July 13
PENNSYLVANIA:
DA to seek death penalty in boy’s murder----Mark Edward Mason, 8, was fatally
stabbed in front of 3 other boys inside a house on High Street in New Castle,
police say.
Lawrence County’s district attorney said he intends to pursue the death penalty
against Keith L. Burley Jr., who is accused in the stabbing death of an
8-year-old boy Monday in Union Township.
Burley was arrested Tuesday morning in Youngstown following the fatal stabbing
of Mark Edward Mason. The homicide took place in the presence of 3 other boys
who were inside the house on High Street where the attack occurred. The other
boys witnessed the stabbing but escaped.
“I can’t get into specific details,” Josh Lamancusa said Wednesday. “But I can
share that this little boy died a hero, saving his brother and the other
children in the house.”
Lawrence County Deputy Coroner Rich Johnson, who attended the autopsy at
Heritage Valley Health System in Beaver County, determined that Mark Mason died
of multiple stab wounds to the neck, and that the manner of death was homicide.
Johnson would not say how many times the child was stabbed, only that the
information would be released at later court proceedings once Burley is brought
to Lawrence County to face the charges.
An angry Lamancusa said that he has contacted the governor’s office, demanding
to know why Burley was released from state prison a couple of months ago after
serving only the minimum sentence for a previous homicide conviction, when he
also has a trail of convictions of other violent crimes, some involving guns.
Burley also has a conviction for having stabbed an inmate in the neck in the
Lawrence County jail in 2002.
Burley had been released on parole from the March 19,1999, robbery shooting
death of 36-year-old Randall Stewart in the Halco Drive area.
According to a 1999 police report provided by New Castle police Chief Bobby
Salem, Burley initially faced 90 different charges in the Stewart shooting,
including homicide and robbery, but he entered a guilty plea to one count each
of third-degree murder and having a gun without a license. He was sentenced to
20 to 40 years in a state correctional institution as a result.
“The (state) parole board released a guy who is a repeat violent and dangerous
offender,” Lamancusa said. “That is ridiculous. I can’t imagine what the parole
board was considering when they released him at the minimum. I find it hard to
believe anyone could have looked at his past record and determined that he’s
not a threat or danger to the community.
State troopers lead Keith Burley to an unmarked state police cruiser Thursday
after a hearing before District Judge Jennifer Nicholson in Lawrence County.
Burley is accused in the stabbing murder of 8-year-old Mark Edward Mason.
Lawrence County District Attorney Josh Lamancusa has announced his intention to
seek the death penalty against Burley.
“Now we have the confirmation of the depth of his depravity, sadly.”
“I will be pursuing the death penalty,” Lamancusa said concerning the Monday
stabbing. “It’s a horrific case.
To do so, he will have to sign a notice of aggravated circumstances and file it
in the courts. The notice will set forth the reasons, including the aggravated
circumstances, to justify it.
“I think Burley meets several of the requirements,” Lamancusa said.
Burley remains in the Mahoning County jail, awaiting an extradition hearing
that is scheduled for Thursday.
According to a criminal complaint and reports from authorities, Burley had
gotten into an argument that turned physical with his alleged girlfriend in the
parking lot of the New Castle Fire Department on Monday night. He allegedly
assaulted and injured the woman, and she was taken to the hospital for
treatment.
In the course of their argument, he is accused of getting into her vehicle
where her 2 sons — Mark Mason and his 7-year-old brother — were waiting and
driving off with them to the house at 60 High St., which was the home of
another acquaintance.
2 other boys, ages 15 and 8, were upstairs playing video games when they heard
someone entering downstairs, the complaint states, about half an hour after the
dispute at the fire station. The boys went downstairs to see who was there and
Burley was there with the 2 boys and was holding a gun, according to the
account they gave the state police.
He directed the 2 boys to go and find the magazine for the weapon. When they
came out of a bedroom, the older one described how he saw Burley stabbing Mark
Mason. They ran out of the house to get help and call 911, according to the
paperwork. No one else was home at the time.
