Nov. 25 IDAHO: Judge tosses Duncan appeal Defense attorneys charged that the FBI plied Joseph Duncan with milkshakes and gifts to manipulate him into not appealing his death sentence, but a federal judge rejected that charge Monday and tossed out the appeal. Duncan's standy attorneys had filed the appeal without his permission. U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge told Duncan: "The right to appeal is possessed by you and you alone." He noted that Duncan still has until Friday to file an appeal of his death sentence, and he's free to change his mind until that point. Sentenced to death 3 times for the 2005 kidnapping, sexual exploitation and murder of a 9-year-old Coeur d'Alene boy, Duncan is entitled to one review of his death sentence by the federal Court of Appeals. But Duncan, who acted as his own attorney in his capital sentencing trial, said in court Monday, "My choice is not to appeal." He had also filed a letter with the court saying, "If any appeal is initiated on my behalf it is done contrary to my wishes." Judy Clarke, who is leading Duncan's standby legal team, told the court the government had "manipulated" Duncan on his appeal decision, in part by providing him with milkshakes and other enticements during jailhouse visits. FBI Special Agent Michael Gneckow said in court documents that he and another agent have met with Duncan 5 times at his Ada County Jail cell since the death sentences were handed down Aug. 27. Gneckow said he was following up on a written offer Duncan made to prosecutors to answer questions about his 2005 crimes; the first meeting lasted nearly 8 hours, and Duncan told the agents at that time that he'd welcome more such discussions. Lodge said he was making no ruling on the question of whether a 3rd party, such as the standby attorneys, can file an appeal for the defendant. Only the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could address that question, he said. However, he said he's within his authority to dismiss the attorneys' notice of appeal if it had been filed without the defendant's permission. When Clarke disagreed, the judge told her, "I'm confident the 9th Circuit will have answers to each one of your questions," and he adjourned the hearing. If Duncan waives his appeals, his execution likely would come much sooner, because appeals can delay executions by years. In addition to 3 death sentences, Duncan's also been sentenced to 9 life terms in prison for his 2005 crimes, in which his attack on a North Idaho family left 4 people dead. Riverside County, Calif., also is seeking a death sentence against Duncan for a 1997 child abduction and slaying there. (source: Spokesman Review) USA: The Black/Afrikan community and the death penalty "Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty. In Virginia, before the end of slavery, there was only one crime for which a white person could be executed. But there were 66 crimes for which a slave could be executed." - Sis. Angela Davis, 2003 Statistical data is abundant that the criminal justice system, from arrest through sentencing, impacts Black/Afrikan and Latino defendants the harshest, and the death penalty is, of course, no exception.(1) Although some political activists will concede the racist, classist and political aspects of the death penalty in specific cases, we continue to remain uninvolved in the larger struggle to abolish it completely. Black activists must dialogue and challenge that mindset within our ranks, or we continue to risk that far too many of our brothers and sisters - such as Bro. Gregory (Ajamu) Resnover, Bro. Ziyon Yisrayah, Bro. Shaka Sankofa and potentially Bro. Troy Davis, Bro. Mumia Abu-Jamal and many more - will be wiped off of the planet. If we stand against racist oppression, we must fully understand that we are all under potential threat of life - unwritten death - sentences or straight up legalized lynching. We must include the abolition of the death penalty as a major plank of all of our platforms. No more treating capital punishment as a back burner issue and dismissing it as a largely white movement! Most people in the Black/Afrikan community very understandably worry more about our children being killed on the streets than by lethal injection. We are so devastated by government-sponsored drugs, increased violence, murders and heartache that discussions around the uneven application of the death penalty are a glaring non-issue when our people live on the frontlines of these war zones. Each day we hear and read of horror stories that fill us with disbelief, anguish and rage; we all share in the deep sorrow of senseless acts of violence and murder and want to tightly embrace those most closely affected. Many of us want an eye for an eye and so readily identify with being victimized that we even support the executions of juveniles and the mentally disabled in particularly gruesome incidences. It also seems a preposterous topic to raise because most people just cant foresee that any member of our immediate families could ever face a death sentence. But when this system offers to murder on our behalf, we must understand that it carries a double-edged sword: Many may believe in the execution of one, but be horrified at the prospect of the execution of another. Unfortunately, we are not given the luxury to pick and choose once we support state-sanctioned murder. "I must admit that at times I wonder and question the intentions and knowledge of the death penalty activists (abolishers) who are horrified and oppose the killing of human beings, but who are not horrified at the very system in its totality, which renders such biased and unjust sentences upon its citizens and which contributes to the dehumanizing of its citizens. I say in turn that it's not just the death penalty which must be overturned, but the whole institution of criminal justice as we know it must be overturned." - From "What Is a Death Sentence?" by Bro. Adullah Hameen, who was legally