February 23
TEXAS:
‘Violent death’: Man accused of killing 2-year-old daughter with hammer
A Texas man who is charged in the "violent death" of his 2-year-old daughter
appeared in court this week, KHOU reported.
Yovahnis Roque has been charged with capital murder after allegedly killing his
daughter with a hammer.
During his court appearance he said the government made him do it and “this is
fake, it’s all fake.”
Roque could face life in prison or the death penalty in the case.
Orange Police Captain Robert Enmon described the murder as the “most gruesome”
case he had seen in 29 years.
When officers arrived at the scene they found Roque completely naked and
covered in blood. Police found his daughter’s body in a bedroom closet.
(source: Fox News)
********************
Meet Big Law Attorneys Who Worked to Block Texas Execution----Norton Rose
Fulbright Houston partners Anne Rodgers and Warren Huang teamed with associate
Nicole Lynn and Dallas counterpart Philip Tarpley to provide pro bono
representation.
A group of Texas attorneys teamed with one of the biggest names at Skadden,
Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in a fight to block the execution of Bobby Moore, a
59-year-old man whose death-penalty case hinges on whether he is intellectually
disabled and therefore cannot be executed.
Lawyers from Norton Rose Fulbright provided pro bono representation, assisting
Skadden litigation partner Cliff Sloan in clinching a major victory for Moore
Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court.
On the case are Norton Rose Houston partners Anne Rodgers and Warren Huang, who
teamed with associate Nicole Lynn and Dallas counterpart Philip Tarpley for the
case that has captured national attention.
Rodgers has been with the firm’s Houston office since 1990, handling a national
and international practice focused on complex and novel commercial matters. Her
practice includes class actions, derivative suits, securities fraud, business
torts and contracts.
Huang handles appeals at federal at state levels, while Lynn, a former Wall
Street analyst, specializes in representing financial institutions. Tarpley is
a member of Norton Rose’s commercial litigation, antitrust and competition
group, where he handles commercial disputes and arbitrations.
The team celebrated the high court’s decision.
“We greatly appreciate the important ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are
very pleased that justice will be done for Bobby Moore,” said Sloan, counsel of
record for Moore.
The high court, which in 2002 barred execution of mentally disabled people,
this week issued a 6-3 per curiam decision siding with Moore for the second
time, and disagreeing with the standards the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
used to determine intellectual disability.
Moore has spent about 39 years on death row for shooting elderly store clerk
James McCarble during an armed robbery in Houston in 1980. But court records
show a litany of social and mental difficulties, including an inability to
perform basic math or understand time or the days of the week.
His attorneys in Moore v. Texas have long argued that Moore has adaptive
deficits and limited intellectual functioning, urging the state to spare his
life.
Moore has had some powerful allies along the way.
In 2018, the American Bar Association filed an amicus brief arguing that the
Texas appellate court had ignored the U.S. Supreme Court mandate. It urged the
high court to reverse the state appellate panel.
And then late last year a new twist: Prosecutors sided with Moore, as the
Harris County District Attorney’s Office, under District Attorney Kim Ogg,
conceded he suffered a mental disability. Before the latest ruling, the Texas
Attorney General’s Office stepped in to pursue the death sentence.
(source: Texas Lawyer)
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
Killing people who kill people is wrong
You know that support for the death penalty in New Hampshire is eroding fast
when the best that capital punishment proponents can do is to trot out Kelly
Ayotte for another round of fearmongering and flimflammery.
Ayotte is the former 1-term U.S. senator who, as New Hampshire’s attorney
general, was the lead prosecutor in the case of Michael Addison. Addison shot
and killed Manchester police officer Michael Briggs in 2006. He was convicted
and sentenced to death in 2008. Ayotte made her role in that case a centerpiece
of her 2010 campaign for Senate. (Significantly, emails from 2006 between
Ayotte and a campaign strategist appeared to show her considering the political
implications of the case for her.)
On Tuesday, Ayotte addressed the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety
Committee, which was considering a bill, HB 455, that would end capital
punishment in New Hampshire.
