Oct. 26
TEXAS:
Man charged with capital murder in deadly home invasion
A man jailed on an unrelated charge has been accused in a fatal shooting at a
home in northeast Houston earlier this year.
Kenneth Ray Nelms Jr., 19, is charged with capital murder in the death of
Terrance Nelson, 28, at 3904 Kress near Makeig about 3:30 p.m. July 17,
according to the Houston Police Department.
Police said Nelms is currently in the Harris County jail on an unrelated
robbery charge. He was charged Monday in Nelson's death.
Police said officers were dispatched to the scene on a emergency call about a
burglary. When they arrived, they found Nelson dead. He appeared to have been
killed during a home invasion. And, police said, his 2007 Dodge Charger was
missing.
Investigators later determined Nelms was the suspect in the case.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
***********************
“Witness To Murder” by Tony Medina
Supporters of Tony Medina are pleased to announce the publication of “Witness
to Murder”, his book of original poetry and essays. Dedicated to his friend and
fellow inmate, Dominique Green, who was executed on Oct. 24th, 2004, this book
both meets a promise made between them, and represents an astounding education
to those who wonder how an innocent man can survive 15 years on death row,
knowing that the next might bring his wrongful death. Tony invites you to join
in the fight to ensure justice for him, and to understand why only the
abolition of the death penalty can help other innocent men and women in the
future.
London, United Kingdom. Oct 26th, 2011 -- Tony Medina, 36-year-old father of
three children, has been waiting on death row for his execution in Texas for
nearly 15 years. He was accused of shooting into a crowd of young people with a
semi-automatic weapon from a dark colored car. 2 children were fatally wounded
during the shooting. Nevertheless, he is innocent according to the furnished
evidence and the testimony of witnesses. He is only guilty of not having enough
money to engage a competent lawyer who would handle his case seriously at the
time of his trial.
Tony owes a great debt of gratitude to Dominique Green, a fellow inmate on
Texas death row before his execution on Oct. 24th, 2004. Dominique showed him
how to channel his anger, at wrongful incarceration and sentence of death, into
creative endeavors, most especially in writing poetry. Both men vowed to work
to publish a book of poetry and essays, and although Dominique didn’t live to
see the dream come true, Tony is proud to have completed the project today in
his memory. Dominique’s final words were, “You are all my family. Please keep
my memory alive." This book is dedicated to him.
Although the bulk of the works in the book are written by Tony Medina, there is
one important contribution from his sister Angie, and some others by Dominique
Green, who gave them freely for use in the book. Together, they tell a story of
hurt, of love, and of hope - hope that you, the reader of his book, will come
to understand that Justice does not come from the broken death penalty process
that persists in many parts of the United States. The innocent (the many that
are exonerated or have their sentences commuted clearly demonstrate that there
are far more of these than the public understand) can be trapped by a system
that more often than not refuses to believe that a trial verdict can be wrong.
It is as certain as can ever be demonstrated after the event, that innocent men
and women have been wrongly executed.
The book can initially be purchased from Lulu Press, which has a number of
International online locations for easy purchase in US dollars, £ Sterling or
Euros. Please visit their website and select the most appropriate location.
Further information about Tony Medina’s case and ways of helping/donating can
be found at: www.tony-medina.info
Witness to Murder
Author: Tony Medina
Paperback: 112 pages
Price: £10.25 / $16.43 / €12.09
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-4709-3028-8
Publisher: Lulu PRESS / Peter Bellamy
(source: Tony Medina)
CONNECTICUT:
"Doomed from birth" killer should be spared death: lawyer
Joshua Komisarjevsky was "doomed from birth," his lawyer on Tuesday told a jury
that convicted him of a murderous home invasion and will now decide whether he
should be punished with the death penalty.
Komisarjevsky, 31, was convicted of murdering Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her
daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, and beating unconscious Dr. William
Petit Jr. at their Cheshire home. Hawke-Petit was strangled and the girls, tied
to their beds, died of smoke inhalation after the home was set on fire.
His accomplice, Steven Hayes, was convicted separately and sentenced to death.
