Sept. 12
TEXAS----impending execution
Death Watch----The Texas death chamber gets back into gear
Texas' death chamber will gear up to take the 1st of 5 lives before the end of
2013 with the execution of Robert Garza, scheduled for Sept. 19. Garza was
convicted and sentenced to die as a party to the gang killing of 4 women in the
Rio Grande Valley.
According to court records, Garza, a member of the Tri-City Bombers gang,
allegedly rode with 2 others to carry out a hit on a group of women that was
supposed to include 2 who'd previously testified against another TCB member
serving time in prison for attempted murder. However, the group targeted the
wrong group of women, and on Sept. 5, 2002, the botched hit claimed the lives
of 4 innocent women just outside the town of Donna: Maria De La Luz Bazaldua
Cobarubias, Danitzene Lizeth Vasquez Beltran, Celina Linares Sanchez, and
Lourdes Yesenia Araujo Torres died in a hail of more than 60 bullets fired at a
car in which they were riding home after a night spent working at a local bar.
2 other women survived the attack.
During questioning by police - questioning that Garza's lawyer subsequently
argued was done illegally, after Garza had invoked his right to an attorney -
Garza reportedly said that the "hit was organized for us," according to court
records, and that "apparently [the gang member who ordered the hit] was mad
'cause it wasn't done right" (killing the wrong people). Garza claimed he was
there when the shooting went down, but didn't actually fire any shots; he was
ultimately tried for the slayings as a "party" to the homicide - a legal
concept that holds individuals responsible for the actions of others that they
should have anticipated.
Among the issues raised on appeal were that Garza's lawyers were ineffective,
not only for failing to protest that Garza's self-incriminating statements to
police were obtained illegally, but also for failing to present any evidence
that might mitigate his sentence. Indeed, there was plenty of information to be
had: Garza grew up in a violent household and was virtually abandoned by each
of his parents, among other allegations raised in his writ of habeas corpus.
Each of Garza's points of appeal were contested by the state and ultimately
denied in both state and federal courts. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to consider his case. If executed next Thursday, he would be the 12th
inmate put to death this year, the 504th since the reinstatement of the death
penalty, and according to records from the Death Penalty Information Center,
the 1,259th inmate ever executed in Texas.
At press time, Garza's mother was scheduled to plead for her son's life before
the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Sylvia Garza says her son should not die as a
party to a crime when none of the actual perpetrators have ever been tried for
the murders. In a press release, Garza echoed his mother's sentiment: "The
question that should be asked [is] who and where is the party?"
Also at press time, lawyers for Rigoberto Avila, on death row for the 2000
murder in El Paso of a child left in his care, were notified that the El Paso
district court would pull Avila's execution date - Jan. 15, 2014 - from the
calendar in order to give the courts a reasonable amount of time to consider a
new appeal. At issue is the rising use of biomechanical analysis that calls
into question whether the death of Nicholas Macias, 19 months old at the time
of his death, was anything more than a tragic accident at the hands of his
4-year-old brother, Dylan, who loved to play like a professional wrestler.
Nicholas died from extensive internal injuries to his abdomen. Despite lacking
any expertise in the area, doctors testified at Avila's 2001 trial that there
would be no way for a 4-year-old to deliver the kind of fatal blow they saw on
the toddler.
A revolution in injury biomechanics - essentially, the study of the effects of
force on human tissues - has raised questions about the subjective conclusions
made about Nicholas' death. The new appeal was filed just days after a new law
passed this spring took effect on Sept. 1, allowing inmates to appeal when an
initial conviction relied on junk or otherwise outdated science. Cathryn
Crawford, post-conviction director for the Texas Defender Service, who is
handling Avila's appeal, says the execution date should be pulled and the
courts should consider carefully the new analysis of the evidence in Avila's
case. He "should be granted the opportunity to present a biomechanical analysis
of the death," she said, and then it will "become clear that today's science
shows that no murder was committed."
Avila's case will 1st have to be considered by the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals, which has the authority to order the district court to hold a hearing
to consider the new evidence.
(source: Austin Chronicle)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Death penalty stretches process
A defense attorney questions a woman about her views on the death penalty.
"Would you automatically sentence my client to death if he was convicted of
1st-degree murder?" Assistant Public Defender Paul Yessler asked the woman on
the stand in Berks County Court.
"Yes," the woman responded.
Attorneys on both sides agreed the woman would not be qualified to sit on the
jury determining the fate of Donald E. Williams Jr., 34, of Philadelphia.
Williams is accused of 1st-degree murder in the June 25, 2009, slaying of Maria
Serrano, 49, of the 800 block of Lincoln Street. Williams is accused of raping
and stabbing Serrano and setting her on fire.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
In a typical criminal case, including non-death-penalty murder cases, panels
are selected within a day.
