June 27
USA:
Election hopefuls find no votes on death row
Mauro Barraza remembers nothing of the day he broke into Vilorie Nelsons
home, nor does he recall battering the 73-year-old with a pair of
gardening shears, jumping on her chest to crush her heart and then
slitting her throat.
Aged 17 at the time, he was pumped up on crack cocaine and, according to
those who defended him at his trial, had been rendered temporarily insane
as a result of an addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was sentenced to
death.
Barraza, 32, hopes a last-minute stay of execution will save him from his
scheduled appointment in the Texas state death house on Tuesday, a date
that coincides with the 32nd anniversary of the historic US Supreme Court
ruling that suspended the death penalty before its reversal 4 years later
with the execution of murderer Gary Gilmore by firing squad.
Whatever his fate, anti-death penalty campaigners will mark the date with
a rally outside the US Supreme Court building in Washington.
The long-running debate as to the rights or wrongs of the US's capital
punishment laws is one of the nations most prominent judicial
controversies, with Hollywood liberals such as Tim Robbins and Susan
Sarandon fronting the abolitionist campaign.
But the issue is something both President George W Bush, a firm fan of the
death penalty, and his Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry, who is
opposed to it, are anxious to sidestep in the run-up to the November
election.
"Its not a good issue for either candidate," said David Elliott of the
National Campaign to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It has the potential to
hurt Bush with some voters because it cuts into the image that he wants to
project of himself as a compassionate conservative.
"But it hurts Kerry a little bit too, because, sadly, we have still not
reached a point when you can be a presidential candidate and be against
the death penalty and not have it damage you. The death penalty remains
very popular among the public."
A CNN/USA Today opinion poll conducted last month by Gallup showed 71% of
the US public in favour of execution for murderers.
When the alternative sentence of life imprisonment is entered into the
equation, however, the balance shifts; 50% of people said they preferred
to see the death penalty imposed over life imprisonment, 46% preferred
life. About half of those questioned believed executions were not carried
out often enough; 23% said the penalty was imposed too often.
Abolitionists acknowledge that they are swimming against the tide,
particularly in the wake of atrocities such as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing,
in which 168 people were killed, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Conscious of the strength of the public view, Kerry has qualified his
opposition to capital punishment by declaring it acceptable when applied
to terrorists.
By contrast, Bush's decisiveness earned him the nickname of the
Texecutioner as governor of Texas from 1994 to 2000. He signed more death
warrants - a total of 152 - than any other governor.
The death penalty debate is not split straight down party lines, however.
Democrat Bill Clinton showed a certain fervour for executing murderers
while governor of Arkansas before winning the 1992 presidency, as did his
vice-president, Al Gore, during his own run for the White House in 2000.
And George Ryan, the governor of Illinois who famously emptied his states
death row last year by granting clemency to all its inmates, is a
Republican.
Attractive as Kerry's sentiments are to anti-death penalty campaigners, he
would have no magic key with which to unlock the cells of death row
inmates en masse if he won the White House.
The states that operate capital punishment do so under their own state
laws, not federal. He would, however, have the right to grant clemency to
prisoners on federal death row, which currently houses 29 men.
Professor Michael Radelet of the University of Colorado, a death penalty
scholar opposed to capital punishment, agrees that "there are things Kerry
could do to soften up the situation" if he were president, including
bringing more thoughtful and informed debate to the issue.
He might also "re-impose some kind of moral leadership and introduce the
vocabulary of international human rights that under the present
administration has been sorely lacking", as well as backing pending
legislation giving inmates improved rights.
Crucially, any president gets to appoint the 9 Supreme Court judges in
whose hands the matter of life and death ultimately rests.
"I think we could hope for more liberal thinkers in the Supreme Court
under Kerry," said Prof Radelet.
Topping campaigners wish-list when they head to Washington on Tuesday is
the hope that the 74 death row inmates who committed their crimes as
juveniles could be spared. The US Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider
the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty in its next session,
which begins in October.
Dr John McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette
University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a proponent of the death penalty,
is scornful of the fact that the pending review could mean stays of
execution for all such inmates in the meantime, including Barraza.
