Dec. 31
NORTH CAROLINA:
N.C. Supreme Court will hear argument to overturn Mario McNeill's death penalty
case
One of North Carolina's most infamous killers is asking the state's highest
court to overturn his convictions because his attorneys shouldn't have told
police where they could find his 5-year-old victim.
The state Supreme Court will hear arguments from Mario Andrette McNeill's
lawyers on Jan. 9. They're asking the court to throw out McNeill's convictions
and death sentence for murder and other crimes.
A Cumberland County jury deliberated for less than an hour in May 2013 before
deciding that he should die for the 2009 death of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis.
Shaniya's body was found 6 days after her mother reported her missing from
their Fayetteville mobile home in a remote kudzu patch. Searchers failed to
find the girl's body until McNeill's lawyers told police where to look.
(source: WXII news)
ARKANSAS:
No refills: Last remaining Arkansas death penalty drugs expire soon
After waiting 11 years to die, 35 death row inmates in Arkansas are likely to
be around for even longer. The state's lethal injection supply of potassium
chloride is set to run out by January 1, 2017.
Arkansas has not had an execution since 2005, due to legal problems centered
around their lethal drugs.
In 2015, Governor Asa Hutchinson (R) set execution dates for 8 death row
inmates, but they were put on hold until the state Supreme Court decided on the
legality of the state's secrecy law.
9 inmates challenged the state's secrecy law, arguing that Arkansas was
violating the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution by not revealing the
maker, seller and other information about the drugs used in executions. Due to
a previous botched execution in Oklahoma, they also argued that one of the
drugs, midazolam, failed to properly block pain receptors, which lead to "cruel
and unusual" executions.
On June 23, the Arkansas Supreme Court voted 4-3 to uphold the state's secrecy
policy, enabling the state to continue concealing information about the drugs
used in executions.
However, this was just after the press discovered that the state had obtained
lethal drugs from a subsidiary of Pfizer.
RT reported on Pfizer declaring its opposition to using their products in
executions, citing their website at the time, which stated: "Pfizer makes its
products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve. Consistent
with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal
injections for capital punishment."
Since then, many pharmaceutical companies in the US have decided to stop
selling lethal drugs to states with capital punishment, and many regulations in
Europe have made it hard for states to import any of the necessary drugs for
lethal injections.
As pharmaceutical companies continue to make lethal drugs difficult to obtain,
states have resorted to alternative sources, but they are not having much luck.
The American Pharmacists Association came out with a statement discouraging its
members from selling lethal drugs to states for their executions, saying, "Such
activities are fundamentally contrary to the role of pharmacists as providers
of health care."
Without a path to buy lethal drugs, the number of executions has reached its
lowest point in a quarter-century, according to a year-end study from the Death
Penalty Information Center. The study finds that executions went from a high of
98 in 1998, to only 20 in 2016. This year also saw the fewest death penalty
sentences since 1972, when the US Supreme Court case of Furman v. Georgia led
to a 4-year-long moratorium on capital punishment sentencing.
(source: rt.com)
KANSAS:
2016 Top story No. 1: Ottawa man sentenced to death in quadruple homicide
Editor's Note: The Herald continues its reflection of 2016 with the top 5
stories of the year. The stories covered a variety of topics, including an
Ottawa man's sentencing in a quadruple homicide case, to a county commissioner
being recalled to a fire that closed a popular Ottawa eatery. Here are the top
5 stories of 2016:
A 30-year-old Ottawa man is sitting behind bars in the El Dorado Correctional
Facility while his death sentence in a Franklin County quadruple homicide
enters the appeal phase.
Kyle Trevor Flack was sentenced to death by a Franklin County district judge
May 18, 3 years after the bodies of a mother, her 18-month-old daughter and 2
men were discovered May 2013 at a farmstead west of Ottawa, according to Herald
archives.
District Judge Eric Godderz said Flack committed the crimes without
justification in a cowardly, senseless fashion, according to archived accounts.
"The one thing though, Mr. Flack, is that no one will forget what harm you have
done," Godderz said addressing Flack. "You'll never get another chance to do it
again."
The victims' families clapped when the death sentence was delivered in Franklin
County District Court, 301 S. Main St., Ottawa, according to the Herald's
accounts of the trial.
The judge's sentencing came after the jury's recommendation March 31 of the
death penalty for the 2013 capital murder of Kaylie Bailey, 21, and her
18-month-old daughter, Lana, for which Flack was convicted March 23, according
to Herald archives.
