Nov. 4
TEXAS:
Death penalty trial to start Monday for man accused of killing teen
A Dallas County jury will begin hearing testimony Monday in the capital murder
trial of a man accused of killing his children's teenage baby sitter after she
accused him of rape.
Franklin Davis, 31, is charged in the September 2012 slaying of 16-year-old
Shania Gray. The girl had planned to testify against Davis the following month
at his sexual assault trial. He has confessed to police and to the media that
he killed the girl.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty if Davis is convicted.
Davis' lead defense attorney, Karo Johnson, declined to detail his trial
strategy. But he said, "We do not feel he is guilty of capital murder. He is
guilty of murder."
Capital murder is punishable by a death sentence or life in prison without
parole. Murder is punishable by 5 years to life in prison with a chance of
parole.
The district attorney's office declined to comment.
This will be the 3d death penalty trial in Dallas County this year. 1 man
received a death sentence for drowning his 3- and 5-year-old sons to get back
at their mother. Prosecutors are seeking a death sentence in another trial
still in progress where a man was convicted of killing an elderly convenience
store clerk by setting her on fire during a robbery.
Davis said last year in a jailhouse interview that he had only wanted to record
Shania admitting that he didn't rape her. She'd told police Davis had sex with
her while she was caring for his children. She was 14 at the time.
Davis denied the sexual assaults in a jailhouse interview. But he admitted to
police that he lured Shania away from school in Carrollton using a fake
Facebook account. Davis brought Shania to Campion Trails Park in Irving where,
Davis told police, he walked her down to the Trinity River at gunpoint.
"Why, Wish?" he said she asked, calling Davis by his nickname.
He said he shot her twice with a .38-caliber pistol. But she was still
breathing. Then, he stepped on her neck until she stopped breathing and tossed
her body into the river, he said.
"I just want everyone to remember me as the man that I was," Davis said from
jail at the time, "not as the monster I became on that day."
Shania's body was found 2 days later in an inlet of the Trinity River on the
border of Irving and Dallas.
Davis also escaped with a sheriff's deputy's gun in December while being
treated at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Davis made his escape, according to an
arrest warrant, as soon as a deputy released restraints on him. Davis shoved a
deputy against a wall, displayed a "makeshift sharp object" and struggled with
the deputy for 2 minutes, according to court documents.
Davis took the deputy's gun and pointed it at the deputy telling him to "lay
face down on the ground or he would shoot."
He was found in a van and surrendered after a standoff with police. No one was
injured.
(source: Dallas Morning News)
*********************
PRO: Supreme Court should set IQ standard with additional training
Using a set of questions or an IQ test to determine whether someone is
intellectually disabled is too risky, according to an expert on the death
penalty.
Texas uses a set of questions that are stereotypes about how mentally disabled
people act, and an IQ test, like a poll, has a margin of error of plus or minus
5 points, said Kathryn Kase, the executive director of the Texas Defender
Service.
That's why the Supreme Court should set the definition.
"It seems to me that it's one thing to have a law, but we also have to be sure
that the laws are only as good as the lawyers and judges can enforce the law,"
she said of the Atkins vs. Virginia decision.
It's not that judges are doing a poor job; they could just use some additional
training, she said.
Requiring it of them would make sense, especially because attorneys on the
capital case appointment list are required to maintain a certain number of
training hours every 2 years, Kase said.
Elliott Costas is one of the attorneys in the Crossroads who knows all about
that training requirement.
He has lost count of how many capital cases he's worked on since beginning
criminal defense in 1984. He is not a fan of standardized tests.
"I'm not a big central government type," Costas said, "but I do believe for
death penalty litigation there ought to be mental health standards that are
agreed upon by the psychological and psychiatric community" because if Florida
death row inmate Freddie Lee Hall had been in another state, his score might
have kept him from receiving the death penalty.
"That's not right," Costas said.
Psychologists also have told him that IQ tests are recalibrated periodically,
such that a one point difference could be significant.
