[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, GA., USA, OHIO

[Rick Halperin]

June 2



TEXAS:

Feds investigate Austin police----Justice Department to review use of
force


The U.S. Department of Justice is launching an investigation into the use
of force by Austin police officers, city officials announced late Friday.

The investigation will include a review of how officers are trained, how
incidents are documented and meetings with community leaders, Austin city
officials said.

City Manager Toby Futrell, Acting Police Chief Cathy Ellison and other
city leaders announced the inquiry  which comes nearly three years after
the Austin chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a federal
complaint  in an evening news conference and said they would cooperate
fully.

A letter to the city from the Justice Department said, "In conducting the
investigation, we are obliged to determine whether APD is systemically
violating the Constitution of the United States."

City officials said the investigation could begin next month and take 1 to
3 years to complete. Officials are expected to meet with federal
investigators in coming days to learn more about the specifics of the
inquiry.

"We welcome an outside, objective review of our department," Futrell said.

Ellison said: "Bring it on. We have nothing to hide. We are an open
department, and we are one of the best police departments in this
country."

Futrell said the first phase will include a review of policies and
practices, but not particular use-of-force incidents. Investigators will
determine whether they want to review specific arrests.

The Justice Department letter said that if the agency finds civil rights
violations, it will recommend remedial measures and provide assistance in
making improvements. The inquiry is not criminal in nature.

Nelson Linder, president of the Austin NAACP, said he fears the inquiry is
too late.

"These were very serious cases back then involving the use of force,"
Linder said. "I suppose it's better late than never, but a federal review
would have been more relevant at that time. Today, it might not have the
same impact."

Linder said taking three years to launch the investigation and possibly 3
more years to complete it is "unacceptable," and federal authorities need
to move faster to assure victims' rights.

The inquiry will likely reinvigorate a years-long debate about how Austin
police officers use force against minorities.

The NAACP and Texas Civil Rights Project complaint was triggered, in part,
by a series of American-Statesman articles in 2004 revealing that from
1998 to 2003, police were twice as likely to use force against blacks as
against whites and 25 percent more likely to use force against Hispanics
than against whites.

During that time, all but one of the 11 people who were killed by police
officers were minorities.

The groups added to their complaint in February 2005 after several
officers and dispatchers exchanged computer messages that included "burn
baby, burn" during a fire at the Midtown Live nightclub, which catered to
African American patrons.

Futrell and former Police Chief Stan Knee co-signed a letter to the
justice department a month later saying they also welcome an outside
review.

Futrell said she is unsure why the agency has decided to investigate now.

The investigation comes as the city is working to hire a new police chief,
who is expected to be named by the end of the month. Ellison is 1 of 5
finalists. Futrell said she doesn't think the investigation will impact
the search, and said if any of the candidates are discouraged by the
review, "then they probably aren't the candidate we need right now."

Futrell said city and department leaders in recent years have been working
to improve the department and to restore community trust.

They expanded the time that rookie officers must ride with more veteran
officers from 8 to 12 weeks and hired an executive research team to
evaluate the department's training programs, she said.

Officials also have installed video cameras in all patrol cars and updated
a policy that now requires that all traffic and pedestrian stops be
recorded.

"We've done everything to innovate and change in our department," Futrell
said.

Ellison and Austin Police Sgt. Jim Beck, president of the Austin Police
Association, said officers will continue to combat crime and meet with the
community during the investigation.

"Officers are used to audits and task forces," Beck said. "They are used
to scrutiny and see the value of it."

(source: Austin American-Statesman)

****************

Investigator saw the unusual and infamous----Larry Dehnert recalls
highlights from nearly 34 years in DA's office


It was one of the more unusual assignments Larry Dehnert was ever handed
by a Harris County prosecutor.

"Go find me some Pixy Stix so we can use them in court," Dehnert, 57,
recalled earlier this week, while closing out his almost 34-year career as
an investigator in the District Attorney's Office.

They needed the plastic tubes filled with powdered candy to show jurors in
the 1974 case against Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who was accused of fatally
feeding his 8-year-old son cyanide-laced Halloween treats in an insurance
scheme.

The city was in a panic after young Timothy O'Bryan's death at the hands
of the mysterious Candy Man. Supermarkets were yanking candy off the
shelves.

"When this thing first broke, they didn't know it was the father that did
it," Dehnert said. "I got a lot of strange looks walking into stores,
saying, 'You got any Pixy Stix?' You could just see the blood start
draining out of their faces."

He eventually tracked down some Pixy Stix at a store in Bellaire, near the
optometrist shop where O'Bryan worked.

"I found them probably in the same place where he bought them," Dehnert
said.

The jurors were stunned, Dehnert said, when the prosecutor dramatically
pulled the plastic tube from his trousers to show how easily O'Bryan could
have sneaked the candy into his Deer Park home without being detected.

"You could hear their jaws dropping," Dehnert said. "It worked very well."

The jury took about an hour to convict O'Bryan and only slightly longer to
hand down a death sentence.

Dehnert joined the District Attorney's Office in March 1974 and eventually
became an assistant chief investigator.

Called irreplaceable

The final 7 to 8 years of his career were spent in the juvenile division,
where he was known for his streetwise investigating instincts.

He had so many contacts in law enforcement and the general community, he
could find witnesses while sitting at his desk faster than others working
the streets for hours, said Harris County Assistant District Attorney Bill
Hawkins, chief of the juvenile division.

Dehnert will be hard to replace, Hawkins added.

"He was an old-school cop who was full of common sense and experience,"
Hawkins said. "He was a real treasure. It didn't matter what kind of case
you were on, Larry was always a big plus to have on it."

District attorney investigators are licensed law enforcement officers.
Much of their work consists of following up on cases initiated by police
detectives. They help prosecutors prepare their cases  everything from
securing crime scene photographs and autopsy reports to rounding up
witnesses.

"Every time the rent comes due, our witnesses are moving and we've got to
go find them," said Dehnert, who has worked under three Harris County
district attorneys.

'Unknown investigator'

When his bosses became worried that someone might try to harm a star
witness in what was arguably the most notorious murder in modern Houston
Dr. John Hill's slaying in 1972  they put Dehnert in charge of protecting
her.

Dehnert kept the witness in a room, under an assumed name, at a downtown
high-rise hotel. Among those keen on talking to her was the late author
Thomas Thompson, who chronicled the story in his book Blood and Money.

Dehnert turned down the author's interview request.

