Oct. 11 ARKANSAS----impending execution State Calls Inmate's Appeal of Execution 'Abusive' Lawyers for the state argue that a U.S. Supreme Court review on whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment should not stop the scheduled execution of an Arkansas death-row inmate next week. Death-row inmate Jack Harold Jones, Jr. appealed last month to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis to stop next Tuesday's execution. But the state attorney general's office says Jones waited too late to make a filing. Assistant attorney general Joseph Cordi Junior accused Jones of "abusive, delaying litigation tactics." In a response, Lawyers for Jones argue that the issue could not be litigated before the case in Kentucky, which challenges how lethal injection executions are conducted. (source: Associated Press) NEVADA: ACLU-Nevada Criticizes Plan To Move Ahead With Monday Execution Nevada prison authorities are "wrongheaded" in scheduling an execution by lethal injection Monday while the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether the injections are constitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada says. The high court decided Sept. 25 to consider whether the injections amount to cruel and unusual punishment, but prison officials have said there's no reason to delay William Castillo's execution based on the high court's move because Castillo wants to die. Castillo, 34, who got a death sentence for beating a retired Las Vegas teacher to death with a tire iron, has refused to file available appeals that would halt his scheduled execution at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. "Going ahead with executions in Nevada is wrongheaded and fundamentally at odds with the rest of the country, which is taking very seriously the claims that lethal injection is a cruel and unusual form of punishment," Lee Rowland, northern Nevada ACLU coordinator, said Tuesday. The Supreme Court's review involves two death row inmates in Kentucky. Rowland said many other states have stayed their executions pending the court's final decision "and of course we are disappointed that Nevada has not chosen to do the same." Both the ACLU and the federal public defender's office are precluded from going to court on Castillo's behalf without his consent absent a finding that he's incompetent. However, Assistant Federal Defender Michael Pescetta said Tuesday his office is ready to act immediately if Castillo decides to appeal. "All he has to do is say anything and it's off," Pescetta said. Castillo met last week with a federal defender and repeated earlier statements that he wouldn't appeal. Castillo was sentenced to die for the 1995 killing of Isabelle Berndt, 86, after working on a roofing job at her home and finding a hidden house key. He and a woman companion returned, burglarized the home and murdered Berndt. Castillo set the home on fire to destroy evidence, but he later admitted the murder to a co-worker and confessed to police. His companion in the burglary and murder was Michelle Platou, now serving a life term with the possibility of parole for 1st-degree murder. If he's executed, Castillo will be the 13th man to get the death sentence in Nevada since the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for capital punishment to resume in 1976. All but one of the previous 12, Richard Moran, had refused to file appeals that could have stopped their executions. Moran, executed in 1996 for 2 killings in a Las Vegas bar while on a drug and alcohol binge, didn't oppose legal efforts to keep him alive - but said he was ready to die. The last man to be executed in the state was Daryl Linnie Mack, who received a lethal injection in April 2006. Mack was convicted of the rape and murder of a Reno woman. (source: KOLO News) CONNECTICUT: Jury begins deliberations in Peeler death penalty case A jury in Bridgeport Superior Court has begun deliberating whether a former drug dealer should be executed for ordering the killings of a woman and her 8-year-old son in 1999. Russell Peeler Junior was convicted in 2000 of ordering his younger brother to kill Karen Clarke and her son, Leroy "B.J." Brown Junior, in their Bridgeport duplex. The boy was expected to be the key witness against Peeler in the fatal shooting of Clarke's boyfriend. The 6 men and 6 women on the jury deliberated for about an hour on Wednesday and were to continue talks on Thursday. Peeler's brother, Adrian, was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, despite being the accused shooter. Adrian Peeler was sentenced to 20 years in prison. (source: Newsday) USA: Keeping error away from death penalty Though 117 nations have done away with the death penalty, the United States continues to send prisoners convicted of the most serious crimes to the gallows. There was a brief period in the 1970s when a series of Supreme Court decisions essentially did away with capital punishment