[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, PENN., TENN.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 24



USA:

States have executed 11 women since '84


38 states and the U.S. government have the death penalty. No woman has
been executed by th federal government in almost 53 years, but state
executions have become more common, especially in the South.

11 women have been put to death by six states since 1984.

The most recent was Frances E. Newton, 40, in Texas. She was convicted of
shooting her husband and two children, a 7-year-old son and 21-month-old
daughter, to collect life insurance policies. The state executed her Sept.
14, 2005, more than 18 years after the killings.

The other women put to death in recent times:

- Aileen Wuornos, 46, by Florida on Oct. 9, 2002. Believed to be one of
the country's few female serial killers, she murdered six men.

- Lynda Lyon Block, 54, by Alabama on May 10, 2002. Convicted in the 1994
murder of a police sergeant. Her common-law husband also was executed for
the killing.

- Lois N. Smith, 61, by Oklahoma on Dec. 4, 2001. Convicted in the
stabbing death of her son's former girlfriend.

- Marilyn Plantz, 40, by Oklahoma on May 1, 2001. Convicted of hiring 2
18-year-olds to murder her husband with baseball bats. One of the men also
was executed. The other received a life sentence.

- Wanda J. Allen, 41, by Oklahoma on Jan. 11, 2001. She was executed for
the shooting death of her female lover. Ms. Allen previously had served 4
years in prison for manslaughter in the shooting death of another woman.

- Christina Riggs, 28, by Arkansas on May 2, 2000. Convicted of smothering
her 2 children, ages 2 and 5.

- Betty L. Beets, 62, by Texas on Feb. 24, 2000. Convicted of shooting and
killing her fifth husband to collect insurance and pension benefits.

- Judy Buenoano, 54, by Florida on March 30, 1998. She received the death
sentence for murdering her husband. She also had convictions for drowning
her paraplegic son and blowing up her fiance's car.

- Karla F. Tucker, 38, by Texas on Feb. 3, 1998. Convicted of murdering 2
people with a pickax.

- Velma Barfield, 52, by North Carolina on Nov. 2, 1984. Convicted of
poisoning her fiance.

Pennsylvania last executed a woman in 1946. She was Corrine Sykes, 22, a
Philadelphia maid convicted in the stabbing death of the wealthy woman who
employed her.

In Ohio, the state where Donna Moonda faces federal charges, a woman was
last put to death in 1954. She was Betty Butler, convicted on a state
charge of murdering her female lover.

(source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)


****************


THE NEW TERM----A Quiet Bombshell in the Legal World; A single high court
decision puts mandatory sentencing laws in limbo.


VIRTUALLY every American knows about Miranda, the famous U.S. Supreme
Court decision requiring police officers to inform suspects of their
rights. But not even many lawyers know about Blakely vs. Washington. Yet
this Supreme Court ruling in 2004 took its place alongside Miranda and
others - including Gideon vs. Wainwright (which required states to provide
a lawyer to indigent felony defendants) and Terry vs. Ohio (which allowed
police to stop and frisk subjects without probable cause) - as a precedent
that would change the course of American criminal justice.

Although the decision had its roots in a dry and abstract legal question,
the case itself centered on a horrific crime. Ralph Blakely Jr., a rancher
from the state of Washington, had kidnapped his estranged wife at
knifepoint, bound her with duct tape and stuffed her into a box in his
pickup truck. At sentencing, the trial judge concluded that Blakely had
acted with "deliberate cruelty" - an "aggravating factor" expressly
legislated under Washington's sentencing statute - and, as a result,
sentenced Blakely to 90 months in prison instead of the standard 53
months.

But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sentence, saying that the 6th
Amendment right to a jury trial prohibited judges from increasing criminal
sentences on the basis of facts that had not been decided by a jury or
confessed to by the defendant. Because a jury had not determined beyond a
reasonable doubt that Blakely acted with "deliberate cruelty," the judge
could not rely on that fact to increase the sentence. That may not sound
like an enormous decision, but it proved revolutionary. Overnight,
sentencing rules across the country were thrown into turmoil. Dozens of
sentences - maybe hundreds - were called into question. If the decision
were applied retroactively, how many felons might challenge their
sentences?

