March 27 OHIO: Inmate wants judge off appeals A federal judge has been asked to remove herself from reconsidering a British-born Ohio death row inmate's fate because she previously reviewed his conviction while serving on the Ohio Supreme Court. Kenny Richey's lawyers said U.S. Circuit Judge Deborah Cook, who was appointed to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Bush, had taken part in rulings that went against the 40-year-old prisoner in 1995 and 1998. Traditionally, federal judges step down from reviewing cases where they had a prior role and it is widely expected that Cook will follow tradition. Richey, who was born in Scotland, is a cause celebre in Britain, where the death penalty has been outlawed. TV documentaries have been made for British audiences proclaiming he was convicted on flawed evidence in Ohio, and the British government has filed legal briefs on his behalf in the U.S. appeals court. He has denied firebombing an apartment in Columbus Grove, a village north of Lima, where a 2-year-old girl was burned to death in 1987. The request that Cook step down came after the Ohio attorney general's office moved for all 12 judges on the Cincinnati-based federal appeals court to restore Richey's death sentence. So far, there has been no signal from the appeals court, or from Cook, about the next step. Last January, a three-judge panel ordered a new trial, saying there were gaps in the evidence against Richey. The panel also found that Richey's 1st lawyer made "grave mistakes" and was incompetent to defend him during the 1987 murder trial in rural Putnam County. Assistant Attorney General Michael L. Collyer of Cleveland said the panel exceeded its authority and "found its own facts without mention of contrary facts" to rule in favor of Richey. Richey's lawyer, Ken Parsigian of Boston, said the state was rehashing old legal arguments. He said the appeals court should "permit the panel's well-reasoned decision to stand." (source: Cleveland Plain Dealer) USA: No shortage of women who dream of snaring a husband on Death Row -- Experts ponder why deadliest criminals get so many proposals Scott Peterson, the man who was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child, had been on Death Row barely an hour when the 1st proposal arrived from a woman who wants to be the new Mrs. Scott Peterson. 3 dozen phone calls came in to the warden's office on Peterson's 1st day at his new home in San Quentin State Prison -- women were pleading for his mailing address, and one smitten 18-year-old said she wanted to marry him. As far as anyone knows, these women don't really know Peterson -- and unlike Laci Peterson, they certainly haven't spent any time with him, usually a requisite for getting married -- but, according to several experts on the world of the condemned, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the allure of marrying a notorious man, regardless of the fact that he may well end his days with a state-approved needle sticking out of his arm. There's the danger of it all, and, ultimately, the safety of it: If things go wrong, the wife can walk away. "They love the celebrity status," said Jack Levin, a criminologist who is director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. Levin is co-author of the book "Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder," which explores, among other things, what Levin called "killer groupies." "These are the same women who might correspond with a rock star or a rap artist," Levin said. When such a woman writes to a rock star, he said, "the best she can hope for is a computerized signature on a photograph." When she writes to a serial killer on death row, "she might get a marriage proposal." Others give the potential prison brides more benefit of the doubt. "A lot of women are really taken with the man's criminal case, and they overwhelmingly believe these men are innocent," said Rick Halperin, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "Many think the man shouldn't be alone and that even if he doesn't get out, there should be somebody there supporting him." Prison weddings in California are a regular occurrence. In general, about 20 inmates get married in ceremonies held on the first Friday of even-numbered months at San Quentin, and usually at least one condemned inmate is among them. And death row inmates have no shortage of suitors. In fact, the more notorious the murderer, the less he has to work for female companionship, San Quentin spokesman Eric Messick said. "You take our 5 highest-profile killers here, and you've got your answer about who the most popular inmates are," Messick said. "I think it's just the publicity that attracts people." Letters of adoration flow in daily to death row inmates from all over the world, some of them 20 handwritten pages long. Richard Allen Davis, the man who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma home in 1993 and killed her, "probably gets more mail than most," Messick said. Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" who killed 13 people and has more than a passing interest in Satanism, has women virtually throwing themselves at him despite the fact he is already married. Messick said "99 percent" of correspondence to the condemned is from women. (There doesn't seem to be a similar clamoring among men for women awaiting death. None of the 15 women on the state's female death row in Chowchilla has gotten married in prison.) A large proportion of those who contact San Quentin's death row inmates are from Britain and Holland. The interest from Europe, according to Messick, is probably rooted in opposition to the death penalty and sympathy for those who are being subjected to it. Ramirez married Doreen Lioy, a freelance magazine editor, in 1996 after an 11-year courtship in which she wrote him 75 letters in prison. He was attracted to her, one of her friends said on her wedding day, because she said she was a virgin. "Satanists don't wear gold," he reportedly told her when they discussed wedding bands. At the time, Lioy declared herself "ecstatically happy." She could not be reached for comment for this story, and Messick said he hadn't seen her around the prison in a long time. Other women's interest in Ramirez continues even today, although "from what I gather he's not real responsive to the mail," Messick said. "He's not a big letter writer." Some death row inmates meet their life partners in more mundane ways. In the 1970s, a woman working for a drug treatment center in San Rafael visited San Quentin and was mesmerized by a convicted murderer speaking about a prison program that tries to keep youngsters from getting into trouble. The woman, who did not want to be identified for privacy and job reasons, married the inmate in 1977. He had been sentenced to death for abducting and killing a gas station attendant with some friends on his 21st birthday, but by the time she fell in love, his sentence had been commuted to life. Their marriage prompted numerous newspaper stories and appearances on national television talk shows, raising the perennial question of why someone would want to marry a killer behind bars. "Why?" she said. "Love. He was like the mayor of San Quentin. He was involved in everything. And I started to become involved in everything relating to the prison." She and her husband were allowed conjugal visits because he was no longer on Death Row. She visited 2 or 3 times a week for 9 years until 1985, when he was released. Throughout that time, she said, other women were contacting him, at least one of whom tried to become more intimate. She said they "grew apart" after his release and eventually divorced. He remarried and now lives in another state. "You just don't know how things will work out until you live with them," she said. "It just didn't work out." She still considers him to be "an unusual, interesting man who is charismatic. I wasn't desperate by any means. I just really liked him and became attracted to him and wanted to be with him any way I could. "It's too hard for me to try to figure out why other women would do this," she said. But she added that she had met several other wives of condemned inmates, and that some had clearly "lost their marbles." "They were attracted to men who did serious, ugly types of crimes, child molesting and such," she said. One woman whose husband is currently on death row said she became attracted to the convicted murderer she eventually married through one of the many prison pen-pal organizations. The woman would not be identified out of fear that her husband's legal prospects as well as her job could be jeopardized. She said that from the outset she "didn't want to become some prison girlfriend. He wasn't looking for a wife. I wasn't looking for a husband." She was already married, but that marriage wasn't working. Her husband said in a telephone interview from death row, "When she first came up here and we met, we certainly were attracted to one another. But I told her, 'No, go home and make your marriage work.'" Eventually, the woman got divorced. "My wife and I would not have stayed married for (all these) years had we not been in love," the inmate said. But he conceded that when one spouse is on death row and the other is free, "it's a very, very difficult circumstance under which to conduct a marriage." None of these marriages will ever be consummated unless the man somehow gets off death row. Yet it wasn't always this way. According to Kay Bandell, a registered nurse who has been tutoring and corresponding with prisoners for some 30 years, at one time, San Quentin's death row "used to have an open visiting area. To handle questions of intimacy, (couples) would sneak in and out of the ladies room, or some people would form a protective circle around a couple that wanted to have sex. "Now they have contact (but non-conjugal) visits in cages, with guards around them. People have sex on the phone, verbal sex. And letters provide a certain amount (of intimacy). But all these are vicarious forms of intimacy. It's not the same as having a consummated physical experience." San Quentin officials said they tightened up the visiting rules about 4 years ago, after a stabbing incident in the common visiting area. For some women, the Death Row husband is someone she has been seeking all her life, and it is frequently a life that has had some horrific knocks. For her 1991 book "Women Who Love Men Who Kill," Sheila Isenberg interviewed 30 women who were married to death row inmates. "Most of these women had been abused in their earlier lives, by parents, fathers, first husbands or first boyfriends," she said. "So a relationship with a man behind bars is a safe relationship. The guy can't hurt them. "Another thing," she added, is that in the pressure to get married, women tend to look for "the most macho man around. He's the guy who pulled the trigger. We tend to venerate the most violent men in our society. Sometimes, it's the good guys, the cops on TV shows, sometimes the bad guys." By marrying a man on death row, Isenberg said, a woman finds a new life that is "always dangerous and exciting. Can he make the phone call? Will he be executed? Will he spend 30 years in prison? All these exciting elements. It's never mundane. "It's a very strange world behind prison