Sept. 29 TEXAS: Man pleads guilty to murders ---- Deal puts killer in prison for life A man charged in the killing of 2 men near Wildorado in April pleaded guilty to a capital murder charge Thursday. Michael Edward Ryan, 29, entered a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence without parole for his role in the killing of Claude Robertson and Allen Hazelwood, according to Randall Sims, district attorney for the 47th District. A family member discovered Robertson's body lying beside his pickup about 1 p.m. April 18 on his property near Adkisson Road and Interstate 40 near Wildorado. When authorities moved Robertson's body, they found he had been shot once in the chest. While searching the area, authorities found Hazelwood - Robertson's employee - dead about 40 yards away. Court complaints filed against Ryan showed that he admitted to officers that he shot both Hazelwood, 51, and Robertson, 74, with a shotgun. Ryan's co-defendant, Jason Michael Williams, 30, is still in custody at the Potter County Correctional Center on a charge of capital murder and a bond of $1 million, according to jail logs. Families of both victims were in court Thursday. Several members of each family gave victim impact statements describing how the deaths of the 2 men affected their lives, Sims said. Ryan made no comment in court, Sims said. "Making the decision on what punishment to try to seek on a capital murder case is the toughest decision you have to make as district attorney since another life hangs directly in the balance of that decision," Sims said in a prepared statement. "Each case must be evaluated independently on all relevant circumstances. "Taking into account all the circumstances that must be considered when deciding whether to seek the death penalty or allow a plea for life in prison, all family members, (Potter-Randall Special Crime Unit) members, and myself agreed this was the appropriate punishment to seek for this case." The break in the homicide case came when Potter County Sgt. John Coffee, a Potter-Randall Special Crimes unit investigator, found that jewelry from Robertson's home was pawned the same day at Cash for Gold, 1913 S. Georgia St. According to court records, Ryan reportedly pawned two of the gold rings that belonged to Patty Robertson, Claude Robertson's wife. One ring had a wide gold band with a large single diamond stone, while the other was a multi-diamond ring with wire-gold bands that are distinctive. Pawn receipts showed that Ryan received about $850 in exchange for the jewelry. Armed with an arrest warrant, a SWAT team later went to arrest Ryan at his home in the 1000 block of West 10th Avenue, where Ryan reportedly jumped out a window. Officers used a Taser to bring him into custody, according to police reports. (source: The Amarillo Globe-News) ************************ COUPLE TELLS OF SUSPICIONS ABOUT SUSPECT The Tyler couple who first alerted police to Clifton Lamar Williams' possible involvement in the slaying of an elderly woman testified Thursday in his capital murder trial. Williams, 23, is charged with beating, strangling and stabbing to death Cecelia Schneider, 93, before setting her body on fire and stealing her car and purse on July 9, 2005. He faces life in prison or the death penalty if convicted. Misty Winters, who used to live a few houses down from Ms. Schneider on Callahan Street, testified the victim was a friend and "like a grandmother" to her children. She said she cleaned Ms. Schneider's home monthly and was last there the Thursday before her murder. Mrs. Winters said she and her husband went out of town and returned Sunday, July 10, 2005, when they received a message about Ms. Schneider's death. She said after talking to her former neighbor, Sharon Harris, regarding her death and Williams' possible involvement, she felt that police needed to be informed. Ms. Harris testified Wednesday that she told Ms. Winters about a story Williams had told her daughter - that he had stabbed a man after the man threatened him with a gun. After seeing no news reports of a stabbed man and the news of Ms. Schneider, they became suspicious of Williams, Ms. Harris said. Mrs. Winters testified that she encouraged Ms. Harris to call police with the information. Her husband, Greg Winters, who is in the Navy and recently returned from Iraq, said he was out of town when Ms. Schneider was killed and said it hurt him when people around him get hurt and he's not available to help them. When his wife relayed the information about Williams, Winters decided that if Ms. Harris didn't call police, he would. He said he also encouraged Jamarist "Monterrall" Paxton to go to the police and tell them what Williams had told him. Paxton has testified that Williams came to his house early July 9, 2005, and told him the story of stabbing a man. "Man, I just messed up. I just killed somebody," Paxton claimed Williams told him. Paxton said there was blood on Williams' white T-shirt and blue jean shorts, and that he showed him a cut on his hand. Williams claimed that Paxton killed Ms. Schneider and forced him to go along, cut his hand to leave DNA and to drive the victim's car. Paxton denied any involvement in the murder. Winters testified that he had painted and repaired Ms. Schneider's home. He said he and his wife looked out for her and were there when she needed them. He called her a "sweet old lady" who had been like his grandma. Winters said he met Williams once but saw him visit his neighbors often. REFUSED TO TESTIFY Courtney "Daniel" Warren was brought into court outside the presence of the jury and after prosecutors announced they intended to call him to testify in the trial, he invoked his 5th Amendment right not to testify on grounds that it could incriminate him. He said he would not answer any questions from prosecutors or defense attorneys. His attorney, Richard Kennedy, advised him of his rights and said he has a pending felony charge. Warren is in jail, Paxton testified that he knew Warren as Williams' friend and he sold crack cocaine to Warren and Williams. William Oliver, Williams' brother-in-law, testified that Williams came to his house near Noonday and woke him at about 5 a.m. on July 9, 2005. He said Williams told him he had cut himself while fighting over a knife with a man. He said he saw that Williams' hand was wrapped up and Williams insisted on changing his clothes. Oliver