Jan. 8 TEXAS: Let's act now to prevent future Yates tragedies----Rewrite laws to reflect advances in treatment Finally, justice will stand a new chance. With the reversal of her conviction, Andrea Yates has the opportunity to have a new trial, and a new jury can deliberate on what the punishment should be for a person acting out of a psychotic state. Everyone, including the Harris County district attorney, recognized the severity of her mental illness. Now, perhaps, Yates will be given a lifetime of treatment. Yet the obstacles to obtaining a just outcome in this case remain formidable. A woman with a long, painful history of mental illness experienced psychotic delusions that led her to drown all 5 of her children. As a society, we can barely cope with the strength of our reactions. In deciding her fate, jury members must set aside their emotions, whether compassionate or angry. They must measure her motivation and her action against Texas criminal statutes that determine whether someone may be judged not guilty by reason of insanity. Mental health advocates around the state believe the provisions and procedures outlined in these statutes have not kept pace with a scientific understanding of how mental illness can affect the ability to govern our own behavior. In the wake of the Yates case and several others, there has been an ongoing re-examination of the codes governing the "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense. There is much consensus among advocates, treatment professionals and the legal community about the need for change: Texas law should reflect that certain biological features of mental illness affect perception of reality, motivation and behavior in ways that undercut personal responsibility and make punishment meaningless, except as an act of revenge. The language in the penal code that responds to this issue was derived from a statute written in 1843, more than 100 years before the introduction of anti-psychotic medication and about 150 years before the brain imaging techniques that assure us that mental illnesses do, indeed, alter the brain. Rather than stipulating, as current statute does, that a person know right from wrong at the time of the action, advocates believe a more meaningful measure is whether a person appreciates at the time of the action that it was legally or morally wrong. This is a small change in wording that carries considerable legal significance. The majority of advocates believe this modification would allow jurors to more fully acknowledge the impact of mental illness on the defendant's actions. It would facilitate obtaining a verdict that makes much more sense in an instance of severe mental illness. Jurors need to know that this verdict does not necessarily mean that the defendant goes home. But judges today are not permitted to instruct jurors about the procedures in place that protect society from any risks of future dangerousness of the individual. That also needs to change. Additional reform is needed to improve the fairness and efficacy of current criminal procedures for processing persons who are assessed as dangerous. (It is worth noting that most people acquitted by reason of insanity have been charged with far less serious crimes than these few high-profile cases.) While it will likely be too late to help Andrea Yates, the 79th Texas Legislature has an opportunity to reconsider these revisions, and in fact the Texas Senate Jurisprudence Committee has been active during the interim in studying the issues. By updating the criminal code to match our modern understanding of mental illness, the Legislature could improve the options for the Texas criminal justice system to deal justly and humanely with cases in which mental illness has governed the actions of an individual. By revising the provisions for processing a person deemed dangerous, appropriate provision can be made to ensure public safety without being reactionary. It will never be easy to accept that in rare instances mental illness can result in extremes of criminal behavior. No procedures, regardless of how carefully followed, will eliminate the possibility of these extremes. But we can and should at least make sure our laws conform to the advances in our knowledge of mental illness if we want to remove the obstacles to justice in a case like that of Andrea Yates. (source: Editorial, Viewpoints, Houston Chronicle; Betsy Schwartz is executive director of the Mental Health Association of Greater Houston, Jan. 7) ****************************** Woman pleads guilty in slayings A 20-year-old Fort Worth woman pleaded guilty Friday to a murder charge in connection with the Dec. 11, 2003, slayings of a Mansfield couple, a court official said. Susana Toledano, who was charge with capital murder, could have faced the death penalty if convicted in the shooting and stabbing deaths of Rick and Suzanna Wamsley, who were found slain inside their Walnut Estates home. Toledano, whose sentencing has not been set, is 1 of 3 people accused of carrying out a murder-for-hire scheme so the Wamsleys' son, Andrew Wamsley, could collect on their $1 million life insurance policy. A 4th defendant is accused of helping to plot the murder. In October, Andrew Wamsley, 20, and his girlfriend, Chelsea Richardson, 20, rejected plea agreements that would have resulted in life sentences. Their trials are set to begin next month. If convicted of capital murder, they could be sentenced to death. Hilario Cardenas, 25, of Arlington faces a charge of conspiracy to commit capital murder in the case. DNA evidence linked Toledano, a former roommate of Richardson's, to the slaying, police said. Rick Wamsley was clutching a handful of hair that matched a sample taken from Toledano, police said. (source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram) NORTH CAROLINA: A lesson in death----Johnston woman wants to use her gas chamber to teach kids about violence Off a 2-lane road in Johnston County, perched in Joyce Decker's grassy back yard behind a wooden seesaw and in front of a crumbling tool shed, the gas chamber bears silent testimony to the lives and deaths of close to 200 people. The steel box from Raleigh's Central Prison is open to the elements, the glass of its witness window broken. Inside, a wooden replica of the chair in which inmates were strapped to die sits beneath the original exhaust fan and alongside an old-fashioned scale that might have been used to weigh prisoners before their execution. A metal compartment that held sulfuric acid protrudes from the floor. Cyanide would drop from a box beneath the chair into the acid, creating the deadly gas fumes. The original switches and dials manufactured by General Electric Co. adorn the wall. It's a macabre lawn decoration but one that Decker, in her 50s and a mother of five, has lived with for 19 years since her husband gave it to her as a