December 12
INDIANA:
Prosecutor likely to request death penalty in Baer case----Indianapolis man
convicted in 2004 slaying of Lapel mother and child
Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings expects to seek the death penalty
sentence of Fredrick Baer, convicted in the 2004 slaying of a woman and her
daughter near Lapel.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday decided not to hear the appeal filed by
Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill to reinstate the death penalty for Baer.
Earlier this year the death penalty sentence was overturned by the U.S. Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals.
"It will eventually come back to Madison County," Cummings said of the Baer
case. "We have to redo the penalty phase of the trial.
"I can't think of any reason I won't ask for the death penalty," he said.
Cummings said he was not surprised by the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to
hear the state's appeal.
"4 justices have to agree to hear a case," he said. "There is only a small
percentage of cases that get to be heard by the Supreme Court."
After being convicted of murder, attempted rape and theft, Baer was sentenced
to death. His convictions and sentence were twice affirmed by the Indiana
Supreme Court, and a federal district court denied Baer's request for habeas
corpus, Hill stated in a September press release.
Several years later, Hill said, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Baer was entitled to habeas relief in the
form of a new penalty phase of his trial - effectively sending the case back to
Madison Circuit Court for a redo of sentencing.
In a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Hill's office wrote the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals did not come close to making the showing that all
"fairminded jurists" would agree that the jury instructions misled jurors into
ignoring mitigating evidence would have resulted in a different conclusion.
The brief continued during the sentencing phase Baer called one witness a
forensic psychologist who described Baer's history of drug abuse.
The instructions twice informed the jurors they could consider any evidence in
mitigation, including voluntary intoxication at the time the crimes were
committed.
CRIMINAL ACT
On the afternoon of Feb, 24, 2004, Baer was working at a construction site in
Anderson. He said he was suffering withdrawal from methamphetamine. Anxiety
hammered in his head. Sweat seeped from his skin despite the February chill.
He drove to Lapel and parked near two homes. He approached one house and
knocked on the door. A woman answered but cautiously kept Baer from looking
inside. He asked to use her phone.
"She brought me the phone, but I was trying to get in," he recalled. "So I
dialed something and gave her the phone back."
Down the road, he spotted a woman moving boxes outside. It was Cory Clark, wife
of John Clark and mother of Jenna and Morgan. Her husband was in Florida
looking for a job, and her older daughter Morgan was at school.
When Cory Clark went to get the telephone, Baer followed her inside and
murdered the mother and daughter.
He was eventually arrested on Feb. 27 after police were tipped off when
residents near the Clark home told police a man had knocked on their doors,
asking for directions to Layton Road.
Residents told police the man was driving a small gray-blue hatchback, which
had a handicap tag in it. One of the residents noted the car's license plate
number.
Police tracked the car to an Indianapolis construction worker who was working
in Anderson. Workers at the construction site said the car belonged to Baer.
During a 2013 interview with The Herald Bulletin on death row, Baer said he
thinks about the case every day and that he deserves to die.
(source: Rushville Republican)
KENTUCKY:
Judge refuses to toss death penalty for 4 charged in deaths of Lexington
bystander, unborn son
4 men charged in the 2016 deaths of a woman and her unborn son can get the
death penalty, Fayette Circuit Judge Kimberly Bunnell ruled Tuesday.
Defense attorneys for Saquan Freeman, 21, Demetrioun Boaz, 22, Joseph Fain, 21,
and Skylar Stigall, 23, had sought to have the death penalty excluded but
Bunnell overruled the motion.
“The death penalty as an option for these gentlemen is constitutional,” Bunnell
said from the bench. “I think the citizens of Fayette County realize what an
ultimate penalty that is."
The four men were indicted on charges of murder, fetal homicide and robbery in
the September 2016 shooting death of Maryiah Coleman, 22. She was not the
intended victim of the robbery, police said previously. An innocent bystander,
she was walking her family’s dog outside the Matador North Apartments on
Winburn Drive when she was shot.
Coleman and her unborn son, Jakobe, died at University of Kentucky Chandler
Hospital about an hour after the shooting.
The defendants were notified that prosecutors intended to seek aggravated
penalties, including the death penalty.
The indictment against the four said Eric Cannady was the intended victim of
the robbery. Police said Cannady was being robbed of guns. While all 4 men had
guns, only 1 weapon was fired.
The Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled that a circuit court judge cannot exclude
the death penalty as a sentencing option before a trial. Only after the facts
are heard at trial and a death sentence is imposed can a circuit judge
determine that the death penalty is disproportionate.
Who fired the fatal shot at Coleman has been debated. The defendants gave
varying accounts, and the gun that killed Coleman and her son has not been
recovered.
Stigall’s attorney, Erica Roland, said he did not even fire his weapon because
it was fully loaded when police found it. Roland also said that Stigall never
pointed his weapon during the robbery, but Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney
Andrea Williams said that assertion is disputed by a witness.
The Kentucky Supreme Court has held that while a defendant may not be the
shooter in a murder, he can be found guilty of murder under a complicity theory
and thus be eligible for the death penalty.
Boaz, Fain and Freeman are scheduled to go on trial in January on first-degree
robbery charges in a separate crime. (Stigall was not involved.)
The robbery charges stem from an Oct. 20, 2016, shooting on Red Mile Road. The
3 men allegedly entered an apartment and fired multiple shots, according to
court documents. Freeman was shot by the homeowner and paralyzed during the
invasion, police spokeswoman Brenna Angel said previously.
(source: kentucky.com)
CALIFORNIA----female could face death penalty
California Mom Responsible for Drowning 10-Month-Old Twins Could Face Death
Penalty
A California woman is accused of drowning her 10-month-old twins inside a motel
room that police helped her to arrange after she caused a scene earlier at a
women’s shelter, reports said.
Tulare police Sgt. Jon Hamlin told officers had no former contact with the
37-year-old Heather Langdon and would have alerted mental health assistance if
they knew she was a danger to herself or the children.
Hamlin noted that the officers didn’t want to leave without getting shelter for
the three on the cold, rainy night, last Thursday, so they found a non-profit
agency willing to pay for the motel room.
It was there authorities revealed that she committed the murders. The children
were confirmed dead at a hospital closeby after they were found not breathing
and underwater, KTLA reported.
Reports did not disclose who called authorities about the children or the how
they drowned.
The children’s father has not been known but reportedly ended a GoFundMe page
for the boys, Mason and Maddox. The woman reportedly has three other children.
According to the station, she faces two counts of first-degree murder and
assault on a child leading to death with special circumstance allegation that
she committed multiple murders.
If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
(source: 360aproko.com)
USA:
The Electric Chair Is Back and the Death Penalty Is on Life Support
On Thursday, David Earl Miller became the 2nd person in the last 5 weeks to
choose death in Tennessee’s electric chair over lethal injection. Miller was
executed for the 1981 murder of 23-year-old Lee Standifier.
After losing a lawsuit claiming he had a right to be executed by a firing
squad, Miller took advantage of a state law allowing death row inmates
convicted prior to 1999 to opt for the electric chair rather than lethal
injection. He did so because he feared that the state’s lethal injection
protocol, which includes midazolam, a drug that has been involved in several
botched executions, would result in a more prolonged and painful death than
would electrocution.
The real significance of the return of the electric chair, though, would be
missed if we saw it only as a loss of faith in lethal injection by death row
inmates. It signals a larger crisis for the death penalty system in the United
States.
Hailed as a humane alternative to hanging, which had long been America’s
preferred method of execution, the electric chair was first adopted in 1888 by
New York state. It decided to use electrocution following the report of a
commission charged with reviewing possible alternatives to hanging. The
so-called Gerry Commission concluded that “The most potent agent known for the
destruction of human life is electricity. … The velocity of the electric
current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the
nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”
William Kemmler, the 1st person scheduled to die in the new electric chair, was
dubious about this conclusion. He sued, claiming that its use would violate the
Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. When the United States
Supreme Court eventually considered his claim, it echoed the conclusions of the
Gerry Commission and allowed the execution to proceed. Unfortunately, Kemmler,
not the commission or the court, was right about the electric chair. His
execution was horribly botched.
Yet, in spite of Kemmler’s experience, the electric chair quickly became very
popular. From the start of the 20th century until the 1980s, the number of
death sentences carried out by electrocution far outstripped those carried out
by other methods, including hanging, the firing squad, and the gas chamber.
2 factors combined to change this situation and relegate the electric chair to
a marginal place among America’s execution methods. First was the development
of lethal injection, adopted by the state of Oklahoma in 1977 and first used in
Texas in 1982. Lethal injection seemed to make execution “cleaner” and “more
painless” than it had ever been. It offered an attractive alternative to the
“inhumanity, visceral brutality, and cost” of the electric chair, according to
state legislators. The modern death chamber came to resemble a hospital room
and executioners seemed like medical professionals.
