April 9
CALIFORNIA:
Man faces death penalty for fire that killed mom, sister
A man accused of intentionally setting a fire in his Mira Mesa home, killing
his mother and sister, pleaded not guilty Monday to murder and other charges
that could lead to the death penalty if he's convicted.
Thongsavath Sphabmixay, 44, was ordered held without bail in the deaths last
Friday of 69-year-old Bouakham Sphabmixay and his sister, 48-year-old Pamela
Sphabmixay. The women died a day after they were overcome by smoke in the fire
at the family's home in the 11200 block of Featherhill Lane.
The defendant lived at the residence with the victims and a male roommate.
About 1:30 a.m. last Thursday, the roommate noticed the smell of gasoline
outside his bedroom door, said Deputy District Attorney Nicole Rooney.
"He (the roommate) opened his door and noticed the landing was on fire, which
was blocking the only exit to the stairs out of the 2nd story," the prosecutor
told reporters.
Rooney said the roommate was able to go through the flames and jump down to a
lower landing to escape.
As he was leaving, the roommate heard the victims - who shared a bedroom - open
their door, scream and shut the door, according to the prosecutor.
Rooney said the roommate called for help to the defendant - who was still in
the house - but he fled the scene.
She said the roommate went across the street to get help and tried to go back
in the house to rescue the victims, but was unable to do so because the smoke
was so heavy.
When contacted by police, the defendant initially gave them his brother's name,
Rooney said.
In addition to 2 counts of murder, the defendant is charged with charged with
premeditated attempted murder and arson, with special circumstance allegations
of multiple murders and murder by arson.
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis will decide later whether the defendant will
face the death penalty or life in prison without parole if he's convicted.
A status conference is scheduled for Wednesday and a preliminary hearing for
April 19.
(source: Fox5 News)
***********
Trial Begins for Marines in Torture Murders of Sgt. and Wife
Opening statements got underway Monday in the trial of 3 former Marines charged
with murdering another Marine and his wife in 2008 in Riverside County.
Sgt. Jan Pietrzak, 24, and his wife, Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were bound
and gagged before they were shot in the head.
Jenkins-Pietrzak was raped while her husband was forced to watch, and a fire
was set to destroy evidence, according to court documents.
The Riverside County district attorney's office is seeking the death penalty
against Kevin Cox, 25; Tyrone Miller, 25; and Emrys John, 22.
A 4th former Marine, Kesaun Sykes, 25, also faces the death penalty but will be
tried separately in August, the district attorney's office said.
Each defendant is charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, with special
circumstance allegations of killing in the course of a robbery and taking more
than 1 life in the same crime.
There is also a sentence-enhancing allegation that a sexual assault occurred
during the robbery.
All 4 have pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors said the attackers stormed the couple's new home in the French
Valley neighborhood in southern Riverside County as part of a robbery scheme.
Pietrzak, an Iraq war veteran, was stationed at Miramar Marine Corps Air
Station in San Diego.
His wife was a counselor with a Riverside County infant care program.
They had been married for 68 days.
(source: KTLA News)
OREGON:
Oregon's Death Penalty Is Being Reviewed For Repeal
A bill seeking to repeal the death penalty in Oregon is scheduled for a work
session next week.
Under House Joint Resolution One, executions would be replaced by life in
prison, without the possibility of parole.
Restitution to victims' families would also be part of the amended proposal.
The bill will move to the Rules Committee for further work before its work
session.
The House Judiciary Committee will hear the bill on the 16th.
(source: KOBI news)
USA:
Death Row & Exoneration
These 3 very scary words--DEATH-ROW EXONERATION-- are enough to make you
upchuck.
Consider what it must be like if you have been convicted for a crime you did
not commit and are now being sentenced to death.
This Op-Ed is concerned with the relationship between the growing number of
exonerations and the death penalty.
In 1972 the US Supreme Court in a vote of 5 to 4 invalidated all death-penalty
laws in the country, saying they were being arbitrarily applied. Justice Potter
Stewart concurred, saying: the Constitution could not "permit this unique
penalty to be so wantonly and freakishly imposed."
The arbitrary nature of applying the death penalty and especially the issue of
class status of the majority of the defendants eventually sentenced to death
warns that caution definitely needs to be practiced.
