Nov. 26
USA (NEW YORK):
Ronell Wilson case: Lawyers will try to convince judge that the convicted cop
killer is not eligible for the death penalty because he has IQ below 70; Does a
mentally handicapped person quote author Ralph Ellison, the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. and industrialist Henry Ford on his Facebook page?
For the next two weeks, lawyers will try to convince a judge that convicted cop
killer Ronell Wilson is not eligible for the death penalty because he has an IQ
below 70.
The hearing, which begins Monday in Brooklyn Federal Court, will feature
psychologists who have examined Wilson, a former girlfriend and family members
said.
Prosecutors believe there is overwhelming evidence Wilson is a scheming
cold-blooded killer who murdered undercover NYPD Detectives James Nemorin and
Rodney Andrews during a gun buy-and-bust in 2003 on Staten Island. And letters,
phone calls and email communications from prison since his 2007 capital
conviction have not changed that opinion.
The sentence, but not the conviction, was overturned by the U.S. Court of
Appeals due to prosecutorial error. And in 2009, the Supreme Court declared it
unconstitutional to execute the mentally handicapped.
Hence the need for Wilson to prove his mental deficiencies at his resentencing
hearing. Few are buying it.
"His claimed mental deficiency must have set in after the murders because he
seemed to have all his faculties when he premeditated the murders," said
Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association.
Wilson, 30, proudly sports a Bloods gang tattoo on his toned bicep in a prison
photo posted on his Facebook page. Prosecutors will use his postings as
evidence to counter his mental retardation claim.
"Comin 2gether is a beginning; Keepin 2gether is a process; Working 2gether is
a success," Wilson quoted the founder of Ford Motor Co., with hip-hop
embellishments.
He found a pearl of wisdom from Ellison, the author of "Invisible Man," last
December: "It takes a deeper commitment 2 change and an even deeper commitment
2 grow."
And he posted this quote from King in January: "True compassion is more than
flinging a coin to a beggar . . . It understands that an edifice which produces
beggars needs restructuring."
Wilson does not have access to the Internet from his cell on Death Row in Terre
Haute, Ind., and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he's
currently detained, so an outsider helps update the Facebook page. But Wilson
does send emails that are posted to the page.
Wilson's lawyers did not return a call for comment.
(source: New York Daily News)
ARIZONA:
Prosecutor: Death penalty not bargaining chip for Kingman murder suspect;
Murder suspect Ketchner may be angling for plea deal
Lawyers on both sides of the death penalty case against the accused murderer
met in court last week as they set a trial date for Feb 1. Defense attorney
John Napper also requested that the court set up a settlement conference, in
which the parties meet before a different judge than the one hearing the case
to see if negotiations can be settled short of trial.
That means Ketchner could be angling for the death penalty to be taken off the
table in exchange for a guilty plea and possible life in prison.
Prosecutor Megan McCoy said that the County Attorney's case reviewed mitigating
factors on Ketchner's behalf both when the case was filed and again recently.
She said nothing provided by the defense has shown pursuing the death penalty
not to be an appropriate decision.
She added that the County Attorney's Office as a general rule does not use the
death penalty as a bargaining chip.
Jury selection in the case is scheduled to begin Feb. 1 and last until opening
arguments, slated for Feb. 19. McCoy said the state's case is expected to last
14 days, with Napper indicating that the defense's case is expected to take
about as long. Judge Rick Williams said the trial would be held Monday through
Thursday mornings for the duration of proceedings.
Williams said he would look to coordinate a settlement conference with a judge
from an outside county for January. Ketchner has waived his presence at
hearings but will be required to attend the settlement conference. He is
currently housed at the Arizona State Prison in Florence on a 15-year sentence
after pleading guilty in September 2010 to weapons offenses in connection with
the case. McCoy has previously said that through that plea, Ketchner has
essentially admitted to being in the Allison home at the time of the murder,
but that she still intends to prove a number of aggravating factors in the case
at trial.
Ketchner is charged with murder and attempted murder for allegedly stabbing to
death his ex-girlfriend's 18-year-old daughter and shooting his ex in the head
after he broke into her Pacific Avenue home on July 4, 2009. 4 other people in
the home, including 2 younger children of Ketchner and Allison's, escaped the
home without physical injury. Ketchner was arrested the next morning after
Kingman Police officers found him covered in blood and passed out on the edge
of the Cerbat Cliffs Golf course several blocks from the home. He is believed
to have been under the influence of methamphetamine the night of the murder.
