Nov. 14
OHIO:
Death row inmate from Warren gets disability hearing
A Trumbull County death row inmate will try to avoid the death penalty in court
this week as a hearing begins today to determine if he is severely
intellectually disabled.
Andre Williams, 49, formerly of Warren, who was convicted in the 1988 brutal
attack on an elderly Warren couple that left the husband dead and the wife
blind will be sitting at the defense table in Trumbull County Common Pleas
Court Judge W. Wyatt McKay's courtroom as Williams' lawyers argue he has an IQ
score below 70.
McKay ruled in 2004 and 2007 without hearings in favor of the state on this
issue, which is known in legal parlance as an Atkins claim. However, the U.S.
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated McKay's ruling in October 2015 and
ordered Williams' execution postponed until a local hearing is held.
The appeals court gave McKay 6 months to start the process for the hearing.
Over the last several months, attorneys in the case have been meeting with the
judge to discuss legal procedures.
Williams is being held in the Trumbull County Jail, where he was taken from his
cell at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it is unconstitutional to execute people
who are severely mentally disabled. In June 2003, Williams' attorneys filed a
petition with the local court stating his death sentence should be set aside.
The state generally considers IQ tests of below 70 to indicate a severe mental
disability. In his earlier decisions, McKay cited Williams' scored higher than
70 on several IQ tests.
Williams was convicted and sentenced to death for aggravated murder in 1989,
and both the Ohio 11th District Court of Appeals and Ohio Supreme Court upheld
that verdict and sentence.
The 1988 attack at the Wick Street SE home left George Melnick, 65, dead and
his Katherine, 64, blind, injured and confined to a nursing home for the rest
of her life. Prosecutors said the woman was raped and left nearly dead under a
kitchen table. She died in October 2012.
Williams' accomplice, Christopher W. Daniel, 47, is serving a 37-to 100-year
prison term given in 1989.
(source: Tribune Chronicle)
IOWA:
Branstad reacts wisely to call for death penalty
A rose to Gov. Terry Branstad for providing a thoughtful response when asked,
in the immediate aftermath of 2 Iowa police officers being killed, whether Iowa
should reinstate the death penalty. Branstad observed that now is the time to
focus on the 2 officers and their families. "I think we have to look at this
from the perspective of, 'What is the most effective thing we can do to protect
the safety of our citizens?'" he said, adding that the death penalty "is not a
panacea" for attacks on law enforcement. Last year, a Branstad spokesman said
the governor would be in favor of the death penalty in limited circumstances -
for instance, when a victim is kidnapped or raped, and then killed. Should that
idea resurface in the 2017 legislative session, Branstad and legislators will
have to confront the irrefutable fact that since the mid-1970s, 156 people sent
to death row have later been exonerated. That equates to 1 death-row
exoneration for every 10 people put to death. It's a reminder that any
discussion of the death penalty will have to be driven by fact-based evidence,
not by the raw emotions that stem from the Nov. 2 tragedy.
(source: Editorial, Des Moines Register)
NEW MEXICO:
Death row exonoree campaigns against capital punishment
"My question to the American public is: How many people need to be exonerated
before we realize we do not need a death row in this country?"
This was the focus of Anthony Ray Hinton's presentation at the UNM Law School
on Thursday, where he was invited by UNM's Innocence and Justice Project.
Hinton was on death row in Alabama for 30 years until he was exonerated in
2015.
"I was, when I was released, the 152nd person that had been exonerated from
death row. Just in a year and a half, 4 more were exonerated," he said. "That
brings the total to 156."
Hinton said he was released on Good Friday, and was able to attend an Easter
service 2 days after.
"Every day the government kills in your name. Do you really want the government
killing innocent people in your name?" Hinton asked. "If you don't, then you
should take a stand,".
He said 1 execution of an innocent person is 1 too many, and that politics
plays a role in where the death penalty is imposed. He accused the death
penalty - which New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has recently said she wants to
bring back - of installing a false sense of security.
