Aug. 18
LOUISIANA:
Angola 5 defendant takes plea bargain
Angola 5 defendant David D. Mathis pleaded guilty Friday to 1st-degree murder
in a deal that spares him a possible death sentence for the 1999 slaying of a
Louisiana State Penitentiary security officer.
Mathis, 36, entered the plea before Judge Jerome Winsberg, ending a lengthy
round of defensive maneuvers and the possibility of a drawn-out trial beginning
in late September.
Mathis was among a group of Angola Camp D inmates whose botched escape plan
resulted in the beating and stabbing death of Capt. David C. Knapps, 49, in a
restroom of the camp's Education Building.
Winsberg immediately sentenced Mathis on Friday to a life sentence without
benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence and ordered that it be
served "consecutively to any other sentence you are serving."
The wording has greater significance in Mathis' case than perhaps in others
involving inmates with multiple life sentences.
His defense attorneys are challenging his 2nd-degree murder conviction and life
sentence in the 1992 slaying of his adoptive grandmother in Baker, when Mathis
was 15.
Defense attorney Jim Boren said Mathis was mentally incompetent in 1992 and
should have been found "not guilty by reason of insanity."
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that a life sentence without the
possibility of parole is unconstitutional for juvenile offenders.
Boren said a hearing in that case is scheduled before East Baton Rouge Parish
Juvenile Court Judge Kathleen Richey on Monday.
The would-be escapees also held 2 other officers as hostages until Angola's
riot control team rescued them. Officers storming the Education Building found
Mathis and inmate Joel Durham holding one of the hostages in an inmate property
storage room.
The entry team killed Durham, 26, and shot Mathis in the face.
Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick took over prosecution of the
case, which had languished without formal indictments until Sam D'Aquilla
became the district attorney for East and West Feliciana parishes in 2003.
D'Aquilla cannot prosecute the case himself because he briefly represented one
of the defendants while serving as a public defense attorney.
Christine Gauf, one of Knapps' sisters, said Connick made the decision to allow
Mathis to plead guilty.
"They didn't know if they could push it to the death penalty. We don't think he
should have got off, but there's nothing we can do," Gauf said after court
adjourned Friday.
Testimony and evidence in earlier trials and hearings revealed that Mathis,
unlike his co-defendants, did not have Knapps' blood on his clothing. Also, no
witness has testified that Mathis took part in the attack on Knapps.
"The killing of Capt. Knapps was a tragedy, and David Mathis is deeply sorry
about the loss the Knapps family has suffered," said Rachel Conner, a Mathis
attorney since 2005.
"This is a just outcome, and hopefully takes into account David Mathis' role in
the offense, and hopefully will provide closure to the entire Knapps family,"
Conner said.
The Jefferson Parish prosecution team, headed by Tommy Block, has obtained 3
convictions and 2 death sentences against the Angola 5 since May 2011.
Juries, which have been chosen in St. Tammany Parish, returned death sentences
against Jeffrey Clark, 52, and David Brown, 39, while Robert G. Carley, 44,
received a 2nd life sentence when his jury had at least 1 holdout opposed to
the death penalty.
"We believe we could have proven the (Mathis) case," Block said after court.
"But anytime an offer is made to plead guilty to the charge, which is what
happened here, serious consideration must be given to that offer," Block said,
adding that Mathis admitted he was a principal to Knapps' murder and will spend
the rest of his life locked "in a cell for 23 hours a day."
The prosecution team lost 2 key members last month when the Caddo Parish
district attorney forced two assistants, Hugo Holland and Lea Hall, to resign
over a dispute about rifles obtained from a state surplus property agency.
Block said Connick has not made a decision whether to ask Holland and Hall to
assist in prosecuting the remaining Angola 5 defendant, Barry Edge, 52, whose
trial is scheduled for January.
Block said he and prosecutor Mike Futtrell will go back to Jefferson Parish and
"begin preparing for his trial in January for his role in this murder."
3 members of the Knapps family said in letters filed in court that the
defendants took a man whose music and humor was the life of numerous family
gatherings.
In addition to a family member, the inmates took the life of a "man in blue"
committed to the duty of confining the people society says are not capable of
living in freedom, niece Cindy Vannoy wrote.
"That could have been any one of us in that bathroom: me, my mom, my dad, my
husband," said Vannoy, one of many Knapps family members who are employed in
corrections.
(source: The Advocate)
USA:
Obama Lags on Judicial Picks, Limiting His Mark on Courts
President Obama is set to end his term with dozens fewer lower-court
appointments than both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush achieved in
their 1st 4 years, and probably with less of a lasting ideological imprint on
the judiciary than many liberals had hoped for and conservatives had feared.
