Nov. 2 INDIANA: Tippecanoe prosecutor will seek death penalty In Lafayette, a prosecutor said Tuesday he would seek the death penalty against a Lafayette woman who is charged with fatally beating her 4-year-old stepdaughter, who police said had spent the night bound and gagged in her bed. Tippecanoe County Prosecutor Jerry Bean said he decided to seek the execution of Michelle Gauvin, 33, after reviewing evidence in the case. (source: Indianapolis Star) ***************** Lawyers met in death penalty case 15 years ago Lawyers on both sides of the Michelle Gauvin murder case have death penalty trial experience -- in the same trial. Tippecanoe County prosecutor Jerry Bean served as 2nd prosecution chair in the 1990 trial of Joseph L. Trueblood. Trueblood was executed in June 2003 for the Aug. 15, 1988, murders of his girlfriend, Susan Bowsher Hughes, 22, and her 2 children, Ashelyn, 2, and William, 1. Thomas O'Brien, 1 of 2 lawyers representing Gauvin, sat at the defense table in the Trueblood trial. O'Brien was 1 of 2 attorneys who represented Trueblood in the 1990 trial in Tippecanoe Circuit Court. That trial didn't go to conclusion, however. Trueblood pleaded guilty during the second day of testimony. The jury was dismissed. Judge Ronald Melichar heard evidence on aggravating circumstances and imposed the death penalty without a jury recommendation. Bean will be assisted during the Gauvin trial by deputy prosecutor Laura Zeman. O'Brien will get help from deputy public defender Lee Griffith. The last time Tippecanoe County had a trial involving the death penalty was the 1995 trial of Christopher Stevens, which took place in Tippecanoe Superior Court 2 with the late Judge George Heid presiding and a Tippecanoe County jury hearing evidence. Stevens' case was venued to Tippecanoe County from Putnam County because of pretrial publicity in the Greencastle area. Stevens was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering a 10-year-old Cloverdale boy he had been molesting. (source: Journal and Courier) USA: Patriot Death Games THE USA PATRIOT Act is intended to give the government the authority it needs to prevent terrorism. But the House has larded its version of the bill reauthorizing some of those powers with extraneous provisions that would significantly reshape the federal death penalty -- and not just in terrorism cases. Whatever else happens in the House-Senate conference committee that will meet soon to reconcile differing versions of the bill, these provisions need to be removed. The most troubling is a little-noticed section that would dramatically alter capital sentencing proceedings. Currently a jury has to be unanimous to impose death: one dissenter and the punishment defaults to life in prison. The bill would change that by allowing a new jury to be empaneled whenever a sentencing jury cannot make a unanimous decision one way or the other. This would effectively give prosecutors a do-over in many of the cases in which they fail to achieve a death sentence the first time around -- or the second time or the third. We oppose capital punishment, but even its supporters should agree that a sentence so severe and irreversible should be meted out only when the arguments for it are overpowering. When a qualified juror is not persuaded, prosecutors should not get another chance. Another House proposal would permit a death sentence in terrorism cases even when the defendant did not intend to kill. Under current law, capital sentences require not merely a homicide but evidence of intent either to kill or to seriously injure someone, except in cases involving espionage and treason. The new language would group terrorism crimes in with those espionage and treason cases, where intent to kill is not necessary. It would become easier to execute low-level conspirators who raised money or aided a plot in some way but who did not mean for their actions to cause death or injury. Depending on how the courts interpret this change, it could dramatically expand the federal death penalty. On the substantive matters at the bill's core, the Senate's bill is preferable to the House's in important respects -- giving the government the authorities it needs while building in better checks and balances than exist now. But to get the right answer on the Patriot Act, it is critical that controversial, unrelated legislation be considered separately. On their own, such radical changes in the federal death penalty would have trouble getting through Congress. They shouldn't be slipped through either. (source: Editorial, Washington Post) ******************* Alito's Record----Upholding executions, but not in every case Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was on the 3-judge panel that did not stop the 1999 execution of so-called House of Horrors murderer Gary Heidnik, and he has rejected other death-row appeals in his 15 years on the Philadelphia-based federal appeals court. He also wrote the majority opinion turning down the claims of a killer sentenced to death in Lehigh County - only to be overturned this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. But Alito, whom President Bush nominated Monday to the nation's highest court, has also ruled in favor of murder defendants. He was on a 3-judge panel that ordered a new penalty hearing in a York County case, and this year, he was part of a panel that upheld a ruling that a death sentence was unconstitutional. In 2 cases involving convicted murderers serving life sentences, he sent cases back for lower-court hearings so defendants could raise jury issues. Lawyers familiar with the Third Circuit said that when it comes to death-penalty cases, Alito doesn't bend over backward to find errors just because it is a capital case - and he doesn't shy away from granting relief when he believes it is appropriate. "He doesn't have a fixed opinion," lawyer Peter Goldberger said yesterday about how his former Yale Law classmate might view death-penalty cases if confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. Timothy K. Lewis, a former Third Circuit judge and ardent death-penalty opponent, said that although he had never discussed capital punishment with Alito, he believes that Alito's "natural inclination toward judicial restraint" means that he would only reluctantly interfere with a death sentence. "What that means in a death-penalty context is perhaps a tendency to require that it be a very convincing case of ineffective assistance, or something the state had done wrong, before interfering with that process," said Lewis, who now practices law in Pittsburgh. Lewis recounted how he had expressed concern about Alito's conservatism during a meeting with then-Third Circuit Chief Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. the night before Lewis was sworn in as a judge. Higginbotham, a liberal member of the court, responded that Alito was a highly principled judge. "He is my kind of conservative," Lewis recalled Higginbotham as having said. Lewis said the elder judge was right. Alito, he said, "was highlyprincipled and intellectually honest, and did not have any kind of agenda or hard-core conservative philosophy." Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer who handles capital appeals and is well-versed in the Third Circuit's approach to cases, said he believed that Alito's conservatism would make it unlikely for him to interfere much with death sentences. "He is likely to decide with those who have been inclined to uphold death sentences, and who construe the death penalty very broadly," Lustberg said. But Goldberger cautioned that it was difficult to figure from Alito's decisions on the Third Circuit how he might approach such issues on the Supreme Court. "The way in which a judge of the Court of Appeals is bound by precedent is different from the way a Supreme Court justice is bound by precedent," Goldberger said. "The Supreme Court gets to mold and advance and sometimes even change and reverse precedent. The Court of Appeals never does." This year, a ruling Alito wrote was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a death-penalty case out of Lehigh County. Ronald Rompilla, convicted of killing a local tavern owner in 1988, and his appellate lawyers contended that his trial counsel had violated the Constitution in failing to get records that might have persuaded a jury to vote for a life sentence, rather than death. In his majority opinion, Alito said Rompilla was essentially saying he was entitled to the "most resourceful defense attorneys with bountiful investigative support." "We may hope for the day when every criminal defendant receives that level of representation," but that is more than the Constitution requires, Alito said. Judge Dolores K. Sloviter dissented from the 2-1 decision, describing what she called "shocking ineffective assistance of counsel." In June, the Supreme Court agreed and reversed the appeals panel. In their 5-4 ruling, the justices overturned Rompilla's death sentence and said his court-appointed trial lawyers had failed to adequately look for mitigating evidence. "If the defense lawyers had looked in the file on Rompilla's prior conviction" for rape and assault, Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court, "it is uncontested they would have found a range of mitigation leads that no other source had opened up." Among the justices who joined in Souter's opinion was Sandra Day O'Connor - the justice whom Alito has been nominated to replace. (source: Philadelphia Inquirer)