“If you repeal the death penalty, I want you to understand that Michael
Addison’s sentence will be commuted to life without parole, which would not be
just and would send the wrong message to criminals when it comes to killing
police officers in the state of New Hampshire,” she said.
Hogwash. First, the bill as written would not apply to Addison. Second, as
attorney general, Ayotte was an officer of the justice system, not the
vengeance system. Third, life without parole would be the very definition of
justice: Those convicted of heinous crimes would be forced to carry the weight
of their transgressions for the rest of their days — and, as we have suggested
before, perhaps come to a moral awakening, an acceptance of awful
responsibility. Finally, how can Ayotte support her assertion that the threat
of punishment would send a “message to criminals”?
She can’t, of course. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows no correlation
between the aggressive application of capital punishment and lower homicide
rates, and survey after survey — of the public, of the nation’s leading
criminologists, of more than 30 years of research on the issue — has concluded
that the death penalty should not be considered an effective deterrent to
crime.
Then there’s the malign influence of human error, faulty procedures, bias,
dishonesty and politics that has led to more than 160 people being wrongly
convicted of capital crimes since 1972. Even more horrifying, serious questions
have been raised about more than a dozen executions carried out since 1989.
Botched executions bring medieval barbarism to the modern death chamber and
traumatize all involved — corrections officials, doctors, nurses, family
members and other witnesses. It’s even a pocketbook issue: One estimate put the
cost of the Addison case to New Hampshire taxpayers at $5.5 million and
counting, compared with $1.4 million for 40 years of incarceration.
New Hampshire is the last state in New England with a capital punishment law
still on the books. A repeal effort failed in 2000 when it was vetoed by
then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. 6 months ago, Republican Gov. Chris
Sununu vetoed a measure identical to the one now being considered, and he has
indicated that he will do so again. The difference: Last year’s measure passed
when the House and the Senate were both were controlled by Republicans, and the
effort to override Sununu’s veto fell just two votes short in the Senate. This
year, Democrats have a 14-10 majority in the Senate and a 223-167 majority in
the House. They will still need substantial Republican support to override a
veto, but that seems more likely than ever. According to Hannah Cox of
Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, Republican support for
repealing the death penalty has grown dramatically since 2000. “A verdict is
taking shape across the nation,” Cox wrote last week on Newsmax.com,
“conservatives have turned against the death penalty.”
Those conservatives include Dan Passen, chair of New Hampshire College
Republicans, who tweeted on Tuesday, “There are so many reasons to overturn the
death penalty … a moral reason, a small government reason, a Christian reason,
a statistical reason, a fiscal reason, a pro-life reason. ...”
Indeed.
On Wednesday, the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee voted,
11-6, to recommend repeal. The bill now moves to the full House and a vote is
scheduled for March. Advocates of repeal, who far outnumbered death penalty
supporters at Tuesday’s hearing, believe they have the votes needed to override
a Sununu veto. At a fundraiser in Hanover last month organized by the New
Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, state Sen. Martha Hennessey,
D-Hanover, while advocating caution, told Valley News correspondent Matt Golec,
“I think we do have the numbers.”
Let’s hope she’s right. It is long past time that New Hampshire stop
threatening to kill people who kill people to show that killing people is
wrong.
(source: Editorial, Valley News)
PENNSYLVANIA:
ACLU asks Pa. Supreme Court to declare the death penalty unconstitutional
The Pennsylvania branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has asked the
state’s highest court to declare the Keystone State’s death penalty statute
unconstitutional, arguing that it violates equal protection provisions because
of “the vast disparities across the commonwealth in the quality of
representation for capital case defendants who are unable to pay.”
Right now, Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that does not provide
state funding for indigent defendants, which means the costs fall back on
counties, “resulting in the highest disparity in capital sentences between
counties of any state in the country,” the ACLU-PA said in a statement Friday.
