Nov. 14
TEXAS----impending execution
Execution Of Scott Panetti, Inmate With Schizophrenia, 'Would Cross A Moral
Line': Lawyer
Supporters of a mentally ill Texas man on death row are petitioning state
officials to commute his sentence to life in prison.
Scott Panetti, 56, rejected a plea deal in the 1992 double-murder of his
in-laws, and was allowed to represent himself at trial, despite the state's
knowledge of his schizophrenia, his lawyers said.
Panetti is scheduled to die by lethal injection Dec. 3.
Greg Wiercioch, one of Panetti's lawyers, said the execution "would cross a
moral line," Courthouse News reported.
Wiercioch and his other lawyers filed a clemency petition Nov. 12 asking
officials to stop the execution. The letter was signed by former Texas Gov.
Mark White, the American Bar Association, and a host of mental health
professionals and religious leaders.
"We come together from across the partisan and ideological divide and are
united in our belief that, irrespective of whether we support or oppose the
death penalty, this is not an appropriate case for execution," said the letter,
which was addressed to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the state board of pardons and
parole.
Panetti, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, claimed that his alter
ego, "Sarge," killed his wife's parents, then kidnapped his spouse and daughter
at gunpoint and held them hostage in a cabin. They were later released
unharmed.
Panetti's lawyers said that the violent spree was triggered by a "psychotic
break," which also led the man to reject a plea deal for life in prison and
represent himself at trial.
During the trial, he donned a purple cowboy costume and called witnesses such
as the John F. Kennedy, the Pope, and Jesus Christ. In 1995, Panetti was
convicted of capital murder in the shooting deaths of his in-laws.
Panetti's case went before the Supreme Court in 2007. In a 5-4 ruling, the
court found Panetti had insufficient understanding of why he was being put to
death, and ordered a re-evaluation. But after his case went to court again, the
state courts decided that Panetti was exaggerating his illness and reinstated
the death penalty.
His lawyers said Panetti maintains the delusion that Satan is orchestrating his
execution by way of the state of Texas, in order to prevent him from preaching
the gospel to other inmates on death row.
"I thought to myself, 'My God. How in the world can our legal system allow an
insane man to defend himself? How can this be just?'" F.E. Seale, a
psychiatrist who examined Panetti several times, said in court, according to
the Journal Sentinel. "I not only thought that Scott was incompetent but that
it was not moral to have him stand trial."
Texas has executed 10 inmates in 2014, and has another nine scheduled for next
year.
(source: Andres Jauregui, Huffington Post)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Trooper ambush suspect charged with terrorism
The man accused of opening fire on a Pennsylvania State Police barracks
admitted killing a trooper because he was dissatisfied with government and
wanted to "wake people up," according to court documents filed Thursday that
provided the 1st indication of a possible motive.
Eric Frein spoke of wanting to start a revolution in a letter to his parents
and called the slaying of Cpl. Bryon Dickson an "assassination" in a police
interview after his Oct. 30 capture, the documents said.
State police charged Frein on Thursday with 2 counts of terrorism. He already
faced 1st-degree murder and other counts in the Sept. 12 ambush, which killed
Dickson, seriously wounded another trooper and sparked a 48-day manhunt in the
Pocono Mountains.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Frein, who appeared by video at a
brief hearing at which state police filed the additional charges but who has
not entered a plea.
On the night of his capture, Frein waived his right to remain silent and told
police in an interview at the barracks that he had shot the troopers "because
he wanted to make a change (in government) and that voting was inefficient to
do so, because there was no one worth voting for," according to a criminal
complaint. "The defendant further acknowledged taking action (shooting the
troopers) to wake people up because it was all he could do."
Court documents filed Thursday also included a letter, which authorities say
was written by Frein and was addressed to "Mom and Dad," that said revolution
"can get us back in the liberties we once had."
"Tension is high at the moment and the time seems right for a spark to ignite a
fire in the hearts of men. What I have done has not been done before and it
felt like it was worth a try," said the letter, found on a storage drive inside
the abandoned airplane hangar authorities believe Frein used as shelter.
Frein, 31, also apologized to his parents, writing, "I am just not a good son,"
according to documents.
The letter was created on Dec. 29, 2013, and was last accessed on Oct. 6, 2014,
while Frein was on the run, the documents said. Police have said Frein had a
laptop with him.
