August 20 TEXAS----female faces death sentence Nueces County for 1st time seeks death penalty for woman For the 1st time in the nearly 160-year history of Nueces County, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against a woman. 14 jurors, 2 of them alternates, were to report Monday for the capital murder case against Maria Raquel Rivas, whom prosecutors and her lawyer describe as a professional prostitute. Rivas, 30, is accused of handing a knife to her boyfriend last year so he could kill a Liberty County man. Her boyfriend was convicted but wasn't sentenced to death. "It is kind of unusual," Grant Jones, Rivas' lawyer, said of the possible punishment facing his client. "I'm not sure they've picked the right case here, but we'll see." The prosecutor, Gail Gleimer, said gender is not a factor and that the death penalty is an option even though Rivas is not accused in the actual killing. "The guy was the stabber; but the evidence was she brought him back and she handed him the knife, so she had a big participation," Gleimer said. "There are other factors that are going to come into evidence that will show her state of mind, her history and her intent to make it not that difficult for the jury to see she's a primary person." Rivas' boyfriend, Leonard Haskins, was convicted of killing James Haynes in March 2004. Haynes, 44, of Dayton, was in Corpus Christi on a construction job when was robbed and stabbed after Rivas brought him to Haskins' apartment for sex. Haynes fled the apartment, got into his truck and drove off, eventually running into a utility pole. An emergency medical crew responding to what they thought was a traffic accident found him slumped over the steering wheel. They also found he had been stabbed in the chest. Haynes never regained consciousness. Haskins, 21, identified by authorities as a crack dealer, was convicted in June of capital murder. A Nueces County jury, however, spurned the death sentence and instead gave Haskins a life prison term, meaning he's not eligible for parole for at least 40 years. Jones declined to discuss specifics of the case and whether he would call Rivas to testify. If jurors convict Rivas, they will choose punishment of either life in prison or death. A new law signed in June by Gov. Rick Perry that gives jurors a 3rd option of life without parole applies to murders committed on or after Sept. 1. Of the 410 inmates on death row in Texas, only 9 are women. And of the 347 convicted killers executed in the state since capital punishment resumed in 1982 after an almost 2-decade hiatus, only 2 have been women. Nueces County was created in 1846 out of San Patricio County, where on Nov. 13, 1863, Chepita Rodriguez was hanged for the ax killing of a South Texas rancher. It would be 135 years before another woman was executed in the state. Karla Faye Tucker was put to death in 1998 for using a 3-foot-long pickax to hack to death a Houston man during a 1983 burglary. 2 years later, 62-year-old great-grandmother Betty Lou Beets went to the death chamber for fatally shooting her 5th husband to collect insurance and pension benefits. His body was found buried in the yard of their trailer home near Gun Barrel City. Next month, Frances Newton is scheduled for lethal injection for the 1987 shooting deaths of her husband and 2 children at their Houston apartment. In the Rivas case, court files indicate she had been kicked out of school for marijuana-related reasons and tested positive for cocaine when she was brought to an emergency room by her mother in 1990 after suffering a seizure. She was 14 at the time, medical records showed. By 2001, when she was hospitalized for infected wounds on her body, records show she had a $50-a-day cocaine habit, also was dealing drugs and told medical personnel she had had been freebasing cocaine at age 15. Rivas has previous convictions for burglary and cocaine possession and was released from a state jail in 2003 after spending nearly a year locked up for possession of a controlled substance, Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show. She's been jailed in Corpus Christi since her arrest about 3 weeks after Haynes was killed when police found her stripping the vehicle of a robbery victim. In September or October, Nueces County prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty in the trial of another woman, Angela Cruz Rodriguez, 31. She is charged in the July 2004 stabbing death of a Corpus Christi convenience store clerk who was robbed of $1.25. (source: Associated Press) CALIFORNIA: Murder Suspect Faces New Charge - Los Angeles Times----Man who will be tried in the deaths of O.C. yacht owners is accused of killing a man in 2003. A former child actor facing trial in the deaths of two yacht owners will be arraigned Monday on a charge that he killed a man he had befriended while in the Seal Beach city jail. A charge of murder-for-profit