[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., USA, ARK.

[Rick Halperin]

July 16



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

N.H. death penalty qualms resurface


2 active cases have New Hampshire taking a fresh look at the state's death
penalty law.

The Legislature voted to repeal the law 7 years ago, but then-Gov. Jeanne
Shaheen vetoed the bill.

A repeal bill failed in the House this spring, but only by 12 votes. A new
repeal attempt is expected in 2009.

The issue has taken on new prominence because prosecutors plan to seek the
death penalty in 2 pending cases: those of Michael Addison, accused of
murdering a Manchester police officer last fall, and John "Jay" Brooks,
accused of soliciting people to help him kill a Derry handyman in 2005.

"Were going to be doing much more soul searching in this state," said Rep.
James Splaine, D-Portsmouth, sponsor of the last 2 repeal bills.

"We're going to ask ourselves, Do we really want to do this?" he told The
Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence.

The trials are expected to play out through 2008 and 2009.

The narrow capital murder law applies to a half dozen crimes, including
killing a police officer, murder for hire and killing someone during a
kidnapping. Prisoners who kill another while serving a life sentence,
murder during a rape and certain drug crimes also qualify. But the state's
last execution was in 1939, and the gallows at the state prison were
dismantled in the 1980s.

In recent history, Gordon Perry was the last person to be charged with
capital murder for killing an Epsom police officer. He avoided a potential
death sentence by pleading guilty to first-degree murder.

Splaine notes that 2 years ago, his repeal bill failed by 70 votes.

Death-penalty supporters say the ultimate punishment is needed, especially
for those who kill police officers.

"I guess Im speaking from the perspective of a mother and grandmother, but
I feel like if someone takes anothers life they shouldnt be able to have
visits from their mother in jail," said Rep. Laura Pantelakos,
D-Portsmouth. "The Bible says an eye for an eye."

But Pantelakos said the tide may be flowing the other direction.

"We have a lot of bleeding hearts who think we should save these people,"
she said. "After theyre in jail for a while, these people suddenly find
God."

Arnie Alpert is coordinator of the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the
Death Penalty.

"We need to help people get past the idea that if people aren't executed,
then somehow they're getting away with it," Alpert said. "The fact is that
the alternative to the death penalty - life in prison with no possibility
of parole - is a serious punishment."

Battles against the capital murder law are already under way in Addison's
case. His lawyers have filed 15 constitutional challenges to the law,
which they say was written without sufficient safeguards for the
constitutional rights of defendants.

Alpert's group and the New Hampshire Chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union are hoping the 2 new cases will finally lead to ending
capital punishment in 2009.

Rep. David Welch, former chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Public
Safety Committee, said support for the death penalty has been receding in
recent years, though it hasnt ebbed to where it was in 2000.

Welch, a death-penalty supporter, said that might change if New Hampshire
actually put someone to death.

"Having an execution might turn people around and finally move them enough
to get rid of it," he said.

While Addison and Brooks face prosecution under the state law, serial
killer Gary Sampson has been sentenced to be executed in New Hampshire
under federal law. A federal judge sentenced Sampson to death in 2004 for
a July 2001 killing spree in which he murdered 3 people between
Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

U.S. Judge Mark Wolf ordered New Hampshire to host the execution because
Massachusetts has no death penalty law and many of the victims' families
lived in or near New Hampshire. Appeals are expected to take years,
however.

(source: Associated Press)






USA:

US death penalty opponents search for innocent victim


Although dozens of US death row inmates have been proven innocent, death
penalty opponents are seeking to bolster their cause by proving that at
least 1 of the 1,087 people executed over the last 30 years in the United
States was innocent.

Thanks primarily to new DNA evidence, a total of 124 people sentenced to
die have been recently proven innocent of the crime they were convicted
for, many after spending years on death row.

Their fates have served as the strongest arguments for advocates of
abolishing the death penalty in the United States, 30 years after it was
revived following a 10 year moratorium.

But death penalty opponents have been challenged by powerful defenders of
executions to find a single case where an innocent man was actually put to
death.

Last year Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative justices on the US
Supreme Court, said that the reversal of an erroneous convictions
"demonstrates not the failure of the system but its success."

Scalia said that like other human institutions, courts and juries were not
perfect, and one could not have a system of criminal punishment without
accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

But with regard to the death penalty in the United States, he continued,
that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum.

"This explains why those ideologically driven to ferret out and proclaim a
mistaken modern execution have not a single verifiable case to point to,
whereas it is easy as pie to identify plainly guilty murderers who have
been set free," the justice said.

Scalia cited the case of Roger Coleman, whose case for innocence of
charges of rape and murder earned support from Time magazine before his
execution in 1992. In early 2006 Coleman's guilt was confirmed by DNA
analysis.

If an innocent person had been executed, argued Scalia, "we would not have
to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by
the abolition lobby."