"I'm sitting in a hotel room with a 12-gauge shotgun across my lap,
watching the door and expecting somebody to kick it in at any minute," he
said. "I'm not going to let someone come in there and interview her. ...
That's probably the reason why I'm the 'unknown investigator' in that
book."

(source: Houston Chronicle)






GEORGIA:

Georgia on My Mind


William Mayo has been wrongfully imprisoned in Georgia for 15 years now,
having received two life sentences plus 40 years (I guess that was just in
case he is reincarnated) for a crime he did not commit, a crime committed
by 2 young men who have since told the courts that William had nothing to
do with the crime.

One of the two has been released, having done the "short" time he was
given for committing the crime of, hold on to your hat, ROBBERY! That's
right, robbery. No one was hurt, stolen articles were recovered, and
William, implicated by intimidation of the 2 young men by the prosecutor,
is paying dearly for it. As Ray Charles said, "Georgia, Oh Georgia!"

It didn't matter that Mayo had never been in trouble before; it didn't
matter that he was just a few hours from getting his degree from
Morehouse; it didn't matter that William Mayo was a positive role model
and mentor for young men, in the act of helping the 2 young men who did
the crime; and it didn't matter that he was a church-going, law-abiding
citizen prior to being dragged into the abyss in which he now finds
himself.

In June 2005 I attended Mayo's court hearing. At least that's what they
called it. And I wrote an article titled, 'New Jack Slavery', after
watching a racist judge make very short work of Mayo's attempt to present
evidence to prove his innocence. He was not even allowed to speak at his
own hearing. Talk about a travesty of justice, that Georgia Judge
displayed it that day.

So Georgia has been on my mind lately, not only because of William Mayo,
but also because of other cases I have seen. The vegan parents whose child
died of malnutrition were given life sentences for murder. LIFE? C'mon,
Georgia. Sure they should be punished, but LIFE?

What kind of state do you Georgians live in? Or is this the kind of
punishment reserved strictly for Black folks, like the 7 years given to
Shaquanda Cotton in Paris, Texas, for shoving a hall monitor?

Georgia is on my mind because of its lack of fairness and its blatant
disregard for even a modicum of compassion for William Mayo, Jade Sanders,
and Lamont Thomas. Even if William did commit robbery, don't you think 15
years is enough? He can't even get a fair hearing to review his case.
Sanders and Thomas loved their child, I am sure, and although they were
misguided and uninformed in the diet they fed the child, I don't believe
they intended to murder the baby. Someone ought to get their sentence
reduced. Is there no common sense in Georgia courtrooms?

The state that boasts the likes of MLK, Maynard Jackson, Cynthia McKinney,
John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, and many more strong Black folks cannot seem to
get it right and fair when it comes to its Black population, which is the
1st or 2nd largest Black population of all the states. 2 life sentences
for robbery, and life for the unintentional death of a baby by his
parents. That's why Georgia is on my mind.

Here are the questions: If a Black man can get double-life plus 40 years
for robbery and a couple can get life for the unintentional death of their
baby, what is the penalty for premeditated murder?

What's the penalty for shooting a 92 year-old Black woman?

What's the penalty for a cop murdering Kenneth Walker? What's the penalty
for beating Paul Johnson to death in a police holding cell? What is the
penalty for mass murder in Georgia? Triple-life plus 50 years?

Yes, Georgia is definitely on my mind; so much so that I would love to
find out why a state with so many Black political figures and influential
"leaders" such as Andrew Young, who defends Paul Wolfowitz but utters not
a word on behalf of William Mayo, can not effect change in Georgia's
ridiculous criminal "injustice system."

What good does it do for Black folks to occupy high political offices in
Georgia, especially in its Capital, Atlanta, and have such glowing
historical claim to being "civil rights" fighters and change agents?

What good is it if these folks do not assert themselves to bring justice
and fairness to a court system under which they and their children must
live?

There is no way anyone can look objectively at the Georgia system of
punishment and say it is equitable. That's not to say the same issues do
not exist in most other cities across this country, but right now, I have
Georgia on my mind.

About 45 years ago, Georgia was a place where only those Blacks who were
from there would travel. I didn't make my first trip to Georgia until
1970, scared of what I would encounter as I stopped at a gas station on
the outskirts of town.

It was the only time in my entire life that I carried a firearm (borrowed)
with me on a trip - or anywhere else for that matter. I was pleasantly
surprised when I pulled up to the gas pump and the White attendant said,
"May I help you, sir?" I exhaled at that point and have been to Georgia
too many times to count since then.

But even today, despite some Black people referring to Atlanta as the
Black "Mecca" and despite the positive changes in other parts of the
state, the criminal justice system imposed in Georgia is straight out of
the Dark Age, and Black folks must stand up against it and demand real
justice - for the innocent as well as for the guilty. Meanwhile, I pray I
never get accused of anything in Georgia. With my editorial reputation,
they would probably give me quadruple-life for speeding.

Free William Mayo, Georgia. Somebody do something for this young man,
please!

(source: Commentary; Chicago Defender----James E. Clingman, an adjunct
professor at the University of Cincinnati's African American Studies
department, is former editor of the Cincinnati Herald newspaper and
founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce)

************************

Public defender argues for funding increase


Colquitt County is growing and so is its crime, but the question now
before Colquitt County Board of Commissioners is whether to shoulder an
increase of more than $72,000 to fund the public defender's office, above
last year's funding of $268,178.

Public defenders are saying that the state is shirking its duty to fund
the indigent defense program and leaving it up to the good graces of
county governments to pick up the slack. Of course, there is another
alternative being considered: Not fulfilling the request.

"I understand what youre saying, but you're not going to make me feel bad
about us not spending enough money for law enforcement. We've spent
$8,709,908 last year for the enforcement of the law. Thats 44 percent of
our total budget. All of y'all are getting your fair share," County
Chairman Benny Alderman told Southern Circuit Public Defender J. Kent
Edwards.

"Mr. Chairman, I know that every tax dollar is important," Edwards said.
"Our problem is we have no control over the number of cases that are made,
so we just have to take the cases as they come in the door. ... If you
don't handle the cases, they just backlog into your county jail and just
sit there. And then the county is forced to build a bigger jail like weve
done in Lowndes County or you have to keep the cases moving, and it takes
staff ... to move the cases. With three attorneys, roughly that means each
attorney will be handling 500 cases. Theres no attorney in private
practice who handles 500 cases."

