Feb. 23 NEW YORK: Researchers archive death row mercy pleas When the last court says no and the clock ticks down toward an execution, a prisoner's only chance is a plea for mercy. Such pleas arrive each year before governors, pardons boards and the president, many with tales of woe told through children's letters, baptism certificates, photos and poetry. And each year, nearly all are rejected and disappear into state and federal files. Now 2 researchers at the State University of New York's Albany campus have created a national death penalty archive and begun compiling such pleas in the hope they will yield valuable lessons about the workings - and failings - of the criminal justice system. "When you read those petitions, some of them cry out that something very bad occurred," said James Acker, a criminal justice professor who started the project with Charles Lanier. Last month, the first boxes carrying 137 clemency pleas arrived at the National Death Penalty Archives from a private donor. The archive will be open to advocates, lawyers, journalists and others. Lawyers and inmates could study the successful petitions when they prepare their own pleas for mercy, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "We have often received requests for this kind of information," he said. Bill Bowers of the Capital Jury Project, a national research effort into how juries make decisions, called the bulging files "a gold mine of things that wouldn't show up in legal papers." Only 15 of the 137 petitions in the archives resulted in clemency, a thrown-out death sentence or a new trial. More than 1,000 people have been executed in the United States since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. Sixty-three prisoners have been spared, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That does not count the 167 death sentences Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted just before leaving office in 2003. Ryan cited flaws in the criminal justice system and the risk of executing an innocent person. Pleas for mercy often cite abuse and mental illness because prisoners often have nothing else to offer, and those making clemency decisions usually have few guidelines to go on but their conscience, according to the archive's founders. Take the case of William Neal Moore, who killed 77-year-old Fredger Stapleton in 1974 in Georgia. A friend had told Moore, then a depressed 23-year-old soldier, that Stapleton kept $20,000 in his home, according to testimony. Moore got drunk and entered Stapleton's home, and Stapleton fired. Moore shot back, killing Stapleton. Stapleton's relatives were among those who pleaded for Moore's life. Their pleas were among the 2 pounds of letters submitted on his behalf. "Billy was just a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time," a relative wrote. "Now we feel like we know him, and ... he's be welcome in our homes." Georgia's Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his sentence to life in prison, saying it was "impressed" that Stapleton's relatives asked for clemency. The archive's founders hope to collect all clemency pleas from across the country, mostly on their own time and with no outside funding. It could be a challenge. Petitions are not always treated as public records, with some states reluctant to release them. And there is also the question of family privacy, Acker said. "There is no shortage of stories that describe just horrendous upbringings," he said. But the archive's founders said the benefit of making the records public is clear. "You would think anyone with a life-or-death decision would want the best information possible," Acker said. (source: Associated Press) CALIFORNIA: Local doctors say medics should play no role at executions Some doctors may personally support the death penalty, but in Napa and throughout California, the debate over whether they can ethically play a role in putting condemned inmates to death took center stage this week. When a court ordered that a lethal dose of barbiturates be administered to condemned killer Michael Morales by medical professionals, 2 anesthesiologists refused, and the execution at San Quentin was put on indefinite hold. The decision by the 2 doctors, who were not identified, is staunchly defended by Dr. Ardith Courtney, president of the Napa County Medical Society. "Doctors are healers, not executioners," she said Wednesday. "It is up to the judicial system to carry out the decision of the courts and the people." The Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors virtually forbids taking human life, and has been cited by physicians who feel it is immoral for a physician to actively participate in the ending of a life. According to Maryann Eckhout, executive director of the Napa County Medical Society, the California Medical Association believes taking part in an execution is not illegal for doctors, but it is unethical. The CMA has for decades sought to end physician participation in capital punishment, and has sought legislation banning such action by physicians and other health care professionals. A CMA position paper states, "A physician is dedicated to preserving life and should not participate in a legally authorized execution." Morales was sent to California's death row for torturing, raping and murdering a 17-year-old girl a quarter of a century ago. The case has renewed the legal and ethical debate over the proper role of doctors in executions and the suitability of the lethal injection method used in California and 36 other states. It was a legal challenge to the method of putting condemned prisoners to death that led to the halting of the Morales execution this week. Assistant Napa County District Attorney Lee Philipson says he does not agree with defense attorneys who