April 16 USA: The Moussaoui effect FOR ALL ITS IMPERFECTIONS and absurdities, and they are legion, the death penalty trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui has been an object lesson in how the U.S. judicial system should deal with accused terrorists. It also demonstrates that following the law and fighting terrorism are not incompatible. The trial in a federal court in Alexandria, Va., also has exposed an inconsistency bordering on hypocrisy in the Bush administration's treatment of so-called enemy combatants. Two years after the Supreme Court warned that the war on terrorism does not provide the president with a "blank check," the executive branch is in some cases - but not, strangely, in Moussaoui's - still insisting on the right to be judge, jury and executioner. Admittedly, the trial of Moussaoui, a French citizen who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks, has at times been an unedifying spectacle. The prosecution's effort to secure a death sentence for Moussaoui was almost derailed when it was revealed that a government lawyer had improperly coached potential witnesses. The defendant's insistence on taking the stand and spewing hatred of the United States gave his own lawyers cause to object that their client, whom they portray as deranged, was turning the courtroom into a circus. Yet, warts and all, the trial is important, and not because it provides the loved ones of 9/11's victims with closure and a flesh-and-blood villain who insisted that he had "no regrets, no remorse" for the loss of nearly 3,000 human lives. Harsh as it may sound, the point of the trial is not to provide catharsis to 9/11 families, though one might have thought otherwise when the prosecution played a chilling cockpit recording from United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to wrest control of the plane from their hijackers. The real value of the Moussaoui trial is that the defendant is having his day in court - and not just any court. He has received a public trial presided over by an independent judge who not only enforced rules of evidence approved by Congress but punished the prosecution when it failed to abide by her orders. Most important, the burden in the trial is on prosecutors to convince a jury of ordinary citizens that Moussaoui - who was in a jail cell on 9/11 - deserves the death penalty. That Moussaoui undermined his own defense by boasting that he had planned to fly another plane into the White House on 9/11 is not the court's fault. Nor can his lawyers be blamed for the seeming death wish that moved the defendant to insist that he was not only sane but also determined to kill Americans if he were released. What matters is that a man charged with one of the most heinous crimes in U.S. history has nevertheless received the protections for which the U.S. judicial system is renowned. Now contrast the Moussaoui trial with the skimpy and selective "due process" the Bush administration has provided other suspected terrorists. >From the beginning, President Bush essentially has argued that the post-9/11 war on terrorism authorized him to act as judge, jury and executioner of enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens. In 2004, the Supreme Court pointedly rejected this assertion of power, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreigners detained at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba could challenge their confinement. "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in holding that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native, was entitled to a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. Hamdi was later allowed to leave the United States for Saudi Arabia, a tacit admission that his prolonged confinement was unnecessary. Despite having its knuckles rapped by the Supreme Court, the administration has continued to play by its own rules. Take the tangled tale of Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who was arrested in Chicago and held as an enemy combatant for more than three years on suspicion of being part of an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the U.S. Only when it looked as if the Supreme Court would hear Padilla's appeal did the Justice Department decide to have him indicted on factually different charges and transfer him to a civilian detention facility. Last month, the high court declined to hear Padilla's appeal of enemy combatant status, noting that he now faces criminal charges. But three members of the court, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., issued an unusual opinion warning the administration that Padilla was entitled to a speedy trial and that if the president decides to reclassify him as an enemy combatant, Padilla "retains the option of seeking a writ of habeas corpus in this court." They might have added that should the administration reclassify Padilla, it might find it difficult to prosecute him, given that much of the evidence against him would probably be inadmissible. The rule of law benefits accusers as well as the accused. In another case, the court is likely soon to rule on whether Bush can try inmates at Guantanamo for