Of course, that's if Edwards gets enough funding to staff three assistant
public defenders. Currently, the Moultrie office has 1 full-time defender
and a defender who comes in half-time. The district attorney's office
wants 3 as well. The Moultrie DA's office now has 2 prosecutors, one fresh
from passing the Georgia bar.

"It's the fastest growing caseload we have in the whole 5-county circuit,"
Edwards said.

The number of indigent cases rose from 782 in 2005 to 1,033 in 2006.
Estimates from the first 4 months of 2007 suggest that 1,478 criminal
defendants will receive indigent representation by the end of the year, he
said.

The state set up a funding scheme to fund indigent defense to take the
expense off of county governments, Nolan Martin, deputy director of the
Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, explained to commissioners.
Funding was set up to come from the criminal defendants through fines and
criminal forfeitures  a user fee system to shift the burden off taxpayers.

Locally, Superior Court judges have attached a $500 fee for Southern
Circuit felony probationers represented through the public defender's
office. Misdemeanor probationers pay $250. That money flows directly back
into the county. Over time, that will build, Edwards said, and that will
help keep the expense off taxpayers.

At the state level, the picture isn't so rosy. The state fund is set to
collect $43 million this year, but state legislators funded the public
defender system the least its been funded since it began in 2005, $35
million, Martin said.

"What the legislators did with the other $8 million we can only guess," he
said, urging the commissioners to contact their legislators. "... This
isn't about money for us. It's about politics. Theres enough money there."

Funding has backslid from $47 million to $37 million to $35 million for
2008, he said. 2 weeks ago, 41 full-time jobs were cut from the Georgia's
public defender system, 14 of which were attorneys. The conflict office in
Valdosta had to be closed down along with others around the state.
Representation for indigents facing death penalty charges have been
revamped to take on more in-house rather than hiring attorneys in private
practice. Still with these drastic cuts, Martin said, the public defender
system will go over-budget.

Martin said the Senate is particularly tough on public defense.

Sen. John Bulloch, R-Ochlocknee, told The Observer that fines and
forfeitures collected from defendants arent exclusively funneled into the
public defender's system.

"There's other costs associated besides just a public defender," he said.

(source: Moultrie Observer)

************************

Judge says media can't even cover hearing?


In Tifton, Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey banned all media Friday from
covering the pre-trial hearings of a man accused of murdering 6 Hispanic
men and assaulting 4 others in 2005.

McCorvey wouldn't allow our camera or even our reporter inside the hearing
and he banned all people involved with Jamie Deamtrive Underwood's case
from talking to the media about any of the pre-trial hearings.

The judge also ordered all court transcripts remain sealed until after the
trial which is set to begin in August.

Underwood is facing the death penalty. His family gathered at the Tift
County Law Enforcement Center Friday.

Underwood and Stacey Sims are charged with brutal attacks that left 6
people dead in Tift County back in September 2005 and other crimes on a
Hispanic family in Colquitt county.

Underwood's attorney is asking for a change of venue and to restrict some
statements he made to police from appearing as evidence in court.

(source: WALB News)

*************************

A Murder Trial Gone Wrong: The Cruel Story of one Man's Destroyed Life


A conversation with author David Rose about a murder trial gone wrong and
what it tells us about the racial and economic bias in America's criminal
justice system today.

In 1986, Carlton Gary, a black man, was convicted of the 1979 rape and
strangulation murders of 7 elderly white women in the small but prosperous
(for some) town of Columbus, Ga. Some of these women had ties to an
exclusive group of wealthy and influential white families called The Big
Eddy Club. Since then, Gary has been sitting on death row. He now waits
for his final appeal.

Those initial crimes were horrific. But, the criminal justice system
failings that followed were equally deplorable: Forced to produce and
convict a killer, a frustrated and increasingly embarrassed set of local
law enforcers, detectives and prosecutors subjugated crucial defense funds
and evidence. Also eviscerated was the "due process" clause of the 14th
Amendment that states, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law."

With elegant prose and striking narrative, award-winning journalist David
Rose investigates the deprivation of that due process and recounts the
human and systemic toll of this crime within a crime in his book "The Big
Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice." The book is a
vivid and thoroughly captivating exploration of the American criminal
justice system. It is also impossible to put down.

"The Big Eddy Club" is as much about Gary's clash with the Southern
justice system as it is a condemnation of the system's racial and economic
bias -- a particularly cruel reality when it's not merely one's liberty,
but one's life, at risk.

Early in the book, British citizen Rose, points out that, unlike America,
his country abolished the death penalty, as did the rest of Europe. And
what started as a piece for the British newspaper the Observer on why
parts of America still find the death penalty so attractive became a
decade-long investigation of the stocking strangler case and the American
criminal justice system.

Rose doesn't come out and say whether he believes Gary is innocent or
guilty, but he lets a conglomeration of suppressed information, faulty
investigative methods, and the actions of seemingly biased law officials
tell its own story. Rose presents a glimpse into the heart of the American
capital punishment that is profoundly enraging and disturbing.

Against a backdrop of post-Civil War Southern history and with poetic
language and intricate details, Rose has penned a book as compelling as
any John Grisham novel or his nonfiction work "An Innocent Man," with the
haunting imagery of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Carlton Gary is by no
means presented as a pillar of virtue. But, it's about time we held our
justice system to a higher virtue than Rose's gripping book reveals.

Recently, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rose over coffee in New
York City and ask him questions about his amazing work and dedication to
it:

Nomi Prins: You mention in "The Big Eddy Club" that everyone asks you
whether you believe Carlton Gary is innocent or guilty, and you don't
answer them directly. Why?

David Rose: I look at the matter in terms of different question, and that
is, was Gary given a fair trial? The answer to that is no.

Were there times during this decade of investigation that you wanted to
just say, I can't do this anymore? What made you keep going?

After 9/11 nobody seemed interested in these issues. I know in England
they didn't like the death penalty -- but what mattered to me was getting
America to see this, particularly the people in Columbus, Ga. They had to
know. So the timing of publication is extraordinary. As we speak, it is
more fortuitous; Judge Land must decide whether to allow a new trial.
Since the book was written, Judge Land has already granted an evidentiary
hearing on Feb. 14, 2007. I think the bite cast (taken at one of the crime
scenes) and its comparison to Gary, excludes him to certainty beyond a
reasonable doubt. The bite cast taken from the victim showed small and
crooked teeth. Gary's are straight and always have been. He used to be a
model; his smile was part of his attractiveness. They compared the
original bite cast and Gary's impression last summer -- there were
significant differences between the two. The state hasn't challenge the
evidence, but they have said it's too late. The defense has argued that if
you consider the bite cast and other evidence, Gary should get a new
trial. The prosecution is arguing that the defense didn't exercise due
diligence at the time of the original trial in pressing the bite cast
issue (though, at the time of trial, defense counsel was not granted the
funds to conduct an independent examination. The state's trying to say
that if the prosecution was lying, the defense should have commented at
the time.

