July 17
TEXAS:
Execution Alert -- Call to Action for Larry Swearingen
Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be murdered by the State of Texas on August
21st, 2019. Larry Swearingen was sentenced to death although no biological
material recovered from the scene contained any conclusive link. Always
protesting innocence, Larry Swearingen is now facing his 6th execution date.
Actions:
* Texas residents, please send a letter to Governor Greg Abbott telling him to
STOP this execution via the 'Speak Out' page on the NCADP website
* Contact Texas Governor Greg Abbott by phone at: 512-463-2000, by email via
this link, or by tweet @GregAbbott_TX If you prefer to send a letter, here is
the mailing address: Office of the Governor, State Insurance Building, 1100 San
Jacinto, Austin, TX 78701
* If you live in Texas, write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.
* Please share this information with your friends, especially those in Texas,
and ask them to help STOP the execution of Mr. Swearingen by taking one of the
actions listed above.
In addition, here is a link to some general talking points to help you in your
advocacy efforts, as well as a recent news article that talks about the decline
in support the death penalty is receiving. Lastly, take a listen to 'Power
Corrupts' the new podcast from political scientist and Washington Post
columnist Brian Klaas. The episode 'An Eye for an Eye' explores Nick Yarris,
who spent 22 years on death row, but right before scheduled execution DNA
evidence set him free. NCADP's Gregory Joseph joins this episode to explore
questions of whether a just society can execute people, racial bias and the
arbitrary nature of death sentences.
Please check the NCADP website in the days to come to stay informed of any new
developments in this case.
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
www.ncadp.org
NCADP
80 M St, SE, c/o WeWork,
Washington, DC 20036
www.ncadp.org
(source: NCADP)
*********************
Former statewide judge leaves GOP, citing Trump’s racism
Citing what she called President Donald Trump’s racist ideology, Elsa Alcala, a
retired Republican judge on the state’s highest criminal court, announced on
Facebook that she can no longer support the GOP and has left the party.
“It has taken me years to say this publicly but here I go. President Trump is
the worst president in the history of this country,” Alcala wrote Monday. “Even
accepting that Trump has had some successes — and I believe these are few — at
his core, his ideology is racism. To me, nothing positive about him could
absolve him of his rotten core.”
Appointed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011,
Alcala spent 20 years as a GOP judge, also serving in a trial court and
intermediate appeals court.
She was one of two Latinas to serve in recent years on the state’s two highest
courts, the other being Justice Eva Guzman, currently on the Texas Supreme
Court. Alcala left the criminal court at the end of 2018.
Alcala said Trump’s behavior, including a recent tweet suggesting that four
Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries they came
from, combined with state and national Republican Party support for the
president, weighed on her conscience.
“Every day with the Republican Party seemed worse than the day before. Trump
speaks about brown people like me as lesser beings,” Alcala told the
American-Statesman on Tuesday. “It’s cliche to say, but the Republican Party
left me.”
Trump, Alcala said, seeks to exclude “people who look like me.”
“I thought that maybe Texas state politics at the Legislature might be better
than the national Republican politics, but it was more of the same,” she said.
James Dickey, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, issued a statement
thanking Alcala for her service.
“We are sorry that she has chosen to no longer support the party that supported
her, her colleagues and her successors,” Dickey said, adding that the booming
Texas and national economies prove that Republican policies work.
“Democrats are promoting extremist schemes with the inevitable tragic
consequences that have destroyed every socialist economy ever put into place.
We encourage every Texan to ensure a bright future and greater opportunity for
all by continuing to vote for Republican leadership,” Dickey said.
During her time on the Court of Criminal Appeals, Alcala made news with a 2016
opinion that said it was time for a closer look at the constitutional issues
behind the death penalty.
Although she expressed no opinion on whether the death penalty was
constitutional, Alcala said that several death row inmates have raised
compelling arguments that the court should address, including whether
confinement in a 60-square-foot cell was cruel or whether the death penalty is
unconstitutional because it disproportionately affects minorities.
On Facebook, Alcala said she will vote in the Democratic primary, adding that
“any of the viable Democratic presidential candidates are superior to the
status quo.”
“I hope Democrats rise to the occasion and put forth some very qualified
candidates and that every polling station will be overwhelmed with voters,” she
wrote.
“The current Republican Party supports Trump, so I cannot support that party in
Texas or nationally. The past Republican administrations were not Trump-like —
they wanted an inclusive party — and I appreciate their past support of me, but
that is no more,” Alcala wrote.
Including time as a Harris County prosecutor, Alcala said she spent 29 years in
government service and loves the United States.
“And don’t tell me to go back where I came from. My relatives have been in this
Texas area since it was before the USA and I was born in the USA,” she wrote.
(source: Austin American-Statesman)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Pennsylvania Death Penalty Appeal
Philadelphia’s top prosecutor and the state district attorneys’ association are
staking out opposing positions in a case to determine if Pennsylvania’s death
penalty will remain in effect.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday his own review found
the state’s death penalty runs afoul of the prohibition on cruel punishment and
disproportionately applies to black defendants and the poor.
The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association also filed a brief with the
state Supreme Court, saying the justices should respect the Legislature’s role
in establishing state law.
The high court in December took a pair of cases that will decide if the capital
punishment system violates state constitutional protections.
2 death row inmates argue arbitrary factors determine who gets sentenced to
death.
The Supreme Court will hear the case in September.
(source: Associated Press)
***********************
York attorney added to death penalty case
A York defense attorney is stepping in as associate counsel in an Adams County
death penalty case.
Suzanne Sennett Smith was appointed June 28 to assist Adams County Chief Public
Defender Kristin Rice to the case against Kristopher Gartrell, 48, according to
court records.
(source: Gettysburg Times)
ALABAMA:
Prosecutors seek death penalty for both suspects in stabbing deaths of
Birmingham grandparents
Jefferson County prosecutors will seek the death penalty against the suspects
in last year’s horrific killings of a couple in their south Roebuck home.
