January 24
IOWA:
Death penalty back on the Iowa legislative agenda
Capital punishment would give the Iowa justice system another “tool” to use in
prosecuting offenders who kidnap, rape and murder juveniles, according to
proponents of reinstating the death penalty after a 54-year absence.
“It’s one of the things I ran on in ’96 and I still think it’s an appropriate
punishment for capital murder,” said Sen. Jerry Behn, R-Boone, who plans to
introduce a death penalty bill for the 22nd consecutive year.
He said his bill will be narrower in scope than House File 62, which was
introduced Wednesday by Rep. Skyler Wheeler, R-Orange City, and would allow
courts to apply the death penalty if the “aggravating circumstances established
beyond a reasonable doubt outweigh any mitigating circumstances” in 1st-degree
capital murder cases.
In either case, Tom Chapman of the Iowa Catholic Conference said “the state
should not commit violence to protect Iowans from violence.”
Wheeler, Behn and Sen. Julian Garrett, R-Indianola, argue that the possibility
of a death sentence would give law enforcement, prosecutors and courts more
leverage in dealing with heinous crimes. Under current law, they said, the
maximum penalty for kidnapping, rape and murder are all the same – life without
parole.
Iowa lawmakers debate reinstating death penalty
Bringing the death penalty back to Iowa likely will get debated but probably
not approved during the 2018 legislative session, key lawmakers say.
“So there’s a perverse incentive for someone who kidnaps and rapes to kill
their victim so there is no witness,” Behn said.
Sen. Kevin Kinney, D-Oxford, who is retired from a career in law enforcement,
said he has no sympathy for people who kidnap, rape and murder, “but I don’t
know if this is the right policy.”
(source: The Gazette)
KANSAS:
U.S. Supreme Court Mulls Kansas Inmate's Appeal Regarding Insanity Defense
An appeal filed by a Kansas man on death row has caught the attention of the
U.S. Supreme Court and could change how Kansas and other states prosecute
people who commit crimes while mentally ill.
Nobody disputes that James Kahler murdered 4 family members in 2009. But
Kahler’s attorneys argued at trial and in subsequent appeals that he had
spiraled into a mental health crisis in the months preceding the murders and
was psychotic during the attack. The murders took place in Burlingame, about 30
miles south of Topeka.
The Kansas Supreme Court upheld Kahler's conviction. In September, his
attorneys petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing that
Kansas has effectively abolished the right to use insanity as a defense in
criminal cases. That, they say, is unconstitutional because it violated
Kahler's right to due process and resulted in excessive punishment.
3 other states — Utah, Montana and Idaho — have also banished the insanity
defense.
From a statistical perspective, the petition faces long odds: Only about 80 out
of 7,000 or more such petitions filed annually with the Supreme Court are
granted.
But last week the court requested more documents from the trial and subsequent
appeals, which experts say may be a sign the court is ready to take on the
case.
All states require that defendants know what they were doing when they
committed an offense. But most states also require defendants to understand
that what they did was wrong, said Elizabeth Cateforis, a University of Kansas
law professor who specializes in capital punishment and criminal procedure.
If a defendant doesn't meet both conditions, he or she can invoke the insanity
defense, which, if accepted, typically leads to mental health treatment instead
of a prison sentence.
In Kahler's case, a Life Alert recording device worn by one of the victims
captured sound during the attack. At one point Kahler can be heard proclaiming,
“Oh s**t! I am going to kill her… G*****n it!,” according to court records.
In a brief opposing Kahler’s Supreme Court petition, Kansas Attorney General
Derek Schmidt wrote that the state hasn’t abolished but rather “redefined” the
insanity defense.
He also argued that the audio recording proves Kahler “knew at the time that
what he was doing was both momentous and wrong.”
Such a claim “rests on a thin reed,” Kahler’s attorneys replied in their brief.
“A psychotic person’s use of profanity hardly suggests he knows right from
wrong and has chosen freely to do wrong.”
