May 1
OHIO:
Still no execution date for Dayton man after 30 years on death row----Samuel
Moreland was convicted in 1986 of killing 5 members of a Dayton family.
25 of Ohio's death row inmates have been assigned dates through 2022 when
lethal chemicals under the state's direction are to be injected into their
bodies. Samuel Moreland isn't one of them, though more than 30 years have
passed since his conviction for the murders of 5 members of a Dayton family.
In fact, of the 25 inmates with scheduled execution dates over the next 4
years, 20 of them entered the prison system after Moreland.
Execution schedules are determined by a number of factors, including whether an
inmate has exhausted all of his appeals. But the wait can be frustrating for
the victims' families, who are forced to relive extraordinarily painful events
with each delay, which can come at any time during the process.
In February, just days before he was scheduled to die, Raymond Tibbetts of
Cincinnati had his execution delayed by Gov. John Kasich after a juror asked
the governor to grant clemency in the case, saying the jury was never told
about the abuse Tibbetts incurred as a young person, including being tied to
his bed by his foster parents. Kasich rescheduled the execution for Oct. 17 of
this year.
Another inmate - Romell Broom - received a stay of execution by then Gov. Ted
Strickland in 2009 when the execution team was unable to local a suitable vein
in which to inject the chemicals. He is now scheduled to die on June 17, 2020.
Moreland has never had an execution date but has spent more than 3 decades
seeking to overturn his conviction. The delays have frustrated Tia Talbott,
whose mother, sister, 2 sons and a niece were found slain in her South Ardmore
Avenue home on Nov. 1, 1985.
The following year Moreland - Talbott's mother's boyfriend - was convicted by a
3 judge panel and sentenced to death. After more than 3 decades of appeals in
the state and federal courts, Talbott was under the impression that Moreland
would no longer be able to delay his execution.
"I thought this is it, it's over. This is the end," she said after the last
appeal was rejected. "He will be executed. Justice will be done."
However, a 2003 Ohio law that allows for additional DNA testing of evidence in
death penalty cases gave Moreland another chance to disprove the prosecution's
case against him. Following a request by the Innocence Project, a legal clinic
at the University of Cincinnati Law School, the court granted permission to
have DNA evidence in Moreland's case retested.
Innocence Project Director Mark Godsey said the group is interested only in
seeing that justice is done. Since its inception in 2003, the group has
reviewed approximately 8,000 cases and taken only 30 of them to court, he said.
"DNA technology is always changing and getting more and more sensitive so there
are more and more things you can do," Godsey said. "The 1st round of testing in
this case that was done earlier came back in a way that was not helpful to Mr.
Moreland. It was indicative of guilt but it wasn't conclusively indicative. Our
position is when someone is claiming innocence and there is DNA testing that
you can do, you should do it, particularly when it is a death penalty case."
Ohio has executed 55 people since 1999, though just 2 since a moratorium was
put in place after a botched execution in January 2014. The executions were
resumed last July.
'My family is valuable'
Former Dayton Police Lieutenant Dan Baker, who was at the scene of the South
Ardmore Avenue murders in 1985, believes the investigation was sound.
"As far as I'm concerned our job was done properly at the time, with the
technology at the time, and professionally," he said. "However, our court
system allows for the appeal situation."
Baker still remembers walking into the Talbott house and seeing the bodies of
the victims. Some of them were shot while others - including small children -
were beaten to death, he said.
Baker has no doubt in his mind that Moreland was the killer. But, he said,
"They are going to take the technology of today and look back 30 years and say,
gee whiz, did somebody make a mistake?"
Talbott says her family feels as though the court system has forgotten the
agony they've been forced to endure.
"My family is valuable. They're human beings," she said. "They're worth
something and they (the courts) should act like it and do justice for them."
According to the Ohio Attorney General's Capital Case Annual Report, the court
initially granted retesting of evidence on July 10, 2014, including "spent,
misfired, and live .22 caliber shell casings as well as blood-stained sweat
pants." The order to transfer the evidence to a lab for testing came on Dec. 4,
2017.
An eyewitness recalls the crime
Montgomery County Prosecutor Matt Heck, who worked on the original case in 1986
as an assistant prosecutor, said the DNA testing of the evidence will find
nothing new.
"It's been handled by a lot of different people. It was handled at the trial. I
handled a lot of the shell casings. I handled a lot of the other evidence. I'm
sure my fingerprints are on some of it. I'm sure jurors' fingerprints are on
it, so it's been contaminated," Heck said.
Heck believes the conviction will stand.