claimed lethal injection is inhumane. "It does not compare to thousands of volts of electricity, or hanging, or gas where (the prisoner) bleeds to death internally," he said in comparing the practice to those used in past years. "Personally, I believe (capital punishment) should remain the law of California," he said. "There are certain individuals who just don't deserved to live. They show a lack of feeling for (other) humans. They present such an incredible danger to us all, inside (prison) as well." He said it has been decades since there was a capital punishment case in Napa County. However the charges against Napa resident Eric Copple -- who is facing trial in the killing of two women in West Napa in November of 2004 -- could make him eligible for the death penalty. "(The death penalty) is certainly on the table," in the Copple case, said Philipson, "but no decision has been made." While a majority of Californians, according to polls, support the death penalty, there is organized opposition locally. "The death penalty keeps the spotlight on the murderer," offered Janis Gay of St. Helena, who serves on the board of the wine country chapter of Death Penalty Focus. She said when a killer is imprisoned without the possibility of parole, the victim's family can begin the healing process earlier. Most people sentenced to die do not meet the executioner for more than 20 years. Money saved by imprisonment rather than execution, she said, can be used for victim family services. The organization was originally known as Napa Citizens for a Death Penalty Moratorium, but recently merged with Death Penalty Focus, headed by actor Mike Farrell. (source: Napa Valley Register) ******************* A fate worse than death Last week, we had to let my old doggie boy Bumper go. He was 17, a great age for a shepherd-mix fellow. I rescued him on the southbound Glendale Freeway in 1991, after I saw him get hit a glancing blow by a car. He had a long, cheerful life, woofing at anyone in a uniform and at every motorcycle. One day I'll find out what it is about khaki and that particular engine pitch that drives dogs wild. But his great age and ailments overtook him, and he made it clear it was time to go. He left in a haze of Demerol, a second drug that sent him into unconsciousness and a third one that ended the feeble beating of his heart. Bumper was released from his pain. In the state of Oregon, terminally ill patients now have the right to make that same choice for themselves. Upheld last month by the U.S. Supreme Court, that right was fought at every step by a political culture that can imagine nothing worse than death and by a conservative religious culture that praises the glories of heaven but is determined to stand in the way of suffering people who want to hurry up and get there. These cultures' cheerleaders need to imagine a little harder. There are things worse than death, as some dying people will tell you - people like my father, who suffered so long from Lou Gehrig's disease and whose wish for assisted suicide was a longing for deliverance. That reality needs to inform our death penalty debate. It's the matter of methods that has just stayed California's hand from executing death row inmate Michael Morales. The lethal injections the state began using 10 years ago this month may not be entirely pain-free, and now the bar has been set higher still: Is any pain at all unconstitutionally inhumane? We've gone through this before, ever since the founding fathers put quill to parchment with that line about "cruel and unusual." Hanging was regarded as more humane than beheading; the electric chair more humane than hanging; the gas chamber more humane than the electric chair; and now it's the needle that's merciful. I'll take death penalty advocates at their word: They aren't looking for pain; they say they just want to mete out the ultimate penalty for murderers. They're fond of that phrase, "ultimate penalty." But by whose reckoning is death the "ultimate penalty"? Why are the advocates so eager for these reviled killers to get an easy exit? A couple of shots, bada boom, bada bing, and good night, sweet prisoner. If it's real, lasting punishment they want to inflict, not just a fleeting twinge right before the Big Sleep, take as an example a sentence passed on a drunk driver. On a New Year's Eve 25 years ago, a 17-year-old Virginian smashed his car into a smaller one driven by a young woman and killed her. It happened on a Friday; his victim was 18 years old; and his sentence was this: He was to make public confession of his crime again and again, to audiences of young people like him. And, every Friday for the next 18 years, he had to make out a check in the dead girl's name for a dollar - one single dollar - and send it to her parents. Less than $1,000 all told, but it had to be paid one dollar at a time. He stopped after 6 years because, he said, "it just hurt too much to continue." He offered to make out a dozen years' worth of checks all at once. The family wouldn't hear of it. The sentence, they said, was meant to guarantee that he "never forgets that he killed our daughter." This young man wasn't even behind bars, and he found his punishment to be too painful. Suffering is dispensed in every size and style. The physical suffering that moved Oregon to change its law. The emotional suffering that moves men and women to suicide. The suffering of an enslaved mind or body - the nation's bold, bring-it-on Cold War mantra was "better dead than Red." To death penalty boosters eager to throw the switch, pull the trapdoor, push the plunger on the syringe - I'm calling your bluff. If your point is to give the killer a taste of some of the torment he dished out, can't you use a little imagination? The death penalty is meant to be