December 10
TEXAS:
Lethal injections are poison, not medicine
Texas’ preferred method for executing criminals is lethal injection with
pentobarbital. The whole process has the look and feel of a medical procedure.
There are protocols, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and people in white
coats. But don’t be fooled: This is not the practice of medicine.
This facade of professionalism is no accident. It becomes easier to execute
people when the public regards lethal injection as a serious and sober activity
— subject to the same safety oversight as a procedure at a doctor’s office.
This is little more than an illusion. Any attempt to cite medical or
pharmaceutical regulatory oversight in any aspect of lethal injection,
including drug manufacturing, is a forgery of the truth. No pharmaceutical has
“lethal injection” as a Food and Drug Administration-labeled indication. There
is no medically approved way to execute someone. The result is a market of
questionable sources for chemicals involved in lethal injections.
According to a recent piece by Buzzfeed News, a Houston-based pharmacy called
Greenpark Compounding may be the source of pentobarbital used in Texas lethal
injection executions. The shocking story reveals that Greenpark Compounding has
been the subject of a number of complaints as a result of improper drug
manufacturing.
They’re not the only ones. Compounding pharmacies have been in the spotlight
before for bad manufacturing, most notoriously in the case of New England
Compounding Center, (NECC). In 2012, NECC manufactured an injectable steroid
that was later shown to be contaminated. This compounded steroid was used
widely to treat patients and, as a direct result, 64 people died.
In Texas, pentobarbital is intended to be used as poison, not as medicine.
Asking whether it is being prepared properly is a question better answered by
the evil queen in Snow White — she of poisoned apple fame — than an authority
tasked with regulating pharmacies. Greenpark Compounding may have substandard
practices with respect to some of its medical pharmaceuticals, but as a maker
of poison for execution, its record of success is unblemished. Yes, the inmates
all die.
However, in several lethal injection executions in Texas, inmates have also
been heard to declare a feeling of burning as they succumb. The Eighth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously prohibits cruelty in the
setting of punishment. Previous courts claimed there is such a thing as the
normal pain of dying, and that lethal injection does not need to be 100 percent
pain free to be a constitutionally valid form of punishment. That’s what the
judges say. Doctors, however, have a different opinion.There is no such notion
of the “normal pain” of dying in the medical field. Doctors seek to relieve all
pain associated with death. Anything less than this is a treatment failure.
Pentobarbital is a drug known to be caustic. Texas injects a large quantity of
this chemical into individuals to kill them. Whether it is properly assembled
or improperly tainted, this chemical will likely burn upon injection.
This burning is not trivial. It occurs on the inside of the body as well as
within the vein that first encounters the pentobarbital. Those watching an
execution might think they’re seeing someone be killed by a chemical that
induces sleep and leaves the body in pristine condition. Evidence under the
skin tells a markedly different story. Autopsies of executed inmates show
internal organ damage unseen by witnesses. This isn’t because pentobarbital was
wrongly prepared. To the contrary, this is exactly how the chemical is supposed
to work. Questions about Greenpark Pharmaceuticals’ manufacturing standards
miss the point. To criticize them for failing regulatory marks is like
critiquing a firing squad because its bullets weren’t properly polished.
Capital punishment is a kind of killing, whether by pharmacy or firing squad,
and any attempt to obscure this simple fact sets the debate backwards. How we
regard the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment requires us to own the
fact of killing, no matter the method.
(source: Opinion; Joel Zivot, M.D., is an associate professor of anesthesiology
and surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine----Houston Chronicle)
VIRGINIA/USA:
Jury to begin sentencing phase for James Fields Jr.
The same jury that convicted a man of 1st-degree murder for driving his car
into counterprotesters at a 2017 white nationalist rally will now decide his
punishment.
The jury in the trial of James Alex Fields Jr. will reconvene Monday to hear
additional evidence and come up with a sentencing recommendation for Judge
Richard Moore on murder and other charges.
Fields, who is from the Toledo area, was convicted Friday in the death of
Heather Heyer during the "Unite the Right" rally organized to protest the
planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Fields also injured dozens when he drove into a crowd of people who showed up
to protest against the white nationalists.
