February 16
NEVADA:
Nevada lawmakers introduce bill to end death penalty
Nevada lawmakers introduced legislation Friday that would abolish the death
penalty in the state.
20 states have abolished or overturned the death penalty, while Colorado,
Pennsylvania and Oregon have a gubernatorial moratorium on capital punishment,
according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Where the death penalty has been abolished or overturned:
Alaska
Connecticut
Delaware
Hawaii
Illinois
Iowa
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Dakota
Rhode Island
Vermont
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)
CALIFORNIA:
Brothers Charged With Murder, Possibly Face Death Penalty in Killing of Missing
Teen Aranda Briones: DA
An arraignment for two brothers accused of killing a missing Moreno Valley
teenager was postponed on Friday.
Owen Skyler Shover, 18, and Gary Anthony Shover, 21, have been charged with
murder in the slaying of 16-year-old Aranda Briones, whose body still has not
been found, the Riverside County District Attorney's Office said.
The two young men allegedly "killed the victim while lying in wait," according
to the charging document.
The special circumstance allegation makes the defendants eligible for the death
penalty, although a decision whether to seek a death sentence will be decided
later by DA Mike Hestrin, prosecutors said.
Their arraignments have been continued to March 1.
Owen Shover was apparently the last person to see Briones before she
disappeared on Jan. 13, according to authorities. Shover told police he dropped
her off at a park in Moreno Valley that evening and saw her get into another
vehicle before he left.
However, after reviewing surveillance cameras in the area, investigators were
unable to find any video corroborating the 18-year-old's account, according to
the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
Sheriff's officials said there is evidence indicating Briones was killed.
The brothers were interviewed numerous times before being arrested at their
home in Hesperia on Monday night, according to the Sheriff's Department.
Both are being held without bail, inmate records showed.
Authorities are still searching for the missing teen's body, and anyone with
information is encouraged to call Riverside County Central Homicide
Investigator Dickey at 951-955-2777 or Moreno Valley police Investigator
Drexler at 951-486-6700.
(source: KTLA news)
************************
He’s on California’s Death Row, But Demetrius Howard Never Killed Anyone
A February 4, 2019 article in the criminal justice newsletter, The Appeal,
features the case of Demetrius Howard, a California prisoner sentenced to death
for a crime in which he didn’t kill anyone. Howard was sentenced to death in
1995 for his participation in a robbery in which another man, Mitchell Funches,
shot and killed Sherry Collins. Howard was never accused of firing a shot and
he has consistently maintained that he neither expected nor intended that
anyone would be killed. But under California’s felony murder law, he was
eligible for the death penalty because he participated in the robbery. In a
letter to The Appeal, Howard wrote, “I am no saint or some angel. I’ve made my
share of wrongs, but I haven’t killed no one [or] told anyone to kill someone.”
California is one of 20 states that allow the execution of defendants who
neither killed nor intended that a killing take place. The controversial
practice has attracted the most attention in the state of Texas, where at least
six prisoners have been executed despite undisputed evidence that they were not
involved in the killing itself. In Howard’s case, the man who actually shot
Collins, Mitchell Funches, received a sentence of life without parole when the
jury in his trial could not reach a unanimous decision on whether to sentence
him to life or death. In 2018, California passed a law that narrowed the scope
of the felony murder law, making defendants liable for murder only if they were
the killer, solicited the killer, or acted with reckless indifference to human
life. The change is retroactive, but does not apply to Howard because the jury
found that he had “acted with reckless indifference to human life” before it
sentenced him to death.
