death penalty news January 2, 2005
LOUISIANA: 88 await execution on state's death row - No one in Louisiana executed last year The number of state-ordered executions in the United States fell 10 percent in 2004, continuing a five-year decline in the use of the death penalty. A dozen states combined to put 59 convicts to death, according to an annual report by a group that opposes capital punishment. The South again led the nation by presiding over 85 percent of all executions. But none took place in Louisiana, which has not executed a convict since 2001 and has 88 people awaiting lethal injection on death row. At the state prison in Angola, where Louisiana's condemned are held, six convicts began serving death sentences in 2004, the prison said. One of the newest arrivals was serial killer suspect Derrick Todd Lee, 36, who was convicted this year of killing Charlotte Murray Pace and Geralyn Barr DeSoto, and is linked to five other slayings. Lee was sentenced to life in prison for the DeSoto murder, but he was condemned to death for killing Pace. The night a jury sentenced him to die, prosecutor John Sinquefield called it "south Louisiana justice." 23 put to death in Texas Only two states outside of the South -- Ohio and Nevada -- used the death penalty in 2004. Texas, as it has for years, topped the list by putting 23 people to death by lethal injection, one fewer than in the previous year. The year-end report by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., concluded that the United States is losing its appetite for executions. "By every measure, the death penalty in the U.S. has been in decline since 1999," the center said. "A handful of states carry out the majority of executions, and the crimes of those who are executed often are indistinguishable from the crimes of those who are spared," the report said. "In many states, the process has slowed to the point where even supporters of capital punishment are questioning its practical value to society." The report draws its numbers from the federal government. It's the reasons behind the falling numbers that are up for debate. Those who oppose capital punishment, such as the Death Penalty Information Center, say the cases in which inmates on death row have been cleared by DNA or other evidence found after conviction have quieted the call for executions. Since 1973, 117 death row inmates have been freed in 25 states. The convicts either won their freedom through new trials, dismissed charges or pardons. Either way, death penalty opponents consider these "innocence" cases. Death penalty advocates, however, say the lower rate of executions and death sentences suggest tougher laws and the threat of execution are true deterrents and have helped lower crime nationwide. In 2003, the country held 65 executions and handed down 144 death sentences. In 1999, the nation executed 98 convicts while imposing 282 new death sentences. Ohio emerged as second on the 2004 list, executing seven inmates, including two double murderers who each requested execution. One of the condemned men killed his parents and then sold their modest possessions to buy crack cocaine. The other shot his girlfriend and their 3-year-old daughter, then placed the bodies in a freezer and refrigerator. Maryland executed Steven Howard Oken in June for the 1987 rape and murder of a 20-year-old newlywed, Dawn Marie Garvin. Oken, 42, sexually assaulted and killed three women within weeks that year, later confessing to his crimes. His impending execution inspired a statewide debate about the death penalty and drew crowds of supporters and opponents to the prison, where one group chanted, "Turn on the juice," according to The Baltimore Sun. Fred J. Romano, who had cradled his dead daughter in his arms after finding her body the day after she let Oken into her home, pronounced it justice. "He had no right to die in dignity, no right at all," Romano said in Baltimore after the execution. "He should have been hung. I would have liked to have seen him dancing at the end of a rope." Arkansas executed a single convict, a mentally ill man who spent 24 years on death row for killing a grocery store clerk he had befriended. Charles Singleton, 44, was Arkansas' longest-serving death row convict. His case drew attention because he suffered from schizophrenia and was deemed legally sane only when taking his medication. While prosecutors said the 19-year-old Singleton who killed was sane at the time, defense attorneys said their client wanted to die to escape living with insanity. The legal standard for execution is that a convict knows he will die and why. 