Jan. 17 TEXAS: Jury selection begins in Round Rock murder case -- Details will finally be revealed in 2003 slaying of Dell worker. Robert Moore found his wife, Christina, dead in the master bedroom closet of their home in an upscale Round Rock subdivision more than 2 years ago. Christina Moore, a 35-year-old Dell Inc. employee who was about 3 months pregnant, was dressed for work. Her throat had been slit, and her arm had been restrained. The couple's daughter, Grace, then about a year old, was in the home but was not harmed. Jury selection is scheduled to begin today in Georgetown in the capital murder trial of Michael Keith Moore, the 30-year-old Florence man who is accused of killing Christina Moore on Sept. 23, 2003. Michael Moore is not related to Christina Moore or her husband. After prosecutors and defense attorneys finish choosing a jury - a process that could take 2 weeks - details of the case will be made public for the 1st time. Those details - and why authorities think Michael Moore is connected to the crime - are scarce. Law enforcement officials have released little about the investigation, and District Attorney John Bradley has declined to comment on the case. Because Moore was in jail on a parole violation when he was indicted, officials did not have to file a probable cause affidavit, a public document that details reasons for a person's arrest. A Williamson County grand jury indicted Moore in November 2004 on charges of capital murder, felony murder, aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping. He could receive the death penalty if convicted. Moore was charged with capital murder because he's accused of killing 2 people while attempting to burglarize the Moores' home. The Texas Legislature passed a law in 2003 defining a fetus as an individual for purposes of criminal prosecution. Michael Moore's criminal history includes run-ins with the law in Williamson and Travis counties. In March 1993, he received 10 years of deferred adjudication, a form of probation, for breaking the windows of 61 Georgetown residences. He was convicted of unlawfully carrying a firearm in Travis County in 1999, and he received a 14-month prison sentence for theft in 2002 after Round Rock police arrested him for a parole violation and found a semiautomatic pistol and stolen stereo equipment and tools at his residence, according to court records. He was released from prison in June 2003. Jury selection will probably last two weeks because jurors have to be questioned individually about their feelings regarding the death penalty, said Allan Williams, an attorney for Moore. Once a jury is selected, the trial is expected to take about a month, he said. The last person to receive a death sentence from a Williamson County jury was Carlos Granados, who killed his girlfriend's 3-year-old son and stabbed his girlfriend several times in Georgetown in 1998. Granados is still on death row, awaiting a ruling on an appeal. (source: Austin American-Statesman) VIRGINIA: Another duped supporter of killer Coleman weighs in I'm related, by marriage, to the former girlfriend of Roger Keith Coleman, the man who was executed in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law 12 years before. (When your family is as big as mine is, stuff like this is bound to happen.) Coleman's last words, before he fried, were, "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight." His girlfriend - my distant relation - believed him, as did high-profile supporters, who spent thousands of dollars and hours fighting for his life. Back then, I read enough about Coleman's case to feel convinced that he killed Wanda Fay McCoy. But the support of his intelligent and passionate advocates gave me pause. Funny how that can happen, if you know one of the players. So I was on edge last week, waiting to hear whether new DNA testing would prove Coleman's guilt or innocence. As we all now know, Coleman did the brutal deed. And death-penalty advocates are making media hay of it. "Stop the presses! It turns out that rapists and killers are also liars," howled Michael Paranzini of Throw Away the Key, a pro-death-penalty group. "Roger Keith Coleman, like every killer on death row, professed his innocence until the very moment he took his last breath." Please. Just because Coleman was guilty doesn't mean that every death-row inmate who professes his innocence is guilty, too. Nor, had the DNA shown Coleman to be innocent, would it prove that all those on death row were also wrongly convicted. However, Coleman's DNA-tested guilt does prove 2 things. First, that we should use DNA testing wherever possible in all criminal cases, the same way we use fingerprint-matching. When someone's liberty is at stake, we ought to use every tool we have to learn the truth. And, 2nd, that Roger Keith Coleman was scum of the earth. - and not just for what he did to Wanda Fay McCoy, whom he practically beheaded after raping her. It's also for what he did to good people like James McCloskey. He's executive director of Centurion Ministries, which advocates for those who are innocent of crimes for which they've been convicted and imprisoned for life or death. McCloskey was Coleman's staunchest advocate (second only to Coleman's former girlfriend, perhaps). His organization spent $100,000 and years of time to exonerate Coleman. They didn't take on his case lightly. McCloskey told me yesterday that Centurion each year receives 1,200 requests for help from inmates who claim to be wrongly convicted. Of those, Centurion accepts just 2 or 3 new cases per year to investigate; each can take up to 8 years to chase through the legal system. Coleman's case consumed twice that for McCloskey. Yesterday, he was still reeling from news of Coleman's guilt. "You make your best judgments based on the information you have in front of you," he