[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----FLA., PENN., USA, VER.

[Rick Halperin]

June 16


FLORIDA:

Don't wait for court to say it's cruel


According to credible scientific evidence, Florida's method of lethal
injection may inflict severe, gratuitous pain. If that is proven in court,
the 3-drug cocktail that the state uses to execute prisoners will be set
aside.

But why wait for a court's decision? There is sufficient evidence of a
problem to prompt the state to redesign its protocol for lethal injection.

The manner in which the state executes humans has been prohibited for use
on pets because the drugs used may inadvertently hide the excruciating
suffering of the animal as it dies. That should be basis enough for the
state to come up with a better method.

This question is not just academic. The U.S. Supreme Court this week gave
Florida death row inmate Clarence Hill the green light to challenge the
constitutionality of the state's lethal injection regimen. While we do not
support the death penalty no matter how it is carried out, Hill did murder
a police officer in Pensacola in 1982 during a bank robbery. He will be
facing the executioner. The only outstanding issue in his case, which is
now before a lower federal court, is whether Florida's method is
unconstitutionally cruel. Florida should not wait for a court to rule that
it is.

(source: Editorial, St. Petersburg Times)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Former girlfriend admits murder


Tall and blond, with a degree in engineering and a prestigious career in
the insurance industry on her resume, Heather Lavelle doesn't fit the mold
of a killer.

But now that she's pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the grisly
torture slaying of Christian Rojas, she's poised to take her place in one
of Pennsylvania's state penitentiaries, possibly on death row.

That choice will be up to Bucks County Judge Rea Boylan. The judge
accepted Lavelle's guilty plea Friday, one day after Lavelle's
co-defendant entered his own plea. Both will be sentenced next week,
following penalty phase hearings in Doylestown.

"Looking at what evidence the commonwealth had available, we feel this is
the best way to proceed," said Lavelle's attorney, Mark Douple.

Lavelle, 35, of Bensalem, admitted that she killed Rojas, 28, on Aug. 24.

She acknowledged police reports that said she and her boyfriend, James
Savage, 39, of Bristol Township, ambushed Rojas in his Bristol Road,
Bensalem, apartment then beat him to death with brass knuckles.

Rojas, a computer programmer and native of Costa Rica, was found hog-tied
in a bathtub filled with bloody water. Lavelle and Savage were arrested on
Sept. 1 after leading police on a chase all the way to Nags Head, N.C.

At his guilty plea hearing Thursday, Savage said he attacked Rojas,
Lavelle's former boyfriend, because Lavelle claimed he'd raped her.

Savage, who had agreed to testify against Lavelle had she gone to trial,
said he knows Lavelle lied and that she plotted the murder so she could
steal Rojas' money to buy crack cocaine.

At her sentencing hearing next week, Lavelle's attorneys, Douple and
Michael Goodwin, will argue numerous mitigating factors in an effort to
convince Boylan to spare her life.

The attorneys will present evidence that Savage bullied Lavelle and that
she was not in her usual state of mind at the time of the killing because
she was high on crack in addition to a turbulent childhood and long
history of substance addiction. The defense also plans to tell Boylan
about the good things Lavelle has done in her life and her desire to
change.

Lavelle, who holds a degree in civil engineering, was a rising star in the
insurance world, working as an assistant vice president with Ace Casualty
Risk in downtown Philadelphia before she became addicted to crack.

An October 2002 press release announcing Lavelle's promotion in the
company's new environmental risk division proclaimed: "Lavelle brings to
ACE 10 years of experience in environmental underwriting and product
management."

Douple said that if Boylan imposes a life sentence instead of capital
punishment, Lavelle will use her time in prison wisely.

"It is her hope that she will be able to educate people about the things
she went through so that they won't take the tragic turn she did," he
said.

If Boylan sentences Lavelle to death, she will be the first Bucks County
judge to do so since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977. Lavelle
will also become the first Bucks woman on Pennsylvania's death row.

Lavelle did not testify during the hearing and refused to answer questions
as she was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and shackles.

A family friend, who asked that she not be identified, said after the
hearing that Rojas was a "sweet" man who tried to help Lavelle. Even after
he ended their relationship because he found out Lavelle used drugs, he
still cared about her and even allowed her to live at his apartment when
she found herself homeless.

Prosecutors played voice mail messages left on Rojas' phone in the weeks
before the slaying. In one series of calls Lavelle could be heard crying,
begging Rojas in a highpitched tone to please pick up the phone because
she needed his help.

A message left a week later was starkly different.