"I don't think there's any question about it," said Heck, who has served as
Montgomery County prosecutor since 1992. "This individual was positively
identified by someone that knew him, someone who was there and someone injured,
almost killed at the hands of Samuel Moreland."
That eyewitness is Tia Talbott's son, Dayron, who was 11 years old at the time
of the shooting. He said he still remembers Moreland opening fire: "Standing in
the doorway with a rifle pointed at my grandma and her picking up a bottle and
him shooting at the same time she threw that bottle."
Heck said evidence in the case has been transferred to a lab, but the results
may not be known for several months. Could Moreland seek additional appeals?
Heck said he would oppose it.
"What I see in many other cases in general, is that so many times they file for
more testing and more testing and as long as a judge will keep ordering it I
can understand a defense lawyer is just going to do it. It takes the
prosecutor, which we do, to object and say there's no reason for this because
we've already done it. And for a judge to say, no, you have reached the end of
the line here because there is no reason to do it, legally, logically,
reasonably, nothing" Heck said.
More delays possible
Tia Talbott is hoping a final decision comes soon because she and her family
members still suffer from the trauma of the murders. When it happened, she was
at the grocery store, returning home to find an awful scene. She still wonders
on occasion if she could have stopped the shooting had she been home, though
she knows that if she had been there, the odds are she too would have been
killed.
Moreland has not commented on the case, despite repeated requests by this news
organization to interview him over the last decade. More recently the Ohio
Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections denied a request for an interview.
Spokesperson JoEllen Smith stated "Due to input received from the facility
regarding his medical or mental health state, DRC is going to deny this request
at this time."
Moreland remains on Ohio's death row at the Chillicothe Correctional
Institution. Given the more than 2-dozen inmates already in line to be
executed, with actual dates set, the earliest he could be scheduled is roughly
5 years from now, and that's if his appeals end soon.
Talbott knows more delays are possible.
"I went from saying this is gonna happen to praying that I outlive Samuel
Moreland, because I can't believe it," she said. "He murders our family and
gets 3 meals a day."
Massacre at 35 South Ardmore Ave.
The dead:
Glenna Green, 46. Tia Talbott's mother and the sometime girlfriend of Samuel
Moreland.
Lana Green, 23, Glenna's sister.
Datrin and Datwan Talbott, ages 6 and 7, sons of Tia Talbott.
Voilana Green, 6, Tia's niece.
The injured:
Glenna Talbott, 2, Tia's daughter.
Dayron Talbott, 11, her son.
Tia Green, 5, her niece.
Unharmed:
Danyuel Talbott, 4, Tia's son.
(source: Dayton Daily News)
MISSOURI:
The Supreme Court Will Review Case of a Man Whose Blood-Filled Tumors Could
Burst During Execution----The question facing them is not if he will be
executed but how.
On Monday, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Russell Bucklew, a
death row inmate in Missouri who was scheduled to die on March 20. Hours before
the execution was set to take place, the high court voted 5-4 to halt the
execution in order to review the case.
Bucklew, who was convicted for the kidnap, rape, and murder of his former boss
in 1997, is afflicted with cavernous hemangioma, a rare disease which causes
tumors to form in the person???s face, neck, head, and throat.
As I reported in March, Bucklew's lawyers argued that given his illness, his
execution could be a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel
and unusual punishment:
Prison staff intend to use pentobarbital, a sedative, to execute him, but this
could cause his tumors to burst. Cheryl Pilate, one of Bucklew's lawyers told
the Associated Press on Monday, he would likely experience "a gruesome
execution with choking and gagging on blood and the infliction of excruciating
pain."
This is the 2nd time that Bucklew's case has appeared before the Supreme Court,
but the only time it has been accepted for review. In May 2014, when Missouri
first attempted to execute him, Bucklew's lawyers appealed, arguing that given
his illness, he could not be humanely executed, and this cruel and unusual
punishment would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The Court granted a
stay in order to allow argument to work its way through the lower courts. As I
wrote: "In Glossip v. Gross, the US Supreme Court said that when the Eighth
Amendment is used to challenge a method of execution a 'reasonable alternative'
must be proposed by the inmate."
In the appeal, Bucklew's lawyers suggested that the state use nitrogen gas.
(The state of Oklahoma recently proposed it as an alternative to lethal
injection.) But according to court documents, Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of
surgery and anesthesiology at Emory University said that "substantial risk"
exists that Bucklew will "suffer from extreme or excruciating pain." Last June,
a federal judge ruled that because Bucklew could not actually show that death
by nitrogen would reduce the risk of suffering, his execution should proceed.
The final decision of whether Bucklew is responsible for proposing another
readily-available method of execution that will reduce the risk of suffering is
now up to the nation's highest court.
