August 12 VIRGINIA: Lethal Injection by Virginia Not Cruel, U.S. Supreme Court Says The U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution yesterday for a convicted Virginia killer who had argued that the state's method of carrying out lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. The 5 to 4 ruling clears a Circuit Court judge to set an execution date for James Edward Reid, 58, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 slaying of an 87-year-old Christiansburg, Va., woman. Reid's attorneys asserted that the combination of chemicals Virginia uses to carry out executions could cause the inmate to "consciously suffer an excruciatingly painful and protracted death." Reid's execution was halted by a federal appeals court one day before its scheduled date last December. The high court gave no reason for granting a motion by Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore (R) to lift the stay. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented. James Turk, one of Reid's attorneys, said the defense will file a request for clemency with Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D). Turk said Reid's life should be spared because a car accident left him suffering from brain damage and he has a long history of alcohol abuse. In 1997, Reid was convicted of capital murder and other charges in the slaying of Annie Lester. According to court records, Reid had occasionally done some odd jobs for Lester and the two had discussed the bible. Authorities said Reid went to Lester's house in October 1996, telling a friend he was going there to do some work. Once inside, he stabbed Lester with scissors and struck her on the head with a can of milk, court documents state. He also took off her clothes and ransacked her bedroom. Reid's attorneys had argued that the first chemical used in a lethal injection, a fast-acting anesthesia, could quickly wear off, even as the other drugs are administered. A second chemical paralyzes the inmate, rendering the inmate unable to show pain, the attorneys said. They said the third chemical, which causes cardiac arrest, could leave the inmate in extreme pain. Tim Murtaugh, Kilgore's spokesman, said that there is "no validity" in Reid's claim and that Virginia's method of carrying out executions has been tested in the courts. Murtaugh also noted that Lester was stabbed 22 times. "If anyone had grounds to complain about undue pain, we believe it should be she," he said. (source: Washington Post) OHIO: Court clerk's mistake gives Ohio wrong information on a ruling A mistake by a clerk at a federal appeals court incorrectly informed Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro's office that the state had won an issue in a death penalty case when it actually had lost, officials said Wednesday. Ohio had asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its earlier decision that set aside the aggravated murder conviction and death penalty sentence for John D. Stumpf, granting him a new trial for a woman's 1984 slaying. The court issued an order Monday denying Ohio's request to rehear the issue, but an employee in the court clerk's office mistakenly made a record entry saying the court had granted the state's request, the employee said Wednesday. Acting on that wrong information, the attorney general's office notified the family of the slaying victim that the state had won the right to argue for reinstatement of Stumpf's murder conviction and death sentence, said Kim Norris, a spokeswoman for the attorney general. Upon learning of the error Wednesday, Petro's office notified the family of Guernsey County slaying victim Mary Jane Stout that the state had lost its appeal, Norris said. "They're very upset," Norris said of the family. "This is a tragic mistake by the 6th Circuit clerk. The impact on the victim's family is impossible to measure." The state is considering whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Norris said. Carol Heise, an attorney for Stumpf, said she is pleased the court denied the state's request for a rehearing. Stumpf, 43, remains on death row at the state's Mansfield prison while the appeal is pending. Beverly Harris, an employee of the 6th Circuit clerk's office, said Wednesday that she had incorrectly entered a notation into the court's records that the state's rehearing request had been granted, rather than denied. Stumpf's attorney said that Harris became aware of the error when they talked about the case. In April, a 3-judge appeals panel ruled 2-1 that Stumpf's guilty plea to aggravated murder was unconstitutional. The appeals court, reversing a 2001 lower court ruling, said then that Ohio would have the option to retry Stumpf within 90 days. Two appeals judges concluded that Stumpf wasn't fully informed as to the possible consequences of his plea, and that the state failed to meet its burden of demonstrating his plea was voluntary. Stumpf was sentenced to die because he was found to have committed murder to escape capture and punishment for other offenses, including robbery and attempted murder. There is no date for his execution while his appeal is pending. Stumpf said that his accomplice, Clyde Wesley, shot Stout. Wesley was separately convicted of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder and aggravated robbery and is serving a life sentence. Authorities said Stumpf and Wesley entered a house to rob its occupants and that the woman was killed after her husband, Norman Stout, was shot twice in the head, but survived. (source: Associated Press) NEW YORK: Senate adopts 'fix' on death penalty law The state Senate voted Wednesday to alter the sentencing provisions of the state's death penalty law to remove procedures declared unconstitutional in June by the state's highest court. The legislation stipulates that when a jury deadlocks over the punishment of a defendant who has been found guilty of a capital crime, that offender will get life without parole. It also creates a third option for juries deciding the correct punishment in a capital case, life in prison with the possibility of parole. On June 24, the state Court of Appeals said the sentencing methods of the capital punishment statute were unconstitutional because if a jury deadlocks between execution and life without parole as the punishment, the trial judge sentences the defendant to a parole-eligible term of up to life in prison. The judges said that option might lead some undecided jurors to vote for death by lethal injection because they cannot bear the thought of a defendant someday being paroled. The ruling effectively cleared the four inmates from death row in New York and put prosecutions seeking executions for murderers on hold. The measure approved 37-22 by the Republican-controlled Senate Wednesday was worked out with Gov. George Pataki. But the willingness of the Democrat-dominated state Assembly to take up the bill, or any measure that might resume death penalty prosecutions was unclear. "This is a highly technical issue with many constitutional implications and we are looking at it," said Eileen Larrabee, a spokeswoman for the Assembly's Democratic majority leader, Sheldon Silver. Larrabee said that while the Court of Appeals ruling was more than 6 weeks ago, the Assembly had not seen the Republican proposal to comply with it until Tuesday. Pataki spokeswoman Lynn Rasic said the measure approved Wednesday by the Senate adopted the approach Assembly Democrats took in negotiations on the issue with the governor and the Senate. "It is baffling they wouldn't pass this legislation immediately," Rasic said. When the Legislature reinstated the death penalty in New York in 1995, Assembly Democrats voted against the bill 52-41. It passed with overwhelming support from Assembly Republicans. Assembly Democrats could effectively keep the death penalty statute on hold by declining to take up the bill approved by the Senate Wednesday. Democratic state Sen. Ruth Hassell-Thompson of Westchester County urged her colleagues to do just that Wednesday. "We should leave the death penalty alone," she said. "It would be foolhardy to fix it. ... We should let the death penalty die." Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, said DNA testing has shown that other states have frequently put innocent people on their death rows. "We made a mistake in '95," she said. "Perhaps we didn't have all of the evidence then." No one has been executed under the 1995 death penalty statute, which fulfilled Pataki's 1994 campaign promise to reinstate capital punishment in New York. (source: Associated Press) ILLINOIS: Death row reversal becomes film The extraordinary conversion of a former US state governor from being a supporter of the death penalty to a fervent anti-death penalty campaigner has been made into a documentary film. The film, Deadline, shows how Illinois's Republican Governor George Ryan - strongly pro-death penalty when elected in 2000 - first began to have serious doubts about its use. He went on to set free 4 men he was convinced had been victims of a miscarriage of justice, and 2 days before he left office in 2003 he granted a blanket clemency, commuting the death sentences of 163 men and 4 women. Mr Ryan told BBC World Service's Outlook programme that he had first begun to have doubts about the death penalty when Illinois released Anthony Porter, who had spent 16 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. "He was released not by the system, but by a group of journalism students from Northwestern University, who went out and went through his case, found the real killer and got a taped confession from him. "Anthony Porter was released from prison. I watched that on television." Questionable circumstances Deadline was recently broadcast by the US network NBC after a representative saw it at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary features footage of the special clemency hearings, as well as interviews with the death row prisoners, exonerated men and Governor Ryan himself. Deadline shows how evidence began to accumulate, showing a serious risk of people being executed on shaky evidence. The Chicago Tribune newspaper, meanwhile, also conducted an investigation which found that a number of convicted prisoners on death row had been tried under questionable circumstances. This investigation had a profound effect on Mr Ryan, who highlighted some of its findings. "I always thought it was a pretty meticulous system, that worked well... until I found out how bad and how broken the system really is, and still is," he said. He said that before being governor he had not studied much about the death penalty. Chicago Tribune study - 33 African-American men on death row in Illinois tried by all-white juries - 45 sentenced to death had been represented by attorneys who had been disbarred or suspended - Some convicted by single eyewitnesses testimony -- But the responsibility of having to sign the papers ordering executions led him to think harder about his role. "By being made governor, it made me executioner for the state. I had final say about who was executed and who wasn't," he said. "Before anybody goes to the electric chair, the date comes from the Supreme Court and the governor signs off and they're executed - or he doesn't sign off and they live. "It's an awesome responsibility." At the time, Mr Ryan's decision was met with outrage and dismay by prosecutors and relatives of murder victims. One victim's father, Vern Fuling, described it as a "mockery." But Mr Ryan said that the more cases he looked at, the more he found there were "a lot of errors of in the system, and a lot of chance for error." "That's when I called the moratorium and stopped the whole machinery of death in Illinois." (source: BBC News) USA: 11 Angry Men----Who says juries have to be unanimous? Suspected serial killer Derrick Todd Lee was found guilty yesterday of second-degree murder. Eleven members of the Port Allen, La., jury voted for conviction, while a lone dissenter voted to acquit. Aren't juries in criminal trials supposed to unanimous? Not in Louisiana or Oregon, where most felony cases require only a supermajority of 10 jurors to convict or acquit. The exceptions in Louisiana are death-penalty cases, as well as trials that use 6 jurors rather than 12. (The second-degree murder charge that Lee faced carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.) In Oregon, all murder cases, regardless of the prescribed punishment, still require unanimity. The tradition of unanimous juries dates back to 14th-century English common law and became the American standard during the colonial period. Louisiana was the first to buck the system, when it authorized supermajority verdicts in felony trials in 1928. Oregon followed suit 6 years later with a section in its state constitution allowing for verdicts when five-sixths of a jury in a criminal trial agrees. Legal historians believe both changes were made in response to concerns over a rising number of hung juries, which often favor the defense. Both laws were challenged in 1972, when the United States Supreme Court decided Johnson v. Louisiana and Apodaca v. Oregon on the same day. The court ruled that non-unanimous verdicts did not violate the 14th Amendment's due process clause, as the plaintiff in Johnson argued. A majority of the justices also decided that the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to trial by a jury, does not also guarantee the right to a unanimous verdict, as the plaintiffs in Apodaca had contended. Though these 2 decisions are widely interpreted as endorsing the constitutionality of non-unanimous verdicts in criminal trials, no other state has followed the example set by Louisiana and Oregon. (One technical exception is Oklahoma, although non-unanimous verdicts are allowed there only in misdemeanor trials in which the punishment is 6 months in jail or less.) There have been several failed legislative attempts to extend the practice, often after high-profile cases that ended with hung juries (as between 5 % and 12 % of all criminal trials do). And in 1999 in Oregon, voters were asked whether they'd like to allow 11-to-1 verdicts in noncapital murder cases. The Oregonians said no. Next question? (source: Slate (Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation)
