Jan. 29
OHIO----stay of impending execution
The execution for Michael Webb on Feb. 22 has been stayed.
The state is once again refining its execution policies following a judge's
ruling that criticized minor variations to Ohio's procedures, Attorney General
Mike DeWine said Thursday.
The announcement comes as another execution was temporarily placed on hold
while the debate over these variations works its way through the federal
courts.
"We believe we have a constitutional system," DeWine told The Associated Press
Thursday. "We want to make it a better procedure pursuant to the federal
judge's order." Frost said the issue was not necessarily small changes to
Ohio's policies, but whether those changes are made in the proper way.
"This is not to say that Ohio must perform all executions in a precisely
identical manner," Frost said in a Jan. 11 ruling. "All that is required is
that Ohio apply the same overarching rules in every execution, with these rules
allowing for necessary and approved non-core deviations."
Frost has also said his rulings aren't a commentary on the constitutionality of
Ohio's execution procedures.
The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction could not immediately say
Thursday what policies were being refined.
DeWine said that even if the new procedures pass muster with Frost, there are
no plans to withdraw an appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. DeWine
said there are large constitutional issues that the high court must decide.
Frost on Thursday, without objection from the state, delayed the execution of a
man who claims innocence in the 1990 arson death of his 3-year-old son.
The 1-page ruling by Frost did not address the innocence claim but instead
dealt with the issue of variations to the execution policies.
Michael Webb, who was scheduled to die Feb. 22, has argued that a leading arson
expert can prove the 1990 fire in southwest Ohio could have been set anywhere
in the house, and not just near a closet or bathroom.
Webb, 65, says that fact backs up his argument that someone else did it. He has
asked the Ohio Parole Board for mercy, and the board will make its
recommendation next week to Gov. John Kasich, who has the final say.
Attorneys for Webb say his situation is the same as another inmate whose
execution is on hold over challenges to Ohio's lethal injection process.
Frost this month delayed the execution of Charles Lorraine of Warren, saying
the state had failed to keep its promise of strictly following its execution
policies. Frost was critical of deviations in an execution in November in which
the inmate's medical chart wasn't properly checked and the documentation of the
lethal drugs wasn't done according to the policies.
(source: Associated Press)
FLORIDA:
3 state lawmakers push separate measures to alter death penalty procedure
If a killer is headed to death row, a jury needs to recommend it unanimously,
contend three Florida legislators who are pushing bills in Tallahassee this
session to change Florida law.
The current requirement of seven out of 12 jurors isn't enough to condemn a
person to death, they say.
3 bills — 2 in the House, 1 in the Senate — seek to amend current Florida law
so that unanimity among jurors would be required when suggesting capital
punishment to a judge.
In Florida, a 1st-degree murder case has 2 phases — 1 to determine guilt and a
2nd proceeding for the jury to recommend a penalty. Florida is the only state
that doesn't require juror unanimity for the recommendation.
"This is out of step with every other state in the United States," said Seth
Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida. "And frankly,
it means that a number of people who shouldn't get the death penalty, get the
death penalty here in Florida."
With the leading number of death row exonerations in the U.S., Florida's need
for capital punishment reform is pressing, Miller emphasized in a recent video
sent out to email subscribers.
There have been 23 death row exonerations in Florida since 1973. Illinois
follows closely with 20, according to December 2011 figures from the
Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center.
The legislation proposed for 2012 isn't a new concept.
They highlight a suggestion made by the American Bar Association in a 2006
report, which advises: "Florida should require that the jury's sentencing
verdict in capital cases be unanimous and, when the sentencing verdict is a
death sentence, that the jury reach unanimous agreement on at least 1
aggravating circumstance."
2 similar bills died in state House and Senate committee hearings during the
2011 legislative session.
This year, Senate Bill 772, sponsored by Sen. Thad Altman, R-Melbourne; Senate
Bill 352, sponsored by Sen. Oscar Braynon, D-Miami Gardens, and House Bill 29,
sponsored by Rep. John Patrick Julien, D-North Miami Beach, all seek the same
reform: the unanimous jury on death penalty cases.