Will this new trial happen in your opinion?

I couldn't say, but now even if the judge doesn't go for it, and as a
Land, it would be an amazing act of courage on his part if he did, Gary's
got his best chance now. The judge could decide this week, or month. Now,
Gary has 2 good lawyers and more federal funding. Now he's well
represented and in a good place.

How has it been received in Columbus -- what was it like going back there
after having published "The Big Eddy Club"?

I knew I had to face Columbus, Ga., tell them why I wrote the book, and
hope they would listen. During my first evening there, 250 people showed
up at a reading I did at the public library. They showed respect.
Enthusiasm. Then, at the Barnes and Noble in Columbus, they had to give
out tickets; there were so many people in line. Before that reading, I had
been warned that there might be people there who would harass me, but they
kept their mouths shut. The audience was very fair. Maybe that will be
enough to show the judge that he won't suffer in the public opinion arena
if he decides to grant a new trial. Maybe, it will encourage him to do the
right thing.

When did you last see Carlton Gary?

I saw him last fall, over a year ago. But the prison guards really screwed
around with me. It was October. A really hot day. They had me sit there
for two hours, no shade, nothing to drink. When I finally got into the
prison, it was after 3 p.m. (visitations end at 4 p.m.). Gary had just had
hemorrhoid surgery. He was moving slowly. There was barely enough time to
get to his cell. He was very disappointed.

Was that kind of hostile treatment indicative of other visits you made to
Gary over the course of the seven years you were investigating this case?

At one of my past prison visits, a guard came out and told me, "Gary
doesn't want to see you." I said, "I'm sure he does, can you just check?"
Then, this man towered in front of me, nose to nose and said, "I think you
should go now." It turns out Gary was never even notified of my visit.

How did you deal with that kind of intimidation throughout your visits?

Coping with intimidation was not a problem. I'd spent time investigating
stories in prisons in the U.K. Smuggling out Gary's semen was a bit
nerve-wracking, though. I went in with all the appropriate materials. As
I'm leaving, I'm trying to look as calm as possible. My heart's beating.
I'm exiting through all eight security checks, thinking what if they
caught me. But I finally made it to my car, got on the Interstate and
drove off.

And, as you mention in your book, Assistant Attorney General Susan Boleyn
decided not to allow this new evidence, despite the fact that the sample
you took would have indicated an inconclusive match to the original sample
taken from the crime scene?

For 20 years, Susan Boleyn (who represented the state) has done nothing
but try to put men to death. She's a part of a group referred to as the
"death squad." Her argument, as with other pieces of evidences, was that
even if the serology conclusively proved that someone else raped the
victims, Carlton Gary would still be guilty of murder. It's a hard
situation. Under current laws, once the state rejects evidence, the
federal courts can't readdress it. This is because of Bill Clinton's
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. That act is the
single most unjust measure enacted in the field of death penalty evidence
in the United States.

Why this obsession to suppress new evidence that could lead to
exoneration?

It goes to the top of the system. Chief Justice Roberts in the Supreme
Court, for example, has shown himself to be unwilling to accept the fact
that the system has convicted innocent people. They tie themselves into
mutual knots to justify wrong convictions here. The court of appeals in
the U.K., though not perfect, is not that bad. The procedural restrictions
are much less restrictive. There, under a clause of "if justice requires,"
it is easier to introduce new evidence that could point toward a different
decision. Here, it is much harder, particularly because of that 1996 act.

What did you find to be the most overwhelming reason for the continued
existence of the death penalty in America?

The most significant fact is regional. Although other states like
California have death rows, they don't have as many executions, yet 80
percent of all executions take place in the former Confederacy, Texas
being far ahead of the rest. There's at a deep level, this sense of the
death penalty as a way of dealing with issues of race in the South being
played out. There, the death penalty serves the same functions as lynching
once did. It supposedly helps give the community in which the murder took
place a sense of "closure." Plus, in a kind of white supremacist
mentality, an egregious crime must invoke an egregious form of punishment.
The death penalty has been one of a set of accommodations for the South
since the Civil War. The federal government ignored the Jim Crow
segregations rulings as did the Supreme Court. It's as if it has decided
that the region is too tricky -- one should let them do what they want.

One of the major requests from original defense counsel, Bud Siemon, was
for more funding with which to engage in appropriate investigations of his
own, a request that was repeatedly denied by the judge. Can you discuss
how that impacted this case, and more generally, similar cases?

If you're a poor defendant, black or white, charged with a capital crime,
justice is like a closing steel trap. They (the prosecuting side) just
don't go away. In the U.K., the prosecutors looked at new evidence in the
case of the Guildford Four, experienced a sense of horror and decided to
let them go. Here, judges and district attorneys are elected or appointed.
Some are partisan and concerned about keeping their positions, hence the
conflict of interest between the individual in front of them versus the
collective that votes for them, particularly in the South. Yet, the
overall cost of death penalty appeal, the average legal costs from
conviction to execution is approximately $2.5 million.

Do you think American will ever abolish the death penalty?

The due process and evidentiary clause in America went backwards with the
Clinton Act, but there's been some progress on the evolving standards of
decency component of the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court amended the
execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded. One justice even cited a
Human Rights Watch report on mentally retarded prisoners at the time. It's
encouraging that international human rights opinions are finding their way
into the U.S. criminal justice system. Also, there's growing concern over
the use of the method of death by lethal injection, based on questions of
whether it causes pain. There's a greater degree of humanity in play, even
though procedural restrictions are still overly restrictive. Thirty-eight
states have the death penalty. But, New York has effectively abolished it
(the New York death statute was declared unconstitutional in 2004), and
states like New Jersey are leading towards abolishing it, so there's hope.

(source: Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos
and author of "Other People's Money" and "Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are
Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not; AlterNet)"






USA:

Lethal care ---- Capital punishment in the US these days is invariably
carried out by injection, often administered by a medical professional.
But what makes doctors and nurses, trained to save lives, get involved?
Atul Gawande, an American surgeon, asked them


Doctor A and his family have lived in their small town for 30 years. He is
well respected. Almost everyone of local standing comes to see him as
their primary-care physician - the bankers, his fellow doctors, the mayor.
Among his patients is the warden of the maximum-security prison that
happens to be in his town. One day, several years ago, the two of them got
talking during an appointment. The warden complained of difficulties
staffing the prison clinic and asked Dr A if he would be willing to see
prisoners there occasionally. Dr A said he would.