was filed Thursday against Skylar Julius DeLeon, 26, of Long Beach, accusing him of slashing the throat of pilot and jewelry maker Jon Peter Jarvi, 45, in Mexico in December 2003. DeLeon's cousin Michael W. Lewis Jr., 24, of Oatman, Ariz., was arrested Thursday on suspicion of being an accomplice and will be extradited to Orange County. DeLeon's wife, who is also a defendant in the slayings at sea last year of the Newport Beach yacht owners, has been charged with being an accessory after the fact in Jarvi's killing. Both are being held without bond at Orange County Jail. Jarvi had finished a four-month federal sentence for counterfeiting days before his death, and soon netted $50,000 after pawning his van and refinancing his Tustin condominium, said Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy. DeLeon met Jarvi while serving a one-year term for an Anaheim burglary at the Seal Beach jail, Murphy said. He spent nights there, but was allowed out during the day on a work furlough program. Jarvi told his mother Dec. 26 that he was going to Mexico on a "no-lose" business deal, then went to his bank and cashed two $25,000 checks, Murphy said. Later that day, police say, DeLeon paid $18,000 in $100 bills to a Costa Mesa boatyard to refit his 26-foot cabin cruiser, deposited about $21,000 in cash in a bank account and bought a $2,200 diamond wedding band for his wife. The next day, prosecutors believe, DeLeon, Lewis and Jarvi drove to Mexico. Jarvi's body was found that afternoon near Ensenada. DeLeon returned late that night to the Seal Beach jail and was allowed in by jailer Alonso Machain. Detectives tracked DeLeon's movements through phone calls he had made to his wife, Murphy said. Machain, 21, of Pico Rivera, is another defendant with the DeLeons in the killings of Tom and Jackie Hawks, a retired couple from Arizona who had docked their boat in Newport Harbor and were reported missing in November. The DeLeons were ordered Tuesday to stand trial in the couple's deaths after a 2-day preliminary hearing that focused on Machain's statements to police that he, Skylar DeLeon and another man threw the Hawkses into the ocean so they could steal their 55-foot vessel, the Well Deserved. The Hawkses' bodies have not been found. (source: Los Angeles Times) MARYLAND: Judge Rules Sniper Must Go to Md. John Allen Muhammad, already condemned to die in Virginia, will soon be transferred to Maryland for prosecution by the county where the 2002 sniper shootings cut their widest swath. A judge in Virginia ordered yesterday that Muhammad be moved to Montgomery County, where he and Lee Boyd Malvo have been indicted on murder charges in 6 slayings. Sussex County Circuit Court Judge W. Allan Sharrett did not set a date for the transfer, which Muhammad had challenged. Lyndia Person Ramsey, Sussex County's commonwealth attorney, said Muhammad would be moved to Maryland "probably immediately." Montgomery County Sheriff Raymond M. Kight said the transfer "could come today, it could come tomorrow, it could come Monday." 6 of the 10 Washington area sniper slayings were in Montgomery, including the 1st and the last. If convicted, Malvo could face 6 consecutive life terms in prison, and Muhammad could face the death penalty. Both have been convicted in Virginia. Muhammad, 44, has been sentenced to death for a sniper killing in Prince William County, and Malvo, 20, was found guilty of a sniper killing in Fairfax County and sentenced to life in prison. Montgomery State's Attorney Douglas F. Gansler has said that prosecution of the 2 is necessary in the county as an "insurance policy" in case they are freed on appeal. Maryland officials have agreed to return Muhammad and Malvo to Virginia once their trials in Maryland are complete. Estimates of the cost of prosecuting the men in Maryland vary widely. Kight's office has said securing the courthouse could cost nearly $400,000, while Gansler has said he expects the additional expense to be "minimal." The trials of Malvo and Muhammad cost Virginia taxpayers approximately $3 million. Malvo has been jailed in Montgomery since May 25. Muhammad, however, refused to sign paperwork needed to send him to Maryland. One of his attorneys, Peter Greenspun, argued unsuccessfully yesterday that the agreement under which his client would be moved, essentially a contract between the 2 states' governors, violates other laws controlling the interstate transfers of suspects. Ramsey said the issue before the court was far more narrow, involving only such questions as whether Muhammad is, in fact, the person charged in Maryland. Malvo and Muhammad were indicted in the slayings of James D. Martin, 55; James L. "Sonny" Buchanan, 39; Premkumar A. Walekar, 54; Sarah Ramos, 34; Lori Lewis Rivera, 25; and Conrad E. Johnson, 35. (source: Washington Post) USA: Killing the Willing: 'Volunteers,' Suicide and Competency Cornell Law