Oct. 21 ARKANSAS: Attorney of Mexico allowed to aid defense A circuit judge will allow a lawyer from Mexico to advise defense attorneys in the trial of a Hispanic woman accused of killing her 3 children. Eleazar Paula Mendez, a Mexican national who was living in De Queen, faces 3 counts of capital murder. Authorities say she smothered 5-year-old twins, Samuel and Samantha Morales, and 8-year-old Elvis Morales. The children were found dead Jan. 28 in the family's home. Mendez' trial is scheduled to start Feb. 26. Circuit Judge Ted Capeheart of the 9 th-West Judicial District has said he will limit the role of a lawyer from Mexico to offering advice. "The counsel from Mexico may sit inside the bar and at the counsel table, and assist Ms. Mendez' lawyers. Mexico's attorney may not make objections, call witnesses, make arguments to the court, examine witnesses, cross-examine witnesses, or do anything else a trial lawyer would normally do at a trial," Capeheart said in a ruling filed Monday. "Further, Mexico's attorneys assistance must be with the concurrence of Ms. Mendez' attorney of record." The Mexican government will be represented in the legal procedures by Danalynn Recer from the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a Houstonbased charity for the defense of the indigent. Recer was retained by the Arkansas Public Defender Commission because of international treaties requiring the Mexican government to be represented in capital-murder cases. Mexico has no death penalty, and Mendez is a Mexican national. Conviction on a capital-murder charge carries a sentence of execution or life in prison without parole. Recer was given the option of being an attorney of record for Mendez, but she declined, Capeheart said. Mendez has been ruled mentally competent to assist in her own defense and to stand trial, according to a report from the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock. At the request of defense lawyers, an independent evaluation has been scheduled for Nov. 2. The start of her trial could be affected by the outcome of that evaluation. (source: Associated Press) FLORIDA----impending execution Supreme Court is last chance for Rolling A federal appellate court in Atlanta rejected serial killer Danny Rolling's appeal Friday to stay his execution, set for next week. Barring any new, last-minute claims, the decision leaves Rolling's attorneys looking to the U.S. Supreme Court to halt his death sentence. Rolling has been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Florida State Prison in Bradford County. Carolyn Snurkowski, assistant deputy attorney general for the state, said Friday she didn't know what options Rolling's attorneys would have. "His last remaining option is to request that the United States Supreme Court take the case. Barring something that would be out of the ordinary, I would expect the same result that was obtained in Rutherford," said State Attorney Bill Cervone in Gainesville. Rolling's appeal relied on the same failed claims made by death row inmate Arthur Rutherford. The handyman, convicted for the 1985 murder of a Milton woman, was executed earlier this week. The appeal had challenged chemicals used in lethal injections and cited an American Bar Association report on the death penalty process in Florida, saying it was newly discovered evidence showing lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. A former inmate who served prison time for robbery, Rolling was a suspect in a 1989 triple slaying in Louisiana. He was being held in Marion County for a robbery when he became a suspect in the slayings of five Gainesville college students. Killed were Christa Hoyt, 18, of Archer; Sonja Larson, 18, of Deerfield Beach; Tracy Paules, 23, of Miami; Christina Powell, 17, of Jacksonville; and Manuel Taboada, 23, of Miami. In 1994, Rolling pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing the 5 inside their off-campus apartments. 3 of the female students had been sexually assaulted. Some of the bodies had been mutilated. (source: Gainesville Sun) ************************ Florida not colorblind in capital cases The following is not a typo: The state of Florida has never executed a white convict for killing an African-American. I wish I could say the reason is that whites just aren't into bothering black people, but to do that I'd have to believe in the reality of the tooth fairy or the efficiency of FEMA. Instead, I'm left reeling from that particular statement and the way the death penalty is applied in Florida. A recently released assessment by the American Bar Association doesn't offer much encouragment, particularly when it comes to the subject of race. For the record, I don't have a position on whether or not the death penalty should be abolished. I firmly believe that it should be fairly and efficiently applied. Unfortunately, there's ample evidence that it's not. Since 1973, the state of Florida has led the nation in the number of death row inmates who have been exonerated. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of a well-run system. The report lists other problems, ranging from the lack of qualified attorneys to the number of Death Row inmates who have severe mental disabilities. Coping with the racial disparities, though, could be the one part of the process that offers an easy start toward a fix. Back in 1989, the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court created a commission to determine whether race or ethnicity affects the dispensation of justice and to develop strategies to end any biases found in the system. The commission specifically addressed race and capital punishment and concluded that the death penalty in Florida is not colorblind -- largely due to a finding that, all other things being equal, a defendant in a capital case is 3.4 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black. The panel looked at 2 solutions: end the judicial override of a jury recommendation for life imprisonment and increase efforts to addresss economic and social conditions that contribute to minority incarceration rates. In 2000, Gov. Jeb Bush revisited the issue by empaneling a task force to study racial discrimination in the sentencing of defendants in capital cases. That panel came up with a far different conclusion. It found that previous studies that showed the existence of bias were simply outdated and relied on flawed methodology. The Bush task force recommended that the Florida Legislature fund a major study on the subject and create an academic clearinghouse on race and the death penalty at Florida A&M University. Six years later, the recommendations