(source: sharonherald.com)
FLORIDA:
State intends to seek death penalty against Michael Hunt
The man accused of shooting three people and killing another could face the
death penalty.
The State of Florida announced it intends to seek the death penalty in the case
against Michael Hunt if Hunt is convicted. Hunt has been charged with 1st
degree murder.
In April, Alexandra "Lexie" Peck, 19, and 3 other people were shot at a home on
Allen Avenue in Panama City. Peck died from her injuries. A month later Panama
City Police announced Hunt was facing charges in connection with the shooting.
Police say Hunt was originally a person of interest in the case and was wanted
on human trafficking charges. Hunt turned himself in shortly after the
shooting. His lawyer told us Hunt was innocent and planned to plead not guilty
to any charges.
Panama City Police say the crime scene was held for more than a week while
their investigators and investigators with Panama City Beach Police documented
the scene and collected evidence.
Hunt is charged with two counts of failure to register as a sex offender, armed
burglary of an occupied dwelling, three counts of attempted felony murder, and
1st-degree murder.
(source: WJHG news)
************************
Florida Capital Sentencing Juries Return Four Life Verdicts in 2 Weeks
In the span of 2 weeks, juries in 4 unrelated cases in which Florida
prosecutors had sought the death penalty have instead returned life sentences.
The cases—which were considered probable death verdicts if judges were
permitted to impose sentence—illustrate the impact of the changes in Florida
law in 2016 and 2017 banning judicial death sentences based on non-unanimous
jury recommendations for death. Between June 27, 2019 and July 11, 2019, jurors
in the cases of Jose Martinez, Karari Ritchie, Christopher Vasata, and Scott
Nelson did not unanimously agree on a recommended sentence. As a result, all
cases ended in life sentences.
Between 2010 and 2015, the three states that permitted judges to impose death
sentences based on non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendations — Florida,
Alabama, and Delaware — accounted for more than 1/4 of all the death sentences
imposed in the United States. More than 3/4 of the death sentences imposed in
those states involved non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendations. However,
in 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s judicial sentencing
procedures and later that year, the Florida and Delaware Supreme Courts
declared that death sentences based on non-unanimous jury sentencing votes were
unconstitutional. The Florida legislature subsequently amended its capital
sentencing procedures to require a unanimous jury recommendation for death
before the trial judge may impose a death sentence and new death sentences
imposed in the state have since dropped from an average of 16.7 per year in the
1st half of the 2010s to an average of 4.3 per year in 2016 through 2018.
The 4 cases show that juries do not automatically impose death even in highly
aggravated cases. Jose Martinez was a drug-cartel hitman who confessed to
killing more than three dozen people over the course of 30 years. Already
sentenced to life imprisonment in California, Ocala, Florida prosecutors asked
the jury if the death penalty was not appropriate for Martinez, then “when is
it appropriate?” Martinez’s lawyers presented mitigating evidence of his
violently dysfunctional background, including that he was a child of incest
resulting from his mother being raped by her uncle, evidence from trauma
experts about the effects of his upbringing, evidence of brain damage he
sustained from a head injury, and testimony from 20 out-of-state family members
describing how he took beatings to protect them and attempted to provide for
them when others in the family would not. On June 27, his jury voted for life.
Also on June 27, Christopher Vasata was sentenced to life in Palm Beach County
for a 2017 Super Bowl Sunday triple murder, after jurors did not unanimously
agree on his sentence. Prosecutors had argued for death because, it said,
Vasata’s “intent to kill was so strong and so thought out.” “This wasn’t a
robbery gone bad,” the prosecutor said. “This wasn’t, ‘I panicked and
accidentally hit the trigger, I didn’t mean to kill him.’ This was a planned
hit.”
On June 28, Broward County jurors spared the life of Karari Ritchie, whom they
had convicted of robbing and stabbing 86 times a Taco Bell manager who had
served Ritchie and his brother drinks before the restaurant officially opened.
