April 14 KENTUCKY: Judge denies killer's request----St. Clair asked Waller to withdraw from resentencing Convicted murderer and death-row inmate Michael Dale St. Clair, who is scheduled to be resentenced this summer, tried without success yesterday to have Bullitt Circuit Judge Thomas Waller remove himself from the case. Steve Mirkin, St. Clair's attorney, argued that Waller might not preside impartially over the August resentencing because he sentenced St. Clair to death in 1998. But in denying the request, Waller said that he will have no difficulty in being fair to St. Clair. St. Clair was convicted of the 1991 killing of Frank Brady, a Hardin County distillery worker. St. Clair killed him after escaping from an Oklahoma prison with another inmate and going on a cross-country crime rampage. St. Clair kidnapped Brady at an Interstate 65 rest area, drove him into a wooded area of Bullitt County and shot him twice. St. Clair was captured about 3 months later at a relative's home in Texas. Last year the Kentucky Supreme Court threw out St. Clair's death sentence because Waller had not informed the jury that life without parole was one of its options. In the same ruling, the court upheld St. Clair's murder conviction. Yesterday Waller said he has no animosity toward St. Clair, who in a January hearing accused the judge of being an alcoholic. Waller thanked St. Clair for his concern but said he does not drink alcohol. Yesterday, Mirkin declined to say whether he would appeal Waller's refusal to step aside. Assistant Attorney General David Smith, who is prosecuting the case, argued that Waller shouldn't recuse himself just because he presided over St. Clair's trial and first sentencing. St. Clair also has been convicted of 4 murders in Oklahoma and is accused of one in New Mexico. Prosecutors in New Mexico have not brought St. Clair to trial, deeming it irrelevant because he was already on death row in Kentucky. A new jury, which could recommend the death penalty, will have to be seated for St. Clair's August resentencing. Waller has scheduled several weeks for the hearing because defense attorneys and prosecutors will have to present much of their evidence again. The sentencing hearing will draw heightened security at the Bullitt County Judicial Center. Extra sheriff's deputies, state troopers and officials from the state Administrative Office of the Courts are on hand any time St. Clair makes a courthouse appearance. "In my mind, a gentleman on death row has absolutely nothing to lose," Chief Deputy Sheriff Jim McAuliffe said of the precautionary measures. "And it's our job to protect the judges, the court workers and the citizens." At yesterday's hearing, officers from the Administrative Office of the Courts screened everyone entering the building with a metal detector, which is not normally the case at the courthouse. 3 officers escorted St. Clair, whose hands and feet were shackled, into the courtroom. Other officers were positioned throughout the building and in the parking lot. (source: Courier-Journal, Apr. 12) CONNECTICUT: Cobb Says He Wants To Drop Appeals, Face Execution A 2nd inmate on Connecticut's death row has announced his desire to forgo further appeals and face execution, possibly setting the stage for another flurry of court action like the one surrounding serial killer Michael Ross. Sedrick Cobb, sentenced to death for kidnapping, raping and killing a 23-year-old woman in 1989, said he wants to drop his appeals in a letter to Superior Court Judge Stanley T. Fuger Jr., The Hartford Courant reported in Thursday's editions. The court received the letter on April 4. Fuger presided over a lengthy hearing last year on Cobb's claim that he was not adequately represented by his lawyers during his trial. "I do this without stress, mental duress, it's just the right time," Cobb wrote to the judge. "I request a date in your court to make this official, so that you can ask of me any questions or concerns that you have." Ross, on death row for killing four young women in eastern Connecticut in the early 1980s, faces lethal injection on May 11. He would be the first person executed in New England in 45 years if the death sentence is carried out as planned. Ross' case is now tied up in a hearing in New London Superior Court to determine if he is competent in deciding to forgo his remaining appeals. Ross decided to drop his appeals last year and his execution was set for Jan. 26, but the competency issue has delayed the date several times. (source: Associated Press) ******************* Execution Date Set for Ross '81 The Cornell graduate who admitted to killing eight women is scheduled for lethal injection on May 11 after repeated postponements, the last one coming just hours before his execution time. The date may be overturned again if Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford rules in favor of arguments that Michael Ross '81 lacks the mental competence to volunteer for his own execution. In 1987, Ross was sentenced to death for the murder of 4 Connecticut women in the early 1980s. His death penalty ruling was overturned by the state supreme court in 1995, only to be