Dec. 25 TEXAS: Stepfather says he killed girl, 12, found in river -- He faces 2nd murder charge as officers question his claim about his state of mind The stepfather of a 12-year-old girl whose brutalized body was recently dragged out of the Brazos River confessed to the child's killing Friday night, just hours after hundreds gathered to bury her. 1st-degree murder charges are pending against Steven J. Carrington in the Dec. 3 killing of Teketria Buggs, who was struck twice with some object and stabbed several times. Preliminary information from the medical examiner suggests Teketria may also have been sexually assaulted, either that day or at another time, said Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Craig Brady, who emphasized that authorities are still investigating that angle. Carrington is in custody in Fort Bend County, charged with 1st-degree murder in the 1998 death of his 21-year-old cousin, Corey Brooks, whose body was also discovered in the Brazos River. While officials believe Carrington's confession to killing Teketria, they do not believe all he has said, Brady said. Carrington maintains that he was high on crack when he attacked the child and didn't realize it was her but thought it was Brooks, Brady said. "He admits it, but he does not admit he knowingly killed a child," Brady said. "He doesn't want to be known as a child killer." Brady attributed the timing of Carrington's confession to "what little bit of conscience he has." What authorities do know is that Teketria was with Carrington at a "filthy" Fort Bend County home owned by Carrington's mother or grandmother when she was slain, Brady said. "There was dog fecal matter on the floor," he said. In the home at the time were several people, including Carrington's family members, Brady said. None is offering any help in solving the crime, Brady said. "Steven's family is uncooperative and hostile to law enforcement," Brady said. Suspect tells of argument Carrington, who maintains he acted alone, was with Teketria in a small room when they began arguing and he struck her with some kind of object, then stabbed her multiple times, Brady said. Officials would not reveal what kind of weapon was used. Carrington told authorities with the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Rangers that he disposed of the weapon, as well as Teketria's shoes and some of her clothing and his, in a burn pile near the home. "It was cold and calculated," Brady said. Officials think Teketria was dead when she was placed in the river and that she died immediately or at least quickly after she was attacked. If authorities find enough evidence of a sexual assault, charges will be upgraded to capital murder, Brady said. Carrington emphatically denies he sexually abused the girl. Brady said it's possible the "cowardly" Carrington doesn't want to go to prison with the rap of being a child-sex offender. (source: Houston Chronicle) FLORIDA: The innocent deserve more from Floridians There are some 86,000 convicts in your prisons this Christmas Day, good people of Florida. Care to speculate on how many are innocent? Maybe a thousand. Maybe twice that. Florida prison officials used to say that "1/3 of the inmates don't belong here, 1/3 are ready to go, and the rest should never leave." With respect to the 1st 1/3, they were on to more than they knew. A recent experiment in Virginia implies horrifying numbers. Gov. Mark Warner last year ordered random DNA testing of forensic samples from old cases in the state's files. It took until now to complete. Among the first 31 reviewed, DNA established the innocence of 2 men who had finished serving long prison terms for rape. (Warner pardoned them last week and has directed testing in every one of several thousand other cases.) That was 6.5 % of the testing universe. The same ratio among the 9,000 people serving time in Florida for sexual offenses would mean that nearly 600 of them are innocent. A similarly significant probability applies to convictions for robbery and homicide, which would mean some 1,300 more innocent people on Florida's conscience. What's worse is how few people give a damn. Even California and Texas, larger states that share Florida's lock-'em-all-up, we-make-no-mistakes style of fighting crime, have provided substantial appropriations to their local Innocence Projects. But in Florida, the one surviving Innocence Project, based in Tallahassee, still depends on voluntary donations and labor to process the hundreds of inmate DNA petitions already on hand. Nothing is being done in Florida to identify and correct the reasons why the innocent are punished and the guilty go free. National studies have established the causes of wrongful conviction. The most common is mistaken identification by victims and other witnesses, which happened to both of the men Warner pardoned. It figured in 125 of the first 163 DNA exonerations nationwide. That's 77 %. False confessions, lying co-defendants and jailhouse snitches - like the one who framed Wilton Dedge - and preventable mistakes on the part of police and prosecutors are other significant factors. "Tunnel vision is insidious," said the report of an official investigation into a wrongful conviction in Manitoba. "It results in the officers becoming so focused upon an individual or an incident that no other person or incident registers in the officer's thoughts." The report recommended annual retraining to guard against this. Tunnel vision, mistaken identification and false confessions figured in Florida's legendary "Quincy Five" case, where 5 men were charged with murder and 2 convicted before a tip led defense attorneys to the identities of the real killers. But there has yet to be the 1st official investigation of any wrongful Florida conviction, whether Dedge's or any of 21 confirmed death row exonerations. This willful indifference cannot be blamed simply on the Legislature, the governor or the courts. People of Florida, they work for you. When are you going to demand that they do their jobs right? Those of you who are lawyers - "officers of the court," as you so often boast - are twice as responsible. You are the Florida Bar. When will you insist that it act? When are you going to petition the Supreme Court for a commission of inquiry? Virginia's dramatic example owes to an unsung angel of mercy, the late Mary Jane Burton, a crime laboratory scientist who saved every sample of bloodstained clothing, every semen swab, long before DNA testing was invented. The files came to light in 2001 and prompted Warner's experiment. The significance was its randomness. