[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Monday, March 19



COLORADO:

Judge to rule on error that left suspect off death penalty filing----
Robert Keith Ray is awaiting trial in slaying of couple in '05.


In Centennial, an Arapahoe County judge may decide as soon as this week
whether a clerical error should prevent prosecutors from seeking death for
an inmate accused of killing a witness. Attorneys for Robert Keith Ray
argued their case before District Judge Gerald J. Rafferty on Friday, at
times criticizing District Attorney Carol Chambers, chief prosecutor for
the 18th Judicial District, for naming the wrong man in a notice to seek
the death penalty.

"I can't believe that Carol Chambers would not put those notices right
before her eyes," said Ray's attorney, Hollis Whitson.

At issue is whether prosecutors failed to meet their filing deadline
because of the error.

Records show that prosecutors filed 2 notices on Jan. 26, both of which
listed Ray's alleged accomplice, Sir Mario Owens, as the defendant who
would be executed if found guilty of the homicides of Javad
Marshall-Fields and Vivian Wolfe.

The couple, who had recently gotten engaged, were gunned down June 20,
2005, a week before Marshall-Fields was to testify against Owens and Ray
in the shooting death of 20-year-old Gregory Vann.

Ray, 21, has since been convicted of accessory to murder in the Vann case.
Owens, 22, was convicted of 1st-degree murder.

Owens and Ray are now awaiting trial for the slayings of Marshall-Fields
and Wolfe, a case for which Chambers said she would seek the death
penalty.

But in Ray's case, his attorneys argue, the death penalty notice was not
filed in time. Prosecutors entered a corrected notice naming Ray on Feb.
8, but state law requires notification within 60 days of arraignment.

For both Ray and Owens, the deadline was Jan. 26.

"Wishing it away doesn't make it so," Whitson said about the mistake.

Prosecutor Emily Warren said the error was made because the notice was
"prepared through a cut and paste mechanism."

Still, she said, the original notice was filed on time, and she argued
that Ray's defense attorneys should have known prosecutors wanted to
execute their client because they cite his case number in their pleading.

"Everyone here is a reasonably intelligent person," she said. "We all know
what was meant by the notice."

(source: Rocky Mountain News)






NEBRASKA:

Repealing death penalty debated


Debate on whether to repeal the death penalty was dominated Monday by
state lawmakers who want to make Nebraska one of 12 states without the
ultimate penalty.

But there will be plenty of time for supporters of the death penalty to
pose their arguments.

Sen. Mike Flood of Norfolk, the speaker of the Legislature, said a vote
could come within the next couple days. The repeal bill (LB476) was
introduced by Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who has tried to rid the state
of the death penalty every legislative term for more than 30 years.

The closest Chambers has come was in 1979, when his bill passed on a 26-22
vote but was vetoed by then-Gov. Charley Thone.

Chambers called the death penalty grotesque and cruel for all involved,
while fellow opponents said it does not act as a deterrent to murderers.

On the Net: Nebraska Legislature: http://www.nebraskalegislature.gov

(source: Fremont Tribune)




LOUISIANA:

Convicted murderer attempting to speed up his execution date


Convicted murderer Gerald Bordelon has hired a high-profile attorney to
speed up his execution.

Last June, a Livingston Parish jury sentenced Bordelon to death by lethal
injection for strangling his 12-year-old stepdaughter to death.

Bordelon confessed to killing Courtney LeBlanc in late 2002.

Attorney Jill Craft is filing documents on Bordelon's behalf to drop all
appeals of that death sentence and set an immediate execution date.

Bordelon says if he were free, he would kill again.

(source: WAFB-TV, Baton Rouge)


DELAWARE:

Bonistall killer may face death-penalty decision today


A Delaware jury is set to begin deciding today if a paroled drug dealer
deserves to die for raping and strangling a college sophomore from White
Plains in her off-campus apartment.

If sentenced to capital punishment, ex-convict James Cooke Jr. would join
16 other convicted murderers awaiting execution in the First State. 14
killers have been put to death there since 1992.

