July 5
TEXAS:
Mom and girl slain, family awaits justice
Elizabeth Goodman was on the phone in her kitchen with her youngest daughter
when the call was dropped.
10 minutes later, she heard from a friend that her daughter had been shot in
her doorway on Hartel Street in Beaumont's South End, less than 3 miles from
the Goodmans' home on Potts.
Mary Goodman, 41, wasn't the only one who was hit. Her 16-year-old daughter,
Briana Goodman, was found shot to death in the backyard.
"To lose a child and a grandchild like that, I just don't understand,"
Elizabeth Goodman, 72, said in her 1st interview since the July 31, 2010 double
slaying. "No one deserves to be killed in cold blood."
Elizabeth and Joseph Goodman, 77, mourn the loss daily. Pictures of
anniversaries, birthdays, rodeo and zydeco events fill their home - reminders
of what was stolen from them.
Briana Goodman, the youngest of 13 grandchildren, hoped to become a teen model
in Houston. Her grandmother tore up an acceptance letter from a modeling agency
she received four months after Briana's death.
"Briana was too young to die," Elizabeth Goodman said.
6 years after the deaths, the accused killer has yet to go to trial, and the
Goodmans have grown impatient with the criminal justice system.
3 close relatives have died while waiting.
Joseph Kenneth Colone, 37, remains in jail on a $2 million bond in the killings
- Jefferson County's oldest capital case, which is scheduled for trial in
January 2017. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Colone, who unsuccessfully sought his release last year because of the trial
delays, intends to plead not guilty.
"We're ready for closure," said Andre Goodman, 52, Mary's brother, who lives in
Liberty County. "This has changed our lives. I don't even drive to Beaumont
like I used to because I think about it every time I come here."
'Gaming the system'
The Goodmans said they believe Colone is "gaming the system" by attempting to
delay the trial, but his is not the only case to linger in the system.
Of 230-plus active cases on the 252nd District Court trial docket, more than
1/2 date to before 2015.
After the Ninth Court of Appeals turned down his request to be released pending
the trial, Colone's focus turned to prosecutors' pursuit of the death penalty.
Bob Loper, Colone's Houston-based attorney, unsuccessfully tried to have the
state's death penalty law declared unconstitutional, which would eliminate it
from consideration at trial.
Such suggestions are rarely given much consideration in capital cases, Loper
admitted. But defense attorneys often challenge death penalty laws based on
fear of innocent people being executed.
District Judge Raquel West ruled against Colone's attorneys. They preserved the
issue for possible later appeal by an appellate attorney, since it was rejected
at the trial level.
Loper was part of a defense team that in 2010 convinced a Houston judge to call
executions unconstitutional.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped the judge's plans to hold a hearing
on the matter. The capital murder suspect, John Edward Green, escaped the death
sentence by pleading to a last-minute 40-year deal in 2011.
"This is not something new and novel, but it has been tried in many other
cases," Loper said.
In Colone's case, Loper argues the law requirement for a jury to consider
whether a capital offender has a likelihood of being a "continuing threat to
society" is something not even members of the psychiatric community can do
accurately.
The delays irritate Joseph Goodman, an aging and ailing man who wants to see
his daughter's killer die before he does.
Andre Goodman points out other family members have died waiting for justice
since 2010 - his and Mary's grandmother, an aunt and uncle.
"We're just sick and tired of nothing happening," Joseph Goodman said.
DNA calculations
Last year, the FBI notified crime labs across the country that data used to
calculate the chances of someone's DNA being found at a crime scene was
determined in error, though they downplayed the errors' impact.
Their methods drastically overestimated reliability of DNA results, from 1 in a
billion, down to less than 1 in a 100.
DNA is key in the case against Colone, lead prosecutor Pat Knauth said.
Knauth did not want to comment on specific evidence for fear of contaminating
the local jury pool, he said.
Colone's attorneys are still considering a push to have the trial transferred
out of Jefferson County for a 2nd time, a costly move that prosecutors do not
want to make.
Prosecutors were ready to try the case this past April, but Colone's attorneys
wanted more time to recalculate any DNA allegedly linking Colone to the crime.
M
"There's a lot of (DNA at the crime scene), some that's very crucial to the
case," Knauth said.
The Goodmans call it "trial strategy," despite the discrepancies in DNA
calculations becoming a nationwide issue, especially for already backlogged
courts.
"It really threw a wrench into our program," Knauth said of DNA calculation
errors. "(The defense attorneys) are doing a good job. It's what I would do if
I was on the defense, present the same motion (to recalculate DNA)."