As many predicted when the Blakely ruling was handed down, the next shoe
to drop involved the federal sentencing guidelines for criminal trials - a
massively complex and controversial structure created in the 1980s. Last
year, the Supreme Court ruled that this vast system of rules also violated
the decision in Blakely. The result, for the last two years, has been a
state of suspended animation for federal sentencing. Although the justices
didn't wipe the federal sentencing guidelines off the books, they ruled
that, henceforth, the guidelines must be considered "advisory" rather than
mandatory.

As the court enters its new session next week, it continues to face the
consequences (perhaps unintended) of its watershed Blakely decision.

For instance, in Cunningham vs. California, which is to be argued Oct. 11,
the court is being asked to decide whether California's sentencing laws
violate Blakely. The case involves John Cunningham of Contra Costa County,
who was convicted on charges of sexually abusing his son. Under
California's sentencing rules, the judge was allowed to sentence him to a
"lower," "medium" or "maximum" sentence. Because the judge thought that
the "aggravating" factors outweighed the "mitigating" factors, he
sentenced Cunningham to the maximum: 16 years. But because f5 out of 6 of
those factors had not been determined by a jury, Cunningham has challenged
the sentence, saying the California "triad" structure too closely
resembles the unconstitutional Washington scheme. At stake is the
California sentencing system.

The other big question still facing the court in the wake of the Blakely
decision involves not where the ruling applies but when. In Burton vs.
Waddington, the court is being asked to decide whether Lonnie Lee Burton,
convicted on charges of raping a 15-year-old boy in Indiana in 1991, can
have his case reopened under the Blakely ruling.

The question is about the retroactivity of judicial decisions, a very
esoteric area of the law. In theory, judges never "make" law but simply
interpret or discern its meaning. So if the 6th Amendment means what the
high court said in Blakely, it has always meant that, even if earlier
judges didn't notice.

By that theory, all decisions ought to be applied retroactively. But if
judges feared that refining or expanding laws would lead to the reopening
of vast numbers of old cases, they might choose never to do so. So our
legal system has created a strange compromise. Roughly put, a decision can
be applied retroactively if it looks like a mere extension of an
established rule - but not if it is the announcement of a new rule. It
also can be applied retroactively if the rule seems absolutely fundamental
to a fair trial, not a more technical rule.

So in deciding whether to apply Blakely retroactively, the court will tell
us just how important or new it thinks its 2004 creation is after all. But
this esoteric little piece of legal doctrine has already proved pretty
powerful.

(source: Los Angeles Times - ROBERT WEISBERG is a professor of law at
Stanford University and director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Prosecutors in Donna Moonda case say killing of her husband was greedy,
premeditated crime


Bonnie Brown Heady kidnapped and murdered a 6-year-old boy. Ethel
Rosenberg leaked atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government executed them both in 1953. No woman has been put to
death in a federal case since.

Given that history, Donna Moonda and her attorney did not expect
prosecutors to seek the death penalty against her.

"I was surprised when they did," Roger Synenberg, Mrs. Moonda's attorney,
said of the government's decision this month to pursue a capital case. "I
didn't think this would happen."

Mrs. Moonda, 47, of Hermitage in Mercer County, is charged with hiring her
25-year-old lover to murder her husband.

She says she is innocent. Prosecutors say she is a cold, money-hungry
killer who planned the murder of Dr. Gulam Moonda for 6 months.

Dr. Moonda 69, a urologist, died in front of his wife and mother-in-law on
the Ohio Turnpike the evening of May 13, 2005. Damian Bradford, who was
having an affair with Mrs. Moonda, shot the doctor dead. He says it was
premeditated murder that was supposed to look like a highway robbery.

Mr. Bradford admits he killed because of greed, saying Donna Moonda
promised him a seven-figure payoff. He said she expected to collect
millions in inheritance and life insurance proceeds from her husband's
death and told him he would receive half of the money.