Fields is also facing federal hate crime charges. If he is convicted in that
case, he could face the death penalty.
(source: Associated Press)
OHIO:
Lawmakers OK bill creating database of violent offenders
Ohio lawmakers have approved creation of a statewide database of violent
offenders under legislation named for a college student who disappeared while
bicycling and was found slain.
The bill named for Sierah Joughin and known as "Sierah's Law" was approved this
week. It will take effect if it's signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich (.
The database of people convicted of violent crimes would be for law enforcement
use. Offenders would have to register when they're released from prison.
The man convicted of kidnapping and aggravated murder in Joughin's 2016 death
in Fulton county had been convicted decades earlier of abducting another woman
riding a bicycle. James Worley has been sentenced to the death penalty in
Joughin's slaying.
The bill passed the Senate Thursday by a 24-3 vote.
(source: Associated Press)
INDIANA:
We don't need the death penalty
We don't need to kill people in order to get justice.
One solid piece of advice for anyone voyaging through the internet is to avoid
the comments section of web posts. Occasionally you might find something witty,
rarely you'll find something insightful.
For me, though, taking a look at the feedback to stories we post on our website
or our social media accounts is part of the job. Admittedly, sometimes it does
help identify questions or follow up stories for us to work on.
But the comments that typically drop below crime stories we write aren't the
greatest.
The definition of "justice" on social media often looks more akin to a Deep
South lynch mob than our modern day court system. That's not an exaggeration.
One comment recently literally was, and I quote, "Hang him in the public
square."
On a story about a man pleading guilty to a charge of murder, there was also a
sentiment that "he got off easy!" Maybe it's just me, but doing 45-65 years in
an Indiana prison isn't "getting off easy."
I mean, this week I am spending all day for 5 days in a Noble County courtroom
for a jury trial in a murder case. There's going to be a lot of effort this
week to litigate that case, meanwhile the other guy just straight up pleads to
murder and that's not good enough? That's a murder conviction handed out on a
platter!
There's a misguided idea that, "Well, if he admitted to killing someone they
should just execute him right away!" But that's not how corporal punishment
works in this state, or in this nation. The decision for the state to take
someone's life away is a weighty, serious, very involved decision.
I've written about the death penalty in Indiana twice before in this column,
once in November 2015 and again in December 2017. In both iterations, I raised
the question why this state still wastes it time and resources on something so
ineffective and wasteful.M
I spent several days of my life in 2014 covering a death penalty case when I
worked in Franklin. At the time, Michael Dean Overstreet, convicted of criminal
confinement, rape and murder of a 18-year-old Frankin girl, was undergoing
Indiana's 1st-ever hearing on the matter of competency to be executed.
After spending 17 years on death row, the judge ultimately decided his paranoid
schizophrenia was so debilitating it had broken the link between his
understanding of his crime and the punishment he was sentenced to. Now, he
remains in prison indefinitely.
According to the Indiana Public Defender Council, the average time an inmate
spends on death row before execution is 16 years. But that's only the ones who
were eventually executed. For every one person Indiana has executed since 1977,
three more have had their death sentences overturned, commuted or otherwise
derailed.
"Well Steve, if we just didn't waste so much time with appeals and finding
excuses for them to get off, we could execute way more bad dudes much faster!"
I suppose we could. And I suppose we could just do away with due process, with
courts, with the Constitution. We could have a legal system more like some
oppressive dictatorship.
And then where is the line?
Death penalty for a drug deal gone bad where someone gets shot and killed?
Death penalty for a domestic dispute turned deadly? Death penalty for parents
who shake or hit a baby and it dies? Death penalty driving drunk and killing
someone in a car accident? Death penalty for drug dealers who sell drugs that
lead to an overdose death?
A timely reminder here as we're talking about killing more people via the legal
system that death penalty cases are magnitudes more expensive than a regular
trial.
Prosecuting (and later defending at appeal) a life without parole case is about
10 times more expensive than a normal trial. A death penalty trial is about 10
times more expensive than a life with parole case -- 100 times more expensive
than a regular trial. That's been a consistent ratio over the years in studies
conducted by Indiana's Legislative Services Agency.
