July 1
VIRGINIA:
US appeals court upholds Virginia death sentence
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence of a Virginia
inmate who claims he can't be executed because he is intellectually disabled.
In a unanimous ruling, a 3-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
said Alfredo Prieto failed to show that no reasonable juror would find him
eligible for the death penalty.
Prieto was sentenced to death for the 1988 shooting deaths of George Washington
University students Rachel Raver and Warren Fulton III. He was on California's
death row for raping and killing a 15-year-old girl when a DNA sample entered
into a national database in 2005 connected him to the Virginia slayings.
At issue in Prieto's appeal was last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a
Florida case that a rigid cutoff on IQ test scores cannot be used to determine
whether someone is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for
execution. Virginia's law on determining whether a defendant is intellectually
disabled was virtually identical to Florida's, so Prieto claimed that the
Supreme Court ruling precludes his execution.
But the appeals court found that there was ample evidence that Prieto's
"adaptive functioning" - his ability to handle everyday tasks - was good enough
to rule out any mental disability even though his IQ score was borderline.
Expert witnesses for the defense testified that Prieto was an extremely slow
learner and lacked impulse control, but psychologists testifying for the
prosecution said he was well-spoken, bilingual and analytical.
"Absent some new 'smoking gun,' evidence of Prieto's adaptive functioning
deficits is at best inconclusive," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote.
Cary Bowen, an attorney for Prieto, said he will ask the appeals court to
reconsider. If that fails, Bowen said, he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to
review the decision.
Attorney General Mark Herring's office declined to comment.
Prieto is 1 of 8 men on Virginia's death row. No executions are scheduled.
(source: Associated Press)
FLORIDA:
Sometimes juries get it wrong in death penalty cases, and then what?
There is no sanitized way for the state to kill a human being.
We don't want to hang 'em because the condemned person's neck might not break.
Firing squads leave a mess. As we know here in Florida, the electric chair can
malfunction and send flames shooting out of the head.
Yuck.
Lethal injection was supposed to solve all that, but there were issues with the
drug midazolam, which was supposed to render the soon-to-be-deceased into a
peaceful coma. What's an executioner to do?
Of course, the aforementioned human wouldn't need to be killed in the first
place if he hadn't killed someone else, and probably in a far less-tasteful
manner than the state has planned.
Well, the U.S. Supreme Court rode to the rescue Monday, ruling midazolam can be
used to aid in the inmate's departure from the living. Florida Attorney General
Pam Bondi quickly asked the court to lift the stay of execution it granted
59-year-old Jerry Correll, convicted of murdering 4 people.
Correll is not exactly sympathetic. He received four death sentences after
jurors convicted him in 1986 of killing his ex-wife and 3 other people. There
appears to be no doubt about his guilt. Evidence against him includes his
bloody palm print and fingerprints at the scene. I think it's fair to say some
in our fair state would just as soon handle these things Wild West style - find
a rope, a tree and a horse. Problem solved.
There is another side to this, though. Supporters say the death penalty is an
effective deterrent to would-be murderers, but there is a strong argument that
it is not.
As of Tuesday, Florida had 395 people on death row - 2nd in the nation behind
California. There are 41 inmates - 41! - who have been there longer than
Correll. Their fate didn't seem to deter others from violence.
Though I have no issue with sending coldblooded murderers to the great beyond,
there is a statistic that should give everyone at least a moment of pause. The
truth is that almost certainly there are innocent people living a nightmare on
death rows throughout the country.
Florida's total of 25 overturned death sentences leads the nation since
executions resumed in 1973.
Paul Hildwin, for instance, was sentenced to die in 1986 for the murder in
Hernando County of Vronzettie Cox. He was released about a year ago after
almost 30 years on death row. The Florida Supreme Court said new DNA evidence
"completely" discredited the state's case against him.
Hildwin's was the 4th death sentence overturned by the state's highest court in
little more than a year after new evidence surfaced. Nationwide, there have
been more than 150 death row reversals.
Lots of people argue that the state needs to kill these guys faster to reduce
the population. If the death penalty is administered quickly, maybe the reality
of what can happen will sink in more quickly.
That's certainly an argument Bondi would make. Part of me agrees with her.
But the better half of me wonders about the ones prosecutors and juries got
wrong.
Most people assume everyone sentenced to die is guilty, but the numbers show
that isn't true.
Unless prison workers start slipping hacksaw blades and power tools to death
row inmates, they aren't going anywhere. So, frustrating as it can be, we
simply have to be sure.
What does the state say if it's wrong?
Oops?