said, still sounding shocked. "We thoroughly investigated Roger's case and we thought we had reason to believe he was innocent. It turns out we were wrong." He said it's too soon for him to feel anger about Coleman's charade. He's still trying to reconcile the man he thought he knew with the one he obviously didn't. But me, I'm already there. Coleman made fools of good people, devouring time and resources that could've been used to free someone truly innocent, the way 122 others on death row have been so far. He also duped a lovely young woman out of years of her life by convincing her of his innocence. All this, on top of killing Wanda Fay McCoy. For all of it, here's hoping he's been rotting in hell since the day he was executed. And rightly so, after all. (source: Ronnie, Polaneczky, Philadelphia Daily News) ************* Closure on Mr. Coleman Mark R. Warner's decision in his final days as Virginia's governor to order the retesting of evidence in the case of Roger Keith Coleman has put an important controversy to rest. Mr. Coleman, executed in 1992 for a rape and murder more than a decade earlier, was shown to be guilty as charged. Mr. Coleman persuaded a great many people of his innocence. Even for those, like us, who were not convinced by his claims, his case was among the more disturbing capital cases to go to execution in the modern era of the death penalty. Thanks to Mr. Warner, those concerned that Virginia might have executed an innocent man now know that the commonwealth carried out the death sentence of a murderer -- and a very clever liar. The decision of whether to allow post-conviction testing is often characterized -- as it was in Mr. Coleman's case -- as a conflict between certainty and the "finality" of convictions upheld by the criminal justice system. As the Coleman case shows, however, the conflict is often fictitious. When a state has locked up -- or in this case put to death -- the right man, it has nothing to fear from the truth. Where a conviction is not solid, finality is not a virtue. The final proof of Mr. Coleman's guilt is being cited by supporters of the death penalty as evidence that there is nothing wrong with the system. They are wrong. The outcome merely shows that in a single case in which the evidence was thin and the appellate process cut dangerously short by procedural errors, no harm was done in the end. That's reassuring. But it hardly means the death penalty poses no threat to innocents. Mr. Coleman was not innocent. Others facing death no doubt are. (source: Washington Post) CALIFORNIA: European human rights watchdog calls Allen execution regrettable Europe's top human rights watchdog reacted with dismay to the execution of California's oldest inmate Tuesday, saying it was regrettable that the governor rejected clemency for the man who arranged a triple murder 25 years ago. Clarence Ray Allen was pronounced dead by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison less than an hour after his 76th birthday ended at midnight. "The death penalty is always wrong, but tying a blind 76-year-old man to a chair and injecting him with poison is grotesque," Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis said in a statement. "I regret that (California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger) has not listened to all the appeals to spare the life of Clarence Ray Allen. As a friend of the United States of America, I look forward to the day this great country will leave the axis of capital punishment." Allen was mostly blind and deaf, could not walk, and suffered a nearly fatal heart attack in September only to be revived and returned to death row. He arranged the three murders in 1980 to silence witnesses in another killing. Capital punishment is not allowed in Europe, where no execution has been carried out since 1997. Various European institutions, including the Council of Europe, have pledged to fight for the abolition of executions outside the continent. "If moral argument is not compelling enough, the American public should compare the murder rate in states which keep the death penalty and states which have abolished it. Then they would realize that executing people is not only inhuman, it does not work as a way of reducing the number of murders," Davis said. (source: Associated Press) ******************* Gov. Schwarzenegger's countrymen were right In contrast to the Dec. 30 Dispatch editorial "You can't go home again," I applaud the people of Austria and of Graz in dishonoring California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his failure to commute the capital punishment of Stanley Tookie Williams. The laws of California unfortunately permit execution; those laws also give the governor the right to override a death sentence when such commutation is abundantly justified, as it was in Williams' case. Schwarzenegger knew what was the right and moral thing to do; and by his political cowardice, he failed to do it, and thereby made himself an accessory to judicial murder. America's love of capital punishment is surely among the reasons why other Western nations so often view America with dislike, contempt or disgust. MICHAEL W. ELLIS -- Hilliard (source: Letter to the editor, The Daily Digest) ********************* America is dead wrong to kill its own -- Where are the moral values in the death chamber? How was justice served? Last December when I hit these keys of futility - composing powerless words - a man sat in his cell near San Quentin State Prison in California, an advocate for peace, a reformed gang leader, possibly innocent of his capital crimes, having refused his last meal, and waited to die. I showered twice that day and I still felt unclean. Greasy, queasy, icky, sullied. Ive found out what it was. Its my American skin. What is my country doing? On that afternoon last December, California "Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to postpone the midnight execution of former Crips gang leader Stanley "Tookie" Williams, an African-American man sentenced to death in 1981 for 4 Los Angeles gangland murders that occurred 2 years before. The part that should give all of us pause is not that Williams always insisted he was innocent, but the fact that he was not alone in this claim. In his attorneys' 11th-hour case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a new witness came forward and testified under oath that a fellow cellmate in the county jail was illegally given documents by the sheriff's department to testify against Williams and to "help frame defendants for crimes" in exchange for reduced or dropped charges against the cellmate, the witness said. Positioned above the fray in their ivory towers, right-wing talking heads clamored for Williams' death. My question to these belligerents is: How can you be "pro-life" and still sleep well at night as your supposedly representative government is forcing potassium chloride into the veins of its constituents? Does that late-night sushi snack taste that much better knowing that your taxes fund an hourlong death march that "humanely" poisons, paralyzes and destroys the vital organs of fellow Americans? Listen, no matter what you believe, our government's responsibility is to protect and serve its citizens, not kill them. In a frighteningly numb statement to the press, Schwarzenegger actually said that Williams "should pay with his life." Earth to Arnold: This is not "Predator 3." This is not a set. There is no second take, no stunt double. This rogue sense of vigilante justice looks good on celluloid, but in real life its brutality is final, unnatural and dead wrong. I know you really want to be that "last action hero" from your lame-ass movie of the same name, but if your giant pectorals contain no mercy or humanity, at least have some respect for those of whom you are about to end. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, the United States has killed more than 1,000 of its own people in exchange for some twisted Wild West-style nostalgia masquerading as a sense of relief or this nebulous thing we like to call justice. Some call the death penalty justice. I call it what it is: unmitigated murder, in blood at least as cold as that of the crimes Stanley Williams had been accused of. And the fresh murder of a 5th person will not bring the other 4 back. Behind bars, Williams became perhaps the nations most outspoken inside crusader against gang violence. He wrote several childrens books with anti-gang messages and only asked for clemency to continue his work preventing young people from making the choices he did, which led to a life of crime and a death sentence. In prison, he no longer was a threat to anyone. In fact, he was at times a uniquely credible positive force, channeling his considerable time and energy toward dissuading vulnerable youngsters from making terrible life decisions. It comes down to that even if Williams were guilty of those murders, the culpability would be his alone, and between him and his god, as they say. When he was executed, the blood is on all of our hands. Who among us wants to answer for this man's death? (source: Minnesota Daily) MARYLAND----impending execution Governor on a Killing Spree----The Pending Execution of Vernon Evans Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich is on a killing spree. Having just killed Wesley Baker on December 5th, he waited a little over a month to green-light the planned execution of Vernon Evans, set for February 6th. Evans's execution would be the third state killing since Ehrlich took office --more executions than any other Maryland Governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Making matters worse, Ehrlich has brushed off the results of a 2003 Governor-Commissioned study that found Maryland's death penalty was applied in a racially biased and geographically arbitrary manner. The study found that Black defendants convicted of killing white victims were much more likely to receive a death sentence than any other racial combination. Vernon Evans, like most of those on Maryland's death row, is a poor Black man accused of killing white victims. The specifics of Vernon's case further expose Ehrlich's murderous intent. Vernon has consistently maintained that he was not the shooter in the 1983 killings of David Scott Piechowicz and Susan Kennedy. Prosecutors contend that Vernon was hired to kill Piechowicz and his wife, Cheryl, who had been scheduled to testify in an upcoming federal drug trial. Too poor to afford a decent lawyer, Vernon was convicted in a trial based on snitch-testimony, contradictory eye-witnesses, and no physical evidence. Several witnesses were never allowed to testify at the trial, including the only eye-witness. This eyewitness later testified under oath that the shooter was a lot taller than Vernon (who is only 5'2" and nicknamed "Shorty") and that the shooter's clothes did not match what Vernon was wearing at the time of the murders. Other witnesses have corroborated this account. Also, In Vernon's 1984 trial, the prosecutor used 8 of his 10 peremptory strikes (80%) against African Americans, even though they were only 20% of the potential jurors. Prosecutors have made much of the sensational details of the 1983 crime, playing on public fears over drug related violence. However, at the intersection of poverty and crime, perpetrators and victims don't line up so neatly. Vernon himself is no stranger to the devastating impact of poverty, drugs, and violence. As a child he was raised in an impoverished, broken home. He was the victim of repeated physical abuse and sexual abuse at the hands of a stranger. Suffering from despair, he attempted suicide at the age of 10. Only