“For centuries, the insanity defense has protected those who cannot choose
between doing good and doing evil,” they wrote. “Either because they cannot
tell the difference or because they cannot control their conduct.”
It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will decide whether to take the case. But
if it does, Cateforis thinks the justices might be more interested in the
narrower angle of capital punishment than the broader question of the insanity
defense.
The court in recent years has ruled that certain categories of defendants —
such as juveniles or people with intellectual disabilities — cannot be
sentenced to death.
It’s possible, Cateforis said, that the Supreme Court intends to extend the
same protection to people “suffering from such an extreme mental illness that
(they) can’t form evil intent.”
Or, she said, the court could choose to say that all defendants have a
fundamental right to an insanity defense.
Another possibility, she said, is that the the court would rule against Kahler.
Should that happen, Cateforis expects other states to mirror Kansas and adopt
more restrictive interpretations of the insanity defense.
(source: KCUR news)
OKLAHOMA:
Supreme Court declines to review alleged racial bias in Oklahoma's death
penalty
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to consider the appeals of 2 convicted
Oklahoma County killers who say a study showing racial bias in Oklahoma's use
of the death penalty warranted reconsideration of their death sentences.
Without comment Monday, the nation's high court rejected the appeals of Julius
Jones and Tremane Wood, who had made similar arguments about racial bias. Both
cited a 2017 study that examined Oklahoma homicide cases from 1990 to 2012 and
found cases with white victims were more likely to end in execution than cases
with non-white victims.
“There is no question that racial bias played a role in Julius Jones' death
penalty conviction,” said Dale Baich, one of Jones' attorneys, in an email
Monday. Baich said the 2017 study showed Oklahoma's application of the death
penalty “unconstitutionally applies death sentences to men of color accused of
killing white victims.”
The state of Oklahoma successfully argued against Supreme Court review. It had
urged the high court to agree with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals,
which determined the racial bias study did not qualify as new evidence worthy
of review. The state cited a 1987 opinion, McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the
Supreme Court ruled a study on racial bias in executions did not prove a black
man's death sentence was unconstitutional.
Furthermore, the state argued, the 2017 study was flawed because it included
both murder and non-negligent manslaughter. The data set was “far too inclusive
to yield reliable results,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabb wrote to
the Supreme Court.
The Oklahoma Attorney General's Office declined to comment Monday because there
are appeals pending for both inmates.
Case details
In a case that has garnered national attention, Jones was convicted of killing
Edmond insurance executive Paul Howell during a carjacking in 1999. Jones'
supporters say he was wrongfully convicted and framed by an acquaintance. After
an ABC docuseries featured his case, protesters marched to the Oklahoma
Capitol, and the Congressional Black Caucus called on then-Gov. Mary Fallin to
“correct this wrongful conviction.”
“The particular details of Mr. Jones' case vividly show how racial bias can
lead to a wrongful conviction, including the words of a juror that 'they should
just take the (racist remark) out and shoot him behind the jail,'” Baich said
Monday.
One juror in the case has alleged to defense attorneys that another juror made
the racist remark. Baich expects to raise that issue in a separate appeal to
the Supreme Court.
Wood was convicted of fatally stabbing Montana migrant worker Ronald Reuben
Wipf at an Oklahoma City hotel on New Year's Eve 2001 as part of a robbery.
Wood's brother, Zjaiton, attempted to take the full blame but a jury convicted
Tremane Wood as well and sentenced him to die.
Attorneys for Jones and Wood maintain that racial bias played a role in their
trials. They cite reporting by The Oklahoman that found Oklahoma County
District Judge Ray Elliott, who presided over Wood's trial and a pre-trial
hearing in Jones' case, admitted to using racial epithets to describe Mexicans
in 2011.
Executions are on hold in Oklahoma while state officials craft an execution
protocol that utilizes nitrogen gas. Nineteen inmates have exhausted their
appeals and are currently eligible for execution. Because they have appeals
pending, Jones and Wood are not on that list.