A normal IQ, or intelligence quotient, ranges from 90 to 110, and mild
intellectual disability ranges from 50 to 70 and 75, said Lane Johnson, the
director of clinical services for Gulf Bend Center.
Florida seemed to use the lower end of the spectrum and possibly relied too
heavily on the test, he said.
Lane said he would like for the Supreme Court to come up with a uniform
standard but did not know how it would do so.
Victoria County has worked with a licensed forensic and board-certified doctor
based in Sun City for the past 6 years on cases in which mental illness may be
involved, Gulf Bend Center's Executive Director Don Polzin said.
Although he is more than 100 miles away, the doctor can evaluate the defendant
through video conferencing technology set up in the jail.
If he is asked to testify in court, he makes the trip to do so, Polzin said.
The doctor doesn't just administer an IQ test. By visiting with them face to
face and pulling their medical record, he gets a well-rounded picture of that
individual, Johnson said.
Still, Polzin agreed, "if there's something broken about the process, I would
hope that it went through a review at whatever court level to include the
Supreme Court to best assure that the process is fair."
*******************
CON: Jury should determine mental deficiency based on entire evidence
Texas best determines whether a defendant is mentally disabled because it does
not solely rely on an IQ test, according to a Crossroads district attorney.
"Tests can be gamed, and other factors can effect test scores," so jurors look
at the whole picture, said Michael Sheppard, the district attorney for Refugio,
DeWitt and Goliad counties.
"For instance, if a defendant who has a 70 IQ commits a home invasion robbery,
kills all the witnesses so no one can testify, wears gloves so as not to leave
any prints and fabricates an alibi that is later debunked by police, how can a
conscientious person find that he really was not capable of understanding the
evil of his actions?" Sheppard said.
While there are instances in which executing a low-functioning person should be
prohibited because to do so would morally wrong, Sheppard said, he believes an
intervention by judicial or legislative branches could undermine the jury
process.
"Using arbitrary standards will result in injustice, not justice," he said.
Jackson County District Attorney Bobby Bell considers himself to be a state's
rights man. He also thought Texas determines mental retardation best because it
goes further than IQ test and there are multiple hearings.
"If someone on death row knows they must score below a 70, don't you think
there might be a motivation for them to have a low IQ? For that test, you would
know how to answer the questions to where you're not getting them right," he
said.
Florida Senior Assistant Attorney General Kenneth S. Nunnelley wrote in court
documents that death penalty inmate Freddie Lee Hall's case is unworthy of the
U.S. Supreme Court justices' attention because it does not answer an unresolved
federal question.
Justices never ruled that states should adopt a clinical definition of mental
deficiency, so Florida's definition of mental deficiency is fair, he wrote.
A jury was convinced of Hall's guilt because it heard evidence he and a
co-defendant drove to a wooded area where they would not be seen murdering the
woman, which required planning.
In the end, "Hall's petition is no more than his request for this court to
interpret Florida law in a manner helpful to him," Nunnelley wrote.
(source for both: Victoria Advocate)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Newspapers, state reach settlement agreement in case challenging Pa. inmate
execution procedure; 2 area daily newspapers have settled a lawsuit against the
Pennsylvania
Department of Corrections and other state officials over the public viewing
procedure surrounding Pennsylvania executions.
Lawyers representing the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Harrisburg Patriot-News
announced last week that a settlement has been reached in a case initiated last
fall by the media outlets, one that challenged a commonwealth policy that bars
journalists and members of the public from fully viewing prison inmate
executions.
The September 2012 lawsuit, which was previously reported on by the
Pennsylvania Record, argued that reporters and other witnesses should be able
to watch the death penalty process be carried out from start to finish.
The newspapers desire to ensure that lethal injections are "fairly and
humanely" administered, they had stated in their complaint.
The plaintiffs, who were represented by attorneys from the American Civil
Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia law firm of Schnader
Harrison Segal & Lewis, contended that during prior executions, all of the
pre-work, such as bringing the condemned person into the execution chamber,
strapping them to the gurney, and inserting the intravenous lines that
administer the lethal drug cocktail, were done behind the cover of a curtain.