Delaware law professor Jules Epstein said he wouldn't be surprised if
jurors recommended death by lethal injection as punishment for the grisly
slaying of 20-year-old Lindsey Bonistall in 2005. Her charred corpse was
found in the bathtub, covered with a guitar and other items that had been
set ablaze.

"Every murder is terrible, but this murder was conducted in a particularly
scary way," said Epstein, who teaches criminal law at the Widener Law
School in Wilmington, Del. "The factor that weighs on its surface, that
just frightens people terribly, is the nature of the crime."

Epstein, a former capital-case defense lawyer, also said Cooke's courtroom
behavior could hurt him if jurors viewed it as showing he had little
remorse. Cooke - whose lawyers had sought a verdict of guilty, but
mentally ill - was barred from the courtroom for much of his trial after a
series of outbursts.

Even his testimony on his own behalf Friday was cut short after he began
ranting.

"When you have a mentally ill defendant, the law is clear that mental
illness is a mitigating factor" that weighs against death, Epstein said.
"The practical problem is, to some jurors, mental illness is frightening.
In common parlance, the crazy killer is scarier than the common killer."

Under Delaware law, the jury that convicted Cooke must now recommend
whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.
That decision, which need not be unanimous, will go to presiding Superior
Court Judge Jerome Herlihy, who does not have to follow it in imposing
sentence.

Herlihy has already sent at least one killer to his death and also
sentenced seven of the inmates now on death row.

Executions in the state are on hold, however, because of a challenge from
death-row inmate Robert Jackson, who contends that the drugs Delaware uses
for lethal injections are unduly painful.

During emotional testimony in the penalty phase of Cooke's trial last
week, the jury forewoman broke down in tears as Bonistall's friends and
relatives related the agony caused by her killing.

Bonistall's mother, Kathleen Bonistall of White Plains, said she spent
Mother's Day 2005 burying the younger of her two daughters, a former
Catholic schoolgirl who was studying journalism at the University of
Delaware.

"I feel - sometimes I don't feel because the pain is too great," she
testified. "There's nothing I can do to fix me or anybody else."

Bonistall's father, Mark, wept on the stand as he told how his daughter's
death had shattered his faith in God.

Mark Bonistall also said he was paying his daughter's monthly cell phone
bill so her grandmother could call daily to hear the young woman's
cheerful voice on her voicemail greeting.

Defense witnesses during the penalty phase included a mental-health expert
who blamed Cooke's actions on a horrific childhood during which he was
beaten with electrical cords and hangers that left scars all over his
back.

Pastoral counselor James Walsh, who interviewed Cooke in jail, said those
experiences partly explained why Cooke became a loner who treated women as
"play things" and fathered 10 children with multiple women.

On Friday, 2 of the children, boys aged 8 and 10, told jurors they wanted
to be able to visit their father in prison. Cooke began his own testimony
by criticizing his guilty verdict; the judge later told the jury to
disregard his comments.

Delaware trails only Oklahoma in the nation in per-capita executions, said
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
in Washington. The group opposes capital punishment.

Across the nation, death sentences were down about 60 percent between 2000
and 2005, Dieter said. Preliminary figures from last year show another
drop, from 128 to 114.

Dieter said the decline was due to increase public unease with capital
punishment, in large part due to DNA testing that has exonerated prisoners
facing execution.

Nevertheless, Dieter - who was unfamiliar with Bonistall's slaying before
told about it by a reporter - said Cooke's situation "sounds bad."

"Given that the people serving on the jury are already people who agree
with the death penalty, it does seem like a case that could end up in
death," Dieter said.

(source: The Journal News)






TENNESSEE:

Holton case featured in documentary


A documentary film crew was here last week shooting scenes and
interviewing people about Daryl Holton. The subject of the program is a
law professor who videotaped Holton, who is on death row for killing his
three sons and their sister.

