Mar. 4
PENNSYLVANIA:
Jury selection opens in Fayette County for accused child killer
Jury selection began Monday in a case where Fayette County prosecutors are
seeking the death penalty against a Point Marion man accused of killing a
4-year-old boy.
Patrick Ray Haney, 29, is charged with criminal homicide and endangering the
welfare of a child in the Sept. 13, 2011 death of Trenton St. Clair. State
police allege Haney beat the boy over an extended period of time.
Potential jurors are being questioned by both sides in the trial being held
before Judge Nancy Vernon.
An autopsy showed Trenton died of peritonitis from an abdominal injury caused
by repeated battering, according to testimony at a preliminary hearing.
Haney, who appeared in court in a button-down shirt, tie and black sweater,
declined comment as he was led from the courtroom to the Fayette County Prison
for the noon break.
Trenton's mother, Heather Lynn Forsythe, is charged with homicide but she is
expected to testify against Haney. Heneks has not revealed the terms of a
proposed plea bargain.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Mehalov and defense attorneys Jeremy Davis of
Uniontown and Charles Carpinelli of Brownsville interviewed 4 potential jurors
before the noon break.
None were selected.
Candidates are being asked whether they could impose the death penalty, or if
they feel that life in prison is an appropriate punishment for a 1st-degree
homicide conviction.
One woman was dismissed at the defense's request when she said life in prison
is not a severe punishment because inmates have no concerns over bills and are
housed and fed at taxpayers' expense.
"They're getting clothed," the woman testified during the voir dire process.
"They don't have to worry about bills. We pay for them to stay there."
Another potential juror was dismissed when she said that, regardless of
mitigating circumstances that might be presented during the penalty phase of a
trial, anyone who is convicted of an intentional homicide should receive the
death penalty.
Haney's trial is anticipated to last 2 weeks if the jury finds he is guilty of
1st-degree homicide and the case proceeds to the penalty phase.
(source: triblive.com)
VIRGINIA:
Newport News judge orders potential jurors not to research death penalty case
A Newport News judge sternly told a pool of about 60 potential jurors Monday to
avoid looking outside the courtroom for details in a death penalty case.
"Everything the jury is supposed to hear about the case occurs in this room -
period," Circuit Court Judge Timothy S. Fisher said. "Do not start looking up
issues involving murder or capital punishment. We have to have a jury that is
fair and impartial."
Those instructions were shared in the 1st day of a death penalty trial that is
estimated to last up to 5 weeks. The remainder of this week is reserved for
picking the jury, with opening statements expected next Tuesday.
John Moses Ragin, 38, of Newport News, is charged in the stabbing deaths of his
wife, Crystal Ragin, a 32-year-old Army sergeant at Fort Eustis, and her 3
children - Sierra, 15; La'Kwan, 10; and Rasheed, 6.
Police say they were killed overnight between Aug. 18 and 19, 2011, before
their apartment on Old Courthouse Way was set on fire. Their bodies were found
Aug. 19, all with multiple stab wounds and burned. Sierra was burned beyond
recognition.
Ragin is charged with 3 counts of capital murder, 1 count of 1st-degree murder,
4 counts of unlawful stabbing in the commission of a felony and arson. The
capital murder charges - each punishable by execution - pertain to the deaths
of the children.
Potential jurors have been assigned numbers, which will be used to identify
them during the trial instead of their names. Most murder trials in Newport
News are comprised of 12 jurors with 1 or 2 alternates.
The pool will be whittled down based on answers to a 23-page questioner and
through the "voir dire" process, which is a string of questions asked by
attorneys from both sides and the judge. The process is used to weed out
potentially biased jurors.
On Monday, Fisher asked them if they had read a recent Daily Press story about
the case. Most said they had not.
"There will be coverage about this case," Fisher told the pool, which filled
more than half of the seating in the courtroom. "You will not read it, discuss
it or gather information about it."