(source: The Oklahoman)
*******************
High Court Won't Review 2 Oklahoma Death Row Cases
The U.S. Supreme Court will not review the sentences of 2 Oklahoma inmates who
argue that people of color are more likely to be sentenced to death in Oklahoma
when the victim is white.
The court on Monday declined without comment to review the separate cases of
Julius Darius Jones and Tremane Wood, whose first name is spelled Termane in
state court documents.
Jones was convicted of killing Paul Howell during a 1999 carjacking and Wood
was convicted of killing Ronald Wimpf during a robbery. Both victims were
white. Jones is black and Wood is biracial.
Attorneys cited a 2017 study that found nonwhites are more likely to be
sentenced to death in Oklahoma when the victim is white.
Defense attorney Dale Baich told The Oklahoman more appeals are planned.
(source: The Associated Press)
USA:
How Netflix's Ted Bundy documentary builds an uneasy case against the death
penalty
30 years ago today, one of America's most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy,
was executed at the Florida State Prison. Bundy had spent the previous decade
on death row maintaining his innocence; only when his execution became
inevitable did he finally confess to the brutal murder of upwards of 30 women
in 7 states between 1974 and 1978.
On Thursday, coinciding with the anniversary of Bundy's death, comes a
four-part Netflix series, Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,
which draws from more than 100 hours of previously unheard interviews with
Bundy while he was awaiting execution. Yet even as director Joe Berlinger
invites audiences into the mind of pure human evil, he builds an uneasy case
against Bundy's 1989 execution. While never truly explicit — Berlinger also
gives Bundy's fiercest critics a chance to justify the nature of his punishment
— the documentary doesn't leave you with relief that Bundy was finally
destroyed so much as it does an overriding queasiness with the violence in
human nature.
Conversations With a Killer follows Bundy from his first verified killings, in
Seattle's University District in 1974, through his multiple escapes from
custody, and eventually to his capture and death in Florida. The documentary is
unflinching in its depiction of Bundy's crimes — Berlinger includes graphic
photographs of crime scenes and uncovered human remains — even as Bundy smugly
maintains his innocence on the tapes. Only when asked, through a bit of clever
flattery, to use his psychology degree to profile the kind of man who would
murder young women does Bundy flirt with a confession — a sort of early version
of O.J. Simpson's If I Did It.
To be clear, there is no doubt that Bundy is a monster; rather, the
documentary's final section raises questions about the American criminal
justice system and the use of capital punishment within it.
First, there is the initial murder case itself, which lacked proof beyond a
trace of a doubt that Bundy was the perpetrator in the bludgeoning of Chi Omega
sorority girls at Florida State University. The case hinged on a potentially
unreliable witness as well as work by an odontologist who claimed Bundy's
crooked canines matched bite marks on one of the victims, a form of dental
forensics that is now considered to be "junk science." This isn't to suggest
that Bundy was innocent — he certainly wasn't, as a later, much more convincing
trial would determine — but that all it takes is "prejudicial publicity" to
persuade a jury to deliver a guilty verdict, even if firm evidence isn't there.
Additionally there is the fact that Bundy was not only ruled competent to stand
trial, but that he served as his own co-council. Bundy repeatedly "sabotaged"
himself in this role, frustrating his defense team that had begged him to take
a plea bargain for a 75-year sentence. "The most important thing was to save
his life," emphasized Michael Minerva, the public defender assigned to Bundy's
case. But Bundy declined, and his erratic behavior in court continued. It
"really just confirmed to me that he did not have a rational understanding of
the proceedings," said defense lawyer Margaret Good. Likewise, a Yale
psychologist asked to assess Bundy "was extremely confident that there was
something unique about Ted's brain that had led to this," said Polly Nelson,
who was Bundy's post-conviction counsel. She goes as far as to question whether
he could control himself at all.
Berlinger balances the questions he raises about capital punishment in Bundy's
case with the voices of death penalty advocates. "I feel that there are some
people who, by the enormity of their crime, forfeit the right to live," said
George Dekle, who served as a prosecutor against Bundy and would later be a
witness to his execution. Or, as former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez (R) is seen
in archival footage telling the news, "[Bundy] represents why you have capital
punishment."