loaned him clothes and Williams threw away the white T-shirt and blue jean shorts. Oliver said he didn't believe the story partly because his clothes didn't look like he had been in a fight and did not have blood on them. Oliver said he asked Williams whose champagne-colored car he was driving and Williams said he took it from the man he fought. He said Williams made a phone call and told someone to "get out of the house." He also told him to tell Williams' sister that he loved her. Oliver said he didn't recall telling police that Williams told him he stabbed the man. Later on the phone, Oliver told Williams he had seen the car he'd been driving on the news. Tyler Police Detective Donald Malmstrom testified how and he and Sgt. Connie Castle gathered evidence from the wrecked Toyota Camry, found on Greenbriar Road, and from the pond off of County Road 1113, where Williams led police to the knife and victim's purse. Sgt. Castle testified that a fingerprint found on the outside of the car matched Williams. She said a palm print located on the back of the car did not match Williams' or Paxton's and she did not have a print of Ms. Schneider's to compare. The trial will continue Friday in 114th District Judge Cynthia Stevens Kent's court. Defense attorneys Melvin Thompson and LaJuanda Lacy are representing Williams while Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham and First Assistant DA April Sikes are prosecuting the case. (source: Tyler Morning Telegraph) *************** Mothers of 2 victims attend capital murder case hearing At Eric Stephen Parnell's second pre-trial motion hearing for the alleged murder of Ana Franklin and rape of her cousin, two women made an unexpected appearance inside an Angelina County courtroom - their presence making a loud statement on its own. Franklin's mother Robin and her sister Rhonda, the mother of Franklin's cousin Jennifer Holliday, sat solemnly on a public bench inside the courtroom, each wearing a pinned photograph of Franklin over the left breast. The images were intended to serve as a reminder to Parnell, both said, adding that they are planning to make shirt buttons out of the photographs. A bailiff patted the mothers down in the hallway outside the courtroom before allowing the 2 inside. After more than an hour of waiting, Parnell's hearing began. Both watched intently, half a dozen rows behind the defense table. At one point during the hearing, Parnell turned around, facing the victims' mothers. The three met eyes for the 1st time. "He looks like a (expletive) normal person," she said, choking back tears. "I expected him to be bigger, taller." "We have to be strong for them (Franklin and Holliday)," said Robin's sister Rhonda. "It's like a horror story. And no one likes horror stories, but they're real." The pre-trial motion hearing in Angelina County District Judge Paul White's courtroom lasted about 15 minutes. Only the voices of Parnell's appointed, state-certified death penalty trial lawyer Stephen Tyler, defense attorney Charles Meyers and Angelina County District Attorney Clyde Herrington were heard. The 3 updated White with their progress on the case. Both sides said they have not had trouble obtaining the bulk of the evidence requested, except for a recorded 911 call Holliday placed from the home of her alleged captor Parnell, five hours after he allegedly shot and killed her cousin. The emergency call led to Holliday's rescue when Angelina County deputies arrived on the scene. The tape remains in possession of the Angelina County Sheriff's Office. The next pre-trial motion hearing date is set for Nov. 8. Parnell is expected to stand trial Jan. 8 for the alleged murder of Ana Franklin and aggravated sexual assault of her cousin, Jennifer Holliday. The state is seeking the death penalty for the capital murder charge. (source: Lufkin Daily News - Editor's note: Normally, names of sexual assault victims are not printed; however, Holliday has talked openly with the press about her experience on May 29, 2005.) ******************** AT THE COURTHOUSE----Freed inmate sues over conviction Man imprisoned for 17 years alleges 'every scientific conclusion' by the HPD lab was false. The "near-total breakdown" at the Houston crime lab occurred because of inattention by the city, county and individual officers and analysts, a man who wrongfully served 17 years in prison alleges in a federal lawsuit. George Rodriguez was released from prison in October 2004 after new forensic tests exposed errors in the analyses from the Houston Police Department crime lab that were used to convict him. "Those tests demonstrated that every scientific conclusion rendered by the HPD crime laboratory ... in George Rodriguez's case had been utterly wrong and, in some respects, patently fabricated," he contends in alleging that his civil rights were violated. The suit seeks unspecified damages. Rodriguez argues that his conviction was the product of deliberate indifference to problems within HPD and at the Harris County district attorney's office. The lawsuit names as defendants the city, the county, District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, crime lab analysts including Christy Kim and Jim Bolding and 13 police officers. An attorney representing Harris County and Rosenthal declined to comment. The city attorney's office, which represents the city and several officers, has filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the city is not liable for Rodriguez's wrongful conviction. Rodriguez was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the 1987 rape and kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl, in part because of forensic evidence that HPD developed. New tests in 2004 discredited that work and excluded him as a possible source of evidence from the case. The new evidence pointed to another man, Isidro Yanez, who was suspected at the time the girl was attacked and whom the lawsuit alleges committed the crimes. Rodriguez's conviction was vacated last year but he has not received a pardon, in part, his attorney said, because he needs Rosenthal's support. "The district attorney has never indicated that he would agree," said Mark Wawro, who represents Rodriguez. If he received a pardon on the basis of innocence, which would require a letter from Rosenthal saying he believes Rodriguez is innocent, Rodriguez would be eligible for compensation of $25,000 from the state for each year he spent in prison. Because Rodriguez has not been pardoned, Wawro said, he is seeking compensation through litigation. His lawsuit alleges that: - The city ignored its own minimum standards for hiring people at the crime lab. - Problems that contributed to Rodriguez's conviction extended to the officers and supervisors who investigated the case. - Harris County's prosecutors were poorly trained about their duty to provide defense attorneys exculpatory evidence. (source: Houston Chronicle) MINNESOTA: 5 reasons to reject the death penalty----Minnesota gave it up a century ago, and capital punishment still is wrong. With a death sentence for Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. in North Dakota and the death penalty on the ballot in Wisconsin, some are calling for a reconsideration of Minnesota's stance on this issue. But Rodriguez's case doesn't change the good reasons to keep the death penalty out of Minnesota. - The death penalty is morally wrong. Leaders from Pope John Paul II to His Holiness the Dalai Lama have spoken out against the death penalty. Most of the world (more than 120 countries) has abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. In 2005, 94 % of all state-sponsored executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States. - The death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. Courts across the country are halting lethal injection executions because there is evidence that the procedure, generally performed by prison staff with no medical training, has caused pain amounting to torture. South Dakota's governor recently stopped lethal injections in that state because of legal concerns. Professional associations for physicians, emergency medical technicians and anesthesiologists have warned members to steer clear because participation in executions violates professional ethics. Reinstating the death penalty will only drag Minnesota courts into the controversy. - The death penalty is too expensive. Experience in other states shows that one death penalty case may cost from $1.2 million up to $23 million. A life imprisonment case costs about $500,000, including imprisonment. One study showed that California could save $90 million a year if it ended the death penalty. Minnesota should preserve that sort of money for other budget priorities. - We risk executing innocent people. Since 1973, more than 120 prisoners have been released from death row in the United States after they were proven innocent. One was Albert Burrell, a death row inmate in Louisiana who was exonerated with help from Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights' Death Penalty Project. - The death penalty is biased and unfair. A United Nations expert appointed to study the death penalty worldwide reported in 1997 that "[r]ace, ethnic origin and economic status appear to be key determinants of who will, and who will not, receive a death sentence" in the United States. 95 % of death row inmates are poor, relying on court-appointed attorneys who often do not have the resources or experience to handle complex death-penalty cases. Studies reveal that blacks who kill white victims are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill black victims. Black defendants are 20 times more likely to be imprisoned than are white defendants in Minnesota. We should not carry that disparity into a death penalty system. Minnesota's last execution was a botched hanging in 1906. 100 years later, the death penalty is still wrong for Minnesota. Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and urges Minnesotans to work to keep the death penalty out of our state. (source: Minneapolis Star Tribune - Jennifer Prestholdt is deputy director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. Laura Young is a Wellstone legal fellow at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights) FLORIDA: Death Penalty Sought For Man Accused Of Sword Murders Prosecutors in Seminole County have decided to seek the death penalty for a man charged with killing his wife and young son with a sword. Franklyn Duzant faces two counts of 1st-degree murder. Investigators said Duzant decapitated Evangeline Duzant, in their home, near Lake Mary, on June 16 and then chased down his son, 11-year-old Nico Duzant, into a neighbor's yard and slashed him to death. (source: WFTV News) USA: Why is the US turning away from the death penalty? If you look at every single indicator," smiles Dave Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), "you see that the death penalty is literally withering on the vine." One by one, he predicts that more states will impose a moratorium while they try to solve all the flaws in the system. In the process, they'll come to see that those problems just can't be fixed. And then, faced with an intractably unworkable policy, they will simply abandon it. "It's not so much a question of whether we will win any more, but when," Elliot claims. "Will it be five years or 15? I'm not sure, but I promise you it will be somewhere between the two. We are on the eve of abolition." But not everyone in the movement agrees. Some worry that they have been here before. They thought the death penalty was about to be abolished by incremental logic more than 30 years ago. And just look, they say, what happened then. In 1972, the Supreme Court declared every state's death penalty statute void. Death sentences were being imposed so arbitrarily, ruled the judges, that they violated the Eighth Amendment. 