Jan. 25 OHIO: Appeals court tosses death sentence for U.S.-British citizen In Cincinnati, a federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out the conviction and death sentence of a man with dual U.S.-British citizenship who was convicted of killing a 2-year-old girl by starting a fire in his ex-girlfriend's apartment. A 3-judge panel of 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Kenneth T. Richey received incompetent legal counsel and ordered the state of Ohio to retry him within 90 days or release him. Richey, who always maintained his innocence, was convicted of killing Cynthia Collins, who died in 1986 in a fire at her mother's apartment in the northwest Ohio town of Columbus Grove. Prosecutors said Richey intended to kill his ex-girlfriend but ended up killing the child. The case received wide attention in Great Britain, where filmmakers produced two documentaries questioning Richey's guilt. British citizens and politicians have written thousands of letters to news organizations and government offices to protect his conviction. Amnesty International sought a new trial for Richey, and one member of Britain's Parliament visited Richey on death row in Mansfield last year and asked Gov. Bob Taft to review the case. Kim Norris, spokeswoman for Attorney General Jim Petro, said lawyers were reviewing the ruling to determine whether to appeal. State attorneys could ask the full circuit court or the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case. (source: Associated Press) ************** Cop, criminal square off in jailhouse duel A pair of movie-star look-alikes waged a war of wits inside the Lucas County Jail as 1982 came to a close. Day after day, hour after hour, the lifelong con man - with more than a passing resemblance to Nick Nolte - played high-stakes cat and mouse with the veteran postal inspector with a likeness, it was said at the time, to Robert Redford. Both were highly motivated. Each was hell-bent on getting the other to play into his hands in what had become a baffling investigation into the murder of 48-year-old Betty Jane Mottinger, the postmaster in a tiny village in western Ohio. John Spirko was a career criminal only recently paroled from a Kentucky prison, with a long history of trying to manipulate curious cops. He was angling to play investigator Paul Hartman for a sap. Spirko had found himself back in jail on Toledo-area assault charges in late October 1982, a few months after Mottinger was abducted 100 miles away in Elgin, and 5 weeks after her body was found. Spirko called officials after reading newspaper stories about the sputtering Mottinger investigation. He figured he could get lenient treatment on the Toledo cases for his girlfriend and himself by saying he had information about the unsolved murder. Spirko's plan was to tantalize Hartman with lurid, hard-to-prove tales about Mottinger's death -- hooking him just long enough to keep his girlfriend out of jail and his own prison time to a minimum. No hard evidence ever linked Spirko to the crime. Nothing in the months- long investigation pointed to him. And the stories he told Hartman were full of gross fabrications and out-and-out lies. But the investigator had a role in mind for Spirko as well. Hartman had never been so deeply involved in a homicide investigation in his 11 years as a postal inspector, although he had interviewed thousands of suspects in lesser cases. He concluded fairly quickly that Spirko was involved "up to his ass" in the Mottinger slaying or knew who was. Hartman's job was to keep Spirko talking, on the chance that he would either help solve a crime that had confounded postal authorities for months, or implicate himself in the process. The 2 men met at least a dozen times in 3 weeks, often for 4, 5, 6 hours or more. For the most part, there were no witnesses to these conversations. No video cameras. No tape recorders. No stenographers. Just Spirko and Hartman. Criminal and cop. Nolte and Redford. And based largely on the fruits of those interviews, Spirko was eventually convicted of kidnapping and murdering the rural postmaster and is now on death row. He is awaiting execution -- barring an intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Bob Taft -- that's likely to come this year. With his deft handling of Spirko, Hartman was almost single-handedly responsible for closing a case that had frustrated dozens of his colleagues, who collectively spent thousands of hours interviewing more than 3,000 people in 37 states, identifying and eventually discarding nearly 100 suspects along the way. Whether he actually solved the Mottinger murder, however, is another matter. Hartman produced what became the most tangible link between Spirko and the scene of the crime. That came in the form of Delaney Gibson Jr., Spirko's former cellmate and best friend, who was identified by an unwavering eyewitness as the mysterious stranger seen hanging around outside the post office in tiny Elgin, Ohio, moments before Mottinger was abducted. Not only did Hartman stumble upon Gibson's photo in Spirko's prison scrapbook, he also succeeded -- in their final session together -- in getting Spirko to tell him that Gibson kidnapped the woman during a robbery, raped her, killed her and then told Spirko about it later. That was the last in a string of whoppers that Spirko told Hartman. When evidence later established that Gibson almost certainly was nowhere near Elgin that day -- evidence that was never shared with Spirko's jury -- the information apparently was buried in a private file drawer and kept from Spirko's attorneys for more than a decade. And in the late 1990s, when Spirko's attorneys used that newly discovered information to argue that the prosecution had presented a false case to the jury, Hartman took center stage once again. The state responded to the new round of appeals by asserting that Gibson's alleged role in the crime was meaningless -- despite the considerable effort expended to prove it -- and that the eyewitness testimony putting him in Elgin was immaterial. The real foundation of the state's case, the argument continued, was the collection of "statements" that Spirko made, statements that purportedly included a handful of "intimate details" that only the killer could have known -- because they supposedly were never made public. It's an argument, adopted nearly verbatim by a succession of appeals-court judges over the last seven years, that