Professor Robert Blecker of the New York Law School in southern Manhattan
is one of a very few people who have visited Holton since he's been
incarcerated as a result of his conviction on four murder charges.

Blecker is a death penalty advocate.

"It's unusual to find an academic who is pro-death penalty," Ted
Schillinger, the writer and director of the documentary, says of Blecker.
"He's a compelling figure; deeply patriotic and an American Revolution
history buff."

Bedford County Circuit Court Clerk Thomas Smith, Shelbyville Police
Detective Lt. Pat Mathis, defense attorney John Appman, former District
Attorney Mike McCown and retired Times-Gazette reporter Glenn "Bo" Melson
were interviewed and filmed for the documentary that currently has only a
working title, "The Robert Blecker Story."

Holton was convicted by a Bedford County jury 8 years ago for shooting the
children, ages 4, 6, 10 and 12, in their backs. He surrendered to police
saying he felt they were better off dead than living with his ex-wife. He
did so during visitation in November 1997.

"The professor has met with Holton on 3 occasions and had videotaped those
meetings," Schillinger said Thursday. "They'll be excerpted in the film."

The documentary on Blecker "falls into the same category" as former Vice
President Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Schillinger said.
However, the style of the program will be more like Errol Morris' film
"Fog of War" about Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the war in
Vietnam.

As a result, there will be no narrator telling Blecker's story,
Schillinger said.

Therefore, he explained, "It was absolutely necessary for us to come to
Shelbyville."

The writer director expressed a sense of restraint about approaching area
residents who might best tell the story.

"This crime happened here," he said. "It affected the people who live here
and we couldn't make the film without including the voices of the people
who struggled with this case in 1997-99."

When interviewed for the film, Smith spoke of the hard evidence in the
case. He's the custodian of those objects: the rifle and a space heater.
The files were sent to Nashville for the appeals.

Before he was interviewed for the documentary, Melson recalled a
"ridiculous" jury selection and of Holton being "a man of conflicts."

McCown has told the Times-Gazette that the case with the four little
children was the "most emotional" case he's ever had, and he didn't
believe Holton would be executed last September. Since then, it would
appear that McCown's awareness of the case and the judicial process
afforded him that insight. There have been other delays in Holton's
execution.

As for Holton's legal situation, its earliest record includes a jury
selection influenced by the defendant more than one might imagine, even if
they are familiar with the process.

That's according to a couple of local lawyers and Melson who said "it made
no difference" what Holton's defense team did.

"They'd have to do it Daryl's way," Melson said of the defense strategy
which, as described by others, might be perceived as motivated by a death
wish.

A jury selection expert was brought to the Bedford County Courthouse for
Holton's trial and Melson asks, "Do you think a jury selection expert
would let the city judge and county attorney on the jury?"

The juror still holding those two government titles is John T. Bobo.

A direct explanation for Holton's execution-styled shooting of the 4
children might be that it was revenge against his ex-wife. But the circuit
court clerk recalls one of Appman's arguments as he defended Holton.

It's related to the propane heater that Smith has in his evidence storage
room.

Holton had been living in an auto repair shop.

"Appman was saying that ... was the only thing for heat, and the fumes did
something to his thinking," Smith said. "Who would have thought it? He was
ingenious."

Smith also has the Russian-made assault rifle that Holton used to kill the
children, and it may be seen in the documentary from Capital Filmworks
Inc. in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The film is to be completed in the "early fall, at which point we'll take
it to film festivals and then have a theatrical distribution," Schillinger
said.

The New York Law School web site says Blecker has railed against the
prevailing academic assertions about capital punishment. While an
undergraduate at Tufts in the late 1960s, Blecker vehemently protested
against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, the school's web site notes.

At Harvard Law School, Blecker was one of a few who publicly defended the
death penalty. During a 13-year quest, he's interviewed a variety of
convicted killers, yet he believes 80 % of the people on death row don't
belong there and that the deck is stacked against poor people, according
to the web site.

