Dec. 11 TEXAS----new death sentence Killer Robert Sparks sentenced to death Convicted murderer Robert Sparks has been sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of his wife and 2 stepsons last year. A Dallas County jury reached its decision this morning after deliberating for 9 1/2 hours over 2 days. Mr. Sparks was convicted last week of killing his wife, Chare Agnew, and stepsons Harold Sublet Jr., 9, and Raeqwon Agnew, 10, in September 2007. Then, he has told police, he raped his 2 stepdaughters, who were 12 and 14 at the time. He tried to justify his actions by telling police and reporters that Ms. Agnew was putting insecticide in his food to poison him and that the boys helped her. Defense attorney Paul Johnson told the jury that his client is not crazy or legally insane, but that he is mentally ill. Psychologists testified that Mr. Sparks, 34, suffers from schizoaffective disorder, paranoid delusions and anti-social disorder. "He don't like me saying that about him," Mr. Johnson said during closing arguments. "You know why? Because he don't believe it." Now that his condition has been diagnosed, Mr. Sparks would not be a continuing threat to society a requirement to spare his life because he'd be on medication while in prison, Mr. Johnson said. Prosecutors called this crime one of the most vicious they had ever seen. "Our sole focus, our sole goal, our sole objective in this case is for... Robert Sparks to be strapped to the gurney and for the drugs to start to flow," said prosecutor Andy Beach. "If this case does not deserve the death penalty, then I don't know one that does," Mr. Beach said. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins presented the final closing argument, a rarity for an elected district attorney in a county the size of Dallas. It was even rarer because of Mr. Watkins' admitted personal concerns about the death penalty. "This is very difficult for me to get up here and ask for you to take a human life, because I value it," said Mr. Watkins. But, Mr. Watkins continued, Mr. Sparks "has been working for this day for 34 years. Reward him and give him what he deserves: the death sentence." (source: Dallas Morning News) PENNSYLVANIA: Death Penalty Shrinking In Pa. A new report out Thursday showed the death penalty is shrinking around the country and in Pennsylvania. The report shows there were 37 executions in 2008, a 40 % drop since the 90s. Most the executions were in the south and in Texas. Pennsylvania has 228 inmates on death row, but none was executed this year. "Not only did it not have any executions, it hasn't had any executions in 30 years, except for people who waived their appeals," said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Nobody who is challenging it has had an execution in Pennsylvania, despite the large death row." Dieter said each death row inmate costs the state $90,000 a year in legal fees, far more than other inmates. (source: WPXI News) USA: Death penalty losing its appeal in U.S. The death penalty could be on the wane in the United States, where a study released Thursday shows death sentences in 2008 are at more than a 3-decade low, and executions the fewest since 1994. The decline comes despite an U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April that lifted a de facto moratorium on executions by upholding the lethal injection process in Kentucky. Death penalty opponents had predicted the ruling would lead to a spike in executions as states "caught up." The report from the Death Penalty Information Center shows Texas remains by far the state that has most applied the death penalty, executing 18. But Ohio distinguished itself by being the only state outside the South to carry out executions - accounting for 2 of the 37 this year in all states. "We were surprised that the surge did not happen," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based centre, which works for the abolition of the death penalty. "Courts, legislatures, and the public are increasingly skeptical about the death penalty, whether those concerns are based on innocence, inadequate legal representation, costs or general feeling that the system isn't fair or accurate." But death penalty expert Richard Bonnie of the University of Virginia said the procedural complexity of setting an execution date means a certain delay was inevitable. "It's just not a process that will happen overnight," he said. More notable as a trend indicator, he said, is the continuing decline in the number of death sentences handed down, since they were not interrupted by the de facto moratorium. The DPIC report projects 2008 will close with 111 death sentences - the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. That translates into steep declines in the rate of sentencing everywhere except in courts under federal jurisdiction, the report adds. "What accounts for this larger trend toward decline in death sentences is that the intensity of public support is less(ening)," Bonnie said. "That's also true among politicians; it's not a big issue in elections now" amid fairly stable crime rates after declines over the past decade. But concentrated public support for the death penalty could rise again if there is a sharp increase in crime rates, Bonnie warned. Beyond Texas and Ohio, there were 4 executions in Virginia, 3 in each of Georgia and South Carolina, 2 in each of Florida, Mississippi and Oklahoma, and 1 in Kentucky. Legal challenges have imposed an effective moratorium in California, which is traditionally known as an execution state. The report says the rise in sentencing under federal jurisdiction comes in the wake of a "greatly expanded" federal death penalty law in 1994. It adds there has been an "emphasis on using the federal law more