[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARIZ., CONN., WASH. DC, USA

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 4


ARIZONA:

Death Penalty Sought for Pair


Prosecutors said Tuesday that they will seek the death penalty for 2 men
accused of terrorizing the Phoenix area in a series of random shootings.

Samuel John Dieteman, 30, and Dale S. Hausner, 33, are charged with
1st-degree murder and attempted murder for allegedly killing 2 people and
wounding 14 others in a string of shootings since May. They have pleaded
not guilty.

"These men stand accused of a spree of coldblooded murder and random
violence unprecedented in our community," Maricopa County Atty. Andrew
Thomas said in a statement.

Police also are trying to determine whether they are linked to 21 other
shootings that date to May 2005.

In all, the shootings grouped in the Serial Shooter investigation left
seven people dead and 17 wounded.

Dieteman's attorney declined to comment Tuesday, and Hausner's attorney
wasn't immediately available for comment.

(source: Associated Press)






CONNECTICUT:

Jury to decide on death penalty


In Hartford, a Superior Court jury was prepared to begin deliberations
that could send a convicted killer to Connecticut's death row.

Closing arguments were held Tuesday in the penalty trial of Jessie
Campbell, 4 weeks after evidence was first presented in the case.

In 2004, a jury convicted Campbell, now 27, of shooting and killing
20-year-old La-Taysha Logan, his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his
son, as they were talking outside a house on Sargeant Street.

The jury also convicted him of shooting 2 other women who were sitting on
the front stoop, 18-year-old Desiree Privette, who was killed, and Carolyn
Privette, who survived after being shot twice.

However, that jury could not reach a unanimous decision on whether
Campbell should be executed for the crimes, prompting a 2nd penalty
hearing, with a new panel of jurors, which began last month.

The jury is to decide if Campbell should be sent to prison for the rest of
his life without possibility of parole of if he should be put on death
row.

(source: Boston Globe)






WASHINGTON, DC----re: federal death penalty

Civic activist faces federal death-penalty trial in D.C.


Antwuan Ball is caught between 2 worlds.

One has him being praised by social workers for his civic activism; the
other has him facing a rare death-penalty prosecution in the District on
murder and racketeering charges.

Mr. Ball is accused of leading a violent street gang that sold hundreds of
kilograms of crack cocaine in Southeast for more than a decade.

But he also has worked as a youth counselor, has helped oversee security
at a troubled housing development and is even quoted in a national social
services newsletter.

What's more, a former White House official said she held him in such high
regard as a civic activist that she regularly sought out his views.

Edgar S. Cahn, a professor at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the
University of the District of Columbia, said, "I just don't recognize the
Antwuan Ball in the indictment."

Mr. Cahn met Mr. Ball in 2001 while doing volunteer work at the Capital
Area Food Bank and said Mr. Ball delivered food to the elderly and
renovated a computer lab for local children.

"I came to know him well enough, and I just felt this was a remarkably
gutsy human being," Mr. Cahn said.

Last month, the U.S. attorney's office filed a notice of intent to seek
the death penalty for Mr. Ball and David Wilson, accused of being leaders
of the Congress Park Crew -- a gang that resorted to assault and homicide
to protect its drug trade in Southeast.

Only 2 death-penalty cases have proceeded to trial in the District since
the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Capital punishment is banned in
the District, except in federal crimes.

Michael Kimsey, executive director of the Kimsey Foundation, a nonprofit
social services group based in the District, said he met Mr. Ball five
years ago and worked with him on ventures in Southeast.

He helped Mr. Ball with startup plans for a consulting business called
MANN Inc., an acronym for Making a Neighborhood Network, and a nonprofit
called Changing Neighborhoods into Communities, he said.

"We saw it as taking a guy who had some troubles in the past who obviously
was intelligent and who wanted to do something positive for the
community," Mr. Kimsey said. "We were trying to help him think of his
future."

Janie L. Jeffers met Mr. Ball when she was the executive deputy director
of the federal D.C. Interagency Task Force in the Clinton administration
in the late 1990s.

Miss Jeffers, now a professor at Howard University, said Mr. Ball attended
monthly meetings at the White House conference center to discuss
initiatives to improve Southeast neighborhoods.