nationwide on constitutional grounds. But the individual states rushed to rewrite their death penalty statutes and executions resumed. A fairly strong constituency continues to press for an end to capital punishment inside the U.S., but public sentiment remains narrowly in favor of executions. Because the death penalty allows no room for error, the state has a duty to make sure that innocent people are not executed. This is not as simple as it sounds. Former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois declared a moratorium on executions in the year 2000 following the widely publicized work of Northwestern Universitys Center on Wrongful Convictions. >From 1977, when Illinois capital punishment law was rewritten to comply with Supreme Court precedent, to 2000, the state had executed 12 prisoners. In the same period, 13 death row inmates were exonerated. The odds clearly need to be higher than 50-50 that a convicted felon is deserving of execution. So we are interested to hear that the American Bar Associations Death Penalty Moratorium Project studied Pennsylvanias administration of the death penalty and found that the issues here are similar to those in Illinois, from disparities based on the race of defendants to simple inequality in sentencing among similar cases. There havent been as many opportunities for error in Pennsylvania, however, when you consider there have been only 3 executions here since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. The Death Penalty Information Center, however, notes that 6 inmates on Pennsylvanias death row have been set free since 1986. Though the ABA previously called for a nationwide death penalty moratorium in 1997, its current study of Pennsylvanias administration of justice does not recommend one. The report emphasizes fairness issues, such as better jury instructions, tougher qualifications for attorneys arguing death penalty cases and improved monitoring of capital case procedures. We doubt there is strong public demand in Pennsylvania for a death penalty moratorium, let alone an outright ban. But there is no question that the process by which people are convicted and sent to death row must be as fair as possible and the ABAs study shows that Pennsylvanias process falls well short of any acceptable standard. (source: Editorial, Carlisle Sentinel) ************************* Death penalty on hold So we have a national moratorium of sorts. An unofficial stay of execution. All quiet in the death chambers. In the days since the Supreme Court decided to take on another death penalty case, 11 states - including Texas, the capital of capital punishment - have suspended executions. In two more states, inmates slated for death next week may be granted a reprieve. But there isn't much hoopla among death penalty opponents or much anger among proponents. The case that will be heard this session isn't about the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty itself. It's about the way execution is executed. The case brought by 2 death row inmates in Kentucky doesn't ask whether the death penalty constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," but only whether lethal injection is cruel and unusual. The justices will be asked to rule on the method, not on the madness. Is there something just a little chilling in this? A searing moral debate reduced to an argument about the details of injections, syringes, dosages, pain and the competence of executioners? When the Eighth Amendment was written, the Founders looked to Europe for examples of "cruel and unusual punishment," such as drawing and quartering. For more than a century, most executions in America were by noose or firing squad. But by 1890, we were enthralled by technology and queasy about public executions. The electric chair and the gas chamber became the "advanced" tools of the trade. Each step toward a more humane standard of state-inflicted death seems to have been followed by horror stories. By the late 1970s, the search for better-dying-through-chemistry led states to adopt the needle as the gold standard. Forgive me for being graphic, but graphic is the issue. Lethal injection is a cocktail of three drugs. The 1st is to put the prisoner to sleep. The 2nd is to paralyze him. The 3rd to stop his heart. That neat, medicinal description doesn't say what happens when the procedure is botched. If the first dose doesn't work, is administered improperly or wears off, the inmate dies in a pain he is paralyzed to express. There's no doubt that executions have been botched. There was the dyslexic doctor from Missouri who admitted that he didn't always calculate the dosages correctly. There was the Lancet study showing that almost half of the inmates were conscious when they received the heart-stopping drug. Then there was the inmate in California, who watched the executioners repeatedly poke him with needles and asked, "You guys doing that right?" Once again, what