broadly" since President George W. Bush entered the White House. Among other statistics: executions peaked at 98 in 1999; there were 3,309 prisoners on death row in January this year; the average time spent on death row for those eventually executed grew to 12.7 years in 2007; and public support for the death penalty fell from 71 % in 1999 to 64 % this year. (source: Canwest News Service) ************** Death sentences, executions drop in 2008 The number of executions in U.S. prisons hit a 14-year-low in 2008, continuing a downward trend and coinciding with a drop in juries handing out death sentences, according to a year-end report. The high court ruled in April that lethal injection procedures in Kentucky were constitutional. The Death Penalty Information Center estimates 111 defendants will be sentenced to death this year, the lowest figure since executions were reinstated in 1976. Just 37 people were put to death in 2008, compared with a record amount of 98 executions in 1999. Texas carried out nearly 1/2 of this year's executions, and one state outside the South carried out executions -- Ohio, with 2. No executions are scheduled for the rest of the year. The reduced figures were helped by a de facto Supreme Court moratorium that put off any capital punishment for the first 4 months of 2008. The high court ruled in April that lethal injection procedures in Kentucky were constitutional, lifting an unofficial ban on the procedure that had been in place for about 8 months while the justices considered the appeal. That case involved convicted murderers Ralph Baze and Thomas Bowling, who both remain on death row in that state. Executions resumed nationwide in May. "We were surprised that the surge in executions that we expected after Baze did not happen," said Richard Dieter, Executive Director of DPIC, a non-profit resource organization that opposes capital punishment. "Courts, legislatures and the public are increasingly skeptical about the death penalty, whether those concerns are based on innocence, inadequate legal representation, costs, or a general feeling that the system isn't fair or accurate." It was unclear whether state prosecutors would be more willing to push for capital sentences in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. However, death sentences have declined since the mid-1990s, when states began passing laws making it easier for prosecutors to seek life in prison without parole instead of death. Currently, 36 states and the federal government have the death penalty. New Jersey banned the death penalty this year, and Maryland is set to consider a similar proposal next year. Nebraska's highest court found hanging, the state's sole method of execution, was "cruel and unusual punishment," leaving lawmakers at odds whether to replace it with lethal injection or prohibit executions altogether. However, the U.S. military is moving ahead with executions for the 1st time since 1961. A former U.S. Army soldier was scheduled to die Wednesday at a federal prison in Indiana, but a judge postponed the procedure to allow lawyers to file more appeals. Pvt. Ronald Gray has been on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since 1988. A court-martial panel sitting at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, unanimously convicted him of committing 2 murders and other crimes in the Fayetteville, North Carolina, area and sentenced him to death. President Bush in July approved the execution. In another high-profile case, the Supreme Court in June banned Louisiana's effort to execute child rapists, saying lethal injection should only apply to murderers. Dieter noted the current struggling economy may force more states to look more closely at the costs associated with the death penalty. California, for example, has an especially long mandatory appellate process for condemned prisoners, which can last 2 decades or more. A report by a commission in California estimated $138 million was spent each year prosecuting, incarcerating and handling appeals of the estimated 667 current death row cases, bringing the system "close to collapse." (source: CNN) ************ The religious roots of southern punitiveness The Death Penalty Information Center reports that 37 people will be executed in the United States in 2008, down 12 percent from 42 in 2007 and a 30 % drop from 2006. Are we looking at a gradual erosion of support for the death penalty, or a meaningless statistical blip? The AP report notes that Texas accounted for 1/2 of the executions in 2007 (18 of 37, or 48% of the national total). Thats a big improvement from 2007 when Texas executed 26 people (62%) out of the 42 inmates executed nationally. Unlike most reports on this year's numbers, the AP article notes that nearly all of the execuations inAmerica this year took place in the South. Only 2 non-Southern states, Oklahoma (2) and Ohio (2) performed executions this year. Although Oklahoma was still a dumping ground for displaced native Americans at the end of the Civil War, it was largely populated by Southerners and is sometimes considered a southern state for statistical purposes. But lets not quibble. Of the 1137 executions in the United States since the re-institution of the death penalty in 1976, 935 occurred in southern states. Thats 82%. In recent years, the South has accounted for an even higher percentage of the executions in America. Why are the numbers dropping? Juries in several states (Texas among them) can now hand down a sentence of life without parole. Many jurors will back away from the ultimate penalty if they know a dangerous killer will never be released from custody. I would like to pose another question: Why are southerners so enamored of the death penalty? Track lynching statistics by