In 2015, that cost was about $385,000 per death penalty case. That cost, by the
way, is paid by the county that prosecutes it, aka, your tax dollars. (And yes,
if you're wondering, incarcerating someone for life is always less expensive
than pursuing the death penalty.)
And, lastly, I must challenge again this notion that pops up: "If we executed
more people then maybe they'd think twice!"
No, they wouldn't.
If the thought of losing the rest of your life, spending 45-65 years in prison,
isn't a deterrent to committing some heinous crime, why would the possibility
of being executed stop them? If you're caught, you've basically surrendered
your life anyway. In some cases, dying is probably less of a punishment than
serving out a full prison term.
We, as a society, don't gain anything by seeking an eye for an eye. Executing a
murderer doesn't bring the victim back. It doesn't stop future crimes.
It doesn't give us a justice that we can't get without it.
(source: Steve Garbacz is editor of The News Sun)
TENNESSEE:
In the Bible Belt, Christmas Isn’t Coming to Death Row----When it comes to the
death penalty, guilt or innocence shouldn’t really matter to Christians.
Until August, Tennessee had not put a prisoner to death in nearly a decade.
Last Thursday, it performed its 3rd execution in 4 months.
This was not a surprising turn of events. In each case, recourse to the courts
had been exhausted. In each case Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, declined to
intervene, though there were many reasons to justify intervening. Billy Ray
Irick suffered from psychotic breaks that raised profound doubts about his
ability to distinguish right from wrong. Edmund Zagorksi’s behavior in prison
was so exemplary that even the warden pleaded for his life. David Earl Miller
also suffered from mental illness and was a survivor of child abuse so horrific
that he tried to kill himself when he was 6 years old.
Questions about the humanity of Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol were so
pervasive following the execution of Mr. Irick that both Mr. Zagorski and Mr.
Miller elected to die in Tennessee’s electric chair, which was built in 1916.
(The state spruced it up in 1989.) Their choice says something very clear about
Tennessee’s three-drug execution cocktail, as Justice Sonya Sotomayor noted in
a dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Mr. Miller’s
case: “Both so chose even though electrocution can be a dreadful way to die,”
she wrote. “They did so against the backdrop of credible scientific evidence
that lethal injection as currently practiced in Tennessee may well be even
worse.” Electrocution might not be any more humane than death by lethal
injection, in other words, but at least it offers a speedier hideous death.
Presumably this is the same thinking behind the position taken by 51 death-row
prisoners in Alabama who want to die in an untested nitrogen gas chamber rather
than by either the electric chair or lethal injection.
Nitrogen gas. That’s where we are in the whole ungodly machinery of capital
punishment: Human beings are choosing to die by nitrogen gas.
Here in red-state America, the death penalty is supported by 73 % of white
evangelical Christians and by even a solid majority of Catholics — 53 %,
despite official church teaching to the contrary — according to a Pew Research
Center survey released in June.
The three men Tennessee most recently executed were all convicted of especially
brutal murders — in Mr. Irick’s case the rape and murder of a little girl left
in his care; in Mr. Miller’s the murder of his girlfriend, a young woman with
cognitive disabilities. Mr. Zagorksi murdered two men who were meeting him to
buy a hundred pounds of marijuana with cash. Death-row inmates are not
sympathetic figures.
Not that being a sympathetic figure gets you very far here in Execution Alley
in any case. In 1998, Texas executed a woman who became a born-again Christian
while in prison. In 2015, Georgia executed a woman who had earned a theology
degree on death row.
It’s hard not to notice that all these inmates, sympathetic or not, were killed
in the Bible Belt, in states where a sizable portion of the population believes
they live — or at least believes they should live — in a Christian nation. Mr.
Miller was the second inmate in the South to be executed last week, and 2 more
— one in Texas and one in Florida — will die at state hands by Thursday. That’s
a lot of killing for the thou-shalt-not-kill states and at a time of year
that’s particularly ironic. What is Advent, after all, but a time of waiting
for the birth of a baby who will grow up to be executed himself?