The hesitancy to pass such legislation is twofold, said a law professor who
worked on the bar's report.
"One explanation for the resistance to unanimity is that it might significantly
reduce death penalty verdicts," said Christopher Slobogin, director of
Vanderbilt University Law School's Criminal Justice Program. "But the unanimity
requirement hasn't prevented Texas and other states from sending plenty of
people to death row."
Slobogin, who headed the team that wrote the report, said another explanation
"is that, since the jury verdict in Florida is advisory in any event, it
doesn't matter whether the jury is unanimous. As far as I'm concerned, that's
an argument for taking the ultimate decision away from the judge and giving it
to the jury."
In theory, a judge in Florida can overrule the jury's decision.
From 1972 to 1999, just under 20 percent of the 857 1st-time death sentences
involved a judge overriding a jury's recommendation of life imprisonment or
life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, according to the report.
Report researchers didn't find instances since 1999 of this judicial override,
although it is still legally possible.
If passed, new laws requiring juror unanimity would only apply to convictions
after Oct. 1, 2012.
Additionally, Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, D-Tallahassee, is attempting
to abolish the death penalty in Florida by July 2012 with House Bill 4051.
If any of the new legislation passes, it still wouldn't change the fate of 2
men sentenced to death in Collier County who remain on death row.
Brandy Jennings, found guilty of the 1995 murders of 3 employees of the Cracker
Barrel restaurant in Golden Gate, was sentenced to death a year later when the
judge agreed with the jury's 10-2 vote.
The 2nd, Thomas Gudinas, was convicted in Collier in 1995 after the trial was
moved to Naples from Orlando. He was found guilty of killing a woman in Orlando
in 1994 and was sentenced to death following a 10-2 jury decision.
The next scheduled execution in Florida is Robert Waterhouse on Feb. 15. He was
convicted of the 1980 killing of a woman in St. Petersburg.
(source: Naples Daily News)
***********************
Notorious murderer facing Death Row again after attacks in Miami-Dade,
Bradford----William E. Wells, who killed 5 people in 2003, originally wanted
death by execution but wound up accepting life prison terms
William E. Wells murdered 5 people in a Florida fishing village in 2003. After
his arrest, he insisted he should be executed.
He wasn’t.
So, Wells began to make meticulous plans to kill a fellow inmate inside a
Miami-Dade prison.
“It’s natural selection — survival of the fittest,” he later told guards.
In May 2008, Wells tied the man up by the wrists, strangled him and stabbed him
with a homemade shiv before other guards stepped in. The man survived — and
Wells quickly pleaded guilty to a life term for the attack.
Nevertheless, Wells behaved well enough to earn a position as an “orderly”
within a maximum security prison in Raiford, giving him greater access to the
cell blocks of fellow inmates. Then last year, Wells finally killed again, this
time teaming up with another man to strangle and stab an inmate to death.
Wells, 36, may finally get his wish to die by lethal injection — the State
Attorney in Bradford County is now seeking the death penalty.
“There is the possibility they are bound and determined to get the death
penalty imposed on them,” State Attorney Bill Cervone said last week.
Evidence detailing the Bradford case has yet to be released by prosecutors. But
newly released Miami-Dade court records in the 2008 case paint the portrait of
an inmate hellbent on murder.
Police first arrested Wells in May 2003 after a 12-hour standoff at his trailer
home in Mayport, outside Jacksonville. Officers found 5 decomposing bodies,
including those of his wife and father-in-law.
Detectives say he killed the relatives over an 11-day period, sparing only his
4-year-old son.
Initially, Wells told a judge he wanted to admit to the crimes and accept the
death penalty. But ultimately, in October 2004, he pleaded guilty to 4 of the 5
murders and was sentenced to life in prison.