Outspoken victim
A probable cause affidavit supporting charges against Colone in a robbery a
month before the double slaying names Mary Goodman as an eyewitness who
recognized him at the scene.
She identified Colone by name and through a six-man photo lineup, according to
the affidavit.
This is the theory prosecutors will present as motive for the killings.
Mary Goodman's willingness to speak up is consistent with how family members
remember her.
"Mary was funny. She would tell you what's on her mind, whether you like it or
not, and Briana was the same way," Andre Goodman said.
Andre last saw his sister, the youngest of the 5 kids, for their parents' 52nd
wedding anniversary - the week before she was killed - and 3 weeks before that
at the 70th birthday party for their Uncle Henry, who owned a rodeo and zydeco
club in the Hillebrandt area.
Uncle Henry died in 2012. He was one of the family members who wanted to see a
resolution in the slayings.
"We go through this every day," Andre Goodman said.
(source: Beaumont Enterprise)
USA:
40 Years of Experience with the 'New and Improved' Death Penalty, 1976???201
4 decades after the creation of the modern death penalty, the system remains
racially biased, costly, and prone to error.
In this September 21, 2010 file photo, the view a condemned inmate would have
from a table inside the death chamber is shown during a tour of the new lethal
injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California.
July 2, 2016, marked the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's 7-2 decision
in Gregg v. Georgia validating the modern death penalty. 4 years earlier, the
Court had invalidated all existing capital punishment laws in Furman, leading
to the rapid revision of capital punishment laws in 37 states. Gregg was the
opportunity for the Court to determine if these "new and improved" laws passed
the constitutional bar that the old laws had been seen to fail. Safeguards
mandated by the Court included reserving the penalty only for those found
guilty of certain specified crimes, such as particularly heinous murders
involving torture, rape, or the killing of a police officer; separating out the
trial of guilt or innocence from a separate penalty phase during which
aggravating and mitigating factors would be considered; and mandating appellate
"proportionality review" to ensure that the punishment was in fact being used
for the "worst of the worst." The Court also mandated direct (automatic)
appeals to the federal court system before a state could carry out a death
sentence, thereby showing its lack of trust that Southern states would carry
out the penalty in compliance with the new federal standards.
In Furman, the Court had found the death penalty to have had strong racial
overtones, and to have been applied arbitrarily and capriciously to a seemingly
random and small set of murderers, akin to a lightning strike. This, the Court
ruled, was no way to operate a system involving life and death.
In the 40 years since Gregg brought the death penalty back, more 700,000
homicides have taken place, and over 8,000 inmates have been sentenced to die.
As of May 1, 2016, 1,435 have been executed.
It's time we took stock. Has the "modern" and improved system resolved the
problems inherent in the old system?
In a word, no. Let's review some of the problems with the old system and see if
they have been resolved.
Capricious and arbitrary: As the numbers above indicate, there have been more
than 700,000 homicides, but "only" 1,435 executions. In Furman, the Court
complained that only a tiny handful of murders were selected, capriciously, for
the death penalty. James Holmes faced 140 counts of attempted murder and was
convicted on 12 counts for the 2012 shooting rampage in a Colorado movie
theater; he was not sentenced to death. While all the more than 700,000
homicides were of course not death-eligible, a good estimate is that about 20 %
of these were, perhaps 140,000 cases or so. With 1,435 executions and 140,000
death-eligible homicides, the math is pretty clear: Perhaps 1 percent of
death-eligible homicides lead to execution. Various studies, most recently a
comprehensive review of all eligible homicides in Connecticut, have made clear
that that 1 percent does not systematically coincide with the worst of the
worst.
Nationally, the odds of execution are dozens of times higher if the victim is a
white woman than if the victim is a black male.
Racially biased: The Court rejected capital punishment in Furman partly because
of its fear that Southern states were prone to execute blacks for crimes
against whites. The Court was right to be concerned, and the concern remains at
least as strong today. Louisiana, for example, has never executed a white for
killing a black (though it did execute a white soldier for a bayonet attack on
2 slave women in ... 1752). Missouri, in which, like Louisiana, a majority of
all homicide victims are black males, has executed exactly 1 white for killing
a black; this was for an Aryan nation hit inside a prison. Nationally, the odds
of execution are dozens of times higher if the victim is a white woman than if
the victim is a black male. In the rare cases where a black male kills a white
female, his odds of execution are higher still. Compared to earlier periods,
the modern death penalty is more geographically focused on the South than it
was in earlier eras.
