April 26
OKLAHOMA----impending executions
Executions scheduled for Tuesday evening in McAlester
The state Corrections Department plans to execute 2 convicted murderers 2 hours
apart Tuesday, with Clayton Lockett's execution at 6 p.m. to be followed by
Charles Warner's execution at 8 p.m.
The times were announced Friday in a notice to the state Court of Criminal
Appeals provided by the Oklahoma attorney general's office.
"This Court is well aware of the tortured procedural history of this case,"
Assistant Attorney General Seth S. Branham wrote, citing how everyone from the
governor to the state Supreme Court to the Court of Criminal Appeals has become
entangled in attempts by attorneys for the condemned killers to delay the
executions and force the state to reveal the source of the drugs to be used to
carry out the sentences.
Lockett, 38, was convicted of the 1999 fatal shooting of Stephanie Neiman, 19,
in Perry. Lockett shot Neiman twice with a shotgun before having an accomplice,
Shawn Mathis, bury her alive.
(source: Tulsa World)
*******************
The Cautionary Instruction: Politics and the death penalty
The legal maneuvering in Oklahoma over the scheduled executions of 2 condemned
men convicted of separate murders has taken a strange, but not entirely unusual
turn. This week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court stepped in to delay the executions
of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner while they pursued their challenge to the
state's "secret" lethal injection methods. That is not unusual.
What is unusual is that the Oklahoma Supreme Court does not normally handle
criminal matters. The Court of Criminal Appeals had refused to consider the
request for a delay, leading to an uneasy confrontation between the 2 courts.
As politics and the death penalty intersect the issue of delay got even
murkier.
The Oklahoma Attorney General called into question the Supreme Court's
authority and asked the Court to drop its stay. The Court rejected the request,
and soon after Governor Mary Fallin issued an executive order asserting that
the stay was "outside the constitutional authority" of the Supreme Court. She
exercised her own constitutional authority to delay the executions by one week,
meaning that the 2 men could both be put to death before their challenge to
lethal injection is resolved.
This confrontation is only the latest in a long history of political wrangling
over the death penalty. My book, The Executioner's Toll, 2010: The Crimes,
Arrests, Trials, Appeals, Last Meals, Final Words and Executions of 46 Persons
in the United States released this week by McFarland & Company, examines how
the death penalty has evolved from a term of art utilized in the criminal
justice system to cultural buzz words used to reveal a philosophy on issues of
law and order.
The death penalty has become, in many ways, a symbolic political term that
lends itself to the illusion of toughness, if you support the death penalty;
and to the illusion of weakness if you do not support the death penalty.
The idea that a political candidate can establish her law and order bona fides
by being pro-death penalty has enhanced the significance of the death penalty
in American politics. As capital punishment has evolved into a political
symbol, "Joe Six-Pack" at the corner bar can also confirm his tough,
red-blooded, law-abiding persona through his support of the death penalty.
The death penalty has morphed into a hot-button political issue right up there
with abortion, guns and taxes. That is why Oklahoma's Governor, attorney
general, Supreme Court Justices and appellate judges are involved in this race
to the death chamber - a public spectacle that serves no other purpose than
political aggrandizement.
(source: Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly &
George, P.C. He is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and just
completed a 6 year term on the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. His
weekly column on crime and punishment is syndicated by GateHouse New
Service----Post-Gazette)
*********************
Why is Oklahoma carrying out its first double-execution in nearly 80
years?----This debate is not about guilt, but rather about how the state will
go about killing Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner and whether the plan
violates the inmates' constitutional rights
On Tuesday, barring any last-minute legal surprises, Oklahoma will carry out
the death sentences of 2 convicted killers, ending weeks of high-stakes
tussling that pitted the state's governor against its court system and
threatened to send the state into a "constitutional crisis", in the words of
one legal observer. A look at how we got here:
The cases
The 2 men at the center of this story are Clayton Lockett, who in 1999 shot and
killed a 19-year-old woman, and Charles Warner, who raped and murdered his
girlfriend's infant daughter.
There is no question of their guilt - this debate is about exactly how the
state will go about killing them, and whether its plan for doing so violates
the inmates' constitutional rights. Lockett was originally scheduled to be
executed on 20 March, and Warner a week later on 27 March. But that month,
Oklahoma said it didn't have enough execution drugs to kill both men, and
shifted those dates to 22 and 29 April.
