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

[Rick Halperin]

May 20


TEXAS----2 new execution dates set

Richard Hinojosa has been given an execution date for August 17, and
Farley Matchett has been given one for September 12; both dates should be
considered serious.

Texas now has 16 confirmed execution dates between May 24-October 25.

The state is easily on pace to surpass its 2005 total of 19 executions.

Texas has carried out 9 of the nation's 19 executions thus far this year,
and 364 of the nation's 1023 executions (35.5%) since executions resumed
in the USA on January 17, 1977.

(sources: TDCJ and Rick Halperin)

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

Truck driver gets new trial date----But challenges by his attorney could
delay case of 19 immigrants who perished


After a yearlong delay because of a dispute between a judge and
prosecutors, the first person to face a possible death sentence under a
1994 federal smuggling law has received a date for a new trial.

Jury selection is scheduled for Oct. 3 in the second trial of Tyrone
Williams, who is accused in the deaths of 19 illegal immigrants who were
packed into his truck trailer during a failed smuggling attempt in 2003.

2 challenges planned by defense attorney Craig Washington could still head
off that trial, however.

Washington told U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal on Friday that he will
challenge the constitutionality of the law carrying the death penalty and
its constitutionality as it applies to Williams.

"If the statute is unconstitutional, Mr. Williams should not be subjected
to another trial to have the decision made," Washington said after
Rosenthal set the date.

He contends that the law is unconstitutional because the death penalty
could be imposed if an immigrant died during a smuggling attempt even if
there was no intent to do harm. Prosecutors say Williams ignored the
suffering of more than 74 illegal immigrants who screamed and pounded on
the walls of his trailer in sweltering temperatures and dwindling air.

Washington told Rosenthal he expects her to reject his challenges and that
he hopes to exhaust the appeal process before the trial. He said he also
will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in response to last week's decision
by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to remove U.S.
District Judge Vanessa Gilmore from the case.

The panel wrote that it was removing Gilmore because of her busy schedule
and because of the "extraordinary history of this case," a reference to
Gilmore's strained relations with prosecutors and the 5th Circuit Court.
In recusing herself from the case, Gilmore denied that her schedule was
too crowded and accused the appeals court of attacking her credibility.

The appeals court sided with prosecutors on four appeals from Gilmore's
rulings in the cases of Williams and a co-defendant, even after
prosecutors defied Gilmore's order that they disclose why they sought the
death penalty against the only black person among 14 people indicted in
the case.

Panel found for Gilmore

Washington noted that prosecutors did not ask the panel to remove Gilmore
and that, in an earlier appeal, a different three-judge panel rejected the
prosecution's request for her removal. That panel found Gilmore to be fair
and impartial.

As Friday's hearing began, Williams hugged Washington before being led to
the defense table.

The Jamaican immigrant from Schenectady, N.Y., has waited about a year for
a trial date because of a disagreement between Gilmore and prosecutors
over how many of the original 58 counts could be brought against him
again.

A jury in March 2005 could not decide on 20 counts but found Williams
guilty on 38 others, including nine that carry a possible death sentence.
But jurors failed to answer questions about whether he was a principal in
the case or an aider and abettor.

Double jeopardy question

Gilmore ruled that Williams could be retried on only the 20 counts in
which no decision was reached.

Prosecutors sought to retry him on all 58 counts and appealed to the 5th
Circuit Court, which ruled in their favor and removed Gilmore.

Washington said he will ask the 5th Circuit Court for an en banc hearing
of all 19 judges to reconsider whether Williams would be put in double
jeopardy by a retrial on the 38 counts in which he was found guilty.

Williams and 13 others were indicted after Victoria County deputies
discovered 17 bodies in and near his abandoned trailer at a truck stop May
14, 2003. 2 more riders died at a hospital.

Of the others indicted, five have been convicted, 5 have pleaded guilty, 1
was acquitted, 1 remains a fugitive and charges against another were
dropped.

(source: Houston Chronicle)






ALABAMA:

The Town That Wept


They didn't know the baby before the broken ribs and wrists, the bruised
arms and legs, the fractured skull.

It didn't matter.

To the residents of Dothan, Ala., Phoenix "Cody" Parrish was as precious
in death as he should have been in life.

