Nov. 12 MASSACHUSETTS: Dead on arrival Massachusetts has a legitimate claim to being one of the most enlightened states in the country, in part because it does not give the government the power to execute prisoners. Civilized nations have ruled out killing as a form of punishment - Europe, especially after centuries of unjust killing by its rulers, is wary of any state-sanctioned death penalty. In the United States, however, federal crimes are punishable by death and individual states can opt for the ultimate measure. It should be a source of pride for the commonwealth that it does not carry out executions, which is why it's unfortunate that the debate should even come up again in the Statehouse, prompted by legislation calling for the institution of the death penalty by Governor Mitt Romney. It has been said that the American experience has not soured the public on execution because the country has never been ruled by tyrants who could kill at will. In the United States, a system of justice has always prevailed that has insured fairness, and even when the final conclusion is death that decision is made after careful deliberation. But that argument is illusory because there are inequities in U.S. courts that have indisputably led to unfair and wrongful convictions. Some of those inequities include lack of access to quality representation and prejudice against minority defendants. Governor Romney claims his proposal is fool proof and would only execute people who are 100 percent guilty, but that is an impossibility. Punishment would only be implemented if DNA evidence and legal safeguards ensure a fair trial, according to the governor, but the possibility of corruption and incompetence make these measures less than fool proof. Every state that uses the death penalty would claim all of the prisoners killed were absolutely guilty, but recently prisoners around the country are being let off death row because new evidence has proved their innocence. How many innocents were killed unjustly? A system of justice that kills even one innocent person has been corrupted and needs reform. The trend of most states in the nation is to question their use of the death penalty considering how many prisoners have been exonerated, but Massachusetts' governor wants to take the state in the other direction. Governor Romney's death penalty plan is set to be debated in the House next week, and fortunately the bill has little support. The governor undoubtedly knows this, but believes pushing for the death penalty will earn him support from conservatives for his all but inevitable presidential campaign. That is a cynical approach toward an issue of life and death that no government, state or federal, should ever play a part in. (source: Editorial, Berkshire Eagle) ALABAMA: Alabama's largest newspaper advocates abolishing death penalty With surveys showing about 3/4 of Alabama residents in support of the death penalty and almost 200 inmates on death row, the state's largest newspaper has come out in favor of a radical change: Ending capital punishment. Citing numerous problems with a system it says is broken, The Birmingham News last week began 6 days of editorials arguing Alabama should do away with the death penalty. Even if all the flaws disappeared, the paper said, executions should be halted in the name of promoting a "culture of life" that includes opposition to abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and euthanasia. "We believe all life is sacred. And in embracing a culture of life, we cannot make distinctions between those we deem `innocents' and those flawed humans who populate death row," said the newspaper, which reversed decades of support of capital punishment. The editorials angered death penalty supporters, yet they heartened opponents of capital punishment who have long criticized Alabama's execution machinery as being error-prone and unfair to minorities and those without financial means to adequately defend themselves. "It would not be surprising to see some changes initiated as a result of this prominent paper's strong new position," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. Esther Brown, who works with an anti-death penalty group run by inmates on Alabama's death row, said condemned prisoners were "delighted" with the newspaper's conversion, even though any change is likely years away. "I think that with something that is so dear to Alabama - state killing - it's going to take some time," said Brown of Lanett, a volunteer with Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. In its editorial series, the News said capital punishment should be scrapped in Alabama for a myriad of reasons. Among them, the paper cited inadequate legal representation for poor defendants; racial disparities in sentencing; and sentencing inconsistencies that make capital punishment seem almost random. But more important, the News argued, is the need to promote life on a consistent basis. It adopted a typically liberal position - abolishing capital punishment - on the same grounds used by conservatives who oppose abortion. "Life has value: the life of a microscopic smattering of cells, the life of an aging person beset by Alzheimer's, even the life of someone who has killed another," said the newspaper. Even the mention of abolishing capital punishment angered victim advocate Miriam Shehane, who waited about 13 1/2 years for the execution of the man who was convicted of murdering her daughter in 1976. Shehane, who founded the Montgomery-based Victims of Crime and Leniency, said the News is a "very liberal" paper that cares more about protecting murderers than comforting victims of even the most heinous crimes. Some people may be wrongly convicted, she said, but it's "just about impossible" to execute anyone who is truly innocent because appeals are automatic and often last for decades. And guilty people are wrongly freed all the time, she said. "Isn't that just as unfair?" Shehane said. Despite such criticism, the newspaper hasn't received much negative response to its change of heart, according to editorial page editor Bob