Jan. 6
TEXAS----new execution date [not considered serious]
Execution date set in double murder case
Judge Brady Elliott Thursday set a date for the execution of a Fort Bend
County man convicted in 1999 of killing 2 men.
Milton Wuzael Mathis, 25, admitted to killing Travis Brown and Daniel
Hibbard on Dec. 15, 1998 with a firearm. Mathis also shot a 15-year-old
girl in the head and set fire to the Houston house where the killings
occurred before driving away in Brown's car. The woman survived, but was
paralyzed following the incident.
Mathis is now set to be executed on April 20, but attorneys arguing the
case say the date will likely be pushed back due to ongoing appeals.
Attorney Stephen Doggett, who represents Mathis, asked Elliott to not set
the execution date, as he has filed an appeal with the U.S. Fifth Circuit
of Appeals over Mathis' possible mental retardation. Doggett said he would
have to seek a stay of execution from the Fifth Circuit to delay the
execution until legal issues are resolved.
"I'm asking you to let the federal issues play out," he said.
Prosecutor Fred Felcman, however, said Doggett was only presenting
opinions and not legal justifications for Elliott to not set the execution
date.
"If the attorney has to get a stay, that's what he's supposed to do," he
said.
Elliott agreed with Felcman, and set the execution date.
"I'm not rushing it," he said. "This is not something I enjoy doing. I
have certain obligations."
The hearing was held in the 268th District Court.
A Fort Bend County jury convicted Mathis in September of 1999. Mathis,
according to court documents, claimed he killed Brown in self-defense and
that he knocked the gun out of Brown's hands before killing him.
However, witnesses to the crime said Mathis appeared calm and deliberate
while carrying it out.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction in a Feb. 13,
2002 ruling. The issue of Mathis' possible mental retardation was raised
after that appeal.
(source: Herald Coaster)
********************
Local lawyer joins elite group
A federal attorney who prosecuted 2 of 3 men accused in the James Byrd
murder case has been hand-selected to handle this country's most
high-profile capital murder cases in Washington, D.C.
John B. Stevens Jr., assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of
Texas, will work in the U.S. Department of Justice Capital Case Unit for a
year.
While serving with this unit, Stevens will prosecute and help make policy
"on the seeking and implementing of the death penalty in those cases where
the death penalty is an appropriate action," he said.
The unit recently was created because of the justice department's
increasing involvement in death penalty cases, a news release issued by
the Eastern District office said.
"Every time I go to Washington, I learn something more that connects
between what we do here and how it applies to the good of a free society.
You see how it affects the community," Stevens said. "I will help our
county be better off than it was before."
The goal of the unit is to ensure consistency and fairness in death
penalty cases.
The 1st federal death penalty case the Eastern District prosecuted was
Shannon Wayne Agofsky, who was serving a life sentence for the 1989 bank
robbery and murder of bank president Dan Short. While serving his sentence
in a federal prison, Agofsky was convicted in the beating death of fellow
inmate Luther Plant, 37, of Orange.
There are very few federal death penalty cases, Stevens said, but when
there is a case they tend to be high-profile like the one involving the
accused Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh.
Stevens leaves this weekend, and immediately will face the pending death
penalty case of a man accused of bombing an Alabama abortion clinic.
Eric Robert Rudolph, who was arrested in May 2003 in North Carolina and
charged with the 1996 Olympic Centennial Park bombing, is facing federal
charges for the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic. An off-duty
police officer was killed and a nurse was critically injured.
Stevens, a Lamar University graduate, received his law degree from the
University of Houston.
(source: The Beaumont Enterprise)
USA:
Searching for a silver lining in death penalty's gender bias
The only time that executions stir more than a public yawn these days is
when a woman is scheduled to die. That was true again recently when the
scheduled execution of Frances Newton in Texas, Dec. 1, drew a flurry of
headlines.
Newton, an African American, was convicted in 1987 of murdering her two
children and her estranged husband to collect $100,000 in insurance money.
Newton's attorneys claimed that she was the victim of lousy
representation, tainted evidence, and a rush to judgment by cops and
prosecutors.
In Texas, the claim of legal taint, racial bias and pitiable defense
attorneys is so routine it almost always falls on deaf ears in the state
court system. In most cases, the condemned are eventually executed. But
Newton is a woman, and that guaranteed that her claim would get noticed.