Zachary Phillips, 24, and Kristen Gullion, 30, have been indicted by a grand
jury on 2 counts of capital murder in the Aug. 2, 2018 deaths of Mary and Joe
“Steve” Holt. They were found dead after a neighbor of the Holts’ called 911
saying a child covered in blood was on their doorstep. The child, later
identified as the Holt’s granddaughter, told officers her “Nene” wouldn’t get
up.
Additionally, Phillips was indicted on a 1st-degree kidnapping charge because
the Holts’ 3-year-old granddaughter was tied up with a phone cord and put in a
bathtub while her grandparents were slain. The indictments against Phillips
were made public Tuesday following his July 3 extradition from Florida to the
Jefferson County Jail. The indictments against Gullion were made public in
February. Gullion and Phillips share a young son.
Documents filed by Jefferson County Deputy District Attorney Deborah Danneman
state that prosecutors are seeking the death penalty again Gullion because the
murder was committed during a burglary and/or a robbery and was committed for
pecuniary gain. Additionally, the notice reads, Gullion was on probation for a
felony crime – receiving stolen property – in Cullman County during the time
the murders happened.
Danneman states the same reasons for seeking the death penalty against
Phillips, additionally noting the crime was committed while Phillips was on
probation for a 2017 burglary conviction in Marshall County.
The Holts lived in the 8700 block of Ninth Court Circle South. Officers went to
the house across the street from where the child wandered, authorities said,
and realized the front door was unlocked. When they entered, they saw
67-year-old Mary Holt’s body in the living room. Police said Mary Holt was
lying face down in a pool of blood and was pronounced dead on the scene.
Officers found Steve Holt, 68, underneath a mattress and box springs set in a
back bedroom. He was also pronounced dead on the scene.
Birmingham homicide Det. Joylyn Craig testified in a preliminary hearing that
the coroner ruled both died from multiple stab wounds.
An evidence technician recovered several knives--2 with visible blood
stains--and an ice pick from inside the home. Police later testified in a
preliminary hearing that one of the knives had a broken tip, but a similar
knife tip was later found in Mary Holt's head. The technician also noted a
bloody boot print on the mattress that was on top of Steve Holt.
After speaking with family members, Craig said she learned that Mary Holt was
the caregiver of the toddler while her son and his wife were at work during the
day. Normally she kept the child at her son's home, but on Aug. 2 she had taken
the little girl to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Her son told police Mary
Holt texted him around 11:30 a.m. saying they had a great time at the gardens.
Several neighbors in the community had cameras, Craig said, and one camera
showed the Holt's 2012 Honda Civic pulling into their driveway at approximately
11:28 a.m. Another camera showed the same Civic leaving the street at 12:20
p.m., and never returning. Craig reported the car stolen.
The day after the Holts were killed, the child was interviewed. She said "the
bad guy came up behind Nene" and pushed "Nene." She said "Nene" never got up
again. The child also said the person who pushed her grandmother was wearing a
dark-colored jacket.
Slain Birmingham grandparents were '2 of the finest people you could ever hope
to meet'
"Our community is heartbroken by the loss of Mary and Steve Holt to a senseless
act of violence,'' according to a GoFundMe launched to help with burials.
The child said while she was trying to wake up her grandmother, the person tied
her up and put her in the bathtub. She stayed in the tub for a while until she
had to use the bathroom, so she managed to free herself from the ties and look
for her grandfather, whom she called "Napo." When she couldn't find him, the
child said she went across the street for help.
Craig said police found a blue and yellow phone cord in the tub that was still
partially knotted and saw a child's bloody fingerprints on the toilet.
The neighbor who called 911 told Craig that Phillips lived next door and she
had spoken to him before. She said Phillips didn't like Steve Holt because
Phillips believed Steve Holt was trying to take pictures of him and seemed to
have a "vendetta" against Steve Holt. On the morning of Aug. 2, the neighbor
also saw a white female at the home.
Police learned that a non-profit group owned a residence they operated as a
halfway house across the street from the Holts' home. Phillips was living
there, and Gullion had been staying there with him for several weeks. The man
who rented the home, and also lived there, said he saw Phillips and Gullion
when he left for work that day but when someone returned around 2 p.m., they
were gone and never returned.
Detective testifies: Child was tied up while grandparents stabbed to death in
east Birmingham home
Kristen Gullion, 30, and 23-year-old Zachary Phillips are each charged with two
counts of capital murder for the August deaths of Mary and Joe "Steve" Holt.
Craig said in the backyard of that home, police found a dark jacket with Steve
Holt's driver's license in the pocket. The Holts' sons also said a television,
laptop, camera, and credit cards were missing from their parents' home.
On Aug. 9 Miami Beach police called Craig and said they had recovered the
Holt's Civic. Craig said she asked if Gullion was in the car, and Miami Beach
police said she was. According to Craig, police in Miami arrested her after
Phillips and Gullion illegally parked the Civic to go inside an ice-cream shop.
Police ran the tag and saw the tag belonged to a car from Cullman and was
stolen, but the VIN number was connected to a double homicide in Birmingham.
Officers watched the car until Phillips and Gullion exited the ice-cream shop.
The two circled the car, and Phillips kept walking. Craig said Gullion tried to
get inside the car and drive away, but police quickly stopped her.
Craig said Gullion told police the car belonged to her friend, but she wouldn't
say anything else because her father told her not to talk to police in
"situations like this."
At approximately the same time, Miami Beach police were called about a stolen
car about a block away. A report went out on that car, and later that day
police in Hollywood, Florida, spotted it. They tried to stop the stolen car on
Aug. 10, but the car led officers on four high-speed chases--the final one
ending in a crash. Craig said Phillips was in the car and fled the scene on
foot, but tracking dogs later caught up to him and Phillips was arrested.
