May 2 OHIO: Experts: Defendant's mental illness can lead to vote for execution The trial of the man behind a string of highway shootings that frightened Columbus-area drivers for months presents jurors with another chance to decide if a mentally ill murder defendant should be hospitalized or executed if convicted. "Both of these outcomes, in a sense, protect us from that person," said David Siegel, professor at the New England School of Law in Boston. "But it seems to me to say tremendously different things about our sort of moral response to their condition." By law, severe mental illness should be considered among the reasons against sentencing a killer to death. But juries and sometimes judges have considered mental illness an argument for execution, death penalty experts say. "If you have evidence of madness, it's going to create fear on the part of the jury, which according to research is the only emotion that correlates with death sentences," said Christopher Slobogin, law professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Charles McCoy Jr. has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to aggravated murder and 23 other counts in the 12 linked shootings at moving vehicles and buildings. His attorneys began their defense late last week, and the case is expected to go to the jury by Wednesday. The defense concedes McCoy was the shooter. But his attorneys can't tell jurors he would be sent to a mental hospital if they agree his paranoid schizophrenia kept him from knowing right from wrong during the shootings over five months in 2003 and 2004. McCoy, 29, could face the death penalty if convicted of the most serious charge - the death of a 62-year-old woman who was the only person struck in the shootings on and around Columbus-area highways. Prosecutors aren't fighting evidence of McCoy's history of paranoid schizophrenia, which causes delusions, but were careful to screen prospective jurors to ensure sympathy for his illness wouldn't prevent them from convicting him. The death sentence remains uncommon in Franklin County. An Associated Press analysis of more than 20 years of capital indictments shows that 16 of the 151 cases that didn't end in a plea agreement, or 10.6 percent, ended with a death sentence. The 16 men Ohio has executed since resuming the death penalty in 1999 included 3 with delusional disorders. One man thought his girlfriend and daughter would come back to life after he stuffed their bodies in his refrigerator and freezer. "People who commit aggravated murder generally are not like the rest of us," said John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, who declined to speak specifically about McCoy. "It shouldn't be surprising that people who commit these kinds of horrible crimes, some of them at least have some problems. That doesn't mean they are legally insane; it doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing." Ohio and other states list mental illness as a mitigating factor that jurors "shall" weigh against the aggravating circumstances of the crime when deciding on the death penalty. Several studies show that mental illness is the only mitigating factor that is more likely to lead to a death sentence, Slobogin said. The trend appears when many cases are studied at once, but it's almost impossible to prove an individual jury or panel of judges ignored the law, he said. In Texas, with the most executions in the country, a jury spared the life of Andrea Yates for drowning her 5 children in a bathtub, in part because of her mental illness. Her convictions were later overturned. On Friday, a military jury recommended death for a soldier who attacked comrades with a rifle and grenades early in the Iraq invasion, killing 2 soldiers. Sgt. Hasan Akbar, 34, has forms of paranoia and schizophrenia and told jurors he attacked because he felt his life was in danger. Nationwide, 16 % of prison inmates have a mental illness, compared with about 5 % of the general population. In Ohio prisons, it's 18 %. "We used to take care of them within the mental health system," said Thomas Hafemeister, director of legal studies at the Institute for Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "The criminal justice system has become the system that can't say no." Separate studies indicate 5 % to 20 % of inmates on death row have the most severe conditions, such as schizophrenia. Often, mentally ill defendants don't have money for attorneys experienced enough to properly raise the issue at trial, said Ron Honberg, legal director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. That makes it impossible to address on appeal. Also, the defendants often deny their condition and resist an attorney's efforts to bring it up. When the subject is introduced at trial, it's often not until the person is convicted and the jury is considering the sentence, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. By then, it just sounds like an excuse. The U.S. Supreme Court has been gradually narrowing the death penalty, saying it's unconstitutional for those so insane they can't understand what's happening, juveniles and those with mental retardation. The next test, Hafemeister and others said, could be severe mental illness that doesn't rise to the level of legal insanity. "We're not saying they would be released, but we reserve the death penalty for the worst of the worst," he said. "We're probably a fair distance from that point." (source: Associated Press) USA: Death as a penalty Fewer people are being sentenced to die. Fewer people are dying at the hands of the state. Fewer states are in the business of killing criminals. Has America lost its appetite for state-sponsored execution? The numbers may not support that conclusion, but the decrease in people sentenced to death in 2004 represents the 6th consecutive annual decline. Something's afoot. The 125 death sentences issued last year were 19 fewer than in 2003, the lowest since the U.S. Supreme Court reintroduced capital punishment in 1976. The reasons for the decline vary. Proponents of capital punishment attribute it to the Supreme Court's narrowing of eligible defendants. Opponents point to DNA exonerations -- 117 since 1996 -- and other high-profile cases of wrongful convictions. Whatever the reason, the decline in death sentences, as reported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, should give judges and juries pause. They underscore the fallibility of the criminal justice system. And they reflect a growing recognition by the public of the immutability of capital punishment in the face of those failings. Maryland has followed the national trend: Death sentences in the past decade have fallen from 7 to 1 last year. But ours is a flawed system -- who gets the death penalty varies by race and geography. Despite those findings from a 2003 University of Maryland study, the death penalty machinery grinds on. A June hearing before the Maryland Court of Appeals presents the next challenge to the state's biased system. That's when the court takes up the appeals of 2 death-row inmates based on the findings of the state-funded UM review. The discretion allowed Maryland prosecutors in seeking the death penalty has resulted in unintended consequences. For example, a convicted murderer-rapist in Baltimore is less likely to face the death penalty than if he committed the crime in Towson. The variances in the use of the death penalty, as identified in the UM study, lead to a disturbing conclusion: Capital punishment in Maryland isn't necessarily reserved for the worst offender or the worst crime. Death penalty laws are under scrutiny across the country. New York legislators last month refused to reinstate capital punishment in the Empire State. In New Jersey, a court has ordered the state to explain its use of lethal injection. A provision of Kansas' death penalty has been found unconstitutional by a state appellate court. In the absence of a promised review by Maryland's lieutenant governor -- an opponent of the death penalty -- and state legislators' refusal to consider the impact of the UM study, the state's high court must address the disparities documented in the voluminous UM report. Until then, jurors deciding a capital case should follow the lead of the jury that sentenced an accomplice in the 2004 ambush-murder of Baltimore police Detective Thomas Gary Newman. It decided that a sentence of life without parole was a fate worse than death. (source: Baltimore Sun) CONNECTICUT: Death penalty opponents plan protest of Ross execution Serial killer Michael Ross' scheduled execution is just 9 days away, and now death penalty opponents are planning three days of vigils and marches. Protestors will begin a 60-hour march and rally 3 days before Ross is scheduled to die. They'll start at Gallows Hill at Trinity College and walk to the Osborn prison. Ross is scheduled to die at 2:01 a.m. on Wednesday May 11 for the murders of four women back in the 1980's. Appeals filed in the state Supreme Court last week may still delay the execution. (source: WFSB News)
