Aug. 22
TEXAS:
Law could curb death penalty cases in Texas
Pending capital murder cases----UPSHUR COUNTY
Sarah Haslam, 20
Andrew Norwine, 21
Daniel Jones, 20
GREGG COUNTY
Torry Jamal Reed, 18
Brendan Xavier Douglas, 23
Joshua O'Steven Reese, 32
An area prosecutor says a new state law aimed at keeping innocent people off
death row could end Texas' long reign as a capital punishment powerhouse.
SB 1292, which goes into effect Sept. 1, requires DNA testing of all biological
evidence in death penalty cases. That's a change that one district attorney
says could prove so costly and time consuming that capital punishment falls by
the wayside.
Rusk County District Attorney Micheal Jimerson predicted Tuesday that the law
will create a loophole that makes it too easy to get the death penalty thrown
out or overturned, and it will increase the cost of prosecuting such cases.
"You're (now) being held accountable for testing biological material you can't
see," Jimerson said. "Death is different. Minor mistakes become harmful
mistakes in death penalty cases."
For example, Jimerson said, if 23 samples of biological evidence are tested and
there were actually 24 samples available at the crime scene, a death sentence
could be overturned based on that technicality - even if the 23 samples point
to the defendant.
Application
The bill also applies to trials set after Sept. 1 for which the offense
occurred before that date, meaning the new law could become a hurdle for Upshur
County District Attorney Billy Byrd in prosecuting three capital murder cases.
Sarah Haslam, Daniel Jones and Andrew Norwine are all in the Upshur County jail
under capital murder charges, awaiting trial in the December beating death of
27-year-old Ronnie Joe Gammage.
Because of a gag order, Byrd could not speak specifically about the Gammage
case but said he has thought about how the bill will affect prosecution.
"We have biological evidence in multiple counties starting with a kidnapping
that originated in Gregg County and multiple stops prior to a death occurring
in Upshur County," he said.
Under the new law, Byrd's office will have to send any biological evidence, and
anything that may contain biological evidence, to a forensics lab.
The issue with that, he said, is the state doesn't define what is and isn't
biological evidence.
"Essentially, every piece of evidence will have to be tested," Byrd said, which
could delay the trials more than a year.
"Certainly, that will be the case. We will have to deal with certain delays and
longer waits," Byrd said. It's not uncommon at all for DNA evidence to take
well more than a year now to be processed, he added.
The average turnaround time for DNA testing completed by Department of Public
Safety forensics labs in 2013 was 132 days, said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger.
"We are constantly striving to reduce DNA testing times at DPS labs," he wrote
in an email.
That is no comfort to Gammage's mother, Frankie Ann Gammage, who said state
lawmakers failed to serve justice for victims in passing the bill.
"I can't understand why they would do something like this knowing this is a
capital murder case," she said.
"They are trying to give the criminals more rights than the victims.
"They never gave (my son) a chance, but yet they want every chance they can
get. ... We'll live with it forever, but this makes it harder to live with
because you have to wait for justice."
Death penalty in danger?
Though not a fan of SB 1292, Jimerson said opponents of the death penalty found
the perfect way to frame their argument in a state where capital punishment
always has proved popular among voters.
"The idea you can't argue with. It's a tremendous idea," he said about working
to prevent wrongful convictions and reduce costly appeals. "But the application
is the problem."
DNA testing has exonerated 49 defendants in Texas, according to the Innocence
Project of Texas, many of whom were on death row.
Of the 1,343 inmates executed in the Unites States since 1982, 503 were in
Texas. The state with the the 2nd-most active death penalty is Virginia, where
110 inmates have been executed during the same period, according to the Texas
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
In the old days, Jimerson said, the bill would not be such a hard pill to
swallow because blood and semen were the go-to bodily fluids for DNA testing.
"Blood and semen speak for themselves," he said, noting now that crime scene
investigators will have to collect biological evidence that includes dead skin
cells and sweat that someone may have left on a wall or doorknob.
The problem with that, Jimerson said, is a fingerprint and dead skin cells
cannot be pinned down to a specific date and time.