Craig said Phillips told police that he purchased the Civic from someone he
only knew as "homeboy" on the east side of Birmingham seven days before, but
later changed the location to the 8700 block on the city's north side. After
that remark, he stopped talking to police.
Craig said upon his arrest, Phillips had several injuries to his hands and
arms. Gullion had a small cut on her leg.
When the Civic was searched, Craig said officers found clothing from the Holts,
a red hooded-sweatshirt, the Holts' car registration, and a pair of boots
inside a military bag that had one of the Holt's son's name on it. Craig said
the boots appeared to match the print inside the Holt's home, but testing is
yet to confirm. Mary Holt sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and Craig said many Mary Kay
products were found inside the car.
Officers also found a Coach brand wristlet, which was identified as belonging
to Mary Holt, inside the car. Craig said that wallet contained both Phillips’
and Gullion’s driver’s licenses, a medical card for Gullion, and cash.
Gullion was returned to Alabama from Florida in September 2018 and remains held
without bond. Phillips was returned 2 weeks ago and also is held without bond.
A court date has not yet been set for him.
(source: al.com)
TENNESSEE:
Gov. Bill Lee officially signs Sgt. Daniel Baker Act into law
Gov. Bill Lee has signed the Sgt. Daniel Baker Act into law.
The law was named in Sgt. Baker's honor because prosecutors are seeking the
death penalty against Steven Wiggins and Erika Castro-Miles in connection with
the sergeant's death last year.
It speeds up a death penalty appeal, by doing away with the part of the appeals
process that sends the case to the court of criminal appeals.
The Dickson County Sheriff's office posted a photo on their Facebook page
Monday night, showing Governor Lee signing the bill, alongside Baker’s wife and
daughter.
(source: WTVF news)
MISSOURI:
Missouri Supreme Court upholds death penalty in Hailey Owens' murder
A majority of judges have agreed to deny Craig Wood a 2nd trial and have upheld
the death penalty. Wood was convicted in the murder of 10-year-old Hailey Owens
in Springfield, Missouri.
Wood's attorney argued that because the judge, not jurors, decided on the death
penalty - it was unconstitutional. His attorney says that Missouri is 1 of only
2 states (Indiana) allowing a judge to impose a death sentence, after jurors
can't agree on the sentence. Other states follow the federal procedure that a
defendant is sentenced to life in prison if jurors are deadlocked.
5 Missouri Supreme Court justices disagreed today, writing that "the man's
death sentence is not disproportionate and did not result from passion,
prejudice or other arbitrary factor."
The Court's decision summary is online at
http://www.courts.mo.gov/file.jsp?id=142465.
Wood was convicted in 2017 of first degree murder of Hailey Owens, who was
killed in February 2014. She was walking home from school when Wood called her
over to his truck and grabbed her.
Her body was found in Wood's home in Springfield wrapped in black plastic,
stuffed into a large plastic tub. She died of a gunshot wound to the head.
(source: KOAM news)
CALIFORNIA:
California indictment alleges MS-13 hacked victims to death
Members and associates of the MS-13 gang committed 7 murders including several
in which victims were hacked to death with machetes in a Southern California
forest, according to a federal indictment released Tuesday.
The indictment by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles charges 22 people
linked to a subset of the gang known as the Fulton clique.
They are suspected of nearly 200 crimes in several states over nine years, the
indictment said.
In one case a member of a rival gang who had been believed to have defaced
MS-13 graffiti was targeted, authorities said.
The indictment alleges that on March 6, 2017, the rival was abducted, choked
and driven to a remote area of the Angeles National Forest where 6 people
dismembered him with a machete and threw the body parts into a canyon after one
cut the heart out of the body.
6 killings were committed by gang members hoping to gain entry into or advance
within the clique's ranks, according to the indictment.
"We have now taken off the streets nearly 2 dozen people associated with the
most violent arm of MS-13 in Los Angeles," said Nick Hanna, the U.S. attorney
in Los Angeles.
16 of the 22 people indicted are charged in connection with those 6 slayings,
which officials called so "heinous, cruel or depraved" that the defendants are
eligible for the death penalty. Prosecutors have not said whether they intend
to seek capital punishment.
All 22 of the alleged MS-13 members and associates are in custody. 18 had been
apprehended over the last year on a range of federal and state charges,
authorities said. 3 were arrested in recent days in the Los Angeles area by a
task force that included FBI agents, Los Angeles police officers and Los
Angeles County sheriff's deputies. Another alleged MS-13 affiliate was arrested
over the weekend in Oklahoma.
Authorities also filed 2 more cases under seal against juvenile defendants in
federal court.
MS-13, or La Mara Salvatrucha, was formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by
refugees from El Salvador and is linked to many slayings in certain parts of
the U.S. In California, the gang has clashed with rival Nortenos gang members.
President Donald Trump has singled out the MS-13 gang as a threat to the U.S.
and blames weak border enforcement for the group's crimes. But many gang
members were born in the U.S.
(source: Associated Press)
USA:
2 inmates accused in a 2012 slaying at U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton will now face
trial in 2021.
Trial for 2 inmates facing death penalty prosecution for a 2012 slaying at U.S.
Penitentiary Hazelton has been postponed again, from next year to 2021.
Originally, Senior U.S. District Judge Irene M. Keeley had the case involving
Michael A. Owle, 30, of Cherokee, North Carolina, and Ruben Laurel, 40, of San
Antonio. She had set jury selection next March 16, with time set aside between
April 6-30, 2020, for the trial. The lawyers had advised the court at that time
that it could take up to 10 days to seat a jury, a week or more for the trial
and possibly twice that long for a separate trial, if necessary, on whether the
death penalty should be imposed.
Earlier this year, the new United States district judge on the case, Thomas S.
Kleeh, granted a joint motion to issue a fourth amended scheduling order in the
case that, among other deadlines, set the jury trial to begin Sept. 21, 2020,
and to last about 7 days, in Clarksburg; and a jury trial for the penalty
phase, if necessary, to begin Oct. 13, 2020, and to last about five days, also
in Clarksburg.
