[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----S.C., GA., FLA., ALA., MISS., MO., KAN., OKLA.
May 27 SOUTH CAROLINA: Why SC's death row inmates continue to avoid execution Serial killer Todd Kohlhepp avoided a death penalty by pleading guilty Friday, but even if he had gone to trial and had been given a death sentence, he likely would not have been executed. Solicitor Barry Barnette said, "Kohlhepp deserves the death penalty, but the reality of the situation is that our state doesn't have a functioning death penalty. The last execution occurred in 2011 and the state's supply of lethal injection drugs expired shortly thereafter. "The victims' families as well as Kala Brown wanted closure instead of the uncertainty of a death sentence," Barnette said. The State of South Carolina currently has 38 inmates serving sentences on death row. Half of the death row population has served at least 15 years awaiting their fate. The oldest case dates back to 1983. Barnette cited the Spartanburg County case of Richard Bernard Moore as an illustration of the problem with the current law. Moore was sentenced to death in 2001 for fatally shooting convenience store clerk James Mahoney. He is still on death row, with additional appeal matters that need to be addressed. "The family of James Mahoney has endured what appears to be an endless wait for justice," Barnette said. "I don't want anyone else go through something like this. I hope the families involved in the Kohlhepp case can rest easier knowing he will leave prison in a casket." Use of the death penalty has steadily decreased in South Carolina, partially due to the uncertainty of the process, but also because of the high costs associated with it. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that Prosecutor David Pascoe initially planned to seek the death penalty for a mother who killed her two children, but changed his mind, with cost being one factor: "Once you file for the death penalty, the clock gets moving and the money, the taxpayers start paying for that trial." Rep. Tommy Pope, a state legislator and former prosecutor who sought the death penalty for Susan Smith in a similar murder, now would tell victims' families to consider agreeing to a life-without-parole sentence instead of the death penalty. Life without parole was adopted by the state in 1995. "(Life without parole) offers a measure of closure that 3 retrials in a death penalty case never would," Pope said. The death penalty in South Carolina: The youngest person executed was a 14-year-old black male. The oldest was a 66-year-old black man. Since Aug. 6, 1912, 282 executions were carried out by the State of South Carolina. Prior to 1912, executions were by hanging in the individual counties. Of the 282, 74 were white and 208 were black. Of those executed, 280 were men and 2 were women. In 1988, the new Capital Punishment Facility was relocated to the Broad River Correctional Institution. An execution held in 1990 was the 1st in the new CPF. The 1st execution in South Carolina by lethal injection was carried out on Aug. 18, 1995. Since 1985, there have been 43 executions in South Carolina. All South Carolina death penalties have been for murder. 6 people were executed in the electric chair. The rest were executed by lethal injection. Dylann Roof was sentenced in January to death by lethal injection for the Charleston church killings. (source: WYFF news) GEORGIA: Judge Closes His Oldest Case by Vacating a Death Sentence - Again Lawrence Joseph Jefferson's 1985 death penalty sentence for years has troubled federal judges who have reviewed the case. Filed on April 23, 1996, it is the oldest case on U.S. District Senior Judge Clarence Cooper's docket - one he kept long after he became a senior judge in February 2009. Ten years ago, Cooper vacated Jefferson's death sentence for the first time. On April 10, 2017, Cooper vacated Jefferson's death sentence once again. In a 71-page opinion, Cooper reaffirmed the position he took a decade ago that Jefferson's trial counsel???one of whom is now a Cobb County Superior Court judge - had been constitutionally ineffective. In the intervening decade, Cooper's original ruling was reversed by a split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The ruling included a strong dissent on Jefferson's behalf by U.S. Circuit Judge Edward Carnes, who as an assistant attorney general in Alabama had built a reputation repeatedly and successfully defending that state's death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently took up the case, filed one day before the enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which greatly narrowed federal judges' authority to grant habeas petitions. In 2010, the high court vacated the Eleventh Circuit ruling and remanded the case for a determination as to whether the state court's habeas findings deserved the presumption that they were full and fair. In his recent ruling, Cooper noted that t
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----S.C., GA., FLA., ALA.