This week, the executions were at first put on indefinite hold by the state
supreme court, and then rescheduled by the governor; they are now both slated
to take place on 29 April. (More on that below).
The drugs
That drug shortage is what this is really all about: the drugs US states use to
carry out executions are made in Europe, and European drug companies don't want
their products used in executions. After the European Commission restricted the
export of such drugs to US corrections departments in 2011, states have been
scrambling to find alternatives.
Many have turned to compounding pharmacies, which are less well regulated than
traditional drug manufacturers. Defense attorneys argue that, as a result,
there is a greater risk of contamination that could cause the condemned
unnecessary - and unconstitutional - suffering during their executions.
Various states have experimented with different combinations of drugs and
dosages. In some cases, they are using untried combinations of compounded drugs
in what is essentially a trial-and-error process. (The doctors who could tell
state officials what drugs and dosages should be used are ethically forbidden
from doing so.) This has, in some instances, had apparently disastrous results.
In January, observers were horrified when the drugs used to put an Ohio man to
death took 26 minutes to finally kill him. Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson,
during his January execution, was quoted as saying "I feel my whole body
burning".
The secrecy
Several states - Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri - have passed laws that keep the
source of their execution drugs a secret, both from the general public and from
the inmates and their lawyers. They claim that if the sources were made public,
the pharmacies would face a backlash or even the threat of violence. An
Associated Press review earlier this month found little evidence to back that
claim up, at least in Texas.
An Oklahoma pharmacy called the Apothecary Shoppe had briefly supplied
compounded drugs to Missouri, but stopped in February. Now no one knows where
Oklahoma, or any other state that has carried out an execution recently, is
getting its drugs from.
"The extreme secrecy surrounding lethal injection in Oklahoma makes it
impossible to know whether executions would be carried out in a humane and
legal manner," lawyers for Clayton and Lockett said in a statement last month.
Some courts have agreed: in late March, Oklahoma district judge Patricia
Parrish found that her state's secrecy law violated inmates' right to access to
the courts. "I do not think this is even a close call," she said. The state
appealed that ruling last Friday to the state supreme court, calling it an
"overbroad interpretation" of the right to access.
Defense attorneys argue that the death row inmates should not be executed
before the constitutionality of the secrecy laws is fully adjudicated.
Oklahoma's prison officials, its governor and its attorney general say the
secrecy issue is a red herring and that the inmates are simply trying to delay
their inevitable executions.
The courts
Appeals came next, as they always do.
Last week, the state supreme court and the state court of criminal appeals
played a game of legal hot potato. Katie Fretland, who has been covering this
case for the Guardian, lays out the events as they stood on Monday:
The state supreme court said it did not have the authority to stay the
executions and transferred the matter to the criminal appeals court. But the
criminal appeals court said it did not have the authority to grant a stay.
And then, late Monday night, the state supreme court's justices, in an abrupt
turnaround, stepped in, apparently deciding that if they didn't issue the stay
no one else would, and announced that both executions were to be indefinitely
delayed until the courts could hear a full appeal of the constitutionality of
the drug secrecy.
The politicians
Here's where things get really weird.
On Tuesday, the state attorney general, Scott Pruitt, asked the state supreme
court to rehear the case, and the court rejected that request almost
immediately.
Outraged, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin on Tuesday issued an executive order to
go ahead with the executions on 29 April. She basically told the state's
highest court that she outranked them. Legal experts were taken aback.
"Governor Fallin is a politician and not a lawyer," said Randall Coyne, a
constitutional law expert who is a professor at the University of Oklahoma.
"According to well-established precedent of the US supreme court, the courts -
not executive officials - have the final word on what is constitutional."
And on Wednesday, a member of the Oklahoma House drafted a resolution calling
for the impeachment of the state supreme court justices who voted in favor of
the stay. It wouldn't have any affect on the ongoing court cases, however.
Back to the court
Very late Wednesday, the state supreme court blinked.
It dissolved the stays of execution, reversing Parrish's ruling that the
secrecy law was unconstitutional. Fallin's order stood, and now the state is
preparing to carry out two executions ??? its 1st double-execution in nearly 80
years.
Within the space of about a week, the state supreme court had 1) denied it had
the authority to issue a stay; 2) issued a stay; and 3) dissolved that stay.
The execution
Fallin said on Thursday that state prison officials were working out the
logistics of how to kill 2 people in 1 day: Lockett at 6pm and Warner at 8pm.