'I put the question to everyone. Could they ever support the death penalty? And with very few exceptions, each answer was essentially the same. Yes -- but only for Hitler.' "These death sentences are cruel and unusual," one justice famously declared, "in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." Jubilant activists assumed it would mean all-out abolition. "What else were we to think?" one recalls. "We thought it was all over. We thought we'd won." But the court had not declared the death penalty unconstitutional per se. It had merely said it wasn't being administered properly. Almost at once, states began drafting improved statutes, with clearer sentencing guidelines. In 1976, the Supreme Court examined three states' revised protocols and agreed that, yes, all the problems had been fixed. So eager were many other states to start executing again that they recalled their parliaments from summer recess the very next day, just to pass a new death penalty bill. Bill Wiseman was a young representative in Oklahoma, one of the states that rushed its legislature back into emergency session. He didn't believe in the death penalty, but he was afraid of losing his seat if he voted against it. "I was just having such a happy time being a politician," he smiles sadly. "It was the most fun. And here this damned thing comes along and it has the potential to just crap all over this wonderful time in my life. So I was faced with a decision -- and I was a wuss about it." He voted yes. "But afterwards I came to the conclusion that if we were going to do the wrong thing, we might as well do it the right way," he says. Wiseman set about inventing an alternative to the gas chamber and the electric chair. "Something," he winces, "that would be more humane." Today, Wiseman is an Anglican priest in a grand old church in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is more opposed to the death penalty than ever. But he has a wolfish, twinkly smile, and it's easy to picture his ambitious younger self back in 1976, loving the limelight while trying to salve his conscience. He describes how the state's medical examiner heard he was looking for ideas, and offered to help. The pair more or less cobbled together a cocktail of intravenous drugs on the back of an envelope. The examiner had no specialist pharmacological training, Wiseman's medical knowledge was zero. But he wrote down what the examiner proposed, called it lethal injection and put it before the house. "I was going round like I was some angel of mercy, really starting to believe my own bullshit, when I ran into a reporter friend of mine one day. I was like, 'How do you like my bill?' And he just shrugged. It was the very first feeling I had of, `Uh oh.' He said: 'Bill, I'm afraid this'll make it too easy for them to pass death sentences.' And on the outside I said: 'Oh no, I'm sure that won't happen.' And on the inside I'm going, `Oh God, what if he's right?' "So what did I do? Nothing. I was enjoying the momentum and fame and the clips on the Today show too much. Everybody liked me. Hey, I was fixing up the death penalty, wasn't I? I was making it humane." More than 30 states soon copied Wiseman's lethal injection bill, many word for word. In 1982, Texas became the first to implement it, with the judge happily predicting that: "1983 will bring some more [executions] ... This humane way will make it more palatable." He was not wrong. Wiseman had certainly fixed up the death penalty; his "more palatable" method has now killed more than 800 prisoners. And, he says quietly, he shares responsibility for every single one. The dilemma for the anti-death-penalty movement today is obvious. By challenging lethal injection in the courts, they have put a lot of executions on hold. They may force some people to think about what it really means for the state to take a life. If they win, they'll give legislators the disagreeable task of finding another way to carry out an inherently ugly act. But to argue that lethal injection is "inhumane" implies the possibility that a humane alternative could exist. For some activists, talk of a humane execution goes hand in hand with demands for a moratorium instead of abolition. It smacks to them of the 1970s all over again, and they don't like it. "The parallels with what happened in 1976 are certainly very strong now," an American Civil Liberties Union activist in San Francisco warns. "We need to be very careful not to let the progress we've made slip through our fingers again." Mona Cadena, of Amnesty International in California, puts it more bluntly: "Moratorium scares the hell out of me. It opens the door for people to think there's a way to fix the death penalty -- and that's exactly what happened in 1972. The Supreme Court said it's not working. The states changed it. They said it'll work now -- and the court said OK. So we've already tried a moratorium. We should be saying it's not appropriate under any circumstances for the government to choose who is going to live and who is going to die." Cadena is the only activist I meet who volunteers a moral objection to the death penalty unprompted. "But I get called a super-crazy liberal pinko communist for saying it -- by people in this movement. It's so bizarre. These days I find myself allied with the Catholics just because they're the only abolitionists who'll talk about right and wrong. I think some people feel the moral argument should be left for the churches, and that a moral discussion is not for us," she says. The debate between pragmatists and absolutists has been raging within the abolition movement for nearly a decade now. What is quite clear is that the pragmatists have won. "The debate is over," the NCADP's Dave Elliot says firmly. "There is no disagreement. The abolition movement has matured." He refers to experiments conducted on pro-death-penalty students, which presented arguments framed around flaws in the system. The approach generated significant movement in the students' minds. Arguments framed in morality did not merely fail to change minds, but reinforced the students' original opinions. Elliot drums the table as he spells out the message: "If you address the death penalty as a moral issue, you ... do ... not ... " What is less clear is exactly how far this is a matter of purely strategic discipline. It would never have occurred to me to ask activists whether they believed it was wrong to execute anyone; I took it for granted. But then one happened to mention that he thought, in principle, it could sometimes be right. He could definitely think of extreme circumstances in which certain people deserved to be put to death, he said. The trouble, he quickly added, was that his "deserving" case would be different from mine, and from the next person's and the next. As we'd never all be able to agree whom to kill, there was no point having a death penalty. I put the question to everyone. Could they ever support the death penalty? And with very few exceptions, each answer was essentially the same. Yes -- but only for Hitler. Oh yes, if you knew someone was guilty and irredeemably wicked -- only you could just never be 100 percent sure. Yes, of course, loads of murderers deserve to die -- it's just that you can't trust the state