Blalock. "So far the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive," he said. Citing many of the same factors highlighted by the newspaper, state Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, has tried for several years to get lawmakers to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in Alabama. A committee approved his bill the last 2 years, but the measure died each time in the Senate. Still, the fact that the bill made it out of committee was viewed as another sign that support for the state's current execution system may be wavering. A statewide poll released in July found that 71 % of Alabamians strongly supported the death penalty, yet even more - 80 % - believed the system could lead to the execution of an innocent person. Despite the overall support of capital punishment, only 47 % of those in the survey thought capital punishment was applied fairly in Alabama. And 57 % supported suspending the death penalty until questions about its fairness were studied. While the numbers indicate some ambivalence about the death penalty, those kind of feelings have yet to result in change. Gov. Bob Riley and all three of the major candidates trying to unseat him in next year's gubernatorial election support capital punishment. Change may be slow, the paper acknowledged, but executing the innocent is a real risk in Alabama. It pointed out that 5 people have been freed from the state's death row in recent years. Bryan Stevenson, a Montgomery attorney who represents condemned inmates in Alabama, said the idea of a Deep South newspaper advocating an end to capital punishment had shocked many people. "What's intriguing and impressive about what The Birmingham News has done is that Alabama is definitely a death belt state where there is little organized opposition to the death penalty," he said. Barring a complete end to capital punishment, the News advocated reforms including a revamped indigent defense system; rules to ensure that prosecutors apply death penalty laws consistently; and new evidence rules to guard against wrongful convictions. What happens next is uncertain, but newspaper editorials seldom seem to lead to major change in Montgomery. The Birmingham News won a Pulitzer Prize for advocating a rewrite of Alabama's tax laws in 1991, and the same basic system remains in place 14 years later. State voters in 2003 rejected a tax reform package that was promoted by Riley and supported by many Alabama newspapers but criticized by conservative opponents as nothing but a huge tax hike in disguise. Under Alabama law, juries that convict someone of capital murder then recommend a sentence of either death or life imprisonment without parole. Judges, however, have the final say and are not bound by the recommendation. The last major change in Alabama's death penalty law was in 2002, when lawmakers changed the method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection, which supporters saw as more humane. (source: Associated Press) KANSAS: Kurtis says death penalty can be misapplied For Bill Kurtis, the investigative reporter, 1966 Washburn University School of Law graduate and former Topeka TV broadcaster, there is no crime that would warrant putting a defendant to death. Kurtis noted that Illinois had wanted to pare down its death penalty, executing only the killers of police officers and sexual predators who killed children. Kurtis sees that as an in-between step to eventually eliminating that state's death penalty. "My choice is not (any death penalty)," Kurtis said during an interview Friday night before he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at Washburn University's Bradbury Thompson Center. There were 250 spectators, including at least 40 people standing along the walls. Kurtis' topic was "What I Have Learned About the Death Penalty." Kurtis referred to death penalty cases found in "The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice," his 2004 book about why capital punishment should be abolished. >From his book, Kurtis told about two defendants wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, one who spent 10 years in prison and the other who served 18 years. Both were ultimately cleared and freed. In an Arizona case, a female bar employee was killed, and evidence that would have cleared the defendant was hidden. In a case in Pennsylvania, a woman and her three children were slaughtered, the heads of the children nearly severed. The defendant, whom Kurtis called a "throwaway person," was cleared after evidence proved his innocence. A Columbia University law school researcher studied death penalty cases between 1976 and 1996, finding reversible error in 68 %, Kurtis said. "I've come to the conclusion that because we have too many mistakes, we should take the death penalty off the table," Kurtis said. During a Q-and-A session, Kurtis was asked what he thought about such cases as that of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial murderer in Wichita. "He didn't face the death penalty, but my initial feeling was to take each one of his limbs and cut it up. But you have to grab hold of yourself," Kurtis said. "I felt that way about (mass killers Charles) Manson and (Richard) Specht. I covered those trials. It's a natural instinct, but we have to allow our intellect to overcome that and look and analyze this thing piece by piece. "They should be sentenced, they should not benefit (from the crimes through movies). These are aberrations of the species. We want to get to the why." In Kansas, 6 men face the death penalty, and 2 death penalties have been vacated by the Kansas Supreme Court, said Donna Schneweis, of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Kurtis' appearance was sponsored by the Washburn University School of Law Center for Excellence in Advocacy and the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. In Shawnee County, Phillip Cheatham is the most recent defendant to be sentenced to death in Kansas. Cheatham, who was sentenced two weeks ago in Shawnee County District Court, was convicted of capital murder for the shooting death of Annette