(source: Column, Joe Henderson----Tampa Tribune)
ALABAMA:
Life on Alabama death row? 45 convicted killers have served 20 or more years
It has been nearly 37 years since Willene and Carl Nelson were shot and stabbed
to death in a robbery at their Blount County home in 1978. Their 3 children,
then ages 10, 13 and 21, were critically wounded but survived, as did the
children's 85-year-old grandmother.
Arthur Lee Giles -- who will turn 56 on July 15 -- went to Alabama death row
for the crime in 1979.
Giles is Alabama's 2nd longest serving death row inmate and 1 of 45 Alabama
inmates who have faced execution for 20 or more years. There have been 9
presidential elections since Giles first arrived on death row.
Only William Bush, sentenced in the 1981 shooting death of Montgomery
convenience store clerk Larry Dominguez, has served more time on death row than
Giles. According to the Alabama Department of Corrections, Bush has served 33
years, 10 months, and 8 days.
Nearly 2 years have passed since Alabama executed an inmate, but a U.S. Supreme
Court ruling this week might pave the way for more executions.
In a 5-4 decision Monday, the court ruled that 1 of the drugs used in lethal
injections does not violate the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual
punishment.
What does that mean for Alabama?
"The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on the constitutionality of states' use of
lethal injections and death penalty opponents cannot continue to indefinitely
delay lawful executions," Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange stated in a
press release issued Monday morning.
"Opponents of lethal injections have repeatedly used court challenges of
certain lethal injection drugs as ways to delay or avoid lawful executions,"
Strange stated. "The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed our belief that executions
using these lethal injection drugs are not cruel and unusual punishment, and
therefore are not prohibited under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution."
There are 189 inmates on Alabama's death row -- all but 3 are men, according to
ADOC. The average age is 39. (The oldest inmate, 80-year-old Walter Leroy
Moody, has been on death row since 1997 in the 1989 pipe bomb murder of Judge
Robert Vance.)
45 inmates -- 24 % of death row's population -- have faced execution since at
least 1995.
That includes:
--James Edmond McWilliams: Sentenced to death in the 1984 rape, robbery and
murder of Patricia Vallery Reynolds, a 22-year-old convenience store clerk shot
to death at the store where she worked in Tuscaloosa County.
--Larry Donald George: Convicted in the 1988 killings of 2 former next-door
neighbors. Authorities say George killed Janice Morris, 29, of Talladega, and
Ralph Swann, 24, of Alpine. George's wife, Geraldine, was shot and paralyzed.
--Anthony Boyd and Robert Shawn Ingram: Convicted for helping take Gregory
Huguley to a baseball park in Munford in 1993, where he was taped to a bench,
soaked with gasoline and burned to death because Huguley owed $200 for cocaine.
--Steven Wayne Hall and Wayne Holleman Travis: Sentenced to death for the
murder of retired school teacher Clarene Haskew, 69, in 1991. She was beaten,
strangled and shot twice in the head. A pentagram had been spray painted on a
cabinet and the words ''thunder struck" were painted on the floor beside her
body.
--Alonzo Burgess: Sentenced to die for the murders of Sheila Nnodimele and her
two daughters, Latoria Long, 14, and Alexis Nnodimele, 8. Burgess also was
convicted of attempting to murder 2-year-old Larice Long, Ms. Nnodimele's son
in Colbert County in 1993. They were fatally beaten and strangled in their
home.
How much does it cost to house -- and execute -- those inmates?
Since 1983, when another U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed Alabama to execute
an inmate for the 1st time since 1965, the average time an inmate has served on
death row in Alabama is approximately 16 years, according to ADOC spokesman Bob
Horton.
The cost to incarcerate a death row inmate in Alabama is $53 per day. Over the
course of 16 years, that comes to roughly $309,732.
That means Alabama has spent approximately $640,742 caring for William Bush.
For Giles, who has served 32 years, 5 months, and 28 days, that is
approximately $628,898. Giles would have been Alabama's longest serving death
row inmate, but his 1979 conviction was overturned and he was again sentenced
to death upon his 2nd conviction in the 1990s.
It's estimated lethal injection drugs run about $100 -- the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice put the cost of their drug cocktails at $83 in 2011,
Forbes.com reported in 2014.
A Seattle University study found that each death penalty prosecution cost an
average of $1 million more than a case where the death penalty was not sought,
an anti-death penalty organization reported.
Whatever the cost, opponents of the death penalty found some signs of hope in
Monday's ruling that maybe the court will one day find the death penalty cruel
and unusual.
"For me what was more significant was the affirmative suggestion by some
members of the Court that the constitutionality of the death penalty itself be
reconsidered," Bryan Stevenson, executive director and founder of the
Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative stated in an email to AL.com.