Flack also was found guilty of 2nd degree murder for the killing of Andrew
Stout, 30; 1st degree murder for the killing of Steven White, 31; and criminal
possession of a firearm, according to archives. Godderz also sentenced Flack to
267 months (about 22 years) on the 2nd degree murder charge; and to life in
prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years in the 1st degree count
and to 9 months for criminal possession of a firearm, according to Herald
archives.
Flack's sentences will run consecutively, served at the El Dorado Correctional
Facility. His case will automatically be reviewed by the Kansas Supreme Court.
(source: Ottawa Herald)
USA:
The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty
Consensus----In employing the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by
international law. But it declines to make the most important international
commitment - to reject the penalty as a violation of human rights.In employing
the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by international law. But it
declines to make the most important international commitment - to reject the
penalty as a violation of human rights.
Last week, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution
calling for a worldwide "moratorium on the use of the death penalty" - the 6th
that the U.N. has approved in the past decade. Each one has gained the support
of more of the organization's members. The latest vote was 117 countries in
favor to 409 against. (31 abstained, and 5 did not vote.) In addition to a call
for a halt to executions worldwide, the resolution urges countries that
maintain the death penalty to increasingly restrict its imposition and to apply
international laws that protect the rights of those facing the penalty. The
rights include that a death sentence may be imposed only for the "most serious
crimes," defined as intentional crimes that have "lethal or other extremely
grave consequences," and that execution be carried out only after "a final
judgment rendered by a competent court," following a legal process that insures
a fair trial and that provides access to appeal to a higher court and the
opportunity to seek a pardon or a commutation of the sentence.
At the General Assembly, the United States cast one of the nay votes. Stefanie
Amadeo, the deputy representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council,
explained the country's position, which is basically unchanged since the U.S.
opposed the 1st resolution against the death penalty, in 2007: "The ultimate
decision regarding these issues must be addressed through the domestic
democratic processes of individual Member States and be consistent with their
obligations under international law," which does not prohibit capital
punishment. The position reflects the American reality of supporting the death
penalty in principle, but increasingly outlawing it in practice. As Jeffrey
Toobin reported recently, the U.S. maintains the death penalty under federal
and military law and under the laws of 31 states - even though only 5 states
conducted executions in 2016 and executed only 20 people in total, the lowest
number in 25 years.
The U.S. stresses the importance of observing global norms. "Just as the United
States is committed to complying with its international obligations," Amadeo
said, "we strongly urge other countries that employ the death penalty to do so
only in full compliance with their international obligations." Meanwhile, in
the past 40 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly sought to restrict
the application of the death penalty to the worst of the worst offenders - 1st,
to people who commit the most heinous murders and, then, only to adults who
commit them, excluding youth under the age of 18. In addition, it generally
takes a decade or more for a state to carry out an execution because of
challenges to a death sentence allowed under due process of law.
Among the states with the death penalty, 12 have not carried out an execution
for a decade or more, and another five have not executed anyone for at least 5
years. In California, where the last execution was in 2006, there were 750
people on death row as of December 2nd. Rather than being executed (the state
has executed only 13 people since 1978) it is much more likely that a death-row
inmate will die as a result of natural causes or suicide.
Roger Hood, an emeritus professor at Oxford, and Carolyn Hoyle, who directs
Oxford's Centre for Criminology, last year published the 5th edition of "The
Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective." Their book documents the many ways
that people are sentenced to death in violation of international law - for
drug-trafficking, for example, rather than for "the most serious crimes," in
unfair proceedings and with no opportunity to ask for clemency, and while
imprisoned in terrible conditions. These and other realities, they write, are
moving "the debate about capital punishment beyond the view that each nation
has, if it wishes, the sovereign right to retain the death penalty" to
persuading "countries that retain the death penalty that it inevitably, and
however administered, violates universally accepted human rights." Countries
that employ the death penalty and insist that they are abiding by international
law, including the U.S., decline to join in making the most important
international commitment about the penalty, which is to reject it as a
violation of human rights.
There has long been a gap between the idealism that the U.S. expresses when
boasting of its dedication to the rule of law, especially the protection of
individual rights, and the reality of its persistent refusal to abide by major
international human-rights commitments. The U.S. was a leader in the
development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.N.
adopted in 1948, but stopped supporting the international system to carry it
out because, among other reasons, Jim Crow laws directly violated the
declaration. There is a sizable list of human-rights treaties - on the Rights
of the Child, for example, and on the International Criminal Court - that the
U.S. has signed but not ratified. Even when the U.S. ratifies treaties, the
government often adds a caveat that excludes protection of some basic rights.