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, remarked that so high an innocence rate among people who had not asked for testing "should give pause to people who think mistakes in our criminal justice system are flukes." "This should be a beacon for other governors across the country to implement post-conviction DNA testing," he said. In fact, it needs to be a beacon for much more than DNA testing. There is no DNA evidence in thousands of convictions, particularly for robbery, where it is just as possible that eyewitnesses could be wrong, co-defendants may have lied, or tunnel vision took authorities off the right trail. DNA is a window onto a vast underworld of arrogance, indifference, suffering and shame. (source: St Petersburg Times) ********************* For 3rd time, killer awaits fate----'Bugsy' LeBron, twice sentenced to die, expects judge's decision Prosecutors and a murder victim's family hope the fate of convicted killer Jermaine "Bugsy" LeBron will finally be determined this week when he is sentenced in Osceola Circuit Court. On Tuesday, Chief Orange-Osceola Circuit Judge Belvin Perry could sentence LeBron, 31, to death for the 3rd time for the 1995 murder of a south Orange County man whose customized red pickup LeBron wanted. An Osceola jury in August recommended death for LeBron on a 7-5 vote after hearing more than a day of testimony and considering its decision overnight. Larry Neal Oliver Jr., 22, worked two jobs to pay for his customized pickup. Prosecutors say LeBron wanted to steal it. Oliver's parents, Larry Sr. and Rebecca Oliver, who have since moved to South Carolina, have kept close tabs on the case and attend practically all the hearings that involve LeBron. The Florida Supreme Court overturned two previous death sentences because of judicial errors. In one instance, the court threw out the sentence because jurors were told LeBron was the shooter after a jury made a special finding that he was not. Florida's death-penalty laws state that a person may receive a death sentence even if he didn't pull the trigger. In another instance, the court tossed out the sentence because jurors heard testimony about a separate case, which the justices said was inadmissible. Testimony from a Kissimmee police sergeant about a 2nd shotgun attack in 1995 for which LeBron was convicted should not have been admitted because it prejudiced the jury, the high court ruled. Lawyers returned in May of this year for what was to have been the 3rd sentencing hearing, but a mistrial was declared when an Osceola County deputy sheriff accidentally called LeBron the shooter during his retelling of the incident. A new jury was impaneled in August for the most recent sentencing hearing. If Perry again sentences LeBron to death, there will be an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. The best LeBron can hope for is life in prison, his attorney Robert Norgard has said, because the Supreme Court did not void LeBron's 1st-degree murder conviction. The case generated so much publicity in Central Florida that the original trial in October 1997 -- which ended in a mistrial -- and a 2nd trial, in which he was convicted in February 1998, were moved to Pinellas County. In a January ruling, the Supreme Court ruling acknowledged "unusual problems" with the case. Rather than simply voting on LeBron's guilt or innocence, the jury that convicted him was told by Perry to make additional findings of fact. The trial jury found that LeBron was not the person who shot Oliver at a Buenaventura Lakes house where LeBron lived with several other people, and that he did not possess a gun during the shooting. Despite that finding, the jury also found him guilty of murder. "Seldom does this Court review capital cases in which the guilt phase produces such specific, and seemingly inconsistent, verdicts," the court majority wrote in its 5-1 ruling. Because of the trial jury's finding, the Supreme Court instructed the judge not to allow any evidence during a resentencing hearing that would indicate LeBron shot Oliver, including testimony from a detective who at the 2002 sentencing hearing said LeBron had confessed. (source: Orlando Sentinel) ARKANSAS: Prison inmates not forgotten at Christmas As most Arkansans celebrate with gifts, food and family gatherings, churches and other groups have joined prison officials to see that 13,000 state inmates are not forgotten this Christmas. Prison officials expected greater-than-normal visitation at prison units around the state this holiday weekend. Saturday and Sunday are normal visitation days but rarely - not since 1994 - has the Christmas holiday coincided. "Visitation day normally doesn't fall on Christmas, so we are prepared for a big turnout," said Maggie Capel, assistant warden at the McPherson Unit in Newport, which houses about 700 women. Observing the holidays behind bars can be depressing for prisoners, said Eddie Sensat, the state prison system's director of chaplain services, so the Department of Correction annually serves special Christmas meals to help uplift spirits. "Let's face it. If you're not where you want to be on the holidays, it can be real depressing," prison spokeswoman Dina Tyler said. "So, this is something we do as a humane gesture." Besides turkey dinner and all the trimmings, Christmas Day services also were scheduled at prisons units. The goal is to "just try to make it as pleasant as we can, as easy as possible," Sensat said. Most prison units, if not all, have put up Christmas decorations, and most have been visited by Christmas caroling church groups. "We have churches, choirs and other groups come in and perform and give out some Christmas presents," he said. At the McPherson Unit, inmates have actually been celebrating the holiday season for weeks, Capel said. Santa visited the women's prison twice - both times on the weekend to coincide with family visitation - and gave gifts to many of the children visiting their imprisoned moms at the facility. Students and faculty in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock supplied the gifts - children's books. The female