[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----LA., N.C., FLA., ILL.

[Rick Halperin]

April 12



LOUISIANA:

Spinning Hope on Incarceration Station


KLSP, a radio station with one turntable, 6 employees and a $48 weekly
payroll, has limited reach over this patch of swampy farmland and razor
wire northwest of Baton Rouge. It is meant to be that way.

The station director and most of the D.J.'s are convicted murderers. Most
of its 5,100 listeners are serving life sentences at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary here. The 100-foot metal pole that transmits the station's
F.C.C.-approved signal - a relatively weak but consistent 100 watts -
rises from a grassy knoll behind death row.

Death row, home to 83 men, is where KLSP-FM (91.7), which prison officials
say is the nation's only licensed prison radio station, finds its most
dedicated audience and inspiration for its core mission: spreading the
word of Jesus (and an occasional message from the warden) to men doomed to
die behind bars.

"Our greatest challenge is to give hope where there is hopelessness," said
Burl Cain, the warden at Angola, where the average sentence is 89.9 years
with almost no chance of parole.

"This radio station helps do that - it beams out positive information,
positive gospel music," he said. "Even gospel rap."

The station is in a two-room cinderblock shed next to Angola's main prison
compound. KLSP, "the incarceration station, the station that kicks behind
the bricks," as Sirvoris Sutton, a D.J. and program manager, puts it,
broadcasts from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.

A Harris AirWave mixing board, two CD players, an aging Gem Sound
turntable and a digital playlist pump out a steady variety of gospel -
praise and worship, uptempo, quartet and choir - during work hours. After
6 p.m., the prison's six D.J.'s, who earn 20 cents an hour, spin an
eclectic mix of bluegrass, hip-hop and golden oldies. Friday nights, after
a talk show for 170 Muslim inmates, KLSP reveals its regional bias,
playing hours of swamp pop, a Cajun brand of rock 'n' roll.

Still, prison officials screen all music for sexual, violent or negative
lyrics; gangsta rap and heavy metal are not played. The station has no
telephone, so song requests arrive by prison mail. D.J.'s, all of them
inmate trustees allowed to move without guards, can be fired for breaking
the smallest rule, including using KLSP stationery, as one former D.J.
did, to write letters to a girlfriend.

KLSP also dives into old-fashioned radio journalism. A five-minute
satellite news feed from the Moody Bible Institute's broadcasting arm in
Chicago arrives at 55 minutes past each hour. Celebrity visitors, mainly
well-known Christians, including the former heavyweight boxing champion
George Foreman and the televangelist Kenneth Copeland, sit for live
interviews. A 12-inch color television in the studio carries news from
outside.

"It's one of the better jobs you can have here," said Mr. Sutton, 35. (His
on-air name, DJ Shaq, was given to him by inmates who saw him dunk a
basketball.) The station's purpose is "to begin to understand the men
here," he said. A prison radio station has to connect differently with its
listeners: "It's a different language."

Angola, known as the Farm, is at the end of a 19-mile rural highway,
spreading over 18,000 fertile acres on which inmates farm corn, soybeans,
wheat and raise cattle. Serene as the prison appears now, its legacy is
soaked in the blood of its inmates. In 1951, 31 prisoners slashed their
Achilles tendons to protest Angola's violence and living conditions.

The prison has been home to a few well-known artists, including the
bluesman Leadbelly in the 1930's and Wilbert Rideau, a former death row
inmate who used Angola's court-ordered reforms in the 1970's to establish
an award-winning prison magazine, The Angolite.

KLSP is the spawn of that artistic legacy, and, Warden Cain said, is
central to what he calls the prison's "Bapticostal" underpinnings, which
foster a mutual respect between his administration and the inmates.

The prison's Christian-based message has been so successful at keeping the
peace that other states have referred to it as a model, though not without
legal challenges. In August, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a
lawsuit accusing Warden Cain and the Louisiana state prison system of
hindering a Mormon inmate's access to religious texts.

Does the prison in essence sanction one religion above others? Cathy
Fontenot, an assistant warden, said the station's mainly Christian message
promotes safety and, besides, is what the inmates want to hear.

Said Warden Cain, "There really is so many positives from the radio
station and really no negatives."

The radio station started in 1987, when the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart gave
inmates old equipment from his radio network.

In 2001, executives from a South Carolina Christian radio station came to
Angola with Charles W. Colson, the Watergate felon who founded Prison
Fellowship Ministries. Broadcasting remotely from the prison, they raised
$120,000 to buy modern radio equipment that allowed KLSP to upgrade its
programming and expand its daily airtime to 20 hours. All the music it
plays is donated.