For many anti-abortion Christians, there’s no contradiction between taking a
“pro-life” position against allowing a woman to choose whether to continue a
pregnancy and taking a “tough on crime” position whose centerpiece is capital
punishment. An unborn fetus, they argue, is innocent while a prisoner on death
row is by definition guilty.
But for a true “pro-life” Christian, guilt or innocence really shouldn’t be the
point. Cute and cuddly or brutish and unrepentant, human life is human life. It
doesn’t matter whether you like the human life involved. If you truly believe
that human life is sacred, right down to an invisible diploid cell, then you
have no business letting the state put people to death in your name, even if
those people have committed hideous crimes.
There are numerous pragmatic reasons to abolish the death penalty. It doesn’t
deter crime. It doesn’t save the state money. It risks ending an innocent life.
(The Death Penalty Information Center lists the names of 164 innocent people
who have been exonerated after serving years on death row. The most recent,
Clemente Javier Aguirre, was released from a Florida prison just last month.)
It is applied in a haphazard and irrational manner that disproportionately
targets people of color. It puts prison staff in the untenable position of
executing a human being they know personally and often truly care for.
But the real problem with the death penalty can’t be summed up by setting pros
and cons on different sides of a balance to see which carries more weight. The
real problem of the death penalty is its human face.
A person on death row is a person. No matter how ungrieved he may be once he is
gone, he is still a human being. And it is not our right to take his life any
more than it was his right to take another’s.
(source: Opinion; Margaret Renkl, New York Times)
ARKANSAS:
Doctors say Perez-Lopez remains unfit for trial in murder case by Ron Wood
A Springdale man charged with capital murder in connection with a 2013 stabbing
is still not mentally fit for trial and, according to doctors at the Arkansas
State Hospital, he may never be.
Juan Pablo Perez-Lopez, 32, is charged in Washington County Circuit Court in
the death of Jesus Cecilio Villalobos, 48, in Springdale on Feb. 13, 2013.
Villalobos was stabbed multiple times.
Involuntary commitment
A procedure whereby a person is confined in a mental institution either for
determination of competency to stand trial or after acquittal by reason of
insanity.
Perez-Lopez has pleaded not guilty.
Results of the latest fitness examination performed on Perez-Lopez concluded he
continues to suffer from schizophrenia.
"At the time of the examination, Mr. Perez-Lopez lacked the capacity to
understand the proceedings against him, as well as the capacity to effectively
assist his attorney in his own defense, due to mental disease," according to
Dr. Lacey Willett Matthews. "Given my opinion that Mr. Perez-Lopez is not fit
to proceed, opinions regarding criminal responsibility are deferred."
Doctors said further efforts to restore Perez-Lopez to competency are not
likely to result in significant improvement.
An assessment of how dangerous Perez-Lopez may be was also conducted. He was
found to pose a moderate risk of violent behavior if released into the
community or a less restrictive setting than the State Hospital.
"This rating is contingent upon his future compliance with treatment," Matthews
concluded. "Although Mr. Perez-Lopez has a history of violent behavior and
severe mental illness, he has not acted violently in approximately 1 year and
his hallucinations and delusions have responded well to medication. As a
result, it is possible that he could maintain stability in a supervised,
structured treatment setting. However, if he is released into the community
without continued treatment and supervision, his risk for future violence would
increase."
Matt Durrett, Washington County prosecuting attorney, said the findings put the
case "kind of in perpetual limbo."
"They've been renewing 180-day civil commitments since he's been not fit to
proceed, so they'll just keep treating him," Durrett said.
Durrett said Thursday the criminal case against Perez-Lopez has been reset to
December 2019 and he has been moved from the State Hospital to a lock-down
facility for ongoing treatment. Perez-Lopez will remain in that facility unless
he's eventually found to be restored to competency.
"As long as they're still affected with mental disease, they still pose a
danger to the community," Durrett said.
The latest examination, at least the 5th, was done in late October. Perez-Lopez
was committed to the State Hospital for treatment and restoration for more than
2 years.
