Sept. 27 TEXAS: Death row inmate who claimed innocence confesses More than 18 years after a Houston man was fatally beaten with a car shock absorber and a beer mug and stabbed repeatedly with a knife, the Illinois man facing execution next week for the slaying is for the 1st time acknowledging the crime. "Years ago, when I 1st went to trial, I said I was not guilty of the crime," Peter Miniel told The Associated Press from a locked visiting cubicle outside Texas' death row. "I was concerned and didn't want to get the death penalty. "I lied. I want to tell the truth. I am guilty. I was wrong. I want to pay the price I was supposed to." Miniel, now 42, was convicted of the May 1986 murder of Paul Manier, 20, at Manier's apartment. He's scheduled for lethal injection Oct. 6, a date he described as "a relief." "I've been locked up 18 years. This is 2004," Miniel said. "I want to get this over with. I feel like I've done a life sentence already." 13 Texas inmates have been executed this year and another is set to die on Oct. 5 - a day before Miniel takes his turn on the death chamber gurney in Huntsville. "I know there's a bigger picture," he said. "And I know in the next life I'll have more understanding. I believe when we cross over and die and go to the other side there's another life for us, and that we will learn and begin again. "I've learned from all my mistakes in the past. I'm sorry for what I've done in the past and I want my future to be more peaceful in a better place. I believe in doing good now. I did something wrong when I was in the free world." Miniel's Minnesota-based lawyer, Greg Merz, said at the inmate's request he's making no appeals to block the punishment. "It's his choice," said Merz, adding that he was unaware of Miniel's disclosures about the crime. "There are a lot of avenues to pursue but he's determined there's nothing further he wanted to do." According to court documents, Miniel and a companion, James Warren Russell Jr., went to Manier's house to get some marijuana, then offered him some cocaine. As Manier leaned over a small mirror he was preparing to use to snort the drug, Miniel repeatedly hit Manier in the head with a glass beer mug. Then Meniel and Russell grabbed a shock absorber that was nearby and continued to beat the victim. When Manier failed to lose consciousness, court records show Miniel stabbed the man nearly 40 times with a small knife, tried slitting his neck and tried to asphyxiate him by jamming a blanket down this throat. They took a stereo and his wallet containing $20, then went to eat at a Burger King. Miniel was arrested about 2 weeks later in Chicago, where he sold some of the stereo to a neighbor. Russell was arrested in Brookshire, west of Houston, took a plea deal that earned him a 50-year prison term and testified against his partner, who wound up with a death sentence. "We got into a fight. The fight turned into a killing," Miniel said. "One thing led to another. We shouldn't have done that. It was wrong. We were very high and drunk. That was my main problem... "I want to apologize to the family members of the deceased. I would like to make peace with them if possible." Manier's relatives told Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials they did not want to be contacted by reporters. Miniel said he began drinking and smoking as early as age 10 with his father in Rock Falls, Ill., about 100 miles west of Chicago. By the time he was a teenager, he was hooked. The promise of a construction job in Houston with his brother, which turned out to be a false promise, brought him to Texas, and he wound up working at a car wash and as an overnight security guard at Houston Intercontinental Airport. He declined a plea bargain similar to the one Russell accepted. "I said I wasn't going to do that," he said, choosing instead to go to trial where a Houston jury took 5 minutes to return a guilty verdict. "I think I should have come forward and told the truth," he said. (source: Associated Press) *********************** Comrades come together to comfort one another Just a week and a half before he was killed during a domestic violence call, El Paso police Officer Angel Barcena responded to an eerily similar call, his partner said. A woman had called the police saying she was threatened by a relative with a gun, Officer Marc Santos said Sunday. Santos said he told Barcena, a trainee officer, "This is it. It doesn't get more dangerous than this. Are you ready?" "I could tell he was scared but it wasn't going to keep him from doing his job," Santos said. "I've seen some rookies freeze. But not him. He didn't hesitate. At that moment I knew he was born to do this." Santos and Barcena jumped on the suspect when the man sneaked back into the woman's house through a window. The officers immobilized the man. "Cuff him, partner," Santos told Barcena. They later found the man's rifle inside the house. Early Saturday, just before 1 a.m., Barcena was on a similar call. This time, he allegedly was shot by Theodore Michael Berry, a man who police said tried to break into his wife's house at 612 Bristol. Barcena, 38, died from the wound, which punctured a major artery. Berry, 42, was charged with capital murder and jailed in lieu of $1 million bond. He could receive the death penalty if convicted. Barcena had been on the job less than a month. His death is the 1st on-duty slaying of an officer in El Paso in about 13 years. Police Chief Richard Wiles told about 200 police officers at a meeting Sunday that people have been calling the Westside Regional Command Center, where Barcena was assigned, to offer their condolences. "It shows the support that we have for each other and that others have for us. People really care about us as human beings," he said. Rebecca De La Cruz, who lives across the street from the home where Barcena was shot, said she was grateful for Barcena's sacrifice. "We get so caught up in everyday life, we take for granted our law enforcement. It takes something like this to give you a reality check," she said. The Barcena family, which includes his wife of less than two months, is expected to make funeral arrangements with Martin Funeral Home at 3839 Montana today, funeral home officials said. Officer Gabriel Zaragoza, who went through the academy with Barcena, said the Korean-born officer was the shortest in his class but the one with the biggest heart. After graduation Aug. 26, Zaragoza was assigned to the Central Regional Command Center and Barcena to the Westside. "I