“The burden of these disparities falls disproportionately on the state’s most
vulnerable populations, particularly people of color and the poor,” the ACLU-PA
observed in its statement. “People of color make up more than half of the
state’s death row population. Stories in the brief include those of defendants
who were represented by lawyers who were drunk, extremely overburdened, or
otherwise ill-equipped to defend capital cases.”
The request was filed as a friend of the court brief in a case now before the
high court’s eastern district in Philadelphia.
According to the ACLU-PA, more than 1/3 of the death sentences imposed since
the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978 have been reversed because of
poor representation. Despite being highlighted as a problem for decades, the
issue has not been addressed, the group said.
“Pennsylvania’s condemned prisoners have not received the death penalty for
committing the most heinous crimes or for being the most culpable offenders,
but because they had deplorable representation,” the brief reads.
Pennsylvania has not executed a condemned prisoner since 1999. In 2015,
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium on executions until a study
commission returned its findings on the state of capital punishment in
Pennsylvania.
That panel eventually found the the death penalty in Pennsylvania is
unnecessarily expensive, unevenly applied, and unfairly influenced by such
factors as geography.
“The Legislature has failed to address the problems with capital punishment in
Pennsylvania, despite the recommendations of every group that has ever looked
at it,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU-PA. “We can’t wait
for the Legislature to fix this unconstitutional system. The court needs to
act.”
Given the “well-documented flaws with the death penalty nationwide — from
racial bias to arbitrary application, and the execution of innocent people —
it’s time for the United States to abolish it,” Anna Arceneaux, senior staff
attorney for the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said.
(source: penncapital-star.com)
********************
Man found guilty in double homicide case charged with another killing
A man found guilty in a double murder last week has been charged with a third
slaying in Williamsport.
Joseph Sentore Coleman Jr., 37, of Williamsport, was arraigned Friday on
charges stemming from the 2016 murder of Christopher Wilkins, 27, of
Philadelphia.
As he was being led from police headquarters he proclaimed his innocence and
accused Agent Trent Peacock of "fabricating everything."
James Calvin Rooks, 27, of Williamsport, was arraigned Thursday on the same
charges. Both are jailed without bail.
Wilkins was found Aug. 30, 2016, lying in a pool of blood in an apartment in
the 500 block of Park Avenue with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
The arrest affidavit alleges Coleman twice admitted to another individual he
had shot someone on Park Avenue.
The motive in the Wilkins killing, according to police, was robbery, the same
as in the case in which Coleman last Friday was found guilty of 2 counts of
2nd-degree murder and related charges.
Wilkins was selling heroin and cocaine from the apartment and the day he was
killed had drugs, cash and multiple cell phones, police said.
Information obtained during the investigation of the Oct. 31, 2016 double
homicide on Poplar Street helped solve the Wilkins killing, Peacock said.
That included learning the identity of the woman driving a Dodge Dart seen
leaving the Park Avenue area the day of the homicide. Coleman and Rooks were 2
of its occupants, police say in charging documents.
The woman has cooperated with investigators, as has another person in the
vehicle, identified by authorities only as JB. According to charging documents,
JB told police he owed a drug debt to Coleman that would be forgiven if he
robbed Wilkins.
He said he Rooks and Coleman were driven to the area of the Park Avenue
apartment, where he got out, checked that the back door was unlocked, and
returned to the car, police said. He said Coleman and Rooks, wearing masks and
with revolvers, entered the building and he heard a single gunshot as he walked
away, police said in an affidavit.
In addition to homicide, Coleman and Rooks are charged in the Wilkins case with
robbery, conspiracy to commit murder and robbery, illegal possession of a
firearm by a convicted felon, possessing a firearm with a license and
possession an instrument of crime.
Lycoming County District Attorney Kenneth A. Osokow said others could be
charged and, if Coleman is proven to be a shooter, Osokow could seek the death
penalty.
Coleman's conviction last week of the killings of Shane Wright, 25, and his
mother, Kristine Kibler, 50, would be considered an aggravating circumstance, a
requirement for imposing the death penalty.
