Feb. 8 ILLINOIS: Report: Treatment of mental illnesses could reduce Illinois death penalty cases The state's death-penalty eligible defendants are disproportionately minority and often suffer from untreated mental illnesses, according to a report released Tuesday by death penalty opponents. Severely mentally ill defendants tried for capital offenses have often gone without treatment for illnesses that include schizophrenia, paranoia, delusions and major depression, according to the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a not-for-profit organization that promotes human and effective alternatives to capital punishment. "To eliminate capital punishment in Illinois, we need reforms to fix a broken system," said Jane Bohman, executive director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Former Gov. George Ryan's 2000 moratorium on the death penalty was not a permanent solution, Bohman said, nor did it produce reforms to capital punishment. Though the General Assembly created the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Center in 2003, findings from the center will not be released until 2008, she said. To more clearly determine how mentally ill defendants are treated in capital cases and how many of those defendants suffer from such illnesses, the state's reform center should require courts to gather information and record findings to produce data, she added. "(Findings released by the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Center) should not be theoretical, it should be evidence based," said Bohman, who called the state's capital punishment system costly, prejudiced, inconsistent and arbitrary. "The system lacks transparency and drains communities of vital and scarce public resources that could be used for education, health care or social services." In 2005, there were 170 death penalty cases pending in Illinois. The defendants in capital cases are overwhelmingly non-white, indigent and young, according to the report. The report also found that last year, 75 percent of capital defendants in Cook County were Black. According to national statistics, about 16 % of the jailed population suffers from at least 1 mental illness, said Lora Thomas, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Illinois. Preventative measures to keep the mentally ill in proper treatment could reduce the number of severely ill who end up in court as death penalty-eligible defendants, she added. "We know those with untreated mental illnesses end up in jail," Thomas said. "And we know people with mental illnesses spend more time in jail than those who do not have mental illnesses." Jennifer Bishop, a member of the coalition's board, said her sister and brother-in-law were killed in 1990 by a 16-year-old who was diagnosed as a dangerous sociopath 8 months before the murders. David Biro, the teenager who killed her pregnant sister, was released from a mental health facility just 2 weeks earlier, though staffers there wanted him to remain hospitalized, she said. "If we spent money on prevention, we could prevent the (executions)," said Bishop, who also serves as a field director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. State law prevents those with mental illnesses from being sentenced to the death penalty, but some patients are medicated to show they are competent to stand trial, said NAMI Illinois President Barbara Doyle. During the trial Biro was not found mentally ill. But because of his age at the time of the murders, Biro was not eligible for the death penalty and is serving 3 natural life sentences. To request a copy of the report, visit www.ICADP.org. (source: Chicago Defender) WASHINGTON: Too big to hang, killer dies in prison----Judge: Hanging could have decapitated 400-pound bank robber Mitchell Rupe, a former death row inmate once found too heavy to hang, died at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla following a long illness. He was 51. Spokeswoman Lori Scamahorn said Rupe died Tuesday at the hospital inside the prison grounds. He had been there since January 3. Rupe shot 2 Olympia bank tellers to death at point-blank range during a 1981 robbery. Juries twice sentenced him to death, but higher courts overturned the sentences. In 1994, a federal judge upheld his conviction but agreed with Rupe's contention that at 400 pounds, he was too heavy to hang because of the risk of decapitation. Rupe argued that would be cruel and unusual punishment. At the time, Washington's only manner of execution was hanging. The main method now is lethal injection. Prosecutors tried for the death penalty a third time in 2000, but a jury deadlocked 11-1 -- just shy of the unanimous vote required for capital punishment. Rupe suffered from a terminal liver disease, and there was doubt at that time whether he would have lived long enough to be executed even if the jury had been unanimous. (source: Associated Press) MONTANA: Judge rules convicted murderer competent, should be allowed to die In Bilings, a state court judge here decided Monday that convicted murderer David Dawson should be allowed to fire his attorneys, end his appeal and move toward his execution. District Judge Gregory Todd wrote that Dawson's requests were made by a "legally competent and obviously intelligent man who has consistently and articulately made his positions known in writing, orally to this court, to court-appointed experts, to his attorneys and to federal judges." Todd said that after review and approval of his finding by the state Supreme Court, he would set an execution date for Dawson. Dawson has been seeking for more than a year to have that done. Dawson was sentenced to death in 1987, for taking a family captive at a Billings motel room and killing David and Monica Rodstein and their son, Andrew. A daughter, Amy, was rescued by police. The matter ended up in Todd's court after the state Supreme Court last summer said a state judge should decide whether Dawson, 48, knows what he's doing in making his requests and whether Dawson is making them "knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently." Todd held a hearing in December to question Dawson about his requests. At that hearing, Todd said he could do one of three things: make a decision based on the information available to him; allow for an outside expert to get involved, as Dawson's attorneys had requested; or allow a court-appointed psychiatrist who evaluated Dawson previously to visit him again. "He has a factual, legal and rational understanding of all his legal proceedings," Todd wrote in his ''findings of fact and conclusions of law," adding that he had no doubt that Dawson was making his decision "knowingly, voluntarily, intelligently and unequivocally." A federal judge in Billings earlier concluded as much. State and federal levels have been involved because Dawson's appeals were before both state and federal courts when he decided to halt them, an assistant state attorney general has said. Dawson's attorneys, Bill Hooks and Kathryn Ross, have raised questions about Dawson's requests, claiming, among other things, that they were influenced, in part, by the toll of years on death row. Hooks declined comment Monday on Todd's findings, saying he had not yet seen them. Hooks did say that a request to appeal the federal judge's decision was pending. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office called Todd's decision Monday another step in the process. Dawson told Todd in December that his attorneys have their own agenda and that he'd asked them repeatedly to step aside. Dawson also told the judge he'd weighed the consequences of his decision carefully and was "ready to die." Todd wrote that Dawson had no hesitation about pursuing his requests. "He has had years to make his decision and years of playing devil's advocate with himself," the judge wrote, adding that time had only reinforced Dawson's decision. "Dawson even stated that he was now more at peace with himself than he had been in years because of his decision to drop his appeal," Todd wrote. (source: Associated Press)
