Sept. 8 OHIO----impending execution stayed/delayed Taft grants two-month reprieve for condemned killer set to die In a rare move for a state where capital punishment has become commonplace, Gov. Bob Taft on Thursday delayed the execution of a condemned killer professing his innocence to allow for a 2nd parole board hearing. The parole board earlier Thursday requested the delay of John Spirko's execution, citing questions about the accuracy of information presented to the board about the case on Aug. 23. Spirko, 59, was convicted of killing a northwest Ohio postmistress but says he didn't do it. "Considering the clemency of an inmate sentenced to death is the Parole Board's most serious task," Gary Croft, the parole board chairman, wrote in a letter to Taft. The board wants to ensure "that the process of making a death penalty clemency recommendation has your full confidence and the full confidence of the citizens of Ohio," the letter said. Taft said he supported the parole board's decision to call for a 2nd hearing. He ordered the execution delayed until Nov. 15 to allow for the hearing. Messages were left for Spirko's attorney seeking comment. The reprieve, only the second of its type by Taft, followed reports that the state presented inaccurate information at Spirko's clemency hearing last month. The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported that Timothy Prichard, director of the attorney general's capital crimes office, made false statements and mischaracterized evidence regarding what Spirko knew about the 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger, 48, and his whereabouts on the day of the killing. After that report, Attorney General Jim Petro defended Prichard's presentation. On Aug. 23, Prichard told the parole board that a description of Mottinger's purse had to have come from Spirko because investigators didn't know what the missing purse looked like. But according to the case record, an investigator was given a very similar description of the purse by Mottinger's husband on the day his wife disappeared, 12 weeks before investigators discussed the purse with Spirko. Taft's decision was the 1st significant legal victory for Spirko, whose execution appeared imminent. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Carr turned down Spirko's request for a new trial and a delay, saying there was no reason to believe that investigators fraudulently hid evidence from Spirko's defense team. Ohio has executed 16 men since resuming executions in 1999, including 7 last year, 2nd in the nation only to Texas. 2 other executions still are scheduled this year. In 2003, following the parole board's recommendation, Taft commuted the sentence of Jerome Campbell of Cincinnati to life in prison after questions were raised about evidence introduced at his trial. Taft, a Republican, has never gone against the parole board's recommendation in a death penalty case. Spirko was charged after approaching authorities and offering to trade information about the Mottinger case to help his girlfriend who was facing charges in an unrelated case. He told investigators details of the 1982 slaying, including what clothes and jewelry Mottinger was wearing that day. But Spirko's lawyers counter that he thought he was telling authorities what they wanted to hear. They say what he knew came from newspapers and lengthy conversations he had with investigators. Petro stands by Spirko's conviction and sentence but supports Taft's decision for a rehearing, spokeswoman Kim Norris said Thursday. "The attorney general recognizes that as the most severe punishment the state can inflict for a crime, capital punishment requires an extraordinary degree of comprehensive due process," Norris said. A review last month of Spirko's case by The Associated Press found that Spirko faces execution while dozens of other killers charged the same year with similar or worse crimes under Ohio law escaped a death sentence. Prosecutors cited two factors in the state's capital punishment law when they charged Spirko in 1983: the murder occurred during a robbery, and Spirko had a previous murder conviction. 47 other offenders charged in 1983 with death penalty crimes had i2 or more factors - called specifications under Ohio law - but only 10 were sentenced to death, the AP review found. Some of those indictments included cases such as Spirko's in which the crime was committed in 1982. ON THE NET -- Ohio death row: _http://www.drc.state.oh.us/public/deathrow.htm_ ****************************** GOVERNOR TAFT STATEMENT ON JOHN SPIRKO REHEARING Governor Taft today issued the following statement regarding the Ohio Parole Board rehearing John Spirko clemency case. "Based on the Ohio Parole Boards request, I have issued a warrant of reprieve for inmate John Spirko, delaying his execution date to November 15, 2005. "I support the Parole Boards decision to accept the proposal from both the Attorney General and counsel for inmate Spirko to rehear Mr. Spirkos case and reconsider its recommendation." (source: Associated Press) USA: The Wrong Side of History -- William Rehnquist lived to see much of his pro-death penalty work undermined. Conservative politicians and pundits in Washington have spent much of the past 3 days celebrating the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's record on federalism, issues of church and state, and constitutional rights. Many have failed, however, to accurately explore one issue on which the longtime jurist managed to lose his grip: the debate over the American death penalty. When President Richard Nixon nominated Rehnquist, then an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, to the bench in 1971, the death penalty was quickly becoming a relic of bygone days. No state had carried out an execution in more than four years, and the case of Furman v. Georgia, in which the Court would strike down all operating death penalty statutes throughout the country -- over the objections of Rehnquist and three other justices -- was already on the horizon. Before long, however, Rehnquist and the nation's capital punishment proponents