But earlier this month, counsel for the government and defense told the court
extra time was necessary.
Subsequently, Kleeh earlier this week issued a fifth amended scheduling order
that set several dates, including: Mailing by the court of a juror
questionnaire, March 16, 2021; final pretrial conference, Aug. 19, 2021; jury
selection, Sept. 13, 2021; guilt/innocence phase of the trial, Oct. 4, 2021;
and, if necessary, penalty phase of the trial, Oct. 25, 2021.
Owle and Laurel were indicted May 1, 2018, on charges of aiding and abetting
1st-degree murder and of assault with a dangerous weapon.
They’re accused in the alleged Aug. 29, 2012, stabbing death of fellow Hazelton
inmate Anthony Morris Dallas, 31, as well as the stabbing of another inmate.
Dallas, who was 31 at the time of his death, was serving a total sentence of 55
years imposed in 2004 by Senior U.S. District Judge James A. Parker.
Dallas’ crimes: The second-degree murder Feb. 21, 2003, of Alfred Jake on the
Navajo Reservation in McKinley County, New Mexico, as well as using, carrying
and possessing a firearm (a Remington .243) in connection with that crime.
Laurel has been serving a lengthy sentence (294 months) for being part of a
cocaine distribution conspiracy in Tennessee involving more than 5 kilograms of
cocaine. Laurel also has gotten in trouble behind bars for committing assault
with serious injury, which added more time to his sentence; possessing weapons;
using drugs or alcohol; and destroying property, according to court records.
He is at U.S. Penitentiary Coleman II in Sumterville, Florida, where he’s
scheduled for release July 22, 2027.
Owle’s crimes include robbery by force or violence, and using, carrying and
discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, May 26, 2008, on the Eastern
Band of Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina. Owle also has gotten
into trouble behind bars previously for assaulting a corrections officer and
another inmate and is serving a lengthy sentence.
Owle is at U.S. Penitentiary Florence Admax in Florence, Colorado, where he is
scheduled for release Jan. 15, 2033.
Previously, Keeley ruled a 300-person jury pool would be needed for the death
penalty prosecution trial. Because it wouldn’t be feasible to accommodate that
many jurors at the same time, the juror questionnaire will be used to whittle
down the pool, Keeley ruled.
The questionnaire will be mailed to randomly selected individuals in Harrison,
Braxton, Calhoun, Doddridge, Gilmer, Pleasants, Marion, Monongalia, Preston,
Ritchie and Taylor counties.
The high-security Hazelton prison, where mobster and inmate James “Whitey”
Bulger was killed last Oct. 30, has been the scene of several violent incidents
among inmates.
No one has been charged in Bulger’s homicide.
Another Hazelton homicide case that’s pending is that of Marricco Sykes, 39, a
prisoner at Federal Medical Center Butner in Butner, North Carolina.
Sykes was indicted March 1, 2016, by federal grand jurors meeting in
Clarksburg, who accused him in the Nov. 6, 2015, homicide of 60-year-old fellow
prisoner Zakii Tawwab Wahiid. Previously, the government was instructed by the
Department of Justice not to seek the death penalty against Sykes.
The court file indicates Senior U.S. District Judge Keeley has received
multiple psychiatric reports on Sykes. The file also has several sealed docket
entries and motions asking that records be placed under seal.
The office of U.S. Attorney Bill Powell also last November balked at moving the
trial of Sykes to the Eastern District of North Carolina, at least on a
preliminary basis, “due to substantial resource limitations.”
A status conference by telephone is set July 22.
(source: The (W.Va.) Preston County News & Journal)
******************
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, Who Led Liberal Wing, Dies at 99
John Paul Stevens, whose 35 years on the United States Supreme Court
transformed him, improbably, from a Republican antitrust lawyer into the
outspoken leader of the court’s liberal wing, died on Tuesday at a hospital in
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 99.
The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered the day before, the Supreme
Court announced in a statement.
When he retired in 2010 at the age of 90, Justice Stevens was the 2nd-oldest
and second-longest-serving justice ever to sit on the court. Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. was about 8 months older when he retired in 1932, and William O.
Douglas had served 36 years (1939-75).
Justice Stevens spent much of his service on the court in the shadow of more
readily definable colleagues when he emerged as a central figure during a
crucial period of the court’s history: the last phase of Chief Justice William
H. Rehnquist’s tenure and the early years under Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Jr.
It was a time when the court took an active role in balancing individual
liberty and national security and in policing the constitutional separation of
powers, asserting a muscular brand of judicial authority that was welcomed by
neither the White House nor Congress.
Societal debates over the rights of gay men and lesbians, the role of race,
private property rights, environmental regulation and the separation of church
and state also made their way onto the Supreme Court’s docket, and Justice
Stevens, a low-key Republican from Chicago, was as surprised as anyone to find
himself not only taking the liberal side but also becoming its ardent champion.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the court’s majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush,
in 2004, which brought within the jurisdiction of the federal courts the
hundreds of prisoners who had been captured as enemy combatants during the war
against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and held at the United States
Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in
2006, which repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put some of those
detainees on trial by military commissions. “The Executive is bound to comply
with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction,” he declared.
On the domestic side, in 2002, it was Justice Stevens who wrote the opinion in
Atkins v. Virginia, declaring that the Constitution does not permit executing
the mentally disabled. Such defendants “face a special risk of wrongful
execution,” he said, because of their limited ability to understand their
actions and participate in their own defense.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that case provided an example of
how deeply divided the court was during those years on both methodology and
outcomes. He complained that the 6-to-3 majority had simply enshrined its own
views as constitutional law. “The arrogance of this assumption of power takes
one’s breath away,” Justice Scalia wrote.
2 years before that, Justice Stevens had his own turn at a bitter dissent, in
Bush v. Gore, the case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election
by stopping the Florida recount. Justice Stevens, 1 of 4 dissenters, said the
court’s action “can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the
work of judges throughout the land.”