Although the jury found the murder of Tikkitress Johnson—whom prosecutors
stressed was a wife and mother, was “especially heinous, atrocious and cruel”—
it took less than 2 hours to sentence him to life after hearing mitigating
evidence of the chronic child abuse and neglect he experienced in a household
in which his mother told him she wished she had aborted him. “We believe his
life has value,” Ritchie’s lawyer told the jury. “Mercy is not earned. It is
given.”
And on July 11, Scott Nelson—who told the jury he was “a homicidal maniac” who
wanted to be sentenced to death—received a life sentence after an Orange County
jury did not reach a unanimous verdict. Defense lawyers presented mitigating
evidence of the chronic trauma he experienced in an abusive childhood and the
severe cognitive deficits its produced, the extreme conditions to which he was
subjected during 25 years in federal prison, and his resulting mental illness.
One juror was removed from the jury after some other jurors reported he had
said he had seen no evidence in the case justifying a death sentence. 3 jurors
later reported that a single remaining juror had voted for life.
(source: Death Penalty Information Center)
MISSISSIPPI:
Mooreville man wants to appeal 2005 capital murder conviction
A Mooreville man who had his death sentence vacated last year hopes a special
judge will allow him to appeal his 14-year-old capital murder conviction.
William Matthew Wilson, now 38, pleaded guilty to capital murder in the death
of his girlfriend's 2-year-old daughter and was sentenced to death in May 2007
by Circuit Court Judge Thomas Gardner.
In December 2017, special appointed judge Larry Roberts granted Wilson's
petition for post-conviction relief and threw out the death sentence, citing
ineffective counsel. The guilty plea and conviction stand.
While the normal time limit to appeal expired long ago, Wilson hopes Roberts
will grant him special permission to appeal the conviction. A hearing is
scheduled Monday on Wilson's out of time appeal.
If he is allowed to appeal the plea and conviction, it would delay the plans of
District Attorney John Weddle to have a new sentencing hearing to pursue the
death penalty. Without a new sentencing hearing, Wilson would be sentenced by
default to life without parole.
"We have it on our schedule to have him resentenced," Weddle said. "We wouldn't
have to try the case again, since he pleaded. But we would have to collect a
lot of information and present it to a jury before they could make a decision.
"If he is allowed to appeal the conviction, that will delay everything."
Wilson admitted to authorities that Malorie Conlee, 2, would not stop crying on
the night of April 28, 2005. He punched the child in the head with his fist 3
times. Even though the child was unresponsive and "didn't look right," Wilson
did not seek medical attention for the child for more than 8 hours.
The guilty plea and death sentence were upheld by the state supreme court on
direct appeal in 2009.
In his PCR petition in circuit court, Wilson argued that his 2 public defenders
rarely talked with him about his case. In his ruling, the judge said the
attorneys also failed to prepare for the penalty phase and had no experts to
testify as to mitigating factors to keep Wilson from being sentenced to death.
"Most telling, however, is the trial counsel's failure to have researched the
sentencing history of Judge Gardner in similar situations where a jury had been
waived in the penalty phase of a capital case," Roberts wrote.
Gardner presided over 2 similar cases and sentenced both to death. One of
Wilson's attorneys was on the legal team of one of the previous cases but never
explained Gardner's history to Wilson.
(source: Daily Journal)
LOUISIANA:
Judge Clayton Davis denies mistrial motion in Kevin Daigle trial
Judge Clayton Davis denied 2 defense motions Friday in the capital murder trial
of Kevin Daigle.
One was to bar moving the trial to Lake Charles and another for a mistrial.
The defense argued that if the Lafayette jurors are moved to Lake Charles they
will be worried about their families and the bad weather and therefore would be
distracted from their duties and maybe even hold it against the defense.
However, Judge Davis said to grant the motion would be to sell jurors short.
Davis said he expects jurors to do their job and that there’s no legitimate
reason to doubt that they will. The judge said they need to finish what they
started.
Also Davis added they could be criticized even more for staying and waiting for
the storm to pass.
At 12:30 p.m. the jury will hear from defense expert and neuroscientist,
Jeffrey Lewine of the Mind Research Network. He will likely testify about
so-called mitigating factors the defense will use to try to persuade jurors not
to vote for execution.