By May 2008, Wells was serving his sentence at Miami-Dade’s Everglades
Correctional Institution, when he lured inmate Christopher Powell to his cell,
intending to kill him.
“I had been planning this for several days,” Wells wrote in a statement to
Miami-Dade police.
Wells stuck up a friendship with Powell, who was serving a year prison sentence
for cocaine possession. They played cards and chess. Wells promised Powell that
he might have some drugs to share.
“I cut 2 lengths of my sheet off in preparation for the killing,” recalled
Wells.
Powell thought nothing of the visit. “I thought it would be all right
considering that I could not spend a lot of time in the rec yard because of the
heart and my epilepsy,” Powell recalled later.
After some card play, Wells made him an offer. “I told him I had a trick for
him. I told him if he could get himself out of a knot, I would give him half a
pack” of cigarettes, Wells wrote.
Wells loosely bound Powell’s hands, then blindfolded him. Suddenly, Wells
tightened the wrist binding and slipped another piece of sheet around his neck,
strangling him.
“Then [I] pulled a knife out of my inside sock and began to stick it where I
could and I repeatedly stabbed Powell,” Wells said.
Other inmates hollered and corrections officers pulled Wells off Powell, who
survived with wounds to the wrists and neck.
“The dude is a drug addict and he let me tie him up,” Wells told corrections
officers. “After that, natural selection took over.”
Miami-Dade police arrested Wells for attempted murder. Within a month, Wells
insisted on pleading guilty to life in prison.
“I was prepared to take his case to trial but he ended up pleading guilty to
the maximum sentence,” recalled Miami-Dade Assistant Public Defender Warren
Schwartz. “He did not want to go through a trial.”
To help corrections officials understand the threat Wells posed, the prosecutor
in the case, Juliana Millón, faxed the convict’s handwritten statement to
prison officials.
Prison authorities sent Wells to Raiford’s Florida State Prison, a
maximum-security facility that houses many violent inmates. Through good
behavior, Wells earned great privileges of access within the locked down
facility, according to a Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman.
But in May 2011, investigators say, he and Wayne Doty — another convicted
murderer serving a life prison term — murdered Xavier Rodriguez, who was
serving 10 years for robbery with a deadly weapon.
Wells is not the 1st inmate to embark on violence after expressing a desire to
get the death penalty.
Ricardo Gill, in 1999, murdered a travel agent in Gainesville and later told a
judge he would kill again if he did not get the death penalty. The judge
ordered him to prison for life — and within days, he murdered his cell mate.
Gill is now on death row awaiting execution.
(source: Miami Herald)
VIRGINIA:
Virginia maintains a disturbing death penalty legacy
This past September, the Georgia case of Troy Davis captured the nation's
attention and galvanized a growing nationwide movement against the death
penalty. Georgia executed Davis, an African-American convicted of murder in the
1989 shooting of a white security guard, notwithstanding serious doubts about
his guilt, including statements disavowing their original testimony by most of
the witnesses who had identified Davis as the shooter at his trial.
Davis' case has prompted renewed calls for abolition of capital punishment as a
flawed and fundamentally unjust practice that risks killing the innocent, is
visited disproportionately on people of color and other minority groups, is too
expensive and is not necessary for public safety. According to the most recent
polling data, public support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in
decades. Four states have ended capital punishment since 2007 and strong
abolition efforts are under way in a number of other states.
Where is Virginia in this current national debate?
Virginia has a long and dark history with the death penalty. The 1st execution
in the New World took place in Virginia in 1608 when Captain George Kendall was
executed in Jamestown for spying. Throughout its history as a colony and a
state, Virginia has executed more than 1,300 people, more than any other state.
Virginia has executed the most women and the youngest children of any state.
Since the resumption of capital punishment in the late 1970s following a de
facto moratorium imposed by the courts, Virginia has executed 109 people, 2nd
only to Texas during that time. The average time between conviction and
execution in Virginia is less than 8 years, by far the shortest in the nation.