"(Murders) don't happen in clean, sterile environments. Some of these crime
scenes aren't sanitary from the beginning," he said, adding that there may be
hundreds of samples - some that have no probative value to the case - being
sent to already backlogged crime labs.
In 2012, DPS completed 5,478 forensic DNA cases, Vinger said, but he was not
able to say how many samples were sent for analysis in that same time period.
Byrd said even if SB 1292 makes it more difficult to prosecute a death sentence
case, his office will continue to try each case on its own merits.
"It's not going to stop us from seeking justice as fit and appropriate in any
particular case," he said.
Kristin Houle, spokeswoman for the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty, said the bill won't bring about the demise of capital punishment,
saying it's been dying slowly for years.
"There has been a 75 % drop in new death sentences handed down since 2003," she
said.
In 1999, the number of new death sentences peaked at 48 and remained in the
double digits until 2009, Houle said. There were 8 death sentences handed down
in 2010, 8 in 2011 and 9 in 2012.
More prosecutors are using their discretionary powers and simply aren't seeking
the death penalty, she said.
"The additional DNA testing is not going to get rid of the death penalty when
it has already been in decline," Houle said. "We already see many counties
seeking not to use the death penalty."
SB 1292, she added, is a way to ensure the criminal justice system is doing
everything in its power not to send the wrong people to death row.
"Anything that delays justice to ensure truth and certainty when a life is at
stake is a good thing for both sides," Houle said.
More tests, more dollars
Proponents have touted the bill as being zero cost to the state, Jimerson said,
but that logic doesn't carry over when more testing is required.
DPS' forensic labs provide testing to law enforcement agencies at no cost, but
Jimerson fears the department's large backlog could force counties to use
private labs, which would significantly increase costs.
Jimerson noted in the past that his office paid from $1,000 to $6,000 per swab
tested at a private lab.
Those costs, he said, would be pushed onto county budgets and paid for by
taxpayers.
"It's going to take the courageous county judge that is going to go to the
people and say 'I need a tax increase to keep the death penalty available,'"
Jimerson said.
The Texas Department of Public Safety crime labs, the state's primary DNA
testing facilities, would have to hire more staff, buy more equipment and build
more labs to keep up with the higher volume of testing, Jimerson said.
Vinger, the DPS spokesman, said it's too early to determine the impact the bill
will have on the agency that operates 13 crime labs across the state
responsible for processing evidence from 254 counties.
"SB 1292 will increase DNA volume, but it is too early to ascertain the
specific impact on DPS labs, as the amount of evidence tested will vary from
case to case," Vinger wrote in an email.
In the past, Jimerson added, district attorneys were told to use their best
judgments because DPS can't test everything.
"Respectfully, the state labs can't handle what they have now," he said, noting
his office waits anywhere from 6 months to a year for DNA test results. "We
don't have the resources. We literally don't have the labs and the
technicians."
Byrd agrees.
"It's not the lab's fault. They have so many cases they are working on," he
said.
Byrd said the bottom line is the bill has passed, and counties will have to
work within its guidelines.
"We've got to work with it. We will work with it," he said.
(source: Longview News-Journal)
****************
Convicted Amarillo killer back in court, looks for new sentence
A convicted Amarillo killer is making another run at having his sentence
changed after jurors sentenced him to death for stabbing another man and
killing him more than 20 years ago.
Brent Ray Brewer was convicted of killing 66-year-old Robert Laminack in 1990.
Although originally sentenced to death, that ruling was overturned in 2007,
reducing his sentence to life in prison. But Brewer was back in court in 2009
for a retrial and new sentencing. For the 2nd time, Randall County District
Attorney James Farren sought the death penalty and for the 2nd time, a jury
agreed.
But even now, in 2013, the case still has not rested with Brewer back in court
this week searching once again to have his sentence reduced.
"The appellant is arguing that he did not receive effective assistance of
council."
Again, after spending 2 days in court, documentation will be sent to the
Criminal Court of Appeals to determine if a 3rd retrial is necessary, An option
Farren said is not only extremely costly, but also redundant and unnecessary.
"It's the whole process of 20 years of appeals and writs and expert witnesses
and additional attorneys, just the cost of paper alone is probably
considerable," Farren explained. "We believe if we pick 12 more jurors, they'll
reach the same decision. Everybody needs a resolution to these things and we
ought to be able to get there in less than 2 decades."