Still, 100 watts does not push the station's signal far beyond the prison
gate, where an etched monument gives tribute to Philippians 3:15: "Let us
therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye
be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you."

Seven miles down Highway 61, KLSP's signal begins to fade. 10 miles out,
there is only white noise.

At a prison like Angola, where most inmates will die of old age, days are
measured not by a clock but, in the words of Kerry Myers, The Angolite's
current editor, a "time that slows down, down and down until it seems to
stop."

The radio station exists partly to keep that time from stopping for too
long. That, inmates say, is when bad things happen.

"When you hear a song from your childhood, it kind of frees you from the
atmosphere that you're in," said Rockin' Robin Polk, a KLSP D.J. and
technician who has spent more than half of his 46 years at Angola for a
crime he said he preferred not to have printed.

Mr. Sutton, a k a DJ Shaq, said the station maintained a steady, calming
influence in inmates' lives. "It's a familiar voice, a voice they trust,"
he said. "Every morning, you get up and think, 'Hey, there's a purpose.'"

Many inmates said that KLSP provided a sense of community, even pride,
because it was a positive daily influence created by guys they knew. And,
they said, the station is commercial-free.

Willie Humphrey, serving the 31st year of a life sentence for armed
robbery, said he was not religious but regularly listened to KLSP for the
bouncy gospel music. But sometimes, said Mr. Humphrey, 53, a D.J. breaks
the spell. "Some guys will try and use big words," he said, smiling, "and
it don't really come out right."

Phil Shappard, a technical manager for Moody Broadcasting Network, said
KLSP's influence on its listeners belies its limited resources.

Mr. Shappard, who plans to make his fourth visit to Angola in August to
deliver training tools like pronunciation guides and vocabulary software,
said: "The radio station is all about moral rehabilitation. The root of it
is ministry, personal ministry to the men there."

After 19 years of prison radio, KLSP's success has led to even bigger
ideas at Angola. Later this year, Warden Cain said, the prison plans to
begin building a small television studio, with equipment donated from a
station in Lafayette, La.

"I wouldn't do it," Warden Cain said, "without the radio station first."

(source: The New York Times)






NORTH CAROLINA:

State Says Condemned Killer Will Sleep During Execution


State prison officials will bring in an electronic monitor for the
scheduled execution of a convicted killer to make sure he isn't awake
while being put to death.

Willie Brown Jr. is to be put to death April 21 for the 1983 slaying of a
woman during a convenience store robbery. His attorneys had asked a
federal judge to stop the execution, citing evidence showing that the
prisoner might wake up but be paralyzed and endure pain.

U.S. District Court Judge Malcolm Howard said he would stop the execution
without an assurance by noon Wednesday that Brown would be monitored so he
could be put back to sleep if necessary.

In a document filed with Howard, the state Department of Correction said
it bought a monitor used to ensure surgical patients are unconscious. A
doctor and a nurse will watch the monitor in an observation room off the
execution chamber, the state said.

But a defense lawyer said the state hadn't complied with the judge's
wishes to say whether qualified medical personnel with training in
anesthesiology would be present. Howard gave the defense until Friday to
file a formal response.

The judge "really asked for the qualifications of the experienced, trained
personnel," said Don Cowan. "The state gave him a machine."

The medical team the state has was "the same nurse and doctor who were
there 10 years ago," he said. "They have not changed the personnel on
their execution team."

Howard said in his order last week that the execution could proceed as
scheduled if there were personnel "with sufficient medical training" to be
sure Brown was unconscious before and during the injection of fatal drugs.

In its filing, the state said its bispectral index, or BIS, monitor, is
approved by the FDA to determine if surgical patients stay asleep. The
state document also said a registered nurse had enough skill to read and
interpret the monitor's findings, but that both a nurse and a doctor would
have access to it.

Department of Correction personnel will administer additional drugs to
assure unconsciousness if the monitor shows the prisoner awakening, state
lawyers said. The execution procedure also was changed to be certain the
prisoner was asleep before starting the final and fatal portion of the
injection.

Using the standard dose of sodium pentothal, the state said, the prisoner
would remain unconscious for hours.

(source: Associated Press)






FLORIDA:

Jamaican on death row in Florida gets extension


LANCELOT ARMSTRONG, a Jamaican man on death row in Florida, has been
granted an extension of time for a clemency hearing, pending investigation
of alleged irregularities relating to a prosecution witness.

