May 12
PENNSYLVANIA:
Man guilty of 1st-degree murder in Baldwin woman;s death
A jury took just 75 minutes to convict a Pennsylvania man of 1st-degree murder
in the stabbing death of his estranged girlfriend more than 3 years ago.
Now the Washington County jury will hear additional evidence and arguments
before deciding whether 26-year-old Jordan Clemons, of Pittsburgh, deserves the
death penalty or life in prison.
"The court is entering the penalty phase. They'll look at aggravating and
mitigating circumstances, and the jury will look at that," said Washington
County District Attorney Gene Vittone.
The defense argued Clemons was irrational and guilty only of 3rd-degree murder,
a malicious killing without premeditation that carries up to 40 years in
prison.
But the jury agreed with prosecutors who argued that Clemons slashed
21-year-old Karissa Kunco's throat 4 times, deep enough to hit her spine,
making it 1st-degree murder.
Kunco's body was found in a wooded area of Mount Pleasant Township in January
2012 a day after Kunco's family reported her missing.
(source: WPXI news)
*********************
Family urges death penalty against Mt. Washington man convicted of killing
ex-girlfriend
Paul Kunco on Tuesday asked a Washington County jury if it's truly necessary
for him to explain the impact his daughter's murder has had on his life.
"Probably not," he said from the witness stand at the Washington County
Courthouse.
Jurors found Jordan Clemons, 26, of Mt. Washington, guilty Monday of killing
his ex-girlfriend, Karissa Kunco, 21, in 2012.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Kunco's family testified in the
morning about losing their daughter, who was found naked with her throat
slashed in a wooded area off Sabo Road in Mt. Pleasant.
Clemons' lawyers are expected to present arguments Tuesday afternoon and
Wednesday to try to persuade jurors to spare their client's life.
On the witness stand, Paul Kunco shared memories of his daughter, including her
love of playing basketball and helping him with his fantasy football drafts. He
told jurors of the time she got mad at him for drafting Tom Brady of the New
England Patriots as his quarterback and then about how happy she was when he
used his league winnings to buy her new shoes.
"I haven't done another fantasy football draft since I lost my daughter. I
can't," he said.
He said his 2 daughters grew up following a tradition of calling him after
midnight on New Year's Eve. His older daughter, Kayla, would call first,
followed by Karissa.
"This past New Year's Eve, I sat there with a cell phone and Kayla called," he
said. "Then I just sat there with a sick feeling knowing that I'm not getting
another phone call. I'm not getting a text message, but I still held it hoping,
saying 'maybe,'" he said.
Kathy Kunco, Karissa's mother, told jurors that life has been a struggle since
her daughter's death.
"I am living every parent's worst nightmare," she said.
"I relive the visions of what she went through every night. I wonder what were
her last words. What were her last thoughts," she said through sobs. "Her body
was dragged into the woods as if she were a rag doll. 3 1/2 years later, I feel
as if I am living a horror story. I'm still waiting for someone to wake me up."
She said she constantly checks her cell phone, hoping to receive a text message
from her daughter that says, "It's OK mom, I'm coming home."
Clemons' defense team is expected to call a number of witnesses to the stand to
tell jurors that Clemons does not deserve the death penalty because he suffered
brain injuries as a high school football player, was abused as a child and has
dealt with drug and alcohol addiction.
"We cannot change anything that has happened, and we cannot detract from the
family's loss," Assistant Public Defender Charles Carpinelli told jurors. "But
you have to remember that the death penalty is something we reserve for the
worst of the worst."
(source: triblive.com)
DELAWARE:
Tight vote expected in death penalty repeal hearing
A 2-year long effort to end Delaware's death penalty could come down to 1 vote.
The legislation heads before a key House committee Wednesday where lawmakers
failed to release a similar measure 2 years ago. Several legislators on the
committee, as well as activists, say they expect a tight vote on the measure
this time.