inmates at McPherson also participated in a contest to see which barracks could design the most festive holiday mural. "They really enjoyed that and the barracks with the best mural gets popcorn," Capel said. Bingo, musical chairs and an art contest also were planned, and roast turkey was on the Christmas dinner menu, she said. Along with a special meal, Tyler said, state prisoners also have been given a $6 credit that they can use to purchase small items, including candy, at their prison unit's commissary. The credits will cost the state about $70,000 and will come out of the state's inmate Welfare Account, which is a combination of fees collected for prisoner phone calls and money made by the prison stores, state officials said. "For some of those inmates, that's all the money they get all year. It's like a holiday bonus," Tyler said. The nonprofit Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind has provided gifts to the children of inmates, coordinator Dee Ann Newell said. The Little Rock-based group is working with 37 families this year, she said. Many of state prison units participate in Angel Tree, a ministry of prison fellowship that offers churches and volunteers the opportunity to minister to prisoners by providing gifts to their children, Sensat said. Betsey Wright of Rogers, who served as former President Clinton's chief-of-staff when he was Arkansas governor and now ministers to death-row inmates, said a coalition of groups came together this holiday season to pack and present special gift baskets to the inmates on death row and their prison guards. The baskets included 2 shirts, 2 pairs of socks, stamped envelopes, writing pads, candy and hot chocolate. Fellowship Bible Church in Harrison, through its inmate ministry program, purchased and gave sweatsuits to all the inmates at the Varner Unit, Wright said. "There are a lot of churches and organizations that have given small gifts to inmates," she said. (source: Arkansas News) USA: Decrease in death sentences continues The number of death sentences imposed by juries around the country has plummeted since 1999, according to a study released last week by the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. In 1999, 276 death sentences were imposed. The figure has dropped every year since, falling to 125 last year. With only 6 days to go in 2005, the projection is that 96 death sentences will be handed down this year, the lowest total since 1976. One of the most striking statistics comes from Harris County, Texas, which has sent more people to death row than any other county in the state, which itself far and away leads the nation in executions. Harris County has generated only two death sentences this year; Houston, its largest city, has been referred to as "the capital of capital punishment." Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based center, said several factors have contributed to the diminution in death sentences -- prime among them the fact that jurors in all but one of the 38 states that have capital punishment laws are able to render sentences of life without parole. Jurors, he said, are becoming increasingly comfortable with voting for such sentences rather than death. In addition, Dieter said, while a significant majority of Americans -- 64 percent according to the latest Gallup Poll, down from 80 % in 1994 -- still support the death penalty, there is growing skepticism about the fairness of its use. He said that is attributable, at least in part, to the growing number of death row inmates who have been released after it was established that they were wrongfully convicted. That number now stands at 122. The number of executions also has dropped sharply, from 98 in 1999 to 60 in 2005; Texas led the field with 19 executions this year, a slight decrease from 23 in 2004 and a sharp decline from the peak year of 2000, when that state executed 40 people. Since 1973, Texas has executed 355 people, more than a third of the national total of 1,004. Virginia, at 94, has had the second most executions, but has carried out none this year. Only 16 states have held executions this year. Death penalty foes also were heartened by several other developments: Illinois continued a death penalty moratorium for the 6th year. In November, the New Jersey Senate passed a bill that would suspend executions and create a commission to study the state's capital punishment law. The bill is set to be considered in the state Assembly in January. If the measure passes, New Jersey would become the first state in the country to legislatively impose a death penalty moratorium. Death penalty foes also garnered significant victories in court this year. In Kansas and New York, the states' highest courts overturned death penalty statutes. Kansas has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court; in New York, the statute would have to be changed legislatively, something lawmakers there have declined to do. 4 states -- Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan and Wisconsin -- considered reinstating the death penalty, but all those efforts failed. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that there was a national consensus against executing individuals for murders committed as juveniles, and the justices barred the practice. The ruling meant that 71 death row inmates' sentences were commuted to life. The court issued 2 other significant pro-defendant rulings in capital cases, 1 involving racial bias in jury selection and another dealing with poor representation during a trial. The Supreme Court has three major death penalty cases on its docket in the current term. Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center said he thought that 2005 "may be remembered as the year that life-without-parole became an acceptable alternative to the death penalty in the U.S." (source: Los Angeles Times) ********************* In Criminal Cases, a Court Nominee Hews to Rules If Samuel A. Alito Jr. had been on the Supreme Court back in January, Ronald Rompilla might well be a dead man. That month the Supreme Court heard an appeal of a decision, written by Judge Alito for a panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, that upheld Mr. Rompilla's sentence for a murder committed in 1988. The Supreme Court, finding that Mr. Rompilla's lawyers had been ineffective representatives at trial, later reversed the ruling in a 5-to-4 vote. Mr. Rompilla's appeal offers a study of how Judge Alito, President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, has handled criminal cases that have appeared before him. Perhaps not surprisingly, the judge, a former federal prosecutor, has often - though far from uniformly - ruled against defendants. But it is not clear that he stands out: In appeals of criminal convictions generally, defendants face a steep uphill battle. Nationally, just 5.6 percent of such appeals result in some kind of reversal, according to the federal Office of Court Administration. Judge Alito's opinions in criminal cases are meticulously written, with careful deference to the findings of trial court judges and juries and scrupulous determination to fit his decisions into the framework built by past cases. He hews to the rules. "The perception is, he's coming from an extremely conservative point of view," said George Newman, a defense lawyer in Philadelphia who has argued cases before the judge. "He's not a good defense judge." In his appeal, Mr. Rompilla argued that his trial lawyers had provided inadequate representation, saying they failed to investigate his background thoroughly by interviewing family members carefully and reviewing medical, police, school and prison records. As a result, his new lawyers said, they did not uncover evidence that he had limited mental capacity, was neglected as a child and suffered other problems. Had evidence of his traumatic life experiences been presented at trial, the lawyers argued, then jurors would not have sentenced him to death. Judge Alito did not agree with these arguments. "Trial counsel conducted an extensive investigation for mitigating evidence," he wrote. "According to their testimony, trial counsel got to know Rompilla well during the course of their representation and established a good relationship with him. Rompilla was questioned about his background but provided no useful information or leads." What is most striking is Judge Alito's close application of rules established by prior cases on what standard of competence a lawyer must meet, without regard to the success of the lawyer's efforts. The focus was on the process they followed, not the result they achieved. For example, he wrote, "With the benefit of hindsight, we know that these records contain useful information about Rompilla's childhood home environment, his mental problems and his problems with alcohol." But, he said, "trial counsel had grounds for believing that if there was any mitigating evidence of this sort to be found, at least a hint of its availability would be disclosed in the interviews with Rompilla and his family members or in the testing and evaluations performed by the 3 mental health experts whom they retained." Judge Dolores K. Sloviter, who dissented from the decision by Judge Alito and Judge Walter K. Stapleton, strongly criticized the majority's reasoning. Judge Sloviter said it did not matter whether the explanation offered by Mr. Rompilla's lawyers for their failure to conduct further investigation was reasonable. What mattered, she said, was whether the failure to investigate was itself reasonable. It is a distinction that the Supreme Court emphasized as well. In an opinion concurring with the ruling in favor of Mr. Rompilla, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - whom Judge Alito has been nominated to replace - wrote: "In the particular circumstances of this case, the attorneys' failure to obtain and review the case file from their client's prior conviction did not meet standards of 'reasonable professional judgment.'" The criminal cases that came before Judge Alito in his 15 years on the appellate court raised a range of issues. Several concerned sentences meted out to convicted criminals. In a 2004 case involving a pastor convicted of participating in a scheme to steal from his church, he wrote that the lower court judge was correct not to reduce the pastor's 51-month sentence because of his charitable work. It is "only when an individual goes well beyond the call of duty and sacrifices for the community that a downward departure may be appropriate," Judge Alito wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. "The defendant's net charitable and civic contributions - taking into account both the good and bad that he did in his capacity as a member of the clergy - cannot be considered as so extraordinarily positive as to warrant a downward departure." Other cases involved substantive legal questions about, for example, the legitimacy of a particular wiretap or search. In the case of an International Boxing Federation official convicted of taking bribes, Judge Alito ruled that a video recording of the hotel room in which bribes were paid was properly taken - a view that, a dissenting judge commented, would "gulp down the Fourth Amendment." The boxing official, Robert W. Lee, argued that the videotaping had violated the Fourth Amendment because it was conducted without a warrant. But Judge Alito wrote that because one of the people in the room had consented to the taping and could have testified to anything said, Mr. Lee had "no legitimate expectation of privacy." The judge added, "Although Lee had an expectation of privacy in the hotel suite so long as he was alone there," once he allowed someone else to enter, that expectation vanished. Sometimes the judge's meticulously logical approach and exacting standards worked in favor of a defendant. In a case decided in 2003, for example, Judge Alito wrote a unanimous opinion for a three-judge panel that concluded that Ronald A. Williams, a black man convicted of murder, should be given a chance to show that a juror hearing his case had concealed racist views. Although courts are reluctant to inquire into jury deliberations, Judge Alito wrote, the woman who claimed to have heard a racist comment by a juror was not herself a member of the jury and she heard the comment outside the jury room. Therefore, excluding the woman's testimony "for the purpose of determining whether a juror lied during voir dire cannot be sustained," the judge wrote. In a 2001 case, the judge also sided with a man challenging a murder conviction, this time after finding that the lower court judge had improperly rejected one of the man's arguments. The lower court had