Feb. 24 OHIO: Former FBI chief supports killer's plea----Spirko seeking to overturn death sentence John Spirko, in his attempt to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his conviction and death sentence for murdering an Elgin, Ohio, postmaster, has found an ally in former FBI Director William Sessions. Mr. Sessions joined 2 former federal judges and a prosecutor yesterday in accusing Van Wert County's former prosecutor of arguing a theory before Spirko's jury 22 years ago that the prosecutor had to know was at least partly suspect. Mr. Sessions, who was FBI director under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is also a former federal judge. "When the ultimate penalty is at issue, justice demands scrupulous conduct from prosecutors," reads the group's brief urging the high court to hear Spirko's appeal. "It is not enough for a prosecutor to weigh all of the evidence, determine that a defendant is guilty, and pursue such a verdict vigorously if he holds back information unfavorable to his desired outcome," it reads. Mr. Sessions declined an interview. He is now a member of the Washington-based Constitution Project's Death Penalty Initiative, which has sought a number of reforms in the capital punishment process. The group has not advocated abolition of the death penalty, and Mr. Sessions personally supports capital punishment, according to the Constitution Project's Pedro Ribiero. A 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel voted 2-1 vote last year to uphold Spirko's conviction and sentence for the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Betty Jane Mottinger, 48-year-old postmaster in the small town of Elgin, 90 miles southwest of Toledo. She had been stabbed about 15 times in the chest and stomach. The majority found that photographs kept more than a decade by the prosecution, which suggested Spirko's alleged co-conspirator was probably 500 miles away in North Carolina at the time of the crime, were insufficient to overturn the conviction. "If [Delaney] Gibson was not a participant in the murder, then he was not, as Spirko told the investigators and claimed at trial, the source of all of Spirko's detailed knowledge of the crime," wrote Judge Alice M. Batchelder for the majority. "And if Spirko did not learn the details of this crime from Gibson, from whence did all of that detail come?" But dissenting Judge Ronald Lee Gilman wrote that he was not convinced of Spirko's guilt. He said many details about the crime had been published in local newspapers. Spirko, now 58, was born in Toledo. Paroled on a Kentucky murder conviction, he had returned to Swanton to live with his sister in 1982. Jailed on an unrelated assault charge, he contacted investigators claiming to have evidence in the unsolved murder of Ms. Mottinger months earlier. In return, he wanted leniency for himself and his girlfriend for a botched prison escape. Prosecutors ultimately discarded most of Spirko's stories as fabrications. But fragments of those tales, details investigators argued could only be known to the killer, were later used to convict him. The prosecution's theory was that Gibson, who had fled Ohio, was the chief perpetrator. Eyewitnesses placed both him and Spirko in Elgin the morning that Ms. Mottinger disappeared. But further investigation led the prosecution to confirm that Gibson was in North Carolina the day before and after the murder and that photographs showed him with a full beard. An eyewitness, now dead, had identified an old photograph of a clean-shaven Gibson as the stranger she saw that day. The prosecution informed the defense of the alibi claim and noted there were "purported" pictures supporting that claim. The defense argues that the use of the word "purported" was misleading because the prosecution already had the photos in hand. "The prosecutors provided sufficient evidence to put Spirko on notice," reads the opposing brief filed yesterday by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro. "He failed to seek additional evidence [probably because that evidence would have done him no good on his theory of the case]." Gibson has since been paroled in Kentucky on a separate murder conviction. He was never tried in Ohio, and, on the day the 6th Circuit upheld Spirko's conviction last year, the prosecution dismissed its 22-year-old murder indictment against Gibson. (source: Toledo Blade) USA: 'The Exonerated' takes a hard look at justice The most powerful media indictment of the death penalty first appeared on Polish TV in 1988: Episode 5 in Krzysztof Keislowski's made-for-TV drama series, "The Decalogue." In the series, each of the Ten Commandments is played out in the lives of the residents in a huge, seemingly impersonal Warsaw apartment complex. An aimless, hostile young man randomly selects a cab driver, himself an unsympathetic character with whom the audience cannot identify, and beats him to death. A zealous young lawyer