He was 4 months old when his mother slammed his head against a bedpost to
hush his cries. His body was so broken, it looked like someone had thrown
him against a wall.

No one from Tampa, where Cody's family recently had moved from, showed up
to claim Cody's remains. People in Dothan couldn't understand. To them, it
was like the baby had been thrown away.

Strangers were left to bury Cody with a funeral that galvanized the city.

17 months later, Cody's mother sits on death row, and his father is in
jail awaiting trial. Cody's great-uncle, who had temporary custody,
pleaded guilty in March for his role in the boy's death.

That got people talking again about the little boy with no one to love him
enough. They still leave flowers and toys at his grave.

Nearly a hundred people braved the rain at Sunset Memorial Park just days
before Christmas in 2004.

Intent on giving Cody his proper sendoff, they brought flowers, cards and
balloons as if they had known the Parrish family forever.

People were overwhelmed by sadness, recalled Robert Byrd, the 50-year-old
county coroner whose funeral home buried Cody.

"A child came into this world depending on us for everything and got
nothing," he said.

Not even the baby's kin claimed him.

"I have 5 children, and I cannot even imagine," Byrd said. "It was like
the baby was thrown away."

Never had this happened, said Byrd, who was born and raised in Midland
City, about 5 miles north of Dothan.

"This is a conservative area," he said. "Life is important."

It's Peanut Country

With 60,000 residents, Dothan is one of the fastest-growing cities in
Alabama. The town is cornered between the state lines of Florida and
Georgia.

Half the peanuts grown in the United States come from Dothan and nearby
communities. Major corporations such as General Electric, Michelin and
Sony call the city home.

Yet people here still consider themselves part of a small, country town.
Everybody knows everybody.

"People here are just old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth, Bible-reading,
God-fearing people who work hard to pay the bills, trying to get ahead,"
said Tom Brantley, a 60-year-old criminal defense attorney who represented
Cody's mother during her trial. "We go to our kids' football games and
dance recitals."

"Here," he said, "we're very startled and upset by child deaths."

Children die in Dothan - sometimes at the hands of their parents - but
rarely are they abandoned at the morgue.

"That was almost as disturbing to the community as the child's death
itself," said Brantley, a grandfather of 2.

The local media made a public plea for residents to come to Cody's
funeral.

"If you don't get a lump in your throat at reading that," Brantley said,
"you're not American."

The district attorney's office filed paperwork for permission to bury the
baby. People donated clothing and money for a casket and plot.

The service didn't last longer than 15 minutes, but those who attended
couldn't tear themselves away.

"People just stayed," said the Rev. Freddie McCain, who was chaplain at
Byrd Funeral Home. "They wouldn't leave. It was incredible."

McCain tried his best to soothe the mourners. Sometimes, he told them,
horrible things happen to good people. Instead of being angry at Cody's
mom, they should pray for her.

"Cody's in heaven," McCain said. "God took care of that. God takes care of
little children."

Days earlier, the 60-year-old preacher witnessed Cody's embalming. McCain
had to leave the room.

Cody had bruises up and down his arms and legs. One arm was so twisted it
wouldn't lie right, McCain said. The knot on his head couldn't be fixed.

At the funeral, Cody wore a long-sleeved outfit and lay in a child-size
white coffin.

"He was precious," McCain said. "He had a little teddy bear. You wanted to
pick him up and hug him."

Like others in Dothan, McCain struggled with the baby's death. He hung on
to Cody's memorial announcement for months, imagining how the baby died.

People eventually moved on with their lives. McCain lost track of the
memorial notice. Then, in September, Cody's mother was sentenced to death.

And Dothan remembered.

An Outrage

Cody was never supposed to be in Alabama. A child welfare worker in Tampa
was fired because he lied about visiting the baby in Hillsborough County.
Cody already was living in Dothan with his 18-month-old sister and their
great-uncle.

Edgar Parrish, 42, had custody of the siblings and planned to adopt them
in Florida. By law, he needed an agreement that would allow him to
relocate as long as Alabama authorities could check on the children.

Parrish also promised to keep Cody away from his parents. Still, he let
the couple move into his mobile home on Third Avenue.

Three weeks later, Cody was dead.

A 911 call on the morning of Dec. 15, 2004, reported Cody wasn't breathing
right. He gasped for air in the background.

