Jan. 4
TEXAS:
Inmate off death row but in limbo for years; He's languished in prison 3
decades after conviction overturned
Jerry Hartfield was still ayoung man when an uncle visited him in prison to
tell him that his murder conviction had been overturned and he would get a new
trial.
Not long afterward, he was moved off death row.
"A sergeant told me to pack my stuff and I wouldn't return. I've been waiting
ever since for that new trial," Hartfield, now 56, said during a recent
interview at the prison near Gatesville where he's serving life for the 1976
robbery and killing of a Bay City bus station worker. He says he's innocent.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Hartfield's murder conviction in
1980 because it found a potential juror was improperly dismissed for expressing
reservations about the death penalty. The state tried twice but failed to get
the court to re-examine that ruling, and on March 15, 1983 -- 11 days after the
court's 2nd rejection -- then-Gov. Mark WHite commuted Hartfield's sentence to
life in prison.
At that point, with Hartfield off death row and back in the general prison
population, the case became dormant.
"Nothing got filed. They had me thinking my case was on appeal for 27 years,"
said Hartfield, who is described as an illiterate 5th-grade dropout with an IQ
of 51, but who says he has since learned to read and has become a devout
Christian.
A federal judege in Houston recently ruled that Hartfield's conviction ceased
to exist when the appeals court overtruned them - meaning there was no sentence
for White to commute. But Hartfield isn't likely to go free or be retired soon
because the state has challenged a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision
favorable to Hartfield, arguing he missed a 1-year windwo in which appeal
aspects of his case.
A 5th Circuit panel of the New Orleans court agreed with the district court in
an October ruling, but last month it made a rare, formal request to the Texas
appeals court asking it to confirm its decades-old decision to overturn
Hartfield's conviction.
Hartfield's current attorney, Kenneth R. Hawk II, described the case as a
"1-in-a-million" situation in which an inmate has been stuck in the prison
system for more than 3 decades because no one seems to know what to do with
him.
Several factors appear to have contributed to Hartfield's unusual predicament.
Hartfield said that when his uncle read him the article about his conviction
being overturned, he didn't fully grasp the meaing of it. Furthermore,
Hartfield's trial lawyers, who worked on his initial appeal, stopped
representing him once hs death sentence was commuted, said Robert Scardino, who
was the lead trial attorney.
Hartfield was 21 in June 1977 when he was convicted of murdering 55-year-old
Eunice Lowe, a bus station ticketing agent who was beaten with a pickax and
robbed.
At the time, Hartfield, who grew up in Altus, Okla., had ben working on the
construction of a nuclear power plant near Bay City, about 100 miles southwest
of Houston. He was arrested within days in Wichita, Kan., and while being
returned to Texas, he made a confession to officers that he calls "a bogus
statement they had written against me."
Scardino sasid that he tried using an insanity defense for Hartfield and that
psychiatrists called by the defense described Hartfield as "as crazy a human
being as there was."
Matagorda County Disdtrict Attorney Steven Reis said with the appeal still
pending, it's premature to discuss a possible retrial of Hartfield.
Hartfield insists he's not angry that he's spent nearly all of his adult life
locke up, and he says he holds no grudges.
"Being God-fearing person, he doesn't allow me to be bitter," he said. "He
allows me to be forgiving."
(source: Dallas Morning News)
VIRGINIA:
Appeals court intervenes, bars release of inmate
A federal appeals court intervened Thursday to halt the release of a
capital-murder defendant who had been slated to go free.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond granted a stay sought by
Virginia's attorney general and local prosecutors. The appellate court's action
delays an order from a federal judge for the unconditional release of Justin
Wolfe, who is facing death-penalty charges for the 2001 slaying of a Northern
Virginia drug dealer.
The district court judge, Raymond Jackson in Norfolk, had said the state's
prosecution of Wolfe was irreparably harmed by prosecutors' misconduct in
allegedly coercing testimony from a key witness and failing to turn over
evidence that could have helped the defense. Jackson ordered Wolfe released by
Jan. 3 and barred prosecutors from trying Wolfe. A state judge had said she
would abide by the ruling and release Wolfe at 5 p.m. Thursday unless an
appellate court intervened. The appeals court's order came barely an hour
before Wolfe was to have been released.
Prosecutors say they acted properly and that Jackson wildly exceeded his
authority by barring Wolfe's prosecution.
The appeals court in Richmond plans to hear the issue in full at the end of the
month.