Only after these actions were completed was the curtain covering the window
between the execution chamber and the public observation room opened, the
lawsuit maintained.
The suit also said that the curtain has historically then been closed after
"flat-lining" occurs, with the witnesses unable to view the coroner pronounced
the condemned prisoner deceased.
The newspapers had argued that the Department of Corrections protocols are
unconstitutional because they violate the public's First Amendment right to
hear a condemned person's final statement.
Stephen J. Shapiro, a lawyer with Schnader Harrison, wrote a letter to U.S.
District Judge Yvette Kane in Harrisburg on Nov. 1 informing the jurist that
the parties have agreed to settle the matter.
The plaintiffs, Shapiro wrote, agreed to dismiss the claims with prejudice
pursuant to the settlement agreement.
A copy of the actual agreement was not included on the federal court docket,
but the Inquirer reported on Saturday that the agreement would allow witnesses
to future Pennsylvania executions to see and hear the entire procedure from
start to finish.
The newspaper quoted its acting editor, Stan Wischnowski, as saying that the
settlement agreement is a "victory for First Amendment rights and the public's
right to know.
"By retaining access to the entire execution process, this ensures a more
informed discussion of the death penalty now and in the future, and also
promotes a strong sense of fairness and transparency," he stated.
The newspaper reported that as per the agreement between the parties, the
curtain between the death chamber and the witness observation room would remain
open during the duration of an execution.
The Corrections Department would also set up a public address system so that
members of the public in attendance can hear the activity that takes place
within the chamber and also be witness to any statements made by the condemned.
The corrections secretary, however, would still have the ability to close the
curtain for security reasons or turn off the public address system if an inmate
says anything "malicious or threatening" toward the witnesses in attendance,
the Inquirer reported.
Pennsylvania's death chamber is located at SCI Rockview, the state prison in
Centre County.
While the death penalty is still technically on the books in Pennsylvania, no
condemned prisoner has been put to death in the commonwealth since the late
1990s, when convicted torture-murderer Gary Heidnik received a lethal injection
for killing street prostitutes who he had kidnapped, tortured and killed in his
North Philadelphia rowhome.
There are currently 191 inmates sitting on Pennsylvania's death row, according
to the Inquirer.
(source: The Pennsylvania Record)
FLORIDA:
Former death row inmates talk about experiences, exoneration
In a Broward County courtroom on Dec. 21, Seth Penalver sat quietly next to his
lawyer, waiting to hear the jury's verdict for a 1994 triple murder he claimed
he didn't commit.
After 18 years behind bars - 6 of which he spent on death row - and 3 trials,
he got his answer: not guilty on all charges.
He wept into his hands as his lawyers embraced him. He kneeled in front of his
seat and prayed. From that day on, he was a free man.
Almost a year since his release, Penalver, 40, said he still remembers the
feeling of being acquitted in a case that became well-known in Broward County.
"It was surreal," he said.
Penalver spoke about his exoneration to about 50 people Saturday inside the St.
Augustine Church and Catholic Student Center in Gainesville. Herman Lindsey, a
40-year-old Broward County resident who was acquitted of a 12-year-old murder
case in 2009, also talked about his experience.
Gainesville Citizens for Alternatives to the Death Penalty partnered with
Witness to Innocence to bring Penalver and Lindsey to Gainesville.
"There's a lot of people who don't follow the issue of the death penalty," said
GCADP co-coordinator Miriam Elliott. "They certainly don't know how many (death
row inmates) have been exonerated in Florida. They don't know the stories
behind them."
***
Since 1973, Florida has exonerated 24 death row inmates - the highest in the
United States.
Death row inmates can have their convictions overturned if they show legal
error or new evidence that supports their innocence. This can include
government misconduct, such as state prosecutors withholding evidence during
trial, eyewitness error or DNA analysis. Lindsey and Penalver were Florida's
most recent exonerated cases.
