy that sends clear, rational messages. Heres one: Killing people is wrong whether theyre walking in a dark alley or strapped to a gurney. Howard Tomb Brooklyn, Nov. 18, 2007 To the Editor: Even if we have no clue whether or not the death penalty actually deters, crime prevention is only one of a handful of reasons that a jurisdiction might consider when choosing to mete out the ultimate punishment. Retribution and the community's expression of moral outrage are at least as important. Failure to deter doesn't inevitably drive us to the logical conclusion to execute the death penalty itself. Jonathan Lubin New Haven, Nov. 18, 2007 The writer is a student at Yale Law School. To the Editor: If the death penalty actually deterred others from committing murder, you would think that the death row in Texas would be almost empty by this time and our murder rate would be near zero. We have had 405 executions in Texas during the last 25 years, 4 times more than any other state in the nation, and we still have about 370 people on death row. Somehow, criminals are not getting the message. The most recent study on deterrence in Texas was published in 1999. A team of university researchers found no evidence of a deterrent effect when the death penalty was carried out in Texas. I would think that this study done by university professionals in the most prolific death penalty state in the nation would have a high degree of credibility in this debate. My personal experience from visiting prisoners on death row over many years is that they were often high on alcohol or drugs, were not thinking of consequences, and did not think that they would be caught. If we want to deter violent crime, we must do a much better job in financing programs that prevent violent crime, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health services, child protective services and anti-gang programs. David Atwood Houston, Nov. 18, 2007 The writer is founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. To the Editor: Studies that suggest execution as a method of lowering the murder rate are invalid because the cost of alternative means was not considered. Your article doesn't acknowledge that the assumption that underlies economics rational choice is inapplicable. If rational choice applied, communities would weigh the cost of execution against other means of prevention. Of the men I have represented on death row, 3 were turned away from drug treatment centers shortly before the crimes. Other murders would have been prevented if social services had been sufficiently financed to intervene in horrific childhoods. Mentally ill individuals, too poor to afford care, ended up on death row after psychosis-driven murders. Spending millions on execution, while cost-cutting on other services, is not a rational choice. The death penalty increases the murder rate, because it necessitates allocation of limited tax dollars to execution while cutting basic social and mental health services. Marilyn Ozer Chapel Hill, N.C., Nov. 18, 2007 To the Editor: The possibility that the death penalty does in fact serve as a deterrent
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA., FLA., TENN., CALIF., ILL.
Nov. 14 USA: Death-penalty cases on hold pending Supreme Court review Prosecutor Matt Whitworth persuaded a jury to sentence Lisa Montgomery to death, but he isn't expecting the Kansas woman to die anytime soon. Whitworth, an assistant U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., said that Montgomery, 39, should to be put to death for strangling a pregnant woman and then using a kitchen knife to cut the baby from her womb. On Oct. 30, however, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the execution of a Mississippi murderer until it concludes a review next year of whether lethal injections constitute cruel and unusual punishment. And even before that, many states - including Texas and Missouri, two of the leaders in state-sanctioned killings - had imposed de facto moratoriums. It'll be many years before it's all wrapped up, Whitworth said. After 1,099 executions since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, there's been an unusual lull in the nation's death chambers. There've been only 42 executions so far this year, the fewest since 1994. In Texas, which has led the nation with 405 executions since 1976, the execution chambers have ground to a halt. In Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston and accounts for 100 executions since 1976, Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson said the uncertainty caused by the high court's review caused her to switch gears. Last week, she asked a court to withdraw the Feb. 26 execution that had been planned for Derrick Sonnier, who raped and murdered a woman and then stabbed her 2-year-old son to death in 1991. We're just not going to go forward with execution dates, although we're still trying cases as death penalty cases, Wilson said. With executions all but on hold across the country, death-penalty opponents see an opening. The American Bar Association is promoting a nationwide moratorium on capital punishment. And despite the long odds against success, opponents want Congress to ban executions. We should take advantage of this apparent pause in executions to consider the severe injustices within the system as a whole, said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who's introduced a Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act. The controversy over lethal injections comes as polls find more Americans questioning the use of the death penalty, particularly over concern about wrongful convictions. Experts say that's giving more ammunition to death-penalty opponents. Right now, certainly the abolitionists are gaining some steam, said Daniel Medwed, a law professor at the University of Utah. The lay of the land is that essentially everyone is waiting for the Supreme Court. A lot of states are just waiting and seeing how that process unfolds. They don't have to do that, but they're being very pragmatic. Thirty-seven states allow the death penalty. Lethal injections have been used in 85 % of the executions since 1976. The remaining prisoners were put to death by electrocution (14 %) and gas chamber (1 %), while three prisoners were hanged and two were killed by firing squads. The Supreme Court review, prompted by a Kentucky death-penalty case, is taking aim at what most people have long believed is the best way to execute prisoners. The lethal injections numb the prisoner's face and make it impossible to show pain. As a result, they're easier for observers to watch. Lethal injections involve three chemicals: sodium thiopental to induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide to cause muscle paralysis and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Opponents of the death penalty say that if inadequate levels of sodium thiopental are administered, the anesthetic effect can wear off before the heart stops. In a report issued last month, Amnesty International cited the case of Angel Diaz of Florida, who appeared to be moving 24 minutes after the first injection, grimacing, blinking, licking his lips, blowing and appearing to mouth words. The curtains surrounding his stretcher eventually were closed. The numerous recent botched executions have shattered the myth that lethal injection is a gentle process, said Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, the director of Amnesty International USA's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. If lethal injection doesn't call medical ethics into question, what does? Health professionals are charged with saving lives, not ending them. Medwed predicted that death-penalty opponents would gain more traction if the Supreme Court concludes that lethal injections are cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injections have been in vogue for a long time, Medwed said. What makes this unusual is that the most popular and prominent method of execution is being attacked. The interesting thing will be to see if the Supreme Court finds it cruel and unusual - what's left? What are states going to do? ... Some people think, in Utah at least, that the firing squad is the most humane because it's just one bullet to the head - it's quick. Wilson, the assistant D.A. from Texas who supports the death
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, KY.