Then, a year or 2 later, the warden asked him for help with a different
problem. The state had the death penalty, and the legislature had voted to
use lethal injection exclusively. The executions were to be carried out in
the warden's prison. He needed doctors, he said. Would Dr A help? He would
not have to deliver the lethal injection. He would just help with cardiac
monitoring.

'My wife didn't like it,' Dr A told me. But he felt torn. 'I knew
something about the past of these killers.' One of them had killed a
mother of three during a convenience-store robbery and then, while getting
away, shot a man who was standing at his car pumping gas. Another convict
had kidnapped, raped and strangled to death an 11-year-old girl. 'I do not
have a very strong conviction about the death penalty, but I don't feel
anything negative about it for such people either. The execution order was
given legally by the court. And morally, if you think about the animal
behaviour of some of these people...' Ultimately, he decided to
participate, he said, because he was only helping with monitoring, because
he was needed by the warden and his community, because the sentence was
society's order and because the punishment did not seem wrong.

At the first execution, he was instructed to stand behind a curtain
watching the inmate's heart rhythm on a cardiac monitor. Neither the
witnesses on the other side of the glass nor the prisoner could see him. A
technician placed two IV lines. Someone he could not see pushed the three
drugs, one right after another. Watching the monitor, he saw the normal
rhythm slow, then the waveforms widen. He recognised the tall peaks of
potassium toxicity, followed by the fine spikes of ventricular
fibrillation and finally the flat, unwavering line of an asystolic cardiac
arrest. He waited half a minute, then signalled to another physician, who
went out before the witnesses to place his stethoscope on the prisoner's
chest. The doctor listened for 30 seconds and then told the warden the
inmate was dead. Half an hour later, Dr A was released. He made his way
through a side door, past the crowd gathered outside, to his parked car
and headed home.

In three subsequent executions there were difficulties, though, all with
finding a vein for an IV. The prisoners were either obese or past
intravenous drug users, or both. The technicians would stick and stick
and, after half an hour, give up. This was a possibility the warden had
not prepared for. Dr A had placed numerous lines. Could he give it a try?

OK, Dr A decided. Let me take a look.

This was a turning point, though he didn't recognise it at the time. He
was there to help, they had a problem and so he would help. It did not
occur to him to do otherwise.

In two of the prisoners, he told me, he found a good vein and placed the
IV. In one, however, he could not find a vein. All eyes were on him. He
felt responsible for the situation. The prisoner was calm. Dr A remembered
the prisoner saying to him, almost to comfort him, 'No, they can never get
the vein.' The doctor decided to place a central line, an intravenous line
that goes directly into the chest. People scrambled to find a kit.

He opened the kit for the triple-lumen catheter and explained to the
prisoner everything he was going to do. I asked him if he was afraid of
the prisoner. 'No,' he said. The man was perfectly co-operative. Dr A put
on sterile gloves, gown and mask. He swabbed the man's skin with
antiseptic.

Why? I asked.

'Habit,' he said. He injected local anaesthetic. He punctured the vein
with one stick. He checked to make sure he had a good, non-pulsatile flow
of venous blood coming out. He threaded a guide wire through the needle, a
dilator over the guide wire and finally slid the catheter in. All went
smoothly. He flushed the lines with saline, secured the catheter to the
skin and put a clean dressing on, just as he always does. Then he went
back behind the curtain to monitor the lethal injection.

Certainly, all boundary lines had been crossed. He had agreed to take part
in the executions simply to watch a monitor, but just by being present, by
having expertise, he had opened himself to being called on to do steadily
more, to take responsibility for the execution itself. Perhaps he was not
the executioner. But he was damn close to it.

Execution has become a medical procedure in the US. That fact has forced a
few doctors and nurses, asked to participate in executions, to have to
choose between the ethical codes of their professions and the desires of
broader society. There are vital but sometimes murky differences between
acting skilfully, acting lawfully and acting ethically.

On February 14, 2006, a United States district court issued an
unprecedented ruling concerning the California execution by lethal
injection of the murderer Michael Morales. The ruling ordered the state to
have a physician, specifically an anaesthetist, personally supervise the
execution or else to drastically change the standard protocol for lethal
injections. Under that protocol, the anaesthetic sodium thiopental is
given in massive doses that are expected to stop breathing and extinguish
consciousness within one minute of administration; then the paralytic
agent pancuronium is given, followed by a fatal dose of potassium
chloride.

The judge found, however, that evidence from execution logs showed that
six of the previous eight prisoners executed in California had not stopped
breathing before technicians gave the paralytic agent; the findings raised
a serious possibility that the prisoners had experienced suffocation from
the paralytic, a feeling much like being buried alive, and felt intense
pain from the potassium bolus. This experience would be unacceptable under
the US constitution's Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and
unusual punishment. So the judge ordered the state to have an anaesthetist
present in the death chamber to determine when the prisoner was
unconscious enough for the2nd and 3rd injections to be given - or to have
a general physician supervise an execution performed with sodium
thiopental alone.

The California Medical Association, the American Medical Association (AMA)
and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) immediately opposed
such physician participation as a clear violation of their medical ethics
codes. 'Physicians are healers, not executioners,' the ASA's president
said. The execution was then postponed (Morales remains on death row), but
federal courts have since continued to require that medical professionals
assist with the administration of any execution by lethal injection.

The Morales ruling is the culmination of a steady evolution in methods of
execution in the United States. On July 2, 1976, in deciding the case of
Gregg v Georgia, the Supreme Court legalised capital punishment after a
decade-long moratorium on executions. Executions resumed six months later,
on January 17, 1977, in Utah, with the death by firing squad of Gary
Gilmore for the killing of Ben Bushnell, a motel manager.

Death by firing squad, however, came to be regarded as a method too bloody
and uncontrolled. (Gilmore's heart, for example, did not stop until two
minutes after he was shot, and shooters have sometimes weakened at the
trigger, as famously happened in 1951 in Utah when the five riflemen fired
away from the target over Elisio Mares's heart, only to hit his right
chest and cause him to bleed slowly to death.)

Hanging came to be regarded as even more inhumane. Under the best of
circumstances, the cervical spine is broken at the 2nd vertebra, the
diaphragm is paralysed and the prisoner suffocates to death, a
minutes-long process.