In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court granted Penalver a retrial after he was
sentenced to death in 1999 for the murders of a Miramar club owner and 2 women.
One of the justices' rulings said the quality of security footage shot inside
the club owner's house during the murder was so poor that they couldn???t
determine if Penalver was the gunman.
That same year, Lindsey was convicted for a 1994 murder of a Ft. Lauderdale
pawnshop owner. The justices, however, later voted to overturn Lindsey's death
sentence conviction, saying state prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to
prove he shot and killed the owner.
Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
in Washington, D.C., said with 80 people executed in Florida since 1979, 1
person is exonerated for every 3 executions.
"That's a terrible ratio," he said. "That means there's far too many mistakes
being made."
With the recent passing of the Timely Justice Act, which will speed up death
penalty sentences limiting the time innocent inmates have to appeal their
cases, Penalver and Lindsey said the death penalty in Florida should be
abolished.
"The system is wrong," Penalver said. "If you get it wrong 1 time, that's all
it takes."
***
While Lindsey and Penalver now live as free men, they say life as exonerees has
been difficult.
Employment is hard to find, especially with murder charges attached to their
records. They're also not eligible for state compensation because of prior
felony convictions.
"We still live in a death sentence," Lindsey said.
Penalver said he's decided not to let his time in prison affect the rest of his
life.
"I gotta let it go," he said. "I don't know how much time I have left, but I
want to go out and enjoy it."
(source: The Florida Alligator)
*******************
'Death is different,' and so is jury selection for Dontae Morris
Starting today, Dontae Morris will experience one of the American justice
system's strangest and most consequential rituals: choosing a group of
strangers who could decide whether he lives or dies.
Jury selection begins this morning in Orlando for Morris, accused of murdering
5 men in the summer of 2010. The trial now getting under way involves the most
heavily publicized of his alleged crimes, the killing of 2 Tampa police
officers.
After a jury of Orange County residents is picked - Hillsborough Circuit Judge
William Fuente is seeking people who have not been exposed to media coverage of
the case - arguments and testimony will take place in Tampa.
Morris, 28, already knows he will die behind bars. In March, he was sentenced
to life imprisonment without parole for gunning down a rival, Rodney "Scarface"
Jones, outside a Tampa nightclub. But if convicted in the coming weeks of
fatally shooting the police officers, he can expect to die on an executioner's
gurney with a needle in his arm.
"Death is different," the U.S. Supreme Court has held, an irrevocable
punishment that must be applied according to its own rules. And experts say the
process of picking jurors for a capital murder trial is different, too - more
important and more rigorous than jury selection for any other kind of crime.
The biggest distinction is the most obvious one: The ethical magnitude of the
decision jurors must make if they find Morris guilty. In Florida, a single jury
decides a defendant's guilt and then, after reviewing additional evidence and
hearing new arguments during a 2nd phase of the trial, issues a recommendation
to the judge for death or life imprisonment. Judges must give "great weight" to
their advice.
These demands lead to a quest for a sort of super-juror, someone able both to
grasp the legal complications of properly meting capital punishment and accept
the responsibility of weighing a human life.
"Whether the person should die in prison or be executed - that is emotional.
That is a moral decision," said Stephen Harper, formerly a capital public
defender in Miami. The National Judicial College's handbook on capital cases
warns judges that potential jurors may be "overwhelmed" when they learn they
have been called to serve for a trial involving the death penalty.
The goal is 12 ordinary people who can exercise the virtues expected of jurors
in any trial - impartiality, thoughtfulness, close attention to factual and
legal details - with something like perfection. The standard is not always met.
Herman Lindsey, a 40-year-old South Florida man who was exonerated and freed in
2009 after spending 2 years on death row for a murder conviction, said watching
the jury deliberate over the value of his life at his trial was dispiriting.
"The people who are going to decide your fate - you got to understand, they
don't know nothing about the law. A lot of them don't want to be there. A lot
of them are inattentive," Lindsey said.