He said that although the actual winner of the presidential election might
remain unknown, “the identity of the loser is perfectly clear”: It was “the
nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
A Slightly Quirky Loner
As the senior associate justice, with the power to assign majority opinions
whenever he was in the majority and the chief justice was in dissent, Justice
Stevens was the field marshal for a series of decisions that achieved liberal
victories late in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s tenure. He assigned opinions to
others in favor of gay rights and affirmative action and kept for himself
decisions that upheld the authority of the federal government in the face of
what had appeared to be the unstoppable states’-rights tilt of the Rehnquist
court’s federalism revolution.
Until this final period, Justice Stevens had been known to the public, if at
all, primarily for the jaunty bow ties he usually wore. His reputation was that
of a very smart, nonideological, slightly quirky loner who, if a case was
decided by a vote of 8 to 1, was as likely as not to be the solitary dissenter,
caring neither to lead nor to follow.
He became the senior associate justice in his 19th year on the court, on the
retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994. The role, which he appeared to
enjoy, heightened his visibility and showed the world what his colleagues
already knew: that he was actually a strategic thinker and canny tactician
whose genial personality and impressive analytic power could forge a path that
might have appeared blocked by the sheer arithmetic of a majority that was well
to his right.
His frequent dissenting opinions, he said, arose from a conviction that both
the public and the law were best served when differing views were expressed and
explained, rather than suppressed for the sake of surface collegiality.
The court’s ideological spectrum was quite different when John Paul Stevens
arrived from the federal appeals court in Chicago in December 1975, named by
President Gerald R. Ford to replace Justice Douglas, who had retired a month
earlier. The liberal titans William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were
still sitting. So was Lewis F. Powell Jr., an appointee of President Richard M.
Nixon, who voted with the conservatives on criminal law issues but stoutly
defended abortion rights.
Another colleague was Potter Stewart, the last of President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s four Supreme Court appointees and, like Justice Stevens, a
moderate Republican from the Midwest. Only five years apart in age despite
Justice Stewart’s substantial seniority, the two men bonded. In a speech in
2004, Justice Stevens said Justice Stewart, who retired in 1981 and died four
years later, “probably had the keenest intellect of any judge with whom I have
served.”
The court’s membership turned over completely and moved indisputably to the
right during Justice Stevens’s long tenure on the bench. The extent to which it
bridged 2 eras of Supreme Court history was underscored on Oct. 3, 2005, when
he administered the oath of office to Chief Justice Roberts, a man 35 years his
junior whom he first met 25 years earlier, when Justice Stevens was the court’s
most junior member and John Roberts was a law clerk.
But the emergence of John Paul Stevens as the court’s most liberal justice was
not simply a result of standing still amid a shifting landscape. His own views
changed over time, moving to the left, particularly on the death penalty and on
questions of racially conscious government policies.
He was skeptical of such policies at first, voting with the conservatives in
the 1978 Bakke case to invalidate an admissions program at a University of
California medical school that had set aside 16 places for minority applicants
out of an entering class of 100. The court ordered the medical school to admit
Allan Bakke, the white applicant who had brought the case.
2 years later, when the Supreme Court upheld a set-aside program that reserved
10 percent of federal public works money for minority contractors, Justice
Stevens was one of three dissenters, along with Justices Stewart and Rehnquist.
In his dissenting opinion in that case, Fullilove v. Klutznick, he warned that
the “slapdash statute,” as he described it, could become “a permanent source of
justification for grants of special privileges.”
In 1989, he voted with the 6-to-3 majority that invalidated a 30 percent
minority contracting set-aside program in the city of Richmond, Va. Justices
Marshall, Brennan and Blackmun dissented, with Justice Blackmun commenting, “I
never thought that I would live to see the day” when the former “cradle of the
Old Confederacy” would adopt a plan to help its African-American residents
overcome a legacy of discrimination, only to see the effort struck down by
“this court, the supposed bastion of equality.”
Nonetheless, Justice Stevens’s nuanced separate opinion in that case, Richmond
v. J.A. Croson Company, demonstrated that he had begun to distance himself from
the court’s increasingly conservative center of gravity. He agreed that the
Richmond ordinance had painted with too broad a brush. But he did not agree
with the majority’s premise that “a racial classification is never permissible
except as a remedy for a past wrong”; sometimes such a classification is
permissible, he said, if it takes account of race as a policy tool for building
a better future.
He had said as much in a dissenting opinion in 1986 in a case challenging a
collective bargaining agreement that shielded African-American teachers against
layoffs in a Michigan public school district. The agreement was meant to
preserve a hard-won racial balance in an economically troubled district, where
the recently hired minority teachers would have been most vulnerable to
seniority-based layoffs.
The 5-to-4 majority in that case, Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education,
concluded that the policy violated the white teachers’ 14th Amendment right to
equal protection. Justice Powell explained that there was no proof of past
discrimination for which the policy could be justified as an appropriate
remedy.
In dissent, Justice Stevens said the majority’s mistake was to look backward
rather than forward. Rather than ask whether the policy could be justified “as
a remedy for sins that were committed in the past,” he said, “I believe that we
should first ask whether the board’s action advances the public interest in
educating children for the future.”
In a speech in 2004, Justice Stevens reflected on the “especially close”
relationship he had enjoyed with Justice Powell, despite their differences in
the Wygant case. He recalled that as the case was about to be argued, it came
up in casual conversation between them.
“We both remarked on the fact that our next affirmative action argument was in
an ‘easy case,’” Justice Stevens said. “It was only later that we both learned
that we thought it easy for opposite reasons.”
His views on the death penalty similarly evolved. He arrived at the Supreme
Court in the aftermath of the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, which
invalidated every death penalty statute in the country. The urgent question was
whether a new generation of statutes that most states had enacted in response
to the Furman ruling would now meet the court’s approval.
