[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----S.C., GA., OHIO, VA.

[Rick Halperin]

July 16



SOUTH CAROLINA:

Fire sprinklers focus of federal death-penalty trial


A federal death penalty trial today in Greenville is again focusing
attention on fire sprinkler safety. Before re-opening as a Comfort Inn in
October 2003, the then-15-year-old hotel off Interstate 85 in Greenville
underwent a $600,000 face-lift that included new televisions, carpeting
and signs.

The hotel's owners left fire sprinklers off their list of improvements.

That decision would prove fatal fewer than nearly 4 months later,
authorities and experts say.

Six guests, including a 15-month-old boy, died Jan. 25, 2004, in an early
morning blaze that broke out on the third floor of the five-story hotel on
Congaree Road.

It was the state's worst fire fatality at a hotel in recent memory.

Eric Preston Hans, 37, of Taylors, goes on trial this week in federal
court in Greenville on a charge of deliberately setting a fire resulting
in death.

If convicted, Hans, who has pleaded not guilty, could face the death
penalty.

The trial comes on the heels of a June 18 furniture store blaze that
killed nine Charleston firefighters -- the worst firefighter tragedy in
the U.S. United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New
York City.

The Sofa Super Store, like the Comfort Inn, didn't have fire sprinklers at
the time of the blaze, though the hotel has since installed them. Neither
business was required to have sprinklers under existing state law because
they were "grandfathered in."

Experts retained by plaintiffs in lawsuits stemming from the Comfort Inn
fire contend that sprinklers could have prevented deaths and injuries in
that blaze.

"All multistoried hotels and motels should be equipped with automatic
sprinklers regardless of whether or not a local law, code or ordinance
requires them," former S.C. Fire Marshal Robert Polk wrote in a 2005 court
report.

"It is too well known that the failure to have such automatic sprinklers
in places creates unreasonable dangers for guests."

On average, there are about 4,600 hotel/motel fires in the U.S. every year
-- about 15 percent of which are arsons, Polk's report stated. Citing
other research by the National Fire Protection Association, the report
said that by the late 1990s, an estimated 90 percent of high-rise hotels
and motels nationwide had sprinklers.

In South Carolina, however, only a third of 1,067 hotels and motels have
sprinklers and meet the standard the federal government uses for its
employees who travel, according to an analysis by The State newspaper
published last month.

Tom Sponseller, president of the Hospitality Association of South
Carolina, which represents more than 13,000 food service and lodging
businesses, said last week his organization is "very encouraged by
discussions" in cities such as Columbia and Charleston about eliminating
or reducing fire sprinkler impact or tap fees that can cost businesses
tens of thousands of dollars.

Lowering those fees, combined with a proposed state law by Sen. David
Thomas, R-Greenville, that would provide tax credits to businesses that
install fire sprinklers, would result in a "lot more commercial businesses
adding more sprinklers," Sponseller said.

Thomas in 2004 unsuccessfully pushed for a law requiring sprinklers in all
hotels and motels in South Carolina. The bill was fiercely opposed by
Charleston hotel operators, who claimed it was too expensive and too
difficult to install sprinklers in many of their historic buildings.

Court battles

There are about 2,000 Comfort Inn hotels worldwide, though officials with
Maryland-based Choice Hotels International, which sells Comfort Inn
franchises, couldn't say last week how many of them have sprinklers.

"We're always trying to go to 100 % compliance," said corporate
spokeswoman Heather Soule.

The company requires smoke and fire detectors, fire extinguishers and
emergency exits, she said, though fire sprinklers are only recommended.

Choice Hotels is one of the world's largest hotel companies with more than
5,400 locations under the brand names of Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites,
Quality Inn, Sleep Inn, Clarion, Cambria Suites, MainStay Suites, Suburban
Extended Stay Hotels, Econo Lodge and Rodeway Inn, according to its Web
site.

(source: The Herald)






GEORGIA----impending execution

Parole Board hears Davis plea for clemency


A last-minute pitch to spare convicted cop killer Troy Anthony Davis from
execution is under way.

The state Board of Pardons and Paroles began a clemency hearing behind
closed doors shortly after 9 a.m. Questions about Davis' possible
innocence surfaced after his death sentence for the murder of Savannah
Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail. Seven of nine witnesses who helped
implicate Davis have since recanted much of the testimony used to convict
him.