Authorities, meanwhile, say they're not worried that Frein's confession could
conceivably be challenged by defense attorneys.
Police refused to tell Frein that his family had hired an attorney for him the
night he was captured, according to defense attorney James Swetz, who said he
was prevented from seeing Frein at the barracks.
"I was told, 'He's an adult and has not asked for a lawyer,'" Swetz recounted
earlier this week.
District Attorney Ray Tonkin has cited Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent
that says police aren't required to tell a suspect that an attorney is seeking
to speak with him or her. A more recent state court decision, however, said the
Supreme Court had not "eliminated the possibility" that a defendant's
due-process rights could be violated under similar circumstances.
(source: Fox News)
DELAWARE:
Efforts to Repeal Death Penalty Begin Again With New Delaware Legislature
Supporters of ending capital punishment in Delaware are gearing up for another
attempt to have a bill passed in Dover.
The 148th General Assembly will begin their session in January and the Delaware
Repeal Project has been busy coordinating a series of upcoming town hall forums
to generate public support.
The town halls will be held Nov. 18-20 and will feature law enforcement
officials from New Hampshire, New Jersey and Connecticut who will share their
reasons why they oppose the death penalty.
Delaware legislators have made previous attempts to end capital punishment and
replace it with life without parole, but faced strong opposition from First
State law enforcement agencies.
"Some of the most significant opposition has come from law enforcement
organizations in the state so we wanted to bring in some folks representing
different aspects of law enforcement to give their point of view," explained
Kathleen MacRae, executive director of the Delaware Repeal Project.
Senate Bill 19, was introduced in 2013 and received bipartisan support from
house and senate members. It narrowly passed the senate but stalled in the
House Judiciary Committee. Since, the 147th General Assembly was not able to
pass the bill during their term, a new bill will need to be introduced.
"It may be January, it may be March but we definitely have plans," MacRae
added. "We're working with legislators in the Senate and in the House to
introduce repeal legislation."
Following the outcome of the election earlier this month, a handful of new
lawmakers and a new Delaware new attorney general will be helping to shape
policy in the state. MacRae said there's a lot of "unknowns" as to how a bill
would fare in the new General Assembly but hopes the town halls will provide
education and raise curiosity about the issue.
"The death penalty is a controversial issue, there's a lot of different points
of view on it from law enforcement prospective, from victim???s family
perspective," MacRae said. "It's an emotional issue, sometimes it's a hard
issue to talk about."
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell has been relatively neutral on the subject.
"If it does come back up it's certainly a conversation I'm more than willing to
have," Markell said during a recent interview on "First."
Markell granted clemency to convicted murder Robert Gattis in 2012 after the
Delaware Board of Pardons votes to reduce the sentence.
There are currently 16 inmates on Delaware's death row.
(source: nbcphiladelphia.com)
VIRGINIA:
Why Is Justin Wolfe Still in Prison? His murder conviction was vacated 3 years
ago, but Virginia won't set him free.
A few years back, I wrote about prosecutorial misconduct in the Northern
Virginia capital murder trial of Justin Wolfe. The case was one of several in
the news at the time in which prosecutors hid evidence that would have helped
the defendant, or strong-armed a witness into falsely testifying. Prosecutors
in Wolfe's case seem to have done both. When I wrote about his case in 2011, it
looked like Wolfe's prosecution was finally over. It wasn't. He's still in
prison.
Wolfe is back on the radar this week because he was featured in Episode 7 of
Serial, the new podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by
Sarah Koenig. As part of her investigation into the prosecution and conviction
of Adnan Syed for a 1999 Baltimore murder, Koenig found her way to Wolfe and
one of his vast team of lawyers and defenders, Deirdre Enright, the director of
the University of Virginia Innocence Project Clinic. (Disclosure: Enright is a
friend.) In the podcast, Koenig said it was "uncanny how many similarities"
there are between Adnan Syed's case and Justin Wolfe's. She interviewed Enright
at length about flaws in Syed's prosecution and holes in the police's case. For
Syed, getting his conviction vacated, as Wolfe did, would be the ultimate
victory. But that raises an obvious question: If Wolfe was vindicated, then why
is he still in prison?