In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the newly appointed Justice Stevens voted with
the 7-to-2 majority to endorse the new approach, which required special
procedures to “channel” the jury’s discretion and to allow the resumption of
capital punishment.
With the passing years, however, Justice Stevens began to express deep concerns
about how the death penalty was being administered. Recent evidence that “a
substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously” was
“profoundly significant,” he told the American Bar Association in 2005,
“because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of
criminal justice.”
Finally, in 2008, he renounced capital punishment expressly, declaring that the
time had come to reconsider “the justification for the death penalty itself.”
Too often, he said, court decisions and actions taken by states to justify the
death penalty were “the product of habit and inattention rather than an
acceptable deliberative process.”
The case was Baze v. Rees, a constitutional challenge to Kentucky’s method of
execution by lethal injection. A majority rejected the challenge, and Justice
Stevens concurred in that result, writing that he felt bound to “respect
precedents that remain a part of our law.” But he had made himself clear: in
the court’s hands the death penalty had become, for him, a promise of fairness
unfulfilled.
Evolving Views
One plausible explanation for Justice Stevens’s growing affinity for the
liberal side was his response to the polarizing discourse about the Supreme
Court that emanated from the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the
mid-1980s. After Attorney General Edwin Meese III criticized a long series of
Supreme Court precedents that had interpreted the Bill of Rights as binding not
only on the federal government but on the states as well — a foundational
premise of 20th-century constitutional law — Justice Stevens took him on
directly. The attorney general, he said in a speech to the Federal Bar
Association in Chicago in 1985, “overlooks the profound importance of the Civil
War and the postwar amendments on the structure of our government.”
Justice Stevens’s own explanation for why his views had changed was simply that
he had learned on the job. “I know that I, like most of my colleagues, have
continued to participate in a learning process while serving on the bench,” he
said in 2005 at a symposium held at Fordham University Law School to mark his
30th anniversary on the court and 35th year as a judge.
“Learning on the job is essential to the process of judging,” he continued. “At
the very least, I know that learning on the bench has been one of the most
important and rewarding aspects of my own experience over the last 35 years.”
Yet in another sense he did not change very much, remaining what he had been at
the start of his judicial career: a judge who looked at the facts on the ground
rather than theories in law review articles, one who tended to regard doctrinal
debates as a distraction from a judge’s real work, which in his opinion was the
application of judgment to the case at hand.
His distinctive approach to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection
was perhaps the best example of his disdain for doctrinal formalism.
By the mid-1970s, the court had developed an elaborate grid for evaluating
claims of unequal treatment at the hands of the government. Policies that
distinguished among people based on their race were subject to “strict”
judicial scrutiny and were almost never upheld. Policies that simply concerned
economic interests were subject to minimal scrutiny and were upheld as long as
they had a “rational basis.” Policies that treated men and women differently
fell somewhere in between, subject to “heightened” judicial scrutiny and
required to serve an “important governmental interest.”
Justice Stevens rejected all this. “There is only one Equal Protection Clause,”
he declared in 1976, concurring in Craig v. Boren, an early sex discrimination
case. “It requires every state to govern impartially.” A straightforward
application of that principle was all a court needed, in his view, to decide an
equal protection case.
One of Justice Stevens’s former clerks, Andrew M. Siegel, a law professor at
the University of South Carolina, summed up the justice’s jurisprudence in a
paper delivered at the 2005 Fordham symposium. “Perhaps the defining vision of
Justice Stevens’s jurisprudence, indeed of his entire life project,” Professor
Siegel wrote, “has been an unshakable faith in the capacity of men and women of
the law to resolve difficult and contentious issues through the application of
reason tempered by experience and humility.”
Professor William D. Popkin of the Indiana University School of Law wrote in a
1989 article in The Duke Law Journal that “a special brand of judicial
restraint and creativity” marked Justice Stevens’s approach to the law. Justice
Stevens was guided by three principles, Professor Popkin wrote: first,
“deference to other decision makers,” based on the view that “the court should
not decide cases that other institutions can decide at least as well or
better”; second, attention to the facts of a case and avoidance of broad
generalizations, based on the view that “the court should decide no more than
the facts of the case require”; and third, the belief that the court’s highest
substantive goal was to “protect individual dignity,” as reflected in his
approach to equal protection.
Justice Stevens gave concrete application to his view of a limited role for the
courts in one of his most important majority opinions, the 1984 case Chevron v.
Natural Resources Defense Council. The court held that when a federal statute
is ambiguous, judges should generally defer to the interpretation of the agency
charged with administering that statute rather than impose their own views of
what Congress must have or should have meant.
“Federal judges — who have no constituency — have a duty to respect legitimate
policy choices made by those who do,” Justice Stevens wrote. Although the case
remained obscure to the general public, it was a landmark of administrative
law, and the term “Chevron deference” became commonplace in judicial decisions
reviewing a seemingly endless array of federal regulations. For the rest of his
career, Justice Stevens looked back on the Chevron case with fondness and
pride.
But while believing that judicial deference was often appropriate, he also
believed that the federal courts must be available when other institutions of
government failed to do their jobs. “I firmly believe that the Framers of the
Constitution expected and intended the vast open spaces in our charter of
government to be filled not only by legislative enactment but also by the
common-law process of step-by-step adjudication,” he said in a 1991 speech at
the University of Chicago.
Rooted in Chicago
That university was his alma mater, and his family had deep roots in Chicago.
John Paul Stevens was born there on April 20, 1920, and grew up in a
Georgian-style house in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He was the fourth son and
youngest child of Ernest James Stevens, a wealthy businessman with interests in
real estate and insurance, and the former Elizabeth Street, an English teacher.
In 1909 his grandfather James W. Stevens, an ambitious and successful
financier, had built what was then Chicago’s biggest hotel, the LaSalle. His
appetite whetted, the older Stevens then formed the family-owned Stevens Hotel
Company to build and operate the world’s biggest hotel, a blocklong, 28-story,
3,000-room behemoth on Michigan Avenue that opened in 1927 as the Stevens
Hotel.
Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart were among the many celebrities the young
John Paul Stevens met there. Those early encounters may have inspired him; he
became an avid pilot himself, flying his single-engine Cessna 172 around the
Midwest for many years.
The Depression ended his grandfather’s dream in a disastrous way. Not only did
the family lose the hotel, which was eventually bought by Conrad Hilton and
stands today as the Hilton Chicago, but John’s grandfather, father and uncle
were indicted by a Cook County grand jury on charges of looting the family’s
insurance business in a failed effort to keep the hotel afloat. Facing extreme
stress, his grandfather had a severe stroke, while his uncle, Raymond Stevens,
fell into a depression and committed suicide.
Only Justice Stevens’s father went to trial, and he was convicted in 1933 of
embezzling $1.3 million. The conviction was overturned the next year by the
Illinois Supreme Court, which decided that Ernest Stevens’s actions had not
amounted to a crime; he had used bad judgment, the court said, but had acted in
good faith in trying to save the hotel, without intending either to commit
fraud or to enrich himself.
With his father making a modest living managing a hotel for someone else, John
attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in English and edited the
newspaper. He graduated in 1941 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and winner of the
university’s highest honors for scholarship and student activities.
He was commissioned as an officer in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He spent most of his Navy service, which
lasted until 1945, stationed at Pearl Harbor working on breaking Japanese
codes, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.
In 1942 he married Elizabeth Jane Sheeren, with whom he had a son and three
daughters. The couple divorced in 1979, and Justice Stevens married Maryan
Mulholland Simon, a dietitian, the next year. She died in 2015. His son, John
Joseph, died of cancer in 1996, and his daughter Kathryn preceded him in death.
He is survived by 2 daughters, Elizabeth Jane Sesemann and Susan Roberta
Mullen, 9 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
With two older brothers who were lawyers, John was encouraged after his
discharge from the Navy to attend law school himself. He used the G.I. Bill to
attend Northwestern University Law School, where he completed his degree in 2
years. He was editor in chief of the law review and graduated first in the
class of 1947 with the highest grade-point average in the school’s history.
A Supreme Court clerkship was a natural sequel. He spent the court’s 1947-48
term as a law clerk to Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, a respected former law
professor and dean who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last Supreme Court
appointee.
Lawyer to Judge to Justice
Justice Rutledge, who died of a stroke at 55 in 1949, cutting short his service
on the court after 6 years, influenced his young protégé profoundly. Justice
Rutledge viewed himself as an old-fashioned “common law” judge who decided
cases one at a time. He was a liberal and, while committed to a strong national
government, was also an internationalist; in 1948 he dissented on behalf of a
group of German-born United States residents challenging the government’s right
to deport them.
Justice Rutledge had “great faith in wisdom born of experience and mistrusted
untried statements of general principles,” Mr. Stevens wrote in an admiring
essay in the mid-1950s, years before his own judicial career began. Decades
later, in writing the court’s opinion that gave the Guantánamo detainees access
to federal court, Justice Stevens took great pleasure in vindicating his old
boss’s position in the 1948 case, Ahrens v. Clark. And in rejecting the Bush
administration’s plan for military commissions, Justice Stevens cited another
dissent by Justice Rutledge, from 1946, in which he argued on behalf of habeas
corpus for a Japanese general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had been sentenced to
death by a military commission.
After his Supreme Court clerkship, Mr. Stevens returned to Chicago to begin
what would be a 22-year career in private practice. Although he had always been
known simply as John Stevens, he began adding his middle name when signing
legal pleadings to add something extra to his bland first and last names. The
full name eventually became part of his professional identity.
He handled regulatory and antitrust cases at one of the city’s most prominent
firms, Poppenhusen, Johnston, Thompson & Raymond, now known as Jenner & Block.
After three years there, he and two other junior associates left to start their
own firm, Rothschild, Stevens, Barry & Myers. He remained there until 1970,
when Senator Charles H. Percy, an Illinois Republican who had been a University
of Chicago classmate, proposed that the Nixon administration nominate him for a
seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the federal
appeals court based in Chicago.
He was a reluctant nominee, at first urging Senator Percy to ask him again in 6
years. “I told John,” Mr. Percy later recalled, “if you wait 6 years, I may not
be senator and there may not be a Republican president. And in that time you
could be on the Supreme Court.”
Mr. Stevens had become prominent in Chicago legal circles, if not among the
public at large, for his role in a riveting political drama the previous year:
an ethics scandal involving two members of the Illinois Supreme Court. Chief
Justice Roy J. Solfisburg and Justice Ray I. Klingbiel were accused by a
private citizen of having accepted valuable bank stock from a politically
influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for ruling in his favor in a criminal
case. When he retired in 2010 at the age of 90, Justice Stevens was the
2nd-oldest and the 2nd-longest-serving justice to sit on the court. President
Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
The court set up a special commission to investigate the charge, with Mr.
Stevens as its counsel. He was selected not only because of his good reputation
but also because, with a law practice that was based in federal court, he had
no ties to the state court bench.
During an intense six-week period, working without compensation in the full
glare of a news media spotlight, he organized and led the investigation and
presented findings that validated the accusation and led to the resignation of
the 2 justices.
Mr. Stevens won high praise for his efforts and said later that he learned
invaluable lessons about how appellate courts work. The episode became the
subject of a book, “Illinois Justice,” by Kenneth A. Manaster, published by the
University of Chicago Press in 2001.
Senator Percy proved to be a better prophet than his reluctant nominee could
have imagined. The retirement of Justice Douglas in November 1975 was a
potential problem for President Ford, who was about to enter a challenging
re-election campaign and did not want the Supreme Court to be a source of
controversy. He asked his attorney general, Edward H. Levi, to find a nominee
who would win easy approval. Mr. Levi, a former dean of the University of
Chicago Law School and president of the university, knew Judge Stevens and
recommended him highly.
