Jan. 15 NEBRASKA: Death penalty repeal proposed State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha is no longer in the Legislature but his successor is carrying on his legacy. Sen. Brenda Council of Omaha introduced a bill today to repeal Nebraska's death penalty. Council's Legislative Bill 305 would replace death sentences with a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Council replaced Chambers in representing north Omaha. Chambers, a staunch death penalty foe, regularly introduced death penalty repeal measures. His proposals were debated and defeated twice during the last 2 years. Council also introduced a bill that would allow juveniles convicted of serious crimes to eventually become eligible for parole. Under LB 306, the length of sentences would be determined in part by a youth's age at the time of committing the crime. (source: Omaha World-Herald) ***************** Neb. lawmaker seeks to repeal death penalty A proposal to replace the electric chair with lethal injection will compete with one that calls for repealing the death penalty altogether in Nebraska. On Thursday, state Sen. Brenda Council of Omaha introduced a bill (LB306) that would repeal the death penalty and replace it with the sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Council replaced longtime lawmaker Ernie Chambers, who fought against the death penalty for decades. He was ousted from the Legislature by term limits. Gov. Dave Heineman wants to make lethal injection the state's most severe penalty. In February, the state Supreme Court struck down use of the electric chair, calling it cruel and unusual punishment. On the Net: Nebraska Legislature: http://www.nebraskalegislature.gov (source: Associated Press) MARYLAND: Death Penalty Debate Some lawmakers are expecting Governor Martin O'Malley to introduce legislation to abolish the death penalty during the session. Maryland State and Republican Senator Richard Colburn says that would be a mistake. He says the only problem with the death penalty in Maryland, is that we don't use it enough. He says it does help to keep crime rates down. "If you look at the murder rates in Baltimore City versus Baltimore County, Baltimore City never uses the death penalty - the county does, you'll see a much higher murder rate in the City. It is a deterrent," said Colburn. Executions have been on hold in Maryland since 2006. That's when the State's highest court ruled that lethal injection began without proper approval by a legislative committee. (source: WMDT News) *************** Copeland gets plea bargain in killing; former death row inmate now looking at 3 years Arthur T. "A.C." Copeland once faced the death penalty for the 1998 shooting of Robert Andre Jackson in Maryville. Now the former death row inmate is looking at about 3 years, the result of a recent plea agreement, said an attorney for Copeland. Copeland's motion to waive a jury trial and guilty plea for a 2nd degree murder charge was heard on Wednesday in Blount County Circuit Court. He'll get a 14-year sentence under the agreement, according to Susan E. Shipley, one of Copeland's defense attorneys. Copeland, 36, was initially tried and convicted of 1st-degree murder. The jury that convicted him in July 2000 sentenced him to death. 5 years later the Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals reversed the Blount County court's conviction and sentence for Copeland, remanding the case back to Blount County. Jackson's murder was triggered by a rape that occurred in Alcoa. An Alcoa woman reported on April 6, 1998 that she had been raped by 2 masked men who she could not identify at her residence, according to the appellate decision's factual background. Her boyfriend, Reginald Stacy Sudderth, appeared at Howe Street Park and "publicized to the usual group gathered there" that he was offering a $10,000 bounty on the head of the person who had committed the rape and that "someone is going to die tonight." The proof further established that Copeland learned of the bounty, expressed interest in getting it, and later that evening accompanied Sudderth and others to Maryville in search of Jackson after deciding that Jackson and one of his friends was responsible for the rape. Around 2 a.m. on April 7, Copeland went to the Scenic Drive residence in Maryville where Jackson was living with his girlfriend and mother and got him to come outside with him, according to background from the appellate decision. Minutes later, the mother heard gunshots and Jackson ran back into the house in a hail of bullets. He collapsed and died in a bathroom, shot in the chest, collarbone area, and groin. No direct evidence indicated who actually shot Jackson, according to court records. Shipley said her client has been in jail since 1998 and has served about 11 years of the sentence. That time will be applied to his 14-year sentence, she said. "The most he's going to do in addition is 3 years," said Shipley. Under state Department of Correction sentence guidelines he could do less, she said. (source: The Maryland Daily Times) CALIFORNIA: Mistakes in fingerprint analysis trigger review of nearly 1,000 LAPD cases----At least 2 people have been falsely implicated in crimes because of errors. The six analysts involved have been linked to at least 945 other cases. Los Angeles Police Department fingerprint examiners who falsely implicated at least two people in crimes have