[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----WASH., N.C., N.Y., TENN.

[Rick Halperin]

July 31




WASHINGTON:

Death penalty deadline extended in Carnation family slayings


A judge on Thursday extended the deadline for prosecutors to decide
whether they will seek the death penalty against a woman charged with
killing six members of her own family in Carnation on Christmas Eve.

King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg now has until September 22nd to
decide whether Michele Anderson, 29, will face the death penalty. The
original deadline had been set for August 4th.

Anderson has pleaded not guilty to 6 counts of 1st-degree murder. Police
say Anderson and her boyfriend Joseph Mcenroe have confessed that they
shot and killed Anderson's parents, her brother, his wife and 2 kids last
Christmas Eve in Carnation.

Earlier this year, Anderson publicly expressed her desire to receive the
death penalty. Her court-appointed attorneys wouldn't let her pursue it,
but during a July 15 hearing a judge agreed to dismiss her defense team.
On Thursday, the judge gave an August 14th deadline for Anderson to
receive new legal counsel.

Anderson told a local TV station she is in her right mind and "taking
responsibility" for her actions. Meanwhile, the victims' grandson said he
doesn't want his aunt to get the death penalty, calling it "the easy way
out."

"I don't really believe in the death penalty in most cases, especially
this one," said Ben Anderson. "It seems that somebody who'd commit what
they committed, they just sit in prison for a few years and get the death
penalty, is pretty easy. People like her really need to sit in there and
think about what they did."

The crime shocked the small town of Carnation and made national headlines.
Prosecutors say Anderson and McEnroe went to the rural home on Christmas
Eve and shot and killed Anderson's parents, Wayne, 60, and Judith
Anderson, 61, her brother Scott and his wife Erica, both 32, and her
brother's 2 young children, 5-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan.

Court documents say Michele Anderson told police she was tired of everyone
stepping on her.

Deputy Prosecuting Attorney James Conant asked Anderson and McEnroe
whether they understood each charge against them. The defendants answered
yes in barely audible voices, so quietly that Conant at one point said to
Michele Anderson, whose long brown hair hung down in front of her face,
"I'm sorry, you'll have to answer out loud."

Their lawyers entered the pleas of not guilty on their behalf.

Family members of the victims and friends sat in the courtroom separated
from the defendants by a pane of glass. They held each other and wept.

Anderson and McEnroe were allowed to appear in street clothes and out of
handcuffs because a judge felt to do otherwise would be prejudicial to a
jury.

Jail guards were upset after the judge had ruled that the suspects could
wear street clothes and go without handcuffs in the courtroom. The judge
on Thursday reiterated the ruling to not tape or show the defendants in
handcuffs or in chains.

(source: KING 5 News)






NORTH CAROLINA:

NC Medical Board appeals execution decision


The North Carolina Medical Board on Wednesday defended its right to punish
physicians who participate in executions, arguing in an appeal that the
Legislature never intended for doctors to take part.

The board asked the state Supreme Court to reverse a Superior Court
judge's decision from September 2007 that determined the board overstepped
its authority by threatening to punish physicians for participating in
executions.

The medical board said in the appeal it filed Wednesday that it "would be
abandoning its own mission were it not to enforce and protect the ethics
of the medical profession, especially one so central to the medical
profession as the preservation of life."

The board's policy effectively triggered a moratorium on the death penalty
in North Carolina, which has not executed an inmate since August 2006.

Department of Correction spokesman Keith Acree said his office couldn't
immediately comment because the agency had not seen the filing.

The board wrote in its appeal that the main question before the court "is
whether the legislature ever intended to jeopardize the trust between the
people of North Carolina and their physicians for the sake of unnecessary
participation by physicians in judicial executions."

The filing argued that the General Assembly has consistently shown through
legislative acts that it "never intended for physicians to actively
participate in judicial executions."

The medical board licenses and disciplines doctors in North Carolina. It
adopted the policy in January 2007, saying the participation of physicians
in executions violates the ethics of a profession tasked with saving life.

But Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens said last year that state law
does not grant the medical board the right to prohibit doctors from
assisting in executions. He also ruled that executions are not medical
procedures.

The filing said that it's irrelevant whether an execution is a medical
procedure because the Legislature has given the board the authority to
discipline doctors for violations of medical ethics, regardless of whether
they involve the practice of medicine. Such violations include sexual
relationships with patients and fraudulent billing.

State law requires that a doctor be present during a lethal injection, and
a federal judge demanded last year that a doctor oversee the process of
putting an inmate to death.

The state had revised its lethal injection process in an attempt to
satisfy the judge, requiring that a physician monitor "the essential body
functions of the condemned inmate" and notify the warden if the inmate
shows signs of "undue pain and suffering."