Davis' lawyers and sisters arrived shortly before the hearing, U.S. Rep.
John Lewis (D-Ga.) sat on the front pew in the hearing room, ready to
support Davis' clemency request.

Neither Lewis, nor Davis' lawyers, would comment prior to the hearings.

One of the witnesseses, Tonya Johnson, arrived with Davis' lawyers.
Johnson is prepared to tell the board that she saw the real killer run
from the crime scene and stash 2 guns in an abandoned house  information
she says she initially withheld from authorities.

Others in the hearing include Davis' mother and representatives of Amnesty
International USA , a human rights group opposed to the death penalty that
has taken up Davis' cause.

A jury sentenced Davis to death in 1991 for shooting Officer MacPhail to
death. MacPhail, working an off-duty job, responded to a report of a fight
in a Burger King parking lot next to the Greyhound bus station in
Savannah.

Courts have declined to hear Davis new evidence, in part because of a
federal law aimed at expediting seemingly endless death penalty appeals.

Davis, 38, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday at the state prison in
Jackson at 7 p.m.

If the parole board commutes Davis' sentence, he would be only the 9th man
in Georgia to receive clemency since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed
executions to resume in 1973.

(source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

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

Execution Of Ga. Man Near Despite Recantations----Some Witnesses Now Say
He Is Innocent


A Georgia man is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday
for killing a police officer in 1989, even though the case against him has
withered in recent years as most of the key witnesses at his trial have
recanted and in some cases said they lied under pressure from police.

Prosecutors discount the significance of the recantations and argue that
it is too late to present such evidence. But supporters of Troy Davis, 38,
and some legal scholars say the case illustrates the dangers wrought by
decades of Supreme Court decisions and new laws that have rendered the
courts less likely to overturn a death sentence.

3 of 4 witnesses who testified at trial that Davis shot the officer have
signed statements contradicting their identification of the gunman. Two
other witnesses -- a fellow inmate and a neighborhood acquaintance who
told police that Davis had confessed to the shooting -- have said they
made it up.

Other witnesses point the finger not at Davis but at another man. Yet none
has testified during his appeals because federal courts barred their
testimony.

"It's getting scary," Davis said by phone last week. "They don't want to
hear the new facts."

The circumstances of the case have provoked criticism beyond the usual
groups that oppose the death penalty.

"There is no more serious violent crime than the murder of an off-duty
police officer who was putting his life on the line to protect innocent
bystanders," William S. Sessions, FBI director under presidents Ronald
Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote recently in an op-ed piece in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But "serious questions have been raised
about Davis's guilt. . . . It would be intolerable to execute an innocent
man."

At the heart of Davis's difficulties is a law passed by Congress and
signed by President Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing
-- the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

The legislation was aimed at bomber Timothy J. McVeigh but has had far
broader consequences: It limits the reasons for which federal courts can
overturn death penalty convictions. In Davis's case, it has helped block
the exploration of witnesses' statements that they had lied at trial.

Before the law, the federal courts intervened to provide "relief" to death
row inmates -- that is, a new trial, new sentencing hearing or a
commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment -- in about 45 percent of
cases, though the rate was declining. But between 2000 and 2007, federal
courts intervened to provide such relief to the death row inmate in about
10 % of cases, according to a forthcoming study.

"People might say the law makes the system more efficient. But we have
significantly increased the likelihood of executing someone who is
actually innocent," said David R. Dow, a University of Houston law
professor who co-authored the study with Eric M. Freedman of Hofstra
University.

The 2nd of 5 children, Troy Anthony Davis grew up with his parents and
siblings in Cloverdale, a black, middle-class subdivision in Savannah.

By Aug. 19, 1989, when the shooting occurred, Davis had finished high
school and had taken a physical to join the Marines. At 20, he was living
at home and working for a fence company.

He had once pleaded guilty to a concealed-weapons charge after a traffic
stop, but he told the judge a passenger had stowed the gun under the car
seat. Davis received a $250 fine. His record was otherwise clean.

The Burger King where the shooting happened is next to a Greyhound bus
station, on a ragged edge of this city's touristy historic district. As
the restaurant was closing at 1 a.m., a fight over a beer was erupting in
the parking lot between a homeless man named Larry Young and another man
who, some witnesses said, threatened to shoot him.