A few jurors have already been dismissed: one who couldn't read or speak
English and another who was no longer a Newport News resident.
After dismissing the jury pool for the day, Fisher had a hearing with attorneys
from both sides, which included updating them about jurors and addressing
pending trial issues.
Ragin, who was present during the hearing, was dressed in green jail-issued
shirt and pants. He smiled as he greeted his three attorneys and took his seat
between them. During the hearing he mostly looked ahead, with his head resting
on one of his hands. He did not speak during the hearing, except to whisper to
his attorneys.
Ragin's attorney's have filed several motions in the case, including one asking
that a DVD of Ragin's initial interview with police be presented as evidence.
Defense attorneys are challenging how Ragin was treated by Newport News police
when he was questioned about 8 to 10 hours in South Carolina between Aug. 20,
2011 and Aug. 21, 2011. Ragin's defense team contends that investigators were
aggressive and "explosive at times" when questioning Ragin. They also want to
play the DVD to show jurors Ragin's state of mind at the time of the interview.
Prosecutors are not planning to admit the DVD as evidence in the trial, which
is the reason for the motion.
Fisher said he would make a decision about the DVD issue and hear the rest of
the defense motions next week. The other defense motions include suppressing a
police search of Ragin's car in South Carolina and also a change of venue
request due to media coverage of the case.
(source: Daily Press)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Justin Hurd found guilty in triple-killing case
On Monday, when Jasmine Hines would have turned 25, her mother wept in a
Mecklenburg County courtroom as a jury convicted an Ohio man of killing her
only child.
Justin Hurd, who prosecutors say led a murderous siege of a north Charlotte
household in 2008, was found guilty of killing Hines, her aunt Kinshasa
Wagstaff, and Wagstaff's boyfriend, Kevin "Fergie" Young. Hurd and his 5
attorneys sat blank faced as the verdict was read in full.
The jury of 7 men and 5 women heard 2 weeks of testimony in Hurd's trial but
spent less than four hours convicting him.
Now, starting Wednesday, those same 12 will decide whether Hurd spends his life
in prison or is condemned to die. Mecklenburg County hasn't sent a killer to
death row since Michael Sherrill in 2009.
Hurd's lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Clayton Jones, also headed
the case against Sherrill.
The speed of Monday's verdict caught some observers of the 7-week trial by
surprise. But it showed that jurors put more faith in the prosecution's
scientific evidence than in the efforts of Hurd's defense team to discredit it.
Prosecutors tied Hurd to the Feb. 4, 2008, murders in north Charlotte through
his DNA. Police said it was found on water bottles stowed in an SUV parked in
Wagstaff's garage. It was found again on the steering wheel of Young's Toyota
Camry, parked a few yards from Hines' body off Beatties Ford Road.
Hines was 18 at the time. She had come to live with Wagstaff and Young while
she worked and took some college classes.
Her mother, Melanie Miller of Danville, Va., who is Wagstaff's sister, was a
daily spectator throughout most of the trial.
Monday, after the verdict was announced, Miller declined to talk to a reporter,
with one exception: The jury verdict she had hoped for had come on her dead
daughter's birthday, she said.
Attorneys from both sides shook hands after Superior Court Judge Robert Ervin
closed the proceedings until Wednesday, then both sides declined to comment.
Super Bowl savagery
Jones and co-prosecutor Reed Hunt said Hurd led up to 3 other men to Wagstaff's
home on Patricia Ryan Lane, shortly after Young had put chicken on the grill
for a Super Bowl Sunday cookout.
Young, a drug dealer, owed big money to a New York drug cartel, witnesses said.
The next morning, firefighters found him and Wagstaff in the fiery wreckage of
the home. Both had been bound. Young had been shot and slashed and stabbed in
his face and throat. Wagstaff, a real estate agent, also had been slashed and
stabbed around the throat. Whoever killed the pair then set the house on fire.
