April 28 TEXAS: Senators would boost payments for people wrongly convicted----WRONGFUL CONVICTION----Senators would boost payments People who are wrongfully convicted and spend time in prison would receive more money under legislation tentatively approved Tuesday in the Senate. Right now, people who are wrongly convicted can receive as much as $25,000 for every year they were imprisoned. Under the bill by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, they could receive $50,000 for every year they spent behind bars. Those who were on death row could receive $100,000 for every year they were on death row. (source: Austin American-Statesman) *************************** Killer of Friendswood woman gets death date Robert Alan Shields date with death is set. Shields, 30, has been on death row for nearly 10 years. A jury condemned him in the death of Paula Stiner in October 1995. Barring an executive-level pardon, he will die by lethal injection on Aug. 23 in the Huntsville prison where he has spent most of the last decade. Shields exhausted the last of his appeals in January, leaving nothing to bar the issuance of a death warrant, which State District Court Judge David Garner signed Tuesday. Stiner, 27, had been Shields neighbor in Friendswood. On Sept. 21, 1994, he broke into her home and waited for her. When she got home, he beat her with a hammer and stabbed her to death. Former Precinct 8 Constable Daniel Cooper arrested Shields 3 days later in The Woodlands. Shields was driving Stiners car and wearing bloodstained clothes at the time of his capture. Shields was the last person in Galveston County to be sentenced to death. (source: Galveston County Daily News) ****************** Mother charged in childs death----Supplemental autopsy shows 2-year-old son died of trauma A municipal judge Wednesday charged a 26-year-old woman with capital murder for the death last year of her 2-year-old son. Judge Hector "Tiger" Huerta set a $250,000 bond for Erica Kendall after an investigation into the Oct. 11 death of Adam Roldan. If convicted of capital murder, Kendall could face the death penalty, District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said. Kendall remained in the Willacy County Jail Wednesday after police arrested her at about 10:15 p.m. Tuesday at her home on Charles Street, detective Samuel Adame said. Authorities charged Kendall about 3 weeks after a supplemental autopsy showed the child died as the result of trauma, Guerra said. The report ruled out illness and other natural factors as the cause of the brain hemorrhage that led to the childs death, he said. "She was the last person with the child and this child had been to the hospital with similar injuries," Guerra said. About 2 months before his death, the boy was hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage, court records said. Kendall, who took the boy to a hospital emergency room, "stated that (the) child had fallen while they were at a park," records said. Court records said the boy died as a result of "massive - hemorrhage in the brain." But "there were no outward signs of trauma," records said. An autopsy showed an "abrasion on his left cheek," records said. Kendall "did not have an explanation as to how the child may have sustained any type of injury," records said. On Oct. 12, Child Protective Service removed Kendalls 3 children from her home, records said. (source: Valley Morning Star) TENNESSEE----new execution date Tennessee Court Sets Execution Date For Steven Thacker The Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence of Steven Ray Thacker. Thacker was found guilty of 1st-degree murder for the January 2000, stabbing death of tow truck driver Ray Patterson. Thacker also was convicted of killing 2 others on a 3-state crime spree. He murdered Bixby resident Laci Hill in December of 1999, and also killed Forrest Boyd after stealing his car near Springfield, Missouri. The Tennessee court scheduled a September 8th execution date for Thacker, pending state and federal appeals. (source: KOTV News) MISSISSIPPI: Death row inmate denied retrial----Attorneys argue police withheld tapes that would have helped defense A circuit judge in Oktibbeha County has ruled against Willie Jerome Manning's motion for a new trial in the 1992 murders of 2 Mississippi State University students. Manning was convicted in 1994 for the deaths of Tiffany Miller of Madison and Jon Steckler of Natchez. In 2004, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a hearing into Manning's claims that prosecutors withheld evidence from his defense attorneys during his initial trial. All evidence gathered by the police and prosecution against a defendant is required to be made available to the defense under state law. Circuit Judge Lee Howard ruled Friday that no new trial was warranted and that evidence was not improperly withheld from Manning's defense team. Manning was convicted in 1994 of two counts of capital murder in the deaths of Miller and Steckler and was sentenced to death. He is currently on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. At the center of Manning's claims were two taped recordings of conversations between him and his then-girlfriend, Paula Hathorn. During a January hearing before Howard, defense attorney David Voisin claimed the tapes were inadvertently left out of the main body of collected evidence kept by the Oktibbeha County Sheriff's Department. Since Hathorn was one of the major witnesses against Manning, Manning's legal team believed the recorded conversations could have aided significantly in their defense, Voisin argued. Howard disagreed, ruling that "no factual basis exists to prove that the state suppressed the existence of tape-recorded telephone communications between the petitioner and his girlfriend, Paula Hathorn." The tapes in question were included with all the evidence turned over to Manning's defense team, according to testimony from Oktibbeha County Sheriff Dolph Bryan, but the attorneys chose not to use them, Howard ruled. Howard said the statements made by Hathorn in the taped conversations would have been of little use to challenge Hathorn's trial testimony. Howard said taped conversations would not be sufficient to result in a different verdict in Manning's original trial. On Dec. 11, 1992 the bodies of Miller and Steckler were discovered in rural Oktibbeha County. Both students had fatal gunshot wounds. Miller's car was found the next morning. (source: Associated Press) USA: The Northeast's executioner Serial killer Michael Ross's on-again, off-again date with Connecticut's death chamber sometimes seems a made-for-TV drama, including a memorable supporting player: Ross's spiritual adviser, Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J. In anti-death penalty circles, Sister Helen is something of a celebrity. She's the author of the best-selling book Dead Man Walking, a chronicle of her experiences counseling 2 killers on Louisiana's death row, and their victims' families. 