"I don't think much has changed since we heard the bill last time around and I
think it is likely going to be met with the same result," said Rep. Trey
Paradee, D-Dover, who sits on the committee and is opposed to repealing the
death penalty.
But supporters of the repeal effort, buoyed by Gov. Jack Markell's public
support for the legislation last week, say they're hopeful that this is the
year the bill will get out of the House Judiciary Committee, but know that they
need 1 person on the 11-member committee to reconsider their position.
"Now is the time for Delaware to be on the right side of history," said Kristin
Froehlich, president of Delaware Citizens Opposed to the Death Penalty. "We can
be at the tail end and wait for other states to lead the way, or we can be a
leader in this fight."
The legislation faces an uphill battle in committee, where the chair, Rep. John
"Larry" Mitchell, D-Elsmere, is a former law enforcement officer opposed to the
measure.
"I have always been for not repealing the death sentence," Mitchell said. "It
is a tool, something that has been in place and not had issues in Delaware in
the past."
Another member of the committee Rep. Steve Smyk, R-Milton, is a retired
Delaware state trooper. There are several other Republicans on the committee,
including Rep. Jeff Spiegelman, R-Clayton, who were opposed to the matter in
2013.
Spiegelman said he's opposed to repealing the death penalty now, more than
ever. The vote will be a very tight one, he added.
"I'm a (new) father," he said. "There is a sense that wasn't there 2 years ago.
What if something terrible happened to my son? What would I consider just at
that point?"
But the measure does have allies in a bloc of several Wilmington and New Castle
lawmakers.
Rep. Gerald Brady, D-Wilmington West, said Tuesday that he's confident the bill
will make it through the committee and on the House floor. But it will be
close, he added.
"The reason that it is going to be such a close vote is because of geographics
and professions," he said.
The debate over the death penalty has been a polarizing, divisive and emotional
one. Supporters say the practice is outdated, fraught with error and applied
arbitrarily and disproportionately. It???s an expensive measure that doesn't
make residents any safer, they say. Recent cases in Delaware and across the
nation have shown that there are inadequacies in the justice system that
present a real risk that innocent people are put to death, they add.
Opponents to repealing the death penalty say capital punishment acts as a
deterrent to violent crime and is a tool prosecutors can use for the most
heinous of perpetrators. They argue that many of the statistics cited by
supporters have no real grounding in Delaware and that the vast majority of
people living in the state oppose the death penalty.
Fred Calhoun, president of the Delaware Fraternal Order of Police, said the
system is not broken in Delaware. Repealing the death penalty will not reduce
crime, or save money, he added. It will only stand to put correctional officers
in jeopardy, he said.
"If you have life in prison, what else do you have to lose," he said. "It puts
all of the corrections officers in danger."
Delaware has 15 inmates currently on death row. The legislation exempts them
from any repeal. The last time Delaware executed someone was in April 2012 when
28-year-old Shannon Johnson was killed by lethal injection, Johnson was
convicted in the 2006 shooting death of Cameron Hamlin, 26, an aspiring
musician.
The death penalty hearing begins at 11 a.m. Wednesday morning.
(source: The News Journal)
OHIO:
UC's Ohio Innocence Project and Exonerees Honored at Award Ceremony by Death
Penalty Advocacy Group----Ohio Innocence Project Director Mark Godsey, OIP
attorney Brian Howe and several exonerees received a "Special Recognition"
award from the Death Penalty Focus advocacy group on May 7 in Beverly Hills,
Calif.
The University of Cincinnati College of Law's professor Mark Godsey, Ohio
Innocence Project (OIP) attorney Brian Howe and three exonerees were recognized
with the Rose Elizabeth Bird Commitment to Justice Award at the 24th annual
Death Penalty Focus Awards dinner, held in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Death Penalty Focus, founded in 1988, is an organization committed to the
abolition of the death penalty through public education, grassroots organizing
and political advocacy, media outreach, and domestic and international
coalition building. The award recognizes individuals whose actions and stories
bring to light the flaws in the US judicial system.