"It's unfortunate this decision won't resolve issues surrounding lethal
injection we are still litigating in Alabama, but I'm encouraged to see members
of the Court warming up to the idea that we may be on the brink of a new era
where capital punishment is prohibited."
(source: al.com)
MISSISSIPPI:
Jordan appeal denied by US Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from a Mississippi death
row inmate.
Court officials announced the decision Monday. The court did not comment on its
decision.
Richard Gerald Jordan's arguments of prosecutorial vindictiveness and
ineffective assistance of counsel had been pending before the nation's high
court since January.
Jordan was convicted of capital murder committed in the course of kidnapping
Edwina Marta in Harrison County in 1976.
Now 68, Jordan is the oldest inmate on Mississippi's death row, having won
three successful appeals only to be resentenced to death. He's also the longest
serving, having spent 38 years in death row.
Attorney General Jim Hood is expected to file a motion soon with the
Mississippi Supreme Court for an execution date.
Jordan was convicted of capital murder committed in the course of a kidnapping
and was sentenced to death on four separate occasions in the case. Following
the first three convictions, Jordan challenged his death sentence successfully,
was re-tried, and was again re-sentenced to death.
Jordan was convicted of kidnapping and killing Edwina Marter in Harrison County
on Jan. 13, 1976. He was accused of collecting a $25,000 ransom from Marter's
husband, then taking the woman to a wooded area in north Harrison County and
shooting her in the back of the head.
In 1991, after a third successful challenge to his sentence, Jordan entered
into an agreement with the prosecution to serve a sentence of life imprisonment
without parole in exchange for not further contesting his sentence.
Jordan appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, saying he had agreed to the
sentence but it was invalid under state law.
The Supreme Court in 1997 agreed, ruling life without parole as a sentencing
option did not exist until July 1, 1994. The justices said the only sentences
available to Jordan were death or life imprisonment with parole. The justices
ordered a new sentencing hearing.
Thereafter, Jordan sought a life with parole sentence. The prosecutor refused.
The prosecutor said that, because Jordan "violated" the first agreement by
asking the court to change his earlier sentence, the prosecutor would not again
enter into a plea agreement with Jordan for a life sentence. The prosecutor
instead successfully sought the death penalty for the fourth time in a 1998
sentencing trial.
(source: Associated Press)
LOUISIANA:
Interim Caddo Parish DA defends stance on death penalty
15 months after his release from a nearly 30 year stint on Angola's death row,
Glenn Ford was given a 2nd death sentence.
This one in the form of lung cancer. Ford died on June 29.
A jury found him guilty of the 1983 murder of Shreveport jeweler Isadore
Rozeman, but new testimonial information exonerated him of the crime in 2014.
Rozeman's killer remains at large.
It's cases like Fords that draw sharp criticism of the death penalty.
"If the people chose to abolish it through their legislators, I'd be fine with
that."
In the same breath, Cox says he still believes the death penalty serves a
worthwhile purpose in society.
It's this stance on capital punishment that formed the basis of a recently
published New Yorker article headlined "Revenge Killing: Race and the Death
Penalty in a Louisiana Parish."
Cox was quoted by a local journalist as saying he believes "We should kill more
people" in reference to capital punishment, words that have come back to haunt
him, although he claims those words were taken out of context.
Cox stands by his statement that this punishment acts as a revenge on convicted
killers.
"We don't go out hunting for people to catch so that we can give them the death
penalty. These are crimes that actually happened here."
"It lays the foundation for why we need a citizen's review committee especially
in cases involving the death [penalty]," says Shreveport resident Craig Lee.
Cox says this type of committee - made up of experienced attorneys - is already
in place with the goal of preventing another case like Ford's.
But he underlines his views, with the notion that the breakdown of the
traditional 2-parent family structure is often to blame for a life of violent
crime.
"Once you destroy that fundamental essence that we built our civilization on,
the rest is sure to follow," Cox says.
It's a view not shared by Lee, who says there a multiple victims in a case like
Glenn Ford's.
"When you take that time from someone's life, where they never realize who they
could have been, and to impact their family, is just an atrocity."
That New Yorker article cites juries in Caddo Parish as sentencing more people
to death than anywhere else in the nation.
Cox says that's often for financial reasons; other jurisdictions may not be
able to spend the money it takes for a jury to be sequestered, as well as for
the extra security required during their service.
He also says keeping the lines of communication open between law enforcement
and prosecutors is vital to ensuring justice is truly served.
Cox spoke at a weekly breakfast meeting Tuesday morning hosted by the
Shreveport Chapter of the NAACP.
He - along with other candidates for the office of Caddo District Attorney -
are being featured as speakers leading up to that race.
