Jan. 22
TEXAS:
Talking with Ivan, I found a flame of life on death row
I was finally about to meet the man I had been writing letters to for 11 years.
Separated by glass, and unable to hug or shake hands, we would have to use
phone receivers to talk to each other. To my right and left, others were doing
the same, a line of tete-a-tetes happening in unison, separated by booth
dividers. My friend Ivan Cantu is on death row in Texas.
I had left my harried life as a working mother in Washington, D.C., for 2 days
this August to make the long-overdue trip. I considered it a pilgrimage of
sorts.
Ivan and I started writing when I was 29 and he was 32. He was 3 years into a
death sentence, convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin's fiancee over
drug money. I was just married and working in international development. Right
from the start, Ivan told me he was wrongfully convicted.
Back then, I didn't have an opinion about Ivan's guilt - it didn't matter to me
one way or another. But I saw clearly that no one was listening to him. His
trial attorney had refused to investigate anything. His appellate attorney
never spoke or wrote to him before submitting the habeas corpus appeal. Maybe I
could listen to him, I thought. Maybe that was the only thing I could do.
The Polunsky Unit where Ivan lives is an oppressive complex of barbed wire and
low gray buildings, incongruously situated on a winding farm road one hour
north of Houston. I had never been to a prison before and everything about it
intimidated me.
"Washington, D.C., eh?" one guard said, eyeing my license. "Do y'all have many
wildfires there?"
"Oh no, we don't. ... Not many," I replied, trying to sound deferential.
The invitation to write to someone on death row came through my connection to
the Community of Sant'Egidio, a Catholic lay association that -- among many
other activities -- supports prisoners and advocates for the abolishment of the
death penalty worldwide.
Pope Francis' recent words to Congress summarize the inspiration behind the
community's work and the first reason why I don't believe in the death penalty
(there are many). "Every life is sacred," the pope said. "Every human person is
endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the
rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes."
(source: Dani Clark, National Catholic Reporter)
DELAWARE:
Death penalty repeal bill headed to House vote
A death penalty repeal bill that had been languishing in a House committee is
headed to a vote by the full House next week after the committee chairman
agreed to release it.
Judiciary Committee members voted 6-to-5 last May not to send the bill to the
full House after it narrowly cleared the Senate on an 11-to-9 vote.
But House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. John Mitchell, D-Elsmere, who
opposes repeal, said Thursday that he withdrew his "no" vote and signed the
measure out of committee with an "unfavorable" endorsement, allowing the bill
to move forward to a House vote next Thursday.
"After some long and serious consideration ... this was a tough decision for
me," said Mitchell, a retired police officer who also has family members in law
enforcement. Mitchell said he remains opposed to the bill but thought that
House members should have an opportunity to vote on it.
"I have a responsibility to members of my caucus to give them the opportunity
to speak ... what happens will happen," he said.
Rep. Sean Lynn, a Dover Democrat and chief House sponsor of the legislation,
said he believes it has enough support to pass the House.
"I'm sure it will be a close vote," said Lynn, who had previously threatened to
try to bypass the committee process to bring the bill to a floor vote. Lynn
expressed gratitude to Mitchell for his change of heart.
"It's fairly magnanimous, and an act of leadership," Lynn said.
Democratic Gov. Jack Markell has said he would sign the measure if it reaches
his desk.
The bill would abolish capital punishment for 1st-degree murder, although it
would not apply to inmates now on death row.
The bill has drawn renewed attention in Delaware after a U.S. Supreme Court
ruling earlier this month that declared Florida's death penalty statute
unconstitutional. The court said Florida's death penalty system was flawed
because juries play only an advisory role in recommending life or death,
allowing the judge to reach a different decision.
Florida's system is similar to that used in Delaware, prompting concerns within
the legal community that Delaware's system also could be declared
unconstitutional.
Citing the Supreme Court's ruling, a federal judge in Wilmington who is
presiding over a death penalty appeal case ordered attorneys Thursday to file a
status report by Monday indicating what impact, if any, the decision has on the
case.
On the state level, the same question is being certified to the Delaware
Supreme Court for its opinion.
(source: Associated Press)
GEORGIA:
Death-row inmate says state should get new source for execution drug
"It is not with malice or glee that (state officials) are forced to conceal
information. It is with forced resignation from the knowledge that those
opposed to the death penalty will stop at no measure to thwart this
constitutional means of punishment."
