Feb. 7 MAINE: Lawmaker wants to bring death penalty back A Sanford lawmaker is waging an uphill fight in the Legislature to restore the death penalty in domestic-violence cases that lead to murder. Republican state Sen. Jonathan Courtney says he is sponsoring the bill, which has not yet been drafted, because "a lot of the things we're doing now (to fight domestic violence) aren't working" and it's time for the state to get tough by imposing the ultimate penalty on killers who murder current or former spouses or partners. Courtney's bill is reviving the debate over capital punishment in Maine at a time when the issue is front-page news elsewhere in New England. Michael Ross, a Connecticut serial killer who faces the death penalty there, was granted a stay of execution by that state's Supreme Court only hours before he was scheduled to die last month. Moreover, Mainers were reminded 2 weeks ago that domestic violence can be fatal, when a jury convicted Gregory Erskine of murdering his former girlfriend, Lisa Deprez, at her Portland apartment last year. Ross would have been the 1st person to be executed in New England in 45 years, according to the Associated Press. Connecticut and New Hampshire are the only states in New England that have the death penalty, which was abolished in Maine more than a century ago. Courtney said his bill is designed "to prevent domestic violence and to make people think twice about it before they go battering a spouse." He said the time has come "to try something stronger or more forceful," because domestic violence remains a big problem despite efforts to prevent it. Almost half of the homicides committed in Maine in 2003 stemmed from domestic violence and the percentage of Maine homicides triggered by domestic abuse averaged 45 % a year from 1985 through 2003, according to the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence. But the Legislature is unlikely to view Courtney's bill as part of the solution, according to legislative leaders in both major parties. Assistant Senate Majority Leader Kenneth Gagnon, D-Waterville, and House Minority Leader David Bowles, R-Sanford, agreed last week that Courtney's bill probably will be defeated. As Democratic state Sen. Joseph Perry of Bangor put it: "This bill will be put to death" for several reasons, including the fact that capital punishment sometimes claims the lives of innocent people. Courtney admits that he did not consult advocates for domestic-violence victims before submitting his bill, to find out if they think it's a good idea. If he had, he would have learned that they may have reservations about it. "There really is no deterrent" in many domestic-violence homicides because the abusers are so obsessed with killing their victims that they are indifferent to the legal consequences, according to Kim Roberts, executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence. Roberts said her coalition has not taken a position on reviving the death penalty, but she noted that abuse victims are sometimes convicted of murdering their abusers, so if Maine restored the death penalty in domestic-violence cases "you could have a victim who is put to death for killing their own abuser." The state needs to work on education, prevention and holding abusers accountable for their crimes, Roberts said. Sarah Standiford of the Maine Women's Lobby offered a similar view, saying the best way to prevent domestic violence is to provide adequate funding for education and prevention. The Legislature has a long history of rejecting capital punishment, including bills in recent years that would have reinstated the death penalty for cop killers or child murderers. The Legislature is unlikely to bring back the death penalty in domestic-violence cases "if we're not willing to impose a death penalty on the most heinous crimes, including victimization of children," Bowles said. Maine abolished the death penalty 2 years after Daniel Wilkinson was hanged at the Maine State Prison in 1885 for killing Bath constable William "Uncle Billy" Lawrence during an attempted burglary. Newspaper accounts of the hanging said that Wilkinson suffered a slow, gruesome death, leading the Legislature to get rid of the death penalty in 1887. (source: Press Herald) USA: Pro-death penalty argument faulty The death penalty is, in every situation, morally unjustifiable and can only be defended by those who mistake vengeance for justice. In the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court made capital punishment illegal. They reversed that decision in 1976, leaving our country where it finds itself now. Since then, there have been 948 people put to death in the United States for a variety of crimes. At its most fundamental level, the argument in favor of the death penalty tends to focus on the benefits of deterrence. The more regularly and visibly we kill people for their crimes, the less people will want to commit crimes, they argue. It makes sense in some kind of cyclical way but, unfortunately for proponents of capital punishment, it is based in absolutely nothing but their own imaginations. There has never been any evidence that proves the death penalty acts as a systematic deterrent to crime. Putting people to death for a crime does not make other people less likely to commit that crime, and that immediately removes the only shred of justification that can prop up the death penalty. So what exactly is wrong with capital punishment? The