The planning that went into the crime is one reason U.S. Attorney Gregory
A. White, of the Northern District of Ohio, is seeking the death penalty
against Mrs. Moonda.

Another factor is that Mrs. Moonda's mother, Dorothy Smouse, then 74 years
old, was in the car with Dr. Moonda when Mr. Bradford shot him.

"She made her own mother a witness to murder, and placed her in the line
of fire when she planned that her husband would be shot to death,"
Assistant U.S. Attorney Linda Barr said in a brief filed in the summer,
when Mrs. Moonda was trying for bail.

Mr. Synenberg said he did not expect a capital case because the government
reached a "sweetheart" plea bargain with Mr. Bradford. He could receive as
little as 171/2 years in prison in return for his testimony against Mrs.
Moonda.

"One issue that is supposed to be considered in death-penalty decisions is
disparity of sentences," Mr. Synenberg said. "They gave the person who
pulled the trigger 17 years and they want to put my client to death."

Mr. White declined to be interviewed, but he and his trial staff consider
Mrs. Moonda the instigator of the plot. They believe Mr. Bradford, a
small-time drug dealer in Beaver County before the murder, had no
inclination to kill the doctor until she set the plan into motion.

Mr. Synenberg, though, has begun arguing that Mr. Bradford killed on his
own, without any help from Donna Moonda.

"Bradford saw a sugar daddy," Mr. Synenberg said. "By killing him, he
thought, he could get his hands on a lot of money."

Mr. Bradford and Mrs. Moonda met in 2004 in a Beaver County
drug-rehabilitation center. He said he was addicted to cocaine. She had
stolen the painkiller fentanyl from hospitals where she worked as a nurse
anesthetist. The 2nd drug case led to her firing and a criminal
prosecution.

He said she told him she was 31 years old and married to a doctor in his
50s. In December 2004, Mr. Bradford said, she decided she wanted her
husband dead.

By that time, he said, Mrs. Moonda was in the habit of giving him money
and gifts. She smuggled him steroids from her husband's medical office to
indulge Mr. Bradford's nascent interest in bodybuilding, he said.

Though Mr. White recommended a death-penalty prosecution against Mrs.
Moonda, the final decision was made by U.S. Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales. He must authorize every capital case in the federal system.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
in Washington, D.C., said federal prosecutors had a record of diligence in
capital cases.

"Money is spent to do these cases right," said Mr. Dieter, whose
organization takes no moral stand on the death penalty, but monitors the
fairness of state and federal prosecutions.

Today, 45 federal prisoners are on death row. One, Angela J. Johnson, is a
woman.

She was sentenced in December for the 1993 murders of five people in Mason
City, Iowa. The victims included 2 girls, ages 6 and 10.

Iowa is one of 12 states that have no death penalty, but Ms. Johnson and
her boyfriend, Dustin Honken, were prosecuted by the U.S. government.

A methamphetamine dealer, Mr. Honken also has been sentenced to death for
the murders. Ms. Johnson, 41, says she had no knowledge of her boyfriend's
plan to kill anyone. She has years of appeals ahead to press that claim.

That was not the case with the 1st woman executed by the federal
government.

She was Mary Surratt, who was hanged July 7, 1865, for conspiring in the
assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Her execution came 83 days
after the president's death.

Execution was even swifter for Bonnie Brown Heady. An alcoholic and a
prostitute, she was smooth enough to escort 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease
from his Kansas City, Mo., elementary school in September 1953 by falsely
claiming to be his aunt.

Bobby's father was one of the wealthiest auto dealers in America. Ms.
Heady and her boyfriend, Carl A. Hall, had been watching the Greenleases
for months, intent on extorting money from them.

They shot Bobby in an Overland Park, Kan., field less than an hour after
abducting him, then demanded a $600,000 ransom from his family, who
assured the boy was alive.

Because Ms. Heady and Mr. Hall had crossed state lines in the crime, they
were prosecuted by the federal government. They were executed Dec. 18,
1953, 81 days after Bobby's death.

Ms. Heady, 41 when she went to the gas chamber, died 6 months after Ethel
Rosenberg. Mrs. Rosenberg, 37, and her husband, Julius, 35, were
electrocuted after being convicted of espionage.