The state Supreme Court eventually reversed both his death sentence and
conviction, ruling the jury's decisions were based on insufficient evidence.
The importance of seating a capable jury is clear in Florida, which has
demonstrably failed in its administration of capital punishment more than any
other state. Florida has seen 24 of its death row inmates exonerated in the
past 4 decades, the highest number in the country.
An automatic appeals process for death sentences ensures intense scrutiny of
jurors' verdict and how they made it. The state Supreme Court can and does
reverse death sentences because a jury didn't weigh evidence mitigating against
execution, such as mental illness or a troubled childhood.
Who, then, is the ideal death case juror?
That depends somewhat on whether you ask a prosecutor or a defense attorney.
But both sides agree to a surprising extent on what makes a good choice, and
say good choices begin by ditching stereotypes.
Swayed by Hollywood's depictions of the courtroom, some people think each side
in a criminal case tries relentlessly to stack a jury with sympathetic stock
characters. A defense lawyer looks for social workers and churchgoers; a
prosecutor seeks veterans and retired cops.
Nonsense, say experienced lawyers. "The cookie cutter is not the best strategy
for jury selection," said Bob Dekle, a former North Florida prosecutor who
tried defendants including serial killer Ted Bundy.
Dekle recalls 2 capital cases in which he did not object to the selection of
jurors who admitted they opposed the death penalty on religious grounds, but
said they could set their personal beliefs aside and follow the law. In both
cases, he said, they delivered convictions, and ultimately recommended death.
One of them did so in tears.
From the opposite side of the courtroom, J. Marion Moorman has seen similar
results.
"I have tried cases where I left retired police officers on juries, just
because I liked the ways they were answering my questions," said Moorman, the
former elected public defender for Florida's 10th judicial circuit. "And they
have not disappointed me in the long run."
Defense attorneys want jurors who can remain rational and unbiased as they hear
the details of wrenching acts of violence. Prosecutors want jurors whose
reasoning will withstand the scrutiny of the state's highest judges. To some
extent, their desires overlap. Dekle and Moorman both said they consistently
sought out jurors who seemed "open-minded" and analytical.
"In death penalty cases, because of the emotional power of them, it's difficult
to understand what their obligations are," said Harper, the former public
defender. "You don't want somebody who has a response coming from their gut."
Critical thinking skills are especially vital in capital cases because jurors
are legally obligated to consider lists of circumstances, laid out in state
law, to guide their decision between death and life imprisonment if a defendant
is convicted. (At least 1 aggravating circumstance, that the victim is an
on-duty police officer, will apply to Morris if he is found guilty.)
But logic and law only take a jury so far. Some of the guidelines in Florida's
death penalty statute are so vague as to be practically meaningless.
One aggravating circumstance is that a crime be "especially heinous, atrocious,
or cruel," adjectives most people use to describe any premeditated murder. A
mitigating circumstance the jury can consider is "the existence of any other
factors in the defendant's background" that should spare him the death penalty.
These are meager road signs on what is probably an unmappable moral terrain.
Who deserves to die? Of the hundreds of men and women who will face Morris in
Orlando today, a dozen may soon be required to answer that question.
(source: Tampa Bay Times)
MISSISSIPPI:
Constitutional challenge to death penalty law goes be Miss. Supreme Court Nov.
13
The Mississippi Supreme Court is looking at the constitutionality of a 1994
state law that allows it to find "harmless" errors committed by juries in death
penalty cases.
Roger Lee Gillett is challenging the law in a post-conviction petition that
seeks to overturn his death sentence or to get him a new trial. The Supreme
Court has scheduled oral arguments for Nov. 13 in Jackson.
Gillett was convicted in 2007 in Forrest County on 2 counts of capital murder
for his role in the deaths of a Hattiesburg couple and the transporting of
their bodies to Kansas in a freezer.
While in custody in Kansas, he attempted to escape. That crime was one of the
aggravating factors prosecutors presented jurors to support the death penalty.
