Jan. 21 PENNSYLVANIA: Death warrant signed for killer of 2 women Gov. Ed Rendell on Thursday signed the death warrant for a man convicted 4 years ago of stabbing to death a Philadelphia woman and her teenage daughter. The execution of Russell M. Cox was scheduled for March 17. He killed Evelyn Heath Brown, 33, and Tina Brown, 17, in February 1986. Evelyn Brown was stabbed 48 times with scissors and a knife, according to court records. Tina Brown was stabbed 53 times. Execution warrants against Cox, 37, have been stayed twice previously by Pennsylvania courts. Rendell has signed 31 death warrants since he took office 2 years ago. 3 men have been executed in Pennsylvania since 1975, with the last execution in July 1999. There were 222 people on the state's death row as of Jan. 3. (source: Associated Press) ALABAMA/LOUISIANA: Mobile inmate charged with death of New Orleans prostitute New Orleans authorities issued an arrest warrant Thursday for Mobile inmate and accused killer Jeremy Bryan Jones. Jones, 31, of Oklahoma, was charged with 1st degree murder in the February 2004 death of a New Orleans prostitute. Jones now fits the FBI definition of a suspected serial killer. Jones is already accused of raping and stabbing a Mobile County woman to death in September 2004 and killing a teenage girl in Georgia in March 2004. By FBI definition, a person is a serial killer if he murders at least 3 people in a row with a short cooling-off period in between. Jones is also considered a suspect in the slayings of a man and his wife in Craig County, Okla. in December 1999. The couple's daughter and her friend disappeared the same night, and Jones has told Oklahoma authorities he knows where the girls' bodies can be found. Craig County Sheriff Jimmy Sooter said earlier this week that he plans to search the area Jones described. (source: Associated Press) USA: Innocent On Death Row----'Exonerated' Looks At 6 Real Cases At a time when the death penalty remains a topic of intense debate nationally - and a day after the scheduled execution of serial killer Michael Ross in Connecticut - Court TV will show "Exonerated," an adaptation of a play about 6 innocent people who served time on death row. Despite the treatment in the Jan. 27 show, there's little in "Exonerated" that's fiction, say its director and cast. "These are real words that real people spoke; it's not been dramatized," says Susan Sarandon, known for her Oscar-winning performance in 1995's "Dead Man Walking," which had an anti-death-penalty message. "As strange as it may seem, these kinds of miscarriages of justice actually do happen." Sarandon portrays Sunny Jacobs, a young mother falsely convicted (with her husband) of shooting a police officer. It was 17 years before the real killer emerged, and by then Jacobs' husband had been executed. It's 1 of 6 cases whose stories are told by Danny Glover, Aidan Quinn, Brian Dennehy, Delroy Lindo and David Brown Jr. of the original stage production. It's directed by Bob Balaban, who is also an actor. "We, Court TV, are not taking a position for or in opposition on the sanctity of the death penalty laws," network chairman Henry Schleiff says. "But we do strongly believe that we need to bring attention and informed dialog to this issue, and I think that's what `Exonerated' is going to do." Sarandon says the stories make the statements. "Quite simply, the content of the words and the stories of these individuals say that far more eloquently, and it doesn't proselytize. It just is what it is, and that's far more eloquent than any kind of ... banner saying abolish the death penalty," Sarandon says. Quinn says that when he was performing the piece off-Broadway, he spoke to the person he was portraying. "He said, 'If you know anyone out there that's strongly for the death penalty, all I want is for them to see this play. All I want to do is give them a chance to see the possibility that maybe we should look at this. That's all I want.' "Because a lot of times we're preaching to the converted here," Quinn says. "That's what this show is going to give us: The chance to ... be in everyone's living room." For the actors, it was humbling to meet the people they were portraying and in many cases to stand next to them in the stage production. "No matter how good the show was, and some nights it was very good," Dennehy says, "when Sunny Jacobs came out at the end of the show to be introduced, or when Kerry came out with his son, that was it, brother. That just put everybody away, including the actors. "There is something extraordinary about these people. It's certainly changed the way I look at it, just meeting them." Sarandon says that even after so many years of wrongful imprisonment, they kept their spirit: "These people make the decision every single day to go toward the light and not go toward the darkness." "Regardless if you're interested in the death penalty or not, this is an inspiration to everybody to see that you can take your life, and it's really you who decides what that life becomes even in the most difficult of circumstances," Sarandon says. "Because it's not just a polemic. It's really taking the specific and showing you the power in a human being to survive." (source: Roger Catlin, TV critic for the Hartford Courant) ********************** The death penalty in America After a 4-year hiatus in the mid-1970s, rates of capital punishment in America soared, particularly in the 1990s. Even liberal Massachusetts nearly restored the death penalty in 1997. But some states (though not Texas) then had