[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS
Feb. 15 TEXAS: State won't seek death penalty against killer Penry The state will not seek the death penalty against convicted killer Johnny Paul Penry in an agreement that will require Penry to serve 3 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, officials said Friday. Polk County Criminal District Attorney William Lee Hon reached the agreement with attorneys for Penry, who was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing a woman at her home in Livingston in 1979. The agreement means Penry's case will not have to go back to a jury to consider his punishment for a 4th time. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court, acting on an appeal from the Texas Attorney General's Office, refused to reinstate Penry's death sentence, clearing the way for a new penalty phase. There is no guarantee that a fourth trial could be conducted in such a manner as to satisfy the concerns of the appellate courts and ensure that Penry would ultimately be executed, Hon said in the press release, which was in the form of a memo he had written. Hon wrote that under no circumstance do I feel that anything less than the death penalty is a just punishment for Penry, but he went on to list reasons that pursuing the punishment is impractical and unwise. This settlement should in no way be interpreted as a reflection or suggestion that Johnny Paul Penry is anything other than the capital murderer and sexual predator that 3 juries have found him to be, Hon wrote. Penry has spent more than 1/2 of his life on death row for the slaying of 22-year-old Pamela Moseley Carpenter, the sister of former Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley. Penry confessed to attacking the woman and stabbing her with scissors. I'm happy about it. I just think this is the only way we're going to be able to keep him in prison, said Bruce Carpenter, Pamela Moseley Carpenter's husband at the time of the murder. It was the only way we could really go. It seems like it's an endless battle and it's never going to end so we came up with this and I think this is the best we're going to be able to get. Bruce Carpenter, now 52, has since remarried and still lives in Livingston. Mark Moseley said that while Friday's agreement brought the tragedy back to the forefront and made him feel almost like it just happened again, he was glad to get the legal situation behind him. Penry's longtime attorney, John Wright, said he was pleased with the decision. They've finally come around to what should be done, Wright said. I've been asking for a life sentence since November 1979. Wright said, though, that there aren't any winners in these cases. ... I'm not claiming a victory. Penry's attorneys had contended their client, who has said he believes in Santa Claus, has the reasoning capacity of a 7-year-old. While psychological tests have put Penry's IQ between 50 and 60, at least five juries have found Penry to be legally competent to stand trial or have rejected defenses based on mental retardation. The high court in 2002 ruled mentally retarded people, generally considered having an IQ below 70, may not be executed. As part of Friday's settlement, Hon wrote that Penry and his attorneys have agreed that Penry was competent to stand trial and that at all times during the legal battle he has not been a person with mental retardation. Penry was on parole about 3 months after serving 2 years of a 5-year rape conviction when he was arrested for the 1979 attack on Carpenter, who lived long enough to identify him as her assailant. He was arrested later that day and has been in custody since. Why don't they just lock me up and throw away the key? Penry told The Associated Press in 2001. That's all I want. The Supreme Court first agreed to hear Penry's case in 1988, and the following year overturned his death sentence on 5-4 vote. In 2000, he got within about 3 hours of execution when the justices halted the punishment. Penry was again sentenced to death, which was voided in 2001 by the Supreme Court on a 6-3 vote. Both times the high court reasoned the jury was not allowed to properly weigh Penry's alleged retardation. A new trial in 2002 led to a death sentence that was reversed in 2005 by the Court of Criminal Appeals, which ruled 5-4 to send Penry's death sentence back for another punishment hearing. It was that decision the attorney general's office appealed to the high court (source: Associated Press) ** Rosenthal resigns as district attorney amid e-mail scandal Chuck Rosenthal resigned as Harris County district attorney today amid an e-mail scandal that recently forced him to abandon his re-election campaign and a lawsuit filed today that sought his removal from office. Bill Delmore, chief of the D.A.'s legal services bureau, which oversees the general counsel's office, confirmed that Rosenthal issued a press release in which he says he contacted the governor's office to tender his resignation. Although I have enjoyed
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.Y., WYO., CALIF.