Investigators later found Young's chicken still on the grill. It had never been
turned.
Hines was found about four hours later. She had been gagged, shot twice and
doused with gasoline. Prosecutors say the teen was running for her life when
the fatal shot hit her in the back.
Hurd was arrested in Ohio a year later. By then one of his alleged accomplices,
Nathaniel "Lil' Nate" Sanders, had been gunned down in Cincinnati. He died 3
days after a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police detective showed Sanders' photograph
to Hurd's girlfriend.
During the trial, 2 jailhouse informants told the jury that Hurd had bragged
that the only witness to the Charlotte murders - Sanders, according to Jones -
had been "taken care of." (Hurd's attorneys said that another man unconnected
to their client has been indicted in the Sanders' case.)
Hurd, according to the informants, said he was an enforcer for a New York drug
ring who had driven to Charlotte from Atlanta to collect what Young owed.
Prosecutors said the intruders spent up to nine hours at Wagstaff???s house
searching for money or drugs to cover the debt.
During the group's time in Charlotte, Sanders was captured on surveillance
videos in 2 area convenience stores. But Hurd remained in the background of his
own trial. Lead attorney Alan Bowman of Newark, N.J., took every opportunity to
remind the jury that no eyewitnesses could link Hurd to the crimes.
Bowman also tore into the jail informants and prosecution witness Antonio
Harmon, who said Hurd and Sanders planned the home invasion a few days before
in Atlanta.
All along, Jones and Hunt argued that the case swung on the DNA. Hurd left the
water bottles behind, Jones said, because when he and his gang doused the house
with gasoline, the fuel exploded rather than burned, buckling the garage door
and blocking in the SUV the killers wanted to steal.
A new choice of life or death
On Wednesday, the trial swings from guilt or innocence to life or death.
North Carolina, as with many states, is operating under a de facto death
penalty moratorium. Statewide, prosecutors are less likely to take on the time
and expense of a so-called "capital" trial. Juries are more likely to opt for
life imprisonment without parole rather than a death sentence, which would be
tied up for years in mandatory appeals.
The state put only one killer on death row last year. Mecklenburg's only death
penalty case in 2013 ended in a conviction, but the jury opted to send Andre
Hampton to prison for the rest of his life for the beating death of his young
son.
Now it's Hurd's turn. Last week, during his attorneys' strong closing
arguments, the burly Hurd had almost bounded from the courtroom at the close of
the day, a broad smile on his face.
But Monday, after each part of his murder conviction had been read to the
courtroom and Miller's sobbing rose up from behind, Hurd sat alone at the
defense table and slowly - almost imperceptibly - shook his head.
(source: Lake Wylie Pilot)
***************
Death row inmate seeking new trial
After nearly 4 years on death row, Michael Patrick Ryan is back in court
looking for a new trial. The 54-year-old Mount Holly man was convicted of
1st-degree murder in the 2007 slaying of David Farrar.
Ryan appeared before Superior Court Judge Jesse Caldwell Monday in Gastonia
with his new attorney, Lisa Dubs. Dubs has filed a motion for appropriate
relief. Dubs says that there were issues with Ryan's 1st trial that led to his
conviction.
DNA evidence: Since Ryan's conviction, Dubs has hired a DNA specialist. That
expert has identified DNA in the case that does not belong to Ryan, according
to Dubs.
And that's only one issue Dubs said she has with Ryan's trial.
Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell said he doesn't think DNA is even an
issue. According to Bell, DNA wasn't needed to identify Ryan as the killer.
There was an eye witness to do that. Wesley Allen Adair testified during Ryan's
murder trial, saying that he and Ryan went to Farrar's Mount Holly home to rob
the man of cash and collectibles.
During the robbery, Ryan shot Farrar several times in the chest with a handgun
then forced Adair to do the same, according to Adair's testimony. Adair pleaded
guilty to 2nd-degree murder and was sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in
prison.