Since the 1970s, 140 persons convicted and sentenced to death in the United
States have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence; the
140 spent an average of 10 years on death row. Many of these victims of a
faulty justice system would have been executed before evidence of their
innocence came to light if they had been convicted in Virginia. Notwithstanding
Virginia's rush to judgment in its capital cases, one innocent Virginian — Earl
Washington — was released from death row in 1994 following his conviction and
death sentence. And just last year, a federal judge vacated the conviction and
death sentence of another Virginian — Justin Wolfe — because of misconduct by
prosecutors at his trial; the judge also found that Wolfe is in fact innocent
of the murder-for-hire for which he was convicted. The history of Virginia's
use of the death penalty is not something of which Virginians can be proud.
While facts like these should be sufficient to cause any concerned citizen to
question why Virginia chooses to persist in its use of capital punishment, we
want to focus on one aspect of Virginia's use of the death penalty that is
perhaps the most disturbing of all — the role played by race in Virginia's
administration of capital punishment. Without question it is a leading role,
the single most salient factor in determining who is executed and who is not.
For example, between October 1908 and March 1962, of the 236 people executed by
Virginia, 201 were black males, 34 were white males, and 1, Virginia Christian,
was a 17- year-old black female. In February 1951, Virginia executed 8 men in a
72-hour period. All 8 men were black, and 7 — known as the Martinsville 7 —
were executed for the rape of a white woman.
A number of studies have confirmed the significant racial disparity in the
application of capital punishment. A 2003 report by Amnesty International
entitled "Death by Discrimination — The Continuing Role of Race in Capital
Cases" documented significant racial disparities in (1) the race of persons who
have been executed (predominately people of color); (2) the race of victims of
crimes for which death sentences are handed down (predominantly white); (3) the
race of prosecutors who seek the death penalty (overwhelmingly white); and (4)
the race of juries that return death verdicts (mostly white).
A report published in 2000 concluded that although Virginia's capital justice
system is not as overtly racist as it was in previous times, "race continues to
be a significant factor in capital sentencing" in Virginia. Among the report's
conclusions based on an analysis of the 88 post-1976 Virginia executions that
had taken place as of 2000 were the following:
(1) In cases of rape/murder, the probability that the offender will be
sentenced to death is about 19 % if the victim is black and about 42 % if the
victim is white.
(2) Blacks who rape and murder white victims are more than 4 times more likely
to be sentenced to death than blacks who rape and murder black victims.
(3) In robbery murders, a death sentence was more than 3 times more likely if
the victim was white than if the victim was black.
It is no coincidence that the states with the heaviest use of capital
punishment are located exclusively in the South, with its shameful history of
slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow. Fortunately, the worst of these practices are
things of the past. Unfortunately, their legacy continues in some present-day
practices, including the use of the death penalty. It is time for Virginia to
bring this shameful history to a close.
(source: King Salim Khalfani is executive director of the Virginia State
Conference of the NAACP----Stephen A. Northup is executive director of
Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty; Richmond Times-Dispatch)
DELAWARE:
Death penalty hasn't made Delaware safer
I write regarding the clemency decision regarding Robert Gattis, of particular
interest is Sean O'Sullivan's reporting on the history of the death penalty in
Delaware.
He quoted Deputy Attorney General Paul Wallace as asserting that the pursuit of
death penalty convictions was a response to a sharp increase in the murder rate
in the early 1990s.
A review of the number of murders in Delaware, using data from 1960 to 2010 by
The Disaster Center, reveals virtually no change in the number of murders in
Delaware from 1985 through 1994. From 2001 through 2010, when the Department of
Justice has aggressively pursued death sentences, the number of murders has
been substantially higher than in the late '80s to early '90s period.
The remarks of the Republican Party chairman following Gov. Markell's State of
the State address are also relevant. They reveal a partisan approach to this
important issue. It reflects the reality of a near-constant effort to push the
death penalty as an answer to Delaware's crime problems. This has included
legislation which expanded the number of death-eligible crimes numerous times
in the past 20 years.