Nov. 13 USA: DNA evidence builds case against the death penalty I spent a couple weeks in Italy recently, and it was while watching a TV news broadcast there that I learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had granted a stay of execution to a convicted murderer in Mississippi. I have no particular interest in the case of Earl W. Berry, who is on death row for killing a woman 20 years ago. I'd never heard of him. And initially I didn't understand why he was important enough to rate a segment on Italy's RAI 2 TV station. My knowledge of the Italian language is pretty rudimentary, but I understood that the news reporter was interviewing some Italian death-penalty opponents in the United States who were encouraged by the high court's action. That's understandable. Italy, like most nations in Europe and indeed most nations in the world, doesn't impose the death penalty. And some Italians have difficulty understanding why the United States, the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation, does. It was with this in mind that I read with interest a report of a forum on the death penalty held Friday in New Hope. 37 states, including Pennsylvania, employ capital punishment; 13 states and the District of Columbia have no death penalty. The Supreme Court's decision on Oct. 30 to at least delay Berry's scheduled execution had really nothing to do with the merits of Berry's appeal. However, it is being viewed as an indication that a majority of the justices intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring. The issue of capital punishment, always controversial, is being challenged now on grounds that lethal injection, the form of execution used in Pennsylvania and most death penalty states, might violate the Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. But there are other issues at hand that are causing some states to reconsider their use of capital punishment. Chief among these is the significant number of convicted murderers sentenced to be executed for their alleged crimes who have been found to be innocent, thanks in some cases to technological advances such as DNA analysis. Since 1973, 124 death-row inmates have been released from American prisons after being declared innocent of the charges that landed them there. There's no way of telling how many innocent people have been executed, but it's giving many lawmakers something to ponder. In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf of Willow Grove, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, formed an advisory committee to examine the cases of people who have been wrongly convicted in the state. The commission consists of about 30 members drawn from the state's prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, corrections officials, police, victim advocates and others. The commission is expected to report its findings and recommendations to the Senate by Nov. 30, 2008. Across the river in New Jersey, the state Assembly is expected to vote next month on whether to abolish the death penalty and make the state's most severe punishment life in prison without parole. The state Senate is likely to take similar action before the legislative session ends in January. If approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jon Corzine, who opposes the death penalty, the move would make New Jersey the 1st state to vote to abolish capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976. New Jersey, like several other states, has had a moratorium on executions for at least a year. Pennsylvania, while having no formal moratorium, has been historically slow to carry out executions. The state has executed only three inmates since the death penalty was reinstated in Pennsylvania in 1974. The last execution was carried out in 1999. Yet, there are 226 inmates awaiting execution on the state's death row. I tend to waver in my support and opposition to capital punishment. When I am in an emotional state angry about some heinous act that has been committed I often hold the opinion that execution is too kind a penalty for the offender. But in more rational moments, I'm horrified to think that a state might put to death a person wrongly accused. If you think about it coolly and without the raging heat of vengeance infecting your soul, what is capital punishment if not an emotionally charged exercise in retribution, a primal act of vengeance. I'm not suggesting we go soft on criminals. Criminals must be punished for their lawless and often brutal acts. And a life sentence with no possibility of parole is a suitable punishment. Taking a life in exchange for a life serves no genuine purpose other than tossing a hunk of meat to our baser appetites. It's better to spare the lives of a thousand guilty individuals than to take the life of one who is guiltless. Because if we allow that to happen, we are no better than those bloody ones we would condemn. (source: phillyburbs.com)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA
Nov. 1 USA: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASECONTACT: US Senator Russ Feingold Feingold Statement on the Severe Injustices of Capital Punishment Today, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold made the following statement on the severe injustices in capital punishment systems nationwide following the Supreme Court's decision to block an execution in Mississippi, widely seen as an effective halt to executions until the court rules on a case involving the death penalty next year. With the Supreme Court issuing yet another stay in a death penalty case this week, it appears likely that states will suspend executions at least temporarily. This de facto moratorium on executions by lethal injection gives us a chance to recognize just how deeply flawed the implementation of capital punishment in this country is. Indeed, the Supreme Court's stay comes just one day after a call by the American Bar Association for a nationwide moratorium on capital punishment based on its detailed study of state death penalty systems, which found racial disparities, convictions based on bad evidence, grossly inadequate indigent defense systems, and a host of other problems with the implementation of capital punishment in this country. We should take advantage of this apparent pause in executions to consider the severe injustices within the system as a whole. Senator