Armstrong, in the meantime, has made a personal appeal to the Jamaican
Government, renewing his request for assistance in escaping death by
lethal injection.

An evidentiary hearing had been scheduled for this Friday, April 14, when
Mr. Armstrong's lawyers would have been required to present mitigating
arguments in support of their plea for clemency on his behalf.

On Monday, however, the court granted a 180-day suspension of the hearing.
This was done, according to David Rowe, Armstrong's attorney, "because it
was determined that a government witness who testified against Mr.
Armstrong had a non-disclosed felony record, which is contrary to law".

ADDITIONAL TIME

As a consequence, he said, the judge had given additional time for his
legal team to prepare for the hearing.

In the meantime, according to Rowe, another investigation has been
initiated by "a third party quasi-government agency" in the U.S., aimed at
looking into the circumstances of Mr. Armstrong's conviction in 1990 for
the murder of Broward County Sheriff's Deputy John Greeney.

Armstrong, in a handwritten 'open letter' to Attorney-General A.J.
Nicholson (dated April 10), a copy of which was faxed to The Gleaner,
renewed his claim that the Jamaican Government had neglected his plight
for 16 years.

"From my arrest in 1990 to February 15, 2006 no Jamaican diplomat,
representative or consul came to see me while I have been in prison. I
have made several requests for help from the consulate in Miami, Florida,
with no response," he said.

That was until Consul General Ricardo Allicock and Vice Consul, Vince
Carter, visited him in jail on February 15.

(source: Jamaica Gleaner)






ILLINOIS:

Ex-Death row inmate wont face renewed charges


Despite a new grand jury probe into the double murder that sent him to
prison, freed death row inmate Gordon "Randy" Steidl is unlikely to again
be charged in the case, a prosecutor said today.

"It doesn't appear that there is any new evidence, any facts, that are
worthy of seeking a new trial against Mr. Steidl," special prosecutor Ed
Parkinson of the Illinois Appellate Prosecutor's Office told the state
Prisoner Review Board.

The board, meeting today in downtown Chicago, makes confidential
recommendations to Gov. Rod Blagojevich on clemency petitions.

Steidl, 54, also appeared before the board, telling its members he seeks a
pardon "based on his innocence."

He spent 17 years behind bars - 12 on death row - before his release from
prison in May 2004. A federal judge had ordered a new trial for Steidl,
and Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan's office dropped an appeal of the
federal court ruling after determining state prosecutors had withheld
evidence favoring Steidl's defense.

The two primary witnesses against him repeatedly changed their stories
about the July 1986 murders of newlyweds Karen and Dyke Rhoads in
Downstate Paris, and forensic experts questioned the alleged physical
evidence against the man.

A former drinking buddy of Steidl's, Herb Whitlock, 60, was convicted in
the couple's deaths on much the same evidence as that presented against
Steidl. Whitlock remains behind bars serving a life sentence. He recently
appealed a trial court decision not to grant him a new trial.

"For 17 years, there was no credible evidence against me," Steidl told the
Review Board. "There is none today. There had never been any. You should
make a recommendation now."

Steidl, now a die-cut machine operator at a container corporation in
Missouri, noted that job applications made after a recent temporary layoff
received no response. That, he said, was because of his record.

A pardon "would open doors for me that will otherwise remain closed
forever," Steidl said.

Karen Daniel, of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern
University School of Law and one of Steidl's attorneys, noted her client
is doing better than many former inmates freed after years behind bars.

"He's doing, I think, better than most people would in his situation," she
said. "He's here before you today to ask for one thing, to have his name
back."

"He has spent 17 years for crime he didn't commit, and it's time to clear
Randy Steidl's name."

Steidl applied for the pardon in July 2005. The Review Board first heard
arguments in October but continued the hearing after Parkinson said a
probe of the Rhoads homicides was under way.

Parkinson said today that a grand jury empanelled in Paris in January is
to finish its work by the end of May. He agreed to then send the Review
Board a letter saying whether charges against Steidl would be brought.

But he noted there is no statute of limitations on murder and said his
office would not declare Steidl innocent. Juries, he noted, find people
guilty or not guilty, not innocent.

"A jury returning a public verdict of not guilty is the strongest
pronunciation of innocence you can have," Mike Metnick, one of Steidl's
attorneys, said later. And Jan Sussler, yet another Steidl attorney, noted
that Steidl spent 17 years behind bars before his conviction was
overturned.

(source: Chicago Tribune)