to tell which ones. Yes -- but it's for God to punish them, not the government. If this is a tactical position, it is certainly very clever. It gets you off the defensive and opens up space to negotiate. But I'm not sure that everyone did say it for purely tactical reasons. Some of them seemed to mean it. "We've brought a lot of people into this movement who seem able to negotiate the thing like that in their own heads. And it's been a huge, huge frustration to me," says Lance Lindsay, who runs Death Penalty Focus in San Francisco, while reflecting on the strange, bittersweet price of the movement's success. "It's focused us on saying 'the system's broken' and thinking `if we put in enough reforms, if it ends up just being a few monstrous people who are killed, I can live with that.' To me, that's completely missing the point." In the end, the purest articulation of what it should be about comes from the inventor of lethal injection. "I'm opposed to the death penalty because of what it does to us -- not what it does to the person who dies," Wiseman says. "That's what it's all about. How it changes and identifies us as a society when we make a corporate decision to take a life. All that stuff about how it's incompetent or unfair, that's all very interesting, but it's not the point. The point is, we must not do this because it eats away at our soul." I'd wondered a lot about what it might do to the soul to attend an execution. Whenever I'd pictured it, it was the final statement I dreaded most. Eric Allen Patton's execution had been selected at random to witness, so I had no idea what he might want to say. When he opened his mouth to speak, it was obvious he'd thought hard about the words, for he had memorized an entire speech. Mindful of the time limit, he had to rattle through it quickly. And so its impact, in the end, was strangely unaffecting -- like hearing someone recite a shopping list. He thanked the prison guards on death row: "They've been like family to me." He thanked his legal team for fighting his cause. He thanked the prison warden -- the governor -- for taking care of him, and he thanked his parents for bringing him into the world: "And for loving me, especially through this trying situation." His life, Patton said, had been "a blessing and blast," but he was ready to meet Jesus Christ his savior "for now and all eternity." At the very end he paused for breath. "That's all," he said. The drugs are administered by three executioners in the room next door, hidden from view. Only the warden knows their identity; they are not employees but volunteers who answered an advert for the position in the local newspaper. They cannot see the person they are killing and nobody can see them. Patton closed his eyes. He let out a deep, noisy breath as the anesthetic entered his veins. As the second drug followed seconds later, paralyzing him, his rib cage slowly stopped rising and falling. The third drug was the one that would kill him -- but by then there was nothing to see. If he did suffer pain, nobody would have known. For eight minutes we all sat there in absolute silence, staring at a frozen body, waiting for him to die. Nothing could have looked less like what was actually happening. I kept having to remind myself that I was watching someone being killed -- because none of the evidence would agree. There was no violence, no resistance, not even the appearance of an act of will. >From the look on everyone's faces you'd think we were witnessing a rather sad but unavoidable law of nature -- not a decision deliberately taken, or one that could have been reversed. After a while, the audience's gaze began to wander from the body. Each of us stared into a different private space, as frozen as Patton, like actors arranged on stage into a tableau of human alienation. The old-fashioned black-and-white clock on the wall above Patton's head ticked slowly by, and at 6.11pm a doctor pronounced him dead. The blinds were lowered, everyone got up and we filed out into blazing sunshine. Back at the media center, Jerry Massie asked how I'd found it. Surreal, I said. That's funny, he said -- a lot of people tend to use that word. I wanted to say it was traumatic, or horrific, or revolting. But it wouldn't have been true. Had Patton been electrocuted, that would have been traumatic -- to watch him jolt to death, even burst into flames, and have to smell his burning flesh would have been unthinkable. It would have had the merit of seeming real, though, and no one could have walked away lightly. But the US justice system has perfected so brilliant a denial of death that the horror of it is how calmly one can watch. In that sense, you could say it really was a humane execution. But the people for whom it has been made humane are the ones carrying it out. The media center felt like a TV studio green room after a show is over. Prison staff munched on cookies, the reporters cracked some jokes and somebody gathered up the piles of unused press releases. Massie was disappointed to hear that Patton hadn't apologized for his crime. His expression suggested he found the omission rather rude. (source: Taipei Times) *********************** Protect our rights----Beware the back-door effort to undermine constitutional protections, warn Timothy K. Lewis and William S. Sessions We have both served for many years on the federal bench, as trial and appellate judges, and one of us as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We feel compelled to sound the alarm about a proposed radical assault on the great writ of habeas corpus that Congress may take up this week before it adjourns for the election campaign. This assault would dramatically limit the ability of federal courts to protect individuals who may have been wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison or even death. We applaud Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., for recently condemning a pending proposal to deny habeas rights to those held as "enemy combatants." We urge him to do the same for those convicted of crimes in the United States. We take a back seat to no one in our support for strong law enforcement, but we are equally committed to our country's long-standing commitment to fair trials and constitutional safeguards. These safeguards are essential to making as sure as possible that when we charge someone with a crime, we have the right