Oct. 18
TEXAS----new execution date
Execution date set for local man who killed 3 over failing marriage
8 days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected what could be his final appeal, a
Waco state district judge set an execution date Wednesday afternoon for a
Central Texas man who killed 3 members of his estranged wife's family in 1989.
Billy Wayne Coble, 70, initially refused to enter the courtroom for the
sentencing hearing Wednesday afternoon after his appellate attorney failed to
show up.
Waco lawyer Russ Hunt, Jr. was appointed to represent him in the hearing and
State District Judge Matt Johnson set a Feb. 28, 2019 execution date.
Coble was convicted in 1990 of killing his in-laws, Robert and Zelda Vicha, and
their son, Waco police Sgt. Bobby Vicha, at the family's Axtell home
After shooting the three, Coble kidnapped his estranged wife, Karen Vicha,
threatened to sexually assault and kill her, but was injured when he crashed
his vehicle during a police chase in Bosque County.
Coble has a list of appeals, the only 1 successful filed in 2007 with the U.S.
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that resulted in the dismissal of the death
sentence and an order for re-trial on punishment after the court's opinion
stated Coble’s jury faced 2 questions that were unconstitutional.
The punishment re-trial ended with the same result, a death sentence.
A retired police officer who worked on the Coble case and a current district
judge who back then was a prosecutor and who took Coble to trial on the capital
murder case for the 1st time were among a few dozen people who crowded into the
54th District Courtroom on Wednesday to watch the hearing.
After a few minutes the judge asked one of the bailiffs why Coble wasn't in the
courtroom and the bailiff said he was refusing to leave the holding cell.
Johnson sent a squad of bailiffs to retrieve Coble, but they reported he
refused to come to the courtroom, after which Johnson called the case, read the
preliminary documents concerning the appeals Coble has filed since his
conviction, and then set the date.
Truman Simons, a former police officer, sheriff's deputy and now a private
investigator, worked on the Coble case back in 1989.
"He killed his (father-in-law) 1st and wrapped him up in a rug," Simons said.
"Then he tied up the 2 kids and shot Bobby Vicha.
"Then he ...waited in the garage where he killed Zelda (Vicha) and kidnapped
(his estranged wife) Karen," Simons said.
Former McLennan County Assistant District Attorney J.R. Vicha, o1 of the 2
children Coble tied up that day, was only 11-years-old at the time his family
was murdered.
The boy, along with 2 of his cousins, were tied up inside the home while the
killings took place.
During the 2008 punishment re-trial trial, prosecuted by retired Assistant
District Attorney Crawford Long, Long told the jury that Coble "has a heart
filled with scorpions."
(source: KWTS news)
************************************
Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----37
Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----555
Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #
38---------Oct. 24----------------Kwame Rockwell--------556
39---------Nov. 7-----------------Emanuel Kemp, Jr.-------557
40---------Nov. 14----------------Robert Ramos------------558
41---------Dec. 4-----------------Joseph Garcia-------------559
42---------Dec. 11----------------Alvin Braziel, Jr.---------560
43---------Jan. 15----------------Blaine Milam--------------561
44---------Jan. 30----------------Robert Jennings-----------562
45---------Feb. 28----------------Billy Wayne Coble-------563
(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)
*************************************----impending execution
Kwame Rockwell Will Be the Next Disabled Person Executed by
America----America's courts still don't have clear protections for defendants
with severe mental illness.
Unless last-ditch appeals are successful, the next person to be executed in the
United States of America is going to be Kwame Rockwell. The Texas Department of
Criminal Justice has scheduled his execution for October 24th. The state had
planned to execute Rockwell along with another prisoner, Juan Segundo, but
Segundo's death was stayed by the Texas Court of Appeals. Together, the cases
epitomize deep problems with enforcement of the death penalty. Both prisoners
are people of color in a state where prosecutors overwhelmingly only seek the
death penalty against non-white offenders, and both are disabled. Segundo has
an intellectual disability, and last year the Supreme Court finally established
clarity around diagnostic standards required to exempt people with such
conditions. Rockwell has schizophrenia. His lawyers didn't bring it up at
trial, and appeals courts refused to consider his condition.
America still doesn't have clear protections for people with severe mental
illness. These 2 cases in Texas remind us of the unfortunate diagnostic
limitations that protect only some people with disabilities from the death
penalty. (Of course, it's also long past time to just abolish the death penalty
altogether.
Last year, Arkansas announced plans to kill 8 prisoners in a rush before their
lethal injection drugs could expire; the state actually executed 4. The 1st to
die was Ledell Lee, an African-American man with fetal alcohol syndrome. He
might have been innocent. After his death, I started to ask a simple question
of experts who provide and organize legal defense for condemned prisoners: How
many people on death row are disabled? The answer came back unanimously: pretty
much all of them. The news last spring wasn't all bad, though. About a week
before Lee's execution, the Supreme Court struck down the "Lennie Standard," by
which Texan judges could issue the death penalty as long as a convicted man's
mental capacity was higher than that of the fictional character Lennie in John
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. In Moore v. Texas, the court demanded instead that
states use the best available medical experts in assessing intellectual
disability. There's still plenty of room for bias in that medical model, but
it's better than using literary analysis to decide life and death.
As I reported those stories, it became clear to me that many legal experts
believe they can save lives through generating an exception for severe mental
illness, similar to the one that Moore v. Texas grants for intellectual
disability. The twin executions planned in Texas demonstrate precisely why
that's needed. Segundo was initially condemned under the Lennie Standard, but
now the Texas Court of Appeals has followed Moore by issuing a stay and sending
the case back to the lower courts to arrive at a more accurate assessment of
Segundo's disability. There's no guarantee that Segundo will be spared, but
he's safe for now.