Feb. 16 NEW YORK: Albany forum hosts death penalty foes Alan Newton knows first hand how the justice system can go terribly wrong and now uses his experience to talk about the time and money be says is wasted on supporting the death penalty. Newton was sentenced in 1985 to 40 years in prison for raping a woman in an abandoned Bronx building in June 1984. He sat there for 22 years before DNA evidence cleared him and he was released in 2006. During the time this state had a death penalty, $200 million was wasted on it, Newton said today in Albany. That is money that could have gone toward rehabilitation or crime prevention. I can tell you that we have brothers and sisters leaving the penitentiaries just as ignorant as they were when they went in. We should be doing something about that. Newton was one of the anti-death penalty panelists who spoke about problems in law enforcement and the death penalty during this weekend's 37th Annual Legislative Conference of the New York State Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators meeting at the Empire State Plaza. There were no death penalty supporters on the panel. In 1995, the state Legislature voted, at the urging of the new governor, George Pataki, to reinstate the death penalty. The Court of Appeals effectively overturned the mandate in 2004. Steven Mollette of Peekskill was forced to face the issue in a Schenectady County courtroom in December 2006. Mollette lost his daughter Unishun Mollette, 19, who was killed by bullets meant for someone else as she sat in the back seat of a car in Hamilton Hill in September 2003. Kenneth Portee is serving 50 years to life. I sat in that courtroom every day during the trial and there was no question in my mind he was guilty, Mollette told a gathering of about 50 people at the session held in a concourse meeting room. Part of me wanted him to die too. But during the sentencing his daughter and mother were there and the compassionate side of me came out. I thought I did not want that man's mother to go through what I went through. Mollette said he believed less money should go to vengeance and more to preventive measures. There should be more reaching out to teach men, for instance, to help out and be more responsible for their families, their own lives and their communities, Mollette said. David Kaczynski, who heads New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, also spoke at the session. The brother of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said the law has many gray areas and has cost millions in taxpayer money that could have been better spent. To date, 213 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 16 who served time on death row, according the Innocence Project, a justice research group. It did nothing to protect us, Kaczynski said of the death penalty. Crime is still up and people are still getting wrongfully convicted and it is no secret that people of color are more likely to face the death penalty. The gathering from across the state saw a full day of individual discussion sessions Saturday on topics such as labor unions, parenting, gang violence, education, health and law enforcement and the death penalty. There was also Youth Hip Hop Summit held at the Swyer Theater on the concourse. The association's conference continues Sunday with information booths and crafts, fashions and music sales, a morning church service, awards ceremony and a gala scholarship benefit banquet. For more information, see http://www.nysabprl.com/main02.htm (source: Albany Times-Union) WYOMING: Judge orders new trial for death row inmate A federal judge has thrown out the conviction of a Wyoming inmate sentenced to die nearly a decade ago for the killing of a correctional officer during an escape attempt. U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer set aside the death sentence and ordered a new trial for James Martin Harlow, who'd been convicted of murdering Cpl. Wayne Martinez in 1997. Harlow was one of only 2 inmates on Wyoming's death row. In his 232-page ruling, released Friday, Brimmer cited several reasons for throwing out Harlow's conviction: * Conflicts between Harlow's trial attorney, Keith Goody, and former state Public Defender Sylvia Hackl; * The Wyoming Public Defender's Office failure to provide enough money for an adequate investigation into circumstances related to the case; * The withholding by state prosecutors of files pertaining to inmate witnesses who testified against Harlow; * Trial Judge Kenneth Stebner's refusal to allow Harlow's attorney to adequately question potential jurors about the death penalty and other issues. Numerous errors were present in the trial of James Martin Harlow, Brimmer wrote. Individually, any one of them likely would have altered the outcome of the trial verdict, or possibly the appeal. Brimmer gave prosecutors 120 days to grant Harlow a new trial. Attorney General Bruce Salzburg did not respond to a message left Friday afternoon seeking