correctly dismissed claims that were not properly made, the judge wrote, but incorrectly lumped with them additional claims that the defendant, Robert E. Wenger Jr., should have been allowed to make. Again, Judge Alito's reasoning was tight, technical and focused on procedure rather than outcome - as he wrote in the unanimous opinion of a 3-judge panel. "Needless to say," he said, "we express no view regarding the merits of the claim." (source: The New York Times) ILLINOIS: State eases DNA testing backlog so cases can proceed -- Funds, outsourcing break logjam It has exonerated men of horrific crimes and freed them from death row. It can lead to a suspect in a cold case, such as the 1977 murder of a Cahokia teen. It can help build or strengthen a case to convict a guilty man. Scientists call it deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA -- the building block of the human body. Investigators call it a powerful tool for solving crime. But the influx of specimens and the shortage in forensic scientists trained to test and compare DNA samples led to thousands of samples sitting in crime labs around the state. The backlog reached its height in 2001 with 1,997 cases waiting for more than 30 days for testing. It's getting much better. In 2004 Gov. Rod Blagojevich allocated $2.6 million to outsource DNA samples to private labs while 13 forensic scientists completed the required 18 months of training. In July, Blagojevich announced the DNA case backlog was eliminated. "We've combated this issue on a couple of fronts by hiring technicians and aggressively pursuing funding mechanisms," said Blagojevich's spokesman Rebecca Rausch. "We are committed to reducing the backlog. By eliminating the DNA backlog, more cases can be solved and the criminals can be prosecuted." Last month, St. Clair County Sheriff's investigators exhumed the body of Sharrey Lynn Case from her Kentucky grave in hopes of finding evidence that would lead to her killer. They recovered "several pieces" of evidence from Case's body. The 17-year-old Cahokia teen was strangled with a wire and her sock was stuffed into her mouth just before Christmas 28 years ago. Her body was found under a pile of construction debris. With the discovery of new evidence during the exhumation, investigators will compare it to the thousands of offender samples in their DNA database -- including that of Gregory Bowman. It could be used to implicate or exonerate Bowman, who was previously convicted of murdering 14-year-old Elizabeth West and 21-year-old Ruth Ann Jany in 1978 and received a life sentence. Bowman previously won a retrial on those charges. While investigators initially said the evidence from Case could take a year to process, Illinois State Police Master Sgt. Rick Hector said the average is much less. He said the average age of an unworked case in the DNA section is about 83 days. "The Illinois State Police seeks to balance both efficiency in completing work with quality," Hector said. All convicted felons in Illinois are required to submit a biological sample for DNA typing. Each DNA profile is placed into a computer database called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, then compared to evidence collected at crime scenes. Both DNA from cases and offenders' DNA must be in the database to solve crimes, Hector said. The state tested 56,599 DNA samples from Jan. 1 until Nov. 30. On that date there remained a backlog of 1,001 felons' DNA samples to be tested as well as samples from 173 cases from around the state, Hector said. (source: Belleville News-Democrat) CALIFORNIA: Death penalty case on break Jurors deciding the fate of Mao Hin, convicted of a 2003 robbery-murder at American Legion Park, will resume deliberations Jan. 6. The jurors left the courthouse Friday without reaching a verdict. The jury has been deliberating since Dec. 1 to decide if Hin will receive a death sentence or spend the remainder of his life in prison. San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Bernard Garber dismissed an ill juror Thursday, causing the jury to start deliberations fresh with an alternate juror. Garber allowed the jurors to leave at noon Friday to take vacations they planned before the trial started. Last month, the jury convicted Hin, 21, of murder for his part in the Oct. 10, 2003, slaying of Alfonso Martinez. Martinez was walking with his girlfriend at American Legion Park in central Stockton when he was shot. His girlfriend survived the shooting with a graze wound to her head. Hin was convicted on a total of 13 counts for 2 other gang shootings in Stockton during a 2-month period surrounding the Legion Park killing. A 2nd defendant, Rattanak Kak, 18, was convicted on a total of 14 counts for his part in Martinezs murder and other gang shootings. Kak, whose sentencing is set for Jan. 9, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. (source: The Record) ***************** Execution puts California in death-penalty spotlight----Moratorium asked until panel reviews punishment data The execution earlier this month of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the former Crips gang leader and convicted killer who became a high-profile symbol of redemption during his quarter-century on California's death row, thrust a global spotlight on California's debate over capital punishment -- attention that is unlikely to soon fade. Hours after Williams was put to death at San Quentin state prison, an ailing 75-year-old convicted killer, who is next in line to die in California's death chamber, asked Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to spare his life. Clarence Ray Allen, a blind diabetic who can no longer walk and needs heart surgery, is scheduled to die Jan. 17, a day after his 76th birthday and a week after a legislative committee begins hearings on a bill seeking to temporarily halt executions in California, home to the nation's largest population of death-row inmates -- nearly 650. While the number of executions across the United States has been in decline, California could be facing its greatest number of execution since 1962, when 11 condemned inmates were put to death. A month after Allen is to be executed, another death-row inmate is scheduled to die, and at least three more -- condemned to die 2 decades ago -- are expected to exhaust their appeals and face execution next