Mr. Obama's record stems in part from a decision at the start of his presidency
to make judicial nominations a lower political priority, according to documents
and interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration
officials and with court watchers from across the political spectrum. Senate
Republicans also played a role, ratcheting up partisan warfare over judges that
has been escalating for the past generation by delaying even uncontroversial
picks who would have been quickly approved in the past.
But a good portion of Mr. Obama's judicial record stems from a deliberate
strategy. While Mr. Bush quickly nominated a slate of appeals court judges
early in his 1st year - including several outspoken conservatives - Mr. Obama
moved more slowly and sought relatively moderate jurists who he hoped would not
provoke culture wars that distracted attention from his ambitious legislative
agenda.
"The White House in that 1st year did not want to nominate candidates who would
generate rancorous disputes over social issues that would further polarize the
Senate," said Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama's 1st White House counsel. "We were
looking for mainstream, noncontroversial candidates to nominate."
Mr. Obama has still put a significant stamp on the judiciary, appointing 2
Supreme Court justices - the same number as Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush each did
in 8 years - and 30 appeals court judges, roughly as many as either did on
average per term. But his impact has been uneven. He has made significant
changes to some appeals court circuits - which have the final word on tens of
thousands of cases a year - while leaving others untouched.
In federal district courts, where trials are held, Mr. Obama has appointed just
125 such judges, compared with 170 at a similar point in Mr. Clinton's 1st term
and 162 for Mr. Bush.
Mr. Obama is virtually certain to leave more vacant federal judgeships at the
end of his term for the winner of the 2012 election to fill than he inherited
from Mr. Bush. Beyond sheer numbers, Mr. Obama has reduced his long-term
influence by appointing judges who were more than 4 years older, on average,
than Mr. Bush's, according to data compiled by Russell Wheeler, a Brookings
Institution scholar.
Mr. Obama has also largely shied away from nominating assertive liberals who
might stand as ideological counterpoints to some of the assertive conservatives
Mr. Bush named. Instead of prominent liberal academics whose scholarly writings
and videotaped panel discussions would provide ammunition to conservatives, Mr.
Obama gravitated toward litigators, prosecutors and sitting district and state
judges, especially those who would diversify the bench.
Mr. Obama was also initially slow to make nominations, falling far behind Mr.
Bush's pace in his 1st year, and while his tempo later picked up, his
administration never closed the gap. There are no nominees for several dozen
open seats, according to data compiled by the liberal Alliance for Justice.
Even when the White House produced nominees, they faced significant obstacles
on the Senate floor. Republicans used procedural rules to delay votes on
uncontroversial appeals court nominees and on district court nominees, forcing
Democrats to consume hours of precious Senate floor time on confirmation votes
for judges of a type that previously would have been quickly handled.
"Obama didn't assertively put forward progressive candidates who would be the
ideological counterweights to some Republican appointees, and yet his choices
have been met with relentless obstructionism anyway," said Nan Aron, president
of the Alliance for Justice. "All of this has left Obama with a significantly
smaller judicial footprint than he is entitled to."
Even as many liberals have reacted tepidly to Mr. Obama's nominees,
conservatives have remained skeptical. M. Edward Whelan III, a prominent legal
blogger and the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said he
suspected that many would turn out to be "activist" left-wing judges.
"Because the left is losing the debate over judicial philosophy, they are
looking for folks who can be depicted as more moderate," he said. "The sort of
record that makes a candidate a 'rock star' to the left also makes that
candidate politically toxic."
Ambiguous Philosophy
It is far from clear, however, that Mr. Obama's relatively moderate choices
merely reflect political expedience. Despite hopes by some supporters that he
would seek to balance ideologically conservative judges with liberals, his own
views on judicial philosophy are ambiguous.
Teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he gained a
reputation as a pragmatist who sometimes challenged liberal orthodoxies.
Positioning himself for a Democratic presidential primary, he compiled a nearly
uniformly liberal record on judges as a senator, voting against John G. Roberts
Jr. as chief justice and filibustering some Bush nominees.
Unlike Mr. Bush, who cast a spotlight on his nominees and judicial philosophy,
Mr. Obama has rarely discussed his views and has sometimes offered seeming
contradictions. For example, he said judges should have "empathy" for people's
struggles and understand how rulings "affect the daily realities of people's
lives" - but also that they should impartially "approach decisions without any
particular ideology or agenda."
Mr. Obama's most prominent comments about judges as president have been his
criticism of what he has portrayed as a growing "lack of judicial restraint" by
conservatives seeking to overturn campaign finance restrictions and his health
care law.
But in April 2010, he shocked some supporters by suggesting a disparaging
equivalence between recent conservative legal efforts and liberal court
victories in the 1960s and '70s.
"It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored
the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes and tried to impose judicial
solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through
politically," Mr. Obama said. "And in the '60s and '70s, the feeling was - is
that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach. What you're now seeing, I
think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error."
