Sept. 27 VERMONT: Prosecutors say Fell death penalty should stand Federal prosecutors are urging a judge to reject claims that could spare the life of convicted killer Donald Fell. Prosecutors deny allegations by Fell's attorneys that they committed misconduct during Fell's death penalty trial last summer. The 51-page document is the 2nd round of an expected lengthy appeals process. Fell was sentenced to death in July after being convicted of kidnapping and murdering Terry King, a 53-year-old wife and grandmother from North Clarendon in November 2000. Fell's attorneys argue prosecutors made deceptive statements during the trial and distorted the law. The defense argued Fell's history of physical and sexual abuse should spare his life. (source: Associated Press) INDIANA----impending execution Governor denies Matheney's clemency request Gov. Mitch Daniels denied Alan Matheney's petition for clemency today, clearing the way for his execution after midnight. Matheney was sentenced to death in Lake County for the 1989 murder of his ex-wife, Lisa Marie Bianco, 29, Mishawaka. The governor's office offered no explanation, other than to state in a written release: "At the time of the murder, Matheney was on an eight-hour furlough from prison, where he was serving time for a previous assault on Ms. Bianco." Matheney's execution by lethal injection in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City would be the state's fifth execution in 2005, the most in a single year in Indiana since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1977. His attorneys had sought clemency on grounds that he suffers from severe mental illness, saved the life of a prison guard and was sentenced to death before juries were allowed to consider life in prison without parole as a sentencing option. The Indiana Parole Board called off hearings on Matheney's clemency request last week after his attorneys could not talk him into appearing before the board for an interview. (source: Indianapolis Star) ************************* Execution close for Indiana killer----Inmate on day pass beat ex-wife who sent him to prison 16 years after beating his ex-wife to death, Alan Matheney is set to die by lethal injection early Wednesday at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. The killing of Lisa Marie Bianco, a 29-year-old mother of two, made national news in 1989 because she had done everything domestic violence experts advise: Bianco had left her abusive husband, helped prosecutors in north central Indiana send him to prison and even worked at a local women's shelter. None of that stopped Matheney. While out of prison on an 8-hour pass, he broke into his ex-wife's home in Mishawaka, Ind. Bianco, wearing only underwear because she had just gotten out of the bathtub, screamed to her 10-year-old daughter to call the police and ran. She made it across the street before Matheney repeatedly struck her with an unloaded shotgun, breaking it into 3 pieces. Then-Gov. Evan Bayh, now a U.S. senator, suspended the state's furlough system. 2 corrections department employees lost their jobs for failing to notify Bianco that her ex-husband had been granted a furlough. And the women's shelter where Bianco had counseled other domestic abuse victims just hours before her death dedicated a conference room in her honor. Matheney, now 54, declined to be interviewed. His attorneys say he is preparing to die, although they hope Gov. Mitch Daniels will decide to commute Matheney's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That's what the governor did last month with another inmate on Indiana's death row, Arthur Baird II, whose attorneys argued he should not be executed because he is mentally ill. Matheney's attorneys say there is evidence dating back at least 20 years that their client suffers from severe delusions and is psychotic. "He was then mentally ill, he has been mentally ill and he is mentally ill," said Carol Heise, an attorney with the Evanston-based Midwest Center for Justice, which handled Matheney's final, unsuccessful legal appeal. "The severely mentally ill should not be executed." Matheney is under the delusion that his ex-wife was having an affair with the local prosecutor and that the two were conspiring to keep him in prison, said Steve Schutte, an attorney with Indiana's public defender office who has represented Matheney for 13 years and is expected to spend Tuesday with the death row inmate. That should not stop the state from executing Matheney, said Millie Bianco, the victim's mother. She said her daughter endured much abuse from Matheney during their 7-year marriage, and that abuse got worse after the divorce. "Every home she lived in was broken into, and he ran her off the road and firebombed her garage," said Millie Bianco, who raised her 2 granddaughters, now both married and in their 20s. She remembers Matheney warning her 4 years before the killing that if Lisa Bianco ever testified against him, she would end up in a grave next to her 17-year-old brother who had died in a car accident. At the time of her murder, Matheney was serving an 8-year sentence for assaulting his former wife and kidnapping