Sept. 26 NEW YORK----federal death penalty sought Death penalty jurors face 82 questions ---- 600 potential panelists in cop-killing trial get a lengthy questionnaire What are your views on the death penalty? Can you decide whether a person should live or die? Name any TV programs you watch dealing with the criminal justice system. Have you ever been the victim of racial, ethnic or religious bias and do you have any bias, sympathy or prejudice toward Ronell Wilson, the police or government? The answers to these questions and dozens of others will help determine the fate of Wilson, a Stapleton resident and an accused cop-killer. As jury selection began yesterday in Brooklyn federal court, potential panelists were asked to answer -- in writing -- 82 queries probing their background, experiences and beliefs, as well as their views on the death penalty. Prosecutors and defense lawyers composed the 54-page questionnaires. Wilson, 24, is accused of slaying two undercover cops on March 10, 2003, in Tompkinsville. Detectives Rodney J. Andrews, 34, and James V. Nemorin, 36, were posing as gun buyers when Wilson allegedly shot each of them in the head in their unmarked car and dumped their bodies on Hannah Street off St. Pauls Avenue. Prosecutors allege the killings were intentional and are seeking the death penalty. Jury selection is expected to take four or more weeks. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis said yesterday the trial could begin around Nov. 6 and last about 2 months. Prior to the start of jury selection yesterday, Wilson was arraigned on a superseding 10-count indictment. It replaces the original indictment filed in November 2004, when federal prosecutors took over the case from the Staten Island district attorney's office. The new charges include 5 death-penalty counts -- 2 counts each of murder in aid of racketeering and causing death through use of a firearm, and 1 count of carjacking resulting in death. Wilson also is accused of non-capital robbery and weapons charges. The defendant wore eyeglasses, a long-sleeve tan shirt, matching trousers and a tie to the arraignment. He said nothing during the brief proceeding; however, his lawyers pleaded not guilty on his behalf to all charges. The defense team comprises Ephraim Savitt, Kelley J. Sharkey and Mitchell Dinnerstein. Prosecuting the case are Assistant U.S. Attorneys Colleen Kavanagh, Jack Smith and Morris J. Fodeman. Over the next few weeks, lawyers will review the questionnaires to root out possible bias and winnow the 600-person jury pool. Potential jurors who survive the initial cuts will be brought into court in mid-October for interviews and followup questions with prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge. 12 jurors and 6 alternates will be chosen. Garaufis ordered that jurors' identities be kept secret to preclude any possibility of tampering or media tainting. "This is in no way unusual," he said yesterday. Prosecutors and the defense team finalized the questionnaire over the weekend after working on it for months. It consists of 6 parts and delves into everything from the personal -- asking jurors if they are leaders or followers and to name the people they most and least admire -- to their exposure to the case through the media. With regard to legal issues, jurors are asked if they could fairly evaluate the case knowing that several "key" government witnesses -- who are not named but reportedly are Staten Islanders Jessie Jacobus, Omar Green and Mitchell Diaz -- participated in the crimes and have cut cooperation agreements in hope of earning lighter sentences. 16 queries focus on the death penalty. Jurors are asked whether they believe a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of release is more severe than a death sentence and whether they would be reluctant to impose the death penalty if they knew Wilson could be locked behind bars for good. They also must state whether their religious beliefs would interfere with their following the court's instructions on weighing the death penalty. (source: Staten Island Advance) FLORIDA/USA: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT---- A high moral, economic price There is new evidence that use of the death penalty is a failed policy. It retains support only because its backers can't find another political symbol adequate for their outrage and fear. Capital punishment has its vocal and stubborn adherents, even though no one can attribute any downturn in the murder rates in states like Florida that promote it. Few murderers analyze the consequences before they act. Even death penalty supporters working in the criminal justice system believe it is fraught with problems, but they are reluctant to give it up. How else would the country have dealt with the likes of Timothy McVeigh? No justice or fairness Opponents point to unfairness and racial bias in its application, its distortion of the justice system and the moral ambiguity of state-sanctioned killing. The latest analysis raising questions about it comes from the American Bar Association, which is amid a review that measures the death penalty process and procedures of various state judicial systems against a set of protocols designed for justice and fairness. Last week, the ABA released an assessment of Florida, and while the ABA did not call for the abolition of the death penalty here or even a moratorium, it did find severe shortcomings. The most shocking finding is that Florida leads all states with the highest number of exonerations of death row inmates -- 22 since 1973, or 1 set free for every 3 prisoners executed in that time. Given the supposed extra care and appeals taken with death penalty cases, that's a statistic that makes one wonder how many of those imprisoned for lesser offenses may also be innocent. There's another big reason for abolishing the death penalty, though: money. The costs simply aren't worth the