Howard’s death sentence is also a by-product of outlier death-penalty practices
in San Bernardino County. San Bernardino is 1 of 5 Southern California counties
that imposed more death sentences between 2010 and 2015 than 99.5% of U.S.
counties, earning the region the nickname “the new death belt.” In 1993,
shortly before Howard was sentenced to death, there were 10 active capital
trials in the county, and then-District Attorney Dennis Kottmeier said he was
considering seeking it in 2 other cases. At the time, Kottmeier told the San
Bernardino County Sun, “That’s higher than I’ve ever seen it. At any given time
in the past the number pending seemed to be about 6.” He attributed the high
number of capital cases to a high rate of violent crime, as well as state laws
passed in 1990 and 1993 that expanded the list of death-eligible crimes. The
California Attorney General’s 2017 report, Homicide in California, shows that
despite its disproportionate pursuit of capital punishment, San Bernardino’s
higher-than-average murder rate has remained the same from 1997 to 2017, while
murder rates have declined statewide and in many of California counties during
that period.
(source: Death Penalty Information Center)
WASHINGTON:
Washington Senate passes death penalty repeal bill
The Washington Senate on Friday approved a measure that would repeal the death
penalty, just months after the state’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down
capital punishment as arbitrary and racially biased.
The measure passed on a 28-19 vote, and would make that court ruling permanent
by removing capital punishment as a sentencing option for aggravated murder and
mandating instead a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.
The bill now heads to the House for consideration, and Gov. Jay Inslee has said
he will sign it if it makes it to his desk.
Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, and a governor-imposed
moratorium has blocked its use since 2014. But the court’s October ruling
eliminated it entirely, converting the sentences for the state’s 8 death row
inmates to life in prison without release.
The court did not rule out the possibility that the Legislature could come up
with another manner of imposing death sentences that would be constitutional,
which led Attorney General Bob Ferguson to request legislation to change state
law.
Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, the bill’s sponsor, said that the
governor and court had already taken a position on the death penalty and that
it was time for the Legislature to do the same.
“It is time to close the chapter on this particular policy in a way that is
respectful of the judicial process that has embarked for so many years and it’s
also respectful of the civil dialogue that the American people have embraced,”
he said.
With last year’s court ruling, the death penalty has been overturned or
abolished in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and several states are
considering measures this year. An additional 3 states — Oregon, Colorado and
Pennsylvania — currently have moratoriums.
The concerns cited in those states have ranged from procedural matters, such as
the information provided to sentencing jurors in New York, to worries about
executing an innocent person or racial and other disparities in who is
sentenced to death, as was the case in Washington. A statistical analysis by
University of Washington sociologists showed that although prosecutors were not
more likely to seek the execution of black defendants, juries were about 4
times more likely to sentence black defendants to death.
Senators opposed to the measure argued that the death penalty should be
retained for the most heinous cases, and as a tool for prosecutors to use to
gain information about other victims.
“As a society, if we value innocent human life, we need to preserve the
ultimate message to those who have taken it or might take it,” said Republican
Sen. Steve O’Ban of University Place.
There have been 78 inmates, all men, put to death in Washington state since
1904. The most recent execution in the state came in 2010, when Cal Coburn
Brown died by lethal injection for the 1991 murder of a Seattle-area woman.
(source: Seattle Times)
********************
State Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional----None of Washington’s death
row inmates are from Clark County. The last Clark County inmate to be executed
was child killer Westley Allan Dodd, who was hanged on Jan. 5, 1993.
The state Senate on Friday approved a measure that would repeal the death
penalty, just months after the state’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down
capital punishment as arbitrary and racially biased.
The measure passed on a 28-19 vote, and would make that court ruling permanent
by removing capital punishment as a sentencing option for aggravated murder and
mandating instead a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.
The bill now heads to the House for consideration, and Gov. Jay Inslee has said
he will sign it if it makes it to his desk.
Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, and a governor-imposed
moratorium has blocked its use since 2014. But the court’s October ruling
eliminated it entirely, converting the sentences for the state’s eight death
row inmates to life in prison without release.
The court did not rule out the possibility that the Legislature could come up
with another manner of imposing death sentences that would be constitutional,
which led Attorney General Bob Ferguson to request legislation to change state
law.
Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, the bill’s sponsor, said that the
governor and court had already taken a position on the death penalty and that
it was time for the Legislature to do the same.