After the man pistol-whipped Young, a police officer doing an off-duty
shift in uniform as a security guard came out. The officer told the man to
halt, witnesses said. Before Officer Mark A. MacPhail could unholster his
gun, the man shot him once in the chest, then once in the face.

Lacking a gun or other physical evidence, police were forced to rely on
witness accounts to determine the shooter.

Davis and a friend were at the Burger King that night; so were several
others. After the shots were fired, they scattered.

In the hours after the shooting, several people at the scene told police
that it was too dark, or that it happened too quickly, to know who was
who.

But the day after the shooting, a person at the parking lot that night,
Sylvester "Red" Coles, came to the police with a lawyer. Some witnesses
would later say that Coles was the shooter. But in his meeting with
police, Coles implicated Davis.

A manhunt for Davis began. He turned himself in to the police 4 days
later.

At the same time, police were working the streets, asking anyone who might
have been there, or who knew Davis, to talk.

"The police came over here 4 or 5 times," said Jeffrey Sapp, 38, a
neighborhood acquaintance of Davis. "They said, 'You know, your friend is
on the run, so he must be guilty.' They said, 'If you don't talk, we can
take you to jail for withholding evidence.' "

Sapp eventually told them that Davis had bicycled by his house and
confessed to shooting MacPhail.

"It was a lie," Sapp said.

Other key witnesses have told a similar story -- that police prodded them
to implicate Davis. The affidavit from Darrell Collins, the friend who was
with Davis that night, was typical.

"I told them it was Red and not Troy who was messing with that man, but
they didn't want to hear that," Collins, who was 16 at the time, said in
his 2002 statement. "The detectives told me, 'Fine, have it your way. Kiss
your life goodbye because you're going to jail.' After a couple of hours
of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down
and told them what they wanted to hear."

Adding to the confusion, the Georgia attorney general's office, which
later looked into the case, portrays Coles as threatening to shoot the
homeless man; the district attorney who tried the case has repeatedly said
that Davis made the threat.

In late August 1991, a jury convicted Davis in the slaying. He was
sentenced to death.

Davis and his family struggled to find lawyers who would pay attention to
his appeal. At a key time in his appeal, the Georgia Resource Center,
which was representing Davis, underwent a 70 % budget cut.

"We were getting a lot of law students," Martina Correia, Davis's sister,
said.

She eventually found a pro bono lawyer from Arnold & Porter, a well-known
firm, on Court TV. But by the time the lawyer took on the case, tracked
down witnesses and got depositions recanting some of their original
testimony, the courts said it was too late to press the appeal. Indeed,
the fact that the new evidence is being presented so late is used to
dismiss his attempts to introduce the testimony, his pro bono lawyer,
Jason Ewart, said.

Prosecutors have dismissed the significance of the new testimony.

"A recantation . . . does not prove that the witness' testimony was in
every part the purest fabrication," Chief Assistant District Attorney
David T. Lock wrote in legal papers filed last week.

Yet a sense that procedure, rather than the question of innocence, has
driven the case has led Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson (D) to explore changes
in the law that would allow appeals courts to more readily review such
cases.

None of the new rules seems likely to help Davis before Tuesday, however.

"I just think they made a mistake in the investigation," Davis said by
phone last week. "I'm just trying to hold up. . . . I'm trying to maintain
my faith that God will step in and soften the judge's heart."

(source: Washington Post)

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

Georgia man scheduled for execution


Barring judicial intervention, Troy Davis will be executed Tuesday for
killing a Georgia police officer despite several witnesses recanting their
testimony.

The case illustrates the dangers that have made courts less likely to
overturn a death sentence, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The case against Davis, 38, withered in recent years as most of the key
witnesses at his trial recanted but prosecutors say they still believe he
is guilty, the Post said.

The center of Davis' difficulties is a federal law passed after the
Oklahoma City bombing, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
of 1996. The law, aimed at bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, limits the reasons
for which federal courts can overturn death penalty convictions. In
Davis's case, it has blocked exploration of witnesses who allegedly lied
at trial, the Post reported.

Support for Davis' case extends beyond the usual groups that oppose the
death penalty.

"Serious questions have been raised about Davis' guilt," former FBI
director William S. Sessions wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man."

Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing an off-duty police officer, who
was working security at a fast-food restaurant.