Kimberly Irving, one of Wolfe's attorneys, said Thursday that she obviously
would have preferred that her client be released, but she remains confident
that the appeals court will ultimately uphold Jackson's ruling and release her
client.
Thursday's action is just the latest in a legal odyssey for Wolfe, who was
first arrested in 2001 and charged with the murder of drug dealer Daniel
Petrole.
Wolfe was convicted of capital murder in January 2002 and sentenced to death in
large part on the testimony of Owen Barber, who admitted he was the triggerman
in Petrole's death. Barber testified that Wolfe paid him to kill Petrole so
that Wolfe - himself a drug dealer - could get out of a debt he owed Petrole.
Barber's testimony was part of a plea deal that allowed him to escape the death
penalty. Since then, though, Barber has changed his story about what happened
several times. His most recent version came in front of Jackson, when Barber
testified that he falsely implicated Wolfe to satisfy prosecutors who had
predetermined that Wolfe was the mastermind.
In 2011, Jackson tossed out the conviction and death sentence against Wolfe,
who at one point had been just 5 days from execution.
Last year prosecutors filed new capital-murder charges against Wolfe, and the
original prosecutor, Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert,
recused himself from the case. But in September, before he recused himself,
Ebert and an assistant made a jailhouse visit to Barber trying to ascertain why
he changed his story. In that visit, they informed Barber that he could face
the death penalty himself for renouncing his initial testimony.
Jackson viewed the jailhouse visit as a thinly veiled threat that compounded
the earlier misconduct by prosecutors. On Dec. 24, he ordered Wolfe freed and
barred the state from pursuing its prosecution of Wolfe.
The new prosecutor, Ray Morrogh, said he has reviewed all the evidence in the
case and is convinced that Barber's initial testimony was truthful. He also
said he has hard evidence to prove that Barber was lying when he testified on
Wolfe's behalf before Judge Jackson in Norfolk. Morrogh says Barber was
relentlessly badgered by Wolfe's appellate attorneys and opponents of the death
penalty to change his story.
(source: Associated Press)
OREGON:
Execution debate up yet again
100 years ago, a condemned New Zealander was at the centre of a passionate
debate on the death penalty in the American state of Oregon. Matthew Gray
reports on a saga that is still playing out today.
A century has passed since an American hangman placed a noose around New
Zealander Thomas Noble Joseph Faulder's neck and sent him plummeting to a quick
and violent death.
But history is repeating itself in Oregon - the scene of Noble Faulder's
execution - where 100 years later, state governor John Kitzhaber is urging
legislators to abolish capital punishment.
The same debate was raging through 1912 while Faulder and 3 others on death row
languished in their jail cells waiting to see whether public opinion would
swing in their direction.
Leading the charge then was Governor Oswald West who put the hangings on hold
pending a public referendum scheduled to coincide with an election in November.
Ironically the same men who he hoped to save had no interest in a reprieve.
The best outcome they could hope for with a repeal of the death penalty was
life in prison.
And all preferred a swift death to life in a cage.
They got their wish after voters returned West to office but kicked his
humanitarian stance to touch.
The 4 were hanged at the Salem Penitentiary on December 13 - the day that fast
became known as "Bloody Friday" by West's supporters.
Faulder's story starts in Auckland where he was born to contractor, landowner
and local body politician Thomas Faulder in 1883.
His English-born father had hopped the Tasman from Victoria to Christchurch
about 20 years earlier after making money on the Victorian goldfields and
married Dinah Plaskett, a young woman from his hometown of Cumberland.
Thomas died of chronic heart disease in 1897 and his business affairs passed
into the hands of his widow and an elder son.
Noble, just 14, showed little interest and grew increasingly restless as he
moved into his later teens.
He was 20 when he travelled to the United States in 1903 and spent 6 years at
sea before working as a miner and prospector in Alaska and a cowboy in Nevada.
But it was in Oregon, while working as a plough shaker on a railway
construction team that he came unstuck in 1911.
Faulder was camped with his mates not far from the city of Chiloquin in Klamath
County.
The 86 kilogram, 1.8 metre tall adventurer had acquired an unhealthy dependency
on booze - as had many of his peers - and the quick temper that often came with
it made him a man to be wary of.
On Sunday, August 6, Faulder spent much of the afternoon drinking with
workmates at Fort Klamath before making the wagon trip back to camp.
Faulder was ready for his crib by the time he crawled back into his tent.
