[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.J., FLA., CALIF.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 12




NEW JERSEY:

Panel to assess death penalty's cost


The cost of the state's seldom-used death penalty will dominate debate at
the Legislature this week as relatives of murder victims get their say.

A death penalty study commission is scheduled to meet Wednesday to take
testimony from witnesses, including relatives of murder victims. Officials
want to hear whether there is a major cost difference between the death
penalty and life in prison without parole.

The special commission formed last year has until mid-November to give
recommendations on whether New Jersey's capital punishment law needs to be
either revised or abolished. The state has 10 men on death row, but the
law that created the commission imposed a moratorium on executions until
60 days after the panel completes its work.

No execution was imminent. New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982
but hasn't used it since 1963.

Sharon Hazard-Johnson, whose parents were killed in their Pleasantville
home in 2001 by death row inmate Brian Wakefield, has been wary of the
commission's work.

"I am very concerned that this is a bid to abolish the death penalty," she
said.

Death penalty foes hope that will happen. New Jerseyans for Alternatives
to the Death Penalty recently released a report that detailed how 25 New
Jerseyans were convicted of crimes they didn't commit.

As the commission debates the death penalty, property tax reform talks
also are to continue at the Statehouse, with lawmakers expected to discuss
regional taxation and shared services.

The committee mulling whether the state can save money by consolidating
its hundreds of local governments is slated to meet Wednesday to discuss
delivering local services on a regional basis.

Senate Majority Leader Bernard F. Kenny, D-Hudson, said the committee
studying whether the state's constitution should be amended to provide
property tax relief will consider whether New Jersey should replace local
property taxes with statewide or regional property taxes.

The committee studying school funding plans to examine how state and
federal legal mandates influence school property taxes, while the panel
studying public worker benefits plans to study health benefits for
government workers.

(source: Associated Press)






FLORIDA:

Fla. Gubernatorial Nominee Acknowledges Mistake In 1990 Vote


After months of political attacks, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jim
Davis is admitting he made a mistake when he voted in 1990 in the state
Legislature to deny compensation for 2 black men convicted, and later
cleared, of killing 2 white gas station attendants.

Davis was to meet Tuesday with Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee to apologize
to them for his vote and admit it was mistake, after he reviewed the
voluminous record in the case, Josh Earnest, a Davis spokesman, said
Tuesday.

"In keeping his promise that he made a couple of weeks ago, Davis went
back and reviewed the record and is going to talk more about the vote
based on a fresh look at the 16-year-old case," Earnest said.

Pitts and Lee originally pleaded guilty to the 1963 killings. They claimed
they were beaten, threatened and interrogated for hours until they
admitted to the crime on the advice of their attorney, hoping they would
receive life in prison instead of the death penalty. The court, however,
sent them to death row, where they remained for 9 years.

The case was eventually overturned, but the pair were again convicted by
an all-white jury in a 2nd trial. Both had maintained their innocence, and
reports later surfaced that the prosecution had withheld evidence in the
trial. Another man eventually admitted to the killings.

They were pardoned in 1975 by then-Gov. Reubin Askew, who cited
substantial doubt about either man's guilt. The other man's confession
also played a part in the pardon.

Pitts and Lee then failed for years to get compensation for their wrongful
imprisonment. In 1990, Davis, along with 5 other lawmakers on a 10-member
panel, again denied payment to them.

They were eventually awarded $500,000 each by the Legislature in 1998.

The 1990 vote dogged the Davis campaign throughout the Democratic
gubernatorial primary race, as his then-opponent, state Sen. Rod Smith,
accused Davis of failing to undo injustice.

The issue resonated with the black community as leaders called on Davis to
admit he made a mistake. Davis had said he didn't have enough evidence at
the time to approve the compensation.

After repeated attacks throughout his campaign for governor, Davis finally
agreed to review the record again.

Even supporters called on Davis to renounce his vote.

"It is critically important to get past the possibility of being defined
as someone that does not care about African-Americans because he cast a
vote that was not favorable to two individuals who were clearly victims of
an atrocious injustice," U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings said Monday.

"I think Davis made a mistake, that's my opinion," the Miramar Democrat
said. "I think he made a bad vote."

However, Hastings, who is black, also noted that Davis has been a strong
supporter of issues that matter to the black community.

"It would be impossible for me to support Jim Davis if I felt his animus
was such that he would be harmful to a group of people because of their
race," Hastings added.

Hastings did not immediately return a telephone seeking comment Tuesday.

Davis was put on the spot at a campaign stop the weekend before the Sept.
5 primary election, when a bishop at a predominantly black church in
Riviera Beach called on the congressman to admit a mistake or explain his
vote.

"This is bigger than black versus white," the Rev. Thomas Masters, of the
New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, said in an interview Monday.
"It's a matter of right versus wrong. It's a moral issue."

Dexter Douglas, a Tallahassee attorney who was appointed by the state to
present the first compensation request from Pitts and Lee to a claims
committee in the 1970s, said the record never showed the pair was
innocent, just that they deserved a fair trial.

He said witness testimony was sketchy and changed often.

"It could have very well happened that they were hammered into pleading
guilty, but it could also very well have been that they were guilty,"
Douglas said in an interview Monday. "I would have ruled that it presented
enough evidence of guilt that it had to be presented to a jury."

Douglas said even Askew wasn't sure of the pair's innocence when he
granted them a pardon.

"He said, no, he couldn't say they were innocent, but he granted them a
pardon because he thought they did not and could not receive a fair
trial," Douglas said.