tries to save the young man; there are hints that he has been deranged by the death of his little sister, killed in an accident for which he was indirectly responsible. But the young man is quickly convicted, and in the final scene, the guards drag him from his cell to the execution chamber, tighten the rope around his neck and drop him through a hole in the chamber floor. Mr. Kieslowski's point is that the brutality of the crime is mimicked by the brutality of the state. We have witnessed two murders in the same hour. I thought of those scenes last week watching and reading about Court TV's critically praised -- and strongly criticized -- star-studded presentation of "The Exonerated," where Danny Glover, Aidan Quinn, Brian Dennehy, Susan Sarandon and others act out the stories of 5 actual men and one woman condemned to death but, thanks to dedicated defenders and DNA testimony, are saved just in time from execution. The current power of "The Exonerated," written as a stage play by Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen, with a script constructed from court documents and letters, derives especially from the medium of TV -- the small screen filled by the character's face. Particularly faces of actors we know, such as Brian Dennehy and Susan Sarandon. We saw her as Helen Prejean in "Dead Man Walking." 3 of the storytellers are black men, who attribute their arrests and convictions to racism. One, Delbert Kidd (Delroy Lindo), who says "f -- " a lot, is a philosopher-poet-ex-seminarian and serves as a chorus, like the commentator ghosts in "Oz," to tie the tales together. Kerry Cook (Aidan Quinn), because he was a bartender in a gay bar, was tarred as a "brutal pervert butcher" by the prosecutor who told the jury to condemn him as it would "put a sick animal to sleep." Several of the 6 confessed; they were led, they say, by trickery or fatigue to go along with their prosecutors. Some may actually be guilty. Joshua Marquis, an Oregon district attorney, has written a critique of "The Exonerated" to be published in the "Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology" this spring, where he argues that, strictly speaking, several of the 6, particularly Sonia Jacobs (Ms. Sarandon), convicted with her husband of shooting 2 policemen, and Mr. Cook, who had been convicted twice, were released on plea bargains and technicalities, not "exonerated" in the strict sense of that word. Ms. Jacobs' husband Jesse, by the way, had already been electrocuted in a grisly botched execution that took him 13 minutes to die. Another man, Robert Hayes, was sentenced for killing a coworker at a race track in 1991 and released after a retrial in 1997 in which hairs found clutched in the victim's hands were shown to be inconsistent with his. The film advises us, however, during the finale in which the real persons appear alongside their actors that Mr. Hayes is in jail for murder again. Last November he was pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of another horse groom near Syracuse earlier in 1987. High on crack, he said, he had attempted to rob her, hit her, and slit her wrists and hanged the body to make it look like suicide. An investigator found that Mr. Hayes had a history of assaults at tracks around the country. The discovery that at least one of the 6 narrators who have won us over is obviously a "bad guy" may take some of the moral steam out of the show. Ultimately, however, the case against the death penalty does not stand or fall on whether the innocent die. The law itself must die because, as Mr. Keislowski shows us, it turns the state -- that is, ourselves -- into killers as well. We leave the last word to the real Delbert Kidd, who tells us in the film's last scene: "I believe God sent me to death row so that I could be a witness against it." (source: Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is a professor of humanities at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J. -- National Catholic Reporter) NEW YORK: Who Got The Death Penalty New York State's death penalty law was in effect just short of 9 years before the Court of Appeals struck it down for its "coercive jury instruction" last June. While Governor George Pataki says he wants the death penalty restored, it is not clear that the death penalty will be made legal once again in New York. Opponents of capital punishment make many arguments - that it does not deter crime, that it is immoral for the government to kill people, even that it is expensive: before it was rule unconstitutional, only .11 % of those arrested for murder faced the death penalty, and yet the costs of administration were in excess of $250 million per year. But the most passionate argument is probably the uneven way in which the death penalty is applied. In New York State, those people who committed murders outside New York City, and those killing white victims, were much more likely to have been sentenced to