“It is time to close the chapter on this particular policy in a way that is
respectful of the judicial process that has embarked for so many years and it’s
also respectful of the civil dialogue that the American people have embraced,”
he said.
With last year’s court ruling, the death penalty has been overturned or
abolished in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and several states are
considering measures this year. An additional three states — Oregon, Colorado
and Pennsylvania — currently have moratoriums.
The concerns cited in those states have ranged from procedural matters, such as
the information provided to sentencing jurors in New York, to worries about
executing an innocent person or racial and other disparities in who is
sentenced to death, as was the case in Washington. A statistical analysis by
University of Washington sociologists showed that although prosecutors were not
more likely to seek the execution of black defendants, juries were about four
times more likely to sentence black defendants to death.
Senators opposed to the measure argued that the death penalty should be
retained for the most heinous cases, and as a tool for prosecutors to use to
gain information about other victims.
“As a society, if we value innocent human life, we need to preserve the
ultimate message to those who have taken it or might take it,” said Republican
Sen. Steve O’Ban of University Place.
There have been 78 inmates, all men, put to death in Washington since 1904. The
most recent execution in the state came in 2010, when Cal Coburn Brown died by
lethal injection for the 1991 murder of a Seattle-area woman.
(source: The Columbian)
******************************
WA’s death penalty may be unconstitutional, but it’s not dead — yet----Capital
punishment has been struck down before, but has always returned. This time
could be different.
Back in October, Washington state made international headlines when the state
Supreme Court declared the state’s application of the death penalty was
unconstitutional. Everyone from The New York Times to the BBC said the death
penalty was effectively over in Washington state, which would make it the 20th
state to abolish it.
Yet the Washington state Legislature is in the midst of considering new
legislation intended to eliminate the death penalty. On Friday, state senators
passed Senate Bill 5339 by a 28-19 vote. The bill will head to the House next.
Gov. Jay Inslee has already indicated he will sign the bill when and if it
makes it to his desk.
But given the state Supreme Court’s decision, one might wonder why additional
legislation is even necessary.
In January, at the request of Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson,
Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, introduced legislation that would remove the
death penalty statute entirely. This is the third time Ferguson has proposed
such legislation. The proposed bill specifies a particular punishment for
aggravated first degree murder: life imprisonment without the possibility of
release or parole.
Ferguson and other advocates of doing away with government-sponsored executions
say new legislation is required because the state Supreme Court never ruled
that the death penalty was inherently unconstitutional. It instead found that
the way the death penalty was applied in the state was unconstitutional.
Specifically, judges concluded it was “imposed in an arbitrary and racially
based manner.”
Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst added, however: “We leave open the possibility
that the Legislature may enact a ‘carefully drafted’ statute to impose capital
punishment in this state, but it cannot create a system that offends
constitutional rights.”
Joe Sprague is executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference,
the public policy arm of the Catholic Church in the state, which advocates for
the “sanctity of human life.” He acknowledges that what the state Supreme Court
did “was very powerful and nothing should take away from their action.” But, he
says, “the underlying law that was found to be unconstitutional is still
there.”
Sprague says he and many of the other approximately 800,000 Catholics in the
state don’t want to leave open the possibility that the death penalty law could
be amended somehow to conform to the court’s demands.
Hugh Spitzer, a law professor at the University of Washington, says although
it’s difficult to imagine how the death penalty could be applied in a racially
unbiased way in today’s world, “the court’s decision was not absolute.”
“They probably just want to clean things up and put the nail in the coffin, so
to speak,” Spitzer says.
If the state leaves the law on the books, there is a chance that those who
believe in the death penalty could put an initiative on the ballot in an
attempt to revive executions in the state. Or the practice could be revived
through legislation, as was stated in the court’s decision.
A bill attempting to do just that had been introduced by Sen. Keith Wagoner,
R-Sedro-Woolley. That bill specifies that a prisoner charged with aggravated
first-degree murder could be sentenced to the death penalty. The bill is named
after Jayme Biendl, a prison guard at the Monroe Correctional Complex, who was
strangled in 2011 by an inmate serving a sentence of life in prison without the
possibility of release or parole. The bill, however, is no longer under
consideration.