reinstated in May 2000. Last year, in a surprising turn of events, the serial killer hired an attorney to speed up his own execution. Dr. Stuart Grassian is one of Ross's examiners who testified Monday that the inmate's judgment has been impaired after years of solitary confinement. "There are people who can't take it anymore, but who are going to show people how strong and powerful they are," Grassian said at a hearing reported by the AP. "He's [Ross] trying to go down in a blaze of glory like these guys did." An expert on the effects of long-term confinement, Grassian described Ross as "a narcissist who has no empathy for the victim's families," according to AP news. Other doctors disagreed. Dr. Michael Norko, former director of Whiting Forensic Institute, testified last Thursday that Ross "clearly understands what's at stake. The evidence is this is his decision, which he makes in contrast to what his friends, supporters and lawyers have advised him to do," according to the AP. Dr. Suzanne Gentile, a suicide expert from Whiting, offered similar conclusions. Judge Clifford, who upheld Ross's mental competency last year, must sort through the conflicting psychiatric evaluations to reach a decision that could end Ross's life and his nearly twenty years in prison or once again delay his execution. Prof. John Blume, law, said that the judge ruling on Ross should consider his motivations for wishing death. The Director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, Blume recently completed a study of death inmates who waived their appeals. His research shows that the profile of these inmates is similar to the profile of people who commit suicide, Blume said. According to Blume, if Ross is attempting to expediate his execution out of a sense of responsibility and remorse, the judge should waive his appeal. However, if Ross is motivated by suicidal tendancies, then the judge should reevalute Ross's case. "We don't let people commit suicide in free world ... Unless there's some sort of special affirmative action program for death row immates," the state should not assist Ross to end his life, Blume said. Ross' only surviving victim is actually pleading against his execution after testifying for the persecution in earlier trials. "I am not him. I will refuse to take his life because he decided to take a bunch of girls' life," Vivian Dobson said on National Public Radio last month. "That's not what we're here -- we're not killers. He is, but we're not." She does not want Ross's death on her hands, she said. On NPR, Dobson told the host that she has been living with heavy guilt for the past twenty years because she survived and the other girls did not. She will "keep on fighting to get rid of this death penalty so he can think about and dwell on every little thing he's done to those girls and what he's done to me," Dobson said. She added, "He cannot get off that easy." Between January and February alone, Ross' execution was delayed 4times. After U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny delayed Ross' Jan. 26 execution to hear more evidence on his mental capacity, another date was set for Jan. 28. Hours before the scheduled time, Ross' lawyer, T.R. Pauling, declared a potential conflict of interest that postponed the date again. It turned out that Judge Chatigny had threatened to go after Pauling's law license if he discovered the lawyer withholding evidence about Ross's incompetency. On Feb. 10 Judge Clifford set the current execution date and also appointed Thomas Groak as a special counsel to investigate Ross' mental soundness. Groak's appointment to the case allows Pauling to fully represent his client's interests in expediting the execution. If Judge Clifford rules that Ross is mentally competent, the graduate from Agriculture and Life Sciences will be the 1st person to be executed in New England in 45 years. (source: The Cornell Daily Sun) SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution Judge denies death penalty stay A federal judge denied an appeal Wednesday in a death penalty sentence stemming from a double murder conviction in Spartanburg 14 years ago. Richard Longworth, 36, is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Friday for his role in the shooting deaths of two Spartanburg movie theater workers in 1991. Federal District Judge Sol Blatt denied motions for a stay of execution and for relief from judgment in an order entered Wednesday. Prosecutors have said Longworth and David Rocheville shot and killed Alex Hopps, 19, and Todd Greene, 24, while robbing the Westgate Mall cinema on Jan. 7. Rocheville was executed in 1999 for his role in the murders. (source: The State) ALABAMA: In Deal to Avoid Death Penalty, Bomber Pleads Guilty Declaring himself "bloodied but emphatically unbowed," Eric Robert Rudolph on Wednesday issued his 1st public explanation for a series of abortion clinic bombings and an attack at the 1996 Olympics, gloating that his plea deal with prosecutors "deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death." In the 11-page statement, devoid of remorse but rife with anti-abortion and antigay language, Mr. Rudolph said he