Rescue workers rushed the baby to Southeast Alabama Medical Center just
before noon, but he couldn't be saved. An autopsy showed Cody had five
broken ribs, both wrists broken and a fractured skull.

"This 4-month-old baby was tortured from the time he was born," said Sgt.
Tracey McCord, 28, of the Houston County Sheriff's Office.

Cody's killing was the worst the detective had seen in his 2 years with
the criminal investigations division.

"It's why I transferred to the vice unit," said McCord, whose wife was
eight months' pregnant at the time with the couple's 3rd daughter. "You
can't help but get attached when a baby is involved."

During his interview with Cody's mother, she didn't even cry, he said.

No one in the home, except for the uncle, seemed upset about the baby's
death, McCord said.

Her defense attorney argued in court that she had an abusive childhood,
that she wasn't the only adult in the home.

"I'm not at all sure if she caused the death of her child, but she took
responsibility for it," Brantley said. "She felt guilty because she
should've been a better mother."

The explanations did little to placate bystanders. They were outraged.

"You have to start with the fact that this was a very sensitive issue for
the community," Brantley said. "This was a high-profile case - not just in
Dothan and Tampa, but all over the country. People felt at least
subconsciously that she was guilty."

The Houston County district attorney refused to settle for anything less
than the death penalty. In the local newspaper, he called Cody's mother a
"child slaughterer."

It took an hour and 17 minutes for a jury to sentence Tierra Capri Gobble
to death for the murder of her infant son. Many in Dothan felt the
punishment fit the crime.

"It's a 4-month-old who had a life before him just snuffed out," said
Houston County Sheriff Lamar Glover, a 63-year-old former state trooper
born just outside of Dothan. "Our community just simply does not tolerate
people who abuse children."

Not Forgotten

Talk of Cody started up again in March when Edgar Parrish pleaded guilty
to child abuse and manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail. He
since has applied for probation.

Gobble, now 23, sits on death row at Tutwiler Prison for Women. Death
sentences in Alabama automatically are appealed.

Cody's father, 22-year-old Samuel Hunter, remains jailed in Dothan
awaiting trial on charges of 1st-degree domestic violence and child abuse.

Cody's sister, now 3, went to live with a foster family in Dothan. For a
while, they took her to visit her brother's grave, Byrd said.

He thought the girl might be adopted by now. He wasn't sure if she visits
the cemetery anymore. People still leave flowers and toys - even a tiny
Christmas tree once.

"There's something on the grave all the time," Byrd said. "It is not
forgotten."

FOR CODY

When 4-month-old Phoenix "Cody" Parrish was beaten to death in Dothan,
Ala., residents there found themselves loving a boy they never knew. 3 of
Cody's family members from Tampa were charged in the Dec. 15, 2004,
murder:

Tierra Capri Gobble, 23, above, was given the death penalty for killing
her son. She is on death row, and her case is being appealed.

Samuel Hunter, 22, was charged with 1st-degree domestic violence and child
abuse in his son's death. He is in jail awaiting trial.

Edgar J. Parrish, 42, Cody's great-uncle, had temporary custody of the
baby and his sister. In March, Parrish pleaded guilty to child abuse and
manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

(source: Tampa Tribune)






USA:

Punishable By Death----The Supreme Court and state legislatures team up to
change standards


With moral and social concerns at the center of American political debate,
the question of capital punishment recurs regularly amongst political
prognosticators. In recent years, both the U.S. Supreme Court and state
legislatures have attempted to reform the practice, mainly by narrowing
its scope while possibly working towards its eventual elimination.

Judicial Tinkering

The Supreme Court has grappled with concerns regarding the implementation
of capital punishment since the 1970s. In that decade, the Court first
declared the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia (1972),
then reversed course in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), upholding more stringent
death penalty statutes enacted in several states. Since then, the Court
has confined itself to slowly limiting the use of the death penalty by
excluding large categories of people from its reach.

Most recently, the court has abolished the use of the death penalty for
mentally retarded criminals in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and for juveniles
in Roper v. Simmons (2004), suggesting a reevaluation of the practice. In
both of these cases, the Court looked to "evolving standards of
decency--generally manifested in state legislation and jury decisions - as
a test of whether such executions are "cruel and unusual," and thus in
violation of the Eighth Amendment. In finding executions of juveniles and
the mentally retarded unconstitutional, the Court emphasized the "speed
and direction - of change, noting that between 1989 and 2002, the number
of states banning such executions jumped from 2 to 18.

