[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----W. VA., LA., PENN.

[Rick Halperin]

May 28


WEST VIRGINIA:

Last prisoner executed in W.Va. murdered a Huntington woman


When Mrs. J. E. "Ruby" Miller drove into her driveway shortly before 11
a.m. on May 27, 1957, she didn't expect to find someone burglarizing her
fashionable home in Huntington's southeast hills. Hearing suspicious
noises coming from inside a bedroom, she armed herself with a shotgun and
proceeded to investigate the source of the sounds.

Front page headlines of May 28, 1957, state that a 39-year-old handyman
and paroled convict named Elmer David Bruner had confessed to the May 27
bludgeoning-style murder of 58-year-old Ruby Miller, wife of a prominent
contractor, who lived at 2021 Washington Blvd.

Bruner admitted to breaking into the Miller home after cutting a screen in
a window. He was ransacking a bedroom when he heard someone enter the
house, says an article. Bruner told law enforcement officials that he
opened the bedroom door and was confronted by Mrs. Miller holding a
shotgun. In his statement he said that "he wrested the gun from her and
'picked up something and began hitting her with it.' "

An article states that Miller was "brutally beaten with the claw end of a
hammer." Bruner had been sought in connection with an armed robbery and 2
burglaries. At the time he was apprehended following a telephone tip,
police were unaware of the Miller murder. When Bruner was arrested, he had
the keys to a car stolen from the Miller home.

Bruner was indicted for the murder of Ruby Miller and brought to trial the
week of June 28, 1957. After a trial before packed courtroom crowds, "an
all-male jury" found Bruner guilty of murder in the 1st degree without a
recommendation for mercy, making the death penalty mandatory, states an
article. It adds that he was sentenced to the electric chair at the West
Virginia Penitentiary on Aug. 21, 1957.

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld his conviction and
sentence. The final date for his execution was set for March 27, 1959, but
because this was Good Friday, Gov. Cecil Underwood moved it to April 3,
1959. Bruner has the distinction of being the last person to be executed
in West Virginia before the state abolished the death penalty in 1965.

(source: The Huntington Herald-Dispatch)






LOUISIANA:

Innocence Project overturns convictions without DNA help


Emily Maw, director of the New Orleans Innocence Project, opened the
drawer of a filing cabinet in her 2nd-floor office on Baronne Street.

"Look at all of them," Maw said as she opened a second drawer stuffed with
letters from prisoners. There were 2,500 letters, all asking for
assistance in proving innocence.

"Most of these people probably arent innocent. But maybe one in 15 is and
thats a big number," she said.

In its 6-year history the New Orleans Innocence Project, a nonprofit
dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, has secured the release
of 12 innocent men from prison, including 7 since Hurricane Katrina, who
served more than 200 years total for crimes they didnt commit.

As of April, 200 wrongfully convicted people nationwide have been
exonerated through DNA evidence, including 9 from Louisiana, giving the
state the fourth-highest wrongful conviction rate in the country,
according to the Innocence Project.

Maw said the state's poor performance is directly linked to its high
incarceration rate.

In 2005, Louisiana led the nation with 797 inmates per 100,000 people, 62
% higher than the national average of 491, according to the U.S.
Department of Justice.

Ineffective counsel and the suppression of evidence by the prosecution
also play a major role in wrongful convictions.

Kathleen Hawk Norman, chairwoman of the New Orleans Innocence Project, was
the forewoman on a jury that sentenced Dan Bright to death for 1st-degree
murder.

During the trial, Norman said Bright's attorney didnt present a defense.
But the jury took little notice.

"There is this weird circular logic that goes on in a jury room that is
shameful to me now," Norman said. "If there is no defense presented, that
must be because there is no defense. And if there is no defense, it must
be because the guy is guilty. It didn't occur to me at the time that the
system didn't work."

After Bright spent 8 years in Angola State Penitentiary, the Louisiana
Supreme Court ordered his release citing suppression of evidence by the
prosecution.