[Deathpenalty] FW: Civil Resistance In the Age of Bush and Cheney
Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954 (phone) 217-244-1478 (fax) fboyle at law.uiuc.edu (personal comments only) From: William Hughes [mailto:liamhug...@comcast.net] Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 1:34 PM To: William Hughes Subject: Civil Resistance In the Age of Bush and Cheney Published, Feb. 16, 2008, Baltimore's Indy Media Center, at: http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/16855/index.php Civil Resistance In the Age of Bush and Cheney by William Hughes Be the change that you want to see in the world. - Mohandas Gandhi The late Philip Berrigan, Dissenter Emeritus, wrote in 1997: The empire's wars are killing us. (1) One of the big props for that empire is the clique in our society, known as the Military-Industrial Complex. This is the same powerful special interest that President Dwight D. Eisenshower warned the nation about in his Farewell Address. (2) Peace activist Berrigan felt, as a result of the arms race, that the world was moving towards a nuclear holocaust. In any event, Professor Francis A. Boyle's new book, Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law, reveals how some courageous individuals have successfully challenged the many outrageous, and ongoing, crimes of our national regimes, via their arrest in a Civil Resistance-type action, and, subsequently, as a defendant in a court of law before a jury of their peers. One of the initial things that Professor Boyle does in his excellent tome is to distinguish between the terms civil resistance and civil disobedience. Often they are confused in the minds of the public. Professor Boyle said that in civil resistance cases, you have individuals, acting peaceably, who are attempting to prevent the ongoing commission of international crimes...They are acting for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, international, and human rights. An example of civil resistance would be protesters risking arrest by trespassing in order to the prevent the production and use of First Strike nuclear weapons, which Professor Boyle claims are illegal under International Law. Classic civil disobedience cases, on the other hand, involved activists, who deliberately choose, by their conduct, to violate domestic laws for the express purpose of challenging and changing those laws. As an example, Professor Boyle cited the activists, particularly from the African-American community, during the 1950s and 1960s, who went to jail for various offenses, like in the historic sit-ins, in order to spotlight racially discriminatory laws and to bring about equal Civil Rights for all Americans. In his demanding role as an educator, attorney, consultant and respected expert witness on International Law, Professor Boyle has been in the trenches taking on the State Crimes of various U.S. administrations for close to thirty years. Civil Resistance has been the primary tool utilized by the activists in their legal-based, court room battles. As a result, the civil resisters, he insists, have become the Sheriffs and the U.S. government officials committing the crimes, the outlaws. Professor Boyle underscores how successive U.S. administrations have manipulated the public in order to justify their lawless ways. The Bush-Cheney Gang is one of his prime examples. He said that it is hell bent on stealing the hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and people living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Essentially, it sells its foreign policy wrongdoings, like the war in Iraq, by posing a Hobessian choice to the people. It suggests that there are only two alternatives: Either threaten or use U.S. military force in a particular situation, or allow the enemies to prevail. Professor Boyle insisted that they ignore a third way, which embraces diplomacy, peaceful resolutions of disputes, the application of the rules of law and the traditions of fair play. Professor Boyle labeled the conflict in Iraq as criminal, and the foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney Gang, which was fueled, in part, by the rabid Neocon ideologues, as out of control. How does civil resistance work within the framework of the American judicial system? Well, Professor Boyle cited the People v. Jarka case, among other landmark litigation, to illustrate some of his key points. In 1984, activists protested in front of the Great Lake's Naval Station base, which is located in Illinois, on Lake Michigan. The focus of the demonstration centered on the issues of U.S.'s violence-producing intervention in Central America and also on our country's buildup of offensive nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan was the president at the time. The defendants were arrested, when they sat in front of the naval base, locked arms, and refused to be moved. They were charged by authorities with the crimes of mob action and resisting arrest. The defendants, in Jarka, elected a trial by jury. The