violations of the "law of war" even though the administration does not recognize them as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. During arguments in a case brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, Justice David H. Souter honed in on that contradiction, telling the U.S. solicitor general, "I don't see how you can have it both ways." It's more accurate to say that since 9/11, the administration has tried to have it one way - its own way - even if today's theory about what constitutes a fair trial for suspected terrorists conflicts with yesterday's. A better alternative would be to try suspected terrorists in federal court (where most defendants are unlikely to have Moussaoui's death wish) or in military tribunals authorized by Congress and conducted in accordance with international law. (source: Editorial, Los Angeles Times) ************************* Painful executions Am I the only person left who wishes the execution process could be more painful? What about the 10-year-old girl who was raped, tortured and then stabbed multiple times to death? What about the shop owner who is trying to eke out a living and is shot to death by some lazy idiot who only wants the easy way? No one ever thinks of the victims anymore. All rapists and child molesters should be castrated, and murderers should face the same death they inflicted upon their victims. Didn't the Bible say an eye for an eye? Steve Fine, Dallas (source: Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News) ****************************** Injustice plagues the death penalty system There are few issues that challenge the beliefs Americans hold about the limits of state power, fairness and equality in the criminal justice system, and sense of moral and civic responsibility, in as dramatic and powerful ways as the death penalty. However, the death penalty is far from an abstract debate on theories of government authority or moral decency. Since 1973, for approximately every 10 individuals the U.S. has executed, 1 individual has been exonerated, released from death row based on evidence of their innocence. Given the seriousness of a capital sentence, one would expect each of these cases to have withstood in the first place the most rigorous scrutiny possible in our criminal justice system. A high number of exonerees does not indicate that the system works. It would be naive and irresponsible to believe that we catch all of our mistakes. Rather, such a figure makes clear that the death penalty and our criminal justice system at large are failing those citizens who are the most vulnerable in our society. The debate over the death penalty, however, is much more than a simple question of guilt or innocence. While egregious errors continue to occur in convicting and sentencing innocent people to death, there are also widespread systematic flaws in the practical application of the death penalty. Several recent state and national surveys have overwhelmingly concluded the exercise of the death penalty to be both arbitrary and discriminatory. Concerns of race, class and geographic bias all were shown to play significant roles in whether or not a death sentence was pursued by prosecutors and ultimately awarded by juries. According to the findings of a 2003 study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, the state's death penalty system is contaminated by racial bias, and geography plays a major role in who faces a capital conviction. The study found that the race of the victim makes a significant difference in whether prosecutors seek a capital conviction. Defendants accused of killing white victims are significantly more likely to face the death penalty than cases with non-white victims. For example, in 1998, 81 % of the homicide victims in Maryland were African-American, yet 84 % of death sentences resulted from cases involving white victims. This pattern of racial bias occurs nationally. In 96 % of the states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a trend of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. In a comprehensive study of the death penalty in North Carolina, the odds of receiving a death sentence rose by 3.5 times among those defendants whose victims were white. The Maryland study also found that whether a person receives the death penalty depends heavily on where the crime was committed. In 1998, Baltimore City had only one person on Maryland's death row, but suburban Baltimore County, with one-tenth as many murders as the city, had nine times the number on death row. In Ohio, about one-quarter of the state's death row inmates come from Hamilton County (Cincinnati), but only 9 % of the state's murders occur there. The uneven application of the death penalty across county lines points to the "unusual" and arbitrary nature of the system, even within a single state. Lack of adequate counsel is also a glaring systemic flaw, unfairly punishing those who cannot afford their own attorney. In Washington State, for example, one-fifth of the 84 people who have faced execution in the past 20 years were represented by lawyers who had been, or were later, disbarred, suspended or arrested. (Overall, the state's