Sleep, however, was the last thing on his mind when he found a dog he had
befriended lying dead on his blanket.
Stray dogs were a problem at the site and several had been poisoned in the
weeks prior by camp cook Louis Gebhardt who had problems keeping the animals
away from his supplies.
Faulder flew into a rage and confronted the unrepentant chef, shooting him with
a rifle as the argument between them spiralled out of control.
He attempted to have a 2nd go at it when he realised his foe was still alive
but was restrained by onlookers.
Despondent, angry and still half cut, he went back to his own digs, placed the
muzzle of his 30-30 rifle against his torso and pulled the trigger.
The shot punctured a lung but failed to kill him so he tried again - this time
using a shotgun. His friends heard the blast and rushed to his aid.
Faulder was not expected to live but made a miraculous recovery after several
weeks in hospital.
Gebhardt had meanwhile succumbed to his wounds and his killer was transferred
to jail to await trial on a charge of murder.
Faulder's supporters set up a defence of insanity in an effort to keep him from
the gallows.
His biggest champion was his brother, Ernest, who was sent by the family to the
US, said newspaper reports, to "testify as to the mental imperfection of the
prisoner".
Several other witnesses were also called on to discuss Faulder's state of mind.
Workmates spoke of a man who "had a wild stare and did crazy things" when under
the influence of alcohol. At least one nurse said she had no doubt her former
patient was crazy after observing him for several weeks.
Their efforts did little to sway jury members who found the defendant guilty in
the 1st degree on March 10, 1912.
Faulder appeared before Judge Benson on May 3, 1912, and was sentenced to hang.
Sitting with him in prison awaiting a similar fate were convicted murderers
Frank Garrison, Mike Morgan and HE Roberts.
All had their original dates with the hangman suspended during the political
debate that led up to the referendum and a visiting newspaper journalist
reported a sense of frustration among them as they pondered possible outcomes.
"We do not want life imprisonment," they said. "We prefer death."
A date for a mass hanging was eventually set down for December 13, 1912.
Governor West, bitterly disappointed by the referendum result, continued to
receive hundreds of requests from constituents asking him to intervene and
commute the death sentences to life imprisonment.
Only he, as governor, had the power to do so.
West took a special interest in Faulder's plight and that of another murderer,
John W Taylor.
A last minute reprieve was granted to Taylor a day before the hanging was
scheduled to take place.
A subsequent rescheduling of execution times had many speculating that Faulder
also might be spared.
Public demonstrations took place in different parts of Oregon and even in San
Francisco before the execution.
Telegrams pleading for leniency flooded in to the governor's office and scores
of speakers including rabbis, professional and church people took to street
corners to protest.
To no avail.
Faulder, reportedly "silent, taciturn, awaiting the end stoically and talking
to no-one", was marched to a gallows in the south wing execution chamber of
Salem Penitentiary, Oregon with the three other condemned men.
The gallows contained 2 traps and the 1st man brought forward was the convicted
murderer Garrison.
He shouted his innocence as the hangman placed the noose around his throat -
claiming he was a victim of conspiracy.
Faulder - "tall, wiry and immensely strong" - took his place a few seconds
later.
Tacoma Times journalist Fred Boalt was among the 100 or so spectators.
"My sharpest impression of the execution at Salem on Black Friday was of Noble
Faulder standing against the rail of the scaffold and giving the 1st half of
his "turn" on Governor West's "bloody feast". Boalt wrote in an editorial on
December 18, 1912.
"He thrust out one clenched hand with an incisive gesture and said: "Hanging
will never cure crime. You must get to the root of the evil."
"It was as if he proposed delivering an academic discussion on capital
punishment. It was a good start. It was to the point. But he stopped there,
and, stepping back, took his place upon the trap."
Faulder and Garrison were hanged at about 11.20am and pronounced dead at
11.26am.
Governor West was not present.
"I believe capital punishment to be a relic of barbarism," he said a few hours
earlier.
"In letting these men hang I am obeying the mandate of the people. Out at this
gaol at this minute they are having a bloody feast."
Faulder's remains were buried in an unmarked plot at the Salem Pioneer Cemetery
on December 14, 1912.
His simple coffin bore the words "at rest" and his name is included on the
family tombstone at Purewa in Auckland where the entire saga was mostly
unreported and not well known.