Severe schizophrenia and similar conditions are a fairly common mitigating
factor in capital crimes, but there's no absolute standard requiring a court to
assess mental disabilities or to take them into account during sentencing. In
trial, Rockwell's lawyers didn't even raise the question of his mental
disabilities, a fact that his appeal lawyers used as evidence of "ineffective
counsel." The Texas Court of Appeals, though, turned down his appeal, and so
far the Supreme Court has declined to intervene. I don't know whether
Rockwell's schizophrenia should be a mitigating factor in assessing his
culpability, but neither does the state of Texas.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, was
one of the experts I consulted when working on disability and the death penalty
last year. At the time, he raised the hope that we might be close to forging a
mental-health exemption to capital punishment, but now he says that we're in
"pretty much the same place" as we were 15 months ago. Citing a 2014 poll, he
tells me that 2/3 of Americans don't believe that people with severe mental
illness should be executed, and notes that over a half-dozen different bills
creating an exemption were introduced in state legislatures last session, but
they all went nowhere. Meanwhile, courts also haven't ruled such executions
unconstitutional.
"This execution is in many respects typical of the cases that end up in
execution," Dunham says of the Rockwell case. "If the evidence of mental
illness had been properly presented at trial, he would never have been
sentenced to death."
The status quo is shifting: Just last week, the state of Washington abolished
the death penalty after a compelling statistical analysis demonstrated that
juries were 4 times more likely to condemn black defendants than white
defendants. Eventually, either wholesale abolition or at least expanded
exemptions will come to the remaining death penalty states, including Texas,
but likely not in time for Kwame Rockwell.
(source: psmag.com)
********************************
Death Watch: Rockwell Schizophrenic or Faker?----1 execution stayed, another
set for Oct. 24
The Court of Criminal Appeals has spared the life of Texas death row inmate
Juan Segundo - at least for now. Segundo, who faced execution on Oct. 10, was
granted a stay just days before in light of the Supreme Court's 2017 ruling in
Moore v. Texas. Like Bobby Moore, Segundo asserts that he is intellectually
disabled and, therefore, ineligible for execution. Further orders from the CCA
are still pending.
In the meantime, another inmate faces execution on Wednesday, Oct. 24. Kwame
Rockwell, a Fort Worth man, was convicted of killing two people during a
botched store robbery in 2010. Though the U.S. Supreme Court denied Rockwell's
last appeal for relief in Oct. 2017, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals approved
a request for Rockwell's previous lawyer to withdraw, and appointed David Dow
as substitute counsel on Oct. 2. That's often seen as a sign of impending
legislation, but few court filings have been made since and Dow did not respond
to requests for comment.
According to court records, the same day Dow was assigned to Rockwell's case,
an amended motion for leave to file for reasonably necessary funds "ex parte
and under seal" was received in a U.S. District Court. Two days later, the
state filed their response detailing Rockwell's request for funding to
"litigate a state competency-to-be-executed proceeding," which the state argued
is not "reasonably necessary." Rockwell alleges that he suffers from
schizophrenia, but the state argues that he's faking his illness, noting that
both his trial attorneys and "own mother" believe he's malingering. The state
also claims that Rockwell's request does not require ex parte confidentiality.
Fort Worth federal court Judge Reed C. O'Connor filed a sealed order the same
day that the state filed their response, but according to O'Connor's staff,
what's in that order is not a matter of public record.
What happens next in Rockwell's case remains a mystery - court records haven't
been updated since Oct. 4. Rockwell is expected to be the 11th inmate executed
this year. 3 more are scheduled for this year.
There had been 6 men slated for end-of-year executions, but a Tarrant County
trial court stayed the execution of Emanuel Kemp, scheduled for Nov. 7, to
conduct additional forensic testing. Kemp, who landed on death row in the late
Eighties, had since been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and was
eventually deemed too ill for execution. But according to the Houston
Chronicle, the D.A. unexpectedly requested the November date before approving
an order to halt Kemp's execution pending DNA testing.
(source: Austin Chronicle)
*************************
Attorney: Autism diagnosis could keep killer alive
Attorneys at a Wednesday hearing differed over whether convicted murderer Micah
Crofford Brown suffers from autism spectrum disorder and whether it would have
saved his life before a jury sentenced him to death 5 years ago.
Brown was convicted in May 2013 of capital murder and sentenced to death by
lethal injection for the 2011 shooting death of his ex-wife, Stella Michelle
"Doc" Ray, a Caddo Mills school teacher.
Testimony in the evidentiary hearing for Brown's latest appeal ended in late
July, and attorneys from both sides made their final arguments Wednesday
morning before 196th District Court Judge Andrew Bench.
"Micah Brown deserves a new trial," said defense attorney Natalie Corvington
with the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, which filed the appeal of
Brown's death sentence.
But the prosecution's attorney, Tina Miranda of the Texas Attorney General's
Office, countered that the trial attorneys may not have even considered
presenting the diagnosis to the jury as part of the defense strategy.
"It is equally probable they could have found that harmful," Miranda said.
At the close of the hearing Bench said he would review the arguments before
making a decision.
Testimony during the trial indicated Ray was shot and killed in Greenville on
the night of July 20, 2011, as the result of a dispute with Brown concerning
the couple's 2 children.
After the conviction and death sentence were upheld by the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals, a last-ditch appeal called a "post-conviction writ" was filed
in 2015 by the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, a state public defender
agency charged with representing convicts sentenced to death in appeals
proceedings.