(source: Kingman Daily Miner)
**************************
Trial in boy's death drags on; Man accused of killing his son in 2004
Maybe Jeffrey Martinson killed his son in 2004, and maybe he didn't.
But he's been in custody for 8 years awaiting resolution to his case, first
lingering in jail because there were not enough qualified defense attorneys to
handle a glut of death-penalty cases.
He finally went to trial last year in Maricopa County Superior Court, and last
November he was convicted by a jury of 1st-degree murder. The verdict was
thrown out, however, after defense attorneys proved that a jury forewoman had
railroaded her peers to find Martinson guilty.
Then the gamesmanship began.
The prosecutor, Deputy County Attorney Frankie Grimsman, tried to quash the
original 2004 indictment and recharged Martinson on slightly different counts.
That way, she could increase her options for getting a conviction and possibly
remove the defense attorneys who got the mistrial from the case, as well as the
judge who made the mistrial ruling.
When that didn't work, she filed numerous motions to have the judge and the
attorneys removed from the case. But the trial judge, Sally Duncan, and the
Superior Court presiding criminal judge ruled against her on all counts.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that Grimsman can, in fact,
dismiss the original indictment -- unless Duncan wants to amend her findings or
hold new hearings to determine if the prosecutor acted in bad faith.
But the battle is not over.
"My instinct is we'll probably take it up to the (Arizona) Supreme Court," said
Michael Terribile, the lead defense attorney in Martinson's case.
If the high court declines to review the case or sides with Grimsman, then she
could succeed in getting Duncan off the case and earn some leeway in her
argument.
The trial has been much discussed in the legal community, and not just because
of the rare juror-misconduct mistrial. Court observers describe Grimsman's
tactics as an unprecedented attempt to stack the deck to ensure a conviction.
"It outrageous, it's misconduct," said retired Maricopa County Superior Court
Judge Kenneth Fields. "They're trying to improperly influence the outcome of
the case."
Mary Durand, a mitigation expert for death-penalty cases, agreed.
"I've been doing this for 42 years, and I've never seen anything like it," she
said.
A spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office said no one in the
office, including Grimsman, would comment on the case because it is pending.
Meanwhile, Martinson, 46, remains in limbo.
Death ruled overdose
In 2004, Martinson was in a custody battle over his 5-year-old son, Josh, on
the night Josh died. Martinson -- through his lawyers -- claimed he found the
boy floating in the bathtub and could not resuscitate him. Then Martinson
claimed that in his anguish, he tried to kill himself but failed.
An autopsy showed that the boy had muscle relaxants in his bloodstream, and the
medical examiner ruled that Josh died of a drug overdose.
It appeared to be a murder-suicide, but Martinson was not charged with
1st-degree premeditated murder, but rather with 1st-degree felony murder,
meaning that prosecutors wanted to prove that Josh died during the commission
of another crime, specifically child abuse. Nonetheless, during the trial
before Judge Duncan, Terribile and his co-counsel, Treasure VanDreumel, sparred
with prosecutor Grimsman over whether Grimsman could present evidence showing
premeditation.
In fact, in a later court ruling, Duncan wrote, "The court further finds that
the State repeatedly represented to the court that the state did not have
sufficient evidence to charge the defendant with premeditated murder while
continuing to advance arguments to support a jury finding intent to kill as a
basis for convicting the defendant."
"The court further finds that the state either deliberately disregarded the
court's rulings or acted in a willfully blind manner."
Terribile and VanDreumel argued that the death was consistent with drowning and
that there was DNA on the bottle of muscle-relaxant tablets that could not be
identified but could not be eliminated as coming from the boy. The defense
maintained the boy may have taken the tablets himself, and Terribile points out
that the pills resembled candy.
Martinson was found guilty, and the jury determined that there were aggravating
factors that made him eligible for the death penalty. But before the jury could
sentence Martinson, a juror came forward to tell Terribile and VanDreumel about
what was going on in the jury room. The forewoman was accused of browbeating
other jurors into finding Martinson guilty.
In March, after months of hearings, Duncan declared a mistrial based on juror
misconduct and improper testimony from a medical examiner that Duncan had
mistakenly allowed into the trial. She ordered a new trial.
In June, Terribile attended a routine pretrial hearing at which Grimsman said
that the original indictment had been dismissed and that she had taken the case
back to a grand jury, this time charging felony murder based on child abuse and
an alternative theory of premeditated murder. Under federal law, jurors do not
have to reach a unanimous decision on a theory of death -- that is,
premeditated or felony -- as long as they all agree on one or the other.