(source: United Press International)

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

"Do not execute Troy Davis, says Secretary General of the Council of
Europe)


"The execution of Troy Davis, scheduled for 17 July, could become famous
as an irreversible mistake and a tragic miscarriage of justice," said
Terry Davis, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg
on Saturday 14 July.

"The conviction of Mr Troy Davis for murder and assault in 1991 was
entirely based on witness testimony. The weapon of the crime was never
found, and there was no other physical evidence in the case.

"Several of the witnesses have since retracted or changed their testimony.
Anyone reading these statements made after the trial was over and after
Troy Davis has spent years in death row is bound to be concerned about his
pending execution, and I understand that there is new evidence against an
alternative suspect in the same case.

"I do not understand how a man can be executed, 16 years after his
conviction, when all the developments related one way or another to his
case cast more and more doubt on the validity of the judgment.

"Killing Troy Davis will not do justice to the memory of Officer Mark
Allen McPhail, who was shot and killed on 19 August 1989. It will not
alleviate in any way the suffering of his family and friends. It will not
be justice.

"I appeal to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute the death
sentence of Troy Davis, said the Secretary General of the Council of
Europe. "This will be in line with the position of our organisation which
has 47 member States and the USA as an observer. We in the Council of
Europe believe that the abolition of the death penalty today is what the
abolition of slavery was 2 centuries ago."

(source: Council of Europe Press Division)






OHIO----female faces fedeal death sentence

Penalty phase begins in Moonda trial


She already has been convicted of hiring her younger, former lover to kill
her husband on promises the 2 would split his millions, and today, the
jury will begin deciding if Donna Moonda should be executed for
orchestrating the plot.

Testimony to determine if Moonda will face the death penalty or spend the
rest of her life in jail begins 9 a.m. today in Akron federal court.

And some of that testimony will include comments from her family, who are
expected to testify how their lives will be affected if she's put to death
and also from an expert on the prison system, whose expected to talk about
prison conditions should the jury sentence her to life in prison.

A judge ruled Friday to allow the testimony after prosecutors objected,
saying neither point related to Moondas sentence.

Moondas co-conspirator, Damian Bradford, was sentenced Wednesday to 17.5
years in prison for killing Dr. Gulam Moonda along the Ohio Turnpike in
Cuyahoga County on May 13, 2005.

Bradford received the sentence after agreeing to become the prosecutions
key witness against Moonda.

His testimony about how Moonda planned the killing in exchange to split
the doctors riches helped convict Moonda, despite attempts by the defense
to paint Bradford as a thug, womanizer and drug dealer.

Defense attorneys wanted Bradford sentenced before this new round of
testimony began, wanting to show jurors the actual triggerman only got
17.5 years in prison.

Bradford and Moonda met in a drug rehabilitation center, and their
relationship quickly turned physical, with Moonda buying cars, clothing
and other gifts and paying for Bradfords apartment, according to
testimony.

Bradford claimed the 2 planned to kill the doctor and split his
inheritance, which was believed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3
to $6 million.

Bradford testified he tried telling Moonda to accept her husbands offer of
$1 million to walk away from the failing marriage, but she said she was
entitled to more.

(source: Tribune-Chronicle)

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

Could Donna Moonda join a rare breed on death row?

Very few women get condemned to death in America.

Mercer County widow Donna Moonda could join these lean ranks this week if
a federal jury gives her the maximum penalty for hiring her boyfriend to
kill her husband along the Ohio Turnpike.

If that happens and she exhausts her appeals, Mrs. Moonda could be the
first woman in 50 years to be executed on a federal conviction and only
the second woman since Ethel Rosenberg to go to the death chamber for a
federal crime.

Historical records indicate the only other woman executed for a federal
offense was Mary Surratt, who was hanged for conspiring to kill Abraham
Lincoln.

Women who are executed differ from their male counterparts both in the
nature of their crimes and in the way they are treated in the criminal
justice system. They tend to be older when they commit their crimes than
the men who are executed. Their victims are more likely to be family
members than strangers. In some cases, prosecutors don't consider the
death penalty for a woman when they might seek it for a man committing the
same crime. Also, anecdotal evidence suggests women have a better shot at
beating a death sentence or avoiding execution if they're good-looking.