Wrote Mike Farrell, the organization's president, in an email about the award,
"Your efforts which resulted in the exoneration of these men for a crime they
did not commit are an incredible accomplishment. It is cases like these which
further illustrate the importance of our work to end the death penalty."
Farrell, an actor and activist, is well-known for his role as Captain B.J.
Hunnicutt from the hit TV show "M.A.S.H."
Event attendees included: Ed Asner, known for his Emmy Award-winning role as
Lou Grant during the '70s and early '80s on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and
spin-off "Lou Grant" and as Ed Wuncler on "The Boondocks," among many other
film and TV roles; actress Amy Brenneman, known for her role in the TV series
"Judging Amy," Violet Turner in "Private Practice" and Laurie Garvey in HBO's
"The Leftovers"; Larry Flynt Jr., publisher and president of Larry Flynt
Publications; and many others.
OIP Award Recipients
Attorneys Terry Gilbert, Mark Godsey, Brian Howe; Exonerees Wiley Bridgeman,
Ricky Jackson, Kwame Ajamu; Attorney David Mills
Godsey and Howe were recognized for their representation of Ricky Jackson. The
OIP's investigation also ultimately freed Jackson's co-defendants, Wiley
Bridgeman and Kwame (Bridgeman) Ajamu, who - along with Jackson - were honored
for their courage and commitment. The men together served over 100 years in
prison for a crime they did not commit; many of those years were spent on death
row. Jackson has the tragic distinction of setting the record for the
longest-serving person to be exonerated in U.S. history. They were exonerated
in November 2014 after a key prosecution witness, Eddie Vernon, recanted his
story that he saw the men shoot and kill Cleveland businessman Harold Franks in
1975.
In addition to the OIP team and exonerees, several other individuals and
organizations were recognized for their work at the event. Awardees included
Dale Baich, an assistant federal public defender, who defended Joseph Wood, a
man whose botched 2-hour execution in Arizona last year was deemed by many to
violate the Eighth Amendment; Rabbi Leonard Beerman, a founder of the DPF and
lifelong opponent of capital punishment; and the program "Death Row Stories,"
an 8-part CNN series exploring cases that pose hard questions about capital
punishment and the justice system.
About the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Institute for Justice/Ohio Innocence
Project
Harnessing the energy and intellect of law students as its driving force, the
OIP seeks to identify and assist inmates in Ohio prisons who are actually
innocent of the crimes they were convicted of committing. Innocence Projects
across the country have freed more than hundreds of wrongfully convicted
inmates to date. The Ohio Innocence Project to date has helped 23 individuals
obtain their long-sought freedom.
Read more about Ricky Jackson's story: http://www.law.uc.edu/oip/ricky-jackson
Learn more about the Ohio Innocence Project: http://www.law.uc.edu/oip
(source: uc.edu)
USA:
Capital punishment's loyal officer
It was a zinger worthy of a Presidential debate (and almost certainly just as
planned). Justice Samuel Alito, confronted Federal Public Defender Robin Conrad
in the midst of her oral argument on April 29 in Glossip v. Gross, a case
challenging Oklahoma's lethal injection execution procedure.
Yes. I mean, let's be honest about what's going on here. Executions could be
carried out painlessly. There are many jurisdictions - there are jurisdictions
in this country, there are jurisdictions abroad that allow assisted suicide,
and I assume that those are carried out with little, if any, pain. Oklahoma and
other States could carry out executions painlessly. Now, this Court has held
that the death penalty is constitutional. It's controversial as a
constitutional matter. It certainly is controversial as a policy matter. Those
who oppose the death penalty are free to try to persuade legislatures to
abolish the death penalty. Some of those efforts have been successful. They're
free to ask this Court to overrule the death penalty. But until that occurs, is
it appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerilla war
against the death penalty which consists of efforts to make it impossible for
the States to obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment
with little, if any, pain?