The law was enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in another Mississippi
capital case in 1990 that state appellate courts can uphold murderers' death
sentences, even if their sentencing juries wrongly considered some adverse
evidence.
In the 1990 case, Chandler Clemons had challenged the reweighing of the
sentencing evidence in his case. The case dealt only with the sentencing phase
of a capital murder trial, not Clemons' convictions.
In Mississippi, the death penalty can be imposed by a jury only after it finds
certain aggravating circumstances. Aggravating circumstances include
particularly heinous acts of violence, violent criminal histories or other
factors that warrant the death penalty as determined by judges and juries.
However, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court said jurors, not judges, had to decide
whether sufficient aggravating circumstances existed to support a death penalty
decision.
In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court said a death sentence must be set aside if a
jury considered inadmissible evidence that otherwise would not have been before
it.
Gillett has seized on those decisions in arguing his due process rights were
violated and the law is unconstitutional.
Gillett was convicted in 2007 in Forrest County on 2 counts of capital murder
for his role in the deaths of a Hattiesburg couple and the transporting of
their bodies to Kansas in a freezer.
The Mississippi Supreme Court found in 2010 that the attempted escape issue was
harmless error and there was sufficient evidence to convict Gillett in spite of
it.
Gillett's attorneys now argue Mississippi law "exclusively assigns the weighing
to the jury" by letting juries decide both the facts that should be considered
and the actual sentence.
"The jury is assigned the duty of imposition of sentence. The role of each
independent fact found by the jury is not independent from other aggravating
facts but is part of a set that are considered collectively," Gillett's
attorneys said.
The attorney general's office argued the ruling in Clemons' case was that an
appeals court, such as the Mississippi Supreme Court, can "reweigh the evidence
or conduct a harmless error analysis" based on what the jury found.
The attorney general argued that courts are not required to reverse a death
sentence when they find such "harmless errors" would not have affected the
verdict.
(source: Associated Press)
OHIO:
Man to be sentenced for death of burned Ohio woman
A man is due to be sentenced in the death of a severely burned 29-year-old
woman who was found wailing along an eastern Ohio road.
Sentencing was scheduled Monday in Zanesville for LaFonse Dixon Jr. The jury
that convicted the 34-year-old Canton man recommended a sentence of life in
prison without parole instead of the death penalty.
Dixon's attorneys argued the Canton man wasn't involved in the August 2012
attack on Celeste Fronsman, also of Canton.
2 women pleaded guilty in the case to avoid the death penalty. They testified
that the trio took Fronsman to rural Muskingum County, where she was set on
fire and abandoned.
Dixon's attorneys argued his life should be spared and told jurors he had a
troubled upbringing.
(source: Associated Press)
MISSOURI:
Ex-death row inmate exonerated in prison stabbing
3 decades after being sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of a fellow
inmate, Reggie Griffin is officially a free man after a Missouri judge
dismissed a murder charge against him.
Griffin, 53, has been out of prison since December while awaiting a new trial
in the 1983 fatal stabbing of Moberly inmate James Bausley. On Friday, Randolph
County prosecutor Mike Fusselman notified the court that he would no longer
pursue that charge because there wasn't sufficient evidence to find him guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt.
"To not have this over my head is more than what words can describe," Griffin
told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Now that it's over, I'm going to try
to put my life back together, to go on with my life."
In the 10 months since an Adair County judge assigned to oversee the case
released him on his own recognizance, Griffin has gotten a job and a new wife.
He also occasionally speaks to young people about his experiences behind bars,
hoping to deter them from making the same mistakes that put him in prison in
1981 for armed assault.
"They are intrigued by the conversations," he said. "A lot of things go on in
those prisons that I guess a person can only hear about. I can tell them
firsthand because I lived it."
Despite a lack of physical evidence, Griffin was convicted of stabbing Bausley
and sentenced to death. He later received a life sentence after it was
determined the state wrongly relied on the prior criminal record of another
convict with the same name as an aggravated factor in pursuing the death
penalty.