(source: Newschannel10.com)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Man on Death Row For 21 Years Wins New Trial
A federal judge has overturned the conviction of a man who's been on death row
for the past 21 years, finding that his conviction in the death of a teenager
killed over her earrings was based on "scant evidence at best."
Senior U.S. District Judge Anita Brody called the case against James Dennis "a
grave miscarriage of justice" and found that authorities withheld evidence.
In a ruling Wednesday, she ordered the 42-year-old Dennis released from prison
unless prosecutors retry him within 6 months.
Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said his office was disappointed
the judge accepted what he called the defense's "slanted factual allegations."
He said he was reviewing the state's options.
"The defendant was convicted for the brutal murder of a teenage girl on her way
home from school, in broad daylight," Williams said. "3 passersby saw him do it
and identified him in court, without any possible motive to lie."
The judge found that Dennis was convicted based on "shaky eyewitness
identifications" following the shooting at a transit stop in the city's Fern
Rock section in 1991. The 3 witnesses described 17-year-old Chedell Williams'
killer as much taller than the 5-foot-5-inch Dennis, according to the ruling.
The judge also questioned the identification techniques used during a police
photo array and police lineup, techniques that have come under frequent
scrutiny in death penalty appeals and that many police departments have since
revised.
Chedell Williams, a high school student, had been at the train station with a
female friend. Witnesses told police that at least 2 men were involved, and
possibly a 3rd as a getaway driver, but Dennis was the only person charged.
Also, the other girl told relatives that she knew the 2 assailants from high
school, although she had never seen the men. The relatives passed the
information to police, but they never followed up on it, the judge found.
"Improper police work characterized nearly the entirety of the investigation,"
the judge said.
Dennis was about 20 and had only a minor drug arrest on his record when he was
charged in the girl's death. He had a child born after he went to prison, said
pro bono lawyer Ryan Guilds, who has worked on his appeal since 1999.
"For him, as a father, for him to have been accused of this horrible crime has
really taken a toll on him," Guilds said.
Dennis now hopes to be reunited with his mother and 2 daughters, Guilds said.
Dennis had maintained that he was on a bus the afternoon of the shooting and
offered an acquaintance who saw him there as an alibi witness. The woman told
police she had taken the bus several hours later. However, the appellate
lawyers, after the 1992 trial, found a receipt from a stop she made that day
that makes it more likely that she had taken the bus earlier than she recalled.
Lawyers from the federal public defender's office and the Pennsylvania
Innocence Project also worked on the case.
"The eyewitness identifications were highly suspect," said Marissa Boyers
Bluestine, legal director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. "When we have
convictions based entirely on eyewitness identification, there have been calls
to disallow the death penalty at all. ... The risk of a misidentification is so
great that that should be off the table."
(source: NBC Philadelphia)
OHIO:
Ohio convicted killer Calvin Neyland appeals sentence, cites execution cost
A truck driver sentenced to die for killing his boss and another man should
receive life without parole instead because the cost of an execution would be
an unnecessary burden for taxpayers, the inmate's attorney told the Ohio
Supreme Court.
The argument came Tuesday as the court weighed the death sentence for Calvin
Neyland Jr., convicted of fatally shooting the two men at Liberty
Transportation outside Toledo in 2007 as he was about to be fired.
Supreme Court Justice Maureen O'Connor questioned the financial argument by
attorney Spiros Cocoves, saying certain government actions are appropriate for
the expense involved, according to The Blade ( http://bit.ly/12nPJ2J ).
"I don't understand how the expense issue becomes something that we need to
take into consideration. Isn't that a policy decision for the legislature?"
O'Connor said.
No definitive study has laid out the exact financial difference in Ohio between
seeking a death sentence and choosing not to pursue a capital punishment case.
Death penalty trials are almost always more expensive because they require
extra attorneys and investigators on both sides. And appeals costs in capital
cases also add up.
The actual cost of an execution is minimal, usually a few hundred dollars for
the lethal drug, the cost of transporting an inmate to the state death house in
Lucasville and other relatively minor expenses.
Justices seemed more interested in whether Neyland was mentally ill.