year and by state between 1882 and 1962 (the beginning and end of the Jim Crow period ) and you will think you are looking at contemporary death penalty stats. Lynching was much more prominent in the South than elsewhere in the United States. Moreover, lynching was far more likely to be used against black victims in the South, especially in the first half of the 20th century. For instance, of the 581 people lynched in this period in the state of Mississippi, 539 were black. In the West, lynching was chiefly used as a form of vigilante frontier justice and most of the victims were white. A similar trend emerges when we consider incarceration rates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2005 the South had a regional incarceration rate of 519 prison inmates per 100,000 population (the numbers rise significantly when jail inmates are included). In the same year, the Midwestern states had an incarceration rate of 386, the rate for the Western states was 378 and for the Northeast it was 314. By international standards, even the Northeastern states are locking people in alarming numbers, but why is the rate of incarceration so much higher in the South? When we consider that the cluster of states around Texas (with an incarceration rate of 691 per 100,000), the numbers skew in a highly punitive direction: Mississippi (660), Oklahoma (652), and Louisiana (797). In this clump of states, the incarceration rate hovers around 700, almost twice the national average. Why? The question becomes more critical when you consider that incarceration rates in Midwestern Red states are virtually the same as in Midwestern Blue states (a tad lower, in fact). Religion, not conservative politics, is the key factor here. There is an tragic correlation between high rates of church attendance and high rates of incarceration, but the folks who attend southern evangelical churches are singularly punitive. In particular, a high concentration of Baptists goes hand-in-hand with multiple executions and an incarceration rate up in the nosebleed region. In the cluster of Red states around Texas, Baptists comprise 37% of the population, compared to 21.8% in the Blue Southern states and around 8% nationally. Incarceration rates in the Blue South (states characterized by a low Baptist count and a vast in-migration of northerners) are considerably lower. How do we account for Southern punitiveness, especially the extreme form on display in and around Texas? I have spent 8 years of my life studying theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 5 of those years (1989-1994) were devoted to an in-depth study of church history with a particular focus on Baptist history in the South. As part of this work I traced the gradual evolution of Baptist attitudes and influence in the southern slave states. Early on, Baptists were low-status commoners in southern states like Virginia where the Church of England was established. This explains why Baptists like John Leland petitioned Thomas Jefferson for a separation of church and state after the Revolutionary War. Initially, most Baptists in the South opposed slavery as something antithetical to biblical religion. But as the South expanded westward after the Louisiana Purchase and slavery became the regions peculiar and defining institution, Baptist attitudes began to change. In 1845, when Baptists split North and South over the issue of slavery, the newly formed Southern Baptist Convention rapturously embraced the virtues of a godly slave society. By the advent of the Civil War, Southern Baptists had moved from condoning slavery to proclaiming its moral superiority to all alternatives. The South was God's Zion largely because it practiced the biblically mandated instituion of slavery. After the holocaust of civil war, the battered South re-organized around the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastors who disagreed with the Jim Crow regime had to find another line of work. I have read hundreds of books by Southern Baptists from the first half of the 20th century. White supremacy was largely assumed, though the indelicate and worldly subjects of slavery and segregation were rarely addressed. Woe to the pastor who addressed the elephant in the room from a progressive perspective. As late as 1972, an employee of the Sunday School Board in Nashville was fired for publishing a picture of black and white children playing together. Segregation died hard. During the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 60s, Southern Baptists were disproportionately represented within the KKK and the white citizens councils. Official pronouncements from the Southern Baptist Convention had a moderate and faintly progressive sound, but the reality in the largely rural and small town Southern Baptist churches was quite different. When Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy sparked a mass shift of southern whites from the Democratic party to the Republicans, Southern Baptists led the way. The disturbing picture at the head of this post popped up when I Googled images of "Southern Religion." I am not suggesting that Baptists are inherently punitive. Nor am I arguing that Baptists were the only southerners to embrace slavery and Jim Crow segregation while opposing the civil rights movement. Baptists simply provide the most illuminating case study. Religion in the slave states reflected the paranoia of the times. Slaves had to be kept into submission, a fact that encouraged runaways. Fear of insurrection was constant, particularly in regions where white freemen were outnumbered by black slaves. During the Jim Crow period, lynching was used to enforce white supremacy. This constant brutality left its mark on the brand of southern evangelical religion