Sept. 6 PENNSYLVANIA: The state's legal system needs to be honest What a colossal waste of time and energy -- not to mention money -- I consider the court hearings on Joey Miller's fate. Let's face it: Even if he's sentenced to death, he won't die by the state's hand. When was the last time the state executed a prisoner? The answer: July 6, 1999, when Gary Heidnik of Philadelphia died by lethal injection. Heidnik was only the 3rd inmate executed in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Like Joey Miller, Heidnik was a serial killer of women. Some claimed he was mentally ill, but the state eventually executed Heidnik, who was a cannibal as well as a torturer and killer. Can you do such deeds if you're sane? I don't know, and more-learned people than I can't agree. What began in Judge Jeannine Turgeon's courtroom last week and continues later this month is an effort to determine if Miller -- who lived in Steelton when he abducted, raped and killed four women and tried to kill 2 others -- is bright enough to be executed. The U.S. Supreme Court prohibits execution if someone is mentally retarded. Dauphin County's district attorney says Miller is smart and cagey. Miller's attorney says he isn't. In the end, I'm betting it won't matter what the judge decides. Miller will languish in a Pennsylvania prison. That's where you'll find 226 people who are sentenced to die, including some who've been on death row 25 years or longer. That's the reality of the system. Courts sentence people to die, but we don't kill them. I'm not advocating that we do. I'm advocating honesty. If we don't like the death penalty, then we should trash it, instead of threatening people. What we do now makes the state the worst kind of bully. Sometimes people are sentenced to spend the rest of their days in prison when we don't mean it. Not in Pennsylvania, of course. In Pennsylvania, if your punishment is life, you're serving life. Most people don't understand that. Why? Because they hear about people like Pfc. Jesse Spielman, 23, of Chambersburg, who was sentenced last week in a military courtroom in Kentucky to 110 years in prison, which seems like more than a lifetime to me. Then just when you think, "That guy's never going to see the light of day again," you reach the part of the article that says, "Spielman will be eligible for parole after 10 years." Say what? Spielman was convicted of rape, conspiracy to commit rape, housebreaking with intent to rape and 4 counts of felony murder, although he apparently didn't rape or murder anyone. His role, the military claims, consisted of being a lookout while other soldiers raped an Iraqi teen and then killed her and her family. Thoughts on his sentence run the gamut. Some say Spielman was a pawn of the military. Others can't figure why he was slapped with such a harsh sentence if he didn't kill or rape anyone. Still others favor locking him up for a couple of lifetimes. It's that way with many of Pennsylvania's 4,337 lifers. A bunch of them never killed anybody. Admittedly, many committed an illegal act, like robbery, when a partner in crime pulled the trigger or used some other method to end someone's life. Under Pennsylvania law, that makes everyone involved guilty of murder. Like Spielman, many lifers committed a crime with its roots in stupidity, being in the wrong place and hanging with the wrong guys. Under Pennsylvania law, juries can't be told that if they find someone guilty of first-degree murder, it equals life without parole. My point isn't to decide who should live or die or who should spend decades behind bars. What I propose is a legal system that's honest. If we don't want to execute people, let's abolish the death penalty. If we want someone free in 10 years, sentence him to a decade, not a century. If we don't want someone locked away for a lifetime, then make sure the jury knows that's exactly what will happen if they find a defendant guilty. Maybe we'd all have more respect for the law if it were honest. (source: Column, Nancy Eshelman, Patriot-News) NORTH CAROLINA: 'He's So Young': Compassion, not revenge, stirs family of victim For $40 and a cell phone that ultimately led to his arrest, 21-year-old Daniel Hayes is going to spend the rest of his natural life rotting in a prison cell. Incredible as it sounds, that's all Hayes made off with the night of Dec. 19, 2005, after he fired two bullets from a .380-caliber pistol into the back of the head of William James Wright, a 55-year-old cabdriver who was doing nothing other than trying to earn a living. Perhaps more incredible has been how Wright's adult son and daughter have conducted themselves. Rather than howling for blood and insisting that prosecutors ask for the death penalty - Wright's killing blew past the legal threshold for capital punishment the instant