All the defense needs is one juror to vote against the death penalty and Daigle
will get a life sentence as it takes a unanimous vote to impose the death
penalty.
The trial continues in Lafayette today but will be held in Lake Charles
tomorrow, due to Tropical Storm Barry.
Daigle was convicted of 1st-degree murder Tuesday and the trial is now in the
penalty phase and near the end.
(source: KALB news)
OHIO:
Convicted serial killer has September trial date in Stark County for additional
victims
A man convicted of murdering a North Royalton mom and her 2 daughters will have
a trial in Stark County this September for the murders of a Lake Township
couple.
In December of 2018, George Brinkman was sentenced to death in Cuyahoga County
after being convicted of murdering Suzanne Taylor, 45, and her two daughters,
Taylor Pifer, 21, and Kylie Pifer, 18.
Brinkman killed them inside their North Royalton home on June 10, 2017.
North Royalton police said Suzanne was stabbed and had her throat slit in front
of her daughters.
Taylor was smothered with a pillow and Kylie was strangled with a phone cord.
Brinkman had known Suzanne since elementary school.
Brinkman is also charged with murdering Rogell Eugene John, 71, and his wife
Roberta Ray John, 64.
They were found dead inside their Lake Township, Stark County home on June 12,
2017.
Cuyahoga County prosecutors said after the murders in North Royalton, Brinkman
drove to Stark County and killed Rogell and Roberta.
Their son found the bodies the next day.
Brinkman was indicted on the charges of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary,
aggravated robbery and tampering with evidence in connection with the murders
of the husband and wife.
His trial is now scheduled to begin on Sept. 30 in front of Stark County Common
Pleas Court Judge Chryssa Hartnett.
He faces the death penalty if convicted.
(source: WOIO news)
NEBRASKA:
Questions about Nebraska execution drugs may go unanswered
Nebraska's corrections director won't have to testify before lawmakers about
the state's lethal injection protocol or how prison officials obtained the
drugs used in an execution last year.
The Nebraska Supreme Court sided Friday with the state corrections department,
which sought to block a subpoena from the Legislature's Judiciary Committee
that would have required corrections director Scott Frakes to answer questions
about his department's lethal injection practices.
The Judiciary Committee ordered Frakes to appear at a public hearing last year,
months before Nebraska executed its first inmate by lethal injection. Committee
members issued the subpoena in response to a complaint from state Sen. Ernie
Chambers, a death penalty opponent who wanted to question Frakes under oath.
The court declared the issue moot because the committee's membership has since
changed.
(source: Associated Press)
OREGON:
New law would limit Oregon’s death penalty to rare cases: Accused MAX train
killer Jeremy Christian and others would face life in prison
A bill is headed to the governor’s desk that would drastically curtail cases in
which a convicted murderer could be sentenced to death in Oregon.
Much confusion surrounds Senate Bill 1013 and the effect it would have on
defendants accused of heinous crimes. Because of last-minute wording tacked
onto the legislation before lawmakers approved it late last month, many
Oregonians -- including some in the legal community -- aren’t aware of who will
be eligible for the death penalty under the new law.
Ineligible defendants include Jeremy Christian, who is accused of fatally
stabbing 2 strangers with a knife to their necks on a Portland MAX train and is
scheduled to go to trial in January. Multnomah County prosecutors haven’t said
whether they’ll push for a death sentence, but the new law would take that
option off the table.
Also in Multnomah County, Homer Lee Jackson would become ineligible for the
death penalty under the new law. Jackson is accused of the prostitution-related
serial killings of four African-American women in the 1980s and 1990s in
Portland after sexually assaulting them, strangling them and dumping their
bodies. Police arrested Jackson in 2015 for the cold-case killings, and he is
scheduled to go to trial next January.
But the subject of much debate in the legal community is whether Senate Bill
1013 would apply to crimes that were committed in the past, but for which
defendants haven’t yet been sentenced.