disbarment rate for attorneys is under one percent.) The debate over the death penalty must be expanded beyond the question of innocence and guilt to questions of adequate representation, race, gender, geography and class. Whether or not one believes theoretically in the justness of the death penalty, it is irrefutable that the system simply does not work so long as it disproportionately executes minorities, the poor and those living in certain geographic regions. To quote Clinton Duffy, the former warden at California's San Quentin Prison, the death penalty can best be understood as a "privilege of the poor." In matters of life and death, we cannot afford to be wrong, even a single time. So long as we choose to value some lives more than others, any pretense of fairness in our capital punishment system will remain unrealized. (source: Johns Hopkins University; Claire Edington is a senior public health and Romance languages and literatures major from Wayland, Mass.) ***************** Should Congress Mandate Supreme Court TV? This is the true story of 9 justices, picked to serve together on a court and have their oral arguments videotaped for broadcast to the public. If the Senate Judiciary Committee has its way, soon the U.S. Supreme Court's justices could be the stars of the newest reality programming to capture the imagination of the MTV generation. Legislation to permit the televising of U.S. Supreme Court proceedings was reported favorably from the Senate Judiciary Committee to the floor of the U.S. Senate last month. Yet this renewed push to bring the Supreme Court into the 21st Century raises a number of questions. The most important question asks whether, on balance, televising Supreme Court oral arguments would be a positive or negative development. Next, Congress will need to weigh the extent to which the legislature should defer to the justices' opposition to televised proceedings. And finally, there is the all-important issue of ratings: Does any audience exist to watch the typical, mundane Supreme Court oral argument? I have personally attended a handful of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, and while the arguments often tend to be interesting as an intellectual matter, they do not ordinarily make for riveting viewing. Stated plainly, the interesting part of a Supreme Court oral argument is what the justices and the lawyers have to say, but there is not much to see other than a lawyer standing at a lectern and robed justices seated at the bench. It is not difficult to tell which justice is speaking based on the sound of their voices, and because only one lawyer engages in oral argument at a time, it is always clear who is addressing the court. I have also watched dozens of appellate oral argument broadcasts, via C-SPAN from the regional federal appellate courts and online from the Supreme Courts of California and Ohio. These oral argument telecasts further confirmed that it is the audio, rather than the video, of an oral argument that communicates the most meaningful information. In March 2006, I had the pleasure of viewing in person several oral arguments presented to the Supreme Court of Ohio in that court's state-of-the-art courtroom in Columbus, Ohio. Ohio's highest court streams live video coverage of its oral arguments across the Internet, and the court also offers an online video archive of past oral arguments. >From within the courtroom, the cameras were entirely unobtrusive. I would not have even noticed them had I not been specifically looking for them. And the courtroom cameras operate automatically, through voice activation, so that the cameras televise whichever person is speaking at a given time. Although I have viewed and listened to the audio of numerous appellate oral arguments, never once have I gotten the impression that an attorney was attempting to play to some outside audience instead of directing the presentation to the court and responding to the questions presented from the bench. Of all courts, the U.S. Supreme Court should be the least concerned that an advocate might be trying to play to the cameras, because it is the rare case indeed where a victory in the court of public opinion could compensate for a loss in the U.S. Supreme Court. Already, in the cases in which the general public is most interested, the U.S. Supreme Court has routinely agreed to same-day oral argument audio release, and in none of those cases were the advocates condemned for trying their case to the public instead of seeking to present the case in the best possible manner to the Court. Moreover, every day that the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral argument, members of the press corps are listening to all that transpires in the courtroom. A court reporter is transcribing every word that is spoken and even the laughter that some justices evoke. The proceedings are audiotaped. And members of the public are in the audience. Everything that happens at oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court is already subjected to more attention than anything that happens at any other appellate court in the nation. Within weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court