have yet to be implemented. The death penalty remains an emotional issue, and the fact that state leaders have made so little effort in recent years to replace much of that emotion with hard facts and solid data borders on the immoral. The issue won't go away, particularly if Florida continues to be No. 1 in exonerating Death Row inmates who arguably shouldn't have been put there in the first place. The next governor and the Florida Legislature must address the problems in administering the death penalty, even if it's just the small step of collecting more accurate data about lingering racial disparities in capital punishment cases. (source: Opinion, Douglas C. Lyons, Sun Sentinel) ILLINOIS: 69 % in county believe Hobbs is guilty Prosecutors oppose motion to move trial Prosecutors sharply disagreed with the results and the impact on the trial, and opposed a motion by the Lake County Public Defender's Office to move the trial to another county. Lake County Circuit Court Judge Fred Foreman listened to their arguments Friday and reserved judgment for a ruling Nov. 6. Pollster Ronald McCullough said the poll has a margin of error of less than 5 %. He said 78 % of the 400 persons questioned said they were familiar with the case, 72 % had heard Hobbs had a criminal record, 53 % knew that Hobbs had confessed, and 40 % knew he had failed a lie detector test. 52 % felt Hobbs deserves the death penalty and 22 % believe he deserves life in prison, McCullough said. The persons completing the questionnaire were among 3,700 called. Keith Grant, chief of the felony trial division in the Public Defender's Office, blamed prosecutors for releasing "a blizzard of unprecedented press coverage by newspapers and television," and "tainting the juror pool" with information that wouldn't be admissible in a trial. He pointed to three boxes full of news clippings and news video tapes. "In another county, it will be easier to find unbiased jurors," Grant said. "That would be nearly impossible in Lake County. Hobbs must be given a fair trial, and the only way is to proceed to another county." Prosecutor Matthew Chancey disputed the poll, challenging the questions as leading and the results as being skewed toward significantly wrong characterizations. "The 3,600 that didn't respond more likely didn't have an opinion." Press coverage has not been unprecedented, Chancey said, citing the Alton Coleman murder trial and 9 other cases that were high profile. He blamed defense attorneys for much of the press coverage. "Just because a person heard about the case doesn't mean they can't be on the jury," Chancey said. Potential jurors are queried in "voire dire" about their ability to be fair and consider a defendant innocent until proven guilty. For the Coleman trial, jurors were picked in Rock Island County, but only after local media there got into coverage, "repeating everything" that had been in Lake County media, "in a concentrated manner." Chancey said before the motion for a change of venue should be considered, voire dire must be conducted in Lake County, and then only "when it becomes apparent we can't get a fair and impartial jury in Lake County." Grant also presented, with minimal discussion, motions to ban the death penalty and to have the case dismissed. (source: Suburban Chicago News) NORTH CAROLINA: Kim Crespi Interview In Charlotte, in her 1st television interview since her husband, David Crespi, murdered her 2 twin 5-year-old daughters, Kim Crespi sat down with News 14's Adam Shub for an exclusive interview. David Crespi pled guilty to 2 counts of 1st-degree murder in July. <>P> He said that he was depressed when he stabbed his 2 daughters. He has since been diagnosed as being bi-polar. Kim Crespi said that she felt that mental illness needs to be understood, and not punished. She was against the death penalty for her husband, something that was at odds with the opinions of many of her family members. "We don't want to watch another member of our family die unnecessarily," she said. Kim Crespi said that she still loves her husband, and that she visits and writes him often. "He is horrified by what he did," she said. "He doesn't understand why he did it." (source: News 14 Carolina) INDIANA: ND to host lecture series about the death penalty----1st event set for Wednesday. A student group at the University of Notre Dame will host a series of 5 lectures on capital punishment, with the first lecture scheduled for Wednesday. All the lectures, which are free and open to the public, will begin at 7:30 p.m. This Wednesday, Vittorio Hosle, a professor of philosophy and political science, will discuss basic theories of punishment, examining the arguments of the philosophical tradition for and against the justice and moral legitimacy of the death penalty. The event will be in the auditorium of the Hesburgh Center for International Studies. The lectures are sponsored by Notre Dame Against State Killing, a new student organization on campus. The remaining lectures: Nov. 1 in the auditorium of the Snite Museum: Thomas Anthony Durkin, a 1968 Notre Dame graduate and chairman of the U.S. Court for the Northern District of Indiana's Panel for Capital Case Appointments, will speak on efforts to implement a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. Nov. 8 in the Hesburgh Center auditorium: George Brooks, director of advocacy and jail chaplain for Kolbe House, the Archdiocese of Chicago's prison and jail ministry, will speak on his conviction that "opposing the death penalty does not mean siding with the offender against the victim, but recognizing that every person is a child of God." Nov. 15 in the student lounge of the Coleman-Morse Center, former Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan, adjunct professor of political science at Notre Dame, will speak of his past decisions on the death penalty. Kernan, who has said he supports the death penalty in obvious and egregious cases, commuted two death sentences while governor. On Nov. 29, also in the student lounge in the Coleman-Morse Center, state Sen. John Broden, a 1987 Notre Dame graduate, will speak about his service on the Indiana Assessment Team of the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. The lectures are co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Amnesty International, Right to Life, Progressive Student Alliance, College Democrats and Catholic Peace Fellowship. (source: South Bend Tribune)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----ARK., FLA., ILL., N.C., IND.
Rick Halperin Sat, 21 Oct 2006 10:39:15 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