death penalty is racist. Since 1976, 80.6 % of the victims of capital cases were white. Even the United States General Accounting Office admitted in 1990 that "in 82 % of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty." Of the 204 interracial murders that have resulted in death sentences since 1976, 192 of them involved a black defendant and a white victim. Only 12 of them involved a white defendant and a black victim. Black victims, in other words, are not deemed worthy of the same "justice" that white victims are. The death penalty results in the death of people incapable of controlling or understanding their actions. Oliver Cruz had an IQ of 64, which officially classified him as mentally retarded. He was executed in 2000. Napoleon Beazley was a juvenile when he committed murder. He was executed in 2002. These are hardly the only 2 cases, but they illustrate that there is a fundamental problem with any system that will execute juvenile offenders, the mentally ill, and the cognitively impaired. The death penalty is irreversible. Oops, we made a mistake in the trial? Gosh, too bad the defendant has already been executed. In any system of justice there is the possibility of error. Subjecting people to a permanent punishment is incredibly short-sighted. The death penalty has resulted in the incarcerations and sometimes even the deaths of innocent people. Whether due to mistaken identity, false testimony, incompetent legal counsel, forced confessions or myriad other factors, it is an irrefutable fact that innocent people get sentenced to death. Lloyd Eldon Miller spent 11 years on death row only to be found innocent the day before his scheduled execution. James Richardson spent 25 years on death row for a crime it was later determined he didn't commit. Cameron Todd Willingham was sentenced to death for an arson that killed his three children. For over a decade in prison he professed his innocence, and new information from multiple fire experts indicated that the original investigation was severely flawed and that the fire may have even been accidental. Willingham was executed in 2004. As of Oct. 6, 2004, there have been 113 death row exonerations in 25 different states, according to deathpenaltyinfo.org. There are no hard statistics on the number of innocent executed, but a 1987 study by the highly respected Stanford Law Review estimated that 23 people had been executed for crimes they didn't commit. So how is it possible that so many innocent people have been sentenced to an irreversible punishment? The death penalty punishes those who cannot defend themselves. Many people who commit capital crimes are economically disadvantaged and have no access to competent legal counsel. Aden Harrison, Jr., an African-American man, could not afford a lawyer and so was appointed one. Specifically, he was appointed lawyer James Venable, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Harrison was sentenced to death. Jesus Romero was represented by a lawyer who introduced no mitigating evidence whatsoever, and whose closing statement was only 29 words. Romero was executed in 1992. Cases such as these are clear violations of the defendants' constitutional rights to a fair trial and due process. The death penalty is also hated by the international community. The United States, Iran, and Saudi Arabia account for over 80 percent of the executions recorded by Amnesty International. Since 2000, the only 4 countries to have executed juvenile offenders are the United States, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan and Iran. Since 1997, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has passed an annual resolution calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The 2004 resolution was co-sponsored by 76 member states. Ultimately, the death penalty is a vengeful, inhuman and short-sighted practice. It undermines everything that we consider our nation to be great for. Freedom, humanity, truth, justice, and equality cannot fully exist in a society that is executing the innocent, giving unequal treatment to minority victims, and preying on the poor, the mentally ill and the cognitively impaired. The existence of capital punishment in a society as advanced and free as ours should be a source of infinite shame. (source: Kurt Hunt, Opinion, The (Mich.) Eastern Echo) ILLINOIS: Police lineups' flaws spur new approach----Standing suspects in a row has come under fire; Illinois is testing an identification method that may help avoid falsely imprisoning people For 18 years, the photographs that lined Steve Avery's prison cells linked him to the outside world. They helped him see his children grow up. They made him feel as if he hadn't completely missed those birthdays and Thanksgivings. But the dozens of yellowed snapshots--now stored in a cardboard box in his blue trailer here--also are bitter reminders of the moments and memories stolen from him while he served time for a rape he didn't commit. Although 16 witnesses placed him elsewhere on July 29, 1985, when Penny Beerntsen was brutally attacked on a Wisconsin beach, she identified Avery in a lineup and swore it was him during the trial. But almost two decades later, DNA evidence proved she was wrong. Avery's case--he was released from a Wisconsin prison in September 2003--dramatically highlights flawed police lineup procedures, where well-meaning witnesses, even crime victims themselves, confidently pick the wrong person, experts