looks antiseptic is not. We have seen another failed attempt to find the execution that fits what the court has defined as our "evolving standard of decency." A case about competence may drive another hole in the notion of a death penalty with decency. Americans overwhelmingly support capital punishment, though not by the margins of the past. When asked to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, they are evenly divided. Twelve states had already suspended death sentences before this case began and last year there were only 53 executions among some 3,300 inmates on death row. We have gradually become more wary of convicted criminals found innocent and of racial bias in sentencing. Now lethal injection is also being de-sanitized. Ironically, we know how to end life painlessly. There are Web sites from here to Holland with information on "death with dignity" and instructions that involve sleeping pills and plastic bags. Surely there are better "cocktails" than the one on trial. The argument about the ways and means of execution reflects our great ambivalence between the desire for punishment and the revulsion from inflicting cruelty, pain, death. I have long shared that ambivalence. But as the Supreme Court takes up this issue again, I remember what Justice Harry Blackmun said after a 20-year struggle about just ways to administer the death penalty: "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death." We are still tinkering. This time, we're tinkering with the dosage and the training. Tinkering with competence and mistakes. We are tinkering, tinkering, tinkering to avoid the possibility that we can't have our death penalty and our humanity too. (source: The Cincinnati Enquirer) ******************************** Brother of Unabomber tells ISU students that death penalty is unfair and cruel----David Kaczynski took suspicions about his brother to FBI in 1995 The man who informed police in 1995 that his brother might be the Unabomber told students and others at Indiana State University that Theodore Kaczynski, who eventually admitted to being the Unabomber, was never violent as a kid. "I had never seen him violent," David Kaczynski told a gathering of around 60 students, faculty and others at ISU on Wednesday afternoon. The Kaczynski family did have concerns about Ted Kaczynskis mental condition, however, David Kaczynski said. But, he said, "We always had a good relationship." David Kaczynski and his wife Linda took their suspicions about Ted Kaczynski to the FBI in 1995, shortly after the Unabomber's anti-technology "manifesto" was published in the Washington Post. Similarities between what was written in the manifesto and other writings by Ted Kaczynski led first Linda and then David Kaczynski to suspect Ted Kaczynski might be the Unabomber. "It took about a month to get [the FBI's] attention," David Kaczynski said. At first, some FBI agents thought Ted Kaczynski fit the psychological profile of the Unabomber; however, other agents believed some physical evidence did not make a strong enough case. Later in 1995, the FBI told David Kaczynski his brother was at the top of their list of suspects in the 17-year-old Unabomber investigation. The 1st incident attributed to the Unabomber was in 1978 at Northwestern University, in which a campus policeman suffered injuries to his hand. David Kaczynski's wife Linda was the first to suspect a connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber, David Kaczynski said. "[Linda Kaczynski] is the unsung hero here," he said. Only after about 3 weeks of studying the Unabombers manifesto did David Kaczynski come to believe there was a "50/50 chance" Ted Kaczynski was behind the bombings, he said. Reading parts of the manifesto, David Kaczynski said, "it was almost like I could hear my brother's voice in it." The Unabomber attacks, which consisted of mailing explosives to victims, occurred between 1978 and 1995. The bombings resulted in 3 deaths and more than a 20 injuries, some of which were serious. The name "Unabomber" came about because the bomber's earliest victims were at Universities and airlines, David Kaczynski said. When FBI agents arrested Ted Kaczynski at his isolated cabin in Montana, they found "a mountain of evidence," David Kaczynski said, including a bomb wrapped in a package that appeared to be ready for shipping. David Kaczynski, 58, is now executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty and travels the country speaking out against the death penalty, which he calls unfair and cruel. Federal prosecutors were seeking the death penalty against Ted Kaczynski, but, after a plea bargain, he was sentenced to life in prison. Ted Kaczynski, 65, is serving his prison term at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. "There are powerful arguments against the death penalty," David Kaczynski told the gathering at ISU. The death penalty is applied unequally for racial and economic