defers to the largely unchallenged trial assertions of Hartman, the man Spirko first encountered in November 1982 in the Lucas County Jail. But a detailed examination of those assertions, the notes of Hartman's interviews with Spirko and the independent evidence in the case shows that the veteran investigator was wrong on several of his claims and may have overstated others. And the condition of Hartman's notes raises questions about how some of the more damaging "intimate details" got there in the first place. Hartman laid out his "intimate de tails" theory -- the essence of which has been repeated in court decisions denying Spirko's appeals -- in a sworn statement on Feb. 1, 1983, three weeks after his final session with Spirko. Among the details Hartman cited was Spirko's revelation that Mottinger's body had been wrapped "in a part of a curtain." "Public disclosure has not been made that the subject shroud was, in fact, a portion of a curtain," Hartman asserted. But that's wrong. It had been publicly disclosed -- right under Spirko's nose -- and right when he was formulating his plan to trade information about the Mottinger case for leniency. Just 11 days before Spirko called federal authorities with his proposal for a deal, The Blade in Toledo reported what was described as a significant break in the case on the front page of its local news section. The shroud around Mottinger's body had been identified as a theater curtain, postal inspectors announced, that "at some time had been cut from a larger piece." The Blade even reported the fragment's precise dimensions. At least twice in the next week --just days before Spirko reached out to au thorities -- The Blade described the shroud as "a remnant of a theater curtain." When prosecutors pressed him during his trial on how he knew about the torn curtain, Spirko replied, "I believe I read that in the paper." Among other "intimate details" that "have not been released to the news media," Hartman cited the location of stab wounds on Mottinger's body, that Mottinger had been wearing a blouse and slacks when she was abducted and that her purse had been taken along with post-office proceeds during the robbery. But those details had been in news reports as well. In fact, almost from the beginning, postal inspectors left little to the public's imagination in this case. Mottinger's clothing, for instance, had been described in the press in considerable detail (light colored or white blouse with a design on the front and dark slacks). And Ohio newspapers from Van Wert, to Lima and Toledo -- not to mention wire services that also fed radio and television reports -- had also disclosed the following: what was believed stolen from the post office (less than $50 in cash, stamps and money orders); how Mottinger died (stabbed at least 13 times in the chest); where and how her body was found (wrapped in a tarp -- later identified as a curtain -- in a soybean field near the Blanchard River in Hancock County, just outside Findlay, roughly 50 miles from Elgin.) Still, Spirko told postal inspectors at least twice that Mottinger had been stabbed in the back -- even though she wasn't -- and that he knew nothing about stamps having been taken from the post office. Spirko also twice described Mottinger as a "fat bitch," even though she weighed just over 100 pounds. Several of Spirko's other descriptions also don't jibe with the facts. For instance, Hartman said that Spirko's description of the shroud "matches exactly" the material Mottinger's body was wrapped in. Hartman's notes indicate that Spirko described the shroud as a "gray curtain" made of a heavy "canvas type material." But everyone who is known to have seen it -- investigators who found the body, pathologists conducting Mottinger's autopsy and forensics experts doing tests for both the prosecution and the defense -- described the shroud the same way: as a painter's drop cloth. The cloth was covered with paint smears and spots, literally thousands of them, according to a prosecutor, who said they represented "probably about every color in the rainbow." And yet, in his description, Spirko never even hinted at paint. Asked about the omission in an interview recently, Hartman dismissed the paint spots as "minutiae." "It looked like a gray shroud to me, as I remember it." Hartman also asserted that Spirko's description of how the slain postmaster was wrapped "matches exactly the manner in which the body was prepared for disposal." In his Dec. 15, 1982, interview, Spirko said he watched as a fictional band of thugs -- all either cleared or never identified by authorities -- killed Mottinger and wrapped her body in the shroud. According to Hartman's notes, Spirko said they "rolled body onto curtain/ flapped curtain end to end over head." Prosecutors argued during Spirko's 1984 trial that this description was so precise that only the killer could have given it. As with many of Hartman's assertions, Spirko denied at trial that he ever said it. But even if he did, he somehow left out these facts: That after Mottinger was rolled into the shroud, it was attached to her body from the outside with a cord, tied around both her neck and waist. That the shroud was further secured from the outside with duct tape, stretched around the body's midsection and legs. That inside the shroud, pressed against the body's abdomen and legs, were two concrete blocks. Spirko mentioned none of those seemingly noteworthy details, according to Hartman's notes. "To me," Hartman said in a recent interview, "the noteworthy detail was that she was put in it [the shroud] in that fashion." Despite such vagaries and inaccura cies, several other "intimate details" cited by Hartman do correspond to facts in the case. But the way they appear -- coupled with the way the interviews were conducted -- raise questions about how some of the most significant details found their way into the investigator's notes in the first place. Among those is the matter of the "pried stone." During his interview with Hartman on Dec. 9, 1982, Spirko digressed into a tale about the exploits of his cast of characters during a Florida drug robbery -- an episode that had little if anything to do with the Mottinger case. But at the very end, under a heading labeled "Miscellaneous info," Hartman's notes indicate that Spirko suddenly blurted out that Rooster -- one of his fictional characters -- had pried a stone loose from a ring on Mottinger's finger after