Restored Balance
When Mr. Bush left office, the conservative legal movement had made remarkable
gains on the appellate bench, in part because Republican presidents had
controlled such appointments for 20 of the previous 28 years.
Mr. Obama has managed to restore a degree of partisan balance on the appeals
courts. Today, Democratic appointees make up 49 % of appeals court judges, up
from 39 % when Mr. Bush left office, and they are majorities on 6 of the 13
circuits, up from just 1, according to Mr. Wheeler.
2 circuits exemplify Mr. Obama's mixed record. He has transformed the Court of
Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., appointing 6 of its 15 active
judges. Long considered the most conservative circuit in the nation, it now has
a significantly more liberal-leaning majority.
Last year, for example, the court ruled on a case that arose in 2003 when a
deputy sheriff in Somerset County, Md., mistakenly shot a man who was trying to
avoid arrest for failing to pay child support. The deputy reached for his stun
gun but accidentally grabbed his handgun and fired.
The man, who survived, later sued, only to have a district court judge dismiss
the case without a trial. But last summer, the appeals court voted, 9 to 3, to
give the man a chance to make his case before a jury after all. For the
once-conservative Fourth Circuit, a decision to side with a plaintiff over a
police officer in a legally ambiguous dispute was a startling sign of change.
But if the new-look Fourth Circuit represents Mr. Obama's greatest impact, its
opposite is the powerful District of Columbia Circuit, which hears a range of
lawsuits like challenges to federal agency regulations and habeas corpus suits
by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mr. Obama waited nearly 2 years to make his 1st nomination to that panel. After
Republicans - their numbers swollen by the 2010 election - blocked a
confirmation vote, he waited more than 6 months before trying again. His
failure to fill any of its 3 vacancies has left a 2-vote majority of
Republican-appointed judges in control.
Frustrated Hopes
Aides to Mr. Obama had initially planned to move more assertively on
lower-court judges. After the 2008 election, aides on Mr. Obama's transition
team filled a 3-ring binder with a list of about 2 dozen potential appeals
courts nominees, several people familiar with the process said. But hopes of
rolling them out quickly were frustrated.
2 Supreme Court vacancies prompted aides to set aside most work on lower
judgeships. Personnel upheavals added to the delays: Mr. Obama has had a
revolving cast of White House counsels and lower-ranking lawyers assigned to
vetting judicial nominees.
Mr. Obama's emphasis on diversity - he has appointed a higher percentage of
women and members of minority groups than any predecessor - also slowed the
search. (Awkwardly, the American Bar Association's judicial vetting committee
later scuttled at least 14 finalists for nominations - nearly all women or
minorities - by declaring them "not qualified.")
And amid the fight on the health care bill, the White House negotiated with
home-state lawmakers to get them to sign off ahead of nominations. Some -
including Democrats - dragged their feet, officials said.
In a speech last year, Mr. Obama's 2nd White House counsel, Robert F. Bauer,
complained that lawmakers were "all too often hard to pin down."
"Sometimes it is just a question of personal preference: the president has
selected a candidate, and a particular member would have chosen differently,"
he said. "And this stalls progress on filling the vacancy."
The transition team's list included district judges it considered shoo-ins for
elevation - like David Hamilton, Mr. Obama's 1st nominee, who had an
unexpectedly turbulent reception - and several high-powered legal scholars,
including Pamela Karlan and Kathleen Sullivan, both of Stanford University, and
Goodwin Liu of the University of California, Berkeley, people familiar with the
list said.
Mr. Obama waited more than a year - when the health care fight was nearly over
- before nominating Mr. Liu for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco. He
was arguably the 1st Obama nominee who was the ideological equivalent of some
of the most controversial Bush nominees. After a bruising fight, Republicans
ultimately blocked him with a filibuster.
Mr. Obama has not since nominated anyone else in his mold. Ms. Karlan - another
prominent liberal academic - said the White House asked her in February 2009 if
she was interested in being considered. She said yes but never heard back.
While she said she was not disappointed, Ms. Karlan expressed worries that if
Republicans nominated outspoken conservatives but Democrats did not nominate
equally liberal ones, the center of mainstream legal debate would shift to the
right. "I don't think I'm any more liberal than Antonin Scalia is
conservative," she said. "I believe in capitalism. I believe in America. I
believe that we should have criminal laws. It's not like I'm an anarchist."
She also criticized Mr. Obama's tactics in nominating Mr. Liu by himself, which
she likened to sending a single soldier onto a battlefield to draw all of an
opponent's fire.
By contrast, she noted, Mr. Bush put forth groups of outspoken conservatives at
once. A few were blocked, but most made it through.