told him nothing happens on the West Side. He said, 'Just you watch. I'll make a name for myself.' And he did. I'm proud of him," Zaragoza said Sunday. Officer Santos remembers Barcena's 1st day on the job. That day, Santos, a 12-year police veteran, was to pick up the trainee he would chaperone for 2 months. He called for Barcena in a room full of trainees. "Right away, he stood up with a big grin on his face. I thought, 'What is he so happy about?' Everybody else looked scared. I remember when I was out of the academy, I was scared," Santos said. Barcena proved to be a conscientious and eager trainee, always happy to be at work, always asking how he was doing. Santos, 33, took to calling 38-year-old Barcena "kid." "He looked so young, like he was fulfilling a childhood dream," Santos said. Barcena's father, Ricardo Barcena, said Saturday that his son wanted to be a police officer to help people. The night Barcena was shot, Santos had taken the night off. Another field training officer, Daniel Delgado, was with Barcena during the fatal call. Santos said he stopped by the station that night around 8 p.m. He told Barcena, "Be careful out there and take care of who you're working with." "That was a joke because he was a rookie, but I said to take care of who he was working with," Santos said. The next time Santos saw him, Barcena was at Beaumont Army Medical Center. He had already been pronounced dead. (source: El Paso Times) TENNESSEE----female faces death sentence Taylor faces possible death penalty in sentencing phase The penalty phase of the trial for convicted killer Latonya Taylor is scheduled to begin Monday. On Saturday, a jury convicted her on 3 counts of 1st-degree murder in the July, 2000 killings of three Captain D's workers in Smyrna. Taylor is eligible for the death penalty for the murders. A jury also convicted her on 3 counts of felony murder, 1 count of especially aggravated robbery, and 2 counts of especially aggravated kidnapping. A trial date has not yet been set for the other person accused in the triple-murder case. 24-year-old Percy Lee Palmer also faces 3 counts of 1st-degree murder and especially aggravated robbery. In his case, the state has argued that it was Palmer who actually pulled the trigger that night. (source: WKRN News) NEW YORK: A Bad Show, Even for Albany I lose no sleep over the fact that New York no longer has a workable death penalty law. Three cheers, as far as I'm concerned. What I find indefensible is the inability of state leaders to come clean: Either they want a death penalty or they don't want a death penalty - or they don't care and just want an issue to stoke the political fires. "There is no viable death penalty in New York right now," Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said earlier this month in explaining why his office would not seek capital charges against the man believed to have cold-bloodedly gunned down 2 NYPD detectives. They had come to his mother's house in response to a call that the man, once again, was terrifying her. If this isn't a death penalty case, what is? Maybe the answer is: no case. But only someone like me, who adamantly opposes capital punishment, will say that. If the Wendy's massacre - where 7 night-shift employees were marched into a storage area and methodically shot through the head by robbers who left with $2,400 - was not a death penalty case, then what is? Again: maybe no case is. But will politicians ever say this? Will they honestly say capital punishment is wrong? That it is an expensive exercise in rhetoric? That the present law gives the illusion of an effective strategy for imposing the ultimate punishment - and an even more cynical illusion of greater public safety? Or will they be content to play the blame game? Following the slaying of the detectives, Gov. Pataki, a Republican, blamed the Democratic-controlled Assembly for failing to enact an amendment that might make the current law constitutional. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who like Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno supports capital punishment, accused the governor of playing politics. And on and on. The state's top court ruled in June that the law Pataki made a centerpiece of his 1994 campaign for governor was unconstitutional because jurors had to be told during the sentencing phase of a trial that if they deadlocked, the judge would impose a sentence that might permit the defendant to be paroled some day. The court felt that this unconstitutionally pressured jurors to vote for death. Silver has promised hearings on the future of the death penalty before the start of the next legislative session in January. The Pataki camp says the topic has been discussed to death (so to speak) and that hearings will be fruitless. But in 10 years, the state has spent millions of dollars seeking a death penalty and wound up with life without parole as its toughest sentence. The money could have been more wisely spent, if only the leaders had come clean and said, as a growing number of New Yorkers seem to understand, that life without parole is a perfectly fine - and fiscally wise - ultimate penalty. (source: Column, E.R. Shipp, New York Daily News, Sept. 26) VIRGINIA: Brathwaite pleads no contest, avoids death penalty Clinton A. Brathwaite avoided a possible death sentence today when he pleaded no contest to killing his girlfriend and her three young children in their Roanoke home. Under a plea agreement reached in Roanoke Circuit Court, he will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole. Brathwaite was convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend, Angela Arrington, in her home on Madison Avenue Northwest. Prosecutors believe he then turned his gun on her children because they witnessed the crime. Killed were LaVoe Arrington, 13, DeVonte Arrington, 10, and Kedeesha Arrington, 8. A 4th child, Kierra Arrington, was shot in the head but survived. Although jury selection had been scheduled to start today, the trial was called off after attorneys reached an agreement in the case Sunday afternoon. Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said a key factor in his decision was potential problems with the testimony of Kierra Arrington, who was expected to be a key prosecution witness. Arrington, who was 14 at the time of the April 4, 2003, murders, has given several different accounts of the shooting that did not match the physical evidence of the crime scene, Caldwell said. (source: Roanoke Times)