Lawyers for a condemned killer are seeking to force the state to find a new
source for its lethal-injection drugs, contending the compounding pharmacy
being used now produces drugs that pose too great a risk of causing needless
suffering during executions.
Their court motion was recently filed on behalf of Brandon Astor Jones, 72, who
is scheduled to be executed Feb. 2. As expected, Senior U.S. District Judge
Charles Pannell dismissed the case on Thursday. Jones' lawyers had told Pannell
their motion was foreclosed by recent precedents set by the federal appeals
court in Atlanta, but they wanted the entire court to take a fresh look at the
issue.
Jones, the oldest inmate on Georgia's death row, is under death sentence for
the 1979 robbery and murder of Roger Dennis Tackett, 30, a high school teacher
working a 2nd job as manager of a convenience store in Cobb County.
Jones's codefendant in the murder was executed 30 years ago.
In a recent court filing, state attorneys said the last 7 executions carried
out by the state used a compounded lethal-injection drug - pentobarbital - and
all 7 inmates were calm, fell asleep and remained still until they were put to
death.
State attorneys also attached "execution timelines" compiled by officials who
observed the most recent executions.
The person observing Brian Keith Terrell's execution on Dec. 9, for example,
wrote that Terrell was "still and quiet" at 12:32 a.m. when receiving an
injection from a 2nd syringe. At 12:37, Terrell "appears to be asleep" and 3
minutes later was still, the observer wrote. At 12:52 a.m., after doctors
checked for signs of life, the warden announced Terrell's execution had been
carried out.
But Jones' lawyers note that 2 prior executions were put on hold last year
after batches of pentobarbital that were to be used in those lethal injections
were found to be cloudy. This translates into an unacceptable error rate of
about 20 percent, the motion said.
Cloudiness poses a threat because the "injection of a precipitated solution
would be akin to having small pieces of broken glass projected into your blood
vessels," Jones' lawyers said. To avoid such a risk, the state should obtain
its drugs from another source.
The request by Jones' legal team is an unusual tactic. In 2008, the U.S.
Supreme Court set an important precedent when upholding Kentucky's method of
execution. To prevail when challenging an execution protocol, inmates must not
only show that lethal injection poses a demonstrated risk of severe pain, the
high court said; they also must show the risk is substantial when compared to
other, reasonably available alternative methods.
Jones' lawyers are saying that a better alternative is not another method of
execution, just another source of pentobarbital.
The lawyers are also asking that Georgia's lethal-injection secrecy law be
declared unconstitutional. The law shields from public view many facets of the
execution process, such as the identities of the compounding pharmacist, the
prescribing physician and those who carry out the lethal injections.
The law enables the state to carry out executions "with no scrutiny of any
kind, save for their superficial and outcome-determinative self-investigation,"
the filing said. "In short, (the state carries out its) gravest duty with
impunity and no accountability whatsoever."
State attorneys responded by saying the secrecy law has been a success because
the state's source of pentobarbital has been protected from the "rabid
manipulations of death penalty opponents" during the past 7 executions.
"It is not with malice or glee that (state officials) are forced to conceal
information," the filing said. "It is with forced resignation from the
knowledge that those opposed to the death penalty will stop at no measure to
thwart this constitutional means of punishment."
As for the cloudy drugs detected last March, that problem "has now clearly been
solved," the state's motion said. It added there is no evidence that inmates
Terrell, Kelly Gissendaner and Marcus Johnson suffered any pain when they were
injected with compounded pentobarbital during the final 4 months of 2015.
Jones' lawyers have noted that prior rulings by 3-judge panels on the 11th
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta sparked concern from 3 judges on the court.
Writing either dissents or separate opinions, these judges questioned the
legality of Georgia's secrecy law. The 11th Circuit currently has 11 judges,
meaning 6 of its members must agree for the full court to hear Jones' appeal.
(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
FLORIDA:
Prosecutors oppose delay in executing Jacksonville white supremacist
Prosecutors with the offices of State Attorney Angela Corey and Attorney
General Pam Bondi are opposing any delay in the St. Patrick's Day execution of
Jacksonville white supremacist Mark Asay.