The diatribe won the lion's share of media attention on the case and much of it
seemingly approving. The stunning nature of his attack on our adversary system
has gone little remarked. Indeed Justice Alito seemed to be refreshingly candid
(Chris Christie style): "let's be honest about what's going on here."
He appealed to his media audiences common sense that executions could be
carried out painlessly (although four of his colleagues doubted that the last
time SCOTUS reviewed lethal injections in Baze v. Rees). He acknowledged that
abolitionists have been making significant political progress lately winning
legislative abolitions, with "red" Nebraska only the latest state legislature
to express a desire to rid the law of capital punishment. He invited direct
challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty: an invitation that
might have seemed totally empty a few years ago but now seems to have
increasing constitutional force (see Jones v. Chappell finding the California
death penalty unconstitutional on grounds of being arbitrary and capricious).
But behind this this seemingly candid and refreshing acknowledgment was a
remarkable attack upon a lawyer doing exactly what lawyers are supposed to do:
zealously advocating for her clients. Justice Alito (echoed by Justice Scalia)
cast Federal Public Defender Conrad and her colleagues as duplicitous, pleading
the terrible risk of pain facing their clients while working behind the backs
of the courts and states to deny states access to chemicals that could
painlessly cause death and thus subverting the honorable workings of justice.
Absolutely no evidence is presented or even suggested for this conspiracy. In
fact, it is a mirror image of reality. The problems American states are
confronting in finding drugs to make lethal injections look kind and gentle lie
in a growing global movement against capital punishment, in which America is
increasingly seen as part of an anti human rights "axis" along with Iran,
China, and Saudi Arabia.
Federal public defenders (and indeed many other Americans) may well sympathize
with this global movement but they are hardly relevant to that movement. As
Justice Alito must surely know, the European Union - our major trading partner
and political military ally and the site of many of the world's leading
pharmaceutical producers - are legally bound to oppose the death penalty where
ever it exists. Federal public defenders are even more irrelevant to the
completely understandable fact that many businesses will need no additional
reason other than publicity to choose to disassociate their products from the
deliberate killing of human beings.
The real guerilla war is being waged by death states that continue to pursue
executions even as crime remains at historic lows and public opinion turns
against this archaic ritual. Many of these states are making a farce of the
Court's own decades-long effort to forge a more legal and more humane death
penalty - by using all means, legal or otherwise, to acquire execution drugs -
and obstructing prisoners and their advocates from discovering even the most
basic scientific facts about how the state proposes to take their lives.
Meanwhile the death penalty majority on the Supreme Court has fought its own
battle to prevent continued judicial oversight of state executions. Indeed, the
first named petitioner in the case in which Justice Alito delivered his appeal
for honesty was executed earlier this year even as the issue he raised was
scheduled for Supreme Court argument.
Justice Alito is correct that the times are changing rapidly for the death
penalty. In retrospect, the rejuvenation of capital punishment in the 1970s
after a couple of decades of declining public support may have had more to do
with the high violent crime rates and toxic racial politics of that era -
conditions that have changed in many respects - than any core American
commitment to capital punishment.
Serious challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty may soon find
themselves before the SCOTUS. One can only hope that Justice Alito will bring a
less closed mind to those arguments than he did to the ones Federal Defender
Robin Konrad (and Justice Sotomayor) presented him in Glossip.
It is our common law tradition that judges are to consider the fate of
litigants one at a time, and answer the compelling legal questions that their
treatment poses. Yet in his exchanges with Ms. Konrad, Justice Alito showed an
injudicious interest in capital punishment as an institution. In his
willingness to defend the death penalty (and his even odder insistence that if
it is to end, it must receive the presumably more honorable dispatch of a
direct constitutional assault) Justice Alito seems to be more committed to that
institution than to our Constitution.