Gas chambers proved no better: asphyxiation from cyanide gas, which
prevents cells from using oxygen by inactivating a vital enzyme known as
cytochrome oxidase, took even longer than death by hanging, and the public
revolted at the vision of suffocating prisoners fighting for air and then
seizing as the ability to use oxygen shut down. In Arizona in 1992, for
example, the asphyxiation of triple murderer Donald Harding took 11
minutes, and the sight was so horrifying that reporters began crying, the
attorney general vomited and the prison warden announced he would resign
if forced to conduct another such execution. Since 1976, only two
prisoners have been executed by firing squad, three by hanging and 11 by
gas chamber.

Many more executions, 74 of the first 100 after Gregg and 153 in all, were
by electrocution, which was thought to cause a swifter death. But the
electrical flow frequently arced, cooking flesh and sometimes igniting
prisoners - postmortem examinations often had to be delayed for the bodies
to cool - and yet in the case of some prisoners, it took repeated jolts to
kill them. In Alabama in 1979, John Louis Evans III was still alive after
2 cycles of 2,600 volts; the warden called Governor George Wallace, who
told him to keep going, and only after a 3rd cycle, with witnesses
screaming in the gallery, and almost 20 minutes of suffering, did Evans
finally die. Only Florida, Virginia and Alabama persisted with
electrocutions with any frequency, and under threat of Supreme Court
review they too abandoned the method.

Lethal injection now appears to be the sole method of execution accepted
by courts as humane enough to satisfy Eighth Amendment requirements -
largely because it medicalises the process. The prisoner is laid supine on
a hospital gurney. A white bedsheet is drawn to his chest. An intravenous
line flows into his arm. Under the protocol devised in 1977 by Dr Stanley
Deutsch, the chairman of anaesthetics at the University of Oklahoma,
prisoners are first given 2,500 to 5,000mg of sodium thiopental (5 to 10
times the recommended maximum for therapeutic use), which can produce
death all by itself by causing complete cessation of the brain's
electrical activity, followed by respiratory arrest and circulatory
collapse. Death, however, can take 15 minutes or longer with thiopental
alone, and the prisoner may appear to gasp, struggle or convulse. So 60 to
100mg of pancuronium (10 times the usual dose) is injected one minute or
so after the thiopental to paralyse the muscles. Finally 120 to 240
milliequivalents of potassium is given to produce rapid cardiac arrest.

Officials liked this method. Because it borrowed from established
anaesthesia techniques, it made execution more like familiar medical
procedures than the grisly, backlash-inducing spectacle it had become. (In
Missouri executions were even moved to a prison-hospital procedure room.)
The drugs were cheap and routinely available. (Cyanide gas and 30,000-watt
electrical generators, by comparison, were awfully hard to find.) And
officials could turn to doctors and nurses to help with technical
difficulties, attest to the painlessness and trustworthiness of the
technique and lend a more professional air to the proceedings.

But in 1980, when the 1st execution was planned using Deutsch's technique,
the AMA passed a -resolution against physician participation as a
violation of core medical ethics. The resolution was quite general. It did
not address, for example, whether pronouncing death at the scene -
something doctors had done at previous executions - was acceptable or not.
So the AMA further clarified the ban in its 1992 Code of Medical Ethics.
Article 2.06 states, 'A physician, as a member of a profession dedicated
to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a
participant in a legally authorised execution,' although a physician's
opinion about capital punishment remains 'the personal moral decision of
the individual'.

advertisementIt stipulates that unacceptable participation includes
prescribing or administering medications as part of the execution
procedure, monitoring vital signs, rendering technical advice, selecting
injection sites, starting or supervising placement of intravenous lines or
simply being present as a physician. Pronouncing death is also considered
unaccept-able, because the physician is not permitted to revive the
prisoner if he is found to be alive. Only 2 actions are acceptable:
provision at the prisoner's request of a sedative to calm anxiety
beforehand and signing a death certificate after another person has
pronounced death.

Today all 38 death-penalty states rely on lethal injection. Of 1,045
murderers executed since 1976, 876 were executed by injection. Against
vigorous opposition from the AMA and state medical societies, 35 of the 38
states allow physician participation in executions. Indeed, 17 require it.
To protect participating physicians from licence challenges for violating
ethics codes, states commonly promise anonymity and provide legal immunity
from such challenges. None the less, despite the promised anonymity,
several states have produced the physicians in court to vouch publicly for
the legitimacy and painlessness of the procedure. And despite the
immunity, several physicians have faced licence challenges, though none
has lost as yet.

[MY NOTE----Nebraska's only method of execution is via electrocution, not
lethal injection]

States have affirmed that physicians and nurses - including those who are
prison employees - have a right to refuse to participate in any way in
executions. Yet they have found physicians and nurses who are willing to
participate. Why do these -people do it?

It is not easy to find answers. Among the 15 medical professionals I was
able to locate who have helped with executions, only five agreed to speak
with me. None was a zealot for the death penalty, and none had a simple
explanation for why they did this work.

Dr A has helped with about eight executions in his state. I asked him
whether he had known that his actions violated the AMA's ethics code. 'I
never had any inkling,' he said. The humaneness of a lethal injection Dr A
was involved in was challenged in court, however. The state summoned him
for a public deposition on the process, including the particulars of the
execution in which the prisoner required a central line. His local
newspaper printed the story. Word spread through his town. Not long after,
he arrived at work to find a sign pasted to his clinic door reading 'the
killer doctor'. A challenge to his medical licence was filed with the
state. If he wasn't aware earlier that there was an ethical issue at
stake, he was now.

Ninety per cent of his patients supported him, he said, and the state
medical board upheld his licence under a law that defined participation in
executions as acceptable activity for a physician. But he decided that he
wanted no part of the controversy any more and quit. He still defends what
he did. Had he known of the AMA's position, though, 'I never would have
gotten involved,' he said.

Dr B spoke to me between clinic appointments. He is a family physician,
and he has participated in some 30 executions. He became involved long
ago, when electrocution was the primary method, and then continued through
the transition to lethal injections. He remains a participant to this day.
Dr B, too, had first been approached by a patient. 'One of my patients was
a prison investigator,' he said. 'I never quite understood his role, but
he was an intermediary between the state and the inmates. He was hired to
monitor whether the state was taking care of them. They had the first 2
executions after the death penalty was reinstated, and there was a problem
with the 2nd one, where the physicians were going in a minute or so after
the event and still hearing heartbeats. The 2 physicians were doing this
out of courtesy, because the facility was in their area. But the case
unnerved them to the point that they quit. The officials had a lot of
trouble finding another doctor after that. So that was when my patient
talked to me.'