say. "That day I heard the news was worse than the day I was assaulted," said Beerntsen, who now lives in Naperville and vividly recalls identifying Avery. "I just wanted the earth to open and swallow me. I felt so horrendous and so guilty about being a part of this miscarriage of justice." In a pilot study under way since last fall, a different way of conducting lineups that some say could sharply reduce the number of false identifications is being tested in Chicago, Evanston and Joliet. Suspects in traditional lineups are arranged shoulder to shoulder in the same room, and witnesses use a process of elimination to select someone who looks most like the perpetrator, said Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has researched mistaken identifications for more than 25 years. Wells and other researchers advocate another approach, the "sequential" lineup, where suspects are brought in one at a time so witnesses can examine each individually. Already used in New Jersey and with half a dozen police departments across the country, the sequential lineup is being tested in the three Illinois communities, a project that will conclude later this year. "Psychologically, it's a very different experience," Wells said. "With the [traditional lineup] it's a relative judgment process that leads to the identification rather than what we're after, which is true recognition." Mistaken identification--which was a factor in more than 75 % of the 155 DNA exonerations across the country since 1989, according to the Innocence Project--can be cut in half or more with sequential lineups, Wells said. Although Chicago Tribune policy is not to name rape victims, Beerntsen has become an advocate for criminal justice reform and regularly shares her story with convicted criminals, politicians and the public. Beerntsen recalls leaving her husband and daughter on a bright July afternoon and taking a jog on a Manitowoc County beach about 30 miles north of Sheboygan. It wasn't far from her family's candy and ice cream store, which she helped manage. After going about 3 miles, she was running back when a man darted from beneath a fallen tree, put her in a chokehold and dragged her to a wooded area beyond some dunes. The 5-foot-2 Beerntsen, then 36, kept talking about her two children, hoping to evoke a sliver of compassion. But he beat her unconscious and raped her. Beerntsen remembers making a mental note of the man's face during the attack. "When he grabbed me, two thoughts went through my head," she said. "I need to stay calm, and the second was, I need to get a good look at this guy." She also made a point of scratching him and thought to crawl on her wrists after the assault to preserve whatever evidence was under her nails. Those scrapings were tested in 1996 but were inconclusive. Man had run-in with deputies While she was being examined at a hospital, Beerntsen recounted the attack to a sheriff's deputy, who thought the rapist's physical description sounded like Avery. The department already was familiar with him because he was accused of running a sheriff deputy's wife off a road 6 months earlier. Just hours after the attack, Beerntsen looked at nine photographs laid out on her hospital bed. She picked Avery. A few days later, she picked him again, this time from a lineup of eight people. Beerntsen was so sure Avery was her attacker that when she saw him in court, the hair on the back of her neck stood on end and she shook, she said. After the Wisconsin Innocence Project took on Avery's case, a pubic hair saved from the rape kit was tested and matched Gregory Allen, whose information was on file because he was serving a 60-year sentence for a 1995 sexual assault. When Beerntsen learned the truth, she was devastated. "You can forgive a wrong that's done to yourself more than you can forgive yourself, albeit unintentional, for something that was done to someone else," she said. For his part, Avery never believed a jury would find him guilty. Even after Manitowoc County sheriff's deputies barged into his home in Maribel, Wis., in the middle of the night, Avery thought the truth would protect him. But when the verdict was read and he found himself sentenced to 32 years in prison, Avery realized his life was forever altered. He went to prison at age 23 and got out when he was 41. A high school dropout who had been laid off as a sheet-metal worker, Avery tried to keep up with the lives of his family: a wife, stepson and 4 children, the youngest twin boys born 6 days before his arrest. But his wife divorced him, and only one of his daughters returned his letters. Avery still can't distinguish his twin sons. For 18 years, an intense anger consumed him--anger at the sheriff's investigation that made him the prime suspect and at a judicial system that found him guilty even though so many people swore he wasn't at the beach the day of the attack. But when Avery left the Stanley Correctional Institution in northwestern Wisconsin and ate barbecued ribs for the 1st time in almost two decades, that anger melted away, he said. "They stole it all from me, but the hate, it isn't there anymore, not like it used to be," he said. Illinois studies reforms Similar cases prompted Gov. George Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment to recommend changing Illinois' lineup procedures in 2002. The following year, state Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston) introduced a bill in the General