walls," she said. "It's courtly love, like the Knights of the Round Table. The man in prison has a lot of time on his hands and can romance a woman the way most men can't because they don't have the time. A man in prison can put a woman up on a pedestal and pay attention to her." "It's all gentlemanly and formal. The women I interviewed said they didn't have sex (with their imprisoned husbands.) It was part of the appeal -- it was more exciting to sit at a table, under the watchful eyes of a guard, and just stare." (source: San Francisco Chronicle) ARIZONA: The price of freedom Whats your freedom worth - literally, in dollars and cents? Unless you've been, say, sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for a murder you didn't commit, you probably havent given it much thought. But Ray Krone had 10 years with nothing but time on his hands to ponder the question. Last week he got an answer: $1.4 million. Thats the settlement amount in a wrongful murder conviction suit he filed against Maricopa County, Ariz. As Krones mom, Carolyn Lemming of Dover Township, says: It sounds like a lot, until you consider: His lost wages and benefits for a decade. His legal bills - about $800,000 total. The misery of 10 years in jail. Do the math, and the settlement adds up to about $380 a day rotting in prison. Subtract his legal fees from that total and he got about $164 a day - or about $6.80 an hour. Thats just $1.65 more than minimum wage. Sounds like Maricopa County got off easy. (source: Daily Record) MARYLAND: Life without parole State lawmakers don't have to look to Texas or Virginia or Florida for reasons to stop executing people. Maryland has plenty of examples. Poor lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct, mistaken identity, withheld evidence, DNA exoneration - for all of these reasons, death sentences here have been overturned. Blacks who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those whose victims are black. Bank robbers who kill a teller in Baltimore County most certainly will face the death penalty, but not if they commit the same crime in Baltimore city. Those racial and geographic disparities in the application of the death penalty, as reported in a 2003 University of Maryland study, have yet to be addressed. As Maryland prepares to execute its fifth inmate in 11 years, legislators should put an end to an imperfect system that can't correct for man's fallibility. It's simply not enough for elected officials to uphold the death penalty law because a majority of Marylanders support capital punishment. The Maryland Catholic Conference, leading advocates for repeal, say there is an alternative: life without parole. A poll commissioned by the conference last month found that a majority of 625 voters surveyed - 56 % - support the death penalty. But responses to a follow-up question showed the softness of that support. When asked, "As a penalty for murder, do you believe that the sentence of life without the possibility of parole is or is not an acceptable substitute for the death penalty?" 63 % said yes. State law now allows prosecutors to seek a sentence of life without parole for 1st-degree murderers. But death penalty opponents say many people don't realize that life without parole means prison for life. No chance at freedom but for a gubernatorial pardon, sentence commutation or the vacating of a conviction - all rare exceptions. Since taking office, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has received no clemency request from a life-without-parole inmate. In rescinding the state's moratorium on capital punishment, Mr. Ehrlich pledged to review every death penalty case before an execution. But a case-by-case analysis can't correct the systemic problems revealed in the UM study. Some victims' families are realizing that a death sentence prolongs their grief because capital appeals can stretch for years. After former National Security Agency cryptologist Darris A. Ware's death sentence was overturned twice, families of his victims pressed Anne Arundel County prosecutors last year to seek life without parole. It was more than 11 years after his conviction in 2 murders. Vernon L. Evans Jr., convicted in the contract slaying of a federal witness and a relative, has asked to delay his execution next month until the Maryland Court of Appeals reviews another capital appeal that is based on the UM findings of racial bias and geographic disparity. The study remains a compelling argument for scrapping the state's death penalty law - and Marylanders' apparent acceptance of life without parole offers yet another reason, a sentiment that is growing across the country. (source: Baltimore Sun) CALIFORNIA: Former prosecutor rebuts claim of jury bias The longtime head prosecutor of death-penalty cases in Alameda County said Friday there was no scheme to exclude Jews from juries in capital cases, including a 1987 conviction that the California Supreme Court is reviewing. Meanwhile, a Montana lawyer summoned by the California attorney general's office to impeach the credibility of former Alameda County prosecutor John "Jack" Quatman, who made the bias charge, instead vouched for Quatman's honesty in court in Friday. The events in a San Jose courtroom marked the 4th day of a rare evidentiary hearing to assess Quatman's declaration that as a prosecutor he had colluded with then-Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stanley Golde to keep Jews off a jury that helped send Fred Freeman to death row. Quatman also asserted in the declaration, which was made public last year, that it was "standard practice" in the district attorney's office to use peremptory challenges to exclude Jews and black women from death-penalty trials. Quatman made his allegations in 2003, nearly six years after retiring from Alameda County and settling in northwestern Montana. Quatman said that during jury selection in the 1987 case he had struck prospective jurors he believed were Jewish upon the private advice of Golde, who died in 1998. It is illegal for attorneys to strike potential jurors because of their race, ethnicity or religion. But Jim Anderson, 61, who successfully prosecuted 10 death penalty cases of his own and supervised attorneys who handled several others, testified there had never been an effort to keep Jews off the Freeman jury. Anderson, who helped send more men to San Quentin's death row than any other lawyer in California, made only a handful of terse statements in court. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Kevin Murphy ordered attorneys to limit the probe to the Freeman case and the credibility of Quatman's allegations. But outside court, Anderson said that any broad policy to exclude Jews or black women would be not only illegal but also bad strategy. Not all black women are liberals, he said, citing Condoleezza Rice and other conservative African American women. "It ain't the color that matters, it's the politics," said Anderson, who retired last fall. "I always tried to kick liberals off my death-penalty juries. ... I've booted people from Berkeley. They don't make good death- penalty jurors." Anderson's testimony was preceded by that of a lawyer and judge from Flathead County, Mont., where Quatman has practiced law for nearly 7 years. Both men vouched for Quatman's honesty. Whitefish City Judge Bradley Johnson said that Quatman had appeared in his courtroom many times and that he considered him to be honest and credible. David Stufft, of Kalispell, Mont., had long court battles with Quatman and his lawyer wife, Phyllis, in 2000 after it was alleged the pair had provided a woman with ineffective counsel in a sex and drug case. Stufft was brought to San Jose by the attorney general's office to impeach Quatman's credibility. But after Stufft said outside court that he respected Quatman, prosecutor George Williamson decided not to call him as witness. However, Freeman's appellate attorney, Gary Sowards, called Stufft to the stand -- and Stufft said Quatman was well-respected in Montana. Sowards told the judge that Stufft's situation showed that the attorney general's office and Alameda County district attorney's office were not interested in determining whether Quatman's allegations were true, but were playing "pin the hide of the defendant to the wall." Sowards said prosecutors were only presenting negative information and testimony about Quatman. "The focus of the investigation has been to kill the messenger," Sowards said. (source: San Francisco Chronicle) ALABAMA: Rudolph security readied for hearing----No traffic detours are expected for Tuesday court date When capital murder suspect Eric Robert Rudolph comes to town Tuesday for a court hearing, security will be a little more relaxed than last time, according to Huntsville police. Federal marshals in the Huntsville office were tight-lipped Thursday about the security plans and calls to the U.S. Marshal's headquarters in Birmingham were not returned for comment. However, an advisory from the office of the U.S. district court said there will be room for the press and spectators in the courtroom. The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at the federal courthouse on Holmes Avenue. Rudolph, 37, is charged with setting a bomb that blew up an abortion clinic in Birmingham in January 1998. A police officer was killed and a nurse was severely injured. Rudolph was a fugitive for five years with a $1 million bounty on his head. The search was spearheaded by federal authorities who focused on the forests of his native state of North Carolina. He was scavenging for food in a trash bin, when he was caught in May 2003 by a police officer on routine patrol in Murphy, N.C. Rudolph is in federal custody in Birmingham. U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith has scheduled Rudolph's trial to begin in Birmingham on June 9 at 9 a.m. Jury selection is scheduled to begin April 6, also in Birmingham. Rudolph's hearing Tuesday will allow the judge to hear arguments over the admissibility or validity of some expert testimony. Rudolph's lawyers have asked Smith to throw out testimony from the government's bomb and explosive experts. The lawyers argue that the lab work conducted by federal agencies might have been contaminated or faulty. Federal prosecutors argue a hearing is not needed, because mishandling or faulty tests did not occur. Local law enforcement agencies estimated that Rudolph's hearing in Huntsville to decide the trial's location last June cost $27,000 to provide security. In less than two hours, both sides agreed to hold the trial in Birmingham and to pull jurors from across North Alabama instead of just Jefferson, Blount and Shelby counties. For that hearing, traffic was blocked on Holmes Avenue and Jefferson Street. But authorities do not anticipate blocking or rerouting traffic Tuesday, said Police Capt. Henry Reyes. Huntsville police, federal agents and marshals will provide security, he said. There will be a place for reporters to stage their operations in the parking lot on the west side of the courthouse, Reyes said. It is not yet certain if Rudolph will be held in the Madison County Jail before the hearing. Sheriff Blake Dorning said federal authorities have not requested a spot in the jail for Rudolph. (source: Huntsville Times, March 25)