Women are less apt to commit violent crimes, but they also end up with
disproportionately fewer death sentences, said Elizabeth Rapaport, a law
professor at University of New Mexico who studies women and the death
penalty.

Women can be tried for capital convictions when there are aggravating
factors, for example, multiple victims or the defendant plotted a murder.

Juries and judges can be more forgiving and governors are sometimes more
prone to grant women clemency after conviction, said Victor L. Streib, an
Ohio Northern University law professor who has studied the outcomes for
female prisoners sentenced to death since 1632.

A classic example of this judicial disparity is the case of Susan Smith, a
white woman from South Carolina who intentionally rolled her Mazda into a
lake in 1994, drowning her two sleeping sons who were buckled into car
seats. She initially told police that a black man carjacked the vehicle
and abducted the boys. She made pleas on television for help. When her
story fell apart, the local district attorney, who was up for re-election,
thought it would be a slam dunk conviction, but her trial lawyers
presented evidence of abuse and depression and the jury voted for a life
sentence. Susan Smith will be eligible for parole in 17 years at the age
of 53.

The common attributes among female offenders are tough to nail down. The
majority of women on death row are mothers. Most kill victims of their
same race. Donna Moonda would be typical in the sense that about half the
women who get the death penalty for murdering a husband or boyfriend hired
the assassin, which is atypical for male offenders.

"Women are less likely to do the dirty work," Mr. Streib said. He also
said it would be unusual for a woman who plotted the murder to get a
lighter sentence than the triggerman, but other scholars said it would not
be unprecedented.

This bodes well for Mrs. Moonda, 48, whose former boyfriend helped
prosecutors secure a conviction by testifying that he shot Dr. Gulam
Moonda on the side of the road according to her plan. For his cooperation,
the 26-year-old drug dealer got a 171/2-year sentence. While the men
imprisoned for conspiring with Mary Surratt and Ethel Rosenberg were
hanged and electrocuted, Damian Bradford could be a free man by the age of
40.

In the 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling that briefly suspended the death
penalty, the Supreme Court noted a consistent racial disparity in the
execution of blacks and whites for the same crimes.

Justice Thurgood Marshall also noted gender bias in application of the
law: "There is also overwhelming evidence that the death penalty is
employed against men and not women. Only 32 women have been executed since
1930, while 3,827 men have met a similar fate. It is difficult to
understand why women have received such favored treatment since the
purposes allegedly served by capital punishment seemingly are equally
applicable to both sexes."

It's all about mercy

The earliest documented capital convictions of women were in colonial New
England and Maryland where a couple dozen women in their teens and early
20s were hanged or drowned for witchcraft. A Massachusetts woman was sent
to the gallows in 1643 for committing adultery.

Between 1712 and 1741, New York and Louisiana hanged several female slaves
for rising up against slaveowners. In some cases female slaves were
executed because their masters' children took ill and died in their care.

In the past 3 decades, women have accounted for 1 percent of executions.
While the percentage of condemned women hasn't risen significantly since
the early 20th century, the legal reasoning for handing down life
sentences has become more covert.

"In the 1940s and '50s, judges would say on the record, 'I'm giving you
life because you're a mother.' Now they just think that, but don't say why
they're being more lenient,'" said Mr. Streib, the legal historian at Ohio
Northern. He said the discrepancies "have nothing to do with law, it's
about mercy and playing on the emotions of the jury."

He suggested that women get life in prison based on the same gut-level
reasoning that dictated women and children had first dibs on the lifeboats
when the Titanic started sinking.

Making the call

A woman's physical appearance appears to have some impact on legal
strategies and outcomes in death penalty cases.

Governors usually have the final call on impending executions, a task that
bears heavily on some. While he was governor of Texas, George W. Bush had
to decide the fate of Karla Faye Tucker, a process he described in his
biography, "A Charge to Keep," as the "longest 20 minutes of my tenure as
governor" and "one of the hardest things I have ever done."

President Bush's friend, the conservative televangelist Pat Robertson,
pleaded for clemency and the then-governor's own daughter appealed for
mercy for Karla Faye at the dinner table. In the 2 years prior, Mr. Bush
had approved nearly 60 executions. A clue to the governor's trepidation
about killing Karla Faye Tucker lies in this appraisal from the book:

"Hers was a pleasant face, a smiling face, a sympathetic face. At 5' 3"
and 120 pounds, with wavy brown hair and large expressive eyes, Karla Faye
Tucker did not fit the public image of a typical death-row inmate. She
seemed contrite and sincere. She had found Jesus and salvation."