"Christian. Call me the (expletive) back NOW," Lavelle demanded in a cold,
deep voice.

The family friend said Rojas was days away from accepting his "dream job,"
a position with an American company that was setting up shop in Costa
Rica, when he was murdered.

"He just wanted to go home. He was homesick," she said.

(source : Bucks County Courier Times)






USA:

The End of Innocence


EARLIER this week, the Supreme Court decided, in a 5-to-3 opinion, that a
Tennessee prison inmate named Paul G. House was entitled to prove he did
not commit the crime for which he was sent to death row. On the same day,
I received a letter from Centurion Ministries, which argued for more than
a decade that a Virginia man named Roger K. Coleman had not committed the
crime for which he was executed in 1992. The letter admitted that
Centurion had been wrong.

These cases have something in common: they pivot on the question of
innocence. For too many years now, though, death penalty opponents have
seized on the nightmare of executing an innocent man as a tactic to erode
support for capital punishment in America.

Innocence is a distraction. Most people on death row are like Roger
Coleman, not Paul House, which is to say that most people on death row did
what the state said they did. But that does not mean they should be
executed.

Focusing on innocence forces abolitionists into silence when a cause clbre
turns out to be guilty. When the DNA testing ordered by Gov. Mark Warner
of Virginia proved that Mr. Coleman was a murderer, and a good liar
besides, abolitionists wrung their hands about how to respond. They seemed
sorry that he had been guilty after all.

I, too, am a death penalty opponent, but I was happy to learn that Mr.
Coleman was a murderer. I was happy that the prosecutors would not have to
live with the guilt of knowing that they sent an innocent man to death
row.

The day before the DNA results were reported in the Coleman case last
January, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Paul House case. In
Mr. House's case, the DNA testing has already been done, and it tends to
suggest that he is indeed innocent. During oral arguments, however,
Justice Antonin Scalia (who was one of the three dissenters when the court
decided the case this week) argued that disputes over factual findings in
a case can't be endlessly rehashed.

He is certainly right about that. As Justice Scalia has said elsewhere, of
course we are going to execute innocent people if we have the death
penalty. The criminal justice system is made up of human beings, and
fallible beings make mistakes.

But perhaps that is a price society is willing to pay. If the death
penalty is worth having, it might still be worth having, despite the
occasional loss of innocent life. Paul House might be innocent, but how
long will we keep death row inmates alive, waiting to find out?

In Mr. Coleman's case, the Virginia Supreme Court did not address the
arguments that he had raised in his appeal, because his lawyer had filed
the papers one day late. When the case got to the United States Supreme
Court, the court, in an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, began its
analysis by saying, "This is a case about federalism."

The case did have something to do with the relationship between the
Supreme Court and Virginia's highest court. But is that what the case was
really about? Mr. Coleman was saying that his trial lawyer had been
incompetent, and that the Virginia courts were refusing to address the
question of whether his trial lawyer had been incompetent because his
appellate lawyer had filed the appeal a day late.

Federalism might be a plot line in this story, but it hardly seems to be
the major issue. When the Supreme Court brushed aside Mr. Coleman's appeal
15 years ago, the justices said that a death row inmate cannot complain
when his lawyer misses a filing deadline, because the lawyer is the agent
of the client, and clients are responsible for the failings of their
agents.

As a result of this syllogism, my client Johnny Joe Martinez was executed
in 2002, because his court-appointed appellate lawyer neglected to file a
proper appeal  a mistake he freely admitted to, attributing it to
inexperience. When the Martinez case reached the federal courts, those
courts, invoking the Coleman decision, said too bad for Mr. Martinez; the
mistake of his lawyer was attributable to him. I could go on with other
examples.

Of the 50 or so death row inmates I have represented, I have serious
doubts about the guilt of 3 or 4  that is, 6 to 8 %, about what scholars
estimate to be the percentage of innocent people on death row.

In 98 % of the cases, however, in 49 out of 50, there were appalling
violations of legal principles: prosecutors struck jurors based on their
race; the police hid or manufactured evidence; prosecutors reached secret
deals with jailhouse snitches; lab analysts misrepresented forensic
results. Most of the cases do not involve bogus claims of innocence, like
the one that swirled for 15 years around Roger Coleman, but the government
corruption that the federal courts overlook so that the states can go
about their business of executing.