person and that that person, if convicted, receives the sentence he or she deserves. All Americans should be alarmed at the many recent exonerations of innocent people who have served years in prison or on death row. Not only have we locked up the wrong people, but the true perpetrators remain free to inflict more harm. As a result, we are profoundly disturbed about reports of a new and misguided assault on the writ of habeas corpus. In a back-door action, the provision in question would be attached to entirely unrelated legislation in the few remaining days before Congress adjourns. It has never been examined by any congressional committee, so no senator or representative has heard what no doubt would be an outcry of public opposition against it. The provision would cover much of the same ground as the Streamlined Procedures Act, an ill-conceived bill that generated enormous opposition last year. For the first time, both the Judicial Conference, representing the country's federal judges, and the Conference of Chief Justices, representing the chief justices of all states, forcefully opposed the act because it would have stripped the federal courts of much of their jurisdiction to hear habeas petitions. Numerous other reasonable voices across the political spectrum also opposed this legislation. They did so because, as the chief justices stated, "The wrongful conviction of an innocent person leaves the actual perpetrator free and undermines public trust and confidence in our criminal justice system." The current measure would add at least two new and pernicious provisions. First, it would give the prosecution an important advantage by accelerating review of federal habeas petitions and by making it virtually impossible to raise new claims discovered after an extremely short 6-month statute of limitations has expired. This "fast-track" treatment is taken from the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which entitles states to procedural advantages in capital cases only if they have provided competent lawyers and reasonable funding for important post-conviction reviews. Congress and the courts have repeatedly found that inexperienced, underfunded and incompetent lawyers have contributed dramatically to the mistakes and injustices that have caused many erroneous convictions. Just a few months ago, Congress amended AEDPA, but it left intact the requirement that states establish satisfactory post-conviction systems for death row inmates or else be denied these procedural benefits. The current proposal simply ignores this requirement and, in certain cases in which a public safety officer or judge is killed, provides states with these procedural advantages without requiring they ensure that potentially meritorious claims of constitutional error were adequately developed and considered by state courts. Second, the proposal strips the federal courts of their jurisdiction to hear sentencing claims in these kinds of cases. If this proposal had been law in the past, federal courts would not have been able to correct egregious constitutional errors. During the past several years, the Supreme Court has correctly reversed a number of death sentences because of egregious sentencing error, either because of hapless representation by defense counsel, as in Williams v. Taylor, Wiggins v. Smith and Rompilla v. Beard, or because prosecutors broke the law and suppressed the fact that a key sentencing witness was a paid informant and committed perjury before the jury, as in Banks v. Dretke. Do we want someone executed where it turns out his death sentence was based on inaccurate, perjured testimony? The current proposal would prevent the courts from granting relief in such cases in the future and substantially inhibit a certain class of individuals from seeking to vindicate their constitutional rights. It also portends future bills granting states similar procedural advantages in cases involving other classes of individuals, such as those convicted of killing children, other government officials, etc. In the end, we fear, the great writ that protects us all will be nothing more than swiss cheese, with more holes than cheese. (source : Pittburgh Post-Gazette -- Timothy K. Lewis, a former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, is a partner at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP in Washington, D.C. William S. Sessions, a former director of the FBI and chief judge of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, is a partner at Holland and Knight law firm in Washington, D.C.) ******************************* Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill The military trials bill approved by Congress lends legislative support for the 1st time to broad rules for the detention, interrogation, prosecution and trials of terrorism suspects far different from those in the familiar American criminal justice system. President Bush's argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant's rights. The United States used similar trials on just four occasions: during the country's revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II. Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday, are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions. The bill rejects the right to a speedy trial and limits the traditional right to self-representation by requiring that defendants accept military defense attorneys. Panels of military officers need not reach unanimous agreement to win convictions, except in death penalty cases, and appeals must go through a second military panel before reaching a federal civilian court. By writing into law for the first time the definition of an "unlawful enemy combatant," the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have "purposefully and materially" supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death. At the same time, the bill immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. It gives the president a dominant but not exclusive role in setting the rules for future interrogations of terrorism suspects. Written largely, but not completely, on the administration's terms, with passages that give executive branch officials discretion to set details or divert from its protections, the bill is meant to provide what Bush said yesterday are "the tools" needed to handle terrorism suspects U.S. officials hope to capture. For