Feb. 1
NORTH CAROLINA:
Mendez scheduled for death penalty hearing
A Rule 24 hearing is scheduled today for Sebastian Mendez, 25, of Onslow
County.
A Rule 24 hearing is held in 1st degree murder cases. The purpose is to decide
whether the state will be seeking the death penalty in the case.
Mendez is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Shaung Liu, and 5-month-old son,
Archer Liu back in July in the Hunter's Creek area of Jacksonville. Shaung was
found dead in her car 3 blocks from her home, while Archer was found dead in a
suitcase in the attic.
Last month, Mendez was charged with trying to pay an Onslow County inmate to
kill a witness in the case. He was charged in the incident and moved to Central
Prison due to safety concerns.
The Rule 24 hearing was originally scheduled for last Thursday, but was delayed
and rescheduled for today.
(source: WNCT news)
**************
Defendant in triple murder case has history of courtroom disruptions
When potential jurors arrive at the Cumberland County Courthouse today for the
triple murder trial of Shawn Lee Legrand, they may encounter a spectacle in the
courtroom.
Legrand, who has tried to fire his lawyers, gotten in trouble for throwing his
bodily wastes at jailers, and been labeled suicidal by a psychiatrist, told the
judge that he will disrupt the trial if he doesn't get his way.
"Thank your punk (expletive) for getting this done," Legrand said in an Aug. 26
letter to Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons. "If not I will half
the time not show up for trial & when I do disrupt your (expletive) courtroom."
He signed it: "Sincerely Shawn LeGrand."
Prosecutors will attempt to seek the death penalty in a trial projected to last
up to 3 months. Indictments say Legrand, 49, killed 3 people and tried to kill
2 others in a triplex home on Ingram Street on Nov. 26, 2011. He was arrested
following a car chase and shoot-out with police officers who were responding to
reports of a stabbing. Legrand was injured in the shooting.
At the residence on Ingram Street, Krystle Price Papile and Gregory Steven
Fitzgerald were fatally stabbed. Ardell Paige Jr. was killed by a gunshot to
his head.
Surviving victims Bennie Darwin King and Stephanie Lashaun Croom were shot in
their faces.
Years behind bars
Prior to the homicides, Legrand had spent most of his life behind bars for
assault, robbery and burglary charges. He was released in July 2011 when he was
44 years old.
His time in custody since his arrest on murder charges in November 2011 has
been troubled, court papers say.
At least 6 times, judges have signed orders that sent Legrand to the state
prison system while awaiting trial instead of letting him stay at the
Cumberland County Detention Center. Ammons wrote that Legrand has thrown feces
at officers and spit on one. Superior Court Judge Claire Hill said Legrand
endangers the other inmates and the jail staff at the county detention center.
In a letter to Ammons dated Dec. 13, Legrand asked to be moved back to the
county jail because he wanted to consult with a woman and a man in Cumberland
County.
It's not clear in Legrand's letter what these people do - they may be medical
professionals as he says the woman "offered me to stay at the hospital for a
week or 2 and I would like to do that."
Legrand said the letter is not a ploy to stop or delay his trial - he said he
is upset it was postponed to today from a previous date.
"I give you my word I will not assault any staff at the jail," Legrand wrote.
He also said he hoped "to see the one friend I have" if he were allowed to stay
at the jail.
Legrand said he was not talking to either of his lawyers. "My attorney's (sic)
really don't give a damn about my well being," he wrote.
A judge on Jan. 7 signed an order to keep Legrand in the prison system.
A forensic psychiatrist wrote in September that Legrand wants to fire his
lawyers and represent himself because he wants to be sentenced to death.
Legrand's request to represent himself has been denied, one of his lawyers
said.
A 1st-degree murder conviction carries 2 possible punishments: death or life in
prison with no chance for parole.
The mother of victim Krystle Price Papile said she wants Legrand to get the
life sentence.
"I am a very Christian woman," said Denise Oteri of Weymouth, Massachusetts.
For the past 4 years she said she has "hated him, wanted to kill him myself
with my own bare hands for what he did to my baby, my youngest daughter."
Oteri said that hate has allowed Legrand to make her a victim.