years later did he find himself sucked into Baltimore's flourishing drug trade. Since then he has lost one son to random violence and another was paralyzed from a shooting. Despite all this, Vernon's humanity and compassion is evident to anyone who has come in contact with him. In fact, this might be the greatest challenge Governor Ehrlich faces in his effort to see Vernon die. Vernon and his family are active participants in the movement against the death penalty. Vernon has authored a blog (www.meetvernon.blogspot.com), conducted a seminar at Mount St. Mary's College, and participated in numerous "Live from Death Row" speaking events. He has written, "When I was in society I did used to whine. But I would whine about things that didn't involve life. I would say: "They tax me too much" "It sure is hot out today" "It's too cold." But now that I've been living with a death sentence for twenty-two years, I have had an education on how meaningful life is. I have come to understand that others may put little into life, no matter what end of the stick they are on. When I whine now, I whine because I have spent my life learning what others know to be true. I whine because there is a system in place that is not fair when it comes to taking a life. I know what others know to be true but turn away from." More and more this truth is gaining momentum. The public outrage that followed the execution of Wesley Baker has not diminished and in small but meaningful ways has begun to translate itself into activism against executions. Also, in a surprising development, the former Governor of Maryland and the man who oversaw two executions including that of Tyrone X Gilliam, Parris Glendening is citing concerns over racism on Maryland's death row for calling for a moratorium in Maryland. We need to back up this call with a push on the ground to make sure Vernon isn't killed. The time to organize is now. We don't have much time. Contact Governor Ehrlich immediately to demand a stop the execution of Vernon Evans at: 100 State Circle, Annapolis, Maryland 21401-1925. Or reach him by phone at: 410.974.3591 or 1.800.811.8336. You can send an email by visiting: http://www.gov.state.md.us/mail/. For more information on how you can get involved in the fight to stop the execution of Vernon Evans, contact the Campaign to End the Death Penalty at [email protected]. (source: CounterPunch - Mike Stark is a national board member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP). He is also a frequent contributor to the CEDP's newsletter The New Abolitionist) USA: The right to life: an interview with Sister Helen Prejean Over 1000 people have been executed in the US since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976. Sister Helen Prejean, a leading campaigner against capital punishment and author of "Dead Man Walking," talks to Isabel Hilton about the flaws in the American judicial system and whether the death penalty will ever be abolished. Plus, an exclusive extract from her new book "The Death of Innocents." 1. Why is the death penalty so important to the United States? Listen to Sister Helen Prejean explain the cultural significance of the death penalty in the United States: "The US people are not wedded to the death penalty at all" not more vengeful" they haven't reflected on it, but when they get close to it it's not a hard sell." 2: Is the New Jersey moratorium a sign of a trend? Listen to Sister Helen Prejean on public concern about the death penalty "If you dont have good defence, the truth can't come out at trial... and with all the goodwill in the world, the jurors can sentence a man to death...theyre making a mistake and they dont know it." 3: What would it take to achieve abolition in the United States? Listen to Sister Helen Prejean on how abolition will be achieved in the United States: "...the time will come when well just say, put it away. Put it away, it's not working." 4. Who opposes abolition in the United States? Listen to Sister Helen Prejean on who wants it and who doesn't.. "For the most part politicians" they are the ones who dont want to lose it because they want an easy political symbol." * * * We read a newspaper account about a man kidnapped and held captive in an abandoned farmhouse. Although his abductor supplied the captive with food and water, he would periodically put a revolver to the defenseless man's head, cock the gun, and say, 'Die', but the gun would click and the man would live to see another day. Sometimes the abductor would tell his captive to prepare himself, that he had 1 more month to live. But the appointed day of death would come and go, and the captive was still alive. When, at last, law enforcement officials located the house in which the captive was held, the abductor had fled, leaving the captive's body strapped to a bed, a dried trickle of blood coming from the bullet wound in his temple. Anyone can tell the victim was tortured. The essential elements are there: the captive was defenseless and terrorized by the threat of immediate death. The crux of a newly framed constitutional argument that the death penalty, by its very nature, is torture involves these 2 elements. Amnesty International defines torture as an "extreme mental or physical assault on a person who has been rendered defenseless." Mental torture is harder to see than physical torture but is nonetheless real. Half a century of research has taught us that mental torture may cause more suffering than physical pain. On the album of Dead Man Walking (Sony), Johnny Cash sings: "In your mind, in your mind... it all goes down in your mind..." This is an extract from Chapter 4 "Death of Innocence" (pp 258-263) from Sister Helen Prejeans second book The Death of Innocents: an eyewitness account of wrongful executions (Canterbury Press, 2006) Abuse of Iraqi detainees