Even Texas departs from its death-row "dispatch them quick and often"
stance when it comes to women offenders. Newton has languished on death
row for 17 years while her appeals meandered through state and federal
courts.
Newton's case, though, is hardly unusual. Women commit more than 1 in 10
murders. But only one in 50 convicted women murderers get the death
penalty, and few of those sentences are ever carried out. Female
executions account for slightly more than 1 percent of executions. Women
are far more likely than men to get their sentences commuted to life
imprisonment.
If Newton is executed, she will be the first woman executed since 2002.
When Oklahoma executed three women in 2001, the state had the grisly
distinction of executing more women in one year than any other state in
U.S. history.
The gender bias that riddles the death penalty as much as racial and class
bias is a good thing in that it saves the lives of women. What's
problematic is the rationale for saving their lives. Prosecutors regard
women as less violent, less threatening and more emotionally unstable than
men. If they kill and maim, they supposedly do it out of blind love or
loyalty to a man. This reinforces the notion that women are the dainty sex
in need of guidance, protection and, ultimately, male control. This strips
them of any social and moral accountability for and control over their
acts. It makes it even easier to marginalize women.
Husbands and boyfriends physically and emotionally savage many women. Yet,
if women kill their mate, courts more often than not consider it
self-defense. They are not branded or demonized as dangerous, violent
sociopaths. When that argument doesn't fit, and women kill for the same
reasons men do, many prosecutors, judges and juries still are reluctant to
impose the death penalty. If they do impose it, there's a similar
reluctance to carry out the sentence.
That happened in the case of pick-ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker in Texas.
Before Tucker was executed in 1998, conservative evangelicals Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson, both death-penalty hard-liners, rallied to her
defense and demanded that she not be put to death. Robertson publicly
called her "a sweet woman of God." Robertson and the evangelicals claimed
they backed her because of her jailhouse born-again Christian conversion.
But scores of men also have grabbed at the Bible and found God on death
row. There's no record that Robertson or the others called any of them
"sweet men of God" and leaped to their defense.
The gender double standard has raised howls from some condemned men,
death-penalty opponents and even some feminists, who argue that gender,
just as race and wealth, should play no role in determining who lives and
who dies in the nation's death chambers. But that argument won't get any
further than the argument that racial bias is ample reason to dump the
death penalty. The Supreme Court put that to rest years ago when it ruled
in McClesky vs. Kemp, which mandated that generalized statistics of race
were insufficient to invalidate a death sentence. For a defendant to have
any chance of having his sentence overturned, he'd have to prove that the
death penalty was imposed based on racial bias in his particular case,
something that is usually difficult to prove.
Even if more women wound up on death rows, and were executed as fast as or
faster than men, it wouldn't make the death penalty any fairer or less
barbaric than it already is. While gender bias perpetuates stereotypes of
female victimization and warped notions of male chivalry, it still offers
some hope that prosecutors, judges and juries are willing to put legal
fairness and human compassion before the bloodlust to legally kill. That
should be the case regardless of whether the accused is Frances Newton, or
a man.
(source: Commentary, The Athens (Ohio) News --Editor's note: PNS
contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and author of
"The Crisis in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press) )
CONNECTICUT:
Conn. Civil Liberties Union challenges constitutionality of the state's
death penalty
As Michael Ross' execution date draws near - there are more and more legal
maneuvers to try to stop it from happening.
A hearing on the constitutionality of the state's death penalty in the
case of serial killer Michael Ross has been put off.
The hearing by a federal judge, which had been moved to Rockville Superior
Court because it could link Ross to the hearing by closed circuit TV, will
be held tomorrow morning.
Yesterday, the state Supreme Court heard arguments over whether a lower
court judge made a mistake when he wouldn't let the public defender's
office intervene on Ross' behalf and present evidence that Ross is
incompetent to call off his appeals and accept death.
The Connecticut Civil Liberties Union which will make its arguments in
court, filed the lawsuit on behalf of Dan Ross, Michael Ross' father. It
claims the state's use of lethal injection is cruel and unusual
punishment.
After yesterday's hearing the public defenders say they will ask a federal
court to block the execution if they fail before the state Supreme Court.
Lawyers, of course, are hoping for a quick decision since Ross is
scheduled to die on January 26th by lethal injection.
Ross has admitted to killing 8 women from Connecticut and New York back in
the 1980's.
(sources: WTNH News & Associated Press)