Dr B did not really want to get involved. He was in his forties. He'd gone
to a top medical school. He'd protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
'I've gone from radical hippie to middle-class American over the years,'
he said. 'I wasn't on any band-wagons any more.' But his patient said the
team needed a physician only to pronounce death. Dr B had no personal
objection to capital punishment. So in the moment - 'it was a quick
judgement' - he agreed, 'but only to do the pronouncement'.

The execution was a few days later by electric chair. It was an awful
sight, he said. 'They say an electrocution is not an issue. But when
someone comes up out of that chair 6 inches, it's not for nothing.' He
waited a long while before going out to the prisoner. When he did, he
performed a systematic examination. He checked for a carotid pulse. He
listened to the man's heart 3 times. He looked for a pupil response with
his penlight. Only then did he pronounce the man dead.

He thought harder about whether to stay involved after that, and drew
thicker boundaries around his participation. During the first lethal
injections, he and another physician 'were in the room when they were
giving the drugs,' he said. 'We could see the telemetry [the cardiac
monitor]. We could see a lot of things. But I had them remove us from that
area. I said, I do not want any access to the monitor or the EKGs
[electrocardiograms]... A couple of times they asked me about
recommendations in cases in which there were venous access problems. I
said, "No. I'm not going to assist in any way." They would ask about
amounts of medicines. They had problems getting the medicines. But I said
I had no interest in getting involved in any of that.'

Dr B kept himself at some remove from the execution process, but he would
be the first to admit that his is not an ethically pristine position. When
he refused to provide additional assistance, the execution team simply
found others who would.

'I agonise over the ethics of this every time they call me to go down
there,' he said. His wife knew about his involvement from early on, but he
could not bring himself to tell his children until they were grown. He has
let almost no one else know. Even his medical staff is unaware.

The trouble is not that the lethal injections seem cruel to him. 'Mostly,
they are very peaceful,' he said. The agonising comes instead from his
doubts about whether anything is accomplished. 'The whole system doesn't
seem right,' he told me. 'I see more and more executions, and I really
wonder... It just seems like the justice system is going down a dead-end
street. I can't say that [lethal injection] lessens the incidence of
anything. The real depressing thing is that if you don't get to these
people before the age of three or four or five, it's not going to make any
difference in what they do. I don't see [executions] as saying anything
about that.'

The medical people most wary of speaking to me were those who worked as
full-time employees in state prison systems. None the less, a nurse, who
had worked in a prison out west, agreed to talk.

Nurse C had fought as a marine in Vietnam. As an army reservist, he served
with a surgical unit in Bosnia and in Iraq. He worked for many years on
critical-care units and, for almost a decade, as nurse manager for a busy
emergency department. He then took a job as the nurse in charge for his
state penitentiary, where he helped with one execution by lethal
injection.

It was the state's first execution by this method, and 'at the time, there
was great naivety about it,' he said. 'No one in that state had any idea
what was involved.' The warden had a protocol from Texas and thought it
looked pretty simple. What did he need medical personnel for? The warden
told the nurse that he would start the IVs himself, though he had never
started one before.

'Are you, as a doctor, going to let this person stab the inmate for half
an hour because of his inexperience?' Nurse C asked me. 'I wasn't.' He
said, 'I had no qualms. If this is to be done correctly, if it is to be
done at all, then I am the person to do it.'

This is not to say that he felt easy about it, - however. 'As a marine and
as a nurse, I hope I will never become someone who has no problem taking
another person's life.' But society had decided the punishment and had
done so carefully with multiple judicial reviews, he said. The convict had
killed 4 people even while in prison. He had arranged for an accomplice to
blow up the home of a county attorney he was angry with while the
attorney, his wife and their child were inside. The nurse did not disagree
with the final judgment that this man should be put to death, and took his
involvement seriously. 'As the leader of the healthcare team,' he said,
'it was my responsibility to make sure that everything was done in a way
that was professional and respectful to the inmate as a human being.' He
spoke to an official at the state nursing board about the process, and
although involvement is against nursing's ethics code, the board said that
under state law he was permitted to do everything except push the drugs.

On the day of the execution, the nurse dressed as if for an operation, in
scrubs, mask, hat, gown and gloves. He explained to the prisoner exactly
what was going to happen. He placed two IVs and taped them down. The
warden read the final order to the prisoner and allowed him his last
words. 'He didn't say anything about his guilt or his innocence,' the
nurse said. 'He just said that the execution made all of us involved
killers just like him.'

I have personally been in favour of the death penalty. I was a senior
official in the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and in the
administration, and in that role I defended the president's stance in
support of capital punishment. I have no illusions that the death penalty
deters anyone from murder. I also have great concern about the ability of
our justice system to avoid putting someone innocent to death. However, I
believe there are some human beings who do such evil as to deserve to die.
I am not troubled that Timothy McVeigh was executed for the 168 people he
killed in the Oklahoma City bombing or that John Wayne Gacy was for
committing 33 murders.

Still, I hadn't thought much about exactly how the executions are done.
And I have always instinctively regarded involvement in executions by
physicians and nurses as wrong. The public has granted us extraordinary
and exclusive dispensation to administer drugs to people, to cut them
open, to do what would otherwise be considered assault, because we do so
on their behalf - to save their lives and provide them comfort. To have
the state take control of these skills for its purposes against a human
being - for punishment - seems a dangerous perversion.

My conversations with the physicians and the nurse I tracked down,
however, rattled both these views - and no conversation more so than one I
had with the final doctor I spoke to. Dr D is a 45-year-old emergency
physician. He is also a volunteer medical director for a shelter for
abused children. He opposes the death penalty because he regards it as
inhumane, immoral and pointless. And he has participated in six executions
so far.

About a decade ago a new jail was built down the street from the hospital
where he worked, and it had a large infirmary, 'the size of our whole
emergency room'. The jail needed a doctor. So, out of curiosity as much as
anything, Dr D began working there. 'I found that I loved it,' he said.
'Jails are an under-served niche of healthcare.' Jails, he pointed out,
are different from prisons in that they house people who are arrested and
awaiting trial. Most are housed only a few hours to days and then
released. 'The substance abuse and noncompliance is high. The people have
a wide variety of medical needs. It is a fascinating population. The
setting is very similar to the ER. You can make a tremendous impact on
people and on public health.' Over time, he shifted more and more of his
work to the jail system. He built a medical group for the jails in his
area and soon became an advocate for correctional medicine.