by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison has brought the subject of torture to the fore of public discourse. Photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a human pyramid and a naked man crawling with a leash attached to his neck shocked us. Seeing American soldiers pointing toward their captives and mocking them shocked us even more. The photographs made torture visible. But the mental torture of the death penalty is invisible, and so far the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to see it. In Furman and Gregg, the Court said that the intentional killing of human beings rendered defenseless is not an act of cruelty. The fact that Dobie Williams was brought to the brink of death three times before he was finally killed did not, in the Courts opinion, constitute torture. Nor did the mental anguish of Joseph O'Dell, who watched as 2 prisoners, one of them a close friend, were showered and led to execution a few feet away from his cell. He thought he was next. But his tears and the cry "They almost killed me" evoked no compassion in the Supreme Court. Neither did the cries of Betty Williams and the other mothers whose sons and daughters are killed by the state. Nor is the Supreme Court willing to acknowledge the slow, corrosive torture the condemned endure for ten or twenty years, confined in cells the size of a small bathroom (U.S. death row cells are smaller by a foot than the cells in Abu Ghraib). The death penalty, the Supreme Court claims, is an act of retribution; so whatever suffering the condemned endure is part of the price they pay for their crimes. Punishment, after all, is meant to inflict pain. And while the Court disapproves of any form of physical abuse of prisoners (such as beatings, prolonged sleep deprivation, or withholding food and water or necessary medications), thus far it has ignored mental suffering endured by men and women condemned to death. In the Courts reasoning, even though life sentences without parole are available, only a "death for a death" will do. In Gregg, the Court says: "Retribution is an expression of the community's belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death." And, as I noted in my letter to Pope John Paul II, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that killing human beings is not an assault on their dignity. Thus, by legalizing premeditated homicide, the Supreme Court legalizes torture. Morally speaking, this is dangerous, for it presupposes that a system of justice can in all cases identify the truly guilty with a degree of certainty that, we all know, cannot be obtained. This ruling also seems oblivious to the corrosive effects on the souls of those who carry out the killings. "Afterward, when I get home, I can't sleep, can't eat," Major Kendall Coody told me after participating in his 5th execution in the Louisiana death chamber. And his participation in the killings wasnt even direct. After prisoners were executed, his job was to collect their personal belongings to send to their families. When the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke, government officials tried to confine blame to a few rogue solders, but inquiries revealed that the soldiers were working within a climate of abuse that had raised questions all the way up to the White House. Memos documented that government officials first sought legal advice before ordering torture tactics against terrorist suspects. The question of Pentagon and Defense Department officials to their lawyers is shocking in its callous simplicity: "The Geneva Conventions prohibit us from torturing or humiliating prisoners of war; how might we legally circumvent those prohibitions so we can inflict pain on detainees during interrogation and not be held legally accountable?" The response was to replace the designation "prisoners of war" with "enemy combatants". "Prisoners of war" have human rights protected by international agreements. There is little consensus on the legal rights, if any, of "enemy combatants". Terrorist suspects detained in U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Abu Ghraib and other bases in Iraq may be held indefinitely without charge and without legal counsel as long as their captors see fit. International human rights groups have been barred from the camps. As of June 2004, more than 5000 foreign nationals have been jailed and stripped of their rights in the United States, Guantanamo, or Iraq since September 11, in antiterrorism "prevention detention" measures. Military intelligence officers told the Red Cross that 70-90 % of the people locked up in Iraq have been arrested by mistake. Torture was legalized under Nazi Germanys Nuremberg Laws, which "redefined" Jews as non-citizens and non-human. By the same legal logic, the Louisiana Legislature legalized cockfighting by designating roosters as "fowl," not "animals," thus circumventing the states prohibition against cruelty to animals. President Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzalez, remarked that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete Genevas strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint [italics added] some of its provisions." Gonzales, you may recall, gave legal guidance to Governor Bush, who dispatched 152 persons to the Texas death chamber. But the Pentagon's list of approved "stress and duress" interrogation techniques, which includes throwing suspects against walls, hooding them, depriving them of sleep for days at a time, and binding them in painful positions, forbids "extreme" mental torture, such as "threatening detainees with immediate death." (italics added) The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (wording from Article 5 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which has been ratified by the U.S. Senate, holds us to a higher standard of moral