"The law is the law and states should feel free to go ahead and exercise
the punishment," he said. "You dont get the death penalty for murder
alone, you get it for murder with torture, murder with rape, and so on.
Opponents say: Gosh, at 17 these boys werent mature enough to make moral
judgments. But they are old enough to join the army, old enough to drive."
Of the 50 US states, 19 retain the option to exercise the death penalty
against juveniles convicted of murder. South Dakota and Wyoming abolished
it this year.
But advocates say the death penalty is both a deterrent and a legitimate
means of justice for victims families.
McAdams said: "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent
effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers.
"If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred
other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims.
I would much rather risk the former."
Crime statistics are black and white
RACE is a significant factor in death penalty statistics in the US, human
rights watchdogs complain. But it is not that there are more blacks than
whites on death row; the split was 45% white and 42% black at the
beginning of 2004, according to figures from the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People.
Instead, the controversy lies in the fact that although blacks and whites
are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes in the US, 80% of
those executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 were for
murders in which the victims were white.
"If you are black you are 40 times as likely to get the death penalty for
your crime as a white," says Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who
has fought against the death penalty in America for 2 decades. "But its
not so much because of the race of the defendant, but the race of the
victim."
The death penalty Information Centre reports that 311 blacks have been
executed since 1976, representing 34.1% of the total number of prisoners
put to death. Around 13% of the US population is black. White defendants
accounted for 57.2% of the total number of executions, while 82% of the US
population is white.
(source: Scotland on Sunday)
NEW YORK:
Taylor may still get death penalty
Former Queens state Supreme Court Justice Steven Fisher may have
instructed the jury that sentenced Wendy's killer John Taylor to death in
a way that he could still receive the death penalty despite the state
Court of Appeals ruling Thursday that the statute is unconstitutional,
according to a reading of the transcript.
Fisher, now an Appellate Division judge, apparently was aware of the
potential problem with the death penalty statute when he presided over the
2002 trial of the 40-year-old former Wendy's fast-food chain employee.
Taylor, with an accomplice, bound and gagged seven employees of the
Flushing restaurant on May 24, 2000, then killed 5 and shot and wounded 2
others. The jury sentenced him to death.
To follow the death penalty statute, judges generally instruct a jury that
if they deadlock between voting for capital punishment and life in prison
with no chance of parole, the judge will impose a sentence that includes a
chance of parole.
In its ruling, the Court of Appeals said that mentioning the possibility
of parole could coerce a juror into voting for the death penalty.
But Fisher told the jury that he expected to sentence Taylor to 175 years
behind bars before he would be eligible in effect, life with no chance of
parole.
Some legal experts argue there was no coercion in the Taylor jury's
decision, because Fisher's instruction made clear he expected the
defendant to stay in prison for life.
"The maximum sentence I could give and would almost certainly impose in
this case, would be a sentence of 175 years to life, which means that the
defendant would become eligible for parole, but only after he had served
175 years in jail," Fisher said, according to the transcript.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown argues that this explanation to the
jury that Taylor wasn't expected to become eligible for parole until he
was over 200 years old removes the coercive aspect of the statute. "That's
why I take the view the case is still alive," he said yesterday.
"I don't want to be so presumptuous as to take sides or go against the
court," Brown went on.
But he said, "Steve Fisher, together with all the lawyers involved in the
case all recognized the concern ... that the deadlock provision in the
statute might be considered coercive. He effectively removed the issue."
Kevin Doyle, who heads the Capital Defender's Office, views it
differently. "This jury was given to understand that it was possible John
Taylor would be paroled in a relatively short time," Doyle said, hanging
his view on Fisher's comments that he would "almost certainly" sentence
Taylor to 175 years, not "certainly."
"We can't begin to speculate how that affected the jury," Doyle said.
In addition, Doyle points out, "The [Court of Appeals] decision didn't
turn on a constitutional error because of the way in which the statute was
applied, but rather appeared to turn on error found on the face of the
statute. And that was the statute on which John Taylor was sentenced to
death."
In other words, as Brown also concedes is possible, the Court of Appeals
decision could mean that as long as the sentencing provision is in the
statute it can't be imposed.
(source: Newsday)