Even more significant for future death penalty jurisprudence was a
footnote in the Atkins decision suggesting that, in considering evolving
standards of decency, the Court would take into account other countries'
actions. This approach elicited howls of protest from many on the right,
including Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Though the Court
has generally been unwilling to make such considerations, Harvard law
professor Carol Steiker told the HPR, "In the Eighth Amendment in
particular, there are better reasons to be looking abroad" 'Unusualness'
is built into the language, and thus calls for some sense of comparative
suffering." If trends that are endorsed by other Western democracies can
influence the Court's conception of evolving standards, Steiker sees the
possibility of judicial abolition of the death penalty at some point in
the likely distant future.

Legislatures Step up to the Plate

While the Supreme Court grapples with the issue, individual states have
taken the matter into their own hands. Illinois became the center of
political and legal attention in 2003, when then-Gov. George Ryan, a
Republican, issued a moratorium that commuted each death-row inmates term
to life in prison. Illinois subsequently established a panel to assess the
costs and benefits of re-instituting the death penalty with more
safeguards - and it is not the only state to do so. In Massachusetts,
which has no death penalty, a panel convened in 2003 by Gov. Mitt Romney
has offered intriguing recommendations. Most notably, it suggests that
should the death penalty be reinstated, juries should be required to find
"no doubt about the defendants guilt" in order to impose a death sentence,
instead of the usual standard of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Indeed, the overriding motive for legislative action on the issue is the
fear of executing an innocent person. Last October Congress weighed in on
the issue, passing with bipartisan support the Innocence Protection Act,
which seeks to ensure access to DNA testing and competent legal counsel
for those accused of capital crimes. These measures will help, but Joseph
Hoffman, the chair of the Massachusetts commission and a law professor at
Indiana University, told the HPR that the most important step may be a
trickier one. "The most effective way to reduce potential mistakes is to
limit prosecutorial discretion to only the most serious of capital crimes
where there is no doubt of the defendants guilt," said Hoffman.

Death penalty opponents frequently point to America's status as an anomaly
among Western democracies in continuing to permit the practice. While
there seems little reason to believe that America's affinity for capital
punishment will end anytime soon, the Supreme Court and state legislatures
seem determined to make the system as reliable as possible.

(source: Harvard Political Review)






OHIO:

Suspect in double homicide faces death penalty


In late July of 2004, shots rang out on Pepper Drive. Rhonda Short of
Huber Heights and a friend Donnie Sweeney of Miamisburg received fatal
wounds from Short's estranged husband Duane Short.

Earlier this month Short was found guilty of the slayings and last week
the jury recommended the death penalty to Montgomery County Common Pleas
Court Judge Mary Katherine Huffman.

According to Greg Flanagan, administrative assistant to Montgomery County
Prosecutor Mathias Heck, Short was also found guilty on charges of
aggravated burglary, felonious assault and breaking and entering.

The next phase of the trial will take place on May 24 when Judge Huffman
sentences Short on the various counts.

"Judge Huffman must look at all the charges to come up with appropriate
sentencing on all the other counts also," said Flanagan.

"The jury actually recommended the death penalty on 3 counts," said
Flanagan. "The 3rd count was aggravated murder while committing a felony."

Flanagan explained that if Short should receive the death penalty, there
is an automatic appeals process with the state of Ohio. If any one of the
decisions were turned over on appeal, the other rulings would still stand.
Besides the death penalty, Judge Huffman has the option of life in prison
without parole.

According to reports at the time of the shooting Sweeney, 32, was dead at
the scene and was found in the back yard where he had been grilling food
when he was shot at close range, according to Huber Heights Sergeant Gerry
Gustin.

Rhonda Short, 31, was found shot in the house, and was removed to Miami
Valley Hospital where she died early the next morning.

The oldest son, then 13, was with his father in the truck at the scene of
the crime. The 2 younger children, a boy and a girl, then ages 9 and 12,
were with their mother in the house.

"The children are now living with family in the area," said Flanagan.

(source: Times Community Newspapers of Greater Dayton)