Roberson on Dec. 13, 2003. She was slain at a duplex in southeast Topeka. In the same incident, a 2nd woman, Gloria Jones, also was shot to death, and a third woman, Annetta Thomas, suffered 19 entrance and exit bullet wounds when shot by Cheatham. As a backup sentence in case the Kansas Supreme Court decision in December 2004 to overturn the Kansas death penalty law is upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, Cheatham was sentenced to consecutive sentences totaling 78 years and one month. After graduating from the law school, Kurtis began his broadcast career in Topeka, then worked for CBS News and now hosts or produces programs for two A&E programs on cable TV, "Cold Case Files" and "Investigative Reports." (source: Topeka Capital-Journal) USA: Spreading 'a righteous anger' Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking" and an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, speaks on a cell phone from a truck bound for Baton Rouge. She is heading for Southern University, where her staff has been housed since she and others in her order, the Sisters of St. Joseph Medaille, were washed out of their home in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. It seems the disaster has hardly put a dent in the peripatetic nun's speaking schedule. Prejean will give a talk titled "Dead Man Walking: The Journey Continues," Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. at Elms College in Chicopee. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sandwiched between her trip to Belgium to receive the Peace Prize of the City of Ypres, and a talk at the University of Liverpool, England. The Elms talk is part of a semester-long evening series at the college titled "Above All Else, Life," which explores the death penalty. Right now Prejean is hauling 2,000 copies of a new play by Tim Robbins based on "Dead Man Walking." Sister Maureen Fenelon is driving. Their old truck was stolen by looters, Prejean explains, and Fenelon, a "'gets-stuff-done' kind of person" who recently got back from a social ministry in California, has offered her pickup and her driving services. Like others from New Orleans, Prejean answers with something between a sigh and a wail when asked about Katrina's damage. "The whole city's devastated," she says. "Some people call it a ghost city. What's going to happen to it is up for grabs. They want to bring in the casinos. They want to turn it into a theme park with a port. It's up for grabs," she repeats. The city's future, like the evacuation of its residents, looks like it's going to be another example of poor planning by the administration, says Prejean. In fact, the sister has a few things to say about the Bush administration, its policies and its piety. "I abhor the way the Bush administration uses religion," says Prejean. "They believe in violence and in the duality of good guys and bad guys. I hate what they do with Jesus. It's Christianity 'Lite.'" Prejean says poverty has risen 17 percent under George W. Bush. And to her, that's not unrelated to the fact that 98.5 of people selected for the death penalty are poor. She believes that capital punishment is unacceptable, even aside from the fact that DNA evidence has exonerated 121 death row prisoners so far. "The heart of it is the practice of torture, which is against the dignity of human nature," says Prejean. "Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's morally right." In her book "Dead Man Walking," she wanted readers to experience the horror of execution. "It's almost a secret ritual," she says. "That's what led me to write the book - to let people see what the death penalty looks like up close. It's easy to kill a monster, but it's hard to kill a real human being." Her new book is titled "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions." It "ups the ante," says Prejean, because it's about two people that she believes were innocent of the crimes for which they were killed. In "Dead Man Walking," the guilt of Patrick Sonnier, who was put to death, was not in question. The 2 men in "Death of Innocents" are Dobie Williams, an impoverished Black man with an IQ of 65, and Joseph O'Dell, whose execution was based on dubious evidence from a jailhouse snitch and whose pleas for DNA testing went unheard. In this book, Prejean addresses the unevenness of the justice system. "I take people into the Constitution," she says, "and I show how the courts rely on procedural technicalities to condemn people. "The Rhenquist Court cut down on constitutional protections and made it impossible for individuals to get due process." It's not justice, says Prejean, when the poor are given ineffective counsel and when African Americans are tried by all-white juries in states with a history of racism. "I want people to feel a righteous anger," says Prejean. "The Supreme Court is emblazoned with the words 'Equal Justice Under Law,' but you look at the selective process by which people are executed and you see bias." Statistics show that states are much more likely to follow through on executions if the victim is white, than when the victim is African American. Black-on-Black killings? "That doesn't even hit the radar screen," says Prejean. Thirty-eight states have capital punishment on the books (Massachusetts does not), and Prejean finds it significant that most of them are in southern states that held slaves. "If a life is negligible, it's not considered important. There's no outrage. "We should be outraged." There have also been cases of innocent people doomed to life imprisonment, which Prejean describes as another form of "silent death." Instead of "re-weaving the fabric of society," she says, the justice system keeps cutting "bigger and bigger holes in it." Prejean, 66, says she was in her 40s before she discovered her life's work. After majoring in education and becoming a nun, she taught high school English. Christ was a comfortable figure to her, not a figure of radical commitment. Then, at 40, "I awoke to the fact of what Jesus was about." She moved into a housing project to live among poor and struggling African