Long process: Attorneys quickly went over motions brought about by the defense
Monday. Some were tabled for another hearing. Much of the discussion centered
on original court and case files. To adequately represent the state, Bell
requested files maintained by Ryan's original attorneys, Calvin Coleman and
Rick Beam.
In criminal court cases, the prosecution is required to share files with the
defense, but the defense is not forced to do the same. Caldwell ordered that
Dubs needs to get all of the documents from the previous attorneys, review them
then make note of anything that would infringe on Ryan's constitutional rights
if shared with the prosecution. A judge will ultimately decide what Bell has
access to.
Asking for death: Ryan's trial took more than a month before jurors came back
with a guilty verdict. Jurors were then asked to consider the death penalty, a
process that is similar to a 2nd trial. Ryan fired Beam and Coleman at that
time and entered the sentencing phase alone.
Prosecutors accused Ryan of trying to commit suicide by jury after firing his
defense team. Ryan assured them that was not the case. "With the death
sentence, you get 4 appeals. With a life sentence, you get 1 appeal. Sitting
out on death row, you get some respect. I don't want to go out in the yard with
those knuckleheads. I'm not looking to get myself killed. Believe me, that
ain't happening," Ryan said in court in May 2010.
Ryan did not speak in court Monday. He was led into court wearing a white
jumpsuit and hand and leg shackles. The next court date was not established.
Documents and files need to change hands before that can happen, according to
Caldwell.
Ryan was ordered to be returned to death row at Central Prison in Raleigh.
(source: Gaston Gazette)
FLORIDA:
Florida's Unconstitutional Death Penalty
As the death penalty becomes rarer and more concentrated in a few parts of the
country, the states that continue to employ it are resorting to more desperate
schemes to kill people.
In January, for the third time in as many months, Missouri executed an inmate
whose appeals were still pending. (A federal appellate judge wrote that he was
"alarmed" by the state's conduct.) Meanwhile, several states are refusing to
disclose where they are buying the execution drugs they use, which come from
unregulated compounding pharmacies.
And while the Supreme Court categorically banned the execution of people with
intellectual disabilities as unconstitutional in 2002, some states continue to
defy that principle by interpreting the court???s words as narrowly as
possible. In that case, Atkins v. Virginia, the court said reduced mental
capacity made a defendant less culpable, but left it to states to enforce the
ruling.
On Monday, the court heard oral arguments in a case challenging Florida's
attempt to get around the 2002 decision by requiring intellectual disability to
be proved by an I.Q. score of 70 or less, even though the test includes a
margin of error of 5 points.
The defendant, Freddie Lee Hall, was sentenced to death in 1978 for murdering a
pregnant woman named Karol Hurst. Over the years, Mr. Hall has scored between
69 and 80 on I.Q. tests. In 1991, a Florida court heard expert testimony and
found that Mr. Hall has been "mentally retarded his entire life," but upheld
his sentence because capital punishment was not yet prohibited in such cases.
After the 2002 Atkins decision, Mr. Hall seemed to have a strong case that he
was ineligible for execution. Yet Florida kept him on death row because he had
I.Q. scores higher than 70. This reasoning runs counter to the consensus among
mental-health professionals, who see I.Q. tests as approximate, incomplete
measures and reject strict cutoffs in reading the results.
It also goes against the Supreme Court's ruling, which relied on a multipronged
clinical definition of intellectual disability that considers limitations in
adaptive functioning, like interpersonal skills and self-care. Under Florida's
law, none of that matters if a defendant scores higher than 70.
Several justices appeared skeptical of that rigid approach. "Your rule prevents
us from getting a better understanding of whether that I.Q. score is accurate
or not," Justice Anthony Kennedy told the state's attorney. "We cannot even
reach the adaptive functioning prong."