At the same time, Berlinger does not flinch from the ugly details of Bundy's
execution, either. The documentary includes footage of the celebration that
sprouted outside the prison ahead of Bundy's electrocution, described by one
witness as being a "carnival." "There were thousands of people outside, you
could hear them even in the inner confines of the prison," recalled FBI Special
Agent Bill Hagmaier. "'Burn, Bundy, burn. Burn, Bundy, burn' ... I looked at
Ted and said, 'You hear that out there?' And he said, 'They're crazy. They
think I'm crazy. Listen to all of them.'" And listen we do — to archival videos
of celebrants' whooping, singing "hey, hey, hey, goodbye," and to vendors
selling T-shirts and electric chair buttons. Other attendees held signs that
read "Hey Ted, this BUZZ is for you," "Teddy, you're the toast with the most,"
and, simply, "Have a seat, Ted." Conversations convincingly portrays the scene
as being as raucous and sickening as a medieval public hanging.
Just as Berlinger had shown Bundy's monstrousness over the previous three
hours, he finds its palest reflection in the justice that is carried out in
retribution. Bundy's mother makes the spiritual case against her son's death:
"My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another's life under any
circumstances is wrong," she told the news, "and I don't believe the state of
Florida is above the laws of God." Even Dekle, the prosecutor who took Bundy to
court "to make sure — certain — that he was executed," expressed horror at his
own emotion over seeing a man put to death. "I'm ashamed to admit that I was
elated," Dekle confessed. "I hope I'm never happy over the death of another
human being ever again."
Berlinger has made his career out of interrogating what he calls the "sanity of
the death penalty," having focused on wrongful convictions and racial bias in
other cases as being "a wake-up call for how broken capital punishment is in
this country." Conversations With a Killer, though, is far from a passionate
crusade against capital punishment; featuring hours of Bundy's unimaginable
crimes, the movie makes death seem like the only fitting option. But, if
there's a lingering sense of unease with the electrocution of one of America's
worst serial killers, then how can we be certain similar punishments are
conscionable?
Conversations With a Killer never offers a simple answer. All it gives us, in
the end, are Bundy's own words: "Vengeance is what the death penalty really
is," he says on the tapes. "Really, it's a desire of society to take an eye for
an eye. And I guess there's no cure for that."
********************
Both Were Once on Death Row, Now They Share a Life Helping Others----Peter
Pringle and Sunny Jacobs were both exonerated after serving time in prison. To
help others who were wrongly incarcerated, the couple created the Sunny Center
Foundation.
9 years ago, Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle were living in a seaside cottage in
a sleepy coastal region of Ireland, when a man from Detroit who had been
accused of murder and rape, a man they had never met, arrived at their home.
“He was a black man in his early 50s who had just spent 20 years in prison,”
Ms. Jacobs said. “He was angry, which I will admit made me very nervous when he
first arrived.”
Their troubled visitor, who had accepted an invitation extended by the couple,
had been wrongfully convicted of the crimes he allegedly committed, which
resulted in 2 decades of his life senselessly wasted behind bars.
“We both knew exactly what he had gone through,” Mr. Pringle said. “We felt his
pain, we understood his anger.”
Ms. Jacobs, now 71, and Mr. Pringle, 80, had each lived a similar nightmare —
she in the United States and he in Ireland — both caught in the slow wheels of
their nations’s criminal justice systems. They were both dragged onto death
row, where they spent a decade and a half awaiting execution, before their
convictions were overturned for the murders that they steadfastly maintained
they did not commit.
“It was an extremely dark time in our lives,” Mr. Pringle said.
On Jan. 29, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle will be at the United Nations
headquarters to attend a screening of “Fallout,” a documentary that will shine
an investigative light on those dark times.