"There are facts in this defendant's behavior leading up to the murders in
question that, it would seem to me, would merit coming to our attention," said
Justice Paul Pfeifer.
Neyland, 49, has been diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, and an
earlier court case referenced mental illness.
Prosecutors argue he functioned reasonably and had a mental condition, not
mental illness.
(source: Associated Press)
FLORIDA:
Witness says woman, rather than man, charged in death of Brooksville teen "did
all of this"
Kevin Shields sat on the stand Wednesday and recalled the day last December
when Byron Boutin and Crystal Brinson showed up at Shields' house in Floral
City.
Brinson was jumpy and said they had something to tell him. She said 18-year-old
DeAnna Stires had freaked out, ransacked Boutin's house and stolen his
methamphetamine.
"She said, 'I had to whoop her ass, Kevin,' " Shields recalled. "I said, 'Where
the hell is DeAnna?' and she says, 'She's in the trunk of the car.'"
The 1st witness on the second day of Boutin's murder trial, Shields seemed to
bolster both sides. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Boutin, but
defense attorneys say Brinson is responsible for Stires' death.
Assistant State Attorney Pete Magrino told jurors during opening statements
that Boutin, 42, and Brinson, 36, were angry that Stires had stolen Boutin's
methamphetamine, and Boutin told Brinson to "do something about it." Magrino
said Boutin is guilty of 1st-degree murder even if it was Brinson who hit
Stires in the head with Boutin's handgun and injected her with morphine.
Defense attorney Charlie Vaughn hopes to convince jurors that Boutin just
wanted Stires out of his Homosassa mobile home on Dec. 26, 2012, and Brinson
took matters into her own hands.
Vaughn repeated what Boutin told investigators after his arrest:
He and Brinson had left Stires alone for about an hour and returned to find
drugs missing, the trailer in disarray and an agitated Stires. He said Brinson
pistol-whipped Stires after finding the meth in her purse and injected her with
a shot of morphine. Boutin said he thought the shot was consensual.
Boutin claims that Stires, who lived in Brooksville with her father, was
snoring when Boutin and Brinson put her into the back of his Lincoln
Continental and drove to his father's house west of Brooksville. Hoping she
would sober up, they bound her to a table in the garage, taped her mouth shut
and left. He said they returned a short time later to find her dead. Boutin
admitted to dumping Stires body in a remote wooded area of Levy County a couple
of days later.
A medical examiner testified Tuesday that Stires died of acute morphine
intoxication.
Shields said he did methamphetamine with Stires in Brooksville on Christmas Eve
before Boutin and Brinson came to pick her up. When the pair showed up at his
house 2 or 3 days later, he said, Brinson was clearly in control.
"There was nothing mentioned by the defendant about permanence or loss of
life," said Shields, who has known Boutin for about 20 years. "Miss Brinson did
all of this."
Later Wednesday, forensics experts testified that Stires' blood was found in
the trunk of Boutin's car and on the rear passenger door.
Brinson faces the same charge as Boutin and has yet to stand trial.
(source: Tampa Bay Times)
******************
Mental health in question as execution set: Marshall Gore
URGENT ACTION
Marshall Gore, aged 50, is due to be executed in Florida on 1 October for a
murder committed in 1988. His mental "competence" for execution is in question.
Marshall Gore was sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of Robyn Novick,
whose body was found in a rural area of Miami-Dade County, Florida on 16 March
1988, four days after she went missing. The Florida Supreme Court overturned
the conviction in 1998 on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, but Marshall
Gore was again sentenced to death at a 1999 retrial. He was already serving a
death sentence passed in Columbia County, Florida in 1990 for the murder of
Susan Roark, a student who went missing in Tennessee in January 1988 and whose
body was found in Florida 2 months later. In a 2009 opinion, the Florida
Supreme Court noted that the question of Marshall Gore's "mental status" had
been a "recurrent theme" throughout proceedings in both cases.
