March 12 PENNSYLVANIA: Death penalty eyed in Moore murder Because Marguerite "Tutti" Eyer's murder was particularly heinous, gruesome and slow, her killer deserves the death penalty, according to prosecutors. Prosecutors filed court papers Friday indicating they will seek the death penalty against Kathy MacClellan, the 70-year-old Moore Township woman who allegedly killed and robbed Eyer, her 84-year-old neighbor. Eyer was found Feb. 7 covered in blood in her Springridge Road home in the Hickory Hills development. With her dying breath, she allegedly told a police officer, "Kathy did it with a hammer." Police said they found a bloody hammer and Eyer's wallet, driver's license and checkbook in MacClellan's home the day after the murder. "This is a particularly heinous crime," said Northampton County First Deputy District Attorney Paula A. Roscioli "The defendant didn't just strike the victim once, causing her immediate death. She struck her at least 37 times with the claw end of the hammer, and this victim lived for a significant period of time in excruciating pain." For prosecutors to seek the death penalty, one or more of several possible aggravating factors must be present in the crime. In this case, prosecutors say MacClellan committed the murder by means of torture. The coroner said Eyer was struck 37 times in the head and had wounds indicating she was trying to fight off blows from the hammer. Witnesses said Eyer was so blood-covered, her white hair appeared red. One of Eyer's fingers was almost severed, and her arm was broken so badly it was behind her shoulder blade. "It looked like someone took a paintbrush and flicked blood on the walls," said Moore Township police officer William Wambold. "Under the circumstances, we believe that the manner in which this defendant caused the victim's death constitutes torture," Roscioli said. A neighbor found Eyer at 5:53 p.m. She died at 7:25 p.m. after being flown to St. Luke's Hospital in Fountain Hill. Another aggravating factor was that MacClellan allegedly committed the murder in the perpetration of a 2nd felony, a robbery. Wambold testified that as he arrived at the home, he saw MacClellan lying in a fetal position near Eyer's car in the driveway. After he tended to Eyer's injuries, Wambold drove MacClellan to the police station. He testified during a preliminary hearing this week that during the drive to the station, she said, "Well, are you going to convict me already?" MacClellan's attorney Anthony Martino declined comment Friday afternoon. She is also represented by attorney Mark Minotti. MacClellan's case is being prosecuted by Roscioli and Assistant District Attorney Jay Jenkins. MacClellan is charged with an open count of criminal homicide, which means she can be convicted of 1st-, 2nd- or 3rd-degree murder or manslaughter. (source: The Express-Times) ALABAMA----new death sentence Sharifi gets death penalty; Judge follows jury's recommendation in slaying of wife, friend Despite protests from Mohammad Sharifi's lawyers, Circuit Judge Laura W. Hamilton followed a jury's recommendation Friday and sentenced Sharifi to die by lethal injection. Sharifi's father, Hossain Sharifi, said he does not believe the criminal justice system treated his son fairly. Authorities failed to follow leads that could have cleared him, he said. A jury convicted Sharifi, 38, of capital murder on Feb. 2 in the death of his wife, Sarah Kaye Smith Sharifi, 47, and her friend, Derrick "Rick" Brown, 47, both of Huntsville. The panel voted 10-2 to recommend that Hamilton impose the death penalty. Sharifi, showing no remorse or acceptance of responsibility for the double murder, took the witness stand during the sentencing hearing Friday. He reiterated his father's claim that police had not pursued other potential suspects. "I swear again I did not commit this crime," he said, adding that he was in Los Angeles when the murders occurred. Prosecutors said Sharifi murdered his wife and Brown in mid-December 1999 at her Spartacus Drive apartment. Their bodies were found weeks later in the Tennessee River not far from Ditto Landing. When federal agents arrested Sharifi in Los Angeles in late December, they found a pistol in his car. They also found the license plate that belonged on Brown's car and Brown's driver's license and Visa credit card. Investigators learned that Sharifi bought the pistol at Larry's Pistol and Pawn in Huntsville in early December. A state firearms and tool marks expert said the pistol fired the bullets recovered during autopsies of Brown's and Smith Sharifi's bodies. Hamilton could have overridden the jury's recommendation. Her decision was not delivered in a vengeful manner, and the court is required to follow the state's laws, she said. "Some laws I agree with and some I don't agree with," she said, "but I'm not at liberty to pick and choose." Larry Morgan and Alan Mann, Sharifi's attorneys, said an appeal will be filed immediately. Prosecutors Robert Broussard and Bill Starnes said they believe justice was served. Morgan and Mann asked Hamilton to sentence their client to life in prison without parole. Because of a situation beyond their control, the lawyers said, they were unable to adequately present mitigating circumstances for the jury to consider. They were unable to collect evidence in Iran from family members and people who knew about Sharifi's life before he came to America, the lawyers said. But the defense attorneys