3 years after its initial publication, in 1993, the book was made into a movie of the same name. The 2 death-row inmates were fused into a single murderer, played with Mephistophelean oiliness by Sean Penn. Susan Sarandon portrayed Sister Helen in what would be an Academy Award-winning performance. Sister Helen's book brings to mind another nonfiction account of capital punishment as seen from inside prison. Robert Elliott's autobiography, Agent of Death, is one of the most unusual views of the death penalty revealed to the public. The author was for some 20 years the state executioner not only in New York, but in New England and New Jersey, too. Published in 1939, shortly before Elliott's death at 65, Agent of Death is a compilation of his journals about his official duties. Elliott used the electric chair. He was by trade an electrician, in a small upstate New York community. He was also a family man and churchgoer. Photos in his book show him strolling a suburban street, his grandchildren in tow, and smoking a pipe. But there were many nights when Elliott would drive off in his Ford sedan to a world he kept secret from everyone but his wife; his book is a chilling and meticulous account of that netherworld. Over the his career, Elliott dispatched nearly 500 people. Moreover, he was something of an "Executioner to the Stars," having thrown the switch on killers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts; Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh's baby (though some still say Hauptmann was innocent); and Ruth Gray, the 1st female in the United States to be electrocuted (1926). Elliott devotes chapters to each case. He discusses the demeanors of the condemned as they were marched to the chair; their defiance, penitence or protestations of innocence. Elliott recounts his thoughts at the moment he applied the lethal current to Hauptmann. "I remember," he writes, "thinking of [Hauptmann's] mother, sitting in Germany not knowing what happened to her son." The similarity of Agent of Death to Dead Man Walking lies in glimpses each book gives into the private side of a death sentence -- a before and after of the execution process. But that's where the analogy ends. Sister Helen is a healer, with the daunting task of comforting not only the condemned but the families of those he murdered. Elliott, on the other hand, was a wraith-like functionary who was paid a flat fee ($300 an execution) to carry out the will of John Q. Public. He merely saw himself as he was: a cog in the machinery of the criminal-justice system. He apparently soothed his conscience with that logic. Yet before closing his book, Elliott faults capital punishment as a failed deterrent to murder. Perhaps for him it was a deathbed confession. (source: Providence Journal) ARKANSAS: Judge Rules Against Lawyers, Says Killer Competent A Crawford County judge Wednesday shot down requests from attorneys seeking to stop Rickey Dale Newman's execution. Circuit Judge Gary Cottrell denied motions to reconsider a February action where he dismissed motions for DNA testing and a new trial. He turned back attorneys for the federal public defender's office in Little Rock, whom Newman fired in February. Also, Cottrell refused to allow Newman's aunt, Betty Moore of Van Buren, to intervene in the case. Federal Public Defender Bruce Eddy said the question of Moore's intervention is moot since Cottrell has ruled Newman is mentally competent. The only way Moore could intervene, Eddy added, would be if Newman was incompetent. The public defenders had sought new DNA testing on evidence collected after the 2001 murder of Marie Cholette. They questioned the effectiveness of Newman's counsel at his 2002 trial. The death row inmate served as his own attorney at trial. The public defenders were seeking a hearing to determine Newman's competency and to see whether evidence would show he is innocent. They claim Newman wants to be executed as part of an "incompetent, illness-driven desire to die." He falsely confessed to Cholette's killing in an attempt to cover up his mental retardation, they said. Assistant state Attorney General Clayton Hodges argued Wednesday questions of Newman's competency should have been brought at trial. Hodges said the public defenders violated court rules by filing the motion dismissed Wednesday. Newman said he did not want the attorneys to try to stop the execution, delayed last September when the public defender's office first intervened in the case. Newman has repeatedly said he wants to die. He said he hoped Cottrell's ruling left further appeals "dead in the water." He has requested the Arkansas Supreme Court dissolve a stay of execution. Newman asked Cottrell whether Wednesday's decision ended the appeals process. "Your guess is as good as mine," Cottrell said. The shackled, handcuffed inmate was escorted by 2 armed guards to the hearing. Newman requested not to be transported from prison in southeast Arkansas to Van Buren on Wednesday. A letter to Cottrell was prepared by the public defender's office and signed by Newman. Cottrell refused to lift a transport order, though, unless he heard specifically from Newman. The judge did not receive a letter from Newman by Wednesday. When asked why he did not want to appear at the hearing, Newman said he thought his presence would hurt Moore. "It's hard to give up on somebody being put to death," Newman said. "I appreciate her standing up for me, but it's time for justice to be done." Before Cottrell refused to give Moore standing in the case, she wrote Crawford County Public Defender Bob Marquette that she would stop trying to prevent Newman's execution. "I thought I was trying to help him, but he don't want or need my help anymore," Moore said in the letter. (source: Fort Smith Times Record)