(source: Shellbyville Times-Gazette)




OHIO----impending execution

Court rules to stop Ohio execution; state appeals


The day before an execution, a federal appeals court ruled Monday to block
that state from putting to death a man who killed a woman, cut her up and
scattered her remains across Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Ohio prison workers still prepared for the execution of Kenneth Biros, 48,
because the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a ruling to
allow the lethal injection.

Biros was moved Monday to Ohio's death house at the Southern Ohio
Correctional Facility in Lucasville, and prison workers will be ready to
carry out the execution as scheduled Tuesday morning unless the Supreme
Court stops it, prisons spokeswoman Andrea Dean said.

A 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Cincinnati refused the
state's request to lift a lower court's order against the execution,
saying Biros should be able to continue appealing a lawsuit with other
inmates arguing that Ohio's method of lethal injection is cruel and
unusual punishment.

Biros' lawyer, Timothy Sweeney, said if the U.S. Supreme Court allows the
execution, Biros still has an appeal before the 6th Circuit that claims he
was not convicted of an offense that merits the death penalty.

Other executions have been delayed in the past year because of the lethal
injection lawsuit. However, former cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren was
executed Oct. 24 despite his appeal.

The execution would be the first under Gov. Ted Strickland, who denied
clemency on Friday.

Biros acknowledged he killed Tami Engstrom, 22, but said it was done
during a drunken rage.

They met after work in 1991 at a tavern in Masury in northeast Ohio.
Police believed she fled his advances, perhaps ran from his car and fell
or was struck or was strangled when Biros tried to quiet her.

A search based on Biros' information led to body parts that had been
buried, and some dug up and reburied, near Masury and in adjacent areas of
Venango and Butler counties in northwest Pennsylvania.

Biros was to receive his special dinner later in the day at the prison,
Dean said.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Biros could be 1st executed under Strickland


A "crybaby killer" whose chance meeting with a young mother at a bar led
to a night of horror faces execution for killing her, dismembering her
body and dumping the parts in 2 states.

By most accounts, Ken Biros, now 48, was a hardworking guy with just a
drunken-driving and theft record when he met Tami Engstrom, 22, after work
on the night of Feb. 7, 1991, in a tavern here on a northeast Ohio
hillside overlooking the abandoned steel mills of Sharon, Pa.

Biros is to be transferred by this afternoon from death row in Youngstown
to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, where executions
are carried out, prisons spokeswoman Andrea Dean said Sunday.

A request to delay the execution, scheduled for Tuesday, is before the 6th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Similar appeals based on the
claim that Ohios method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual
punishment have resulted in conflicting court rulings in the past year.
Former cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren was executed Oct. 24 despite his
appeal, others were delayed.

Family members recall Engstrom as a beautiful wife and proud mother of a 1
1/2-year-old son, with a zest for life, outgoing and ready to help people.

Their lives crossed paths in a late-night meeting when Engstrom went to
the Nickelodeon Lounge where her uncle worked. After drinking, she
apparently passed out, awoke and planned to drive home when Biros, an
acquaintance of the uncle, offered to give her a ride.

The 2 left together and she was never seen again.

Rocky Fonce, a Brookfield Township police detective working his 1st case,
knew Biros as a "perfectly normal" guy from the area but noticed Biros
quickly got nervous while being questioned about the missing woman.

"All of a sudden, I'm watching his swallowing, I'm watching his
respiration. Kenny's getting scared. I'm starting to get bad feelings,
said Fonce, who had held out hope that Biros and Engstrom had parted ways
and Engstrom was trying to find her way home.

Fonce got Biros to admit something bad had happened but, fearing legal
problems with any confession, left him to consult privately with an
attorney who emerged ashen-faced.

At that point, "I'm still thinking an accidental death," Fonce said. The
attorney said Biros was willing to take police to the "locations" where
Engstrom's body would be found.

At that moment, the horror dawned on Fonce. "I said, 'He cut her up.' This
was no accident. I said, 'This was a mutilation. This goofball murdered
this girl and he cut her up.'"

