Feb. 10 MASSACHUSETTS: Thanks to Mass. law, death penalty won't fly The lack of a state death penalty statute guarantees the harshest punishment Neil Entwistle faces is a lifetime behind bars if convicted of slaying his wife and baby girl. Though capital punishment has been recommended, and at least in one case given, in some Massachusetts murder cases in recent years, they were prosecuted under federal and not state statutes. Entwistle will be tried on state murder charges and there is no federal component to his crimes that would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty, said Gerald T. Leone, a former federal and state prosecutor now running for Middlesex district attorney. And even if there were a federal hook, Britain, with no death penalty, usually insists that it not be applied before allowing a suspect to be extradited. Since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan has sought capital punishment in several Massachusetts cases prosecuted by his office. In 2003, Gary Lee Sampson was sentenced to death in the murders of 3 people during carjackings, a federal crime. Veterans Affairs hospital nurse Kristin Gilbert was spared execution and given life in prison after her 2000 federal conviction in Springfield for murdering 4 patients at the federal facility. (source: Boston Herald) MISSOURI: Appeals court clarifies status of death-penalty case In St. Louis, a challenge to the constitutionality of Missouri's three-drug lethal injection method rests with a 3-judge appeals panel, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis has ruled. The decision late Wednesday clarified the status of a case brought by death row inmate Michael Anthony Taylor against the Missouri Department of Corrections. With one judge dissenting, the case was returned to the appeals court's 3-judge panel. Taylor, 39, of Kansas City, claims that the three-drug lethal injection method, if administered improperly, causes pain in violation of the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. His case has been mired in appeals, and some court observers believe it must be resolved before any more executions can be scheduled in Missouri. Missouri Supreme Court spokeswoman Beth Riggert disagreed, but said there is nothing to preclude the court from considering that or any other issue in any given death penalty case. Attorney General Jay Nixon has said he doesn't think much of Taylor's argument and doesn't expect it to succeed. His office has asked the court to handle the case quickly. Taylor's attorney is asking for a reasonable amount of time. The 3-judge panel could send the case back to U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan in Kansas City, who ruled against Taylor's claim on Jan. 30 after a two-day, emergency telephone hearing that was closed to the public. Gaitan was under an appeals court order to rule by noon Feb. 1, but Taylor's attorney, John Simon of St. Louis, maintains he was unable to present critical witnesses under the rushed schedule. He has called Gaitan's session a "pseudo hearing" that lacked legitimacy. Taylor's appeal doesn't object to Missouri's 3-chemical sequence used in lethal injections - the short-acting anesthetic, sodium pentothal; the paralytic pancuronium bromide; and potassium chloride that burns as it courses through the veins and induces cardiac arrest - but rather the method. Simon said that if the inmate is not rendered unconscious by too little anesthetic, he can wake up to the pain of burning and heart attack and "there's no way to know it because of the paralytic." The state argued that it uses a larger-than-normal amount of the anesthetic, so it won't wear off. Simon argues what's needed is an "adequate dose of a long-acting, deep-running" anesthetic. He also objects to Missouri's injecting the chemicals through the femoral vein, which is painful and medically unnecessary unless the inmate is a drug user. Gaitan didn't buy any of those arguments in denying Taylor's appeal. Taylor had been scheduled to be executed Feb. 1 in the 1989 kidnapping, rape and murder of 15-year-old Ann Harrison of Kansas City. A 3-judge appeals court panel denied Taylor's stay of execution, but the full appeals court stayed it, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to lift it. Simon wants a full hearing before Senior U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright in Kansas City, who originally was assigned the case at random before the appeals court had the case reassigned to Gaitan. Nixon, citing other death-penalty cases, said the state has never lost the underlying issue of whether the execution method is constitutionally appropriate. (source: Associated Press) USA: Supreme Court Puzzles Some With Mixed Answers on Lethal Injection In the past 2 weeks, the Supreme Court stopped 2 executions in Florida and allowed a lower court to halt another in Missouri -- but the justices allowed 3 other death sentences, in Texas and Indiana, to proceed. The court's actions are not necessarily contradictory under the law, but they have puzzled many on both sides of the debate over capital punishment because in each case the death-row inmate raised a similar issue: the legality of lethal injection as the means for execution. In the Texas case, for example, lawyers for Robert Neville Jr. took the wording for their Feb. 8 appeal from a petition that the court had accepted 14 days earlier when it halted the execution of Clarence E. Hill in Florida. But the justices rejected Neville's bid; he was put to death Wednesday. "We look to the Supreme Court for consistency and a policy everyone can follow, and we're not getting it from this court," said Richard Alley, Neville's lawyer. