June 23
ARKANSAS:
Suspect In Tontitown Stabbing Death Pleas Not Guilty
The man accused of stabbing a 32-year-old woman to death last month near
Tontitown pleaded not guilty before a magistrate judge on Monday (June 23).
Brock Atkins, 19, is being held without bond on a capital murder charge. At his
arraignment before Judge Ray Reynolds, Atkins entered a not guilty plea and was
given a trial date of Aug. 20 in Washington County Circuit Court.
At arraignments, not guilty pleas are common to allow the case to proceed in
the court system. Suspects who enter a plea other than not guilty also risk
losing their right to an appeal.
Meanwhile, the family of LeAnn Frazier, who attended the arraignment on Monday,
told 5NEWS they are calling for the death penalty for Atkins and for suspected
accomplice Lewis Hedges.
Marvin Stout Jr. said the 2 suspects acted as "judge and executioner" in
killing his sister and should receive the death penalty for that.
The death penalty can be applied to people convicted of capital murder and
being an accomplice to capital murder, said John Threet, Washington County
prosecuting attorney. No determination has been made on whether the office will
seek the death penalty against either suspect.
Hedges, 34, of Springdale pleaded not guilty at his June 11 arraignment to a
charge of being an accomplice to capital murder, officials said. At the
arraignment, Hedges was ordered by Reynolds to appear in Washington County
Circuit Court on August 14.
Hedges, known as "Tony," was booked into the Washington County Detention Center
on May 30 after being transferred from the Cass County Jail in Texas, according
to the Washington County Sheriff's Office. Authorities arrested him in Texas
after a week-long manhunt.
Hedges is being held without a bond on the felony charge.
Hedges was arrested May 29 by authorities in Texas following an interstate
manhunt when Washington County deputies named him an accomplice in Frazier's
May 21 stabbing death.
Atkins, who was arrested May 21, is accused of stabbing Frazier in the throat
until she was dead during an altercation that centered on drugs, according to
court documents.
An arrest warrant for Hedges states he encouraged Atkins to kill Frazier by
telling Atkins that Frazier was a "snitch." Hedges said Frazier could not be
trusted.
The warrant also states that Hedges said Frazier had stolen drugs from him. He
then held a semi-automatic handgun to Atkins' head and told Atkins that he
needed to kill Frazier, according to court documents.
Atkins later chased Frazier outside and began stabbing her. Hedges blocked the
patio door of the residence to prevent others from helping Frazier in any way,
according to the warrant.
(source: 5newsonline.com)
USA:
Race and the Execution Chamber----The national death-row population is roughly
42 % black - nearly 3 times the proportion in the general population.
After a 7-week freeze following Clayton Lockett's botched execution in
Oklahoma, 3 states executed 3 death-row inmates in less than 24 hours last
week. Georgia, Missouri, and Florida had tangled with defense lawyers for
months over the secrecy surrounding their lethal-injection cocktails and where
they were obtained, a key issue in Lockett's death. Florida also addressed
concerns about its inmate's mental capacity; his lawyers claimed he had an IQ
of 78. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected all appeals, however, and the 3 inmates
- Marcus Wellons, John Winfield, and John Henry, respectively???were
successively executed without apparent mishap.
In addition to their fates, Wellons, Winfield, and Henry have something else in
common. They are among the disproportionate number of black Americans to have
been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
In the 3 states where they were executed, blacks constitute a disproportionate
share of the death-row population relative to the state population. In Oklahoma
and Missouri, black Americans are overrepresented on death row by nearly a
factor of 4.
These states aren't isolated examples. The national death-row population is
roughly 42 % black, while the U.S. population overall is only 13.6 % black,
according to the latest census. (The national prison population overall is
roughly 39 % black, according to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics data.)
Some individual states are worse. In Louisiana, the most carceral state in the
Union, blacks are roughly 1/3 of the population but more than 2/3 of the
state's death-row inmates.
We've long known that the death penalty disproportionally kills people of
color. David Baldus, a University of Iowa law professor, and his colleagues
studied more than 2,000 homicides in Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s for
evidence of bias. Their landmark research, known popularly as the Baldus study,
found vast racial disparities in Georgia's capital-punishment system.
A black inmate named Warren McCleskey, who had received a death sentence for
murdering a white Atlanta police officer, challenged it before the Supreme
Court in 1987 using the Baldus study, arguing that Georgia's racially
discriminatory system violated his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Justice William Brennan, who opposed the death penalty in all circumstances,
explained in his dissent why the statistical evidence mattered:
At some point in this case, Warren McCleskey doubtless asked his lawyer whether
a jury was likely to sentence him to die. A candid reply to this question would
have been disturbing. First, counsel would have to tell McCleskey that few of
the details of the crime or of McCleskey's past criminal conduct were more
important than the fact that his victim was white.