On 13 May 2013, Governor Rick Scott signed Marshall Gore's death warrant in the
Miami-Dade case. Marshall Gore's state court lawyer told the governor that his
client might be "incompetent" to be executed, that he was "irrational" and
"could not be reasoned with". The execution of a prisoner who lacks a rational
understanding of the reason for and reality of their punishment violates the US
Constitution. As required under Florida law, the governor appointed a
commission of 3 psychiatrists to assess the prisoner's competence. During their
evaluation, Marshall Gore told them that there was a conspiracy among Florida
officials to harvest the organs of executed prisoners, and that a state senator
was in line to obtain Marshall Gore's eyeballs for his son. The psychiatrists
concluded that Marshall Gore was faking mental illness to avoid execution. The
same 3 experts had recently found another inmate, John Ferguson, competent. He
had a decades-long history of paranoid schizophrenia, and was executed on 5
August, displaying signs of delusional thinking to the end
(http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/057/2013/en).
The lawyer who was representing Marshall Gore in federal court raised a
competence claim in US District Court. On 18 June, the judge noted that there
was a "reasonable basis" for asserting that Marshall Gore might be incompetent
for execution, given the various "delusional" statements he had made. The judge
noted that Marshall Gore had indicated a belief that his execution was set for
his 'death and organ/harvesting/to be a human sacrifice or both', that his then
execution date of 24 June added up to 6-6-6 and that "because of his virgin
innocence of murder, he is a target of Satan Worshippers who have threatened
that date by mail for years'.
On 24 June, the District Court found that the case presented a "highly unusual
set of circumstances" as Marshall Gore was being represented by 2 different
lawyers in state and federal court. As the state lawyer had not filed a
competence claim in state court, the federal judge ruled that he could not
review it. Since then, the federal lawyer has taken over the state appeals.
After a state court hearing in July, at which an expert for the defence
asserted that Marshall Gore was incompetent for execution and two of the three
governor-appointed psychiatrists stated the opposite, the judge ruled that
Marshall Gore "has a rational understanding that he is being executed because
he murdered Ms Novick and will die as a result of that execution". On 13 August
the state Supreme Court upheld this.
Please write immediately in English or your own language:
Noting the serious crimes of which Marshall Gore was convicted and the
suffering caused by violent crime;
Opposing his execution, and noting the questions about his mental competence
for execution;
Urging the Governor to commute his death sentence.
PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 2 OCTOBER 2013 TO:
Governor Rick Scott, Office of the Governor, The Capitol, 400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001, USA
Email: [email protected]
Salutation: Dear Governor
Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country.
Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.
--
URGENT ACTION
Additional Information
In 1986, in Ford v Wainwright, the US Supreme Court affirmed that the execution
of the insane violated the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and
unusual punishments". However, the Ford majority neither defined competence for
execution (although Justice Powell's suggestion that the test should be whether
the prisoner was aware of his or her impending execution and the reason for it
was generally adopted by states), nor did a majority of the Court mandate
specific procedures that must be followed by the individual states to determine
whether an inmate was legally insane. The result was different standards in
different states and minimal protection for seriously mentally ill inmates (see
USA: The execution of mentally ill offenders, January 2006,
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/003/2006/en).
In June 2007, in Panetti v. Quarterman, the Supreme Court moved to clarify the
Ford ruling which it acknowledged had "not set forth a precise standard for
competency" (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/114/2007/en). The
Panetti majority said that "A prisoner???s awareness of the State's rationale
for an execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it". In 2012,
in a Florida case, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit wrote: "The
bottom line of the Panetti decision is that there is not yet a well-defined
bottom line in this area of the law. Instead of attempting to answer more
specifically the question of what is required for a rational understanding of
death by execution and the reason for it, the Supreme Court preferred to leave
'a question of this complexity' to be addressed in a fuller manner and on a
better record by the district court and the court of appeals in that [Texas
death row] case. The decision not to decide more is, unfortunately, the last
word from the Supreme Court on the 'question of this complexity'".
In the Panetti ruling, the Supreme Court had acknowledged that "a concept like
rational understanding is difficult to define". In other words, there will
always be errors and inconsistencies. There is only 1 solution - abolition.
Pending that outcome in the legislature or by judicial order, the power of
executive clemency should be used.
