March 25 TEXAS: US Supreme Court refuses appeal of Texas death row inmate The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review the case of a Houston-area man sentenced to death for the rape and strangling of a 7-year-old neighborhood girl more than a decade ago. Eric Nenno, 46, had asked the top U.S. court to review last summer's rejection of his appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court said Monday it would not review the case. He argued the silence of a polygraph examiner after he took the lie detector test improperly coerced him into making an incriminating statement that led to the discovery of the dead girl's body in the attic of his home in 1995. He does not have an execution date. All executions are on hold until the Supreme Court decides a Kentucky case that challenges the constitutionality of lethal injection, the method used for capital punishment in Texas and most other states with the death penalty. A decision in the case is expected by early summer. (source: Associated Press) MARYLAND: House votes for study of death penalty The House of Delegates voted 89-48 to establish a 19-member commission to study the death penalty in Maryland, defeating 3 amendments proposed by conservative lawmakers seeking to broaden the scope of the examination or to limit Gov. Martin O'Malley's influence over the committee. Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell, the House minority leader from Southern Maryland, sought to give the General Assembly the power to appoint the commission's 2 co-chairs and to ensure that those who served on it didn't work for an advocacy group. Both amendments were defeated soundly as supporters of the measure said the guidelines for the study were sufficient to ensure an unbiased look at capital punishment. Death penalty opponents had hoped that Maryland would follow New Jersey this year in repealing the death penalty, but when lawmakers met with gridlock once again, many coalesced around the push to study. New Jersey's decision last year followed recommendations developed by a task force. (source: Baltimore Sun) **************** Republicans denounce proposed death penalty study A proposed death penalty commission denounced by Republican leaders as a "stacked deck" for Gov. Martin OMalleys repeal position won approval in the House of Delegates on Monday. The House passed a study of Marylands death penalty practices after rejecting Republican-led efforts to reduce the number of governor appointees and exclude members who belong to public policy groups. As proposed, the 19-member commission will include 12 members appointed by O'Malley, who opposes the death penalty, and will be staffed by his Office of Crime Control and Prevention. Under those provisions, Republicans called the study a "decision waiting for a process to validate it." "The outcome will be that the death penalty is racially biased, that it's cruel and unusual punishment and that it's more costly to use the death penalty than life in prison," said Del. Michael Smigiel, a Cecil County Republican. Republicans have accused OMalley of imposing a de facto ban on the death penalty by refusing to adopt new regulations after a December 2006 Maryland Court of Appeals ruling suspended executions until lethal-injection protocols are formally adopted. The commission will look at racial and economic disparities in death penalty sentences, according to supporter Del. Samuel Rosenberg, a Baltimore City Democrat, who said three of the commission members will belong to victims families. During debate Saturday, Rosenberg said any reinstatement of the death penalty would be "inappropriate" until the courts have rendered a final decision. "We do need a death penalty commission that is not a stacked deck," Rosenberg said. "It will be balanced." State analysts estimate the 6-month review will cost almost $89,000. The Senate has not yet taken action on the proposal. (source: Examiner.com) ILLINOIS: Lake County prosecutors seek death penalty in loan store slaying Lake County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a Wisconsin man accused of killing a clerk at a Waukegan payday loan store last year. Montago Suggs of Kenosha is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the May 21st shooting death of 22-year-old Melinda Morrell of Round Lake Park in a robbery at a Check 'n Go in Waukegan. Suggs also is charged with attempted armed robbery and attempted murder in an incident five days later at a Beach Park convenience store. Police say Suggs, who could face 21 to 45 years in prison in the Beach Park case, stole about $2,000 from the Waukegan loan store. (source: Associated Press) ARKANSAS: Decay Wants Death Penalty Barred In Case----Motion Claims Execution Method Cruel, Unusual A man accused of killing a Fayetteville couple last year wants the death penalty declared unconstitutional. Gregory Christopher Decay, 22, wants the state to be prohibited from seeking the death penalty and the jury prohibited from imposing it. Decay and Jesse Westeen, 21, are accused of killing Kevin Barkley Jones and Kendall Rachell Rice, both 24. Jones and Rice were found dead April 4 at their apartment at Club at the Creek Apartments, 701 W. Sycamore St. Both had been shot, according to Fayetteville police. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Decay but not Westeen. An attorney for Decay filed a motion Monday in Washington County Circuit Court arguing that the Arkansas capital murder statute unfairly constrains the discretion of the jury, that the method of execution, lethal injection, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and that there is a disparity in the application of the death penalty between blacks and whites. Decay is black and Westeen is white. Julie Tolleson argues that the statute does not allow jurors to show mercy if they find aggravating circumstances. Tolleson also argues the statute is unconstitutional because it fails to give jurors any definition by which they can differentiate between capital murder and the lesser included charges of 1st- or 2nd-degree murder. The defense also argues that it is unfair to seek the death penalty against Decay but not Westeen when the charges stem from the same circumstances. Lethal injection, according to the motion, subjects the condemned to an unacceptable risk of pain and suffering and there remains a pending challenge in federal court. The alternative method, electrocution, also involves the possibility of unnecessary pain or lingering death, according to the motion. Finally, Tolleson argues the death penalty is not fairly applied. The motion contends that there is a clear pattern showing the death penalty is more likely for a defendant accused of killing a white person. Police say Decay, also known as "TuTu," admitted shooting Jones and Rice in their apartment, and Westeen admitted driving Decay to the apartment with a gun. The killing was allegedly over an unresolved dispute, police said. Both Westeen and Decay pleaded not guilty to charges of being an accomplice to capital murder. Both men are being held without bond at the Washington County Detention Center. Both men currently have an April 21 trial date, but the cases have been severed so one will be reset. (source: Springdale Morning News) USA: 3-in-5 Americans Back Death Penalty A majority of adults in the United States is supportive of capital punishment, according to a poll by Harris Interactive. 63 % of respondents believe in the death penalty, down 6 points since 2003. Conversely, 30 % are opposed to capital punishment, up 8 points in 5 years. Since 1976, 1,099 people have been put to death in the United States, including 42 last year. More than 1/3 of all executions have taken place in the state of Texas. 12 states and the District of Columbia do not engage in capital punishment. Earlier this month, Missouri governor Matt Blunt filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to voice his support for imposing the death penalty for the sexual abuse of minors. Blunt wrote: "Violent sex offences against children are unspeakable crimes, crimes so horrific that they defy comprehension and demand harsh punishment." 5 U.S. statesLouisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texasallow capital punishment for child rape. Polling Data Do you believe in capital punishment, that is the death penalty, or are you opposed to it? 2008 2003 Believe in it ---- 63% ---- 69% Opposed to it ---- 30% ---- 22% Not sure / Refused ---- 7% ---- 9% (source: Angus Reid Global Monitoring----Harris Interactive ----Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,010 American adults, conducted from Feb. 5 to Feb. 11, 2008. No margin of error was provided) ************************ States win over President on criminal law issue The Supreme Court, in a sweeping rejection of claims of power in the presidency, ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the President does not have the authority to order states to relax their criminal procedures to obey a ruling of the World Court. The decision came in the case of Medellin v. Texas (06-984). Neither a World Court decision requiring U.S. states to provide new review of criminal cases involving foreign nationals, nor a memo by President Bush seeking to enforce the World Court ruling, preempts state law restrictions on challenges to convictions, the Court said in a ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. The decision, aside from its rebuff of presidential power, also treats the World Court ruling itself as not binding on U.S. states, when it contradicts those states criminal procedure rules. The international treaty at issue in this dispute the Vienna Convention that gives foreign nationals accused of crime a right to meet with diplomats from their home country is not enforceable as a matter of U.S. law, the Roberts opinion said. And the World Court ruling seeking to implement that treaty inside the U.S. is also not binding, and does not gain added legal effect merely because the President sought to tell the states to abide by the decision, the Court added. The ruling also is a defeat for 51 Mexican nationals who won a World Court decision in 2004, finding that U.S. states had denied them their consular access rights and advising the U.S. government to take steps to enforce the ruling. In the specific case, Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin, sought to rely on both the World Court decision and the Bush memo to reopen his case, claiming that he was never given access to any Mexican diplomat while his case was going through Texas state courts. The Bush Administration did not agree with the World Court ruling, and, in fact, withdrew from the international protocol that gave the World Court the authority to enforce the Vienna Convention. Even so, Bush issued a memo in February 2005, agreeing that the U.S. would seek to obey the World Court, and he told the states involve to "give effect" to that tribunals decision. The case thus came to the Court as a major test of presidential authority, in seeking to enforce treaty obligations, to override contradictory state criminal procedure rules. In that test, the presidency clearly lost. (source: SCOTUS Blog) ********************************* Consensus on Counting the Innocent: We Can't A couple of years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in a Supreme Court death penalty decision, took stock of the American criminal justice system and pronounced himself satisfied. The rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is, he said, less than 3/100 of 1 % .027 %, to be exact. That rate, he said, is acceptable. "One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly," he wrote. "That is a truism, not a