There is at least 1 other way the death penalty could come back to life.
King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg calls statutes that stay on the
books after they’ve been found unconstitutional “Zombie Laws.” In a letter to
the Senate earlier this month, Satterberg cited the example of state statutes
that ban abortions, which still exist in 10 states, despite Roe v. Wade, the
Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
So-called Zombie Laws, Statterberg notes, “could come back to life in the event
that a later court reverses itself and finds the law constitutional.”
Significantly, advocates point out that this is the fourth time the court has
found Washington’s death penalty law unconstitutional. Each time, the
Legislature has revived the death penalty by attempting to address its
problems.
The court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 in the wake of a
U.S. Supreme Court decision that found it was arbitrarily imposed, in 1979
after an initiative had reinstated the death penalty, and again in 1981, when
the court pointed out defendants could escape the punishment simply by pleading
guilty, violating “a defendant’s constitutional rights to plead not guilty and
demand a jury trial.”
Death-penalty opponents say now is the time to vote for a “clean repeal” and
end the “unproductive cycle.”
The study that killed the death penalty in Washington
Washington state Supreme Court rules death penalty is "arbitrary" and "racially
biased." An initiative should restore the death penalty — no exceptions allowed
— for those who murder children in particularly cruel manner.
In addition to the Supreme Court’s actions, public support for the death
penalty in Washington state has typically been weak. The last execution in
Washington state was carried out in 2010. A lethal injection was used to kill
Cal Coburn Brown for the 1991 murder of a Seattle woman. Four years later, Gov.
Jay Inslee declared a moratorium on capital punishment.
Last year, the Northwest Progressive Institute unveiled a poll that showed a
majority of Washingtonians would rather send convicted murderers to prison for
life than execute them. In the survey, 69 % of respondents surveyed said they
preferred 1 of 3 life-in-prison alternatives to just 24 % who said they
preferred the death penalty. 8 % said they were not sure.
"Washingtonians don’t need to be convinced that replacing the death penalty
with life-in-prison alternatives makes sense,” said Andrew Villeneuve,
executive director of Northwest Progressive Institute. “It’s what they already
believe."
Villeneuve also argues that getting rid of unenforceable laws is a habit
legislators should embrace.
Although the path to abolishing the death penalty in Washington state might
seem clumsy to some, other states have followed the same pattern. North Dakota
and Rhode Island both passed legislation to repeal the death penalty after a
court declared it unconstitutional.
“Now that the law is unenforceable, it serves no purpose other than to confuse
Washingtonians about the state of the law,” Ferguson said. “Removing
unconstitutional laws from the books shows proper respect for the judiciary and
the rule of law. Letting unenforceable laws linger, especially on matters of
such importance, will only serve to confuse the public.”
“I’m hopeful and optimistic that they'll be able to move it forward,” Sen.
Carlyle says of the bill. “It is absolutely essential that we close this
chapter.”
(source: crosscut.com)
USA:
Barbaric and Excessive: 2 Books on Punishment in the United States
ON OCTOBER 11, 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the state’s
use of the death penalty due to overwhelming evidence of racial bias. Key
players, including the state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Governor Jay
Inslee, praised this move as a distinction of humaneness. Ferguson went so far
as to assure us, “We should act quickly to remove the death penalty from state
law once and for all. Next session, I will again propose legislation repealing
the death penalty, replacing it with life in prison without the possibility of
parole.”
Washington is now the 20th state to overturn the death penalty, a trend no
doubt tied to the difficulty of obtaining pharmaceuticals necessary for lethal
injection. Whether it’s pharmaceutical companies’ noncompliance or the awakened
humanity of the courts, the death penalty is increasingly unpopular today.
This, however, does not mean that the United States’s penchant for severe
punishment is any less strong or in force right now.
