[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----N.C., COLO. ARIZ.

[Rick Halperin]

June 12



NORTH CAROLINA:

Death penalty opponents remain vigilant


Stephen Dear, executive director of the Carrboro-based People of Faith
Against the Death Penalty, is keeping a close eye on Raleigh.

Last year, the North Carolina House of Representatives passed the Racial
Justice Act, which, if approved by the Senate, will allow a person accused
of a capital crime to request a court review of whether race played a role
in the prosecutors decision to request the death penalty or in a defendant
subsequently being sentenced to death.

Dear and other proponents of the bill argue theres substantial reason for
concern that race is a contributing factor in who gets sentenced to death
in this country.

A study of the death penalty in North Carolina conducted at UNC in 2001
found that defendants who killed a white person were 3 1/2 times more
likely to receive the death penalty than those who killed a person of
color.

The Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center reports that
since the death penalty was resumed in the U.S. in 1977 after a 10-year
moratorium, 238 people have been executed for committing an interracial
murder. Of those cases, 223 involved a black defendant and a while victim;
only 15 involved a white defendant and a black victim.

Should the Senate pass the Racial Justice Act (its uncertain whether
theyll get to it in the current session), Dear will welcome it as an
important step in what he believes to be an incremental eroding away of
the death penalty in America.

Executions have currently been suspended in North Carolina (the state is
one of 36 that still have the death penalty). Last year, in response to a
challenge to the states use of lethal injections, the N.C. Council of
State approved changes to execution protocol that included a statement
assuring that a doctor would be present at executions to monitor the
condemned inmates essential body functions. But less than a year prior,
the N.C. Medical Board issued a policy statement affirming that "physician
participation in capital punishment is a departure from the ethics of the
medical profession," and that while doctors could be present at
executions, they could not participate in any manner. The medical board is
now appealing a ruling against its position.

Meanwhile, 5 death-row inmates have filed suit on the grounds that their
attorneys werent allowed to present evidence to the council when it was
considering the new protocol.

Dear isn't confident either of those cases will be won. Should they be
lost, he says, "We could have an unprecedented number of executions in
2009."

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP) was formed in 1994 by a
group of 5 clergy and lay people (Chapel Hill resident Tye Hunter,
executive director of Indigent Defense Services, was among them. Bob
Seymour, for whom Orange County's Robert and Pearl Seymour Center is
named, was very early involved.) Dear came onboard in 1997.

"Our mission," says Dear, "is to educate and mobilize faith communities to
act to abolish the death penalty in the United States."

He and Amanda Lattanzio, a Jesuit volunteer serving as a community
organizer, comprise the PFADP staff. About 60 percent of funding comes
from foundations, 40 % from individuals.

"We shouldnt exist," says Dear, "People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
should not have to exist at all. It's a tragedy that we exist and that our
mission is to educate and mobilize faith communities to do what they're
formed to do.

"The mainline Christian churches have been opposed to the death penalty
since the 1950s and they dont even know that  their own local pastors
don't know that and certainly the people in the pews don't know that."

Reminding them is Dear's task.

"I'm talking about the mainline churches," Dear says. He doesn't spend
much time with fundamentalist churches.

Dears theory, he says, "is that if we could just get the people who agree
with us mobilized, we'll win. We'll end the death penalty. But theyre not
mobilized because they don't even know that they have all these resources.

"When we started, I think we were seen  and to some people still are seen
as the people who protest on the nights of executions."

That's not what Dear is asking people to do though: "In fact, I don't want
people to come to vigils if they haven't done other things. Don't come
protest when somebody is being executed. Call your senator; I'd rather you
do that."

Relatively speaking, the anti-death penalty movement in North Carolina is
pretty strong. Dear calls organizational efforts here relative to South
Carolina, for example, "polar opposites  they're where North Carolina was
in the early 60s."

That's thanks to people like the late Rev. W.W. Finlator of Raleigh, a
longtime member of PFADP's board of advisors and a founder, in 1965, of
North Carolinians Against the Death Penalty, which in 2003 changed its
name to the North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium.