April 17 SOUTH CAROLINA: South Carolina and the Death Penalty There are 2 very high-profile capital murder cases in the headlines this week: one in Massachusetts, with the Boston Marathon bomber the defendant, and one here in South Carolina, with a former North Charleston policeman as the defendant. The cases are very different. Each provides us with the opportunity to rethink when, how often, and why we as a society condemn convicted murderers to death. The argument in favor of the death penalty is much easier to make in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. His crime was heinous. As of this writing, his trial for the crime itself is over; he has been found guilty on 30 counts, including killing 3 people and injuring over 250 others. Everyone with a television has been a witness to the act itself. The victims were utterly innocent, and the killers were politically motivated individuals whose sole purpose was to instill terror - and, in their minds, to have vengeance against the country who had in their eyes committed murder on a vastly larger scale, in the Middle East. In this country, our laws do not allow for vengeance killings. The death penalty itself is allegedly not about vengeance, it is about justice and about deterrence. In our nation we profess to follow the Judeo-Christian teaching that "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." Renounce "eye-for-an-eye" vengeance, our religion tells us. It is a statistically proven fact that the death penalty does not deter murder. Terrorists are not deterred by the prospect of their own death; indeed, many terrorist killings are suicide bombings. The south has by far the most death penalty executions in the nation. All but 897 out of 2040 such executions since 1976 have taken place in the south, and 635 of those 897 took place in Texas and Oklahoma. The northeast has seen just four (4). And yet the murder rate in the south is higher, not lower, than in the northeast. If deterrence worked, the south would have the nation's lowest murder rate, and we don't. Justice should be the answer. Justice, that is, seen as the greatest punishment for the crime. If I were to glance into the troubled psyche of the 21-year-old Tsarnaev, I would dread much more the prospect of spending some 70 years in prison than being put to death in a year or 2. Should not justice take that into account? Then there is the case of North Charleston's Michael T. Slager, the former police officer whose act of murder - not yet come to trial - has also been seen by anyone with a television set. His act was much less heinous than that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He killed an unarmed man who was running away at the time. His crime took place in South Carolina, where there are currently 47 inmates in prison on death row - and not in Massachusetts, where none have been executed in over 30 years. Is the death penalty more appropriate for Slager than for Tsarnaev? Here's a different question: given those numbers, is the death penalty more likely for Slager than for Tsarnaev? I would argue that vengeance is the only reason for the death penalty, and it is not a good reason. Unlike Tsarnaev or Slager, most murderers are not captured on video. According to the "Death Penalty Information Center," while those 2040 executions were taking place, 140 people have been released from death row having been determined innocent after their sentencing. If we agree to execute only those we are most sure are guilty, we as a society are still statistically certain to execute some innocent men and women. We should not take that step, even in cases as obvious as that of Tsarnaev - much less that of Slager, whom geography has placed here in South Carolina, unlike Massachusetts a confirmed "death penalty state." It should not be about vengeance. It should be about justice. Justice does not require us to kill people, even murderers. We are better than they are. (source: Opinion, Robert Scott; Edgefield Advertiser) Without a drug supplier, South Carolina faces moratorium on executions Trying to overcome pharmaceutical companies??? reluctance to be associated with capital punishment, S.C. lawmakers are considering a law guaranteeing secrecy to manufacturers that provide drugs needed to execute death-row inmates. Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the House Judiciary Constitutional Laws Subcommittee on Thursday that the last set of drugs the state had expired in September 2013. Since then, the state has had no way of executing death-row inmates, he said, until it can obtain more through a different provider or the inmate chooses South Carolina's only other option - death by electrocution. "I'll just put everybody on notice that we could have someone come in tomorrow and say, 'I choose to waive my appeals and I want to die,'" said Stirling. If that happened, he said, the state