year. Williams was the 13th condemned inmate to be executed in California since the state resumed capital punishment in 1992. Legal appeals, typically lasting nearly two decades, have prevented the state from quickly carrying out death sentences. But as more death row inmates run out of legal options, the pace of executions is sure to increase, prompting alarm among death penalty critics who want the state to delay all executions until the state's Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a bipartisan panel created by the state Senate last year, completes its review of how criminal punishment, including the death penalty, is meted out. The commission is expected to issue its findings by the end of 2007. When it comes to administering capital punishment, "We have to deal with what seems to be an imperfect system in California," said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, a Democrat from West Hollywood, who is one of the sponsors of the moratorium. "We're not questioning whether the death penalty is right or wrong. We're saying that we should wait until the commission finishes its work," Koretz said. Since California reinstated the death penalty in 1977 following a US Supreme Court decision, 6 death-row inmates have successfully appealed their convictions and been freed, according to opponents of the state's death penalty. Across the country, more than 120 death-row inmates have been released in recent years because of improved DNA technology and fair-trial issues. "We can only speculate how many other innocent people are sitting on death row," said Stefanie Faucher, the program director of Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco-based group opposed to the death penalty. Despite a large population of progressives, an overwhelming majority of Californians supports the death penalty. In March, a Field Poll found that 2/3 of Californians were in favor of capital punishment, although the same poll found that a sizable minority, nearly 1/3, had reservations about the fairness in which death sentences were being imposed. "What use is there doing a study and still killing people while waiting for the results of the study?" asked Lawrence Marshall, the former director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions who is now a Stanford law professor. In 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 condemned inmates after an inquiry led by Marshall's center showed that several condemned inmates were innocent. The study revealed deep inequities, based on race and class, in death penalty cases. "There is no way the people of California are less amenable to having their eyes opened than the people in Illinois," Marshall said. The state attorney general's office has not taken a formal position on the moratorium, but has no authority to suspend executions, said spokesman Nathan Barankin. "We don't support a moratorium. There are already too many delays. It only adds to the injustice," said Charles Hobson, an attorney with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based group that advocates for the rights of crime victims and their families. Supporters of the moratorium hope to send the legislation to the governor by late summer. Schwarzenegger has not commented publicly on the proposal. Since becoming governor in 2003, Schwarzenegger has had 4 clemency petitions before him. He has denied 3, including 1 for Williams, whose transformation from hardcore gangster to author of antigang children's books and Nobel Prize nominee, made a compelling case for clemency, his supporters argued. The 4th clemency request before the governor centers on Allen, who was already serving a life sentence for 1 slaying when he arranged, while behind bars, the shotgun deaths of 3 people who he held responsible for his earlier murder conviction. Allen would be the oldest person executed in California. His failing health is certain to become a central issue. "The state not only begins to look ghoulish and foolish, to go executing a man who's blind and riddled with diabetes and heart disease, and who is not likely to live much longer," said actor Mike Farrell, the president of Death Penalty Focus who is best known for his role on the television show "M*A*S*H." "What we're dealing with here is a test of the efficacy and appropriateness of a system that speaks to who we are as a society," he said. (source: Boston Globe) ***************** Effort to speed executions stalls in Senate -- Provision unrelated to security had been added to Patriot Act Congress' last-minute decision to extend key search and surveillance provisions of the USA Patriot Act for five weeks has sidetracked, at least temporarily, a little-noticed but important provision intended to speed up death penalty cases in California and other states. The proposal, attached to a version of the Patriot Act that was blocked by a Senate filibuster, represents the latest attempt by prosecutors to shorten timetables for capital case appeals that, in California, often last 20 years or more. Stanley Tookie Williams, convicted of 4 Los Angeles-area murders, had been on death row for 24 years before he was executed Dec. 13. Clarence Ray Allen, scheduled to be executed Jan. 17 for ordering 3 Fresno killings from his prison cell, was sentenced to death in 1982. The extension bill that Congress approved last week included only the 16 Patriot Act provisions that were due to expire next Saturday and not an assortment of prosecution-backed amendments that had won House passage, including the so-called fast-track proposal for death penalty appeals. But that measure is expected to be taken up again early next year, either joined to the Patriot Act or as part of separate legislation that would limit federal court appeals by state prisoners. If the death penalty legislation passes, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer will seek to apply the tighter deadlines to California cases, said spokesman Nathan Barankin. Lockyer sponsored a bill as a state legislator that was intended to qualify California for the fast-track procedures under existing law. "He is an advocate for reducing the nearly 2-decade delay in resolving capital appeals," Barankin said. Chief Justice Ronald George of the state Supreme Court also thinks death penalty cases take too long to resolve, but opposes the federal legislation. "We