killing her. This was significant because a tiny, $7.99 "pinky ring" was the only jewelry found on Mottinger's body, a detail that apparently never was revealed to the public. And the ring's single rhinestone, not much bigger than the tip of a ballpoint pen, was missing. How it came to be missing was never independently established. Prosecutors later argued that the mere fact that it was gone could only have been known by the killer and, as a result, was evidence of Spirko's guilt. But that information was obviously known by investigators as well. And that's exactly where Spirko testified he got it -- during hours of give-and-take chatter with Hartman. "I will never forget the exact words he used," Spirko said of Hartman, during his trial testimony. "I gave him a couple of fictitious names. And he says, The one I want to get a hold of . . . [is] that stinkin' son-of- a-bitch that pried that stone out of her ring.' That's the first time I heard anything about a ring." Hartman denied at trial that he ever suggested information. And Spirko's reputation for truthfulness is hardly sterling. But it's impossible to tell where that piece of information -- or any other -- actually came from, because of the way the interviews were conducted. It's also impossible to know what questions Hartman asked, whether Spirko's answers were recorded accurately or what was said between the two men that wasn't written down. Not one of their sessions was tape recorded. Spirko was never asked to write a statement -- or to sign any of Hartman's notes -- to vouch for the accuracy of any of the accounts. And he was never asked to initial additions or deletions, a standard procedure for validating edited documents. The technique appears to fall short of accepted police standards, even for the time. Today, deep into the age of DNA evidence, more police agencies are requiring video or audio recordings of suspect interrogations - especially in homicide cases - because so many documented cases of wrongful convictions have involved faulty confessions. Researchers say these often occur when investigators, in the process of questioning or prodding their suspects, either deliberately or inadvertently reveal critical information that later shows up in a suspect's statement. Of the 18 death-row inmates exonerated in Illinois alone, half were originally convicted based on what turned out to be false confessions or witness statements, said Steven Drizin, staff attorney for the Center on Wrongful Convictions and professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Notes of even the best police interrogators have been shown to contain significant errors when compared with tape recordings, Drizin said. Notes are also notorious for omitting critical details. "That's why you need taped interrogations," he said. Hartman testified that he never used a tape recorder while interviewing suspects. He said it hampered his efforts to establish rapport. He acknowledged on cross-examination that his notes of the Spirko interviews are not verbatim accounts of everything that was said. Rather, Hartman said, they are "my interpretation, as it were, of the words." And in a recent interview, Hartman said that police officers typically don't ask suspects to initial or sign notes of conversations. In 28 years as a postal inspector, he said, he never did. But in Spirko's trial, Hartman's notes of more than a dozen conversations were presented as the defendant's "statements." And standards for handling those have been in place for half a century. John E. Reid & Associates, Inc., a Chi cago firm that trains thousands of law enforcement, government and private investigators every year, is considered one of the nation's leading authorities on investigative techniques. The traditional procedure for documenting a suspect's version of events is to have him write and sign a statement, said Reid's president, Joseph Buckley, or to have the investigator write a summary of their conversation and have the suspect read and sign it. "In some cases, you might have a stenographer come in and take it down in shorthand - where it's a question-and- answer process. Then, she would go type it up, the suspect would read it and sign it," Buckley said. "That hasn't changed," he said. "That has been the case for decades. 40 years. 50 years." The purpose, Buckley said, is credibility. Without a written, signed statement, he said, the validity of the information becomes a matter of whom the jury believes - the police officer or the defendant. Hartman did none of those things in his interviews with Spirko. Given Spirko's record, credibility with a jury wasn't likely to be an issue. It would be cop over criminal every time. A curious fact raises another question about Hartman's interview tactics. In several instances in which Spirko is al leged to have uttered "intimate details" about the case, those very details were added after the original notes were written. That's definitely the case in one of only two references in the notes to the "pried stone." And it's possible the other was added later as well, according to 2 documents experts asked to examine portions of Hartman's handwritten notes. There's no way to tell from the documents whether the critical information was added minutes, hours or even days after the original notes were written. Nor is it possible to tell what prompted the additions. Hartman disputes that he made any significant additions to his notes. What is certain, however, is that Spirko never initialed the changes to verify that he was the source of the information. The most significant examples, in addition to the "pried stone," include Spirko's alleged description of Mottinger's purse and of the clothing the postmaster was wearing when she was killed. Both are among the "intimate details" cited by Hartman. When he first reached out to federal investigators in October 1982, Spirko said that he knew the identities of three men involved in the crime and that, while at a party in the Toledo area, he had seen a bag that might have contained loot from the robbery. Spirko described it merely as a sack, made of cloth or canvas, according to notes of that preliminary interview with a different investigator. By his first interview with Hartman, however, the sack had morphed into a cream-colored bag with "loop handles" and "brown trim around edges," according to Hartman's notes, a description that matched Mottinger's missing purse. That's the