The 124-page document listed multiple alleged problems with Brown’s conviction
and sentence, including "ineffective assistance" by the defense attorneys in
the trial and initial appeals hearings; "improper arguments" by prosecutors
during the punishment phase; and failure to present "evidence during the
punishment phase that Brown suffers from autism spectrum disorder."
The condition is a developmental disorder that affects communication and
behavior, which, Corvington argued, may have mitigated the jury’s decision to
issue the death penalty.
Corvington said the trial defense team failed to listen to a mitigation
specialist who suggested Brown may have the disorder. She told the court that
the disorder "could be responsible for how he appeared as remorseless and
unemotional during the commission of the murder, during police interviews and
interrogations and while testifying in his own defense during trial."
"None of this is justification, of course, but it is by its definition
mitigating," Corvington said, noting how the revelation of the condition
potentially could have convinced "just 1 juror" against returning with the
death penalty. "Autism explains all of it."
Miranda responded by noting that defense attorneys did present at trial other
information provided by mitigation specialists showing that Brown suffers from
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She said the disorder would have
accounted for many of the same symptoms.
"I don't know what else counsel could have done," Miranda countered, adding
that about 80 of Brown's family members and friends were interviewed by the
defense about the case - none of whom mentioned that Brown had or might have
autism.
"That's where the red flags [about potential autism disorder] should have come
from," she said.
Brown, who has been in custody at the Hunt County Detention Center since the
July hearing, was to be transferred back to the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice-Institutional Division following Bench's final ruling in the appeal.
An execution date has not yet been scheduled for Brown.
(source: Herald Banner)
PENNSYLVANIA:
City man on death row seeks new trial----Staton claims attorney failed to
present evidence
An Altoona man who was sentenced to death 12 years ago for the stabbing death
of his estranged girlfriend is seeking a new trial based on his attorney's
failure to present evidence of his alleged "diminished capacity" during his
attack on her.
Andre Staton, 55, is an inmate at the State Correctional Institution at Greene
County.
He was sentenced to death in May 2006 after being convicted of 1st-degree
murder for the killing of Beverly Yohn, 26, whom he attacked on Feb. 25, 2004,
after breaking through the back door of the home where the victim was staying
with her 3 children.
Staton stabbed Yohn 12 times and then fled to his native Baltimore where he was
arrested 3 days later.
An aggravating circumstance presented during the death penalty stage of his
case was that he was under a protection-from-abuse order at the time he stabbed
Yohn.
Since his conviction and death sentence, Staton, through multiple attorneys,
has repeatedly attempted to obtain a new trial.
His most recent try came Thursday when he filed a petition with the U.S.
District Court in Johnstown contending his attorney was ineffective for not
attempting to introduce evidence of diminished capacity during the guilt phase
of his case.
Staton contends his counsel failed to "investigate, develop and present expert
testimony in support of the defense theory that (his) history of depression and
fit of rage on the day in question, rendered him incapable of forming a
specific intent to commit 1st-degree murder."
Staton stated there were many factors in his life, including brain injury, that
"rendered him incapable of forming a specific intent on the day of the crime."
His attorney's failure to present such information until the penalty phase of
his trial, he contended, was unreasonable.
He explained that he had been interviewed by psychologists and a psychiatrist
who noted he had medical problems as a child and suffered throughout his life
from substance abuse of cocaine and PCP, also known as angel dust.
Staton also stated he had several psychiatric hospitalizations over the years.
He concluded in his petition that had there been expert medical testimony
presented during the guilt phase of the trial, "There is a reasonable
probability that the result of the trial would have been different."
Whether the motions in Staton's petition will ever be heard remains a question
because on Monday, U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti in Pittsburgh ruled
that she would not consider his new petition and instructed him to continue to
meet with his present court-appointed attorneys to prepare an acceptable
petition for a new trial.
Court records show that Staton remains at odds with his court-appointed
attorneys, John A. Schwab and Robert Perkins, both of Pittsburgh.
Staton was upset with Schwab for preparing a petition without consulting him,
federal court records show.
Conti met with Schwab, Perkins and Blair County Assistant District Attorney
Deanne Paul on Monday to discuss Staton's post-trial appeal at the federal
level.
She denied his motion for a new attorney "without prejudice," meaning he can
refile it if the differences with his present attorneys cannot be resolved.
The federal record shows that Staton has already had 6 attorneys appointed for
him.
He has a history of not getting along with his attorneys and in 2013 attacked
Ebensburg attorney Tim Burns following a hearing before Blair County President
Judge Elizabeth A. Doyle.
Burns suffered a severe concussion in the attack.
Staton argued in his petition presented to Conti that his diminished capacity
argument has never before been raised by his appeal attorneys.
(source: Altoona Mirror)
DELAWARE:
Delaware High Court Rejects Convicted Murderer's Appeal
The Delaware Supreme Court has ruled that a man serving life without parole for
the rape and murder of a 68-year-old woman has failed to offer any new evidence
to prove his innocence.
The Delaware State News reports that the court ruled against Ambrose Sykes's
motion for post-conviction relief.
Sykes, now in his 40s, was sentenced to death for the 2004 rape and
strangulation of retired teacher Virginia Trimnell. Delaware abolished its
death penalty in 2016, a decision that applied retroactively.
The court said Sykes' lawyer raised "speculative and implausible theories"
about how someone else could have been involved in the crime, and speculated
that Sykes had a consensual relationship with the elderly woman without so much
as a sworn statement from Sykes himself.