Defense attorney Barry Scheck co-founded the New York-based Innocence
Project to exonerate the wrongfully incarcerated through DNA evidence. The
New Orleans branch is one of the few in the country that takes on non-DNA
cases such as Bright's.

No other group is eager to touch these cases because it is incredibly hard
to prove innocence without "black-and-white" DNA evidence. Such cases can
take as long as 8 years to resolve, Maw said.

But the New Orleans group has a secret weapon.

"All of our cases are screened by 50 self-trained inmate counselors in
Angola," Maw said. "It's one of the reasons we've had such a great track
record. They are the best screeners we have and direct us straight to the
good non-DNA cases."

Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys
Association, said not everyone freed from death row is innocent. Some are
released due to legal errors or attorney wrongdoing during trial. He
cautions against overusing the term "exonerated."

"The overuse of the word 'exonerated' by people who are just blowing smoke
further delays justice for those people who really need the process, he
said. "If someone really didn't do it, they shouldn't have to wait in line
behind 10,000 people just trying to waste the court's time."

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

Wrongful convictions ripple through court system


(Hidden Innocence is a 3-part series spotlighting individuals who have
been wrongfully convicted, the reasons why and the impact on their lives.
Today's installment profiles one of the leading causes of wrongful
conviction - suppression of evidence.)

Dan Bright stood in the middle of Laussat Street in the Ninth Ward and
pointed to the spot where Murray Barnes was shot to death in 1995.

He walked across the street to Creola's Bar, now a flood-ravaged shell of
a building.

"And this is where he ran inside and collapsed," Bright said.

It was late afternoon and the sky was gray with storm clouds.

Bright pointed to a one-story brick apartment building two blocks down the
street and around the corner from Creola's. The windows and doors were
gone. There was nothing inside except scattered bottles and cracked mud
left over from the storm.

"That's where I was when the guy got shot," Bright said, and then he grew
quiet. "If there had been a stop sign or a red light, something that would
have made me five minutes latey. "It's like walking someone through my
worst nightmare."

An Orleans Parish jury convicted Bright, 26, of 1st-degree murder in 1996
for slaying Barnes and sentenced him to death.

8 years later, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered Bright's release and a
new trial because evidence suppressed at the time of trial included a
statement from a confidential FBI informant positively identifying the
real murderer as Tracey Davis. The state declined to retry Bright.

"I'm angry because nothing is being done. No one is taking any
responsibility for what they did to me," Bright said.

In April, DNA evidence helped exonerate the 200th person wrongfully
imprisoned in the United States. Louisiana has had 9 DNA exonerations, the
fourth-highest rate in the country, according to the Innocence Project, a
New York-based organization dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted
people through DNA evidence.

Emily Maw, director of the New Orleans Innocence Project, said Louisiana's
wrongful incarceration rate follows naturally with having the highest
incarceration rate in the world and a broken indigent defense system.

Bright, however, is not counted among these numbers because he has never
been fully exonerated. When the state declined to retry the case, it
robbed Bright of the opportunity to have the charges dismissed in a new
trial. Now he fears he will forever be labeled a murderer for a crime he
didn't commit.

"First thing and last thing anyone sees in me is death row," Bright said.

Innocence disputes

Bright and many others are products of Harry Connick's reign as Orleans
Parish district attorney, Maw said.

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a defendant's constitutional rights
are violated if the suppression of evidence denies a person a fair trial.
The landmark ruling arose from a trial overseen by Connick's office, in
which the suppression of evidence was ruled egregious by the Supreme
Court. "Suppression of evidence like in Dan's case is a legacy in New
Orleans," Maw said.

Connick was unavailable for comment.

Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys
Association, said there are not that many innocent people behind bars. "By
claiming there are thousands of people who didn't do it in prison, that's
cheapening the term 'exonerated' for the relatively few who might be
wrongfully incarcerated," Adams said.

Bright's trial took 2 days and ended with a death sentence.

"Everything was in a fog," Bright said. "It was going too fast for
something I didn't do."

Bright spent 5 years in Angola State Penitentiary on death row in a
coffin-sized cell for 23 hours out of every day.

After the courts commuted his sentence to life, Bright was thrown into a
dormitory populated by 72 hardened felons.