"I'm not going to have that anymore. I'm not going to let him decide how my
emotions, or my life is run. So I have decided that I'm going to forgive him,"
Oteri said. "And that forgiveness is for my own healing, and part of my
grieving process."
(source: Fayetteville Observer)
GEORGIA----impending execution
Panel to Hear Clemency Request From Georgia Death Row Inmate
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles plans to consider a clemency request
from the state's oldest death row inmate.
The board plans to hold a hearing on the request from Brandon Astor Jones on
Monday. The 72-year-old is scheduled for execution at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the
state prison in Jackson.
The parole board is the only entity in Georgia with the authority to commute a
death sentence.
Jones was convicted in the 1979 killing of Cobb County convenience store
manager Roger Tackett.
A federal judge granted Jones a new sentencing hearing because jurors had
improperly been allowed to bring a Bible into the deliberation room. He was
resentenced to death in 1997.
Another man convicted in the killing, Van Roosevelt Solomon, was executed in
1985.
(source: Associated Press)
*******************
A Life on Death Row----Facing Execution at 72, Georgia's Oldest Death Row
Inmate Exposes Death Penalty's Racist Roots
The 1st time Michael Marcum saw the byline "Brandon Astor Jones," he was
working as a jail commander in San Francisco. It was 1993; Marcum can't recall
what the article was about. But he remembers it made an impression - and when
he saw the author's bio, he was taken aback. Jones was a man on Georgia's death
row.
Jones sent his articles everywhere, from newspapers in Atlanta to Australian
political journals. His musings on politics and prison life found a
particularly receptive audience abroad, where he had a number of devoted pen
pals. Marcum wrote to Jones at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State
Prison, asking permission to reprint the piece in his jail newsletter.
It was an unusual publication, produced by prisoners and staff alike. But then
County Jail #7 was an unusual jail. In the era of "3 strikes" and the 1994
crime bill, it was an experiment in corrections, where prisoners raised plants
in a greenhouse and tended to buffalo. Marcum had helped design it, firm in his
belief that if the state of California was going to build new jails, they
should be places for education and vocational training. Instead, Marcum saw the
country going in the other direction.
Jones wrote back to Marcum, granting his permission to reprint the article. The
2 soon began exchanging letters. "We wrote a lot about our childhoods," Marcum
recalled. They found unexpected overlaps in their lives: Jones had grown up on
the South Side of Chicago, where his favorite pizza joint belonged to Marcum's
father-in-law. Marcum continued to publish Jones' writing in the newsletter; he
saw it have a positive influence on inmates and staff alike. "Some of the
prisoners saw Brandon as a role model," he said.
But what really connected Marcum and Jones was the search for redemption. In
1966, when Marcum was 19 years old, he had shot and killed his own father with
a hunting rifle - the violent culmination of years of domestic abuse against
Marcum and his mother. It was Marcum who called the police; later he pleaded
guilty and got a sentence of 5 years to life. When he was released in 1972, he
said, "I felt I had to prove my value as a human being." He was lucky. His
parole officer helped him get into college and Marcum began an unlikely career
in law enforcement, determined to use his experiences in prison to reform the
system from within.
Now a retired assistant sheriff, Marcum acknowledges his journey is unique. But
"this was California, not Georgia," he said. "And I wasn't black."
Indeed, for his friend and pen pal across the country, the future held a very
different fate. In 1979, Jones and an accomplice, Van Roosevelt Solomon, had
killed a white man named Roger Tackett, the manager of a convenience store in
Cobb County, Georgia. Jones and Solomon, who was also black, robbed the store,
then shot Tackett to death, only to be apprehended immediately by a cop on
patrol. The forensic evidence showed that both men had recently fired a gun -
both denied shooting the fatal bullet. Both were convicted and sentenced to
die.
Jones remained on death row - today he is 72. He no longer publishes articles,
and some years back, Marcum stopped receiving letters from him. Then, earlier
this month, Marcum came home to a message I left on his landline. Georgia had
set an execution date for Jones - the state planned to kill him on February 2.
Marcum was shaken. "I had no idea," he wrote in an email, agreeing to an
interview. He then wrote 2 letters - 1 to his old friend, and 1 to the Georgia
Board of Pardons and Parole in Atlanta, asking it to stop the execution.