conduct than we have been able to achieve on our own. By signing on to the Convention Against Torture, we have committed ourselves never to engage in "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted." The concept of severe "mental" suffering is revolutionary. It reveals an "evolving standard of decency" of human rights never before embraced by the United States. With these words, the United States Supreme Court and its people face a new reality about the death penalty: There is simply no way that we are ever going to figure out how to preordain the killing of a human being without inflicting severe mental suffering. The defenselessness of persons under the control of their captors is central to understanding torture. If someone can resist an aggressor, we don't call it torture. It is the defenselessness of the victim that makes us loathe torturers and cringe when we see the photographs of our soldiers smiling and giving a thumbs-up at the plight of suffering Iraqi prisoners. I was glad when the Supreme Court consulted the wisdom and experience of the world community in Atkins and ruled that executing mentally retarded persons is an act of cruelty. Most of our democratic allies stopped killing mentally handicapped persons long ago, though Justice Scalia, as we have seen, dissented in Atkins, scornfully refusing to consider international moral standards of cruelty. "[Other countries] notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people," he said. Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist were the only dissenters in Atkins. Perhaps they were trying to hold the line against the Court's "slippery slope" for fear that by declaring the execution of the mentally retarded a violation of the Eighth Amendments prohibition against cruelty, the Court might eventually forbid the execution of juveniles. Their fears are justified. Some of their colleagues are signaling that they intend to do precisely that. Right after Atkins, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer expressed grave reservations about the moral decency of executing juveniles, pointing out that only a handful of nations - Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia - still kill children. In a public speech in Atlanta recently, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "I suspect over time we will rely increasingly [on], or take notice of, international and foreign law in resolving domestic issues." She added that when 30 percent of the U.S. gross national product is derived internationally, "no institution of government can afford to ignore the rest of the world." Only the United States and Somalia have refused to sign the Covenant on the Rights of the Child. U.S. officials have admitted that a major obstacle lies in the covenants prohibition of juvenile executions. I wonder what the Framers of the Constitution would think of how the United States holds on to the death penalty while so many of our allies have abandoned it over the last fifty years. The Framers wrote the best Constitution they could, incorporating the best ideas and values from other countries. They very much wanted the new Republic to stand tall among other nations in its respect for the human person against the massive powers of the state. I think they would be appalled by the way constitutional protections of defendants have been ignored or abused in the administration of the death penalty. In the absence of those protections, they would not be surprised that so many innocents have been caught up in the system. I think theyd be shocked at the legalistic quagmire the courts have created and immensely saddened by the Supreme Court's heavy emphasis on procedure over law. With long-term imprisonment available, as it was not in their day, they'd be quick to see that capital punishment was no longer necessary or desirable. And I think they'd take Senate ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture very seriously, embracing its prohibition against mental and physical cruelty. I can see them proudly holding high the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which the torture convention was based. (source: Open Democracy) **************** Don't mourn Roger Coleman. Just wait So he's guilty as charged. Never mind the timeline that some thought made it almost impossible for him to have committed the crime. Never mind the book casting doubt on his culpability. Never mind his death chair declaration: "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight." Never mind any of it. Last week, a DNA test confirmed that Roger Coleman did indeed commit the crime for which Virginia executed him in 1992, the rape and murder of his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy, 11 years before. For those who believed in Coleman's innocence, to say nothing of those who simply believe capital punishment an unwieldy, unfair and uncivilized way of punishing crime, the news is a bitter blow. Some had imagined Coleman's might be the case that put a human face on the death penalty's fallibility and the potential consequences thereof. Instead, the only thing proven is that Coleman, in addition to being a rapist and murderer, was also a con artist and liar. If proof of his guilt is disappointing to those who oppose capital punishment, one imagines it is received more warmly by death penalty advocates, particularly those in the gubernatorial and prosecutorial offices of Virginia. The state's criminal justice system stands vindicated. It is telling, though, that Virginia resisted for years allowing the sophisticated DNA testing, unavailable during Coleman's lifetime, that conclusively proved his guilt. This, even though a coalition of newspapers and an anti-death penalty group offered to pick up the tab. The state fought them all the way to its Supreme Court. After the court ruled