posts online at its Web site a written transcript of each oral argument. And at the end of each term, the U.S. Supreme Court releases the audiotapes of all oral arguments. Soon thereafter, those audiotapes become available online via the Oyez Web site. In the past, some U.S. Supreme Court justices have expressed apprehension that televising that court's proceedings would cause the justices to lose whatever degree of anonymity they now retain and could also result in the media's use of sound bites to misrepresent what the justices were actually saying in the questioning of an attorney. On the anonymity issue, it is possible that televised Supreme Court proceedings would make the justices more recognizable to the general public, but even now anyone who wants to learn what a justice looks like need only do a simple Internet search. And most of the justices engage in frequent public appearances, suggesting that anonymity does not rank high on their list of personal priorities. With regard to the potential for media misrepresentation, in my experience having the audio or video of an oral argument readily available to all allows immediate identification and correction of any media misrepresentation. At present, by contrast, the media has a greater ability to misrepresent a justice's statements at oral argument because in most instances neither the audio nor the transcript is immediately available. On the issue of legislative deference to the U.S. Supreme Court, I do not believe that Congress would be exceeding its constitutional power to require that oral arguments be televised. It is ironic, following 2 recent U.S. Supreme Court confirmation proceedings at which some senators complained that the Court was not sufficiently deferring to congressional factfinding, that members of the Court are now requesting special deference from the legislature. I think that the congressional sponsors of the legislation requiring televised U.S. Supreme Court proceedings realize that the justices are nowhere close to agreeing voluntarily to allow TV cameras into the courtroom. After all, Justice David H. Souter is on record as saying that cameras will come into the courtroom over his dead body, and he remains very much alive and plans to remain so for many years to come. Thus, legislative deference to the Court is, for now and likely for many years to come, the tantamount to agreeing that televised proceedings will not occur. Although I support the proposed legislation mandating televised U.S. Supreme Court proceedings, perhaps compromise is possible. For example, it would be almost as useful if the Court agreed to release same-day audio of all oral arguments. Several federal appellate courts already post oral argument audio files online at their Web sites for download soon after the oral arguments have taken place. Presumably, the U.S. Supreme Court could do likewise. Same-day oral argument audio from the highest court in the land would be nearly as good as television and much more informative than what is now immediately available to the public. And the justices would not need to worry about their horrendous Nielsen ratings or losing what is left of their anonymity. (source: Law.com - Howard J. Bashman operates his own appellate litigation boutique in Willow Grove, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia) GEORGIA: When a Child Says He's a Killer----Georgia's Legislature passed Amy's Law to stiffen juvenile penalties after a boy confessed to slaying a girl. Then someone else confessed. When Amy's Law - passed by the Georgia Legislature and awaiting the signature of Gov. Sonny Perdue - was introduced, a small group of child welfare advocates cautioned against rushing to tighten laws against juvenile offenders on the basis of a single emotional case. That case, the 2004 strangling of 8-year-old Amy Yates, has since become even more emotional and more complex. The 12-year-old locked up for the crime - he's now 14 - has been released. A mentally disabled 18-year-old, who was a minor at the time of the crime, confessed. Authorities don't know which youth, if either, should be held accountable. The father who fought for the law in his daughter's name is struggling to see justice served - for her and for the two young suspects. Thomas Yates last saw Amy as she bicycled to her friend's trailer to deliver an invitation to her Hello Kitty birthday party. That April evening, Amy was strangled and her body left in a ditch. Days later, a 12-year-old boy, a known troublemaker in the trailer park, confessed. But he soon retracted his statement, and his lawyer complained that he had been interrogated for 3 hours without legal counsel. Furious that the boy's age meant that the stiffest penalty he could face under Georgia law was 2 years in juvenile detention, Yates, a 31-year-old newspaper deliveryman, petitioned legislators for stiffer sentences for juveniles. Amy's Law would give juvenile court judges the authority to lock up any child found guilty of murder until the offender turned 21. Under current state law, children younger than 13 can be sentenced to a maximum of 2 years of confinement for murder; juveniles 13 and