that provided a theological justification, and later a twisted spiritual celebration, of slavery. How do you preach "whosoever will may come," in the heart of the Jim Crow South? Very carefully. It is hard to preach grace to people you regard as subhuman. A turn-or-burn religion based on the crude juxtaposition of heavenly bliss and hellish torment fit the spiritual needs of the slave states. It was essential that religion be utterly divorced from politics and social p0licy. The profane elephant in the room had to be ignored at all costs. The hyper-spirituality of southern religion has little to do with evangelical theology. In the North, as in England, evangelicals were frequently at the heart of the progressive movement. But in the slave states, the church was the piper and the wealthy planter class called the tune. These brutal facts of history gave southern evangelicalism a disembodied, anti-incarnational, and schizophrenic character that persists to this day. Oddly, the punitive cast of southern evangelicalism is more apparent in the courthouse than in the churchhouse. Southern attitudes are changing. The crude racial bigotry of the Jim Crow period is dying fast (the proliferation of noose hangings and hate groups notwithstanding). But the paranoia and punitiveness of the Old South lives on in the juryroom. Fear of the other, a stark line of separation between the saved and the damned, and a deep-seated fear of the angry black man translate into support for the death penalty and mass incarceration. I am not advocating that southerners turn their backs on evangelical religion. Quite to the contrary; the South needs a revival of a radically biblical evangelicalism freed from the shackles of cultural captivity. As a practical matter, support for slavery and segregation meant the abandonment of biblical grace and justice. That's the problem. Once the disease is diagnosed, the cure is obvious. The South will find its salvation in a back-to-the-Bible revival of religion. (source: Friends of Justice) ********************** This article, "Executing Human Rights: The Death Penalty in the United States" was published on December 10th in the ACLU publication, Human Rights Begin At Home. It is available on the ACLU website at http://www.udhr60.org/executing_human_rights.pdf. Authors, Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, and Christopher Hill, State Strategies Coordinator, are with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. ARIZONA: 9th Circuit Considers Case of Oldest Man on Death Row in U.S. We wrote about Viva Leroy Nash, the character shown below, a few weeks ago. Mainly, we took a hard look at his case because, at 93, he's the oldest man on death row in the United States. We pointed out that, despite being sentenced way back in 1983 to die, Mr. Nash never will be executed for the brutal robbery-murder he committed inside a west Phoenix coin shop. Nash has been on the Row at the Arizona Department of Corrections in Florence for more than a quarter-century. But no one in his or her right mind would suggest that, someday, the government will strap this "fossil" (as one of Nash's attorneys calls him) to a gurney and fill his body with lethal chemicals. Yet, Nash's appellate case continues. Up in San Francisco on Monday, a 3-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (one step below the U.S. Supreme Court) heard from one of the Phoenix attorneys representing Nash, and an assistant Arizona Attorney General. That lawyer, Paula Harms, told the panel that "the ability to communicate rationally with your attorney is absolutely crucial to the relationship. When a client's mental illness is of such severity that this rational communication cannot take place, the attorneys cannot do their job." She claimed that Nash is so mentally incapacitated by now that he can't help her with his latest appeal even if he wanted to. Harms explained that she needs Nash's help to prove her contention that Arthur Hazelton Jr., the murderer's trial attorney in 1983, was pathetic in his representation during the trial and before sentencing. She noted that Nash never has had a court hearing on the state or federal levels on the "ineffective assistance of counsel" issue. Our reporting on the case showed that Harms' point on Hazelton's lack of diligence in the case is well-taken. However, Nash surely would have landed on death row for the robbery-murder (the victim was 23-year-old Greg West) at a west Phoenix coin shop even with the best barrister this side of the Pecos. "He's not going to be any help to me at a hearing," Harms said of Nash, referring to her client's age, physical infirmities, and alleged serious mental illness. Assistant attorney general Jeff Zick argued that "based on what I've seen so far, I believe that Mr. Nash...has the ability to rationally communicate at this point." One of the judges asked Zick, "He is quite elderly, is that correct?" "He is 93 years old," the prosecutor replied. "He's had some health issues that I'm aware of." Harms said that, beyond his myriad medical issues, Nash has been diagnosed with a delusional disorder that long has rendered him incompetent to assist his counsel, much less to be executed. Perhaps. But on October 15, Nash himself wrote to New Times about his articulate attorney, who works at the Capital Habeas Unit of the federal Public Defender's Office. "She is a highly intelligent lady," Nash wrote of Ms. Harms. "Doesn't trust outsiders which is a required professional trait. Her group has the official federal judicial authority to take over capital cases where judicial doubt is seen and proceed to handle those cases in federal or even international courts, seeking justice." The word cogent comes to mind. (source: Phoenix New Times)