According to Marshall Gore's appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, the defence
expert at the state competency hearing in July said that in his opinion,
although Gore knew that he was going to be executed, he did not have a rational
understanding of the reason for that punishment. The expert also pointed to a
number of prison records in Marshall Gore's case over the past decade that
indicated delusional or other distorted thinking, and that he had been
prescribed antipsychotic medication in the past. He disagreed with the state
experts that Marshall Gore was malingering.
Over a century ago, the US Supreme Court said that the USA's constitutional ban
on "cruel and unusual punishments" had a "progressive" character and "may
acquire wider meaning as public opinion becomes enlightened by humane justice".
In recent decades country after country has abolished the death penalty, and
today 140 countries are abolitionist in law or practice. In contrast, there
have been 1,343 executions in the USA since the US Supreme Court approved new
capital statutes in 1976. Florida accounts for 78 of these executions. There
have been 23 executions this year, 4 of them in Florida.
4 US states have legislated to abolish the death penalty in the past 4 years -
New Mexico (2009), Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012) and Maryland (2013), and
18 US states are now abolitionist. The annual number of death sentences in the
USA has declined since its peak in the 1990s. Florida remains one of the states
bucking this trend. In 2012, there were 22 death sentences passed in Florida,
more than in any year since 1998 and more than 25 % of all new death sentences
nationally. Legislation recently enacted in Florida threatens to increase the
pace of executions in the state (see
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/038/2013/en).
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in call cases and all
countries, unconditionally.
*********************
Florida man found guilty of murder in teen's violent death
A Florida man was found guilty on Tuesday of 1st-degree murder in a 2011 case
of a teen who was lured by text message to an ambush where he was shot,
dismembered and incinerated.
Michael Bargo, now 21, faces the death penalty for killing 15-year-old Seath
Tyler Jackson whose remains were shoveled into paint cans and discarded,
according to an arrest affidavit.
The jurors will return to the courtroom at a later date to begin a 2nd phase of
the trial to determine whether Bargo is sentenced to death as requested by
prosecutors or to life in prison.
4 co-defendants, including 2 teenage girls, previously admitted their roles in
the murder and are serving life prison sentences, according to court records.
Their statements helped authorities piece together what happened.
According to an arrest affidavit, the 2 girls, then-18-year-old Charlie Kay Ely
and 15-year-old Amber Wright, helped lure Jackson via text message to a home in
Summerfield, northwest of Orlando.
Bargo, along with then-16-year-old Kyle Hooper and 20-year-old Justin Soto,
beat and shot Jackson, put him in a bathtub and tried to break his kneecaps so
he could be folded and stuffed in a sleeping bag, according to a report by
Marion County Sheriff.
When they noticed Jackson was still alive, Bargo shot him again and they threw
his body in the sleeping bag into a fire pit that had been lit before Jackson
arrived, authorities said. His remains were put into paint cans.
2 days later, Hooper told his mother what happened and later told investigators
the house was cleaned with bleach. Investigators found no clear motive other
than that Bargo allegedly did not like Jackson.
After both sides rested in the trial, Bargo changed his mind and asked to
testify on his own behalf.
Bargo's lawyer, Charles Holloman, argued to the jury that his client was guilty
but not of the premeditated 1st-degree murder as charged.
(source: Reuters)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Death penalty sought in Durham woman's slaying
A Superior Court judge on Thursday approved prosecutors' request to seek the
death penalty against a Fayetteville man accused of killing a Durham woman last
month.
John Franklin Alexander, 34, of 4402 Ruby Road, is charged with first-degree
murder, possession of a stolen vehicle and possession of stolen property in the
death of Ella Davis.
Davis, 58, was found stabbed to death inside her home at Greens of Pine Glen
apartments on Glen Hollow Lane on July 23.
Alexander was arrested in Harnett County after he crashed in Davis' car.
Durham County Assistant District Attorney Jim Dornfried said Alexander's
criminal history warranted that prosecutors pursue a capital case against him.
Alexander pleaded guilty in 2001 to 2nd-degree murder and was sentenced to 13
to 16 years in prison for the June 21, 1998, stabbing death of 29-year-old
Kerry Mortenson in Fayetteville. He served a little more than 10 years before
he was released from prison in March 2012, and his parole ended in December.
Judge Michael Morgan ruled that prosecutors presented sufficient evidence to
proceed in a capital case.
(source: WRAL News)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