The fact is that Delaware is no safer than it was 20 years ago when the
aggressive pursuit of the death penalty began.
It is time for an objective study of the use of this approach to be undertaken.
Perhaps Delaware could be better served by its Department of Justice and prison
system if we abolished the death penalty.
Tom Eleuterio, Newark
(source: Letter to the Editor, News Journal)
CALIFORNIA:
Ballot measure: Is Calif. death penalty worth the cost?
In 1978, Douglas Ray Stankewitz was sentenced to death in Fresno County
Superior Court after he killed Theresa Graybeal and then bragged to his
friends: "Did I drop her or did I drop her?"
More than 3 decades later, Stankewitz remains on death row at San Quentin
Prison, no closer to execution than the day he was sentenced.
First there were years of appeals. Then a federal judge in 2009 ordered a new
trial to determine whether Stankewitz -- who has been on death row longer than
anyone in California -- should be executed or given life in prison. Prosecutors
head back to court Feb. 6 to argue that ruling.
To death penalty opponents, cases like Stankewitz's illustrate an issue: It can
take decades before appeals run their course, leaving taxpayers to foot the
bill for special housing at San Quentin, plus all that court jockeying.
In fact, it takes so long to get a date in the death chamber that far more
inmates die of natural causes -- or by their own hand -- than are executed. And
the costs are mounting. A study last year estimated that the death penalty has
cost California at least $4 billion since it was reinstated in 1978.
Now, a growing chorus of death penalty critics who for years focused on moral
arguments are making a pocketbook appeal to voters: Their ballot measure to
abolish the death penalty focuses on the costs to taxpayers to execute a
prisoner. They say they have collected enough signatures to get it on the Nov.
6 ballot.
"It is time to stop wasting money," said Natasha Minsker, statewide campaign
manager for SAFE California, which proposed the measure. SAFE stands for
Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement.
Proponents of the initiative say taxpayers will save $1 billion over 5 years by
replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. Those savings,
they say, would be better spent on unsolved rape and murder cases, and for
hiring teachers and building roads. There are 722 condemned prisoners on death
row -- including 42 from the central San Joaquin Valley.
Among the initiative's supporters are a former San Quentin warden, Jeanne
Woodford, and Don Heller, a former prosecutor who wrote the original ballot
measure reinstituting the death penalty.
Heller now says the death penalty was a mistake and is too costly to
administer.
But Shani Jenkins, an assistant Tulare County district attorney, worries the
ballot measure may be only the start of a long-term effort to scale back other
prison terms: "What will they go after next? Life in prison without parole?"
Prosecutors in Fresno, Kings, Madera and Tulare counties each have at least 2
death penalty cases in the works, and they say capital punishment remains a
crucial prosecution tool. It can be used as leverage to get defendants to plead
guilty to murder in return for life in prison, thereby avoiding costly trials.
It also can be used as a bargaining chip to get a murderer to divulge the
motive for a killing or location of a body, sparing families the trauma of
having to wonder what happened.
Miguel Valdovinos, an assistant district attorney in Madera County, said the
initiative's proponents fail to note how the death penalty can aid prosecutors,
even in cases that don't end in a death sentence.
"Hopefully, voters will recognize what they are trying to do -- make it tougher
for us to do our job," he said.
"Saying it costs too much is an easy thing to do," Valdovinos added. "But the
easy thing is not always the right thing."
Kings County District Attorney Greg Strickland sees it in more basic terms:
"People who rape and kill a child deserve death."
(source: Fresno Bee)
KENTUCKY:
Age-Related Illness Catching Up With Death Row
Randy Haight wakes every morning to sore hands and a creaking body. The
59-year-old blames the pain on arthritis -- something that he describes as
rampant at his home for the last 17 years -- Kentucky's death row.
"It gets a lot of these guys," Haight told The Associated Press in an interview
at the prison in Eddyville.