(source: Associated Press)
NORTH CAROLINA:
"Relic of Another Era": Most People on North Carolina's Death Row Would Not Be
Sentenced to Die Today
In the summer of 2001, North Carolina executed 42-year-old Ronald Wayne Frye,
convicted of stabbing and robbing his 70-year-old landlord in 1993. The crime
was brutal and there was no question of his guilt. Yet the circumstances of
Frye's trial and conviction would come to shock members of the public - and
even members of his own jury - as his execution approached. 2 jurors came
forward to say that they would not have sentenced Frye to death row had they
known then what they had since learned.
Like many who end up on death row, Frye lived a life marked by severe abuse and
trauma. This history was never investigated by his defense attorneys, despite
the fact that it would have made for powerful mitigating evidence. "A
background of neglect and abuse would have changed my decision and my vote,"
one juror told the Hickory Daily Record weeks before Frye's execution. Among
the evidence the jury never heard was that Frye's mother had given him and his
brother away to a pair of strangers she met at a gas station when Frye was a
young boy. The couple beat Frye and his brother with a bullwhip and forced the
boys to beat each other as well.
Frye was reluctant to share this history with his court-appointed lawyers. "I
didn't want my family involved," he told one reporter. "I felt like I had
shamed them enough already." A competent capital defense attorney would have
navigated this challenge to save a client's life. Instead, Frye was represented
by a man named Tom Portwood, a dentist-turned-attorney who had a severe
drinking problem. His alcoholism would force him to stop practicing just a few
years later. Portwood all but abandoned his client, later admitting that he did
no work on Frye's case outside the courtroom. Portwood's co-counsel did not
speak up until 2 weeks before Frye's scheduled execution, writing in a sworn
statement that he "chose to believe the best about my friend for as long as I
could."
North Carolina's legal community was moved to action by Frye's looming
execution. "For the 1st time in its 35-year history, the 4,000-member N.C.
Academy of Trial Lawyers asked for clemency for a death-row prisoner," the
Raleigh News and Observer reported in August 2001. If the governor allowed the
execution to go forward, the group's president said, "The right to counsel has
lost its meaning in this state." Nonetheless, on August 31, 2001, Frye died by
lethal injection.
Frye's execution came at a flashpoint for capital punishment across the
country. In the late 1990s, the American Bar Association had recommended a
national moratorium on the death penalty, citing unfair trials, racism, and
wrongful convictions as pervasive problems. In North Carolina, activists,
lawyers, and lawmakers took up the cause; in 2000, a legislative commission
recommended a moratorium on executions in the state. A few months before Frye's
execution, a major study examining data from 1993 through 1997 found new
evidence of racism in North Carolina’s death penalty system.
It was in this same era that the North Carolina legislature passed the 1st in a
series of hard-fought reforms to the state's death penalty system. Among them
was the establishment of Indigent Defense Services, a state office that
coordinates the representation of people facing the death penalty. Opened in
July 2001, it imposed standards to ensure that cases were assigned to competent
lawyers who received decent compensation - too late for defendants like Frye,
but to the benefit of scores of defendants in the years to come.
The majority of people on death row were tried in a system that was effectively
rigged against them.
The overhaul of indigent defense was a game-changer in North Carolina. But it
was its combined effect with other systemwide reforms that would transform the
landscape of capital cases in the state. This evolution is at the heart of a
new report by the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Titled
"Unequal Justice: How obsolete laws and unfair trials created North Carolina's
outsized death row," it reveals how the majority of people on death row were
tried in a system that was effectively rigged against them. Of the 141 men and
women facing execution in North Carolina, more than 100 - 73 % - were sentenced
before the creation of the indigent defense office. The majority were also
convicted prior to laws that prohibit the execution of people with mental
disabilities; impose protections against wrongful convictions; and require
prosecutors to share evidence against defendants before trial.
The CDPL report shows how the implementation of such reforms has led to a
precipitous drop in death sentences. "The death penalty is all but extinct in
North Carolina," the authors write. "Juries have recommended only a single new
death sentence in the past 4 years. Capital trials have become rare. The state
hasn't carried out an execution since 2006." Although North Carolina's death
row is still among the largest in the country, it "is a relic of another era."
In Catawba County, where Portwood once practiced, no one has been sentenced to
death for 20 years. Yet his legacy lives on. In 2012, the state settled a
federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Glen Edward Chapman, sentenced to die
in 1994 for a double murder he insisted he did not commit. Represented by
Portwood, Chapman spent years on death row before a Superior Court judge
overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial. He was exonerated in 2008.
Another one of Portwood's former clients, Nathan Bowie, remains on death row.
Bowie was 20 years old when he was tried alongside his uncle for a double
murder in 1993. Today he is 47.
Bowie is one of a handful of condemned men profiled in detail in the report,
which describes his case as "emblematic of capital defense at the time."
Portwood was appointed to represent him despite his well-known drinking problem
and assisted by a lawyer with no experience in capital defense. Bowie remembers
Portwood showing up to one of their 1st meetings smelling like alcohol. In the
time he represented Bowie, the report notes, Portwood was involved in a car
crash and found to have a blood alcohol level sufficient to kill him.
A video on the case of Nathan Bowie featured in the CDPL report.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Portwood and his co-counsel did little investigation
into Bowie's background. As a child, Bowie had experienced poverty, abuse, and
bouts of homelessness; he was removed from his home when he was 12 and placed
in the custody of the Department of Social Services. At 13, he was sent to
Sipe's Orchard Home, a facility for troubled youths, where he stayed until he
was 19. Portwood did not review the records or interview staff from the
facility. If he had, he would have discovered evidence of sexual abuse that
occurred at Sipe's, where Bowie kept a stick in his possession that he called
his "protector."