Assembly requiring sequential lineups across the state. She agreed to a pilot study last year to test the 2 procedures. "We're going to learn which one is better," she said. During the study, Evanston is using a case numbers to determine who gets what kind of lineup. Suspects assigned even numbers get the traditional lineup while others are lined up sequentially, Deputy Chief Joe Bellino said. The only glitch so far for the relatively small department is finding a person with no knowledge of the case to fulfill the "blind administrator" requirement, Bellino said. With the sequential approach, someone without any knowledge of the suspect is to conduct the lineup as a way of avoiding body language or commentary, no matter how slight, that might influence the witness. In Joliet, lineups in the eastern half of the city are being conducted sequentially. And in Chicago, all lineups in the Harrison Police District on the West Side are being done that way. Sheri Mecklenburg, coordinator for the pilot program and chief counsel to Chicago Police Supt. Philip Cline, hopes to submit a report to the General Assembly on the findings from all three jurisdictions at the end of the year. Then lawmakers will decide whether to adopt the practice statewide. 'We have ways to improve' But Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School, thinks the study is unnecessary. Bowman represented John Willis, who was exonerated in 1999 of a string of Chicago robberies and sexual assaults. While there's no way of knowing if sequential lineups would have prevented the dozen or so women who identified him as the attacker, using the approach is a no-brainer, Bowman said. "The Willis case just makes crystal clear that when we have ways to improve this, we need to employ them," he said. "I can't conceive why anything needs to be studied." Avery admits he doesn't know whether the lineup procedure is solely to blame for his conviction. But he does believe he's owed for the 18 years of his life he missed and is suing Manitowoc County, the former sheriff and the former district attorney for $36 million. Since his exoneration, Avery has been helping out at his family's auto-salvage company, plans to remarry in July and hopes for more children. "I'd like to hear 'Daddy' and 'Mama,'" he said. "That's one thing I miss. So I figure I'll have a couple more so I can hear that." (source: Chicago Tribune) OHIO: Death penalty challenged -- Lawyers say man was brain-damaged In 1988, a 3-judge panel in Hamilton County sentenced William H. Smith to die for the stabbing death of Mary Bradford one year earlier. Now, after he's spent 17 years on Ohio's death row, Smith's attorneys say his life should be spared because he was mentally impaired at the time. The request comes one month before the 47-year-old man is scheduled to be executed. Hamilton County prosecutors say Smith stabbed Bradford 10 times, raped her as she lay dying and then stole electronic equipment from her apartment. The Ohio Parole Board will hear the arguments Tuesday, then make a recommendation to Gov. Bob Taft about whether Smith's sentence should be commuted to life in prison. All death row inmates have a clemency hearing. Since executions resumed in Ohio in 1999, there have been 16 clemency hearings, with Taft granting one request, that of Cincinnati native Jerome Campbell. In 1991, Gov. Richard Celeste commuted the sentences of seven death row inmates days before leaving office. In September 1987, Smith, then 30, met Bradford, a 45-year-old single mother of 4, at a West End bar. Smith told police he and Bradford left the bar together. At her Pleasant Street apartment, Smith said, they argued over drugs, prompting Bradford to threaten Smith with a butcher knife, which he took away from her. He told police he slit her throat and then had sex with her as she lay dying on her bed. Smith was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder, one count of rape and one count of aggravated robbery. In addition to the death penalty, the three-judge panel sentenced Smith to consecutive 10-25 year prison terms for rape and robbery. Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Ron Springman called Smith's story self-serving. "There was never any evidence of a struggle," he said. "He set out to kill her that night." And, it was brutal, Springman said. There were 10 stab wounds. Smith's attorneys, an Ohio public defender and Jennifer Kinsley of Sirkin, Pinales & Schwartz in Cincinnati, aren't challenging his conviction or the facts of the case. Kinsley said she would focus on Smith's mental status. She says judges never heard evidence that would have suggested Smith deserved life in prison rather than death. She said a neurologist found that Smith has brain damage. A scan showed lesions on his brain, possibly, Kinsley said, from severe drug and alcohol abuse when he was a teenager. At a young age, Smith was hospitalized for mental illness and given shock treatment, Kinsley said. "We feel if the 3 judges knew that, it could have changed sentencing," she said. Bradford's children agreed with seeking the death penalty. Today, her oldest daughter said she still believes the death penalty was an appropriate sentence. Martha Bradford, 50, said Smith took advantage of a woman weaker than himself. She said her mother suffered from severe asthma. "He low-down brutally murdered her," Martha Bradford said. "He shouldn't be in society." (source: Cincinnati Enquirer)