older can be prosecuted as adults in violent crimes. The Amy Yates case - which was picked up by news outlets across the world as a heart-rending example of the argument for stiffer penalties for juveniles - is now becoming a study in the difficulty of treating children like adults. In February, the 18-year-old confessed to killing Amy. He too later retracted his statement. Last week, the younger boy - who was sentenced to a juvenile facility in August 2005 after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors - was released after a juvenile court judge threw out his plea agreement. Dist. Atty. Pete Skandalakis has three weeks to decide which suspect to prosecute or whether to drop the case altogether. "I think it's possible that there will always be doubt in this case," he said. "We have no DNA, no fingerprints, no witnesses. We're relying on the statements of a boy who was 12 years old and a mentally disabled adult." Yates, who earlier was convinced the 12-year-old committed the crime, now is "100% certain" that the older suspect, Chris Gossett, did it. It was Gossett's home that Amy was pedaling to on the night she died; Gossett was her friend's brother. Although some details of Gossett's confession did not match information that investigators knew about the case, Yates said that key details - Gossett said he threw Amy's white notebook across a creek and unbuttoned her pants - corresponded with information that had not been made public. Yates is so convinced of Gossett's guilt that he is fighting on behalf of the boy he previously thought committed the crime. "I made a mistake," he said. "I've apologized to the family, because I said a lot of hateful things to them.. Now I'm asking everyone to stand up and admit we made a mistake." Some child welfare advocates feel a certain vindication. "The fact that a second boy is a suspect is the icing on the cake in terms of what we've been saying about the differences between children and adults," said Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Assn. of Homes and Services for Children. Adams, who worries that legislators are becoming more punitive in dealing with juvenile crime, said that children - including those who commit serious crimes - are cognitively different from adults. "Both of those boys were interrogated without counsel, and it is possible to coerce confessions out of children fairly easily," he said. In 2004, Yates was indignant when the lawyer for the 12-year-old complained about the boy's interrogation. Yates did not believe a doctor who said that someone that age would eventually say anything to get out of the room. According to Georgia's Department of Juvenile Justice, 4 children 12 or younger have been convicted of murder in the state in the last decade. Although there seems to be no statistical evidence that more children are committing murders, Anne Dupre, a specialist in child law at the University of Georgia, said the perception that such crimes were more frequent was driving a national trend toward stricter sentencing. Despite Yates' belief now in the younger boy's innocence, he is still convinced of the need for Amy's Law. "Any crime that results in the loss of life deserves harsh punishment," Yates said. He said he still did not trust the senators, politicians and lawyers who urged caution in changing juvenile law. "I want to take a stick to the back of their heads," he said. Instead, he said, he takes a picture of Amy out of his wallet. "Senators, do you have children?" he asks. "If your kid was in a coffin, tell me, would two years be enough?" Yates no longer lives in Twin Oaks Mobile Home Park, where his daughter was killed and the 2 suspects also lived. Many of the park's residents moved in after Amy's death, and those who remember her say they have struggled to keep up with the recent twists in the case. "People here don't know what to think," said Norman Pope, 59, sitting in his trailer's porch swing one afternoon last week. Pope said he never felt certain that the 12-year-old had killed Amy. "He just didn't seem the type that would have done it," he said. "He bummed cigarettes, but I couldn't see how he could murder. He was just a little 12-year-old boy, not all that big." In a dim trailer on the other side of the complex, Chris Gossett's mother, Jean, 57, said her son had confessed after experiencing a psychotic breakdown. "Chris isn't capable of things like that," she said. "They had the right one. If they didn't have enough to charge that youth, he wouldn't have been" locked up. Amy's father disagrees. He now hopes to introduce a second Amy's Law - for the boy he once wished would be locked away for life. It would require that any juvenile suspected of a serious crime be interrogated only in the presence of an attorney. "Juveniles must have proper representation," he said. "If we had had that legislation now, we would have been spared this heartache and misery." (source: Los Angeles Times) TENNESSEE: Justice put on standby----Accused of brutal gang killings, his federal capital case is longest running Donnell Young was 22 when he was arrested for killing a fellow gang member in Oklahoma City. Today, at 31, he sits