second thoughts and the number of executions in America fell sharply from 1999 to 2001. "Closure," a top justification for the death penalty, is typically undermined by years of complex appeals. In 2002 the Supreme Court made two decisions that further pushed back capital punishment, one of which was subsequently made retroactive. There is good reason to question the death penalty. A study published in June 2000 showed high rates of error in its use. The judicial system often mishandles capital cases, and minorities fare particularly poorly. It is doubtful that electrocution has restored respectability to American executions. Britain pledged never to restore it when it ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1999. America, like Singapore, thus remains grouped with such human-rights luminaries as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Congo. (source: The Economist) CALIFORNIA: Death penalty needs a closer examination, Reynoso says Since voters approved Proposition 7 in 1978, which reinstated capital punishment in California, the death penalty has frequently been recommended by juries and imposed by trial judges. However, executions have been rare. Early Wednesday, Donald Beardslee became only the 11th inmate killed by the state since 1978. He was put to death by lethal injection for the 1981 murders of 2 Bay Area women. In large part because the death penalty process in California moves so slowly, voters in 1986 recalled three members of the state Supreme Court, who were blamed for not carrying out the will of the people. One of those 3 justices, Cruz Reynoso, is today a professor of law at UC Davis. In an interview Tuesday with The Enterprise, Reynoso explained why he believes voters recalled him, Chief Justice Rose Bird and Associate Justice Joseph Grodin, and why so few condemned murderers have been executed, not only since 1978, but since he left the court. "Governor Deukmejian and some senators made the death penalty a political issue," Reynoso said, "and convinced the people that we weren't applying the law. "I used to tell people, if I believed what they were saying, that I wasn't applying the law, I would have voted against me," he said. "I was a judge - it was my duty to apply the law. And, in fact, we were applying the law." Reynoso explained why he believes so few executions have occurred in California. "The rarity of executions has to do with the difficulty of processing the death penalty in light of the requirements that the U.S. Supreme Court has laid down," he said. "As you know, one needs the trials to impose the death penalty, then there's the right of appeals. Thereafter, writs are not unusual, nor should they be. Writs bring to light evidence that was missed at trial," Reynoso said. Reynoso, who served as a judge on the 3rd District Court of Appeals from 1976 to 1982, immediately preceding his elevation to the state Supreme Court, believes some of the delay is built into the American appellate system. "One of the big reasons the process is so slow is that the court has found it difficult to find appellate lawyers to represent the accused," he said, "and the law requires that (defendants) have an appellate lawyer." Although every death penalty case must be reviewed in full by the California Supreme Court, Reynoso does not believe that requirement slowed down the process when he was an associate justice. "When I was on the Supreme Court, as soon as a case was ready to be heard, the chief justice, Rose Bird, despite all the criticism of her, was always interested in having that case heard immediately," he said. "She would immediately assign it to one of the (7) judges on the court. "We actually had very few cases which were ready to be heard - that is, the entire record was complete - and the case was not heard," Reynoso said. "I don't believe it's so much that the court can't hear these cases because they're burdened. We always gave priority to those cases." Nonetheless, Reynoso said capital punishment issues took a lot of time. "I would personally spend weeks on a death penalty case that was assigned to me by the chief justice," he explained. "I'd have my clerks spend months on them, seemingly. Then, they would prepare an extensive memo because we would deal not only with the death penalty issues, but invariably they would come up with many other criminal law issues. So it would be a very extensive calendar memo that one would have to prepare." While Reynoso believes capital punishment is merited in some cases, he's not convinced it is carried out fairly. "I'm not morally opposed to the death penalty. I think it can be appropriate in certain circumstances," he said. "However, I do support the American Bar Association's call for a moratorium." Reynoso said he believes there should be "an in-depth study to try to answer the question as to whether the death penalty can, in fact, be imposed even-handedly and whether it serves the best interest of protecting the public. My own view is that the death penalty has never been imposed even-handedly." Enjoying his life as a professor of law at UC Davis, Reynoso is not bitter about his recall from the court: "I was never angry. I never took it personally. I considered it just a political attack." (source: The Davis Enterprise) *************** Grieving brother's pain gives protester pause It was a chance meeting outside the gates of San Quentin prison late Tuesday as hundreds of anti-death-penalty protesters milled about, waiting for the midnight execution of Donald Beardslee. A college student carrying