had originally intended to bomb the Olympics every day to "confound, anger and embarrass" the government for legalizing abortion, but was foiled by his own poor planning. He described watching federal agents who hunted for him in the North Carolina woods during his five years as a fugitive, and disputed a popular theory that he was influenced by an extremist Christian sect based on racial purity. The statement was released after Mr. Rudolph pleaded guilty to 4 bombings: the Olympic attack here in the summer of 1996, attacks on an abortion clinic and gay club here in 1997 and an explosion at a clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in 1998. Collectively, the bombings killed 2 people and injured 150. Mr. Rudolph made the pleas, 1st in federal court Wednesday morning in Birmingham and later in the day in Atlanta, as part of a deal he struck to avoid execution. Mr. Rudolph will serve 4 consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. The statement was a sharply unambiguous follow-up to the 2 hearings, and left some bombing victims and their relatives with the sense that Mr. Rudolph was anything but contrite. In Birmingham, dressed in a red jail uniform and shackled at the ankles, Mr. Rudolph nodded vigorously as a narrative account of the bombings was read aloud, and at one point he appeared to wink in the direction of the prosecutors. "It was very unsettling," said John Hawthorne, whose wife, Alice, was killed in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, adding that he would not have as readily agreed to the plea deal had he known how Mr. Rudolph would behave. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty if Mr. Rudolph admitted guilt and revealed the whereabouts of about 250 pounds of dynamite he hid in the North Carolina mountains, including a bomb intended for federal agents hunting him. In the statement, Mr. Rudolph described an elaborate plan to kill those agents, but said he changed his mind at the last minute. "Perhaps after watching them for so many months, their individual humanity shown through the hated uniform," he wrote ungrammatically. "It was not that I lost my resolve to fight in the defense of the unborn." At a news conference, David E. Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta, said the plea deal resolved a significant public safety problem posed by the hidden explosives and avoided the uncertainties inherent in a lengthy trial. "Eric Rudolph is guilty today," Mr. Nahmias said. "There will be no further delays in obtaining justice for the public and the many victims of his terrorist activity." Mr. Nahmias also noted that life in prison was the most severe possible sentence for most of the injuries Mr. Rudolph caused. "The families of the victims for whom we could seek the death penalty accepted this agreement," he said. The hearings, in which Mr. Rudolph and his lawyers had to confirm that he was freely entering into the plea deal and understood its terms, were primarily a formulaic catechism of "yes, sirs" and "no, sirs." But when Judge C. Lynwood Smith of Federal District Court in Birmingham asked Mr. Rudolph if the government had enough evidence to prove its case against him, he answered, "Just barely, Your Honor." And when the judge asked if Mr. Rudolph had detonated the clinic bomb, which killed an off-duty police officer, Robert Sanderson, and maimed a nurse, Emily Lyons, he replied, "I certainly did, Your Honor." Ms. Lyons; her husband, Jeff; Mr. Sanderson's widow, Felecia; and Alice Hawthorne's daughter, Fallon Stubbs, were in the courtroom, but all waived their right to speak, saying they would wait until the sentencing hearings. In Birmingham, Judge Smith scheduled that hearing for July 18 - coincidentally, Ms. Lyons's birthday. Mr. Rudolph's statement, an amalgam of Biblical quotes, sermonizing and an oddly passive voice, offered a glimpse of how he planned and carried out the bombings and of his five years as the nation's most famous fugitive, celebrated by some for his beliefs, admired by others for his ability to survive in the Appalachian wilderness, and reviled by many as a domestic terrorist. Abortion was his central foe, though the Olympics, he wrote, promoted the "despicable ideals" of "global socialism" expressed in its theme song, John Lennon's "Imagine." His goal was to force the cancellation of the Games, or at least scare people away; at one point, he wrote, he planned five timed explosions, each preceded by a 911 warning so the affected area could be cleared. But there was not enough time - the plan "was a monster that kept getting out of control the more I got into it," he said. In the closest thing the statement contained to an apology, he acknowledged that civilians were at risk: "There is no excuse for this, and I accept full responsibility for the consequences of using this dangerous tactic." After the first Olympics bombing, he decided not to follow through with the plan, and detonated the bombs at what he said appeared to be a large construction site east of Atlanta. As for the attack on the gay nightclub, Mr. Rudolph, who has a gay brother, wrote that homosexuality practiced in private