Justice Elena Kagan asked why Florida refuses to consider the margin of error,
even though state officials don't dispute that it is part of any test-score
interpretation. The lawyer for the state responded that using accepted
scientific practice "would double the number of people who are eligible" to be
exempt from execution. "And that's inconsistent with Florida's purposes," he
said.
Florida's purpose, in other words, is not to comply with the Supreme Court's
ruling, but to execute its death-row inmates whether or not they are
intellectually disabled. The court rejected that practice once. It should do so
again, unequivocally, for those states that missed the message the 1st time.
(source: Editorial, New York Times)
********************
For Death Row Inmate, Survival May Ride on IQ Test's Margin of Error
At 10 a.m. Monday morning, while most of Washington, D.C., lay quietly under a
blanket of snow, the U.S. Supreme Court rang with nerve-wracking arguments over
the fate of Florida death row inmate Freddie Lee Hall.
The question at hand was whether Hall, who in 1978 helped assault and murder a
21-year-old woman, is intelligent enough to merit the death sentence. The
court's decision could set new national standards for assessing the mental
capacities of death row inmates. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that
executing people who are intellectually disabled qualifies as cruel and unusual
punishment, which is unconstitutional, but it left individual states to
establish their own means of assessing a defendant's level of impairment.
Since the 2002 ruling, Florida has opted for a strict definition of
intellectual disability as having a score of 70 or below on tests that measure
a person's IQ. The state says that Hall's average score puts him above a
"bright line" of 70, and therefore makes him eligible to be executed. But
Hall's lawyers and mental health organizations, including the American
Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association, argue that
Hall's assessment does not include the standard 5-point margin of error built
into the design of the test. If that uncertainty is considered, Hall would not
be eligible for the death penalty, they argue.
In an hourlong hearing, justices grilled both Hall's and Florida's
representatives over the statistical nuts and bolts of the IQ test and its
analysis. Several expressed considerable confusion over what it means to have
an intellectual disability (referred to by both lawyers and justices in the
court transcript as "mental retardation"), given the phrase's recent
redefinition in the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, or DSM. Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what it means to have
an intellectual disability according to the DSM definition. Although such a
definition means "that the scholars can talk about it," he asked: "Is ... there
any evidence that society in general gives substantial deference to the
psychiatric profession in this respect?"
Other justices seemed to find the use of the IQ test alone problematic. "[T]he
ultimate determination here is whether somebody is mentally retarded; and the
IQ test is just a part of that," noted Justice Elena Kagan. "It's a part of one
prong of that ultimate determination." In considering Florida's approach, she
and other justices homed in on the fact that once a defendant received a test
score above 70, the state does not allow them to submit other evidence about
their cognitive abilities. "[W]hat your cutoff does is it essentially says the
inquiry has to stop there," Kagan said. After a long line of cases
demonstrating that "we allow people to make their best case about why they're
not eligible for the death penalty," the Florida cutoff "stops that in its
tracks," she said.
The court has until early summer to issue a decision.
One researcher, however, says Hall v. Florida demonstrates why the DSM's
definition of intellectual disability needed to be revised. Too often, says
James Harris, a professor of neurodevelopmental psychiatry at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Maryland, an IQ score can't predict or explain how a
person copes with real-life challenges and social situations and is used
inappropriately in court. That was one reason Harris spearheaded the recent
changes in the DSM's chapter on neurodevelopmental disorders and served as a
consultant to Lee's lawyers. The new DSM, Harris says, emphasizes "adaptive
ability" - how a person responds to difficult social and practical challenges -
and not just IQ.
The hearing went "pretty much as I expected," Lee Kovarsky of the University of
Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore tells ScienceInsider. He
represented Marvin Wilson, who had an IQ of 61, before he was executed for
murder in Texas in 2012. Kovarsky says that although he and other advocates are
hoping the court uses the case as an opportunity to issue a broad ruling on
mental health and the death penalty, he says the justices appeared to take a
narrower approach, focusing on the mechanics of the 70-and-below IQ rule. The
court "wants to have its cake and eat it, too," he says. It "wants to say
there's a bar" of mental function below which you cannot execute, but "it
doesn't want to have to deal with the corollary, which is to define what mental
retardation is."