Circuit Judge Mark Lindsay signed the original commitment order at the behest
of Durrett. The order said Perez-Lopez is a danger to himself or others and
should remain at the State Hospital as long as he remains unfit. Doctors
periodically report to Lindsay on his condition.
Perez-Lopez's attorneys notified the judge 2 years ago they were having trouble
working with him. An initial examination at the Arkansas State Hospital found
Perez-Lopez fit for trial, but a second examination called his mental fitness
into question, and he was again committed for treatment.
A report by Melissa Dannacher, a psychologist at the State Hospital, diagnosed
Perez-Lopez with schizophrenia and antisocial disorder. Dannacher was hopeful
at the time he could be restored to fitness with continued in-patient treatment
and restoration services.
Motorists called Springdale police in February 2013 about 2 men fighting on
Huntsville Avenue and said one of them had a knife and was riding away on a
bicycle.
Police found Perez-Lopez on a bicycle with a knife and bloody hands, then found
Villalobos in a parking lot with multiple stab wounds to his chest and his
throat cut, according to a search warrant affidavit. Perez-Lopez told police he
went to Walmart, stole a knife and returned to Latino Tires with the intention
of stabbing Villalobos because he thought Villalobos was making fun of and
taking advantage of him.
Perez-Lopez said he stabbed Villalobos, an auto mechanic, about 20 times at the
business and in the street, according to the affidavit.
Capital murder, if convicted, is punishable by life in prison without parole or
the death penalty.
(source: Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette)
OKLAHOMA:
‘The Innocent Man’: Inside the Two Gruesome Murders Haunting a Small Oklahoma
Town----This new 6-part Netflix docuseries, based on the John Grisham book of
the same name, re-examines two controversial murder cases in Ada, Oklahoma.
“If I wrote The Innocent Man as a novel, fiction, folks probably wouldn’t
believe it,” says John Grisham at the outset of Netflix’s new six-part
documentary series based on his bestselling 2006 non-fiction book. Those who’ve
watched Making a Murderer, The Confession Tapes or any number of other recent
true-crime offerings, however, will immediately recognize it as a familiar
example of a criminal justice system gone awry—and, specifically, the
difficulty of exposing false confessions and overturning unjust convictions.
Executive-produced by Grisham and directed by Clay Tweel (Gleason), and
premiering on Dec. 14, The Innocent Man concerns Ada, Oklahoma, a rural enclave
best known for pecans and 2 notorious murders that took place more than 30
years ago. The 1st of those involved Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who, on
the night of Dec. 8, 1982, left her job at the Coachlight (a “boot-scootin’
bar”) and returned to her apartment, where she was brutally raped and killed,
her body and furniture scrawled with misspelled messages. Then, on April 28,
1984, young Denice Haraway disappeared while working at McAnally’s gas station
convenience store, the apparent victim—according to eyewitnesses—of an
abduction.
In both cases, a pair of men was suspected of murdering the victims. Three of
them were eventually sentenced to life in prison, with the fourth receiving the
death penalty. But as The Innocent Man contends, none of them were guilty;
rather, they were railroaded by law enforcement and the district attorney’s
office, who cared more about providing the community with resolution (and,
perhaps, with covering up their own misdeeds) than with unearthing the truth.
The Innocent Man tackles its intertwined tales with an occasionally ungainly
hand, flip-flopping between its narratives—and their various points of focus,
including the accused’s friends and family members—in a manner that leaves the
proceedings feeling a bit jumbled. That fortunately doesn’t undercut its cogent
contentions about Ada’s lead police investigator Dennis Smith, Oklahoma State
Bureau of Investigation’s Gary Rogers, and D.A. Bill Peterson. Those men built
their cases on the backs of dubious confessions, which were vital given that
there was little physical evidence linking their would-be killers to the slain
women. And alongside those admissions, they employed dubious scientific
findings as well as testimony from a prison snitch who just happened to possess
key information about both trials.