grounds, sometimes is imposed on innocent people and costs taxpayers several times more than imprisoning someone for life, he said. The death penalty provides an "illusion of justice," David Kaczynski said. "We have a system that's really broken," he said. David Kaczynski told his audience at Holmstedt Hall that he and his wife were faced with a dilemma when they began to suspect Ted Kaczynski might be the Unabomber. If they did not go to police and Kaczynski turned out to be the Unabomber, another innocent person might be killed. If they did go to the police, Ted Kaczynski might be put to death for murder, he said. "Anything we did could lead to somebody's death," David Kaczynski said. Soon, the fear that another innocent person might be killed tipped the balance in favor of going to the FBI, David Kaczynski said. "For us, that was just a thought that was too daunting," he said. After his brothers arrest, the news media converged on David Kaczynski, his wife and mother. The family was angry because FBI agents had assured them they would be anonymous informants. Later, after being confronted by David Kaczynski, FBI agents apologized, saying there had been a leak to the news media. Ted Kaczynski was brilliant, his brother said. Ted Kaczynskis IQ was once measured at 165, he attended Harvard at age 16 and would eventually become an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. But there were troubling signs as well, David Kaczynski said. David Kaczynski remembers his brother often removed himself from others when upset, stayed alone in his room for long periods of time, had no known friends when in college and eventually showed signs of paranoia, such as when he rejected David's invitation to be best man at his wedding and warned David that his bride-to-be was a threat, despite having never met her. "Ted was living in complete isolation," David Kaczynski said. David Kaczynski is working on a joint book effort with one of the seriously injured survivors of the Unabombers attacks, Gary Wright. Wright was a computer store employee when he was injured in an attack attributed to the Unabomber. (source: Tribune Star) PENNSYLVANIA: Report Calls for PA Death Penalty Reform A report sharply critical of Pennsylvania's death penalty system calls for serious reforms. An American Bar Association team spent 2 1/2 years studying capital murder cases in Pennsylvania. WFMZ's Mike Lowe reports. (Summary of ABA Report ) ( ABA's Death Penalty Problems & Recommendations ) The American Bar Association has set forth 93 protocols to ensure capital punishment is applied fairly ... The report says Pennsylvania only complies with 7 of them. Anne Bowen Poulin: "If you're going to have the death penalty, you have to make sure the process is as good as it can be. There's no way you can say that Pennsylvania's process is as good as it can be." Villanova University law professor Anne Bowen Poulin headed the 5-member team that studied capital punishment in the state. The group says the following recommendations would help ensure fairness: - Videotape all police interrogations - Preserve biological evidence until the defendant is released or executed. - Create a statewide database that keeps track of all death penalty cases - Provide better training for defense attorneys - and -- the report says -- the state should Reform post- conviction proceedings -- allowing more leeway for appeals. "There should be minimum practice standards." Bruce Castor is the president of the Pennsylvania District Attorney's association. His group is writing an objection to the ABA Report. "There's been no one executed in 45 years. I agree the system is broken, but not in the way the ABA says it is. The system is broken because victims of crime aren't seeing justice done." Castor says he's proud of his county's record ... but the report criticized the state system because funding for capital defense attorneys is not uniform. Castor: "We have 67 counties and 67 DA's do it 67 ways." "Some counties pay a defense attorney in a capital case so little, it doesn't provide appropriate representation." That and evidence of racial bias and overall inconsistency led Pennsylvania state senator Jim Ferlo to draft a bill that would implement a two year moratorium on executions. "I think that's crazy. What we should do is judge each on a case by case basis." "The tragedy is victims of crimes and their families don't get justice." "Just because the victims family wants to see execution in a cae, doesn't necessarily mean its the right case for execution." The debate is happening against the backdrop of a pending local execution. Raymond Solano -- convicted of a 2001 murder is set to be executed tomorrow. (source: WFMZ TV News)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----ARK., NEV., CONN., USA, PENN.
Rick Halperin Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:22:26 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