Mark McLoughlin, who directed and produced the film, which follows the lives of
Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Pringle and two others in the difficult aftermath of their
exonerations, said he was “concerned by the fact that a victim of the state
becomes classified as an enemy of the state as they fight to establish their
innocence.”
“I was specifically interested in the trajectory of their lives after prison,”
Mr. McLoughlin said, “which in most longer term cases have been destroyed.”
To avoid such plight, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle — who were married in November
2011 in New York and were the subjects of a Vows feature — have created the
Sunny Center Foundation, which is based at their home in Ireland and at a
donated property in Tampa, Fla. They welcome men and women who have been
wrongfully incarcerated, providing them with spiritual, emotional and physical
support to ease them back into society.
When in Ireland, they also make sure to maintain “some alone time,” as Ms.
Jacobs put it, starting with breakfast every morning together, but not before
they feed their cat and their dog, and their goats, donkeys and hens.
“All of us live together on what you might call a little bit of a farm, with a
magnificent view of the ocean,” Ms. Jacobs said. “As far as entertainment goes,
we have 11 grandchildren between us spread out in Los Angeles, Ireland,
Australia and New Zealand, so keeping up with them is entertainment enough.”
“Otherwise, Peter and I are more than satisfied with going for a long walk on a
beautiful evening, and coming home and reading a good book,” she said. “Of
course, things are a lot different when an exoneree is staying with us, then
everything changes, all of our attention gets focused on them.”
Since 2010, there have been 14 exonerees who have traveled to meet the couple,
with the man from Detroit being the first. The majority of the exonerees have
had their spirits lifted and been given a renewed sense of purpose by Ms.
Jacobs, Mr. Pringle and a handful of professional counselors and therapists
affiliated with their foundation. Others, however, have not been able to return
to the productive lives they were leading before they were wrongly convicted
and jailed.
“When you are imprisoned, love is the first thing that disappears from your
life,” Ms. Jacobs said. “So the first thing we do for our exonerees is make
them a part of our family, we invite them into our home and shower them with
unconditional love.”
The 14 exonerees, which included a woman from Holland and a man from Taiwan who
arrived with an interpreter, stayed with the couple for anywhere from 2 to 4
weeks, “depending on the psychological condition of each individual,” Ms.
Jacobs said.
The 1st week, she said, “is all about them getting their stories out, so we
mainly listen,” and the 2nd week, “is when we begin to share our own
experiences with them.”
By weeks 3 and 4, their fellow exonerees are encouraged to meditate,
participate in yoga and pray, and are provided with tools that the couple say
went a long way toward their own emotional and spiritual recoveries.
“The greatest tool is forgiveness,” Ms. Jacobs said. “If you hold on to that
anger and resentment, then there’s no room for happiness and love in your
heart, and you start destroying your own life.”
Other tools come in the form of trauma specialists and counselors, “and that’s
where things get expensive,” Ms. Jacobs said, “which is why we need donations
to keep our foundation running.”
Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle are hoping to expand their base of operations in the
United States and Europe through donations and future fund-raising events.
Thousands upon thousands of frequent flier miles have already been donated to
the couple’s foundation.
“We run on an extremely minimum budget,” said Ms. Jacobs, whose work has
already taken her and Mr. Pringle to 12 countries.
“The more we can expand, the more people we can help,” she said. “Do you
realize that there are over 2,000 exonerees in the United States alone?”
According to the National Registry of Exoneration, there are in fact 2,363
exonerees in the United States, which total 20,045 lost years of life.
“These exonerees, who did nothing wrong in the first place and lost huge chunks
of their lives in prison, are offered little or no compensation upon their
release, whereas actual criminals who served their time are entitled to receive
all the financial benefits the system will allow,” Mr. Pringle said. “It makes
no sense.”
Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle have each written a book about their experiences,
hers entitled, “Stolen Time” (Random House, 2007), and his, “About Time”
(History Press, Ireland 2013).
The couple met in 1998, during Ms. Jacobs’s global campaign against the death
penalty that brought her to a crowded pub in Galway, Ireland, to speak at an
Amnesty International event, which Mr. Pringle had attended.