Several dramatic botched executions in Florida also contributed to the sharp
decline in electrocutions. Included were two executions in which inmates caught
fire as they were being put to death in what Floridians referred to as “Old
Sparky.” Following those botched executions, other states reconsidered the
electric chair. For example, in 2001 the Supreme Court of Georgia decided that
electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment under its state constitution. In
that opinion, Justice Carol W. Hunstein said that “death by electrocution, with
its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and
blistered bodies,” was no longer compatible with contemporary standards of
decency.
The Supreme Court of Nebraska followed suit seven years later and used
similarly vivid language to characterize the electric chair. “Burning of the
prisoner’s body is an inherent part of an electrocution,” the court said.
Echoing the ways 19th century proponents of the electric chair had
characterized hanging, it found that electrocution “inflicts intense pain and
agonizing suffering.”
Several dramatic botched executions in Florida also contributed to the sharp
decline in electrocutions.
Today, 9 states retain the electric chair as a legally allowable method of
execution. Since 1980, only 11 percent of American executions have involved the
electric chair. Most of the other countries that have capital punishment choose
1 method of execution and stick with it. In contrast, since the late 19th
century, the United States has used 5 different methods of execution: hanging,
electrocution, lethal gas, the firing squad, and lethal injection. The death
penalty has been sustained by the hope of making progress in the grim business
of putting people to death. Indeed, its legitimacy is closely linked to the
search for a technological magic bullet to insure the safety, reliability, and
humanity of execution.
Even though Miller became just the 16th person put to death by electrocution in
the United States since the turn of the 21st century, a period in which there
have been 873 lethal injections, the return of the electric chair and other
previously abandoned methods of executions signifies more than just the
severity of lethal injection’s current problems. This back-to-the future moment
suggests that the United States has reached the end of the road in the search
for ever-better execution methods. It highlights the shaky ground now occupied
by America’s death penalty.
(source: slate.com)
*********************
Potential jurors in Christensen trial getting 31 pages of questions
If you read books, which authors and types of books do you like? Do you
regularly listen to any radio talk shows? Have you ever used any online dating
apps or websites?
These are some of the questions lawyers want answered by potential jurors in
the April 2019 trial of accused kidnapper and killer Brendt Christensen.
The 31-page questionnaire is much longer than in a typical case, but as
University of Illinois Law professor Andrew Leipold said, "Capital cases are
always different."
"The rules are different, the procedures are different. Everything is
different," said Leipold, the director of the UI's Program in Criminal Law and
Procedure.
So this "is more than I've seen and than I would expect most are, but this is a
capital case," Leipold said.
The questions will help attorneys choose an impartial jury that they hope can
fairly decide whether Christensen is guilty of kidnapping and killing Yingying
Zhang, a visiting UI scholar from China, and if he is guilty, whether he
deserves the death penalty.
While many of the questions are obviously relevant — asking potential jurors
about their views on different crime-related issues, whether they know anyone
involved in the case and their opinion of the death penalty — others are
seemingly unrelated.
For example, from the prosecutor's list of proposed questions:
— Please name the three public figures, living or deceased, whom you most
admire.
— Do you enjoy movies?
— Do you have a "web page"?
If a person lists three religious figures, or all Republican or all Democratic
presidents, those answers might tell the attorneys something about the juror,
said Steve Beckett, the attorney for Ms. Zhang's family, who's been involved in
6 death-penalty cases.
"The newspapers or periodicals that somebody may read can tell you a lot about
them; the news channels that they watch; their historical perspectives," he
said. "Those are all — I hate to use the word 'hunch,' but maybe educated
hunches that attorneys might make about them."
Attorneys "want to know as much about the individual juror as you possibly
can," Beckett said. "A questionnaire allows you to do that without spending the
time in open court."
In open court, a juror could taint the jury pool by stating what they've read
about the case or what their opinion of it is.
Attorneys in the Brendt Christensen kidnapping case want to leave nothing to
chance when picking a possible jury. That's evident in a 31 page questionnaire
recently submitted to a judge for approval. Some of the questions might
surprise you.
Christensen's lawyers are hoping to avoid this by having questioning done
individually.