Griffin denied his involvement but was convicted after two inmates claimed to
have seen him stab Bausley.
One of those inmates later recanted, saying he had not seen the attack and that
the testimony he gave at Griffin's trial was not true. The other inmate has
died.
An appellate attorney also discovered that prosecutors had withheld a report
that guards had confiscated a sharpened screwdriver from another inmate as he
was attempting to leave the area where the attack took place.
The Missouri Supreme Court threw out Griffin's conviction in August 2011,
saying it was no longer "worthy of confidence." Eight weeks later, Fusselman
filed a new murder charge against him, saying new DNA evidence tied him to the
murder weapon.
But on Friday, Fusselman acknowledged in court documents that he didn't think
there was enough evidence for a conviction.
DNA tests on the screwdriver "didn't pan out," he told The AP on Wednesday, and
with several of the original witnesses either dead or not found by his office,
he had no choice but to dismiss the case.
"It was challenging, a bit frustrating and a big learning case for me," he
said, adding that the decision wasn't an easy one. "Once it's made, I can't
come back and refile it. It's done."
In a statement issued Wednesday, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster backed
that move, saying it was "the appropriate and ethical decision at this time."
Cyndy Short, one of Griffin's attorneys, said Wednesday that the U.S. justice
system is one of the best in the world but that cases like Griffin's also show
that it's not perfect.
"We humans are flawed, and those flaws have led to wrongful arrests, wrongful
convictions and, unfortunately, this situation where time and time again you
see prosecutors holding onto cases, even when evidence of innocence is clear,"
she said.
(source: Associated Press)
NEW MEXICO:
NM jury to decide if death penalty is an option
Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for convicted killer John McCluskey
are scheduled to deliver closing arguments Monday in the 1st phase of his
sentencing trial.
It will be up to jurors to decide whether the death penalty will be an option
as they consider punishing McCluskey for the August 2010 slayings of an
Oklahoma couple following his escape from an Arizona prison.
McCluskey, 48, was convicted by the same jury on Oct. 7 of murder, carjacking
and other charges in the deaths of Gary and Linda Haas of Tecumseh, Okla.
In an effort to spare McCluskey from the possibility of execution, the defense
called several neurological experts over the last week in support of their
argument that McCluskey is incapable of controlling his impulses and making
reasoned decisions due to brain abnormalities, emotional and physical abuse,
and a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Prosecutors on Thursday called to the witness stand Johns Hopkins neurologist
Barry Gordon, who told jurors he had interviewed McCluskey, conducted an exam
and reviewed the convict's brain imaging scans and health history.
Gordon concluded that McCluskey has the capacity to control himself.
McCluskey was serving 15 years for attempted second-degree murder, aggravated
assault and discharge of a firearm when he and 2 other prisoners escaped from a
medium-security prison near Kingman, Ariz., in July 2010 with the help of his
cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Welch.
One inmate was quickly captured after a shootout with authorities in Colorado,
while McCluskey, Welch and inmate Tracy Province headed to New Mexico.
Testimony showed the trio targeted the Haases at a rest stop near the New
Mexico-Texas state line.
Province and Welch pleaded guilty last year to charges of carjacking resulting
in death, conspiracy, the use of a firearm during a violent crime and other
charges. They both said McCluskey was the triggerman.
(source: Associated Press)
USA:
Death Penalty States are Having a Problem Killing People
Ohio state will execute a man next month using an untested combination of
drugs, something fraught with ethical and legal questions. Why is this
happening and why might the practice become more frequent in capital punishment
states?
Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced earlier this year
that, like several other states, it does not have enough of the drug it uses to
carry out executions, in this case pentobarbital, for an execution that is
scheduled for November - yet despite this would go ahead with the execution by
finding another drug or combination of drugs.
The state has now announced it will use a combination of midazolam and
hydromorphone to execute Ronald Phillips, aged 40, who is to be killed for
raping and killing a 3-year-old girl in 1993. The drug combination has not
received FDA approval and as a method of execution remains untested, but such
drug combinations are increasingly the choice for those states among the 32
that carry the death penalty.