Seth Day, an attorney for Lockett and Warner, said the public has no way of
knowing whether the execution will be carried out in a "constitutional and
humane manner."
Oklahoma revised its lethal injection protocol in March to allow 5 different
ways to kill condemned inmates by lethal injection, depending on the particular
mix of drugs it is able to acquire before execution time.
2 weeks ago, Katie Fretland reported for the Guardian that the state had a new
source of manufactured - not compounded - vecuronium bromide, 1 of the 3 drugs
that will probably use in Tuesdays' executions. When asked to identify the
mystery source and whether it was approved by the US food and drug
administration, assistant state attorney general John Hadden told defense
attorneys, "This information is irrelevant to your clients".
(source: The Guardian)
KANSAS:
Kansas death penalty appeals changes unresolved
Kansas legislators are expected to try again to pass a measure that would
shorten the time allowed for death row inmates to appeal their convictions
before the state Supreme Court.
The measure is one of several lingering issues remaining for legislators to
resolve when they return Wednesday to the Statehouse to resume their session.
The death penalty changes would limit the amount of time that attorneys would
have to file briefs with the Kansas Supreme Court in direct appeals by inmates
and appeals on issues related to the convictions. Supporters say the changes
will expedite the appeals process.
The bill is in a compromise agreement that also would make certain law
enforcement documents related to arrests and search warrants available for
public view.
(source: Associated Press)
SOUTH DAKOTA:
Make death penalty quick
The death penalty in South Dakota is a joke, so you folks that are opposed can
relax. We have 3 or 4 individuals who are on death row in South Dakota, except
we warehouse them for many years at a cost of $30,000 plus and then spend
hundreds of thousands for appeals that never end that make lawyers rich. We
must be careful we do not deprive them of their civil rights.
Whatever happened to the right of those folks that were murdered as well as the
families and friends of the victims? I would like to suggest to all those that
are against the death penalty to step up and pay for their keep so they can be
warm and comfy in their cells. I think the death sentence should be carried out
within 90 days of sentence. I'm neither for or against the death penalty, but I
am against warehousing them indefinitely at great cost. Those wasted dollars
should be spent on education of those that want it.
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and the 5th says, "Thou shall not kill."
But Jesus also said, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."
I believe it is the state's responsibility to protect its citizens, keep them
safe and not waste money. Those convicted say that they were mentally
handicapped when they did their deed. May I suggest that the state claim mental
disability when they execute them.
Paul Willadsen, Sioux Falls
(source: Letter to the Editor, Argus Leader)
CALIFORNIA:
William Suff death penalty ruling Monday
The California Supreme Court will rule Monday on the serial-killer death
penalty case of William Suff, who was convicted of killing a dozen women in
Riverside County.
Sentenced to die in 1995, Suff is now 63 and on San Quentin Prison's death row.
Suff lived in Colton at the time of his arrest and worked as a Riverside County
supply clerk, participating in van pools and chili cook-offs.
But investigators said he also used his van to cruise neighborhoods in
Riverside and Lake Elsinore where prostitutes gathered and sexually mutilated
and strangled 12 of them from 1989 to 1991.
Suff kept jewelry and clothing from the women he killed, washed the articles
and gave them to female friends.
Suff claimed the prosecution had framed him, and said the news media had
defamed him.
(source: Press-Enterprise)
******************
Prosecutors win statewide award for case against Bay Area serial killer
2 Marin County prosecutors who won guilty verdicts and the death penalty
against a Northern California serial killer last year have received statewide
honors for their work.
Deputy District Attorneys Dori Ahana and Rosemary Slote were named outstanding
prosecutors of the year by the California District Attorneys Association. Ahana
and Slote prosecuted Joseph Naso, 80, who is now on death row at San Quentin
State Prison.
Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian announced the award Friday during a
boisterous staff gathering at the Civic Center. He also recognized Inspector
Michael McBride, the primary district attorney's investigator on the case, and
volunteer assistant Mary Bramblett.
Berberian noted that the state award was created in 1977 to honor 2 Marin
prosecutors -- Jerry Herman and Terrence Boren -- for their work on the "San
Quentin 6" murders that stemmed from a prison riot. Herman went on to become
district attorney, while Boren became a judge in Marin Superior Court.
"37 years later, that recognition has come back to Marin County," Berberian
said.
In brief remarks, Ahana and Slote said they would accept the award on behalf of
the entire office when the annual ceremonies are held in June in Newport Beach.