Governor West continued with his efforts and capital punishment was repealed,
by a slim margin, in 1914. It was restored, by constitutional amendment, in
1920.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT HISTORY IN OREGON
Capital punishment has been a political hot potato in the state of Oregon since
the 1st execution was carried out in 1851.
It was outlawed from 1914 to 1920, 1964 to 1978 and for a period during the
1980s.
Constituents have, between times, voted to reinstate it and 37 people are now
on death row, awaiting lethal injection.
Modern-day governor John Kitzhaber has tackled the issue with a similar
fervency to his historic counterparts. Last year he waded into the case of
twice-convicted murderer Gary Haugen who had waived his own appeals and
resigned himself to his fate.
Kitzhaber issued a reprieve against the inmate's wishes. His intervention has
since been declared invalid by a lower court and he is now appealing that
decision. Haugen, like Faulder so many years earlier, has no interest in the
wide debate around capital punishment. He just wants to die.
(source: stuff.co.nz)
USA:
It's time for the demise of capital punishment in the US--The death penalty may
be in terminal decline, but it's a symptom of a broken justice system that
locks up 6 million Americans
2012 was a bad year for the death penalty in America, but a better one for
humanity.
Executions have decreased 75% since their peak in 1996, and Connecticut joined
17 other states and the District of Columbia in abolishing capital punishment.
All in all, the United States justice system killed 43 people last year.
That our government punished "only" 43 people by lethal injection in 2012 is a
macabre achievement, but represents a significant departure from the death
penalty-happy 1980s and 90s, when hundreds of inmates were killed every year.
Those of us who think it's about time our country joined the ranks of civilized
nations can only hope this trend continues.
The United States is in the good company of China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia
as 1 of the top 5 executioners in the world. Not to be outdone, we imprison
more people than any other nation ever has - more than China, more than the
Soviet Union at the height of the gulags. We have 5% of the world's population,
but 25% of the world's prisoners. And we lock up more of our children than
anyone else: more than 70,000 kids were in jail in 2010, and Texas alone has
sentenced more than 400 minors to life behind bars.
6 million people are under "correctional supervision" in the United States.
More than 1/2 of those are in for drug crimes. And of the people who are in
prison for drugs, 80% are there for possession. Billions of dollars in prison
spending, much of it directed at private enterprise, means that a handful of
businessmen are getting very wealthy on the mass incarceration racket.
Prison in the US is not an equal opportunity placement. As Michelle Alexander
details in her book The New Jim Crow, our mass incarceration system functions
as a means of social control in much the same way that Jim Crow laws and even
slavery did. Of black American men who don't graduate from high school, more
than half end up in jail. African Americans are 13% of the US population but
comprise 40% of its prisoners.
The death penalty is similarly racialized. Race and location play crucial roles
in whether a prosecutor will seek the death penalty and whether a jury will
award it. More than three quarters of death penalty convictions are for crimes
involving white victims, even though half of all murder victims in the US are
black. And a black defendant accused of murdering a white victim is 3 times
more likely to get the death penalty than a white person accused of killing a
white victim.
Even putting aside the fact that our prison industry is essentially a
systematic method of racial oppression, we should ask ourselves: what purpose
does the death penalty serve?
It doesn't deter crime. It punishes a perpetrator, but does so with a sentence
that can't be undone. We can never know how many executed men were actually
innocent. We do know that more than 100 death row inmates have been exonerated.
We also know that our justice system is imperfect by construction, and that
there is no way to ensure that no innocent person is ever convicted of a crime.
In a flawed system, imposing death upon the convicted simply sets the stakes
too high.
But even if we were able to be completely certain that all death row inmates
were guilty, we should still oppose the death penalty. The state's ability to
infringe upon the basic freedoms of its citizens through incarceration is not a
power that should be taken lightly. It is a power that must sometimes be
leveled to achieve a fully functional society, but it must be treated with
exceptional reverence - the power to deprive a citizen of their liberty is,
after all, the power to deprive them of the entire normalcy and much of the joy
of daily life, to curtail most of what we understand as "living". To deprive
them of life entirely is an egregious abuse.
State-sponsored, judicially-approved killings do not promote esteem or
admiration for our justice system; they promote distrust, and at best, fear.
Figures who establish their authority with extreme physical violence are not
respected, whether those figures are parents, police officers or the courts.
Modeling abusive behavior does not often lead to less abuse.