results (killing a person in the false hope of detering crime) and the lost opportunity to spend that money more wisely to keep us safe. I could find no current Florida figures on the total cost of the death penalty from trial through appeals to the injection of poisons. Unlimited prosecution costs The state now allocates a mere $3,500 for trial counsel if neither a private lawyer or a public defender is available. You might spend more on a vigorous defense of a drunk-driving charge. Florida also caps appellate counsel fees at $100 an hour for a maximum of 850 hours to find the errors created by that inexpensive, inexperienced trial counsel. (State Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero, a Miamian appointed to the bench by Gov. Jeb Bush and no liberal, has called the work by some of those appellate attorneys ''some of the worst lawyering'' he has seen.) There is no cap on how much the prosecution spends, and the other sundry costs such as transcripts are huge. Florida also pays $26,422 a year to house death row inmates, $8,315 more than other inmates. The average length of stay until execution now is 11.92 years, a figure that is growing despite all of the legislative and judicial efforts to short-circuit the appeal process. In 1988, a Miami Herald study estimated that the state spent only 1/6 the total costs of capital cases on prisoners sentenced to life, or in 1988 dollars, $3.2 million per capital case. A more recent estimate for Texas, which ranks with Florida in its fondness for the death penalty, was $2.3 million per case. Better social services Even if we take the lower Texas estimate, Florida will spend $864 million from trial to execution on the 376 current death row inmates. If none are exonerated, that is. That's irrational. If Florida took 5/6 of that sum attributed to the extra cost of the death penalty and spent it on better social services for children now destined for crime, on prison rehabilitation for those who will get out, on more sophisticated policing, on just about anything, we'd be a lot safer. Perhaps we need a death penalty for the Timothy McVeighs among us, but our present costly system dealt him the same punishment for mass murder as it deals the bank robber who kills security guards. Both crimes are heinous but surely not equivalent. We pay a mighty price for this failure to distinguish between those crimes. (source: Miami Herald) CALIFORNIA: U.S. Judge to Open Rigorous Review of Lethal Injection----Federal judge will open four days of hearings focusing on a killer's claim that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. California's execution of condemned inmates by lethal injection will be put to its most stringent test ever at a hearing scheduled to start today in San Jose federal court. Attorneys for Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Terri Lynn Winchell in Lodi, will try to show that California's procedures violate the 8th Amendment to the Constitution because they may inflict unreasonable pain upon inmates. The case has ramifications not only for the 638 individuals scheduled to die in California but for inmates in other states, including Maryland and Missouri, where court challenges to lethal injection are also pending. Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno, an expert on methods of punishment, said the California case is pivotal because U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has gone beyond judicial efforts in other states to delve into how lethal injection works, including the unusual step of visiting the execution chamber at San Quentin earlier this year. The issue may wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Fogel has scheduled four days of hearings, allotting himself six hours to pose questions to members of the execution team at San Quentin and to medical experts. The lawyers will also question witnesses. "What's at stake in this hearing is whether or not a judicial officer is willing to take a very sober, extremely hard constitutional line on the administration of lethal injection in California," said Elisabeth Semel, who runs the death penalty clinic at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "One thing that sometimes get lost, or confused, is if the state wants to continue to execute people, it is the responsibility of the state to institute a procedure that meets the requirements of the 8th Amendment," which bars cruel and unusual punishment, Semel said. Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, whose lawyers are defending the California procedure, offered a contrary view. "This is a very straightforward case whether California's existing lethal injection protocol puts Morales at risk of suffering cruel and unusual punishment," Barankin said. "It is his burden to prove that to the court, and we are confident that the state's protocol is the most humane method of carrying out this criminal sentence." Dane Gillette, California's senior assistant attorney general, who heads the office's death penalty unit, added: "We believe that California's current lethal injection protocol is constitutional, as was the old one, and that the hearing will establish that fact." But Morales' legal team believes "that we will establish that California's execution protocol is so poorly designed, managed and staffed that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is institutionally unable to ensure that executions are performed humanely," said Washington, D.C., attorney Ginger Anders. Barbara Christian, mother of the slain teenager, stressed Monday that she is not concerned with whether Morales suffers. "As a mother, I don't care what kind of pain Morales feels because of what he did to my daughter," Christian said in a formal statement released by her attorney, Gloria Allred. "He showed no mercy when she cried out for it. He deserves no mercy." According to testimony introduced at trial, Morales killed Winchell, then a high school student, by beating her head in with a claw hammer. Morales' lawyers are expected to probe everything about the state's lethal injection procedures the nature and amounts of the drugs used, the lighting in the room where people monitor the inmate's death and the background of the people on the execution team. The state has had a de facto moratorium on executions since February, when officials postponed Morales' execution after they were unable to meet Fogel's conditions, imposed to ensure that the execution would withstand constitutional scrutiny. Since then, California officials have made some changes in the three-drug cocktail in use at San Quentin and across the country. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is an ultra-fast-acting barbiturate that is supposed to make the condemned inmate lose consciousness. The second drug pancuronium bromide is a paralytic agent to prevent the inmate from moving or speaking. The third, potassium chloride, causes cardiac arrest. A key contention in Morales' lawsuit and lethal injection challenges in several other states is that condemned inmates have been insufficiently sedated by the 1st drug and therefore experience intense pain but are unable to express it because they are paralyzed. Fogel, in prior rulings in the case, said state records suggest that sodium thiopental may have not worked properly in as many as six of the 11 lethal injection executions conducted in the state, starting with that of William Bonin, the so-called Freeway Killer, in 1996. A federal judge in Missouri has halted all executions in that state after finding flaws in its lethal injection procedure. An execution has been blocked in South Dakota while a federal judge reviews challenges. Yet another federal judge, in Baltimore, held an extensive hearing on the issue last week. On the other hand, federal judges in Florida, Oklahoma and Texas have recently rejected challenges to lethal injection, though none of them held hearings as in-depth as the four-day proceeding Fogel has scheduled. In response to Fogel's concerns, California officials have made some changes in procedure. They have lowered the initial sedative dosage from 5 grams to 1.5 grams, but the state protocol now also calls for the barbiturate to be administered in a constant flow through an intravenous line in one of the condemned person's arms. The remaining 2 chemicals are to be injected sequentially in the other arm after the initial sedative dose. State officials believe these changes will ensure that the inmate remains unconscious during the entire execution. But Morales' attorneys who also include John Grele of San Francisco, David Senior of Los Angeles and Richard Steinken of Chicago are skeptical. They note that such a procedure has not been tried in California or elsewhere and consequently would need to be closely monitored by medical professionals. But the state's protocol does not call for a doctor on its 14-member execution team, and medical oaths "first, do no harm" bar doctors from participating in executions. Organizations for registered nurses also urge members not to participate. The only role a doctor has had in the modern era of capital punishment in California is in pronouncing the inmate dead. In February, Fogel told the state it either had to have an anesthesiologist on hand or execute the inmate with an overdose of the sedative. The state chose the 1st option, but the 2 doctors appointed to do the job backed out shortly before the execution was scheduled to occur. (source: Los Angeles Times) ************* Judge debating state execution procedure respected by lawyers Some of the warmest compliments for Jeremy Fogel, the federal judge pondering a challenge to California's lethal injection procedures, come from lawyers on the losing end of his rulings. Fogel is "very capable, very smart, very principled," said Richard Jones, an attorney who represented two French organizations battling Yahoo over its posting of Nazi memorabilia on a Web site available in France. Fogel ruled in 2001 that French court orders requiring Yahoo to restrict access to the material were unenforceable in the United States. "If I were to (draw) him in a new case, I'd feel pretty good about it,'' said William Kennedy, an attorney who lost an arbitration-law case before Fogel in 2003. Fogel, a 1998 appointee of President Bill Clinton, begins a 4-day hearing in his San Jose court today on an issue that could affect the future of the death penalty: whether medical monitoring is needed to reduce the risk of a condemned inmate suffering an agonizing death from lethal injection. Executions in California are on hold while Fogel considers the state's proposed changes in its lethal injection procedures. Those changes were prompted by his rulings that led to a stay of Michael Morales' execution Feb. 21 for the 1981 rape and murder of a 17-year-old Lodi girl. The case is one of an increasing number of challenges around the nation to lethal injection, used by 37 of the 38 states with death penalty laws. In preparation for the hearing, Fogel has visited San Quentin State Prison, examined the death chamber and taken testimony from the leader of the prison's execution team. A law professor who has appeared in Fogel's court said the judge is well suited for a case on the cutting edge of the law, neither too timid nor too reckless. "He's very independent, but he really has a sense of restraint ... a very good instinct in terms of how far you can push something,'' said Gerald Uelmen of Santa Clara University. "He's willing to be courageous if he needs to be, but he's not someone who will leap to a decision prematurely," said Jon Streeter, a San Francisco attorney who won rulings from Fogel that led to a 2003 settlement banning racial profiling in traffic stops by the California Highway Patrol. A San Francisco native, Fogel, 55, graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School and began his law practice in 1974. Four years later he became directing attorney of the Santa Clara County Bar Association's Mental Health Advocacy Project. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the Santa Clara Municipal Court bench in 1981, and he won election to the Superior Court in 1986. Over the next decade, he established a moderate reputation while handling several major civil cases. He upheld Santa Clara County's 1996 sales tax for transportation, a 1994 Los Altos referendum that overturned the city's mandate to build affordable housing, and a 1993 San Jose ordinance barring anti-abortion protesters from picketing residences. Fogel also heard divorce and custody disputes, an assignment he described in a 2003 article as the most emotionally intense of his career and one that made him more inclined to settle cases. In a recent opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News, Fogel disavowed the concept of the judge as an impersonal arbiter or umpire. "Philosophy and life experience do sometimes matter with the close calls," he wrote. The judge, who worked at a legal clinic for poor people while in law school, also described the "pervasive impact of economic inequality on the quality of justice people receive." He did not respond to The Chronicle's request for an interview. Some of his cases in 8 years as a federal judge have illustrated the tension between Fogel's philosophical inclinations and his judicial caution. One involved a Santa Cruz medical marijuana clinic represented by Uelmen. Fogel said during a 2003 hearing that he was moved by accounts of patients who had died after federal agents confiscated their cannabis, but didn't see how federal law allowed him to prohibit raids or order the return of the marijuana. Soon afterward, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a separate case that federal drug laws didn't prohibit patients from obtaining locally grown marijuana. The ruling led Fogel to reconsider the Santa Cruz case and issue an injunction that kept the clinic operating for nearly a year, until the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the appellate decision in June 2005. Fogel has no experience in death penalty trials. But before Morales' case, he rejected federal appeals from two condemned prisoners challenging California's lethal injection procedures. In each case, he cited a state expert's finding that the inmate was unlikely to be conscious when paralyzing and heart-stopping drugs were injected. Both inmates were executed. But he reversed course in Morales' case, saying there was new evidence: records and observations of California executions suggesting that inmates were still breathing beyond when the same state expert said they should be motionless. Rather than halting executions, though, the judge proposed alternatives: The state could arrange to have medically trained personnel monitor Morales and make sure he was unconscious, or it could kill him with a single massive dose of a barbiturate. Only when prison officials were unable to comply did Fogel issue a stay of execution and order this week's hearing. The outcome is unpredictable, but lawyers who have appeared before Fogel make one forecast with confidence: He will take an active role questioning both sides. "He seems to enjoy the process of exchanging observations and analyses of legal problems he's wrestling with,'' Streeter said. "He loves to engage with counsel on the hardest questions.'' That may unnerve some lawyers. Jones, who represented the French organizations against Yahoo in the suit over Nazi memorabilia, said he entered the courtroom confidently, looking for a quick win. He knew he was in trouble, he said, when "the first words out of Judge Fogel's mouth were, 'This is the most interesting case I've had the privilege of working on.' " (source: San Francisco Chronicle) CONNECTICUT: Charges against alleged killer include possible death penalty A state prosecutor has filed additional charges in a triple homicide in Bridgeport that could bring the death penalty. Richard Roszkowski had previously been charged with murder, accused of gunning down 2 adults and a 9-year-old girl on a city street in September Seventh. Yesterday, State's Attorney Jonathan Benedict charged Roszkowski with capital felony in the killings of 39-year-old Holly Flannery, her daughter, Kylie, and 38-year-old Thomas Gaudett on Seaview Avenue. A capital felony conviction can carry the death penalty, but Benedict says he hasn't decided whether he will seek capital punishment. (source: Associated Press) TENNESSEE----new death sentence Man receives death sentence in slayings of wife, 2 men A Madison County jury sentenced a 42-year-old man to death on Monday for killing his estranged wife and 2 men at a Tennessee Department of Transportation garage last year. The jury had found David Lynn Jordan guilty Saturday on all 10 counts he faced in the shooting on Jan. 11, 2005. Public defender George Googe told WBBJ-TV after the sentencing that he had hoped jurors would have mercy and give Jordan "a life sentence without parole." During the trial, a number of witnesses including 2 Jordan wounded gave detailed, emotional testimony about the shootings that officials believe may have been motivated by jealousy. Besides Jordan's estranged wife, Donna Renee Jordan, also killed were Jerry W. Hopper, a 28-year veteran of the Forestry Division of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, and David Gordon, manager of HCI Delivery Services in Jackson. James Goff, who was wounded along with Larry Taylor, testified that "Renee was on the phone" when Jordan came in. (source: Associated Press)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.Y., FLA., CALIF.. CONN., TENN.
Rick Halperin Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:05:49 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