description Hartman read to the jury. But the investigator's handwritten notes show that the words "loop" and "brown trim around edges" were all added sometime after the original notes about the bag were written. Again, experts say, it's not possible to tell when the additions were made. The same thing happened with the description of Mottinger's clothing. In an interview with Hartman on Dec. 10, 1982, Spirko indicated that he had seen Mottinger alive in the basement of a "safe house" after she had been kidnapped. "The defendant described the victim's clothing, indicating that the postmaster had been wearing dark slacks, a light yellow blouse, which buttoned in the front and bearing a print design," Hartman told the jury. Spirko insisted at trial that it was Hartman who supplied those details. And a glance at the investigator's handwritten notes reveals that the entire description - "dark slacks, light yellow blouse, button front, print design" - was added after the original notes were written, and in a different handwriting style. Again, no way to tell when. Hartman insisted recently that he had added nothing to his notes, that any changes were nothing more than innocent corrections. "All these notes were written contemporaneously. They were written during the interviews," he said. "What happened is, obviously, in the course of writing the notes, I went back and added these little notations." On Aug. 17, 1984, a week after his original testimony, Hartman was called back to the witness stand on the last day of Spirko's trial. He denied prompting or suggesting any information in his interviews with Spirko. "For me to have done those things would have violated seriously sound investigative procedure and would have completely destroyed the integrity of the investigation," he testified. But just a few moments later, while still on the stand, Hartman made the most dramatic addition of all to the notes of his interviews with Spirko. Asked if Spirko ever actually admitted killing Betty Jane Mottinger, a detail conspicuously absent from his notes and earlier testimony, Hartman said that, as a matter of fact, he had. Defense attorney Ed Hatcher was stunned. "Would you like to tell me when he told you that?" Hatcher asked. "He stated that to me . . . on January 11th of 1983," Hartman replied, the date of his second-to-last session with Spirko. In an internal memo written sometime after that interview, Hartman asserted that Spirko said to him that day: "Lay it all on me. I killed her." But defense attorneys had never heard such a claim before. In fact, in at least two sworn statements made after the Jan. 11 interview - statements in which he summarized his theory of Spirko's involvement - Hartman had mentioned nothing of the sort. Likewise in his testimony - and cross-examination - about the Jan. 11 interview. And the notes of Hartman's interview for that day - which he had earlier testified were "accurate in all respects" - contained nothing even close to such an admission. Hatcher pressed him on the notes: "Well, let's take a look and see, OK, on that date. You would have written that down, wouldn't you?" The investigator calmly replied, "I don't believe that that is in my notes." Hartman, who retired from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in early 2000, after nearly three decades in law enforcement, said recently that he didn't need notes to recall the encounter. "I didn't need to write that down to know that he said it," Hartman said in an interview at his Medina County home. "I remembered it then. I remember it now." And he remains just as certain that Spirko deserves to die for killing Betty Jane Mottinger. "It is my belief that he did it," Hartman said. "If and when they execute him, I will have no qualms. No qualms." Just days after Hartman's final ap pearance on the witness stand 20 years ago, Spirko addressed the postal inspector's assertions in a remarkable statement to the jury. But first, with his conviction freshly on the books, Spirko asked the jury to recommend the death penalty. Even while insisting he was innocent. "I have never seen Betty Mottinger in my life," he said. "I did not kill Betty Jane Mottinger. I did not kidnap Betty Jane Mottinger. But, I have been convicted for it. "From what I have heard, a lady that went to work, bothered no one, had a family, a husband that loved her, she was cruelly taken away, brutally murdered. She didn't get no appeal. Nobody gave her that right. Instead, they just stabbed her to death. They probably still out there now laughin' about it; laughin' because I got convicted of it. But she deserved justice, and if that means me, then that's the way it should be. I'm convicted, I should die. It's simple; simple arithmetic." Spirko blamed no one but himself for his predicament. "I started all this" by reaching out to authorities in the first place, he said. "I put myself in this position." But then he turned to his battle of wits with the postal inspector. "I don't actually hold no animosity towards Paul Hartman," Spirko told the jury. "But he did not tell you the truth, not about the statements. "Why? I can't tell you why. But who am I . . . to call the government liars, the state liars, when I'm a known liar? "My chances of gettin' up there and telling the truth were nil. But I did tell you the truth. That's the hell of this whole thing. I have told you the truth. "I feel one thing. I might be bound for hell, but I know Paul Hartman will be right on my tail end. And him and I is going to have a go-around in hell. You can believe that." (source: Cleveland Plain Dealer) CONNECTICUT: Death penalty debate -- As Connecticut's 1st execution since 1960 draws near, state's bishops urge Catholics to speak out Just weeks before the scheduled execution of serial killer Michael Ross, Connecticuts Catholic bishops urged the states more than 1 million Catholics to "make their voices heard" by calling for repeal of the death penalty. "The death penalty diminishes each of us," said Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport. "It offers the tragic illusion that we can defend life by taking life." Ross, 45, who would be the first person executed in Connecticut since 1960, has admitted to killing eight young women and is scheduled to die by lethal injection Jan. 26. He has refused to appeal his case further, saying he wants to die in order to bring closure to the victims families. Death penalty opponents argue