The former prostitute had helped slay 2 people with a pickax while high on
drugs.

Despite a high execution rate, Texas had not executed a woman since 1863,
but the board of pardons tied his hands, he wrote, and he let the
Huntsville prison officials carry out their task.

Mr. Streib said Mr. Bush's trepidation in this instance is a factor
defense lawyers are fully aware of: "I know when I consult on these cases
we talk about making [female defendants] look demure, vulnerable, not in
control and not sexy so the jury might find some sympathy for them." The
ideal look, he said, is the "Trisha Nixon type with downcast eyes and
white gloves."

There's also some coaching that goes into defending a woman in a capital
case. "It's terribly sexist but women are able to play-act and cry on cue.
More males have a difficult time showing their emotions or the appearance
of remorse," he said.

To combat this type of sentimental appeal, prosecutors make an effort to
"dehumanize and defeminize" women on death row, he said.

Before Judy Buenano's death, prosecutors took pains to ensure that the
only image the public saw of the 54-year-old was her mug shot, Mr. Streib
said. One month after Karla Faye Tucker's hotly debated execution,
Florida's infamous "Black Widow" was electrocuted for killing her husband
and stealing a car with far less public outcry.

Coverage of the bedraggled looking Aileen Wuornos, played by Charlize
Theron in the 2003 film "Monster," focused on how the former prostitute
was a rare exception as a female serial killer. In the buildup to her
Florida execution in 2002, the public knew she was unrepentant for slaying
seven men, but reporters gave less airtime to what defense lawyers argued
were severe mental health issues.

Battered women?

There are several readily apparent explanations for why so few women get
the death penalty. Women who kill their children are more likely to win an
insanity defense, because society cannot fathom how a mother could do that
to her child. Andrea Yates appealed her life sentence for drowning her 5
children and after she won an appeal, a 2nd jury found her not guilty by
reason of insanity.

Violence that stems from domestic abuse is assessed differently by
society, so legal outcomes for violent women are often different, said Ms.
Rapaport, the death penalty scholar at the University of New Mexico.

Former Ohio Gov. Richard F. Celeste granted clemency to 25 female inmates
after reviewing the work of Ohio State University sociologists who
interviewed all female inmates at the state penitentiary at Marysville.
The study found many women convicted of killing a husband or boyfriend
suffered from "battered women's syndrome," but the existing law prevented
them from introducing this evidence at trial.

The governor then commuted the death sentences of all 4 women and 4 of 97
men on death row in his last days in office, drawing criticism from
victims' rights groups.

Most homicide convictions for women are not capital convictions because
society doesn't view as seriously the type of domestic homicides women
generally commit in the heat of passion as it does cold-blooded killings
or slayings that occur in the course of a robbery or rape, Ms. Rapaport
said.

"You can terrorize your family, but people still pity you because of your
emotional trauma," she said. Terrorizing a stranger is something jurors
can picture and fear, but they often can't imagine their families would
harm them.

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

Facts about female executions


Women make up a tiny percentage of state and federal death row inmates. Of
about 3,350 condemned inmates, 49 are women.

When women get capital convictions, their own family members, including
husbands, significant others and children are most likely the victims. Of
the 11 women executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1973, 7
were found guilty of killing their mates and/or children. 25 of the 49 on
death row were sentenced for killing their husbands, boyfriends and/or
children.

Most women on death row for murdering romantic partners hire hit men to
carry out the homicides. Slightly less than 50 % of women on death row
hired their victims' killers, which means that in many instances where an
adult partner was killed, it was a for-hire killing.

Proportionally, the U.S. executes fewer women than men. Women account for
10 % of all homicide arrests, but just 2 % of death sentences are given to
female offenders and only 1.1 % of inmates killed in the death chamber are
women.

A greater percentage of women on death row get their sentences reversed
than men. 66 % of women have their sentences reversed or commuted. A
little more than 50 % of condemned men get reversals or commutations.