that Hayes pulled the trigger - Christopher and Jeri Wright asked that Hayes be given the chance to plead guilty and accept life without parole. "He's so young," said Christopher Wright, a gentle giant who drives a school bus for a living. "I have a soft spot for the youngsters. I just decided that I wouldn't want his mom to have to go through (his execution)." Meets the standard If there ever was a defendant whose case screamed out for capital punishment, it was Hayes. According to Detective Tim Taylor of the Winston-Salem Police Department, Hayes jumped in the back of Wright's cab with larceny in his heart and a loaded gun in his hand. "He denied it at first. He said he found the cell phone at the Motel 6 on Patterson Avenue," Taylor testified. Investigators knew that wasn't true; they had a statement from an acquaintance of Hayes who said that he was present when Hayes came to his house with blood-soaked pants and he watched as Hayes burned the inside of Wright's cab. "He eventually came clean.. He said his plan was just to get the money," Taylor said. Police found Wright's cell phone on the arm of a sofa where Hayes was resting when he was picked up for questioning Dec. 21. Later that morning, they found the murder weapon stuffed under a cushion of that same sofa in the exact spot where Hayes told them they would find it. A murder committed during the commission of another felony (armed robbery), an attempt to destroy evidence, and 2 bullets pumped into the back of an innocent man's skull at close range all add up to "aggravating factors" - all legal grounds on a checklist to determine whether a killer is eligible for a gurney ride at Central Prison. Forgive but not forget Of the 166 inmates on death row, 12 were convicted in Forsyth County - the largest number of any of the state's 100 counties. In other words, if prosecutors chose to push for the death penalty, chances are good that they would have gotten it. But an incredible thing happened not long after Hayes was charged. Christopher and Jeri Wright, along with their mother, Edith Littlejohn, stepped forward to tell prosecutors that they didn't want Hayes put to death. "We thought about how hurt we felt," Jeri Wright said after hugging Taylor and thanking him for seeing that her dad's killer was caught. "We decided pretty quickly that we don't want to cause any pain for anybody else." The Wrights agreed that the killing was senseless and a tragedy not only for their family but also for Hayes' relatives. How many of us would feel sympathy for the family of a man who admitted killing someone close to us? Or the killer himself? Their compassion wasn't lost on Hayes, who took the unusual step of apologizing to them in court. "Me taking this life (sentence) right here is hard, but it's for my life," Hayes said. "I believe I have something out there I can do." The plea bargain and the life-without-parole sentence handed down to Hayes affords the Wright family something else - a chance to honor their father's memory by moving forward without hatred eating away at them. "I'm trying to find it in my heart to forgive him for it," Christopher Wright told the court. "It's hard to do. "Sooner or later, I will forgive. But I won't forget." (source: Winston-Salem Journal) FLORIDA: Prints scandal stalls death-row appeal The fingerprint scandal at the Seminole County Sheriff's Office has found its way to the Florida Supreme Court and pushed a double-murder case back to a local trial judge. The high court agreed to step aside temporarily until a Sanford judge can sort out whether death-row inmate Clemente Javier "Shorty" Aguirre, 27, deserves a new trial. That could happen before the end of the month. A jury convicted Aguirre last year in the murders of a wheelchair-bound woman and her 47-year-old daughter. Carol Bareis, the older woman, and daughter Cheryl A. Williams were stabbed to death with a chef's knife found lying in pine needles in their neighbor's backyard. Sheriff's Office print expert Donna Birks told jurors that a bloody print found on its handle belonged to Aguirre. But 2 experts at a state crime laboratory reworked the case this year and concluded there was no match. For months, since they learned about the mismatch, Aguirre's attorneys have pressed for a new trial. Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. in Sanford will decide whether he gets one. On Wednesday, Eaton set aside a half-day Sept. 25 to hear the evidence. The Aguirre case is the most sensational of Birks' bad calls, but she made at least seven others, according to the Sheriff's Office. And prosecutors are awaiting re-analysis in 2 other murder cases that have sent men to prison, said Chris White, chief assistant state attorney in Seminole County. It was not clear when that work would be done, he said. But more than 300 cases have been reworked. The Sheriff's Office shipped them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after one of Birks' co-workers complained that the 13-year department veteran made a positive ID on a print that was unreadable. The state lab found not just the eight mismatches by Birks but another by one of her co-workers. Birks quit in June, the same day she was notified she was about to be fired. The co-worker who made the other error was reassigned to the sheriff's radio room. Newly-hired fingerprint experts at the Sheriff's Office have since found a 10th mismatch, sheriff's spokesman Lt. Dennis Lemma said last week. The part-time employee who made that call has since left the agency. In one case, Birks identified a print as belonging to the wrong person, according to state analysts. In the others, she made positive IDs on prints that were impossible to match to anyone. Despite the errors, there is no evidence an innocent person has been sent to prison, said Lemma. But prosecutors dropped two cases against a suspected car burglar after Birks' fingerprint matches, the most powerful evidence against him, were rejected by the state lab. In Florida, all death-penalty cases are automatically reviewed by the Florida Supreme Court. That's the case with Aguirre. Two weeks ago, after reviewing evidence about the mismatched print on the knife, the high court agreed to temporarily halt its work and ship the case back to Eaton. He presided at Aguirre's trial and imposed the death penalty after a jury recommended it. Even though prosecutors now say Birks made a bad call, that's no guarantee Aguirre will get a new trial. The victims' blood was found on his clothes, which were stuffed into a bag and thrown onto the roof of the shed where he lived. It was next door to the victims' home. And on the witness stand Aguirre admitted touching the knife. He told jurors he entered the victims' home, found them already dead and got their blood on him when he tried to find out if they were still alive. (source: Orlando Sentinel) MISSISSIPPI: Despite DNA Test, a Case is Retried The scene in the tiny Noxubee County jail on a rainy afternoon has become almost commonplace. Kennedy Brewer, sentenced to death and locked up for 15 years for the rape and murder of a 3-year-old, was released on the strength of a DNA test showing that the semen in the rape kit was not his. The bail bondswoman snapped a Polaroid. Mr. Brewer's sister, Martha, smiled and said, "I ain't got to mow the lawn no more." Back home on Highway 388, 2 of Mr. Brewer's nieces sketched out a T-shirt design to read "Welcome Home Kenny." But Mr. Brewer is not free and clear. He is only out on bail. In a move that appears to be novel, prosecutors intend to retry him for the crime. Virtually no effort has been made to find the man who raped the girl, Christine Jackson, and dumped her body in a creek in Noxubee County, one of the most rural in the state. This is the 1st time prosecutors have sought a new capital murder trial after a conviction was overturned by DNA evidence, said Peter Neufeld, director of the Innocence Project, a legal aid group based in New York that has used DNA testing to exonerate the wrongly convicted since 1992. Usually such cases are simply dropped. But prosecutors are not convinced of the innocence of Mr. Brewer, a black laborer who is mildly retarded. Forrest Allgood, the district attorney who 1st tried the case, said his theory then was that Mr. Brewer, who was the boyfriend of the victim's mother, acted alone. At the trial, Mr. Allgood argued that the couple's bedroom was "the killing field," although traces of human blood found there were so small that they could not be tested. His view has changed. "I perceive that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child," Mr. Allgood said. "Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn't make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death." Mr. Allgood declined to offer a new theory of what occurred the night Christine disappeared, saying only that Mr. Brewer was the baby sitter that evening and that there was no sign of forced entry at the house. The defense lawyers, including Mr. Neufeld, say the girl could have been abducted by way of a broken window in the bedroom. Mr. Brewer is being retried as Mississippi has been trying to reverse a reputation for judicial chicanery that dates from the civil rights era. In that time, vigilante violence often went unpunished, and the state conspired to shield Ku Klux Klan. In recent years, high-profile cases from that period have been retried, resulting in convictions. "The Brewer case illustrates that there are two Mississippi criminal justice systems," Mr. Neufeld said. "There's the old system that hasn't changed at all and the new system that is trying to take the Bill