In his first 6 months in general population, Bright saw a man tied to a
bed, doused in oil and burned alive, and another whipped with a sock full
of padlocks.

And then they came after him.

One day Bright found himself in the shower threatened by a 6-foot-6,
300-pound inmate.

He had 2 choices - run and risk being labeled "easy prey" or fight back.
"Violence breeds violence," Bright said. "You have to become what the rest
of them are in order for you to stay alive. If you don't protect yourself
in Angola, every little fish in the sea is going to take a bite out of
you. So I whipped him with a bat."

Bright's self-defense earned 2 years in solitary confinement in a cell the
size of a bathroom with no television, radio, newspapers or human contact.
"There were 237 bricks in the walls, which were 10 paces apart," he said.
"Once you hit Angola you're as good as dead."

Unlikely alliance

While Bright was fighting for his life on the inside, he made a strange
ally on the outside - Kathleen Hawk Norman, the forewoman of Bright's jury
and one of the people responsible for sentencing him to death.

Norman said the responsibility of holding a man's life in her hands was a
terrible burden but she believed they had convicted a guilty man at the
time. Four years later, when she heard attorneys had discovered a
statement from an FBI agent identifying the real killer, she requested a
meeting with Judge Dennis Waldron, who presided over Bright's trial.

"After the judge heard my testimony, he said either I was confused or
misguided and showed me the door," Norman said. "These guys were
perpetrating a fraud on the public and let me sentence an innocent man to
death."

Norman devoted the next four years to securing Bright's release with
suppressed evidence that could have proven his innocence at the original
trial.

The Louisiana Supreme Court said the FBI failure to release the
informant's statement "cannot be tolerated in a society that makes a fair
and impartial trial a cornerstone of our liberty from government
misconduct."

Prosecutors also concealed the criminal history of Freddie Thompson, the
only witness to implicate Bright.

Of the first 130 DNA exonerations in the United States, 101 involved false
identification, according to the Innocence Project.

8 years after Bright entered Angola, the court ordered his release.

Losing faith

Bright has been a free man for more than 2 years but continues to
struggle. He can't get a loan to buy a house and can't land a steady job.
The children he left behind to be raised by his parents think of him as a
big brother instead of a father.

During his first year of freedom Bright said he filled a paper bag with
receipts to prove where he was at all times. If he went to a store he
would stand in front of the security camera to make sure it recorded his
face. "They weren't going to get me again."

But because his charges were never dismissed, he remains a legal target.

"When the cops pull me over and run my license, 'death row' pops up,"
Bright said. "It's not that I'm innocent. It's that I got out on a
technicality. One time the cops drew their guns on me, made me get out of
the car, put the cuffs on me and brought me down to the police station all
because death row is still on there. I thought, 'Here we go again.'"

Bright and Norman remain close friends but she said the experience
destroyed her faith in the justice system.

"Dan's sister Donna saw the guy who did the murder on the streets for
years after. She asked him how he could do this, let her brother be
executed, and he said, 'They don't have any evidence on him. No way he
goes down.'"

(source for both: New Orleans City Business)






PENNSYLVANIA:

Retrial Possible for Most Famous Black Inmate


The talents and skills of leading U.S. lawyers, pathologists, scientists
and independent criminal investigators are likely to be marshalled to save
the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal if he is granted a new trial -- and also to
highlight the role skin colour may play in U.S. death penalty convictions.

After nearly two decades of appeals, on May 17 a U.S. federal court of
appeals took its 1st step towards possibly ordering a new trial for
Abu-Jamal, one of the best-known among the country's 3,500 death row
inmates. The decision of the panel of judges is expected to take several
months in what has become one of the most controversial death penalty
cases of all times.

Robert Bryan, the lawyer leading the battle for Abu-Jamal's life over the
past 4 years, believes his client's case is very strong and that the
appeal judges may order a new trial. Now for the first time since
Abu-Jamal's conviction in 1982, the U.S. justice system is seriously
considering whether racial discrimination and political bias interfered
with Abu-Jamal's right to a fair trial.