their 2 daughters. "He had a mission, and he declared it years before. It was all-important--delusional or not--to complete that mission," Bianco said. "I don't think any mental illness he may or may not have had would preclude him from knowing right from wrong." Since her daughter's death, Bianco has appeared at conferences and on national television to speak out against the way the criminal justice system treats victims. She wants abusers held accountable from the initial domestic disturbance--something she says did not happen with her daughter. Abusers need anger-management classes and counseling, she said, and victims must be offered help too. Most of all, victims' rights need to be as important as the defendant's, Bianco said. There has been some progress in the way society views and deals with domestic violence victims, said Cyneatha Millsaps, president of Family Services of Elkhart County, which operates the women's shelter where Bianco worked. "Domestic violence is now being talked about on larger scales," Millsaps said. "Back in 1989, you could barely get people to talk about it. The violence was still something that a lot of people hid." She said staff at the Elkhart County Women's Shelter will plan a special activity Tuesday night for the women and children staying at the 40-bed center to help them keep their minds off the execution, scheduled to be carried out 60 miles away in Michigan City. "We're more concerned with Lisa's life and what she did for us than giving Alan Matheney's life any extra attention," Millsaps said. "Our concern is the survivors." (source: Chicago Tribune) *********************** Indiana should stop executing prisoners On Sept. 9, more than 125 death penalty opponents from the Seeking Peace: the Courage to Be Nonviolent Conference, gathered on the plaza outside Gov. Mitch Daniels office. Our vigil was a call for the end of state-sanctioned murder. Our posters depicted ways executions have happened: hanging, crosses, burnings at the stake, electrocution, guillotining, firing squad and lethal injection. A delegation of 8 of us went in to meet with the governor after the vigil. We came to express appreciation for his commutation of Arthur Baird IIs sentence. We came to request the end of the death penalty in Indiana; to point out the high cost of Indianas death penalty in comparison with sentences of life without parole (38 percent greater); and to urge that state money be used for victims of Hurricane Katrina rather than for the death penalty. Our delegate from Illinois came to remind Daniels that former Illinois Gov. Ryan put a hold on all Illinois executions because innocent people have been condemned to die because of the racist nature of executions and bias of the death penalty against the poor. Our delegate from Canada wanted to inform him that Canada, like most other democratic countries, does not have a death penalty. We were chagrined when neither Daniels nor the lieutenant governor was in his office. Only a young staff person who had worked just a couple days was behind the desk to hear our concerns. Therefore, we have chosen this less personal route to communicate our invitation to him to end the death penalty in Indiana through all means at his disposal before Alan Matheneys execution, scheduled for Wednesday. CLIFF KINDY----North Manchester (source: Letter to the Editor, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette) MISSOURI----new execution date Execution is set for Oct. 26 in Chain of Rocks murders 1 of 4 men convicted in the April 1991 murder of 2 sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge is scheduled to be executed Oct. 26. The Missouri Supreme Court set the date Monday for Marlin Gray, 37, who was sentenced to death in December 1992 for his role in the rapes and murders of Robin Kerry, 19, and Julie Kerry, 20. The sisters were stripped, beaten and raped over the course of an hour before they were shoved off a pier of the bridge into the Mississippi River. Their cousin, Tom Cummins, 19, was forced to watch the assault and then ordered to jump into the river. He survived. "The brutal murder of these 2 sisters shocked the community and the sensibilities of all decent Missourians," Attorney General Jay Nixon said. Gray's attorney, Joanne Martin Descher, said she has asked the U.S. Supreme Court and Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt to intervene. "They portray (Gray) as the mastermind, but there was no evidence that he directed anyone to do it," Descher said. At his trial, Gray testified that he had left the bridge to smoke marijuana while two of his friends, Reginald Clemons and Antonio Richardson, murdered the women. Gray told authorities that he raped the sisters, but later recanted his taped confession, saying it had been coerced by police beatings. A judge rejected his claim. He wasn't the only witness to allege mistreatment by police. Cummins was an initial suspect before police found evidence that pointed to Gray and his companions. Cummins later sued the city, alleging that detectives had tried to force a confession. The suit was settled on confidential terms. Richardson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was