Asay attorney Martin McClain has argued that he cannot properly defend Asay
because the Florida Supreme Court hasn't given him enough time to review the
case. McClain was appointed Asay's lawyer Jan. 13 and is supposed to have his
argument on why the 51-year-old shouldn't be executed filed by Jan. 27.
In his motion to the Supreme Court for more time, McClain said many of the
files in the case had to be destroyed after they were stored in an
insect-infected shed by one of Asay's previous lawyers.
But in a motion opposing a delay, Assistant Attorney General Charmaine Millsaps
said McClain has been provided all the relevant files, and those that were
destroyed are irrelevant.
"Counsel ignores that he would be in much the same position if none of the
files had been lost," Millsaps said in court filings. "In either case, he would
be faced with reading thousands of pages of records regardless of the source."
McClain knew he was unfamiliar with Asay's case when he agreed to take it on,
Millsaps said.
Gov. Rick Scott signed Asay's death warrant Jan. 9. When a death warrant is
signed, a defendant gets one last expedited appeal before a trial court judge
and if that judge rejects the appeal, the Florida Supreme Court reviews it.
The Supreme Court told Jacksonville Circuit Judge Tatiana Salvador to review
the case and have a ruling by Feb. 3.
The Supreme Court will then review Salvador's ruling and hear oral arguments
March 2. Asay is scheduled to die March 17.
During a Thursday morning status hearing, Salvador said when Scott signed the
death warrant she had her aide call around trying to find anyone to represent
Asay and no local lawyers were willing to take the case.
McClain, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who's handled multiple death penalty cases,
agreed to take it on.
He has requested the Supreme Court move the Feb. 3 deadline for Salvador to
issue a ruling.
Proceeding with the case "would be a violation of due process, equal protection
and fundamental fairness," McClain said in his court filing.
Moving the Feb. 3 deadline also would likely delay oral arguments to the
Supreme Court and Asay's date of execution. Salvador cannot grant a delay to
the deadline; only the Supreme Court can do that.
A DECADE LOST
In his motion, McClain said Asay hasn't had a lawyer representing him in state
court in a decade. Jacksonville attorney Thomas Fallis was representing him in
federal court, but withdrew from the case.
Asay's arguments for a new trial have been rejected by judges in the
Jacksonville-based 4th Judicial Circuit, the Florida Supreme Court and U.S.
District Court.
According to court filings, Asay still had a right to appeal his conviction to
the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, but instructed Fallis not to
bother.
The Supreme Court will likely decide whether to delay the case early next week.
Asay was convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of Robert Lee Booker
and Robert McDowell in 1987. Both victims were black and McDowell was a
cross-dressing prostitute.
Asay was drinking with friends, and they decided to look for prostitutes after
the bar closed.
One of Asay's friends was asking Booker about where to find prostitutes when
Asay called him a racial epithet and shot him in the stomach. Booker ran off
and was later found dead.
Asay and a friend continued looking for prostitutes and agreed to pay McDowell,
who was dressed as a woman, for oral sex. But Asay then shot McDowell 6 times.
If Asay is executed, he will be the 1st inmate put to death from Jacksonville
since Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis in July 1999. Davis was the last person to be
executed in Florida by the electric chair. The state switched to lethal
injection in 2000.
(source: Florida Times-Union)
ALABAMA:
What it's like to watch a man die
Arthur James Julius seemed to welcome death.
Many said it was too good for him. Too quick. Too easy. This was a guy who --
while free from prison on 8-hour leave - raped and killed his own cousin.
What I recall most is his hands, the double thumbs up he gave those who
gathered at Holman Prison in Atmore in 1989 to witness his death. Thumbs up,
like some injured athlete signaling his A-OK as he was carted off the field.
Or the earth.
They strapped his hands down on Alabama's old "Yellow Mama" electric chair. He
gave a statement, forgiving the warden who had to kill him, and professing his
faith in a God that would not torment him.
Julius offered a little smile, as if in farewell. And witnesses gathered in a
little observation room adjoining the execution chamber said nothing. Nothing.
We walked quietly away. To write our stories. To tell the world that Julius was
dead. The sentence had been carried out, and Julius was officially the seventh
person killed by Alabama since the re-instatement of the death penalty.