"It was a team effort," Slote said.
Naso, a retired property manager and photographer, was sentenced to death in
November after nearly three years of court hearings that included a lengthy
trial in Marin Superior Court. He was tried in Marin for all the murders,
including ones that occurred in other counties.
During the guilt phase of the trial, he was convicted of murdering 4 women
between 1977 and 1994 and dumping their bodies on rural roads in Marin, Yuba
and Contra Costa counties.
During the death penalty phase of the trial, Ahana and Slote also presented
evidence that Naso also killed 2 other women, a former Naso tenant whose body
washed up in Tiburon in 1981, and a nomadic Bob Dylan groupie who was killed in
1992 in or near Nevada County.
Prosecutors alleged that the women represented 6 of 10 unnamed women on a list
Naso maintained to document his murders. Investigators still hope to determine
who the other 4 women were.
Naso, who represented himself at the trial, maintained that the prosecution had
failed to prove its case and that evidence was planted. He said the prosecution
"was kind of like a hate crime against me."
The California District Attorneys Association award for Ahana and Slote is in
the category for counties with populations under 450,000. The award for large
counties went to Eric Smith, a Kern County gang prosecutor who spent 236 days
in trial last year on 8 cases, including 7 murders, the association said.
(source: San Jose Mercury News)
*********************
Sacramento burglar sentenced to death for killing 'a totally innocent victim'
In case there was any question in Ronnie Vang's mind, Sacramento Superior Court
Judge Steve White reminded the convicted killer Friday why he was about to join
the other 745 inmates who have been sentenced to San Quentin's death row as of
April 2.
"All murders are intrinsically horrible," the judge told Vang, "but some
murders are more horrific than other murders, and I think - having seen a lot
of murder cases - that the difference has to do with the amount of time that
goes into the moments preceding the murder.
"Lots of murders are of the moment. They are sudden. They are spontaneous. They
are ill-chosen acts. But they are not largely thought out."
It was the deliberations Vang went through in carrying out the murder of Keith
Anthony Fessler during a June 2009 residential burglary that qualified the
defendant to be only the fifth to be sentenced to death in Sacramento in the
past decade.
There was "a series of moments, a countless series of moments" where Vang had
to stop and think about what he was doing, White said. At each juncture, Vang
went forward, to where he executed ??? with 2 gunshots to the back the head -
"a totally innocent victim, and somebody who was esteemed and highly regarded
by apparently everybody who knew him, and (who) presented no threat of harm to
you whatsoever," the judge said from the bench.
Vang was convicted Dec. 4 in the shooting death of Fessler, 44. The following
month, a jury found the murder merited the death penalty because it was
committed to eliminate a witness and took place during the course of a
burglary.
Out of prison only 4 days from a previous burglary conviction, Vang, 32, and
his cousin, Joson Vang, 27, broke into Fessler's home in the 7400 block of
Carella Drive in the Meadowview area on the day of the killing. Fessler woke up
during the daytime burglary. When Fessler confronted the burglars, Ronnie Vang
and his cousin tied him up and threw him across a bed. A witness testified that
Ronnie Vang told him Fessler told the intruders to take his stuff and pleaded
for his life. Ronnie Vang then shot Fessler twice in the back of the head, the
jury found.
"You make a whole series of choices," White told Vang, who sat impassively and
declined to make a statement at the sentencing hearing. "You choose, instead of
leaving, to stay. You choose, instead of letting him leave, unmolested by you
and your co-defendant, you decide to hobble and hogtie him."
"White said it's plain that Vang, who was not wearing a mask and who didn't
want to go back to prison, did not want to leave anybody around who could
identify him.
"And you decide to kill Keith Fessler," White said. "Those were tortuous
moments for Keith Fessler, and you had infinite opportunities to change your
mind. He wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't presenting any threat to you. But you
decided instead to put 2 bullets into him."
Born in Alabama, Fessler grew up in Sheboygan, Wis., before moving west and
settling in Sacramento about 10 years before his death. He worked nights fixing
MRI machines and other types of medical equipment at Kaiser Permanente. His
real passion, however, was music, and he wrote and recorded his own songs and
played several high-quality guitars. He also enjoyed windsurfing.
After killing Fessler, Vang and his cousin stole the guitars and his
surfboards. They then set fire to Fessler's house and left in the victim's car,
which they also burned. They were arrested after Ronnie Vang tried to sell the
guitars at a pawn shop. A video surveillance camera in the store recorded him
as he walked in, strumming the guitar "like he was on a Sunday drive," Deputy
District Attorney Valerie Brown said in her opening statement at trial.