As a result, the U.S. has ended up in some rough company, particularly when it
comes to the death penalty. In the past generation, the number of countries
that have stopping using the death penalty has doubled, from about 50 to about
100. Of the 57 member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe, and of the 35 member states of the Organization of American States,
only the U.S. carried out executions last year. The countries that executed the
most offenders were, in order, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United States. China executed thousands of people, though its secrecy about its
use of capital punishment makes it impossible to know exactly how many.
Excluding China, Iran (with close to 1000 or more), Pakistan (326), and Saudi
Arabia (158) executed almost 9 out of 10 people put to death worldwide - "often
after grossly unfair trials," according to Amnesty International, and "for
crimes - including drug trafficking, corruption, 'adultery,' and 'blasphemy' -
that do not meet the international legal standards for the use of the death
penalty." In 2015, according to Amnesty International, at least 1634 people
were executed, an increase of more than 50 % from the year before and the
highest number in a quarter of a century. (The organization expects to release
figures for 2016 in the spring.)
The United States, in other words, ranks with countries that conspicuously are
not in full compliance with their international obligations. And its
responsibility is sometimes worse than guilt by association. As Maya Foa, the
director of the death-penalty team at Reprieve, an international human-rights
organization, told me, "The U.S. clearly leads and influences global
death-penalty practice. Our partners, who are lawyers and human-rights
defenders in jurisdictions that retain the penalty, tell us that the use of the
death penalty by the U.S., a 'developed' nation, is used to justify the
death-penalty practice in the jurisdictions they work in." Reprieve is
providing legal and investigative assistance to people facing execution in 11
countries, in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, and in the
U.S.
In August at a rally in Istanbul, after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the
BBC reported, the country's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said, "They say
there is no death penalty in the E.U. ... Well, the U.S. has it; Japan has it;
China has it; most of the world has it. So they are allowed to have it. We used
to have it until 1984. Sovereignty belongs to the people, so if the people make
this decision I am sure the political parties will comply." He said that the
Turkish people might want to restore the death penalty to punish those
responsible for killing hundreds of citizens during the attempted coup. That
has not happened yet, but, if it does, its purpose, Erdogan suggested, will be
a display of cold-blooded power.
The influence of the U.S. on the death penalty worldwide has sometimes been
constructive. In 1976, for example, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was
unconstitutional for a state to make the death penalty mandatory for any crime,
it marked the beginning of the decline of mandatory death sentences around the
world. "The fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment,"
the Court said, "requires consideration of the character and record of the
individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense."
The Indian Supreme Court employed this logic when it struck down the mandatory
death sentence in the country's penal code, in 1983. The legislature, it held,
could not compel judges "to shut their eyes to mitigating circumstances and
inflict upon them the dubious and unconscionable duty of imposing a preordained
sentence of death." More recently, the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty
Worldwide reports, 18 other countries have followed suit and struck down the
mandatory death penalty, including almost every Caribbean nation and Uganda,
Malawi, and Kenya.
In their latest edition of "The Death Penalty," Hood and Hoyle write
optimistically about the U.S. example: "Those who campaign for abolition
worldwide can hope that it will not be many years before the U.S. Supreme Court
will be able to find that the majority of states, in line with a majority of
countries worldwide, does not support the death penalty for anyone." Donald
Trump has said that he will replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia - the
Court's most vehement defender of the death penalty for almost 30 years - with
someone in his mold. But, even when that happens, there will be a possibility
that Justice Anthony Kennedy will join the Court's moderate liberals in
striking down the death penalty, for reasons Justice Stephen Breyer articulated
in 2015: "The Court in effect delegated significant responsibility to the
States to develop procedures that would" insure the fairness of the
capital-punishment system, he wrote. "Almost 40 years of studies, surveys, and
experience strongly indicate, however, that this effort has failed." If the
Court continues to uphold the death penalty, on the other hand, the gap between
the U.S. and a large and growing majority of the rest of the world will
continue to increase.
