Dec. 10
OHIO:
Mammone appeals conviction to Ohio Supreme Court
The Canton man convicted of killing his 2 young children and former
mother-in-law is taking his appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. Arguments in the
case will be heard in Columbus on Wednesday.
The Ohio Supreme Court will hear the death penalty appeal of the Canton man
convicted of the 2009 murder of his 2 young children and former mother-in-law.
The hearing is set for 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial
Center. Mammone does not have an execution date.
In 2012, the 5th District Court of Appeals denied James Mammone III's request
for a new trial and upheld a lower court's decision.
Attorneys with the Ohio Public Defender's Office had asked a judge for
post-conviction relief on several grounds, including allegations of mistakes by
his trial attorneys, juror misconduct and withheld drug-testing evidence.
A 3-judge panel for the 5th District held that the judge ruled correctly on the
arguments, including that preliminary drug-test results would have helped
Mammone at trial and called into question his confession to police.
In the appeal to the supreme court, attorneys for Mammone are arguing that
publicity prevented an impartial jury in the 2010 trial. The defense contends
Mammone could not get a fair trial in Stark County.
Mammone's attorneys also claim the trial attorneys were ineffective when
questioning jurors about the death penalty and pretrial publicity, according to
the supreme court's public information office.
During his trial's sentencing phase, Mammone gave a 5-hour unsworn statement to
the jury explaining his actions. He killed his two children, age 5 and 3, and
former mother-in-law out of retribution following his divorce and said he was
trying to spare the children from being raised in a broken home.
The defense argues that his statement to the court should have been limited.
Another claim is that the prosecution showed the grisly crime scene and autopsy
photos beyond the boundaries set by the high court, according to the public
information office.
(source: Canton Repository)
TENNESSEE:
Question: Why Don't More Death Penalty Sentences Occur in Rutherford County and
Elsewhere in our State?
With more and more murder trials being heard in Rutherford County in 2014, some
residents have spoken out suggesting more convictions should equal more death
sentences. Regardless of where you may stand on this issue, the written law
specifies what can end with a death penalty sentencing and what cannot end in a
death sentencing.
One of the murder trials schedueld to take place in 2014, deals with Jacob
Pearman who allegedly killed his wife in the Blackman home on Valentines Day,
earlier this year.
Whitesell told WGNS that certain requirements must be met in a court of law for
the death penalty to be pursued.
Statutory Aggravating Circumstance:
(1)The murder was especially heinous, atrocious, cruel or depraved (or involved
torture)
(2) The capital offense was committed during the commission of, attempt of, or
escape from a specified felony (such as robbery, kidnapping, rape, sodomy,
arson, oral copulation, train wrecking, carjacking, criminal gang activity,
drug dealing, or aircraft piracy)
(3)The defendant committed 'mass murder' which is defined as the murder of 3 or
more persons whether in a single episode or at different times within a
forty-eight month period
(4) The defendant knowingly created a grave risk of death for 1 or more persons
in addition to the victim of the offense
(5) The murder was committed by means of a bomb, destructive device, explosive,
or similar device
(6) The murder was committed for pecuniary gain or pursuant to an agreement
that the defendant would receive something of value (7) The defendant caused or
directed another to commit murder, or the defendant procured the commission of
the offense by payment, promise of payment, or anything of pecuniary value
(8) The murder was committed to avoid or prevent arrest, to effect an escape,
or to conceal the commission of a crime
(9) The defendant has been convicted of, or committed, a prior murder, a felony
involving violence, or other serious felony
(10) The capital offense was committed by a person who is incarcerated, has
escaped, is on probation, is in jail, or is under a sentence of imprisonment
(11)The murder was committed against a person less than 12 years of age and
then defendant was 18 years of age or older
(12)The victim was especially vulnerable due to a significant handicap or
disability, whether mental or physical and the defendant knew or reasonably
should have known of such a handicap or disability
(13) The victim was a government employee, including peace officers, police
officers, federal agents, firefighters, judges, jurors, defense attorneys, and
prosecutors, in the course of his or her duties
(14)The victim was a correctional officer
(15)The murder was committed against a national, state, or local popularly
elected official, due to or because of the official???s lawful duties or
status, and the defendant knew that the victim was such an official
(16)Defendant was involved in killings in the course of or attempt of
aggravated child neglect and aggravated child abuse
(17)The defendant knowingly mutilated the body of the victim after death
Additional Items Examined:
The murder was committed in the course of an act of terrorism
The victim or the murder was 70 years of age or older
Murder committed against any emergency medical or rescue worker, emergency
medical technician, paramedic or firefighter, who was engaged in the
performance of official duties, and the defendant knew or reasonably should
have known
(source: WGNS Radio news)
MISSOURI:
Missouri AG appeals stay of execution
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster's office has appealed the stay of
execution for convicted killer Allen Nicklasson, calling the federal appeals
court ruling "an abuse of discretion."