Bob Ferguson’s proclamation for a reformed criminal justice system, where life
in prison without parole replaces the death penalty, only proves how far the
imagination will stretch for some. 1 in 7 people in prison today are serving a
life sentence, which is a total of more than 200,000. Some of these prisoners
are from the 3 strikes law that nailed many nonviolent drug offenders. In any
other developed nation, this would be considered inhumane and absurd. 2 new
books echo this sentiment. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, authors of The Meaning
of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, and Alisa Roth, author of
Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, argue that the US
criminal justice system metes out excessive punishment at the expense of public
safety and the humanity of those caught within its web. The Meaning of Life
focuses on the problem of life sentences bloating the prison system and
violating human rights, while Insane addresses mental illness and why jails and
prisons have become the de facto institution for those suffering from severe
mental illness. Both books expose grave injustices in a broken system and
advance the discussion by adding new insights addressing reform, not just for
nonviolent drug offenders, but for all prisoners.
Mauer — executive director of The Sentencing Project — and his co-author Nellis
— a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project —would reject Bob Ferguson’s quick
response to replace the death penalty with life without parole in Washington
state. They cite racism as a prevailing factor in how we punish, which will not
simply go away when we exchange one severe punishment for another. According to
Mauer and Ellis, two-thirds of the 200,000 prisoners serving life sentences are
people of color. Public perceptions — not always based in reality — are well
known to influence political platforms that determine policy, which has
historically resulted in the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws and Bill Clinton’s 1994
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that mandated life sentences
after “three strikes,” overwhelmingly tipping the scale toward locking up young
black men and women. Mauer and Ellis find that “whites hold more punitive
beliefs than other racial groups. To the extent that whites view certain crimes
as ‘black crimes,’ their support for harsh punishment increases.” Whites also
overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color up to 20 to
30 percent. As a result of this biased overestimation and an overzealous
commitment to punishment, demands for public safety are entrenched in
retributive, vengeful gains over restorative, forgiving measures that may have
better overall outcomes for society.
Mauer and Nellis’s central argument, based on research and case studies, rests
on the overuse and excessiveness of the life sentence, which they claim is
racially targeted and does not result in public safety returns. Their
conclusion follows the logic that if the overall goal of the prison system is
to prevent crime and to rehabilitate prisoners then the widespread use of life
sentencing is a step away from this goal. Some of Mauer and Nellis’s most
compelling evidence comes from their research on the diminishing returns of
life sentencing. They find that prisoners age out of crime, noting that
prisoners are “much less of a public safety risk at the age of forty than they
were at twenty.” This decrease even holds for “individuals who are frequent
offenders.” The peak age for robbery is 19 and the peak age for murder is 20,
with these rates more than halved by the time an individual reaches their early
30s. One explanation for this is maturity. People grow up and develop
responsibilities that can change the course of their lives. Another
explanation, unsurprisingly, is stable employment. With this information, we
can assume that prisoners doing over 20 years for crimes they are not likely to
ever commit again is a waste of resources and a waste of a life.
Another important takeaway from Mauer and Nellis’s book is that there are more
effective methods for deterring crime than long-term imprisonment. So why not
implement these other methods? For one, cultural attitudes toward punishment
need to move beyond a racial mythos that supports more severe consequences for
black and Latinx people. Attitudes shift policy. According to Mauer and Ellis
“significant policy change” has occurred at the state level since 2000 because
of outside pressure to reform. They note, “twenty-nine states have enacted some
type of reform to their mandatory sentencing policies, and 10 states have
reduced their prison population by at least 15 percent.” These gains may not be
enough to overhaul a system premised on social control, but they are indeed a
sign that punishment in the 21st century is under scrutiny.