Prone to reversals and error: With more than 8,000 death sentences but fewer
than 1,500 executions, the odds of execution, given a death sentence, are just
13 percent. By far the most likely outcome when a death sentence is applied is
that an appeals court will overturn it and the inmate will be resentenced to
life in prison. Further, with 156 exonerations and 1,435 executions, we have
had one exoneration for every nine executions. Exonerees, we should note, often
leave prison with no compensation, and often not even an apology.
Costly: California has the nation's largest death row, but a very inactive
death chamber. The state has executed just 13 individuals (most recently in
2006), but has spent over $4 billion on capital punishment related expenses
(chiefly, maintaining a separate death row) since reinstatement in 1978. New
Jersey, which did not execute a single individual before abolishing capital
punishment in 2007, spent over $250 million on the system.
Geographically arbitrary: Harris County, Texas (home to Houston) has seen 125
executions, whereas the next most active state (after Texas), Oklahoma, has had
just 112 in the same time period. Just 2 % of U.S. counties generate more than
1/2 of all the executions. Perhaps the most surprising element of this question
of geography is that the localities with the highest murder rates (for
instance, New Orleans) are not the places with the highest rates of execution,
or even close. In other words, the "lightning strike" element of the death
penalty so firmly rejected by the Court in 1972 has not disappeared. Crimes in
St. Louis are much more likely to be met with execution if they occur in the
outlying suburbs rather than in the central city. Crimes in Los Angeles are
likely to be met with a penalty of "life in prison with the remote possibility
of death" whereas in Houston it may be met with death.
As we reach the milestone of 40 years since Gregg, perhaps we should assess the
death penalty again as it really operates, rather than as some wish it might.
(source: Frank Baumgartner, The American Prospect)
US MILITARY:
Defendant in Okinawa slaying seeks change of venue
A U.S. base worker has denied premeditation in the brutal slaying of an
Okinawan woman and wants his case moved to Tokyo, saying he can't get a fair
trial on the tiny Japanese island due to extensive media coverage.
Kenneth Franklin Gadson, who worked on Kadena Air Base and goes by his Japanese
wife's family name of Shinzato, was charged last week with murder and rape
resulting in death in the death of Rina Shimabukuro, 20, an Uruma office worker
who disappeared in April.
Gadson confessed to the crime, though his attorney said he was under the
influence of narcotics following a suicide attempt. In a statement to Stars and
Stripes over the weekend, Gadson did not deny killing Shimabukuro but said the
police account of the incident isn't correct.
"I did not have the intention of killing the victim," Gadson wrote.
"Furthermore, I did not rape her. I will state the details of the case in
court."
A petition for a change of venue was filed Monday with the Supreme Court of
Japan. Defense attorney Toshimitsu Takaesu requested that jurisdiction of the
case be changed to Tokyo District Court.
"The content of [Gadson's] confession and the presence of evidence in this case
has been reported by media, which not only contributed to people on Okinawa to
have prejudgment in this incident but to let all women on Okinawa to have the
victim's mindset with a feeling that the victim could have been me," Takaesu
wrote in the petition.
"Men and women alike share the mourning feeling with the victim's parents and
feel a close kinship with the victim???s family. This circumstance applies to
every and all of the citizen judge candidates that could be called upon to
participate in the criminal trial."
The slaying has sparked protests in Okinawa, where tens of thousands turned out
to call for the U.S. to leave the island where it has retained a large presence
since World War II, and elsewhere in Japan.
It drew apologies from President Barack Obama, U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy
and Lt. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, Marine Forces Japan commander, along with
condemnations from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Okinawan Gov. Takeshi
Onaga.
Takaesu said the Okinawa public is filled with "hatred" for his client, and the
audience for any trial could be filled with Shimabukuro's friends or family,
which could further influence the judiciary.
He also said Gadson is in need of a mental evaluation and adequate translation
services.
If convicted, Gadson could potentially face the death penalty, though it is
rarely imposed in Japan for single homicides.
"I believe that the jurors not only have concluded me as guilty through the
polices' 1-sided story, but also will not believe what I say despite it being
the truth," Gadson wrote to Stars and Stripes. "They believe that the case is
cold-blooded and heinous and will decide to give me the death sentence."
Gadson has been held since May 19 when he reportedly admitted to strangling
Shimabukuro and led police to her body in a remote wooded area in northern
Okinawa. Shimabukuro had been missing since April 28 when she told her
boyfriend she was going for an evening walk. Her boyfriend reported her missing
the next morning.
Gadson's red SUV was among about 300 vehicles captured in security-camera
footage from the area where the victim was last seen. Police say he was out
cruising, looking for a victim to rape and kill. They have said he clubbed
Shimabukuro over the head from behind, then strangled and stabbed her while
attempting to rape her, but that she died before he could finish the sexual
assault.
(source: Stars and Stripes)
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