(source: sciencemag.org)
MISSISSIPPI:
Death row inmate sues Miss., claims state hasn't given enough execution drug
info
Lawyers for a woman facing the death penalty in Mississippi say the state isn't
telling them enough about where it's getting execution drugs and how it plans
to use them.
Michelle Byrom and her lawyers sued the Mississippi Department of Corrections
on Monday, saying it failed to follow public records laws. They asked Hinds
County Chancery Judge William Singletary to find that the department has
violated the state public records law by not releasing the expiration date of
lethal injection drugs that the state currently has and by saying it was too
hard to search for other documents.
"MDOC's evasive and obstructionist response clearly runs afoul of the public
records act, and hides from public view important details of the state's
infliction of the most serious and irrevocable penalty against one of its
citizens," the lawsuit states.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Tara Booth declined comment, saying the
agency will respond in court.
Byrom was sentenced to death in 2000 in Tishomingo County in the killing of her
husband, Edward "Eddie" Byrom Sr. Attorney General Jim Hood has asked the state
Supreme Court to set a March 27 execution date for Byrom.
The state also wants to set an execution date for Charles Ray, who was
sentenced to death in 1994 in Tippah County for the murder and rape of college
student Kristy Ray.
Nationwide, states are scrambling to find execution drugs after European makers
cut off use for that purpose. Because of that, states are concealing where
they're finding the drugs, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center.
"The trend lately has been states withholding as much information as they can
about the source of their drugs," Dieter said.
An Oklahoma compounding pharmacy announced it would stop selling drugs to
Missouri for executions after it was revealed to be the source.
"A company that makes drugs for healthful reasons is exposed as making killing
drugs," he said.
The invoices provided to Byrom's lawyers show Mississippi bought vecuronium,
which paralyzes a person, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart, in
2012 and 2013. But the names of the suppliers on the purchase orders were
redacted for what the state called "security purposes." Byrom's lawyers said
there is not an exemption under state law.
Missing from the disclosure is any purchase of a barbiturate which would cause
a person to lose consciousness.
Vanessa Carroll, who now represents Byrom for the New Orleans office of the
MacArthur Justice Center, was an attorney with the agency that handles appeals
for Mississippi's death row inmates. She submitted the same public records
request in October when she worked there and received a May 2012 invoice for
the barbiturate sodium pentobarbital and a copy of the protocol for
administering the drugs. Neither was released to her this time.
It's unclear whether the Department of Corrections has any sodium pentobarbital
on hand, and whether its expiration date has passed. Experts say such drugs are
likely to be expired by now.
"We don't know what the expiration date is for that," Carroll said. "I don't
know if they still have any."
She said the department could have provided expiration dates for the drugs it
does have, calling the refusal "an evasive response."
It's also unclear if the department has changed its rules for administering the
drugs.
Dieter, though, said he's not sure if the jousting will delay any executions in
Mississippi.
"States are carrying out executions," he said. "It's not like they're not
finding drugs."
(source: Associated Press)
OKLAHOMA:
High court affirms new trial for death-row inmate in Tulsa woman's killing;
Accused of killing a Tulsa woman in 1997, his new trial is set for November.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld an appeals court ruling that granted a
new trial to an Oklahoma death-row inmate.
Without comment, the justices rejected Oklahoma's petition to review the
decision by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Sterling B. Williams
was unfairly convicted of 1st-degree murder.
The appeals court said jurors in Williams' trial should have been allowed to
consider second-degree murder, which doesn't carry the death penalty as a
potential punishment.
Williams was convicted of fatally stabbing LeAnna Hand, 22, at her Tulsa home
in 1997 and was given the death penalty; he also was given 99 years for trying
to kill her roommate.
(source: Tulsa World)
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