The president acted quickly. In two weeks the nomination was official, and 19
days later, on Dec. 17, 1975, Justice Stevens was confirmed by a vote of 98 to
0. The only opposition during his three-day confirmation hearing came from
several women’s groups, which objected to his dissent from a ruling by the
appeals court that it was illegal for an airline to require flight attendants
to remain single.
Even though he was the first Supreme Court nominee since the court established
the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, nearly 3 years earlier, he
was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing.
30 years later, on the occasion of Fordham Law School’s anniversary symposium,
Ford sent a letter to the school’s dean, William Michael Treanor. “I am
prepared,” the former president wrote, “to allow history’s judgment of my term
in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination 30 years ago of
Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Separating Church and State
Among the positions for which Justice Stevens was best known on the court was
his insistence on strict separation of church and state. “Whenever we remove a
brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we
increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our
democracy,” he wrote in dissent from a 2002 decision that upheld an Ohio
program providing taxpayer-financed vouchers for religious school tuition.
In an abortion case in 1989, he was the only justice to take the position that
a Missouri statute declaring that life begins at conception not only violated
the court’s abortion precedents but also was impermissible as “an unequivocal
endorsement of a religious tenet” that “serves no identifiable secular
purpose.” Over the years, he was a strong defender of the court’s precedents
defining the right to abortion.
He was also strongly on the federal government’s side in the court’s running
debate over the proper allocation of federal and state power. He wrote the
court’s 2005 opinion upholding the power of Congress to prohibit the use of
marijuana for medical purposes in California and other states that had chosen
to permit it. Later that year, he told a bar meeting in Las Vegas that while he
agreed with “the policy choice made by millions of California voters,” it was
nonetheless “pellucidly clear” that the court was obliged to uphold
congressional authority.
In that same speech, he reflected on his majority opinion in the 2004-5 term’s
most controversial case, upholding a city’s power to use eminent domain to
condemn a private home and use the property for economic development. He said
that while his position in the case, Kelo v. City of New London, was correct as
a matter of constitutional interpretation, it was “entirely divorced from my
judgment concerning the wisdom” of the city’s land-use policy.
In 1997 he wrote the court’s opinion in Clinton v. Jones, rejecting President
Bill Clinton’s request to delay proceedings in a sexual harassment suit brought
by a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Corbin Jones. Ms. Jones “has a right
to an orderly disposition of her claims,” Justice Stevens wrote.
His patriotism was of the old-fashioned, unabashed variety. In 1989, he
dissented from the court’s decision that gave First Amendment protection to
those who burn an American flag as a political protest. “Sanctioning the public
desecration of the flag will tarnish its value,” he wrote in that case, Texas
v. Johnson, “both for those who cherish the ideas for which it waves and for
those who desire to don the robes of martyrdom by burning it.”
Reflecting years later on his vote in that case, Justice Stevens said that
while he still believed he was right, he now saw a silver lining. Flag burning
had all but disappeared, he observed to a Chicago audience in 2006.
“What once was a courageous act of defiant expression is now perfectly lawful,”
he noted, “and therefore is not worth the effort.
He wrote 2 particularly notable dissenting opinions toward the end of his
career, both in 5-to-4 cases in which the conservative justices prevailed. One
was District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which the court for the 1st time
interpreted the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to own a
gun.
The other was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which freed
corporations from federal limits on campaign spending. The decision “threatens
to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation,” Justice
Stevens wrote. It was that decision in early 2010, in fact, that prompted his
decision to retire. Reading his dissenting opinion from the bench, he stumbled
uncharacteristically over his words. He had suffered a small stroke. His
retirement that spring opened a 2nd vacancy for President Barack Obama to fill.
The president named Elena Kagan, then serving in the administration as
solicitor general, to the seat.
Justice Stevens had various health problems over the years, including
open-heart surgery to repair a valve in 1974, prostate cancer in 1992 and a
blocked coronary artery that was cleared by inserting a stent in 1997. But his
energy and athleticism in advanced age continued to amaze those who witnessed
it.
He remained an avid tennis player and golfer, shooting a hole in one in his
80s. He was a bronze-level life master at bridge, which he and his wife played
competitively. They lived much of the year in an apartment in Fort Lauderdale,
Fla., with the justice traveling to Washington for court sessions and
communicating with his law clerks and colleagues by email the rest of the time.
In retirement he wrote frequently, particularly for The New York Review of
Books, and in 2011 he published a memoir, “Five Chiefs.” In 2014 he published
“Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.” In that book
he proposed constitutional amendments that would unambiguously define the
federal government’s power to, among other things, regulate firearms, limit
campaign contributions, ban capital punishment and prohibit election-district
gerrymandering to give one party an advantage. This year, he published “The
Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years.”
In an interview last November, Justice Stevens said that he first thought of
writing the book during a surprise 94th birthday party. By the time he finished
writing, the book had grown to 531 pages. “It’s a long story,” Justice Stevens
explained.
He also made forays into public debates. In 2018 he wrote an opinion piece,
after a school shooting, calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Later
that year he declared in a speech that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was unqualified
for the Supreme Court because of his partisan language during a Senate hearing
on his fitness for the court over an accusation he sexually assaulted a girl
during high school.
Justice Stevens was known around the court for treating others with sensitivity
and respect. One former law clerk, Christopher L. Eisgruber, described in a
1993 essay an incident at a party for new clerks: Before Justice Stevens
arrived, an older male justice had instructed one of the few female clerks
present to serve coffee. When Justice Stevens entered, he quickly grasped the
situation, walked up to the young woman and said: “Thank you for taking your
turn with the coffee. I think it’s my turn now.” He took over the job.
(source: New York Times)
_______________________________________________
A service courtesy of Washburn University School of Law www.washburnlaw.edu
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Unsubscribe: http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/options/deathpenalty