lynched by the State of Delaware on May 25, 2001 We can't advocate against the death penalty and expect people to be able to feel where we're coming from without talking about the prison industrial complex in its entirety, the cradle to prison pipeline. While the vast majority of us very definitely agree with addressing the much-needed healing within our collective family and reclaiming our community from violence from within, we must also deal with increased police aggression against our children in the form of violent police terror attacks and their snatching up of our children, some even at elementary school ages! The oppression of the Black community via the criminal justice system and its agents intensifies by the day as prison cells are inhumanely overcrowded and the prison warehouses are bursting at their seams. The police attacks that lead to incarcerations can now be more openly viewed in all their sick glory via the internet with its videos and on-the-scene accounts, putting their hate speech, beatings, shootings and murders on full blast before the world. We are also all too familiar with the massive oversentencing of Blacks vs. their white counterparts, manufactured evidence, tortured confessions, deliberate confusion and lies and even more. Our children are seen as sub-human, easily manipulated, undomesticated and unemployable, sent down a conveyor belt straight to these dungeons and thus insuring the financing of their own encagement. State and private prisons are among the largest employers in many towns and the profiteers are plentiful, including the phone companies and the many, many corporations who provide and receive untold services and benefits from these hellholes. It is mindblowing. Organizers are too often painted as "siding with criminals" when addressing the disparities within the system and at times are even accused of being in denial about inmates' culpability in the commission of crimes. After all, they will argue, they did wrong, they knew they were doing wrong and they should pay! Even though many folks will concede that some captives may be innocent, at least of lesser counts than those with which theyve been charged, and that some belong in drug or psychiatric treatment and not prison, and that of course some are becoming more hardened and callous than when they went in, and that yes some will be raped, beaten, tortured, enslaved for corporate profit while in prison and even killed - the bottom line for many remains that our community cannot be seen as making excuses for crime, a la Bill Cosby. As a result, many of our brothers and sisters will advocate even harsher punishments than the system already has in place and mimic those who would call for the jailing of our children for "crimes" such as wearing sagging pants or violation of noise ordinances. We still yet believe that this system's laws are designed to protect us, when nothing could be further from the truth! When presented with evidence that the death penalty is race- and class-based and not evenly applied, many will respond that yes, it needs to made fair, but it doesn't need to be gotten rid of, not in all cases. Unfortunately, however, this system's very foundation of racism and corruption can never be reformed or "made fair," so it definitely cannot be trusted to determine who lives and who dies! "As I sit here on my bed, exhausted yet full of joy and uncertainty, feeling the affects of seven and a half years of constant chemotherapy, I am reflecting on the day of Sept. 23, 2008, as we entered the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, where I wanted to cry but I could not; I wanted to yell but I could not; I wanted to leave but I could not. Then I watched the expression on my sons face, that for the first time in his 14 years of visiting death row, he witnessed more than 100 SWAT, Tactical Squad officers, corrections officers with dozens of dogs, shotguns in hand, all because the state of Georgia wants to kill his Uncle Troy. I have only seen such force on television from the civil rights era." - from "Silencing our Joy" by Sis. Martina Correia, sister of innocent death row prisoner, Troy Davis, Sept. 25, 2008 When addressing the needs of families of victims of crime, we must include the families of death row inmates. They are among the most underserved and unspoken of as they, too, cope with the tremendous depression suffered by all grief-stricken victims. These families, adults and children, are barely able to function while on the dizzying legal rollercoaster leading up to their family members date with death. Some are treated as pariahs within their own community while struggling to carry on with work and school - simultaneously acting as their loved ones source of emotional and financial support, traveling sometimes incredibly long distances to visit through glass or even by video, gouged by outrageously over-priced phone calls and advocating for these inmates with inadequate legal representatives(2), politricians and god-complexed prison officials. These families are not offered comfort or treated with even the most basic human dignity. Capital punishment is itself premeditated murder! Its about keeping alive this countrys bloodthirsty passion for legalized lynching, a passion which they will fight to feed even in the face of overwhelming innocence, recantations of perjured testimony, even to the point where an unhealthy inmate will be cured just so that they can be healthy enough to be murdered on death day! But how many police officers and/or other officials were given the death penalty for the terrorist murders of 11 members of the MOVE family - men, women and children - when police dropped a BOMB on their home in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985?! How many police officers and/or other officials are given the death penalty for the murders of people in our communities, period? That is unacceptable! Their badges, guns, tasers and titles do not give them the