behind bars at the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Nashville, waiting to go to trial on a murder charge that could send him to the federal death row. Young's case has the distinction of being the oldest federal death penalty prosecution in the nation that has yet to conclude at trial. And his case - part of a larger prosecution of members of the West Coast-based Rollin' 90s Crips gang - is just the 2nd time that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville has sought the federal death penalty. Almost nothing has been simple about Young's case, including how the Los Angeles gang member ended up in Nashville, a city he had never visited until he was indicted here. Jury selection for his upcoming trial took three months. The trial itself could last about five months. The decision of whether Young would face the death penalty went all the way to the attorney general of the U.S. And if Young does get a death sentence, he'll be the only person from Tennessee on federal death row. There are 43 people on it now. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sunny A.M. Koshy, lead counsel for the prosecution, declined to comment for this story, citing a gag order issued by U.S. District Judge John Nixon last year. Young's attorney, Richard Kammen, in private practice in Indianapolis, also said he could not comment. And Young himself was not available to be interviewed. But in a handwritten letter to Nixon in 2003, Young wrote: "I just (want) to go to trial and get this over with. I don't care where the trial is at any more; my family has suffered long enough. If it's my destiny to die by the 'sword' of the Government - so be it." Mr. T, Bootsy and the pit bull In various court filings, prosecutors say Young has no remorse and has committed other acts of violence. Authorities say Young's bad acts include the alleged torture of a teenager over a drug debt and the beating of the debtor, an Oklahoma City man named Troy Rogers, or "Mr. T." According to prosecutors, Young led a group in beating Rogers and the teen in an effort to collect what Rogers owed for three ounces of crack cocaine. While Young held down the teenager, others sodomized him, according to court filings by the government. The indictment against Young also alleges he and others committed violent acts, such as using and carrying guns to collect drug debts and to beat up, kidnap and kill people. Court documents also show that the government "intends to prove that the defendant acted as an armed enforcer in the drug conspiracy, and severely assaulted co-conspirators to instill discipline and collect drug debts." In addition, prosecutors said that Young threatened to stab a witness if he cooperated with the government, offered to pay off one witness to stab another one, had a "stabbing instrument" of some kind while in custody and expressed a desire to harm other witnesses. Several witnesses, according to a detective, said Young would get either a kilogram of cocaine or $20,000 for killing Pilcher, court papers show. Prosecutors also said they have evidence to show that Young seriously beat up Lawrence Washington, or "Bootsy," to collect a drug debt, then later decapitated a pit bull terrier that belonged to Bootsy's friend, Wallace Davis, known as "Kaos." Parts of the dog's body were found in the washing machine in a home where Bootsy lived. Pilcher was killed a few weeks later at that same house. Police found three fingerprints belonging to Young at the home where Pilcher was killed, according to court papers. Young's attorneys downplay the significance, saying it is the only physical evidence linking him to the killing and that he was known to frequent the house, according to Young's court filings. They also say another possible suspect's fingeprints were found "at this location virtually exactly the same place as (where) Mr. Young's fingerprints were found." 'Specter of death' The Rollin' 90s Crips started out on the mean streets of poor, inner-city L.A. But part of the drug ring operated out of Music City - with people associated with the Rollin' 90s involved in gang-related killings in the Midstate, operating drug houses here and using young Nashville teens as drug couriers. Young, who was called "Lil' Peso," was accused of the Oklahoma murder of Woody Pilcher in 1997 on the orders of kingpin Jamal Shakir. The gang boss, it appeared, wanted Pilcher taken out because he had either lost or stolen cocaine he was supposed to sell, according to court documents. Pilcher was shot to death. In 1998, federal prosecutors got a Nashville jury to indict Young and 19 other defendants on several drug conspiracy counts. Murder charges were later added. Young says he is not guilty and, in various court filings, names other possible killers and explanations of why other people may have tried to set him up. The long wait has not been kind to Young's case. Some informants and witnesses - including one key witness who could have cleared him - are now dead. A few have disappeared. Others just can't be found, according to one of Young's court filings. One defense investigator said a potential witness "is now 'crazy' and has little recollection of last week much less 8 years ago," the court papers say. "There's always the possibility of loss of witnesses, and the witnesses you still have around, their memories begin to dull," said Skip Gant of the Capital Resource Counsel, who is based in Nashville. He is 1 of 2 "counsels" assigned by the judicial system to help federal defenders around the country with death penalty cases. Several high-profile federal death penalty cases have come and gone in less time than Young has spent waiting for his trial. The fate of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is moving closer to resolution, as jurors are currently deciding whether he should be put to death for his role in the plot. He was indicted in 2001. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested and put to death in a shorter time period than Young has awaited trial. "Anybody who's sitting in a cell with the specter of death hanging over him, that's got to have some debilitating effect on his psyche," Gant said. 'I want to go to trial' When federal prosecutors added murder counts to Young's indictment in 1999, he was put on notice that his crimes made him eligible for the death penalty. But it took 3 more years until then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft made it official and told local prosecutors to seek to put him on death row. There were other delays. Young's case for several years was tied to several other co-defendants. That meant his proceedings slowed to a crawl when they asked for continuances and delays, his attorneys said in court filings. Court-issued funds to carry out investigations to support his innocence were late in coming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, hindering progress in the case. In another time-eating legal battle, the Rollin' 90s defendants asked the judge to move their cases to Los Angeles, where most of them lived. It took more than 7 months for the district judge to decide to keep the trial in Nashville. Then when Young's attorneys won permission from Judge Nixon to seat 2 juries in the case, prosecutors appealed to the 6th Circuit. Nearly 5 months later, Nixon's decision was overturned. "There were these long, long delays, and (Young) was saying, 'I want to go to trial,'" Gant said. Last October, jury selection in Young's case finally began before Nixon in the Nashville federal building. Over 3 months, attorneys whittled down a pool of 500 prospective jurors to 70. But before attorneys could finalize picking a jury of 12 with 6 alternates, everything stopped. Nixon ruled that 19 witnesses could not testify because prosecutors did not tell the defense about them before the trial started, according to the judge's ruling. That new evidence included information about the assault on "Mr. T." The trial is on hold while the government appeals that decision, which could set back the trial several more months. 'Twisting in the wind' The average time between indictment and capital trial in the federal system is 20 months, according to Kevin McNally, a Kentucky attorney who specializes in capital litigation. For Young, it's been more than six years. "He's been slowly twisting in the wind," McNally said. He is not one of Young's lawyers but is familiar with the case. "Ponderously slowly" is how Young's attorneys describe the glacier-paced case in a court motion they filed claiming his rights to a speedy trial have been violated. They say Young is not responsible "in any meaningful way for the unprecedented delay, which has infected this case." The government, in its court filings, places part of the blame on Young. He did not object to various court motions requested by his co-defendants to delay the trial and he himself has asked to postpone it, the prosecutors say. The first time the Nashville U.S. Attorney's Office sought the death penalty was a murder-for-hire case in the late 1990s. In that case, a hit man who murdered a federal grand jury witness and the witness's ex-boyfriend who arranged the killing because he didn't want her to expose his drug ring ultimately pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to life in prison. Along with Young, the Justice Department is seeking the death penalty against two other Rollin' 90s Crips members, including Shakir and Eben Payne. Shakir's trial is scheduled for September. No trial date has been set for Payne, who has undergone mental examinations and a competency hearing, according to court files. The prosecution against the Shakir gang is among the largest in the country, according to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney's office. There are more than 2,200 docket entries, and Young's attorneys said they got about 150,000 pages in digital format of discovery from prosecutors. Why the Justice Department decided to authorize Young's case for the death penalty perplexes McNally, who follows capital cases around the country. Capital prosecutions are almost exclusively reserved for cases where the victim is either white, female or both, McNally said. Pilcher, who went by the nickname "Screwloose," was neither. And he was no saint, according to court papers. He carried out several gang-ordered killings, including