was acceptable, but that any effort to "drag this practice out of the closet" and have society recognize it as legitimate or normal "should be ruthlessly opposed." By the time of his final bombing, in 1998, he had refined his technique, designing what he called a "command-detonated focused device" that could be set off remotely when the desired victim appeared. After considering three clinics in Birmingham - a location he chose "purely for tactical reasons" - he settled on the New Woman All Women clinic where, he said, "every employee is a knowing participant in this gruesome trade." He intended to set off the bomb when the doctor who provided abortions at the clinic appeared, he said, but was forced to change his plan when Officer Sanderson, the clinic security guard, discovered the device. Mr. Rudolph described several attack plans, including an effort to bomb "an abortion mill" in Asheville, N.C., before the 2000 election, that he said were never carried out for various logistical reasons, including periods where he spent much of his time gathering food. By the fall of 2000, he wrote, he had stockpiled a supply large enough to last several years. Almost off-handedly, Mr. Rudolph described his frequent proximity to law enforcement agents. He used a dugout under a rock to avoid helicopters and heat-seeking equipment, describing one near-miss with evident exhilaration: "In defiance I looked toward the ridge into which the chopper had just gone and said, 'I am still here.'" He also disputed accounts that he was a "big time drug dealer" and a believer in Christian Identity, a sect that espouses a white supremacist theology. He said that he attended the church because he was engaged to a woman whose father was a member. "I was born a Catholic and with forgiveness I hope to die one," Mr. Rudolph said, adding that he never agreed with the "convoluted Identity argument of racial determinism." He dismissed another story, that his anger at the government stemmed from its refusal to approve an experimental cancer drug that might have saved his father's life, saying he knew nothing about the drug at the time. Mr. Nahmias, the federal prosecutor, said that while much of Mr. Rudolph's statement was "garbage," it was useful as a document that filled in the gaps of the bombing investigation. "I think there's a lot of stuff in there that no one would have ever known except him," he said. (source: New York Times) ILLINOIS: State is urged to look at claims of innocence An Illinois group that helped free Keith Harris, a Belleville man wrongly imprisoned for 22 years for murder, is urging legislators to create a commission to investigate other questionable cases in the state's criminal justice system. The campaign is based partly on concern that Illinois' aggressive death penalty reforms may lead to more life sentences for accused killers - and more possibility that innocent people will be sent to prison. The Downstate Illinois Innocence Project investigates claims of innocence among those sentenced to prison or death. Larry Golden, who works with the group, called on the state to fund an "Innocence Commission" to investigate claims of innocence. Currently, much of the burden for taking up the causes of potentially innocent inmates is borne by private groups. "It should not be the responsibility of the private sector . . . to correct errors in the public sector," said Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a former New Jersey boxer who was freed from prison after serving 20 years for a crime he did not commit. Carter, who works with the group, spoke at a news conference Wednesday at the state Capitol. Just before he left office in January 2003, former Gov. George Ryan commuted all death row sentences to life in prison. He had already placed a freeze on executions after 13 prisoners who were innocent or wrongly convicted were freed from death row. Gov. Rod Blagojevich has not lifted the freeze, waiting to see if changes in the death penalty system are successful. The reforms include greater power given to the Supreme Court to throw out unjust verdicts, more access to evidence for defendants and barring the death penalty in cases depending on a single witness. Golden said although Illinois has become a leader in death penalty reforms, those changes to the system can make it more difficult to investigate innocence claims in non-death penalty cases. "Those who are not sentenced to death, but life in prison . . . those cases are just as important," he said. Recent reforms to the system have caused prosecutors to think twice about trying for the death penalty, he said. People sentenced to life in prison who claim innocence do not have the benefit of groups like the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project, Golden said. Matt Jones, Illinois States Attorney's Association spokesman, said reforms are not keeping prosecutors from trying for the death penalty when warranted. Prosecutors "take a close look (before deciding to try for a death sentence), but to say they're afraid to seek the death penalty is silly," Jones said. (source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