that to execute him would be tantamount to state-assisted suicide. In addition to the Connecticut bishops effort coordinated by that states Catholic conference, religious voices against the death penalty were also heard recently in New York State, which faces legislative moves to reinstate capital punishment, and in California, where an interfaith vigil at a Catholic church was held before the execution of Donald Beardslee early in the morning of Jan. 19. In Connecticut, Gov. M. Jodi Rell denied Ross a reprieve of execution Dec. 6. "To uphold the existing laws of Connecticut is to uphold the death penalty," she said in a statement. On Jan. 18, Dave Robinson, executive director of Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace movement, wrote a letter to Rell, urging her to commute Ross sentence. The death penalty in the United States is a "seriously flawed system," Robinson said. "For Connecticut's criminal justice system to again head down this road is frightful -- both in terms of the potential mistakes that could be made in implementing the death penalty, as well as the racial and moral inadequacies prevalent in every capital punishment system." New Hampshire is the only other New England state that still has the death penalty, but it has no one on death row and has not executed anyone since 1939. The bishops of Connecticuts three dioceses each issued letters outlining the Catholic churchs opposition to capital punishment that were to be read at all Masses Jan. 8 and 9. The following weekend parishioners were invited to sign a resolution written by the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, calling for the abolition of capital punishment. A poll taken by Connecticuts Quinnipiac University last year found that 59 % of the states voters favor capital punishment, while 39 % do not. The poll also found that 66 % of the states Catholics supported the death penalty. Connecticut bishops said their opposition to capital punishment was guided by Pope John Paul IIs encyclical letter on the value of human life, Evangelium Vitae. In the encyclical, the pontiff argued that "punishment ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender, except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society." He wrote that "such cases are very rare if practically nonexistent." In his Jan. 8 letter, Hartford Archbishop Henry J. Mansell wrote, "Human life is a gift from God that must be respected from conception to natural death." "Some people don't want to hear this, but the church teaches that Michael Ross is still a human being. He still has human dignity," Deacon David Reynolds, legislative liaison for the Connecticut Catholic Conference, told the Fairfield County Catholic, newspaper of the Bridgeport diocese. Accounts about Ross depict a violent and tortured man who has been both victim and victimizer. In a 1996 article in The Connecticut Law Tribune, author Martha Elliott reported that Ross was probably physically and mentally abused by his mother, herself psychologically disturbed, and Ross was sexually abused at age 8 by his babysitter, a young uncle who committed suicide at age 14. Ross killings occurred in the early 1980s. 6 of his 8 victims were teenagers, including 2 14-year-olds killed in a double murder. In that attack, he raped and strangled 1 girl while her friend, bound by Ross, watched. He then strangled the 2nd girl. Edwin Shelley, father of 14-year-old Leslie, who was killed by Ross during the double murder, said he firmly believes the execution will bring closure for his family. "I am looking forward to attending the execution. I will be there. My wife will be there and my eldest daughter will be there," he said. Shelley said he could understand a person being opposed to the death penalty, but his support for capital punishment was also based on religious belief. "[Christ] came back not to abolish any rules but to make certain his fathers words were carried out. In other words, A life for a life. I believe that this message has been lost in religious teaching. This man, he took not only one life. He took eight lives. He has destroyed 9 families. He has destroyed his fathers life." Ross confessed to many of his crimes shortly after his arrest in 1984 and was given the death sentence in 1987. He has long claimed his mental illness caused his criminal behavior, and initially fought his death sentence, arguing that the jury was not allowed to consider his mental illness as a mitigating circumstance. But as early as 1995 he began seeking ways to expedite his execution in order to spare his victims families a prolonged court process. "I owe these people," Ross told Reuters. "I killed their daughters." Ross has written numerous reflections about spirituality and life on death row, some of which have been published in periodicals and posted on the Web. A Catholic, he wrote that he is "not afraid to face God, for while I am very ashamed of what I have done with my life and of the many, many horrible sins I have committed, I know that I am forgiven." But Ross admitted he is haunted by the prospect of heaven. Should he get there "after his time in purgatory," he doesnt want to face the women he murdered. "I don't want to see the look on their faces or hear the anger in their voices when they ask, What are you doing here? Because there is no answer for that. It wouldnt be right for me to be in heaven, and it certainly wouldnt be justice. So while the doors to heaven would be open due to Gods forgiveness and divine grace, I can't go." Attorneys with Connecticuts Division of Public Defender Services, some of whom represented Ross until he fired them last year, have unsuccessfully tried to argue before a lower court and the states Supreme Court that Ross, who has attempted suicide at least twice while in prison, suffers from depression and is not competent to refuse his appeals. Both courts declared the inmate to be rational. The public defenders are currently appealing Connecticuts Supreme Court ruling before a federal judge. T.R. Paulding, Ross current attorney, suggested that Ross actions were those of a man exhausted from the strain of living under the constant threat of death. Paulding told The Hartford Courant his client did not believe an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court would result in an overturning of his sentence. While death penalty opponents made a last-minute push to spare Ross life in Connecticut, activists in