are concerned with speed and efficiency, but we're also concerned about fairness," George said during his annual meeting with reporters last week. In particular, he said, he objects to a proposal to allow the U.S. attorney general, rather than the federal courts in each state, to make the initial decision on whether a state qualifies for the fast-track deadlines. The fast-track procedures are contained in a 1996 federal law but have not been implemented in any state. They include a six-month deadline for a condemned prisoner to file a federal challenge of a state court ruling upholding a death sentence; a further six-month deadline for a federal judge to rule on that appeal; and a four-month deadline for a federal appeals court to rule on the same case after receiving all written arguments. Those appeals are called petitions for habeas corpus. They are usually filed after a prisoner's initial appeal is rejected by the state's top court and typically seek to raise new constitutional issues about the evidence, the conduct of the judge or jury, and the trial lawyer's competence. Of the 646 prisoners sentenced to death in California, 263 have had their sentences upheld by the state Supreme Court, according to the prison system's latest report. Most of the 263 are either preparing or litigating habeas corpus claims in state or federal courts. The 1996 law made states eligible for fast-track deadlines if they have rules to appoint and pay competent lawyers and enable them to raise constitutional objections to death sentences in habeas corpus proceedings. But federal judges have repeatedly ruled that states have failed to meet those standards. Rulings by a San Francisco federal judge in 1996, and by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2000, concluded that California fell short because it had no binding standards for the defense lawyers and because death row inmates had to wait as long as five years before getting a lawyer. The proposed federal law would instead allow Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to decide whether a state met the fast-track criteria. His decision would be reviewed by the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., a court that is generally more conservative than the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit. George, in his meeting with reporters, said he sees "a problem with having a representative of the prosecution (Gonzales) rather than a court making that determination." The legislation, whose chief sponsors include GOP Rep. Dan Lungren of Gold River (Sacramento County), a former state attorney general, was amended recently to require the Washington appeals court to conduct an independent review of Gonzales' findings, rather than deferring to his judgment unless he was clearly wrong. George said the change is an improvement, but he still questions "whether it's appropriate to have the attorney general make the initial determination." It's better than having the Ninth Circuit make the decision, countered Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, a prosecution-oriented nonprofit. The proposed change was based, in part, on "a belief that this issue hasn't been getting a fair shake in the Ninth Circuit," said Scheidegger, who helped draft the new federal legislation. He said the San Francisco court shouldn't be making the decision because it would be affected by the tighter deadlines, and thus "has a stake in the outcome." George, who as a state lawyer defended California's death penalty law before the U.S. Supreme Court, said he believes the system can work more efficiently without sacrificing defendants' rights. Among other things, he said, the state needs to spend more on recruiting qualified defense lawyers for death penalty appeals. Although California has increased pay rates for death penalty lawyers in recent years, to $120 an hour, George said the state still lags behind federal court pay rates and hasn't been able to clear up its backlog of unrepresented prisoners. The number of death row inmates without lawyers has fallen from 173 in January 1999 to 107 as of October, in part because of a decline in death sentences. But inmates still wait 3 years for a lawyer, said George, who personally approves all the appointments after reviewing the lawyers' qualifications. "If California wants to have a death penalty, California needs to provide a level of funds where we can attract counsel," he said. (source: San Francisco Chronicle) ****************** Death case a mission for prosecutor----He has pursued Clarence Allen for 24 years and is now prepared to watch him die. During the trial, he sat "second chair" to the lead prosecutor and helped lay out the case that resulted in the death penalty for Clarence Ray Allen. Deputy Attorney General Ward Campbell then spent nearly the next quarter-century arguing and writing before the California Supreme Court and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - ultimately persuading them to uphold the work of the prosecution team. Now Campbell is battling against Allen's petition for clemency with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. If he succeeds in that venue, and in turning down the assorted last-minute appeals that the condemned inmate almost certainly will file, the prosecutor will find himself standing outside the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 17, watching through the window while the executioners administer Allen his lethal injection. "I always believe I made a commitment to this case, and that's part of fulfilling my commitment," Campbell said in an interview, about his observer's role at the execution. "If you're going to be an advocate for that type of punishment, you need to be willing to be present there. I feel a lot of somberness about it."Campbell, a career deputy with the attorney general's office, has been afforded a unique view of the application of the death penalty in California since it was reinstituted with the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. He could become the only attorney to have worked the trial, contested the appeals, handled the clemency proceeding and attended the execution. The 51-year-old University of California, Davis, Law School graduate said the 24 years he has spent on the case have given him a passion for capital justice just as intense as