Low-Key Model
But for Mr. Obama, the Liu defeat was a lesson. Even after the 2010 midterm
elections, when the Republican takeover of the House curtailed his legislative
agenda, he stuck to the relatively low-key model he had adopted at the start of
his presidency.
Last fall, for example, Mr. Obama nominated Paul J. Watford to the Ninth
Circuit, who was confirmed in May. In part because he is black and relatively
young, Judge Watford has attracted attention as a potential Supreme Court
prospect on the Democratic judicial farm team. But he has a strikingly mixed
resume for a judge with such status.
A former prosecutor and law firm partner, Judge Watford clerked for a liberal
Supreme Court justice but also for a conservative appeals court judge. He
represented liberal clients - supporters of campaign finance restrictions and
the rights of gay people - but also corporations facing suits over human rights
abuses and faulty products.
Some liberals have held out hopes that Mr. Obama might be more aggressive on
judicial nominations in a second term; as his term progressed, Mr. Obama became
more combative with Congressional Republicans.
But Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, said that without significant changes to Senate rules,
a greater push might make little difference.
"If Obama is re-elected, he is still going to face these same problems - and if
he has a Republican Senate, it will be much worse," he said. "I think the best
liberals can hope for is for Obama to be able to appoint middle-of-the-road
people that will hold back the pressure of conservative activism. But certainly
the great expectations when he was elected have not come to fruition."
(source: New York Times)
PENNSYLVANIA----new, not serious execution date
Execution date set for convicted killer
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett signed an execution warrant Thursday for Andre
Staton, 49, a Baltimore native who in February 2004 stabbed his estranged
girlfriend to death after breaking into her home on the 200 block of Third
Avenue.
The warrant set Oct. 10 for Staton's execution.
The death warrant doesn't ensure Staton's execution any time soon, Blair County
District Attorney Wade Kagarise said Friday.
Attorney Tim Burns, who handles criminal appeals in the Blair County courts,
has been appointed by Judge Elizabeth Doyle to prepare a post-conviction appeal
on Staton's behalf.
Staton cannot face the death penalty until his appeals are disposed of,
Kagarise said. The death-row inmate, currently lodged at the State Correctional
Institution at Greene, has already gone through a 1st round of appeals before
the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Staton's initial complaint was that a jury found as an aggravating circumstance
that he killed Beverly Yohn while under a protection-from-abuse order to have
no contact with her.
Staton contended both in his 2006 trial and his initial appeal that he was not
aware of a PFA order against him.
According to the testimony, Yohn moved into her mother's house to get away from
Staton, who was physically abusing her.
On Feb. 24, 2004, he entered the home and in front of one of her children he
stabbed her repeatedly in the back until the knife he was using broke. Staton
then fled to Baltimore but was arrested several days later.
Staton was convicted in May 2006 of 1st-degree murder, and a jury then
sentenced him to death after weighing the aggravating circumstances of the
murder against the mitigating circumstances. One of the mitigating
circumstances found by the jury was that Staton had a "potential for good."
Staton, at times, has requested to serve as his own attorney.
Corbett had to wait until the state Supreme Court disposed of the initial round
of appeals before signing the execution warrant, Kagarise said.
(source: The Altoona Mirror)
***************************
Indiana Co. man ordered to stand trial on charges he killed daughters,
estranged wife
An Indiana County man was ordered to stand trial on charges that he killed his
2 young daughters and his estranged wife after state police testified that he
confessed to the crimes.
District Judge Guy Haberl ordered that Lewis Paul Beatty, 41, be held for court
on 3 counts of homicide.
Lewis Beatty, 41, of Home, is also charged with arson and animal cruelty
because he allegedly set fire to his home, where the girls were killed, and his
wife's new residence, and also fatally shot the family's pet pony, goat and
dog.
Indiana County District Attorney Patrick Dougherty said his office will deicde
soon if they plan to seek the death penalty.
"Death penalty cases are long and they are cost intensive. I want to make sure
the victim's family is on-board for everything that is included in a death
penalty case," Dougherty said.
According to police, Beatty choked and slit the throat of his 6-year-old
daughter, Sara, after she mentioned her mother was dating another man,
beginning the killing spree on June 1.
Police believe Beatty similarly killed 11-year-old Amanda when she came home,
before driving to the home of his estranged wife, Christine, whom he choked
before slashing her throat.
Beatty's preliminary hearing was moved to the Indiana County Courthouse where
security was tightened in the courtroom.
Trooper Timothy Frew, deputy fire marshal, testified that there were multiple
points of origin for the fires at both homes. Frew had ruled both fires arson.
Investigating Trooper Timothy Lipniskis testified that he interviewed Beatty at
about 1:30 a.m. on June 2, and Beatty confessed to the slayings and to setting
the houses on fire.
He also admitted to shooting the family's pony, dog and goat, Lipniskis said.
(source: WPXI News)
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