[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA., N.C.
Sept. 27 USA (PUERTO RICO): Puerto Rico jury rejects death penalty A Puerto Rican jury rejected the death penalty Thursday for a convicted drug dealer accused of killing an ex-girlfriend who was an informant for the U.S. government. Edison Burgos Montes will face life in prison for the July 2005 killing of Madelyn Semidey Morales, who had been cooperating with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in the investigation against him. He was found guilty of the killing in late August. Among those celebrating the verdict was Semidey's mother, Georgina Morales, who said earlier this year that she did not believe in capital punishment. I'm satisfied that justice was served, she told reporters after the verdict was announced. Morales used the opportunity to publicly ask Burgos to tell the family where her daughter's still-missing body is located. Please tell us where you put it, what you did with her body, she pleaded. This will cause us anguish for the rest of our lives. The victim's father, Carlos Semidey, also expressed satisfaction with the verdict. They did their job. The system worked, he said. Capital punishment is constitutionally illegal in Puerto Rico, but Burgos was being tried in federal court, which allows for the death penalty. Many Puerto Ricans had criticized the U.S. government for ignoring the island's constitution and becoming involved in local affairs. The jury of 8 men and 4 women deliberated for 2 days before issuing their verdict. Burgos remained motionless when the decision was read. Defense attorney Steven Potolsky cried. The defendant's sibling Efrain Burgos said his brother maintains his innocence. U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez said she respected the verdict, and acknowledged that life imprisonment is also a severe punishment. Rodriguez said she wasn't concerned whether Puerto Rican ideologies would prevent any jury from favoring capital punishment. I think we will soon be ready for the appropriate case, she said. It was the 3rd time a Puerto Rico jury had rejected a federal death penalty case. 2 other federal death penalty cases are expected to go to trial in January, including 1 involving a man accused of masterminding a 2009 bar shooting that killed 8 people. The other centers on a man accused of killing an undercover police officer during a drug transaction. Puerto Rico's governor has asked that federal authorities prosecute certain cases, including carjackings and drive-by shootings, to reduce violent crime. The island of nearly 4 million people reported a record 1,117 homicides last year. Osvaldo Burgos, president of the human rights commission of the island's Association of Attorneys, said he doubted any Puerto Rican jury would ever seek capital punishment. Burgos is not related to the defendant. It's a measure that does not respond to the idiosyncrasies of our people, he said. It is a product of failed federal policies. Puerto Rico banned the death penalty in 1929, 2 years after farmworker Pascual Ramos was hanged for beheading his boss with a machete. The island reiterated its stance after approving its 1st constitution in 1952, calling the death penalty a human rights violation. In 2000, Puerto Rican Judge Salvador Casellas ruled that applying the death penalty would violate Puerto Rico's constitution as well as the federal statute concerning its status as a self-governing entity. His decision was overturned in 2001 by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which ruled that Puerto Rico is subject to federal law. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision. Puerto Rico joins 17 U.S. states that do not apply the death penalty. (source: Associated Press) GEORGIA: Marcus Wellons' Death Penalty Upheld After Chocolate Penis Appeal Giving a judge a penis-shaped chocolate may be tasteless and inappropriate, but it doesn't make for an unfair trial, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday. Marcus Wellons, now 57, was convicted of the 1989 rape and strangling murder of 15-year-old India Roberts and sentenced to death in 1993. In 2010, however, the Supreme Court ordered a review panel to take another look at the case after Wellon's lawyer, Mary Elizabeth Wells, argued that her client could not have received a fair trial because the judge and bailiff received gifts of erotically shaped chocolate from jurors. Superior Court Judge Mary Staley received a piece of white chocolate shaped like a penis from juror Mary Jo Hooper, while bailiff Loretta Perry was reportedly gifted a breast-shaped chocolate from a juror who has yet to come forward. Wells maintained that the bawdy nature of the gifts indicated that the jury was not taking the murder trial seriously. On Wednesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court unanimously upheld the death penalty for Wellons, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The court said that although the gifts were tasteless and
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, GA., N.C., US MIL., LA.
Dec. 5 USA: Report: Death Penalty Creates More VictimsFamily members, especially children, suffer in the aftermath of an execution Families of the executed are victims too, according to a new report that Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights will release on December 10. Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind draws upon the stories of three dozen family members of people executed in the United States and demonstrates that their experiences and traumatic symptoms resemble those of others who have suffered a violent loss. It's something you don't ever get over, said Pam Crawford, one of the family members featured in the report. Crawford, a Charlotte native, is the sister of a man who was executed in Alabama in 1996. She described the nightmares and other difficulties that her teenaged granddaughter still experiences in the aftermath of the execution. Other family members agreed that children, in particular, suffer as they struggle to understand a relative's death at the hands of the state. What impact does this event have on children's impressionable lives, and what cost does society pay for that impact? asks Robert Meeropol, another survivor featured in the report. Meeropol's parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in New York when Meeropol was 6 years old. As a victims' organization, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) researched and published the report to highlight the similarities between the experiences of survivors of homicide victims and survivors of people who are executed. Family members of the executed are the death penalty's invisible victims, said Renny Cushing, executive director of MVFHR. With each execution, we create a new grieving family who experience many familiar symptoms of trauma, some of them long-lasting. As a society, what are we doing to address the suffering of these families? Creating More Victims includes recommendations for mental health professionals, educators, and child welfare advocates. MVFHR also plans to deliver the report to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights and request that that office undertake further study of the impact of executions on surviving families. (source: BBS News) GEORGIA: Lawyer says death row client not strangler Defense: Columbus case evidence suppressed A lawyer for the so-called Columbus stocking strangler said Tuesday that serendipitously discovered new evidence bolsters his claim that his death row client, Carlton Gary, was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering three elderly women 20 years ago. Attorney Jack Martin said the evidence which he says had been suppressed by prosecutors until now suggests Gary was not the man who terrified Columbus residents in 1978 and '79 during an eight-month crime spree that left victims strangled with their own stockings. This case is a tragic example of the prosecution refusing to reveal to the defense powerful physical evidence pointing toward innocence which has only been discovered by chance decades later, he said. No one from the state attorney general's office could be reached for comment Tuesday evening. Martin filed a motion with the federal court in Columbus on Monday asking for a hearing for consideration of the new evidence. Among the items: During Gary's original trial and the appeals process, prosecutors did not disclose that they had made a mold of a bite mark found on the breast of one of the victims, Martin said. The defense was later told that the mold was lost or had been misplaced. Then, while cleaning out his office, the Muscogee County coroner found the mold, which allowed a forensic dentist to compare it with a mold of Gary's teeth, Martin said. The dentist concluded to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that several inconsistencies show that Gary was probably not the biter. Defense attorneys, during Gary's original trial, also were not told that police had obtained shoe print sizes from the scene of 2 attacks that Gary had been tied to. Martin learned of the shoe prints when a GBI agent called him last year. The agent had been part of the GBI task force on the case, but later retired. He provided Martin with photocopies of one of the prints. It was of a size 9 shoe. Gary wears a size 13 1/2. Martin found a similar discrepancy while reviewing shoe prints obtained from a 2nd crime scene. That didn't match, either, he said. The new evidence do not involve the 3 victims Gary was convicted of strangling. But in their efforts to prove Gary committed those murders, prosecutors implicated him in the raping and killing four others in a virtually identical manner. He was not tried in those cases. If the evidence now shows he didn't commit one of these crimes, it proves he didn't commit any of them, Martin said. Gary was arrested May 3, 1984, after Columbus police traced to him a gun that had been stolen from a home in the neighborhood where the killings occurred.