As the penalty phase of Komisarjevsky's trial began on Tuesday, Petit, the lone
survivor of the 2007 attack, left the courtroom. Petit was a constant presence
throughout the first part of the trial, which ended October 13 when the jury
convicted Komisarjevsky of 17 counts of murder, arson, kidnapping and sexual
assault.
The defense asked the same jury on Tuesday to consider the odds stacked against
Komisarjevsky throughout his life - particularly sexual abuse as a child - in
order to understand why he should be spared from death row, where Hayes now
sits.
Komisarjevsky should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of
parole, said lead defense attorney Jeremiah Donovan.
"He was doomed from birth," Donovan told the jury.
Born into a family with psychological problems including bi-polar disorder,
Komisarjevsky was then adopted in infancy by a family with extreme evangelical
beliefs, his lawyer said.
"Anyone who does not accept Jesus the exact same way they did was an influence
to be avoided," Donovan said.
One of the most traumatic events of his life occurred after adoptive parents
Ben and Jude Komisarjevsky took in a 15-year-old foster teen, who sexually
abused 4-year-old Joshua Komisarjevsky.
"He burned him with cigarettes and otherwise terrorized this small child,"
Donovan said. "Joshua lived in fear."
Because of the family's rigid religious beliefs, the sexual abuse haunted him
throughout his life, his lawyer said.
"He saw himself as a sinner because of the sexual activity thrust on him," he
said.
When Komisarjevsky started spying on neighbors, stealing and setting fire to a
gas station, his parents relied on evangelical theology rather than psychiatry
and psychology to help their troubled son.
"They kept it all a secret. They didn't believe in counseling."
He was home schooled and kept away from "outsiders" who could have helped him
with his problems, his lawyer said.
When authorities sent him to a Connecticut home for juvenile delinquents,
counselors advised psychiatric counseling and medication to treat his
depression.
His adoptive parents were able to transfer him to a faith-based treatment
center in New Hampshire after his mother said she would consider medication for
him. The family moved to a religious community.
"There was no counseling, no analysis" at the New Hampshire center, Donovan
said. "They were just trying to get him back to God."
Prosecutors waived their opening statement in the penalty phase of the trial,
launching their case by presenting evidence of Komisarjevsky's criminal record
-- three burglary convictions in three towns, including Cheshire in 2002.
(source: Reuters)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Nearly 1/3 of the 381 capital convictions in Pennsylvania have been sent back
for new hearings or reversed since the modern death penalty took effect in
1979. Mistakes by defense lawyers were so obvious that they deprived the
accused of a fair trial.
Income shouldn't determine quality of justice
What defendant on trial for his life would willingly turn to a divorce lawyer
with no experience in death-penalty cases?
Or to an attorney who had prepped for all of 15 minutes?
Or a Bible-quoting counsel who rattled off the one verse that, whoops,
convinced jurors to hand down a death sentence?
As it turns out, dozens of people on trial for murder in Pennsylvania have had
to rely on such ill-prepared, inept, and incompetent court-appointed counsel
provided when defendants couldn't afford an attorney.
These are attorneys who - mostly because they're paid a pittance to prepare a
complex death-penalty defense - prove to be well short of the task. The problem
has been long-known, but it's finally gotten the full attention of the state's
highest court.
In September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court named a veteran Philadelphia
judge, Benjamin Lerner, to investigate the compelling accusation of a
Philadelphia-based death-penalty defense group that the courts are scrimping on
justice by shortchanging the poor in capital cases.
That's a welcome and overdue step by the Supreme Court - a point driven home
even more by an Inquirer review of death-penalty cases published Sunday.
In nearly one out of every three capital convictions stretching back over three
decades, the courts have reversed or sent cases back for new hearings due to
inadequate representation.
With so many botched legal defenses, no Pennsylvanian can be assured that the
state's system of capital punishment is being administered fairly.
Judge Lerner has been given a short timetable to conduct an inquest into the
claims raised by the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation that
Philadelphia's fees for court-appointed counsel, in particular, are less "than
any remotely comparable jurisdiction in the country."
The likely remedy appears to be pretty clear-cut: Increase attorney fees, which
also should expand the pool of qualified lawyers who would be willing to take
on these assignments.
Better yet, Pennsylvania should follow New Jersey's example and scrap the death
penalty altogether.
