April 5
CALIFORNIA:
DA seeks death penalty in east Modesto triple homicide
The Stanislaus County district attorney's office is seeking the death penalty
against 3 of 7 men indicted in the shooting deaths of 3 people last year inside
an east Modesto home.
Deputy District Attorney Marlisa Ferreira announced the decision to seek the
death penalty during a continued arraignment hearing this afternoon in
Stanislaus County Superior Court.
Ricky Javier Madrigal, Robert Palomino, Juan Jose Nila, Armando Osegueda, Jose
Osegueda Jr., Richard Tyrone Garcia and Joseph Luis Jauriqui have been charged
with 3 counts of premeditated murder, 1st-degree burglary and participating in
a criminal street gang.
The DA is seeking the death penalty against Armando Osegueda, Garcia and
Jauriqui. Ferreira said the death penalty would not be sought against the other
suspects.
The defendants are accused of participating in the March 3, 2012, killings of
16-year-old David Siebels, 19-year-old Alyxandria Tellez and 31-year-old Edward
Joseph Reinig inside a home on McClure Road across from Creekside Golf Course.
The slayings, officials have said, are connected to the alleged torture of a
19-year-old woman about a month before the murders. That woman later was the
only survivor in the attack inside the McClure Road home.
The defendants face enhancements, alleging they used a gun and committed the
crime for the benefit of a street gang. They face special circumstances in
connection with a multiple murder committed during a burglary, and being active
participants in a criminal street gang.
Authorities have said the men are known Nortenos.
Garcia and Armando Osegueda have been charged in the indictment with torture,
assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment. Garcia also is charged
with spousal abuse and enhancements of inflicting great bodily injury, using a
knife and a gun and committing the crimes while out on bail.
(source: Modesto Bee)
*************************
DA: Murder Trial Begins Monday for 3 Former Marines; Kevin Cox, 25, Emrys John,
23, and Tyrone Miller, 25, are being tried for murder in the October 2008
deaths of a Marine sergeant and his wife in their French Valley home.
Opening statements are slated to begin Monday in the trial of 3 of 4 former
U.S. Marines charged with the 2008 murders of another Marine and his wife in
their French Valley home.
Kevin Cox, 25, Emrys John, 23, and Tyrone Miller, 25, have each been charged
with 2 counts of murder with special circumstances including murder during the
commission of a burglary, robbery and rape by instrument, as well as double
murder.
Nearly 5 years ago - in October 2008 - Marine Sgt. Jan Pietrzak, 24, and his
wife, Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were found brutally murdered in their home
in French Valley, in the unincorporated area of Winchester near Murrieta.
Both victims were found bound and had been shot in the head, according to a
statement issued Thursday by the Riverside County District Attorney's Office
about the upcoming trial proceedings.
Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach is seeking the death penalty
for the trio, as well as for a 4th defendant, Kesaun Sykes.
Sykes' case has been severed from the others - in 2011, Sykes' attorneys
claimed he was mentally unfit to stand trial, but a jury subsequently found
that he was competent - and has a trial readiness conference scheduled for Aug.
2 for his separate trial.
Defendants Cox, John, and Miller all worked with Sgt. Pietrzak at one time as
Marines while stationed at Camp Pendleton, according to the statement sent by
John Hall, spokesperson for the DA's office.
"It is believed that all 4 defendants went to the home to rob the victims,
forced their way inside, and then physically assaulted Pietrzak, sexually
assaulted Jenkins-Pietrzak, and murdered both victims," Hall stated.
The trial is being held at the Hall of Justice in Riverside.
Deputy District Attorney Daniel DeLimon of the Homicide Unit is prosecuting the
case.
(source: Murrieta Patch)
WASHINGTON:
Man pleads not guilty to murdering grandparents
The man accused of murdering his elderly grandparents hours after his release
from a Washington state prison has pleaded not guilty. Michael "Chadd" Boysen,
26, appeared in a King County courtroom Thursday to be arraigned on 2 counts of
aggravated murder. Prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to seek the death
penalty in the case.
Boysen is accused of strangling Robert Taylor, 82, and Norma Taylor, 80,
shortly after the couple picked him up from the correctional complex in Monroe,
where he served 9 months for attempted burglary.
Their bodies were found in the closet of a spare bedroom in their Renton home
on March 9.
According to court documents, Boysen stole thousands of dollars in cash, credit
cards and jewelry from the home. Several items, including Robert Taylor's
wedding band, were later pawned at AC Coins in Kent.
Detectives believe Boysen checked into the Extended Stay America in Tukwila on
March 10, but left before deputies were tipped off to his location on March 11.
On the morning of March 12, a clerk at the Westshore Oceanfront Suites in
Lincoln City, Ore., called 911 to report that a man using the name "Michael
Chadd Boysen," checked in the night before. After a 10-hour standoff, Boysen
was taken into custody at the motel and hospitalized for several self-inflicted
cuts.
(source: mynorthwest.com)
USA (IOWA):
Death penalty retrial delayed
The upcoming death penalty retrial for Angela Johnson, convicted in five
drug-related slayings, will be delayed while prosecutors appeal rulings
limiting potential evidence.
Proceedings were scheduled to begin June 3 in Sioux City, but U.S. District
Court Judge Mark Bennett suspended the retrial indefinitely Tuesday.
Johnson, 49, of Klemme, became the first woman sent to federal death row in
decades after jurors gave her 4 death sentences. Their verdict followed a trial
in 2005 for Johnson's role in what amounted to the executions of 5 people.
Greg Nicholson, 34, and Terry DeGeus, 32, 2 former drug dealers, were set to
testify against Honken in a federal court case when the disappeared. Lori
Duncan, 31, was 1 of the drug dealer's girlfriends. She and her 2 children,
Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6, also disappeared.