The search based on Biros information led to body parts that had been
buried, and some dug up and reburied, near Masury and in adjacent areas of
Venango and Butler counties in northwest Pennsylvania.

Her head, right breast and right leg had been severed, intestines were
found in a swampy area in Ohio, a leg was broken over a railroad track,
the torso was found in a rural area of Pennsylvania and part of a liver
was found in Biros' car.

The victims frantic family, already dreading that she was dead, had to
wait nearly a day for confirmation of the crime based on the search for
body parts. Some organs were never found.

"The nightmare just escalated and escalated and escalated, the victims
sister, Debi Heiss, 41, of nearby Hubbard, told The Associated Press after
a teary-eyed courthouse reunion with Fonce, their first meeting since the
Biros trial.

"Just when we all thought this cant get worse " Fonce said.

"  It got worse every day, said Heiss, finishing the thought.

Biros, dubbed the crybaby killer after he wept repeatedly at his trial,
said the violence reflected a drunken fit. Police theorized that Engstrom
fled Biros advances, ran from the car and fell or was struck, or perhaps
she was strangled when Biros tried to quiet her.

Biros said the dismemberment, which a trial witness said was done with
surgical precision, resulted from a blind rage. The jury convicted him of
aggravated murder, felonious sexual penetration, attempted rape and
aggravated robbery.

His attorneys argued that Biros didn't deserve to be executed and said
life in prison was more appropriate. His years in prison have been marked
by good behavior, even teaching fellow inmates to read, Timothy Sweeney
said in an interview in his Cleveland law office.

"Ken Biros committed a terrible crime and he needs to be punished for his
crime," Sweeney said. "He's a quiet man. He's a shy person. Hes not a
troublemaker by any stretch. Hes been a very good, decent prisoner."

Sweeney and fellow defense attorney John Parker said in an appeal for
clemency that Biros overcame a childhood with an abusive father, worked
for a while in the Alaska fishing industry, finished a 13-year effort by
earning a geology degree from Youngstown State University and had a job in
the asphalt industry.

"He did a terrible thing in February 1991 and would love to take that
back," Sweeney said. "He knows he needs to be punished for that. He's
accepted his punishment. He's accepted his responsibility for the murder
of this beautiful young woman."

On Friday, Gov. Ted Strickland denied the clemency request. Biros would be
the first inmate executed under his administration.

Sweeney, who has known Biros for more than 6 years, frowned at the mention
of the "crybaby" reputation and said Biros tears showed he was sorry for
the crime.

"I'm surprised by that kind of mocking him," Sweeney said. "I think his
tears were sincere tears of sorrow and regret and pain and recognition of
what he has done."

The victim's family scoffs, sometimes in anger and sometimes in
frustration, at Biros, his poetry, his prison tutoring and his reputation
for good behavior behind bars, but mostly for the years they have waited
to watch him die.

"I just don't want any more delays," Heiss said. "I want him to take his
last breath. I want him off the face of the earth so we can have some
closure, especially for my poor mother."

Her brother, Tom Heiss, 39, who was too upset to speak to the parole board
against clemency, said the case has ruined hundreds of lives, including
family members, friends, neighbors and investigators haunted by the image
of a young woman cut to pieces.

At the mention of a fatal heart attack suffered 1 1/2 years ago by the
victim's widower, Tom Heiss simply adds, "Broken heart."

(source: The Chonricle-Telegram)

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

Appeals court rules to block Biros execution


In Cincinnati, a federal appeals court has ruled that tomorrow's scheduled
execution of convicted killer Kenneth Biros should be stopped.

A panel of the court in Cincinnati says an injunction against the
execution should remain in place while appeals continue on a lawsuit
claiming Ohio's method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual
punishment.

A spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann says the state has
appealed today's ruling to the U-S Supreme Court.

Biros was convicted of killing a young mother in northeast Ohio in 1991
and cutting up her body.

(source: Associated Press)