With regards to Carter, police took 5 years before truly targeting Ron
Williamson—a once-promising baseball phenom with mental illness issues whose
life had fallen apart after his athletic career flamed out—and his best friend
Bill Fritz, who’d been on the skids since his wife was murdered in front of
their young daughter. Primarily on the basis of testimony supplied by Carter’s
school friend Glen Gore, who said he saw Williamson arguing with Carter at the
Coachlight, and also a forensic report about a hair sample found at the crime
scene, Williamson was sentenced to death, while Fritz just narrowly escaped
that fate, instead getting life.
Not helping either man’s defense was a May 8, 1987, interrogation with
Williamson (recorded five years after Carter’s death), during which he
recounted a dream about killing Carter. That this account wasn’t real didn’t
seem important to police or the D.A., who used it against him at trial. And
they did so, to a large extent, because they knew it was a tactic that would
sway a jury—because it already had, in the earlier case of Denice Haraway.
PURSUIT OF JUSTICE
In September 1985, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were given life sentences for
the murder of Haraway—despite her body having not been found—thanks to matching
confessions in which they claimed to have abducted, raped and stabbed her to
death along with a 3rd accomplice. As it turned out, Ward’s damning statement
(which was given 1st) was at least partly the byproduct of a dream he’d had
in-between his 1st and 2nd interrogations. Moreover, as happened with
Williamson and Fritz, D.A. Peterson—in lieu of physical evidence, which didn’t
exist—used testimony from prison informant Terri Holland as part of his
courtroom argument.
As grippingly recounted by The Innocent Man, subsequent revelations in both
cases shined a suspicious spotlight on those who put these individuals behind
bars. In 1999, twelve years after their conviction, Williamson and Fritz were
exonerated by DNA evidence, which proved that Carter had in fact been killed by
the prosecution’s star witness, Glen Gore. And even before that, on January 20,
1986, Haraway’s body was found—in a location different from where Ward and
Fontenot had confessed to disposing it; in a blouse that didn’t match their
descriptions of it; and with a single gunshot to the head, rather than stab
wounds. Which raised the obvious questions: Had Ward and Fontenot’s (wholly
erroneous) confessions been coerced by police? And if so, why?
Marrying new on-the-ground footage (with lawyers and journalists) to
interrogation videos, dramatic recreations and archival interviews, photos and
home movies, The Innocent Man thoroughly dissects its related cases as well as
the ongoing attempts to appeal Ward and Fontenot’s convictions. In doing so, it
reveals a systematic attempt to not only coerce false confessions, but to cover
up potentially exculpatory evidence, to ignore other leads, and—according to a
theory promoted by numerous speakers—to protect possible killers because they
might have damaging info on law enforcement. Like Making a Murderer, it
suggests that reliable witnesses are often the real culprits, and that vacating
first-degree murder convictions is an uphill battle, especially in the absence
of a clear alternative hypothesis about what took place.
Most of all, though, Tweel and Grisham’s series is another stinging censure of
a legal machine compelled to find answers to mysterious crimes at all costs
(regardless of whether those answers are accurate), and then to stand by those
findings, no matter how thoroughly they’re debunked by new evidence and
analysis. As Grisham himself puts it, “In small towns like Ada, the prosecutors
and the police are under enormous pressure. Winning means justice. Winning
means everything. And along the way, if the truth gets blurred, or forgotten,
or twisted, or manipulated, that’s too bad... It’s all about winning.”
(source: thedailybeats.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Man convicted for killing Modoc deputy
Jack Breiner, the man who killed Modoc Sheriff's Deputy Jack Hopkins in 2016
was convicted of several charges in court Thursday including 1st degree murder
and 1st degree attempted murder.
Breiner was also found guilty on the special circumstances of shooting a peace
officer, and shooting from a vehicle, killing someone.
He was also convicted of numerous weapons charges.
The sanity phase of Breiner's trial starts Wednesday to determine if he is sane
enough to be convicted for the death penalty.
There is a gag order in place for this trial, meaning most of the details of
the case are not being released to the public at this time.
(source: KRCR news)
_______________________________________________
A service courtesy of Washburn University School of Law www.washburnlaw.edu
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Unsubscribe: http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/options/deathpenalty