This is not the only capital punishment case in the Supreme Court this year.
Last October, the Justices heard arguments for Marion Wilson, a Georgia death
row inmate who argued that his trial counsel had been ineffective. The court
ruled in his favor earlier this month.
(source: Nathalie Baptiste, Mother Jones)
******************
Missouri execution halted over fears prisoner would face extreme
suffering----Supreme court intervenes in case of Russell Bucklew, who argues
tumor in his neck could rupture and bleed during lethal injection
The US supreme court has intervened to stop Missouri from executing a prisoner
with a rare medical condition on the grounds that he could have endured
prolonged suffering during the lethal injection process.
The nation's highest court on Monday agreed to review the case of Russell
Bucklew, 49, a convicted murderer who has a large tumor in his throat that is
susceptible, experts say, to rupturing and bleeding during the execution -
potentially causing him excruciating pain. The justices will consider his
predicament in the fall, holding out the prospect that he will not be executed
at least for another year.
This is the 2nd time that the nation's highest court has stepped in at the 11th
hour to halt Bucklew's judicial killing as he was virtually at death's door. In
2014 the court similarly ordered a stay of execution on the day he was
scheduled to be strapped to the gurney.
Shortly before his 2014 brush with death, Bucklew spoke to the Guardian from
his cell in death row. He expressed his fears that he would experience terrible
pain choking and gagging, and that his family members would have to go through
the horrific trauma of watching him suffer.
"My brothers and my friend are going to have to watch that. How much pain is
that going to put them through?" he said.
In a petition to the US supreme court last month, Bucklew's lawyers warned that
as a result of his unique medical condition, cavernous hemangioma, which he has
had since birth, he was likely to endure terrible suffering during the
execution process. "He will experience the sensation of suffering for several
minutes, a needlessly prolonged period," they wrote.
Experts called by the Bucklew legal team in previous stages of his case
testified that given the tumor in his throat he was at risk of severe choking
and suffocation during the lethal injection. "When Bucklew is supine, gravity
pulls the hemangioma tumor into his throat which causes his breathing to be
labored and the tumor to rupture and bleed."
Cheryl Pilate, Bucklew's lawyer, welcomed the decision of the supreme court to
review the case. "Based on Mr Bucklew's severe medical condition, we believe he
would be at substantial risk of extreme and needless suffering during execution
by lethal injection," she said.
There is no doubt surrounding Bucklew's guilt, or the terrible nature of his
crimes, for which he has accepted full responsibility. In 1996 he murdered
Michael Sanders, the new partner of his former girlfriend Stephanie Pruitt, and
then kidnapped Pruitt and raped her before being arrested after a high-speed
chase by police.
Bucklew's execution, had it gone ahead, would have been the 10th judicial
killing in the US this year, and the 1st for 2018 in Missouri. There have been
5 executions so far this year in Texas, 2 in Alabama and 1 each in Florida and
Georgia.
The death penalty has declined steadily since its 1999 peak at the height of
the moral panic over urban crime when 98 prisoners were put to death. In 2016
the annual figure fell to 20, rising slightly to 23 last year.
But that does not mean that the legal challenges of state killing has
disappeared. Some 2,817 prisoners remain on death row in America, scattered
among the 31 states that still adhere to the death penalty.
When they come to consider Bucklew's case later this year, the 9 justices will
be looking at whether his special medical condition gives him additional
safeguards against a potentially painful death. The current, rather macabre
state of the law in the US is that when prisoners protest against the method of
execution they are facing on grounds that it might cause them cruel and unusual
punishment they have to be able to suggest an alternative death procedure that
would be more humane.
In Bucklew's case, he has proposed that he be killed using lethal gas which he
says would cause fewer problems with his tumor. Missouri has the option of
death by gas in its protocols, but its gas chamber was demolished years ago;
the last time a prisoner was executed by gas in the state was in 1965.
(source: The Guardian)
UTAH:
Prison Officials Review 74 Cases After Death-Penalty Blunder
Utah prison officials say they've reviewed 74 court cases involving inmate
medical records after the department failed to produce documents in a
death-penalty case.
The probe came after Judge Wallace Lee called for an investigation into the
Department of Corrections' handing of the case of 36-year-old Steven Crutcher,
who had once faced capital punishment in the death of his cellmate.
Crutcher took a plea deal last month after Department of Corrections' failure
to produce 1,600 pages of medical records that his lawyers called key to his
defense.
State attorneys apologized to the judge and prison officials contacted lawyers
in the 74 active cases involving medical records to see if all documentation
had been produced.
Prison officials say all but about 12 of those cases have now been resolved.