If Jones dies by lethal injection on Tuesday, less than two weeks from his 73rd
birthday, he will be the oldest prisoner ever executed by the state of Georgia.
After more than 35 years facing execution, he embodies what Supreme Court
Justice Stephen Breyer last year called the "unconscionably long" time
prisoners spend on death row, many of them elderly and infirm. But Jones is
also a relic of an earlier era of the death penalty in Georgia, the roots of
which remain impossible to ignore.
To date, the oldest prisoner executed in Georgia was Andrew Brannan, a
66-year-old Vietnam veteran with PTSD, who was killed last January. His was the
1st of 5 people executed by the state in 2015 - among them, an intellectually
disabled man, a man with claims of innocence, and a woman sent to die for a
murder her boyfriend carried out and who had became a poster child for
rehabilitation.
If 2015 reaffirmed Georgia???s reputation for controversial executions, it also
quietly revealed an opposite trend. "Despite the relative flurry of
executions," a Georgia legal website, the Daily Report, noted last December,
"the other end of the death penalty process has slowed significantly." Georgia
did not send a single person to death row in 2015 - a development the Report
called the "newsmaker of the year." The turn away from capital punishment is
part of a larger nationwide trend, even across the most active death penalty
states. "The same thing that is happening in Georgia is also happening in Texas
and Virginia," Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center, told the Report.
Bridging the disconnect between the "new Georgia," as Dunham put it, and the
state's recent spate of troubling executions are people like Jones. "We have
this very strange situation now in which these people sentenced to death a long
time ago - and who managed to get through all the stages of review - are now
being executed," said Stephen Bright, president of the 40-year-old Southern
Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. "They almost certainly would not be
sentenced to death today." (In court filings, lawyers for Jones point out that
death sentences for killings carried out in the course of a robbery have
"fallen into complete extinction.") Bright describes them as "zombie cases" -
convictions that "remind us of just how unfair" the system used to be.
Indeed, it was not until 2005 that the state opened the office of the Georgia
Capital Defender, seeking to remedy a decades-old problem: defendants on trial
for their lives with grossly inadequate representation. "At the time of Jones'
case and so many others," Bright said, "any lawyer who was a member of the
Georgia bar could be appointed to represent someone in a death penalty case."
With no meaningful funding for indigent defense - and a sloppy, ad hoc network
of public defender offices throughout the state - death sentences were often
handed out "not for the worst crime, but for the worst lawyer," as Bright wrote
in a 1994 article for the Yale Law Journal.
The problem was especially pronounced when it came to race. In 1974, 5 years
before Jones landed on death row, a Georgia man named Wilburn Wiley Dobbs was
sent to die for a murder carried out during a robbery. His court-appointed
lawyer made no effort to save his life - in fact, he referred to his black
client as "boy" during trial, later admitting that, as the grandson of a
slaveholder, he believed African-Americans to be "inferior to whites morally
and intellectually." Dobbs' death sentence was overturned in 1997, yet he has
never had a resentencing hearing. At 66 and sick with prostate cancer, he will
almost certainly die behind bars.
In a different 1974 case, a Georgia man named John Young was ineptly
represented by an attorney who not only was later disbarred, but encountered
his former client on the prison yard at the county jail, where the lawyer had
been sent on drug charges. "Being born black in America was against me," Young
said before dying in the electric chair in 1985. "Y'all cry out that America
was built on Christianity. I say it was built on slavery."
Evidence that the state's death penalty was racially biased was a major
contributing factor that led to Furman v. Georgia, the landmark Supreme Court
case that in 1972 suspended the death penalty across the country. (The
plaintiff, William Henry Furman, was a black man deemed "mentally impaired" by
a state psychiatrist, who had been convicted in a 1-day trial in Savannah.)
Furman forced states to amend their death penalty statutes to avoid the
"arbitrary and discriminatory" imposition of capital punishment.
Just 4 years later, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's new death penalty law in
Gregg v. Georgia. Yet the law showed clear continuity with decades past: Of the
1st dozen people to die in the electric chair following Gregg, 9 were black.
Bright still bristles at the "arrogance of that; to think that all of the
problems identified in Furman - the racism, the consequences of poverty - to
think that you could have that fixed in 4 years was just so incredibly
preposterous."