one where he stuck a gun in one man's ears and "blew his brains out," court papers said. Other evidence suggests he shot and killed a couple, and also shot their three-year-old daughter, who almost bled to death. "Generally speaking, when you have minority males killing minority males involved in the drug trade - while convictions result and life sentences result - juries do not generally impose the death penalty," McNally said. (source: Ashland City Times) OKLAHOMA: Appeal denied in death penalty case An appeal filed on behalf of an Inola man who was sentenced to death in 2000 in Rogers County has been denied. Karl Lee Myers, 58, was found guilty by a jury of 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, and robbery in connection with 2 deaths in Rogers County in 1993 and 1996. He was given the death penalty, which he appealed in 2002. An opinion issued by Judge C. Johnson regarding the appeal confirms the penalty, stating he "found no error warranting reversal or modification" and affirmed both the judgment and the sentence. According to Rogers County District Attorney Gene Haynes, Myers was 1st arrested in March 1996 following the discovery of the body of Cindy Michelle Marzano in the Verdigris River. Upon investigation, authorities took DNA samples from Myers, which matched semen found on Marzano, and a 2nd victim whose body was found in 1993. "There was an unsolved murder from 1993 and the sample from her body matched Myers' DNA," Haynes said. "That was the only evidence in that case." Once the evidence pointed to Myers as the perpetrator of the unsolved deaths, he was charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, and tried for both crimes in 2000. According to court records, the body of Shawn Marie Williams was found on the afternoon of April 16, 1993, at the Commodore Boat Ramp Area, Rocky Point Recreation Area in Rogers County. Williams had reportedly been shot 5 times, with 1 shot rupturing her aeorta, which caused her death. Authorities reported that Williams had left her home in Catoosa at 8:30 p.m. to make a call from a payphone when she ran out of gas west of 289th E. Avenue on Highway 412. Williams truck was found abandoned by her mother at approximately 4:30 p.m. April 14, 1993. Marzano's body was found on March 15, 1996, after the Rogers County Sheriffs Office received a call about a female found in the river at the Kerr-McClellan Navigation Channel. Her vehicle was found at Denny's Restaurant in Broken Arrow and she was reportedly last seen at 11 p.m. March 14, 1996, at the restaurant with Myers. When authorities questioned Myers, he denied leaving with Marzano, stating she left the restaurant before he did, and that he drove straight home to Inola, arriving at 12:45 a.m., according to court records. Deputies reported that Marzano's body was found in an area located within a very short distance, and accessible to the highway Myers told authorities he traveled on his way home. Deputies also stated that the time frame in which Myers drove from the restaurant to his home was within the time Marzano died. An revealed that Marzano had been unusually assaulted and strangled to death. (source: Claremore Daily Progress) ******************** Man planned to eat murder victim: police A man in the Oklahoma town of Purcell has been arrested on suspicion of murdering the 10-year-old daughter of his neighbor and planning to eat her body, police said on Saturday. Kevin Underwood, 26, was arrested on Friday in the murder of Jamie Rose Bolin, who was reported missing after she failed to return home on Wednesday from a public library in Purcell, 36 miles south of Oklahoma City. "Regarding a potential motive, this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones," Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins told a news conference. Underwood was among many Purcell residents who participated in a search for Bolin, but police said he acted strangely when pulled over at a Highway Patrol checkpoint. Police found the girl's body after Underwood, who lived upstairs from Bolin and her father in an apartment complex, allowed them to search his apartment. He confessed to the murder after investigators found a plastic tub in his closet that had been taped shut, according to an affidavit released by Purcell Police. "At that time Mr. Underwood stated 'go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,'" the affidavit said. Based on interviews with Underwood and files found on his computer, investigators said it appeared that Underwood had planned to eat the body. McClain County District Attorney, Tim Kuykendall, said he would file a 1st-degree murder charge against Underwood on Monday and seek the death penalty. In addition to finding the girl's bicycle dismantled and stowed under Underwood's bed, police found "a decorative dagger believed to be used in an attempt to cut off the victim's head, a hacksaw, duct tape, meat tenderizer, skewers, and a duffle bag." (source: Reuters)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA, GA., TENN., OKLA.
Rick Halperin Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:16:51 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