That has left up in the air the future of defendants such as Angela McAnulty, a
Eugene woman who became Oregon’s only female death row inmate when she was
sentenced for the torture-starvation death of her 15-year-old daughter. A judge
last month issued a draft opinion reversing McAnulty’s 2011 conviction and
sentence, and granting her a new trial.
Also up in the air is the fate of Billy Lee Oatney, a death-row inmate who won
a reversal in 2015 and is headed into a new trial in Washington County next
January under charges that he killed a 34-year-old woman who had hired him to
make her wedding jewelry in 1996. Susi Larsen’s funeral was held on what would
have been her wedding day.
Senate Bill 1013 clearly states that it applies to past cases in which
defendants haven’t yet been sentenced. That will bolster defense attorneys’
arguments that the death penalty doesn’t apply to McAnulty and Oatney, if
they’re convicted again.
But Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, told The Oregonian/OregonLive Friday that
an unrelated bill, Senate Bill 1005, states that Senate Bill 1013 doesn’t apply
to defendants who’ve previously been sentenced but have been granted reversals.
Williamson said that includes McAnulty and Oatney. Williamson said lawmakers
wanted their intent to be clear so they added the language, on the advice of
legislative lawyers, after Senate Bill 1013 has already passed both houses but
Senate Bill 1005 had not yet passed.
During a legislative hearing in April, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, told
fellow lawmakers that the new legislation is intended to restrict the use of
death sentences to “very, very rare cases.”
“It’s a good way to move away from what’s a very expensive model, one that
essentially ... puts people on death row and then has nothing else happening to
them except spending a lot of money on appeals,” Greenlick said.
Aliza Kaplan, a Lewis & Clark College law school professor and director of the
Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, said 2/3 of people sentenced to death in the
past 35 years had won reversals. The appeals system, which can last decades for
each defendant and can result in multiple retrials, consumes millions of
dollars of taxpayer money each year.
“These reversals are costing a ridiculous amount of money, and are a serious
indication of how broken our system is,” Kaplan said.
The bill’s backers note that only two inmates have been executed since
Oregonians re-instated capital punishment in 1984 -- and both volunteered to be
killed in the 1990s by giving up on the appeals process. 30 people are on death
row today, but executions have been put on hold since then-Gov. John Kitzhaber
instituted a moratorium in 2011. Gov. Kate Brown extended it during her tenure.
The bill narrows the definition of aggravated murder, which is the only crime
in Oregon that can draw a death sentence. In order to be convicted of that
crime, a defendant must have killed 2 or more people as an act of organized
terrorism; killed a child younger than 14; killed another person while locked
up in jail or prison for a previous murder; or killed a police, correctional or
probation officer.
No longer will defendants be eligible for death under a list of other
circumstances, including: killing 2 or more people at once; hiring someone else
to murder for them; killing in the act of torturing or maiming a victim; or
killing a victim in order to cover up another crime. Those who kill under those
circumstances could be prosecuted under the new crime of 1st-degree murder,
which for an adult could result in a sentence of life in prison with no
possibility of release.
An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that of the 30 inmates on death
row today -- if tried based on the new criteria in Senate Bill 1013 -- as many
as eight would be eligible for the death penalty. That includes Bruce and
Joshua Turnidge, the father and son convicted of killing two police officers in
the 2008 bombing of a Woodburn bank and several inmates who murdered children
ages 2 to 13.
Lawmakers don’t have the power to outright repeal capital punishment. That
would require voter approval.
Josh Marquis, who retired after 25 years as Clatsop County District Attorney in
December, has closely followed the death penalty. He described the bill as a
“craven attempt” to effectively abolish the death penalty.
“The honest thing to have done would have been to refer this back to the
voters,” Marquis said. He thinks that hasn’t happened because death penalty
opponents know it would fail.
The bill, if signed, won’t be retroactive: It won’t convert the sentences of
Oregon’s current death row inmates.
The governor hasn't said if she'll sign the bill. But her spokeswoman Kate
Kondayen said Brown "has been quite public about her opposition to the death
penalty and plans to continue the moratorium."