in Virginia's favor and the coalition asked Gov. Mark Warner to authorize testing on his own authority, he dithered for 4 years before finally giving approval. Point being, Virginia's reluctance to allow the test suggests the state had less than maximum confidence in its outcome. Would you resist something you knew would prove you right? While I can commiserate with those who worked on Coleman's behalf and feel personally betrayed by him, the larger community of death penalty opponents has as little reason to feel chagrined by these results as death penalty advocates have to celebrate them. The inevitable has only been forestalled, not denied. Since 1973, more than 120 people have been released from death row after being proven wrongly convicted. In November, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas likely erred in 1993 when it executed a man named Ruben Cantu for robbery and murder. The only witness to the crime now says he identified Cantu wrongly, under pressure from police. The man who was supposedly Cantu's partner says Cantu was not there. So it is only a matter of time before someone is proven, to a scientific certainty, to have been executed for a crime he did not commit. How can it be otherwise? How can we believe a system conceived by human beings can work without flaw? That all mistakes are caught before it is too late? Not a chance. Someone will die -- probably already has -- because of a lying cop, a bad lawyer, a mean judge, a botched investigation. But most of all, because some of us prefer to close our eyes to the obvious, be narcotized by denial, sleep in the unearned assurance that the system works for everybody, always. It had been thought -- and hoped -- that Roger Coleman would be the wake-up call. He is not. But someone will be. And when it happens, those who support capital punishment will have to explain why this was an acceptable death, why an innocent life taken in our name ought not give us pause, ought not bring us shame, ought not make us ill. Against that day, I have 2 words of advice for advocates of state-sanctioned killing: Sleep well. (source: Editorial, Akron Beacon Journal; Leonard Pitts is a Miami Herald columnist) FLORIDA: Jury fails to reach verdict in Demeniuk murder trial; set to return to court today----Jurors deliberated for a few hours, then told judge they would be unable to decide the case Monday. In St. Augustine, tired and unable to reach a verdict, the 6 jurors went home Monday night and will return to court today to continue deliberating over the fate of Leslie Demeniuk. Attorneys spent several hours earlier in the day working out the details in the jury instructions, and they gave closing arguments in the afternoon. The jury deliberated for a few hours, then told Circuit Judge John Alexander they would be unable to reach a verdict. Demeniuk, a 36-year-old Ponte Vedra Beach woman, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges that she killed her twin 4-year-old sons, James and John, in 2001. Her attorneys argued that she was temporarily insane and involuntarily intoxicated on antidepressants, alcohol and Xanax. Monday's closing arguments started with Assistant State Attorney Noah McKinnon asking for first-degree murder convictions, saying Demeniuk was sane and knew what she was doing when she shot her sons on March 17, 2001. He focused in part on the time he said Demeniuk had to think about the killings, the premeditation that warrants a first-degree murder conviction. Case timeline March 17, 2001: Leslie Demeniuk is arrested after authorities find her twin 4-year-old sons, James and John, shot to death in a Sawgrass condominium in Ponte Vedra Beach. She was passed out on a bed, with the gun in her hand, police said. May 2001: Demeniuk pleads not guilty. May 2001: Prosecutors announce they will seek the death penalty. February 2003: Demeniuk changes her plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. Feb. 25, 2004: The first day of a hearing about the insanity defense that ended a week later with Circuit Judge Robert Mathis saying he would allow psychiatrists' testimony as "pure opinion." March 2004: The 5th District Court of Appeal grants a delay so prosecutors can argue against Mathis' ruling. August 2004: Appellate court sides with the state; the hearing returns to St. Johns County. Circuit Judge John Alexander, who replaced Mathis, rules that the science behind the insanity defense is not generally accepted and can't be presented as fact. Mathis, who had moved to civil court after the death of his son, later retires. Dec. 22, 2005: The state, led by a new prosecution team after the resignation of Assistant State Attorney Maureen Sullivan Christine, files a waiver saying it will not seek the death penalty. Jan. 3, 2006: Jury selection scheduled. "The intent to kill was in her mind when she looked [James] in the face, put the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger," McKinnon said. "... When she killed the 1st boy, she had time to reflect before she killed the 2nd little boy." Defense attorney Bill Sheppard began with a reference to one of the state's psychological experts, who had written a book in which she said that she wouldn't give Prozac to a teenage boy because of the potentially "murderous" side effects of the drug. Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, is part of the same family of drugs as Demeniuk's Paxil. The expert's work was "insightful," he said. Demeniuk was delusional when she killed her children, as shown by the recordings of police interviews right after the incident, he said. "The bottom line of it is, the only explanation for the hideous, hideous act is she though she was saving her children," Sheppard said. "She was taking them to a better place." He pointed to warnings from the drug manufacturer that said in 1999 that the drug is associated with alcohol abuse and psychotic depression. He mentioned warnings from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005 about possible dangers of the drug. He even credited the prosecution's psychological expert, Barbara Kirwin, for describing the drug's "rare side effect." "A rare side effect is a reasonable doubt," Sheppard said. He drew the jury's attention to an extensive recording of Demeniuk after the shooting, as she was questioned by police. She said, among other things, that she meant to kill herself. The defense experts had said Demeniuk was "over-bonded" to her children, considering them part of herself, so killing them was the right thing to do to end all their misery. "The bottom line of what her answer was is she was trying to kill herself," Sheppard said. Her medication had tripped "that rare, murderous moment that Dr. Kirwin talked about," he said. It also caused an inner restlessness that in turn caused her to self-medicate with alcohol, he said. "The alcohol use was not voluntary," Sheppard said. He closed his arguments with a string of quotes from Demeniuk on the day of the killing. He repeated her confusion, her questions of "What happened to me?" He quoted another statement, "They're safe now." When McKinnon had his final word after Sheppard's closing argument, he turned to testimony from defense psychiatrist Ernest Miller. Miller had said that the medication does not cause murder. McKinnon then said the factor in the intoxication was alcohol, and Demeniuk had been a drinker since her teenage years. There was no evidence that Demeniuk's medication caused her to consume alcohol, he said. He showed a timeline of Demeniuk's phone calls on the day of the killings, and referred to it repeatedly. The phone calls Demeniuk made to her boyfriendand her ex-husband, were "not psychotic," he said. He reminded the jury that a paramedic, a nurse, and an emergency room doctor all said Demeniuk seemed sane right after the shootings. "No one has ever seen psychosis on the part of this defendant," McKinnon said. He asked whether she could have been insane for only 2 to 3 minutes of her life. "That doesn't make common sense, does it?" he asked. Then he referred to the defense's position that Demeniuk killed her children while under the delusion that she was taking them to "a better place." "If you accept that delusion, she is still guilty of 1st-degree murder," McKinnon said. (source: The Florida Times-Union) ***************** Should a juror have veto power? Texas executes far more people than any other state in the nation. It even inspires jokes about electric bleachers. And yet the death penalty in Texas requires a unanimous jury vote in favor of execution, as many states do. Florida doesn't. And of those that do not, only Florida allows executions after a simple majority vote of 7-5. So requiring a 12-0 vote by jurors here would put Florida closer to the death-penalty mainstream. There's nothing radical about the idea. And, as you may have read, this year the Florida Legislature will consider making a unanimous jury vote for death a requirement. Backers argue that would actually strengthen the death penalty. The requirement could make it less likely that a future legal challenge could overturn the state's death penalty laws, that argument goes. Could be. But with Florida's prosecutors statewide saying they don't expect a problem with judicial review, that worry isn't likely to persuade many death penalty advocates. There just isn't that much reason to think Florida's death penalty faces any imminent threat. So, can this be sold as simply a good idea, a valuable safeguard? Maybe I'm a good test case. I'm just a lukewarm death penalty supporter. As I've explained before, I think some crimes call for execution. I don't think there is anything barbaric about acknowledging that reality, gruesome though an execution is. I've witnessed 2 executions. I don't like anything about them. I don't like anything about prisons, either, but I think they are a grim necessity. Still, unlike some pro-death penalty zealots, I'm also adamant that we shouldn't execute anyone unless guilt is certain. Guilt beyond any doubt at all should be the required standard. So, how do I feel about requiring unanimous jury votes for the death penalty? Well, I admit I sort of think I should like the idea. But I can't work up any enthusiasm for it. One reason is Joseph P. Smith, the man who abducted, raped and murdered 11-year-old Carlie Brucia. It is hard for me to imagine why any juror would find him guilty and then vote that he should not be executed, unless it was someone who simply can't emotionally sentence someone to death. And yet, the vote for death at Smith's murder trial was just 10-2. And that's not at all unusual in Florida, even in the most horrific cases. Should 1 juror, or even 2, have veto power? Should those 2 have had the power to override the other 10 and ensure that Smith would get a life sentence? I just don't think so. The crimes that put people on death row in Florida are normally all too deserving, and yet, as a news story just reported, only about 16 percent of the death penalties issued in Florida in the 1990s were based on a unanimous vote. Maybe that's because Florida courts allow people who are less than enthusiastic about the death penalty, as are many thoughtful people, to serve on juries. It could be that not requiring a unanimous vote makes the decision different for some jurors. Those with qualms simply feel more free here to vote for life when they know it won't amount to a veto. I doubt that many jurors would want such veto power. It would be a huge burden for any one person. The judge has a death penalty veto. The governor does, too, through the power of clemency. Maybe it is best that every juror does not. (source: Tom Lyons, Herald Tribune)