Jones was sent to Georgia's death row 3 years after Gregg. Among the people
there when he arrived was another black man named Warren McCleskey, who had
been convicted of murdering a police officer in the course of an attempted
robbery in Atlanta the year before. McCleskey went on to appeal his conviction
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, on the basis that Georgia's death
penalty system was racially biased. His evidence was a now-famous 1983
empirical survey of Georgia murder cases during the 1970s, which found that
black defendants convicted of killing white victims were far more likely to be
sentenced to death.
But in its 1987 ruling in McCleskey - one of its most derided and consequential
in death penalty law - the Supreme Court concluded that racial bias in the
application of the death penalty was not unconstitutional unless it could be
proven to be intentional. The effect was far reaching; in the New Jim Crow,
Michelle Alexander writes that the ruling "immunized the criminal justice
system from judicial scrutiny for racial bias."
After 5 years facing execution, Jones got a lucky break. A federal court
overturned his death sentence, finding that jurors had consulted a Bible during
their deliberations. (His codefendant, Solomon, was less fortunate: He died in
the electric chair in 1985.)
As he awaited a resentencing hearing, Jones began a life on death row. He read
voraciously and soon began writing. His essays were both autobiographical and
sharply political, and he wrote a lot about race, inspired in large part by his
own upbringing.
Jones was born in Indiana and spent his childhood in Chicago, where his family
life was unhappy and abusive, according to the findings of a defense
investigator. Jones described "extremely violent beatings" by his uncle, as
well as sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin when he was 5 years old. One
friend and neighbor recalled that his "arms and face were always covered in
bruises."
When Jones was 13, he robbed a milkman and was sent to a reformatory outside
the city that sat on some 900 acres of farmland, where boys underwent military
and religious training. Then at 15, he was sent to Sheridan, a state
reformatory where he said he was beaten, which became embroiled in scandal soon
after his release. In 1961, the superintendent and 6 staffers were fired
following reports that boys at Sheridan were "beaten, confined naked in
unlighted cells, and put on bread and milk rations," as described by 1 Illinois
historian. An investigation also found that the younger boys -15 years and
under - were preyed upon sexually by the older ones, including men in their
20s.
Later, according to court documents, a clinical psychologist would determine
that Jones had a "lifelong pattern of behavior consistent with childhood-onset
bipolar disorder," and signs of PTSD rooted in "physical, sexual, and emotional
trauma."
After an unsuccessful stint in the military at 19, Jones spent his early
adulthood in and out of jail. He admitted to investigators that he "sometimes
would get charged with something, make bond, change his name, and never show up
again." He married twice; his wives described him as "unstable" and physically
abusive, including to his children.
In his letters to people like Marcum, Jones would occasionally express regret
at his fractured relationships with family, saying he understood why they did
not keep in touch. In his published essays, which he often began with a passage
or quote from a newspaper article, he sometimes shared his memories of
relatives as part of a broader critique of society.
In 1 piece, a local report on the detrimental effect of carrying heavy
backpacks reminded Jones of a time he went to pick cotton with relatives in the
Mississippi Delta. His aunt suffered crippling back pain, he wrote. "My
question is, when will a doctor in America show concern for those countless
Black backs still bent with the pain and weight of American slavery past and
present?"
In another essay, Jones discussed a boating program geared toward
African-American kids from Philadelphia. As a lover of boats, he was a devoted
subscriber to WoodenBoat ("I read every issue cover to cover"). He wondered why
the magazine had not run an item about the Philadelphia program, which he
considered very important.
In 1996, the Canadian New Internationalist published an essay by Jones that
would prove particularly moving to people. It described the small ways he
sought to ward off the intense sensory deprivation of death row: collecting
scraps of wood to be able to feel their natural texture, picking a bay leaf out
of 1 of his meals and taking it back to his cell, where "I washed it off," he
wrote, and carefully stored it for months.
One reader, Sue Bond, remembers the essay vividly - it was one of the first by
Jones she ever read. More than 20 years later, she has struggled to solicit
support for him over Facebook. She still has all his letters, she told me over
email. "I can't bear to open that box right now. It is too painful, knowing
that he may be executed very soon."