Mauer and Ellis ask in earnest, “At what point does punishment become
barbaric?” This question is the premise for Alisa Roth’s findings in Insane:
America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, an engrossing, unsettling
account of how the US criminal justice system deals with mental illness. Her
book is the culmination of meticulous research into the trenches of the
criminal justice system, where those most in need of mental health services are
also those most likely to end up incarcerated in jails and prisons. Most
poignant and telling of the criminal justice system’s failures to mitigate
mental illness are the several profiles that Roth includes of people caught
within the harmful cycle of the system. Take Bryan Sanderson, a former
firefighter, who suffers from manic depression and psychosis, which led him to
make impromptu road trips across the country with little to no money. His
illness cost him his home, his wife, and his mind. His first arrest over a
misdemeanor for streaking in an elevator and ostensibly resisting his arrest
spiraled into an unmitigated horror that has ended in his self-inflicted
blindness. As Roth documents, Sanderson’s level of delusion and disorientation
only escalated during his first interaction with the police, which led to
countless other interactions with the criminal justice system. Roth writes
about Sanderson’s first arrest:
When the deputies handcuffed him, he got terrified and angry. He tried to fight
back, which made him seem unruly and dangerous. […] In both cases the offensive
took his behavior as reason enough to treat him more harshly, treatment that in
turn aggravated his response. […] For a person with symptoms of mental illness,
it can be nearly impossible to obey the rules. To corrections officers trying
to maintain order, though, that may come across as insubordination, not a
response to fear or confusion: as the officers escalate their own response, the
prisoner is simply less likely to do what he is told.
This scenario is familiar and the backstory to many police shootings.
To be mentally ill and without access to meaningful and consistent services for
help — lacking in this nation — overwhelmingly means you will wind up in jail
or dead, which was the case for 18-year-old Keith Vidal: shot dead by the
police when all his mother wanted was for the police to help calm down her
erratic and scared son. Most often when police come into contact with someone
suffering bouts of psychosis, the situation gets worse, as Roth demonstrates
with ample evidence. Edgar Coleman, a Minneapolis resident who once had a
future as an NFL player and a career as a teacher, is one example among many.
He was arrested 200 times between 1996 and 2012 and was often picked up for
“marginal offenses.” Rather than helping, his stints of incarceration have made
his “illness much worse.”
We as a society must develop alternatives that prevent the interaction between
police and a severely mentally ill person that often leads to their
imprisonment. This vicious cycle of incarceration and even death has everything
to do with society’s disdain for and neglect of those with severe mental
illness. With regards to the number of mentally ill people on death row, Roth
concludes that this is “visceral proof of our ambivalence, or worse, our
antipathy toward people with severe mental illness […] and it speaks to our
culture’s collective fear we have of people with mental illness: they will
somehow attack us personally.”
Rather than develop more effective and sustainable methods of treating the
severely mentally ill, we have fallen toward severity and even barbarity. Roth
writes extensively about her time observing mental health units in the Los
Angeles County Jail, which has become a de facto psych ward with 25 % of male
prisoners needing mental health care and 40 percent of female prisoners. Roth
rightly notes that “[j]ails and prisons are dehumanizing places.” This, after
all her finely attuned research, seems an understatement.
Roth attempts to uncover a bit of hope, though, in an otherwise bleak system
where effective mental health services are circumvented by the conditions of
incarceration that lead to more violence, harmful conditions of solitary
confinement, and overmedication. She writes about High Observation Units in
jails that specifically separate and house prisoners dealing with severe mental
illness, community mental health centers that try to intercept jail time, and
diversion courts, which all attempt to recognize the challenges and differences
posed by mental illness. This still is not enough to sustain the blow caused by
a bloated, powerful, and violent prison system.
Roth, Mauer, and Ellis expose the excessive nature of punishment in the
criminal justice system and how this cripples the most vulnerable in the United
States. Even more significant, these books open a dialogue for including
violent offenders in prison reform efforts. After all, it’s violent offenders
who are languishing in prison for life. It’s violent offenders who are wiping
feces on the walls in prisons, rejecting their meds, and are being locked up in
solitary because of an untreated mental illness. This is an uncomfortable truth
that prison reformers must account for in their attempts to improve a broken
system where, more likely than not, a person is locked up for a violent
offense. There will be no effective prison reform unless we confront and
challenge a system that locks up violent offenders for far too long at an
unseemly rate.