Theirs was perhaps the most publicized federal death-penalty case until
Timothy McVeigh's. He was executed for killing 168 people in the Oklahoma
City bombing of 1995.

(source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

****************

Bill could help put an end to wrongful convictions


In an important move toward improving the criminal justice system in
Pennsylvania, the state Senate in April unanimously passed The Innocence
Commission Act.

The legislation (Senate Bill 1069), introduced by Sen. Stewart Greenleaf,
R-Montgomery, with a bipartisan group of co-sponsors, would establish the
commission to study the reasons why innocent people are convicted of
crimes.

SB 1069 now awaits action in the House Judiciary Committee. Several
representatives from south-central Pennsylvania are members of that
committee, and I strongly urge them to ensure that the bill finds its way
out of the committee and to the full House for a vote.

A wrongful conviction is a nightmare for the innocent person, the crime's
victim, and for our society. I should know. I spent 10 years in an Arizona
prison for a crime someone else committed. My incarceration included
nearly 3 years on Arizona's death row.

I am a Pennsylvanian who was wrongly convicted in another state, but this
problem is not unique to Arizona. Thomas Doswell, Vince Moto, Nicholas
Yarris and Barry Laughman are all Pennsylvanians who were wrongly
convicted.

Among them, these four men spent nearly 70 years in Pennsylvania prisons,
and they were all locked up while they were in their 20s, in their prime,
a time when they were trying to establish their personal and working
lives.

The Innocence Commission would examine how these tragedies occur. My case
included some of the typical problems with the justice system.

When Kim Ancona was killed in 1991, a friend of hers mentioned someone
named Ray to investigators, and the police focused on me as their only
suspect.

In fact, investigators were so focused on me that they ignored evidence
exonerating me, including a footprint from the scene that did not match my
size. In addition, I owned no shoes that matched the tread.

Because I trusted the justice system, I did not bother to hire a private
attorney and accepted court-appointed counsel. My attorney's resources
were woefully inadequate. A bite mark was the one piece of evidence that
led to my conviction, but my lawyer could not afford to hire a bite mark
expert. He relied on a family dentist as our expert.

At trial, my roommate testified on my behalf, stating that I was at home
sleeping when Kim was killed, but the prosecuting attorney attacked his
credibility. The prosecutor claimed that my roommate would lie on my
behalf because I had taken him in during a rough period in his life.

I was luckier than most, though. My family and friends came to my aid. My
mother took out a second mortgage on her house and spent her retirement
savings to help. High school friends held fundraisers for my legal
defense.

My cousin, Jim Rix, whom I had never met before I went to jail, heard my
story and offered to finance my appeals. My family and friends spent
hundreds of thousands of dollars to help free me.

A wrongful conviction is not just about the unlucky person who goes to
jail. It's also about the victims and the safety of society.

We must not forget the simple and obvious truth that when we get it wrong,
a guilty person goes free. 20 days after Kim was killed, Kenneth Phillips,
the man whose DNA matched the evidence from the crime scene, assaulted a
young girl, a crime for which he was incarcerated at the time of the DNA
test that freed me.

In fact, had investigators broadened their list of suspects, they might
have found Phillips soon after the death of Kim Ancona. He lived just a
few hundred yards from the bar where the crime occurred, and was on
probation at the time for breaking into a neighbor's house and assaulting
her.

I lost 10 years of my life in jail, but I choose not to be bitter. Rather
than focus on the 10 years I lost, I've made a conscious decision to focus
on the next 10. By talking about my experience, I hope to impact
significant change toward making our criminal justice system truly just.

Sen. Greenleaf's Innocence Commission Act would move Pennsylvania in that
direction. The House Judiciary Committee and the entire House of
Representatives can help by supporting SB 1069.

(2ource : The Patriot-News -- RAY KRONE of York County was the 100th
person since 1976 to be exonerated after being on death row. He is the
director of communications and training for Witness to Innocence (www.
witnesstoinnocence. org))

*******************

Attaching a cost is case itself


Think it was a tough chore figuring out how many bodies were found in Hugo
Selenski's backyard?