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) also cited "uncertainty" about the Supreme Court's direction when he declared Feb. 1 that he will not sign any more death warrants until the court issues final rulings on the Florida cases. "I am sure the court is trying to apply some sort of sensible standard," said Douglas A. Berman, an expert in criminal sentencing law at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. "But they need to do a heck of a lot better job explaining why." The probable explanation for the court's apparent zigzag is that a majority of the court is ready to consider only a relatively narrow issue related to lethal injection. But because the court generally does not reveal more than a bare minimum of information about how and why it chooses to take up any particular matter, lawyers have only been able to arrive at this educated guess after much litigation. Introduced in Oklahoma in 1977 as an alternative to the electric chair, lethal injection has been adopted as the principal mode of execution by 37 of 38 death-penalty states, including Maryland and Virginia, as well as the federal government and the U.S. military. The District has no death penalty. Yet anti-death-penalty activists argue that the dosage of anesthetic in the 3-drug "protocol" used to kill capital offenders is flawed, and that, if it is administered improperly by untrained personnel, the process of suffocation and cardiac arrest caused by the other 2 drugs can therefore be as painful as electrocution or the gas chamber. Their claim was bolstered by a 2005 article in the Lancet, a medical journal, but state law enforcement officials remain skeptical. "It's sort of a legal 'Hail Mary' pass," said Joshua Marquis, prosecutor in Astoria, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. Indeed, the argument had made little headway in court until the night of Jan. 25, when the justices issued a stay of execution to Hill, the convicted killer of a Pensacola, Fla., police officer, as he lay on a gurney waiting for the flow of lethal chemicals. The court acted without recorded dissent after first rejecting Hill's request to consider the broad issue of whether lethal injection as such is "cruel and unusual punishment." But it did say it would hear Hill's narrower claim, which had been rejected by a federal appeals court in Atlanta: that he should have an opportunity to argue in the lower courts that Florida's lethal-injection formula, which is similar to that used in other jurisdictions, would cause him excessive pain, thus violating his civil rights. The next day, the court's unanimity fractured. It denied a stay of execution to Indiana death-row inmate Marvin Bieghler, who was appealing the Indiana Supreme Court's rejection of his broad challenge to the constitutionality of lethal injection. 2 justices, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, signaling that they thought the court should hear the broader constitutional claim, too. Bieghler then brought the broad claim to the lower federal courts, winning a stay of execution from the federal appeals court in Chicago. That court based its 2 to 1 decision on the Supreme Court's grant of a stay to Hill. But the majority of the appeals court said it had acted only because it was not "comfortably certain" about the meaning of the court's stay for Hill. The next day, the Supreme Court overturned that stay -- with dissents by Stevens, Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer -- and Bieghler was put to death. That ruling is the clearest indication that the court is, indeed, interested only in the narrow claim raised by Hill -- that there should be a chance to raise a civil rights challenge to the injection formula. On Jan. 31, the court granted a stay to another Florida inmate, Arthur D. Rutherford, who was in an identical position to Hill. A day later, on Feb. 1, the court denied a stay to Texas's Jaime Elizalde Jr. -- but refused to vacate a stay for Missouri's Michael A. Taylor that had been imposed by the federal court of appeals in St. Louis. This time, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Taylor had raised a Hill-like narrow claim early in his appeals process but had been given only a hasty, last-minute hearing on the claim in federal district court, said Thomas C. Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who represents a Tennessee death-row inmate at the Supreme Court. This apparently prompted the appeals court to give him a stay, and a majority of the Supreme Court, including new Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to let it stand. The bottom line appears to be, Goldstein said, that while the court will not block executions for those raising only a broad claim that lethal injection is cruel and unusual, it has agreed to decide whether challenges to a lethal-injection formula may be raised as a civil rights lawsuit, and is therefore blocking executions for people who have not yet had a sufficient day in court on that claim. Meanwhile, however, it is also not stopping executions in which death-row inmates seem to be raising the narrow issue only at the last minute, to take advantage of its decision to hear Hill's case. In a 2004 opinion, the court had expressed opposition to such latecomers. That would explain why the court denied Texas's Neville a stay of execution -- with no recorded dissents. With 22 executions scheduled by the states and the federal government before the end of June, when the court's term ends, lower courts remain caught up in the lethal-injection issue. In California, Angelo Michael Morales is challenging that state's injection formula before a San Jose federal district judge. His execution is set for Feb. 21. In Maryland, Vernon L. Evans Jr. has received a stay of execution from the Court of Appeals so that it could decide several claims, related both to alleged racial discrimination and to the state's lethal-injection protocol. But his lawsuit is based on alleged violations of state rather than federal law. (source: Washington Post) ****************** Seeing the crucifix in a whole new way Sister Helen Prejean was a surprise to her audience in a couple of ways - the Louisiana-accented humor in a deep and smoky drawl - but her message was the one she carries throughout her extensive speaking schedule:eliminate the death penalty. North Dakota, she noted, "is one of 12 enlightened states that does not have the death penalty." Prejean was the keynote speaker Thursday at the annual University of Mary Prayer Day, which this year was the culmination of a series of programs surrounding the university's production of the play "Dead Man Walking," based on Prejean's best-selling book. Lifting the cross she wore on a chain around her neck and indicating the standing crucifix behind her, she