May 6
OKLAHOMA:
Death penalty sought in Pottawatomie Co. slaying
A prosecutor has announced he will seek the death penalty for an 18-year-old
Asher man charged in the shooting death of an East Central University student.
Jerrod Murray is charged with 1st-degree murder in the Dec. 6 shooting death of
18-year-old Generro Sanchez of Stuart. Both were students at ECU in Ada at the
time.
District Attorney Richard Smothermon said in court papers that Sanchez begged
for his life before Murray shot him in the head twice as Sanchez was driving
Murray to a nearby store. The document says the car the 2 were in crashed into
a tree and Murray then shot Sanchez a 3rd time in the head.
Murray has pleaded not guilty.
A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for Friday in Pottawatomie
County District Court.
(source: Associated Press)
***************
Willie Manning, Mississippi Death Row Inmate, Denied DNA Test; Execution Set
For Tuesday
Convicted double murderer Willie Jerome Manning, who has been on death row for
nearly 2 decades, is set to be executed Tuesday, after being denied a DNA test
that could save him from the execution chamber, the New York Times reports.
In a 5-to-4 decision in April, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that there
was "conclusive, overwhelming evidence of guilty" and that DNA tests would not
"preclude his participation in the crimes," according to the Times.
But in a dissenting opinion Justice James W. Kitchens argued that "whatever
potential harm the denial seeks to avert is surely outweighed by the benefits
of ensuring justice by the scientific analysis of all the trace evidence."
Dov Fox of the Georgetown University Law Center says that "no physical evidence
has ever linked Manning to the crime," in a Huffpost blog.
The 44-year-old black man was convicted in the 1992 kidnapping and murder of
Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller, 2 white college students.
According to the Jackson Free Press:
One of the victims, Tiffany Miller, was shot twice in the face at close range.
One leg was out of her pants and underwear, and her shirt was pulled up. Her
boyfriend John Steckler's body had abrasions that occurred before he died, and
he was shot once in the back of the head. A set of car tracks had gone through
the puddles of blood and over Steckler's body.
Dov points out that a jury convicted Manning based largely on the testimony of
a cousin of the defendant and a jailhouse informant, who claimed Manning
confessed to him.
"The cousin had accused 2 other men before Manning, however, and the informant
has since recanted altogether," Dov writes.
The Washington Post points out that the justice department admits to flaws in
forensic testimony as part of a broad review of the FBI's handling of evidence
in the 1980s and 1990s.
In urging Gov. Phil Bryant to issue a stay of execution, Death Penalty News
pointed out that the tests could provide the identity of a possible 2nd
perpetrator who has never been caught and put to rest questions over
now-outmoded forensic practices, used at the time of the investigation.
"Since 1994, Manning has been seeking DNA testing of the rape kit, fingernail
scrapings that were recovered from both victims and hairs recovered from the
scene," the blog states.
In an Atlantic article entitled, "A Ghost of Mississippi: The Willie Manning
Capital Case," Andrew Cohen says the specters of racial bias, a faulty
confession and untested scientific evidence have haunted this case.
(source: Huffington Post)
CALIFORNIA:
Graveside vigil held for man killed by Jodi Arias; Travis Alexander, slain by
his ex-girlfriend in 2008, was born, raised and laid to rest in Riverside
About 100 family and friends held a prayer vigil for former Rubidoux resident
Travis Alexander, whose ex-girlfriend Jodi Arias is on trial in Phoenix in a
murder case that has become a tabloid and cable TV sensation.
Alexander, who was born in Riverside, was slain in June 2008 at his home in
suburban Phoenix. He suffered nearly 30 knife wounds, a slit throat and a
gunshot in the forehead. Arias' palm print was found in blood at the scene.
The jury got the case Friday, May 5, after hearing weeks of evidence and the
defendant's ever-changing version of events. Deliberations are set to resume
Monday. Arias could face the death penalty if convicted as charged.
"We've been watching the trial for 4 months! This is the day we can come
together and release all that stress," said 43-year-old Lisa Almendarez, of
Menifee, who helped organize Sunday's vigil at Alexander's grave in Riverside's
Olivewood Cemetery.
"Let justice happen," she said. "We'll never have him back. But as long as we
know she can feel the pain of what she did, it'll be satisfying."
Alexander was born in Riverside, graduated from Rubidoux High School and went
on a mission in Colorado for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
then returned to his boyhood home before moving to Arizona and buying a house,
said childhood friend Michelle Coto, of Riverside.
Alexander's parents are dead. He and his siblings were raised by his
grandmother, who died last year and also is buried at Olivewood Cemetery.
Alexander's sister, Tanisha Sorenson, of Redlands, tearfully led the group in
prayer. She called for justice for her brother and offered thanks for the work
of the police and prosecutors involved in the homicide case.
Authorities have tried to prove that Alexander's 32-year-old ex-girlfriend
killed him because she was enraged that Alexander wanted to end their affair
and was preparing for a trip to Mexico with another woman, investigators say.
Arias initially denied any involvement, then later blamed the violence on
masked intruders.
But 2 years after her arrest, she said she killed Alexander in self-defense
when he attacked her after a day of sex.
Alexander grew physically abusive in the months before she killed him, Arias
claimed, though there was no evidence or testimony during the trial to
corroborate her allegations.
During closing arguments, defense attorney Kirk Nurmi acknowledged to the jury
that his client is a liar. But she isn't on trial for lying, he emphasized.
Nurmi tried to sow the seeds of reasonable doubt as he battled for a verdict of
less than 1st-degree murder. Any lesser verdict would save her from facing the
death penalty or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Only the ultimate price, however, would satisfy many of Alexander's supporters.