Many anti-death penalty proponents cite the often overlooked price tag of
performing an execution, saying it's something more people should be concerned
about.
"Nobody, no government, no prosecutor, can look you in the eye and tell you
that you are more safe with the death penalty on the book than not," he said.
Hinton explained there are studies which show, in states without the death
penalty, the murder rate is low, as opposed to states that have the death
penalty, where the murder rate is higher.
"The governors would tell you that is because we don't use it enough. That is a
political answer. We need to wise up in America and see things for what they
truly are," he said, adding that the justice system is in need of an overhaul.
Hinton said the first step to dealing with the problem is admitting there is
one.
"I'm telling you how many death row inmates have been released. I don't even
have a figure on how many regular general population people have been
released," he said. "That alone should tell you we have a problem."
He said race and class both play a role in who gets incarcerated.
"They would have you to believe that justice is blind. But I promise you she
can see. She sees what race you are. She sees what college you went to. She
sees financial status. She sees what neighborhood you live in," Hinton said.
"And all of that plays a part in whether you will go to prison or not."
He said organizations like the Innocence Project are so important, because
income affects who is sent to prison.
"I sat on death row for 30 years. Not once have I ever heard (of) a rich man,
or a rich person that was sat on death row. Money determines who goes and who
doesn't go," he said.
But, Hinton said, these organizations cannot save everyone.
"We need to come in and we need to strike down the death penalty as a whole in
this country," he said.
Gordon Rahn, a research professor at the UNM Law School and director of the
Innocence and Justice Project, said that Hinton's story is one everyone should
hear.
"When the wrong person goes to prison, the person who actually committed the
crime is left to prey on society, which more times than not leads to even more
victims," he said. "So it's important for the students and the public to know
that we need to do everything we can to avoid these wrongful convictions in the
first place."
The project reviews and investigates post-conviction factual claims of
innocence, Rahn said, which gives students an opportunity to make a difference
while they are still in school.
"They're the future of the legal community in New Mexico, whether they're going
to be criminal defense attorneys or prosecutors," Rahn said. "In their
investigations and as part of the seminar, they're learning how these wrongful
convictions happen and they're also learning how they can be avoided in the
future."
(source: Cathy Cook is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo)
CALIFORNIA:
California's death penalty process more flawed and more expensive than ever
One of the ballot initiatives Californians passed on Tuesday promises to pose a
number of unfortunate problems for the state in the coming years: Proposition
66. This measure, which was marketed as a "fix" to California's death penalty,
will only further entrench problems that exist with an inherently broken
system.
After Prop. 66's passage, all post-conviction proceedings in death penalty
cases will now be moved from the California Supreme Court to state trial
courts, which are the same courts that handed down the death sentences
originally. State trial courts, which have no experience reviewing these
appeals, are also now tasked with appointing lawyers - many of whom have never
worked on a death penalty case - to handle the flood of petitions.
Under the law, too, the amount of time lawyers will be allowed to investigate
and file habeas petitions in death penalty appeals is shortened from 3 years to
just 1 year unless there is a "substantial claim of actual innocence," which
would extend the deadline to 2 years.
One of the main problems with the death penalty in California isn't that it's
not speedy enough, but rather there aren't enough lawyers for inmates on death
row. According to a 2008 report published by the California Commission on the
Fair Administration of Justice, the lack of legal representation for death row
inmates - many of whom are indigent and wait years just to get state-appointed
lawyers assigned to their cases - is what has made California's death penalty
system so broken.
"To reduce the average lapse of time from sentence to execution by half," the
report said, "[California] will have to spend nearly twice what we are spending
now." This ballot initiative did not address the added costs that will
inevitably come from trying to speed up the process.
Already, the death penalty is expensive for California. According to the same
report, the state spends roughly $137 million a year on the death penalty
alone. California has spent over $5 billion to maintain the death penalty since
it was reinstated in 1978, despite only a handful of executions having been
carried out (the last of which was over a decade ago).