'Law of the land' Closer to home, Orleans Parish counted its seventh year without a single death sentence, despite ample opportunity and a high murder rate. But the fact that Orleans Parish jurors rarely impose the death penalty is not a factor for prosecutors when deciding who deserves it, District Attorney Eddie Jordan said. "We seek the death penalty in every first-degree murder case," Jordan said. "That is my policy. I support the death penalty. I believe it is the appropriate sentence in cases of that kind." Orleans Parish hasn't sent a convict to death row since 1997, when Phillip Anthony was condemned to die for the triple killing at the French Quarter's Louisiana Pizza Kitchen. But, prosecutors haven't stopped trying. "It's not a matter of popularity," Jordan said. "It's the law of the land. It's the law of the state of Louisiana. I'm simply following the law." In 2004, an Orleans Parish jury unanimously gave life to a convicted cop-killer after prosecutors had asked for death. In the case of a 7-year-old boy stabbed to death, a crack cocaine addict with a history of mental illness stopped his capital murder trial to plead guilty. For Theodore McCoy, a sentence of life in prison without chance of parole was a plea bargain, when faced with the prospect of the death penalty. He stopped his trial on its first day, before the jury returned from lunch. His was the rare case in Orleans that veteran lawyers on both sides of the bar considered a candidate for the death penalty. During jury selection, several people refused to look at the photographs of the slain boy. "The majority of citizens would agree there are certain crimes so horrific, so unconscionable, so heinous, that the death penalty is the only appropriate sentence," Jordan said. "I'm confident the community wants the state to seek the death penalty under specific circumstances." A Jefferson Parish jury in 1999 knew that DNA found on a ski mask left at the scene of Tommy Vanhoose's 1997 murder in his Bridge City grocery didn't match Ryan Matthews' DNA. But jurors still convicted him and condemned him to death. It took a new round of appeals and a series of tests by Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick's office for Matthews to gain his release, after five years in prison. Matthews became the 14th death row inmate in the nation released from charges because of DNA tests. Connick's office spent about $35,000 on tests to confirm what Matthews' defense team had said all along: No physical evidence placed Ryan on the scene. A second man, Travis Hayes, remains in prison serving life as an accomplice in the Vanhoose murder. Hayes is appealing in Jefferson Parish courts, but seems far from following Matthews to freedom anytime soon. 'Volunteer' convict At least five executions are scheduled this month in various states, including that of a serial killer in Connecticut who said he wants to die to help his victims' families, as well as his own, begin healing. Michael Ross, who admitted strangling eight young women and girls, and raping most of them, would be the first person executed in Connecticut since 1960. He was convicted of killing four women in the 1980s. Ross, a graduate of Cornell University who was selling life insurance in Connecticut when arrested in 1984, told a judge this month that he is neither suicidal nor ignorant of the law. "I don't know, I'm just trying to bring it to an end, judge," Ross said, The New York Times reported. In death penalty lore, Ross is known as a "volunteer," a convict who declines further appeals when facing execution, and Connecticut's Republican governor said she will not intervene in the execution scheduled for Jan. 26. But Ross' father and public defenders have filed for a stay of execution. Racial issue Of the nation's 59 convicts executed last year, 36 were white, 19 were black, one was Asian and three were Hispanic. Of their collective victims, there were six times as many white people as black people. In 35 cases, the crimes were white-on-white. The study cites those statistics as evidence of racial bias in the death penalty system. Only 12 percent of those executed in 2004 were guilty of murdering white victims, the group noted, despite the fact that black people are victims in about 50 percent of the murders in the United States. Nearly all of the 59 state-sponsored executions were carried out by lethal injection. The only exception was a man in South Carolina, a convict with a violent past who was sentenced to die for shooting two women in the head. In each case, the murder arose during a robbery of what most people would consider pocket change and took place in the victim's home. In South Carolina, where the condemned may choose lethal injection or the electric chair, James Neil Tucker, 47, refused to decide how his life would end. It was a final act of defiance against the system and the death penalty, his attorney said. Tucker would not condone his own death by choosing a method. The state obliged him, exacting capital punishment with a brown hood and a 1912-era wooden chair hooked up to a breaker -- the first electrocution there since 1996. He died May 28. Tucker's attorney read his last words: "To those I have harmed: My abject apologies and regrets. I am ashamed." (source: New Orleans Times-Picayune)