Death-penalty cases are different.
The jury-selection process in the Williams case took 6 full days to seat a
panel of 12 and 2 alternates. The lawyers and the judge worked until 8 p.m.
several days.
The U.S. Supreme Court requires that each juror be qualified by lawyers from
both sides to serve on a death case.
This process requires that each juror be interviewed alone to provide them with
privacy when revealing their views on the death penalty.
In the Williams case, a total of 170 jurors were called for potential duty and
broken into 2 groups. About 50 jurors were left in each group for a 2nd round
of questioning.
The jurors were questioned in a group to determine if they had hardships that
could include required work, vacation airline tickets and illnesses. They also
were asked general questions about the death penalty.
Each juror that made it through the 1st round was interviewed alone for about
30 minutes by the prosecutors, defense attorneys and the judge. Each side got
to strike 20 potential jurors without providing a reason.
If a potential juror says that he is against or for the death penalty, the
juror is typically struck, and it does not count as a strike for either side.
The last time they tried to pick a jury in Williams' case in August, Judge
Stephen B. Lieberman declared a mistrial because there were not enough
potential jurors.
Selecting a death-penalty jury takes a great deal of patience.
Thankfully, for all of those involved, the trial is finally underway.
(source: The Reading Eagle)
VIRGINIA:
Reform Needed to Keep Innocent People off Death Row in VA, Study Says
A recent study by the American Bar Association found several flaws in
Virginia's death penalty, and made recommendations for reform.
While the study did not call for a suspension of capital punishment until
reforms are made (as previous studies have), the team of legal experts did
suggest changing interrogation procedures and policies regarding biological
evidence.
Requiring all interrogations in capital cases to be video recorded is one such
improvement and would be easy and inexpensive to implement, according to James
E. Hawdon, sociology professor and director of the Center for Peace Studies and
Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech.
"It would be difficult to justify not [requiring that]," he said, pointing out
that digital technology has made recording easier and more affordable.
Currently, only 9 Virginia law enforcement agencies record a majority of their
interrogations.
Improving preservation of biological evidence could be a trickier reform to
implement. Hawdon explained that some evidence just deteriorates naturally,
while other evidence takes up too much space to store for a long time.
Similarly, improving post-conviction access to biological evidence may prove
more difficult than the report suggests, because lawmakers will want to avoid
creating a system that allows convicted persons to delay their sentence by
demanding more evidence.
Better access to biological evidence is likely to happen at some point though,
Hawdon said, because of cases where biological evidence has exonerated people.
There have been 311 instances of DNA exoneration in the United States,
according to The Innocence Project.
"There's going to be pressure on the state to make the system as failsafe as
possible," Hawdon added.
Mary Atwell, a professor of criminal justice at Radford University, agreed.
"In the past, legislators have been most open to reforms that have to do with
biological evidence," she said. "The argument can be made that such evidence
increases the likelihood of punishing the really guilty and freeing the truly
innocent. It's hard for legislators to argue with that. But, I'm not sure in
the current climate whether legislatures will want to approve any reforms that
will increase the cost of prosecution."
Public support for the death penalty has been declining in Virginia, as well as
in the nation at a whole, according to Roby Page, a sociology professor at RU:
"As the state with the second-highest execution rate since reinstatement [of
the death penalty] in 1976, Virginia is relatively supportive of capital
punishment, and I believe approximately in sync with American public opinion in
general."
Page went on to point out that national support has been slowly on the decline
- Pew data shows that 78 % of Americans favored the death penalty for a
convicted murderer in the 1990s, while only 68 % favor it today in the same
situation.
All the experts seemed to agree that these improvements are inevitable, but may
be slow in coming. As Hawdon put it:
"The law is inherently conservative in the sense that it is not easy to
change."
All is not lost, however. Hawdon continued by saying that proponents of the
death penalty are not likely to oppose these changes, because they???re only
meant to protect innocent people from being executed.
"Even staunch proponents of capital punishment don't want that," he said.
(source: Independent Voter News)
NORTH CAROLINA:
NC reversal on death penalty law reopens old discrimination wounds
When Benjamin McKinney found himself on the jury of a death penalty case in
North Carolina in 1996, his focus was on the defendant and the evidence
presented. He had no idea at the time the level of scrutiny prosecutors were
placing on him, too.
McKinney had served in the military and worked for the same company for three
decades. He has no criminal record and, by his own estimation, is an upstanding
citizen. More than 15 years passed before McKinney, who is black and now 65,
learned prosecutors attempted to strike him from sitting on the jury for the
capital case because he was also a member of the NAACP.