Prop. 66 requires California to expand the number of lawyers eligible to
represent death row inmates, which will increase costs by at least $95 million
per year. Extra court costs will also have to be taken out of taxpayers'
pockets.
The biggest worry is that all of this speeding up of the process, compounded by
the fact that many lawyers appointed to these petitions will have little to no
experience handling death penalty cases, increases the chances that an innocent
person may be executed by the state.
Indeed, as the unfolding scandal at the Orange County District Attorney's
office is showing us, "snitch" tactics have been used by prosecutors in ways
that may have led to wrongful convictions.
Beyond this, there are also growing concerns over just how the state plans to
obtain any lethal injection drugs to actually carry out executions. Already,
the California Department of Corrections has amended its lethal injection
protocol to allow the state to obtain one of four barbiturates from a licensed
pharmacy to carry out an execution. However, many states that still have
capital punishment on the books have faced a years-long shortage of FDA
approved execution drugs. And there are pending lawsuits over challenges of the
new or experimental drug protocols other states have adopted or used.
Voters may have thought that this initiative would deliver justice for families
and victims of the horrendous crimes that put people on death row.
Unfortunately, it will instead highlight just how broken the system is at the
expense of victims, the accused and taxpayers alike. And if the state is able
to carry out an execution under this new law we'll have to hope voters' desire
to expedite the process doesn't end in the state killing an innocent person.
(source: Opinion; Lauren Krisai is director of criminal justice reform at
Reason Foundation----Orange County Register)
********************
Death penalty never seems to die
The fight over the death penalty never seems to die.
Even though it's not yet certain if opponents lost both capital punishment
ballot measures, they pre-emptively asked the state Supreme Court to block
Proposition 66 that would speed up executions.
The 1st volley in what could be a protracted legal battle rankled death penalty
supporters and could be a harbinger of a long road ahead if the reform measure
goes into effect and shakes up the way appeals are handled.
Phillip Cherney, a Visalia-based capital case attorney, said the writers of the
proposition have only themselves to blame when it comes to future litigation
against Proposition 66.
"It is no surprise that Proposition 66 would spawn litigation. It was poorly
written by folks who are more concerned about seeking speedy vengeance than
they are about ensuring that no innocent person is convicted or unjustly
sentenced to death," Cherney said. "The dominant theme of Prop 66 is 'damn the
torpedoes!' We will mete out execution regardless of the consequences to the
overall welfare of our system of justice. Everyone, victims and their families
included, have a stake in a criminal justice system that ensures our basic
rights are protected and Proposition 66 is not above being tested for its
creditworthiness."
Backers claimed victory with support on about 51 % of more than 8 million
ballots counted. But with millions of outstanding votes, it was still too close
to call Friday.
"Proposition 66 was passed by the voters because they are sick of lawyers who
oppose the death penalty constantly undermining the system with lawsuit after
lawsuit," said McGregor Scott, a former state and federal prosecutor who
co-chairs the Yes on 66 Campaign. "It is not at all ironic, and is in fact a
slap in the face to the voters, that their response to the passage of
Proposition 66 was to file another lawsuit trying to thwart the will of the
voters."
Cherney, who also teaches Criminal Law/Procedure and Evidence at San Joaquin
College of Law, disagreed.
"The petition filed by John Van De Kamp and Ronald Briggs filed with the
California Supreme Court is not a 'slap in the face' to voters, who barely
passed Proposition 66," he said. "Seeking a temporary stay is a legitimate and
well-worn means to ask the court to consider many of the short-sighted
provisions of Proposition 66 before it goes into effect, and, they allege,
violate fundamental constitutional notions of due process."