struck back in full force. In 1976, with re-written statutes in Georgia and several other states, the court, with Rehnquist in the majority, reinstated the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. Within a year, the state of Utah executed Gary Gilmore by firing squad, and by 1985, 50 people had already been executed in what has come to be known as the "modern era" of capital punishment. In the aftermath of Gregg, Rehnquist blasted the "endlessly drawn-out legal proceedings' involved in the capital punishment system - a system, remember, in which more than 120 death row inmates have been exonerated on account of actual innocence since the 1970s - and urged a faster, more streamlined means of handling death penalty appeals. Those opinions, as well as his opinions of the late-1980s, which ignored evidence of blatant racial discrimination with regard to capital defendants and greased the machinery of death for the years to come, eventually exacted their toll: the decade of the 1990s brought with it an explosion of executions nationwide, with a peak of 98 in 1999. But in his final years on the court, Rehnquist began to lose his command of the death penalty issue. In 2002, he dissented in Atkins v. Virginia, which banned the execution of people with mental retardation; and earlier this year he joined Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the landmark Roper v. Simmons case, which banned the execution of juvenile offenders. Those decisions, combined with a number of others that have struck the heart the American death penalty since the turn of the century, have launched the capital punishment debate onto a new coursequite possibly in the direction of total abolition. Meanwhile, trends outside the court have followed suit. The number of death sentences imposed nationwide has dropped 50 percent over the past five years, and current public opinion polls show far less support for capital punishment than in the 1990s. At the state level, there's been a similar shift. Just this April, New York essentially gave up on its death penalty system, and several other states, including Connecticut and New Mexico, have begun to reconsider their statutes. Following the court's reasoning in Atkins and Simmons - that certain executions violate the nation's "evolving standards of decency," as determined in large part by the actions of state legislatures, and thus violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment - these actions at the state level could well determine the fate of capital punishment itself in the years to come. Of course, Bush nominees to the Supreme Court, starting with the former Rehnquist law clerk John Roberts, are not likely to force an end to capital punishment in the United States if and when they join the bench. But as recent history demonstrates, some conservative jurists, such as Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the court in Simmons, have not hesitated to part with the notion of blind support for the death penalty that Rehnquist so firmly held. The late chief justice, make no mistake, seriously damaged the status of human rights in the United States through his opinions and decisions on capital punishment over the past 4 decades. Fortunately, however, he failed, despite his best efforts, to solidify the death penalty as a settled hallmark of the American justice system. And with support for state-sanctioned killing rapidly eroding across the nation, it seems increasingly likely that Rehnquist will eventually occupy the same territory in the death penalty debate that he will forever hold on the issue of school segregation: the wrong side of history. (source: Patrick Mulvaney is a freelance journalist and a law student at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written recently for The Nation and the Village Voice; Mother Jones) CALIFORNIA----new death sentence Motel Owner Gets Death Penalty for 4 Murders A judge today ordered the execution of a Studio City motel owner who strangled and burned a business rival and her 3 relatives. Pravin "Peter" Govin, 35, becomes the 646th inmate on California's death row, and the 196th from Los Angeles. A jury found him guilty of the May 4, 2002 murders of Gita Kumar, 42; her son, Paras Kumar, 18; her daughter, Tulsi Kumar, 16; and her mother-in-law, Sitaben Patel, 63. The sentence was imposed by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell. Govin did not address the court, nor did any survivors of the victims. The family members were strangled with plastic garbage bag ties, beaten and burned when Govin, his brother and a business partner set Kumar's Hollywood Hills home ablaze. The other 2 men have also been convicted of the crimes, stemming from a dispute over access to an alley that separated two hotels on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Virendra "Victor" Govin, 37, is on death row, and Carlos Amador, 28, pleaded guilty and is in prison for life. Kumar and the Govin brothers owned adjacent motels in the 10700 block of Ventura Boulevard. Both families claimed the right to use the alley separating the two properties. The Govins wanted to expand their business, the Studio Place Inn. Kumar, who co-owned the Universal City Inn with her husband, Harish Patel, wanted to use the alley as a driveway. The prosecutor's case rested largely on the testimony of Amador, who said he saw the Govins rob the victims' home, gag and blindfold them with duct tape and beat them before strangling them by tightening plastic "zip ties" around their necks. Amador was charged with the Govin brothers, but later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a deal made with the district attorney's office. He is serving 4 concurrent terms of 15 years to life. Defense attorney John Sweeney contended there was scant evidence to place Pravin Govin at the crime scene and attacked Amador's credibility. "It's difficult to see what people are willing to do just for money," said Joseph Woods, the foreman of the jury that recommended Govin be executed. "This case was all about money, it was all about greed." (source: Los Angeles Times)