The person accused of firing the fatal shots in that case, Jordan Adonis Rawls,
37, is awaiting trial. A 3rd person charged, Casey N. Wilson, pleaded guilty to
third-degree murder and testified against Coleman.
According to testimony in Coleman's trial, the three decided to rob Wright.
Wilson drove the other 2 to Poplar Street, went inside to make sure women and
children were upstairs and the back door was unlocked.
He returned to the car and Rawls and Coleman went inside. 2 shots were heard.
(source: pennlive.com)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Friend-of-the-Court Briefs Challenge Systemic Injustices in North Carolina
Death Penalty
2 amicus curiae briefs filed in the Racial Justice Act appeal of North Carolina
death-row prisoner Rayford Burke (pictured) are asking the North Carolina
Supreme Court to redress systemic problems in North Carolina’s administration
of its death penalty. One brief, filed by the New York-based NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), urges the court to provide Burke “the
opportunity to prove that racial bias impermissibly influenced jury selection
and infected his death sentence.” A 2nd brief, filed by the Promise of Justice
Initiative and 12 former judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials
from North Carolina, asks the court to declare the state’s death penalty
unconstitutional.
Burke was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of a man who he
said had testified falsely against him in a prior case. He had sought review of
his death sentence under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), enacted in
2009, which permitted prisoners to challenge their death sentences based on
statistical evidence of racial discrimination. However, before a hearing was
held on Burke’s Racial Justice Act claim, Cumberland County Superior Court
Judge Gregory Weeks conducted an extensive evidentiary hearing in the case of
Marcus Robinson and granted Robinson relief. In a 167-page opinion, Judge Weeks
reviewed an “exhaustive study” of North Carolina prosecutors’ strikes and
acceptances of more than 7,400 jurors in 173 North Carolina capital murder
trials between 1990 and 2010 and found “a wealth of evidence showing the
persistent, pervasive, and distorting role of race in jury selection throughout
North Carolina.” Weeks wrote that prosecutors struck black jurors at more than
twice the rate of all other jurors, with “remarkable consistency” in strike
rates in every county and across the entire period of time studied. Race, he
said, “was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in
decisions to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by
prosecutors when seeking to impose death sentences in capital cases” and he
concluded that the strikes were intentionally undertaken on the basis of race.
The legislature responded by repealing the RJA in 2013. Although four death-row
prisoners had received sentence reductions prior to repeal, Burke’s claim had
not yet been heard in court and his trial court ruled that the repeal had
extinguished any right he had to a hearing. The state courts also overturned
the grants of relief to the four prisoners. On March 2, 2018, the state supreme
court announced that it would hear RJA appeals from three of those prisoners,
as well as from Burke and another prisoner whose RJA claim had also been filed
but not heard.
The LDF brief sets forth evidence that prosecutors discriminated in Burke’s
case, including that prosecutors struck all African-American prospective
jurors, resulting in an all-white jury, and called Burke “a big black bull”
during the trial. It also catalogues what it describes as “a long and tragic
history of entrenched racial discrimination in the administration of North
Carolina’s death penalty.” In a statement accompanying the filing of the brief,
LDF Senior Deputy Director of Litigation Jin Hee Lee said: “Allowing racial
bias in Mr. Burke’s case to go unchallenged would be tantamount to condoning
racial bias in the administration of justice. The Court must affirm its
unwavering commitment to fundamental fairness and racial equality by affording
Mr. Burke the opportunity to prove that discrimination tainted his death
sentence,” said.
The Promise of Justice Initiative brief, joined by the former judges,
prosecutors, and law enforcement personnel, takes an even broader view, calling
on the court to strike down North Carolina’s death penalty as unconstitutional.
“The time has come to consider whether the system of capital punishment that
currently operates in North Carolina violates the evolving standards of
decency,” the brief states. Citing evidence that, in North Carolina, no one has
been executed since 2006 and the state has averaged fewer than one new death
sentence per year over the last seven years, the brief argues that “it is now
beyond dispute that use of the death penalty is unusual.” It also points to
recent court decisions striking down the death penalty in other states,
including Delaware in 2016 and Washington in 2018. “Courts have recognized that
the penalty is corrupted by arbitrariness, plagued by error and discrimination,
and unsupported by evidence that it deters,” it says.