(source: KTBS news)
*************************
Caddo Parish has sentenced more people to death on a per capita basis than
other place in the country, New Yorker reports
Juries in Caddo Parish, home to Shreveport, have sentenced more people to death
per capita than any other county or parish in the country, according the New
Yorker magazine.
"77 % of those sentenced to death in the past 40 years have been black, and
nearly 1/2 were convicted of killing white victims. A white person has never
been sentenced to death for killing a black person," writes Rachel Aviv for the
weekly publication.
According to the story, Caddo Parish was also home to more lynchings than
almost any other county in the South in the decades following the Civil War.
Aviv focuses on one Caddo death penalty conviction involving Rodricus Crawford,
who was accused of murdering his son. To read the full New Yorker story, go
here.
(source: Julia O'Donoghue is a state politics reporter based in Baton
Rouge----New Orleans Times-Picayune)
INDIANA:
Pick your death penalty poison, Indiana
In the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Monday on Oklahoma death row inmate
complaints that a new drug cocktail was leading to barbarously botched
executions, the upshot was simple: You got a better method?
No? Then we're good here, a 5-4 majority decided - prompting more liberal
justices to protest with references to the potential of prisoners being "drawn
and quartered, slowly tortured to death or actually burned at the stake."
Outside the hyperbole of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent - and the caustic
reply to the dissent via Justice Antonin Scalia - the ruling leaves hanging the
fact that Indiana is in a similar situation as Oklahoma.
The only differences are the name brands going into the execution cocktail, now
that supplies of the proven sodium thiopental - the barbiturate once used in a
3-stage process - are gone.
The question is, as Indiana contemplates what to expect in a switchover to a
new sedative in its lethal injection protocol: Does that sort of
pick-your-poison conclusion offer enough confidence to carry on?
With Monday's ruling, the justices in the majority effectively put that
question back on Indiana and the other 30 states still using the death penalty.
It's another chance to pause and rethink. Is the death penalty really worth it?
Justice Stephen Breyer picked at that scab in a dissent that asked whether it
was time to reconsider whether capital punishment goes against the Eighth
Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. He called out the
death penalty, reinstated by the court in 1976, for "fundamental constitutional
defects: 1. Serious unreliability. 2. Arbitrariness in application. 3.
Unconscionably long delays" between sentencing and execution.
"Almost 40 years of studies, surveys and experience strongly indicate, however,
that this effort has failed," Breyer wrote, referencing studies that suggest 4
% of those who land on death row are innocent.
Justice Antonin Scalia scoffed, calling Breyer a "drum major in this parade"
against capital punishment and knocking his argument as little more than
"gobbledy-gook."
"Welcome to Groundhog Day," Scalia wrote, saying he "would not presume to tell
parents whose life has been forever altered by the brutal murder of a child
that life imprisonment is punishment enough."
Scalia's thought: "Capital punishment presents moral questions that
philosophers, theologians and statesmen have grappled with for millennia. The
framers of our Constitution disagreed bitterly on the matter. For that reason,
they handled it the same way they handled many other controversial issues: they
left it to the people to decide."
Fair enough. So the question is, Hoosiers, should Indiana stick with this?
Last time we checked in, Indiana was being petitioned by Par Pharmaceutical, a
Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, maker of Brevital, the state's sedative of choice:
Please, don't include our drug in the execution cocktail.
Indiana Department of Correction officials were confident the drug would do the
job. Then again, Oklahoma officials had the same confidence in midazolam, the
barbiturate that came under Supreme Court scrutiny.
But Par Pharmaceutical's objections aren't far removed from the escape made by
Hospira, a company that protested the lethal injection use of its products
before it quit making sodium thiopental after moving manufacturing to Italy,
where officials pressured the firm to stop making a drug used in executions.
As drug companies distance themselves, either by the end of manufacturing or
protests as unwitting accomplices, the state could be cornered in a death
penalty industry in which ingredients of lethal injections become increasingly
unavailable or increasingly unpredictable.
You got a better method? Maybe not for long - if one is actually reliable now.
Will it really take the return of the electric chair or a firing squad or some
other means less palatable under the Eighth Amendment to bring Indiana around
on this?
There's no sympathy here for criminals who commit the most heinous crimes. But
isn't the same purpose met - and at less expense, factoring in an appeals
process that can take 2 decades to wind out - with life without parole?
The nagging misgivings that resurfaced this week in Breyer's dissent are
difficult to shake. Breyer might just be a drum major, but in a form of justice
as final as the death penalty, his gobbledy-gook amounts to reasonable doubt.
And as Scalia implied, it's up to Indiana to do something about it.
(source: Column, Dave Bangert----Journal & Courier)
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