(source: Lincoln Caplan, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a senior research
scholar at Yale Law School and the author of the new book "American Justice
2016: The Political Supreme Court."----The New Yorker)
*****************
For Asheville attorney, a life's work fighting the death penalty
The attorney leans to her left, drawing the young man beside her out of his
long stare, one that fixates on the wide table before him or some unknown spot
straight ahead.
The 2 share a whispered conversation, and when they are finished, he returns to
his gaze, never acknowledging the judge in front of him or the spectators
behind, witnesses to an accounting of his terrible crimes against men and women
in prayer.
The interaction in a Charleston courthouse, though small and inconspicuous,
speaks to the rapport between the defendant and attorney Kimberly C. Stevens.
In a career spanning more than 2 decades as a capital defender, she has
represented defendants accused and convicted of a host of high-profile crimes,
some that have rattled small towns or large cities or entire states.
This one, the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof and his attack on Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, has captured the attention of a nation.
Until recently, Stevens' career was centered in North Carolina, where she
became known among colleagues not only for her expertise in the complicated
legal arena that is capital litigation, but also for compassion toward both her
clients and their victims.
Last year, she left state service and Winston-Salem for a senior advisory role
as a federal capital defender, establishing an office in Asheville.
Stevens, 49, brings to her cases a doggedness in unraveling the histories of
her clients, men and women who often have mental health issues, developmental
disabilities or an upbringing plagued by abuse, said Bob Hurley, who served as
North Carolina's capital defender for 13 years until 2015.
"I would point her to the most difficult and challenging capital cases in the
state. By that, I mean I felt there was a significant likelihood the defendant
would receive the death penalty, either because of the heinousness of the crime
or the prominence of the victim involved or the outrage of the community over
the crime," Hurley said. "She would get my 1st call."
Those calls from Hurley and others have put Stevens on more than 40 capital
cases where often, as with Roof, a possible sentence that pits life against
death is the primary concern.
Colleagues say Stevens, who declined interview requests for this article citing
the ongoing Roof trial, stands opposed to state execution for reasons that
include its tendency to target defendants who are impoverished, mentally ill or
are in minority groups, as well as concerns the condemned could be wrongly
convicted.
Stevens is exceptional in her dedication to those clients, and that she's left
North Carolina's roster of death penalty attorneys to focus on federal defense
has "left a void that certainly will not be filled by anyone else in the
state," said Victoria Jayne, an assistant capital defender based in Buncombe
County.
"You have clients who have made bad decisions all of their lives," Jayne said.
"Every time they make a decision, it's been a bad one and what we know is that
on their own, we can't expect them to make the most important decision of their
life, which is to choose a life plea over going to trial and a possible death
sentence."
Those life sentence pleas negotiated by Stevens include some of the most
high-profile capital cases in North Carolina's state and federal courts: Gary
Michael Hilton in 2007 murdered an elderly couple near a popular hiking trail
in Pisgah National Forest. A year later, Demario James Atwater kidnapped and
shot to death Eve Carson, the student body president at UNC Chapel Hill. Quincy
Allen, a South Carolina man, in 2002 shot to death 2 men at a Surry County
convenience store. Eric Lorenzo Davis in 2013 beat to death his 4-year-old
daughter in a Jackson County motel.
Twice Stevens has won bids on appeal to have condemned men removed from death
row.
And once she did not.
Witness
It was brightly lit, the execution chamber in Raleigh's Central Prison. The
room has not hosted a death since 2006, but in 2003, when Stevens took a seat
its cramped gallery, 7 men died there.
Set on the other side of a windowed concrete wall stood a gurney, John Dennis
Daniels strapped to its mattress. Beyond the prison walls, about 30 protesters
gathered against the dark November chill for a candlelight vigil, according to
Associated Press reports.
Hours earlier in a last-minute clemency bid, a retired psychiatrist appeared
before then-Gov. Mike Easley, telling him she no longer stood by her original
assessment of Daniels, one made on behalf of prosecutors amid trial.
Daniels should not be put to death for the strangulation of his elderly aunt,
she testified.
The state's attorneys never gave her critical medical records about Daniels'
suicide attempts, a history of depression and brain damage from alcohol and
cocaine use, information the doctor said she learned only after Stevens
unearthed and presented her with the missing paperwork.
The testimony failed to persuade Easley, a decision that devastated Stevens,
the attorney told a reporter.
"John Daniels is my friend and they're about to kill him," she said, and in
telling her client that no hope remained, they hugged and cried together. The
lethal injection began at 2 a.m., Stevens watching as Daniels lifted his head
from the gurney, coughed and then fell still.