California held a vigil outside San Quentin State Prison as Donald Beardslee, 61, was executed by lethal injection shortly after midnight Jan. 19 for the slayings of two San Francisco area women, Patty Geddling and Stacey Benjamin, in 1981. The U.S. Supreme Court denied Beardslee's appeal for a stay after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency. More than 400 demonstrators, most in opposition to the death penalty, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, gathered at the prison gates during the execution. Earlier in the evening, an interfaith vigil protesting the death penalty was held at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in El Cerrito, Calif. In a statement released after Beardslees execution, the first in California in three years, San Francisco Archbishop William Levada said that life in prison without possibility of parole is "just and exacting punishment that would protect the community. "To continue the cycle of violence by killing Mr. Beardslee undermines societys commitment to respect the God-given dignity of every human person." Meanwhile, New York religious leaders have joined opposition to reinstatement of the death penalty in that state, which has not had an execution since 1963. Capital punishment was made legal in 1995, but in June 2004 the State Appeals Court overturned the law, citing constitutional flaws. Gov. George Pataki has announced his intention to introduce new legislation to institute the death penalty this year. On Dec. 15, a state legislative hearing was held in New York City to consider the question. Among the numerous witnesses who tried to convince lawmakers to reject capital punishment were Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, families of murder victims, and Mercy Sr. Camille DArienzo, who spoke as a representative of New York Religious Leaders Against the Death Penalty ( see accompanying statement). Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a freelance writer living in Worcester, Mass. NCR staff contributed to this report. DEATH WATCH NCR last reported the names of the people executed in the United States in mid-October. Since then, 15 more people have been put to death. Of these 15, Texas executed 10: Peter Miniel, 42, on Oct. 6; Donald Aldrich, 39, Oct. 12; Ricky Morrow, 53, Oct. 20; Dominique Green, 30, Oct. 26; Lorenzo Morris, 52, Nov. 2; Robert Morrow, 47, Nov. 11; Demarco McCullum, 30, Nov. 9; Frederick McWilliams, 30, Nov. 10; Anthony Fuentes, 30, Nov. 17; and James Porter, 33, Jan. 4. North Carolina executed 3: Sammy Perkins, 51, on Oct. 8; Charles Roache, 30, Oct. 22; and Frank Chandler, 32, Nov. 12. Ohio executed Adremy Dennis, 28, Oct. 13; and California executed Donald Beardslee, 61, Jan. 19. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 946 people have been executed. We ask prayers for the victims of the crimes that may have been committed by those listed here, for those executed and for those participating in the execution done in our names. Learn more about the death penalty and organizations working to abolish it at the Death Penalty Information Center on the Web at www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. (source: National Catholic Reporter) ****************** A Sentence Reluctantly Applied In 1647, Alice Young of Windsor was convicted of witchcraft, and became the first recorded person in the state to be executed. There are few mentions of her execution in official records of the time, but if it were like others from the mid-17th century, it took only weeks to carry out. "The time between conviction and hanging, unless there were extraordinary circumstances, was very swift," said Walter Woodward, Connecticut's state historian and a professor at the University of Connecticut. In Ludlow's Code, enacted in 1650 as Connecticut's most comprehensive legal code to that date, the state classified all sorts of misdeeds as capital offenses, including idolatry and blasphemy, and New Haven's Code (New Haven was a separate colony then) imposed a death sentence for such crimes as working on Sunday. But, even then, the state was reluctant to tie the noose, Dr. Woodward said. Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Joette Katz, in a speech on the death penalty to the Connecticut Bar Association in 1994, noted that the sentence was applied sparsely in colonial times, and never for idolatry, blasphemy, kidnapping, or the cursing or smiting of parents by children. She said the state administered its early capital laws mildly. "They tended to use them more to ward off bad behavior than to actually punish it," Dr. Woodward said. Now, Connecticut is preparing to execute Michael Ross, the convicted murderer, on Wednesday. It will be the 1st time the state has exercised the death penalty in 45 years. Alice Young was executed within weeks of her trial. Joseph Taborsky, known as Mad Dog, the last person executed in the state, was put to death in 1960, three years after his conviction. Mr. Ross was sentenced almost 18 years ago, and a handful of the 6 other death row inmates have been there almost as long. And Mr. Ross would still be waiting if he were not insisting he wanted to die. Unlike a dozen other states, Connecticut has decided to keep the death penalty on the books, but has shown little inclination to use it. For various reasons, death penalty trials and appeals have lasted longer in Connecticut than elsewhere in the country. The gravity of a death penalty case keeps lawyers and judges from moving hastily and compels public defenders to use every avenue to try to save their clients. But the length of time between executions, experts on the death penalty said, also reveals a deeper ambivalence in Connecticut and other states in the Northeast about imposing the ultimate punishment. "Over all, ambivalence does slow things down," said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group in Washington, which is critical of the way the penalty is applied. "There are ways this process can go slower if you're more deliberative." Depending on where people stand on the death penalty debate, Connecticut's history of deliberation is a good or bad thing. For relatives of victims, it can be maddening. "When it takes 20 and a half years, she did not receive justice," said Raymond Roode, the stepfather of April Brunais, who was one of Mr. Ross's 8 murder victims. "The way the state acts, they act like my daughter's life was a throwaway," he