That's because capital punishment states are facing the prospect of their
lethal injection drug supplies drying up.
Why? It's because those drugs are manufactured in the EU - in pentobarbital's
case, Denmark. Due to strict EU regulations that oppose "capital punishment,
torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," the
United Stated has now been told it cannot source such drugs from the EU for the
purposes of executions. Now, U.S. supplies have started to run dry with several
states already having to find alternatives and others looking at that prospect
come the early part of next year.
Rather than put executions on hold, some states have attempted to get around
this problem by relying on compounding pharmacies, but that???s seen as risky.
Such pharmacies tend to import ingredients from places like China from other
Asian markets, and as such there is little government oversight into the
precise nature or the effects of the drugs such pharmacies are creating.
Indeed, in recent months other states like Massachusetts have moved to more
closely regulate compounding pharmacies to prevent incidents like the 2012
meningitis outbreak that was eventually traced back to a compounding pharmacy's
poor hygiene practices.
Nevertheless, the process of allowing physicians to combine or alter drugs for
specific purposes is what Ohio will exploit in order to get around its
shortage, but there is reason to think the state will have to first answer a
lawsuit.
3 death row inmates from Texas have filed a federal lawsuit against the state's
board of corrections and administration saying that the state's turning to a
compounding pharmacy in suburban Houston in order to purchase 8 vials of
pentobarbital last month could potentially violate their constitutional rights
by subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment if the drug were to fail to
kill them painlessly.
The lawsuit states: "There is a significant chance that [the pentobarbital used
in the executions] could be contaminated, creating a grave likelihood that the
lethal injection process could be extremely painful, or harm or handicap
plaintiffs without actually killing them."
Obviously, the same fears would appear to apply in Ohio's case and with the
added concern that the drug combination being used next month has not
previously been used in this exact way before.
Kevin Werner, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions, told Reuters
that he believes the November 14 execution might be put back as the courts
become involved in what seems to be an ever escalating legal battle surrounding
the death penalty and the human rights of prisoners.
"Not too many states are going this way but the ones that have are running into
challenges and are being held up in court," he said.
Other states have sought more create solutions to this problem, many of which
have also thrown up their own issues.
For instance, Missouri had been contemplating using the powerful anesthetic
propofol, a drug commonly used by anesthesiologists throughout the country, in
order to carry out executions, one of which was scheduled for October 23.
However, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon halted that execution when it was realized
that if propofol was used, the drug could then fall under the EU's supply ban
with the drug's leading supplier, Germany-based Fresenius Kabi, warning that
all supplies and not just those specifically earmarked for executions could
then be severely hampered.
So potentially difficult is the minefield of legislation surrounding drug use
that Missouri lawmakers are calling for the governor to allow executions by gas
chamber, a practice that is still also technically allowed in Arizona,
California and Wyoming.
It remains to be seen whether this will ultimately only be a temporary problem
for death penalty states, but among death penalty repeal advocates there does
appear a shared and growing energy to capitalize on the issue of the drug
shortage to advance that it is time to put the death penalty to bed once and
for all.
(source: care2.com)
******************
Federal prosecutors still pursuing death penalty in Renz case
Federal prosecutors are moving ahead with their push to pursue the death
penalty for a Cicero man who admitted to killing a Liverpool schools librarian
and raping a young girl who was with her.
On Monday, prosecutors appeared in court to request the release of the grand
jury minutes from the David Renz case so that they can review them.
Renz's lawyer, Ken Moynihan, did not object to the request from the US
Attorney???s office.
Accused of a host of felonies - including rape, kidnapping, and murder - Renz
has pleaded guilty to murder in the 1st degree and predatory sexual assault in
the 1st degree.
He faces life in prison without parole for killing Lori Bresnahan and sexually
assaulting the child.
According to his plea agreement, Renz can withdraw his plea if the authorities
pursue the death penalty.
(source: WSYR TV news)
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