reduced to life in prison when the state Supreme Court ruled last October that he had been improperly sentenced by a judge rather than a jury. Clemons remains on death row. The 4th killer, Daniel Winfrey, who was 15 at the time, was sentenced to 30 years. (source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch) CALIFORNIA: Calif. Rule Shuts Out Foreign Lawyers When state legislators cracked down on deadbeat dads several years ago, they probably didn't realize it would stir up a minor international crisis over the practice of law -- one that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger now has the power to correct. The only problem is no one's sure what the governor plans to do now that a bill to resolve the issue sits on his desk. The current conflict began innocently enough when then-Assemblywoman Jackie Speier in 1992 pushed a bill through the state Legislature that prohibits the renewal of any professional license -- including a bar license -- for anyone who is in arrears on family- or child-support payments. Social Security numbers were used as the tracking device, and the State Bar routinely made up 9-digit numbers for the convenience of keeping tabs on foreign lawyers. Matters got complicated last year, however, when the State Bar began enforcing a state statute that requires any applicant for a Bar license to provide a Social Security number as part of the state's Child Support Enforcement Program. While that posed no obstacle to foreign lawyers living and working in California, it effectively shut out untold numbers of attorneys who traditionally have practiced law or taken the state's bar exam while residing in their home countries. An uproar ensued, particularly from England and Ireland, but there were also complaints from Italy and the deans of American law schools with foreign students. Alison Hook, head of the international department of the Law Society of England and Wales, wrote in an August letter that the new requirement "has resulted in a complete bar on access to the bar exam by English solicitors and, indeed, other foreign lawyers who are not U.S. citizens and do not (and do not necessarily intend to) possess a green card." Martin Uden, consul general of the British consulate in San Francisco, noted in his own August letter that the requirement could have adverse impacts on trade relations between the United Kingdom, which has the world's 4th largest economy, and California, the 6th. "It is clear that if British lawyers resident in the U.K. cannot join the California Bar, they are more likely to direct clients to parts of the U.S. with which they are familiar -- that is, where they have been admitted to practice (e.g., New York, Virginia, Washington state or Oregon)," Uden wrote. "In our view, California clearly stands to gain if British (and other foreign-based attorneys) are allowed to resume sitting the California bar." The San Francisco-based Irish consulate also expressed concerns. Last month, with the State Bar's support, Assembly Judiciary Committee Chairman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, proposed that applicants be allowed to use a federal tax identification number "or other appropriate identification as determined by the State Bar" in lieu of Social Security numbers. "What's intended," said State Bar Deputy Executive Director Robert Hawley last week, "is to create an exception for the Social Security number requirement for lawyers who want to become full-fledged members of the State Bar of California, but are not going to be here and do not have child-support problems." He said the current requirement is a barrier to California being "a richer player in the market for international legal services." The proposal faces one hurdle. It was attached to an existing bill -- AB 664 -- that would let courts refer tenants in eviction actions to legal aid providers that receive State Bar trust funds in addition to those federally funded through the Legal Services Corp. When the bill went before the Senate on Sept. 6 and the Assembly on Sept. 7, Republicans overwhelmingly voted against it, even though it passed in both houses. Supporters and opponents, however, say the vote expressed hostility to the trust funds proposal, and not for the change in licensing identification. The two issues can't be separated, and it's not clear whether Schwarzenegger will veto or approve AB 664. "It's a toss-up," says one person familiar with the process who wanted to remain anonymous. 2 other anonymous sources, though, said the governor has indicated he supports changing the number requirement. He has until Oct. 9 to make a decision or allow it to pass into law without signing it. In urging passage, Uden, the British consul general, noted that the U.K. welcomes California attorneys to practice there and puts up no regulatory barriers as long as the applicants are qualified. "We would hope," he wrote, "that this open approach on the part of the U.K. legal authority (the Law Society) would earn British lawyers reciprocal treatment in California -- as it has done in the past up until last October." (source: The Recorder)