With voters shooting down a measure that would have repealed capital punishment
and leaning toward adopting the series of reforms to expedite appeals, they
appeared to give a lifeline to the beleaguered death penalty that has sent 900
of California's most vicious killers to death row in the past 4 decades but
only resulted in 13 executions.
Proposition 66 would make procedural changes in how appeals are heard and who
is qualified to represent condemned killers. Currently, the pool of appellate
lawyers handling capital cases is small and inmates are sometimes not assigned
counsel for more than 5 years after conviction.
Cherney is part of that small pool of fit attorneys who have handled appeals
cases, including Richard Allen Davis, the man condemned to death for the 1993
slaying of 12-year-old Polly Klaas.
The reform effort would expand that pool by assigning attorneys who currently
handle other types of appeals to death penalty cases.
While the California Supreme Court would still hear direct appeals regarding
errors at trial, appeals for claims such as newly discovered evidence,
incompetent counsel or misconduct by jurors or prosecutors would be heard by
the trial court. Those secondary appeals would have to be filed within a year
of conviction instead of 3, and all state appeals would have to be exhausted in
5 years.
The petition filed Wednesday with the California Supreme Court by former
Attorney General Van de Kamp and Briggs, whose father wrote the ballot measure
that expanded California's death penalty in 1978, said the reform measure would
disrupt the courts, cost more money and limit the ability to mount proper
appeals. They said the deadlines would set "an inordinately short timeline for
the courts to review those complex cases" and result in attorneys cutting
corners in their investigations.
Death penalty opponents had claimed the reform measure would lead to the
appointment of incompetent lawyers and tight deadlines would prevent appeals
based on new evidence that can take years to unearth. Seven of the past 10
exonerations in the U.S. took 25 years or more to find evidence of innocence,
attorney Barry Scheck said.
Paperwork alone can add years to an appeal process.
"To review and correct errors in 25,000 pages of trial transcripts and hundreds
of boxes of confidential files can easily take upwards of 2 years alone."
Cherney said.
Qualified lawyers may not only be rare, the ones who are already in the system
may have contracts that don't fall in line with the propositions time lines.
The measures could add to the already backlogged courts across the state.
"What is going to happen when you have jerry-rigged system with lawyers that
are not competent to do the job, with courts that are overburdened, with time
limits that everything has to be done in 5 years?" asked Scheck, co-founder of
the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York. "It could be a
bloodbath."
Proposition 66 supporters dismissed the challenge before the California Supreme
Court as a frivolous stall tactic.
Kent Scheidegger, director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation who helped
write Proposition 66, said it will take some time for the California Judicial
Counsel to approve lawyers to handle such cases, but he said they would be
competent. He said the current shortage of lawyers is due to the people
controlling the appointment process who won???t consider well-qualified
lawyers, such as former prosecutors, willing to handle appeals.
"Having anti-death penalty crusaders in charge of an important part of the
process has been a big part of the problem," he said.
Cherney rebutted.
"The failure and refusal of the drafters of Proposition 66 to anticipate the
financial fallout of 'reforms' is not the fault of abolitionist 'crusaders,'
but falls squarely on the shoulders of those who wrote the damn thing," he
said. "They have no one to blame but themselves for the serious flaws that will
now be exposed in our courts."
Experts predicted extensive litigation over Proposition 66.
Sean Kennedy, a law professor at Loyola Law School and former federal defender
who handled death penalty appeals, said the law seeks to speed up appeals like
the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 did in U.S.
courts.
Elements of that law are still being contested and he expects future challenges
in California to argue on due process grounds that expedited appeals hamper
meaningful review.
"I think California is very schizophrenic about the death penalty," Kennedy
said. "Majorities often support the death penalty ... but people are concerned
about being like Texas and having no real due process."
(source: visaliatimesdelta.com)
USA:
A comeback for the death penalty?
After years of declining use of the death penalty across the United States and
declining public support for capital punishment, last week's election gave hope
to death penalty proponents. The results of balloting in California, Oklahoma
and Nebraska as well as the election of Donald Trump seem to foretell a
comeback of capital punishment.