right to murder our people with impunity - on the streets or in their prison death chambers! The good news is that more and more community activists, and most significantly our creative and genius-filled young brothers and sisters, are not only adopting a community-wide view that eclipses the media and societal pressure to be consumed with self and self alone, but even understanding the broader significance of our peoples global struggle for liberation and self-determination! There exists an incredible potential to seize the time and build a strong anti-death penalty contingent within our organizations and/or to make certain that a representative of our groups becomes involved with existing anti-DP organizing in our area, lest we continue to scramble and scurry when emergencies arise. There is an immediate need for education and discussion around the issue of capital punishment and there is an abundance of anti-DP information on and off-line to be disseminated within any gathering of our people. Furthermore, these politricians have to be made to feel that their continued allegiance to capital punishment will negatively impact their careers, and so will anyone else who purports to act as a religious or other type of representative spokesperson for our communities. Addressing police and prison issues is critical to rebuilding grassroots activism in any real and meaningful way, and the issue of state sponsored murder is a crucial part of that. This is the system that far too many of our families are touched by and, as Bro. Hameen wrote, not just the death penalty but "the whole institution of criminal justice as we know it must be overturned." We must make it "un-hip" to be down with the death penalty, particularly amongst our own ranks! ABOLISH THE RACIST, CLASSIST DEATH PENALTY! FORWARD EVER! References (1) From www.deathpenaltyinfo.org: Even though blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes, 80 % of people executed since the death penalty was reinstated have been executed for murders involving white victims. More than 20 % of Black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries. (2) More at www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Bad-Lawyering.php. Please also check www.troyanthonydavis.org, www.onamove.com and www.freemumia.com. (Freedom fighter Sis. Marpessa Kupendua , San Francisco Bay Fighter) VERMONT: Law professor Michael Mello, expert on death penalty, dies Michael Mello, a well-known professor at Vermont Law School, died at his home during the weekend. Mello was a national expert on legal issues surrounding the death penalty and had represented inmates on death row. Mello was also involved in legal and court matters in Vermont. He testified before the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this past summer. Mello also thought about and commented on decisions particularly those decisions involving the Vermont Constitution or the U.S. Constitution made by Vermont and U.S. courts. "He was my colleague for 20 years," Professor Joan Vogel said. "It hasn't really sunk in to me that he isn't here anymore." It was Mello's commitment to advocating for fair treatment of those accused of crimes, especially his death penalty work, that she remembers about him, she added. "He was someone who cared deeply about the criminal justice system and how badly it works most of the time," Vogel said. "Sometimes these clients were not upstanding folks. That was really not the point. The point was whether they are guilty of what they were accused of doing. "He certainly worked tirelessly to try and convince people how often mistakes were made in this system," she said. "He had enormous courage to do that." Mello's humor and his dedication to what he was doing and its serious impact on people's lives made him a good teacher and lawyer, Vogel added. "He had a wonderful sense of irony and humor and to do the kind of work he did you had to have that," Vogel added. "Michael Mello is well known as a prolific writer on the death penalty and criminal law matters, but I will remember him especially for his mentoring friendship for students and his willingness to contribute in myriad ways to the life of Vermont Law School outside the classroom," Jeff Shields, the Dean of the law school, said in a statement. Mello, who lived in White River Junction, died Sunday following a brief illness, according to the law school. The cause of death was not immediately known. Mello, 51, was also an author of several books, including "The Wrong Man" about the 2 decades he spent preventing the execution of Joe Spaziano, a case which, according to the summary of the book, cost Mello any hope of practicing in Florida again. "Most Americans would be horrified at how courts and governors handle death-penalty cases, and this book is more than worth its price for its account of that process," the Washington Post Book World said of that book. Mello also carried on a correspondence with Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski after Kaczynski was in prison. "To some extent at least, I know him," Mello said of Kaczynski in 1999. Mello also wrote a book about Kaczynski's case. In Vermont, Mello was also known for commenting on complex and controversial criminal cases, including the death penalty case of Donald Fell and the Vermont Supreme Court decision to overturn the felony domestic assault case of Michael Brillon because his trial took too long. The decision by the justices was controversial, but Mello said it was not without basis. "We do poorhouse justice here in Vermont. That has been a lurking crisis here really before Howard Dean was governor, but especially during his tenure," Mello said of the Brillon case. Mello is survived by his wife, Deanna, who is a Vermont Law School alumna. (source: Rutland Herald)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----IDAHO, USA, VER.
Rick Halperin Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:14:52 -0600 (Central Standard Time)