Portwood's failures were compounded by the conduct of the prosecutor in Bowie's
case, Jason Parker. "His office had prosecuted a Sipe's staffer for molesting
boys there," the report reveals, yet Parker cast the facility as a wholesome
environment before the jury. Arguing for the death penalty, he also emphasized
that no one from the facility had appeared at trial on Bowie's behalf. Yet
Parker had actually received a letter from the head of the facility offering to
testify on Bowie's behalf, which he never disclosed to defense.
Parker is now retired. In total, he sent seven people to death row, including
Frye and Chapman, the two other people represented by Portwood. Parker said he
never saw evidence that Portwood was drunk on the job in the years he tried
cases against him. "Everybody knew he would take a drink here and there,"
Parker said, "but as far as coming to court drunk, alcohol on his breath, never
saw it." Parker's personal feelings about the death penalty have not changed,
he said. "In certain horrific cases, the death penalty is highly justified."
Nevertheless, he says he would no longer seek death sentences if he were still
working as a prosecutor today. "My reason is simple," he said. "In reality the
death penalty does not exist in North Carolina."
Parker explained that of all people he sent to death row, only 1 - Frye - has
been executed. 1 man killed himself. Another 2 died of natural causes. The
remaining men - Bowie and his uncle - "have outlived the son of my co-counsel
who was born during their trial" and died in a car accident at 24. "My position
would be: Why waste my time?"
"Zombie Cases
More than 40 years since the start of the so-called modern death penalty era in
the United States, it has become widely understood that most people sentenced
to death are more likely to die awaiting execution than on the gurney. In
California, home to the country's biggest death row population, the last
execution was carried out in 2006; only 13 people have been executed since the
1970s. Those who do live to see the death chamber have often spent decades on
death row.
The result is what Stephen Bright, founder of the Southern Center for Human
Rights, has described as "this very strange situation now, in which these
people sentenced to death a long time ago" are coming up for execution in cases
that would be highly unlikely to lead to a death sentence today. Bright called
them "zombie cases" - convictions that "remind us of just how unfair" the
system used to be.
In Georgia, Kenneth Fults was executed in 2016 despite revelations that one of
his jurors harbored racist animus against him, telling an investigator, "Once
he pled guilty, I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that's what
that nigger deserved." Veteran death penalty lawyer Thomas Maher, who heads
Indigent Defense Services, has written about this disconnect in North Carolina.
"The question, then, that policymakers and courts should confront is this:
Should we execute scores of inmates for crimes that would not warrant the death
penalty if they were tried today?"
Gretchen Engel, director of CDPL, explains that the report was published to
"ignite a conversation" about this question. "It speaks to a need for there to
be some kind of mechanism that will account for our evolving standard of
decency," she said. Given that most of North Carolina's death row population
would likely not be sentenced to die today, "it's very hard to justify how we
can execute them now."
Engel joined CDPL soon after graduating law school in 1992. "I think when I
arrived there were maybe 75 people on the row" in North Carolina, she said. But
the 1990s became "just a very bloody, frenzied time.' By the end of the decade,
there were more than 175 people on death row.
Part of what drove the surge in capital prosecutions were overzealous
prosecutors like Ken Honeycutt, who "celebrated new death sentences by handing
out noose lapel pins to his assistant DAs," as the CDPL report notes.
Particularly notorious was Joe Freeman Britt in Robeson County, who attracted
national media attention and even a listing in the Guinness World Records as
the "world's deadliest DA." Britt sent some 38 people to death row over his
14-year tenure. Among them were 2 teenagers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who
were famously exonerated of murder and rape in 2014.
The impact of overzealous prosecutors has been well-documented where capital
punishment is concerned. But in North Carolina, the phenomenon was compounded
by a perverse, lesser-known feature of the state's death penalty system. One of
the more startling areas of the CDPL report is a section that explains how
prosecutors were essentially coerced into seeking death sentences as often as
possible. "In the 1990s, N.C. was the only state that required prosecutors to
seek the death penalty for every aggravated 1st-degree murder," the report
explains, "regardless of other factors that called for mercy."
Rooted in years of rulings by the state Supreme Court, the sentencing scheme
was originally intended to ensure uniformity in the application of the death
penalty. But in practice, it curtailed prosecutorial discretion to an absurd
degree. Prosecutors were forbidden from arranging plea deals in which a
defendant could plead guilty to 1st-degree murder in exchange for a life
sentence. Instead, their only alternative was to reduce a charge to 2nd-degree
murder.
In 1993, the year Bowie was tried, 33 people were sent to death row in the
state.
Parker began handling capital cases in Catawba County in 1990. He recalls
seeking the death penalty in numerous cases that he would not have tried
capitally had they come later in his career. In the case of Nathan Bowie,
Parker actually offered a plea deal for 2nd-degree murder. "That wasn't the
world's greatest case," he explains. The witnesses were unreliable - the kinds
of people who say one thing in a meeting, then "go out on the stands and they
say something entirely different." But Bowie and his uncle rejected the deal.
"So I didn't have any choice but to try them for the death penalty. Once they
turn down that 2nd degree, it was on."
Alex Charns, Bowie's current attorney, counters that in fact, Parker did have a
choice in Bowie's case. "It could have been tried as 2nd degree," he says,
adding that most prosecutors would not be inclined to do that. Bowie's fate
speaks to the utter neglect of Portwood in representing his client at every
stage of his case, Charns says. But it is also illustrative of a phenomenon
known as a "trial penalty," in which prosecutors come down especially hard on
defendants who refuse their plea offers. The notion that a crime could merit a
charge of 2nd-degree murder in 1 minute and a death sentence the next is also
emblematic of the arbitrariness so often described by critics of capital
punishment.