Americans. She became a spiritual advisor to a man in prison. And from then on, the direction of her life became clear to her. Tim Robbins' stage adaptation of "Dead Man Walking" will be presented at Elms College from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Unlike other programs in the series, it will have an admission fee of $10. "Dead Man Walking" has also been made into a movie and, more recently, an opera. (source: The Republican) ********************* Moussaoui's life could depend on what U.S. knew ---- Judge: Key issue is whether 3,000 victims could have been saved The fact that the U.S. government overlooked numerous warning signs in the run-up to the September 11 attacks is an old story that is being used in a new way in the Zacarias Moussaoui case. It could save his life. With the admitted al Qaeda conspirator facing a death penalty trial early next year, the judge framed a key question in a recent closed-door hearing: Even if Moussaoui had told the FBI everything that he knew, would that have enabled the government to avert the 2001 terrorist strikes? The question by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema was released this week in a transcript from a hearing last month. Federal prosecutors say Moussaoui's failure to tell the FBI what he knew resulted in 3,000 deaths. When he was in custody before the attacks, Moussaoui denied being a member of a terrorist organization and denied that he was taking pilot training to kill Americans. Moussaoui told the FBI he was training as a pilot purely for his personal enjoyment and that after completing his training, he intended to visit New York City and Washington as a tourist. In April, Moussaoui pleaded guilty to conspiring with the September 11 hijackers to kill Americans and declared that Osama bin Laden had personally chosen him to fly a plane into the White House in a later attack. The upcoming penalty phase has Moussaoui's lawyers poring through material from past investigations for evidence of what the government knew before September 11. For example, the month before the terrorist strikes, CIA Director George Tenet was briefed about Moussaoui's arrest in Minnesota. "Your honor ... he was given a slide show," attorney Edward MacMahon said of Tenet. "In August of 2001, Tenet was given a presentation called 'Islamic Extremist' or 'Islamic Fundamentalist Learns to Fly."' According to the newly released transcript of an October 12 hearing, MacMahon also told the judge that inside the U.S. government before September 11, "we know that there were other requests for information ... to people outside of the normal chain ... about Moussaoui" and 2 suspected terrorist operatives among the 19 September 11 hijackers -- Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The CIA failed to put al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi on government watch lists or to let the FBI know that the future September 11 hijackers had entered the United States in early 2000. "We need to know almost frozen in time what was known by the government before the planes hit the World Trade Center," MacMahon told the judge. (source: Associated Press) CALIFORNIA: Attorney for death row inmate Williams challenges evidence An attorney for Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the condemned former leader of the Crips street gang, has challenged evidence presented at his 1981 murder trial in hopes of staving off a December execution. The 82-page brief filed with the California Supreme Court attacks forensic firearms analysis presented by the prosecution in the trial as "junk science" and suggests faulty evidence led to Williams' convictions for killing 3 people during a Los Angeles motel robbery in 1979. It asks the state's high court to reopen Williams' criminal cases and to allow for re-examination of specific pieces of evidence, particularly the ballistic evidence presented at trial for the shotgun killings of Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Ye Chen Lin. "The shotgun evidence isn't reliable," Pasadena attorney Verna Wefald told the Associated Press on Friday. "There isn't any question about this." The brief also questions the credibility of a witness who testified that Williams killed Whittier convenience store clerk Albert Owens. The witness is now in a Canadian prison for a murder conviction. Williams, 51, received the death sentence for his 4 murder convictions and now lives on death row in San Quentin State Prison. He went on to become a Nobel-nominated children's author behind bars and iconic figure for the anti-death penalty movement. But his previous appeals, in which he claimed racial bias during jury selection and that a prosecutor made racially tinged comments during arguments, were exhausted last month when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case. A Los Angeles judge then set a Dec. 13 execution date. "What Williams is receiving now is aggressive legal representation, which is something he is entitled to. But what he is not entitled to is relief without justification," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer. The state Supreme Court gave Lockyer until Thursday to submit a response. "(Williams) had 25 years to litigate all of these claims, and he's been to every state and federal court this country has to offer. They've all rejected him," Barankin said. This week other attorneys working for Williams submitted a clemency petition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has agreed to consider the petition and a response from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. Attorney Jonathan Harris submitted the clemency bid with copies of e-mails sent to Williams by former gang members, police officers and others moved by his books and speeches. Williams was nominated 5 times for the Nobel Peace Prize and 4 times for the Nobel Prize for literature for his children's books and international peace efforts to curtail gang violence. As a teenager in the 1970s he helped form the Crips, one of the most prolific and infamous Los Angeles street gangs. (source: Contra Costa Times)