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) responded in
June with a report detailing the cases of 4 executed inmates, whose cases
cast serious doubt on their guilty verdicts.

They include Ruben Cantu, a 26-year-old Latino man from San Antonio,
Texas, who was executed in August 1993 for a murder committed in 1985,
when he was 17.

In November 2005, The Houston Chronicle published an investigative series
in which it reported that another defendant in the murder who pleaded
guilty, but who did not testify at Cantu's trial, had signed an affidavit
swearing that Cantu had no role in the murder.

Another executed man whose conviction was questionable, according to the
NCADP, was Larry Griffin, a 40-year-old black man from St. Louis, Missouri
who was put to death in June 1995 for the drive-by shooting of a drug
dealer in 1980.

The only evidence against him was a witness, Robert Fitzgerald, a white
career criminal with several pending felony charges, who claimed to have
seen Griffin at the crime scene.

But in July 2005, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that the first
police officer on the scene and the victims sister both agreed that
Fitzgerald himself wasnt in the neighborhood when the shooting occurred.

David Elliot, a spokesman for NCADP, said Texas and Missouri need to set
up independent commissions to investigate these cases.

"Innocent people get sent to death row because humans run the criminal
justice system and humans make mistakes," Elliot said.

"The government cannot investigate itself and expect to reach a fair
conclusion" on whether the executed men were wrongly convicted, he said.
"It's the fox guarding the hen house."

Meanwhile, NCADP, Amnesty International and other organizations have
mobilized to try to save the life of Troy Davis, a black man who is
scheduled to be executed in Georgia Tuesday for the murder of a white
police officer.

The majority of witnesses in the case have retracted their testimony,
making it possible that Davis becomes the 125th person freed from death
row.

(source: Agence France Presse)

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

Freed inmate shows flaws in death penalty


Executing even one innocent person should be intolerable.

Anyone who has followed the sagas of Paris Hilton or the Haddonfield
teenagers who marauded through a neighbor's home probably know that
justice is not blind.

Yet, it also appears that justice sometimes cannot be found, even in life
and death cases.

A Superior Court judge last Monday dropped murder charges against a man
who had served 22 years of a life sentence. A jury had declined to impose
the death penalty sought by prosecutors.

It turns out that DNA testing not available in 1985 couldn't connect Byron
Halsey to the murder and sexual assault of his live-in girlfriend's
8-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter. Test results implicated another
man, Clifton Hall, who lived in the same rooming house as the children and
Halsey. After testifying against Halsey in 1988, Hall later was jailed for
committing sexual assaults.

Halsey is the 205th convicted person nationally and the fifth inmate in
New Jersey to be exonerated through DNA evidence since 1973. Since 1976,
more than 1,000 inmates have been put to death. Because DNA is not
available or allowed to be considered in every post-conviction case, it is
unknown how many people may be wrongly imprisoned or put to death.

Halsey's case and the others like it make a compelling case for abolishing
the death penalty -- or even the threat of capital punishment -- in New
Jersey and other states.

A legislative commission has recommended that New Jersey abolish its death
penalty. It has not been carried out since being reinstated in 1976. The
commission found that not only was it not a deterrent to crime, it also
cost New Jersey taxpayers a premium to maintain a death row.

It is not clear whether there is the political will to do, although most
state residents support life without the possibility of parole over the
death penalty, recent polls show.

The commission found that life in prison would provide sufficient safety
for the community against murderers. The money saved by abolishing death
row could then be redirected to provide more support and assistance to the
families of murder victims.

Some people might argue the problem with the death penalty is the
reluctance of officials to use it. Or, that the error rate is too small to
eliminate this ultimate penalty. But the error rate isn't zero, either.

Even if mistakes are rare, one wrongful death should be intolerable. If
murder is wrong for the individual, execution is certainly wrong for the
state.

(source: Courier Post)






ARKANSAS:

Killer of Ark. elderly woman asks to appeal death sentence


A man awaiting execution in the slaying of a former Arkansas legislator's
mother-in-law has told a judge he wants to appeal his conviction and
sentence.

Justin Anderson of Saratoga was convicted in 2002 of killing 85-year-old
Clara Creech.

Creech was shot in 2000 while gardening in her yard in Lewisville. She was
the mother-in-law of then-state Representative Russ Bennett of Lewisville.

Anderson told police he stole a gun and decided to kill someone in the
hope of forcing police to shoot him to death.

A judge on Friday appointed a lawyer for 26-year-old Anderson to guide him
through his appeal options. The state Supreme Court earlier ordered a new
sentencing hearing for Anderson, but a Miller County jury reimposed the
death sentence.

Before Creech's slaying, police say Anderson stole two guns October
Second, 2000. Four days later, he entered the cab of a parked
tractor-trailer and shot the sleeping driver, Roger Solvey. Solvey lived
and Anderson received a 50-year sentence for attempted capital murder.
Officials say Anderson killed Creech on October 12th, 2000.

(source: Associated Press)