That's the right thing to do, and it's also a far less costly means of assuring
that the outcome of murder trials is just, and that the punishment for
1st-degree murder - life without parole - is a certainty, providing needed
closure for victims' families.
(source: Editorial, Philadelphia Inquirer)
*******************
How much is Pennsylvania's death penalty costing taxpayers?
Jill Creighton was still alive when her killer broke her nose, cut her face and
destroyed her right eye. He raped her, and she died as he beat her with a
baseball bat.
Jake Wesley’s case was certainly worthy of the death penalty. A jury thought
so, and sentenced him in 1996 to die by lethal injection.
But when the case came back for resentencing after rounds of appeals 6 years
later, Jill’s sister, Amy Mokricky, found herself asking the district attorney
to hold back.
It had nothing to do with morality. Mokricky had been relieved by the first
sentence and felt it did her sister justice.
But the 2nd time, her family was simply exhausted by the process.
Wesley took a deal for life in prison, and the appeals stopped.
Since it was reinstated in 1978, only three people on death row in Pennsylvania
have actually died by lethal injection, and those three defendants basically
signed their own death warrants by waiving their rights to appeal.
A much higher number, about 140 people, have been released from death row
following successful appeals.
Some were found to be innocent. Most simply had their sentences commuted to
life in prison. But in the meantime, taxpayers were footing the bill for their
lengthy appeals, and by lengthy, we’re talking decades.
State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, a former prosecutor from Montgomery County and
the chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, has commissioned a
bipartisan task force to take a look at what this bottleneck has cost taxpayers
over the last 40 years. Right now, there are no estimates.
The task force will also explore whether the death penalty is worth keeping.
Gov. Tom Corbett’s office has no position on the Greenleaf’s resolution.
Until it’s complete, an obvious question is emerging: If no one is actually
dying, what’s wrong with Pennsylvania’s death penalty?
Just like in a courtroom, there are two sides — maybe three — to this issue,
and no easy answer.
NO SIMPLE ANSWER
In 1990, a joint task force couldn’t figure it out. The state Supreme Court
tried again in 2003, and then American Bar Association in 2007.
We just don’t know how much the death penalty costs Pennsylvania taxpayers.
But if anyone has come close to compiling numbers that give a big-picture
perspective, it’s Robert Dunham.
He’s a Harrisburg-based assistant federal defender, who began researching the
results of cases by hand when he was director of the Death Penalty Resource
Center in the 1990s.
People on both sides of this issue agree that he has the most accurate
statistics on Pennsylvania death penalty cases.
His recordings show that 237 people have had their death penalty sentence
overturned since 1978, but because he didn’t start researching them until the
1990s and the state keeps no records of these cases, he said it’s unclear what
happened to about 75 of those defendants. He does know that about 15 defendants
were sent back death row and are still there.
About 123 were resentenced to spend life in prison.
At least 12 people resentenced to less than life.
There were 6 complete exonerations — Nicholas Yarris and Harold Wilson, Jay
Smith, William Nieves, Neil Ferber and Thomas Kimbell.
Another, Fred Thomas, got a new trial and died waiting for it.
Those results make Dunham believe that often the simple answer to
Pennsylvania’s problem is that there is too little funding for poor defendants.
In many other states, when an inmate on death row exhausts appeals and the
governor signs the death warrant, he or she is executed.
In Pennsylvania, the end of that same road is a new sentencing — sometimes an
entirely new trial — and Dunham said many times it’s because it’s very common
for public defenders on death penalty cases to be so underfunded that their
defense is inadequate by the standards of the law.
Instead of paying for a better defense up front, Pennsylvanians are paying the
price of years of appeals, hearings and re-investigations that often don’t even
lead to death by lethal injection, Dunham said.
Former state Attorney General Ernie Preate said he witnessed that when he was a
prosecutor.
He successfully argued for five people to be sentenced to death row. Slowly,
four of them won appeals that ended with life sentences instead.
Preate — who himself went to prison for 16 months on a mail-fraud conviction —
is now publicly against the death penalty.
“I lost faith in it,” he said. “It was clear to me that the system had to
change if we were going to have an effective death penalty law.”