Furthermore, counsel would feel bound to tell McCleskey that defendants charged
with killing white victims in Georgia are 4.3 times as likely to be sentenced
to death as defendants charged with killing blacks. In addition, frankness
would compel the disclosure that it was more likely than not that the race of
McCleskey's victim would determine whether he received a death sentence: 6 of
every 11 defendants convicted of killing a white person would not have received
the death penalty if their victims had been black, while, among defendants with
aggravating and mitigating factors comparable to McCleskey's, 20 of every 34
would not have been sentenced to die if their victims had been black.
Finally, the assessment would not be complete without the information that
cases involving black defendants and white victims are more likely to result in
a death sentence than cases featuring any other racial combination of defendant
and victim. The story could be told in a variety of ways, but McCleskey could
not fail to grasp its essential narrative line: there was a significant chance
that race would play a prominent role in determining if he lived or died.
5 justices disagreed with this assessment. The majority decision in McCleskey
v. Kemp ruled that aggregate empirical evidence of racial discrimination could
not invalidate an individual defendant's death sentence. "At most, the Baldus
study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race," Justice
Louis Powell wrote, "but this discrepancy does not constitute a major systemic
defect."
Unchecked by the judiciary, the death penalty's racial discrepancy survived and
thrived. Eleven years after McCleskey, Baldus studied 667 homicides in
Philadelphia between 1983 and 1993 and found that black defendants there were
nearly four times likelier than white defendants to receive a death sentence
for the same crimes. Racial disparities in crime rates aren't a factor in this
because homicide, the predominant capital offense, is an overwhelmingly
intra-racial crime. Federal statistics show that 84 % of white victims and 93 %
of black victims between 1980 and 2008 were murdered by someone of the same
race. But death-row statistics don't reflect those rates: Although roughly half
of all U.S. homicide victims are black, more than 3/4 of victims of death-row
defendants executed since 1976 were white.
In Philadelphia, black defendants were nearly four times more likely to receive
a death sentence than whites.
The McCleskey precedent also radiated throughout the criminal-justice system,
from jury-pool demographics to departmental arrest rates and beyond, where the
threshold to prove impermissible racial discrimination had been placed almost
impossibly high. "African-Americans are stopped, ticketed, searched, and/or
arrested by the police at far higher rates than whites," according to the
NAACP. "Relative to their rates of arrest and participation in crime,
African-Americans are represented within U.S. jails and prisons at unreasonably
high rates."
"Within a decade of McCleskey, the number of minority citizens in prison
exceeded the total number of persons incarcerated in the U.S. in the year
preceding the decision," the NAACP concluded. By all but nullifying legal
claims of racial bias in the capital-punishment system, the case steadily
evolved into a cornerstone of mass incarceration.
Powell's biographer later asked him if he would change any vote he had cast
during his tenure on the Court. In those 15 years, he had joined the majority
in controversial cases ranging from Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion
nationwide, to Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld sodomy laws. "Yes," Powell
replied. "McCleskey v. Kemp."
But other justices recognized the flaws this created in American capital
punishment. In an impassioned and lengthy dissent in an otherwise-unremarkable
death penalty petition's denial in 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun cited McCleskey
as evidence that American capital punishment was morally and constitutionally
indefensible:
Having virtually conceded that both fairness and rationality cannot be achieved
in the administration of the death penalty, see McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S.
279, 313, n. 37 (1987), the Court has chosen to deregulate the entire
enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements
with mere aesthetics, and abdicating its statutorily and constitutionally
imposed duty to provide meaningful judicial oversight to the administration of
death by the States.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.
[...]
The Baldus study further demonstrated that blacks who kill whites are sentenced
to death "at nearly 22 times the rate of blacks who kill blacks, and more than
7 times the rate of whites who kill blacks."
Despite this staggering evidence of racial prejudice infecting Georgia's
capital sentencing scheme, the majority turned its back on McCleskey's claims
...
Justice Antonin Scalia, who concurred with the majority in McCluskey, openly
mocked what he saw as a "false, untextual, and unhistorical" legal argument
from Blackmun. The New York Times noted Blackmun's unusual move in a lengthy
article the following day:
Justice Blackmun's remarkable 7,000-word statement was aimed toward a future in
which, he said, the Court would realize that the effort to administer the death
penalty fairly and consistently was "doomed to failure."
"I may not live to see that day," he said, "but I have faith that eventually it
will arrive."
Blackmun died in 1999. That same year, 20 states executed 98 defendants - the
most since the death penalty had been reintroduced in 1976. 1/3 of them were
black. The "machinery of death" whirrs on.
(source: The Atlantic)
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