A separate jury convicted the cousin on the same 7 counts that were sustained
against Ronnie Vang - murder, burglary, robbery, arson (2 counts), attempted
burglary, car theft. White sentenced Joson Vang to life in prison without
parole in January.
Fessler's parents, Eldred Anthony Fessler and Dianne Fessler, attended every
day of trial, along with their son, Craig, all of whom live in Florida. Another
son, Eric Fessler, attended the beginning and the end of the trial. Members of
the family made statements at Joson Vang's sentencing, which occurred just
before the jury returned the death penalty verdict on Ronnie Vang. They
declined to return to Sacramento for Ronnie Vang's sentencing.
In a written statement to the court, Dianne Fessler recalled the pain of being
told about her son's murder and the difficulty of going to a city they did not
know to make funeral arrangements. Then there was the insurance agent who
"began calling us over and over and insisting we go to Keith's house, the crime
scene" and how they had to call a police detective to tell the agent to "quit
hounding us."
Dianne Fessler said that in the year after her son's death, she and her husband
had to deal with as many as 80 emails and a similar number of phone calls in
handling the details of their son's death.
"Each call requires repeating the death of our son," she wrote. "Each call
reopened the wound in your heart."
Keith's death "left a big empty hole in me/us," she wrote.
"He was such a good son, brother, uncle, a huge part of our lives," Dianne
Fessler said. "He never missed calling on Mother's Day, Father's Day or on our
birthdays. He was so good to all of us, never raised his voice in anger, and
was so helpful. We will never see him, hear his voice, talk with him, hear his
laugh or be with him again."
(source: Merced Sun-Star)
OREGON:
Oregon shows no inclination to carry out the death penalty -- should it?
Next month marks 17 years since Oregon executed a prisoner.
Harry C. Moore was executed by lethal injection on May 16, 1997, the 2nd of
just 2 Oregon prisoners put to death by the state since 1976. Both volunteered
to be executed, waiving their appeals.
At a time when executions in the United States are in decline (10 percent in
2013, according to the Death Penalty Information Center) and death sentences
are approaching historic lows, we wondered whether capital punishment has a
future in Oregon.
Here's some background:
The state is 1 of 34, in addition to the U.S. government, with laws making
certain murders capital offenses. But Oregon stands 30th among them in
executions carried out.
As of Dec. 19, Oregon's death row held 34 prisoners (including 1 woman).
Oregon patterned its death penalty statute after Texas, which leads the nation
in executing prisoners - more than 500 since the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed
its acceptance of the death penalty in 1976.
Oregon's death penalty: Take 3 For PoliticsOregon hasn't executed a person in
nearly 17 years. In Texas, 514 people have been executed. Should Oregon
continue the death penalty or should we abolish it? Dana Tims and Bryan Denson
explore options. Gov. John Kitzhaber, who served as governor during the state's
last two executions, took a formal stand in 2011 against the death penalty. He
put a moratorium on execution as death row inmate Gary Haugen volunteered to
face the ultimate criminal punishment.
"In my mind," Kitzhaber said during his third term, "it is a perversion of
justice."
It appears that Haugen's wish to be executed won't be granted during
Kitzhaber's term as governor.
(source: The Oregonian)
US MILITARY:
Odd Guantanamo episode derails defense of detainee healthcare
Attorneys abruptly halted an Army doctor's bid to defend detainee medical care
Friday after it was revealed that the prison's lawyer had engaged in some
peculiar pretrial preparation in the USS Cole death-penalty case.
The top prison lawyer, a Navy officer, had summoned the doctor Thursday to
watch a secure feed of war court testimony at prison headquarters that
described his patient as a torture victim. Nobody, it seemed, had instructed
the doctor - or the prison lawyer - that the doctor had to be shielded from the
proceedings.
Instead, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 49, accused in the Cole bombing, watched
Friday as his anonymous doctor at Guantanamo's secret prison, Camp 7, said in
court that he had watched torture expert Dr. Sondra Crosby criticize Nashiri's
medical care the day before.
The doctor, wearing the uniform of an Army major and identified only in court
as Dr. M, said the staff attorney summoned him at 8:30 a.m. Thursday to watch
the torture treatment expert testify on a secure feed in the attorney's office.