(source: Death Penalty Information Center)
MISSISSIPPI:
Distant Jurors to Hear Trial for 8 Killings in Mississippi
A judge has set a February 2020 trial for a Mississippi man charged with
killing 8 people in May 2017.
Lincoln County Circuit Judge David Strong on Friday announced the trial date
for Willie Cory Godbolt. Strong also said jurors will be chosen from DeSoto
County, in far northern Mississippi, and they will be brought south to Lincoln
County to hear the case.
The 2 counties are about 250 miles (402 kilometers) apart.
Godbolt is accused of killing a Lincoln County sheriff's deputy, and 7 others
at 3 houses.
He has pleaded not guilty to 4 counts of capital murder, 4 counts of murder, 1
count of attempted murder, 2 counts of kidnapping and 1 count of armed robbery.
Godbolt is jailed without bail. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
(source: Associated Press)
SOUTH DAKOTA:
Man charged with murder in Yankton woman's death
Authorities say a Nebraska man has been charged with murder in connection with
the death of a Yankton woman whose body was found last November on the Santee
Sioux Indian Reservation.
Joseph Lloyd James, 47, has been charged with four counts of murder, according
to a release from the United States Attorney's Office for the District of
Nebraska.
While the release does not name a victim, James had previously been indicted on
arson charges by an Omaha grand jury who said he set fire to a car belonging to
Phyllis Hunhoff.
Hunhoff disappeared after visiting her mother in Utica on Nov. 4, and was found
3 days later on the Santee Sioux Indian Reservation. Her car had been burned,
and it appeared that attempts were made to set her body on fire.
Video evidence showed James getting out of Hunhoff's car in the early morning
of Nov. 5 and getting gas, and then several hours later pumping gas into a soda
bottle.
He then entered the gas station, telling an attendant that blood on his shirt
was due to him hitting a deer with his car.
Authorities said a gasoline-covered soda bottle was one of the items found in
Hunhoff's burned car, and the blood was determined to be Hunhoff's.
James was charged with murder, felony murder, kidnapping resulting in death and
carjacking resulting in death. If convicted, James could face life in prison or
the death penalty.
CALIFORNIA:
East Bay man freed from Death Row nearly 33 years after
conviction----Conviction overturned over defendant's mental health at trial
A man who spent nearly 33 years awaiting execution on California’s death row
took his first steps as a free man Wednesday, following an appeals court
decision that overturned the death sentence and raised questions about his
mental state during trial.
At age 25, Freddie Taylor was convicted for the 1985 murder of an 84-year-old
widow, Carmen Carlos Vasquez, who was brutally raped and beaten to death inside
of her Richmond home. For years, Taylor filed legal motions asking for a new
trial on the grounds that the court had ignored obvious indications he was
incompetent to stand trial.
Taylor was denied a new trial by state courts. But in 2016, a federal judge
ruled in his favor, in a decision affirmed by the Ninth Circuit last December.
On Wednesday, prosecutors offered Taylor freedom, agreeing to a plea deal that
would reduce his sentence to time served in exchange for pleading guilty to a
manslaughter charge. Taylor, now 58, was released from jail Wednesday
afternoon.
Chief Public Defender Robin Lipetzky, whose office handled the plea deal, said
it’s an example of how the state’s death penalty system “is not fail-safe.”
Attorneys familiar with the case say Taylor’s situation could have gone on
overlooked if a Bay Area defense attorney, Nanci Clarence, had not doggedly
pursued it for roughly 20 years.
“Had he not had the benefit of zealous appellate lawyers dedicated to his
cause, Freddie Lee Taylor may well have been executed,” Lipetzky said in an
email. “His is but one case. Others like him who have meritorious claims may
not be so fortunate. There are over 700 more people on death row — many waiting
for an attorney to be appointed to their case and others still waiting for
their cases to be finally resolved by the courts.”