Three years ago the doctors who had been involved in executions in his
state pulled out. Officials asked Dr D if he would take the contract.
Before answering he went to observe an execution. 'It was a very emotional
experience for me,' he said. 'I was shocked to witness something like
this.' He had opposed the death penalty since college, and nothing he saw
made him feel any differently. But at the same time he felt there were
needs that he as a correctional physician could serve.

He read about the ethics of participating. He knew about the AMA's stance
against it. Yet he also felt an obligation not to abandon inmates in their
dying moments. 'We, as doctors, are not the ones deciding the fate of this
individual,' he said. 'The way I saw it, this is an end-of-life issue,
just as with any other terminal disease. It just happens that it involves
a legal process instead of a medical process. When we have a patient who
can no longer survive his illness, we as physicians must ensure he has
comfort. [A death-penalty] patient is no different from a patient dying of
cancer - except his cancer is a court order.' Dr D said he has 'the cure
for this cancer' - abolition of the death penalty - but 'if the people and
the government won't let you provide it, and a patient then dies, are you
not going to comfort him?'

His group took the contract, and he has been part of the medical team for
each execution since. The doctors are available to help if there are
difficulties with IV access, and Dr D considers it their task to ensure
that the prisoner is without pain or suffering through the process. He
himself provides the cardiac monitoring and the final determination of
death. Watching the changes on the two-line EKG tracing, 'I keep having
that reflex as an ER doctor, wanting to treat that rhythm,' he said. Aside
from that, his main reaction is to be sad for everyone involved - the
prisoner whose life has led to this, the victims, the prison officials,
the doctors. The team's payment is substantial - $18,000 - but he donates
his portion to the children's shelter where he volunteers.

Three weeks after speaking to me, he told me to go ahead and use his name.
It is Carlo Musso. He helps with executions in Georgia. He didn't want to
seem as if he were hiding anything, he said. He didn't want to invite
trouble either. But activists have already challenged his licence and his
membership in the AMA, and he is resigned to the fight. 'It just seems
wrong for us to walk away, to abdicate our responsibility to the
patients,' he said.

There is little doubt that lethal injection can be painless and peaceful,
but as the courts have -recognised, ensuring that it is requires
significant medical assistance and judgement - for placement of
intravenous lines, monitoring of consciousness and adjustments in
medication timing and dosage. How, then, to reconcile the conflict between
government efforts to provide a medical presence and our ethical
principles forbidding it? Are our ethics what should change?

The doctors' and nurse's arguments for competence and comfort in the
execution process certainly have force and they gave me pause. But however
much these practitioners may wish to comfort a patient, it ultimately
seems clear that the inmate is not really their patient. Unlike genuine
patients, an inmate has no ability to refuse the physician's 'care' -
indeed, the inmate and his family are not even permitted to know the
physician's identity. And the medical assistance provided primarily serves
the government's purposes - not the inmate's needs as a patient. Medicine
is being made an instrument of punishment. The hand of comfort that more
gently places the IV, more carefully times the bolus of potassium, is also
the hand of death. We cannot escape this truth.

This truth is what convinces me that we should stand with the ethics code
and legally ban the participation of physicians and nurses in executions.
And if it turns out that executions cannot then be performed without, as
the courts put it, 'unconstitutional pain and cruelty', the death penalty
should be abolished.

(source: This is an edited extract from 'Better: A Surgeon's Notes on
Performance' by Atul Gawande (Profile Books), available for $11.99 plus
1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0870-428 4112; books.telegraph.co.uk; The
(UK) Telegraph)






OHIO:

Decision could affect Biros execution


Local prosecutors and the family of Tami Engstrom are hopeful that a
ruling Friday from a federal appellate court in Cincinnati could help pave
the way for the execution of Kenneth Biros, who was convicted of
Engstrom's murder.

Judges with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to given an
review of how long death row inmates have to file appeals that challenge
Ohios use of lethal injection.

The federal appellate judges let stand an earlier ruling by a 3-judge
panel of the court that said an inmates appeal was filed too late.

The lawsuit was filed in 2004 by Richard Cooey, who was sentenced to die
for raping and killing 2 University of Akron students in 1986. It did not
seek to reverse Cooeys conviction or sentence, but argued the state's use
of lethal injection is inhumane.

Biros, who first was sentenced to die of lethal injection in January and
then given a 2nd execution date in March, joined the Cooey suit later.
Other death row inmates also had joined the Cooey suit.

"Hopefully Biros gets dismissed from this suit and it allows something
that should have happened in January and then in March to go forward,"
said LuWayne Annos, assistant Trumbull County prosecutor who handles
appellate cases.

Engstrom's sister, Debbie Heiss of Hubbard, called it another good sign.
"TGIF. It will make for a great weekend," Heiss said, pointing out that
she spoke with prosecutors who had worked against Biros in the federal
courts.

"They pointed out that (if Biros is excluded from the suit), he still has
a chance to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they're due to be on
vacation until October, so there will be a wait," Heiss said.

The latest ruling is not expected to have an immediate effect on
executions in Ohio.

The Ohio Public Defender's Office said it will now seek an appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court.

"We believe these issues are strong enough to merit the U.S. Supreme
Court's time and attention," said Greg Meyers, the chief counsel to the
Ohio Public Defender. Meyers said an appeal would be filed as soon as
possible.

If the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a challenge to the statute of
limitations in filing appeals, it would open the door to an evidentiary
hearing on the merits of the inmates' claim that Ohio's method of lethal
injection is cruel and unusual punishment that amounts to torture.

The Ohio Attorney Generals Office contends that Cooey did not file his
motion within the 2-year statute of limitations. Defense attorneys argued
the state miscalculated the start date for triggering an appeal.

Biros joined the suit only after he was given an execution date.

Biros, 48, was convicted in the 1991 slaying, mutilation and dismemberment
of 22-year-old Engstrom of Brookfield after he had offered to drive her
home from a bar. Parts of Engstrom's body were found scattered across 2
Pennsylvania counties and in the trunk of Biros' car.

A parole board Jan. 4 unanimously recommended the death penalty for Biros
after Trumbull Prosecutor Dennis Watkins argued against clemency at a
hearing.

Heiss and other family members waited more than 6 hours March 20 until the
U.S. Supreme Court made it clear it wouldn't lift a stay that was in place
on the execution.

(source: Tribune-Chronicle)