Try figuring out how much it costs to investigate and prosecute a case
like Selenski's.

The billing is so complicated that it's practically impossible to tell
exactly how much money Luzerne County spent in all the digging, testing,
chasing, arresting, and prosecuting in Selenski's homicide case since the
1st 2 bodies were unearthed in 2003.

Since November 2004, the district attorney's office has spent at least
$95,000, according to Deputy Controller A.J. Martinelli.

In 2006, when Selenski's first double-homicide trial occurred, the county
court system paid $240,000 in expenses in all death-penalty cases,
according to Deputy Court Administrator Jack Mulroy. The Selenski case
accounts for an unspecified amount of that money.

Also, District Attorney David Lupas said some of his expenses, such as the
amount of detectives' overtime in the investigation, are calculated under
a different line item in his budget and not specifically listed as a
Selenski expense.

"The expenses just aren't tracked that well," he said.

Selenski's trial stemmed from the deaths of two drug dealer suspects.

Investigators said he lured the two men, Frank James and Adeiye Keiler, to
his Kingston Township home in May 2003 before robbing them of drugs and
money and using a shotgun to kill them.

He was charged with homicide and other charges and prosecutors sought the
death penalty.

At his trial in February, Selenski was cleared of killing the men but
convicted of burning the bodies.

That prevented the case from making it to the death-penalty phase. But
money had already been spent on preparation for that phase.

Mulroy said most of that $240,000 in death-penalty cases was spent on
trials. This year, two death-penalty trials were conducted, Selenski's and
Joseph Gacha's. That budget line item does not differentiate the expenses
between cases.

The expenses, Mulroy said, mostly come from paying experts.

For instance, if a judge orders the testimony of a prior hearing
transcribed or for a defendant to undergo an independent psychiatric
examination, the court has to pay for those jobs when given the judge's
order, Mulroy said.

In Selenski's trial, the county was ordered to pay about $80,000 for
Selenski's defense.

That was just from the first trial. He has another one coming up.

In that one, Selenski and Paul Weakley were charged with killing Michael
Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett.

And prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in that case, too - for both
suspects.

It might seem as if the number of death-penalty cases would be crippling
Lupas' budget, but he said a death-penalty case is not much more expensive
than a homicide case in which prosecutors do not seek the death penalty.

He said a death-penalty case costs "tens of thousands" of dollars to
prosecute.

But most of his expenses are from the guilt portion of the trial. The
amount of expenses, he said, depends on the amount and type of evidence
that has to be presented. The more experts needed to testify, the more
costly a trial will be.

Prosecutors, he said, do not incur many more expenses in the death-penalty
phase because they have a limited amount of testimony to present.

For instance, in the recent Joseph Gacha homicide case, prosecutors called
only 4 witnesses, 3 of victim Carrie Martin's family members and one
expert, to testify during the death-penalty part of that case.

The defense, on the other hand, called 12 witnesses, including 2 experts.

"They have much more latitude in what they can present," Lupas said.

And with the amount of homicides this year, you can bet the price of that
defense, and prosecution, will increase.

Mulroy said the county court system has 18 pending homicide cases.

Lupas is preparing for them.

This year, he had $180,000 in his budget for all trials. Next year, he
plans on asking for an additional $20,000 for all trials.

And if he needs even more, he won't be afraid to ask the county
commissioners.

"We haven't run in to that problem yet," he said.

(source: Times Leader)





TENNESSEE:

Man Convicted of Killing Wife Faces Death Penalty


The man convicted of killing his estranged wife and 2 other people at a
TDOT garage faces the death penalty.

A jury found David Lynn Jordan guilty on Friday and sentenced him on
Saturday.

The Madison County jury heard testimony from both sides Saturday on
whether he should spend the rest of his life in prison or be sentenced to
death.

Jordan killed his estranged wife Donna at her office at the TDOT Garage.
He also killed another state worker, Jerry Hooper, and David Gordon, a
delivery man, who just happened to be there dropping off a package.

(source: News Channel5)