"He's a member of an organization which I strongly associate with being
anti-state and anti-death penalty," the prosecutor then told the judge. The
request to strike him, however, was found unconstitutionally discriminatory and
McKinney was allowed to serve. The jury ultimately found the defendant guilty.
"Come to find out all of this happened behind closed doors," said McKinney, who
was informed of the statements by the ACLU while it looked into cases of racial
discrimination in capital trials. "It didn't really matter about my character,
it was all about the color of my skin. It kind of makes you lose faith in the
court system."
Race continues to threaten the balance of justice in North Carolina, critics
say, as a new law has gone into effect cutting off appeals of death row inmates
charging racial discrimination.
In North Carolina's criminal court system, McKinney's situation is an outlier
only in how much was divulged in court records. A study of jury selection in
North Carolina capital cases conducted by Michigan State University, for
example, found prosecutors used their right to peremptory challenge - the
mechanism for striking potential jurors without giving a reason - to block
black jurors from serving on death-row cases in the state twice as often as
other potential jurors.
"In every analysis that we performed, race was a significant factor in
prosecutorial decisions to exercise peremptory challenges in jury selection in
these capital proceedings," the study found.
The question of how far racial discrimination affects death-row cases led the
state to enact its Racial Justice Act in 2009. Signed into law by then-Gov.
Beverly Purdue, a Democrat, it allowed executions to be commuted to life
sentences without parole if race proved to be a significant factor in imposing
the death penalty in their cases. It was the 1st law of its kind in the country
- one supported by those for and against the death penalty as a safe guard
against flaws in the criminal system.
A new state law signed into effect in June, however, unravels all that.
Newly elected Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, quietly endorsed a repeal of the
Racial Justice Act. The repeal shuts down appellate claims based upon racial
discrimination and effectively turns the lights back on in the state's
execution chamber.
"The policy implementation of the law was seriously flawed. Nearly every person
on death row, regardless of race, has appealed their death sentence under the
Racial Justice Act," McCrory said in a press release (PDF) after signing the
repeal. "The state's district attorneys are nearly unanimous in their
bipartisan conclusion that the Racial Justice Act created a judicial loophole
to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice."
Legal limbo
After the Racial Justice Act was enacted in 2009, appeals were filed by the
vast majority of the state's death-row inmates. While only four of those cases
had been heard by the end of 2012, all $ were able to successfully prove
discrimination and the death sentences were commuted to life in prison without
parole. More than half - 52 % - of the 151 inmates on death row are black.
North Carolina's population, by comparison, is 22 % black.
The Racial Justice Act forced "a very uncomfortable conversation about
discrimination, and discrimination in particular against jurors," said
Cassandra Stubbs, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union's
Capital Punishment Project in Durham, N.C.
There is "enormous widespread, epidemic discrimination against qualified
jurors," she said. "There is no sign that it's going to get better."
While North Carolina lawmakers' repeal of the Racial Justice Act reignites the
fierce debate about the role race plays in capital cases in the state, it also
leaves those 150 death-row inmates who had filed appeals in legal limbo.
"They're sitting there, and nobody knows what is going to happen with them,"
Stubbs said. "I think we have very good constitutional due-process arguments,"
she said. "The legislature cannot retroactively take away those rights."
One case caught in limbo is that of Kenneth Rouse, who was convicted of
murdering a convenience store clerk in 1992 and sentenced to die. Following his
conviction, however, a juror admitted to a law student conducting research that
he lied about his mother's murder in similar circumstances years earlier in
order to ensure he'd be selected for the jury.
"There are numerous factors which I feel could be more influential in making a
legal decision aside from my mother's almost forgotten murder," juror Joseph
Scott Baynard wrote in a signed affidavit. Under the handwritten scrawl he
clarified what he meant: "Bigotry."
"This is a case where a juror signed an affidavit saying that racial prejudice
was very important in his decision," Stubbs said. "It's an extraordinary case
in terms of the very clear proof of discrimination."
Those claims, however, were never heard in federal or state court, she said.
Rouse has no further appeal claims outside of the Racial Justice Act.
"If he does not have his Racial Justice Act claim, he will be executed," Stubbs
said. "And there's no question that he???s on death row because of the racism
of his jury."
Color of justice
According to the Death Row Information Center, 7 death row inmates have been
exonerated in North Carolina since 1973. A national look shows wrongful
convictions at a more rapid clip - an average of 5 death row inmates were
exonerated per year in the U.S. from 2000 to 2011, according to the DRIC.