more than 57 months after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush maintained that he did not need congressional authorization of such tools. But the Supreme Court decided otherwise in June, declaring the administration's detainee treatment and trial procedures illegal, and ruling that Bush must first seek Congress's approval. Now Bush has received much of the authority he desired from party loyalists and a handful of Democrats on Capitol Hill. "The American people need to know we're working together," Bush told senators before yesterday's vote. But Tom Malinowski, the Washington office director for Human Rights Watch, said Bush's motivation is partly to protect his reputation by gaining congressional endorsement of controversial actions already taken. "He's been accused of authorizing criminal torture in a way that has hurt America and could come back to haunt our troops. One of his purposes is to have Congress stand with him in the dock," Malinowski said. The bill contains some protections unavailable to the 8 Nazi saboteurs who came ashore in the United States in 1942 and were captured 2 weeks later. 6 were executed that year after a closed military trial on the fifth floor of Justice Department headquarters. That proceeding was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision it explained 2 months after the electrocutions. Under the new procedures, trials are supposed to be open, but can be closed to protect the security of individuals or information expected to harm national security. Defendants have a right to be present, unless they are disruptive, and a right to examine and respond to the evidence against them. Proof of guilt must exceed a reasonable doubt. Many constitutional experts say, however, that the bill pushes at the edges of so much settled U.S. law that its passage will not be the last word on America's detainee policies. They predict it will shift the public debate to the federal courts, a forum where the administration has had less success getting its way on counterterrorism policies. "This is a full-employment act for lawyers," said Deborah Perlstein, who directs the U.S. Law and Security Program at the New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights First. Former White House associate counsel Bradford A. Berenson, a supporter of the bill and one of the authors of the rules struck down by the Supreme Court, agreed. "Some of the most creative legal minds are going to be devoted to poking holes in this," he said. Anticipating court challenges, the administration attempted to make the bill bulletproof by including provisions that would sharply restrict judicial review and limit the application of international treaties -- signed by Washington -- that govern the rights of wartime detainees. The bill also contains blunt assertions that it complies with U.S. treaty obligations. University of Texas constitutional law professor Sanford V. Levinson described the bill in an Internet posting as the mark of a "banana republic." Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it's not clear that most of the members understand what they've done." In contrast, Douglas W. Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University, said Congress "did reasonably well in terms of fashioning a fair" set of procedures. But Kmiec and many others say they cannot predict how the Supreme Court will respond to the provision barring habeas corpus rights, which he said will leave "a large body of detainees with no conceivable basis to challenge their detentions." There are other likely flashpoints. In the Supreme Court's June decision overturning previous administration policies, 4 members of the court who joined the majority opinion said conspiracy is not a war crime. The new bill says it is. Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal said the bill's creation of 2 systems of justice -- military commissions for foreign nationals and regular criminal trials for U.S. citizens -- may violate the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which requires equal protection of the laws to anyone under U.S. jurisdiction. "If you're an American citizen, you get the Cadillac system of justice. If you're a foreigner or a green-card holder, you get this beat-up-Chevy version," he said. (source : The Washington Post) ***************** UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Rubber stamping violations in the "war on terror": Congress fails human rights By passing the Military Commissions Act, the United States Congress has, in effect, given its stamp of approval to human rights violations committed by the USA in the "war on terror". This legislation leaves the USA squarely on the wrong side of international law, and has turned bad executive policy into bad domestic law. On 27 September, the House of Representatives passed the Military Commissions Act by 253 votes to 168. On 28 September, the Senate passed the Act by 65 votes to 34. After any discrepancies between the Senate and House bills are reconciled, the legislation will go to President Bush for signing into law. If President Bush signs the bill, as expected, Amnesty International will campaign for repeal of the Act. The constitutionality of the legislation is also likely to be challenged in the courts. In the "war on terror", the US administration has resorted to secret detention, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, indefinite detention without charge, arbitrary detention, and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Thousands of detainees remain in indefinite military detention in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantnamo Bay. Congress has failed these detainees and their families. President Bush has defended the CIAs use of secret detention and in the debates over the Military Commissions Act, members of Congress have done the same. Yet this is a policy in clear violation of international law. Accountability among higher officials for human rights violations authorized or committed by US personnel in the "war on terror" has been absent, as has been reparation for such abuses. Investigations into alleged war crimes and human rights violations have lacked independence and have not gone up the chain of command. Not a single US agent has been charged with war crimes under the USAs War Crimes Act or torture under the extraterritorial anti-torture