a candle walked past Ernest Montano, whose grief has consumed him ever since Beardslee killed his sister, Patty Geddling, nearly 24 years ago. "Why don't you light a candle for my sister?" Montano said to the student, Neil Ferron, a 20-year-old senior at Santa Clara University. Given the tension of the moment, it might have been the overture to a slugging. But on Tuesday night, it turned out to be the opening of a conversation between the protester and the victim's brother, a dialogue that drifted in and out for nearly 2 hours. Ferron, shielding the candle's flame with his hand, was taken aback by the question. "Who are these guys?" was his first reaction to the small group of Geddling's relatives -- Montano and several cousins. It was cold, the wind was whipping off the bay, and many of the approximately 400 people who were there to bear once-removed witness to Beardslee's execution moved around and stamped their feet to keep warm on the otherwise deserted main street of Point San Quentin Village. Montano and his cousins were at the back of the pack. Montano could have been inside the prison, watching Beardslee die, but he said he preferred the open space of the street rather than the claustrophobia and prison-imposed rules of the witness chamber. Up near the prison gate, speaker after speaker called for an end to the death penalty. Occasionally, Ferron, by now curious, would wander over to where Montano and his cousins stood. Montano checked his watch from time to time, to see how close they were coming to the 12:01 a.m. Wednesday execution. "Only 42 more minutes," Montano said, then walked around to warm himself. On the fringes, his cousins would from time to time launch a broadside at the crowd, urging them to consider the women Beardslee killed, Geddling and her friend Stacey Benjamin. "I was 11 years old when Patty died," said Montano, who is 34 now. "There were endless nights of my family crying." Ferron asked him if he had ever talked to Beardslee's relatives. Montano considered the question. It was clear he was not here to argue, and he seemed to like talking to the younger man. "It's irrelevant," Montano said. And so the dialogue turned to the idea of: What if it was your brother who did this to somebody? Montano said, "If I had a brother who did this, I don't think I could support him." Then somebody asked Ferron, what if was your sister who got murdered, and the killer was about to be executed? "I know that taking one more life wouldn't bring back my sister," he said. Montano didn't say anything and eventually Ferron wandered off to find his friends. He had been hanging around Montano for a while now, and his thinking was making a subtle turn. "I totally didn't expect to meet those guys here," he said. "I'm glad I did." He said the orthodox program of an anti-death-penalty demonstration like this would be a repetition of "the same consistent message -- don't kill Beardslee." "But for them," he said, nodding toward Montano and the cousins, "it's part of their life. It's not something abstract. This is the guy who killed their sister. "The biggest thing of all this is choice," Ferron said. "I chose to be here. You chose to be here. But this event chose Ernest." Listening to Montano made Ferron realize that life can take wrong turns, he said. "None of this should have happened. There shouldn't have been a dead prisoner, and there shouldn't have been a dead woman." Toward midnight, the speeches stopped, and the crowd grew silent. No one in the crowd knew what was going on in the death chamber -- the prison guards spent the first 15 minutes of Wednesday morning hunting for the right veins in Beardslee's arms. By 12:29 a.m., he was dead. Outside, these precise increments of time were irrelevant. At 12:10 a.m., about when everyone in the crowd thought it was over, the quiet was palpable. "Is it evil for me to feel closure?" Montano said. "I think my justice has been served. It's over. He's dead." At that point, his voice broke, he began to weep, and he walked away. Moments later, Ferron put down his candle and walked over to him. The two men stood there and continued to talk. The candle, still flickering, stood alone on the ground, not far from the sidewalk. ******************** Governor sets high bar for clemency ----Beardslee case indicates standard will be legal insanity Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in denying clemency to confessed murderer Donald Beardslee, has indicated he will spare the lives of mentally impaired death row inmates only if they are legally insane, a standard that few, if any, condemned prisoners may be able to meet. Schwarzenegger's decision, which cleared the way for Beardslee's execution Wednesday, lacked the moralistic fervor often displayed by former Gov. Gray Davis in his clemency rulings. But Schwarzenegger seemed to share Davis' limited view of the circumstances in which a governor should grant clemency. Their approach fits a national trend in which a governor's intervention in capital cases, once common, is now rare -- with Illinois Gov. George Ryan's blanket commutations for 167 death-row inmates in 2003 standing as the striking exception. By contrast, California governors in the 1950s and 1960s took a broad view of their clemency power and spared killers' lives for mental deficiencies, among other reasons. The state's last grant of clemency was in 1967, when Gov. Ronald Reagan cited post-trial evidence of Calvin Thomas' brain damage to commute his sentence for a firebomb attack that killed his girlfriend's 3-year- old