"And yet with all this evidence of a flawed justice system, you want to apply
the most permanent penalty that anyone can receive," said Rev. Dr. William
Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP. "Now we're in the place of legal
quandary, because the (Racial Justice Act) has been proven constitutional and
necessary."
Barber, who was a vocal advocate for the Racial Justice Act, takes issue with
complaints that the appeals process has been misused.
"Just because somebody applied, that's no rationale for pulling the law out.
That's the point," he said. "You can't deal with a systemic problem without
looking at it systemically."
"There's a long history of discrimination and the death penalty in the United
States," said Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan who
focuses on criminal procedure and wrongful convictions. "Before the Racial
Justice Act - and now after it's been repealed - if you didn't have evidence of
the sort of thing that nobody ever says out loud, then you didn't get to court.
This was a major advance."
For now, however, the fate of the Racial Justice Act rests in the courtroom.
"One thing that is known is there is going to be a lot of litigation about how
this ends," Stubbs said. "There will be plenty of work to do in North Carolina
for capital lawyers."
(source: Al Jazeera America)
GEORGIA:
Judge orders psych exam for admitted Athens cop-killer Hood
Self-confessed Athens cop killer Jamie Hood must undergo another mental health
exam to see if he is competent to stand trial.
But unlike previous requests by defense attorneys for such an exam, this one
was ordered on Tuesday by Western Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge H.
Patrick Haggard.
The judge stated in his order he was concerned by Hood's bizarre behavior
during pretrial hearings.
During the most recent hearing on Friday, Haggard cleared the courtroom to hold
discussions with Hood and his attorneys concerning Hood's desire to represent
himself. During that private meeting, deputies had to forcibly remove Hood from
the court for undisclosed reasons.
"Due to observations made during several pretrial hearings, the court concludes
that it should exercise its duty ... to inquire into the accused's mental
competency to stand trial," Haggard wrote in his order.
The judge ordered the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental
Disabilities to "conduct an evaluation of (Hood), provide treatment for the
defendant, if appropriate, and to provide the court a report of diagnosis,
prognosis and its findings with respect to competency to stand trial."
Haggard ordered a "prompt" evaluation of Hood to be undertaken either at the
Clarke County Jail or a hospital.
Hood is facing trial for the murder of Athens-Clarke Senior Police Officer
Elmer "Buddy" Christian. In the March 2011 shooting, he also seriously wounded
SPO Tony Howard.
In previous hearings, Hood has repeatedly interrupted proceedings with
outbursts and diatribes that, among other things, accused his attorneys of
being in cahoots with prosecutors in an attempt to railroad him. He has
frequently and openly argued with 2 sets of attorneys that had been appointed
to him by the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender.
Haggard's order this week marked the 3rd time Hood's mental competency has been
called into question.
Following a civil court bench trial last September, Western Judicial Circuit
Chief Judge David Sweat ruled that Hood was competent to stand trial.
During the trial, the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental
Disabilities' director of forensic services testified that Hood not only was
competent, but demonstrated he had an above-average appreciation of how the
court system operates.
As part of the mental evaluation, Karen Bailey-Smith and another state
psychologist conducted a 5-hour jailhouse interview with Hood. She testified
that Hood met none of the criteria for a successful mental incompetency claim.
Among other things, the psychologist said, Hood knows the charges against him,
articulated what happened the day he shot the officer, is aware he faces the
death penalty, and knows the roles of all officials involved in a criminal
trial.
"He was actually very detailed" in his answers, Bailey-Smith said. "Mr. Hood
was right on target. He knew what he was talking about" and possessed the
skills necessary to assist attorneys in his defense.
In March this year, Hood's new defense team made another request for a mental
competency exam. They stated, among other things, that Hood's previous
attorneys did not challenge the findings of state psychologists through cross
examination during the 1st competency trial, nor did they present witnesses of
their own.
Haggard denied the request at that time.
(source: Onlineathens.com)
FLORIDA:
Fla. Supreme Court upholds penalty 2nd time around
The Florida Supreme Court is upholding the death sentence of a former assisted
living center employee convicted of murdering a resident's daughter.
It marks the 2nd time that the high court has considered the conviction and
sentence of Andrew Michael Gosciminski.
Gosciminski met Joan Loughman through an assisted-living facility where he
worked and her father was a patient. Prosecutors say Gosciminski had planned to
steal $40,000 worth of jewelry.
Prosecutors say he attacked the Connecticut woman in September 2002 at her
father's Fort Pierce home where he beat her, stabbed her and cut her throat.
The high court ruled in 2008 that some evidence during his 2005 trial had been
improperly admitted. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial and Gosciminski was
convicted and sentenced to death a 2nd time.
(source: Associated Press)
_______________________________________________
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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