revelation." But there is reason to question Justice Scalia's math. He had, citing the methodology of an Oregon prosecutor, divided an estimate of the number of exonerated prisoners, almost all of them in murder and rape cases, by the total of all felony convictions. "By this logic," Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a response to be published in this year's Annual Review of Law and Social Science, "we could estimate the proportion of baseball players who've used steroids by dividing the number of major league players who've been caught by the total of all baseball players at all levels: major league, minor league, semipro, college and Little League and maybe throwing in football and basketball players as well." Joshua Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor cited by Justice Scalia, granted the logic of Professor Gross's critique but not his conclusion. "He correctly points out," Mr. Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., said of Professor Gross, "that rape and murders are only a small percentage of all crimes, but then has absolutely no real data to suggest there are epidemic false convictions in, say, burglary cases." What the debate demonstrates is that we know almost nothing about the number of innocent people in prison. That is because any effort to estimate it involves extrapolation from just 2 numbers, neither one satisfactory. There have been 214 exonerations based on DNA evidence, almost all of them in rape cases, according to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law. But there is no obvious control group to measure these exonerations against. Virginia, though, has discovered thousands of closed rape files from 1973 through 1988, many with untested biological evidence. DNA testing of a preliminary sample of 31 of them yielded two wrongful convictions. Those numbers are too small to be reliable, of course, but they would suggest a false conviction rate of 6 %. Even that rate may be low, said Shawn Armbrust, the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project. Ms. Armbrust said investigators in Virginia were able to get results in only 22 of the 31 tests, suggesting a false conviction rate of 9 %. The other important number comes from death row. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 127 death row inmates have been exonerated. Here we do have a control group. There have been more than 7,000 death sentences since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. But exoneration in the capital context is a funny concept. It suggests complete vindication, but its real meaning is generally narrower. DNA evidence in a rape case can provide something like categorical proof of innocence. Death row exonerations, on the other hand, can be based on all sorts of things, like, say, prosecutorial misconduct. In other words, it is possible to wrongfully convict a guilty defendant. Mr. Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor cited by Justice Scalia, says the number of authentic death row exonerations is more like 30. Many people exonerated in the legal sense, he said, in fact committed the crime but could not be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Professor Gross thinks the number of guilty people released from death row is very small. Professor Gross concluded that the false conviction rate for death row inmates has ranged from 2.3 % to 5 %. Were even the lower end of that range applied to people who received prison sentences of a year or more in the last 3 decades, he wrote, it would suggest that about 185,000 innocent people have served hard time. But extrapolating from capital crimes to felonies generally is problematic whatever the number of exonerations. On the one hand, there is some reason to think that homicide cases yield what Justice David H. Souter, dissenting in that same death penalty decision 2 years ago, called "an unusually high incidence of false conviction, probably owing to the combined difficulty of investigating without help from the victim, intense pressure to get convictions in homicide cases and the corresponding incentive for the guilty to frame the innocent." On the other, as Justice Scalia responded, capital cases "are given especially close scrutiny at every level." We are left with an uneasy agreement between Professor Gross and Mr. Marquis on at least one point. "Once we move beyond murder and rape cases," Professor Gross wrote, "we know very little about any aspect of false conviction." But a few general lessons can be drawn nonetheless. Black men are more likely to be falsely convicted of rape than are white men, particularly if the victim is white. Juveniles are more likely to confess falsely to murder. Exonerated defendants are less likely to have serious criminal records. People who maintain their innocence are more likely to be innocent. The longer it takes to solve a crime, the more likely the defendant is not guilty. Justice Scalia, for his part, focused on what he saw as good news. "Reversal of an erroneous conviction," he wrote, "demonstrates not the failure of the system but its success." (source: Adam Liptak, New York Times) CALIFORNIA: Penalty phase begins for man convicted of murdering Cal Poly student Jurors began to hear evidence this morning to help them decide whether a convicted killer deserves the death penalty or life in prison without parole for cutting the throat of a 20-year-old college student. During a trial last week in Pomona Superior Court, the same jury convicted James Winslow Dixon of murdering Christina Burmeister. The jury also found that the murder occurred during a robbery and kidnapping, which makes Dixon eligible for capital punishment. Dixon snatched Burmeister in 2001 while the Cerritos woman was on her way to a fraternity party in Pomona. He and two other people took her to a bank in Montclair and withdrew $400 from