said her particular cross also was purchased with blood. Inmate Eddie Sonnier, the brother of Patrick Sonnier, the man executed in "Dead Man Walking," sold plasma to pay another inmate to make it for her, she said. Jesus himself would likely have seen forests of the crucified when he visited Jerusalem; it was one way the occupying Romans demonstrated their power, she said. Prejean said that in the years since she walked Patrick Sonnier to his execution in 1984, she has come to look at the crucifix in a whole new way, not as a decoration, but as the symbol of Jesus being executed by the state. In the catacombs of Rome, when early Christians were persecuted, images of fish and shepherds declared their faith, she said. It took Christians 300 years, until the emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, to show the cross, the shameful symbol of a criminal's death. Today, "it would be like using an electric chair" as a symbol, she said. "We are all on a journey," she told the crowd in the McDowall Activity Center on campus. Her own journey as a death penalty opponent followed an illuminating moment when she heard another nun speaking of social justice. "I knew the world wasn't fair," beforehand, but she remembers the exact words that changed her:"We never know when the spirit of God is going to set us on fire," she said. The line that got her: "Jesus preached good news to the poor. And they would be poor no longer." After all, no mere preaching about loving one another would have gotten Jesus executed, she said. "'Love one another' doesn't threaten anyone" - it's the decision to do something about it that scares people, she said. Her decision was to move into a housing project among the poor of New Orleans; there, she said, "my saints changed. My education began." This life led to her meeting with death row inmate Patrick Sonnier and becoming his spiritual adviser. Two and a half years later, she walked with him to his execution in the electric chair. She thought of the women who stood vigil at the foot of Jesus' cross. When it was over, she vomited. "Grace comes up under us when we need it, not before," she said. "My face was the last one he saw." >From the experience came her book, "Dead Man Walking," followed by the movie of the same name starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, a play and an opera based on the book, and a second book, "The Death of Innocents," which she has begun preliminary talks about filming, as well. Prejean travels extensively, promoting a moratorium on executions and elimination of the death penalty. "We should be outraged" at violent crime, she said:"That's a morally legitimate way to feel. It's what we do with that outrage ..." The death penalty is rooted in how we, as a young country, solve social problems- with violence, she said. She has marshalled research: For example,more than 80 % of U.S. executions are done in the 10 Southern states that practiced slavery: "Does that tell you something?" she asked. Prejean started out as a teacher, she said, and she figures she's still teaching. "The classroom just got bigger." (source: Bismarck (N. Dad.) Tribune) OHIO: Man could face death penalty An Englewood man - charged with robbing and gunning down a woman in a Dayton alley - faces a possible death penalty after a grand jury indicted him Thursday in the Nov. 27 shooting of Antoinette "Toni" Hollingsworth. Montgomery County Prosecutor Mathias H. Heck Jr. said the case ranks among "only those few cases deserving" of the state's most serious charge, aggravated murder. Reginald D. Tucker, 23, was arrested in Hollingsworth's death along with Sean Rutledge, 16, who will be tried as an adult. Heck suggested the teen would be indicted as charged in juvenile court: Complicity to commit murder and aggravated robbery, with firearm specifications that could imprison him at least 28 years. Police said the pair spotted Hollingsworth, 22, a Toledo native and former Dayton Job Corps Center student, as she left a store, then shot her in the 800 block of Burwood Avenue. Tucker was the shooter, Heck said. (source: Dayton Daily News) NORTH CAROLINA: Death penalty sought In Concord, prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty against Lisa Louise Greene, who is charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder after her 2 children died in a fire at their Midland home last month. Greene, 40, was arrested and charged Jan. 13 with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, and 1 count each of 1st-degree arson, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. Greene is charged with the deaths of Addison Brooke Macemore, 8, and Nathan "Daniel" Macemore, 10. Prosecutors Tuesday filed a motion to request a hearing to pursue the death penalty. Cabarrus County District Attorney Roxann Vaneekhoven said her office made the decision to seek the death penalty because of the nature of the crime. "This was an especially heinous crime," she said. "That's one of the factors we will ask the judge to consider at the hearing." Greene told officials the fire started with a candle. Cabarrus County Sheriff Brad Riley said an open flame was used to ignite combustible materials. He would not say what the materials were. Bobby Smith, Cabarrus County fire marshal, said the State Bureau of Investigation tested evidence taken from the home to see if any accelerants, such as gasoline, were used. "We didn't find any evidence that any flammable liquids were used," he said, and investigators ruled out that this was an accidental fire and was caused by "human hands." Greene also told deputies she tried to get her children out of the house, but couldnt because she injured her ankle when she went for help. Vaneekhoven said if a judge grants the death penalty motion, another attorney would be assigned to Greenes case. All death penalty cases have 2 attorneys. Greene has 1 court-appointed attorney, Lisa Dubs of Hickory, and is being held without bond at the Cabarrus County Jail. Greene's previous charges include driving while impaired and possession of drug paraphernalia. In 2005, she pleaded guilty to DWI, and the drug paraphernalia charge was dismissed, according to court records. Both are misdemeanors. (source: Independent Tribune)