"He was the victim," said 47-year-old family friend Anita McCall, of Yucaipa.
"He was trapped and seduced and brutally murdered.
"He was a good, good man. At his father's funeral, he was comforting me -
that's the kind of man he was."
(source: Press-Enterprise)
USA:
Wrongfully Convicted Often Find Their Record, Unexpunged, Haunts Them
In Wisconsin, Audrey Edmunds served 11 years in prison in the shaking death of
an infant girl for whom she had been baby-sitting. In 2008, a mountain of new
medical evidence cast so much doubt on the case that a higher court overturned
her conviction and set her free. Leaving prison, Ms. Edmunds hoped that would
be the end of it.
But a few months later, as she applied for a secretarial job with an
office-supply company, her conviction for first-degree reckless homicide popped
up in a background check. Sorry, she was told. She tried to get work with an
airline, but heard a similar rejection.
"I hate it," said Ms. Edmunds, 52, who now lives in northern Wisconsin. "They
put us through enough to begin with. They don't give us any assistance. I'm
glad to be out, but there's got to be more support. I don't like having this
awful nightmare of a cloud hanging over me."
Across much of the country, sealing or clearing a criminal record after a
wrongful conviction is a tangled and expensive process, advocates and former
prisoners say. It can take years of appeals to courts and pleas to governors to
wipe the slate clean. Even then, many felony convictions remain on federal
databases and pop up during background checks or at traffic stops.
Aside from the practical challenges - a criminal record can impede big things
like finding housing and employment, and smaller things like getting a hunting
license - people who have been exonerated say they feel unfairly marked,
branded with a scarlet letter from a justice system that should not have locked
them up in the first place.
"It was destroying my life," said Sabrina Butler, who was sentenced to die in
Mississippi for the 1989 death of her infant son, then exonerated in 1995.
"It's always there."
Clearing a criminal record can take years and cost thousands of dollars in
legal fees, and differs widely state to state. Many require that defendants
return to court to prove their innocence, a higher hurdle than showing that
charges were dismissed or a conviction was overturned. In some states, a
governor's pardon is needed. It can be a complex process, which advocates say
is made even more difficult by a lack of support services for the exonerated.
Ms. Butler said she realized her arrest was still on the books after she failed
a criminal-background check while trying to buy a shotgun. She said she applied
for jobs at restaurants and retailers, and was turned down every time. After
she petitioned the state, her record was expunged last July - 17 years after
she was released.
With hundreds of men and women now freed from prison by exculpatory DNA tests
or successful appeals by advocacy organizations, more states are grappling with
questions of what they owe the wrongfully convicted, and how to prevent former
prisoners from slipping into poverty or back into prison.
A study of 118 exonerated inmates led by Evan Mandery and Amy Shlosberg, two
criminal-justice researchers, found that one-third still had criminal records,
sometimes more than a decade after their release. They found that former
convicts with clean records were less likely to return to prison than those
whose records had not been expunged.
Some states, including New York and Illinois, have a straightforward process
for erasing or sealing criminal records after a wrongful conviction. But legal
researchers say that most state laws are out of date with the recent waves of
exonerations, and require onetime convicts already declared not guilty to once
again prove their innocence.
"Even in the best case, it is difficult to move beyond a prison sentence," Mr.
Mandery and Ms. Shlosberg wrote in their study, which is now under review at
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. "The wrongful conviction serves as
a permanent, undeserved stigma."
Of course, blotting out a criminal record does not solve everything.
Researchers have found that high percentages of the wrongfully convicted slide
into poverty or substance abuse as they struggle to rebuild a life outside
prison. How do you explain a 10-year gap on a resume? How do you answer a
yes-or-no question from a prospective employer asking whether you have ever
been convicted of a felony?
"Employers, if they see a homicide conviction, dismissed or not, they're not
going to get past that," said Saundra Westervelt, an associate professor of
sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who has written
extensively about exonerated death-row inmates. "The conviction is still there.
You're stuck."
In Alabama, Gary Wayne Drinkard said he was pulled over for a routine traffic
stop after being released from prison. His 1995 murder conviction had been
overturned, and a 2nd jury trial found him not guilty. But, he said, the
charges popped up when the officer ran a background check. Mr. Drinkard said he
was held in the squad car for 30 minutes while the police checked out his
story.
"They knew I'd done something wrong," he said. "And here I was on the street."
So far, he has not tried to have his record expunged. "I don't even know how to
file the petition," he said.
Sometimes, the lingering record reflects a court system that views exonerated
defendants as not guilty, but not innocent. In Philadelphia, Vincent Moto spent
a decade behind bars on charges that he and another man had dragged a woman
into a car at gunpoint, robbed her and raped her repeatedly. He was convicted
after the victim identified him as one of her attackers, but DNA testing later
showed that none of the samples from the crime scene had come from Mr. Moto. In
1995 his conviction was vacated and he was freed in 1996.
In the 17 years since, he said the charges have trailed him like a shadow,
frustrating his efforts to get work. He is unemployed and lives on a monthly
disability check from the federal government. But he is behind on property
taxes on his Philadelphia home, and worries that a foreclosure is coming. He
does not sleep much these days.
"It's still on your record," he said. "Who wants to take a chance on someone
who was locked up for 10 1/2 years?"
In 2007, he filed a petition asking that his record be expunged, but
Pennsylvania fought the effort, arguing that based on the victim's testimony,
the state still viewed Mr. Moto as the assailant, even though prosecutors did
not believe they could convict him again. After conflicting rulings from lower
courts, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the charges should stay on
Mr. Moto's record.
(source: New York Times)
_______________________________________________
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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