Wolfe was charged with capital murder for allegedly hiring someone to kill
Daniel Petrole Jr., in 2001. Prince William County prosecutors theorized that
Wolfe, who was 19 at the time and sold marijuana that he purchased from
Petrole, murdered his drug supplier because he owed Petrole vast amounts of
money. Rather than pay up, they claimed, Wolfe arranged a hit on the drug boss,
allegedly choosing Owen Barber IV as his triggerman. In addition to Barber's
testimony implicating Wolfe, the cops were able to link Wolfe, Barber, and
Petrole to the drug ring via phone records. In 2002, a jury in Prince William
County, Virginia, convicted Wolfe and sentenced him to death. He's been in
prison since his arrest in 2001, and on death row for most of that time. In
2005, he came within 2 weeks of being executed.
The prosecutors want Wolfe to be dead. Failing that, they'd like him in prison
for life.
As Drew Lindsay's excellent 2009 Washingtonian story pointed out at the time,
"courts in Virginia are the least likely in the country to reverse a capital
conviction of sentence." Nevertheless, in the summer of 2011, Raymond A.
Jackson, a federal district judge in Norfolk, vacated the murder conviction and
Wolfe's death sentence.
What led Judge Jackson to make that decision? For one thing, Barber recanted
his testimony. Barber was the main witness against Wolfe at trial, and the only
one who testified to the murder-for-hire. But in 2005, he completely disavowed
the story he told at trial, swearing that he had lied about Wolfe hiring him to
kill Petrole only after the cops threatened him with the death penalty. It was
the police, Barber said, who cooked up the idea that Wolfe was the mastermind
behind the murder-for-hire.
Barber's recantation wasn't his final word on the Petrole killing. He later
recanted that recantation, then reversed course again. Ultimately, he told
Judge Jackson that he had indeed lied during Wolfe's trial, and that Wolfe had
nothing to do with the murder. It was this final testimony, Jackson said, that
he found most compelling.
Jackson also found that prosecutors had behaved atrociously. The judge
determined that they had systematically concealed evidence that would have
helped Wolfe's defense, including that Barber and Petrole had a longstanding
violent relationship; that Petrole had a hit out on Barber at the time of
Petrole's death; that Barber had told a roommate that he acted alone; and that
a detective had told Barber that the commonwealth might "entertain the idea of
not charging him with [the death penalty]" if he incriminated Wolfe. All of
that evidence should have been turned over to Wolfe's lawyers. It was not.
(It's also worth noting that Wolfe's original defense attorney made numerous
mistakes during the murder trial, as the Washingtonian piece documents. In
2003, he surrendered his license after the Virginia bar "received complaints
from at least a dozen clients.")
As a result of that behavior and other actions, Judge Jackson accused the
prosecutors of conduct that was "not only unconstitutional in regards to due
process, but abhorrent to the judicial process." Prosecutor Paul Ebert (who has
now stepped back from the case) explained that his office suppressed all of
this exculpatory evidence because it "does not have an 'open-file policy,'
providing criminal defense counsel access to entire case files." Ebert
explained that he had "found in the past when you have information that is
given to certain counsel and certain defendants, they are able to fabricate a
defense around what is provided." Put another way, Ebert admitted that his
office hangs on to proof of innocence in order to keep criminal defendants from
proving themselves innocent.
Judge Jackson's 2011 ruling and Ebert???s statement should have ended the case
for good. Instead, the commonwealth appealed.
In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld Judge Jackson's
order vacating all of Wolfe???s convictions and sentences. The court found the
conduct of the prosecution in this case "abhorrent to the judicial process." As
a result, Wolfe was released from death row on Sept. 7, 2012, though he
remained locked up in Prince William County.
But just 4 days after the 4th Circuit issued its mandate, Ebert and his
assistants visited Owen Barber in prison. They told Barber that by recanting
his testimony, he was now in violation of his plea agreement. Prosecutors
advised Barber that if the plea agreement were revoked, he could face the death
penalty again. In effect, they applied the same pressure that had been applied
before Wolfe's trial. (For their part, prosecutors say it was defense attorneys
who "relentlessly badgered" Barber into proclaiming Wolfe's innocence.) After
prosecutors went back to the prison to try to pressure Barber into testifying,
their star witness decided to hire a lawyer, plead the 5th, and stop talking to
anyone.