The medical board said in the court filing that the state Department of
Correction and the Central Prison warden had given contradictory
statements about the extent of doctors' involvement in executions.

(source: News-Record)






NEW YORK:

Senate plays games on death penalty, police reforms


Gov. David Paterson last week threw more dirt on the grave of capital
punishment, but some die-hards in the State Senate keep trying to dig it
up.

Paterson, who has opposed the death penalty throughout his career, took
steps to formally decommission the 2-cell capital punishment unit at Green
Haven Correctional Facility. That facility was never used during the
state's failed 10-year experiment with capital punishment, which ended in
2004 when the Court of Appeals declared the statute unconstitutional.

That left New York law in line with the views of a growing majority of
state residents who tell pollsters they now support life without parole as
the maximum sentence. Crime rates, which began dropping 5 years before the
death penalty was passed, have continued to drop in the four years since
it was dismantled.

We've also learned about the plague of wrongful convictions staining this
state's professed commitment to equal justice. Several former inmates who
served long prison terms for crimes they did not commit  including
Buffalo's Anthony Capozzi, Niagara Falls' Gary Beaman and Westchester
Countys Jeffrey Deskovic  are scheduled to come together at Buffalo's
Pratt Center today to discuss the pressing need for reforms in the
criminal justice system.

But this is not enough for some Republican state senators, led by Dale
Volker, R-Depew, who insist on rejecting any attempts to minimize wrongful
convictions, even as they indulge in the empty gesture of passing a
1-house bill to restore the death penalty. Volker, in what can only be
described as a bizarre display, insisted during a recent death penalty
debate that innocence was irrelevant to the issue.

Volker's comments came as the majority Republican senators rejected an
amendment to their death penalty bill that would have created a commission
to look at the kind of common sense reforms that would minimize wrongful
convictions  videotaping custodial interrogations, changing eyewitness
identification procedures, improving the state's system of public defense
and strengthening policies concerning cataloging and retaining DNA
evidence.

DNA reforms are probably the best known of the reforms, since a report by
The Innocence Project last year revealed that New York has the dubious
distinction of leading the nation when it comes to exoneration of inmates
after post-conviction, DNA-based investigations this decade. But since
upwards of 85 % of homicides do not yield any DNA evidence, it is clear
that reforming DNA procedures is no panacea.

Being tough on crime requires that we be smart on crime as well. As the
state dismantles its death house infrastructure, hopefully for the last
time, lawmakers should turn their attention to reforming criminal justice
procedures to ensure that when it comes to wrongful convictions, New York
can no longer say "We're number 1."

(source: David Kaczynski is executive director of New Yorkers Against the
Death Penalty; Opinion, The Buffalo News)






TENNESSEE:

Judges Delay Death Penalty Appeal Cases----Convicted Killer Paul Reid's
Case Appealed In 2003


Did you know that its a state law that Tennessee judges have one year to
rule on a death penalty appeal?

If you didn't, don't feel bad, because it's a law that has been ignored by
judges for more than a decade.

When attorneys for convicted killer Paul Reid filed an appeal for his
death sentence, by law, judges have 1 year to make a decision.

Reid appealed the decision in April of 2003. The judge is still waiting
for paperwork, but Reid isn't the exception, he is the rule.

"I think the general public and victims particularly feel like this is
hypocrisy," said Death Penalty Commissioner Verna Wyatt.

Its not that it usually takes the judge more than a year to settle an
appeal, because no judge has ever decided an appeal in less than a year in
the laws 13-year history.

Some of the members of the new Death Penalty Commission are wondering why
a law passed in 1995 has been completely ignored.

"I'm willing to listen to the judges and those who are involved to tell us
why it cant be done. But as you look at the cases and see that sometimes
it takes 7, 8, 9 years, there is no way that it should take that long and
that the victim's family should have to wait and wait for justice to be
done," said state Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville.

Judges and post-conviction defense attorneys said the one-year time limit
is ridiculous.

"It's a question between promptness and fairness. Hitler ran the railroad
on time. If thats what you want, if you want to have a system that gives
no justice, no fairness, in which there is no way to check to see if an
innocent person is convicted, then sure, one year is fine. But none of us
would want to participate in that system," said post-conviction defender
Donald Dawson.

But for victims family members like Verna Wyatt, it looks like death
penalty cases are going to the bottom of the stack.

"They are either dragging their feet because they don't believe in the
death penalty, or they don't care and it looks really arrogant. It looks
very arrogant," she said.

The status of death penalty cases was put on paper for the first time in
the laws history on Thursday.

(source: WSMV News)