Faith based

So what role does the word "faith" play in PFADP's work?

"The way one of our local organizers put it," Dear says, "is if you're
comfortable with us, we're comfortable with you  whatever the word [faith]
means to you."

Dear grew up attending Catholic school and going to mass on Sunday at Our
Lady of Mercy Catholic Church in Potomac, Maryland, where, he says, he
would look up at an "enormous crucifix of this sickly thin Jesus,"
contemplating the man's fate.

"I've never understood how Christians could support the death penalty when
our savior was born homeless and killed as a death row prisoner. I just
don't understand that. I'm still scratching my head after 11 years with
People of Faith."

Genesis 9:6 reads: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
shed: for in the image of God made he man."

"If you ask me," says Dear, "that's a warning: If you live by the sword,
you die by the sword. Its not saying it is proper for government to kill
on God's behalf. But people seem to want to believe that. And they ignore
the numerous examples of where the Old Testament calls for the death
penalty for all sorts of sins." Adultery, for example; gluttony. The
stoning of children for bad behavior.

"This work can change your view of what churches are all about," Dear
says, "and it makes me think that there are many  places that Martin
Luther King rightly called 'irrelevant social clubs.'"

Dear and Lattanzio tell of having recently experienced a very trying day
and then Rick Edens, co-pastor of the United Church of Chapel Hill walked
in.

"He was all excited," Dear says. "He has this great idea; and he's just
engaged." 10 bad experiences are then wiped away, Dear says, and faith is
reconfirmed.

Lattanzio says she was concerned coming in that this work might render her
irreversibly cynical: "It's something Steve and I talk about quite a bit
when we have hard days. But it hasn't. I feel I've learned so much this
year about the world around me."

Dear talks of just having had lunch with the head of North Carolina Murder
Victims Families for Reconciliation.

"I've met so many incredibly wonderful people who have been through
unimaginable horror," he says, "and who are healing themselves and their
communities by their work against the death penalty."

Step by step

Progress, says Dear, has come in increments:

"11 years ago, when I started here, I never really thought we'd be in the
great position of having abolished the death penalty for people with
mental retardation and then had 5 or 6 enormously important reforms that
have really changed the death penalty."

As examples, he cites district attorneys being given the discretion of
whether or not to pursue the death penalty in 1st-degree murder cases and
the founding of the Office of Indigent Defense Services.

Another important development was the creation of the North Carolina
Actual Innocence Commission, which provides a forum for prosecutors, DAs,
judges, law-enforcement agents and victims advocates to discuss how to
decrease the possibility of wrongful convictions. The commission is viewed
as a model for other states.

November could be a very critical month in the history of the death
penalty in North Carolina. We'll have a new governor then. And, should the
effective moratorium be lifted, we may soon have a backlog of executions.

How will the new governor respond?

If it's Pat McCrory, the Republican candidate, Dear says, "He'll have his
pens ready to sign [the orders of execution] as fast as he can."

Dear says that in 2000, as mayor of Charlotte, McCrory was the only
elected official in North Carolina who actively organized against a
PFADP-sponsored moratorium on the death penalty.

"He was very passionately pro-death penalty," Dear recalls.

As for Beverly Perdue, the Democratic candidate, Dear says that on April
30, 2003, the day the North Carolina Senate passed the moratorium bill,
she, as lieutenant governor, gave a speech in favor of the bill, which
passed.

"She has repeatedly since said she supports a moratorium. So we're very
hopeful that Governor Perdue certainly will be a breath of fresh air as
compared with Governor Easley."

Dear says he believes support for the death penalty in this country "is
eroding away."

A 2006 Gallup Poll found that support for the death penalty had declined
from 80 % in 1994 to 65 %. When respondents were asked to consider life
without parole as an alternative, 48 chose that option; 47 % chose
execution.

This decline in support is probably due in some large measure to
deteriorating public confidence in its effectiveness.

The Death Penalty Information Center reports that only one percent of
police chiefs polled believe that expanding the death penalty would be an
effective detterent to crime, while 31 % said reducing drug abuse would
help and 17 % listed more jobs and a better economy.