Justice Alito's passion for the death penalty recalled for me the curious
character of the "Officer" who conducts a "Traveler" to witness the execution
of a condemned prisoner in Franz Kafka's haunting story The Penal Colony. The
story, set in a little described "penal colony," involves an execution ritual
in which the condemned are placed into a complex machine known as the "harrow"
that effectively kills them by slowly inscribing the name of their crime into
their body with metal needles as they are rotated within the harrow. The harrow
requires constant tinkering, which the Officer enthusiastically supplies. The
Officer acknowledges to the increasingly uneasy Traveller that the colony's
commitment to this strange ritual is in fact waning fast, but he remains so
loyal to it that he abandons all restraint - and ultimately even self
preservation - in attempting to obtain for it at least one last victim.
Like the penal colony's harrow, our execution machinery needs constant
tinkering, both technical and legal. Some Justices, Harry Blackmun and John
Paul Stevens, once supporters of the death penalty, eventually renounced
"tinkering with the machinery of death" and denounced the penalty as
irreconcilable with commitment to the rule of law.
More Justices soon must make clear that their decades long servitude to this
institution must come to an end. But perhaps the last will be Justice Alito,
who - like Kafka's Officer - seems increasingly willing to depart from his role
in order defend the machinery of death against law itself.
(source: Jonathan Simon, professor of law, Univ. Calif., Berkeley----The
Berkeley Blog)
*******************
Problems with FBI hair analysis latest example of the perils of old-fashioned
forensic science
Kirk Odom was convicted of a 1981 rape and robbery after a woman identified him
as her attacker and an FBI specialist testified that hair on her nightgown was
consistent with hair on Odom's head.
But DNA testing some 30 years later affirmed what Odom long had maintained: The
hair wasn't his; neither was the semen left on a pillowcase and robe. A felony
conviction that imprisoned him for decades was overturned in 2012 by a judge
who declared it a "grave miscarriage of justice."
"I was hoping that I was going to go home that day," Odom, recalling his trial
in Washington, D.C., said in an interview. Instead, "they sentenced me to 20 to
66 years in prison."
His experience is but one example of flawed forensic science from the pre-DNA
era, a simmering problem that now appears far more widespread than initially
thought. The Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongly accused,
has identified 74 overturned convictions in which faulty hair evidence was a
factor. Now, a new disclosure by the FBI that experts gave erroneous testimony
on hair analysis in more than 250 trials before 2000 suggests that number could
rise dramatically.
Defense lawyers say the latest revelations - on top of established concerns
about bite mark identification and arson science - confirm fears about the
shortcomings of old-fashioned forensic techniques and could affect thousands of
cases. Advancing technologies have put such techniques under more scrutiny,
including from judges, and highlighted the limits of once-established
practices.
"There are forces converging at the moment that are finally bringing some
recognition to the failings of many venerable techniques," said Chris
Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project.
A 2013 Associated Press investigation concluded that at least 24 men convicted
or charged with murder or rape based on bite mark evidence - the practice of
matching teeth to a flesh wound - were exonerated since 2000. Some high-profile
criminal cases involving arson science have come under renewed scrutiny amid
debunked fire investigations. Last year, a Pennsylvania judge threw out the
conviction of a Korean immigrant who had spent 24 years in prison for his
daughter's death.
When subjective speculation is injected into a trial under the guise of
science, "then a real perversion of justice is what happens," Fabricant said.
Microscopic hair analysis, which involves comparing hair specimens through a
microscope, has for decades been an established FBI practice and passed along
at seminars to hundreds of state-level examiners. But critics say the technique
lacks objective standards, with limitations that led experts to too often
overstate the likelihood of a match with a particular hair found at a
particular scene. Though this kind of analysis can be used to exclude a person
as a potential source of a hair sample, critics say there's no way to
conclusively know how common or rare the specimen is because no national
database of hair specimens exists.
A 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences described as "highly
unreliable" testimony purporting to identify a particular defendant through
hair analysis. The FBI has acknowledged its scientific limitations and uses the
practice now in conjunction with more scientifically reliable DNA testing.
The Justice Department in 2012 embarked on a review of more than 2,000 criminal
cases following high-profile exonerations in which microscopic hair analysis
was used.