been linked to nearly 1,000 other criminal cases that authorities say must now be reviewed to ensure that similar errors weren't made. Nearly 2 dozen of those cases are awaiting trial in the Los Angeles court system, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty Steve Cooley. Prosecutors began a review of the cases as part of their work with a multi-agency task force formed by Chief William J. Bratton last fall in the wake of a Times article that revealed that six print analysts with the LAPD latent print section had made critical errors in their work. "Our goal is to go through all of [the cases] within about three months, starting with the D.A.'s priorities," LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said. Even though the review focuses on the work of the 6 analysts, Beck said LAPD officials would conduct random sample tests for the entire latent print unit. The LAPD's effort to reform the unit, however, has moved slowly because of a lack of funding. Beck said the department has not secured the $400,000 to $500,000 in grants it sought to bring in an outside firm to review practices and protocols of the 80-person fingerprint unit. He said he is determined to move forward with the help of prosecutors and other law enforcement agencies. The review of cases is being conducted by six of the LAPD's top fingerprint experts. In a limited number of reviews so far, no new wrongful charges have emerged, officials said. Nonetheless, none of the 6 analysts has been allowed to resume print work, several have been disciplined and one has been fired, according to Beck. The multi-agency task force, which includes the LAPD, FBI, district attorney's office, city attorney, the Police Commission's inspector general and the L.A. County public defender's office, was formed in October but has yet to meet. Beck said that the entire body would not meet until next month but that a core group of top LAPD officials meets regularly and that the department has regularly consulted with other agencies and experts. Jennifer Friedman, forensic science coordinator for the L.A. County public defender's office, said she and others would like more information. "The LAPD may be meeting every day, but the other participants aren't involved," she said. The public defender's office has requested extensive records from the LAPD about its internal fingerprint processes, she said. After an inquiry from The Times, Friedman said Wednesday, she received an invitation to meet with the LAPD and the district attorney's office. A recent Times investigation found that errors were partly the result of the unit's being marred by inadequate training, antiquated facilities, poor supervision, careless handling of evidence and other shortfalls. Friedman said prosecutors have provided the public defender with the list of 945 cases involving the questionable print examiners. She said the list is probably not comprehensive because it was derived from subpoenas of LAPD print examiners for each case. She said that in other cases, the print examiner could have done work after charges were filed. Prosecutors said, however, that fingerprint evidence probably played a minor role in the cases. "In a lot of these cases, the fingerprint evidence wasn't necessary. In most of these cases, there were [guilty or no contest] pleas," said Gibbons, the district attorney's office spokeswoman. The issues with the latent print section came to light in April 2006, when prosecutors informed the unit that a renowned fingerprint expert had testified that LAPD analysts had made a mistake on a case. Months before, one of the unit's print specialists had determined that several prints lifted from a cellphone store where a burglary had occurred belonged to Maria Maldonado. 2 others in the unit had signed off on the work. The woman was charged with the burglary. Maldonado said detectives went to her home in southeast Los Angeles County on the basis of the fingerprint evidence and rummaged through her clothing. They found a sweat shirt they said looked like one worn by one of the burglars, whose faces were not visible on the store's security video. They took her to a couple of San Fernando Valley cellphone stores, she said, asking each time how she got in. "I told them I never been there," she said. The analysts stood by their work, but days later the file containing the suspected burglar's prints disappeared from the unlocked drawer where it was kept. Working from copies of the prints, others in the unit and outside consultants later concluded that Maldonado had been wrongly accused, and the charges were dropped. Her case coincided with one in which a person was extradited from Alabama to face burglary charges after analysts matched the prints to a crime scene. The mistake was caught as prosecutors prepared for trial. A subsequent internal report highlighted the errors and many of the ongoing problems in the unit. But Bratton did not create the task force or tighten the procedure for verifying fingerprint matches until The Times obtained that document and made its findings public. Beck said changes in the way examiners verify prints have been made to guard against future mistakes. "Our current . . . process should eliminate this issue as we move forward," he said. (source: Los Angeles Times) USA: Supreme Court Eases Limits on Evidence The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that evidence obtained from an unlawful arrest based on careless record keeping by the police may be used against a criminal defendant. The 5-to-4 decision revealed competing conceptions of the exclusionary rule, which requires the suppression of some evidence obtained through police misconduct, and suggested that the courts commitment to the rule was fragile. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that the exclusion of evidence should be a last resort and that judges should use a sliding scale in deciding whether particular misconduct by the police warranted suppressing the evidence they had found. "To trigger the exclusionary rule," Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system." That price, the chief justice wrote, "is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the dissenters, argued for "a more majestic conception of the exclusionary rule, and a more categorical one. The rule requires more than a cost-benefit calculus to deter police misconduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote. It also protects defendants rights, she said, and prevents judicial complicity in "official lawlessness." The case began when methamphetamines and a gun were found after Bennie D. Herring, an Alabama man, was arrested based on police officers mistaken belief that he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant. That belief was based on incorrect information in the computer files of a neighboring county's police department. The warrant had been withdrawn, but the database had not been updated. Calling the error "isolated negligence attenuated from the arrest," Chief Justice Roberts said the lower courts had been correct in allowing the jury in Mr. Herring's case to consider the evidence. He was convicted and sentenced to 27 months in prison. The ruling itself is relatively narrow and is arguably merely a logical extension of a 1995 decision, Arizona v. Evans, which recognized an exception to the exclusionary rule for arrests resulting from erroneous computer records kept by court employees (as opposed to the police). The decision in the case, Herring v. United States, No. 07-513, may have broad consequences, said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University. "It may well be," Professor Bradley said, that courts will take this as a green light to ignore police negligence all over the place." Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the exclusionary rule was unlikely to deter isolated careless record keeping and should be reserved for "deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring systemic negligence." "The deterrent effect of suppression must be substantial and outweigh any harm to the justice system," the chief justice wrote. "Marginal deterrence does not pay its way.'" Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer, wrote that the majority "underestimates the need for a forceful exclusionary rule and the gravity of record keeping violations," particularly given the heavy reliance by law enforcement on the electronic databases that "form the nervous system of contemporary criminal justice operations." In a separate dissent, Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Souter, called for a "clear line" to be drawn between "police record keeping errors and judicial ones." That, Justice Breyer said, "is far easier for the courts to administer that the chief justice's case-by-case, multifactored inquiry into the degree of police culpability." The decision in the Herring case divided along familiar lines. A 2nd case, about the role of the jury in sentencing decisions, was also decided Wednesday by a 5-to-4 vote, but it had a less predictable lineup. That decision marked either a pause or a stopping point in a judicial march that began with the courts 2000 decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey that the Constitution bars judges from making factual findings leading to increased sentences. The question in the new case, Oregon v. Ice, No. 07-901, was whether the requirement established in Apprendi applied to the decision whether a defendant convicted of multiple crimes must serve consecutive or concurrent sentences if the harsher punishment required a judge to find facts not determined by the jury. Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Breyer and Alito, wrote that the Apprendi rule did not apply to that situation "in light of historical practice and the authority of the states over the administration of their criminal justice systems." It was undisputed in the case that some state systems that give judges discretion on this point are constitutional, including those in which judges have complete freedom and those in which they are allowed to opt for more lenient concurrent sentences. The system used in Oregon, however, introduced an additional element in allowing judges to impose harsher sentences. The Oregon law required judges wishing to impose consecutive sentences in some cases to make factual findings about, for instance, the defendant's "willingness to commit more than one criminal offense," before imposing the longer prison terms. An Oregon judge did so in the case of Thomas E. Ice, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl on 2 occasions. The judge effectively increased Mr. Ice's sentence to 340 months from 90 months. Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Souter and Thomas, dissented, saying the majority opinion was "a virtual copy of the dissents" and filled with "repeated exhumation of arguments dead and buried" in the Apprendi line of cases. "I do not understand," Justice Scalia wrote, "why we would make such a strange exception to the treasured right of trial by jury." (source: New York Times) ********** Evidence Is Valid, Despite Police Error----Rights Were Not Violated, Justices Rule The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that evidence seized in an improper arrest does not always have to be thrown out by the courts, provided the error was the "result of isolated negligence" on the part of the police. The court's conservative members held sway in a 5 to 4 decision that upheld the drug and gun-possession conviction of an Alabama man who had been arrested only because a computer mistakenly indicated that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the incident was more of a "bookkeeping" error than an attempt by police to skirt the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. "We conclude that when police mistakes are the result of negligence such as that described here, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements," the evidence need not be barred from use at trial, Roberts wrote. He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The decision prompted an immediate debate about whether it was a logical extension of previous rulings or a dramatic change in how the court views the Fourth Amendment. Dissenters said the opinion dramatically weakened the protections of the "exclusionary rule," which enforces the Fourth Amendment and is meant to deter the police from breaking the law to obtain evidence against suspects. "The most 'serious impact' of the court's holding will be on innocent persons 'wrongfully arrested based on erroneous information [carelessly maintained] in a computer data base,' " Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote. She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer. She said the decision would give law enforcement great leeway in justifying arrests and little incentive to correct problems such as defective computer databases. There is no dispute that it turned out that officers in Coffee County, Ala., did not have cause to arrest Bennie Dean Herring in 2004, but they did not know it at the time. Herring was well-known to law enforcement, and when he showed up to retrieve something from his impounded truck, officers checked to see whether there was an outstanding arrest warrant. A clerk in a neighboring jurisdiction said there was, so officers promptly arrested Herring and then found methamphetamine in his pocket and a pistol -- which as a felon he could not lawfully possess -- in his truck. About 15 minutes later, the clerk called back to say that the computer had made an error and that the warrant had been withdrawn months earlier. Herring argued to lower courts that the evidence should have been suppressed because the rescinded warrant meant his arrest was illegal. But Roberts wrote that the judicially created exclusionary rule did not provide that such evidence be automatically kept from juries. He said justices decided in 1995 that a similar computer mistake -- in that case, attributable to judicial personnel -- was a "good-faith" error that did not warrant throwing out an arrest. Yesterday's decision extends that to law enforcement personnel. "As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence," Roberts wrote. "The error in this case does not rise to that level." Paul Cassell, a former federal judge who teaches at the University of Utah law school, agreed that the decision seemed to be a natural extension of the court's positions. "I thought this was a fairly straightforward case for the government," he said. Defense lawyers disagreed. "Whether it intends it or not, in effect, the court is promising in the future to reward sloppy police work. Ironically, that's one of the kinds of conduct the exclusionary rule was created to correct," John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said in a statement. "They should call it the 'Barney Fife' exception to the Fourth Amendment." In a second criminal case decided yesterday, Ginsburg wrote that judges, rather than juries, may find facts that allow them to impose sentences that run consecutively rather than concurrently. Ginsburg was joined by Stevens, Kennedy, Breyer and Alito in ruling against an Oregon man who said that only a jury could have decided the facts necessary to consign him to consecutive sentences on burglary and sexual assault convictions. The decision seemed to move away from a line of cases the court has decided since 2000 that require juries to find facts that result in longer sentences. But Ginsburg said the "decision to impose sentences consecutively is not within the jury function that 'extends down centuries into the common law.' " Scalia wrote a dissent saying the decision "directly contradicts what we held eight years ago and have reaffirmed several times since." The cases decided yesterday are Herring v. United States and Oregon v. Ice, respectively. (source: Washington Post) _______________________________________________ DeathPenalty mailing list [email protected] http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A free service of WashLaw http://washlaw.edu (785)670.1088 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