delivered swiftly - the fact that it isn't is one of its advocates' chief gripes about the process. But the author of "Dangerous Liaisons" remarked memorably nearly 200 years ago that revenge is a dish best served cold. A swiftly delivered death sentence is like fast food compared to the protracted punishments that could be ordered up for killers. Make their victims' ghosts their cellmates. Hang their victims' pictures on the cell walls. Make the perps remember birthdays, anniversaries. The symmetry of 2 deaths - victim and killer - is gratifying, but somehow it makes the victim disappear when the killer does. You'll know you have inflicted real punishment when you hear that some San Quentin lifer has filed the first petition requesting execution because the prospect of decades more of such a penance is a living death more painful to bear than the real thing. (source: Los Angeles Times - PATT MORRISON) ******************** A long way from the gallows? THE Oscar-nominated "Capote," which revolves around a protagonist sliding deeper and deeper into the mire of moral relativity, includes a jarring scene of an April 1965 execution in Kansas. >From the dank, cavernous setting to the ushering of the condemned killer up the stairs to the waiting noose -- to the hard thunk that presages the body's final spasms of life -- it's almost hard to imagine such state-sanctioned barbarity occurred in a civilized society in modern times. Today, only the states of Washington, Delaware and New Hampshire still allow hanging as a method of execution. Lethal injection is now the process of choice for the vast majority of states with capital punishment. Electrocutions and firing squads remain on the books as options in just a handful of states. In 1996, California switched to lethal injection as the preferred method after the federal judges ruled that the gas chamber -- with its potential to produce several minutes of suffering -- amounted to constitutionally proscribed "cruel and unusual" punishment. The legal dispute that stopped Tuesday's scheduled execution of Michael Morales has once again forced Californians to confront the ultimate issue of moral relativity: Is there a humane way to kill another human being? How much suffering can the state inflict and still regard its killing as morally distinct from the violence of the heinous criminals whose lives are being taken? Lethal injection was supposed to assuage those tugs of conscience for advocates of capital punishment. At first, California conducted the "procedure" behind a closed curtain, pulling it back after the inmate's breathing stopped. Lethal injection was supposed to be an antiseptic, fast and painless way to die. But the will to live in human beings -- even of the most despicable, who have every reason to be absorbed in guilt and self-pity -- is not so easily extinguished. Eyewitnesses to the December execution of Stanley Tookie Williams described his frustration as technicians poked around for a vein -- "You guys doing that right?" he asked -- and how his chest heaved as the lethal doses worked to stop his breathing and halt his heart. The legal fight over the execution of Morales took the concept of lethal injection from the soothingly theoretical to the disturbing nitty-gritty of how to kill. A federal judge insisted that it be done "right" -- meaning that licensed professionals would have to be on hand, and the injection would have to be made up close and personal. 2 anesthesiologists ended up balking at the prospect that they might have to intervene if Morales regained consciousness while the state was trying to kill him. The California Medical Association, seeing the ethical quandary of helping a state refine its killing technique, plans to sponsor legislation to prohibit doctors' participation in executions. For medical ethicists, the proper argument is not the moral relativity of a method of killing, but of the core morality of the act of killing. (source: Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle) ILLINOIS: Sheriff defends role in Manning case Lake County Sheriff Gary Del Re this week said his former department did nothing wrong in pursuing kidnapping and murder charges against a former Chicago police officer in the 1980s. Steven Manning, who was sentenced to death and spent 14 years in prison before his exoneration in 2004, filed a federal complaint last week against former Buffalo Grove detective Robert Quid and Del Re, Quid's supervisor at the time. Manning alleges that Quid and Del Re worked with FBI agents to falsify evidence against him during kidnapping and murder investigations that took place in the late 1980s. Last year, Manning sued FBI agents Gary Miller and Robert Buchan on similar allegations and won a multimillion-dollar decision. Del Re, who was head of detectives for Buffalo Grove at the time, said he recalls the case because of the magnitude of the investigation but said he remembered it only involving "good, solid police work." "In my term with the Buffalo Grove Police Department, which was 21 years, it was one of the most professional and well-managed law enforcement agencies in the region," Del Re said. "To suggest that there were any improprieties or mismanagement of the Manning case was simply not true." Manning, a former Chicago police officer, was convicted of insurance fraud in the early 1980s and later retained as an informant for the FBI to gather evidence about an interstate theft ring. According to Mike Kanovitz, Manning's attorney, Buffalo Grove police began investigating Manning after the 1986 murder of Thomas McKillip, whose body was found inside a truck near the intersection of Buffalo Grove and Dundee roads. While investigated the murder, Del Re and Quid helped the FBI gather evidence against Manning in relation