Authorities recovered the bodies in 2000 near Mason City after Johnson
confessed to a jailhouse informant.
Bennett overturned the sentences last year after finding Johnson's defense
inadequate for failing to present evidence about her mental state that might
have convinced jurors to spare her life. The judge did not overturn the
convictions, however, saying Johnson was clearly guilty.
In January, Bennett ruled the retrial would be limited to a "penalty phase,"
meaning a new set of jurors will decide only whether Johnson should be punished
with death.
Bennett also ruled he will instruct jurors, if even one does not want to impose
the death penalty, he will sentence Johnson to life in prison without parole.
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids plan to take up the
rulings with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They argue the rulings
unfairly bar prosecutors from telling jurors that if Johnson is not executed,
she could someday be released from prison.
Iowa does not have the death penalty. Federal prosecutors sought capital
punishment because the case involved killing federal witnesses and children.
Jurors also sentenced Honken to death, and he remains on death row in Terre
Haute, Ind.
Johnson is an inmate at a medical center in Fort Worth, Texas.
(source: Associated Press)
**************************
Death penalty film-makers hit the road to profile America's exonerees;London
documentary crew are driving across the US to tell the stories of 10 former
death row inmates who have been exonerated - and to highlight the injustices of
capital punishment.
They belong to a very small and extremely unusual club that has only 142
members. The factor that unites them is that they have all experienced
America's capital punishment system at first hand, yet lived to tell the tale.
This is the club of death row exonerees. Its members include Kirk Bloodsworth,
the first death row inmate to be exonerated by DNA evidence in 1993 and now an
anti-death penalty campaigner of national renown.
Then there is Damon Thibodeaux, who walked free last September, an innocent
man, from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana where he spent 15 years in
the shadow of the death chamber.
And the only woman in this peculiar group, Sabrina Butler, who was wrongfully
sentenced to death by Mississippi in 1990 for killing her 9-month-old son,
compounding the grief of a teenaged mother who had lost her first born, as it
later transpired, to liver failure.
Now a pair of film-makers from London are planning to profile this exceptional
club of death row exonerees in a creative experiment that will see them travel
4,500 miles across the US in an RV, in which they will drive, eat, sleep and
edit as they go in what they hope will be a ground-breaking interactive
documentary project. They are calling it One for Ten - after a simple but
harrowing fact: that since the death penalty resumed in America after a hiatus
in 1976, there have been 1,323 executions and 142 exonerations.
In other words, for every 10 prisoners executed, another one has been allowed
to walk free because the death sentence was found to be unreliable.
"Whether or not you agree with the death penalty, that's an outrageous level of
failure," says Will Francome, who will be hitting the road next month [April]
along with his film-making partner Mark Pizzey. "The consequences of such
glaring flaws are horrifying - if you get the death penalty wrong it's
irreversible."
The 30ft RV will embark from New York on 11 April, and end up in Las Vegas on
18 May. The idea is that in the course of five intense weeks, the team will
meet and make an internet film about 10 exonerees, each one representing a
different critical problem with the application of the death penalty in
America.
Through the individual narratives of the 10, Francome and Pizzey hope to
highlight the many ways in which US capital punishment fails to deliver on its
promise of only putting onto death row those who are guilty beyond even the
minutest doubt. The 10 have been carefully chosen to elucidate those problems -
from misidentification of suspects, to false and coerced confessions,
prosecutorial misconduct, atrociously poor representation by defence lawyers
and bad forensic science.
The project's creators hope that in addition to highlighting the injustices of
capital punishment, One for Ten will also break new ground in terms of
documentary film making. They have devised the road trip as an interactive
process in which individuals can participate from start to finish.
They have crowd-funded the operation, raising 18,000 pounds ($27,500) from web
donations and a further 14,000 pounds ($21,300) from companies and foundations
- enough to get the RV rolling, though they are still hoping to raise a further
50,000 pounds ($76,000) to fulfill all their creative ambitions.
Musicians and animators have also contacted the production team offering their
services having read about the project on the web.
They've added a sprinkling of star power, with Danny Glover narrating the pilot
and Jeremy Irons also on board for some of the 10 live films. The filming
proper will kick off on 12 April in Philadelphia with Kirk Bloodsworth as
subject, and at that point One For Ten will invite people following them on
social media to submit questions to the exonerees and give feedback on how they
think the films are going.
It's a tight and gruelling schedule. The pair aim to film, edit and post 2
films each week, allowing them to profile 10 exonerees over the five weeks of
the project. That gives them 3 or 4 days to make each 5-minute film from
scratch, during which time they not only have to meet and film each subject,
but also have to drive long distances - from Philadelphia to Ohio, Illinois,
Minessota, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico - editing as
they go.
Once the 5 weeks are done, and each film is posted, Francome and Pizzey intend
to hold a Google hangout to allow people to discuss the films that have gone
up. At the end of the 5 weeks they will make all the unedited footage they have
collected available for free use on a digital archive.
"We wanted to see what we could do with the documentary form that was different
from the traditional conversation," says Pizzey. "We've done a lot of TV and
film work in the past that was very 1-way, and this time we're seeing what
happens if you make it much more interactive."
But in the last analysis, this will be a project about the iniquities of the
ultimate punishment. As Ray Krone - the 100th death row exoneree, who was
released in 2002 on DNA evidence having spent 10 years awaiting execution -
puts it in the pilot film: "Being on death row, seeing what happens, seeing the
inability of our system to get it right, to really get to the truth, to have a
punishment that you can't reverse so that when you find out you made a mistake
that's just unacceptable."
The Guardian will be joining One For Ten on the road to follow the progress of
the project.
(source: The Guardian)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