The same essay prompted an artist in the U.K. "to send him one of my detailed
textured landscapes and lead him on a 'walk' through it, encountering the
sounds and textures along the way," as she wrote in an email. She too forged a
friendship with Jones, as did her son, John. (This month, John set up a website
to solicit clemency letters for the Board of Pardons and Parole.)
As his 1997 resentencing trial approached, Jones??? readers galvanized to try
to save his life. Readers from the U.K. and Australia volunteered to testify
via video on his behalf. In a letter to the Georgia Indigent Defense Council,
Michael Marcum described the "value in Brandon's life and in his writing," how
it conveyed to "young offenders who are still at risk of committing violence
upon release from our jails into our community ... that they can retake control
of their lives before they further harm others and themselves, and they can
make a lawful place in our society."
But in his closing statement on the day of the resentencing hearing, the
prosecutor said that for all of his writings, Jones had shown no remorse for
his crime. "He's got all kinds of pen pals who apparently would do anything for
him," he said, and yet none of them had sought out the victim's family to seek
their forgiveness on his behalf. "So where is the remorse? Is not that the kind
of conduct that deserves the death penalty?"
Defense attorneys asked for a mistrial, saying the statement violated Jones'
Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But they were denied. After
reaching an "impasse" due to the misgivings of a single juror, the judge
ordered the jury to continue deliberating. A few hours later, Jones was once
again sentenced to death.
or years, Jones relied more on his relationships with readers than he did on
his family. He seldom received visits. Nor did he have many friends in prison -
at least according to one prison guard who got to know him on death row. Bobby
Allen was 20 when he went to work at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification
Prison in the 1980s. He remembers Jones as well-behaved. "I never had a
moment's problem with him," he told me. Yet Jones wasn't particularly
well-liked among the guards or counselors, Allen says, or by his fellow
prisoners for that matter. Spending most of his time writing in his cell, his
attitude seemed to be that "he had a superior intellect over everybody." Part
of what Allen found vexing was that Jones "didn't see himself as an inmate. He
didn't see himself as a lawbreaker."
Allen was at the prison on the day the state executed Jones' codefendant, Van
Solomon - 1 of 10 people killed by the state of Georgia during his years
working on death row. Allen???s duties included escorting the condemned
prisoner from his cell - 1st to the medical unit "for a full physical," and
then down "the last mile," to the holding cell where the prisoner awaited
execution. One of the worst parts, he remembers, was passing the electric
chair, which prison officials covered in a white sheet. "I have nightmares
about it even today," he said. He often struggled to reconcile the men he knew
on death row with the crimes they had committed. "I believe that I saw some of
these men change," he said.
Allen can't speak for Jones, he says. "I don't know the man he is now." But, he
said, "I can say that the people that we did execute might not have been the
same person he was when he committed the crime."
As he aged in prison, Jones lost some of his longtime supporters. In 2001 he
cut ties with the Australian editor of a radical leftist magazine after it
refused to publish a column following the 9/11 attacks. In it, Jones expressed
sorrow and patriotism while condemning any retaliatory violence against Muslims
in their homes or mosques. The essay included a drawing of an American flag he
had hung in his cell "at symbolic half mast, midway between the floor and
ceiling." In response, the editor, who was white, accused him of "wrap[ping]
himself in the flag under which the white ruling elite in North America
enslaved black people." Jones was deeply offended.
Jones' most recent writings reveal a man in decline. In a 2013 column addressed
to the Georgia prison commissioner, he describes being told he must remain
shackled while eating and being denied a free hand to clean himself after using
the bathroom, policies that "rob medical prisoners of our human dignity." Other
posts are less lucid - bitter missives about prison policies, or defective
purchases at the prison commissary.
But last month, Jones received a visit that he never expected. His 4 children
came to see him in prison. Now in their 50s, they barely knew him growing up.
"It was the 1st time that all 4 of us had seen him together," his son David
told me over the phone from Texas on Friday. The trip to Georgia included a
contact visit - "the 1st time I ever touched his body."
For decades, David refused to visit his father. "I felt he was dead," he said.
Jones himself seemed to have given up on life. Until his children visited,
David said, Jones planned to reject the clemency process. He did not want to
give the state of Georgia the satisfaction of hearing him plead for his life.