The doctor left the lawyer when Crosby finished testifying, and was summoned
back when, in a surprise, trial judge Col. James Pohl ordered additional
testimony by Crosby Thursday afternoon.
Pohl was miffed: "I certainly would not expect that type of scenario to occur
again."
The development temporarily sidelined defense attorney Rick Kammen's efforts to
get the judge to suspend pretrial preparation in the warship bombing case until
Nashiri gets better healthcare. Nashiri is accused of orchestrating al-Qaida's
Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the Navy destroyer off Yemen.
17 American sailors died, and the prosecution seeks the death penalty.
Kammen, meantime, says Nashiri needs mental health treatment for the trauma he
sustained during four years of secret CIA detention. He was waterboarded and
threatened during interrogation by a revving power drill. Crosby testified this
week that the Saudi got to Guantanamo from CIA custody in 2006 as a victim of
physical, mental and sexual torture.
Friday's testimony from the prison doctor was meant to dispute Crosby's expert
testimony that U.S. military doctors treat only Nashiri's symptoms -
anal-rectal complaints, sleeplessness, chronic pain - not his Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder.
Were he to testify, the Army doctor said, he'd advise: "I believe we give
adequate care, absolutely. More than adequate care."
For his part, the chief prosecutor didn't directly concede that anything went
wrong when the military doctor watched the civilian doctor's testimony at a
secure location outside the courtroom. Instead, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins
tried, in court, on the spot, to cobble together a proposed judicial order to
in the future strictly govern video feeds from the courtroom to offices around
this U.S. Navy base.
The order would let the court "know something about who's in the places where
the closed-circuit television is going," Martins said. Pohl didn't take up the
offer.
Friday's disclosure was a variation on a January 2013 war court episode when
someone from the CIA reached in and muted the courtroom feed to the public.
Judge Pohl ordered all remote-control kill switches disconnected.
Now it appears that an undisclosed number of offices around the base have CCTV
feeds unsupervised by either the court or prosecution.
Some sites are known. Reporters watch in a Camp Justice press room, where the
military posts a soldier to watch the journalists. Other Army and Navy troops
watch in private public affairs officers chambers restricted to "military
personnel only," a restriction that could admit entry to thousands of troops.
Civilian contractors have feeds of courtroom proceedings into their work space,
as does the lawyer for the prison camp commander, Adm. Richard Butler, at
prison camp headquarters some distance from the war court compound.
Nashiri's civilian death-penalty defender Kammen labeled the development as
"rather bizarre" and at odds with civilian court practice. He asked the judge
to order to court the Army psychiatrist who was assigned to Nashiri's case for
the past 7 months, since that doctor hadn't watched Crosby's testimony.
That brought another surprise. It was disclosed that the psychiatrist assigned
to treat Nashiri, also with the Army, went on leave last week and was somewhere
in the Untied States. The psychiatrist may testify Monday by
video-teleconference.
In other court developments Friday:
-- Judge Pohl ordered the government to fund a defense jury consultant for the
Nashiri trial, scheduled to start with jury selection in October. The Pentagon
pays all defense bills and had refused to pay for expert Marjorie Fargo. A case
prosecutor argued that Nashiri's lawyers didn't need a consultant to help pick
the U.S. military jury. Pohl overruled them.
-- Defense and government lawyers went into a classified session with the
judge to discuss a secret motion on a prosecution plan to have a Yemeni man who
was killed in a U.S. drone strike testify through hearsay. Prosecutors
apparently propose to have federal agents describe a decade-old interrogation
of the "witness," Fahd al Quso.
-- The judge instructed Nashiri's lawyers to decide by Monday whether to begin
arguing over a prosecution bid to scale back the judge's sweeping CIA
black-site discovery order, or start addressing the motion for reconsideration
in June. Prosecutors wrote in a still-sealed filing that, if the judge doesn't
change his mind, they'll appeal the order to a Pentagon panel - a scenario that
would likely derail plans for a December start to the trial.
(source: Miami Herald)
USA:
Why putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death is wrong ---- The reprehensibility of
the alleged terrorist shouldn't cloud our judgment about human life
This week, Boston passed an important milestone on its road to recovery from
last year's horrific bombing: the city's annual marathon came and went without
incident. And while the scars, both literal and figurative, are still very real
for the bombing's victims, the healing process has largely shifted out of the
public gaze. Yet, there remains one unanswered question that will inevitably
push the bombing back into the focus: will 20-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get
the death penalty?