death. How Many Arrested, How Many Sentenced Since 1995, when the death penalty was restored in New York, 6,545 arrests have been made for murder, according to statistics compiled by the Capital Defender Office. Of these, 500 resulted in 1st-degree murder indictments. Of these 500, 58 resulted in a "death notice" being filed - a notification by the prosecution that it may seek the death penalty. Of these 58: 9 cases are still pending, 27 resulted in life without parole from a plea bargain; 1 defendant committed suicide in jail; one death notice was withdrawn, 5 were given very long sentences; and 15 so far have been given trials. Of the 15 who have been given trials, One's sentence is still pending; one was acquitted; one was sentenced to 115 years to life; 5 were sentenced to life without parole. And 7 defendants were sentenced to death. All 7 are still alive. Where You Kill Makes A Difference The chance of a 1st degree murder indictment turning into a death notice varies depending on where one is accused of doing the crime. Only six percent of the murder one indictments in New York City resulted in a death notice, compared to 23.1 % upstate. The chance of being convicted and sentenced to death is much greater in the New York suburbs than elsewhere. (Given the few death sentences one should be cautious about drawing inferences about patterns, since the three death sentences in the suburbs all come from Suffolk and from three quite sensational cases. However, the use of a death notices certainly enhances the prosecution's chances of getting a long sentence from a plea bargain). Race of Defendant, Race of Victim Those accused of killing a white victim are more than twice as likely to receive a death notice than are those accused of killing only a non-white victim. Similarly they are twice as likely to go to trial and over 5 times as likely to receive the death sentence. These figures are statistically significant according to an analysis by David Baldus, an expert on the application of the death penalty. Because of the disparity in the application of the death sentence upstate versus downstate, and given the demography upstate versus downstate, blacks accused of murder are much less likely to receive the death sentence. Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and provides expert testimony on a range of cases, including housing discrimination. The opinions expressed are his alone. (source: Gotham Gazette) ILLINOIS: Judge to rule on admitting serial killer's confession in murder trial In Lawrenceville, a judge will rule next month whether jurors in the murder trial of Julie Rea Harper can hear the confession of a serial killer on death row in Texas that he, not Harper, is responsible for stabbing to death the woman's son. Harper was convicted in 2002 of first-degree murder in the Oct. 13, 1997, slaying of her 10-year-old son, Joel Kirkpatrick, as he slept in his bed in her Lawrenceville home. That conviction was overturned on a technicality, and a new trial is set to start on Dec. 5. During a preliminary hearing Wednesday in Lawrence County Circuit Court, Judge Barry Vaughan said he would issue his ruling on March 11 about whether or not jurors will be allowed to hear the confession of Tommy Lynn Sells. Sells, who is awaiting execution for the fatal stabbing of a 13-year-old Texas girl in 1999, made his confession to an author and later to Illinois officials, saying he had killed Joel. Defense attorneys argued that his confession is credible, saying his statements corroborate information that Harper gave to police immediately after the killing. "This is not a close call," said Ron Safer, one of Harper's attorneys. "(Admitting the confession) is not a difficult decision. What kind of justice system would we have if we didn't allow the jury to hear this serial killer's confession?" But prosecutors said the confession did not mesh with the known facts in the case and was partially based on information Sells gleaned from the Internet. Prosecutors also argue that Sells was merely trying to become part of a pending case to postpone his execution. Authorities have implicated him in at least a dozen murders, including a 13-year-old Springfield, Mo., girl killed 2 days after the murder in Lawrenceville. Ed Parkinson, the special appellate prosecutor handling the case, said Sells' confession should be "viewed with suspicion" and argued it should not be admitted. But even if it is, he said after Wednesday's hearing that he was confident the case against Harper would hold up. "I'm very satisfied with the strength of the state's case," he said. "I wouldn't be prosecuting a person I didn't think was the right person." Prosecutors have said Harper murdered her son to get back at her former husband, who had just won custody of the boy. Harper, who is free on $750,000 bond, has always blamed a masked intruder, who she said struggled with her before fleeing. (source: Associated Press)