(source: oregonlive.com)
*********************
The most powerful argument for the death penalty: Steve Duin
Angela McAnulty is the only woman on Oregon’s death row. She’s also the most
powerful argument for it. She killed her 15-year-old daughter with such
methodical depravity that even the most experienced jurists are shaken by the
crime.
Steven Krasik, one of her overmatched defense attorneys, said the aggravated
murder of Jeanette Maples is the “most indefensible case” he ever tried.
McAnulty abused and starved Jeanette for years, and “tortured her for months
before her death,” the Oregon Supreme Court argued in rejecting McAnulty’s
appeal of her death sentence:
Her “pattern of conduct leading up to Jeanette’s death showed the targeting and
isolation of a vulnerable victim over an extensive period of time, coupled with
numerous acts of brutal violence.”
And when J. Burdette Pratt, a senior circuit court judge, reviewed the case for
post-conviction relief, he was confounded that McAnulty’s defense team believed
a jury might consider her guilty plea an expression of remorse.
“The fact that that the course of (McAnulty’s) behavior leading up to her
daughter’s death lasted months if not years, that she removed Jeanette from
school to avoid detection, refused to get medical care for Jeanette,” and
dodged responsibility after her arrest, Pratt writes, “would counteract any
argument that she was remorseful.”
Unfortunately, that is not all Pratt writes. The Malheur County judge motors
along until he arrives at a ruling that vacates McAnulty’s guilty plea,
conviction and death sentence.
The death penalty is where I part company with so many progressives, especially
the legislators who voted last month to redefine capital punishment in Oregon.
Aggravated murder, the only crime punishable by death, is now limited to
terrorist acts that kill two or more people, and the murders of police officers
or children under the age of 14.
Jeanette Maples was 15, and all of 50 pounds, when emergency responders in
Eugene pulled her lifeless body from the family bathtub in 2009.
In McAnulty’s case, the death penalty is not tinged by racial bias. Her jury
was unanimous in concluding, beyond any reasonable doubt, that she would hurt
someone else if given the chance.
When the Supreme Court affirmed that conviction and sentence, Justice Richard
Baldwin found but a single error by investigators, prosecutors and the trial
court, and deemed it harmless.
Because Governors John Kitzhaber and Kate Brown have maintained a moratorium on
the death penalty since 2011, that ruling did not move McAnulty an inch closer
to her just reward.
It simply pushed the appeals process into post-conviction relief, where
McAnulty and her new Portland defense team argued she was not adequately
represented by Krasik and Kenneth Hadley.
Pratt reviewed 18 claims and sub-claims about the trial work of Krasik and
Hadley, and dismissed 15 of them in a draft ruling obtained by Aimee Green of
The Oregonian/OregonLive.
But Pratt agreed that McAnulty’s attorneys “failed to exercise reasonable
professional skill and judgment” in advising her to plead guilty to aggravated
murder without any concessions on sentencing from prosecutors.
“The gruesome and emotional nature of the evidence” weighed against that
strategy, Pratt writes, because the details of Jeanette’s torture and
starvation were presented in the penalty-phase rather than the guilt-phase of
the trial.
Jurors didn’t “have time to process the gruesome details and pictures and allow
time for the shock to diminish before making a sentencing decision,” Pratt
argues.
Jeanette Maples died almost 10 years ago. Has the shock diminished for anyone
who knows about the pliers or the exposed femur or the blood on the walls?
Pratt also ruled that McAnulty’s lawyers failed in the penalty phase of the
trial by not presenting enough mental health experts to convince at least one
juror that McAnulty’s endless sadism was a result of trauma in her own life and
“that she was not simply evil.”
Was Krasik disappointed or embarrassed by Pratt’s conclusions? Not at all. He
welcomed the criticism, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email. “I
support any court decision that undoes Angela’s misguided, horribly
disproportionate, death sentence.”
Jeanette Maples’ death sentence? I guess that’s just blood under the bridge.
(source: Steve Duin, The Oregonian)
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