Other than the recreation time, Haight and the 33 other men housed in the
Kentucky State Penitentiary's unit for condemned inmates spend their days in
cells that are 6 1/2-feet wide, 13-feet long, and 12-feet high. It's a forced
lifestyle that, inmates and experts say, has accelerated age-related health
problems for the condemned population - causing hands to ache, knees to pop and
hips to degenerate.
Kentucky's 35 death row inmates (including one woman held in a different
prison) are an average age of just more than 50 years old - an average of 14
years older than the 23,000 inmates in the Kentucky prison system. Condemned
inmates have waited more than 16 years for execution, three years longer than
the average prison sentence in the state, and 15 have been on death row for 2
decades or more.
All that time has been spent living a sedentary life in close quarters in a
setting that doesn't change much.
"They don't get any kind of stimulus," said Ronald Aday, a sociology professor
at Middle Tennessee State University who has studied death row inmates.
"They're aging in place with very little interaction."
Some states are using hospices or medical parole to tackle the aging inmate
population. Across the country, Human Rights Watch found, 8 % of the prison
population in 2010 was 55 or older, compared to 3 % in 1995. That's not an
option for inmate sentenced to die in Kentucky, so the state is left housing
them and paying increasing medical expenses.
While the state doesn't keep separate statistics for the death row population,
medical expenses for the Department of Corrections have risen each year since
2008, from $49.1 million that year to $54.8 million in fiscal year 2011.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said death row inmates get the
same level of care as the other 23,000 inmates in state custody - regular
access to doctors and medications when necessary.
Aday said death row inmates tend to age quicker than those in general
population, with a 50-year-old showing signs of chronic illnesses normally seen
in a 65-year-old on the outside.
56-year-old Robert Foley arrived on death row as a relatively healthy
38-year-old. These days, Foley, a large, muscular man awaiting execution after
being convicted of killing six people in Laurel County, gets around with the
assistance of a walker, a wheelchair and his death-row friends. Foley's hip has
deteriorated, he said, to the point that even sleeping has become excruciating.
"It's painful, believe me, very painful," Foley said. "I sleep next to nothing,
maybe an hour or 2 a night."
The prison makes efforts to accommodate the aging population by responding to
complaints. Prison officials and Foley recently settled a grievance over access
to religious services by allowing other death row inmates to carry his
wheelchair or walker while Foley goes up several steps into the chapel.
Kentucky public defender Jamesa Drake, who once worked with the Project for
Older Prisoners at George Washington University and now represents Foley, said
prisons are not equipped to house geriatric inmates.
"Prison is no place to grow old," Drake said. "We are failing in that regard
with respect to the growing number of elderly and infirm inmates."
Kenton County Commonwealth Attorney Rob Sanders, a vocal proponent of the death
penalty, said the state should find a way to accelerate the pace of executions
so aging condemned inmates aren't an issue.
"When voters start making timely executions a priority, the legislature will
take steps to speed up the process," Sanders said.
Kentucky has executed three people since 1976, with the most recent taking
place in 2008. In that time, 7 death row inmates have died of health-related
causes ranging from cancer to kidney failure.
Currently, Kentucky is under a judge's order barring executions because of
issues with the lethal injection procedures. The order stopped the last
scheduled execution in 2010 and the case is pending.
Some inmates, such as 55-year-old Michael Dale St. Clair, condemned to death
for kidnapping and killing a man in 1991 in Hardin and Bullitt counties, figure
the life on death row will kill him before an execution does.
"Mother Nature has first mortgage on my death," St. Clair told the AP.
The long stretch on death row and health issues sometimes pushes an inmate to
consider beating the state to his death by committing suicide, said Haight,
sent to death row for killing 2 people in Garrard County after escaping from
custody in 1985.
"It's crossed my mind a few times," Haight said. "It's truly a fine line ...
being able to live in this kind of environment."
(source: Associated Press)
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