said. "I think he should've been executed 10 years ago." he said. Mr. Ross himself said he was going forward with the executions to end the pain for the families of victims. "My execution will not heal the families of my victims, and it will not bring back their daughters," he wrote in a letter to Gov. M. Jodi Rell. "But it will bring about an end to the seemingly never-ending proceedings whether it be future court appearances, or be the future filing of the various post-conviction appeals." Others were encouraged by the length of deliberations. Susan Omilian, a lawyer from West Hartford who was on the Commission on the Death Penalty, created by the Legislature in 2001 to review the capital punishment laws, acknowledged in an interview that the lags can be difficult for the families of victims. But, she added, they show that the deliberations are taken seriously. "It should be a long process, because this is a serious decision," she said. Mr. Roode said he understood and shared the concern many people have about executing innocent people. But Mr. Ross, he said, is certainly guilty. "There was no question of innocence here," he said. "This guy's guilty. He would've been dead a long time ago in Florida or Texas or other states." That may be true. The average amount of time nationally between the imposition of a death sentence and execution was 10 years and 7 months as of 2003, according to statistics from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Connecticut, of the 7 men on death row, 2 were first sentenced in 1989, 2 others in 1991. Most discussions of the death penalty focus on the period after 1972, when the United States Supreme Court declared that the death penalty as administered was unconstitutional. Many states, including Connecticut, rewrote their death penalty statutes to deal with the ruling. But since 1976, when the court upheld revised capital punishment laws, states in the Northeast have been comparatively slow to put people to death. Only Pennsylvania, which is included in the Northeast in federal statistics, has executed anyone since the ruling and it has executed three people. Texas, by contrast, has executed 337 in that same period. In states like Texas, arguments and deliberations are often much shorter, said Samuel R. Gross, a death penalty expert at the University of Michigan Law School. Mr. Gross said he had been at entire trials in the South that took just a few days. Texas death row inmates are executed in an average of 10 years 5 months, according to 2003 statistics from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. One Texas inmate, Joe Gonzales, spent just 252 days on death row before being executed. In Southern states, there are more people on death row, sent there by aggressive prosecutors, willing juries and conservative appeals courts, Mr. Gross said. In Mr. Ross's case, the delay in moving from the sentence to the execution was caused in part by the decision of the state's Supreme Court to grant him a new hearing on whether he deserved the death penalty. Although Mr. Ross was arrested in 1984 and his initial trial ended in 1987 with the jury sentencing him to death, the Supreme Court reversed the sentence in 1994 because some evidence about the defendant's mental state wasn't introduced. Mr. Ross's conviction stood, but he got a new trial on whether he should be executed. Before that trial, however, Mr. Ross asked to die to spare the families a second penalty hearing. Arguments about his request went on for 2 more years before the Supreme Court ruled that his appeal should continue. The new jury, which heard evidence from psychiatrists about Mr. Ross's sexual sadism, deliberated for 9 days in 2000 before agreeing he should die. The Supreme Court affirmed the sentences in May 2004, and again Mr. Ross asked to die. Mr. Ross could still make various appeals to the state and federal government that lawyers said could last at least 5 more years. In its report issued in 2003, the Commission on the Death Penalty calculated that it took Connecticut an average of 1 year 264 days to put on trial the defendants who ended up on death row. After conviction, the interval between the notice of appeal and the filing of the defendant's appeal brief took 2 years 284 days. And the interval between the defense's appeal brief and the prosecution's brief was 1 year and 125 days. Once the Supreme Court hears oral arguments, it has taken an average of 7 months for it to issue a decision. And further delays can occur if a new hearing must be scheduled, new evidence surfaces, laws change, or the defendant makes a request that must be reviewed. Lawyers who spoke to the commission said the delays are necessary to make sure the state has put the right person on trial and imposed the right sentence. Defense lawyers pore over transcripts to search for injustice and prosecutors must address each challenge made by the defense. While defense lawyers in a noncapital case might limit appeals to the strongest points, they generally challenge all possible issues in death penalty cases. "The record of the trial that needs to be reviewed may be 10 or 20 times longer," Mr. Gross said. In one pending death penalty case in Connecticut, the defendant's appeals brief cited nearly 300 other cases. The prosecution cited more than 350. The appeals brief for the prosecution in Mr. Ross' case was more than 300 pages. The Office of the Chief Public Defender, which has 6 lawyers working exclusively on capital cases, also employs 2 mitigation specialists, whose job it is to go over a defendant's background and find reasons why he should not be executed. In addition, because the state hasn't tested its death penalty statute in so long, many of the issues that often come up in death penalty cases have not been litigated, so the case law is still thin. When Mr. Ross asked to be executed after his 1st appeal, for instance, courts spent years considering his request. "That involved quite a bit of time to decide how to do it," said T. R. Paulding, a lawyer Mr. Ross hired to expedite the process of putting him to death. The commission, however, found that the process was also slowed by an attitude among the people involved. "The commission's review found that the principal players in death penalty appeals (defense counsel, the State, or the Courts) do not generally focus upon expediting the death penalty appeals process," the commission wrote. Mr. Dieter said a death penalty