Yet the foundations of the case against capital punishment remain strong and
the likelihood of continuing progress toward abolishing the death penalty
remains great.
For supporters of capital punishment the most consequential development was the
election of Donald Trump. Trump is such a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of
capital punishment that, in December of 2015, he promised members of the New
England Police Benevolent Association that he would issue an executive order as
president containing the "strong, strong statement" that he wants the death
penalty for those found guilty of killing a police officer.
"Anybody," Trump said, "killing a policeman, a policewoman, a police officer,
anybody killing a police officer: Death penalty is going to happen, okay?"
Trump's election is likely to put on hold any prospect that the Supreme Court
will take up Justice Stephen Breyer's recent invitation to his fellow justices
to reconsider the constitutionality of capital punishment.
State votes are bad news for death penalty foes
The results of referendum questions on the ballot in California, Nebraska and
Oklahoma also brought bad news for abolitionists. Voters in California
delivered a double-barreled blow. They rejected Proposition 62, a measure which
would have replaced capital punishment for murder with life in prison without
parole. They also approved by a narrow margin a separate measure intended to
speed up executions. That measure designates special courts to hear challenges
to death penalty convictions, limits successive appeals and expands the pool of
lawyers who could handle those appeals.
Nebraska voters, by a margin of 61% to 39%, approved reinstating that state's
death penalty one year after state legislators voted to abolish it.
In Oklahoma, 66% of voters supported State Question 776 declaring that the
death penalty cannot be considered cruel and unusual under the state
constitution. It added a provision that "any method of execution shall be
allowed, unless prohibited by the United States Constitution."
Despite these electoral victories, the likelihood of a reversal of fortune for
capital punishment is remote. The high costs of capital prosecutions, serious
doubts about the reliability of capital convictions, concerns about
arbitrariness in death sentencing, and the difficulty of finding reliable
methods of execution remain.
These issues have allowed death penalty opponents to build their case state by
state, appealing to public officials and offering them a different way to frame
opposition to capital punishment.
Over the last decade, that strategy has led to judicial or legislative
abolition in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland,
Nebraska (a decision reversed by Tuesday's referendum) and Delaware.
Its success can also be seen in the dramatic drop in the number of death
sentences handed out across the United States. They have been cut from 315 in
1996 to 49 in 2015.
The number of executions also has declined significantly, going from 98 in 1999
to 28 last year.
Why death penalty is on the decline
These changes have occurred because abolitionists have reframed the way many
judges, legislatures, and governors think about capital punishment. The focus
of political and legal debates has moved from moral and philosophical
abstractions toward a careful consideration of the way the death penalty works
in practice. Even after the recent election, public officials can continue to
oppose the death penalty by questioning whether its day-to-day practices are
compatible with central American values, like due process and equal treatment.
As former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn explained in 2011 when he signed a bill to
end the death penalty, "I have concluded that our system of imposing the death
penalty is inherently flawed. Since our experience has shown that there is no
way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that
can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded
that the proper course of action is to abolish it."
While they did not persuade the citizens of California, Nebraska or Oklahoma,
opponents of the death penalty have made substantial progress with the American
public. A 2015 national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that
71% of Americans believed that there is some risk that an innocent person will
be put to death and only 26% thought that there are adequate safeguards in
place to make sure that does not happen. That same survey found that 52% of
respondents agreed that minorities are more likely than whites to be sentenced
to death for similar crimes.
Because of these concerns about the risk of executing the innocent and about
racial discrimination in capital sentencing, 42% of the public now opposes the
death penalty, the highest such opposition has been since 1972.
Last week's electoral results are a reminder that the death penalty continues
to have powerful populist and symbolic appeal, but it does not foretell a
comeback for capital punishment. Abolitionists will remain on the offensive,
and America still seems to be on the road to abolition.
(source: CNN)
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