Notably, the current administration under Trump pushed for sentencing reform
with the First Step Act, which reduces mandatory minimums and lowers sentencing
(to 25 years) for nonviolent three strike offenders in federal prisons, a
direct yet feeble backhand at former president Bill Clinton. This “first step”
still does not address the issues at the core of Mauer, Ellis, and Roth’s pleas
for reform, never mind the other harmful surveillance “reforms” the act
proposes.
The prisoner accounts that Mauer, Ellis, and Roth tell lay bare the
consequences of a system that illogically sees value and futurity in locking up
generations of people for life. Both books propose compelling policy and
alternatives to prison, and both move an important discourse on prison reform
forward in a time when both sides of the political aisle are poised to act.
Mauer and Ellis’s proposal for a 20-year sentence cap, thoroughly outlined and
argued, and Roth’s impassioned plea to find new ways of treating people with
mental illness do not fall on deaf ears as much as they remain suspended in an
echo chamber. A system premised on the social control of poor people will not
simply get better for those it targets, as time has proven.
But these books do add to a discourse of prison reform that we should not be
ready to forfeit. As they demonstrate, for those of us who want meaningful
change, it’s a matter of not capitulating to tired narratives that barter
nonviolent offenses for a sliver of humanity in an inhumane system. For AG Bob
Ferguson, a greater good might be “prison for life without the possibility of
parole” over capital punishment, but this will continue to sink us further into
the hell that we have made of prison. The perspective that capital punishment
is inhumane whereas 200,000 prisoners in for life is a viable improvement is
just as absurd as believing prison provides adequate mental health services. If
anything, these books at least stridently remind us that change won’t come
until we see all prisoners as humans.
(source: Sabrina Alli is a writer, activist, and educator living in Brooklyn,
New York. Her work has been published in The New Inquiry and
Guernica----lareviewofbooks.org)
******************
Trump hails China’s use of death penalty for drug dealers
President Donald Trump on Friday praised China’s use of capital punishment for
drug dealers, suggesting that the United States would deal better with
narcotics trafficking if it put offenders to death.
In China, drug dealers get “a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal drug
dealer gets a thing called ‘how about a fine?'” Trump told reporters at the
White House.
“So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem.
You can end it a lot faster than you think.”
It is not the first time that Trump has advocated capital punishment for drug
related crimes.
Last March, he suggested the United States could bring in the death penalty for
drug dealers.
Officials indicated there would be no attempt to change the law to make the
death penalty mandatory for trafficking alone, a move that would could well run
afoul of Supreme Court rulings on proportional punishment.
In those rulings, the high court suggested that nothing other than murder can
be considered a capital offense.
(source: journalducameroun.com)
********************
DeWitt Chili's double homicide suspect now eligible for the death
penalty----Prosecutors pursuing death penalty for DeWitt Chili's homicide
suspect
The man accused of shooting and killing 2 inside a DeWitt Chili's back in
September is now facing the death penalty after being charged in federal court
on Friday.
William Wood Jr is accused of fatally shooting 2 employees inside the
restaurant over what police say was a robbery.
Onondaga County District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick says Wood meant to shoot
others inside the restaurant, but his gun appeared to have jammed.
He has been charged federally with interference with commerce by robbery, use
of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, and murder.
Wood was already facing life in prison without parole if convicted.
The federal indictment brings him one step closer to possibly being sentenced
with the death penalty.
The death penalty is not allowed in New York State and can not be set as a
sentence by county or state judges, which is why federal prosecutors would be
involved.
The U.S. Attorney's Office now decides if they want to pursue the death
penalty.
If the U.S. Attorney's Office approves it, the case would go forward for
review.
The death penalty was last considered in New York in the case of David Renz in
2013, who was convicted of murdering a Liverpool school librarian and raping a
10-year-old girl after abducting them in the parking lot of Great Northern
Mall.
4 others have been charged for their involvement in the crime.
(source: WSYR TV news)
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