Wolfe's lawyers went back to Judge Jackson, citing this further misconduct on
the part of the prosecution. In December 2012, Jackson ordered that Wolfe be
released from prison. In their improper response to Barber's changed testimony,
Jackson wrote in his ruling, prosecutors had "permanently crystalized" errors
they had made earlier in the case. This repeated misconduct made any
possibility of a fair retrial for Wolfe impossible.
But the commonwealth appealed again. And, in May 2013, the federal appeals
court for the 4th Circuit found in a 2-1 decision that the lower federal court
had overstepped its authority by barring a new trial.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to get involved last February. Now, prosecutors
have brought new charges against Wolfe, including much stiffer drug conspiracy
charges that mandate life in prison if he's convicted. Though Wolfe
acknowledged in his initial trial that he used and sold drugs, prosecutors are
now claiming that he was a kingpin in a "continuing criminal enterprise." I
asked Enright about the "kingpin" theory that prosecutors have relied on for
Wolfe's retrial. She told me that her students at the Virginia Innocence
Project clinic have been phoning all around the commonwealth to find even one
instance of the state charging someone in this manner. They have yet to find
one. When I asked how Wolfe could possibly be characterized as a "kingpin" she
laughed, suggesting that even Petrole, the drug supplier and murder victim,
likely wouldn't qualify for that title for purposes of the Virginia statute.
She believes the commonwealth is beefing up these drug charges "to try to hold
onto Justin for life, or strong-arm him into a plea bargain that the real
kingpins - and their lawyers - would laugh at."
If your neck hurts from all the ping-ponging between the federal district
court, the appeals court, and the state trial courts, maybe just score it this
way: The prosecutors want Wolfe to be dead. Failing that, they'd like him in
prison for life.
Not only have Virginia prosecutors now deprived Wolfe of potential exculpatory
evidence at his retrial, they are seeking to read Barber's original (recanted)
testimony to the new jurors. In effect, they will have erased the intervening
years, and their own misconduct. These compounded sins of initially
manipulating Barber, hiding evidence, and then allegedly threatening Barber
into silence were sufficient for the federal district court to find that "the
holding of a new trial would be unjust." The appeals court disagreed. The
retrial is set for nine months from now. Wolfe's attorneys are still trying to
sort out what will and will not be admitted at that trial.
Paul Ebert has now formally removed himself from the case and was replaced with
a special prosecutor, Ray Morrogh, who announced almost immediately upon taking
the case that "Wolfe was absolutely involved in this murder and planned it and
caused it to occur and he did it out of greed. ... Justin Wolfe is many things
but innocent is not one of them." So we know where he stands. In a 2012
hearing, when asked by the Virginia judge what she should make of Judge
Jackson's findings, Morrough, replied, "Now we're back to square one. We're in
the commonwealth of Virginia and we're in the state court." As if the entirety
of the federal proceedings had been a kind of glitch that could be repaired by
the state judicial system.
There is nothing new about rampant prosecutorial misconduct or the widespread
refusals of prosecutors to comply with their obligation to turn over
exculpatory material. The prosecutorial system is built on broken incentives
and until prosecutors face real consequences for manipulating evidence and
witnesses, we only hear about the handful of egregious cases, like Wolfe's, and
not the misconduct that goes unreported and unsanctioned every single day.
Prosecutors made it impossible for Wolfe to have a fair trial. They have pushed
forward with another trial, on even more attenuated charges, because to do
anything less would be to admit defeat. The paradox here is that the inability
to admit error in the face of the truth is precisely what got them into this
mess. And so Justin Wolfe sits in prison. It's been 13 years.
(source: Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate)
NORTH CAROLINA:
NC anti-death penalty group marks 20th anniversary
2 half-brothers recently exonerated of murder are the guests when People of
Faith Against the Death Penalty marks its 20th anniversary in North Carolina.
The group has scheduled a banquet for Friday at the Friday Center in Chapel
Hill. Its guests will be Leon Brown and Henry McCollum, who were freed in
September after a judge vacated their convictions in the 1983 rape and murder
of a 13-year-old in Robeson County.
McCollum was the state's longest-serving death row prisoner.
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty will give an award to Helen Prejean,
the nun known for her anti-death penalty work through the movie "Dead Man
Walking."
Other awards will go to Sen. Floyd McKissick and to Rep. Larry Womble, who
sponsored and championed the Racial Justice Act of 2009.
(source: WRAL news)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