Though Massachusetts is not a death penalty state, federal prosecutors
announced in January that they would seek the execution of Tsarnaev, and it
appears they have a good deal of support nationwide for their decision. While
just a third of Boston residents favored executing Tsarnaev according to a
September Boston Globe poll, polling conducted nationally in May of 2013 found
that 70 % of Americans would support the death penalty for Tsarnaev if
convicted. Compare that with the 55 % of adults who favor the death penalty
generally, and it appears that Tsarnaev has inspired more than a few
special-case considerations.
And Tsarnaev's case is the sort of unusual example that can buttress the
argument for the death penalty, were someone so inclined. Beyond the gravity of
the crime itself, there is also little doubt of Tsarnaev's own guilt: He gave a
confession shortly after his capture, and allegedly scrawled one on the wall of
the boat he hid in during his pursuit. Though some still insist that Tsarnaev's
confession should be thrown out given that he had not been properly Mirandized
at the time, and his defense team appears to be preparing a sort of coercion
narrative based on the influence of Tsarnaev's now deceased older brother
Tamerlan, the fact remains that he appears to have produced a cogent account of
what he did and why he did it.
But the certainty of Tsarnaev's guilt is, in my thinking, a good reason to make
his case a worthy argument against the death penalty. Each of the points posed
above that would militate against his execution - possible coercion, improper
handling of Constitutional rights, the slim possibility of innocence - are all
based on the idea that the death penalty is wrong because it is so often handed
down in error. This leaves open the potential for a world in which the death
penalty is handed down without those errors, which would by those standards
render it a just penalty. But I am willing to concede everything the pro-death
penalty agents in the case of Tsarnaev conclude: that he is guilty, that he is
responsible, and that the constitutional issues in his case appear to have been
vastly blown out of proportion by the media. And he still should not be
executed.
This brings us to the point attorney Alan Dershowitz made shortly after the
bombings: "if this defendant does not deserve the death penalty, then no one
does." If Tsarnaev is the limit case - the circumstance in which none of the
error-based arguments against the death penalty work - then holding the
hardline position that he still should not be executed makes a much more
profound point against execution at large. And Tsarnaev's case is doubly useful
for making the argument against the death penalty precisely because his
criminal activity was based overtly in a complaint against the United States
itself.
The brothers Tsarnaev didn't have a sophisticated set of grievances, but rather
a broad theme: that the United States plays fast and loose with human life
abroad. For the Tsarnaev brothers, this was offensive because of its affect on
Muslim populations overseas; but the statement the complaint makes about the
character of the United States is rather more broad, namely that the country
does not appropriately value human life. While some might view it as a kind of
capitulation to allow Tsarnaev to live in light of what he has done, it appears
to me that it would be more of a capitulation to kill him. In that case, we
would be surrendering to his vision of what the United States is, and
conforming to the view that human life is of mutable value in this country's
policy.
But the fact is that human life is not of mutable value; it is, rather, the
chief object of moral concern. Tsarnaev is in the wrong precisely because he
and his brother showed a callous disregard for human life in the vicious
attacks they carried out, but by refusing to allow our ethics to degenerate to
that level, we have the opportunity to both disavow his behavior by example and
to assemble a more sturdy ethical position from which to carry out that
disavowal in the long term.
And there is more to be gained from jettisoning the death penalty than the
moral high ground. By removing the death penalty from its repertoire of
sentences, the states makes a permanent sort of commitment to its citizenry: No
matter your offense, the value of your life is still unconditionally affirmed.
This removes the extraordinarily adversarial edge that the death penalty brings
to the cases it's invoked in, and could easily be the foundation of a justice
system more based on rehabilitation - which by its very intent upholds the
value of the offended and the offender as related rather than opposed - than
retribution with no possibility of repentance or restoration.
The death penalty is in practice wrought with error, but it is also
fundamentally wrong because it agrees more with philosophies like the one
Tsarnaev himself seems to have operated on than one that would correct and
potentially rehabilitate him. As an extremely powerful and highly visible
institution with the ability to influence discourse and public thought, the
United States' government should affirm the immutable value of human life in
direct opposition to both the image of the U.S. Tsarnaev maintains and the type
of response he undertook, because human flourishing does not arise from the
escalating devaluation of human life. Everyone counts, even the worst; anything
less is a moral hazard at the least and a direct danger at the most.
(source: The Week)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