But this decline of confidence in the death penalty might well be
primarily attributable to the growing number of exonerations. Since 1973,
129 death row inmates have been exonerated. 8 of those were in North
Carolina, 3 in the past 6 months.

"It's going to wither away," Dear says. "I'm not sure if the death penalty
will completely be abolished in America. Because I think for terrorism and
some massive crimes it might still be on the books.

"But in terms of street crime, it will be largely taken off the books."

(source: The Carrboro Citizen)






COLORADO:

Owens will not speak to jury before death penalty decision


Sir Mario Owens has chosen to not speak to the jury that will soon
consider whether he should receive the death penalty.

The judge in the case offered Owens the right to speak to the jury without
being subject to cross examination. On Thursday morning owens told the
judge he did not wish to speak.

Owens has already been convicted of the 2005 murders of Javad Marshall
Fields and Vivian Wolfe.

For the last four weeks the same jury that convicted Owens has
participated in the death penalty phase of the trial. It is thought that
jury will start considering his fate on Friday.

Currently there is only 1 person on Colorado's death row.

(source: KUSA)






ARIZONA:

Man gets death sentence in woman's '96 strangling


A Maricopa County Superior Court jury on Monday sentenced a Phoenix man to
death for the 1996 strangling death of a western Arizona woman.

Gary Wayne Snelling was found guilty in 2007 of murdering Adele Curtis,
66, but that jury was unable to reach a decision on whether he deserved
death or life in prison.

A 2nd sentencing trial with a new jury began in May in front of Judge
Linda Akers and brought back a death verdict for Snelling, 54.

According to court records, Davis was found dead on July 18, 1996, in the
bathroom of a townhouse she owned in Phoenix near Missouri and 33rd
avenues.

Davis lived in Wenden, a western Arizona town on U.S. 60, and she had come
to Phoenix to take care of her property. She had cleaned the townhouse
after evicting a tenant and had disrobed to take a shower when she was
attacked and strangled, apparently with a lamp cord that police found in
the bathroom sink. She had been dead for four days before authorities
discovered her body. Her truck had been found days earlier, parked outside
a west-side Phoenix bar.

But the evidence police found did not lead to her killer.

At the time of the murder, Snelling was awaiting trial on a
sexual-indecency charge. He was convicted and spent some time in jail, and
then, because he could not comply with the terms of his probation, he was
sent to prison where he was obligated to provide a DNA sample to be
entered into law-enforcement databases.

In 2004, a Phoenix police detective opened Davis' cold case and ran DNA
tests on blood spots found on a doorframe and on the floor of Davis'
bathroom.

They matched Snelling. Snelling's fingerprints and a palm print were also
found in the townhouse and in Davis' vehicle.

He went to trial, and a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in
May 2007. That jury deadlocked on the penalty.

Under Arizona law, the death verdict must be unanimous. The 2nd jury
considered only the life-or-death question and on Monday came back with
death.

(source: Arizona Republic)

******************

Man gets death sentence in ``cold-case" murder


A man has been sentenced to death for the murder of a woman in her Phoenix
home 12 years ago.

Gary Wayne Snelling, 54, was sentenced Monday, immediately after a
Maricopa County Superior Court jury decided unanimously that the death
sentence was appropriate.

The jury was the 2nd to consider the case. The 1st jury, which convicted
Snelling of 1st-degree murder in 2007, voted 11-1 in favor of death,
sending the punishment issue to a 2nd jury because the death sentence must
be unanimous.

Snelling was accused of killing Adele Curtis, 66, who was found nude and
strangled with an electrical cord inside her Phoenix town home on July 18,
1996. He was arrested more than 9 years after the murder as a result of
DNA evidence, and was indicted in April 2005.

Maricopa County Andrew Thomas, in announcing the death sentence, said,
"Even though so many years have passed, it is important that we seek
justice for this murder victim. Bringing these so-called cold cases to a
successful conclusion is a difficult talk that involves careful
coordination between the Phoenix police and our prosecutors."

(source: KTAR News)