Pitts never forgave Davis for that vote, and hoped that one day the
congressman would admit his mistake. He said Tuesday he was pleased but
also noted the timing was suspicious.

"I think this all has to be looked at with the politics that brought it
out," Pitts said. "I just wish it had been under different circumstances."

(source: The Associated Press)






CALIFORNIA:

Death penalty hovers in AG race


For most of his adult life, and now in the midst of his bid to become
California's next attorney general, one political issue has hovered over
Jerry Brown: the death penalty.

In 1960, Brown helped persuade his father, then-Gov. Edmund G. "Pat"
Brown, to delay the execution of convicted murderer Caryl Chessman.

As governor in the late 1970s, Jerry Brown vetoed a bill reinstating the
death penalty, but exerted little effort to block a legislative override
that subsequently enacted the law. Almost a decade later, his appointee as
state Supreme Court chief justice, Rose Bird, was removed from office by
voters angry in part because of her handling of death penalty cases.

In the years before he became mayor of Oakland in 1998, Brown railed
against capital punishment on his radio show, "We, the People," describing
it as "state murder."

Now, as the Democratic nominee for attorney general, Brown remains morally
opposed to the practice but insists he will follow the law.

Brown brings that history to the contest against Republican Chuck
Poochigian, whose views on the death penalty are much less nuanced. A
state senator from Fresno, Poochigian unabashedly supports it as a
deterrent and a measure of justice for perpetrators and their victims.

"No one should take pleasure in the loss of anyone's life," Poochigian
said in an interview. "But in those cases in which the death penalty is
applicable, given the heinous crimes being committed against innocent
people, it is in my mind imperative that we have it."

The death penalty was a potent topic in California campaigns of the 1970s
and '80s, particularly in gubernatorial and attorney general races. Since
then, however, some political observers say, the death penalty has faded
as a campaign issue.

Poochigian hopes his campaign can benefit from Brown's personal aversion
to capital punishment. Brown has much wider name identification among
voters and a 21-percentage-point lead in a month-old Field Poll.

As a candidate for attorney general, Brown has appeared less fervent in
his criticism of the death penalty.

"I think we'd do better without it, but a majority of Californians
disagree with that," Brown said in a wide-ranging interview in March. He
added that he would "strongly ... carry out the law of California."

His campaign staff declined several recent invitations for Brown to
discuss the subject.

Brown's position disturbs death penalty opponents, who once counted him as
an ally because he often described the sentence of life in prison without
the possibility of parole as a more humane and equally effective deterrent
as capital punishment.

"It's somewhat tiresome when somebody gives me that excuse," said Mike
Farrell, an actor and president of Death Penalty Focus. "I would love to
see him sort of put his career, if you will, where his mouth is."

Homicide cases in state courts generally are prosecuted by county district
attorneys. If a jury hands down a death sentence, the case is
automatically appealed to the state Supreme Court, where the attorney
general serves as prosecutor. That office also handles federal appeals of
death sentences, such as a pending case challenging California's lethal
injection method of execution.

Among recent attorneys general, three, all Democrats, opposed the death
penalty on moral grounds -- Brown's father, Stanley Mosk and John Van de
Kamp. Republicans Evelle Younger, George Deukmejian and Dan Lungren backed
capital punishment, as does the current attorney general, Democrat Bill
Lockyer.

Brown has cited his dad, Mosk and Van de Kamp as models for how he would
defend capital cases, despite his personal misgivings.

Pat Brown's history on the subject, though, is complicated. As governor,
he allowed 36 executions and commuted 23 sentences to life without parole.
But in his 1989 book, "Public Justice, Private Mercy," the elder Brown
recounted how in 1959 he considered capital punishment a "necessary evil"
but later deemed it a "gross failure" as a deterrent.

Van de Kamp said in an interview that it was not a contradiction for him
to pursue death sentences when he was attorney general from 1983 through
1990.

"You swear on the Bible, if you will, that you will uphold the laws and
the constitution of the state of California," said Van de Kamp, now a
private attorney in Los Angeles.

But Michael Rushford, a death penalty supporter who heads the
Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, is skeptical that
Brown would be assertive in defending the state's capital punishment laws.

Rushford suggested that Brown could slow the work of the attorney
general's death penalty unit or assign inexperienced lawyers to it.

"You don't have to be a brain surgeon to understand that someone who is
personally opposed is not going to be aggressive," Rushford said. "It
would be like hiring (former Moral Majority leader) Jerry Falwell to ...
run an abortion clinic."

Brown once was strenuous in his opposition to capital punishment. On his
KPFA radio shows, Brown insisted that too little attention was paid to
social causes of crime, that criminals are undeterred by the death
penalty, that doctors violate their oath by participating in lethal
injections and that politicians benefit from executions.

Five years before, as a presidential candidate, Brown said he favored
televising executions as a means of boosting opposition to them. In 1967,
he demonstrated against the execution of Aaron Mitchell outside San
Quentin State Prison.

But later, as governor in the late 1970s, Brown accepted the Legislature's
desire to reinstate the death penalty. "Now that it is a valid law," he
said at the time, "I will carry out my oath of office."

Poochigian, who co-chaired the campaign for a successful 2000 ballot
measure that in part made gang-related murders eligible for death
sentences, said his views were set as a teenager even before a distant
relative was murdered in Chicago.

"I remember being very angry about it and perplexed by how the system
didn't deal more effectively with the perpetrators," he said.

Death penalty foes contend there are too few precautions against executing
innocent people and too few politicians willing to forcefully oppose
capital punishment. They have little hope that Brown will turn out to be
one of them.

(source: The Sacramento Bee)