But in the visiting room that day, David thinks his father realized "he has a
reason to live for his own family. He stood up and walked to the end of the
visiting area with each of his children, 1 by 1. I could see them crying and
holding each other." In recent weeks, "My children have been talking to him for
the 1st time in their lives," David said. If the state of Georgia kills Jones
on Tuesday, they will lose the grandfather they have only just met.
On Saturday, David went back to Georgia to see his father again. On Tuesday, he
will represent his family, asking once more for the state to spare his life.
"I'm not oblivious to the pain that's been created by his crime," he says. "But
many lives got lost in 1979, not just 1. Today, he has a lot of people who love
him."
(source: The Intercept)
FLORIDA:
House Panel To Take Up Death Penalty Proposal
A House panel is slated to take up a death-penalty proposal Tuesday, 3 weeks
after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida's death-penalty system giving
judges --- not juries --- the power to impose death sentences is
unconstitutional.
The 8-1 ruling in the Hurst v. Florida case was centered on what are known as
"aggravating" circumstances that must be found before defendants can be
sentenced to death. A 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in a case known as Ring
v. Arizona, requires that determination of such aggravating circumstances be
made by juries, not judges.
Under Florida law, juries make recommendations regarding the death penalty,
based on a review of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, but judges
ultimately decide whether defendants should be put to death or sentenced to
life in prison.
Under the House proposal (PCB CRJS 16-07), death sentences could only be
imposed if juries --- after weighing aggravating and mitigating factors ---
unanimously decide that at least 1 aggravating factor exists. The proposal
would also require at least 9 jurors to vote for the death penalty.
Florida is 1 of only 3 states that do not require unanimous jury decisions
about imposing death sentences. Florida law only requires a simple majority of
the jury to recommend death, but requires unanimous jury verdicts in other
cases. The only other 2 states that do not require unanimous decisions ---
Alabama and Delaware --- require at least 9 jurors to vote in favor of capital
punishment.
The measure --- offered by the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee, chaired by
Miami Republican Carlos Trujillo --- mirrors recommendations offered Wednesday
by 5th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Brad King at a Senate Criminal Justice
Committee workshop on the death penalty.
All of the other experts on a panel at the workshop --- including judges, death
penalty experts and lawyers representing death row inmates ---suggested that
requiring unanimous jury verdicts in death penalties would be the best way to
fix the sentencing system, because of other cases pending before the U.S.
Supreme Court.
The House Criminal Justice meeting is scheduled on the same day the Florida
Supreme Court will hear oral arguments addressing the Hurst decision in the
cases of Cary Michael Lambrix, who is scheduled to be executed on Feb. 11, and
2 other death row inmates.
(source: WUSF news)
ALABAMA:
Supreme Court ruling could affect 2 local cases
It's been nearly 17 years since Danny Sledge was brutally stabbed to death and
robbed at his Shoal Creek restaurant.
"Instead of trying to remember the good times and the good things about Danny,
because of the court system we are constantly reminded how he died," said his
sister, Mary Ann Rippey.
Last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that all teenagers convicted of capital
murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole should
be re-sentenced, triggered those painful memories for Rippey and her family,
she said.
Nathan Boyd was 17 when he and his brother, Eric, were arrested and charged
with Sledge's death. A year later, in October 2000, Nathan Boyd was found
guilty of capital murder. With the death penalty ruled unconstitutional for
teens, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Eric Boyd was found guilty of felony murder, and also was sentenced to life in
prison without the possibility of parole.
Nathan Boyd, now 34, would be eligible for new sentencing under the recent
ruling because he was a teen when he was convicted and sentenced.
There is another local case that could fall under the Supreme Court ruling.
Matthew Williams, of Muscle Shoals, was 20 when he was shot in his truck while
driving on Woodward Avenue on March 17, 1997.
Charles Eugene Black, who was 17 at the time, was convicted of capital murder
and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Jamie Mackey, 19 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison with the
possibility of parole. He remains in Limestone Correctional Facility in
Capshaw.
Ben Burt, the man Williams said ordered the killing, is serving a 20-year
prison sentence.
Colbert County Assistant District Attorney Kyle Brown said he already has
contacted the Williams family about the ruling.