In reversing his death sentence, a U.S. district judge ruled that the judge who
oversaw Taylor’s 1986 trial had failed to act on signs that should have called
Taylor’s mental health into question. Taylor spoke incoherently in open court,
for instance once claiming that his lawyer, “Tells me today he can feel for me,
you know, but he can’t feel for me and what I want to say and do.”
Most compelling, Taylor had a lifelong history of mental illness, along with
diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia, brain damage and borderline personality
disorder. In September 2016, a federal judge gave Contra Costa County
prosecutors a decision — retry Taylor, or set him free.
Last December, the Ninth Circuit appeals court affirmed the 2016 decision,
ruling there was insufficient evidence on the record to retroactively assess
Taylor’s mental health at the time. From there, Contra Costa prosecutors had 60
days to decide if they wanted to retry Taylor. Instead, they offered him the
deal.
“It was a pretty weak case,” prosecutor Jason Peck conceded in an interview
Friday. “I think he did it, but proving it beyond a reasonable doubt is another
matter.”
Taylor’s history
Taylor was born in Oklahoma, the grandson of sharecroppers, and was subjected
to intense, horrific trauma and abuse. He started using drugs, like sniffing
glue, before the age of 10.
In the early 1970s, from ages 13 to 17, he was housed in state juvenile
detention centers described in court records as a “gruesome, dehumanizing and
frightening world where rape, beatings and fear were constant.” Accounts of the
detention centers say wards were subjected to torturous conditions, like staff
deliberately breaking wards’ bones, or beatings with razor straps.
Discipline came in the form of corporal punishment, or solitary confinement in
dungeons with no view of the outside and a “slop jar” in lieu of a toilet.
Drugs were everywhere, and staff turned a blind eye to it. Conditions at the
detention centers improved after a team of investigative journalists at Gannett
exposed what was going on, according to court records.
After being released at age 18, Taylor traveled to Richmond to find his
biological father who he had previously been told was dead. He later served
time in Folsom prison for a robbery conviction, but after his release in 1984,
he married his girlfriend and started a family.
They moved from California to Oklahoma, but struggled financially in both
states; Taylor was unable to find work.
Then, on Christmas day of 1984, Taylor was arrested during a “family dispute,”
according to court records. He was taken to a mental institution, where he
attempted suicide for the 3rd time in his life up to that point.
Doctors recommended placing Taylor in a state mental hospital. Instead,
hospital staff released him as an outpatient, ignoring signs he was a harm to
himself or others, according to court records.
From there, Taylor returned to Richmond. Within 30 days, he had been arrested
and charged with murdering Vasquez, along several other crimes that all
occurred within a 2-week span.
Now a free man, Taylor is returning to Oklahoma with the hopes of starting
fresh, according to attorneys familiar with the case.
“Mr. Taylor has participated in extensive treatment and programming,” Lipetzky
said. “I have every expectation that he will do well when he returns to his
family in Oklahoma.”
The murder
It was Vasquez’s son, now in his 80s, who found Vasquez’s body inside her
Richmond home on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 1985. She had been severely beaten
to death, with serious injuries to her head and neck. Authorities determined
from a rape test kit she had been extensively sexually assaulted, but did not
recover a suspect’s DNA evidence from her body.
A television was missing from Vasquez’s home, and it was theorized that she had
been killed after interrupting a burglar. Taylor was identified as a suspect
after his fingerprints were found on a door and a plexiglass window.
But Taylor had burglarized Vasquez’s home days earlier, which gave him a
plausible explanation for why fingerprints were at the scene. Jurors are
instructed during trial that if there are two reasonable theories behind the
evidence, and one points to innocence, they must adopt it rather than convict
the defendant.
That, along with the lack of DNA and the fact that several police witnesses had
died, weakened the prosecution’s case for a retrial.
“That’s a tough one,” Peck said, when asked if he believed justice was served.
“34 years is 34 years, but a jury in 1986 thought he deserved death.”
(source: East Bay Times)
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