School Research Paper No. 04-022 _Michigan Law Review, March 2005_ (javascript:WinOpen();) Abstract: Of the 822 executions, in the "modern" era of capital punishment, 106 involved "volunteers," or inmates who chose to waive their appeals and permit the death sentence to be carried out. The debate about volunteers, although intense, has primarily been polemic. Those who wish to curtail a death row inmate's ability to waive his appeals refer to volunteer cases as nothing more than "state assisted suicide"; advocates of permitting inmates to choose execution reject the suicide label, instead focusing on respect for a death row inmate's right to choose whether to accept his punishment. This article takes a different approach. It asks how, and how often, volunteers are in fact similar to suicidal persons and offers some empirical comparisons between the characteristics of death row inmates who have waived their appeals and been executed with those of people who commit suicide in the "free world." The demographic and epidemiological similarities between death row volunteers and free world suicides strongly suggest that the present legal standard for assessing the legitimacy of a death sentenced inmate's desire to waive his appeals - the competency standard - has turned a blind eye to the possibility that many waivers are motivated by the inmate's desire to commit suicide. Thus, this article proposes a standard for assessing waiver which both attempts to insure that a death row inmate is not permitted to use the death penalty as a means of committing state assisted suicide, and which protects the right of a mentally healthy inmate to forego further appeals when motivated by acceptance of the justness of the punishment. (source: Cornell Law School) FLORIDA: Lawyers of man on death row seek detective's testimony -- Said to have had affair with killer's girlfriend Cary Michael Lambrix's lawyers were back in court Friday, asking a judge to hear the testimony of an investigator who allegedly had an affair with a woman who helped put Lambrix on death row. An attorney for the state told Lee Circuit Judge R. Thomas Corbin it's not necessary to hear from former investigator Robert Daniels because his relationship with Frances Ottinger had nothing to do with Lambrix's convictions. Lambrix, 45, of Glades County has been on death row since 1984 for the murders of Alisha Bryant, 19, of LaBelle and Lawrence Lamberson, 35, of Key Largo. Lambrix and Ottinger - who was Lambrix's girlfriend at the time - met Bryant and Lamberson at a bar on Feb. 5, 1983. Prosecutors say Lambrix lured the two to his trailer and then took them outside and killed them. Ottinger, 52, whose name was Frances Smith in 1983, told jurors she was cooking spaghetti for the four of them when Lambrix entered the trailer covered in blood and said he'd killed Bryant and Lamberson. During an April 5, 2004, hearing, Ottinger testified she had an affair with Daniels, who was an investigator for the state attorney's office, during Lambrix's trial. Attorneys Roseanne Eckert and William M. Hennis III of Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, the state-funded law office that represents death row inmates, are trying to use Ottinger's revelation and numerous other issues to get Lambrix a new trial. Eckert told Corbin the love affair - which Ottinger testified lasted "a very short time" - was something the defense didn't know about at the time which could have altered the jury's perception of Ottinger. "They had a reason to manipulate the testimony," Eckert said, adding that "every person on the jury would want to know that the 2 main witnesses were having sex at the time." "Everything she said has to be re-evaluated in light of the affair." Florida Assistant Attorney General Carol Dittmar told the judge Ottinger's testimony was consistent during the investigation and trial and Ottinger hadn't met Daniels when she made her initial statements to police. "They didn't even know each other when she came forward with this evidence," Dittmar said, adding the defense argument "doesn't make any sense." Saying sex "does not equal a conspiracy," Dittmar said she's "at a loss to understand why we need to have any more evidence taken on any of the claims before this court." During the April 2004 hearing, Lambrix made a revelation of his own. He testified for the 1st time that he killed Lamberson, who was also known as Clarence Moore, in self-defense when he found Lamberson attacking Bryant and he tried to intervene. Lambrix wasn't present Friday. He listened via a telephone hookup with death row and said little other than he's satisfied with his lawyers. Corbin didn't say whether he'll take the testimony of Daniels and other witnesses the defense wants to present. The judge said he'll have a transcript made of the hearing and issue an order as soon as possible. (source: The News-Press)