statute, despite compelling evidence that such offences have occurred. Meanwhile, the Military Commissions Act provides for trials of the "enemy" in front of military commissions using lower standards of evidence than apply to US personnel, and with the power to hand down death sentences. Whether charged for trial or not, those detained by the USA as "enemy combatants" will not be able to challenge the lawfulness or conditions of their detention in habeas corpus appeals. Habeas corpus is a fundamental safeguard against enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The legislation will lead to violations of international law and standards. Among other things, the Military Commissions Act will: Strip the US courts of jurisdiction to hear or consider habeas corpus appeals challenging the lawfulness or conditions of detention of anyone held in US custody as an "enemy combatant". Judicial review of cases would be severely limited. The law would apply retroactively, and thus could result in more than 200 pending appeals filed on behalf of Guantnamo detainees being thrown out of court. Prohibit any person from invoking the Geneva Conventions or their protocols as a source of rights in any action in any US court. Permit the executive to convene military commissions to try "alien unlawful enemy combatants", as determined by the executive under a dangerously broad definition, in trials that would provide foreign nationals so labeled with a lower standard of justice than US citizens accused of the same crimes. This would violate the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights. Permit civilians captured far from any battlefield to be tried by military commission rather than civilian courts, contradicting international standards and case law. Establish military commissions whose impartiality, independence and competence would be in doubt, due to the overarching role that the executive, primarily the Secretary of Defense, would play in their procedures and in the appointments of military judges and military officers to sit on the commissions. Permit, in violation of international law, the use of evidence extracted under cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or as a result of "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating or degrading treatment", as defined under international law. Permit the use of classified evidence against a defendant, without the defendant necessarily being able effectively to challenge the "sources, methods or activities" by which the government acquired the evidence. This is of particular concern in light of the high level of secrecy and resort to national security arguments employed by the administration in the "war on terror", which have been widely criticized, including by the UN Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee. Amnesty International is concerned that the administration appears on occasion to have resorted to classification to prevent independent scrutiny of human rights violations. Give the military commissions the power to hand down death sentences, in contravention of international standards which only permit capital punishment after trials affording "all possible safeguards to ensure a fair trial". The clemency authority would be the President. President Bush has led a pattern of official public commentary on the presumed guilt of the detainees, and has overseen a system that has systematically denied the rights of detainees. Limit the right of charged detainees to be represented by counsel of their choosing. Fail to provide any guarantee that trials will be conducted within a reasonable time. Permit the executive to determine who is an "enemy combatant" under any "competent tribunal" established by the executive, and endorse the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), the wholly inadequate administrative procedure that has been employed in Guantnamo to review individual detentions. Narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act by not expressly criminalizing acts that constitute "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment" banned under Article 3 common to the 4 Geneva Conventions. Amnesty International believes that the USA has routinely failed to respect the human dignity of detainees in the "war on terror". Prohibit the US courts from using "foreign or international law" to inform their decisions in relation to the War Crimes Act. The President has the authority to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions". Under President Bush, the USA has shown a selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the absolute prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment. Endorse the administrations "war paradigm" under which the USA has selectively applied the laws of war and rejected international human rights law. The legislation would backdate the "war on terror" to before the 11 September 2001 in order to be able to try individuals in front of military commissions for "war crimes" committed before that date. There appears to be little doubt that President Bush will sign the bill. He had sent a version of it to Congress on 6 September at the same time that he had announced the transfer of 14 "high value" detainees from years in secret CIA custody to detention in Guantnamo. He said that these detainees could be tried if Congress authorized military commissions acceptable to the administration. Amnesty International deeply regrets that Congress failed to resist this executive pressure and instead has given a green light for violations of the USAs international obligations. See also: USA: Military Commissions Act of 2006 Turning bad policy into bad law, 29 September 2006 http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511542006. USA: Justice at last or more of the same- Detentions and trials after Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 18 September 2006 http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511462006. USA: Rendition torture trial- The case of Guantnamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 20 September 2006, http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511492006 (source: Amnesty International)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, MINN., FLA., USA
Rick Halperin Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:40:53 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