to a 1984 kidnapping in Missouri. Manning was never charged with the McKillip murder, but he was charged and convicted for the Missouri kidnapping and later the 1990 murder of Des Plaines trucking firm owner James Pellegrino. After spending 14 years in prison, including 6 years on Illinois death row, the murder and kidnapping convictions were overturned in 2000 and 2004, respectively. (source: Pioneer Press) *************** Hanover Park Man Faces Possible Death Sentence----Reeves Convicted Of Davoodi's Rape, Murder A Hanover Park man convicted of raping and murdering 14-year-old Nassim Davoodi could be sentenced Thursday. Prosecutors are seeking a death sentence for Turner Reeves III. Reeves and his friend, Skyler Chambers, were found guilty of the brutal 2002 murder that Assistant State's Attorney Steve Rosenblum called "pure evil." Court records indicate that Reeves and Chambers lured Davoodi into a car at Bartlett High School on May 31, 2002, then drove her to Reeves' Hanover Park townhouse. According to The Chicago Tribune, the two men sexually assaulted the high school freshman in the back seat of the car as it was parked in the garage of the Reeves home, then smothered and suffocated her with 2 plastic-covered pillows. Reeves' relatives were in court to plead for his life, saying he is a family man who is close to his parents and plays a significant role in his 4-year-old daughter's life. Reeves has been in jail since his arrest 3 years ago. Davoodi's parents addressed the court on Wednesday, the Tribune reported, saying that their family has been destroyed by their daughter's rape and murder. "Our lives will never be the same again," said the victim's mother, Juanita Davoodi. "No one has the right to take her life away." (source: NBC News) NEVADA: Nevada high court rejects another appeal from supermarket slayer A man who got multiple death sentences for the random shotgun slayings of four Las Vegas supermarket employees in June 1999 has lost another Nevada Supreme Court appeal. Zane Floyd raised the issue of inflammatory rhetoric by the prosecution during the penalty phase of his trial, arguing that his attorney was ineffective for not objecting to the remarks. In rejecting Floyd's appeal, justices pointed out prosecution comments that were "misleading or excessively intemperate and derogatory," but added there's no "reasonable probability" that a defense objection to the remarks would have prevented a death sentence. Floyd phoned an outcall service, and raped a woman sent by the service to his apartment about two hours before the shootings. A former Marine, he then put on camouflage clothing and told the woman he was going out and would kill the first people he saw. He walked to a supermarket less than a mile from his home, gunned down the victims and then surrendered to police. Jurors found Floyd guilty of 4 counts of 1st-degree murder, 1 count of attempted murder, burglary, kidnapping and sexual assault. He got 4 death sentences for the murders and the maximum terms for the other crimes, and was ordered to pay $180,000 in restitution. The Supreme Court ruling last Thursday follows a 2002 high court decision - also involving inflammatory prosecutorial comments during the trial - that went against Floyd. In that decision, justices said the remarks were harmless given the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. (source: Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 21) OKLAHOMA: Inmates sue to halt lethal injections Oklahoma was the first state to mandate executions by lethal injection, but it is just one of many facing challenges to how it puts condemned inmates to death. Death penalty in Oklahoma The current death penalty law was enacted in 1977 by the Oklahoma Legislature. The method to carry out the execution is by lethal injection. The original death penalty law in Oklahoma called for executions to be carried out by electrocution. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the death penalty as it was then administered. Oklahoma has executed 159 men and 3 women between 1915 and 2005 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. 82 were executed by electrocution, one by hanging (a federal prisoner) and 79 by lethal injection. The last execution by electrocution took place in 1966. The 1st execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma occurred Sept. 10, 1990, when Charles Troy Coleman, convicted in 1979 of 1st-degree murder in Muskogee County, was executed. Execution process Method of execution: Lethal injection. Drugs used: Sodium thiopental causes unconsciousness. Vecuronium bromide stops respiration. Potassium chloride stops heart. 2 intravenous lines are inserted, one in each arm. The drugs are injected by hand held syringes sequentially into the intravenous lines, alternating between the 2 lines. The sequence is in the order that the drugs are listed above. Saline also is injected after each drug is injected. 3 executioners are utilized, with each injecting one of the drugs. Other states Lethal injection originally was proposed as a means of execution in 1888 in New York, but the state chose electrocution instead. In 1977, Oklahoma became the 1st state to adopt lethal-injection legislation. 5 years later, Texas performed the 1st execution by lethal injection. Of the 38 states that have a death penalty, 34 use lethal injection as the primary form of execution. Nebraska uses electrocution. The federal government and the military also use lethal injection. In 2004, according to the Department of Justice, 59 people were executed in the United States, and all but one of those died by lethal injection. The number of states authorizing lethal injection increased from 27 in 1994 to 37 in 2004. (sources: Oklahoma Department of Corrections & The Oklahoman)