"I'm still waiting to see the proof," she said of the charges against Mr.
Ball. "They want to make him out to be this charismatic 'Scarface' type of
figure, saying all he did was all an act. But I saw no evidence of that."

Mr. Cahn and Miss Jeffers said they met Mr. Ball through Harv Oostdyk, who
was involved with a Texas-based nonprofit called the Step Foundation.

Mr. Oostdyk could not be reached for comment.

A 2002 article in the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy
newsletter profiled Mr. Oostdyk's work in the Congress Park Public Housing
Complex in Southeast and said he spent 40 years building up troubled
neighborhoods in Harlem and Dallas. The roundtable is a nonpartisan public
policy group based in New York that studies government partnerships with
faith-based groups.

"Harv gave us a way out," Mr. Ball is quoted as saying in the article.
"But I don't need him to open up any more doors. He gave me the know-how I
needed to make it on my own. I have a family. I have a bank account."

The Step Foundation was hired to provide security services in the Congress
Park complex. Organizers hired local residents for security details,
including Mr. Ball, Mr. Wilson and several other gang members, prosecutors
said.

The foundation has since merged with another ministry based in Dallas,
said Lalla Shackelford, a former executive director who said she did not
know Mr. Ball.

Miss Shackelford said the foundation's general mission was to improve
troubled communities by giving jobs to ex-convicts attempting to turn
around their lives.

A spokesman for Edgewood Management Corp., which has run the Congress Park
complex for much of the past decade, said Mr. Ball attended several
community gatherings that involved the Step Foundation.

Federal prosecutors said Mr. Ball used his security position at the
foundation to strengthen the Congress Park Crew's hold on the drug trade.

"Mr. Ball and his co-conspirators used that organization ... took over
security of that complex in order to keep rival drug dealers from being
able to distribute in Congress Park," Assistant U.S. Attorney M. Jeffrey
Beatrice told a judge at Mr. Ball's bail hearing last year. "So they
turned what may have been a well-intentioned organization into a means to
further a conspiracy."

A superseding indictment against Mr. Ball and more than a dozen other
reputed Congress Park Crew members filed in May states that Mr. Ball
"personally committed murders and assaults to further the purposes of the
organization."

Mr. Ball fatally shot Troy Lewis on Jan. 23, 1996, prosecutors said. Mr.
Ball and Mr. Wilson also are accused of conspiring to kill members of a
rival gang, the 10th Place/Trenton Place Crew.

In addition, prosecutors said, Mr. Ball used "intimidation and physical
force" to keep witnesses to slayings silent.

Mr. Ball got his start in drug dealing in the 1980s as a lieutenant in the
1-5 Mob, authorities said.

His mother, Violet, was a cooperating witness in the prosecution of the
1-5 Mob, whose leader, Tommy Edelin, received life in prison without
parole, though prosecutors had sought the death penalty.

Mr. Kimsey said Mr. Ball never talked in depth about his past.

"We never talked specifically about it," he said. "He didn't talk about
anything illegal, but he pretty much admitted he had a troubled past."

(source: The Washington Times)






USA:

Supreme Court term begins with arguments in death penalty case


Justices heard arguments yesterday in a California death penalty case that
could further demonstrate an increasingly hardened split on the court over
executions.

A decision whether to reinstate a death sentence for Fernando Belmontes in
a 25-year-old California murder could affect a handful of other cases.

Belmontes beat 19-year-old Steacy McConnell to death with a dumbbell bar
in the burglary of her Victor, Calif., home. He was convicted of the crime
and sentenced to death, a decision upheld by state courts and a federal
judge.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, however, has twice thrown out the
death sentence, the second time after the Supreme Court told it to
reconsider Belmontes' sentence under a recent decision that restored the
death penalty in another California murder case.

The appeals court said the trial judge misled jurors about whether they
could consider the prospect that Belmontes could live a productive life
behind bars based on his good behavior during an earlier commitment to a
California correctional facility for youth.

One change that took effect yesterday was the posting of transcripts of
the oral arguments on the Supreme Court's Web site a few hours after they
took place.

The California death penalty case is Ayers v. Belmontes, 05-493.

(source: SouthCoast Today)