did offer mitigating evidence, Hamilton said. Sharifi had no significant criminal history, she said. The state proved the aggravating circumstance that Sharifi killed at least 2 people during a single act or scheme, she said. Hossain Sharifi said a witness who reported seeing a police officer with a bloody hand leave Smith Sharifi's apartment was never called to testify. Nobody ever located Smith Sharifi's gun or determined if Brown also owned a gun, he said. His son was too small to drag the two victims from the apartment, put them into a car, and dispose of them in the river, he said. His son lived with his wife and Brown in the apartment, he said, and it is logical they would share identification and credit cards. (source: The Huntsville Times) FLORIDA: Death Row Lawyers Florida has 367 people on death row. For the most part they are represented by lawyers who are employed by the state and work for one of two regional agencies. But the state also has a registry of private attorneys who handle cases in the northern part of the state and when there's a conflict of interest elsewhere. There are 140 attorneys on the registry. 80 of them have cases. The state Supreme Court has recently criticized the performance of some of the registry attorneys to an oversight board that monitors capital appeals. In testimony to a House committee, some prosecutors defended the performance of the registry attorneys. Representative Bruce Kyle of Fort Myers says he's considering sending a letter back to the Supreme Court to ask what steps it has taken to make sure death row inmates are properly represented. (source: Associated Prss) ********************* State owes the innocent their freedom Wilton Dedge, an innocent man Florida imprisoned for 22 years, was lucky in one respect. Had he been falsely convicted for robbery rather than rape, there would have been no DNA to set him free. Florida politicians are fooling only themselves if they think that the current post-conviction DNA testing law does away with wrongful imprisonment in the Sunshine State. The only circumstance more outrageous than the resistance to compensating Dedge is the Legislature's pervasive indifference to the moral certainty that there are hundreds of equally innocent people still rotting behind Florida bars. Such things are impossible to estimate reliably, but one can guess. From death row alone, 24 people have gone free, most of them clearly exonerated. DNA vindicated another after he died in prison. There are more than 200 people serving lesser sentences for every one on death row. The same kinds of blunders that ensnared Dedge figured frequently in those death row cases. For the minority of cases where DNA evidence exists, the law entitling prisoners to testing expires Oct. 1. That is only part of what's wrong with it. The vast majority of convicts, those who pleaded guilty or no contest, are excluded, even if they did it only to avoid harsher sentences. The state crime lab isn't equipped for some of the more sophisticated recently developed tests, which cost $2,500 privately. The Florida Innocence Initiative, a voluntary agency in Tallahassee, has only $30,000 in the bank to cope with nearly 300 accumulated requests from inmates. A similar project at Nova University has more than 300 cases waiting. What happened to Dedge could happen to anyone. Even you. If you have ever had a deja vu experience, the false certainty that you have seen someone or something before, that's how easy it is to be falsely accused and convicted. Police, prosecutors and jurors rely too heavily on eyewitnesses. There is also a mental process called transference, in which witnesses identify a "suspect" they have seen in some other context. That's what happened to Dedge. The victim first told police she had been slashed and raped by a balding man who stood 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. Dedge was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 130 pounds and had a full head of hair. But she and her family had casually encountered Dedge and his family before, and on seeing him again at a convenience store she thought he resembled her assailant. She became more certain, and more wrong, as the case developed. Believing her, the Brevard Sheriff's Office and prosecutors relied on junk science and a flagrantly perjurious jailhouse snitch to put Dedge in prison and keep him there. The victim's mistakes were not malicious, but the authorities should have known better. In an example reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education 5 years ago, a rape victim identified a prominent Australian psychologist and memory researcher as her attacker. "Not only was his alibi airtight - he was being interviewed on live television at the time - but she had mistaken him for the rapist because she had seen his face on her television screen during the assault," the article said. In another notorious Florida case, a woman who had been stabbed by a would-be rapist let police coax her into identifying a young man they considered a suspect. The assailant she had described wore dental braces. The innocent man they convicted didn't. The conviction was overturned and the state admitted its mistake, but by then it was too late to charge the actual perpetrator. Florida sorely needs what North Carolina has: a blue-ribbon commission to identify the causes of wrongful convictions and recommend ways to avoid them. Darrell Stephens, the