anything the opposition can muster. "There's always been a lot of focus on the defendant and their attorneys," Campbell said. "The public really needs to know that there is an equal commitment by individual prosecutors in all these cases. And an equal interest. We are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats. We are in fact people, all of whom get very involved and very dedicated to the cases they're assigned to." >From his 2nd year on the job in 1981 when he got assigned to the Allen case, Campbell has risen to become the supervisor of the office's capital appeals division for the 2 state appellate districts that stretch from the Oregon border to Bakersfield. He currently oversees the work of about 80 attorneys handling 134 death penalty appeals. Campbell has personally handled 7, including 4 others that are pending besides Allen's. Along the way, he has earned the love of the victims' families, the admiration of his colleagues, the respect of his adversaries in the courtroom - and the suspicion of death penalty opponents. "I think he is symptomatic of the problem with the system, which is the dehumanization process that takes place on both sides," said Mike Farrell, the actor who is now the president of Death Penalty Focus. "The perpetrator, or the presumed perpetrator, is dehumanized, and he or she becomes an animal, a monster, so we can feel better about killing them, and it's been my experience that the process affects the other side, that they become so intent on revenge that they lose sight of the capacity of human change." Still, Allen's clemency lawyer, Michael Satris, described Campbell as "an honorable man." Ronald S. Prager, the lead prosecutor at the Allen trial and now a San Diego Superior Court judge, said his former partner is "incredibly enthusiastic, knowledgeable and tenacious." "He is a wonderful person - I can't say enough good about him," said Patricia Pendergrass, the sister of Bryon Schletewitz, one of Allen's four victims. "For all my family has been through, he has always treated us with such kindness and respect." Pendergrass said her deceased parents, Ray and Frances Schletewitz, "loved him." "After this happened, they dedicated their lives to improving the criminal justice system, and Ward was their guide," she said. Bryon Schletewitz, 27, was shot and killed on Sept. 4, 1981, in a Fresno market that his parents owned. Also fatally shot in the same incident were store employees Douglas White, 18, and Josephine Rocha, 17. The killings were orchestrated by Allen from his cell at Folsom State Prison and carried out by Allen's former inmate friend Billy Ray Hamilton, who was accompanied in the killings by a woman named Connie Barbo. Hamilton, convicted in a separate trial, also was sentenced to death, with Campbell fighting off his death row appeals, too. Barbo is serving a life term without possibility of parole. According to evidence at Allen's trial, he arranged for the killings to eliminate witnesses in what he hoped would be a retrial - never granted - on his previous conviction in the June 1974 murder of a 17-year-old girl named Mary Sue Kitts. Allen orchestrated Kitts' strangulation, the jury found, because the girl told Bryon Schletewitz that Allen, the head of a Fresno-area burglary and robbery ring, was behind an earlier break-in of his parents' store - the same one that became the site of the 1981 slaughter. (Eugene Leland Furrow, the man convicted of carrying out the Kitts murder, was convicted of 2nd-degree murder but later testified against Allen and has since been paroled, according to Campbell.) Campbell, who began work for the attorney general in April 1980, was named Prager's backup on the Allen case after the Fresno County District Attorney's Office recused itself on a lawyer's conflict. Moved to Glenn County on a change-of-venue motion, the trial resulted in an August 1982 conviction and the ultimate imposition of the death penalty. It's been a major part of Campbell's work life ever since. "It's dominated my whole career," the prosecutor said in an interview in his cluttered office. "I've always been hooked on it, always been fascinated by it. I think, objectively speaking, it is the most aggravated death penalty case in this whole country in the last half-century. I don't know of any other case where you have a guy on the inside of a prison conspiring to kill people on the outside to the scale he was." Besides Schletewitz, there were 7 other people Allen wanted killed, according to a "hit list" investigators found on Hamilton at the time of his arrest for the market slayings. No great friend of prosecutors, the California Supreme Court under the late Chief Justice Rose Bird agreed the case was pretty egregious. Allen's death sentence was one of only four capital cases it upheld out of the 64 it considered, according to Campbell. In their clemency petition, Allen's lawyers say their 75-year-old blind and diabetic client who needs open-heart surgery and will turn 76 the day before he is scheduled to die ought to be considered for a compassionate commutation. Campbell disagrees, arguing that Allen has grown old and feeble because the length of the death penalty appellate process would turn any middle-age murderer into a senior citizen by the time it's completed. "It's really a part of the deliberativeness of our own process, which is what allowed him to survive this extra quarter of a century," Campbell said. "To use that as an excuse is really ironic." Campbell said the ordeal has left him scratching his head over what he sees as the system's relegation of the actual trial to "some sort of annoyance" to be picked over in the federal courts. While capital punishment opponents cite the nation's 122 death row exonerations in recent years, Campbell isn't much impressed. He said only 30 to 40 of them have actually been proved innocent and "there is no proof that an actual innocent person has been executed" since the sentence was reinstituted nationally in 1976. As for Allen, "it's an end to a chapter" but not the end of the story, he said. "The Hamilton case is still out there for the victims, I regret to say. So it's not really the end," he said. "It was Hamilton who was in that market. Once this is done, we have to turn around and press ahead on that case to get this case ultimately resolved." (source: Sacramento Bee)