The lack of prosecutorial discretion in 1st-degree murder cases was "perhaps
the biggest driver of a decade of excessive death sentences" in the state, the
CDPL report says. It "propelled North Carolina to one of the highest death
sentencing rates in the nation." In 1993, the year Bowie was tried, 33 people
were sent to death row in the state.
In 2001, the North Carolina legislature finally passed a law to address the
problem of prosecutorial discretion. "Some DAs were having to try capital cases
that they really didn't want to try," remembers Rep. Phil Baddour, a Democrat
from Wayne County who sponsored the bill. "It went through without a lot of
opposition."
To Engel, it made sense that prosecutors would not oppose the new law. "It
increased their power and so they didn't fight it. I think that's why it was
really probably the least controversial of the reforms." What she and her
colleagues did not necessarily expect was just how dramatic a change would
follow. Death penalty prosecutions "plummeted," from an average of 50 per year
in the 1990s to roughly 16 capital trials per year in the decade following the
2001 law.
The drop was no doubt due to prosecutors like Parker, for whom the death
penalty became an easy way to force a defendant to plead guilty in exchange for
life. "Most of the cases I tried for the death penalty after the law changed
were those who rejected the plea offer taking the death penalty off the table."
Still, defendants were inclined to take the deal, he said. "Once you prove that
you could put somebody on death row, it was a heck of a tool."
A Legacy of Racial Violence
"I think if you polled district attorneys, they would all say, 'Oh yes, the
death penalty is very necessary,'" Engel says. But their actions betray the
truth. Prosecutors are seeking fewer death sentences and are more willing to
accept a plea to a life sentence, she points out. Indeed, as Parker recalls,
after the law changed, "I made that offer available in the great majority of
1st-degree murder cases."
Engel sees something similar among the general public, which seems to favor the
death penalty more in theory than reality. "I think while public support for
the death penalty in North Carolina has fallen just like it has nationally,
you'd still have a fairly large number of people who would say, 'Yes, of
course, we should execute the worst of the worst.'" Yet "jurors are not
returning death sentences, even in really horrendous cases."
Nevertheless, the stubborn devotion to North Carolina’s death penalty has been
on dramatic display for much of the past decade, in the ugly battle over the
state's Racial Justice Act. Passed in 2009, the groundbreaking law provided a
way for condemned people to fight their sentences if they could prove that
racism played a role in jury selection at their trials.
4 people on death row succeeded in getting their sentences commuted to life
without parole before the Republican-led legislature repealed the RJA in 2013.
2 years later, the North Carolina Supreme Court vacated the judge's rulings,
sending the 4 defendants back to death row. It was up to Engel and her office
to share the wrenching news. By then, a couple of them had gone to medium
custody, she recalls. One, Christina Walters, had completed her GED. "The
impact on the families of those clients - to think your [child] is spared from
execution and then 3 years later, oh no, you're back on death row - it was
devastating."
Nathan Bowie was among those who sought relief under the RJA before its repeal.
In a 2012 filing, Charns, his lawyer, details the history of racial violence in
Catawba County and the surrounding area. In 1919, the filing noted, a black man
named Tom Gwyn died in the electric chair for raping a white girl despite the
efforts of a mob that tried to lynch him first. He was still awaiting trial
when a local newspaper declared the guilt of the "brute" with "beast-like
hands."
An all-white jury convicted him in 10 minutes.
Racism permeated the prosecution of black men in rape cases into the 1970s,
Charns points out. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group called North
Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence tracked racial intimidation
by the Ku Klux Klan in Catawba County. By the time Bowie went to trial before
an almost all-white jury in 1993, the county had a black population of less
than 9 %. Parker, who is black himself, appealed to the racist fears and biases
of the jury in court. Although there was no evidence that the crimes had
anything to do with gang rivalry, Parker attributed the murders to a gang war,
invoking Philadelphia, where Bowie came from, and contrasting it with the town
of Hickory - "your community."
Parker demurred when asked about evidence of racism in North Carolina's death
penalty system. And he was dismissive of Bowie's RJA motion. "All I can say is
... you had a black guy trying 2 black guys for killing 2 black people," he
said. "So if that's injustice, fine. You know? I don't see it."
The evidence of systemic racism contained in Bowie's RJA filing - and the
aggressive denial that such a thing exists - underscores the broader thesis
underlying the CDPL report. It's not just that North Carolina's death sentences
are a relic dating back to the bad laws of the 1990s. Its death penalty system
is inextricable from a history of racial violence rooted in slavery and
reconstruction. As in the rest of the South, the same kind of fearmongering
propaganda once used to defend lynchings would support state-sanctioned
executions, particularly as punishment for rape against white women. The
bloodlust extended all across the state; in 1922, 16-year-old McIver Burnett -
"convicted in 3 minutes and 30 seconds," according to the Daily Free Press -
was executed for rape in Raleigh amid a crowd of spectators holding tickets to
the execution, a mob dominated by "youths wearing the red caps that distinguish
State College freshmen," according to the News and Observer.
Evidence of enduring racism in capital cases helped pave the way for the
landmark 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia. The plurality decision
held that the death penalty was arbitrarily and thus unfairly imposed. Some
death penalty states responded to Furman by crafting new statutes that would
provide for bifurcated trials with a penalty phase to weigh aggravating and
mitigating evidence - the system widely in place today. But others decided that
the solution was to make the death penalty mandatory for crimes like murder and
rape. The first to do so was North Carolina.
One of the 1st people to face North Carolina's mandatory death penalty was a
black woman named Joan Little. The 20-year-old had been charged with 1st-degree
murder after stabbing a white guard to death with an ice pick while being held
at the Beaufort County Jail in 1974. She said she had killed the man to stop
him from raping her - his body was found naked from the waist down in her cell,
with seminal fluid on his leg. Nevertheless, Little faced a mandatory death
sentence if she was convicted.