case can be delayed in a state like Connecticut "if any actor along the way questions it." "In places like Connecticut, sometimes it's the state court, sometimes it's the federal court, sometimes it's the governor," he said. "Just in being ambivalent, they might say, 'I'm just going to have that expert testify or have that DNA tested.' Things do have a way of slowing down when you look at things closely. "You almost need all the elements to work well to move executions forward," he said. In interviews, commission members praised the work of the public defender's office, saying it ensured that defendants receiver adequate representation. The commission concluded that the state should not expedite the trials if it risked harming the rights of the defendants, though it did urge the state to increase the budgets for the offices involved to speed the process. Officials at the public defender's and state's attorney's offices said their budgets had not increased markedly in response to the recommendation. Garrett Flynn, a Farmington lawyer who was on the commission, also said he thought some of the court battles over the death penalty were really deliberations about whether the state should even have the death penalty. Even when there was no question of innocence, people continue to fight, he said. "I think people still fight the imposition of the death penalty because they're against the death penalty, not based exclusively on the facts of the cases," he said. "In some ways, defense attorneys are fighting the death penalty itself as much as the case in front of them. That can lead to delays." Patrick J. Culligan, the chief of trial services for the Office of the Chief Public Defender, said the public defender's office was focused specifically on Mr. Ross's case. "Our belief is that he is not competent to make the decision to forgo further legal proceedings available to him to fight for a life sentence," he said. Mr. Ross has argued repeatedly that he was competent and that he was sure that now is the time for him to die. But before the lethal fluids are injected, state law still gives him the chance to call it off because he still has appeals available. Some of those awaiting his death doubt he will stick to his pledge to die. "He's a real coward," Mr. Roode said. "I don't see him allowing himself to be executed for us. I think he's going to blink." (source: New York Times) USA: Lethal injection seen being far from pain-free As Michael Ross lies spread and strapped in the death chamber he will feel an intravenous pinprick in each arm. He may hear executioners on the other side of a wall setting up containers of fluid and mixing powder with saline. At 2 a.m., gallery coverings will snap open and witnesses will gaze at the 45-year-old serial killer through thick plate glass. When the order is given, lethal chemicals will flow into a tube, through the wall, and into Rosss vein. As far as correctional officials and doctors know he will sink into unconsciousness and never wake up. And there s no doubt that Ross will not leave the room alive. Lethal injection is the culmination of long quest to find a humane, quick, and clean way to execute criminals. But just how humane poses an unanswerable question to critics of lethal injection as it is currently carried out in 38 states. Some believe Ross may experience excruciating pain. Incorrectly injected barbiturate would leave him alert but unable to move as he is paralyzed and his heart is stopped, they say. Medical experts say the possibility of Ross feeling anything except intravenous needles is remote. About 10 % of the 300 or so lethal injection executions since 1976 have degenerated into unplanned and grotesque scenes of suffering. Men with a minimum of medical training may stab the condemned repeatedly until they find a suitable vessel to accept the poisons. They may perform bloody surgical "cut downs" without anesthetic to find suitable veins. Needles slip out of arms and spew chemicals across the walls. Prisoners grimace, groan and writhe. 20 minutes to half an hour or more may pass before the condemned is declared dead. Some witnesses may be gratified. Others may feel faint or sick. Physicians who swear to heal are loath to discuss capital punishment. One prominent New Haven anesthesiologist who asked that his name not be used said lethal injection as prescribed in Connecticut law is humanitys closest approach to pain-free execution. Ross will first start to receive innocuous normal saline. Then the anonymous executioner will push down a plunger, sending 2,500 milligrams of thiopental into Rosss body and brain. Thiopental is a barbiturate that prevents the flow of sodium ions into neurons. This keeps the nerves from firing, which rapidly shuts down the brain. The 2,500 dose is about 10 times the amount of thiopental that anesthesiologists commonly use. That alone is probably sufficient to cause death and will almost certainly block all subsequent sensations, the anesthesiologist said. Next, a bolus of pancuronium bromide will flood Rosss body. This chemical interferes with acetylcholine, preventing muscles from contracting and causing paralysis. All muscles go slack, including the diaphragm necessary for breathing. Death would follow in minutes as the brain runs out of oxygen. Then potassium chloride, the third and final chemical, will enter Rosss dying body. A massive influx of potassium ions will short-circuit the heart. The vital pump will stop almost instantly. And permanently. Deborah Denno, professor of law at Fordham University, who has written extensively on capital punishment, said Ross may not receive adequate thiopental. The drug could go into muscle rather than vein, for example, she said. Pancuronium and potassium chloride would be extremely painful - cruel and unusual - and unconstitutional, she said. Sodium Phenobarbital seems like a more effective barbiturate, she said. Successive means of execution have been more humane and less gruesome, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington D.C. Hanging was less torturous that drawing and quartering. Electrocution was deemed more humane than hanging. The gas chamber was considered an improvement. Lethal injection seems modern, medical, and clean, though it often is not, he said. However, no more humane alternative is apparent, Dieter said. Certainly not before Ross feels the straps tightening around his body, arm and legs. (source: The Middletown Press)