(source: upr.org)
USA:
'Death by Instagram' tainted jury pool, lawyers say
A 4-day series examining the racketeering conspiracy case against the Seven
Mile Bloods gang tainted the jury pool, defense lawyers argued Monday.
The "Death by Instagram" series published by The Detroit News was prejudicial
and included so many details about a rare case involving the death penalty that
U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh should order separate trials for several
defendants facing lesser charges, defense lawyers argued.
The unsuccessful arguments were aired during a routine pretrial conference that
turned into an airing of grievances following publication of an in-depth series
about the east-side gang. The Seven Mile Bloods are blamed for terrorizing
neighbors, fueling the nation's opioid epidemic and assassinating rivals
targeted on Instagram hit lists.
The hearing Monday came more than a month after the 1st wave of trials against
4 members and associates of the gang ended with an acquittal and a hung jury
for 3 defendants. A 2nd wave of trials is scheduled for June 5 in federal
court.
"This is an absolute disaster. My client cannot go to trial ... in this
environment. The taint for the jury pool is unacceptable," said lawyer William
Swor, who represents defendant James "Wick" Robinson. '"Death by Instagram' is
not something jurors are likely to forget."
The Seven Mile Bloods participated in more than 14 shootings, at least 4
homicides, 11 attempted murders and drug crimes that eroded the quality of life
on the gang's home turf, known by locals as The Red Zone, according to the
government.
More than a dozen defendants are awaiting trial in the Seven Mile Bloods case.
The Justice Department, so far, has signaled it will pursue the death penalty
upon conviction of one accused leader of the gang, Billy Arnold. A decision
regarding 4 other men is pending.
Several defense lawyers pushed to have their clients tried separately from
those facing possible death sentences.
"These articles had an extremely prejudicial effect on him and his ability to
be tried at this time," said lawyer Henry Scharg, who represents defendant
Detroit resident Eugene "Fist" Fisher.
Fisher is charged with attempted murder and accused of storing an AR-15-style
weapon linked to 3 shootings and 2 homicides.
A decision on pursuing the death penalty against defendants Corey Bailey,
Keithon Porter, Robert Brown and Arlandis Shy is expected by May 10, Assistant
U.S. Attorney Christopher Graveline told the judge Monday.
The men, like Arnold, would stand trial separately if the government decides to
pursue the death penalty.
On Monday, Shy's lawyer Mark Magidson held aloft a copy of the "Death by
Instagram" series in court and complained that one article mentioned his
client's criminal record.
"It leads somebody to think he must be the worst person around," the lawyer
said.
The series, which outlined how the FBI and Detroit Police used social media
posts and crime-scene evidence in an attempt to topple the gang, gave the
government a "tactical advantage," Magidson said.
The series drew a wide following, lawyers said, citing encounters with people
who talked about the articles in church, at an area gym and downtown office
building.
"It resonated with people," Magidson said.
The judge questioned whether the series would impact the jury pool.
Steeh pointed to several high-profile, federal criminal trials in Detroit in
recent years, including the racketeering case against former Detroit Mayor
Kwame Kilpatrick and the terrorism trial of "Underwear Bomber" Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab.
The trials showed a jury can be empaneled despite extensive media coverage, the
judge said.
Prospective jurors in the Kilpatrick case were questioned extensively about
exposure to media reports about the former mayor's tenure and misdeeds.
More than 1/2 of the nearly 500 prospective jurors in the City Hall corruption
case were dismissed, most because they said they could not be fair to the
ex-mayor and his co-defendants.
Many prospective jurors wrote in jury questionnaires that they had a positive
opinion of the former mayor and believed he had been treated unfairly by the
media. And a "fair number" of jurors said they had heard nothing about the City
Hall corruption case, Kilpatrick';s trial judge, U.S. District Judge Nancy
Edmunds, said at the time.
In the Seven Mile Bloods case, Steeh said he would support an extensive jury
questionnaire to probe exposure to "Death by Instagram" and awareness of the
Seven Mile Bloods.
"With the number of defendants and the complexity of the case, it seems that if
you read (the series) 3 times, and carefully read it 3 times, after the passage
of days, you could not name a person or attribute specific behaviors," the
judge said.
Scharg partially agreed.
"Whoever reads it won't remember names or events but they will remember the
Seven Mile Bloods being bad, dangerous dudes," Scharg said.
Defense lawyers might be allowed to examine prospective jurors' social media
accounts to determine if any posted links to "Death by Instagram" or commented
about the series.
A questionnaire for prospective jurors also might be tweaked to ask additional
questions about knowledge of the case. And jurors might be isolated while being
asked additional questions about the case and media coverage.
(source: The Detroit News)
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