of Rights seriously." Modern forensic tools do not appear to carry much weight in Noxubee County. Mr. Allgood said DNA reversals - there have been more than 200 nationwide - did not prove innocence. Prosecutors often drop such cases only because witnesses are no longer available or evidence has been lost, Mr. Allgood said, but "John Q. Public thinks another innocent man got convicted who would have been killed." After the DNA results from the rape here came back in 2002, Mr. Brewer was moved from death row to the county jail, where he stayed for 5 years. Because Mr. Allgood was still seeking the death penalty, Mr. Brewer was not eligible for bail. Mr. Allgood tested the DNA found on the girl against that of two men who visited Mr. Brewer at the house the night of Christine's disappearance. The men were not a match. He also ran a second test that excluded Mr. Brewer's male relatives. But he did not run the profile against the state's DNA database, saying in an interview that no such database exists. That was a surprise to John M. Allen, the assistant director of the state crime laboratory, who said, "We've been up and running on our DNA database for years." Mr. Allgood also said he had notified the sheriff's office of the DNA results. But the sheriff, Albert Walker, said he had not received any official notification and had not reopened the case. "The case is already solved, far as the murder," Sheriff Walker said. Earnest Eichelberger, chief investigator for the sheriff's office when Christine disappeared, said of Mr. Brewer, "I didn't use DNA to get him convicted." Mr. Eichelberger said he never constructed a narrative that would explain where Christine had been raped and killed, when her body had been dumped and whether or not anyone else could have been involved. Mr. Eichelberger said that if he had his way, both Mr. Brewer and Christine's mother, Gloria Jackson, who had been arrested several times for child abuse and neglect, would have been tried. "She was an accessory simply because of her history, to me," he said. In March 2006, after a former lawyer for Mr. Brewer joined District Attorney Allgood's staff, the prosecutor agreed to recuse himself in the case. The new prosecutor, Ben Creekmore, the district attorney in Oxford, 100 miles northwest, decided not to seek the death penalty and agreed not to oppose bail. The new trial is now scheduled for next year. On that Saturday night in May 1992, Mr. Brewer had stayed in the house with Christine and two other children. Ms. Jackson returned home at 12:30 a.m. Early that morning, she later testified, Mr. Brewer arose twice, once for a diaper for the baby and a second time to prepare a bottle. In the morning, the 2 discovered that Christine, who had been asleep on a makeshift pallet of sofa cushions at the foot of the bed, was gone. That afternoon, as dozens of family members and friends searched, Mr. Brewer and Ms. Jackson were arrested. After Ms. Jackson had been in jail for 7 months, the charges against her were dropped. The state's star witness was Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg who had become a controversial expert in the identification of bite marks. Dr. West's findings have been contradicted by DNA evidence in at least two other cases. At the time of the trial, Dr. West had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology and had resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Science and the International Association of Identification, pending expulsion. He testified that he had found 19 human bite marks on Christine's body, all made just by upper teeth, and that at least five of them were made by Mr. Brewer. A defense expert, Richard Souviron, testified that the wounds were not human bite marks. "Have you ever bitten off a piece of meat with just your top teeth and not used your bottom teeth?" Dr. Souviron asked. "It doesn't make any sense at all." In 2005, Mr. Allgood informed the defense that a jailhouse informer had come forward, saying Mr. Brewer had told him that he was forced at gunpoint to bite Christine. 20 months before Christine's death, another 3-year-old, Courtney Smith, disappeared from her bedroom in the county and was found raped and murdered in a nearby pond. In that case, the mother's boyfriend was sentenced to life in prison after being identified in court by a 5-year-old girl and testimony from Dr. West, who said that just the boyfriend's upper teeth had left a mark on the girl's wrist. Mr. Eichelberger and Mr. Allgood say the cases are unrelated. Mr. Brewer's defense lawyers are requesting permission to test the evidence in the Smith case for DNA. (source: New York Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----PENN., N.C., FLA., MISS.
Rick Halperin Thu, 6 Sep 2007 18:20:25 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