The House case will make it hard for abolitionists to shift their focus
from the question of innocence, but that is what they ought to do. They
ought to focus on the far more pervasive problem: that the machinery of
death in America is lawless, and in carrying out death sentences, we
violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

(source: Op-Ed; David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of
Houston, is the author of "Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on
America's Death Row."----New York Times)






VERMONT----federal death sentence

1st death sentence in Vermont in 50 years----State abandoned capital
punishment in the 1960s


A man convicted in the fatal beating of a grandmother as she prayed for
her life became the 1st person sentenced to death in Vermont in half a
century on Friday.

Donald Fell, 26, said what he did "was horrible and wrong" as he
apologized before U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III formally
sentenced him to die.

"I know the wounds will never heal," Fell said. "If it comes down to it in
the end that I do die, I understand that it's no less than what I deserve.
I truly am sorry."

Fell was found guilty of killing Terry King in Dover, New York, on
November 27, 2000, after she was abducted in Rutland as she arrived for
work at a supermaket.

Fell's lawyer, Alexander Bunin, said he would appeal the sentence and
thanked King's family for "the courtesy they have shown us."

The last time a death sentence was issued in Vermont the year was 1957.
The state abandoned the death penalty in the mid-1960s, although the law
remained on the books for another 20 years.

Vermont still does not have a state death penalty; federal prosecutors
brought the charges against Fell because the killers had crossed state
lines for a carjacking that results in a death.

Since his conviction, Fell has been held at the federal prison in Ray
Brook, New York.

Prosecutors have asked Sessions to order that Fell be executed at the
federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, the site of the federal
Bureau of Prisons' death chamber.

King was 53 when she was abducted outside a supermarket by Fell and his
co-defendant, Robert Lee. The 2 had just killed Fell's mother and her
friend after a night of heavy drinking in a Rutland apartment.

In a confession played at his trial, Fell said he killed King because she
could identify him and Lee. King prayed as she was beaten to death by the
side of a road.

Fell and Lee were arrested in Arkansas 3 days later.

Lee died in prison in September 2001. His death was ruled an accidental
hanging. Fell, a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was charged with 2
federal crimes, carjacking with death resulting and kidnapping with death
resulting.

Fell's attorneys didn't contest his guilt. Instead, they asked the jury to
spare his life because they said he grew up in a violent household with 2
alcoholic parents.

In court Friday, King's sister, Barbara Tuttle, criticized the judge, who
at one point in the case declared the death penalty unconstitutional but
was overturned on appeal.

"For almost 6 years this family has been held hostage by this court,"
Tuttle said.

Then she turned and spoke directly to Fell.

"There is no way you will ever comprehend what you did to this family,"
she said. "You are less than human. You have created a hole in my heart
that will never be filled."

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

Vt. to Have 1st Capital Trial in 50 Years


A man convicted of helping to fatally beat a grandmother as she prayed for
her life was formally sentenced to death Friday, Vermont's 1st death
sentence in almost half a century.

Donald Fell, 26, said what he did "was horrible and wrong" as he
apologized before U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III sentenced
him.

"I know the wounds will never heal," Fell said. "If it comes down to it in
the end that I do die, I understand that it's no less than what I deserve.
I truly am sorry."

Fell was sentenced nearly a year ago by the same jury that found him
guilty of killing Terry King in Dover, N.Y., after she was abducted as she
arrived for work.

The last death sentence in Vermont was issued in 1957. The state abandoned
the death penalty in the mid-1960s, although the law remained on the books
for another 20 years.

Vermont does not have a state death penalty, but federal prosecutors
brought charges under a U.S. law that allows the death penalty for a
carjacking that results in a death. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft
rejected a plea bargain that would have given Fell life in prison.

Since his conviction, Fell has been held at the federal prison in Ray
Brook, N.Y. Prosecutors have asked Sessions to order that Fell be executed
at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., the site of the federal
Bureau of Prisons' death chamber.

King was 53 when she was abducted outside the supermarket by Fell and his
co-defendant, Robert Lee. The two had just killed Fell's mother and a
friend of hers after a night of heavy drinking in a Rutland apartment.

In a confession played at his trial, Fell said he killed King because she
could identify him and Lee. King prayed as she was beaten to death on Nov.
27, 2000, by the side of the road.

Fell and Lee were arrested in Arkansas 3 days later.

Lee died in prison in September 2001. His death was ruled an accidental
hanging. But Fell, a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was charged with two
federal crimes, carjacking with death resulting and kidnapping with death
resulting.

Fell's attorneys didn't contest his guilt. Instead, they asked the jury to
spare his life because he grew up in a violent household with 2 alcoholic
parents.

(source: Associated Press)