9 states with the death penalty have never executed a woman and several
countries where capital punishment is legal exclude women. Idaho, Indiana,
Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming
have never executed a female inmate. Virginia, 2nd to Texas in numbers of
executions, last executed a female in 1912. India and several former
Soviet republics have abolished the death penalty for women but not men.

(source for both: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)






VIRGINIA:

Whatever happened to ... The woman who fought to eliminate Va.'s death
penalty


IN HER DECADES OF WORKING TO STOP executions in Virginia, Marie Deans
earned the label "The Angel of Death Row." Her friends knew better than to
use it around Deans, a transplant from South Carolina who often infuriated
the Virginia Department of Corrections.

The only halo Deans, 67, might concede to having involved the
near-constant ring of cigarette smoke above her head as she worked in a
small Richmond office, surrounded by photographs of people who had been
put to death.

She was no softie liberal, she often declared as she headed off to a
meeting or another television interview. Rather, she was a radical bent on
eliminating capital punishment.

Deans is now retired, if one can retire from a career that rarely paid a
living wage. She finally owns a home, a fixer-upper in Charlottesville,
courtesy of a federal program to help the poor. And she works for a small
group of Buddhists helping channel donations from around the world to
Buddhist efforts in the United States.

It doesn't pay much. "They're Buddhist," she says with a laugh.

Briefs and legal documents fill her attic and guest room, she said. She
can't say no when a prisoner or family comes asking for help.

Deans was the 1-woman staff of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons
until that organization finally ran out of money.

She was a regular on the state's death rows, counseling inmates, finding
them lawyers, coordinating appeals and standing vigil at executions that
often would follow.

Later she started the Virginia Mitigation Project, an effort to reduce the
population on death row by intervening earlier in the cases, before the
death sentences were returned.

She also was the founder of a national group of unlikely opponents to the
death penalty: Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. She qualified
the hard way, when her beloved mother-in-law was followed home by an
escaped convict and murdered in her home.

Deans had an epiphany when she discovered that the murderer's family had
repeatedly appealed, without success, to get him mental health treatment
while in prison.

Deans decided the system was as guilty as the killer and began working
against executions.

After a fact-finding tour of Southern prisons with Amnesty International,
she settled in Virginia, deciding that the commonwealth treated its
condemned with the least compassion of any state she had visited.

Encouraged by her friend, Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man
Walking," Deans is working on a memoir about her life and how it changed
with her mother-in-law's death. She was a writer before being sucked into
advocacy, but the writing has been difficult, she said, and the emotions
are so raw the work can be difficult to read, one friend told her.

Her son, Robert, was in grade school when she began ministering to death
row inmates. He briefly ran the Murder Victims' Families group after
graduating from the University of Virginia and working for the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Robert has a 2-year-old daughter that Deans dotes on.

And she has a 17-year-old grandson who has been helping her fix up her
home.

He loves visiting, she said, and her voice catches when she reports that
he thinks she's the happiest person she knows.

The philosopher Joseph Campbell gave her the prescription for a happy life
years ago, and it didn't involve income levels, she said.

"Follow your bliss " was his simple advice.

And for Deans, tilting at windmills in the form of an execution order has
been just that.

(source: The VIrginian-Pilot)

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

Death penalty expected to be affirmed at cop killer's sentencing


A man who shot and killed a Norfolk police officer will be sentenced
Monday.

The jury recommended a death sentence for Thomas Porter after convicting
him of the October 2005 murder of Norfolk police officer Stanley Reaves,
who was shot to death in the Park Place neighborhood as he investigated a
report of a man with a gun.

Porter was arrested 6 days later in New York.

The trial was held in Arlington in March because of pre-trial publicity in
Norfolk

The judge is expected to certify the jury's death sentence, which carries
an automatic appeal.

Porter already has been given a 22-year sentence for use of a firearm and
for grand larceny for taking Officer Reaves' gun following the killing.

During the trial, Porter admitted shooting Reaves, but the 7-time felon
said he shot Reaves because he was scared.

The jury also heard some of Porter's prison phone calls in which he
discussed the killing, saying he was going for the head instead of other
parts of the body that might have been less lethal. In a call, Porter was
heard to brag about being a "good shot."

Porter's mother was a witness for her son. She talked about his rough
childhood. She was 1 of 8 friends and family members who testified on his
behalf.

Officer Reaves left behind a wife, Treva, and 2 children, Reagan and Ryan.

(source: WVEC News)