As Little's trial approached, the case became a cause celebre - a symbol of the
South's deep-rooted racism and the largely unspoken sexual abuse of black women
by white men dating back generations. In 1975, amid demonstrations, a jury
acquitted Little. The next year, in Woodson v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme
Court struck down the state’s mandatory sentencing scheme.
For Jennie Lancaster, 1 of the jurors in the case, the Little trial would
indelibly shape her perspective on the criminal justice system. As a
25-year-old counselor at a juvenile prison facility in Raleigh, "I had this
almost idealistic view of what you could accomplish" within prisons, she
recalls. After the Little trial, she went on to become warden of the state's
women's prison and eventually the Central Region director in the North Carolina
Division of Prisons, where she supervised 12 facilities, including the prison
in Raleigh that houses death row.
"Racism and sexism. That was prevalent in the whole judicial process within
deep eastern North Carolina."
Among Lancaster's early responsibilities was presiding over the 1984 execution
of Velma Barfield, a white woman convicted and sentenced to die for poisoning 4
people. As her execution date approached, the case of the "death row granny"
became a media circus and political lightning rod; the state set the execution
date just days before a major election for Senate. Democratic North Carolina
Gov. James Hunt faced incumbent Sen. Jesse Helms. Hunt, who would go on to
lose, denied Barfield’s pleas for clemency.
"I got to know Velma," Lancaster says. "I got to know her family. I got to know
what a positive influence she was" at the prison. She also saw the additional
ways in which women behind bars were abused and dehumanized. Lancaster recalls
having to fight with prison administrators to allow Barfield to wear a bra
during her execution. "She was a big-breasted woman and she asked me, 'Miss
Lancaster, if I've got to go through this, I would like to have the dignity of
wearing a bra.'"
The Barfield execution would eclipse the Little case in North Carolina's death
penalty history. But it was the latter that opened Lancaster's eyes. "The
system was on trial," she said. "And our role in the criminal justice system
was really on trial." While she was proud at the outcome, the case was only her
1st look at the rampant abuse within prisons. "It ingrained a stronger sense of
responsibility within me, about how we should be caretakers. And how we should
not allow, if we're in a supervisory role, the taking advantage of offenders
who are under our care."
"And also, the amount of racism," Lancaster added. "Racism and sexism. That was
prevalent in the whole judicial process within deep eastern North Carolina."
Today Lancaster is an outspoken critic of the death penalty - and especially of
its impact on prison staff. "There's no training for it," she says about the
psychological and emotional effects of executions. For the public, "executions
are out of sight, out of mind," Lancaster says. People don't want to deal with
it - "they just want it to be over with." But people who work in the system
"can't go home and talk about it. We can't talk about it anywhere. We can't
really even talk about it at the prison." Over the course of her career,
Lancaster attended 24 executions.
Parker, the former prosecutor, did not attend the execution of Ronald Frye in
2001. "I gave my ticket to the arresting officer," he said. Parker said he had
developed a certain level of affection for Frye by then. "I thought he has
what's coming to him, but I wasn't gonna go watch him die."
I asked Parker if he would feel satisfied if Nathan Bowie were to be executed
today, 25 years after he was convicted. Would he consider it justice? Parker
paused. "I really haven't given it much thought," he said, adding, "I did my
job." He doesn't miss it. He's happily retired, playing golf a few times a
week, he told me. "I don't think about it much anymore. I leave it alone."
(source: theintercept.com)
**********************
Suspect in fatal shooting of NC state trooper identified
Prosecutors have identified the man accused of fatally shooting a North
Carolina State Highway Patrol trooper during a traffic stop in Columbus County
early Wednesday morning.
According to officials, Raheem Davis, 20, of Chadbourn has been charged with
1st-degree murder in the shooting death of Trooper Kevin Conner.
First Sgt. Michael Baker with the State Highway Patrol said Conner was shot at
approximately 12:15 a.m. while conducting a traffic stop for a speeding
violation on U.S. 701 near Sellers Town Road in Columbus County. As Conner
approached the vehicle, the suspect fired several shots, striking the trooper.
Conner died after being taken to a local hospital.
"At that time, the driver fled the scene and drove into Fair Bluff," Baker said
in a media briefing. "The Fair Bluff Police Department attempted to stop the
vehicle and a chase ensued. The driver of that white GMC became disabled on the
railroad tracks in Fair Bluff off of Rogers Street. A foot pursuit ensued and
he was apprehended by authorities after an extensive search."
Davis made his 1st appearance in a Columbus County courtroom Wednesday
afternoon, flanked by 9 officers, some wearing bulletproof vests.
During the appearance, Davis was brief while answering questions from the
judge, limiting his answers to "yes" and "yes, sir."
The judge ordered that Davis be held under no bond. He faces the possibility of
the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
Following the court appearance, District Attorney Jon David said "this was
cold-blooded, 1st-degree murder" and that Trooper Conner, just 15 hours prior,
was "patrolling the streets of Columbus County, but now he's dead."
Conner's funeral services are scheduled for Sunday with visitation at South
Columbus High School from 1-4 p.m. The funeral is scheduled after visitation.
David said Davis was driving a stolen pickup truck and speeding in the opposite
direction on U.S. 701 prior to being pulled over by Conner in front of a nearby
convenience store. David said the deadly shooting was caught on dashcam video
and by the store's surveillance system.
According to David, Conner was "blissfully unaware" as he walked up to the
truck and asked Davis why he was speeding, at which point Davis allegedly
started firing a gun without saying anything. Conner was struck twice.