The questionnaire should also help attorneys on both sides select jurors they
want to strike.
Each side can argue to the judge to strike a juror for cause. They also each
get to strike 20 jurors without cause.
Said Leipold: "As long as they're not basing it on race or gender," which the
Supreme Court has ruled is unconstitutional, "they can remove a juror because
they think they won't be as good as some other juror. They're trying to
identify people who really seem like they might be biased toward the
prosecution or the defense."
If a juror is stricken without cause, then the other side can argue that the
juror was stricken improperly.
"The other side can challenge my peremptory challenge, saying I'm doing it
based on race or gender. Then it's up to me to give a race- or gender-neutral
explanation," Leipold said. "I can say I don't like Juror 4 because she seemed
inattentive or uninterested, but I can't say I'm removing her because I think
women are more likely to believe X."
'Inflammatory, redundant'
In Christensen's case, the U.S. Attorney's Office has filed a 36-page
questionnaire and the defense has filed a set of questions under seal.
Last week, the 2 sides filed an agreed-upon set of questions totaling 31 pages.
They're continuing to argue over supplemental questions the defense wants to
ask.
Prosecutors have accused the defense of trying to ask questions that, among
other things, could lead to a conviction being overturned on appeal.
"The defendant's Proposed Supplemental Jury Questions are inflammatory,
redundant, and specifically designed not to identify and select fair and
impartial jurors, but to identify and select jurors who are predisposed in the
defendant's favor and to create reasons to strike jurors who are not so
predisposed and to later appeal if any are selected," prosecutors wrote.
Christensen's lawyers said they want to ask certain questions so they can
select jurors who are willing to give a life sentence if he is found guilty,
instead of automatically giving the death penalty, and whether they will be
open to mitigating factors.
That's part of the problem with the jury-selection process in capital cases,
said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death
Penalty Information Center.
In a capital case, jurors have to be willing to consider sentencing the
defendant to death, so the jury-selection process is good at getting rid of
those opposed to the death penalty.
Bias from the start
But the process is also supposed to remove jurors who would automatically
impose the death penalty if the defendant is guilty, Dunham said, which doesn't
always happen.
The process "is designed to try to eliminate bias in both directions. All the
studies tell us that it doesn't do that," he said. "People who are opposed to
the death penalty are much more likely to say they're opposed to it. People who
support the death penalty are much more likely to say that they don't believe
that they would automatically impose the death penalty. ... They understate
their support for the death penalty."
The questionnaire is designed to help attorneys find what jurors actually
believe, but Dunham said the mere fact of going through the jury-selection
process biases the jury.
"The Capital Jury Project looked at more than 1,000 jurors who served in
capital cases and found that 10 percent of jurors had already reached a
judgment on what the guilt or innocence of the defendant should be," Dunham
said. "They thought, 'Why am I being asked about the penalty if the guy isn't
guilty?'"
And, he said, jurors often don't understand all the instructions. For example,
the jury must unanimously agree on the presence of the aggravating factors, but
each juror can individually agree on the presence of mitigating factors that
could lead to a life sentence.
While most capital cases don't result in a death sentence, Dunham said the
flaws in the system lead to more convictions of more serious charges.
"You might still be convicted of 1st-degree murder on facts that a jury that
hadn't gone through the death-qualification process would have said is a
second-degree murder or manslaughter," he said. "And we don't know how many
people would have been spared with a fairer jury-selection process even after
being convicted of 1st-degree murder."
(source: The News-Gazette)
************************
Feds seek more time to review death penalty option for Tree of Life shooting
defendant
A federal judge on Tuesday extended the time for discovery material to be
produced in the prosecution of Robert Bowers until April and said she'll hold
monthly status conferences as the case proceeds.
Mr. Bowers, who waived his appearance in court, is accused of killing 11
worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue in October.
Prosecutors have delivered some discovery material but the parties want more
time to produce and review everything. The U.S. attorney's office also wants
extra time to review the case for possible death penalty designation by the
Department of Justice.
U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose set an April 18 deadline.
The U.S. attorney's office will submit information about the case to the
justice department’s capital review committee about whether Mr. Bowers should
face the death penalty. The defense will have a chance to respond.
The capital review process takes at least 90 days from the time of submission
of a case for review and a decision by the attorney general.
All filings in the case will remain sealed.
Mr. Bowers is charged with 44 counts related to the Oct. 27 mass shooting.
(source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
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