A 3-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday granted a
stay for Nicklasson, scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for
killing businessman Richard Drummond nearly 2 decades ago.
Late Monday, Koster's office asked for a hearing before the full 8th Circuit.
By Tuesday morning, no decision had been made on that appeal.
After going nearly 3 years without an execution, Missouri had been preparing
for its 2nd in 3 weeks. The state executed racist serial killer Joseph Paul
Franklin on Nov. 20. It was the 1st execution in Missouri using a single drug,
pentobarbital.
(source: Associated Press)
SOUTH DAKOTA:
SD Lawmaker Will Propose Repeal Of Death Penalty
A state lawmaker who previously supported the death penalty says he will ask
the 2014 South Dakota Legislature to repeal capital punishment.
Rep. Steve Hickey of Sioux Falls, who also is a pastor, says he changed his
mind on the death penalty after reviewing the Bible. He says he also believes
it does not deter people from committing horrible crimes, save money on appeals
or improve public safety.
Hickey says his bill would not affect the 3 people currently on death row, but
would ban the death penalty in future cases.
Attorney General Marty Jackley says he will oppose the bill because he believes
the death penalty is appropriate for the most vile crimes. He says the death
penalty does not increase appeals costs and can prevent other crimes.
(source: Associated Press)
USA:
Why Don't Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death
Penalty? ---- Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and Lewis Powell - all
appointed by Republican presidents'started out as supporters of capital
punishment. Their decades-long study of capital cases made them see things
differently.
If you spend any time at all studying the death penalty in America today you
eventually come across an immutable truth: No one who digs deeply into these
grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital
punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice. The movement, over
the past 40 years anyway, has almost always been in the opposite direction: The
closer one gets to capital punishment, the more dubious it appears to be.
This has been particularly true of Supreme Court justices since the death
penalty was resurrected in America in 1976: The closer these esteemed jurists
have gotten to "the machinery of death," the more flawed convictions and death
sentences they were forced to review, the more racial inequality they saw in
its application - and the more likely they were to recoil from the arbitrary
imposition of capital punishment in those states that still practiced it.
This is just one of the many important takeaways from the book of the year
about the death penalty, Evan Mandery's work titled "A Wild Justice: The Death
And Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America." I will have more on the
book - as well as an online interview with Mandery - in a related post tomorrow
here at The Atlantic. But for now let us focus on 4 Republican-appointees to
the Supreme Court and the impact their decades-long focus upon capital cases
had upon their judicial philosophies toward executing condemned murderers.
The closer one gets to capital punishment, the more dubious it appears to be.
Take Justice Lewis Powell. In 1976, the Nixon appointee voted in Gregg v.
Georgia to reinstate the death penalty after a four-year hiatus. (He also had
dissented, strongly, from the Court's fractious 1972 decision in Furman v.
Georgia that temporarily brought capital punishment to a halt.) In McCleskey v.
Kemp, in 1987, he wrote the majority opinion denying racial bias in the system,
even though evidence showed that defendants who had murdered white victims
received more death sentences than those whose victims were black.
But Justice Powell later came to publicly regret those views. Late in life, he
told his biographer, John Jeffries: "I have come to think that capital
punishment should be abolished." His thinking evolved, Linda Greenhouse wrote
in her New York Times' obituary of Powell in 1998, "based on pragmatic concerns
rather than on questions about the morality or constitutionality of the death
penalty itself." Doubts about the death penalty could never be resolved and
would inevitably bring the judicial system itself into disrepute, the justice
concluded.
Or take Justice Harry Blackmun. In 1976, the Nixon appointee also voted to
reinstate the death penalty. Nearly 2 decades later, however, shortly before he
resigned from the Court, he wrote in a Texas capital case that he would "no
longer tinker with the machinery of death." That's the phrase that always gets
cited. But what Justice Blackmun wrote next in Callins v. Collins in 1994 goes
to the heart of the matter. His experience on the bench had soured him on the
experiment of capital punishment:
Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of
fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel
morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty
experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no
combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the
death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.
The basic question - does the system accurately and consistently determine
which defendants "deserve" to die? - cannot be answered in the affirmative. It
is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be
employed, relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, and vital judicial
review to be blocked. The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal,
and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some
defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable
sentences of death required by the Constitution. (Citations omitted by me)
Almost exactly 20 years after Justice Blackmun wrote those words, every single
failing he identified about capital punishment still exists. The Supreme Court
- far more conservative today than it was in 1994 - continues to labor under
the convenient delusion that there are sufficient "procedural rules or
substantive regulations" to ensure that capital punishment is applied fairly
and accurately. The sad truth, however, is that "factual, legal, and moral
error" are still rampant in those states that cling to capital punishment.