It was sterile. It was clinical. It was over.
That was 27 years ago, after a U.S. Supreme Court ban on executions had ended,
when the state rushed to make up for lost time. Alabama executed 4 people in
1989, and 9 between 1986 and 1992. I saw a handful of them.
I saw more than I wanted to see. Then again, I saw what I needed to see. I
don't even remember all their names.
I remember Horace Franklin Dunkins. He died in that chair 4 months before
Julius. It would be almost impossible to turn Dunkins into a sympathetic
character. He raped and killed a young mother from Warrior, a woman tied to a
tree and stabbed 67 times.
But Alabama did it. It strapped Dunkins - with his IQ of 69 - down and zapped
him with what was supposed to be enough voltage to kill a man, and it didn't
work.
A guard scrambled over to pull the blinds down in the observation window.
Another muttered how they'd put the jacks on wrong. Beside me in that quiet
chamber Dunkins' father said, over and over, "they're torturing him."
They hit him again and he died about 20 minutes after the 1st jolt. I don't
want to make it too dramatic. It was not gruesome. The 1st electricity rendered
him unresponsive, and I believe he felt no pain.
I felt for his father, but in truth I felt little else. It was the same every
time I witnessed an execution. I wanted to feel more. I expected to feel more.
I felt bad, quite simply, because I did not feel bad. I was constantly
overwhelmed by the ... nothingness.
I was neither judge nor jury. Just a witness. And he was convicted of ghastly
crimes. Who am I to say he did not deserve a similar death?
But of late I have begun to feel. Not for Dunkins, or Julius, but for all of
us.
For one other thing sticks with me about that botched execution. It is the
anguish of the prison official who stood shaking after it was done.
"I regret very very much what happened,'' Alabama Prison Commissioner Morris
Thigpen said then. "It was human error."
That makes me feel.
Because if human error can screw up the killing of a man, it can screw up
justice, too. Alabama knows human error.
Alabama has sentenced innocents to death. Alabama is the only state left in
which judges can ignore juries and send people to die. At least one in five
Alabama death row inmates are there because a judge overrode a jury.
Don't misunderstand. This is not to say it is wrong for the state to kill
people,. It's not to say it is right.
I don't know. Decide for yourself.
But I do know we can't be satisfied to feel nothing. And we can never go too
far to be sure. Sure that we have the right men or women. Sure that we stand
for justice, and not simply vengeance.
Vengeance is too easy. Justice is hard.
We have to be right and must be righteous. So we never look back at a human
death and apologize. For human error.
(source: John Archibald, al.com)
CALIFORNIA:
Death Penalty Possible in Marina Del Rey's Teen Murder----Cameron Anthony
Frazier, 21, was ordered to be held without bail while awaiting arraignment
Feb. 3. for the shooting death of a Texas teen.
A San Diego man was charged Wednesday with capital murder for allegedly gunning
down a teenage girl in the parking lot of a Marina del Rey shopping center in
what may have been a botched robbery involving marijuana.
Cameron Anthony Frazier, 21, was ordered to be held without bail while awaiting
arraignment Feb. 3 at the Airport Branch Courthouse in Los Angeles in
connection with the Jan. 6 death of 17-year-old Kristine Carman.
The murder charge includes the special circumstance allegation of murder during
the commission of a robbery, along with an allegation that Frazier personally
and intentionally discharged a handgun.
Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to seek the death penalty against
Frazier, who was arrested Monday by members of the FBI Fugitive Task Force
outside his residence in Vista.
Along with the murder count, Frazier is charged with 2 counts of attempted
2nd-degree robbery involving 2 other alleged victims.
The victim lived in Houston, Texas, and was visiting relatives in the Southland
at the time of the shooting, according to authorities.
The teen was shot to death during a robbery attempt while she sat in an SUV
with 2 other people at the Villa Marina Marketplace mall, according to Deputy
District Attorney Keri Modder.
Following the shooting, the person behind the wheel drove across the parking
lot, stopping in a parking space outside a Panda Express, where the girl was
ultimately found dead.
The suspect fled the location in a dark-colored SUV, possibly heading toward
the Marina (90) Freeway, police said.
Lacey Carman of Marina del Rey wrote on Facebook that Kristine was her sister.