gift. Garland Decker was hired to demolish part of Central Prison in the 1980s to prepare for a more modern structure. Joyce Decker said her husband was unable to crush the room because it was built so sturdily. A spokesman at the N.C. Department of Correction thinks he didn't want to. It ended up on a trailer in Decker's back yard, a souvenir from her husband. Many people would be appalled, and Decker was -- initially. She draped it with canvas so she wouldn't see it. But then she got curious. She wanted to know who died in that gas chamber and for what crimes. She began researching, visiting the State Archives and trolling online. Years passed. Decker's children grew up and left home. Her husband died. But the gas chamber remained. It's a piece of history, Decker said, and over the years she has developed an eerie attachment to it. "It doesn't bother me," she said. "It used to, but it was a curse I confronted." The chamber's history Central Prison was built in the 1870s. Decker's chamber might have been used both for electrocution and for lethal gassing, said Keith Acree, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction. The department keeps no records of how many people died in Decker's gas chamber, but about 200 people were executed between 1936 and 1984, the years the chamber was in use. The state took over administration of the death penalty from local governments in 1910. That year, the state electrocuted its first inmate, a convicted rapist from Robeson County. The electric chair was last used in 1938. 2 years earlier, the state began gassing inmates in the chamber that now sits in Decker's yard. In 1983, the Legislature allowed death row inmates to choose between gas or lethal injection. A year later, the old gas chamber was removed by Decker's husband, but gassing continued until 1998, when the state used gas for the final time to execute Ricky Lee Sanderson. Later that year, the Legislature voted to make lethal injection the state's only form of execution, rendering lethal gassing obsolete. Future lessons Still, Decker thought her gas chamber could serve a purpose. She wanted to do something with it, but she didn't know what. And then she did. She would cart it around to schools in the area and talk to students about the link between child abuse and violence and the link between violence and the death penalty. Maybe she could get a grant to subsidize the plan. "I do believe children who are abused will abuse when they grow up," she said. Maybe if children step inside the gas chamber and hear the stories of people who died there, they would think twice about violence, she hopes. So far, the chamber has visited one school, East Wake High School. Officials at the school could not be reached this week. In preparation for more school visits, Decker has festooned the steel chamber with painted signs. One reads, "Stop child abuse and domestic violence." Another proclaims, "Joyce Decker's Dream." (source: The News & Observer) ILLINOIS: Guilty, you say? Let's go to the tape Gary Gauger is living back on the family farm just south of the Illinois border, the same place his parents lived and, he discovered 1 never-ending spring morning almost 12 years ago, died as well. He found his father's body in a farm building used as a motorcycle repair shop. His mother lay in a small trailer where she sold rugs. Gauger didn't know it at that moment, but their throats had been slit by bikers who made off with maybe $15 - then went out and blew it on breakfast. Made off with a good chunk of someone else's life, it would turn out as well: Gary's own. The real killers have now been sent off to prison - but only after he was both convicted and sentenced to death on the basis of what authorities contended was a confession. "That was one of the things that fascinated me about Gauger," said Dave Daley, a Wisconsin journalist and former Journal Sentinel reporter working on a book about Gauger entitled "The Wrong Man." "Here is a guy who is innocent. How does he confess?" Looking back, Gauger himself says, he now realizes he was in "emotional shock." "My parents were killed," he said. "I was very vulnerable. I was doing everything I could to help the police eliminate me" as a suspect. Naive and sleep-deprived, he was interrogated for 18 hours. Police told him, he contends, that they had evidence implicating him. He says they also persuaded him to imagine a hypothetical scenario under which he might have done it. "I told them I had absolutely no memory of this," he said, "and then the suggestion came up that I did it in a blackout." "They claimed that at 5:30 in the morning that I blurted out this detailed confession." He says a confession is not what he uttered. Jurors, unfortunately, were much less inclined to believe him than police. Gary Gauger isn't the only man who has ever been falsely convicted. Just this week, a task force formed to examine the case of Steven Avery, the Manitowoc man who spent 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit, made some recommendations for reform. Despite a lot of debate, those recommendations did not include taping interrogations of suspects. Nowadays, we tape everyone who walks into a convenience store, uses an ATM or finds an answering machine instead of a person on the other end of a meaningless phone call. We tape TV shows and movies and football games that last forever - but matter not a whit. We can't tape the most crucial moments of a person's life? Taping, ironically, probably wouldn't have made a difference in the Avery case. It could have made all the difference, however, in the case of Gary Gauger - who was freed after an Appeals Court overturned his conviction in 1996. The McHenry County Sheriff's Department, which conducted the investigation, did not return a call Friday afternoon, so I don't know what they think about either Gauger's comments or the taping of interrogations. There's ample suspicion, though, that if his interrogation had been taped, things would have turned out very differently. His twin sister Ginger believes the case never even would have made it to trial. Gauger himself, in the meantime, who was pardoned in 2002, almost certainly would not have made it as far as death row. (source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) CONNECTICUT: Catholics asked to sign petition to end death penalty As the execution of serial killer Michael Ross looms, the archdiocese of Connecticut is asking Catholics to sign a petition calling for an end to the death penalty. A letter will be read to parishioners at services across the state to mobilize some of Connecticut's 1.2 Catholics. The petitions will then be presented to Governor Jodi Rell and state lawmakers. A number of religious leaders are planning to call for the end of the death penalty during a news conference next Wednesday at the state capitol. (source: WTNH News)