son. Beardslee, of Redwood City, confessed to the shotgun killing of Patty Geddling, 23, and the throat-slashing murder of Stacey Benjamin, 19, in April 1981, while he was on parole from a 1969 murder conviction in Missouri. His chief argument for clemency was that a new examination by a prominent neuropsychologist showed lifelong brain damage, aggravated by two serious head injuries. His lawyers said the condition crippled Beardslee's ability to make independent judgments under stress and left him in a robot-like state during the 1981 crimes, following the orders of codefendant Frank Rutherford, who wanted the two women killed over a $185 drug debt. In his six-page decision Tuesday, Schwarzenegger said the 61-year-old inmate apparently suffered from a mental impairment. But he went on to cite prosecution evidence of Beardslee's actions during the crimes and attempted coverup -- for example, directing an accomplice to buy tape to bind the victims, wiping fingerprints off a van, and pulling one victim's pants down to create the appearance of a rape. "There is no question in my mind that at the time Beardslee committed the murders he knew what he was doing -- and he knew it was wrong," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Clemency is not designed to undo the considered judgment of the people in favor of the death penalty, but to prevent the miscarriage of justice." In language resembling a legal ruling, the governor was spelling out his standard: Executing Beardslee would be a miscarriage of justice only if his mental defect prevented him from being aware of the nature or wrongfulness of his acts when he committed them. That is precisely the definition of insanity adopted by state voters in a prosecution-sponsored 1982 ballot initiative. A defendant who meets that standard at the time of trial would be found not guilty by reason of insanity. An advocate for California prosecutors said Thursday that Schwarzenegger's decision set a solid precedent for future cases. "He used the legal standard for mental defect," said David LaBahn, executive director of the California District Attorneys Association. "He wasn't plowing new ground. He was applying the proper standards." But an academic expert on clemency said Schwarzenegger, like most current governors, appeared to be reducing clemency -- traditionally an exercise of mercy -- to a legal formula. "He's acting as if he were a court," said Austin Sarat, professor of law and political science at Amherst College and author of a forthcoming book on clemency in capital cases. "What Schwarzenegger seems to be saying is, 'I'm satisfied that this man deserves his punishment.' (But) mercy is not something that can be deserved. It's an exercise in compassion." John Howley, a New York lawyer who has won clemency cases in Virginia and Alabama, said governors considering clemency are supposed to have a different perspective than courts. He also noted that U.S. Supreme Court rulings already prohibit execution of the insane and the mentally retarded. Apart from Ryan's sweep of Illinois' death row, governors of the 38 states with death penalties have commuted only 27 death sentences in the last 13 years. But Sarat said the clemency rate was 20 to 25 % a few decades ago, when crime was a less-sensitive political issue. Pat Brown, California's governor from 1959 to 1967, granted clemency in 23 of 59 cases and ordered brain scans for inmates who sought clemency. One case illustrates his approach and its contrast to later governors. Brown granted clemency to Vernon Atchley, convicted of murdering his wife in Butte County, on the day before his scheduled execution in August 1961. He said a new exam revealed that Atchley had suffered brain damage from a blow to the head that was probably responsible for the crime. "I am sure that the strongest advocates of capital punishment would agree with me," the governor wrote, "that it would be inhumane and barbaric to permit a person to suffer the extreme penalty who is not wholly responsible for his acts, and incapable of a complete freedom of choice." (source for both: San Francisco Chronicle) OKLAHOMA: Execution date set for Slaughter An execution date has been set for a former nurse and Army Reserve officer convicted of killing his girlfriend and their daughter. Jimmie Ray Slaughter was sentenced to death for killing 29-year-old Melody Sue Wuertz and their daughter, Jessica Rae Wuertz, on July 2, 1991. Wednesday the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals set Slaughter's execution date for March 15. Prosecutors contend Slaughter, 57, went to Wuertz's Edmond home, where he crippled her by shooting her in the spine before killing the 11-month-old girl with 2 gunshots to the head. He then shot Wuertz again, killing her, and mutilated her body. He also placed hairs and other items around the body in an effort to divert suspicion from himself. In addition, Wuertz's sexual organs had been slashed and an occult symbol had been carved into her abdomen. According to court records, Slaughter was married when he and Wuertz began having an affair in the summer of 1989. After Jessica was born a year later, Slaughter volunteered to go an active duty during the Gulf War and was stationed in Fort Riley, Kan. While he was away, Wuertz went to the Department of Human Services to get the agency's help in collecting child support. Court documents indicate that witnesses at Slaughter's trial "testified to Slaughter's rage stemming from Wuertz's commencing those proceedings." (source: McAlester News Capital)