She said she was the one driving the vehicle her sister was in, and that "my
sister was just murdered in front of me in a robbery gone wrong." Her sibling,
she wrote, was "beautiful smart and undeserving" of the fate that befell her.
"I pray that God is real and holding my sisters hand right now. I pray that you
never have to feel this pain or this self loathing," she said.
Police have repeatedly declined to comment on a CBS2 report that the shooting
may have been prompted by an alleged attempt by Lacey Carman's boyfriend to
sell 2 pounds of marijuana.
(source: patch.com)
****************
Critics question California's single-drug execution plan
The state's plan for single-drug executions in California would give prison
officials a choice among 4 lethal chemicals. But 2 of them are no longer
available from the manufacturers, and the other 2 have never been used for
executions.
The proposal by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation "is not based
on sound research and amounts to experimentation" on human beings, said Megan
McCracken, an attorney with the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law School.
Lawyers from the clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union said the
department has failed to disclose where the drugs would come from or how they
would be tested.
But the department says the drugs can be produced by its own pharmacies, or by
private pharmacies if necessary. And a leader in the campaign to resume
executions in California said Thursday the source of the chemicals is
irrelevant.
"If it can be confirmed that a drug is what it's supposed to be, that the
substance in the bottle is of a given concentration and no impurities, it
doesn't matter where it came from," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of
the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
Scheidegger's organization filed a lawsuit on behalf of families of murder
victims that the state settled in June by agreeing to switch from 3-drug
executions, which it has used since 1996, to a lethal dose of a single
sedative, the method now employed by many states.
The change is intended to satisfy concerns raised by a federal judge, who
halted executions at San Quentin State Prison in 2006 after finding that flaws
in injection procedures and staff training raised an unacceptable risk of a
botched and agonizing execution.
Members of the public, who have already submitted thousands of written comments
on the one-drug proposal, will have a chance to speak out Friday in Sacramento
at the only public hearing scheduled on the issue. After another month of
written comments, prison officials will have until November to respond to the
public and submit a final proposal to a state legal office for review.
But the plan's future could be determined at the ballot box before it has a
chance to take effect. An initiative being circulated for the November election
would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without
parole. A competing initiative would seek to speed up executions by imposing
new deadlines on courts and lawyers, and would also eliminate the need for
administrative review, or public comment, on the single-drug proposal.
In the meantime, execution drugs are in short supply nationwide, and opponents
of the California proposal are questioning the availability and reliability of
the 4 proposed lethal sedatives.
1 of the drugs, thiopental, which has been used in the state's 3-drug
executions, is no longer manufactured commercially. A 2nd drug, pentobarbital,
is produced by a single U.S. manufacturer that has prohibited the use of its
product in executions.
The other 2 drugs, amobarbital and secobarbital, have not been used in
executions. Amobarbital is manufactured as a powder and is the active
ingredient in the barbiturate amytal sodium. Secobarbital is sold in pill form
as the prescription drug Seconal.
The corrections department's proposal says the department has pharmacies that
can produce the drugs in lethal doses, and if problems arise, it can obtain the
drugs from private "compounding pharmacies" that would prepare them to order.
Texas, Missouri and Georgia have carried out recent executions with
pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies.
But Jennifer Moreno, an attorney at the UC Berkeley Death Penalty Clinic, said
those pharmacies are lightly regulated and have produced some contaminated
drugs, like the one responsible for an outbreak of meningitis in Massachusetts
in 2012.
State prison officials haven't specified "how they will choose the pharmacy,
what guidelines the pharmacy will use, what testing will be done, if any,"
Moreno said. "They haven't given any information about doses, concentration"
and other critical details, she said.
Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton said details of the proposal are
available on the department's website, www.cdcr.ca.gov. Scheidegger, of the
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said he wasn't concerned about the fine
points.
"I doubt that the level of regulation has much to do with the reliability," he
said. The type of contamination that led to the meningitis outbreak "is
irrelevant if the drug was intended to cause death."
"If medical knowledge about a drug tells us that it produces anesthesia and in
a higher dose causes death, that's really all we need to know," Scheidegger
said.
(source: San Francisco Chronicle)
_______________________________________________
A service courtesy of Washburn University School of Law www.washburnlaw.edu
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Unsubscribe: http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/options/deathpenalty