The government provided an astonishing update last month when it revealed that
of the 268 trials reviewed as of mid-March, investigators found erroneous
statements from FBI experts in nearly all of the cases - including in
death-penalty prosecutions. The review is limited to cases dating before 2000
in which FBI examiners provided evidence. But the number of affected cases
would almost certainly be much higher if the review took into account cases
involving FBI-trained state examiners.
Still, no one knows how many defendants have been wrongly convicted because the
existence of flawed testimony - often just 1 element of a prosecution - does
not establish innocence.
"What it does mean is that those cases need to be looked at very closely to see
what role hair played in the case," said Norman Reimer, executive director of
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Advocates say they are working to ensure that individuals potentially affected
have opportunities to challenge their convictions. They've also encouraged
states to do their own audits because most of the prosecutions were local
cases. The Justice Department has said it will waive procedural objections,
including statute-of-limitations claims, in federal cases.
Odom, 52, always maintained his innocence, saying he did not know the woman and
was not at her apartment when the assault occurred. But the hair evidence and
eyewitness identification proved persuasive, and Odom spent more than 20 years
in prison before being released on parole in 2003.
The big break came when the public defender's office in Washington reopened
Odom's case following the earlier exoneration of another local man because of
faulty hair evidence.
DNA testing on evidence pulled from storage showed that the hair on the woman's
garment could not have come from Odom. The conviction was thrown out - a relief
for a man who had been a registered sex offender and whose travel had been
hampered.
When the call came that he'd been cleared, Odom was on a nighttime plumbing
job, "and I just yelled out in happiness. It was a very joyful moment."
(source: Star tribune)
*******************
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev's youngest victim at centre of death
penalty debate----8-year-old victim's father described gut-wrenching decision
to leave him at the scene
U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday rejected a claim by the Boston Marathon bomber's
lawyers that they had not proven that the death of the attack's youngest victim
took a heavy enough toll on his family to influence a jury to sentence bomber
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.
The prosecution's statement, in a filing in U.S. District Court in Boston,
comes a day before the two sides are to give their closing arguments. After
those arguments, the same jury that found the 21-year-old ethnic Chechen guilty
of killing three people in the April 15, 2013, attack begin deliberations on
whether to sentence to Tsarnaev to death by lethal injection or to life in
prison without possibility of release.
On Monday, defense attorneys had argued that prosecutors had not shown evidence
to back up the claim that the death of 8-year-old Martin Richard was one of the
"aggravating factors" that the jury could take into account in making its
decision on Tsarnaev's fate.
Boston Marathon Bombing
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is said to have expressed genuine sorrow for the victims of
the Boston Marathon bombing, according to death penalty opponent Sister Helen
Prejean. His lawyers have rested their case to save him from execution.
Richard's father, William, during the 1st phase of the trial described being
thrown through the air by the twin pressure cooker bombs, seeing his 3
children's injuries and making the gut-wrenching decision to leave badly
wounded Martin at the scene with his wife, who was also injured, so that he
could save the life of his youngest daughter, Jane.
None of the Martin family was called to testify in the trial's sentencing phase
after they asked federal prosecutors in a statement published on the front page
of the Boston Globe newspaper to drop their quest for the death penalty.
Martin family did not testify
Instead they heard from a doctor who described the enormous injuries Martin
Richard had sustained.
"The injuries to Martin covered his entire body and were described as
extraordinarily painful," prosecutors wrote in a court filing on Tuesday. "This
evidence comports with the type of "victim impact" evidence which is clearly
admissible."
BOSTON-BOMBINGS-TRIAL
In making their sentencing decision, the jury is expected to weigh the
"aggravating" factors of Tsarnaev's crime, including the young age of some of
his victims and the large number of people injured, against "mitigating"
factors put forth by the defense, which contends Tsarnaev played a secondary
role in an attack planned and driven by his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan.
Tamerlan died 4 days after the bombing following a gunfight with police that
ended when Dzohkhar ran him over with a stolen car.
(source: CNC news)
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