Minutes later, before the official pronouncement of death, the attorney left
the room.
Stevens was overcome with emotion.
Emotion has been there also, in a federal courtroom in Charleston, and though
the defense team led by the venerable and storied capital defender David Bruck
will not comment, their frustrations often have been visible.
Roof represented himself in jury selection, relegating Bruck and Stevens to the
role of standby counsel. Unable to address the court directly, the attorneys
attempted to use notes to guide Roof through lines of questioning.
The defendant appeared unable or unwilling to follow direction, an exercise
that often left Bruck to raise a hand to a furrowed brow, as Stevens'
frustration came in sagging shoulders.
At Roof's request, the counselors were reinstated in the guilt phase of trial,
but the 22-year-old will again serve as his own attorney as a jury weighs
sentencing, a phase that commences on Jan. 3.
The move blocks counselors from presenting evidence that Roof may suffer from
mental illness.
That situation is most certainly devastating for Stevens and the team, said
Hurley, the former North Carolina public defender.
"I think the worst position for a capital defense attorney to be put in is one
in which the defendant has decided to go pro se [self-representation] and
they're asked to sit on the sidelines and watch," Hurley said. "It's almost
like watching someone committing suicide and you can do nothing about it."
A quiet stand
Stevens began as an assistant federal capital defender in July 2015, a senior
position held through the Oregon-based Capital Resource Counsel Project. Its
primary focus is to guide and train death penalty lawyers in cases throughout
the eastern United States.
A native of Tacoma, Washington, Stevens in 1989 graduated from Washington State
University, then accepted a full scholarship to Wake Forest University's law
school. By 1994, she began representing death row inmates in North Carolina,
taking on defendants facing the death penalty in the following years, work that
later took her to the federal courts.
She joined the Roof defense team as co-counsel in July as a late addition, the
impending trial date only months away.
The timing of that move came on the heels of a court filing that indicated
Bruck, appointed to the case a year earlier, would pursue a mental defect
defense at sentencing.
While Roof in courtroom interactions appears cordial and comfortable with the
team, his own statements and filings indicate he split with Bruck's decision
over the mental health issue.
In her defense of clients, Stevens brings a commitment to unearthing medical
records and a personal history that might explain why they committed crimes,
said Mark Rabil, a law professor and director of the Innocence and Justice
Clinic at Wake Forest.
"She's somebody who works endlessly to find the good in people. In the
mitigation phase you look into someone's background and talk to all of their
family, their friends, get all of their records to find out, "What is it that
created this person?'" said Rabil, who has partnered with Stevens in about a
half-dozen capital cases, each ending with a plea deal for life.
"If anybody can help us find out why this horrible situation occurred in
Charleston, Kim's perfectly suited to that and she's very, very sensitive and
caring about the victims of the crime and the victim's families."
Rabil noted also that she is conscientious of the charged and difficult issues
where race is a factor, typically involving a black defendant and a white
victim. Roof, an admitted white supremacist, was convicted of murdering nine
black parishioners in the Dec. 15 jury finding that included guilty verdicts
based on hate crime laws.
Throughout the trial, about 40 or so people have gathered on the benches behind
prosecutors. Most are African-American and family members of the slain. Seats
behind the defense team are populated by reporters and the public, with one
bench reserved for Roof's family. His grandparents have appeared a few times;
his mother once, at opening statements.
At moments, wrenching testimony has dropped courtroom spectators to a silence
burdened with grief, interrupted only by the low hum of a furnace from
somewhere deep in the building.
It is a despair that also appears to weigh on a defense team trying to save the
life of a client who targeted a church, a pastor, fathers, mothers, the
elderly, the young. All of them innocents.
Among the survivors is Polly Sheppard, who appeared as the last witness for the
prosecution on Dec. 14, delivering a steady and solemn account of praying aloud
amid gunfire, drawing Roof's attention.
"Shut up!" he yelled, still holding the gun as the dead and dying lay around
them. He told her would let her live to tell the story.
That story told, Bruck walked to the retired nurse, hands linked behind his
back.
"I'm so sorry," he said quietly. "I have no questions."
Behind him, Stevens rose to stand in a silent gesture of respect.
The movement reverberated throughout the courtroom, as row by row, the dozens
of observers took to their feet in silent ovation. Sheppard, in slow steps,
walked into the arms of supporters.
(source: Asheville Citizen-Times)
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