Add to this the David Baldus' findings on the lop-sided application of the
state-mandated execution of non-whites and especially blacks, which also warns
that caution needs to be practiced.
Baldus (June 23, 1935 -- June 13, 2011) ushered in new ways to study social
phenomena. His pioneering research on the death penalty nearly convinced the US
Supreme Court in the 1987 Supreme Court decision McCleskey v. Kemp. The Supreme
Court decided, though, that statistics did not matter!!
Regardless, the Baldus research uncovered a major finding that demonstrated
that blacks were significantly and most importantly disproportionately more
likely to be sentenced to death than whites. In addition, regardless of the
race of the defendant, those who killed white victims were four times more
likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of killing black victims.
The gist of the Baldus research is this: a death sentence is more likely to be
based on the race of the victim, not the offender.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens spoke to this issue in a New
York Review of Books column. He put it thus:
That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of
white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern
lynchings.
http://bit.ly/i2uMbg
This becomes all the more important in that most capital-murder defendants are
poor and unable to mount a legal defense. And, when court-appointed attorneys
are appointed to represent them they are more likely than not to receive
inferior counseling. Or least a defense that suffers from the ability to
harness the resources--private investigators, scientific experts, independent
DNA analysis--that are often critical to successfully establishing one's
innocence.
The systemic nature of injustice is everywhere, leaving this writer to draw the
hypothesis that YES, there must be innocent people who have been executed in
the United States of America.
Executing the Innocent:
The death-penalty clearinghouse currently has listed on its web site 10
executions of individuals who may have been innocent. These are:
Carlos DeLuna Texas Conviction: 1983 Executed: 1989
Ruben Cantu Texas Convicted: 1985 Executed: 1993
Larry Griffin Missouri Conviction: 1981 Executed: 1995
Joseph O'Dell Virginia Conviction: 1986 Executed: 1997
David Spence Texas Conviction: 1984 Executed: 1997
Leo Jones Florida Convicted: 1981 Executed: 1998
Gary Graham Texas Convicted: 1981 Executed: 2000
Claude Jones Texas Convicted 1989 Executed 2000
Cameron Willingham Texas Convicted: 1992 Executed: 2004
Troy Davis Georgia Convicted: 1991 Executed 2011
Many of these executions have drawn considerable attention, some none. The
Cameron Willingham case in the Texas arson probe has again gathered
considerable attention.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the US in 1976, there have been 1,325
executions (including year 2013).
Executions in 2013: 5
Executions in 2012: 43
Executions in 2011: 43
Kirk Bloodsworth would have been one of those executed, had it not been for DNA
evidence. Kirk Bloodsworth, a jolly white male, is one of many young men
sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit; he was convicted in March of
1985 for the brutal killing and sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl.
Bloodsworth was exonerated 8 years later. And, according to Bloodsworth he is
the 1st inmate released from death row based on post-conviction DNA evidence.
Prosecutors who take capital cases know that the possibility of executing an
innocent person (most likely a male) is a very real possibility. In the
Missouri case of Larry Griffin, prosecutor Jennifer Joyce, St Louis circuit
attorney, understood this when she said:
Every prosecutor conceptually has the notion that someone innocent can be
convicted. http://nyti.ms/16vuMmy
There is strong evidence that the US justice system has executed innocent men
and women. But we don't talk about such atrocities. In a society where only 6
or 7 states have halted "state-mandated executions" the execution of men and
women still remains a part of the normal processes of everyday life.
Fewer than 20 states have either abolished outright or have placed a moratorium
on the death penalty. This leaves over 50% of states still in the business of
executing men and women. And, up until recently the US executed youth under the
age of 18, with most states following recent Supreme Court decisions no longer
doing so.
{Charles L. Scott, MD, 2005, "Roper v. Simmons: Can Juvenile Offenders be
Executed?" Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry and Law 33:4:547-552}
With nearly 400 exonerations coupled with the long history of carrying out the
death penalty it stands to reason that innocent people have been executed.
Because death by state sanction is irreversible, it makes sense to be
absolutely certain --"beyond a reasonable doubt"--that the person being
executed is guilty.