Feingold, a longtime opponent of capital punishment, is the author of S.447 - the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act. (source: Common Dreams) ** The Death Penalty: What is an Acceptable Error Percentage? Though the Georgia Supreme court has agreed to finally hear his appeal, Troy Davis sits on death row for the murder of Officer Mark McPhail in Savannah GA, despite the fact that most of the witnesses have since recanted, many alleging they were pressured or coerced by police. There was no physical evidence against him and the weapon used in the crime was never found. The case against Davis consisted entirely of witness testimony, which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. As Davis fights for his life, the American Bar Association recently released a report that evaluated the fairness and accuracy of capital punishment of 8 states, including Georgia. The report is based on a simple premise that if ours is a society that is going to have a death penalty there can be no margin for error. The ABA findings found serious problems in every state they evaluated, fueling calls for a moratorium on the death penalty. According to the report, states generally are failing to require the preservation of physical and/or biological evidence through the entire legal process. DNA testing statutes often are drafted too narrowly, with strict filing deadlines and onerous procedural hurdles. States are not requiring that crime laboratories and medical examiner offices be accredited. Most states have had at least one serious incident of crime lab mistakes or fraud. Every state evaluated continues to struggle with racial disparities in its capital system. And none seem to have addressed the impact that mental illness as well as mental retardation can have on capital cases. Moreover, with some states utilizing judicial elections, there can be an erosion of judicial independence as judges are increasingly selected based on their political positions, especially on capital punishment, than justice and fairness. These findings and others within the report strongly indicate the only consistency is the inconsistencies in the manner in which capital punishment is administered. As a result, if you are poor, a racial minority, or suffering from mental health or mental retardation, you have a much better chance of receiving the death penalty. The ABA report is hardly groundbreaking. It does, however, bring light to the inequity of the policy. Suppose all the flaws cited in the ABA report were addressed, is it possible to have a perfect capital punishment policy? On matters of life and death, at what point do the errors become unacceptable? Why is it that a country that consistently demonstrates distrust for government with benign matters can allow for such bureaucratic malfeasance on the critical issue of life? Are the poor, racial minorities, or those suffering from mental health or mental retardation expendable political pawns? The obvious answer is yes. Ambitious politicians, running on tough on crime policies, can take the most egregious scenarios and make them emblematic of the whole. The system is flawed; Illinois proved that in 2000 when it exonerated 13 men on death row who had been wrongly convicted. I have no idea if Troy Davis is innocent. I do know that his life cannot be in jeopardy based on a system that has nothing more than inconsistent witness testimony on which to convict him. Given that it is a system that cannot be 100 % accurate, what then is an acceptable percentage of accuracy? Anything above zero is a form of social
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA
Nov. 2 USA: Death penalty requires national soul-searching On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of a Mississippi death row inmate, so that it could determine whether death by lethal injection violates the bar against the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments contained in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This exercise seems a waste of precious time and resources. The question currently faced by the Supreme Court is an easily answered red herring that masks a deeper and more important issue. If the intent of the Founding Fathers under the Constitution is our guidepost, then clearly death by lethal injection does not represent cruel and unusual punishment within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. That amendment was drafted at a time when the accepted and preferred method of execution short drop hanging often resulted in a slow and painful death by strangulation. Thus, the Founding Fathers plainly did not judge the cruelty of a punishment merely by the amount of pain inflicted. Nor should we. No form of execution always will be fully painless. If our society believes in the imposition of the death penalty in appropriate cases, then we should stop behaving hypocritically, worrying that any existing alternative mode of execution including lethal injection, is inhumane. Instead of pondering whether particular methods of execution cause too much pain, we first should answer the question of whether this country, as a whole, still believes in the death penalty. In an era when DNA evidence is exonerating some death row inmates, do we want to continue risking the execution of an innocent person who was wrongly convicted? Moreover, morally and ethically, do we remain convinced that a supposedly civilized society should condone the taking a life for the commission of even the worst crimes? And what about the treatment of criminals who are not put to death? In varying degrees dependent on the type of crime committed, ex-cons who have served their debt to society spend the rest of their lives as pariahs whom, we make clear, no longer are welcome to live with us, work with us or associate with us. Some might argue that such lifelong punishment amounts to a form of impermissible double-jeopardy that should be deemed cruel and unusual. We first need to decide how our society feels about these issues. Only then can we pursue appropriate penal remedies that accord with our current sensibilities. Perhaps we should stay all executions until these questions can be answered, but we should not be staying them on the grounds that the mode of execution might be considered cruel and unusual. (source: Opinion, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