her account. They then drove her to Highway 39 above Azusa, where Dixon slit her throat. A sheriff's deputy found the woman's body inside her new pickup truck parked in a turnout. In deciding which penalty to recommend, the jury can consider not only the circumstances of Burmeister's murder, but several other factors, including the impact of her death on her family, Dixon's criminal history and any other bad acts he's done throughout his life. During opening statements of the penalty phase proceeding this morning, Deputy District Attorney Cathryn Brougham ran through a list of reasons prosecutors would provide during the hearing to show Dixon deserves the death penalty. She told jurors the decision to recommend the ultimate sentence may not be easy, but it will be appropriate. "The ultimate crime calls for the ultimate punishment," she said. The prosecutor began her presentation by reminding jurors of a few nasty details about how Dixon took Burmeister's life, such as the way he tied her hands and made her lie face down in the backseat of her truck as he took her into the mountains to kill her. She said Dixon made a series of "cold, evil decisions" throughout that night to torment and executed the young woman. "This was a planned out attack on this innocent girl," she said. Later in the presentation, the prosecutor told jurors the murder left Burmeister's relatives with a gaping hole in their lives. She showed jurors a series of photographs of Burmeister as she grew up, from her baptism to school graduations to family vacations. The pictures showed a vibrant young woman, smiling, happy and beautiful. "That's a little bit of the life of Christina Burmeister," Brougham told jurors. The prosecutor, however, had one photo remaining. She closed the slideshow with a macabre photo of Burmeister's lifeless face as she laid on a coroner's table. "And this is what he did," Brougham said. Brougham told jurors that evidence during the penalty phase will also show Dixon has lived a life of crime since at least 1987, when he was a high school student who chased after another student with a knife. In 1992 and 1993 he was convicted of possession for sale of drugs. In 1995 and 1997 he was convicted of possession of gun by a felon, the prosecutor said. In February of 1996 he sodomized another inmate in prison, she said. In 1997, the same year he raped 2 women inside a West Covina apartment, he also pulled a gun on a policeman in an Ontario park. And he also was involved in the battery of another inmate last year while he was in jail awaiting trial in this case, she said. "He is a dangerous man who victimizes other people," she said. Dixon's attorneys did not make an opening statement. Testimony will continue throughout the day. (source: Daily Bulletin) ***************** Death penalty upheld in murder case despite new evidence California high court says inmate can bring a new petition to try to prove his innocence in a 1989 killing. The California Supreme Court upheld the death penalty Monday for a man whose professed innocence was bolstered late last year by the discovery of a gun buried in mud in a Modesto field. Though unanimously rejecting Dennis Lawley's constitutional challenge of his conviction and death sentence, the state high court said he could once again try to prove his innocence by presenting a new petition based on the discovery of the gun. Lawley was sentenced to death for hiring 2 men in 1989 to kill Kenneth Stewart, a recently released prisoner who had been robbing drug dealers. The triggerman, Brian Seabourn, has admitted shooting Stewart but said he did so on orders from the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang. Seabourn said he buried the murder weapon in a field near the scene of the crime. Seabourn's statement contradicted weapons experts, who testified the bullets that killed Stewart came from a gun found in Lawley's home. "Seabourn's testimony may point to Lawley's innocence if believed, but there is a substantial question whether it should be believed," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote in Monday's ruling. Scott F. Kauffman, Lawley's lawyer, received state funds last year to search the field where Seabourn said he buried the weapon nearly two decades ago. The gun Kauffman found in December matched Seabourn's description but was too old and rusted to be tested against the murder bullets. The discovery also came too late to influence the court in Monday's decision. Kauffman is expected to argue in a new petition that the weapons experts were wrong when they identified Lawley's gun as the murder weapon and that the discovery of another gun in a location pinpointed by Seabourn proves that he was telling the truth. (source: Los Angeles Times) PENNSYLVANIA: Death Penalty Reverend Walter Everett was one the speakers to take part in a "Voices of Hope, Agents of Change" tour that made a stop at Widener School of Law in Dauphin County. He's touring the country trying to educate the public about how he says the death penalty negatively affects society. Everett's son was shot to death more than 20-years ago. He says he not only forgave the man who killed his son but also testified on his behalf. He believes the death penalty does everything but discourage acts of violence. Rev. Walter Everett: Dauphin County: "We're hoping that people will begin to see that violence only breeds more violence and when the state becomes violent it only encourages other people to be violent as well." Harold Wilson, the 122nd person in the US to be exonerated from death row, also spoke today. It was just 1 week ago when a jury overturned his conviction. (source: CBS News)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, MD., ILL., ARK., USA, CAL., PENN.
Rick Halperin Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:58:16 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