As Mr. Pringle listened to Ms. Jacobs share the horrific events of the day in
February 1976, when her world went dark, he began to cry.
Ms. Jacobs, then 28, was a passenger in a car driven by a man named Walter
Norman Rhodes Jr. Also in the car was her 2nd husband, Jesse Tafero, as well as
their 10-month-old daughter and Ms. Jacobs’s 9-year-old son from her first
marriage.
Mr. Rhodes, who had befriended Mr. Tafero during an earlier prison stint for
both men, was giving the couple a ride from Miami to the home of friends in
West Palm Beach, Fla., when they were pulled over by two police officers at a
rest stop off Interstate 95 in Broward County.
The scene erupted in a hail of bullets, leaving both officers dead. The police
captured all 3 suspects and charged them with murder. Mr. Tafero and Ms.
Jacobs, who maintained that Mr. Rhodes had done the shooting, were sentenced to
death, while Mr. Rhodes, who testified against the couple, plea-bargained with
authorities, reducing his sentence to life.
In 1981, Ms. Jacobs won an appeal and the Florida Supreme Court changed her
sentence from death to life in prison. But her spirits were crushed the
following year when her parents, who were raising her 2 children, died in the
crash of Pan Am Flight 759 in Kenner, La.
“It was the most devastating time in my entire life,” said Ms. Jacobs, who
still wears her mother’s wedding ring, which was salvaged in the wreckage.
Her children were cast into the foster-care system, but Ms. Jacobs still had
her husband, with whom she exchanged prison letters.
“Anything he touched, or that he wrote on, or that he licked with his tongue, I
was keeping,” she said. “I existed on those letters.”
But on May 4, 1990, with Ms. Jacobs still in prison, Mr. Tafero was put to
death in a Florida electric chair.
“The world had become a place I didn’t know anymore,” she said.
She continued to fight for her release, which came in 1992, nearly 17 years
after her arrest, when her conviction was overturned on appeal, as Mr. Rhodes
eventually confessed to murdering the 2 officers.
Ms. Jacobs had entered solitary confinement inside Broward Correctional
Institution as a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” she said, and exited prison
as “a 45-year-old orphan, widow and grandmother.”
(Her story, along with five other wrongfully convicted death row inmates,
became “The Exonerated,” a play that had its Off Broadway debut in October
2002, with Ms. Jacobs portrayed by the actresses Jill Clayburgh, Mia Farrow,
Lynn Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields and Marlo
Thomas).
Mr. Pringle was accused of being 1 of 3 men who had murdered 2 police officers
following a bank robbery in July 1980 in Ballaghaderreen, Ireland. A
41-year-old divorced father of 4 at the time, he had been sentenced to be
hanged after his conviction.
His lawyers won a stay of his original Dec. 19, 1980, execution, which was then
reset for June 8, 1981. His hanging was only weeks away when, on May 27, 1981,
Ireland’s president commuted Mr. Pringle’s sentence to 40 years without parole.
Mr. Pringle, who is originally from Dublin and dropped out of school when he
was 13, decided to serve as his own counsel. “I became something of a jailhouse
lawyer,” he said.
Mr. Pringle was eventually able to prove that an interrogating officer had
written down his alleged confession before any interrogation had actually taken
place. He said that in May 1995, “the case was quashed by the court of criminal
appeal on the grounds that my conviction was unsafe and unsatisfactory.”
Ms. Jacobs, who was born in Rockway, Queens, and grew up in Elmont, N.Y., was
living in Los Angeles at the time she met Mr. Pringle. She made an effort to
remain his long-distance friend, saying she found him to be “a very honorable
man.”
6 months after they met, Mr. Pringle invited Ms. Jacobs back to Ireland, this
time to give a talk during a local concert he arranged in Galway.
“During that visit, we fell in love,” Ms. Jacobs said.
“We didn’t just share a past,” she added. “We had a vision for a future.”
(source: New York Times)
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