former St. Petersburg police chief who is now chief at Charlotte, is one of the members of the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission. Among its first recommendations: "double blind" lineup procedures so that the police officer showing suspects or pictures to witnesses doesn't know who the suspect is. Florida has its own model to follow, the gender bias commission that the Supreme Court established with legislative support 18 years ago. Janet Reno, who was sensitive to wrongful convictions as U.S. attorney general, would be a superb person to chair the Florida Actual Innocence Commission. But such things don't happen unless someone in power cares enough to make them happen. Is there anyone who does? (source: Column, Martin Dyckman, St. Petersburg Times, March 6) TENNESSEE: Numerous appeals land inmate back on death row There is a lesson to be learned from taking too many bites from the judicial apple. Just ask death row inmate Jonathan Wesley Stephenson. Stephenson was sentenced to die for the 1989 ambush slaying of his wife, Lisa Stephenson, in a remote section of Cocke County. He appealed and won a new sentencing hearing in 1994 when the state Supreme Court found reversible error in a legal instruction given to jurors who imposed the death penalty. District Attorney General Al Schmutzer Jr., whose jurisdiction includes Cocke County, offered Stephenson a deal that would put the case to rest for his slain wife's family - life without parole for 1st-degree murder and an extra 60 years for conspiring with hired hitman Ralph Thompson. Stephenson took the deal but again appealed. He won. The state's high court ruled life without parole was not an available punishment in Tennessee at the time Stephenson's wife was killed. That penalty was added to the law books later. The case was sent back to Cocke County Circuit Court for a third sentencing hearing. This time, Schmutzer offered no deal and instead sought to convince a jury to impose the death penalty. The panel did. In an opinion released this week, the state Court of Criminal Appeals declared Schmutzer the victor this appellate go-around, affirming the death penalty in the case. Because Stephenson is back on death row, his case will be granted an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. Schmutzer said Friday that he kept pushing for the death penalty in the wake of appellate losses because he believed it was the only just punishment. "I thought it was a solid death penalty case," he said. "He was out trying to hire a number of people to kill his wife. He knew (the couple's) very young children would be left unattended when his wife was lured (to her death)." It's still not clear who pulled the trigger on the high-powered rifle that left a "large hole" in Lisa Stephenson's forehead in December 1989. Stephenson and Thompson were there when she was killed, but neither would admit being the one who fired the fatal shot. "Each confessed and said the other did the shooting," Schmutzer said. Schmutzer charged both men and sought the death penalty against both. Under the law, it didn't matter who pulled the trigger. Stephenson claimed Thompson shot his wife and then hit him up for payment. "I did not pull the trigger," Stephenson told then-TBI Agent David Davenport in a statement. "I did not arrange the set up. Ralph took care of everything." Thompson claimed that Stephenson offered him a boat, a motor and a truck for the slaying. But after Stephenson lured his wife to Bruner's Grove in Cocke County, Thompson said Stephenson ended up killing her while Thompson stayed in the truck. When Stephenson lured his wife away from the couple's home, their 4-year-old and 8-month-old sons were left in the house alone for nearly 24 hours. When Lisa Stephenson's father, H.A. Saylor, found the children, the 4-year-old had managed to break open a box of cereal to eat and "had prepared a bottle for his 8-month-old brother," the appellate court opinion recounted. Although Stephenson has never said why he wanted his wife dead, Schmutzer called as a witness Stephenson's girlfriend, Julie Webb. The pair met in 1989 at a bar in Knoxville. Webb said she did not know he was married. In November 1989, Stephenson gave Webb a ring and talked about marriage. As it turned out, that ring belonged to his 4-year-old son. It had been a gift from the boy's grandfather, who brought the ring back "from a tour of duty in Korea," the opinion stated. Saylor saw the ring on Webb's finger during Stephenson's first trial and told authorities it belonged to his grandson. Webb later returned the ring to Saylor. Thompson was tried separately from Stephenson. He, too, was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, but a jury declined to sentence him to death. Instead, he is serving a life term. Stephenson tried in his latest appeal to argue that his crime was not heinous enough to merit the death penalty. In this week's opinion, appellate Judge David H. Welles disagreed. "The victim, a mother of two young children, was shot in the head with a rifle at close range through the windshield of her car," Welles wrote. "There was no apparent provocation or justification for the killing. The jury heard no testimony regarding any showing of remorse by the defendant for her murder with the possible exception of his callous remark that although he didn't love her, he was going to 'miss the (expletive).'?" (source: Knoxville News Sentinel)