There are inconsistencies, Preate said. Prosecutors sometimes get thousands of
dollars for expert witnesses when the defense doesn’t have anyone to counter.
Public defenders who sometimes have hundreds of other cases on their desk are
put up against district attorneys with just one.
“There is still a great chasm between the quality of representation,” Preate
said. “So, the prosecutors have a very strong advantage in these cases. The
object of the prosecution certainly is to punish guilty, absolutely you want to
be sure you got the right man and he got a fair trial. You don’t want to have a
rush to judgment.”
By and large, district attorneys who seek the death penalty see it as a good
bargaining tool. And it’s safe to say that no prosecutor wants to try a case
twice.
But there is no state regulation for paying court-appointed attorneys, so each
county judge makes that call in every individual case. Public defenders’ pay
varies by the county, too.
“And we all know how strapped counties are right now,” Dunham said.
In federal cases, attorneys are paid $160 an hour.
In 1990, a state task force reviewing the death penalty decided a good hourly
rate was $75.
Dunham believes the actual rates in most counties are still well below the $75
mark, and he says that’s one major reason 125 cases have been overturned for
ineffective counsel since 1978.
A few years ago, a study by the Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and
Ethnic Fairness — a state Supreme Court-related commission — looked at death
penalty cases and found that defendants who spend less than $125,000 on a death
penalty trial are twice as likely to be sentenced to death than those who tack
on another $75,000 and spend at least $250,000.
Dunham believes things are starting to turn around a bit, and that judges are
seeing this problem and allocating more money for defenses.
In Philadelphia the rates are so low that the nonprofit group Atlantic Center
for Capital Representation filed a petition to the Supreme Court saying they
were unconstitutional. As a result of the group’s filing, the Supreme Court
ordered a Philadelphia judge to research the pay rates.
POINTING TO APPEALS JUDGES
Across the aisle, one of Dunham’s courtroom counterparts — the head of appeals
in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office — isn’t convinced of the
underfunding argument.
“I think there’s a number of points in which that analysis doesn’t account for
reality,” Ronald Eisenberg said. “It’s not true that Pennsylvania is the only
place where a lot of death penalties get reversed. It’s absolutely true that
more death penalty cases get reversed in Pennsylvania than in Texas. ... No one
thinks the lawyers are better in those states, but they’re getting different
results.”
So, then what’s the x factor?
Eisenberg said it’s the ideals of the appeals judges on the U.S. circuit
courts.
“It seems pretty clear since it’s the only common denominator,” he said.
“Between Pennsylvania and Florida, the only obvious difference is the
circuits.”
He isn’t the only one who feels that way.
Northampton District Attorney John Morganelli has been fighting pushback on
executions since the early 1990s, when he sued then-Governor Robert P. Casey
for refusing to sign death warrants.
“There’s no question,” he said. “It’s not the state court’s problem. The state
Supreme Court generally has upheld these death penalties. ... This is a
concerted effort on the part of the federal judiciary to do everything they can
to make sure no executions are carried out in Pennsylvania.”
As a prosecutor, Morganelli said he understands the need for a period of
scrutiny on these cases before the defendant walks to the chamber.
5, maybe 10 years, he said. Not 20 or 30.
“We have 200-some people in the system and not every one of them has been
railroaded,” he said. “A judge brings an agenda to the bench, and in
Pennsylvania we have liberal judges who bring an anti-death penalty agenda to
the bench. We have a de facto moratorium on the death penalty caused mostly by
the federal court.”
It sounds like a court cliche, but Richard Dieter, the executive director of
the Death Penalty Information Center, said the answer is probably somewhere
between the prosecution and the defense.
The DPIC is a Washington-based center that looks at death penalty issues and
compiles numbers across the country. It doesn’t take up issues of morality, but
rather efficiency and cost.
He points to Virginia as an example. It seems to have things figured out.
Virginia has only 13 people on death row, yet it has sent 109 killers to the
death chamber successfully.
Dieter believes that’s because of a combination of better safeguards and
different appeals court judges.
So, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
In efforts to make the system fairer and less bottlenecked, there have also
been several rule changes for lawyers, Eisenberg said.