Grimsman had also dropped the intent to seek the death penalty, and she
represented to the judge that new counsel had been appointed. It was news to
the judge and to Terribile, but Duncan vacated the trial.
Within weeks, after motions filed by Terribile and VanDreumel, it became
apparent that Grimsman had never filed a motion to dismiss the original
indictment before the new one was obtained, which is in violation of the state
Rules of Criminal Procedure. Duncan reinstated the original indictment.
A flurry of motions
In a subsequent ruling, Duncan reiterated that the prosecutor could not
re-indict Martinson for premeditated 1st-degree murder because she had not
presented any new evidence of premeditation, other than a posttrial talk with
the mistrial jury, whose members said they thought Martinson intended to kill
his son.
Duncan wrote that "absent new evidence or other legally permissible bases, the
state cannot seek to indict the defendant, after a trial and after the granting
of a mistrial, where the state has previously argued that there is no evidence
to support a premeditated murder."
Furthermore, Duncan ruled that Grimsman could not make arguments that Martinson
suffocated the child.
Grimsman filed at least 4 motions to remove Duncan from the case, claiming she
was biased against the prosecution. Duncan refused to recuse herself, and
Presiding Criminal Judge Douglas Rayes refused to remove her.
Grimsman then turned to the defense attorneys and again tried to remove
Terribile and VanDreumel, this time calling in the head of the county's Office
of Public Defense Services to testify that the attorneys were overpaid and that
because the case was no longer a death-penalty trial, the defendant was not
entitled to 2 attorneys.
The matter was argued before Rayes, who sternly detailed the circumstances of
Terribile's appointment to the case. Terribile had long refused to do contract
work for the county, but given a dearth of qualified capital-case attorneys and
the fact that Martinson was constitutionally at risk of being denied a speedy
trial, a former associate presiding criminal judge had persuaded him to take
the case at a higher-than-normal rate of pay.
As for the question of 2 lawyers vs. 1 for a non-capital case, Rayes noted that
the attorneys had split the duties and should not be punished for having a
successful outcome in the 1st trial. He kept Terribile and VanDreumel on the
case.
"The state's bent over backwards trying to get the judge off the case and
trying to get us off the case," Terribile said.
But prosecutors don't get to pick the defense attorneys they go up against, as
Durand pointed out.
"Now anyone who deals with the defense is considered evil," she said. "I think
we're lost if we can't provide a fair trial."
Martinson went back on trial Oct. 1, but Grimsman filed a special action in the
Arizona Court of Appeals, and the trial ground to a halt. VanDreumel and
Grimsman argued before that court Oct. 24, and the ruling came down last
Tuesday.
So, Terribile and VanDreumel will ask the Arizona Supreme Court to reconsider
whether the original indictment can and should be dismissed.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Martinson remains in jail after eight years without a final
determination of whether he belongs there.
(source: Arizona Republic)
CALIFORNIA:
Opinion: Death Penalty Repeal It's Worth Trying Death Penalty Repeal Again
If you want to make a change in California by ballot initiative, you usually
have to lose first. Howard Jarvis suffered through a pair of failures to pass
property tax relief before he won with Prop 13. Redistricting reform failed 5
times at the ballot before the voters endorsed it.
The repeal of the death penalty just lost.
But there are signs that, if backers of repeal try again, they'll win.
Those signs? The death penalty repeal initiative -- Prop 34 -- came very close
to winning, with the current tally just under 48 %. Prop 34 outperformed late
polls, suggesting it had gained.
There are also signs that the population in California, and nationally, is
moving against the death penalty. Much of the democratic world sees the death
penalty as beyond the pale (the U.S. is an outlier among advanced countries in
maintaining the death penalty).
What's more, the death penalty costs more than life imprisonment, and
California is a state with persistent budget problems that aren't going away
(despite recent happy talk about the temporary tax revenues that were approved
as Prop 30).
So it's a good bet that Prop 34 was just the `st of what could be multiple
attempts to repeal the death penalty. Here's betting that backers of this
cause, by losing, will eventually win.
(source: NBC Los Angeles----Lead Prop Zero blogger Joe Mathews is California
editor at Zocalo Public Square, a fellow at Arizona State University's Center
for Social Cohesion, and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the
Golden State and How We Can Fix It (University of California, 2010).
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