"My goal is for him to go home to his family. That is the best of
outcomes," Bryan told IPS.

Abu-Jamal, an outspoken political activist as a young man and still today
from prison, was convicted by a nearly all-white jury in Philadelphia of
the murder of policeman Daniel Faulkner. Faulkner was killed after he
stopped a car driven by Abu-Jamal's brother in December 1981. Abu-Jamal
was said to have run from his taxi to the scene and was arrested.

The facts of the crime are disputed. Eyewitness accounts are
contradictory. Evidence is incomplete and has gone missing. Abu-Jamal was
wounded in the chest by a bullet. Abu-Jamal has always maintained his
innocence.

"The thread that runs through this case from the day Mumia was arrested
until today is racism. At the original trial, the jury only heard one side
of the coin. It was a comedy of errors. This case has never been properly
investigated," Bryan said.

At the appeals hearing, Bryan and others argued that Abu-Jamal's original
trial was unfair because blacks were intentionally excluded from the jury,
a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The final jury consisted of 10
whites and 2 blacks. The population of Philadelphia at the time was 40
percent African American.

"What matters is that African American citizens were denied their right to
participate in this important civic right and duty on the basis of race,"
Christina Swarns, a lawyer with the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People Legal Defence Fund, told IPS. "The
questions of fairness have been there since the time the jury was chosen.
Had the Pennsylvanian courts followed the law, this hearing would have
been held many, many years ago -- and should have been."

There were other problems with the 1982 trial, Bryan said. The prosecutor
misled the jury into believing that if they agreed to send Abu-Jamal to
death row, the chance of him actually being executed was low. And the
judge who presided over the trial, Albert Sabo, aimed a racial slur at the
young journalist during a recess in the trial, Bryan said.

Sabo also had a conflict of interest and should never have presided over
the trial, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, a member of the National Lawyer's Guild,
told IPS. He was an active member of the Fraternal Order of Police, a
powerful group that represents the interests of police and lobbies for the
death penalty in cases where police officers have been murdered.

"They have lobbied heavily for Mr. Abu-Jamal's execution," said Elijah,
also a professor at Harvard University. "Judge Sabo's involvement
indicated a conflict of interest and compromised his ability to be
objective."

According to reports elsewhere, Sabo, who died in 2002, was nicknamed "the
hanging judge". In a 14 year period, he presided over trials in which 31
defendants were sentenced to death, more than any other U.S. judge. 29 of
these came from ethnic minorities. While Abu-Jamal's lawyers used the
appeals court hearing to push for a new trial, prosecutors urged the
judges to re-affirm his death row conviction. Pennsylvania Governor Ed
Rendell has stated publicly that if the judges did this, he would order
Abu-Jamal's execution.

Rendell has a long-standing interest in Abu-Jamal's case. He was
Philadelphia district chief prosecutor in 1982, and it was his office and
his employees who prosecuted Abu-Jamal.

In the past the district prosecutor's office had been involved in a
pattern of discrimination in many cases, Bryan said. This included
presenting false evidence and getting witnesses to lie. He was optimistic
that the federal appeal judges would acknowledge this and allow Abu-Jamal
a new trial.

"My goal is to win this case," Bryan said. "We have a lot of new evidence.
If we can get a trial, it will be presented to the new jury. A lot of new
pathology, DNA and ballistics will be done. I have faith that 12 men and
women of the jury will let my client go home."

But Bryan would want to move the case out of Philadelphia. "There is so
much corruption and unfairness in the Philadelphia court system, it's hard
to imagine getting a fair trial," Bryan said.

Abu-Jamal, now 53, has won thousands of supporters around the world. "When
they put him on death row, they thought they would shut him down," Bryan
said. "Instead, Mumia has become an international symbol against the death
penalty."

His supporters include Hollywood celebrities, politicians and university
students. In St. Denis, France, a street is named after him.

At the appeals hearing, about 200 people packed the courtroom. Outside
about 500 people demonstrated on Abu-Jamal's behalf. Supporters came from
France, Germany and elsewhere.

(source: Inter Press Service)