Yet, there is not even agreement on the US Supreme Court about the level of
certainty required to substantiate the imposition of the death penalty.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work
prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of
that person's official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section
105, of the US Code.
In 2006 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:
It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single
case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he
did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not
have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by
the abolition lobby. The dissent makes much of the new-found capacity of DNA
testing to establish innocence. But in every case of an executed defendant of
which I am aware, that technology has confirmed guilt.
{KANSAS v. MARSH (No. 04-1170), 278 Kan. 520, 102 P. 3d 445, reversed and
remanded. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1170.ZC.html}
Despite Justice Scalia's assurances that we have never executed an innocent
person, exonerations are like the canary in the mine. They raise serious
concerns that we have in fact executed innocent people.
Justice Scalia fails to address or be concerned with the fact that the
appellate process is very narrow in what it allows to be considered in capital
cases. He overlooks, in his assessment that new data--including DNA--is not
usually allowed to bring forth a new examination of the case. Rather he
suggests that the original trial by jury that resulted in a conviction based on
evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" and the appeals process that takes place
in all death-penalty convictions is sufficient to ensure that innocent people
are not executed.
Even for those who support the death penalty I argue that "beyond a reasonable
doubt", while it plays out in movies and TV programs, assuring the viewer that
all evidence has been considered, is too low a standard for something that is
irreversible as an execution.
Conclusion:
DNA testing [has] established conclusively that numerous persons who had been
convicted of capital crimes (by 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt') were, beyond
any doubt, innocent. --Judge Jed Rakoff, United States District Court Southern
District of New York; United States v. Quinones (2002)(in Gross, 2013)
There are so many cases of faulty justice in death sentences that books could
be written about them. Unfortunately few have been published to date. One such
case is that of Earl Washington.
On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington, a black man--defended for all of forty
minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death-penalty case--was found guilty
of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine
years (9) on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his
life. However, he spent another eight years (8) in prison before more
sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/case/cases/
Because of this and so many other cases there should be a 50-state moratorium
on the death penalty until we put in place policies and procedures that allow
one to be 100% certain that the person being executed did the crime.
Sources: Tim Junkin, 2005, Bloodsworth: The True Story of One Man's Triumph
over Injustice, A Shannon Ravenel Book
http://amzn.to/11kXIMZ
Garrett, Brandon, 2012, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go
Wrong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
David Grann, 2009, "TRIAL BY FIRE: Did Texas execute an innocent man?
SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann
Gross, Samuel R., 2013. "How Many False Convictions are There? How Many
Exonerations are There?" Pp. 45-60 in C. R. Huff & M. Killias eds Wrongful
Convictions and Miscarriages of Justice: Causes and Remedies in North American
and European Criminal Justice Systems. New York: Routledge.
Gross, Samuel R. 2012 "David Baldus and the Legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp." Iowa
Law Review, Vol. 97, No. 6, 2012; U of Michigan Public Law Research Paper No.
301. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2200269
http://www.thejusticeproject.org/profiles/bloodsworth/kirks-story/
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-united-states
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diann-rusttierney/shouting-from-the-rooftop_b_294991.html
(source: Earl Smith, Op-Ed News)
******************
US soldier faces death penalty for fighting with al-Qaeda in Syria; A former
American soldier who fought as a rebel in Syria faces the death penalty for his
ties to a Syrian faction, Jabat al-Nusra, that has merged with al-Qaeda's Iraq
branch.
Hours after US prosecutors successfully applied for Eric Harroun to face the
death penalty, an announcement emerged in Iraq that the Islamic State of Iraq
was joining forces with al-Nusra. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said his group and
Syria's al-Nusra Front - which has been blacklisted by the United States -
would now jointly go under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant, the SITE Arabic monitoring service said.
Baghdadi said the Iraqi group would share its forces and finances with its
Syrian partner, which has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US
despite belonging to the Western-backed Syrian opposition coalition.
Harroun faced the charges of working with Nusra and firing rocket propelled
grenades while in Syria at a court in Virginia. The maximum penalty if found
guilty is death, and the minimum is life imprisonment.
After his arrest, Harroun, 30, told the FBI that he had killed 10 people while
fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
(source: The Telegraph)
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