"We wanted them to know what this is about and what could happen," Brown said.
"Most likely, the case could be re-sentenced."
Brown said the high court's ruling points out the court must have a choice when
sentencing teens convicted of capital murder.
"With the death penalty for a juvenile deemed unconstitutional, the court had
only 1 option, which was life without," Brown said.
"The ruling, basically, is saying the person convicted must have a new
sentencing hearing to reconsider the sentence for a lesser sentence, or even
probation," Franklin County District Attorney Joey Rushing said.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said there are at least 70 convicted
murderers serving life without parole sentences who could be granted the chance
for new sentences.
Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said the ruling brings up
several issues.
"In Alabama, there is no option (when it comes to sentencing a juvenile
convicted of capital murder)," he said. "Also, if we are going to re-sentence
them, who will make the sentencing recommendation? In a capital murder case,
the jury makes that recommendation. So, will we have to impanel a jury to have
these re-sentencing hearings, or can the judge do it?"
Connolly said because there is no alternate sentencing in place, the Alabama
Legislature will have to address the issue.
Randy Hillman, executive director of the Alabama Office of Prosecution
Services, said he expects to see the Legislature address the issue in the
upcoming session, and come up with another option. The session convenes
Tuesday.
"If not, these inmates will have to be brought back in and either re-sentenced,
or make them eligible for parole down the road," Hillman said.
He said the inmates, if re-sentenced, still could be sentenced to life in
prison without parole.
Strange said the ruling will have a "devastating effect" on the families of
murder victims who thought they received closure in cases going back decades.
"Murder victims' families may be put through the ordeal of seeing the person
responsible for the death of their loved one years ago being allowed to receive
a new sentence," he said.
Rippey said it would bring old wounds.
"It's something that we don't want to go through again," Rippey said. "It's
like we are not allowed to move on."
Nathan Boyd was up for parole last year, and it was denied. He's not eligible
for another parole hearing until 2019.
"We are convinced as far as the Boyd case, he will never get out (of prison),
even if he has to be re-sentenced," Connolly said.
(source: Tines Daily)
KANSAS:
Bipartisan House bill seeks to repeal Kansas death penalty
A Kansas man who spent 15 years behind bars for a killing his brother
eventually admitted to committing says his case is a good example of why the
state should repeal its death penalty.
Floyd Bledsoe, who was released from prison in December, was sentenced to life
in prison for the 1999 slaying of Camille Arfmann in Oskaloosa. His freedom
came after new DNA evidence was found and his brother, Tom Bledsoe, wrote notes
in which he admitted killing Arfmann before he committed suicide.
On Thursday, Floyd Bledsoe urged Kansas lawmakers to repeal the death penalty.
He said although he wasn't sentenced to death, his experience proves the
state's laws and court system are imperfect, the Topeka Capital-Journal
(http://bit.ly/1PWWqxi) reported.
"The death penalty is unjust. Please stop it," he said during an anti-death
penalty rally in the Statehouse rotunda.
A bipartisan bill to repeal the death penalty was introduced in the House
earlier this month by Rep. Steven Becker, a Buhler Republican who is a retired
judge. 16 other representatives - 10 Republicans and 6 Democrats - co-sponsored
the measure.
Becker said his experience in the criminal justice system solidified his
opposition to the death penalty, arguing that the "reasonable doubt" standard
for proof in criminal cases is paradoxical to the death penalty.
"How can we impose the absolute certainty of death when we don't require the
absolute certainty of guilt?" Becker asked.
Under his bill, death sentences would be barred for anyone committing a crime
on or after July 1. Defendants sentenced for a crime before that could still be
executed, though Kansas hasn't executed anyone in more than a half-century.
Death sentences would be replaced by sentences of life imprisonment without the
possibility of parole.
The bill also would create a "death penalty abolition fund" under the control
of the Kansas Department of Corrections. The bill would require the state
budget director to place any cost savings stemming from abolition of the death
penalty into the fund for use by the corrections department.
Rep. Bill Sutton, a co-sponsor, noted the high fiscal costs of the state's
death row and said he came to the Legislature to shrink the size of government.
"It doesn't make any sense. You get exactly nothing for your tax dollars,"
Sutton, a Republican from Gardner, said.
(source: Associated Press)
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