But don't just take my word for it. Take the word of retired Justice John Paul
Stevens. In 1976, the Ford appointee also voted in Gregg to reinstate the death
penalty. In 2008, however, in a Kentucky case styled Baze v. Rees, he announced
that he had changed his mind. Evaluating capital punishment for nearly 1/3 of a
century on the highest court in the land, Justice Stevens wrote, had allowed
him to reach certain conclusions about the misapplication of the death penalty.
He emphasized four specific concerns:
Litigation involving both challenges for cause and peremptory challenges has
persuaded me that the process of obtaining a "death qualified jury" is really a
procedure that has the purpose and effect of obtaining a jury that is biased in
favor of conviction.
Our former emphasis on the importance of ensuring that decisions in death cases
be adequately supported by reason rather than emotion has been undercut by more
recent decisions placing a thumb on the prosecutor's side of the scales.
A 3rd significant concern is the risk of discriminatory application of the
death penalty. While that risk has been dramatically reduced, the Court has
allowed it to continue to play an unacceptable role in capital cases.
Whether or not any innocent defendants have actually been executed, abundant
evidence accumulated in recent years has resulted in the exoneration of an
unacceptable number of defendants found guilty of capital offenses. (Citations
omitted by me)
The systemic problems with capital punishment that Lewis Powell mentioned in
1991, and that Justice Blackmun identified in 1994, had not been cured by the
time Justice Stevens identified them in 2008 (and again in 2010, in The New
York Review of Books, in a review in which he lamented the Court's broadened
application of capital punishment). Nor has the Supreme Court addressed, let
alone resolved, these problems in the years since Justice Stevens retired. Just
last month, the justices refused even to hear an Alabama case in which an
elected judge overrode a jury's sentencing verdict and imposed a death
sentence.
3 Republican-nominated justices, three men of moderation, among the least
ideological the Court has produced in the past 50 years, all came late in life
to regret their early doctrinal support for capital punishment. Retired Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, the 1st woman on the Court, a nominee of President Ronald
Reagan, also questioned the use of capital punishment near the end of her
tenure on it. She had concerns about the execution of the innocence, she said,
and she acknowledged the equal protection implications of the fact that rich
capital defendants get better legal representation than poor ones.
Now let's list the Supreme Court justices of our time, or of our parents' time,
who started out as advocates for the abolition of capital punishment but whose
experience with capital cases on the High Court over decades caused them to
support the death penalty. Alas, we can't do it. Not a single justice has ever
been so converted. Isn't that not telling? Exposure to capital cases doesn't
cause these smart and honorable men and women to gain confidence in the neutral
and accurate application of the death penalty, because no such confidence is
warranted???because no such application exists.
No one ever studies these cases and says: "Look, this state here has come up
with a procedure that ensures the accuracy of result in capital cases by
providing defendants with competent counsel and by ensuring there are no racial
disparities in the way prosecutors charge capital cases, or in the way juries
are selected to hear them." Or, "Look, this state here has come up with a way
to ensure that prosecutors permit the testing of all relevant DNA testing and
are blocked from relying solely upon dubious eyewitnesses testimony."
Capital punishment today in those states that still practice it - 8 fewer than
did in 1972 - is, instead, still as patently arbitrary and capricious as it was
back then. If you are black, or if you are poor, or if your victim is white, or
if you live in certain counties you are far more likely to receive the death
penalty than if you are white, or rich, or your victim is a person of color, or
if you live in certain other counties. Only 2 % of counties in this nation
generate more than half the capital sentences in America, according to a report
issued this year by the Death Penalty Information Center.
Much about the death penalty today, even by the murky standards of Furman or
Gregg, is indefensible, which helps explain why three of the justices
responsible for its resurrection in 1976 stopped defending it. And yet the
Supreme Court persists today in endorsing America's capital regimes without
even candidly acknowledging the flaws in them. Meanwhile, the ultimate question
- whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment as "cruel and
unusual" - never even comes up anymore because advocates understand that there
are at least 5 votes on the current Court, perhaps more, to sustain capital
punishment.
As I'll address tomorrow, Mandery's new book is trenchant in part because it
highlights the Court's longtime cognitive dissonance on capital punishment. The
justices who changed their minds (or at least their votes) between Furman in
1972 and Gregg in 1976 did so without demanding or receiving any assurances
from the states that the new death penalty laws would generate more accurate
and less racially biased results. And that's why those old capital cases
represent such terribly shaky ground upon which the Supreme Court has chosen to
construct the current generation of death penalty laws.
(source: Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic)
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