Hilton Cox lives just down the road from where the shooting occurred and was
outside his home smoking a cigarette when he heard 4 or 5 gunshots ring out.
"When I heard the gunshots, I heard tires squeal and saw the cop car still
sitting there with blue lights going," Cox said. "I told my wife something
didn't seem right." Cox said he jumped in his vehicle and drove down to
Conner's patrol car where he found the trooper lying on the highway in front of
the car.
"I immediately called 911 and started talking to him, checking his vitals. He
had a pulse. He was breathing and he still had a heartbeat and was gasping for
air," Cox explained. "I held onto him until the EMTs showed up."
Other troopers responded to the scene and watched the dashcam video to identify
Davis, who they found minutes later in the same truck in Fair Bluff.
After Davis' truck stalled on some railroad tracks on Rogers Street, he fled on
foot and was later found hiding in a wooded area behind the tracks.
David said the gun used in the shooting has not been found yet.
David and Columbus County Sheriff Lewis Hatcher have requested the SBI
investigate the incident.
According to online records, Davis was out on probation after serving about 3
months in prison after he was convicted last year of firing gunshots into a
couple's SUV as they were driving through Chadbourn on their way to Myrtle
Beach, SC in 2015.
Conner was an 11-year veteran of the N.C. State Highway Patrol and was assigned
to Troop B out of Columbus County.
(source: WECT news)
SOUTH CAROLINA:
Twice-convicted cop killer seeks new trial
Luzenski Cottrell, a twice-convicted death row inmate, is asking for
post-conviction relief.
Cottrell fatally shot Myrtle Beach police officer Joe McGarry in 2002.
He was sentenced to death in April 2005.
3 years later, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the conviction
because the jury was not allowed to consider a lesser charge of voluntary
manslaughter.
Cottrell was found guilty again in a retrial in 2014, and was again sentenced
to death.
According to documents filed October 12, 2018, Cottrell is seeking
post-conviction relief.
"Mr. Cottrell's right to effective assistance of counsel... was violated when
his trial attorneys failed to exercise peremptory strikes to remove 2 jurors
whose views, expressed during voir dire, prevented or substantially impaired
their ability to consider constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence," the
documents state.
During voir dire, two jurors stated "unequivocally that they would not regard
evidence of a defendant's 'background characteristics' as 'relevant' in
selecting an appropriate penalty for murder... Defense counsel rightly
recognized these statements as conclusive indicators that each juror lacked the
capacity to perceive and give effect to mitigating evidence mandated by the
Eighth Amendment, and objected to the jurors' qualification on the ground that
each was 'mitigation impaired...' However, once the trial court overruled their
objections... trial counsel deficiently failed to exercise peremptory strikes
necessary to ensure the unqualified jurors would not be seated on the jury."
"As a result, both unqualified jurors were seated, and both participated in the
guilt-or-innocence and penalty determinations," the document continues.
"Because of their self-professed unwillingness to consider a broad range of
constitutionally relevant mitigating evidence, it is at least reasonably
probable that one or both jurors adversely affected the outcome of the penalty
phase deliberations, and that, absent their participation, the result of those
deliberations would have been different."
The filing seeks a new trial-- or at the very least, a new sentencing hearing.
Cottrell is already serving a life sentence in an unrelated murder case, but is
also serving 3 10-year sentences for grand larceny, resisting arrest and
assault with intent to kill related to the McGarry case.
Authorities say McGarry confronted Cottrell outside a Dunkin' Donuts, and the
officer pinned Cottrell against a car as he questioned him. The 2 struggled and
investigators say Cottrell shot the officer in the face.
Cottrell admitted to the killing.
For McGarry's parents, justice for their son means the ultimate price. "He
(Cottrell) needs to the ultimate punishment," said Anita McGarry, Joe's mother.
"He's a murderer. He's a gangster. You have to pay the price for what you do."
(source: WPDE news)
ALABAMA:
Shannon Gargis capital murder trial underway in Franklin County
More than 2 years after the death of a Franklin County toddler, the man accused
is standing trial.
Shannon Dale Gargis is charged with capital murder for intentionally causing
the girl's death.
Over the last 3 days, a jury pool of 500 people were questioned repeatedly by
prosecutors and defense attorneys. Wednesday afternoon, 12 jurors and 2
alternates started hearing the case.
The details of how 22-month old Serenity Renfroe died are haunting. A state
forensics autopsy performed shortly after her death indicated Serenity died
from blunt force trauma to the head.
During a preliminary hearing after Shannon Gargis's arrest, an investigator
with the Franklin County Sheriff's Office took the stand. He stated under oath,
Gargis admitted to becoming "overly aggressive" after the baby spilled cereal
on the floor. The investigator added Gargis said he picked the toddler up by
the throat and threw her across the room onto a loveseat, hitting her head.
Prosecutors opened their statement by saying this was one of the most serious
cases in Franklin County history. District Attorney Joey Rushing took jurors
step-by-step through the investigation and how they believe Gargis killed
serenity.
Autopsy results showed she had over 100 bruises on her body - which showed
signs of abuse.
Defense attorneys claim the death of Serenity came at the hands of her mother
Halie Renfroe. According to investigators, Renfroe was at work until 2:30 that
morning and returned home to find Serenity dead and laying at the feet of
Gargis who was asleep.
In 2017, Halie Renfroe pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution after it was
determined she was not involved in the death. She is expected to testify for
the prosecution during the trail.
Courthouse officials expect the trail to last at least 2 weeks. If convicted,
Gargis could face the death penalty.
(source: WHNT news)
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