A justice system where the criminal defendant is presumed innocent, where the
state bears the burden of proving guilt, where there are rules and protections
against the introduction of evidence illegally obtained or unfairly
prejudicial, and where all accused are entitled to be heard by a jury of their
peers is, in theory, a marvelous one. But killing the people we convict taints
what could be exceptional. Meting out exceptionally long prison sentences, and
punishing offenders with state-sponsored physical and psychologically torture
like solitary confinement, and tangential but ignored physical and
psychological torture like prison rape and assault, turn the potentially noble
into the actively sadistic.
It does seem as though the US is headed in the right direction. It's too late
for the 43 people who were executed last year. But for the 6 million who are
currently behind bars, change can't come soon enough.
(source: The Guardian)
MONTANA:
Ronald Smith death-row clemency case unresolved; Outgoing governor hints he
won't make decision, passing it to his successor
Montana's outgoing governor has given the clearest signal yet that he won't be
granting clemency to Canadian death-row prisoner Ronald Smith during his final
days in office, likely placing the Alberta-born killer's fate in the hands of
governor-elect Steve Bullock when he takes over the state's top job next week.
It's a situation that one of Smith's lawyers describes as "uncharted waters"
for Montana's justice system, which has been dealing with Smith's case for more
than 30 years.
The 55-year-old Albertan is 1 of only 2 Canadians sentenced to death in the
United States; the other, Newfoundland-born Robert Bolden, 48, is appealing his
death sentence after being convicted in the 2002 killing of a St. Louis bank
guard.
Responding to questions about the Smith case in recent days, Montana Gov. Brian
Schweitzer told The Associated Press: "The recommendation to me was not to do
anything."
He added that he's still "not saying one way or another" whether he might
commute Smith's death sentence before his gubernatorial term ends on Monday or
endorse the recommendation made by Montana's parole board last year that the
execution should proceed.
But Smith's case "is not any more on the table at this point than anyone
else's," Schweitzer added - apparently referring to unresolved issues
concerning the legality of Montana's lethal-injection system, which must be
dealt with before the Canadian's execution could be carried out anyway.
Schweitzer's comments point to a hands-off approach that would leave the
potentially explosive issue to his successor, Bullock, currently the state's
attorney general and nominally the Montana justice official who has been
responsible for fighting Smith's legal appeals in recent years to avoid
execution.
Yet Bullock, a Democrat like Schweitzer, is not considered an ardent supporter
of capital punishment, and his moderate views on the subject have sparked
attacks in the past by Republican rivals intent on preserving the ultimate
punishment in a state sharply split over the issue.
"We are waiting for Gov. Schweitzer to act on the clemency petition, and
without his action then the issue shifts to the next governor," Ronald
Waterman, 1 of Smith's 3 main lawyers, told Postmedia News this week. "But I
don't know that the clemency petition would automatically transfer over or
whether a new petition would have to be presented before Gov. Bullock would be
able to act on the petition. We are in uncharted waters here."
Throughout Schweitzer's 8-year term, the populist governor had been expected at
some point to make the final decision on whether Smith - who murdered 2 Montana
men in August 1982 during a drunken hitchhiking trip to the U.S. from Red Deer,
Alta., - would be executed as ordered by his trial judge in 1983, or have his
death penalty commuted, largely because of his Canadian citizenship and this
country's abolition of the death penalty in 1976.
Schweitzer, however, has been under pressure for years from relatives of
Smith's 2 victims - Blackfeet Indian cousins Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey
Mad Man - not to block the execution once all legal obstacles had been cleared
to carry out the death penalty.
Canada's Conservative government, meanwhile, has sent mixed messages to the
Montana governor, controversially declaring in 2007 that it would no longer
lobby for Smith's life, but then reluctantly reversing that stance in 2009
after a Federal Court of Canada judge ordered federal officials to resume
efforts to secure clemency for Smith.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird recently repeated Canada's official request
that Smith's life be spared by sending a letter to Schweitzer that - like one
he sent a year ago - emphasized that the government's renewed push for clemency
was forced by the 2009 Federal Court decision.
Opposition critics have repeatedly slammed Baird and Prime Minister Stephen
Harper for not doing enough to prevent Smith's execution.
Waterman said Smith's legal team holds out some hope that Bullock is reluctant
to see a death sentence carried out during his term as governor.
"Bullock has a history of being consistent with all past attorneys general, who
have always worked with county attorneys to try to keep them from seeking the
death penalty," noted Waterman.
(source: The Vancouver Sun)
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