“It makes it pretty hard for a lawyer to do the right thing when the rules
change,” he said, leading to more overturned cases on technical mistakes.
With time, that should change, he said.
“And if that happens, it will be because the law is finally catching up with
those cases,” he said.
But it’s happening slower here than in other parts of the county.
“And that geographical difference is a huge flashing sign of the true nature of
the problem,” he said. “I think every person active in this field knows it is
the real reason. I think no one in this field really believes that lawyers in
Pennsylvania are underfunded more than in Mississippi.”
PROCESS TAKES TOLL
Ed Rendell is a former Philadelphia prosecutor who signed 119 death warrants
during 8 years as governor.
Then, in one of his last public remarks as the head of state, he said the state
needed to either fix or do away with the death penalty. It isn’t right for
people to be spending 30 years waiting, he said.
“The American people are by and large losing confidence in the death penalty,”
Preate said.
Preate has seen that distrust even in the faces of victims.
“[They were] tired,” he said. “They didn’t want to deal with appeals, or just
got more compassionate. I think it was both. I know it was both. Some want to
see the death penalty carried out and others say ... ‘I want to move on.’”
Amy Mokricky, whose sister, Jill Creighton, was killed in 1994, said her family
was only able to move on after the death penalty was off the table.
The initial wave of relief that she felt when he was sentenced to death soon
went away when she realized it meant years of more court hearings and appeals.
In 2000, when the state Supreme Court reversed the sentence for Jill’s killer,
the Allegheny County district attorney told the family that he was going to try
again to put him to death.
Mokricky said no.
“Initially, it was very, very emotionally driven,” she said. But the second
time around, her family was completely worn down.
Mokricky’s mom had died of a broken heart just 4 months after Jill’s death.
Their dad wasn’t healthy.
Another sister had lost her job trying to make it to so many court hearings.
“My family can’t take any more re-exposure,” Mokricky said.
In the small ways they can, Mokricky said her family was able to start to heal.
She now runs a spiritual book, gift and jewelry store, and wrote a book about
being a crime victim.
AVERAGE WAIT: 15 YEARS
The national average time for appeal in a death penalty case is 15 years. That
means, generally, from the time the sentence is read in court to the day the
defendant dies on the table.
There are lawyers in the offices of district attorneys, public defenders and
attorney generals who do nothing but death penalty work.
But if the death penalty was off the table, appeals attorneys such as Eisenberg
and Dunham would likely still be employed.
“If we didn’t have the death penalty ... all the effort put into fighting death
penalty sentences will go into fighting life without parole.” Eisenberg said.
“We have a lot of people who get life sentences who don’t stop appealing. They
appeal as long as they can.”
A similar shift has already been seen in juvenile cases.
Once advocates successfully lobbied to get the death penalty off the table for
defendants younger than 18, they began trying to eliminate the
life-without-parole sentence for juveniles, too.
“No one on that side has pledged publicly they won’t challenge life without
parole once they get rid of the death penalty,” Eisenberg said.
‘Perception will change’
Ohio used to have our problems.
For 20 years, they had a growing death row population with no executions.
But in 1999, they started again.
Some of that was because of reform — including better funding for poor
defendants — and some of that was just a matter of patience, the Death Penalty
Information Center’s Dieter said.
“When you have so many cases, it creates a slow process,” Dieter said. “This is
true in California, too, where you have 700 people on death row.”
In Ohio, there were reforms in the way attorneys for indigent defendants are
paid, although Dieter said there are still some problems.
But when executions started happening again, something else was restored,
Dieter said.
Public confidence.
“The perception will change,” he said of Pennsylvania. “Once they start,
assuming the death penalty continues, then the perception will be that we have
a working death penalty, it’s not an endless appeal. There is an end to it.”
Until then, Dieter calls Pennsylvania’s death row “theoretical.” And when the
governor signs a death warrant, he doesn’t even list the execution date under
the “upcoming” tab on the DPIC website.
“The odds are, Pennsylvania has a very expensive form of life without parole,
that’s really what it has,” he said. “So, people are given more expensive
trials, more expensive appeals, but it’s really life in prison that they’re
serving, in practice.”
(source: The Patriot-News)
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